“How did I get here? I was at the port…”
“You were brought here with a bullet wound in an unconscious state. Don’t worry, the wound isn’t serious, the bullet went right through. You will recover soon.”
Mike remembered. He could also remember the blow to the shoulder, when he drove the stolen UAZ at full speed from the burning port. He had barely got out, and ended up in the hospital. He wondered what had happened to his passengers.
“How are you feeling?”
“Well, I can hear a ringing in my head, and everything is all floating before my eyes.”
“It's OK. You've lost a lot of blood, we are doing a transfusion.”
He noticed a red package with a thin tube coming from it. The tube went into his hand, and, as he looked, he saw ties around his wrist.
“Hey, why am I bound?”
“Sorry, Mike, but you have already tried several times to pull out the IV when you were unconscious, so for a time we had to hold you still.”
His double vision became even stronger, and the woman's voice began to sound slow and malleable, like a tape played on a very low speed.
“Don’t worry, go to sleep again. You need to gain strength.”
Yes, it was a great idea - a little more sleep. He must rest; he had a really fucking crazy morning.
The injured driver fell asleep again; and the doctor added new data to his file then headed out of the tiny chamber, heading for the coffee machine for an espresso. She needed to cheer up, the day had been very difficult and it didn’t seem that the night would be any easier.
Most of the time the services provided at the hospital on the small naval base far from any combat situations weren’t the most complicated cases; usually her work involved routine medical examinations and minor injuries. But this morning, since some unknown and very influential guests had come to them, everything turned out differently; she had never seen so many seriously wounded and killed in one day.
The first three victims were those from a burning Hammer, then the marine was brought in who had been shot in the stomach; with great difficulty, they managed to keep him from death. Then it became worse: following those patients were two mercenaries who had been burned very badly. And then the driver, who escaped easily – the heavy bullet had pierced right through his shoulder. Now he was lulled by the anesthetic, and she had to go to the burn center.
“Well, what is it?”
“Here, look.”
She took the tablet from a nurse and went to the wounded, trying not to look at their burned faces. They were both now unconscious under a huge dose of anesthetic. The left one had no chance, burns covered ninety-five percent of his skin. The one lying on the right bed was likely to be saved, but he would remain disabled for the rest of his life, if it could be called life. So, what had changed with the analysis? Why was her knowledge needed?
“What the hell?! There must be some mistake, re-check the test results!”
“I already checked twice, I don’t know what to think.”
“I will check myself; there must be a mistake. This can’t be!”
23. Reinforcements
Flashes were coming from welding, and jackhammers rumble - construction was underway, on a parking lot for army trucks, to build a mobile research complex. From the capacious wombs of transport aircraft, modular kits were unloaded one by one, and engineers quickly assembled these kits into airtight compartments, like a toy city built from Lego blocks. They added multi-seat tents for personnel and deployed large plastic rolls, which were converted into solid domes after being supplied with compressed air. Workers assembles inflatable transitions between modules, set satellite dishes and launched the powerful mobile power station. Once the construction was over, IL76 almost immediately turned around and took off. Five minutes later a Hercules with the same emblem of the private transport company landed. The propellers hadn’t completely stopped, but passengers began to emerge from the ramp - dozens of men and women in the same uniform with the same steel suitcases. Bronson’s thugs silently surrounded this group, accompanying them on the short path to the research complex.
“Francis Palmer.”
Intruder’s heads by high, very thin woman in a light gray coat, fashionable hat hides short red hair. She looked a little over forty, and if not for her excessive thinness and extraordinary pallor, she would look good, at least in the opinion of the Colonel. Richardson thought she looked something like the porn stars of his youth. Arrogant domineering bitch, that must be immediately put on table and fucked.
Although, judging by her papers, she was fucking him over. He had already received orders that confirmed her power, and now he, along with everyone on the base, was subject to Miss Palmer, and should provide all possible assistance in her incomprehensible business.
“How's Bronson?”
“He is in the hospital. Can you take him and his two boys?”
“We aren’t medics. They will stay in your hospital under the supervision of my men.”
“How long are you going to stay with us, Miss Palmer?”
“As long as necessary.”
The redhead skinny bitch departed, leaving the Colonel alone, thinking about what was happening. They weren’t medics, she said. And what had they built in his territory, where he had no right of entry? What was it for?
Richardson realized that he knew the answer. They would work with this huge ball, which apparently is the lander from the satellite. The whole mess started because of this thing, and now the bastards in Washington, who dropped it on his head, refused to take it back.
Why had they not taken the ball back? Why had they decided to work with it here, on his base? Since its fall last night, the burnt metal ball had already claimed the lives of two hundred, including several of his men, and who could guarantee that there would be no more death? They were afraid of it, and therefore didn’t want to pick up it and take it home – that was the only logical explanation.
“Bastards!”
Richardson sees from his office, as to the Palmer’s town going rover with precious cargo, Bronson’s men guarding the car.
“I await your instructions, sir.”
“Look after them.”
24. Cargo
“Lower, lower - stop!”
The once white, and now charred, metal ball fell onto a support; a few more seconds and it was released from cables. The long journey was over.
“In zero hours and seventeen minutes we will begin the inspection.”
By habit Palmer spoke into the built-in helmet voice recorder to capture all their actions and all her thoughts about what was happening. It was good to have a record that would allow her to remember not just the events, but also her thoughts on the matter. Such a measure was always useful, despite the fact that right now a dozen cameras are shooting film of the charred ball.
“Obviously the lander was twice subjected to high temperatures, the first time when it entered the atmosphere, the second time during a fire. As a result, the external thermal insulation circuit has been damaged much more than we first thought. I wonder what happened to the cargo under it.”
The operators completed a preliminary recording and departed to the wall, letting Francis forward. The sealed compartment was not a large area and most of this space was already occupied by the lander, so they had to work very carefully in their heavy biological protection suits. Every step and movement was correct, the effect of many weeks of training in which they had practiced such a scenario.
Francis held a bright red glove on the rough ceramic surface, which protected the lander during its fall. Fibers clung to her fingers, the aftermath of the aerodynamics heating to two thousand degrees Celsius. The heat circuit had originally been designed for only one instance and the likelihood that it would be needed a second time was extremely small.
“The time between the two cycles of heating was twelve hours. Immediately after landing, the lander was in the ocean water for an unknown length of time. I
don’t presume to predict how the temperature differences impacted on the cargo; we will investigate it in a thorough way.”
The only place free of ceramics was a massive hexagonal bolted plate, which covered the hatch in the hardware compartment. Francis remembered how the rover’s manipulators had fastened this plate eleven months ago. The plate was also scorched, but the fire hadn’t caused the damage here; fire wouldn’t affect this armor. This was from another, much more serious accident.
“The speed at the moment of impact was about eighteen kilometers per second; the fragment struck the hatch and entered the hardware compartment.” Francis’ fingers gently touched the edge of the hole. She couldn’t resist the temptation and shone a little flashlight inside.
“Probe!”
A miniature camera on a long flexible probe entered the hole; she directed it, looking inside the lander. For some reason she remembered the first Alien, which she had been terrified of as a child - for a split second she had the idiotic thought that a facehugger would jump out of the hole.
Francis laughed her childhood fears nervously - an alien wouldn’t be so bad, especially considering the damage observed at the first examination.
“The capsules are broken. Sea water got inside and boiled in the fire, I see salt stains. All right, enough. Open the hatch immediately; it may be that there is something inside that can be saved.”
After removing the probe, Francis retreated a few steps, giving the opportunity for her assistant to approach the plate, and quickly remove the bolts.
“Take off on the count of three. One, two, three!”
25. Rain
There had been dry weather for sixteen days. In the evening of the seventeenth, a breeze started blowing in from the ocean, driving dark clouds towards the city. Minute after minute, hour after hour, the clouds increased, merging and concealing the stars and the thin silver moon. There was a flash of lightning, then a second, a third - soundless flashes of white flame. Distant thunder sounded, first weak, then stronger and stronger. And then the first heavy drops fell onto the city.
Rushing from the clouds, water drummed on tin roofs and spilling in broad streams through the narrow streets, immediately picking up floating debris and dragging it back into the ocean. This happened almost everywhere except in the destroyed warehouse near the water. Last night dozens of powerful lights dispersed the darkness of the nigh here, and the work didn’t stop for a minute. And now this place met the rain from the sky with darkness and the persistent smell of burning.
Where there had towered massive hangars and workshops, now only twisted metal fragments remained, still so hot that the first heavy drops of rain boiled on impact. A measured hum extinguished all the other sounds, like a giant pillow, muffling the noise of cars and gunshots. The shooting stopped briefly, then started again in another place; sometimes muzzle flashes or the lights of cars and fast shadows could be seen through the rain. Outside observers have no chance to understand what and why is happening in the streets, but if you know the background, then everything is clear.
The fire had not only greedily devoured the most important part of the city, where an invisible path of drugs, money and weapons converged, but had also killed most of the drug lords. Along with them, tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana had been burned to ash. The rain had not yet washed away this ash into the ocean, and those who were lucky enough to survive the firestorm, now rushed to claim power in the kingdom that had suddenly lost its ruling dynasty.
Business obligations, oaths of loyalty, family ties - all of these had given way to the struggle for power, which wasn’t dampened at all by the hard rain. By morning, the city and the province would have a new leader, but for now, pretenders to the throne gathered their men to fight with competitors. Past deeds and responsibilities were forgotten, because the past doesn’t exist anymore; it burned down, and now there was only the future.
There was no use in protecting the charred ruins, because there was nothing of value left. There were no survivors of the fire; all that could be found were dozens of bodies, charred so badly that it was impossible to identify them. It was hard to even see whether they were men or women. In the port there was nothing more that could be done, and people had withdrawn from there to fight the enemies.
An hour later, after the first drops of rain fell on the burned ruins, a man in black, charred clothing stood up from the piles of trash and debris on the edge of the former warehouse. He, too, was badly burned, but almost didn’t feel the pain of the terrible burns. He felt hungry.
26. Lines-6
The time to study the plate had been reduced to a minimum - as much as was enough to completely dig it from sand and take a picture of lines. The army cryptographers and most powerful computers worked hard in a futile attempt to decipher the lines, while Walt meanwhile turned the rover back to the obelisk. They already knew that the inside of the obelisk was hollow – it had been confirmed by the fluoroscopy and ultrasound – and now they had the task to open it.
In fact, it took nineteen days to break through the sarcophagus. They had to work very slowly, with the utmost caution - the cutters and drills on the rover were extremely small, and replacing them would be impossible. Over nineteen days and nights, they fixed a cutter to the manipulator and it gradually made its way through the armor. After removing the section, they were able to open the sarcophagus.
Inside were capsules – sixteen cylindrical capsules, sixty centimeters in height and twelve in diameter, standing in twos on each side of the octagonal sarcophagus, installed on small pedestals three quarters of a billion years ago.
They took two more days to inspect the capsules from all sides, before touching them. They were formed of dark volcanic glass, the color of iodine, completely smooth, except for the end of each cylinder, where they found lines similar to the ones on the plate. They were similar lines, made by the same laser at the same angle, but not quite identical – clearly they had a different meaning.
When they cut through the armor, the Martian atmosphere broke into the sealed space of the sarcophagus. The vacuum had the same temperature as the outside, for seven hundred and fifty million years. The climate and atmospheric composition during this period hadn’t changed much, and seismic activity on Mars was virtually absent, which ensured the safety of the sarcophagus and capsules in it. Now they had to find out what had happened to the contents of the capsules.
“Carefully, lift the first.”
They began with the closest capsule, the manipulators picking up the cylinder of dark glass and raising it from the pedestal with a jeweler’s precision.
“On Earth, the weight will be eighteen kilogram and two hundred grams, on Mars it is two and a half less.”
“Highlight it in the visible spectrum.”
A powerful beam passed through a dark glass.
“That it’s, down at the bottom. Now let's try in the ultraviolet.”
“We don’t know how ultraviolet radiation will affect it.”
“We don’t know how the normal lamp might affect the contents. We'll have to risk it.”
Using the ultraviolet they could make out a dark substance that filled the capsule to about a third. Walt instructed his assistant to slowly turn the arm and then watched as the substance was slowly poured into the capsule. It was a viscous and thick liquid, not frozen despite the temperature of minus twenty-five Celsius.
27. Cargo-2
Immediately after they’d pulled back the hatch in the hardware compartment, Francis ordered her men to retreat. It wasn’t just for safety reasons, not at all.
She hadn’t been a part of the first team that discovered the Object. Walt hired her towards the end of the operation, when the rover had already exposed the sarcophagus. It seemed that her colleagues were ahead of her everywhere, and she hadn’t become a pioneer, in the same way as Walt had, but events had been turned on their head, and now she was the first person to get access
to the Prometheus lander and its cargo. She would be the first person in the world, the first scientist in history to take into her hands the object created by extraterrestrial intelligence. Or, at least, fragments of the object.
First she carefully selected a splinter that was half a palm long, the dark, almost opaque, glass contrasting with the bright color of the suit gloves. The glass was smooth and about thirteen millimeters thick. She took the chip out with her fingers and carefully examined it, then handed the piece of dark glass to her assistant, giving the order to make an immediate analysis. Made by unknown tools, the glass was particularly strong; in fact, it seemed almost like translucent armor. But this armor couldn’t withstand the impact of the escape velocity, and now, in front of her, is a whole pile of dark debris instead of capsules.
Naturally, the contents of the broken capsules had spilled out even before the lander separated from Prometheus. What had happened to the heavy viscous fluid?
Had it boiled and evaporated away completely due to the hole in the armor, and the temperature of a thousand degrees inside the hardware compartment in those seconds when the lander entered the upper atmosphere? And if not, then perhaps it had mixed with salt water, and boiled again when the ball was in the raging fire. In any case, leakage had occurred. But what was the degree of risk? It was completely unknown, as were the possible consequences. In the meantime, they needed to collect the debris and scrape the inside of the lander, to see if there was anything left.
“Look at this, Walt.” A small camera was pointed at a pile of dark debris.
“Both capsules were completely destroyed. The cargo spilled out and there is a high degree of probability that it was lost into the atmosphere or the ocean water, which came into the hardware compartment through the hole and then boiled in the fire. Now we are trying to find at least small traces, but will have to wait for the first results in the morning.”
Vampire's Day (Book 2): Zero Model Page 5