Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Charlotte just nodded. Wounds on her feet? She hadn’t even noticed. She realized for the first time that some of her toes were bandaged. She put on the fatigue jacket and a pair of man’s shoes because of the bandages. Though they were far too big for her, they still managed to pinch her feet. Then she and Adrian followed the bashful orderly. As they walked, Charlotte noticed he was losing his hair in neat little circular patches at the back of his head.

  The bridge was the size of a ballroom. Computer screens gleamed everywhere, and crewmen were sitting at brightly lit consoles. There was an air of calm determination. At the back, Captain Korodin had ordered that a large table be put in place that was clearly not part of the normal equipment. As they arrived on the bridge, two men were just crawling out from underneath it with drills and screwdrivers. The screws fastening the table to the floor gleamed bright and new.

  Morley and Angela were already there. They were standing next to a group of men whose uniforms were a pale blue, in contrast to the dark blue uniforms they had seen on the ship so far. The men in dark blue were giving a wide berth to this group and glowering at them mistrustfully. They were American sailors, with yards of gold braid on their sleeves. The competition, so to speak. No wonder she could feel a breath of frost in the air on the bridge.

  One of the Americans approached them. “Commander John Penrose, ma’am, US Navy,” he barked and put his hand out to Charlotte. “You must be Miss Malroux.”

  Charlotte nodded. His hand felt warm, dry, and strong. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “And Dr. Cazar, if I have been informed correctly.”

  “Adrian,” Adrian answered happily.

  “I’m afraid,” the commander went on, “you’ll have to tell us everything you already told Captain Korodin and his people all over again. And please don’t be concerned—we’re going to be filming you. This isn’t to try to catch you out later; we just want to have the most comprehensive documentation of events that we can get. Nobody can explain what’s happened here, so that means every scrap of information you can give us is important.”

  “Sure thing,” said Adrian. He seemed immensely cheered to have the commander there as a living link to the mother country.

  The captain approached. “Commander Penrose,” he said in thickly accented English, “I invite you and your men to take your seats. We are ready.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Penrose said frostily and gestured to his men. “Are there any new readings from the island?”

  Korodin nodded curtly. “The temperature continues to rise. It is now more than fifteen degrees Celsius. Above zero!”

  Penrose frowned. “That’s—”

  “About sixty degrees Fahrenheit, Commander,” Adrian put in. “Which is unbelievable in this region. May I ask how you are measuring?”

  “They’ve got an infrared camera.” Penrose pointed to a group of Russians standing around a screen at the other end of the console, all of whom had worried looks on their faces. “Okay then. We have a few tricks of our own. Come on, have a seat.”

  Morley and Angela finally made their way through the knot of people to join them.

  “Hi, Charlotte,” Angela whispered, putting an arm around her. “How are you doing? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. More than one, I guess.”

  “I don’t remember anything,” Charlotte admitted. “I’m just glad we got off that dinghy.”

  “Just watch out for the coffee they serve you here,” Morley warned her softly. “It’s unbelievable stuff. It’ll burn your guts out.” He looked pale and probably spoke from experience.

  They sat down together. The American delegation joined them to their right; the seats to their left stayed empty for the time being. The Russian representatives were still clustered around Korodin, who was holding a telephone to his ear and listening intently, every now and then saying, “Da.”

  “Not a bad idea, this.” A lanky soldier who had just opened his laptop in front of him rapped his knuckles on the table. “Puts us right in the middle of the action. Better than cooling our heels in a conference room, huh?”

  “They mostly want to show us that they have nothing to hide,” Commander Penrose put in skeptically. “I just hope that’s true.”

  The Russians finally joined them at the table. Korodin now had an interpreter with him, who translated whatever the captain said to him in Russian into barely comprehensible English. This didn’t matter: Commander Penrose also had an interpreter beside him, who translated straight from the Russian.

  “I have just had a call from Moscow,” the captain declared. “The crew of the International Space Station has been able to track the course of the object that took off from Saradkov. The data have been passed to the Russian Academy of Sciences and several other groups and show that it was traveling at fifty-one kilometers per second—and still accelerating.” His interpreter was better at mental arithmetic than at English pronunciation; he calculated the speed without skipping a beat as “thirty miles a second.”

  Commander Penrose rubbed his chin. “That seems pretty darn fast to me.”

  “It is about fifty times the speed of sound,” Korodin replied dryly.

  “Given the correct starting trajectory, the object has now reached solar escape velocity,” added a Russian officer wearing wire-rimmed glasses. “Meaning that it is now moving fast enough to leave our solar system and enter interstellar space.”

  The American commander looked at the soldier with the laptop. “Can you confirm, Lieutenant?”

  The lanky young man tapped rapidly at the keyboard. “Eh…yes, sir. Just in. AFSPC is still tracking. It’s beyond the orbit of the moon and flying at…” He whistled through his teeth. “Wow. Sixty miles a second. And still firing, looks like.”

  Korodin nodded once his interpreter had translated. “So you see, this object displays abilities well beyond our current technology. This is not a Russian rocket—and not American either.”

  “I understand,” the commander said, although it didn’t entirely sound as though he did. He cleared his throat. “So the question remains what it actually is.”

  “Aliens,” Morley burst out.

  Nobody contradicted him. In fact, everyone nodded.

  6

  Charlotte nearly jumped out of her seat. What? Aliens? What were they talking about? What was happening here? Hiroshi—this all had something to do with Hiroshi’s machine. Or was she completely wrong?

  Commander Penrose passed a hand over his face. All of a sudden he seemed tired. “Okay, guys,” he said, looking around the table. “This is probably one of those moments that’s going to end up in the history books. Let’s try not to look like idiots.” He nodded to the soldier with the laptop. “Jim, show our hosts the satellite image.”

  The young lieutenant jabbed a few keys and then turned his computer around so that everybody could see the screen. Displayed there was something that looked at first glance like the latest in modern art, and at second glance like a gunshot impact photographed through a microscope.

  “We received this image on our way over here,” the commander said. “It’s an image of Saradkov Island. What we see here is a deep hole in the middle of the island, running down several miles—”

  “Pardon me, sir,” Adrian interrupted. “Could there be some mistake? We were working with satellite images of the island as well—topographical radar images—and there’s no sign of this hole on any of them.”

  “Well, there is now,” Penrose said curtly. “These pictures are three hours old.” He leaned forward and pointed at a structure of nested semicircles at the edge of the hole. “Our eggheads say that these are magnetic coils. We can only see part of them, because the satellite wasn’t exactly over the mouth of the hole when it took these shots. They tell us the whole thing is a kind of upright linear accelerator that catapulted the object up into space. The barrel of the gun, so to speak.
And whatever’s racing away from us up there was the bullet.”

  Korodin had folded his arms and listened to all this without expression. Now he nodded. “Meaning that the engines only needed to ignite when the rocket was in the air, in order not to damage the launch equipment.”

  “Exactly. And that in turn means there could be other rockets.”

  Charlotte leaned back in her chair and concentrated entirely on the feeling of the cool plastic against her back. She wasn’t dreaming all this, was she? No. She raised her head. The Arctic sea outside the enormous window was gray and sluggish, the ice floes shimmering like teeth torn loose from a gigantic mouth. The steel towers of the submarines swayed ponderously. She no longer felt any urge to contradict them. It seemed to her that in some strange way they both had a part of the truth—that she and the military were both thinking along the right lines.

  “We have orders to land troops on the island, inspect the facility there, and take material samples,” the Russian captain declared. “Since your president and ours have been on the phone with each other for several hours, you may already know I am authorized to invite you to send some of your own men along.”

  Penrose nodded. “Thank you, Captain. We will of course accept your offer.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Adrian burst out. “That island is dangerous. More than that: it’s deadly. It skewered one of our team and sucked him dry like a spider sucks a fly.”

  The Russian captain and the American commander turned toward him with almost identical expressions of indignation.

  “I understand your concern, young man,” Penrose replied, “but dealing with danger is our job. We are trained for that very purpose, so don’t worry. We know what we’re doing.”

  He glanced at his Russian colleague, who nodded and said, “Exactly.”

  The frostiness between the two military groups vanished all of a sudden. They understood one another.

  While preparation for the landing party got underway, the military began to take their statements. One American and one Russian soldier each put a video camera on the conference table. The American hooked his up to a computer, while the Russian used a bulky recorder that took cassette tapes. Adrian was first up; the others were asked to wait out of earshot on the other side of the bridge.

  “This is all going to go wrong,” Morley moaned.

  They stood in a group by the window looking down at the deck below, where preparations were in full swing. A helicopter was towed out of a hangar, a row of big black dinghies stood ready, and men in thick thermal parkas were checking their guns. Meanwhile, ever more ships joined the fleet, little gray boats with huge antennae and multibarreled gun placements in the bow.

  Angela hugged herself and shivered. “I wish I’d stayed home.”

  She volunteered to go next once Adrian had rejoined the group. As though she hoped they would get her out of here once she had finished.

  Adrian didn’t have much confidence in the mission either. “They’re watching the island; you can see it up there on one of the monitors,” he said, gesturing briefly toward the console. “And they’re still picking up movement. No way have the aliens flown off so that we can loot what’s left of their base—I don’t think so.” He was frowning deeply, his brow furrowed with worry. “The Russian guy even told me the directional mics are picking up sound coming from Saradkov. A kind of low buzzing, he said. Like a swarm of insects.”

  Morley groaned. “This is all going to go wrong, I’m telling you.”

  Just as Angela finished making her statement, the landing party set out. The boats were put into the water and the crew climbed in, and the helicopter took off. A Russian soldier came and asked them to sit at the conference table for the duration of the mission; just for safety’s sake, he said.

  Captain Korodin was standing next to the helmsman with an air that suggested this was his customary place. Head held high, he issued curt, sharp commands as he watched events unfold on the radar screen. He never once let go of the phone receiver in his hand as he communicated with Commander Penrose, who was following the action from his submarine. The captain’s own English was hardly any worse than his interpreter’s. There wasn’t much to see, and what they could see was notably unspectacular: five black dinghies headed for the island leaving five trails of gleaming silver wake behind them, and above them a helicopter, a shadow skimming across the featureless sky.

  Charlotte would have liked to know what time it was. She had lost all sense of the passing hours. She would have believed it was the middle of the night as readily as anything else. Wasn’t there a clock here on the bridge? Here and there she could spot a display that showed minutes and hours, but every one of them showed a different time.

  “We’re approaching the coast,” the loudspeakers crackled. “It’s a strange sight. The whole island seems to have been steel-plated. It reminds me of the Death Star…”

  “What’s he saying?” Adrian asked, so Charlotte translated.

  The American soldiers who had stayed onboard grinned at the Star Wars reference. “Hey, maybe they’ll meet Darth Vader,” said the one who had worked the video camera.

  “The work that has been done here is astonishing,” the voice from the loudspeaker resumed. Some of the screens began to display pictures from the cameras onboard the helicopter. As the dinghies reached the shore, the crewmen leaped out and pulled them up on land; they were clearly well trained. “The surface of the steel is corrugated in complex patterns. We can walk on it without any problem. We can see what looks like a large gate up ahead. Lieutenant Miller suggests we head there first.”

  “Whatever you do, stay together,” Korodin replied. “Apart from that, you have a free hand.”

  Now they could see the gate, rising huge and foreboding from between massive ribs of steel where yesterday—had it only been yesterday?—there had been the bare, rough rock of the southern face of the mountains. Whatever had taken over the island had rebuilt it completely in the space of a few hours.

  On the screen showing the helicopter broadcast they could see the terrain from above. The soldiers looked like little dark ants as they marched across the shimmering plain, and they could also see movement up on the battlements. At Korodin’s command the cameraman zoomed in: there was nothing standing watch there, nor were there any machines converging to intercept the landing party; rather, the battlements themselves were changing shape, sprouting bizarre metal structures that branched and twisted in the blink of an eye, becoming thicker or thinner or flatter in an instant, changing color…

  “That’s incredible,” someone gasped. Charlotte thought she heard a sound here on the bridge—the sound of the hairs standing up on everybody’s neck.

  For a second there was complete silence. Then a scream rang out that froze the blood in their veins.

  “Lieutenant Sinyukhaev!” Korodin barked into the radio. “Report!”

  “This is Captain Yuran, Captain,” another voice came on, panting and gasping. “The lieutenant has…vanished, sir. He simply sank into the ground. I…we don’t know what happened. It looks as though…ah!”

  “Captain?”

  Nothing. No reply.

  Korodin’s fist crashed down on the console. “Why don’t we have any pictures of what’s going on? Helicopter!”

  The cameraman onboard the helicopter swung his lens around wildly, looking for the soldiers who had just landed, and pulled back with the zoom until they could see the whole beach. There was nobody there. All the soldiers were gone. So were the boats, the guns, everything.

  “Devil take it!” Korodin cursed. “What about the other cameras?”

  Hectic activity at the control panels, then someone found some footage that showed at least part of what had happened, a long-distance shot. They saw the men throw up their arms in astonishment and then sink in an instant, and saw the dinghies…dissolve. The
boats suddenly deflated, collapsed, and then seemed to melt into the ground.

  “Helicopter!” Korodin ordered. “Turn back. All ships: increase distance from island.”

  Just then the picture from the helicopter camera showed something shooting up from the battlements, and then the screen went dark. They watched from the window of the bridge as the helicopter fell. But it wasn’t the spiraling crash familiar from the movies; instead, the aircraft burst apart into a cloud of smaller pieces that rained down onto the steel walls of the fortress and melted into them, like drops of mercury falling into a quicksilver sea.

  “Get me Moscow,” Captain Korodin ordered his radio operator. “I want to talk to Admiral Ulyakov.”

  For a while nothing happened. The captain had left the bridge, and the helmsman steered left, then right, while the other officers stared into space.

  “Holy shit,” murmured the American soldier with the video camera. “Patrick Miller has two daughters, five years old and two. Hannah and Lauren. I don’t even want to think…”

  Just then Captain Korodin returned to the bridge, a look of grim determination on his face. Without looking left or right he marched to his place by the helm. “K-107 and K-334, set course for the island,” he ordered. “Prepare to fire from optimum barrage distance. Target that gate.”

  Someone passed him the telephone; obviously, Commander Penrose was calling. Korodin listened for a long while before he answered. “I understand, Commander, but I have clear orders from my commander-in-chief.” Another pause. “I am sorry. I understand the scientific interest, but the security of my country takes precedence over any such concerns.” Apparently, the commander knew an attack was planned and was against it. “Commander, I hardly need remind you that we are on Russian sovereign territory. Yes. I am sorry, but those are my orders. You would do exactly the same thing if our circumstances were reversed.”