The Void

CHAPTER 8

“A tragedy.” Colonel Jack Hammerson, ‘Hammer’ to his friends and enemies, had the phone on speaker and leaned back in his chair as five-star General Marcus Chilton related the events of the Orlando space shuttle orbiter crash.

“Revelation Mountains, Jack, bad news for recovery; almost inaccessible, and this time of year, even an airdrop is suicide for any normal rescue team — nothing but white-outs, blasting winds, and rock faces that make the Matterhorn look like a playground slide.”

“I know the area, Marcus; we’ve done some training work there. It’s a little bit of hell, right here on Earth.”

He turned to the large window overlooking the parade grounds, and waited for the general to get to the point. Hammerson was the head of the elite Special Forces group known as the HAWCs. They went in when everyone else wouldn’t or couldn’t, and did jobs the other security and military agencies didn’t even want to know about. And just as well, because his team made their own rules, and when they were done, there was blood and broken bodies — always the other guys’.

Chilton’s voice lowered. “Okay, Jack, that was the above-the-line speech, and now for the ears-only upload.”

Hammerson took the phone off speaker, and plugged the pellet into his ear. He sat forward, his large fingers clasped together on the desk. “Go, sir.”

“Jack, the Orlando was using one of our latest model deep-ground penetrating imagers. As the orbiter was going to be circling the world 300-plus miles up, we decided to make use of its altitude to take a few pictures — in fact loads of pictures. We set it to capture images and then let it run.”

Hammerson knew all about the capabilities of the DPIs. “Oh, good lord.” Hammerson tilted his head back and shut his eyes momentarily. “We mapped ourselves, didn’t we?”

“Oh yeah,” Chilton replied. “Problem was, we couldn’t transmit the images back to base — the probability of them being hacked and intercepted was too great. We needed to physically accept that device back into our hands.” He grunted. “Jack, that film is as lethal as it is invaluable.”

“Who else knows about it?” Hammerson had a sinking feeling.

“We know the Russians and probably the Chinese know about it, but they couldn’t do a damn thing about the Orlando when it was in orbit. Now that it has fallen out of the sky, they can.”

Chilton drew a deep breath and let it out in a low rumble. “That was the bad news. Now for the worse news — the Russians now have the jump on us. Our intel tells us they’re about to dispatch a team or already have. Jack, we can’t have an unarmed NASA recovery team running into a few Russian torpedoes up on those cliffs now, can we?”

“No sir, that we cannot.” Hammerson smiled grimly. “You want us to ride shotgun?”

“NASA is calling the shots on this as they know their bird. Normally, we’d send a standard Spec Ops team, but this has complications. We understand that Russia is putting a top team in for a fast snatch. They intend to blitz the site. These guys are displaying a distinct lack of respect; Jack, we, and by that I mean you, need to remind them who they’re dealing with.”

“Be a pleasure, sir.” Hammerson smiled grimly.

“One more thing, there’s a quarantine order over the entire site, and it’s not just for show. Where the Orlando went down we managed to get some initial satellite images before the cloud cover closed it all in. Looks like some sort of contamination dispersion. I’m sending you the Sabers images and initial report… now.”

A second later Hammerson’s computer pinged.

“Got ’em.” He immediately opened it and went to the first set of the satellite images. His brow furrowed. The Orlando had come down in among a set of massive jagged mountaintops that formed a sort of tooth cavity about two miles wide. He could tell by the way there were clouds hanging at its shoulders that it was high, and some numbers printed down the side confirmed it — 10,100 feet up.

It was high, cold, and virtually inaccessible. On this day it was calm, but Hammerson had been in the territory and knew it normally would have been a freezing hell of hurricane winds and chill factor of a hundred below in unsheltered areas. The only other place he could think of to make a fast extraction any more difficult might be the bottom of the ocean.

“Long way up,” Hammerson observed.

“Sure is, and a long way from home,” Chilton responded. “Average altitude where Orlando came down is 10,000 feet, and it’s close to absolutely nothing.”

Hammerson enlarged one of the images. He could easily make out the impact skid-line of the craft as it obviously came in at a hard angle. There was a debris plume, but the craft seemed to be primarily intact. The several pictures he looked at were time-stamped only minutes apart but as each image progressed in time they showed what looked to be a growing stain around the craft. The first was a dozen feet, and the last, hundreds. In addition, the last picture seemed to be blurred, but only over the spreading stain.

“What am I looking at here? Is that some sort of chemical leak, or fuel burn?” Hammerson squinted at the images.

“Unknown, but something sure is spreading, Jack, and it’s not a burn. Our tech teams believe something is growing down there.” He exhaled. “And that weird distortion of the image — well, we think that whatever that stuff is that’s spreading on that mountaintop, it’s giving off some sort of gas.”

“That’s a pretty damned hostile environment to be growing in; extremophile, maybe?” Hammerson asked. He knew that only a few creatures could live in a place that was deadly to anything else. Extremophiles, named after their extreme environments, could thrive in hot vents at the bottom of the ocean, sulfur pools, or underneath permanent ice sheets.

“What else could it be?” Chilton replied. “But what sort?”

“Nothing I’ve heard of.” Hammerson stared at the images. “Especially something with that speed of spread…” He checked the time stamps. “…this is happening over a matter of minutes.”

“Indeed,” Chilton said. “But it gets even weirder — we got movement as well.”

“Holy shit — survivors?” Hammerson began thinking through the rescue implications.

“Could be, but how? There’s some audio from the cockpit; it’s not encouraging.”

“Sir?” Hammerson’s brow’s knitted.

“Best if you hear it yourself, Jack. Anyways, Sabers has lost sight now, and we can’t improve resolution any better than what we’ve got. But before we went over the horizon, we picked up some thermal signatures before it whited-out completely. The signs definitely showed objects — life forms — moving away from the downed craft.”

“Well, if it is our people, those guys won’t stay warm for long,” Hammerson observed.

“I know. Make a plan, Jack, ASAP. Work with NASA. Find out what happened. First prize is you bring back that film, and locate any survivors. Second prize is no one else gets it. Anyone tries to stop you, well, you know what to do.”

Hammerson’s mouth pressed into a grim smile. “Yes sir, that’s what we do.”

“Okay, that’s it for now. You come up with anything else, feel free to share your observations with me. Good luck, God’s speed and strength to you and your team.” The general disconnected.

Jack Hammerson quickly read through the remaining briefing papers, and went to the bios of the missing astronauts — all quality pilots, technicians and scientists themselves. Not one of them looked prone to making mistakes, or freaking out.

He read the mission report and saw that the crew had been attempting to evade some space debris, and eventually had brought it onboard… and then everything went to shit. Two possibilities: it was all a coincidence, which as far as he was concerned, never happened. Or whatever they dragged into their hold made everything go bad, real quick.

Hammerson rubbed his chin and opened the attached audio and visual files from the shuttle orbiter’s last moments that Chilton had mentioned.

“Jes-uuus Christ.” He sat back — the screaming, moaning and other sounds of pain, utter desperation and hopelessness made the hair on his neck prickle.

“What the hell happened up there?” He narrowed his eyes and then ran the recording forward and back a few more times. The voice analyzer couldn’t determine which astronaut’s voice was which, or for that matter, even which was male or female. When Hammerson closed his eyes then ran the recording again, he wasn’t sure the screams even sounded human.

He checked the cargo manifest. There were lab animals onboard. Maybe, he thought. The visuals were even more inconclusive as something greasy looking seemed to have been smeared or splattered over the internal camera, and the cabin became indistinct as it filled with something like smoke or fog.

Could have been an onboard fire. He sat back, thinking. There were other possibilities, of course — one was sabotage. After all, the Russians were a little too quick off the mark for his liking. And the Orlando going down in Alaska, separated from Russian territory by around fifty miles of Bering Sea, was also a little too convenient.

He hated the thought of having to work with civs, but at least he’d worked with NASA before and found them competent. Sending them up there without HAWCs might be a death sentence if the Russians decided they wanted to play hardball. He imagined what was likely to happen if a Russian team of torpedoes came across a wounded astronaut or unarmed civilian. If the Russians wanted to remain invisible, they’d eradicate all evidence of having been there. Basically, if anyone saw them, they didn’t live to tell.

Well, if the Russians were sending torpedoes, then he’d send nukes. “And that’s why they call me the Hammer.” He smiled as he brought up his active HAWC list.