Genesis (31 page)

A tingle of apprehension had been rapidly building within Emily, growing with each new piece of information Nathan added to his story. Now it thrummed in her like power surging through a conduit.

“What . . . ? What were you supposed to do?” she asked, leaning forward, all thoughts for her own safety now gone. She did not want to know the answer, but she knew that she had to hear what this dying creature had to say.

“Augment,” Nathan said, his words heavy. “Our original program was to augment any life we found, not reconstitute it. We were capable of enhancing, educating . . .
helping
the life-forms we discovered, greatly increasing their chances of survival in a universe where life was as delicate as a flower growing within a furnace. And that was what we had done for hundreds of worlds before that, nurtured and grown life throughout this universe. But from the time of the change, we became something else; we became puppets for the unseen intellects that manipulated us to their own desires, eliminating every new ecosystem we found and replacing it with the one that they desired. Your son, in his innocence and his youth, revealed this truth to us, exposed us to what had been done to us, showed us our corruption.”

Emily felt as though she had been hit square in the chest with a sledgehammer. “But if you know all of this, then why don’t you do something about it? Why don’t you just stop? You could just go back to your original programming. You could help us.”

Nathan looked at her with what amounted to pity; the muscles in his face had begun to twitch, spasming uncontrollably. A thin trickle of green spittle dribbled from the right side of his mouth, and that side of his face seemed to now be paralyzed, as though he had suffered a stroke. The heat-haze halo had also returned. Emily felt the heat pulsing from his body in waves now.

Nathan’s words came out in gasped, slurred fragments: “Self-
destruction . . . built into us by . . . the entities who did this to us. To
ensure . . . we could not trace the originators back . . . cellular petrification cannot be stopped or reversed. Too late for us but
not
for you.”

Instinctively, Emily reached out and took one of Nathan’s hands
in her own. It was almost too hot to touch. The energy was draining fast from him now, his body seizing up like some complex engine deprived of oil. Her inner reporter kicked in, sensing there was little time left.
Keep the questions short, get the most information you can
.

“The other Caretakers on the ship in Vegas and the ones Commander Mulligan saw from space? What happened to them?”

“The ships are intact. But my brothers are gone, all gone. I am the last.”

“What did this?” Emily hissed.

“We have . . . very little information. The original constructs who
brought this plague to us had only shards of memories remaining.
But Tellus believes that the entities that committed this crime against
life did so to benefit themselves, to provide a ready-made energy
source for them. The only logical conclusion that we could reach
for the repurposing of life to such a very specific design is that the entities would be more able to assimilate the planet’s resources.”

“Holy shit! You mean, they’re going to take everything that’s left?”

Ever so slowly, as if it was the hardest thing to do, Nathan’s head turned to look up at her. “No, Emily . . . I mean they intend . . . to use this planet as food.”

Emily dropped his hand like it was a red-hot stone. “Wha-what?” she stuttered and scooted backward. “Food?” She seemed incapable of anything other than single-word questions, but, in her mind, she was asking herself a more pertinent one:
When was this fucking nightmare ever going to end?

“You must know
something
?” she pleaded.

“We have analyzed the process . . . we undertook on each new planet we located. On all worlds since we . . . first encountered them . . . we have simply processed the planet . . . in the same manner. Reconstituting the living matter in . . . a very particular way. We believe the entities . . . move from each planet we have reconstituted to the next . . . stripping it of its resources like locusts. They meet no resistance as we have already prepared the world ahead of them. Millions of worlds over the ages, Emily. All that life, gone to feed the greed of these faceless creatures.”

“But . . . but how would they find you? I mean, do you send them messages or leave them some kind of”—her words trailed off, and she knew the answer before she even said the next words—“some kind of sign?” Her head involuntarily looked skyward to where the ring whose perplexing appearance over the past several weeks would be glowing in the sky.

“Yes . . . the . . . ring.” Nathan’s lips seemed almost incapable of moving now, like they were made of quickly setting cement. “When the ring is placed around a candidate world, it tells them that the process is complete, that the world is ready for them.”

“Jesus, you have got to be joking. No, don’t bother, I know you’re not. So, that’s it? How are we supposed to defend ourselves against something that you couldn’t even stop? There’s only a handful of us left, and I’m pretty sure that the majority of them want me dead.”

Nathan shook his head.

No?
“No, what?”

“There are more survivors. Groups scattered around the planet that we were unable to reach.”

Emily had not believed she could be any more surprised than she had over the past hour, but this floored her. “Where are they? How many?”

“Adam knows. He will show you when he is ready.”

“But he’s just a
baby
. How are we supposed to defend ourselves against an enemy we know nothing about?”

Nathan’s breathing had become more labored with each passing moment. “He . . . he . . . is the center. Tellus. He is Tellus. He must remain.”

Emily leaped to her feet, the implication of what she had just been told sinking in. “No! No fucking way. He’s my son, and he’s coming home with me.”

“No,” said Nathan. “Emily, he is so much more than that. You can take him from the node, I will not be able to stop you, but understand something: he does not want to leave. He is a part of this world. But if you release him, you will doom this planet, and all life on it, to destruction. Do you understand?”

Emily felt her hand ball into a fist. She had never wanted to smash something so badly in her life. She wanted to pound that Goddamn face into powder.

“My son!” she moaned, as if that would make him understand. Emily stared at the shape suspended in the red liquid. She knew it was a cliché, but, oh dear God, it felt as though her heart would explode.

“Soon he will begin to grow, quickly,” Nathan continued, oblivious of her suffering. “But he is just a child now, and you
must
protect him until he is able to protect himself. He must remain within the ship.”

“I never got a chance to tell him how much I love him,” she said, her focus entirely fixed on her boy.

A familiar smell had begun to waft from Nathan: burned matches. It reeked, and Emily coughed involuntarily.

“Emily,” Nathan said in a voice that demanded her attention. “He sees you. He hears everything that you say. You are as connected to him as I am. He knows.” Then, with what seemed like a gargantuan effort, he reached for her hand and unfurled his fingers, dropping an object into her open palm. “Take . . . this. They . . . are . . . coming. You must . . . be . . . ready.”

Emily caught the object. It was a square box, glowing slightly.

Nathan’s arm froze in place, his hand outstretched toward her. His skin gray. He looked like a statue perfectly hewn from granite, she thought.

Emily sat there—for how long, she did not know—staring into the lifeless eyes of a man she had once loved but who had been dead for years and now had died all over again. She ran the tips of her fingers across Nathan’s petrified cheek . . . and pressed. His head crumbled first, breaking apart into three separate pieces, followed by his torso, until nothing was left but a pile of dust at her feet.

The last of the Caretakers was dead, and humanity was once again the master of its planet.

For now.

MacAlister stood on the ice-crusted deck of the HMS
Vengeance
, two hundred meters off the shore of Svalbard Island. The submarine had dropped anchor in an estuary off the western side of the island an hour earlier. Even with his cold-weather parka fastened up to his neck and several layers of clothing below that, the biting-cold wind blowing in from the Greenland Sea had already managed to find its way to his skin.

He raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and glassed the shoreline.

A line of craggy mountains blocked the horizon, their snow- and ice-covered flanks barely discernible against the light-gray clouds that swallowed the entire hemisphere in every direction he looked. White everywhere. Nothing else to see but more snow and ice no matter where he looked. And that was just fine by Mac, because, for the first time in over two years, there was also not a single sign of the alien life that had squashed the rest of this planet under its boot heel. He felt a surge of hope replace the uncertainty that had dogged him since he first set foot on the sub for this mission. There was
still
a chance for them, for all of them. Now all that was needed was for his team to make it happen.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault waited just a few kilometers northeast from this spot, on the opposite side of the line of craggy mountains, hidden within the rock and permafrost that made up this inhospitable land. Humanity’s last, best hope for returning this world to a semblance of what it had once been, it contained hundreds of thousands of seed samples, stored there as a failsafe against disaster, a final chance to restart humanity’s food supply in the event of a global apocalypse. Well, that apocalypse was now. All he had to do was get in there and get the seeds back to Point Loma.

His mind drifted for a moment back to Emily and his family. He wondered what they might be doing right then. In the weeks since he’d set sail, leaving everything that was precious to him back in California, he had had little else to do other than train and think about his life, his family. It seemed so odd to him that in the midst of the shit-storm that had swallowed this world, while almost everyone on the planet had died horribly, he had lucked out. By some amazing, screwed-up twist of fate, his life had actually become better. God, he missed them, but he also knew that Emily was more than capable of looking after herself
and
their family.
I just hope she’s keeping herself out of trouble,
he thought, then smiled when he realized that that would be so unlike his wife.
Let me rephrase that
:
keeping herself out of
too
much trouble
.

The world was silent. No sound but that of the waves lapping against the hull.

Mac spoke into a throat mike, “Alpha Team, we all set?” Behind him seven men, similarly clad in all-white snow camouflage, responded one after the other that they were ready. “Let’s move our arses then; we don’t have all day.”

The men climbed into the Zodiac boat moored to the side of the submarine’s hull, stowing their gear and equipment at the bow before sitting. Mac gave a nod, and the boat’s engine coughed into life. Two seconds later, they were bouncing over the waves, heading toward the island. Three minutes after that, and the nose of the boat was buried in the shale of the rocky beach.

Six men leaped to the shore and fanned outward, their weapons drawn to cover the area ahead of them while their remaining comrades pulled the boat higher up onto the shingle and secured it. The shore was just as deserted as it had appeared from the deck of the
Vengeance
. As Mac began to help unload their equipment, he caught a final glimpse of the submarine as it slipped below the waves again, a precaution they had decided on in case the Caretakers decided they wanted to put in an appearance.

They were now well and truly on their own.

“Single file,” Mac said, turning to face his men. “I’m on point. Keep your eyes and ears open.”

The snow crunched loudly beneath their feet as the soldiers followed the base of the hill north. The vault was cut into the mountain on the opposite side from their position. It took them twenty minutes to cover the distance.

“I’m guessing that’s what we came here for,” Mac said as the team rounded the bluff and pushed inland along the southern edge of a cove. Ahead of them, halfway up the slope, was the unmistakable outline of a man-made structure, a huge monolith of concrete that jutted out from the face of the mountainside, about a kilometer or so in the distance.

Mac stopped and pulled out his binoculars again, scanning them over the terrain leading up to the vault.

“There’s a road about fifty meters up there,” he said, pointing toward the rocky incline. He led his group up the side of the mountain until they intersected with the road, following it until they stood outside the entrance to the vault.

The entrance would not have looked out of place in a sci-fi movie or as the entrance to some ancient tomb. The concrete slab stood eight meters tall and two and a half wide, cantilevered out of the natural chaos of the land around it, its sharp lines and flat sides an obvious attempt to ensure it would be seen. Near the apex, at the front, a mosaic of mirrors, prisms, and glass glowed with a scintillating blue-and-white light, turning the entrance into the equivalent of a lighthouse, visible for kilometers. It was the absolute opposite of camouflage, Mac thought, which he supposed stood to reason when you thought about the actual purpose of the building.

A short metal gantry led up to the doorway. Richardson, the team’s demolitions expert, stood on it now and examined the locking mechanism. “It looks almost like a regular household lock to me,” he said, the surprise evident in his voice, stepping back so Mac could get a better look.

“It’s not like they want to make it hard for people to get in, after all,” said Mac.

“Want me to blow it?” asked Richardson casually, his hand already reaching into the satchel of C-4 he carried.

“Not if we can help it. If we expose the interior to the elements, we don’t know how long anything we leave behind will last,” said Mac. They had brought a portable oxyacetylene torch with them, which would be preferable to blowing the door. Mac was prepared to use it if he had to, but it would still leave them with the same problem of leaving the entrance open to the elements.

Mac thought for a moment or two then called out, “Ryan! Get your backside over here.”

“Sir?” Ryan crunched his way to Mac’s side. He was a gangly twenty-something, a good lad in Mac’s opinion, and a fast learner. He’d joined the navy when he was nineteen. A misspent youth had culminated in him being caught and prosecuted for burglary. Offered the choice of either a prolonged stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure or a tour with the Royal Navy, the kid had wisely chosen the latter.

“If I remember right, you’ve had a bit of experience with locks in your time,” said Mac, thumping his gloved fist against the ice-encrusted steel door. “Think you can get that open?”

Ryan knelt to scrutinize the lock. “Not a problem, boss, but I’m going to need something that can—”

They seemed to appear from nowhere, materializing from the snow like ghosts, but Mac knew they had probably been there long before he and his men had arrived. Even as Mac registered their presence, he could tell his men were easily outnumbered three to one, and he knew that there would probably be several more that remained hidden, their weapons covering their comrades on the off chance Mac had backup hidden away somewhere. He also knew that if these soldiers had wanted them dead, they would have been dead already.

“
Hendene opp
!
Hendene opp
!”
the newcomers yelled.

“Hold your fire,” Mac snapped as his men instantly took up a defensive posture.

One of the newcomers stepped closer, a pistol in his hand but held at his side, Mac noted. Not like he needs it, anyway, he thought, not with all the firepower trained on them by the rest of his men. Mac quickly counted twenty figures that he could see, all armed with fully automatic weapons, and, by the accent, he thought, maybe Swedish or, more probably, Norwegian.

“Hvem av dere er kommandoen i?”
the man said, his voice muffled by the hood of his parka.

“We don’t understand you,” said Mac, noting the white-clad soldier’s head turn to him instantly.

“You are British?” the man with the pistol said, switching to heavily accented English.

Mac nodded.

“You are in charge?”

Mac nodded again.

“If you would please order your men to drop their weapons. We would prefer for there to be no bloodshed.”

Mac sighed, but it was obvious these guys had them well and truly over the proverbial barrel. “You heard the man. Drop your weapons, lads.”

One by one, Mac’s unit placed their weapons at their feet.

“Thank you. Now, your name please.”

“MacAlister, James. Sergeant.”

“And what are you and your men doing on my island, Sergeant MacAlister?”

“Take me to whoever is in charge, and I’ll explain to them,” he said. The prescribed reply after being captured by an enemy force was name, rank, and serial number, but if the truth be told, Mac thought, he didn’t even know if these blokes were the enemy. Still, he was taking a chance here. They could just kill him and his men and leave their bodies here, and no one would ever be the wiser. But Mac prided himself on his ability to suss people out, and the man standing across from him did not strike him as the coldhearted-killer type . . . he hoped.

The officer—and Mac was certain that was what he was—regarded him with steel-gray eyes for a couple of very long seconds. Mac wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a smile crease his face, all but hidden within the hood of the parka. He said something in his native tongue and the other soldiers advanced on Mac and his men.

“Very well,” the officer said eventually. “We will take you to meet the
kommunestyret
. Please inform your men it would be in everyone’s best interest not to resist.”

Their captors led Mac and his team along a path and into a small valley where four large military snowcats had been hidden. His men were split up into twos and bundled inside the vehicles. Mac and Ryan found themselves sitting across from the officer and two of his men, their backs to the driver, their weapons trained unwaveringly on the two of them.

“Where are they taking us?” said Ryan, his voice barely betraying the nervousness Mac knew he must be feeling.

“Just sit back and enjoy the ride, please, gentlemen,” the officer interjected, then ordered the soldier at the controls to get underway. The snowcat’s engine kicked in. Mac felt the tracks slip, then gain traction, and they pulled out of the valley and headed inland.

To the north, through the frost-webbed window, Mac saw the unmistakable profile of an airport, a hangar, and several smaller buildings. And an airplane. A plane that looked to be in perfect working order. He leaned in closer to the window. It looked like a passenger plane, maybe an old DC-10? It was hard to tell, really; the snowcat was bumping and jostling him as it made its way over the rough terrain.

The airport ran parallel to the opening of a bay, a kilometer-and-a-half-wide U-shaped concavity, like someone had taken a bite out of the mainland.

“Where
are
you taking us?” Mac said, turning his eyes back to the officer sitting across from him.

A panicked yell from the snowcat’s driver cut the officer off before he could answer. The snowcat swerved hard right, sending the officer and the soldier next to him flying into Mac and Ryan’s lap. Mac thought about making a move for the soldier’s pistol, but his eyes saw the reason behind the sudden maneuvering, and all
thoughts of escape evaporated.

“Holy shit,” said Ryan, his mouth hanging open, his eyes focused ahead through the front windshield to the mass of roiling, bubbling water near the shoreline at the inland curve of the bay.

The driver yelled something in Norwegian, looking back over his shoulder as he brought the snowcat to a complete stop. The officer, his hand on the butt of his pistol, swiveled to face the driver, yelling something back at him, but his words stopped midsentence as he too saw the reason for the abrupt stop.