Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Hopper nodded, pointing at the monitor. “What are those faint speckles? All of them seem to be the same temperature, but cooling fast.”

At his desk, Sugarman put his face close to his dedicated feed. He spoke briefly into his headset to another analyst. Finally, he responded.

“We believe those are dead bodies, ma’am. About fourteen of them. Human.”

“You can’t possibly confirm that, Airman. Plenty of large primates live in that area of the world.”

“Some of them are carrying spears, ma’am.”

Hopper was silent for a moment.

“I see,” she said.

On screen, the thermal image flashed to white, saturating the sensor and washing out the screen. As the exposure slowly returned to normal, the anomaly seemed different. The fading specks were now closer to it.

“What was that?” asked Hopper.

“I . . . it appears to be growing,” responded Sugarman. “And there’s something new emerging from the middle of the lake. A smaller, six-sided structure.”

The third monitor lit up with splotches of color. A hazy cloud of blue and orange appeared in the atmosphere above the anomaly. It seemed to be drifting east on a slight wind current.

“We’ve got an ash cloud,” said another analyst. “The atmosphere down there is soaked with it. It must have been ejected from the anomaly somehow. More readings incoming . . .”

The colonel drew a finger down a column of figures on the top-secret laminated binder page. The vital information had been laid down as simply as a child’s book report, created with the age-old maxim of K.I.S.S.—“Keep it simple, stupid”—in mind.

Her finger stopped at a mass spectrum graph. There was a tremor in her voice as she issued her next command:

“Get the mass spec readings from the drone.”

“Already on it, ma’am.”

Seconds later, a junior analyst slid a mass spectrograph onto the colonel’s desk.

Once again, Hopper ran a finger across the laminated sheet. When she stopped and looked up, the tremor in her voice was gone.

“We have positive ID,” she said.

“Of what?” asked Sugarman, pivoting to face his boss. His lips were pale, voice dry and on the verge of cracking. Behind him, the entire room of analysts had turned to watch Hopper, solemn in their fear.

“The signature peaks are an almost exact match,” she replied, “to the Andromeda Strain recovered in Piedmont, Arizona, over fifty years ago. Somehow, something made of a similar substance is down in that jungle right now. And based on the visuals, it’s getting bigger. Those bodies are almost underneath it.”

“But that’s not—” Sugarman stopped himself. “You mean to say . . .”

Every person in the room knew the purpose of this mission. Yet none of them had ever actually believed the strain would reappear. Not even now, in the face of overwhelming evidence. Except for one.

Hopper stood and addressed her incredulous staff, tucking the binder under her arm.

“Project Eternal Vigilance has just fulfilled her purpose. Our work here is done. I wish you well on your future assignments, whatever they may be.”

Colonel Hopper then turned and walked directly toward the high-priority communications room—a soundproofed closet, really. The analysts watched her go with their mouths open, speechless.

Over her shoulder, Hopper issued her final orders.

“Alert your colleagues at Peterson AFB and transfer those feeds. Based on an exponential rate of growth, tell them I estimate we’ve got less than four days.”

“Four days? Until what?” asked Sugarman.

“Until that anomaly spreads all the way to the ocean.”

And with that, Project Eternal Vigilance was complete.

Alert

RAND L. STERN WAS ALREADY DEAD TIRED, AND THE day had hardly begun. A four-star general with a sprawling family and a rocket-powered career, Stern faced a constant and overwhelming demand for his attention. For his own part, he was simply looking forward to eating lunch for fifteen uninterrupted minutes.

Stern was a compact African American man in his fifties and only now going gray at the temples. A top graduate of the US Air Force Academy, he had spent thousands of hours as a command pilot in an F-16 Fighting Falcon, hundreds of those in combat. Afterward, he had done a stint as a professor at West Point. And for the last three years, he had been in charge of the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), after his nomination was confirmed unanimously by the US Senate in 2016.

Stationed at Peterson Air Force Base in central Colorado, General Stern oversaw the activities of thirty-eight thousand individuals concerned with monitoring and protecting American interests in the area from two hundred to twenty-two thousand miles up, a volume of space dwarfing that of the entire planet. His annual budget was in the tens of billions, twice that of any existing multinational company.

If asked, he would respond that his most complex command assignment was the parenting of four preteen girls alongside his wife, a research scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver.

At home, Stern’s voice was only one among many. At work, however, he spoke for over three hundred million American citizens.

In his first-day briefing packet, Stern had been informed of twelve high-priority ongoing top-secret projects of extreme significance to national defense. Among them was something called Project Wildfire, created in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident of some fifty years before. Wildfire had seemed like an innocuous footnote compared to the ambitions of the Chinese and the astonishing amount of unaccounted-for nuclear material that had been lost in orbit. Yet during his tenure, no other project had been a bigger thorn in his side.

Dealing with the Andromeda microparticle had gone from a purely scientific undertaking to a secret arms race with the sort of global repercussions not encountered since the height of the Cold War. As a result, Project Wildfire had grown to consume a disproportionate amount of resources. It had become a gargantuan feat just to hide its dozens of subprojects from the public view, costing billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.

All of it weighed heavily on the general.

In a later interview, he described the job as “feeling like Atlas, crouched there alone, holding the planet in my arms—and nobody knows what I’m protecting them from or why. Not even my girls.”

Among the classified downstream projects, the existence of Eternal Vigilance was peripheral at best. Serious fear of another spontaneous mutation from the Andromeda microparticle had evaporated over time. Instead, what was most important were the possibilities of intentional weaponization by enemies of the state.

In typical human fashion, attention had turned away from the wondrous contemplation of extraterrestrials and settled squarely and mundanely on the countries (allies and not) who had inevitably learned about the deadly version of the microparticle called AS-1, and its plastic-eating cousin, AS-2.

Both varieties had proven to be dangerous in their own ways.

Upon inhalation, AS-1 was almost always immediately fatal. The relatively benign AS-2 variety, which had evolved spontaneously in the heart of the Wildfire laboratory, had shown itself capable of lingering in the upper atmosphere, turning most plastics into dust—a development that had set back the US space program by decades. It also made AS-2 samples freely available to any nation with the scientific acumen to go up and collect them.

No other varieties of Andromeda, natural or manufactured, had been detected—though not for lack of trying.

And now, the call Stern had been dreading for years had come from an utterly unexpected direction—not from his agents scrutinizing the China National Space Administration, or the spies sent to investigate disease outbreaks around the world, or even from a certain secret clean room still buried under a cornfield in Nevada.