“As most of you now know, further gravitational readings and further math indicate that this object is headed directly toward Earth. As of an hour ago, it was travelling just over a million miles per hour, and it is still slowing. If it continues to decelerate smoothly, it will intersect our planet in exactly twenty-two days time.”
19
John Kolke waited patiently for his commander to return to his office, one of several the colonel maintained at military bases across the country.
Colonel Morris Jacobson entered and took the chair at his desk, facing his second in command, and he didn’t look good.
Kolke was confused by his demeanor. “You did tell Rosenblatt about his daughter, right?” he asked.
Jake sighed. “Yeah, I told him.”
“Then why do you look so miserable?”
“It didn’t go the way I thought it would. I might have made things worse.”
“What? How is that possible?”
“Part of him is desperate to believe me. But part of him thinks this is some kind of cruel mind fuck. That I’m giving him hope, just so I can snatch it away later to destroy him even more. So he’s afraid to believe me, just in case it isn’t true. If he believed me, and then it turned out I was lying, it would be like losing his daughter twice.”
“I see what you’re saying,” said Kolke.
Jake checked his watch. He had about twenty minutes before he called Miller a second time. His people had gotten nowhere tracing the call or finding Miller’s IP address, as expected.
“So what did you think of Kira Miller?” asked Jake. Kolke had listened in on his call, but Jake had wanted to delay any postgame discussion until after he had spoken with Rosenblatt.
“She’s impressive,” replied the major. “Her reputation is well earned. Her charisma comes through, even when you can’t see her. And from her pictures, I can only imagine how much seeing her in person adds to the effect.” He paused. “You can’t possibly believe she’s sincere about this trade, though.”
“No,” agreed Jake. “Not for a second. But we need to figure out what her angle is. She didn’t go through this charade for her health.”
“It has to be a rescue attempt.”
“I agree that’s the most likely explanation. She’ll set up the handoff so she’ll know where we’ll be with her people. Then she’ll attack. Or members of her group will. She’ll count on those pills of hers giving them the advantage, no matter how we protect ourselves.”
“So how do you want to play it?”
Jake didn’t answer for almost a full minute. Kolke waited patiently while the colonel weighed options in his head. “We restrain Desh and Rosenblatt at a location far away from where we acquire Miller. Metal handcuffs, plastic handcuffs, leg irons, the works—we bind and gag them so thoroughly we can walk away without any worry they’ll escape. In an apartment, maybe. Or a hotel room.”
“What about in a self storage facility? In one of those little steel rooms you can rent out?”
“Perfect,” said Jake. “When Miller is safely in our custody, we tell her people where to find Desh and Rosenblatt. This way, ambushing us does them no good. Not if they want their people back.”
“I like it. But she’ll never agree to it.”
“If you’re right, I’ll have at least forced her to show her hand. She’ll still be intent on outsmarting us, so the discussion won’t end there. The ball will be in her court, and you’d better believe she’ll hit it back.” He paused. “But for some reason, I think she’ll agree to just about anything I propose.”
Kolke’s face wrinkled in confusion. “Why?”
“Because she’s a lot smarter than we are. Even without her magic pills. We’re just thinking a move or two deep and congratulating ourselves. She’s playing a different game. I think she already factored this play into her equation.”
“If that’s true, then you should refuse to deal. Period.”
Jake smiled. “Yeah. Probably. But if I do that she’ll have won forever. She already has me second guessing myself, jousting at shadows. But if I believe no matter what I do, she’s a few steps ahead, then I’m paralyzed and may as well pack it in now.”
“So what else do you think she might have up her sleeve?”
Jake rubbed his head. “There is one flaw in my plan. Even if she can’t directly free her friends, she could try to capture me and force me to give up their location.”
Kolke considered. “Not if you don’t know it,” he said.
“Good thought, Major. Very good thought.” Jake paused for several long seconds. “So we can play it like this. You and I separate. You leave Desh and Rosenblatt bound somewhere, but you don’t tell me their location. But now it should be in an apartment. Far more of these than there are storage facilities. If she really does give herself up, you tell her people where to find our two guests. If she kills or captures me and our team while we’re trying to take her into custody, you just re-gather the prisoners and she’s no better off.”
“Not to rain on this parade or anything,” said Kolke wryly, “but under this scenario, she might not get her people back, but you’re still captured or dead. Doesn’t seem like much fun on your end.”
Jake laughed. “Well, I’ll do my best to see that this doesn’t happen. It’s just a worst case. We can have her rent an SUV and give her driving instructions as she goes, so we can’t be ambushed. We’ll find a stretch of low ground between two cliff walls—like a shallow canyon,” he said, his head tilted back as he thought it through and tried to envision the handoff in his mind’s eye. “One she can get to quickly by off-roading. We can have helos overhead making sure she isn’t followed and snipers on both cliffs. Most with live ammo—but a few with tranquilizer rifles, just on the off chance she doesn’t try anything.”
“That seems like . . . adequate . . . protection,” said Kolke, and Jake could tell his second in command was convinced this was overkill. Maybe so, but this woman’s capabilities had him spooked.
Kolke was about to continue when Jake said, “hold that thought,” and picked up the phone on his desk. He described the kind of terrain he was looking for in the Colorado area to the woman who answered, and that he needed the GPS coordinates of such a place communicated to him as soon as possible. He hung up and gestured to the major. “Go on,” he said.
“I was just going to say, if she agrees to this—a huge if in my book—she’ll have zero chance. Even if she takes one of her pills when you encounter her.”
“Don’t forget that she and her Icarus friends can come up with breakthrough technology every time they’re enhanced. Very little is beyond the reach of their minds. And even without a technology advantage, if she’s able to take a gellcap, you don’t want any part of her. That’s where the tranquilizer comes in. We use one to put her to sleep. When she’s down, we maintain our positions—snipers and helos—for ninety minutes. Even if she enhanced herself just prior to the encounter, the effect only lasts about an hour. After ninety minutes, we tape her mouth shut so she can’t surprise us and take a pill, strip her naked to eliminate the possibility of hidden technology, and take her in.”
“Easy as pie,” said Kolke dryly. “What are we waiting for?” He paused and shook his head. “It’s a good plan, Colonel. But I’m still afraid she’ll never agree to it,” he added.
“That’s funny,” said Jake grimly. “I’m more afraid that she will.”
20
Madison Russo finished her prepared statement, took a seat on the podium, and Dr. Timothy Benari replaced her at the lectern. He glanced down at his notes.
“I’m going to keep this short and simple,” he began. “As Dr. Tobias mentioned, my work is in the field of zero point energy. I’m glad Miss Russo described relativity to you. The other major breakthrough that occurred around this time, which Einstein also had a big hand in helping to launch, was quantum physics. I’m not going to explain this to you now, simply because it’s so strange that it makes relativity seem
intuitive. Even Einstein could never bring himself to really believe the implications of this theory. This being said, modern electronics wouldn’t be possible without it, and it is arguably the most successful theory of all time.”
He paused. “But it is unbelievably bizarre. What it says is that particles can be in two places at once, can be linked over unlimited distance, and can pop into and out of existence. Oh, and it suggests something else: that there is a nearly infinite amount of energy in every square centimeter of vacuum. That the vacuum really isn’t a vacuum. That as close to a free lunch as this universe will ever offer is just waiting to be harvested. Zero point energy.
“This was confirmed in 1997, an event the The New York Times described particularly well in an article entitled, Physicists Confirm Power of Nothing, Measuring Force of Universal Flux. I’ll read a few excerpts from it now:
“For half a century, physicists have known that there is no such thing as absolute nothingness, and that the vacuum of space, devoid of even a single atom of matter, seethes with subtle activity. Now, with the help of a pair of metal plates and a fine wire, a scientist has directly measured the force exerted by fleeting fluctuations in the vacuum that pace the universal pulse of existence . . . Dr. Lamoreaux’s experiment was the first direct and conclusive demonstration of . . . the Casimir Effect, which has been posited as a force produced solely by activity in the “empty” vacuum. His results came as no surprise to anyone familiar with quantum electrodynamics, but they served as material confirmation of a bizarre theoretical prediction.
Quantum electrodynamics holds that the all-pervading vacuum continuously spawns particles and waves that spontaneously pop into and out of existence on an almost unimaginably short time scale.
This churning quantum ‘foam,’ as some physicists call it, is believed to extend throughout the universe. It fills empty space within the atoms in human bodies, and reaches the emptiest and most remote regions of the cosmos.”
Dr. Benari stopped reading. “So why is any of this relevant?” he said. “Because speeding up an object the size of a car to near light speed takes some serious energy: more than the total output of our sun over a fifty year period. With current human understanding, the only way this could be done is if a civilization found a way to tap this zero point energy. Even taming antimatter wouldn’t provide enough power. I’ve spent my entire career trying to find some way to tap this infinite free lunch, and so have my colleagues. We haven’t gotten very far, to say the least. Many of us believed it couldn’t be done.” He nodded his head slowly. “Well, now we know otherwise.”
He paused for several seconds. “I’ve theorized that if this zero point energy, or ZPE, were tapped,” he continued, “it would change something called the Planck constant. I’d be happy to explain what this is later on. The bottom line is that an object harvesting this energy would change some fundamental properties of the universe around it, including light, and result in a telltale spectroscopic pattern that I’ve called Casimir Radiation.”
Dr. Benari smiled broadly, unable to help himself. His theory had been attacked without mercy, and until yesterday, his prediction had been considered to be untestable. What a difference a day made. Einstein had predicted that light from a distant star coming close to the Sun would be bent, but it was years before an eclipse occurred and proper equipment was in place to measure it. Once it was, the deflection of the light turned out to be 1.7 arc seconds, matching Einstein’s prediction exactly, proving his vision of gravity and spacetime and making him the most famous scientist on the planet. Now it was Benari’s turn.
“Turns out my theory isn’t just a theory anymore,” he continued. “We’ve discovered this Casimir Radiation coming from the object, precisely as my theory predicted. Whatever is coming towards us is not only alien life, and intelligent alien life, it’s from a highly advanced civilization that has conquered the ultimate energy source.”
He raised his eyebrows. “And assuming it doesn’t veer off course, I, for one, am dying to get a peek under the hood.”
21
Jake trained a pair of binoculars on the red SUV that had just entered the center of the wide ravine. Hundred-foot cliff walls rose sharply on both sides.
“Nice choice,” noted a self-assured voice from the earpiece in his left ear, coming in clearly despite the whipping sound made by the blades of three helos circling overhead, maintaining a three mile surveillance perimeter. “How many men do you have on each cliff?”
“One or two,” replied Jake noncommittally.
“More like five or ten, I’m guessing,” said Kira Miller. “And helicopters to boot. Looks like someone was paying attention the day they taught how to take the high ground in military school.”
“Just a sign of how much respect I have for you,” said Jake.
“Lucky me,” she mumbled wryly. “I’m getting out now,” she added. “How about reminding your men of our little agreement. No killing the helpless girl.”
“They know,” said Jake.
A moment later the front door of the car sprung open and a lithe woman stepped out wearing faded blue jeans and a teal, v-neck blouse. He could see her well enough but he used the binoculars to zoom in on her face. His heart picked up speed. It was Kira Miller in the flesh. At least it seemed to be. With this woman you could never be sure of anything.
“Walk ten or fifteen yards away from your car with your hands in plain sight,” he instructed.
She was wearing a headset as he had asked, so her hands were completely free. She raised them above her head and began walking. “As you can see, it really is me,” she said into the microphone extending toward her mouth. “I’ve done everything you asked for. I’m in your control. Now how about living up to your end and texting my associates where to find your prisoners?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll stick to our agreement. But I’m not quite satisfied. Not yet.”
“Another sign of respect?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m going to add someone to the call. She’s going to ask you a few questions.”
He manipulated his phone and a second later a woman joined them on the line. “Tell me the properties of a Type III restriction enzyme?” she said, her voice low and scratchy.
A wide, unselfconscious grin came over Kira Miller’s face, which Jake saw clearly through his binoculars. “Okay, now I’m impressed,” she said. “You take caution to whole new levels, Colonel. If this isn’t really me in the middle of nowhere, who do you think it is? You think I found a perfect double and convinced her to give herself up in my place?”
“Probably not. But I thought you were in the building I destroyed, and I was wrong about that. You can never be too careful. I promised to give up Desh and Rosenblatt for Kira Miller. Not a stand in.”
“A fair point,” allowed Kira. “Okay. A Type III restriction enzyme cuts DNA about twenty to thirty base pairs from its recognition site, which consists of two, inversely oriented, non palindromic sequences. They have more than one subunit, require AdoMet for DNA methylation, and need ATP as a cofactor. They methylate only one strand of DNA, at the N-6 position of adenosyl residues.” She paused. “Are we done?”
“Not quite yet,” said the woman. She went on to ask four additional questions, each of them more difficult, and several which could only be answered by someone with a practical knowledge of genetic engineering, rather than just book knowledge.
When Kira had answered the last question, Jake’s expert told him that in her professional opinion the woman on the phone was a top flight molecular biologist, and left the call.
“Satisfied?” asked the stunning woman in the gorge below.
Jake signaled to a sniper nearby, and seconds later Kira Miller crumpled to the ground, unconscious.
“Completely,” replied Jake to no one in particular.
***
Jim Connelly broke the lock on the door labeled 47J in the Pinewood Knolls apartment complex east of Denver and carefully stepped inside, although he
knew this wasn’t an ambush. He had complete confidence in the assessment his altered self had made of Jake’s veracity, and would have bet his life the man would not go back on his word. In fact, he realized, he was betting his life.
As he entered the unit, Connelly found David Desh and Seth Rosenblatt bound together in the center of the living room in multiple ways, with layers of gray duct tape firmly affixed to their mouths. Connelly found the keys to multiple pairs of handcuffs and leg irons in a potted plant in the corner, as he had been told he would. He quickly removed these devices from both men and used his freshly sharpened combat knife on Desh’s bonds first, sawing through the tough plastic handcuffs and other fasteners that continued to immobilize him.
While he was doing this he pulled the tape from his friend’s mouth in one quick motion.
“How could you let her do this?” demanded Desh the instant his mouth was free. “She’s more important than all of us combined!”
Connelly continued cutting through his bonds. “When Kira Miller is intent on doing something,” he responded calmly, in marked contrast to his friend’s rage. “No power on earth is going to stop her.” He gestured toward Rosenblatt. “But let’s talk about this later.”
Seconds late Desh was free, and within another minute they had both managed to free the tall physicist. Desh was still fuming, but he remained silent.
“David, you’re with me,” said Connelly. “Dr. Rosenblatt, I’m going to ask you to stay here for just a few minutes.”
Rosenblatt looked confused but nodded his acquiescence.
Shortly after Desh and Connelly left there was a knock at the door. The physicist eyed it warily and then opened it.
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