Exodus 2022 (37 page)

Whatever happened, though, Mia was Mia. Matriarch. Mother. Grandmother. Sister. Cousin. And something beyond all of those things.

Her family—her entire pod and clan and community—revered her. Loved her. And regardless of the outcome, they would be at her side until the end.

They swam—listening, hoping—the balance in their minds shifting slowly, inexorably toward despair.

The sonar was unstoppable, most of them were beginning to think. Unending. A festering, malignant tumor in the collective consciousness.

We will never get out.

We will die here, as the humans turn the bright seas into putrid, lifeless holes.

We will die here.

And then it happened.

Ping…ping…ping
…

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

The whales swam on, wanting to believe but not jumping to conclusions, almost expecting the toxic noise to resume. The sound had plagued them for so long.

It did not resume, and a shiver of excitement traveled the length and breadth of the entire community. Starting low and building in intensity, the shiver intensified, an infectious explosion of happiness ricocheting throughout the community like the peal of a bell.

Mia cleared her mind and pulled to the front of the pack, visualized the long-rehearsed call one last time, and sent it in a single burst lasting thirty seconds. A song haunting and beautiful and poignant. Unlike any other whale song in the history of the world.

She waited a minute, then sent the same message again. And again. And out into the darkness the call moved, like a key gliding toward a lock.

Mia fell silent and dropped back once again, swimming on autopilot, swimming as if it were just an ordinary moment in her long life.

Silence.

Silence.

And then…a reply. Multiple replies. Calls, coming in from far away. Calls faint but discernible. Replies from fin whales and blue. Minke and gray. Replies from every orca clan within one thousand miles. Different dialects. Strange voices. All saying the same thing:

We understand and we will spread the word.

Another sound then, mixed with the replies: the music of the tunnels. Getting stronger, growing louder.

Throughout the world’s oceans, the tunnels flared bright, like golden, unearthly embers reborn. Like miniature stars igniting in the deep.

The Exodus had begun.

PROFESSOR DIETURLUND’S EYES
flew open and he lay in the darkness of his room at The Willows, heart thudding in his chest.

It’s begun.

He lay motionless, trying not to think or feel or analyze. Letting the news wash over him raw and unadorned.

The Exodus has begun.

He listened, breathless, allowing Mia’s tidings to play across his mind like a story, feeling blessed to be connected to her still.

He felt her mind and spirit now like an electrifying physical presence, a supernatural entity throwing off light and heat in its ascendance.

Like the tunnels, Mia was flaring brighter by the moment, gaining power and strength. Mia, assuming her role. Donning her mantle.

She will be the last to pass the gates
, Dieturlund realized.
The last to transit, before the tunnels vanish.

Except…

There was something else. A puzzling revelation hidden in the torrent of thought flooding over him now. A whisper revealing news he couldn’t comprehend.

Mia is a singularity.

But she has a twin.

A counterpart.

An equal.

It made no sense.

Dieturlund lay there trying to see, trying to understand. Getting nowhere.

Mia is Mia. Mia is the architect. The prophet. The leader. How can there be another?

In the darkness the old man remained. Listening. Waiting. Finding no answers.

SUNRISE, THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED,
found
Marauder
anchored two miles from the outer edge of the Broken Group Islands, at the mouth of Barkley Sound.

It was only 5 a.m., and already Beck’s crew was working full-tilt. Runabouts were in the water—two Boston Whalers with 150-horse Honda outboards, and an eighteen-foot Zodiac jet boat. And a specially trained team on the well deck was readying the
Velocity
, Beck’s two-person thirty-foot-long supercavitating submarine.

Inside the bustling War Room, Ring’s focus was split between a torrent of fresh images from two distinct sources: Joe Stanton’s head and an ROV falling fast through the water column directly beneath
Marauder
’s hull.

Ring and his team were also monitoring news reports, a growing chorus of voices—some puzzled, some panicked—from around the globe.

Ring caught his breath as the ROV driver tilted the probe’s 12x high-res camera down, toward the seafloor.

The ROV’s fifteen-hundred-watt quartz halogens revealed a swarm of organisms—a stupendous undersea parade of fish and mammals, predators and prey—all steadily moving in the same direction.

Down.

Down.

Toward an explosion of light in the deep. A ghostly, phosphorescent nexus of illumination beckoning like an airfield on a stormy night.

Marauder
’s sonar had been tracking the flood of life since the ship’s arrival, but it was different seeing the stark real-time images from the ROV.

Ring caught sight of Beck in his peripheral vision and addressed him without turning.

“Lots of chatter this morning. Twitter. CNN. FOX. MSNBC. Al Jazeera. Migration’s pretty much all NOAA’s talking about. Military channels are going nuts as well.”

Beck slid into a chair next to Ring but said nothing.

One of Ring’s techs brought up news feeds on a half dozen of the smaller monitors: reporters querying marine experts. Experts pontificating breathlessly. News anchors narrating grainy homemade videos from around the globe. The clips showed whales and other mammals massing, congregating, moving with a singularity of focus never before witnessed. One feed showed whales in marine parks going berserk, hurling themselves against the walls of their enclosures. But the bulk of the coverage was about the tumult in the sea.

“Shit’s hitting the fan,” said Ring.

“Anybody talking about the tunnels yet?” Beck asked. “Or is it all related to the migration?”

“
National Geographic
crew in Thailand’s posted video of a tunnel, but they have no idea what it is. A diver in the eastern Mediterranean posted footage as well. Low-res. Can’t see much. Give it an hour though. There’ll be plenty more.”

Beck stared at the monitors, feeling alert but jagged. Raw. He’d been on the phone for the past hour with various US authorities. Officials calling to tell him in remorseful tones that a helicopter registered to Erebus Industries had crashed in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. That Coast Guard vessels were on the scene and that an investigation had begun.
No survivors have been found,
they said, before assuring him that the search would continue throughout the day.

He hadn’t slept, and Heintzel’s magic potion—whatever the hell had been in that syringe—was propelling him still, but wouldn’t last much longer. He could feel the crash coming: Collapse. Meltdown. And once that happened…he didn’t know, and he couldn’t bring himself to think about it. The possibility of seeing the eyes again—of the thing, whatever it was, prowling the corridors of his mind, unleashed—was too much to contemplate.

He said to Ring, “Will your plan work?”

Ring paused, a can of Orange Crush in his right hand, halfway to his mouth. “It should. If I’m right about Mia.”

“Right about her how?”

“In thinking that she won’t allow the doors to shut until her entire family is through. Every last member. If an individual is delayed, then the tunnels—or at least, this particular tunnel—will stay open. That’s my belief.

“I wrote up a plan.” He handed Beck a tablet computer with just two paragraphs displayed. An outline. “I went over this with Collins. He thinks they can pull it off.”

Beck scanned the plan. Nodded. “So let’s do it.”

JOE STANTON AWOKE
to bright lights and a hospital smell that made him instantly sick to his stomach. He rolled onto his side, retching as he turned, appalled by the weakness and fatigue in his limbs. In his core.

There were people around him, he realized. Medical staff moving, working quietly, fiddling with equipment, adjusting his gurney. No one offered help or comfort.

“What’s going on?” Joe asked. And it felt like someone had glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “What happened?”

The room was a blur, the medical staff a swirl of amorphous white-clad shapes.

No response. Just movement. People busying themselves. But Joe sensed that something was about to happen.

He lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes, though that did little to diminish the awful headache-inducing glare of the surgical lamps directly over his bed.

Ella?

Joe! Is that you? Joe?

Joe felt a wave of relief as Ella’s voice registered in his mind. The interaction blew the cobwebs apart. Made it easier to think.

She sounds scared
, Joe thought.

Of course she’s scared.

He wanted to reassure her.

Hi, sweetie. Yeah, it’s me. Where are you?

Here. On the ship. I’m okay.

Where on the ship?

I don’t know. Lowest level, I think. Joe. What’s happening? They won’t tell me anything.

Joe’s eyes snapped open as the gurney rocked forward and began rolling. The white-clad shapes were moving him. Taking him someplace.

Ella
, he said.
I have to go. I love you. I love you so much.

I love you, Joe. I love you.

Through the curtain of his own terror, he could feel Ella reaching out to him, touching him with her mind. Could almost feel her warm body next to his. He held her there, and shut his eyes.

RING AND BECK
and the War Room staff busied themselves in the command center, but dozens of other crew—from engine-room mechanics to dishwashers—were outside, on the decks, standing in the glow of a molten-copper sunrise, witnessing the strangest spectacle any of them had ever seen.

The ocean, shining platinum beneath the sky, was boiling. Seething. Not with waves or surging tides, but with life.

The sea—alive with purposeful movement.

The crew stood staring. Turning. Gawking. Snapping pictures. Not speaking.

A path—a trail of particularly vigorous churning—snaked away south toward the strait, and organisms of every description were jetting along this “highway” now, making for Barkley Sound.

Spectators standing on
Marauder
’s decks could see only a tiny fraction of the billion-creature flood, but even the surface display was stupendous, beginning with a dozen species of whales, rolling and breaching, leaping and diving. There were dolphins, seals, sea lions, otters, and fish—salmon and snapper, sharks and sturgeon—flashing like mirrors in the dawn as they shot along the trail, periodically breaking the surface.

More boats were out now. Powerboaters from Tofino. Kayakers from the Broken Group. People coming to observe the strange tumult in the water.

In the cool machine glow of the War Room, Ring surveyed the images of the surface—courtesy of a dozen cameras positioned around
Marauder
’s decks—but the bulk of his attention was on the pictures pouring in from the ROV.

The boxy, unsexy underwater vehicle the size of a home generator had settled to a depth of two hundred meters, and there it hovered in the water column, motors whirring softly. The

robot’s forward-facing 12x camera showed the glowing, gently undulating tunnel mouth, perhaps a quarter mile distant. Vast and cavernous the opening looked. Mysterious as an alien city.

A torrent of organisms—creatures of every shape, size and description—swarmed through the tunnel’s gently arcing bell and deep into the heart of the fantastic structure.

“It’s happening all over the world,” Ring said to his team. “But this is the mother tunnel. The nerve center of the whole operation.”

Ring’s ROV pilot ordered the craft slowly forward, closer to the tunnel’s gaping maw.

“Because Mia’s here?” Beck asked. “And she’s the—”

“Catalyst,” said Ring. “The nexus. Yes.”

A commotion near the entrance to the War Room drew all eyes. A team from the infirmary was maneuvering a gurney into the darkened room, wheeling the narrow bed among the consoles and touch screens. Technicians stopped what they were doing to watch.

The infirmary crew lifted the gurney through a tight space, turned it, and came on, toward Ring’s work area.

Ring glanced at Joe, then fixed his attention on a particular patch of screen, the ones showing the feed from the “Mia Cam,” as Ring called it. Mia was sending a continuous, voluminous stream of thought to Joe Stanton now, and Heintzel’s freshly installed thought-capture hardware was allowing Ring to eavesdrop on every bit of it.

The infirmary team parked Joe’s gurney in the middle of Ring’s workstation, set the brakes, and raised the end of the narrow bed so that Joe was sitting up. His head lolled to one side, and his mouth worked, but no sound came out.

Beck stepped from the shadows and took a close look at the young priest.

A two-inch square bandage covered the incision area above and behind Joe’s right eye. The scalp around the bandage looked pink and tender and freshly shaved.

Joe’s head sagged further and his shoulders slouched. If not for the strap across his chest, he might have rolled off the gurney.

“Christ’s sake,” said Beck. “Give him something to perk him up.”

“Dr. Heintzel just did,” said the lead attendant. “Should be seeing the effect of that fairly soon.”