Black Sun: A Thriller (34 page)

“Meaning?”

“An unending torrent of charged particles that will, over time, affect human tissue. But at a far quicker pace it will destroy the electrical grids, computers, processors, and any other device with modern circuitry. While it will not melt the earth, as some in Hollywood have suggested, a large solar flare or an event known as a coronal mass ejection could set us back to the stone ages. Or at least the late eighteen hundreds.”

The president went silent. He seemed to be mulling this over. And then he offered the drowning man an unexpected branch.

“I’m guessing you think these stones were sent back here to prevent that?”

Moore perked up. “Yes, Mr. President. Seeing this data, I would come to that conclusion.”

Stecker scowled. “Oh, Arnold, you are naïve. After all this, you think these things are a blessing?”

He pulled out a printed sheet of paper. “From your own man’s translation: ‘The children won’t learn so they must be punished. War of man and man, food no more shall grow, blood shall endless flow, disease shall take the most. The day of the Black Sun has brought the
doom of man. Five Katuns, a hundred years, of endless killing, Fifty Katuns, a thousand years of disease and dying. To stop it there must be sacrifice for all.’”

Stecker dropped the paper. “Millions killed in war, billions from disease and starvation. These things are weapons, Arnold, bombs sent to destroy us quick and clean before we do it in a way that will ruin the world for them.”

Moore fumed. “It’s patently illogical to think you can go to the past, destroy a huge section of society, and not have it affect you down the line. Your argument makes no sense, Stecker, and if you were actually smart enough to understand what you are saying, you’d see that.”

Stecker bristled but he didn’t back down. “If these things are supposed to help us, then why’d they hide them?” Stecker asked. “You ever hide a first-aid kit? A fire extinguisher? Of course not, but you hide mines and booby traps and bombs. Hell, if this thing were meant to help us they would’ve dropped it in our laps, not buried it in some ancient temple three thousand years ago.”

With that statement all hell broke loose. In a minute Moore was shouting at Stecker, the two scientists were arguing, and the president was repeatedly demanding calm, like a judge in a courtroom gone wild.

“This is goddamned ridiculous!” Moore shouted. “The most incredible journey in the history of mankind, quite possibly the single greatest achievement of all time, and you think they did it to destroy their ancestors?”

“Stop deceiving yourself,” Stecker retorted. “Man’s greatest achievements are the efforts put forth in war. Countries, continents, and religions mobilize everything
they have, every ounce of physical, mental, and spiritual energy in the struggle for survival.”

Moore felt himself on the defensive, wanting to shout back but having nothing intelligent to say. In the absence of any defense, Stecker pressed the case.

“And yet you have these people of yours from the future, sending something back to our time, something that seems to be affecting us negatively, and you believe they come in peace? If they wanted to help us why not just send the stones to our time? I’ll tell you why: because these things needed time to load themselves up. They sent them to a time before ours so that they can gather energy unto themselves, store it in this four-dimensional loop you keep talking about, and then unleash it on us all at once. To teach us the error of our ways.”

Moore burned with the temper of his youth, but restrained himself from physically striking out at Stecker.

He turned to the screen. “Mr. President, we’re not talking Arnold Schwarzenegger, H. G. Wells, or
Star Trek
here. We’re talking about an act of supreme effort, one that taxed and debilitated and mutated the men and women who undertook it. One that eventually left them here to die on what is essentially a foreign shore.”

“Suicide mission,” Stecker interjected blithely. “You ever hear of the kamikazes?”

“This isn’t a damn joke,” Moore said.

“No, and it’s not a puzzle, either,” Stecker said. “That thing is a danger. It’s a ticking bomb that we don’t know how to defuse. And your messing around with it is going to get us all killed.”

A quick study of the president’s gaze told Moore that
he was losing the argument. And yet he couldn’t throttle back. He found himself railing further at the director of the CIA despite the president’s urging, despite his own realization that he must have looked like a lunatic by now.

He turned to his own scientist and then the screen with the president’s image and then across the room to where Nathanial Ahiga sat quietly, watching the whole thing like a spectator, drinking a grape soda through a straw.

“You!” Moore shouted. “Say something, damn you. The president sent you here to share your opinion, to decide who’s right. Well, it’d be nice if you opened up your goddamned mouth once in a while.”

As Moore lashed out at anyone in reach, he realized that he was now attacking the referee. He didn’t care anymore; he was beyond exhaustion, and in his current state it was all he could do to recognize his self-implosion. He was powerless to stop it.

Ahiga looked at him curiously and the whole room went quiet. Even the White House feed only buzzed with static. Perhaps realizing that the spotlight was on him, the old Gallup, New Mexico, resident took another sip from his grape soda.

“You want me to speak,” he asked, rhetorically. His voice was soft and gravelly, like smooth-sided stones rumbling together. “Of course. I can do that, as long as all the yelling and shouting is done.”

He cleared his throat, and put the soda bottle down. “In my opinion,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and looking straight at Moore, “you’re wrong.”

It seemed as if he’d just decided randomly, a flip of a
mental coin. Or perhaps it was because Moore had yelled at him. Could the man take his job any less seriously?

“That’s it?” Moore said. “That’s all you have?”

“No,” Ahiga said, nodding toward Stecker. “He’s wrong, too. You’re both running around in circles. Shouting and yelling and making all this racket. Hard to think with so much noise. I’d like to say it’s white man’s noise, but my father made it, too: the sound of people who want to be right, not people who want to know the truth.”

As Moore stared at Ahiga, he shrugged again. “Do I know what the answer is? No,” he said. “I don’t know. But I know enough to see where you’ve gone wrong.”

“And where’s that?”

“Both of you are trying to decide what to do based on what these men of the future have done. Based on their actions and what they’ve sent you and whatever record they left of it. And by doing that, you’re missing the whole point.”

Moore struggled to follow the logic.

“You’re mixing up cause and effect,” Ahiga elaborated. “When they made their decision a thousand years from now, all of this—the finding of the stones, this argument, whatever results from it, if anything—it was already done and gone. Ancient history, so to speak. And that means they made their decision based on what we did. They didn’t send these stones here to make us
do
one thing or another. They sent them here because in some way, we asked them to.”

In his polite way, Ahiga looked around at them.

“We’re the cause, and their actions are the effect. Our
choice is their destiny, not the other way around. If they live in misery because our warlike nature finally got the best of us, then it’s our choices that caused it, regardless of these stones. And if they live in paradise, then we should get the credit for that, too.”

“So you’re saying we don’t have a choice?” the president asked.

“No, I’m not saying that at all,” Ahiga said. “Of course we have a choice, but whatever we eventually choose, it
will
lead them to send these stones our way, be it for destruction or for salvation.”

Moore sat down and exhaled. Even Stecker had been stunned into silence.

“Well, that kind of circular logic doesn’t help us much,” Moore mumbled.

“I know,” Ahiga said, sitting back down and grabbing the soda bottle for another sip. “That’s why I was keeping it to myself.”

E
ven through the slightly distorted, electronically encrypted satellite transmission, Danielle could tell from the sound of Moore’s voice that things had gotten worse. But it was not just the geopolitical news or Beltway power grabs that had him upset.

“I have some information on Yuri,” he said. “Some from a source of my own, some from Stecker, of all people, courtesy of a highly placed source in the Russian Science Directorate. I believe it’s accurate.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, fearing the worst.

“I’ll download the details for you, and you can use the data screen on the phone to view them, but here’s the gist of it: Yuri was born just outside the hot zone near Chernobyl. His parents, whoever they were, could not take care of him, as he came into this world with the degenerative nerve disease you see in him now. The actual diagnosis remains a mystery but what is known is that it attacks the nerve fibers relentlessly. At first the afflicted person notices tics and shudders but soon they turn into full-on tremors and even seizures. By stage three the person has lost all motor control and by stage four involuntary muscles like the heart cease to operate, resulting in death.”

Danielle reeled as Moore spoke the words. “What’s the progression?”

“Under normal circumstances, five years to get to stage three, ten years maximum before the terminal condition.”

She thought about what he was saying. “Are you sure? Because I don’t see many symptoms at all, and unless there’s something wrong with your math, Yuri would be dead already.”

“Nothing wrong with my math,” Moore said. “Yuri is still alive because the Russians have been treating him in an unusual manner. In rare cases, high levels of direct electrostimulation of the nerve fibers, spinal column, or cerebral cortex have been shown to slow the progression of the disease.”

“He has an object buried in his cortex,” she said, relaying what they’d discovered at the emergency room. “Some kind of implant.”

“Yes,” Moore said. “It was an experiment. And in addition to retarding or reversing the disease, it’s that implant that seems to have given him the abilities you’ve noticed, the power to see or sense electromagnetic disturbances.”

She had felt nothing but a sense of revulsion when she’d learned that Yuri had been the subject of experiments, but now her perspective changed. “The trial seems to have worked,” she said. “At least physically.”

“It’s not all roses,” Moore said.

“Why?”

“After looking at the data and the rather strange etymology of the device, we’ve come up with a guess as to what they implanted in Yuri’s brain. It isn’t a piece of
medical equipment, it’s a shard of the Russian stone, which the Russian Science Directorate has been in possession of since the fifties.”

“What?” She could not believe what she was hearing.

“It seems the Russians found their stone long ago, or at least they found what was left of it,” Moore said.

“What are you saying?”

“Yesterday I got blindsided by Stecker. He and his team tied these stones into the continued reduction in the earth’s magnetic field. Quite a competent job,” he added, sounding disgusted. “They appear to be correct in some ways, including a link between the stones and a weakening magnetic field.”

“Are you kidding me?” she asked.

“No,” Moore said. “Each time we’ve pulled a stone out of the ground, there has been a corresponding reduction in the field strength and a shift in location of the north magnetic pole.”

Danielle listened and thought. She was suddenly back in Kang’s brig, listening to Petrov tell of how his vessel had lost its way, sailing north instead of south, relying only on the magnetic compass. The pole had moved, but he didn’t know it. She thought of the GPS going out, the sharks following them, and now she knew why: Yuri and the shard embedded in his brain. The small pulse on November 21 in the Bering Sea had to have come from him, with the sharks tracking them, just as the sharks in the gulf had homed in on her when she carried the stone.

“There was a similar weakening in 1908,” Moore added. “It took me awhile to understand why.”

“The Russians pulled the stone that far back?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” Moore said. “We think the stone detonated or self-destructed in central Russia in June of that year.”

June 1908. The date was familiar
. “The Tunguska blast,” she said.

“You know the story?”

“Of course,” she said. “Summer 1908, a massive explosion shook the Russian tundra. Fireballs were seen in the sky from three hundred miles away, trees knocked over like dominoes for twenty miles in every direction. Most people think it was caused by the airburst of a meteor or perhaps even a small asteroid. Expeditions have gone looking for the remnants but as far as I know, nothing was ever found. Last figure I saw equated the burst with a thirty-megaton bomb.”

“Try fifty,” Moore said. “According to the Russians anyway. Two thousand times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.”

“And you’re telling me it was one of the stones?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said. “The drop in the magnetic field coincides exactly with the event. The blast itself has remained unexplainable even with the theory of an airburst. No crater, no radiation. And then there is the one thing the Russians did find.”

“The remnants of the stone,” she guessed.

“As it turns out,” he said. “In 1957, amid the chill of the cold war, the Russians mounted an expedition that they have never admitted to. And using the latest technology of the time they were able to find what they considered a ground zero of the event.

“Highly distorted magnetic readings led them to believe they had zeroed in on the nickel-iron core of a
fallen meteor, at the bottom of Lake Cheko. A year of underwater work recovered nothing, until suddenly the magnetic readings shifted and all electronic systems failed in the main dredging boat. During the repairs a magnetometer led them to a single shard that had been hauled aboard just prior to the meltdown.”