Decipher, p.28
Decipher, page 28
The ability to view installations remotely and report on their layout, contents and status with startling accuracy.
By the power of thought alone.
4:16 P.M
Bob Pearce stood on the snow barefoot. And took a look around.
“What do you see?”
There was no one else with him. So to keep some sort of rational perspective welded to the situation, he had a cellular phone pressed against his ear. He was looking at his feet when he reported back. Wiggled his toes. “Snow,” he said. “Ice. It’s very cold here.”
“What do you see of the base?” Gant insisted on the other end of the line.
Pearce jerked his head up.
Directly in front of him, a matter of inches away, the charred remains of a Chinese soldier lay slumped over his machine-gun nest. Some sort of blast had erupted behind him and taken the back of his head with it. His face was frozen solid, contorted. But his entire back half was a blackened, twisted lump.
Smoke rose in stacks from behind twisted, jagged wreckage. An overturned drilling mast had crashed across a mobile cabin, itself a mass of flaking debris. This was what was left of Jung Chang.
“It’s destroyed,” Pearce reported. “It’s devastated.”
Darkened debris littered the surrounding snow like ground pepper on a plate of mashed potatoes. There was a hand still clutched to a magazine a few feet off. Half a torso. And a birthday card, flapping in the breeze.
“The weather’s fine here,” Pearce realized.
“Can you get further into the base?”
“Just a moment. I gotta get past this, uh, thing,” he said, giving another lump of frozen charcoal-covered flesh a wide berth. Pearce could feel his stomach churning over. As he drew closer, the smell of burning and death grew thick and pungent, stung his nostrils and caused him to gasp involuntarily.
“I know what’s in Atlantis. I know because I’ve been there before,” Hackett announced, with his feet up on the table. Scott looked over.
Hackett rifled through the documents as Scott asked: “What are those?”
“Transcripts,” he explained, “of Bob’s little visitations.”
They were in Polar Star’s Deck 2 Research Laboratory, where the team had assembled to watch Bob on the video link. Scott pulled up a chair next to Matheson. Hackett, who sat across from them, passed over the paperwork. He watched Scott sift through the pages, spreading them across the table.
Sarah’s eyes were on Matheson as he gingerly attached a connecting wire to the output socket on a small plastic box-shaped unit, then hooked it up to the computer workstation bolted to the desk behind him, careful not to dislodge any more fried circuits than he absolutely had to.
“Think you can get it to work?”
“Of course I can get it to work,” Matheson responded dismissively. “I designed this thing.” He chipped away flaking particles, disgustedly. “What is this stuff all over it?”
“Blood,” Sarah revealed abruptly. “Eric Clemmens’s charbroiled blood. They had to prise it from the wreckage.”
“Oh,” Matheson murmured queasily. He had been about to chew his nails. Now that didn’t seem like such a good idea.
“This is unbelievable,” Scott groaned, turning the page.
“Why? Because it doesn’t fit with your world view?” Hackett challenged as Matheson reached behind his chair and flipped a switch.
There was a low hum, followed by electrical chirping as a single green LED blinked insistently to let him know it was alive. He spun around to key the computer. Hit—UP-LOAD—and: “Bingo.” He sniffed, self-satisfied. “Transferring all Giza data to the main terminal. We gotta party goin’ on.”
“You cannot,” Scott insisted, “claim to know what’s going on someplace else just by thinking about it.”
“He channels the energies,” Hackett reminded. “We can see him channeling the energies.”
“Jon,” Scott retaliated, “you’re a scientist. How can you, of all people, accept this?”
“Richard, we still don’t fully understand quantum mechanics, but what we do know is this TV monitor won’t work without it. No one knows what effect superstring theory will have on our everyday lives but we know for the universe to exist, there are at least twenty-seven dimensions. We know there’s no ‘nothingness.’ If you sucked all the air out of a little black box, shut out all the light, extracted everything—there would still be thirty-seven fields of potential left. Thirty-seven! At the last count! Particles would continue to pop up out of nowhere sporadically, which is important because it links to another theory. Spatially, I know you’re sitting there. I know your ass is in that seat. And I know we’re sailing on the ocean. But think about it—this’ll be important to you: where, spatially, is the past?”
“Where is the past?”
Sarah was excited. “Wow. That’s a good question.”
“Where is the past?”
Hackett nodded. “In feet and inches, Richard, if you please.”
Scott thought about it. “The past,” he replied hesitantly, “is over two miles beneath the ice—in Antarctica.” He sat back on his haunches, feigning smug. But he knew it wasn’t much of an answer.
“Okay.” Hackett attacked again. “So what is the distance between good and evil in kilometers?”
That got him.
“We don’t use eighty percent of our brain,” Hackett said. “And of the part we do use, eighty percent of that is given over to processing visual stimulus. The point is, we as a species have existed for longer than our cognitive abilities to process what we perceive. It’s possible our bodies can detect things we are simply not capable of recongnizing—yet. Maybe we haven’t evolved sufficiently to process that kind of data. Perhaps we need to develop a new kind of sense. You’re confused when I ask ‘where is the past’ because it’s a different type of question, one you’re not used to. Yet linguistically you can’t deny it’s grammatically correct.” Reluctantly Scott agreed. “Perhaps what Bob’s doing simply requires asking different types of questions.”
“Are you saying he’s more highly evolved than us?” Scott challenged.
Hackett refused to answer.
“Shh!” November scolded. “Can I at least hear what Bob has to say? Can’t you just give him a break and keep the faith?”
Scott turned to face where November sat fiddling with the Giza tunnel footage on her computer. She met his gaze levelly. “He may be right, or he may be wrong,” she said. “But right now they can’t even get a satellite to tell us anything useful. So what’s wrong with just keeping the faith?”
“We’re scientists,” Scott explained dryly. “We don’t do faith.”
November just focused on the monitor, where Bob Pearce had a room all set up with a table and chairs, a map of Antarctica and a whole stack of grid references. There were no crystal balls, burning incense or wind chimes. It was clinical. And bright: he had a set of lights, which he sat and stared at through closed eyes. It made for bizarre viewing.
Across from him, Gant sat with pen, paper and a sheet of reconnaissance data.
Pearce stirred. “I’m uh, I’m through to the other section. I’m passing a lot of wreckage.” He threw his hand over his mouth as if he were about to be sick. “Ugh, uh, it’s a … It’s like a bomb went off. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
“Okay, Bob, I guess it’s gruesome. But we need to know about automated systems. Rack guns. Land mines—”
November was concerned. “I thought there was a ban on land mines?” she whispered.
“Yeah, right,” Matheson snorted. “On paper, maybe.”
“Northwest of the compound, on the perimeter,” Pearce announced, “automated rack gun. Operational. And, wait a minute … yes, another gun. But it’s out of ammo. Correction: looks like they never loaded it.”
Scott rubbed his hand across his chin, astounded. “What does he see?”
“He sees their base,” Hackett commented. “And from the sound of things, he sees it pretty well.”
Scott watched Pearce on the monitor, and that was when he noticed something equally odd happening in their own environment. A thin gray film of dust covered everything close to an open porthole. Suddenly the ship jolted as it hit rougher seas, and it was Bob Pearce on the other end of the video-link who voiced Scott’s concern.
“Something’s not right,” he said.
Vents of steam trickled out of blowholes all around Bob Pearce, like steamholes in a pot of overboiled rice. The steam rose up only a few feet before it quickly turned to snow and danced away on the wind.
Huge cracks crisscrossed through the ice. And as Pearce picked his way through the debris, he became aware the ground was dipping out from under him. It was like being on the edge of an impact crater. The blowholes were getting large, and the ground was starting to look more like Swiss cheese. Exposed ice tunnels twisted away into the interior, large enough to accommodate teams of men.
He could see something beyond the twisted, shattered hulk of an Armored Personnel Carrier in front of him, smashed up, and balanced on its side. It was something dark. Vast. Stretched out across the ground. If only he could reach it.
Was that a cry? Muffled. Distant. Pearce checked all around his position. Trying to determine where it was coming from.
“Say again?” Gant demanded.
But Pearce didn’t have time to answer. Carefully, he lowered himself down into a blowhole, and peered into the steep, glistening ice tunnel. And as the frosty mist wafted its way past him, up toward the surface, he spotted something moving. Something black and disheveled, clawing its way forward.
Pearce rushed to its side for a closer inspection and was shocked to discover a Chinese soldier, in mountaineering gear. His skin was black in patches. Not from burns, but from frostbite.
“My God! We’ve got a survivor here!” he exclaimed.
He crouched down next to the young man who couldn’t have been more than twenty. “Jesus, he’s just a kid,” Pearce added, disgusted. “Send in a SARGE! Now!”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Bob,” Gant warned. “We don’t even know if we can get a SARGE that deep into enemy territory.”
“They’re all dead except for this kid,” Pearce insisted. “Get a SARGE in here. Drag him out, for God’s sake—get a SURGEon!
There was steam rising from the delirious young soldier’s mouth. A powdered, crystallized breath. He opened one drooping eyelid, and it looked for all the world like—
“I think he sees me,” Pearce gasped.
“That’s impossible,” Gant replied gruffly. “You’re not really there, Bob. You’ve projected your mind into that area. Check around you. See what he’s focusing on.”
But Bob wasn’t listening, because the young Chinese soldier was trying to speak now. With one finger outstretched to indicate the tunnel behind him, he was trying, with every fiber in his being, to articulate sounds. Bob Pearce leaned forward, and though he couldn’t understand him, tried his best to repeat those sounds.
Scott ran his finger over the equipment in the lab and studied the residue as November fought back a retch. “What is that smell?” she complained.
“Close the portholes,” Scott ordered, covering his mouth and reaching for the nearest porthole to him. The ship lurched once more. But this time, worse, like it had hit a wall of bad weather. Sarah too came over to study the dust. Outside, it seemed to be raining nothing but a swirl of gray, vile, sulfurous-smelling powder.
“It’s volcanic ash,” she decided. “There must be some heavily active volcanoes coming up.”
“Mount Erebus is active,” Matheson said. “It’s right in McMurdo Station’s backyard.”
“Great,” Sarah moaned. “This’ll be fun.”
She joined Scott at the porthole, but he didn’t seem to be so amused. He brushed the ash from his fingertips, saying: “Brimstone. I never thought I’d get to see the day—”
“Hey, Richard,” Hackett interrupted. “Can you speak Chinese?”
Scott turned on the physicist. “A little. Why?”
Hackett pointed at the monitor. “Because Bob’s started speaking it.”
Scott came over to him and cranked the volume up, straining to hear the mumbling CIA agent.
“Yao ye heikodo!” he seemed to be saying. “Yao ye heikodo!”
Which left Scott cold. “It’s Cantonese,” he explained. “He keeps saying ‘There’s something down there. There’s something down there … And it’s alive.’”
sacred places
The Popol Vuh cannot be seen anymore … the original book written long ago, existed, but its sight is hidden from the searcher and the thinker.
Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiche Tribe of Maya,
University of Oklahoma Press Edition, 1991
PINI PINI TUNNELS NIGHT
It was raining. Again.
They had told him it didn’t actually rain all that much in the rainforest, except maybe during the rainy season. They had lied. Jack Bulger pulled the canvas flap over on his canopy to stop the rainwater from dripping down into his computer.
Piled in front of him were nineteen individual two-foot-square cubes of Carbon 60 crystal, cut out and removed from the tunnels below ground in a systematic process that had taken the best part of twelve hours. Under their own tarp, they had been placed directly onto the ground, where a muddy puddle had collected, like a brown soup that was fast becoming home to an array of festering insects.
A lightning burst arced across the sky as Bulger pulled the tarp back and set up his microscope on the topmost block. He had removed its base so the optical unit peered directly down at the block below. After all, the sample of C60 was too big to slip under the lens on a glass slide.
He had been watching the blocks under the power of the camp lights, and it had become increasingly obvious that dark shadowy veins seemed to have feathered throughout the crystal blocks, like faults in a gemstone. They were not features he had noted when he examined the Carbon 60 in its original state, wrapped in a spiral around the inside of the tunnel. If the crystal were an animal, he would have said it was dying.
He hooked the microscope up to his laptop, and powered up. It wasn’t what he preferred to be doing. He’d rather be down in the thick of it, carving this stuff out, but they wouldn’t let him. He would have argued the point, but they had the guns. Jack Bulger was many things, but he wasn’t stupid.
Eddie the winch operator was busy stringing out the chain and hoist for the next delivery of Carbon 60, running the length of metal links out to the hole in the ground leading down to the tunnel, as Bulger zoomed in on his own specimen of crystal.
“Make sure that thing doesn’t snarl up on a stump this time!” Bulger snapped over his shoulder, not bothered if Eddie the winch answered or not, so long as he did as he was told.
Bulger concentrated on his screen. There were three fields of magnification, across a wide band spectrum. The first was maximum optical magnification. Unfiltered. Undiluted. Pure visual data. The second field was enhanced optical. The image was filtered through a patchwork of software to artifically clean up key features of the specimen in different parts of the spectrum. The third field was artificial magnification. Extrapolating key data from the first two fields, the computer used the optical data as a baseline and enhanced what it detected based on a set of algorithms. The result was the computer could artificially increase apparent optical magnification by a factor of 1,000 to an accuracy of 98 percent.
Fine. So long as the damn thing gave him a close-up, Bulger didn’t care how inaccurate it was. A fracture was going to look like a fracture, hazy image or not. The important point was, if the extraction process was damaging the crystal in some way, he was going to have to do something about it. A damaged crystal was a damaged pay packet.
He lit up his cigar and blew rings. Keyed zoom, and inspected the surface.
There was movement.
Bulger jerked his eyes away from the screen. Eyeballed his microscope on the crystal block with some suspicion. Was he tired or had he done something wrong?
His first instinct was contamination. Fucking rainwater. He stumbled to his feet and pulled the canvas canopy further over his microscope. He picked the thing up briefly, wiped down the surface just in case it really was wet, and set it back down again. He hit RECALIBRATE and waited.
Movement again.
“Jesus H. fucking God all—assholes.”
“Pretty, Jack,” Eddie the winch commented, as he sat out by the generator, smoking a cigarette. “Real pretty.”
Bulger glimpsed the tip of the man’s cigarette glowing in the dark. “Shut up, asswipe.”
“Yessir.”
He studied the screen intently. Could the artificial magnification be reacting to something like an external light source? Misrepresenting a moving dance of shadow and light across the subsurface structure?
“What’s the problem?” Eddie the winch asked.
“None of your damn business,” Bulger replied, instinctively shifting in his chair to shield the screen from the other man’s prying eyes. Eddie shrugged and stuck to his winch.
The image on the screen seemed to be showing tiny filaments, like tubes of carbon, intricately woven throughout the crystal. It was within these filaments that there seemed to be movement, very much like a liquid. Did this Carbon 60 have some sort of super-fast capillary action as one of its properties? The ability to suck a liquid in if it came into contact with it? Most rocks had this property, but not at this speed.
He hit MAGNIFY, boosting the image far beyond the system’s recommended levels. The result was greater inaccuracy but Bulger was prepared to live with that. He passed microns and was in the realms of nanometers now—measurements that covered billionths of a meter. A place where materials began to act very differently.
There it was again. Something shot past the lens. A blur, a dark burst. Then another, and another.
Like shadows on glass. There was no way he could move the lens accurately enough to keep track of, or pace with whatever was speeding through the tubes. No problem. This was a laptop. It had highspeed shutter capabilities. He hit RECORD and took a digital film shot at 10,000 frames per second. The three-second burst was theoretically enough to give him the information he needed.
