He relaxed-he never could explain it, but it was strangely relieving to have the right time on his wrist.
The screech of the jet’s tires hitting the runway.
A tilt as the nose touched down.
The scream of the engines in reverse, brakes.
That crazy feeling of having your body pasted against the seat.
The jet slowed. As it taxied to wherever it was going to discharge Raine, he thought of something that hours ago hadn’t seemed too odd:
He brought nothing.
No uniform. No change of underwear, no running shoes. No toothbrush, no personal effects. Nothing but what he wore to the bar, and a wallet filled with too little cash. The idea hit him full force.
It’s crazy. To fly out here with nothing. Sure, orders are orders…
But he didn’t have a clue what it meant.
The plane slowed some more. Raine unbuckled his belt while it still taxied. When the jet stopped, he listened to the small sounds of the engines slowing, quieting. Bright lights came on in the cabin.
Jackson stood up before him.
“Welcome to Buckley, Lieutenant.”
He went over to the small jet’s door and pulled a wide metal latch to the left, unlocking it. And like some magical portal, the door popped open, sending stairs down to whatever waited outside.
THREE
HANDLING THE TRUTH
Raine walked out into the cold mountain air, where an Air Force jeep stood by, engine running.
“I assume that this jeep is for us, Jackson?”
“Yes.”
Raine walked over and got in the back while his escort went around to the front passenger seat. The jeep pulled away fast, before Raine even had time to get settled.
“We late or something?”
No response. Of course not. Raine looked out at the quiet airfield, the hangars with bright lights inside showing massive bombers and jets as if on display. A few ground crew walked around, but other than their arrival, there didn’t seem to be much happening at the base.
He looked over his shoulder at the small jet. Already it had started taxiing, turning in the other direction.
Time for its next pickup?
As the jeep raced toward a distant corner of the base, Raine felt his apprehension-if that’s what it was-grow.
He had been thinking what this might be about. Being picked up in the middle of the night. Flown here. The private jet. Not getting anything from his apartment.
It would be as if he had simply vanished.
Not that there was anybody to notice. With his family gone, and his last attempt at a relationship crashed months ago on the reality of his steady deployments, who’d really be looking for him?
The landlord maybe. For rent. But even that was automatically sucked out of his checking account.
So what was this?
He didn’t know; but he knew one thing. Whatever this was about, he would be finding out shortly.
Raine looked down at his hands: clenched tight, resting on his knees.
Relax, he commanded them. Ease up. Whatever the U.S. government had planned for him was-quite literally-out of his hands.
The jeep streamed on, and they’d soon left the main part of the base with its hangars full of expensive hardware. A massive building loomed in the distance, four, five stories tall. It looked like something NASA might need, but prefab and put up fast.
Raine leaned forward as the jeep went straight to that structure in the early Colorado morning.
The building was surrounded by a fence topped with concertina wire, and at the gate post, four soldiers stood with their M16s at the ready.
And inside the fence-in case no one got the point-an Abrams battle tank, another soldier manning the. 50 caliber from the open turret.
Probably more security inside the building itself. Raine’s intrigue was growing. Something pretty important was happening there.
The jeep screeched to a halt, and he didn’t need to be told this was their next stop. He opened the jeep door.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said to the driver.
Following Jackson, he went to the gate. Jackson flashed something from his back pocket, one of the soldiers gave a signal, and the gate opened.
Raine came up beside him. “Y’know, stopping for a warm coat might have been a good idea.”
Jackson was dressed only in his suit.
“Tell me about it.”
A joke? Interesting.
Jackson led the way to a side door. Raine could see this building had giant hangar-sized doors as well. Something big was going on in there.
Or was going to come out of there.
Another solider at that door, but he already had it open, and the two men walked in. Raine noticed that Jackson walked with the quick, direct stride of someone who knew where he was going.
He’d been here before.
He made a sharp right at entering and went down a long corridor with corrugated metal walls on either side. It seemed to Raine that there was no way to go deeper into the building.
But then the corridor turned left, and right again, like a maze. Jackson moved quickly, leading him down a warren of hallways before they came to an open service elevator. It was a wire mesh frame, designed to get big things up and down. Jackson slid it open, the elevator’s gate rattling.
Raine looked up, the roof of the building high above them, then at the elevator keypad.
After a zero, all negative numbers.
“We’re going down?” Jackson nodded as the elevator gate closed. He slid his card in front of a reader-too fast for Raine to see-and a light turned green. The elevator started down.
And it kept going down for what seemed a long time.
When it stopped, someone was there to greet them.
“Lieutenant Nicholas Raine. How are you, Lieutenant?”
Raine looked through the mesh and saw his old captain.
“Captain Hill?” Raine saluted.
Hill opened the gate. At first he was surprised to see his captain, but then Raine noticed the scene behind Hill, and it seemed the surprises might only have begun. It resembled Hollywood’s fantasy version of a war room. Banks of computer screens, some showing images, other data. People walking around quickly with a grim sense of purpose. And toward the back, a raised stairway up to a door.
Two more soldiers at that door.
Raine walked out of the elevator. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Captain.”
Captain Stephen Hill, a man Raine had always respected even if he didn’t always agree with him, laughed. “To be honest, Raine, never expected to see you here as well.” The smile faded. “In fact, I never expected to see you again.”
“I-um-”
“I know. You’ve got questions. Well, I’ve got answers. I have an office down here. It’s small and a bit of a mess, but it will serve.” Hill took a breath.
“I’m ready to tell you everything.”
Hill had his eyes locked on Raine’s.
Like-he’s sizing me up.
For what?
“I think I’m ready for that.”
A bit of a smile returned.
“So, Lieutenant, you think… you can handle… the truth?”
Such a line. An old movie scene that every officer Raine ever knew could quote verbatim.
“Always preferred truth to its opposite, Captain.”
“Yeah. I know that about you. Okay-follow me and we’ll get started. ’Cause, you see… you don’t have a lot of time.”
As they walked toward Hill’s office, the captain pointed to a little kitchenette off to the side. “Coffee? Glass of water?”
“No, sir. I’m fine.” Why is he stalling?
They reached his office, and Raine took a seat facing Hill’s desk. It was piled with papers, stacks of photos, and an open laptop. Behind the desk, another computer screen. On it was a paused video, cued to run.
“Tell me, Raine. What do you know about Apophis 99942?”
“Asteroid. Doing a flyby of our planet. Big. Seen the pictures.”
“Right.”
Hill hit something on his computer, and the frozen video on the screen began running. It showed a massive object moving through space. The asteroid.
“That animation?”
“No. Real. We’ve had some deep solar system projects out there. Not public knowledge, but they do intersecting loops of our solar system. Give us video feeds. Mainly to watch what other countries might be doing in space. At least, that was the idea.”
“Jesus, Captain. That is mighty big.”
Raine stared at the live image. This careening hammer threatening to destroy anything in its path.
If this rock from space actually was to hit Earth, we wouldn’t have a chance.
“God. The size of a city. Over three miles wide. Good thing it will miss-”
“But here’s the thing, Raine. It’s not going to miss. It’s going to be a hit. A direct hit.”
The words hung in the room like the pronouncement of a death sentence.
Because in that instant… Raine knew that’s exactly what they were.
“An asteroid that big? It would be-”
“A slate wiper.”
The screen changed. Now it was animation, showing the asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere, a massive shock wave racing before it, walls of ocean water rising up, screaming away from the impact well before the asteroid hit.
Then- impact.
No sound. But there might as well have been, as the animation showed an explosion that seemed to bite off a massive chunk of the planet, sending country-sized pieces of Earth flying upward.
Hill touched his laptop.
The animation paused.
Raine shook his head. Hill had been his captain for two major counterinsurgency efforts, a by-the-book officer who stood by his men, and definitely stood by the truth.
So Raine didn’t question what he’d just been told.
But it seemed unbelievable, unreal… impossible.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “The whole world thinks we’re safe. They’ve been told.”
Hill nodded, and gestured to the control room they had passed.
“See out there?”
“Couldn’t miss it. Like Canaveral.”
“Yeah. This is just one of many sites with a similar purpose. Here in America, and in other countries, too. Apophis is coming, and there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about stopping it.”
“So…” Raine took a breath.
The whole mad night had turned surreal. Maybe he’d blink, wake up, and find himself sleeping off the boilermakers from The Hook.
“… we’re doomed?”
Hill sat down. He leaned close. Raine thought -God -that he saw something in the captain’s eyes he’d never seen before. Not in all the bloody streets and valleys of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as bad went to worse.
Were his eyes watering up?
“We couldn’t stop Apophis,” Hill said. “But that didn’t mean we couldn’t do anything. ”
He had looked away, and only now looked up at Raine.
A small smile, and Hill looked away again.
Something else was going on inside his captain, Raine realized.
“Ready for your orders?” Hill said.
Raine actually hesitated before responding. He was a soldier, though, and an officer was about to give him a mission. Somberly, professionally, he said, “Yes, sir.”
Hill stood up.
“C’mon, then.”
And Captain Hill led the way out of the office.
FOUR
THE ARK
They walked up the stairs behind the bank of workstations, toward a door Raine had noticed when he first descended into this command center. The way was illuminated by a mammoth screen that hovered above everything. The only thing on it was some sort of timer: 2d4h37m37s.
The seconds rolling back, flying away, the time left until Apophis hit.
The time left until doom.
The two guards at the door moved aside as Hill waved a pass and the door opened.
“What you’re about to see is not something a lot of people have.”
Hill went in and Raine followed.
And what was there-Raine couldn’t even put a name to it.
He and the captain stood side by side at a railing, looking down at a dark, massive object. One end came to a cone-shaped point. The sides had razor-toothed metal tracks, like what you’d see at a mine operation, ostensibly for digging into the ground and moving rock.
The base looked flat, and wider, like the bottom of a mammoth bullet. And-at that base-a door.
“Captain, I have to admit: I don’t know what that is.”
People in white coats walked around, holding tablet computers, touching them, looking at other screens.
And-surrounding the room-were the ever-present soldiers in full combat gear, holding their machine guns at ready.
As if they were expecting a raid.
“You’re not supposed to,” Hill said. “C’mon-I’ll show you.” He led Raine down another flight of stairs, so that they were on the ground next to… whatever it was. With it looming above him, Raine was impressed by just how tiny it made him feel. They walked around it, and he noticed little details without knowing what they were for. Finally, they completed their circuit.
“It’s called an Ark, Lieutenant.”
“Like Noah?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s why they picked the name. The French call it L’Arche, the Chinese-with no connection to Noah-a chun jia. Means ‘life pod’ or something.”
“Everyone has these?”
“Those with the tech. Those that the scientists who discovered the truth about Apophis 99942 thought could be trusted. Lot of countries still don’t know. They still expect the flyby.”
“An Ark. You’re going to put people in there?”
Hill turned to him. “People are in there. Deep cryo. This one’s hours away from insertion.”
“And that means?”
“Each Ark gets buried somewhere, some nearly a mile deep-depends on the strata and rough predictions of seismic activity over the next century. Each one goes in with the survivors in cryo sleep-”
“Hang on. You call them survivors. This is to save people?”
“Right. Like Noah. Save some of humanity. The best and the brightest. Scientists, doctors, scholars. Each country with an Ark program formed a committee, also top secret.” Hill looked at Raine. “I’ll tell you-it’s fucking amazing no one has found out.”
“Sure is.”
Hill pointed at the truck-sized Ark in front of them. “This one will get inserted, and it’s due to emerge 120 years from now.”
“Where-”
“Above my pay grade, Raine. All I know is the timing. It’s thought that whatever radiation Apophis releases on impact should have subsided by then. The darkness created by the hit will have also long passed. Life may not survive, but as these Arks come up, they will bring hope for some kind of future for humanity.”
“I imagine they carry seeds, tools, things to start again.”
Now Hill had his eyes trained on him. Raine was so caught up in taking all this in, the global destruction to come, the Ark Project, this top secret place-that he forgot he had come here on orders.
What the hell could those orders be?
Hill put a hand on his shoulder.
“You see, Raine. That Ark down there has one empty and free cryo chamber. And you, my friend, are going in it.”
Raine turned away. I’ve been told that it’s all over. And that thing down there, that’s hope.
That was his first reaction.
More than a century in the future.
Was that hope? Which was worse? Dying in a flash or emerging from under the ground to what could-he imagined-be hell.
Unlike the rest of the world, he now had an option.
To survive, to have hope, to possibly have a future. �
�I don’t get it, Captain. You said… ‘best and the brightest.’ Pretty sure I don’t qualify.”
“What will the world be like a hundred years from now? Whole landmasses may have been blown away by the impact, bodies of water disappeared while new ones took shape. Will anything alive have survived? So yeah, we are sending down a lot of scientists. Doctors of all kinds. All the collected wisdom in the world in the Ark computers. But all that knowledge and learning still may need one thing-”
A woman-white coat, chiseled face, blond hair pulled back, librarian glasses-came up to Hill.
“They’re ready for you down there, Captain.”
She shot Raine a glance. Was that jealousy in her eyes? Envy?
Pity?
The scientist turned sharply away.
“They may need some law and order, Raine. Security. Things could get a little hairy. Leadership may be the skill that could make the difference between life and death.”
A small laugh. It sounded false.
“So amidst the Arks, we placed a scattering of military, all trained in difficult situations. War, disasters, all kinds of crises. Armed, and with an understanding of their mission: to protect the Ark Survivors, and lead them if necessary.”
“Why me?”
“Well, it wasn’t going to be you. I was supposed to be going. Not my choice. They brought me in, told me the mission, and I agreed. But then-”
Now Hill looked away.
“They found something during one of the last medical checks. Some cancer. With enough time, treatable. Hell, I might even live. But we didn’t have time. So…”
Hill looked back to Raine. “Would you send someone who’s perhaps dying with cancer into the future? I offered to withdraw before they even came up with the idea.”
He took a breath.
“I also suggested my replacement.”
Neither said anything for a moment.
“Guess-I should say thanks. But I feel like I don’t know enough. Who’s in this Ark? What can I expect when it comes out? Where-”
“I know. Lots of questions. Follow me.”
Hill moved toward the Ark.
Toward the open door.
Raine had to duck down as he slipped into the Ark.
Inside, in the pale light, the interior was quiet, a hushed temple of technology. Scientists moved around the room, some checking monitors, taking notes, others hitting keys.
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