The Omega Project (8 page)

“General, you can’t be serious.”

“It’s the only way. You have to convince GOLEM that you’re preparing in earnest to take over for the crewman in question. If the computer suspects otherwise, who knows how it will react.”

“With all due respect, there’s no way in hell I’m climbing into a cryogenic pod so that some souped-up computer can pour goo over me and turn me into a human Popsicle—not for a month or a year, or one day, for that matter!”

General Schall grimaced. “In that case, you leave us no choice. Mr. Vice President, I formally recommend we proceed with Omega. We’ll just have to hope, for the sake of those twelve astronauts and the rest of the world that the computer is functioning fine and the members of its crew are sound of mind and have not been coerced by the fossil fuel industry. It’s risky, but then Andria Saxon and the rest of her team knew that when they accepted GOLEM’s invitation to join the mission.”

I felt the blood rush from my face. “Andria’s one of the Omega astronauts? My Andria?”

“She didn’t tell you? Oh, that’s right, this was all kept top secret. Sorry, son. Best to enjoy your time together now, seeing as how she won’t be returning to Earth for another six years.”

7

I believe that Europa is the most promising place in the solar system for astrobiological potential.

—
R
OBERT
P
APPALARDO
, study scientist for the Europa mission at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, August 28, 2009

EAST ANTARCTICA
SEPTEMBER 25, 2028

Antarctica: coldest region on Earth—5.5 million square miles of ice that doubled in size each winter as the surface of its surrounding oceans freeze six feet thick. With an ice cap that averaged over a mile deep, the continent held 70 percent of the world’s freshwater. If this ice were ever to melt, sea levels would rise two hundred feet.

Larger than both Australia and the United States, Antarctica was also the highest continent on the planet, its landmass unevenly divided into eastern and western sections by the hundred-million-year-old Transantarctic mountain chain.

West Antarctica, located below the tip of South America, was the smaller of the two regions, encompassing two major ice shelves and Mount Erebus, an active volcano. Global warming was a far greater threat in West Antarctica, as much of its ice sheet lay below sea level.

East Antarctica, located on the Indian Ocean side of the mountain range, occupied two-thirds of the continent. A mountainous desert of ice, it was the coldest, driest, and most desolate location on the planet.

Antarctica was not always a frozen wasteland; its landmass was once a temperate zone, part of the supercontinent, Gondwana. Two hundred and fifty million years ago Gondwana broke apart, an event that caused Antarctica to separate and drift over the equatorial seas. Coniferous forests dominated the landmass during the Cretaceous period, a green habitat that supported Antarctica’s dinosaur population.

Twenty-three million years ago the Drake Passage opened below South America, further isolating the continent. Oceanic currents and tectonic plate movements combined to push Antarctica to its present location over the South Pole where colder temperatures attributed to a drop in planetary carbon-dioxide levels, decimating the forests while leaving in its place a permanent ice cap that has covered the entire landmass over the last six million years.

As the Earth revolved around the sun, our planet was also rotating 23.4 degrees on its axis. From the spring equinox on March twentieth until the vernal equinox on September twenty-second, the South Pole was tilted away from the sun, casting Antarctica into six months of frigid darkness. The sun returns in late September, warming the continent through February.

Despite its frigid temperatures, Antarctica was home to the most fertile oceanic feeding habitat on Earth, its surrounding seas forming a convergence zone where cold water meets warmer currents flowing down from the north. Nourishing plant and animal life, Antarctic seas attracted everything from giant schools of tiny krill to pods of blue whales, the largest creatures ever to inhabit our planet.

*   *   *

The Boeing CH-47 Chinook heaved and rattled, its twin 4,733 horsepower engines commanding its pair of tandem rotating blades to elevate the 24,000 pound helicopter and its crew into the crisp Antarctic air. Powered by a combination of hydrogen fuel cells and a coveted supply of jet fuel held at the Casey Station outpost, the converted military transport had just enough range to deliver its crew and my cursed uncle and me to our destination on Ross Island.

I pressed my forehead against the cargo bay’s frosted window, gazing out at the seemingly endless white landscape. My eyes followed the chopper’s shadow as it crossed Wilkes Land, ABE instantaneously feeding my mind information:

WILKES LAND. LOCATION: EAST ANTARCTICA.

A FROZEN DESERT OF ICE, THREE MILES THICK. CONCEALED BENEATH THE ICE SHEET IS THE LARGEST METEOR IMPACT CRATER ON EARTH. DISCOVERED BY NASA’S GRACE SATELLITE TEAM, THE CRATER IS THREE HUNDRED MILES WIDE AND WAS CREATED BY THE CELESTIAL IMPACT OF AN OBJECT THIRTY MILES IN DIAMETER. THE IMPACT OCCURRED APPROXIMATELY 250 MILLION YEARS AGO, RESULTING IN THE PERMIAN-TRIASSIC EXTINCTION, THE LARGEST EXTINCTION EVENT IN HISTORY. THE IMPACT WIPED OUT 99 PERCENT OF ALL LIFE-FORMS ON THE PLANET—AN EVOLUTIONARY PREREQUISITE THAT LED TO THE RISE OF THE DINOSAURS. THE IMPACT IS NOW CREDITED WITH INITIATING THE TECTONIC RIFT THAT CAUSED THE BREAKUP AND SEPARATION OF THE GONDWANA SUPERCONTINENT, LEADING TO THE FORMATION AND PRESENT-DAY RELOCATION OF THE SEVEN MAJOR CONTINENTS.

I blinked away the information overload, preferring to obsess over the thoughts that had dominated my every waking moment over the last twenty-four hours.

It had begun with a call to Andria—a conversation that quickly degenerated into a shouting match. How could she have accepted a six-year mission to Europa without telling me? Did she expect me to wait for her? How would she react if our roles were reversed?

In the heat of battle I decided not to mention anything about my trip to the Pentagon or that I’d be joining her aboard
Oceanus
for the Omega practice run. By the time I phoned her back three hours later, Andie and her fellow crewmen were already en route to the South Pole, all means of communicating with the outside world silenced.

A harsh katabatic wind buffeted the chopper, separating me from my thoughts. Three days earlier, the sun had peaked above the Antarctic horizon, bringing an end to six months of wintery darkness. Despite the returning daylight, spring would not arrive until mid-November, the sea ice finally thawing in January.

“Robbie, you okay?”

I turned to my uncle, who was seated next to me. The two of us were dressed in thermal long johns, ski pants, and boots, and were seated on our goose-down parkas, the hard bench seats no picnic on our bouncing buttocks. “I was just thinking about Andria.”

“Your problem is that you think too much. You’ll be seeing her in about six hours. Which reminds me, it’s time for your next shot.”

“I told you, I’m committed to the Omega trial but I’m not being frozen.”

“And I told you, GOLEM will never allow you on board
Oceanus
without blood work. The Omega astronauts have already received a month’s worth of shots. You’ll need to double up on your protocol over the next two weeks, right up until the moment the crew is frozen. At that time, you can inform the computer that you’ve determined the suspected crewman is fine to stay with the mission, and that instead of being held in cryogenic stasis you’ll be using your designated sleep time to catch up on your reading. That’ll give you another four weeks to observe GOLEM.”

My response was silenced by another wave of turbulence, the violent wind gusts peppering the Chinook with ice particles as the airship soared west over the Transantarctic mountain range, heading for the Ross Ice Shelf.

Formed and fed by eight mammoth glaciers, the Ross Ice Shelf was a six-hundred-mile-long, five-hundred-mile-wide sheet of ice, a half-mile thick. Floating atop Antarctica’s Southern Ocean, this sheer white cliff occasionally fractured, calving city-size icebergs into the Ross Sea, which formed the shelf’s southwestern border.

Another eighty minutes passed before the military transport slowed to hover over McMurdo Station.

Established in 1955, located on Ross Island’s Hut Point Peninsula, McMurdo Station was a research center shared by scientists throughout the world. Functioning like a small town, the southernmost community in the world featured four airport runways on hard ice, a harbor, and more than one hundred prefabricated buildings, including dormitories, a commissary, gymnasium, general store, post office, barbershop, a radio and television station, chapel, and an aquarium. Buildings were numbered based on the order in which they were built. During winter months, it was not unusual for these structures to outnumber McMurdo’s residents.

The Chinook shuddered violently as it landed on the helipad’s permanent ice. Our arrival summoned a four-wheel-drive military vehicle. Its rear axle sported triangular-shaped traction belts and the front tires had been replaced with skis. An electric heater, installed beneath the hood, kept the engine block from cracking.

Securing my jacket’s hood over my head, I climbed down from the chopper to chase after my uncle in the glacial cold.

There is cold, there is freezing cold, then there is bone-rattling, witch’s tit, get-me-the-fuck-outta-here cold. Three days ago, I had boarded a solar-powered train in Orlando. The dawn temperature that day had been a balmy 82°F. As I stepped out into the Antarctic dawn, the wind-chilled air was minus five. Overhead, a cobalt-blue sky was streaked with a neon lime-green ghost of color. The charged particles of the aurora australis appeared to slither a snake’s dance toward Mount Erebus, the twelve-thousand-foot-high active volcano looming to the east.

The wind howled across the compound, stinging my ears and crystallizing tears in my unprotected eyes. The truck’s warmth beckoned and I shoved my uncle inside the back of the vehicle, then slid in next to him. I slammed the door shut, silencing the continent’s retreating winter. My body was trembling.

The driver was dressed head to toe in an internally heated environmental suit. Removing his mask, he turned to greet us, revealing a mop of straw-colored hair and flushed cheeks. “Major Phillip Gazen. Welcome to the icebox, General. My instructions are to take you and your nephew to the CSEC for an oh-six-hundred briefing.”

“Where’s the rest of the Omega team?” I asked.

“Two of the team—a man and a woman—are doing prep work in the Crary labs. The others are already at the deployment site, thirty-seven miles to the northwest. The ice sheet’s a mile thick out there, blasted by a katabatic wind so cold it’ll quick-freeze your nut sack into ice cubes within two minutes. Enjoy the tropics of McMurdo while you can, gentlemen. You’ll soon be experiencing the true definition of Antarctic cold.”

Lovely …

*   *   *

The driver wove the growling vehicle toward the center of the compound and the Crary Science and Engineering Center, the largest facility on Ross Island. Laid out as a series of three prefabricated buildings linked by a long shaftlike corridor, the CSEC’s interconnected phases totaled 46,500 square feet of workspace.

Major Gazen parked at the top of the hill in front of the entrance to the first and largest of the CSEC’s three rectangular buildings—a two-story structure elevated on pilings five feet above its rocky foundation. “Welcome to the Crary Center. This building is Phase I. Your briefing will take place in forty minutes in the conference room of Phase II; just follow the long ramp into the next building. Make yourselves at home, gentlemen, there’s coffee and sandwiches set up for you in the library upstairs. Oh, one last thing: Because of the dry windy conditions, there’s no smoking, candle lighting, or incense burning allowed anywhere on McMurdo Station. See you after the briefing.”

“Major, wait. Where can I find the woman from the Omega team?”

“Hell if I know. Try the women’s room.”

I slammed the truck door, muting Gazen’s laughter. Hustling after my uncle, I followed him up a concrete ramp leading to the Crary Center’s air-locked double doors.

The interior of Phase I resembled a modern hospital without the smell of sick people. Its corridor was white tiled, its doorjambs trimmed in pink. There were labs and equipment rooms and offices, everything open—but no one to be found.

“Like a ghost town,” I muttered.

“The sun may be up, but we’re still four months away from the Ross Sea opening to ships,” my uncle explained. “I bet there’s less than a hundred people on this entire outpost. I need to find a bathroom.”

“I need to find Andria.”

Leaving my uncle, I followed the main corridor until it connected to a long sloping ramp that led into the building known as Phase II. The structure was divided into an Earth Sciences pod and an Atmospheric Sciences pod. Entering the latter, I hurried through a maze of offices, quickly lost my bearings, and found myself in a short hall that dead-ended at closed double doors.

A nameplate identified the interior as
TELESCOPE
. I could hear someone speaking inside and entered.

The chamber was dark, save for the fluorescent glow emanating from four computer monitors mounted in a staggered formation above a sophisticated GPS station. A silver-haired man who looked to be in his late seventies was working at the terminal, conversing with another party on a landline.

“… according to the last set of images, Arthur, the absolute magnitude of 1997 XF11 has changed. Either the asteroid’s a lot bigger than we thought, or its trajectory was altered when it passed Jupiter. Either way, I want you and Carol to recalculate the error eclipse for the pass on October twenty-sixth.”

Hanging up the phone, the scientist swiveled around in his chair to face me. “Another visitor? It’s getting pretty crowded around here. Lowell Krawitz, International Astronomical Union.”