“There’s something about that guy I don’t like,” Jack said, watching the captain make his way toward the back of the plane.
“There’s no law against being a jerk,” Gabby told him.
Jack nodded. “No, there isn’t. I just hope to hell Admiral Stark vetted this guy better than the fake ONI crew that tried to kill us.”
•••
Ten minutes later the C-17 shook violently as it touched down on a runway made of ice and snow. The engines reversed thrust, slowing the huge aircraft. With no windows, it was difficult to tell whether or not they were taxiing or standing still. The voice of the pilot came over the intercom, calling Captain Mullins to the cockpit. Mullins undid his seatbelt and stood. So too did Jack, his legs feeling wobbly from sitting for so long. He made his way to the front of the plane, steadying himself against the bulkhead with his left hand and the stowed equipment with his right. Both he and Mullins reached the pilot at the same time.
“Dr. Greer, please return to your seat,” Captain Mullins ordered him.
“Back off, we have a right to know what’s going on,” Jack shot back. He turned to the pilot, a grey-haired man named Steve Peters, who removed his sunglasses and folded them into the breast pocket of his aviator jumpsuit.
“When we failed to reach anyone to confirm our landing I wondered if there was a problem with the equipment on the ground. Then we tried another channel and all we got was static.”
Mullins’ expression hardly changed. He ducked down and peered out through the cockpit windows at the extensive cold-weather habitat. Jack did the same. By any definition, Northern Star was an impressive sight to behold. Three brightly colored modules connected to a central core. It resembled the spokes of a giant wheel. Each module sat on a pair of hydraulic stilts, raised several meters up from the snow-covered ground. But apart from the structure itself and a handful of smaller huts and support vehicles, there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“Where is everyone?” Jack asked. “Shouldn’t this place be bustling with activity?”
The copilot removed her helmet. She was a thin young woman with dark hair and a calming demeanor named Natalie Thomson. She pushed the earpiece to her ear as she continued to radio Northern Star. “Still nothing.”
“Well, we can’t sit here all day long,” Jack said. “For all we know they’re having the same radio problems we are.”
“We should follow protocol,” Mullins said sternly. “We don’t disembark until we get the all clear.”
“And what if it never comes? Are we to sit here on the runway until we freeze to death? At the very least, a few of us should investigate to make sure everything is all right.” Jack fixed Mullins in his sights. “Unless you know something is off.”
Mullins looked offended. “I know what you’re insinuating and I don’t like it one bit. I’m following regulations and maybe you should too.”
“Listen, Captain, I shouldn’t be the one to have to tell you that we don’t have the luxury of waiting around for a green light on this. That flying extinction machine isn’t going to wait till we get a green light. We may only get one shot at stopping this thing. We screw this up, we won’t get a second chance.”
“Okay, fine. A few of us will head out and figure out what’s going on. Everyone else will stay here and wait for the okay.” Mullins clapped a hand on Jack’s chest. “There may be a big pile of shit to eat for breaking the rules. I hope you’re hungry.”
Ten minutes later, Captain Mullins, Jack, Dag and Gabby donned their biosuits, modified for cold weather. The suit itself was already rated for temperatures around zero, but warming coils sewn into the fabric increased that to minus forty. Given the air would be breathable, they opted to leave their helmets behind.
Dag and the others donned their OHMD (optical head-mounted display) glasses that had served them so well during the exploration of the alien craft.
“Testing, one, two, three,” the lanky red-bearded Swede said. His voice came through filled with static.
“Whatever’s causing this interference is making it hard to hear you,” Jack told him. “Let’s use hand signals and keep the talking to a minimum.”
“I’m in charge of this mission,” Captain Mullins reminded Jack. “And I’ll be the one giving orders.”
They were about to leave when Anna appeared. “Captain Mullins, would you mind if I joined you?”
The captain looked uncomfortable. “Not a chance,” he said to her. Then to the others, “The tin can’s only gonna slow us down.”
“She isn’t a tin can,” Gabby corrected him. “Her name is Anna and if you gave her half a chance, you may just be surprised what she can do.”
Anna smiled. “Thank you, Gabby, for your kind w—”
“All right,” Mullins barked, feeding a magazine into his M4 rifle. “You want that thing along, you look after it.”
“Thing?” Anna said with a touch of annoyance as the C-17’s loadmaster opened the front hatch and lowered the folding stairwell into a gust of frigid, unforgiving wind.
Chapter 13
Mia couldn’t erase the eerie image of the maternity ward Jansson had shown her. How it had been filled with pregnant women afflicted with Salzburg, all of them expecting twins. If there was any doubt before, it was about as clear now as the glass beaker in her hand that Salzburg was on the move. And yet the exact mechanism by which the blast wave had been altering the DNA of so many species on earth was still unknown. Clearly, it represented a technology many years ahead of anything humans possessed. Academic as it might seem, it was a question Mia knew was central to articulating a strategy to slow and perhaps even reverse the damage that had already been done. But reaching that goal first meant understanding how Salzburg was able to sneak into our DNA in the first place.
There was a time when the average human genome consisted of 23 pairs of chromosomes. Now that number had been bumped up to 24. According to Alan Salzburg, it was a process which had only been discovered a few years ago, but one they’d retroactively traced back to the mid-90s.
Mia deposited the beaker and activated the DNA sequencer. While she was figuring out how to tackle the problem at hand, she might as well get the genetic ingredients that made up the newly discovered LRP5 gene.
They knew the blast wave from the ship hadn’t caused Salzburg to appear. That had happened before. However, it was clear that the waves emanating from the ship were affecting the Salzburg already inside of people. That meant it had to have been introduced in another way.
Watching the lights on the sequencer flash on and off reminded Mia of the time she’d spent on the ship and how those Sentinel agents had posed as naval intelligence officers. She knew from Admiral Stark’s testimony that they must have had someone on the inside. Someone, or perhaps a group of folks, high up enough to get them the certification they needed to usher them through the multiple layers of security around the mission in the Gulf. She was in the middle of daydreaming about how powerful that person would need to be—the secretary of state? Or maybe even the vice-president?—when she was struck by what could only be described as an epiphany.
Maybe Sentinel wasn’t alone in having people on the inside. What if Salzburg had also used a form of sleeper agent as well? Something planted in our DNA from the beginning, waiting patiently for the right time or perhaps the right signal to begin introducing Salzburg into our genetic makeup?
But what would such a thing look like? Would it have been a length of DNA? Her eyebrows arched quite on their own. Or could it possibly have been a gene? If so, it would have been a gene common to each of the species already affected. There were dozens of affected species of animal that had either been domesticated by humans or lived near them. Luckily, most of them had a genome that had been fairly well documented in the last twenty years.
Mia asked one of the young technicians to pull up that data along with a list of the genes that were common to all of the species on the list.
It was less than an hour later t
hat the technician returned with five stapled sheets.
“Here is what you asked for.”
Mia thanked her and went to the projection room to have a quiet place to have a look. She was looking for a gene that scientists knew next to nothing about, or possibly one with no obvious function or purpose. Most of that time she spent scratching off genes that didn’t match. The vast majority were well understood and performed important jobs in the organisms they resided in. Before long she came upon one gene called HISR that displayed a particularly interesting set of characteristics. It coded for a non-essential protein which helped speed up membrane production. As per the search parameters she had given the technician, the gene was also present in each of the species she had outlined. But it was a final data point Mia found which stopped her cold. The HISR gene had been rendered obsolete in about seventy percent of the animal and human population by “loss-of-function” mutations. That meant small changes to the genes over time had rendered these genes dormant in around seventy percent of the species population who had it. Which was to say, only thirty percent of any group had active versions of HISR, a number that just so happened to be the same percentage afflicted by Salzburg.
Before leaping out of her chair with joy, Mia asked for the sequenced genome of anyone with Salzburg who was part of the Kolkata study. Once again, the information took some time to arrive. But after poring over it, one thing became clear. Individuals with the dormant version of HISR showed no signs of Salzburg while those with the active version now possessed a genome with a full extra chromosome.
What did this mean? Mia was in the middle of asking herself when Jansson stormed into the room.
“I heard you found something,” she said, practically panting.
“HISR isn’t merely a useless remnant from our ancestral past,” Mia started to explain. “It’s an assembler gene, one that’s been waiting for eons to perform its one and only purpose, creating Salzburg.”
“But from what?” Jansson said, both amazement and skepticism in her voice. “New chromosomes and genes don’t simply pop into existence out of nowhere.”
Mia met her gaze and held it. “I believe it’s using our non-coding DNA, what some still erroneously refer to as junk DNA, as the building blocks.”
Jansson held the edge of the table to stabilize herself. “That’s incredible. But why now? What triggered HISR to become active?”
“I’m not sure,” Mia told her. “But I have an idea how to find out.”
Chapter 14
Washington, D.C.
The GPS coordinates Kay got at the restaurant led her to the Korean War Veterans Memorial in West Potomac Park. Dedicated in 1995, the main feature was a triangular strip of land with a platoon of nineteen stainless-steel soldiers.
She stood for a moment, biting at her lip, watching the statues silhouetted against the darkened sky. Strolling through the park at night wasn’t exactly the smartest thing for a woman to be doing, but the promise of a big story had overwhelmed the nagging little voice in her head. Thankfully, a handful of couples were milling about, including a family of four. One of the children dragged his feet, whimpering.
Laydeezman had told her she would know it when she saw it and here she was standing before the memorial without seeing much of anything. She decided to circle around the display, checking the surroundings for anything unusual. Like the grounds themselves, the soldiers were also arranged in a tactical wedge formation. Kay moved clockwise, circling around to the left of the soldier out front and scanning left and right as she went. She looked at her phone and saw less than ten minutes remained before the deadline. She had reached the rear of the formation when something caught her eye. One of the statues was carrying an unusual piece of equipment. In the dark it almost looked natural, but something about the shape of it stuck out. It was a black bag. Kay stepped over the chain fence and drew nearer. She was less than five feet away by the time she realized she was looking at a black laptop bag. Bingo!
•••
Not long after, she had returned to Biltmore Street and the one-room apartment in the Adams Morgan part of town she called home. Her cat Goggles—so named after the circular patches of dark fur covering his eyes—greeted her at the door with an onslaught of recriminating meows.
“I know I’m late,” she told her persnickety roommate, moving into the living room and setting the laptop bag down. “You should have food in your bowl.”
Goggles stared as she spoke, then meowed.
Kay sat on the couch next to the laptop and tapped her leg. “Get over here, you stubborn little bugger.”
After playing hard to get, Goggles leapt up, rubbing the sides of his face against Kay. Soon the little beast was curled next to her and Kay carefully removed the laptop and flipped open the top. There wasn’t a power cord inside the bag. She pressed the power button and to her surprise the machine hummed to life. It had barely gotten started when the computer asked for a password.
Kay frowned. It was just her luck to get this far only to be stopped dead by something so small. She pulled out her phone and was about to message Laydeezman when she remembered something. Hadn’t he included a string of numbers in his message to her? She had assumed it was some kind of phone number, but maybe she’d been wrong. Scrolling up, she found what she was looking for.
2028569587
Kay inputted the numbers and clicked enter. A spinning disc appeared briefly before the desktop appeared.
So far, so good.
Not only was she in, but getting in with the password also confirmed she’d left West Potomac Park with the right item.
The desktop displayed a single icon. It looked like a video file. Kay clicked it.
A black and white video began to play. Five men sat in what looked like a boardroom. The strange downward angle of the shot gave Kay the distinct impression the group had been filmed secretly. But even without color or close-ups, Kay was able to easily identify who she was seeing. They were among the most powerful men in the country. Vice-President John Millard, Speaker of the House Julia Lopez, President of the Senate William Jackson Jr., Secretary of State Robert Chase and Secretary of the Treasury Ellen Hall.
There was audio too. She listened with bated breath.
“He’s already started moving the departments of agriculture and energy underground,” Lopez said, tapping on the table with the pads of her fingers.
“I heard Treasury’s set to go next,” Hall told them with disgust. “There aren’t enough bunkers in the whole country for more than a few thousand, not to mention our family members. I’m telling you he’s dead wrong on this one.”
“The prospect of living underground for the next few decades while the earth cools isn’t my idea of fun,” Jackson said, shaking his head and leaning back in his seat. “John, did you try convincing him to hit that thing with every nuke we had?”
“Till I was blue in the face,” Millard replied. “President Taylor’s already given up. He’s convinced nuking it won’t do any good. And he’s certain a nuclear strike will start an interplanetary war we could never hope to win. Thinks if we go down that road they won’t stop till every last one of us has been exterminated. And that if we go underground and wait out the worst of it, at least some of us might still be around to rebuild and repopulate the planet.”
After that the room erupted. It was clear to Kay the president was hoping to weather the incoming impact, rather than risk a move that might lead to the eradication of our species. To the men gathered around this table, however, such a move was tantamount to giving up. If the human race was going to die, let them do it fighting, rather than hiding in a hole like rats. Kay found herself ping-ponging back and forth between each of the positions. They both had merit and yet at the same time, both options were terrible.
As Kay listened to them argue, a single thought kept running through her mind: What about the rest of us? If the president was already sending critical governmental bodies down into bunkers, would the rest of t
he American people, the rest of the world be left to die? A large-scale effort to save seven billion lives would take years, even decades, assuming it was even possible. A measly two weeks wouldn’t be nearly long enough. Clearly it was a shitty situation with a short list of shitty solutions.
“Taylor’s a lost cause,” Chase told them. “He’s already made up his mind. Man’s left us no choice. The line of succession is very clear, ladies and gentlemen. Once he’s gone, Millard will slide into the job. Least then we’ll have a fighting chance.”
After that the video ended.
Kay’s mouth was dry from the shock of what she had just witnessed. This wasn’t merely a bunch of angry government bureaucrats venting their frustration. This was proof of a massive conspiracy involving the president’s own cabinet. A conspiracy to have him assassinated and replaced by his vice-president.
The ping from Kay’s phone startled her. She shifted to remove it from her pocket, annoying Goggles, who was busy cleaning his ears. The Laydeezman had sent her a message.
Have you watched it?
“Where did you get this?”
I can’t say. But I hope now you can understand my paranoia.
“The president’s life is in danger,” she wrote, her fingers feeling numb against her phone’s touch screen.
Not if you can publish the story first.
“What do you mean? Shouldn’t you just contact the authorities?
Don’t be naïve. The highest levels are in on it. However, once the conspiracy is exposed to the public, the authorities will have no option but to move in. There’s a folder on the laptop with still images. Close-ups of each of the conspirators. That way they won’t be able to claim it isn’t them. But it needs to get out as soon as possible, otherwise President Taylor, along with the rest of us, will end up dead.
Chapter 15
The blast of cold air bit the exposed skin on Jack’s face as he exited the plane, his boots crunching over tightly compacted ice and snow. They were on a wide-open Arctic plain, the wind whipping along at incredible speeds. As if to prove the point, the American flag flying atop Northern Star rippled violently. Fifty yards away lay the four cold-weather modules that made up the base. Three massive blue structures connected to an even larger red one in the center.
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