Patrick put his hands up in surrender. “Take a deep breath and just relax. I’ll be right back.” The scrawny man with clothes three sizes too big disappeared and reemerged minutes later with a blue bucket and a large wrench. He made the beeping sound of an emergency vehicle as he passed her. “Please step aside, ma’am, for your own safety.”
Patrick opened the cupboard beneath the bathroom sink, slid the bucket beneath the pipes and turned the water supply valves off. He then began to loosen the coupling on both ends. “Did you shut the tap off as soon as it fell in?” he asked.
Kay leaned over his shoulder with fascination, as though she were witnessing a surgeon operating on a human brain. “Yes, I believe so.”
Patrick then removed the trap and dumped its contents into the bucket. In went his hand, where he fished around until it emerged a moment later holding an engagement ring. “Easy as one, two, three,” he said, grinning as he handed it to her.
“Oh, you’re a genius,” she cried out, taking the ring and hugging him where he sat on the bathroom floor.
“Okay, okay, you’re about to squeeze the life outta me.”
Ollie appeared. “When you two are done renovating the bathroom, make your way to the living room. We just received a disturbing report.”
•••
Kay and Patrick followed Ollie to the other room where Armoni and Sven were already waiting. Neither of them appeared worried or solemn, which told Kay Ollie hadn’t spilled the beans yet on what he’d learned. They took a seat and Ollie began.
“Our resident brainiac Armoni here has managed to breach the inner core of Homeland Security’s cyber-defenses and uncovered the exact location of the detainment camps. Not only that, but Armoni has also managed to pinpoint the exact location of the four individuals Kay has asked us to rescue.” He picked up a tablet, made three quick swipes and came to a stop on a map of the South Carolina coast just north of Savannah. Ollie spun it around, zooming out with his fingers. Eventually a large patch of green grass appeared. In the center of it sat a rectangular compound fenced off with razor wire and filled with rows and rows of wooden bunkhouses.
“You found the camps,” Kay said, beaming over at Armoni with an expression of sheer joy.
“Hilton Head?” Patrick exclaimed in disbelief.
Sven looked at him and grunted.
“What’s wrong?” Kay asked, confused by his reaction.
“Zoom out a touch,” Patrick said, pinching his fingers in the air.
Ollie complied.
“See how the field’s shaped like an elongated kidney bean?”
“What about it?” Kay said, still not clear what the issue was.
“Can’t y’all see the camp was built on a darn golf course? I mean, it don’t get much more ironic than that. Hilton Head was a haven for retired folks. You know, the place they were meant to spend their few remaining years shopping, golfing and hitting the beach. In a twisted sort of way, it’s serving the same purpose, I suppose, as a glorified bus stop on a one-way road to the afterlife.”
Sven started laughing.
“I mean it, man,” Patrick said, defensively. “This is either a total fluke or the boys who built this have a real sick sense of humor.”
Kay shook her head. “The real question is how do we get them out?”
“If you’re asking whether or not they can be extracted,” Ollie replied, “the answer is perhaps. But not by us.”
Kay stood up. “Not by us?” she said, her eyes alight with searing anger. She felt a double-cross coming.
“We have another team,” he explained, “with heavy weapons, who are much better equipped to bust in there and free those people. You wanna make your way over there and join them, be my guest. If that were the only thing on our plate at the moment I’d gladly be there myself. But let’s just say a rather critical piece of information has just fallen into our lap.”
Sven’s eyes narrowed. “How critical?”
“Maybe the worst kind,” Ollie replied, the stress lines in his face looking suddenly more like earthquake fault lines. “We know Sentinel launched the secret coup to overthrow President Taylor because he refused to fire nuclear weapons at the alien ship. Instead, he opted to outfit Cold War bunkers with enough supplies that humans might one day emerge to reclaim all that was lost.”
Armoni folded her arms and pressed her back into the chair she was sitting in. “Which immediately raised a whole other set of problems, like how do they decide who’s allowed to become part of the next generation?”
“Or the one after that,” Patrick said. “There’s nothing to say they wouldn’t be trapped down there for decades. Maybe longer.”
Ollie gritted his teeth and nodded. “Unfortunately, Patrick’s right. Once Myers was in office, everyone assumed he’d scrap the bunker plan, but he didn’t. He actually did what he could to speed it up. What was scrapped was the lottery. You see, for some reason, the bloke who was really pulling the strings, a man named Alan Salzburg, refused admittance to anyone with the disorder that bore his name. He also insisted on a rigorous DNA screening process to ensure the candidates were pure and not tainted by any alien genetic tinkering.”
“I never thought I’d see the resurgence of the eugenics movement,” Kay said, astounded by what Ollie was telling her.
She was referring to ideas about genetic inheritance and purity that had gained prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One branch of scientists, seeking to rid society of poverty, drunkenness, crime, and mental illness, sought to sterilize certain segments of the population, arguing that genetically flawed people should not be allowed to pass along their bad genes. But genetic inheritance in peas and livestock proved vastly different from inheritance in people. It wasn’t until the philosophy, first begun and championed in America, was exported to Nazi Germany that the dangers of such thinking became grotesquely apparent.
“That Salzburg guy sure hates all things alien,” Patrick said, raising his shoulders. “To him it’s like polio, a virus that needs to be eradicated.”
“The aliens probably think the same thing about us,” Armoni joked with black and deadly humor.
“What you’re saying may be true,” Ollie said. “The fact remains, President Myers and his Sentinel overseers were hedging their bets. Upgrade the existing bunkers while also doing what they could to destroy the ship. It was a foolish plan and as we’ve seen, one with a failure rate of one hundred percent. Then there was the hypocritical aspect of knocking off a president you disagreed with only to continue with a huge part of his plan. But now fresh intercepts from a handful of moles in the organization are beginning to shed light on the logic behind Sentinel’s move. Alan Salzburg isn’t against the alien chromosome. The truth is he wants it for himself, to harness the power to grant an almost unlimited genetic advantage to himself and those who follow him. Which brings us to his backup plan.”
Kay sat up straight. “Backup plan?”
Ollie nodded. “One I’m afraid is far worse than we thought.” He glanced over at Armoni, who collected a half-dozen papers from a nearby desk and handed them out. It revealed a satellite image of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Until China outdid it in 2016, Arecibo was the largest radio telescope in the world. From the air, the dish resembled a giant, dirty punch bowl pressed into the ground. Cables running between three concrete towers suspended a bulbous white receiver over the dish. Lush green mountains hemmed it in from all sides, except for a rise overlooking the site, which housed a collection of scientific and support structures.
Kay had seen the radio telescope before, mainly in pictures online, never in person.
“Take a look below the overhanging receiver,” Ollie instructed them.
They did.
“It looks like they’ve added some kind of building with a retractable roof,” Patrick noticed.
“What’s it do?” Kay asked.
Ollie held Kay’s dark brown eyes. “After the original ship was
discovered near Mexico, Sentinel sent a group of agents in to steal as much alien tech as they could get their hands on. Their goal—to reverse-engineer what they found—was straightforward enough. What we’ve since learned is that they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.”
“In so little time?” Kay asked, incredulous.
“Apparently, they managed to hack into an advanced AI system named Anna and steal a decryption key used to crack the alien language.”
“So what’d they build with all that stuff?” Patrick asked. “A big-ass laser cannon?”
“Close,” Armoni admitted. “But it’s far worse. The device they cobbled together is some sort of human and alien hybrid technology capable of creating singularities at great distances.”
Kay shook her head. “I’m not following.”
“Black holes,” Ollie said with deadly emphasis. “Sentinel is preparing to fire this thing into space and create a black hole directly in the ship’s path.”
“Oh, snap!” Patrick hollered. “That is smart and nasty all rolled into one.”
“And there’s a good chance this thing might work,” Ollie said, the creased brow from before now obvious for what it really was, plain old fear. “And those bastards are arrogant enough to think they’ll be able to shrink it down again before it wreaks havoc.”
Space talk wasn’t Kay’s playground, which meant she was struggling to wrap her head around the implications. “Havoc?”
“One of the benefits of Salzburg is I can already see from Sentinel’s equations that the plan to shut the black hole down after it’s taken care of the ship is fatally flawed,” Armoni replied.
“Which means?” Mia asked, although the lump of anxiety in her gut told her she already knew the answer.
“First the black hole will devour the ship,” Armoni explained. “Then when it’s done, it’ll turn on the nearest celestial object…us.”
Chapter 42
15 hours, 36 minutes, 55 seconds
Jack and the others switched on their helmet lights as they descended deeper into the largest of the alien structures and the main objective of their mission. Jack flashed his light, capturing walls draped with hanging moss, a veritable living tapestry. There did not appear to be a single place on board this ship where the vegetation had failed to colonize. Soon, they came to a dead end, with a darkened passage on either side.
Anna glanced around. “Dr. Greer, we are missing three members of our group,” she said, a hint of alarm in her voice.
Gabby glanced at him, her eyes quickly falling to the floor.
“I detect Ivan and both of the pack mules are absent.” Anna studied the geophysicist’s face. “Why has everyone grown quiet?”
Yuri slumped onto the floor, his back pressed against the moss-covered wall, staring off vacantly.
Jack pulled her aside. “Listen, Anna. I’m afraid Ivan didn’t make it.”
“I do not understand.”
Jack sighed and cupped a gloved hand under her chin. “He’s dead, Anna. I’m sorry to have to tell you this way, I really am, but he is. We were fleeing through the jungle and that thing reached down and took him.”
“Took him?” she said, hopeful. “The definition of that word suggests ‘to carry off,’ which implies Ivan might still be intact.”
Jack shook his head. How did you tell a child she’d just lost a friend without scarring her for life? He paused, searching for the words.
“It ate him, damn it,” Yuri shouted from the floor. “Just tell her the truth, the bloody thing crunched him to bits.”
Anna turned her horrified gaze on Yuri.
“He went down fighting,” Jack said, trying to reassure her. “He was brave. But you already knew that.” He pulled her into his arms and she began to weep. Over the years, Jack had had his fair share of women cry in his arms, but never one who really meant anything to him. “Let’s just give her a minute,” he told the others.
“I do not like this sensation one bit,” she said. She lifted her head and her digital cheeks were flushed.
“We’re all sad,” Jack admitted.
“Not all,” she said, motioning to Yuri, whose face was scrunched up with anger.
“Don’t be fooled,” Jack told her. “He may be the saddest of all. It’s never easy when a parent loses a child, synthetic or not.”
“I will make a note of that,” she said, gathering herself together. “In humans, one emotion can often camouflage another.”
“That’s right,” Gabby told her. “There are stages with grief, some of which you may have experienced after Rajesh’s passing.”
Stokes tapped his watch. “Sorry to intrude here, folks, but we got a choice to make.” He pointed at the two corridors leading in opposite directions.
“We should split up,” Jack suggested. “There are ten of us, so two groups of five. Anna, Grant, Yuri and Kerr, why don’t you four come with me. Stokes, you take the rest and holler the minute you find anything.”
“If we find anything.”
“Ever the optimist,” Jack said, grinning away the crushing stress he felt rumbling through his insides.
They headed off, their lights bobbing along the corridors as they continued their search. Jack pulled up the countdown clock on his glasses. With less than 15 hours before impact, he knew this might be their last hope.
It wasn’t long before the corridor opened into a circular room no more than twenty-five feet across with a domed ceiling about half that size. Like the other locations they had come across, the room here was also covered with a mishmash of yellow moss and ruby-colored vines. But unlike the others, barely visible through the creeping plant life were hundreds of tiny incubation chambers lining the walls, each of them no bigger than a curled-up fist.
“There’s so many of them,” Gabby exclaimed, tearing away the overgrowth to get a better look.
Yuri peered over her shoulder. “What were they for, do you think?” His Russian accent making “think” sound more like “tink.”
“We discovered nearly identical structures inside the Atean ship,” Anna explained. “They were used to cultivate and then release full-grown specimens into Earth’s prehistoric environment.”
Yuri took a closer look. “What kind of a creature could you fit into this? It’s the size of a urine sample cup.”
“I won’t ask how you know that,” Gabby said, with marked disapproval.
He stopped and stared at her. “You telling me you don’t like to smoke once in a while?”
“All the time,” she admitted. “But mainly cigarettes.”
“Ha, there goes the pot calling the kettle black,” Yuri shot back.
Anna eyed the interaction with fascination. “A saying that dates back to the sixteenth century when kettles and pots were both darkened from cooking over an open flame.”
“Yeah, we got it,” Kerr said, making his way to a break in the wall where a new corridor lay.
“Maybe this ship did things differently,” Jack theorized. “Rather than incubating a full-grown specimen, perhaps they released strands of genetic material into the environment.”
They pressed on, moving through another passage into a room that bore an uncanny resemblance to the previous one. The third was no different. Each was filled from floor to ceiling with thousands of mini-pods. Jack reached out to Stokes and the others, sending back images of what they had found.
“We got the same thing here,” Stokes replied. “Grant tells us you’ve seen this before.”
“That’s right,” Jack said. “Which is why we aren’t stopping to snoop around. Any serious comparison will have to wait. We’ve just started heading through another long hallway. I can already see that it opens into a massive chamber.”
Jack and his group emerged into the cavernous space. The ceiling, if you could call it that, looked more like the roof of an enclosed sports stadium than an alien compound. Soft lighting bathed the rough edges of moss-covered rock formations. A platform rose up from the middle of
the room. Blue lights blinked on and off in sequence, running up and down its length. A series of steps led to the top where a silver altar sat, most of it covered by vines and other vegetation.
Stokes waved at them from the other end of the chamber. It appeared both corridors led to the same location.
“What is this?” Dag asked, hurrying past Stokes, who warned him not to rush ahead. There was no telling what creatures might be hiding in here.
The two groups met in the center, by a shallow pond. Grant went over to one of the rock formations and scraped off a sample, using the magnification on his glasses to zoom in.
“This certainly doesn’t beat my microscope, but it appears these mounds are also made of discarded nanocells.”
“How could that be?” Yuri asked, stunned.
“It is very simple,” Anna said as she began scaling the steps to the altar. “Some of the earliest forms of life on Earth were mounds of microbes that formed rock-like structures.”
“Some of them appear to still be alive,” Grant began. “Or at least, still functioning.”
Standing next to Jack, Gabby eyed the platform. “You think that was where they made the human sacrifices?”
Just then Dag called them over to a spot at the base of the platform. “I got a collection of bones here,” he said, carefully picking one up. “You ask me, this looks a lot like a Mesonyx arm bone. There’s a partial skull here too.”
Jack, Gabby and Grant went over to have a look.
Anna reached the top of the platform and began peeling the vegetation away from the altar. “Dr. Greer,” she called out. “I believe our assessment of this object may have been incorrect.”
Jack took a handful of steps away from the base until he caught sight of Anna at the top. “Show us what it is you see.”
“Very well.”
The visual came through a moment later. What they thought was an altar was a rectangular metallic formation, its composition a mishmash of what appeared to be silver and lead. The blue lights that ebbed along the edge of the platform criss-crossed over the flat surface of the object Anna was examining. Parts of it were so shiny they could see her reflection as she bent over for a better look.
Extinction Series (The Complete Collection) Page 71