Extinction Crisis Read online

Jack stalked over to the closet and pulled open the door right as Gabby and Grant appeared in the electronics lab doorway. A tiny robotic dog shuffled out of the closet, its delicate feet scrambling for traction on the slippery linoleum floor.

  “Wha, wha,” it bleated. The animal was a mad assortment of disparate parts.

  Gabby swooned, dropping onto her hands and knees and calling after the little electronic beast. Grant laughed, clapping his hands together, showing no sign he’d suffered anything like the bullets he’d taken to his chest and left wrist only two days earlier. The dog stopped by Jack’s feet, squatted over the toe of his boot and began tinkling. Now all of them burst into a gale of wild laughter as Anna came over and scooped it up, running her padded fingers over its small head.

  “Do not worry, Dr. Greer, Tinkerbell’s bladder is little more than a thimbleful of water.”

  “Tinkerbell?” Gabby said, surprised. “Are you a fan of Peter Pan?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, but she’s a fan of Paris Hilton, who also had a dog named Tinkerbell. Don’t ask me how I know these things.”

  Grant leaned against the doorframe, wiping the tears from his eyes and then clutching his abdomen. “Oh, thank you kindly. There’s no telling how much I needed that.”

  Anna set the dog down and it ran straight into the edge of the table, knocking itself over in the process.

  “Grant, are you sure you should be walking around?” Jack wondered. “I know you like to think of yourself as Hercules, but you’re a mortal man and one who was shot less than forty-eight hours ago.”

  Grant unbuttoned his shirt and revealed his bare chest. “If you can find a bullet hole, old chap, you’ll be doing much better than that bloody doctor.”

  This still wasn’t making sense. “What about your wrist? I saw the blood spray out when you were hit.”

  Swinging an awkward hand into the air, Grant displayed his left wrist and rotated it above his head like an overaged cheerleader.

  “Have they offered any kind of explanation, other than your manliness? I mean, we knew you were getting better and faster than usual, but to go from lying in bed riddled with holes to walking around hole-free in less than twenty-four hours, well, that’s not normal.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that myself, Jack,” he replied, the humor gone from his voice. “I’ll give you this, it is quite perplexing and I can think of no other explanation other than Salzburg syndrome. I wasn’t the only one hit. Captain Mullins was flown to a naval hospital in Maryland and is still in serious condition. And he was one of the lucky ones.”

  Grant didn’t quite speak Rajesh’s name, but Jack noticed the flicker in Anna’s eyes all the same.

  “First Salzburg nearly kills you,” Jack noticed, running through the puzzling sequence of events, “and then it practically doubles your muscle and bone mass and heals you in record time.”

  “I’m not complaining, Jack.”

  “Nor should you,” he said, rubbing his fingers together. “But I suspect you’re not the only one displaying strange and even amazing symptoms. The real question is what it all means.”

  Gabby, her silver hair tied back behind her head, looked from them back to the dog. “So you built this out of parts scavenged from a Roomba?” she asked, impressed.

  “Mostly,” Anna replied, unable to hide her pride. “Although many of the parts were cannibalized from other, shall I say, less successful projects.”

  “Seems it still has a ways to go to catch up to you,” Jack observed, watching the dog’s legs kick at empty air.

  Anna bent over and righted Tinkerbell, who proceeded to run around the room.

  But Jack knew she hadn’t torn apart that vacuum to build an intelligence to rival her own. She had done it for a simple reason. She missed Rajesh and was trying to forget.

  The radio on Jack’s belt came to life. “Jack, any word from Anna on those drones?”

  “I was right about to ask her,” he replied, wiping the water off his boot.

  “Well, hurry up. The teleconference with the Joint Chiefs is in less than five minutes and we still have no clue what’s on the other side of that portal.”

  Anna was watching him. Already, she had remotely piloted six drones through the opening, but had yet to produce a report for them.

  “That is correct. I was waiting to see if I could reacquire the signal,” she explained.

  Grant’s brow furrowed. “Did they manage to beam any images back from the other side?”

  It was a question each of them had been wondering. Standing before the swirling energy mass, it was difficult not to see shapes moving on the other side. Jack had thought he had seen his deceased mother. He wasn’t the only one. Apparently, after staring into the eye of it, some had reported seeing loved ones, others relatives, long since dead. Rumors had spread faster than a fire at a matchstick factory that they had uncovered a doorway to heaven.

  Anna shook her head. “To date, Dr. Holland, nothing has come back.”

  Chapter 3

  The conference room on Northern Star was spacious and decked out with a single, long, oval table and twenty plush chairs. The seven humorless faces of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stared back at them from a sixty-inch television at the far end of the room. Those gathered grew silent as the chairman, General James F. Dunham, addressed them.

  “I’m sure it will come as no surprise to any of you that the Israeli government has denied any involvement in the attack on Northern Star. Secretary Myers—excuse me, I mean President Myers—is at the U.N. right now giving them a piece of his mind. Seems they felt we were denying them access to salvaged alien technology. Our assurances that Sentinel was the only group that came away with anything useful fell on deaf ears. But it isn’t the Israelis who worry us. Russian agents are scouring the planet in the hopes of finding an alien ship of their own. We’ve vetted every member at the Greenland site, but we can’t deny the possibility that one or more personnel are working for the enemy. The president has ordered three carrier strike groups to cover every possible approach. Short of a full nuclear war, I can assure you, no Russian forces will get within a thousand miles of your position.”

  Talk of nuclear war made Jack and everyone else in the room justifiably uneasy.

  “Your latest sitrep said the blast waves have subsided,” the general said, glancing down at a paper before him.

  “That’s correct,” Jack informed him. “Which has given us a chance to clear away the ice and debris near the doorway underground.” He was referring to the storage area where the gun battle with the Israelis had taken place. “We’re using that location as a forward operating base for any exploration through the doorway… or whatever it is.”

  The edges of the general’s mouth turned down. “Admiral Stark has informed me that our initial attempts to reconnoiter beyond the doorway have not been successful.”

  “That’s correct, General,” Stark replied. “At this point, we aren’t quite certain what we’re dealing with. The simple robots we’ve sent in have not be able to communicate from the other side, nor have they returned. Our lower-tech solutions have proven more successful in some regards, but in others they’ve only raised more questions.”

  “Low-tech solutions?” one of the other generals asked.

  Stark swallowed hard. “Well, you see, when the drones failed to report back or to even return, one of the technicians suggested we push a cellphone through at the end of a selfie stick.”

  The room erupted in a spate of laughter.

  “Admiral,” Dunham said, leaning forward, “you have at your disposal the greatest technology the United States has to offer and you’re using selfie sticks?”

  “I know how it looks, but so far it’s the only thing that’s worked. At least partly. There’s a distorting wave around the opening, so the images we took were blurry, but we’ve managed to clean them up a touch and it’s clear there is something on the other side.”

  Dunham leaned back and cleared his throat. He w
as a wiry man in his early sixties who didn’t like anything fuzzy. He expected answers and it was apparent this deficit was not sitting well. “So here’s the situation and I want to make sure you folks are reading me distortion-free. That incoming craft has just passed Jupiter. By NASA’s closest estimates, in the next seventy-two hours, it’ll strike one mile off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. At its present speed, the devastation will be like nothing we’ve ever seen, scorching the surface of the entire planet and killing anyone who isn’t deep underground.”

  They knew what was coming. All the same, to hear it in such specific terms made chills dance up the back of their necks.

  As though to drive home the point, a clock behind General Dunham ticked away the time until the human race would be no more. It read: 72 hours, 13 minutes, 52 seconds.

  “As you can see,” General Dunham told them, “there isn’t a moment to lose. If the answer to the current crisis lies somewhere beyond that energy field, then we need to find it. And if your electronics aren’t giving you answers, then I’m sorry to say you’re gonna have to put some lives at risk and send some people in there. I suggest you begin with members of the Delta team currently on location.”

  “I’m not certain that’s such a good idea, General,” Jack chimed in.

  “Excuse me? Who is that?”

  “Jack Greer, sir. What I mean is that we have no idea what’s behind that door. For all we know, it’s a portal to another world. If we send through a team of armed men, I can’t imagine it’ll be good for intergalactic relations.”

  The room burst into a jumble of overlapping conversations and arguments.

  “If anyone should go, it should be me,” Jack said. “I’ll go in unarmed and secured with climbing equipment. At the first sign of trouble, the team here can pull me out.”

  The room settled down just as a single hand rose into the air. The general’s expression changed when he caught sight of it. “Yes? Would you like to say something?”

  “Thank you, General Dunham,” Anna said, lowering her hand and folding her arms on the table before her. “As the only artificial person at this facility, I believe I should be the one to go through. Unlike my colleagues, I am uniquely equipped for the challenging environment that may exist on the other side.”

  “Anna, don’t do this,” Jack told her, gripping her arm.

  She put her hand gently over his and squeezed. “Please, Dr. Greer. This is something I need to do.”

  Chapter 4

  70 hours, 45 minutes, 12 seconds

  Base Camp Zulu was nothing more than a series of Quonset huts ― steel composite frames wrapped in a sturdy fabric membrane. Undoubtedly, they looked like something straight out of World War II, but they offered the scientists and military personnel working under the Greenland ice sheet a warm place to eat, work and rest. As Jack had informed the general, once the Army Corps of Engineers had removed the debris from the storage area, they had quickly set about erecting the camp. Military efficiency had seen the huts put up in record time. They had also been equipped with everything Jack and the other scientists would need: labs where they might conduct research and experiments, rows of bunk beds where weary members of the team could steal a quick nap whenever an opportunity presented itself, and a mess hall with an endless array of hot meals.

  “A man could get used to this,” Dag said, his breath pluming out before him as he snacked on a veggie wrap.

  They were out in the open: Jack, Gabby, Eugene, Grant and Anna. The humans were dressed in their biosuits, their helmets slung under their arms. Far above their heads, the same hole punched through the cavern’s icy ceiling now exposed a night sky packed with stars twinkling in the clear frigid air. Tinkerbell yapped a number of times before Anna reached down and scooped her up.

  “Tink, I need you to behave,” she told it. “I will not be gone for long.”

  Jack led them through a stone archway and up a series of steps that led to the pyramid’s main chamber. He glanced back now and then, watching the joints in Anna’s mechanical legs lift her gracefully from one riser to the next. They made eye contact for the briefest of moments and she smiled. In spite of the brevity of their exchange, Jack saw the hint of something in her face. He couldn’t help but wonder if it could be fear.

  The group arrived in the pyramid’s main chamber to find Admiral Stark and a host of other military and scientific personnel. A monitoring station had been set up to the right of the entrance, positioned behind a transparent blastproof wall. A similar configuration was visible on their left.

  Before them, however, was the real star of the show: the portal itself, swirling in that slow, hypnotic fashion. Just as Jack remembered it. He hadn’t been back since his very first encounter, but the image of what he had seen and the mystery of who had built it and where it led had stayed with him ever since.

  “Does she have everything she needs?” Stark inquired, eyeing Anna up and down.

  A soldier approached and handed her an M4 rifle. Anna stared down at the object in confusion and handed it to the first person standing next to her. Unfortunately, that person happened to be Eugene, who took the weapon eagerly.

  “Cool!” he exclaimed, looking like a little boy left alone in a toy shop.

  His finger was in the process of sliding over the trigger when Grant snatched the rifle out of his hands, the distinguished biologist scowling his disapproval.

  “Young man, you were well on your way to shooting yourself or someone else.”

  “No guns,” Jack said. “Not until we know what exactly is on the other side.”

  One of the techs came and wrapped a rock-climbing cord around Anna’s waist, tying off the end with a figure-of-eight knot. He yanked on it a handful of times to ensure it would not come undone. The other end was tied to an electric winch. In an emergency, she could be pulled back to safety.

  Dag finished his wrap, licked his fingers and moved in to hug her. The others gathered and did the likewise. Finally it was Jack’s turn and he fought to choke down the terrible feeling in his heart that he was never going to see her again.

  “Dr. Greer, would you watch Tink while I am away?”

  He took the mechanical dog in one hand and hugged her with the other.

  “See you soon,” he assured her, willing himself to believe his own words. Rajesh had asked him to watch over her and here he was sending the man’s beloved creation into undeniable danger. But over the guilt came another little voice, one that kept reminding him that her offer to go had really been a selfless act designed to spare the lives of those she cared about. Surely even Rajesh would have been proud.

  One of the techs approached with a clipboard, waving an electromagnetic detector over Anna’s head and around her torso. “Her bio-mechanical readings are in the green and coming in clearly.”

  “Good luck,” Gabby said, squeezing her arm.

  Everyone in the chamber watched Anna head towards the swirling vortex. What looked like a layer of fine mist was being thrown off the hovering object’s spin. The closer she got, the fuzzier she became. Jack’s heart pounded in his chest as he watched her turn around, wink an eye and then step through.

  All at once, Anna’s signal flatlined.

  “What do you mean she’s gone?” Jack said. His worst nightmare was coming true.

  “She was fine going in,” the tech replied, his panicked fingers swiping back and forth. “Then, nothing.”

  Another technician activated the winch to reel her back in. But they could all see the rope was loose, tangling as it attempted to spool. What remained of the cord emerged from the portal a moment later, the ends frayed.

  Jack swore, threw on his helmet and ran for the portal before anyone could stop him. He caught the faint sound of Gabby’s terrified voice shouting after him. A violent burst of pastels assaulted his optical nerves. He pushed forward, a buzzing sound growing in his ears and building to a painful pitch. The first step had been the easiest, but wherever he was going it seemed he
would need to force his way through, like a child pushing out of its mother’s womb. He felt a giant pair of hands shove him from behind and all at once he lost his balance, his forward motion arrested by a rather inglorious faceplant on the ground. Jack stood and wiped at his visor, his own breathing heavy in his ears. He spun in amazement and confusion. He had stepped into the looking glass. But even so, the sight before him was hard to believe.

  Chapter 5

  Kay Mahoro stood in line to get a loaf of bread, a carton of milk and a jar of peanut butter. Wasn’t much of a list, she realized, looking down at it. Short as the list was, she was doubtful they would even have anything left by the time her turn came around. She’d been waiting three hours already, baking in the hot D.C. mid-afternoon sunshine. In all that time the line had barely moved a full block. Which left at least three more to go.

  While Salzburg had been difficult and in several cases deadly for the human population, for farm animals around the country, the chromosomal disorder had proven downright disastrous. Millions of cows, pigs and chickens had been destroyed out of hand, days before there was any sign that some had begun to recover. Not that it mattered much. No one wanted to get milk from a cow who was seen as sick. At least, that was the general attitude as it stood a week ago. Today, however, Kay was more than certain any of the desperate people in this line would not bat an eye at the prospect. Was the cow still alive? Well, then that was all that mattered.

  That very human tendency toward knee-jerk reactions had also led to a serious run on the banks as folks worried they might lose access to their money. Ironically, the mass of withdrawals that had followed had all but triggered their worst fears. And not only in America. The same had happened in China, India and nearly every other industrialized—and even semi-industrialized—country. Those nations still tied to an old agrarian way of life were the least affected. Over there, if the family cow got sick, you didn’t kill it, you tried to heal it. And in many cases that worked, or seemed to when the poor creature emerged from its stupor and came back healthier than ever.