by Scott Mackay
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
PART ONE - The Builders
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
PART TWO - Nuclear Vox
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
PART THREE - The Wreckers
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Praise for Phytosphere
‘‘Mackay manages to breathe life into the tired alien invasion genre, deftly juggling hard sci-fi and a bleak tale of postapocalyptic survival. . . . [He] churns up enough high-tech intrigue and old-fashioned suspense to make a fresh read.’’ —Publishers Weekly
‘‘This hard-hitting apocalyptic thriller has a strong emotional core. The characters are believable and sympathetic, and while the humans are easy to root for, the Tarsalans aren’t so easy to hate. The science is lucid and delivered with finesse, yet Mackay never forgets that his story is ultimately about what makes us human.’’ —Booklist
"Refreshing ... an innovative, well-written apocalyptic science fiction thriller.’’ —Alternative Worlds
‘‘There’s a lot in this novel that’s intriguing and engaging, and the science is great.’’
—Science Fiction Weekly
‘‘A scary look at a seemingly possible future. . . . Slightly reminiscent of The War of the Worlds, this is a book that both hard-core science fiction readers and others will enjoy equally.’’ —Romantic Times
‘‘Perfect beach reading; plenty of entertainment and . . . fast-paced.’’ —SFRevu
Praise for Other Novels by Scott Mackay
‘‘Scott Mackay can always be counted on to create a work that is original in design." —BookBrowser
‘‘A terrific book, from first page to last: big ideas, believable characters, great action—it’s all here.’’
—Robert J. Sawyer, author of Mindscan
‘‘Mackay writes with impressive grace and clarity.’’
—Locus
‘‘Very suspenseful, a good scientific puzzle, and enough plot twists to give the entire novel an original feel." —Chronicle
"A decidedly different ‘what-if.’ ’’
—Science Fiction Weekly
‘‘[A] satisfying action SF, quite suitable for a week-end’s entertainment.’’ —Booklist
‘‘Mackay’s newest has everything we expect of good sci-fi.’’ —The Davis Enterprise
ROC
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
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First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, May 2008
Copyright © Scott Mackay, 2008
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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eISBN : 978-1-4406-3397-3
To Susannah
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the following people for the contributions they have made to this novel: Joshua Bilmes, Anne Sowards, Claire Mackay, Joanie Mackay, Colin Mackay, Nicky Scrimger, Ginny Ouellet, and Dan Larsen.
‘‘When beauty is abstracted Then ugliness has been implied; When good is abstracted Then evil has been implied. So alive and dead are abstracted from nature, Difficult and easy abstracted from progress, Long and short abstracted from contrast, High and low abstracted from depth, Song and speech abstracted from melody, After and before abstracted from sequence.’’
—LAO TZE, 500 BC
Yin-Yang: ‘‘Two primal opposing but complementary principles or cosmic forces said to be found in all nonstatic objects and processes in the universe.’’
—WIKIPEDIA
PART ONE
The Builders
1
In the lunar valley below, Dr. Cameron Conrad saw Stradivari—ten generators focused on a dime-sized containment field, his life’s work, his grand creation, the reason he was here—slowly slip away.
The installation was now obscured by a cloud of dust, ejecta hurtling past, propelled by whatever cataclysmic event unfolded behind Bunker Hill. A meteorite strike? His heart contracted. He saw Lesha, Mark, and Jesus—his workers—staring eastward toward the source of the disturbance. The dust thickened. The first generator, A-Node, fell over, slid along the ground, tumbled a few times, and was gone, disappearing behind a rise on the Moon’s western horizon. Lesha clung to B-Node. The node moved, then settled. She got to her knees.
Cam strained to see. ‘‘Lesha!’’ he cried through his suit radio.
The gray cloud thickened. Cam caught one last glimpse of Jesus, aloft, before the gray cloud swallowed him.
Something appeared overhead. Cam looked up in time to see what looked like a large silver eye peering down at him from the other side of Bunker Hill. He caught only a glimpse; then the eye, the sphere, whatever it was, dipped behind the summit. A new wave of ejecta shot over the hill and rained on top of him. He got to his knees, scared. Sweat came to his brow. Adrenaline rushed through his blood.
‘‘Lesha?’’
All he got was the sea-sound of broken static.
He turned east, saw the Gettysburg Scientific Installation, the Moon’s only research and military outpost, brightly lit, like spokes on a wheel, tight to the ground, as yet undamaged. He saw the Sumter Module and Command Port. Rocketing dust enfolded the SMCP. Modules and command vehicles bounced away like oversized metal balloons. An oxygen feed broke loose and hissed blue gas.
The ejecta lessened. The weak lunar gravity pulled the dust and flying regolith groundward. The static in his radio faded.
He pushed himself up and keyed a command into his wristpad. He looked at the small screen on his inside visor, where his biomonitors showed the sawtooth dramatics of his heart, then got to his feet.
With the static gone, his radio came back—but didn’t come back in the usual way. Instead, he heard commercial radio from Earth, signals that weren’t supposed to reach this far or on this frequency, an unnerving anomaly that told him things were truly awry. He heard music, news, weather. English, Mandarin, Arabic. Snippets of various stations as his radio skidded through the band like someone turning the dial with a palsied wrist.
Visuals popped to his visor screen. Network television from Earth, technically impossible because his screen wasn’t equipped to receive such signals. A wild flipping of stations. Like someone with a bad case of channel surfing. Television from all over the world—America, Europe, New Sumeria, the People’s Republic of North China. His fear deepened. He thought of the silver sphere. Perfect. Too perfect. Too unearthly. He tried to transmit—a standard hail to Gettysburg—but his voice wouldn’t penetrate the broadcast pollution.
He took a few steps. In the valley below, more dust settled. Stradivari was wrecked, nodes A through J tumbled like toys. Ejecta patterns streaked Bunker Hill, showing up on the brown surface of the Moon like frost patterns on a window.
‘‘Lesha?’’
‘‘Cam?’’ Her voice emerged through the electromagnetic tide.
‘‘What was that thing? Did you see it? That huge silver sphere?’’
Radio sludge overwhelmed her reply.
He took a few steps into Shenandoah Valley and, peering over Bunker Hill, saw the sun. His visor screen channeled appropriate shading. The sun lost its glare and became a small silver sphere.
Then he saw that other silver sphere, much larger than the sun, glimmering along the edge of the valley’s south slope, its argent-tinted luminescence reminding him of a dew drop on a leaf.
‘‘Cam?’’ Lesha’s voice came again.
‘‘Do you see it?’’
More moondust cleared, the larger pieces sifting out of the finer particulate, hitting the ground first, leaving a brown veil behind. Shenandoah Valley had fresh white scars everywhere.
A voice struggled to break through the radio interference: ‘‘Status . . . status . . . Stradivari Team . . . report.’’ Lamar Bruxner, chief of support at the Gettysburg Scientific Installation, sounded not only frantic but also confused, his voice tight, nasal, just short of panic.
Cam ignored Bruxner, too spellbound by the thing in the valley.
The sphere rose thirty stories, its mirrorlike surface reflecting with uncanny resolution the new gashes in Shenandoah. It spun, seemingly in all directions at once. He was scared. Stunned. Couldn’t move for several seconds. But he came out of it a moment later, pawed his wristpad with a shaky hand, engaged his vidcam, and, like a man hiking through the wet forests of the Northwest and catching an unexpected glimpse of Bigfoot, filmed.
‘‘Stradivari Team . . . report . . . report . . .’’
Once again he ignored Bruxner’s voice. More dust cleared. In the dark sky above, a green shadow moved, bending the vacuum. He blinked several times. In shape it was like a vortex, but being of scientific mind, he was disinclined to give it a label of any kind just yet. Still, the notion persisted. A vortex? A gate? A wormhole? Beneath his fear and bewilderment, he felt some excitement, that rarefied giddiness only a subatomic physicist like himself could feel in such situations, when a new phenomenon— perhaps even a glimpse of the hyperdimensionality he had always postulated about in his own papers— was making itself manifest. He bounced a few steps closer, his vidcam steady in its stabilizer. The dust continued to settle around the lucid sphere.
Looking up once more, he saw the green vortex close, as if the thing’s arrival—and its presence—was now frighteningly established.
Inside Gettysburg, Cam waited in the main common room with the other scientific staff. Through the observation window he saw what was left of the Sumter Module and Command Port. It reminded him of a multicar pileup on the freeway, only these weren’t cars but space vehicles, tangled with each other, heat shields shattered, thrust conduits twisted, cabin windows cracked.
Lesha sat next to him, hunched over, hand to her mouth, and stared beyond the window with apprehensive blue eyes. Jesus was still out there. Mark Fuller paced to one side. Cam raised his hand and placed it on Lesha’s shoulder.
Scientists from the Princeton Team—the only other scientific team currently conducting research at Gettysburg—sat in the back next to the kitchen serving area.
A Gettysburg support man named Laborde emerged from corridor 7 and walked to the Princeton Team. Team members stopped their low, earnest conversations. Laborde spoke to Dr. Renate Tennant, Princeton Team leader. Renate sat forward, a tall woman, back straight, elbows on the table, hands clasped, a scientist Cam had gotten to know over the past two months. Laborde motioned toward corridor 7, asking her to come. Renate got to her feet and the two retreated.
‘‘I wonder where they’re going,’’ said Cam.
Lesha remained preoccupied with Jesus. ‘‘Do you think he’s all right?’’ She pulled a tissue from the dispenser and dabbed her nose. Cam leaned forward, put his hand on her knee, and stared out the window, feeling odd, displaced, and unusually compelled to go out and look at the strange new sphere, nearly as if he had a voice in his head telling him to go out and look at the recent arrival.
Then out the window he saw the Emergency Rescue Vehicle’s lights flash out in Shenandoah. Lesha got up and moved quickly to the window. He rose as well, hopeful that the ERV might be bringing Jesus back. Mark and two other team members, Blaine Berkheimer and Lewis Hirleman, joined them at the observation glass.
Twice the size of a regular rover, the ERV rounded the far side of the SMCP at full speed. This made Cam nervous.
This could only mean that Jesus had been seriously injured.
Cam left the window and headed toward the air lock. As he entered corridor 6, he clutched the railing to steady himself in the disorienting Moon gravity. Lesha was right behind him.
They came to corridor 9, turned right, and arrived at the air lock. Cam looked through the small pressure window into the garage. He saw several surface vehicles parked along the side.
A moment later, a red light flashed above the vehicle-entry port and a hissing came from the air-lock valve. After a minute, the red finally went to green, and the big door lifted. The ERV rolled into the air lock and the bright overhead lights came on. The door closed. He heard hissing again as the garage filled with air. The ERV eased into a parking spot.
With the ERV now stopped, Lamar Bruxner, head of Gettysburg support, maneuvered out of its cab and bounced to the back of the vehicle. Johnsie Dunlap, Gettysburg’s nurse practitioner, emerged from the rear doors. She turned around, gripped a gurney, and pulled. Jesus, strapped to the gurney, appeared feetfirst from the vehicle’s rear. Moondust covered his orange pressure suit, and StopGap, a compound f
or sealing leaks, clung to his left leg like lime sherbet.
‘‘His suit’s been breached,’’ said Cam.
Pushing from the other end was Harland Law, a third Gettysburg support staff member. Harland and Johnsie maneuvered Jesus around the side of the vehicle and Bruxner shut the doors. The three hurried to the air lock. Bruxner, a heavyset man in his fifties, typed the necessary commands. The seal hissed, the outside door opened, and the group entered the linking chamber. The chief of support then keyed in another command, and the inside door slid back. Frigid air billowed into corridor 9.
Cam asked, ‘‘Is he okay?’’
‘‘His condition is critical,’’ said Johnsie.
The three Gettysburg support staff hurried down the corridor toward the infirmary with their casualty. Cam and Lesha followed. But Bruxner allowed them only so far before he raised his hand. Cam saw Bruxner’s broad, meaty face through his pressure suit’s yellow-tinted visor. ‘‘If you could wait in the common room . . .’’
‘‘His leg,’’ said Lesha. ‘‘Was there a depressurization?’’
‘‘Dr. Conrad, if you could take Dr. Weeks back to the common room . . .’’
Harland and Johnsie disappeared through the infirmary doors with Jesus. Bruxner turned around and followed.
As Cam watched them retreat, the three moving through the weak gravity with the skill of long-term Moon personnel, he thought the infirmary looked too small to handle such a big emergency. It was no more than a first-aid station, staffed by only a nurse practitioner, no doctor—with the Emergency Evacuation Vehicle able to transit from the Moon to Earth in less than a day, a doctor wasn’t needed.
But now the EEV was wrecked. The whole module and command port was destroyed. This meant they had no way of getting off the Moon until NASA or the Pentagon could launch a rescue mission. Which meant for the time being they were stuck here.
Stuck on the Moon with that strange lucent sphere just over the hill.
