Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (29 page)

58

6:00 p.m.

Jenna felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Noah, standing close. Protective. “You were right,” he whispered. “Is there anything you can do?”

She looked back, uncertain. A sense of satisfaction filled her. Everything was playing out according to the plan that had been written in her DNA. She didn’t need to do anything. Yet her rational mind knew that the feeling was a lie. It was
wrong
. She didn’t want the message to be sent. Didn’t want the world and everyone she loved to be swept away in a global apocalypse.

Cort was still trying to get a grasp on what was happening. “Can this be done remotely? Is there an alternate control room?”

Miller shook his head. “The computer controls the array, but we’re locked out.”

“It’s Chu,” Jenna whispered. “He’s taken over the network.”

Cort stared at her a moment, processing this, then turned to Miller. “Is that possible?”

Miller raised his hands in a gesture that indicated he was out of his depth. “I wouldn’t have thought any of this was possible, but yes. If somebody broke into our network, they could take control of the array.”

“So he could be anywhere. Timbuktu, for all we know.”

“He’s here,” Jenna said, still whispering, though she didn’t know why. “He’s with Sophia. They’re here somewhere. They have to be.”

One of the other technicians spoke up. “If you wanted to take over the network on site, the best way to do it would be to splice into one of the fiber optic lines.”

“Where are those?”

“Everywhere. But the antennas would be the ideal place. Or the pads. There are nodes at each one.”

Cort breathed a curse. “Can you pull the plug? Shut down everything?”

“We’re locked out,” Miller repeated.

“Then cut the damn cord with an axe!” The scientist looked aghast at the suggestion, so Cort continued, “I’ll do it. Show me where.”

“Too late,” Jenna murmured. She wasn’t sure how she knew this. It didn’t feel like an implanted memory. It might have been nothing more than a sense of imminent defeat, but she was certain that the message was already being transmitted. If it was as simple as the Wow! Signal, it might already be done. If it was something more complex, like the DNA transmission, it would take longer, but certainly no more than a few minutes. And then…?

Then Jarrod Chu would signal the rest of the clones scattered around the world to start tipping the dominos.

This is the way it’s supposed to happen
.

This time, there was no mistaking the source of the thought. Her voice—the teacher’s voice—still with her.

No! I won’t do this. I won’t stand by and let everything be destroyed. I didn’t get this far by giving up
.

She closed her eyes and tried to reach out with her mind. She had always heard that twins shared a strange, almost psychic bond. Maybe clones did, too. She envisioned Jarrod Chu, bent over a computer, watching as the message was uploaded. Was it a vision—was she seeing it through his eyes because of some psychic bond—or just her imagination? Either way, it didn’t help. She tried to picture Sophia Gallo, someone she had never even heard of until sixty seconds before, yet with whom she shared a unique blueprint. What was she doing right now?

Track maintenance.

After the antennas, the most critical component of the Very Large Array was the rail line, which made it possible to move the massive dishes to different positions along the legs of the Y. Ensuring that the two hundred ton dishes could be moved without incident required the forty miles of steel rail and over sixty thousand wooden railroad ties. Maintaining all that required specialized equipment and unique vehicles.

Cort dug into his pocket and pulled out a phone. He tapped a contact name and strolled a few feet away, his back to them, his voice hushed, but urgent.

With Cort distracted, Jenna whirled to face Noah. “I can find them. Give me the keys.”

She said it so forcefully that Noah dug into his pocket for the keys, but the gravity of her demand hit him before he could hand them over. He gave her a crooked smile. “Sorry. The rental agreement doesn’t allow that. But I’ll drive you.”

For just an instant, Jenna was grateful for his support. Then a chill, like a premonition of death, shot down her spine.

Just you
.

She shook her head. “I can’t explain why, but I have to do this alone. You asked if there was anything I can do. This is it. Please trust me.”

His smile fell, replaced by an intense stare that cut right to her core. “Jenna...”

“
Trust me
,” she repeated, then added a word that seemed strange in her mouth. “Dad.”

“I trust you,” he said, barely louder than a whisper. He held out the keys, but as she took them, he said, “Remember, Jenna. Nurture is more powerful than nature. I raised you well.”

As she bolted from the room, she heard Cort shouting, “Where the hell is she going? In ten minutes, this place will be—” The door shut, cutting off his voice.

In ten minutes, what?

Doesn’t matter
, she decided, and she ran faster.

59

6:03 p.m.

Noah’s words haunted her as she sprinted toward the parked Jeep. He had seen through her. He had seen something that even she couldn’t see. She was being summoned—drawn by a siren song that rang out from every cell in her body—to a reckoning where she would discover whether he was right.

Stop it? Why?

She slid behind the wheel and started the SUV. The track maintenance yard was just three hundred feet away, easily identifiable by the collection of strange looking vehicles, many of which sat on rail sidings. Two men in hard hats and work clothes stood near one of the vehicles and she steered toward them, rolling down the window as she skidded to a stop.

“Where’s Sophia?”

One of the men glanced up, a perturbed expression on his face. “You shouldn’t be driving in here.”

“Sophia,” she repeated, more forcefully. “It’s an emergency.”

“She went to check the west track. But you shouldn’t—”

Jenna didn’t hear the rest. She angled the Jeep toward the rails directly ahead and punched the accelerator. She bounced over the rails without slowing and then steered onto the access road that ran parallel to the tracks. A cloud of dust rose behind her like some kind of biblical pillar of smoke, marking her presence. Cort would have no trouble tracking her. The speedometer ticked up—fifty miles per hour…sixty…seventy. It didn’t seem fast enough.

She passed an enormous hangar-like structure, easily as large as the Aerojet silo building in the Everglades. The side facing the rails was open. A massive antenna stood inside, undergoing some kind of maintenance. The dish was pointing straight up, like an enormous chalice waiting to be filled.

Beyond that building lay several empty pads, each with three concrete footings that rose up from the dusty ground like grave markers, then a dish, then more pads. She checked each without slowing, looking for the track maintenance vehicle that would indicate Sophia’s location. Three long minutes later, she spotted what she was looking for: a Chevrolet pickup truck that had been modified with flanged steel wheels to run on railroad tracks. It sat parked in front of a towering antenna dish. As she got closer, she saw movement high above, on the staircase that led up to the base of the massive dish.

Jenna stopped the Jeep and got out. A dark haired woman wearing blue coveralls, descended the staircase, taking several steps at a time with the agility of an experienced parkour athlete. Even from a distance, Jenna could see the resemblance; the woman—it had to be Sophia Gallo—looked just like her.

Sophia paused on the lowermost landing just above the concrete pillars upon which the antenna rested. There was an unmistakable look of excitement on her face, and Jenna found that she too had broken into a broad smile.

“Come on up.”

Without waiting for further prompting, Jenna mounted the short flight of stairs to the landing, where she found Sophia waiting with open arms. Jenna fell into the embrace without the slightest hesitation.

The sense of kinship—sisterhood—was overpowering. The bond she felt with Mercy was only a shadow of what she now experienced. This woman didn’t merely share the same DNA. Sophia and Jenna were the same person, only separated by age and experience.

Sophia released her and held her at arm’s length. “You’re new.”

It sounded a little strange, but Jenna understood. It wasn’t just that Jenna was young. Sophia was a connected part of a family that Jenna had only just learned about. “Yeah,” she replied. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“I’m Sophie.”

“Jenna.”

“Wonderful.” Sophia laughed with undisguised joy, “Well, you’re timing couldn’t be better. Come on up to the vertex room. You can tell us both.”

She gestured to the ascending stairs, which rose at least another forty feet above the landscape.

“Both?”

“Oh, sorry. I guess you really are new. Jarrod is up there.”

Jenna was not the least bit surprised that her intuition had been proven correct. Everything was happening according to plan. She started up the stairs behind Sophia, and with each step, she felt herself moving closer to a pivotal moment in history. The moment
everything
would change. She wondered if this was how the crew of the Enola Gay had felt one early August morning in 1945, as they took off from the Marianas Islands with a cargo of nuclear death in their bomb bay. The world was about to change, and Jenna would bear witness.

Sophia passed a gently chugging compressor and ducked under one of the large curving gears that allowed the dish to tilt. She continued up another flight of stairs that ended at an innocuous looking door right below the dish. She opened it and allowed Jenna to step inside first.

The room looked empty, like a disused storage closet. A small raised metal platform provided access to the upper reaches of the pyramid-shaped space. Several large cylindrical objects reached down from overhead. A man stood in front of a cylinder. She recognized him, both from the picture Cort had shown her at the safe house and from the uncanny resemblance to the face she saw in the mirror. Jarrod Chu. He held a laptop computer trailing a thick cable connected to the cylinder.

Jarrod showed only a trace of surprise at seeing her, and then his face broke into the same smile with which Sophia had welcomed Jenna. Sophia stepped in behind her and made the introduction. “Jarrod, meet Jenna. She’s new.”

“Very new,” Jarrod remarked. His voice was a deeper version of Jenna’s. “You must have slipped through the cracks. Last generation?”

Jenna risked a quick glance at the computer screen. It showed a download progress bar, about two-thirds green.

I’m not too late
, she thought. And then,
Too late for what?

“I think so,” she answered. “And I only learned about…all off this...a couple of days ago.” A small lie, but one she delivered without the slightest hint of dishonesty. Jarrod gave no indication of registering the falsehood, and Jenna realized that, despite his training as an FBI special agent, he wasn’t adept at reading people. She pointed at the laptop. “Is that it?”

“This is it,” he confirmed. “In about two minutes, give or take, it will be done.”

Two minutes
. Jenna felt a tingle of anticipation.
All I have to do is stand back, let it happen and the world will change.

I told Noah I could stop it.

Stop it? Why?

“What exactly is it?”

Jarrod cocked his head sideways in a look of mild surprise. He glanced at Sophia then back at Jenna. “You mean you don’t know?”

Jenna gave a helpless shrug. “Still catching up.”

Jarrod tapped the touch pad and then turned the screen so she could get a better look. The display was filled with ones and zeroes, a binary code. After just a moment’s scrutiny, Jenna recognized the pattern. It was identical to the DNA message Soter had received thirty-seven years earlier. But then an impossible detail leapt out. A change. Something in the code had been modified, added, but why?

She almost asked for an explanation, but before she could phrase the question, she came up with a possible answer on her own. The DNA message was a unique recognition code. Sending it back to the source would be a way of signaling that it had been read and understood. The addition revealed that the language could also be spoken by those on the receiving end.

“You must have talked to Soter,” Jarrod continued. “How is our dear father?”

“Uh, he seemed kind of confused actually. He didn’t think any of us understood the last part of the transmission.”

Sophia grinned. “He still thinks it’s from aliens.”

This time, Jenna made no effort to hide her ignorance. “It’s not?”

Jarrod laughed. “You
do
have some catching up to do.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but instead he returned his attention to the computer, closing the window with the message and checking the progress bar. Three-quarters done now.
Ninety seconds? Less? And how much time was left on Cort’s ten minute countdown, to...what? Nothing good.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jarrod continued.

“You do?”
He does? I doubt it
.

“You’re wondering if this is the right thing to do,” Sophia said.

“We’ve all thought it,” Jarrod said.

Jenna gave an involuntary gasp.
Of course they know. We practically share a brain
. “Is it?” she asked, abandoning all pretense. “Destroying the world?”

“Destroying?” Jarrod exchanged another meaningful glance with Sophia. “Jenna, we’re
saving
the world. Saving it from this slow death called humanity. I know it’s a lot to process, and I know you want to believe there’s a better way. We all did. We’ve spent years trying to find a better way, but the message…”

Sophia picked up the thread of his explanation. “You only need to look at a newspaper to see it. We—humans—either consume with no regard for the future, or hide our heads in denial while the problems multiply.”

“We’re omnivores,” Jarrod said. “In the truest sense of the word. We devour everything. And we congratulate ourselves on our ability to adapt when we exhaust one resource, even though our miracle solution drives thousands of species to extinction.

“Did you know that in the 1960s the human population was poised to exceed carrying capacity? The planet could not produce enough food to feed everyone. The population was about three billion, and one third of them were just a drought away from starvation. But then we discovered new ways to extend the food supply. New strains of wheat and rice, fertilizers made from petrochemicals, new farming methods, intensive factory fishing. And what has happened? Ninety percent of the world’s forests have been cleared for agriculture. The seas have been emptied of fish and are poisoned by fertilizer run-off. Worst of all, instead of stabilizing the food supply to feed three billion, the so-called Green Revolution fueled a population explosion. It took thousands of years for the population to reach three billion. In the last forty years, it has more than doubled. And by the middle of this century, there will be ten billion people.”

In the back of her mind, Jenna could see the seconds ticking away, but she knew that Jarrod wasn’t stalling. His intention was to educate her. To help her overcome her moral reservations about what they were doing…what they were destined to do.

“No one even realizes what a disaster it was,” he continued. “Human society congratulates itself on their ability to squeeze the Earth’s limited resources even harder, ravaging the natural world, heating the planet with our waste until the oceans turn to acid and the land becomes a barren desert. Only when we have killed every other living thing will humans admit to folly, and then they will say ‘Why didn’t we do something about it?’ Well, we
are
doing something.”

“We aren’t destroying the world,” Sophia said. “Humanity is doing that. We’re saving it. Treating the infection before it kills everything.”

Jenna felt the truth of the words. Humanity’s fatal flaw was the ability to ignore dire generational problems while focusing on short term gratification. It was written into the human genome as surely as this moment had been written into her own. And she knew, without a shred of uncertainty, that it would never stop. There would be no great awakening. The human species was a runaway train that would destroy all life on Earth with its inevitable crash.

All I need to do is let this happen
, she thought.

There would be survivors. As if awakening to another implanted memory, she realized that the others had already made preparations for it, and once the ashes of World War III cooled, they would step forth and begin building a better human society, one in which the rapacious appetites of Humanity 1.0 would be bred out.

“A lot of people are going to suffer and die,” she replied in a small voice that didn’t feel like her own.

“They’ll suffer and die if we don’t take action,” Sophia countered. “We cannot afford to cling to the illusion of false hope.”

A faint chime sounded.

It was done. The signal had been sent. Jenna had failed to keep her promise, yet somehow, it didn’t feel like failure.

Sudden nausea swept through her, bending her vision, moving through her body, head to toe, like a wave of energy. It staggered her, but passed in a second and left her feeling...invigorated. Renewed. Stronger. Sharper.

What the—

She glanced up at Sophia and Jarrod. Neither seemed to have suffered the same effect, but they were different. The chestnut-brown hair they all shared was now black. And their eyes, once dark brown like Jenna’s, were now fiery brown, almost orange. There was no place to see her reflection, but Jenna’s hair was long enough to pull around and see. She did it casually, as though nervously playing with her hair, confirming that the fine, straight strands were now as black as theirs. Given their lack of reaction to her eyes, they matched as well, still doubles, but not in Jenna’s memory.

They didn’t notice the change
, Jenna realized. The fact that it took place a moment after the signal was sent wasn’t lost on her.
The modified DNA...