The frowns were infectious.
“Captain. I’m afraid, you’re not making any sense to us,” the President cut in.
“I appreciate that, sir. It’s the situation that’s not making sense. I am conveying the situation as it presents itself. Accurately. The magnetometer will arrive bottom-side in approximately fifteen minutes and we can begin the scans to confirm it’s a steel structure. It’s that badly overgrown.”
“Then just describe to us what you are seeing.”
“I have the visuals up, sir.”
The captain’s voice ran over the streaming video shot over the past hour.
As the ROV progressed down the anchoring chains, tracing them as they’d fallen toward the stricken rig, the small audience drew in their breath and gaped in disbelief at what they were seeing.
A pristine and contemporary twenty-first century recently dropped anchor chain and cabling lay higgledy-piggledy in piles as it had fallen to the ocean floor. But as the ROV progressed, there was a distinct end to the cable yet its remnant pattern of confused piles continued on the same trajectory, obscured by mounds of silt, until the framework of the rig attached to that cabling appeared, standing proud, canted over and half submerged on the bottom.
The only clue that it was the rig was its distinct angular geometry.
It was draped in sea life. Gently swaying gardens of coral ferns disturbed by the ROV’s arrival on scene and a menagerie stocked with assorted living things of the deep: big-eyed fishes, eels and crab-like monsters in miniature of every kind poked their heads out from the encrusted wreckage.
The evidence was there before their eyes—the slow pace of life two and more kilometers below the ocean had somehow built homes, layer upon layer and generation upon generation, in the days since the rig went down—but its anchors and chain remained unfouled.
“What exactly are we looking at?” The Secretary of State was the first to break the stunned silence.
“Th… this is why I could not conclusively say we had found it, Ma’am,” the Captain stammered. “We don’t understand. The magnetometer should give us readings and we will try to retrieve some of the wreckage.”
There was silence in the room. A worried silence, all questions of strategy that might have been asked about the recovery now made moot by the evidence that there was little to recover.
“Mr. President, anything else…? Brigadier? Madam Secretary?”
All in the room shook their heads and the Deputy National Security Advisor held up a finger.
“May I propose that we hold the Russians off until we retrieve the anchors and then let them in… to at least diffuse the tensions?”
There was agreement and the General cut the connection with, “Thank you Captain.”
“What now?” the President asked, looking for a taker, for any taker to that question. Eyes were cast down as his gaze searched the room for a taker.
“Let me start with a simple one… planes and boats missing off Newfoundland and a giant column of aurora in the area…? Connected to what you were doing in the Southern Ocean?”
“Doctor…” Lincoln O’Dowd, Director of Operations, turned to Dr. Daxton Cronner, science advisor, “do you have an opinion?”
All heads swiveled to Daxton. He had visibly begun to sweat.
“I… well, we… we don’t know. It could be.”
“Could be…?” the President repeated, looking peeved.
“Too soon to tell, sir,” Daxton responded stutteringly.
“Okay… What went wrong? Simplify it.”
Daxton cleared his throat. He was a solitary man, more comfortable with graphs and mathematics. He was not used to addressing large crowds and disliked the limelight.
He was having the worst day of his life.
“In a word… we do not know. Our second test vehicle, Bandit, fired.... Vaporized to nothing, but there appeared to be no space-warp, B-2 flew on through the five-hundred kilometers of space, not hopping over it, as if nothing had occurred. We have no idea what happened to the energy release. The images we are seeing throw up impossible speculations, but I have nothing concrete. We have followed every lead and they all seem to come down to one highly speculative hypothesis… ‘dark matter’… possibly ‘dark energy’. The laser interfering in some way we can’t begin to assess yet without a grip on the fundamentals. If we had the foggiest notion of what they are in practical terms, we might be on the first rung toward eliminating or confirming our first tentative assessments. But we simply don’t know.”
“So, you have no details for us?” The Secretary of State went in for the kill. “In a situation where the entire world is riding a razor’s edge of hostility caused by your experiments, you’re telling us you don’t know what you’re doing?”
“Well, yes, Ma’am, we do understand much of it. But there are unknown factors of these energies. That is why we experiment. That’s why we always start small.”
He looked around the room, hoping O’Dowd would volunteer how they had the opportunity to abort when the first test went out of spec.
O’Dowd was mirroring the Secretary’s body language and what it implied twisted Daxton’s gut.
There was a long pregnant silence and he felt obliged to start filling it.
“We’re in the realms of black holes with this… and quantum gravity, sir. That is what we were producing up there.” He addressed the President directly, hoping to find an ally.
“I’m certain nobody present is well versed in the mathematics of Einstein’s field equations, but therein lies what we were doing. Briefly, a set of ten equations in the theory of relativity describe the fundamental interaction of gravitation and curved spacetime. They state that our three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time, are part of the same fabric, and that the energies we were dealing with can tie them in knots—”
They all seemed to be following him thus far, so he dug deeper.
“…There are four black hole solutions to the Einstein field equations. Two rotate: the Kerr and Kerr–Newman black holes. We believe that black holes rapidly decay to a stable state. Then, by the no-hair theorem—except for quantum fluctuations that might arise—stable black holes can be completely described at any moment in time by eleven numbers….”
He was losing them, but there was no easy way to explain it other than by the challenging facts.
“…We produced a state where both Time and Bandit created black holes that T-1 and G-2 tripped over. Some might argue that we created a relativity-induced time dilation from our perspective. It would take a lot more analysis to see if that is true. The laser provided a spin that whirled the cataclysmic conditions and seems to have frame-dragged time around with it. It is possible that we created a kind of energy flux at the poles that blew out in jets, one directly down the trajectory of the laser, back into the rig and through the earth…. It is counter intuitive, but the energy burst contacting with the earth might….” he hesitated to say it, so outlandish was the thought that had popped into his head. “It might somehow have referred and conferred the time dilation beyond its own event horizon.”
There was a long pause of silence and blank stares.
He swallowed, unsure whether to add detail that may be meaningless to the audience, but with no cue forthcoming, the urge to fill the silence with his best speculation overtook him.
“…It depends whether the dark matter or dark energy somehow changed the state from a Schwarzschild black hole to a Kerr black hole. We’re not talking here about any physical surface to the event and black hole we created. The boundaries were more mathematical surfaces and sets of points in space-time. The dark matter and dark energy are mere speculations at this instant, Mr. President.”
The President looked all around the room for anyone better versed in these matters to make a challenge.
“Are you saying you warped time instead of space, that we pushed that rig back through time?”
“That would be one summarized possibil
ity… yes.”
“Were these things not factored into the experiment, Doctor?” the President posed, his frown gruesome, unsettling Daxton.
“Mr. Pre… President. Well… Yes… Yes and no. We, of course, considered some interference, but it’s at the boundary of our knowledge, hence the two experiments—an initial test condition and then the primary.”
His mouth was dry as the Gobi, and he took a sip of water.
“…Time… our first test satellite ten minutes before Bandit caused this severe anomaly… showed indications outside of our predicted parameters.”
“Outside? What does that mean?” The President sat forward in a threatening posture.
Daxton looked to O’Dowd for backup, but O’Dowd wouldn’t meet his eye.
“It… it… it means that there was a referred tectonic influence back here on earth that was six hundred percent bigger than anticipated.”
“And you had this data ahead of the second test… before the Bandit phase? You appreciate my next question if I am correct?”
Daxton swallowed and looked again pleadingly to O’Dowd and then began to speak, “I said to…”
But O’Dowd cut him short. “Mr. President. It was precisely the question I asked of Dr. Cronner in the instant before the test. I had my hand on the abort button, leaving the decision in the hands of science, but…”
He shrugged theatrically.
“I see…” said the President as he rocked back in his chair, tapping all four fingertips together contemplatively before his face. “I think then, Dr. Cronner… that will be all.”
He raised his eyes toward the door and a buzzer could be heard outside it.
A moment later, it opened and Daxton shuffled his papers together and left through it in silence, taking with him a storm of confusion, fear and anger within.
Chapter 6
Viking Ship, 35 Nautical Miles East of Newfoundland
Latitude: 47°37'14"N
Longitude: 51°45'52"W
Throughout the night, under the rash of stars, Raol conned his vessel ahead of the howling wind, preferring the tiller in his own experienced hand with the fast conditions.
The men tried to sleep as best they could to prepare for the coming confrontation with the skræling, but sleep eluded most.
It was not yet ten days ago that they had been routed and lost half their small civilization to the marauders.
And now Odin’s emphatic decree that they must return to do his will weighed heavily on each man.
The boat skipped ahead of the wind through the dead of night, and sheets of thrown water flew over them, icy and miserable with the chill factor of speed as they raced down the fronts of ocean swells.
And then a sight that set their nerves to jangle befell them.
Out of the far horizon, came a vast city of lights, row stacked upon row, level over level battering fast in their direction, nearly headlong into the wind. It was a mountain of lights that crossed their bows faster into the wind than they ran with it.
The heart of a monstrous beast throbbed within this vessel, the sound of its grumbling came to them through the soles of their feet. At the stern of the titan, boiled a violent turbulence.
As it went by, the monster blasted an angry horn of warning, “Baaaaaaaawwwwp…. Baaawwwp, Bawwwwwp…”, and then it was gone, stroking into the night.
When the ship was already nearly five leagues past, from its surging prow came a bow wave half as tall as their own mast.
Their dwarfed little vessel skipped gamely over the crosswise run of that wave.
The men knew it was some devious magic that the gods of the skræling had sent to head them off. But no threat would make them turn away from their oath now, and on they pressed, sleep impossible, the wind still at their backs.
Before dawn, the wind abated and land could be seen on the far horizon. They were heading for a large encampment, a watch fire at every tent. The terror of what they suddenly faced gripped Raol, making his mind explode with questions.
Could the savages have somehow multiplied in their short absence to have such an encampment in place? Why would they keep their fires burning all night?
They must be forewarned that we return, he thought with a terrible foreboding.
He pulled the steering oar towards himself, turning their boat north to run along the coast, avoiding the waiting skræling.
Finally, there was only the unlit blackness of the coast left, and then the first glow of dawn began to warm the sky.
There, low and squat was Vinland once more—a fine peninsula of land jutting out into the sea, a peninsula with a profile that Raol recognized when they’d first explored this coast.
With war now declared between their gods, each Norse warrior aboard was in silent contemplation and high alert as he pulled with all he had for a sanctuary around that headland.
Without instruction from Raol, each man knew the coming tactic; they needed to make a rapid landfall and not be caught on the sea by the canoe fleet of the savages. The god-vessel of the night before would no doubt have sent ravens or some other swift news of their approach.
Men of the fjords knew in their every sinew that they needed the high cliffs of a protected inlet to gather their strength and wits once more.
As they approached the rounding point of the peninsula, they passed by another strange craft some distance abeam, further out in the deep than they ran. It was bigger than any vessel they had ever seen until they had witnessed the gargantuan of the night before.
This one was only a little longer than their own vessel, fifty feet as she was, but it had massive bulk and was taller above the water. She evidently held the same sort of beast trapped in her belly, making way without oars or sail.
Raol gave her a wide berth. The Norsemen had their axes close at hand and kept a keen eye on the sailors, a clutch of whom gathered at the rail, staring back. Some of the strangers waved and a whistle and laugh carried to them over the flattening sea.
They came around the familiar headland and saw the smaller bay he’d expected nested alongside a much bigger bay, both with virgin cliffs out to the next headland in the very far distance.
All the long while since sunrise, whenever their spirits had flagged, across the roof of the sky Odin had kept drawing and re-drawing his finger of cloud.
Sometimes that finger ran crosswise, back out to sea or down to the south, but they all knew that was a trick.
“It is their gods trying to head us off,” Raol had concluded emphatically. “They are full of trickery.”
And the men had agreed heartily.
“We must rest soon,” he spoke, for all of their aching bodies.
Without further chatter, they pulled with new vigor into the inlet, scanning the shore for that tight bay with a good shingle beach and steep cliffs.
As they’d progressed, the water had become strewn here and there with strange floating carcasses—or rather, just the shells and pelts of dead things, some with bizarre markings. That’s what these items seemed to be at first encounter.
They hove to on several occasions to gingerly investigate the most interesting samples, first poking at the lifeless mass to check it for signs of ambush.
Satisfied these castoffs were truly without life, they hooked up piece after piece on the end of an oar, carefully bringing it close enough to smell and touch.
In every case, the flotsam was without smell, slippery to the touch but leaving no residue.
After some time, they had a small collection building up on the deck.
Thin but tough sheets of the waterproof stuff were seamed in some cases to form bags; some clear and transparent, others opaque and ragged with age. A few were of single-hued color; strangest of all, with repeating patterns of rune-like markings that looked almost scribed, and lifelike painted images of strange and peculiar images.
One bore the likeness of an animal, perhaps a hound of peculiar proportions.
Another was red with white and the ima
ge of a man with a short, pointed beard wearing something about his face resting on his nose and encircling his eyes.
Three prominent rune markings repeated on several surfaces of the evident container.
As they rowed on, Raol on the tiller oar kept picking up that strangely folded sodden parchment and examining it. Sniffing it over and over he could barely detect the smell of the animal that must have vacated this, its shell. It smelled vaguely edible.
Of all the cup- and gourd-like items they’d found, three had the identical red and white pattern markings.
Two of these had identical design, size and shape, and seemed to be grown into a metallic shell. These had an access hole just big enough to insert a finger at one end, the lip was sharp and had a prominent nub jutting nearby.
A third, with the strange red and white design, was more like the tough, clear parchment material of the sheets and bag with a hound’s face on it.
The mystery of it vexed Raol—he lay these items out close to one another, trying to categorize them by shape, material or markings, wondering which of these features defined the relationship.
It seemed an impossible task.
So perfectly uniform was each item created that his initial instinct leaned toward some sort of creature having grown or produced them.
But the more he examined them, the more obvious it became that they were purposefully manufactured to a pattern.
Obsessively curious about why the patterns were so strangely similar across different kinds of materials and what the common material of their construction was, gnawed and confounded him as their little boat surged on up the coast.
Amid their collection, was a ball and tangle of tough and almost invisible thin colorless chord and an apparently similar material plaited into a tough, bright orange length of rope almost as long as their vessel.
These items were a bounty and could be used in any number of ways, yet, welcome as they were, what they portended was of deep concern.
The closer they drew to land, the more plentiful and varied these floating cast-off skins became, until there was no reason for halting to collect any more.
Everything felt suddenly strange and terrifyingly unknown to Raol. For the first time in his long life on the sea, he doubted his own navigational skills and even his own mind.
Ragnarok Page 4