24
“I’ve got it now,” said Tanner, his eyes red-rimmed, his face
noticeably pale. He’d reached the limits of the anti-sleep
medication. He had only an hour at most before either he
collapsed or it started doing serious internal damage.
“Let’s see it,” said the Colonel.
“I should warn you—” Tanner began.
“—I don’t need any warnings,” the Colonel interrupted.
“Just play it.”
Tanner sent the file through the screen and opened it. It
started to play.
Tanner closed his eyes, but once the sound started, the
dim hiss of static, the images flooded into his mind anyway,
made worse by his imagination and his lack of sleep. He
opened his eyes and looked.
There wasn’t much. The image had been broadcast
through layers of rock and it was, in a sense, surprising that
anything had gotten through at all. Tanner wished that it
hadn’t.
At first there was only the sound of static, the image itself
nothing but snow. Then, little bits and pieces started to
emerge. In terms of the images, it was as if the snow was
taking on texture, a vaguely human face forming and then
dissolving again, what looked like a hand, what could have
been a fist around a pipe or then again been nothing at all.
The sound went from a staticky hiss to a whisper to
something that sounded like a man was speaking through a
mouthful of bees. Something that sounded like a scream,
bloodcurdling. A dull rhythm that might have been someone
talking. Someone singing, a wandering, meandering
nursery rhyme.
And then, suddenly, a brief moment of clarity, a man’s
face, weirdly backlit and terrified, his skin covered with
something, quickly bursting into fuzz again.
“Freeze that,” said the Colonel.
Tanner stopped the vid and spun it backward. The man’s
eyes had an emptiness to them. His features were
strangely distorted, as if he were screaming. His face was
covered with strange markings, symbols of some kind,
which extended down his neck and chest and arms.
“Hennessy? What’s he done to himself?” asked the
Colonel. “What did he use to write?”
“Blood, we think,” said Tanner. “You can see it dripping
off his hand to the left there, and there seems to be a cut on
his arm. Maybe it’s his own blood, maybe Dantec’s. If you
look behind him, you’ll see traces of the symbols on the
walls as well, which, we assume, is also blood.”
The Colonel furrowed his brow. “What do the symbols
mean?”
“We don’t know,” said Tanner. “Nobody has ever seen
anything quite like them.” When the Colonel didn’t say
anything, Tanner asked, “Shall we go on?”
The Colonel waved his hand. “All right,” he said, “go on.”
More hissing, more static, more vague and distorted
images. At one point, a brief glimpse of an arm that had
been torn free of its socket, its lifeless hand curled up like a
dead spider. A bit of the command chair, spattered with
blood. And then Hennessy was back, humming to himself,
swaying slightly, covered with bloody symbols.
“Hello,” he said, then dissolved again. He flickered in and
out of existence, along with bits of words, nothing that could
be sorted out, and then, something that sounded like
shame or maybe was part of another word. And then “—
something—eed to know.”
Onscreen, Hennessy clutched his head and then was
replaced by static, in color this time. When he reappeared,
he was giving the camera a strangely ecstatic smile.
“—track,” he said.
There was a long silence.
“—simply not en—” he said. Then, a little later, “—not
care—will have le—usk.”
Hard to make much sense of it, thought Tanner. But
whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
Then Hennessy was back again, with that same intense
smile. He had moved closer to the camera, almost filling up
the screen.
“—virgins,” he said, and gestured offscreen. Then he was
still there, still talking, but little more than a ghost in the
static, the sound completely lost until, near the end he came
back, the image almost clear now. “—understand the—” he
said, then a microburst of static. Then “—destroy it.”
Hennessy moved out of the way, revealing, in the
command chair behind him, the bits and pieces of
Dantec’s body. And then the vid ended.
“How many people have seen this?” asked the Colonel.
“This particular version? Three or four technicians. But it
was generally broadcast, so a lot of people may have seen
different bits of it. No way to say who has seen what.”
“So, no point killing the technicians, then?” asked the
Colonel.
“Excuse me?” said Tanner.
“This is big, Tanner,” said the Colonel. “Much bigger than
you can even imagine. It’s much more important than a life
or two. There are billions of people on the earth. People are
expendable. But this thing, whatever it is, this is the only
one we’ve ever seen.”
“Are you saying I’m expendable?” said Tanner slowly.
The Colonel gave him a shrewd look. “Don’t take this the
wrong way,” he said. “At this point, you’re less expendable
than nearly anyone else. But yes, if the circumstances
develop in the wrong way, you’re expendable. Does that
bother you?”
“Yes,” said Tanner.
“Then don’t let the circumstances develop in the wrong
way,” the Colonel said. He looked at his chronometer. “I’ll
give you until morning. Find out how widely the vid is
spreading and how much of it people have seen. Get some
people on the ground who can ask the right questions
without raising suspicions. Once we know where we stand,
we’ll figure out what to do.”
25
The call came around 1 a.m. Altman lay in bed, watching
his phone buzz on the table beside the bed, like a trapped
insect. It buzzed and buzzed and then stopped. He checked
it—no number listed and the hologram image was blocked.
Almost immediately it started buzzing again.
It could be Hammond, he thought, I should answer it. Or
Showalter, Ramirez, or Skud. But he just watched it buzz
until it stopped.
The third time, it woke up Ada. She yawned and
stretched, her body arching. “What time is it?” she asked
drowsily, and then she sat up in bed, tucking her hair
behind her ear. “Michael, aren’t you going to answer that?”
He watched his hand reach out and flip his phone open,
bringing it up to his ear.
“Hello,” he said. Even to him his voice sounded dry and
crackly, as if he hadn’t spoken for years.
“Is this,” said the voice, and then paused. “Michael
Altman?”
“Who is this?” asked Altman.
The man on the other end of the line ignored the
question. “I have a simple question I need you to answer,”
he said. “I’m curious if you’ve managed to pick up anything
unusual lately. Intercepted something.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“I can see that you haven’t,” said the voice quickly. “I’m
sorry to have wasted your time.”
“Do you mean a signal of some sort?” he asked, thinking
of the pulse.
There was a silence on the other end of the line.
“Some sort of transmission?” said Altman.
“Maybe,” said the voice slowly. “Do you have something
in mind?”
“Who is this?” said Altman again.
“That doesn’t matter,” said the voice.
“What kind of transmission are you talking about?” he
asked. “A pulse of some kind?”
The voice suddenly turned nasty. “You’ll have to do better
than that, Mr. Altman,” it said, a harsh note to it.
“Wait,” said Altman. “Let’s make a deal. If you tell me
what you’re looking for, I’ll tell you if I come across it.”
The line went dead.
“What the hell was that about?” asked Ada.
“I don’t know,” said Altman. “I wish I did. Someone trying
to pry something out of me.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
He got out of bed. He went into the bathroom and
washed his face, stared at the man looking back at him
from the mirror. There were dark circles under his eyes, his
eyelids puffy and swollen. He barely recognized himself. He
hadn’t been sleeping well. Bad dreams and, on top of that,
all the excitement and fear associated with whatever was
going on in the crater. Plus a headache that seemed to go
on and on.
What if something had happened to Hammond? he
wondered. What if they had killed him? What if they were
coming after him now?
No, that was crazy. There was no point being paranoid. It
was just a phone call.
He went into the other room, switched on the computer,
connected to the secure server. Nothing new from the
others since he’d last checked.
“What are you doing?” Ada asked him. She was sitting
up in bed again, hair falling partly over her face.
“I have to check on something,” he said. “It won’t take
long.”
“Michael,” she said, her voice stern now, “I want to know
exactly what’s going on. You shouldn’t keep secrets from
me. You’re not in trouble, are you?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“If you were in trouble, you’d tell me, right?” she said.
“I’d like to think I would,” he said.
“What do you mean you’d like to think you would? What
kind of answer is that?”
“I mean yes, of course I would.”
“There,” she said. “That’s better.”
She ran her fingers through her hair and twisted it so it
fell behind her shoulders, then got up and went into the
bathroom. He turned to the screen and quickly typed:
Strange phone call this morning, just after 3 AM,
asking me if I’d intercepted something. Thought he
was talking about the signal from the center of
Chicxulub, but when I hinted at that, he rushed to get
off the line. Maybe a transmission of some sort, but
what, I don’t know. Anybody else get the same call?
He waited a minute, staring at his screen until Ada came
out and climbed back into bed. Then he logged out and
shut the system down, climbing in next to her. Probably
nothing, he told himself.
“You promise me you’d tell me?” she said, sleepy again
now.
“Yes,” he said.
A few minutes later, he realized she was asleep. He lay
in bed, eyes open, staring up at the darkened ceiling. It was
a long time before he was able to fall asleep as well.
In the morning, logging on, he discovered all three of the
others had had the same call, all well after he’d had it.
Ramirez first, then Showalter, then Skud, which suggested
that maybe the person making the calls was simply moving
alphabetically down a list. They were all as puzzled as he
was. Ask around, Altman wrote back. Find out if other
people had it, and what they make of it.
By noon, they had the answer. Every scientist in
Chicxulub they’d contacted had been called. Most of them
had no idea what was going on, chalked it up to a crank call
or the work of some paranoid. But Ramirez had finally
talked to someone who seemed to know.
“He’s talking about the vid broadcast,” a man named
Bennett said, a geologist and amateur radio enthusiast. “I
figured it out right away. He called, all cryptic, fishing for
something but not wanting to give away what. I said, ‘You
mean the vid broadcast?’ He pretended not to know what I
was talking about, got me to describe it, then he thanked
me very politely and hung up.”
Bennett had only part of the vid, a few brief seconds,
something he’d come across broadcasting on not just one
band but several, and so, out of curiosity, he’d recorded it.
There were about three seconds of static, followed by five
slightly distorted seconds of someone talking, followed by
eight seconds of static. A few other people, said Bennett,
had gotten other bits of it, and someone at DredgerCorp
seemed to be gathering copies of all the bits. Why, he
didn’t know. Bennett was pretty sure it was a hoax,
somebody’s idea of a joke. But how they’d got it to seem
like it was being broadcast from the center of Chicxulub, he
didn’t know. Probably a transmitter on a boat or—
“It was broadcast from where?”
“Somewhere near the center of Chicxulub crater,” he
said. “All part of the hoax, I’m guessing.”
“Can I have a copy?”
“Why not?” he had said. “The more, the merrier.” He spun
it over.
It was a strange document—a man, naked, his body
covered in symbols written in a substance that seemed to
be blood, staring with a strange grin into the camera.
“understand it—” he said, “destroy it—” And then static.
Altman watched it again. There wasn’t much to it, just a
few seconds. Maybe Bennett was right and it was a hoax,
but there was something about the man’s expression, the
tightness of his features, the dead, mad emptiness of his
eyes, which made Altman feel that it was not. Where was
he? He watched it again. It was a small, confined space,
the walls, too, smeared with symbols written with the same
substance as was smeared on the man. Something at one
point cast a reddish glare under the man’s chin, when he
bobbed forward. The lighting was industrial, harsh and
unfriendly. “Understand it—destroy it,” the man said. I’m still
working on understanding it, thought Altman. To be frank,
I’m not even sure what it is.
He leaned back in his chair, his elbows on the chair’s
arms, his fingers tented in front of his face. Maybe a hoax,
he thought, but maybe not. What if we take it all seriously?
What if we try to put it all together? What will we come up
with?
A signal pulse from the center of the crater, something
that hadn’t been noticed before.
A gravity anomaly, also something new.
A suspicious freighter, not exactly over the center of the
crater, but not far from it.
On the deck of the old freighter, a brand-new industrial
submarine hoist. Also military or ex-military personnel on
board.
Evidence of either seismic activity or of drilling, either in
or very near the center of the undersea crater.
A vid, sent out on multiple channels, apparently
broadcast from the center of the crater. On it, a man in a
confined space, apparently mad, covered in odd runes,
saying “understand it—destroy it.”
It all seemed connected, and it all came back to the
crater. Something happening at the heart of the crater that
someone—probably DredgerCorp, since they were doing
the asking, but maybe others besides them—was very, very
interested in. Interested enough to start a drilling operation,
probably illegal, to try to see what it was or to try to remove
it.
That might also explain the vid fragment, Altman realized.
What if the broadcast was from a submarine? He shivered
slightly.
The problem was that that only raised bigger questions.
He sighed. It’d be easier, he realized, to think of it as just
a hoax and stop worrying about it. Only he couldn’t think of it
as just a hoax. The more he thought about it, the more he
pondered it, the more he thought it must be real.
He brooded, hesitating. Your move, Michael, he told
himself. What would be the best way to flush out the secret?
In the middle of the afternoon, he hit upon an idea. It wasn’t
the best idea, but it had the beauty of being simple, and it
was the only thing he could think of likely to have quick
results.
He put a copy of the vid onto his holopod and slipped it
back into his pocket. “Done for the day,” he said to Field.
The man looked over, his expression like that of a dead
fish. “It’s only two thirty,” he said.
Altman shrugged. “I have a few things to look into.”
“Suit yourself,” said Field, and turned back to his
holoscreen.
Fifteen minutes later, Altman had a hat pulled low over
his face and was sitting in the lobby of the town’s youth
hostel, using its single ancient terminal—a pre-holoscreen
model. The deskman cast him a lazy glance and then
ignored him. He wasn’t paid enough to care who used the
computer.
He spun the vid from his holopod to the terminal and then
spent some time making sure he hadn’t left a trail. Then he
went onto FreeSpace and created a dummy account. It
could be traced back to the monitor, he knew, but there was
nothing he could do about that. It couldn’t, in any case, be
traced directly to him.
He prepared a message: DredgerCorps’ Illegal Doings
in Chicxulub, he typed into the subject line, and then
captioned the vid, Last Words from a Submarine
Tunneled Deep into the Heart of Chicxulub Crater. He
stayed for a minute thinking and then added, A Retrieval
Mission Gone Wrong. He then proceeded to copy the vid
to every scientist he could think of in Chicxulub, himself
included, and to a select few beyond.
There, he thought. That should get their attention.
That evening he told Ada what he had done, explained to
her what they’d found out, what he thought it meant. He
thought she’d tease him, tell him that he was making
something out of nothing because he was bored. Instead,
she just crossed her arms.
“You’re such an idiot sometimes. Don’t you realize it
could be dangerous?” she asked.
“Dangerous?” he said. “What, you think they’d try to kill
me for revealing some industrial secret? This isn’t a spy
movie, Ada.”
“Maybe not, but you’re acting like it is,” she said. “Secure
Web site, gangs of scientists, secret subs, signals that
shouldn’t exist. And then this video.” She shivered. “A
madman covered in symbols drawn in blood. Doesn’t that
make you think it might be dangerous?”
“What?”
“How do I know what ‘it’ is?” she asked, shaking her
hands at him. “The thing at the heart of the crater might be
dangerous. Or the people who want to retrieve it might be
dangerous. Or both.”
“But—” he said.
“It’s just—” she said, and then stopped.
She lowered her head and stared at the tabletop. He
watched her hug herself, as if she were cold. “I don’t want to
see you hurt or dead,” she said quietly.
She was motionless for long enough that he thought the
conversation was over. He was about to get up and get a
beer when suddenly she started speaking again.
“You have all your data,” she said in a very steady voice.
“You’ve put it together and made it mean something.”
“I might be wrong,” he said.
“That’s not what I’m getting at,” she said. “Just be quiet
and listen, Michael. You scientists have only one way of
looking at the world. I’ve got data of a sort, too, and it’s just
as troubling.”
She started to lay it out for him, slowly weaving it together
as if it were a story. The signal pulse began at a certain
moment, she said, and from that moment on, everything
was different. He knew it as well as she did. “Do you
remember when you started having bad dreams?”
“I’ve always had bad dreams,” he said.
“But not like these,” she said. “Bloody, apocalyptic, endof-
the-world stuff every night?”
“No,” he admitted. “Those are new.”
“Everyone is having them, Michael. Even me. And I’m not
normally prone to nightmares.”
She had noticed how distracted and ill-rested everyone
seemed, from the townspeople to her colleagues. She was
trained to notice things like that, so she’d started asking
around. Did you sleep well last night? Did you have any
dreams? Nobody was sleeping well. Nobody was
dreaming anything but nightmares. And when she could get
them to remember when the nightmares started, it always
corresponded to when the signal pulse had begun.
“That’s just the start,” said Ada. “Do you know how many
times over the past week you’ve told me that you had a
headache? Dozens. Do you know how many times you’ve
clutched your head and winced, but not said anything about
it to me? Dozens more. And you’re not the only one,” she
said. “Everybody is having them. Before the signal pulse,
hardly anyone was having them. Now everybody is.
Coincidence? Maybe, but you have to admit it’s strange.”
“All right,” he said. “I admit it.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Michael,” she said. “This is
serious. I’ve spent months investigating the rituals and
legends of this region, and before that I spent years reading
other people’s reports on them. The thing about the
legends is that they’ve been basically the same for
hundreds of years.”
“So?”
She reached out and cuffed the side of his head. “I
thought I told you not to be a smart-ass,” she said, her dark
eyes flashing. “They’re no longer the same. They changed
drastically once the pulse symbol started.”
“Shit,” he said.
“The villagers are having nightmares, Michael,” she said,
“just like us. But while our dreams are only thematically
similar, theirs are very specifically alike. They’re all
dreaming of the ‘tail of the devil,’ which, as I mentioned the
other day, is what the word Chicxulub means.
Coincidence?”
Altman just shook his head. “I don’t understand it,” he
said.
“I’ve noticed here and there, traced in the dust or freshly
carved into the bark of trees, a crude symbol like two horns
twisted together. When I asked what it was, people ignored
me. When I kept asking, finally someone told me, almost
spitting the word: Chicxulub.”
She got up and went to the fridge, pouring herself a cup
of distilled water. She drank it down and then poured
another cupful, sat back down. She reached out and put her
hand in his palm. He squeezed it.
“I don’t know how it all fits together,” she said, “nor how it
meshes with your own data. Maybe it’s all just weird
coincidence. But all of it taken together makes me think that
whatever is at the bottom of the crater is something that
wishes us harm.”
“You make it almost sound like a living thing,” he said.
“I know it’s not very scientific,” she said. She took her
hand back, rubbed her temple with it. “Ah, another
headache,” she said, and gave a wry smile.
After a moment, she went on. “The people of the town
seem to have a whole mythology about this ‘tail of the devil.’
I don’t know if the mythology has always been there or if it’s
something that’s only recently developed. Certainly I’m only
starting to notice it now.
“The only one I can get to talk about it in any detail is the
town drunk, and he talks only if I ply him with booze. He
claims there are stories that have been passed down from
generation to generation, about a huge forked object thrust
deep into the middle of the ocean. This, he told me in a mix
of Spanish and Yucatec Maya, is all that remains of a great
devil who surrendered his dominion upon the earth to dig
down to the depths and rule over hell. His tail got caught
and is still there, perhaps still alive. Some believe that this
devil may still be attached to it.
“If you touch the tail, they say, you make yourself known to
the devil. If the devil knows you, he will try to claim you. If you
destroy more than you create, you make yourself known to
the devil. ‘You and your people,’ the drunk told me when he
was deep in his cups, ‘you are known to the devil,’ and then
he made that strange symbol at me, a kind of curse, twining
his index and middle fingers together.”
She stopped and drank the rest of the water, leaving the
cup on the table. “After that, he refused to say more,” she
said. “I tried to coax him to go on, offered to buy him more
drinks, but he just shook his head. He was, he finally
admitted, afraid that the devil might hear him.”
They sat silently for a moment, staring at each other.
“Maybe there’s a logical explanation,” said Altman.
“For the stories?”
“For all of it.”
“Maybe,” said Ada. “But I don’t know. I could, I suppose,
argue that these stories are an odd mixture of Mayan and
Christian belief. Maybe if I dug deep enough and thought
long and hard enough, I’d have a theory about how they
developed. But there’s still something there, a genuine
warning and sense of fear that my heart tells me we should
be listening to. I love you, Michael. Promise me you will at
least try to listen.”
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