Phobos

by Steve Alten

  Sigerfjord was a barrier island, one of hundreds surrounding the coast of Norway. Isolated from the mainland, with a population that rarely exceeded eight hundred, the remote location seemed beyond even Lilith Mabus’s long reach. Dave quickly endeared himself to the local community after repairing a malfunctioning turbine at Sigerfjord’s geothermal plant, while “Jennifer” used her legal experience to find gainful employment at a law firm.

  Peeking beneath her smart glasses, Evelyn Mohr steals a glance at the young woman lying topless in the lounge chair on her right. May Foss is her employer’s daughter, a daddy’s girl from the neighboring island of Gjaesingen. As a present for graduating law school, May’s father had promised his daughter and her best friend, Anna Reedy, an all-expenses-paid, two-week vacation anywhere in the world, and the twenty-four-year-olds chose Miami.

  The entrepreneur had agreed, with one stipulation: Foss’s American assistant, Jennifer, would serve as escort.

  Dave had naturally protested, but to deny her boss’s request would have sent up red flags. The job was good, and relocating again was risky, so the former Mrs. Evelyn Mohr packed her bags, assuring her husband she’d be safe.

  After six years living in Norway, the South Florida heat was heaven.

  “May? May, where are you?”

  May sits up, waving to her friend. “Over here.”

  Anna Reedy hurries up the aisle, the dark-haired Italian beauty flush from running. “May, I’m in love!”

  “Again?”

  Evelyn smiles to herself, eavesdropping on the girls’ conversation.

  “His name is Julian. He’s tall, six feet six, with long brown hair and the physique of a Greek god. And those eyes—”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-nine and single. And he’s traveling with a friend.”

  “Have you seen the friend?”

  “No, but so what? They want to meet you. You too, Jen.”

  Evelyn’s skin tingles. “Me? Why me?”

  “I don’t know. I showed him our photo, the one of the three of us in South Beach, and he asked me to introduce you.”

  May nudges her. “Maybe the Greek god likes older women.”

  Fubitch! Lilith has our images streaming everywhere, along with offers of a sizeable reward. What if …

  “Wait here, I’ll go get him.”

  “Anna, wait!” Evelyn is about to go after her when the buzz of the i-glasses’ phone reverberates in her ears. She taps the control by her right temple, accepting the call.

  David Mohr’s liver-spotted face replaces the eastern horizon of the Atlantic. “Jen, where the hell are you? According to my GPS, you’re somewhere in the fukabitching Bermuda Triangle.”

  Her husband’s attempt to use streaming slang profanity elicits a smile. “Calm down, Erik. The girls wanted to take a cruise. It was either Bermuda or Cuba.”

  “Oh, geez. No, you made the right choice. Cuba, gee whiz. If you have so much as a traffic violation, island security demands an anal probe.”

  “I won’t ask you how you know about that. Miss me?”

  “Intensely.”

  “Know what I miss?”

  “Jennifer—”

  “I can’t help it. Being back in Florida … the warm weather … the palm trees—”

  Without warning, the ship shudders violently, as if its keel has run aground. May screams as she’s tossed from her feet, along with hundreds of other passengers, everyone looking around, confused and fearful.

  “Did we hit something?”

  “Are we sinking?”

  Dave Mohr yells to regain his wife’s attention. “Jen, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. It felt like the engines seized. Maybe we hit … whoa!”

  Without warning, the ocean liner rolls hard to port. Passengers scream, the listing deck causing hundreds of levitating lounge chairs to flip like concentric circles of stacked dominoes.

  Evelyn tumbles forward, landing hard against the starboard rail. Passengers are flung haphazardly across the shifting deck as the ship executes a radical course change.

  After a long terrifying moment, the cruise ship levels out, continuing on its new heading—due west.

  May helps Eve to her feet. “Jennifer, what’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. Find Anna.”

  The girl fumbles with her bikini top as she runs off.

  Eve turns her attention back to her husband. Dave appears in her right eye lens, the physicist frantically operating his projection screen computer, the free-floating images of the ocean liner appearing via satellite feed.

  “Dave, what happened? Why have we changed course? Was it a tsunami? A rogue wave?”

  “No seismic activity. No telltale ripples. No other ships in the area. I don’t—” The scientist pauses, his already pale complexion losing color. “What in God’s name is that?”

  Robert Gibbons, Jr., rushes into the bridge, the disheveled captain demanding answers. “Mr. Swartz, report!”

  First Officer Bradly T. Swartz hovers over his navigation board, clearly baffled. “Sir, it wasn’t us. The ship appears to be caught in some sort of rogue current.”

  Captain Gibbons focuses his binoculars on the surface of the Atlantic, now rippling like a swiftly moving river.

  “Captain, ship’s compass has gone haywire. Zero degrees is now pointing … due west.”

  “What?”

  “Sir, lookout has spotted something! Requesting your immediate presence.”

  Gibbons rushes out of the bridge, ascending a narrow flight of steel steps to the lookout post. An ensign steadies the deck-mounted scope, his eyes filled with fear. “It’s a mile straight off our bow, sir. Never saw anything like it.”

  The captain presses his right eye to the spyglass’s rubber eye guard. “Good God …”

  Neither whirlpool nor maelstrom, it appears simply as a hole in the ocean, its dark circumference several miles in diameter. The Atlantic Ocean drains down its throat like a 360-degree Niagara Falls, its vortex inhaling the surrounding sea—along with the Paradise Lost.

  The captain grabs the internal phone. “Change course! Forty degrees on the starboard rudder!” Without waiting for a reply, he races down the circular stairwell to the bridge. “Mr. Swartz?”

  “Executing course change now, sir.”

  Gibbons stares at the ship’s bow. Come on … turn!

  The cruise ship sways to the right, meeting resistance. The boat shudders but is unable to escape the gravitational forces in play.

  “No change, sir.”

  “Stop engines. Full reverse!”

  “Full reverse, aye.”

  The propellers shut down, the bow veering back to port. Gibbons focuses his binoculars on the massive anomaly, now looming seven hundred yards away, its edge spanning the entire horizon, dropping off … to where?

  The Paradise Lost shudders as its twin screws reverse and fight to catch hold of the sea. The ship’s forward speed slows, but still they cannot break free.

  The captain’s heart pounds in his chest. “Mr. Halley, send an SOS. Inform the Coast Guard we need emergency airlift choppers. Warn all seafaring vessels to stay clear of this area.”

  The stunned radioman manages a raspy, “Aye sir.”

  Deck officers line up by the bay windows, staring in fear and disbelief. A few attempt to call their loved ones—unable to get a signal.

  A chorus of screams builds to a crescendo as passengers catch sight of what lies ahead.

  Light-headed, his limbs shaking, Captain Gibbons finds his way to the command chair, a sickening feeling invading his gut as the 130,000-ton cruise ship slowly topples over the edge of the fourth dimensional vortex … into oblivion.

  Screams of protest mute in Evelyn Mohr’s consciousness, the sudden silence accompanied by the strangely familiar angular face of a dark-haired man, his azure-blue eyes radiating intensely behind his sunglasses, his powerful arms lifting her away from the listing deck to somehow carr
y her inside the ship, his muscular physique moving in defiance of the laws of physics. She experiences a quantum second of weightlessness before gravity’s unleashed forces take over, simultaneously fragmenting and dispersing every cell in her body.

  2

  If we go on the way we are, we may not get through the next century at all. When there is a clear danger in the headlights, common sense says hit the brakes, but scientists often want to keep the foot hard down on the accelerator pedal.

  —MARVIN MINSKY, PHD

  MANALAPAN, FLORIDA

  MAY 1, 2047

  The palatial mansion of Lilith Mabus, widow of the late billionaire Lucien Mabus, stretches along a private ocean lot in Manalapan, a small island town just north of Boynton Beach, Florida. The thirty-one room, three-story home features a seaside swimming pool complete with waterfall and swim-up bar, two tennis courts, a fitness center, a 1,200-square-foot grand salon illuminated by a six-thousand-pound crystal chandelier imported from a nineteenth-century French chateau, an observatory dome, and an eight-car garage, its floors paved in Saturnia marble. Each of the six bedroom suites has its own balcony facing the Atlantic, the mansion’s windows self-cleaning, made with a thin metal oxide coating electrified to help rainwater to wash away loose particles. A small NiCE electrical station is located on the northern grounds, harnessing power from the sun and wind.

  The newest addition to the oceanside luxury home is a configuration of satellite dishes situated in a concrete bunker on the south lawn. The receivers allow Lilith Mabus and her intel team to pirate a network of Pentagon surveillance satellites from the convenience of her home office, though “officially” they merely provide MTI’s CEO the means of communicating with a fleet of space planes owned and operated by her subsidiary company, Project H.O.P.E.

  The origins of America’s space program can be traced back to the first Cold War, when the conflicting ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union blossomed into a full-fledged race into space. President John F. Kennedy raised the bar in 1961 by setting a goal to land an American astronaut safely on the moon—a goal that was accomplished on July 20, 1969.

  For the four decades that followed, space exploration floundered.

  Part of the problem was a lack of clearly defined goals, exacerbated by President Nixon’s decision to hinge NASA’s future on the space shuttle—a nonexploratory Earth-orbiting vehicle hampered with design flaws that would lead to the fatal Challenger and Columbia disasters. With the rest of the outdated fleet reserved for “shuttle duty” to and from the International Space Station (yet another Earth-orbiting tortoise), the public’s interest in the space program waned.

  What NASA officials never knew was that all lunar missions had been permanently scrubbed as part of a top-secret directive that dated back to the Lyndon Johnson era. It was not until 2029 that a private company would break the military industrial complex’s stranglehold on space exploration, the revolt led by a billionaire’s son hell-bent on his own self destruction.

  Lucien Mabus was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth. The only child of defense contractor Peter Mabus and his late wife, Carolyn, Lucien was raised by private tutors and athletic trainers for much of his childhood while his father mounted a political campaign to challenge the incumbent President Ennis Chaney for the White House. Bitter over losing the 2016 election, Mabus sought other avenues to rid the country of its leader. He was eventually “sanctioned” by the Gabriel twins’ bodyguards after hiring an assassin to kill Jacob and Immanuel.

  In shock over his father’s murder, Lucien Mabus spent what remained of his teen years under the watchful eye of an uncle, who preferred to keep his defiant nephew confined to rehab centers rather than deal with the boy’s ongoing drug and alcohol addictions. Lucien celebrated his emancipation on his eighteenth birthday by leaving his halfway house and tossing his court-appointed guardian out of his father’s home. The family fortune now his, Lucien would pacify his angst with the self-abuse that comes from a lifestyle dependent on immediate gratification.

  Six years, two bad marriages, and a four-month jail sentence later, Lucien found himself in the company of Lilith Aurelia. The mocha-skinned dominatrix became his obsession, her ruthless ambition sweeping him along like a raging river. Born into poverty, Lilith sought the kind of power enjoyed by society’s new elite—pathological globalists who were slowly and steadfastly manipulating the international powers into a one world government.

  To be a player in the New World Order required a niche, and Lilith would find it in Project H.O.P.E.

  Humans for One Planet Earth was a space program conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers, and rocket scientists who had left NASA because of the agency’s “good ol’ boy” policies. Unlike other private space companies who were in the business of launching satellites, H.O.P.E. wanted to pioneer the space tourism industry, their team having completed designs for a new passenger vehicle that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the plane into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero gravity and a lifetime of memories.

  All H.O.P.E. needed was a major investor.

  At the urging of his fiancée, Lucien Mabus struck a partnership with H.O.P.E.’s directors, taking over the company as majority shareholder. On December 15, 2029, the world’s first “space bus” took off down its new fifteen-thousand-foot runway at the Kennedy Space Center. Onboard were 120 VIPs, including key stockholders, political dignitaries, members of the media, Lucien and Lilith, and a crew of twelve. Nothing real or imagined could have prepared these civilians for the magic of space. The flight was smooth, the accommodations first-class, and the views both humbling and inspirational. Midway through the trip, Lucien and Lilith were married, the couple consummating their wedding vows in their honeymoon berth in zero gravity, becoming the first official members of the 22,000-mile-high club.

  They would not be the last. Within a few months, H.O.P.E. was shuttling four space buses a week at a cost of $100,000 per ticket. Even with its high price tag, there was still a fourteen-month waiting list. Three more planes were quickly added to the fleet, with plans announced for Space Port 1, the first space hotel designed to accommodate the paying public. When a lunar shuttle was included in the brochure, the Defense Department stepped in, declaring the moon off-limits.

  Lucien was furious. Maybe the New World Order could control his freedoms on Earth, but nobody owned the moon. A high-priced law firm was engaged, lawsuits threatened.

  Lilith charted her own course around the gauntlet, rendezvousing in secrecy with President John Zwawa.

  A week before his twenty-sixth birthday, Lucien Mabus died of heart failure, an ailment his physician blamed on a decade of alcohol and drug abuse. Weeks after the funeral, Mabus Tech’s new female CEO was granted access to Golden Fleece, a top-secret space program overseen by NASA’s Dave Mohr.

  Three months later, reports began to circulate that Lilith was pregnant. Devlin Mabus was born eleven months after Lucien’s death, confirming suspicions that the boy’s mother had been having an affair. Popular consensus around the District of Columbia was that President Zwawa had been the man who had sired the white-haired, blue-eyed infant.

  They were wrong.

  The black limousine follows its police escort north along scenic State Road, A1A, turning into the gated drive of the Mabus estate.

  President Heather Stuart exits the vehicle, the auburn-haired Democrat escorted by her chief of staff, Ken Mulder, and National Security Advisor Donald Engle. Ignoring the bell and intercom, the 280-pound Engle bangs his fist several times against the double oak doors. Waits. Then knocks again.

  Mulder casts a perturbed look at the president. “Is this some kind of game they’re playing?”

  The second female president of the United States and the first homosexual ever to reach the executive branch nods. “It’s poker, Ken. Make no mistake, they’re watching an
d evaluating our responses.”

  Mulder glances up at the surveillance camera. “Poker’s a game of chance. I prefer chess.”

  The door opens, revealing a putty-complexioned man in his late sixties. His short-cropped hair is mouse gray and curly, his matching piggish eyes heavy behind rose-colored spectacles. Barefoot, he is dressed in a paisley Hawaiian shirt and matching Bermuda shorts, his narrow lips sucking on a pacifier bong.

  Donald Engle casts a wide shadow over the doorway. “Lilith Mabus?”

  A buzzed smile creases into a giggle behind the portable cannabis device, freed by manicured fingers. “No, big man, I’m Lilith’s personal assistant. Benjamin Merchant, at your service. Y’all come in, we’ve been expecting you.” The accent is a southern Alabama drawl, laced with saccharine.

  Merchant leads them through the grand entrance, the floors polished onyx marble, the bay windows at the rear of the house revealing the pool, its invisible lines melding perfectly into the azure shades of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “May I say, Madam President, that finally meeting you is quite an honor. I’m a flamer myself. Probably stems from my upbringing. Did your Catholic priest fondle you, too?”

  Heather Stuart’s face flushes pink. “No, he most certainly did not.”

  “Yeah, I suppose they restrict themselves to little boys. What about the nuns?” Moving past a sweeping oak staircase in a drug-induced saunter, he leads them to a matching set of interior doors. “The lady of the house is inside. Go on in while I fetch us something to drink.”

  Ken Mulder waits for the annoying man to leave before opening the door.

  The study is a thousand-square-foot pentagon-shaped chamber, its walls paneled in rich mahogany, its high arched ceiling crisscrossed by teakwood beams. A matching desk houses a wraparound computer station featuring a 270-degree plasma screen. On the other side of the room is a sitting area—three leather sofas and two bamboo chairs forming a square.