Unfathomed (The Locus Series Book 1)

by Ralph Kern

  “Yes, it is,” Slater agreed, her hands still clasped behind her back.

  “Okay, we know that land isn’t where we thought it was. What steps have you taken to try and find it?” Reynolds asked.

  “Perry, please scroll out as far as we’ve got.” The large screen pulled out even further, the island shrinking even more in size. “This is as far as we’ve managed to reconnoiter. Eighteen months ago, a crew took a sailboat a sixty miles pre-event north-west with some forward operating equipment we had. We then fired one of our unarmed Tomahawks from here. It reached one hundred and twenty miles beyond our scout boat...”

  “And?” Solberg asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “And how the hell could that be? America was there, Florida was there. That should easily have been over the peninsula. Now it has just disappeared?” Kendricks squinted at the screen.

  Slater could only give a shrug. “My Tomahawks have a much longer range, but without support infrastructure, one hundred and twenty miles is the best we could manage and still get a video feed from the camera mounted on it.”

  “My god. It’s all gone?” Laurie’s face was white. “Wait, what did you mean by pre-event west? What event?”

  “We don’t know what the event was. All we know is the date it happened. July 12, 2024,” Slater said. “After that date, we lost all contact. We also have had some anomalies in our navigation system; including north and south swapping.”

  “Swapping? What? As in north became south and south, north?” Laurie asked.

  “Yes, we’ve had to reconfigure a lot of our equipment to compensate.”

  “We saw that as well,” Solberg said.

  “So a polar shift?” Laurie said thoughtfully, this detail new to her.

  “I suppose you could call it that,” Slater said.

  “And your systems presumably wouldn’t automatically compensate for that?” Laurie pressed.

  “I doubt it. I certainly haven’t seen it covered in my idiot’s guide to the nav systems on this scow,” Slater said.

  Reynolds recognized the look on his daughter’s face. She was working something through in her head. “Laurie, talk us through your thoughts.”

  “Look, I read a lot of those popular science magazines—Focus, Scientific American, stuff like that. May I?” Without waiting for a response, Laurie walked to a white board situated on the wall which was covered with what appeared to be a work roster. Grabbing the wiper, she quickly rubbed the board clean and drew a circle. “This is the Earth. That’s north and that’s south,” she drew notches on the top and bottom and then drew a smaller circle within. “The Earth is essentially a huge dynamo, the core spinning independently of the crust we live on. Every few million years, that core can precess, or change orientation. Normally that would cause just a slight shift, a wobble if that, but a large enough precession would cause the poles to quite literally swap. North becomes south and vice versa.”

  “That certainly would play hell with just about every piece navigation technology we have,” Kendricks nodded.

  “Exactly,” Laurie said. “Bear in mind, my interest is this is only causal, so I only know what I’ve read. But surely that would cause a lot of the satellites to malfunction.”

  “It would,” Slater nodded.

  “Far be it for me to say,” Solberg said. “That can account for a temporary loss of contact with the mainland. It doesn’t account for the time oddities we are facing. You being here for two years, for example.”

  “No... no it does not.” Slater said. The initial excitement of getting some kind of explanation visibly washing out of her. “Nor the fact we have been out of contact so long. But it could explain why we are having trouble finding the mainland. Navigation 101 is that true north and magnetic north are two different things. We could have fired that Tomahawk in a completely random direction.”

  “But that still doesn’t account for the simple navigation that we used to head west,” Solberg said. “We simply put the rising sun to our stern as soon as we realized there was a problem. We should have still hit the mainland.”

  “So what about these time oddities or anomalies?” Laurie asked.

  “Now that is what is concerning me the most,” Slater said candidly. “Perry, overlay the arrival’s map please.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am.” Donovan once again tapped the console and on the screen and a series of simple-shaped boat icons began popping into existence on it, spread between Nest Island and deep into the pirates’ domain. Each had a number attached to them.

  “From what we can see, although every ship claimed to arrive on the same day, July 12th. The ones to the pre-west arrived first, and then the arrivals propagated to the pre-event east,” Slater gestured with her hand from left to right. “There have been twenty-seven arrivals which we know of, ranging from the odd dingy to ferries. It may be egotistical, but as the Ignatius is the most significant asset, we consider ourselves the datum, hence why there are a few negative numbers. Take for example this boat,” Slater gestured at an icon denoted by a -342. “This one appeared nearly a year before we arrived. We are zero, the latest ship to arrive is the Atlantica at 742 days. Would you be so good as to tell Perry where you arrived?”

  Kendricks looked at Solberg who nodded. Pulling out his phone, Kendricks tapped away at the touch screen for a few moments, pulling up the inertial navigation log.

  “Bearing in mind what we spoke about with the screwed-up navigation, by our best estimates we would around three hundred miles pre-event east-north-east,” he walked to the map and indicated deep in the right side of the red zone. “About here.”

  Perry tapped at the console and a boat icon appeared entitled Atlantica and the numbers 742 appeared.

  Laurie squinted at the screen. “So as the ships have arrived, time is moving on yes?”

  “Yes,” Slater nodded.

  “And the last ship to appear before us was that one?” Laurie pointed at one to the pre-event west of Atlantica, separated by a stretch of around forty miles that was emblazoned with 715.

  “Yes. She was a fishing boat,” Slater’s spoke in a clipped tone. “She decided to press on west to find the mainland. She never returned.”

  Turning back to the board, once again Laurie wiped it clean. Glancing between the screen and the board, she plotted the ships and boats denoted on the screen onto the board. Once she had finished, she stepped back and looked at it for a moment.

  “Look they follow a pattern,” Laurie said after a long moment of silence, her head cocked to one side. “Roughly speaking, as we get further west, I mean pre-event west, they are arriving later right?”

  “Right,” Slater agreed.

  Under the plot, Laurie drew a graph. From the east to the west the graph followed a near smooth diagonal. Until it reached the ship that came through before Atlantica, then the line was almost horizontal with only the slightest of upturns until it reached the cruise ship.

  “Look, the curve propagating across changes dramatically with us. Why?”

  All in the room squinted at the graph. The difference in the graph was stark. It was like the top of a mountain had been lopped off.

  “Unless...” Laurie said, once again she stepped closer to the white board and scrubbed it clean. She began plotting the ship arrival points, only this time over a much larger scale, leaving plenty of room to the bottom and right side of the board.

  “What are you thinking?” her father asked.

  “Shhh,” Laurie said as she finished plotting the points. Taking another color pen, she began circumscribing circles around a center point between Atlantica and the other arrivals. After a few moments, a series of concentric circles were visible.

  “Until we came, you had just a set linear data set, yes?” Laurie said finally.

  “Yes, it was simple, the further pre-event east the later they were arriving,” Slater said, exchanging looks with Donovan.

  “But we’re an anomaly. Atlantica doesn’t fit in with tha
t data set as a simple west to east progression. We only make sense if you consider there is a locus, and ships are arriving out from that locus. The closer you get to the center of the locus, the later they arrive, yes?”

  “Sonovabitch!” Slater exclaimed. Seeing what Laurie talking about. “So there is something in the center of that locus which will come through last?”

  “Exactly. Something there,” Laurie tapped the whiteboard in the middle of the circles, “is at the center of where all the ships are arriving. That would also account for why the pirates seem to have been here for a similar amount of time or longer, they came through on the other side of this locus. Like Atlantica, they probably worked their way through on different radii out from the center.”

  “And that thing is the cause of us being here?”

  “Now that’s something that I can’t answer, it’s certainly one assumption, equally something on the edge could be the cause,” Laurie shrugged. “I suspected you have explored that possibility?”

  “Well,” Slater replied thoughtfully. “Not really. We have no idea where this hypothetical edge is.”

  “Okay,” Laurie gestured at the board. “Still, we have a lead and at least we know where it is, and when it will arrive.”

  “And when will it arrive?” Reynolds cut in.

  “Well, this is just rough work, I’ll need to do this properly... but give or take a few days, in three weeks.”

  “Twenty-one days,” Reynolds nodded. “That’s my girl. I knew it was a good idea to bring you.”

  “We might have an answer for all this?” Slater whispered, and the calm, measured tone was gone. Instead the sheer sense of longing washing out of her.

  ‘“We might,” Reynolds smiled at her.

  “But there are still a couple of problems, as much as I hate to steal your thunder,” Solberg said.

  “And what’s that?” Slater said.

  “By your own admission we will all be on the cusp of starving by then. At our best conservation of food, we will barely last that long,” Solberg said bitterly.

  “But we might get rescued then,” Donovan said quietly.

  “Captain Solberg is right. We will be down to our last few morsels by the time this... this locus arrives. And who’s to say that whoever or whatever is at this locus can help us get home?” Reynolds said. “We still have to consider that we may need to find a longer term solution.”

  “We’ve tried,” Slater said quietly. “God we’ve tried. The only thing we’ve found is this tiny island.”

  “What we need is better reconnaissance,” Reynolds said. “At the very least it will give us something to do while we’re waiting for that locus thingy to arrive. And, of course, we have an obligation to discover as much about this phenomenon as we can, even should returning home be possible.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Slater asked.

  “You mentioned you have BMD capability?”

  “Yes,” Slater said in a confused tone. “I’m equipped with a set of RIM 161s and RIM 162s.”

  “So, can we use them?”

  “I don’t see how. They’re designed for shooting down ballistic missiles.”

  “But they have cameras on them?” Reynolds pressed.

  “If you mean by ‘cameras’ IR sensors. Yes, they do. Quite sophisticated ones, as it happens,” Slater said, her voice becoming firmer again as she spoke business.

  “Can they differentiate between land and sea?”

  “I see where you’re going with this now. You think you can use one to map the area. No, they’re designed to pick up the heat signature of a ballistic missile. They would be quite useless at differentiating between land and sea,” Slater said.

  “Can we not just mount one?” Kendricks asked the obvious question. “A camera, I mean.”

  “Mister Kendricks, Each RIM 161C SM-3 is twelve million dollars’ worth of carefully engineered rocket whose sole purpose is to shoot down satellites and ballistic missiles. Simply strapping a digital camera on the front will not work at best, and mess with the aerodynamics so badly it’ll tear itself apart at worst.”

  “Ma’am?” Donovan said.

  “Yes, Perry?”

  “It may be possible to modify a RIM 161, just not with the workshop we have on board the Ignatius...”

  “But we have probably far more extensive capabilities on Atlantica. We have substantial workshops, 3D printers, and trained technicians to use them,” Kendricks finished for him. “I mean, I don’t know what’s involved, that will be where you guys come in.”

  “Perry, I know in a previous life you worked on the Aegis implementation program. Put together a proposal. If it looks workable—and only if—I will give you a RIM 161 to modify.

  “Aye aye, ma’am.”

  Chapter 23 – Day 8

  “So, you found the last place he was, and some specks of blood,” Kendricks leaned back in his chair, hugging his injured, slung arm across his body in obvious discomfort. Kendricks’s office was a small cubbyhole, kept in his preferred minimalist style. “But nothing as conclusive such as a body?”

  After the initial discussions with Donovan, they had all headed back to the Atlantica and began to get the ball rolling for the modification of the Rim 161. Kendricks had a lot to square away, from getting a summary of what workable materials they had in the inventory to getting a Donovan a copy of the 3D printer tolerances and specifications. Once again, the missing officer, Grissom, had been pushed to the back of Kendricks’s mind.

  “That’s about the extent of it,” Jack said. “By the way, get your money back from whatever security consultant placed your cameras. The idiot put one right behind a lifeboat.”

  “What can I say? It’s what you get when you give the work to the lowest bidder,” Kendricks said, taking a sip of his tepid coffee and grimacing.

  “Is there any possibility one of the pirates got by you? During the initial attack, I mean.”

  “You saw it down there, Jack. It was bedlam. Hand on heart? No, I couldn’t say, but I did have a look at the CCTV there after. From what I can see, no. It doesn’t look like any managed to break out.”

  “Yeah, that tallies with what I saw as well,” Jack sighed. “Which leads to three conclusions—one, Grissom’s still on-board somewhere, enjoying himself, but not reporting for duty. Two, he had a nasty accident and somehow slipped, fell, hit his head, and went overboard. Or three, someone did it to him.”

  “Great, so to add to our list of woes we may have a goddamn murderer on board,” Kendricks said. “You know, just when this fucking cruise couldn’t get any worse. Jack, I’m going to need you to handle this. We have another project on the go at the moment and it’s taking up a lot of head-space.”

  “Go on,” Jack prompted.

  “We’re going to try modifying one of the Ignatius’s missiles. We’re going to see if we can launch it high enough to map the entire region.”

  “That sounds like it’s a positive step.”

  “That it is, but we’re going to need to convince Captain Slater we can have it first, and that’s going to keep me busy. Bottom-line, I need you to handle this.”

  “Very well.” Jack nodded. “Leave the investigation to me.”

  “Thanks, Jack. Look, Walt was a good kid. Carte Blanche. If someone hurt...” Kendricks squeezed his eyes closed for a moment. “If someone killed Walt then find who did it. Just do it quietly. Last thing we need is the fact there may be a murderer on board to panic people any more. With a little luck, he’s actually just hidden below decks with a house mouse.”

  “House mouse?” Jack asked.

  “You don’t want to know. Let’s just say, most bachelor officers tend to have one. Just find him, Jack.”

  “Roger that,” Jack said as he stood up. “We also still need to look at recruiting. There has got to be some ex-military and police on board. They can help with security in case we have any more run-ins with those pirates.”

  “Fingers crossed, that won’t be a pro
blem for much longer. I know Lars has been reluctant to go that far. It’ll feel like we’re up shit creek permanently if we start finding jobs for the passengers.”

  “Yeah, but we need to get them in place and trained now, not when we need them.”

  “Okay, okay.” Kendricks held his hands up in mock supplication. “I’ll have another word with him.”

  ***

  “So, what do you think?” Kendricks asked.

  Solberg frowned and with a creak of leather, leaned back in his chair. “Just so we’re on the same page here, let me reiterate. You want to recruit from among the passengers for security and to assist Nest Island with farming duties?”

  Kendricks glanced at Carrie, who he had invited to the meeting so she could share her opinion. “That’s right.”

  “Not to sound too... ghetto, but that sucker ain’t gonna fly with the passengers,” Carrie said after a pause. “As far as they’re concerned, it has only been a week. They may understand with their heads we’re in trouble, but not with their hearts, not yet. After all, had we kept to our itinerary, we would only just be coming to the end of the cruise.”

  Solberg steepled his fingers and looked at his two senior staff members intently. Kendricks waited for him to say something, to wade in on one side or the other.

  “Captain,” Kendricks said, after the pause went on to the point of awkwardness. “This is one of those situations where we have to be decisive. If we wait until we need the security or the food, it’ll be too late.”

  “I take your point,” Carrie rebutted. “However, the morale of the passengers is also an issue. At the moment, I have my staff working hard to keep them happy and occupied. But if we start admitting to them we need their help, we may cause a panic.”

  “Carrie, what is the food situation?” Solberg held his hand up to forestall Kendricks’s response.

  “My chefs have worked out a more efficient menu. We’ll use the perishable items first, then phase in the longer-lasting stuff. At the revised rate of consumption, we’re looking at around three weeks before we start to see a major drop in menu quality.”