Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Without any means of control, the Tiangong-1 fell into a decaying orbit.

Thermal readings from multiple spy agencies determined that life support had been shut off, with the surface of the station as cold as the space around it. Abandoned, the station continued to orbit the earth for several years, engines offline and radios silent.

On April 10, 2018, the scant air particles percolating in the upper atmosphere finally managed to drag the station into destructive reentry. The metal cylinder was ripped to superheated shreds by atmospheric friction, reduced to a flaming confetti that rained down on the planet below—directly above the primordial jungles of the eastern Amazon.

Thus, the entire effort ended in a brief streak of light and heat.

The failure would likely have been deemed harmless were it not for a single, final bit of information. During the continuous monitoring of the space station—from launch, to resupply missions, to its last fiery reentry—operatives had noticed something the Chinese space agency never mentioned publicly.

The last crew of three taikonauts had never emerged from the Tiangong-1.

Code Name Andromeda

BARELY FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE A JUNGLE CANOPY that itself soared a hundred and fifty feet high in places, a Sikorsky H-92 Superhawk helicopter thundered over shivering trees. The gray metal chopper was streaked with jungle mist, nose jutting out like the beak of a predatory bird. In its wake, bands of monkeys hooted in the treetops and colorful birds took startled flight.

James Stone didn’t remember falling asleep.

Even with the thudding of the rotors in his ears and the vibration of the window glass on the rolled-up jacket he was using for a pillow, he’d had no trouble nodding off.

Later, when every detail of his life was declassified and dissected, splashed across the front pages of newspapers and magazines, it became well documented that Stone had the ability to fall asleep anywhere, at almost any time—to “turn off,” to use the parlance of soldiers.

James had been able to do this since he was a little boy.

Part of it must have been out of sheer necessity. Young James spent his childhood accompanying his famous father—the Nobel Prize–winning polymath Dr. Jeremy Stone—on his scholarly travels around the world. Well dressed and soft-spoken, little James seemed nothing like his loud, impatient father. Together they were an odd couple, circumnavigating the globe every few months as Dr. Stone delivered lectures, attended scientific talks, and toured various international scientific projects.

James very rarely saw his mother, Allison, after his parents were divorced near his ninth birthday. And although the two were so obviously different from one another, Stone’s father was clearly dedicated to ensuring that the boy learn something new every day of their never-ending travels. Today, this type of roving education is called world schooling.

Yet according to private interviews that were not splashed across the tabloids, there was another reason that Stone had become very good at falling asleep—it was because he so frequently woke up in terror, his skin crawling with the cobweb remnants of a singular nightmare. This time, aboard the Sikorsky, would have been no different.

In recovered cabin security footage, Stone woke with a start and stared dazedly at the stripped-down interior of the former military helicopter. The sun was low on the horizon outside, flooding the interior with ruddy morning light. His jaw tightening, Stone blinked a few times before apparently forcing himself to relax.

By his own account, the dream was always the same, its familiar images having solidified over the years into a kind of half memory. Stone described it as a gruesome stream of blood, wine-dark, flowing over white desert sand. The spreading stream stopped, suddenly still, wrong somehow, as the surface of the blood seemed to congeal all at once, the gleaming slick shrinking in on itself and solidifying into tiny grains of ocher dust—fine particles of dried blood that swirled up and away on the oven-hot breath of desert wind.

Stone shook his head to clear it.

Putting the dream out of his mind, he focused on the brightening jungle outside. He must have felt a sense of raw anticipation. As a child raised by a daredevil scientist, he had finally, at the start of his fifth decade, found himself joining an adventure to rival his father’s.

Briefing documents lay spread out on the empty seats beside him, covered in dire warnings and classifications. Among them was a stiff, waxy photograph accompanied by a few pages of technical readouts.

It was truly a stunning image.

The ultra-high-resolution picture had been created by the army’s adaptive super-resolution image reconstruction algorithm, which combined multiple video frames, still images, and radar-generated topographical information to construct a three-dimensional image and paint it with light in spectacular detail.

Even so, it still looked like a hoax.

The structure reminded Stone of his trips to the ancient Mayan temples of Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula. How the surprisingly intact rock edifices peeked their heads out of misty jungles, like giants frozen midstride over a primal landscape that had grown up around them.

Similar, except that the appearance of this particular structure had triggered the scrambling of an international coalition of esteemed scientists to the most remote jungle on the planetary surface. It was apparently worth hiring a black-market chopper for a surely outrageous price, and sending a trio of polite but firm active-duty soldiers to retrieve Stone from a guest lecture before a college class, midsentence, confiscating his phone and firmly escorting him away.

And yet Stone had only glanced at the glossy image. The structure was obviously interesting, but it wasn’t what had piqued his curiosity. That would have been the other readout:

MASS SPECTROMETRY RESULTS

/// These data were collected by [redacted] High-Resolution Spectral Analysis suite and are intended for AFSPC USE ONLY. ///

*** UNAUTHORIZED USE PROHIBITED. CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET—DISSEMINATION IS SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL PENALTIES INCLUDING SUMMARY EXECUTION WITHOUT TRIAL ***

Unknown reading /// Unknown reading. N2. Saturation. /// Composition analysis . . .

. . . Incident in PIEDMONT, ARIZONA. MATCH *** MATCH *** MATCH ***

The atmospheric readings were startling in that they very nearly replicated the exact composition of air rising off the sunbaked plains of Piedmont, Arizona, in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident.

And with that, a haunting name was invoked:

PROJECT WILDFIRE * PROJECT WILDFIRE * PROJECT WILDFIRE *

The words would have undoubtedly caused deep, conflicting feelings in Stone. Over fifty years before, his father had played a significant role in stopping the spread of the Andromeda Strain. While under preliminary consideration for inclusion on the Wildfire roster, James Stone had been given access to a slew of classified documents. He had used the opportunity to pore over every detail of the incident—and especially his father’s part in it.

Yet to try and discuss it with the old man would have been impossible—literally illegal.

In all the years of traipsing around the globe together, there is no indication the father and son ever conversed about what happened in Piedmont. With his balding crew cut and thick-framed glasses, Dr. Jeremy Stone seemed never to have left behind the 1950s tradition of stoicism. He took his top-secret status very seriously. Jeremy Stone did not speak of the classified portions of the events that occurred during that five-day period—not to his son, not to any of his ex-wives, not to anyone else in his life.