Decipher, p.44
Decipher, page 44
FIRE AND ICE
They were standing on the edge of a precipice, a cliff face of solid ice overlooking a chasm of incredible proportions. But this was no ordinary chasm. This was the vast and jagged sinkhole down into which the writhing green energy twister above was descended.
It swirled before them, a great transparent kaleidoscope, effervescent with crackling, colliding ionized particles. Yet it was eerily quiet. Occasionally, odd high-pitched hissing sounds would fill the air as charged molecules exploded and whizzed by. But overall the sensation was like being confronted with an apparition. There was a sense of shimmering air. A light breeze, electricity in its essence. Maybe even life.
It was awesome.
Hackett felt a chill run over him as he took a good long look at their predicament. They were about half a mile down from the surface, which could still be seen way above them. But the surface itself was in far greater trouble than any of them had realized while they were up there. For from here, they could see the true structure of the ice below. And it was not stable.
They were like fleas on the inside of a frozen Swiss cheese. Huge skyscraper-sized arches of ice rose up all around them, connected with, and diverged from, other mountainous columns. Across from them lay further tunnels. Some seemed barren and lifeless, blue arteries into the body of a dead giant. But other tunnels were far more ominous and forbidding, for they breathed steam and smoke, and hinted at what lay below.
Hackett spied the glowing water that rushed between his feet and watched it cascade off the edge and tumble into the dark void below.
There seemed to be no other way of describing it: “Oh crap,” he sighed.
“Which way?” Gant demanded, turning on Yun with barely suppressed anger. “Which way down?”
Yun shuffled forward, eyeing the darkened trunk containing the warhead as he did so. He surveyed the tunnel system ahead. In either direction there was no way of reaching any of the options without somehow securing a line across, for as he noted as he analyzed the edge wall of the chasm, “The path has gone.”
“No shit,” Gant growled. “Now which way?”
Yun looked to Scott for support, but Scott was as eager to find out as anyone else. Yun pointed to a tunnel directly across from them, about thirty feet away and several feet lower down. Steam rose out of it, like the breath of a sleeping dragon.
“Oh great,” Matheson moaned. “That means we gotta pass through this plasma stream, right?”
“Right,” Michaels agreed, already taking off his backpack and handing it to November to hold. He started fishing out a grappling line and hook, but Gant had another idea.
“Hillman, you got your harpoon with you?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Attach a line and fire that across. I don’t think you’re just gonna be able to hook onto an ice feature, Michaels. There ain’t any purchase.”
“I think we’ll need several lines, sir,” the marine replied evenly, “to distribute the weight. I volunteer to go across and attach more cables.”
Hackett was cautious. “Are you insane?”
“You see any other way across?”
Gant pulled out the first of many mountaineering-style ice spikes they’d need to make the crossing, attached a nylon rope and started hammering it into the hard ice. He tied the other end to Michael’s belt and patted the marine on the shoulder, while Hillman took aim with his harpoon and fired.
The bolt whistled as it exploded out across the chasm carrying a second line with it. It blasted into the ice and dug deep, just inside the mouth of the passage.
A few sharp tugs and it was clear it would hold. Gant attached the second line to another spike and hammered it home while Michaels clipped himself on and lowered himself down.
One single thin line suspended across the divide was all he had to make the crossing with, but it was all he’d need. He gripped the line tightly, hooked his legs up over it and started heaving his way across.
November shifted on her feet nervously, watching the marine approach the whirling mass of electrical energy. “What’s that stuff gonna do to him?” she asked.
Sarah shook her head. “No idea.”
“He’s not earthed,” Hackett explained quietly. “I don’t know what kinda power’s flowing through that thing, but theoretically the effect should be nothing.”
Gant eyed the physicist sternly.
“Theoretically,” Hackett reiterated.
Hesitantly Michaels pulled himself along before coming to a stop in front of the wall of magnetized energy. He seemed to visibly tense, as unsteadily he clung on with one hand, and with the other—reached out to the maelstrom.
“I can feel the hairs all over my body starting to stand on end!” he reported back anxiously. “But other than that, no ill effects. I’m going to attempt to go on through.”
Michaels used all of his upper body strength to get his momentum going again and edged deeper and deeper into the thick of the ionized mass. Before long he was entirely immersed in the swirl of energy.
No one commented while they watched the marine’s progress, except for one tiny little mechanism that was built into the watch on Hackett’s wrist. For it beeped suddenly. Hackett’s mood seemed to visibly darken as he checked the time and shut the watch off.
“You didn’t set that thing as a wake-up call now, did you?” Pearce asked.
“No, I didn’t, Bob.” He addressed the others. “It’s the solar storm. It’s going to connect with the earth in a little over fifteen minutes. It’s going to be highly violent, and it’s going to wind up being siphoned—right through here.”
“Fifteen minutes?” Sarah gasped. “We won’t all get across in that time.”
“You just watch,” Gant replied, ordering Hillman to shimmy across with a third line.
The major knelt down and started clipping the warhead to the two lines that were already established before tying the thing off onto the back of Hillman’s belt. Together they all lowered the container down gently so as not to put too much undue pressure on the lines, until it hung in place.
Then, regardless of whether the warhead was swaying or not, regardless of whether the grappling line moorings were creaking in the ice by Michaels’s feet, Hillman set off—dragging the dangling warhead behind him.
It was painful to watch, slow and laborious. Every time he shifted forward he would have to stop and tug at the warhead in order to get it moving again.
Gant leaned in close to Hackett as they were forced to simply watch. “All that energy isn’t gonna set that thing off, is it?”
“I hope not,” was the extent of Hackett’s reply.
Gant was not pleased.
Hackett shrugged. As answers go, that was truly the best he could do.
Out on the rope, however, Hillman had stopped once again. Unhooking the line to the warhead, he tossed it out to Michaels who caught it in one fluid motion. From his secure position across the other side of the chasm, he quickly took up the challenge, leaning into the weight of the container and heaving the thing across, leaving Hillman to complete his journey in double-quick time.
Hillman soon had the third line secured to its moorings and was helping Michaels with the warhead.
“Well, that answers that,” Hackett noted. “No, all that energy will not set off a nuclear warhead.”
Gant ignored him, slapping three of the others on the back. “Okay, November, Sarah and Ralph—get going. One line each.”
SOLAR STORM
It was spotted first high in the sky over Indonesia.
A gigantic orange fireball that grew ever larger until the entire sky in every conceivable direction resembled a blazing fire.
For the onlookers on the ground it brought nothing but a sense of panic and dread as they felt the atmosphere around them swell and expand with the heat. It made breathing ferociously difficult and it caused thousands of ordinary people to run terrified and screaming through the streets of Jakarta.
Farther on across the Pacific, where the islands were already troubled with severe volcanic ash and earth tremors, the new terror was suddenly the rain itself, superheated while still high up in the atmosphere.
Across New Guinea and Northern Australia, schoolchildren who had been out playing were suddenly running back inside in floods of tears, their skin a mass of red blotches where they had been scalded by the torrential downpour. Many had second-and third-degree burns.
Out in the agricultural lands, farmhands were forced to take shelter in their barns, and had little option but to watch helplessly as their livestock were broiled to death on the spot.
As the winds picked up across the Northern Australian plains, it was not long before the all-pervading smell of boiled meat seemed to fill every available pocket of fresh air.
And as the ionic chaos penetrated deep into the upper atmosphere, so it loosed lightning storms the like of which had not been seen on planet Earth for millions of years. Vast streaks of electrical energy shot up from ground to sky at such a ferocious rate in some areas that the scorchmarks left across the plains resembled the aftermath of an assault by some gigantic Gatling gun.
Much more of this and it was hard to believe anything would be left alive across the surface of the earth.
With multiple satellites being knocked out of commission like pins in a bowling alley, it was difficult for any one national space agency to keep track of the marauding destruction in isolation from the rest of the world. Pretty soon the likes of NASA found themselves trading information freely and quickly with ESA and the Russian Space Agency, each agency keeping track of different quadrants of the sky.
But it didn’t take long for the suspected and long anticipated pattern to start emerging.
The storm was being sucked relentlessly into the magnetic fieldlines of the earth’s magnetic poles.
The solar storm was being rerouted. Destination: the South Pole. Antarctica.
ACROSS THE EARTH
Day was turning to night.
Billions of tons of searing volcanic matter were being blasted into the atmosphere by the relentless eruption of volcanic action around the globe.
From Washington State to Montana, from northern California to southern Mexico, clouds of hot ash were pluming twenty, even thirty kilometers high.
104 million hectares of lush green American farmland was suddenly flattened, scorched and devastated by acrid pumice hailstones. In a stroke, billions of U.S. dollars’ worth of damage was inflicted upon the single most impressive economic powerhouse the world had ever known.
In a radius of up to 1,500 kilometers from each volcanic site around the globe, thousands of people were rushing to crammed hospitals with eye sores, skin rashes, pus-ridden wounds and burns from the whirlwind of scolding volcanic fallout. Lungs were seared. Lives were lost.
In 1945, Nagasaki in Japan had been ripped from the face of the earth by a 20-kiloton atomic explosion. That was equivalent to 20,000 tons of dynamite.
When the solar storm connected with the earth, it triggered five further catastrophic volcanic explosions which exploded with the force of one million kilotons apiece. The equivalent to five Krakatoas.
The explosions were heard in every corner of the globe, like the death rattle of a dying planet.
THE PROBLEM
Sarah’s clip was stuck.
She tugged at it again, but it was no use. Somehow the line she was shimmying across on had become jammed into the hinge part of the clip to which her safety line was attached. She was stuck fast.
Sarah looked around for help, but Matheson was already across and climbing down into the tunnel while November, who was looking back, having seen there was something wrong, was stuck out on a line that was simply too far away to be of any use.
“I’ll be okay,” Sarah assured her. “You go on ahead. I’ll get this untangled in a minute.”
Reluctantly November continued on her way, hand over hand, dragging her body weight across the chasm, leaving Sarah to struggle in the center of the energy stream.
Scott craned his neck and squinted for a better view. “What is she doing?”
“She’s stuck,” Pearce realized.
“Now is not a good time to be getting stuck,” Hackett sang out, checking his watch again. “Any minute now this quiet little energy twister is gonna turn into a pillar of blazing fire that wouldn’t look outta place in the Bible.”
“I better go over,” Gant announced, getting his line ready, but Scott had other ideas.
“No,” he intervened. “I’ll go over. You send Yun across on the other line. I don’t think he’ll attempt to double back if you’re waiting for him back here.”
Yun clearly didn’t like that comment.
Quickly, both men clipped their safety lines onto the main ropes and set off monkeying across to the other side.
Yun eyed the anthropologist coldly as they both heaved in unison. “Why do you not trust me? I said I would come with you. To flee is to be a coward.”
“I’m not calling you a coward,” Scott replied, struggling with the maneuver. “But everyone’s entitled to change their mind once in a while.”
Yun continued on his way, as Scott pulled himself up alongside Sarah, who in turn rolled her eyes. “Oh, great. That’s just what I wanted to be. The goddamn damsel in distress.”
“Well ‘hey there’ to you too,” Scott remarked, swinging closer and grabbing hold of Sarah’s main line. “Y’know, joining the circus and walking a tightrope was never very high on my agenda in life,” he said.
“Me either. Can you see what’s wrong?”
Scott held on to his own line with one hand and twisted Sarah’s clip and safety line with the other. “Oh, I gotcha … your safety line got wrapped around your clip when you latched on. When you put your weight down on it, I think what happened was it pulled the main line in and forced it into the hinge. What we got here is a very tight knot!”
“Can you get it free?”
Scott could feel his arms starting to ache. Good question. Could he get it free? He took a good long look at the problem, grunted with the effort and could feel himself starting to sweat.
He tugged at the knot. “Y’know, in ancient times,” he said calmly and lightly, “Egyptian priests were highly regarded if they specialized in the art of knots. Knots were highly significant, magically. They were associated with the binding of energies.”
Sarah looked up into the endless stream of oncoming ions.
“In knot magic, the number seven was the master number.”
They eyed each other closely. There was the number seven again: was that the key to unlocking the Atlantis language?
“Richard, knots are fascinating, but you need to move your ass, my friend.”
Sarah glanced over at Hackett, who was by now shimmying up beside them on his own way over to the other side, Yun having already completed the journey.
“The study of knots,” he grunted, “is at the forefront of looped space theory in physics.”
“And that’s relevant how?” Sarah remarked, amused by the way all of Hackett’s exposed hair was standing completely on end.
“Looped space is linked to time. Something neither of you have. Time is precious.”
Suddenly the whole chasm lit up as intermittent bursts of crackling energy, like snakes on the warpath, weaved in and out of the main stream and began to pulse down from above and careen off into the void below.
All three scientists screamed.
“Jesus Christ!” Scott bellowed, feeling the sheer terror of volatile electricity roll across his skin. He reached for his side pocket and pulled out a knife. “We’re gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way,” he said. “Think Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot.”
“But I won’t have a safety line!” Sarah protested.
“So tie yourself onto me,” Scott insisted, slashing at Sarah’s safety and slicing it in two.
“Okay, go!” Gant ordered, clipping Pearce’s safety onto one of the lines.
“But Jon’s still on his way across! What if the line can’t take two people?”
“You see that out there?” Gant barked, balling a fist at the volatile energy mass. “Your argument’s with that, not me! Now get out there and start moving!”
They could hear it now, like the roll of thunder accompanying the approach of a thousand freight trains. An intense rumble that was intent on shaking their very surroundings to pieces.
Scott struggled to pull himself along hand over fist, acutely aware that entire boulders of snow and ice had started to tumble past his field of vision. As adrenaline pumped around his system he suddenly felt a sharp pain jabbing through his leg once again, but he fought it. Fought for all he was worth.
Sarah was aware of the shrieks. Encouraging, panic-stricken shouts from those already across. But she kept her eye on the end point and hauled ass, for watching them gathered in the mouth of the next ice tunnel only seemed to make matters worse. Their voices sounded muted. Masked as they were by the building rumble of impending disaster.
“My arm, Jesus, my fucking arm!” Pearce heard himself scream as he tensed and flexed, dragging himself along the wire and into the whirlwind.
Suddenly he felt himself being pulled. Sucked sideways as if caught in the middle of a blender set on “fine.”
“Somebody!” he yelled in sheer panic. “Somebody help me!”
But the only two people in a position to help, Scott and Sarah, were already up ahead and being helped down off the ropes.
“I can’t hold on!” he bellowed, his voice drowned out by the frenzied blasting of ever-increasing chaos. “I can’t hold on!”
Gant appraised the situation with the calm of a man used to action.
While the rest of the group hurried inside the archway of the lower ice passage and disconnected Scott and Sarah from their safety lines, Gant focused more on what was going on half a mile up above their heads.
The energy tendril was writhing. Convulsing, like a snake that had just eaten a rat and was trying to digest it whole. It whipped around from side to side as the sheer volume of energy that was being dragged down from space was bottle-necked up where the ice refused to open out further and let the sheer volume of ionized matter through.
