Extinction Series (The Complete Collection)

by James D. Prescott

  An important piece of a very strange puzzle was missing and Kay thought she knew who just might have it.

  Chapter 35

  Greenland

  Following the enemy’s retreat, the team left with the dead—both friend and foe—and set up a defensive position in a four-story building overlooking the plaza. Mullins had made a convincing case that the open space would provide an excellent field of fire should the enemy decide to attack. Two of them would remain on guard duty at all times, a responsibility they would rotate every hour.

  Without a proper place to bury the dead, they put them in the building next door, laying them side by side. But first they collected weapons and searched the two enemy soldiers. It wasn’t like Sentinel agents carried membership cards. But they did tend to have the next best thing: Tattoos. Mullins found one on each man after rolling up their sleeves.

  “Huh.”

  “What’d you find?” Gabby asked. “Are they Sentinel special forces or what?”

  “They’re special forces all right,” Mullins replied, his jaw cocked at an odd angle. “But not for Sentinel. They’re Israeli.”

  Rajesh’s lips parted with confusion. “We aren’t at war with Israel.”

  “Not yet,” Mullins confirmed. “Given the sorry state of the world, I think it’s fair to say we may soon be.”

  “Clearly they’re here to get their hands on what they couldn’t back in the Gulf,” Jack said. “And they may not be alone.”

  Gabby shook her head in disgust. “You’d think the world would come together given everything we’re facing. I guess Ronald Reagan was wrong.”

  The group smiled, an expression with no small irony. Gabby had been referring to a speech Reagan had given before the United Nations in September of 1987 where he mused about how quickly human differences would vanish if our planet were facing an alien threat.

  “Sentinel… Israel…” Grant said. “Does it matter who’s against us? What’s important is to consider what happens if any of these self-serving nations get their way. I’ve been thinking about things and I believe we only have two options. Find a piece of Atean technology we can use to call and tell them to leave us alone, or transform it into a weapon that can destroy them before they reach us.”

  “You sound like the vice-president,” Jack said, recalling his rather tense meeting in the Oval Office.

  “But didn’t you say the government was moving people into bunkers?” Eugene said, hopeful. “We’re down here freezing our asses off while the rich guys are probably buying prime spots in huge underground resorts.”

  “Consider how well that worked out for the people who lived here sixty-five million years ago,” Gabby said plainly. “You saw the panels they erected. Even as dust from the impact was blotting out the sun, they still took the time to make a record of what they were facing. Right now, these empty buildings are the sole monument to their existence. That’s what none of you seem to realize. This isn’t an archeological site. It’s a tomb and humans are now facing the very same dilemma and making the same dumb mistakes.”

  Jack turned to Anna, who had remained unusually quiet. “What do you think we should do?”

  “I believe it may not matter,” she replied with unusual darkness. “Either path will lead to destruction for most of the species on earth. That is a fact.”

  “That was not what he asked you,” Rajesh snapped, stepping in, a worried expression blooming on his wide face.

  Anna’s eyes dropped and she went to one of the openings where she stood, staring out at the plaza below.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Dag asked, throwing a thumb over his shoulder.

  “How would you feel,” Gabby said, “if your best friend was just killed?”

  Jack caught sight of Tamura. She had also become quiet, her gaze a million miles away. Was she feeling the effects of having taken two lives in a few days? Or was something else the matter? The loss of friends she had known at the facility or the loss of her own humanity at having to avenge them?

  •••

  After they had finished, Mullins and Dag decided to take first watch while Gabby, Tamura and Rajesh headed up to the third floor to catch some shuteye. One level below, Jack, Eugene and Grant sat on the cold stone floor, picking at MREs and sipping on water cold enough to numb the roofs of their mouths. With his helmet off, Jack could see thin fingers of steam rising up from the neck of his suit.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a few sticks of wood to make a fire,” Eugene complained, rubbing his hands together with vigor.

  Grant had no sympathy for the diminutive theoretical physicist. “If you’re cold then turn the heat up in your biosuit.”

  “Turn it up?” Eugene said, sneering. “It’s already at ten.”

  Jack shook his head, drawing in a lungful of cool air and watching a thick plume rush past his lips. He brought his fingers to his mouth as though he were holding a cigarette and repeated the action.

  “You’re playing a dangerous game, amigo,” Grant said, noticing the momentary pleasure on Jack’s face.

  “Why is it the stuff we love the most is so bad for us?” Jack asked, resting his head against the wall behind him.

  “Doesn’t always start out that way,” Grant told him. “I’m sure you didn’t love the first cigarette you smoked, nor the first ice-cold beer you drank.”

  Eugene shivered. “Is there any chance, moving forward, we can avoid the words ‘ice’ or ‘cold?’”

  Jack smiled, his eyes closed. “I can still see the girl who got me hooked. Her name was Sandy, but people called her Sweet. She had long cornsilk hair that tumbled over her shoulders and danced in the sun whenever she swung her head. I met her when I was fourteen and out riding my dirt bike along the trails that cut through the rural town where I grew up. Those were the days before helmets and helicopter parenting, when the only rule was be back before sundown, if at all. About a mile past the nearest gas station, my tank ran dry. I suppose I saw the needle was low when I started out, but I was sure I could make it back before it got me into trouble.”

  “Pushing the limits,” Grant said, smiling. “I suppose some things never change.”

  “No, I guess they don’t,” Jack said, staggering beneath the uneasy weight of Grant’s comment. “Sweet had an open field behind her house and when I passed by, pushing my thirsty bike, I caught her standing by a stand of trees, sneaking one of her mom’s cigarettes. She stamped it out right away, a guilty look all over that pretty face of hers. I knew her from school, but not that she smoked. She was one of those clean girls and yet in one fell swoop, that glittering reputation had been upended. She begged me not to say a word. I told her the truth. That I was more interested in getting some gas for my bike than I was in ratting her out.

  “That’s when Sweet’s face lit up in a big old smile. Said her stepdad kept a can of gas in the shed. That he had it for the John Deere he liked to ride around the property on weekends and that she’d be willing to give me enough to get home, but on one condition. I had to smoke a cigarette with her.

  “At the time, I thought that hardly made much sense. I wasn’t a smoker and I could see she only had one left. Looking back, I later realized she was more interested in finding an accomplice than in hoarding her stash of smokes. I suppose in her mind, if we were both guilty, it lowered the chances I’d change my mind and turn her in. Anyway, I held up my end of the bargain and coughed my way through that first one. She did too and got me enough gas to get home.

  “But days later, something in the back of my mind kept nagging at me. I wanted to see Sweet again and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out whether it was her pretty face I was after or another one of her mom’s cigarettes. She was pretty all right, but more than a dump truck full of trouble.

  “We dated for a few years, even after I left and started working on rigs in the Gulf. Every second weekend, I’d come back to town and we’d head over to one of the Indian casinos that had just opened up. Which was how a sweet l
ittle girl introduced me to my second lifelong vice. One that nearly destroyed me.”

  “She sounds awful,” Eugene said, transfixed.

  “Quite the opposite,” Jack said. “She was terrific.”

  “By awful, I meant to say a bad influence,” Eugene amended.

  “The way I look at it,” Jack said, drumming his gloved fingers against the top of the helmet beside him, “the lure of addiction’s always been in me. If it wasn’t Sweet who got me hooked, it woulda happened some other way and with someone far less exciting.”

  “That’s so much more romantic than my high-school experience,” Eugene said, frowning. “I grew up in Brooklyn and used to get chased by bullies every day after class. Then one day after second period, along comes this strapping kid named Bob—actually we called him Big Bob because he was built like a brick shithouse and never lifted a friggin’ weight in his life. Go figure. So Big Bob offers to protect me if I agree to pay him five bucks a day. Five bucks a day! Who did he think I was? I didn’t have five cents a day. But I agreed all the same, hopeful I’d figure something out before Bob realized I wasn’t good for it and decided to pummel me himself. A week later, I was going through a file cabinet in the basement of my house, looking for staples for a science project, and I find a stack of Hustler magazines. Must have been my dad’s secret stash. Right then and there a light went off in my head. I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a pair of scissors and cut out as many of those sexy pictures as I could. Don’t forget, this was before the internet. After that I sold ’em every day at school for a quarter a piece to a bunch of horny boys. After a month I had enough to hire two bodyguards and buy another twelve magazines.”

  “You were like a drug dealer.” Jack laughed. “But instead of pot, you were selling porn.”

  Eugene threw up his hands. “I was the son of Polish immigrants, born with a big fat ‘kick me’ sign on my back. I didn’t have much choice.”

  The sound of Anna’s metallic footfalls clanked up from downstairs. “I hate to interrupt,” she said, turning to face them once she reached the top riser. “But I thought you should know the decryption protocol I have been running has arrived at a solution.”

  “Which decryption is that?” Jack asked, sitting up straight.

  “The 47th chromatid,” she replied, evenly.

  “You mean Salzburg?” Grant nearly shouted.

  Anna wobbled her head from side to side as she’d seen Rajesh do so often. “Not all of it, Dr. Holland. If you recall, Dr. Ward has only provided us with the DNA sequence for one half of the chromosome. In this case, the 47th chromatid. I expect when she returns I will be able to begin work on the 48th.”

  Something popped into Jack’s mind as Anna spoke. It was an image of the full Salzburg chromosome, the one they had found hidden inside the blast wave. At the time, the extra chromatid showing up in a third of the population had been labeled a disorder. Then once they realized there was more to come, Salzburg no longer represented a strange genetic anomaly, but a dramatic and purposeful shift in human evolution. Still, the question remained whether that shift was intended to help humanity or kill it from within.

  “What led you to the solution?” Eugene asked.

  Anna pivoted at the waist. “The credit for reducing the decryption time must go to Tamura.”

  “It was her observation on the Fibonacci sequence in the temple, wasn’t it?” Jack said, rising and pushing the glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  “Correct, Dr. Greer. After running through millions of possible links to that particular sequence of numbers, I discovered that by adding the first thirty-seven prime numbers, one arrives at the sum two thousand five hundred and eighty-four. That also happens to be the eighteenth Fibonacci number. I then multiplied eighteen by the key number of thirty-seven and arrived at six hundred and sixty-six.”

  Grant gasped. “I’m not much for superstition, but isn’t that the sign of the devil?”

  Jack cocked an eyebrow.

  “I am familiar with all of the world’s religions,” Anna replied without a hint of arrogance or pretension. “While the Book of Revelation does attribute six six six to the beast, those same three numbers are often utilized in several other contexts and often without any ill effect. In our particular case, six hundred and sixty-six also happens to be the thirty-seventh number in a triangular number sequence.”

  “Thirty-seven keeps popping up everywhere,” Eugene said in wonder.

  Anna seemed to contemplate this for a moment. “Given its importance, I suppose it would be strange if it did not. To make a long story short, I then applied the first thirty-seven numbers of the triangular sequence against the binary data from the 47th chromatid and proceeded to run it through the same bitmap application we utilized in deciphering the blast wave image.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, holding the sides of his head. “You’re starting to give me a headache again. Just show me what you found.”

  “Very well, Dr. Greer,” she said, patching the image through to everyone’s glasses.

  Two separate pixelated images materialized before him. Jack flipped between them. The first appeared to be notched lines of varying length originating from a central point.

  “Looks like an exploding star, if you ask me,” Eugene observed.

  They caught the sound of laughter on the channel. “It’s a pulsar map,” Gabby said, coming down the stairs and into the room where they were gathered. Tamura and Rajesh were not far behind.

  “I may be the only one without eight PhDs,” Tamura said, sheepishly. “So I might need someone to tell me what that is.”

  “In 1977,” Gabby, the astrophysicist, explained, “NASA launched twin probes, Voyager One and Two, with the goal of mapping the solar system and someday reaching interstellar space. Each Voyager was outfitted with a golden record that contained key pieces of information about Earth. It also contained a pulsar map, a sort of guide to locating our planet within the Milky Way Galaxy. Pulsars are collapsed stars that give off intense bursts of high-energy particles at predictable rates. By identifying the pulse rate and the relative distance from a planet, you could not only show its location, but also when the probe was launched.”

  “Yes,” Eugene added. “That’s because as the positions of the pulsars relative to one another will change over time, so too will the pulse rate, but because the change is predictable, finding their locations in the past is simply a question of working the calculation in the opposite direction.”

  Tamura stared intently at the 3D galactic map projected on the lens of her glasses. “So you’re saying the aliens encoded a map to their home world inside human DNA?”

  “Not only human,” Grant said. “It’s inside any creature affected by Salzburg.”

  Dag cackled with laughter. “Far out, isn’t it? And if you look at the second image, you can see a representation of the beings themselves.”

  The image was crude, but the resemblance between the praying mantis people and the image decoded from Salzburg was uncanny.

  “It’s like a watermark,” Gabby said, running her fingers through the hologram.

  “Anna, any idea what planet they’re from?”

  “Yes, Dr. Greer. The pulsar map leads to a planet in the constellation Sagittarius one hundred and fifty light years from Earth.”

  The room grew eerily quiet. In the Star Trek series that distance represented about a twelve-day journey at warp nine. In real life, our fastest spacecraft would take forty thousand years to reach the closest star, Alpha Centauri, a measly four point three light years away.

  “Why does that ring a bell?” Eugene asked, scratching a spot at the top of his head, now barren of hair. “It’s gonna bother me all day now.”

  Gabby swiped the visuals before her off to the side. “It’s because of SETI’s famous Wow! signal. In 1977, radio astronomer Jerry Ehman recorded a strong, narrow-band radio signal far above background noise. They traced it back to the constellation Sagittarius, a hundred and fifty light years
from Earth. Since then there’s been speculation the signal was nothing more than a passing comet, but given what we’ve just seen, I believe there’s certainly a strong case to be made that the signal wasn’t a case of mistaken identity at all.”

  Still unencumbered by his helmet, Jack heard the sound of a distant rumble. At once, the thought of another blast wave being released chilled the blood in his veins. But there was something different about this new sound.

  The brightness of Anna’s LED features lit up. “I am receiving a faint signal. It is incredibly garbled and difficult to comprehend.”

  “Any chance you can clean it up?” Jack asked.

  “Running filters and boosting,” Anna replied. Several tense minutes passed before she played the message.

  “This is Admiral Stark. Northern Star is currently in the hands of Russian forces. Moments ago, two of our heavy transports were shot down on approach. If any of you made it down, be aware, you’re about to have company.”

  “Transmission over,” Anna said, more than a hint of concern in her melodic voice.

  “That’s just great,” Eugene said, rubbing his gloved hands on his knees. “Sandwiched between Russian and Israeli special forces. And what have we got? A bunch of nerds and a robot who’s more scared than we are.”

  “Keep your cool,” Jack snapped. “We’ve got weapons and we’ve already killed two of their people. For now we keep pushing toward the pyramid and hope we get to whatever’s inside before they do.”

  Chapter 36

  Rome

  “What the hell is that?” Jansson asked. The flesh around her eyes was dark while the rest of her normally tanned complexion looked pale and sickly.

  “It’s an electromagnetic field generator,” Mia replied, flipping off the switch and killing the current on the crude-looking device. It seemed easy enough to build—a length of coiled copper wire hooked up to a car battery—and easier still to procure. The hospital’s connection to Sapienza University in Rome meant a single phone call from Dr. Putelli to the university’s physics department had secured one right away.