Ocean of Storms Page 2

  The President shook her head. “I won’t duck and run, Jim. It’s not what this country needs.”

  “Ma’am,” Stein protested. “I think you might be underestimating the severity of the situation.”

  “No, Aaron, I think I understand it perfectly. It’s for that very reason I’m staying put.”

  McKenna smiled and shook his head. He’d known the President long enough to recognize when her mind was made up. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s pull up a chair and go over some—”

  As McKenna was speaking, the lights suddenly snapped back on. Everyone froze for a moment, unsure if it was just a fluke. When the power appeared to be on for good, the room burst to life. Everyone ran back and forth. Phones began to ring, and laptops were popped open. Stein’s secure satellite phone went off in his hand. The President nodded to him and Stein answered it. A few minutes later he switched off the phone, his face drained of blood.

  “How bad?” the President asked.

  “Madam President,” Stein began slowly, “the preliminary reports indicate that the pulse wasn’t contained to the DC area.”

  “What is it?” McKenna demanded. “Not the entire Eastern Seaboard?”

  “No. Not just the seaboard.”

  The President leaned on the table. “Surely you’re not telling me it hit the entire country?”

  Stein shook his head. “We’re getting initial reports from bases as far away as the Philippines. We believe this pulse or whatever it is knocked out power across the entire planet.”

  Over the next several hours, the President’s staff began dissecting what had transpired. Preliminary reports were good. Most people across the country had remained calm, believing that the power outages had been isolated to their immediate area. Though details were sketchy at this point, there were almost no incidents of theft or looting. For the most part America had behaved exactly as she’d expected it would have. However, the report from Michelle Artus, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, was not as comforting.

  “Ma’am, from what we’ve been able to piece together, we have several hundred downed planes. Casualties are thankfully pretty light across the country. Most pilots were able to make water landings or emergency touchdowns in fields and out-of-the way locations. Early estimates of fatalities are in the low thousands.”

  “The low thousands?” the President asked. “Can’t we get a more specific number than that?”

  “It could’ve been a lot worse,” Secretary Martin suggested.

  “Any number is too high,” the President said quietly. “We haven’t even begun to estimate things like car accidents, power outages at hospitals, and the like. How about international flights?”

  Artus sighed. “We know of one plane so far that came down in a major city. We’re still assessing the damage, but it looks like the death toll could be catastrophic.”

  The President sat down. “Where?”

  “Hong Kong.”

  December 22

  Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb Museum

  Kowloon, Hong Kong

  4:14 p.m.

  As she did every other month, Dr. Soong Yang Zi was leading a school field trip on a tour of the museum when it happened. Dr. Soong certainly didn’t need to schedule the excursion. As one of the most respected forensic anthropologists in China, she couldn’t really spare the time, but she loved the time spent with the children.

  “Come along,” Soong said as she led her charges to the entrance passage of the museum where the centerpiece exhibit, a tomb from the Han dynasty, was kept. Closed to the public for conservation reasons, its interior was only visible behind plate glass.

  “This tomb was discovered in 1955, when a hill slope at Lei Cheng Uk village was being excavated,” Soong explained. “According to inscriptions on the tomb and other findings, we think it is almost two thousand years old.”

  The ten children in Soong’s group oohed and aahed at the number, and she smiled. After days on end of working in crime labs and university basements piecing together how a person lived and died, she found that leading these tours was the perfect way to recharge her batteries and reignite her passion for the work. As a student, Soong studied archeology at first but gradually became more interested in anthropology, wanting to know who the people she was digging up were. In time, she discovered that the greatest way to solve any puzzle was to break it down to its barest elements. On a whim, she took a course in osteology and never looked back. By studying the bones of a subject, she found that it was possible to determine where and how they lived, whether they were male or female, and even how they died. Her thesis on dental anatomy and its relation to primate and hominid evolution was received with nothing less than hosannas in academic circles, and she had her pick of just about any university placement she wanted upon graduation. However, when the bones of a murder victim were uncovered not far from her home, Soong offered her help in analyzing them. The team on the case discovered that the victim was a seventeen-year-old girl who had been missing for two years. Although the girl’s family was devastated, Soong saw that they were relieved to at least know what had become of their daughter. Seeing the relief they got from having that closure was enough to propel Soong into the field full time. In the ensuing decade, she cracked some of the toughest cases the department had, as well as reopened a few cold cases with successful results. During her off-hours, Soong also found time to visit the university, where she often would work with some of her old professors, poring over bone fragments and trying to piece together some long-forgotten civilization. Still, as much as she loved it, it was very easy to get jaded in her line of work. Day after day spent with the dead could grow tiresome, to say the least. So to come here and see the innocent excitement with which these children viewed the pursuit of the past always gave her enough of a charge to keep going.

  As she spoke, the room was filled with a terrible high-pitched sound. To Soong it sounded like the scream of an animal dying in extreme pain and fear. The glass surrounding the tomb cracked and then exploded, showering the entrance hall. Instinctively, she tried to draw the children to her, shielding them as best she could from the airborne fragments. Pots and vases forged thousands of years ago shattered in milliseconds against the onslaught of sound, which reached a wild fever pitch before lapsing into silence. After a moment, a terrible second wave hit them, filling Soong with a sense of vertigo not unlike what she felt when she was ten and climbed Mount Taishan with her father. The wave passed, and all power in the museum snapped out. Soong lay there a moment, huddled in the darkness with the children, then sat up.

  “Is everyone all right?” she called out.

  Miraculously, apart from a few nicks and scratches, they had all managed to avoid being cut to ribbons by the flying glass and shards of pottery. Soong gently stood up, brushing off debris. As she caught her breath, she heard another sound. This one was faint but seemed to be getting louder.

  “What is that?” asked an elderly man, a security guard she knew as Li. He walked outside to have a look while Soong attempted to calm the children down. Almost immediately he ran back in, a look of sheer panic on his face.

  “Get them to safety!” he cried, pointing at the students. “Now!”

  Soong barely had time to react. She instantly herded them together and led them into the tomb’s massive chambers. When the children were safely away from whatever danger was headed their way, she looked over to Li.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Li frantically waved her away. Before Soong could open her mouth, the world around her exploded. A deafening roar like a derailing freight train filled her ears. Soong was blasted off her feet and into the chamber. The museum walls buckled and cracked, threatening to collapse and send several millennia’s worth of history tumbling down.

  The deafening cacophony overhead continued, the sound of shrieking and twisting metal stretched beyond its limits, blending with the symphony of shattering glass. Underneath it all, an un
earthly sound of churning engines and turbines hummed. The combined sound was easily the most terrible thing she had ever heard or could even imagine hearing. To Dr. Soong, the gates of diyu had opened and the hungry ghosts of wicked souls were sweeping across the land.

  Finally, with a last defiant cry, the tumult stopped. Without waiting, Soong crawled out of the tomb and led the children out onto the sidewalk. As soon as she got outside, she wished she’d stayed put. In the middle of the street, amid the wreckage of buildings it had destroyed in its death throes, sat a commercial airliner. Steam hissed from popped rivets and broken seams while its still-turning jet engines blew dust and debris everywhere. Soong looked at the ruin before her and back at the miracle of the still-standing museum behind her, at the people running to and fro, screaming and crying, at the buildings hollowed out by the devastation of the plane’s landing. As she was surveying the carnage, a little girl from her tour group gently touched her hand.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  Looking out at the terrible tragedy the afternoon had wrought, Dr. Soong could not help but feel that it was only just beginning.

  December 24

  The Pentagon

  Arlington, Virginia

  9:15 a.m.

  We are all prisoners of our possessions, the President thought as she walked the Pentagon’s long corridors, and I’m the kid with the most broken toys. Here she was the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, but she had been unable to do something as simple as address her own people on national television. It had taken two whole days for the American government to get their computer and communication systems up and running again. For those two days she had to rely on legwork and conflicting reports about the state of the nation. However, preliminary reports from the major cities were good. Few people had reacted violently, and most were trying to aid the thousands upon thousands who had been wounded when electrical systems all over the planet failed. People had been trapped in elevators, in cars, in planes and tunnels, on trains and bridges. The crash in Hong Kong had managed to kill several thousand people, and the damage to the downtown area was staggering. The President shook her head. The sheer magnitude of it all was almost overwhelming. But now, as things began to normalize, the general mind-set of the planet had drifted from outright panic to quiet terror. People were beginning to ask questions. People wanted to know what had caused this.

  As the President entered the briefing room, everyone, including the Joint Chiefs, stood at once. The room was crowded, as the President had asked not only her entire cabinet to assemble but the various heads of space programs around the country as well. The sight of so many rumpled scientists standing around the table contrasted with the gleaming sharpness of military uniforms and the blue and gray business suits of professional politicians.

  “As you were, ladies and gentlemen,” the President said. She took her place at the head of the table but did not sit. “Sorry to keep you from your families on Christmas Eve, but as you no doubt realize, we’re teetering on the edge of a worldwide panic, the likes of which no generation has ever seen. What you may not know is this: the world is a radically different place from the one we once knew.” She paused, not for dramatic effect as she so often did (rather well, if you went by the editorial page of the Washington Post) during her other speeches. This pause came from a simpler notion. She honestly did not know what to say. After another beat, the President inhaled a deep breath and continued. “The cause of the anomaly on December twenty-second has been, to an extent, determined. As of right now, we have positive confirmation that we are not alone in the universe.”

  Knowing who was speaking, people tried their best to be respectful, but there was a collective rumble of gasps, groans, and hmmms in the room. A few of the more cynical attendees muttered a “Jesus Christ” or “Beam me up, Scotty.”

  The President silenced them with a look. “I know how it sounds,” she said. “But we have at this point conclusive proof that the pulse emanated from something buried beneath the Moon’s surface.”

  “From the Moon?” asked Aaron Stein, wiping his glasses with a monogrammed handkerchief.

  The President answered Stein’s query with only a slight nod. “For further analysis, I turn you over to Dr. Elliot Seaborne of the University of California at San Diego. He heads the LSI team that first encountered the anomaly.”

  Seaborne bustled up to the front of the room, a cluster of rolled-up maps and charts under his thin arms. A nervous balding man with a pinched face and a threadbare tweed jacket, he looked every bit the stereotypical lab rat. However, when he began speaking, he displayed a surprising confidence.

  “Thank you, Madam President,” he said, clearing his throat. “Okay, everyone. I should first give you some background on our work. As you are probably well aware, SETI has spent decades using giant radio telescopes across the country to search the heavens for any sign of extraterrestrial life. What you may not know is that in 1977 Jerry Ehman at the Ohio State SETI program received a strong narrowband radio signal that went on for seventy-two seconds. He was so excited by what he heard, he wrote the word wow in the corner of the page. Unfortunately, attempts to relocate the signal failed, and it was never heard from again. Still, it represented the closest thing we have to proof that intelligent life other than our own exists in the universe. Until now. We know very little about the anomaly at the moment. But we do know it came from a source of extreme power and originated from the Ocean of Storms.”

  “That’s the landing site of Apollo 12,” said Jack Sykes, director of the National Security Agency.

  “Yes, sir,” Seaborne said. “And as many questions as that raises, it also answers a few others. For starters, it all but exonerates Alan Bean from burning out the camera lens during the first extravehicular activity, or EVA, in November 1969.”

  “How is that?” asked Len Byrnes, a NASA scientist. “I thought he pointed the thing at the sun.”

  “He may well have, Dr. Byrnes,” said Seaborne. “But in all probability, the camera had already been ionized by electrical activity at the site.” He paused again. “Activity that most probably came from some sort of buried object.”

  The room erupted in murmurs. Some members of the NSA tried to keep poker faces, but beneath the veneer, a thin film of worry was showing.

  Secretary Martin spoke up. “What other questions have been answered?”

  Seaborne cleared his throat. “Well, for one thing, there’s the water that was detected in the early seventies. At the time NASA thought it was just some kind of vapor released during a moonquake. We now believe that the water was most likely condensation of some sort from this buried object. Then there are the rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts that contained bits of rusted iron. We theorize that the iron was driven into the rocks during the object’s possible impact”—he paused—“approximately two million years ago.”

  McKenna set his coffee cup down. “How the devil can you know that?”

  “Teams of geologists have been studying those rock samples since the 1970s, General,” Seaborne explained. “The tests conclusively proved that the rusted iron ore found on the Moon was at least that old.” Before letting this new development sink in, Seaborne plunged on. “The most fascinating discovery we have made during our studies of the site also stems from the days of the Moon landings. On November 20, 1969, when Apollo 12 blasted off from the Moon, astronauts Conrad and Bean sent the ascent stage of the LEM—that’s short for the lunar excursion module—crashing back into its surface. Seismic equipment left behind recorded that the impact of the LEM caused the Moon to reverberate almost like a bell for over an hour. Dr. Frank Press of MIT explained the phenomenon by saying that the impact must have simply caused a series of avalanches and collapses on the Moon’s surface. This explanation, however, does not account for the long, sustained seismic readings following the crash. Several experiments were subsequently conducted by NASA, which determined that the Moon—at least in that particular area
—is hollow. The results of these tests have never been disclosed.”

  “That’s NASA for you,” one gruff military voice intoned. “Never A Straight Answer.”

  Seaborne cleared his throat again. “Spectrographic analysis of the Moon’s surface around the Ocean of Storms reveals some clues that may point to an answer.” At this point he nodded to an assistant at the far end of the room, who punched some keys on a laptop terminal. Instantly a crisp photo of the area appeared on a large television screen mounted into the wall behind Seaborne.

  “These are pictures of the Moon’s surface taken yesterday by orbiting telescopes. And that,” Seaborne said, pointing at the photo, “is what we believe is the source of the EM pulse. Shortly before the pulse hit the Earth, this fissure opened up in the Ocean of Storms. As you can see, there is no discernible impact crater. The ejecta we see on the surface is new, previously unseen. Further, its dispersal pattern indicates that whatever caused this fissure to open came from the inside.”

  “Blasted out from the inside?” Stein wondered.

  “Exactly. While shadows prevent us from peering too far into the fissure, by bouncing radar waves from our orbiting satellite, Stellaluna, at it, we can discern that this area of the Moon has an almost-hollow interior.”

  “And what exactly caused this area of the Moon to be so hollow?” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Rick Gonzalez wondered.

  “Well, General—and this is pure speculation—it appears that whoever put that object on the Moon had likely dug caves around it.”

  A palpable silence fell about the room. McKenna cleared his throat. “So what’s the next step?”

  “Well, that’s where things get interesting,” Seaborne said. “On a hunch, my team, in collaboration with some radio astronomers from SETI, analyzed the EM pulse. We theorized that whoever sent the pulse may have been trying to make contact.”

  “But that’s just a theory,” General Gonzalez noted.