Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Noon Field Briefing

PENG WU WATCHED THE THREE OTHER SCIENTISTS gather and check their luggage in the hacked clearing without saying a word. Though she of course spoke perfect English, and French and German for that matter, she found silence almost always to be the best response around her European and American colleagues. She had read the dossiers on her team (both the American and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army–supplied documentation), but had met them each just briefly.

Only the older African man, Harold Odhiambo, made her feel comfortable. He spoke slowly and with deliberation. And though he often wore a wry grin below thick round eyeglasses, he refrained from constantly flashing his teeth in glaring and pointless smiles.

Peng knew that with her keen intellect and piercing black eyes, she could appear severe to Westerners, especially civilians. She wasn’t bothered by it. In her estimation, their discomfort was due less to a cultural divide than to the simple fact of her military background and natural disposition.

When she was a small child in Zhengzhou, Peng’s parents were often gone—dispatched on various assignments for the PLA. Left in the care of her grandfather, she had begun to experience separation anxiety that soon blossomed into panic attacks. As a solution, the old man had introduced his granddaughter to the ancient game of weiqi (known as Go in the United States). He explained that life was like the game—and every word spoken, every emotion betrayed through gesture or expression, constituted a move. By controlling each of your moves, you could reduce anxiousness and win the game.

Peng Wu found that she very much liked winning, at weiqi and at life.

From those years on, Peng’s strategy had been to reach her goals in the fewest number of moves. Rising through the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army and undergoing intensely competitive astronaut training, she had learned to suppress her anxiety by choosing her actions carefully, and always with the express intention of accomplishing the mission. In this way, she had strategically chosen to marry an ambitious fellow soldier and had gained the full trust of her government and the military.

Peng turned her attention to a group of a dozen frontiersmen—native jungle specialists who had been hired to clear this landing area and accompany the field team on their expedition into the Amazon. The brown-skinned men blended traditional tribal adornments with modern military equipment. They worked together as a team with wordless efficiency, using the natural resources on hand to craft a base camp out of the raw clearing. Every step, every swing of the machete, was done with a familiar ease that spoke of lifelong jungle experience.

Meanwhile, the civilian scientists were still adjusting to life without their smartphones or the Internet.

Methodically breaking down her traveling backpack to separate out the extra scientific goods that could be hauled by one of the native porters, Peng resolved to stay close to the guides—doing so would maximize her survival probability and therefore the success probability of the mission as a whole.

“FINALLY, WE’RE ALL here,” said Vedala.

The Indian woman barely glanced in the direction of James Stone as he stomped across the muddy clearing, huffing and puffing, dragging a black plastic hard-case full of equipment. Wearing a brand-new khaki outfit, the roboticist was in his early fifties but looked younger. His face was already sweaty in the oppressive heat of high noon.

“Let’s begin,” she added.

Vedala stood under the low ceiling of a maloca—a simple thatch-roofed hut the guides had hastily constructed beside the gurgling brown river. A paper topographic map was spread across a folding table and weighted at the corners with muddy stones. Across from her stood the immaculately outfitted Peng Wu. The PLA Air Force major stood perfectly straight, with martial precision, trim and athletic in a long-sleeved jacket and khaki pants neatly tucked into her boots.

With her military bearing, Peng stood out in stark contrast to the much older Harold Odhiambo, a robust Kenyan man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a gently amused attitude, and a disheveled outfit complete with cargo shorts and an Australian bush hat with one side pinned up.

Odhiambo turned his kind eyes to Stone as the bedraggled man joined the group under the thatch roof.

“Welcome, Dr. Stone,” said Odhiambo, with an English accent. “I enjoyed your work on collision avoidance using low-resolution imaging. Very efficient.”

Stone was speechless for a moment, surprised that the famous xenogeologist would have bothered to read his work. Then he recalled that Odhiambo supposedly read everything , and with that, his manners returned.

“Thank you, Dr. Odhiambo. That’s very flattering. I apologize that I haven’t caught up with your latest—”

Vedala cut in.

“You can take that offline. Harold has dabbled in just about everything over his career,” she said. “Which is why he’s perfect for our mission. He’s not just a specialist.”

The words hung in the air long enough to be awkward before a modulated ringing interrupted.

“Back to the agenda,” she added.

Vedala picked up an Iridium satellite phone from the table. The chunk of black plastic was a restricted military model commissioned by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). It had been ruggedized, weatherproofed, waterproofed, signal-encrypted, and fitted with a hot-swappable antenna adapter. Currently it was attached to a thin black antenna wire strung around the wooden poles supporting the hut. The ice-blue LED screen glowed coolly in the heat of the jungle, four out of four connection bars illuminated.

“Dr. Sophie Kline is joining us from the International Space Station,” Vedala said, depressing a button to answer the call. “Good afternoon, Doctor, how’s the view from up there?”

“Beautiful, Nidhi, and not a single mosquito.”

The voice on the speakerphone was confident and feminine, but a few lightly slurred syllables and a slight tremor betrayed its owner’s neurodegenerative disease. “I’m over top of you now, but in a few minutes my orbit will carry me beyond the horizon again and our comms may not be so clear.”

Looking at her crew, Vedala continued. “I assume you’ve all read my personal briefing letter, as well as the red folder docs sent by the Department of Defense—”

James Stone raised his hand, and Vedala stopped, lips pursed in annoyance.

“Yes?”

“Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Vedala, but I didn’t get a briefing document.”

Vedala blew a curl of hair away from her eyes in irritation. “No, of course you didn’t. You were a . . . late addition.”

“Oh, I didn’t know—”

“It’s not your fault,” she snapped, more abruptly than she meant to. “Our fearless leader, General Stern, approved the final details of this expedition, and I’m not privy to all the information he had. You can pick up the details as we go—it’s almost time to start the day’s march. This is Project Wildfire, so you all understand the stakes.”

“The fate of the world . . .” Odhiambo smiled.

“You may not be far from the truth,” said Vedala. “Agenda item number one, let’s talk situational background. Twenty-six hours ago a terrain-mapping drone detected a . . . structure in the deep jungle, thirty miles from here. This anomaly is two hundred feet tall, and it appeared within the last two weeks in the middle of impassable jungle, without any known roads or a landing strip. And now for the reason we’re here. Subsequent mass spectrometry readings detected a chemical fingerprint closely matching the original Andromeda incident. Any questions?”