He swore he would find out what it was. Even if it killed him.
24
“I’ve got it now,” said Tanner, his eyes red-rimmed, his face noticeably pale. He’d reached the limits of the anti-sleep medication. He had only an hour at most before either he collapsed or it started doing serious internal damage.
“Let’s see it,” said the Colonel.
“I should warn you—” Tanner began.
“—I don’t need any warnings,” the Colonel interrupted. “Just play it.”
Tanner sent the file through the screen and opened it. It started to play.
Tanner closed his eyes, but once the sound started, the dim hiss of static, the images flooded into his mind anyway, made worse by his imagination and his lack of sleep. He opened his eyes and looked.
There wasn’t much. The image had been broadcast through layers of rock and it was, in a sense, surprising that anything had gotten through at all. Tanner wished that it hadn’t.
At first there was only the sound of static, the image itself nothing but snow. Then, little bits and pieces started to emerge. In terms of the images, it was as if the snow was taking on texture, a vaguely human face forming and then dissolving again, what looked like a hand, what could have been a fist around a pipe or then again been nothing at all. The sound went from a staticky hiss to a whisper to something that sounded like a man was speaking through a mouthful of bees. Something that sounded like a scream, bloodcurdling. A dull rhythm that might have been someone talking. Someone singing, a wandering, meandering nursery rhyme.
And then, suddenly, a brief moment of clarity, a man’s face, weirdly backlit and terrified, his skin covered with something, quickly bursting into fuzz again.
“Freeze that,” said the Colonel.
Tanner stopped the vid and spun it backward. The man’s eyes had an emptiness to them. His features were strangely distorted, as if he were screaming. His face was covered with strange markings, symbols of some kind, which extended down his neck and chest and arms.
“Hennessy? What’s he done to himself?” asked the Colonel. “What did he use to write?”
“Blood, we think,” said Tanner. “You can see it dripping off his hand to the left there, and there seems to be a cut on his arm. Maybe it’s his own blood, maybe Dantec’s. If you look behind him, you’ll see traces of the symbols on the walls as well, which, we assume, is also blood.”
The Colonel furrowed his brow. “What do the symbols mean?”
“We don’t know,” said Tanner. “Nobody has ever seen anything quite like them.” When the Colonel didn’t say anything, Tanner asked, “Shall we go on?”
The Colonel waved his hand. “All right,” he said, “go on.”
More hissing, more static, more vague and distorted images. At one point, a brief glimpse of an arm that had been torn free of its socket, its lifeless hand curled up like a dead spider. A bit of the command chair, spattered with blood. And then Hennessy was back, humming to himself, swaying slightly, covered with bloody symbols.
“Hello,” he said, then dissolved again. He flickered in and out of existence, along with bits of words, nothing that could be sorted out, and then, something that sounded like shame or maybe was part of another word. And then “—something—eed to know.”
Onscreen, Hennessy clutched his head and then was replaced by static, in color this time. When he reappeared, he was giving the camera a strangely ecstatic smile.
“—track,” he said.
There was a long silence.
“—simply not en—” he said. Then, a little later, “—not care—will have le—usk.”
Hard to make much sense of it, thought Tanner. But whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
Then Hennessy was back again, with that same intense smile. He had moved closer to the camera, almost filling up the screen.
“—virgins,” he said, and gestured offscreen. Then he was still there, still talking, but little more than a ghost in the static, the sound completely lost until, near the end he came back, the image almost clear now. “—understand the—” he said, then a microburst of static. Then “—destroy it.”
Hennessy moved out of the way, revealing, in the command chair behind him, the bits and pieces of Dantec’s body. And then the vid ended.
“How many people have seen this?” asked the Colonel.
“This particular version? Three or four technicians. But it was generally broadcast, so a lot of people may have seen different bits of it. No way to say who has seen what.”
“So, no point killing the technicians, then?” asked the Colonel.
“Excuse me?” said Tanner.
“This is big, Tanner,” said the Colonel. “Much bigger than you can even imagine. It’s much more important than a life or two. There are billions of people on the earth. People are expendable. But this thing, whatever it is, this is the only one we’ve ever seen.”
“Are you saying I’m expendable?” said Tanner slowly.
The Colonel gave him a shrewd look. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “At this point, you’re less expendable than nearly anyone else. But yes, if the circumstances develop in the wrong way, you’re expendable. Does that bother you?”
“Yes,” said Tanner.
“Then don’t let the circumstances develop in the wrong way,” the Colonel said. He looked at his chronometer. “I’ll give you until morning. Find out how widely the vid is spreading and how much of it people have seen. Get some people on the ground who can ask the right questions without raising suspicions. Once we know where we stand, we’ll figure out what to do.”
25
The call came around 1 a.m. Altman lay in bed, watching his phone buzz on the table beside the bed, like a trapped insect. It buzzed and buzzed and then stopped. He checked it—no number listed and the hologram image was blocked. Almost immediately it started buzzing again.
It could be Hammond, he thought, I should answer it. Or Showalter, Ramirez, or Skud. But he just watched it buzz until it stopped.
The third time, it woke up Ada. She yawned and stretched, her body arching. “What time is it?” she asked drowsily, and then she sat up in bed, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Michael, aren’t you going to answer that?”
He watched his hand reach out and flip his phone open, bringing it up to his ear.
“Hello,” he said. Even to him his voice sounded dry and crackly, as if he hadn’t spoken for years.
“Is this,” said the voice, and then paused. “Michael Altman?”
“Who is this?” asked Altman.
The man on the other end of the line ignored the question. “I have a simple question I need you to answer,” he said. “I’m curious if you’ve managed to pick up anything unusual lately. Intercepted something.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“I can see that you haven’t,” said the voice quickly. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
“Do you mean a signal of some sort?” he asked, thinking of the pulse.
There was a silence on the other end of the line.
“Some sort of transmission?” said Altman.
“Maybe,” said the voice slowly. “Do you have something in mind?”
“Who is this?” said Altman again.
“That doesn’t matter,” said the voice.
“What kind of transmission are you talking about?” he asked. “A pulse of some kind?”
The voice suddenly turned nasty. “You’ll have to do better than that, Mr. Altman,” it said, a harsh note to it.
“Wait,” said Altman. “Let’s make a deal. If you tell me what you’re looking for, I’ll tell you if I come across it.”
The line went dead.
“What the hell was that about?” asked Ada.
“I don’t know,” said Altman. “I wish I did. Someone trying to pry something out of me.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
He got out of
bed. He went into the bathroom and washed his face, stared at the man looking back at him from the mirror. There were dark circles under his eyes, his eyelids puffy and swollen. He barely recognized himself. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Bad dreams and, on top of that, all the excitement and fear associated with whatever was going on in the crater. Plus a headache that seemed to go on and on.
What if something had happened to Hammond? he wondered. What if they had killed him? What if they were coming after him now?
No, that was crazy. There was no point being paranoid. It was just a phone call.
He went into the other room, switched on the computer, connected to the secure server. Nothing new from the others since he’d last checked.
“What are you doing?” Ada asked him. She was sitting up in bed again, hair falling partly over her face.
“I have to check on something,” he said. “It won’t take long.”
“Michael,” she said, her voice stern now, “I want to know exactly what’s going on. You shouldn’t keep secrets from me. You’re not in trouble, are you?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“If you were in trouble, you’d tell me, right?” she said.
“I’d like to think I would,” he said.
“What do you mean you’d like to think you would? What kind of answer is that?”
“I mean yes, of course I would.”
“There,” she said. “That’s better.”
She ran her fingers through her hair and twisted it so it fell behind her shoulders, then got up and went into the bathroom. He turned to the screen and quickly typed:
Strange phone call this morning, just after 3 AM, asking me if I’d intercepted something. Thought he was talking about the signal from the center of Chicxulub, but when I hinted at that, he rushed to get off the line. Maybe a transmission of some sort, but what, I don’t know. Anybody else get the same call?
He waited a minute, staring at his screen until Ada came out and climbed back into bed. Then he logged out and shut the system down, climbing in next to her. Probably nothing, he told himself.
“You promise me you’d tell me?” she said, sleepy again now.
“Yes,” he said.
A few minutes later, he realized she was asleep. He lay in bed, eyes open, staring up at the darkened ceiling. It was a long time before he was able to fall asleep as well.
In the morning, logging on, he discovered all three of the others had had the same call, all well after he’d had it. Ramirez first, then Showalter, then Skud, which suggested that maybe the person making the calls was simply moving alphabetically down a list. They were all as puzzled as he was. Ask around, Altman wrote back. Find out if other people had it, and what they make of it.
By noon, they had the answer. Every scientist in Chicxulub they’d contacted had been called. Most of them had no idea what was going on, chalked it up to a crank call or the work of some paranoid. But Ramirez had finally talked to someone who seemed to know.
“He’s talking about the vid broadcast,” a man named Bennett said, a geologist and amateur radio enthusiast. “I figured it out right away. He called, all cryptic, fishing for something but not wanting to give away what. I said, ‘You mean the vid broadcast?’ He pretended not to know what I was talking about, got me to describe it, then he thanked me very politely and hung up.”
Bennett had only part of the vid, a few brief seconds, something he’d come across broadcasting on not just one band but several, and so, out of curiosity, he’d recorded it. There were about three seconds of static, followed by five slightly distorted seconds of someone talking, followed by eight seconds of static. A few other people, said Bennett, had gotten other bits of it, and someone at DredgerCorp seemed to be gathering copies of all the bits. Why, he didn’t know. Bennett was pretty sure it was a hoax, somebody’s idea of a joke. But how they’d got it to seem like it was being broadcast from the center of Chicxulub, he didn’t know. Probably a transmitter on a boat or—
“It was broadcast from where?”
“Somewhere near the center of Chicxulub crater,” he said. “All part of the hoax, I’m guessing.”
“Can I have a copy?”
“Why not?” he had said. “The more, the merrier.” He spun it over.
It was a strange document—a man, naked, his body covered in symbols written in a substance that seemed to be blood, staring with a strange grin into the camera. “understand it—” he said, “destroy it—” And then static.
Altman watched it again. There wasn’t much to it, just a few seconds. Maybe Bennett was right and it was a hoax, but there was something about the man’s expression, the tightness of his features, the dead, mad emptiness of his eyes, which made Altman feel that it was not. Where was he? He watched it again. It was a small, confined space, the walls, too, smeared with symbols written with the same substance as was smeared on the man. Something at one point cast a reddish glare under the man’s chin, when he bobbed forward. The lighting was industrial, harsh and unfriendly. “Understand it—destroy it,” the man said. I’m still working on understanding it, thought Altman. To be frank, I’m not even sure what it is.
He leaned back in his chair, his elbows on the chair’s arms, his fingers tented in front of his face. Maybe a hoax, he thought, but maybe not. What if we take it all seriously? What if we try to put it all together? What will we come up with?
A signal pulse from the center of the crater, something that hadn’t been noticed before.
A gravity anomaly, also something new.
A suspicious freighter, not exactly over the center of the crater, but not far from it.
On the deck of the old freighter, a brand-new industrial submarine hoist. Also military or ex-military personnel on board.
Evidence of either seismic activity or of drilling, either in or very near the center of the undersea crater.
A vid, sent out on multiple channels, apparently broadcast from the center of the crater. On it, a man in a confined space, apparently mad, covered in odd runes, saying “understand it—destroy it.”
It all seemed connected, and it all came back to the crater. Something happening at the heart of the crater that someone—probably DredgerCorp, since they were doing the asking, but maybe others besides them—was very, very interested in. Interested enough to start a drilling operation, probably illegal, to try to see what it was or to try to remove it.
That might also explain the vid fragment, Altman realized. What if the broadcast was from a submarine? He shivered slightly.
The problem was that that only raised bigger questions.
He sighed. It’d be easier, he realized, to think of it as just a hoax and stop worrying about it. Only he couldn’t think of it as just a hoax. The more he thought about it, the more he pondered it, the more he thought it must be real.
He brooded, hesitating. Your move, Michael, he told himself. What would be the best way to flush out the secret?
In the middle of the afternoon, he hit upon an idea. It wasn’t the best idea, but it had the beauty of being simple, and it was the only thing he could think of likely to have quick results.
He put a copy of the vid onto his holopod and slipped it back into his pocket. “Done for the day,” he said to Field.
The man looked over, his expression like that of a dead fish. “It’s only two thirty,” he said.
Altman shrugged. “I have a few things to look into.”
“Suit yourself,” said Field, and turned back to his holoscreen.
Fifteen minutes later, Altman had a hat pulled low over his face and was sitting in the lobby of the town’s youth hostel, using its single ancient terminal—a pre-holoscreen model. The deskman cast him a lazy glance and then ignored him. He wasn’t paid enough to care who used the computer.
He spun the vid from his holopod to the terminal and then spent some time making sure he hadn’t left a trail. Then he went onto FreeSpace and created a dummy account. It could be traced bac
k to the monitor, he knew, but there was nothing he could do about that. It couldn’t, in any case, be traced directly to him.
He prepared a message: DredgerCorps’ Illegal Doings in Chicxulub, he typed into the subject line, and then captioned the vid, Last Words from a Submarine Tunneled Deep into the Heart of Chicxulub Crater. He stayed for a minute thinking and then added, A Retrieval Mission Gone Wrong. He then proceeded to copy the vid to every scientist he could think of in Chicxulub, himself included, and to a select few beyond.
There, he thought. That should get their attention.
That evening he told Ada what he had done, explained to her what they’d found out, what he thought it meant. He thought she’d tease him, tell him that he was making something out of nothing because he was bored. Instead, she just crossed her arms.
“You’re such an idiot sometimes. Don’t you realize it could be dangerous?” she asked.
“Dangerous?” he said. “What, you think they’d try to kill me for revealing some industrial secret? This isn’t a spy movie, Ada.”
“Maybe not, but you’re acting like it is,” she said. “Secure Web site, gangs of scientists, secret subs, signals that shouldn’t exist. And then this video.” She shivered. “A madman covered in symbols drawn in blood. Doesn’t that make you think it might be dangerous?”
“What?”
“How do I know what ‘it’ is?” she asked, shaking her hands at him. “The thing at the heart of the crater might be dangerous. Or the people who want to retrieve it might be dangerous. Or both.”
“But—” he said.
“It’s just—” she said, and then stopped.
She lowered her head and stared at the tabletop. He watched her hug herself, as if she were cold. “I don’t want to see you hurt or dead,” she said quietly.
She was motionless for long enough that he thought the conversation was over. He was about to get up and get a beer when suddenly she started speaking again.
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