Читать книгу Oblivion Stone - James Axler - Страница 11

“The Hindus believe that everyone should bathe in the Ganges at least once in their lives,” Clem Bryant explained, a mischievous twinkle in his clear blue eyes. He was a tall man in his late thirties, with a trimmed goatee and dark hair swept back from a high forehead.

Bryant’s companion, Mariah Falk, looked at him dubiously. “You want me to—” she air quoted “—‘bathe’ in that?” A slender woman in her midforties, Mariah had short brown hair streaked with gray. While not conventionally pretty, she had an infectious smile and an inherent inquisitiveness that made her a delight to be with.

Both Bryant and Falk were Cerberus personnel. He was an oceanographer turned chef, while she was an expert geologist. Like many of the Cerberus personnel, the pair shared an unusual bond—as government employees, they had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and placed in the Manitius Moon Base, where they were protected from the subsequent nuclear holocaust that ravaged the Earth. They had been awoken two hundred years later, and found themselves in a world blighted by the horrors that had superseded civilization in the United States of America in the wake of the nukecaust.

“I’ve done it,” Clem told her as they stood at the head of eight wide stone steps leading down to the flowing, muddy waters of the mighty Ganges River in India. The steps were a pale sandy color and there were numerous other people there, locals going about their business, washing their clothes, filling buckets that they rested on yokes across their shoulders, Brahmans washing the soles of their feet. No one seemed to take much notice of the two Westerners who were dressed in the immaculate clothes of the Cerberus redoubt, and whose skin was so much paler, as if they had never seen the sunlight.

Wrinkling her nose, Mariah looked out over the silty wash that swirled past the foot of the steps. “I don’t know, Clem,” she said. “How long ago did you do this?”

“I took a gap year after college,” Clem told her. “Traveled a little. Many Hindus believe that the Ganges is the source of all life. They hold it in the highest respect. They say that Brahma washed the feet of Vishnu here and they believe that it has the power to wash away an individual’s sins.”

“I don’t have any sins,” Mariah said, shaking her head and turning away from the murky water as sunlight twinkled across its surface in dazzling white highlights.

Clem took Mariah’s hand and squeezed it, looking into her bright eyes. “I’m sorry, Mariah,” he said. “Bad choice of destination. Next time you can choose where we go.”

Mariah looked from Clem to the wide river, then back to Clem once more. “You really bathed in it?”

Clem shrugged. “I…paddled,” he admitted evasively.

Mariah let go of the oceanographer’s hand and crouched down, unlacing the dusty white pumps she wore on her feet. “Okay,” she said, “I can do that.”

The sun beat down as, hand in hand, the two Cerberus personnel made their way down eight sand-colored steps to the water’s edge.

Mariah looked down at the murky water, watching the silt swirl within it as the many activities there churned sand up in little cloudlike bursts. “Am I going to catch anything?” she asked Clem, wincing and gritting her teeth.

“Only enlightenment,” Clem assured her as Mariah pulled her hand away from his grasp.

In a final rush, Mariah took the last few paces on her bare feet and waded into the flowing Ganges, letting it lap around her bare ankles and calves as she held her shoes aloft. “Eeeee,” she cheered, “it’s warm.”

Sedately, Clem followed her in, feeling the water flowing over his sandals, splashing around his feet and soaking the bottoms of his pant legs. He turned to Mariah as she held her pumps over the sun-dappled surface of the water and tentatively waded a little deeper, making her way from a group of local women who were busy washing their clothes. To Clem’s eyes, she looked happy and, for all the activity going on around her, she looked at peace.

Clem called to her as he made his way over to where his companion was now standing hip-deep in the flowing river. “Can’t you feel your sins washing away?” he inquired.

Mariah dipped down and, to Clem’s surprise, ducked her head under the water for a moment before resurfacing and shaking the water from her dark hair. “Oh, Clem, how did you ever talk me into this?”

“I don’t recall,” Clem replied with a laugh. “Did I promise infinite being, infinite consciousness and infinite bliss?”

“No,” Mariah said, “you said you’d teach me to scuba dive. And take me dancing.”

Clem shook his head. “I can’t imagine that I would have agreed to the dancing.”

“Are you saying you won’t dance with me, Bryant?” Mariah asked coquettishly, reaching her arms around his shoulders.

Placing his own arms around her waist, Clem pulled Mariah closer and together they danced in the flowing waters of the River Ganges, Mariah’s shoes still dangling from her crooked fingers, while all around them people carried on with their daily chores, oblivious to the couple’s joy.

Mariah was still laughing five minutes later as Clem led her back to shore and they ascended the wide stone steps. “I can’t believe you made me do that,” she said. “I’m soaked through.”

Clem stretched his arms wide and turned his head toward the sky. “The sun will dry you off,” he told her. His own clothes—a light ensemble of shirt and cargo pants—had stuck to him from the soaking that he had received in the river. “I can’t believe I’m back here. I feel like I’m twenty-one all over again.”

Mariah walked barefoot up the steps, her sopping pumps dripping in her left hand. “Me, too,” she said. “With everything we go through at Cerberus, it’s funny to think that places like this still exist. It feels like they haven’t changed in a thousand years.”

“India suffered in the global conflict as much as any country,” Clem told her. “It’s just that New York and Washington, London and Moscow—those locales have been relegated to the history books. While places like this—” he swept his hand about him to indicate the magnificent vista of the wide river “—they’re eternal.”

“Do you really believe in this stuff?” Mariah asked as she and Clem made their way back onto the dusty road that led down toward the steps. “Enlightenment and the washing away of one’s sins?”

Clem smiled. “The belief in a higher purpose, the desire to be a better person—these are universal,” he said. “These are precisely the tenets that Cerberus subscribes to.”

“I didn’t really think of it like that,” Mariah admitted, running her hand through her hair. To her surprise she found that it was almost dry already, thanks to the warmth of the pounding sun.

“Speaking of which,” Clem said, reaching into a sealed pocket of his pants and pulling free an earpiece with a built-in microphone pickup, “it’s about time we were heading back to work. I’ll radio in and let them know we’ll be entering the mat-trans in about twenty-five minutes.”

Mariah nodded reluctantly as she watched Clem place the portable communications device over his ear. Unlike the field teams, she and Clem had decided to forgo the minor operation that inserted the Commtact equipment beneath the surface of the skin. As such, they were both limited to carrying robust, portable units around with them and firing them up when they needed to. Also Cerberus was less easily able to contact them while they were away from home base. On occasions such as this, Mariah reflected, that lack of contact and the privacy it brought wasn’t such a bad thing.

It had been a nice afternoon, Mariah considered as Clem patched his signal through to Cerberus and waited for an acknowledgment. Although she had seen Clem around the base in the Bitterroot Mountains on a number of occasions, where the man mostly served as a cook within the canteen, having forsaken his primary discipline of oceanography, it was only in recent months that they had become close. It had started innocently enough—they had been thrown together by chance to investigate the epicenter of an earthquake. But somehow, Clem’s easy manner and his dry wit had put Mariah at her ease and, more than that, had reminded her of something that most of the Cerberus personnel seemed to have forgotten—what it was like to live in a world without constant fear. Clem was capable and incisive, and he was renowned among his Cerberus peers as a fiercely logical tactician and puzzle-solver. And yet, at times like this, he seemed almost carefree in his utter enjoyment of the world about him. For Clem, it seemed, being cryogenically frozen and learning of the nukecaust were just minor blips in that delightful adventure he called life. And while the rest of Cerberus were geared up to the discovery of new horrors and the unveiling of new conspiracies concerning the ceaseless subjugation of mankind, Clem’s was a very refreshing attitude to have.

“Funny,” Clem mused, his rich voice breaking into Mariah’s thoughts, “I can’t seem to get any response from Cerberus. I hope they’re not sleeping on the job.”

“With Lakesh in charge?” Mariah asked. “They’re lucky they’re allowed restroom breaks!”

“Quite,” Clem agreed, removing the earpiece and looking it over. “I wonder if perhaps the river water has got into my equipment.”

“Aren’t they waterproof?” Mariah asked.

“They’re meant to be,” Clem said thoughtfully, turning the earpiece over on his open palm. “It certainly appears to be sealed tight.”

Mariah reached into her own pocket and pulled loose the earpiece that she had stowed there. “Do you want to try mine?”

Clem nodded, plucking Mariah’s earpiece from her grip. In a moment he had the earpiece hooked over his ear, and was engaging its pickup mic. “This is Clem Bryant calling home. Come in, home.” He waited a moment, stopping at the side of the road as a cart drawn by a donkey and laden with ripe melons trundled past. There was no response from the earpiece.

“Anything?” Mariah asked as a half-dozen chickens went rushing past, herded by a shirtless boy who appeared to be no more than ten years old.

“Nothing at all,” Clem mused, and his tone was irked. “It’s very unusual for two comm devices to go offline at the same time like this. In fact, I’d estimate the odds are up in the hundreds of thousands against.”

“Me, too,” Mariah agreed. “That hardware is old but it’s military solid. Do you think maybe something else has happened? Perhaps Cerberus doesn’t want us back.”

Clem looked pensive as he considered what to do next. “I’m going to keep trying them while we return to the mat-trans. If there’s no response by then, we may need to consider our options more thoroughly.”

Mariah nodded as she replaced the white pumps on her feet, feeling the water in them squelch against her toes. Whatever else you might say about Clem, she thought, he was certainly a man who didn’t ruffle easily.

THE MAT-TRANS UNIT at the end of the Cerberus ops center was just winding down, clouds of mist being sucked away by hidden filters beneath the hexagonal chamber. The door hissed back on its hinges, and three familiar figures stepped out into the antechamber only to find themselves facing a veritable wall of armed guards.

“Hey, guys,” Kane said, dropping the sword and raising his empty hands as he saw the wall of firepower arrayed before him. “It’s us.”

Beside Kane, Grant and Brigid were also raising their empty hands to shoulder level where they could be seen, and all three of the Cerberus field team were wondering just what was going on.

A mellifluous voice called to Kane from somewhere behind the wall of armed guards and, a moment later, Lakesh came brushing past the guards to greet the three of them. “I’m frightfully sorry about all this,” Lakesh began as he grasped Kane’s hand in a solid two-handed shake. “We’ve had a major glitch with the communications relay, causing us to lose contact with everyone out in the field. Precautions will remain in place until we can track who’s entering via the mat-trans, I’m afraid.”

Kane nodded as Lakesh made a path through the wall of armed guards toward the main area of the control room. He saw Edwards sitting with his own field team in one corner of the room. The military man’s face was red with anger and he was complaining in loud terms to his teammates about having his own people pointing guns at him on his arrival at the redoubt.

“Some welcome this is,” Edwards snorted. “If I’d wanted this kinda aggravation every time I walk in the door, I’d’ve got married.”

Edwards’s teammates agreed with the man, used to his bluster.

Kane and his crew strode beside Lakesh toward the Cerberus leader’s own desk.

“Our Commtacts ceased working about an hour ago,” Grant explained. “I was talking with Kane at the time and suddenly—nada—the line was dead.”

Lakesh looked from Grant to Kane to Brigid, concern marring his features. “Did everything go okay?” he asked.

Kane nodded. “Got a little hairy for a while, but you know us—managed to play things by ear.”

“And what about the artifact?” Lakesh quizzed. “An alien chair, wasn’t it?”

“It’s Annunaki, all right,” Brigid confirmed as she removed her dark hat and tossed her lustrous hair back over her shoulders. “I think it’s an astrogator’s chair, used for navigation in starship travel.”

Lakesh stroked at his chin in fascination. “You tested it?” he asked.

Brigid made a sour face. “It kind of tested me,” she admitted, still conscious of the tingling feeling on her skin where the tendrils had tried to consume her just an hour before.

“That doesn’t sound so good,” Lakesh mused. “Would you care to elaborate?”

Brigid began to explain about the strange chair that had held her in its unshakable clutches, but Kane interrupted. “That can wait,” he said. “What’s going on with the Commtacts?”

“And the transponders?” Grant added. “My tracker’s still operating but it couldn’t even locate my own frequency blip while I was out in the field.”

Lakesh indicated the satellite monitoring and communication desks where Brewster Philboyd, Donald Bry and several others were working in unison on what was evidently a fraught and urgent project. “The satellite feeds went down fifty-three minutes ago,” Lakesh explained. “We’ve lost all external comms, including Commtacts, monitoring and general analysis and prediction software.”

“You ‘lost’?” Kane asked.

“It’s still down,” Lakesh told him. “Our best guess is that something has taken out the Comsat and Vela satellites, and Donald and his team are trying to backtrack over the unmonitored feeds to see if we can find any evidence as to what.”

Tucking a lock of her red-gold hair behind her ear, Brigid asked hesitantly, “Do you think this was a deliberate sabotage?”

“We haven’t ruled out that possibility yet,” Lakesh said ominously, “but at the same time it may just as easily be a natural phenomenon or a massive internal failure of the satellites themselves.”

“Affecting both of them at once?” Brigid asked, clearly dubious.

“Freak weather conditions, such as a magnetic storm, could result in a block to all our signals,” Lakesh suggested. “Until we can locate the specific data, we’ll be hard-pressed to give any definitive answers.”

“And in the meantime,” Kane observed, “you don’t know who’s coming through the mat-trans, be they friend or foe.”

“Hence the security detail,” Lakesh said. “Though some people seem less understanding of the need for it than others.” He inclined his head toward Edwards, who continued to rant about having a blaster pointed in his face when his team had arrived home.

Kane shrugged. “You know as well as I do that Edwards will be on his feet and covering your back at the first sign of trouble,” he said quietly. “Leave the man to let off steam for a while—he’ll be there when we need him.”

Lakesh looked at Kane and smiled, reminded of the natural leadership qualities that the ex-Mag possessed.

While the men explained how Kane had come into possession of the ceremonial blade and outlined what had happened with Ohio Blue out in Louisiana, Brigid took it upon herself to assist Donald Bry and his brain trust in sifting through the data to verify the nature of the satellite disruption itself. Brigid had been a crucial player in many of the Cerberus team’s technical advances, including the understanding and development of the interphaser, a portable teleportational device that exploited naturally occurring geomagnetic energy. With her uncanny memory and natural intelligence, Brigid’s contribution of both facts and intuitive leaps had served the operatives of the redoubt well in their continued defence of the people of Earth.

When she joined them, copper-haired Bry was flicking through screen after screen of raw data along with two other computer operators, analyzing each page as quickly as they could, looking for possible errors or glitches. While it was true that Cerberus monitored much of the activities on Earth at any given moment through a variety of data streams, it would be impossible to assign an individual to continuously monitor each of those feeds, particularly given the redoubt’s personnel limitations. Instead, the vast majority of the system was automated, requiring staff only to engage in the more time-responsive feeds, such as the real-time communications that the Commtacts offered.

Brigid rested against the side of the desk next to Bry, sitting on its very edge. “What do you have, Donald?” she asked brightly, gazing at the scrolling data on his terminal screen.

“A headache,” Bry growled, shaking his head. “Something like this should be obvious, but I just can’t pinpoint what it is.”

“Looking too hard, maybe?” Brigid suggested as she peered at the data screen for a few more seconds, feeling Bry’s frustration. “What time did this happen?” she asked.

“We have it as 15.37 and eight seconds,” Bry responded. “But I’ve looked through all the satellite footage and data leading immediately up to that point and nothing is showing up.”

“Both satellites went down at the same time?” Brigid asked.

Bry shook his head. “There’s three seconds in it,” he explained. “The Keyhole sat went first.”

Brigid considered this for a moment. “What if you flip the search?” she asked. “Look outwards instead of in?”

“We’ve checked sunspot activity,” Bry told her. “In fact, it was one of the first things that Lakesh suggested—but there’s nothing.”

“Do you have footage?” Brigid asked.

At a nearby desk, lanky Brewster Philboyd overheard Brigid’s request and called up something on his own computer monitor with a quick tapping of the keys. “This is what we’ve got,” he told her.

Brigid dropped down from where she perched by Bry’s desk and stepped over to watch the footage playing on Philboyd’s monitor. It was a fairly standard satellite photo, showing an unspecified terrain of yellow-brown color, coupled with the dark blue edge of water to one side, and a white blush of clouds drifting across the center. Brigid watched for a few seconds, noticing the slightest movement of the shadows of the clouds on the terrain beneath, confirming that it was not simply a static image. After fifteen seconds, the image abruptly cut to static.

“15.37.08,” Brewster told her.

“Play it again,” Brigid instructed, her eyes still on the monitor’s recorded satellite feed.

Brewster tapped at his keyboard for a moment, and then the image seemed to reset itself before the sequence repeated. He ultimately played it a further seven times before Brigid caught what it was she was searching for.

“There’s a shadow,” Brigid told him.

By this stage Donald Bry and several of the other techs had joined them to watch the sequence for themselves, wondering at what Brigid’s eerily insightful mind might discover that they had missed.

Brewster ran the fifteen-second sequence once more, and Brigid closed her eyes and counted it down in her head. “Sun’s roughly overhead. Watch the cloud to the bottom right of the screen,” she instructed, not bothering to open her eyes. With her exceptional memory, Brigid was able to reconstruct the sequence with incredible accuracy in her mind, and she used that facility to focus in on the information she wanted, magnifying the image in her head. “Twelve, thirteen,” she counted to herself, and then she pronounced in a louder voice, “shadow.”

Then the feed went dead once more, the clock indicator showing 15.37.08.

A smile played across Brigid’s lips as she opened her eyes and saw Donald, Brewster and the others turning from the static-filled screen to stare at her in openmouthed bewilderment.

“It’s there for a second,” Bry said.

“Less than that,” Brewster corrected. “What is it?”

Brigid’s brow furrowed as she thought it over, trying to transform the half-second shadow on the uneven surface of the cloud into a three-dimensional object. “Pass me your notepad,” she instructed.

Brewster Philboyd did so, handing her a pen, as well. Still standing, Brigid bent over the table and sketched hurriedly on the pad until she had roughed out a side view of a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Then she drew the shadow that they had seen upon it, recalling the details from her mind while Brewster brought up a static frame for reference for the others. Sketching three quick lines out from the shadow, she extrapolated its form, interpreting the shape of the object that must have cast it. It was roughly circular, fat at its girth so that it appeared to be more like a flattened or squashed circle. The edge seemed ragged, deliberately so, for Brigid’s penmanship was precise. When she had finished she showed the others her sketch, and the notebook was passed around the handful of technicians standing around the desk.

“What is that?” Donald asked as he gazed at the ragged, circular object that Brigid had drawn.

“Unless it’s been severely damaged, it’s almost certainly nothing mechanical or man-made,” Brigid said. “It’s too irregular. I think it’s a meteor.”

“Couldn’t be,” Bry muttered, shaking his head with disbelief. “It would have to be pretty big to knock out both satellites so completely.”

When he looked up, Donald Bry found Brigid staring at him with her piercing emerald eyes. “Is there a new rule?” she inquired coquettishly.

“What do you mean?” Bry asked.

“Meteors can only get so big now?” Brigid suggested.

In spite of himself, Bry laughed at her comment. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just so unbelievable. We’ve had trouble coming at us from every which way since Cerberus was established—aliens and parasites and insane tribal killers. I just never expected to lose everything so suddenly because of a natural phenomenon.”

“Meteors don’t always travel alone,” Brigid pointed out. “Could be a storm, with two separate rocks knocking into our equipment.”

As the discussion continued, Lakesh, Kane and Grant came over to see what the commotion was. When Bry explained Brigid’s extrapolation based on the data, Lakesh looked concerned.

Kane sidled up to Brigid as the others discussed the implications of her theory. “You wouldn’t have thought a big chunk of rock would cause so much upset,” he muttered.

Brigid looked at him. “An impacting meteor could fall into the class of an extinction-level event, Kane,” she told him quietly.

Kane made a show of looking at his hands, checking he was in one piece before looking back at her with a lopsided grin. “And yet we still stand.”

Brigid shook her head in despair. “A meteor killed the dinosaurs, darling,” she told him sarcastically.

“An’ if it takes out lizards, I’m all for it,” Kane assured her.