22
“How long has it been?” asked the Colonel.
“Too long,” said Tanner, his face drawn, his voice
hoarse. “Nearly forty-eight hours now.” He’d been awake
almost two and a half full days. Most of that time he’d spent
trying to get in touch with the F/7. There’d been a few
scattered bits, moments when somehow everything aligned
to let the signal through, and so he assumed there had
been moments they’d seen him as well. But it never lasted
long enough for them to communicate. And then, just when
he was ready to give up hope, there had come a signal,
broadcasting on all bands. They had gotten only bits of that,
too, but others had picked up other bits of it on other
channels. Tanner’s team had gathered as much as they
could and were working to sequence it all together to form
something. He’d thought they’d have something by now,
which was why he’d contacted the Colonel, but they were
still working.
“Could they still be alive?” the Colonel asked.
“We already know one of them is dead.”
“Hennessy?”
“No, Dantec,” said Tanner. He rubbed his eyes. He’d had
a headache for days now, maybe even weeks. He was
starting to feel like he couldn’t remember when he hadn’t
had one.
“That’s a surprise,” said the Colonel.
Tanner nodded. “We still don’t know what happened, but
we know he’s dead.” He spun the holofile through the
screen, watched the Colonel take it up on his end. Tanner
knew what it was: a grisly image capture showing a
disjointed torso propped in the command chair, its limbs
piled neatly on the chair just in front of it. The head was
broken and distorted and hardly human. “It’s a piece of one
transmission that we were able to salvage. The last image
we have, really.”
“How do you know this is Dantec?” asked the Colonel.
The Colonel was a hard man, Tanner thought: his voice was
just as even as it had been before, like he was looking at
somebody’s wedding picture.
Tanner circled portions of the image on his monitor. “You
can see here and there bits of hair. It’s caked in blood, but
we’re reasonably certain it’s hair.”
“Ah, yes,” said the Colonel, “now I see.”
“Hennessy was bald,” Tanner said simply.
The Colonel leaned back in his chair, thoughtful. “What
happened?” he asked.
Tanner shrugged. “Something went wrong,” he said.
“Beyond that I can’t say.”
“If you had to guess, what would you guess?”
Tanner sighed. “Hennessy must have gone crazy and
caught Dantec unawares. Maybe something wrong with the
oxygen supply that had some effect on his brain, maybe the
pressure of being confined in such a small space for too
long. Or maybe he was already insane and we didn’t know.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as strange?” asked the Colonel.
“Of course it strikes me as strange,” said Tanner. “It’s not
normal behavior.”
“No,” said the Colonel. “Yes, of course, all that is strange,
but it’s even stranger that it happens now, just now, when
they’re on their way toward an impossible object found in
an impossible location.”
“Sabotage, you think?”
“I can’t rule it out,” said the Colonel. “But that’s the least
strange of the possibilities, Tanner. Show a little more
imagination.” He leaned forward again. “Contact me
immediately once you’ve got some footage to show me,”
he said, and reached out to cut the link.
23
The power of the signal, Altman realized, had increased
sometime during the night. The indicator he’d installed was
reading higher than he’d ever seen it. The pulse ended and
it fell back, still higher than it had been in its previous
resting state.
He glanced over at Field, who seemed immersed in his
own calculations. Just to be safe, he angled his holoscreen
so that there’d be no chance of Field seeing what was on it.
He scrolled back through the data log until he found the
shift. There, sometime around six or seven in the morning,
though he’d have to do a full correlation to make sure. The
signal’s increase wasn’t gradual but immediate, as if
something had suddenly and deliberately amplified it.
He hadn’t heard from Hammond since the night in the
bar, which concerned him a little but not too much. The
security technician was probably lying low, being careful.
When he wanted to get in touch, he would. In the meantime,
it was up to Altman to find out what was going on.
He logged his results into the encrypted database and
then looked to see if they correlated with work done by the
others—the others in this case being the three other
scientists who had, like Altman, been intrigued by the
gravity anomaly and the pulse and wanted to pursue it:
Showalter, Ramirez, and Skud.
Showalter, who had more powerful equipment than
Altman’s simple sensor, had gotten the same readings. At
6:38 a.m., there had been an extraordinarily strong pulse,
followed by a shift in the signal patterning. The signal was
now perpetually amplified. There were still high and low
points, but the basic profile of the signal was stronger, and
had remained so ever since.
Ramirez had noted something else, something that he
had picked up off the satellite images while trying to get a
sense of whether there had been a change in the condition
of the crater itself. A freighter, anchored about fifteen miles
southeast of the crater’s center.
“At first I didn’t pay much attention to it,” said Ramirez in
the vidfile he’d attached. “But then, I go back a day and it’s
still there. I go forward a day and it’s there, too. If it’s really a
freighter, what would it be doing sitting in the same place?
“So, yesterday morning, I hired a local man who called
himself Captain Jesús to use his old motorboat to run me
out for a closer look. I took a fishing pole with me. Once we
were about two hundred meters from the freighter, I had
Captain Jesús stop and cast my line into the water.
“The captain told me I wasn’t going to catch anything.
When I asked why not, he gave me a long hard look and
pointed out to me that I hadn’t bothered to put any bait on
the end of my line.
“I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.
Captain Jesús made a point of looking at the freighter and
then looking back at me, then told me that it didn’t seem
like it was fish I wanted to catch and that the kind of fishing I
wanted would cost me extra.
“In the end, I had to promise to pay the good captain
double his normal rate to stay there so that we could get a
good look at the freighter. It didn’t have any markings. Other
than that, it seemed an ordinary enough freighter, except for
the fact that it had a brand-new heavy-duty submarine lift
attached to its deck.
“That was all I had time to ascertain,” Ramirez said.
“We’d been there all of five minutes, two of which I spent
bartering with Captain Jesús, when a launch appeared
from the other side of the ship and pulled up alongside us,
manned by four muscle-bound boys with military haircuts,
but without the requisite military garb.
“ ‘Move along,’ one of them said.
“ ‘I’m fishing,’ I claimed.
“ ‘Fish somewhere else,’ he said. I was going to argue,
but Captain Jesús threw the boat in gear and took us out.
When I asked him why, later, all he would say was ‘These
are not good men.’
“Which left me with three questions,” said Ramirez,
concluding his vid-log. “First, what use would a freighter, if it
really is a freighter, have for a submarine? Second, what
makes them want to keep other boats at a distance? Third,
what the hell is really going on?”
What indeed? wondered Altman.
The last report, from Skud, a laconic Swede, didn’t arrive
for another hour. It was a document instead of a vid-log.
So sorry, his report read. Had to double check. What
followed was a series of charts with captions in Swedish,
none of which Altman knew how to read. After them, Skud
had written: Insufficient data for certainty.
For certainty of what? wondered Altman. He tried to
scroll down, but the report ended there.
He checked the network and found that Skud was still
logged in to the system. Skud, he typed, please clarify the
conclusion of your report.
By insufficient data I mean there is not enough data, he
wrote. Without enough data, we cannot be certain.
Altman sighed. Skud was a good scientist, but a little
lacking in communication skills.
What is your data concerning? he asked.
Seismographic data, wrote Skud.
And what were you trying to prove? Altman wrote.
That the seismic disturbance was something generated
by a machine rather by ordinary seismological activity.
What kind of machine?
As I said in my note, wrote Skud, and then there was a
long moment where the screen remained blank. Very sorry,
he finally wrote, I see now I left it off my note. A drill. I do
not have enough data to prove it, and maybe it is only
ordinary seismic activity. But I think maybe somebody
has been drilling, and maybe in the center of the crater.
Altman immediately disconnected from the system and
went outside to call Skud. The man seemed startled, a little
confused, but after a while, he started to fill in the details in
a way that Altman understood. Skud was drawing his
readings from multiple seismographs, some on land, some
underwater, several very close to the center of the crater
itself. Only those near the center had noticed anything. The
reading, Skud said, was something that would normally be
dismissed as insignificant, very minor seismic activity. But
it was also possible, he claimed, that it could be from a
heavy, industrial-scale drill. It was very regular, he said,
which would not be typical of a seismic event.
“But you’re not sure if it’s in the center of the crater.”
“No,” said Skud. “Exactly, that is the problem.”
“Where else would it be if not the center?”
“It might be as far as fifty meters from the center,” said
Skud. “I have done calculations but I am afraid they are
inconclusive.”
“But that might as well be the center!” said Altman,
frustrated.
“No, you see,” said Skud patiently. “As I said, it might be
as far as fifty meters from the center. That is not the center.”
Altman started to argue, then stopped, thanked him, and
disconnected. He stayed there, looking out at the ocean
awhile and then glanced inside to the window. Field was
still keeping to his side of the room, talking on the
telephone now, seeming no more and no less animated
than earlier. Altman turned back to the ocean again.
Slowly things were beginning to take shape in his mind.
He wished that Hammond would get back in touch, since
he’d been aware of it before anyone else. He might have a
perspective that Altman and the others didn’t have yet. In
the meantime, it was up to them.
There was nothing to say for certain that the pulse, the
freighter, and the seismic readings were all connected. But
then again, there was nothing to suggest that they weren’t.
And all three had something in common: the center of the
crater. Something was going on down there. Maybe
something had been discovered, maybe it was some sort
of weapons test, maybe it was some incredibly uncommon
but natural phenomenon. But something was happening,
something weird, something that someone didn’t want the
public to know about.
He swore he would find out what it was. Even if it killed
him.
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