by JK Franks
“When?”
“Just now. We were tending to Kissa’s injuries, and when we stopped, Henry was nowhere to be found. Your man, Alias, went to see if he could find it.”
Cade shook his head, frustration mounting with every tick of that damn clock. He looked over at the man lying on the table.“How is he?”
The Honduran’s voice came back way too chipper, “Hey Boss, I be okey dokie.”
“What in the fuck did ya’ll give him?” Cade asked, and before they could respond, he added, “Whatever it was, save some for me. Look, we have to find Henry, he may be the only one who can help us turn off that damn machine. It’s going to microwave the planet starting in...” he checked his dive watch, “Shit, fifty-two minutes now. Where would he have gone, Thera?”
“He would want out. That was the sense I got from him all day.”
“Cade, the disruption in the geomagnetic field has begun. My orbital sensor array is detecting the wave form changing,” Doris stated somberly.
“And the other?” Cade asked. He didn’t want to alarm his friends about the potential annihilation of the Kalypso. It was something they likely could not escape anyway.
In response, a new clock appeared in the corner of his tactical contacts. “Not disabled yet, but Astra appears to have some interest in self-preservation. I am using her potential death as leverage. I learned that from you, Captain.”
“And the student becomes the master,” he said, forcing a smile.
Cade asked Doris and Thera both the same question. “Do we have any way of communicating with Henry?”
Thera looked at him strangely. “I’m just trying to help. Henry seemed to want to stop all this. I wish he hadn’t disappeared.”
“The neural thingy, it may not just be a weapon. I’m pretty sure it’s also how they communicate with each other, Cade,” Thera answered.
Doris said, “His willingness to help us would seem counter to his biological imperative, but if what you say is true, what good would that do?” She added, “Didn’t you say Henry’s underside had the bluish glow prior to you getting the data feed from him?”
“Yeah, it…he did.” He turned back to Thera, "Did Thrall ever try to build something like it? Something to talk to the Saraph’s?”
Thera snorted out a no. “He only saw them as some sort of biological machine. A hard drive with tentacles and scales. He conditioned them to respond to signals for food but that was about all.”
“Alan and Micah have been working on a way to create our own version of a neural pulse. If he is in the water, then there is a very good chance they would be able to detect it, possibly even from a great distance,” Doris said.
“Sounds promising, what do we need? "
“Slow down, Captain. I’ll get Greg and Thera working on it, maybe a few of the engineers onboard can help.”
“We’re not going to be able to do all this in the next few minutes, are we?” Cade asked, knowing time was quickly running out.
“I’m afraid not, and there is no guarantee that Henry will respond, or even if he does, if he will know how to deactivate the Icarus device. It’s a shot in the dark, Captain.”
“But at least it’s a shot.”
97
“Let’s go, Thrall,” Cade said as he dragged the man to his feet. He refused to look at the display. He knew it was under forty minutes now. “Fuck!” He hated feeling helpless, but even the analyst seemed out of ideas.
“Get up, we’re taking a ride,” Cade yelled.
“We’re going out there?”
“Yes, we are, I need you to think of it like time travel. Take a second and just imagine the future, cause you’re not in it Thrall, unless you help me stop this shit.”
Cade marched the man down the corridor flanked by two of Alex’s people from Team Raptor. They entered the launch bay where one of the Corsair’s doors was open, and it was already powering up.
The former tech billionaire was visibly shaking now. “Arrest me,” he said. “I have rights.”
“No, Thrall, dead men have no rights, and you, sir, are very fucking dead.” One of the sharpest memories Cade had from Henry was the creature’s hatred of Thrall and apparently an Asian man whom it had already dealt with. On some level, he was hoping Henry might sense Thrall being nearby, even if they couldn’t establish any direct communication.
Cade motioned to the two soldiers to stay behind. Clearly, this was not the order they had from their commander. “Alex won’t like it,” Cade admitted, “but I got this. No need in all of us being at risk.”
“Cade, if you can get Thrall off the ship in the next few minutes, that would be a big help.”
“Why is that, Doris?” he asked, slipping in behind the control wheel of the Corsair and punching the controls to begin launch.
“Astra will relinquish remaining control once Thrall is no longer on board. In that scenario, she gains a significantly higher level of command authority and has more latitude to make decisions based on self-preservation. Her base code is highly inflexible, but I am beginning to find ways to work with her.”
“Consider it done, if she will unlock the restrictions on launching at depth.” Almost immediately, water covered the thick window glass as the craft descended the small ramp toward the opening door.
“We…we’re too deep. This is below crush depth for these,” Thrall said, panic clear in his voice.
Cade smiled and looked at the navigation screen which was flashing a similar warning. “I know, you really should have built these better.” He hit the throttle and was impressed as the thrusters pushed him back into the seat.
“Where are we going?”
“Down.” Cade rose and walked to the back of the vehicle and began putting on one of the undamaged XOD divesuits he’d had placed there.
“Wait,” Thrall yelled, looking around at what was going on. He tried to rise from the seat, but Cade had looped his restraints through the metal seat base. “You have a hard suit. You can’t just do this.”
“Pretty sure I can,” Cade said, fastening the helmet into place. He clicked on the external comms. “See, just did.”
“Kalypso Station is secure, Nomad. Astra is standing down,” Doris stated enthusiastically. “Greg is modifying one of the communication dishes to transmit the Saraph signal. Says to give them five minutes.”
“Roger that,” Cade said, remembering how awkward the pressure suit was when out of the water. When the little Corsair started to come apart, he would be glad to have it. “Dee, set course and speed to the most likely location of the Icarus device.” Since Doris had control, she automatically upgraded access for all of her subminds. This Corsair had been the first to get a partial software upgrade even before it launched.
The long drop through the Midnight Zone was eating up precious time. Now all he had to do was wait. There was no way to rush the descent, the small craft could only power dive so fast at this depth. They both knew it wouldn’t make it to the bottom…not in one piece.
As the timer on his goggles clicked down below twenty, Cade turned his seat to face the man. The former tech giant and visionary pioneer now just a humiliated mess of flesh and bone. “Why Ivan, why all this? How do we stop this?”
The man shrugged, “You can’t, she’s going to...”
Cade wanted to ask who ‘she’ was, but Jaz interrupted, “Cade, the device is active. It is beginning to have an affect on Earth’s geomagnetic field. Sensors are picking up increasing anomalies in the magnetic field. Ozone holes are opening up over the China Sea and will probably pass directly over Tokyo in the next ninety minutes. Other locations are in the paths of additional weak spots. We will have a global disaster on our hands. By the end of the day, the effects may very well resemble the Toba Catastrophe.” Her voice echoed her grave concerns.
“Casualties?”
“Initially, the numbers will probably be low, a few hundred to maybe a thousand,” she stated flatly. “Millions will already have received their own
death sentences, though. Within a month, possibly fifteen percent of the population will be gone, or nearly so. A large swath of the planet will be irradiated to the point we will not even be able to travel through it, and that is only if there’s only one big one, and it doesn’t shift.”
The conversation had been private, but Thrall seemed to guess he was listening to a report. “Tokyo?” he asked.
“What the fuck, man?” Cade yelled.
Thrall calmly stated, “Payback for all those whales they killed, dude. Hated seeing that shit on those documentaries. Whales, one of the most beautiful and magnificent creatures on the planet.”
“So, let me get this straight. You’re going to kill a billion people just because Asians like a certain seafood?”
“Whales are mammals, man. Just like you or me. They are probably closer to us genetically than apes are. Do you know that if aliens came down prior to about 1.5 million years ago to communicate with the smartest animals on Earth, they would have ignored our own ancestors and headed straight for the oceans to converse with the whales and dolphins?"
Cade started to punch him in the face, then realized with the suit, he would likely take the man’s head off. “You and I are not the same species.”
98
“Nomad, we are broadcasting a signal to the Saraph,” Doris said. “Thera and Kissa came up with what to say.”
“So, now we wait?” Cade replied.
“My sensors show the seals on your ship are beginning to degrade. I am not certain you have that much time to wait.”
“Was there anything helpful in your ReLoad session with Thrall? There has to be a way to turn this thing off.”
“Not really, not on that at least. But thanks to Astra, I have the schematics to the device. The scientific data on the exotic material recovered from the comet as well as the original data from the Saraphs that got the Founders heading down this path. Unfortunately, none of that indicates any way of shutting it down once activated,” Doris answered.
Cade was still confused. “Why would they have created something like this?”
Doris seemed to consider it. “That is an excellent question and one I have been searching for an answer to as well. Strangely, Thrall never once seemed to even ask it. It was something they could do, so they blindly pursued it. My best guess is, it would have been used for terraforming planets for them to be more suitable to Saraph physiology. Possibly the magnetic field on their own planet was unstable, and they developed this to help solve that problem.”
“So, the Founders revived the Saraph in all their permutations and now are rebuilding the planet to better suit them?”
“The enticement of new technologies and power was too great for them to ignore. The fact that they were being manipulated by a long extinct intelligence never seemed to occur to them,” Doris said.
Cade leaned his hulking suit up against a bulkhead. He wanted to bury his head in his hands. While he and his teams had succeeded at the mission, he felt they had potentially failed on an epic scale. “What if Henry doesn’t show, can I go down alone? How would I find the device-?”
Doris answered, “The team at The Cove and I had discussed that option. The suit should hold, but obviously, we didn’t test for those kinds of depths. The actual problem is, there is no way you can find it. The device is not metal, it would leave no traceable signature, and while we know when it hit bottom, the exact location was deliberately scrambled from all systems, including Astra’s internal monitoring.”
He and Doris were on a closed channel, and Thrall just kept staring out the window as if he expected one of his monsters to attack at any minute. “Doris, how long before Tokyo is hit?”
“They were sent an official emergency message through normal channels. The opening is moving onto land now, but fortunately, there is heavy cloud cover. That will help, but Tokyo will begin to feel the effects in about forty minutes. I am receiving reports of civil defense alarms going off across the island. If enough people seek shelter, this first pass may only have minimal lethality.”
Cade shook his head, still grasping it with both hands. “Can we affect the aiming or disrupt the control signal?”
“Cade, we have explored all plausible scenarios already. The encoding of targets was done weeks ago, and all the controls are self-contained in the Icarus device.”
“Okay, keep broadcasting to Henry, but continue heading into international waters.” They had already made plans to drop the prisoners on an unpopulated island until the Navy and Interpol decided what to do with them. Another Corsair was heading to pick up the injured members of WarHawk and Raptor, all of which were near the original splashdown location. The original plan had called for Navy RHIBs, which would have been slower and much harder to explain to the Cubans if detected.
Thrall ran his finger across a viewport leaving a trail in the moisture accumulating there. “We’re leaking.”
Cade didn’t bother responding.
99
Thrall became agitated. “You are just going to let me die aren’t you? You don’t care, just like your government. Hell, like all governments. Live like there’s no tomorrow. Well, guess what? There is no tomorrow. Not anymore.”
Cade knew the pressure was getting to the man in more ways than one. He was rapidly becoming unhinged. Truthfully, he wanted to kill Thrall, but this man’s intelligence was buying him time. Somewhere in all this madness might be a way of stopping this mess.
Thrall continued his rant, “I’m guessing you don’t even believe in climate change do you? You’re okay with killing whales and coral and everything else?” He shook an empty coffee cup at him. “You are okay with polluting our oceans, our air, even the very soil of our planet?”
“This isn’t about me, Thrall. I am not a murdering lunatic. In truth, I do care very much. I don’t even disagree with much of what you say, but I am at best a practical environmentalist. I don’t want to give up my cold beer and AC to protect the ozone layer. I expect science to figure out a better solution, and you know what? Given the right encouragement, they usually do. Cooking off the most populous city on the planet is not an encouragement to change. It is terrorism. It is genocide.”
Finally, Cade asked,
“I don’t get it, you kill everybody off, you let this alien species take over. I don’t understand. Do you hate humanity that much?”
“Not as alien as you think,” Thrall muttered.
“What was that?” Cade watched the man more closely now.
“You’ve never asked what killed the ancients, not even where they came from,” Thrall finally said with a sneer.
“Do you know that?”
“We have a good idea, yes.” Thrall glanced out again at the absolute blackness outside the small window and shivered involuntarily. “They were…they are,” he corrected, “aggressive, ruthless in their pursuit of pure science. They discovered new fields of science, math, and physics that we haven’t even considered yet. They learned they weren’t alone in the universe. After all that, imagine our shock to realize they were from here.”
“Wait, what?” Cade asked disbelieving. “So you are telling me the Saraph are not alien, they’re from Earth?” Cade asked.
Thrall responded, “Oh, they are very alien to us, but yes, from here, from Earth…although, not the planet you or I know. A planet millions of years in the past. That’s just a blink of the eye on a cosmic scale, and nearly so on the geological timeline. They were the original Earth civilization, maybe not the original, who knows… could have been others, many others. The planet is nearly five billion years old—we humans have been around for just a tiny fraction of that. Have you never wondered how dinosaurs lived for 400 million years, yet supposedly only evolved to a point to build, well, better dinosaurs? Humans, my friend, are not the pinnacle of evolution on this planet, we are just the latest tenants of the Terran apartment building.”
“Why are there no fossil records of anything like this? How could they exist without a
ny physical signs they were here? No cities, no art, no bones?” Cade asked.
“The oldest fossils we have are only 3.5 billion years ago, and that is of a fucking bacteria,” Thrall shot back. When you are talking more complex life, the earliest fossils are only about 550 million years old. The truth is, finding any fossil is incredibly rare. The fossil record is very incomplete. One fossil emerges every 10,000 years. Dinosaur footprints are rarer still. We have probably found much less than 1% of life. We have fossil records of less than 5% of the animals and plants alive on Earth right now. We estimate that when you factor in all species alive right now, we actually only know of perhaps ten percent.
“So, to base any conclusions on if we have discovered it or not is very unscientific. Secondly, the landmasses have changed dramatically over millions, much less billions of years. The Earth’s crust is constantly being sub-ducted back down into magma, and new land emerges. What was dry land may become seafloor in a few million years. Antarctica was a lush tropical continent for much of its history. The ancient ruins of Rome geologically happened just a second ago. Dinosaurs ruled the world a half hour ago on the geological clock. While we didn’t know, didn’t even understand, was what happened a day ago…much less last week on the cosmic calendar. After a couple of million years, the chances are that any physical reminder of a prehuman civilization will have vanished, so you have to search for things like sedimentary anomalies or isotopic ratios that look off. “
Thrall continued explaining, “These mere shadows of ancient civilization are all we could even hope for when we got started. Our scientists studying the Anthropocene—the proposed epoch of Earth’s geologic history in which humankind’s activities dominate the globe—is how close today’s industrially induced climate change resembles conditions seen in past periods of rapid temperature rise. These thermal maximum events are found throughout our planet’s prehistory and can be studied in a number of ways, including ice cores from the polar regions. Whether the warming was caused by humans or by natural forces, the fingerprints—the chemical signals and traces that give evidence of what happened then—look very similar to what we see today.