The Filter Trap (13 page)

“Well, congratulations, pilot, you’re about to hit the big leagues. I’ve been authorized to put you in one of our Seahawks for this mission. I can give you a few hours with one of my ‘hawk pilots before you go, but it’s up to you after that. Don’t worry, it’s like your bird, just a lot slower and more fidgety. I cleaned up after twenty-four sorties in Gulf War One in a ‘hawk. An accomplished pilot like you should have no problem.” He winked at her.

“If I may, sir, you sound sarcastic.”

“Astute observation, Raptor Fairy. Consider it a personal challenge. Something to bring you back here in one piece so I can give you your Raptor back.”

Nobody spoke, and the captain drank up the silence until satisfied.

“Good. I’ve loaded the coordinates for the docs into a tablet that’ll be on your chopper. I advise you all to rest up a bit and get some grub in the mess. You’ll be flying out, courtesy of Lieutenant Green here, at 0400.”

He saluted them and the pilots saluted back before he left the room.

“Wonder if that guy ever sleeps,” Allan muttered as they all started to leave their seats.

Nana poked Allan in the chest. “He stays on watch so
you
can sleep at night, Doc.”

“Hey, lay off, big guy,” Jill gently pushed the finger away. “He didn’t seem enamored with you three, either.”

“He just doesn’t think we’re true pilots. It’s an old Navy and Air Force pissing contest,” LARS said.

“Probably wants our jets cuz he thinks his F-18 pilots deserve ‘em more than we do,” Nana added. “With the F-35s stuck in development-hell I bet his Navy jocks would love to get their hands on a Raptor for a change.”

“Worse than that,” Lee said, looking equal parts dejected and scared. “Apparently the captain, and whoever drew up this mission, didn’t look too close at my helicopter training record.”

“You got this,
Chopper
-Fairy,” said Nana with a pat on Lee’s back.

“Now hold up, kids,” came the captain’s voice from behind them. “I didn’t say we were done here just yet.”

The five started for their seats, but the captain stopped them. “At ease, folks. The captain’s left the room, now you’re just talkin’ to an old sailor who’s seen too much, and not heard enough.”

The captain took a small liquor flask from his back pocket.

The others looked about without moving their heads, all recognizing unusual behavior for a Navy captain.

The captain popped open the flask to reveal it was nothing more than an ornate toothpick holder. “They call my boat ‘The Stick’, so I used to keep this around as a joke.” He laughed like it felt good to do so.

“Now I find a good toothpick especially stimulating after giving up cigarettes.” He extended the case towards them with an open hand. “Cinnamon.”

“No takers?” He closed the case with a brisk snap. “Down to business then.”

He wiggled one of the little wooden splinters between his incisors and turned from the pilots to face the scientists.

“We rode some rough water to get out here from San Diego. They don’t let guys like me in on the good stuff, but some things are obvious. I think you deserve to know. The next stop for the doctors here, after they get what they need on the mountain, is Cheyenne from what I can tell. What’s more certain is that the Joint Chiefs are preparing for something a hell of a lot more dangerous than refugee rescue and riot patrol.

“They’re moving all the heavy hitters offshore, and they’re askin’ our gunboats how high up in the atmosphere they can shoot. Every ship that’s sea-ready is on the water. Every Ohio-class sub-hell,
all
the subs, and every sailor, enlisted, or reservist that can see straight is deployed on active duty. Even the Coast Guard is mountin’ up.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Lee grumbled.

The captain slapped her shoulder. “Be glad you get to go out fightin’ if you do. Not for politicians or big oil like the last few ‘conflicts.’ Nope, you kids’ll be sticking it to ‘em for mankind while geezers like me watch from the wings.

“The Event was just the beginning. Somethin’s comin’. I can feel it like a summer storm on the Pacific. I reckon these two professors are gonna take a look at it. The rest of y’all will have the job of shootin’ it out of the sky. Saving the world.”

Far enough from the islands for the naked eye to discern detail, one could imagine that life under the ocean waves continued no different than it always had. The water, a soothing constant in a new chaotic reality, lulled Allan into a false sense of security.

The all-important tablet computer with coordinates handpicked and delivered from Cheyenne Mountain after an exhaustive compilation of mostly analog and disparate ground telescope data slipped a little in Allan’s grip. Since the observatories on the mountain were evacuated after the Event, the Joint Chiefs didn’t want to chance inoperable radios. An offline copy of the data for the giant eyes pointed at the sky became nearly as important as the scientists themselves.

The waves grew wider, longer, spreading into even troughs and valleys. Their blue fractals spread and wavelengths increased to transition and match the sky, then green mountains and valleys, a scorching look at the Sun, and finally the red of magma beneath Mauna Kea. Lucid dreaming again, Allan realized he perceived not the Hawaiian Islands, but the radiation spectrum, ending with radio waves. That strange voice reached out again, this time varying in intensity, like the peaks of an AM radio frequency.

Unlike before, it didn’t want a dialogue, instead it parsed Allan’s scientific knowledge while he watched, or rather, felt. Time slowed and whirlpools of images surrounded him. Evolutionary leaps. Transitional fossils. He sat in an empty hall, watching Stephen Jay Gould. This was decades ago. Allan’s semester at Harvard.

Just as quickly Gould disappeared and time zoomed forward, both Allan’s timeline and the past and present history of the known universe. Allan got the feeling this portion of the universe existed only in some miniscule proportion to the Searcher’s larger understanding.

The cavalcade slowed and stopped again, stuck on one phrase. Invasive species. Then, Earth. “You must be my subconscious,” Allan said in his dream, looking around at still photographs of kudzu, beetles, beavers, and men. “I know what you’re trying to tell me!”

Information flew by too fast for Allan to comprehend, images varying at the lengths of the wavelength, approaching and surpassing gaps as small as a pinhead. The ride back through the visual band went from red to violet, ending in wavelengths merging into a static white light as the gaps sizzled down to the size of atoms. Allan imagined information tunneling through the Internet, a simultaneous existence of a photon riding through transparent fiber optics, starting and stopping in the same moment.

Something pulled at him, straining to find information, his neurons a repository for a faraway query. The lack of control scared him. “Subconscious?” he shouted. “Id? Ego? What are you?”

A flash of space. Dots around a ball. A world. Green, but unfamiliar. Too fast to follow, the world zoomed through sky, dirt and water, ending in darkness. Unable to use any outward senses in the dream space, Allan felt a brief mix of relief and hope, though from a vast audience. He’d only ever felt that before when a class gave him a standing ovation. He shared this unknown space with the Searcher.

Vibration filled him, slow wavelengths like before, but no images accompanied it until he opened his eyes to the blue sky and the whup-whup of helicopter rotors.

LARS stared at him. “That must have been some dream, man. You made some weird noises.”

“I saw it,” he said, happy to be able to tell someone. “The possibility that our new orbit may be accompanied by new variables that Sol spent billions of years guarding us from.”

“Orbits and variables? Shit, Doc, even your
dreams
are boring.”

“No, not math variables. Dangers. Meteor showers at regular enough intervals could force all Earth life to retreat back to the oceans. A slight uptick in gamma rays could cause atmospheric changes for a permanent winter, or worse. For all we know, we’re close to one of those formerly distant collapsed stars now, showering us with radiation. Worse yet, if our orbit isn’t perfect, we may slowly spiral into the new Sun, or spiral away into a frozen void. All these things, and more, could happen simultaneously.”

“Good morning to you too, Nostradamus.” LARS pulled her head back, waking up. “Hope your prognostications are wrong.”

“The observations at Mauna Kea will give us some clues. An updated lifespan for humankind measured in millennia, centuries, or months.”

LARS looked over at Jill, still sleeping through the jumpy chopper turns. “I hope you’re as smart as the president gave you credit for.”

As they passed by the smaller islands, Moloka’i, Lanai, Maui, and Kaho’olawe, they could imagine nothing in particular was wrong. At 12,000 feet
—
the Seahawk’s service ceiling
—
the islands, partially covered in low, swiftly-moving clouds, still looked cut from a travel brochure.

As they sunk lower in the sky, Jill woke from the buffeting of rough air. “My God, look!” she exclaimed. “The tsunami tore through here before landfall.”

“I thought those were red algae blooms,” Jill gasped, “but they’re deoxygenated blood and plasma.”

Whales, dolphins and dismembered things of all kinds floated at the top, permeating the water in broad films of inky red.

“There’s so much blood,” Allan noted.

“A blue whale’s heart is so large that a human child could pass through,” Jill said. “There must be much more carnage under the surface.”

“If this goes all the way down, how will this impact fishing yields?” Allan wondered aloud. “The food chain could be imbalanced for decades.”

“Assuming we’ll last that long,” LARS said.

“Look!” Nana motioned. “Something’s eating down there right now.”

Jill covered her mouth and tried not to vomit.

As the helicopter continued to drop they observed a shoal of tiger sharks rip apart an injured sperm whale.

Jill turned her eyes back to the cargo hold, meeting Allan’s as he sat across from her, feeling the same disgust.

“You always were squeamish!” he shouted over the roar of the rotor engine.

“You’re the one that passed out in biology class!”

Allan was happy to laugh at himself. It helped fight off the encroaching nausea from seeing the bloody melee.

“Hold on!” Lee shouted from the cockpit as they banked east.

The heavy chopper approached land, passing overturned cruise ships adrift off the port in Kona, then swung around the volcanically active side of the Big Island. Allan had been there only once, but remembered the sweet smelling macadamia trees on the plantation. Much of the Big Island sat above sea level and Allan hoped the plantations were high enough to be saved.

They passed over what used to be resorts at Mauna Lani, now washed-out wrecks of wood and bricks nestled in the still overly green manicured grass. Flying even lower, they sped over Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway and followed Waikoloa Road to Waikoloa Village.

Though largely deserted, the village’s elevation saved many homes from the fate of their lower neighbors. Refugees from Mauna Lani and other smaller villages huddled on the still verdant village golf course, now an open air triage center.

Lee took the eastern route along an old lava flow, following it to its ancient source atop the mountain. When they broke through the low-hanging clouds surrounding the summit, they were relieved to be cut off from the sorrows buried at lower elevations. Allan wondered if Lee had passed so low because of her poor chopper piloting skills, or to instill in the scientists a sense of who they were working for. There were people alive down there, people who deserved saving, but weren’t on the president’s short list.

Gleaming bubbles sitting on top of the world appeared first as specs, leftover lychee from a giant’s dessert plate, ready to roll down the slopes. As the chopper curled closer they could see the individual telescopes, buildings, and the small road leading up from the cloud cover and the nearby peak. In every picture they’d ever seen the complex looked exactly like this: lonely, barren, and monumental.

Mauna Kea served as a permanent reminder of man’s presence on Earth and science’s victory over tradition. Islanders fought long and hard against the original construction on the sacred site. One man, a brave scientist, waged a life-long battle to see the observatories built. The eyesore on God’s own mountaintop might soon play a small part in saving all life under it.

“Which golf ball?” Lee called out from the cockpit, the white domes covering the telescopes looming.

“What?”

“Where should I put us down?”

“Keck!” Allan shouted, stumbling forward as Lee struggled to keep level in the drafts.

“What?”

“The twin golf balls!” he shouted again, at the cockpit wall.

Lee steadied herself for the landing. “Strap in back there!”

The complex consisted of nine telescopes of varying sizes, infrared arrays, and a few other blocky white buildings, all connected by a singular road that looped across the top of the dormant volcano. The road was the only flat patch suitable for a helicopter landing.

Snow flushed into the air as the rotors exerted down force on the mountaintop. Not one for hesitation, Lee dove right in and rattled her passengers with an abrupt slam onto the access road. The smaller wheel at the back of the helicopter didn’t hit the road, but dipped into the crusty red soil. Her passengers nearly rolled out of the big opening on the side as the helicopter shifted suddenly to the right, the tail skidding on the slippery surface.

The tablet came loose from Allan’s grip and slid on the corrugated metal. Jill swiftly snatched it from falling into the snow. Under direction from the cockpit, the back tire made its way, under all eight tons, to solid footing.

Once firm, the crew started moving their MREs, water, sleeping bags and laptops into the main entrance of the Keck Observatory, setting up camp in the
operations room
. The narrow room with gray soundproofed walls stretched alongside the telescope’s curve with workstations staring at empty chairs. Red tinsel holiday decorations still hung from the drop-ceiling in long arcs. A few desks had menorahs, others had stockings or Santa bobble-heads still jittering.

The hastily deserted facility had a strange acrid smell, the only sign that the computer screensavers had been building pipes for days.

“Ugh!” Lee held her nose. “Nana, find the kitchen and take care of that.”

“They didn’t even get time to put the eggnog back in the fridge,” Nana surmised and branched off to find the odor.

“Power still works,” Allan said, gleefully looking over the equipment. “We’re lucky they left in a hurry, otherwise we’d have to do a cold start on all this.”

“This is your show now, Doc.” Lee put her hands on her hips. “How can we help?”

“I’m calibrating the dual-mirrored observatory to track the new sky upon the next sunset. We have to hurry since we don’t know when sunset is anymore! It would help most if you could secure the building while Jill and I get these systems back in order. I saw some abandoned vehicles less than a mile down the slope. The drivers may be hiding out in here somewhere. They mustn’t get in the way of our work.”

“I take it we mustn’t either,” she chuckled. “Okay, Doc.” She pointed at LARS. “Let’s take a look around. Meet me outside in thirty.”

Jill, although not an experienced telescope operator, tried her best to help Allan, participating in an ongoing call and response.

“Ascension?”

“Declination?”

“Anemometer?”

“What?”

“Wind check.”

“Oh. Only fifteen miles per hour.”

“Good, twice that and we have to worry about buffeting.”

“Hydrometer?”

“Uh . . . 45%.”

“Good, twice that too and we have to shut down. Keep an eye on it.”

“Don’t we have to calibrate on a bright star or something?”

“If you know the locations of the new stars up there go ahead.”

After a long pause, Allan noticed Jill on the other side of the room, glaring. “You know this isn’t my specialty, Allan. I study the data from all this, I don’t operate the scopes myself.”

“Sorry, okay? We can’t calibrate on stars that we don’t have in the books. We have something else to look at today, anyway.” He held up the tablet he’d clutched since leaving the Teddy. “They gave us coordinates for
something
, remember? Now, see if you can find the operator terminal for the Subaru Infrared.”

Jill scanned the room as Allan input the coordinates into multiple terminals. They began yelling back and forth again.

“Is there an arcminute convertor here?”

“How will we account for precession?”

“Do we even
have
precession now?”

“First images coming, hold on.”

Two terminals slowly plotted out the view from the Subaru Infrared. A black image scrolled down the screen piece by piece. In the middle a bright object glowed in white, yellow, and red.

“My God, this can’t be right. Allan, look at this!”