[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (6 page)

Leaving the beach later that day, neither of them would have the presence of mind to think of the man when they discovered that their rental car was missing. Especially as they would hear from the police within ten minutes of calling them that it had already been found, twenty miles away on the other side of the island, locked and unharmed, at the ferry terminal linking the island to nearby France.

Without any evidence of a break-in anywhere on the car, the police would not waste much sleep on the investigation.

In the same building as the conference room where Neal and Laurie West had reviewed their report not two weeks ago for General Pickler, Neal sits, alone now, reviewing his notes. He is back on the run-down, outdated civilian side again, seemingly so far from the state of the art equipment and brusque but efficient air force officers.

This part of the building is not maintained by the deep pockets of the US Air Force, but instead by the ever-shrinking coin purse of the university’s physics department. Though the PCs are actually provided by their government-backed neighbors, it is clear that this part of the building represents the place that the colonel sends his outdated and unwanted PCs to die.

Over the past couple of weeks since the meeting with General Pickler, Neal had contrived to make himself unpopular again by incessantly demanding that the government look into retrieving one of the asteroids that had, without exception, landed near, but never actually on, land. Confounding what might have otherwise been a fairly reasonable proposition was the fact that they had all fucking well landed in deep water, thought Neal angrily.

But it
could
be done, he had said a hundred times. According to all reports from near the impact sites they had all survived the atmosphere to hit with apparently significant force, registering on seismographs around the globe, and causing minor but clearly defined shockwaves to wash up on nearby shores. This fact indicated that they were even denser than even Neal had speculated, making other theories that they must have disintegrated upon impact far from certain. Those theories were further refuted by the lack of any floating debris at the Alaskan site, which the coastguard had been dispatched to survey, or the Scottish site, which had been visited by the RAF and British Royal Navy.

But Neal’s arguments had fallen on deaf ears. The colonel, who had caught some of Neal’s enthusiasm in spite of himself, was controlled by higher powers that were more pragmatic and less curious than he, and both Neal and his theories had been brushed under the carpet.

So Neal had returned to his 1970s decorating nightmare of an office and worked his theories with his limited resources, sending his reports to any noted scientist he could find an e-mail address for. The only one who had responded was about to join him on the cheap side of the fence for a meeting.

Dr. Laurie West had found herself quietly impressed with Neal. But more than that, she felt the same shared pangs of frustration when she looked at him as she did when she remembered her own wasted shouts of protest before she had learned to play the surprisingly political game of modern scientific pursuit. Like it or not, the days of discovering life-changing breakthroughs in your basement laboratory were all but gone. The machinery necessary to explore the limits of our ever growing field of knowledge were simply too expensive to afford without navigating the bureaucracy of big business, or worse, big government. Nowhere was this truer than in astrophysics, Laurie thought as she climbed the stairs to Neal’s floor, where people like her and Neal simply must have access to big toys to see what they wanted to see.

As she turned the corner, she saw Neal. He looked tired, but as he rose to greet her she saw the same eagerness in his eye she had seen the day they had met in the control room. Since then she had been back in Washington, in her usual office. Unbeknownst to Neal, she had been party to the calls between General Pickler and Colonel Milton, and she wondered if Neal knew how vigorously the colonel had pursued Neal’s cause.

After receiving his latest reports, they had spoken briefly over the phone, but without the numbers and graphics in front of her it had sometimes been difficult to follow all of his arguments. Besides, it had been a while since she had found herself discussing a theory as interesting as this, and with someone as surprisingly capable as Neal was. Conversations like this were so much better in person. So she had arranged another trip to the Array a little sooner than she otherwise might have, and now found herself smiling warmly as she walked up to Neal, who watched her approach like a shipwrecked sailor sighting a sail on the horizon.

“Dr. West, I can’t say how grateful I am to you for coming all this way.” he said sincerely, taking her proffered hand.

“It’s Laurie, please.” she said with a friendly smile, “I have to say I was looking forward to it. You have some very interesting ideas, even if they are leading to some strange conclusions.”

“Yes, well, it certainly seems that way, but the numbers speak for themselves, don’t you agree?” he said, hopefully.

“Well apparently they aren’t speaking a language Washington can understand.” she said, laughing ruefully as she took a seat at the large table.

“Yes, well, maybe you can help me to translate it, or maybe just take out the big words.” he said with a smirk.

She surveyed the table which Neal had sequestered for his research, and the slew of papers, piled statistical analyses, physics textbooks, and copious notes that covered every inch of it. She felt a surge of curiosity and excitement for the coming debate. Though she always wanted to believe even the most outlandish theory, she would never allow herself to follow one blindly, and her powers of perception were of such a high level that she could play devil’s advocate to even the most well-founded and accepted theory.

While this one was currently accepted by only one man, she felt certain it still qualified as well founded, and looking up at the incisive eyes of that lone believer, she felt keen to start the battle of minds she sincerely hoped she was going to lose.

But before that, she would need some ingredients to stir the proverbial soup.

“OK,” she said, “we’re going to need coffee, cookies, water, a whiteboard, and more coffee.”

He laughed out loud, feeling a surge of hope at the arrival of this prospective ally, “With pleasure, Laurie, with absolute pleasure!”

* * *

Three hours later, they had lost none of their enthusiasm and the room had become strewn with even more papers, while the three large whiteboards they had wheeled in were well covered with often conflicting equations, and diagrams depicting angles of entry and orbit. Laurie had brought so much rigor to his thinking that he was almost ashamed that he had presented his thoughts to anyone without putting them to this test first. But neither of them could doubt now that this rigor was only strengthening his conclusions.

Several things had kept Neal up after the meteors had made their scattered impacts on Earth, most of which were merely circumstantial: that they had landed near land, but never on it was curious, as was the fact that they had all landed in patches of deep water or underwater trenches that veered unusually near to land. But despite General Pickler’s opinion of him, Neal was not one to wildly pursue conspiracy theories and these apparent coincidences had no more impact on him than they had had on a man of the general’s unimaginative disposition.

The thing that had peaked his interest was that they had all made it to those oceanic impacts at all.

While an ultrasonic entry to an atmosphere as thick as ours is always destructive, you could never predict exactly how the vagaries of shape, mass, constitution, and density would combine with the prime factors of angle-of-entry and speed to affect an arriving meteor’s ability to survive the onslaught.

You could, however, say that increased size also increased the probability that the mass would survive the introduction to our planet and make it to the surface. So at a given angle of entry, there was a size above which it was very likely that some part of it would make it all the way, and conversely there was a line below which it was inordinately unlikely that it would.

Between these two wannabe-absolutes was a range where factors like shape and density held more sway, though the degree to which they would affect the outcome was harder to predict than the blunter factor of being very big or very small.

“Our eight friends,” Neal had explained to Colonel Milton, then to General Pickler, and had reiterated to Laurie’s nods of understanding at the beginning of their conversation, “fall in the bottom of this range of mixed probability.

“Specifically,” he had continued, “the odds were that they each had on average a roughly 1 in 46 chance of impacting the surface, based on our estimates of weight against the norms of meteor showers in the past.

“Now those are odds we have all faced many time in Vegas, sadly, but multiply that likelihood that one of them would impact to cover all eight making it and you have the same increase in probability that you will win eight times in a row at a roulette wheel.

“Specifically, the chance that all eight would impact is closer to 1 to twenty trillion, roughly.” Or 1:20,047,612,231,936, as he had written on the whiteboard for effect.

Once again, Neal was not one for flights of fancy, but above one in a million, he started to get curious. At the very least this probability had to warrant some exploration. This had been the crux of his argument to Washington. General Pickler’s counter, for he was not a complete fool, it turned out, or, at least, one of his advisors wasn’t, had been that these estimates of likelihood were based on the relatively limited experience we had with interstellar masses, and maybe these were just of a type that we had not previously theorized.

While the general had agreed that this unusualness alone did make the asteroids of interest, he had then pointed out that the shallowest of the waters they had landed in was nearly two miles deep, roughly the depth the Titanic had sunk in. Given that it would cost a massive amount to raise any of them, but more than the difficulties of getting one of these rocks up, there was a much bigger problem. It was one thing to find one of the largest ships in history sitting on a rocky ocean bed, but the very thing that made these rocks of interest was their relatively small size. Finding them amongst their annoyingly also very rock-shaped surroundings presented a potentially insurmountable problem.

It was to these challenges that Neal had set his mind, and as he had discussed his ideas with Laurie, it had become enticingly clear to her that the problem had been a proverbial Pearl Harbor to his sleeping intellect, and had awakened a giant.

* * *

At 4am Laurie lay in her hotel bed, too mentally exhausted to relax. A late dinner of pizza had been eaten on a tablecloth of papers as they had gone through the final throws of their efforts to codify their conclusions. Eventually she had returned to the faceless Marriott Courtyard and collapsed.

She could remember the moment she realized his ideas were taking shape in her own mind. As she had started to defend them in ways he had not yet seen she had realized that she had joined him, and was now one of two people that believed that these objects could and should be found. It was an opinion that had lost him his short-lived respect at the Pentagon, but she had friends he did not. That and the fact that the two of them now had a plausible theory on how to find their quarry should make some measurable difference.

In Washington on Monday she would don a suit and bring to bear the powers of her title as Senior White House Scientific Advisor. On Monday, she would demand a meeting with the White House Chief of Staff, and then, hopefully with his blessing, she would go and see the president.

Pei Leong-Lam stood up as the long, green and brown bus entered the processing center at the East Gate of Weifang Base, home to the 26
^th
Infantry division of the Chinese Army and to their most prestigious officer training school. As the high, chain-link gate closed behind them and the six armed guards reassumed their positions in front of it, he reached up to pick up his large military duffle bag from amongst the identical piled bags on the rack above all their heads. He was careful to appear as strained by its weight as his cohorts were by their bags, even though his was essentially empty.

Up until two days beforehand the large duffle bag had contained only one item, itself another container of sorts, but now, though it appeared to be full, its contents were notably absent.

Pei Leong-Lam jumped down from the bus with his fellow officer candidates and formed up along a yellow painted line at the barked commands of the drill sergeant’s team of squad sergeants. The drill sergeant walked silently among them, eyeing up the officer candidates, assessing them with long-experienced eyes.

His scarred face was of Tibetan origin, and he had grown up on the plateau, the son of a Sherpa, joining the Chinese People’s Liberation Army years after it had first subjugated the Tibetan government. Eight years into his army career he had returned to his homeland with a rifle, and fought with cold calculation and efficiency alongside his fellow Chinese soldiers when they had reinvaded his home country to regain control.

As he surveyed the new meat, his calculating eye came to Officer Candidate Pei Leong-Lam. He noted the soldier’s bolt upright stance, the controlled breathing that belied his obvious strength and physical conditioning, but most of all he noted the complete lack of emotion shown on his face as his black eyes remained unflinchingly forward while he was surveyed.

The drill sergeant decided offhandedly to make this one his first example. He would push this one till he broke, or till he met the highest possible standards, either way it did not matter to Drill Sergeant Shih. The others would see from this moment what was expected of them, and what happened when his standards were not met.