Starfire

by B. V. Larson

  “There are disaster protocols,” the woman continued, undeterred. “They have not been followed. Not at all. We should have all been evacuated down to Fairbanks as of yesterday. For all we know, those lunatics planted a bomb on the lab grounds. It's probably ticking away as we speak. Let the officials—”

  “Dr. Goreki,” the new director interrupted. “I understand and appreciate your concerns. But the base is secure now, and we must proceed with our mission goals.”

  Goreki swiveled her head, looking at her neighbors. They gave her sympathetic nods of support.

  “Are you mad?” she demanded. “Thirty-nine are dead! Mission goals? We’re studying global warming trends in the Arctic! I think, under the circumstances, that noble mission can be set aside until the situation has stabilized.”

  The director stared at her coldly. “I’m in charge here now. We are involved in matters much larger than climate change. Lab 126, in fact, always was.”

  Yuki raised her hand then. Reluctantly, the director called on her. He looked like a man whose carefully laid-out briefing was disintegrating into a free-for-all.

  “Director,” she said, “where did you and these other scientists come from so suddenly?”

  “I’m from Sandia Labs. You’re from Lawrence Livermore. Most of the others here are from one national lab or another.”

  Goreki spoke up again, as if she couldn’t contain herself after a valiant effort to do so. “Director? What is our mission? What’s so important that every protocol must be ignored—and that our lives must be endangered?”

  “It’s a matter of national security. We’ll brief everyone on details on a need-to-know basis. What I need from all of you is a report on the functionality of your research equipment. Can you get your drones, probes and mini-subs into the sea today? Tomorrow? Report back to me on readiness by five o’clock tonight. That’s all for now.”

  He left the building, striding purposefully and angrily. The scientists growled and gestured excitedly among themselves.

  Yuki stood. She almost swayed on her feet, but Edwin steadied her with a hand.

  “I’m going after him,” she said.

  “You sure you’re up to that?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and followed the director out onto the walkways. She was so angry, she didn't care about her physical pain right now.

  “Director Evans?” she called.

  He hesitated, then turned to face her. She came up to him, walking painfully. His face softened.

  “Still in pain, are you?”

  “Yes, the bullet left a hole, you see.”

  He stared for a second, then chuckled. She smiled.

  “Sorry about my colleagues back there,” she said.

  “Yes, well, I handled it poorly.”

  “They weren’t in the best mood.”

  “No, understandably not. It’s all this secrecy, you understand. It stresses people to know they’re in danger, especially if they don’t know why they should put up with it.”

  She thought about that. “There is a reason, right? I mean, we aren’t all stuck up here just because no one wants to admit to the press what happened?”

  “For once, it’s not political. The reasons are real. This is very serious.”

  “Director, could you give me a hint? I took a bullet here. That woman—Dr. Goreki—when I first met her she had a bottle full of gasoline in her hands. If I could take something back to the scientists, something they could sink their teeth into, it would lower tensions around here a great deal.”

  “They trust you, don’t they? You’re new, but you were here in the middle of it. All right, tell them this: We’re running a deep mission at dawn with everything we can get working. We’ve even brought your probe up from Livermore. That wasn’t in the original plan, I gather, but now they’ve stepped things up. Homeland wants answers.”

  “Answers to what?”

  “To what’s sitting on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean in a particular spot.”

  She turned to stare out to sea. There was ice out there. White, floating ice a mile or so off the coast. She could see broken chunks of it everywhere.

  “Something at the bottom of the Arctic?” she asked aloud. She turned back when she got no answer and found Director Evans was striding away from her.

  She hurried back to the others to share what she’d learned. It wasn’t much, but even a hint was better than nothing when people were scared and angry.

  Chapter 25

  Gulf of Anadyr

  Night

  The first helicopter arrived from the mainland six hours after they made initial contact. By that time, Lev and Kira were down inside the boat, wanting to keep warm. A howling wind had come up, and it had begun to snow up on the deck. Every surface was soon sugared white.

  They kept the hatch that led up into the conning tower open, watching and listening for any plane or ship. When the droning sounds of approaching aircraft finally did cut through the singing wind, they looked at one another.

  Dr. Norin looked worried. Lev smiled with half his mouth. “They’re here. That’s an Mi-8—I know the sound like I know the whisper of breath in my own lungs.”

  Dr. Norin stared at him silently.

  “No last words?” he asked. “No special messages for me? I doubt we’ll be in contact much longer.”

  “What do you want me to say? I can see you’re insufferably proud of yourself.”

  He shrugged. She was right, he was prideful. His mission had been accomplished. Lev took pride in completed missions. Thus far in his career, he’d never failed to do whatever his commanders demanded of him.

  “What will happen to me?” she asked.

  “You’ll be processed in Vladivostok. After that—I don’t know.”

  “You’re a robot,” Dr. Norin said with sudden vehemence. “You have no perspective. I did what I did because I felt I had to. I changed the world that day, whether you understand it or not. Nothing you’ve accomplished in your entire life—nothing you ever will accomplish—matters in the least in comparison to what I did out there under the ice.”

  Lev folded down the corners of his mouth and nodded as if he were impressed by her words—but he was not. She was full of bluster. All criminals were when it came down to the end. She was no different.

  Still, he was mildly curious. She had done something strange down there, inside that unnatural Artifact. The people in the Kremlin had cared enough about it to send him. How could he not wonder if there were any grains of truth in her hints and ravings?

  “This is your chance,” he said. “Your last one. If you want to tell me why you came here, what you’ve been doing, now is the time.”

  Outside, the droning faded, then grew again, stronger than before. There were two helicopters now. They were circling, perhaps setting up to drop men aboard the sub. They had to be careful and take their time. If a man fell into this frozen sea at night—even a Spetsnaz man—he might freeze to death before they could reel him back up.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “Why did you kill your own people and destroy a research facility? That would seem counterproductive even for a bureaucrat such as yourself.”

  She glared at him. There was hatred in her eyes, but it did not bother him in the slightest. To Lev, she was a criminal. A killer of the worst kind. She had betrayed her own people. He suspected she’d done it for some kind of personal gain, no matter what kind of noble horseshit she was about to claim as her motivation.

  “You came to the ice, and you dug me out of the sea like a dog hunting a rabbit,” Kira said, nodding thoughtfully. She stared at the deck and the glowing instruments that surrounded them, limning the two of them in a soft red glow. “I guess for this, I can reward you with as much truth as you can comprehend.”

  Lev made a hurry-up gesture with his gloved fingers.

  “In 1908,” she began, “a meteor struck ground in Siberia.” As she spoke, she looked at the wall behind him, as if seei
ng another time and place. “You might have heard of that—the Tunguska Event.”

  Lev shrugged. “Yes, I remember something of it. A rock knocked down a forest, as I recall.”

  “That was just part of the debris,” she said. “Three parts came down—three parts that we know of today, anyway. The largest piece landed in the Siberian forests and was destroyed. Nothing was left but molten metal and rock. But two other smaller chunks came down as well that same day.”

  Lev nodded, eyebrows raised high. He was already becoming bored.

  “The second piece crashed into the Arctic, punching through the ice cap and sinking. That is what we call the ‘Artifact’ today. It survived with less damage due to landing in water.”

  Lev was beginning to see what she was talking about. She was saying the Artifact under the polar icecap wasn’t from Earth—that it had fallen from the skies above.

  “Why are you so deeply involved?” Lev asked. “Besides being present during the discovery?”

  “I have a certain affinity for the Artifact. It allows me to manipulate it in ways others cannot.”

  He squinted at her, absorbing this information. “I’ve always assumed the Artifact was something built long ago by a primitive society. A mystery like the pyramids. How can one have an affinity for such an object?”

  “It isn’t an object. It is a piece of a larger structure. A structure built by someone else.”

  “Someone…” he laughed suddenly. “Aliens? You’re going there, am I right? I must admit, you had me interested for a moment.”

  “That’s exactly the response you’ve been carefully programmed to produce,” she said with quiet bitterness. “Nearly a century of laughter and the discrediting of reports backs you up. You’re in good company as a skeptic. But Lev, you saw it. You were down there in the sea, in the very core. You had to have felt the alien nature of that wreck that sits beneath coldest water on Earth. Don’t try to deny it.”

  Lev paused, thoughtful. “All right,” he said. “I agree there was something odd about the structure. But there’s something odd about Stonehenge, too. Did aliens build that as well?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “But if it was capable of generating a massive pulse of radiation, I’d at least have to consider the idea.”

  Lev nodded, conceding the point. “Go on,” he said. “We’ll hear boots on the deck soon.”

  “There is a third piece. This section didn’t break off and crash. We don’t know why. Instead, it landed under power.”

  “Where?”

  “In the United States. In the center of a vast, empty desert. Flat, dry land—we think it was seeking a safe landing spot.”

  Lev huffed uncertainly. “The Americans have it then?”

  “Yes. They found it long ago.”

  “Are you saying they’ve got alien technology? It certainly hasn’t shown up much.”

  “Hasn’t it? What nation first split the atom in that same desert? Do you know where the light bulb, the automobile, the first powered aircraft, the radio, the television, the electronic computer—a thousand other discoveries were first made?”

  Lev’s humor had faded. He frowned down at the deck thoughtfully. “You’re saying the Americans had help? Can you prove any of this?”

  “No, not really,” she admitted. “But these realities do form an amazing sequence of technological coincidences, don’t they? What’s wrong with the rest of humanity? Is ninety-nine percent of the planet’s population mentally stunted? Why have the Americans been so far ahead for so very long, doling out one discovery after another for—coincidentally—the last century?”

  “Let me pretend to take your claims seriously for a moment. I must caution you that they sound like the deluded ravings of envy and paranoia—but I’ll go along for argument’s sake. If all this is true, why did you go to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and burn your people with radiation?”

  “That was unfortunate,” she said. “I tried to engineer it so that no one would die. But then you came along, and I ran out of time. I knew what your mission was. Word of my theories and my efforts to awaken the beacon at the bottom of the sea had reached the Kremlin, and I was to be forcibly expelled. So, I took radical action. I initiated the signal. The results are yet to be seen.”

  Lev felt a chill, and it wasn’t just due to the icy winds coming through the circular opening in the hull above them. Somehow, he found himself believing her. At the very least, he believed that she was telling the truth from her perspective. That meant she was either mad or more daring than almost anyone he’d ever met. This last option seemed possible, as she’d shown herself to be resourceful and even dangerous when cornered.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s say I believe in your version of events. Why would you want to awaken this—this alien Artifact? It would seem to be the height of madness to me.”

  She smiled without humor. “If the aliens do come back to investigate, where do you think they’ll investigate first? A crater in a forest? A half-dead, damaged module sunken in the frozen sea? Or wouldn’t they more likely seek their landing craft, which we suspect is relatively intact?”

  He stared at her. “You’re doing this out of revenge? To strike back at the Americans?”

  “I have other reasons. But the Americans sowed the seeds of their own destruction long ago,” she said confidently. “All I’ve done is help nurture and mature those seeds. I’ve sped up the inevitable.”

  Lev was no longer amused by the woman. He wasn’t frightened, but he was apprehensive.

  He opened his mouth to ask another question, but then boots thumped on the deck above them. Voices shouted, whipped away into unintelligibility by the sharp wind.

  Lev raised his hands and put them on his head, fingers intertwined. Slowly, Kira did the same.

  A moment later, the black muzzle of an AK-12 poked down through the hatch.

  Their conversation was at an end.

  Chapter 26

  Lab 126, Alaska

  Day

  Yuki’s sea drone was swimming freely at last. Like a dolphin raised in captivity, it seemed to know it was in a bigger body of water than it ever had experienced in its sheltered existence.

  Already, elements of her design that had never been tested were coming into play. The stabilizers took to the currents well. The tiny craft didn’t flip over or turn off course. Instead, it swam with deliberate, focused movements. Deeper and deeper it went, following the contours of a cliff under the sea.

  What was most amazing to Yuki was that the drone wasn’t anywhere close to her. It was hundreds of miles offcruising ever deeper into theAmundsen Basin. When she’d first learned that her drone had been brought up to the Arctic with her, she’d assumed it would have been physically handed to her at Lab 126. She’d imagined herself checking every system carefully and possibly even sliding it through a hole in the ice, watching it wriggle away on its maiden voyage.

  That wasn’t how things had gone. Instead, the B-6 had been delivered to a sub out on the fringe of the icecap. She was controlling it remotely from the labs. Handed off and released at depth, the drone had never been in her possession—not even for a moment. The thought was depressing, but exhilarating as well.

  Other robotic scouts had been sent into the icy water, but so far her creation was the star of the show. During the initial hours, a bathysphere and two regular deep sea subs had been charted alongside the drone, but they’d already turned back. No one had directly said why, but scientists are poor whisperers.

  “Radiation.”

  She’d heard that word several times. There were no specifics given, but she had to assume that since it was dangerous, it had to be ionizing radiation. Particles that could punch through the flesh of a person and do them irreparable harm.

  A tiny surge of pride ran through her when she calculated that her drone would be able to reach the bottom if necessary. It had none of the compression problems many deep water drones had. Even with the equivalent of four hu
ndred atmospheres pressing down on it, the tiny craft kept swimming and thinking independently in the cold dark sea.

  Communications were a huge problem underwater, another reason her drone was so important for missions like this one. Radio couldn’t be used to transmit messages from a submarine to a drone that was running deep. The water created too much interference. That left sonar, but the trouble with that was any noises generated would automatically register as a blip to anyone who might be listening.

  Her drone was designed to operate without instructions from a human operator. This capacity meant it could effectively play the part of an underwater spy. It was programmed to record everything it learned along the way to be replayed by its masters on its return.

  Originally, Yuki’s design had been funded to spy on warships in harbors. By sneaking the tiny vessel into hostile ports, the B-6 could wriggle around taking pictures and measurements. It could spy where no other device dared venture without being detected. It moved in a natural animalistic fashion, had few metal parts, and was no bigger than a seal or a sea otter.

  She’d never asked exactly where the funding had come from for her drone. She’d always figured it was from the Pentagon, something earmarked by the Navy for intel on opposing fleets. When she’d been asked to build it robustly so it could take great depths in stride, she’d been baffled, but compliant. Perhaps there was something down there the Navy was interested in. Maybe they wanted to find a lost Spanish Galleon. What business was it of hers?

  Today, however, she felt very much involved. She was on-site, using her prototype design to plumb the depths of the Arctic in secret.

  After they lost contact with the B-6, it swam independently for miles. At least, that’s what she hoped it was doing. She’d programmed it to keep going until it ran out of power or found something interesting.

  The wait was a long one. Following the sea bottom, it would look for large artificial structures. When it found one, it would investigate discretely and then return to base.

  She’d fallen asleep by the time contact was reestablished. There was something about the operating center that was hypnotic. The lights were low, the screens throbbed and glowed.