The major pointed his index finger directly up in a swift move. Allan silenced an urge to correct him: a telescope never looks directly up.
“The public might panic more when they do get communication networks back and start asking those questions.”
“Something easily quelled by a few M2-equipped Humvees and a man at the ready,” Nana quipped.
The major snapped his neck to stare at Nana.
“Sorry for the interruption, sir.”
“Despite yourself, you’ve got it right, airman. C-30s started making deliveries to places usually flown-over a few hours ago. They were offered ostensibly as protection, our own little gifts from Santa, but the local NRA members sniffed the threat of martial law and things got tense. Dropping a few larger gifts, soldiers and tanks, put a stop to that. However, this crisis is still young, and 300 million people haven’t been informed yet that our satellites didn’t disappear, we did.”
“Pardon me,” Allan started, hoping his assumptions were wrong, “what do you mean, we?”
“You. Me. Us. Everyone. We appear to have been moved out of our regular orbit. Since we’re in daylight in the Western Hemisphere we really only have sparse reports from the East to verify, but from what we’ve seen it’s undeniable.”
“I’m sorry,” Allan had to interrupt, “I just wanted to make sure the military came to the same conclusion I did. The Earth is definitely off course, or worse.”
“Hey! Why you lettin’ egghead interrupt?” Nana protested.
“Look, pilot, rank doesn’t grant either of us the privilege of the full story. If Dr. Sands chooses to run his mouth, and you don’t interrupt, we might learn something new.”
“What do you mean, ‘or worse?’” asked SIMI. “How could it get worse than the whole planet getting picked up and pushed around? I can’t even get my head around that.”
Allan bit his lip. “Our recent lack of geocentric orbiting material may have affected our new orbit much less than the gravitational effects of the nearest star, which has broader implications than a longer year.”
“Hold up, stop!” Nana put up his hand. “Doc, you know what a green apple is?”
“I’m assuming pilot slang.”
“Damn right. It’ll save your life in a pinch, but not if you don’t know what it is, and it ain’t a piece of fruit. What you know could save all our lives, but stop assuming we all have an astrology PhD.”
“Astronomy,” Allan corrected. “One is superstition and the other science.”
“Exactly!” Nana said with frustration, slapping SIMI’s arm for support. “If I tell you the green apple in your cockpit is gone, it won’t mean shit to you, but if I told you your emergency oxygen supply is gone you’d get the picture real quick. Pretend you’re explaining this to your kids or your wife . . . or the president.”
“The airman’s not far off,” Britely reminded him. “You made the president’s list for a reason, Doctor Sands”
“Well I hope I do get to explain all this to my wife. Is she here?”
“No.”
“Well where is she?”
“I don’t know, Doctor. If command says she’s safe, then she’s safe, and the only reason they’ve kept her safe is so you can answer questions like what this airman has posed. I’m sure you’ll be reunited with your family in due time, but we have more important things to worry about first, like the security of our entire nation-nay, the planet.”
Allan closed his eyes, pausing to start fresh and set his concerns for his family aside for the moment. “What I mean to say is that we’re not in our regular orbit around the Sun. This has several implications. Firstly, it means our biggest satellite, the Moon, has gone and we’re feeling the effects this morning. Those tidal waves weren’t from earthquakes, although that may soon come as well, but from the Earth’s water settling back into place since nothing tugs on it from both ends any longer.”
“Ordinarily there are a few different ways this could happen, but absent reports of a massive meteor strike from another hemisphere, and none of the ash drifting into our airspace, I think we can dismiss that. It is possible that we’ve been nudged by forces outside our full understanding, perhaps a shift in our magnetic field that caused the Moon to spin away and the Earth reacted in kind. However, again, we’d see signs of this, for one thing-it wouldn’t happen overnight.
“That leaves us with what may be the most improbable—but possible—solution. We’ve slipped down a nascent wormhole and landed somewhere else.”
“Slipped in a what?” asked Nana.
Lee rolled her eyes. “Don’t you ever watch movies, Nana? A wormhole is just about how every spaceship in any movie gets anywhere. Don’t make me get a pen and paper and show you the old cliché demonstration. Remember Event Horizon? Interstellar?”
“Oh, you mean when the guy bends the paper and explains physics to the other astronauts. I always thought that was weird.”
“Well, most astronauts are pilots first, and you didn't know either, airman,” Britely smirked.
“Not important y’all.” LARS waved his hands at Nana and Lee. “So where did the wormhole take us, Doc? Where are we?”
“Well, ironically, with our satellites gone, it’s hard to say just yet. At nightfall we’ll have a clearer picture of the sky, which is why contact with the dark hemisphere is vital.”
“So, wait, we just happened to fall through a wormhole?” SIMI asked, incredulous.
“Yeah, in both those movies everything got fucked up when they went through. Like seriously fucked,” LARS added.
“If you want to see seriously fucked, you need to see reconnaissance photos of lower Manhattan,” Britely scolded her.
“That’s not what I meant,” SIMI clarified. “The wormholes in those movies didn’t just appear out of thin air, we made them.”
“I see where you’re going,” Allan assured him. “A sufficiently advanced civilization might control wormholes at will. I’m sure the major has been informed that we may be presented with a first contact scenario shortly.”
This news excited Lee. “So you’re saying aliens pressed a button yesterday and activated warp drive for a whole planet? So first contact like in Contact?”
“Sort of, except they didn’t send us instructions for constructing a wormhole, they just built it around the planet. It seems unbelievable, I know,” Allan confirmed. “But we’re running out of other excuses.”
The major stepped in. “You’re damn right it sounds unbelievable. All the research says that it would take a huge amount of energy just to transmit a ship, let alone a whole planet. What you’re describing is essentially impossible.”
“Impossible for us, Major. Don’t forget, we’re newcomers to this old universe. We went from riding horses to riding rockets in one human lifetime. Sentience that developed alongside the dinosaurs would have a 200 million year head start.”
“Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Lee said.
Allan smiled and turned. “Yes. Yes, exactly, Lee! Arthur C. Clarke.”
“Like in The Light of Other Days?” She bit her lip.
“Not exactly. That wormhole only transferred information. And it wasn’t exactly a Clarke novel.”
Nana put his head in his hands and chuckled. “Apparently it took the end of the world to find someone for Raptor Fairy to talk shop with.”
“Like that fantasy book, your wormhole is pure speculation, Doctor,” the major grunted. “One that only leads to more reckless postulates. How would they have created the wormhole? What did they learn in that evolutionary head start?”
“That, sir, is not my specialty. However, recent work suggests control of quanta, localized events having impacts on a galactic scale through the manipulation of higher dimensions.”
“What?” Nana asked, with a worse look of incomprehension than before.
Britely sighed. “Doctor, I let you prattle on because I was hoping you’d put my mind at ease. Given my orders for you
all I was hoping for a different explanation of this morning’s events than the one I’ve already been supplied. Instead, you’re talking about inter-dimensional beings and little green men in flying saucers. Speculation can be dangerous, and that’s where we’re headed now.”
“Major, I hardly think it’s dangerous to—”
“Doctor!” the major shouted and pointed. “This is not the Cal-Tech debate club.”
Allan shrank back.
“What are our orders, sir?” asked SIMI.
“Go to San Francisco and evacuate Dr. Jill Tarmor.”
Allan’s jaw dropped. The rest looked at the major in befuddlement.
“Senior researcher at SETI,” he added.
“America’s foremost expert in astrobiology and exobiology,” Allan finished.
“Exo-what?” Nana asked.
“Little green men,” Lee answered.
Chapter 6
A lone Chinook flew across the vast warm waters of the Pacific. From inside, Allan watched the water form an endless matrix of jagged pockets, each sending a collection of all wavelengths at once back at him before tumbling back into the trough. Nothing seemed to have changed in the vast oceans, but Allan knew it loomed in ways yet undiscovered.
How long before the ecosystem changed, before the temperature in the oceans would drop? The older, cooler star might keep the food chain going for another hundred years. Maybe this change would be nothing on a planetary timeline compared to what humanity already wrought.
Allan left the window and looked around the very full cargo bay. The ride reminded him of the jarring torture of a wooden roller coaster, every bump worrying Allan they were about to crash into the waves. The fighter pilots all slept soundly through the chop, issuing silent edicts on Allan’s masculinity. His two pillows, a luxury compared to the pilots sleeping on bags of rice, gave him no comfort.
The major explained it three times before they boarded the chopper. Allan came as talisman, a friendly face so Dr. Tarmor wouldn’t need persuasion from stern voices and loaded AR-15s to come back. Why the sleeping Air Force pilots came worried him. They should be navigating the sky, not dangerous city streets in potentially hostile territory. Could the United States military, larger than the next ten competitors combined, already be stretched so thin in this crisis to commit pilots to ground rescue missions? He comforted himself with an alternative hypothesis: this rescue wouldn’t be dangerous enough to warrant the ground combat skills of the Marines or Army. According to the major, Jill would be waiting for them at the Presidio.
The chopper bucked, at least harder than it had since takeoff, and Nana’s foot slipped, colliding with Lee’s thigh. She opened her eyes directly at Allan. He closed his eyes quickly, hoping she couldn’t see he’d been staring at her, lost in thought.
“Get some rest, Doc,” she said as non-threateningly as possible. “You’re gonna need it.”
Three hours later another jolt woke Allan to stare at the ocean again, involuntarily this time as the chopper banked hard toward the coast. Allan slumped over and up the side wall until he could see out of the circular window. He saw blue for a minute, the ocean, then smoke.
The chopper righted itself and put Allan back on the floor, trapped between two ominously close pallets of bottled water. The canvas strips holding the pallets strained against the sudden turns.
“We’re here, folks,” the pilot’s speaker barked. “What’s left of it, anyway. They told me to drop you off at the Presidio, but I’m not going to be able to touch down.”
“Drop is right!” LARS looked down with trepidation. “I haven’t jumped since basic.”
“Aren’t you a pilot?” Allan asked, happy to not suffer his fear alone.
LARS nodded and leaned over to Allan. “I prefer two Pratt and Whitney’s with 35,000 pound-feet of thrust to escort me to the ground, not a big piece of canvas. Pilots only see parachutes when something goes wrong.”
Lee rolled her eyes. “Just enjoy the view, probably your last chance to relax for a few days.”
“I have a feeling the view won’t help us relax,” Nana said, pointing at the columns of smoke outside.
SIMI, sensing Allan’s trepidation, tapped him on the chest. “You’ll love it, Doc. I got you, don’t worry.” He grabbed a parachute and brought the harness up around Allan’s shaking legs. A few uncomfortably tight strap pulls later and SIMI bumped his fist on Allan’s shoulder. “Ready!” SIMI put Allan’s hand on the red tab just above his opposite collarbone and lowered his voice. “Just remember to pull this if you want to stay alive, okay?”
Allan, shivering with fear, managed to nod.
The cool fog of the bay whistled in as the back of the chopper opened.
“Ready!” the others shouted in turn and made a makeshift jump line by the window into the sky.
“Drop point, Presidio, thirty seconds,” the pilot advised.
“Let’s go!” Lee shouted at Allan, pulling him into the line behind her. “I saved you a spot.”
LARS, behind Allan, put a hand on his shoulder and leaned in. “She always goes first when we’ve got something tough to do, that way the rest of us can’t back down from a challenge. Now you can’t, either.”
The gaping maw started to look less like sky and more like a smoking patchwork quilt stuck in the San Francisco Bay.
“Hey!” Lee shouted and snapped her fingers in front of Allan’s eyes. “You’ll be fine, just watch me, and when I open my chute you open yours, then grab the handles and pull. You’ll get it, it’s intuitive.” Raising her voice for the others, “If these dumbasses can do it, you can too.”
Lee leaned onto the platform, slowly walking the plank. Beyond her the miasma of colors gave way to individual details, familiar buildings and public parks mangled almost beyond recognition.
“Looks like they put the city through a washing machine then lit it on fire,” LARS said.
“Don’t look at the bay!” SIMI shouted, which of course brought their eyes there.
“What are those, fish?” LARS asked about the many bobbing white objects in the flooded edges of the bay.
“They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. All foul, all rotting, all dead,” Lee whispered cryptically.
“What!” Allan yelled.
“She’s just showing off her library again,” SIMI said.
“I get that, the Dead Marshes, but what are those down there?”
“Bodies.” LARS solemnly realized.
“All dead,” Allan repeated Lee’s quotation to himself.
LARS nodded. “Victims of the tsunami.”
Lee, almost at the edge of the platform, shifted and pointed at their destination, high flat cliffs covered with tens of thousands of newly minted homeless between the dead marshes and the Pacific.
“The Presidio!” she shouted. “If we lose each other watch for my flare!”
“Candles of corpses,” Allan mumbled through a shiver. He felt hands at his neck and jerked around.
“Easy buddy,” LARS shouted, pulling Allan’s shirt up over his mouth. “Try not to breathe that smoke.” He leaned to Allan’s ear and whispered, “Or you’ll light little candles of your own.”
“You too?” he asked, acknowledging LARS’s awareness of at least one of Lee’s literary references, despite the latter quotation coming from a popular film adaptation. Allan pointed at Lee’s back. “Does she know?”
“That I like that Hobbit shit too?” LARS gave Allan a friendly pat on the back. “Better to let her think she’s smarter; takes ego and confidence to lead people, eh, professor?”
LARS yanked Allan back around to face the smoke and gave him a firm push.
Lee had already jumped. LARS pushed again. Hard. Allan let out the most blood-curdling expletive he could think of and ran straight off the deck.
Allan instantly regretted the bravado, spinning and falling at 120 miles an hour. His eyes struggled to make sense of the jumbled mess. Lee had told him to pull hi
s parachute after her. He tried to find Lee, a speck floating in the maelstrom hurtling up. A large red and white striped ball spun past.
Allan fumbled at his collar for his parachute, but the handle was gone. One of those damn pilots sabotaged him. Panicked and twirling into the earth, he worried he’d fizzle out of existence like a falling star. Why did they bring him? It wouldn’t help to show Jill his dead body. Or maybe it would, if she still hated him. The humor calmed his panic attack.
Breathe. Close your eyes. Concentrate. How good will it feel to remind Jill for the rest of her life that she owes it to you? Save yourself first, hotshot.
Reason revisited Allan. He replayed the instructions of the pilots before the jump. The handle sat on the other collar. In less than a second he felt the chute deploy and lift up, slamming his thighs into the thick straps and cutting a deep wedge into some very soft flesh between his legs. He didn’t feel it yet, focusing instead on the worrisome increase in spin.
What had they said? Handles! Allan pulled two large canvas circles and began to unravel his swirl, allowing him to focus on landing. He searched the crowd below for an opening. Thousands of survivors from the tsunami took refuge in the Presidio among uprooted trees and stranded boats washed in from the western cliffs. They looked as scared as he was. Pulling down with all his strength on the canvas loops only delayed the inevitable. Allan’s knees slammed into shoulders wet from swimming through a wall of water only a few hours earlier.
“Are they coming?” asked a ragged, bruised man pinned under Allan.
“I’m sorry, what?” Allan gingerly stood and helped the man to his feet as an anxious crowd turned to face them.
“That was a Chinook. My brother flew one in the Gulf. You’re the Marines, the first in. You’re here to help us, right?”
The man’s lips turned down, realizing Allan’s soft belly and lack of uniform belied his civilian status.
The Filter Trap Page 6
