by Darren Beyer
“What source?” A look of doubt appeared on his face. “I need you on the CIS agent.”
“It’s someone connected to the terror plot.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.” Mandi exhaled. “This person contacts me anonymously through text chat.”
“Anonymous text chat? Honestly, Mandi.”
“They’re connected. I know it. The source knew things before they came on the news. Like, way before.”
“I can’t.” Her producer set his jaw and shook his head.
“You owe me. I’ll work the CIS agent, but I need time for this too.”
He stared at her.
Mandi stared back.
“All right.” After an uncomfortable moment, he gave in reluctantly. “You’ve got your time, but get me something on that CIS agent ASAP.”
“I’ll get on it as soon as I return.”
“What? Where are you going?”
“I’m meeting with my source in Florida tomorrow.” Mandi smiled as she turned to leave. “It shouldn’t take more than a day—or maybe two.”
“Two?” he yelled after her. “Be back in one day, or don’t come back at all!”
Mandi smiled all the way to her desk. This source had something. He had called the enrichment value of the uranium from the terror plot to the decimal—to the decimal!—and he had done it while the story was still unfolding. Without a doubt he was in on it. But who was he? A co-conspirator? A complicit scientist? An engineer? One thing was for sure: she was going to find out. First she had to discover where the meet was to take place. The source had been vague.
She pulled up her chat log to review their last exchange:
Anonymous: I have vital information for you. Do you believe I’m legitimate?
MNkosi: How did you know?
Anonymous: Answer my question.
MNkosi: Yes! Now tell me who you are and how you knew.
Anonymous: Not over the ‘net. Meet me tomorrow in Florida at 3:00.
MNkosi: Florida is a big place.
Anonymous: At Stonehenge where a healing god sacrificed three intrepid travelers to the flames.
MNkosi: WTF is that?
Anonymous: You have one day.
Connection terminated.
Mandi spent the better part of the day trying to decipher the cryptic message.
She found two references to Stonehenge in Florida. One was a rusting sideshow along Interstate 4, where someone long ago with too much time and money had partially buried in the ground ancient campers on-end in a very rough likeness of England’s iconic standing stones. She couldn’t believe that the source would want to meet her there. It had no connection to the rest of the message. The second was a tourist attraction in the southern part of the state near Homestead, a garden of large structures carved from coral limestone commonly called the Coral Castle and only tangentially referred to as a Stonehenge.
And “Stonehenge” was only part of the clue. Where a healing god sacrificed three intrepid travelers to the flames. What healing god? Whom had he sacrificed? Stonehenge, while potentially associated with druidic sacrifice, held no references of anyone being burned to death. Searching for healing gods did her no good. She turned up more than a hundred possible gods from dozens of mythos.
Mandi sat back and stared at the sentence for what seemed like hours. Three intrepid travelers. Why intrepid? Of all the words in the sentence, that one was most distinctive. A quick search on “intrepid” yielded expected results: the definition was fearless and adventurous; there were a number of companies a little too full of themselves named Intrepid; the flagship of the Coalition Home Space Fleet; a World War II aircraft carrier named Intrepid had been turned into a New York City museum.
Mandi pondered this last item.
The Intrepid Museum exhibits were impressive. The world’s first supersonic transport, the Concorde, was a centerpiece. The first Space Shuttle orbiter, the Enterprise, gave visitors a glimpse of humankind’s first reusable spacecraft. A submarine was berthed adjacent to the massive aircraft carrier Intrepid, with military aircraft spanning multiple eras displayed on ship’s deck and in its hangars. There was even a Mars exhibit, complete with one of the original robotic landers from the era of first exploration, before humanity had passed the bounds of Earth’s orbit, when the existence of Class M worlds had been as much fiction as reality.
There had to be something there. It was the only clue in the entire puzzle with any meat on its bones. Mandi combed through records, virtual tours, photographs, videos, holos of the museum. Nothing pointed her in a promising direction. When her stomach growled for the tenth time, she glanced at the clock and realized that it was almost midnight. She needed to get out of the office, get something to eat, and go home for at least a few hours of rest.
Old-fashioned home cooking, tolerable coffee, proximity to the office, and, most importantly, hours that suited her schedule made Lulu’s Café Mandi’s staple. North Capitol was wet from a cold, early autumn rain, and streetlights reflected off its pavement and sidewalks in stark contrast to the dark buildings flanking the street. She pulled up her coat collar against the midnight chill. The streets were empty, but Mandi felt something on the back of her neck—the sensation of being watched. In any other city, she would have chalked it up to unknown surroundings, being in an unfamiliar place, maybe a sketchy neighborhood. But this was her town and her neighborhood. She had spent her teenage years not ten blocks away, playing in Union Station and making a pest of herself on the Georgetown campus. She’d snuck out of her uncle’s house late at night countless times. North Capitol was the closest thing she had to a home.
An autocab passed, its tires hissing against the wet pavement. Mandi stopped to watch as it paused briefly at the intersection before turning onto K Street. Something made her turn and look behind her, her heart beating a few beats faster. Nothing was there. She resumed her brisk walk to Lulu’s, quickening her pace. When she opened the restaurant door and stepped into the brightly lit diner, she let out a breath. The night manager and cook recognized her and waved from across the empty restaurant. She cast a relieved smile of acknowledgement before taking a seat at the counter.
“A little late tonight.” He approached her on the other side of the counter, sliding a rag under his hand.
“A difficult puzzle at work,” Mandi said, turning to look at the door. No one followed.
“The usual?”
“Huh? Oh, no. It’s a little late for that. How about a bowl of tomato soup, extra crackers, and a cup of coffee? Better make it decaf, or I’ll be up all night.”
“Coming up.” He slapped the counter with his rag and headed into the kitchen.
Mandi turned on her personal comm and accessed her information on the Intrepid Museum. The cook returned with a cup and coffee pot. As he poured her decaf, she sighed.
“Tough day?”
“I’m trying to figure something out.” Mandi shut off the comm display on her lens and shook her head. “I just can’t get it.” She looked up as he finished pouring. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever been to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York?”
“I don’t go to the museums right down the street,” he chuckled as he set a bowl of sweetener packets and creamer in front of her. “I did go to the Hornet once in San Francisco. That was great. They had the planes and the entire history of the ship on display. I’ll be back with your soup.”
“The history of the ship.” Mandi picked up her coffee cup and took a quick sip. Maybe the museum had nothing to do with it. She used her comm to perform a search for Intrepid’s history and found a detailed timeline, almost day-by-day. The carrier had been commissioned in April of 1943, and then nothing of consequence had occurred for the remainder of the year. In January of ’44, Intrepid began combat operations, and then was torpedoed in February and out of commission until June. The combat history was storied. Mandi read the details of every engagement, scouring the text. It wasn’t until she got t
o the end of WWII that she paused and looked up. The cook was raising an eyebrow and motioning toward her soup. She hadn’t even seen him return with it.
“I’ll get you some warm.” He retrieved her now-cold dish.
“Sorry about that. I’m on a deadline.”
“I know how it is.”
Mandi continued reading. Nothing much followed the end of WWII, until Intrepid served as the recovery ship for Scott Carpenter and his Mercury space capsule. Some small spark of recognition fired deep in Mandi’s mind. She scanned the rest of the timeline, her eyes finally landing on 23 March 1965. Intrepid had recovered John Young and Gus Grissom and their Gemini capsule Molly Brown. Her heart quickened as the spark of recognition grew. She abandoned Intrepid and pushed into Gus Grissom. Suddenly there it was, right there in front of her.
Grissom had had a distinguished career as an Air Force pilot and astronaut. On January 27, 1967, at the age of forty, he had been killed along with astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee in a fire in the Apollo 1 capsule during a pre-launch test. Three intrepid travelers sacrificed to the flames.
A few more rapid searches gave Mandi the backup she needed: Apollo, the Greek god of healing and music, along with an old exhibit in the Intrepid Museum, “27 Seconds, the Apollo 1 Tragedy.”
What was the Stonehenge reference? Searches combining Stonehenge and Apollo 1 yielded no meaningful results. Mandi began searching through old photo libraries of Apollo 1. She found a myriad of pictures of the three astronauts posing and in training, with some of the aftermath of the fire.
Then, standing alone in the middle of the collage, an image stood out: a decaying structure of four cement pillars supporting a concrete platform with a circular opening in the middle. It looked monolithic, almost primitive, in comparison to the technology in the pictures surrounding it. One side of the platform had collapsed and leaned diagonally against a pillar, chunks of concrete littering the ground. Rust-colored stains bled down the sides, the only clue that reinforcing steel had once strengthened the structure. The caption on the photo read, “Apollo 1 Launch Pad—NASA’s Stonehenge.”
“Fuck, yeah!” Mandi said out loud.
Startled, the cook looked up from the kitchen with a smile. He motioned to her second bowl of now-cold soup.
“I’m sorry!” Mandi gathered her things. “I’ve got to go. Catch you next time.”
She burst from the restaurant. It was still cold and raining, and that feeling of being watched had returned.
Chapter 12
Eridani
From a distance, it looked like a massive white wave ready to crash on a far shore. As the helo closed, the Amanzi Cliffs began to take shape, a continual, sheer precipice extending in each direction farther than the eye could see. A blanket of lush greenery capped the kilometer-high granite wall, the product of the ten meters of annual rainfall fed by sea moisture and captured by the coastal mountain range. That same water cascaded off the cliffs in numberless waterfalls, breaking into a fine mist and obscuring the ocean in a perpetual cloud. Dotting the shoreline, lower spires climbed out of the mist, remnants of an ancient cliff line clinging to existence. Each spire sported its own jungle of Eridanian plant life on top, the larger spires with secondary waterfalls.
The helo began a wide arcing turn toward the granite cliffs, approaching them on a nearly parallel course five hundred meters above the sea. With the white cliffs towering above, the fine mist formed into larger droplets on the helo windshield, shedding off the side in dozens of tiny streams. The pilot pushed the control stick forward, dropping the helo into the mist. It gained speed as the cliffs became lost in the clouds and were replaced by a blanket of gray. After a few tense moments, the pilot pulled back on the stick and the helo rocketed up, carried by the powerful updrafts spawned by the afternoon sea breeze. As it exited the mist, the granite cliff wall came into view again, speeding by the cabin windows. Suddenly the cliff disappeared, as the helo launched over the top. Now denied the updraft, it all but fell, with its passengers momentarily floating in zero g, until its airspeed increased once again.
Jans looked at the dark-haired woman next to him, her face full of fear and excitement, as though experiencing a rollercoaster for the first time. Laughing, he pointed through the windshield along the white line of the cliff. A massive granite outcropping cantilevered over a kilometer of nothingness. The pilot gauged the wind, pointing into it as they approached the natural platform. The helo buffeted on approach, rocking as it worked closer, before finally hovering and landing with a bounce.
The wind all but blew the door out of Jans’ hand as he opened it and stepped out on the flat granite surface. Force-six winds swirled, shaking the helo even as the pilot shut down the avionics to starve the engine of power. The woman leapt out behind Jans and ran toward the edge, her hair blowing in the wind.
To one side of the granite outcropping, a small stream cascaded over the edge of the precipice. The woman bounded toward it, peering into the lush jungle canopy as though searching. Huge plants like tall evergreen trees bristled with large aerodynamic needles that gave them the ability to resist the ever-present winds. Below, sheltered by these taller growths, large, leafy plants funneled the mist into large cups at their centers and soaked up what little sunlight they could through higher foliage.
Glancing back at Jans, the dark-haired woman smiled. She hopped onto a large rock in the middle of the stream, then tiptoed on several smaller stones until she disappeared under the heavy canopy.
Jans looked at the sky. The haze, which had only veiled the backdrop of the coastal mountain range, had grown thick now, obscuring it. Before his eyes, the skies became dark and threatening.
Jans called out after the woman, but his voice was lost in the dull roar of wind and rushing water. A flash of lightning painted the sky, followed by rolling thunder. As the sound dissipated, Jans called out again. In a growing panic, he ran to the stream and stumbled into it up to his knees. Struggling against the flow, he fought his way upstream. The current grew stronger, the water deeper. As it reached his waist, it threatened to knock him off his feet. He called out again and again, even as he lost his footing and fell into the torrent. He clung to rounded rocks to keep from being swept over the white granite cliff. Momentarily his hand gained purchase, but a sudden wave surging down the stream crashed into him and carried him away.
***
“You are not sleeping these days,” Dagan said.
“You are gifted at stating the obvious.” Jans closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He wished he could take back the words as soon as they left his mouth. “Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. I also have lost loved ones before their time, Jans.” Dagan paused. “I know about your dreams.”
Jans cocked his head.
Dagan shrugged.
“I guess I’d be disappointed if you didn’t,” Jans said. “I’m just surprised that the doc told you.”
“I would never presume to invade your privacy by talking to your doctor. I have other means at my disposal.”
Jans shook his head.
“Jans, this is natural after a loss.”
“Don’t think less of me, Danny, but I don’t think my dreams are about Sophia.” Jans stood and took his position at the windows of his office. “They’re about all of this.” He gestured at New Reykjavik below. “Can we really pull it off?”
“That is an answer that only time can deliver.”
Jans stood pensively for a long moment.
“Not to add to your anxiety,” Dagan continued, “but this Deliverance that I mentioned to you before?”
Jans nodded.
“We picked up a significant increase in direct references immediately before and after the public news on the nuclear terror plot. I am worried.”
“Couldn’t that mean anything? Perhaps Deliverance is an anti-terror program or some technology to detect nuclear material. We don’t know.”
“Agreed. But we also detected secondary refer
ences that terminated here on Eridani.”
Jans’ eyes narrowed.
“And,” Dagan paused, “normally I give little attention to tangential references, but we have detected one of particular interest, which terminated at the Washington, DC, offices of GNN. It is connected to an account belonging to a reporter named Mandisa Nkosi.”
“Nkosi? As in—”
“Gisela’s daughter, yes.”
Chapter 13
Earth
A fly buzzed in the back seat as the car pulled out of the badging station along the Canaveral River causeway on the approach to the Kennedy Spaceport.
Mandi looked at the press credentials that would gain her access to the controlled part of the complex. They were legitimate, and what she was doing was legal, but she couldn’t shake her anxiety upon entering a controlled government facility.
The water passing either side of the car was a brackish estuary, the land housing the spaceport, an island. Houses, docks, and boathouses dotted the estuary coastline behind her. The shore she was approaching showed only greenery, mangroves, and a lonesome guard gate ahead. To one side, an exit headed toward the commercial spaceport, Mandi’s last chance to back out without raising an eyebrow from security at the gate. She steeled herself, exhaling a breath as her car passed the exit and approached a line of cars at the gate.
Mandi’s heart pounded as, one by one, the cars ahead were waved through. Her heart was about to leap out of her chest when her turn arrived. She was almost disappointed as the access light turned from red to green and the guard waved her through without giving her a look. The gate’s facial recognition had automatically matched her with her press credentials.
To her right, a series of ancient buildings stood in contrast to the line of modern ones to her left. The old headquarters building and processing facilities were pieces of American history, monuments to the fledgling space program that had paved the way for humanity’s exploration of the stars. However, those weren’t the monuments Mandi had come to find. As her car pulled into the parking lot and found a parking space, she deactivated the auto-drive and pulled out a paper map showing the location of the Apollo 1 launch pad.