“Please tell me you’re not leaving me holed up in this shack to bake to death?” Armoni said, her eyes half-moons of disapproval.
“Of course not,” Ollie reassured her. “You, Kay and Patrick will be team number three.”
“What will we do?” Kay asked, the fear coiling around her chest like a boa constrictor around its prey.
Ollie positioned the map over the dish. “Your job will be simple. Destroy the alien weapon.”
Chapter 45
7 hours, 15 minutes, 29 seconds
Jack returned to the structure to find Anna and Dag sitting on a rocky outcropping, the others gathered around them.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Anna’s movements were slow and appeared almost pained. She looked up at him. “I have viewed many videos on the internet of people being struck by lightning or run over by cars. I feel as though I have finally experienced both and wish to never do so again.”
“You should have seen her ten minutes ago,” Dag said. “She could barely walk.”
“Where’s Caretaker?” Gabby asked.
Jack shrugged. “Probably still up there surveying his domain. I tried to get him talking but keeping him on one thing is like trying to herd cats.” He briefly summarized the incredible incident with the Stalker he had witnessed.
“With powers like that we should be calling him Merlin,” Dag said. “He has no idea how much he’s selling himself short.”
Grant cleared his throat. “Dare I say, to a Neanderthal or, for that matter, to any of our early ancestors, the mere act of turning on a television set would seem like magic, not to mention the moving images it produces.”
“My sense is he doesn’t want to tell us how to stop the planet’s destruction,” Jack told them.
“Then maybe we should make him,” Stokes offered, tapping the receiver of his M4.
“Is that your plan?” Gabby said with disgust. “Waterboard him? Maybe threaten to extradite him back to the U.S.?”
Jack put up his hands. “We won’t get anywhere with threats, I’m quite certain of that. Perhaps a softer approach might work.”
“Yeah,” Dag said. “Make him feel comfortable. Get him talking. There’s this bartender at the Billy Goat. Every time I go in there, I end up spilling my guts…”
All eyes turned to Anna. She glanced up at them, worried. “Me?”
“Who else?” Jack said, crouching next to her. “He’s taken a shine to you.”
“He’s not my type.”
Jack laughed. “I didn’t know you had a type.”
“Dr. Greer, there is plenty you still do not know about me.”
Gabby pressed a hand on her back. “You liked Ivan, didn’t you?”
Anna’s eyes fell.
Jack looked up at Gabby who shrugged. “What can I say? Women’s intuition.”
“Will you do it, Anna?” Jack pleaded. “Strike up a conversation with Caretaker.”
Dag was down next to Jack. “Yeah, but what if he zaps her again?”
Jack tapped the back of his helmet. “No one’s getting zapped. Just get him talking and we’ll do the rest.”
Anna nodded. “Very well, Dr. Greer.”
Twenty minutes passed before Caretaker returned, still in his humanesque form. By then Anna was back on her feet, running a diagnostic to make sure none of her systems had been irreparably damaged. She paused when she spotted him and stepped forward to speak.
“You wish to learn more about me,” Caretaker said, cutting her off before she could say a word.
Anna froze. “That is correct. Were you listening to our conversation?”
“I did not need to,” he replied, eyeing the others who were standing nearby. “We are linked. I can see your thoughts as if they were my own.”
“That is truly fascinating,” Anna replied. “Will you share how this is possible? Or have you planted a virus in my operating system?”
“There is a field of energy largely unknown to your scientists. It goes by many names and holds tremendous power. On my home world it is known as Ka. I have seen in your memories you call it by a different name.”
Anna nodded. “Yes, I see what you are showing me.” Her eyes were locked on a distant, invisible image.
Jack and Grant exchanged a questioning look.
“Dark energy,” she said at last. “We are only at the very beginning of understanding its true potential.”
“Ka is but one of many tools,” Caretaker said. “Over millions of years, my people have learned to harness other kinds of power.”
“Yes,” Anna said, turning her head to view something else only she could see. “We call those Dyson spheres, named after an Earth scientist who first imagined them. I see you have many.”
“Had many,” Caretaker corrected her. “It has been many millions of years since my departure and my attempts at contacting my home world or its many colonies have not been successful.”
A look of concern washed over Anna’s features. “What do you suppose might have happened?”
“It is impossible to know for sure unless I return home.”
“Home?” she asked. “Where is that?”
“We call it Telon and by your measurements it lies twenty-five thousand light years away, a world close to the galactic center with a star very much like your own. However, Telon is tidally locked, which is to say it does not rotate the way your Earth does. As a result, one side remains a frozen wasteland, while the other is a hellish inferno. Thankfully, there is a strip between the two that allowed life to take hold. Just as you evolved from tree-dwelling marsupials, we evolved from a species that lived in the seas and gradually migrated onto shore. Over millions of years we lost most of the trappings of those ancient days living in the sea, although a species is never as far from its barbaric past as it would like to believe. On Telon, life in the sea was challenging and often required a brutal practice where the smallest members of the litter were eaten. This is a reality that exists on this world as well. But for us, even after we left the tepid waters for the far more bountiful conditions on land, this practice continued. Eventually, as we developed a greater sense of morality, social taboos led to the act being outlawed. A ritual took its place in which the youngest offspring was sprinkled with spice and seated at the head of a giant feast. Over time, most forgot where this ritual came from—some even denied its real origin. Either way, it helped to signal a departure from our barbaric past. As you have shown me, Anna, humans are not all that different. A simple search through their own rituals has made that perfectly clear.”
“He may have a point,” Gabby said. “I mean, when you look at the rituals around weddings, it’s largely rooted in superstition.”
Anna pulled away and approached Jack. “Dr. Greer, there is something you need to know.”
Jack’s gaze slid past her to Caretaker, who was watching them. “Is it about…”
“No,” she replied. “My decryption protocol has just completed.”
He looked at her, a glimmer of hope in his tired eyes. “You cracked the 48th chromatid?”
Anna nodded, her face aglow. “Yes, and I think you will be surprised by what it contains.”
Chapter 46
“I did not anticipate finishing the decryption for at least another week,” Anna began. “However, over the last hour, the number of calculations I was able to process began to grow at an exponential rate. If you recall, the previous solution led us to a triangular number sequence that ended in the numbers 666.”
“How can I forget,” Grant said. “I’d become convinced we’d unlocked some sort of demonic vortex.”
Gabby laughed.
“As it turns out,” Anna continued, “the first one hundred and forty-four digits of pi also add up to 666. As well, one four four is the twelfth number in the Fibonacci sequence…”
“Is anyone here a mathematician?” Jack interrupted Anna in order to query the group.
One by one they shook their heads no.
“Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s skip the foreplay and get to what you found.”
“Very well,” Anna replied, feeding the decrypted file into each of their OHMD glasses.
“Whoa, this is a lot bigger than I expected,” Jack said, tossing his into an external holographic view he was able to rotate with his hands.
“They’re building plans,” Yuri exclaimed, the sole engineer among them.
Jack swept through the schematic, a mess of rooms, corridors and chambers. He shrank the image down as small as it would go and then swore.
Caretaker looked on as a parent watching excited children tear wrapping paper off Christmas gifts.
Gabby swept aside the image she had been looking at and glanced over at Jack. Hovering before him was the holographic image of a huge diamond-shaped craft.
“I don’t understand,” Dag said, staring at Jack as well. “Okay, so we have the plans for the Death Star. Now all we need is a Luke Skywalker to go blow it up.”
“No,” Jack shot back. “That’s not it. Do you really think they would encode this into Salzburg just so we could come along and find its one weakness?” His gaze swung over to Caretaker, who wore an amused expression. “This isn’t a game,” he shouted. “Billions of people are going to die.”
“Life and death is the cycle of all things in the universe,” Caretaker replied stoically. “Even the largest universes must one day collapse.”
“Universes?” Dag blurted out.
“Yes,” Caretaker said. “The immensity of the physical universe is unfathomable, even to us. Our people have learned to travel to many of them in search of the source.”
“The source of what?” Anna inquired innocently.
“Of everything.”
“What’s wrong with the Big Bang being the source?” Gabby asked. “I was pretty sure we had that one licked.”
The smile that grew on Caretaker’s lips was without a hint of condescension. “Endings and beginnings are a matter of perspective. Your Big Bang was merely the death of a super-giant star in another universe.”
“You’re talking about black holes?” Jack said. “I still don’t see how this relates…”
“I am speaking of both ends, and do not worry, you will.”
“White holes,” Gabby said excitedly. “The same principal behind the portal.”
“Correct. As I said, all things that live must one day die. This is the order of the known world.”
“But why?” Dag asked. “What made it that way?”
Ripples formed in Caretaker’s chin before it took on a more distinct shape. Even as he spoke, he was perfecting his new form. “That is the question we are also trying to answer. The only way of doing so is by traversing from one universe to another, following back through each Big Bang, as you call it. In that way we hope we might arrive at the prime creator.”
“You’re talking about God,” Dag said.
“We had no expectation for what we might find, if anything at all. And now with the possible extinction of my people, it will be left up to another species to carry on. Perhaps that means you.”
Each of them fell silent. Jack let the full weight of Caretaker’s words settle over him before asking, “Is that why your people seeded Earth with life?”
“In part, yes,” Caretaker replied. “Like you, our planet was also seeded by another and when the time came we were deemed worthy. This is how intelligent life spreads throughout the cosmos. Whether Homo sapiens or cetacean, the form is not important. It should not surprise you to learn there have been many other intelligent species that have called this planet home. What you call the Mesonyx are but one. Several have learned to manipulate their environment and one nearly became a spacefaring race. But none of them possessed the requisite abilities necessary to end the cycle of extinction. Intelligence alone is not enough.”
Jack struggled to put the pieces together. Humanity was facing its greatest test, without knowing any of the rules or what it was expected to do. “The plans for the spacecraft are for us. You want humans to take over,” Jack said, fumbling for the right words. “Carry the baton, seed other planets, the way it was done to you and the way you have done with us. Spread life throughout the galaxy and beyond, all in the search for the answer to the ultimate question.”
Caretaker nodded. “The search for the prime creator. It is not a coincidence that your species has sought out answers to these very same questions. That drive was implanted in us as it was in you.”
They were quiet for a moment, mulling over Caretaker’s words. To learn that the human drive to know who we were and where we come from, our insatiable curiosity, was imbedded within us was a lot to take in.
“Have you considered there might not be one—a creator, I mean?” Grant asked, in the sort of matter-of-fact way only he could.
“Gaining a full understanding of the universe and our place in it is never a waste, if that is what you are implying. Would you give up the study of biology if your theory of evolution proved incorrect?”
Grant shook his head.
“No, of course you wouldn’t,” Caretaker admonished him. “Every apocalypse breeds an opportunity for a new species capable of joining the search. As civilizations like my own fade away, many others will step up to take their place.”
Jack brought up the countdown timer, watching precious seconds slip away. “What we need to do is figure out how to break the cycle,” Jack said, racking his brain, feelings of self-doubt and despair hovering about him like a fine mist. Humanity had convinced itself they were the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, not merely one among many. Not only were they at the bottom of some galactic pecking order, it was starting to look like they might not even be able to stave off their own demise.
Gabby was back studying the plans for the doomsday ship when she said, “I think I might know how.”
Chapter 47
The sun was brushing the horizon with long golden fingers when they left the Puerto Rican shack. They would make the journey to the Arecibo Observatory in two separate vehicles—Ollie and his team in one, Luis, Kay and the rest of her team in the other.
Ramon had discovered a recently abandoned logging road that ran parallel to the observatory. And this was the route they would take. Given the facility stretched out over several miles, Ollie’s team would push further into the nearby valley.
“Maintain radio silence,” Ollie said to the others, speaking softly into the mic.
“Roger that,” Richard replied from the van behind them as it pulled off the road and into position.
Ollie’s van raced on, kicking up dust and bits of gravel as it sped along the narrow road. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d suggested not all of them would make it back. Although it had seen its fair share of bad luck, blowing up the nuclear missile in Florida had been a resounding success. Sure, there had been moments when things had been touch and go and they had been forced to take a few lives, but the real concern was that a false sense of confidence might set in. And he knew there were few things deadlier in the field than complacency.
Before long, Paco pulled over. They got out and geared up. Each of the four men had a backpack with water, a first-aid kit, a machete, two hundred rounds of 7.62 ammunition for the AKs, as well as several 9mm pistol mags. And they might have carried more too if they hadn’t needed to scale a hill in seventy percent relative humidity.
Ramon led the way, hacking through the jungle as they began their climb. It wasn’t long before Ollie felt beads of sweat rolling down his forehead and into his eyes. The rifle strap was strung across his chest and still it jostled around, jabbing him in the ribs as he struggled to place one foot in front of the other. Beside him, Sven was not faring much better. For starters, his muscular frame meant he was carrying a lot more weight. Only Paco, the thinnest of them, showed no signs of fatigue.
The vegetation was thick, but Ollie was sure he could see the outline of a white building through the screen of trees above them.
“Report your status,” Ollie said, gulping for air.
“I have reached the northernmost tower,” Luis replied, “and am preparing to attach the explosive charge.”
“Kay?” Ollie asked. “What about you?”
“We’re moving along the edge of the dish and will let you know when we’re in position.”
So far so good, Ollie thought. Ten minutes passed as he and his team moved slowly through the jungle. It made him wish they’d had a tank to bust through the front gate. Or better yet, a long-range missile to obliterate the area from a distance.
“Almost there,” Ramon said, lowering his profile against anyone looking for movement along the perimeter.
Then it came fully into view, a three-story white structure. The sides were made of corrugated metal. On the top floor, a series of windows overlooked the dish itself. Luis had told them that was where they would find the control room.
They reached the edge of the jungle and stopped searching for guards and cameras. Finding none, they shuffled into the open, aiming for the nearest entrance. A door leading to the structure’s main floor stood directly before them. That was when Ollie spotted the recessed stairwell which led up to the third floor. He tapped Sven and everyone headed in that direction.
They were halfway there when they heard the explosion. Ollie scanned left into the open valley below, where he saw a huge fireball billowing up to the left of the dish. The flames streaked up the length of a steel pillar a second before they caught the distant sound of screeching metal. Slowly, the pillar began to topple over like an enormous tree. The receiver buckled as the cables holding it were stretched beyond acceptable limits. Soon the sound of snapping cables joined the cacophony of destruction below as one tower after another was pulled down by the weight of the first.
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