“Only he never quite learned that lesson, did he?”
Titov nodded somberly. “No, I guess he didn’t. You know, I envy you for being the man that killed Brendan. I would have liked to see his face before he died.”
“I’m not sure he
had
a face when he died,” Francis said. “And if you want to know the truth, I didn’t kill Brendan. He killed himself. Men like that always do eventually. I was just there to see it happen.”
Titov contemplated this for a moment, then smiled. “Enough dwelling on the past. I’d better go and pick up the car. I’ll see you outside.”
Aurora
Wednesday 6 June 2007
1830 EEST
Richelle stood motionless, her eyes fixed on the small glass display case in front of her. Inside it, mounted on a background of black velvet, were two sheets of aging yellow paper covered in jaggedly typed Cyrillic script. At the top of the first sheet was a crudely printed hammer and sickle flanked by stalks of wheat below a red five-pointed star.
Before his death at the hands of his own bodyguard, her father had arranged at great expense for the document to be recovered from a little-known archive on the outskirts of Moscow that housed thousands of sensitive documents dating back to the early 1920s. This particular one, the very existence of which had been denied by the Soviets, and later by the Russian Federation, was an order signed by Stalin himself on July 19, 1945, three days after Trinity, the codename for the first-ever detonation of an atomic bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico by the Manhattan Project. The document was an executive order halting all preparations for Operation Typhoon, the full-scale invasion of Western Europe scheduled for the early spring of 1946.
Her father had shown it to her on the day he asked her to take his place as the director of Aurora. To Peter Bershadsky it had represented in a singularly ironic and monumental chain of events everything that was wrong with the world. Richelle had asked for the document to be placed in the entrance hall to her office to make sure she never forgot it.
“It still sends a chill up my spine every time I see it.”
She turned to see Heinz, Aurora’s chief scientist, standing just inside the doors at the end of the hall.
“Do you really think it would have happened?” she said.
“The invasion? I have no doubt it would have. They had every reason to go through with it, and there was nothing anyone could have done to stop them.”
“Without wiping Europe off the map.”
Heinz nodded. “I guess that’s what it would have come to in the end. But it didn’t.”
“I still can’t quite believe it,” she said.
“In the light of subsequent history it’s hard to imagine, perhaps,” Heinz said. “But things were much different back then.”
“Were they?” she asked.
Heinz walked over and put a hand on her arm. “Don’t torture yourself with these questions. Your father once told me that we should never let our dread of what might have been taint our focus on the future. And we have a lot to be optimistic about, don’t you agree?”
She smiled. “Yes, I suppose we do. Although if I’m honest, it’s hard to see where we go from here.”
“Perhaps you’ll let me worry about that,” Heinz said. “I happen to have a few ideas. And as for the possibilities, from where we stand now, they seem almost endless. But one thing at a time.”
The door opened behind them and Erik, Aurora’s Chief of Construction, stepped into the hallway. “Everything alright?”
“Fine,” Richelle said. “Go on in. Are the others on their way?”
“All here,” Erik said, nodding at the door.
“Tell them to come in,” Richelle said.
Erik pulled the door open and motioned to the small group standing outside.
They entered in single file, Professor Watkins in the lead.
Watkins was a tall, thin man with graying hair. He had been recruited two years earlier from the linguistics department at Ohio State University. Watkins was Aurora’s leading authority on the language native to the long-since deceased crew of Origin and, by extension, its chief historian. Behind him came Mitch Rainey. Once a computer engineer for the FBI in Washington DC, Mitch was now Heinz’s assistant and principal authority on the computer systems onboard RP One. He was followed by David Williams, captain of the Callisto, the refurbished Russian Victor-Class submarine that had, until recently, served as Aurora’s only lifeline to the outside world.
The office looked more like a library. One wall was lined with tall hardwood bookshelves that ran to the ceiling. The remaining three were covered in artwork, all of it original, and some of it priceless. Half the floor space was taken up by a long, oval conference table. On the wall at one end, framed in ornate gold-leaf, was a large digital screen.
Richelle waited until everyone was seated before calling the meeting to order. “Erik, I know you have to get going, so why don’t you run us through what you have and we’ll send you on your way.”
“Everything is on schedule,” Erik said. “The last of the contractors are leaving today. We should have the tunnels connected by the end of the week, unless we lose another drill bit. The KG is returning tomorrow afternoon with the generators. If we don’t run into any hitches I’d say we could be up and running by the end of the month.”
“What about Amity?”
“You mean, when will we start tearing it down?”
“Yes.”
“As soon as I have your assurance that nobody is going to start a riot over it, I guess.”
Richelle half-smiled. “It’s that bad, is it?”
“Worse,” Erik said.
“Have you shown everyone the new plans?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“I think everyone agrees it will look nice. But it’s going to take over a year to complete. And I get the feeling your sister isn’t exactly over the moon about the projected costs either.”
“You leave Caroline to me,” Richelle said. “The foundation has the money. Maybe not for
everything
we’d like to do, but we have it for this. Trust me.”
“You’re the boss,” Erik shrugged.
“Anyone have any questions?” Richelle asked.
No one did.
“Off you go then,” Richelle said. “And if people start showing up with pitchforks and rotten fruit, you can send them to me.”
When Erik was gone she turned to professor Watkins. “The professor says he has something he would like us to hear. We’re all ears, Chris.”
Watkins looked nervously around the table and reached for the glasses in his breast pocket. He appeared to be sweating despite the air conditioning, and his hands were shaking slightly. “As you know, we’ve had access to the mission logs on RP One for several weeks now. I’ve been busy finishing up the translation tables, so I only started looking over them a few days ago. Most of it appears to be some kind of routine maintenance schedule, just a list of dated entries. But last night I came across a log entry for a previous surface landing.”
“You’re kidding,” Heinz said.
“No, I’m not. I’ve been up all night translating the file. According to the entry, RP One has been used as an observation platform on several previous surface landings, so you guys may have to rethink your single-use theory. Anyway, the log contains a brief description of a habitable planet discovered over a decade into the mission. It appears to be the only discovery of intelligent life they made before they arrived here.”
“By intelligent life, you mean humans?” Richelle asked.
“Yes,” Watkins said. “The planet is described as slightly larger than Earth and very similar in climate. The atmosphere was highly radioactive when it was found, but it appears there were ample signs of civilization.”
“Radioactive?” Heinz said, “As in—”
“As in, they’d been blown into extinction,” Watkins finished. “The surface was covered in blast craters, some of them several miles wide.”
“Holy shit,” Mitch said.
“That’s what I said,” Watkins agreed. “And that’s not even the weird part. The native population had no such weapons. They were more akin to something like our own Mayan civilization, a society of farmers and hunters.”
“You’re saying the planet had been what, attacked?” Heinz said, looking incredulous.
“More like obliterated,” Watkins said.
“And there is no way it was a natural event?” Heinz said. “A meteor shower or something?”
Watkins shook his head. “The report is quite clear on this. The Saishans even found fragments of the weapons used.”
For a long, awkward moment no one spoke.
“Please don’t say that the warheads were Russian,” Mitch finally said.
Watkins let out a bark of nervous laughter. “No, they weren’t Russian.”
“Okay, well that’s a start.”
“Do they know when it happened? This attack?” Heinz asked.
“That’s the other thing,” Watkins said. “We’re not talking about something recent. The event predates even the Saishans by several million years.”
“Several
million
!” Williams said.
“Yes. Approximately four and half million years.”
“Incredible,” Heinz said.
“I don’t know what it means,” Watkins said. “But I thought everyone should know.”
“Thank you, Chris,” Richelle said. “I don’t know what it means either. I’m not sure I even
want
to right now. As fascinating as it is, it doesn’t really change anything. Once we’ve finished translating the logs, perhaps it will all make a bit more sense. Who knows?”
Watkins picked up his papers and stood. “Well, I’d better get back to work.”
“You’re doing a great job, Chris,” Richelle said. “Why don’t you grab yourself a cup of coffee and a good night’s sleep. You look a little pale.”
“I’ll be fine,” Watkins said.
Richelle watched him leave and let out a long sigh. “Okay, well that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, but I have a feeling that’s probably going to be par for the course around here from now on.”
“This is serious shit,” Mitch said. “Prehistoric alien civilizations nuking entire planets? How the hell can that not change anything? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I agree, it doesn’t. I’m just saying,
how
can that be?”
“Calm down, Mitch,” Richelle said.
“What about Chris?” Williams said. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for him to be going through all this stuff on his own. Imagine what it must be doing to his head. Did you see him, he looks like he’s—”
“Like he’s just had a sneak preview of what’s in store for us if we don’t get our own shit together?” Mitch suggested.
“Alright,” Richelle said. “I can see we’re all freaking out a little. Let’s just think happy thoughts for a moment, shall we?”
“Yeah,” Mitch said. “Maybe he’ll have better news tomorrow. Maybe he’ll tell us about the great traveling space circus, going from galaxy to galaxy, bringing nothing but joy and happiness to all who welcome them.”
For a moment nobody said anything, then all four of them burst out laughing at the same time.
“You see?” Richelle said. “Happy thoughts. Well done, Mitch. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to move on to RP One. Heinz?”
Heinz shook his head slowly. “Same thing. We can access the log files, but not the mainframe. Mitch and Naoko have been running the sequence for two weeks now without success. We think there may be some kind of DNA-based access protocol. If that’s the case, we’ve got a serious problem.”
Williams raised a hand. “When we launched RP One from Origin didn’t we access the mainframe then?”
“We’ve never accessed the mainframe of Origin
or
RP One,” Heinz said. “And we sure as hell didn’t
launch
RP One. The beacon located by Siren Call was transmitting on a loop. All we did was decode part of the signal and send Origin what it wanted. The confirmation came from Siren Call, not Origin. Then we just eavesdropped on the exchange between Origin and the beacon to gather the information we needed to set up the Pandora as a landing platform. Once everything was in place, we used Siren Call again to acknowledge the request. The launch sequence was pre-programmed. Does that answer your question?”
“Not really,” Williams said. “You lost me somewhere around the beginning.”
“Never mind,” Richelle said. “The point is, we can’t access the mainframe.”
“Correct,” Heinz said. “I’m not saying we’re giving up. We’re just not there yet.”
Mitch nodded. “We’ll keep at it, boss.”
“Good,” Richelle said. “Then I suggest we all get back to work.”
Jangdan-myeon, North Korea
Thursday 7 June 2007
0900 KST
General Seo-jun Rhee of the Korean People’s Army arrived at the airfield just before noon and lost what little remained of his temper when the young captain in attendance informed him his driver was running late.
“Then why haven’t you provisioned local transport?” Rhee demanded.
“Sir, I apologize, but all our vehicles are waiting for parts. I sent a—”
Rhee held up a hand. “When will the car arrive?”
“It should be here within the hour, sir. Perhaps you would like to wait inside?”
“Where else would I wait? Did you think I was going to stand out here?”
“No, of course not, sir. Please forgive my ignorance.”
The captain led them to the small, dilapidated building that served as the airfield’s terminal. The two soldiers flanking the door stood to attention and looked straight ahead as the general passed. Behind them the helicopter began to rise, shrouding the makeshift runway in a cloud of fine dust.
The captain’s office was little more than a room with a desk at one end and a dented filing cabinet at the other. Above the cabinet sat a picture of the supreme leader in an ornate gold frame. Rhee surveyed the room with obvious disgust and pointed at the picture. “That picture is dusty. Is this how you show your respect for our beloved leader?”
The captain scrambled to his desk, rummaged through the drawers, and finding nothing with which to clean the picture, quickly left the office.
He returned a minute later with a cloth and began feverishly wiping down the portrait. When he reached the bottom and began again at the top, Rhee shook his head, “Enough! That will do.”