ELEVEN

 

Geneva, Switzerland

 

I made them.

Carter felt a mild surge of panic at Fallon’s revelation. He would not have made the admission if he had any intention of allowing her to walk out the front door.

She wasn’t afraid of him, though. Not by a long shot. Her panic arose from the possibility of what might happen if the man was stupid enough to threaten her.

Yet, there had been no threat, not even an implicit one. Fallon did not come across as a mad scientist or a maniacal Bond villain, crowing about having the power of life and death in his hands. Rather, he seemed almost embarrassed.

Not ‘I just caused a global catastrophe that killed thousands of people’ embarrassed, Carter thought. More like ‘Whoopsie, I just backed over your cat’ embarrassed.

“We haven’t established a connection yet,” Tanaka snapped. He was afraid of what she might do with the knowledge. “This was purely an optical test. The earthquakes couldn’t have been caused by anything we did.”

“Come on, Ishiro,” Fallon countered. “Coincidences like that just don’t happen.” He looked at Carter again. “Let’s get you up to speed.”

“She’s a biologist—”

“She’s a scientist, led here, and to you, by impressive deductions. Let’s read her in. Maybe she’ll give us a different slant on this.”

Carter’s anxiety ebbed a few degrees. Whatever else these men were, they weren’t madmen bent on destroying the world.

Fallon returned to his seat at the head of the table and began entering commands into a laptop. One of the wall screens began changing. Without looking away from what he was doing, Fallon said, “I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with what it is we’re trying to do here.”

Carter advanced and took a seat at the table. As she sat down, she took out her phone and laid it on her thigh. “By here, you mean Tomorrowland…or is it Space Tomorrow?”

Fallon gave a mirthless laugh. “I wanted to call the company Tomorrowland, but Disney sicced their lawyers on me.”

“Lawyers.” Carter smiled. She also tapped the icon on her phone screen to open a voice-chat application that would stream every word uttered in the room to Dourado in Rome. “As I understand it, you’re trying to develop robotic systems to advance space exploration.”

“Exploration. Colonization. We were supposed to have moon bases and space stations by the dawn of the twenty-first century. What happened? A loss of vision, that’s what. Well, that and the fact that space is exceptionally hostile to organic life. Science fiction did us all a huge disservice by making it look easy.”

He gave a dismissive snort, then seemed to realize that he was straying from the point. “Colonizing space…building space stations and livable habitats is possible. You probably saw my robots when you came in. To borrow a phrase from an old TV show, ‘We have the technology.’ With just the robots I have here at Tomorrowland, I could build a self-sufficient lunar base in six months, using raw materials from the moon itself. But the real goal…the Holy Grail…is terraforming. Making the other planets in the solar system habitable.” He paused a beat. “You’re familiar, I assume, with the concept of the Goldilocks Zone?”

Carter nodded. “It’s the hypothesis that life can only exist in a very specific range of temperatures. Earth is just the right distance from the sun. Venus is too close, and therefore, too hot. Mars is too far away, too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface.”

“Actually, Mars lies within the habitable zone, and Venus is marginal, but yes that’s the gist of it. Temperature is the variable. If we could modulate the amount of solar energy reaching those planets—send more sunlight to Mars or the moons of Jupiter, offer Venus some shade—then terraforming moves from science fiction pipe dream to plausible reality. We would also be able to shut down global warming here, and make the Earth a little more habitable again.”

Carter felt a glimmer of understanding. “Manipulating sunlight. Smoke and mirrors on a planetary scale. That’s what you were trying to do.”

“Not trying,” Fallon said, with more than a little pride. “We did it. We stopped the sun for ninety seconds.”

“How?”

“Like you said. Smoke and mirrors. More mirrors than smoke, actually.”

She nodded at Tanaka. “You said it was an optical test. You used microwaves to heat the ionosphere and create a plasma lens, right?”

“The ionosphere? That’s nothing.” Fallon returned his attention to the computer for a moment, entering a final command. “Do you know what a Dyson Swarm is?”

“Is it anything like a Dyson Sphere?”

Fallon nodded. “The Dyson Swarm is a variation on Freeman Dyson’s theoretical proposition that a sufficiently advanced species would, out of necessity, need to utilize all the available energy from its home star. One way to do this is the Dyson Sphere, a shell built around the star, collecting all the radiant energy. As engineering projects go, that would be pretty ambitious. You would need several planets worth of raw materials to create something like that. The Dyson Swarm proposes using free orbiting solar collector satellites rather than a solid structure. Obviously, that would greatly reduce the amount of energy that could be collected, but the yield would be tremendous. Enough energy to colonize the entire solar system. Maybe even fuel interstellar near-light-speed spacecraft. Last year, astronomers observed unusual fluctuations in the light coming from a star 1,400 light years away. The most plausible explanation for these dimming periods is a Dyson Swarm, built by an intelligent alien civilization.”

“I’ve heard about that. I’ve also heard that they probably aren’t alien structures at all, but comet fragments.”

Fallon smiled. “They aren’t comet fragments. And they aren’t alien megastructures, either. When Dyson first proposed his idea in 1960, he couldn’t conceive of any other way to harness a star’s energy, but today we know that light can be focused and refracted with strong magnetic fields. With the technology that we have today, it’s possible to utilize a considerable portion of the sun’s energy without building a physical shell or a swarm of collection satellites. All we need, is a few of those.”

He pointed at the wall screen, which now displayed an image of what appeared to be the Earth, viewed from space. Just visible in the faint blue band where the Earth’s atmosphere meets the vacuum of space, was a jagged black shape.

“Its unofficial name is ‘the Black Knight Satellite.’ It’s an electromagnetic anomaly orbiting the Earth, first detected in 1899 by Nikola Tesla, while he was conducting radio experiments. But he had no idea what it was. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when the idea of sending man-made satellites into orbit became a reality that anyone considered the possibility that the signals Tesla picked up might be coming from an object already in orbit. Over the next two decades, there were several sightings from reputable sources—U.S. Air Force pilots, naval tracking stations, astronauts. The government moved quickly to cover them up, dismissing interest in the phenomenon as UFO hysteria. In 1973, a Scottish astronomer published his hypothesis that the object was an alien space probe that had been in orbit for thousands of years. Somewhere along the line, the name ‘Black Knight’ stuck.”

“Aliens?” Carter made no effort to hide her smile.

Fallon seemed not to have heard her. “NASA says it’s a thermal blanket from the International Space Station.”

Carter took another look at the object on the screen. It did sort of look like a crumpled-up blanket floating in zero-G. “You’re sure it’s not?”

“Could a blanket do this?”

As if on cue, the misshapen object on the screen began to expand and swell, like a bag of popcorn in a microwave oven. In a matter of seconds, it transformed into a perfectly symmetrical sphere, glowing brighter and brighter until the screen was filled with radiance.

Fallon turned away, looked at Carter. “That’s our mirror. The footage you’re seeing is from a satellite I sent up six months ago to keep an eye on it. From a discreet distance, of course. This is from three hours ago. The test.”

Three hours ago, Carter thought. When the earthquakes hit.

A full minute passed before the brilliance receded to a pinpoint, and as the afterglow faded, Carter saw that the object had returned to its original irregular shape. She turned back to Fallon. “What is it?”

“It’s a meta-material. Carbon nanotubes spiraling around an alloy core of copper, with tungsten and molybdenum. At least we think so.”

“You think?”

“The experimental results are consistent with that identification,” Fallon said. “Our hypothesis is that the satellite was originally part of a larger structure that almost collided with the Earth. The main body fell into a near-polar orbit, while smaller pieces fell to Earth as meteorites. Fragments of the same material have been recovered at various meteor impact sites around the planet, which is how we were able to confirm the age of the satellite. It’s 13,000 years old.

“The U.S. government took an interest in it after World War II. We know that because civilians investigating the Roswell crash in 1947 reported finding a piece of metal that was as pliable as fabric, but always returned to its original shape.”

“Roswell? Aliens again?”

Fallon shook his head. “What crashed at Roswell was an experimental military aircraft utilizing a piece of the meta-material recovered from one of the Black Knight meteorites. An early attempt at a stealth plane. The so-called ‘alien bodies’ recovered from the site were ordinary human test pilots who experienced a physical alteration after exposure to the meta-material. It’s safe to handle under everyday conditions, but when stimulated it can have…unpredictable results.”

Carter wanted to hear more about unpredictable results but Fallon didn’t give her a chance to ask.

“Roswell was a rare failure. Almost every significant technological breakthrough in the last fifty years came out of the effort to reverse engineer that meta-material. Just the effort, mind you. No one has been able to duplicate it.”

“Is it alien?”

“The Black Knight is extraterrestrial in origin, as was the meta-material used in the Roswell aircraft. By extraterrestrial, I mean that it didn’t originate on Earth. That doesn’t mean that it’s the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence, though.”

Carter got the distinct impression Fallon believed that to be the case, even if he wasn’t willing to go on record with it. “How did you activate it?”

“I managed to acquire the Roswell meta-material fragment—a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right offer. By incorporating it into our antenna array, we were able to generate a focused beam of microwave radiation at the precise frequency of the satellite, which produced a sympathetic electromagnetic field around it. EM fields can refract or magnify light just as effectively as a glass lens. More effectively, since the photons don’t have to interact with a solid medium. The sun produces a staggering amount of energy, of which only an infinitesimal fraction reaches Earth. The trick is producing and maintaining a field big enough to manipulate that fraction.”

Or turn it into a weapon, Carter thought, imagining Fallon as a little boy, using a magnifying glass that looked like the Black Knight satellite to incinerate an anthill. Even if he wasn’t malicious, Fallon was reckless. “And it never occurred to you that something like that might be dangerous?”

Tanaka spoke up, his tone defensive. “There’s not a shred of proof linking these earthquakes to our test.”

“I’m not here looking to assign blame. I just want to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Ever. Off the record, is it possible that there’s a connection between your experiment and the earthquakes?”

Tanaka glowered but said nothing. Fallon spread his hands. “I’m afraid it’s more than just possible. It happened.

“Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of energy stored in the Earth’s crust, usually from the movement of tectonic plates.” He pressed his fingertips together to simulate the oppositional forces. “The energy builds up over long periods of time—thousands of years—and then it’s released in a sudden sharp movement that sends out seismic waves. Something we did today must have caused all that stored energy, in faults all over the world, to be released simultaneously.” He allowed his fingers to slip past each other with an audible snap.

“Could disrupting the Earth’s magnetic field do it?” Carter asked. “A lot of people were worried that HAARP might trigger a pole reversal.”

“Magnetic pole reversals have occurred many times in the past. On average, every million years or so. There’s no evidence that those pole shifts were accompanied by seismic disturbances, though, and in any case, there’s no evidence of severe electromagnetic disturbance. No, I think the culprit is gravity, specifically, tidal forces.

“You probably know about ocean tides. As the Earth rotates, the sun and moon exert a constant gravitational pull on the oceans. But the tides also affect the Earth itself, not just the crust, but the whole globe, creating a measurable bulge that moves as the Earth turns. We don’t notice it because it’s happening on a global scale. Over the last few billion years, the planet has reached a sort of equilibrium—seismically speaking—with these forces, much the same way a spinning top will straighten up after an initial wobble. But imagine what would happen if that equilibrium were to be disturbed by some external force. It would be like bumping the top.”

Carter nodded. “So the Black Knight didn’t just bend sunlight. It bent the sun’s gravity waves, too?”

“That’s my working hypothesis.”

“But it’s over now, right? The top is spinning normally again?”

“I see no reason why it shouldn’t. The sun’s tidal force is less than half that of the moon. I know it may not seem like it, but the bump was slight. These earthquakes would eventually have happened anyway. Some of them might have been much worse, so in a way, this is a good thing. I don’t think we’ll see the same level of seismic activity moving forward.”

It took Carter a moment to digest what Fallon was saying. “Moving forward? Are you serious?”

“Progress only moves one way. And if the data support this hypothesis, we might be a step closer to cracking the problem of artificial gravity.”

Carter narrowed her gaze at him. “What would have happened if the ‘bump’ had been a little bit harder? What would have happened if you had kept it turned on for two minutes? Or five? Or an hour?”

Fallon looked away, unable to endure her scrutiny. “That’s not going to happen.”

“You need to shut this down. Put the genie back in the bottle.” The exhortation was as much for her own benefit—and hopefully for Dourado’s eavesdropping ears—as for Fallon’s. His cooperation was unlikely at best, and even if he agreed to suspend his research, that was no guarantee that he or someone else wouldn’t pick it up again at some future point—uncorking the bottle and letting the genie out once more. “You said you needed the Roswell fragment of meta-material to activate the Black Knight. That’s the only way to do it, right?”

“Technically any piece of it would work, but that’s the only fragment I’m aware of.”

“So we get rid of that and problem solved.”

Fallon bristled. “I’m not going to just throw it away.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” Carter took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders like a lioness preparing to pounce. While her unique…condition…was not something she could exercise with surgical precision, the mere fact of its existence, of the fury she could unleash, allowed her to project strength, menace even, and that was a force almost as powerful. “Right now, the governments of every civilized nation on Earth are asking themselves if someone has invented an earthquake weapon. I figured it out. They will, too. They probably already have. They’ll be coming for it and for you, and unlike me, they won’t ask nicely.”

When Fallon did not reply, she pressed her attack. “This is how you save the world, Fallon. Bury it deep before someone uses it to start the next arms race. Because if you don’t, you’ll be responsible for whatever happens next. Today was an accident. Tomorrow will be mass murder.”

Fallon sagged a little under the verbal assault, which did not escape Tanaka’s notice. “You can’t be considering this.”

Fallon was silent for a few seconds. When he spoke, his manner was subdued. Defeated. “If Einstein had known, at the beginning, what his research would lead to…” He leaned back in his chair, leaving the thought unfinished. “Maybe we did move a little too fast with this.”

Carter forced herself to relax. It wasn’t the decisive victory she might have hoped for, but it was a huge step in the right direction. Now I just need to figure out how to get that meta-material away from him.

Tanaka, who had been glowering at his employer, looked down at his computer screen, his face registering consternation, then alarm. “This isn’t right.”

“What is it, Ishiro?” Fallon asked.

Tanaka tapped a few keys and the picture on the wall screen updated with a flicker. It still showed the Black Knight with the curve of the Earth behind it, but from a different angle, which altered the satellite’s appearance. A moment later, Carter realized it was more than just a change of perspective. The Black Knight was expanding again.

The transformation was more gradual than before, like the slow movement of a clock’s hour hand, where before it had been as quick as the sweep-second hand.

“What’s happening, Ishiro?”

“I don’t know. It may be responding to Earth’s magnetic field or background radiation.”

Fallon’s anxiety was palpable, as was Tanaka’s helplessness. Carter shared both emotions. “What will happen when it finishes changing? Another bump?”

“It depends on the timing,” Tanaka said. “If full deployment happens on the nightside, probably nothing, provided it cycles down again. If it deploys on the dayside or stays that way when its orbit brings it back around…” He shrugged. “A really big bump.”

“You turned it on,” she said. “Can’t you turn it off again?”

Fallon passed the question to his scientist. “Can we?”

“Another pulse perhaps.” Tanaka seemed to be thinking aloud. “An attenuating frequency.”

“Do it.”

Tanaka nodded and started tapping keys on his computer, but after a moment he slammed his fists down on the table. “I’m locked out.”

“Locked out?” Fallon and Carter asked the question simultaneously.

“We’re being hacked. Someone is overriding our system.” Tanaka looked up. “That must be why the satellite went active.”

Fallon bent over another of the computers and for several seconds, the only sound in the room was the faint clicking of plastic keys. The tension multiplied with each passing second until Carter couldn’t take it anymore. “If we pull the meta-material—the Roswell fragment—out of the antenna array, would that shut it down?”

Fallon looked up at her, then at Tanaka. The Japanese scientist shook his head. “The satellite is out of our control. Removing the meta-material might make things worse.”

“Or better,” Fallon countered, jumping to his feet. “We’ll try it.”

“Marcus!”

But Fallon was already heading for the door. “Have a cart waiting for me out front,” he said, as he passed the waiting guide robot. “We’re going to the array.”

The robot slid forward, putting itself between him and the exit.

Fallon barely managed to stop short of crashing into it. “What are you doing? Get out of the way.”

“Your presence is not authorized,” the electronic voice said. “Please remain where you are. Security has been notified.”