The Lightning Stones

22

The Akademik Nikolay Zhukovsky was 560 feet of post-Soviet glory. Her hull was painted black, the superstructure white, and all interior passages that particular shade of institutional green that the Russians seemed to love so much, or could purchase at a tremendous discount. Her superstructure was low and almost sleek and would have given her a racy line, especially since she didn’t need an ugly soot-blackened smokestack. But what made her functional was also what made her ugly. Forward of the three-story superstructure were two massive dish antennas measuring more than a hundred feet in diameter, which made their outer edges hang far over the ship’s rail. Aft was an even larger antenna. They resembled the skeletal dishes used by radio astronomers. The first two were mounted on powerful hydraulic gimbals, so they had some degree of directionality. The aft structure was so large it was permanently affixed to the ship and overshadowed the rear deck like a monstrous upside-down parasol.

The Zhukovsky had been conceived and constructed as a mobile tracking station for the Soviet version of the space shuttle, a reusable orbiter they called the Buran. Though the program never got past a single unmanned flight, a great deal of infrastructure was put in place for a time when squadrons of Burans would orbit the earth and ostensibly terrify the West with Russian strength and ingenuity.

And like so many projects the Soviets attempted as their government was about to collapse, most of it was for domestic propaganda. While the American space program enjoyed the hospitality of dozens of nations who allowed tracking stations, the Soviets were forced to build their own floating system because only a handful of countries had strong diplomatic relations with Russia. In that regard, the Zhukovsky made sense. What did not make as much sense — and where Soviet bombast came into play — was the fact that the ship and her planned sisters were all atomic powered. There was no functional need for nuclear reactors to power them; the energy needs weren’t outrageous. But the Soviet planners simply liked the idea that their latest creation had the most modern, efficient power plants, and that their mastery of the atom was so complete they could employ nukes on civilian research ships. America had gone a similar route with a nuclear-powered freighter called the Savannah—until it was realized that propaganda was only necessary when you were falling behind.

While the Akademik Zhukovsky never got a chance to fulfill her role in the space race, she did earn another assignment. Rather than being decommissioned, the Zhukovsky had been laid up in a naval base near Vladivostok, and her nuclear plant was kept operational as a backup power supply for the base’s notoriously unreliable main generators. It was a rather ignoble end, but it had saved her from the scrap heap.

D’Avejan had approached the base commander with an offer to buy his backup power source. The ship needed extensive refit to make her seaworthy once again, and the price was quickly agreed upon. The corrupt admiral had even offered the use of his base facilities to revive the vessel. That took six months, and ate up the better part of the Luck Dragon trading company’s slush fund, but the payback was going to make d’Avejan’s purchase the greatest investment of all time.

After leaving Vladivostok, the vessel had stayed well clear of established shipping channels — with the exception of a chartered helicopter delivery from Kushiro, Japan, which contained the crystal sample recovered in America. Akademik Zhukovsky was now in the Pacific Ocean, approaching the equator in a remote spot north of New Guinea. The irony that the mission had taken them there, considering what had been learned in the last forty-eight hours regarding the remains of Earhart’s plane, was not unnoticed. The bulk of the crystals they sought were less than a thousand miles from the ship’s current position, and they intended to find them.

Before this new revelation, plans were well under way to use a combination of artificial and genuine stones — d’Avejan had one stone from America and another that had been passed down to him from his great-uncle (who himself had acquired it mysteriously as a young man in the Orient). Professor Jean-Robert Fortescue, a gifted scientist who worked for d’Avejan in Eurodyne’s sophisticated labs, had taken d’Avejan’s sample and figured out how to coax it to grow, which had led to the discovery of the stones’ true potential. Fortescue had synthesized the crystals using a massive press machine that exerted tremendous force, while at the same time heating the seed crystals to 1,000 degrees centigrade. In this hellish place, tiny bits of the original shard were forced to grow once again, adding to themselves the way a lizard regrows a tail. And like the reptile, the new appendage wasn’t quite as good as the original. Fortescue was as eager as d’Avejan to obtain a larger selection of real gems, though for him this was an intellectual exercise rather than a quest for profit.

Fortescue had already run the numbers twice and had come up with the same location for the lost aviatrix as the one that had been intercepted in Washington. He was a cautious person and never accepted another man’s work if he could do it himself. The measurements of the sample’s electrical properties jibed with his own work, and the assumptions seemed reasonable and in line with what he would have done. But he also knew that a minute deviation from the starting point could have profound implications at the end. Whoever the American had used to do the work had been very, very good. So much so that Fortescue would have welcomed the scientist into his own lab as an assistant.

Like many academicians, Jean-Robert Fortescue neglected the passage of time when he was engrossed in a problem. He could spend hours working and forget to eat, or entire weekends and forget to shower. His single-mindedness could be off-putting.

Fortescue had wanted to explore the crystals’ remarkable shielding ability. His initial thought was that the crystal could offer unprecedented protection to microelectronics for nano-scalar circuitry, but soon after Fortescue instead found himself drawn into a geoengineering experiment to try to strengthen Earth’s magnetic field. D’Avejan had told him his work would help avert a global climate catastrophe. Jean-Robert wasn’t so certain about that side of the experiment, but with d’Avejan’s encouragement he was eager to continue.

Fortescue was in his tenth straight hour of work, having stopped only to relieve pressure in his bladder and force himself to swallow some electrolyte-infused sports drink. He was clicking through the images the American had snapped of the Afghan geode that had yielded the amazing gems. Fortescue had seen the geode already, in a series of photos taken by a Pakistani soldier they’d hired to track the American in the dangerous tribal regions bordering the two countries.

Fortescue should have missed the anomaly. The inside of the geode was roughly bathtub size, with a honeycomb surface where the accretion matrix had once held the dun-colored crystals. It was intricate — so complex it became featureless, like looking at faces in a crowd. In their multitude they lost their individuality. An earlier computer match of some of the pictures had shown the topography to be identical in both sets of photographs, but somehow, comparing the two side by side on a pair of monitors, Fortescue now noted a difference. As soon as he did he cursed.

“Oh, you are indeed a clever one,” he said to the empty room. “You were so smart and so good that you even fooled my computers. Ha! You did not fool me.”

For the next hour, Jean-Robert redid all the work he’d so laboriously produced already, only this time he adjusted his own calculations about the size of the geode. He didn’t understand how a filtering program through which he’d washed the American’s pictures hadn’t detected the difference. The filters analyzed at the bit level, searching for statistical anomalies or signs of infilling, and had found nothing. The technology he was up against was indeed formidable, but sometimes what a computer cannot see, a human can. And after the first hour’s work he knew that the pictures sent to him from Washington, D.C., had been doctored.

The size — and yield — of the geode had been reduced by 9.681 percent. That’s when Fortescue realized his opponent was making a fool out of him. This was a slap in the face — and Fortescue threw himself into the contest. He ran numbers for another couple of hours, churning simulation after simulation through the mainframe so intensely that the ship’s engineer had detected a spike in the nuclear plant’s output and called to the control center to inquire if everything was all right.

“Better than all right, Chief, I assure you,” Fortescue said into the phone embedded in his workstation. “But you must excuse me. I need to speak to Monsieur d’Avejan right away.”