by Bill DeSmedt
Good! The woman was cowering to one side. The man was framed in the now-open hatch. All Yuri needed to do was aim carefully, steady himself against the helicopter’s bouncing, and the upholstery would not be bloodied. He grinned, broadly.
Suddenly, he heard a shriek, to his right. Not a scream of fright, more like a war cry. At the same instant he glimpsed a blur of movement almost at shoulder height. Something or someone was hurtling horizontally through the air towards him!
He was turning to bring the .45 to bear on this new threat, when his elbow exploded in agony! He heard an awful snapping sound. The gun was jarred loose, went skittering across the floor. The man grabbed for it, but missed. It flew out the open hatch, into the night.
Yuri howled. The bitch had broken his arm! Kicked him! Kicked him with all of her weight behind the blow somehow.
Yuri ducked and a second kick only grazed his forehead. He would not be caught unawares again. He turned to face the woman. She was crouching in some sort of martial arts stance. No question now who represented the greater danger. Yuri had miscalculated, seriously. What he wouldn’t give for his gun!
He roared and lunged for the bitch. Crashed hard into the seatback instead. As he screamed in rage, she delivered another blow, this time with the toe of her boot, this time to his ribcage.
The pilot was having difficulty compensating for the sudden redistributions of weight. The copter tilted abruptly. The man fell out the open hatch. The woman hesitated a moment, then leapt after him.
Sliding across the deck, Yuri snagged a seatbelt in his remaining good hand, managed to hang on. Cradling his arm, forehead bleeding, he stumbled to the door. He looked down fifteen meters to the heaving surface of the sea but could make out no details in the dark.
“Lights!” he commanded hoarsely. “Take us lower!” The pilot switched on the big spots and angled them down, illuminating a wilderness of waves. Then—
“There!” The two of them, bobbing on the surface. The woman was struggling with the man’s knapsack, trying to pull something out.
Yuri dogged the hatch shut and climbed forward into the unoccupied copilot’s seat, wincing as he jarred his shattered right arm. He strapped in and pressed a red button built into the frame of a flatscreen display. Two panels in the forward fuselage slid back to reveal a brace of machine gun snouts. The Colibri dropped all pretense of being a civilian aircraft and owned its true identity as a helicopter gunship.
“Strafing run!” Yuri said. The machine guns’ video sights were equipped with infrared. On the screen, in the crosshairs, images of two warm, fuzzy blobs stood out against the cold, dark water. What he wouldn’t give right now for a rocket-propelled grenade or two! Yuri squeezed the trigger. The spotlit chop below pocked with splash-craters as the slugs hit the water fast enough to ricochet.
Now there was nothing to be seen. Did he get them? He looked in vain for bullet-riddled corpses floating amid the swells.
Yuri ordered the pilot to circle, circle again. The downdraft from the rotors kicked up the surf, obscuring what he most needed to see. Still nothing. No sign of the man or that devil-woman. He ached to get them in the machine guns’ crosshairs. Especially her. He knew her now, something in her voice, her stance. It was that bitch who’d tried to interfere with the extraction in New York. But he had seen her fall!
Over the years, upwards of fifty men had died by Yuri’s hand. He had never killed a woman before. Other than under contract, of course. Certainly not in revenge. Revenge upon a woman would be uncultured, not in keeping with the code.
Now, though—the devil with the Mafiya code! He longed to see the dark blood-blossoms sprout on her brow as the slugs sang into her braincase. Wanted it so badly, he could almost see the image forming on the sighting display.
He saw nothing but churning, spotlit water.
A minute went by. Five. Still the helicopter circled over the now-empty sea.
Finally, the pilot protested. “This is useless, Yuri Vissarionovich! Our fuel runs low. We must turn back to Rusalka now, or go on to Horta to refuel. They are dead in any case. If the bullets did not kill them, the Atlantic surely will.”
Yuri peered out into the darkness, considering. Grishin would want him back on board in the hours following the capture, not sitting at some devil-take-it airport in the Azores waiting for the night crew to refuel the copter.
And . . .
Yuri was not a stupid man; stupid men do not last twenty years in the Sarkatvelo Mafiya. Till now, it had seemed the two Americans were engaged in industrial espionage, pure and simple. But with his recognition of the woman came a realization: the U.S. government was behind this! And it was not Yuri’s place to decide what to do about that. Grishin would need to know, soon. Yet, if they were indeed being stalked by CROM, he ought not break radio silence to report that fact.
And . . .
His arm throbbed in agony. It would require attention soon if Yuri was to be of any use in the crucial hours ahead.
All these reasons, good reasons. Still, for a long moment, prudence warred with murderous vindictiveness, the brain versus the blood. Then—
He turned to the pilot. With his uninjured hand he traced a single arc in the air and then pointed back the way they came. He scowled.
“Devil take them! Circle once more. Then we go.”
The helicopter executed one more slow, fruitless circuit of the dark sea, and then arced off back toward the northwest, back toward Rusalka.
As it departed, the roiled black waters of the North Atlantic subsided again into gentle, empty swells.
23 | Armageddon
VURDALAK FED.
Vurdalak would always feed. An entity defined solely by its ravenous hunger, Vurdalak hurtled along its subterranean trajectory, and it fed.
But there was so little to feed upon! Vurdalak’s capture cross-section was only marginally wider than the diameter of an atomic nucleus. At subatomic scales the solid material of the mantle through which Vurdalak traveled was mostly empty space. Individual atoms were few and far between, and what few it consumed were as nothing compared to its mountainous mass. They could do little to assuage its insatiable appetite. Only when it had spiraled in to the very center of the Earth, where the atoms of the molten interior were densely packed, could it begin to feed in earnest.
Yet, for a time, the dynamics of its own motion forestalled that inevitable outcome. Although Vurdalak swallowed only a few atoms in its headlong plunge through the Earth, its passage influenced many more. Its immense local gravitational field reached out to draw in mass from the immediate vicinity all along its path, to collide in its wake.
The resulting shockfront at its stern yielded Zeldovich-Salpeter acceleration—a tiny push that, for a time at least, could counter the even tinier pulls of gravity and drag. Powered by its own self-made thrusters, Vurdalak would remain in a semi-stable orbit, for a time.
For a time, a time now well into its tenth decade, Vurdalak’s augmented trajectory would keep it within capture range. The question was how to capture it.
On its travels through the Earth, Vurdalak traced out a delicate rosette, reminiscent of a rose window in a Gothic cathedral. But each petal of this rose, each orbital arc, took the shape of a flattened semicircle, half of an ellipsoid. This geometry was critical for capture: it meant that Vurdalak’s speed was not uniform. Most of the time, the primordial black hole whizzed along like the subterranean sputnik it was. But there were two points at either end of the arc where it ceased to rise and hesitated before falling back. In this, its motion was not all that different from a cannonball fired into the sky at an angle: it goes up, it comes down, but for a moment there, at the maximum of the curve, it does neither. It slows and slows and then hangs in space for an instant before speeding up again on the return trip.
It was in these moments, when Vurdalak slowed to a crawl at the top of its curve, that it would be easiest to stop it entirely. Stop it and hold it.
It had taken thirty-three mon
ths of electromagnetic nudging, nearly three years truing up the orbit. But finally the local maximum of one of Vurdalak’s arcs, its 22:47 apogee, was about to pass precisely through the center of Antipode Station’s spherical superconducting electromagnet array.
Galina sat at the master console in the now-crowded quarters of the secret lab, with Grishin hovering over her shoulder. She leaned forward and keyed in a single word: Armageddon. A strange, non-Russian word, that. A word from the Bible. She had looked it up: the final battle between Good and Evil, the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Galina nodded to herself; it fit.
Three thousand meters below, responding to her keystrokes, Antipode Station came on line.
Galina looked at the time-display as Antipode’s enormous electromagnets powered up: 10:37 P.M. Vurdalak was still ten minutes downrange.
“Postrel’nikova here,” Galina spoke into her mike. “Requesting verbal confirmation on array power-up.”
“North hemisphere, nominal—temperature holding at minus two sixty-six degrees C,” a voice whispered in her headset, followed by okays from the other monitoring stations.
She swiveled her chair and nodded to Arkady Grigoriyevich. All boards green. Showtime! Curtain going up in eight minutes on the most important performance of her life.
Vurdalak sped along its track, oblivious to what awaited.
Grishin nodded a confirmation: they were go for capture. Galina entered a penultimate keystroke combination. She licked her lips and leaned toward the microphone again.
“Commencing braking train configuration.” It came out as a whisper.
Three kilometers down in the sunless depths of the Newfoundland Basin, there rose a mountain called Hope.
Mount Nadyezhda—Russian for “hope”—was the seamountwhose summit, towering a kilometer and a half above the abyssal plain, cradled Antipode Station. And whose eastern slope was now the scene of frantic activity as automated systems responded to the keyed-in command.
Galina did not need her displays to visualize what was happening all along the undersea mountainside that Vurdalak would be climbing in just seven minutes thirty-two seconds. In her mind’s eye she could see the superconducting toroids of the braking train rearing up out of their cryogenic armatures and locking into place. Now a strand of interlaced rings adorned Nadyezhda’s shoulder, descending in a gentle curve from her mile-high crown to her foot. Nor did the annular chain end at the seafloor; from there it entered the Shaft, a borehole twice as deep as the mountain was high.
A thousand supercooled metal-jacketed donuts—widely spaced at first, but bunched closer and closer together as they neared the summit—were now aligning precisely along the final five kilometers of Vurdalak’s upward track.
Timing was critical: for safety’s sake, the superconducting toroids had to be cooled well below the near-zero ambient temperature. Before long, seawater would begin to freeze on the now-exposed rings. The accreting ice could do damage. Worse, as it expanded, it could warp individual braking rings out of alignment. The solution was to limit the exposure of the active elements as much as possible—limit it to the final seven minutes before capture.
But that tight a time margin could create problems of its own.
Galina’s display flashed red! A twenty-toroid section in the middle of the braking train was not responding to the reconfiguration command. The assembly as a whole was a hundred percent overengineered; it could still perform its function if every other one of its component electromagnets were to fail. But it could not handle a continuous hundred-meter gap in the chain!
Six minutes till the onset of the deceleration run. But only four before she must initiate a scram, or the links in the chain would not have time to withdraw out of Vurdalak’s way. They would be destroyed, and to no purpose! She poised a trembling finger above the Abort key, hoping against hope that the holdout units would join the rest of their own accord before time ran out.
“What is it, Galina Mikhailovna?” Grishin’s voice startled her. She had forgotten he was standing there behind her. “Are we still go? We must make capture on this pass.”
“Please, Arkady Grigoriyevich, there is no time to discuss this right now. I must think!”
Under other circumstances she would be shocked to hear anyone, much less herself, address the head of Grishin Enterprises International in such peremptory tones. As it was, she scarcely paid heed to what she had said. Or to his reaction. Her mind was racing frantically, like a squirrel in a cage. Must focus, focus . . .
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she found herself thinking back to the banquet the previous evening. Back to something Dzhon had said there, some joke. What was it? Ah yes, his so-called First—or was it Second?—Law of Data Processing: “When in doubt, reboot.”
Nothing to lose. Try it!
She keyed in the reset command and hit Send. Barely time enough left for this to work. If it worked. It would take a full minute to retract all the units back into their sockets, another to step through the restart procedure, yet another to raise the toroids back into braking position again—three minutes cycle-time in all. Three minutes before she would know if the recalcitrant links in her chain would move into alignment with the rest.
Please—please!—let it work.
Silence stole over the lab. All eyes locked on the countdown displays, watching the seconds tick down to the scram point. The three-minute mark approached, passed. Nothing . . . Still nothing . . .
“Green! I read green!” One of the techs, Voshchanova, screamed it out from down the row of workstations. Galina checked her own display: sure enough, the entire five-kilometer track was now showing as an almost-continuous string of little green dots from bottom to top. The last laggard units went from red to green even as she watched. They all winked merrily at her like a strand of lights on a yolochka, a Christmas tree.
She would sag with relief, but there was no time, no time! Two minutes thirty-two seconds remaining till Armageddon. “Powering up frontline toroids,” her voice cracked as she spoke the words. She entered the keystrokes, hit return. They were committed now.
Sixteen hundred fathoms below, power began to course from Antipode’s main nuclear reactor down the braking train. At the bottom of the shaft, the first ten decelerators came to life.
But only the first ten. The reactor’s output was insufficient to drive all the toroids in the braking train and still have power enough for what else must be done. No matter: this had been planned for.
“Confirming frontline toroids at full field strength. One minute eight to go on the clock,” Galina announced finally. She was surprised at how calm her voice sounded, now that there was no turning back. “Engaging deceleration sequence in five, four, three, two . . .” She entered one last command.
“Mark: 2246 hours.” The cool, androgynous tones of a synthesized voice picked up where Galina left off. “Armageddon Phase One: Deceleration Sequence, engaged.” The mission computer had now assumed control over all aspects of the final phase, status reporting included.
10:46 P.M. Sixty seconds to go. Vurdalak was still twenty kilometers out, closing at thirty-two hundred kilometers per hour, but slowing, slowing as the vertical component of its velocity vector dwindled to zero with the approach of apogee.
Enough time for a last check of the readouts: at t minus forty seconds, Antipode’s gravitometric instrumentation was just beginning to pick up Vurdalak’s signature propagating through the mantle beneath the seafloor. Now the SQUIDs were reading its magnetic profile as well. The geophones detected the first faint subterranean rumblings of the vampire’s approach.
The final seconds ticked down. Galina glanced again at the Abort button, but that option was no longer available to her. Humans were now out of the loop, their biochemical reaction times orders of magnitude too slow to even observe, much less direct, what would happen next. The Antipode techs could only sit on the sidelines as their automated factotums decided the fate of the Earth.
Galina wat
ched as the countdown went to t minus seven, t minus six, t minus five . . . All the years of preparation, all the effort, the sacrifice, now balanced on the fulcrum of this single instant. No time left for second thoughts now, no time for might-have-beens.
t minus three, t minus two . . .
Time, perhaps, only for a prayer. A simple prayer, remembered from long-ago summers spent with her grandmother. Gospodi, pomilui. Lord, have mercy, have mercy upon us.
t minus zero.
Vurdalak encountered the first toroid in the braking train. Things began to happen. Fast.
Everywhere else in the known universe, magnetic poles come in inseparable north and south pairs. Can’t have one without the other.
But Vurdalak was a magnetic monopole. In effect, just one big south pole, with no north to offset it. And the operative term here, from the standpoint of field strength, was big.
The superconducting rings were oriented so that their own magnetic south poles faced downward, in the direction of Vurdalak’s approach. Like-charged poles repel one another. As Vurdalak entered the first ring, its radial field plowed into the one threaded around and through the toroid. For a few milliseconds the ring resisted the hole’s forward momentum, and, though the outcome of the struggle was never in doubt, neither did Vurdalak escape entirely unscathed. It was slowed, if only by a minuscule amount. It was also deflected, by an equally minuscule amount—just enough to aim it dead center toward the next decelerator in the chain.
The toroid itself did not fare anywhere near so well. If time had permitted, the irresistible force of Vurdalak’s passage would have smashed it flatter than a tin can in a roller press.
Time did not permit; there were bigger, faster effects afoot than mere mechanical stress and shear. Move a magnet across a conductor and you get electricity. As Vurdalak traversed the first toroid, electromagnetic induction set a current to flowing in the unit’s superconductive alloy. Like all the rest of the phenomena associated with Vurdalak, it was a very large current.