Lord of All Things (48 page)

“Okay,” Hiroshi said, handing back the card. “What’s this about?”

The man who was apparently called Hopkins hefted his leather ID briefcase in his hand as though uncertain what to do with it. “We’d like you to watch some video footage. Over in the car,” he said, nodding toward the black limousine. “If you can make any sense of what you see there, we’ll tell you the rest.”

“If I get into this car,” Hiroshi asked, “will I be able to get out again when I choose to?”

The man’s face pinched into what was probably meant to be a smile. Perhaps his superiors needed to be told he wasn’t the best man for the job next time they needed to talk someone into an adventure late at night. “We don’t kidnap people, Mr. Kato. We’re asking for your help on behalf of the president of the United States.”

Wow. Even if that wasn’t true, it sounded hugely impressive. “Okay,” Hiroshi said. “Let me just go tell my friends.”

On the way back to the living room he took his phone from his pocket. He pressed one button to switch it on, then another to dial Rasmussen’s number.

“It’s me. Did you tell somebody from Defense where I was?”

“Hiroshi!” Rasmussen groaned. Bar music tinkled in the background. “Life would be a whole lot easier if you didn’t switch your phone off the whole time. I wanted to give you a heads up, but do you have any idea how many Alvarezes there are in San Francisco? Two pages in the phone book!”

“Fine, sorry. So this is serious?”

“I even called the White House to be sure. Yes. A couple of hours ago the threat level was raised to red alert. There’s some sort of crisis at sea, but in Russian sovereign territory, and they want your technical expertise. I don’t know anything more than that.”

“They’re here at the door, and they want me to climb into their big, black car.”

“I think in this instance you can do that.”

“Okay, thanks.” He hung up. Rodney and Allison were looking at him with fear in their eyes. “No need to worry,” he said. “This will only take ten minutes.”

Rodney took out his own phone. “I’ll film you getting into that car. And then I’ll call someone, and I’ll stay on the line until you get back here,” he declared grimly. “Just in case.”

The two men accompanied him to the car, opened the back door, and joined him on the seat. The taciturn one took out a laptop and logged on via a fingerprint scanner. It booted up in an instant. He passed it over to Hiroshi’s lap. “Here,” was all he said.

Hiroshi watched the video footage. It had obviously been taken on an island in the Arctic Ocean; some of the sequences had been filmed underwater.

“Once more, please,” he said when the screen went black.

The taciturn man pressed “Return,” and the whole thing started again from the beginning. Hiroshi felt a feverish excitement seize hold of him. How was this possible? These were images he had until this moment only seen in his deepest, strangest dreams.

“Where was this footage taken?” he asked. “And what would you like me to do?”

They told him. Hiroshi considered for a moment, then said, “Okay. I just need to call my mother, tell her something’s come up.” He saw Rodney standing in the living-room window with his telephone to his ear. “And say good-bye to my friends.”

“Your luggage,” said the man whose badge had identified him as Hopkins. “It’s kind of handy you’re ready to travel.”

“I’ll need a computer. And a multiband radio to go with it.”

“You’ll get them.”

They let him out, and he walked back into the house. Allison was waiting for him in the hall, still wide-eyed, and Rodney came to stand next to her, phone in hand. “So?” he asked.

“I have to go. Now. Right away.” He reached for his travel bag. “Thanks for everything. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

“You have to leave? Why? Has something happened?”

Hiroshi looked at him seriously. “Your aliens,” he said. “By the look of it, they’re here.”

In the end they were taken back to the sick bay, where they had no news of whatever might be happening next. But at least it looked as though nobody was preparing a nuclear strike. The ships continued to plow through the Arctic, from time to time an iceberg struck the side, and that was about all the entertainment on offer. At one point a soldier came to the sick bay to have a scrape bandaged. Charlotte overheard him telling the doctor that they were expecting a helicopter with “yet another” American from Amderma air base.

The helicopter arrived shortly after dinner. They couldn’t see the landing pad from the sick bay, but the sound was unmistakable. And shortly after that an officer appeared and asked Charlotte in Russian to come up the bridge. “No. Only her,” he insisted when Adrian and the others began to get up off their beds as well.

Charlotte was not a little surprised to see another figure standing in the middle of the bridge, deep in conversation with the admirals and other commanding officers. Hiroshi!

“How did you get here so fast?” she asked when he left the group and came over to greet her.

“Ask whoever had them call me,” Hiroshi answered with a wry grin. “Just a few hours ago I was with Rodney and Allison. Then all of a sudden some government agents turned up, drove me to an airport, and took me off by helicopter to a military airbase, where they…put me in a B-2 bomber. Unbelievable. I mean, I’ve seen photographs, of course, but when you’re actually standing in front of a machine like that you really think you’re in a science-fiction movie and the little green men are going to pop out from around the corner. An unladen B-2 without the full complement of weapons can fly halfway around the world at the speed of sound without needing to refuel.” He passed his hand through his hair, as though making sure his head was still on his shoulders. “It was interesting. I don’t ever want to do anything like that again in my life, but it was interesting.”

It struck Charlotte that he was unusually chatty, surprisingly so. He was also still rather green in the face. Maybe that was why.

“So?” she asked. “Can you make anything of all this?”

He puffed out his cheeks. “Well…Hrrm. I mean, sure, those are nanites. Nanobots. Nanotechnological machines, whatever else they are. Even if only because there’s no other explanation for what I saw in the footage. The only other possible explanation would be CGI. Special effects.”

Charlotte thought of Leon and the way he had vanished before her eyes. “This isn’t special effects. It all really happened.”

“Okay. Then…” He paused. “Come over here. I’m just loading one of my programs on the computer. It should be ready in a moment.” He smiled briefly. “The secret services of two countries are going to be all over my Internet connection, and then they’ll be on my binary code like flies after honey. Well, let them.”

They all sat down together at the conference table and gathered around Hiroshi, who had a chunky and somehow military-looking laptop before him. “In the dossier they gave me to read on the flight over there was something about legends surrounding Saradkov Island,” he said. “Supposedly more than a thousand years old. One is about a war between heaven and earth, and a black angel who fell down onto Saradkov and was buried in the ice. He was the leader of the heavenly hosts and, as the legend goes, if the ice ever melts, war will begin anew. Which is why it always had to be winter up here.”

The Russian admiral nodded. “An old Siberian folktale.”

“I can imagine how this story might actually contain memories of a real event—of a probe that shot down from space. A probe that uses nanotech machinery and that has some mission that we know nothing about.” Hiroshi folded his hands. “As I see it, this is how events unfolded: the probe struck Earth at some point and sank into the ice. It must have tried to activate itself and carry out its mission. We should imagine it as something like a seed: the nanites within it had a certain amount of energy and raw material at their disposal already. But when they were surrounded by millions of cubic meters of ice, they had no access either to further energy sources, or to a wide enough selection of elements—all they had were hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and they couldn’t carry out their mission with just those. So they did as much as they could and then they waited.”

“What for?” Whitecomb asked.

“For conditions to improve,” Hiroshi said. “And mostly for carbon.”

“Carbon?”

“Carbon is the smallest atom capable of forming four molecular bonds. Which is why it plays a crucial role in nanotechnological constructions.” Whatever was happening on the screen in front of him clearly required that he stop for a moment; he paused to think, then rapidly pressed a few keys. “This incident with the Dutch journalist,” he said as he worked. “The human body is composed of up to ten point seven percent carbon. For a body mass of seventy-five kilos, that’s about eight kilograms of carbon, meaning four by ten to the power of twenty-six atoms.”

Whitecomb snorted derisively. “You’re not seriously telling us that one human body contains enough carbon to completely steel-plate twelve square miles of island?”

“No, not in the least. But the nanites only needed to develop far enough to get unlimited access to the elements they needed. The ice was unforthcoming, and they had presumably already exploited the adjacent rocks for whatever they could use—I imagine that by the time they could assimilate the carbon in the journalist’s body they were just a hair’s breadth, so to speak, from rest of the resources they needed. Those eight kilos of carbon were the spark that started the blaze.”

Charlotte felt her gorge rise. She remembered Leon van Hoorn as an adventurous, cheerful fellow with a fondness for weak jokes—and now these men were talking of him as nothing but eight kilos of carbon. She heard Admiral Ulyakov saying, “Saradkov Island was surveyed even in Stalin’s time for mineral resources. There’s nothing there. Just rock.”

“Nothing worth exploiting with the power of human labor alone, perhaps,” Hiroshi replied. “But at the scale at which nanotechnology sees the world, there are resources almost everywhere. Once the nanites broke through to the ocean—if not before—they had everything they could ever need. Seawater contains every element there is, in solution. Granted, some of them are only there in trace amounts, but when you have as much seawater as you want and as much energy as you need, you can extract whatever you like.”

“Energy—now that’s a key point,” Whitecomb broke in. “One of the people advising the president—Dr. Drechsler or some such—said that the central question is where the nanites are getting their energy from. Nothing can happen without energy, he said.”

Hiroshi nodded. “That’s right. I suspect their energy is coming from within the earth. The nanites probably put down feelers several kilometers deep and are getting their energy from the temperature differentials.”

“From inside the earth? All the way up here?” Whitecomb said skeptically. “Does that give them enough energy for all that?” He pointed toward the island, shimmering darkly on the horizon like the gates of Mordor.

Hiroshi looked at the rear admiral without expression. “It’s a little-known fact that the earth’s core is almost as hot as the surface of the sun, and that it has not cooled significantly in the billions of years since planetary formation. So yes, I believe that it can supply enough energy for most purposes.”

Ulyakov leaned forward. “Doesn’t that mean we can just switch off their supply? If we cut off these…feelers down into the earth, they’re finished. So that’s what we must do!”

Hiroshi frowned as he listened to the interpreter. “The question is how we could do that,” he replied. “You mustn’t imagine there are just one or two thick pipes running down there that we could simply cut off. There are more likely to be millions of them, tubes too fine to see with the naked eye—think of it like a fungus putting down threads.”

“An atom bomb will get rid of fungus, too.”

“Not this one. The nanites can doubtless store energy, meaning that even after a total disruption, such as a subterranean nuclear explosion, they would still be able to build new connections.” Hiroshi glanced appraisingly at his screen. “To be honest, I doubt that an atom bomb would even have a chance to explode. It’s entirely possible that the nanites could take it apart faster than it can fall.” He cleared his throat and pulled the computer toward himself. “If you’ll excuse me. My program is ready to run. I want to try something. ”

“May we know what that is?” Rear Admiral Whitecomb asked in a tone that left no doubt that this was not just a question or even a request.

“I want to open communication with the nanites.”

“And how do you intend to do that?”

Hiroshi seemed to consider this point. “It would take me several hours to explain that in terms that you could understand. Actually doing it would take a few minutes. And it might not even work. I really think it’s best for me to try now and explain later.”

The rear admiral traded glances with the other military men around the table, then shrugged. “Okay. Try it.”

Hiroshi was already at work. His fingers danced over the keys, his gaze fixed on the bizarre diagrams and rapidly changing columns of figures on the screen. Connected to his computer by a cable was a red-orange box blinking with diodes in every color, which now sprang into hectic life. A multiband radio, somebody had said. Charlotte had no idea what that was, and she had no desire to find out. She just wanted to get out of there.

Outside, dark clouds were gathering, while snow and rain drove against the windows on the bridge. The ship began to pitch from side to side. Charlotte couldn’t help but recall the hours they had spent in the dinghy and shuddered at the memory. Though she was still stuck in this nightmare, at least she was no longer so cold. She looked at Hiroshi. What was he really doing? Sending radio signals to the nanites? To machines from outer space? Why did he think they would understand him?

Just then one of the officers watching for activity on the island called out, “Movement!” He leaned over and turned some dials. “The gate’s opening!”

In an instant they were all standing behind him, peering at his screen. All but Hiroshi, who carried on working as calmly as if he had heard nothing at all. Indeed, the gate had opened about halfway and showed a dark crack into the mountain. Admiral Ulyakov ordered his crew onto high alert in case artillery or some other weapon appeared from behind it.