The Rising(41)
“My answer’s still the same.”
“It wasn’t a question.”
“Would you leave me?”
He looked at her finally.
“You wouldn’t, would you?” Sam continued. “No more than you’d leave that kid who was about to get smashed last night.”
“He was my teammate. It’s what we do.”
“Well,” Sam said, lying back on the second bed, “this is what I do.”
40
JANUS
“I BELIEVE WE’RE READY now, Doctor,” Donati heard the disembodied voice say and slid his chair closer to his computer.
Six hours had passed since Donati called for an alert, that much time taken to assemble the Janus team—no small challenge given two of the five were in truly remote regions and had to be transported to where service was available. Even with that, one remained out of touch, leaving only four boxes on his computer with bar grids that danced in accordance with which one of the participants was speaking. No names had been exchanged and, for all Donati knew, the voices had been scrambled for security purposes as well.
“We’ve all had a chance to review your classified report from eighteen years ago on the explosion and its aftermath,” the voice, associated with the top left-hand square on Donati’s screen, continued, “along with the addendum material filed in the wake of your call for an alert earlier today.”
“Most disconcerting,” the box immediately beneath that one voiced. “What degree of certainty can you provide as to the validity of your conclusions?”
“One hundred percent.”
“No such thing,” the box on the lower right insisted.
“There is this time,” Donati told him, told all of them.
Janus had begun years before as an amorphous extension of the NEO, NASA’s Near-Earth Object office, located at the agency’s jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, which monitored asteroids and the algorithms of their potential trajectories with regards to Earth. Its mission statement was to function as a kind of extraterrestrial NSA or CIA, responsible for dealing with threats posed to the planet from outer space. Unlike the NEO, however, Janus trained its focus on hostile threats, specifically from other life forms. Since its existence had been covertly circulated among the various departments responsible for monitoring space, primarily the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, three alerts had been called, all of them ultimately deemed to be false alarms.
Janus hadn’t been around eighteen years ago, and Donati was all too aware that it owed its very existence in large part to what had taken place at the lab he’d been working at back then.
“Doctor,” the sharp voice of a woman began, from the top box on the right side of Donati’s screen, “the purpose of this call is not to rehash your unfounded conclusions from eighteen years ago. Indeed, none of your claims involving the incident at your former workplace were supported by the investigation that followed.”
“That investigation was sanitized, covered up, eighty-sixed, deep-sixed, shoved under the rug. Should I go on?”
“Stick to the present, Doctor,” from Lower Left.
“Precisely, completely, and inalterably my intention, sir, sir, sir, and madam. Except for the fact that the repeat of the same, or similar, pattern is impossible to ignore.”
“You’re speaking of this sequence of naturally occurring phenomena,” said Top Right, the lone woman again.
“That all depends on your definition of ‘naturally occurring.’”
“I wasn’t aware there was more than one, Doctor.”
“Semantics, ma’am. In both cases, today’s as well as eighteen years ago, such phenomena may have been natural, but they occurred as a direct result of outside stimulus.”
“Your report on the laboratory explosion from eighteen years ago made that clear,” noted Top Right.
“The odds of those particular phenomena following the precise curvature of the Earth were estimated at a million to one. The odds of these similar phenomena today following that same pattern are closer to ten million to one.”
Lower Right’s voice grid began dancing a beat ahead of the actual sound. “Which in and of itself does not suggest the kind of hostile action your alert specifies.”
“At least not directly.”
Donati heard the woman in the top right chuckle mirthlessly. “Direct threats, Doctor, were what Janus was created to deal with, not theoretical ones.”
“Unless a particular threat boasted as a harbinger geoplanetary disruption. I’m convinced that such seismic disruptions are due to slight alterations to the Earth’s rotation, as demonstrated by them occurring along a specific line of curvature in both instances, accompanied by drastic spikes in electromagnetic radiation. So small and minor, infinitesimal, really, as to be completely immeasurable.”
“And what,” asked Top Left in a flat tone, “would you say was to blame for such disruptions both then and now?”
“Alterations in the time-space continuum.”
“Not this again,” the woman sighed.
“If you’d read my complete report on the circumstances surrounding the explosion of eighteen years ago,” Donati retorted, trying to stay calm and keep his voice steady, “you wouldn’t take that attitude.”