Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

Stone waited, but he could feel the lie in Vedala’s shaking voice. The smooth descent had been replaced by a gritty constant tremor, like a car passing from paved highway to cobblestone. Stone imagined that the tensile strength of the ribbon had shifted slightly. The nanoscale conversion process was turning the atoms of the tether into the new evolution of Andromeda material.

Similar, but not the same.

Stone’s stomach lurched as the platform decelerated upon reaching the extreme upper atmosphere. To avoid being torn apart by air friction, he was slowing to a still punishing speed of five hundred miles per hour. The planet had once again grown to encompass nearly his whole field of vision. Looking upward, he saw that the upper portion of the silvery tether had turned deathly black.

“Will I have enough time, Nidhi?” he radioed. “Tell me the truth.”

“You only have fifty miles left—”

“The truth!”

“The ribbon is thin, James. It’s going dark so fast. Ballpark . . . it’ll overtake you in minutes. Two, maybe three.”

Stone quickly did the calculation in his head. Moving at five hundred miles per hour, he would need six minutes to cover the final fifty miles. It was a simple math problem with a terrible answer—he needed to travel fifty miles in two minutes.

“I have to accelerate,” said Stone. “It’s simple, Nidhi. Fifty miles in two minutes. Three times faster.”

“That’s Mach 2. You’ll experience reentry burn,” said Vedala. “It’ll kill you.”

“We have to try,” said Stone. “Nidhi. We have to try.”

Vedala registered the desperation in Stone’s voice.

Any other person might have paused; might have waited until it was too late. Despite feeling the rapidly fading effects of her morphine dose, Dr. Nidhi Vedala clearly understood every variable in this equation, including her own emotions.

She punched the button.

“Hold on tight,” she said.

Stone couldn’t respond—his breath was caught in his chest as the climber instantly accelerated downward with the full force of its electric motors.

“I’ll radio when it’s time to detonate and jump,” said Vedala. “Get ready. This is going to hurt.”

On the last point, it wasn’t clear whether Vedala was talking to James or to herself. Everyone involved understood that Stone’s probability of survival was now essentially nil.

Stone could hear and feel the piercing vibration of metal on metal; it seemed to scream through his bones. His vision shook along with the quaking platform.

“Maximum acceleration—”

Vedala’s voice was drowned out by a chaos of shaking. Stone felt blood rushing into his head as the downward acceleration pulled him up off his seat. It was just as well, as the metal undercarriage was already heating up as it collided with particles of the upper mesosphere. Staggering, he pushed up to a standing position.

He looked like a man on a ledge to infinity.

“Fifty seconds,” said Vedala, though Stone could no longer recognize the voice he was hearing. Around him, a corona of flame flared like a waterfall of light falling upward.

For several seconds, Stone considered it beautiful.

“Friend, be careful,” urged Komarov over the radio. “You are going to burn yourself to a cinder. From here you already look like a fireball.”

Stone felt a new vibration. Looking up, he saw that microscopic pieces of the rolling mechanism were disintegrating. The speed and friction were too much. As the invisible particles collided with the ribbon above, they burst into a soaring rooster tail of flame.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” radioed Stone. His voice was barely discernible in the roaring static. He was now moving well over a thousand miles per hour.

This would be his last discernible radio communication.

Images of the catastrophic final descent were collected from low-angle telephoto shots on board a trio of B-150 long-range bombers operating at their maximum service height. The spy aircraft captured a surreal sight—a cone of bluish flame cascading up the curving thread of white light. Barely visible inside the inferno was the solitary figure of a man, standing silhouetted in wavering lines of flame. Beyond the cone of fire, the cold empty blackness of space draped itself over a blue-white horizon.

The sound was not transmitted over radio, but Stone screamed into his suit as his forehead accidentally touched the glass of his visor. He was scalded instantly. The fabric exterior of his suit was charring, and the bottoms of his boots had begun to melt.

“Thirty seconds,” said the voice in his helmet.

The gridwork around Stone’s feet had begun to glow red, and flecks of molten metal were dribbling up and streaking past like meteors. Moaning, gritting his teeth, Stone reached down and found the leash around his waist. Following it with both hands, he focused on the golden pin mounted at the rear of the shaped-charge canister.

Amazingly, it was still secure.

On the backs of his eyelids, Stone could see a white-hot desert. A woman was there, lying on her back. She had been hurt badly. Blood had spilled from her wrists in a tide over the grains of sand. The image was from a classified black-and-white photograph that had become a memory that had become a nightmare.

“Fifteen seconds,” said a voice. “Hold on, James.”

With a gloved hand blackened by flame, Stone disconnected his primary tether hook. That left only the secondary tether, attached to the golden pin. In nuclear strategy circles, this detonation method was known as a “fail-deadly.” As opposed to a fail-safe, the explosive was sure to trigger if there was no human operator present to stop it.

“Stay with me.”

Eyes closed, teeth bared in agony, Stone clung to his tether and cried evaporating tears as the inferno rose up around him. Against the glare of pure blazing light, he forced his eyes open and glimpsed the green bulk of the South American continent. The sight made no logical sense to him. It was simply a swirl of colors—an impossibly beautiful rendering of green, teal, and brown.

It had nothing to do with his current life of pain.

He’d found the image in the Andromeda materials. His birth mother, lying dead in the Arizona sand. Her blood had turned to dust, and it was rising in a swirl on the hot wind. It was his only photograph of her, his only memory of her face.

Millisecond by millisecond, Stone felt his consciousness stripped away into the roaring chaos. He could feel the desert heat, swallowing him up, carrying his blood away on its oven-hot breath—just as it had done for a mother and father he would never know, for a world he had never had the chance to grow up in, an entire life that had been stolen.

James heard a far-off voice whispering in his ear. It was a gentle voice. He struggled to hear what it was telling him.

“Mama?” he asked.

“Now,” the voice said. “Now, now, now.”

James Stone felt his knees buckle. He turned and fell backward from the burning platform. He felt the secondary tether snap and trigger the shaped-charge explosive. With a concussive thump, the canister detonated in a pale puff of smoke.

There was no visible effect for fifteen seconds.

The subsequent wink of flame occurred at a height of thirty-seven miles above the surface of the earth, well beyond the troposphere. It was a peculiar sight for those who observed it firsthand. And of those few witnesses, none observed the speck falling below the blast.

It was a speck in the shape of a man.

Resolution

. . . we understand what’s happening now . . .

That’s the important thing. That we understand.

—MICHAEL CRICHTON

Out of Eden

THE EXPLOSION WAS VISIBLE FROM OVER TWO HUNDRED miles away in every direction. It occurred at the epicenter of a constantly evolving patchwork of international quarantines, ordered by various government agencies with differing levels of enforcement capability, including the United States, Russia, China, Brazil, Peru, and nearly every other equatorial nation. The airspace above the canopy was under patrol by multiple squads of American, Russian, and Chinese fighter jets.