The Orion Protocol (6 page)

8

Fiddling with the Goddard security guest pass clipped onto her jacket pocket, Angela looked over John Fisher’s shoulder at the TOLAS Mars photo now loaded onto the mainframe.

The planetary geologist was working with the image, using shape-from-shading algorithms to pull out even more visual detail.

“Whoever did this is good.”

Many of the satellite images of the Cydonia region, where the Face on Mars was found, were distorted by camera angles or sun angles or otherwise made useless for research because of low resolution, transmission glitches, or cloud cover. But not this one. This image was absolutely perfect.

“Jesus, every little rill and berm is so pristine. And this came from where?”

“Over the transom,” Angela said. “How about the pyramids?”

“Too good. Much too good. We can crack this.”

“Ya think?” Angela glanced at Eklund, but his expression was guarded.

“They can run, but they can’t hide.”

In their obsession with finding supporting data for the Intelligence Hypothesis, Eklund and Fisher routinely pored over every Mars satellite photo as it came in and every frame ever released of the Cydonia region in the NASA archives. But there had never been a capture like this; Eklund was certain it was not something they’d have missed.

“John? Check the mission code on this thing.”

“Sure. This is so weird, though, it’s like the dream capture of all time.”

Angela enjoyed watching Fisher whack and slash at the keyboard. It was like a virtuoso piano recital.

“What’s mission code?” she asked, leaning closer toward the screen.

“Each frame dumped from the satellite buffer carries code numbers to ID the origin for archiving.”

Fisher enlarged the sequence and then stopped, staring at the monitor.

“Shit,” he said.

“Shit what?” Angela stabbed two blunt-cut wings of dark hair behind her ears and out of her face. Eklund read off the code in an oddly official tone.

“F26/OP5/1/394MO.”

“Shit diddly.” John smacked angrily at the keyboard, enlarging the sequence on-screen. “Well, they knew what they were doing, no question about it. No telltale little insert edges, no outlines. Smart-ass little fucks . . . sorry.”

“John’s pissed because with all the real anomalies on the planet that we’re trying to get taken seriously or at least looked at with an open mind, this kind of thing getting dumped on the media just makes it so much harder . . .”

“But it’s a hoax, right?” Angela knew something was going on that she wasn’t quite getting. Eklund sidestepped the question.

“Let’s just go in on a pyramid until it falls apart.”

“Absolutely.”

Fisher scrolled up and zoomed in radically until the image broke up, hitting the faceted mounds on Mars with the digital kitchen sink.

“Damn. What we’re looking for is evidence of tampering, little soft spots, little giveaways here and there where something on the original image was erased so the pyramid image could then be supered in.”

“But it’s not cooperating.”

“No, ma’am.” John fumed, exhausting his bag of tricks. “I’m seeing no apparent degradation, no visible tampering or erasure. Maximum pixel resolution, full gray scale, format is mission-correct. Fuck me.”

He rolled back from the keyboard and flicked a sidelong look at
Eklund. Angela saw a world of unspoken information flash between them.

“All right. Will somebody please tell me what the problem is? Or do I have to kill one of you to make the other one talk?”

“Sorry. This is the problem, down here.” Eklund scrolled back to the code sequence. “F26/OP5/1/394MO. . . .
F
means ‘frame number.’ OP is ‘orbital pass’—”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Angela refocused on the screen. “So, this was the twenty-sixth picture, taken on the fifth orbital pass . . .”

“And one-three-ninety-four is the date . . .”

“ ‘January third, 1994 . . .”

“And
MO
identifies the mission for archiving:
Viking Orbiter was VO
;
Mars Global Surveyor
is
MGS
. . .”

But Angela had already worked it out.

“This is from
Mars Observer
.”

No one spoke. In the quiet hum of the Goddard workstation, the words
Mars Observer
seemed to carry a kind of emotional weight, like invoking the name of a martyred saint. Angela looked from one scientist to the other.

“But that’s not possible, right?”

John looked somber, as if grieving a personal loss. Eklund nodded.

“
Mars Observer
was launched in late ninety-one with Mars Orbital Insertion set for mid-ninety-three. Perfect launch, perfect wake-up, status was one hundred percent, right on schedule.”

“And then it disappeared.”

“Final midcourse corrections went right by the numbers, boom-boom-boom. Then, around forty-eight hours out . . .”

“Phhht! Gone. Two billion dollars and ten years of work.”

“Do they know why?”

Eklund shrugged, keeping a neutral expression on his face.

“NASA says the radio was turned off by accident and they never regained contact. Point is,
Mars Observer
went dark in ’93 and no imaging was ever sent back. Period.
Nada
. Zero.”

Angela indicated the photo dated 1994 still being refreshed on-screen.

“So, this is a picture that can’t exist.”

John ejected the TOLAS disk and handed it to Angela.

“You might want to get a second opinion,” Eklund said.

Angela thought about the other Mars satellites gone missing,
Mars Climate Orbiter
and
Mars Polar Lander
. Images from angry House hearings came to mind: an embarrassed Dan Goldin, former NASA administrator, on CNN and testifying about bungled metric fuel conversions, basic math failures messing up the satellite’s telemetry. It hadn’t made much sense at the time and didn’t now.

Neither Eklund nor Fisher said anything.

Suddenly Angela’s neck and shoulders ached and she felt dead on her feet, even in her comfortable running shoes. Her ankles hurt and her lower back was stiffening up and she wanted to just go home and lie down in a hot bath more than anything she could think of.

“Look, guys, I really appreciate your help, but I need to go away and think about all this. And I’m sure I don’t have to say it, but . . .”

“Don’t worry. It won’t leave this room.”

“Thanks.”

Angela shouldered her bag, slipping the disk with its Tricks of Light and Shadow back into its original envelope. She would not have been entirely surprised if the Mars CD had emitted some portentous sci-fi hum and sweep, and then folded itself up and disappeared into a parallel dimension.

“One more thing. What you said before about
Mars Observer
and the radio? That’s the cardinal sin, isn’t it?”

Both men were impressed that she knew such minutia about the arcane art and science of satellite tracking. Eklund nodded.

“It’s the cardinal sin.”

“Never—turn—off—the—radio.” John pronounced it like a catechism.

“That’s what I thought.”

Angela let herself out, dropping off her pass at security before trudging outside to the magnesium-lit parking lot and her red Jeep Grand Cherokee. Her brain was running on fumes. Angela could not have said exactly what she thought, how she felt right now, or what the hell she was going to do next. But she knew her life was about to change.

9

McMurdo Station/Antarctica

Across from Augie Blake, inside the cavernous fuselage of the LC-130 Hercules, Captain Wesley Bertrand looked out the window at a skyful of spectral auroras dancing in the polar dark and listened to his Spec Ops crew arguing in their jump seats.

“Wrong, you are so full of shit. Blake had the left seat. Do the math.”

“Deaver had command.”

“Doesn’t matter who has command.”

“You don’t know jack, Dubczek.”

“I know that the mission fails if the spacecraft does not make it safely home. I know that without the pilot, the spacecraft is a whole lot less likely to make it safely home. So, who goes first up the ladder, fool? The pilot, Augie-fucking-Blake. Which means Jake Deaver left the last boot print on the moon.”

Bertrand got up and leaned over the seat backs, keeping his voice down.

“All right, everybody put up or shut up. Last boot on the moon. Twenty bucks says it was Colonel Blake. Come on, show me the money. I’m gonna go ask him.”

Collecting bets, Bertrand looked at his watch and glanced over at Augie. Then, feeling the eyes of his Spec Ops team on him, he worked his way through strapped-down medical equipment and containers marked
DANGEROUS
and
EXPLOSIVES
to where the legendary astronaut was slumped, fast asleep.

“Colonel Blake.”

Augie roused himself and peered groggily up at the young Air Force captain who was touching his shoulder and pointing out the cabin window.

“Thought you might like to see the show, sir.”

Augie squinted out at the amazing electromagnetic Aurora Australius, its silent green and indigo waves rippling from horizon to horizon.

“Some show,” he said. “Thanks. What’s our ETA, uh, Captain . . . ?”

“Bertrand, sir. We’re out about twenty-five minutes and change, Colonel. With your permission, sir?”

“Don’t stand on ceremony, son.”

Augie waved Bertrand into the empty seat facing him and then rummaged in a carry-on bag. Finding a plastic container with his salt tabs, he shook out two and chased them with bottled water. Radiation exposure, including the UV rads increasing yearly at the poles, caused rapid dehydration and salt depletion. He offered some to the captain.

“Thanks, I’m good, sir. I understand you’re evacking some astronauts?”

“Taking them to quarantine in Auckland. You on a Shared Assets ticket?”

“Yes, sir. Shared Assets.”

The Antarctic was technically off-limits to the military by UN treaty, but Bertrand was unsurprised that someone of Augie’s stature would know about their presence. NASA, the aerospace giant Raytheon, and the Pentagon had recently begun combining forces on various projects, with as little fanfare as possible.

This so-called Shared Assets policy amounted to a Trojan horse, a move by the Defense Department toward reversal of the strict civilian status with which NASA had been endowed by charter back in 1959. President Eisenhower had held a wisely jaundiced view of the U.S. military controlling space activities and had insisted that NASA be established outside the Pentagon umbrella and accountable to the citizens.

But a lot can happen in forty-some years.

Long the Space Shuttle’s primary client, the twenty-first-century Air Force, and its newly created Space Command Wing, routinely requisitioned
civilian NASA test-bed rockets and borrowed their top personnel to aid the military’s own space program. In exchange, NASA got to piggyback Earth Sciences projects onto the Pentagon’s Low Earth Orbit or LEO satellites, although all data collected was controlled by the military and was not to be made available to the public.

As it happened, it was global warming and the Shared Assets interface that was bringing Augie Blake and Captain Bertrand to the South Pole.

Augie eyed Bertrand’s Spec Ops insignia.

“How much did they tell you?”

“All they said at Langley was, the National Science Foundation had inserted a team to do some ice-core sampling and then started having problems at the dig site. Some kind of weird bacteria or microbes . . .”

“At Dunsinane.”

“Yes, sir. Op Dunsinane. Some kind of prehistoric virus in the core samples they were bringing up. People on the team started getting sick. So, they stopped coring and the hydraulics on the ice drill froze up.”

“The nuclear-powered ice drill.”

“Yes, sir. Sounds like quite a mess, sir.”

Aside from a brief summertime outburst of hardy vegetation, the dominant plant life tough enough to exist in the Antarctic is lichen. And the closer you go to the pole, the more the only life capable of surviving in such an extreme environment is microbial: tiny bacteria hibernating under the surface of ice-covered rock. What a temperate climate forest of trees was doing frozen in glacier ice at that latitude was mystery enough. But the historic find held the potential of filling in huge gaps in our planetary history, if not rewriting it altogether, and even of adding new phylum and new species of plants, animals, and insects long lost to the rolls of terrestrial life.

Unfortunately, after ten thousand years, modern Homo sapiens no longer had any immunity to the hibernating bacteria now waking up at Dunsinane.

The lumbering Hercules now began its approach and Augie felt the off-peak fall of a roller-coaster ride as the guppy-bellied transport dropped, shuddered, and then banked around low-wide-and-handsome,
the fat Pratt & Whitney props roaring and clawing for purchase in the hypercold air.

“McMurdo Station, gentlemen,” Captain Bertrand called out to his crew, who responded with whoops and wrist-cracking high fives all around.

“Hoo-ya!”

“Who sled the dogs out?! Hoo-Hoo!”

The LC-130 dropped its flaps. Out the window an eerie nightscape was rushing up to meet them: a bulldozed ice airstrip scraped off the top of a glacier and lined and lit by burning barrels of diesel oil.

“Hoo-hoo-hoo!”

The pilot had obviously done this before, falling fast, setting down hard, and reversing the props furiously in a half-blind, screeching, gooney-bird skid.

“Hoo-ya!”

The chorus of pumped-up Spec Ops voices echoed across the cabin. Augie leaned closer to Bertrand.

“So, what exactly do they want you to do?”

“They want us to do what we do best,” Bertrand said, with a good-ol’-boy shrug. “And then get the hell out of Dodge.”

Augie nodded, smiling at the captain’s man-of-action style as the plane slid to a halt and everybody started grabbing up their gear. Bertrand stood and glanced over at his crew.

“Uh, Colonel, would you be kind enough to settle a small wager?”

“Which side is your money on?”

“Oh, hell. Any schoolboy knows that Colonel Augustus Julian Blake, USMC, was the last man to walk on the Moon, sir.”

“Your money is safe, Captain. And good luck.”

The Hercules lowered its cargo ramp with a servo-driven whine and an explosive bang, sending a blast of subzero Antarctic air down their necks.

“An honor to meet you, sir,” Bertrand said, saluting crisply and rejoining his men. Augie pulled up the fur-lined hood on his expedition parka.

“Jesus God Almighty.”

Outside, a heavily bundled ground crew on snowmobiles had already swarmed in to chock the wheels and refuel the aircraft with the engines running.

He swiftly pulled on insulated gloves and began working his way cautiously down the metal rampway, grimacing into the shocking slap of polar wind.

“Fuck me.”

Augie felt his eyeballs threatening to freeze. The dispatcher at San Pedro had said it would be about fifty below, making it minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit with the windchill factored in; the kind of cold that could slam through layers of arctic-rated gear like an amphetamine-crazed killer kicking in a cardboard door.

“Hey!”

Augie squinted and waved toward a snowmobile headlight emerging from the voracious dark that was McMurdo Station in February, then lost his balance on the icy ramp, grabbing a handrail with both hands.

“Colonel Blake!”

A hooded astronaut-trainee slid to a stop in a rooster tail of ice and quickly helped settle Augie on board the motorized sled.

“Let’s do it!”

Augie braced himself and held on for the short run over to the electric lights and blessed warmth of the NASA compound’s Quonset-style barracks. Peering back at the runway and its barrels of blazing fuel oil set alight every fifty feet, he could just make out Captain Bertrand overseeing the handling of pallets of aluminum containers, each stickered and stenciled with “Danger” symbols now illuminated by the oily fire.

He also saw the first contingent of scientists and engineers being evacuated as they struggled across the ice toward the cargo ramp. Most of them could make it under their own power, but some had been bundled up and were being carried to the plane on stretchers, like wounded soldiers rescued from a frozen battlefield.

In that moment, the flames of the runway fuel drums reminded him of torches flickering on the wall of Shakespeare’s tragic Scottish castle.

“Until Birnham Wood come to Dunsinane . . .”

Augie recited the line from
Macbeth
and shut his eyes against the cold wind, the moisture of his own breath freezing instantly on his face.
Arriving at the metal-domed Quonsets, he was less concerned with the Bard of Avon than with assessing the damage in situ and getting his people out, safe and sound.

He would soon need to tell the media something as the evacuees arrived in New Zealand; a dramatic winter air rescue at the South Pole was certainly a newsworthy story. And what he told reporters would have to be only partially true and carefully crafted to explain why so many were “rotating out” of the science colony at once and why they were going into quarantine at an Auckland hospital. But first things first.