“Odhiambo?” called Vedala, panting. “That sounds seismic. Is the anomaly growing again?”
“Doubtful. This is definitely a hydrological feature,” said Odhiambo. “Feel the pressure in your ears? That is from a lot of water filling an empty void.”
Moving with a slight limp, Odhiambo fished a fresh chemlight from his kit pocket and cracked it. The eerie light swung back and forth in his fist as he clambered forward. The exhausted scientists were moving with growing panic, boots thumping into a skim of water darkening the metallic floor.
The disturbing roar was building all around them.
“This tunnel is a tiny volume compared to the lake,” said Odhiambo. “And I’m afraid it will flood very, very quickly.”
Tupa sprinted in easy strides. Navigating by the light of the drone, the boy had pulled out far ahead of the others. As he ran, his feet dipped deeper into the water. Farther back, Stone and Vedala now ran side by side, panting but keeping the same pace. The surging water was seeping into their boots now, igniting a panic that drove them forward faster.
Odhiambo, older by nearly two decades, kept up for a few minutes. Then he began to slow, grimacing and holding his side. Though the roar of water was deafening and the chilly liquid clearly rising, his body simply would not allow him to keep pace with the others, adrenaline or not.
As the water rose to his calves, however, the lifelong spelunker understood innately that his life depended on reaching an exit on the other end of the tunnel.
If, indeed, one existed.
When Stone turned to check on him, Odhiambo raised a hand to shoo him forward.
“Go!” he panted. “I’ll catch up.”
Stone ignored Odhiambo’s advice and stopped. Reaching an arm around the older man’s shoulders, he ushered him ahead. Vedala had not slowed, trying to catch up with Tupa. Stone could glimpse her eyes occasionally as she glanced back over her shoulder to check on his progress.
Nearly two feet of frigid brown water had already risen around the team’s legs, nearly up to their thighs. They stampeded forward in a chaos of panting and splashing and metallic echoes. Every scattered droplet was shadowed and lit by the flickering, dancing light of their headlamps.
A scream came from up ahead.
“Tupa!” shouted Stone, torn between helping the old man beside him and the young boy up ahead.
“Jahmays!” came an echoing reply from somewhere in the distance.
Struggling through the splashing turmoil with one arm around the sagging shoulders of Odhiambo, Stone thought to check the monitor hanging around his neck. From the canary camera feed, he saw why Tupa was shouting. The boy had reached the end of the tunnel.
On the far wall, a metal ladder rose into darkness.
Odhiambo had been right about the speed of the flood. The lower rungs were already submerged in sloshing river water. Tupa had climbed the ladder to get above it. And at the top, he’d found another hatchway.
Tupa punched and clawed at the closed portal, to no avail.
Still pulling Odhiambo along, Stone shouted to Vedala ahead in the darkness: “Nidhi! There’s a locked hatchway ahead! Tupa can’t get through!”
The nimble woman increased her speed, calling over her shoulder, “Got it!”
As the ice-cold water rose to his waist, Stone slogged forward, helping Odhiambo along as fast as he could. The old man was shaking violently now, wheezing with each breath. He had pushed his body well beyond its limits. And yet he held on to Stone with a grim strength, forging stiffly ahead.
It was quieter now. The roaring had hushed, along with the splashing.
Both men tossed away their backpacks. Now they were moving through what felt like cold lead, pushing forward on numb feet, their clothing soaked and heavy. The only warmth was their arms around each other, and even that heat was fading.
“Stone,” said Odhiambo, between labored breaths. “It is true that men must capture fire. Otherwise we do not survive. But this fire . . . it does not belong to us.”
Odhiambo gripped Stone by the forearm, looking into his eyes.
“This fire belongs to the gods.”
“Come on, Harold,” replied Stone, pulling his arm away. “We’ll philosophize later. The end is just ahead.”
“Too far, I’m afraid,” panted Odhiambo, nodding at the dark water. It had risen above his waist. “For me, but not for you.”
Stone kept moving.
At the other end of the tunnel, Vedala had reached the ladder. Tupa was clinging to the rungs. A pressurized hatch waited at the top. Vedala noticed a number pad on the wall—a lock that required a key code. Climbing up two rungs past the boy, Vedala reached overhead and punched in random numbers.
The door beeped a negation after four digits.
“Good,” muttered Vedala.
At least the hatchway had power. And now she knew it was a four-digit code comprised of numbers only, leaving only ten thousand possible combinations.
Below her, Tupa had hooked an elbow through the ladder. His lips were bluish in the light of the canary, and he was trembling. His wet hair was plastered across his forehead and the last of the fearsome red paint had washed off.
His face was that of a little boy, scared and cold.
Twisting her body to access her hip pack, Vedala began to desperately paw through its contents. The remaining canary drone was beeping a low battery alert, strafing the nearby walls with fading light, throwing lunatic shadows as it avoided the rising black surface of the water.
Vedala finally found her digital camera and turned it on.
Swiping through a grid of images, she paused when she saw the first corpse they had found inside the anomaly, then continued scrolling hastily through a series of pictures. Finally, she zoomed in to see what she had been looking for—barely visible on a twisted body that was half dissolved in the floor.
It was a work badge, along with an ID number.
. . . k B . . . kstein #23402582
Vedala tried to pull the camera closer to her face with shaking fingers. Fumbling, she dropped it. The camera fell into the water and sank. The light of it flickered to the bottom and disappeared.
“Damn it,” she cried.
Meanwhile, Tupa was pulling himself up the rungs to avoid the rising water. The boy was pressing his rail-thin body against her hip. They were either going to die here together or be born again through the hatchway above.
Vedala closed her eyes to concentrate. She reached up and punched in the last four digits of the badge code she had seen, hoping that her memory wouldn’t fail her in this panic. Saying a silent prayer to Krishna, she dug a finger into the enter key.
The hatchway beeped a chirpy positive, and an electromagnetic bolt thunked open as the hatchway unlocked.
“Yes!” shouted Vedala.
Her triumphant voice was swallowed in the shrinking space. Glancing down, she saw the water was nearly up to the tunnel ceiling. Stone and Odhiambo were still nowhere to be seen. Tupa was looking upward, regarding her with silent fear in the fading light of the canary. The boy’s teeth were clenched together to keep them from chattering.
Vedala threw open the hatchway over her head and ushered Tupa past herself and into the unknown above.
Dropping back down into the water, Vedala peered into the narrow crevice of blackness between the tunnel ceiling and the water’s surface. She could no longer touch the bottom without going under, but Stone and Odhiambo were taller. They could still make it, she hoped.
In the stark glare of her headlamp, the corridor had shrunk to just a foot-high trapezoid of space that stretched away into darkness. None of Odhiambo’s greenish chemlights were visible. The last remaining canary had already followed Tupa up the shaft and out of the hatch.
“Stone! Odhiambo!” Vedala shouted.
The only response was the whoosh of a damp breeze as the rising water pushed the remaining air out of the tunnel. Staring into the dark with a lump growing in her throat, Vedala blinked wi
th surprise—she thought she had seen a faint glimmer of light, perhaps a headlamp.
But she couldn’t be sure.
Farther up the tunnel, Stone and Odhiambo were bobbing forward on their toes, the water up to their necks. They had heard Vedala’s call but couldn’t take a breath deep enough to shout a response. The two of them were trapped in a claustrophobic sliver of air just below the ceiling.
They weren’t going to reach the end in time.
“We have to swim for it,” said Stone. “Okay?”
“See you on the other side, James,” said Odhiambo. “It has been an honor.”
Head tilted back, Stone took a last glance at Odhiambo. The old man offered him a sad smile. Stone understood this was goodbye. He gave Odhiambo’s shoulder a squeeze under the water and took a final gasp of air, his lips pressed to the ceiling. With that, Stone dropped under the surface and began kicking his legs. For the first few seconds, he felt the presence of Odhiambo beside him.
Then that awareness was lost in the panicked throbbing of his lungs, the crushing cold and utter blackness of the water around him, and the occasional slippery metal wall of the tunnel against his shoulder or hand. Stone groped ahead blindly until his eyesight erupted in pinpricks of light.
Finally, his fingers closed around a metal bar—a ladder.
With that, he felt a hand close around the collar of his shirt and haul him up. He saw Vedala through a blur of water as he emerged, gasping and coughing, into blessed air. Then he fell to the ground, wheezing and blind.
The Wildfire field team leader continued to watch the swirling water rise, her lips pressed together in a white line. She refused to give up hope.
“Come on, Harold,” she muttered. “Swim, old man.”
Fifteen seconds passed. Thirty.
The water rose to the lip of the hatch. Vedala waited until the final seconds as it began to overflow. As Stone coughed violently, lying on his back nearby, she reluctantly pressed the hatch closed and locked it. Swallowing a shudder in her lungs, Vedala felt the heat of tears mingling with river water on her cheeks.
Dr. Harold Odhiambo passed away at approximately UTC 23:10:07 on day four of the expedition. The cause of death was anoxic cerebral injury due to drowning. He was the third member of the Wildfire team to perish under violent circumstances.
Unfortunately, he would not be the last.
Activation
DETAILS OF THE REMAINING PORTION OF KLINE’S FINAL experiment could not be recovered. The cameras on board the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module had been ruptured by the intentional breach, and the R3A4 ceased to transmit its video. Logs of Sophie Kline’s brain-computer interface were available, but too complex to re-create the activity of the Robonaut.
Instead, the next few moments were captured in a shaky handheld video recorded by the two other astronauts on board the ISS. Held captive for hours, Yury Komarov and Jin Hamanaka had been forced to bear witness from their temporary exile within the Zvezda service module.
Jin Hamanaka was hovering before the largest Earth-facing window of the module, a sixteen-inch porthole in the main working compartment. She was a trim astronaut who wore her dark hair in a tight ponytail, known among her JAXA colleagues for having a famously loud laugh. She wasn’t laughing now, as she continued to flash a scavenged laser pointer in an SOS signal. At this point, the beam was noticeably dimmer. And more disturbingly, Earth itself was also noticeably farther away. The ISS had continued to accelerate and gain altitude.
The cosmonaut Yury Komarov, stocky and bearded, was positioned across the module near a partially disassembled wall panel. He had spent the last few hours trying to piece together a functioning radio from parts scavenged from ancillary systems, without much success.
As a precautionary measure, both astronauts had changed into their pre-EVA uniforms. It had been decided between the two of them that nothing was off the table in terms of safety. A hasty retreat into the Soyuz spacecraft and an emergency descent were likely, though the risk of sabotage was high.
Surviving this situation was far from guaranteed.
This was the reason that Komarov had turned on his personal GoPro camera. He had set it to record and let it float ignored through the module. The hope was that, in the worst-case scenario, a record of what happened would at least exist.
Click-click-click. Click, click, click. Click-click-click.
“Call it a day with that, why don’t you?” asked Komarov over his shoulder. He winced at each click of the laser pointer button. “They know we are in distress. Look how far from home we are.”
Hamanaka seemed not to have heard him.
Thirty seconds passed, punctuated by the repetitive clicking of the laser. Komarov looked up in annoyance. He had just opened his mouth to speak again when an impact violently jarred the module. The entire ISS infrastructure shook along its main trusswork, the solar panels flapping like great wings.
Komarov’s mouth snapped shut in alarm.
Grabbing the tiny camera, he pushed himself toward Hamanaka. “What was that? What is happening?”
Hamanaka turned to him from the window, her face pale and lips trembling. She placed a hand over her mouth.
“Jin?” asked Komarov.
Her eyes turned to the window. Moving her gently out of the way, Komarov pressed his face to the glass.
“What is that cloud?” he is heard asking. “Why is it . . . it’s growing darker. It is—ah, gospodi!”
Komarov turned to Hamanaka, his jaw working. The Japanese astronaut had quickly composed herself. Her brow was furrowed as she began to work through the implications of what they’d seen.
“It is a debris plume,” said Hamanaka in a quiet voice. “Forward deckside. The Wildfire module is breached.”
Komarov found a different vantage point through a nearby nine-inch portal. He watched the rupture in disbelief.
“There is something else,” added Hamanaka. “On the side of the module. Some kind of new growth is spreading. Dark purple.”
The Russian astronaut shook his head. His toes were lightly curled under a bar on the forward wall of the module, not straining, placed perfectly to maintain position without expending too much energy. Komarov was on his third visit to the station, a veteran, and until Kline’s coup he had been commander of this mission.
“This is too much!” he exclaimed, breath misting the inch-thick, quadruple-paned circle of glass. Komarov had forgotten to aim his camera outside, and it was now trained on the side of his concerned face. The following data was reconstructed through footage collected by an external camera mounted to the truss segment.
A glittering debris cloud still lingered near the Wildfire module. Komarov could be heard repeating the word no, again and again, as he watched the hole opening wider. The breach was ejecting a steady plume of wreckage. Reduced to shocked silence, Komarov watched as the dull golden face of the Robonaut R3A4 emerged from the jagged hole.
It looked around slowly, as if in wonder.
The Robonaut R3A4 was leaving the confines of the BSL-5 protected Wildfire module in which it had been built. The humanoid robot carefully squeezed its bulky body through the ragged breach and into the vacuum.
Turning, it reached back into the hole.
The robot teased out the ribbon filament. In the harshly lit images, the ribbon was tattooed with an alien sheen of hexagons, like dull dragon scales. The length of it spilled from the breach like a lolling tongue.
Even from a distance, and even at this early juncture, it was clear that the ribbon was still growing rapidly. The white-hot front edge glowed like smoldering coals. Anchored within the module, the ribbon now trailed after the ISS like a fishing line cast into a current.
Its surface was sparkling, presumably as it absorbed stray molecules of debris and atmosphere.
This frightening sight was visible to the ISS crew but too distant to be observed by the hundreds of astronomers watching from around Earth’s equator, both professional and amateur. N
ASA itself had “requested a look” from several orbital security assets of the US military. They saw a metallic ribbon, razor-thin and glinting in the sunlight, stretching away from the space station toward Earth. After a day of constant acceleration, it was plain to see that the ISS had progressed to a distance of nearly twenty thousand miles—toward geosynchronous orbit.
What remained unseen was even more concerning.
Imagery recovered after the fact revealed a luminous patch of violet on the Wildfire module. The encrustation had been expanding steadily, not in hexagons but in pulsing, serpentine tendrils. Now the size of a dinner plate, it flashed green and then purple as it spread across the hull in a starburst pattern.
Distinct from AS-3, it was the birth of a new evolution.
Day 5
Ascent
Of all the ways you can limit yourself, your own self-definition is the most powerful.
—MICHAEL CRICHTON
A New Paradigm
ENVELOPED IN A SHROUD OF DARKNESS DEEP BENEATH the anomaly, the remaining survivors of the Wildfire field team would have found themselves exhausted and without hope. They had just witnessed the deaths of two team members. Their supplies had been lost, including Stone’s backpack. The final canary lay still, out of batteries. Shivering and wet, Stone and Vedala sat back-to-back, leaning against each other with Tupa curled on Stone’s lap. Their body heat had slowly begun to dry them.
In the dark unknown, the touch of other people must have been reassuring.
Based on postincident interviews, the team could discern only that the floor beneath them was flat and hard—made of the same material as the rest of the structure. Their fingers could make out the faint traces of hexagons etched in its surface. And though they couldn’t see the space around them, it was full of echoes. An eerie whistling sound came and went, almost like melancholy singing, emanating from someplace high.
The Andromeda Evolution Page 20
