Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

“Stone,” said Odhiambo, between labored breaths. “It is true that men must capture fire. Otherwise we do not survive. But this fire . . . it does not belong to us.”

Odhiambo gripped Stone by the forearm, looking into his eyes.

“This fire belongs to the gods .”

“Come on, Harold,” replied Stone, pulling his arm away. “We’ll philosophize later. The end is just ahead.”

“Too far, I’m afraid,” panted Odhiambo, nodding at the dark water. It had risen above his waist. “For me, but not for you.”

Stone kept moving.

At the other end of the tunnel, Vedala had reached the ladder. Tupa was clinging to the rungs. A pressurized hatch waited at the top. Vedala noticed a number pad on the wall—a lock that required a key code. Climbing up two rungs past the boy, Vedala reached overhead and punched in random numbers.

The door beeped a negation after four digits.

“Good,” muttered Vedala.

At least the hatchway had power. And now she knew it was a four-digit code comprised of numbers only, leaving only ten thousand possible combinations.

Below her, Tupa had hooked an elbow through the ladder. His lips were bluish in the light of the canary, and he was trembling. His wet hair was plastered across his forehead and the last of the fearsome red paint had washed off.

His face was that of a little boy, scared and cold.

Twisting her body to access her hip pack, Vedala began to desperately paw through its contents. The remaining canary drone was beeping a low battery alert, strafing the nearby walls with fading light, throwing lunatic shadows as it avoided the rising black surface of the water.

Vedala finally found her digital camera and turned it on.

Swiping through a grid of images, she paused when she saw the first corpse they had found inside the anomaly, then continued scrolling hastily through a series of pictures. Finally, she zoomed in to see what she had been looking for—barely visible on a twisted body that was half dissolved in the floor.

It was a work badge, along with an ID number.

. . . k B . . . kstein #23402582

Vedala tried to pull the camera closer to her face with shaking fingers. Fumbling, she dropped it. The camera fell into the water and sank. The light of it flickered to the bottom and disappeared.

“Damn it,” she cried.

Meanwhile, Tupa was pulling himself up the rungs to avoid the rising water. The boy was pressing his rail-thin body against her hip. They were either going to die here together or be born again through the hatchway above.

Vedala closed her eyes to concentrate. She reached up and punched in the last four digits of the badge code she had seen, hoping that her memory wouldn’t fail her in this panic. Saying a silent prayer to Krishna, she dug a finger into the enter key.

The hatchway beeped a chirpy positive, and an electromagnetic bolt thunked open as the hatchway unlocked.

“Yes!” shouted Vedala.

Her triumphant voice was swallowed in the shrinking space. Glancing down, she saw the water was nearly up to the tunnel ceiling. Stone and Odhiambo were still nowhere to be seen. Tupa was looking upward, regarding her with silent fear in the fading light of the canary. The boy’s teeth were clenched together to keep them from chattering.

Vedala threw open the hatchway over her head and ushered Tupa past herself and into the unknown above.

Dropping back down into the water, Vedala peered into the narrow crevice of blackness between the tunnel ceiling and the water’s surface. She could no longer touch the bottom without going under, but Stone and Odhiambo were taller. They could still make it, she hoped.

In the stark glare of her headlamp, the corridor had shrunk to just a foot-high trapezoid of space that stretched away into darkness. None of Odhiambo’s greenish chemlights were visible. The last remaining canary had already followed Tupa up the shaft and out of the hatch.

“Stone! Odhiambo!” Vedala shouted.

The only response was the whoosh of a damp breeze as the rising water pushed the remaining air out of the tunnel. Staring into the dark with a lump growing in her throat, Vedala blinked with surprise—she thought she had seen a faint glimmer of light, perhaps a headlamp.

But she couldn’t be sure.

Farther up the tunnel, Stone and Odhiambo were bobbing forward on their toes, the water up to their necks. They had heard Vedala’s call but couldn’t take a breath deep enough to shout a response. The two of them were trapped in a claustrophobic sliver of air just below the ceiling.

They weren’t going to reach the end in time.

“We have to swim for it,” said Stone. “Okay?”

“See you on the other side, James,” said Odhiambo. “It has been an honor.”

Head tilted back, Stone took a last glance at Odhiambo. The old man offered him a sad smile. Stone understood this was goodbye. He gave Odhiambo’s shoulder a squeeze under the water and took a final gasp of air, his lips pressed to the ceiling. With that, Stone dropped under the surface and began kicking his legs. For the first few seconds, he felt the presence of Odhiambo beside him.

Then that awareness was lost in the panicked throbbing of his lungs, the crushing cold and utter blackness of the water around him, and the occasional slippery metal wall of the tunnel against his shoulder or hand. Stone groped ahead blindly until his eyesight erupted in pinpricks of light.

Finally, his fingers closed around a metal bar—a ladder.

With that, he felt a hand close around the collar of his shirt and haul him up. He saw Vedala through a blur of water as he emerged, gasping and coughing, into blessed air. Then he fell to the ground, wheezing and blind.

The Wildfire field team leader continued to watch the swirling water rise, her lips pressed together in a white line. She refused to give up hope.

“Come on, Harold,” she muttered. “Swim, old man.”

Fifteen seconds passed. Thirty.

The water rose to the lip of the hatch. Vedala waited until the final seconds as it began to overflow. As Stone coughed violently, lying on his back nearby, she reluctantly pressed the hatch closed and locked it. Swallowing a shudder in her lungs, Vedala felt the heat of tears mingling with river water on her cheeks.

Dr. Harold Odhiambo passed away at approximately UTC 23:10:07 on day four of the expedition. The cause of death was anoxic cerebral injury due to drowning. He was the third member of the Wildfire team to perish under violent circumstances.

Unfortunately, he would not be the last.

Activation

DETAILS OF THE REMAINING PORTION OF KLINE’S FINAL experiment could not be recovered. The cameras on board the Wildfire Mark IV laboratory module had been ruptured by the intentional breach, and the R3A4 ceased to transmit its video. Logs of Sophie Kline’s brain-computer interface were available, but too complex to re-create the activity of the Robonaut.

Instead, the next few moments were captured in a shaky handheld video recorded by the two other astronauts on board the ISS. Held captive for hours, Yury Komarov and Jin Hamanaka had been forced to bear witness from their temporary exile within the Zvezda service module.

Jin Hamanaka was hovering before the largest Earth-facing window of the module, a sixteen-inch porthole in the main working compartment. She was a trim astronaut who wore her dark hair in a tight ponytail, known among her JAXA colleagues for having a famously loud laugh. She wasn’t laughing now, as she continued to flash a scavenged laser pointer in an SOS signal. At this point, the beam was noticeably dimmer. And more disturbingly, Earth itself was also noticeably farther away. The ISS had continued to accelerate and gain altitude.