Class Fives: Origins (3 page)

“Sinski,” he called over.

“Yes?”

“On this liquor store assault, what’s this about the surveillance camera?”

Dan sighed.

“It was glitched.”

“It was what?”

“The image stopped about two minutes before the assault. Tape was blank after that.”

“How’d that happen?”

“I haven’t a clue. Crappy equipment, maybe.”

The Lieutenant grunted, cast a glance back into the folder.

“You didn’t talk to the last plate?”

“No sir. Wasn’t home. Apartment manager’s supposed to call us next time he sees him.”

“Well, you need to go check it out again in the morning.”

“Sure thing.”

“I want to put this one to bed quick.”

“Right,” Dan responded. “Oh, by the way,” he added, looking up from the screen, “Is the DA gonna violate the victim?”

“That’s up to him. But it’s a weapons charge so I’d bet yes.”

“Total dumb ass. He just gets out and the first thing he manages to do is violate himself. How can people be that stupid?”

“Who knows. But if they weren’t we’d be out of a job.”

“Right,” Dan added thoughtfully, returning his gaze to the bright white of the empty form on the screen before him.

It was kind of weird, he pondered again. It’s like the guy who decked him knew Peter Morales was going to hit the store before he ever stepped inside and got the chance to pull his piece. Did he know somehow? Maybe he knew Morales, knew he’d already done who knows how many more stick-ups. A friend, maybe? Pissed off accomplice?

He looked over to where the other man was already turning languidly to reenter his office.

“Lieutenant?”

“Yeah?”

Dan pondered a moment before speaking.

“The clerk said something funny. At first I thought it was because of his lousy English, but now…”

The Lieutenant turned slowly back.

“That bit about seeing the perp jump across the room a couple minutes before it went down?”

“Yeah. Only not so much ‘jump’. He said it was like he disappeared from one spot and popped up in another.”

“What, you think the clerk was maybe smoking something in the back room?”

Dan shook his head thoughtfully.

“No, he wasn’t high.”

Dan turned fully to face his superior.

“He said that the guy was coming up the aisle on the left toward the counter, where the beer was, and he was starting to get up from his stool to meet the guy at the register, and then the guy was just gone, and a second later, he steps around the right aisle to just inside the door, where the drink coolers were. What do you think that was all about?”

“Don’t know,” the Lieutenant responded. “Don’t much care. Maybe he’s a magician.”

“Right. Or a ninja. I hear they can do that kind of thing, too.”

The Lieutenant folded the report closed.

“Well, go be enlightened first thing tomorrow, all right?”

“Yes sir. Should we just bring him in? Let one of the gold shields do the questioning?”

“Just find out where he was at that time. If it doesn’t feel right, use your own judgment.”

“Yes sir.”

The Lieutenant turned and stepped back into his office.

Dan returned his attention to the still-blank form on the screen before him.

Finish this one up and get the Hell out of here, he told himself. But maybe, some time tomorrow, swing by the liquor store and get the clerk to clarify what he thinks he saw.

Dan was the kind of cop who trusted his instincts, and in this case, as ordinary and unspectacular as the aborted robbery was, something just didn’t feel right. In fact, it really felt… creepy. And if there was one thing Dan couldn’t resist, it was creepy.

He lifted his hands, settling his fingers on the keyboard, and glanced down at his notebook. He began to type.

2

A Looming Threat

Dr. Marvin Henry was a complete geek, and proud of it. He was enjoying his second year as an Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the small, private and very prestigious university and finally beginning his own research, the passion that had gripped him since he’d first heard of the concept in a particularly progressive high school science class. The moment he’d heard about the very concept, his mind had caught fire and he’d dedicated himself to searching for the solution to this new, great mystery.

It was called Dark Matter, but no one, not even the cosmologists who first postulated its existence, could say what it might be. And no one, ever, in the history of the world, would ever see it, touch it, taste or smell it. Like a black hole, it was beyond viewing directly. In some senses it didn’t even exist in this universe.

It could only be observed by its effect on things around it. It had first reared its magnificent head when physicists discovered that, in direct contradiction to the laws of motion, the stars at the ends of the spirals that formed the Milky Way galaxy were rotating around the central mass far too rapidly. And the only way they could make the familiar, well-worn mathematics work would be the presence throughout the massive collection of circling stars of more matter than actually could be seen. Stunning amounts of matter. And since the mathematics were never, ever wrong, then that additional mass, perhaps a half dozen times more than could be observed, must be there, existing in a state that somehow placed it beyond our ability to perceive.

Dark Matter.

And Marvin wanted to find it.

Unfortunately such esoteric knowledge held little immediate practical, that is to say, commercial value. So in order to obtain the funding for his own research, he had agreed, along with the University itself, that a very impressive grant from a government agency would allow him to spend a part of his time on his passion, and the balance maintaining an obscure but important observation post on behalf of a little known department of the Pentagon. This not only paid for his research, it also granted him a surprisingly high security clearance and direct contact with some very important people, within the government and without.

Marvin settled down in the plush swivel chair and reached out to poke the keyboard and start the evening's data collection.

The computer emitted a small, obedient beep and began compiling. Marvin leaned back and sighed, fixing his attention on one of the bank of computer screens before him.

He supposed it was, in its own way, a necessary task, though what practical good could come out of it he couldn’t know. Perhaps, he considered, there was one, and even his clearance was not high enough to discover what it might be.

His eyes flicked to the red phone sitting on the corner of the desk. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips when he considered that he could, at any time he wished, pick up that phone and a direct connection would be made with a small, continually manned desk somewhere in the Pentagon, just outside Washington, DC. And depending on what he said into the device, he could be walking into the Oval Office of the White House by this time tomorrow, to break the news to the President of the United States that the Earth was doomed.

The program was kept very quiet, funded out of the seemingly endless and untraceable cookie jar that was the annual United States military budget. Its sole and total purpose was to keep an eye on the Heavens, endlessly watching for any body of significant mass that might unexpectedly decide to direct its course toward the only known world where life existed.

Data from every major observatory across the planet was, deliberately or unknowingly, feeding pure information into the bank of computers that was the brain behind the screens he now stared at. Every object visible in space, every photograph, every captured radio wave, every reading, came here and was gobbled up by the software that digested it and spit back its conclusions.

The whole endeavor had only become possible two years ago when a half-crazy computer genius at the university’s computer school developed a program that could do the phenomenal high-speed calculations to make sense of the almost infinite volumes of data pouring into it continually from around the globe.

It knew, to within millimeters, the current position in space relative to the other bodies of mass in the solar system, of every single celestial object ever observed beyond the planet Earth. It could tell, with uncanny accuracy, the future direction of motion, and speed, of each of those objects. It could even predict exactly when and where one object would encounter another for impressive distances into the future.

It was, quite literally, the planet’s early warning system for total destruction.

Marvin recalled the chill that had crawled its way up his spine when he’d learned how small a celestial object could be to guarantee the complete extinction of all life in the world. A chunk of rock, no larger than the island of Manhattan, could slam into the surface at many thousands of miles an hour, literally vaporizing everything it encountered on impact for thousands of miles around. The shock wave and explosion of heat alone would encircle the planet and char everything it encountered to ash. Depending on the density of the rock, it could quite literally shatter the Earth into a drifting cloud of rubble, wheeling through space.

The software, which had been awarded the catchy name of Deep Look, was humanity’s best bet for at least knowing its death was on the way.

Fortunately so far, it had found a tenuous harmony and grace in the motions of the other bodies within the solar system. Planets continued their lazy, endless circling of the Sun, and even the asteroid belt jostled along pleasantly, some masses being bumped out of their trajectories, bumping others, but always remaining comfortably trapped within the overall gravitational field in which they swam, each potential escapee being gently pulled back into the mad, circling rush of rocks around their unending track.

Of course there was always the possibility of some intruder from the dark, empty recesses beyond our celestial neighborhood appearing unexpectedly. Some lumbering, wandering body might cruise in from outside the orbits of the Ort Cloud and race, like a bullet, straight toward the Earth. The software would see it the moment it appeared in the unimaginable distance, and mankind would know there was something out there with organic life’s name on it. But in the two years since the project had been in operation, the software hadn’t picked up even a shadow of a hint that such an object even existed.

Marvin slowly stretched out and yawned, settling into the chair, preparing himself to spend the next several hours studying the software’s conclusions, its predictions, its prescient speculations. And while quite interesting merely for the amount of data it utilized alone, it could get somewhat boring.

I’m a Goddamn cosmic security guard, he thought.

The computer emitted another quiet beep, announcing the completion of some particularly massive calculation and, to Marvin’s surprise, one of the computer screens suddenly went blank. A moment later there was another quiet beep. And then another. On the fourth beep Marvin sat upright suddenly, already reaching out to stab a finger onto the readout key.

The blank screen went a bright blue for a moment, then flashed with a new image. It was a virtual simulation of orbital patterns, the tiny points of light with their long, fading tails, moving slowly along it in great arcs.

Marvin pulled the chair forward and leaned in to focus on the screen.

The software had noticed something.

It took him a few minutes to isolate what had captured the software’s attention and zoom the simulated image toward that spot among the many slowly swirling lines, zooming down in scale until he reached a level where two specific trails of light were seen to be clearly moving together.

His hands lifted to the keyboard and he began to work the data.

In another few minutes he slowly slumped back, his mind attempting to absorb what he’d just seen.

The software had captured a shadowy image of a dim object, tumbling end over end, and moving in a rather peculiar way, almost cutting across the normal flow of traffic on the inner edge of the asteroid belt. It stood out enough to cause the software to automatically focus on it and immediately do an analysis of its trajectory, then run a particular subroutine that tracked back along its path in an attempt to discover where it originated.

The object, a relatively unimportant hunk of rock already identified and catalogued as NC1107H, was roughly the size of the Empire State building, first noticed by observers decades before, because of its orbit, which was slightly elliptical, causing it to track a path that made it stand out against the clutter of the asteroid belt itself.

What Marvin saw was at the very least unsettling, and would require greater study. But what left him feeling tense and with a growing sense of anxiety, was the forward projection of the object's path. Within the next week, the software predicted, it would collide with another object, KL4440R, an impressive mass whose circumference equaled that of the state of Texas. Ordinarily this would have resulted in a minor reshuffling of the chaotic racetrack order of the objects as they sped around the distant sun. But in this one case, the virtual image showed that the projected line of KL4440R’s flight would change after that collision. A single thin line representing its future path emerged from the thick jumble of lines and was shown racing off, away from the pack of circling debris. And it pointed, like an arrow, toward the center of the solar system. Toward Earth.

After rerunning the projection a second, and then a third time, his sense of alarm rising as the preliminary projection was confirmed, Marvin felt a tight lump in his stomach.

He hesitated only briefly to let the full implication of what he was seeing solidify in his brain.

Then he reached for the red phone.

It was difficult for Grigori Flezoff to believe that such a place could exist, here in the middle of the endless expanse that was Russia. Having been born and raised in the city once again called St. Petersburg, his entire concept of Russia was that of either lush fields or thick blankets of snow. But here he was, thousands of miles deep into the east, and slowly working his way through a fetid swamp amid the bones of trees long since burned to matchsticks.