Ocean of Storms Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Christopher Mari & Jeremy K. Brown

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503938779

  ISBN-10: 1503938778

  Cover design by Adam Hall

  For my wife, Ana Maria, with love and gratitude. What’s real lasts.

  —C. M.

  For Alli, who never stopped believing and who loved me before I ever published a word. To the Moon and back, honey. Always.

  —J. K. B.

  CONTENTS

  PART 1: THE SIGNAL

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART 2: OCEANUS PROCELLARUM

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART 3: THE CALDERA

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  PART 1: THE SIGNAL

  Chapter 1

  December 22

  Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics

  La Jolla, California

  12:14 a.m.

  Max Shepherd knew few people who loved working the graveyard shift. But for him, working nights at the institute was about as plum a job as he could have wished for. Just a year into his doctoral program, he had landed a position as research assistant to Dr. Elliot Seaborne, the noted seismologist currently heading up the Lunar Seismology Initiative. A NASA-sponsored project, the LSI was yet another component of the agency’s increasing desire to mount a return to the Moon.

  A new series of lunar missions had been talked about since Shepherd had been in grammar school. But since NASA had scrapped its shuttle program back in 2011, the Moon had become the agency’s central focus. Yet despite all the talk about new missions, NASA still found itself in yearly battles with Congress over the costs of space exploration. Desperate for a way to convince Congress that manned spaceflight had not gone the way of the dinosaur, NASA was willing to listen to any theories that might generate some additional funding. That’s when Seaborne had approached the agency with the plans for the LSI. The hope was that by demonstrating the Moon’s geologic activity, they might be able to convince the politicians to set a firm date to mount another round of manned missions to Earth’s nearest neighbor. Surprisingly, some initial funding had been approved. On July 7, 2010, an unmanned probe, Stellaluna, had been launched to the Moon. Once in orbit, it had sent several seismometers to the Moon’s surface, devices considerably more sophisticated than the ones placed there by the Apollo astronauts more than forty years earlier. Now all that was left was for them to do their thing. Which is where Max Shepherd came in.

  Pretty slow night up there, Shepherd thought as he glanced at Stellaluna’s telemetry. He began surfing through the channels on the lab’s thirty-six-inch flat-screen television. There wasn’t much on any of the twenty-four-hour news channels, just some footage from the recent congressional hearings on human cloning. Some major biotech company was apparently on the verge of a breakthrough, and the age-old debate had flared up again. After ten minutes of flipping, Max muted the sound and turned his attention to the lab’s radio antennas. He cranked the speakers, filling the room with the sounds of what was commonly called “cosmic debris,” the collected noise of millions of radio, TV, and cell phone signals trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. The sound was eerie, like someone turning a wet finger around the rim of a crystal glass, but Max loved it.

  Just as he was starting to relax, the seismic equipment monitoring Stellaluna’s probes sprang to life. Needles and gauges flicked with such intensity that he was certain he was looking at a massive impact. The Moon was continually being bombarded by meteorites, but whatever had struck it tonight was a real whopper. Max scanned the readouts, searching for telltale signs. If this is a meteor impact, he thought, it’s a helluva big one. He reached for the desk phone and punched in Dr. Seaborne’s cell number.

  “Unless the Moon just exploded, I don’t care,” came the sleepy voice on the other end.

  “Sorry to bother you, Doctor,” said Max, “but I thought you’d want to see this.”

  Seaborne sat up in bed, struggling to wake himself. “What’ve you got?”

  “Something highly unusual. Massive seismic activity on an unheard-of scale.” He tapped out a few keystrokes and e-mailed the data to Seaborne. “I’m sending you the numbers now.”

  There was a pause as Seaborne checked over what Max had just sent to his smartphone. “Impact,” he deduced. “It’s got to be.”

  “I thought so too,” Max said. “But it’s so damn big. It’s like—wait. I’ve got an e-mail coming in from Big Sky.”

  Max often kept in touch with the astronomers at Big Sky Observatory in Montana. Whatever he heard, he reasoned, they might be able to back up visually.

  “Um, Dr. Seaborne?” he said hesitantly. “They’re saying that they’re picking up debris on the Moon.”

  “Debris? There it is—it has to be an impact.”

  “I agree, but they’re saying the ejecta pattern doesn’t match an impact.” Max paused, making sure he had read it right. “It’s almost as if—”

  Before he could finish, a high-pitched tone tore through the phone lines, nearly striking both of them stone-deaf. Max yanked the phone away from his ears and dropped it, expecting the intensity of the sound to diminish. He howled in shock and pain, but the sound was drowning out his own voice. It was everywhere—in the speakers, the TV, the stereo. It was even coming from equipment that normally didn’t emit sound. The noise had a deep bass undercurrent that made Max think of a hive of angry bees. He could feel his bones vibrate from the sound. The experience was invasive, disorienting, and altogether awful. He crawled under a desk, praying that it would stop, or that he would die. The sound reached a fever pitch that seemed to resonate deep in Max’s brain before spiraling madly down into silence. Almost instantly, the discord was followed by a second wave. This one cascaded through Max with locomotive force, bringing forth a powerful sense of vertigo. The coffeepot exploded, spraying hot liquid everywhere. Every lightbulb overhead popped and burst. Even his MacBook cracked open. All at once, the windows of the lab blew inward. Max blinked, stunned. He meekly picked up the phone, listening to see if Dr. Seaborne was still there.

  Nothing.

  Dead.

  For a terrible moment, Max felt as if he were the only person left alive on the planet. He peered out the shattered window at the Moon, wondering just what secrets she had to tell tonight.

  December 22

  South China Sea

  Off the Taiwanese Coast

  4:14 p.m.

  As a lieutenant colonel in the United States Marines, Franklin Wilson was not required to fly patrols. In fact
, the act was frowned upon by other officers. But Wilson had volunteered. Every once in a while he just needed to get away, and he was never as free as when he was in the air. Stationed on the USS Nimitz off the coast of Taiwan, Wilson was overseeing the US initiative to protect American interests in the region. In recent months China had become increasingly adamant about its “one-China” policy and had expressed to the United States its view of Taiwan being a rogue province. Some feared that the situation, which had been escalating for some time, would ultimately lead to war.

  If that’s the case, let it come, Wilson thought. It’s better than all this damn waiting.

  Nearly forty years old, he had spent the first six years of the century as a pilot in his country’s ceaseless campaign against terrorism and had fought in some of the most harrowing bombing operations of the conflict. Then he had applied for the astronaut corps and gotten in with no trouble, though he maintained his active-duty status. Today he was here more as a favor than in an official capacity. His experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia would prove useful should a combat situation arise, his superiors had thought.

  That was fine with him. He had logged just one mission in space since 2011, when the United States had decommissioned its shuttle fleet. All attention was now focused on the new Phoenix project, which when Wilson last checked was still bogged down in cost overruns and research and development after his abortive test flight of the prototype Phoenix capsule. Wilson was slated to command another Phoenix mission sometime down the line, but at the rate the process was going, such a feat could take years. He figured a few weeks on an aircraft carrier would do him good. Plus, he had reasoned, they’d have to extend an officer a little courtesy and let him try out some new hardware. And that was just what he was doing right now.

  “Mother Hen, this is Eagle One, over,” he said, contacting the Nimitz’s control tower.

  “Go ahead, Eagle One.”

  “Everything out here looks fine. No unfriendly skies, over.”

  “Roger that, Eagle One,” the flight controller responded. “Why don’t you come on back?”

  “Will do, Mothe—”

  Wilson’s F-35 Lightning II was suddenly rocked by a powerful concussive force that struck him so solidly that for an instant he thought he had been hit by an object. His plane spun wildly out of control, caught in the mercy of the shock wave. He fought to right her, to no use.

  “Mayday, Mother Hen, Mayday,” Wilson said. “I’ve lost control and I’m going down.”

  No sooner had he said the words than every light on board blinked out and all the controls stopped responding. Wilson was handling a dead stick in a vertical dive.

  He grasped the ejection-seat handle, praying that whatever had knocked his plane out hadn’t screwed that up as well, and yanked it hard. With a whoosh, the canopy’s explosive bolts fired and Wilson shot into the afternoon sky, his plane falling away beneath him.

  “C’mon, baby, c’mon,” he whispered. Almost in response, his chute snapped open, jerking him back forcefully, and he began floating gently toward the ocean. Deep in his stomach, he got a sinking feeling. He had been to enough classes on terrorist tactics to recognize the effects of an electromagnetic pulse. As he hit the water, he ignited the waterproof flares he carried in his flight suit, hoping the Nimitz would be able to pick him up. Treading water, he searched the horizon, wondering when both rescue and answers would arrive.

  December 22

  Taiyuan Launch Center

  Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China

  4:14 p.m.

  The rocket stood on the launchpad, ready for its journey to the stars. That journey, however, was still a few months away. This afternoon was simply a routine test of the capsule, which rested atop a new staged rocket the Chinese believed would jump-start their first series of manned Moon missions. On board were the two men selected to fly the craft: Commander Yuen Bai, a decorated officer of the People’s Republic with a spotless service record, and Professor Bruce Yeoh. Although they were teammates, the two couldn’t be more different. Yuen was a former fighter pilot in the People’s Liberation Army, a cold-eyed black belt with an intense disposition, who had trained for this mission for almost five years. Yeoh, on the other hand, was Chinese born but American educated. A brilliant physicist, mathematician, and computer scientist, he had entered Caltech on a full scholarship, leaving Shanghai when he was just sixteen. His findings on gravitational motivation and Planck theory were considered some of the most groundbreaking scientific revelations in a generation. At twenty-five, he returned to his native country with his PhD and began applying his research to spaceflight. Four years later he was sitting here on the launchpad, preparing to bring everything full circle. If the Chinese were going to be the first people to return to the Moon, industry pundits around the world speculated, Bruce Yeoh would be the man to help get them there.

  “Tai-Ping, this is Mission Control,” said the flight controller.

  “Go ahead,” answered Yuen.

  “We are go for a preliminary test.”

  Yuen was about to respond when everything went haywire. Their headsets were filled with a horrible squealing sound; then everything went black. The lights and instruments on board the ship failed and, from what they could tell looking through the small viewport, all the lights on the pad had gone out as well. The two men sighed. It would likely be some time before they found out what had happened. They were strapped into their seats, and the hatches on these craft worked on an electrical locking mechanism. They were stuck.

  Yuen, a disgusted expression on his face, looked at Yeoh. “Damned Russian technology.”

  December 22

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  3:30 a.m.

  “Is it nuclear?” asked General James Francis McKenna, chief of Space Command and NORAD, as he whisked down the hallway toward the Situation Room of the White House. He was almost afraid of the answer. He was sure only an electromagnetic pulse triggered by a nuclear detonation could knock out power like this, including emergency generators. Those on staff when the lights went out had resorted to using flashlights. Their beams cut wildly through the dark as McKenna walked with the President’s advisers, including Aaron Stein, the secretary of defense.

  “We just don’t know for sure, General,” Stein said. “We’ve only got sporadic radio contact with local NEST teams in and around DC. But there’s no visual evidence of a detonation.”

  “Hell, I could have told them that,” said McKenna irritably.

  McKenna had been trained not to be surprised by anything. Sixty-five years old and tempered on the crucible of Vietnam, he had seen death as up close and personal as any man on this Earth. Over the next few hours, he would have to assess a possible threat that could ultimately lead to the annihilation of millions. McKenna didn’t care how many years you’d spent in the game of war; that decision never came lightly.

  These thoughts turned over in his mind as he strode into the Situation Room, which was lit by the halogen lamps of the emergency lighting system.

  “Madam President,” McKenna said.

  “Morning, Jim,” said the President. “What’ve you got for me?”

  “Right now, we’re in the dark, ma’am, literally and otherwise. Aaron’s been briefing me on the way, and it looks like, at this point, we may be able to rule out a nuclear strike in the immediate vicinity.”

  “Can we be sure?”

  McKenna and Stein exchanged worried glances. “Truthfully, ma’am, we can’t,” Stein flatly stated. “With the phone lines out, we’ve been unable to maintain continual contact with Nuclear Emergency Support Teams in the DC area, or those units in other cities. We’re only able to raise them via radios operating on battery reserves, but the comm chatter has been a little chaotic. We’re trying to clear it up now.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the President muttered. “We’ll have to dispatch people personally to every primary and secondary target in the area. Aaron—”
>
  “Madam President,” Stein said calmly. “None of our vehicles are working either. No electrical system is functioning at all. This has all the earmarks of an electromagnetic pulse.”

  “An EM pulse of this magnitude with no indication of a nuclear explosion?” the President asked incredulously. “Is such a thing possible?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to ascertain now, ma’am.”

  The President turned back to McKenna. “Have there been any incidents of civil unrest?”

  “Not as of yet. It’s too soon to be sure, but it’s something we may be facing should this crisis last the night.”

  “That’s not good enough, gentlemen. We’ve got to deploy the National Guard, keep people calm.”

  “We’ve begun mobilizing them as best we can,” said Stein. “We should be able to deploy them within the hour.”

  “We might want to consider calling in the army,” voiced Amy Martin, secretary of Homeland Security.

  “Posse comitatus forbids it,” said the President.

  “You could invoke the War Powers Act,” she suggested. “A military presence could send a powerful message.”

  “The wrong message,” McKenna broke in. “Madam President, you give the order and I’ll roll a tank up to my blue-haired granny’s house in Decatur. But, in my opinion, you’d be courting disaster. You’ll put fear into every citizen, and fear will quickly give way to aggression. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Somalia, Liberia, Iraq. Trust me when I tell you it’s the quickest way to make a bad situation worse.”

  “I agree,” said the President. The two had known each other for decades. McKenna was the most sensible man the President knew. She trusted his views more than those of many of her closest advisers. She turned to Secretary Martin. “We’re not there yet, Amy.”

  “If I may, ma’am,” offered McKenna, “I think the best thing we can do right now is to get you, the vice president, and the Joint Chiefs to a secure location. We still don’t know what we’re facing and we need to maintain a working government.”