This charade went on for over half an hour before the supervisor on the other end got involved and quickly adopted the opinion of his subordinate, namely that the captain was a prank caller getting his kicks out of blocking the emergency frequency—a crime punishable by several years behind bars—as he wasted no time pointing out.
Things only started going the captain’s way when the Xilin Gol was identified on the coast guard’s radar and stubbornly refused to answer all calls for identification. From there the matter slowly began to crawl its way up the bureaucracy until the commanding officer was eventually woken up. He arrived an hour later and immediately ordered the deployment of the station’s only vessel, an aging Type 053 frigate with only two of its four diesel engines in working order. By the time she set sail the Xilin Gol was 112 miles from shore.
The frigate’s skipper, a retired tanker captain in the navy reserve, began hailing the cargo ship with increasingly harsh threats, as if the reluctant crew were merely holding out for the worst possible terms before responding.
When the Xilin Gol was only
80
miles away and likely to reach land somewhere between the mouth of Jiaozhou Bay and Tuolou Island—a heavily populated stretch of coast—within less than four hours, the order was given to arm the frigate’s anti-ship missiles.
The first of these was launched half an hour later. It travelled less than a quarter mile before the active radar in the rocket’s nose cone malfunctioned and sent it plunging into the sea. The second faired only slightly better and short-circuited the entire launch system in the process, starting a fire in the battery compartment that nearly took the ship down with it in what would have been irony at its very best.
It was for this reason that only two members of the crew witnessed the arrival of the nearest thing to the son of heaven the Chinese had seen since the abdication of the last Manchu emperor. It was little more than a streak of bright blue light, not unlike a shooting star, but much closer. Both men would later recount the sighting on numerous occasions and on the graves of as many dead relatives as they could think of.
The Pandora
Wednesday 27 June 2007
0100 EEST
The hours leading up to the launch of Odin were among the most awkward any of those living through them could recall, and for reasons that had little to do with the looming disaster in the East China Sea. Everyone but Naoko, who was sleeping the sleep of the dead compliments of GlaxoSmithKline, had heard Titov’s reprimand of Francis and Richelle. As the only member of the group—and possibly Aurora as a whole—for whom the light bulb had yet to come on, Heinz was perhaps the most affected. You might think that this comparatively irrelevant issue would have been overshadowed by the weight of all others, but human interaction is not mathematics, and thus divorced from logic and free of reason. Mitch found the entire thing highly amusing, while Watkins maintained the fiction that he hadn’t heard anything, and Titov appeared to be praying, more likely than not for a time machine. Meanwhile Francis and Richelle had retreated to separate corners of the universe. It made for five colorful hours.
“Ten minutes,” Mitch said. “Someone better go get Romeo down here.”
Titov glared at him, and for a moment it appeared as if Mitch’s future, too, hung in the balance, but the Russian only grunted his disapproval and walked away.
The Xilin Gol was now 65 miles from shore. No one had noticed the Chinese coast guard’s failed attempt to sink her because the altitude of the current view was too high to make out individual ships. All that was visible on the screen was the rectangular tracking marker and the rapidly approaching coast line.
Titov returned with Francis a few minutes later.
“You better sit here,” Mitch said and climbed down from the command seat.
“You ready?” Titov said.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Francis said.
Mitch sat down beside Watkins at the terminal directly in front of Francis. When the timer on the screen finally hit zero, a blue cross appeared on the screen. Mitch zoomed in the view until only the Xilin Gol could be seen and positioned the cross in the empty space between two of the cargo hatches. When he confirmed the location, a compartment in the wall of RP One between the two adjacent terminals popped open with a faint hiss. Heinz reached inside and pulled out a helmet that was similar but not identical to the one they had used on the Isle of Dragons. Instead of covering the eyes, this one had a red visor and was made of a much lighter material. Also unlike the other one, this helmet was attached to something inside the box by a thin cable that appeared to stretch rather than roll out as Heinz walked to the center of the bridge and handed it to Francis.
“Any last prayers?” Francis asked.
When no one offered one he raised the helmet above his head and put it on. He reached for the buttons on the sides only to find there weren’t any.
“So how do I turn it on?” Francis said.
“You don’t,” Mitch said. “I think the other system was a direct link. This one either runs through Gandalf or the dropship. You’re just going to have to trust us.”
“Well… I’m ready when you are,” Francis said.
Mitch selected the launch command and looked at Watkins.
“Do it,” Watkins ordered.
When he executed the command another countdown began.
“You’ve got about twenty seconds,” Watkins said. “That’s assuming the link is instant. There’s a chance it may only come online once Odin is on the ground.”
“I think I’d prefer the latter,” Francis said. “Falling from outer space isn’t exactly—”
When they all turned to look at him Francis was gone. His eyes were shut and his lips pressed together in the frozen
m
he had been about to articulate.
“I guess that answers
that
question,” Mitch said.
Watkins was about to concur when the screen suddenly split in two. The bottom half contained the new list of available commands while the top displayed an image of the Earth in the form of a black ball surrounded by a halo of light.
“Holy shit,” Mitch said. “Is this a live feed?”
“I think so,” Watkins said. “What else can it be?”
The answer to this question never made it to Mitch’s lips. One moment the bridge was silent, the next it was filled with a spine-curdling scream of exhilarated terror.
38,000 Miles Above the Earth
What made Francis scream was not the sight of his home planet hurtling itself in his direction at a speed only a particle physicist could realistically conceive of, but the accompanying sensation. Francis would never find the words to even approximate what it was like because the feeling was entirely artificial. It was what a fighter pilot might experience if he achieved a speed far beyond the level at which his body would disintegrate while remaining entirely conscious. In other words, something which could not in reality be felt, yet was possible using a technology that made the Large Hadron Collider look like a high school science experiment.
What made him stop screaming was the voice of Mitch, as loud and clear as if they had been sitting next to each other on a church pew.
“Francis? Can you hear me?”
He was about to say he could when his sense of reality was assaulted again, this time by the sight of a shooting star from above rather than below. It was there and gone again so quickly Francis thought it might have been his imagination.
“Mitch? Is that you?”
“It’s me alright,” Mitch said.
“How am I looking?” Francis said.
“If you mean the version of yourself you left behind, you look like you’ve got Down syndrome.”
Francis laughed. “Thanks.”
“So what’s it like?” Mitch said.
“I wish I could tell you. I really do.”
“Can you move?” Mitch said. “You know, move your arms?”
The idea hadn’t even occurred to him. He could feel his body. Which is to say, he was aware of its form. But when he tried lifting a hand to his face it refused to move.
“I think I’m frozen,” Francis said. “Do we have any idea what’s going to happen when I get down there? I only ask because I think I’m moving a little too fast for a smooth landing.”
“A hundred and sixty thousand miles an hour,” Mitch said. “According to Heinz’s calculations.”
To Francis, who had once driven a stolen BMW from Berlin to the Czech border and reached the lofty speed of 140 mph, the figure was too high to mean anything.
“You’ll slow down when you reach the atmosphere,” Heinz said. “As for the landing, I think we’re just going to have to assume that whoever designed this thing knew what they were doing.”
“That’s reassuring,” Francis said.
The next few minutes lapsed in sporadic conversation to which everyone contributed. Whenever there was a pause Francis found himself drifting off into a haze in which it all looked and felt like a lucid dream. Then Mitch or Titov or Watkins would say something and he’d be back, falling toward the Earth like a comet with memories. In some ways the small talk felt almost sacrilegious, a human stain on a divine moment.
“Hold on to your hat,” Mitch said. “You’re about to fall out of heaven.”
Francis barely had time to make sense of the statement before he was engulfed in a ball of flame. There was a sudden sensation of heat, but it wasn’t painful. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was gone, overtaken by an entirely new sensation. The feeling in the pit of his stomach seemed to fold into itself as the atmosphere began to push back. He could feel himself slowing down, although to his eyes there was no apparent difference. The surface of the earth, a black canvas covered in clusters of bright light, was coming at him way too fast.
This was when Francis began to feel afraid. That it would make no difference to his own body if Odin crashed into the ship and straight through it to the bottom of the sea did not abate this fear in any way. He was in
this
body now, and the physical and emotional stimulus it provided were his own. The fact that he could hear Mitch expressing his own concerns to the rest of the team on RP One didn’t help.
It wasn’t until the Xilin Gol was actually in view that Heinz’s assumption about Odin’s creators proved well founded. As with everything else inside this alien body, the sensation was an exaggerated version of things he had felt before. In this case it felt like a parachute opening above him, only this one didn’t actually exist, and the deceleration was so strong it would have turned a human body into a puddle of organic matter in the toes of its own boots.
The impact was a marked improvement on the one Francis had imagined, but it was not exactly gentle. When he looked down at his feet he was standing in a steel crater several feet deep. The depression had knocked the cargo hatches to either side of him off their rails. One of the sections to his right collapsed into the hold beneath with a mighty clang. Then there was only the night, the stars and the low hum of the ship’s engine.
“Francis?” Mitch said.
Francis tried to move his arm again and this time it responded. He stood flexing his hand for a moment, mesmerized by the reflection of the moonlight in the strange elastic material. Heinz had theorized that Odin was made of an alloy which was animated by some kind of electric charge, an idea that made no more sense to Francis than the theory of relativity.
“I’m here,” Francis said. “And I’m working.”
“Well thank God for that,” Titov retorted. “Can you see the bomb?”
Francis could. He was about to say so when Mitch said, “That’s it.”
“I don’t know which is more strange—being a giant or most of the people I know living in my head,” Francis murmured.
The bomb was sitting in the gap between the hatch to Francis’s left and the one beyond it. He was about to walk across the top of it, then remembered what had just happened to the other one and went around. Although Odin’s skin had the bizarre feel of liquid glass, neither soft nor flexible to the touch, the soles of its feet felt as if they were made of rubber. They made no sound as he walked across the steel floor.
Francis reached the covered frame and pulled off the canvas.
“This isn’t a bomb,” he said, forgetting again that he was now sharing his sight.
“It’s six bombs,” Mitch finished.
Francis reached for one of the cylinders and quickly drew back his hand.
“What the hell was that?” Mitch yelped.
“You tell me,” Francis said. “I feel like I just stuck my fingers into a plug socket.”
“The charge readings just went into the red,” Mitch said.
“Amazing,” Heinz said.
“What do you mean?” Mitch said.
“I think it was charging itself,” Heinz suggested.
“With radiation?” Francis said.
“With energy,” Heinz said. “Try it again.”
Francis did, but this time there was no shock.
“No reading,” Mitch confirmed.
“Because it’s fully charged,” Watkins put in. “Look at the readout.”
“Alright, guys,” Francis said. “How about we leave the science for later. I need to stop this ship.”
“I think we can assume everything on the bridge is fried,” Mitch said. “You’ll have to head for the engine room.”
“Hold on,” Watkins said. “Look back at the middle of that thing.”
Francis did.
Watkins pointed. “What’s that on top of the box in the center?”
Francis leaned closer. There was a square aluminum box welded to the center of the frame. The lid was fixed on by eight bolts. Protruding from the top of it was a steel rod about three feet high.
“It’s an antenna,” Mitch said.
“Can you get the lid off?” Heinz said.
Francis tried getting one of the bolts between two of his fingers but it was too small. Before anyone could suggest an alternative he snapped off the antenna, pushed his thumb into the side of the box and peeled the cover back as if it were made of dough. Five of the bolts snapped off with a loud ping. One of them hit Francis in the chest and ricocheted off like a bullet.
“Take it easy,” Mitch said. “That’s an atomic bomb, not a jungle gym.” Inside the box, partially obscured by wires, was a digital readout welded onto a circuit board.