Gillian Anderson: A Vision of Fire

“What do the brain trusts think?”

“The same thing us nonbrains think—that something’s scaring them. My guess? Could be some kind of massive ice calving. No one knows.”

Mikel was about to ask if the satellites showed any preliminary breakage when a massive crack echoed across the ship.

He grabbed a pair of binoculars from a locker and raced back to the railing. Another crack turned his knees to water but he steadied himself and fixed the binoculars on the iceberg. He felt bodies press around him as the sightseers switched their attention from the penguins to the block of ice—which was splitting in half. But as the awed cries of the veteran sailors suggested, it was like no phenomenon any of them had ever witnessed.

Seawater surged around an ice tower newly separated from its mother berg, swirling like an inverted whirlpool and in slow motion. Mikel swore and shoved his face harder against the binoculars, struggling to accept what he was seeing. It was there for only a moment before that side of the new iceberg turned away from the ship.

The sheared face of the massive chunk of ice had not been purely white or blue. It had held something no living person had seen in Antarctica, an object that would make sense only to someone who had seen it before—and Mikel had.

“What the hell?” he heard someone murmur. “Was something out there?”

“I don’t know,” said another as the vessel chugged away.

A third person tried bravely to take a video but Mikel artfully inserted himself between the passenger and the object, pretending to slip on the icy deck. By the time the phone was turned back to the calving iceberg, there was nothing to shoot.

Mikel didn’t listen to any of the speculations. He had seen the vast brown ovoid marked with black crescents, and below its lowest curve, a smaller, rectangular projection. He had already formed his own hypothesis, rejected it as impossible, then embraced it again—for Mikel had seen this image on a shard of barnacle-crusted pottery.

It was an airship from the lost world of Galderkhaan.

The authors wish to express their gratitude to agent Doug Grad; to Steve Burkow, Sally Wilcox, and Aaron Anderson; to editor Brit Hvide and the team at Simon & Schuster; and most especially to Clare Kent, who managed the flow of pretty much everything.

Gillian Anderson is an award-winning film, television, and theatre actress whose credits include the roles of Special Agent Dana Scully in the long-running and critically acclaimed drama series, The X-Files , ill-fated socialite Lily Bart in The House of Mirth , and Lady Dedlock in the BBC production of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House . She is currently playing the role of Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier in Hannibal and is a costar on the television thriller, Crisis. She currently lives in the UK with her daughter and two sons.

Jeff Rovin is the author of more than 100 books, fiction and nonfiction, both under his own name, under various pseudonyms, or as a ghostwriter, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. He has written over a dozen Op-Center novels for the late Tom Clancy. Rovin has also written for television and has had numerous celebrity interviews published in magazines under his byline. He is a member of the Author’s Guild, the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Horror Writers of America, among others.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon451 Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Simon451 hardcover edition October 2014

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Interior design by Joy O’Meara

Jacket design by Christopher Lin

Jacket images: runes © tschitscherin/Shutterstock; background © Michael Turek/Gallery Stock

Author photograph by Stephen Busken

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anderson, Gillian.

A vision of fire : a novel / Gillian Anderson, Jeff Rovin. — First Simon451 hardcover edition.

p. cm

1. Women psychologists—Fiction. 2. Fire—Fiction. 3. Visions—Fiction. 4. Astral projection—Fiction. 5. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. I. Rovin, Jeff. II. Title.

PS3601.N54365V57 2014

813'.6—dc23

2014022692

ISBN 978-4767-7652-1

ISBN 978-1-4767-7654-5 (ebook)