[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (12 page)

Madeline looked at him. He had emphasized to her that he could not explain why he was allowed to go on the mission and she was not. He had tried to say it was because he was ex-navy, but she knew him better than that. As he explained the clearly covert tool, her suspicions became ever more certain.

A government girl she was not, and she had never really understood how she had fallen for an ex-military guy, so finding out that he may still be part of that organization was more than a little disturbing. Of course, the fact that it appeared that he was now and had always been part of Naval Intelligence may explain why he seemed so different from other navy guys she had met.

Either way, as he asked her to trust him and forgive that he could not tell her everything, his pleading eyes had touched her. If he was some kind of spook, he was one for the right reasons, she thought, and that would have to do … for now.

“Of course,” interjected Neal seriously, “there is one important factor here that we have overlooked.”

They all looked earnestly at Neal and he went on.

“If Madeline’s ‘cover’ is that she is James’ bit on the side,” he said turning to Laurie, “what does that make me?”

They all laughed, Laurie shaking her head and wagging her finger as he pretended to lean in for a kiss. Though she was twenty years his senior, her timeless good looks and auspicious title made her still far, far out of his league.

“Hey,” Neal said, as he continued trying halfheartedly to hug her, laughing as she spurned him, “I’ll have you know I’m a secret agent. James Bond has nothing on me.”

Madeline egged him on.

“Oh God!” Laurie groaned, laughing in spite of herself. Across the aisle, James closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, laughing in spite of himself. What had he gotten himself into, he thought.

* * *

That had been two days ago. They had since spent a two full days configuring the probe, Captain Hawkson dispatching the majority of his crew to get supplies while he snuck the two civilians onboard to help set things up.

But all that was behind them now. They had said their good-byes and now Madeline and Neal stood on the shore, hiding as inconspicuously as possible amongst the crowd of locals that had come to see the ship depart. They joined the crowd in waving at the large ship motoring out of the harbor, Madeline looking for and finding its captain standing rigidly on the bridge and smiling at the thought of the more amorous farewell she had given him in the wee hours of the morning.

As the helmsman steered the ship, the captain conning from over his shoulder, the whole bridge was surprised when the captain asked the first lieutenant to take the con and stepped out onto the port gantry. The
King’s Transom
was nearly one hundred feet long, a converted deep-sea trawler that had been used as a marine research vessel for over ten years now. During that time, its owners had proved amenable to having it ‘commissioned’ by the navy for certain operations, proving discreet enough not to mention the changes of crew the missions usually required.

Its high bridge soared over an impressive bow, designed to brave even the toughest waters. As you moved astern, the sides got steadily lower, allowing ever easier access to the water for the host of cranes mounted on its open stern. The word ‘transom’ was the old navy name for the very back end of a ship, and such was the plethora of equipment, cranes, and even a functioning two-man submarine mounted on the
King’s Transom
’s backside that the name had seemed appropriate.

Extending from each side of the high bridge were two gantries, designed to allow the captain or his lookouts to look over the side of the ship, or survey the horizon for signs of fish. Now, as Captain Hawkson stood on the port gantry, he surveyed the small crowd on the shore. Finding the two white faces hiding in it, he smiled. He then glanced down to the deck below to Dr. West who was looking up at him, smiling understandingly, and turned to head back onto the bridge.

It turned out Dr. West had not needed Dramamine for the relatively calm seas they would encounter. As they had left the harbor behind, she had met with Captain Hawkson, his first lieutenant, and the navigational officer, and they had gone over their search area.

Though satellite images had pinpointed the spot where the meteor had touched down, the vagaries of current made the range of its potential resting spots on the ocean bed significant. They had decided on a spiral search pattern. They would start at the center of their proposed search area, and then spiral slowly outward in an ever increasing circle. For the sake of testing the equipment, they had also run the probe while heading to the central start point.

The computer that they were using to plot the results was connected to the ship’s GPS and it used that link to map the images it was receiving over a standard oceanographer’s chart of the ocean bed. After three days, Laurie sat reviewing the results to-date. The image she saw was a chart of the southern Indian Ocean, specifically the area off India’s southeast coast. In the bottom left-hand corner she could see the edge of northeastern Sri Lanka. Protruding from that was the bridge of relatively shallow water that joined it with mainland India, whose southeastern coast showed in the top left corner of the image on-screen.

Sprouting from a point on the Indian coast that she knew was the fishing town of Kodikkarai was the line of their path to the center of their search zone. Either side of the line was the detailed image of the ocean bed that the probe had gathered en route. Once they had reached their starting point, they had started their spiral outwards, making the whole image look like an ever-growing lollipop, its handle lodged in the port of Kodikkarai like it was clasped in the hand of a little girl.

She could zoom in on any part of the probe’s imagery, utilizing its extremely high resolution to see the ocean bed in astonishing detail, all of it color coded by mass like a heat sensitive image or some psychedelic fractal. They had not found anything yet that came close to the density Neal and she had estimated the objects must have to all have survived their trip through the atmosphere, so Laurie stood up to join the captain on deck. They were only 15% of their way through the planned search field, after all.

* * *

That evening, as they both enjoyed dinner, the computer started beeping. It had found an anomaly. Looking at one another in surprise they put down their knives and forks and went over to the terminal. James let the doctor take a seat at the PC and watched as she zoomed in on the flagged part of the image.

Although the program had the ability to highlight that part of the image that it had flagged, that would not be necessary here. In the middle of the screen were two shapes, each completely black. The computer had not found the high-density they had expected. It had found nothing. These two spots on the ocean floor were sending back no image at all. Somehow the objects they were looking at were absorbing the probe’s signals entirely.

* * *

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Laurie.” said James calmly. They had returned to his cabin with a printout of the image so they could discuss it out of earshot.

“Not get ahead of ourselves? This is very strange, James. I’m afraid I can only draw a few possible conclusions from what we seem to be seeing here, and none of them are good.”

“OK,
possible
conclusions, exactly. That’s my point, we really only have theories so far, there is no need to be so … agitated.”

“Captain, let me explain my concerns to you and I think you’ll see why I am so ‘agitated’…as you put it.” Laurie frowned at him.

“OK, I’m sorry. I’m just, well, maybe I’m a little agitated myself.”

“Look, there is only one thing that would return no signal to the probe that I am aware of. The probe has a very wide range of scanning ability, that is how you all designed it, after all; and, well, the only thing I can think of that would not show up, I guess, is some kind of superconductive material.”

James frowned and she continued.

“When a superconductor is fully functional…and bear in mind we’ve only been able to do this in lab conditions with a separate power source cooling the material…it absorbs…or rather it
conducts
, pretty much all energy. So if you were looking at a perfect superconductor it would look pitch black, because it would be conducting all the light, not reflecting any of it.

“Now, here is where it becomes a little more disturbing: as I said, only a perfect superconductor would absorb
all
wavelengths and all energy, but we don’t know how to make a perfect superconductor. They are purely theoretical. But what we are seeing here, well it looks like … a perfect superconductor.”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this, Doctor.” said James, looking at the pictures in his hands.

“Oh, I know, James, trust me, I know. I’ve made a career out of staying calm in the face of overly excited scientists. That is precisely why the president trusts me to give him balanced advice. But combine that thought process with the fact that this object we have found is more than likely the object we tracked from deep space to this spot and we can’t help but go down a pretty disturbing road.”

She paused. James glared at the images in his hands like they were pictures of his own funeral and Laurie bit her lower lip as she watched him absorbing it all. She had an impulse to desist, to leave him alone, but her own anxiety would not let her and she spoke once more, more softly this time, “But that is not all of it, is it, James?”

He shook his head, black or no, the image still gave them another key piece of information: the objects’ shape.

“Now, James, tell me, what does that shape look like to you?”

“Two halves.” he said.

“Two halves of what, James?” she prompted.

He sighed, not wanting to say. After a moment he met her intent stare and replied in a cold, quiet tone, his shoulders tensing as he spoke, “It looks like two halves of a missile, Laurie,” he said, finally, “or…” and this took all his strength to say, “two halves of some kind of container.”

They went silent, the implications too stark to warrant further discussion.

* * *

Above them, acute eyes tracked the
Transom
’s circular path, waiting. They were waiting to see whether the
Transom
’s probe discovered anything. They were waiting to see if the threat would pass, to see whether the team of humans would succeed in their task, or fail, saving them from having to take action.

They were listening to see what messages the ship transmitted home, ready to intercept them, ready to stop them from reaching their source if necessary, and ready to stop more from following if that was necessary. There had been some radio messages they had not been able to decode, but then there had also been several others that had been easily decipherable. As long as these messages continued to inform them of the probe’s progress, they would let the ship be.

* * *

Each night since the
King’s Transom
had left, Madeline and Neal had gathered in his small lodger’s room at 11pm, the prearranged time when they would use their Secure Field Radio, or ‘SurFeR’ as they had been dubbed, to speak with James and Laurie.

It was now 11:30, and they had not heard anything. Madeline had always been very excited for these calls, and Neal had as well, to some degree. But some small part of him had always worried, slightly afraid of what they might discover out there. The silence of the radio this night had him spooked, and Madeline had subconsciously picked up on that concern and become unsettled herself, though she was keeping up an appearance of calm as they sipped a dubious local fruit juice and made small talk.

The sudden beep from the radio that lay between them on the single bed was startling. Madeline made an ‘I-told-you-so’ face as she reached for the green plastic radio that looked like a 1990s cell phone, complete with oversized rubber aerial.

“Where have you been?” she said into the handset.

“Yeah, sorry for the delay, we’ve been…” there was a pause on the other end, “…trying to figure something out.” came James’ voice over the two-way.

There was a slight delay as each of the radios went through the lengthy process of decoding each signal, and then thoroughly encrypting the return signal. The stilted conversation continued with Madeline asking, “What kind of something, James? Are you two OK?”

Over the next hour James and Laurie discussed the discovery with Neal and Madeline. Madeline was fairly incredulous at first, but that part of Neal that had been so keen to find one of the meteors had also been equally aware of what his original equations about their makeup had suggested. It was not long before the conversation moved away from whether the meteor was a natural occurrence and on to what to do about the strong possibility that it wasn’t. Based on the object’s description, Neal had posited three theories of what it could be.

First, it could have carried some kind of bomb, possibly thermonuclear, but it was unlikely that none of the eight would have detonated, so the group seemed to consider this possibility moot. Second was that it bore some kind of pathogen: a virus, or some other biological or chemical weapon. Laurie had responded immediately, “Yes, we thought about that, Neal, but surely if you wanted to disperse a pathogen effectively you would detonate the delivery device in the air.”

“Maybe they did? Maybe this is just the remains of the capsule?” said Neal. Madeline wondered how they had so easily gotten to a discussion of ‘they.’ It had just never occurred to her as she had worked on the probe that it might find something…unnatural. But even as she struggled with this thought, Neal was moving on to his last, and most outlandish theory.

“My third thought is both the most ridiculous, and yet … perhaps … also the most plausible of the three.” Madeline stared up at him, the radio silent as they all waited for his next words. “Well,” he continued, “they may have been … landing capsules. For some kind of … machine.”