‘Go ask him yourself. Maybe he’s waiting to be evacuated. Saul, just to be clear on one thing. I don’t know that he actually has the codes you need, only that he’s authorized to carry them. And, even then, I don’t know how the hell you’re going to persuade him to reveal them to you.’
‘I guess I’ll have to rely on my natural charm and powers of persuasion.’
‘Now I really feel sorry for him. How long before you can make it here to Arizona, do you think?’
‘No idea.’ Saul stared at the drop zone with longing. ‘But it’s going to have to wait until I’ve spoken to Hanover.’
‘Fine.’ He heard her sigh. ‘They’re going to try and hold off one of the launches until you get here, but there’s only so long they’ll be prepared to wait.’
‘I understand.’
‘Good luck, Saul. But, before you go, I want to ask you something.’
‘Fire away.’
‘What made you ask about Mitchell?’
Saul started walking towards the group of hotels. ‘A man named Donohue was trying to tell me something about him.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘That’s the thing, I don’t know. We got interrupted before he could finish.’
‘This isn’t making a great deal of sense,’ she said.
‘Right before you tracked me down at Harry’s, I was helping to track down an ASI shipment hijacked out of Florida. According to Donohue, it was loaded with Founder artefacts, but it wound up sinking to the bottom of the Pacific at the exact same location the first of the growths appeared.’
‘I remember hearing about a hijack on the news, but I’d no idea they were in any way connected.’
‘Nobody did, at least not then. But I think Donohue was trying to tell me that the plane going down, when it did, was connected with Mitchell in some way. What that connection might be, I can’t even begin to guess.’
‘But you think there’s something in that?’
‘After the past couple of days, Olivia, I’m prepared to believe pretty much anything.’ He hesitated. ‘This means I’m going to need to ask you for at least one thing more.’
‘What exactly?’
‘That’s kid of hard to define,’ he admitted. ‘I thought if there was anything significant, then maybe it would be buried in the ASI’s own databases.’
‘You’re asking me to break into their records
again
?’
‘If you can.’
‘I could end up attracting a lot of unwanted attention if I keep doing things like this, you know that, right?’
‘Even if they realize what you’re up to, they’re not going to come after you, not this late in the day. All their resources seem to be going towards protecting the Array.’
‘I hope to hell you’re right,’ she grumbled. ‘There’s nothing else you can give me to go on before I go looking?’
‘I’m afraid not. I don’t know the exact time the shipment disappeared off the radar, or the precise coordinates, but I’m hoping that it might not be restricted data. Maybe you won’t risk setting off so many alarms this time.’
‘You were lucky this man Hanover turned out to be so close at hand,’ she said. ‘But I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for this time.’ She paused. ‘Unless you think I should just go find Mitchell and
ask
him?’
Saul thought of that video footage he’d seen of Mitchell’s suit disintegrating in some vast alien vault, then of him being lifted naked on to a stretcher. He remembered the medical reports he’d read suggesting that Mitchell had died and come back to life.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t do that. Just see what you can find out, if anything.’
He stared over towards the Dorican, wondering if he might be better off not knowing just what it was Donohue had been trying to tell him earlier.
Off the coast of Guam, 8 February 2235
By sheer good fortune, their ferry departed Tumon Bay on the afternoon of the 6th, just hours before a bad storm struck the west coast of Guam, setting the sky above the island ablaze with a lightning storm the likes of which Thomas Fowler had never seen. There was something about the sight that inspired a near-religious terror in his heart, as if he were witnessing the retribution of an angry god. He stood at the starboard rail alongside Amanda and the rest of the passengers, watching this eerie display until the coast faded to a thin smear of green sandwiched between ocean and sky. He overheard someone saying that the same lightning was now wreaking havoc on Yona and Mangilao on the island’s east coast, both setting towns ablaze and killing dozens unlucky enough to be caught outside when it struck.
As she pressed closer against him, he slid one hand arou Amanda’s waist. ‘Have you seen the rust on the hydrofoils?’ she asked, gesturing over the rail towards the foaming waters below. ‘And the hull’s so patched-up, it doesn’t look like it could survive a squall, let alone a thunderstorm.’
‘It’ll make it,’ he said confidently, glancing back at the brightly lit windows of the restaurant deck, as rain began to patter down. Above the restaurant entrance, some of the crew had strung a banner that read ‘END OF THE WORLD CRUISE’, the letters hand-painted in bright rainbow colours. ‘Maybe we should head inside.’
They found the restaurant mostly deserted but for a small group of men and women huddled around a lengthy table, playing cards. These were the geophysicists from Tokyo University, whom they’d met on arriving in Guam, and one of them now waved at them to come over.
‘Jason,’ remarked Fowler, approaching the table, ‘you’re up pretty late.’
‘Never too late for gambling,’ replied Jason, tapping a spread of cards lying face down on the table before him. ‘Care to join us?’
‘Thanks, but not this time.’ Fowler took a seat along with Amanda. ‘We won’t be sticking around for long. It’s been a long enough night as it is.’
Jason turned towards him, resting one elbow on the back of Fowler’s chair, the Minnesota University t-shirt stretched taut over his not inconsiderable belly. ‘Some show, huh? Tesla would have been proud of it.’
‘Tesla?’ asked Amanda.
‘He means Tesla’s earthquake machine,’ said an older Japanese man, his accent by way of Southern California. ‘Resonant frequency, that kind of thing. He reckons those growths are going to shake the world to bits, and that tonight’s lightning storm is the prelude.’
Some of the others around the table chuckled at this suggestion, then carried on with their own separate conversations.
‘Just because it sounds crazy doesn’t mean it can’t be true,’ Jason huffed.
‘I heard someone say the growths were disrupting the normal flow of magma deep beneath the crust,’ said Fowler, recalling one pet theory that had circulated amongst his own scientific staff. ‘Something like that would be more than enough to trigger the kind of seismic activity we’ve been seeing.’
A middle-aged man, with dark features, laid down his cards and sighed. ‘I will tell you exactly what is happening,’ he said. ‘The slate is being wiped clean.’
‘Then you’re a bigger nut than Jase is, Nick,’ someone else pointed out.
‘If anyone – or any
thing
– really wanted to destroy our world,’ Nick continued, ‘tre are far, far easier ways to go about it. Like triggering a solar flare, or dropping a black hole into the Earth’s core.’ He gestured towards the north-west, in the same direction they were sailing. ‘It seems to me that whatever created those things out in the ocean, their intention was clearly
not
to destroy our world.’
‘Then what do they want?’ asked Amanda, clearly fascinated.
The man called Nick smiled, placing his cards face-down on the table. ‘I can only hazard a guess, I fear. Perhaps the growths are a means of sterilizing this world in preparation for implanting an entirely alien flora and fauna for the benefit of forthcoming invaders. Or perhaps the reason is something entirely alien and unimaginable to us. What is clear, however,’ he continued, fixing his gaze on Fowler, ‘is that they could only have found their way here through the Array.’
Fowler felt Amanda’s hand reach out to take hold of his own under the table. ‘That’s hardly an original observation,’ he replied.
Nick smiled. ‘Imagine, if you would, that out there amongst the stars, we found something that we did not understand. Perhaps we would study it carefully, even bring it back here to Earth for closer scrutiny. Does that not seem like a reasonable conjecture?’
‘Sure, if you subscribe to the kind of news feed that runs items about two-headed babies and biblical visions,’ Fowler replied, doing his best to ignore the fear clutching at his heart. All the same, his comment elicited a few smiles from the rest of the table.
‘Oh man, conspiracy theories,’ said Jason. ‘I
love
conspiracy theories.’
‘What is irrefutable, to my mind,’ Nick continued, a glint of malice now evident in his gaze, ‘is that we are currently witness to the greatest act of murder in history. I mean the murder of an entire planet and its civilization.’
Amanda’s grip on Fowler’s hand became so tight that it hurt.
‘You really think someone
caused
all this?’ Fowler replied.
‘An act of negligence, perhaps, if not outright murder, but the result is the same.’
‘I think Jason was right,’ said Fowler. ‘I’ve heard a hundred conspiracy theories just like that one in the past week.’
The table had by now become quite silent.
‘Perhaps,’ said Nick, conceding the other man’s point. ‘And yet I have found myself encountering the most remarkable people on this voyage. Some, I suspect, are far better informed than one might reasonably expect.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Amanda, ‘but I didn’t catch your last name.’
‘If you’ll excuse us, we have to go,’ she said, suddenly standing up and tugging at Fowler’s arm. ‘Like we said, it’s been a long night for all of us.’
‘Of course,’ said Nick, his smile tightening across his teeth. ‘I wish you a good night.’
‘He recognized you,’ she whispered as they hurried back to their cabin. ‘I don’t know who he is, but he sure as hell knows who
you
are.’
‘Can you place him? Was he working anywhere on the Tau Ceti station?’
‘I really don’t think so. There’s very few of the staff we didn’t account for during the clean-up process, and he’s not one of them. But the way he was looking at us . . .’ She shuddered despite the tropical heat. ‘He knows, Thomas, I feel sure of it.’
‘It’s not like it takes a great leap of logic to figure out that the growths might be the result of some error of human judgement. It’s unlikely he was making any
personal
reference to either of us.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘stop trying to rationalize this! I could see it in his face, the way he was looking at you. It’s not just that he knows about the Founders: he also knows who you are.’
They came to the door of their cabin, and Fowler put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Even if that turned out to be the case, it’s much too late to worry about it now. We already know what’s in our future.’
‘But how sure are you, really, that it’s set in stone?’
He hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Sure enough to believe that what I saw in that video is bound to come to pass, whatever else happens in the meantime.’
They were woken during the night by angry shouting, followed by gunfire. Fowler pressed his ear to the cabin door, unwilling to risk stepping out into the corridor and wishing he had thought to arm himself. When first light came, he summoned up the courage to venture out on his own and learned, from a member of the crew, that a few of the more belligerent passengers, who had apparently come on board armed with sports rifles, had demanded the ferry make a detour towards a pod of whales sighted several kilometres to the east. The captain’s blank refusal had led to an argument, and the argument – largely fuelled by alcohol – had led to a violent altercation, leaving two of the passengers dead and another seriously injured. Their sleep after that was restless, and Fowler dreamed of bone-white flowers growing from blood-red seas.
The Pacific growth – the first one of all to come into existence – became visible on the horizon the following afternoon. It looked to Fowler like something that Magritte might have imagined: a silver and gold behemoth resembling a flower only in the most abstract terms, and self-constructed on a scale that ded all logic. The senses rebelled at the sight of it when seen directly, and he felt the same tight knot of primitive terror deep in his chest that he’d experienced on first seeing the news footage of this same growth.
Once again they gathered by the rail with the rest of the passengers, steadying themselves cautiously as the ferry rose and dipped with the waves. The growth was still sufficiently distant for the lowest part of its base to be hidden below the curve of the horizon, and yet the complex structures sprouting from its massive stem, like tangled nests of leaves, were clearly visible even at so great a distance. So was a haze of barely discernible black dots and curious twists of light that clouded its upper half.
‘Do you think he was right?’ Fowler asked, tasting salt as waves broke against the hull. ‘That man last night, I mean – in what he said about the slate being wiped clean.’