by Dean M. Cole
"Shit!"
He sat there cross-legged for a long moment, exploring his mouth with a grease-stained finger. Looking under the Black Hawk's tail, he stared across the airport grounds, trying to understand the apocalyptic panorama painted across its expanse.
Shaking his head, Vaughn wiped the red finger against the tan leg of his desert-camouflaged flight suit. He spit another bloody glob onto the pavement. It wasn't as much this time. The man shook his head again and then grabbed the helicopter's whale tail of a horizontal stabilizer and pulled himself upright.
Wheezing, Vaughn walked to the tug and climbed onto its top-mounted tractor seat. After pausing to catch his breath, he dropped the vehicle into reverse and released the handbrake. He guided the tug with its still connected tow bar away from the helicopter and parked it on the far side of the square section of tarmac.
Vaughn had already checked the Black Hawk's logbook. It was clean with no open maintenance issues. A quick pre-flight inspection told him everything else that he needed to know. The helicopter was flight-ready, and someone had been good enough to leave it topped off with fuel.
Vaughn was traveling light. He'd flown in from New York yesterday and had left his bag in his hotel room when Mark picked him up that morning. Due to the road conditions, that bag would be waiting there until he could return with help. Until then, Vaughn would make do with the clothes on his back. He supposed he could land in a Walmart parking lot or maybe even that of his hotel and get supplies. But sooner rather than later, Vaughn wanted, no, he needed to find someone and find out what had happened, and he sure as hell wasn't going to find either here in Cleveland.
Without so much as a traveling toothbrush, the Army pilot climbed into the Black Hawk's primary pilot seat. Vaughn flipped switches and twisted knobs as he went through memorized pre-start checklist items. Arcane pieces of unknown electronics that appeared to relate to the helicopter's Border Patrol mission created a couple of hitches in his normal flow. Finally, he powered up the aircraft's on-board auxiliary power unit, or APU. Its small turbine engine fired to life, creating a high-pitched whine that echoed off of the hangar. Using the power supplied by the APU, he finished testing the Black Hawk's systems and then donned a borrowed flight helmet.
Vaughn looked up at the helicopter's throttles and fuel levers. The moment of truth had arrived.
Would it start?
Vaughn had never flown the civilian edition of the Black Hawk. However, he had a couple of thousand hours flying the Army's version of this aircraft in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the damn thing would start, he had no doubt that he could fly it. Hell, as a helicopter pilot, he could likely fly just about any aircraft in the world. It might not be pretty, but he knew he could keep the greasy side down and make survivable takeoffs and landings. Vaughn had considered taking one of the intact airplanes that sat on the Cleveland aviation ramp. He looked at the crashed jets that littered the airport's runways and shook his head. Even if he could find a runway clear enough to permit a takeoff, there'd be no guarantee that he'd find a suitable landing strip at the other end.
No, a helicopter was his best bet, at least until he could find the edge of the devastation. There had to be an end to it, right?
Shaking off that last unsettling thought, Vaughn reached up for the throttle quadrant. His thumb hovered over the starter button. "Here goes nothing," he said and pressed the switch.
And received exactly that: nothing.
"What the hell?"
He pressed it again.
Still it refused to respond.
"Shit!"
He scanned the helicopter's instruments and switches but couldn't find anything wrong or out of place. Then he bent over and looked at the side of the center console.
"Crap! Really?"
An empty key slot frowned at him from the edge of the control panel. A few decades ago, some military flight school flunky had taken an Army helicopter on a joyride. It had ended with the young man in Fort Leavenworth's military prison, but not before he'd landed the Huey on the White House lawn. Afterward, the government had installed an ignition switch in all military airplanes and helicopters—and apparently in all government-owned civil aircraft as well. Once you started the engines, you could pull the key out with no ill effects—you wouldn't want a plane to fall out of the sky just because a ten-dollar switch had failed—but without that key, you couldn't start the helicopter.
"Smooth move, dumbass!" he said, shaking his head.
Vaughn climbed out of the aircraft. He walked a few steps and then paused, looking back at the Sikorsky and its still running APU. Military procedures—and likely US Customs, as well—dictated that you never walked away from a running turbine engine. He scanned the visible portions of the airport and then shrugged his shoulders. Screw it! It wasn't like someone was going to steal the damned thing.
Not without a key, anyway.
Oh, were that your only concern, Captain, he thought wryly.
Vaughn shook his head and jogged back into the hangar.
After a ten-minute search, he gave up on the key. Wheezing again, he dug through a mechanic's toolbox. He found the necessary implements and stuffed them into the leg pockets of his flight suit. Then he trotted back to the helicopter.
A couple of minutes and a bloody knuckle later, he had the barrel of the ignition switch pulled from its inch-wide hole. Like multicolored entrails, four wires ran from the back of the small silver cylinder and into the opening, disappearing into the shadowed interior of the center console. He disconnected two of the wires and then connected them to the same lugs as their opposite member. This bypassed the keyed switch, taking it out of the loop. Vaughn reinstalled the device back into its hole and stuffed the tools into a pouch attached to the inside of the pilot's door.
A quick scan of the airport grounds showed that he was still alone. Vaughn climbed back into the pilot's seat. After a silent prayer, he took a deep breath and then pressed the start button again. The whoosh of compressed air blowing through the number one engine's starter rewarded his efforts.
He pumped his free hand. "Yes!"
A few minutes later, Vaughn had both engines running and all of the helicopter's systems online. He taxied the Black Hawk up to the rolling gate that separated NASA's aviation ramp from the taxiways of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
Vaughn looked at the radio control head and frowned. "Might as well give it a try." He tuned the radio and then squeezed the transmit trigger. "Hopkins Tower, this is November Two Three Four Six Five," he said, using the aircraft's tail number as his call sign.
Of course, no one answered. Vaughn could have tried several other air traffic control frequencies, but he'd already placed enough unanswered calls for one day.
As he listened to the silent radio, six words came to mind:
What can Brown do for you?
He looked left. The giant vertical fin of the parked wide-bodied MD-11 cargo plane protruded above the roof of the United Parcel Service facility. Why did their slogan keep bouncing around inside his noggin?
Vaughn shook his head. Turning, he looked across the field and stared at the silent control tower.
"Screw it!"
He brought the helicopter to a high hover. To his far right, the pile of broken and burned fuselages still smoked. Vaughn could just make out the crossed aluminum struts that he'd driven into the ground. A tear leaked from his left eye. He released the collective control for a moment and brusquely batted away the moisture with the back of his left hand.
Where to go?
Vaughn knew that Cleveland and Houston and likely everything in between had fallen to whatever had caused all of this. With its timing, the light must have swept from north to south or east to west, or a combination of the two. Vaughn didn't know what the light had been or where it had originated, but he reasoned that it must've run out of steam somewhere south and west of Houston.
Considering his mother's location in Boulder, Vaughn prayed that it hadn't
made it much farther west at all.
Finally, he nodded and said, "Colorado it is."
Vaughn squinted into the low sun. Hovering a hundred feet above the ground, the aircraft turned toward the golden orb. The pilot lowered the nose of the helicopter and increased power. The Black Hawk quickly accelerated as it climbed into the orange sky.
As he flew past Mark's shallow grave, Vaughn glanced down and shook his head. Then he looked forward and lowered the helmet's smoked visor.
"I'll come back for you, Mark."
Chapter 8
"This is Commander Angela Brown broadcasting from the International Space Station. I am alone and stranded on the ISS with no descent module, no way to get to the surface. Please reply on this frequency at twelve hundred Zulu or twenty-four hundred Zulu. That's noon and midnight Greenwich Mean Time. I will monitor the frequency both times each day." Two seconds later, the message repeated. "This is Commander—"
Angela turned down the radio. She plucked the floating clipboard out of the air and placed a check mark adjacent to the item on her improvised list. After reading the next line, she looked around the JEM. It was the station's largest module. The Japanese Experiment Module even had its own manipulator arm. Through the port cone's window, she looked out on the Terrace. It was the informal but descriptive name of the Exposed Facility. Currently, it hosted several power-hungry experiments that ran in hard vacuum.
Angela didn't have unlimited resources. Primarily, she needed to conserve food, water, and oxygen. While she had plenty of electricity, there was no sense in placing unnecessary loads on circuits that also powered limited lifespan components upon which her very life depended. So Angela started turning off each experiment.
After finishing with the Terrace, Angela shifted to the projects running inside the module. After shutting down a crystal processing test and one that studied thermal dynamics in microgravity, she moved to a life sciences experiment. Her hand hovered over its kill switch. If allowed to continue long-term, this one would definitely consume some of her most precious resources. The project's enclosure had a dedicated heater and an independent environmental control system, but more importantly, it required a constant supply of water and nutrients.
It had to go.
But Angela's hand refused the order to terminate the experiment. Instead, it dug in her pouch and extracted a tool. A few minutes later, the implement along with several metal screws went back into the bag. The enclosure's glass front broke free from a black seal after a bit of prying. The woman peered expectantly into the dimly lit confines of the now open self-contained unit.
Twitching whiskers emerged from the gloom. Then beady red eyes manifested behind them. Finally, the two white mice swam into the JEM's bright interior.
Mabel and Stan mastered microgravity aerial navigation shortly after arriving on the ISS aboard Angela's flight. Initially, the two rodents had floated around their enclosure, bouncing off the walls between unproductive spasming fits of twitching legs. They soon learned to propel themselves and maneuver using a combination of purposeful wall kicks followed by something that approximated swimming. It was slow, but the little boogers could get to the reward of cheese that awaited proper navigation.
Angela held out a small yellow cube of Cheddar. Mabel spotted it first. Soon she was kicking and stroking her way through the module's cool air. A moment later, the cute little fart wrapped all four of her legs around Angela's outstretched fingers.
Nate floated a half-meter in front of them. Framed by long, white whiskers, his twitching pink nose sniffed the air. He looked at her as if to say, "Hey, where's mine?"
Angela smiled. With her other hand, she sent a cube slowly tumbling toward him. "There you go, Nate. Bon appétit, little guy."
It might be a waste of resources, but Angela didn't care.
She would rather have a couple of mice for company than converse with a Wilson volleyball. Besides, for all she knew, these might be the last two animals on—or above—the planet.
Nate showed his appreciation for the treat by peeing and pooping all the way to the floating cheese.
Angela cocked an eyebrow. "We'll have to do something about that."
Having placed Nate and Mabel into their new home—a Tupperware bowl with holes cut into the lid for air circulation—Angela headed to her assigned workstation. There was one additional, power-hungry experiment that she needed to terminate. She had saved this one for last as it was her favorite.
When the loss of the resupply flight had forced the halving of the station's crew, this experiment's importance had directly led to her assignment as Expedition Commander. As the station's sole theoretical physicist, Angela was the only person on-board that understood the inner workings of its electronics and sensors. Hell, she'd been part of the MIT team that had built the damn thing: the first space-based gravity wave detector.
The Modified NASA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (MONA-LISA) looked for gravity waves in a particular frequency range. Building on the success of previous land-based experiments and employing recent technological advances, MONA-LISA was significantly smaller than its proposed but never deployed predecessors. It maintained a laser link with two mirrors that flew in formation with the space station. Between the laser's power demands and the detector's required operating temperature being near absolute zero, the experiment would hog her limited resources.
Twenty-four hours ago, Angela had first seen the mysterious light. Now she watched Europe pass beneath the ISS once again, this time on the live external video feed piped to her workstation monitor. After seeing a wave of energy wipe humankind from the planet, gravitational-wave astronomy no longer seemed important.
Her finger hovered over the module's power switch. Then she saw movement on the device's display. A small gravity wave signal sent a tremor through all three graph lines. Somewhere in the universe, likely millions if not billions of years ago, two black holes were in the throes of merger, spinning about their common point at incredible speed and carving their wakes across space-time.
Out of curiosity, Angela asked the computer to calculate the distance to source. These events happened at a known rate. Therefore, just as with electromagnetic astronomy, one could measure distance to the point of origin by the amount of frequency loss or Doppler effect red shifting.
A moment later, the computed distance to source popped up on the screen. Angela stared at it, unable to believe the number.
"What the hell?" She shook her head. "That must be a mistake."
She entered the command again.
A few moments later, the same report popped up:
< 1 Light-Second to Source
That didn't make any sense. They had always expected to be measuring distances in light years, so a light-second was the smallest unit the gravity wave detector could specify. The Moon was more than a light-second from Earth. So that would mean the gravity waves were coming from somewhere near the planet.
Angela's eyes widened. Theoretical physicists had long hypothesized the existence of miniature black holes, singularities left over from the Big Bang. Unlike the micro black holes that they had hoped to create and sense with the Super Collider, miniature singularities could have the mass of Mount Everest. They wouldn't evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation. Theoretically, they could still exist today.
In spite of the day's tragic events and her precarious predicament, Angela's pulse raced as she contemplated the exciting possibilities. Had her detector just found the first evidence of a primordial black hole? And not just one but two? She looked at the waveform again. The signal was the unmistakable footprint of a binary, a pair of black holes rapidly orbiting about a common point.
Her eyes returned to the displayed distance to source. The range of less than one light-second meant that the binary was within 186,000 miles.
"Let's narrow that down."
Angela floated over to the detector's keyboard. Her fingers became a blur of activity. The programmers at MIT had set th
e distance to display in increments of light years, but she knew that the underlying data had much finer detail than that. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so she only needed to change the formula to display the distance to source in miles.
She hit the enter key and then closed the page. The gravity wave display returned. Its signal filled the screen again, even stronger now. Angela looked at the distance to source. Her brows knitted together as a confused look took over her visage.
"What the hell?"
The number rapidly counted down through three hundred miles.
"Oh shit!"
Was the station about to disappear into a black hole?
Just as she had the thought, the rate of closure slowed precipitously. Angela's suddenly tensed shoulders relaxed a shade. The numbers continued to count down like the points of an algebraic curve as it neared its closest pass to the horizontal axis. It appeared that the station would soon fly parallel to the binary pair at which point their paths would begin to diverge or separate.
Then the distance to source began to settle on an all-too-familiar value of 250 miles.
"That's the altitude of the ISS," Angela said with fresh confusion.
Her eyes slowly moved to the live video feed that streamed from the station's external camera. She watched as the lowlands of Eastern France gave way to the mountains of Switzerland. The Super Collider, CERN, lay beneath that border.
As did the epicenter of the life-stealing light wave.
And it was the region where dozens of nukes had disappeared, vanishing in an instant.
As if swallowed by a singularity, Angela realized.
And at that moment, all of it was exactly 249 miles beneath her.
The station passed over Switzerland's Lake Geneva and continued its easterly course, its orbital path now carrying it away from the region.
As the ISS raced away from CERN, the gravity wave detector's distance to source began an accelerating count up from the lowest value it had reached.