The Unearthing

By Steve Karmazenuk

© Copyright by the author 2006

It has always been the way of tales and dreams. Time forgets itself. That is also the way of remembering. But when remembering or retelling, it is best to start at the beginning. And for all memories, all tales, and all dreams, there is but one beginning. . .

Prelude: The Beginning

In the beginning, all was void and without form. There was no substance, no matter or energy. The elemental forces did not exist; neither did space or time. All that existed was nothing. Born of this irresolute paradox, the universe came into being and for the first time the eternal dark was broken by the light.

The order of oblivion was shattered by the chaos of creation. Elemental forces of unstoppable violence roiled, pushing back the void to make room for the strange powers and energies that were screaming out from the core of creation to find their place in the new reality. The elemental powers, titans of weak and strong and strange attractors, defined the first basic laws that governed creation. Their wrestling war against one another unleashed the energy that fuelled the continued growth of existence. Protomatter coalesced from burning plasma caught in fields of cold unmerciful gravity only to be rent asunder and scattered in an ever-widening sphere. The farther away from the violent chaos of creation these scattered elements fled, the cooler they became. And as the matter and energy of the newborn universe began to cool, a new order descended over all.

Vast nebulae formed from cooling gasses and strange, elemental particles. These nebulae grew so large and dense, so fertile with the stuff of creation that they began to collapse upon themselves. As matter condensed, energy was released in violent reactions and chain reactions. New explosions dawned in a universe scarcely a billion years old. Globules of superhot matter and energy were scattered to the winds of spacetime, trailing dust in their wake. When these burning spheres finally came to rest rotating gracefully on their own axes, the dust they had stolen began to settle into rings and disks around them. Slowly these disks of dust underwent their own transformations, forming dense pockets of matter and trapped energy all their own. Sometimes enough substance would collect into spheres of gas. Sometimes these spheres would collapse and ignite, becoming new, smaller stars. In other cases the matter would collect into loosely affiliated but nevertheless superdense clouds of gas. Just as often, matter would collect into spheres dense enough to harden into planets or cold, random lumps of rock. Other stranger forms of matter and energy were often born but their placement would remain as much a mystery as their substance.

Not every world would bear the gift of life, but life still appeared and in many cases flourished in the otherwise barren universe. Not all worlds that held life held it long enough for sentience to emerge. And not all worlds that held sentient life would live long enough for that life to spread out beyond the cradle of its birth. And tragically the losses on these worlds went unnoticed by the universe at large. On many of these worlds, civilizations rose and fell, succeeding and often failing on their own merits. Other times it was blind and uncaring cosmic chance that decided their fates.

But on every world where life did prosper, where sentience emerged, the desire to understand the origins of their world, their universe emerged as well. Many worlds approached these issues from a philosophical standpoint, looking to the sun, to spirits, to gods to ponder questions about the nature of the universe and why they were in it. Other worlds looked at creation analytically, using the methods of empirical knowledge to determine how they came to be. Many worlds asked both how and why, trying to merge the twin opposites of science and religion into one. Invariably whether worlds of individuals or hive-like superorganisms, whether peaceful or warlike, whether superstitious or scientific, all sentient worlds turned their attention beyond their nesting spheres and out into the heavens. The ships created by these worlds were as wide in variety as the races that spawned them. Their means of propulsion were diverse, sometimes using systems of kinesis and power that the scientists of other worlds would maintain were impossible. But on every world the first ships and on many worlds whole flotillas of ships were explorers.

As explorers set out, first tentatively learning about their own star systems before heading out into the darkness of space, they discovered much of consequence about their own origins and the fragility of their worlds. Sometimes within their own systems they found other life. Often the explorers would discover themselves alone orbiting their parent stars. But when they left behind their homeworlds and birth stars, they set out with hope of finding others.

Chapter One: The Discovery

A dust storm was blowing across the road as James Johnson piloted the camper down the long stretch of New Mexican highway. A sheet of dust rippled and danced, breaking like a wave against the asphalt. The storm was so bad that James had to switch on the enhancer in the camper’s windshield. The enhancer created a computer-rendered simulation of the road and desert surrounding him. The wire-frame image of the world outside his windshield compiled quickly, filling in with detail and colour that looked almost exactly like the real world.

“James, where are we?” the Prof called from the back of the camper.

“Hang on, I’ll check.” James called back.

There was a small monitor mounted in the middle of the driver’s display panel, the stylized word

Galileo™

shimmering on the screen.

“Galileo,” James said, “where are we?”

Over the music playing through the camper’s stereo system came the perfectly-simulated female voice of the Galileo system:

“We are now approaching the city limits for Laguna.”

“We’re just crossing into Laguna, Prof,” James called back. A moment later he added, “I thought we were already in Laguna.”

“We are,” the Prof called. “We crossed into the Laguna Band District an hour ago and now we’re going into the town of Laguna itself.”

As if in confirmation of this, the camper rolled past a large white sign proclaiming

WELCOME TO THE TOWN OF LAGUNA

GOVERNMENT OF THE SOUTHWESTERN NATIVE PROTECTORATE

LAGUNA BAND DISTRICT

In the back of the camper, sitting in the horseshoe-shaped booth guarding a formica table, Professor Mark Echohawk sat working with his console. He wore a small but elaborate headset: an earphone in his left ear from which radiated a compact array: a microphone stretched out beside his mouth and a boom extended a small display screen over his left eye. The band that held the console to Echohawk’s head cinched down over his long, graying hair. The headset was connected by a small, flexible cable bundle to the CPU Echohawk wore on his belt. The device itself weighed less than the headset and most of its size was taken up by the Digital Optic Slip reader on its front. A wireless remote keypad sat on the tabletop.

Echohawk, an archaeologist attached to the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society and working out of UCLA, was studying images of an object unearthed in the desert near Laguna. The chief of the Laguna Band, Paul Santino, had contacted the society only days before requesting someone come. What the Lagunas had apparently unearthed was one side of a golden pyramid. Echohawk got wind of the discovery and immediately asked to be assigned to the project. His passion was the study of the ancient civilizations of the Americas and this discovery had captivated him.

“We’re almost there, Prof!” James called from the camper’s cockpit.

Echohawk stood up, retracting the monitor boom of his console and folding up the keypad. He headed forward and took the front passenger seat beside his assistant. The camper reached the turn-off to head into the town of Laguna. The side road was little more than hard-packed dirt. But as they crossed the decorative wall guarding the approach to the town, they left the desert behind them. The town of Laguna was an oasis in the desert. Greenery and trees sprang up in large tracts of parkland surrounding the downtown core. The Southwestern Protectorate had developed extensive water reclamation systems and was bringing life back to the desert. The residential neighborhoods were densely packed communal green spaces, the norm more often than not. As the camper swung though the streets, some of the locals took notice.

. . .

Laguna was a closed community, a company town promoted and developed as one of the crown jewels in the Southwestern Native Protectorate. Unemployment was near zero, with the town’s twenty-odd thousand residents working either on the farms or in the shops, or the town’s backbone, the One Tree Hill software company. Following the Galileo system’s concise directions, James took the camper right to the parking lot of the Municipal Building where Echohawk would meet with Paul Santino.

“We’re here,” James said, parking and shutting down the camper.

The Ballard cell engine cycled down, the whine of the system dropping to a hum and then silence. Echohawk climbed out.

“Great news,” he said. “Even better, there’s a Coke machine. I don’t think I could stomach another cup of your coffee.”

Echohawk fed his debit card into the soda machine as James slipped on his own console headset.

“Call Peter,” he said into the microphone.

A second later he was connected. “Peter? Yeah, we made it. How far behind us are you? Uh-huh … OK, well, the Prof wants to get out to the site as quickly as possible so I’d suggest linking to our Galileo and following us there. No, unless you want to stop and get some sodas, I think you can bypass the town. No, the Prof’s going in to meet with him now.”

As James spoke, Mark Echohawk made his way into the air-conditioned interior of the Municipal Building.

The Municipal Building was only four storeys high but its lobby could have been that of a more auspicious building: elegantly decorated with local flora, pictures of area landmarks adorning the walls. Echohawk was about to announce himself to the receptionist when the man he’d come to see came down the hallway and introduced himself.

“Professor Echohawk? I’m Paul Santino,” the Laguna chief said, extending his hand.

“Mark Echohawk.”

“Pleased to meet you; my office is this way.”

Santino led Echohawk down the hall. They were close in age, though Echohawk was visibly older, his hair graying slowly through the ponytail hanging down his back. Santino, his hair dark and closely cropped, had the robust features characteristic of an outdoor life in the New Mexico badlands. Echohawk had over the years become an academe. This was the first fieldwork he’d done in a few years, though the weathered look of a seasoned field archeologist had not softened from his face. They reached the office. The ground floor corner suite looked out over a spacious park rich in greenery and with a flowing fountain. The blinds were open and the office was alive with rich sunlight. Santino sat behind his desk and pushed a file across to Echohawk. The archaeologist picked it up and began flipping through the pictures inside.

“Tell me again how this was found.”

“A few local kids were tooling around the desert in gas-powered buggies,” Santino replied. “One of the buggies wrecked pretty bad and dug up the tip of the pyramid. When they started digging it up, they thought it might be old cowboy loot dropped from a saddlebag. It didn’t take them long to realize it wasn’t. That’s when they came to town to get help. We managed to excavate almost three meters of the thing before we called your people.”

“That was a week ago,” Echohawk said. “Have you managed to unearth any more of the object?”

“We cleared off a second face of the pyramid to a total depth of four meters,” Santino replied. “The damn thing is huge. The size of the excavation’s making it harder to dig up and the soil is rocky around here so the dig is pretty tough.”

“The land around here’s remained unchanged for tens of thousands of years,” Echohawk said. “Under accepted theories about native migration across the continent, that shouldn’t be possible. Then there’s the question of just how the object was buried. How far is it to the site?”

“It’s almost thirty klicks out of town,” said Santino, “well past city limits, but still within the Laguna District.”

“Any other towns nearby?”

“Ghost towns now; most of the land around here was given up after the war. When White Sands was nuked, the fallout blew right through this area.”

“It doesn’t seem to have affected things here.”

“Laguna’s the end product of the first twenty years of Southwestern Protectorate civil engineering,” Santino replied. “The town and the band are old, going back to the reservation era, but after the war, this area was pretty badly beaten up. The town’s only looked like it does now for about ten years.”

Echohawk nodded gravely. He remembered the battles that had been waged both in the political and personal arenas to establish the American First Nations Protectorates.

“How hot is the dust where the pyramid was found?”

“Remarkably, it’s almost clean,” Santino said. “The radiation level is negligible.”

“Can we get out to the site? I’d like to see the object for myself.”

“We can leave right away if you like,” Santino said, rising.

Echohawk also got to his feet.

“We’ll follow you in my camper,” Echohawk said. “I want to get out to the site and start setting up a base camp right away.”

“I’ll get my car and meet you around front.” They headed for the door.

. . .

They traveled to the site on a dirt path stamped out in the earth by the recent activity surrounding the buried pyramid. This was outback; hilly desert stretching out for miles around them. The dig was visible as a glint on the horizon long before they reached it. Several cars were parked haphazardly around vaguely crescent-shaped pit, a canteen truck standing guard by the cars while a dump truck waited near the portable toilets as earth and stone was hauled from the arena by wheelbarrow. James pulled the camper up to the other cars as Santino parked his own vehicle close by. Echohawk left the camper, approaching the chief of the Laguna Band.

“Who’d you get for the dig?” Echohawk asked.

“Locals,” Santino replied. “City works crews and highschoolers looking for summer work.”

Echohawk descended into the work pit. The excavation had uncovered two faces of the pyramid which shimmered in the late morning sun. The work pit was about ten meters wide at its base with a gradually sloping pathway to the surface. They’d moved a lot of earth; the problem with excavating a pyramid was that the further down one went, the larger the pit had to be so that there was enough room to work around the bottom of the pyramid and continue digging. Echohawk studied the dig so far: they had been primarily concerned with hauling away the earth and stone surrounding the pyramid’s two exposed sides. The bad news was anything in the earth of geological significance that had been thusfar removed was now lost. The locals had been eager to unearth the structure and in so doing had destroyed many potential clues to the pyramid’s origins. However, there was still enough undisturbed land around the pyramid’s two unexposed sides for them to learn what they needed to know.

“I’m going to want to clear everyone out,” Echohawk said to Santino. “We have to proceed carefully, and for now, that means shutting down the dig.”

He turned to James, who was once more on the console link to Peter.

“James, when Peter gets here, I want you guys to start taking core samples from around the site,” he said. “We need to establish the geological age of the pyramid. Also, get a grid set up on the unexposed sides; thirty square meters of half-meter squares. Then until we’ve dug everything out to the same depth. We’ll do Doppler seismography to get an approximation of the site after the geosurvey cores are taken.”

James nodded and began relaying the information to Peter who was leading a small convoy of three cube vans of equipment and crew to the site. Echohawk started down into the work pit and approached the pyramid. Though only two sides were exposed and then only four meters of the structure, it was already impressive, imposing. Its golden surface reflected the sunlight brilliantly. The pyramid was nearly perfectly smooth. There was hardly any sign of weathering on its surface; few scuffs or scratches and almost no dents or pockmarks. Given the tools the locals were using, Echohawk had expected there to be some significant scoring on the pyramid’s surface, but there was none. It was almost too smooth. He knelt beside the pyramid, running a hand over its surface.

“Excuse me, Professor,” Santino said, “but I was wondering: you’d mentioned doing a geological survey of the land. May I ask why?”

Echohawk stood up, looking around the work pit. Shovels and pickaxes, yet no damage to the pyramid.

“A geological survey will allow us to establish, roughly, about how long the structure’s been buried,” Echohawk explained. “As time passes, the ground, surface dust and natural debris changes. Each new surface layer preserves the one underneath. Each layer of earth will be characteristic of a different geological era. Certain types of seed found mixed in the earth could be extinct in the present era or be the progenitor of a current plant. Soil metallurgy changes, too, as time goes on. One layer of earth might have a relatively high amount of salt from when this was once an ocean floor. Another could contain high quantities particalised iron or other materials indicative of a nearby meteor impact. The pyramid’s position relative to the local geological history and how the earth around the pyramid settled will tell us how long it’s been here and then hopefully help us figure out who put it here and more importantly, when.”

As Echohawk and Santino finished speaking, Mark became aware that several pairs of eyes were focused on him, some faces suspicious, some hopeful, all expectant.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” Echohawk began. “I want to start off by thanking you one and all for the effort you’ve made so far in digging up the pyramid behind me.”

And Echohawk was very aware of the pyramid behind him. The Mayan and Incan civilizations had worshipped at pyramids and he easily imagined this object being used as the source of veneration. He wondered when there had last been an elder preaching as a crowd gathered around him to listen. Though he admitted, the smooth lines of this pyramid owed more to Egyptian styling than South American.

“My crew and I were sent here based on the pictures your band council sent to the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society. I can tell you that the discovery of this pyramid is an important one, not just from an archaeological point of view but also as a societal one for us and for all aboriginal peoples in the Americas. Because of the need to gather as much information as possible and because of the need to protect the structure, we will have to temporarily cease excavation.”

Grumbles and disappointed moans greeted Echohawk’s words. He raised his hands in a stopping motion, calling for silence.

“Folks, please . . . I said temporarily!” Echohawk called. “This is necessary, because we have to run certain tests in order to properly date the find, study the soil composition and to determine the height of the structure itself. In order to do that, unfortunately, we have to stop digging for a while. I promise that as soon as we are ready to resume digging, any and all of you who are still interested in working on the dig will be rehired. And when you are rehired, you’ll be working for the WAAS and being paid according to their very generous scale.”

This brought smiles and some applause. There were worse ways of kicking people off a dig site. As the work crew shouldered their shovels and pickaxes, climbing from the work pit, Echohawk returned his attention to the pyramid. He reached out to its golden surface, laying his hand on metal warmed by the desert sun. Except that the metal covering the surface of the pyramid was cool; it certainly was no hotter than air temperature, which on that fine summer morning was hovering around thirty-two degrees Celsius. Baking in the sun, the skin of the pyramid should have been much warmer. Echohawk slid his hand along the pyramid, feeling the smoothness of it. There were some scratches and pockmarks on it, but they felt weathered, smooth. He couldn’t find any fresh scratches or gouges despite the equipment that had been used. The surface of the pyramid was mottled, but that appeared to be a function of design. Echohawk stood and made his way from the pit. This was an unbelievable find and so far the information didn’t make sense to him at all.

LINX TO: Laura Echohawk
FROM: Mark Echohawk
SUBJECT: Laguna Dig

Dear Laura,

I got your last linx yesterday. I’m glad you like the book; finding a tome on abstract art of the 1980s was difficult. I think you’re one of the few people on Earth who actually likes work from that era. I hope the book helps you with your current project. It was also good to hear that you and your room mate managed to work things out; Allison’s a great girl and it would have been a shame if your friendship ended over something as trivial as housework division.

I have news of my own: I have returned to the field! If you can believe it, I finally got a field project interesting enough to pull me out of the classroom: Early last week, shortly after I linxed you my last letter, the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society contacted me regarding a discovery made in New Mexico on land belonging to the Laguna Band. The Lagunas discovered the tip of a golden pyramid buried beneath the desert.

Three things about this discovery have piqued my interest well beyond my usual tomb raider’s curiosity: First, it was previously assumed that the pyramid-building Aboriginal societies hadn’t established themselves any further north than the Mexican Peninsula. Second, the Laguna Pyramid has more in common in design with Egyptian pyramids than it does to its South American cousins: it is covered in gold or some sort of gold alloy and has a pointed peak and smooth sides, as opposed to the plateaued summit and staggered sides of most South American pyramids. Lastly, that the Laguna Pyramid is buried is significant, because the land around Laguna has been unchanged by geological event for thousands upon thousands of years. This means that either the Laguna Pyramid is quite ancient or it was meticulously and deliberately buried. I haven’t been this excited about a project since Doctor Aiziz and I discovered the Quipu repository, in Columbia.

I hope this linx finds you well; I look forward to hearing from you soon. Let me know how things go authenticating those works you discovered in the university’s warehouse. We’ll go out for coffee as soon as I get back to LA.

All my love,

Dad

Peter Paulson arrived at the head of a convoy of cube vans and one flatbed trailer. They parked just inside an area marked off earlier by James using orange CAUTION tape and aluminum poles. A small army of assistants, graduate students and general help began unloading crates of equipment and setting up tentlike portable shelters to be used as living quarters and a mobile lab building made from corrugated aluminum sheets and a titanium frame. By the middle of the afternoon Mark Echohawk’s archaeological team had set up the entire base of operations and James and Peter had drilled out their first core samples.

“James!” Peter called, stepping inside the lab, “what have we got going?”

James turned his chair away from the workstation and shook Peter’s hand.

“’Sup, Pete?” he asked. “What we’ve got going is the end-stage analysis of the core samples.”

James handed a sheaf of paper to Peter.

“This is interesting,” Peter said, reading the report. “It says here there’s a high concentration of iridium in the soil around the structure.”

“Only at a specific depth in the soil,” James answered. “It looks like a local meteoric impact.

“Yeah, but the patterning suggests the KT boundary,” Peter said.

“You noticed that too, huh?” James asked. “The Prof shit when he saw it. He wants me to drill new samples and re-run the geological survey.”

“I can see why.”

In geology, the KT boundary is a marker indicative of a time at the end of the Cretaceous Era when the Earth was subject to massive meteoric bombardment, including the so-called “Death Star” that wiped out the dinosaurs. The hallmark of the KT boundary was an uncommonly high concentration of iridium in the soil of the era, iridium being an element common in space, but exceedingly rare on earth.

“I don’t believe it’s the KT myself,” James said. “I think it’s just an anomalous iridium layer, probably from a local nearby meteoric impact.”

“That would make more sense to me,” Peter replied. “It’s something to keep an eye on. We’ll look for other signs of a nearby impact when we do seismography.”

“Yeah, the Prof wants to see you about that,” James told him. “He wants the cannons set up for a wide scan.”

“Why?”

“He wants to completely rule out the KT boundary’s significance to the dig.”

. . .

Peter made his way across their narrow, dusty compound to Mark Echohawk’s trailer. He was a couple of years older than James and was tall, dark-haired and athletic. Coming from a poor neighbourhood, he’d exploited an athletic scholarship to get himself into the UCLA Anthropology Department. It didn’t take his teachers long to realize this jock in particular was more interested in working in the field than playing on one. It wasn’t long after that Mark Echohawk, dean emeritus of the newly-expanded archaeology department, took an interest in the young Peter Paulson.

Peter found Echohawk in the camper’s kitchenette brewing a pot of coffee. He favoured an old-fashioned percolator urn-style coffee maker over the more popular — and faster — drip-brew coffee makers. He was waiting patiently for the “Ready” light on the urn to turn red, a large glass mug in his hand.

“Hi, Mark,” Peter said.

He was the only one of Echohawk’s students to call him, privately, by his first name.

“Hello, Peter,” he said, reaching for the tap on the coffee urn the instant the light flashed red. “Want a cup?”

“Hell yeah,” Peter said, sliding into the horseshoe-shaped booth. If there was one thing the Prof did exceptionally well besides archaeology, it was brew a pot of coffee. Echohawk put milk, brown sugar and a bottle of cinnamon on the table. Peter began fixing his coffee as Echohawk sat down. Peter, almost twenty-five, watched the sixty-odd-year-old Echohawk fix his own coffee. Peter had studied under Echohawk for years now and had been fortunate enough to go into the field with him twice. This was their third expedition together and Peter, close to graduating and beginning his own career as an anthropologist, considered Echohawk both a friend and mentor.

“You read the geosurvey report?” Echohawk asked.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we have to run some scans and dig.”

“Why?”

“The iridium layer,” Peter replied. “It could be anomalous, but I’ve seen enough spectrographs of the KT boundary to know when I’m looking at it. So either the structure was buried at the end of the Cretaceous or else it was built in a pit dug out that far down and then very meticulously buried.”

Echohawk nodded. He’d come to the same conclusion. Neither of them liked the implications.

“That’s why I want to start off with an extended Doppler seismology scan,” Echohawk said. “To see if it was buried deliberately or not. I also want to find out if the pyramid was part of some sort of temple complex. If they dug a pit to build the thing in, chances are it wasn’t a stand-alone structure. Chances are there’s other structures buried nearby and I want to see if we can’t locate them as well.”

“We should follow up with a hard dig,” Peter said. “Use positron emission test scanners to see what’s between us and the structure and just strip out as much earth as possible. We may even want to consider getting an orbital deep radar scan of the surrounding desert.”

“One thing at a time,” Echohawk said. “Set up the Doppler cannons for as wide a scan field as possible. Then we determine the next step.”

. . .

It took most of the rest of the afternoon to set up the Doppler seismology cannons for the scan. Doppler seismology scanning had been a beneficial addition to field archaeology years earlier. Using special cannons, slug weights were fired into the ground. The seismic vibrations, Doppler waves, resulting from the blasts were picked up by echographic equipment similar in nature to ultrasound scanners, and the resulting information was fed into computing systems that compiled three-dimensional images of objects buried beneath layers and layers of earth. The use of multiple cannons fired simultaneously and networked in to a central computer would generate a detailed image of an object and anything surrounding it for kilometres. Doppler seismology had proven to be most beneficial in paleontology, helping discover entire dinosaur burial grounds. But Doppler seismology had also been used in archaeological digs in Egypt, Iraq and India. The greatest success of Doppler seismology to date had been the discovery of an entire lost city in China’s Gobi Desert.

. . .

When James and Peter returned from setting up the cannons, the sun was well on its way towards setting. Three canteen trucks, one cooking hamburgers, fries and pizza, one serving ice cream and one serving just about everything else, had established a beachhead on the edge of Echohawk’s camp. James left to get their suppers while Peter reported in with Echohawk. The rest of the expedition were seated at picnic tables eating, or were working diligently in the lab building preparing for the Doppler scan and running final analyses on the soil samples taken earlier that day. Peter and James ate their fast-food suppers and then joined Professor Echohawk in the lab where the Prof sat with Paul Santino.

“Gentlemen,” Echohawk said, “we’re ready when you are.”

James sat at one workstation, Peter at another.

“Tracking and recording are online,” James said.

“Echography imaging systems on,” Peter said. “We’re compiling a scan of ambient seismic activity.”

“An ambient scan will allow us to get an accurate image,” Echohawk explained to Santino. “By sampling the seismic ‘noise’ made from foot and vehicle traffic and natural shifting in the ground, the scanner will then be able to filter out that background activity and focus entirely on the shockwaves set off by the cannons firing.”

Santino nodded and continued to watch the display screens in front of James and Peter.

“We’re ready, Prof,” James called.

“You may fire when ready,” Echohawk said with amusement.

“Thirty second blast warning,” Peter said, toggling a switch.

Two short blasts of a siren erupted in response, followed by a long wail which cycled higher and higher in pitch before dying out

“Cannons armed,” James reported.

“Final countdown,” Peter said, reaching for an isolated console, “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and one. Fire!”

James unlocked a sealed button on the computer console and pressed it. There was a deep muffled rumbling noise, and the slightest of tremors passed through the ground. A sound like distant thunder rolled through the compound and instantly every screen on the monitors before them flared to life, recording the progress of the shockwaves set off by the multiple cannons firing. A distinct image was forming on the main screen where the Doppler compilation was being done. It showed the pyramid as seen from above, resting atop a large circular dais. From there the image became strange, almost incomprehensible to Echohawk or his team: The dais was sitting on top of the crest of an arched dome, kilometres across. The dome was covered by an irregular network of pits and canyons and large constructs that looked like clusters of buildings. The dome itself was so huge that its periphery could not be seen on the scan image.

“What the hell was that?” Echohawk asked, rising.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I don’t understand what we’re looking at.”

“Show me three-D of the scan,” Echohawk said. “James, how far did we scan?”

“We set up the seismology to scan everything within a ten-kilometre radius of the pyramid,” James said.

“Can we compile further out?” Echohawk asked, “extrapolate based on what we have so far?”

“It won’t be well defined,” James said, “but there’s enough seismic activity for the Doppler imager to compile an image another ten K out, with about fifty to sixty per cent accuracy.”

“Do it,” Echohawk commanded.

“I have the three-D, Prof!” Peter called.

Echohawk leaned over Peter’s workstation and stared in disbelief.

“The view is along the Y axis,” Peter said. “We’re looking at it from the horizontal now.”

The pyramid appeared onscreen with scale measurements below the image. The Laguna Pyramid was almost twenty meters tall and nearly twenty-five meters wide at the base. Hardly a large pyramid by any standards, but it crested the ridge of a massive dome. At its summit, the bowl of the dome was six kilometres wide and stretched down beyond the scope of the initial Doppler image. About two kilometres down along the surface of the dome was a ring of pyramids spaced evenly one every half-kilometre around.

“I’m recompiling all images now,” James called from his workstation. “You aren’t going to believe this.”

The image onscreen shrank, to accommodate its full scope. The dome was not a complete sphere but part of a mountainous arch that curved down into a massive disk. They were looking at the upper half of a massive object onscreen. One whose presence they could not even begin to understand. Their compiled image was twenty kilometres in diameter. The object they were looking at was a circular disk with an arched dome on its surface. Said dome was seven kilometres high and at its widest was fifteen kilometres. Most incomprehensible was that the gargantuan object was right now buried beneath their feet.

“I think we need to call somebody,” Echohawk said, stunned.

Chapter Two: Excavation

“I won’t believe it until we’ve had the entire Doppler seismography equipment checked out and another set of scans done,” Echohawk said during the next morning’s meeting.

“In fact, I wouldn’t object to replacing the Doppler equipment altogether. Is it possible that something in the local geology is setting up some weird harmonic that’s messing with the equipment?”

“Not likely,” James said. “Prof, Peter looked at the Doppler equipment while I went over the geology last night: the equipment checks out fine and the only anomaly in the soil out here is that the area we’re in has significantly lower fallout levels than most of New Mexico. White Sands was a nuclear target during War Three, and most of New Mexico has measurable fallout. There’s almost none in the area surrounding the Laguna Pyramid.”

“What about the iridium in the soil from around the pyramid?” Peter asked.

“That’s the other problem with the dig,” Echohawk replied. “If the object was deliberately buried, then the spread of iridium through the soil would not be consistent from one sample to the next. There is a very distinct spread to the iridium layer, and from what we can see, it’s right through the KT Boundary. So according to the current evidence not only was the object buried naturally, it was here well before the end of the Cretaceous.”

“That would mean the object was here more than sixty million years ago.”

“I know,” Echohawk said, dryly.

“But that would be impossible,” James said. “Unless there was an advanced civilization here on Earth sixty million years ago. No evidence has ever been found to even suggest that.”

“James, until a few years ago there wasn’t any evidence to suggest there was life on one of Jupiter’s moons,” Peter said. “Then the Clarke probe brought back water samples from Europa that were rich in bacteria.”

“The point is, we don’t know what it is we’re dealing with,” Echohawk said emphatically. “And the only way to find out is to dig. We’ll start a full excavation today. I’ve asked the society to book us some time with the orbital labs so we can get a deep radar probe of the area and find out for sure if the object is really as big as the Doppler seismology says.”

“When do we expect the sweep?” Peter asked.

“In about a week and a half,” Echohawk replied. “The lab aboard the Concord 3 station is very busy right now, and even as a priority booking, the earliest we could get is then.”

“Well, between now and then, we have some earth and stone to start moving,” Peter said. “We should use magnetic resonance imagers and positron emission testers to make sure we can dig through quickly. Anything of significant interest between us and the pyramid will show up on a scan.”

“I agree,” Echohawk said. “And this dig will be slow enough as it is. The real question is whether or not we go public with what we have so far; and if not, just how long we can expect to keep it a secret.”

. . .

A limited press release was issued by the WAAS. It said in part that a structure of unknown origin had been found on land belonging to the Laguna Band and that a team of researchers was currently undertaking its unearthing. Aside from a few details about the size and composition of the structure, little else was added. Some people were curious and came to see but no more so than would be expected on most digs. Only Santino, Echohawk and Echohawk’s senior assistants knew the truth. And none of them were talking.

. . .

The dig was progressing well enough; the PET and MRI scanners allowed them to dig more quickly and less gingerly. They had excavated much of the pyramid in a widening circle. Laser cutters on loan from the society allowed them to clear away the heavy stone deposits, but the dig was nonetheless becoming more difficult because of the nature of the structure they were unearthing. During extensive excavations, it was often possible to “level” a dig laterally so the maximum width of a work pit could be maintained. But with a pyramid, the deeper one dug, the wider one had to make their pit. The wider they had to make their work area, the more soil they had to move from the surrounding land. Consequently, the dig was starting to slow down. Where they had taken a week to reach their current depth, it would take them twice as long to expose the rest of the buried pyramid. And that was without considering what lay beneath that. If anything of significance presented itself in the soil between them and the base of the pyramid, they would have to excavate that object before continuing.

. . .

Echohawk’s team first exposed all four sides of the pyramid and from there dug down another four meters. The pyramid was now peeking out of a pit eight meters deep, itself nearly ten meters wide to a side at that level. Their workpit was a further twenty meters wide at current depth. Actual digging had stopped while James and Peter began another round of tests on the ground, using the PET and MRI scanners to ensure there was nothing archaeologically significant between them and the base of the pyramid.

“How’s it looking?” Echohawk asked as he approached his two assistants.

“If the Doppler seismology reading was right,” James said as he and Peter calibrated the MRI scanner, “we’re about nine, maybe ten meters from the base of the pyramid. The ground is starting to become solid rock at this point, so we might consider precision blasting to widen the pit and bringing in more laser cutters to get past the rock deposits.”

“I’m not crazy about using explosives,” Peter advised Echohawk.

“Neither am I,” the elder archaeologist concurred, “but I’m inclined to agree with James. I’ll call the society and have them send us an explosives engineer. We need to uncover the pyramid, at least.”

“Yeah, but then what?” James asked. “Prof . . . this thing isn’t some Mayan ruin. The pyramid is metal. And if it really is sitting on a structure twenty kilometres wide, what the hell is it and what do we do with it once we have access?”

Echohawk shrugged.

“We go inside and have a look around,” he said.

. . .

Nightfall brought the day’s work to a close, the pit a little wider, a little deeper. The last of the work crew left the digsite behind and only James, Peter and Echohawk remained, staring at the pyramid under floodlights. James and Peter were sore, sweaty and filthy from their day in the work pit. Echohawk had done his share, but had to balance his time in the work pit with his time coordinating the other tasks involved in the dig: analysis of recovered soil and stone, coordinating the expansion of the digsite, the logistics of hauling away the earth burying the pyramid and keeping the World Aboriginal Archaeological Society abreast of the ongoing efforts. Experts from around the globe were already beginning to weigh in on the artifact and its origins. Echohawk had to sift through their reports to find nuggets of use to the dig.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this,” Peter said, tiredly.

“Neither have I,” Echohawk replied, “although I’ve had worse digs. Try cutting through stone like what we’re chopping up with jackhammers and weak explosives. We didn’t always have laser cutters and sonic pulverisers, you know.”

“I keep hearing that with Doppler seismology, MRI machines, PET scanners and deep probe radar that the days of digging are over,” Peter said. “And it’s all bullshit. We’ll never stop digging in the dirt to find things.”

“I hope you’re right,” Echohawk said with a smile.

They turned and began making their way from the site. Echohawk stopped and clasped his left ear as it suddenly started to vibrate. He’d been wearing a communications headset so long that day that he’d forgotten he still had it on. He toggled a small switch on the earpiece and began speaking.

“Mark Echohawk,” he said. “What? Really? That’s excellent. We’re on our way to the lab now. We’ll linx in directly from our main computer console. Thanks!”

Echohawk ended the linx and began pacing from the work pit a little faster.

“What’s up?” Peter asked, jogging up beside his mentor.

“That was Professor Todds,” Echohawk said. “We got our operation time with Concord 3. The orbital scan of the area is going to begin in a few minutes.”

. . .

Early in the twenty-first century, Space Station Unity, the International Space Agency’s crown jewel, went into operation. The costly venture helped open the door for other international efforts in space, including the Bova Manned Mars Mission, the Clarke series of robot probes to Jupiter and its moons and an international commercial venture by the Netter Consortium to build an orbital hotel. The privatization of civilian space ventures paved the way for cooperative international scientific missions. After long decades of use, Unity Station was retired. But the fledgling World Space Agency was already planning the second generation of international space stations. This time, four stations were to be established around the globe. Later, two more would be added to the planned project. Six Concord stations were commissioned: five in geostationary orbit around the globe; Concord 1 hung in the sky over Europe; Concord 2 over Asia and Eastern Europe; Concord 3 over North America and Concord 4 and 5 over the North and South Poles, respectively. When Concord 6 was completed, it would follow an orbital flight path between the Equator and the Antarctic Circle, covering the needs of the Southern Hemisphere. At the present time, only three of the six stations were operational; the other three in various stages of construction. Concord 2, 3 and 5 were fully staffed, while work continued on Concords 1, 4 and 6. The first five stations would have been up and running had a major electrical fire aboard Concord 1 and a near space collision aboard a fortunately empty Concord 4 not set back the schedule.

. . .

Like all of the operational Concord space stations, Concord 3 was staffed by members of the World Space Agency. Following regional preference guidelines, the cosmonauts aboard Concord 3 came primarily from the North American Union; American, Canadian, Mexican and Cuban cosmonauts handled all aspects of the day-to-day running of the station, including the constant research projects from both military and civilian interests. The station’s command module was large but cramped; every available surface used as a workstation, including a spherical island moored to the inner bulkhead by a large support column through the center of the room. Two dozen officers occupied the module at any given time, everyone there running or monitoring part of the station’s vital functions. The science system module was directly below the command module and looked much the same, though it was devoted to running the two arrays of scientific equipment at either end of the station; one array faced the Earth, the other the stars. Between the command and science modules was the command office for Concord 3. The command office consisted of three separate suites: one for the station’s chief clerk; one for the officer of the watch and one for the station commander. At this time, only one office was occupied: that of the station commander, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Margaret Bloom.

Lieutenant Colonel Bloom’s office boasted a large blister window of a transparent metallic alloy. The view from her office was across the breadth of the space station to the Earth orbiting beyond. In the three months she had been skyside at C-3, Bloom had grown used to the view and then become tired of it. She had three months more to go before returning to Earth and her true love: flying. At fifty-five, Bloom only had ten years left before her flight status was permanently revoked. She had crystal blue eyes and short, blonde hair. She had strong Germanic features and her active lifestyle had kept the age from her features. She could pass for thirty and give women even younger a run for their money with men their own age. A former fighter jock and now an Air Force test pilot, she loathed the idea of giving up the stick. The hazardous nature of her work necessitated that every 18 months she take a six-month ground or non-flight assignment, and each time she spent six months grounded, it was to her six more months that she wasn’t in the cockpit. The last thing she’d piloted had been the shuttle that had brought her up here. The next would be the shuttle home. The ten years she had left to fly seemed painfully short after almost four times as many years of flying behind her.

. . .

Bloom studied the watch report on the electronic notepad before her. All the standard statistics about what was just another day at the cracker factory. She signed off on it, planning to take a break from the monotony long enough to have a coffee and a cigarette. Not that there were any places aboard a space station that one could legally smoke. Bloom wondered how the tobacco companies were staying afloat. For a change of pace, she put down the watch report and began going over the requests for access to the station’s scientific equipment and arrays. Normally, Bloom didn’t pay much attention to the scientific research being done; if it was civilian, it only concerned her if it was a potential threat to the station. If it was military, Bloom was required to supervise. Most of the time the requests for authorization crossed her desk, she signed off on them and they were forgotten. However, when the requisition from the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society crossed her desk, Margaret Bloom became personally involved.

. . .

Bloom finished up on some unrelated paperwork and made her way from the office module into the command module. The communications hub dominated the lower hemisphere of the workstation island in the center of the module. She pushed and floated her way to the com operator’s station.

“Colonel?” the communications officer asked as Bloom drifted to his station.

“Lieutenant, I need a direct linx to the communications spar for the ongoing deep scan in New Mexico.”

The lieutenant worked his console’s controls and a few seconds later the linx was established. Bloom slipped on a headset and oriented herself to face the two-way screen in the center of the operator’s station.

. . .

In Laguna, Echohawk, James and Peter took their seats around the main computer station in the lab. The computer was linked in to the World Grid and would shortly be receiving preliminary data from the deep scan being done aboard Concord 3. The actual full compilation of the data would be done on the station and then transmitted down to the Laguna site for full analysis. The data being transmitted to Laguna would be basic, but would be enough to form preliminary images of the object buried beneath them and confirm its size and age, if not its composition.

“We have an incoming linx from Concord 3,” James reported. “It isn’t the data dump, though. It’s a communication linx . . . for you, Prof; from the station commander.”

Peter and James both looked questioningly at Echohawk, who shrugged and arched an eyebrow. Echohawk slipped on a headset with a video boom and lowered the mini screen over his eye. He toggled a switch on the side of the earpiece and nodded to James.

“Put it through to my spar,” he said. “I’m online.”

James focused a minicam onto Echohawk and then transferred the signal over. Instantly the viewer over Echohawk’s eye filled with the image of Lieutenant Colonel Margaret Bloom.

“Hello, Meg,” Echohawk said. “What a pleasant surprise!”

Bloom smiled.

“Hello, Mark,” she said. “How have you been?”

“I’m fine. How about you, Meg? Finally get tired of test-piloting orbital relay fighters? I’m surprised to see you at a desk even if it is in orbit.”

“I’ve been good,” Bloom replied. “And no, I’m on a six-month ground-time rotation. They wanted me back at Engineering and Design but I was so fucking sick of E&D I took a command rotation on Concord 3.”

. . .

Bloom was happy to speak with Mark another again. It had been too long, she reflected, since she’d last seen him. But they both lived their own lives and they both knew it was best that way. But seeing his face onscreen, Bloom knew she wanted to get together with him again soon.

“Have you heard from Laura?” Bloom asked to break the silence.

“Same time every week,” Echohawk replied. “She writes me a linx, tells me how she’s been doing and what’s going on in her life. I always write back and offer her advice when she asks; same as you.”

“And she never takes any advice,” Bloom said wryly. “Same as you. She gets that from your side of the family, you know.”

“I know. And I’m proud of it; same as you.”

“Mark, I have to say I was surprised to find you back in the field,” she said. “I thought for sure you’d given it up for the classroom.”

“They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, Meg,” Echohawk said. “Have you read up on the details of our request?”

“Honestly, I hadn’t. Usually the station’s clerk reads through the bulk of it and summarizes the requests in three sentences including one for the applicant’s name.”

Echohawk smiled.

“Reread the application,” he said, “and you’ll understand why I’m out here. You’ll also see why we ordered the scan.”

“Mark . . . do you have any idea how busy it is up here? There’s a hundred projects just like yours going on each day; those are just the civilian operations. Then there’s the government stuff and then the military. There are projects ongoing I’m not even supposed to know about. Then, I have to oversee the day-to-day operations of running this station. I don’t get a lot of time to read requests and reports.”

“I think you’ll want to read this one and not just for my sake.”

“Is it that big?”

“You just said a mouthful.”

. . .

History records that early in the twenty-first century, international organizations decreed that Internet service was a public utility, much the same way that telephone or electrical services were. They renamed the Internet the World Grid and unknowingly ushered in a new technological era. Television, telecommunications and the services of the Internet were gradually combined into one vast, single medium. Extremely high bandwidth was required to transmit the Grid’s information to the world, so fibre optic trunk lines were established solely to provide Grid access. And the World Grid delivered everything: view-on-demand television programming replaced broadcast TV’s schedules; people began to watch what they wanted, when they wanted; long-distance calling became a thing of the past because of real-time voice chat; telephones gave way to streaming video communication, and the host of services once provided by the Internet were still all available on the new World Grid.

. . .

The new media required new delivery systems and a small electronics firm working in Ottawa, Ontario, provided the world with the next step in computer evolution: quantum optic computing, the computation of information using light instead of electricity and quantum processing. Previous computer systems relied on the electric processing of digital signals. Optic processing used light pulses instead of electrical impulses to transmit information. And where traditional computers transmitted bits of information as either ones or zeros to process information, quantum computation processed information by transmitting them as ones, zeros, or as virtually any probable combination of ones and zeros. Quantum-optic computers, sometimes called optical probability computers, worked so much faster, so much more efficiently, that the amount of information that could be transmitted processed and stored was exponentially greater than any previous computer system designed.

With the advent of quantum optic computing, Grid service providers replaced or absorbed cable companies, phone companies, Internet service providers and a host of other data-based industries. As currency was replaced by electronic credits to meet an international economy, even banks were absorbed into the new World Grid. The debit card became the new cash, with card-scanners built into most computer keyboards. Banks became largely virtual, with most people performing their financial transactions from their computer terminals. The World Grid was so all-pervasive that governments around the world formed supervisory committees to control as much of the technology as they could. And what couldn’t be legislated was closely watched.

Most national Grid oversight committees simply ensured that no criminal activities were committed. There were some governments, however, who used theirs to spy on their own citizens, the United States of America among them. The House Grid Securities Commission had empowered the Homeland Security Agency to do just that. The work was outsourced to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Laguna dig had been attracting attention ever since it started. But when the Doppler seismology tests revealed the possibility of a massive artificial construct buried beneath the New Mexico desert and that that object would have been there for millions of years, very keen interest was paid to the dig. When the Concord 3 space station began its survey of the area, the DIA was already tapped into their systems through a back channel, recording everything. Already General Roy Harrod, head of the DIA, was aware of the ongoing operation and was supervising it closely under the direct orders of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

. . .

Within an hour of the deep scan’s beginning, the data being compiled by Concord 3 was already being compiled and extrapolated by the DIA’s own supercomputers. And the results of that extrapolation were so shocking to General Harrod that immediately after he had read the report, he contacted the Cee-Jay-Cee on a Grid channel that was only to be used in the most urgent situations. Harrod’s desk was devoid of any furnishing other than three computer consoles connected to the same keypad. The information from Concord 3 was on the console to his right. On the middle console, he was linxing through to the chairman, Joint Chiefs.

“General Harrod,” the chairman said. “What is it?”

“Sir, this is in regards to the Type Seven in New Mexico,” Harrod replied.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m linxing the information to you now, sir,” Harrod said as he entered a sequence of keys on his keypad. “I would suggest deploying personnel to New Mexico and securing control of the site.”

At his own workstation, the chairman was reading over the report Harrod had just sent him.

“I concur, General. Use standard protocols and keep me fully informed. This is your operation, General Harrod.”

“Yes, Mister Chairman.”

. . .

In his office at the Pentagon, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sighed heavily. The chairman terminated the link and then removed his earpiece. He couldn’t get the knack for hitting the buttons without seeing them. He tapped in the correct sequence and replaced the earpiece. His console turned black except for a single red dot in the center of the screen.

“Yes?” a voice issued into the chairman’s earpiece.

“Put them on call,” the chairman said. “We may need to meet.”

There was a long pause on the other end. An emergency meeting was rare.

“Understood,” the voice said, at last.

The signal was cut. The chairman sat back in his chair.

. . .

Two hours after the downlink from Concord 3 began, James was nearly done a preliminary compilation of the data.

“A lot of this is going to be conjectural,” he warned. “We’ll know the basic size and shape of the object but we won’t be able to tell its composition or any fine details.”

“That’s alright, James,” Echohawk said. “Let’s see what you have.”

A large display screen had been set up to the left of the main console workstation. It unrolled much like an old projection screen, and liquid crystal within compiled the image. They had set up the screen to accommodate the small audience of onlookers who had gathered, including the entire Laguna Band Council.

“We’re only going to be able to see from the top down,” James explained. “We can do a side view, but only of the upper half of the object. Whatever it looks like from below will remain a mystery, unfortunately.”

Those were the last words spoken by anyone for a very long time. Onscreen, the image of an arched dome appeared. The dome stretched out along its base into a long disk so that it seemed to be a tall, rounded mountain stretching out to a valley floor. At the top of the massive dome was the elevated dais and atop that, looking very small when compared to the dome itself, was the Laguna Pyramid. A distance from the top, a ring of three-quarter pyramids guarded the crest. According to the scale, there was one pyramid roughly every half-kilometre, twenty-eight in all. At the bottom of the disk, the object was thirty-two and three quarter kilometres across. It was circular, and the blister-like top of the arched dome was almost seven and a half kilometres high.

“My God,” Santino said. “What the hell is it?”

“James, get me a linx to the WAAS,” Echohawk said. “I need to speak with Professor Todds immediately.”

James nodded and began working a second keypad.

“I don’t understand,” Peter said. “What are we looking at? A domed city? If so, who built it?”

“We don’t know that that’s what it is,” Echohawk cautioned.

“Well, what else could it be?” Peter demanded, “And how did such a civilization occur without any other evidence ever being found? How did they develop their industry without fossil fuels?”

“Alcohol-based fuel?” James suggested. “Maybe they used geothermal power?”

“James, my linx to Professor Todds, please,” Echohawk reminded him. “Guys, let’s try and stay focused here. We don’t know what we’re dealing with right now and we can’t jump to any conclusions.”

“Prof? We have a problem,” James reported.

“What is it?”

“I have no Grid access,” James said. “I’ve even lost the feed from Concord 3.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know!” James answered. “I can’t access the WAAS, Concord 3, I can’t send linxes and I can’t even get a VOD show.”

Echohawk crossed to where he’d put down his travel bag and pulled out his own console. He switched it on as he slipped his headset on. Lowering the microphone and display booms into place, Echohawk placed his own Grid linx. All his display showed was a standard no-service message:

ERROR 201.21: UNABLE TO ACCESS WORLD GRID AT THIS TIME. PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOUR MODEM IS ONLINE AND THAT YOUR CONNECTION SETTINGS ARE VALID. IF THE PROBLEM PERSISTS, PLEASE CONTACT YOUR GRID SERVICE PROVIDER.

“Shit!” Echohawk swore. “What the hell is going on?”

In response to his question, the aluminum walls of the lab building began to rattle and hiss as they were pelted with sand, dust and small rocks. At the last, Echohawk heard the distinctive staccato thunder of helicopter blades rumbling in all around them. He, James, Peter and Chief Santino rushed from the shelter into the night air. A storm of debris blew around them as four massive black helicopters landed in the compound. Several other military vehicles, including the British-made Ranger armored personnel transports, were rolling up. The glare from the floodlights on the helicopter illuminated the compound with dusty beams of cruel, artificially white light. The storm began to die off as the helicopters’ propellers cycled down to a halt. The growling whine of the power cells in the land vehicles also faded, leaving only the migraine white of the floodlights that seemed to be everywhere. Echohawk squinted vainly, feeling pain behind his eyes. James and Peter produced sunglasses. Santino shielded his face by making a visor with his hand. They watched, stunned, as soldiers began running around in an organized, concerted effort. The soldiers were rounding people up from the mess tents and the shelters, bringing them all over to the central location of the laboratory. Two soldiers stood before Echohawk as the rest of the camp’s inhabitants and the dozen-odd curious onlookers that were almost always on site were herded together behind them.

“What the fuck is going on?” Echohawk bellowed with indignant rage.

The soldiers said nothing. Finally, after everyone was brought together, one of the soldiers spoke into her headset.

“Area secure, Colonel!”

She barked. A door in the helicopter nearest to Echohawk slid open. A man in combat fatigues, tall, gaunt with ice-blue eyes and graying hair shorn clean to his scalp, walked slowly, deliberately from the cabin. As he reached the hard-packed earth of the desert floor, he slipped a visored cap onto his head and walked with the same imperious, deliberate pace he had used to leave the helicopter over to where Echohawk stood. He had all the bearing of a senior officer and all the power and menace of a veteran soldier.

“Professor Mark Echohawk,” the Army officer said, “I am Colonel Isaac Jude, United States Army Rangers, Thirteenth Battalion.”

“How very wonderful for you,” Echohawk said.

Jude ignored the remark.

“By order of the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, acting on the behalf of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the United States, we are seizing control of this site and all equipment and records within. This area is now considered to be entirely the property of the government of the United States. You and your people will be detained long enough to be debriefed on the artifact you’ve uncovered. Until further notice, all access to the World Grid in this area, including the town of Laguna, has been blacked out.”

“You have no right to do this!” Santino bellowed. “This land belongs to the Southwestern Aboriginal Protectorate, as per the terms of the North American Aboriginal Charter! You can’t do this!”

Jude turned his head to regard Santino with a cold, dispassionate gaze.

“Chief Santino,” he said, sounding stunned at Santino’s words, “we just did.”

Jude shook his head at their dumbfounded expressions, unable to suppress a smile.

. . .

“Colonel Bloom?”

Bloom was at her desk, overlooking resource consumption reports on her console screen. Bloom keyed open the intercom channel and replied.

“Go ahead.”

“Colonel, you asked to be kept apprised of the deep scan of New Mexico,” the operator on the other end of the intercom explained. “There’s been a development, ma’am.”

“I’m listening.”

“The scan is still ongoing. Howeve,r we are no longer able to relay telemetry to New Mexico.”

“Put a crew in the virtual chairs and deploy repair drones,” Bloom said. “It’s not rocket science, Lieutenant.”

“The problem isn’t on our end, Colonel,” the lieutenant replied. “There’s no Grid service at the site.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The entire Laguna district of the Southwestern Protectorate, in other words most of northwestern New Mexico, is without access to the World Grid.”

“That’s impossible. There’s optic trunk lines buried right through the continental landmass and we monitor satellite traffic from up here. I haven’t gotten a report of any satellites being down.”

Bloom unstrapped herself from her chair, drifting away from her desk.

“I’m on my way.”

She pushed her way up to the airlock leading from her office and from there left, into the command module.

“Colonel on deck!” the duty officer called.

Bloom made her way to the command and control station that was monitoring the flow of communications to and from Concord 3.

“What is the situation?” Bloom asked, after returning the lieutenant’s salute.

“Well, ma’am, as I said, it looks as though that Grid service to the area comprising the Laguna District and surrounding communities has been completely cut off. There’s no discernible activity whatsoever.”

“That’s impossible,” Bloom reiterated. “Every single substation, communication central office, microwave and radio transmission relay tower . . . all of it would have had to have gone down at once.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Bloom,” the duty officer called, “you have an incoming linx from General Harrod of the DIA.”

Bloom turned to the young major, a look of disbelief on her face.

“You’re kidding me, right, Major?”

“No, ma’am,” she replied.

“What in hell is the head of the DIA doing, calling me?”

She moved back towards the hatch.

“I’ll take it in my office.”

. . .

Back in her office, Bloom unrolled the viewscreen from her console. A minicam built into the screen transmitted her image directly to General Harrod’s office.

“General Harrod,” Bloom said as the general’s image appeared onscreen, “what can I do for you, sir?”

“Good evening, Lieutenant Colonel,” Harrod answered. “I’ll be brief. You can start by collecting all data that you have recorded about the New Mexico deep scan operation and packing it for transport back home.”

“General?”

“There’s a jump plane fuelled and ready for takeoff at Edwards,” Harrod continued, “In ninety minutes, the plane will be docking with Concord 3. I will be aboard and at that time I will take delivery of the optic slips.”

“With all due respect, General, Concord 3 is an international space station and is not subject to American military control,” Bloom said. “If you intend on acquiring a copy of the data, you’ll either have to take it up with the World Space Agency, or with the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society; they’re the ones who commissioned the scan, and so by international proprietary law, it belongs to them.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Bloom, I’m not putting in a request. As your superior officer, I am ordering you to stand by and surrender those optic slips. You don’t have any choice in the matter. I am seizing them, as they directly relate to the national security of the United States.”

“You are neither my immediate superior nor in any position to order me to surrender those slips,” Bloom snapped, indignant rage filling her.

“You sure as hell don’t have the authority, General, to breach international law and violate World Council treaties! And begging your pardon, General, you damn well know all of this already!”

She hit the killswitch on her keypad and severed the communication. Seconds later, she was sending an emergency audiovisual linx to World Space Agency headquarters. She was immediately put through to space station control in Hamburg, Germany.

“Colonel Bloom,” the control operator responding said, “this is Brenda Hensing. How can I help you?”

“We have a situation up here,” Bloom replied. “I have reason to believe that members of the United States Defense Intelligence Agency are going to try boarding the station within the next two hours.”

“What? I don’t understand. Why would they–”

The signal began degrading; Bloom couldn’t make out what Hensing was saying.

“Say again, Hamburg,” she called, “Say again, please.”

Hensing’s voice came back through the linx, faintly. “We’re getting a lot of static on–” the image onscreen froze, depixillated and was replaced with a plain blue background.

The words

EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS RELAY FAILED

flashed across the screen. Bloom tried to reestablish the linx, but could not.

“Oh fuck,” she hissed.

Chapter Three: Indomitable Truth

Throughout time the corrupt have risen to power. Throughout time they have manipulated the Truth in order to stay in power, even when at the cost of Life. The greatest weapon of the corrupt has always been ignorance. But Truth yearns to be free and it always finds a champion. . .

He regarded them with ice-blue eyes over a hale, angular face. The corners of his mouth curved upwards into an oh-so-slight, ever-present smile, this Colonel Jude. As their captor sat down, Echohawk couldn’t help the feeling that he was a supplicant before a king awaiting judgment. Jude consulted a notepad which he then tossed down onto the collapsible metal desk that had until recently served as Echohawk’s command post within the lab building. Echohawk and Santino stood before Colonel Jude, two of Jude’s men behind them.

“Do you have any idea,” Jude began, “just how often it is that I’ve been called in during my career to help save people from themselves?”

The tall soldier regarded them, the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes reaching outward as he squinted.

“You strike me as more of a hired killer than a professional hero.” Santino said angrily.

Jude regarded him a long moment, perhaps wondering how Santino had gained such astute insight.

“I’ve been that, too, when necessary,” Jude said. “Right now, I’m the man who’s keeping you from further digging on the object you’ve discovered out here.”

“Do you have any idea what it is that we’ve discovered out here?” Echohawk demanded angrily.

“No, Professor Echohawk, and neither do you. That’s the problem.”

Jude leaned forward in his chair, as if trying to explain things to two errant schoolchildren.

“The fact is, gentlemen, that the object could be anything. And until such time as a proper threat assessment can be made, it is in the interests of national security to halt the dig.”

“What threat can an object that’s been buried for the last sixty-five million years possibly pose to national security?” Echohawk demanded.

“What threat did the Kreutz virus pose to humankind while it lay dormant in a cave in the Amazon for ten thousand years, until clear cutting exposed it to cattle farmers?” Jude countered. “Professor, my job here is simple: I’m shutting the dig down and I’m going to debrief you and everyone associated with this project on everything you know about the object. Once I’ve completed that, then my superior will decide what action is best taken.”

Of course, this wasn’t strictly true; his superior, namely General Harrod, had already decided what action was to be taken: Echohawk, Santino and the Laguna Pyramid archaeological dig team were to be debriefed and then silenced. The digsite would be closed, permanently, and the world would get back to normal. Contingencies had already been discussed, ensuring that no one came out to the dig site for a very long time. This was New Mexico, after all. The Laguna dig would unearth highly radioactive, contaminated soil from War Three. That contamination would of course force the United States government to cordon off the entire area for the next hundred years or more. A shame about the archaeologists, really, but there were risks to digging within the fallout zone of one of the dirtiest atomic bomb blasts of the war. Jude had no problems with his orders in this case. Everyone on-site were to be considered red-shirts, expendable. It wasn’t the first time he’d been ordered by his government to kill and certainly not the first time he and his troops had targeted civilians. Covert operations were never pretty. However, they were almost always necessary. And if there was indeed a Type Seven buried beneath their feet at this moment, it was imperative that this area be secured.

“So, quite simply, Professor Echohawk, the quicker you are to cooperate with us, the quicker this will all be over.”

. . .

A hastily called meeting in the office module brought Lieutenant Colonel Bloom together with most of her senior staff: Major Jack Benedict, her executive officer and the only one aboard with whom Bloom had served before; Captain Charles Boucher, Bloom’s head of station security; Captain Elizabeth Donnelly, the station’s operations chief, and Major Louise Cohen, the officer of the watch.

“Current as of now we have a serious situation,” Bloom explained. “For some reason, the deep scan we were commissioned to do of northwestern New Mexico has attracted some unwanted attention. The Defense Intelligence Agency has decided to black out all Grid communication access to the target area and to seize all material relating to the deep scan, including the originating systems, aboard this station. We’ve been ordered to turn over absolutely everything we have relating to the scans, including the science console core drives.”

“But they can’t do that,” Benedict replied. “This station is under international jurisdiction.”

“General Harrod seems to think he can do whatever he wants, Exo.” Bloom looked around the table and stood.

“A jump plane left Edwards’ Air Force Base less than twenty minutes ago. ETA with the station is ninety-eight minutes. Before that plane gets here, there are several things we have to do.”

She turned to Benedict first. The younger black man leaned forward almost conspirationally to listen. He trusted Bloom implicitly; they’d both flown sorties together as combat pilots during the Australian Conflict a decade past. She’d been squadron leader then. When all but their two planes were destroyed during one firefight, it was her orders and deft manoevering that saw them both through.

“Major Benedict, you and Captain Boucher need to secure the station. Seal off all docking ports and the access ways between the docking hub and the rest of the station. That won’t stop them, but it will slow them down. Major Cohen, I need you to determine who among the crew we can trust and who we can’t. Everyone we can’t place above suspicion will have to be locked down in the habitat carousel. I suspect some of our fellow Americans might think we’re mutinying against the DIA and therefore the U.S. government.”

Bloom turned to Donnelly, “Captain, you and I will go over the telemetry from the deep scan. We need to know what it is that’s down there, causing this mess. I want to know exactly why the DIA has decided to violate World Council treaty in order to seize this information. Maybe then we can figure out what to do with it.”

“Wouldn’t that put us in direct violation of orders?” Boucher, the senior staff’s lone Canadian officer, asked.

“Whose orders?” Bloom asked. “We’re under the direct and exclusive authority of the World Space Agency up here.”

“General Harrod’s for one,” Cohen replied. “With all due respect, Lieutenant Colonel, he did issue specific orders.”

“I’m afraid they’re orders I can’t legally recognize,” said Bloom. “And all they can do is haul us before a hearing. We’d be exonerated.”

“And our careers would stall,” Donnelly protested. “I’d like to rise in rank and pay a little, before I retire. I’d also like to avoid a series of assignments to godforsaken posts.”

“Like this one?” Bloom asked. “My career was stalled, too, a few years back. I was court-martialed twice, acquitted twice and I was never supposed to make major. I’m a lieutenant colonel now.” She tapped the clusters on her uniform for effect and then continued. “Your objections will be duly noted in my log. If you like, I can confine you to quarters for the duration. Following me on this one will be done strictly on a voluntary basis.”

“Count me in, Lieutenant Colonel,” Major Benedict said.

“Me as well,” Cohen added.

“What have I got to lose? I work for the Canadian Armed Forces. We’re not violating orders that came from my government,” Boucher confirmed.

“I’m in,” Donnelly said curtly. “Under protest, but I’m in.”

Bloom nodded her head.

“Then it looks like we have a job to do,” she said.

. . .

The soldiers had done cursory interviews and separated the workers into two groups: those who knew the full scope of the object they were unearthing and those who did not. The people with little or no knowledge were all herded together, while anyone with any real knowledge was kept isolated and under guard. James and Peter had been quick to pick up on this and played dumb well enough to end up grouped in with those who were genuinely ignorant of the object buried beneath them. They stood together plotting their next move.

“What do you think?” Peter asked James as they tried not to seem too obvious about watching their military captors’ movements.

“I think that when we get out of this, I’m going to go buy a pack of joints and smoke one after the other.”

“I hear you,” Peter said, “but that’s what I mean: how do we get out of this?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. What do you think is really going on here? I mean, did we accidentally dig up something the government buried down here, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Peter admitted, “but I don’t see how they did unless they tunneled out the whole desert before they built it.”

“Then why do they want so badly to keep this quiet?” James asked. “If it isn’t some supersecret government installation, then it’s just the ruins of a civilization that predates man. So what’s the big deal? As old as the planet is and as long as the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, it’s pretty egotistical of us to think that we’re the first intelligent civilization to grace the planet’s surface.”

“That’s just it, James,” Peter said. “What if there’s a third option, one that is the exact reason the feds sent in the troops?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, please don’t say aliens.”

“It has to be considered, James,” Peter said. “What if whatever’s been buried here in the desert for the last sixty-five million years isn’t of Earth origin at all?”

James looked around at the soldiers, noticing not for the first time how many of them had their rifles at the ready.

“Then I’d say we’re in a lot of trouble,” he said.

. . .

Using handholds built into the padded bulkheads of the space station’s narrow corridors, Bloom pulled her weightless self through the access way and into the science module. Weightless but with mass, her stomach and ears telling her she was in freefall, Bloom — like everyone else not currently in the two-thirds Earth-gravity environment of the habitat carousel — had to be careful not to become disoriented or move too rapidly or swiftly. More than once in the time she’d been here, Bloom had witnessed someone slamming headfirst into a bulkhead. In zero gravity, nosebleeds could get very serious.

. . .

The science module was deserted except for the stocky redheaded woman working one of the console stations. Her hair was tied in a French braid to keep it from floating off and she was strapped into the workstation’s chair so as not to drift. She drank coffee from a bag with a valve-straw that floated near to hand. Bloom took a bag of coffee from the dispenser mounted by the main hatch before pulling herself over to where Captain Donnelly worked. Anyone entering the same hatch Bloom had used would first get the impression that the two women were glued to the ceiling.

“What’s telemetry showing?” Bloom asked.

“Lieutenant-Colonel, you wouldn’t believe me if I showed you.”

“Show me,” Bloom said, stabilizing herself into an upright position relative to Donnelly.

On the viewscreen before them a three dimensional image began rendering. It showed the object under the New Mexico desert: a massive disk with a blistered dome arching up seven kilometres from the disk’s surface, where it ended in a ring of small pyramids guarding a single pyramid at the summit of the mountainous arch.

“Wait a minute,” Bloom said. “Is this right? This can’t be . . . the scale shows this thing to be almost thirty-five kilometres in diameter!”

“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me,” Donnelly replied. “And there’s more, ma’am. That was just the initial radar sweep. Further scans have determined the object to be of an unrecognized metallurgical composition which won’t allow us to do a scan of the interior.”

“Is the sweep still running?”

“Never stopped, Colonel Bloom.”

“We got cameras aimed down there? Regular video?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Show me the digsite. It should be right in the center of the scanning field.”

Donnelly worked the console and a few moments later a satellite view-from-above image of the Laguna Pyramid digsite appeared on the small viewer immediately to the right of that console’s main viewer.

“Zoom.”

The image grew in size and detail. Now they were able to see shapes moving about, evidently people.

“Again,” Bloom said.

The people became visible to them. They were all armed and all wearing camouflage.

“Jesus Christ, the Army’s already taken complete control of the site,” Bloom hissed.

“Now what?”

“Now we need a new plan,” Bloom said. “Contact Major Benedict and Captain Boucher. Have them meet us in my office the minute they’ve completed their work.”

. . .

“Let’s review,” Peter said, “What do we know?”

They were sitting in a corner of the laboratory on folding chairs provided to the detainees by the military. They were fenced in by simple retractable cordons, but what was keeping them all in place were the heavily armed soldiers on the other side of the barrier. James and Peter had pulled their chairs away from the rest of the crowd and were drinking coffee also provided to them by the soldiers.

“Access to the World Grid has been shut down,” James said. “There’s no way to send any Grid-based communications out.”

“Right. And we know that the object underneath us is about thirty-odd kilometres wide and that it’s been here for sixty-five million years at least.”

“We know the government wants it.”

“More precisely, we know they want to keep it secret.”

“And we know that they’re doing everything they can to appease us right now,” James added, “giving us chairs, giving us coffee, donuts . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever been arrested or detained before, but usually when you’re dumped into holding, the guards don’t try and keep you happy.”

“No,” Peter said. “They just try to keep you there.”

“Pretty much.”

“So without Grid communication, what can we do?” James sat silent for a long time, his brow furrowed and eyes downcast. Suddenly he straightened and looked at Peter.

“I just thought of something,” James said.

They watched members of the dig being escorted to Colonel Jude’s desk.

“Yeah?” Peter asked.

“The Army came in here in BVT 624 Ranger transports,” James said. “Those babies are equipped with full onboard console systems including independent Grid backbones. Even if the World Grid is being blacked out right now, the console systems in those vehicles can get online. If we can get to one, we can get online.”

“Great,” Peter replied. “So all we have to do is figure out how to get past the barricade in here, past armed guards, out into their motor pool and into an Army vehicle and online using a computer that’s probably passcode-secured.”

“If I can get to my console, I can get in that computer. I’ve got hackware that no one’s ever seen before.” James’ console unit was neatly stowed in its pouch on the desk of the lab’s main computer workstation.

“We still have to get out of here,” Peter said. “Which we won’t be doing any time soon.”

“Yeah,” James admitted, “that’s the fatal flaw in my otherwise brilliant plan.”

“I could probably boost the vehicle if we can get to it,” Peter said. “But the instant we try that shit, we’ll come under fire and pursuit.”

“Not a problem,” James replied. “I read about the 624 Ranger in Jane’s Review. They’re armor plated and can take an RPG round and keep going.”

Peter nodded, suddenly soberly terrified by what he and James were talking about. It was unreal: they were prisoners of the United States Army, plotting their escape, the theft of a vehicle and the expectation that they would be under fire while doing all this.

“This is really heavy,” he said.

. . .

Concord 3 hung in space over the Earth, a tiny white mote with silvery-black solar sails above a massive blue sphere. The station orbited over North America, staring forever down upon the eerie luminescence of the nighttime oceans bordering the continent and the brilliant web of diamonds that were its many cities. Toward the station flew with pointed precision and cold determination a white jump plane inscribed with the insignia of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The triangular, wingless wedge of metal shone from its own running lights as it made the approach. Capable of orbital insertion and return under their own power, jump planes had replaced the aging space shuttle fleet early in the twenty-first century. Successive generations of jump planes helped lessen the expense of both air travel and space travel, making even lunar voyages accessible to the average citizen. But the plane approaching Concord 3 was hardly an innocuous tourist flight. General Roy Harrod was aboard and he brought with him an entire battalion of troops.

. . .

Armed with the news that Harrod’s plane was less than an hour away, Bloom once more stood before her senior staff.

“Donnelly and I have analyzed the telemetry from the New Mexico scan,” she explained to them. “There’s an object buried down there, composition unknown, origin unknown. Everything points to it having been there for the last sixty-five million years, maybe longer. The size and shape of the object as well as its composition seem indicative of it not being of Earth origin. The Defense Intelligence Agency has sent troops in to occupy the digsite. And as we already know, General Harrod himself is coming here to seize all evidence of the scan on our end. This is what they’re trying to hide.”

Bloom hit a switch on her desk’s keypad, and the wall to their left lit up with a three- dimensional computer rendition of the object.

“Oh God,” Cohen said, her breath catching in her throat.

“My guess is it’s a ship,” Bloom said. “And my second guess is that the U.S. government is trying to keep its existence a secret so they can keep everything they find for themselves. They’re violating both the North American Aboriginal Charter regarding the sovereignty of the protectorate territories and the World Space Accords to make sure they have exclusive control of the information.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Benedict asked.

Bloom smiled.

“We’re going to do just what the DIA doesn’t want us to do, Exo,” Bloom said, “We’re going to broadcast the information out onto the World Grid. Any objections?”

There were none.

“Fine. And thank you one and all. Captain Donnelly, I’ll need you to put a team together for an EVA. Because our Grid link has been cut, we need to aim our communications dish at another satellite. Then we have to hack in and send our signal. That’s where you’ll come in, Captain Boucher. I understand your skills as a hacker are what landed you in military security to begin with.”

Boucher nodded.

“All that’s going to take some serious time, Lieutenant Colonel,” Benedict said.

“Correct, Exo: time we’ll buy for ourselves by shutting down docking control. If Harrod’s boys have to dock with the station without our help, it’ll take them at least another forty minutes. That gives us time to aim a dish, hack a satellite and transmit the information we have.”

“Where are we transmitting to?” Donnelly asked.

“I think there’s only one place to send the signal,” Bloom replied. “Where the world gets its news: INN.”

. . .

The jump plane neared the space station. Concord 3’s appearance in the cockpit window had grown from a speck of light reflecting against the sky to an indistinct shape, finally to a series of three segmented columns joined together in tight parallel. The columns were bisected by massive solar sails, designed to collect most of Concord 3’s power from the sun. At the upper end, the three columns met together in one junction, joined to the gently rotating barrel-shaped habitat carousel. The carousel spun clockwise and generated an internal gravity approximating two-thirds that of Earth’s. Above the carousel was the space observatory array consisting of radio, x-ray, optical and electromagnetic telescope equipment. At the earthside pole of the space station was a similar, though scaled-back array. Between the two arrays and just below the solar sails was the docking hub. And it was towards this target that the jump plane’s pilot was heading. Thrusters fired across the surface of the plane’s skin in quick, controlled bursts, adjusting its speed and attitude. In space, foils and rudders were useless with no air to displace. Earth hung just beyond the station to their left, and as the pilots made another course correction, the planet filled the horizon, seeming to roll toward them as they turned. Now they were perfectly aligned with the distant station, growing larger as they approached.

“Docking control, this is the Trafalgar. Come in please,” the pilot said into his headset, “Concord 3 docking control, this is jump plane Trafalgar. Do you copy, over?”

The pilot turned to his co-pilot.

“What’s our ETA?”

“We are thirty-eight minutes from hard dock.”

“Trafalgar to Concord 3 docking control,” the pilot said one last time, “We are currently forty minutes — that’s four-zero minutes — from rendezvous. Come in, over.”

There was no response when the pilot toggled the com switch to receive.

. . .

Donnelly’s breath echoed loudly within the confines of her helmet. She felt the push of the space suit’s built-in jets as she thrust her way towards the upper array. Two of her assistants were behind her, and watching via cameras from the command module, Major Benedict kept her appraised of their progress. Donnelly watched another bead of nervous sweat pull away from her forehead and float up to the top of her helmet.

“Looking good, Liz,” Benedict’s voice said over their radio link.

“Yeah, easy for you to say; you’re inside,” Donnelly replied.

She hated spacewalking. The cosmonaut thing wasn’t bad if you were in a space ship or doing time on the lunar or Martian surface, but out in space with no dirt under you? That was too much for Donnelly.

“You’re almost there,” Benedict reassured her.

“Yeah,” Donnelly breathed. “Almost.”

Donnelly and Benedict had determined prior to her sortie that the station’s communication array was being hit by a microwave jamming field, most probably from a nearby military satellite. As the field was aimed at the base of the station and the array pointing toward Earth, the array at the top of the station should be free from such interference. All they had to do was aim one of the microwave scanning dishes at the top of the station down towards another satellite and they would be able to communicate with the world again. They knew the approximate location of another nearby satellite and were going to use handheld equipment to locate it and aim the dish. Benedict had already run wires from the science lab to the command module, effectively turning the radio astronomy dish into a communications array.

“The SETI people are going to be so pissed about this,” he muttered gleefully.

“Hey,” Donnelly said through the open channel, “they’ll forgive you, Major, when they hear about the Ship. We’re here. I’m going to start now. We’re going take the dish off its mounting bracket. Christ, the thing is huge. . .”

. . .

“What’s our status?” General Harrod asked, returning to the cockpit for the second time in ten minutes.

“We’re still trying to raise docking control,” the pilot said. “No go. We’re less than twenty minutes from the station now, sir.”

“Can you dock this thing without their help?”

“I could, but I’d rather not.”

“You’re going to have to, I’m afraid,” Harrod replied. “Believe me, son, I’d rather be dirtside as well.”

In truth, there were few places that Harrod would not have chosen over space. He hated the constant feeling of falling, the nausea associated with having his stomach contents float around on their own and what that did to his acid reflux. Harrod had a long career in military intelligence, most of it as an analyst, sitting comfortably behind a desk. Space was for him the antithesis of comfort. True, he’d done his time in the field as an operative and served proudly. But given a choice between being undercover surrounded by people who would kill you — or worse — if they knew you were the enemy, often on the run, sometimes in shootouts or working a nine-to-seven and having three days off with the wife and kids, any man would pick the latter. Harrod wasn’t one to shirk his duty, but he wasn’t one to necessarily enjoy it, either.

“A manual docking procedure without the station’s help will take longer,” the pilot advised the general. “Probably on the order of forty-five minutes to an hour.”

“Be that as it may,” Harrod said, “just get me and my troops aboard that station.”

. . .

There was a haze of smoke in Bloom’s office. She’d manually — and illegally — disabled all the smoke detectors within the confines of the small room shortly after taking command of the station. The lights were off, the only illumination from the glowing red tip of her cigarette. She stared out the blister window behind her desk, allowing herself to float in the zero-gravity environment. Womb with a view. The view, of course, was Earth’s nightside. Dawn was creeping up somewhere to the right. But a different set of lights was shining in front of the luminous nighttime of America. It was these lights that held Bloom’s attention. The Trafalgar, an Avro Phoenix III orbital insertion jump plane configured for military use, modular payload convertible between cargo, hardware deployment, or troop capacity. The blinking running lights heralded the approach of General Harrod and his troops. The jump plane had grown from an indistinct reflective blur to a series of flashing lights to the point where Bloom could make out the plane’s silhouette. They were minutes away from beginning manual docking procedures and not a damn thing Bloom could do about it except hope her people finished their work before Harrod’s troops breached the bulkheads.

“Lieutenant Colonel?” Benedict’s voice came through the intercom.

She toggled a switch on her headset.

“Go ahead, Major.”

“Ma’am, the microwave dish has been uncoupled from the array and we’re currently trying to locate a satellite we can hack into.”

“Good news, Major. But the Trafalgar is minutes away from hard dock,” Bloom advised him, “and we won’t have control of the station for long after that happens.”

“We’ll be ready on time,” Benedict assured her. “You have my word on it.”

The confidence in Benedict’s voice came through even in the tiny speaker in her ear. He’d changed a lot from the fighter jock she’d known during the Australia conflict. He’d been scared shitless back then. During the attack, their entire squadron was taken out in one violent assault by suicide flyers and antiaircraft fire coming in from ground and orbit. The boy that Jack Benedict had been was gone now. The man who took his place someone that Bloom would want watching her back any day.

“Roger that, Exo,” Bloom said. “Contact me when you’re good to go.”

“Will do, ma’am.”

“Banshee out,” Bloom said, ending the comm with her pilot’s callsign.

. . .

There was a sudden rumble and then the earth shook. Nothing violent and not for very long but there had been a definite quake. The people confined to the lab at the edge of the Laguna dig made a frightened noise, followed by nervous, excited conversation. The soldiers looked to their senior officers for orders, who in turn looked to Colonel Jude.

“What in hell is going on?” Jude demanded. “What was that?”

“Earthquake, Colonel,” one soldier offered.

James and Peter saw their opportunity and pushed their way past colleagues to the front of the barricade.

“If you let us get to the main console, we can tell you exactly what’s happening,” James called. “We have Doppler seismology equipment set up all over the area. We can use it to get a Richter count and find the epicenter.”

Jude eyed them suspiciously. Then he nodded to two of the guards, who escorted James and Peter over to the console. The two soldiers stood behind them as they got to work. Surreptitiously, James moved his console to his lap in order to access a keypad that it was blocking. They were bringing up the Doppler seismology systems, reviewing the mild quake that had just shaken the area.

“Well?” Jude asked from behind them.

“We’re at the epicenter of the quake,” Peter reported. “Looks like whatever it is we’re digging up did this.”

“How is that possible?”

Peter looked at him contemptuously.

“You tell us, Colonel,” he said. “You’re the one who stopped us from digging.”

Another quake hit, this one longer and more forceful. People screamed this time as many of them staggered and fell. James and Peter regarded each other, both knowing what had to be done before this quake subsided.

“EVERYBODY RUN!” James bellowed, rising to his feet, knocking over his chair. He and Peter shoved past their guards and the colonel who were already off-balance from the quaking ground. The wave of people broke, stampeding for the exits from the shelter. The soldiers at the site did their best to evacuate everyone in an orderly fashion, but the bedlam was out of control. The earthquake stopped by the time James and Peter cleared the building, but the people they had been held prisoner with were still panicked and scattering.

“Which way?” James asked.

Peter looked around and then pointed towards one of the 624 Rangers.

“There!” he said, dashing off.

James was at his heels and they could hear the sounds of more footsteps behind them. James didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to. A soldier was standing by the open door of one of the vehicles, speaking on a linx and consulting the console system in the dash. Jackpot. Peter slammed into the soldier from behind, knocking her into the door and pushing the stunned woman aside. He climbed in as James raced around to the passenger side door. They were locked in just as their pursuers caught up to them. The soldiers that had been guarding them were hammering on the vehicle as Peter tried to hotwire the starter, while James began connecting his console to the Ranger’s system using an elaborate octopus of cables. The transport was being quickly surrounded by troops — with guns drawn.

“Hurry up, Pete,” James growled.

Floodlights hit the Ranger, turning night into day inside the cab. Colonel Jude was marching towards the human shield forming around the vehicle. He, too, had his sidearm drawn. James had no doubts about their fate should they be hauled out of the vehicle. Troops were grabbing at the doors now, trying to get the transport open. The locks were shut but it wouldn’t be long until someone produced a master key or an electronic override. Peter was playing with wires and fuses under the dashboard while James began trying to slice into the console. Maybe he could send the information out, before it was too late; maybe he could–

“HOLY SHIT!” James exclaimed.

The Ranger bucked, its front end lifting into the air and slamming back down. Another earthquake had started, this one violent and showing no sign of slackening. The line of troops surrounding them broke as soldiers fell or ran away. The engine of the Ranger whined to life. The three-tonne transport rocked on its suspension from the violence of the quake. The engine was humming now, a sharp arrhythmic sound, as Peter climbed back up from under the dashboard. He was bleeding from his forehead, but he said nothing as he put the Ranger into gear and tore out of the compound.

“Pete! Over there!” James shouted, pointing.

Echohawk and Santino were staggering away from the digsite. Peter swung the transport over to where his mentor and the chief of the Laguna Band were, reaching around to open one of the two back doors on his side of the trucklike vehicle.

“Get in!” Peter ordered.

Someone had rallied behind them, realizing they were stealing a military transport. Shots were fired, ringing off the back of the camper. Echohawk and Santino scrambled aboard and the stolen Ranger took off.

“Where to?” Peter asked.

“Back towards Laguna,” Santino replied. “Let’s get the hell away from this place!”

“What’s going on?” Echohawk asked. “You were working the console before this went down.”

“It looks like the object beneath us is causing the quakes,” James replied, slipping on a headset and beginning the process of hacking into the Ranger’s Grid backbone. “I think it’s trying to unearth itself!”

. . .

Short siren blasts sounded from the intercom speakers throughout the station. General Harrod’s ship had completed hard dock and his soldiers were now desperately trying to re-route power to bulkhead doors that had been sealed, their wiring and control circuits either torn out or just incinerated. Bloom stood by Major Benedict as the two of them hovered by the console where Boucher sat, overseeing Donnelly’s progress. She and her team had aligned the microwave dish and were now trying to tune in to the satellite’s control frequency. Boucher kept his hands ready at the console’s keypad. Once they had access to the satellite, he would begin the process of hacking in.

“How long?”

“I’ll only need a couple of minutes,” he replied, “once we have the satellite linkup. We’re hacking into K-Sat 213; Concord 3 actually launched that satellite a few years ago, so we have its startup protocols in-system. It’s just a matter of making the satellite think we’re restarting its command sequences without actually shutting it down.”

“I don’t know how much time we have,” Bloom said. “I expect very little.”

Boucher nodded his head, his dark features growing more determined.

“I’ll get it done, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

“We’re in!” Donnelly’s voice called through their headsets.

Boucher lowered a monitor boom over his left eye and began a furious dance of fingers across the keypad in front of him. Bloom followed the action from her own monitor boom, but the large strings of code meant little to her. Her background was engineering, not code-crunching.

“Almost there . . .” she heard Boucher say after some minutes.

But his voice was not the only sound she heard. There was the shriek of a bulkhead being forced open, barks of orders and troops rushing to secure locations . . . they were close, very close.

“Almost got it. . .”

Bloom looked at Boucher as he said the words, then hit the button to seal the command module’s hatches.

“I’m in!” Boucher said triumphantly. “I’m connecting to the INN Grid spar now.”

They heard pounding on the main hatchway into the command module.

“Hurry it up, Captain,” Bloom advised.

The pounding on the hatch became more determined, and a moment later, the door shuddered as they began forcing it open.

“Captain. . .”

“I’m beginning to downlink the data from the scan now,” Boucher announced. And then the power to the command module was cut. A moment later, the bolts holding the hatch into the command module were cut through and the door was forced open.

“Freeze! Nobody move!” an aggressive, frightened soldier bellowed.

“You’re too late, Colonel Bloom,” General Harrod said immediately after.

Chapter Four: The Unearthing

When they had first arrived, the land around them was lush with life. Animal, vegetable, even microbial life, in quantities far beyond anything previously recorded or predicted. What had begun as a simple catalogue became an epic task. It was a challenge they met eagerly, devoting themselves to the task of determining why a relatively small world would harbour such a wide variety of life. They had been diverted from their core mission to study this tiny world. The Ship and its crew gave no thought to this change of plan. Though the process of uncovering the secrets of life on this small blue world could well take ages, they themselves were ageless; their mission was already a thousand years old by the time they had been diverted. A thousand more, more or less, would mean little to them.

And so it was that the Ship came to be nestled in the earth of this far-distant world, fecund in its varieties of life. The Ship already held a catalogue of life from a thousand other worlds, but this one was unique. So varied was the plant and animal life that it would merit a special place in the archives. Explorers were sent to all the continents and all the environments on the world to study and collect tissue and fluid from each life form they encountered. The two hundred thousand strong crew devoted entirely to the task of the catalogue.

They believed, naively, that the enemies of their purpose and the threats to life had been left far behind when they had landed their massive Ship on this small world in a distant galaxy. This mistaken assumption would prove to be their downfall.

Sirens wailed throughout the Ship as the extensive catalogue within was secured. They had little time. No time to safely take the Ship away from the planet and no time to prepare the stasis systems for their habitation. Their inattention had condemned them to die. But the Ship could be saved, as could their catalogue. They had calculated the size and trajectory of the approaching asteroid. It was massive, deadly and was deployed to strike dangerously close to their position; it was only luck that had spared the Ship from being at ground zero of the projected impact site. They prepared the Ship, giving it instructions and a cargo so precious that it should survive the destruction of this world even if the Ship’s crew could not. After the impact, the Ship should sleep and heal. It should wait. When all was ready, the Ship began powering down, and alone in the last, its crew waited in the darkness for their deaths.

The asteroid slammed into the Earth with a force of immeasurable magnitudes. The shockwaves from the strike blasted out across the planet, leveling everything on the continent struck and raging out tidal waves the size of mountains to obliterate as much as they could on the others. The fireblast created by its impact shot up into space. A fury of molten sulfur stone and metal seared out, burning the land and burying the Ship in the scorching fires of hell. There were probes still out across the world when the first shockwave hit. Those that survived the shearing hurricanes did not survive the firestorm. They were pummeled by heaps of molten slag as large as they were; slammed into the earth, which itself roiled in revolt as it burned and broke open. And of the many forms of life on the once-fecund little world, few were left alive in the firestorm’s wake.

Those who lived through the violence of the cataclysm were almost all wiped out in the time of gentle famine that followed. Little vegetation was left, and as the leaf eaters died, so did most of their natural predators. Armageddon’s holocaust had visited the dinosaurs and most of the other forms of life left on the world. The dust of the cataclysm spread, blocking out the sun and the stars in the last. Only the heartiest creatures lived through the thousand-year night, the hundred thousand-year winter. Those who were smart enough to adapt and cunning enough to evolve were the ones who survived, who prospered, after a fashion. And everything they witnessed, the destruction of their fertile paradise, the descending of the long dark and the great cold was engraved in them all, the first and most powerful racial memory. So powerful was the trauma that the memory of it was made part of their genetic code, passed down to their descendants, eventually becoming the unconscious birthplace of all nightmares in all creatures in all the world.

Throughout it all, during the dark times when individual animals first learned to eat their young to survive, during the great ice ages that reshaped the continents, during the aeons it took for those same glaciers to finally recede and the flood oceans that followed to rise and fill with life and then to recede and leave their mark on the resurfacing land for the millennia it took for life to return in force and prosperity to a world all but obliterated by an incomprehensible violence and nightmarish devastation, the Ship lay buried, resting, healing and waiting.

Above, the mammals flourished. The strange little world’s fertility prevailed in the end, and although vastly changed, the climates and environments spread out across the globe had returned in vengeance. A small feral animal, designed for ruthlessness, cunning and adaptation, emerged. Its lineage was an unbroken chain of evolution, leading back to primitive creatures who had survived the cataclysm. Had the cataclysm not occurred, they would have been hunted to extinction by the smaller carnivorous dinosaurs as tasty little morsels. With the dinosaurs gone, the furry little mammals’ fate had been forever changed and forever changed the fate of the world. Following the cataclysm, this creature’s descendants spread out across the globe, diversifying, multiplying, adapting to a hundred different environments. In one corner of the world, it thrived well enough to begin evolving: creating language; then leaving the trees; learning to hunt, to use tools and then learning to walk upright. The most significant discoveries this primitive species could make after that were the mastery of fire and learning to farm. Their place on the planet was established. In less than a million years, the world was theirs.

Below, the Ship rested healed and waited. It slept with its masters’ final instructions etched forever into memory: heal and wait.

At last, the Ship’s wait was over.

The Ranger raced across the desert back towards Laguna. The ground shook violently now; so badly it was all Peter could do to keep control of the wide, heavy vehicle.

“How could it be unearthing itself?” Santino asked, desperately afraid.

They were being pursued and this gargantuan object that had lain dormant beneath their feet for sixty-odd million years was suddenly waking up like some mythical giant.

“The earthquakes are centered right around the object,” James replied. “And looking over the record, the quakes actually started with very mild tremors the moment the orbital deep probe scan began.”

“And what makes you think the object is causing the earthquake?” Echohawk demanded.

“Because the quake zone only extends as far as the outer edge of the object itself,” James replied.

“How’s it coming hacking into the Grid backbone, James?” Peter asked.

“Not good.”

“You’d better hurry up,” Echohawk advised. “We’re about to have some company!” He looked out the back windshield at the receding digsite. One of the helicopters that had come in with the troops was rising into the air.

. . .

Colonel Isaac Jude picked himself up off the violently shaking ground and watched the Ranger tear out of camp with a mix of stunned surprise anger and the grim admiration that a hunter has for skillful prey. People were scattering everywhere around him, but he knew the four in the stolen Ranger were the most pressing. He used two fingers to press his headset tighter into his ear, quickening his pace towards the landing area as the aluminum shelter behind him began to collapse.

“Knight to Rooks 1 and 5,” he hollered to be heard against the din of quaking chaos around him, “get ready for dust-off. Rooks 2, 3, 4 and 6 to the Rangers 3 and 6; we have targets on the move.”

The affirmative callbacks came from his soldiers, members of Jude’s elite covert operations team referred to as Rooks. Jude staggered his way to the landing pad where his pilots were climbing aboard the massive black helicopter whose blades were already rotating for takeoff.

“Lock onto the transponder frequency for Ranger 1,” Jude said, speaking his command into the microphone of his headset, “Our main objective is the safe capture of the information held by the people within. Secondary objective is their live capture. Repeat: their live capture is secondary to our mission. Very secondary.”

. . .

Lieutenant Colonel Margaret Bloom reclined in her bunk, feeling the pull of the tumbler-generated gravity weighing her down towards the outer bulkhead of the habitat carousel, listening to the rumble of the large spinning module of the station. It was strange how after hours in zero gravity the relatively light two-thirds Earth-normal gravity of the carousel made her feel tired. She and Majors Benedict, Cohen and Captains Boucher and Donnelly were housed together, becoming the first people in the history of the Concord space station series to ever inhabit the brig. Little more than a set of four bare-bones beds and a bathroom facility along the outer bulkhead nestled behind the waterworks and electrical supply housings of the habitat carousel, the brig was still built as a jail, one never expected to have been used. Bloom had had enough of sitting. She began pacing, walking up the long round floor of the brig. It was like walking up a constant incline; when she stopped, Bloom was almost directly overhead from her subordinates. Gravity inside the spinning carousel was along the outer bulkhead, and this created three hundred and sixty degrees of floor space. Interestingly, if one of them were to jump high enough, they would break free of the gravity and hang suspended and weightless in the air as the rest of the room spun around them. From Bloom’s angle, her personnel were over her head. Likewise, they were looking up at Bloom.

“Did you get the signal out, Exo?” Bloom asked Benedict, craning her neck to make eye contact.

“Not in its entirety,” he replied. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“No worry,” she said. “Our next move is to figure out how to get out of here and stop Harrod from taking the data off-station.”

“Not likely, ma’am,” Donnelly said. “I’m sorry. But on three sides, we’re along the outer bulkhead. The only inner wall is twice as thick as standard bulkheads, and the door in and out is a hatch that only opens from their side.”

Bloom paced again, completing her circuit around the floor.

“We can’t just sit here,” Bloom growled.

But in truth, she herself didn’t know what more to do. Harrod had won. She’d given him the opportunity to seize the station from her when she’d locked most of the station personnel up in the habitat. Any claim she had that Harrod had planned to violate World Space Agency property or international treaty was gone. She and her command staff could be hauled away, court-martialed privately and locked away or otherwise disposed of, permanently. But there had to be something . . . anything that they could do.

. . .

The tremors were worsening. With the collapse of the shelter came a series of violent fissures in the ground. Two of Echohawk’s assistants fell into one such rending of the earth to their abrupt and violent deaths. Other people were racing for vehicles or running away on foot. At the dig site was bedlam. But had anyone been able to see the quaking site from the air from even a few meters, they would have seen the underlying order to the chaos. Not the whole area was quaking and collapsing. There remained a long, stable landmass extending from the edges of the object to the pyramid whose unearthing had started the matter. Just before it reached the dig, the stable section of land stretched out in a ring encircling the pyramid and everything around it for most of a kilometre. Beyond this land bridge, the rest of the ground was cracking and shaking, while pinpoints of brilliant royal-blue light began shimmering through the fissures in the earth.

. . .

“We have target in check, Knight!”

The call brought Jude forward to the cockpit. The windscreen of the cockpit was a giant display and not an actual window. Onscreen an enhanced image of the stolen Ranger appeared, lit up from the surrounding territory and locked in by several sets of crosshair targeting sights. Telemetry on the vehicle’s speed, passengers, onboard electronic and photonic activity surrounded the bottom of the display. Jude ignored them. The Ranger’s movement was erratic as it was thrown around the unstable ground burying the object as it continued to attempt to unearth itself.

“Arm the ion gun,” Jude said. “Disable their electricals.”

Rook 5, the helicopter’s gunner, nodded his head and began to work his panel. Rook 1 continued his deft piloting. The gun would fire a sweep of ionized energy at the target, instantly disabling any electrical or electronic equipment aboard by overloading it.

“Charging,” Rook 5 said.

A staccato pinging noise became one long whine.

“Fire!” Jude commanded.

An arc of electric white fury shot from the bottom of the helicopter. But instead of striking the Ranger dead center and crippling the massive truck-like vehicle, it only glanced impotently off the rear fender. The Ranger had been thrown from the force of the quaking ground. As the helicopter banked to pursue, a sudden flare from the ground exploded, blinding them all temporarily as the viewscreen’s RF system compensated for the affront.

“What the hell just happened?” Jude demanded as the helicopter suddenly veered away from the flare.

“I don’t know!” Rook 1 called as he struggled to stabilize the helicopter.

As they regained control, the viewscreen returning to normal, Rook 5 reported:

“Knight, it looks like some kind of energy wave shot from the ground; I think that the object caused it.”

“Are we alright?”

“Roger that,”

“Then resume pursuit!” Jude bellowed again.

This time, however, the colonel sat down in one of the cockpit’s jumper seats and strapped himself in.

. . .

“That was really fucking close, James,” Peter cried as they sped away from the scene. “They almost fried us; you’ve got to hurry it up!”

“It would help if you’d drive us out of this fucking quake zone,” James retorted angrily. “Every time we’re jostled, I miss a keystroke and have to start over.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying.”

In fact, the distance they had given themselves from the pyramid had lessened the violence of the quakes. But the ground was still shaking; the ground was still breaking open. Peter, James, Echohawk and Santino could only imagine how bad it was at the site.

“I’m in!” James said at long last.

The violent shaking of the ground began subsiding.

“Okay, give me the OS; I can send this to anywhere on the Grid,” James said.

“Send it to INN,” Echohawk commanded, leaning forward. “Everything we have; don’t bother filtering it — just send everything!”

“Got it.”

As their attention diverted to James’ work, none of them noticed the black helicopter as it closed on them from behind.

. . .

“Target in check.”

“Fire!”

Another bolt of searing white energy arched from the helicopter’s underbelly. This one hit the Ranger dead-on. Sparks danced across the vehicle’s surface as a black weld burn blossomed on its roof. Smoke billowed from under the Ranger’s hood, and it rolled to a gradual stop. And it was truly motionless, for now they were well beyond the earthquake zone of the unearthing object. The helicopter circled around, coming in for a drop-down landing less than ten meters from the crippled armored troop transport.

“Checkmate,” Jude said.

. . .

The inside of the Ranger went completely dark. The console and Grid backbone that James had been using was photonic; the circuit-frying surge of energy from the ion cannon hadn’t harmed their processing equipment. However, the electrical power supplies for the devices had been destroyed.

“Oh fuck!” James exclaimed as the helicopter touched down in front of them.

“How much was sent?” Echohawk demanded. “How much information did you get out?”

“I don’t know,” James said. “I don’t know, Prof! Enough, I hope.”

The four men sat in silence, watching as two more Rangers pulled up: one behind them, one parked beside the helicopter. Troops debarked: seven in all. They were carrying heavy guns, all aimed at the Ranger. Echohawk and Santino saw the familiar figure of Colonel Isaac Jude debark from the helicopter: walking slowly, deliberately, coming to stand directly in front of the crippled stolen vehicle. In the silence imposed upon them by the death of their vehicle’s electric and electronic systems, they could hear the not-so-distant thunder of the violent earthquakes caused by the object’s unearthing. It was a wonder they hadn’t noticed it before. Watching Jude’s troops advance toward them, each man in the Ranger went through their own silent introspection. Echohawk thought of his daughter Laura; of Meg, his ex-wife. He wondered if he’d get to see either of them again.

. . .

Santino’s mind raced with indignant outrage. He’d come up against the American military before, during years of civil unrest among the aboriginal tribes of the Americas as they fought and eventually won the right to establish the protectorates. Twice Santino had been fired on and had even found himself locked in what would have proven to be a fight to the death with one soldier, had friends not intervened. Paul Santino was a veteran of conflicts with the oppressive nature of the military and so his mind was flooded with both outrage at this latest injustice and a grim satisfaction that this should be the way his life ended: locked in combat with the American military. Like so many of his ancestors before him, it would be white soldiers that would take his life. He vowed he would not go peacefully.

. . .

Peter sat with his hands on the wheel, staring with dumb disbelief at the approaching killers. They couldn’t possibly mean to kill them, he reasoned. Arrest them, yes. But not kill them. No.

. . .

James’ eyes were wide, his ears open, his nose breathing deeply of the air. Every sound, every sight, every smell seemed that much more clear to him. These were his last moments. He was terrified both of dying and that his last seconds of life might be spent groveling, afraid and so far away from those he loved. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

“God. . .” he heard himself whine: a prayer, a lament, a useless last word.

. . .

Jude stopped, standing in front of the Ranger. He began speaking. Behind them, the rumbling stopped and the horizon lit up in a western dawn.

. . .

The axiom that those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them is true. It is also true that those who learn from history’s successes can repeat them as well.

When in the closing decades of the twentieth century a billionaire industrialist named Ted Turner created an entire cable network centered on the news, he was for the most part considered a fool. But CNN’s success led to a host of copycat all-news stations, some of which were still cropping up when the Photonic Revolution sounded cable’s death knell. Multichannel access and superfast computers combined with the power of the new World Grid, the successor to the Internet, led to view-on-demand television. The principle was simple: the user could program their consoles to watch whatever show they wanted, whenever they chose to do so.

As Ted Turner had seen the potential of cable, so did Joel Dubois see the potential of the new World Grid and view-on-demand technology to fuse into one supermedium. After hiring the best reporters he could and setting up a database of all the world’s news services, Dubois set about creating software that would allow the viewer to decide what news they watched, calling up related stories, background information, biographies and a host of other facts at the touch of a keystroke. He then created a Grid spar large enough to accommodate millions of channels of outgoing and incoming information. Critics said that INN would fail because it was too complicated and would overwhelm the viewer or the user with information overkill. Quite the opposite happened.

In the first month it was operational, INN received a million subscriptions. That doubled before its second operational month ended. Over the years, the Interactive News Network had been refined and was continually being upgraded to keep it at the leading edge. Like CNN before INN spawned a host of copycats, all of which lived in its shadow. But INN also generated subsidiaries, such as the Interactive Sports Network, the Interactive Entertainment Network and the Interactive Arts Network.

What led to INN’s greatest success was its up-to-the-minute news format, which was derived from link up sites to its Grid spar where anyone with new information could send in contributions. To avoid useless news stories from cranks, frauds and lunatics, special context-recognition hardware was designed to prioritize information. Questionable data was put through a screening process that determined all the facts, and data that was flagged as higher priority was put through an immediate review. The information was so well filtered that never once in its history did INN have to issue a retraction, despite times when it broke stories that were debunked by the rest of the world’s media until all the facts came out. INN had offices in every capital around the globe and could be accessed by anyone at anytime through the World Grid. Its head offices, however, remained in Dubois’s hometown of Ottawa, Ontario, where years before Dubois had made his first million by purchasing shares in an upstart photonics manufacturer.

Two hundred employees worked each eight-hour shift, scanning the end-results of their information filtering process for the latest news. The balance of INN’s employees were computer, communications and broadcast technicians. There were no paid news anchors. Annanova, a British experiment in virtual newscasting, had first inspired Dubois to found INN. Expanding on technology developed by the people behind annanova.com, INN had almost no on-air talent beyond a handful of field reporters. Few people outside INN realized that their favorite and often most trusted news anchors were nothing more than digital ghosts.

Stories uplinked to INN literally had to reach the top before being posted onto INN’s news site or put out for broadcast. They came in through the basement where INN had several interlinked Grid access hubs and were filtered through the first tier of computers which separated the stories by keywords and again by category. The second tier of INN’s sources looked for story corroboration by checking the uplinks against stories brought in through other news services and versus other corroborating uplinks. If the files were similar, they were merged and sent on to another level. If the stories were conflicting, both articles were flagged for research. When no corroboration existed, the stories were checked for general facts that could be confirmed. Enough corroboration transferred a story to a research system, where live operators made the final confirmation of the facts. The stories were then either dropped as false (most of the submissions) or sent on to an editor who would then decide which stories would receive highest priorities on postings or broadcasts.

. . .

The story out of New Mexico had been sent to Richard Mayhew’s research station. While reading it over, he began to wonder how in the hell it had gotten so far up the editorial chain. He was about to dump the story when the list of corroborating links began loading and continued to load. First, substantiation came from Concord 3. Then from eyewitnesses and then from an observation satellite sliced into by some kids at Texas A&M. Mayhew checked the source of the broadcast and began looking at the chain of events that was related to the story. Then he linked to the satellite feed and dumped a copy of the story to an optic slip while printing up a quick summary of what he had just seen. Mayhew tore from the research operator’s console bank and charged straight for the office of Ruth Tyler, INN’s overnight broadcast editor.

“What is it?” Tyler asked, having been caught in the middle of an embarrassingly thorough armpit scratch.

Mayhew smiled, not at Ruth’s awkwardness, but for the information he handed her.

“It’s the story of the millennium. I mean that, Ruth. I really fucking mean it.”

Tyler put the slip into her reader and scanned the document onscreen. When the audio began, the voice of James Johnson squawked briefly through the room before Tyler could slip on her earpiece. She listened and watched for a couple of moments. Then she turned her attention back to Mayhew.

“Can we verify its legitimacy?”

“It passed through all the filters,” Mayhew said. “It also coincides with that mysterious flare of light from New Mexico, the Grid being down in New Mexico and the sudden signal loss Houston reported from Concord 3. It’s way too elaborate to be a hoax. There hasn’t been enough time to dummy up something like this. We’re also already getting some sporadic uplinks that corroborate much of the data here.”

Tyler was silent a long moment, not weighing the story as Mayhew thought, but in fact pondering the implications of the information she had on her console at that moment. She sighed, feeling her breath shudder in her throat. Just based on what she had read, she was in shock.

“Run it unedited on the next three continental news updates,” she said calmly. “Edit it and run it on all globals after that. Then start cross-referencing the information into the interactive format.”

She looked at him a long moment, her deep blue eyes wide with a vehement fire.

“Richard? What the fuck are you still doing in my office? GO!”

. . .

Colonel Jude crossed his arms behind his back, standing with his legs akimbo. He stared down at the desert floor contemplatively one long moment before looking up at the Ranger.

“Gentlemen, let’s not make this any harder than we have to. Step out of the vehicle, please.”

Suddenly the sky behind the crippled Ranger lit up in blinding blue brilliance. Jude’s first thought was atomic blast and his first instinct was to duck, shielding his eyes. If he could get back to the insulated interior of the helicopter, he’d be safe from the x-ray blast and radiation wave, and hopefully they were well beyond the shockwave and firestorm zones. But the light didn’t turn from blue-white to red; it stayed blue and stayed fairly constant. There was no echoing thunder rolling in, no blast of wind. When Jude dared look again, it was as though the aurora borealis had moved several thousand kilometres south and landed on the ground. There was a shimmering luminescence to the horizon, and Jude had no doubt that this was coming from the object back at the digsite. He keyed a sequence in on the wristband console he wore, linking himself with his troops still at the digsite. If there still was a digsite.

“Knight to Rooks 7 through 12!” he called into his headset. “All pieces’ status! Repeat: all pieces’ status!”

The replies were faint, staticky and full of insane background noise:

“Rook 8 here.”

“Rook 9.”

“Rook 11 reporting in: Rook 12 is down; she fell into a fissure that opened beneath her.”

“What the hell is going on?” Jude demanded.

Rooks 7 and 10 still hadn’t been accounted for.

“The object has gone active,” the voice of Rook 9 reported back. “We are now dealing with a Type Seven Omega!”

Jude’s heart stopped. There were no contingencies for a Type Seven Omega. When the Type Seven classification had been established for the discovery of alien encounters or artifacts, there were different sub-classes assigned for each possible category: Alpha for recoverable or securable artifact, Beta for deniable contact and so on up until Seven-Omega: an encounter or artifact seen or experienced by a large group of people, unsecurable, unrecoverable and undeniable. Jude gestured to Rook 2, whose attention was trying to stay focused on the four civilians who were ignoring the soldiers now entirely to stare west at the shimmering blue lights on the horizon itself.

“Rook 2, secure the prisoners in Ranger 2 and let’s proceed back to target zone.”

Jude looked around at his other troops.

“Come on,” he shouted, snapping them back to reality. “Let’s go; Rook 1, Rook 5, get the bird ready for dust-off! Double time! Go!”

Jude walked up to Professor Echohawk.

“Now do you understand, Professor?” he asked, “This is what I meant when I told you that you had no idea what you were dealing with. What the fuck is going to happen now?”

Echohawk only smiled.

“History,” was the last thing the old Indian archaeologist said to Jude before climbing into the Ranger.

. . .

The door to the brig opened and General Roy Harrod stood in the hatchway. One of his soldiers quick-stepped in, bellowing at the prisoners.

“ATTENTION ON DECK! A FLAG OFFICER IS PRESENT, MAGGOTS!”

Cohen and Boucher actually saluted. Donnelly stood at attention. Benedict looked up from his relative position over everyone else’s heads. Bloom crossed her arms over her chest. Harrod stepped into the room.

“You and your subordinates have done well for yourselves, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said.

Bloom regarded him with all the casual disinterest of a cat. Harrod continued speaking:

“You’ve managed to wrack up enough charges to keep you in prison for the rest of your lives,” he said. “Among the worst charges are that you’ve endangered certain ongoing missions vital to national security and that you hijacked the operation of an international space station.”

“Now that’s the pot calling the kettle black,” Benedict said. “Sir.”

Harrod stared at the young black officer for one long, terrible moment. Benedict was a major, Harrod a general. Certain things just weren’t said, weren’t done. Harrod finally chose to resume his tirade, turning his attention back on Bloom:

“Fortunately for you, for even greater reasons of national security, we need to keep these operations hidden. We’re going to help each other out, Lieutenant Colonel. I’m going to let you go. You’re going to keep quiet about the fact that the DIA was trying to cover up the existence of the Ship and anything else you think you believe. Everybody wins. Our operations remain secret and you get to live a while longer. Do yourself a favor, Colonel Bloom. Accept my offer. I could silence you otherwise, but it would be much more complicated that way.”

. . .

They returned to the site, Rook 5 in the helicopter navigating for the Rangers on the ground. The object, now so obviously a ship, was unearthed. A gargantuan luminous gold and black craft, the Ship shone under the brilliance of its own blue lights, laid out in vast trenches across its surface. As they approached it, the Ship dominated the landscape around them. Flying over it, Jude remarked that it became the only ground-based point of reference. The violence of its unearthing over, the Ship had begun to sing. There was no other way to describe what it was doing, Jude reflected. All around them, echoing though the desert and across the great plain of the Ship itself, a strange, haunting sound resonated. It was at once reminiscent of crystal and of whalesong. There seemed to be an almost identifiable progression to the slow, pulsing music, but it remained surrealistically out of reach. Jude sat inside the helicopter. His earpiece was turned up to maximum gain and still he had trouble hearing his surviving troops’ reports over the Shipsong. And in truth, he had even more difficulty concentrating on them. Even his cold soldier’s heart was moved by the never-before heard alien sounds resounding through the desert night outside. It was an appreciable moment of pure and perfect beauty, something Jude could not get used to, something he would never forget.

Forgotten by their captors by the sight of the massive Ship, Echohawk, Santino, James and Peter made their way to the edge of the drop-off, looking over the almost completely unburied Ship. It filled the horizon from end to end: a massive, luminous golden city. From the edge of the desert surrounding the Ship, the drop to the leading edge of the alien artifact was easily several kilometres. The Ship had moved millions, perhaps billions of tonnes of earth to reveal itself. The question on Echohawk’s mind was what had happened to that earth? The land bridge, a three kilometre wide peninsula that the Ship had not destroyed in its unearthing, connected the outside world to the top of the dome of the Ship and the pyramid whose accidental discovery had led to the revelation of this millions-year-old secret. The apparent cracks and rivulets across the Ship’s surface were glowing blue from within. The pyramid, now unearthed, sat atop a ringed dais which in turn occupied a great inverted bowl at the very top of the sharply curved dome of the upper surface of the Ship. Random-seeming lights dotted the surface of the Ship, lending more credence to the effect of seeing a city laid out before them. All around them on the peninsula were people, now numbering close to a thousand. Santino suspected that number would continue to swell. Throngs of people were all likewise milling around. A group of young people had driven up in a flatbed truck and were blasting music from a large stereo system. Oddly enough, the music they have elected to play was symphonic. The piece in question is an industrial technodelic version of Beethoven’s Ninth. It echoed eerily into the canyon created by the Ship. Echohawk looked back over the crowd and back at the pyramid below them.

“Gentlemen,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the Shipsong, “from this point forward, our world has been forever changed.”

Santino nodded his head gravely. James turned around, taking a moment to rub his eyes and shake his head once in nervous reaction. Like trying to shake the last remnants of a flash of dream or déja vu from his mind. It was then that he noticed someone watching a Grid broadcast on a console with a large roll-out screen. The console’s owner had linked to INN and the report onscreen was about the Ship.

James smiled. News as it happened.

“Good morning and welcome to the Interactive News Network. As of twelve-oh-seven this morning, life as we have known it is over. In the New Mexico desert at this hour, near the community of Laguna, an object, almost certainly a ship, with an approximate measurement of thirty-two kilometres unearthed itself. The United States Armed Forces responded almost immediately in an effort to secure the Ship and to try and keep a safe distance between it and the thousands of people that have already shown up at the site. Video images obtained by INN from sources aboard the Concord 3 space station and at the archaeological digsite that originally discovered the Ship show the unbelievable sight of the unearthing. . .”

The world that mankind had always known had come to an end. The Ship had put to death all that they thought they knew of life. A new era had begun: an era of hope and of fear and of order and of chaos, an era of incredible dreams and unimaginable nightmares.

Chapter Five: Reactions

LINX TO: Laura Echohawk
FROM: Mark Echohawk
SUBJECT: What else? The Ship!

Dear Laura,

Sorry I haven’t had the chance to linx you recently. As you can imagine with everything that’s been going on, I haven’t had much time to myself to get much of anything done. To make up for it here is one nice, long linx.

I got all your linxes and I read and watched each one. I even got a couple of quick linxes from your mom, but she’s been mighty quiet since everything happened. Unfortunately with what’s been going on, I haven’t had much chance to reply.

You asked what the real story was; what’s really gone on since the Ship unearthed itself. Well, things are pretty much as reported on INN but I’ll recap for you as I see things: As the deep scan compiled and we began to realize what we’d discovered, the Army came in and took control of the site. After the Ship was unearthed they stuck around setting up an armed camp, virtually overnight. Over a thousand people have gone missing since the Ship was unearthed; either because they were lost during the unearthing or because they wandered off. Whatever the case, the Army used that as an excuse to cordon off the site. I don’t think so many hundreds of kilometres of perimeter fencing have ever been put up so fast. The World Council responded to the American action quickly enough and that’s when things got hairy.

Even before War Three, America’s been very protective of its sovereignty in the global community. So when the World Council declared that the United States didn’t have exclusive rights to the Ship despite it being found on American soil (never mind that it was in fact found on the territory of the Southwestern Protectorate and that the Protectorates are considered to be under the trusteeship of the World Council), things got tense.

America still has military clout and some political influence among the nations of the World Council. However, it lacks the economic power it had up until the war and certainly can’t strong-arm the World Council the way it had the old United Nations. But neither America nor the World Council can afford to go to war with one another. Therefore in the end things weren’t as tense as they seemed; the threatened embargo against the US was bluster and bluff, as were the American posturing, threats and anti-World Council rhetoric we’d seen the last couple of weeks before the States acquiesced. It all seemed to be a crisis but no forces were deployed no troops put on standby alert. The World Council had to give the States a way to back down and still save face. Therefore, putting the U.S. military in charge of security at the Ship and putting mainly Americans on the World Ship Summit is not so much an appeasement as it is a symbolic gesture. The people really in charge of the Ship right now are the World Council Special Oversight Commission.

One question that keeps popping up is how we knew that the object is indeed a ship. Following the initial scans done by Concord 3, a whole barrage of tests and scans had been done, using equipment that in many cases is still experimental. We’ve successfully compiled a full image of the Ship, both upper and lower halves. It’s one complete, sealed hull. The upper surface is the mountainous dome we’re all familiar with. The lower surface is perfectly rounded, but covered with hundreds of overlapping blister-like structures. Although we haven’t been able to determine the source of propulsion for the Ship, we are certain that the Ship landed and then burrowed into the surface of the earth, compacting and displacing the ground, stone and everything between as it came to rest. It could only have done so if it lowered itself very gradually into the ground. Our best guess is that most of the Ship was above the surface of the Earth until the Death Star slammed into the Gulf of Mexico some sixty-five million years ago.

By the time you read this linx I will be about a day away from announcing that I have accepted the position as head of the Ship Survey Expedition that the World Council intends on sending to the Ship. I’m already whittling away at the short list of people I want on the SSE. I’m thrilled! Who wouldn’t be? I’ll be one of the first people in world history to set foot inside an alien vessel. I haven’t slept much these last few nights, just because I’m so excited at the prospect. I promise I will still be at your place for Thanksgiving. I’m anxious to see you and to see your mother again. Nothing, not even the Ship, will keep me away from your table. What you do to a turkey words cannot do justice.

In any event, I have to cut this linx short and go to bed. It’s been another long day of inquisition here in Geneva testifying before the World Ship Summit and the Oversight Commission. I wish to God they’d have let us testify over the Grid from Laguna. My time would be better served there than here. Oh, well. Tomorrow I’ll be announced as the head of the Ship Survey Expedition and I’ll be on the next jump plane home after the press briefings. Home for the next little while will be Laguna, New Mexico.

All my love.

Pope Simon Peter, the vicar of Christ, servant of servants and earthly head of the Catholic Church, sat in his private garden eating breakfast. It was an hour after dawn and the weather was cool. His handlers wanted him to eat indoors, but there were still blooms on the many plants he tended here in his private time. Here was his sanctuary. The garden, hidden within the walls of the Vatican and accessible only through the pontiff’s private apartments, had long been a refuge of the popes, and the variety of flora in the enclosed halfacre courtyard reflected the different men who had come to occupy the loneliest position within the clergy. Pope Simon Peter, born Vincent St-Amand seventy-two years before in a small village in Haiti, had the distinction of being the second black pope and only the fourth pontiff in the church’s history to call for a Vatican Council. He was the first to open the council proceedings to the religions of the world, a decision that had earned him criticism and condemnation from more than one council of bishops and had doubled the number of death threats he received in any given day for the last three weeks.

He remembered the announcement well. He’d made it from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica during Mass two days after the unearthing. The crowd that had gathered that morning had exceeded the capacity of the square to hold them. Streets had been blocked off and loudspeakers set up so the assembled masses could hear him. He stood on the balcony that morning, making his first public appearance since the unearthing as a cool rain came down over Rome. Pope Simon Peter spoke into the microphone discreetly hidden in the fabric of his vestments.

“My brothers and sisters in Christ, our world has been changed forever by the events in the Southwestern Protectorate,” he had said.

This had been his first official comment on the Ship and because of this an immediate hush fell over the thousands of people below. Pope Simon Peter licked his lips and continued: “There is a new universal truth: We are not the only intelligent life that has graced God’s creation. This news is an awesome revelation. For though it has answered a very old question, the Ship now poses others to us now. Questions that are frightening and almost terrible: What is our place in God’s plan? Why was the Ship discovered now? What does it mean for our future as a race? And most importantly, what divine message is hidden within the Ship? For I believe that this Ship is indeed part of God’s plan for us. I believe that the Lord intends us to learn something, to come to some revelation and that this Ship is the means to that end. But I also believe that this message is intended for all people, for all of God’s children. And it is for this reason that the Fourth Vatican Council must be open not only to the leaders of the Holy Catholic Church but to the leaders of all of the world’s religions. I have already spoken with Israel’s Rabbinical Council and with the Khalif of the Council of Islam, and both have confirmed their willingness not only to attend this council but to assist in organizing it.”

His last few words had nearly been drowned out by the uproar from the assembled masses. Many of the faithful were old enough to remember the terror attacks on the Vatican that had claimed the life of one of Simon Peter’s predecessors and utterly destroyed the Sistine Chapel. Many more were those who remembered only that the terrorists had been radical Muslims. Most of these souls so sadly unforgiving had forgotten the years of the Great Reconciliation of Faith that Pope Gregory, who had overseen the reconstruction of the Vatican, had organized between Christians, Jews and Muslims.

“We are all God’s children!” he called out loudly by way of admonition. “And as such, the Ship belongs to us all. Therefore, only if we join together can we hope to understand the mystery of the Ship. Only if we come together as one can we hope to find God’s truth to us all. To try and do so separately would be to damn us all to stumble through the darkness, blind and ignorant forever.”

And the deed was done. The Fourth Vatican Council had been called, and today Pope Simon Peter would oversee the awesome task of finalizing the list of delegates to be invited to the conference. A burdensome undertaking given that between the twin pillars of the Ship’s unearthing and his own announcement that the Fourth Vatican Council would be open to the heads of all religions, the faiths of many Catholics had been shaken in some cases to the very foundations. Conversely, the latest statistics from the International News Network showed that overall attendance at religious gatherings was up over thirty percent; broken down religion by religion, the Catholic Church was fourth overall in increased attendance behind Islam, the collective banner of the pagan religions and of all things, Scientology.

. . .

Lieutenant Colonel Margaret Bloom sat in the base commander’s outer office at Houston Air Force Base. She had spent most of the last several days in the stockades aboard Concord 3 and back dirtside. After the Ship was unearthed, they’d dropped her into the deepest hole they could find while the world turned its attention to the Ship. Now that the dust was finally settling, they’d pulled her out. Bloom expected it wouldn’t be much longer before she saw the inside of another prison cell. She’d resigned herself to spending time behind bars the moment she made the decision to send the survey revealing the Ship to INN. Bloom knew the drill: She’d be called into the base commander’s office, he’d chew her a new asshole and then she’d be brought up on formal charges and escorted back to the barracks by the MPs. There’d be a meeting with a JAG officer and then she’d sit back and wait for the court martial. Bloom wasn’t sure whether or not she’d be exonerated. She wasn’t sure she’d still have a military career when this was over with, either. The loss of flight privileges would be the most heart wrenching, but it was a small price to pay for what she’d accomplished. Who the hell knew? She might still be able to get a job with the World Space Agency. The door to the base commander’s office opened. Colonel Hays stuck his head out and looked at her.

“We’ll see you now, Bloom,” he said sternly.

“We?” she repeated as Hays closed the door.

Bloom rose and stepped into the inner office and found herself looking right at General Harrod.

“Lieutenant Colonel, after your . . . behaviour . . . aboard the Concord station, we cannot allow you to represent the United States government or military on an international venture again,” Hays said. “You violated direct orders from the head of the DIA, used World Space Agency property in an illegal fashion for unlawful ends, incited others to mutiny and put into danger the lives of officers in the field. On top of that, you also violated several civilian statutes regarding private domain satellite channels and endangered some very valuable corporate property.”

Bloom heard Hays, but wasn’t listening. Her eyes remained locked on Harrod. He had fled Concord 3 within half an hour of the first INN broadcast about the Ship. Here he was, back again. She knew she’d nuked her career when she’d sent the link to INN. What she didn’t realize was just how personally Harold was taking this one. He wouldn’t be here unless he wanted to make sure she was completely fucked. Best then to cut to the chase.

“Am I under arrest, sir?” Her eyes never left Harrod’s.

Hays activated the console on his desk and pulled up a file.

“No, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “I’m afraid you don’t get off that lucky.” Bloom didn’t allow herself to react to Hays’ statement. She simply continued to stare coldly, hatefully into General Harrod’s ice-blue eyes. The man showed no emotion, revealed no expression. He exuded power and a cold, calculating arrogance. He stared at her with a predatory dispassion. She was no threat to him and he would never allow her to become a threat.

“In fact, you have two options,” Hays said. “You may stand for a general court martial and answer for your actions aboard Concord 3—.”

“Which nobody wants because the world still doesn’t know just how complicit the Defence Intelligence Agency was in trying to cover up the Ship’s existence,” Bloom interjected.

“Or,” Hays continued, “you may accept reassignment under General Harrod’s direct command with the Defence Intelligence Agency. It appears General Harrod is offering you a job.”

“I wasn’t aware the general needed another grave digger.”

“Lieutenant Colonel!” Hays shouted.

“At ease, Colonel Hays,” Harrod said dismissively as he turned to regard the base commander.

Harrod’s gaze turned back to Bloom. “Lieutenant Colonel, the fact of the matter is you know far too much to be cut loose, and fortunately for you, that little escapade of yours skyside aboard C-3 means you’re too high profile to make disappear. Our only option is to reassign you, keep you out of the way.”

“And under your thumb.”

“Precisely, Lieutenant Colonel,” Harrod said, sounding genuinely pleased and even surprised that she understood, “and what’s more, I intend on putting you to work for the DIA. The United States government spent billions training you as a pilot and as an aerospace engineer. The DIA will now reap the benefits of your knowledge while we keep you out of the way.”

“And just how long will I be kept out of the way, General?”

“Until you’re of no further use to the DIA.”

“So my choices are prison . . . or indentured servitude.”

Harrod rose from his seat and crossed to the door of Hays’ office.

“I’m glad you understand,” he said. “Don’t take too long in making up your mind, Bloom. I’m leaving in an hour.”

Harrod paused in the doorway, turning around. Bloom remained standing at parade rest, facing the chair he had vacated. From the corner of her eye, she watched as Hays turned his attention to the doorway. She was aware of Harrod’s presence; she could sense his deliberate patience, waiting for her to turn around. Finally she did, turning slowly, until she faced the door. Harrod stood in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest.

“Lieutenant Colonel, don’t be so arrogant as to believe that the truth is on your side, or that you’d survive a court martial,” he said. “There are a lot of places where a person can be locked up and left to rot. Pack a bag and send for the rest of your gear. You can go with me, you can go to Leavenworth, or you can go to hell. I don’t really give a good goddamn which.”

. . .

“My children, last night an Angel of the Lord came to Me in a dream,” Gabriel Ashe spoke with no emotion, His voice relaxed, flat and almost toneless. “I was taken up to a great mountain that had been split in half. Below Me, lay the Ship. . .”

As He spoke, Ashe’s followers began to see what He had imagined. Their eyes were heavily lidded as they sat swaying slightly, silently, in the church around Him. Gabriel Ashe’s strange delivery held them entranced; their visions fuelled by the steady mix of hallucinogens that Ashe fed His followers along with His hypnotic sermons. Ashe Himself consumed the same diet. And yet, His mind was more focused than theirs. He knew why, too. For He was the Son of God’s Son: the Advocate foretold by Christ. The drugs allowed Him to see divinity and learn from its wisdom. The drugs allowed His disciples to share in His divinity. And their worship would make Him become the last piece of the Mysterious Holy Trinity. That was why He had founded the United Trinity Observants: so that His Father could see how He was loved. And that was why He knew that the Ship was His enemy: for an Angel of the Lord had shown Him how people would worship it. From atop a mountain cleaved in half by the Ship’s unearthing, He was shown just what would befall the world, if it came to pass that the Ship was worshipped in His stead:

“The Ship filled a great valley and shimmered with a strange inner light. The pyramid that lay at the Ship’s center became a temple to their false god. All around the Ship, night was made day and the false light drew them all, the siren song of the Ship making their ears deaf to the Word of the Lord.”

Ashe remembered what the Angel had shown him in the fever-dream of drugs he had consumed on learning of the Ship. He remembered watching clouds of inky blackness roiling with deadly, liquid grace across the horizon to the East, towards the Ship. He remembered the purple lightning that shot from the clouds, painting the world in blacklight colors.

“The Angel of the Lord showed me how the Prince of Darkness had come, riding on clouds as black as death,” Ashe said. “And where the clouds touched the Earth, everything was consumed and the clouds grew. The Angel of the Lord showed Me.” The Angel had shown Him much. How the pyroplastic cloud curled about the Ship, locking itself around it on all sides. He had been shown what fate the dark clouds had in store for their victims.

“The Angel bade Me watch, as first all died, consumed by the cloud’s touch. The Angel showed Me how the dead would then rise from the grave, their flesh rot, their eyes burning embers of the devil’s fire. The Angel showed Me how these monstrosities would serve their evil master, until all of God’s creation was consumed.”

The Angel also told him that He, Ashe, would be among the first claimed by the Devil if the Ship was not stopped.

“The Ship is the agent of the Devil,” Ashe said. “For it will summon the black cloud of the Prince of Darkness. Even now the Ship calls to Him, to the Evil One.”

Ashe remembered how the Angel told him the clouds would come: a seductive evil released from the Ship, one which would be embraced by all. They would consume it and then from within, it would consume them. They would surrender themselves body and soul to the Ship and then to the clouds that would follow.

“The Ship is the agent of the Devil,” Ashe said again. “The Angel of the Lord has told Me this. The Ship will beget Armageddon, My Children. Unless we stop it, the Soldiers of the Lord will not number rightly, the number needed to combat the Devil in the Last Days. We must seize the Ship and in so doing make it a vessel and a weapon unto My Father. So say I, so sayeth the Lord.”

With one voice His congregation responded:

“So say You, so sayeth the Lord.”

“The Lord commands us to rise up as an army against the Ship’s covetous masters,” Ashe said. “The time of our Purpose is at hand. We must prepare to fight, to die for this holy cause. So say I, so sayeth the Lord.”

“So say You, so sayeth the Lord.”

Ashe raised his hands upwards, looking unto the Heavens.

“Lord, let Me be an instrument of Your power,” Ashe said. “Let My flock be an army at Thy command. Let us destroy Your enemies, Lord, so that I may sanctify Your house in their blood. So I do, so doth the Lord.”

“So You do, so doth the Lord.”

“Let the torment of our enemies shine upon you, O Lord, and grant us the favour of Your Grace in this battle against Thine enemies. Let My hand wield the sword of Your might, let My head bear the helm of Your fury. Let My commands be issued in Your name. So say I, so sayeth the Lord.”

“So say you, so sayeth the Lord.”

As Ashe stood silently behind the lectern, his congregation began singing “Onward, Christian Soldier.”

“Praise My Name,” Ashe uttered as they sang.

. . .

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sat down at his desk, the door to his office locked and the shades drawn. Using a small device he kept on his person at all times, the chairman scanned the room for monitoring equipment. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and removed a locked box. The box required him to place his eye over a lens on the locking mechanism before it would open. From within the chairman took a small console with built-in roll-up screen and folding keypad. He set this up on his desk, connecting it to a handheld audio linx. The two devices coupled, he rolled out the screen and activated the console. Soon he was connected to a small network independent of the World Grid, known and accessible only by a handful of people on the planet. Eight other faces appeared on the screen before the chairman, each face in its own separate window surrounding a central image.

“Thank you for joining us, Mister Chairman,” the elderly image of the head of England’s MI-6 said. “Now that we are all present, we can begin.”

The British minister of defence cleared her throat and spoke from the upper left-hand corner of the chairman’s screen, beginning the meeting with an old, now purely ceremonial statement:

“The doors of these chambers are now sealed and those who do not have business with this committee have departed. The committee is now in session. Let everything said within these walls remain within these walls.”

The chairman settled into his seat.

“We have several items on the agenda this evening, all of them dealing with the Ship,” the British defence minister said. “First and foremost, the committee’s influence over the World Ship Summit and the Oversight Commission. It is my understanding that our colleague and my Canadian counterpart at the Ministry of Defence has been appointed to the World Ship Summit. Elizabeth, we will be sorry to see you go.”

The Canadian defence minister nodded her head, the window occupied by her image on the lower right hand side of the chairman’s screen.

“As disappointed as I am to be leaving the sitting council of the committee,” the Canadian minister said, “I know that I will be able to continue to serve its purpose from the World Ship Summit.”

“How much influence do you have with the prime minister regarding your replacement?” the White House chief of staff asked, from the middle right of the chairman’s screen.

“Little, I’m afraid,” the Canadian minister replied. “However, the front runner to replace me is someone who is up to the task at hand.”

“Farewell, Madam Minister,” the British defence minister said. “You will be missed.”

“Thank you, Madeline,” the Canadian minister replied.

“Moving on,” the British defence minister said, “it is my understanding that the Ship Survey Expedition’s makeup has been finalized and will be announced on INN in the next twelve hours.”

“Correct,” MI-6 replied. “Professor Mark Echohawk is confirmed as the head of the expedition, and I have acquired the list of divisions within the expedition, including archaeology, linguistics, mathematics, biology, engineering and abnormal psychology.”

“Abnormal psychology?” the chairman asked. “I don’t follow.”

“May I?” the curator of the Smithsonian Institute interjected from his place on mid-left of the chairman’s screen; the British defence minister nodded.

“The function of an expert in abnormal psychology on this mission would
be twofold,” the curator replied. “First, an abnormal psychologist would, calling on his background, be of intuitive help in understanding the alien mind should the linguists, mathematicians and engineers fail in their tasks of understanding the workings of the Ship. Second, the abnormal psychologist will be essential in monitoring the members of the expedition for signs of psychosis, relating to their proximity of an alien artifact.”

“Is the Ship expected to drive them all mad?” the Canadian minister asked.

“No,” the curator continued. “However, the reality for most people on the planet is that the Ship is little more than a news event. Only the people directly exposed to the Ship can truly understand how real it is. Those who will be charged with the task of exploring the Ship run the risk of being confronted with this reality even far more directly. This committee has studied the effects exposure to alien artifacts has on the human psyche. At best, the results are unpredictable. At worst, we’ve seen people go insane. And that from exposure to significantly less important extraterrestrial finds. We’re already seeing an increased hysteria among the general population. We can only imagine what the members of the Ship Survey Expedition will go through.”

TRANSCRIPT
INTERACTIVE NEWS NETWORK NEWSCAST
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PATH: INN <> BROADCAST >> THE SHIP >> HEADLINES >> WORLD SHIP SUMMIT ANNOUNCES SHIP SURVEY EXPEDITION MEMBERS><

ANCHOR

Good afternoon and welcome to the Interactive News Network. Just a few minutes ago, the World Council’s World Ship Summit announced the final makeup of the Ship Survey Expedition. We’ve known for about a week now that the World Ship Summit intended that the makeup of the expedition include experts in the fields of archaeology, linguistics, biology, mathematics, engineering and psychology. Now we know who the people are that will be occupying these positions. Professor Mark Echohawk, the archaeologist who originally discovered the Ship, will lead the expedition as well as take charge of the Ship Survey Expedition’s archaeology department. He has personally chosen all the senior members of the Ship Survey Expedition and they are as follows:

They met together for the first time just prior to the first official excursion of the SSE. One by one, they had arrived at the site over the course of the last two days and settled in. Echohawk was surprised by the level of development that had occurred since the Unearthing. A small village had blossomed along the southwest ridge of the crater made by the Ship’s unearthing, the ramp just to the east of the village. It was a shantytown to be sure, structures of corrugated sheet metal, tents, in only a few cases actual prefab housing units. Tens of thousands of people had flocked to the site before the Army had managed to get the area under control. The village was allowed to stay, but the Army Corps of Engineers had been brought in to provide sewage, water, and electricity and comm lines. Roads were still beaten dirt and the population had exploded to almost thirty thousand.

To the east of the ramp, curving along the south-easterly hemisphere of the Ship’s canyon was Fort Arapaho, the base of operations for the military forces that had taken over the area immediately surrounding the Ship and the base of operations for the Ship Survey Expedition.

. . .

Seven strangers sat around a large horseshoe-shaped table. They waited, silently looking one another over, too nervous, perhaps too excited to speak. James and Peter were the only two in the room who knew each other, though they recognized a couple of other faces around the table. Finally, Echohawk came into the room and all attention focused on him.

“Hello, everyone,” he said. “I’m guessing none of you have really had much chance to talk to one another and so probably I’m the only person in the room everyone knows. So, let’s go around the table starting with you, Sonia.”

The dark-skinned woman on the far end of the horseshoe swallowed hard. She tugged nervously at the side of the ghata el ras, the traditional Muslim headscarf she wore. She hated public speaking, even to so small an audience.

“My name is Sonia Aiziz,” she said, her voice wavering with nerves. “I . . . I am a linguist from the University of Gaza antiquities department. My specialty is ancient languages. I was on the expedition with Professor Echohawk that discovered the Quipu repository in Columbia.”

“Don’t be so modest, Sonia,” Echohawk said. “You were essential in discovering and deciphering the Quipus we found.”

The Palestinian woman smiled and looked away demurely. She loathed the spotlight, preferring to work from the background. Echohawk nodded to the next person in line.

“Hello, everyone,” the portly older man said. “I’m Everett Scott, late of the Bombardier Aerospace firm in Montreal. I’m a design engineer, specializing in spacecraft design. Although I didn’t know Professor Echohawk prior to the Ship being found, I understand he’s been kept abreast of my work by one of his associates.”

“An old friend of mine was involved in the shakedown flights of the DF-104 jump plane,” Echohawk said, before gesturing to the next person sitting at the table, a young Asian man about the same age as Peter.

“I’m Doctor Mark Kodo,” he said, “and I’ll be your biologist. If there’s any sign of the beings that built or piloted the Ship, I’ll be the one investigating. I guess I’m on this expedition because of my work in the Arctic, where I helped discover the Rothschild Subterranean Oasis and an entirely new and flourishing species of trilobite.”

The Rothschild Subterranean Oasis was a network of caves extending deep under the Antarctic ice sheet, heated by volcanic vents. There was little by way of plant life in the caverns; however, Kodo had discovered a species of trilobites, insect-like creatures long thought extinct, positively thriving in the caves, feeding off of mosses and lichens. The trilobites had been cut off from the world for millions of years and instead of dying off had evolved and prospered. The man sitting next to Kodo nodded appreciatively. He was in his early sixties, gaunt, his face weathered and his hair cropped short and spiky.

“I am Professor Michael Andrews,” he said. “Until recently, I was dean of mathematics at Oxford. However . . . things didn’t quite work out. I’ve published some rather obscure and extensive papers on fractal equations, mathematical constants in the known universe and the laws of statistical probability. Given the likelihood that aliens attempting to communicate with lesser species would first try and build a common primer using the periodic table and mathematic sets, I will be helping linguistics decipher the alien script we can expect to find everywhere within the Ship.”

He nodded towards Professor Aiziz who smiled back.

“And I am Doctor Simone Cole,” the woman seated next to James and Peter said. “I’m a trained physician, psychiatrist and abnormal psychologist. I’ve worked with Interpol and the FBI, profiling and hunting down many serial killers, including Ludwig Gorsky. My skills as an abnormal psychologist will be applied to trying to understand a little more about the alien minds behind the Ship as well as serving as heading up the expedition’s medical staff.”

“He’s James Johnson,” Peter said.

“And he’s Peter Paulson,” James added. “And everyone here’s had a chance to meet us already. I’m the Prof’s head geek and hacker; I have a major in geology, a minor in archaeology and ended up getting involved in all this thanks to my skills with a console. I sent the feed to INN about the Ship’s discovery and will be hopefully smegging around with the Ship’s computer systems.”

“I’m an archaeologist myself,” Peter said, “with backgrounds in anthropology, geology and mineralogy. I’ll be working mainly with engineering, looking at the metals and alloys used to build the Ship and hoping to discover Peternium, Paulsonium and any other new element or compound that I can tag with my name.”

Everyone laughed or smiled politely at Peter’s joke.

“Now that we all know each other a little better,” Echohawk said, “let’s take a look at what we’re expected to accomplish as part of the Ship Survey Expedition.” Echohawk pulled out a handheld remote and a display screen rolled down from the ceiling. The thin flexible fabric of the screen instantly powered up and began the presentation that the World Ship Summit and the Oversight Commission had prepared. They worked through it within an hour, covering their mission statement, objectives and rules of safety and conduct expected of the members of the SSE while they were on duty. The presentation was dull, despite the efforts Echohawk made to bring life to lifeless material. Finally, it was done with; the SSE members were visibly relieved to be through the presentation, some even fidgeting in their seats.

“Well, that’s over with,” Echohawk said. “You will of course all be expected to give the same presentation to your departments now that staffing is completed. We’ll be making our first foray to the Ship the day after tomorrow. That will give you tomorrow to break in your respective crews. Concluding our official business today, we have a special treat. If everyone would accompany me, please.”

Echohawk led them from the room, out into the air of Fort Arapaho. The military base was a hive of activity as soldiers scrambled about, preparing the last installations necessary to protect the Ship Survey Expedition and defend the Ship. From what invaders, Echohawk did not know. A barracks building was being assembled from prefabricated sections. The barracks would be six storeys high when complete and the Army Corps of Engineers were hard at work. Echohawk led the Ship Survey Expedition through the bustle to the base’s airstrip, where a large helicopter sat waiting. Green and gold, resting on large rocker arms, it reminded Echohawk of an insect, especially with the large double blister windscreen in the front. Echohawk, James, Peter, Aiziz, Andrews, Scott, Kodo and Cole climbed into the back of the helicopter, which had two wide benches facing each other, sandwiched between two large observation windows. The airstrip was located near the ridge of rock that dropped off some seven kilometres to the Ship below. From here the Ship was visible below and around them. The Shipsong was distinct, heard not over the noise of activity around them but accompanying it; it was all-pervasive and all-inclusive, turning even the most random sounds into part of its eerie alien symphony. As the helicopter dusted off, half a world away the World Ship Summit was announcing the makeup of the Ship Survey Expedition. As they flew out over the Ship, two billion people logged on to INN in what would be the world’s largest ever recorded number of simultaneous hits to a single Grid spar.

The Ship was spread out beneath them in all its magnificence. Even at the altitude the helicopter had climbed to, it stretched out in all directions, radiating brilliance as the sun reflected from its eastern surfaces, the western end of the Ship blanketed in a crescent shadow, lit only by glowing blue energy conduits that danced across the Ship’s surface. While his ex-wife would remember an airbase in Houston, Texas, Echohawk would forever remember the image of the pyramid, as it reflected the sunlight into a brilliant spear right back into the sky, when he thought about how the world had changed because of the Ship. For a moment, he thought he saw the outlines of massive portals just below the ring on which the pyramid rested, between the main pyramid and the ring of secondary pyramids that circumvented the Ship’s arching dome. But it was only an illusion created by the natural curves of the hull of the Ship. They crossed the pyramid heading northwest until they came upon the Zuni mountain range. The mountains ended abruptly in a razor-sharp cut along the curve of the dish of the Ship, dropping straight down along a sheer and flawlessly smooth cut in the stone and soul of the mountains. The helicopter curved back around from Zuni and dropped down nearer to the surface. Echohawk leaned to look out the window at the topography of the Ship as it rushed away beneath them.

“Can we get this door open? Would we decompress or something?”

“At this speed, the door stays shut from inertia,” the co-pilot said. “We’d have to land to open it. I’m only authorized to land this bird where I picked her up, but we’ll do it on other flights. Keep the door open, I mean. Climb on the next one, if you like. One extra ride won’t make much difference; we got all manner of people flying today: members of Congress, foreign dignitaries . . . the press . . . shit, we’ll be flying all day.”

“I might just take you up on that offer,” Echohawk said.

“We’ll be coming up on the falls soon,” Peter interjected.

And they were. The helicopter had rounded away from the Zuni Mountains and followed the rise of the dome of the Ship back down to the south. The dome looked like a small mountain itself, rising gradually from the outer edge of the Ship’s disk, curving up almost a full seven kilometres. Ending in a gently rounding slope, backlit from within and resonating in its own alien song, the mountainous dome was topped by the plateau on which stood the pyramid. To their left were the walls of Ship’s Canyon, as it had become known. Perfectly smooth, the drop ranged from ten kilometres at its highest, four at its lowest from the surface of the Earth, to the Ship below. A small rain cloud had gathered itself around the Salado Falls, as they were now called. Seven kilometres above, the Rio Salado had been cleaved away during the unearthing. The water now rushed down, curving out ever so slightly as it left the edge of the riverbed. Only a large stream of white water and the constant rain of spray actually struck the Ship, the rest of the water misted out into the cloud that surrounded the falls. There was some concern that the river would run itself dry this way, and talks about the engineering necessary to divert the river before it was too late were under way.

“That must be marvellous to see at night, when the trenches are glowing,” James commented as they approached the cloudbank.

The pilots kept the helicopter a respectful distance from the clouds and the waterfall, but the helicopter lingered, as all were transfixed by the site of a waterfall that had only existed for a matter of days. Soon, they were on their way back to the landing strip at Fort Arapaho, the Ship even more real to each of them than it had been before. Despite the fact that they had found the pyramid, despite the fact that they had seen the Ship from the ramp or the edge of Ship’s Canyon countless times, only now did they truly feel its presence. Only now did they understand the magnitude of the Ship’s significance.

Chapter Six: Oaths of Office

It was a miserably cold and rainy day. A massive storm cell had stalled over the Ottawa valley and showed no signs of dissipating. Cold, hard rain came down, dampening and chilling the air to unseasonable lows. As the newly sworn-in Canadian minister of defence left his Ottawa residence for the Hill, the short trip to the waiting car left him shivering. The waters of the Rideau Canal that afternoon were choppy and black, the streets slick and the skies promising more to come. The Peace Tower seemed forbidding to the minister as they drove toward the Hill along Sussex Drive. The American embassy flashed into view, an eyesore: a steel and glass construct designed to be attention-getting that was completely and deliberately out of place with its historic surroundings. The minister was reminded yet again of the difference between Canadians and Americans. It didn’t surprise him in the least that their political attitude was that they should stand out even in another country’s capital. Then it was gone, the U.S. embassy passing out of view and they were turning onto Wellington Avenue, up to Parliament. The minister looking out at Parliament Hill as they crossed the gates onto the grounds of the nation’s capital. And then his car was plunging into the new underground parking garage; a misnomer because it hadn’t really been “new” since it had been built some twenty years before. His assistants were already waiting for him as he stepped from the elevator from the garage into the Parliament buildings on his way to his offices. His new offices, as minister of defence.

“We’re still trying to get the offices organized,” Diane, his assistant, said, “but we’re going to need another full forty-eight hours. So far, we’ve managed to flag the more important files; here’s a list of everything that needs your immediate attention, your direct attention and your constant attention.”

She handed the minister a handheld display, its screen alive with filenames.

“Secondary and tertiary concerns are going to the deputy minister and to the rest of the staff. You have a Cabinet meeting at eight, Cabinet meet-the-press at nine, a meeting with the heads of the Armed Forces at nine-thirty, Parliament and then a meeting with the solicitor general and the heads of the RCMP, CSIS and the NIS about the Montreal situation at two-thirty.”

“When do I get time to be brought up to speed personally?” the minister asked. Diane consulted her data pad.

“Sometime over the Christmas break,” she said. “In the meantime, you’ll have to play catch up. Don’t worry. I have everything under control, and we’ll spoon-feed you until we can get you sat down long enough to get up to full speed. We’re even covering anticipated questions from the opposition during Question Period.”

“I couldn’t do it without you, Diane.”

“I know.”

. . .

Later he was sitting behind his desk, the doors to his office closed and Diane on guard at her desk in the outer office. The linx hadn’t started chiming yet. It was seven-thirty and the minister had already been at work for nearly an hour. The rain outside was hitting the window with a cold, cruel rattle, making it impossible to see out. The windows were misted and the water was running in slick rivulets down the windowpanes. The wind whipped up, assailing the building with more rain. It was cold out and damp. His offices, lit by a desk lamp and windows with curtains thrown wide, were dismal and dark, made all the more oppressive by the Gothic architecture and the weather. The minister contemplated how much nicer this place would look when the sun was out on a nice, crisp October afternoon. As a gust whipped a screaming spray against the windows again, the minister wondered how he was going to make it through such a long and miserable day. He turned his attention back to the two consoles on his desk. One was blank, while the other displayed a summary that he was supposed to be studying. He needed tea. It was too damn early in the day to be trying to filter through government nonsense without a good, strong cup of tea. He reached for the other console, meaning to contact Diane, when it chimed, apparently of its own volition. Diane appeared onscreen, her earpiece discreetly hidden under her hair.

“Minister, you have a linx from the British embassy,” her voice said over speakers hidden on the desk.

The clarity of the sound was such that she could well have been in the room with him. The minister arched an eyebrow and shrugged, slipping on his own earpiece, forwarding the second console’s audio into the unit.

“Put it through in here,” he said.

Diane nodded and vanished from the screen a moment later. The screen remained blank for a few more seconds before the image of the British ambassador to Canada appeared onscreen in a short cascade of pixels. The minister himself didn’t immediately recognize the man, but identifier software that was part of the communications parcel on his government console was able to name him, displaying that text at the bottom of the screen.

“Mister Ambassador,” the minister said. “Good morning. I must say, I didn’t expect to hear from your offices. Let alone from you, sir.”

“Good morning, Minister,” the ambassador said. “No, I don’t suppose you would have expected a linx from me. However, neither protocol nor security concerns would permit me to see you in person.”

“Security concerns?”

The ambassador shook his head in an apologetic, self-effacing gesture.

“I’m sorry, Minister. This won’t be much of a welcome to the job,” he said. “And usually you would be afforded more time to settle into your position as defence minister before I contacted you. However, given the nature of the ongoing situation in the protectorates to the south, time is of the essence. I had to contact you as soon as possible.”

“Regarding what, may I ask?”

“Regarding a package that you will receive late this evening. The package will arrive from the British embassy, by a special secure carrier. It will be a document pouch, the contents of which you are required to read only when you are alone and only from a secure workstation.”

The minister was annoyed by the sudden cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

“And the topic of these secure documents?”

“That is something I will be unable to discuss with you, Minister, until such time as you have read the contents of the document pouch and contacted me on channel QU137. It’s a secure channel and the linx will be routed to me no matter where I am.”

“This is ridiculous,” the minister objected. “I’m not in this job an hour and already the spychaser nonsense has started.”

“This is a very serious matter, Minister,” the ambassador said gravely, “and you’ll better understand and appreciate that when the carrier arrives tonight. We’ll speak then, and I’ll answer any questions you have.”

The image of the British ambassador to Canada froze and depixillated, leaving the minister both dumbfounded and annoyed. He toggled the intercom.

“Diane, would you be so kind as to bring me the largest goddamned pot of tea you can find? I have the feeling I’m going to need it.”

. . .

Echohawk strolled into the briefing room, sipping from a coffee mug so large it was nearly a thermos. He relished the bittersweet coffee’s heat and energizing caffeine as it pumped from his mouth to his senses through an expanding warmth in his belly.

“Good morning, everyone,” he said. “Well, we’re all familiar now with each other’s backgrounds and with the nature of this expedition. We’ve all had a chance to see the Ship from the air and now our skills as an expedition team will be put to the test: Today, we will be allowed down to the pyramid and, with luck, we might actually get a look inside.”

He thumbed a button on the remote. The thin fabric screen lit up with a view of the pyramid as seen from the ramp, the land bridge that the Ship had allowed to remain between it and the outside world. The image had depth of field and proportion creating the illusion that the screen was a window overlooking an actual scene instead of a liquid crystal display. The view slowly tracked in as the Ship Survey Expedition watched.

“This footage was taken two hours ago, by a remote-controlled drone using a Cannon Magic Mirror 3D enhancement camera,” Echohawk explained. “It rolled to within ten meters of the pyramid at the top of the Ship and recorded these images. Take a close look: it’s about to zoom in on the base of the Pyramid facing the ramp.”

The image onscreen changed again as the telephoto lens on the drone switched focus to pull in close to the pyramid. They could all clearly see that there was a depressed archway in the pyramid’s surface some five meters high and just as wide. The back of the archway was sealed, but all indications seemed to point to this being a hatch.

“The Army’s recorded similar archways on all the other exposed pyramids along the Ship’s dome,” Echohawk explained.

“I expect we’re looking at the main doors into the Ship,” Andrews said.

“I would argue that you’re right,” Scott replied, “but we could just as easily be seeing thruster ports.”

“I agree,” Andrews replied. “However, thruster ports don’t usually have control panels put to either side.”

“What?” Scott and Aiziz asked together.

Andrews took up a laser pointer from his position at the horseshoe-shaped table.

“Here and here,” he said, pointing the laser beam to either side of the image of the arch onscreen. “Professor Echohawk, can we get a zoom in on those locations?” Echohawk consulted the remote he was holding. A moment later, the image did zoom in to one side of the arch. There was a long, recessed panel beside the arch. It was filled with what appeared to be a number of rectangular tiles, all of which had some device inscribed upon them.

“Can we get a better view of those tiles?” Aiziz asked with urgency. “Can we see the inscriptions on them?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Echohawk said. “This is already an enhancement of the original image. We’ll have to wait until we get out to the pyramid itself.”

Aiziz stared long and hard at the indistinct image before her.

“Well, then, what are we waiting for?”

. . .

They rode over from Fort Arapaho to the pyramid in a small convoy of all-terrain transports. The long, multi-wheeled vehicles drove out in a row, the SSE heads and their small entourage of assistants in the first two vehicles, an emergency medical response unit directly behind them, a communications wagon behind that and finally, two cargo haulers that carried all the equipment and even survival gear they would need for their forays into the Ship. Echohawk, Scott and Andrews sat together in a knot of conversation.

“I argue that the arched depression is a door,” Scott explained, “because on a vessel this size, you’d probably have a network of antenna and sensor arrays across the entire hull. Same thing with weapons, assuming it had any, and because of the sheer size of the thing, manoeuvring and propulsion would have to be spread out over the whole surface of the Ship, especially if it was able to make planetfall.”

“Are we sure it landed?” Andrews asked.

“It couldn’t have crashed,” Scott replied. “It wouldn’t have stayed together this well and there’d be some evidence of a crash trail, or a much larger impact crater in the local geography. No, the Ship dropped right out of the sky and nestled itself into the ground.”

Having been married to a fighter jock, Echohawk knew a little about physics and a little about aerospace engineering. His engineering studies at university had been one of the factors involved in his introduction to Margaret Bloom in the time of history that Echohawk had begun referring to as What Couldn’t Have Been That Long Ago.

“So the ring of smaller pyramids we’ve witnessed would also be doors?” Echohawk asked.

“Most likely, yes,” Scott replied. “Assuming we don’t get there and discover the pyramid’s not an access point at all. The whole pyramid network could be an elaborate array of some kind. Although I expect it isn’t.”

“In all likelihood there are several other points of access to the Ship as well,” Andrews noted. “Escape hatches, cargo bays . . . docking bays, that sort of thing.”

“No doubt,” Scott agreed. “This is why we can also count on there being several layers of hull. The Ship will be much like an onion.”

“In order to reduce the risk of explosive decompression,” Andrews said, “the two main problems with a vessel the size of the Ship being accessibility and safety. The inner sections of the Ship closest to the outer hull will probably be quite barren then, lots of bulkheads and hatches, or the equivalent of such in alien design.”

“Are you acquainted with engineering?” Scott asked, with hopeful curiosity.

Andrews gave his head a quick shake, pulling a cigarette from his breast pocket.

“No,” he said, handing a smoke to Echohawk, “I’m an expert in the laws of probability, the mathematical likelihood of certain things occurring. For instance, I’ll wager that the pyramid on top of the Ship will be the only way in we’ll be afforded and that it won’t be immediately accessible to us.”

“What makes you say that?” Scott asked.

“Well, perhaps Professor Echohawk would be kind enough to tell us how long the dig had been going on before the orbital scan was performed?” Andrews asked by way of reply.

“About three weeks,” Echohawk said. “Not including the time that the Laguna Band was working the dig themselves.”

“And how long after the deep scan did the Ship begin unearthing itself?” Andrews asked.

Echohawk looked off to where James, Peter and Kodo were talking.

“James,” Echohawk called. “James! How long after the orbital scan started did we start recording tremors?”

“I’d have to go back and checked the seismography,” James replied, “but I think the initial tremors started about ten minutes into the scan.”

This seemed to satisfy Andrews to no end; he smiled broadly.

“The Ship only unearthed itself after it was scanned from a high-orbit with a multi-spectral deep scan, and yet, efforts had been ongoing to expose it for quite some time before that: there were Doppler seismology, MRI and PET scans used on the object while it was still buried. You used precision blasting, laser cutters and picks and shovels to dig it up. However, the Ship only began to unearth itself after it was scanned from orbit.”

“You’re saying it was waiting for an orbital scan?” Echohawk asked, incredulous.

“Many theorists involved with the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life assume that only space-faring cultures or cultures about to become spaceborne would be targeted for first contact,” Andrews explained. “We know that the Ship was buried at the end of the Cretaceous, by the so-called death star meteoric impact. Likely, the Ship was damaged and needed to repair itself. But fully restored and still buried, why didn’t it just leave? Why not unearth itself then and take off?”

“It must have been instructed to stay,” Scott realized.

“Exactly,” Andrews said with a smile, his unlit cigarette dancing in the corner of his mouth, “and why stay, unless it was waiting for something here? Some sign of intelligence, perhaps? A space-faring intelligence, aware of its presence?”

“Then it only unearthed itself in response to our actions,” Echohawk said.

“Most probably,” Andrews replied. “This is why I believe that we’ll find that the archway in the pyramid is indeed a door and that that same door is sealed.”

“I don’t follow,” Echohawk said.

“No, but I think I do,” Scott said. “An alien race looking for signs of intelligence from another species and using the Ship’s presence as an interactive tool to determine that intelligence would set up certain tests.”

“The land bridge we’re driving across, for example,” Andrews said, “leads directly to the pyramid, which until recently was the only portion of the Ship to be partially unearthed. And also the highest point on the Ship.”

“And the runes to either side of the archway would be another test,” Scott said, his eyes glistening with dawning realization.

“And when we get there, we’ll find out just what form that test will take,” Andrews concluded.

. . .

Paul Santino stared at the console screen before him. Since the Ship had been unearthed, the Laguna Band had discovered that it had lost several hundred of its own out in the desert during the unearthing. Laguna had also suffered an increase in crime, pollution and traffic. The new highway extension being put down was supposed to take most of the traffic away from Laguna, but the fact that the Band Council had had to shut down Laguna’s bars, nightclubs and even its bowling alley as a result of the influx of people coming to gawk at the Ship wasn’t helping the local economy. The jail was full of rowdies, drunks and even a handful of soldiers from the newly constructed Fort Arapaho. Vandalism, traffic accidents, littering were all up. The problem was that in the Village, as the shantytown that had formed near the Ship had been christened, had almost no entertainment. There were shops and a couple of ramshackle restaurants, but it was Laguna that had the multiplex, the entertainment complex and all the bars, nightclubs, pool halls and other recreation facilities. This meant that the resources available for a modest desert community were now being used by an entirely new community. And it was up to Santino as chief of the Laguna Band to try and figure out how to solve the problem. The Protectorate Council sure as hell wasn’t offering up any assistance. Suddenly Santino was struck by an idea. He slipped a linx headset into his ear and keyed open a communications line on his console. Moments later, he was connected with the loan officer of the Aboriginal American’s Bank of the Protectorate head offices in Pueblo, Colorado.

“Chief Santino!” the loan officer, one David George, exclaimed. “How can I help you, today?”

“Hello, Dave,” Santino replied. “I guess you must be aware of the current situation we have out this way.”

George smiled.

“It’s kind of hard not to be,” he said.

“Well, that’s why I’m calling. We have a unique business opportunity presenting itself. The village that’s sprung up around the Ship is all homes and shops. I understand they have a Taco Bell and a couple of coffee joints, but little else. In fact, we had to shut down some of our businesses because they were being overrun by villagers.”

David George nodded his head.

“I haven’t talked this over with the council yet, but I’m positive they’ll agree,” Santino explained. “I’d like to propose that the band guarantee business loans to Laguna businessmen to set up bars and clubs in the Village. The Village is leasing the land from the Laguna Band Council, so we have no worry about purchasing problems. We’re looking at construction and setup costs only.”

“Interesting,” George replied. “Let me talk it over with some of my people here and get back to you after you’ve thrown it out to the Band Council.”

Now it was Santino’s turn to smile.

“Will do,” he said. “Thanks, Dave. I’ll linx you back, this afternoon.”

As Santino ended the linx, a message flared to life across his console screen:

You have 1 new text linx waiting.
(1)View now (2)View later

Santino selected to view the message. He read it through once and then directed his console to verify its authenticity by tracing it back to the sender. When that was completed Santino read the message again. Then he requested hard copy and holding the paper print-out in hand read it a third time.

“Jesus,” Santino rasped, stunned.

After the Ship unearthed itself in his back yard he’d not believed anything could possibly surprise him. How wrong he had been. The message read:

Chief Paul Santino
Chief of the Laguna Band Council
Laguna, Laguna District
Southwestern Protectorate

Dear Mr. Santino,

His Holiness by the Grace of God and Jesus Christ our Lord, Pope Simon Peter requests your attendance as a special advisory delegate to the forthcoming Vatican Council.

His holiness believes that as Chief of the Laguna Band and an accredited Shaman of the Acoma people, your insight to this most pressing matter of the Faith and of all Faiths will be invaluable. That you live in proximity to the Ship and were present during the Unearthing has also been heavily considered in your favour, as a delegate to this Council.

The Fourth Vatican Council will begin in a few weeks’ time and we request that you reply to this invitation by the deadline listed below, either by reciprocal World Grid linx, or by postal service, to the address below.

We thank you, Mr. Santino, for your attention to and consideration of our invitation and pray that you will see fit to join us in Rome for the conference.

Yours respectfully,

Br. Simon Gage
Delegate Liaison Vatican IV

There was no longer any question. They were face to face with a door that almost perfectly matched a measurement of three meters by two meters. The tiles to either side of the door were strange, rectangular runes, each rune carved with a different alien symbol. Complicating things further was a second set of glyphs, these circular and divided into three different sub-types: One type was perfectly round, the other two oval; one oval along the horizontal, the other along the vertical. Round, oval, tall or wide, each glyph-type had only five characters: an empty “ring” glyph, another with one quarter full, a half-glyph, three quarters filled and a full one. Aiziz and Andrews were all over the symbols which were arranged in six different groupings: one for the runes, three for what were evidently numeric glyphs and two combined. The two combined rune groupings were to the left of the door, the four separate sets to the right. Aiziz pulled a small handheld device from her pack. It consisted of a small console screen and a laser pen. She switched the device on, adjusting the width of the beam to its widest, and began sweeping it across the surface of the door. Each pass recorded part of the alien script into the device, layering the next pass onto it, flawlessly.

“I’ve never seen writings like these,” she said. “There are certain similarities to ancient languages that I’ve studied, but it’s unlikely those similarities are anything but coincidental.”

Echohawk approached, studying the scriptures on the door.

“I doubt that we’ll be doing any comparative studies with Earth languages.” He paused, realizing what he had said, and chuckled. “Now, there’s a phrase I never thought I’d use: ‘Earth languages’.”

“Funny thing, the way reality catches one up, isn’t it?” Andrews remarked. “Earth languages . . . alien languages . . . I doubt that comparative study will yield an interpretation of these symbols. But I do expect that there will be some kind of universal primer. Not here on the door, of course, but inside the Ship itself.”

“The primer will do us little good inside the Ship if we’re locked outside,” Aiziz said, “unless you know how to decipher this and get us in.”

“There’s actually no need for us to decipher this information right now,” Andrews said. “All we need to do is open the door. And the aliens that built this Ship have left us everything we need to do so right here.”

“What do you mean?” Echohawk asked. “How can we open the door if we can’t make sense of the inscription on the door?”

“I said earlier that we’d be faced with a combination lock,” Andrews replied, “and that is essentially what we have here.”

“How, exactly?” Aiziz asked.

The other members of the SSE were pausing in their tasks to regard Andrews.

“It’s simple, really,” Andrews said. “I daresay that the symbols to either side of the door would indicate the aliens who built the Ship have a base-five numerical system. Look at the round glyphs. They cannot be anything but number sequences. The runic text accompanying the glyphs is most likely irrelevant to the task at hand anyway.”

“I don’t see why,” Echohawk said.

“This door was designed to be secured, but I doubt it was designed to keep others out,” Andrews said. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it was meant to be opened by us.”

“By us?” Echohawk asked.

“I think I see where he’s going,” Aiziz said.

“By us,” Andrews confirmed. “We all agree that the Ship was running a program when it unearthed itself. Correct?”

Everyone nodded in agreement. Andrews continued:

“The Ship executed that program and unearthed itself, giving us deliberate access to the pyramid via the ramp. The ramp leads to the door before us. Aliens intelligent enough to engineer the Ship would probably realize their language would not necessarily be known to us. Therefore, they must have left us a mathematical puzzle that we could solve. The sets of runes and glyphs along the doorframe are that puzzle. It is therefore quite unlikely that the runic script we see is a set of instructions. I’ll defer the question of what that message must therefore be to Doctor Aiziz. That they are connected is evident. The individual runes and glyphs are laid out to the right of the door, and to the left, we have two sets of combined runes and glyphs.”

“Each of the two combined sets is laid out differently,” Aiziz concluded, “though both resemble alphanumeric keypads. If they’re an input device, the test Professor Andrews is speaking of can only be a sequential pattern-recognition test.”

“And once we determine the pattern and sequence, we’ll have access to the Ship,” Andrews concluded.

. . .

Lieutenant Colonel Margaret Bloom had again spent the last few days in a holding pattern. She’d been shipped out to DIA headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base in D.C., been assigned to barracks and had been left there to rot. She’d spent days drifting, waiting to be called to Harrod’s office for some sort of assignment or duty. Nothing. Bloom had found herself spending her time drifting between the rec room and its game consoles’ Grid connections and vid screens and the officers’ club with its pool tables, dart boards and where her rank bought her a thousand dollar credit line at the bar. She had access to the airfield but no flight privileges, so she oftentimes found herself hanging out with her fellow fighter jocks, including some old wing mates who had become instructors. Her linx was always in her ear, always standing by for the call that never came. Finally, this morning, Bloom had received word. She’d been in the rec room in a simulator game, heavily involved piloting a deep space fighter craft called a Starfury, hence the name of the game, when her linx chimed.

“Shit!” she swore absently, pausing the game in mid assault on an enemy frigate. She put down the control pad for the game, pressing a switch behind her ear on her headset.

“Bloom here.”

“Lieutenant Colonel,” Harrod’s voice came, grating in her ear, “report to my office immediately.”

“I’m on my way, General,” she said.

At last, things were moving again.

. . .

“Sit down, please,” Harrod said.

He didn’t look up from the central console on his desk. He keyed a switch and behind him a wall-screen rolled out of its recess. Its flexible fabric rippled as some unseen bump on its roller repeatedly hit the groove of the track it was in. The screen drifted to a halt and flared to life. Displayed on it was Bloom’s service record.

“I’ve been reviewing your file, Lieutenant Colonel, trying to decide what is to be done with you,” Harrod said.

He looked up at her briefly then resumed reading from his console.

“I’ve kept you here on hold while I did some checking into your background beyond what’s in your service jacket. Needless to say, what I discovered surprised me a great deal. It’s amazing to me that you’ve been promoted up through the ranks to where you are. Apparently, however, your skills behind the stick are seen as redeeming a record that’s been spotted with incidents where you’ve challenged your superior officers. Not to mention the number of times you’ve been court-martialled for assault, disobeying direct orders and . . . other offences.”

Bloom said nothing. She’d let Harrod bait her once too often already. He continued.

“Despite your problem with those in authority over you, you’ve handled your own authority quite well. You’re also one of the top aerospace engineers the Air Force has. These things have counted in your favour so far, and they are also among the reasons you simply didn’t disappear en route to Bolling. You can still be of use to your government.”

“How?” Bloom asked, at long last.

“Lieutenant Colonel, as you are aware, the DIA is not simply another intelligence and espionage agency like Homeland Security, the NID, the CIA, the NSA, or ConsOp. We are also one of the most important military research and development agencies that the United States controls.”

“And if the rumours are true,” Bloom said, “the DIA also operates one of the largest, most heavily equipped shadow armies in the world.”

“Our primary concern right now is the research arm of the DIA,” Harrod retorted, “and more specifically your place in it.”

Bloom took a moment to look around, studying her service record on the large screen behind Harrod as the console cycled gradually through three-page sets.

“And what place would that be exactly, General?” she asked. “What is my assignment? And where?”

“Lieutenant Colonel, the Defence Intelligence Agency monitors thousands of research and development projects in both government and the private sector that are aimed at improving our nation’s defence capabilities. The government projects are done at one of four facilities under the DIA’s direct authority. Would you happen to know which facilities I’m referring to?”

“I’m honestly only aware of three,” she said. “Los Alamos, of course; Black Ridge in Texas, which was established after White Sands was nuked during the war, and the Cheyenne Mountain facility, which was turned entirely over to research in the 1970s when the Pennsylvania Avenue bunker complex was completed.”

“The fourth is the facility we’ll be en route to shortly,” Harrod said. “You may have heard of it, though doubtless never in any official capacity: the Groom Lake Special Research Facility in Nevada.”

Bloom had to pause a moment. The name was familiar but she didn’t know why. Then it dawned on her: Nevada.

“Area 51,” she said, incredulously.

“No,” Harrod replied, “Area 51 is a parcel of land bordered to the north and west by fence, to the south by Area 46 and Area 52 to the east. It is part of the perimeter of the Groom Lake facility. Forget everything you’ve ever heard about Area 51, Colonel. The truth is much stranger than the fiction.”

“Isn’t it always,” Bloom mused, eyes locked on Harrod’s, not knowing whether or not to be surprised, shocked or to have expected anything less from the DIA in general and General Harrod in particular.

“Take a look at this, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said, keying a sequence on his console.

Onscreen, Bloom saw her first pictures of the Bugs.

“They were discovered in a hillside in the Alberta Badlands after the end of War Two, in nineteen hundred forty-six. They have been the source of a lot of advances in military technology for a very long time. They’ve also been the source of some of the most confounding mysteries the DIA has ever faced.”

Bloom was looking at images of two waspish craft as they appeared while being pulled out of the hillside. One was smashed and damaged beyond repair. There was the suggestion that they might have once been gold and green in colour, once been quite vibrant. The scale on the screen gave them twenty-three meters in length. The craft were insectile in appearance, with flowing lines from the aft section, narrowing towards the middle before blossoming in an elliptical forward segment. The “head” of the craft seemed to be joined to or supported by the rest of the Bug by tapering nacelles that stretched from the mid-section of the craft almost to the tip of the “nose.” Bloom suspected the forward section of the craft was either a sensor or equipment array of some kind, possibly made to store ordinance. The pilot — if any — would be housed midway through the craft with the large rear section given over to engines and power supply. The destroyed Bug’s aft section was crumpled. The other one had damage across one side but seemed mostly intact. The images changed, showing the two Bugs in a hangar, the damaged one being disassembled and components from both being examined and extracted.

“I was planning on recruiting you for this project before the incident aboard Concord 3, Lieutenant Colonel. You simply forced me to change methods and the timetable. However, this project is too important to hand it to someone who has a problem with their commanding officer. You and I both work for the same government for the same reasons: to defend this country and in our particular fields to improve upon this country’s defences. The benefits to you will outweigh the inconvenience of being recruited. And this project is not at cross-purposes of my intention of keeping you the fuck out of the way. I can deposit you elsewhere, Bloom. Probably somewhere you wouldn’t even work as hard as you will at the facility. But I will not put you to work at the facility unless I know you will respect my authority. The choice is yours.”

She’d heard the phrase “through the looking glass” used before. Now Bloom was beginning to understand the true context of it. And she also understood that she wanted this. She wanted the Bug more than anything else on earth.

“I’m in,” she said, meeting Harrod’s for the first time since entering his office, her eyes bright with want, with desire. “I’m in, General.”

Harrod nodded his head and keyed a new sequence into his keypad. The images on the large screen changed. Bloom was now looking at a single Bug, though this one was far from damaged. It stood proud on very insect-like struts, glistening. Its upper and lower sections were bisected from stem to stern by a narrow band of brilliant blue energy.

“We built one?” Bloom asked.

“No,” Harrod replied. “This is the second Bug. The first one was beyond salvage and so we’ve spent countless decades trying to reverse engineer it, occasionally going to the second Bug to see what we could understand. The second Bug has been our control craft, left almost completely untouched except when absolutely necessary. However, after the Ship unearthed itself, the second, more salvageable vessel began to. . .” he seemed about to say heal, “repair itself. This image, taken today would appear to be the end result.”

“Holy shit. . .”

“Yes. Your job will be to learn as much as you can from the active Bug.”

“Does that include . . . no, never mind,” she said.

“Does it include what?” Harrod asked.

She looked at him, hopeful, embarrassed and angry with herself for feeling like a kid being given a new bike for her birthday.

“Does that include . . . flying . . . the Bug, General?”

Harrod sat back in his chair, a poorly suppressed smile on his lips. He knew he had her then. And she knew it, too. She hated herself because she knew she truly didn’t care.

“Possibly,” he said. “Once a proper risk-analysis has been made. I take it you want the assignment?”

“Hell, yeah,” Bloom rasped.

“We leave for Nevada in thirty minutes.”

. . .

It had been a long day and the rain hadn’t let up. The minister was watching INN and he’d moved his console over to the coffee table by the bay window in his office. It was cold and dark out now, the rain turning to sleet. Bitter October weather. It had been a long and difficult day, the escalating Montreal crisis keeping him at the office far longer than even he’d expected to stay on his first day. He was reclined on a couch on the wall adjacent to the window, watching the news system’s latest broadcast. His back was a screaming web of cold, dull aching pain, and on his console screen, a news anchor was explaining that the leader of the United Trinity Observants had set up an open church in the village around the Ship, and the reporter relaying the information back to the studio was discussing the alarmingly large crowds that kept coming to the services.

“These services are held every three hours and always presided over by Gabriel Ashe,” the reporter said. “And he uses each sermon to attack the Ship, calling it everything from the tool of the Devil to the Temple of Death.”

The minister used a laser pointer to select a viewing of one of Ashe’s sermons. Onscreen Gabriel Ashe appeared behind his pulpit staring blandly out at the audience, his manner and expressions belying calm, serenity, almost apathy. However, his eyes were manic, shifting constantly, the pupils dilated, the whites bloodshot.

“And yea did an Angel of the Lord speak unto Me,” Ashe said in his dispassionate monotone delivery. “And this Angel did say that the signs of the end are all around us, plainly visible to all who wish to see. Are we not here now gathered in a place where the night has been made into day? Are people not already fighting over who shall posses this golden idol? The earth has opened up to reveal the gates of the Ancient Prison.”

Ashe delivered his sermon in a flat lifeless voice. And yet the audience was held in sway. The minister was disturbed by the image. Ashe continued:

“The Ship is the forbear of grievous evil, My children. And it has offered itself up to us as a new god, an idolatrous obscenity, a graven image to be worshipped in God’s stead. This Ship is an affront, My children. Whatsoever displeases Me displeases My Father. The Ship is an obscenity. The Angel of the Lord showed Me. I was taken to the Valley of the Pyramid where I was shown the future. The Angel of the Lord showed Me how the people would flock here, worshipping the Ship and turning away from God. The Angel of the Lord showed Me how the Antichrist would come in boiling black clouds; how those who worshipped at this unholy altar called the Ship would summon the Antichrist, the destroyer, the cancer of the soul. We must stop the Ship. We must keep it from claiming the souls it needs to open the way for its hideous creator. So say I, so sayeth the Lord.”

The image paused and there was a curt ping from the console. The minister toggled his earpiece.

“Yes, Diane?”

“Minister, there’s a courier here to see you.”

The minister froze a moment. He hadn’t thought of the British ambassador’s cryptic linx all day. He’d forgotten somehow, not simply put it out of his mind. So another mystery was about to be solved.

“Send him in, Diane.”

He shut down his console, got up and straightened his shirt and tie. The courier knocked on the door to the inner office twice before stepping in. The courier wore a suit but the line looked a little bulky for his frame. The minister suspected the courier was probably wearing body armour and wondered again at the nature of what was in the metallic case shackled to the courier’s wrist. The courier put the case on the table and opened a panel on its side. He pulled out a reader, the chain shackling him to the case giving him enough reach to use both hands.

“Minister, I’ll need to confirm your identity with your eye print,” the courier said, his voice accented British.

“Of course,” the minister said, taking the reader from him.

The reader had a binocular-like device on its side. The minister brought this up to his eyes. The light changed gradually from red to green. He handed the reader back to the courier.

“Confirmed,” the courier said a moment later.

He replaced the device and opened the case. Inside was a sealed diplomatic pouch. The courier took a second reader from within the briefcase, detached a trackpen from its side and began filling in a small form displayed on the second reader. He then turned to the minister.

“Please verify, Minister, that the seals on the pouch are intact and sign this.”

The minister studied the pouch and took the reader from the courier, signing it and returning it to him. The courier scrolled to another part of the form. He noted the date and time and then handed the pouch over to the minister. The minister took it, and then the reader was proffered again.

“Please sign that you have received the package, Minister.”

The minister did. The courier packed up the device, bid the minister good evening and left. The minister toggled his inter-office link.

“Diane, you might as well go home. Lock up behind you. I’ll set the alarm when I leave.”

“Sir, try to get some sleep tonight.”

“You too, Diane. Sorry I kept you so late. Knock off early on Friday. Say around 10:00 A.M. Any later and I’ll have to fire you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, Diane.”

The minister heard her leave a moment later. He sat down at his desk, looking at the envelope before him. The first thing he’d noticed after taking receipt of the package was how light it was. He opened it. A lot of packing material held a single hard-sealed letter. It was labeled in angry red letters with the inscription:

TOP SECRET: DEFENCE MINISTER’S EYES ONLY!

The minister opened the envelope. The letter inside was printed on real paper as opposed to a reprintable magnetic sheet and was written in the precise, deliberate hand of the former defence minister.

Minister,

You have come to this office because either I have retired or been replaced. Whether I have been replaced through death, election, or cabinet shuffle is unimportant. Whether we are from the same party or not is irrelevant. We are both mandated by this office to protect the lives of Canadian Citizens. For this reason I must ask that you pay close attention to the words in this letter. You must follow these instructions precisely, because to do otherwise would be to put the lives of all Canadians and indeed the lives of everyone in the world in danger. Secrecy is of the utmost. If you will not abide by these conditions this letter must be destroyed and the case returned through the same messenger that brought it. Instructions on how to contact this messenger are printed on the last page of this letter. I urge you to stop now and consider the importance of the rest of what I have to say and your ability to commit to it before you read any further.

If you are reading further you should know that you are bound by the First Sealed Clause of the Official Secrets Act. At the end of your first day as Defence Minister I trust you have already been made aware of the Sealed Clauses of the Act. If not read no further until you have been. You are now one of nine people who at any given time sit on a secret international body known as the Committee. From Great Britain the head of MI-6, the British Ambassador to Canada and the Defence Minister. From Canada, the Defence Minister, the Minister of Natural Resources and the Solicitor General. From the United States the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House Chief of Staff and of all people the Curator of the Smithsonian Institute.

In order for the Committee to sit, two thirds of its members must be present. An informal group of councillors made up of former chairs of the Committee advise us. The Committee was founded just after World War Two, in 1946. During a joint British-Canadian archaeological dig in the Alberta Badlands a ship of alien origin was unearthed. It had been there at least sixty million years.

‘Now, doesn’t that sound familiar?’ the minister murmured.

The Committee’s sole purpose is to catalogue, where possible acquire and study any and all artifacts of alien origin. We have been able to adapt many technologies form these artifacts for use here on Earth. Others still remain a mystery. You were instructed earlier by another member of the Committee to contact them after you had received this package. At twenty-three fifty-nine hours tonight use whatever method described to you by that person to contact them. If you have already missed that window repeat at one fifty-nine and if necessary again at three fifty-nine. Cease all attempts to contact for the night, should the last contact not be made. Resume contact again at twenty-three fifty-nine tomorrow night. If you fail to meet a final rendezvous time of twenty-three fifty-nine the day after tomorrow we will assume you have defaulted and I will resume my post on the Committee. If you keep your appointment you will be fully briefed on the Committee and the organization it commands. If you stay with the Committee, Minister then I congratulate you and promise to pray for you. Because nothing that can be said to you will prepare you for the burden of what it is we do. Dispose of this letter in the manner your contact specifies and good luck to you.

The minister checked his watch. It was a quarter to one. Looked like he’d have a little bit of a wait and plenty of time to reflect on whether or not he wanted to make the contact. He sat back and pondered this latest turn of events in his life. If he’d had all this to do over again, he thought, looking at the cold rain dropping down from the black sky, he would have told the prime minister to go to hell. He still had the option of not calling, of leaving the committee to the former occupier of this office. It would require no effort on his part; all he’d have to do was not send a linx on channel QU137 and he’d be free. But the minister knew. He knew with a certainty that weighed heavy on his heart that he could no more refuse the committee than he could have refused the prime minister when he was first offered the Defence portfolio. He was imminently curious. Although the Ship had removed much mystique from the prospect of aliens coming to Earth, alien artifacts would for a long time to come be exotic, ancient artifacts all the more so. The minister had too many questions following the letter he’d read to refuse. He also had a duty to the Canadian people. He had been given this portfolio, and the committee was, although not what he’d been expecting, part of that portfolio. The minister counted down the time remaining until he was to contact the British ambassador. Time stretched on almost agonizingly, the combination of the late hour, the long day and the news he had just read swamping his system. He was alert and exhausted all at once, and he doubted he’d be able to get much sleep tonight without herbal assistance. He just hoped that there was a joint left in the pack at home because at this hour there wouldn’t be anyplace he could buy another pack. The RDCBO, the Recreational Drug Control Board of Ontario, would be closed until nine in the morning. He’d need some relief tonight — this morning really — if he were to get any sleep. Finally, it was time to place the call. And now the minister found he still wanted to think about this one. Whether or not he was certain he was up to the challenge. But even as he was second guessing himself, he was keying the channel address into his console. It only took a moment and the British ambassador was onscreen, looking at him.

“Welcome to the committee, Minister,” he said.

The most important acts of a civilization, be they atrocities against life or acts of compassion beyond understanding, are always done in the name of the greater good. And no one who acts in the name of the greater good believes they are wrong. That is why right and wrong are so often indistinguishable.

Chapter Seven: The Greater Good

Gabriel Ashe knew this was a Dream the same way He always knew He was Dreaming. His last memory was of taking High Communion, a cocktail of narcotics hallucinogens and dangerous stimulants. It was a combination of drugs that would have killed lesser men. It brought Him instead closer to bliss, though not always peacefully. Ashe didn’t remember if He’d partaken of the flesh. He probably hadn’t unless the Angel of the Lord had demanded a sacrifice. For this was indeed a True Dream, sent to Him when he took High Communion. He would know soon enough. He was in a dark desert, the sky overhead black with thickly flowing clouds moving slowly across the horizon. Flashes of purple lightning backlit the clouds, occasionally spearing the Earth, searing it, making it scream. And of course, the shining light in the darkness of this most unholy night was the Ship. It reigned in the valley below Him like an evil king. He was standing on the precipice of the Shorn Mountain, the sheer drop to the Ship kilometres below seeming to fall on forever. How long would He fall if He was pushed and the Angels weren’t there to catch Him?

“Do not test the Lord your God, Gabriel Ashe.”

The voice as always, preceding itself slightly, echoing in reverse, turning Him to face the direction it came from to watch the Angel appear. To Gabriel Ashe it seemed that the Angel unfolded from a rift in the air in front of His eyes. One moment there was nothing, then a bubble the shape of the Angel and then the form of the Angel filling the bubble ballooning into existence.

“They seek to break the great seal on the Ship,” the Angel said, turning to look down upon the infernal vessel. “It goes against the will of the Lord for this to happen.”

“I will stop them,” Ashe said, “if you will but tell Me how.”

The Angel inclined its head towards Him.

“Ask,” the Angel said, “and ye shall receive.”

And Gabriel Ashe received.

. . .

He woke hours, perhaps even days later, back inside the compound bought and built in a matter of days by the United Trinity Observants. Just behind their Open Church in the Village that had grown up around the Ship. Ashe didn’t bother trying to guess how long he had been in the Dreamstate. He was never sure and it never really mattered. It had been long enough, though. He could tell by the dried blood everywhere. Apparently he had taken a sacrifice for the Angel. Once He would have found this disturbing. But that had been before His Baptism, before His Father revealed Himself to Ashe. Now he saw this as what it was: the law of the Lord. The girl’s body was torn open, her eyes gone an opaque white, no longer seeing, the terror and pain of her final moments glazed over in a dull expression of death. She and Ashe were naked both, their clothes discarded as her life had been. He didn’t remember offering the sacrifice and wasn’t sure if He’d partaken of her flesh before or after rending it for the sake of the Angel or if He’d fucked her at all. No matter. The Angel had once again shown him the way. Ashe found His legs and unlocked the door of His private suite. His trusted Apostles were there, their faces as always nervous and uncertain.

“Take the offerings and burn them,” Ashe said, “in the proscribed place and in the proscribed manner. I must cleanse Myself, break My fast and speak to the Congregation and the Open Church.”

“As you say,” His Apostles complied, heading into the room to take care of the remains of the faithful departed inside.

. . .

The Open Church of the United Trinity Observants was the public face of Gabriel Ashe’s cult. It was here in the Congregation’s new home in the Village that people came to hear the Word of the Lord Most High Jesus Christ from the lips of His Son Gabriel Ashe. Like most of the other buildings in the Village, the Open Church was built of corrugated tin and polywood beams. There was little to distinguish the Open Church from most Christian houses of worship; a large crucifix stood behind the altar, a pulpit stood off to the left and pews surrounded the altar on three sides. Certainly this surface similarity to most Christian sects is what drew so many from the Village to Ashe’s sermons. The rumours of sex and drugs in Ashe’s cult doubtless attracted many others, but Communion was reserved for the Converted and all most people received at the Open Church was prayer and Ashe’s disturbing, charismatic sermons.

“My children, the allies of the Ship are now making ready to open the great seal and descend into the belly of the beast. This should never have been allowed to happen, but it has. The Devil has won this battle. The Ship is idolized as a great treasure unto the World. Even the supposed leaders of the World’s religions are seduced, gathered in the capital of idolatry, Rome, to discuss how the lies they preach can be changed to include the Ship. When their lies are disproved, My children, the liars invent fresh lies.”

Ashe studied each face. He counted many possible new converts among the audience tonight. And His heightened perceptions allowed Him to see His enemies out there as well. A dishevelled young man whose body belied physical strength and health under the ratty hair, dusty clothes and five-day growth of beard . . . a woman in a suit, tie askew, hair undone, evidently weary from a day’s work; her eyes betrayed an alertness that did not correspond to the dark circles that surrounded them. There were others but not enough for Ashe to be concerned. He had not done anything yet for them to strike. Their suspicions were all unsubstantiated, and they had never successfully instituted a raid against His church. He continued His sermon, marking each face of His enemy. When they went over the video from tonight’s sermon, He would concern himself with these people again.

“We have lost the battle to keep the Ship sealed to all but Me, but we have not lost the war against the Devil, My Children,” He said. “We can still and yea, we must save the world from itself. We must find some way to shut down this site, to force the world to desert the Ship. Let us pray now to the Lord My Father, Jesus Christ.”

TRANSCRIPT
INTERACTIVE NEWS NETWORK NEWSCAST
Plain text format

PATH: INN <> HEADLINES >> THE SHIP >> UPDATE><

ANCHOR
Good morning. Topping the headlines this morning is the announcement from the Ship Survey Expedition that after several days of intensive study of the alien text found around the door at the base of the pyramid, they believe they have deciphered the code necessary to unlock it and gain entry to the interior of the Ship.

PATH: THE SHIP <> SHIP SURVEY EXPEDITION >> ALIEN TEXT >> INTERVIEW WITH PROF. MARK ECHOHAWK><

ECHOHAWK
The alien text found around the door into the pyramid can be divided into two sets of characters. Professor Michael Andrews

PATH: SHIP SURVEY EXPEDITION <> BIOGRAPHICAL DATA >> ANDREWS, MICHAEL, PROF.><

Prof. Michael Andrews, sixty-two, assigned by Professor Mark Echohawk to the Ship Survey Expedition, is a theoretical mathematician who was until recently the dean of mathematics at Oxford University. Andrews published a paper that defines the predictable statistical probability of

PATH: ANDREWS, MICHAEL, PROF. <> ALIEN TEXT << INTERVIEW WITH PROF. MARK ECHOHAWK><

ECHOHAWK
Professor Michael Andrews identified the numeric glyphs, the first set of characters and consequently the basis for the Ship builder’s basic numeric system. Our linguist, Professor Sonia Aiziz, has identified the second set of characters, some forty-seven different runic symbols, as the primary characters for the builder’s written language. The symbols are as yet indecipherable to us, but Professor Aiziz hopes that when we get inside the Ship itself, we’ll find a primer that bridges the gap between their mathematical language and their written language. Then we will truly be able to begin understanding more about the Ship.

Bloom shut down her Grid connection and retracted the video boom of her mobile console back away from her left eye. She took one last drag from her cigarette before dropping the stub to the ground and crushing it out under her foot. Break time was over. She made her way past saluting subordinates to the secure underground hangar where the (healed) repaired Bug sat, humming its own counter-harmony to the Shipsong. Bloom stood under the Bug. It balanced on four insectile struts a little more than two meters off the hangar floor; there was just enough space for her to walk under. Her subordinates gathered around her as she switched on the camera on her headset. She’d be breaching the cockpit of the Bug in just a few minutes.

. . .

Since the unearthing, this Bug had gone from damaged and inanimate machine to being fully operational and active. The engineers had been all over the machine like ants; they’d examined the outer hull of the craft, opening what few access ports there were and trying uselessly to cut open the Bug’s skin for a look within. The hatchway into the twenty-three meter long Bug led to a series of three crawlspaces and a round, sealed room that Bloom could only guess served as the cockpit. Two of the crawlspaces led back to the engine compartment where even now techies were looking at alien machine components, trying to understand their function. The third crawlspace led past the cockpit along to the front of the craft and the sensor node. After being given a brief tour of the Bug by her new staff, Bloom had been brought up to speed by the engineer immediately subordinate to her, a fellow by the name of Brubaker.

“The dead Bug’s given us a lot of insight over the years; a lot of our scanning and imaging systems came from what we found in the sensor node in the forward section of the craft,” he explained. “Stealth shielding came from the outer membrane of the Bug’s hull, liquid crystal video and three-D imaging technology from the cockpit . . . a lot’s come out of it. But with the power and propulsion systems in the aft of the Bug completely destroyed and the second Bug inactive until now, all we were really able to do was catalogue parts.”

“No attempts were made to reproduce the power or propulsion systems based on what was found in the second Bug?” Bloom asked.

“Several times,” Brubaker replied. “However, we’ve never been able to duplicate its power supply. There are also several types of material, including some radioactive elements that we’ve never been able to synthesize. And a lot of those materials have changed since the Bug went active.”

“Changed, how?”

“Well, the outer skin of the Bug’s become impenetrable; we can’t cut through it. And a lot of the internal systems and relays have changed, liquids flowing through conduits where there were none before . . . relays between systems suddenly made of a different material . . . We’ve brought in a biologist to examine the Bug because we think that it’s at least partially based on organic technology.”

“You think the Bug’s alive?”

“At least partly, yes.”

Bloom nodded and consulted the engineering study logs on the Bug on the data pad before her.

“Tell me about what happened the last time someone tried to access the cockpit area,” she said. “The report wasn’t too clear.”

“We had someone climb up into the cockpit as soon as the Bug had finished . . . repairing itself. As you know, the cockpit is a small area, a sphere roughly two-point-five meters wide, accessed from the rear. As the tech climbed inside, the access hatch sealed automatically and the chamber started filling up with an unknown liquid.”

“The report said the chamber flooded and tried to drown him.”

“It’s a little confused,” Brubaker said. “When the floor started rising, he made for the hatch. He described a thick, yielding liquid substance that tried to form itself around him, amoeba-like. When he got out of the chamber, though, he was perfectly dry.”

“Before the Bug was active, there was never anything like that reported,” Bloom said. “In fact, the cockpit was just bare chromatic grey walls.”

“That’s right.”

“And there’s been no other . . . attempts . . . made in other parts of the Bug to grab anyone.”

“Also right.”

Bloom nodded her head.

“That’s what I thought. Fine; there’ll be a team meeting first thing tomorrow. Once everyone’s gone over the Bug and studied the systems connecting to the cockpit, I’ll be climbing in.”

. . .

Now Bloom pushed open the hatch that led into the small cockpit. She wore a small atmosphere canister on her back connected to a face mask. Climbing inside, Bloom put the mask on and opened the valve from the canister. She stood, looking around.

“I’m in,” she said into her mike. “I’m stepping towards the center of the floor.”

She was calm. Bloom fully expected she knew what would happen next. The floor seemed to liquefy around her feet, slowly rising up.

“The floor’s moving now,” she said. “Climbing up. . .”

The liquid rose to her knees and kept climbing. As it reached her hips, Bloom raised her hands instinctively. She felt herself beginning to float. She was nervous but not overly worried. She had techs on the other side of the chamber door to get her out if need be. The chamber was filling quickly now, but she was no longer rising. Bloom judged her position to be about halfway between floor and ceiling. The liquid was warm, nearly body temperature. It was like being in a hot bath. Suddenly the liquid reached her neck and went up around her head. She felt a moment’s panic as she realized she couldn’t move. But there was a space between her head and the membrane and it seemed as though fresh air was passing through the space. Bloom found she had use of her arms again. She pulled her mask off and inhaled fresh air.

“The liquid’s encased my body,” she said, a little uneasily. “It’s — I can’t describe it. It’s like there’s a bubble around my head. I can breathe and see clearly. The liquid’s not interfering with my vision at all; there’s no ripple, no distortion . . . I can’t move very well, but I’m fine. Whoa!”

Suddenly, control panels materialized in the environment around Bloom’s hands. There were two control sheaves, one near each hand and a panel covered in Shiplanguage runes and glyphs between them. Displays around the periphery of her vision were unintelligible in Shiplanguage, but obviously status readouts.

“Tell me this is recording!” Bloom called into her mike.

“We’re getting the images,” Brubaker said. “We’re not believing them, but we’re getting them.”

The cockpit walls rippled, first losing their colour, then their opacity. From Bloom’s perspective, the entire hangar suddenly became visible around her. There was the barest ghost-image of the Bug around her. Beyond that, she could see out into the hangar and at her staff collected around the access to the Bug. She could see her own camera’s POV reflected back on the console screen one of the techies was holding.

“Cool,” Bloom said.

She turned her attention back to the control panel before her as well as the control sleeves to either side of her own arms. She recognized the layout, though it resembled nothing she’d yet flown.

“I get this,” she said. “These are the flight controls. The sticks must control pitch and altitude, direction. . .” She felt with her feet.

“There are pedals down here. I think I could fly this thing. All we’d need to do is map out the control panel, but I think I could fly this thing!”

. . .

Gabriel Ashe stared out at His Congregation. Here were His true disciples. Here were those whom had chosen to follow Him: those who had understood His revelations, those who understood His importance. And these were the ones He loved most: those who had been with Him since the Beginning or very near to it. Only they and two each that they had chosen from among the Congregation that they trusted. They were here tonight to prepare for war. To prepare for jihad.

“I am the Promise Kept, I am the Spirit Made Flesh,” Ashe said. “I am the Body Made Whole. And I have gathered you here so that we may do the Lord’s work.”

Ashe looked out upon His flock and began the Recitation: “Before He was taken up to Heaven, Jesus said to the faithful: ‘When the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you will be filled with power and you all will become witnesses unto Me and preach the Good News to the ends of the earth.’ When the day of Pentecost came, all the believers gathered together to pray. Tongues of fire filled the room they had gathered in and rested upon each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in tongues as the Holy Spirit took possession of them.”

He turned to the altar. He had prepared Communion for them earlier and had placed them here on a silver tray. The very tray, the Angel had once told Him, upon which the head of John the Baptist had been presented to King Herod. Three pills each in twenty-five cups: one an extremely high-powered opiate, one a hallucinogen and one stimulant. One set of pills for each Disciple before Him and one set of pills for Him.

“Here is the Spirit of the Lord made ready to fill us all with the His power. But only the Faithful may receive this Communion, for only the Believers are Holy.” At once and as one, His Disciples began reciting the Creed of the Observants:

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth and in Jesus Christ His Only Son who saved the world from sin in death and in dying restored life. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Son of the Son of God, promised to us when the Spirit of Christ descended on his Apostles. I believe in the Divinity of the Son of Christ, in His power to make God whole so that the Lord may return to Earth and in the Everlasting Glory of the United Trinity, Amen.”

When they had finished, they approached, kneeling along the communion rail that surrounded the altar. The pills were designed to be fast-acting and dissolved under the tongue. Ashe placed the pills into the waiting mouths of each of His disciples, saying the words “The Spirit of Christ” to each. Seconds later, the drugs were taking effect. Ashe heard one of His supplicants moan as though in the throes of pleasure. Another sounded as though he were in agony. Another was laughing. But all had Received the Gift. He took His own dose last, His eyes rolling into His head, His heart trip-hammering, His breath turning to fire and ice. When he looked out at His Congregation, He saw that they were as He had left them, slumped around the Communion rail or staggering back to the pews. He saw ribbons of color weaving through the room, making the image before Him all the sharper, all the clearer. He saw the world as His father meant it to be: pure and under His control.

“And now we are full of the Lord,” He said, His voice a clear hypnotic monotone. “And now you can be open to His Word as I speak it. So say I, so sayeth the Lord.”

“So say you, so sayeth the Lord,” His congregation replied, those having returned to the pews now sitting, but unable to stay still.

Others had paired off indeterminately, lying against one another, fondling, rocking, but paying Ashe rapt attention. Almost all were paying Him full attention. Only a few did not. One was too busy convulsing, his body unable to handle the dose, the other one passed out, one hand under her blouse, the other twitching and flopping against the rail, as if both autonomous and spastic. Another appeared to be choking on his own vomit. None of them had taken Communion with a pure heart. Any that survived, Ashe would order killed.

“We must strike out at our enemies,” Ashe said to those remaining. “The time has come for us to act. We are called upon to Soldier for My Father, to Soldier for Christ. We may be called upon even to be Martyred for Him. But if His will is not served, the Trinity will not be united and the Devil will rule Heaven and Earth. His will is that we strike out against the Ship and those who serve it. My will is that we strike them. My will is that we smite them in the Name of My Father. My will is the will of the Lord.”

“Your will is the will of the Lord.”

“Lord Jesus My Father, let My people be an army unto You. Let them strike in the Name of Your will. Let their every attack bring death and their every death be a sacrifice unto You.”

“So say you, so sayeth the Lord.”

They sang “Onward Christian Soldier” then, with perfect clarity and coherence. He looked out on them, contemplating them: His soldiers, ready to march into war for Him, ready to kill in His name, bearing His Father’s standard before them as they butchered His enemies. The song ended and they turned to Him expectantly. He would not leave them wanting.

“My children . . . My Soldiers, we must now plan for these attacks. We must now prepare ourselves to fight, to die, in My Father’s name,” He said. “And I will give you a war to fight, a cause to die for. I will give you the salvation not just of Mankind, but of Heaven. I will give you the war against the Devil, the war for the Ship, the war against those who serve it. If you will not fight for Heaven, what will you fight for? If you will not die for God, then who will you die for?”

“We will die for the Lord our Living God,” His congregation responded, even as they were lost in thrall to the drugs: hallucinating, convulsing, engaged with themselves or others, still they knew the words:

“We will die for Our Saviour Lord Jesus Christ and for His Only Son.”

“Then let us begin making our plans.”

. . .

The transports rolled their way across the ramp, pulling up in front of the pyramid. Even after the dust had settled from halting the vehicles, the members of the Ship Survey Expedition took a moment before deciding to step out towards the pyramid. The Shipsong seemed a little louder today, the sun’s reflection off the gold of the pyramid and the Ship just a little brighter. But finally the sound of the Shipsong became less haunting and more taunting, and one by one. starting with Andrews, they stepped from the vehicles. Echohawk began giving instructions to the subordinate members of the Ship Survey Expedition to begin setting up a small base camp, including the necessary communications equipment for the SSE going into the Ship to stay in contact with the surface. The support vehicles were turned around facing back the way they’d come, in case a quick getaway became necessary.

Doctor Cole shouldered her medical kit, and the two EMTs that were to accompany the SSE did likewise. Aiziz and Andrews had their equipment, as did Doctor Kodo and Professor Scott. James and Peter stood ready, both wearing headsets equipped with cameras and viewers. James panned his camera over the expedition as the base camp’s toilet facilities, mess tent and medical center were set up, speaking lowly into the microphone cradled against his cheek. Peter scanned the pyramid, standing a short distance away from the rest of the expedition. Echohawk looked over his team members one last time, ensuring everyone was ready.

“Well, all right,” he called. “Let’s go see if we can get in the Ship.”

They approached the pyramid, the sound of Shipsong wrapping itself around their footfalls. Andrews stepped up to the panels of runic script and numeric glyphs and pulled out his notepad, switching the device on with the pressure of his thumb. Andrews and Aiziz had determined that there was a hidden pattern in the blocks of text, repeated quite clearly; twelve characters: seven runes and five glyphs were scattered throughout the message. Andrews moved to the keypads to the left of the door, studying his display.

“Well, here goes nothing,” he said.

He found each rune and glyph he was looking for and keyed them in sequentially. Each rune yielded after the slightest pressure and slid effortlessly into the back of the keypads. Andrews repeated the sequence on the bottom keypad. When he reached the last rune, he paused, looking into James’ camera with a grim smile.

“Let’s see what happens now,” he said, pressing in the last glyph.

Everyone, Andrews included, stepped back from the door almost unaware they were doing so. From somewhere in the pyramid before them, there was a loud, echoing thud. This was followed by a rumbling from the door or the mechanism behind it as it cracked away from the rest of the surface of the pyramid and began sinking into the ground on a diagonal drop that matched the angle of the pyramid. A gust of old, stale air escaped the pyramid, blowing past the members of the SSE who were stepping cautiously back towards the opening in the pyramid. The door dropped fully into its recess, stopping with another loud thud. The members of the SSE crossed this threshold into the pyramid.

. . .

The interior was black, bare and devoid of any marking or design other than a large golden circular dais, raised up in the center of the room. A meter in through the door, this ring rose from the ground wide enough to step onto before dropping back down to the floor on the inside. The expanse of floor inside the ring filled the pyramid’s cavernous interior and was grey in color, not the same rich black of the rest of the pyramid’s interior. As they stared at this new phenomenon, a small black dot appeared dead center on the grey floor inside the golden ring.

“What do you make of that?” Echohawk asked Scott as the engineer bent to examine it.

A breeze was blowing, and it took Scott a moment to realize that it was coming from the black dot which was in fact a tiny hole. Before he could report this to the others, the hole suddenly opened a little further and the floor inside the ring dropped so that it curved in from the dais to the hole now undulating at its center. With the widening of the hole, the breeze seemed to get stronger as well. As they watched the hole in the floor get wider from pockmark to pothole to pit, collapse back a bit and then get wider still, they realized that the undulations were coming from the grey floor itself.

“What are we looking at?” Echohawk asked, mystified.

“It’s behaving almost like,” Kodo stammered, stepping forward for a better look, “like an arterial valve.”

As he finished speaking, the hole opened completely, the grey floor disappearing entirely. They knelt around the edge of a precipice, looking down a long, black pit. The wind gusted violently, and the members of the SSE were forced to back up from the force of it. The wind peaked and then levelled off as a weak gale. Echohawk stepped cautiously back towards the opening, squinting against the wind. Scott, Kodo and Aiziz all wanted a better look at what was going on and joined him. As they reached the lip of the hole, a rushing whine could be heard coming up behind the still-gusting wind. The noise grew louder and textured with other subtle sounds as the source of the fray approached. Echohawk peered down the hole, which was blacker than he could gauge. He caught movement somewhere below, then lost it in the shadows and wind. When he caught it again, he realized it was much closer and still coming.

“Get back!” he yelled.

A half-second longer to react and he’d have been too late. Kodo, Aiziz, Scott and Echohawk fell backwards, barely in time to get out of the way. A massive golden egg rushed out of the opening, halting as it crested the dais. The peak of the thing stood nearly as high as the pyramid’s roof. The ceiling and floor of the crystal and gold object were apparently composed of the same alloy as the outer hull of the Ship. The ovoid object seemed to be some form of conveyance, evidenced by both its transparent walls and that these same walls split open facing the SSE. The inside could hold two dozen people and equipment, perhaps more.

“Now what?” James asked.

“I think that would seem obvious,” Echohawk said. “We call in to base camp and then climb aboard.”

“Are we certain that it will be able to bear our weight?” Andrews asked. “Presumably it hasn’t had passengers since it was buried here.”

“Based on everything we’ve seen so far,” Scott replied, “I think we’ll have to make a leap of faith and assume that it does. This Ship was meant to cross interstellar distances. We can assume that it was built with longevity in mind. Just because ninety percent of our consumer goods are designed with built-in obsolescence doesn’t mean the Ship will be as well.”

“I suppose not,” Andrews said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

Aiziz settled the matter by climbing into the lift and stepping to the back. She waited expectantly, a bemused look on her face as one by one the others joined her inside. They looked around at the transparent walls of the conveyance. The golden floor and ceiling were flat and highly polished. The black walls of the pyramid’s insides stood silent guard around them. They looked at one another, each of them wearing an expectant, nervous face. There were no buttons on the inside of the egg-like lift car, no apparent way to direct the lift. Then the door into the lift slid shut, the seams of the portal disappearing, leaving them inside an immaculate crystal bubble.

“Mimetic crystal?” Scott mused aloud. “I wonder how–.” He was cut short as with a sudden lurch, the lift started moving.

It dropped half a meter, stopped and then began to slip more slowly, fluidly, down the shaft beneath it. Soon they were surrounded by the darkness of the tunnel, the lights from their headset cams the only illumination provided them.

“Everyone make sure your headsets are recording,” Echohawk advised, unable to conceal his excitement.

Their progress downwards soon became evident as they passed through rings of blue light, each transition seeming to push them a little faster on down the channel. Although they felt no acceleration, they began rushing past the luminous rings more frequently until they were launched from the outer hull into the vast interior of the Ship. It was golden and aglow, open before them in all its majesty. As far as they could see, all around them in the gap between the inner and outer hulls was the ancient, secret interior of the Ship.

“Allah keep and protect us,” Aiziz murmured, looking out at the wonders spreading out below them.

The inner hull was several kilometres below them, held to the outer hull through a massive airframe. Black girders the size of villages, each of them honeycombed and a kilometre wide, stretched out like the arms of an umbrella along the inside surface of the outer hull, reaching for the large disk of the inner hull. Everything else inside the Ship was golden but for the shimmering blue trenches along the surface of the inner hull. The tube their lift car was traveling through was transparent and undulated to accommodate them as though they were being swallowed. Other transparent tubes carried massive flows of energy up to the thick outer hull. From what they could briefly ascertain, there seemed to be whole decks if not entire stations ringing the outer hull. More access portals like the one moving them along ran to and from these stations and the inner surface of the Ship.

“There’s more than we could see in a thousand trips up and down this lift,” Andrews said, his voice hushed. “You’d have to bloody fly through here to see it all.” Like the others, he was now looking down at the looming inner hull. The tube carrying them descended straight into its topmost level, a large cylindrical outcropping. Their arrival at this destination was imminent.

“Next stop, wonderland,” Echohawk said.

. . .

The lift car nestled itself into the center of a large, round chamber. The walls were golden, divided into a mosaic by a thousand fissures of strangely deliberate shapes. A band of blue energy ringed the chamber halfway up the rounded walls. The crystal car split open, and there was a quick rush of air as the atmosphere of the inner chamber equalized with that of the car.

“What are the odds that we’re breathing anything toxic?” Kodo asked.

“Possible,” Cole said, “but not probable. I hope not, anyway.”

Quickly, nervously, she drew breath and then exhaled.

“In all likelihood, the Ship sampled our atmosphere long before we entered,” Andrews said, “and endeavoured to match the interior atmosphere to our own. Otherwise, we’d probably have been asphyxiated on the lift. No, my guess is the environment throughout the Ship has been adjusted to be ideal to support us.”

“Whatever the case may be,” Cole said, “we can breathe it.”

As the SSE exited the car, they noticed two sealed doors leading from the chamber. There were no panels on the doors, no visible way to open them. However, a large black slab of stone dominated the back of the room behind the lift car. On it was inscribed hundreds of runes, glyphs and other symbols. To the left of it was another elaborate iconic and runic keypad. Aiziz and Andrews tore towards it as one.

“It’s the primer!” Aiziz exclaimed, grabbing equipment off straps on her utility pack.

She was laser-scanning the images on the primer before anyone else reached her. Andrews studied the primer before walking around to the other side. The black stone on the reverse was bare, but a panel stood out from it, a little more than chest-high. It was again covered with runes and numeric glyphs as well as the stranger new symbols.

“This time I think we’ll find it’s not quite so easy to proceed,” Andrews said. “I doubt the combination to the doors will be anything as simple as a hidden pattern.” He returned to the primer.

“You expect we’ll have to input the response to some question? Some test of our understanding?” Aiziz asked.

“Precisely,” Andrews replied. “The primer will give us a rudimentary idea of their language. There will also be mathematical sets, values such as less than, greater than; units . . . equation values as well, perhaps . . . true/false values . . . I would expect the periodic table will also be represented here.”

“Then they’ll be expecting us to respond to some abstraction,” Aiziz said. “The atomic weight of caesium less the atomic weight of lead or some such.”

“Most probably.”

“Then you and I have much work to do,” Aiziz said, with a smile.

James and Peter recorded as much information as they could, Cole and her EMT team stood watching and waiting to be needed or not, and Echohawk, Scott and Kodo were studying the lift tube that had brought them here.

“What do you make of it?” Scott asked.

“Its behaviour was too organic,” Kodo said. “The way the lift gate opened in the floor of the pyramid, the way the tunnel seemed to swallow us . . . it’s indicative of biomaterial.”

“Yes . . . but that would mean that the Ship’s organic components have been alive how long?”

“A long time,” Kodo said in awe, “a very . . . very long time.”

“I’d like to get up to look at that airframe.” Scott said. “We have to find a way out there.”

“In good time, Doctor Scott,” Echohawk said. “I don’t want to risk having you climb the lift shaft.”

Scott looked at him dejectedly. He had been looking at the gap between the crystalline lift car and the shaft that had conveyed them here with hungry eyes.

“Of course not,” he said, resigned.

“Take note of the dimensions of the stone,” Aiziz told Andrews as they made a detailed study of the artifact. “They may have some significance to the primer. We don’t know what cultural significance the size and shape of things had for the builders.” Andrews looked at her, wryly.

“I’ll leave you to make your own jokes, Doctor Andrews,” Aiziz added.

. . .

There was painfully little else that could be done inside the Ship until the primer had been decrypted. After mapping the room extensively, the SSE returned to the lift, all of them wishing to stay longer if only to be within the Ship.

“Have you noticed?” Kodo asked as they boarded the lift. “The Shipsong, we only hear it outside.”

“There are no doubt countless thousands of noises inside this monster,” Scott replied. “I suspect the lift, the lift tube and this chamber are all remarkably well soundproofed. I’d bet that besides air circulation, we won’t hear much inside the Ship.” They were left to ponder Scott’s statement as the lift sealed and began rising. Everyone’s attention was then given over to the business of witnessing the spectacular display of the airframe between the inner and outer hulls of the Ship: the airframe itself, the conduits running between inner and outer hulls, the apparent stations and towers; there were thousands of details to absorb. None of them were identifiable except by anthropomorphic assumption that similar forms would have similar functions from one civilization and species to another.

“We’ll be studying this thing for centuries,” Echohawk said. “Thirteen generations from now, we still won’t understand half of what we’re looking at.”

“Thirteen generations after that, we’ll probably not be that much closer to full understanding, either,” Aiziz added, her voice reverent, hushed.

Echohawk had used similar tones. No one else, it seemed, dared to breach the silence. They all felt the same reaction: that they were in the presence of something far greater than themselves, something that had been built by hands and minds so far removed from their own experiences that they could never hope to empathize. They were humbled by the greatness of the Ship, its majesty, its outright supremacy. The society that had created it must have been exponentially more advanced than humanity was now long before humanity had existed. Now millions of years later, mankind would be fortunate indeed to ever even hope to approach the builders in the scope and scale of their technological dreams.

. . .

They were all too excited to sleep. Even after an exhaustive day spent briefing the press and the World Ship Summit on what they’d found, making more sorties down the tunnel to the first chamber in the Ship to gather what seemed to be an endless string of images from the inside of the airframe. Aiziz and Andrews had spent the day first cataloguing the symbols found on the codex and then trying to make sense of the representations therein. James and Peter had busied themselves compiling data collected for the benefit of those not directly involved with the expedition. Scott and Echohawk with the engineering aspects of the Ship; how could it be so large and yet so stable? Was it built in orbit or on the surface of some low-gravity world? How were the biological components integrated? Kodo had collected small samples from the lift gate and the tube that had carried them into the Ship and was enthusiastically pursuing them in his lab.

. . .

If the linx from Santino hadn’t come when it did, if he had waited until the following day to contact Echohawk and the SSE, things might have ended differently.

“Hello, Professor,” Santino said. “How are things over at Earth Base One?”

“Earth Base One?”

“You haven’t heard?” Santino chuckled. “That’s what everyone’s started to call your camp at the bottom of the pyramid.”

“I haven’t been near a console unless it’s to give an interview,” Echohawk said.

Santino nodded his head.

“I can understand why,” he said. “I’ve been at my console working for most of the day, too; putting some affairs in order.”

“Really? Why?”

“I’ve been asked to join the North American Aboriginal delegation going to Rome for the Vatican IV talks on the Ship. And I’ve decided to go. It seems my brief stint as a medicine man earned me some notoriety. It might also have to do with some of the material I’ve published over the years on native beliefs.”

“Congratulations, Chief.”

“Thank you,” Santino said.

“We should all get together before you leave, to celebrate.”

“My people had the same idea. I’m being dragged out tonight, as a matter of fact.”

“Why don’t I round up the SSE and we’ll all meet?” Echohawk suggested. “Christ knows that after the day we’ve put in, we could all use a break.”

. . .

They’d stayed out celebrating much later than anticipated. The members of the SSE and Santino’s Band Council had closed the restaurant they’d settled into and then the bar adjacent. The horizon was already coloured with the first lights of dawn when they finally staggered outside. Of course by then, the partygoers’ herd had been culled. Everyone from Santino’s council excluding Police Chief Sharon Raven had left early, begging off because of work the next day. As had Kodo and Doctor Cole. Aiziz and Andrews had paired off and parted earlier that evening and wouldn’t be seen again until the following day. That left Echohawk, Scott, James, Peter, Santino and Raven to greet the day in the parking lot of the Laguna Tavern.

“James,” Echohawk said, “you want to linx for some cabs?”

James, who had been in the tavern’s smoking section with Peter and Kodo getting high for most of the night, didn’t hear him.

“James?” Echohawk asked, chuckling.

“What?” James asked, dumbly.

This struck Peter as eminently funny, and his cackling laughter soon had Raven and Santino joining in.

“James!” Echohawk said, trying to suppress his own laughter and sound authoritative. “Call us a fucking taxi!”

“You’re a fucking taxi!” James said, clueing in on the joke.

Peter and Santino were leaning against one of the cars in the parking lot, their intoxicated laughter making it impossible to stay standing.

“Stop. . .” Raven begged, her face flushed. “Stop . . . I’ll piss myself. . .”

She raised her hands and fumbled for her headset buried somewhere in her purse. She searched for it, thinking about when she was a teen and the headsets had first come out. Although they were bulky contraptions by today’s standards, everyone who owned a headset back then wore them constantly in a vulgar display of status. Now you could never find one of the fucking things when you were looking — At first she thought one car had slammed into another. Then Raven thought what she’d heard had been a set of two small explosions, possibly firecrackers or fireworks. She looked up. Everyone looked stunned, staring at Echohawk. But that wasn’t precisely right, she realized. They were looking at him, at Doctor Scott who was lying on the pavement and at the man who was standing in front of them holding a handgun. A wisp of blue smoke danced from the gun’s barrel, painfully visible under the sodium arc lamps in the bar’s parking lot. Raven started to reach for the throwdown gun she kept in a holster in the small of her back, fumbling drunkenly with the holster strap. Echohawk was clutching his chest, the front of his shirt damp with blood that was running rapidly down his belly and groin. The man with the gun fired again, freezing everyone before they could react. Echohawk staggered and fell. The man smiled and began screaming a song as he turned the gun on himself:

“Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching off to WAAAAAR!” he wailed, putting the gun to his temple.

Police Chief Raven heard him scream “Memento Mori!” before pulling the trigger and blowing off the other side of his head. The gunman’s death seemed to finally galvanize everyone. James moved to Echohawk, ripping open his shirt to apply first aid. Raven dumped her purse out on the hood of the nearest car and slipped on her headset to call emergency services. Peter rushed back to the bar to do the same, and Santino was working Doctor Scott. But in both cases, it was too late: There was a neat hole just off-center in Scott’s forehead, a gaping exit wound at the back of his scalp. He was dead. And as James worked to control Echohawk’s bleeding, the archaeologist gave a shuddering, convulsive cough which sprayed James with blood and then was still. Sirens sounded in the distance, fast approaching. Sharon Raven identified them by their wails: an ambulance and two police vehicles. But it was too late. The shooting victims were dead, and the shooter had gone on to face celestial justice far beyond the reach of any mortal law.

Interlude: Rain of Tears

She’d woken up at five ready to start the day. Bloom was primed and ready for the first test flight of the Bug; she’d barely slept the night before and was aching for this day. Launch was scheduled for seven. She was showered, dressed and leaving for her pre-breakfast run when none other then General Harrod appeared at her door.

“General. To what do I owe–?”

“I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you this, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “I know how you feel about me, and you know how I feel about you. I wish I wasn’t the one who had to bring you the news. Christ knows you deserve to hear it from someone who could be more sympathetic.” Harrod sighed and gave his head a curt shake. “There’s no easy way to say this. There was a shooting in Laguna early this morning. I don’t have all the details . . . but . . . I’m afraid your ex-husband is dead.”

“No,” she said, not really believing the denial as it passed her lips. “My God . . . I have to call Laura.”

“I’ve arranged for a private channel to be made available to you,” Harrod said, showing what Bloom would have normally seen as uncharacteristic sympathy. “And the test flight will be postponed so you can attend the funeral.” He stepped past her and switched on the console on the small desk in her quarters.

“I’ll leave you be,” he said. “Your paperwork’ll be waiting at the company clerk’s office. Lieutenant Colonel, for what it’s worth, you have my condolences.”

He let her be after that. She sat down at the terminal, inputting Laura’s linx address manually. Seconds later, Laura Echohawk’s tearful image appeared onscreen.

“Mom. . .”

Bloom looked at her daughter’s tear-streaked face, noticing not for the first time the blend of features she’d inherited from Mark and from her. Laura’d missed out (at least as far as Bloom was concerned) on her mother’s blonde hair, instead favouring her father there with jet-black tresses; she had her father’s eyes, his sharp cheekbones and his ruddy complexion as well; and she had that same intense, all-seeing gaze that Bloom had first fallen in love with in Mark Echohawk. Laura had her nose, though, and her mouth and chin. Bloom found herself confused and alarmed that she was sitting here, staring at her Laura’s image, looking to find the traces of her ex-husband in her daughter’s features, searching her and trying to find him . . . as if to confirm that he’d lived, that he’d touched their lives, that part of him was still alive.

“Oh, baby. . .” Bloom sobbed.

“How did it happen? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Bloom said. “I don’t know what happened. I only just found out.”

“My roommate told me,” Laura said, with no small trace of bitterness. “She saw it on INN. Why the fuck did they know before we did?”

“I don’t know, honey,” Bloom said. “I wish I knew. I really do.”

“When will you be here?”

“Before noon your time,” Bloom said. “I promise.”

“I need you, Mommy,” Laura said, breaking down, the grief too much for her to bear any longer.

Bloom was breaking down, too; she and Mark had parted amicably, they’d stayed close friends . . . and ended up in bed together after the divorce far too often not to have laid claim to an ongoing relationship with one another. Mark’s death shocked her . . . wounded her. And she was wounded all the more seeing her daughter in such anguish, to be so far away . . . too far to make this better, to at the very least wrap her arms around her little girl and give her what comfort she could.

“I’ll be there soon,” Bloom choked out. “I promise . . . I promise.”

She put her hand against the screen and they sat there, as together as possible given the distance between Bloom’s secret Nevada location and Laura’s Los Angeles apartment, and cried awhile. It was ten to six and the day had barely begun.

. . .

They gathered together in the main shelter in base camp. The eyewitnesses to the slayings had given their statements, and now they and rest of the SSE sat together inside the small cafeteria, sharing coffee and the cold comfort of one another’s company. The military presence had been increased to the point that a small occupation force was guarding the Ship and the surviving members of the Ship Survey Expedition. James realized that they were survivors now. He looked from face to face. The surviving members of the SSE shared similar expressions of shock, pain, of loss. Only Doctor Cole wasn’t there; she was working closely with the investigation into the assassinations but had promised to join them as soon as she could. James had studied with Echohawk and Peter the better part of four years; they’d both lost a mentor, a friend. Of the members of the SSE, theirs was probably the most personal loss. Sonia Aiziz and Michael Andrews hung back slightly from the rest of the group, still at the same table, but nonetheless shrouded in the conspiracy of two of a new couple. Aiziz was talking, Andrews listening, nodding sympathetically.

“I was his assistant at the time,” she was saying. “We’d been searching for what had been described as an Incan treasury. It was a treasury, all right . . . but not what we expected. There were tens of thousands of Quipus sealed inside the chamber. Quipus were Incan visual communication that used strings knotted in different positions in different sequences to relay meanings. We spent weeks trying to decode them, to learn the language. For years, everyone had assumed that the Quipus were merely a form of accounting, but we learned otherwise. Scholars are still discovering epics that put Homer, Shakespeare, Tolkien and Jordan to shame and music to humble composers from Bach and Beethoven to Van Dyk. And if Mark hadn’t picked me for the expedition, I wouldn’t have been there when the discovery was made. I wouldn’t have the career I do today . . . I wouldn’t be part of the SSE today if it weren’t for him.”

She stifled a sob and drew closer to Andrews.

“I only knew the Professor by reputation,” he said. “And even then only fleetingly. But from what I knew of him, he was the best choice to lead this expedition, and he was a good man.”

He looked uncomfortable. He was at a loss for words and knew he was damning the man with faint praise.

“It seems so strange,” Aiziz said. “Here we are, talking about Mark . . . and we’ve so little to say about Doctor Scott.”

“I know,” Andrews agreed, “but what can one say about someone they barely knew? Any death such as his is a senseless tragedy. And I’m sorry he’s gone . . . but I didn’t know him well.”

The hoary old line suddenly occurred to him, and Andrews could hear himself saying in a loud Scottish brogue: “Everett Scott, we hardly knew ye!”

“None of us did,” Mark Kodo said, sipping from his mug and snapping Andrews back to the present. “None of us really took much time to get to know him, either. Not that we had that much time . . . we’ve been together for only a few days.”

“We should have done more to know him,” Andrews said. “Perhaps then we’d at least be able to feel his loss as well. In my case, I should have done more to know them both better.”

There was silent assent to Andrews’ statement, although for the most part, the members of the SSE understood that it was a moot statement. Scott was dead, his remains returned to Montreal where his family was laying him to rest. They could not mourn for a stranger, but they could regret having not tried to know him. Ahead of them was Echohawk’s funeral, in Los Angeles. Presently, Doctor Cole entered the cafeteria and made her way to their table.

“Hello, everyone,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to stay long, I’m afraid. I just came by to let you know that I’ll be scheduling sessions with each of you over the coming days. We have to discuss what’s happened, in context of the expedition and how each of you has been affected by it.”

“Wait a minute,” Kodo said. “Most of us are heading to L.A. for the Prof’s funeral.”

“I know,” Cole said. “And there’s no reason the sessions can’t start when everyone gets back.”

“Assuming we come back,” James said, bitterly. “I don’t know if the expedition’s worth what happened.”

“And better that Professor Echohawk and Doctor Scott died for nothing?” Aiziz asked with the slightest edge to her voice. “We owe it to them to continue this work. We owe it to Mark’s memory, especially.”

“Hear, hear,” Peter added dryly.

James looked down into his coffee for a long moment before nodding his head.

“You’re right,” he said, his words a sad affirmation. “The bastards who did this want us to leave. You’re right.”

“If any of you need to speak with me in the meantime, I will be available for most of this afternoon,” Cole replied, a smile touching her lips.

“Thank you, Doctor Cole,” Andrews said. “Are you sure we can’t convince you to stay for a coffee? One of the things we’ve come to realize is how poorly we knew Doctor Scott, and we’d hate to repeat that mistake again, with any member of the expedition.” Cole smiled again, a weak, sad smile.

“I think perhaps I will.”

. . .

Bloom embraced Laura when they met at the airport terminal. They held each other tightly, both their faces damp with tears.

“Mom,” Laura said, “it’s so good to see you.”

“I’m here for a while,” Bloom said. “Don’t worry.”

Bloom drew back to look at her daughter and smiled, her face a mix of mourning and joy at being with her daughter again.

“Let me get a look at you,” she said, and Laura smiled.

“You cut your hair. It used to be so much longer.”

“It kept getting in the way,” Laura said distractedly, running a hand absently through her shoulder-length tresses. “And it was a bitch to dry after a shower.” They put their arms around one another’s shoulders and headed out to the parking lot.

“The funeral home’s made all the arrangements,” Laura said. “When they couldn’t reach you aboard the station, they contacted me. Where were you, by the way? I thought you were supposed to be skyside another three or four months.”

“I was,” Bloom said. “I got . . . reassigned. I wish I could tell you about it, but I can’t.”

“Top secret, huh?”

“Top secret, yeah.”

They reached Laura’s car; a battered canary-yellow hatchback she’d bought from a desert car dealer a couple of years before. Bloom stowed her carry-on in the trunk. Laura gave her another tight hug, snuffling back more tears before they got in, powered up and drove out.

“Have you heard anything else?” Laura asked as they drove. “Do you know what happened?”

“Only what I heard on INN,” Bloom said. “I linked to their spar on the plane. I’m hoping to reach James or Peter when we get back to your place. They were with him when . . . when it happened.”

“I know. James called. They’re coming in tomorrow.”

“Are you okay with seeing James again?”

“I’m fine,” Laura said. “James and I were over a long time ago . . . and I think he and I are okay. Not as okay . . . not as okay as you and Dad . . . were . . . but we’re okay.”

“That’s good,” Bloom said, her voice hushed. “That’s good to hear.”

Laura reached for her hand and they linked fingers, squeezing each other’s hands and reassuring, comforting one another with their touch and their presence.

“Oh, Mom . . . why did it have to happen?”

“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”

. . .

They arrived back at Laura’s apartment in West L.A. without further incident or discussion. They reached Laura’s landing, and soon she had unlocked the door and they were inside.

“You can have my room,” Laura said. “The couch folds out in the living room, so it’ll–.”

“Be fine for me,” Bloom finished. “I’ve slept in barracks, on some of the most uncomfortable beds in the world, Laura. Aboard C-3, I had to try sleeping in two-thirds of a Gee; the sofa bed will be fine.”

To punctuate this statement, she threw her bag onto the couch. Laura shrugged and continued down the short hallway.

“Allison’s cleared out for the day,” Laura said, “to give us a chance to settle.” Bloom followed Laura to her daughter’s bedroom. Here she saw fresh evidence of how much alike she and Laura were: the room was an eclectic mix of styles, and the general contrasts in chaos reminded Bloom of her premilitary youth: dimly lit from dark curtains but brightly painted. The bookshelf and music collection were neat, ordered, but the desk and dresser were cluttered, messy. The bed was neatly made, but the floor was scattered about with tissues, dirty laundry (some of it scraps of clothing Bloom would never have thought Laura daring enough to wear), wads of paper and dirty dishes.

“Can I smoke inside?” Bloom asked.

Laura turned to regard her mother and smiled weakly.

“Yeah. Tobacco or pot?”

“You have joints?”

Laura fished a pack off of her desk and an ashtray from the floor by her bed.

“I bought a pack last night,” she said, the smile suddenly fading.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Last night. . .” Laura replied. “God, last night seems so far away . . . another lifetime.” Laura choked on a sob and looked at her mother.

“I guess it was another lifetime, wasn’t it?” she said.

Bloom went to her, hugging her tightly. There were fresh tears from Bloom as well as her daughter. Mark was dead. He was dead. They hadn’t seen each other in months, nearly a year, and the last time she’d spoken to him, it had been concerning the New Mexico survey. She and Laura cried themselves out, holding each other. It was a short tearfall, and Bloom knew that like rain squalls before a storm, the real downpour was yet to come.

. . .

Bloom woke early the next day, still working on the strange schedule kept at Groom Lake: eighteen hours of work for three days, two days’ rest and three more eighteen-hour work days. The days started at five in the morning. The sun wasn’t even in the sky and Bloom was taking her morning run. Forty-five minutes later, she was back at Laura’s, showering. The schedule helped. The routine helped. It kept her distracted, kept her from thinking, kept her from remembering how she’d loved him so much, yet how at the end of their marriage, she’d found she just wasn’t in love with him. It had broken her heart to admit it and broken his more when she’d told him. They’d been together fifteen years, fifteen glorious years. She had been in love with him once and for quite a long time, too. They’d met while she was still a cadet and he was a sophomore at Colorado State. The sex had been good, and he’d proved himself to be quite the conversationalist. What had started as a beautiful friendship had blossomed into love. But he had always loved her more than she loved him. She regretted it, but that was the truth. She’d wanted him to mean more to her, especially since he’d given her Laura. But she hadn’t been able to. She didn’t love him enough to stay married to him, but she loved him too much to lose his friendship. He felt the same about the friendship, and he’d found it easier to adjust to staying friends with her than she’d dared hope. She’d expected him to hate her, but he couldn’t. He fell into his work and discovered that archaeology was indeed his true love. She missed him. Oh, God, did she miss him.

. . .

There were grim tasks ahead of her that day. Echohawk’s remains (as if the saccharine objectification used by the funeral director could make them forget it was Mark’s body) had arrived, and for the sake of formality, the immediate family had to confirm his identity. After that, there were linxes to send, more to reply to and other matters, other problems to deal with. The members of the Ship Survey Expedition were coming in, and although it would be good to see them and therapeutic to hear eyewitness accounts of what had happened, neither Laura nor Bloom really wanted to deal with them. But the business of dying was tedious one for the living, and there were things that needed their attention.

. . .

They went to the funeral parlour together. Laura drove and Bloom smoked, the tobacco hurting her throat but calming her. She wanted to quit before they had to clone her new lungs. Although when Mark had had the surgery three years back, it hadn’t slowed him down. She laughed, a single “huh,” and a smile crossed her lips when she thought of his resilience, his determination to return to work.

“What?” Laura asked.

“I was just thinking of your Dad.”

“Oh,” Laura said, smiling. “He was great.”

“He was.”

They pulled into the funeral home’s parking lot and were soon inside. After words of consolation from the funeral director, words that Bloom knew were well meant but suspected were also well rehearsed, they were taken to see him. They went down a flight of stairs behind a door marked “Staff Only” and into a small room that was softly lit and tastefully decorated in mind of being comforting as well.

“Please wait here,” the director said. “I’ll bring his remains out to you in a moment.”

Then he was gone through another door that whisked open silently, sliding into the wall. Laura drew closer to Bloom. and her mother put an arm around her waist.

“You don’t have to be here if this is too hard,” Bloom said.

“It’ll be just as hard for you.”

“Laura, you don’t have to live up to some standard–”

“I know. But I need to be here with you as much as I need you to be here for me.”

“I feel the same, baby.”

The door opened again and the funeral director came out. Behind him, one of his assistants wheeled out a utilitarian black plastic coffin used simply to transport the dead to the funeral home.

“Oh, God. . ” Laura whimpered.

Bloom drew her closer, her daughter clinging to her.

“Whenever you’re ready,” the director said.

Bloom looked at Laura. Her daughter nodded, and Bloom nodded to the director. He turned to the coffin and worked some hidden latch. Bloom’s insides fluttered, a fearful anticipation spinning her stomach. The lid of the coffin opened and there he was. Mark had a sheet drawn up to his chin, his eyes closed, his skin pale with death. It was his stillness, his inanimate presence that got to her. Her throat suddenly closed painfully, her eyes hurting from the pressure of tears building up in their ducts behind them, her mouth tightening in an effort to keep her composure. This time, it was Laura who was bearing up better:

“That’s him,” she said, her voice raspy, hurting.

“Would you like a moment alone with the deceased?”

“Yes,” Bloom choked.

The funeral director made his way from the room, his assistant preceding him.

“Just press this button,” he said, pointing to a small white push plate in the wall beside the door, “when you’re done.”

“Thank you,” Laura said.

The director left, and uncertainly, hesitantly, Bloom and Laura let each other go, approaching the coffin and Mark’s body with ginger footsteps.

“Oh, Mark,” Bloom said.

She ran her hand down the side of his face, the outside two fingers of her hand just grazing his cheek. It had been her gesture, her touch. Her sign of love to him, going back to the very first night they’d lain together. He’d looked down at her, his face flushed, his eyes full of affection, and her arousal had been deepened by that look. She’d been moved . .  so moved by what she’d seen in his eyes that night. Looking at him now, she began to understand he was gone . .  that he’d never laugh again . .  never speak again . .  never smile that cocky, boyish, “I’ll always abide” smile again . .  never make love to her again. She knew damn well that after the divorce, he’d slept with other women. She’d slept with other men as well. But they both always knew they’d always been able to turn to each other when they were in need. They always knew the other person would be there. But not anymore. He was gone, he was gone.

Laura touched his shoulder gingerly before pulling away. She could gain no comfort, no solace from touching him, from seeing him. It only served to remind her that her father was gone. They’d never debate politics of philosophy again . .  never discuss archaeology, or her love, art history, again. Gone were the summer fishing trips, the Kings games, the long, written linxes he’d send her from his digs, the long linxes she’d write him, talking about work, about school, about life in general. They’d been close. She’d always felt closer to her mother, having become an Army brat and moved from base to base, but Laura and her father had formed a distinct friendship as she grew up. He’d accepted her as and treated her like an adult, never once the condescending patriarch. She was happy with the arrangement, her mother being the one she could turn to for parental comfort and guidance, her father the one who was a friend and an advisor of sorts. Now that was over. Now he was gone.

“Why?” she sobbed, crying again.

It was a broad question. Why was her Daddy dead? Why now? Why like this? Why couldn’t she keep from crying? Why did she want to stop crying at all? She looked at her mother, who looked at her. They’d been alone with their grief. Now, they needed each other again.

. . .

When they’d recovered, the downpour over but the storm not quite done, they summoned the funeral director again. He explained that his assistants would prepare the deceased now and told them when visiting hours would be. They thanked him, took his platitudes in stride and then left, heading for their next promise to be kept at the airport, with the SSE. Bloom knew that she’d had her hard cry now. There’d be more tears, of course. Perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow night as well. She knew the flood of emotions would come again at the funeral, but she also knew that the deluge, the painful storm of tears, of acceptance of loss was done. Mourning was now becoming healing. Cold comfort, but it was nonetheless something to cling to, in the ocean of tears.

“We have a little time before their plane touches down,” Bloom said. “Do you want to have a coffee and something to eat first?”

“Yeah,” Laura replied. “God knows I could really use a cigarette.”

“Know somewhere with a smoking area? In this town?”

Los Angeles’ antismoking bylaws were notorious, making it illegal to smoke anywhere besides someone’s home or car. There were few exceptions to the ban.

“Oh, yeah,” Laura said, “I know a place.”

. . .

The boarding ramp pulled away from the jump plane, and it taxied out to the launch field. The surviving members of the SSE sat together aboard the plane. Everyone was silent, talked out. There was nothing new to say, no new emotion left to express with regards to Echohawk’s death, and it was still far too soon to really change the topic without seeming forced. James looked out the window as the plane finished taxiing. Below, struts were coming up from the launch pad and connecting magnetically to the underbelly of the jet. The landing gear was then retracted and the plane readied for launch. All this was audible inside the plane as a series of thunks and thuds. A moment later, the horizon outside James’ window tilted sixty degrees as the plane was elevated into launch position. The humming cycle of the plane’s power-up for takeoff was heard. The “Fasten Seatbelts” sign stayed on, and with a thunderous roar, the plane launched into the sky. In less than an hour, they’d be in Los Angeles. James watched as the Ship retreated away beneath them, still dominating the horizon even as the jump plane reached its low-earth orbit cruising altitude and levelled off. As the plane banked, he watched the Ship retreat across the horizon; he got an impression of what it must have looked like in flight. James wasn’t just leaving behind the Ship; he felt as though he were abandoning Echohawk’s life as well. It felt wrong to be going, as if in their departure from this place, they were making the Prof more dead. The man had died in his arms. James had never seen anyone die before. He hoped to never see anyone die again. One minute Mark Echohawk had been laughing, smiling, alive. In the next he was meat; all traces of the man he’d been were gone. James was still trying to make sense of it. He thought he’d felt . . . sensed something when Echohawk died, but he couldn’t be sure. Was it some spiritual fare-thee-well, a comforting goodbye from the great beyond? Or was it James’ own hysterical mind, trying to cushion the blow of Echohawk’s death and the inevitability of his own? He didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure. James had been raised Catholic, raised to believe in the
afterlife. He’d also been raised to believe that a faithful person should have no doubts, especially when someone died. And yet he had doubts. He had nothing but doubts. James looked to his faith when Echohawk died and had found it lacking.

. . .

They met the flight from New Mexico under the scrutinous eye of security and a not-too-small and always-hungry division of media. The World Ship Summit had arranged for both transportation and accommodation in Los Angeles for the SSE, but running the gauntlet at LAX, even with the assistance of security, was daunting. In their exuberant haste to report the facts, several media outlets identified Bloom and Laura as “Unidentified Persons” accompanying the Ship Survey Expedition on their way to meet with Echohawk’s surviving family members. Only INN had the facts straight on the identities of the two women during those crucial first moments when news broke. Further to that, only INN and a handful of other news organizations had the good taste to restrict their presence in the airport to the officially set-up media zones. It was agreed, for the sake of their privacy, that Bloom and Laura would accompany the SSE to their hotel. The staff of the hotel would be better equipped to protect Laura’s, her mother’s and the Ship Survey Expedition’s privacy before and after the funeral. And Laura refused to return to her apartment once Bloom threatened to use her sidearm on any reporter so tasteless as to assault the sanctity of her daughter’s privacy at home.

. . .

They were together in the sitting room of one of the small suites the World Ship Summit had arranged for the SSE’s accommodation in Los Angeles. James and Peter sat across from Bloom and Laura. Aiziz, Kodo and Andrews stood to either side of the group, drifting in and out of focus on the narrative going on in front of them, at times wanting to hear what was being said, at other times wishing not to have to hear it at all.

“I want you to tell me exactly what happened,” Bloom said intently, calmly, trying to be clinical, analytical.

She tried to pretend that Mark’s life was just another plane crash, that the specifics of that crash would lead her to some insight, to some understanding of what had happened and why. Peter took a breath and hesitated.

“I still don’t really know what happened,” he said. “It was like the guy appeared out of nowhere. We never even saw him coming . . . we were all pretty out of it and just trying to get back home.”

Laura shuddered and suppressed a sob.

“Laura, you don’t have to stay, if–”

“I need to hear this,” she said tightly.

Bloom said nothing else. She knew exactly how Laura felt. The news would be horrid, the details would be traumatic, but she needed to hear for herself what had happened. Bloom felt exactly the same way.

“I actually saw him walk towards us,” James said. “He got out of a car . . . Christ only knows how long he’d been sitting there. I didn’t think anything of it as he walked up to us. I didn’t even realize he was reaching for a gun until he started shooting . . . Scott was dead and then the Prof went down.”

He choked back tears, not out of shame, but so he could say what he had to say. Bloom was crying, as was Laura, Peter and Aiziz. Kodo and Andrews were choked, throats lumped and sore, their faces tight. James continued.

“I went to him . . . trying to help . . . trying to stop the blood . . . Oh, God, there was so much blood . . . but I couldn’t. I couldn’t and he . . . died. . .”

He broke down then, the memory of Echohawk coughing up a great gout of blood, the look of confusion and pain in his mentor’s dying eyes too much for James to bear.

“There was nothing you could have done, James,” Bloom said. “He was shot twice in the chest at point blank range.”

She choked on the words, shuddering as she recalled James’ description of Echohawk’s final moments. Over the next few minutes, everyone preoccupied themselves with regaining their composure; Aiziz was helped by Andrews’ comforting rubbing of her shoulders, Laura with a tight squeeze of Bloom’s hand, James by staring at the floor between his feet.

“Oh, fuck,” someone sighed at long last.

“Yeah,” Bloom said, identifying Peter’s voice.

They all looked tired, she reflected, worn out. No surprise there, actually, and she knew she must look much the same, if not worse. Such was the way of funerals; strained faces, tired from loss, tired from pain, tired of both.

“We should go out and get something to eat,” she said, “or at least send up for room service. The visitation tonight’s not until seven.”

And she knew that before long, she’d be coordinating linxes from members of Mark’s family, of hers, all of them flying in for the funeral tomorrow.

“Is there anything we can do, Meg?” Peter asked.

“You can get on some headsets,” she said, Peter’s offer seeming to come in answer to her prayers, “and help me organize the hundred or so people we’re expecting.”

“I’d be happy to,” he said.

Bloom had no doubt he would be. Dealing with a funeral was always easier if you had something to do with it, be it making calls, ordering flowers or any of the dozen other tasks left to survivors to deal with. It was a headache she would appreciate help with and didn’t want to put Laura through more than necessary.

Everything got busy after that. Between arrivals at the airport, rail stations and by car, linxes to make, more to answer, information to be given out, Bloom, Peter and James and Laura spent most of the rest of the afternoon working on funerary arrangements. That night was a blur of faces. Faculty associates from the university; Echohawk’s family, including a younger sister, a nephew, Echohawk’s stepfather and cousin; Bloom’s family, mutual friends, Paul Santino and others from the last weeks of Mark’s life . . . they all blended together for her forever after in dreams as one unfocused, sad androgynous face wearing black. After everything that had happened today, Bloom didn’t have the capacity to recognize everyone there.

. . .

It was really only the following day, when Mark was buried, that she was finally focused again, finally over the worst of it. The last hurt would be watching him being lowered into the ground. She knew after that it would all be letting go and that before would be grim anticipation. She’d been through the worst of the pain already. What Bloom remembered most about the day was its silence. The noises that were heard were all incidental, all background. The alarm going off at five, audio preset to an all-news channel. This last deliberate so as not to tune in to any music that might be out of place today. Getting up out of bed, getting into the shower, the shower’s spray hot, cleansing but not warming. Not today. She felt as though she’d never be warm again. Dress uniform, medals over the left breast, rank insignia firmly affixed. Hat tucked under right arm. Breakfast, something light. Tea over coffee to keep the stomach from any potential upset. A cigarette after the last of the tea. The smoke inhaled deep and stinging into her lungs, outlining them in a shadow of pain. Feel more alive. Remember that under the costume of mourning that a human being was waiting to come back out. Life yet to be lived, her own. Let the nicotine take root in the blood. Exhale one blast through the nose for old times’ sake. Time to face the day. Back in the kitchen for another cup of tea. At the breakfast table, Laura and her roommate. Paleskinned girl, short, wavy red hair. Comely enough that she pulled off black in a way that Bloom admired, but in a way she also knew would be morbidly inappropriate at a funeral.

“Hello, Allison.”

The words out of her mouth, the tea poured, she made her exit. On their way in Laura’s car to the funeral parlour. There, a chance to see Mark one last time, laid out in a proper casket but poorly made up. His skin shaded too pale for his Apache background. The stench of flowers, cloying, sweet, forever the scent of death, pee-sweat scent of lilies overpowering. Now a chance to spot who was here, some strangely conspicuous in their absence. Shaking hands, comforting embraces, more words about the loss. Sympathetic nods and a few private moments with Mark’s body, time to reminisce and regret, before it was time to proceed with services. The pain beginning to surface again, that particular tightness in her throat as the casket was closed, the realization she’d had her last glimpse of him, ever, and then shuttled from the funeral parlour to the hearse. Getting into the limousine that would follow the hearse to the funeral home with her daughter and other members of Mark’s family. Mark’s stepfather looked broken. Laura and Bloom shared a quick glance. They’d want to keep watch over their Pops. The solemn ride in silence to the church. The service Catholic, interspersed with readings in Mark’s native tongue. Eulogies, three: one by Mark’s closest colleague from the university; another by Mark’s stepfather and one from Laura. All of them touching, beautiful. Laura’s bringing fresh tears to Bloom’s eyes. And then from church to cemetery and the graveside service. The final farewell, the last words by the priest, and then Mark’s body being lowered into the ground. It hit her then as Mark’s funeral concluded, as she knew it would. Watching as the mourners each took an handful of earth and dropped it down onto the coffin, as at last it came her turn to do the same, looking down that narrow, deep hole at the coffin. Inside, his inert body, eyes closed, lifeless and still, while above, the living shovelled earth in on top of him. It was over for him, his end like all their ends would be: sealed in a box and buried. The storm ended inside of her, with one last downpour. She cried, her heart wrenching with each sob, unable, unwilling to stop the tears. Laura walking with her, crying as hard as she, both of them clinging to one another for support. Even as she cried, though, Bloom reflected that the tears this time weren’t as bad a deluge as when she’d first seen Mark’s body, but still rain enough to drown her heart. Laura helped her back to the car, and leaving Mark’s grave somehow made it all the worse; it felt as though she were abandoning him, without quite being ready to say goodbye.

Chapter Eight: Continuation and Contrast

“Paul Santino?”

Santino looked in the direction of the voice. It was reassuringly American, especially to someone who had just rediscovered travel in Europe. As an undergrad, Santino had toured the Continent with a girl he’d been seeing at the time; he’d not been out of North America since. Any desire Santino had to visit foreign lands was satisfied with either a trip to the backwards little Canadian province of Quebec or to Mexico. He scanned for the source of the voice in the maddening crowd of tourists, clusters of priests and priestesses in Catholic vestments, European business commuters and frenetic families going to or from Rome on holiday or other travel. Santino knew he was being met, but he no longer knew if he was in the right airport, let alone the right terminal. They’d buried Mark Echohawk the day before. Except that wasn’t necessarily right, considering he was seven time zones from home and hadn’t slept since leaving Albuquerque. It had been, he reflected, one hellishly long day, indeed. There was a break in the crowd. A young black man in some sort of uniform . . . Catholic vestments. Not a priest’s costume, the young man must have been a novice.

“I’m Brother Simon Gage,” he said, shaking Santino’s hand.

A monk. Santino had forgotten about Catholic monks.

“On behalf of the Roman Catholic Church,” Gage continued, “I’d like to welcome you to Vatican City.” He shrugged. “Well, we aren’t in Vatican City just yet. This is Rome, actually.”

“Hi,” Santino said, blearily. “How far is it to . . . to wherever it is I’m staying?”

“That depends entirely on the traffic.” Gage said. “At this time of day . . . probably half an hour.”

“I thought someone from the Aboriginal Council was going to be here.”

“I’m the liaison to the Aboriginal Council for the Catholic Church. As hosts, we have to look after all the delegates,” Gage replied, leading Santino back to their car. “You should have actually been on a diplomatic flight, but as I understand, there was a problem getting clearance into New Mexico.”

“A jet from the Vatican’s missionary services would have made a tasty target, Brother Simon,” Santino said. “The attack that killed Professors Scott and Echohawk was most likely the work of a terrorist cult.”

“The United Trinity Observants,” Gage said knowingly, helping Santino stow his luggage in the sedan the monk had led him to. “I saw the reports on INN. What happened was tragic. I can understand now why authorities wouldn’t let us out west.” They climbed into the car which was soon powered up and fighting to leave the airport parking lot.

“To be honest, Elder Santino, even if you weren’t part of the delegation, I think you’d have been invited to the talks.”

Santino hated the “Elder” honorific. He’d been a shaman once, but not for long. He’d made a better scholar than practitioner.

“How so?” he asked, politely.

“You were there!” Gage said. “When the Ship unearthed itself. You saw it happen!”

“I didn’t actually see the unearthing, but I suppose you’re right,” Santino said. “I’ve been to the Ship. Well, closer than most before the blockades went up. I’ve been too busy to go since the expedition started. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to sleep from here, to wherever.”

“I understand perfectly,” Gage said as the car shot from the airport out onto the street. “Have a good rest and leave the driving to me.”

Santino closed his eyes and allowed the silent rushing of road noise to work with his exhaustion and provide him some rest.

. . .

The minister finished his coffee, staring out the windows of Wilfrid’s, the café/bar just off the lobby of the Laurier Hotel. The view was not the most auspicious; he looked out across the divide where Rideau Street became Wellington Avenue, out at the old rail station which had long since become the Ottawa Convention Center. He often came here for a late lunch or a cup of coffee; the Laurier was only a few minutes’ walk from Parliament Hill and as such a convenient getaway. Far better than trips to the food court at the Rideau Center or the fast food shops down Bank Street. Not that the minister didn’t enjoy a sub from Quizno’s or a Taco Bell now and again. But Wilfrid’s was, to him, an oasis of calm and elegance in his otherwise hectic days. The minister put his coffee cup down and sighed. He was going back to work, but that wasn’t what troubled him; when the minister got back to his office, he would be going directly into a meeting of the committee.

. . .

He was learning fast as a committee member. The minister supposed that one had to. His initiation into the committee had been very thorough, conducted by his British counterpart.

“You’ll find that the committee is anything but a normal government agency,” the British minister of defence had told him when they had met as part of a NATO conference. “First off, we don’t answer to any branch of any of the three governments who make up our membership,” she’d explained. “Our organization is of benefit to our respective governments, but to protect them, plausible deniability has to be maintained.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“All governments are partisan,” she explained, “and the committee is not. Were partisan politics to come into play, the committee would be rendered useless. Simply put, none of us can trust our governments with the secrets of the committee.”

Trust was a major issue for the committee, the minister had discovered. One of the first things he’d learned was how little anyone on the committee trusted anyone else. He of course trusted his fellow Canadians on the committee; he’d known the solicitor general since they’d both been junior backbenchers and the minister for natural resources was another party veteran. It seemed almost everyone trusted only their fellow countrymen. Beyond that, the Canadians trusted the British within reason, but resented their patriarchal attitude. The Americans were viewed with a double-edged sword: They were, of course, Canada’s closest neighbour and single largest trading partner; Canada and the U.S. were also partners in the North American Union. But the Americans were also politically domineering, forever trying to grasp once more the reigns of international power that they had held until after War Three’s disastrous conclusion. A strange mix here: both England and America had each had their time in the sun as the rulers of the world. Canada’s traditional role had been as the world’s peacekeepers and as a moral leader, never interested in power. Canada and England had helped to lead the way towards founding the World Council, and the United States had bowed to Canada’s suggestion that Cuba, the Dominican Republic and others long considered “undesirable” by Washington be let in to the North American Union. And now, working with representatives from Canada’s two most important allies, the minister still felt somewhat suspicious of his fellow committee members. It wasn’t that they weren’t men and women of character, or ideal. They were. But their agendas, or more precisely the agendas of their respective governments, were another matter. Both England and the United States were interested in the Ship. The States out of some hope that the territorial advantage of having the Ship on homeland soil would give it influence on the world’s political stage once more. The English were more interested in access to the Ship than control of it. They wanted second pick at the technologies inside the Ship. That meant shared residuals from whatever the States got first plus exclusive rights to whatever was found that the Americans overlooked or discarded. The committee reported to itself. Only its members knew it existed. And its members were all fully aware how their work could benefit the citizens of the countries they represented. At the very least they knew how to use the committee to their own personal advantage, in the name of their countries. The minister hadn’t yet determined which of the two categories he fell into, but he nevertheless understood that where working with the rest of the committee was concerned, he knew it would help if he came to understand which of the two categories the rest of his colleagues fell into. And to that end, he was learning quite quickly.

. . .

His secure console in place on his desk, his door locked and the antisurveillance sweep of his offices complete, the minister sat down at his desk. Onscreen, eight small windows surrounded a central window. On each the face of a committee member. The head of MI-6 spoke the traditional opening to committee meetings, and as he did, his image was brought to the central window. The minister had been briefed on him early on after becoming head of national defence. He was ruthless, cunning and almost fanatically loyal to the Crown. With the opening phrase delivered, the head of MI-6 launched straight into things:

“We have a unique opportunity before us,” he said. “The assassinations in Laguna enable us to put operatives into play in both direct and indirect contact with the Ship Survey Expedition.”

The minister had read the briefing. At least one position on the Ship Survey Expedition needed to be filled. Echohawk’s role as archaeologist had become mainly academic once it had been determined the Ship was fully active. The aerospace engineer was the more important member of the team. Likewise, the Pentagon would want to put someone new in charge of security at the site. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be in a position to make recommendations for the former and to hand pick the latter if he wanted to. The committee would take full advantage.

“We have several candidates in mind,” the chairman of the joint chiefs said. “The files are on call on your consoles.”

They accessed their consoles, calling up four candidate biographies at a time.

“I notice you haven’t suggested any British engineers, Mister Chairman,” MI-6 chided.

“Or Canadians,” the solicitor general added. “I can think of one or two who would fit the bill.”

The minister scanned the bios. He already knew the Americans wouldn’t budge on their “suggestions”; best to pick the least of available evils. He scrolled through the list, read over the notes and almost scrolled past someone he’d have not expected to be on the list at all. But when he re-read the name, he knew he had to act.

“I would suggest Lieutenant Colonel Margaret Bloom,” he said.

Bloom’s reputation preceded her in defence circles. Legendary pilot, veteran of a number of campaigns, she was also an engineering ace, and it wasn’t long before she was test-piloting the latest and greatest on both sides of the border. Under North American Union treaty, she worked an exchange. She had test flown the prototype for the Bombardier DF-104 Phoenix orbital relay fighter and had helped in its subsequent redesign. She’d also saved a young woman from rape at the hands of some drunken Marines, taking all four of them on in a knife fight and had been subsequently acquitted at court martial. Bloom was an American hero, but she was everything good about that ideal. She’d take on her own if they were wrong. She was fifty-five, with another good ten or fifteen years of flying ahead of her. An intelligent, perceptive pilot and engineer in her prime.

“Not only is she Echohawk’s ex-wife,” the minister continued, “which in itself will assist us with both public perception and accessibility to the Ship Survey Expedition, but she is also top in her field. And . . . working as an engineer in one of the committee’s double-blind research facilities? Is that accurate, Mister Chairman?”

“Yes, it is,” the joint chiefs chairman replied, consulting his console.

“Yes, it is. She’s at . . . our Groom Lake facility.”

Onscreen, it seemed to the minister as though MI-6 was eyeing him, studiously. It was an uncomfortable sensation. The minister’d heard stories about this gentleman; how perceptive he was, how highly skilled . . . how merciless and accomplished a killer he had been in his youth. The current head of MI-6 had proven himself countless times as a field operative and as a tactician, baptized in blood during War Three. As a member of the committee, he was cool, diplomatic and always completely aware of what was going on around him. At once, the minister felt like a target, a supplicant to interrogation and someone easily dispatched. MI-6’s gaze made the minister feel mortal, indeed.

“I second the new member’s suggestion,” MI-6 said at last. “Any other suggestions? No? All in favour of Lieutenant Colonel Bloom, then?”

As the votes were cast, the minister realized he’d made a gamble suggesting Bloom. On more than one front: he was now responsible for her. He also had to wonder who else here had a stake in Bloom’s candidacy, if anyone, and who didn’t. They had voted for Bloom unanimously save for the chairman of the joint chiefs’ abstention.

“I have a recommendation for head of security also,” the chairman of the joint chiefs said. “He did some work for us when the Ship was found.”

“Do tell, Mister Chairman,” MI-6 urged. “Do tell.”

. . .

Bloom’s leave expired two days after the funeral. Mark’s close family stuck around for most of the first day, and the Ship Survey Expedition left only on the morning of the second. Laura had hoped to be able to spend more time alone with her mother, especially now that her father was gone. Laura rose early that day, snapping awake when the door closed as Bloom left for her morning run. She got up, showered and made coffee. Within minutes of the aroma from the coffee machine hitting the air, Allison was up, familiarly dressed in an oversize T-shirt and ratty bathrobe. One of the things that had endeared Laura to Allison above all the roommates she’d had in the past was that Allison always woke up if she smelled coffee brewing. Something left over from her childhood, she explained, when her father used to make breakfast every morning, brewing the coffee first thing at five. Now, no matter what time it was or what condition she was in from the night before, she would be up and in the kitchen at the first scent of coffee.

“Morning,” rasped Allison.

She said nothing else until the coffee was brewed. Once she’d fixed herself a cup and had put half of it away, she came more awake.

“How are you doing today?” she asked.

Anyone else asking the question would have made Laura resentful. But it was the same question Allison asked her nearly every morning and held particular meaning after the events of the past few days.

“Better.”

“That’s good,” Allison said. “It’s a start. Good coffee.”

“Thanks,” Laura said with a smile.

Her father had taught her to make it when she first started living on her own. His trick was to put a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg in the coffee grounds before brewing it. Allison had a cigarette with the last half of her coffee and then headed for the shower. Laura’s mother came back from her run around the time Laura was sitting down to breakfast. Allison was out of the shower and making her own breakfast as Bloom fixed herself some coffee. They talked idly for a while, Bloom having a quick breakfast while Laura and Allison finished theirs. Bloom headed for the shower. Another coffee and then they were getting their day ready. Allison was off to classes, Laura to bid farewell to the SSE and her mother.

. . .

Airport greetings and farewells were becoming too commonplace for Laura’s tastes. Last night it had been her grandfather, uncles and aunts. Today it was her father’s colleagues from the Ship Survey Expedition, two dear old friends and her mother. She turned her car into the parking lot, and she and her mother stepped out and headed down to the terminal where they were to meet the SSE and bid them farewell. When they met up with the Ship Survey Expedition, they found them sitting in the terminal waiting area talking amongst themselves. As Laura and Bloom approached, the SSE stood.

James and Peter were the first to greet them, followed by Aiziz, Andrews and Kodo.

“It’s been good seeing you guys again,” Laura said. “I just wish it had been under happier circumstances.”

“So do I,” Peter said. “So do we all.”

“Actually, you may be seeing me around, at least for a little while,” James told Laura. “I’m staying in L.A. to wrap up the Prof’s affairs at the university. I know the material and where it is in his office. I should stay behind . . . at least to take care of that. It’s also not just his teaching: there’s speaking engagements, conferences and a whole slew of shit that has to be dealt with by someone who . . . who knew his itinerary.”

The others agreed with the wisdom of this, but from the look in his eyes, James knew that Peter suspected there was more permanence implied in James’ tones than in the words he’d used. There was something else in James’ eyes; a loss, a trauma, a doubt . . . Laura couldn’t name it, but something said that the university was the simplest excuse as to why he wasn’t returning to the Ship. She’d find out why, later. If Laura had asked, Bloom could probably have told her the reason: James’ face bore marks she recognized well. During the Australian Conflict, Bloom had been stationed in the Philippines with the Allied World Army. She’d had friends among the ground forces and had seen many of them with that same look. It was a look that said: “I’ve seen too much bloodshed. I’ve had enough violent death.” It was a look Bloom associated with combat veterans who’d seen one too many of their comrades killed in action. It was a look that said no force on Earth would bring him back to the place where those horrors were made real for him.

“I understand,” she told James.

The look he gave her before nodding his head told her that he knew she did.

“There’s still time to reconsider, James,” Aiziz said. “We’d benefit a great deal from your presence at the site.”

“I know,” he said, “but there are things here that need to be done.”

The finality of his attitude ended further comment. The flight back to New Mexico began boarding shortly after that, leaving just enough time for final farewells. Then Bloom, Laura and James found themselves together.

“Have you got a place to stay yet?” Laura asked him.

“I have a guaranteed spot in Campus Apartments as part of my contract as your dad’s TA,” James said. “At least, I will have for the next little while. After that, well, I’ll be looking for a job and a place to stay.”

“You aren’t going back to the ship survey?” Bloom asked, though in truth she suspected she knew the answer.

James looked away and swallowed hard against a lump in his throat.

“I don’t think so,” he replied, his voice heavy.

He said nothing more, waiting for Laura while she and her mother bid each other farewell. Then they walked together back towards the parking lot.

“James, why don’t you stay with me and Allison?” Laura offered. “At least until you figure things out. You can have the couch.”

“I don’t know,” James said. “I guess. It’s been a while since you and I really got together to shoot the shit.”

Laura smiled.

“It’s settled,” she said. “Let’s get some lunch.”

. . .

“Tower to Moon Dog, over,” Bloom said into her mike. “Report.”

“The floor of the cockpit’s rising up under me,” Captain Harriman’s nervous voice came back. “You’re sure this is safe, over?”

“Roger that,” Bloom said. “Report back when the controls have gone up.”

“Roger.”

Bloom toggled off the commlink between herself and the pilot that General Harrod had given the Bug to. It still stung, because up until the funeral, the Bug’s first flight had been all but hers. Her mind drifted back to the day before when she’d returned to the facility after burying Mark.

“Lieutenant Colonel,” Harrod had said, returning her salute as she reported in. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you, General,” she’d replied. “When has the test flight of our Bug been rescheduled for?”

“Captain Harriman’s being briefed on the controls now.”

“Harriman?” Bloom repeated. “General, I don’t understand.”

“Given the circumstances, Lieutenant Colonel, it was decided to replace you as pilot.”

“General, Harriman doesn’t have half the flight time I have,” Bloom had said. “And I’ve seen his jacket, remember: I’ve flown over a hundred different kinds of aircraft. He’s done what? Ten? Fifteen? The facility built a Bug prototype just prior to War Three, General. At the time, the pilot who took it up had more experience than I did. He died in the ensuing crash. I’m the best pilot here. I should be taking the Bug up.”

“You just came back from burying your husband,” Harrod replied.

“My ex-husband sir, though I loved him dearly. I assure you I am ready to fly this mission. I want to fly this mission. I need this.”

Harrod regarded her a long time before shaking his head.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant Colonel. I can’t authorize you to fly this one. You know the regs.”

“With all due respect, General, fuck the regs!” Bloom snapped.

“Lieutenant Colonel,” Bloom heard the danger in his voice, “tread lightly. I’ve explained to you: Harriman is flying this one. We’ve had him training for this since the cockpit layout was determined. You’ll be in the control tower acting as his flight monitor. You’ll talk him down if anything goes wrong.”

“Anything goes wrong, General, and there won’t be time to talk him down.”

. . .

“Moon Dog to Tower,” Harriman reported in, giving his call sign. “The control panel’s materialized. I’m adjusting my display boom to lock onto the console.”

Harriman had been supplied with an eyepiece that overlaid the translated runes onto the control panel before him. He sat cradled in the protective restraints of the cockpit, adjusting the eyepiece on his headset console so that the overlay was perfectly set. The display “locked” itself to the console in front of him. Harriman could look away from the Bug’s control panel and the display would likewise scroll away from in front of his eye. The translation team at the Groom Lake Facility had worked no small miracle while Bloom had been away. Working with runic icons they’d found in the dead Bug and retracing circuit pathways from the cockpit of the living Bug had allowed them to interpret most of the flight controls. Samples of runic script had been found in both vehicles years before, and the facility’s respective teams of engineers, interpreters and investigators had had decades to begin unravelling the mystery of Shiplanguage.

“Roger that,” Bloom said.

Air traffic reported in. Their airspace was clear.

“You are cleared to leave the barn,” Bloom said.

Bloom watched, feeling jealous, depressed, angry, empty all at once. She studied the displays around her as a dozen people worked consoles monitoring every nuance of this test flight. The Bug taxied from the hangar out onto the tarmac. She could see it from here out of the control tower’s windows: a green and gold object reflecting the morning’s sunlight.

“The bee has cleared the hive.”

“Roger that, Moon Dog,” Bloom replied. “Throttle up and take her into the sky.” Almost immediately, the Bug rose on a near-vertical. Bloom felt the windows start to rattle a fraction of a second before the sonic boom hit. Alarms were pinging and people were exclaiming harried status reports from their consoles. Bloom heard the hollering whoop coming over Harriman’s mike and felt that twinge again. She watched her readout. Impossibly, the Bug was up to Mach 3 and climbing rapidly. She watched, stunned, as the Bug pulled a turn so steep that it should have been sheared in two.

“This can’t be right!” one of the operators called. “He didn’t even pull any gees on that turn!”

“Tower to Moon Dog!” Bloom exclaimed. “Reduce your speed! Reduce your speed!”

“Oh, man, this is incredible!” Harriman exclaimed as the Bug slowed and halted. He was almost five kilometres above sea level. The Bug was hovering effortlessly.

“Moon Dog, what happened when you executed that turn?”

“Nothing, Tower. Nothing! I can’t believe how this craft handles! And you should see the view from here!”

Bloom could imagine. Harriman was hanging inside a spherical imaging chamber that rendered a perfect three-dimensional image of the southwestern continental United States directly below him.

“Tower, I want to take this thing higher,” Harriman called. “I think I can get up into high orbit.”

“Negative, Harriman,” Bloom called. “I don’t recommend — dammit!”

Harriman wasn’t listening. A test pilot born and bred, he, as Bloom would have done, was doing what he wanted to do: taking the Bug into orbit.

“Moon Dog!” Bloom called angrily. “Moon Dog! Abort! Return to base!”

She didn’t like being in this position: bellowing orders she knew wouldn’t be obeyed to a hotshot pilot who was doing what they wanted to do, orders be damned. Part of her had to admit she would rather have been the pilot. The other part was planning Harriman’s dressing-down and the indefinite suspension of his flight privileges.

“Moon Dog to Tower, do you copy?”

“Copy, Moon Dog. Over.”

“Are you reading my display? What is that?”

Bloom hit a switch on her console. She was now seeing what Harriman and the video operator three chairs down from her were seeing. Something on the display screen of the Bug was being tracked. What Bloom could only describe as crosshairs was sliding across the starscape overhead.

“Are you reading my display?” Harriman asked. “The Bug’s tracking something. It’s . . . Cancel that, Tower. The Bug is tracking my eye movement across the screen.”

“Hit the toggle key labeled manual target,” Bloom replied.

“Roger that.” Harriman found the key on the console and stabbed it.

Suddenly the crosshairs locked on one of the distant stars and brought the image forward. Harriman pulled back in his restraints as he watched a planet rush towards him.

“What in the fuck?”

“Moon Dog, you are on VOX,” Bloom came back. “We’re reading the image. You’re looking at . . . the Planet Uranus.”

“Say again?”

“The rune must have been mislabelled,” Bloom said. “You probably triggered some sort of onboard telescope.”

“Roger. How do I shut it off?”

“Hit the toggle switch again,” Bloom said.

The planet receded and Harriman’s view shifted back to the orbital starscape of Earth.

“That did the trick,” Harriman said.

“Good. Now, bring her back in, slowly, and try some more manoeuvres,” Bloom said. “That’s an order, understand?”

“Yes, Mother,” Harriman said. “The bee is returning to the hive. Engaging afterburners.”

She watched his view shift to the console. Harriman keyed the engines.

“What the hell?” Harriman muttered. The image suddenly broke up into static and then cleared.

“What the hell?” Harriman said, more alarmed.

Static again . . . dissipating, leaving behind a much less well-defined image.

“Tower to Moon Dog. Do you copy? What is your status?”

“OH MY GOD!” they heard Harriman scream.

Then static; horrible, silent static. They were stunned into silence a long moment before Bloom turned to the monitor stations.

“Get me telemetry. I want everything we have. I want to know just what the fuck happened out there.”

And in the back of her mind, for the first time, Bloom wasn’t sure she was so envious of Captain Harriman anymore.

TRANSCRIPT
INTERACTIVE NEWS NETWORK NEWSCAST
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PATH: INN <> HEADLINES >> INVESTIGATION INTO THE LAGUNA MURDERS ><

ANCHOR
Good morning and welcome to the Interactive News Network. The name of the assassin of Professors Scott and Echohawk has been released. Francis George Franck, age thirty nine, formerly of Phoenix, Arizona. According to authorities, Franck has been a member of the United Trinity Observants for the last ten years. INN reporters in Arizona were unable to learn much else about the man, who kept mainly to himself before joining the Church of the United Trinity Observants. Authorities are now working on determining whether or not the United Trinity Observants were directly involved in any way with the assassination, despite denials issued by the cult and despite the condemnation of Franck’s attack by Gabriel Ashe, leader of the United Trinity Observants.

PATH: <> RELATED STORIES >> THE SHIP >> WORLD SHIP SUMMIT NAMES NEW HEAD OF THE SHIP SURVEY EXPEDITION><

ANCHOR
The World Ship Summit has announced who will be the new head of the Ship Survey Expedition: Colonel Margaret Bloom. Bloom is one of the top test pilots in the United States Air Force and is reputed to be one of the best aerospace engineers to come from government service in years. Bloom is also the ex-wife of the late Professor Mark Echohawk, who was at the time of his death the head of the Ship Survey Expedition. The expedition itself is set to resume later this week, once the new head of security at the site and added patrols have been put in place.

There was a moment of disorientation when he woke up. Looking around as the apartment began coming into focus, James realized where he was and how he had come to be here. The sofa bed creaked beneath him as he shifted into a sitting position and memories of the previous evening found their way from memory storage to his conscious waking mind. He and Laura had stayed up most of the night talking, occasionally joined by Laura’s roommate Allison. They smoked up and spent a lot of time talking, though James found it awkward talking around Allison at first. He soon discovered that she was both sympathetic and insightful. In Laura and Allison both, James had found peers, people he could talk to who could empathize and not analyze. Allison stayed silent or was absent for much of the dialogue about Echohawk, for it could not include her. Laura was his daughter, James one of his graduate students and his primary assistant. Allison had met him all of three times. But Echohawk and his death weren’t the only subjects they discussed, nor were James’ and Laura’s reactions to it (which were polar opposites: Laura was finding her own faith strengthened, where he was rapidly losing his). But they also reminisced about their early years together, discussed school life.

. . .

James climbed from the bed, which creaked and groaned beneath him. Even the sofa bed had a story: Laura had bought it from a grizzled old man of indeterminate age, who’d claimed to have owned it along with what he’d described as “the world’s most comfortable waterbed” for almost a hundred years.

. . .

Despite the implausibility of that statement, Laura claimed to have believed him. James made his way into the kitchen and began to rummage for breakfast. As alike in age and background as James, Allison and Laura were, James had one set of experiences with which they could not yet hope to compare: he had seen the Ship up close and personal. He had survived what almost certainly would have been his own extinction by the hand of one killer and witnessed the death of his mentor at the hands of another. He had entered the new historical age just ahead of them. The coffee began percolating as he made this reflection. He admired the old-fashioned coffee percolator that Laura used. It made a better brew, a richer tasting coffee than a drip brewer. The scent of coffee soon brought the sound of a door opening and closing. Moments later, a bleary-eyed Allison shuffled into the kitchen.

“James,” she said, clearly not expecting him.

Habit dictated that it was Laura she expected. She squinted and looked at the wall display.

“Fuck,” she said. “It’s only four.”

“I still haven’t adjusted to California time,” he said. “It’s five to me.”

“James, five o’clock is still too early.”

“You’re up. It’s four.”

“The coffee, James; the smell of coffee always gets me up.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“S’all right,” she said, sitting down. “I’ll be happier when I’ve had a cup.” She lit a cigarette. He joined her as the coffee brewed.

“James?”

“Yeah?”

“You really have to learn to sleep in.”

. . .

Bloom crossed the threshold into General Harrod’s office and saluted sharply. He gestured for her to sit down.

“Our teams finished putting together what happened, out there,” Bloom said, sliding an optic slip across his desk. “Based on observations from satellites, space and ground-based telescopes and telemetry, what we came up with is pretty surprising.” Harrod took the slip and dropped it into the reader of one of the consoles on his desk.

“Summarize,” he said.

“How much do you know about wormholes?”

Harrod stared at her a long moment and shrugged.

“We did some work on the subject at Cheyenne Mountain,” Harrod said. “They’re a class of quantum string, as I understand it. Theoretically, one could be stretched open and form a gateway between two different points in space and time. Practically, however, it’s impossible.”

“Basically,” Bloom replied. “The physics are beyond me. But it looks like the Bug was able to open a wormhole between Earth and Uranus.”

“How?”

“If we still had the Bug here, I still couldn’t tell you,” Bloom replied, referring to her notepad. “We didn’t even think it was possible to open a wormhole. The chain of events is like this: what we took for a targeting computer is in fact part of an elaborate navigational system tied directly to the Bug’s engines. When Harriman tried to key off the image of Uranus and power up the afterburners, he in fact started the sequence. His cameras and a nearby observation satellite recorded a flash of light near to the craft. The image you’re looking at now is particularly interesting.”

On Harrod’s screen was the view from the satellite. The Bug was a green and gold speck just outside of Earth’s domineering form. The surrounding space was black, but there appeared to be an area even darker ahead of the Bug. The visual was very poor; light and colour seemed to bleed out from the image.

“What happened?” Harrod said. “This picture is shit.”

“What we’re looking at is light from the nearby objects being drawn towards the event horizon of the Bug’s wormhole,” Bloom explained. “The next series of images records the Bug’s engines driving it toward and then into the wormhole.”

Harrod watched the stills.

“We have video on this?”

“It’s still being analyzed,” Bloom explained. “What we have here is groundbreaking, revolutionary. An electromagnetic flux was recorded everywhere we have monitoring systems in the solar system. The Aurora Borealis was recorded over Utah, in broad daylight. By a stroke of luck, a science experiment measuring the solar system’s gravitational field recorded a micron-wide super gravitational string extending away from the Earth and out towards Uranus.”

“And what happened to the Bug? To Harriman?”

“We’re still collecting images from Uranus from one of the Earth orbital telescopes. We recorded a flash of extremely bright light in orbit around Uranus, and it looks like it occurred a few seconds after the Bug disappeared from Earth orbit,” Bloom explained. “But we can’t say for sure what happened. We don’t know. Harriman’s a good pilot. If he’s still alive, and I think it possible that he is, he could even get the Bug back home. We hope.”

“In any event, Lieutenant Colonel, the whole matter is no longer of your concern,” Harrod said with finality.

“What?” Bloom exclaimed, anger and outrage boiling up within her.

He glanced up at her and regarded her for a long moment.

“You seem to attract attention, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “Early yesterday morning, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff contacted me. It appears you were recommended to the World Ship Summit by someone in the Pentagon. The World Ship Summit has asked that you be assigned to the Ship Survey Expedition.”

“What? Me?”

“Your work as an aerospace engineer seems to have qualified you for the position,” Harrod explained. “Someone from the Pentagon will be coming in this afternoon to collect you and brief you. You are going to the ship survey as an officer of the United States armed forces. As such, there will be certain . . . directives you will be expected to fulfill.”

“Yes sir.”

“You have the rest of the morning to get your gear together,” Harrod said. “Dismissed.”

. . .

Bloom found herself back at Space Command in Houston, recent site of what she had thought would prove to be the end of her career. She was ushered into a different office in a different wing of the administration building across the small courtyard from Colonel Hays’ office. The corner of her mouth turned up in a sneer at the thought. He’d be shitting himself if he knew she was here. When her new control stepped into the office from a door behind the desk, Bloom nearly shit herself as well. No lesser person than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented himself to her. She rose to her feet, saluting immediately. His station alone demanded it. Here was the man who had ordered General Harrod to Concord 3, the man who’d ordered her flight group into Australian airspace fifteen years before. The chairman had kept his position through four consecutive presidential administrations spanning two parties. He was a hero of War Three, a trusted advisor to three presidents, a respected and trusted public official and cunning, so very cunning.

“Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

He opened a file which held an optic slip and a sealed envelope. He placed the slip into his console and watched the screen a moment, keying something with deliberate precision into the console.

“Given your reputation and record,” he said, “I suspect you’d rather not stand on ceremony.”

He slid the envelope across his desk. She opened it. Inside were two gold clusters.

“Therefore, consider yourself promoted to full colonel.”

Bloom actually gasped. She’d held the rank of lieutenant colonel for the better part of ten years. After her second career court martial before that, she’d never expected to advance farther than major. Being promoted up to lieutenant colonel had been a shock. That she was now a full colonel, with the privileges and duties implied therein, was inconceivable. More so, the detached analyst in her head remarked, than even the existence of an alien ship that measured nearly thirty-two kilometres across.

“I . . . I’m . . . honoured. . .”

“More thanks than I was told to expect,” the chairman said. “Colonel Bloom, I want to make something clear. Although you are assigned to the World Ship Summit, although the Ship Survey Expedition will probably be your command under them, you are still an officer in the United States Air Force. And as an officer of this air force, you will report your activities to my office, through General Harrod, for the duration of your tenure. You will report all discoveries made about the Ship, and you will be expected to carry out any orders you are given through this office, even if those offers are in conflict with orders given you by the Ship Survey Expedition. The worst you’ll face from them is expulsion from the SSE. Disobey me and you will face your last court martial. I’ll make the charges of hijacking an orbital station look like a jaywalking conviction. Your primary concern is the national security of these United States. Is that understood?”

“Yes sir.”

The chairman turned back to his desk and keyed a command into his console. A printer on the other side of the desk began shooting out sheets of paper into a tray facing Bloom.

“Among the burdens of command associated with being a full colonel are certain facts, certain pieces of information and certain orders kept secret from the lower ranks,” the chairman explained. “The file printing now contains a summary of that information. For now, absorb the basics. As you’ve recently come from a posting at Groom Lake, I’ll assume you know the penalties for divulging top-secret information. You’ll be briefed in full later. You can take the printout to the study behind me. The printout stays in there when you are done.”

Bloom collected the papers as they finished printing. The chairman continued speaking.

“For expediency’s sake, we have to get you to New Mexico as soon as possible. You’ll be briefed in full on that information, therefore, after you’ve set up your command. I’ve decided that your command will also incorporate site security, so the SSE will be moved into the base there. Fort . . . Arapaho, I believe it’s called. Congratulations, Colonel.”

“Thank you, sir,” was all Bloom could think of to say.

. . .

Life is in constant motion. It is always evolving, forever changing. With change comes adaptation. With adaptation comes learning. The price of failure to adapt has always been death. No greater change had happened throughout human history than the discovery of the Ship. No greater opportunity for humanity to learn, to grow. No greater potential for humanity to fail, to die.

Chapter Nine: Discoveries

Major Jack Benedict sat down at his desk in the offices of Fort Arapaho. He was reviewing reports by Laguna Police Chief Sharon Raven, who had been assisting the military police with their investigation into the slayings of Professors Echohawk and Scott. Francis George Franck had indeed been a member of Gabriel Ashe’s cult, but there was nothing beyond that to tie the United Trinity Observants to the killings. Benedict finished reading Police Chief Raven’s report and closed down the screen. There was a note at the end of the report requesting that he linx her once he was through. Benedict slipped an earpiece into his ear and keyed in Raven’s linx address. An instant later, her image appeared onscreen in three-quarter profile. She looked at the screen momentarily before turning her gaze away again. Background noise filtering in over the linx made Benedict realize she was driving.

“Major Benedict,” she said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” Benedict asked.

“No, right now we’re just patrolling around town,” she said. “I had to get away from my desk for a while. You read my report?”

“Yeah,” Benedict replied. “Ashe’s one clever son of a bitch.”

“Then you agree he’s behind this?”

“Him or someone high up in his organization,” Benedict said. “Looks like Francis George Franck was basically riled up by Ashe’s preaching. I’m willing to bet that was the idea.”

“We have to find some way of getting him,” Raven said. “We can’t prove that Franck was given specific instructions by Ashe; no witnesses who would speak up. I know the Feds have people inside his organization, but they aren’t talking. What about the gun used in the attacks?”

“Bethesda’s got the gun,” Benedict replied. “No serial numbers, and the ballistics registry’s turned up negative.”

“The ballistics registry is voluntary.”

“Thank you, NRA.”

“Even if the gun shows up in the registry, we’d only be able to tie it to the original owner, if any, and trace it back through any crimes it was used in. While that might give us a chain of suspects to follow back to the person who supplied Franck with the gun, there’s no guarantee that it would lead to someone in the United Trinity.”

“More good news,” Benedict added. “I just caught a newsflash from INN. The World Court has turned down Washington’s request to expel the United Trinity Observants from the World Ship Preserve.”

“They’re going to wind up regretting that decision,” Raven said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Experience,” Raven said. “I used to be a Fibbie; worked with ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Groups like this almost always wind up causing or being the cause of worse and worse trouble.”

“Wonderful,” Benedict growled. “I’m sure that’s just the sort of thing the new base commander’s going to want to hear.”

“Yeah . . . I heard she’s coming in today.”

“That’s right; Colonel Bloom.”

“I read in your jacket you two served together a few times.”

“A few times; she was my wing commander in Australia, and she was station commander aboard Concord 3.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“She’s a hard-ass. She’s had two court martials, one for disobeying direct orders during the Australian Conflict, the other for assault with deadly intent. She was exonerated both times and the record expunged.”

“Impressive.”

“She’s always had a problem with authority, and despite a natural command ability of her own, she’s avoided it as much as possible. Even dodged squad leader when she was still a fighter jock. But when she is in charge, she’s the best you can have.”

“I thought she was commander of C-3.”

“Orbitals always have temporary command staff,” Benedict said. “And they’re almost always flyers who need to be kept busy when they’re grounded.”

“Is that what you think she’s doing here?” Raven asked. “Killing time?”

“No. She’s an engineer. Most flyers have some engineering skills. She has a lot of them. She’s going to roost.”

“Any idea why Bloom was selected?” Raven asked.

Benedict was tempted to tell her what he really knew.

“Apparently, Bloom’s attracted the right kind of attention,” was his reply instead.

. . .

Santino’s group had been assigned to work on the problem of how creation beliefs would be affected by the Ship’s presence on Earth these past sixty million years. It was a burdensome question for many reasons. Although some religions, such as Catholicism, had long ago accepted that the creation stories and myths were for the most part allegorical tales not to be taken literally, humanity’s exalted status among God’s creations was now called into doubt. Had God been revealed to the aliens who built the Ship in some other manner? If so, in what way? What was their place in the grand scheme of things? The problems inherent here lent themselves to other religious aspects being explored, such as Gaianism, messianism and reincarnation, which although anathema to Catholics, Muslims and Jews, was an integral part of Hindu, Buddhist and some aboriginal belief systems. The free flow of ideas thrown about the room became more heated and more confrontational as the morning wore on into the afternoon. A debate waged after lunch after it was suggested the Ship may have been some kind of seeder vessel designed to populate barren worlds, a terrifying possibility that had generated a long argument. All the world’s beliefs would become invalid, useless, if that was the case. In the silence that followed that exchange, it seemed to Santino that his fellow delegates had more questions than they had possible answers for. It wasn’t that they were attempting to fit the Ship in to their creation myths, or explain the Ship away. Their task was to discover how the Ship affected the lessons taught in the creation stories, to determine whether those lessons remained valid or not. Many faithful of most religions had been thrown into crisis by the Ship; many more were questioning outright not just the validity of their chosen religions, but the very existence of God. The expressions on the faces of the delegates gathered around this table and no doubt every table in every conference room reserved for the purposes of Vatican IV showed that even the leaders and scholars of these religions were not entirely immune to the same doubts, the same questions.

“I think that the worst thing,” Rabbi David Abrams announced to the group during that ponderous, introspective silence, “the absolute worst thing about this whole business is that the Scientologists are having a field day.”

Everyone laughed, a needed ejaculation of mirth that broke through the theological tension felt by everyone. The mood was lightened by the exchange, but from the general “let’s talk about everything but what we’re supposed to be talking about” murmur of conversation filling the room convinced everyone that little else would be accomplished today. Not that they’d expected to wrap up their committee’s business on the second day of the conference. Nevertheless it was Abrams, whose gently persuasive manner and cast-iron religious conviction had turned him into the group’s unofficial leader, who made it official.

“People, I really think we should call it a day,” he said. “We’ve overwhelmed ourselves with ideas, problems, questions and philosophies. What we should all do now is go home, or back to the dormitories anyway, relax and digest what’s gone on here today. Or better yet, we should take in the sites. We are in Rome, after all, one of the oldest, most beautiful cities on our planet. Above all else, folks, we can’t let our questions, doubts and insecurities about the Ship cloud our judgment, or our faith. We Believe.” He capitalized that last word by pausing, letting them absorb the strength of the statement, then continued: “Perhaps what we believe in is wrong. It’s a point we all have to concede; we’ve had the argument about whose beliefs are right and wrong among ourselves for millennia. But that which we believe in, God, the almighty creator, will always be a part of who we are. Even if the Buddhists are right and the only God is the God within, we believe, we have faith. That faith can and must be allowed to sustain us.”

They were silent, all pondering his words. Finally, the day’s conference broke up for good and everyone began leaving.

“That was impressive, Rabbi,” Santino said as the two men passed on their way out of the conference hall.

“It’s just common sense,” Abrams demurred. “Which all too often has no relevance to religion.”

Santino chuckled.

“I have to agree with you there,” he said and then a little more bitterly added. “That’s certainly been my experience.”

“How so, Elder?”

“Please,” Santino said as they walked down the hallway and down to the street, “don’t call me that. I’m not a shaman. I was once, but that was a long time ago, as far as I’m concerned.” Abrams nodded.

“That answers my question, then,” the rabbi said.

They continued making their way in silence. They reached the street, mingling with tourists and pilgrims touring the sites and shrines of the capital of Christianity.

“There’s actually a good place to get coffee not far from here,” Abrams said conversationally, “unless you have a personal objection to coffee.”

The last humorous barb brought another chuckle from Santino.

“I have no objections to coffee,” Santino said. “Coffee sounds just about right.”

“Good!” Abrams said, cheerfully. “I want you to tell me a little more about the Ship.”

. . .

Colonel Margaret Bloom only said one thing to the pilot who took her from Houston to Fort Arapaho:

“Take the scenic route.”

And so they did. As they first made the approach to the site, the pilot took them around the Ship in a figure-8 pattern which covered the span of the Ship. She had him do it twice. She’d never seen anything like it. The bowl of the Ship was a small mountain rising from the dish. There was no telling what the Ship looked like from underneath. Its immense size rivalled those of many cities she’d known. Certainly the height of the thing dwarfed any artificially made object she’d ever seen. That it had flown was unbelievable. That it had come here from space was undeniable. The blue-glowing canyons and gold and black crests and valleys spread out below and around her, the pyramid at the summit of the Ship catching the sun, reflecting it back across its surface. Were the Ship more highly polished, she thought, it would be blinding for kilometres in every direction. She almost felt she could hear the Shipsong through the bulkheads of the plane and wished once more to have seen it from space after the unearthing. From this low an altitude she couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Bloom wanted to see the Ship in its entirety. And even more so than that, she wanted to be inside the Ship, in the belly of the beast. As the plane began final approach to the airfield, Bloom looked out at the Ship one last time and admitted to herself that she simply wanted the Ship. Mark had died to unlock its secrets. She would do everything in her power to make sure his death wasn’t in vain. She would make sure that the work he’d started would continue and that she would be part of that work. The Ship was a treasure trove that belonged to humanity. Honour enough to be one of the first to glance upon its finery, to see the Ship unspoiled. To possess, even if only in memory, the merest fraction of it, to be forever part of the Ship’s history, lore and tale . . . that would be a gift from God. The plane touched down with a jolt, snapping her from her covetous idlings.

“Welcome to Fort Arapaho, Colonel,” the pilot said.

“Thanks,” she said, absently.

She was here. She had arrived.

. . .

Sonia Aiziz got up from her desk, bending backwards to stretch. She’d been there all morning, poring over images of the codex, as she had done all the previous day and the day before and the day before. She’d launched into the project the minute they’d returned from Echohawk’s funeral. She was fuelled by a new desire: to continue her mentor’s work, to unlock the Ship. But the codex, the key to the Ship, was turning out to be its strongest barrier yet. Across the room at his own workstation, Michael Andrews was also poring over images from the codex. A scale reproduction of the tablet of runes and numeric icons and other symbols was plastered to the table between them. Their relationship had improved collaboration on the project of deciphering the alien scriptures, rather than weaken it. They were professional, their desires’ fulfillment reserved for off-hours, their passions channeled into the project during on-hours. They had made progress but achieved no breakthroughs. Aiziz was beginning to fear that they might never decipher what was here before them, evidently deliberately left, evidently meant to be understood. Worse was her fear that mankind might never decipher the codex, that the secrets of the Ship would be locked away another sixty million years, those mysteries outliving their species and perhaps any other intelligence that might ever arise on the world in the future. Such a tragedy she could not bear to fathom. But the possibility was one she had to admit to.

“You’re having more coffee?” Andrews asked her, not looking up from his console, spectacles perched on the end of his nose.

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m watching my intake.”

“Caffeine addiction happens fast,” he cautioned. “Don’t forget: until a few years ago, it was strictly regulated under the same laws that restricted and nearly banned tobacco products.”

“I was a teenager at the time, and the ban was only in the West,” she said, “and Israel, of course. But the Arab world had no such compunctions against coffee. Nor tobacco.”

“Allah be praised,” he replied. “It would have made my tenure at the New University of Baghdad completely intolerable.”

“I didn’t know you taught in Baghdad.”

“Only for a year, the last year of prohibition.”

“Ah,” she said with a smile, deliberately pouring herself another cup. “They run you out of there as well?”

Andrews smiled wryly. He’d lost the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge under circumstances not entirely dissimilar from those that had required him to leave Baghdad.

“In a manner of speaking,” he admitted.

Further musings on the subject were cut short by the door chimes sounding.

“As long as I’m up,” Aiziz said with the slightest barb in her voice.

Technically he was closer to the door, though he made no move to answer it. Andrews’ mouth turned up at the corners by a fraction, but he remained focused on the screen of his console. Aiziz toggled the switch for the door screen and their caller’s image appeared. She let her in.

“Hello, Doctor Cole,” she said.

“Hello, Sonia. Michael,” Cole said, stepping inside. “I just stopped in to let you know that Colonel Bloom’s arrived. She’ll be involved with the military thing for an hour or so, logging in, I suppose. Once she’s done there, however, she’ll be sitting down with the Ship Survey Expedition.”

“What time?” Andrews queried.

“About fifteen hundred,” Cole replied. “I also wanted to ask both of you why you haven’t made your appointments with me regarding Professor Echohawk’s death?”

“Doctor Cole, I grew up in Palestine during the war with Israel,” Aiziz said. “I’ve seen death many times, lost loved ones, friends and family both. I’m long past the point of being traumatized by violent death. To me a death is a death; each one is tragic, but no longer traumatic.”

“Nevertheless, the ship summit requires you both to sit down for evaluation after the Professor’s death.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Andrews said. “We will make time for the evaluation soon enough.”

“But —.”

“We’ll see you at the meeting,” Aiziz interjected. “We’ll discuss it then. We really have to get back to work on the codex now.”

. . .

“Good afternoon, everyone,” Bloom said. “It’s good to see you all under better circumstances.”

She looked around the table. Peter and Sonia were the closest familiar faces here. Sonia had changed quite a bit since her time as Mark’s grad student. The other members of the Ship Survey Expedition sitting around her she could barely remember from the funeral. She took a breath and continued, switching on her workpad.

“I have already been brought up to speed insofar as your most recent briefing to the World Ship Summit, so let’s start with an update. Doctor Kodo?”

“I’ve run samples on the valve that seals the lift tube,” Kodo said, referring to his own workpad. “It’s biological, all right. But I’ve never seen cell structure like it before. I’m still trying to identify all the cellular components.”

“Are you sure it’s a cell and not nanotech?” Bloom asked.

“It might prove to be,” Kodo said, “but everything would seem to point to cellular biology. You’re welcome to have a look.”

“Let me know when’s good for you,” Bloom said. “On to the inscription. What have we got, so far?”

“We’ve identified an anomalous set of characters in among the numeric glyphs.” Andrews said, “The quarter-to-three quarter runes reversed, with the negative space inverted.”

“It is possible that these new symbols are indicative that the builders used a base-ten, or decimal number system,” Aiziz added. “We’re still doing the sequencing. We’ll know for certain later on.”

“We have also identified symbols which we believe are calculation values,” Andrews said. “Once we know what numeric system we’re working with, we’ll know exactly what each symbol means. It looks like there are enough to run the whole gamut: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, sine, cosine, exponent, equals, does not equal, less than, greater than . . . several more.”

“And on the linguistic side?”

“I’ve positively identified forty-seven base runic symbols and twenty-five others that seem to belong to subsets of each of the base symbols,” Aiziz said. “Others, I can’t yet classify. Still no clue yet as to what the symbols mean, but there are glyph and rune combinations that would seem indicate that the mathematics will create some form of corollary.”

“How much of a corollary?” Bloom asked. “We might be able to understand concrete concepts, but what about the abstracts? Communication of ideas relies on abstract concepts. Can we learn their conversational language armed only with the knowledge of their scientific language?”

“In this instance, mathematics is the key,” Aiziz said. “The concrete concepts they will explain to us will include things like measurement, temperature, the periodic table and other constants that can be likewise expressed numerically. These constants will open the way to teach us their abstracts.”

“How so?”

“Let us assume we have working concepts for their periodic table and mathematic sets,” Aiziz said, leaning forward. “Combinations of their temperature sets and the periodic table could yield concepts like liquid, solid and vapour.”

“How long will it take to decipher the message on the codex?” Bloom asked.

“That . . . we do not know,” Andrews replied. “We’re analyzing the alien glyphs, trying to establish beyond any doubt what numeric system the aliens who built the Ship had favoured. The problem is with the sequencing. Base ten works well for certain sets of numerics on the codex, but not with others.”

He keyed up a diagram that appeared on the main wall of their boardroom.

“Using base ten,” Andrews explained, “we’ve identified the mathematical sets on the codex represented by a handful of runes that appeared only in conjunction with the numbers. Simple equations on the codex became evident once this was accomplished. But there are several false equations in the mix, equations that make no sense in base-ten mathematics. Some of those false equations become true if we switch to a base-five mathematic set, but others still remain false. Then there’s the textual half of the codex, long lines of runic text accompanied by a handful of numeric glyphs. The glyphs are invariably arranged into mathematical equations, but those equations aren’t similar to either congruent or incongruent equations on the numeric half. There seems to be no pattern to placement of the equations, either. There are considerably more true statements than false, but there are far too many false statements for them to be ignored altogether.” Andrews paused, making sure what he had said was understood by all.

“We’ve identified what we believe was the alien’s representation for the periodic table of elements, but we won’t be able to confirm that until we know for certain that base ten is the numerical system we’re dealing with.”

“We’re at an impasse until we’ve catalogued and classified every symbol on the codex,” Aiziz concluded, “and then we’ll have to determine how each symbol works in context with other symbols. We don’t know if the runes represent whole words, concepts or phonetic values. The numeric runes will determine much, but there will be much more that we will have to determine on our own.”

“You had less to work with when you and Mark deciphered the Quipu, Sonia,” Bloom said. “Right now you have a primer and the eager resources of the world’s linguists, scholars and mathematicians at your disposal. Keep in mind, though: out of all of them, you’re the one sitting here.”

Bloom consulted her workpad a moment and continued with the meeting.

“On the engineering side,” she said, “I’ve studied Doctor Scott’s notes, but until I go down to the Ship, there’s nothing I can yet bring to the table. Tomorrow, when we make our return excursion to the Ship, I might be able to lend a little more insight. Doctor Cole, you’ll be reporting to me privately regarding crew health later on today.”

“I still haven’t received your own evaluations from the Pentagon, Colonel,” Cole said. “I may ask to run my own health and psych profiles on you.”

“It won’t come to that,” Bloom said dryly. “Peter, you’re running operations. Any problems I should be aware of? Anything we need that we’re not getting?”

“Nothing like that,” he said. “The biggest problem I’ve had has been sorting the information sent from the different scientific analysis groups working for us. Our secure message spar receives something like a thousand linxes an hour. I don’t have enough people on-site to go through them all.”

“What would you need to control the volume of traffic?” Bloom asked.

Peter hesitated. He needed James; James was the hacker, not him.

“Right now, I only have thirty operators, working in two eight-hour shifts and using the standard heavy-traffic downlink processors built into their consoles,” Peter said. “I need twenty-five operators working per shift around the clock. And a Dexo CR-490 or equivalent context-recognition processor connected directly to the message spar’s baseline. Without that, half my people have to work filtering all the crap from the hard research, which’ll mean we’ll be hampered on what we gain from external research. We’ve changed the spar ident three times already, so that won’t keep the trolls, cranks and amateurs from hitting us.”

“I’ll put in the request to the World Council,” Bloom said.

She consulted her handheld console again.

“On to the trip down tomorrow, the Ship summit wants us to . . . oh, this is good. Until we’ve deciphered the codex, they want us to explore the surface of the Ship and find an alternate point of entry.”

“That’s a little like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Kodo remarked.

“Not necessarily, Doctor Kodo,” Andrews said. “Given the scale of the Ship and the number of interior levels we observed on the inside of the outer hull, it is safe to assume that there are several different points of entry, most probably including docking bays for support vehicles. The real problem would be identifying them and getting them open.”

“Astute,” Bloom said. “I wasn’t aware you had any engineering background, Doctor Andrews.”

“I don’t,” he said. “The Ship is the size of a city. With inner levels along the outer hull, multiple points of entry become possible without risk to the personnel and inhabitants in the inner hull itself. If you want, I could come up with a rough estimate of how many access points we can expect to find per square kilometre of the Ship’s surface,” he paused and then added, “for all the good it’ll do us.”

“What do you mean?” Bloom asked.

“If the builders had wanted us to have such easy access to the Ship, they wouldn’t have bothered sealing the first chamber, now would they?” Andrews replied. “I’ll wager you that any hatches accessible from the outside have been sealed and the rest can only be opened from the inside.”

“And we can barely get readings on the Ship as it is,” Peter said. “The thing’s impervious to laser cutting . . . there really is only one way in.”

“I want a look inside the Ship,” Bloom said. “And I wouldn’t mind getting a feel for its exterior geography, either. Tomorrow morning, we’ll go down and have a look around. In the afternoon, we’ll take a walk across its surface.” Everyone nodded, more than one face betraying smug mirth at Bloom’s disregard for the Ship summit’s directives in favour of taking the fantastic trip down to the first chamber again.

“Unless there’s any other business,” Bloom said, “we’ll adjourn. Peter, put together the gear for tomorrow’s descent. Doctor Cole, we’ll meet in my office in a half-hour.”

. . .

In this most Holy Dream, the Angel stood before Him near the entrance to the Pyramid. Gabriel Ashe beheld its presence as the Ship sang its siren song, aglow in the garish blue light of the fires of Hell. The Angel was a pillar of gold fire, aglow from within and without, amorphous but for its eyes. Unlike mortal humans, the Angels had three eyes, so that they could look upon the Lord without earning destruction. The Angel’s eyes were dark spheres of black violet, turned such for having looked upon the Lord. It approached him, a strange fore-image of itself preceding it. As the Angel drew nearer, its indistinct shape took the vaguest of mortal forms, the suggestion of legs and arms, blurred in movement below an asynchronous head.

“Remember this,” the Angel said in a voice like raw electricity, “for I speak the Word of your Father, the Lord.”

The Angel then set off for the Pyramid, leaving Ashe to follow. He could not but notice that the Angel had had no need to turn around, before moving down toward the Pyramid; it simply changed its point of view.

“I follow in the footsteps of the Angel of the Lord,” Ashe said, “and I shall fear no evil.”

They stood before the gaping black maw that was the opening into the Pyramid.

“You must pass through the gates and descend into the heart of the Golden Temple,” the Angel said, “for this is the Word of the Lord whom I serve. You will be baptized within and shown the way to spread the Word of the Lord to all mankind.”

“I will join My Father?”

“You will join Your Father.”

“Then show me how.”

And then the Angel moved forward and showed him.

. . .

It was cold before sunrise. She knew that as a fact of life about deserts and had experienced it herself many times in Australia, Africa and Brazil. Somehow she’d expected it to be warmer near the Ship. It meant that her usual running clothes of a tee shirt and shorts had to be traded in for sweat pants and a long-sleeve. Bloom had been nonetheless thrilled to discover Fort Arapaho boasted a run track along the edge of Ship’s Canyon, including a bridge that covered a natural curve in the rock. The bridge was all guard rails and grillwork; you could see right through it and down to the Ship, kilometres below. Bloom loved the echo of her feet hitting the bridge. The Shipsong seemed to wrap itself around the sound of her footfalls, the clanging percussion of sneaker on steel timing the rhythm of the strange, crystalline ululations. She couldn’t help but pause in her run, walking over to the guardrail on the bridge to stare out at the Ship, feeling a thrill of vertigo as she stood staring out at the gargantuan alien artifact. The horizon to the east was brightening mightily, the first glints of light beginning to be reflected from the Ship’s surface. The Shipsong echoed through the valley it had created to occupy. Even as the sun began rising, the Ship was still mainly aglow with the blue fire of its power source. Bloom marvelled over it for several long moments before realizing she had to turn around and start back or she’d be late for breakfast.

. . .

They made their way down the ramp to the base of the pyramid. The great door stood open as they had left it following their first descent into the Ship. No one from the expedition had been here since Echohawk and Scott had been killed. The Ship Survey Expedition stood silent before the entrance to the Ship a long moment, a respectful, ponderous pause. The Shipsong cycled through its strange alien notes and sounds, echoing throughout Ship’s Canyon and resonating powerfully around the members of the expedition. Finally, Bloom stepped forward and crossed the arch into the pyramid. She was strangely let down by the scene inside: the flat black walls of the interior, the raised dais upon which the lift car would rest when it rose from the bowels of the Ship. It seemed almost ordinary. A faint trickle of dust and dirt had scurried into the pyramid, drifting through the open door and into the far corners, curling around the side of the dais that faced the door. As the members of the expedition came in behind her, a wind turned the detritus into spinning dust devils. The wind came from the lift tube, whose sealing valve opened in anticipation of the approaching lift car. Bloom had gone to see Kodo that morning, and she had agreed with him: the valve was indeed biological and not nanotech. The Ship was indeed partially organic.

“Headsets on, people,” Bloom said as the wind’s rushing augmented.

The lift could be heard coming towards them, displacing the air between it and the pyramid as it ascended. The expedition members switched on their headsets, cameras recording. The lift car surged through the valve, coming to an abrupt and startling halt.

“That’s unbelievable,” Bloom said, taking tentative steps towards the gigantic lift car.

It reminded her of a titanic Faberge egg. She reached out to touch its surface. The crystal car’s eggshell walls split open, and the door into the lift appeared. Bloom stepped back as this occurred, drawn to the mimetic effect of the crystal walls. She turned to face the door as they waited for the car to seal and descend. Bloom watched as the door slid back into place and fused seamlessly shut.

“Any ideas on how the car knows all are aboard and ready to go?” she asked, her voice hushed.

“It appears to be automated,” Andrews supplied. “Although whether it’s triggered by the open door into the pyramid, or the presence of people within, is still a mystery. My guess is sensors either in the walls or floor count the number of people who enter the chamber and then the car.”

“One mystery of many,” Bloom said.

The car was swallowed into the darkness of the first leg of their journey. Soon they were dropping past the rings of blue light that marked passage through the tunnel and then came the climactic descent into the Ship’s vast interior.

“My dear God,” Bloom gasped.

The members of the Ship Survey Expedition were all faced outwards, peering at the wonders around them. The huge spires of the airframe bridged the gap between inner and outer hulls. Deck after massive deck, whole cities unto themselves encircled the upper half of the outer hull, some extending well into the airframes themselves. They wrapped around the interior of the Ship in a gigantic ring, joined to the outer hull and to whatever lay below their line of sight by tubes of flowing blue energy and the skeletal fingers of the airframe. Bloom craned her head up to take in more of the Ship’s interior as they dropped away from it. The curvature of the Ship was dizzying from the inside, and Bloom felt like an ant staring up at the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. As massive as the Ship was, it was also a thing of beauty. The gold and black of its interior was a majestic triumph of engineering, of art, of the ability to create. She was looking at the fulfilled promises of a thousand legends: El Dorado, Atlantis, the City of God, Shangri-La . . . Had the hearts of the prophets and storytellers who spoke of those places been somehow brought here, to this place in their dreams? As the car brought them to the end of their journey and down into the first chamber of the inner hull, Bloom felt robbed, cheated of the wonders she had seen. She was unsurprised by the dampness on her face. Kodo, Aiziz and Peter, she saw, had also been overwhelmed by their emotions during their congress to the inner hull.

Bloom’s hand traced itself around the brilliant blue band of encased energy that bisected the walls of the round chamber. The walls of the golden room had the same mosaic appearance as the floor of the lift. As did the ceiling, save for where the white light shone through. Only the floor, a smoothly polished yet flat and reflectionless black, differed. The codex dominated the room from its central position. The large, black stone fairly commanded attention. Andrews and Aiziz looked from the codex to their workpads, to the keypad by the sealed door.

“If the numbers are base ten, then this is definitely a periodic table,” Kodo said, studying the stone with the pair. “The layout is perfect, and from what I remember of atomic construction, the runes associated with this pattern would seem for the most part to match them.”

“For the most part,” Andrews stressed, “but even from what I remember of the sciences I took in school, I know there are far too many elements listed. What is the currently accepted prediction? No more than twelve additional elements are possible?”

“Something like that,” Kodo conceded, “but up until a few years ago, there were only a hundred and twenty-six elements on the table. There are a hundred and thirty-one now.”

“There would appear to be over two hundred symbols on this table,” Andrews said. “What do you make of that?”

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Kodo said. “Of the twelve predicted elements left to our periodic table, none of them are likely to be stable matter. How much do you want to bet most of the new elements here will be stable? I bet they will be. But, hell . . . I’m still trying to figure out the extra chromosome pairs and strange components in the cells I lifted off the lift tube valve.”

“Extra components seem to be something the builders enjoyed,” Andrews said bitterly.

Aiziz gasped and looked at Andrews and Kodo.

“That’s the key,” she said. “The extra components. I’m sure of it.”

“How do you mean?”

“The equations that are evidently false. I don’t think they are,” Aiziz said. “I think they’re meant to call attention to themselves, to show us something else.”

“Like what?” Andrews asked.

Aiziz stepped back from the codex, her eyes roving until she could take it all in, at a glance. She ran her eyes across the surface of the black stone with grim determination. Andrews and Kodo watched her. Soon, Bloom was turning to regard the younger woman, as was Peter. At once, Aiziz’s eyes froze and widened in dawning realization.

“Sonia?” Bloom and Andrews asked, as one.

“I think . . . I . . . yes. Yes, I believe so.”

She used her stylus to scribble fiercely across her workpad, pausing only long enough to study the codex before continuing with another burst of scrawling. She did this for several minutes and then moved for the keypad on the far left of the codex. She keyed in a series of glyphs and runes and then pressed the stand-alone rune that appeared comparable to an “execute” key. There was a thud and then a hiss. The door from the first chamber rolled down into the floor, and a short corridor beyond began to light up.

Chapter Ten: First Contacts

James Johnson stared gravely at the door before him. They’d already scraped the gold-lined black lettering from the door. The words

Prof. Mark Echohawk

had once graced the frosted glass panel in the doorframe of the office in UCLA’s Costen Institute. Now the glass was bare. James put the key in the door, turning the lock. Yesterday he’d sorted through the Prof’s papers, checking the curriculum and assigning the work to the teachers who’d taken over Echohawk’s classes. James had sent Echohawk’s journals on to the World Aboriginal Anthropological Society as per Echohawk’s last will and testament. Today James would be cataloguing the pieces in Echohawk’s private collection, including photos, video chips and countless artifacts ranged along shelves in Echohawk’s office suite. Some pieces were to be distributed to colleagues, friends, family, the rest of it to be boxed up and sent on to museums. James didn’t want to be here. He’d slept poorly the night before, and the circumstances surrounding his first few waking moments today left him in a dark mood, indeed.

. . .

He’d woken up gasping for breath, his belly a tight, cold knot of terror. It took a moment for James’ breathing to come under control, several moments more for his heart to slow down. There was enough light coming in from outside for him to identify his surroundings: Laura’s living room. There was not enough light for his terror to be extinguished. Another nightmare. The Prof’s death played out again. This time, he was the Prof, getting shot, feeling the pain . . . getting shot again, falling over and knowing that these were the last few seconds he would be alive. James rolled out of bed, got into an undershirt and sweat pants and shuffled into the kitchen. He paused when he heard a low moan coming from down the hallway. He could hear bedsprings creaking rhythmically. Allison and Laura had gone out that night. He’d remained behind, declining the invitation to come with. They’d come home long after he’d gone to bed. One of them apparently hadn’t come home alone. As another, louder, swooning sound of pleasure escaped down the hallway, James felt both aroused and so very alone. But above all, the terror, the irrefutable knowledge that he would one day die, that he would grow old, degenerate and finally expire. From the time he had been a child, James had had doubts about whether or not he had a soul, though the five-year-old boy he’d been would never have been able to articulate it that way.

“Childhood’s over when you know you’re going to die,” James said.

It was a quote from an old, old movie. A movie about death and resurrection, as he remembered. Resurrection was a concept James wasn’t sure he believed in any longer. Death was an all too present inevitability. A door in the kitchen led out onto a balcony. He went outside to breathe in the night air. He was so afraid of dying. Watching the Prof’s death had triggered that fear, released the genie from a bottle he thought he’d sealed a long time ago. He stayed out on the balcony, overlooking a small green space, taking in the night air and the stars for quite some time. It helped bring down the panic, but it did nothing for the fear. After a little while, he heard the door to the fridge open and caught light from its lone sentinel of a bulb. Inside the kitchen, Allison was taking a long, thirsty pull from a bottle of orange juice. James was unaware. She felt the breeze against her bare legs below her nightshirt. The door onto the balcony was open and James stood outside, watching the sky.

“James?”

He turned around and watched as Allison came outside.

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”

“No,” she said. “James, are you all right?”

He couldn’t help noticing the smell of sex on her. It was potent, her scent spicy and musk at once. It made him feel again as alone as aroused. It also made him feel intrusive. She had better things to do right now. He wasn’t one of them.

“Yeah,” he said. “Bad dreams.”

“About Laura’s dad?”

She took another step forward, the light from the still-open fridge enough to silhouette her beneath the filmy fabric of her night shirt. He tried not to notice the way the cool air hardened her nipples.

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh.

“James,” she said, reaching to hug him.

He let her, more from the need for comfort than anything else. But while Allison was in his arms, he became uncomfortably aware of how warm she was under the nightshirt and that it was damp from perspiration. Her shoulder felt disconcertingly there under his palm, her breasts too present in their warm weight against his chest, her hip pressed a little too close to his for the interminably short hug, and then she broke contact to regard him.

“James, you have to try and take it easy,” she said. “We’re going out to do stuff tomorrow, you and me, to take your mind off of things. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

As terrified as he was of his own mortality, at that moment James had a completely different set of things to take off of his mind.

“Get some rest, James. Okay?” she said, with an encouraging smile.

She kissed his cheek and padded back to bed, kicking the fridge door shut as she walked past. James turned back to the green space but regarded it from behind closed eyes. And Allison was all he could see.

“Get a grip, James,” he muttered. “The last thing you need right now is the hots for your ex-girlfriend’s roommate.”

. . .

And now as he catalogued antiquities, it was thoughts of death and of Allison’s warm body pressed against his that were captured in James’ mind, fear and longing, neither feeling bringing comfort. He turned on the radio on the Prof’s desk, hoping music would keep him from hearing the sound of Allison’s voice in a lover’s rapture. He’d not been paying much attention to the radio until he heard the announcement that the Ship Survey Expedition had just gained access to the Ship’s interior.

. . .

The Encyclical Council was meeting with Santino’s group, the subject of the meeting of course focused on the creation myth. Santino, Rabbi Abrams, Mufti Ressam and Brahman Radu sat to one side of an ancient conference table, and Cardinal Santangelo and three bishops sat at the other end.

“There’s honestly not much we can tell you at this point,” Rabbi Abrams told them. “We are evidently not the only intelligent life in the universe and most probably not one of God’s first creations.”

Abrams had become Santino’s council’s de-facto leader, a wise and guiding voice among their ranks.

“That is precisely our problem, Rabbi,” the cardinal said. “How significant do we become in our creator’s eyes if we are one of many? What is our place in creation?”

“‘Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?’” Mufti Ressam replied, quoting from the Gospel of Luke. “If we have one thing we can agree on it is that God’s love is universal. There are millions, billions, perhaps, of different forms of life on planet Earth. God loves all his creations.”

Cardinal Santangelo shook his head.

“What concerns us, Mufti, is that in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus also tells us, ‘But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.’ We have all been told time and again that we are God’s chosen people. If the human race is simply one among many, if we are not the chosen people, then who are we?”

“I would like to remind you if I may, Cardinal,” Radu said, “that we Buddhists do not believe that we are God’s chosen people. We do not believe in any manifest destiny for humanity in the greater universe. Perhaps it is time you started to look at this from our point of view. We have always maintained that we are but one of many wonders in the universe.”

“That may work fine for the Eastern traditions, Brahman Radu,” the cardinal said, “but how would it upset the teachings and history of Semitic and Gentile traditions?”

“‘Love thy neighbour as you would love thyself?’” Radu countered. “It sounds like a universal truth to me.”

Before the cardinal could reply, one of the bishops accompanying him received a linx on his headset.

“I’m sorry, Cardinal,” he said, “but I’ve just received a message from the council. The Ship Survey Expedition has unlocked the inner hull of the Ship.”

. . .

Allison was curled into her favourite chair, her console in her lap. A steaming mug of coffee sat in a cup stand to the right of the chair. She was switching between channels, looking for something worth viewing. She flagged a nature documentary on insects as a possible and continued searching. An image caught her eye as she slipped past it. She returned to that channel. It was a picture of the Ship as seen from the Zuni Mountain Range. The image changed as the familiar face of an INN anchor appeared. Behind him was a picture of Colonel Bloom.

“Hey Laura, your mom’s on INN again!” Allison called.

She picked up her headset and linked into the console, studying the image on the screen. Allison keyed the INN story up and began viewing. In her room, Laura was linking her own console to INN. The anchor began speaking right at the start of the newscast.

“Good afternoon and welcome to the Interactive News Network. Colonel Margaret Bloom, leader of the Ship Survey Expedition, announced this morning that the Ship Survey Expedition succeeded in gaining access to the Ship from the first chamber. Access was made possible thanks to the discovery made by Professor Sonia Aiziz, about the nature of the codex found in the first chamber.”

Each keyword said by the anchor generated an icon at the bottom of the console screen. Icons linking to Bloom’s biographical data, to an information page on the SSE and images from the descent into the Ship and the exploration of the first chamber appeared along the bottom of the screen. Other icons for the codex, on Aiziz and on her report to the ship summit closed out the list. Allison continued with the headline newscast.

“The sealed door in the first chamber opened down a small corridor and into another, larger chamber beyond,” the anchor said; Allison linked to the icon that read “SECOND CHAMBER AND BEYOND”.

. . .

They all stared down the open passage. The next chamber was aglow, inviting them in. Aiziz, closest to the now-open door, had the clearest view. From her vantage, she could see that the door into the next chamber was inscribed with another of the runes of Shiplanguage. As for the hall between the two chambers, it was a plain enough passage by the Ship’s standards: golden walls, bisected by a brilliant blue band of energy, the golden ceiling transparently backlit by orbs of soft light.

“How did you do that, Sonia?” Bloom asked. “Holy shit.”

“The codex isn’t a language primer,” Aiziz said. “Not in the true sense. It is a list of their alphabet, their numeric system and, yes, even their periodic table. But among the many equations and basic statements were what appeared to be false statements and false equations. That was not the case. The equations and statements were all coordinate sets; rows and columns. The false numbers that confused us were the key. Each supposedly false number was actually the atomic weight of one of the elements on the periodic table. The false runic values similarly located specific runes in the textual grid. It was just a matter of determining which number represented rows and which one represented columns.”

“Congratulations, Sonia,” Bloom said. “If that doesn’t earn you the Nobel Prize, nothing will.”

Sonia smiled and accepted the praise of her fellow expedition members with good humour. But there was still bad news.

“The problem is we are still no closer to deciphering the Ship’s language,” she said. “All we have is a list of several hundred runes, of which we only know the meaning of a handful. We still have no sense of their grammatical structure, or conjugation.”

“We’re getting there,” Bloom said.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Kodo said, “but I’m ready to get going on into the rest of the Ship.”

“Hold on,” Bloom said. “There are some things we have to cover first. Peter, how’s our link to the surface?”

Peter checked his portable console.

“We’re doing good,” he said. “But I’d like to set up relay points down here. We’re getting deeper into the Ship, and its hull is starting to mess with the signal. According to the lag time between the beacon navigator and the beacon, we’re a good five kilometres down. Topside’s another time zone from here.”

“How long will it take to set up another relay transmitter down here?” Bloom asked.

“Counting round trip topside, I could have it done in half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes.”

“That being the case, I think we should go back up ourselves and make our reports to the World Ship Summit before we continue,” Bloom replied. She toggled her linx and spoke: “Doctor Cole? I’ll need you to have some of your EMTs set up a small ambulatory center down here in the first chamber.” She paused as Cole made her reply, and then Bloom said: “We’re going into the Ship, Doctor, and I’ll want first responders down here on scene. All right. I’ll see you shortly.”

She cut the link and gestured for everyone to follow her to the elevator. They did so, reluctantly.

“The Ship’s waited sixty-five million years for us,” she said. “Believe me: it’s going to still be here when we get back.”

. . .

“Good afternoon, Major,” Bloom said as Benedict sat down at the table she had taken in the officers’ mess.

Like most of the buildings on the base that served no direct military, administrative or research objectives, the officers’ mess looked out over the Ship. Bloom had chosen a table near a window.

“Good afternoon, Colonel,” Benedict said before digging in to his lunch. It was a little past noon, and shortly after returning to the surface, Bloom had scheduled this lunch meeting with her second-in-command, who was also serving as security officer.

“Good coffee here,” Bloom said, sipping from her mug.

“Not as good as we had skyside,” Benedict said. “Concord 3 had the best damn coffee I’ve gotten in a commissary.”

“The disadvantage being we had to drink it from a plastic sip-pouch.”

Benedict grinned.

“It’s good to be back under you, Colonel.”

It was Bloom’s turn to grin.

“If I had a dollar for every time a man said that to me. . .”

They laughed and ate in silence a few moments.

“How would you say the SSE is adjusting to the security measures?” Bloom asked.

“Bitchy,” Benedict replied. “It’s furloughs into town that are going to be really problematic. Washington wants to send in the Secret Service if they need escorts. Geneva looks inclined to agree.”

“What have we been able to tie to Ashe?”

“Sweet fuck, all,” was Benedict’s bitter reply between mouthfuls of lunch. “Goddamn, this macaroni salad’s like rubber! Shit. No, Ashe is resourceful. The gun used in the assassination was completely clean. Never used before in connection with anything. Registry information hasn’t been able to turn up anyone connected to the Untied Trinity Observants in the village who owns that kind of gun. We’re spreading our search to the national database, but so far nothing. Plus because fourteen member nations of the World Council have recognized the Observants as a legitimate religion, the World Ship Summit’s upheld their right to be in the village, despite the obvious connection between them and the slayings.”

“Obvious but improvable,” Bloom said. “Ashe is going down. I’m going to see to it. I owe that fuck. I want to know everything that goes on inside that lunatics asylum he calls a church. I want full reports from you and the civilian authority. I’m not going to be happy until they haul that bastard off to the shithouse to rot.”

“We do have some leads from informants inside.”

“Nothing from his inner circle,” Bloom countered. “And that means nothing that INN and Interpol haven’t already told us.”

“No. But we’re trying there, too. We know that Ashe is planning something; we just don’t know what yet. He seems to be divesting power to his inner circle. They may be forming terrorist cells.”

“I’m supposed to be taking the SSE back into the Ship in a few minutes. We opened the way out of the first chamber and twenty minutes later the whole fucking world knew about it. And tomorrow we’re scheduled to start crawling around the outside of the thing, looking for a shortcut inside.”

“You want extra security?”

“I want a full security net on the SSE,” Bloom replied. “Tactical response, emergency response and evac standing by. I want guards posted at the entrances into the Ship and in the first chamber as well as an escort with each SSE team. I want attack helicopters on the perimeter and snipers guarding every access to the base, the expedition and the Ship.”

“You expecting to be attacked?”

“I don’t know what to expect. And the lives of the people on the Ship Survey Expedition are my primary concern. So I’m going to cover all the possible plays.” Benedict nodded.

“I’ll have a full security detail ready before you leave for the pyramid,” he said.

“Good,” Bloom said, rising, her lunch done. “I’ll see you before we leave then, Major.”

He rose as she left, taking her tray with her to the trash.

“Oh, and Major?” This came as he was about to sit back down to the rest of his lunch.

“Colonel?”

“When I get back from today’s expedition, I’m going to want to sit down and discuss Ashe. So you and Police Chief Raven are best advised to keep the early evening free.”

. . .

Doctor Cole’s medical staff had finished setting up a fully equipped emergency trauma unit by lunchtime. By 1:00 P.M., the Ship Survey Expedition had returned. The codex that dominated the center of the vast room now served to delineate the trauma clinic from the rest of the first chamber. Bloom gave the new infirmary a cursory inspection as Doctor Cole and her staff stood by.

“Very nice,” Bloom said. “I just hope we don’t need any of you to do more than treat a skinned knee.”

“I feel much the same way,” Cole said, hoisting on a moderate-sized backpack. “I’ll be accompanying you as you make your way into the Ship. The expedition is to have trained responders with them at all times, and I can think of none better than the SSE’s chief medical officer.”

“Glory hound,” Andrews chided her, jokingly.

They made their way over to the open doorway, all eyes staring expectantly down the corridor beyond. Finally Bloom turned to Aiziz.

“You figured it out, Sonia. This is your show.”

She gestured for the young linguist to cross the threshold.

“I feel as though I should say something,” she said. “Make some eloquent speech for the permanent record of these events. Nothing comes to mind, though, and I hate public speaking.”

She stepped across the threshold and into the corridor beyond. Here the floor was a polished blue, the same colour as the bands of energy flowing to the right and the left of the hall, though non-luminous. Aiziz, followed closely by Andrews, Bloom and the rest of the Ship Survey Expedition made their way down the short, wide hallway towards the door on the far end. A black rune was engraved in the gold surface of the door. The rune was made up of a series of interlocked rings and curved lines. In the upper left corner of the rune, a lone ring sat. Its opposite number sat in the lower right corner of the room. Between the two, three interlocked rings of different sizes, one inside another, burst out towards two lines, curved away from the rings. The mirror opposite of this image completed the sojourn to the lower right ring; two upwards curving lines interlocked with the lines above and stood guard over three more interlocked rings and the lone ring in the lower right.

“Is that one of the runes you found?” Bloom asked Aiziz.

“Yes,” the linguist replied. “But not one I was able to properly classify.”

“Curious and curiouser,” Bloom mused.

The door dropped down through the floor as they reached it.

“They must have an awful lot of space between decks, wouldn’t you think, Colonel Bloom?” Andrews asked.

“They’d have to,” Bloom said as they stepped towards the dark opening. “Unless the doors are made of some sort of mimetic material.”

“An interesting thought,” Andrews said. “One that leads to several different possibilities.”

Bloom ducked her head in through the door. The chamber beyond was dark. There was little possibility that there was anything threatening inside. Unless, a tiny voice in the back of her mind whispered, that these chambers and corridors were all part of an elaborate test full of tricks and traps. She suddenly felt—

“—Very much like rats in a maze.”

Aiziz and Andrews turned to regard her.

“It’s an apt analogy, I think,” Aiziz replied. “Though not entirely called for at the moment.”

She swallowed hard and then crossed into the chamber.

. . .

James arrived home late that afternoon, burdened with several bags of groceries. Allison and Laura were in the living room directly across from the kitchen.

“Hey guys,” James said as he got inside. “What’s new?”

“My mom’s on INN again,” Laura said.

“What’s happened?” James asked, heading to the kitchen.

“They discovered some sort of archive in the Ship,” Allison supplied.

James peered through the doorway in the kitchen into the living room. The monitor screen on the wall was linked to INN, and Bloom’s image onscreen was frozen. Behind her was a picture from inside the Ship. Without a frame of reference, James couldn’t tell what the picture was supposed to be. Not that he had much interest. Since he’d left the SSE, James had avoided news of the Ship wherever possible.

“Coming to watch?” Laura asked.

“No, that’s okay,” James replied, ducking back into the kitchen. “I’ll catch the stream later.”

Laura and Allison shared a look. They knew he wouldn’t. Laura understood why, or at least part of why. She was still having bad moments since her dad died. They were diminishing, but even she was still prone to them. But James seemed to shut down a little whenever the subject of the Ship or something related to it came up. James made a point of keeping to the kitchen while Laura and Allison went over the INN stream about Laura’s mom.

“You want me to go talk to him?” Allison asked Laura in a low voice.

“I wish he’d come talk to me,” Laura said. “He and I have been friends for
a long time. He’s supposed to be able to do that. So why won’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Allison replied. “It’s not like he tells me much, either. I’ve tried to get him to talk to me about this, too. He only says so much and no more.”

“Men are fucked,” Laura said and turned back to the wall console, upon whose screen the image of her mother was still frozen in place.

Laura toggled a button on her earpiece.

“Resume,” she said, bringing Bloom’s image back to life.

James heard none of their exchange from the kitchen. And even if he had, he still wouldn’t have been able to find the words or the voice to use them. How could he explain how thoughts of his own mortality plagued him every hour of every day? How when he was out at the university, working in the archives, he was aware of each passing minute and could feel the day’s end when work was done as another day he’d never live? He felt the same when he slept too late: that he’d squandered precious time. Not even yet thirty, James could feel the weight of his years and measure it against the years that he might have left. So many things he’d never done, his youth almost over. The last ten years had gone in the blink of an eye. One day he’d been a high school graduate and the next he was working his way through the final months of his doctoral studies while helping to excavate the Ship. Allison came into the kitchen and sat down beside him. She waited, watching him long moments as he browsed the Grid from his portable console. Finally, she took his console from him and set it aside.

“How much longer do you think you can keep this shit bottled up, James?” she asked.

He looked at her a long, difficult moment. Their encounter on the balcony had happened much earlier that morning, but it was still achingly fresh in James’ mind. He found it hard to look at Allison, remembering the sounds he’d heard her making for most of the morning and the scent of sex that had been on her skin. He wanted to talk about what was going on in his head. He wanted to talk about it with Allison. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her for the right reasons.

“Let’s not get into this now, please,” he said, at length.

“If not now, then when, James?” she asked. He sighed heavily.

“Tonight,” he said. “Okay? We’ll go out and we’ll go grab a coffee somewhere. I just . . . I just want a chance to put my thoughts together a little first.”

“I’m going to hold you to this,” Allison warned. “Tonight.”

“All right,” he conceded.

For millions of years, the Ship had waited for indigenous sentient life to discover and then to unearth it. A patient entity, the Ship had not minded the long, solitary vigil. It had been engineered to traverse extragalactic space with its crew safely in hibernation. The Ship was used to solitude and idleness. However, when it had at last been discovered, there was a certain excitement to the sudden activity. When the subjects had completed the first test and descended into the Ship, it immediately began studying them, the technology they carried and their means of communication, which proved to be largely aural with some physical gesticulation. They had a grasp of written language as well, for it wasn’t long before they had solved the second, more complicated context-recognition test. Therefore judged ready for first contact, the Ship opened the first of two doors leading further into its secretive interior. Soon, the subjects would learn how to enter into direct communication with the Ship, and then a final determination of their intelligence would begin. . .

The chamber they stepped into was brilliantly lit from its vaulted ceiling, the gold walls lined with what appeared to be consoles or workstations. The spacious room was built around a large central dais, which suddenly unfolded as the members of the Ship Survey Expedition entered. A large black column rose from its center, and a panel covered in Shiplanguage runes and numeric icons blossomed below it.

“HYSANIHUZA POGU VU WY,” came a thunderous voice from all around them. Aiziz realized that the voice had the same crystalline timbre and tone as Shipsong. The black column in the center of the dais suddenly blossomed in gold runes and icons. Their ordered placement could only mean one thing.

“Dear God, we’ve found the language lab,” Aiziz said in hushed tones.

Every screen surrounding the central column lit up with different runes and icons in different configurations.

“My God, it’s genius!” Andrews exclaimed, rushing over to one of the panels. “These are geometric equations and diagrams. And on this screen . . . this looks like trigonometry.”

“I think I’ve found the periodic table, over here!” Kodo announced, standing by another panel. “I count two hundred and twenty-seven elements, but it’s definitely the periodic table; looks like we have basic molecular layouts on the screens opposite.”

“Test and simple images here,” Aiziz said. “It appears to be just basic shapes and word associations, but it could mean anything.”

“Doctor Kodo, over here, please,” Doctor Cole called.

As the biologist came over, Cole pointed to the screen in front of her.

“Doctor, would you say that this is a cell diagram?”

“Definitely, Doctor Cole,” Kodo replied. “It looks like it has all the same strange components as the cells I extracted from the lift tube, but it’s definitely a cell.”

And so it went throughout the room. The SSE spent the rest of the afternoon recording and collecting data from the thirty-one terminals surrounding the central dais. They discovered information relating to chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy. Other panels weren’t immediately identifiable, but Aiziz and Andrews seemed more than satisfied with what they had gleaned.

“We have more than enough to begin deciphering Shiplanguage,” Aiziz said. “We obviously won’t be able to discuss elaborately abstract concepts with the Ship yet, but we will be able to do that eventually, once we’ve established direct communication with the Ship.”

. . .

“The doors are now sealed. . .”

The minister tuned out slightly as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave the now-familiar opening oration to the meeting of the committee chairs. The minister glanced over the eight other faces on his console screen as the chairman’s image dominated the center of his screen.

“Our operatives within the Ship Survey Expedition report a stunning breakthrough,” the chairman said. “They are at this hour being debriefed by the World Ship Summit. As of now, only they know what we know: a language lab was found in the second chamber, and the SSE has begun learning how to communicate with the Ship.”

“Once communication has been established, we should expect the SSE to be able to breach the south door from the first chamber,” the curator said, “which will probably mean they’ll have full access to the Ship.”

“Unless,” the British defence minister said, her image now sharing the main screen with the curator’s, “the south door opens into another test. If they even manage to enter into communication with the Ship at all.”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” asked the solicitor general.

“The committee did a study on this a number of years back,” the British defence minister said. “First, communication with an intelligent alien life form depends on at least some similar evolutionary characteristics. We assume that sight, hearing, taste and smell will be senses universal to intelligent life. They most probably are not. The sense of touch is most probably the only sense that we would have in common with alien beings. And even then, their perceptions might differ from our own.”

“What other possible senses could there be?” the minister for natural resources asked.

The British defence minister shrugged.

“Virtually anything,” she said. “Telepathy, chemical communication; they might perceive only the infrared or ultraviolet ends of the electromagnetic spectrum instead of what we call visible light. They might be able to sense gravity, or even changes in local spacetime. We simply have no way of knowing.”

“Isn’t it safe to assume they have visual abilities, given the runes that we found?” the White House chief of staff asked, “and considering the liquid crystal imaging technology we recovered from the Bug?”

“That the aliens have or had visual acuity is likely,” the British minister conceded, “but not necessarily very similar to our own. A multispectral scan of the imaging system aboard the Groom Lake Bug revealed that the system was broadcasting images on several wavelengths invisible to the human eye.”

“In any event,” the chairman interjected, bringing the debate back to topic, “we must plan for the contingency that they will gain access to the rest of the Ship.”

“Indeed,” MI-6 said. “Before the World Council gets inside, we must have operatives within acquiring technology for us.”

“Why?” the minister asked, for the first time challenging MI-6. “To what end? The World Ship Summit and the oversight commission will be handling the catalogue and assessment of any technologies found within.”

“Precisely why we have to get there first,” MI-6 replied testily, unused to being questioned. “The committee’s goal is to acquire alien technologies to the advantage of our respective governments, Minister. If the World Council is to decide who gets what from the Ship and what technology is to be restricted or utterly banned, there will be no advantage.”

“To that end,” the chairman said, “I propose we prepare of team of operatives to infiltrate the Ship if and when access is acquired.”

“Will Colonel Bloom be in a position to grant us access?” the chief of staff asked.

“She’s in no position to refuse,” the chairman growled.

“I agree and second the motion,” MI-6 said.

From his offices in London, the head of MI-6 crouched in closer to his console’s camera plate. The image of his face on the minister’s console grew perceptively. It was almost as if MI-6 were addressing him. In fact, the minister suspected he was.

“All in favour?” MI-6 asked a fraction of a second before the chairman could.

The minister took a moment to consider his position. He’d voiced his objections. Did he truly have enough reason to dissent here, to go against both MI-6 and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

“Aye,” the minister said when his turn came.

. . .

They were just outside of L.A. in a deserted park that Allison liked to frequent, sitting on the hood of her car and smoking a home-rolled joint. She blew the ash off the end of the cherry with a short puff and passed the joint to James. She held her breath as he took his hits, exhaling only as he passed it back to her. Before she took a hit, she spoke:

“Okay, James,” she said. “Seriously, I don’t know you that well. But even I can tell you’re not normally as tense and brooding as you’ve been since you moved in.”

She took a hit, held it a second and exhaled. She continued speaking.

“I know that it’s not just about Laura’s dad, because even she’s picking up the pieces better than you are. So the way I see it, the shooting triggered something else that’s burning your chip.”

She took a proper toke from the joint and passed it back. He took a long haul off of it, as though it were a cigarette. He coughed it out a second later and flicked the ash off the end of the joint. Allison took it as James began talking.

“Well, it’s like you said,” he began, “I don’t know you very well, and this is shit I’ve never really talked to anyone about before.”

He took the spliff back and took his own hits.

“What’s the problem, James?” she asked, her tone serious and somewhat annoyed. “Laura’s worried; I don’t know you well, but I like you and I’m worried. What the hell is up, James?”

“I—,” he began, grasping for words. “The Prof—.”

He shook his head. She took the joint. It was nearly done. She threw it down the gravel roadway leading into the hillside rest stop. He looked at her. She waited patiently for him to speak.

“Do you believe in anything?” he asked her.

“What?”

“Do you believe in God? Or in life after death? Or reincarnation? Any of that?” Allison was taken aback by the question. The drugs were kicking in, and it wasn’t entirely great trying to focus on such issues when she’d just been trying to get James to open up.

“Well, yeah,” she said, “I . . . well, I’m a Marian Pagan.”

“A what?”

“You’re going to have to give me a second, James,” she replied, reaching into her purse. “I need a butt, and could you get me a can of Coke from the car? My throat’s paste.”

“Sure,” he said, dropping off the hood of the car and moving to the door.

“James? What has any of this got to do with you?”

“Just tell me what you believe,” he said. “Okay?”

Allison rolled her eyes. There was nothing worse having a conversation with somebody who was stoned and trying to make a point. He came back with her Coke and his ginger ale.

“So what is a . . . Marian Pagan?”

“I follow the goddess worship tradition that says Maid Marian, from the Robin Hood legends, was the high priestess of the goddess’s cult. It’s not the same thing as Christian Marianistic Paganism, which is about making the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene into goddess figures, but the two get confused all the time,” she told him as she finished lighting her cigarette. He took one, lit it.

“Wait. Paganism . . . isn’t that like witchcraft and all that?”

“No,” she replied. “Although most pagan beliefs incorporate magick into their ceremonies, paganism is not strictly witchcraft. Marianism does use spellcraft and some earth magick, but we don’t classify ourselves as witches. We pray, we get together, we study our religion, and we try our best to come to know the Goddess.”

“Okay, so then who was Robin Hood?”

“The high priest of Hearn the Hunter, a forest god represented by a stag,” she replied. “He was consort to the Earth Goddess, and his horned image was bastardized by the early church into that of the devil, and what the hell does any of this have to do with your problems, James?”

“I was raised Catholic,” he said. “I was raised to believe that Jesus died for our sins and came back to life so that we could live forever in communion with God. The thing is, since the Ship was found . . . well, I’ve been having some doubts. And then . . . when the Prof . . . died . . . I was raised to believe . . . I kept expecting . . . to feel something; to have some sensation, some knowledge that his soul had passed on. The bitch of it . . . the bitch of it is that I didn’t feel a fucking thing when he died. Not a fucking thing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think.”

He was choking out the words at the end, and when he stopped speaking, he took a long, angry drag from his cigarette. The wind blew the smoke into his face and burned the tears he was trying not to shed from his eyes. He snuffed a leak back into his sinuses and took another haul off the cigarette.

“Fuck,” he rasped.

Allison put an arm around his shoulders.

“James,” she said. “Gods, James, I didn’t know.”

“It’s not exactly something that comes up, is it?”

“James. . .”

She rubbed his back in what she hoped was a supportive manner.

“I was raised to believe that God sent his only son to Earth to die for our sins,” James said. “I was raised to believe that God made us. He loved us so much, he died for us. Well, if God sent the messiah to us here on Earth, what did he do for all the other species of life that must inhabit the galaxy? For all we know, there isn’t a single animal alive on this planet that didn’t evolve from something the Ship brought here! Where does God fit in to all that? Everybody always says that Constantine and the early church bastardized history and Jesus’ teachings for their own end, and now they’re saying that the Ship helps prove what a fraud the whole of Christianity is. Everything I’ve been taught to believe’s just been incredibly fucked up by the Ship. You’re supposed to know, to feel something when someone dies right in front of you. You’re supposed to witness something. Feel something, think something . . . I don’t fucking know. But that’s what I don’t understand. What happened to the Prof, after he died? What happens to us when we die?”

Allison held him then, simply drawing him into her arms. He went gladly, and for a long time, she just hugged him tightly against her.

“James, this is really heavy shit you’re trying to deal with,” she said after a long silence. “I know, because I’ve been there. I don’t know if you’ll find the same answers I did or if you’ll find any answer at all. But James, you’ve got to learn to talk things out sometimes. Laura and I are your friends. That’s what we’re here for.”

“I don’t think you guys can help me with this,” he said, pulling away from her.

He shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it, taking a long drag.

“It’s a rough road to go down alone, James.” She turned him so he was facing her. “I don’t want to see you get lost along the way.”

“I . . . thanks,” he said.

She kissed him lightly.

“You’re welcome.”

. . .

It had been a long and tiresome night, and it didn’t feel to Bloom that it was ever going to end. Aiziz and Andrews had been at the language lab until Bloom and Doctor Cole both ordered them up. Then there were the debriefings. Aiziz explaining to the SSE that the language program had shown her the key to understanding the Shiplanguage and how it was now in the process of teaching her and Andrews how to speak it. Then Kodo had shown them the original tissue samples he’d taken from the Ship’s organic components. The upper layer of cells in each sample had gone through a process that had hardened them. The cells underneath still seemed to be normal, at least as normal as he could determine, relative to the Ship. Kodo was looking into the process, including a metallurgical analysis of the hardened cells, but he had nothing yet. The general debriefing was followed by supper, in this case pizza and beer. After supper came the debriefing to the World Ship Summit. Then Doctor Cole delivered her report on the SSE to Bloom. Kodo and Peter were bearing up well, but smoking far too many joints in their off-hours. Aiziz and Andrews might be developing an obsession with the Ship. Some of the peripheral members of the SSE, studying the Ship from the points of view of geological history, radio spectrometry, scans and other such esoterica, were showing signs of strain. Two were cases of APCSD, a term long-ago coined by whatever government department had originally thought up the idea of an extraterrestrial first contact: the acronym stood for alien post contact shock disorder. The three other cases of strain were from people unable to handle the workload. In all five cases, Cole recommended sending them packing. Bloom concurred and highlighted Cole’s recommendation to the World Ship Summit that the APCSD cases were given immediate and mandatory therapeutic treatment. After all was said and done, Bloom sat in her quarters eating cold pizza. Once her appetite had been sated, Bloom declared the day done. She showered and made for bed. She had just fallen asleep when the first explosion woke her.

A universal truth of all intelligent life is that their first contact with an alien civilization is invariably cathartic. It is also universally true that all post-contact civilizations go through a period of panic. The distinction is that some civilizations survive this panic and some do not.

Chapter Eleven: Crisis

“The Lord Your God calls upon you to soldier for the cause of the salvation of His Son,” Gabriel Ashe said in His hypnotic monotone.

Before Him were the Chosen. Those marked by His closest disciples as being ready to fight, to die for Christ’s Son. The sun was high in the sky outside Ashe’s Church; the SSE had just breached the Second Chamber as had been foretold to Him in His visions. Ashe knew that this was the sign He had been waiting for. He had known since waking from the Dreams, the night before.

. . .

He had risen from His slumber and knew that the moment the Angel had bade Him prepare for was at hand. The knowledge had filled Him as surely as His lungs filled with air when He breathed. The time of His Ascension had come at last. Ashe inhaled deeply to calm Himself. It was then that the stench of rot hit Him and He became aware of His surroundings. The charnel smell of the Sacrifices He had taken for the sake of the Angel before His last vision quest, before He was shown the path to walk. Ashe moved to the door of the suite, past the torn and broken bodies. The man had been from the military,
the woman from Interpol. He had broken them from the start, feeding them drugs to heighten their terror and enhance their pain. They soon confessed their sins under His carefully cruel ministrations. Even after they confessed their crimes, He took much pleasure in their long brutalization and violation before He finally killed them, disemboweling the man with His bare hands and choking the woman with the still-dying soldier’s entrails. Then the rush of the Act had taken Him and He partook of their flesh, before sundering their bodies as the Angel commanded. Ashe unlocked the door of His suite and stepped through. His Apostles, as always, were there.

“The time of completion of our great work is at hand,” He told them. “Dispose of the sacrifices in the prescribed manner and prepare My bath and fast-breaking meal. Soon I will enter the Temple of My Rebirth and I want to be ready.”

. . .

“The salvation of the Son can only come from the victory of the Son of the Son of God,” Ashe told His Chosen, His Knights of Christ. “For I am the Promise Kept, I am the Word made Flesh, I am the Spirit of God that will unite the Father and Son unto Me. You have been chosen from the flock to be My Knights, to soldier for Me, for My Father and My Father’s Father. You must remember death, for you may all die so that God might live. You are my Christian soldiers, Knights of Christ, of Christ’s Son. Time flies from us and the time to act, to fight . . . and to die . . . is at hand.”

They began singing “Onward, Christian Soldier,” a hundred men and women, their voices raised in unison. They wore white robes, a red sash hanging down from their collars. Ashe stood over the altar, where a hundred doses of Communion had been prepared. As one, Ashe’s Knights of Christ rose and began forming a single queue, kneeling and moving toward the altar. This time Ashe had designed the drug differently. It would at first give them hours of ecstatic hallucinations and leave them highly sensualized. Then hours later, the drug’s second stage would kick in, driving them into an adrenalized madness and psychotic rage barely controlled by their conditioned rapture toward Him and the Church of the United Trinity. They would move out into the World Ship Preserve, attacking the Village, Fort Arapaho and even the town of Laguna. And around the world, Ashe’s Apostles were preparing his Knights of Christ to do the same. For tonight would be the Great Harvest. And tonight Gabriel Ashe would make the Ship His.

“Tempus fugit,” each of His supplicants said, before receiving Communion; Time flies.

“Memento Mori,” Ashe replied to each, as He gave them Communion; Remember death.

At last all had taken Communion; all were falling under the drug’s spell. As the drug began taking hold, His followers began partaking of each other’s flesh; grouping off, men and women, women and women, men and men . . . today, they would enjoy their last hours of earthly pleasure. Tonight, they would die in His name. And Ashe, his own arousal rising, would partake of their flesh as well as they celebrated the triumphant coming of the Kingdom of the Lord.

. . .

Bloom was out of her quarters and running, her gun drawn as sirens began wailing. She was halfway across the compound, moving towards the operations center when a Ranger pulled up beside her. The back door opened.

“Colonel!” Major Benedict shouted. “Get in!”

Bloom hopped inside, pulling the door shut behind her.

“Report!” she barked. “What the hell is going on?”

“All hell’s breaking loose,” Benedict replied. “The airfield’s been hit; two explosions blasted the main hangar and the fuel dump. We’re getting reports of explosions in the village, so far, all in residential areas!”

“Shit! Who the fuck is doing this?”

“We don’t know. It looks like lone individuals with explosives strapped to their chests. We’re rallying now. Emergency response has been dispatched to the village to help, and all available personnel have been deployed around the base to ensure no one else is out there. It’s an organized attack, but we don’t know who’s behind it yet.”

They pulled up in front of the main building. Bloom was out of the Ranger, Benedict with her as she charged inside.

“Get the SSE to the designated secured areas,” she said, “and get something, anything into the air; call in aerial recon from whatever’s nearby if we don’t have it, and don’t just send emergency response into the village, dispatch troops!”

She tore into the command center, where a war theatre had already been set up. A map of the World Ship Preserve was already displayed on a tabletop screen. The village and Fort Arapaho were centered, red circles on the map showed blast zones.

“How the fuck did this happen?” Bloom demanded. “How did they get past our perimeter?”

A communications officer was racing by. Bloom grabbed him at the shoulder.

“I need an immediate three-way linx to the World Council Security Commission, the World Ship Summit and the DIA,” she told him, slipping a linx into her ear at the same time. “Put it through to me here, right away, with a sub-window on this screen.”

She stabbed the tabletop screen with her finger.

“Contact Civil Protection and find out what’s needed to secure the village,” Benedict said to another officer. “Find out from Laguna how long before they can assist.” General Harrod and the liaison to the World Ship Summit appeared on Bloom’s console. She apprised them of the situation.

“Have the protectorate deploy the peacekeepers to cut off access to the World Ship Reserve,” the liaison said.

“My security chief’s taking care of that as we speak,” Bloom replied.

Across the room, Benedict had jacked a video boom onto his headset and was linxed in to Police Chief Sharon Raven in Laguna, and he was speaking with his civilian counterpart while information scrolled directly across his vision.

“We have civilians at the gates,” another aide called. “They want in!”

“Get them inside and head them down into the shelters,” Bloom barked, turning back to Benedict. “Exo; what’s happening with the peacekeepers?”

“The protectorate’s peacekeepers are being deployed,” he reported, “and we now have a preliminary casualty list.” His tone at this was now grimmer.

“What are the numbers?” Bloom asked.

“At the airfield, five dead . . . seventeen injured, twenty more unaccounted for. There’s an estimated count of over three hundred dead in the village.”

“Put everyone not on defence onto the rescue,” Bloom said.

She was about to turn back to the tabletop where an alarm sound signaled another set of explosions when the command center itself was hit. The explosion rocked the building, throwing everyone from their feet and plunging them into a thunderous darkness.

. . .

Laura and Allison had finally coaxed James out of the apartment. He went grudgingly, but admitted to himself that seeing Allison in clubwear was well worth it.

“This is our favourite club,” Allison told James when they arrived at Freebase, a Sens club that catered to the tox crowd with heavy beat dance music and flashy surrealistic lighting and décor.

Freebase served alcohol, hallucinogens, narcotics and other recreational drugs at the bar. As Allison, Laura and James bought and consumed half doses of E from a scantily clad waitress, he found himself recalling why he’d once enjoyed the club scene so much. As the fast-acting Ecstasy began taking hold, they made their way out onto the dance floor. It wasn’t long before the three of them were stoned, sweaty and sensuously moving against one another, the music seeming to control them. James tried to concentrate his dancing on Allison, wanting so much to touch and be touched by her, but concentration was difficult. Whenever Laura, or for that matter anyone else, brushed up against him, he found himself pulled into that experience. Several times, James found himself engaged in dances with strangers, being drawn back into Allison and Laura’s circle. Often he simply remembered he was here with them and turned around to marvel at the sight of the two of them dancing together, pressed and grinding together like lovers. Then they would pull him back, and they would dance together some more.

Finally, they retired from the dance floor to one of the upper levels of the club, Laura and Allison pulling James away from where he had been standing next to a bus-sized subwoofer, relishing the way the violent vibrations from the giant speaker seemed to be displacing him in space and time. The three of them collapsed in a sinuous heap, drinking concentrated fruit juice over crushed ice, brought over by a nearly nude waiter whose only covering was boots, a silver thong and a money belt.

“God, I love the service in this joint!” Allison said approvingly.

James lit a cigarette from his pack, his head throbbing and the sweaty heat of Allison and Laura electric against his chest. The Sens music was unbelievably loud, jarring psychedelic sounds with almost no clear pattern to the noise. Rhythm was dead, raw sound was the new music aesthetic. Suddenly, the crowds started screaming and cheering, and it took James a long moment, still buzzing and still recovering from more than an hour’s non-stop dancing, to realize why. The music had changed, the noise shifting subtly around a new sound: the crystalline wailing of Shipsong. The spinner had manipulated the alien tempo and notes somehow, warping Shipsong’s natural rhythms and octaves, layering it all back on itself. Somehow the Shipsong was still whole in the mix and made every sound in the club part of its symphony. While Laura and Allison seemed enraptured by the sound, it was upsetting to James. It seemed to be encroaching on him, suffocating him.

“Shit,” he said, pushing himself up and away from Allison and Laura. “I have to get out of here. I need some air.”

He rushed past Allison and Laura who, stunned by his sudden egress, needed a moment before they were clear-headed enough to follow him. James pushed his way down to the main level and out towards the front entrance. Forcing through the multitude and fighting to get out only made James’ level of panic rise. He felt like he was suffocating, the air he was breathing in too hot, too humid. A crowd was already in the lobby, waiting to get inside the club itself. Stoned, freaking out because of what the Shipsong was dredging up within him, bordering on a drug-heightened panic attack, James ran into someone in line. He looked into the crazed face of a young woman who, unbelievably, was singing “Onward, Christian Soldier,” the hymn Francis George Franck had screamed out after killing the Prof and just before taking his own life. It was more than James could take; he stormed into the street. It was cold and raining out, and James began breathing deeply of the chilly air, trying to calm himself.

“James!”

James looked back. He had started across the street. Allison and Laura were closing on him.

“James, what’s wrong?” Laura asked. “What’s going on?”

“I . . . freaked out,” he said. “I had to get out of the club and–.” The entire front of the club blossomed into orange fire.

A hot blast of air threw James, Laura and Allison the rest of the way across the street. They were deafened instantly by a concussion they barely heard and then fell violently to earth. They were pelted with debris. James whited out, stunned into a daze for a few moments. When he came to, forcing himself into a sitting position, what he saw stupefied him. The club had been in the middle of the block. It and the buildings to either side of it had been leveled, turned into flaming rubble. The street was littered with debris. Every car on the street had had its windows shattered. People staggered from other buildings, wounded, bloody; mangled bodies littered the sidewalk. James only became aware of the deafening ringing in his ears as it subsided. He could hear people screaming, sirens approaching and, unbelievably, more explosions, near and in the distance.

“James!”

He turned his head. Allison. She was dirty, cut . . . kneeling over Laura. He made his way over to them. Laura was struggling to breathe. Some jagged metal shard had cut through her and she was covered in blood, rasping breath in gurgling lungfuls.

“Oh, God. . .” James moaned.

He dug into a pocket for his linx. It had been shattered. Ambulances and fire trucks were pulling in, to either side of the street.

“Go!” he bellowed desperately at Allison. “Go get help!”

Allison ran, no, limped, he noticed, as she had been cut in the leg. Allison was screaming towards the nearest ambulance. In the eternal moments it took for the paramedics to rush over, James couldn’t help but think of how horribly familiar this all was, cradling Laura’s head in his lap as she lay dying, choking on her own blood just as her father had, the same scared, shocked expression in her eyes, just as he had seen in her father’s.

. . .

The lights flickered back to life and then flashed out again. Emergency lights flared as the sprinkler system began to deluge. Ghostly beams of glaring light from the emergency lights in the corners cast an eerie incandescence over the dead, black consoles and systems control panels in the situation room. Bloom picked herself up as did the rest of her crew. Benedict listened intently to his linx for a moment.

“They hit the south side of the building,” he said. “The structure’s been very badly damaged; it could come down at any time.”

“Give the order to evacuate,” Bloom said. “Everyone at arms-ready. We’ll fall back to the emergency shelters.” Bloom made sure her voice was heard by all. “Grab some portable consoles on the way out; we’ll set up our command center there. Post guards at all shelter entrances. Anyone who fails password confirmation is to be shot on sight.”

There was nothing left to be said. Only the hiss of the water spraying down from the fire extinguishers and the wet footsteps of the evacuees was heard. Gunshots, sirens and the cold desert air greeted them as they made their way outside. Their wet clothes immediately began steaming as they made their way to the nearest shelter entrance. A soldier came running up, saluting quickly as he paced Colonel Bloom.

“We’ve engaged the enemy across the compound, ma’am!” he reported as they reached the doors of the shelter.

A sandbagged machine gun nest had already been set up at its entrance.

“Who’s the enemy?” Bloom demanded. “Do we have an ident yet?”

“Enemy or enemies unknown!” the soldier replied as he and Bloom began ushering people inside. “Civilian clothes, but their hardware and tactics say very well trained!”

“We’re receiving reports of similar attacks around the country,” Benedict said, pressing his linx into his ear. “And sporadic reports of other attacks around the world.”

. . .

The minister had been escorted — under guard — to the Defence Ministry headquarters on Laurier Avenue. He was brought straight to a situation room in one of many sub-basements. A string of terrorist attacks had begun across the country at 1:13 A.M., Pacific Time. The attacks coincided with similar attacks in the United States, Mexico and across Europe and Asia. The Canadian attacks had taken place in the Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City regions. Oddly enough, Ottawa, the nation’s capital, had not been attacked. Invariably, military, residential and commercial districts had been attacked by powerful bombs and weapons fire. The national death toll was catastrophic, already into the thousands. The minister was immediately linxed into a conference with the World Council Security Commission and his defence colleagues from around the world, including two of his confederates from the committee.

“The most violent attacks seem centered in and around the World Ship Preserve,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remarked. The World Council security commissioner referred to his notes.

“It would appear that the attacks can be directly attributed to one group: The Church of the United Trinity. A primary analysis shows that in almost all the areas under attack, there is a significant United Trinity Observant ministry present.”

“Yes,” the British defence minister said. “Italian police managed to intercept one of the attackers before she could get to her principle target, the Vatican. She claimed to be working for the ‘Son of the Son of God’; that’s been Gabriel Ashe’s self-ascribed moniker for years.”

“It certainly fits with the attacks on Professors Echohawk and Scott,” the chairman observed, “and that means we must move against the United Trinity Observants immediately.”

“The World Council Security Commission has already called for an emergency session to do just that,” the security commissioner said.

“Good!” the chairman said. “And when the World Council’s passed that resolution, the United States will have taken care of Gabriel Ashe ourselves.”

“Mister Chairman, I don’t think you would be well advised to take unilateral action against Ashe,” the security commissioner said, uncomfortably.

“Gabriel Ashe has organized and orchestrated attacks against American citizens, while on American soil,” the chairman growled, “which means dealing with him is an internal matter outside of the World Council’s jurisdiction. The World Council can handle the United Trinity Observants. Gabriel Ashe is ours.”

“I don’t think it would be wise to make Gabriel Ashe into a martyr for every cult, militia and anti-government group out there, Mister Chairman,” the minister cautioned.

“I am inclined to agree with my Canadian counterpart on this one, Chairman,” the British minister of defence added.

“And the United States is not about to sit back and discuss this in a committee,” the chairman retorted.

The message was clear. The US was going it alone on this one, without the World Council, or the committee.

. . .

From the time the attacks began to their violent conclusion with the deaths of most of Gabriel Ashe’s so-called Knights of Christ, five hours would elapse. Those who had not been killed had gone to ground in the churches of the United Trinity. Police and military forces around the world surrounded these structures, now determined to have been heavily fortified. As the sun rose into the sky over the village in the World Ship Preserve, Colonel Margaret Bloom herself stood at the barricade, Major Benedict at her side. Ostensibly, they were standing guard, waiting for an arrest warrant to be issued by the Justice Department. However, Bloom’s hope was for action, resistance, an attack that would justify making sure no one inside the church came out breathing. They had a ten-meter perimeter around the stand-alone structure that had become Gabriel Ashe’s base of operations, with security guards posted in all the sewers and conduits going in and out of the church and every other building within a kilometre. The protectorate’s peacekeepers were patrolling heavily as well in case Ashe and his followers had other means of escape. Bloom took another hard look at the structure of the church. In many ways, it was typical, with white stucco walls and a low, sloped roof. Rounded corners and adobe-type windows added a certain distinction to the building, but it could well have been an Irish Catholic parish in some bedroom-town suburb as opposed to the fortified bunker of a maniac who believed himself to be Jesus’ only begotten son. Bloom only hoped that Justice allowed her to go in with them. Otherwise, she and her soldiers would be on parade while Justice went in with FBI and ATF special units. Bloom had to remind herself that she wasn’t a foot soldier; she was a pilot. The closest she had come to ground combat had been when her plane had been shot down behind enemy lines during the Australian conflict. But she still wanted to storm that damn compound. She hoped something, anything happened that would justify that neither Ashe nor any of his supporters made it out alive.

“What’s keeping Justice?” she muttered irritably. “I want action!”

She turned to Benedict, who was nodding his head as he listened to his linx. Benedict turned to her, his face grave.

“Was that Justice?” Bloom asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “You’d better switch to Channel 8A0N3W5. It’s about your daughter.”

. . .

When they reached the hospital, the trauma center was already overflowing. Emergency cases from the attacks were all over; James remembered seeing images like these on the Grid during the last serious war overseas, hundreds of wounded people flooding hospitals in what had become an urban war zone. Laura’s injuries were grave enough for her to be taken immediately into surgery. James and Allison had miraculously escaped with only minor injuries and were left to sit and wait. They waited two and a half hours to be triaged and another six hours to be seen by doctors. And still they waited, worried, wanting for news on Laura’s condition.

. . .

Allison bided her time by trying to contact the World Ship Summit, to let Laura’s mom know what had happened. There was no way to get through; all Grid linx lines into the World Ship Summit were prioritized and shut down to public access. When Allison returned to the waiting room, she realized why: The display console in the waiting room had been switched to INN, which was broadcasting coverage of the worldwide attacks. Allison was dumbstruck. And all James could do was ask over and over again under his breath the same two questions:

“How? Why?”

. . .

It was late morning when, finally, one of the surgeons who had been working on Laura came down.

“Your friend is out of surgery,” he said. “There was damage to her spine and right lung. We were able to repair her spinal injuries, though we still don’t know the extent of the neurological damage she might have suffered. Her right lung was shredded and had to be removed. We’re cloning a new one for her, but that process can take several weeks.”

“We — can we see her?” James asked.

The doctor shook his head.

“She’s heavily sedated right now, unconscious and on a respirator to help her breathe. The best thing you can do is go home and get some rest. We have your linx codes. We’ll call if there’s any change.”

. . .

And so Allison and James made their silent way home. Allison wearily slipped her key into the lock and opened the door. She tried again to send a linx to the World Ship Summit. She got through and began trying to connect to a live operator who would be able to relay either her or her message to Colonel Bloom. As she struggled with this, James went to shower. Allison was just finishing the linx when James had finished his shower. He went into the living room and dressed in a clean T-shirt and shorts while Allison, wiping tears of frustration/rage/exhaustion from her eyes, headed down the hall for her own much-needed shower. James opened up the sofa bed and lay down. He stared at the ceiling, trying not to think. The sun was already high in the sky and the living room was bright. James still felt that he might be able to sleep, if only to shut out everything he’d just been through. The violence he’d witnessed tonight, five hundred people alone dead inside Freebase, twelve thousand dead across the city; it was so much worse, so much more horrifying than anything else he’d ever witnessed, including the assassinations of Professors Scott and Echohawk. The two events were undeniably linked. James had survived both, but both had shattered his faith; in God, in humanity. James had watched Mark Echohawk die, struggling for breath, drowning in his own blood. Tonight, he had watched Laura Echohawk very nearly suffer the same fate.

. . .

The shower stopped. James listened to the new gap in the silence of the apartment until he heard Allison’s footsteps padding down the hall, back towards the living room. She stood in the doorway, wrapped in her ratty bathrobe.

“James?” she asked hesitantly. “James . . . after all that’s happened . . . I — I really don’t want to be alone right now.”

. . .

Allison led James back to her bedroom. James’ heart was hammering out an anticipatory tattoo; he wanted to be with Allison for a flood of reasons: He had a crush on her; the memory of the smell of sex on her skin from the other night on the balcony still haunted him; he didn’t want to be alone tonight any more than she did; after everything he’d been through in the last few days/weeks, James wanted to feel alive again. Allison paused in the doorway, turning around to kiss James. She broke contact quickly and stared at him a moment. For a panicked instant, James thought she might have changed her mind, but she kept looking and he found himself growing hotter, staring into her contemplative, lustful jade green eyes. The moment took her, and Allison pulled James into a tight embrace, sliding her hands under his shirt, feeling his back warm and muscular beneath her hands. James kissed her, relishing the taste of her mouth. He undid the belt of her robe, sliding his own hands around her back. They drew together, and Allison found James hard already beneath his shorts as she pressed into him. She pulled him out of his shirt. Once free of it, James threw open her robe and scratched his nails roughly across the contour of her breasts. Allison gasped at the sharp sensation and then moaned as he squeezed. She shrugged free of her robe and drew him to her again for a deeper, longer kiss. She could feel the heat building between her thighs as his strong arms pulled her against him. His scent and the residue of soap on his skin permeated the air around her, an overwhelmingly clean, strong, man’s smell. She scratched her nails down his back and under the waistband of his shorts, dug her hands into his buttocks, pulling him harder against her. James felt his cock press against her prickly pubic hair as she hitched her left leg over his right. He gasped with the sensation; part of him was in awe that he would be with Allison. He wanted her so much . . . he wanted to make her come, to make her want him the way he wanted her. James gasped again as Allison slid a hand down across his scrotum and gripped his cock, tightly.

“God…” he rasped.

James pushed Allison backwards into her room, dark from the heavy curtains over the window. He closed the door behind him, slamming it shut. They found their way to Allison’s bed, climbing atop the covers. Allison leaned to light some candles on the shelf over her bed. James admired her backside shimmering in the candlelight, her red hair like silken fire spilling down against her pale skin. Allison turned around and smiled at catching him looking. She leaned back to watch him watch her. James blushed, embarrassed, not quite knowing why. Allison reached for him, pulling him onto the bed with her. They kissed for a long while, their hands caressing and exploring, bodies grinding into each other with wet determination. The only sounds in the candlelit room were their whispered sighs and gasps and the louder noise of the bed sheets rustling beneath them. Need slowly overtook them. James moved in Allison’s hand, Allison pressing his calloused fingers harder against her sex. Finally, her need surpassed his. She pushed him down, wanting his kisses elsewhere. He turned around, giving her access to him. She clenched her legs around his head as he tasted her for the first time; she held him like that, relishing the contact before taking him in her hand and into her mouth. Their moans and cries grew louder, more desperate, as passion took hold. Allison came first, quickly, intensely, and she rolled away from James while the strongest waves of sensation elapsed and before he could come. Sated but not satiated and James still very much in need of release, Allison straddled him, pressing her hands hard into his shoulders as she let him inside. She kissed him, tasting herself in his mouth as they made love, desperation and need still not lost to either of them. Soon her thrusting lost its slow deliberateness, gaining force and urgency. She took one of his hands away from her breasts and moved it down where she needed it more. Soon they were both thrusting, both crying out both aching in the throes of passion.

. . .

James dozed off while Allison had gone to wash up. Her return startled him awake, gasping, his heart thundering in his chest.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he lied, pushing back the death-dream’s terror by sheer force of will. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Allison caressed his chest, playing in the hair that grew there, tickling his nipples.

“No regrets?” she asked.

“No,” James replied. “You?”

She smiled and bent to kiss him.

“None,” she answered. Allison retrieved a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray from the shelf over her bed. They each lit one, smoking in silence.

“I checked the linx,” she said. “No word on Laura.”

“I guess that’s a good thing.”

“I guess.”

She stared at him, seeing the faraway look in his eyes, visible in the candlelight and dawning daylight from outside.

“James . . . are you okay? Really?”

“I don’t know,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “I want to . . . I mean, this sounds stupid and selfish given what’s happened to Laura tonight . . . but all this death . . . I keep thinking of my own. I need to know what’s out there. I can’t accept not knowing. I . . . I need something to believe in.”

“We’ll find it, James. I promise.”

. . .

As the United Trinity Observants’ Knights of Christ began their attacks, another attack was about to take place. Argentinean military dictator Roberto Diaz was orchestrating an invasion force that was taking over South America. Among his arsenal of weapons was a laboratory-enhanced version of the deadly Kreutz virus. The strain was so dangerous that when American intelligence heard about it, they immediately began taking steps to make sure the virus could never be deployed.

. . .

Diaz was at his retreat in the hilly countryside far beyond Buenos Aires. The compound was alight and alive in the night, a party going on in the large walled garden. Behind thick stone walls topped with battlements and heavily armed guards, the partygoers were sheltered from the ravages of the war that was tearing across South America, a war started by the fanatical madman who was in fact host of the evening’s facilities. Captains of industry, military leaders, heads of state sympathetic to the Argentine Ambition, as the war was termed. All of General Diaz’s allies were in attendance, while only a few hundred kilometres away, bloody battles were being waged by Diaz’s troops. An aide approached Diaz and spoke to him briefly. Diaz nodded, replying. The aide departed, and Diaz continued to work the crowd. The general had no way of knowing that his guards in the foothills had been taken out and that even now he was centered in the site of a high-powered sniper rifle. Colonel Isaac Jude watched Diaz impassively through the night-scope of his rifle. He had a clear shot.

“King in check,” he said quietly, calmly into his headset. “Stand by for endgame. All pieces’ status.”

“Rooks 1 and 2 standing by. Package secure.”

They had a sample of the Kreutz virus.

“Rook 3 standing by,” came the next reply. “The castle is in check.”

The bioweapons production lab that had grown the Kreutz virus was wired, ready for complete incineration.

“Rooks 4, 5 and 6 in position. Egress golden.”

“Rooks 7 and 9 in position. Pawns at West covered.”

“Rooks 8 and 10 in position. Pawns at East covered.”

“Rooks 11 and 12 reporting. Rendezvous is clear.”

Jude tightened his finger ever so slightly on the trigger of his rifle. One squeeze and Diaz would be dead. Argentine rebels were already waiting to claim the victory and storm the grounds of the retreat and presidential headquarters. Dissenters in the military ranks would be mutinying as soon as word spread. With the head gone, the body of the monster that was Diaz’s barbaric organization would collapse. The United States would be able to lead the Allied World Armies through the South American blockade and mop up the rest of this mess. Jude’s finger tightened a little more. A twitch of his finger and this operation would be complete.

“Checkmate,” he announced.

“Stand by, Knight,” Control’s voice came through his earpiece, startling him.

Jude relaxed all tension on the trigger. He took a moment to refocus his aim and keep Diaz in his sights.

“The King is in check! Endgame ready to run!”

“Stand by, Knight,” Control reiterated. “We are receiving new orders.”

“In the middle of an operation? We’ve had operatives in the field for months planning this!”

“Stand by. . .” Control called back. “Authentication’s coming through. Continue with endgame and fall back to the rendezvous. When Match 1 is complete, another team will take the board for Match 2.”

The second phase of their operation was the most crucial. Jude and his troops were supposed to ensure the rebels scored victories against Diaz’s army that the rebels had no real chance in hell of winning. Another team moving in at this juncture would be dangerous; the rebels were already wary of Jude, who had worked in Argentina a total of five days in the last eight months. A new team would be completely mistrusted.

“Profile’s not nearly complete!” Jude protested. “Why the fuck are we being redeployed?”

“I relay the orders, Knight,” Control replied. “I don’t analyze them.”

Jude was silent, waiting a few more moments as he got the money shot he wanted, the back of Diaz’s head.

“King in check,” he hissed.

Jude squeezed the trigger.

“Checkmate.”

The back of Diaz’s head blew apart, and a few seconds later, the roar of a powerful explosion was heard. Jude had already dismantled his rifle and was rushing through the darkness to the rendezvous when the first sirens wailed.

. . .

Bloom sat in her office, cradling her head in her hand. The voice message from Allison had said it all. Bloom listened to it over and over again before fully absorbing it. She had left Major Benedict at the barricades, returning to the base in an attempt to raise the hospital where her daughter was. Their Grid spars were shut, overworked by the calls flooding in from people like her, trying to find out about wounded loved ones. She’d requested emergency leave. General Harrod had denied it due to the ongoing crisis. Bloom had left Major Benedict at the barricades to wait for the Department of Justice. She was expecting to hear from him any moment now.

. . .

Major Benedict watched the armoured transports roll up. Immediately, he knew something was wrong. The FBI and ATF didn’t use Rangers, which were wide, high and boxy truck-like vehicles. They used smaller transports that could easily be disguised as civilian cargo haulers. The Rangers were, in fact, almost exclusively used by the military. Benedict stood at the head of the barricade with Police Chief Sharon Raven, who had been coordinating on behalf of the protectorate’s peacekeepers.

“What the hell is this?” she asked.

“No idea,” Benedict replied.

The lead Ranger halted and a passenger immediately debarked, heading over to Benedict. A colonel’s rank was pinned to the man’s uniform. Benedict saluted sharply.

“Major James Benedict?” the colonel asked, returning the salute.

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Isaac Jude,” Colonel Jude said. “Major, you and your men are relieved.” Jude turned to the police chief. “You and yours as well, ma’am. This is now a strictly military operation, and it has been put under my exclusive command.”

. . .

“Do I or do I not have command of this operation, General?” Bloom demanded angrily of the image on her screen. “Would you mind clarifying that for me?”

“Don’t think the new promotion gives you more clout with me, Colonel Bloom,” Harrod growled. “You watch how you address me.”

“I think you can explain to me why my chief of security’s been removed from the conflict,” she replied, “General, sir.”

“The conflict is no longer within the bounds of his jurisdiction, Colonel. Nor is it within the bounds of yours.”

“What?”

“You are in command of Fort Arapaho and the project for which Fort Arapaho was commissioned: The Ship Survey Expedition. In collusion with the Southwestern Protectorate and the Laguna District, the Department of the Army is in charge of security on the World Ship Preserve. The village and Gabriel Ashe are outside your jurisdiction.”

“How can you log us out after what we were hit with here?”

“You and your personnel are not part of this operation, Colonel. Accept it and move on.”

He terminated the linx then, leaving her staring at a blank screen. She turned to look at Benedict.

“Who the fuck is this son of a bitch, anyway?”

“Colonel Jude,” Benedict replied, sitting on the other side of Bloom’s desk. “He’s a Special Forces type, strictly black ops. I’ve actually dealt with him in the past, Colonel, before I was assigned to Concord 3.”

“You don’t say,” Bloom growled. “Please, Major. Tell me all about it.”

“I’m afraid that information is still classified, Colonel.”

“Really?” Bloom said, giving him scrutinous regard. “One day we’re going to have to sit down and talk about all the things we’re not supposed to sit down and talk about.”

“One day, Colonel.”

They sat for a long moment, in silence. Finally, Bloom spoke:

“They’re going to delete Ashe, aren’t they? And we’re not cleared to know about it. They don’t want me involved because of my position in the Ship Survey Expedition.”

“That would be my assessment,” Benedict replied.

Bloom considered this a long moment. Considered Ashe and what one of his followers had done to Mark, what they had done to Laura. Considered the nightmare being faced by hundreds of people around the world as Ashe’s followers ran rampant wherever they could. Bloom took a long, hard moment and considered the black ops that was going down here and the reasons behind it.

“Good,” she said at last, “I hope they turn the bastard into stew. How are rescue operations coming?”

“They’re on schedule,” Benedict replied as they made their way from the nearly silent command center, “but the people we’re pulling from the wreckage are in bad shape. We’ve pulled about two hundred and fifty people from the wreckage, and we’re still digging the rest out. There’s still nearly five hundred trapped in the rubble. It looks like we have to expect a forty to fifty percent fatality rate among the casualties.”

“God dammit,” Bloom hissed. “We could have stopped this right after Mark died, if they’d have thrown this bastard out! What the fuck’s the death toll going to climb to now?”

“Colonel, it was out of our hands.”

“And it’s been taken out of our hands, again.” Bloom retorted bitterly as they left the administration and command building.

They could see the barracks building from here, a twelve-floor tower, though it was barely recognizable as such anymore. The front half of the building was gone, the first five floors having been destroyed by the suicide bomb blast, the top half having caved in upon itself.

“What the hell did that bastard have strapped to his back?” Bloom asked.

“Our best guess is that the bomber had a backpack full of C-17 or a similar compound,” Benedict replied. “We’ll know more, I suppose, once the investigation is underway.”

Benedict paused, the headset in his ear chiming.

“Colonel, we’ve just gotten word,” he said. “They’re storming the Church of the United Trinity Observants.”

Chapter Twelve: Inquests and Inquisitions

The Ship had been instructed to establish communication with whatever intelligence found it by teaching them its common language. The Ship, however, had had millennia to consider the possibility that the beings who found it might not be able to grasp the complexities and subtleties of the language. Designed to be able to evolve beyond its initial programming, the Ship decided it might become necessary to learn the common language of whatever beings found it. After all, time and again, history had proven the difficulty of communication between alien beings. The Ship spent centuries revising the tutorial for its common language and devising the means to learn its discoverers’ common language.

And so when the Ship unearthed itself, it began monitoring as much of this world’s communications as it could. It catalogued hundreds of different languages and dialects, spoken, written and gesticulated. The beings of this world used the radio spectrum to send audio, visual and data streams, and the Ship was able to exploit this as it tried to learn the language used most often on this world. The Ship had not anticipated the insight it would glean into this world’s cultures. Like many primitive species, this world’s many divergent (and often opposing) cultures were seeped in violence. The Ship catalogued great lists of both simulated and actual violence in the recorded visual media. The Ship was able to discern what was real and what wasn’t only through careful study. In fictitious violence, it was usually the same beings who suffered or inflicted suffering on others throughout various recordings. The Ship witnessed one being die no less than seventy times in seventy different recordings. And in many cases that proved their evident fictional nature, creatures and technology that couldn’t possibly have existed were the ones inflicting and ultimately having violence inflicted upon them.

But the level of real violence, from their recreations to their public events to their interpersonal encounters, disturbed the Ship. How had such a primitive, violent species attained such a level of technological advancement without self-destructing? There had recently been a sudden period of violent chaos: a series of murderous attacks by affiliated groups of beings against their parent civilizations as a whole. The representations the Ship gleaned from current events broadcasts seemed to indicate that this had been linked to the discovery of the Ship. This was not unusual among primitive cultures encountering an alien race for the first time. However, the level of violence that had occurred during the attacks wasn’t encouraging.

. . .

The Ship continued to study their languages in hopes of better determining why these creatures were prone to such violence. In the meantime, it would continue to teach these beings to communicate with it through the common language. And it would continue to watch and to wait. The Ship had much to decide about the beings who had discovered it and none of it easy.

TRANSCRIPT
INTERACTIVE NEWS NETWORK NEWSCAST
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PATH: INN <> BROADCAST >> HEADLINES >> NIGHT OF BLOOD >> UPDATE><

ANCHOR
Good morning and welcome to the Interactive News Network. Around the world at this hour, police and military forces are still fighting pitched battles against the heavily armed followers of the Church of the United Trinity Observants after what is being called the Night of Blood. The call to arms for this cult seems to have been issued by their leader, Gabriel Ashe. Although the Observants have issued no statement concerning this violence, intelligence about the cult would suggest that it is part of a
plan to stop what they see as the idolatrous worship of the Ship around the world. The
source of the violence indeed came from the World Ship Preserve, where a series of late-night bombings by followers of Gabriel Ashe set the stage for the violence that has hit so many world capitals this morning.

PATH: INN <> HEADLINES >> REPORT FROM THE WORLD SHIP PRESERVE >> UPDATE ><

WALTER QUINCY ROBERTSON
I am standing here this morning, broadcasting on the border between the Laguna District of the Southwestern Protectorate, New Mexico, and the World Ship Preserve. Since 1:15 A.M. local time, this and every other highway road and trail into the preserve has been under blockade by both U.S. Army and protectorate peacekeepers. From what we have witnessed overnight, we know that a small war is being waged within the preserve. There have been numerous explosions, gunfire . . . We have been told nothing, but given similar incidents of mayhem around the world over the last nine hours, we know that the cause of this madness is Gabriel Ashe and the United Trinity Observants.

. . .

“And by morning, the Son of the Lamb will become the Scapegoat,” he muttered, freezing the image on the portable console.

Those who had stolen the souls of people of this world, those who sought to use the Ship for their ends were now calling Him a criminal. But He knew He would be remembered forever as the Saviour. But they had to try and make the world hate Him. Otherwise, Prophecy would not come true. The House of God on Earth itself would reject Him. The Catholic Church, which so blasphemously spoke of itself as that same House of God, had already fulfilled that part of the divinations. Now, the House of Man would oblige Him by fulfilling the next part. His Ascension was imminent. For all was proceeding exactly as the Angel foretold. He looked out at the Ship and reveled in the sound of its seductive song. There was only a short distance to go before He was standing on its golden surface: the slow climb down to the Ship itself. The Angel had shown Him in the Dream how the canyon wall had collapsed where the Salado Falls had until recently flowed. Now with the Rio Salado diverted, the Falls had become a rock climber’s challenge. But the Angel had shown Him how to get down. And so down towards the Ship, the Chariot of God, He would go, all the while knowing His enemy was above, hunting Him, coming for Him as he had from the beginning of these last events, before His Ascension.

. . .

“Rook 1, do we have intel?”

Jude never faced away from the building across the way. A double barricade of mobile shield walling stood between him and the macadam road dividing them from the Church of the United Trinity. Rook 1 worked behind him, while Rooks 3 and 4 did a final weapons check. Control and Rooks 2 and 5 were skyside in the helicopter. Rook 1 linked the data to the headset Jude wore. The information was transmitted directly onto his eye from the micro scanner boom. He read the information using a series of eye movements and blinks to scroll through. Hardware twenty years from being low-tech enough to go public was at his command. Jude swiveled the viewer boom up and turned to Rook 3.

“Let me have the McAllister .30 calibre.”

“We going to pick them off one by one, Knight?” Rook 4 asked, jokingly.

“Stow that, soldier,” Jude chided. “No. Just giving them a sign that their End Times have come.”

As they spoke, Rook 3 retrieved the specified rifle from its case, snapped its components together and produced the ammunition magazine for Jude. The colonel took the gun and leaned over the side of a low section of plating. A flip of a switch on the bulky scope and he had a brilliant blue and yellow CG image of the interior of the Church of the United Trinity Observants.

“Knight to Control,” he said into his mike. “Target in check using TMI scanning. Link to scope view line and confirm target acquisition.”

Jude had selected a target at the far end of the church itself, a stoned-mad faithful member of Ashe’s congregation who seemed to be gently caressing an assault rifle cradled like a newborn in his lap. The shot was set up perfectly so that the front of the person’s head would blow off, sending bone, blood and grey matter flying right at Ashe’s altar and hopefully right into his face. With this gun and this scope, Jude was confident he could make the shot. Jude wanted to send them a message. He wanted them to know they were being hunted. He wanted Ashe to know. He wanted Ashe to die last. He contemplated this while waiting for the helicopter to position itself in such a way that its own thermal/magnetic imager could lock on to the church and link to his scope.

“Target acquisition confirmed, Knight,” Control said.

“Target in check,” Jude said, leaning into the gun, staring into the scope. He watched his oblivious target, knowing what his prey did not, that they would be dead, in seconds. Jude felt no remorse, no sympathy for his target. They would die caught with their guard down, believing they were somewhere safe, somewhere secure. Jude squeezed the trigger of the sniper rifle, ever so slowly, ever so gently. There was a hollow sound as the gun fired, and in the next instant, Ashe’s apostle’s head was blown off.

“Checkmate,” Jude said dryly, a grimly satisfied smile on his cold features.

. . .

He opened His eyes with a start as something hot and wet sprayed Him. Ashe heard His disciples scream in alarm and watched as one of His flock fell, their head vaporized. Ashe stood up, trying to understand where the shot had come from. His Apostles moved to make a human shield around Him. Such was their love of Him that where His Father’s Apostles had betrayed and denied Him, His Apostles were ready to die in His Name. A moment later, the back wall of His Church rattled with gunshots and His followers in the back rows convulsed as they were sprayed with bullets. As the doors into His Church were blown inwards by His enemies’ weapons, Ashe was ushered by His loving Apostles back into the Sacristy and the Sanctuary they hoped was beyond.

. . .

Ashe’s followers were stoned sitting ducks for Jude and his troops. He and his men wore full body armour, and they moved in quickly and ruthlessly on their targets. Rooks 3 and 4 were the vanguard, equipped with short-barrelled “house-cleaner” automatic rifles, hosing down the opposition inside. Rook 1 was covering them from behind, taking out anyone they hadn’t cleaned up with his assault rifle. Jude took up the rear, rifle at the ready. He was after only one target. His men could handle the rest, but Gabriel Ashe was his. As his guard fanned out into the church, Jude shut out the screams for help and surrender coming from the panicked followers of this doomed cult. Some tried to organize themselves enough to return fire, but had no chance to respond. None of it mattered. Jude had spotted his prey heading out into the back of the church.

“Target sighted, Control. Movi