The Filter Trap (21 page)

“He knew the job,” Silversun muttered coldly.

Kam wasn’t sure the young woman who fought her way into the Huey should be apologizing. He felt guilty as well. Why was he so special that Corporal Minor may have died to make sure he escaped? As they left the ruined city, survivors on rooftops tugged at his heart. He’d been rescued twice by the Marines, no doubt sacrificing other lives starving below.

With the winter chill and flooded streets, leaving the city by any other means was just as deadly as staying. Kam imagined the agony of watching his helicopter pass over the desperate arms of what only a week ago many referred to as America’s Greatest City. Others called it the
world’s
greatest. If that were true and the world’s greatest city’s citizens were left to starve or freeze to death, then the globe was heading for a new dark age.

Outside the city, things grew grimmer. Where there were no rooftops higher than the waves, the survivors had long ago found means to flee or succumb to fate. Days ago, when the water ran back out to sea, it carried bodies by the thousands, slowly sinking as the air left them. The bodies resurfaced as stiff blue ghosts near ships many miles in the ocean. They still reeled in and attempted to identify each one before a second burial at sea. Kam had seen it in person on a morning walk on the Kearsarge, the back platform kept permanently open not for hovercraft, but to fish for bodies drawn up and around by the keel.

Because their lack of fat and muscle made them unappealing meals, too many of the bodies piled near the Kearsarge’s misty high back chasm were children. The smell of salty bodies bloated to the sea’s surface by methane and sulfide would never leave him, nor the brutality and futility of hauling them in only to toss them back like chum to churn in the ship’s wake. For many, the effort of identification would go unnoticed, as entire families perished in the tsunami.

The Huey flew high over the overflowing banks of the Hudson River, demolished neighborhoods of Union City, Secaucus and the rapid-flowing Hackensack River. Slowly the hollowed-out former homes gave way to ravaged hills, raked fingers collecting uprooted garbage when the wave fell back against the low mountains of Wawayanda State Park.

Eventually, the trees grew taller and the standing water filtered away to frozen ground and ice-covered pines. Had it not come with millions of lives extinguished, the aftermath of the storm on the Catskills would have been welcome. A beautiful, glittering ice-sheen wrapped a forest occasionally split by access roads carrying Humvees, mobilized from West Point to higher ground before the storm.

The impromptu evacuation base sprung from temporary flat ground hidden under mountain peaks west of Woodstock. Tiny lakes swelled and the Ashokan Reservoir broke, flooding Bluestone and pouring through Kingston from the west to finish what the swollen Hudson had taken in the eastern assault.

The large, grassy, nearly-level Catskills hillside, normally a peaceful retreat sporting a few campers, ran rampant with helicopters, Humvees, soldiers, and civilians. Into the chaos the Huey touched down. The passengers were ushered off and it took off again, this time flying west over higher peaks.

“They’re turning around to get the rest of the survivors, right?” Kam asked the winchman.

“Doubt it,” he said, before running off, lost to the storm of camouflage.

“They’ve got food at the building for weeks,” Silversun patted Kam on the shoulder. “They’ll be okay. Come on.”

She led Kam and Natalie through the throng of soldiers to a command tent and disappeared inside. A few tense moments later, Silversun returned looking diminished. “All rescues are suspended. That Huey came from the east because it was from the Kearsarge, not from here. They turned her around overnight.”

“What? Why?” Natalie implored. “I thought they were sending the Kearsarge to rescue survivors in Florida.”

“Rescues are no longer a priority. They’re mobilizing every tool we’ve got for something big up north. They told me to take you two to the edges of camp, got waiting choppers there. They’re sending Doc somewhere classified and returning you to South Korea.”

“Why are they separating us?” Kam asked, taking Natalie’s hand.

“We’re at war.” Silversun stated. “If we keep her here now it’d go against international law. Since her dad was some kind of big shot with bigger purse-strings, they’re arranging a private jet.”

“War with who?” Natalie squeezed Kam’s hand tight. “You’re essentially saying you can kidnap him but not me. Why?”

“Little green men, apparently. While we were in Manhattan sending our SOS, the telescopes found something else. Many somethings else. Nobody down here is claiming them. They wouldn’t tell me much, but everybody knows they’re big. Really big. Too big to be man-made kind of big.”

“A meteor shower? Maybe from the same cluster that knocked out the Moon and perturbed our orbit?”

“We both know that ship has sailed, Doc, unless you and your friends were SETI’s resident mineralogists. Korea is probably safer than the US at this point. Whatever these things are, they’re coming down in different spots, but not in her backyard. She’ll be safer than you, and you’ll be safer than me.”

“You’re leaving too?”

“Shipping out to California in case there’s a ground assault on the one coming down out there.”

“Invasion!” Natalie breathed heavily. “What chance do we have? Kam, come with me.”

Silversun rattled her rifle. “None of us have a choice. But we do have a chance. My fellow Marines and I will go out fighting if we must.”

A shockwave echoed through the mountain like a far-off buckshot.

“‘Up north’ like Canada?” Kam said. “Was that one of them?”

A trio of fighter jets screamed overhead, followed by more. The existing bustle of the camp turned up a few degrees. Commanders screamed over megaphones and younger faces of concentration turned to outright worry.

“They’re mobilizing. It’s starting, we’ve all got places to go,” Silversun said, beckoning Kam and Natalie to follow her. Kam stopped her for a moment.

“Private Silversun, what’s your name?”

“Amanda.”

“Thank you for saving my life, Amanda. I hope I get the chance to thank you again someday.”

“Just doing my job, Doc.”

He took Natalie’s hand. “May the good fortune that brought us together follow you to California.”

He pushed his other hand toward Amanda. She quickly shook it. Natalie took Amanda’s hand in turn, rubbing the ring on Amanda’s finger for a split-second as she let go. “Good fortune runs in Amanda’s family, I’m sure.”

Amanda cautiously studied Natalie, opening her mouth as if to say something substantial. She shifted instead and looked beyond in the direction she tried to lead them a minute earlier. “He’ll take you two to your extraction points. Godspeed.”

They turned to see a scared, teenage boy in an oversize Army uniform. “Doctor Douglass? Ms. Cho? I’ll escort you.”

“Just give us a moment, please,” Kam said.

By the time they turned around Amanda had vanished, rejoining the shoal of shifting camouflage at the camp. As more helicopters lifted away, jets rocketed over, and soldiers swam around them, Kam and Natalie faced each other, perhaps for the last time.

“Kam, when we get to the choppers it’ll be too loud. I need to tell you, I—”

He covered her lips.

“I love you, too.”

Congressional hearings in the voluminous United States Senate building on C-Span always looked elegant and official. Deep underground Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, thousands of miles from the real Senate, a country courtroom called to order, complete with a ribald, unscientific prosecutor named Pith. How many senators does it take for a quorum in a congressional hearing? Only one, Kerry Bolton, attended under the mountain and even he seemed under suspicion by the garrulous general.

Though scientists, statesmen, and soldiers alike knew words spoken here became official record, the small oval room with a high dais and mostly-empty chairs felt more like a television set for a bellicose family court judge. Pith and Bolton, neither a fan of the other, sat with three empty chairs between them behind the grandiose polished oak desk spanning the width of the room. Before it, an empty low table with a microphone, three glasses of water, and three tablet computers waited for three scientists.

Kam entered first through the small door behind the table and took a seat.

“Good morning, Dr. Douglass,” Pith addressed him. “Good to see you made it in one piece. I hear your ride over was a bit more dramatic than my own.”

“There’s a fine line between dramatic and heartbreaking,” Kam uttered, looking quizzically at the other two empty chairs.

“I walk that line every day, Dr. Douglass. Those seats are for your friends from the West Coast. I’m afraid they received more of a briefing than you did since your arrival down here was . . . delayed.”

“Friends. Right.” Kam took a long drink of water.

Allan Sands and Jill Tarmor walked in together and surveyed the room before sitting. Jill looked older but fitter than Kam remembered. All those years after he left SETI to return to his graduate studies she stayed behind, working long nights and early mornings.

Allan looked as sad as ever, having finally grown into the uncouth graying hair and pot belly that Kam had exaggerated in his memory over the years. He wouldn’t be “the professor” this time though; Kam had earned his way to that distinction as well and became better known in his own field than Allan ever hoped to be, book deals or not. Of course, that was an easy feat considering the race to be the top Tocharian linguistics expert wasn’t crowded with bestselling authors and television personalities like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan. Allan was old enough to have actually known Sagan, something he made sure everyone knew when it suited him.

Kam spent years trying to simplify his feelings about Allan into a single emotion. Jealousy would be easy, but sympathy perhaps more appropriate. They had both loved and lost the same woman, but suffered dramatically different consequences. The only thing he could claim he really knew about Allan was that they each believed
he
received the shorter end of the stick from Jill.

Now they’d be colleagues, and from the looks of things, those two had already kissed and made up no sooner than Kam professed his love for yet another woman whom circumstance would snatch away too soon. His separation from Jill hadn’t been at gunpoint though; it had been at the end of her long bony fingers, pushing a hotheaded young graduate student out of her apartment door in frustration. How many times had he mentally put Natalie and her father through the same ordeal?

Hypocritical or not, the pain lingered long and worked its way from his heart to his mouth in a hurry, snipping at his walking wounds.
“I couldn’t believe it when they told me they picked you two.”

“A lot of unbelievable things have been happening lately, Kam,” Allan said, pulling back his chair and Jill’s.

Jill leaned toward Kam as she sat between the men. “Imagine how
I
feel.”

“Vindicated, I’d think,” he answered.

The senator moved his arm behind the crown of the desk and a click bounced from the walls.

“I’ve just started the recording so we may begin, General.”

“Thank you, Senator.” He turned to look down on the scientists.

“It’s taken a great effort, and in some cases the lives of some good soldiers, to get you three here. Very soon you’ll be included in Cabinet discussions with the president, but first we need to get at this . . . ‘eureka’ moment, as you called it, Dr. Sands. Just what exactly did you think you found up there on Mauna Kea before the whole thing erupted? The picture I have here looks like nothing more than a lens smear.”

“We’ll get to the ‘smear’ in a moment, but what might be more important are the other dots.”

“You mean the stars, Doctor?” Bolton asked.

“Exactly, Senator. These star formations are the first solid confirmation that we’re no longer in our original solar system.”

“So where the hell are we?” Pith asked.

“Most people know that Earth is in the Milky Way, but common knowledge gets a little fuzzy beyond that. Are either of you familiar with Laniakea?”

The senator and general glanced at each other, neither willing to admit ignorance until the other showed it first.

Allan continued, “The Milky Way makes up a very small part of a cluster of galaxies called the Local Group, containing about fifty galaxies. Beyond the Local Group is the Virgo Supercluster, a massive cluster of about a hundred galactic groups. If we pull back from the Virgo Supercluster, we’d see it as just a small part of Laniakea, an enormous cluster of superclusters.”

The general finished a sip of water. “I’m guessing you’re gonna tell us we’re in that ‘Lanai’ thing, since that’s where you stopped zooming out.”

“Not exactly. It’ll take further computing to verify, but based on our star charting software it’s conceivable that we’re outside the previously known observable universe.”

“You mean to tell me we’re on the other side of the universe?”

“It might be more accurate to say we could be anywhere from just outside of Laniakea to anywhere else in a straight line till infinity in the opposite direction of Virgo.”

“What?” asked both men sitting behind the dais.

“To be honest, I have no idea where we are, which is miraculous.”

“I’m not sure I agree with your choice of words, Sands,” Pith said dryly. “I’ll remind you there are billions of people struggling to survive because of your ‘miracle.’”

“Then how about ‘impossible,’” Jill offered, coming to Allan’s aid. “It’s hardly Allan’s miracle; in Einstein’s world there’s virtually nothing that could permit a planet to travel instantaneously to distances farther than a few hundred thousand miles out of orbit, let alone the ‘other side’ of the universe. This signifies the existence of forces far beyond our understanding, and throws a wrench into every aspect of conventional physics.”

Bolton smiled. “An
act of God
if I ever saw one, wouldn’t you agree, General?”

“Whatever you call it, we wasted a lot of good soldiers to get you three down here to figure out where it brought us. You’re telling me you can’t do that?”

Allan proceeded slowly. “Perhaps when we launch another Hubble we’ll be able to perform deep field exploration again and place ourselves back within Laniakea, maybe back in the Local Group. Based on what I’ve seen, though, probably not.”

“So your answer is a no, then,” Pith complained. “What’s more important is who did it. The few ground-based observatories we’ve got left have detected objects headed for the planet. Most of what we’ve heard is that they have to be comets or some other natural phenomena in this solar system.”

“Hell, they could be new moons for us, right?” Bolton added.

“Hold your horses, Bolton. That’s exactly why we’ve got these three. Before we go in and advise the Commander in Chief what to do about it we want to hear some spitballing from the experts.” Pith turned to the scientists. “The tablets in front of you have all the data we’ve got on them so far. Some of it you’ve seen and some of it you haven’t, so take a gander and work out your hypotheticals with us before we present to the president. These objects are incoming, so we need a tactical plan in the next few hours.

“I’ve got feedback from my folks, but other than a few Air Force stations we don’t really mess around with non-man-made space objects. And those Air Force folks don’t have the pedigree or experience of Doctor Sands. Otherwise he wouldn’t be sitting here. So earn your rent here, son, and give me something to chew on . . .”

The scientists pored over the data for several minutes. Finally, Allan leaned into the mic.

“The streaking of these objects might ordinarily be seen as a comet; however, the previous trajectory readings indicate a sudden course change.”

“A comet impacting with space junk?” asked Bolton.

“Good guess, but no. An explosion, no matter how slow, should have a debris cloud reflecting visible light, but as you can see, the size of the illumination stays roughly the same. The more interesting observation is that the object appears to increase in velocity after the turn.”

Bolton asked, “Couldn’t this thing just change course because of another close object, not a collision, and maybe that object’s gravity has whipped it into a faster orbit? Doesn’t NASA use gravity to slingshot deep space probes?”

“Yes,” Allan answered. “But it’s extremely unlikely it would increase velocity afterward to nearly 400,000 miles per hour. That’s a lot faster than any comets in an intra-solar orbit that I’ve ever heard of.”

“Well, you said yourself we’re far away from all the things you’ve heard of, right?” Pith reminded Allan.

“Even out here, comets can’t travel in a straight line. We’re still orbiting a sun, so comets would be bound to the laws of gravity too.”

“How far out is this non-comet?” Bolton asked.

Jill leaned into the microphone. “About ten million miles, four times closer to the Earth than Mars. Well, than Mars used to be. We believe first contact may be less than twenty-four hours away.”

Bolton removed his classes and put his head in his hands. “Now wait just a minute, ‘First Contact’? You mean like . . . with aliens?”

“Yes,” Jill answered.

“Jill!” Allan whispered and gripped her arm, cautioning her against making such a bold statement. She shook him off and gave him a stern look.

Bolton straightened up in his chair and licked his lips. “I think we’re about to get some answers to all our questions. This is one for the history books!”

“Senator, it could be the
last page
!” Pith shot back. “You wanted something interesting to come out of this to tell the president, I’d say this qualifies.”

“Yeah. But what’s he gonna do about it?”

“We’ve still got nukes.”

“We have no evidence the objects mean us any harm,” Jill said.

“Do you have evidence they don’t?” Pith asked rhetorically.

“The timing suggests they knew we were coming,” said Bolton. “Otherwise, something decided to make a beeline for empty space, which seems even more unlikely. Do we know anything about where this emissary of God came from? Can we follow the bee back to the hive?”

Pith pointed a finger at Jill. “The Chinese, I presume?”

“Uh,” she said, caught off guard, “you could put it that way.”

“What do you mean?” Bolton asked. “How are the Chinese behind this?”

“The general told us China had a satellite launch scheduled in Wenchang right before the Event. When they saw the tsunami coming, they decided to launch immediately. Hainan Island would take the brunt of the waves and the mission would be a total loss regardless. They basically pressed the go button and then got the hell out of there, forgetting about it for a few days.

“With United States rockets not ready for a launch for weeks, it’s a stroke of luck we’ve got anything up there looking out for us right now. The Chinese don’t have to share anything with us, but they’ve turned their satellite on and they’re telling us what they’ve seen.”

“They’re sharing because they’re goddamned terrified,” Pith groaned. “They’ve got the only eyes, but we’ve got all the muscle. Most of China’s nukes are tied to old delivery systems, so an ICBM isn’t much good if the Inter-Continental part has an asterisk.”

“As the Israelis keep reminding us: it only takes one,” Bolton noted.

Pith cackled. “Our best estimates are that the Chinese have 250, none of them deployed. They need us to do the dirty work if we have to-and I can tell you we won’t let them down in that regard. We’ve got almost ten times as many nukes
deployed
as China has in their little mountain hideaways. We’re ready to blast the bastards to kingdom come!”

“Blast who, the Chinese or the aliens?” Jill asked. “I’m not sure which would be a more misguided choice.”

Bolton put his hands up. “Let’s hope neither. Maybe these things are just probes. Maybe we’ll learn as much from them as they do from us.
Could deliver the cure for cancer or aging.”

“Or the invitation to join an intergalactic community,” Kam spoke up. “This could be the secret to Fermi’s Paradox. Maybe all the intelligent life in the universe is pushed into the corner for some reason. Maybe to easier engage in communication and trade.”

“You watch too many movies,” Pith scoffed and lit a cigar, drawing ire from everyone else in the room. He rolled his eyes. “We could all be dead next week, so I’m going to enjoy myself.”