Phobos

by Steve Alten

  For a long moment the Fastwalker simply remains poised above the desert carving. Then it shoots into the heavens at the speed of light, joined in space by hundreds more, their designs representing dozens of different subspecies—all emerging from the far side of the moon to escort their long-lost prophet to the destiny that awaits.

  35

  It looks like the White House has chosen the nuclear option.

  —FORMER NASA MANAGER,

  COMMENTING ON AN OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

  PLAN TO CANCEL PROJECT CONSTELLATION,

  A 2005 ENDEAVOR TO RETURN

  ASTRONAUTS TO THE MOON,

  NEW YORK TIMES, JUNE 11, 2010

  The white haze filters into a cool mist that dissipates across the garden’s azure lagoon.

  Immanuel Gabriel opens his eyes. He walks along the pink sand past the pristine waterfall to the mountain-size inverted tree, its upper three limbs beyond his scope of view, the cluster of six branches that follow spread out majestically overhead as far and wide as his consciousness can perceive. Ahead, the trunk melds into the naked man and woman standing back to back—hundred-foot giants fused at the vertebrae.

  Manny approaches the illusion projected across the cosmos by the unified thoughts of his parents. “The last time I was here was because you willed it. This time the choice is mine. Tell me what I must do to save the Earth.”

  His father’s voice speaks to him telepathically. You think yourself worthy of such a task?

  Manny stands before the tree of life, his being trembling. “Am I worthy? I’ve suffered the loss of two soul mates. I’ve spent an eternity tortured by Seven Macaw. I haven’t seen my wife and daughter for eleven years. What more do you want?”

  Transformation. You continue to see yourself as a victim of existence. Salvation requires a connection with the higher realms, a connection with the Creator’s light. Victims cannot access this energy, they remain consumed by the ego.

  “I’m not here as a victim. Give me the opportunity and I’ll prove to you I’m worthy. Let me rid your garden of its serpent.”

  What you fail to see, Immanuel, is that you are the serpent.

  “What? How am I—”

  The hero twins were conceived with a symbiotic relationship. Your brother, Jacob, cleaved to the tree of life that you see before you, which is why his soul remained pure. You were bound to the tree of knowledge, a dark side that cleaves to the human ego. Lacking restriction, you consumed the tree’s forbidden fruit until you became a slave to it. As Chilam Balam, your soul sought the dark gift to become a powerful sorcerer and seer, yet you never challenged the Maya to end its savage violence, fearful of angering the Council and losing your power. As Immanuel Gabriel, you refused to accompany Jacob to Xibalba, seeking only to live out your days for yourself alone.

  “I was afraid. And yes, it’s true, I was selfish. I didn’t want to lose everything I had worked so hard for just to appease Jacob. It was his mission, not mine. He was more advanced than I, far stronger.”

  And yet, as powerful as Jacob was, he could not succeed in the eleventh dimension of Hell without your ability to adapt to the dark side. You were the yin to his yang. Through cause and effect, you lost everything. Through cause and effect, it was you who brought the singularity to the winter solstice of 2012.

  “I brought it? That’s insane! Jacob instructed me to return to this time.”

  And because you lacked a connection with the light, your journey through the wormhole served as a conduit for the strangelet. Now it is too late. Earth, and humanity with it, shall perish.

  “That’s it? I don’t believe you! Where is the Fastwalker taking me? To Xibalba?”

  The white haze rises from the soil, concealing his parents and the tree of life. When the mist clears, Immanuel finds himself in the extraterrestrial craft, staring out a vast portal into deep space.

  The ship is orbiting Mars, soaring just above another object in space—an immense eighteen-mile-long, twelve-mile-wide mouse-gray spherical object, its surface identified by an enormous crater.

  Immanuel Gabriel’s pulse quickens as he stares at the moonlike mass racing along the starboard portal.

  Phobos …

  SITUATION ROOM, WHITE HOUSE

  The chamber has gone quiet, every man and woman focused on the nearest flat-screen television as the images from Camp Borneo display on-screen.

  The dense clouds poised over the North Pole are engaged in a powerful clockwise dance, the swirling vortex drawing the toxic blanket of volcanic ash into space as if inhaled by a heavenly maelstrom.

  “Sir, NASA is receiving images from the Hubble. They confirm the funnel cloud is jettisoning the atmospheric debris into space.”

  “It’s a miracle,” an aide cries out, her outburst effecting an avalanche of applause.

  “Quiet!” A harried President Chaney stares at the rushing gray-brown river of atmospheric debris, as baffled as the dozen scientists in the room. “You say it’s jettisoning the debris into space—where exactly is it going? Is it orbiting our planet?”

  “No, sir. NASA says it’s streaming into space and dissipating, at least as far as they can tell. There’s a lot of atmospheric interference. Maybe it really is a miracle?”

  Nods of agreement.

  “Now listen up,” Chaney bellows. “I don’t want to hear about miracles or Second Comings or any such nonsense. I want answers, and I want them fast. Where the hell’s that damn megawave?”

  “It just struck Jacksonville, now it’s bearing down on the coast of Miami.”

  SOUTH FLORIDA EVALUATION AND TREATMENT CENTER

  MIAMI, FLORIDA

  Anthony Foletta continues moving down the empty seventh-floor corridor, hounded by his new head of security.

  “Sir, the bus is loaded and waiting,” Paul Jones pleads. “All that’s left is the Level 7 patients—”

  “—who will remain incarcerated, Mr. Jones. Why I allowed you to talk me into this course of action in the first place … I should have my head examined. No wave is going to reach this far inland, I don’t care how big it is.”

  “Sir—”

  “Get on the bus and leave. Now, Mr. Jones, before I change my mind and order all inmates returned to their cells.”

  Jones shakes his head and races to the elevator.

  Foletta sits in the security lounge, returning to his laptop and his application for the directorship vacancy in Ontario, Canada. The salary is far less than he’s earning in Miami, but the cost of living in Ontario is lower, and severing his ties with Pierre Borgia is necessary for his own mental health.

  He continues working on the application another fifteen minutes, when he hears the rumble.

  Foletta saves the file, then walks to the alcove and the fire ladder leading up to the roof. He contemplates the climb, then pulls himself up one rung at a time as the rumbling grows louder.

  The painful impact of his right shoulder against the metal hatch forces open the exit. He climbs onto the roof, gazing east.

  The seven-story building is far too low and inland to view the Atlantic Ocean, but something large is definitely approaching. His eyes lock onto a high-rise blocking his sightline, his pulse pounding, the reverberations registering in his bones.

  He winces as the high-rise collapses surreally before him, revealing a horizon of surging ocean. He refuses to move, not even when the first concrete-laced droplets of sea strike him in the face, nor when the megatsunami bashes through the streets, foaming as it reaches the asylum, searching for a way in.

  It finds nothing.

  Foletta smiles as the five-story surge makes an island of his rooftop sanctuary, affording him the best view in Miami.

  And then, like a slowly bursting dam, the aged cinder-block structure crumbles along its eastern face and the rooftop fragments, the Atlantic Ocean swallowing the facility beneath him.

  NAZCA, PERU

  The dense brown volcanic cloud blanketing the once-cobalt-blue sky has turned into a raging riv
er of mud, sweeping the hot air balloon and its four frightened occupants to the northeast at a terrifying 125 knots.

  “It’s the Rapture,” Beck yells, crossing himself.

  “It’s the caldera,” Kurtz counters. “No trumpets, no Jesus riding on a white steed, just a lot of snow and ice and mass starvation.”

  “Ain’t no caldera causing this wind! This is Revelation!”

  The Pacific Ocean beckons beyond the plateau, offering certain death. Spotting the mountaintop, Mick shuts off the flame, collapsing the envelope. Dominique cries out as the balloon drops into a steep descent. The basket skims the mountain’s western face, bounces across the summit, then abruptly smashes into the side of a boulder with a bone-jarring jolt, flinging its startled occupants across the jagged crest.

  Within seconds, hurricane winds sweep the partially deflated balloon high into the air. For several minutes it spirals out of control, until the wind shear snatches it, driving it into the raging Pacific whitecaps.

  Dominique is on her knees. She is battered and bruised, but her attention is focused on a monolithic carving etched into the western face of the mountain.

  Mick crawls over, shouting to be heard over the gale. “You okay?”

  “What is that?”

  “Trident of Paracas. Traces back to Viracocha. Come on, I saw a cave to the east, we can take shelter!” He drags her to her feet, leading Dominique and the two guards to the dark void, partially concealed behind boulders.

  Kurtz shakes his head. “You three go on in, I’m a bit claustrophobic.”

  Beck nods. “I’ll stay out here with the little guy.”

  Kurtz waits until Dominique and Mick are inside the cave before conversing. “I was able to reach the Situation Room,” he yells above the atmospheric roar. “There’s some kind of vortex poised over the North Pole, drawing all this ash into space.”

  “You think it’s HAARP?”

  “Let’s hope so. I sent POTUS a photo I took of that alien spacecraft.”

  “Think he’ll believe it?”

  “Hell, I don’t believe it and I saw the damn thing. But he needs to be aware, just in case the object sucking up the atmosphere isn’t one of ours.”

  Mick and Dominique enter the cave—a seven-foot-high tunnel of rock that twists and disappears into darkness.

  “Mick, that trident … I’ve seen it before. Sam drew it on his cell wall. What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know, but as my father used to say, there are no coincidences. Let’s see where this cave leads.”

  They follow the tunnel of rock into the darkness, the cave becoming a twisting, rapidly descending cavern, its geology lit by a soft blue hue coming from somewhere below.

  “Mick, where’s that light coming from?”

  “Let’s find out. Take my hand, it gets pretty steep.”

  He takes the lead, the thirty-degree slope forcing him to crouch into deep side-steps, the rock beneath his boots offering a natural traction.

  “Dom, listen! Do you hear that?”

  “The rush of air?”

  “No. Something deeper … like a generator switching on.”

  The cavern continues spiraling downward, funneling them deeper into the mountain until the path abruptly levels out and they are standing before an immense object—a twelve-foot-high rectangular frame of highly polished metal.

  Centering the object, glowing in neon-blue light, is the symbol of the Trident of Paracas.

  “Mick?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I think … it’s the Balam.”

  “How can that be? You told me Jacob and I left on the Balam back in 2032.”

  “Manny looped time, maybe the Balam did, too?”

  “How do we get inside?”

  “We possess the twins’ genetics; let’s try telepathy. Hold my hand, then close your eyes. On three, imagine the passage opening. One … two—”

  The portal slides open, beckoning them inside.

  Dominique shrugs. “Sorry. Jumped the gun.”

  They enter a dimly lit corridor, the floor, walls, and thirty-foot arched ceiling composed of a highly polished, translucent-black polymer. The confines are warm, the only light coming from the obsidian panels’ luminescent blue glow.

  Mick pauses to press his face against the dark glass, attempting to peer inside. “I think something is behind these walls, but the glass is so tinted, I can’t see a damn thing.” He turns to Dominique, who gives him a terrified look. “You okay?”

  “Okay?” She grins nervously, her lower lip quivering. “No, I don’t think I’ve been okay since the day I met you.”

  He takes her hand. “Don’t be scared. This vessel belongs to our son.”

  “Mick, we don’t have a son. Another Michael and Dominique in another lifetime had twin sons. You and me? Never happened. Nor will it ever happen. Not because I don’t like you,” she wipes back tears, “but because I don’t think we’re going to survive the day.”

  He moves in close, hugging her to his chest. “We’ll survive.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because I’m standing in a starship that’s probably more powerful than anything else in the galaxy. I know because the bloodlines of a superior race of humans run through our veins. Most of all, I know because I have faith.”

  She holds him tightly. Then she looks up into his ebony eyes, leans in, and kisses him.

  36

  We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know.

  Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

  —ATTRIBUTED TO ALBERT EINSTEIN

  PHOBOS

  Discovered in 1877, the celestial object dubbed Phobos is seven times larger than the Red Planet’s other moon, Deimos, and revolves so close to Mars that it actually orbits faster than the planet can rotate. This unusual characteristic, combined with its unique surface density, led astrophysicists to postulate that Phobos was neither a moon nor asteroid but a hollow iron sphere.

  A white haze obscures Immanuel Gabriel’s vision, and then it absorbs him, its particles dancing across his flesh and deep into his muscles and bone marrow. His body trembles; as if the mist has penetrated every cell in his body, stretching the spaces between every proton, neutron, and electron in his body—

  —the effect culminating in the sudden sensation of gravity literally pulling his collection of molecules through the atomic structure of the extraterrestrial vessel—his atoms having separated just enough to allow him to slip into the cold vastness of space, only he cannot feel the cold, merely the rush of vertigo as he is squeezed inside the rocky metallic surface of Phobos.

  Immanuel doubles over in agony as the microscopic gaps between his cells shrink back to their original size, the bizarre feeling causing him to tingle and itch.

  Then he realizes it is not his flesh that is itching, it is a thin luminescent dermal film encasing his entire body like a second skin, warming and protecting him while allowing him to breathe.

  He looks around, his suit’s light revealing a metal interior scorched long ago from what appears to have been a flash fire.

  Immanuel recalls his brother’s words, delivered outside the cave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. “Our parents never died. Their collective consciousness remains trapped.”

  “Trapped? Where? Jake, where are they trapped?”

  “On Phobos … Our parents were taken aboard a Guardian transport before the sun went supernova. The transport entered the wormhole, followed by the Balam. The wormhole deposited both vessels far into the past. Phobos isn’t a moon, it’s all that remains of the Guardian’s transport vessel. Our parents are held inside, their consciousness trapped in cryogenic stasis.”

  Guided by the glow coming from his protective second skin, Immanuel Gabriel moves through an access corridor where he comes across evidence of a mortal breach in the ship’s hull. The craterlike indentation, as large as a three-story
building, has been sealed, but not before the asteroid impact caused a tremendous explosion, venting the interior of the transport ship.

  The corridor leads to the top section of a massive acrylic dome, covered in dust. Brushing away debris, Manny peers through the top of the glass—a vast particle chamber, one of dozens that service a photonic reactor—an antimatter power plant generating hundreds of trillions of photons, each traveling at the speed of light. These avalanches of potential energy remain separated from their matter counterparts by collection chambers made up of powerful electromagnetic rotational fields.

  For several minutes Manny simply stares, mesmerized by the swirling emerald-green vortices of antimatter, the power hub of the ship.

  Continuing on, he enters a massive cathedral-like chamber as large as three Superdomes. Set in countless levels and rows like alien dominoes are eight-foot-high pods—tens of thousands of them. Most of the containers are shattered and empty, their contents having been sucked out into space by the breach in the ship’s hull.

  Manny approaches a row of containers that appear intact. He rubs at the frosted glass of one pod, revealing the lifeless remains of a tall being, its body naked and frozen, its skull hairless and elongated.

  Post-humans. The genetic donors of the Hunahpu.

  The thought is projected into his mind so quickly it startles him.

  Mick?

  He follows the perceived direction of the buzzing sensation in his skull, crossing a walkway to an immense vaultlike door. The panel lights are glowing with power.

  He drags open the vault door and enters a small lab, his senses bombarded by “ghosts” of thought-energy being projected from the spherical chamber’s walls.

  He listens as his mother asks, What is this place? He is about to respond when he hears a second female voice, the two engaged in a conversation that had occurred eons ago in this very chamber.