Extinction Countdown (Ancient Origins Series Book 2)

by James D. Prescott

  “Is that why you killed the wounded man in the tunnel?” Jack asked. “So he’d stop talking?”

  Avraham turned to her. “That was you who shot Dahan?”

  “Sure,” Jack answered for her. “And he wasn’t the only one. She also killed the other guy you left in the facility, probably so we would trust her.”

  The distant sound of a buzzsaw caught Jack’s attention. No, not a buzzsaw, more like a swarm of bees and they were heading their way. Tamura and Avraham caught the sound too because they each looked around fearfully.

  The noise grew louder until a dozen black objects dropped down through the hole in the ceiling and dove on their position. They broke up into two even groups, one half going for Tamura, the other for Avraham.

  They were the drones Anna had put together in the electronics lab before heading down.

  Tamura swatted at them before raising her pistol to take a shot. One of the drones flew from behind and crashed into the weapon, knocking it from her grasp. The drone tumbled end over end, only to catch itself and zip away before hitting the ground. Another made a sharp turn and jammed its spinning rotors right into her face. Tamura shrieked and clutched at her bleeding eyes.

  Jack sank an ice cleat into the top of Avraham’s boot at the same time that he buried his elbow deep into the commander’s gut, bending him at the waist. He then rolled over, grabbed the man’s fallen rifle and popped up, riddling his body with as many holes as he could.

  Now all the drones were on Tamura. Blinded, she pawed at the ground in a frantic attempt to retrieve her weapon. But Jack was there first, crushing her outstretched fingers with the heel of his boot.

  Tamura squealed in pain, terror plastered over her now pallid and bloody face. He set the barrel to her head and moved his finger over the trigger.

  “Dr. Greer, please do not kill her,” Anna begged.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I venture to guess continuing to exist with what she has done will be far more painful.”

  Jack flipped the gun around and brought it down against her skull, knocking her out instead.

  Gabby came over and rushed past him to Dag and Eugene, who had punched their way out of the packed snow. They had kept their helmets on, which meant they could still breathe under all that snow. Working together, they began searching for the others. It soon became an all-hands affair as, one by one, they managed to pull them free.

  “How’s Grant?” Jack asked Gabby.

  “He’s alive,” she said. “For now.”

  But the same couldn’t be said for Rajesh. The bullets that had struck him in the chest had killed him in a matter of minutes. Captain Mullins was also alive, but barely.

  The sound of Russian voices echoing from inside the tunnel froze the blood in Jack’s veins. How could it be that after everything they had sacrificed, and struggled to overcome, they would be taken out by a fresh group of enemy soldiers?

  Jack, and the few who could, raised their weapons, prepared to fight. Gunfire echoed down the corridor toward them. Jack tensed, dropping behind cover. A moment later figures moved into the chamber and Jack had to ask himself if he was dreaming.

  “Friendlies,” Admiral Stark shouted. “Do not fire. I repeat, do not fire.”

  He was flanked by a squad of SEAL Team operators. From the other corridor came members of Delta Force.

  Jack collapsed into the mound of ice beneath his feet.

  At last Anna reached Rajesh and continued to stroke his hair with her one remaining hand until they took him away.

  Chapter 53

  Greenland

  With Northern Star back in friendly hands and the enemy forces either dead or captured, the next phase could begin. Namely, putting to rest Rajesh and the others who had fallen and mourning those who had given their lives. Mullins was in intensive care and being prepped for a medevac back to the United States. Grant’s initial prognosis had been the same, but had changed dramatically over the course of a few hours. It seemed his wounds were healing faster than any of the doctors could believe, and something inside of Jack suspected that if Mia was here, she might understand why.

  Tamura, as it turned out, was not Israeli Special Forces, but an agent working on their behalf. Born and bred in America, she had been telling Jack the truth about her family’s imprisonment in the camps during the war. Despite the government’s attempts to reconcile, she had lived with that burning desire for revenge her entire life. Blinded and disfigured, she would be returned to the U.S. where she was expected to be tried as a spy, a crime for which she would certainly face the death penalty.

  As for Anna, she had been reduced to a third-rate pair of treads and a single arm until the necessary parts were flown in, along with the two grad students, Adam and Leah, who were all that remained of her maintenance team. It was sad and downright disheartening that Rajesh would never get a chance to see the rest of Anna’s incredible journey to adulthood and beyond. Jack hoped it would be a long one, but given the present situation, anything longer than a week or two would be nice.

  She had stayed by his icy grave on the surface until her hydraulic fluid had begun to congeal with the cold. That kind of devotion had left the rest of the military personnel on site feeling mystified and somewhat disturbed. But not anyone who knew her. In more ways than one, Rajesh had been a father to her. And whether she knew it or not, Anna was now an orphan.

  Walking the now-bustling corridors of Northern Star, Jack couldn’t help but reflect on the astounding discoveries they had made beneath Greenland’s ice sheet. For reasons they had yet to understand, the once-flourishing Mesonyx civilization had been marked for extinction, a frightening fate now shared by humans today. His mind turned to one of the statues they had found in the temple, the simian creature with the chain around its neck. Genetically, it was a distant cousin and yet after millions of years it had remained but an animal. Evolution, it seemed, didn’t choose favorites. This time around, perhaps by a series of accidents or blind luck, Homo sapiens were the ones to scale the perilous slope and claim a spot at the top of the animal kingdom. But the most important questions remained unanswered. Were we worthy of the honor? And could we succeed in holding on where so many species before had failed?

  •••

  Soon enough, the time came to descend once again. Other teams had swept over the underground city extensively, only to discover that Jack had at least been right about one thing. The storage area did lead up to the pyramid. Centered inside the pyramid’s main chamber sat what appeared to be a twenty-foot-tall ornate marble shrine. Like the Edicule that covered the purported tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem, or the Kaaba in Mecca, the beautifully carved rectangular structure radiated with energy. Unlike those other mystical places, however, the power here could actually be measured. The readings off the magnetometer revealed incredibly powerful electromagnetic currents flowing all around the structure.

  All who could be were present when engineers began prying apart the structure, looking for a way to get at whatever was inside. A winch and pulley helped to remove the roof. Then the walls came down. For Jack, seeing a structure that ancient turned to rubble broke his heart. But what they saw inside left them in awe.

  “What is that thing?” Dag asked.

  A circular distortion nearly twenty feet across hovered before them. It shimmered in the dim pools of light, rotating in a slow clockwise circle. As they stared into the swirling pattern, it was almost possible to see strangely shaped figures gathered on the other side.

  For a moment, Jack could swear one of those shapes resembled his deceased mother. He rubbed his eyes for what felt like a long time. When he was done, he could hear Mia beside him, calling out her daughter’s name.

  Everyone gathered was in tears, their faces masks of tortured ecstasy.

  A surge of longing and nostalgia closed around him like a tight fist. Jack fought free from its intoxicating grasp. He understood now why the ancient people who had lived here had worshiped this spot. To
them it had been a doorway to the afterlife. But then an old saying came racing through the cluttered neural pathways in his mind.

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  A famous science fiction writer had once coined the phrase, and it had never been truer than it was at this very moment. They weren’t witnessing some metaphysical gateway to the spirit world, they were staring into another kind of doorway altogether.

  “It appears to be a portal,” Anna observed.

  Gabby swallowed. “But to where?” she wondered, brushing the salty tears from her eyes.

  “Difficult to say for sure,” Jack replied dreamily, his fingers rubbing against one another in slow, thoughtful circles. “But I can hardly wait to find out.”

  Real life versus fiction

  While Extinction Countdown is a work of fiction, several of the elements that went into building the story were drawn directly from newspaper headlines and magazine articles as well as from medical and scientific journals. Here are just a few.

  Pulsar Map:

  When the Voyager space probes were launched in 1977, each included a golden phonograph record intended as a greeting to any extraterrestrial intelligence who happened upon them. The golden case protecting them was inscribed with binary instructions on how to play the record as well as a pulsar map indicating Earth’s location. Pulsars are the rapidly rotating remnants of exploded stars, each and every one emitting a unique pattern of pulses. They are also among the most consistent known objects in the universe, lasting millions and often billions of years. The map identified fourteen nearby pulsars, showing their relative distance from Earth. An alien species who was capable of understanding the message would only need to locate three of the fourteen pulsars mentioned in order to triangulate Earth’s position in this part of our galactic neighborhood.

  Biophotons:

  Although they sound utterly fantastical, biophotons are real and consist of photons in the ultraviolet and low visible light range that are produced by biological systems. First discovered by Soviet scientist Alexander Gurwitsch in the 1920s, the low-level biophotonic light is considerably weaker, for example, than that observed during displays of bioluminescence. Recent hypotheses suggest this may represent one of the ways in which cells communicate with one another. However, further testing is required.

  GPS location in images:

  What many of us don’t realize is that every time your smartphone (and in some cases cameras) snaps a picture, that beautiful vista isn’t the only thing being captured. In many cases, several metadata fields are also recorded. Some of these fields include the time the image was taken, the model, camera settings and, more importantly, the GPS location. In some cases, this has helped the police apprehend a criminal, although at other times, it has been used by stalkers and other bad actors.

  GMOs:

  One thing I want to make clear. Extinction Countdown is neither pro- nor anti-GMO. In the book, the idea of genetically modified organisms was merely used as a technological benchmark for the appearance of Salzburg into the general gene pool. Developed in the 1980s and offered commercially in the 90s, GMOs have garnered a lot of bad press, some of it deserved, much of it not. The process of creating GMOs is commonly mistaken for being no different than what farmers and breeders have done for millennia. Breeding and farming, however, use artificial selection, choosing traits by breeding or cross-breeding, while GMOs can make specific changes to individual genes that are not known to occur in nature.

  Wow! Signal:

  In the summer of 1977, Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope detected what it believed was a signal of extraterrestrial origin. The strong narrowband radio signal appeared to be coming from the constellation Sagittarius. While reviewing the data days later, astronomer Jerry R. Ehman thought enough of the signal that he circled it in red ink and wrote “Wow!” along the margin. Since then, several “more scientifically accepted” theories have been proposed to explain the emission—ranging from satellites to passing comets. Despite repeated efforts, the signal was never detected again and remains a mystery.

  Drone Swarms:

  Artificial Intelligence has opened the door to connecting small, relatively dumb computer brains into a technological hive mind. Recent demonstrations on 60 Minutes and elsewhere have showcased the awesome, and in many cases frightening, potential of this new technology. As of now, the majority of the applications for drone swarms seem to be military-based. But with drone deliveries on the horizon, it’s inevitable that the skills perfected for combat will one day be used to deliver Christmas gifts and pizzas.

  Japanese Internment:

  This aspect of the book was loosely inspired by the story of Fred Korematsu, who, in May of 1942, defied Executive Order 9066 (directing the forced removal of “resident enemy aliens” from coastal areas) and was arrested and sent to an internment camp. He later fought a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the internment of Japanese Americans violated their rights under the Constitution, in particular the Fourteenth Amendment (the equal protection of the laws) and the Fifth Amendment (due process). Surprisingly, he lost that battle. In 1988, however, President Reagan passed the Civil Liberties Act which offered an apology and financial compensation for those affected by Executive Order 9066.

  Quick Reference

  Genes in the 47th Chromatid

  COL1 encodes a protein that attacks bone density, mirroring the effects of diseases such as osteoporosis.

  TRPP2 specifies a protein that weakens the ability of DNA to repair damage from ultraviolet radiation, leading to albinism.

  DAF4 mimics the genetic disease progeria, which causes a rapid whittling down of chromosome tips, greatly accelerating the aging process.

  SER3 produces a protein that effectively shrinks the frontal and temporal lobes, sections of the brain which control abilities such as speech and reasoning.

  Genes in the 48th Chromatid

  LRP5 encodes a protein that greatly increases bone density.

  SOD11A encodes a powerful protein Dsup, helpful in shielding us from radiation.

  MRE11, a gene which repairs errors in our DNA.

  HOK3: Effects unknown.

  Glossary

  Chromosome: A structure found within most cells which carries genetic information.

  Chromatid: The single strand of a chromosome

  Gene: A sequence of nucleotides located within a chromosome. Genes help to determine inherited traits.

  Proteins: Produced by genes as a means of expressing its function in the body.

  Gene Sequencing: Used to determining the order of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, in a strand of DNA.

  Thank you for reading Extinction Countdown

  Book 2 in the Ancient Origins Series!

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