Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (2 page)

“I assume someone ran up the red flag?” he said, the momentary terror turning loose of him and letting him step into the shower.

“I’d bet Arecibo did,” she said, bending the car around another corner at what sounded like an insane speed.

“Then you need to make sure you get out. Do you know any private airstrips around there?” he asked, as the water washed the layer of sweat off his skin.

“Avra Valley’s just outside Marana. It’s pretty quiet,” she answered, her tires screeching again.

“I can be there in an hour,” he offered.

“I can’t.” The sounds in the background fell away. She was slowing down. “Damn. It looks like there’s an invasion force heading up to the Peak. There must be eight or ten choppers coming out of the valley.”

“Did they see you?” It’d be a disaster if they picked her up before he could get the information.

“I don’t think so,” she said, “but I’m the only car on the road.”

“Let’s hope Dr. Anthony can keep them occupied. You concentrate on getting some miles between you and the observatory. I’ll be waiting.”

“I’ll be there,” she said.

Colton stood for several minutes in the shower. “Mica, I need to call a staff meeting.”

Stepping out under the drying lamps, he realized that his demons were no longer going to be confined to the realm of his nightmares.

It was time to introduce them around.

***

Washington:

Sylvia Hutton sat staring at the snow on the White House lawn. What was going to be a gray sunrise, was made worse by the stack of reports that lay in her inbox. She knew what they’d say without reading them. The words had become a meaningless fugue over the last six years. No changes. Progress on one front, lost ground on another.

She dealt with the unending stream of terrorist organizations, just like all of her predecessors. They still called it a war, even though it barely fizzled and popped like a wet firecracker across the world’s starving wastelands. Now that it was her turn to lead America through the battle fields of destiny, instead of glory, she had learned what it was to be a powerless steward, chasing shadows in a pointless political masquerade.

Today, dawning lifeless on the heels of another sleepless night, all she wanted to do was to crawl into a hole and wait for the pit to fall in on her. Blowing out a slow breath, she glanced at the ornate clock on the corner of her desk. Alvin Stanley, her Advisor on Science and Technology had called, insisting he had an emergency.

An emergency?

Janice had squeezed him in. “Excuse me, Ma’am, Dr. Stanley is here.” In truth, any crisis would be a welcome diversion from the relentless repetition of her daily routine.

“Send him in, and hold my–” He burst into the room without the usual escort. Trailing a split-second behind, Janice was visible before he slammed the massive door with an unceremonious heave.

Forming a comment about his unusual entrance, the words dried in her mouth. This was not the Al she knew. It was his body, with a face dancing in an incredible swirl of nervous twitches, an animated mask of something dangerously close to panic. Walking across the room, he leaned on the back of the chair facing her, his breath uneven, and a roulette wheel of expressions playing across his features.

Al Stanley was a huge man, sumo huge. He was also a world-class scientist and one of her late husband’s dearest friends. When her husband had died just before her election, she’d offered Al the position of Science and Technology Advisor. He’d performed exceptionally well, but every time she saw him, the memories of her husband came painfully back.

Except this time.

Maybe he was having a heart attack? She knew about his failing health, but she’d never before seen any sign. “You look like you need a doctor,” she said, nodding to the chair he was leaning on.

He shook his head, reaching into his pocket to pull out a pill dispenser. The parade of tics slowed, only to be replaced with a fine sweat. “We need to talk.”

Nodding, she fingered the panic button on the edge of her desk, debating whether she should call for help. He settled into the chair. She could see his pain, but there was something else. He was buckling under the weight of an even bigger problem.

“Can I get you something?” she asked. “Water?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, snorting out a sad laugh. “I want to finish out your term, but my cardiologist says it’s a matter of time ‘til my heart gives up.” He held up the bottle of pills and explained, “So I take my nitro, and try to avoid stress.”

“Jeez, Al,” she said. “There’s nothing left to do here that’s worth dying for. It’s housekeeping from here on."

Looking down at the floor, he said, “Not anymore.” He held out a shiny microdisk in his sweaty palm.

“I have a thousand reports a week on my desk,” she said. “Save me the time—"

He drew a deep breath and started to speak, but his mouth just hung open. The roulette wheel of expressions spun once more across his face. He shrugged, holding out the disk again.

“So this is a problem?” she said, taking it from his outstretched hand.

Clearing his throat, he pulled himself together. “Yes Ma’am."

Looking at it, she dropped it into her media player. “Get us some coffee,” she said, nodding toward the urn near the door.

“You’ll want something stronger,” he warned.

Accessing the file, the wallscreen across the room flickered to life. He glanced at the display, indicating with his eyes that she should watch.

The file loaded and she recognized the diagram for what it was: the Solar System. The inner planets, visible in their positions, a clock blinking in the bottom corner.

“This is important because?“ she asked.

He snagged the remote off the corner of her desk and clicked the advance button.

A red line appeared, swinging around in a gradual curve from outside the orbit of Mars until it crossed the path of Earth and then looped back once. A small dot marked the position of an object.

“Do I want to know what that is?” she asked. He’d not brought the coffee but she realized he might have been right about wanting something stronger.

He shook his head. “Ordinarily it would have been called a Potentially Hazardous Object,” he said. “But that’s a bit of an understatement I guess. It’s dead on track to hit us.”

“How long do we have?” she asked. She’d seen the same idea play out in a hundred movies, but it felt significantly different as reality. It took serious effort to keep her voice calm.

“698 days and a few hours, January 6th, 2:14 PM Eastern Time,” he said, tapping the button to set the images into motion. The red dot slid with a silent certainty toward its intersection with Earth.

“When was it discovered?” she asked, staring at the image.

“Arecibo bounced an echo off it yesterday,” he said. “A team from Kitt Peak found it a couple days before. Maybe seventy-five or eighty hours ago."

“Why didn’t we hear about it sooner?” she asked.

“When we shut down the government backing for Spaceguard, we killed the communication channels up the chain of command,” he said. “This was one of those events we figured was too improbable to spend money on."

“So that was a bad call,” she said, understanding that history could make ruin out of even the best decisions.

“Yeah,” he sighed.

“So let’s work this,” she said. “Doesn’t it take a while to make a good projection? Seems to me I remember a panic a couple times before that turned out to be based on bad information.”

He nodded. “The difference is that we’ve got more sophisticated tools now."

He punched another button and the orbit diagram was replaced by a map of North America. A flattened gray circle ran from Phoenix, through Seattle, into southern Canada and back through Chicago. In the center of the circle, just south of Cheyenne, Wyoming, a black hole appeared.

“The first ring represents the margin of error in the projection,” he explained. “The other one is the area of the crater itself."

“How big is it?” she asked, realizing that the black spot was half the size of Colorado.

He shrugged. “Call it ten or twelve cubic miles. Plenty big enough to punch our ticket."

“Who knows about this?” she asked, feeling the situation as a tangible weight on her shoulders.

“Only the original astronomers, and Arecibo so far,” he said. “The International Astronomical Union has an automated reporting system, but after that last false alarm they changed the protocols. Now, before it’s reported, it’s got to be confirmed. I asked Arecibo to decline confirmation of the initial report.

“If they don’t confirm it, won’t someone else?” she asked.

“It has a particularly low albedo, so it’s hard to see. Right now there might be two or three ground-based telescopes in the world that could pick it out. It was really a lucky break that anyone caught it this early,” he said.

“Won’t one of those others take a look?” she asked.

“Only if they’re asked,” he explained. “Dr. Anthony at Kitt Peak called Puerto Rico first. They confirmed back to Anthony, but the director at Arecibo is an old friend of mine, so he checked with me before making an announcement."

“So nobody else has any idea?” she asked, starting to make notes on her epad.

“Other than the two observatories, no,” he said, “I assumed you might want to keep this quiet for now.”

“At least until we can figure out what to do,” she said.

“I hope I didn’t overstep,” he added, “but I tapped Homeland Security to send a team out to bring in the astronomers who spotted it. We don’t want them wondering what happened to their discovery and bringing in another observatory.”

“She nodded. “How long can we keep this quiet?"

“That’s not my area.” He shrugged. “For a while it’ll be too faint to see, but in eight months its orbit swings by the Earth. It’ll almost be visible to the naked eye."

“We’ve got a plan for this, don’t we?” she asked. She was sure there’d been a proposal since before the turn of the century.

“Hell no,” he snorted. “There’s been a lot of talk, but no action. Everything we’ve ever thought about doing is based on having ten years to push it off course, and most of that was using technology that was defunded a decade ago.”

“We’ve got nothing?” she asked, the blood draining from her face.

“No Ma’am,” he said.

She stabbed the button on her intercom. “Janice, clear my calendar for today and put the rest of the week on stand-by. I want Dick Rogers and Norman Anderson in my office immediately. Get State and Defense here too.”

“Yes ma’am,” Janice said. “Secretary Herman is about to leave for the Damascus Summit. His plane should be on the tarmac at Andrews right now.”

“Don’t let him get off the ground,” Sylvia said, slapping her hand down on the intercom switch. She stood up and walked over to her coffee pot.

“We need an assessment of our options. Get NASA, Space Command, the astronomers from Kitt Peak, whoever you need. I want to know our options.”

“Yes ma’am.” he said.

“Keep it on a need-to-know basis if you can.” She waved a hand toward the door. “Now move,” she said, glaring as he hesitated.

She’d already forgotten that a few minutes earlier he’d been having a heart attack.

***

Chapter Two:

Paradigm Slip

Avra Valley Airpark, Marana, Arizona:

The sun was starting to tinge the sky violet when Danielle Cavanaugh swung her Fierenza coupe through the gate. In spite of her breakneck run down the mountain, it had taken her almost two hours. It seemed like there was always some kind of construction on the highway, but when you lived in a fast growing metro area, you learned to put up with traffic problems, even in the middle of the night.

She’d intended to grab a few of her things, but couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t have been waiting at her condo. The sight of the helicopters storming the observatory had stoked what had started out as a whisper, into a full-blown paranoid roar by the time she reached the airfield. She’d watched the mirrors for the last twenty miles expecting to see a black SUV full of government agents pulling up behind her.

By the time she keyed the gate at Avra Valley Airpark she’d almost managed to convince herself that she wasn’t followed, even if her heart was still pounding. Although she’d moved her Comanche out to the new airport in Oracle, they hadn’t deleted her pass code.

She eased through the rows of aircraft, wondering how she was going to recognize the company jet. She shouldn’t have worried, right on the edge of the runway sat Stormhaven’s Citation X with its lights on, the tail emblazoned with the corporate logo. The blue S of Stormhaven reminding her of the 1950’s Superman emblem.

Her phone beeped as she turned toward the jet. “Unidentified caller on encryption,” her phone said.

“Answer,” she said, hoping it wasn’t the government telling her to wait where she was. “Yes?”