“What are Northcom’s missed rendezvous protocols?” asked Vedala. “Are we in some kind of danger?”
“I don’t know. You’ve—”
“Why won’t you put us through to Northcom?” demanded Vedala.
“I don’t have the right equipment—”
“Bullshit. What’s happening here? Why do you want us to leave this place?”
A solid five seconds of silence elapsed.
“Put Sergeant Brink on,” said Kline with a tone of finality.
Vedala hesitated. She had grown darkly suspicious of Sophie Kline’s behavior. Putting a finger to her lips, she quieted the group. Shaking her head, she mouthed: Something is wrong.
Speaking into the satphone with forced conviction, Vedala lied, “Brink is out hunting with the Matis. He should be back soon. We have fifteen seconds.”
Static hissed over the line as the final seconds of the transmission ticked away, and then Kline spoke quickly: “Tell him . . . tell Brink to be extra careful with the Omega watch I lent him. Tell him it’s very important. It’s an Omega.”
Vedala glanced at her fellow scientists for clarification of Kline’s bizarre statement. Her concerned gaze settled quickly on Peng Wu. The former soldier was biting her lower lip, cheeks flushed and trembling.
“Sophie? We fail to see how—” began Vedala.
Before she could say another word, Peng leaned forward and clicked off the satellite radio. The others stared at her in surprise.
Peng took a deep, shaky breath.
“Peng? What’s wrong?” asked Vedala.
Without speaking, Peng reached into the kit bag hanging high on her slim hip. With shaking fingers, she produced a small black case. Carefully opening it, she slid out a vial full of viscous, amber-colored liquid. As she turned it slowly in the fading daylight, everyone was able to read the text imprinted on its side: OMEGA.
“I took this from Brink’s personal effects,” said Peng. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure who I could trust.”
Nidhi Vedala gently took the vial and case. She held the vial up to examine it, shaking her head at its contents. Carefully, she repacked the vial and slid the case into her pocket.
Having had no military experience, Stone was baffled. Tupa sat protectively at his side, eyeing the bulge in Vedala’s pocket with suspicion.
“Are you saying . . . is that poison?” offered Stone.
Odhiambo cut him off.
“It is most likely a nerve agent,” he said. “The kind that can only be produced by a state-sponsored program run by very smart and well-equipped chemists. Placed on any surface or in food or drink, this substance would kill us all quickly and without a struggle.”
A wave of anger washed over Vedala. She threw the satphone to the dirt. Peng Wu placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t know why,” said Peng. “But I think it’s clear . . . Sophie Kline just tried to have us all murdered.”
Day 4
Breach
Presidents and generals and all the important people in position to make the most important decisions are, by and large, the least equipped for making them.
—MICHAEL CRICHTON
Operation Scorched Earth
IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, IT WAS THE DAWN OF A NEW day on board the International Space Station. As was her morning routine, Dr. Sophie Kline was floating in the ISS cupola module and looking down upon the world. Her world. Locked in a prograde orbit aligned with the rotation of Earth, the ISS was falling over the dark face of the equator. Stretching to the horizon, only a few lights twinkled here and there across the great black expanse of the planet.
The night before, Kline had finally spoken the dreaded code word.
It had been a last-ditch effort, a Hail Mary, and she knew it. Managing to place Brink on the ground mission had been thanks to both preparation and luck. Kline had ensured that a well-paid asset was stationed nearby to be selected if a call was put out, and it had been. Now there was nothing more to be done about the field team situation—the outcome of the gambit would be revealed with a message from Brink, or it wouldn’t.
Kline found she didn’t particularly care.
She turned her attention to the ground-monitoring equipment clustered in the cupola. Outside the windows, the last teal curves of the Pacific Ocean were disappearing in the west. Data from the ISS WideScat all-weather radar system painted a nearby monitor in shades of red and blue. It showed a map with a few blinking signatures: slow-moving commercial aircraft at an altitude of about forty thousand feet.
More importantly, there were four new signatures—moving fast.
Kline smiled.
Four state-of-the-art fighter jets were cruising low over the jungle, on a beeline for the anomaly—which was just over the horizon from Kline’s location.
Stern’s airstrike was under way, and Kline was glad.
The field team had made it too far, pushed too deeply into mysteries best left alone. Kline had warned them. Yet they had pressed on. It was largely due to the pigheaded stubbornness of Dr. Nidhi Vedala. And despite Brink’s repeated assurances, a hired mercenary couldn’t be fully trusted.
From the beginning, Sophie Kline had been amenable to a backup plan of aerial bombardment. Presumably the Wildfire field team would soon be incinerated in a hail of napalm and likely doused with some form of the inhibitor substance.
Kline activated another instrument. On the monitor, a shaky thermal satellite visual showed four contrails of exhaust raking across the night. At this rate, she estimated, the jets would unleash their deadly payloads at dawn—just after Kline’s morning shift began.
It was truly ironic, thought Kline, as she looked down upon the slowly spinning world, that in a few hours Dr. Vedala would likely be crushed by multiple high-tonnage payloads of the same inhibitor substance she had invented to save life.
Dawn Strike
IN THE HOT, HUMID AIR A THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE Ucayali region of the western Amazon jungle, the gleaming skins of four F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter aircraft blazed pink with the first rays of dawn. Headed east, the jets roared at roughly the speed of sound directly toward a breathtaking orange-red eye rising over a vista of roiling green jungle. A thin expanse of mist rose over it all. The early-morning dew was evaporating, beading the silver jets with streaks of moisture.
The labyrinthine interior of the jungle below had remained impenetrable to wave upon wave of human civilization. It was a place where countless explorers had spent centuries searching in vain for mysterious artifacts.
Now, one had finally appeared.
No mist rose near the anomaly, only a foreboding pall of smoke trickling up from smoldering tree branches. After a series of mitotic growth events, the structure had stabilized on satellite footage as a long, slightly curved wall soaring nearly three hundred feet high at its center. On its northern side, a stagnant brown lake had formed where the river was blocked. A narrow shaft rose straight out of the water, a surreal sight at more than three-quarters of a mile tall. To the south, a stream ran out from under the obstacle, tracing a glittering trail along the wide banks of its former route.
Over six thousand miles away, General Stern stood in the wings of the launch control center in Peterson Air Force Base. The room had been built to accommodate the occasional public performance, with a viewing area for dignitaries or politicians to be photographed triumphantly overseeing a successful launch. At the rear, a pair of discreet doors allowed such celebrities to disappear without photo opportunities if things were to go explosively wrong, as they so often did.
It was after 3:00 a.m., yet the control center was crowded with experts of all kinds. Each of them had been called in to ensure the maximum probability of success for what was admittedly a desperate plan.
To that end, Stern had seized dedicated clearance from the CIA for the spectacularly expensive NIX-3 series reconnaissance satellite cluster. So far, the sensors had detected alarming levels of growth from the anomaly, and no t
race of the Wildfire field team. The scientists had been lost somewhere between their last contact with the ISS and the anomaly perimeter.
Lost . . . and now, eighteen hours after a missed rendezvous, categorically presumed dead.
With a live view of the dark anomaly, the plan was to drop stripes of napalm along its outer edges. The infected area would be cauterized, isolated from the living jungle. Napalm would be followed by a payload of classified inhibitor substance—with the hope that it would shrink the structure, or at least ensure it didn’t start growing again.
The plan was desperate for a variety of reasons.
First, it broke quarantine and potentially exposed the aircraft and pilots to a highly infectious strain of Andromeda. Second, executing an airstrike on foreign soil was the definition of an act of war—one that would likely precipitate a Brazilian counterstrike and total international discord.
The original Andromeda incident had itself nearly sparked a domestic nuclear disaster with worldwide repercussions. Yet General Stern could see that his current situation was clearly much, much worse. The analysts could sense his anxiety. Aside from crunching on an occasional tablet of Tums, Stern had only been listening, not speaking.
The room hummed with the subdued energy of hushed conversations. This whispered din would fade to full silence only when the room-wide speaker loop delivered occasional reports from the Super Hornet squadron commander, call sign “Felix,” as it did now.
“Felix-1, painting target. Trail formation on me. We’re gonna pop the approach, so be ready.”
From the front of the room, an intern named Maxim Lonchev watched General Stern toss another brightly colored bit of calcium carbonate into his mouth. Sitting at a table that had been dragged in from the cafeteria, Lonchev was leaning over his tablet computer. Four minutes earlier, a subprogram had flagged an exception in the NIX-3 satellite data. The image in question was now laid out flat on the table at its maximum resolution.
“Master arm switch is on,” reported the pilot.
The intern was frantically poring over the image, trying to ignore a technical conversation between two other people sharing his table.
Lonchev had designed “Pillion,” an artificial intelligence algorithm that analyzed visual data collected by the NIX-3 cluster. The rudimentary AI was unique in that it was a general-intelligence application with no particular modus operandi. Most algorithms were tailored to find very specific patterns, such as vehicle deployments or radar installations. Maxim Lonchev—acting against the advice of his academic advisor at the Stanford AI Lab—had designed an algorithm that simply looked for potential outliers—in other words, anything interesting.
As such, Pillion was an experimental effort, designed by a university student, and never expected to do much. The necessity of Lonchev’s presence in launch control was, in fact, arguable—and he knew it.
Defining exactly what Pillion found “interesting” had become a principal research challenge. It was also the problem Lonchev now found lying on the table before him. He stared intently at the stitched-together black-and-white image.
“Tally the target,” said the pilot. “We’re headed downtown.”
Pillion had registered an unlikely formation of tree branches. In a small strip of clearing along the anomaly, the configuration had simply been labeled “low probability.” The problem was that this blurry image was a composite, generated by averaging multiple frames of video taken at different times of day from different positions. Lonchev was straining his eyes, trying to figure out why Pillion was showing him this stupid image of scattered branches.
“You want a coffee?” asked the analyst sitting next to him.
“No,” snapped Lonchev. “Thank you. Sorry.”
He winced as his voice echoed loudly. The cavernous room had grown quiet as the pilot spoke again over the radio.
“Let’s get down on the deck. Holding cherubs two for final,” he said in clipped pilot-speak.
In every image, the branches were hidden by the tree canopy or shadows from it, as well as the heat and electromagnetic interference washing off the surface of the anomaly. Reconstructed, the picture was blurry and choppy. Impossible to interpret.
“Alive?” asked the talkative analyst.
Lonchev looked up, hair mussed from running his fingers through it. “Yes, I’m alive. I’m also busy.”
“No, alive,” said the analyst, rotating the tablet until it was upside down. “Those tree branches are laid out in a message. See it there? ‘Alive.’”
“Felix-1 is in hot.”
Lonchev’s mouth popped open into a surprised “Oh.”
He scrambled to his feet, his knees loudly jarring the table, causing heads to turn. He stopped, breathing hard, his face flushed red with embarrassment. Legs shaking, he stared out at a room full of high-ranking officials who could make or break his career with a few words. Lonchev hesitated another second.
And then the graduate student began to shout.
Entry
COCOONED IN A HAMMOCK ILLUMINATED BY A HINT of gray morning light, Nidhi Vedala listened as the scream of jet engines died away. The flaring burst of napalm she expected had not cascaded through the canopy in fingers of bright flame. Nor had the scorching heat of a nuclear blast wave washed across the face of the alien structure. A relieved smile eased itself onto her face. Odhiambo’s crude message of fallen tree branches must have been received.
It appeared the field team was going to survive another day.
The night had been utterly uneventful. Nothing living seemed to be left in this area of the jungle—a stark and disturbing contrast to the chaos of noise and life the team had experienced on the march to get here. Even the trees and plants seemed to shy away from the foreign material. Their high, skeletal branches reached like shriveled claws under the thin haze of smoke that rose from charred leaves. The near-total quiet combined with the unnatural heat and dryness made it feel as if the environment itself was being transformed around them, from verdant rain forest to . . . something else.
Stone’s physiological monitoring logs showed that he had been thrashing with nightmares for most of the night—even worse than usual. The entire team had spent the hours of darkness drifting in and out of fitful bouts of unrest. Only the young Tupa seemed to sleep peacefully, comfortable in an extra hammock, his doubts and fears drowned in an inescapable flood of pure exhaustion.
Rolling out of her hammock, Vedala roused the rest of the field team and ordered them to assemble at the mouth of the anomaly immediately after breakfast. As Peng set about restarting the campfire, Vedala laced her boots tightly and reapplied inhibitor over her sleeved arms. Munching on a granola bar, she made her way alone through silent trees to the slick riverbank.
The structure had not undergone any more growth spurts in the preceding hours. Even so, Vedala felt she could sense a thrumming force inside the featureless structure. There seemed to be a kind of potential energy growing within, as if it was gathering itself up for another expansion.
Sitting on the dry tip of a hundred-foot log embedded in the sucking mud of the riverbed, Vedala let her feet dangle and studied the hexagonal mouth of the tunnel. The breach was human-size, positioned to the left of a cascade of yellow-brown water that flowed out from under the anomaly. Following the contours of the muddy riverbank, the scummy stream was heaped with mounds of froth.
Hazy morning sunlight fell in shafts over the hushed riverbank.
Vedala noted flakes of broken anomaly material scattered about the tunnel entrance. Most of the jagged stones lay among cratered streaks of mud. In some places, she could see empty holes—likely from pieces that had been harvested by the Machado. But the overall pattern of the streaks radiated away from the entrance. It gave the scene the kinetic texture of a debris field, as if the shards had erupted from the mouth of the tunnel.
Vedala’s mind returned to Tupa’s description of the angry god’s roar, and Kline’s admonition to run away.
&nb
sp; A wave of air washed over the back of her neck, and Vedala heard the whir of a canary. She also smelled coffee. James Stone emerged from the trees, carrying a tin cup in each hand. He was already hypothesizing out loud.
“The breach there is caked in the same ash substance we found before,” he said, pointing with a glinting cup. “Some pieces are missing from around the tunnel mouth. I’ve got the canaries on constant alert for airborne toxins, of course. But there don’t seem to be any. Anyhow, we’d already know by now if there were.”
Stone sat down on the log beside Vedala, handing her a cup.
“We’d be dead,” he added.
“I’ve been mulling that,” said Vedala. “The ash and flaked rocks are solid substrates. But a lot more material must have been vaporized by an explosion. The Machado breathed in the cloud of dust, only trace amounts, and it activated inside their bodies, slowly at first . . . but it drove them crazy. Very similar to Piedmont.”
Vedala sipped her coffee.
“But why would it explode?” she asked. “Odhiambo says this area is volcanically dormant for five hundred miles in every direction. It’s not likely to have been a natural process.”
“I don’t think it was,” said Stone. “I’m not ready to reveal my pet theory without more evidence, but I think what happened was a mistake. A human mistake.”
Vedala shot Stone a look of concern. She lowered her voice and faced forward as she spoke her next words.
“I look forward to hearing your theory. As you’ve seen, elements of this expedition have been compromised. Some people have been keeping secrets. And I need to be able to trust you, James.”
“Look, I know it wasn’t your idea to bring me, Nidhi, but I’m not some kind of a spy—”
“That’s exactly what I mean. You’re trustworthy because you were never supposed to be here. You’re a wild card, Stone, and possibly a very lucky accident.”
The Andromeda Evolution Page 15