Landfall
By John McWilliams
Copyright © 2015 by John McWilliams
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
“SUPERBUG COULD KILL MILLIONS!”
Special Agent Lauren Madison read the headline projected above her new, midnight black HoloWatch. The CNN report continued:
“During this morning’s press conference, President Daniels and CDC Director Charles J. Atwood urged federal, state, and local authorities to suspend all unnecessary travel…”
“You see this?” Lauren adjusted her mic.
The Sikorsky JetHawk helicopter banked hard right and, for a heartbeat, all they could see out the side window was pure white. Then they banked left, and found themselves staring at a sheer rock face on the side of a mountain.
“I swear to God,” Special Agent Ellis Cole muttered, “if we survive this, I’m going to break both their necks. See what?”
Lauren’s stomach lurched as they dove into a valley.
“This.” She showed him her watch, and as they bottomed out of their dive, her hand landed on his knee.
Ellis stared at the wispy holographic image, then at her. “I’ve seen it.” He turned back to the blur of pine trees rushing past.
“This means Arthur has to let us use the G10-X indefinitely.”
“Two hundred thousand dead in Africa, thirty thousand dead in the United States—and we get to keep the hyperjet. Remember what Arthur said about sounding like a sociopath?”
“He said psychopath. And he was referring to you.” Lauren shook her hand, and the ghost that had been haunting her wrist disappeared.
“No, he wasn’t. He meant you. He just directs stuff at me because he doesn’t have the nerve to tell you to your face.”
“He’s afraid of me, and not you?” Lauren laughed.
“I didn’t see it until the other day, but I think he’s got a thing for you.”
“That’s—don’t be an idiot.”
“Actually, I think he’s in love and terrified at the same time.”
The JetHawk’s twin turbines changed pitch as the helicopter slowed and began circling a frozen lake.
“Well, I don’t know what Arthur thinks, but it isn’t my fault that this virus broke out. I’m not completely heartless, you know.”
“I never said you were.” Ellis returned his attention to the window.
Lauren knew that her obsession with things like the G10-X tended to make her seem heartless. She didn’t want that. She wanted to seem not heartless.
“I think this is it.” Ellis pointed out the window.
Lauren leaned across his lap, her ponytail in his face.
“Do you have to—”
“I don’t see it. Where?”
They descended below the tree line, moving east over the lake, then slowed, hovered, and inched toward the shore. A wall of trees, rocks, and fanglike icicles grew closer. Ellis tried to angle himself so that he could see the top of the mountain.
“There it is.” Lauren planted a finger against the glass. At the top of a twenty-foot climb, no more than a stone’s throw from the lake’s edge, was the object they had traveled all this way to investigate.
Blades still ripping at the air, engine still howling, the JetHawk’s wheels settled into the snow.
“If this isn’t a hoax,” Lauren said, “I’m going to use this case for my screenplay. We just need some cool details.”
“You want me to make something up? Hang on. I need to—” Ellis reached for the intercom button on the center console.
“Don’t,” Lauren warned him. She held his steely eyes. “You want to chew them out, do it when we’re back at Edmonton. I really don’t feel like hiking out of this godforsaken place.” She tossed her headset onto one of the seats.
Ellis frowned, stared at his hands a moment, then turned to the intercom. Politely, he told the pilots they could shut down, but that they were not to leave the aircraft. Then he got up and threw the cargo bay door open. Cold air leapt at them like a wet dog.
“Jesus…” Ellis muttered.
“You got your kit?”
He patted his snowsuit’s thigh pocket.
Lauren glanced warily at the blades overhead, ran a hand over her holstered Glock, and started forward.
Just past the perimeter of the rotors, they found a path leading up to what two hunters the day before had mistakenly identified as a NASA space capsule.
It was, quite possibly, a space capsule. It just wasn’t one of NASA’s.
The tarnished white cone peeked out of the snowy crest as if riding atop a frozen wave.
Lauren stared up at the mountain’s ragged cliffs.
“Dead Horse Mountain,” Ellis remarked.
“And we have clouds moving in.” Lauren pointed west.
They continued their stomp up to the capsule.
The pictures the hunters had taken had made it all the way to the vice president’s office. NASA had quickly dismissed the notion that the capsule was one of theirs, but upon further examination, alarm bells had gone off. One of the photos showed a logo to the right of the capsule’s hatch—a circular piece of artwork with “JL Aerospace” printed across the top, an image of a fiery god in the center and, at the bottom, the word “Helios.”
That’s when FBI Deputy Director Arthur Johnson called in Lauren and Ellis.
Lauren couldn’t remember Arthur Johnson ever being so freaked out. At first he was absolutely certain it was a hoax. But then the president called. Six or seven yes sirs later, Arthur handed Lauren the access codes to his Gulfstream G10-X.
Before he let them leave, however, he told them, “You two weren’t around back then, but this was a real embarrassment to the FBI and the government at large. If this thing is real… wow…” He massaged the folds in his forehead.
“You want us to destroy it, sir?” Ellis asked.
The deputy director just glared. “For God’s sake, Cole. No, I don’t want you to destroy it.” He turned to Lauren. “Special Agent Madison, please see that your partner doesn’t do something incredibly… destructive. Actually, Cole, why don’t you see if you can just get through the week without killing someone?”
“Me?” Ellis looked at Lauren.
“Don’t worry, sir,” Lauren said, “we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Later, on the way to the airport, Ellis teased Lauren with those words. “Don’t you worry, sir, we’ll get to the bottom of this.” Then he saluted.
She punched him.
Now, Ellis and Lauren approached the frozen capsule, its nose jutting out of the snow. Ellis removed a field scanner from his thigh pocket and checked for toxins, radiation, and explosive materials before giving the all clear. But Lauren hadn’t waited; knees planted in the snow, she was already examining the logo with the sun god on it. She removed a sliver of blackened material from the underside of the capsule and, with a handheld spectrophotometer, ran a full material analysis.
“If this is a hoax,” she said, studying the device’s readout, “someone sure went to a lot of trouble. Carbon fiber with surface oxidation consistent with reentry heating.”
Lauren shielded her eyes against the now-fall
ing snow as she looked up at Ellis, who had climbed up the side of the capsule to inspect an open panel. She admired the snugness of his FBI-issue snowsuit. She was wearing the same, but somehow these outfits seemed to be more of a masculinity enhancer.
“It’s starting to snow,” she said.
He looked down at her; large flakes drifted between them. “Forget screenplays—maybe you should be a weather reporter.”
“It’s called polite conversation, idiot.”
“Hey, hey…” He slid down beside her.
“So what do you think?”
“It’s definitely a space capsule.”
“Oh, good, I thought for a moment it might have been an igloo.” She held up her hands in a don’t blame me gesture. “Hey, you’re the one who started it.”
“Okay, maybe I did. So, anyway, this thing apparently had parachutes that deployed and ejected.” He indicated the open panel at the top of the capsule. “And these”—he knelt, tapping on the skin next to two blackened holes just above the cleared snow—”are the thrust ports that must have taken over after that. I think that’s how these things used to work. If they came in over water, they kept the parachutes. If they came in over land, they used these thrusters. It probably had some kind of system for determining the best spot to set down.”
“Some spot.” Lauren looked around.
“Hey, it missed the mountain, didn’t it?” Ellis blinked into the snow, peering up Dead Horse Mountain. “And the lake.” He pointed at the expanse beyond the JetHawk’s sadly drooping blades. “You remember anything about this?” he asked. “About the bombing?”
“I was like two.”
“I mean from history class.”
“A little, I guess. It was barely covered by the time I went to school.”
“Oh, because you’re so young?”
“Because it wasn’t like a terrorist attack. I don’t even get why Arthur and the vice president are so freaked out about it. I mean, I get that it was a blunder that this guy was able to pull off what he did, but how could anyone have foreseen it?”
“Obviously, it had to do with something above our pay grade.” Ellis leaned against a snow bank a few feet from the capsule. “It’s weird though, because there’s really not that much official information out there on the bombing.”
Ellis took out his satellite tablet and navigated to a bookmarked website. Projected above the device was an image of the International Space Station. Snowflakes, like asteroids, sailed through it. Lauren leaned against the snow beside him.
The text below the image read:
“The original International Space Station (ISS I), along with two of NASA’s communication hubs, were destroyed in an attack that has over the years sparked numerous conspiracy theories, from espionage to alien invasion. While costly in dollars, only a single life was lost in the incident—that of the lone bomber, Dr. Jan Lee: American entrepreneur, astronaut, and founder of the space transport company JL Aerospace.”
“The Space Station Bombing happened almost exactly thirty years ago.” Ellis looked at the snowbound capsule. “This thing’s been sitting here a long time.”
“Remember the movie?” Lauren asked.
“The Dark Side of the Moon?”
“That’s it. How’d that end again?”
“Dr. Lee learns that the aliens have infected his brain with some kind of virus, so he blows up the space station to save Earth.”
“That’s right. He isolates himself so the others can escape. And then he has to talk to his wife. Remember that?” Lauren dug the heel of her boot into the snow.
“That was pretty corny.” Ellis laughed.
“I know.”
“And you’re going to write a screenplay? You have no grasp of that crap.” He pushed off the snowbank and dusted his rear end. “Besides, you’ve got at least another ten, maybe fifteen years of field work in you.”
“You think?”
“Sure. You look like you’re twenty-five, and your reflexes—”
“I do?”
“Well, maybe not twenty-five, but certainly no more than twenty-nine.”
“Thanks,” she replied dubiously.
“You’re welcome.” Ellis looked at the JetHawk through the snow. “All right, we had better get this done before those idiots call it on weather.”
“Oh, they can fly in almost anything these days. Hey, didn’t that guy, Dr. Lee, actually get everyone off the space station before he blew it up?”
“That’s right, he did. So?”
“Why would a crazy person let everyone go?”
“Maybe he was suicidal but not homicidal.”
“Or maybe he was neither.” She went over to the capsule. “This thing isn’t supposed to be here. It was supposed to have blown up with the space station. But it came back. Maybe he came back with it.” She banged on the side of the spacecraft as if hoping for a reply. “Maybe he’s not alive, but he still could be in there.”
“Thirty years… he could be a real mess.”
“Nah, he’s been preserved in ice.”
“True.”
Lauren removed a glove and ran a finger along the capsule’s surface. The sky had turned darker and the snow was coming down more intensely.
“All these years,” she said, “and the infamous Space Station Bomber has been right here—at the foot of Dead Horse Mountain. Perfect sort of stuff for my screenplay.”
She looked around at the woods, the cliffs, the frozen lake beyond the JetHawk. She turned to Ellis. “Let’s crack this thing open.”
Chapter 2
Thirty Years Earlier
Dr. Jan Lee stares into the rain. Farther down the walkway, water pours over the gutter in volumes that seem impossible for the aggregation of mere raindrops.
This has got to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done.
Well, you’ve come this far…
Not twenty hours ago he was in free fall, circling the Earth at seventeen thousand miles per hour. Now he was about to do… what?
He holds up the bag and stares at it. The words “Thank you” are written above a picture of a Chinese temple. Below that is the word “Enjoy.”
I must be crazy.
He starts walking, keeping a hand on the railing, not quite having regained his Earth legs yet. He checks the room number on each door. At the fifth, he stops.
This is it. He knows that what happens next could very well determine the rest of his life.
He stretches his fingers.
You’d think I was about to step onto the stage at Carnegie Hall.
He raises his fist, but before he knocks, the fan below the window next to him rattles to a halt. The power’s out. Dual emergency lights at the corners of the building switch on. Given the downpour, this isn’t surprising.
He gathers his wits and knocks. A little harder than he should have.
The curtain in the window moves, and he tenses. Someone turns the knob.
Jan brushes water off the bag. The door opens.
Holy shit!
Standing before him is someone he knows. Someone who doesn’t know him. But according to the Message, this young man is one of the Senders.
“Nineteen forty-two,” Jan manages. Water drips from his hood onto his unshaven cheek. He blinks.
The young man, wearing only boxers, is Tyler Cipriani, someone Jan’s company, JL Aerospace, has been trying to recruit for years; he’s one of those once-every-five-hundred-years geniuses.
Jan recalls the description of this encounter from the Message as he looks into the room. On the bed, a young woman wearing only a sheet smiles politely at him. Even in his slightly dissociative state, Jan can certainly appreciate why a man might remember this encounter some thirty years later. And it has nothing to do with the Chinese food delivery man.
“Anything else?” The young genius stuffs several bills into Jan’s hand and takes the bag.
Jan stares at him. Remember the probability curve, he tells himself.
“Enjoy your meal,” Jan says, gathering his wits. He pulls the strings of his hood taut and backs away. Then he turns and jogs down the walkway, glancing back as the kid closes the door.
At the end of the walkway, he slows. He grabs the handrail and squats down as a wave of fatigue and vertigo hits him.
Three weeks in space, the splashdown, jetting across the country—ignoring all protocols so that he could get here in time—and now this. The Message is real. And the Senders are no slouches.
His life as he’s known it is over.
This encounter was the last of five offers of proof that the Message was indeed coming to him from the future. The other four had been almost comically benign: a magnitude 3.2 earthquake near New York City; a ninety-six-year-old woman winning a $430 million lottery in Florida; a helicopter ditching into a swimming pool in England; and a two-headed snake found in a Staten Island drainage pipe.
All had come true within the past forty-eight hours. All had been specifically chosen so that he would have no motivation to intervene. There were no train derailments to stop, no airline passengers to warn, no stock market profits to be made—not that the Message didn’t ultimately have a lofty goal.
But then there was this encounter. This one wasn’t so much an offer of proof as to when the Message was sent—but by whom. The Senders had given him the time, the place, and the details about the role he was to play—if he was game.
It was by no means absolute proof, but it was something. After all, how could they really prove who was involved? Any personal information would prove little, and could end up just being dangerous. So, like the other offers of proof, this one, too, had had to be benign.
Somewhere above those swollen clouds—Jan looks up—the full content of the Message is being extracted onto hard drives. In another four weeks, the entire experimental apparatus will be delivered via a supply run back to Earth. At that point, there’ll be some big decisions to make. But, for now…
It’s time to get out of here.
Jan uses the handrail as he makes his way down the steps. Reaching ground level, he braces for his mad dash into the parking lot.
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