Into the Looking Glass votsb-1 Read online

  “Why?” the XO asked.

  The Specialist sighed. “Angles, sir.”

  “Sit, Crichton,” the battalion commander said. “Then explain. This is all new to me, too.”

  “Thanks, sir,” he replied, grabbing a chair, then holding his hands up like a ball. “This is the Earth, right? For the damage to be circular it would have to have come in straight.” He pointed towards where he’d had his hand cupped, then pointed from the sides. “But a meteor can come in from any direction. It’s much more likely that it will come in at an angle. And if it hits,” he clapped his hands together and then fanned them out, “it’s like throwing a rock into a mud puddle. Most of the mud splashes away from the rock. Some splashes straight up. Some, a little, splashes back. They think the one that took out the dinosaurs hit down in the Yucatan. ‘Splashes’ from it hit in Europe and up in the tundra. The plasma wave crossed most of North America. Say one came in from the west for this. First of all, we should have seen, have reported, some sort of air-track. ‘A shooting star in the day.’ Then, we should have had flaming bits of rock raining all the way from here to Cocoa.”

  “Which we didn’t,” the battalion commander said, nodding his head. “The Orange County Sheriff’s department wants to send a helicopter into the area to assess the damage and find out what’s going on. They have their own chemical and biological response person, but they want a military presence who knows something about nukes. All we’ve got for that is you. Will you volunteer for the mission?”

  “Yes, sir,” Crichton said, his eyes lighting.

  “It could be dangerous,” the commander pointed out.

  “So was driving Highway One, sir,” the specialist replied. “But I’d give my left arm to be on the first survey team. For us it’s like being the first one through the door is for infantry. This is the mother of all doors for an NBC specialist.”

  “Okay,” the battalion commander said, smiling. “I’ll give them a call and then call the Chief of Staff.”

  * * *

  “Well, that was the Army Chief of Staff,” the defense secretary said. It was forty minutes from Washington to Camp David by UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. Three had been dispatched and picked up the national security advisor, the director of homeland security, the defense secretary and the Chief of Staff. The Vice-President was aboard Air Force Two circling over the Midwest but in contact by speaker phone. “He’s been talking to the local National Guard commander. His survey teams so far report no evidence of radiation and there was no EMP. He also says that it does not appear to be a meteor strike. I’m not sure about how high a certainty to put on that, he’s apparently depending upon the opinions of a private and evaluation of meteor strike is not part of his training.”

  “The private agrees with FEMA,” the national security advisor said. “And Space Command. The evidence is not consistent with a meteor impact and I’m suspicious of meteors that hit research facilities.”

  “So what was it?” the President asked. He had taken a twenty minute catnap and now paced up and down the room occasionally looking at the TV. “What’s the estimate of casualties?”

  “We don’t have one so far,” the director of Homeland Security said. Technically he should have given the FEMA report, since it was under Homeland Security. But he liked and respected the NSA so he didn’t make an issue of it. He also was phlegmatic by nature, a man who never hurried in a crisis but stayed calm and made rapid, rational decisions. Many thought that he had been tapped by the President because he was the former governor of an important swing state but it was his unflappable manner that had gained him the post. “FEMA didn’t want to give even a wide estimate but the lowball I extracted from them was fifty thousand.”

  “My God,” the President whispered.

  “Yes, sir, it is very bad,” the director admitted. “But it’s contained and local emergency services are responding as well as can be expected.”

  The phone rang and was answered by the national security advisor, who held it out to the President. “Your brother, sir.”

  “Hey, Jeb,” the President said, calmly. “A black day.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, right away. Good luck and God Bless.”

  He handed the phone back and nodded at the Homeland Security director.

  “That was an official request from the governor to declare a state of emergency. I think this counts.”

  “I’ll tell my people,” the director said, standing up and walking out of the room.

  News helicopters that had been loitering near the dust-ball zoomed in on a white and green helicopter that bore the logo of the Orange County Sheriff’s department as it approached the scene of devastation. An area could now be seen that was stripped clean of all vegetation and homes although some foundations remained. The helicopter came in slowly and hovered low, stirring up dust from the ground to add to the pall that was drifting lightly to the west.

  “There goes the first survey,” the defense secretary said, quietly. The National Military Command Center had already sent in its estimate of casualties. NMCC had programs and protocols dating back to the Cold War for estimating casualties. The estimate they had given him, backed by high end modeling that had taken a series of servers nearly fifteen minutes to run, said that the FEMA estimate was low.

  By nearly an order of magnitude.

  * * *

  “We just picked up some dust,” Crichton yelled, cracking the door on the helicopter and holding out the wand on his Geiger counter. “Hold it there.”

  “You sure this is safe?” the Emergency Services guy shouted, his voice muffled by his chemical suit and almost impossible to hear over the sound from the rotors.

  “No,” Crichton responded. “But you want to die in bed?”

  The Emergency Services guy, Crichton hadn’t caught his name, was used to responding to spills on I-4 in Orlando. He knew all about how to contain a dumped tanker truck of carbon fluoride. He even knew about containment and cleanup of a dumped load of radioactive material. But responding to a nuke was pretty much outside of his normal job description.

  It was for Crichton, too. But he at least had manuals to go by. And he’d boned up, fast, as soon as he got detailed to the mission. He knew the sections on ground survey backwards and forwards but all he knew about aerial survey was from the books and they assumed that the helicopter had been fitted with external systems. No external systems were available so, leafing to the back of the manual, he’d found the section on “field expedient aerial survey.” Which was much less detailed than the standard methods. Get close to the destroyed zone, staying upwind from the site, kick up some dust and get a reading. If it was hot, back the fuck up.

  His counter was reading normal.

  “This isn’t a nuke,” he muttered.

  “What?” the pilot shouted. There were internal headsets but they wouldn’t fit over his gear.

  “It’s clear!” he yelled back. “Go in closer.”

  “How close?”

  “As close as you can get,” Crichton said. “Or set it down and I’ll walk!”

  The chopper inched forward, slowly, as Crichton kept his wand out against the prop-wash. Still nothing.

  “Set her down!” Crichton yelled. “We’re still clear! I need a ground reading.”

  “You sure?”

  “There is no radiation!”

  “I’ve got the same,” the Emergency Services guy said, looking over at Crichton. “This doesn’t make sense!”

  “No, shit,” the specialist muttered.

  “Wait,” the copilot called back. He had been looking out to the front as the pilot searched for a reasonably flat place to land. “You can see something at the base of the dust cloud.”

  The base of the cloud was dark, obscuring the light from the sun that still hadn’t reached zenith. But near the ground there was a deeper darkness. There was a crater as well, one that looked very much like an enormous bomb hole. The darkness, though, wasn’t at the botto
m of the crater. Then an errant gust of wind pushed some more of the dust aside and the darkness was revealed. It was a globe of inky blackness, darker than the spaces between stars on a cloudless night. It seemed to absorb the light around it. And it was hovering above the base of the crater, right about where ground level had previously been.

  “It looks like a black hole,” the copilot yelled. “Back away!”

  “No!” Crichton yelled. “Look at the dust! If it was a black hole it would be pouring into it!” For that matter, he suspected that if there was a black hole that large the helicopter and most of Florida, if not the world, would be sucked into it faster than it could be seen. The dust wasn’t being sucked in but he noticed that what dust went in didn’t seem to be coming out.

  “I’m calling the news service choppers and getting one in here for a visual,” the pilot yelled. “You’re sure there’s no radiation.”

  Crichton glanced at the counter that had been forgotten in his hand and then shook his head. “Still quiet.”

  “Okay,” the pilot yelled then switched frequencies and muttered on the radio. Crichton looked out the window and noticed one, and only one, helicopter inching closer; apparently the need to get a scoop did not outweigh common sense. He turned back to look at the ball, which didn’t seem to be doing anything and shouted in surprise as something dropped out of the bottom and hit the base of the crater.

  It was a giant insect.

  No.

  It was… It had black and red markings, mottled, not like a ladybug but some of the same color. It was… his sense of perspective zoomed in and out oddly. It couldn’t be as large as it looked, but if it wasn’t, then the pilot in the front seat was a child and his head the size of baseball. Crichton shook his head as the thing, using too many legs, wriggled and got to its feet. It was the shape of a roach, colored red and black and it had… more, way more, than six legs. It looked… wrong. Everything about it was wrong. It scared him more than any spider, however large and they got pretty damned large in Florida, he’d ever seen in his life.

  It wasn’t from this world. Not in this time. Or from any time in the past. And, hopefully, not any time in the future. It was from… somewhere else.

  It was alien.

  “Oh, Holy shit.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Most of the faculty of the university was, presumably, off-campus when the event occurred.” The briefer was from the FBI, which was one of a dozen agencies trying to make sense of the “event.” No name had stuck to it, yet. It was not “Pearl Harbor Day” or “9/11” or “the Challenger.” It was just “the event.” The day still hadn’t passed. By tomorrow, or the next day or the day after that some glib newsman would hang a moniker on it that would stick. But for right now, glued to their TV, tying up the phone lines, people just referred to it as the White House spokesman had as “the event.”

  “Presumably because many of them lived near the campus,” the briefer added. “The president, however, lived in Winter Park, outside the blast zone, and one of our agents contacted him. The center of the event, where the…”

  “Globe,” the National Security Advisor prompted. “Or hole, maybe.”

  “Where the globe now… floats… was where the high energy physics lab used to rest.”

  “Industrial accident,” the President said, then laughed, humorously. He’d by now seen the Defense Department estimates and the “updated” estimates from FEMA, which were climbing higher as the day progressed. “The mother of all industrial accidents. Who?”

  “The president was unwilling to directly point fingers but we believe that it was probably an out-of-control experiment by this man,” he said, flashing a slightly Asian-looking face onto the screen. “Professor Ray Chen, Bachelors degree and Ph.D. in physics from University of California. Third generation American despite his looks. Formerly a professor at MIT. Professor of advanced theoretical physics at University of Central Florida. He apparently moved there, despite a cut in pay and relative prestige of the facility, because of the weather in Boston.”

  “Why not California?” the President asked then waved his hand. “Never mind, irrelevant.”

  “Only slightly Mister President,” the national security advisor said. “Thank God it was UCF and not MIT or JPL. We’d be looking at a million dead if it was either of those. And I know, vaguely, about Dr. Chen. But not enough.”

  “Bob,” the President said, turning to the national science advisor. The science advisor was not normally part of the inner circle but he’d been called in for obvious reasons. His degrees, however, were in molecular biology and immunology; he’d been chosen for his background in biological warfare against the possibility of such attacks from terrorists. He knew he was out of his league.

  “The security advisor probably is as good as I am at this. We need a physicist, a good one, that can think on his feet. Soon.”

  “Mr. President?” the defense secretary said. “When the high energy physics building was noted as the location I told my people to scrounge up a physicist. He’s got background in advanced physics and engineering and holds a TS for work he does with my department. He’s a consultant with one of the defense contractors.”

  “How soon,” the President asked with a smile. “How soon can he be here, that is?”

  “He’s in the building, sir,” the defense secretary said, quietly. “I’m not trying to step on toes…”

  “Bring him in,” the President replied.

  “Academic egghead,” the Homeland Security director muttered, smiling, while they waited. “No offense,” he added to the national science advisor.

  “None taken,” the scientist who hadn’t published in seven years said. “What is his background Mr. Secretary?”

  “NASA, then defense contractors,” the secretary said, smiling faintly. “Ph.D.s in physics, aeronautical engineering, optics, electronic engineering and some other stuff. Smart guy. Very bright, very sharp, high watt.”

  “Fifty-ish, balding,” the Homeland Security director added, chuckling. “Fifty pounds overweight, pocket protector, five colors of pens, HP calculator on his hip.”

  The defense secretary just smiled.

  The man who entered, passed by the Secret Service, was just below normal height. He had brownish-blond hair that was slightly tousled and lightly receding on both sides. He walked like a gymnast or a martial artist and if there was an ounce of fat on his body it wasn’t apparent; his arms, which had strangely smooth skin, were corded with muscles. He had light blue eyes and a face that was chiseled and movie star handsome. He was wearing a light green silk shirt and well-worn blue jeans over cowboy boots.

  “Gentlemen and ladies, Dr. William Weaver,” the defense secretary said, lightly with some humor in his voice. “Senior scientist of Columbia Defense.”

  “I’m sorry about how I’m dressed, Mr. President,” the scientist said, sliding into a chair at a gesture from the President. “I didn’t think I was going to need a suit this weekend; they’re all at home.” He had a slight, but noticeable, deep south accent. “Ahm sorry ’bout how Ahm dressed, Mister Pres’dent.”

  “Not a problem,” the President said, waving his hand. Unlike his predecessor he insisted on suit and tie in the nation’s work and never took his off when he was in the office. He had changed as soon as he got back from Camp David and all the senior staff were in suits or dresses. “Where’s home? You don’t live in Washington?”

  “No, sir, I commute from Huntsville,” Weaver said.

  “We don’t have much for you to go on,” the President said. “But this event this morning appears to have originated at the high energy physics building at the University of Central Florida. We think that it might have been due to something that was being worked on by a physicist named… name?”

  “Ray Chen,” the national security advisor said, watching the newcomer.

  Weaver closed his eyes and grimaced. “Ray Chen from MIT?” he asked, not opening his eyes.

  “Yes,”
the NSA said.

  “Well congratu-effing-lations, Ray,” the scientist said to the ceiling. “You just made the science books.” He looked back down at the President and then narrowed his eyes. “I can make some guesses Mr. President. That’s all they are but they are informed guesses. Say about a seven on a scale of one to ten.”

  “That’s good enough for now,” the President said. “How bad is it?”

  “Not nearly as bad as it might have been,” Weaver answered, clearly trying to figure out how to phrase things. “One possibility is that we would all have just disappeared, as if we were never here. Unlikely, but possible. I’m going to have to explain and I’ll try to tell you when I’m getting into completely raw speculation.”

  “Go ahead,” the President said, leaning back.

  “What Ray Chen was working on was the Higgs boson particle,” the scientist said, shaking his head. “First thing to remember is that quantum mechanics can drive a normal man crazy so if it seems like I’m insane just keep in mind that it’s the physics, not me. A Higgs boson is a theoretical particle that is named for the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who suggested it as a way to explain some phenomena in high energy and vacuum field physics. Some scientists and especially science fiction writers believe it contains a universe within itself. Me, I always thought it was just reinventing the zero point energy fluctuation energies, or vice versa.”

  “You mean a galaxy?” the Defense Secretary asked.

  “No, Mr. Secretary, a universe. All the physics that make up a universe, which won’t be the same as this one, all the math, all the galaxies if they form. Theoretically.”

  “That’s…” the Homeland Security director stopped and chuckled. “It isn’t insane, it’s the physics, right?”