They stared at one another in silence before Amy asked where he was going.
“Airport. South American equator. We have to plan for the worst. That’s where they’ll launch an intercept vehicle, if it comes to that. Or, should I say I? That’s where I’ll launch. I’m the one who has to make a plan.”
He paused and let his imagination step into a room with seemingly endless rows of options, only to have it freeze with indecision. Bile crept up Ben’s esophagus and soured his mouth. Blind spots grew in the corners of his peripheral vision. He neared that part of a dream when he fell and lost equilibrium, only to jolt awake.
“He warned me. I can’t lose my head.”
Ben sat down on the bed and closed his eyes, but it wasn’t enough. Stumbling, he made it to their adjoining bathroom and vomited into the toilet bowl. Amy tiptoed in as he finished a round of dry heaving. She pulled a toiletry bag out from under the sink and dropped in her toothbrush, floss, deodorant, and tampons.
“Wait,” Ben said. “What’re you doing?”
He sank to the cool tile floor and wiped his mouth and jutting chin.
“Packing,” Amy said, ducking into their shower. “I’m coming.”
Ben shook his head and wobbled. When he tried to argue, Amy whipped around and glared with her gray eyes.
“You’re not leaving without me.”
Amy was a military brat raised on several bases until she got her GED and became a legal adult at eighteen. She worked several different jobs and lived with several boyfriends while taking night courses at several community colleges. Every time Ben mentioned that he wanted to move to a larger living space, Amy leveled her eyes at him and said, I’m done with moving. She wanted her idea of a settled home where Ben was a permanent fixture.
“Cap it.”
“What?”
“Cap your razor,” Ben said, pointing to the pink disposable in her hand. “Or you could cut yourself.”
Amy towered above his crumpled form, wearing a ratty Mystery Science Theater 3000 T-shirt and a stolen pair of his boxers, which he hated for the sole reason that they fit better on her flat navel.
“C’mon,” Amy said, not ungently. “You need to get over your shock and get dressed.”
She left the bag of toiletries on the sink and grabbed Ben under the arms. Leveraging her weight, Amy leaned back and stood Ben up.
“Now, go find our passports,” she prodded.
Ben usually knew where things were because he was the one who put them away in the first place. Using walls for support, he followed Amy back into their bedroom. Two empty suitcases were already on the bed with unzipped mouths gaping open. Amy grabbed armfuls of clothes from their closet and dumped them into the suitcases with their plastic hangers. Ben pulled on a pair of jeans and tucked his wallet and their passports in his back pockets. A car horn sounded briefly from the street.
“Cool your fuckin’ jets!” Amy hollered.
Ben flinched at the loud noises. His hands were shaking, but hers were steady and determined. All those hours she spent alone in her tiny bedroom reading science fiction novels and comics had prepared her.
“Amy, you know this is for real, right?”
She nodded. Amy had been waiting to save Earth since the fifth grade.
“Everything we know and understand is at stake.”
“Yeah, I got it,” she said, and grabbed their suitcases by the handles.
Ben watched her struggle. A braver, simpler man would have rushed to help, but Ben was neither brave nor simple. His mind was still reeling.
“My God,” Ben whispered. “What’s gonna happen when the world knows what’s coming?”
TWO
Dark Comet
Pacific Northwest
August 7
T-minus 178 days to launch
JACK CAMPBELL WAS on layover in Seattle on his way to Alaska when his eyes caught “dark comet” on an overhead monitor. The news ticker looped as Jack blew steam off the surface of his franchise coffee. His pursed mouth froze when the full headline came into view: SPACEWATCH DISCOVERS DARK COMET UD3. He didn’t know why it sounded ominous, so he googled it.
Online articles described dark comets as those that are out of sight from Earth’s perspective. UD3, according to a NASA report, was a long-period comet that approached from the other side of the sun and slingshotted around the massive star, hurtling into the view of telescopes. NASA stated that there wasn’t enough information to estimate the comet’s trajectory or provide comment on probability of impact. Jack looked up from his phone and studied the other travelers waiting at gate 36. Danger felt more real when shared with others, but everything appeared normal. Men, women, and children were either bent down toward phones, laptops, books, or magazines or cat-napping until a flight attendant flipped on her microphone and welcomed all passengers—especially American Airlines AAdvantage program members.
Jack boarded the plane and secured his camera bag in the overhead compartment. He was a photojournalist headed to an assignment aboard an Arctic expedition. It was an opportunity of a lifetime, and he should have been over the moon with excitement.
“What do you think about this comet?” Jack asked the silver-haired passenger in the window seat. “The one that was just on the news?”
He tried to show her the screen of his phone, but she waved it away.
“Oh, I don’t follow news, honey. Too depressing. Are they giving us food on this thing, or do we have to pay for snacks?”
* * *
THE PLANE LANDED in Anchorage just after three p.m. Alaska daylight time. The faces of other passengers were set with a sense of urgency as they hurried on to jobs, family, or more travel. One boy studying his phone and likely hunting for Pokémon bumped into a wall, rebounded, and continued on his way. He was another reminder that life was mostly keeping your head down, only catching fleeting glimpses of the great wide open and all its implications.
Jack’s editors at National Geographic had arranged for a driver to take him the remaining leg of the journey to Seward. Travel schedules for his profession were grueling, but at thirty-two and with no strings attached, it was a price Jack was willing to pay for a job he loved. He kicked off his sneakers and stretched his lanky six-foot-two body across the back seat of the town car, and he was on his way.
During the flight from Seattle, Jack had web surfed and discovered that cosmic impacts were nothing new. It was the larger bodies that were rarer. For the last 70 million years, Earth had had a lucky streak…but luck could run out. Probability said it would.
Jack pulled out his phone and ignored all the new emails and texts from friends, colleagues, and ex-lovers from all over the world. He didn’t answer his mother’s latest emails, so it was no surprise when she called at the end of his three-hour drive. She asked about the flight and other niceties, but Jack was only interested in discussing the comet.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you read,” his mother advised.
“Mom, it was on CNN.”
“Exactly!”
He knew where this was headed.
“Why would this be fake news?” Jack asked. “There’s no political gain in scaring people…” But he knew there was, so he switched tack. “There was an asteroid the size of a school bus that came closer than the moon back in March,” he countered. “It was discovered five days before it zipped past. And back in 2014, there was another of these dark comets called Siding Spring. It came out of our blind spot from behind the sun and almost hit Mars.”
“I never heard that.”
“Me neither, until I read about it today. Just because we’re not paying attention, it doesn’t mean these things don’t happen, Mom.”
“I can hear you sighing. How would you like it if I sighed every time you gave an opinion?”
“These are facts. Facts are not opinions.”
“I didn’t call to argue.”
Jack heard his own sigh too late to stop it.
“Are you still leaving
?” she asked.
It was the question his mother always asked.
“Because if you change your mind, your father and I could come visit…”
Jack tapped the speakerphone button so he could listen while checking what was trending online:
Red Sox vs. Yankees
Taylor Swift concert
Autism and antidepressants in utero
FIFA World Cup
Hair loss from shampoo
…
Comet UD3 came in at number 16, bumping Manchester City Football Club. It appeared that Jack’s mother wasn’t the only one who missed its headlines.
“We wouldn’t take up all your time,” she assured him. “We can do a matinee and then meet up for dinner. It’s been so long since we took a trip up to the city…”
“I gotta go, Mom. With all the flights, I’m beat.”
It was true. On some things, his mother didn’t argue. Jack said he loved her, which was also true, and ended the call.
As his town car reached Seward, Jack made one more Google search. Some of the articles he read on the flight referenced an official document released several years ago by the outgoing executive administration. Jack typed a few of the words he could remember and clicked on the first auto-fill option: National Near-Earth Objects Preparedness Strategy. The top link sent him to an unavailable webpage on the current whitehouse.gov site, one of several removed indefinitely.
Thank you for your interest in this subject, Jack read. Stay tuned as we continue to update whitehouse.gov. In sharp focus, contrasting with a blurry American flag in the background, were twin microphones atop a lectern with the presidential seal, as if any minute someone important would step up with something to say.
Jack’s driver parked at the Seward waterfront and unpacked his bags onto the concrete. Jack didn’t move when he came around and opened his passenger door. Never had he felt such hesitation before a long assignment. Not when his father needed heart surgery, not when an on-again-off-again girlfriend called him sobbing, not when an old sports injury acted up and left him limping in pain with heavy camera bags. Jack wasn’t one to believe in premonitions, and yet he had one even as all the people he encountered continued to function with an expectation of normalcy.
The driver ducked down, confused, but then saw Jack’s face.
“I could drive you back to Anchorage. I’m sure they’ll understand,” he added, nodding over his shoulder to the massive ship in port.
Jack quickly thanked the driver for his patience and shook his hand. He stepped into moist air that smelled of salty rot. The mist billowing down the snow-veined mountains surrounding Resurrection Bay was thick as smoke. Jack hoisted the weight of his bags onto both shoulders, ever mindful of his camera, and walked across the long and narrow dock with his head bowed.
He felt that all his assignments were of great significance, and documenting the last Arctic expedition by the US Coast Guard cutter Healy was no exception. There were only two guest slots available, and Jack had practically begged his editors to pull strings to secure one. They had all met at Washington, DC, headquarters back in June to discuss the magnitude of such a mission. It’s like you’re capturing the Yangtze River dolphin, one editor told Jack. Aboriginal Tasmanians. The Javan tiger. The Bo of the Great Andamanese peoples. Passenger pigeons whose flocks could blot out the sky…The editor winced and shook his head. All beautiful and extinct. All that’s left are fossils and pictures. Jack was assigned to capture the beauty of the Arctic with his camera before it was gone.
It wasn’t until he neared the water’s edge that Jack could see more than fifty large, feathered carcasses floating in the bay. He walked up to the edge of the dock, stood beside a piling wrapped with ropes thicker than a man’s wrist, and gaped at the dead dark birds of prey. A large young man walking several yards behind suddenly dumped his duffel bag and joined Jack to stare at the awful sight. He wore a navy brimmed cap and hooded sweatshirt with HEALY CREW in yellow block letters stretched across his wide shoulders.
“These are eagles,” the young man said, frowning in surprise. “It’s only been murres before.”
He scanned the water and pointed to the carcass of a penguin-like bird.
“There’s a murre. With the global weirding and all, things got out of whack and they starved. Thousands of ’em.”
Jack asked about the eagles, but the younger man shrugged and said he didn’t know.
“Maybe they saw the headlines about the comet,” Jack said, squinting up at the sky, now empty of eagles. “Or know something we don’t.”
“Aw, I heard that comet was a conspiracy. But enough of politics—I’m Ned Brandt.”
The beefy Coastie had the jaw, neck, and torso of a quarterback. His cheeks were flushed in the damp wind, and his face held an honest, open expression. He was handsome in a Chris Pratt kind of way. Ned was a Coast Guard lieutenant and helicopter pilot returning from mid-patrol break.
Jack gave his own name and a handshake.
“I’m one of the guests,” he explained.
“The poet?”
“No, I’m the other one. Photojournalist.”
“Yeah? Well, if you’re looking for aerial shots, I can take you out in the helicopter,” Ned offered. He suddenly smirked. “Unless that comet of yours leaves us SOLJWF.”
“What?”
“Shit outta luck and jolly well fucked,” Ned explained. “We’ve got lots of acronyms in the military.”
He jogged back to his duffel bag and lugged it over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The two men continued on together to the end of the dock. Looming ahead was USCGC Healy, the country’s most technologically advanced polar icebreaker. The ship was longer than a football field and nine stories high, and for all the eye could see, there was another thirty feet of ship below the water. Despite this, Jack felt sure it would become claustrophobic on their late-summer deployment. Everything familiar became claustrophobic.
The two men approached Healy’s 420-foot hull, painted bright red for visibility on ice. Ned elbowed Jack in the ribs and nodded for him to follow as he cut ahead of the long, single-file line of civilian scientists waiting to check in with their luggage. A Coastie stood by the bottom of a steep gangway greeting the new arrivals. She gave a bright smile to Ned and checked Jack’s name off her passenger list. When she handed him a pager, Jack snorted a chuckle at the outdated equipment.
“Last time I saw one of these, it was hanging off the shorts of my freshman year pot dealer.”
The woman also handed Jack a welcome aboard packet and a new passenger card held together with a paper clip. The card listed his emergency life raft, pager number, and stateroom assignment. Jack was to share quarters with the other guest passenger, a poet and Nobel laureate in literature. A poet was an unusual pick for the expedition, as guest slots had previously gone to wildlife surveyors, filmmakers, photographers, and Indigenous community observers. Jack wondered if the selection committee was more sentimental in this final round and wanted the Arctic preserved inside the immortality of the written word.
Ned led the way as the two men lugged their bags up Healy’s metal gangway and into the red belly of the ship. Immediately on the right was a ladder well labeled MAIN DECK. Ned bounded up like a mountain goat, but Jack had to be cautious on the steep and shallow stairs while balancing the weight of his bags and camera. He turned down the passageway of 02 deck and found the door to his stateroom closed. Jack knocked and entered the dark, windowless room. After flipping on the lights, he jumped back, cursing. There was a small man sitting at a desk.
“Sorry,” Jack said quickly, “but you scared me.”
The other man stood, only as tall as Jack’s collarbone. Deep crescent lines arced from the inner corners of his black eyes down around gaunt eye sockets and into broad cheekbones. His hair—chopped bangs in the front and long and straight in the back—was still black and thick, though the skin of his face was weathered. Jack guessed the man was somewhere in his late fo
rties to early fifties, but it was difficult to tell.
“Jack. Nice to meet you.”
“Gustavo,” the man said without a smile.
His sagging denim jeans were cinched up high on his frightfully thin waist with a leather belt. It was no surprise when Gustavo quickly excused himself for being unwell. Jack stood aside to let him pass; it was difficult to get out of the way in such a small room. Gustavo kicked off worn leather shoes and unbuttoned his linen shirt. Stripping down to jutting bones and dingy white underwear, the poet climbed nimbly up to his top bunk and drew its curtains for privacy.
Jack glanced around their stateroom, but there wasn’t much to see. The boxy cabinets, bunk beds, and closets were made of cheap sheet metal. On the wall to the left of the door hung a phone with a pager directory. Farther along, there was a small sink with a cabinet and vanity mirror and then a couple of desks and chairs. Jack saw nothing on Gustavo’s desk—not a phone, laptop, book, magazine, or journal. The poet must have been sitting in the dark at the mercy of his own thoughts.
Jack dumped his bags in the closet that stood open and empty. He was still jet-lagged from all the travel and followed infantry wisdom: Never miss an opportunity to sleep, eat, or shit. Jack took off his sneakers and jeans, climbed into the bottom bunk, and drew its curtains closed.
* * *
JACK WOKE AFTER three in the morning. He turned back and forth in his narrow bunk, but the same premonition of danger kept him alert. Outside his stateroom, Healy’s corridors were lit with red light like the darkrooms from Jack’s earlier days developing film. A network of exposed cables and pipes ran along the ceilings. In the red light of after hours, they looked like arteries or intestines inside a great beast, like Jack was Jonah in the whale.
In his restless wanderings, Jack found the science lounge on 02 deck. It had long tables with computers and chairs, cheap couches, and widescreen TVs. There was only one other person: a youngish woman hunched over the keyboard of a Mac Mini workstation against the wall. Her straight black hair was gathered into a thick ponytail that stopped just short of the floppy hood of her dark sweatshirt. After the woman didn’t turn to acknowledge him, Jack walked to one of the inferior HP laptops on a long table in the middle of the room.
The Effort Page 2