Deep Storm

58

It took Crane twenty minutes to complete his sweep of deck 9. Normally bustling at all hours of the day and night, it now looked like a ghost town. The theater was a graveyard of empty seats; the library, utterly deserted. The PX was closed, its windows dark; the tables of the sidewalk café unused and lonely. Crane found a worker sleeping in a carrel in the multimedia nexus, and a lone technician in the Medical Suite, where he stopped to retrieve a portable medical kit. He sent both on ahead to deck 12.

He ducked into the laundry-empty-and grabbed another towel. Then he returned to Times Square, giving the shopfronts one last appraising glance. The stillness was eerie. The smell of roasting coffee hung in the air, and music filtered out from the café. And there was another sound, as well: a faint groaning from deck 8, directly beneath. It reminded him irresistibly of his submarine duty, and the strange-almost sinister-creaking of the ballast tanks as they filled with seawater.

As he climbed the stairwell, his thoughts returned to Michele Bishop. He did not want to believe it. And yet a part of him realized it was, perhaps, the only explanation for why she hadn't organized the scientists herself; why she had not called him back as promised. Someday, he would try to figure out her motivation. Right now, he could not even begin to.

He thought back to their final, brief phone conversation. So Spartan's not going to stop the dig? she had asked. One thing, at least, was painfully clear: it was not idle curiosity that had prompted this question.

Reaching deck 12, he made his way quickly through the now-hushed corridors. The staging area for the escape pod was a large chamber adjoining the Compression Complex. As he entered, he found two dozen people lined up before a metal ladder bolted to the wall. It disappeared up through a hatchway in the ceiling. A faint bluish light filtered down, throwing the ladder into spectral relief.

Vanderbilt was supervising the boarding, Hui Ping at his side. When they saw Crane enter, they came over.

"Anyone?" Vanderbilt asked.

"Only two."

The oceanographer nodded. "That's everyone, then. The sweeps of the other three decks are complete."

"What's the head count?" Crane asked.

"A hundred and twelve." Vanderbilt nodded toward the line that snaked its way toward the ladder. "Once these last are aboard, we'll initiate the launch sequence."

"Where's Stamper?"

"He and the rest of his crew are already in the pod. There's nothing more they can do from this side of the breach."

Vanderbilt headed back to the ladder, and Crane turned to Hui Ping. "Why aren't you aboard?" he asked, removing the damp towel from around her shoulders and replacing it with the dry one.

"I was waiting for you."

Silently, they joined the end of the line. As they waited, Crane found thoughts of Michele Bishop creeping back into his head. To distract himself, he turned back to Hui.

"What was that you were going to tell me?" he asked.

Hui was absently clutching the towel, her gaze far away. "I'm sorry?"

"Earlier, you said you'd deciphered that transmission. The longer one, the one they first received from beneath the Moho."

She nodded. "Yes. Well, it's a theory, anyway. I can't prove it, but it seems to fit."

She dug into the pocket of her lab coat, pulled out a dripping palmtop computer. "This thing is drenched. I'm not even sure it will work." But when she snapped the power button, the display flickered to life. Taking the stylus, she opened a window of binary numbers:

"Here it is," she said. "The digital stream Dr. Asher saved as 'initial.txt,' the one he never tried to decrypt. While I was waiting for you I tried a variety of cryptographic attacks on it. Nothing worked. It seemed to have nothing in common with all the mathematical expressions he deciphered."

The line for the ladder was slowly growing shorter; there were perhaps ten people ahead of them now. "Go on," Crane said.

"I was about to give up. Then I thought of what you'd said about WIPP, and how they were employing not one but several types of warnings. 'Pictures, symbols, text,' you said. And I got to thinking. Whoever planted this stuff beneath the Moho, maybe they used several types of warnings, too. Maybe they weren't all just forbidden mathematical expressions. So I started experimenting. First I attempted to play the message back as an audio file. That didn't work. Then I wondered if it might be a graphic image, or images. I broke it up in various ways. Those repeated pairings of ones in the first half of the sequence intrigued me. So I divided it into two equal parts. You'll note that the first image is delimited by ones. And there is precisely the same ratio of ones to zeros between the two images. It seemed it was meant to be divided in half."

She tapped the stylus on the screen. The binary sequence reappeared, this time broken in two:

She glanced at Crane. "See anything different about the top image?" Crane peered at the screen. "The ones are clustered together." "Exactly." With her stylus, Hui circled the groupings.

"Now, does that suggest anything to you?" she asked.

He shook his head. "No. Not really."

"Well, it does to me. I think it's an image of the inner solar system." She tapped the large cluster. "There, dead center, is the sun. And circling it are the inner five planets. And I'll bet that if you checked the star charts, you'd find they had been spun back to their positions of six hundred years ago."

"The time of the burial event."

"Precisely."

"What's the second image, then?" Crane asked. "It looks random. Like noise."

"That's it exactly. It is random-and in fact, it's perfectly random. I checked."

Crane frowned at the storm of ones and zeros. Then a sudden, chilling thought struck him. "Do you think it means…Armageddon?"

She nodded. "I think it's another kind of warning. If we disturb what's down there…" Her voice trailed off.

He looked up from the screen and stared at her. "The solar system will be blown to bits."

"Literally and figuratively."

Now Vanderbilt was helping a female scientist directly ahead of them ascend the ladder into the escape pod. As Hui stepped forward and grasped the ladder, Crane stopped her. "That was impressive, you know."

She turned to him. "I'm sorry?"

"You, hiding in that lab, having the presence of mind not only to work on this problem, but to figure it out…"

At that moment, the door to the staging area flew open. A marine in black fatigues stepped in, M-16 assault rifle in his hands. His gaze went from Crane, to Hui, to Vanderbilt, to the scientist halfway through the hatch.

"Step away from the ladder," he barked.

Crane turned to him. "We're evacuating this station, going for help."

"There will be no evacuation. Everyone is to disembark and return to their stations, and the escape pod is to be secured."

"On whose orders?" Vanderbilt said.

"Commander Korolis's."

"Korolis is unwell," Crane said.

"I'm the senior scientist here," Vanderbilt said. "With the lower decks inaccessible, I'm in charge. The evacuation will proceed."

The marine unshipped his weapon and aimed it at them. "I have my orders," he said, his voice perfectly flat and even. "Everyone will leave the escape pod. One way or the other."

Crane's looked from the barrel of the rifle to the soldier's flinty, impassive eyes. There was no doubt in his mind-none at all-that this was not an idle threat.

The woman on the ladder had frozen in place. Now, slowly, sobbing quietly, she began to descend once again.