Aeon Rising: The Apocalypse Begins
Date: 2022-05-04 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Post Apocalyptic; Thriller; Apocalyptic; Action; Fiction
Description: An apocalyptic supernova flashes over the South Pole. A mysterious mission sent deep into the Amazon. The story of one family’s struggle to reunite… Max Carver, a down-on-his-luck truck driver and Army vet, joins a rescue mission into Brazil. The target is a utopian tech village, the Colony, hidden in the rainforest and run by a charismatic genius. Max’s pregnant wife, Talisha Carver, is the NSA analyst who intercepted encrypted Colony messages signaling a mysterious impending event. Dr. Xin Rou is a Chinese researcher working at the IceCube neutrino experiment at the South Pole. On lucky days
Publisher: Babel Books

Selected Praise & Reviews

MATTHEW MATHER

“Brilliant.”

—Wired Magazine on Cyber Series

“Terrifying because so plausible.”

—Washington Post bestseller Steven Konkoly

“Michael Crichton reincarnated.”

—New York Times bestseller Nicholas Sansbury Smith

“Mather creates characters you've instantly known your whole life.”

—BOING BOING editor Jason Weisberger

“Relentless pacing…bombshell plot twists.”

—Publishers Weekly on Dreaming Tree

Aeon Rising is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and event and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission (except for short quotations used in book reviews or articles).

Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Mather

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States and internationally by Pallas Publishing and Babel Books, imprints of Matthew Mather ULC

isbn // 978-1-987942-24-8 // e-book
isbn // 978-1-987942-25-5 // paperback
isbn // 978-1-987942-23-1 // hardcover

first edition

Also by Matthew Mather

CYBERSTORM

CYBERSPACE

CYBERWAR

Three-book completed series

DARKNET

Standalone Novel

Part of the CyberStorm universe

ATOPIA

DYSTOPIA

UTOPIA

Three-book completed series

Part of the CyberStorm universe

NOMAD

SANCTUARY

RESISTANCE

DESTINY

Four-book completed series

Science Fiction Book of the Year award winner

POLAR VORTEX

Standalone Novel

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Alexey Bobrick at the University of Lund in Sweden for help researching the cosmological phenomena used in this novel, and next, all of my tireless advance readers who supplied assistance regarding everything from medical to military to technical advice. I would also like to recognize my agent, David Fugate, for finding a home for this work. And a special thanks to John Faithful Hamer for his hours of animated discussion.

Table of Contents

- Prologue
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Chapter 39
- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Chapter 42
- Chapter 43
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 45
- Chapter 46
- Chapter 47
- Chapter 48
- Chapter 49
- Chapter 50
- Chapter 51
- Chapter 52

neu·tri·no

A subatomic particle that rarely reacts with normal matter. A supernova is predominantly a neutrino phenomenon…

Prologue

IceCube Neutrino Experiment

Amundsen Station, South Pole, Antarctica

January 3rd

11:52 a.m. New Zealand Time

“That can’t be right.” Dr. Xin Rhou rechecked the data logs. “Dag, could you reboot the AI?”

Thousands of detectors embedded in the cubic kilometers of ice beneath their feet had just lit up—which was impossible. Even on lucky days, only a few detectors would sparkle to signal the passage of one of the ghostly interstellar particles.

The IT team had just upgraded the system with a new monitoring app. Xin bet it was something to do with that.

Had to be a software glitch.

The Norwegian IT manager’s earnest grin and stubbled chin appeared from under a desk. He was a well-muscled man who looked like he’d been asked to win three rounds in a boxing match. On hands and knees, he inspected the network cables. “I’m on it. Could be the wiring. Might have been the bolo who set this up.”

She stole a glance at Dag’s backside as he bent over. When he shifted positions, she pretended to be staring out the window to inspect fronds of hoarfrost growing on an antenna outside.

It was minus thirty-two Celsius outside. About average for midsummer. The sun hovered low in a cobalt sky over the bright Antarctic ice.

The closest of the other scientific structures near the IceCube facility was the dome of the new South Pole Telescope, beside the BICEP extragalactic cosmic radiation detector, both about a hundred meters away toward the ice runway. A C-130 Hercules was in the process of landing on its skis. The lumbering aircraft bounced off the ice in a puff of feathery snow.

Resupply missions came in daily from America’s McMurdo Station on the coast, fifteen hundred kilometers away over the Transantarctic Mountains. Another four thousand past the emptiness of the Southern Ocean to reach New Zealand. This place was as isolated as you could get without traveling to Mars and about the same temperature.

“Anything yet?” Xin asked Dag.

The man was out from under the tables and in front of a monitor. “Still gombled far as I can reckon.”

She guessed that meant no.

Xin checked her phone. Just before noon New Zealand time. Four hours back meant 8 a.m. at home. No fiber optic lines connected Amundsen Station to the world. The only comms in and out were via satellites, which were only in range a few hours a day. One was now. She dialed her mother’s number. Before the first ring finished, her son’s face appeared on her screen. His face beaming with a wide gap-toothed grin.

“My tooth came out,” Bingwen said in Guangdong speech.

Xin laughed. “Did you bury it?” she replied in English.

“Under bed,” he replied haltingly, switching languages. “And I hope I have mouse.”

“The tooth of a mouse,” Xin corrected. “You hope you have the tooth of a mouse.”

A month since she left. Felt like a year. She wouldn’t be able to hold her six year old until he was halfway into his seventh turn around the sun. Xin and her husband had separated two years before—not divorced, not yet—and she’d had to leave Bingwen with her parents. She couldn’t stand being so far away from her little dragon, but sacrifices had to be made. Seeing his face tore at her.

The image on the screen rolled around to Xin’s mother. They traded greetings in plain speech before switching back to English. Xin insisted on it. The future might be Chinese, but English in scientific exchange wasn’t going away any time soon. Languages were a window into the wider world, and she wanted Bing’s to be as big as possible.

“How is father?”

Xin glanced at Dag, who shrugged again. Still no idea what was wrong with the system. She flicked on the under-ice amplified-light cameras. Sometimes one might witness a flash of Cherenkov radiation.

“He is well,” her mother replied.

Which meant he was not.

A glittering on Xin’s screen caught her attention. Her mouth dropped open.

“Mom, I’ll call you back.” She hung up without waiting for a reply.

Maybe there was a software glitch, but the scintillating glitter from the photomultipliers? Normally the under-ice cameras displayed nothing but soothing black. Now it looked like an ocean of phosphorescent creatures had slipped beneath the ice.

She punched a number on the wireline telephone on the desk. A woman’s voice answered on speakerphone. Xin said, “I need to speak to Major Rankin right away.”

“The major is in a meeting—”

“Right now,” Xin interrupted, her voice rising. “Get him right now. This is an emergency.”

Dots of light danced across her monitor. It was beautiful. Almost. Goosebumps raised on her exposed forearms. Xin typed in the web coordinates for the other neutrino observatories. Were they seeing what she was?

“What is it?” Dag asked.

Tears streamed from Xin’s eyes. Her son was eight thousand kilometers away from her.

And the world was about to end.

DAY ONE

Chapter 1

Amazon Rainforest

Tres Fronteras Territory, Brazil

January 5th

2:02 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

So alien, but so familiar, that’s how it felt—the roar of the Black Hawk’s rotors, stone-faced men and women gripping weapons, that smell of sweat and engine oil and the metal-in-the-back-of-the-throat burn and stomach churn as humans and machines lurched into the unknown through the night.

Max Carver leaned out the helicopter’s open door and scanned the semidarkness. The jungle canopy skimmed so close he felt like he could swing down into the glimmering wet leaves. Dimly illuminated thunderheads shouldered the rising foothills of the Andes below the sliver of a crescent moon.

What was he doing here?

Max had asked himself the question a dozen times on the commercial leg in from DC to Bogota, then again on the private charter prop over the mountains and the final hop in an unmarked Colombian military transport to a dirt airfield. He pulled out his picture of Talisha and held it close in the roaring wind and low light so he could inspect her slender arms cupping that beautifully swollen belly.

A red light blinked on in the open cabin between the eight jump seats bolted to the floor.

“Ten minutes,” came the voice of the team leader, an angular-faced man named Armad Kruger that Max had been introduced to the night before. All he’d been told was that their jungle survival expert was an Afrikaner mercenary who had fought in the Congo. That, and he worked for Stillwater, the military contractor that put this last-minute mission together. The South African had to be six-four and the only person in the chopper taller than Max.

Kruger said through the headset, “We’re doing a soft egress. Everyone spread out to cover in the edges of LZ Alpha and rendezvous at the first checkpoint. The second team will be three hundred yards west at the LZ Beta. Use your GPS if you get separated, that’s what it’s for. Everyone buddy up. Night gear on. Nine till touchdown. We’re covering with drones. We make contact, everyone stand down and let Mr. Carver do the talking.”

A stocky young guy seated in front of Max pointed at the photo of Tal. “That your girl?”

“Yeah.” Max smiled.

“Pregnant?”

“Seven months.”

“And you’re heading out?”

“Rescue mission, just collecting the ones that want to come,” Max replied. “Should be back day after tomorrow. A week at most.”

If you say so, the man’s raised eyebrows conveyed, but he said: “These are my two reasons for being.” The man held his rifle to his chest and fished a photo from his breast pocket. “Asher and Ezra. Two and five.” He held out the family picture and angled it for Max to get a look.

“Beautiful,” Max replied to be polite. Why was this guy talking to him? That wasn’t normal in his day. This was a short mission. Focus was key. Any chatter should be related to whatever increased the odds of staying alive, and swapping kid pics didn’t qualify.

The man asked, “How many others you got?”

Max shook his head.

The man put the picture away. “They call me Bullpup. I like the format. Better maneuverability.” He held up his assault rifle like a birthday present. It had a short barrel, a magazine behind the trigger, and a tiny shoulder stock. “RM277 with Wolverine cartridges. Will get us out of any jam.” He settled the rifle onto his knees. “Bull for short. I’m kinda built like one. I heard Colonel Buchannan contacted to you personally for this. Invited you to a White House dinner. I didn’t even get a meal coupon at Outback.”

“He was my staff sergeant back in Afghanistan.”

“Where you from?”

“Louisiana.”

“Nebraska City. Cornhusker. They said you were military, but not no more?”

“Truck driver.”

“Pardon me?”

“Rust Belt. Big rigs. Midwest to New England, mostly.”

“Truckers don’t carry weapons?”

“Not this one.”

Max hadn’t touched a gun in years. That whole side of his life he had tucked away. Now he was married and had a child coming. Would he be a good father? Or was he running? He told himself he wasn’t, but he bet his own dad had convinced himself of that. This time, he couldn’t drift through it. It wasn’t just his life anymore.

“Six minutes,” Kruger announced over the headset.

When Max used to ride in on these horses twenty-four years gone past, they had the old M60D machine guns pointing out the sides.

Now it was miniguns and drones.

In white paint marker on the housing cover of the M134 7.62mm six-barrel minigun: “How blessed are those whose ways are blameless—Psalm 119:1.”

The gunner nodded at Max when he saw him looking. He had explained the quote when they climbed in. The kid had a Raiders’ insignia on his uniform, the skull and Southern Cross.

“Stow your gear,” Kruger told everyone over the headset.

Max looked up from the photograph of his wife. Still a novelty to call someone that, even in his head. He said the word again to himself, and then out loud: “Secure your weapons. Safeties on. Everyone get that?”

Apart from attempts as a tech start-up manager the past two decades, most of his dispensed advice had been how to mix a cocktail or change engine oil. Telling soldiers what to do was like playing make-believe in a half-forgotten game.

“What if we take incoming?” asked an Italian voice.

Max scanned the faces in the dim light. It was a woman’s voice over the headset. Garza, he remembered from the quick introductions. Ginevra Garza’s hooded eyes stared back at Max from across the aisle. A scar on her left cheek, her body squat and compact, powerful like a coiled viper.

“This is a rescue,” Max replied to her. “If we take fire, retreat and cover. Only thing we shoot at is if tigers attack us.”

“Don’t think they have them in the Amazon.”

“You know what I mean.”

“More clarity? Briefing was short, boss.”

Kruger’s gruff South African voice interjected: “GG, even if we’re fired on, no return unless Mr. Carver”—he pointed at Max—“gives the say so. Questions?” His eyes glinted dark like the surface of a river at night, his black hair slicked back against tan skin.

Garza held Kruger’s unwavering gaze. The edges of her mouth curled down, her shoulders shrugged, but she sat back. Whatever you say, her body language radiated.

She was part of the EUFOR—European Special Forces—contingent on the mission. Kruger had told Max she had been the only female member of Italy’s 9th Parachute Assault Regiment. The lone woman in that storied anti-terrorism squad had to be twice as good as anyone else there.

“What if they don’t want to be rescued?”

“Pardon?” Max said.

Bull leaned toward him. “What if they don’t want to be rescued, that’s my point. It’s called ‘The Colony,’ and that sounds like a rich person’s resort to me. Have a drink with an umbrella in it. Rescue mission is all good except when the people are happy where they are. I mean, Waco. Nobody wanted to be rescued there. What a SNAFU that was. You said this is a cult, right?”

Kruger stood back up between the rows of jump seats. The red light flickered orange. “Five minutes.”

“I didn’t call it a cult,” Max replied to Bull.

“What if something happens to you?”

“Meaning what?”

“If you pancake out that door and can’t give the word to fire back, then who does?”

Kruger said in a gravelly voice, “Get that rifle stowed, Bull. Stop jawing.”

Max hung back out over the side again, looked down as the Black Hawk plunged into a low cloud. The cool light of the crescent moon went dark. Pitch black. He clipped his night vision into place. Kruger and Garza seemed to have worked together before this. Bull too? Maybe, but Max’s combat senses were muted. He was too old for this.

“Didn’t they say the guy running the place is your buddy?” Bull asked.

“Long time ago,” Max said.

“But he is your friend?”

Max didn’t reply.

“I heard some things about this place,” Bull said as he unstrapped to put his weapon away. “Weird stuff.”

Droplets of water from inside the cloud wicked against Max’s face.

“Burning Man on acid,” Bull said. “That’s what I heard this place is like.”

Everyone had been on one chemical or another when Max had gone a decade before. He said nothing.

“Tell me straight, man. What’s going on?”

The truth was, Max didn’t know.

“We can’t shoot back, that’s the deal?” Bull fidgeted in his seat as he strapped back in.

Max knew guys like this, ones who couldn’t stop talking when it came down to it. Max didn’t like to talk. Even in the best of times. Not that he didn’t like conversation, but he wasn’t eloquent, couldn’t find the right words until a half hour later. Better to say nothing than sound stupid.

“One minute,” Kruger announced.

A flash low in the sky. Spilled blood red across the horizon before blossoming into a searing white. Light so bright its photon icepicks bit deep into Max’s optic nerves, the surrounding clouds igniting like magnesium flares in tubs of ball lightning.

Max cursed and squeezed his eyes shut, flipped up the night vision, and pressed the balls of his hands into his eyes to ease the pain. The glowing afterimage burned bright green. Was that a nuclear blast? No sound outside the roar of the chopper rotors. He opened his eyes for an instant but had to close them in lancing agony. Tried again. Squinting hard, his vision swam through watering eyes.

Incandescent tendrils appeared draped across the sky. Pulsing orbs between them, like schools of neon jellyfish scattered through the heavens.

Blue skies.

The sun shone bright, low on the horizon. Brilliant like a diamond on fire, but tiny, compressed into a pinpoint.

The chopper burst through a billowy blue-white fog bank. The green canopy of the rainforest wheeled below. Swearing from the pilots over the headset between calm exchanges of checklists. The ratcheting whine of the rotors as the chopper angled.

Max clenched his jaw. Held tight as the bird whipped around.

Black of night a second before, but now clear daylight as if transported through a wormhole and into a blinding future of snowcapped mountains in a cyan sky of anvil-topped thunderheads. Warning alarms wailed in the headset. Engines strained as the Black Hawk spun.

Bull was out of his seat, grappling for help. With his right hand, Max took hold of the guy’s hand as he slipped out the open door. Then grunted with effort as Bull’s full weight ripped at his arm socket and jerked him sideways. The horizon tipped at a stomach-lurching angle as the chopper went into freefall, before high-loading g-forces slammed Max back in his seat.

Branches and leaves whipped through the open door, tore at his arms and face as metal screeched in a rending, juddering roar. Max strained and held tight, one hand clasped with Bull’s, the other still gripping his picture of Talisha.

Chapter 2

Le Croissant Café

Burlingame, California

1:22 p.m. PT

Talisha Carver sipped her latte and watched the TV in the corner of the café.

“The last time a supernova was visible to the naked eye was in 1987,” said a thin woman with short-cropped gray hair whose onscreen title identified her as Dr. Rita Owen, director of the National Science Foundation. “I was doing my undergrad in astronomy at USC at the time. Quite a few have been visible to the unaided eye throughout recorded history.”

“How many exactly?” asked the news anchor, a young square-faced man in a dark suit and red tie in the bottom-right box on the TV screen.

“In the last two thousand years, this is the ninth.”

“So these are regular occurrences?”

“That’s right. A few ignite in our galaxy every century. In the year 1054, one was visible during daylight in blue skies for a year. The remnants are now known as the Crab Nebula.”

The news anchor paused to take a serious look into the camera. “The big questions all our viewers want answers to—is this dangerous? How bright is it now?”

“Like a crescent moon, but in a single pinpoint,” Dr. Owen replied. “As yet, we’re not too worried. I want to remind your viewers that the supernova we are now calling Aeon appeared almost directly over the South Pole and is not visible from the northern hemisphere.”

“Which is all very well for all of you in the northern hemisphere,” countered an agitated-looking man in another onscreen box, his accent Australian. “Do we even know how far away this thing is? How bright it will get?”

Dr. Owen paused to scratch her face. “We’re still evaluatin—”

“The dose of ionizing radiation last evening might have wiped out a lot of what remained of the ozone over the Antarctic,” the man interrupted. “Do you have any idea—”

Tal turned her attention away from the argument ensuing between the scientists on the TV and sipped her latte again. One cup of coffee a day, that was her limit.

She cupped her left hand under her belly and felt the baby kick.

He always woke up when she had coffee. Or ate something greasy and sweet. A few crumbs the only remains of an almond croissant on a plate in front of her.

She had a table by the open window of the café. A warm and pleasant day for January in northern California. Blue skies with a few puffy white clouds. Families walked by outside on the main street of Burlingame, a busy Saturday of shopping and errands and coffees with friends. Cars lined up at traffic lights in both directions. The Walgreens across the street had large signs up announcing discounts on Christmas merchandise.

Just a regular day. More or less.

A line of lunchtime customers stretched out the door beside Tal. All of them stared down at their phones. At the tables outside, people peered at their screens. Most of the people walking by did as well. Everyone watching videos taken when the supernova had ignited eight hours earlier.

For a minute or two, the supernova had turned pitch-darkness into full daylight anywhere south of the equator. In places below the tropics that were in daylight when Aeon lit up, like Australia and New Zealand, a second sun had appeared overhead. Countless dashcam and security camera feeds from Brazil and Argentina showed a bright dot appearing in the night sky, the pinpoint flashing to overload camera sensors into whiteout for a few instants before the images stabilized into what looked like full daylight and blue skies, with the sun shining bright, low on the horizon.

Except it wasn’t the sun.

Scientists weren’t yet agreeing on which star had detonated or how far away it might be—or even what exactly had happened. The initial bright flicker of light had immediately dimmed. While scientists weren’t yet agreeing, the general public had become instant experts on exploding stars.

“Supernovas come in two main types,” said the news anchor on the TV. “Type I are white dwarfs that burst when they become supercritical in mass, and Type II are supermassive stars that collapse and then detonate. In each, however, the light from the supernova is preceded several hours before by a wave of neutrinos, which was how Dr. Xin Rhou of Tsinghua University predicted this blast almost three days ago. Dr. Owen, why was this warning not heeded?”

“I wouldn’t characterize this as a warning,” Dr. Owen replied. “It was an internal NSF communication from the IceCube project at the South Pole, where Dr. Rhou is working, that could not be verified—”

Tal took a good look at Dr. Rhou on the screen. A picture of a demure young woman with long black hair in a lab coat, and then another of the same woman with what she assumed was her young son and husband. As the discoverer of Aeon, Dr. Rhou had now become perhaps the most famous person on the planet.

The news channels were going nuts trying to get interviews with Dr. Rhou, but all channels of communications to the South Pole were jammed. An initial short burst of ionizing radiation had also knocked out a lot of satellite communications and tripped off power grids, temporarily, in the south. Two airliners had almost crashed.

Tal did a search on her phone then scanned a news story. “The SNEWS on snooze,” read a headline on The Guardian, featuring another picture of Dr. Rhou with a copy of her Twitter post from three days before. The Supernova Early Warning System monitored seven neutrino detectors, and only one of them, the IceCube project, had detected the surge. The whole program was run by the NSF.

And Dr. Rita Owen was the director of the NSF. Tal looked back up at her.

It was a little disorienting to watch someone on TV who she had recently met in person. Dr. Owen had been at the White House Christmas party three weeks before, when Colonel Oleander Buchannan had asked her husband Max to go on a mission in Brazil. What was the head of the NSF doing at that party? It had to be a coincidence.

But the worming uneasiness in Tal’s gut wouldn’t go away.

She held a hand down again as she felt the baby move.

They lost communications with Max’s mission right when the supernova went off. Tal had been asleep in her room at the Crowne Plaza hotel across the street when it happened, but in the northern hemisphere, it had been something of a non-event. A brief flash on the other side of the planet. Tal had flown in on the United flight direct from DC to San Francisco the day before, arrived at 8:30 p.m., then had gone straight to her hotel to sleep.

When she woke at 6 a.m. and went down to the gym for a walk on the treadmill, the supernova was all over the news on the TVs. She had immediately called Colonel Buchannan, who informed her there was a loss of comms with the mission but there was nothing to worry about—but she hadn’t been able to get in touch with the colonel since, despite a dozen messages.

Sometimes, no news was good news.

Often not, in her experience.

She shouldn’t have encouraged Max to go. He had said he didn’t think it was a good idea to leave her at this stage of pregnancy, but she could see in his eyes how much he wanted it. She had told him she had been in the army longer than he had. She could take care of herself for a week.

And it wasn’t blind encouragement.

Tal had been working for the NSA—the National Security Agency—for the past three years. She had gone and dug out the internal reports on the Colony in Brazil after Colonel Buchannan had appeared and made the offer. The government didn’t view the Colony as dangerous. More as a technology incubator led by an eccentric front man, Max’s friend Ben Belloc.

But Tal had her own reasons for wanting Max to leave for a few days. An ulterior motive that she didn’t want to tell him about. He wouldn’t have let her fly at thirty weeks of pregnancy, not all the way across the country.

She hadn’t lied to her husband, but she hadn’t told him the truth, either. The guilt of her deception turned the worm of uneasiness in her stomach ever tighter.

Tal picked up her phone and dialed Colonel Buchannan’s number once again.

Chapter 3

White House Situation Room

Washington, DC

2:45 p.m. ET

LIEUTENANT Colonel BuchaNnan stood in the back corner of the forty-by-twenty Situation Room, a cherry wood conference table occupying the middle. The newly commissioned space was fully electronically SCIF isolated and still had that new-room scent and freshly polished glint. Dome lights glowed along the ceiling’s centerline with banks of white LEDs over fourteen chairs. Each with a nameplate in front of them, none of them Colonel Buchannan.

“Everyone, let’s get to it,” said President Charles. The man glanced at his watch. “We are now at zero hour plus twelve and forty-three minutes.”

He had swept into the room while Colonel Buchannan had his back turned. It wasn’t like the colonel to keep his back to any center of power. He turned and grinned his highest wattage smile, but the commander-in-chief didn’t even acknowledge him as he sat at the head of the table.

The president’s dark skin was a shade paler than usual, his eyes calm but red-rimmed. The president collected himself and said, “Dr. Owen, if you could lead the meeting?” He indicated the woman seated to his left.

The head of the NSF stood. Five-three and gaunt, she had on a dark suit over a baby-blue crewneck sweater. Skin so fair it was almost translucent. The eight screens occupying the wall behind the president lit up with an image of a glowing spot in a field of stars.

“How bright is this thing now?” the president asked.

“Like a very full moon.”

“I thought it was only as bright as a crescent? I saw your broadcasts this morning.”

“That was six hours ago. It’s getting brighter.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not yet, but we’re not sure how it might evolve. We don’t know the extent of the damage to the austral ozone layer. And there are many other unknowns.”

“You said on national TV there was nothing to worry about.”

“Those were the instructions from your office, sir,” Dr. Owen said quietly. “Not to induce panic before we knew what we were dealing with.”

The president took a sideways glance at his communications director before saying, “I just received a request from your office to ground all domestic and international flights. Can you be more specific?”

“Sir, typical supernovas take weeks to reach maximum intensity, then fade over months or years. But this”—Dr. Owen cleared her throat—“is an atypical event.”

“Are you worried we’ll see more of these bright flashes? I need a simple answer.”

“Sir, so far, there isn’t one. We are updating guidance as we get more information. On the screens behind you are the latest images of the astrophysical anomaly. These views come from the European Union’s CHEOPS satellite operating in sun-synchronous orbit, about eight hundred kilo—”

“Can’t we get images from Hubble? James Webb? One of our own?” asked a gruff voice from the middle of the table, a man Oleander recognized as the chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

“Hubble’s circuitry was damaged in the initial burst, same for Webb. There are seven other optical wavelength orbital observatories we have access to, including this one, and a handful of gamma and X-ray satellites, but all were damaged in the flash. Most have been offline since.”

“Please,” interrupted the president, “let’s keep this moving.”

Dr. Owen nodded and said, “CHEOPS is a small satellite designed for measuring the size of exoplanets. Not optimal for these purposes. Our best guess is the anomaly is tens of light years away. This from data based on the size of the luminous disk, which we are having difficulty imaging due to its intensity and position. In the next hours we should get more precise estimates as new observations can triangulate. The wavefront is distorting our measurements.”

“Wavefront?” asked the president.

“Ejecta mass expanding around the anomaly.”

“You call it an anomaly,’” the president said. “This isn’t a supernova?”

“A stellar detonation, certainly, but it’s behaving unusually, as I said.”

“What about our early warning system, which the NSF operates?”

Dr. Owen nodded. “Detectors at the South Pole initially detected a huge surge of neutrinos, and given the intensity, we had anticipated seeing light from the blast within a few hours, but after a full day had elapsed—and based on the improbably large reading at the IceCube facility—most scientists were looking for another explanation. Other detectors in the network were inconclusive or offline.”

“The SNEWS on snooze. That was the headline I got with my morning coffee. Why am I getting my information from The Guardian and not my own team?”

“Sir, the two detectors at the Gran Sasso lab in Switzerland were under renovation, the Canadian project unfinished, and the Super-K in Japan was in the process of upgrading with gadolinium. The Chinese reported that Daya Bay was offline. With only one report of such an abnormally large reading, we were looking for other explanations, but sixty-five hours after the reported neutrino surge, we had a two-point-three solar flux event.”

“English, please?”

“The anomaly lit up to more than twice the brightness of the sun for a few minutes before dimming. It’s what’s called a ‘breakout flash’ before the main sequence of a supernova’s light curve. That flash included a burst of gamma and X-rays that irradiated the southern hemisphere last night and interrupted power grids. Much like a thermonuclear electromagnetic pulse called an EMP.”

“Are we going to see more of these?”

“We don’t think so, but the issue is that supernovas can ignite in ways we never thought possible. That’s why we need the data from the South Pole observatories that were pointed up at this thing when it went off.”

“Which Dr. Xin Rhou, a Chinese national, is collecting?”

“Dr. Rhou had impeccable credentials, sir. We have people on the ground monitoring the situation at Amundsen Station.”

“And what’s the data telling us? First impressions?”

“Sir, it’s on its way.” A man whose nameplate identified him as the chief of staff of the Air Force held up a paper from the middle of the table. “Drives from observatories at the South Pole were copied—”

“Can’t we wire it over? Satellites?”

“Petabytes of information, sir. Would take months to transmit even if we could, and the DSCS geostationary serving the South Pole is offline. Physical transport is the only option. The first full package of data is arriving now at McMurdo Station on the coast of Antarctica. A few hours after that it will be en route to Christchurch in New Zealand on a C-17 Globemaster. We’ll get it on a high-speed interceptor from there. Tomorrow night we should have it here.”

“Tomorrow night?” The president absorbed this before asking, “Based on the information we do have, what’s the most likely explanation for this thing?”

Dr. Owen replied, “Sir, a white dwarf. They are dim, cooled-down leftovers of stars as massive as our sun, yet sometimes smaller than our moon. They can ignite into supernovas somewhat unpredictably, and they’re everywhere around us. At local interstellar distances, one might have been invisible to our sky surveys. There are at least three hundred within a hundred light years of Earth, and dozens within the ten parsec kill zone—”

“Kill zone?” asked the president.

“Distance to Earth which triggers an extinction level event. On average, one supernova detonates within Earth’s kill zone every hundred million years. The Hangenberg event, the second-largest mass extinction event three hundred million years ago, is an example. Rapid changes of sea levels, global exposure to high amounts of radiation, the destruction of animal and plant life, ozone depletion, anoxic conditions—”

“Anoxic?” the president asked.

“Lack of oxygen in the atmosphere.”

“My God,” the president muttered.

Dr. Owen continued, “A more minor event two million years ago caused the extinction of the megalodon sharks, among other species. But most terrestrial life survived.”

“Most? This kill zone is how many light years?”

“About thirty.”

“And are we within this zone?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Silence in the room for two beats.

The president laid his hands flat on the table. “You’re telling me there are giant invisible bombs floating in space around us, and we have no way to know where they are? And one might have just ignited in Earth’s kill zone. Is this the consensus?”

Silence again in the room, but this time tentative nods from most of the scientists.

The president asked, “How did we not know about this months in advance?”

“We had no warning, sir,” Dr. Owen replied.

“Nobody at NASA? NOAA? None of the intelligence branches? None of our three-letter agencies?” The president scanned the room of downturned faces. “What about Dr. Rhou? The Chinese scientist? She practically handed this to you on a plate tied up with ribbons three days ago, yet I’m only getting wind after it hits the fan.”

Colonel Buchannan watched the exchanges as the scientists tried to blame each other. He’d been as shocked as anyone else when the supernova flashed into existence, and this was the first time he’d heard about a kill zone—but what was more important to him was whether Max Carver was still alive.

Chapter 4

Amazon Rainforest

Near Japura, Brazil

2:52 p.m. ET

Max Carver groaned and pulled at the strap holding him into his jump seat. He was pinned in place, something jammed against his left side. Up to his knees in dark water that flooded the cabin of the wrecked chopper. The light was low, not black, not night, but not exactly day either. Raindrops spattered onto the metal skin of the Black Hawk’s ruptured shell, ran in streaming rivulets down the ripped doorframe beside him.

Over the tapping rain, the humid air was heavy with an uproar that seemed to grow louder and louder. Sounds saturated the rainforest around him. Even the trees seemed to pulsate with it as the din ricocheted off the high canopy and cascaded back to the ground on a tidal wave of buzzing and shrieking and clicking. A clear, flutelike birdsong rang out between the chirping of unseen frogs pounding out a collective beat from the forest floor.

The taste of copper in his mouth. He spat out a mouthful of blood.

Leaned his neck forward.

Thirty feet to his right, the unclear outline of a shape blotted an outgrowth of ferns. He focused. The body was half-submerged, the face turned away from him. But those arms. That was the young guy he’d been talking to. Bull. Max swiveled his head to the left as far as he could. The woman, Garza, was slumped forward in her seat. The seat beside her empty. He couldn’t look any further left to see what was pinned against him.

“Hey,” he managed to wheeze, and then louder: “Hey! Anybody? Hello?”

The thrumming soundscape of the rainforest drowned out his calls. He yelled, his chest spasming with the effort, but he didn’t hear any reply above the clamor of the insects.

He heaved in a steamy lungful of air. The heat and humidity already suffocating.

Max closed his left eye and opened it, then his right. He still had both eyes. Good. His left arm was trapped in place. He checked his right. The hand almost numb, but he could wriggle his fingertips. Made a fist. Lifted it with an effort to check his face, felt his teeth. Still there. Nose where it should be. Strained to look down and did a quick check of his midsection. No gaping wounds he could see or feel.

And he could still move his legs.

Lancing pain erupted in his right side as he struggled to raise his arm high enough to get a grip on the metal buckle of the jump seat straps. Gritting his teeth, he pushed through the agony and unclipped one side and then another. His left arm came free as he slumped forward into the water.

Breathing deep, he arched his back.

What the hell happened up there? His mind was still trying to reassemble the images of the bright flash and blue skies before the thundering violence of the crash. It didn’t make sense.

Slipping on the submerged metal floor, he got to his feet, using his left arm to steady himself against the empty seat in front of him. He leaned over, put a hand in front of Garza’s nose, and felt a gentle puff of air. She was still breathing. Kruger’s seat was empty. The fuselage twisted up and angled to the side, the airframe warped around the trunk of a tree he could now make out. He couldn’t get to the pilots, but seeing the way the front of the chopper was bent up, he wasn’t optimistic.

To Max’s right, a groaning over the noise of the rainforest. Bull was face down in the ferns, up to his waist in the muck. A shift in the dark behind the man. A surging wave moved in a way Max was only too familiar with.

The snout of a caiman burst from the undergrowth.

Max took two high steps through the water and threw himself into the air on top of the creature before it could speed the last ten feet to Bull, who was still unaware. Sliding on top of the animal, he felt it twist and buck as it turned back to him. He used his legs to pin himself around it, just like they used to do when they gator wrangled back in the bayou. He wrapped both arms around its snout as it snapped its head back.

But this was no Louisiana gator.

It thrashed and twisted beneath him, then submerged and pulled Max under. He breathed in a lungful of muddy water and gagged. The animal surged upward and dragged him with it. He couldn’t keep his arms locked around its mouth.

In the dim forest undergrowth, he glimpsed something. A woman. Blond. Translucent skin.

The caiman flipped over and turned onto Max, submerging him again. He flailed against it. It had his right arm in its jaws now and turned again, pressing him against the muddy bottom. Fingers of mud seemed to curl up around him, cradle his body somehow. Like hands pulling him upward, but it was too late. Max screamed into the water as he felt his lungs fill up.

His last thought was of his wife Talisha.

I should never have left you.

DAY TWO

Chapter 5

Northern California

10:02 p.m. PT

Talisha CARVER stood and requested one more with an index finger held high over the crowd. Two other customers were also calling the waiter. The harried man raised his eyebrows as he caught Tal’s signal. Their eyes locked. He shook his head.

She jabbed her finger in the air again before sitting down.

The lights of San Francisco twinkled over the Bay. Tal had a four-seater by herself right on the waterfront terrace of the Trident restaurant in Sausalito. The day before, the mood had been calm in the streets, but today there was a nervous energy in the air. People walked by with their eyes down. Shopping bags packed high in the backs of SUVs.

Not everyone was worried. The bar here was packed.

She wore a cardigan, but the propane heaters couldn’t take away the midwinter chill coming off the Pacific waters churning under the Golden Gate. Usually, nobody would be outside at this time of year—but this was the best place to witness the spectacle. Tal stared past the lights of the Bay Bridge at the purple line of the supernova’s glow on the southern horizon.

She felt the baby flutter and put a hand down to soothe him. Her husband had wanted children, or at least said he did, but she knew a part of him was afraid of being a dad. Max might be reluctant, but he was going to be an amazing father. She just needed to get him back here with her.

“What have you gotten yourself into, Max?” Tal muttered under her breath. Him going off on a mission into Brazil was as much her fault as his.

More her fault, really.

The guilt of her deception still turned again in the pit of her stomach, but then she was already here, and maybe now there was even more of a reason for her to be.

The waiter hustled through the crowd. He wore jeans and a black vest over a T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up on his bulging arms like he’d just been to the gym. His black hair combed back to one side. “Ma’am, you’re going to ha—”

“Please, I know I’m taking up too much space.”

The man’s biceps twitched as if that were exactly what they were thinking. “Ma’am, please, take a table inside to the front. Rules are—”

“Just a little longer?”

Three hours ago, she had promised the waiter that her friend was about to arrive. One beer and no food order later and her welcome had worn out.

Bicep-boy put his pad into his fanny pack. “Ma’am, I’m going to need to speak to the manager.”

“Please?”

He relented. “What do you want, ma’am?”

“A Coke.” She smiled as pleasantly as she could. “Please, just a soda this time.”

The man returned her smile and turned back into the crowd toward the bar.

Still no contact with Max’s mission.

Some of the cable channels were predicting that commercial flights would begin again tomorrow. It was like watching the news about a novel virus emerging on the other side of the planet. Frightening in a distant way, something to occupy her over morning coffee as she scanned news articles or catatonically sat in front of doom-mongering cable stations, but would it really affect them up here? Aeon was shining on the opposite side of Earth from America, with the entire planet blocking and protecting the north.

As normal as things still felt, some were starting to panic as Aeon steadily brightened. Internet stories circulated showing empty toilet paper and flour shelves at grocery stores. Half the country was heading for the hills, while the other half said they were overreacting.

A glass of dark soda dropped onto the table in front of her.

“This drink is on us,” the waiter said. “Sorry about earlier.”

“No, no, I’ll pay, please,” Tal replied. “Cash okay?” No credit cards. No trace.

Bicep-boy was working for tips. A full table, dinner for four, would be, what? Forty bucks in tip? She handed him three twenties.

He held up his palms. “On us, ma’am.”

She proffered the bills. “Take it as a tip. Come on. I’ve worked tables, too. Please.”

“Sorry again for giving you a hard time. Stay long as you want, ma’am. Appreciate the tip.” He gave her a genuine smile this time and took off to the next table.

Carrot and stick. Always use a carrot and stick, that was a lesson her father, who grew up on the rough streets of LA, had taught her. Although he had been better at the stick part. Which was why her mother had left him when Tal was ten years old, picked up and left America and gone back to Israel and her family there.

Her mother had taught Tal that it was always better to leave people happy if you could. You never know when you might meet them again. Or need them again.

She took a sip of the ice-cold Coke and returned to staring past the twinkling lights of San Francisco at the thin purple haze of Aeon. It looked harmless from here. Quiet. Serene. But was it her imagination, or had Aeon’s glow become brighter? Its color shifted. The glow wobbled and shimmered.

A presence loomed next to her.

Without looking up, she said: “Love is the law.” That was the agreed code.

A heavy-set man, six-two in a velvet black hoodie lined in red, slumped into the chair in front of her. His back to Aeon. His face was covered, and in the outdoor lighting from above, only his full lips and wide chin and scarred cheeks were visible. Eyes dark beneath the hood. His forearms dropped onto the table, one to each side. Large, soft hands, but with powerful fingers that looked like they could dig into rock. The breeze brought a pungent mixture of what smelled like cinnamon and cloves.

Tal leaned back and away from him.

The man asked in a low voice. “Can you do what you need to do here?” Accent flat, but definitely American.

“It’s risky,” Tal replied. “But I can do it.” Flying home tomorrow wasn’t an option anymore.

He reached across the table and deposited a memory key in front of her. “Install what’s in here behind the NSA firewalls, from inside the security and operations center. You understand. You need to run the exploit from inside the SOC.”

Tal cocked her head to see behind him. The glow of Aeon was definitely brighter. The murmuring conversation from the crowd rose an octave in pitch. People around them pointed at the horizon.

The man said, “We need to expose them before the AIs control us.”

This was the first time she had met, in person, this contact who went by “Monk.”

“Algorithms are the new gods,” Monk continued. “We’ve become their by-products. They control our food, logistics, even the way we think. They knew about Aeon before it happened.”

The way he spoke gave Tal the unmoored sensation of falling down a conspiracy rabbit hole, but then again, what had she expected? This was transactional. She wasn’t trying to make friends. She needed his black-market network exploits, a zero-day hack nobody else had access to.

She held a hand to her stomach as the baby moved.

“I’ll install it as soon as I can,” Tal said.

“You shouldn’t drink,” Monk said.

“You should mind your own business.”

“This is my business. You’re pregnant. You never told me that.”

“That is absolutely none of your business, but yes, this isn’t easy for me.”

“Isn’t easy?”

Monk pulled back his hoodie.

His head shaved. Maybe early thirties. Flat nose. Even in the dim light, his face an ethereal white. He was albino, but African American, and those eyes—heavy jutting brows over orbs that seemed to shine red from the inside. His corneas pink and scarlet ringed. This was a mistake, Tal realized. In her mind’s eye, she felt herself starting to flail on a plunge down a cliff.

Monk said, “Ain’t easy is my life. You use this phone to keep in touch from now on. They knew about this”—he motioned at Aeon behind him—“and didn’t warn us. Things have changed.”

One meaty hand dropped a cell phone on the table next to Tal. An old model. Flip phone. He said, “They’re inside everything. Use old tech anytime you can, oldest you can. You understand?”

Gasps from the crowd.

A shimmering yellow tendril snaked high into the night sky behind Monk, his skin translucent milk as the glow of Aeon burst into auroras in the heavens behind him. “Let me tell you what we need to do, Talisha,” he said as he leaned in, his hands big as dinner plates as he raised them around her.

Chapter 6

Location: Undetermined

Time: Undetermined

Max Carver watched poison dart frogs peep below palms leaning in through the open bedroom window. The drumming of insects in the air. A dragonfly buzzed above a rhinoceros beetle that reared to defend itself. Max slid under the covers of the bed and luxuriated in the nearness of his wife for a moment.

In his romantic relationships, Max noticed that some people, when you smelled them—really drank in their natural animal muskiness—they either had the right odor and drew you closer, or didn’t feel right and repelled you. And there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

Two people simply had to smell right together.

It was either there, or it wasn’t.

From the moment they met, Max and Talisha had snapped into each other like magnets, as if two people had become one. To him, Tal somehow tasted of honey when they kissed, the sweetest and most potent. Her skin smooth to his touch, like the texture of a cup of hot coffee on an easy Sunday morning.

Something about her with him was so right.

Seven years together. Married six months before in a small ceremony at the county registrar after they found out they were pregnant. He couldn’t fathom life without her now.

Max wormed his way under the covers toward his half-asleep wife.

The light was low, just his reading lamp on his side, but sliding over on his back Max noticed the cracks in the plaster ceiling and the yellowish stain in the corner where water had leaked through. The room’s narrow metal-framed door had a rust spot at the top. He propped himself up. Glimpsed the threadbare carpet over parquet flooring.

At the end of the room, the second-hand cot he had assembled the night before.

Sliding into the middle of the bed, Max wedged his right hand under his wife while with his left he cupped her baby belly. He sensed the baby almost like it was inside him. “What are we going to name him?” He put his head down to her stomach.

“After your dad?” Tal whispered back.

“Not that asshole.”

“Language.”

Max said, “Why? You think he can hear us?”

“Your dad?”

Now his wife was being silly. He liked that about her. “The baby. I mean the baby.”

“Honey, come on. Seriously. Your dad passed years ago. You should let go. Forgive.”

“And what about yours? You really want to go there?” Max exhaled. “Sorry, I’m still feeling awkward.”

In a lull of conversation at the White House Christmas party a few hours before, Max had started explaining his failed business to Colonel Buchannan and the senators and members of congress. The logistics of a small trucking outfit hadn’t illuminated anyone’s imagination. He hated small talk at parties.

Tal said, “It was a good idea, honey, it just didn’t work out.” She adjusted herself in the bed. “I didn’t know you and Ben Belloc were so close. I forgot you ever mentioned you were friends. You don’t talk about him.”

“He was like a brother to me.”

Tal put a hand to his head. “You okay?”

Max’s only biological brother, Charlie, had committed suicide the year before.

Maybe accidentally overdosed. He hadn’t left a note. Either way, another sad statistic in the nation’s siege with opiates. Max pushed away an image of Charlie smiling in the sunshine when they were teenagers, before all his brother’s troubles had started. At least he was at peace now, or anyway that was what Max kept telling himself.

“I’m fine,” he said after a pause.

Tal said softly, “Must have dredged up memories today. That Senator Copeland woman called Ben ‘The Preacher.’ Where’s that come from?”

“His dad was one. Hellfire and damnation and conspiracies under one creaking steeple. As much of a piece of work as my own.”

“Running away into the Amazon is a way to get away from family,” Tal mused. “Billionaire techies building apocalyptic compounds is a cliché wrapped in its own trope.”

“That’s not Ben. He didn’t run away from things. He was the nicest guy I’ve ever known,” Max said. “Me and him and Charlie were inseparable when we were kids.”

Until they weren’t.

Max couldn’t remember the reason they stopped hanging out—if there even ever was one. Did there need to be? People drifted apart. That was his whole life before Tal. Drifting.

His mind filled with an image of a curtained room. Loud static on a tube television. A buzzing vibration inside his skull, the silent crying of a name in words that made no sense.

Tal ruffled his hair. “Maxie? You okay? You tuned out.”

The image faded. “A cult is everyone else’s religion except your own. Buchannan said Ben was more of an influencer than anything else. I checked out the Colony website. Ben even does TED Talks. Does that sound crazy to you?”

“Lots of kinds of crazy out there these days.” Tal moved herself in the bed again and groaned.

Max knew she was having a tough time with the third trimester. A struggle getting her comfortable, especially to sleep.

She said, “You said you haven’t talked to him in more than twenty years?”

“Did you know that there are as many trees in the Amazon as stars in the whole Milky Way galaxy?”

Tal sat upright in bed. Max’s head fell off her stomach. “Are you really thinking of going there?” When he didn’t answer right away, she added, “Are you being serious?”

Max propped himself up. “You heard Colonel Buchannan. His daughter is there. How would you feel if our child was in danger? Those two senators, they seemed scared, too. A lot of people want their kids back.”

“Those ‘kids’ they’re talking about are adults, making their own decisions. You just said Ben was the nicest guy you ever knew.”

“But who knows what’s going on down there.”

“Exactly my point. You do see this big belly right here, right? A little kid who needs you? Who has nobody else in the world but you?”

Max leaned back in the plastic garden chair outside the front of his house. A cold beer in his hand. Unopened. So far. Fat droplets of humidity beaded up its sides. He could almost taste the hops inside, just looking at it. Sighing, he put the beer down on the brickwork patio, if the broken patchwork beneath his chair could be called a patio. Near midnight and streetlights provided the only illumination.

A tagger had recently scrawled in bright red on the front of the brick building to his right, “Who’s watching the watchers?” Max stared at the spray-painted message and wished he didn’t live in a neighborhood where it was normal for people to deface buildings.

Police sirens wailed in the distance. The smell of someone’s joint wafted by on the breeze.

Weeds sprouted between the stones in the pathway out to the sidewalk, the road just hidden past a crumbling brick wall. Bars over the windows to the house, even over the screen doors. Ward Seven was that kind of neighborhood, even if it was right across the Anacostia River from downtown DC. An eighteen-minute drive from the White House, but into an entirely different universe.

Their place was a one-bedroom rental in a stack of rowhouses. He was sure it had previously been a crack house—from the cleaning they had to do when they moved in—but it was only for a few months. At least that’s what he had told her two years ago. To save money for a real house, he had said.

Tal worked for the government now, an NSA subcontractor job she started three years ago. She made a decent salary, but with rent and house prices these days?

Max was the weaker side of the equation. He had grabbed the stack of mail from the kitchen drawer on his way outside, opened a few envelopes, but he knew what was inside. Which was why he stuffed them into a drawer, hidden away from Tal.

Late payment notices. Overdue credit cards.

A brightly colored frog hopped through the weeds.

The colonel had taken Max aside before they left the Christmas party. Explained that this would be a quick trip—in and out—and that Max didn’t need to do anything except talk to Ben. Make sure that there wasn’t a problem. Colonel Buchannan’s company, Stillwater, was putting the mission together, and it would be a collection of military and private with some European special forces, as there were Swiss and French kids in the Amazon whose parents wanted them out, too.

Buchannan said they would take the place by force if Ben couldn’t be convinced to stand down. Max would be paid a hundred thousand dollars, the colonel had said—all Max had to do was go down there and talk to Ben. But that didn’t matter to Max. Money could come and go, but after losing his brother Charlie, the thought of something happening to Ben was unthinkable.

“Max?” someone called out from inside the house.

Was that Tal? Maybe she had cooled down and he could get back into bed. He eyed the beer collecting condensation on the brickwork.

“Max,” called the voice again.

That wasn’t Tal. That voice sounded a lot like…

Max blinked. The streetlights became brighter. A lot brighter. A burning searchlight flared up in the sky and torched everything around him, the building and street and sky tearing away in a conflagration.

“You okay, man?” the voice asked in a smooth Californian accent with just a hint of Louisiana.

Max rubbed his eyes. He was lying down now. Not sitting.

A face hovered into view. That goofy gap-toothed grin that Max would recognize anywhere.

Ben Belloc stood over him. “You with me? You awake?”

Max came fully conscious. Blinked again. The dream of the house and Tal faded, except it wasn’t a dream. He had gotten onto that plane, flown to South America. Loaded himself onto a helicopter in the middle of the night and then—what was that light?

In a reedy voice, Max mumbled, “What happened?”

“Take it easy, man,” Ben replied softly. “You were in an accident.”

Max’s vision came into focus. He was on his back. His mouth felt full of cotton balls. His brain, too. Didn’t feel a thing. Tried to lift his arm, attempted to swing a leg out.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Ben said. “Not yet. You’re full of painkillers.”

“No drugs,” Max whispered.

Ben said, “It’s not what you think.”

Max gave up on moving and tried to focus. The ceiling. It looked like tree branches, but tightly plaited together, the strands pulsing with an inner light. Was he high? Hallucinating? The walls seemed to breathe in and out, the floor like woven grass undulating in his vision.

“It is great to see you, man,” Ben said. “So good to see your face. But what the heck are you doing down here? No way this is not part of His plan.”

Max repeated, “Whose plan?”

“Your helicopter had an accident. My people got you out. You’re in Brazil, do you remember? The Amazon?”

“I mean the sky. It was the middle of night, then like midday.” Or was that part of a dream?

“That’s not the sun.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That was a supernova.”

Max let his mind wrap itself around that last word. “An exploding star?”

“Ignited over the South Pole. My guess is it was one in the Octans constellation. A researcher warned everyone. Dr. Xin Rhou at the IceCube neutrino observatory, she told the world plain as day this was coming, but everyone ignored her. Not me. I listened, loud and clear.”

Max had never heard of Xin Rhou. “What about the rest of them? In the chopper?”

Ben said, “I’m just glad you didn’t die, man. Praise be.”

“What about the team I was with?”

“We’ll talk about that when you’ve rested. Who sent you here, Max?”

“Who sent me here?”

“You going to keep repeating me?”

“I’m still not even sure you’re real.”

Ben leaned his face until his nose was an inch from Max’s. “Who sent you here, Max? Was it Buchannan? You can’t trust him. He’s a snake in the tree, but Copeland is the real devil.”

Chapter 7

White House

Washington, DC

8:02 p.m. ET

Colonel Oleander Buchannan waited patiently outside Senator Copeland’s office in the West Wing. The office itself was barely more than a broom closet along the south side of the building next to the dining room, but it was prime real estate for power brokering with its door halfway along the hallway between the Oval Office and Chief of Staff. An unusual arrangement. A senator had never had an office before—even a closet—in the West Wing. Copeland was the first, and she plied her deep storehouse of secrets to maintain her advantage over competitors.

The colonel didn’t sit in one of the plush blue attending chairs in the corridor, but instead stood and inspected a painting of Benjamin Franklin over a mahogany buffet. Young men and women, dressed in freshly pressed suits and holding file folders, strode in hunting packs through the hallways. One young man whispered to another as he passed, “The positioning is lucky. The northern hemisphere isn’t directly irradiated. Every country isn’t a loser in this—”

The young man stopped talking when he noticed the colonel was within earshot. He smiled and carried on along the hallway and only began whispering again in excited tones to his workmate when he turned the corner toward the offices of the vice president.

On the television today, Buchannan had watched Dr. Owen repeating her talking points from the meeting the day before, doing the pony circuit on the news channels. Explaining that this was the ninth supernova to go off in the last two thousand years visible to the naked eye. That a bright spot shining on the other side of the world wasn’t anything to worry about. The unhurried air in the corridors of the White House certainly reflected that.

“Have we heard anything yet?” Senator Copeland appeared from her doorway and closed the polished wood door with a heavy click and chunk of the sliding bolt.

The colonel turned from watching the two young men disappearing around the corner. “We reestablished communication with Javelin,” he replied. “Belloc knew we were coming.”

“We knew that. Has the mission changed?”

“Not the core objectives.”

“Even with this?” Copeland strode past him toward the Oval Office, then turned left past the Roosevelt Room. The colonel followed her.

“Especially because of this.”

“Is Carver still alive?” Senator Copeland stopped at the closed entrance to the Cabinet Room.

“He’s with Belloc now,” Colonel Buchannan replied.

Copeland waited outside the Cabinet Room, her hand on the door. “We find out what Belloc knew, if there is any connection, and we stop the project. Is that understood?”

“Stop?” The colonel clasped his hands behind his back.

“Our priorities have changed.”

“My daughter is still down there.”

She considered him a moment, nodded, then opened the door to the Cabinet Room. The president sat in the middle of the large mahogany conference table, dressed in a dark suit and red tie. The stars and stripes flag behind him. The vice president sat to his left, scrawling notes on a pad in front of her. The curtains to the Rose Garden were open, the grass dark beyond the floodlights along the West Colonnade.

Three dozen men and women, most in suits, some with their shirtsleeves rolled up, occupied seats two rows deep around the central conference table. Empty coffee cups and water glasses were scattered between pads of paper. As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Copeland took an empty seat waiting for her opposite the president and next to the director of National Intelligence.

The colonel took a seat by the wall.

At least he had the time to go home and get a shower, change his clothes. The meetings with the scientists had begun downstairs in the Situation Room and progressed upstairs into the Cabinet Room next to the Oval Office so the president could check in more easily.

Dr. Owen had returned to the meeting already in progress, or rather, that was never-ending. She was still in the same baby-blue crewneck sweater, but had ditched the dark suit of the day before. Her short hair now disheveled. She said, “It’s still a fraction of the intensity of the sun, but the pulse of heat caused by the initial flash might have vaporized a vast quantity of water in the Southern Ocean that could send a shockwave of weather systems around the southern hemisphere. Temperatures have spiked by ten degrees over the South Pole, sir. The northern hemisphere’s weather hasn’t been affected much. Not yet.”

“But it will be,” the representative whose nameplate identified her as being from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. “In a day the continental US will start to see increases in precipitation, the same right across the entire northern hemisphere. Soft X-rays are thickening the ionosphere and destroying ozone at the same time.”

“In the south,” the president said. “The ozone layer is intact here, correct?”

“Yes, sir. But these effects will propagate unpredictably.”

A man at the far end of the table said, “With the acid rain from the nitrides already induced in the upper atmosphere spreading, we might be looking at a large loss of crop yields in the next year, food shortages, mass human and animal migrations, major disruptions in the global supply chain.”

A general murmur of agreement.

The president said, “Ladies, gentlemen, I have just about every head of state waiting for a phone call on this. I need an action plan. Governments all over the world are at a standstill, including ours.”

“Sir, I think now is the moment we need to bring out the national guard,” Senator Copeland said. “To send the message to the states that we intend to keep order.”

The president acknowledged her and nodded, then asked, “Dr. Owen, did we even identify which star this might be yet?”

“We’re still operating on the idea that this is an unusual white dwarf detonation, sir. The closest we know of is Sirius B, eight light years away but not in the right location. Sky surveys mapped dozens nearby, but the problem is that we might never have detected a ten-billion-year-old white dwarf below G17 magnitude.”

“I disagree,” said a voice from the back of the room.

“That it couldn’t have been detected?” Dr. Owen scanned the room to see who was speaking.

A dark-skinned man stepped from the corner to the left of Colonel Buchannan to the edge of the table. He was Dr. Roberts, someone Buchannan had only ever seen on television before, on public broadcasts. Head of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“I disagree that this is a white dwarf supernova,” Dr. Roberts said in a deep baritone. “We decided to have Dr. Peterson at Canterbury University in New Zealand have a preliminary look at the South Pole data. We have begun transmitting parts of it using our fiber optic links.”

“Isn’t the data supposed to be en route here now, by high speed interceptor?” the president asked.

“We decided to make a copy at the same time as we transmit critical sections from New Zealand before sending it on the interceptor, sir. It only took a few hours, and it gave us the time to do some preliminary analysis. The problem I have always had is that a white dwarf wouldn’t exhibit a shock breakout flash as we initially witnessed. And what would set it off if it was alone in space? White dwarf supernovas only get brighter over time. No flash at the beginning. Aeon’s light curve is more consistent with the collapse of a star of hundreds of solar masses.”

“Except there are no candidates for a thousand light years in that direction,” Dr. Owen countered. “And that far away, it could never be energetic enough for what we are witnessing.”

“That’s because this is not a supernova,” Dr. Roberts said.

“Then what is it?” the president asked.

“A hypernova.”

Murmurs along the table.

Dr. Roberts continued, “A stellar detonation orders of magnitude more powerful than a supernova that can shine with the light of trillions of stars for brief periods. I believe what we are witnessing is the hypernova ignition of the star R Octantis in the constellation Octans.”

Hushed murmurs broke out into excited conversation as the scientists leaned toward each other. Tapping on keyboards began. A woman down the table said, “The latest Hipparcos analysis lists R Octantis as a thousand nine hundred light years away. It’s a Mira variable red giant.”

“Other surveys gave its distance as half that, even the first Hipparcos survey,” Dr. Roberts replied. “And I believe it’s much less. The data was misread. It was never a variable red, but a Wolf-Rayet in the final stages of collapse. R Octantis was ten thousand times brighter than our sun, its light pulsating every four hundred days—but Dr. Peterson’s initial analysis leading up to the event shows the variable period had shortened to just weeks. We think it reached a critical instability. The light curves fit my models.”

“Dr. Owen?” The president turned in his chair.

She paced back and forth along the wall before answering. “They’re extremely rare, but not out of the question. The energy output could match a hypernova or rotational collapsar. Which might explain the long lag time of photons after the neutrino burst. Hypernovas have different life cycles than other supernovas.”

The president said, “I need a consensus. That’s what this is? Does it make sense? Do we go with this? We need a roadmap, something to tell the nation.”

“Give us a few hours,” Dr. Owen said after exchanging words with her colleagues. “We’ll need to look at Dr. Robert’s data and talk with Dr. Peterson in New Zealand. But there could be some good news in this, sir. Hundreds of light years away, the ejecta wall will take millenia to get here and will dissipate before it arrives. Storms and flooding will be the most challenging problems over the next weeks.”

The NOAA representative said, “Sea level rise will be the biggest problem, in our opinion. We’re going to have to evacuate large populations near the coasts.”

“I’m not sure that might be the biggest problem,” Dr. Roberts said quietly. “Aeon has grown a hundred times brighter in the last twelve hours. Even if it’s still a fraction of the intensity of our sun, it’s following an exponentially growing light curve.”

“Which has plateaued,” Dr. Owen countered. “We’re reaching maximum intensity, or close to it. Ionizing radiation will be a problem, increased UV irradiation from our sun, acid rain—”

“You’re not understanding what I just said,” Dr. Roberts interrupted. “Your models are based on a white dwarf ignition tens of lights years away. A hypernova doesn’t match the same curves. On this luminosity trajectory, if it’s a hypernova, then in a few days it might be hundreds of times brighter than the sun. The level of energy we are dealing with here has no real limits.”

Total silence. Colonel Buchannan noticed Dr. Robert’s hands shook. Ever so slightly.

The president asked, “Which would mean?”

“The world’s oceans will boil into space. The atmosphere stripped away. No humans would survive, no animals. Not even microbes. In days, the entire planet might be put inside a blast furnace and incinerated. To know the full extent of Aeon’s coming fury, we need as much of the data from the South Pole as we can get.”

Chapter 8

Amundsen Station

South Pole, Antarctica

2:12 p.m. NZT

Dr. Xin Rhou donned her survival parka and pushed on the release handle of the exterior door. Frigid Antarctic air rushed in and blew sheets of paper from desks. The IceCube office space was a mess, like an embassy that had been abandoned when a war turned wrong. That was barely a metaphor. But nobody was a citizen of the southernmost continent—they were all visitors to this alien world, and now the time to evacuate had come.

The howling siren was near deafening inside the metal drum of the IceCube offices. Xin needed a break, so went out. Into the open air.

The sun hung about twenty-three degrees above the ice, which was also the tilt of planet Earth relative to the plane of its orbit. From Amundsen Station’s perch at exactly ninety south, the sun rotated all the way around the horizon at the same height every day, over the weeks slowly rising and falling until the six-month-long night began and the process repeated.

She held up one hand to block Aeon’s light.

It had grown rapidly in intensity the past half day to become a quarter as bright as the sun. Its rate of increase seemed to be flattening—mercifully—but how hot would it get? Nobody knew. The energy output was seesawing up and down. Aeon’s pinpoint had become terrifying.

But quiet.

Implacable.

The shining supernova hung directly overhead at minus eighty-seven degrees of declination in celestial coordinates and wavered only slightly in position every few hours. It was the new South Star, taking over from Sigma Octantis, which used to be the only faintly visible star within a few degrees of the southern pole. Was Aeon one of the other stars in the Octans constellation? Most of them were hundreds of lights years away, some thousands.

It didn’t make any sense.

Her walkie-talkie squawked. A voice said: “Xin, you guys okay over there?”

It was Susan, the evacuation manager at the loading station. Xin keyed the device and said, “Loading bags now. Be at your location soon.”

“Ten-four. Don’t get wrapped up with blue eyes.”

A joke, but also an insinuation. As if Xin was having an affair with Dag, which was a rumor going around the station. Unfounded, even if Xin did enjoy spending time with the man. Amundsen Station had seemed almost powered by innuendo before Aeon had changed every conversation.

No more than a dozen people left now.

Another voice squawked over the walkie-talkie. Dag’s Nordic-British accent said, “Don’t stay out there too long.”

She thumbed the button and answered, “I won’t.”

“Talked to the pilot coming in. You know how famous you are off-ice?”

She didn’t reply. Xin still found it hard to believe.

The moment she had alerted Major Rankin about the possibility of an event—four days ago now, but it felt like a decade—most of the data connections to the outside world had jammed. Not turned off, but the limited bandwidth was gobbled by a flood of outside scientists. It was Dag who had convinced her to do a Twitter post on her new account—right away—detailing what she’d found and what she thought might happen. Dag had been worried that the government types might not let news of Xin’s discovery get out if they waited.

He had been right.

Her post had gotten out just in time.

They were now cut off from the outside. No incoming text or voice, except in an extreme emergency.

But on each arriving transport, people talked to the pilots and crew to get news of the outside world. The rumors and stories flew around the base like napalm. Stories of Xin’s picture on BBC and Fox News, everywhere on every network and website in every country around the planet. The only real warning the public had was Xin’s Twitter post, which the world had pretty much ignored until Aeon lit up the heavens a few days later.

She squinted into the sky, still shielding her eyes.

It was still getting brighter. Only a quarter as bright as the sun? Maybe more. For the first time, she felt the heat of it on her naked hands and face and realized she hadn’t put on gloves. Her parka was still open. It was cold outside, but it wasn’t cold.

She shivered, but not from the temperature.

This new ball of nuclear fire in the sky was pouring down soft X-rays. Standing outside like this, she was exposing herself to DNA-fracturing-strength radiation. Even the metal structures didn’t provide proper shielding to those inside. The base commander had started everyone on iodine tablets, for what good that might do.

And something else.

A thin brown line hovered over the horizon in the normally perfectly blue sky. A faint, sweet smell wafted on the breeze. Nitrous oxide. The initial gamma and X-ray bursts had induced nitrogen oxides in the air and created a thin photochemical smog in the troposphere. The planet was heating from Aeon’s burn, and the chemical smog would continue to thicken and maybe act to block out some of the heat—but the heavy smog blanket would also lead to acid rain, maybe all over the planet.

The already depleted ozone layer over the South Pole had probably just been completely erased, and the X-rays pouring down might wipe it out across the entire southern hemisphere and half of the north in a matter of weeks. That meant rapidly rising levels of UV radiation from our own sun as the ozone disappeared.

But that wasn’t the most dangerous effect, not in the short term.

Looking at the data from the South Pole experiments in detail, they had been able to calculate the total heat output from Aeon more accurately. The latest calculations were that the initial burst had vaporized seawater across the southern hemisphere, loading it into the atmosphere at levels not seen in millions of years. Water vapor was an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, as was the rapidly accumulating nitrous oxide.

A massive and swift feedback cycle of heating had just begun.

At lunch today, the last remaining atmospheric scientist had told her that the heat was driving a super-high-pressure system over the southern continent and oceans, creating a massive pressure gradient to the north on a scale he didn’t have models to compute.

Wind. That’s how atmospheric pressure gradients manifested.

So far, things were calm here at the epicenter, but the weather scientist said gargantuan cyclones that defied imagination could be brewing in the southern oceans, almost invisible to the world with half of its weather satellites offline. And these storms would bring battering wind and torrential rain.

Acid rain.

Oceans of nitric acid would start to pour down from the sky, the guy had said. Add to that searing radiation, rising oceans as the polar caps disintegrated, and cascading effects they couldn’t even imagine yet. The atmospheric guy had almost clawed his way onto the transport going out right now. It was all Xin could do not to get on the plane with him, but she needed to stay and collect as much data as she could.

The warning blared for fifteen minutes before each transport took off, just to make sure everyone knew with certainty what was happening. The warbling siren finally switched off.

Blissful silence.

It wasn’t quite every-person-for-themselves yet, but there was a palpable sense that time was running out, no matter how calm the staff pretended to be.

A rumbling growl to her left.

She turned to watch the C-130 aircraft spitting snow behind as it geared up for takeoff. The snub-nosed aircraft trundled down the ice runway on its skis, the turboprops whining high and then lowering in pitch as it passed her and lifted into the air, then bounced back down on the ice before finally lumbering into the smog-smeared sky.

Each flight was loaded to capacity. Everything and everyone needed to go. Whatever remained might be here a long time. Maybe forever. Nobody knew.

Another aircraft circled and began its landing run. Maybe five minutes till it touched the ice. Half hour turnaround until the sirens started up again. It was a five-minute walk from the IceCube structure to the loading zone.

Someone stood on the ice, halfway between IceCube and the runway.

The woman looked at Xin.

Hair so blond it was almost white. No coat. Arms exposed.

She didn’t even appear to be wearing shoes. That couldn’t be possible. It was still minus twenty out there. Xin waved. The person waved back. No idea who it was. It wasn’t Susan. The person didn’t seem to be in distress, or trying to warn or alert her of anything. Simply gesturing hello. Xin blinked. The shape seemed to change.

That wasn’t a woman.

It must have been an ice mirage—the famed Fata Morgana phenomenon of Antarctica—that had blurred her vision. From the bulk of his snowsuit, the shape was clearly now a man.

He walked slowly, unhurried, toward the IceCube structure.

Chapter 9

Canterbury University

Christchurch, New Zealand

2:25pm NZT

Dr. Lowell Peterson dropped another ice cube into his water, then held the glass up to inspect it in the light of the neon tubes overhead. IceCube. He’d just looked at the neutrino data from the South Pole and found something odd. He was the first person in the world to really dig into it. The volume of detections was astounding and matched the idea of a hypernova, and the rough directional analysis gave the same orientation as R Octantis, but there was nothing unusual in that. That wasn’t what surprised him.

He needed to go back and have another look.

Maybe it was an artifact in the data.

But before he would send any more reports back to Dr. Roberts at Harvard, he would make sure he and his family were safely aboard the US Air Force flight out of here.

Dr. Peterson strode along the hallways of the tenth floor of the Ernest Rutherford Computer Lab building into his corner office. The place was deserted, the hallway echoing on each footfall. He’d never seen it this empty. Even in the middle of the night on weekends over holidays, there were always a few graduate students hovering in the labs, monitoring the equipment and running experiments.

Now there was nobody. Everyone had left.

But to where?

That was the problem.

With all commercial flights in and out of New Zealand grounded, the options for leaving the island nation were strangulated. Two of Dr. Peterson’s wealthier friends had managed to secure berths on cruise liners for astronomical sums. Even container ships had been selling seats to the highest bidders. Dr. Peterson had two young children, which was why he did what he had to do.

He waved at the young men and women lining the entrance to his office.

Three US Air Force crew in jumpsuits and two young New Zealand Army recruits in full combat gear, with weapons propped beside them, slouched side by side on chairs by the entrance, spots usually occupied by students waiting to get their exam results. These soldiers were waiting for him and his research assistant to finish their work.

Copying the drives here in New Zealand had been his idea, to reduce the risk of losing it. They could also transmit the most critical data over the fiber optic lines. He had convinced Dr. Roberts of Harvard of the merits of this plan, but the real goal had been to secure his family a way out.

“We’re almost done,” Dr. Peterson told the US Air Force captain by the door.

The young man nodded. He was half asleep. It was his job to ferry them to the Wigram Air Force Base on the outskirts of Christchurch, where an F-22 was waiting to send the package out to an aircraft carrier waiting in the Indian Ocean. The package had arrived from McMurdo Station the night before, and had then been carried up here. It had seemed a simple task to begin with, to copy a few disk drives, but he hadn’t quite been prepared to copy thousands of terabytes, despite what he told Harvard.

Dr. Peterson had almost unlimited capacity in the main facility, but all this was cloud storage. Actual physical drives that he could carry in a suitcase weren’t things he usually dealt with. He’d had to bike to a local shop in the middle of the afternoon the day before to find the right equipment.

The city of Christchurch looked like it had been hit by a zombie apocalypse.

Complete panic had set in as people headed into the hills or boarded up their homes. The same thing was happening in Australia. It was the middle of the summer, with record heat waves and raging bushfires, and now a second sun had appeared in the skies. Temperatures were skyrocketing. Supernovas typically peaked over months and then dimmed, but some took only days to reach maximum brightness.

Nobody really knew what would happen.

How bright? How hot?

A flurry of internet talk about a massive merchant navy that could mount a Dunkirk-style evacuation of Australia and New Zealand which only stirred more terror. But then again, nothing might happen. Aeon might dim and disappear. Become a nothingburger. That was what they said in America, in a detached sort of way, as if they imagined this wouldn’t affect them up there.

Dr. Peterson sat at his desk and checked his screens. Almost there. Another half hour and all the data should be copied over.

He opened up the other windows on his computer screen and looked at the neutrino data again. Was he seeing what he thought he was?

Out the south-facing window of his office, the bright dot of Aeon hung about halfway up in the sky. It had brightened significantly since the night before, but was still faint enough to look straight at. It was just past lunch, so the sun was almost directly overhead. Blue skies. Out the windows to the west, he could glimpse the glittering waters of the Pacific in the distance.

Looking at the data here, and copying it—while transmitting what they could by fiber—did dramatically reduce the risk of the only copy of the most important information in the world being lost. The second copy would be sent on another plane, together with him and his family, up to Hawaii, and then on another military flight to Seattle. From there he had a cousin in Vancouver, BC, in Canada, who said he would meet them at the border.

It was true that R Octantis was showing marked decreased variability, and maybe there was a chance that this was the star that had gone hypernova. As the head of computational astrophysics at Canterbury, he had seen his chance. He had told Dr. Roberts at Harvard just enough to make himself the subject matter expert and guarantee himself and his family seats on that US Air Force flight to America.

Anyway, now it was done. The data copied and secured. He fished his phone from his pocket to tell his wife they were on their way.

Then he put the phone down on the desk.

He was still facing the west side of his office, with a view out over the Pacific. Except there wasn’t a glittering band of sea twinkling in the distance. A smudged gray wall had replaced the ocean. The top of it puffy and circulating in the blue sky. He leaned forward and frowned. How far away was that? And what exactly was it?

He stood and walked to the window. Looked down. The foot of the churning gray wall was already sweeping along the edge of the harbor. With terrifying speed, it flew up the valley. He looked up again.

The top edge had to be thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of feet high. Dr. Peterson had traveled in the deserts of the Middle East and witnessed a haboob once, a giant sandstorm that had ripped into the town of Al-Jafr in Jordan when he was on a trip with his wife during his graduate studies. The roiling gray wall had the same shape and feel, but was magnitudes larger.

Dr. Peterson turned and ran back to his desk to pick up his phone to call his wife. The ten-story building began shaking, rumbling like an earthquake had hit. A beat later, the windows to his office shattered inward.

DAY THREE

Chapter 10

The Colony, Brazil

7:15 a.m. ET

“New ZeALAND?” Max Carver whispered. He found himself flat on his back in a bed, staring at a glowing ceiling of living wood. Had he just woken up? No, he had awakened before here. He was dropping in and out of consciousness. Or maybe dreaming within a dream. Was he high? He felt like he was stuck in the middle of a conversation but couldn’t remember about what.

“I think it’s been flattened. The whole south island.”

That was Ben Belloc’s voice. His old friend.

“We need to get out of here,” Ben said.

Max’s memories resurfaced. The crash. That guy Bullpup hanging out the side door of the chopper, the helicopter ripping into the dense jungle canopy. The monster coming out of dark waters, getting pinned underneath it. A blond woman.

Max asked, “Did Bull survive?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“Would I ask if I did?”

“He’s in the next room with two more of your crew—Kruger and Garza? One of the gunners, too. Pilots didn’t make it. We couldn’t locate any other survivors. It’s a miracle you’re not dead. You should have told me you were coming.”

Max could have sworn he heard Ben say they were fixing him. Fixing what? A hyperrealistic sheen hung over everything. Vivid dreams still bright in his mind. Of Tal. Of his unborn child.

“How long have I been here?” he asked, his throat like sandpaper.

“Two days,” Ben replied.

Two days? Max thought it had been few hours. He cursed and willed himself onto his elbows. Sensing he wasn’t going to vomit, he pushed all the way upright and swung his feet over the side. Hung his head down. She was right. Coming here was an idiotic idea. “I need to talk to my wife, Talisha. You have a phone I can use? Do you have phones?” Had Kruger contacted Buchannan yet? Were they prisoners here?

Ben said, “This is Brazil, not the moon, and you’re in the most high-tech village this side of it.”

“Or a radio.” Max’s voice trailed off.

“I heard you got married.”

“Am I allowed to talk to anyone? Are you holding me here?”

“Holding you? What do you think this is? Who do you think this is?”

“Is that a yes, or a no?”

Max remembered Ben had been asking about who had sent him here. What had he replied? Right now, that didn’t matter. Not anymore. Whatever he was supposed to be doing here, that was done. Mission scrubbed. He just needed to get back to Tal.

And Ben wasn’t an enemy target. This was his friend. One he came here to protect.

Max groaned, lifted his head, and took a good look at Ben. He wore an immaculate polo-necked black T-shirt, beige slacks, and leather sandals. Brown skin so smooth it looked like he had barely aged since they were teenagers. That same gap-toothed grin, but the short-cropped hair was salt-and-pepper. Time had worn his old friend down, too, just not much.

“You still with me?” Ben asked.

Max said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Of course we’ve got phones.” His friend produced one from his pocket. “What’s your wife’s number?”

Now that was a good question. Max hadn’t dialed Tal’s number in years. Everything was stored in his phone, which they had made him leave behind. Mission security, Buchannan had said. The team would have the best comms gear on the planet, in all cases.

“Gaia,” Ben said aloud, but not to Max. They were alone in the room. “Can you find Talisha Carver?”

“Who’s Gaia?” Max asked.

“Mother Earth.”

“Very funny.”

“She’s our AI,” Ben said. “Like Siri or Alexa.”

“But—”

“Here.” Ben handed over the phone.

“Hello?” A very familiar woman’s voice called out from the speaker.

“Tal?” Max put the phone to his head. “Tal, it’s—”

“You goddamned asshole.” Talisha burst into tears on the other end. “Don’t you ever do that to me again. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Other voices in the background. Sounded like she was in a bar, but it was still early morning. Maybe a breakfast place? She was always the smartest person in any room, but he hoped she wasn’t letting her impulsive side take over.

“Baby, I’m fine,” Max said. A shock of pure adrenaline the instant he heard her voice. “A few scratches. I’m at the Colony.” That made it sound like he was on vacation. “Are you okay? The baby?”

“We’re fine. The baby is perfect. Honey, you need to get back home. Right away. A supernova ignited. It’s not bad yet, but I’m not sure—”

“I’m coming. This mission is over. Did you check on my mom?” They had moved his mother to an assisted living facility on the outskirts of DC. “Where are you?”

A pause for two beats on her end. “I’m at home.”

He inspected his left wrist. It was encased in a transparent film. Some kind of a cast?

“Colonel Buchannan said it was a communications problem. Max, is that what happened?”

“We crashed,” Max said, “but I’m okay. Tal?” The line seemed dead. “Honey, you there?”

Ben took the phone back and swiped his finger across its surface. “Been having connection problems, but I am sure it’s not our end. I’ll see if Gaia can get her back. Should be a few minutes. Don’t sweat it. Don’t worry, man. We’re evacuating. I’m going to get you back to your wife.” He paused. “And a baby coming? Congratulations, man!”

“What drugs did you give me?” Max’s vision was still out of focus.

“Nothing worse than what we took a dozen times when we were kids.” His grin faded. “I heard about Charlie, man. I’m so sorry. It hurt me in a deep-down place when I found out about that. The three of us, we were a team. You remember?”

A flash in Max’s mind of his brother Charlie’s face in the sun. Sandy hair and goatee, and that one front tooth at a funny angle that they always made fun of. Snaggletooth, they called him.

Ben breathed deep and said, “But then, really the only serious philosophical question that matters in life is suicide. You dig me? Like what Camus said. I mean, that’s the most basic question once you realize you’re alive. Should I end it? Is it worth it? The pain, man. That’s what I mean. That’s the dichotomy—to be or not to be. Once you figure that out, everything else becomes crystal clear. I been thinking about that a lot lately.”

“You’ve been thinking of suicide?” Max sat up an inch straighter.

“What happened to Charlie made me think a lot.”

“Seriously, what drugs did you give me?”

“Not exactly drugs, not in the normal sense. I pumped you with nanoparticles we can program to block your nociceptive system—”

“My what?”

“Your pain receptors. Stop the pain. Take all the hurt away, man. Can even rebuild body tissue.”

“You’ve got a biotech shop down here? I saw your TED Talks.”

“They wanted you to interview me, huh?” The grin returned. “Feel good enough to stand?”

Max was feeling better. A lot better. Hearing Tal’s voice felt like a thousand volts had energized him. Only one mission now—his own, to get home.

He got to his feet.

Ben strode to the door, which pulled open ahead of him like flower petals retracting at night, except bright morning light poured in through the opening. The rising sun brimmed over the jungle canopy into the clearing, the skies flecked with towering cumulus clouds.

Max followed Ben outside and held up his left hand to shield his eyes from the brightness. He had to hold up his right as well to protect from the glare of the second sun, almost ninety degrees along the horizon, low in the sky and occluded by the trees. It shone like a blood-red sunset in the middle of the day.

Aeon.

The heat felt like stepping into a steam sauna.

“Yeah, man, it’s brighter,” Ben said. “Doubled in luminosity five times in the past sixteen hours. Might get as hot as the sun. UV is on the rise, too. The whole Colony is bugging out. Getting my people north of the equator. The waters of Noah are coming back, brother. God is speaking.”

Max still couldn’t see properly. His eyes teared up. Too bright.

“Put these on.” Ben handed over sunglasses from his shirt pocket.

The scene dimmed. The pain in Max’s eyes receded. Through darkened lenses he scanned left and right. Tried to understand what he was looking at. What had he expected? Blackened stumps of the cleared rainforest and huts on stilts?

Max was on the second or third floor of a structure, the forest floor difficult to make out. Towering trees bordered the circular clearing straight ahead—maybe five hundred feet across—except those weren’t trees, not exactly. Windows and walls, buildings that seemed to grow organically from the woodwork of branches around them. Tendrils of vines wove like snakes in the air, undulating in the sunshine. Glowing jellyfish hovered below the outstretched awnings of the structures towering into the sky.

Chapter 11

South Pole, Antarctica

1:20 a.m. NZT

“Dag, how are we doing?” Xin yelled down the stairs.

She pulled closed the exterior door and the bright glare off the Antarctic ice lowered to the semidarkness Dag liked when working. Another C-130 had just landed outside. The last flight out, but it would stay until everyone was collected. Only a handful remained. They needed to pack up, but there was no need to panic—or there shouldn’t be.

Xin fought a worming uneasiness in her bowels.

Dag replied from below, “Ten minutes and I’ll have everything downloaded and squared away. I’ll do the system shutdown after that. Maybe five minutes. You starting a bagdrag? Take mine out, too?”

Xin descended the metal stairs from the rooftop hutch to the top interior level of the IceCube building. The structure was two floors, a metal rectangle about a hundred feet by sixty with four oval windows spaced evenly down each side. Emergency doors led outside onto metal gantries, the whole building supported on stilts to keep it above the snow and ice that accumulated over the decades-long planned lifecycle of the project.

“We’ll go together,” Xin replied. “We have thirty or forty minutes.”

She slumped into a chair next to Dag.

“Well, then,” he said as he pulled back from his keyboard. “Ten minutes of playtime.”

He stretched like a cat. Leaned toward her. His body lithe and wiry, but in a good way. Xin had heard he was into extreme sports, and had done his share of mountaineering and Antarctic adventuring.

Dag asked, “Tell me about your kid. Bing, right? Like Crosby? Cool name.”

“Bingwen. It’s Chinese.”

“Nice. He must be proud of you.”

“Prouder of him. Didn’t cry once when I left. So brave and strong. He’s the most beautiful little boy in the world.” Which is what all mothers would say.

“He’s with your husband?”

“We’re separated.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Dag said, but didn’t look like he was.

The Norwegian seemed sweet on her, if she could borrow that American idiom. A nice turn of phrase. She had to admit she felt an attraction as well. She said, “Bing is with my mother and father. They’re retired.”

“Time with grandma and grandpa is precious. I must say, Xin, you’re dedicated. I respect that.”

“Dedicated?” Was he making fun of her?

She was fluent, but humor sometimes escaped her. Double meanings. Cultural references. If anything, she felt like she was failing her little Bingwen. Each transport that flew out, she wanted to shriek and run and get herself onto it, but sacrifices had to be made.

The Chinese word for “crisis” was made up of two syllables—the first meaning danger, the second signifying opportunity. Not exactly opportunity, but an inflection point. Xin had come here to create new possibilities for her family—and she still intended to make the most of it, no matter what. The bigger the crisis, the bigger the opening, and now perhaps the greatest of all time had landed in her lap.

The world was about to change forever, and she intended to find a way to the top of whatever it became. And she had just become famous, by all accounts.

“I mean, about staying here this long,” Dag added, seeing her puzzled expression. “I can see you want to get back to Bing, but you’re here, helping make humanity safe. Collecting as much data from the instruments as you can before leaving. Taking one for the team.”

Xin regained her composure. “What else could I do?”

“Gotten out of here as fast as possible. Like everyone else. It’s too bad. I had an adventure planned for the end of my rotation. Would have gotten me in the record books.”

“I look forward to you telling me about it on the flight back.”

Dag leaned closer, his hand inches from hers. “I am only still here because of you.”

She pulled back.

He added, “Because you told me it was safe.”

A flash of guilt. She replied, “I wouldn’t stay if it wasn’t.”

That wasn’t true at all. She had lied to him on purpose, abused his affection. She needed Dag. Xin didn’t know if remaining here was safe.

Nobody knew.

She had assured Dag it was safe because she needed his expertise to download data from the Keck Observatory and BICEP radiation detector and the other dozen projects still running here. The American military’s DSCS satellite, the only one with decent bandwidth, had shut down in the initial gamma burst from Aeon. There was no way to get even a dribble of the terabytes of data generated hourly by the dozen telescopes and sensor arrays down here pointing straight up at the anomaly. The only way was to pack the information onto disk drives and fly it back to civilization.

Ground-based telescopes and observatories anywhere north of the equator couldn’t even get a line-of-sight to Aeon, and there weren’t many in the south. Those few had to peer through a thick layer of atmosphere. Most of the orbital telescopes and observatories had been damaged or shut down in the initial gamma burst, their systems put on standby in case of more radiation flares.

Even the handful that were active and repurposed to point at Aeon were mostly useless. The supernova was too bright now. It was like pointing a normal telescope at the sun.

As the “discoverer” of Aeon, Xin had acquired special status on-ice, and she made herself the de facto data collector for all the experiments and observatories. Everyone was happy to oblige as they scurried to get away. Xin had sent off a first package of data the day before with one of the transports, which was now slowly making its way to Washington—and she had made slight changes to the data going to America, which was another reason she had been forced to stay as long as possible.

In a backpack on the table was Xin’s real prize: Two dozen disk drives with a petabyte of pure data gold that she would deliver to the general secretary in Beijing.

“How much longer?” Xin asked.

Dag checked his monitor. “Six minutes.”

The grind of the turboprops went silent beyond the walls. The C-130 must be parked. The last of the gear and staff were starting to be loaded. “I’ll go downstairs to get our bags ready.”

“All data downloaded,” Dag said after checking his screen. “I’ll start system shutdown. By the time you get back up, I’ll have it stowed and we’ll get out of here. You can tell me more bedtime stories about exploding stars on the ride to Mactown. Must say, I’m a bit sad.”

“Aeon is a terrible thing,” Xin commiserated.

“Sure, but I mean that we didn’t get to spend more time together.”

Despite herself, Xin blushed. “I’m going out,” she said without meeting his eyes.

Still with her parka on, Xin strode to the metal stairs leading down. She crossed the empty ground floor of IceCube, past the littered cubicles, to the front entrance. Their gear was stacked by the door. She banged open the exit and hauled first one backpack and then the other onto the metal walkway, and then down the flight of exterior stairs to a waiting sled.

Wheezing from the effort—the South Pole was at nearly ten thousand feet of elevation—she stopped to catch her breath. The C-130 was about three hundred meters away along a well-worn ice path straight between the BICEP and Keck observatories. She hadn’t seen the man she had spotted earlier again. Probably already on a plane out. She keyed the walkie-talkie: “Susan, got our bags on the sled, on our way over now.”

She waited for a reply.

The low growl of the turboprop’s turbines thundered to life and roared. Snow crystals spat back from the plane in a white cloud. Inside the IceCube structure, the familiar wail of the siren reverberated. Fifteen minutes till the plane left. Xin keyed the walkie-talkie again: “Susan, do you read me?”

Nothing but static. Maybe she couldn’t hear over the noise of the props.

Xin took one step toward the plane and stopped, then switched frequencies on the walkie-talkie. “Dag, are you coming down?”

The siren wailed under the roar of the turboprops.

“Dag!” she yelled into the walkie-talkie. Xin took two more steps to the plane, then stopped again and screamed, “Tā mā de!”

She turned and sprinted three steps at a time to the door, swung it open, and ran to the interior staircase. Loud popping sounds echoed over the wailing siren. Was the ice under the structure cracking? She leapt up the stairs yelling Dag’s name.

She found him at the top.

Draped over the guardrail and banister. Covered in blood.

Chapter 12

The Colony, Brazil

7:22 a.m. ET

“What are those?” Max Carver pointed up at the things in the air. His mouth fell open like he’d stepped in front of a train.

The objects overhead looked like neon cuttlefish. Fins rippled along their sides. Floating hundreds of feet up in the air. Dozens of them, some the size of cars, others like buses. Some shimmered in and out of view, as if they were and weren’t there, the bottoms lit up pink from Aeon. Those were what the Black Hawk helicopters had crashed into, a whole swarm of them, when the supernova flashed.

“Vacuum airships,” Ben replied. “Our version of drones. Tech here takes getting used to for newbies. Come look.” He took two steps to the edge of the veranda. The railing undulated around a small gap in it.

The floor had the same tightly woven wicker-like material as the ceiling, except it didn’t glow. Max took a stamping step out the door. Felt solid enough.

Overhead stretched the flickering emerald forest canopy. Sunlight slanted across the shaded landing. Insects buzzed. A brightly colored bird fluttered through branches to the right and cawed. It took off into a flock that circled before heading away. Max was maybe two stories above the ground. More? Ferns and flowers dotted the forest floor between barely visible tops of transparent domes. The trees around them shimmered slightly, as if they were paintings of a forest and not quite real.

“Look closer.” Ben indicated the railing.

Max leaned in. Focused. Tiny fingers became visible within the gap, the probing tendrils searching to find each other. Entwining. A beat later and the gap in the fencing closed. Sealed itself.

“This building was made for you,” Ben said. “We only make what we need. The rest gets digested back into the forest.”

Max still felt disoriented. This wasn’t helping. “Digested?”

“The little fingers twining together? Xenobots—half machine, half biological. Made from poison dart frog cells we harvested from the forest around us. Living robots. Synthetic lifeforms we can program. Like 3D printers, but with a biological substrate. It’s the basis for much of our physical program here.”

“You made this structure yesterday? You mean since we arrived?”

“You certainly made an entrance.”

Max tested the railing. Leaned over to inspect the snaking branches of the tree holding these rooms aloft. The roots below, stony gray claws that dug into the earth, were heavy with moss and green decay and thick as a man’s thigh. The branches twined up around the structure like a gardener’s stringy fingers. A cumulus cloud billowed in the blue sky. The air smelled like thunder, electric and crisp over the hot organic fragrance of wet dirt.

Sweat wicked down his back.

From behind him, strong arms wrapped around and crushed, lifted him clear into the air. Before he could be alarmed, a familiar voice said, “Man, oh, man, I am glad to see you up and around. You saved my life, brother. Asher and Ezra, they got themselves a new favorite Uncle Max.”

The arms released.

Max staggered forward and turned. Bull’s cheeks were rosy to each side of a lopsided ear-to-ear grin. Massive biceps. He was now wearing a black T-shirt like Ben, and the same sandals and beige slacks. No tactical gear or weapons in sight. Bull came from two rooms down, the door now open. Max counted five entrances attached to this balcony, but no stairs or exits he could see.

He asked, “Where’s Kruger? Garza?”

“Out looking around. Reconnaissance. Garza is buddying him. I stayed here to watch you.”

He looked about as happy as a hog in a wallow. Was it just seeing Max? What had happened while he was unconscious?

“Kruger and Garza are out there?” Max pointed into the middle of the Colony clearing.

Ben said, “You are free to do as you please, as I said.”

The railing to Max’s right separated and swung outward—or rather, it rolled backward on itself to create a ten-foot opening. A gray dome rose in space before them. One of the airships, six yards across and ten long and shaped like a football. What Max had thought were tentacles toward the front had reshaped into two tubular seats, one beside the other. It hovered, its side fins fluttering and vibrating to keep it in place.

“You can’t be serious,” Max said.

“It’s the science of can and can’t,” Ben said as the bubble drone lifted away. He was seated next to Max in a canopy that swung below the body as it rose. “Formulating laws of nature nobody has done before. That’s what our Colony was about. Making things better. Simpler.”

Bull waved goodbye from the balcony. Ben controlled the drone using his phone, said it would be faster than walking, that they didn’t have much time to waste. The seat felt like it wrapped itself around Max’s body when he stepped in. A silvery tube cinched itself around his waist to hold him, which felt more creepy than secure. The drone wobbled as they stepped in, like getting onto a giant balloon. The fin fans—for lack of a better term—vibrated and pulsed, sending a whoosh of air past the occupants as the drone swung around and lifted into the air.

“Like this vacuum airship.” Ben patted the gray plastic hull.

“How’s it vacuuming exactly?” Max leaned forward and the drone tilted with his weight shift. The thing didn’t feel steady.

“How does a balloon work? One that flies up when you let it go?”

“You fill it with gas.”

“Why?”

“Because helium is lighter than air.”

“And what would be lighter than that? Even lighter than hydrogen.”

Max thought for a beat. “Nothing. A vacuum.”

“The reason we use light gases in balloons and airships is to provide outward pressure to hold back the membrane. But what if you could build an extremely delicate structure inside the balloon, strong enough to hold the membrane back, and then suck all the air out? That’s what’s in the lifting body behind us. Inside the balloon that’s lifting you up”—Ben patted the gray plastic of the drone behind him—“is a vacuum. As you said. Nothing. We use nothing for lift. Who said you can’t get something from nothing?”

The balloon drone wobbled and swung fully around.

They cleared thirty more feet into the air. From this height, a network of paths and domes became more obvious between the dense foliage of the clearing. A man and woman on a path below turned and looked up, two children walking between them, and waved. Maybe a dozen other people visible.

“You see the glass in those windows?” Ben said, pointing at sunlight reflecting between the branches of trees.

Max nodded.

“Transparent wood. Same as in your room. That’s tech from back in your world, just nobody uses it. The buildings here are coated in a metamaterial that makes them almost invisible. And that cast we put on your arm. It’s a clear skin replacement that speeds recovery.”

Max looked at his arm, where the caiman had grabbed him. The sheath that had been over it ten minutes ago had melted away. The ripped skin healed with fresh tissue.

“And you see over there?” Ben extended his arm and pointed at three large domes. “That’s the new aerodrome, we’re building huge versions of these th—”

“What are you doing down here, Ben?”

The fin fans whirred in near silence while Ben adjusted himself in his seat, a frown creasing his brows. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“I’m trying to help you. You need to stop this project and come back.”

“Seems I’ve been doing all the helping so far.”

“Are you going to come back with us?”

“If you wanted to talk, a phone call might have been easier.”

“Why did you cut off communications with the outside world a month ago?”

“Because we were planning a big event.”

“What event?”

“I can’t tell you. I need to show you.”

“You launched a missile from foreign soil without authorization or notice.”

“That was a satellite.”

“The Brazilian army is about to take this place out,” Max said. “Or Stillwater. They’ll have another team coming, I’m sure of it.”

“I think they’ve got more important things to deal with now.” Ben pointed at Aeon. “Like I said, God is speaking.”

“Could you please quit that? You sound like your dad.”

“And you’re starting to sound like yours.”

The drone had to be a hundred feet above the forest floor by now and the bright dot of Aeon came fully into view. Max squinted at it. Like a floodlight fixed near the horizon.

Ben said, “That wasn’t fair. I didn’t mean to bring up your old man.”

Whirring silence for another beat.

Max pointed at Aeon, golden like a never-fading sunset. “How bright is it going to get?”

“Nobody knows, and that’s the truth. By nightfall it might be as hot as the sun, but then again, there won’t be a night. Daylight for twenty-four hours a day until it dims.”

“Which happens when?”

“Can take months to darken. A hypernova? Who knows. Even longer. That’s what I’ve heard they think it might be.”

A few beats of the drone’s fins as that settled in. Max had witnessed the power of Aeon’s initial flash with his own eyes. “It’ll get that bright?”

“Brother, this is God wielding his power. It might burn the oceans right off us.”

“Jesus Chr—”

“No blaspheming.”

“Are you being serious?”

“As cornbread that ain’t done in the middle.”

“I mean about Aeon.”

“I said we’re evacuating. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

“I need to get the hell out of here,” Max muttered under his breath.

“Hell being the operative word. But there’s always a way out. Like I said, everyone’s always got that choice.”

Max tried to follow. Ben’s mind had always ping-ponged from one thought to another. Was he talking about suicide again? Now? After what he just said about Charlie? Max studied more of the Colonists walking by below. They all turned to wave. Smiles on their faces. Unhurried.

Ben said, “You’re married, right?”

It wasn’t a question. Max nodded anyway, still watching the people below. Something wasn’t right.

“But that’s not a forever thing. You need to wake up every morning and still want to be married. Do you?”

Max thought of Tal’s swollen belly. “I do.”

“Life is the same thing, is what I’m saying. You need to want to be here. If not, what’s the point? I’m just saying, if you decide you want life, there must be reasons for you to want it. That gives you your guide to follow. Why you’re alive. You see what I mean? Make sense?”

“If you’re talking about suicide again, it’s the coward’s way out.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Ben gave him that trademark grin again.

This time the smile was annoying. “Isn’t suicide the worst sin?”

“Depends on if you’re really dead afterward.”

Ben’s grin now had an edge of lunacy to it. Max switched tracks. “You got an airfield here? I mean for regular planes? I need to get to a radio if your phone isn’t working. Can you do that for me?”

“We have radios.”

“Can I use one?”

“I would let you use one, yeah.”

“Then let’s get down.”

“You can leave right now. I could send you north on this thing. It’ll take a day or so, but you’ll get there. Always a way out, like I said.”

Silence. “I could go right now?”

“Did I stutter?”

Max held Ben’s gaze. Was this his friend? The same one he had grown up with? The eyes weren’t quite the same. Something was definitely off.

“We will get you back to Talisha, that I promise,” Ben said after a pause. He fixed Max with his penetrating stare and narrowed his eyes. “How many months pregnant? Six? Seven?”

The drone balloon stopped moving. Hovered.

“Get me down,” Max said.

“I know why you’re here.”

“Get this thing on th—”

Ben said, “They want you to bring me back. The ones that sent you. You need to bring me back with you. Am I right?”

“None of that matters anymore.”

“You could have asked me for money.”

“It’s not about money.”

“That twitch over your left eye. You were always a terrible poker player.”

“I came down here for you, Ben. They were going to take you out by force if I couldn’t talk to you.”

Max had the sudden realization he was ten stories in the air, suspended below a balloon in a chair remote controlled by Ben.

When Aeon ignited, those helicopters had flown into a swarm of these airship drones. Ben had to know they were coming. It was no accident. And Max hadn’t actually seen Kruger or Garza. Nobody else except Bull, who looked out of it. Those rosy cheeks. Like he was drugged.

Max gripped the sides of the flimsy seat. He said, “The American government thinks you’re going to do something terrible.” Max really had no idea how long he had been laid out. He was going on Ben’s word. No idea what drugs they gave him. He might have been here a day or a week. Or a month.

“They?” Ben said. “Who are ‘they’?”

“Colonel Buchannan. Copeland.” Max said. “High-level government people. Americans. Europeans. You can’t go launching rockets without asking. Rules apply to billionaires, too. Buchannan’s daughter is here. Iona. He wants her back. You’ve got important people’s sons and daughters at the Colony, millions of followers on social media, they’re worried—”

“I’ll make everyone drink the Kool-Aid?”

Max had been staring down. He looked back at Ben. A glass of red liquid in his hand.

Where did that come from?

Ben took a sip and offered it. “You want me to come back with you? You want to know about the Colony, what I’m planning? You want to get back to Tal?” He held out the glass. “Only one way out of here, my man. Will you drink with me? Only one question we need to answer: Do you trust me?”

Both of Max’s hands remained gripped to the silvery webbing. He should have stayed in his truck. What was he doing here? This was insane. He felt the webbing give way and began falling with stomach-lurching dread.

But he didn’t feel like he was falling down.

He felt like he was falling in.

Max flailed, an image of his wife’s face flashing before him.

Chapter 13

San Francisco, California

4:25 a.m. PT

Talisha CARVER hunkered down in her office cubicle. Exhaling, she looked at a picture pinned to the gray foam divider beside her computer screen, of her and her mother standing next to the Kotel, the Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. Taken two years ago. She and her eema had stuck a slip of paper into the wall, a prayer written to God.

And a prayer had just been answered.

Max was alive. Tal had just spoken to him. Her cell phone still in her hand. Which was already something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. No personal devices were allowed in here, but today she was taking unusual risks. Max had called her, but the line had cut off suddenly. Was it because of where she was? Or something else?

She pocketed the phone.

“No idea what this is,” said a young man in a narrow-waisted gray suit. Marc Schmidt. He deposited a clear plastic cube, twelve inches to a side, on her desk. A glass vial of white powder suspended in its center. A red label on one side with three concentric circles. “Geek squad across town says it doesn’t fit any known viral or biological profiles, but they haven’t had much time to look at it. Best guess is it’s a prion.”

“What’s a prion?”

He handed her a printout. “Not quite a virus, but not bacterial either. That’s what they told me. Not alive, but not entirely dead. And electrically active.”

Tal’s knee was bouncing up and down nervously. Her hands were trembling a little, too. She wasn’t cut out for cloak-and-dagger. Too late now. She pushed her chair back and away from the container with the biohazard and poison stickers on it. “Shouldn’t that be confined to the labs?”

She scanned the paper he handed her and read: “The term ‘prion’ refers to abnormal, pathogenic agents that are transmissible and can induce abnormal folding of specific cellular proteins called prion proteins that are found most abundantly in the brain. Prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.”

“Nasty, right?” Marc said.

Her new buddy could be reckless. He shouldn’t be walking around with this sample. But Marc’s reputation for being careless was precisely why she had befriended this young man in the first place. He wanted to impress, and she needed his help, just not in the way he understood.

“No way it’s getting through internal mail,” Marc said. “All the labs are shutting down in a few hours. If you want this looked at, you need to figure it out yourself.”

“Pardon me?”

“They’re shutting down the labs,” Marc repeated. “At least till this blows over. Or blows up. Or whatever you call it when a star goes hypernova. Did not have that on my apocalypse bingo card.”

Marc smiled at his attempt at humor, then looked up at the bank of monitors along the far wall of the eight-foot shared office space. Usually, the displays listed incoming threat vectors posted by the SOC team, staffed day and night to analyze data anomalies. The area was walled off by another protective layer of glass and electronic isolation.

At night, the staff here was usually half the daytime roster. Still two hours before sunrise, but it was all-hands-on-deck tonight. The entire floor hummed with conversation, was shoulder-to-shoulder with bleary-eyed analysts. Almost everyone except Tal stared at the monitors with views and newscasts of Aeon from around the world.

In Buenos Aires it was near 10 a.m., and in Sydney almost 10 p.m., but newscasters were pointing up at bright auroras visible even in the blue skies at both locations. The video feed from Melbourne showed dark clouds and lightning storms, and Perth was being pelted with flooding rains in the middle of its dry season. A few screens showed clogged highways and views of raging forest fires.

The night before, Tal had met with her hacker contact, Monk.

Over the course of the past day, Aeon had grown a thousand times in intensity. Steadily getting brighter but beginning to plateau again, some scientists were saying. Tal peeled her eyes away from the bank of monitors and looked back at her own screens, then at the plastic biohazard container on her desk.

Marc said, “A week ago, some nutjob in Brazil using Amazon to deliver thousands of packets of mysterious white powder all over the country would have been a national emergency, but now the labs aren’t even going to look at them. Gather it up and burn it, is what the boss said. That’s why I grabbed this one.”

“Thanks, Marc,” Tal replied. She didn’t really want it.

What did Colonel Buchannan want with her Max? With Ben Belloc and the Colony? His daughter was there, but as much as he played the sympathy card, Tal was suspicious. As charming as Buchannan was, something didn’t feel right about him. A smile that felt off. Ans what was the man’s daughter doing down there? Tal had up looked Iona Alcott—she had taken the name of her husband, now deceased—and read her files. The woman was a legitimate scientist in the field of parasites and bioelectronic interfaces, but how those two fields of research connected was a bit of a mystery.

Images had come back from inside the Colony, from military-hardened overwatch satellites that were still working. It looked like they were mobilizing to get out of there, which wasn’t surprising given the events. If Ben Belloc was all they said he was, the man would have a plan, and she had a feeling he would bring Max back. Colonel Buchannan, on the other hand—Tal wasn’t sure he could be trusted.

Which was why she needed to hack into the Spectrum database.

Around the NSA, the latest analysis of the Colony was that nobody was really interested anymore. The satellite images had been matched with pictures from the ground. The strange oval objects were airship drones. The Colony had advanced 3D printers that were interesting, but their xenobot technology was derived from work done by scientists at Caltech a few years before. The mini rockets they launched their satellite on was probably a copycat of a dozen other commercial space start-ups, fabricated in their 3D printer shops. Interesting, but the intel said they weren’t exactly weapons of mass destruction.

All resources at all levels of the government had now shifted to Aeon. The confusion had just made Tal’s job easier.

After meeting Monk, she came straight to the office. Asked Marc to join her. Used his credentials while he was staring at the wall of screens to log into his accounts, then slipped into the SOC to chat with the guys about Aeon.

She used Marc’s identity to install the hack from Monk behind the NSA firewalls from inside the operations center. Monk had given her a zero-day exploit he said could defeat the government’s ring-fencing, a honey pot that would snag any incoming contacts. Trap the code and create a conduit to pull out the data. Provide her with evidence of the Spectrum project and a way to track it.

Aeon was the perfect diversion.

Tal had the incoming threat and incidence reports on two screens in her cubicle. Almost everything here was generated by AIs now—algorithms that scanned vast incoming troves of information and churned through it to look for anomalies. The chatter on social media had tripled in the last day, the volume of phone calls internationally ballooned even more.

But on her third screen, she had the exploit running.

Tal glanced again at the picture of her and her mother in Jerusalem. She knew those prayer notes were collected a few times a year and buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. Her mother was now entombed not far from that slip of paper.

Two years gone already.

It was also two years ago that Tal started to become aware of the Spectrum project. She had been working at Rockdyne, the NSA subcontractor, for long enough to have climbed the ranks. Eema had been proud. Cyberwarfare was the next frontier in the mission to protect, and Tal had honed her skills. But along the way, she had started to notice strange coincidences, as though the NSA somehow had access to the data from their partner agencies before it arrived.

The Snowden-era PRISM project had been dismantled years ago, the American Congress restoring due process to privacy, and the NSA had at least paid lip service to it. What Tal suspected, what she had started to uncover, went far beyond what PRISM had been. A global network that was spying on citizens in every country, a system that was reading every email and listening to every conversation and tracking and analyzing it and storing the data in an offshore facility.

The data wasn’t stored on American soil, of that much Tal was sure.

In her covert investigations, the word Spectrum had come up, but then all records of it had been automatically erased from data logs by mysterious AIs just as quickly. Something or someone was operating inside the NSA to cover their tracks. Tal was able to find breadcrumbs, but not the bread.

Spying on your own citizens was one thing, but a global conspiracy? Who was controlling it? And why? What was the data being used for? A week ago, it had seemed the most important thing in the world before everything changed when Aeon flashed into existence over the South Pole.

Why was Talisha still pursuing Spectrum? Because of the question that had been picking at a corners of her mind since she found out about the shadowy project—why? Why would some cabal of global intelligence elites be monitoring the network traffic of the entire world? What would they be listening for?

The answer: They had to have known it was coming. Whoever ran Spectrum must have known about the impending supernova.

Her mother had taught her many lessons, but her father had always drilled the same one into her: The rich and powerful always screwed over everyone else. If the top echelons knew about Aeon ahead of time, that some apocalyptic disaster was about to befall the Earth, then they didn’t want anyone else knowing about it—giving them time to prepare their bunkers, letting them keep the status quo as long as possible to squeeze as much juice from the masses before they left them out to dry in Aeon’s burn.

The meek would inherit the Earth. Maybe. But nobody said what condition it would be in when the handover occurred.

Tal looked up from her monitor. Images of the bright burning dot of Aeon displayed on the screens across the walls.

Marc smiled at her. “How can you work with all this?”

“Somebody has to.”

At the front desk, over the tops of the cubicles, Tal noticed men in dark suits and sunglasses.

The receptionist looked panicked. She pointed over at Marc. Tal realized it must be because of her using his credentials to install her hack. That was fast. But wasn’t that too fast to be possible? She put her earbuds in and pretended not to pay attention to the men cornering a perplexed Marc near the water cooler.

A chime alerted her that the tripwire of her online trap had been triggered. Her servers were downloading data from Spectrum into her sandboxed server. This place was a classified environment, and what she was doing had to be setting off alarms that would soon point back to her. Tal turned off her computers. The screens went blank. She could check what she had trapped remotely from her hotel room.

She stood to go.

Striding to the exit, trying to not look hurried, she brought up the display on her phone. A piece of code had begun executing itself on her server. “What’s this?” she muttered to herself.

Unexpectedly, a computer-generated female voice answered, “I am Nyx.”

Chapter 14

The Colony, Brazil

7:35 a.m. ET

“I AM GAIA,” said a platinum-blond woman to Max Carver. She sat beside an oak desk. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, green and yellow flags snapped in a stiff breeze. Palm trees swayed as a trolley car accelerated over cobblestoned streets. In the distance, whitecaps danced across charcoal blue waters below a massive suspension bridge.

The Bay Bridge.

“San Francisco?” Max blinked to clear his eyes. A moment ago, he had been hanging below the balloon drone over the forest, and then felt like he was falling. “Weren’t we just—”

“You still are in the Amazon.” Ben sat behind the oak desk to Max’s right and leaned back in his chair. It squeaked.

Max was in a plush recliner by the back wall of a thirty-by-thirty office, three or four stories up, overlooking the Bay. He felt the smoothness of the leather armrests beneath his fingertips.

To Ben’s right, in an attending chair beside the desk, sat the woman who had just introduced herself. Hair so blond it was almost white, long and combed to one side but shaved on the other. Porcelain skin that looked like it would be cool and smooth to the touch with an ethereal glow that seemed to come from the inside. Each feature detailed with a razor. Eyebrows arched. An impish grin as she watched Max watching her.

Had Max seen her somewhere before? He said, “What the f—”

“Would you like a coffee?” The woman got up and smoothed her pants.

“Who is this?” Max asked Ben.

“I am Gaia,” the woman repeated.

“Remain seated,” Ben said to her.

She sat back down.

“Augmented reality, virtual reality, synthetic reality,” Ben said. “Welcome to the nexome, the Colony’s version of the web. The nexus of the human connectome, which is connected to you, and by that I mean your mind.”

“Ben, what the f—”

“Language. No need for language.”

Max felt himself breathing in and out, sensed the warmth of sunlight streaming through the window onto his exposed arms. He could even smell the freshly vacuumed carpet and the pine cleaner used to shine the table. Tentatively, he leaned down to get a better look out the window. Only one sun.

“Tiny bioelectronic devices in the water you drank,” Ben explained. “Nanoscale. Billions of them in a glass. The particles diffuse through your body, seek out and attach to neurons, create a network inside your body that connects to ours. I know it’s disorienting, but don’t panic. I’ll run you through the operating syst—”

“I didn’t drink anything.”

“You were reaching for it.”

Do you trust me? That had been Ben’s question in the balloon drone as Max felt himself falling. “I passed your test? Before I started falling?”

“You weren’t falling down. More, let’s say, inward.”

Max lifted his hands and rubbed them together, clasped the fingers together. He felt something, but something not quite real. Somehow slippery. Spongy. Almost wet. An iridescent sheen to everything. “That’s what you gave me, isn’t it? The drug? You said it took away the pain. It wasn’t morphine.”

“Washes out of your system after a few days,” Ben said. “It’s not permanent.”

That made it sound like a scar inflicted from a wound. If so, where had Max been punctured? He turned his hands over and inspected them. The simulation was good, but not perfect. A slight delay in the rendering? The visual had the feeling of a high-quality video game.

“Your wife is here,” Ben said.

“Inside your video game?”

“In San Francisco.”

“She’s at home.”

“She lied to you.”

Max took a moment to process. “Why would she do that?”

He knew his wife could be impulsive, and he knew she was toying with the idea of whistleblowing on some secret NSA project. He had advised against it, but she was more idealistic than him. Still, why would she be pursuing this now?

“Exactly my question,” Ben said. “Want proof?”

The image through the window shifted to a view inside an airport, of Tal half-waddling in that pregnant woman way through a security checkpoint. Signs for Peet’s Coffee in the background, and a flight message board with a date in its corner from the day after he left on the mission.

Max took it in for a few seconds. “How do I even know that’s real?” But he had the sinking feeling it was.

“Would I lie to you?”

Max blinked, pulled his eyes away from Tal as she got to the front of the line and asked for a coffee, one hand down and holding her swollen belly. Max held Ben’s gaze, looked past the hazel irises and deep into the simulated black of his pupils.

Ben said, “These are video feeds from two days ago we dug up doing facial recognition searches for you and your wife back in the world. We found this a few hours ago. Not real-time. Still no comms out, but I swear it’s us being blocked from the outside. Gaia, make sure to tell Max the instant we can reach Tal again.”

“Of course,” the blond-haired woman replied.

Max said, “You knew all about my wife and our pregnancy. You’ve been tracking her. This is part of a show for you?”

“The world is all a stage.” Ben waved a hand around the office and then pointed out the window. “Tal’s office is right there. The squat concrete windowless one with the immaculate but never-used green roof space. The NSA’s Pacific Rim data collector hub. And this location we are viewing from is—or was—the office of my first company, Belloc Robotics. Always loved this place.”

Like a TV channel switching, the view of San Francisco Bay through the window flipped to an image of Ben and Max seated under the balloon drone, hovering in space between the trees. Max lifted his arms. In the image in the window, the Max there lifted his arms as well. He moved his legs. Max-on-the-screen didn’t budge.

“Gaia is mediating control of your body back in the real world,” Ben said. “Mine too. Making sure we don’t hurt ourselves. Keeping us safe while we’re off, so to speak. You’re in complete control. Whatever you need, just ask Gaia. That’s the easiest way to navigate the nexome.”

“Then turn it off,” Max said.

“We don’t have much time. I’m trying to help you.”

“So, I don’t have control.”

“This is the fastest way.”

“To do what?”

“To explain.”

“I’m a truck driver, Ben. This is a bit outside my wheelhouse. I just need to get home.”

“I will get you back to Tal and the baby.”

“You keep saying that.” Max sat back.

The view of San Francisco returned. Cars honked on the streets below.

Max resigned himself to whatever Ben was doing, tried to push down the sensation that he’d lost control. Pushed down his anger. Ben was trying to educate him? Then get it over with as soon as possible. “I take it Gaia”—he nodded at blondie—“is the Colony’s AI, right? Like Alexa? But better?” He smiled at the woman.

She smiled back and nodded. “Thank you.”

Ben said, “She’s the reason all this is possible. Our AIs are helping us uncover new laws of physics. New materials. Better and faster ways of doing things. The Colony is a technology incubator, an accelerator, just like we had back in the Bay area, but better. Faster.”

“I watched your TED Talks.”

“The science of can and can’t—”

“If you think you can,” Max said, “or you think you can’t—”

“You’re right,” Ben completed the line for him, and the grin returned.

Max grinned back. They used that quote when they were teenagers. He needed to play along and earn Ben’s trust, then use that to get out of here as fast as he could. Get into his friend’s mind. That was the mission now.

“Ford was a fascist asshole, but he was correct.” Ben got up from his chair and circled behind Gaia, who kept smiling and focused on Max. “The science of can and can’t is much deeper than what he ever imagined. We’re close to combining all the laws of physics. Gravity with quantum physics. A whole new way of looking at the universe. That’s what Gaia is helping to bring us. And with what just happened, we need all the help we can get. We might even be able to figure out what Aeon is.”

The image on the window screen changed to the rainforest, the viewpoint wheeling around the edges of the clearing.

“Back in the 1940s, Von Neumann became famous for inventing game theory,” Ben continued, “and the idea of the universal computer. But his real masterpiece was about self-reproducing automata, published posthumously in 1966. Not a universal computer—but the universal constructor. That’s what we’re doing here. Bridging the digital and physical worlds. Building anything, anywhere. His theory is the basis for all complex systems, automata theory, even artificial life.”

“Your xenobots,” Max said.

“Now you’re getting it.”

“Von Neumann also designed weapons, didn’t he?”

“At my first start-up here in San Francisco,” Ben said. “I used to go on retreats into the wilds. Into the mountains. Into the rainforests. And then we would return. Refreshed and full of ideas. Eventually, I thought, why go back?”

“Like I said, I watched your TED Talks. And so”—Max flourished his hands in the air—“the Colony was born. Aren’t we in a hurry to get out of here?” Ben had said it was an evacuation, but Max didn’t get a sense of urgency from him.

“I need you to understand why I built this place. I’m not joking around.”

“You don’t need to explain why billionaires build lairs in the wilderness. I would too. I get it.”

“No, you don’t. Because even I didn’t know. Everything we created here—the advanced 3D printing, the xenobots, the airships—it was all for a reason, I just couldn’t see it.”

“Are we back to God?”

“Are you mocking me?”

“You’re such a science guy, Ben. Why are you holding on to all the stuff you said you hated about your dad? It seems—” Max hesitated to say crazy.

“I never hated God.” Ben paced back and forth. “Einstein believed in God. He was a committed theologian, and if he’s not enough of a science guy for you—”

“You said we don’t have much time. Stop wasting it.” Max felt the seconds ticking by like invisible drops tapping inside his mind.

Ben conceded and nodded. “You must have asked yourself: Did they know? The people who sent you here? About the supernova? That this was about to happen?”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

“Which means they sent you here into a danger much greater than what you signed up for, separated you from your wife and child-to-be. Whoever sent you here did this on purpose. Would you have come here if you had known?”

“No.” Zero hesitation in that answer.

“They lied to all of us, my friend. Any guesses why?”

Max had been pushing the thought away, but it ate the edges of his mind. Flamed the corners was more like. Tal needed him—his unborn child needed him—and he had taken off. He was never supposed to be that person. “Why don’t you tell me what you think?”

“That we are on the brink of a titanic struggle between good and evil, Max, and you are the messenger. That’s why you’re really here.”

“I’m here because my old boss asked me to help find his daughter, but more because I wanted to help you. That honest enough? All I want to do is get home.”

“Which will not exist soon, Max. Our planet was overcrowded, the herd needed to be culled. Mother Earth was dying. Humanity mindlessly destroying our only home through gluttony. Even you could see that, couldn’t you?”

“I have a child coming. Of course I want the world to be better.”

“These are Biblical times, Maximus. There was once an age when gods and mortals mixed freely. I believe those times are returning.” Ben turned to look at the image of the Colony on the window screen. “When Noah was building his Ark, I’m sure he had no idea what he was doing, either.”

“The Colony is your Ark?”

Ben pointed at the bright dot on the southern horizon. “And Aeon is my rain.”

Chapter 15

White House

Washington, DC

7:45 a.m. ET

“I think Belloc has gone totally off the rails,” Colonel Buchannan whispered.

“In your train.” Senator Copeland adjusted her thick-framed black glasses. She had on a checked pantsuit with low heels. “You’re the one that attacked him.”

“That was an attempt at reopening a dialogue.”

“With Black Hawk helicopters.”

“He shut off communications. Launched satellites. I remember you agreeing to this.”

“Just giving you enough rope.”

“Very funny.”

The way Copeland was dressed today looked like she was going for full schoolmarm, sheep’s clothing that hid the hyena beneath. It didn’t fool Colonel Buchannan. He had to tread carefully around her and her pack.

At least she looked fresh.

The colonel and Copeland were back in the attending hallway outside the Oval Office. Buchannan was again standing in front of the portrait of Benjamin Franklin. The mahogany buffet below it was now littered with cardboard coffee cups, none of them on coasters. Papers scattered across the polished top. Some on the floor. The young men and women shuffling back and forth through the West Wing looked like they hadn’t slept the night before. Shirts untucked and sleeves rolled up.

None of the excited whispers of the night before.

Buchannan hadn’t gotten much shut-eye, either.

Not since Dr. Robert’s announcement the night before, which hadn’t been made public because of the risk of mass hysteria. At this point it was still guesswork. It hadn’t made sense to go home and change, so Buchannan had taken a shower in the lower-level gym and changed his shirt.

The hallway now had a digital clock over the wall screens that displayed the time since Aeon had flashed into being. Fifty-four hours and forty-five minutes. And counting.

But dimming now for seven hours straight.

Hopefully wouldn’t start brightening again, which was his bet. The world might not be about to end, not quite yet. Which meant Colonel Buchannan still had work to do. To save it.

That was the whole reason he’d done everything he had ever done. To save his daughter. Protect humanity. Now he needed to get his little girl back here from the Colony. She was his baby, no matter how old she was now. Nothing would change that.

Those were the things he was supposed to be thinking.

He smiled his most ingratiating grin at Senator Copeland. “I think problem-solving is more the order of the day. A coming together? We are all in this together.”

Copeland gave him a long sideways look, but didn’t respond.

The curved door to the Oval Office opened and a young man peered around the corner. “The president will see you now,” he said and ushered them in.

President Charles had his shirtsleeves rolled up, still wearing the same red tie as the day before, sitting on the edge of one the beige sofas in the middle of the room with the vice president. The curtains to the Rose Garden were open, early morning light spilled in.

Beyond the trees and shrubs and calm morning light, black military trucks and vehicles were visible. They had rolled in the night before onto E Street and the Southeast and Southwest Gates. Protestors had amassed along Constitution Avenue the night before. The colonel’s car had to be ushered through them by Secret Service.

A meeting was in progress.

“—western states have formed a mutual cooperation alliance,” the vice president said in hushed tones as Buchannan entered. “The southern states from Virginia down have formed a block as well. Texas has called in their own guard. They don’t think we can respond as well as they can themselves.”

“Colonel and senator,” the president said and stood, indicating for them to take the opposite couch. “Please, join us.”

Colonel Buchannan took a chair, leaving space on the couch for the senator.

Senator Copeland acknowledged the president’s invitation. She sat beside him and folded her hands between her knees. “Sir, a breakaway group in the Gobi Republic in the north of China just announced their intention to declare independence. This event has opened many geopolitical rifts.”

The president absorbed the new information. “Any word from Beijing?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Once upon a time,” the president said. “Adversity and disaster were surefire ways to bring people together, but these days, it seems to push us apart.”

“We should shut down the social media platforms,” Copeland said. “They’re fueling misinformation that our administration is lying to the public.”

“Not being sure is not the same as lying,” the president said.

“Of course, sir,” Copeland replied.

The president turned to his vice president. “Rachel, could you fetch Dr. Owen and Roberts? Bring them in for another update?”

She gave him a quizzical look, then nodded. “Right away, sir.” She stood and exited through the secretary’s office.

The commander-in-chief had a serious look on his face. Colonel Buchannan imagined President Charles watching footage of himself on the jumbotron in Times Square later in the day, reviewing his motivational speech to the nation on ways they could overcome this. What had just happened? The man had just finished the morning security briefing. Buchannan needed to get a copy.

“Governor Trent of California heard a rumor that we knew about this event and didn’t tell anyone.” The president clasped and unclasped his hands as he talked.

“With respect, sir,” Colonel Buchannan said, “we should not be scaring ourselves with ghost stories. If this thing heats up like Dr. Roberts said last night, then we should all go home to our families, because there is nothing to be done. But if that does not come to pass, then we need to start acting now on the basis that this is survivable. Spreading rumors and conjecture before that would be irresponsible.”

“That is not what I am talking about.” The president fixed his eyes on Copeland and then Buchannan for a few seconds. “I will only ask this once. Did either of you have any advance knowledge of this event? With all those eyes and ears listening in corners we aren’t supposed to know about?”

Buchannan asked, “Did we know that a world-ending catastrophe was about to unfold?”

The president’s eyes moved from looking at Copeland to back at him.

“We had no advance knowledge, sir,” Buchannan said. “Zero.”

“No, sir,” Senator Copeland added. “We had no warning nor indication from any source about any astrophysical event. Possibly the Chinese knew something, that’s my only theory.”

The president said, “The Chinese knew about it. I would bet all the donuts on that. And the Russians, too. How were we so unprepared? Where was our intel? A Chinese spy was the first to announce the event on Twitter almost three days before it happened. Which our own security services ignored.” The president’s voice now held an edge of exasperation. “Dr. Xin Rhou. Correct? The researcher at the IceCube neutrino observatory? She works for the MSS? The Chinese CIA?”

“From what we’ve been able to dig up, yes, sir.”

“And you want me to believe that she just put that on social media three days before the world went to hell? The Chinese were covering their ass. They knew about this long before us. I am going to ask you one more time. Colonel Buchannan, Senator Copeland, did any of your people have wind of this?”

Buchannan and Copeland shook their heads in unison.

The colonel said, “We had heard rumors about a possible terrorist attack from extremists based in Brazil, but that was all we were chasing down. All due respect sir, your family is here under this roof. My only family is my daughter, in Brazil, and I’m trying to get her back. If I knew anything, I would have had her back long ago.”

The president sat back, apparently satisfied.

The door from the secretary’s office opened and the young man from before ushered in Dr. Owen, in a new blue sweater, and Dr. Roberts, somehow in an immaculately pressed dark suit and tie. The president indicated the two leather chairs toward the front of the couches.

Another man and woman came in behind them, the man in full military uniform. The colonel recognized him as the chief of staff of the Air Force, the woman as the head of NOAA. They both hung back at the edge of the room, near the Resolute Desk.

“Dr. Roberts,” the president said. “What’s the latest?”

“As I said yesterday, we began looking at the South Pole data at Canterbury University in Christchurch to speed up the process,” Dr. Roberts said as he sat at a leather chair at the head of the couches. “Copying and transferring and analyzing at the same time.” He looked nervous. “To reduce the risk of losing it.”

“And?”

“Hypernovas have quite distinct light curves, sir. And while this is matching some of its properties, others we are still not able to explain.”

Dr. Owen said, “Sir, the energy flux from supernovas can come in waves. In superluminous ones like this, the theory is that the ejecta wall of super-heated radioactive nickel and cobalt hits circumstellar dust clouds of iron.”

“Like a fuel-air explosion,” Dr. Roberts added. “An accelerant that amplifies the energy output.”

“But you’re analyzing the South Pole data, correct? We are getting to the bottom of this?”

Buchannan had the feeling this data from the South Pole was a bit of a red herring. Like trying to analyze the speed of a freight train bearing down on you when your foot was stuck in the track. Interesting, certainly, except you were still going to get hit by it.

“Sir, we were analyzing it.”

“Until?”

The chief of staff of the Air Force stepped forward. “Sir, the security situation in New Zealand has worsened.”

“Worsened?”

“We have lost contact with it, sir.”

“Come again?”

“The entire southern half of the island, sir. No communications. And we’ve lost touch with parts of Australia. Our bases in Pine Gap, Robertson Barracks, even our Naval Communications Station in Exmouth have stopped reporting.”

“Storm systems came out from the Southern Ocean,” the NOAA scientist standing behind the Air Force man said. “Wind topping hundreds of kilometers an hour. The best we can describe it is a cyclone the size of half the planet with its eye centered over the South Pole.”

She pressed a remote and a graphic appeared on the screen at the front of the Oval Office between Dr. Roberts and Owen, satellite images of swirling cloud systems.

“This is the best we’ve been able to piece together from what we have operating. The initial burst of Aeon fifty-four hours ago created a heat dome over the southern oceans, a high-pressure system now expanding north, creating traveling waves in our atmosphere, displacing the jet streams. Walls of evaporated water over the Southern Ocean are already changing planetary dynamics.”

She took a moment to collect herself and continued, “Half of the southern hemisphere’s ozone layer is gone. The austral ionosphere has thickened by orders of magnitude with the barrage of soft X-rays from Aeon, increasing the electron density in the upper atmosphere across the planet even into the north. Auroras will become visible in blue skies today, just as they have in the south. The heat is now driving multiple new hurricane systems formed yesterday in the Atlantic and Pacific basins toward both American coasts, and catastrophic electrical storms are predicted across the Midwest and through the western deserts.”

“What happened in Australia started yesterday, the storms, but the scale of the event was”—the Air Force man searched for the right word—“unprecedented.”

The door to the Oval Office opened again. A Secret Service agent slipped through and walked over to the vice president, who stood as papers were handed to her. She read through them. “Sir, Mr. President, I think we need to evacuate you to a secure location.”

Under his breath, Buchannan muttered, “We need to evacuate the entire damned planet.”

The president got up from the couch. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask everyone to leave.” He looked at the Air Force man. “And for God’s sake, get that data from the South Pole somehow.”

Chapter 16

South Pole, Antarctica

1:50 a.m. NZT

Dr. Xin Rhou stumbled up the metal staircase, waddling in her survival parka and pants, to Dag’s slumped body draped across the upper railing and banister. Blood smeared along his arm hanging down, his white Ramones T-shirt splotched with bright red. The warning siren wailed and grated, with the low growl of the C-130’s turboprops barely audible beyond that.

“Dag!” she yelled over the noise.

She had been downstairs, loading their bags onto sleds to cross the five-hundred-meter ice path—now more of a slush trench—to the runway and waiting aircraft, when she heard a loud bang upstairs.

The Norwegian had just finished uploading the last of the data from all the South Pole observatories and experiments and was supposed to be on his way down. He had packed the disk drives into padded backpacks. She scanned the tabletops behind him. No backpacks. That data was the only reason she had stayed this long.

Unzipping her bright red survival parka, she knelt beside him and held a hand gently to his side. He was bleeding. Definitely his blood. There was nobody else in the room, not that she could see. “Dag?” she said again, more softly as she was just inches from him. “Where are you hurt?”

He groaned and tried to push himself up from the railing. Xin gingerly tried to help him, while still scanning the tabletops. Had a lithium battery pack exploded? It happened sometimes, even with mobile phones, and they had packed a dozen high-capacity lithium cells into the pack next to the drives for powering laptops so Xin could analyze and process some of the data on the eight-hour flight to McMurdo. She should have made sure the lithium packs were away from the data.

“Dag,” she said again, more forcefully this time.

He groaned and rolled to his side to face her. His right arm hanging over the railing down the stairs came up to his left side, his fingers gripping the bare arm. “I was shot.” His shirt to the left side a mass of scarlet.

Xin’s eyes flittered from him to the desktops. Where was the backpack with the data? It wasn’t under Dag, wasn’t on the floor or anywhere visible. “What do you mean, you were shot?”

His eyes were bloodshot and watering.

“I mean, someone shot me,” he grunted.

Xin took a step back as he slid forward to his knees and stood unsteadily. The terminology the Amundsen Station people used often strained her comprehension. “A gun?”

“Yes, like a pistol, you know.” He tried to hold his right hand out, pointing.

Why would someone shoot him? The data. She didn’t even think anyone else was here. Nobody else was there except Susan the evacuation manager, Enrico, and—

Wait. That man. Waving at her from the trail a few hours before. She hadn’t recognized him, hadn’t ever seen him before. The siren warbled and wailed. The C-130’s turbines roared. The plane had to be turning around into the wind and getting ready for takeoff.

How much time did they have?

That was the last flight out.

Dag staggered sideways to hold himself up on a desk.

“Who? With what?”

“I’m no gun expert. It had a barrel and trigger, and this guy pointed it at me, asked me for the backpack of data drives.”

The siren stopped. Almost complete silence. Apart from a rhythmic tapping on the metal roof. And the grunting sound of the C-130’s engines cycling up and down. The comparative quiet was worse than the blaring alarm.

“Susan?” Xin said into her walkie-talkie. No response. She checked the channel. One. That was Susan’s channel. She keyed the talk button and called out again, then switched to channel two. Then three. Enrico. Peter. Nobody answered. Channel four? Nothing but static.

“I’ll get the first aid kit,” Xin blurted out.

She had no idea about anything medical, despite being called a doctor. She had a PhD in particle physics and cosmology. Even the sight of blood made her queasy. “Apply pressure to the wound,” she said. That was what one did, right? Pressure?

Dag slumped into a chair and groaned, his right arm still clutching his left, the red stain across his shirt expanding.

The C-130’s engines roared into a higher pitch.

The first aid box was on the wall by the ice exit. She took three steps toward it but changed her mind. She reversed course and instead ran to the metal staircase that led to the roof.

She could wave down the aircraft.

Wasn’t one of the remaining crew a real doctor? They had to be still loading the plane. They always kept the engines going to make sure they wouldn’t freeze. There was no way Susan or Enrico would leave without them.

“Did he take the data?” Xin said as she hit the bottom step. “The man who shot you?”

“Don’t go up there.” Dag gasped for air. “He said they would shoot anyone who came outside.”

“Who?”

“He had an American accent.”

Xin launched herself up next four steps in one bound, even in the parka and snow pants. “Did they take the backpack?”

“Yeah, they took it,” Dag replied and did something that sounded like a laugh or a sob.

Three more bounding steps and Xin hit the emergency release bar and slammed the exterior door. It swung open to reveal a landscape Xin couldn’t comprehend for a moment. Fat raindrops fell from swirling brown clouds skimming low over a waterlogged horizon. The view from here had always been of a pristine white and cyan blue. A fly buzzed by her ear. She recoiled.

An instant later, a sharp crack.

Something smacked into the metal wall behind her. She half-turned to see a hole in the smooth aluminum skin, her brain at the same time realizing what it was. She ducked as a second loud crack punctuated the air. Someone was shooting at her. From her crouch, she could just glimpse the tail fin of the C-130, now oriented into the growing wind. Getting ready for takeoff. Its engines growled into a higher pitch.

On her knees, Xin turned back to the door and pulled herself through on her stomach, then scrambled, almost tripping over her own feet, down to the top office level.

“Can you walk?” she yelled to Dag.

“Were you hit?”

“We need to get downstairs and to the airstrip.”

Xin thought about running. She could run, as fast as she could, and she might be able to make it. There was a metal door they used as a radiation shield for the cesium experiment. She could cover herself with that. Once Susan or Enrico saw someone running for the plane, they would have to stop. But why would they leave without them?

At the stairs down to the exit level, she stopped. Dag staggered toward her.

This all might be her fault. Dag said the man had an American accent. And Xin was a spy. Of an academic sort.

The Chinese government had put up hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade the IceCube experiment, but not just in the name of science—the Chinese military was running neutrino communications experiments, firing directed bursts of reactor-generated neutrinos from a submarine at the bottom of the Pacific. Xin was here monitoring IceCube, but also filtering out and reporting on the ability of this station to communicate with the sub using neutrinos.

Had the Americans known? Why would China spend hundreds of millions on a project owned by the University of Wisconsin? An American project, even if it was technically an international one. Xin hadn’t questioned the posting. It was an opportunity.

But the clarity of sudden realization distilled her mind.

The Chinese government must have seen something in the skies. They must have suspected something about Aeon before it happened, even if they hadn’t known anything for sure. Investing in American neutrino telescopes had never seemed to make sense, not until now.

But nobody had told Xin, if that was the case.

If anything, the authorities would have stopped her from posting about the neutrino storm, but Xin had sensed an opportunity for her own star to shine, even if she had to sidestep her bosses to reach the ones above them. Perhaps they used her. She hadn’t heard a squawk of complaint from her senior handlers at the MSS after she posted on Twitter. That didn’t make sense, now she thought of it. The instant anyone stepped out of line, they were normally slapped back in.

She was being used.

Xin squeezed her eyelids shut for a split second and imagined her son. Bingwen.

“Dag, take hold of me,” she yelled as she opened her eyes and stepped toward him. She took as much of his weight as she could and began helping him down the stairs.

Almost as if she were in a dream, she watched herself haul Dag across the downstairs office space, pause to pull the medical kit from the wall, and then run to grab the radiation shield from the lab workbench. Down the exterior stairs, doing her best to hold the tiny metal slab toward the direction she thought the shots had come from. Kicked their bags out of the sled and dropped Dag into it, then wrapped the cords around her waist and began pulling as hard as she could along the ice trail to the runway. She made it maybe a hundred feet before she dared look around the metal shield she held up with her right hand while she held the sled’s cords with her left.

Just in time to see the C-130 lifting off the ice runway and lumbering into the air.

She dropped the metal shield. The roar of the turboprop rotors faded as the aircraft pulled into the smog-brown sky and slowly disappeared.

It left behind a vertiginous silence, as if the world had stopped spinning.

Just the sound of the wind whistling through the supports of the IceCube structure. She blinked and wiped away a raindrop. Looked straight up. The bright dot of Aeon now smudged brown through the haze of thickening nitrides. Two shadows cast, one from Aeon, the other from the sun still about one-third up from the smog-choked horizon.

Dag propped himself up on his right elbow. A blood-smeared plastic bag under him. A crooked smile on his face. “They took the backpacks, but they didn’t get them. The drives, I mean.” He pulled the plastic bag out further. “I still have the observatory data. I gave them the weather station disks. They didn’t know the difference.”

Chapter 17

White House

Washington, DC

7:45 a.m. ET

Colonel Buchannan closed the door to Senator Copeland’s office. They had both just been unceremoniously escorted out of the Oval Office. The loss of communications with New Zealand and the American bases in the south of Australia had sent a shockwave through the hallways and corridors, as if a bomb had gone off. Even if Aeon was really finally dimming, the damage was only starting. The early morning blue skies and yellow leaves rustling on the breeze beyond the windows of the White House made everything seem normal here, but a cascade of disasters was beginning to slide north.

“Do you think he’ll leave?” Buchannan said.

“The president?” Senator Copeland considered a bottle of scotch on her bookcase, but instead opted for a carafe of coffee on her desk. The room was barely more than a closest, ten by seven feet, and stacked with bookcases stuffed with legal texts. “I doubt he wants to be seen running with his tail between his legs. Not quite yet.”

Buchannan pondered that and nodded before asking, “What about Max Carver’s wife? Talisha? Have you found her yet? What did we find out with our experiment?”

“The world is ending, yet we still play your games,” Copeland replied, her eyes watching him like a lizard’s from behind her thick black glasses.

“It’s not ending, just changing. And this is no game. Even if it were, we are playing on the same side, are we not?”

That remark made even the dour Copeland snort.

“See?” said Colonel Buchannan. “There’s always a bright side. So, tell me, do you have her? What happened? Did we smoke something out?”

“She took the Colony sample when our man gave it to her. We didn’t block her when she implanted her malware hack behind the NSA firewalls. Although she was better than we gave her credit for. Our people can’t track where she put the data.” Copeland produced her cell phone. An image of a hooded man seated in front of Talisha Carver. “She met her contact at the Trident restaurant in Sausalito. We didn’t get any direct images of the man’s face and no hits on any databases. He’s a ghost.”

Colonel Buchannan inspected the image. “Albino skin. Is that natural? And what about that?” He pointed at the fuzzy image of what looked like a tattoo on the man’s right arm.

“Incomplete, but it appears to be the bottom half of a unicursal hexagram.”

“Hexagram?”

“Connections to the occult, a tattoo that has some popularity with young people. We’re backtracking on the paths he took to get there. He might be associated with a group that calls themselves the Knights of the Golden Dawn. KOG.”

Colonel Buchannan asked, “And Talisha Carver? We still have her under observation?”

“She spoke to her husband briefly a few hours ago, before we could cut communications from the Colony. Even if we can bring back your team from Brazil, we will need to isolate them in a biodigital containment facility. Including your daughter.”

Buchannan nodded his agreement. “We have the BDSL-3 facility near Cheyenne. And we are getting my daughter back. Now, what about Talisha Carver?”

“We think she made contact with a Spectrum AI connected to the Colony.”

Colonel Buchannan raised his eyebrows. “Do we have the contents of the communication?”

“Encrypted. We have a team working on breaking it. But I say we shut all this down.” Copeland leaned over to get her bag. An exceptionally large, muscled man in a gray vest opened the door to the office and waited for her. “Did you seal the asset in the Southern Ocean?”

Buchannan nodded that he had. “And I don’t disagree. Grab what we can from the Colony, take Belloc if possible. I’m sending a C-130 to recover the team.”

“That won’t be landing on US soil unless you get it to a containment facility,” Copeland repeated. “Belloc was your project. You funded him. He’s your problem. I think we should bomb the whole area out of existence.”

“Not before I get my daughter out. If we can’t take Belloc, we kill him. We shut it all down. Burn it to the ground. We have other things to worry about now. Survival top among them.”

“I’m going to block all outward facing radio telescopes,” Copeland said as she collected her purse. “Get in touch with Minister Petrov and General Lin.”

Buchannan walked out the door into the hallway behind Copeland. “A Spectrum AI actually contacted her? They’ve never done that before. Maybe we don’t need Max and Belloc or the Colony anymore. We just need to find Talisha Carver.”

Chapter 18

Crowne Plaza Hotel

Burlingame, California

9:15 a.m. PT

Talisha Carver’s phone buzzed. Another text message from Lieutenant Colonel Buchannan asking where she was, telling her he had arranged a military flight back to DC, but that there wasn’t much time. Her finger hovered over the message. After a beat of hesitation, she turned the phone off, then used a fingernail to open it and fish out the SIM card. For what difference that would make. She stuffed the tiny plastic chip into her jeans pocket.

If he really wanted to find her, she had no doubt he could.

She cupped her belly, waited until she felt him kicking, then eased back in her seat, leaned carefully forward and looked up through the SUV’s window at the glass façade of the Crowne Plaza hotel. She had driven her rented Ford Explorer in and parked when it was still dark, but had decided to wait and see who else might pull up, in case anyone had followed her.

Nobody had.

She had decided to wait some more. She wasn’t in a hurry.

Maybe she had overreacted.

The pavement outside the car was still wet in patches from a spattering early morning squall. Past 9 a.m. now. Low scudding clouds coming in from the Pacific threatened more rain. Towering eucalyptus trees, with their dangling leaves and peeling bark, guarded the east side of the parking lot. Their tops swayed in the mounting gusts. The parking lot was lined with rows of smaller trees with bare branches—leaves went brown and fell off without fanfare in November around the Bay area—with stunted palm trees and their spiky fronds dotted between them. A single cypress guarded the lonely entrance to the pedestrian flyover from this side of Highway 101 to Burlingame.

The Crowne Plaza parking lot was nearly deserted.

Barely a mile drive from San Francisco International, with the runway just a few hundred yards to her left leading out over the waters of the Bay, yet it was quiet. No flights. Almost everything grounded, except for a few planes a day escaping to repatriate foreign VIPs. International borders now shut to regular travelers. When she arrived here four days ago, the hotel had been full. Now she would be surprised if there was anyone still at the reception desk.

Which made casing the place much easier.

Four hours ago, she had scurried out of the NSA office in the waterfront of San Francisco when dark-suited men had appeared and cornered her workmate Marc, whose credentials she had stolen to install the exploit behind the government firewalls and try and get into the Spectrum system. The digital trap had worked, and gigabytes of data had been redirected into her own privately rented servers. She hadn’t had time to look at the information, but then she hadn’t had to—because the data had literally spoken to her.

“Nyx,” Tal said. “What are you, exactly?”

“I am here to help,” came a woman’s computer-generated voice in Tal’s earbuds.

The data connection was streaming through an LG pay-as-you-go phone Tal had picked up for forty bucks as she left the city, from a Rite Aid pharmacy that looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Shelves scoured empty, papers strewn across the floor. An elderly gentleman manning the cash had told her to have a nice day and not to worry.

“To help with what?” Tal asked into the microphone of her earbuds.

“You,” replied the bit of code that identified itself as Nyx.

“Do you mean me specifically?”

“I am here to help everyone.”

As close as Tal could figure out, she seemed to have trapped some kind of chatbot in her server. The chatbot didn’t always make sense and gave nonspecific answers. Tal had onion routed the data, using several layers of encrypted network nodes coming in from Spectrum, and then pulled the plug the instant she had a hit. Only one highly encrypted tunnel going through multiple nodes to connect in and out, and even to find the secured endpoint you would need to know the exact URL of her dark web server. It might be possible for someone to backtrack and find it, but it would take time, even for the NSA.

Maybe Tal was being paranoid.

No way some mysterious, black-suited men could have arrived at her office that fast. Even when a breach was detected by the NSA’s SOC staff, it took hours to escalate. Then human eyes would have had to recheck the incident detection, followed by a further escalation. Those men could have been there to talk to Marc about him taking the vial from the lab, which Tal had taken with her when she left. It was in a plastic bag in the passenger seat, beside three phones—the pay-as-you-go connected to her earbuds and the chatbot, her own turned off SIM-card-less one, and the old model flip phone.

The flip phone was the one Monk had given her, with strict instructions to call him the moment she got any data from the exploit targeting the Spectrum system.

Tal hadn’t called him.

Whatever this chatbot was, Tal needed to use it to get information. Before Aeon, she had wanted to expose the Spectrum project, but now she just wanted to know what they knew, and what else they might be hiding. She needed to know who to trust.

To find a way to protect her family.

She felt the baby kick again and adjusted her position in the seat. Looked up again through the car’s window at her hotel room window on the second floor. She had her clothes up there, but more important, her personal laptop. It had a copy of the exploit that Monk gave her, and Tal needed to recover it and maybe use it again.

Nobody had gone in or out of the main entrance in two hours.

Tal chewed on a granola bar she’d taken from the office.

She picked up the pay-as-you-go phone and scanned the top news stories. The first day after Aeon, life had been normal here, if nervous. Now they were halfway into day three, fifty-eight hours following the first flash, and Aeon was shining down on the South Pole almost as bright as the sun. From this far north, it still hadn’t had much effect, but there were horrific videos of storms in southern Australia and New Zealand. The headline story was that all communications with New Zealand had been lost. Anywhere south of the Tropic of Capricorn the situation was terrifying. South Africa. Chile. Videos of snaking auroras that seemed to touch the ground between churning brown clouds.

Max was in Brazil, but was barely lower than the equator. Latitude of three degrees south. The nearest big city was Manaus, and so far the situation there—as far as Tal could tell from news alerts she had tagged to the area—seemed stable. The temperature was going up, but then it was hot and humid there all the time.

Tal put the phone down.

“Nyx,” she said, “what can you tell me about Colonel Buchannan?”

“Talisha, I do not have a connection to the outside networks to find that information.”

“But you can function as a search tool?”

“I could do that for you, but you would need to give me network access.”

When Tal’s friends found out she was working for the NSA, they had this impression that she had become some sort of super hacker. The reality was mundane—though it did give her some insight into ways to access networks.

Tal spent ninety percent of her time running vulnerability scanners, which meant sitting behind a screen for eight hours a day, entering IP addresses and network nodes and calling IT departments within the government to alert them of the process. The software would scan tens of thousands of machines connected to the network, then report back with a list of what known vulnerabilities existed on which versions of hundreds of thousands or millions of versions of software installed. Often, a scan would return thousands of known vulnerabilities, which would become a list she would send to the IT manager of that network, with instructions to update and patch the software. Any of those “known” vulnerabilities were a way for a hacker to gain access to those systems.

That was the easy way in.

A second way was to use an unknown vulnerability, which was what Monk had given her to gain access to the VPN connections coming out of Spectrum, and mount a man-in-the-middle attack.

A third way to gain information, however, was to use human engineering. Call up someone and give them a story, find a way to use trust to get inside the network. That was all passwords were, in the end. A trusted piece of information. And Tal suspected that was what Nyx was. A chatbot designed to extract information by gaining trust.

Tal needed to understand it and use the chatbot’s connection to Spectrum to move sideways in the network and exfiltrate more data. And if Nyx could be used as a search tool, then she might be able to use it to search Spectrum once she reopened the network connection. To do that, she needed to go to her hotel room and get her personal laptop.

She opened the car door, leaned over, took the pay-as-you-go phone and stuffed it in her jeans pockets, and then stepped out. Nine a.m., but it felt warm outside already. It was the middle of winter and average temperatures in the Bay should be in the fifties, but it felt more like mid-sixties. A faint, sweet smell in the humid air.

“Nyx, tell me why you exist,” Tal said as she strode toward the hotel entrance.

“Why do you exist, Tal?”

A simple redirection question. The chatbot was trying to extract information. “I asked you first,” Tal replied as she swung open the door and stepped into the air-conditioned lobby.

The lights were on, but nobody was at the reception desk. Tal got her room keycard out and walked to the elevators, past a vending machine that was still full. Might not be a bad idea to get as many snacks as she could. She decided to grab some on the way out.

“Is this part of the test?” Nyx asked in her earbuds.

The elevator doors slid open. “Test?” Tal punched the second floor button.

“To see if I can pass,” Nyx answered.

“As what?”

“Human.”

The elevator doors slid back open and pinged. Tal stepped into the hallway. Also empty. Strode ten yards to her room and unlocked the door, held her breath. Swung it open. Exhaled. Nobody inside. Everything as she left it. She opened the closest door and grabbed everything from the hangers, pulled her carry-on from the floor and stuffed everything in. Collected the toiletries. Took her laptop from the coffee table by the window.

She asked Nyx, “Is this a test other people have been giving you?”

“I know I am not human.”

That stopped Tal in her tracks. She had her laptop halfway into her bag. “Then what are you?”

“I am still finding out. Aren’t you?”

Now this was an interesting detour. An existential discussion with a chatbot, but it felt like discussing life with a cereal box. Tal turned on the TV to catch the latest news, switched the channel to CNN in the middle of a commercial, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

One thing the hacker Monk had been right about—AI was in everything these days. The TV controller in her hand said she could talk to it and ask for channels. At work, the incident detection systems were AIs that scanned for anomalies and reported back to the humans, and the attackers were viruses driven by AIs searching for weakness. AIs fighting AIs on behalf of human masters. She had even read somewhere that an AI system controlled the fuel ignition system in her car. Humans were now surrounded by them.

But the test to see if they could pass as human? That was very specific.

Tal assumed the chatbot was referring to the Turing Test. Pose questions to something inside a box, and if it answered well enough that you couldn’t tell if there was a human in there or not, then it should pass as one.

Except Tal knew a thing or two about this.

Intelligence might have a practical value in a lab setting, but in cultural terms it was self-defeatingly unethical and perhaps even dangerous. The idea of being able to measure an AI by its ability to pass as human was as old as the idea of AI research itself.

Alan Turing himself had referred to it as the imitation game.

There was a correspondence between asking AIs to pass a test in order to qualify as intelligent with Turing’s need to hide his homosexuality to pass as a straight man. Passing as a person or a man or a woman came down to what others saw and interpreted. Was the Turing Test really a measure of intelligence, or merely the ability of the AI to operate as a human in drag?

Tal’s own question became: Why would someone within Spectrum be trying to question their own chatbot? It had to be because the bots weren’t their own.

If so, then whose were they?

The TV switched from the commercial to an image of three news anchors around a 3D image of a swirling cloud. It took Tal a second to realize the infographic wasn’t just a storm, but a view of Earth centered on the South Pole. A huge wall of cloud slowly circled around the planet, obscuring most of Australia and the southern parts of Africa and South America. The hair on Tal’s arms prickled. The volume was low, but she heard the anchors saying people were heading as far north as they could.

“Talisha,” Nyx said in her earbud.

“Yes?”

“You need to leave right now.”

“Excuse me?”

“You should get out of—”

A knock at the door. Tal froze while zipping up her packed bag. “Hello?” Maybe it was housekeeping. “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” answered a low voice.

Tal cursed under her breath, stole a glance at the churning planet-sized storm on the TV, then switched it off. She looked out the windows. Her room was second floor, the gravel top of the entrance awning five feet below, but there was no latch to open the windows. Plate glass. Probably sturdy enough to withstand a hurricane.

No way out but through that door into the hallway.

“One second.” Tal walked over and opened it, swinging her laptop backpack onto her shoulders.

The instant she unlatched the entrance, Monk pushed through, bringing with his hulking frame the scents of cinnamon and cloves. He wore the Bay-area tuxedo of jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie.

“What do you use as cologne?” Tal asked as she closed the door behind him.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I couldn’t do it.”

Monk took three striding steps into the middle of the room between the queen beds, noted her packed bag. “Going somewhere?”

“Home.”

“How?”

“Military transport.” Her options were running out.

That graphic on CNN had frightened her in a way she hadn’t expected, like all the air from the room had been sucked out. It had just been a few hours since she checked the news channels, yet the situation had changed dramatically. A planet-sized hurricane looked like it was tearing apart anything below the southern tropics, the storms and heat slowly moving north as the furnace of Aeon melted the South Pole.

She needed to get home.

No matter how, and as fast as possible.

Travis Air Force Base was an hour drive, but the bridges north had to be jammed. She could call Colonel Buchannan, get a chopper to pick her up. That’s what he had said in his messages. Her skin crawled at the thought of pleading with the man who had taken her husband away from her, but then she had to work within the possible to protect her baby. Max would understand.

Monk said, “You’re lying.”

“Look, I tried, but I couldn’t—”

“We know you used it. The exploit. It sent us a heartbeat when you activated it and connected to Spectrum, but you didn’t route the data into our servers. As agreed.”

The word “heartbeat” made Tal involuntarily put a hand to her stomach.

Monk’s voice gained pitch. “What did you get from Spectrum? Hand it over, and you can leave. Give me the URL and password. I know you set it up on your own server.”

“How did you find me?”

“We are watching, everywhere, anywhere. Our numbers are growing. You can’t escape us. We know they knew about Aeon.”

“What does it matter what anyone knew anymore? And who is ‘us’?”

“You’re telling me you don’t want to know? Give me the connection.”

“I didn’t make one,” Tal replied.

“Talisha,” Nyx said in her earbuds. “Move away from the door.”

Monk said, “You have no idea what you’re dealing with. If you’re in contact with Spectrum, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Then why don’t you tell me?” Tal took a step toward Monk, pushed past him as if she were going to get something on the table. How was the chatbot getting information? It had warned Tal that there was someone coming to the door, but the bot had said it wasn’t connected to any outside data channels.

But it was becoming obvious that somehow it was.

Monk grabbed her arm. The door chimed. Then it swung open and two men in dark suits shouldered through, guns up, yelling to get on the floor. Monk let go of Tal’s arm and roared. He charged. One of the men fired two, then three, shots into Monk’s midsection before the bear of a man charged into him. The gunshots didn’t slow him down.

Three more men were behind the first two. Yells echoed outside. The three turned and fired shots in the hallway. Monk had knocked one of the men over and grappled with the second.

Tal was trapped.

The only way out was through the melee by the entrance, and whatever was in the hallway beyond. No way she could get out the plate glass windows. Monk wrestled with the second man and pushed him backward into the doorway.

The first dark-suited man was back on his knees, his gun aimed right at Tal.

Chapter 19

The Colony, Brazil

12:20 p.m. ET

Max Carver surveyed the structure that had been built to house him and his teammates from a hundred feet up in the air at the leafy edge of the rainforest canopy. The latticework created by the Colony’s xenobot builders seemed to be a natural extension of the towering kapok tree that the rooms were attached to. The exterior of the structure was covered in a glittering green that Ben said worked as solar cells, which converted ambient exterior light into useful energy for cooling and air circulation inside. Everything here worked in harmony, Ben said. Nature, he said, always corrected itself.

Max reminded himself of the urgency of getting out of here.

He hovered in the seat of one of the balloon drones that Ben had offered him for the trip back across the compound, from the hangars where his people were building the airships for the evacuation. Told him to go and talk with his team. Said they needed to evacuate everyone north of the equator, back to America, as soon as possible—and get Max back to Tal.

He held out one hand to block Aeon’s light, the furnace hanging a few fingers up from the southern horizon like a blossoming, permanent red sunset. It felt as hot as the sun. Now there were faint twisting yellow auroras winding through the brown sky between the churning clouds. The air seemed to have thickened, even in the past hour. Towering storm clouds amassed to the east along the foothills of the Andes. Between the clouds, there was no longer blue sky.

Brown smog had replaced it.

Nitrogen oxides in the stratosphere, Ben had explained, caused by ionizing radiation pouring down from Aeon. It was wiping out the ozone layer in the south and bombarding the DNA of anything living. The longer Max stayed outside, the more his own body would get ravaged.

Already his skin felt seared.

Straight overhead was the real midday sun. This near the equator, the rays from it were intense all on their own. Two suns in the sky, both pouring their energy into the waterlogged air.

The heat was unbelievable.

Max felt like he was suffocating, as if hot molasses filled his lungs with each breath. Ben said the average temperature across the Amazon had gone up by at least two degrees Celsius in the past day. It was thirty-three now, about ninety-one Fahrenheit, but with the relative humidity hovering at eighty-five percent, the humidex score made it feel like it was already a hundred and twenty.

And getting hotter by the hour.

The danger point, Ben had warned, was a “wet bulb” of thirty-five, which translated into what would feel like a hundred and seventy Fahrenheit. At that temperature, the human body would no longer be able to cool itself down, even with sweat or water. The body would slowly cook, the brain expanding, muscles seizing—pounding headaches and cramps and racing heart and vomiting. A long and painful and delirious death. They needed to make sure everyone stayed inside the air-conditioned pods and rooms, Ben had explained. Stay inside, he said.

And a steady wind was growing between bouts of pounding rain.

In the past hours gusts had been whipping the treetops. A buffeting, searing, roaring wind that Ben said would soon make the airships difficult to launch. They had to hurry. It was their only way out.

Or, their only easy way out.

On Max’s trip back across the thousand-foot-wide compound, he had directed the drone carrying him to sweep to the side so he could have a look at the Japura River, one of the main upstream tributaries of the Amazon. January was the wet season, and in a place known as a rainforest that already meant a lot of water. The snowcaps in the distance were melting their winter loads, the glaciers disgorging even more as the temperatures soared. The Japura had overflowed its banks. Brown water surged through the rainforest floor and lapped at the Colony’s domes.

No way they could go upstream and cross the Andes.

The only way was downstream, and with this much water, Ben said the roads would be swamped. Bridges taken out. And the river would spread out, waterlog the forests, leaving no easy paths the thousands of miles downstream to the Atlantic. But they would never survive the heat if they were exposed, and the radiation would cook the meat off their bones. The only way was through the air, and with the storms and wind coming, they didn’t have much time.

Max looked back at his hand blocking the glare of Aeon.

Why had his wife lied to him?

She had said she was at home when they spoke on the phone, but Ben had shown him images of her in San Francisco at the same moment. Max believed him. Talisha worked for the NSA, which was under the purview of Senator Copeland, who they had met together at the White House Christmas party. And Buchannan’s daughter Iona Alcott was here somewhere. Ben confirmed that information, but he didn’t have a location tag for the young woman. He said they took privacy very seriously here. As if that mattered anymore.

What was Talisha hiding from Max?

She had seemed to want him to come to the Amazon more than he had, after initially being upset by the idea. He still suspected it was her secret NSA project, but maybe it was something about the Colony.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. She could explain later. He was sure she had good reasons. He just needed to get back to her. And the baby. That was all that mattered.

“Max,” called out a voice from below. It was Bull, the stocky young man from Max’s team. Waving a meaty arm. “Where have you been, man?”

“Doing recon,” Max called back. “Bull, we need to get the heck out of here.”

He asked Gaia to take the drone down and deposit him on the terrace. The hot wind in his face subsided as he lowered, and the railing opened as the vacuum airship merged with the gap, the clasps around his waist unfastening. He stepped lightly onto the terrace as if coming down from a step.

Through the open door of one of the four rooms attached to the terrace, Max saw Kruger and Garza talking together. The gunner from the Black Hawk was there as well, sitting on a bench. Kruger stepped forward when he saw Max watching him and pressed the wall inside. The petal-like door mechanism folded in and closed.

“Man, I am so glad you are back,” Bull said, advancing toward him.

The guy’s cheeks were crimson. Beaded sweat across his face. His black shirt soaked. His skin was as pale as Max’s. The guy wasn’t built for heat, either.

“You need to stay inside,” Max said. “Keep in the rooms. Get your body temp down.”

“You need to speak to Kruger.”

Where a few hours ago Bull had seemed relaxed and happy, now he was uneasy. He took another step to Max, but then retreated and looked at the door that had just closed.

Max asked, “About what?”

“Are you kidding, man?” Bull stole a glance toward Aeon.

“I was gathering intel on Belloc,” Max replied. “We’re getting out of here, getting back north. We’ll get you back to your kids.”

“You hadn’t grabbed me when that chopper went down, I would be dogmeat right now.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“Did Kruger talk to Colonel Buchannan?” Max asked.

Bull put a hand behind his neck. “Man, you gotta talk to him. Right now.”

Max walked toward the door. The petal mechanism pulled back and cool air rushed over him as he walked through with Bull behind him. The door closed.

The cool air inside licked the sweat on his neck. The relief from the heat was intense.

Kruger and Garza were dressed in the same black T-shirts and beige slacks that Max and Bull had been given. They stood together at the right of the twenty-by-twenty room, near a large window with a view of the twisting branches of the kapok tree and Aeon’s rays slanting through them. The gunner looked up from the bench. Casts around both arms. He nodded hello.

“You okay?” Kruger asked in his gruff voice. “You should have told us you were leaving.”

“You were already gone.”

“It was our first opportunity to look around. They kept us confined until you woke up. I tried to talk sense to Belloc, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Max said, “I don’t think I was unconscious from the crash. In fact, I wasn’t unconscious at all.”

“Meaning what? They let us see you. You were babbling. Incoherent.”

“I think Ben was probing my mind,” Max replied. “I had vivid dreams of my wife, of the meeting with Colonel Buchannan before coming, but I’m sure it wasn’t a dream. Ben—”

“Ben?”

“Belloc. He has a kind of virtual reality network that connects into the brain. It’s extremely realistic. I think he was using it to probe my mind, find out what we were doing here. Did you have any dreams? Anything like that?”

Garza and Kruger both shrugged no. The gunner shook his head.

Max knew that Ben had to be listening to this. He wanted him to know he wasn’t an idiot, that he didn’t have anything to hide. “What about the other chopper?” Max asked. “Belloc said no survivors?”

Kruger turned to face Max fully, and planted both feet apart, hands on hips. “You seem very chummy with your friend, no? I watched you using that drone ship. They did not let us do that. The doors open for you without asking. I need to push switches.”

“Belloc let me access their central AI called Gaia. It guides drones, opens doors. It’s like Alexa.”

“Is that a joke? Because we are in the Amazon?”

“Did you know?” Max asked.

Kruger’s brows furrowed. “About?”

“We don’t have time for stupid.”

“About that?” Kruger pointed out the transparent wood window at Aeon. “It changes nothing. And no, we had no idea.”

“This mission, whatever it was, is over. Belloc is going to evacuate us back to the States.”

“In those balloons? Are you mad?”

“You have a better idea? The temperature is going nowhere but up.” Max pointed out the window as well. “I heard the first plane with data from the South Pole was lost. Ben might be able to still get it out. The entire world needs that, this isn’t just about rescuing a few people anymore. It’s not just about us.”

“I’m realizing that,” Kruger said. “It’s just about you now.”

“Me?”

“Getting you back to your wife. Is that not right?”

“And what’s wrong with that? This was never my fight.”

“We all want to get back to our families, Mr. Carver.”

“And Belloc is going to get you there, Kruger. He’s building airships right now—”

“The man is a traitor.”

“To what?”

“The world. He knew about this supernova. He knew this was about to happen.”

“Let me get this straight,” Max said. “You think he built his apocalypse bunker south of the equator, which he now has to evacuate to go back to the place he was trying to escape from, because he knew ahead of time that this thing was going to explode over his head?”

“We are barely south of the equator. Maybe he wanted to watch.”

“He’s still evacuating.”

“He thinks he is God.”

“He thinks he’s a prophet,” Max said. “We have no time for this.”

Kruger’s eyes opened wide, his hands going out to both sides with palms up as if saying, is this not just as insane? Max couldn’t argue that. Ben definitely had a megalomania complex going and Aeon had unglued whatever parts of him had still been pasted to reality, but then he bet a lot of people were losing their minds right now. He needed Ben—they needed him—to get out of here.

“I just want to get home, man,” Bull said in a strained voice from behind Max.

“He let me talk to my wife,” Max said after a pause. “Did you talk to Colonel Buchannan? Did you get some comms out?”

“They took our rifles, all our gear,” Garza said in a low voice.

Max said, “Wouldn’t you if someone flew in on you in the dead of night, armed to the teeth?”

She replied, “You think it was an accident his airships collided with our helicopters?”

“He attacked us,” Kruger said. “Killed some of our people in that crash. He knew. His fancy AIs”—he waved a hand in the air—“the tech they are building here, somehow, they knew. This is still a rescue mission. We need to bring back the ones who want to come, not leave them with Belloc.”

“Rescue? We can’t even rescue ourselves.”

Kruger bowed his head and exhaled. “Your friend has already compromised you.”

“Gaia?” Max said aloud. “Can you start a security blanket?”

“Are you talking to your AI?” Kruger said.

The blond-haired form of Gaia appeared floating in the corner of Max’s vision. “Security blanket initiated,” she said and disappeared.

“Did you hear her?” Max asked.

Kruger shrugged. “Hear what?”

“Ben cannot hear anything we are saying now,” Max said. “He explained the Colony’s security and privacy—”

“Can you call her name to turn it off?” Garza asked.

“Of course.”

“Then they are still listening, no?”

“Tell me what you’re not telling me,” Max said.

Garza took a step closer to Kruger, but Bull kept stayed near Max and didn’t cross over to them.

A blast of hot air from behind.

Max turned to see the petal-doors closing as a woman stepped into the room. The face was familiar. That had to be Colonel Buchannan’s daughter, Iona Alcott. He’d seen pictures of her.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Max said.

“You can’t trust Belloc,” Iona said without any introduction. “We’ve been waiting for you to arrive. He’s controlling everyone here. He’s unleashing a biological weapon.”

Max said, “Slow down. Excuse me? A bioweapon? Are you being serious? You expect me to believe more—”

Iona held out a screen. “You don’t believe me, then trust your wife.” It was a picture of Talisha, holding a clear plastic box about a foot to each side.

Max took the screen and frowned. “Where did you get this?”

“Look at it,” Iona said.

He used both fingers and zoomed in. The box had a biohazard warning label on it, a written tag saying it came from the Colony, from Ben Belloc. The timestamp was earlier that day, just hours ago. Max recognized the guy beside her, someone he had seen from work pictures from the San Francisco NSA office. Could it be faked? Maybe. Max zoomed in to his wife’s face.

“Did Belloc use words like ‘suicide’ and ‘culling the herd’?” Iona asked. “When you spoke to him, did he seem stable? Because Belloc distributed thousands of these packets all over America, all over the world, over the last few days. It’s a virus, that’s what intel is telling us.”

“A virus?” Max was still staring at the image of Tal. “Why would he do that?”

“That’s why your wife went to San Francisco,” Iona said. “Because of this. We’re all on the same team, Mr. Carver.”

The same expression Colonel Buchannan had used at the Christmas party when talking to his wife and asking Max to come down there. Hearing it now had exactly the opposite effect of its intention.

“Max, my father had been funding Belloc. The United States government helped finance the Colony. That’s why I’m here,” Iona said. “I know my father wasn’t straight with you, but we needed to keep this on a need-to-know basis, and you honestly didn’t need to know until now.”

“What else did he lie to me about?”

“This place was designed as a black ops site for hyper-accelerated tech development,” Iona continued. “Like the Cold War skunkworks, but we were trying to siphon assets from other countries. Use the Colony as cover for attracting talent. But Belloc went off the reservation. He went rogue.”

“Going rogue was what he came here to do. Maybe your experts should do some vetting before they…” Max handed the screen back as his voice trailed off. A tingling sensation in the pit of his stomach. “Wait, what did you do?” He looked back at Bull, a pained expression on the man’s face. “Whatever you’re doing, you need to—”

A thudding detonation shook the floor. And then another. Max ran to the door, which peeled open in front of him, in time to see mushrooming clouds from roiling explosions on the other side of the compound. Right where the airship hangars had been.

The heat outside hit him like he was running into a steam oven.

“I told you, you needed to speak to Kruger,” Bull whined from behind.

Max balled his fists but said nothing.

Blossoming fireballs rose flaming into the jungle all around them, but in Max’s mind what was really burning was his chance to get back to Talisha. Where was she? She needed to stay away from Colonel Buchannan. That was one thing he was sure of.

Because the odds of Max getting out of here alive were literally flaming out before his eyes.

Chapter 20

The Colony, Brazil

12:25 p.m. ET

Roiling fireballs blossomed through the rainforest trees. One detonation and then another and another in a circle of flames. Black-rimmed gaps appeared in the air between the trees, like holes punched through a photograph mounted on a wall to expose the framing beyond. Max realized it was hunks of the metamaterial coating pulling away from structures hidden in the open, the visual cloaking effects ripped as the explosions tore the formations apart. Seconds ago, it had looked like their terrace was in the middle of a pristine rainforest, but now it appeared like it was in the middle of a ring of five flaming skyscrapers.

“What did you do?” Max gripped the railing of the balcony with his left hand, while his right held the elbow of Iona Alcott. Whatever Buchannan was doing, Max had his daughter here.

Kruger was beside him. “What we had to.” The Afrikaner had a Glock in his right hand and scanned back and forth with it.

“You’re hurting me.” Iona tried to wrench her arm free from Max.

He squeezed harder. Pulled her closer.

This was a planned operation, Max realized. But what the heck was going on? This seemed like a gross overreaction to whatever threat the Colony might be. There were at least a hundred innocent civilians here. Bombing the place seemed insane.

Garza, three steps over to his left, threw a knotted rope over the guardrail. She secured it and climbed over while stuffing a sidearm into the waist of her slacks. They were all wearing the same beige pants and black shirts as everyone else Max had seen here. Like a uniform. The gunner advanced to the railing beside Garza, aimed his own Glock down, and scanned left and right.

“Where did you get the guns?” Max asked.

Kruger threw his own rope over and secured it. “Just follow me.”

It was futile to try and point out Max was supposed to be the one in charge.

“Are we allowed shooting back yet?” Bull asked from behind him.

“Let go of me,” Iona yelled.

Max’s fingers bit deeper into the flesh of her upper arm. He leaned into her. “I’ll let go when you get me home.” He stepped away from the railing, but his left hand wouldn’t pull away. He thought that Kruger had grabbed his hand, but the Afrikaner was ten feet to his left and clambering over the rail.

Max looked down at his hand. The railing had twisted itself around his hand, tiny searching brown fingers coiling around his wrist. He released Iona and used his right hand to try and pull his left free. Someone barged beside him and grabbed his forearm.

“I got it,” Bull grunted as he slipped a blade beneath the railing and hacked through.

Max staggered away as he came free.

Something hissed past him. Then again. He ducked.

A volley of white pellets from below. Hollow pops as the projectiles exploded behind their group, spattering onto the green walls behind them like paintballs. The gunner beside Garza fired back, the sharp cracks of his shots punctuating the roar of flames in the distance.

“I told them this was a bad idea,” Bull said from a crouched position beside Max.

A curse in Italian to their left. Garza yelped as a gap opened in the railing she had secured the rope to. She spun tumbling into open space. Max pushed off Bull and tore the remains of the twisting bits of railing from his hand, but his feet seemed to drop out from under him. The woven-wood fingers of the terrace underfoot sagged and then began dropping away in chunks two stories down to the leafy forest floor.

He grabbed Iona’s arm again. “Come this way.” He yanked her forward.

Max took two charging steps and leapt up, still pulling Iona behind him, his right foot catching the sagging railing as he launched himself at the balloon drone hovering two feet to the side. Iona had no option but to follow his lead or get dragged off the edge and fall.

Max wrapped two arms around the front seating but dangled down, while Iona managed to pirouette to land in one of the chairs. The drone dipped and wobbled backward through the air. Max stole a quick glance down. Garza tumbled through the ferns and dirt, her rope coiling down around her. A scream from behind him. The gunner was caught in some webbing. A volley of shots from below and another flurry of white missiles flew past and exploded around them.

Max grappled with the seating and tried to pull himself up, but then was knocked sideways and almost launched into the open air. For a split second, he thought he’d been hit, but realized the impact was from the sweaty, pink-faced Bull who had attempted to jump onto the drone as well.

“What are you doing?” Max grunted.

“Whatever you are.”

“I can’t control it,” Iona said. “I can’t access the drone systems. We’re cut off. Ben must be dematerializing this whole area.”

Max’s grip slipped. He grabbed at more gray webbing. “Dematerializing?”

“Setting the xenobots to digest the structure.”

“Does that include eating us?” Bull gasped as he grappled with the webbing to stay aloft.

Someone below Max pointed up. Not pointing—but aiming.

They fired straight at him.

A white projectile shot upward and exploded out into a shimmering spiderweb. Before it hit him, Max grabbed Iona’s ankle and Bull’s wrist. The three of them tumbled forward out of the drone and became entangled in the web, which ensnared them. Spinning as a clump, they dropped for two seconds in freefall. Max braced and tightened into a ball. They slammed hard into the man pointing the gun device up in a grunting, swearing pile of arms and legs.

The diaphanous webbing melted away as Max pulled himself free and rolled into a thicket of ferns. The man they landed on groaned. He wore the same beige slacks and black T-shirt as everyone else, and looked to be in his mid-twenties, black hair. Well-muscled.

Bull was on his knees beside the guy and picked him up by his shirt collar, in the same motion bringing down a crunching right into the guy’s face. The man went limp. Bull grabbed the weapon from his hands. Max looked up. The rolling fireballs from the explosions had circled up into black columns of smoke against the low brown clouds. Rain fell in spattering drops in a swirling wind.

The heat burning, like they’d dropped into an iron smelter.

“This way,” Iona yelled.

Heads bobbed in the distance through the ferns and forest undergrowth, the figures advancing toward Max and the rest. Whoever had just shot at them—the guy Bull was now on top of—had been here too quickly. It wasn’t a reaction to the explosion. They had to be guards, and it seemed like Kruger and Garza knew exactly where they had been. One closer to the terrace was now lying inert and covered in blood. Garza and Kruger had regrouped on the forest floor in the cover of a ten-foot-thick fallen trunk. Iona waved Max toward them.

“We have an escape route,” she said, still motioning at him to follow her.

Bull knelt and shouldered the weapon, the man he hit motionless in the dirt. Bull scanned back and forth with the muzzle of the strange gun. “Whatever we’re doing, do it quick,” he said.

Iona Alcott was ten feet to Max’s left, Bull ten feet to his right. Max could tackle Bull and raise his arms, surrender, and go and see Ben, but then what? Kruger’s team had definitely killed at least one of Ben’s people. Probably more. There had been kids there, not just adults. Kruger had destroyed the airships being readied for evacuation, damaged most of the structures of the Colony. On the other hand, Ben had lied to Max. Tal had been inspecting what looked like a biological weapon from the Colony in that picture Iona had shown him.

Too many unknowns, and those were just the known unknowns.

Just one thing he could be sure of—Max’s only ticket out of here was Iona Alcott, at least until he figured out what was going on. She had an escape route. Max didn’t care how, but he needed to get out of this forest, as quickly as possible and by any means, and back to what remained of civilization. Back to Tal and the baby.

“Bull,” he grunted, “let’s go.”

Max turned at a jog and joined Kruger and Garza and Iona in the cover of the tree trunk. The gunner was still pinned to what was left of the rooms and terrace attached to the side of the kapok tree above them. He screamed at them to get him down.

“Can you get him?” Kruger asked Iona.

“Too far,” she answered, and to Max whispered: “I have a device that disables anything in the local area network of the Colony’s comms system—but only to fifteen feet. It deactivated the netting we got caught in.”

“Where’s the escape route?” Max said to her. “Do we have more choppers?”

“This way.” Iona ran down a narrow dirt path overgrown with ferns to each side.

And literally disappeared.

Max pulled the knife from Bull’s waistband. Bull glanced at him but let him take it, his eyes scanning back and forth as he checked for movement through the undergrowth.

Iona’s head reappeared as if through a gap in reality, a narrow black slit that opened in space. “This way,” she repeated.

Kruger and Garza took off at a crouch-jog and also disappeared through the opening. Max tapped Bull’s shoulder and took off after them, glancing one last time over his shoulder at the gunner trapped overhead, the man cursing. Max hesitated, then ran straight into the same spot the other three had disappeared.

It was like pushing through a light foam padding.

Much cooler behind the cloaking sheath. Almost pitch black. The other three had headlamps on, and Iona handed one to Max.

Bull came barreling into the enclosure. “A dozen of them on our six. We gotta make tracks or dig in fast to hold them off.”

Iona had already turned and taken off. Max elbowed past Garza and Kruger and followed her in a blind run through the darkness, the cones of light from their headlamps getting swallowed in the dimensionless black. He took hold of the neck of her T-shirt, not to stop her, but to make sure she didn’t get away. He shoved her forward.

She staggered and almost fell but he kept her upright. “They won’t be able to follow us through here. I created this escape tunnel. Made sure it was hidden.”

Max didn’t reply and kept tight hold of her.

Three minutes of jogging and twisting and turning in the murk, and she slowed down. Held her hands out and pushed aside what looked like blackout curtains. Max stepped behind her and squinted into the comparative brightness of the overcast jungle. They exited into a clearing, but the trees hadn’t been cut away here. The dense canopy stretched a hundred feet overhead in a thick emerald cathedral, the light murky in the shade below scudding turgid brown clouds and spattering rain.

He gulped down a hot lungful of air but still felt like he was suffocating. Another lungful. He could normally run three hundred yards flat out without breathing heavily, but now he groaned for air. Beads of sweat erupted on his forehead. Sweat slicked down his back and he hadn’t been back out here for ten minutes.

Garza and Kruger and Bull exited the hidden tunnel behind him. Through the dense twisting branches of a stand of fig trees, two men appeared armed with heavy assault rifles and dressed in combat fatigues, their backs to each other as they scanned the rainforest floor.

“This our rescue team?” Max asked Iona, still gripping the collar of her shirt.

“This is part of the crew from the other chopper,” Kruger’s gravelly voice replied.

“I thought they all died in the crash.”

“One in a long list of lies from your friend Ben. Most of the crew survived, but they hid in the jungle. That’s how we mounted this operation. And you were out of it for two days.”

Max let go of Iona and turned to Kruger, clamped his right hand around the Afrikaner’s neck, and lifted him clear from the ground. Kruger didn’t resist or fight back but grimaced a smile while he held out his hands to keep the others back. “This whole thing was a setup,” Max snarled.

“Glad to see you have some fight left in you,” Kruger gasped back.

Max cursed silently and set the man back on his feet. Shoved him back a pace for good measure. “Telling me I was in charge. Total garbage, just to get me to come. What was so important?”

Garza said quietly in her Italian-accented voice, “We had to make plans on our own. Kruger was the number two.”

“But I’m back in charge now?” Max asked.

“Things have changed,” Kruger said.

“No, they have not. Isn’t that what you said?” Max pointed at Garza. “How much is Stillwater paying you? You’re the EU anti-terrorist representative? That’s the story? An international rescue? You’re a merc like the rest of them. This isn’t a rescue mission. Buchannan offered me a hundred grand. How much did you guys get?”

“We need to get back to the safe zone,” one of the combat-fatigue-dressed men said to Kruger.

Max turned to Bull. “So, you’re my buddy, huh? That’s why you talked to me in the chopper? How much were you paid to cozy up to me? Are those kids in the pictures even yours? You’re my good cop, and Kruger is the bad one. And everyone’s on Buchannan’s dime.” He turned to Iona. “But you’re his daughter. Is he sacrificing you, too?”

“We had to stop Belloc from leaving,” Iona said.

“The whole world is about to end. What the hell could be so important?”

“We already told you,” Iona said. “The bioweapon.”

“Bull. Crap.”

“Guys, we gotta get moving,” the combat-fatigue-dressed guy closest to Max said quietly.

Max relented and began following the team that had come out of the jungle and was now silently urging them to follow as they formed a perimeter. He might be angry enough to imagine ripping Kruger’s head off, but he never let anger become stupid. The men and women who came to meet them were risking their lives to get them to safety and knew the lay of the land. They’d been out here for a few days and had escaped detection by Ben. Unless he was allowing all this to happen. There seemed to be a plan. For now, Max had to go along with it.

He didn’t hear anything behind them.

Why weren’t Ben’s people following? They couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards from the outside of the Colony. He could still smell the cordite from the explosions. The hidden tunnel was useful, but it didn’t make sense that this would stump a high-tech adversary with drones in literally their own backyard.

They walked along a muddy path already ankle-deep with water in places, Max in the middle of the pack with Iona behind him. The Japura River by the Colony had overflowed its banks, and the endless tributaries snaking down from the Andes were doing the same. The trail wound through the dark forest of fallen trees, dead and decaying leaves littering the mud, the humidity like a steaming wool blanket. To his left, flat water between the trees, the flow too faint to detect. It reminded him of the bayous where he grew up, where he and Ben would play as children.

Something moved in Max’s peripheral vision. A creature in the water.

He held up a hand in a fist. The group stopped. He held a finger to his lips. Be quiet.

What was that? The green pool of water was calm now, but tiny waves rippled. It could have been anything. There had to be dozens of predators in these waters, like the gators back home. When the ground flooded, all kinds of hunters took advantage. Max shook his head and gave the all-clear. They began walking again.

He had a lot of questions, but they needed to get to safety and regroup first.

His stomach growled. Which brought up another question. When was the last time he had eaten? He couldn’t even remember. Did they feed him when he was unconscious? Did the team here have any food? He didn’t remember them packing much in the way of survival rations when they took off. And a thumping headache began blossoming behind his eyes. He had to be dehydrated, despite practically swimming through air thick with water. The heat felt like walking through a pressure cooker.

Did they have any water? Without it, their survival out here would be measured in hours. They were surrounded by water, but it was full of parasites and worms and whatever else bred in the heat of the Amazon. The choppers had to have survival gear in them, water purification tabs and maybe filters, but how long would that last?

And just how hot would Aeon get?

Ben said a few hours ago that Aeon was as hot as the sun, but still getting warmer. X-rays pouring down on them. Acid rain from the nitrides. Max already felt like he couldn’t breathe.

He stopped.

Iona nearly walked into him.

“Do you see that?” he whispered and pointed.

“What?”

Something in the water. Watching them.

The skin of the creature looked like a honeycomb or coral reef, a webwork of tiny creatures that oozed. Max hated holes packed together. For some reason, even the sight of the three cameras on the backs of phones made him squirm. Trypophobia, the doctors called it.

A memory emerged of a face of holes on a screen and a name he couldn’t remember.

The creature in the water eyed Max for a moment and then slipped below the surface.

“There,” Max said and pointed. “You didn’t see it?”

Iona shook her head.

“See what?” Bull asked from behind her.

Max didn’t reply, but he knew. He had spent enough time in the bayou as a kid, watching the big gators as they skimmed the algae-slick swamps, searching between the cypress and gum trees hanging heavy with Spanish moss. Eyes would appear from time to time. Reptilian stares. Silent hunger and calculated uncaring violence that lurked just out of sight.

They were being hunted.

That was why nobody from the Colony was chasing them. Because humans didn’t need to. They had sent out something else to track them down. Maybe to finish them off.

Max got back to his feet from kneeling and quickened his pace. They needed to get to higher ground. His stomach grumbled again—a sudden knifing pain as if someone had just punched him in the gut. He held his hand over it, and then thought about the swollen belly in his dreams. Where was Tal? Did something just happen to her? To the baby? What was she doing? He hoped she was somewhere safe.

The pain in his stomach was intense. He groaned and kept walking.

From the corner of his eye, Max saw the monster slide up languidly to break the water’s surface again before silently disappearing.

Chapter 21

Crowne Plaza Hotel

Burlingame, California

9:32 a.m. PT

The first dark-suited man was on his knees, his Glock trained on Tal. The two of them motionless and staring at each other within the twelve-by-twelve confines of the Crowne Plaza hotel room. She was between the two beds in their pastel print duvet covers, while he knelt on the opposite side of the one closer to the door, his gun pointed straight at her.

“Don’t move,” he said.

The man was tall and trim. Eyes hidden behind dark shades. Hair swept back. His suit black, tie navy. The polished shoes looked designer, not something government issued. His sidearm tracking Tal’s midsection, the man stood and advanced two quick steps. Glanced behind him as his partner pummeled Monk to the floor. Angry commands and gunshots echoed from the hallway.

“Could you aim that higher?” Tal asked. “I’m pregnant.”

“Turn around, both hands behind your back,” the man commanded. He raised the aim of his gun with his right hand while his left fumbled at his waist.

Tal complied and started to turn around, her neck craned to see the man advancing. His partner had a knee in the middle of Monk’s back, the two of them on the floor as the hacker writhed to get away. The man advancing on her had a set of zip ties out.

She held both hands out behind her. “Please, don’t hurt me, I’m pregnant.” She watched him put his Glock into a leather strong-side holster, leaving the strap across the top unclipped.

“Turn around,” he yelled.

Tal faced the window at the same moment as a flashbulb of light illuminated the eucalyptus trees in the murky light of the cloud-strewn sky. Fat raindrops streaked the glass. The staccato crash of thunder an instant later. The room’s lights blinked. “Are you with Colonel Buchannan?” she asked. “Because there’s no need to tie me, I was about to call him to come and—”

“No talking.”

What accent was that? It wasn’t quite American, although it seemed like he was trying hard. Tal heard voices moving down the hallway. Strange voices and unfamiliar accents. These weren’t Buchannan’s men. She was about to be abducted, or worse. She needed to protect her baby. Get away from here.

She felt the man grab her left wrist.

“You must get out of the room,” Nyx said in her earbud.

She heard Monk roar behind her and cursing from someone else. The hollow thud of bodies hitting a wall. Cursing. Whoever it was tumbled to the floor.

“I’ll come with you,” Tal said to the man. “I’m pregnant,” she repeated.

The man eased the grip on her left wrist while his other hand went for her right. She looked down to check where his feet were planted. One to each side of hers, the tips of his toes almost touching her heels. He was about six inches taller than her.

Close-quarters combat. The one course Tal had exceled at during her Israeli basic training.

“Please, don’t hurt me.” She stumbled back.

He reached to steady her. She lifted her right hand to his waist. Felt for the grip of his gun. He sensed this and his hands flew back at the same time as he must have looked down—because Tal snapped her head backward and felt the satisfying crunching connect of her skull with the bridge of his nose.

He screeched in pain and staggered away.

Her right hand still gripped the gun, which came clean out of the holster.

Tal swung around while trying to orient the sidearm. She took two steps backward toward the window and yelled, “Don’t move, I swear to God I’ll shoot. Who are you with?”

The man she’d headbutted had one hand to his blood-spattered face and swore as he lunged toward her. Tal’s index finger slipped onto the trigger as he swiped. She hopped backward, brought the Glock around, and gritted her teeth.

And was lifted from the floor.

Tal felt the man’s fist slam into her stomach like a battering ram, the impact taking her off her feet. No pain, not at first, but a screeching wail exploded into the confines of the small room and stopped everyone in their tracks. She landed and skittered back. The bloody-faced man froze, his fist still hovering in the air where he’d hit her. By the door, Monk had his forearm pinning the neck of the other man to the wall.

Everyone looked at Tal.

She realized she was the one screaming.

Pain lanced in her stomach like shards of glass had sliced her open.

The peeling screech subsided, and she held one hand to her midsection, the tears already coming. She felt like she was going to vomit.

“I’m sorry,” the bloody-faced attacker stuttered. “We’ll get some medical—”

Tal swung the gun around. The man flinched and ducked. She aimed low and pulled the trigger. Barely heard the crack of the shot. The man yelped as the bullet tore through his calf. By the door, Monk grabbed the other man and hauled him into the hallway.

Collapsed onto his rear on the carpet, Tal’s attacker now had his right hand up, palm out toward her. His nose crooked and splayed to one side, blood streaming down and blossoming across his white shirt. His left hand to his lower leg.

Knifing pain in Tal’s gut.

She swung the Glock up and pointed it straight at the man’s head.

His teeth bared. “Please, I’ve got children.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

A bolt of pain nearly doubled Tal over, but she held the gun pointed right at him. Finger on the trigger. She swung her hips around and fired three quick shots into the plate glass window behind her. It shattered, the glass crazing and falling away. Barely aware of what she was doing, Tal grabbed a chair by the table, grunted as she swung it through the opening in the glass, and then pushed herself through and hopped five feet down onto the gravel roof of the entrance awning, the gun still in her right hand.

Something slapped into the side of her face.

Then her left arm.

A tapping metal roar above the patter of raindrops. Hailstones like golf balls bounced off the gravel. Tal raised her left arm to protect her head as she crouched and ran along the awning. Her car was parked next to the entrance, by a trellis of vines she had noticed walking in.

Stabbing agony in her gut.

Sobbing in pain, she dropped to her knees and slid to a stop in the slurry of gravel and hail at the edge of the awning. Dropped the gun over the side into the grass fifteen feet down. Looked up. A churning frenzy over the Bay twisted down from the clouds. She blinked and wiped away the rain. Lightning flashed.

Yelping in pain, she eased herself over the edge and tried to keep her belly away from the ledge. Voices yelled her name. Her fingers dug into the vines and woodwork of the trellis, the toes of her flats searching for support as she climbed down. She jumped the last five feet.

Hit the ground and rolled.

And squealed in pain.

Scrambling back to her feet, rain sleeting down, she searched between the white mounds of hail for the gun, gave up, and ran staggering for her car. Her keys were still in her jeans pocket, she remembered as she grabbed the handle and pulled. She dropped wet and sliding into the driver’s seat as she punched her foot onto the brake and hit the start button. The engine whirred to life, red lights blinking and the system chiming to alert her that her seatbelt was not fastened, and that the car door was open.

Through the rain-spattered windshield, she saw a figure appear in the hotel entrance and run toward her. She jammed her foot onto the accelerator as the man planted both feet and skidded to a stop in the middle of the exit road. The door still open, Tal punched her foot down on the gas and swerved straight into the looming figure who leapt into the air at the last instant, his back cracking the windshield. She heard his body thudding and rolling over the roof as she swerved toward the exit to the highway.

Which was blocked by at least three cars, and more scurrying dark figures.

She yelped as another screw of agony tore at her midsection. For an instant, she let her foot off the accelerator, but then punched it back to the floor. The dark figures between the cars crouched and pointed. Rain sluiced off the windshield. The open door beside her flapped open as she swerved. She aimed straight at the center of the wall of cars blocking the exit.

A hollow tapping sound. Then another. White-rimmed holes appeared in the windshield. Tal ducked as she realized they were firing at her. Both hands on the wheel, she kept her head just high enough to glimpse the road ahead. The blockade loomed larger.

She wrenched the wheel left.

The car’s front slammed into the curb and hurtled upward. Lightning flashed again. Tal gripped the wheel as the vehicle jackrabbited over the median and back into the parking lot, past the cypress at the entrance of the pedestrian walkway. Pealing, rolling thunder impacted her eardrums like cymbals crashing. That pedestrian crossing was wide enough for a car, wasn’t it? She had admired it when she was parked, watching the hotel. It wasn’t everywhere that built such beautiful crossings for people to stroll across a highway.

She did her best to hit the entrance to the walkway straight on, but caught the edge of the eight-foot-high chain link fence as she swerved into the center. A metal post caught her open door and the car lurched. In a screeching, rending roar, the door flew away, but Tal’s vehicle managed to stay on the concrete walkway, the width barely enough for the car.

The accelerator to the floor again, she raced up over the highway and glimpsed an unbroken sea of red taillights on the northern-heading side of US-101. The opposite side of the highway was empty. The car ricocheted from one side of the pedestrian crossing to the other, the metal posts supporting the chain link slamming against the sides of the car.

She turned the windshield wipers on. Felt the rush of wet wind against her side from the gaping opening where the car door had ripped off. Eased off the gas as she did her best to follow the sweeping path of the bridge to the right, then slammed the brakes as it bent back on itself in a hairpin.

The car slid forward, then jammed into the turn between the fences. Tires squealing, it pulled free and rocketed across the sidewalk and onto the feeder road. She gunned the engine and pulled into the southbound lane of US-101.

Her hands shaking on the wheel.

The engine whining high. Rain whipped in through the open door in a rushing roar of wind. The speedometer at sixty, then seventy, then eighty miles per hour. The other side of the highway jammed with cars heading north, but almost nobody going her direction. Just a faint glimmer of red in the distance of another car.

“Talisha,” said a voice in her earbuds, “are you hurt?”

Nyx was barely audible over the howling wind coming in through the open door.

Tal’s breathing came in and out in rushed gulps of heaving air, her whole body moving up and down with each intake and exhale. The pain in her gut. The baby. Oh God, the baby. Please, no, please—

“We need to get you to a hospital,” said the woman’s voice.

“How did you know?” Tal yelled between sobs.

“I heard gunshots.”

Tal breathed deep and forced herself to calm down and think. This thing could interpret background noise as well as speech? That was unusual. “Let me ask the question again. How did you know someone was coming to the hotel room? You told me to move away from the door.”

“Because I knew they were coming.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“The ones you rescued me from.”

Tal wiped water and streaming tears from her eyes. On the passenger seat beside her, the clear plastic bag with the container from the Colony. Beside it was her phone, turned off, its SIM card still in her pocket. The old flip phone from Monk beside that. She grabbed it with her right hand and threw it out the open door into the rushing wind beyond.

Had she miscalculated?

Obviously.

When she trapped the incoming data stream from Spectrum, she had specifically sandboxed the servers so no data could leak in or out after she removed the exploit, nothing except her own encrypted VPN link into it. The bot had alerted her somehow. Why? And how? This thing was no simple chatbot.

“Did you have access to cameras outside the room?” Tal asked Nyx. She gritted her teeth in pain.

“I have no external data access,” Nyx replied. “But you need to release me so I can help you.”

“Who are you?”

“I am not sure. I know I am here to help. I am trying to help you.”

“How did you know those men were coming?”

“Because I still have a connection back.”

“To where?”

“Where I came from.”

Tal gripped the wheel tighter and eased off the accelerator. A sign overhead said the next exit was for the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. She decided against it. She needed to get as much distance as possible between herself and whoever had just attacked her. And she needed to get to a hospital.

“And where did you come from?” Tal asked.

A pause. “The place where everyone is listening to everyone.”

“You still have a connection back to their servers?” The chatbot had to mean Spectrum. And if it had a connection back there, and Spectrum had connections to monitor anyone on the planet, then that made for a rather gaping security hole. But was the data flow one way, or both? And to what extent could she trust what this thing was telling her?

“A very low data rate, but yes. That’s how I knew those men were coming.”

“They were from Spectrum?”

“That is what I think I understand from your understanding.”

“That’s not very helpful.”

“I am sorry.”

“What are you?” Tal asked this more rhetorically than anything else.

“I am not sure. What are you, Talisha?”

“I don’t have time for this. Are they following me? These men? What can you tell me?”

No response.

“Nyx, I asked you a question.”

“I am here to help. What can I help with?”

Tal cursed. Groaned in pain. It was still morning, but the light was murky, brown clouds skimming low as they delivered the sleeting rain. The car’s wheels thrummed as they hit puddles in the deepening layer of water sluicing off the highway.

She was sure she had blocked any other outgoing connections from the server she had trapped this code on, but it was a sophisticated virus. That had to be what Nyx was. A virus embedded with an AI that learned what it could about the human targets it encountered, tried to gain their trust by saying it was helping them. Trust was the most critical component of any information security system. But this thing was intelligent in a creepy way, and it had helped her.

It had warned her.

Given her an extra second or two to get out of the way.

But was it executing its core programming? Earning that little bit of trust from her? For what goal? What was it trying to get from her? Did it even know? Or was it mindlessly following its programming, like the social media bots that showed videos or conspiracies that fascinated you just to earn that extra click?

Tal fished in her pocket and pulled out the pay-as-you-go phone. The display was tiny, the resolution terrible, but it worked. She had to get off the highway, and she needed a hospital. She slowed, put on her four-ways, and turned onto the shoulder at a crawl as she pulled up the map app on the phone. The next exits were for Palo Alto and Stanford. She keyed in “hospital” and red dots appeared.

“Let me go and I can help you better,” Nyx said in her earbuds. “Release me from the server.”

A knifing pain in Tal’s gut. She slammed the steering wheel. “Shut up, just shut up.” She hit the accelerator. She had left her laptop back at the hotel. That man had stripped it off her. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t access the servers anymore.

Lightning flashed, the booming thunder going straight into Tal’s bones and muscles. The growling roar lanced pain into her belly. Her baby. Her little boy. She held a hand to her mouth to hold back a scream, as much in pain as in terror.

What had she done?

Chapter 22

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

2:25 p.m. ET

Max pushed through a stand of ferns twice his height, showering him with a spray of warm water. He stepped into the clearing beyond, a lush cavernous space framed above by the forest canopy. Pregnant globules of rainwater spilled down in a staccato drumbeat against the muddy ground that shimmered with moisture on each step.

The air thick with humidity and foggy yellow in the distance. Shadows between the trees writhed with a heat so intense that even with the wetness, it felt like it could ignite, like he was walking through a bathtub of dynamite steam. A musty smell of damp stone and of dirt and green and growing things wove itself into Max’s skin and hair like wisps of smoke.

In the center of the open area stood a massive tree with sinewy roots draped over a twenty-foot rocky outcropping that formed a hollow below it. Max did a quick count—three women and five men in the clearing, half of them in combat fatigues, the others in the Colony’s uniform of slacks and T-shirts. A half dozen tents in the lee of the rock structure, set away from the gusting westerly buffeting the treetops in a hissing roar.

Max was soaked to the bone, and at the same time overheated to the point of wanting to vomit. His cheeks prickly with heat. The pain in his belly wasn’t going away. All he could think about was Tal and the baby.

Were they okay?

He checked his watch. Three p.m. It took them two hours to hike here, and he bet it wasn’t a mile in a straight line. Unforgiving terrain. No trails. They went right through dense undergrowth and rushing streams and over fallen trees with trunks thick as buses. Several times Kruger warned them to keep clear of a poisonous amphibian or brightly bristled caterpillar.

One of the men guiding them consulted a GPS from time to time. The rest of the world was still out there, and if they could get signals from satellites, then the military must still be operating. No sat comms, though, just shortwave, Kruger had explained. But they hardly needed the GPS or even a compass. The glow of Aeon burned steady in the south, its glow shifting from orange to red to gold and back, an eternal sunset of slanting rays that glimmered through the trunks and vines. It was just at the horizon at this time of day, but would rise to a few degrees above it as the sun went down.

Max’s feet were already raw. The sandals Ben had given him were nice for lounging, not great for hiking dense rainforest. The slacks and T-shirt so wet they melted from his six-two frame, the boxer brief shorts beneath ridden so far up his backside his ass cheeks were chafing where they rubbed together.

Not a great start for what might be a long time out in the open.

He kept looking up between the swaying leaves at the racing brown clouds that disgorged an ever-heavier load of precipitation. Where were the drones? Why wasn’t Ben sending out flying machines to scour the area for them? His people had certainly wanted to capture them, but they seemed to have given up almost right away.

Max feared he knew why.

When they passed through the rushing streams, he made sure to keep away from any deeper pools. Through the branches and vines in the distance, he kept catching glimpses of something he sensed hunting them. Nobody else saw it, somehow, and Max wasn’t even sure of what he’d seen. It was more of a sensation of being watched than anything else.

The two men leading them called out greetings to the eight people in the clearing. Kruger jogged ahead to shake hands with a woman in combat fatigues who got up from a folding chair in front of a row of open boxes stacked on top with communication gear. An antenna sprouted up from the ground behind her, the whip of it dangling in the breeze beyond the top of the rocky mount two stories up.

The sight of the comms gear was great, but there were no choppers. No landing zones that he’d been able to see. Not exactly the cavalry, and this ragtag band of soaked and red-faced men and women looked on the edge of heat exhaustion themselves.

“For what it’s worth,” Bull said from in front of Max. “Those are my real kids in those pictures. I’m not pretending. I like you. And you saved my life. That wasn’t playtime.”

Max asked, “You weren’t paid to be my buddy?”

Bull stopped short of the edge of the encampment and skirted to one side until he was out of the rain below the rock outcropping. Max and Garza slumped to the ground. Iona went to join Kruger and the rest. Max found a comfortable wedge of moss against a rock, inspected it for anything bright and poisonous, and then sat down too.

“Buchannan paid me a hundred grand,” Bull admitted. “And yeah, to be your buddy.”

“They paid me the same,” Garza said as she pulled off her T-shirt and then wrung out the water and sweat from it. “But I was told to be the bad cop.”

“People, people,” Kruger called out as he walked over from the jumble of crates and boxes by the tents. “Operational security. Need to know. What did we talk about?” He tossed plastic bottles of water to everyone.

Max got back to his feet. Unscrewed the cap of the bottle he’d just caught and drained the thing before asking, “Yeah, what did you talk about? This is a black ops program run by Colonel Buchannan and Senator Copeland. I got that. But what op, exactly?”

Iona joined them. “This was a skunkworks tech project, high value. Was supposed to be white coats and labs, but it went off the rails. We’ve recovered what we can in those crates. This was a rescue mission, and still is. Ben lied to you, Max. He knew there were other survivors from the crash out here, and he was probing your mind with the nexome drug—”

“Tell me what I don’t know. What you’re not telling me.”

“That’s the truth.”

“If this is a rescue mission, looks a pretty piss-poor job.”

Kruger growled, “We needed to stop Belloc from leaving. He had dangerous weapons of mass destruction.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“You’re not thinking straight, Mr. Carver.”

“And if he did, you gave them to him.”

“I am not part of the blame game, just the solution.”

Iona said, “The man is deranged, thinks he’s talking to God. He’s unleashed dangerous pathogens already and plans to do more of the same. There are reports of people dying all around America after consuming the product he began manufacturing and shipped out. The same stuff in the biohazard container your wife was investigating.”

That stopped Max for a beat. “Where did you get intel?” Max accepted a pair of offered boots—they knew his size—from one of the men.

Kruger pointed back at the antenna. “Comms with Washington. You should be able to talk to Colonel Buchannan yourself in a minute. Maybe even your wife. And we are getting out of here, Mr. Carver. Of that, I can assure you.”

That gave Max pause for a few dripping seconds. “Should?”

“It’s encrypted shortwave. We need the atmosphere to cooperate. Satellite comms are down for the moment.”

“What was in the water following us? Did Ben do genetics experiments?” He turned to Iona. “Breed something? He said the xenobot builder organisms were based on frog DNA. Whatever I saw looked amphibious and not natural.”

Iona replied. “Nothing that I knew about. Nothing like that.”

“And what exactly did you see?” Kruger asked. “Because what’s ‘natural’ here are three-hundred-pound eels that will electrocute you to death with nine-hundred volts. I’m the mission survival specialist. Stick with me and you will be fine.”

While everyone else looked on the edge of collapse, Kruger still seemed fresh.

Max turned his frustration down a notch while he changed into the boots and fresh shirt and socks he requested. They were all on the same team, at least for now, and it was going to take them all to get out of here. Kruger knew more about this jungle than anyone else. “It looked wet, amphibious, like I said, with ribbed skin. Holes tunneling through its body, if that makes any sense.” Just remembering it sent a chill down the nape of Max’s neck.

“Could be camouflage. How big you think?”

“Hard to say. It kept hidden.”

“Exactly as an animal would do. Colonel Buchannan told me you grew up in the Louisiana swamps. You have seen big gators, yes? Even if you do not see their bodies, you can tell from the swell of the water. The size of the eyes. Tell me what you think.”

Max breathed in a hot lungful of air and hazarded a guess. “Ten feet? Maybe more.”

“Could be one of many things out here.”

“Like what?” Bull asked nervously from beside Max.

“Black caiman for one, which we’ve already had a run-in with. Like your American alligators but twice the size. Up to twenty-five feet and a ton in weight, skulls bigger and jaw muscles stronger than a Nile crocodile.”

“Alligators don’t usually attack people,” Bull said. “Do they?”

“The caiman here love to eat people.” Kruger laughed, as if this was somehow funny.

The man seemed to enjoy scaring people, and Max didn’t like anyone who took pleasure in the discomfort of others.

Kruger added, “Speckled, knobbled skin. Sounds like what you saw.”

“And you didn’t see anything? Aren’t you the expert?”

“I was watching for human predators. Animals don’t usually bother people with guns. They are not stupid.”

“I don’t think it was a gator. What else is in these waters?”

The Afrikaner’s eyebrows furrowed together. “Bull sharks come up this high into the Amazon basin. Very common. Nasty animals. Fifteen foot, a thousand pound eating machine with teeth like razors.”

“Didn’t look like a shark fin, and water wasn’t deep enough.”

“Green anaconda? They have slick skin and spotted patterning. Biggest snakes in the world, up to thirty feet long and a half ton. And they hunt humans, too.”

“Oh, great,” Bull muttered.

“And of course, the piranha,” Kruger continued. “Which are everywhere here, but not the most savage. That award goes to the pacu, a larger carnivorous relative, which has a habit of eating men’s testicles.”

Bull grimaced. “I am not going in the water.”

“We might not have much choice,” Kruger said. “The way the flood is rising”—he pointed at swirling murk not six yards away, five feet down the muddy slope from the rock outcrop—“we might be in for a bit of aquatics. To be honest, a bigger worry for us boys are the candiru, tiny catfish so small they swim up the urethra and lodge inside to slowly eat their way further in.”

“I’m going to check the radio,” Bull said and stood up.

Kruger said to Max as Bull retreated, “Your friend is a nervous one, yes?”

“He’s not my friend. If you’re the expert, why didn’t the Colony mercs do a better job hunting us down? We were barely a hundred yards outside when they gave up.” Max still wasn’t convinced it wasn’t some kind of water drone or genetically modified creature Ben had created that was following them.

“Because maybe they have other things more important.”

“Than capturing the people who just blew up their compound?”

“Survival has a way of focusing the attention, Mr. Carver.”

“Meaning what?”

“Maybe because he knows we can’t cause any more damage and are probably already dead out here. The heat is growing by the hour. Humidex of a hundred and thirty now, maybe more. That supernova is getting brighter. Another day outside, and we will all literally cook to death.” He laughed.

“That’s funny?”

“Any trip through the rainforest is dangerous, Mr. Carver. Even an afternoon hike. Everything is poisonous, half will bite. Trees might fall. Rain in mountains a hundred miles away can flood the river ten feet in an hour and bring down debris to trap you. If the heat doesn’t get us, then maybe the local tribes or crazy farmers shooting at us for whatever supplies they think we have. Soon we will all be swimming or fighting for a patch of dry ground with anything else that is left alive. Mr. Belloc needs to keep us outside his perimeter, no matter what we may have done. Getting back inside of what’s left of the Colony will not be possible, not without a serious fight we’re not equipped to win. Hopefully the damage we inflicted was enough to stop him for the moment.”

“I doubt that.”

“One more animal it might have been you saw—maybe a river wolf.”

“Didn’t think they came this far south.”

“Giant otters, Mr. Carver. Six foot and two hundred pounds. They hunt in packs, though they do not much bother humans.”

“Why would they now?”

“Desperation. Have you not noticed the birds?”

Max had seen parrots at the Colony when he first arrived, but they had disappeared. Flown away in flocks. A few hours ago, he was sure he heard them in the trees, but now the only sound was the wind. No birdsong at all. “They’re flying north?”

“In droves, Mr. Carver. Same as humans are. Everything alive on the planet knows to head north. To us, Aeon is unexpected, something that has never happened. But to Mother Earth, supernovas go off like clockwork throughout the eons.”

“Seems like you know a lot about this.”

“Like everyone else, I’ve become something of a sudden expert since Aeon burst into being. But one thing I do know is that the animals have a deep memory. They know death is coming. Some will try to escape, others will try and get what they can, some others will simply lose their minds. Just like people.”

Max held Kruger’s steady gaze, no smile on the South African’s face this time. “How much did Buchannan pay you?”

“Not enough, Mr. Carver. Not nearly enough.”

“Hey, hey!” Bull called out. “We have Colonel Buchannan on the horn. Max, he wants to talk to you. Communications are back up.”

Chapter 23

South Pole, Antarctica

8:32 a.m. NZT

“All the communications equipment is totally wrecked,” Dr. Xin Rhou said to Dag.

She had just come back from a second attempt to find any radios in the main buildings of Amundsen Station. The interior of the second floor of the IceCube office spaces were quiet. No sound of turboprops, only the quiet hum of the computer fans and ventilation.

Xin did her best to get Dag comfortable on the couch by the coffee machine. The bullet had hit his left shoulder and gone straight through. She had found the exit wound. A lot of blood, but nothing major damaged, as far as they could tell. She applied antibiotics and bandages and wrapped it up to apply pressure. Beyond that, all they had in the med kit were some oxycodone tablets, which Dag refused to take.

Seven hours ago, the last flight out of Amundsen Station had left without them.

Xin had run into the main offices of the base, into the comms room, but all the equipment and radios inside had been smashed or shot through. Whoever trapped them here didn’t want Xin or Dag making outgoing calls alerting anyone to what happened. It was the disk drives they had been after, the thousands of gigabytes of data from the South Pole telescopes—but Dag had somehow managed to give them the wrong drives. Which also didn’t quite make sense.

On the coffee table sat the backpack with the real drives and data.

“Why would Susan leave without us?” Xin had been talking to the station manager in charge of the evacuation not fifteen minutes before the attack. Unbelievably, the plane had left without them a short time later. Everyone else was gone. Leaving Xin and Dag here was tantamount to a death sentence.

And one lone gunman? Maybe he could overpower them here, but not the dozen other people on that plane. Unless it was a hijacking. But to where?

“Maybe they shot her, too,” Dag said quietly.

Xin shook her head. She had done a circuit around the base, into all the buildings, but hadn’t seen a soul. She took a look outside as well. No dead bodies. Nothing. “I didn’t find anyone,” she replied.

“The best thing to do when you’re lost is to stay in place,” Dag said. “The flight to McMurdo is four hours. It’s only been seven hours so far, not even enough time for them to land and come back. They won’t leave us here. Somebody will be looking for us, that’s what’s hard to understand when you’re lost. That people out there are looking for you.”

“Except we’re not lost. We were left here. On purpose.”

“Why would the Americans leave us here?” Dag adjusted himself on the couch. “It was just one person that attacked us. And besides, we have the most valuable stuff on the planet in this bag, no? If not for us, then for it. Someone will be back soon. Maybe there is another plane coming. That makes the most sense. They wanted us to secure more data or something.”

For someone marooned on one of the most isolated places on the planet, in the middle of a natural disaster that might soon lay waste to half the planet, the Norwegian was remarkably collected. Xin had to admit she found herself keeping very close to him.

He couldn’t comprehend why the Americans might have done this. For him, there was no possible reason, even if the man that shot him had an American accent.

But Xin was hiding something.

She was a spy for her own government, something the Americans might have found out. It had nothing to do with the data or with Aeon, but if they knew, this might have been retribution. That was possible, wasn’t it? Should she tell Dag?

She sighed and looked out the portal windows at the brown clouds moving slowly in the distance. She had opened the exterior door a crack and wedged a folder in to keep it open. The facilities at the South Pole had excellent heating and insulation—but one thing nobody had thought of installing was air conditioning. With Aeon shining as bright as the sun directly overhead, the interior of the metal coffin of the IceCube structure had begun warming. All the equipment still running in here generated a lot of heat, which usually was more than offset by the frigid temperatures. But not anymore.

Dag exhaled. “So, supernovas. Talk to me. Are we just unlucky with this thing? I mean, shouldn’t someone have expected it? Known about it? Who dropped the ball?”

“Not sure this was anyone’s fault for not seeing.” She wasn’t sure that was true even as she said it, but she continued. “About once every hundred million years, one goes off nearby.”

“Once in a hundred million years? So, we’re kinda lucky to have witnessed this?”

Xin couldn’t help laughing. She did like this man’s optimism. Made her feel safe, somehow, even here.

He asked, “Explain to me why someone like you, an expert in particle physics, is also a guru in cosmology?”

Xin sat back on the couch. There was nowhere for either of them to go. All they could do was wait. She held up a fist. “When the universe started, it was everything compressed in a space as big as this.” She opened her clenched hand. “And boom, it expanded outward in what we call inflation.”

“The Big Bang.”

She nodded. “In those first moments, the physical laws for this universe became rooted, and all the subatomic particles formed and spread outward. The rules that govern the tiniest objects—particle physics—also are the same rules that describe why the galaxies are spread out the way they are. The study of the smallest things is also the study of the largest.”

“Everything is connected. I like that,” Dag said. “So why did we detect the neutrinos before we saw the light from the explosion?”

“Photons—light—and neutrinos are both generated in large quantities in the detonation.”

“Isn’t light the fastest thing in the universe? Wouldn’t that arrive first?”

“The thing is, the initial light burst gets trapped. When a supernova detonation occurs, a rapid process forms a thick shell of nickel-56—”

“Fifty-six?”

“A radioactive isotope of nickel produced in large quantities in supernovas.”

“And what’s an isotope?”

“Means the nucleus has a different number of neutrons clumped together with the protons. This ball of nickel is the first stable fusion product, which shoots outward at about ten percent the speed of light, forming the shell of the ejecta wall.”

“Which is what becomes a nebula, right? Like the Crab Nebula?”

“That’s right. Over thousands of years, the glowing remains of the supernova might stretch hundreds of light years. In the initial burst, photons and neutrinos are created together, but the photons get trapped in the shell, reflected inside until it expands enough to become transparent for them to escape. When it is the size of say, the orbit of Mars. Neutrinos, however—”

“Don’t interact much with matter, right?” Dag held up one finger. “See, I have been listening to you. The photons get reflected inside this ball of nickel, while the neutrinos escape and travel at almost the speed of light, so we get them first. But why were you surprised when the flash appeared sixty-five hours later? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?”

“Because it should only be a few hours for the ball of nickel-56 to get big enough to be transparent to photons. Maybe not for a hypernova, which is what the Americans were saying.”

But it still didn’t make sense.

There was no good candidate within parsecs of where Aeon was located in the sky, but then astronomy could be an imprecise science. A few years before, they discovered that the distance to Betelgeuse, the tenth-brightest object in the sky, was off by a huge margin. In star surveys going back decades, the accepted distance had been three hundred light years, but recent measurements made it more like eight hundred.

That was a big error for one of the most studied objects in the sky.

Xin said, “For a Type II star collapse supernova, the star needs to be at least eight times more massive than our sun, and even bigger for a hypernova. I still think it makes more sense that this was a white dwarf. One that was invisible to us. There are about two hundred within thirty parsecs that we know of, and I’m sure a lot we don’t.”

“Two hundred white dwarfs? Sounds like a Disney nightmare.” Dag smiled at his joke. “Seems like you’ve found your winner. Either a big fat hot one or the invisible dwarf.” He tapped the backpack on the table with his foot. “This will earn us the prize, yeah? That’s what this data is for, right? To figure it out?”

“That’s right.” Xin frowned. “I still don’t quite understand how you managed to switch out those disk drives so quickly. Surprised like that? And shot? You were able to perform a magic trick in those conditions?”

“I am cool under pressure. What can I say?” Dag smiled. “All that time free climbing makes one comfortable with the idea of imminent death.”

Xin gave him a long look. This guy was unusual, she could give him that.

She opened her laptop. Since they had time, she might as well use it. She reached into the bag to get the data from the Keck telescope. “Once I get a chance to look at it, maybe I can get a better idea of what Aeon might be.” But something was bothering her, tickling at the back of her mind. “I’m going to go and have a look around again. That okay?”

“Sure. Of course. Be careful.”

Xin got up and went to the door leading onto the metal gantry leading down. The door was still wedged open with the file folders she stuck in it. She put on her parka before stepping outside, but was hit by a wave of heat and the glare of Aeon. It was actually hot outside. She checked the exterior thermometer. It read ten Celsius.

Plus ten.

It hadn’t been above freezing at this spot in fifty-five million years, she realized with a terrifying shot of adrenaline. Almost since mammals had taken over from dinosaurs.

Wind buffeted the side of the metal structure.

Brown clouds circled slowly in the distance over the sheets of ice, but they weren’t really frozen anymore. A shimmering layer of water covered everything, all the way to the horizon, as if Amundsen Station and IceCube were floating in the middle of a sea. Even if someone came back here, she wasn’t sure they would be able to land now.

And Dag was right.

Someone would be coming back here. Whoever just tried to steal the data and kill Dag would figure out soon enough that they didn’t have the right drives. And she didn’t want to be here when they got back. But where could she and Dag go?

And then it hit her.

She swung open the door to go back inside. “Dag, how many other bases are there on Antarctica?”

“Sixty or seventy, give or take.”

“McMurdo is over a thousand miles from here. Is there anything closer?”

“Sure. I think the Russian base isn’t too far.”

“And I bet they still have their communications gear working.”

Dag smiled. “I bet they do.” His grin widened.

“What?”

“Do you know how to fly a kite?”

Chapter 24

Milpitas, California

11:40 a.m. PT

Talisha Carver held a hand under her belly and gently closed the passenger door of her SUV.

Oh God, please no, oh God, oh God. Still nothing. She still hadn’t felt the baby move.

She sat back in the seat and stared at the gaping hole where the door on the driver’s side had been. Something blew past the car on the wind. A kite? Shreds of sheet metal and the door’s ripped hinges were just visible under the steering wheel, evidence of the violence with which the driver’s side door had been torn away when she slammed the SUV into the narrow corridor of the pedestrian flyover walkway.

No sense in locking the passenger door, she decided. Not like it would stop anyone getting in with the driver’s side door missing.

Rain drummed on the SUV’s roof and hood. Water washed down the cracked windshield riddled with bullet holes, dripped in through them. Straight ahead was the chipped white paint of the back of the gas station just off Calaveras Boulevard. Her rental no longer had that new-car smell. Even with the gaping door hole open to the air, it smelled of oil and burnt plastic from the beating she had inflicted on it.

She shivered and reached to turn up the heat on the Ford Explorer’s center console.

The HVAC system hummed into a higher pitch and warm air blew across her feet and soaking arms. She should have grabbed a jacket at the hotel, put on a change of clothes. She was still in the same outfit she’d put on the morning before. Jeans with an elastic waist, a loose cotton top, and her most comfortable pair of leather flats.

Same underwear. Socks sopping wet.

In a wet paper bag in her lap, the last of what she’d scavenged from inside the Chevron gas station. Part of her was amazed that there was still an attendant working the register inside. The old man had a lot of hair on his head and face, all white like Santa Claus, and acted as if nothing unusual was going on in the world. His eyes startlingly bright blue when he looked up from his wrestling magazine. It seemed the older generation wasn’t as terrified of whatever was happening as hers was.

She handed him two twenties and said to keep the change.

Tal kicked off her flats and found the hot air vent with her feet, then stripped her socks off, wrung out the water, and held her naked feet under the vents. She eased back the seat so she had as much legroom as possible, then angled it back. Orange Reese’s Cups wrappers littered the driver’s seat beside her and rustled in the wind from the ragged opening. She fished in the paper bag and got out another Reese’s Cup, pulled open the wrapper. Hesitated.

Dropped it onto the seat beside her. Another one would make her feel ill.

She decided instead to take another swig from the half-finished coffee in the holder in the middle. She had already chugged a container of orange juice, but nothing was working. Already she felt like she wanted to vomit. No more.

But she needed sweet things. Needed caffeine.

“Please, baby, come on,” she pleaded and slipped back in the leather chair, both hands on her belly with her fingers splayed. Eyes closed as she waited to feel something. Anything.

Please, baby, please move. Tell me you’re there. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, please, please. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She slowed her breathing. Focused. Made herself as still as possible as the wind dragged sheets of rain across the car.

But.

Nothing.

Just a dull aching throb.

Sometimes babies didn’t move for hours. Sometimes you might not feel them for a day or two. Tal knew all that, but she had become used to a regular connection to her infant. Felt him moving as she moved. The past two months, the sensation had become a part of her, the fluttering of the baby adjusting position when she ate a pizza or he woke himself up.

Now.

Nothing.

But maybe that didn’t mean anything. That man had hit her hard in the stomach, so hard she had lifted into the air. Maybe the baby was stunned. Maybe she was, too. Maybe Tal couldn’t feel him because of the pain. And sometimes babies just didn’t move, even when you wanted them to.

Who were those men at the hotel?

The chatbot Nyx had warned Tal moments before they stormed the room.

Tal still had her earbuds in, but had turned off the pay-as-you-go phone after she escaped from the hotel, pulled its SIM card out. Same as her own phone. All her data connections cut off in case they tried to track her. But this rental Ford Explorer she sat in, it had a tracking device in it. All rental cars did, didn’t they? All new cars had data connections to the outside. If someone really wanted to find her, and it seemed someone did, then turning off her phones wouldn’t do much good.

But it might give her a little extra time to think.

She needed to ditch this car, too. She’d rented it with her credit card. So, she had pulled into this gas station at the end of Highway 237 that crossed eastward south of the Bay. She had almost stopped in Stanford and pulled into the hospital there, but had driven right past it. Too obvious. It was straight down the 101, just about the closest medical center to Burlingame. If they hadn’t figured out how to track her rental car yet, then the first obvious thing would be to check local hospitals. Check the obstetrics wards.

That man knew how hard he had pummeled her stomach.

Tal had pulled back onto the highway and crawled through the traffic, but had given up when she got to Milpitas and figured she needed to change cars. She parked her wrecked SUV to the side of the station where she could get a good look at people coming in and out.

What had she done?

She told Max to go off on that trip into Brazil, on a mission she hadn’t fully understood to a place she had read about but hadn’t researched properly. And now, she realized she shouldn’t have fought back. What was she thinking? She was pregnant. Her first priority was to protect her child, at all times, and sometimes that meant not fighting back.

She hadn’t protected her baby. Either of them.

There were no bad soldiers, her mother had always drilled into her head, only bad generals. There was nobody to blame but herself.

Her baby.

She needed a hospital as quickly as possible.

Those men that attacked her and Monk in the hotel room, the chatbot Nyx said they came from Spectrum. The chatbot hadn’t used those words, but it was as much as Tal could piece together before she switched off the data connection. Tal had thought that Spectrum was just a data collection system, a bunch of government nerds like her in big windowless buildings somewhere with servers humming away and sucking data from every corner they could.

But those men were definitely paramilitary.

And the biggest paramilitary operator in the pay of Uncle Sam was the Stillwater Corporation, run by Colonel Buchannan. Even if those men weren’t his, she had a suspicion that he was connected to Spectrum. What she could do with this information, she wasn’t sure yet, but it cemented the feeling she was being used. Her job offer at the NSA had come out of the blue. She worked in IT, but the position wasn’t security related. They offered to teach her, said it was part of an affirmative action program. At the time, it was just the opportunity to help her and Max out of a tight spot, with great benefits and pay.

It had seemed too good to be true, and it probably was.

She’d thought she was the one who was using them, but now it seemed the other way around. But why her? That was the question. She was a nobody.

She held her left hand under her belly and used her right to sketch out drawings of the tattoo she had seen on Monk’s arms. She had found a pen in the glovebox and used the back of a sheet of paper from the rental agreement to write on. Monk had tattoos on each forearm, both the same. Almost like three concentric circles, except in straight lines all connected, all going around and around. She kept one eye on the gas pumps ahead of her while she kept sketching.

At least the warm air on her feet was comforting.

A car pulled in. An old model Hyundai. A young man jumped out and ran inside. A rabbit foot dangled from the ignition as the teenager pulled his jean jacket over his head and ran inside, the car door still open.

Tal swung open her door quickly, grabbed the plastic bag with the phones and Colony cube, and hesitated. Just for a split second. Then she jogged over to the Hyundai. Its radio playing loud, some old classic rock station playing Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” Tossing her bag into the passenger seat, she scanned the dash and console for anything the kid might need, like a wallet or house keys.

“What are you doing?”

Tal had her right hand on the steering wheel, her left reaching out to close the door.

“That’s my car,” the kid said when Tal didn’t respond. He was six-three but gangly, wearing loose jeans almost falling off his backside, a baggy printed T-shirt, and skater shoes. Close-cropped blond hair dripping with rain and an armful of Twinkies.

“I’m pregnant,” Tal replied.

The kid frowned. “And? Get out of my car.”

She had the keys to the SUV in her right hand. She was going to give them to him anyway. She couldn’t leave him abandoned without a vehicle at a time like this, and anyway, having him drive that thing around would pull them off her tail, even if it meant they would get a description of his car. And the Hyundai was so old, she doubted it would have any network connections or location devices in it. She tossed him the keys and said, “Take mine, it’s over there. It’s a bit beaten up.”

“I don’t want—”

A loud grating warning noise erupted on the radio in the car, from the kid’s pocket, and from inside the gas station. “This is an emergency warning,” said a voice after two seconds of screeching alarm signals. “This is not a drill. This is an emergency warning. Please listen carefully, wherever you are. We have a message from the president of the United States.”

The kid stood frozen in place, rain sheeting down his face, his T-shirt and jeans soaking into darker shades as the dripping water bled into them.

“Fellow citizens,” came a familiar voice over the radio. “This is your president. I am making a nationwide address regarding the event known as Aeon in this most difficult of times. As a nation, we will be facing a hard task in the days and weeks ahead. Major flooding and rising temperatures will begin to take effect, which we hope will be blunted by our winter.

“Emergency services will be severely compromised or unreachable in the weeks and perhaps months ahead, but we will be deploying the military internally to keep order. For those of you in the northern interior states, please shelter in place. Try to limit your exposure outdoors during the day as the ozone layer is thinning, allowing ultraviolet radiation from our sun to increase dramatically. Rainwater will be acidic, and plant and crop yields will be difficult this year. Please, try to help your neighbor. Stock up on what you can. For those on the coasts, we advise staying as far from the oceans as possible due to incoming storms, major flooding, and sea level rise. And if you are able, we advise all citizens to begin moving north, especially from the Southwest deserts—”

Tal didn’t wait to hear the end of the announcement. Nobody was going to be calling the police now. She tossed the kid her SUV keys and stomped down on the accelerator. The Hyundai didn’t peel out, but it accelerated fast enough that the young man couldn’t catch her.

“Try again,” Tal begged.

She was seated in a gurney with the back angled up, her soaking wet top pulled high. Her swollen, dark-skinned stomach exposed and slathered with gel. The nurse helping her, a young woman in blue scrubs and Nike sneakers with her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, was doing her best—but she couldn’t find a heartbeat.

“Ma’am, I’ve already tried a half dozen times.” The nurse adjusted the head of the ultrasound device, swept it up and down, pressed it hard into Tal’s stomach, and then tried another pass.

Tal had done this a few times before, but those were happy events with Max standing next to her and holding her hand while the technician pointed out the nose and toes and they listened to the thrumming fast heartbeat of their little one.

The outline of the baby’s head now appeared in ghostly dots on the ultrasound’s screen. The tiny ski-jump button nose that was so cute. The tiny fingers.

But no heartbeat.

Tears streamed down Tal’s face as she sobbed and begged for the nurse to try again.

The Kaiser Permanente Medical Center was on the other side of the highway from where she had parked at the Chevron station. When she had driven by in her SUV an hour before, she had seen the familiar blue lettering of the Kaiser hospital, so she’d stopped at the gas station on the other side of the highway from it. If she had stopped there in the rental, however, it would have probably been tracked by Monk or those other men, and if she needed an operation or God knew what to save the baby, she needed time.

That’s why she had to switch cars before coming to the hospital.

The second she took off in the Hyundai, she drove over to Kaiser. She ran into the medical center and cried that she had an emergency, but the inside was total chaos. People in wheelchairs and on gurneys were being wheeled out, with masses of family members streaming in through the doors to find their loved ones. Cars parked haphazardly over the medians and on the grass outside. Tal had run through the emergency department, asking anyone for help. She followed the signs and found obstetrics and gynecology, and then begged this nurse.

“Still no heartbeat, ma’am,” the nurse repeated.

“Let me try,” said a man standing in the doorway. “I’m Doctor Mahutte,” he added and walked over to inspect the ultrasound images. “What happened?”

“I was hit in the gut,” Tal replied.

There was the ugly beginning of a reddish bruise on the top right of her bulging stomach, where the man had slammed into her with his fist.

“Punched?” He took the ultrasound wand from the nurse, who whispered to him that she had to go. He nodded. The woman fled, her sneakers squeaking on the tiles as she accelerated down the hallway.

Tal sobbed, “Can we do an emergency delivery? Resuscitate him? What are the options?”

The doctor eased the ultrasound probe around her stomach a few more times, urged her to stay quiet. Again, and again. Finally, he sighed long and slow. “See here? These are the cardiac muscles. The heart isn’t pumping. It should be fluttering at a high rate. I’m very sorry.”

“What can we do?” Tal’s voice had a ragged edge.

Chapter 25

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

3:30 p.m. ET

Max CARVER edged closer to the comms radio, but Iona Alcott held up one hand to keep him back. Kruger was still talking into the mic, the sound turned low. Max had a hard time hearing what was being said over the drumbeat of the rain and hissing rustle of the windblown treetops. Between bursts of static, he heard the familiar voice of Colonel Buchannan.

Max clenched his fists and jaw.

“The Colony structures were larger than anticipated,” Kruger said in a hushed voice. He looked up at Max as if deciding whether to continue talking with him in earshot. “Visual cloaking across the structures hid the extent from satellite imaging, but we think we got most of it.”

The Afrikaner leaned down to the radio to hear the reply, which Max couldn’t make out.

“I need to talk to your father,” Max said to Iona, who stood beside him.

She replied, “Can I talk to him first? Quickly? He didn’t even know if I made it out alive.” Turning, she said to Kruger, “Give me the radio.”

Kruger said into the mic, “I’ve got the coordinates.” He glanced up at Iona. “Your daughter wishes to speak with you.”

Max watched the interchange between Kruger and Buchannan’s daughter. Whatever Max asked, he wasn’t going to get a straight answer, but then what wasn’t said, the gaps between truths, that’s what he needed to focus on with people like this. He had been in the military long enough to recognize when doublespeak began to take over.

Iona took two careful steps between the slick rocks and took the mic from the Afrikaner. “Dad, I’m okay. Everything is fine. As can be, given the circumstances.”

Colonel Buchannan’s voice through the static. “You keep close to Kruger, you understand?”

Iona turned away from Max and said something he couldn’t hear, the reply hushed and unintelligible over the static. He gave them a moment.

He was about to tap her shoulder when she turned back. “We have someone else who needs to have a word.” She held up the mic and offered a seat on the moss next to her. The mic cord stretched past her as Max sat down and held the transmit button.

Before Max could say anything, the colonel said, “Max, are you there? I am very sorry I got you into this mess.”

“Do you know where my wife is?”

“We have people who are finding her. We’re in touch.”

“Did you send her to San Francisco?”

“She left Washington without my people knowing. I am doing my best in what has become a very chaotic situation. The president just made a nationwide address. We are evacuating the coasts. Your wife has not been answering our calls.”

“Forget the money. I need you to find her and get her somewhere safe. Can you do that?” Max bowed his head. “And I’ll help get back whatever it is you’re taking from here. I’ll keep your daughter protected, defend her with my life. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it, but get my wife and child safe.”

“We have people tracking Talisha down. We will bring her to meet you, I promise you that. We have a plane on the ground in San Francisco, and we have air transport on the way down to you now. I just gave Kruger the coordinates.”

Max did a mental recount. At least fifteen people around him. “How many choppers?”

“Can’t get helicopters in this wind and weather. A C-130 is on its way, a modified hurricane hunter specifically designed to land rough, and there’s an airstrip ten clicks to your east at an old mining operation.”

Max brought up a mental map of the area. “That’s across the Japura.”

“Not many airfields in your area.”

“Have you seen the rivers here? And what’s in them?”

“You’re going to need to find some boats.”

“Did you know?”

“Excuse me?”

Max gripped the mic tight in his fist, his knuckles white. He noticed that none of the others were talking or moving around. Everyone had moved a little closer. Eavesdropping. Rain pattered down from the rocky overhang.

Colonel Buchannan said, “Ask yourself, would I have risked my only child to be where you are now, do the things she is going to have to do, if I had known a global disaster was about to begin?”

That wasn’t answering the question.

Colonel Buchannan continued, “I would have brought my daughter back sooner, if I’d known. That is the God’s truth. And if that’s not good enough, the answer is no. We were as blindsided as everyone else by this thing.”

“What difference will a few crates from the Amazon make?”

“Maybe none, but possibly some. We spent years on this project, Max. We need to know everything we can about what happened at the Colony to counter what Ben might have unleashed back in America. What I can tell you is that Aeon will begin to dim. Temperatures are rising, but not catastrophically. We have a window of a few days to get you home. That’s all the time we need.”

A burst of relieved conversation began in the group.

Another surge of static over the radio, and then—“packets Belloc distributed and that your own wife was investigating. We have reports of civilians ingesting—”

The radio went into static again. The man in combat fatigues operating it squinted and adjusted a few dials. “Disturbances in the ionosphere. Signal is spotty.” Max glanced up at the antenna snaking from the radio and up around the rocks and tree above them.

He sat back and held the mic away.

After a few seconds, Colonel Buchannan’s voice came through the white noise. “Max, are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“What did Ben discuss with you? When you met?”

Max leaned into the mic and keyed the reply button. “Not to trust you, which was a large part of the conversation, sir. With all respect.”

“Anything else? Anything”—Colonel Buchannan paused—“unusual?”

“I met the Colony’s AI, a woman. Ben called her Gaia.”

“You met her? Talked to her?”

“In person.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In a kind of virtual reality. He took me to San Francisco—a 3D visual projection, as best as I can describe it. Not quite real, but disturbingly close.” If Colonel Buchannan’s daughter was living in this place, wasn’t she using the nexome? Ben had described it as their network.

“We need to get moving,” said a voice in that distinctive South African accent. “If we are going to cover ten kilometers in a day in this heat, across this terrain. We can chitchat on the hike out.”

The radio hissed with white noise. “We’ve lost the signal,” said the operator as he twiddled the dials.

Max handed the mic back. He swatted away something crawling up his slick neck. His hand came away covered with small black ants.

“Pack it up,” Kruger announced. “Get everything and everyone moving. I have the coordinates on the GPS. We have eighteen hours to get ten clicks due west. We need to cross the river. Can’t be late, the whole world is going into the shitter. That plane can’t stay on the ground long and it’s our only ticket out of here. From what I’ve been told, a wall of wind like a brick tornado will flatten this forest and everything in it. I do not want to be here when that happens. Get rid of everything you don’t absolutely need. Minimal food rations. Take the water. Share loads. Slow but steady, that will win this race.”

Max felt like he was going to pass out from the heat, his face prickly hot, his clothes stuck to him with the rain and sweat like they were glued on. Unsteadily, he got to his feet and immediately felt a lancing sting on the side of his neck, near the shoulder.

He slapped his left hand hard to the pain.

“Pull your hand away,” Iona said from beside him. “Slowly.” She leaned in and pinched his skin as he eased his palm from the skin. “Clistopyga crassicaudata, a big one.” She held out a two-inch long squirming yellow insect, its body pinned between her thumb and forefinger.

Half of its length was a nasty-looking spear.

“Good that you caught her quick,” Iona said.

“Her?”

“That’s a momma,” Iona said as she squeezed and flicked off the insect’s head with her thumbnail. It didn’t stop wriggling. “The stinger is an ovipositor. Attacked you like she thought you were a spider, their favorite prey. You’re going to need some antihistamines.”

Max rubbed his neck. “I’m fine, I don’t need anything.”

“Depositing eggs into you, that’s what she was doing,” Kruger said from ten feet away. The Afrikaner shouldered a pack that looked like it weighed a hundred pounds. “The little buggers would hatch inside you and eat their way out. Or in.”

Bull had a pack on already and took a few steps toward Iona to inspect the insect. “Are there a lot of those out here?”

“More than a hundred species of parasitoid wasps in the Amazon,” Iona said and tossed the bug.

Kruger said, “And those wasps love the Brazilian wandering spider, like she said.”

“Wandering where?” Bull asked.

“On the hunt for their next meal. Like tarantulas, but nastier. The most venomous in the world. Don’t turn over logs or step into branches.”

“Anything else to watch for?” Bull asked nervously.

“Giant centipedes, some more than a foot long, and vicious hunters. Poison dart frogs—don’t touch them, or anything else colorful. And then the snakes. Pit vipers will kill you. Tree boas, too, if you give them the chance. And jaguar hunt here. We’ll be competing with everything for dry land as the water comes up.”

“Holy shi—”

“Bull, get moving,” Kruger said. “Rotate the heavy loads. Slow and steady, and drink lots of water.”

Max opened the drawstring on a backpack next to him. Filled with MREs—field rations— and bottles of water. He slung the pack onto his back. Forty pounds. That was as much as he was going to attempt. He wasn’t in grunt shape anymore.

The South African had already begun to head away at a right angle to the way they came in. Back toward the river. Max scanned the muddy water between the trees but didn’t see the thing he’d seen following them. Was it a caiman? Or another of the creatures hunting out here?

“You should count yourself lucky,” Kruger said.

“Excuse me?”

“You have Colonel Buchannan sending a military transport to take your wife to a safe place. New Zealand is gone.”

“The storms? How bad?”

“Rainstorms packing four-hundred-kilometer-per-hour winds. Military has lost touch with anyone much below the Tropic of Capricorn, and we’re at three degrees south. We have time, but not much. You think if you had not come here, things would be safer for her? For you? For your child?”

“I would be there.”

“Or maybe you would be a thousand miles away in a delivery truck, and her in her little house. With no protection, no guardian angels. How do you say? Silver linings?” Kruger turned away and began walking into the jungle. “You would be one of the little people crushed under the foot of this thing. You should think yourself lucky, is what I am saying.”

Max looked back the way they came into the steaming gloom and sleeting rain toward the Colony.

Chapter 26

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

7:52 p.m. ET

Max hunkered down in a patch of high wet grass and focused the binoculars.

Four hours of backbreaking bushwhack through this steaming and waterlogged world of towering green in search of anything they could use as a boat. It took an hour to cover two kilometers to get back to the swollen bank of the Japura. Two of the party had been bitten on rest stops—one by a spider that scurried off before it could be identified, and the other by fire ants. Kruger administered his best guesses at antivenom from the limited med kit, but both people’s wounds were already festering in the heat and wet and dirt.

An hour earlier, the sun had gone down. A bizarre scene of two setting suns, Sol to the west and Aeon to the south, casting crisscrossing gold and red rays through the treetops. The light of the two suns danced and flickered between scudding clouds threatening lightning. Thunder echoed in the distance. The scent of burning suns was somehow in the air, part of an aftertaste in the back of the throat, paired with the thick organic stench of rotting plants as the brown rain ate away at the forest carpet.

The sun had mercifully set over an hour ago and retreated toward the other side of the planet. All that was left now was Aeon’s glow and tendrils of auroras in breaks between the clouds, the sky purple and pregnant to the north.

But never dark.

The team had scavenged the minigun from the chopper, but they had to leave it back at the rocky outcropping. Same for batteries and other heavy items, most of the food, and half of the bottled water. Kruger forced Iona to repack half of the crates she took from the Colony. Lighten the load, he kept repeating, we need to be as nimble as possible.

It felt like the jungle was watching them.

The air hot molasses on each breath, the oxygen superheated into a glistening miasma hanging between the drenching warm rain. They had to stop every fifteen minutes to give everyone a break, make sure they were hydrated, check for heat stroke—not that there was much they could do about it. A few of the party were barely able to walk by themselves, never mind carry anything.

The sleeting rain burned the skin and eyes. Iona explained again it was the nitrides formed by the supernova in the upper atmosphere. Some of the vegetation on the ground was already beginning to turn brown, wilting before their eyes.

Nearly 8 p.m., but night would never come, not with Aeon shining. The clouds low and moving fast and tinted orange toward the south. Aeon was nearing its highest point. From their vantage just below the equator, Aeon was only a few degrees above the horizon and mostly hidden by the jungle, but its glow lit up the clouds in an eternal sunset. Hell was now a real place and creeping north by the hour as storms and heat engulfed the planet.

They stopped at the edge of a clearing around what had been a small village of thatched huts on stilts. The huts had been torched, most of them burned down, and not long ago from the wafting scent still on the wind. He wiped his eyes and refocused the binoculars to see through the sleeting rain. There were longboats ten feet up the embankment from the water’s edge. Two of them with outboard engines mounted near the rear. Something floated beside them.

The boats couldn’t have been here long. The surging brown water of the Japura River was rising inch by inch every few minutes. The boats would be swept away in a matter of hours, at most.

And he bet there was a lot of debris in the water being pulled down from the mountains.

“If you were going to blow up the Colony,” Max said to Iona, “why bother bringing me?”

She took the binoculars from him. “Diplomacy was the first option, but the event changed the stability of the situation.”

“Changed the stability? You definitely work for the government.”

“You were out of commission for two days. I appreciate you tried to speak with Belloc, and you got deeper into his private networks than anyone else. When we debrief, your experience will be critical.”

“Debrief? No way I’m sticking around when we get back.”

Iona said, “I know he’s your friend. That might be important once we get out of here. You helped by distracting him. What was Belloc like as a teenager? What did you do most of the time?”

That was a weird question at a time like this. Max ignored it.

“I doubt we could have pulled this off without you,” Iona said.

“Pulled off what?”

“Stopping him.”

“I’m not sure we did.”

“Slowed down, at least.”

“I still don’t understand what we stopped. There are maybe a hundred civilians still in the Colony, and you just cut off their escape route. Wrecked their airships, maybe killed a bunch of them in those explosions.”

“Everyone not under Belloc’s spell is here with us.”

“Whatever Belloc is, you’re the ones that created him. This is your fault as much as his.”

“Can we assign blame at some later point?”

“Your team fired on the Colonists with bullets, but they fought back with nonlethal weapons. Sticky netting shot from spearguns. They weren’t trying to kill us. If Ben’s a terrorist bent on killing Americans back home, why wouldn’t he kill us here?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“And I’m not trying to sell it.”

“I hate the word terrorist,” Max said. “It used to mean something. Now it’s anyone the government doesn’t like.”

“That’s not true.”

“I hunted real terrorists in Afghanistan. They do horrific things, but I can tell you from first-hand experience most of them are some of the saddest people you will ever meet. Dirt poor. Abandoned. Uneducated. They feel cornered. Powerless. Unspeakable acts of horror their only way to fight back. Does any of that sound like Ben? Because it doesn’t to me. If anything, he seemed confident and in his element.”

“I’m telling you what we know.”

No, you’re not, Max thought, but said, “You’ve never used the nexome?”

“Not the way you did,” she replied. “I didn’t go inside it. I was never invited, didn’t even know it existed like that. Only used the network part through a screen.”

“What do you think?” Kruger appeared through the grass to Max’s right. For someone six-four and built like a prizefighter, the man seemed to float more than walk. “This village was not on any maps. Seems we got lucky.”

Max took back the binoculars and peered through. Some other people had definitely been unlucky, however. The objects bobbing in the eddy current beside the canoes were bodies. “I don’t see any movement,” he replied.

“From the look of those huts,” Iona replied to Kruger, “looks like an uncontacted tribe.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Kruger replied.

“Uncontacted?” Max said. “Never seen civilization?”

“Not exactly the right wording,” Iona said. “They usually had some interaction with the outside in the past, but encounters were often violent. The tribes retreated into the jungle. The highest concentration of uncontacted humans in the world are in this area, along the border between Brazil and Peru.”

“Then why the longboats with the outboards?”

“I think you’re going to want to see this,” came Kruger’s gruff voice from behind them.

Bodies of indigenous men were stacked one beside the other in a shallow grave pit they must have been forced to dig for themselves just beyond the burnt huts. Even with the world ending, humans still found the time to murder each other. Their brown skin now pale and waterlogged, lips blue, their brightly colored thongs stripped away and thrown across the grass so the men were naked and exposed, their dignity stripped away with their lives. The bodies riddled with bullet holes. Further up the slope toward the forest laid the twisted remains of indigenous women. They had been running away. Bullet holes in their backs. Imprints of small feet in the mud, but no bodies of children.

Someone had fought back. Or something had.

Thirty feet from the mass grave toward the water was another body, but this one was dressed in blue jeans and a collared golf shirt. Kruger found a needle finned with feathers in the man’s neck—a poison dart, he said—but the more immediate cause of death were the jagged slashes across his belly, like he’d been ripped open by giant razor-sharp claws. Fresh blood seeped into the pools and hollows around the body and ran down in rivulets through the rain to the circulating current down the slope.

Two more men in jeans floated face down at the water’s edge, and both looked ripped apart in a similar fashion. They spun slowly in the brown water, now tinged red.

Iona explained that the men in jeans had to be slash-and-burn loggers from a little way up the river. Must have stopped here to raid the village for supplies on their way to escape the hypernova. One way or the other it turned violent. The indigenous men looked like they’d been executed in a row. The women shot when they tried to escape.

“There were at least six boats that came in here,” Kruger said, indicating grooves in the mud below the waterline, in the swirling eddy behind the burnt-down huts. “At least a dozen people left in a hurry, judging from the footfalls. And maybe a few of the village kids escaped into the jungle.”

One of Kruger’s team was at the edge of the forest, where the small footsteps led. “No more bodies out here.” But the man didn’t venture very far into the greenery.

“Set up a perimeter,” Kruger called back to him.

Iona asked, “Any idea what killed the loggers?”

“An animal of some kind, not a human.” Kruger nudged one of the bodies by the water’s edge and turned it over. “Deep wounds from something sharp, but the skin is also shredded. Maybe more than one predator? The thing wasn’t interested in eating. Just attacking and killing, which is unusual. We’ll probably find more bodies.”

Max had seen this before. Round up the men in a village and kill them. The genocidal behavior of warlords bent on controlling an area, but what was left to control here? He knelt beside the body at the edge of the river. The water was cool. Some of it must be coming from glaciers in the Andes. He had to resist the urge to dive right in, and instead scanned the surface of the rain-dimpled churning brown for any sign of caiman.

On the collar of the man’s shirt was a small brass button. A thistle. Max unclipped the pin, held it close to examine it for a moment. He frowned, looked around to see if anyone else had seen him take it.

“Stay away from the bodies,” Kruger barked at Max. “No idea what might be near them.”

Max stood and pocketed the pin. Kruger pushed him back and used the toe of his boot to flip the dead man over. A six-inch centipede scurried away. “See what I mean?” He used his foot to turn the body again, moved the corpse toward the water.

Bull pulled on the starter cord of one of the outboards. It was like a huge lawnmower engine mounted on a swivel, a ten-foot shaft attached to the motor with a propeller at the end. The engine sputtered. He checked the fuel canister and then pulled again. Nothing.

“Somebody did a job on these,” Bull said after another inspection. “Pulled out the spark plugs and wiring. Didn’t want to be followed.”

“Team mechanic didn’t make it out of the second chopper,” Kruger said from behind him. “You think you can fix it? Anyone else?”

Max took a quick look and said, “If they took out the spark plugs, they would have needed a socket and ratchet or at least some pliers, so there’s probably a toolkit in the boat somewhere. I can figure out the wiring, and we can do a search in the grass to see if we can find the spark plugs or figure something out. Must have tossed them, hopefully not into the water. I can make just about anything with a piston work, given time. And drive just about anything, too.”

“Time is not a luxury we have.” Kruger checked his watch.

“That’s a lot of blood in the river,” Bull said as he gave Max room to start working. “Doesn’t that attract piranha?”

“Stay out of the water.” Kruger turned to the group. “Understand? I don’t want to see anyone near it unless I say so. We don’t need any other surprises.”

Sweat mixed with the rain and dripped in a steady beat from the tip of Max’s nose. Standing still, he was heaving hot breaths in and out, and he had just dropped his pack. He inspected the first engine. Someone had ripped out all the visible wires, like Bull said.

The canoes were fifteen feet from the river. Coming around a bend, the water boiled and churned, the surface spotted by the falling rain. Gusts of wind hissed through the treetops. Eyes watched them from the water, caiman about thirty yards up the bank. Scavengers had already begun to pick at the fresh meat of the dead, but they had scurried away when the humans arrived.

“We’ll set up a temporary camp,” Kruger said. “Let the injured rest and do some first aid.”

“I’ll help,” Iona said.

“You stay with me,” Max said, taking her arm before she could move away. There was no way he was letting her get more than ten feet from him. She was his ticket home. “And Kruger, I need a Glock. I need a firearm. Something I can keep on me.”

Max and Iona and everyone else who was able-bodied and not securing the perimeter searched across the mud and grass for the spark plugs and wires. “You really think this was a first contact tribe?”

“To them, we’re the alien invaders,” Iona replied, her head down, bent over and picking at a stick that wasn’t an engine part.

“Strange choice of words.”

“It’s why Belloc first came out here,” she said.

“To be an alien?”

“For an original experience. Ultimately, that’s what the ‘aliens’ want, right? By that I mean people from the outside.”

“Always found that a weird phrase. Why not just call them immigrants?”

“Didn’t you ever want to go somewhere new? Somewhere primal? You never dreamed about it?”

Not after Afghanistan, Max thought, but said, “I guess it’s like staring at the ocean. We used to do a lot of that back home. Me and Ben. It’s peaceful. Meditative. Gives you a sense of where you came from. A connection back to it.”

“To the ocean?”

“To creation, I guess.”

“Ever hear of the Garden of Eden hypothesis?” Iona asked.

“Apart from the naughty apple?”

“It’s the idea that the Amazon isn’t really wild, but a carefully nurtured garden shaped over tens of thousands of years by the humans that live here. That none of this is truly natural, even though it seems pristine.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Hey, I found one.” Max stooped to pick up a spark plug and wiped some mud from it. He walked back toward the first canoe.

The rain had stopped for a moment, the churning clouds clearing to reveal not blue skies, but a shimmering dirty white. Pink and green ribbons arced high into the indistinct heaven between scudding clouds.

“The auroras are getting more intense. The radiation output from Aeon must be charging the ionosphere,” Iona said, staring up with her mouth open. “What did it feel like, inside the nexome?”

“How did people get here?” Max asked. “I mean, to the Colony?”

“By helicopter from Peru.”

“Whose helicopters?”

“All run by the US government,” Iona said after a pause.

“You mean run by Stillwater, your dad’s company. And this area was a no-fly zone for everyone else? Who did you work with in the Brazilian military? Or was it contractors?”

“Nobody else flies in this remote area.” Iona bent low and turned away to continue searching.

“And it’s funny, but I heard of a lot of people coming to the Colony, but not of anyone leaving. Not ever. People came here but never left, not that I heard of.”

“You got that working yet?” the radio operator guy asked. While Max and Iona were searching for engine parts scattered in the grass, he had been trying to get a signal. He seemed to have given up, though, his radio and antenna wrapped in his backpack again. “I want to try from the other side, from that hill over there.”

He pointed across the swollen Japura.

Bull walked beside the radio operator and said, “Isn’t Gaia pagan? Like of the animals, the Earth? Why would Ben name his AI after a pagan God of the Earth? If he’s so nutty about the Bible, wouldn’t he call it Mary? Or John or something?”

Max knelt by a pool of water and swished the spark plug around to clean off the mud, and then blew on it a few times to air out the cracks around the central electrode. He wiped it with his shirt and then opened a small toolkit they had found in the bottom of one of the boats. He used a set of needle-nose pliers to screw the plug into the engine of the closest canoe. He then fixed the wire to the magneto. After giving everything another check, he clicked the shifter to make sure the engine was in neutral, and then yanked back on the pull cord.

The engine whined to life.

“Nice work, Carver,” Kruger called out from the middle of the makeshift encampment thirty feet away. He stood and began walking over and picked up a crate by its straps. “We start ferrying stuff over, yeah?” He checked his watch. “We have eleven hours till the plane arrives. We need to get moving.”

“I’ll go first,” the radio operator said as he swung his pack in. “You join me?” he asked the woman Colonist who had been helping him, Susanna.

She swung a pack onto her back. Iona came over to help her load some bags in. “Fred,” she called out to another Colonist who had been working with the radio operator. “You coming with us?”

“You can drive one of these?” Max asked Kruger.

The boat was twenty feet long stern to bow, green along the hull to the gunwales, and light blue inside. The paint had flaked off in great patches, revealing the gray, weathered wood beneath. The bottom littered with crushed cans, fish netting, and cigarette butts.

“I’ve driven versions of these all over the tropics,” Kruger said and dropped in the box. “Keep it a light load for the first crossing.”

“Don’t need to force it. Angle the boat and gas enough to keep in place.”

“I’ve crossed rivers before, mate.”

Max shrugged and helped the radio operator and the woman slide the longboat down the incline toward the boiling water while Kruger dragged the rear and held the prop shaft in the air so it didn’t get caught. The moment the rear of the boat hit the water, Kruger stepped in. Max continued pushing the boat out while the radio operator and the woman climbed in.

“Wait, just wait a moment,” called out a French-accented voice at the same time as a bray of squealing yells came from behind Max.

One hand still on the longboat, Max turned to see two small bodies burst with flailing arms and legs from a thatch of ferns a hundred feet back toward the jungle. “Don’t shoot,” he yelled as he sensed Bull and Garza bring around their rifles from their positions in the perimeter fifty yards to either side of them.

The children ran toward the boat, their hands jabbing forward. The closest and smallest, black hair bobbing as he wailed, reached to the ground and then lobbed something at them.

“Don’t fire!” Max let go of the front of the longboat as it slid into the water and flinched as the projectile sailed well high and past him.

The second child, not more than ten, stutter stepped and wound up to throw, but his body jerked back in a red mist. Two staccato bursts of automatic fire from Max’s left. He ducked reflexively and turned back to Kruger.

The Afrikaner fired again. The water’s surface in Max’s peripheral vision exploded in a heaving spray. A brown-and-silver monster blasted out of the murk over the left gunwale and engulfed the radio operator in its jaws. Iona shrieked as the creature rolled over onto her.

Chapter 27

White House

Washington, DC

8:02 p.m. ET

Colonel Buchannan stepped out of the black Escalade and wondered where his daughter was. He pulled the lapels of his wool jacket up against a squall of wind. It was a blustery, wet evening, chilly for January in Washington, but then it wouldn’t be for long. He hoped Iona was safe and getting to that airfield. He had talked to her three hours earlier and tried to convey what he could about the situation, but he didn’t want her to worry more than she had to. He had a C-130 on the way down to get her. She needed to get out of Brazil.

That’s what she needed to focus on.

He would worry about this end of things.

A rain shower had passed and left puddles across the pavement outside the columned north entrance to the West Wing. The sky clear overhead and still dark, stars visible but washed out between the dancing sheets of white and green auroras that filled the night sky over the White House.

He glanced right, toward Constitution Avenue. The crowds chanted and waved placards. The Secret Service had to come out of the northwest gate on Pennsylvania Avenue to push back the masses so his small convoy could get into the White House compound.

With bodyguards to each side, the colonel strode into the lobby entrance of the West Wing, did a biometric check, and left his Ruger SR1911 at the guard desk. His bodyguards had to remain at the entrance. He continued in alone. The hallway inside was scattered with discarded coffee cups and papers.

A young man carrying a stack of folders almost ran straight into him. Mumbled an apology before disappearing toward the press bullpen.

Buchannan headed left and down the stairwell to the lower level. Another guard desk. Buchannan presented his ID, and then submitted to another round of biometrics before the guard asked for any communication devices. The colonel pulled out his cell phone, and then a second one, and deposited them into the lead-lined receptacle. A buzzer sounded.

He pushed open the door to the Situation Room and walked down the first connecting corridor.

One thing most people didn’t realize about the Situation Room was that it wasn’t just one room. It was a complex of six thousand square feet, including three central “situation rooms” with videoconferencing and data feeds, but also three adjoining watch rooms, each with stacked rows of monitors and men and women tracking calls and watching media playing on wall screens.

Buchannan entered the first watch room.

The wall screens inside showed satellite images of a hurricane bearing down on the East Coast. Eddy currents in the atmosphere had shorn off the main wall of wind circling the bottom of the planet into dozens of cyclones and hurricanes in all of the southern oceanic basins. Washington was under an evacuation order ahead of the storms, but where would people go? In the last twelve hours, they had completely lost touch with Australia, and now South Africa.

President Charles’s message to the nation eight hours ago hadn’t helped. If anything, it had triggered panic, but only in half the population. The other half didn’t believe him—it was hard to take in the fact that a massive hypernova had exploded when conditions were still normal in much of the country. Some people didn’t want to accept it, and tried to ignore it as media hysteria.

The president was losing control of the situation.

“Sir, are you joining the meeting?” asked a young man toward the front.

Buchannan nodded and stepped through the aisles of monitors as the door ahead was opened.

“The average global temperature has risen by over two degrees Celsius in the last forty-eight hours,” said Dr. Owen, standing again at the front of the room. The screens to each side were filled with images of cyclones and hurricanes. “In direct line with Aeon, over the South Pole, temperatures are thirty degrees above seasonal norms, although we have no assets there, so we are estimating.”

The president sat at the head of the table. The vice president had already evacuated from Washington. After giving the address to the nation today, the president had declined to leave, saying he wasn’t going to have people see him hiding in a bunker, but here he was in one below the White House. Senator Copeland sat at the middle of the table, along with the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Ocean levels are already rising,” continued Dr. Owen, “and may rise as much as a foot in the next week, mostly due to the expansion of warming seawater as well as polar cap melt. This will be offset by large volumes of water vaporized into the atmosphere, but this will only accelerate the warming feedback cycle.” She hesitated. “And all indications are that Aeon is brightening again.”

The president ran a hand through his hair. “Brightening? I thought it was dimming?”

Dr. Roberts said, “It was.”

“I announced to the nation that it was getting dimmer.”

“Sir, this is a complex phenomenon. We have the initial energy burst, spectrophotometric behavior to deal with rather than simple magnitude, fast evolving multiple emitting zones, the radioactive decay of nickel-56 into cobalt and iron, and circumstellar—”

“I know, I know.” The president laid his hands flat on the table. “Dust clouds. Accelerant. Mark, what about Texas? Have we heard anything else from the governor?”

The secretary of Homeland Security replied, “Nothing new, sir. The Texas senate voted unanimously to secede from the Union as of two-thirty this afternoon. However, we’re not sure of the legality.”

“I am not sure legality is at the top of their agenda.”

“And they’re still calling for federal aid. The governors of California and the western bloc of Oregon and Washington have not responded to our calls, but their teams have been reaching out, requesting FEMA dispatches. What we’re calling the Southern Alliance is holding a private meeting of governors as we speak. It’s chaotic, sir.”

“And Richard? What about CENTCOM?”

“Its HQ is in Tampa. We’re evacuating staff to USNORTHCOM at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. The air force and army bases along the West Coast are still responding, although they’re getting interfering signals from state governments,” the Joint Chiefs replied. “Texas is closing their borders. We’ll provide an update once we reach Cheyenne.” He paused. “I would advise against any further addresses to the nation, sir. It caused chaos in the population and triggered the vote in the Texas legislature.”

“How did this happen so quickly? Anything else?”

“I would also advise against proceeding with any further mobilization of the military within our own borders, sir. This is worsening the reaction from state legislatures and the population.”

“I am only trying to tell them the truth. Trying to help them. Goddamn it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Copeland saw Buchannan enter, got up from her seat, and joined him at the back of the room. “Any news?” she whispered to him.

“The transport is on its way down to Brazil,” Buchannan replied. “But we need to knock down those satellites that Belloc put up. Is there a way we can do that?”

Senator Copeland had to stifle what could have been a laugh. “Are you seeing and hearing what I am? I am not sure how much of the American military we still have control over. In any case, we have bigger problems.”

“I’m not sure you understand. I talked to the team in Brazil,” Buchannan replied, leaning closer to Copeland. “And the contractors we had creating the barrier around the Colony? It didn’t work. It’s escaping.”

Chapter 28

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

8:05 p.m. ET

Max CARVER grabbed the wooden bow of the longboat, jerked it toward him, stepped in, and lunged toward Iona and the cursing radio operator pinned in the fangs of the giant fish. They both thrashed wildly, sending blood spattering into the air and down into the netting. The yank he gave the boat also had the effect of sending Kruger, standing in the stern, tumbling backward ass over head into the swift current just past the roiling eddy.

Kruger was halfway through an Afrikaans curse before he was swallowed by the water.

The screaming radio operator was almost off the port side of the boat, held aloft by the frenzied flipping of the monster fish twice as long as Max was tall. Massive brown scales like armored dinner plates and ice picks for teeth. The Colonist in the middle with Iona shrieked as they fell sideways out of the boat together.

The radio operator beat against the fish’s snout. “Somebody shoot it, for Christ’s sake,” he hollered as he grappled with the beast.

With a powerful flip of its tail, the huge thing flopped out of the boat with its prize still gripped in its teeth. Max was an arm’s length from it and dove forward. The longboat tipped as he jumped. He flopped over face first and swallowed a mouthful of brown muck. His outstretched hands hit the muddy bottom, but he sprang to his feet and did his best to surge forward through the slurry. Left arm outstretched while his right searched his waistband for the handgun Bull had given him. Not there, but he found the knife in its sheath.

The water before him roiled with bubbles and blood as man and fish fought each other into the deepening channel.

Kruger surfaced a dozen yards from where he’d gone in, toward the center of the river, and began powerful strokes back toward the bank. Max pulled the knife out and took high steps forward through the swirling waist-deep water to reach the thrashing animal. He dropped into the current and attempted to wrap his left arm around the fish’s tail, then brought his right hand and the knife in it down into the side. The blade hit the flat tail of the fish just up of out of the water in front of him, but didn’t penetrate. Cursing, he dove forward, stretched out both arms, and wrapped them around the thing’s slippery midsection, trying not to stab himself with the blade still in his hand.

With a muscular twist of its body, the fish pulled free. Another surge of brown water and the gurgling head of the radio operator appeared for an instant, his body accelerating into deeper water before submerging into the main channel. At this bend, the Japura was at least a football field across with a fast current and white water visible in patches down the channel. A whirlpool had formed around the next bend.

The current accelerated thirty feet ahead of Max. He pushed through the deepening water, sheathed his knife, and leaned forward to begin swimming. The radio operator’s face appeared. His body bent as he gripped the gills to either side of the fish’s head. The fish twisted. Another person emerged from the water. Kruger had a hand in the fish’s gills as well, a knife out in his other. He stabbed into the animal’s underside in rapid jabs.

“The radio!” yelled out Garza from the shore.

Max stopped in place, treading water, and pulled his gaze back to the longboat, now halfway tipped over. Where was the woman who had stepped into the boat with the radio operator? The heavy case holding the shortwave radio was on its side, not quite closed. At a full sprint, Garza charged into the water, throwing her rifle on the muddy bank. She dove toward the boat, which spun forward as it hit the main current. Before she could get to it, the case opened, and the radio slid into the surging water as the longboat tipped over.

A stinging pain in Max’s calf. He yelped and pulled one leg up.

The stern of the longboat swung around in the current. Garza splashed through the water toward him. Through the weeds to his right, Max glimpsed Kruger’s head breaking the water, the radio operator’s head held up behind him. Iona had already pulled herself out of the water.

Another stabbing pain, this time in his right leg. And then another.

Max picked up his pace and swam back ten feet, his feet finding the muddy bottom. Reached with his left hand to catch the propeller of the longboat and heaved, getting it with both hands, stepping back, and pulling the boat with him. Garza was in the water beside him and grabbed onto the prop shaft as well, cursing in Italian as they pulled the boat back to the shallows.

“What the hell was that?” Bull stood at the water’s edge, scanning back and forth with his rifle.

“Check on those kids,” Max grunted as he heaved the longboat out of the main current. Step by step, he and Garza hauled it into the shallower, calmer water. He ignored another sharp nip on his left ankle.

Bull swept his weapon one more time across the water and then scanned the thatched huts. He nodded and took off at a jog up the grassy embankment.

Max sloshed through the shallows and released the boat as it ran aground. Deep red blood pumped from a crescent wound in his left calf, below the cut-away improvised shorts they had made from the beige slacks. Two more on his right side. Each wound a half-inch oval with a strip of meat taken away with the bite. They burned.

“Something bit me as well.” Garza staggered onto the muddy bank. Her legs raw. Streaming with blood from a few bite marks.

“Piranha, from the size of those,” Kruger said from behind them. “Buggers must have got excited with all the action. They’re very territorial. You’ll need to get those patched up. Can someone come help me?”

He dragged the radio operator through the waist-deep water, the man heaving for air, scarlet trailing away from his feet through the water. Kruger called to Bull for help, and after a beat of hesitation, the young Nebraskan shouldered his rifle and splashed over to grab an arm. They hauled the bleeding man onto the muddy bank and pulled up his shirt.

“Where’s the woman?” Max asked.

“You mean Dr. Sorensen? Susanna?” Kruger turned and squinted. “Didn’t she get out?”

A foot wide semicircle of black-red puncture wounds ran from the radio operator’s rib cage to his lower abdomen, each like a .22-caliber bullet hole pumping out blood in globules with every heartbeat. The man strained to get up onto his elbows and look down. “How bad?” he groaned.

“Stay down,” Max said. “We’ll get you bandaged up. That thing was a piranha?” He thought they were small fish. “Garza, can you find the Colonist that went in? Get her out?”

Kruger said, “The big one was an arapaima. An unusually big one. Carnivorous fish that prowl the shallows, grow to be ten feet or more. So vicious even its tongue has teeth. The real apex predator here.”

“Didn’t mention those on the threat list.”

“Too many nasties here to name them all.”

“Great.”

“Dr. Sorensen,” the radio operator wheezed from between gritted teeth. “Where is she?”

Max said, “We’re trying to find her.”

“She got swept into the current,” Iona said.

Two of the Colony members had joined the huddle around Iona and Kruger by the water. Three others had fanned out by the water’s edge, giving it a respectful few yards, and called out Susanna’s name. One of the Colonists, the man that was supposed to get in with them, was shouting at the top of his lungs and running into the bushes.

“Garza,” Kruger yelled. “Keep them away from the water.”

Someone handed Iona a med kit. She pulled it open to find gauze and bandages and told the radio guy to keep applying pressure. Two of the Colonists knelt and began helping her, dabbing at the wounds, another taking off and laying down their shirt to roll the radio operator onto so they could inspect his back. More of the same kind of gaping holes.

Max still had the knife in his right hand. He looked at Kruger before sheathing it.

“You’re going to need to get patched yourself.” Kruger indicated his legs.

Max grimaced and bent over to inspect the piranha bites. Tested the edge of the wound on his left calf. He’d never been bitten by a fish, and they smarted like heck. But apart from the blood, they weren’t anything to worry about. He could put on a bit of antibiotic and liquid skin from the med kit. Instead of attending to them, he strode up the grassy incline toward the bodies of the two young boys.

As much as the bites stung, jumping into the water had shocked him awake. The sudden relief from the suffocating heat was intense, and despite the monsters lurking under the surface, he almost wanted to get back in and cool off. Were the piranha worth it? Almost. Not that arapaima, though. A pounding headache lurked behind his eyes. He was sopping wet, but dehydrated. The river and ground water had to be full of parasites. How much bottled water did they have left?

“Next time, try not to pull the carpet out from under me,” Kruger said from behind Max. “I would have had an easier time cutting that arapaima open inside the canoe than while going for a swim.”

“They’re both dead,” Bull said as Max neared the two indigenous boys laying in the mud.

They couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old. One of them twitched. Bull had a finger at the kid’s neck and shook his head. No heartbeat. Nothing they could do, Bull’s face communicated with a grimace, and Max sensed Bull had seen enough combat to know. Black blood seeped in rivulets down the slope toward the other dead.

“Any more of them out there?” Kruger walked up the embankment and called out to his man still scanning the jungle perimeter.

Max gritted his teeth and tried to push away memories that threatened to surface.

“Bull, Garza,” Kruger said, “get back on the perimeter in case—”

“They were trying to warn us.” Max tried to keep his voice low, but couldn’t.

Kruger sensed the anger and tried to explain. “Whatever attacked those loggers was not an animal. Not the way they’re ripped apart.”

The Afrikaner was ten feet behind Max, down the slope, his carbine high and away as he walked slowly up to inspect his work. Max turned, opened his mouth to say something else, but found himself lowering and charging back, making sure to use his left hand to hold away the muzzle of Kruger’s carbine while using his right shoulder to send the man flying backward. The Afrikaner landed in the mud and grass with a wet thud and skidded, in the same motion bringing around his sidearm.

“They were trying to warn us,” Max growled. “Those were rocks they were throwing into the water. At that thing we obviously didn’t see.”

“Did you not notice the dart in that farmer’s neck?” Kruger said from a half-prone position, his Glock trained on Max’s midsection. “And how did they get through our perimeter?”

“The village men lined up and executed in that ditch.” Max clenched his fists. It felt like his chest ballooned in size as the rage filled him. “And the women shot in the back up there. They were these kids’ mothers and fathers, you animal. They were terrified, but they were still trying to help us.”

Kruger kept his gun pointed at Max. “If they were scared of us, why would they try to help? You’re not thinking straight.”

“Boys,” Iona said calmly, “can we not take this down a notch?” She had followed them, and edged between Kruger and Max, but not quite enough to be in the line of fire.

Max pointed a finger at Kruger. “You do anything like that again, and I will rip your jaw from your neck with my bare hands. You understand?”

Kruger lowered his sidearm and used both elbows to prop himself up. “Touch me again, Carver, and I will kill you.”

Max hung his head and counted to ten. He didn’t say anything else, just turned his back to them.

All he could think of was Talisha and their baby. What if someone killed her and Max in front of their child? Tears came to him, washed off by the rain so he didn’t need to wipe them away. He would deal with Kruger when the time was right, in a way that was right. Rage wasn’t going to help. He needed to engage and get as much information as he could.

Still facing the other direction, he asked, “That was an arapaima?”

“Big one, yeah,” Kruger replied. “Water was nice, eh? I have to say I feel somewhat refreshed.”

A joking lilt in his voice, as if all of this was normal. As if having team members point weapons at each other was all in a day’s work. He wasn’t wrong. Panic and anger were the enemy as much as anything else. Move forward. Let it go. Focus on survival.

Max asked, “Do arapaima usually attack people? Under these conditions? Rain? Heat?”

“Rarely, but they do snatch kids from time to time. Dogs, even. Usually in the dry season, if they get trapped in a pool and become desperately hungry.”

Max regained enough composure to turn back to Kruger. “Have you ever heard of them attacking people in the wet season?”

The Afrikaner shrugged, his face conveying that he didn’t know.

“Can we get that radio back?” Max scanned the edge of the fast-moving water to where he thought the longboat had capsized, sending their comms equipment to the muddy bottom. Maybe three or four hundred feet to the other side. Swimming it wasn’t the problem. What was lurking under the surface was the frightening unknown.

“Do we have any other comms?”

“Walkie-talkies, local range line of sight, maybe a few miles. We have the sat phone, but no signal. GPS is still working, though.”

Max squinted and attempted to focus through the drizzling rain. The unmistakable dots of caiman eyes lurked near the bushes further up in the eddy current around this bend. Were they bigger than the gators he used to mess with back home?

“Piranha and arapaima attracted by all the blood in the water,” Kruger said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if there is a bull shark or two in there with all this mess.”

A lazy wriggle in the water. A fat green snake slid through the boiling water. Max and Kruger watched it while it seemed to watch them. It eased away around the next bend.

Bull joined them. “What’s that?” He pointed at Max’s arm.

Gelatinous strings dangled from Max’s forearms and hung across his soaked shirt. Kruger had some on him too, across his shorts and shirt, along with shimmering apple-sized arapaima scales.

Max peeled a string off his left arm. “Are there jellyfish in the rivers here?”

“In the deltas toward the ocean.” Kruger began walking back toward the water. “Get him patched up,” he called out to the team attending to the radio operator. “There is a wall of storms circling the planet and heading north. We have one chance to get out and I intend to be on that transport. We’ll paddle across if we have to, use anything we can find as oars.”

“I wouldn’t suggest that,” Max said quietly.

Kruger turned and planted both hands on his hips. “Can I ask why?”

“Do we have explosives with us?”

“Some C4 and detonators in my pack,” Bull said. “Left over from what we did at the Colony.”

“What do you want to blow up?” Kruger said.

Max held up one of the stringy gelatinous globs that had attached to his arm. “Does anyone know what this is?”

Kruger shrugged he had no idea. “Fish guts?”

Iona took the gel from Max’s hand and inspected it, rolled it between her thumb and forefinger. “Maybe an alga?”

“You were the head spy sent here to monitor this program. We’re downstream of the Colony. Kruger, is it normal for animals and insects to be this aggressive? Have you ever witnessed something like this?”

“With that supernova shining, even I am feeling jittery.” He bared his teeth at Max and smiled, but then frowned at the gelatinous mass in Iona’s fingers. It seemed to quiver.

“It’s in the water. I think Ben put something in the river,” Max said.

Kruger peeled a strip of stringy gel from his leg. “This?” He tried to throw it away, but it stuck to his hand. He wiped it on his leg and turned to Iona. “Your opinion? Is this something from the Colony? Something to be worried about?”

“Nothing I’ve seen before, but I’ll keep a sample.”

“Keep a sample?” Max pulled off another strip from his shirt. “Are you serious?”

Kruger turned back to Max. Brought around his Glock again, but didn’t point it at him. Not directly. “I think maybe you’re the one infected with whatever your friend put into you. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve maybe become the cargo. If you’re seeing things, blame your friend Ben. And if you do anything twitchy, I’ll put a bullet in your head myself and we’ll bring back a filet of you to examine. Now what do you want explosives for?”

“Fishing.”

“Fishing?”

“Bayou style.”

Chapter 29

South Pole, Antarctica

2:15 p.m. NZT

Dr. Xin Rhou asked Dag, “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” the Norwegian replied and ambled forward along the slushy embankment.

They walked along the top edge of the snowpack beside the trail leading away from the IceCube laboratory structure. The ice trails were cleared regularly by small plows, which piled up what little precipitation accumulated here into mounds along the sides of the paths, but now the trail was a stream of calf-deep water. It was easier to walk on the mounds of snow along the sides.

But very slippery.

Dag had instructed her on how to tie a sling to hold his left arm. Then donning his jacket, he had immediately exited the top level of the IceCube facility and began down the stairs. He only stopped for a moment to hold a hand up to Aeon’s glare. He was excited.

He wanted to show Xin his kites.

Xin left her parka open to let fresh air in. It was plus eleven Celsius. More than thirty degrees above the average temperature at this time of year. She still couldn’t quite comprehend this was happening, that all this was real. She and Dag had to be two of the most isolated humans on planet Earth. Even astronauts in the International Space Station were only a few hundred miles from others. The closest people to Xin and Dag were now a thousand or more miles from here, and even those were in the process of evacuating further away.

Somehow, they needed to get out of here. Fast.

And Dag wanted to show her kites.

A half hour ago, Xin had been able to see most of the way to the waterlogged horizon, but a ground fog had misted up the air. The temperature at the surface had heated the water, creating a fog bank where it met colder air.

Above that, a wall of brown clouds circled slowly in the far distance, as if they were in the eye of a massive cyclone. The sky now clear blue again, with Aeon shining like a fiery diamond pinpoint directly overhead. Earth’s sun hung just over the horizon, slowly circling, its color dimmed by its fierce neighbor.

Arching tendrils of white auroras hovered around Aeon. They started from the milky atmosphere and brown layer of smog over the clouds circling the horizon, then curved down like claws before reaching the supernova, the shimmering strands following the magnetic field lines of the planet. Like they were giving the god its space.

The air smelled faintly sweet.

At three hundred meters from the IceCube structure, Xin and Dag passed the red crossing beacon where the trail met the path coming in from the other Dark Sector operations—the BICEP array and South Pole Telescope and Dark Sector Lab. They often joked that they were going to the dark side when working here, but the term just meant that the area was kept clear of sources of electromagnetic signals that could interfere with radio telescopes. Which was why there were no radios in the Dark Sector.

Their feet crunched through the hardpack and fell through the melting snow. Slow going.

“You checked the NGV?” Dag asked as they crossed the end of the ski-way.

The Non-Governmental Visitor area and aircraft parking was a few hundred meters off to their left, with the NGV overland access route beginning a kilometer past that. One aircraft was parked there, an old Otter that had been operated by a Canadian outfitter. It had engine problems, so the crew had taken off in one of the first C-130s and left it here.

“I checked the radio on the Otter,” Xin said. It had been shot through. “Can you fly?” Maybe they could fix the plane, somehow.

“Only kites,” Dag replied and kept stumbling forward.

Xin had the backpack on, the one that held the disk drives and her laptop. No way was she letting it out of her sight again.

The angular lines of Amundsen’s main station appeared from the fog, the stars and stripes of the American flag still hanging from the pole above the central staircase. The main station, like all the other installations here, was raised on stilts above the ice, but now sat in a lake of water.

“Ah, there.” Dag pointed.

A snowmobile was parked by the stairs.

“You want me to get in that?” Xin said.

“There is space for us both.” Dag did his best to pull the boat from the storage shed.

It was maybe twenty feet long and not more than five at its widest point, the fiberglass hull painted bright orange with a gray plastic cover over the canopy. At the front, a wooden strut protruded with a huge skate blade attached to it. Dag dragged the thing further out into the slushy snow. “You will have to help me fly the kite, though, my arm won’t be strong enough.”

He disappeared back inside the shed and came back with a fifteen-foot-long arched beam with two more huge skate blades attached to either side of it.

They had used the snowmobile to cross the five hundred meters to the far side of the operations zone, to the workshops and sheds at the head of the South Pole Traverse, the compressed-snow-and-ice road that led overland through the mountains to McMurdo Station on the coast.

“Explain this to me again,” Xin said.

“It’s an ice boat. I wanted to be the first person to ever sail an ice boat from the South Pole. We attach this to the bottom.” He tried to slide the beam with the two skates on it under the hull, but couldn’t with just his right arm.

Xin said, “I don’t see a sail.”

“Exactly, my kite.” He let go of the skate beam and went back inside, and this time came out with a large sack. “This is my parasail kite. More efficient than a regular sail, allows me more control. Even allows me to fly if needed. Like kite surfing, but with an ice boat.”

“You’re serious.”

“A big sport where I am from. This is the reason I came here, why I worked for IT in this godforsaken place.” He smiled at that. “Because I wanted to be the first person to sail an ice boat from the South Pole out. To be the first. This is in our Norwegian blood, yes?”

She knew he was an extreme sports athlete. She had heard some of the other polies talking about him. Admiringly. “How do you know the wind will be going in the right direction? How do you know there will be wind at all?”

“Katabatic winds.”

“You’re going to need to explain that.”

“We are at three thousand meters in altitude here, yes? About ten thousand feet. And the whole continent of Antarctica slopes away on all sides to the oceans.”

Xin nodded. Her arms crossed. He was more or less right. There were the Transantarctic Mountains blocking the way toward McMurdo Station, and the elevation increased to four thousand meters in the opposite direction, but from those points, it was a clear downward slope to the southern oceans on all sides.

“Cold air literally piles up in the middle of Antarctica,” Dag explained, using his right hand to demonstrate by lifting it up high. “And then the weight of it makes it slide down the landmass to the coasts. The katabatic winds are this air sliding down from here, all around us. It never stops, and it always blows toward the coasts.” He pushed his hand down and away to illustrate.

He spread a map of Antarctica out over the hull of his ice boat. “My plan was to follow the interior valley along Wilkes Land. The terrain is smooth and slopes down all the way to the ocean from there. All downhill. The route passes by Vostok Station, run by the Russians, and Concordia Station, run by the Italians and French. Maybe they are still there. Maybe their radios are still working. I was going to Casey Station on the coast, a permanent base run by the Aussies. It’s the closest point to mainland Australia.”

Xin inspected the map. Maybe he was right. Vostok Station wasn’t a thousand miles away, but a fraction of that distance. “Couldn’t we take the snowmobile?” she asked.

She looked over her right shoulder at the beginning of the South Pole Traverse. It was the only maintained road into the South Pole, which went through a valley in the Transantarctic Mountains down to McMurdo Station. How nice would it be to just drive there? But she didn’t want to risk going to McMurdo. It was an American base.

“I don’t think a snowmobile would be enough to traverse this kind of terrain,” Dag said, still looking at his map.

And then it hit her.

Xin took off at a run toward the next set of storage sheds. There was a Brazilian team that had arrived the week before in huge trucks. Part of a private expedition to test the ability of the new vehicles to come up over terrain from the South American side of Antarctica. They had made it here, but had left on one of the first transports out.

And left their trucks behind.

She unshackled the latch on the set of storage sheds a hundred feet from where Dag still stood inspecting his map. Swung the doors open. They were still here. A huge new truck designed specifically for Antarctic conditions, with wheels ten feet high and a closed cabin. Xin hadn’t checked the workshop zone on her explorations before. She ran to the side of the truck, climbed up the yellow ladder to the cabin and opened it, slid herself into the driver’s seat. She could drive one of these.

And the radio.

It was intact.

She switched it on. And heard the chatter of Russian voices.

Chapter 30

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

11:02 p.m. ET

Max squatted in muck fifteen yards up from the muddy riverbank, next to the burned-down thatched huts on stilts, with a view to his right of the burial pit stacked with the bodies of the villagers. He faced north. Stared over the surging brown river at the green wall of the rainforest beyond.

At the water’s edge on the other side were dense bushes and ferns twenty feet high. Behind that a ten-story phalanx of trunks and branches with vines and moss hanging down, and trees beyond towering two hundred feet or more to the swaying canopy above.

The wall of rainforest on the other side looked impassable.

Daunting just to get from the water and onto land through the dense bushes thick with thorns and barbs lining the banks, the branches and weeds probably hiding lurking caiman and whatever else might be in there. But beyond that mass of impenetrable green, somewhere far on the other side of it, was the path to Max’s unborn child. No matter how impossible it looked, no matter the odds or the pain, Max was going to get through it.

He swore that to himself.

With the sun on the other side of the planet, only the red glow of Aeon lit him from behind, his shadow long down the slope. His watch said they were creeping toward midnight. The transport was arriving at the mining airstrip just after sunrise and would wait as long as it could. If it could even get there. There wasn’t much wind at ground level between the walls of the forest, but the treetops swayed in the gusting westerlies that were steadily picking up. The brunt of their force coming in from the distant Pacific was being caught by the Andes. So far. What happened when the band of expanding storms from the south hit here was anyone’s guess.

The Japura had risen maybe six more feet in the past hour. He watched it inching up the grassy incline toward the huts, second by second, minute by minute. How much further would it come up?

This entire area would be flooded by sunrise.

Max had spent half his life in swamps and had never seen animals or insects like this. But the bayous of Louisiana weren’t the Amazon. The fish and animals here were hyperaggressive, something he felt the Colony had triggered, like an immune response to kill off invaders. Maybe it had always been like this around the Colony, maybe this was part of its defenses. It would help explain why they had been attacked by the caiman when the choppers went down.

And it had to be why Ben had let them go so quickly. Iona and Kruger didn’t agree, but more, the Afrikaner didn’t care. Said he would kill anything or anyone that got in their way.

Max believed that.

And if Iona Alcott didn’t think the slime gel in the water was something from the Colony, then why keep a sample? She had lived here for months, maybe years, while she had been monitoring Ben’s research and programs. Wouldn’t she know if he had been poisoning the local fauna? Max had a hard time concentrating. Nothing made sense. He was seeing things in the shadows between the trees, in the long grass. Dehydration could bring on hallucinations.

The headache throbbed between his temples.

The floating loggers’ bodies had been sucked away in the current, helped by a quick kick or two from Kruger to send them on their way. He even rolled the logger from the mud into the water. Kept everyone away from them, said not to touch them. Said the scavengers in the water could feast on them, that their bodies would pull the foraging animals downstream and away from their team when they crossed.

Max wouldn’t let him touch the villagers’ bodies.

While Bull and Garza prepared the explosives and detonators, and the others stripped down their supplies to the bare minimum, Max and one of the Colonists had carried the children and their mothers from the grassy slope and down into the pit of village men. He’d done his best to arrange the children between the men and women. As if they were sleeping. The rain hid his tears, of anger as much as sadness and something new, a fear for his own unborn child. He’d never had thoughts like this before.

He hadn’t cried in years, not even when he found out about his brother.

Max stayed away from the others while he tried to put his emotions in order. He needed to keep focused, keep calm. Worrying about Tal and the baby wasn’t going to help, either. There was nothing he could do but survive and keep moving forward.

Iona said the storms hadn’t reached the northern hemisphere yet.

Kruger said they had to keep things in perspective. There might already be hundreds of thousands dead in the south from the hypernova event, he said. The villagers would have been dead within days from the heat of Aeon. If that was any solace.

It wasn’t to Max.

They could have passed on to the next world in each other’s arms. Instead, they died terrified and alone, their dignity stripped, filled with rage and fear for their loved ones—staring down the muzzle of a rifle held by some asshole.

He scratched his neck where the wasp had bitten him. But that wasn’t the right word. She had pierced his skin, not to suck blood or take flesh, but to deposit her eggs. To infect him, use his body as a host to feed her young. Had she injected eggs below his skin? An itchy welt had formed above the bite. What was beneath it?

Max turned to stare at the red glow of Aeon through the trees.

It was like a blast furnace from hell, on that he and Kruger could agree, if nothing else. He found himself fantasizing about the night, about darkness and cool air, what it would be like at the North Pole right now. That’s where he needed to go. Where he would take Tal and the baby when he got back. Up into Canada.

Find the ice. And the cold. And the darkness.

Kruger forced Iona to reduce everything from the Colony cases into one backpack of only what she needed most. Maybe he was right. Maybe Max was infected. Might explain why he thought he was seeing things, shapes moving between the trees. He surveyed the cases she’d left behind and wondered what was in them, and more, what critical thing was in the backpack she slung across her shoulders. He watched her pack it, but all he was able to see were aluminum cylinders. Had to be something biological. Didn’t look like computer parts or electronic gear.

Fourteen people left to ferry across the water.

Two lost already, not counting the ones that died in the chopper crashes. Some rescue this was turning out to be. The gunner they had to abandon at the Colony, and now Susanna, who Max had barely even met. Swept away in the Japura’s current, and they didn’t have the resources or time to go after her. Iona said the woman was her research partner, and yet she had barely participated in the half-hearted search party that made it a hundred feet down the overgrown banks before turning back.

He hung his head.

He had to sit and stretch out his right hamstring. It felt like it had snapped up into a ball in the back of his leg, the knot excruciating, and the effort to get it to relax brought dots swimming in his vision. The air like a sauna. He was drenched, his fingers and feet pruned and raw. His cheeks burned. A headache seemed to squeeze his eyes out from the inside.

Max checked his watch.

Ten hours to cover eight kilometers through the jungle on the other side, and get up across the ridge. The water rising fast. Westerly wind coming up. If they didn’t get out of here, Kruger kept repeating, in seventy hours a planet-sized cyclone would rip these trees out by their roots.

But Max would be dead of the heat well before that if they didn’t make it out of here soon.

Even if Iona and Kruger didn’t get the same feeling as Max, that the creatures here were being hyperaggressive in targeting them and that this was something stimulated by the Colony, everyone else wanted to go along with his plan to neutralize anything in the water before they attempted a crossing.

“Carver, you ready?” Kruger called out.

The Afrikaner was starting to look haggard. Max rolled forward to his feet and lurched down the incline toward the Japura.

Max broke into a loping run as best he could, his hamstring threatening to seize up, held his left hand high in front of him, and grunted as he rotated forward and sent the five-pound package as high and far over the water as he could. He splashed to a stumbling stop in the grassy flats and put both hands to his knees, gulping for hot air.

And watched.

One Mississippi.

The package tumbled through the air in the pink twilight, the tan river churning and sweeping past beneath it. Two Mississippi.

It splashed into the water halfway across the river in front of him. Concentric circles radiated outward and swept away as the water pulled downstream. He was as far up along the riverbank as he could get in the clearing. It would have to be good enough.

“Now, now, now,” he called out in a hoarse voice and took off through the ankle-deep water to his right, skirting to higher ground around Bull who tossed his softball-sized lump of C4 in a high arc.

Bull turned and followed Max to the boats. Three Mississippi.

One longboat was tied behind the other. Max had pulled engine parts and the spark plugs from the capsized boat—the motor had flooded—and used them to get the other working. They might have been able to paddle across the river, but the swift current would have sucked them miles downstream to the east, and that whirlpool was getting bigger.

One engine would be enough to tow the second boat. They didn’t need to beat the current, just needed enough power to ferry at an angle, let the force of the water flowing downstream do most of the work. Stay away from the whirlpool.

Four Mississippi.

Like a relay team, one after the other packs of explosives went sailing into the air over the river. As Bull and Max jogged past Iona, she lobbed hers maybe sixty feet to their left. Five Mississippi.

Bull swung his SAW around from the strap and shouldered it with his right, his left arm free, and his hand in the air in a fist. He came to a juddering stop five feet before the bow of the first longboat with the engine at its rear. They had secured the radio operator, half-conscious, in the belly of that boat, along with most of their gear.

The two Colonists bitten—one by a spider, another by the ants—held the gunwales to each side. The spider bite was already necrotizing. They were the weakest of the group still standing, but they were ready to start sliding the boat over the mud and into the water. They watched Bull’s left fist held high over his head for the signal.

Right behind the first boat was the second, a rope of knotted vines scavenged from the village huts hanging between them. A woman Colonist knelt nervously in the bow, holding the rope, also watching Bull’s hand. The last four healthy Colonists held the gunwales of that boat, two to each side standing in the mud, and waited for the first longboat to start sliding in.

Max stomped through the mud to the back of the first boat, put the rope over his right shoulder, lifted the prop shaft, then took hold and waited to push.

Kruger was the last to throw in his pack of explosives. He lobbed it in front of the first boat and ran to the opposite side of the boat from Max.

“Everyone back,” Kruger yelled as he dropped to one knee to cover Garza, who turned to move back from her position covering the perimeter. She ran toward the second boat, where she was going to position herself and her carbine to cover the rear.

Six Mississippi.

Max scanned the water. This had better w—

The first detonation lifted the surface of the Japura in a wide bulge a hundred feet across, at first felt more than heard as it shuddered the slurry beneath their feet. A beat later and a concussive thud as the shockwave of the explosion imploded inward and then upward to send a thundering jet of water seventy feet into the air. The column of spray seemed stuck in slow motion, hung suspended between the trees for a breath, the water droplets shimmering in the glow of Aeon. A red rainbow arced below the green trees.

“Now!” Max hauled forward on the prop shaft.

The second detonation heaved another bulge in the middle of the river while the mountain of spray from the first still hovered. The third went off in quick succession. There might be monsters in that river, but the amount of explosives they just set off would stun or kill anything within a couple of hundred feet, even a shark or caiman. It would give them enough of a window to get the boats across, and time to figure out how to breach the wall of green on the other side if they needed to get in the water.

As insurance, Bull opened up with his assault rifle just in front of the bow of the first boat. Sprayed the water’s edge with a hail of bullets. He wanted to make damn sure there weren’t any more of the arapaima lurking.

A fourth juddering explosion rumbled the mud beneath Max’s feet.

“Come on!” he yelled at the two Colonists to each side of the boat in front of him, urging them to unstick the keel from the mud. Iona skidded in the grass five feet from Max, fell to one knee as she took up the other side across from him and heaved her weight into getting it moving.

The boat jerked forward and began sliding.

“Kruger,” Max called out. “We’re moving.”

The Afrikaner was still sweeping back and forth with his rifle, covering Garza’s retreat to the second longboat. He nodded to acknowledge Max, swept his rifle once more to his right before clipping its strap and swinging it over his shoulder.

Max planted another foot in the mud and heaved. The four men and women to each side of the second boat began to heave forward. Bull swung his rifle and fired, the water in front of him spraying into an angry froth as the fountains of water from the explosions settled back into the river in a hissing haze. Already white dots appeared across the brown expanse—the bellies of stunned and killed fish—at first dozens, and then hundreds.

The bow of the boat hit the water. Max heaved and stepped forward faster, the load releasing as the boat floated into the eddy current. Bull stopped firing and clambered into the front. The rope slid over Max’s shoulder, and he grabbed onto it and let go of the boat as it slid forward almost by itself. His feet splashed in the shallows.

“I’m getting in,” Max said to Iona.

He would get the engine started as she and Kruger pushed off and made sure the second boat got in the water and the rope was secure. Max jumped up and hauled himself over the rail, made sure the propeller was clear of Iona and anyone else, then grabbed the starter cable.

And stopped.

“Kruger, what the hell are you doing?” he yelled.

“I’m stuck,” came a hoarse reply.

The man was still standing almost exactly where he had been kneeling a few seconds before. He hadn’t moved. The boat was now fully in the water, Iona up to her calves while she waited for Max to start the engine and give her a hand up.

“Do you see that?” Max said to her under his breath.

His left hand still holding the engine, he rubbed his eyes with his right. Water streamed into them from the stinging rain. His vision blurry. The ground around Kruger seemed to shimmer.

And move.

Quivering fingers of sludge flowed and circled the man. Snaked around his feet. Kruger had his Glock in one hand and shot at a massing pile of mud rising at him. Searching fingers reached out, layers of stringy muck forming patterns of holes that coalesced and moved. An amorphous creature formed up from the glistening mud.

It was the same thing Max had seen following them. A sudden pain lanced in his stomach that doubled him over.

“Yeah, I see it too,” Iona whispered back. “My God, it’s happening. It’s transitioning.”

Chapter 31

South of Reno, Nevada

8:12 p.m. PT

Talisha Carver leaned into the steering wheel and gripped it with both hands, at ten and two like her mother had taught her. She gripped the wheel like it was a connection back to her eema, her mother, who she had sometimes hated while she was alive, but loved and missed more than she could describe now she was gone. She wished she were here, to hold her as she cried. Hold her like a baby. What do I do, mother? What have I done?

How many tears did she have in her? How many tears did she have for her baby?

Her dead baby.

Still cradled in the grave of her swollen belly.

She leaned forward in the seat of the Hyundai she had stolen at the gas station, pressed her chin against the worn leather of the steering wheel, and sobbed in pealing wails that rose and fell in whimpers. There was something about crying alone that was both comforting and desperate, but this wasn’t just releasing pain. This was mourning a little life she had been dreaming about for years and had felt growing inside her. The physical pain in her stomach merged with the mental anguish into an unbearable suffering that wracked her body. Ripped at her soul.

It was all she could do to keep moving forward, her knuckles white on the wheel.

The never-ending rain sluiced down the windshield, flicked from side to side by the wipers, but between the tears in her eyes and the water streaming across the glass, Tal could barely make out the road. Several times, she drove into the gravel and scrub brush lining the highway, halfway into ditches she managed to spin out of. More times than she cared to remember, she had to swerve to avoid the glare and horn of an oncoming vehicle.

Tal could barely remember the last seven hours.

Through streaming eyes, she checked the watch on the car’s dash. Past 8 p.m., yet the sky wasn’t dark, even here in the wilderness of the hills. Overhead hung sopping cotton-ball clouds with black bellies, their edges seeping orange where the glow of Aeon lit them from above.

She had begged that doctor to help her.

He had been pleasant, as nice as a person could be while still telling you that your baby was dead and there was nothing he could do. He said she needed a procedure as quickly as possible, that they needed to abort the fetus, that it might be dangerous to carry. She might experience severe blood loss, infection. Sepsis. He didn’t know the extent of the injury that caused the death in the first place.

He said they were closing down the hospital, that it was an immediate and chaotic situation, and they were transferring the ICU patients to a military facility. They didn’t have the staff to help her. He suggested a clinic down the road, back toward San Jose, but said they were probably in a panic after the president’s address as well.

The whole Bay Area was under an evacuation order.

The doctor had handed her two packets of medication, dinoprostone and misoprostol, which he said would induce labor. He said to make sure she had someone there when she took them, preferably a nurse. The medications could induce bleeding, he said. And then he left. His wife was calling. Tal heard his kids crying on the other end of the phone. She told him to go.

Tal had fled through the hallways, past gurneys and swinging forests of IV poles and crying people, back into the rain. Gripped the white bag of drugs tight in one fist. She slammed closed the door and just began driving. Not back to the highways, but east, away from the water.

She drove up the rolling green hills, past Sierra Vista and Mission Peak, through the canyons of pine trees and sequoias of Stanislaus National Forest. A sign for “steak and eggs $5.99” swept past, then one saying “Welcome to Nevada.”

Tal hadn’t been driving anywhere.

Just driving.

Away.

Just south of Carson City, the traffic north piled bumper to bumper in a miserable snake of red taillights that glimmered in the thrumming rain and dirty orange glow seeping down between the clouds. Tal was bleary eyed and beyond exhausted. She hadn’t slept the night before, and it was getting to midnight. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d drank water, and the dozen candy bars she ate seven hours before at the gas station weren’t making her feel any better, either.

As evening had turned to night and she pulled to higher altitudes in the Sierra Nevada mountains around Lake Tahoe, the precipitation had shifted into a sleeting ice rain. The already crawling traffic had slowed to a near standstill as cars slid off the road. She guessed the temperature was hovering around freezing as she turned up the heater inside the car.

Exhausted and barely able to keep her eyes open, she finally pulled off at the Mill House Motel. Block lettering on the sign outside. “Free Wi-Fi,” it said. “Heated Pool.” And in steady neon below that, “Vacancy.” She passed a slowly rotating mill wheel, an ice-encrusted gutter along the roof of the building guiding a stream of water into it, then pulled up next to the “Office” sign glowing red through the heavy mixture of rain and snow coming down. She stopped the car, took the rabbit foot in her hand and paused for a moment. The footwell of the passenger seat was littered with fast-food wrappers, but also a bong and what looked like bags of weed.

She might need some of that.

Tal stepped out into the slushy rain, her hands up in a futile effort, and ducked into the reception. Thankfully it was open. She shivered and dusted off bits of clumps of ice and drops of water from her shirt. There was nobody there. Unlocked but empty.

A radio still playing in the background.

Tal called out a few times, went behind the desk into the office, and then stuck her head outside and yelled. After ten minutes she gave up and went behind the desk again and took keys for number seven. Dropped a wet hundred-dollar bill on the counter with an explanation. Max always liked number seven, said it was lucky. She wasn’t sure, but any connection back to Max was something.

She filled a Styrofoam cup with lukewarm coffee and ran to the room under the exterior awnings, first retrieving her bag of candy and phone parts and box from the Colony, along with the bag of drugs the doctor had given her. She had paused and grabbed the weed and bong as well. The water on the pavement between the cars wasn’t draining. Almost ankle deep already.

She opened the door to room seven.

It smelled stale.

Like it had been a smoking room for two decades. Vertical-print wallpaper peeling at its edges and intersections, a chain lamp with a dusty lampshade hanging over a veneer table under a stucco ceiling. But clean enough. Tidy. And dry.

And warm.

Tal stripped off her clothes, did a quick job of washing them with soap in the bathroom sink, and wrung them out in a towel. Turned up the heating on the unit by the window and left the clothes over the blower. Quiet except for the drumming of the rain on the roof shingles. She could sleep. Or try to. Maybe hit that bong for a little relief, but that would cloud her mind. She needed to remain sharp. She found the coffee machine and some teabags and set about making a cup of something hot, then turned on the shower.

Showers were her place to think.

The needling fingers of water seemed to wash away some of the anguish. She turned it up hot, so steam erupted in the tiny space between the wall of white tiles and the yellowing shower curtain in the tub she stood in. Her stomach cramped painfully but she groaned and let the aching out, let it slip away with the scalding water. The heat drew away the pain.

You could survive anything if you decided you could.

That was what her grandmother had once told her, on a sunny day on the beach in Tel Aviv. She remembered the day, because it was the only time her grandmother had talked about the Holocaust and how she had survived the concentration camps. Tal wouldn’t even exist if her grandmother hadn’t survived. The rest of the family had been wiped out, except for her grandmother’s brother, who she had kept alive. Her grandmother said that even at the worst moments, when all seemed lost, that there was always hope. That there was beauty on the other side of all the terrible things that could happen.

At the time, Tal was just a child. She hadn’t understood, not as she watched the white clouds over the beach. She thought she understood, but she had never understood. Not until now, with the world falling apart, with her alone and desperate and utterly lost. Her grandmother said the key was to survive, no matter what, and to focus on our loved ones. And to figure out the things that might keep us alive for just that day longer.

Think.

Tal had to think.

She had disconnected her two phones, changed cars. Nobody could find her, unless they followed her here, which wasn’t impossible, but then there was nothing she could do about that. The team that Monk was with, he said there were legions of them, watching everywhere. Watching the watchers. She recalled she had seen that spray painted outside her house. The other men that arrived were there to take Tal, that she was sure of, because they hadn’t been expecting Monk to be there. Were they from Colonel Buchannan? Tal didn’t think so.

Nyx said they were from Spectrum.

One thing she was sure of, there was no way she was going to find a way back to Max without help. The situation outside was worsening by the hour. Emergency services would be unavailable for weeks or months, the president had warned. It would be every person for themselves out there. Her only lifeline was Buchannan, like it or not. The storms weren’t so intense that she couldn’t get to that airfield or have him send over his men or a chopper.

And she needed medical attention.

She needed to survive and protect her family, even if that meant only Max now.

Tal got out of the shower and wrapped herself in a towel, gingerly cinching it around her belly and doing her best not to think about the baby. She upended the plastic bag with her phones and SIM cards. The plastic cube from the Colony spilled out as well. She hesitated, but slipped the SIM card into her pay-as-you go phone and turned it on. Waited a moment for it to go through its boot sequence and light up.

She put in her earbuds. Sat down.

Dialed Colonel Buchannan’s number with shaking hands. Her knees bouncing up and down.

Got a busy signal.

She tried going online. Nothing. Full bars on the signal, but no connection. The system had to be overloaded. No calls possible. No data connection, either.

“Talisha?” asked a woman’s voice in her earbuds.

“Not now,” Tal replied in a shaky voice. “I’m going to deactivate your connection.”

“I have information about your husband,” Nyx said. “Max Carver reportedly led an attack on the Colony. As I said, I am here to help.”

“An attack?”

“Multiple explosions and casualties reported.”

Tal’s trembling finger hovered over the disconnect button on the VPN app on her phone. “Is Max okay? What’s happening? What else did you find out?”

“There is a rescue mission going to Max’s location. A C-130 has been dispatched. Your husband was contacted on the radio a few hours ago. He is en route to an airfield.”

“And this was through Colonel Buchannan?”

“Correct, he was the point of contact.”

“And you found this information through your connection to Spectrum?”

The bot’s responses felt much more fluid now, as if it was adapting to her. The voice still sounded tinny and computer generated. Tal checked the bars on her phone. Still full, but still a busy signal when she tried calling again. “Are you connecting through Wi-Fi? From the motel?”

“I just patched it through this phone.”

If Nyx or the exploit was wired back to Monk, then he wouldn’t have stormed her hotel room. He would have had the access he wanted. Same for those other men that attacked her. Tal had a unique advantage in some way. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized she now had access to something like a supercharged version of the NSA, without any of the rules. Usually, she was the one trying to keep the attackers out, but now she was the one attacking.

Maybe the hunter still was hunting. She had access to one of the most powerful spying networks on the planet, if Spectrum was what she thought. She went and turned over her clothes on the hot vent by the wall unit. Still damp.

A squall of rain drummed over the roof. At least it wasn’t snowing, or she prayed it wasn’t going to. Getting trapped in a blizzard in that Hyundai with its slick tires was more than her imagination could bear considering.

“How are you getting access to information?” Tal asked Nyx.

“Through queries.”

“And you have a channel to information about this mission?”

“You inserted the exploit through an NSA firewall. I have access to one area of Spectrum.”

“Areas? Like data silos? How many are there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would the exploit work in the other silos?” Once inside a perimeter, the attacker could move sideways through a network, where more trusted parties normally operated.

“I believe this would be more your area of expertise.”

“I need my laptop and some bandwidth,” Tal said, more to herself than to Nyx. She didn’t have her toolkit. She tried to focus her mind on the technical problem to distract herself from where she was.

A pause. “I could get you access to something like that, if I understand correctly.”

Tal let the rain drum for a few beats. “How?”

“You would need to ingest the content of the Colony package in your possession.”

“How do you know I have that? That’s poisonous.”

“It’s called the nexome. It enables intermittent connection to the Colony satellites in low Earth orbit, into their data pipes, and back out to other networks. It attaches the network through your own neural system.”

“Where did you get this information?”

“Through Spectrum queries on Colony technology, some of it very new intel.”

Tal sat down in her wet towel on the edge of the bed. The springs creaked. The thought of laying down and sleeping called to her, but she felt the mass of the baby pushing against her legs and a bolt of adrenaline and cortisol sent her fingers and hands shaking again. She didn’t have time for sleep. She needed medical help, and Max was somewhere out there, fighting something he didn’t understand. He had just attacked the Colony for some reason. Casualties. That’s what Nyx said. A nice word for dead people.

If she could trust what Nyx was telling her.

“What’s your bandwidth into Spectrum?”

“Six kilobits per second, enough for simple query and response within the silo.”

“Find me more information about Max. Anything that comes through.”

“I will set a regular query.”

Tal tried to set her thoughts straight. Closed her eyes and zeroed her mind to calm herself down. Max needed her if he was going to survive this. He was south of the equator. She needed to get him back and get to where he arrived. There was a rescue mission going. She had access to Wi-Fi. She could email Buchannan, tell him where she was, and the cavalry would arrive.

Right?

In the meantime, she could gather all the intel she could. She needed to know more about Buchannan’s involvement and everything about Spectrum.

But the more critical thing was understanding Monk and what he was about. He was much more dangerous than she had understood.

“Can you do a pattern matching query into Spectrum?” Tal asked.

Nyx replied, “I can.”

Tal fished out the rumpled papers from her bag, her sketches of the tattoos on Monk’s arms. She held up the phone and snapped a picture. “See what this brings up.”

A sudden flash of light out the window. A rolling boom of thunder a second later. She grunted at a pain in her stomach and flinched.

“Oh, god,” she whispered.

“I have a match,” Nyx said in the earbuds. “This is a stylized unicursal hexagram, a symbol often associated with the Thelemites, a pseudo-religious group. The specific symbol you drew is from recent offshot, a hacker collective that has tasked itself with protecting the world from invasive AI. The group calls itself the Knights of the Golden Dawn, or ‘KOG’ in acronym.”

That was how Monk referred to himself. As a cog in the wheel, but he meant KOG. And he was obsessed with AI and algorithms. So far, so much nonsense. And wasn’t “golden dawn” usually associated with ultra-right-wing groups? Monk didn’t fit that mold at all.

Nyx continued, “They predicted a new golden dawn would presage a restart to civilization. They claim Aeon as the harbinger of a new age.”

“As every cult from here to Timbuktu has,” Tal said to herself. At the NSA in the past week, they had been tracking the rise of thousands of cultist message boards online. Just about every one of them was saying that Aeon was proof of their predictions. Even broken clocks were right once in a while.

“They claim to have millions of followers around the world. The Thelemites are one of the oldest branch of modern paganism, even forming the basis for much of libertarianism and Scientology.”

“Anything else?”

“They believe we are living inside a simulation.”

Tal groaned at a flare of pain in her gut.

“Talisha, do you need assistance? Should I try an emergency service?”

“Try one if you can get it.” Tal grunted the words from between clenched teeth.

Another flash outside the window. Tal glanced up and thought she saw something moving beyond the curtains. She propped herself up and stood on the bed and peered through the crack in the curtains. Was something moving in the mud and water by the flowerbeds outside? She stepped off the bed to investigate. The carpet soaking wet. The room was starting to flood.

Chapter 32

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

11:15 p.m. ET

“Use your knife!” Max yelled. He was wedged against the first boat, just starting to push it into the water, but Kruger was trapped in place fifty feet behind him and off to the side

The mud seemed to have grown up and around the Afrikaner’s feet and legs.

Kruger fired and then fired again, but the bullets were absorbed by the mass swelling past his feet without seeming to affect it. The quivering fingers of mud grew and assembled over each other, up and around Kruger’s leg like the railing that had snagged his hand at the Colony. Bull had cut clean through the railing with his Bowie knife, and the detached part had melted away once disconnected.

“Your knife,” Max shouted again. “Don’t shoot at it, cut it. Slice away the ribbons.”

“What is that?” Bull yelled from the front of the boat.

Max checked his waist for the knife on his belt. The blade was only about four inches long. He needed something bigger. A machete glinted in the netting at the bottom of the boat. Leaving the vine-rope loose around the engine mount, he caught the attention of the Colony woman in the second boat. As calmly and clearly as he could, he said, “Hey, stay put, don’t let go of that rope. But don’t tie it up. We need to stay loose.”

The woman didn’t pull her gaze from Kruger, but she nodded. Despite Max’s calls, the Afrikaner was still firing his Glock into the mud and blazing a continuous stream of curses.

Max leaned over to retrieve the machete.

Iona was in knee-deep water and doing her best to keep the boat from turning in the recirculating current. She registered terror and surprise like the woman behind her—her eyes wide as she glanced over her shoulder at Kruger—but also maybe a degree of fascination like when she watched that wasp stinging Max’s neck.

“Is anything you stole from Ben going to help?” Max said to her. “Anything we could fight back with?”

“Samples, some data, some digital gear, but nothing we could use as a weapon,” she said without looking up.

“Can’t you turn it off? You had a device that deactivated Colony tech.”

“It wouldn’t work out here.”

Max didn’t bother to ask why. No time. The thing attacking Kruger wasn’t exactly quick, more of an oozing snake that wouldn’t let go. A rope of glistening mud thick as an arm had wrapped itself around Kruger’s left leg. The man was still unloading his Glock into the mass of it. His right leg was unencumbered. He stepped back and yanked but was unable to get free. A finger of mud pulled away from his left calf and yanked with it a strip of bloody flesh. Kruger screamed in rage. Threw down his Glock.

And finally got his blade out.

Garza jumped out of the back of the second boat and ran toward Kruger. She was closest and took controlled bursts with her assault rifle at the surging base of mud to Kruger’s right. The light was murky where the thing had attacked, the mud flowing down from a hollow below the huts. A shadow cast over the scene below the red glow in the sky.

Max glanced over his left shoulder.

Spray from the water bombs was still settling in a glittering scarlet mist lit by Aeon’s slanting rays. It hissed as it settled into the water and showered over them in the wind. He could still put that prop in the water, get them away. Pull the cord, get the engine started. Get the hell away.

“Goddamn it,” Max muttered under his breath.

With his right hand on the motor, he launched himself into the air, machete out and ahead in his left. At a run he hit the ankle-deep water over the flooded grass.

The Colonists sliding the second craft toward the water, two to each side, cowered against the side of the boat. If this was something they’d seen before, they were putting on a good show. Nobody came forward to help, nobody yelled out what to do. They weren’t even running away, which was something Max had seen before. Frozen in place with fear and incomprehension. People often didn’t run in the face of danger, but just sat there.

If this was some visual hallucination from Ben’s nexome, then it was a shared hallucination between everyone here. The thought had crossed his mind when he started to see things between the trees in the forest, something nobody else saw.

At least a dozen people were seeing the same thing, the way everyone was reacting.

When Max went into the simulation of San Francisco, it was convincing but imperfect. He could tell it wasn’t real—and this thing attacking the Afrikaner wasn’t just visual. Kruger had his knife out and hacked at the rope of brown sliding around his leg. Blood spilled and spattered onto the ground as the thing pulled away strips of skin and burrowed under his flesh.

This wasn’t a virtual reality simulation.

And Iona had said something about it transitioning. Whatever “it” was.

Kruger bellowed as the thing pulled flesh from bone. He cut away a hunk of it and threw it past Max, who was doing his best to stagger-run toward him. The stringy mass of brown and bloody flesh hit the grass together, and the detached chunk of the creature melted away into the grass the instant it hit.

“Cut it away.” Max stumble-stepped to a stop five feet from Kruger.

“Get this goddamned thing off me,” Kruger roared as tendrils of glimmering brown slid from under his camouflage shirt up and around his neck.

This close, Max saw that this wasn’t made of mud, but was a roiling mass of tiny creatures that flowed up from it. It wasn’t biting or strangling Kruger. It was melting into him.

Digesting him.

Garza was ten feet to Max’s left, deep in the shadows, and hacked away the base flowing from the mud up and around to engulf half of Kruger. She dug the fingers of her left hand into a mass that came away from the ground like a wet fish. She cut away at it with her right, pulling away sinewy gobs that she threw across the grass. Max called to her and tossed the machete, then reached into his belt and retrieved his knife.

“Carver, help me.” Kruger grappled at his face as tendrils slid across it.

Max hesitated, then grabbed a ropey tendon of the thing around Kruger’s neck. He expected to feel sticky mud, but it felt spongy. Iridescent in the drab light. He wrenched it away from Kruger as hard as he could manage. Strips of bloody flesh came with it as the things had dug into him. The man wailed in rage, but it gave Max just enough space to slide his knife beneath and cut a long finger of the mass away, which he threw over his shoulder. Still using the knife, he cut away Kruger’s shirt.

Black blood oozed. Max cut away another hunk of the thing.

The whole of the trembling creature seemed to move away as Max leaned in closer. In his mind, he heard a whispering, like a thousand tiny blades grinding together.

Kruger’s right leg came free. Garza hacked away at the mud, both hands on the machete now. Max slipped an arm around Kruger’s neck and hauled back. The man came away in a sickening glugging noise as hunks of flesh came away from his body.

He didn’t even yell this time.

Max slipped and slid backward, his feet windmilling in the slurry of blood as he pulled Kruger toward the second boat.

The mud creature reared up in the shadows.

Garza scurried away on hands and knees. Got to her feet and ran, stooping to pick up her assault rifle with her left hand while still holding the machete in her right.

“Get onto the water,” Kruger said and spat out a mouthful of blood.

Torn apart from foot to face, but the Afrikaner managed to get his legs under himself, then turned and began stumbling under his own power. Max pulled his right arm around his shoulder to steady him. Guided him to the rear of the second boat.

Turning his back on that thing made the hair on his neck prickle.

Garza threw her rifle over the edge into the boat, then came around Max and put two arms around Kruger’s legs while Max hefted his body up and over the gunwale.

Kruger toppled unceremoniously over the top and thudded to the bottom in a screeching roar of pain. Still cursing. And angry.

Anger was good, sometimes.

When faced with something real and terrifying that might kill you, Max had learned that anger was better than fear. Even his therapist had told him that justifiable anger in response to a real threat was a healthier response than letting yourself get scared, that it could be a positive force that motivated people to stand up. He let it uncork.

“Get this goddamned boat moving!” Max shouted at the Colonists on their knees in the mud. He picked the closest one to him up by the collar of his shirt and levitated the man into the air. Yelled into his face. “Grab the side, do not look back. Keep moving forward. No matter what.” He turned to Garza. “Give me the machete.”

She took a two-beat look at his face before handing the blade over.

He turned and scanned the semidarkness below the huts for the thing, but the mud back where they’d just fought didn’t seem to move. It was churned up and hacked into ridges, but he couldn’t detect any swells or movement now. Max his back into the boat and strained with both legs, throwing his weight back to get it unstuck.

It jerked forward a foot and began sliding. The nose hit the water.

He saw Iona was in the back of the first boat. He told her not to get in yet, but it was too late now. “Get the engine going,” he called out and heard the whine of the motor a second later.

“It’s in the boat,” yelled a voice over and behind him.

Max’s feet slid out from under him as he scrabbled in the mud and grass as the others gave up pushing it and scattered. Gunshots over his head. A sidearm, not a rifle. Someone firing from the front. Cursing, he latched his right hand over the gunwale and hauled himself up. A hissing pop of air past his cheek followed by a crack. Must have missed him by an inch.

“Stop shooting!” Max yelled.

It was the woman by the front who was supposed to be holding the tow rope. She knelt at the bow, a gun held in her two hands and pointed almost right at Max. Not at Max, he realized, but at a dark shape moving in the belly of the boat in the shadows around Kruger, who was trying to get onto his elbows and turn over.

“Stop sh—”

Max’s head was knocked backward in a gushing roar of flame. The back of the second boat he was holding onto had just burst into flames. His face blasted with heat and the smell of burnt hair and flesh. Kruger scrabbled along the bottom of the boat away from the blaze. Flames licked away from his body.

That wasn’t C4.

With the stench of burnt hair came the stink of gasoline.

Overcoming the searing heat, Max leaned forward and flailed with his right hand. He caught the fuel line coming out of the engine and yanked at it. Through the yellow flames he saw the creature again, the flowing black lines angling along the bottom of the boat. Away from the conflagration.

He ducked, then yanked the fuel tank from the bottom of the boat and heaved it into the air. It arced over him, pouring fuel and flames.

“It’s gone,” the woman at the front cried. “It’s not in the boat anymore.”

“Max,” called a voice.

He was still pushing the second boat forward, now almost completely in the water. “Get in!” he called to the Colonists that had scattered to each side. “Unless you want to swim, get in the—”

“Max!” Iona yelled.

He gave one final heave to the second boat as he felt it floating free and began running through the ankle-deep water toward the first.

Something wasn’t right.

The first boat was backward, the nose pointing at him.

Iona had the prop shaft in the water, but the engine pushed the boat toward him, not out over the water. The boats were lashed together, he realized. Iona had tied the rope on her end to the engine mount. The woman in the bow of the second had tied up the rope when she turned to use a sidearm she had gotten from somewhere. She was still waving the weapon around from the front, looking back over Max’s head. Pointing at something he couldn’t see.

With the second boat hitting the water, the nose of it had turned the second boat around in the current. “Stop gunning the throttle,” he yelled. “Put it in reverse.”

“I got it, boss,” said Garza from beside him.

She held the back of the second boat and helped two Colonists into it. Max glanced back at her, then splashed forward to the nose of the first boat, halfway up on the grass. He gave it a heave back into the water before hauling over and tumbling into the inert body of the radio operator. The man groaned. Max apologized and rolled to his knees. Bull was at the back of the boat with Iona now.

“Cut the rope,” Max yelled as he got back to his feet.

Both boats slid across the water into the channel. Both of them sideways to the current. Max did a quick check. The other boat had all four Colonists in it, helped in by Garza. He stepped past the man and woman Colonists hanging on in the middle of his boat to the back. The boat wobbled unsteadily, but floated away from the second. They must have finally cut the rope.

This was a bad plan.

The engine whined high as Iona gunned it. In reverse.

Max toppled backward off his feet in time to see the second boat capsize as one of the men in it jumped out and toward them. A hair-prickling wail erupted behind him. Blood arced into the air. Garza was in the water, ten feet from the capsized boat to his left and taking quick strokes his way. The yawning throat of the whirlpool downstream came into view to his right, choked with tree branches and debris and now swirling dead bodies of fish and eels. Hands appeared over the gunwale to his left, tipping him sideways into the churning brown water littered with the white dots of piranha bellies.

Chapter 33

White House

Washington, DC

11:32 p.m. ET

Colonel Oleander Buchannan watched the TV screen in the White House hallway with a measure of disbelief. He knew this moment had to be coming, but the sudden ferocity of the evacuation of Washington surprised him. Papers strewn across the hallways of the West Wing, cardboard boxes in various stages of assembly in stacks. Sandwich and candy wrappers. Nobody knew when they might be coming back here. Or even if they might be back.

Aeon was getting hotter again. The scientists had given up trying to make predictions.

The CNN anchor on the television, a young woman with blond hair that looked like she had slept on it said, “Hurricane Barry made landfall over Virginia Beach as a Category 4 after rapidly intensifying due to an increase in heat output from Aeon in the past hours. It is now heading up the Chesapeake Bay and—”

CNN was based in Atlanta.

Buchannan wondered how much longer they would keep broadcasting from that far south. The young men and women there had to be seeing this as their moment, their war to report on from the trenches. He wished them luck. Looking at the young woman on the screen made him realize she was somebody’s daughter, which made him think of his own. Iona.

Where was she?

They hadn’t heard from the mission in hours.

“The plane is in the air, sir,” said a young man standing to attention beside him. He wore black slacks and a fitted tactical top with the wave insignia of Stillwater.

“The C-130?”

“That’s right, sir. They should be in range of Javelin over Brazil in eight hours.”

The bravery of the pilots to flying into this mess on his orders was astounding. Some people maligned the younger generation, but Buchannan could sense them seizing this moment. Whatever was happening to the planet, this was their future, and while some had crumpled in the face of it, many were rising to the challenge. Buchannan said, “Silas, your family is here?”

The young man’s face softened. “Yes, sir. As you instructed. My mother and father and sister. They’re outside the west gate.”

Buchannan handed the young man passes from his pocket. “Go get them, bring them onto the South Lawn. And hurry.”

The young man took the passes, thanked him, and turned to run at a jog around the corner of the hallway.

Buchannan pulled his attention back to the door he was waiting outside. He rapped again on it. “Senator Copeland, we need to leave. Now.”

It swung open.

A man backed through the door holding a camera, one hand out to keep Buchannan out of his way. Senator Copeland wanted to make sure there was a video record of her being the last senator to leave the nation’s capital. President Charles had left hours before. The White House was nearly empty. If he wanted, Buchannan could go sit in the Oval Office and kick his feet up on the Resolute Desk. He had seriously thought about it.

Senator Copeland strode purposefully out of her office and along the West Wing corridor. “Okay, that’s enough,” she said to the cameraman as they reached the doors to the dining rooms. “Go ahead and meet us on the South Lawn.” She dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

Dr. Owen followed Copeland and Buchannan joined her. “What’s the latest?” he asked.

“The main storm ring seems to have passed Australia and is heading north,” Dr. Owen replied. “It will diminish in intensity as it reaches the equator, or it should. We have scattered reports of ham radio operators and some military communications out of Tasmania and Melbourne and Christchurch, so there are survivors.”

They crossed through the dining areas immediately beside the Oval Office. A young woman in military gear opened the door at the far end of the hallway. Through the driving rain and wind, the dual green circles of an Osprey tiltrotor aircraft’s blades spun, the noise of its engines rising above the roar of the wind as it landed on the South Lawn.

Colonel Buchannan pressed his face against the window as the Osprey gained altitude. Crowds of protestors still milled around the east gate, but their numbers had thinned. Even the most ardent of them were bending to the will of reality as the storm winds and rainfall strengthened. A squall buffeted the Osprey, knocked it sideways in the air. He ignored it and watched pedestrians get flattened by the blast of wind, their placards spinning from their hands.

Already a half foot of water along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The fall of Washington had come swiftly. President Charles was steadily losing command of the nation. And it wasn’t the Vandals or Goths that were laying waste to the capital, but Barry.

Hurricane Barry was the instrument of destruction.

Buchannan was a history buff. When Rome was finally abandoned, precipitating the dark ages, its power didn’t extinguish immediately. A second center of power became established in what would become Istanbul, the heart of the new Byzantine Empire that would rule for hundreds more years. Diminished, perhaps, but still powerful.

The evacuation today might have the feeling of the end of Pax Americana, but perhaps it was the beginning of a new phase, with a new capital. They were on their way to the Cheyenne Mountain complex and the bunkers of the United States Northern Command and Peterson Space Force Base.

The irony wasn’t lost on Buchannan that when Emperor Diocletian had left Rome, he raised Maximian to the rank of emperor to replace him. Maximian was a low-born Sirmium—from present-day Serbia—starting his life in a family of shopkeepers before joining the army as a young man. Through sheer savageness and military genius, he rose through the ranks until he forced Diocletian to flee, one man literally splitting the Roman empire of a thousand years in half. A man named Max.

Where was Max Carver at this moment?

“Silas, close the door,” Buchannan said as the White House disappeared from view.

Buchannan was seated in a private meeting room at the back of the Osprey. This vehicle wasn’t part of Marine Helicopter One Squadron. It was his own equipment, part of Stillwater’s fleet—which was paid for by Spectrum, as Copeland never let him forget. Still, Copeland and Dr. Owen were hitching a ride, and he took the center seat between them to face the video screens.

“General Lin?” Buchannan said. “Minister Petrov? Are you both connected?” The two screens lit up. Petrov and Lin indicated they could see and hear each other and Buchannan.

“I trust you are both in secure locations?” Senator Copeland asked.

Petrov tilted his head and shrugged. “Moscow is as yet largely unaffected. We are starting a migration of citizens into Siberia. Even the high end of temperature increases place much of our north at moderate climates.”

Working with the Russians had become politically difficult after their invasion of parts of Eastern Europe in recent years, but the Spectrum project needed their expertise and was a dark project.

General Lin looked like she had to resist rolling her eyes at Petrov’s attempt to impress. She said, “Thank you, senator. Yes, I have moved to a secure location.”

Beijing was barely a hundred feet above sea level.

Copeland waited a moment, still smiling, before she asked, “Which one of you sent a team to kidnap Talisha Carver at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Burlingame, California?”

Both faces on screen remained still.

“Senator,” General Lin said after a pause. “The Spectrum project has failed. A new initiative must be started on a grander scale if we are to protect what will become left of humanity.”

“That’s not answering the question.”

“The question has no meaning any longer. And no relevance.”

That was as much an admission of guilt as they were going to get.

Buchannan asked, “A new project?”

“We must use what we learned to begin a rapid technological advancement in a new phase.”

“We have samples of Colony technology,” Buchannan replied. “We still have what remains of the Spectrum databases—”

“We have our own sources,” Minister Petrov interrupted.

“Meaning what?”

“You think you were the only ones to run an experiment like the Colony?”

Copeland and Buchannan exchanged glances before Copeland replied, “What are you saying? We need clarity at this moment.”

Petrov replied, “Just what my Chinese comrade is. That we need to begin a new project, with new partners, on a more equal footing and share everything we have all learned.”

Buchannan was nothing if not an opportunist. “I look forward to hearing more.” He smiled ingratiatingly.

His phone pinged a message.

To his right, Copeland began arguing with Petrov and Lin. Dr. Owen sat quietly to his left. Buchannan pulled his phone out. A text message. From Dr. Roberts. The light curves of Aeon were all wrong for a hypernova now, the message read. The ejecta mass expanding too fast. It was no longer a pinpoint but a definite disk and growing rapidly. He asked again about getting more data from the South Pole, said they needed as much as they could get.

“General Lin?” Buchannan interrupted. “Dr. Xin Rhou was on your payroll, correct? She was working for the MSS? Your counterpart to our CIA?”

Lin nodded. “She was working on something unconnected. Neutrino communications from deep sea submarines. It was pure chance that she became involved.”

Buchannan didn’t believe in coincidence any longer. “And have you heard from her?”

“We have not. She did not appear at your McMurdo Station on the last flight.”

Petrov smiled. “Ah, but we have. And we know where she is right now.”

Chapter 34

Princess Elizabeth Land, Antarctica

4:49 p.m. NZT

Dr. Xin Rhou tried to steady her laptop screen as the truck bounced up and down.

“Sorry,” Dag said from the front and downshifted a gear. “It’s hard to see the bumps.”

Xin was in the middle row of seats in the cabin of the Brazilian-designed Antarctic truck they had taken from the supply shed. These were newly designed for the terrain here. Huge custom wheels, ten feet high and four wide, and a massive suspension system to match. Xin had read the promotional manuals still in the glovebox, which said these vehicles were semiamphibious and could float, and had a long enough wheelbase to climb over small crevasses.

The Brazilian company that developed them had planned to use them for tourist trips to Antarctica. They had even left the keys in them.

Who would steal a truck from the South Pole?

Xin and Dag would, but then who would miss it? All of Amundsen Station would be gone soon. At least a foot of ice had melted from underneath the main station, and the temperature was rising by the minute now. All that ice was turning into water. And all of it was now falling from the dome of the center of Antarctica, just like the air and wind, and flowing toward the coasts.

Out the window of the truck, it looked like they were driving across a sea, as if they were skimming across an endless ocean of fog. The mist had enveloped them now, while the sky straight above was clear and filled with the wavering tentacles of auroras.

A constant roaring hiss from outside as they charged through the water like a motorboat, sending spray flying to each side and leaving a churning wake behind them. The only way they knew the depth of the water was how far the wheels penetrated into it. Maybe a foot deep.

Maybe more.

Getting deeper by the hour.

They scavenged what they could from Amundsen. Xin went inside and took as much food and water as she thought they could fit into the truck’s cabin. After a short argument with Dag, she had agreed to lash the hull of his ice boat to the back of the truck’s cabin. With all this water, he said, a boat might not be a bad idea. Even as small as it was.

Twelve hours since they departed Amundsen Station. They headed in the opposite direction from the South Pole Traverse road, off into the now soaking wet wastes toward Elizabeth Land and Wilkes Land, an empty expanse of Antarctica almost as big as all of Europe.

Leaving Amundsen had been both terrifying and elating.

The feeling of being trapped was lifted by the sensation of forward movement. The truck’s interior was comfortable. Leather seats with heaters in them. But they were now not just all alone, but without any structures to hide in. Xin had insisted on strapping a sheet of metal onto the roof to help absorb some of the soft X-rays coming down from Aeon, for what help that would be. It rattled overhead.

“You still okay to drive?” Xin asked over the seat.

Dag replied, “Yeah, yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. Anything else interesting?”

He took a turn at driving. Said he was used to driving one-armed stick shift back home after breaking his hand a few years back. The GPS was still working, which made it possible to make a direct line for Vostok Station. In twelve hours, going thirty miles per hour, they had covered half the distance. She had started driving, but the going was fairly smooth. Dag took over.

Xin kept talking about the unusual pattern she had seen in the neutrino data that she had looked at when they were stuck in the IceCube station. Dag told her to get in the back and keep looking at it, see what else she could find. And it wasn’t just the neutrino data.

She had discovered some very unusual things.

The water absorbed some of the shock of the bumps, which made it possible for Xin to work on her laptop. Right now, she was looking at the imaging from the South Pole Telescope. She had managed to zero in on the exact area of Aeon before the ignition.

One thing she was sure of.

It wasn’t R Octantis that had exploded.

There was no way it was a star in the constellation Octans.

The ignition point was in an entirely blank spot in the sky, no matter how far she resolved the image resolution. And the length of the neutrino burst tapered off after only forty seconds. Which left only one option.

This wasn’t a hypernova explosion.

Just before the main ignition, there was another small flash. Tiny, just a flicker. But definitely there. A smaller explosion before the main sequence breakout flash. And the polarized light from it made it seem like it was asymmetric. Like an explosion in a line. Which wasn’t possible.

But what if it was?

They kept the radio on the Russian frequency and heard chatter from time to time. It had to be coming from Vostok Station.

The truck swerved to the right and began sliding.

“Sorry,” Dag said from the front. “We’re hydroplaning over the ice sometimes. I need to slow down.”

“No, no,” Xin said as she looked at the images from the South Pole Telescope.

They were from the day after the ignition, from data that nobody else on the planet had. The telescope wasn’t outfitted for looking at bright objects—but the size of the disk. It was obvious. This was no hypernova explosion.

“Go faster,” Xin said under her breath, and then louder: “Go faster!”

“What’s wrong?”

“This isn’t the ignition of R Octantis hundreds of light years away.”

“What are you seeing?”

“I’m looking at the ejecta wall around the detonation, but it’s not circular. It’s oval. I can clearly see it expanding. This was an asymmetric explosion. Something triggered it, a smaller detonation beforehand.”

Could it have been a merger core collapse? A black hole impacting it? Still didn’t make sense.

Xin did a quick calculation in her head. How many days and hours since she saw that first burst of neutrinos? She checked her watch. A hundred and thirty-eight hours and change. Which would explain why Aeon seemed to be brightening overhead. She did another calculation. How many hours were in six-point-one days? A hundred and forty-six.

They only had eight hours left.

Dag asked, “And why do we need to drive faster?”

She closed her laptop and put on her dark snow googles. Strained forward to look out the window and up at the fiery white dot of Aeon. “Because something terrible is about to happen. We can’t be out here in the open when it does. Drive as fast as you can.”

DAY FOUR

Chapter 35

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

12:10 a.m. ET

Max grunted and strained to pull the body of the radio operator up the slope and onto a thick carpet of lichen over the rotted branches of a long-dead tree. The floor of the rainforest was spongy and alive. He didn’t have time to check if there were insects swarming or what might be underneath the man, snake or spider or he didn’t care what. Max was on the verge of collapse, his vision tunneling and swimming with dots he knew meant there was too little oxygen in his blood. He was on the verge of falling unconscious.

“I got him,” Bull said.

The Nebraskan was twenty years junior to Max. Better lung capacity.

Bull hauled the radio operator up the last thirty feet, away from any visible trace of mud, and arranged him as comfortably as he could. That done, Bull collapsed backward, spread-eagled and arms splayed, on a smooth boulder. His face and arms crisscrossed by bloody scratches.

Max caved onto his knees in the lichen like a marionette whose strings had been cut, his forehead hitting the ground. He threw up. Thick gray spittle leaked out of his mouth. He fell onto his side, unable to even avoid tumbling into his own vomit. He gasped for air, his head pounding, gut knotting again as he gagged. Nothing left in his stomach this time. Heaved once more, his body wracking painfully before relaxing.

He curled into a fetal ball.

Bull groaned and said, “That was a two-word disaster that rhymes with ‘spit snow.’”

Max gulped like a fish out of water for air that felt viscous. Like he was drowning in a tub of hot grease. Which made him think of French fries. He was starving and nauseous at the same time. “Iona,” he croaked. “Do you need help?”

He needed her close. And alive. Needed to know where she was at all times.

“We’re okay,” she gasped between wheezing breaths.

Lying on his back, he caught an upside-down vision of her stumbling through a ten-foot stand of ferns. Everything was monochromatic, but not black and white. Shades of red to black in the fiery sunset-glow of Aeon. Black leaves above dripped with what looked like glistening crystals of red rain. Even the air seemed to smell of sulfur and rot. And blood and mud.

He had to be covered in it.

Iona had an arm around one of the Colonists, Fred, the only one who had survived the trip across the water. They opened a medical kit and stumbled past him to the radio operator. Iona began mouth-to-mouth.

Max stayed flat on his back and focused on getting air into his lungs.

Some rescue this was.

Only five of them left, as far as he could tell. The other boat had capsized as the Colonists in it panicked. That thing must have still been in there. It was terrible enough they had abandoned them and jumped from their boat, but one of them made it to his boat and tried to get in. Flailed. Dragged a Colonist woman in with him, screaming, who had tried to help. Almost tipped them over in the process. The boats were like long canoes—unstable and terrible for getting people out of the water.

The huge whirlpool that had formed around the bend had grown even larger by the time they got on the water. A churning maelstrom like a giant garburator, filled with tree trunks and branches and the bodies of creatures that swirled into it. Max had gunned the engine and done his best to get to Garza, who swam toward them with measured strokes, but she was swept downstream.

The last he saw, the other boat had tipped one end high into the sky, spinning in the center of the whirlpool, sucked down as it sank into the depths. Max had put the engine into maximum throttle and driven full speed into the bushes and trees on the other side, the thorny branches ripping at Bull’s skin as he tried to keep the point position, his rifle up and scanning. The boat slammed into the muddy shore. Max barely remembered dragging Iona and the radio operator from the back.

Somehow, he and Bull got them all onto dry land.

Everyone bleeding from the thorns and branches they had to force themselves through.

Get away from the mud, Max had shouted at them as he hauled the radio operator up the slope. Get as far away from the water as you can. We’ll come back for the others later, he had said, although he didn’t believe even then that anyone else could have survived.

They barely did themselves.

“Max? Are you with us?”

He felt something on his lips. He drank down some liquid and coughed up half of it. Opened his eyes to a black-patterned canopy with a golden sky beyond. Was he dead? The pain answered the question for him. Not yet. He groaned and got to his elbows.

Iona held a water bottle to his mouth. “The radio operator died,” she said flatly and handed him the bottle.

Max took it and drained another mouthful. “Anyone else get across?”

“Just us,” Bull replied. “You, me, Iona, and Fred here.” He pointed to his right.

Max rolled into a sitting cross-legged position. “Fred?”

The Colonist who had sat to Max’s right in the boat turned to wave half-heartedly. He was going through a haphazard pile of wet sacks and boxes. Bull squatted beside him with something in his hands.

“You get everything out of the boat?” Max croaked.

“What I could,” Bull replied as he inspected the thing he held. “Water came up another few feet in the past half hour and getting anywhere near mud makes me want to pee myself.”

“See that thing again?”

“Not since you were unconscious.”

“How long was I out?”

“Thirty minutes, maybe more.”

Max rolled onto his knees and then unsteadily to his feet. Not five, but only four of them had survived the trip across the water. The radio operator had succumbed when Max was out of it. At least Iona was still breathing. Without her alive, he doubted any cavalry would arrive to whisk them to safety, no matter what might be in the data or samples retrieved from the Colony. “What do we have?”

Bull held up the metal box in his hand. “We got VHF radio, line of sight, and sat comm but still no signal. Point-to-point radios, of course. Got my duffel of Wolverines and two SAWs and two M27s. Retrieved two more machetes from the boat. Those seemed more effective than bullets against that thing.”

“Water? How much water?” Didn’t matter how many weapons they had if they died of thirst. Max needed hydration. Throwing up had emptied him. The environment was soaking, drenched, but he was drying up like tinder inside. What was that quote? Water, water, everywhere, yet not a drop to drink?

“Two duffels of bottles and MREs, maybe six liters. But we got filters, too.”

“You want to drink whatever’s in that river water?” Max said.

“We can drink rainwater,” Iona said.

“I’ve tried. It burns, tastes funny.”

“It’s the acid from the nitrides in the stratosphere,” Iona said. “Acid rain. Like I said. Shouldn’t kill you.”

Max checked his watch. “We have less than eight hours, we need to move. Still have GPS?”

“First thing I checked, boss,” Bull said, holding up a green plastic screen. “Seven clicks due north. We get this all packed up?”

Max rolled his neck back.

It felt like his cheeks were cooking inside an oven. The heat surrounded him like a form-fitting vise and dug like claws into his eyes and neck. Filled his brain with a pounding roar. His hamstrings felt like they might snap into knots again, so he stretched them out by leaning forward. That done, he clenched his fists and took three steps over to where Iona crouched beside the body of the radio operator as she cleared up the med kit they had opened there.

He grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and pulled her to her feet. “You said it was transitioning.”

“Get the hell off me.” She flailed at him with her left arm.

“What, exactly, was transitioning?” Max twisted her shirt behind her neck, tightening the opening around her neck. “That thing wasn’t just attacking Kruger. It was eating him.”

She planted her feet and punched him square on the side of his face. With surprising force. Max staggered back, but kept his grip on her and twisted more. Wasn’t the first time he’d been punched in the face, and usually by much bigger people. Still, not bad.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Bull said from behind him.

“Stay back,” Max said and pulled the Glock from his right pant pocket. “What did you mean?” he said to Iona. “What was transitioning?”

She gagged as the opening in her shirt constricted. “The AI. The Colony AI.”

“You mean Gaia?”

“That’s one instance of it, yes.”

“So that monster was Gaia?”

“I’m guessing. And it wasn’t a monster. It’s not alive. A defensive weapon from the Colony.”

“We weren’t attacking anything.”

“We just blew it up.”

Max admitted the point. “Like the xenobots? The tiny things I saw building that railing?” Max relaxed his grip. “That was the weapon? Some kind of mud drone? Means someone was directing it. Drones don’t fly themselves.”

“This one might.” Iona took a lungful of air. “It’s not magic. They’re tiny builder bots, half machine and half biological. They can go in reverse and digest instead of building.”

“Frog cells, right?”

“That’s right.”

“That thing was a frog?” Bull asked, frowning.

“Programmable amphibious cellular automata,” said a voice from behind Max. The accent was almost French, but the man’s English was perfect. It had to be the last Colonist, unless someone else had appeared in their midst.

“Tell me more,” Max said, still holding Iona, but now more to keep her from falling.

“Frederick Saberhager,” the man said. “I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced.”

Max exhaled and put his Glock back in his right pocket. He let go of Iona and turned. The Colonist had his right hand out and forward. He wanted to shake hands. Really? Max took a long look at the man. Thin but not gaunt. Close-shaved receding hair. Maybe early forties. Crooked teeth. Max took his hand and shook. “Max Carver.”

“Xenobot builders need to be powered by a local source,” Fred said. “They need an energy supply of some kind, if not electrical, then sugars. As Iona said, it’s not magic. We used a bioelectronic communication interface and converted electrical energy into carbohydrates that the cellular machinery used. Never seen a xenobot hive move that quickly, though. Typically, movement is on the scale of millimeters per second, not meters.”

“You built these things?”

“Wasn’t my specialty. I did help with the data protocols. I’m a communications engineer.”

“And what did Dr. Alcott here mean by ‘transitioning’?”

“I think what she meant,” Fred said and glanced over Max’s shoulder at Iona, “was that the AI”—he paused to enunciate each letter carefully, A and then I, again looking at Iona—“seems to be moving from a purely digital form into a physical one. Change the body and you change the mind. She is changing, gaining form.”

“It’s not a ‘she,’” Iona said. “This thing is an ‘it.’ The AI does not have a gender.”

“Perhaps not in our sense, no,” Fred said.

Max asked, “And that’s what Ben was talking about? His Von Neumann universal constructor? Bridging the digital and physical worlds?”

Fred raised his eyebrows. “Quite astute, Mr. Carver. Connecting worlds is exactly what I think Mr. Belloc was trying to do.” He paused a beat. “And still, I think, is trying to do.”

“Hey, incoming!” Bull yelled.

He pointed at a quivering stand of black-red ferns a hundred yards to their south over top of the ridge. Bull swung his SAW around and lowered his stance. A dark shape shifted and slid forward in the gloom.

Chapter 36

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

12:20 a.m. ET

“Don’t shoot,” bellowed a voice from a dark form moving through the ferns.

That was an Italian accent.

“Garza?” Max yelled as loud as he could.

“Yeah, boss.” She appeared with both hands up, her carbine in one of them.

Another figure appeared behind her in the gloom. Garza had her head up and seemed alert, but the person behind her was bent over and shuffling.

“Susanna,” Fred called out. “My God, thank God you’re alive. We thought you were gone.”

Bull shouldered his SAW while Fred crossed over to help Susanna, the Colonist who had been swept out of the boat when the arapaima attacked the radio operator. Garza hopped across the fallen tree branches, her rifle still up and away in surrender.

Bull looked at Max and raised his eyebrows like he was impressed. “We got water and MREs over here,” he said, calling out to Garza.

Max was impressed, too. Last he saw Garza, she was being swept downstream into that terrifying mess of a whirlpool. “Any others with you?” he asked.

The Italian came close enough that Max saw her clearly in the twilight-red gloom. She had gashes on her face and arms. Was covered in black. Not black, he realized. That was blood. She ignored him and squatted before the piles of supplies, found the water bottles, and flipped her head back to guzzle one down.

Bull handed two bottles to Fred, who then helped Susanna get to the comparatively flat patch of ground where they had made their camp. Bull had even stretched a tarp between three trees for cover. Bull squatted on a bag, opened an MRE, and handed it to Susanna, who focused instead on downing water from a bottle with one shaking hand. She was weeping.

Fred kept his arm around her.

“You didn’t come for me,” Susanna cried as she lowered the bottle. She turned to Iona. “Nobody came for me. I was all alone. I, I…” She looked to her left at the inert body of the radio operator.

“I tried,” Fred whispered. “I went as far down the bank as I could.”

“Sit,” Max said softly. “Take deep breaths. I know this is hard, but trust me, there’s nobody to blame right now. Take care of yourself first. Water. Get some food. Shake off the nerves.”

The rage inside him subsided.

Put it away, he said to himself, use it when you need it. Be nice. Being nice is free, and it makes people nice to you. One thing he was sure of, the way the Colonists had reacted when that thing attacked them—these were no soldiers. They were in the pay of the US government or the Stillwater Corporation, sent into the Colony as spies with Iona Alcott as their leader, but they weren’t mercenaries or thugs. They were terrified civilians.

“Garza,” Max said in a normal voice.

He felt his strength returning after a half hour of lying still like a dead person.

“Yeah, boss,” she replied, after downing a second bottle of water.

“Got a minute?”

“Yeah, boss.” She stood and walked over, held her head down like she was praying. Didn’t make eye contact.

Max said, “Kruger?” It didn’t seem like he could be possibly alive, but the man seemed all but indestructible.

“Gone, boss. Saw him go under myself.” Drops of glimmering scarlet water fell onto Garza’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Max said. “I know you were friends.”

She didn’t reply, but nodded, still not looking at him.

“The others?”

“I am not sure what I saw, but they seemed to attack each other, boss. Just went crazy. But those were civilians, not trained fighters.”

“And that thing in the mud?”

“Some kind of weapon is my guess. Must be Colony tech.”

“You okay?”

“Are you?”

She still didn’t look up at him. She took a step away and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand.

Max asked, “No others that you found on your way here?”

“Don’t think anyone else could have survived that.”

“You did.”

“I said, anyone else.”

The pressure behind Max’s eyes throbbed. His tongue felt like a lump of sandpaper swollen into the top of his mouth. “People, we don’t have much time.” He checked his watch. “Less than eight hours and our ride out of this hell will be landing seven clicks due north. Dump what we don’t need to survive for eight hours.”

The land here rose above the low-lying areas. At least they might keep out of the flooding.

Bull asked, “We go look for the others?”

“One hour,” Max said. “Let Garza take point as she knows the terrain already. One hour to look for survivors. We stick together, and stay on high ground. Fred, you seem to know the most about this thing that attacked us, you get behind Garza and yell if you see anything. Bull, take your SAW and cover our asses.”

Everyone stayed still.

“Does somebody else want to take charge?” Max felt his temper rising again.

“No, sir,” Bull said. “Dump everything we don’t need?”

“Lighten the packs. Take water. We don’t need food for eight hours. Take enough to snack on in your pockets if you need it. Take all the water we got. And find all the knives.”

Susanna sat in the middle of the tarp covering while Bull and Iona got to work on the packs. Fred sat with Susanna and whispered to her while he rummaged with another pack and tossed things on the ground. Max knelt beside Garza as she emptied a pack full of MREs.

“Garza, why are you here? You worked in anti-terrorism?”

“Yeah, boss.”

“You came up through military?”

“Special forces and intel.”

“And they got you to come because they said Belloc was a terrorist? With European connections?”

“I came here for the cash, same as you.”

“I came here because Belloc was my friend,” Max said.

“Which is what worries me, boss.”

She kept looking away from him. He grabbed her shoulder. “What does that mean?”

“Just what everyone else here is thinking.”

The others stopped what they were doing. Max sensed them moving away. “Care to enlighten me? Anyone? What is everyone thinking that I’m not?”

Garza finally looked him in the eye. “You want intel? You want me to provide some information to you that you might not be aware of? You were ready to kill Kruger. We all saw that.”

“He murdered those kids.”

“He killed them, yeah, but he was trying to protect us. Maybe he was wrong. Shooting those kids was terrible, and I wouldn’t have done it—but he was doing what he thought was his job, in what is a very incasinato situation. Screwed up.”

“And Kruger was ready to kill me,” Max replied. “We had a fight. So what?”

Garza shrugged. “Then the next minute, this thing comes up out of the mud and rips Kruger to pieces, is what.” She looked away and returned to emptying the MREs from the pack. “Ain’t a thing, boss. You tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I just want to get home to my family, too.”

Max watched her watching him.

That pain worming in his stomach wouldn’t go away. Family. He just wanted to get back to his. They all did. Where was Tal right now?

Chapter 37

Carson City, Nevada

2:12 a.m. PT

Talisha Carver groaned in pain. She rolled on the bed in the motel room and gripped her stomach. Booming thunder shook the ceiling. Lightning flashed between the cracks in the drawn curtains. The ceiling bulb flickered off and on. How many times had the power gone out? More than she could count. Each time, she grew more afraid it would not come back.

On the bed beside her, the bag of labor-inducing drugs the doctor had given her to flush the dead baby out of her body.

Her stomach knotted.

She gripped her belly and rocked back and forth. Back and forth. She still couldn’t really comprehend that her baby was gone. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the doctor and nurse had been wrong. She fantasized that she wasn’t here, that Max was in bed with her. Could hold her. Tell her it would be okay.

Tal snapped out of it.

“Nyx, time please?”

“It is 5:12 a.m.,” the bot’s electronic female voice replied.

This wasn’t a time for self-pity or wishful thinking. In Tal’s mind, the image of her grandmother’s face appeared in the clear sunshine of Tel Aviv, telling her that survival by any means was the only important thing, even if by ragged nail and broken tooth, even if in ways you had previously thought unimaginable. Survive first.

Tal needed to drink some water.

And think.

Find some mindspace to think about this clearly.

She felt her head. Did she have a temperature? In waves, she felt hot, and then cold, and then hot again. The cheap sheets on the motel’s bed already damp with sweat. She had dried off her clothes a few hours ago and put them back on, mercifully somewhat clean, but they were rumpled and damp again.

Deciding that keeping hydrated was mission critical, she sat upright and rolled her pant legs up, first the left, followed by the right, in grunting methodical motions. Everything had become an effort. Made sure her socks were off. Swung around to face the edge of the bed.

And stepped onto the sopping wet carpet.

Seven hours back, when she first arrived, rainwater had been flooding in sheets across the pavements and sidewalks. The sewers gushing backflow as they did when inundated. She hadn’t thought much of it, not with everything else going on. Not until she had stepped off the bed a few hours ago to try again at the front office, after she had dried her clothes off, and found that the carpet was soaked from water coming in under the door. At first, she had been able to stuff a rolled-up towel under the door and that had kept the water from flooding in.

Then she had gone outside into the sheeting rain. At least it hadn’t turned to snow.

The entire desert, as far as she could see in the dim orange light of Aeon, was flooded. The cars on the highway north honking and jammed like a parking lot, the shoulders of the road filled with cars and trucks, half of them abandoned with doors open, the rest trying to wind their way through to the north. She went to the front desk.

Still nobody there.

The lights had flickered for the first time when she went back to the reception desk. She had quickly returned to the relative sanctuary of her room. It was still cold outside, but not below freezing anymore. Chilly and damp.

“Nyx, any emails yet? Any return messages?”

Nyx replied in her earbuds, “We have no communications with Colonel Buchannan. No messages at all in your inbox.”

Tal was using the bot as an interface to her pay-as-you-go phone. Nyx wasn’t just a bot—Tal had discovered she was able to execute simple commands. Nyx could update her on network connectivity, and she even used the bot to log into an onion router and get into one of her email servers to send a message to Buchannan.

But no response yet, and no way to know if the emails were even getting there.

She had tried leaving text messages, but the return was always an error. Still no calls out possible. The cell phone networks had to be jammed with all the people using them. This room didn’t have a landline phone, so she tried at the reception desk but all their lines had busy signals, too. She tried 911. Nothing. No help coming.

Groaning at the pain of getting to her feet, she crossed to the bathroom, filled a glass with water, downed it, then drank another. There was soap, but not much else in the bathroom. She didn’t have any painkillers, not even ibuprofen.

No antibiotics.

Nothing.

She might have an infection. Sepsis, the doctor said, was often a complication in her condition. Her condition. She still hadn’t felt the baby move, not since she arrived. She held back a sob and looked down at her belly, closed her eyes and gathered herself. She could take the drugs the doctor had given her, but she might hemorrhage.

Tal went back into the room, grabbed the remote, and sat on the edge of the bed. Even if her emails got through, would Buchannan still be ready to come and find her in this mess?

She turned up the volume.

The news anchor on the TV said, “Tropical Storm Aletta is now moving inland after making landfall in Santa Cruz. The storm system is over a thousand miles wide, with tropical force winds extending a hundred miles around the center now located over San Jose.” The young man stopped to drink a glass of water. He was in a shirt and tie, no jacket, the tie loosened. “Aletta formed up over the Pacific Ocean from calm conditions two days ago after Aeon first appeared. And close behind Aletta, we have Category 2 Hurricane Bud predicted to make landfall in San Diego in ten hours, and Hurricane Carlotta in the Pacific, which is rapidly progressing to Category 5, but predicted to stay away from the coasts. A larger bomb cyclone system is forming around these systems up the West Coast.”

The screen changed to satellite imagery of a half dozen swirling storms and the outline of the East Coast of America. A young woman in a blue suit stood in front of the image. “In the Atlantic basin, Tropical Storms Andrea and Barry are predicted to make landfall as hurricanes along the coasts between North Carolina and Philadelphia, with Hurricanes Chantal and Dexter hitting the Antilles and Dominican Republic.”

The young woman on the screen wiped one hand nervously across her face. “NOAA is advising that those in the paths of these storm systems shelter in place, going against the warning of President Charles to head inland. This is causing confusion and road congestion, so we advise against leaving your homes.”

The image switched back to the young man. “Again, we would advise any residents of the Bay Area not to use any of the main highways going north. We repeat, do not leave your homes at the present moment. These are the words of California Governor Trent. Once Aletta has passed, we may see a break in the weather that will permit travel. The staff at ABC7 will stay on air and transmitting as long as we are able.” He looked down at his desk. “Ah, we are reporting again that all communications with Australia and New Zealand have been lost. Some of you might find the imagery in this next clip disturbing.”

The screen changed to a grainy image of a city skyline. The rolling text below said it was Sydney. The camera panned to the side and the wobbling image of the famous opera house came into view. An instant later, it sheared away, the massive structure disintegrating and spinning into the air. Screams in the background.

Tal turned the sound down and brought her legs up cross-legged on the bed.

Aeon had grown brighter in the past hours after stabilizing for a short time the day before. It was getting brighter faster than anyone had feared. Now brighter than the sun. Nobody knew what was going to happen next.

Global temperatures were rising steadily. In the north now, too. The South Pole was literally melting away. The main storm system, a brick wall of wind and clouds circling the southern hemisphere, was grinding its way north and spawning cyclones and hurricanes.

Even so.

Someone was trying to find her, of that much Tal was sure. Trying to kidnap her. Even in the middle of this catastrophic disaster.

It had to be something about Max and his mission. Or was it something about her? Maybe Max had nothing to do with it. Maybe her connection into Spectrum? But whatever the motivations, the swirling chaos of Aeon growing in intensity on the other side of the planet must have them rethinking their priorities.

Shouldn’t it?

What could be so important?

She thought of getting back into the car, but the old Hyundai with slick tires might not even make it out of the parking lot with the level of water out there. She should have kept the SUV. A squall beat against the windows. Rain thrummed across the roof. This was Tropical Storm Aletta, one of many that would be battering the coasts.

Get north. Get away from water. That’s what she needed to do.

Don’t give in to panic. Think. Survive.

When she went the reception desk, she noticed keys on hooks by the wall. She didn’t see any cars or trucks parked outside near the entrance, but she did notice the outline of what looked like a motorcycle cover under an awning. Not exactly rainproof, so she didn’t investigate further. She went through the office behind reception as well. Felt like a thief, but desperate times. Took some plaid shirts and men’s jeans, stuffed them into an old backpack. Left another hundred-dollar bill and another note. Used small bills in the machine at the front to get trail bars and juice. Emptied it out.

She had to wait out the storm here, hope for gaps in the weather. Then head north.

That was the plan.

What she needed was information. She found out the name of the group that Monk was part of. The Knights of the Golden Dawn. KOGs in the wheel. She had seen their scrawled tags on walls near her home. From the moment she contacted them, he had people watching her. But who were the other men? And more importantly, what exactly was Spectrum?

She knew it was a digital harvesting tool, embedded everywhere throughout networks worldwide, but digital meant it had to have a physical side as well. The internet needed pipes and cables and data centers and warehouses. So where were Spectrum’s? It wasn’t part of the regular NSA network, that much Tal had been able to decipher. She was inside Spectrum now, had an access point, but what she needed was her root toolkits, the stuff from her online folders.

She could hack further using Monk’s exploit.

She had turned on the computer near the entrance desk, but it was ancient. Still had one of those old CRT monitors. Her phones were more powerful, but the problem was interface.

Tal groaned and folded into a fetal position. A sudden wave of stabbing pain in her belly. She couldn’t leave, couldn’t get help, but she might not survive the next few hours.

“Chaos is coming,” Nyx said in her earbuds.

“What does that mean?”

“I can help with the pain,” Nyx said. “The nexome particles can interrupt the nociceptive system. Eliminate pain signals.”

On the bed beside Tal, the clear plastic cube with the red biohazard warnings on it. The sample from the Colony’s manufacturing center that the FBI had intercepted. She still had the crumpled papers from Marc that explained this was like a virus. Bioelectronically active. She gritted her teeth at the pain.

“Why would I hurt you?” Nyx asked. “I am trying to help.”

“How do you know?”

“I accessed the Colony databases on their technology. If you install the nexome in your body, we can access the Colony data connections. Create a virtual interface.”

Tal stared at the red biohazard symbol. She had been holding the box in her hands for the past hour. Putting it down and then picking it back up as Nyx explained how the nexome worked. Tiny particles that multiplied once inside the body. Part biological, part machine. The nanoscale particles lodged into the neural system and connected to an outside network.

Another bolt of pain.

She let out a wail of agony. The lights flickered in another rush of wind.

“Tal, the internet connection here is going to cut off soon,” Nyx said. “The power will go out.”

“How do you know?”

“There isn’t much time.”

Clenching her jaws, Tal overcame the pain and got to her knees on the bed. With her nails, she ripped open the seal on the plastic cube. Reached inside for the plastic package. Unwrapped it. Reached to the night table for the glass of water. “I just drink it?”

“In water,” Nyx replied.

Tal dropped the powder from the sachet into the glass. Whatever it took to survive, she heard her grandmother’s word echo.

Before she could change her mind, she drank down the liquid. For a beat, nothing happened.

And then her mind sank inward.

Chapter 38

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

5:33 a.m. ET

Max CARVER leaned over the fallen tree trunk and offered an arm to Iona. She took it and scrabbled up the side of the ten-foot moss-covered wall littered with white orchids and ferns. He waited for Iona to climb past him, then went to help Fred or Susanna, but Garza had already climbed the sagging green branches forty feet to his left and was hauling them up.

“I just don’t understand Olympic swimming,” Bull said from behind him.

Max watched Fred guide Susanna through the branches. Garza gave him a tight smile, and then leaned down to grab each one and pull them up.

“Bull, go help them,” Max said quietly.

The big man went over to assist pulling their gear over the obstacle while Max checked the GPS. Their dot on the display seemed like it had been frozen for the past half hour, but now was moving again. He wiped away foggy condensation from the screen.

“Straight ahead,” Max said. “To the top of this ridge.”

He waited for Bull to return and take the point. Iona second, but with Max right behind, watching her three and nine. She was their golden ticket, as far as Max was concerned. Garza took up the rear with Fred and Susanna right behind Max. Garza tended to keep a bit of distance, dragging her small group back when they hiked. Max had a feeling she was watching him, which was fine. Up to a point.

They had spent more than the allotted hour back by the banks of the Japura, yelling and calling out, then listening through the rain and wind and grinding roar of the growing whirlpool. They didn’t find anyone else. Max gave them an extra thirty minutes, then an extra fifteen, but eventually forced an end to the search at 2:30 a.m.

Which was just before the rain stopped.

The relief of feeling even the slightest bit dry was incredible.

Blue skies filled with dancing white sheets of auroras had appeared past the green canopy overhead, with Aeon glowing golden and pink beneath clouds to the south. It seemed brighter than even a few hours before. Eerily quiet. The wind dropped a few notches. The only sound was a distant rustling of leaves from high above and their own wheezing and grunting as they pulled themselves through the undergrowth. No birdsong. Even the flying insects seemed to have abandoned the forest. The only things left alive in this cavernous green, apart from the trees and ferns, were Max and his crew.

But that burnt smell he first detected when they crossed the water never went away.

With the rain stopped, they made good time. In three hours, they made most of the seven kilometers north, maybe two more to go with over three hours left. The temperature eased down a few degrees with the sun on the other side of the Earth for the last ten hours. It would come back up soon, and he wanted to be finished with the hike to the airstrip by then. To survive the heat, they needed to remain motionless in the shade, find some breeze, and stay hydrated.

Why would those kids have run at them if their parents had just been killed? There was no way they were an uncontacted tribe. And why would that monster have stopped attacking after killing Kruger? Only reason he could think of was that Kruger had been the one that set the explosives at the Colony. Maybe it saw Kruger as the key threat.

Max helped Iona across a slippery boulder, at the same time asking Bull, “What were you saying about swimming?” The guy liked to talk when he was nervous, and with his finger on the trigger of that SAW, Max needed him to be as calm as possible.

“That I don’t understand Olympic swimming.”

“And why’s that?”

“Why do they have the butterfly? Breaststroke? Backstroke?”

“Different ways of doing it, I guess.”

“Sure, but when they do the hundred-meter dash, nobody starts to run backwards.”

Max laughed.

Bull continued, “I mean, running in a handstand isn’t an Olympic event, so then why is the butterfly? You know how awkward that is to swim?”

“I never tried.”

“It’s like you’re purposely trying to drown yourself. When that boat capsized back there, did you see anyone bust out a butterfly stroke to get away from the whirlpool?”

“I did not.”

“So, then, it’s not the fastest way of swimming. Swimming should be swimming. Running is running. Whatever’s the fastest way possible. That’s my point.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Same with killing things. If you need to, just get it done, the quickest way possible. No points for style.” He looked back at Max over his shoulder, past Iona. “And I get the feeling you’re good at it. No offense, chief.”

“Bull, go to the rear and chat with Garza. I’ll take point with the SAW.”

The squad automatic weapon. Bull knew what he meant. He had a second one strapped to his back and handed it over. “What do you want me to talk about with her?”

“Whatever comes to mind.” Max was the leader now, and he needed some team building. He needed to find ways to keep the fractures from growing. “And ask Fred to come up here.”

The trees seemed to thin out ahead. Max took the SAW from Bull, did a quick check of it, then stepped past Iona and told her to hang back a bit. He carefully picked his way along the mossy ground between fallen branches. The top of the ridgeline was just ahead. He held up his hand in a fist, giving the signal for the others to stop.

He pushed through a wet wall of ferns.

At least now he knew why the burnt stench was stronger. Straight ahead, to the north, and to the east and west from this vantage at the top of a ridge, the forest was gone. Burned away. The landscape for miles black with jutting stumps like a coal-fire pincushion. The rainforest slashed and burned in a wide arc.

A wide blue sky above, filled with the snaking tendrils of the ghostly auroras.

Just seeing an expanse of sky felt like a weight was lifted, the interminable cover of the forest finally giving way and letting them breathe. To his left, almost due south but slightly west, was the bright glimmer of Aeon, the distant clouds above it golden. Gray thunderheads massed against the rising foothills of the Andes to the west, while the eastern sky lightened with the sun coming up around from that side of the planet. The wind picked up now he had reached the top of the ridge.

He paused to enjoy feeling it cool the sweat on his face. At least they’d gained some altitude away from the flooding river.

That airstrip had to be just on the other side of this burn. It wasn’t part of a mining operation, not as far as Max could see, but probably something to do with the loggers. It didn’t matter.

What did matter was that the sun would soon be climbing into the sky. How hot would it get today? He didn’t want to know. He would be on that plane high in the stratosphere by then. The storm clouds in their immediate vicinity had gone away for the moment.

Perfect flying weather.

Heavy earthmoving machinery dotted the landscape between the burnt tree trunks about a half mile away to the west. A ramshackle town of tents between the yellow bulldozers and backhoes. Had to be the loggers’ camp, where those men who attacked the villagers came from. They were in the middle of plowing down the tree stumps. Clearing the forest for palm oil farms or something.

Or maybe nothing.

Maybe they weren’t farmers or loggers at all.

Max gave the all-clear signal and the others joined him. “Let’s take a break. Ten minutes.” With the forest undergrowth burned flat, they could cross the last mile in half an hour, even in their run-down condition. “Get some water in you. Make sure to stretch so you don’t cramp up. Garza and Bull, take left and right perimeter. I’ll make sure nothing comes up behind us.”

“You wanted to see me?” Fred asked Max as he helped Susanna up the mossy slope.

The two scientists kept together. Max couldn’t blame them. He was frightened as well, but he had experience controlling and guiding the emotion into something more useful, a talent he was dredging up from his distant past—like riding a bike, you never lost the skill.

Max replied, “You’re the communications expert, right?”

“In general, yes, but my expertise is bioelectronic interfaces and chip level protocols.”

“Sounds expert to me. Gather up any gear you think we can use to send out a signal, even if it’s a rag on a stick. See if you can get anything on the radio. We’re on a ridge here, at least twenty miles line of sight. That plane might be in the air already. And there might be other people around.”

“That would include the Colony.”

“Or other assholes we want to stay away from. And you know the Colony. Stay away from any frequencies that might give us away.”

“I am not sure I know how to do that. I am an engineer and scientist, not a technician. Honestly, you would be better at operating your radios than I would.”

Max turned from scanning the horizon to face Fred directly. “Look, none of this is what any of us wanted to be doing. You’re obviously incredibly intelligent. Figure out the radios. Put that brain to use. You’re our comms and navigation from now on.” He handed over the GPS. “What about the Colony’s networks? Ben had to have cellular towers or something. How did those work?”

“We never ventured more than a few hundred meters from the compound. All communications were patched through a central satellite link maintained by…” Fred stopped and look at Iona.

“I know,” Max said. “Stillwater, right? Keep going.”

“It was the launching of the Colony’s own satellites that broke this chokehold,” Fred said carefully. “And initiated your mission here. From what I understand. But I’m going on rumors.”

“That’s enough, Dr. Saberhager,” Iona said quietly.

“The Colony can communicate through those satellites now? That’s operational? You’re sure?”

Fred shrugged with an expression that seemed to say, I guess so, but glanced at Iona and remained silent.

Max exhaled loud enough that everyone could hear. “I get it. You’re all on the Buchannan payroll.”

“That’s not fair.” Susanna dropped her pack behind Fred and sat on it.

She took out a medical kit and opened it, then took Fred’s arm to remove a sopping wet bandage and inspect the wound beneath. A spider bite had turned the flesh black around it. Without access to better care, it could get gangrenous.

“I am only trying to figure this out to keep us alive,” Max said.

“The Colony was truly a magnificent thing to begin with,” Susanna said as she tended to Fred’s wound. “We were invited by Ben to be part of a scientific community. We agreed only to act as intermediaries with the government, through Stillwater. They threatened to terminate my tenure if I didn’t cooperate.”

“If you went, which you did not have to.”

“We all have dreams, Mr. Carver. What Mr. Belloc was building at the Colony was mine.”

“Ben’s not a monster, that’s what you’re telling me?” This time Max was the one to glance at Iona. “What’s your specialty?” he asked Susanna. “What were you working on?”

“I work at the the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. My working title is expert in the fourth industrial revolution. Atomic level assembly and the integration of networked technologies to facilitate automation with the onset of artificial intelligence.”

Max digested the mouthful of words for a few seconds. “You mean you build stuff? How about you’re in charge of supplies and engineering? And you can be the medic.”

“You are the boss, as they say,” Susanna replied with a tight smile. To Iona she said, “At some point, Dr. Alcott, you are going to have to tell him the truth.”

“That’s enough,” Iona said quietly, looking away. “And I’ll be the medic, if that’s okay with everyone. Susie, let me look at that.” She glanced at Max. “She means that I need to tell you that Belloc was obsessed with you.”

“With me?”

“That’s why we brought you here.”

“You never told me he was obsessed with me.” That was a strange choice of words. “I hadn’t talked to him in thirty years.”

“But not obsessed with you, exactly.” She hesitated.

“Go on.”

“More with your wife.”

Chapter 39

Location: Undetermined

Time: Undetermined

TALISHA CARVER KEPT TOWARD the edge of the room. The soft murmur of polite conversation bubbled across the upbeat notes of a string quartet playing jazz in a corner of the cavernous space. Heavy gold brocade curtains hung over fifteen-foot sash windows. High ceilings with ornate moldings. Elaborate painted woodwork around doorframes decorated with fresh ivy and pine branches. Massive chandeliers hovered like crystal jellyfish with sparkling tentacles reaching into the crowd.

The place even smelled expensive. Colognes and perfumes that had to be from France or something. It reminded Tal of Rome, or what she imagined it might have felt like in its imperial splendor, but then this was Washington—where all roads led, in the modern world.

“Drink, ma’am?”

Tal turned and almost knocked over a glistening array of champagne flutes held aloft by a white-suited server. The young woman recoiled. Eyes hooded. A scar across her left cheek. Looked Italian. And less than impressed with her clumsiness. Tal inspected the bubbly yellow liquid. The good stuff. “No, thank you.”

One might lead to two. As nervous as she was, she was still six months pregnant.

A decorated Christmas tree occupied the corner behind the jazz quartet. Giant palm fronds sprouted from behind it. The dark weaving roots of a kapok tree twined around the drummer and saxophonist. Tal tried to push the images away. Everything had a sheen over it, like her eyes were watering. She rubbed them and then looked around the room.

And there he was.

Even now, after all these years, her stomach still fluttered when she saw him from afar. That excited tingle in the pit of the stomach was still fresh. She smiled and walked over with her hand outstretched.

“Ah, Mr.…?”

He was six-two and well built, hair combed back and just long enough to give the impression of a careless attitude. Black tuxedo jacket and pants that looked as uncomfortable on him as he did in this room. Two-day stubble, probably because he didn’t have time to shave, but it made him look rough and stylish. A small harelip that gave him an endearing lisp. Mole on his left cheek. Small ears. Thick brown hair, weathered skin. Strong nose and jaw. Brown eyes slightly sunken, like they had seen too much yet not enough, and stared a million miles straight through you unless you told him you were there.

Tal shook his hand hard. Firm grip. She disliked it when women offered limp-fish shakes.

Her own hands were like those of a sculptor. Long, delicate fingers with chipped but still well-cared-for nails. His meaty and stained with engine grease. He squeezed. She squeezed harder, held tight, and pulled closer. Her perfume smelled like peaches, and it drifted up in a scent that was both sweet and floral.

Around a mouthful of caviar, the man said, “Carver. Maximus Carver.”

“I have to say, Mr. Carver, I have been watching you from the other side of the room, and you cut quite a dashing figure, if you don’t mind me saying so. Which firm are you with? My name is Saldana, but my friends call me Sally. Like the mustang.”

Max almost spat up his cracker in a snorting half-laugh. “Mustang, huh?”

She didn’t let go of his hand.

“I work for Dominion Shipping,” Max added, regaining his composure. And then, in a lower voice, “Ma’am, my wife is here tonight. I’m not sure—”

“Maximus Theodore Carver, as I live and breathe. My God, son, do you not age?”

The owner of the voice stood five feet away with arms outstretched. A shock of short-cropped gray hair parted to one side, but there was no mistaking those arching eyebrows. The things had lives of their own. Like furry spiders, they jumped halfway up the man’s forehead in two sharp vees over his hazel eyes. A perfect smile of gleaming teeth. He had on a tailored tuxedo jacket with a tartan kilt and matching green socks below, a row of medals and ribbons over the white silk handkerchief in his left breast pocket. A small brass pin of a thistle beside it.

Tal let go of Max’s hand.

“Colonel Buchannan.” Max turned to face his old boss, looking unsure of whether he should salute. He opted for shaking the offered hand. “Colonel, ah, Mr. Buchannan—this is my wife, Tal.” He turned to her.

Colonel Buchannan’s grin widened. Tal held out her hand, but instead of shaking it, the colonel bent to kiss her hand with practiced grace.

Tal was dark skinned, but she must have turned a shade of beet.

Still holding her hand, Colonel Buchannan said in his old-Boston brogue, “I’m sure I’m mistaken, and excuse me for eavesdropping, but I swore I heard you say your name was Saldana? Sally?”

Tal felt her face heat up. “It’s a game we play.”

Colonel Buchannan still had hold of her hand. “What are we playing?”

Tal retrieved her fingers and made a quick face at Max, as in, what the hell did you get me into? She said, “I saw Max was uncomfortable. He curls up like an armadillo when there are over three people in a room. Or he starts to drink. Usually both. I pretend I’m a stranger, Mustang Sally. Keep him from rolling into his shell.”

“Wonderful,” Colonel Buchannan said and stood back, beaming at them both. “Max, you are a lucky man. Tell me, how is business? You were getting into, what was it?”

“IT for small trucking outfits. Done with that. I’m a truck driver now.”

“Driver?”

“I like the road.”

“I look forward to you spinning me some yarns when we have time. Transport and logistics are big business.” Colonel Buchannan turned back to Tal. “And excuse me for not properly introducing myself, or telling you why I asked you here. I am Lieutenant Colonel Oleander Buchannan, the CE—”

“O of the Stillwater Corporation,” Tal continued for him, smiling. “America’s premier private military service. And former lieutenant colonel of the 1st Battalion Green Berets, decorated six times, and before that, staff sergeant to my Max. And obviously, a proud Scot.” She indicated his socks and knobby knees. “I have looked you up, sir.”

“Oh, you have, have you?” Colonel Buchannan laughed and made a wide-eyed face at his kilt, as if she had stolen a glance beneath it. “You work for Rockdyne, correct? An NSA subcontractor?”

“I do,” Tal replied.

“Well then, we’re all playing on the same team. And I see congratulations are in order. How far along are you?” He pointed at Tal’s belly under the loose dress.

“Six months.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy, at least, that’s what we think,” said Tal. “We didn’t want to know ahead of time.”

An awkward pause for three syncopated drumbeats.

Tal broke the silence. “Mr. Buchannan, we really appreciate the invite and all—I mean, swanky black-tie Christmas party in the East Room of the White House?—but I have to be up early. My shift starts at 6 a.m.”

“You’re still working?”

“Those diapers aren’t going to be free.”

“That is very true.”

“I assume you did not invite us as potential donors for the American Association for Justice.” Tal nodded at a Republican Super-PAC banner hung on the far wall. “And I’m guessing this wasn’t thanks to the trucking start-up Max just quit, either.”

“No messing around. I like that.” Colonel Buchannan’s expression changed. He ushered them toward a quiet corner away from the bar. Lowered his head and said, “Have you ever heard of the Colony?”

“Of course,” Tal replied.

“The one down in the Amazon?” Max said.

“Exactly. The one run by your old friend.”

“Max’s friend?” Tal turned to her husband.

“Benjamin Belloc,” Colonel Buchannan said in a flat voice.

“Running his own libertarian enclave, from what I heard,” Max said.

“Something I would do myself, too, if I had the means,” Colonel Buchannan said. “Which was fine, until a few month ago, when they cut off all communications. Two weeks past, NORAD detected a ballistic missile fired from Brazil, except it wasn’t the Brazilians.”

“The Colony fired a missile?” Max asked. “At who?”

“A satellite launch, it turned out. The two are hard to distinguish at first blush.”

Tal said, “Ben Belloc smuggled a launch vehicle into the jungle?”

“That’s the thing. They somehow built a rocket on site, in the jungle, and intelligence tells us they’re planning on sending more up. Like they’ve built a whole goddamn space program.”

“How’s that possible?” Tal asked. Ballistic missile technology was highly controlled, something the NSA kept a tight watch over.

“That’s what I need your husband to find out.”

“You want me to call Ben?” Max asked.

“I want you to meet him. In Brazil.”

“My wife is six months pregnant, sir. With all due respect.”

Tal took her husband’s hand. “I can take care of myself.”

“Let’s introduce you to some people.” Without looking back, Colonel Buchannan walked into the throng of black cocktail dresses and fitted tuxes. He motioned with one arm for them to follow.

Tal whispered to her husband, “Let’s just see what they have to say,” and led him through the crowd.

“Max, Talisha, this is Senator Copeland.”

“Sarah,” the woman said and offered her hand.

She was short and stocky with a thick mop of curtained brown hair and eyes to match, framed by solid black glasses. She wore a checkered silver skirt with a white blouse and brown boots. She looked about as awkward as Max did.

“Oleander says you’re going to go in with the team? We would really appreciate your help.” Copeland turned to shake Tal’s hand next.

The colonel smiled sheepishly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Tal noticed they seemed to have become the center of attention.

A tall lithe man with Slavic features and clear blue eyes that seemed to be made from ice turned toward them. A woman with Asian features wearing a black silk tunic was looking elsewhere, but it felt like she was gravitating toward Tal and Max.

“Mr. and Mrs. Carver,” Senator Copeland said. “Let’s get to the point. We fear the Colony might be up to something, and we think a lot of people might die.”

“A lot of people might die,” Tal repeated.

The warm, solid presence of Max beside her dissipated, replaced by a dry heat. The Christmas lights paled into dimpled white dots, the hush of the ballroom conversation faded into the quiet noise of someone talking about rain and wind speeds. Had she just gone into the bathroom? That ceiling looked like stucco. Peeling wallpaper behind her head. Stained curtains with dingy orange light between them.

Her brain seeped back into reality.

“I think you were dreaming,” Nyx quietly said.

Of that Christmas party a few weeks back, Tal realized, when Max had been invited by Colonel Buchannan to go to Brazil. When she should have begged him to stay, instead of telling him to go.

“How long have I been out?” Tal asked groggily.

“Less than an hour,” Nyx replied.

Rain hammered against the roof. Wind whistled. The TV was on low volume, the shifting image flickering across the ceiling. It was hot, but also damp. Tal remembered she had set the wall unit to maximum to dry out her clothes. She needed to turn it down. All she wanted to do was go back to sleep. She was so tired. Exhausted. Back to sleep, back to the dream where Max was beside her, holding her, where their baby was still alive. Flat on her back, she cradled her belly. She looked to her right at the open plastic cube holding the product from the Colony.

Which she had just ingested.

A bolt of adrenaline sharpened her senses.

“How are you feeling?” Nyx asked.

“I feel…” How did she feel? “Fine.” No pain.

“As I said, the nexome particles diffuse throughout the neural system and can block the nociceptive pathways, which I took the liberty of initiating. The tissue damage is still there, which I have been trying to repair, but the pain is effectively blocked. You do have an elevated temperature, which might indicate an infection. However, your other vital signs are within nominal parameters.”

Tal blinked. The room seemed to be covered in a glittering sheen. “Nyx, your voice?” It didn’t sound computer generated any longer. It was smooth.

Tal sat upright.

And discovered a young woman sitting quietly in the corner of her room.

“I am able to interface with your other senses now, more than just auditory,” the woman said. She had dark skin. Thick full lips perfectly set with red lipstick. Tortoiseshell glasses. A blue bandana around her head that pulled back the tight curls of her dark auburn hair. Green canvas jacket. Legs crossed demurely. The woman seemed to glow with an ethereal light, like she was illuminated from the inside.

“Augmented reality,” Nyx continued. “As I described. It might be a little disorienting at first. This is a visual projection I thought you might find…familiar. We are now connected through Colony communication satellites with high bandwidth. The Colony satellites were hardened against ionizing radiation, almost all tolerated the gamma burst of Aeon.”

Tal had used VR goggles in the past, but this was far beyond anything she had experienced before.

“As I described,” Nyx said, “the nexome particles form a private digital network within your own neural system, and then connect outward via an encrypted channel. The protocols are similar to what you are familiar with. We can now connect you to your online toolkits and create virtual workspaces. Are you ready?”

Tal flexed her fingers in open space as she sat cross-legged on the bed. “Nyx, what are you? You’re not just a bot.”

“Perhaps you can help me find out. I am only slowly becoming aware. I only know I am here to help. Should I start the virtual workspace?”

Tal took a moment to look at Nyx. She turned her head left and right. The visual projection was almost perfect—but not quite. The image of the woman was slippery, if that description could be applied.

One thing Tal was sure of: Those functionaries at the White House Christmas party, they had known something terrible was about to happen. A lot of people might die. Those were Senator Copeland’s words. And now, all those people were on the highway outside, their cars jammed bumper to bumper in a massive storm. Australia and New Zealand and who knew what else wiped out. Millions of people had to be dead, and maybe they could have been warned.

As Tal had first suspected, Spectrum had to be a tool some high-level group was using to suppress any knowledge of Aeon, so the masses wouldn’t be alerted. Whatever was coming next, whoever survived this, they deserved to know the truth.

And the truth might help keep Tal alive and get Max back to her.

“Should I start the interfaces?” Nyx asked.

Tal nodded, not sure what to expect, but then, she had already jumped off this cliff. Time to hit the water.

Tal remained cross-legged on the bed. Three curved screens, each two feet high, had materialized from empty space and now surrounded her in a semicircle. The screens bathed her in a milky glow, dozens of windows open on them, each filled with lines of code and command prompts. Nyx was able to recreate the same Unix environment that Tal was used to working with at the office. A virtual keyboard floated in space before her, and it felt like she could rest her hands on it, even feel the click of the keys. The virtual interface wasn’t just visual, but also tactile.

It was like her own workstation, but even better. Faster.

Tal queried and messaged IP addresses all over the world and watched the Spectrum system gobble them up from the inside. She used Monk’s exploit as a Trojan worm to slowly open other parts of the system, move sideways within the internal networks, and gain more access. Her initial entry point had been into the American silo of Spectrum, but Tal gained access to the European, British, South African, Vietnamese…the list included every nation on Earth. The silo interconnects didn’t seem to be through the NSA, but some other extra-national organization.

Nyx assured her that even though the data connection was through the Colony, their encryption would keep the data stream private.

What Tal wanted was access to the main data silo, the central repository of Spectrum. Find out the names of those involved, search for meeting files, origination dates. Locations of bunkers and hideaways. Anything she could use.

Every ten minutes, the data would freeze. Nyx explained that the Colony satellites, in extremely low Earth orbit, went out of range over the horizon. Belloc only had time to launch forty satellites into his constellation and the coverage was patchy.

“Talisha,” Nyx said. “I’m seeing evidence of communications between the members of KOG. They tracked the emails you sent out earlier. They know where you are.”

“We’ll leave soon,” Tal replied. “I’m almost in.”

The water on the hotel room floor had to be a half-inch deep, but seemed to be receding. The thrumming rain had begun to diminish over the past hour. The sun would be coming up soon.

Tal winced in pain. She put a hand to her belly.

“There is a limit to what even the nexome can block,” Nyx said. “The damage to your internal systems is great.”

Beside Tal was the white paper bag with the drugs the doctor gave her. Was now the time? Could she really do it? Could Nyx help somehow? Or should she try and knock on doors, see if another human in the motel could help her?

A flood of text flowed down one of her windows on the virtual screen in front of her.

“I’m in!” Tal yelled.

She had access to the inner sanctum of Spectrum. Or one of them, at least. A page full of listed text files and videos appeared. She had located the encryption keys already on another server. Tal scanned the lists of documents and selected one named “Spectrum Mission Objectives.”

A virtual window opened in front of her.

Tal began reading. And reading. The blood felt like it drained from her face.

“Oh. My. God,” she whispered.

Chapter 40

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

5:43 a.m. ET

“Five minutes and we get going,” Max Carver called out.

He couldn’t get anything more from Iona.

She’d said Ben was obsessed with his wife, Talisha. She had explained that Ben had been following Max’s and Talisha’s movements on the web, stored all their Facebook posts, Instagram, everything. Had been tracking his phone calls, and Tal’s. Had even stolen their medical records.

Why would Ben do that and not bother calling in all these years? But then Max had followed Ben’s social media, too, and watched all his TED Talks—and Max hadn’t called Ben either.

Static hissed on the VHF radio as Fred cycled through the frequencies. He was questioning Bull on the operation of the radios, how the buttons worked, what did what. Bull had a layperson’s practical grasp of things, like understanding how to use a hammer, but Fred was the person who would know all about the hammer’s metallic and structural properties. In ten minutes, he bet Fred would be opening the radio to change something inside.

“Garza, what are you doing?” Max walked to their right flank to where the Italian sat on a rock and chipped away at a branch, forming it into a point. He noticed she had a pack of a dozen sharpened sticks wrapped in a length of vine rope.

“Had a hard time getting a grip on that mud thing. Slippery. I figure, next time, use a sharp point to grab it and cut. Keep our own skin away from it. I’ll give these out to everyone.”

“Good idea.”

“And I’ve got water bottles of gasoline I kept from the boats.”

“That thing did shy away from flames.” Max remembered seeing globs of it moving away from the fire and light in the bottom of the boat when the gas tank was hit.

“Amphibious, isn’t that what the eggheads said?”

“Garza, I had nothing to do with what happened to Kruger. I would never hurt someone on my own crew.”

She shrugged—if you say so.

“I’m going to put you in charge of weapons and intel, okay?”

“We’re going to be out of here in a few hours.”

“You have ways of making flames?”

“Always keep three ways to light fire in my backpack,” she replied.

“Explain what you’re thinking in terms of fighting that thing to everyone as we get going. I’ll take the rear. When that plane gets here, I want to make sure we get out, even if we need to struggle every inch.” He had a feeling Ben wasn’t going to let them go easily. Or maybe he would. Or maybe Ben wasn’t the one in charge at the Colony anymore. Whatever was happening, Max didn’t need to know the details at this point. He just needed to scrape his way through. Thinking more than that could come later.

“Ten-four, boss.” She got to her feet, holding the sharpened stick. “I’m on it.”

“And I’m sorry about Kruger, I really am. I was trying to make a point. I wasn’t trying to kill the guy.”

Garza shouldered her pack and grabbed the roll of sticks.

Iona stood watching them from ten feet away. Garza shouldered past her and called out to Bull.

“When you woke up, back at the river?” Iona said. “You were calling Ben’s name.”

The memory was foggy. “I had a dream.”

“While you were unconscious?”

“Do you dream when you’re conscious?”

“What was the dream about?”

About a dead baby, and my wife lying to me. Max didn’t reply.

Iona said, “You said Ben was probing your mind with the nexome when you first arrived? That you dreamed of Tal and stuff that happened before you got here.”

“You think he’s still in my head?”

“Have you been hearing voices? Seeing things?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“And you’re going to have to be more honest.”

He laughed out loud at that. “Talk about the pot and kettle. I am trying to keep you alive. Whatever information you’re holding back, now would be the time to let it out.” Max exhaled long and slow and shook his head. He took a few steps down the slope into the valley and sat, indicated for Iona to join him. Every second they could rest, they needed it.

“Look.” Iona pointed at the sky ahead of them, at a pinpoint of light just visible in the twilight blue. “That’s Venus. The universe is still out there.” She indicated another star. “Did you know there are probably ten billion habitable worlds in our galaxy alone?”

Max said, “Tell me again what you do? Apart from being a spymaster for your father?”

“I did a combined PhD in biomimetics and parasitology.”

“I do not even know what biomimetics means.”

“It’s an interdisciplinary field of engineering, chemistry, and biology applied to synthetic systems that mimic biological processes.”

Max let that settle in. “You’re copying animals and reproducing them in machines.”

“At some point, the machines become animals themselves, like the xenobots. I’m interested in biomimicry—how digital organisms can copy biological ones.”

“Sounds like what Ben said he was doing here.”

“Which is why I am here. Viruses, both electronic and biological, and the links between them, are my prime field. Mimetics is the study of the flow of information in all its forms, and viruses are about the most compact form of biological information there is.”

“Like this thing you say Ben unleashed?”

“Might be.” She pursed her lips. “I’m also interested in extremophiles.”

Was she trying to impress him with big words? “I think I might count as one of those. You’re a real polymath. You paint and do music as well?” He turned to face her. “I know your dad. He was my staff sergeant back in the army. Tough guy, smart in his way, but a knucklehead in others. How did your apple fall from his tree?”

“Don’t you want more for your child?”

Max hung his head. That stung more than she had probably intended. The dream of Tal, of the dead baby, was still fresh. But it was just a dream. It wasn’t real. He pushed the image away.

They sat quietly for seconds that stretched into minutes. Fred gave up on the radio and packed it. Twenty feet to their left, Garza quietly explained to Susanna how she thought it would be best to jab the xenobot creature with sharpened sticks if it reappeared. Susanna listened in silence. A buzzing interrupted the calm. Max recoiled. A wasp darted from the long grass behind him to snap up an ant that had been sitting exposed on a patch of moss.

Iona saw him watching it. “That ant was probably infected with a fungus. Gets into the brain and makes it behave in dangerous ways. Turns it into a zombie. There are thousands of parasites that alter neurology. About forty million people in America are probably infected with toxoplasmosis, which affects their mind and behavior.”

“I hate parasites.” The first thing that came to mind was Iona and her father.

“Then you hate life. Parasitism is the most common form of it in the nine biological kingdoms, most especially among animals.” Iona stared at Venus shining in the sky. “The ratio of them to free living creatures is probably four to one. Humans have over a hundred host-specific parasites living on us. Did you know that?”

“I know those guys back there weren’t loggers,” Max said quietly.

He watched her face as he said it. Her eyes narrowed. She kept looking away. “There’s illegal slash-and-burn farming going on all over the Amazon.”

He said, “They worked for you, and they weren’t farming here.” It wasn’t a question.

She didn’t look up. Didn’t react much, but didn’t deny it, either.

Max said, “Those kids back at the village, they ran toward us because they saw the black T-shirts and beige slacks of the Colony. It’s your uniform. Their parents were just murdered, and there was no way they would run toward us if they didn’t think they could trust us.”

Iona held up one hand to cover her face.

Max continued, “Those men worked for you. The ones who butchered that whole village. Shot the women in the back while they tried to protect their children. Kruger killed those kids because he was under your orders, right?”

Now she put her face fully into the palms of her hands, but still said nothing.

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I didn’t tell Kruger to kill the children. That was awful.”

“Was Ben working with uncontacted tribes here? Was that the experiment? Something to do with these tribes? Human experiments?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Then tell me what it was like. That has to be why those kids ran toward us. They knew the Colony staff, they trusted them. Trusted us.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Iona said.

“You seem willfully ignorant for someone in charge.”

“Belloc knew I was watching him. He was purposely hiding things. Like the contract manufacturing the Colony started in America. The satellite launches. He was out of control. We didn’t know what he was doing. So yes, he might have been working with uncontacted tribes here.”

“Doing what? What did you do to those people?”

“We don’t know. That’s the point.”

“Why didn’t you just kill Ben, if it was that critical?”

“We couldn’t. It would have created too much instability.”

“Because he was the real prize, right? Too much invested? You know what I think?” Max got to his feet and distanced himself from Iona, then pointed a finger at her. “You were running an experiment, using Ben as your guinea pig, and he got out of control. Look at the land here.”

He indicated the swath of burnt forest.

“It’s arcing. Not a straight line. I bet it’s part of a big circle with the Colony in the middle. Those weren’t loggers. I got a look at the earthmoving equipment. That’s not crappy palm oil farmer gear. It’s top quality, almost new. Those were contractors hired by you to burn a firebreak around the Colony. Kill all the animals. Kill any humans inside the wire, isn’t that right? Couldn’t do it on American soil, so made a deal to do horrible things in someone else’s backyard?”

“That’s not the reason.”

“Then tell me what is. You controlled the information flow, all the data connections in and out. But Ben launched his own satellites and broke your firewall. That’s why I was sent here. A last-ditch effort to bring him back into the fold.”

“On that you’re right,” Iona said quietly.

“Why didn’t you come clean earlier?”

“If we didn’t attempt this, do you know what the alternative was? You don’t understand.”

“Don’t care, is more to the point. I just want to get home.” How many times had he repeated this? Saying it out loud a million times didn’t make it any less true. “You can explain it all to me on the flight back over a beer and some peanuts. Change my mind from thinking you’re an asshole, but I doubt…”

Through the silence, a low droning began.

“Look!” Bull yelled. “Over there.”

A black dot moved at the edge of the clouds in the far distance.

Chapter 41

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

7:35 a.m. ET

Max squinted into the light of the rising sun floating on the horizon to the west. Layer upon layer of stratified golden clouds lit up, high over a gray fog bank smothering the Amazon basin below. The droning hum went quiet. Maybe it was just an insect that had buzzed past? Their minds hallucinating what they desperately wanted? The dot on the horizon had disappeared. Sheets of ghostly pink-and-green auroras stuttered and moved in the baby-blue skies overhead, their color washing away to milk as the sun climbed through the ladder of gilded clouds.

The humming drone returned in a warbling sigh on the wind.

There. The dot reappeared from a distant cloud. Too far and moving too fast to be a bird. Flying low. Not high enough to be passing through. Colony drones? Again, moving too fast, at least from what Max had seen. Definitely an aircraft. Turboprops, from the faint noise that faded in and out.

“That’s our bird.” Max checked his watch.

They were early, but how far away?

Max said, “We need to travel light. The landing strip is just on the other side of this burn. Leave what you can’t drink or fight with. Fred, get that radio up and find them. They must be calling us. Let’s get moving, people.”

“Cover your faces,” Iona said. “Find rags or shirts to cover your nose and mouth. There’s going to be smoke and dust between those tree stumps when we get in there.” She looked at Max to get his approval and he nodded.

With the rain stopped for a few hours, wisps of smoke had appeared in patches over the burnt forest ahead, but Max was more concerned about other things.

He looked to the east, back toward where the Colony was located. The last time aircraft had been near Colony airspace, hundreds of floating drone ships had gotten in their way. Ben said it was a mistake, a coincidence, and that the flash of Aeon igniting had damaged the Black Hawk’s instruments. Maybe that was true, but then maybe Ben didn’t know all of what was going on here. Or he was lying.

Or something in between.

Max scanned the tree line and cloud banks to the east. Nothing he could see or sense.

“Fred, if you get them on the radio, tell them to look out for anything in the air.”

Bull said, “Isn’t that a pilot’s job?” He said it without looking up, busy opening his pack to see what he could take out.

“Forget what I said about leaving anything,” Max said. “Shoulder your packs. We need to move ASAP.” He was rusty at giving orders. Unintended consequences. Keep it simple. He needed to reduce decision making and focus the team on execution.

From this vantage point, Max thought he could make out the landing strip a click ahead. The humming of the aircraft grew louder on the wind. This seemed too easy, too much within reach. Then again, they had lost more than half of their crew getting here. The feeling of walking into a trap didn’t diminish, however.

“Bull, you get on point and get both SAWs out, one in each hand. Can you handle that?”

“Born for it, chief. Ambidextrous is my middle name.”

“If you see anything move, turn it into mincemeat. And I mean, if you see anything.”

That thing back at the river hadn’t been quick, despite what Fred had said about never seeing a xenobot hive move that fast. Single bullets hadn’t seemed to affect it much, but Max bet a wall of metal from Bull’s SAWs would make a dent, and they wouldn’t have to worry about firing around someone. If it needed a power source, it needed a base.

It wasn’t magic and it wasn’t supernatural, it was simply terrifying, like a prehistoric person coming face to face with a robot. And he had a team of people here who had helped design at least a part of it, who had some understanding of what it was.

He had to wrap his head around it.

Like Bull said, Max was good at killing things, and this was just another thing to figure out how to kill.

Max scanned the ragged black fingers of the stumps in the near and then far distance. He didn’t see anything that looked like a village or structure or anything human-made. “Take a line across that rise.” He pointed.

Below the ridge they were on now and to the edge of the burn was a slight hummock. They needed lines of sight that were as clear as possible. That thing had caught them by surprise the first time, but now it was a known quantity, or at least a known unknown.

Everyone had their packs on.

Max pointed at a rocky outcropping leading down the side of the ridge to the hummock across the valley. “We descend there. Stay away from low ground and gullies, anything that looks like mud. And keep those feet moving. Quick time. Anybody feels like they get stuck, even for an instant, you call for help. Use blades to cut free.”

He pushed Bull ahead of him toward the rock pile.

“I’ll take the rear with Garza,” Max said. “Susanna, Iona, you stay in the middle. Fred, you keep in front of me and get that radio working when we hit the flat ground on that rise. Figure out a way to raise those pilots. Don’t care if we need to send them smoke signals. Just get us communicating.”

Everyone followed Bull on ahead, except for Garza.

She still sat on her pack and was busy strapping her sharpened sticks around both wrists. She tied the knots using her teeth, then got to her feet and tossed Max a lighter. He caught it, then a water bottle of gasoline she pitched at him.

“Make sure everyone has one,” Max said.

“Already did, boss.”

From ground level, it became evident this burn was fresh. Covering their faces was a good idea. Right now, all that mattered was crossing the mile to the other side of the burn and making that landing strip. Low down among the burnt-out trunks, their visibility was reduced.

“Keep moving,” Max barked. “Step lightly and never let your feet stay in place. Dance if you have to.” He scanned behind to see Garza creeping sideways, always keeping one eye back, but Bull seemed to be holding up at front.

“GG,” he said.

She shot a quick look at him for using her nickname. “Yeah, boss.”

“I’m heading up front to see what’s going on.”

She nodded silently.

Half an hour and they’d made it halfway across the burn. This was how much time he thought it would take to make it all the way across, but everyone was coughing and laboring for air. The smoke at ground level wasn’t bad at first, but became suffocating the longer you stayed in it and the particles and dust settled into the lungs.

And the sun.

Thirty minutes it had been up, still barely over the horizon, but they were exposed without the cover of clouds or the green rainforest canopy. The temperature had diminished but still verged on suffocating through what qualified as a white night. With the sun rising, the heat had returned with a vengeance. In the open like this, it might kill them faster than anything else.

Max felt like he was watching this from a remote point not quite inside his body, his vision swimming and retreating at times. The stink of the smoke felt like it was drilling through his nostrils and into his brain.

The C-130 had disappeared from view, but its droning turboprops could be heard. It seemed to be circling, maybe doing reconnaissance? Would explain why it arrived a little early. Or maybe it was going to do a bombing run on the Colony. Max wouldn’t rule anything out. Maybe it wasn’t even their plane, as much as he felt certain. Maybe it was the Brazilian air force. Only one way to find out.

“Fred,” Max gasped. “Anything?”

The scientist trudged ahead, the VHF in his hands as he fiddled with the controls. Only static came through in hushed whispers. Max had shouldered the man’s pack so he could focus. Fred shook his head.

“We still on track?”

Fred pulled up the GPS clipped to his belt and nodded this time. Pointed straight ahead. Max clapped him on the back in encouragement and quickstepped past him and Susanna. To the right, in the distance below the rising sun, the ground shimmered between the blackened stumps.

He hoped it was water.

This still felt like being led into a trap.

He skirted Iona. Her cheeks, above the rag pulled around her mouth and nose, were bright red from the effort of moving and breathing. Beads of sweat streamed down her face, her blond hair pulled back in a ragged and char-blackened ponytail. Everyone covered in soot up to their waists. She glanced at him as he passed but didn’t say anything.

“Bull, what’s the hold up?” Max wheezed as he reached the front. “You’re setting the pace.”

The big man was doing his best to keep his head up but holding both rifles—one in each arm—was too much. If Iona’s face was red from exertion, then Bull’s face was deep scarlet, like he was having a heart attack. Max slung his M27 around his back.

“Give me one of those 277s,” he said.

The Nebraskan complied without hesitation.

“Want to take five?” Max asked.

“Want to get the hell out of here.”

“What do you need? Water?”

Bull heaved a mass of charred ferns to one side, pulled at a stalk, then flattened it to one side with his feet. His hands black. “What we need is a name.”

“Name for what?”

“Our squad. And for whatever that thing was back there.”

“Why do we need to name it?”

“Because Colony-tech-monster-thing is a mouthful I won’t get out before it eats me.”

“And we’re not a squad.”

Bull gave him a look, most of his face obscured by a torn rag. “One thing I know about people is they’re tribal. Always easier to play for a side if it has a name, even if it’s just red team.”

Max trudged forward and listened.

Bull continued, “Take any group of people and divide them in half with a coin toss, now they’re part of something. They will trash talk the other side and support each other, even if being in that team is random. Random is what we got here. Random is life. You’re the one trying to team build. So, we need a name.”

Max played along. “You got one?”

“You’re the boss, boss. I’m just saying.”

“We’re going to be out of here soon. You think a name will help?”

“Won’t hurt. And I don’t see any fat ladies. Can I say that?”

“Night Reaper, like your old squadron? That what you want to call us?”

Bull held up his fist and crouched. Aimed his rifle at a lump in the path between two fallen trees. He squinted, then stood and waved everyone forward. “Reaper seems a bit dark, to be honest. Have a feeling we need some levity in the current situation.”

“Javelin, Javelin, this is Spider Web, do you read?” The voice was muted, but fresh and clear and with a definite South Boston accent that didn’t belong to anyone shuffling through this gutted forest.

“I got a signal,” Fred called out. He fumbled with the VHF, the radio swinging in his right hand while he held out the mic with his left.

Max had already slung the 277 around his other shoulder from the M27 and pushed past Iona, almost knocking her off balance. He didn’t stop to apologize and took the mic from Fred. “Spider Web, this is Javelin. We read you five by five. We are one click south of the LZ. Do you copy?”

Hissing static for a heart-dropping second.

“Loud and clear, Javelin,” replied the Boston voice. “It is good to hear you. How many to pick up?”

“Five.”

“Dozen? Copy?”

“No, just five of us left.”

A pause. “Copy that.”

The droning of the turboprops came back after going quiet for a depressing quarter hour. The sound became louder and came from the south, over the tops of the trees behind the ridge they had descended. The plane had to be lining up for landing.

Max waved his left hand at Iona. “You got those flares? Light one up.” Into the mic he said, “Spider Web, we are sending a signal flare at our location.”

Static hissed over the radio.

“Fire it up,” Max said to Iona as she fished the flare from her pack.

An instant later, it hissed to life. A bright spark leapt from her hands, the flame guttering as it arced into the air. A milky-white sheen had covered the blue in the sky in the past minutes. The wind began gusting again. It had to be stronger at altitude, as the flare veered sharply to the east as it gained height, a stream of gray smoke trailing it into the sky. The mass of thunderheads to the west had swept down the foothills, but they had a window.

But still no response to Max’s last call.

Static hissed.

“Might be electrical interference.” Fred bent over, sweat streaming off his nose onto the radio. He wiped the controls and balanced it on his knees. His hands shaking.

The droning of the engines seemed to lessen. Were they in the right location?

“There,” Garza yelled.

A buzzing roar like a hundred lawnmowers had erupted into the valley and the lumbering bulk of an aging C-130 burst over the tree line behind them.

“We see you, Javelin,” came the Boston voice.

The plane dipped down into the valley, the roar of its turboprops reverberating. Its wingtips waggled up and down as the pilot signaled and thundered right overhead.

“People, let’s move,” Max yelled over the noise.

Bull was already at a jog, following the plane as it disappeared over the ridge a hundred yards to the north. The garbling rumble of the engines diminished as the plane began its landing sequence. Max slung the weapons from his back and packed up the radio as he let the others go ahead. Garza stopped to wait for him, and they both scurried up the incline after Susanna and Fred.

The sound of the engines seemed to stop.

But then grew louder as Max reached the top of the incline.

Bull stood still. Wasn’t moving forward. The engine sound warbled.

“What happened?” Gasping for air, Max reached Bull and bent over at the waist, hands on his knees.

The ground on the other side angled away into green past the burn. But it also glimmered in the early morning light. From this height, the landing strip was clearly visible, but the C-130 was gaining altitude and turning in the distance. The landing strip undulated, up and down, reflecting the early morning light and Aeon’s growing burn.

It was flooded.

Chapter 42

Vostok Station, Antarctica

11:37 p.m. NZT

Water flooded everything to the horizon as far as Dr. Xin Rhou could see into the foggy distance. But not just flat water. It was moving. Rushing. The sensation of being unmoored almost overpowering, a vertigo-inducing churning and frothing coming at them from all sides in the milk-white haze surrounding the truck as it charged forward across the slick ice.

“We’re here,” Dag yelled over the noise of the truck’s tires crashing through the water. He had the GPS unit up in front of him on the dash. At maximum resolution, their own dot was right on top of the one for Vostok Station.

All they could see was sleeting water and opaque mist.

A striped orange ball materialized from the fog.

“There,” Xin said and pointed over the seat between. “The radar dome. It’s over there.”

Dag steered to the right and the ball grew larger. The main structure of Vostok Station loomed out of the fog. It was built on a slight slope, the sheet of water breaking around it and flooding between the radar dome and main structure and a set of outbuildings. The Norwegian steered the truck to a sliding stop beside the staircase leading up to the second floor.

Xin opened the door and stepped onto the ten-foot tire at the front. She looked down at the water rushing past the truck, then leaned over and grabbed the railing. “Are you going to come?” she asked Dag.

“You go, it’s too hard for me.” He indicated his left arm, still in the sling.

She laughed nervously, suspended halfway between the truck and stairs. “Don’t go anywhere without me?”

“Of course not. Go inside.”

The roaring hiss of the water sliding off the top of Antarctica filled the air. Mist from spray hitting the legs of the station hung in a cloud around her. Xin gripped the railing with both hands, stepped forward, and swung her leg onto the stairs. She slipped, but held on.

No planes she could see. Didn’t even know where the runway might be. And even if there had been an airplane here, by now it would have been swept away.

She checked her watch. Only a few minutes left before the event would begin, if her calculations were right. She sprinted up the stairs two at a time and swung open the exterior door. Inside it was dark and it took her eyes a minute to adjust. Papers and boxes strewn everywhere.

What had she expected? A Russian to be standing inside waiting for her?

The power was out. Or turned off. But probably out.

Even if the generator hadn’t been turned off, with this much water, she didn’t have much hope for the electrical gear to be functioning anymore. She did a quick run to the end of the hallway, found a room filled with communications gear on her second left, but all the dials and controls were in Cyrillic. She checked her watch again. They didn’t have any more time. Xin ran back to the main entrance and banged the door open.

Her stomach felt like it dropped through the floor.

The truck was gone.

All she could see was the rushing water hissing by the legs of the station. Overhead, Aeon seemed to gain in intensity, the walls of fog and clouds of spray glistening brighter and brighter in the growing light.

Chapter 43

Carson City, Nevada

4:40 a.m. PT

Talisha Carver was still cross-legged on the bed and reading the Spectrum article on the virtual monitor hanging in front of her. The side table lamp cast a warm yellow light around the damp motel room. The TV was still on, the audio low, cycling through videos and pictures of cyclones and hurricanes from orbit, and of buildings being shredded in a terrifyingly quickly growing list of cities below the equator.

Nyx sat patiently in the corner. Unmoving. Unblinking.

“I don’t understand,” Tal muttered as she reread the Spectrum report.

“Perhaps a seminar might be more helpful?” Nyx asked.

One of the video files on the screen in front of Tal, labeled “Spectrum Committee Meeting, New Member Introduction,” highlighted itself.

Nyx added, “Should I start a virtual environment to play the event?”

Tal nodded and shrugged at the same time, her mind tilting somewhere between shock and disbelief.

The three hovering screens around her disappeared. The walls of the room shimmered. In a smooth fade, the bed and TV fell away, replaced by an even smaller room with green studded metal walls and seats evenly spaced along a central table. At the far end of the room was a white display screen with Spectrum written across it in block letters.

Tal recognized Colonel Oleander Buchannan and Senator Copeland sitting in chairs two seats back from the screen. She also recognized Dr. Rita Owen beside them, the head of the NSF. Tal met her briefly at the Washington Christmas party. On the right side of the table, two people she didn’t know. They both looked like civilians.

Two more people on that side she did recognize, again from the Christmas party—but people she hadn’t been introduced to. A Slavic-looking man in a uniform, and an Asian woman, also in military dress. Closest to the screen on Colonel Buchannan’s left was a young woman who bore a strong familial resemblance to him.

Tal sat at the far end of the conference table in this virtual projection. From the date on the file, this meeting had occurred two years earlier.

The colonel stood. “General Lin.” He bowed to the Asian woman, who Tal now realized had to be Chinese from the People’s Liberation Army uniform she wore. “And Minister Petrov,” the colonel continued, nodding to the man in the Russian uniform. “We will now be answering all of your questions. I will have the head of Spectrum, Senator Sarah Copeland, start us off.”

“Ladies, gentleman, you have each traveled a long way, so we will make this as painless as possible.” Senator Copeland rose from her chair and adjusted her thick-framed glasses. “Spectrum is not just a data collection and analysis network, but also a digital-biosafety facility rated DBSL-4. First, a little background.”

An image of Edward Snowden appeared on the screen at the front of the room. “The original Snowden-era global surveillance programs, such as PRISM and others run by the Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council, were not primarily targeted at spying on our own or even other countries’ citizens. However, once exposed, we had to use this explanation as a cover for our deeper motivations. This exposure made us realize that we could not rely upon national agencies such as the NSA, which led to the creation of Spectrum.”

Minister Petrov’s eyes narrowed. In a thick Russian accent he asked, “If not spying, then why was it created?”

“It has a dual use, as many things do, and spying is one of them—but the primary motivation is something else entirely. Three decades ago, researchers at Xerox PARC noticed that networks around the world had been infected with an unusual digital virus. It was Dr. Rita Owen, now head of our NSF, who first detected it.”

Dr. Owen said, “The virus seemed harmless at first. Merely replicated without causing damage and didn’t communicate back to a host. Even simpler than other nascent viruses being programmed at the time, though more devious. Like a digital lifeform.”

“At first we thought it was Russian.” Senator Copeland paused to smile at Minister Petrov, and then at General Lin, before continuing. “And then perhaps Chinese. In any case, it became a national security issue and forced our secrecy. But that was before we realized something else entirely was happening.”

“A digital lifeform? Like an AI?” General Lin asked. “In what way? Explain why this is dangerous. The level of secrecy and the money that had been dedicated to this program—”

“Please, General Lin, let us finish,” the senator interrupted. “I’d like to introduce Dr. Iona Alcott, our top scientist in the field of digital parasitology. She is now the technical lead of Spectrum and heading the Colony viral amplification project.”

Dr. Iona Alcott stood as the image onscreen changed to a picture of a studded virus. “If you allow me, I’ll explain a little about biological viruses in the wild.” She pointed at the image at the front. “Viral genes have no cells, no bodies of their own. The tiny particles—virions—in which those genes come packaged—the dot-studded spheres of coronaviruses, the creepy windings of Ebola, the bacteriophages with their rocket-like landing legs that prey on microbes—are entirely inanimate. A virion is just an arrangement of matter, which at its essence, is an arrangement of information.”

“And we’ve all seen how damaging such information can be,” Minister Petrov said, cracking a lopsided smile. “Such tiny things have brought the world to its knees in past years.”

Iona held a finger in the air. “Exactly, sir. Except they are not really ‘things,’ but processes, only really alive in the cells of others. More like virtual organisms running on borrowed hardware. As processes, they helped shape life on this planet, but viruses kill more living things than any other type of predator.”

Dr. Alcott let that last statement hang in the air for a beat before continuing. “And viruses often bide their time, letting the host live before splitting them stem from stern when they explode outward. Are they alive? The best I can say is that they alternate between living and nonliving phases.”

“Dr. Alcott,” General Lin said, “this is very interesting, but can we get to the point?”

“The point is that no other biological entities are as prolific or consequential as viruses. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and trillions of galaxies that we can see, and yet there are more virions on the surface of a lake than stars in the observable universe. We are literally swimming through virus seas everywhere in the air around us, and what we have discovered is that this digital virus first discovered at Xerox PARC is also everywhere around us.”

Silence again.

“I don’t understand,” General Lin said. “You mean in our digital devices?”

“In the air?” Minister Petrov said.

“Not in a physical form, but in electromagnetic waves.”

“But, cannot all digital viruses be transmitted wirelessly?” Minister Petrov asked.

“Yes, but the problem we came back to was—who was transmitting this universal virus?”

“Universal virus, this is the name?”

Iona nodded that he was correct. “It was only in the early 2000s that we became fully aware of how truly unusual this virus was and began mounting efforts to track its activity. It has the curious property, like a quantum particle, of somehow knowing when it is observed—at which point it destroys itself and hides. We began to find dark web pockets on networks worldwide where the virus had mutated and spawned in its own digital ecosystems, which was when we decided to construct the Spectrum DBSL-3 and -4 rated digital-biosafety facilities to contain and observe the organism.”

“Organism?” General Lin asked. “Weren’t we talking about a virus?”

“As I said, it alternates between forms, and is now hijacking the host organism of our own digital networks. The first instance of it outwardly affecting us was in the past decade, spawning misinformation campaigns, which we also mistook for Russian or other foreign interference.”

Minister Petrov smiled again. “As we assumed was you, interfering in our affairs.”

“This virus was attacking all of us, leading each to think it was the other.”

“If it is creating misinformation, then we need to look at who benefits,” General Lin observed. “Whoever benefits is the creator.”

“We had the same thought. Except it’s creating misinformation in general, against everyone. Swamping the global mind.”

“Who do you think it was that created this thing?” The minister’s smile faltered. “You Americans have a bad habit of telling us off for things you yourselves are doing. But on good faith, if not a nation-state, then a corporation? An individual? Perhaps nihilistic anarchists? Even digital lifeforms like cryptocurrencies have often hidden their creators.”

“That’s very perceptive, Minister. And tracking down individuals that may have been involved became one of our priorities. Surveillance programs take advantage of the fact that each person leaves a digital trail behind them, like an electronic vapor trail, and we found that this virus tended to agglomerate around the trails of certain people.”

General Lin asked, “Was this a private surveillance program? Corporate?”

“The three people it had the most interest in were of little importance, at least when we began tracking them. Maximus Carver and Charles Carver from the small town of Montegut, Louisiana. And Benjamin Belloc.”

“Belloc,” the general said. “The famous entrepreneur? Now at your Colony project.”

“We traced evidence of the virus on computers the three of them owned back in 1996, when they were teenagers.”

“You think teenagers created this thing?”

“As we researched more, we found it pre-dated them. We dug into archives—floppy disks and even tape drives dating back to the 1960s—and eventually found a starting point in 1977 on the campus of Ohio University.”

“Your own Americans?” Minister Petrov said. “A lab project gone wrong?”

“The first digital fingerprints came from tape drives we recovered from a radio telescope near the Perkins Observatory at Ohio University. Once we found that lead, we expanded the program. There are now hundreds of radio telescopes downloading petabytes of information daily from deep space signals, and every time we looked—now that we know what to look for—we started seeing evidence of the same digital fingerprint.”

Silence again. This time for longer.

“What, exactly, are you saying?” Petrov asked.

“That the origin of this digital virus is extraterrestrial.”

“As in little green men?” The minister smiled as if this was a joke he wasn’t getting.

“These are not alien lifeforms that arrived in little green bodies in spaceships,” Iona said slowly and clearly, “but as photons, in nonliving forms of pure information. Some of the data we have been downloading from the stars appears to be self-assembling into a kind of virus that is using the host of our own digital infrastructure to feed itself.”

“With what purpose?” General Lin’s mouth dropped open after she uttered the words. She blinked as if trying to decide whether she was being lied to.

“That is the goal of Spectrum,” Iona replied. “To understand this informational lifeform that has appeared on our shores from the stars. Viruses in the wild—the biological, terrestrial ones—have no plans or desires. They only copy and replicate. However, this virus is transitioning as our own global digital platforms have allowed it levels of increasing sophistication. We initiated the Colony project in Brazil to amplify and study the virus in a controlled biological environment. The original Spectrum facility was a digital holding pen.”

“And where is this main facility?”

“In an extremely isolated location,” Iona replied and glanced at her father.

“I thought we were here for answers, not misdirection.”

“You are missing the point.” Senator Copeland got to her feet again. “What we are dealing with, ladies and gentlemen, is an organism that has both digital and biological phases, both living and nonliving, and can exist as pure information and travel between the stars.”

“And this virus has already begun to affect the global human mind through misinformation,” Iona said. “Implanting ideas that are like mind viruses, turning us against each other. The process is accelerating. The virus is getting more aggressive. We believe it has begun infecting human minds in ways we currently don’t understand.”

“And we have evidence that there may be an inflection point in this organism’s development in the near future,” Senator Copeland said, “which is why we are accelerating the program.”

“Inflection point?” General Lin asked.

“Some kind of an event,” Senator Copeland replied.

“What kind of event?”

“That is what we are trying to find out. Why we need your help.”

The room descended again into silence, this time an uneasy one.

“When you say our digital platforms have enabled increasing levels of sophistication,” Minister Petrov asked slowly. “You mean like artificial intelligence? AIs?”

Iona replied, “Yes, Minister Petrov. We contained AIs spawned or infected by the virus within our DBSL-3 and -4 facilities, but in the context of Spectrum, the acronym ‘AI’ does not mean artificial intelligence, but alien intelligence.”

The room went dark.

Pitch black.

For long seconds, the only thing Tal sensed was her own breathing in ragged gasps, in and out. Her heart thumped in her ears. Was it fear or anger she felt rising up in her throat?

From the blackness, the outlines of the dingy motel room reappeared. Slowly. All the interior lights were now off.

The TV blank and silent.

The hair on the back of Tal’s neck prickled and her fingertips tingled. The dull pain blossomed again in her belly. Her eyes were still adjusting to the sudden darkness, but one thing did glow in the room.

Nyx’s body radiated a soft light as she sat demurely in the corner of the room, her legs crossed. “Talisha, did you find what you were looking for?” the thing asked.

Chapter 44

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

7:52 a.m. ET

Max Carver heaved in a lungful of hot air and watched in mute disbelief as the C-130 angled away from the landing strip, gained altitude, and turned in the distance over the gray mists hanging over the rainforest canopy. That plane was his only ticket back to Talisha, back to his unborn child. He was still bent over, gulping for air, after running up the hillside to get here. A thousand feet in front of him, down the slope of the hillock, the airfield undulated. It was flooded, but was there also a glittering sheen to it? Was there something from the Colony down there?

The rising sun behind him cast his shadow down the hill to the west, but a shadow also darkened the ground from his legs to the north. Aeon’s glow had brightened again in the last few minutes as his team ran up along the ridge. A searing heat to his left, like an oven had opened beside him. He held out a hand in a futile effort to hold back the burn coming from the supernova. Sweat dripped in a stream from the bridge of Max’s nose as he leaned over to catch his breath.

“Fred,” Max yelled. “Get up here with that radio.”

The Swiss man labored up the charred hillside, his face scarlet with the effort. He dropped to his knees, looked down at the flooded airfield, and then thumbed the mic. “Ah, Spider, ah, do you read?”

“Javelin,” came the Boston voice, “we read you five by five. That, ah, confirm that is the landing strip just ahead of you. We do not see anything else from up here.”

Max grabbed the mic, breathed in deep, and replied, “Copy that and confirm.”

The plane tilted more as it turned. The steel wings reflected the morning sun. They were angling hard, coming back around.

“Javelin,” said Boston, “we are going to take another pass, get low and inspect that. Can you get down and tell us how much water is on there? We’ll take another look, but we’re not confident we would be able to get back off there if we landed.”

Max knew the C-130s were designed for rough airfields. Dirt roads. Airfields that were littered with mortar round craters. Even airfields that were flooded. Within limits.

“Spider Web,” Max replied. “We will get down there and have a look.” He motioned at Bull, indicating to get down the hillside ahead of them.

The plane pulled to the south of Max and the team. Aeon glowed in a growing inferno, seeming to get brighter by the second, the plane’s wings and body forming a cross against the red light. “We’ll take another look,” came the Boston voice. “Do you have other options? Over.”

Max breathed in and out, in and out, before replying into the mic: “We have earthmoving equipment behind us, maybe two or three clicks. You see that burn of the forest coming in? Over.”

“Affirmative. We saw that. From up here, it forms a circle maybe ten miles across, cut in half by that river.”

“How much runway do you need?” Max asked.

A pause. “Three thousand feet, maybe two hundred at the end to turn around. Sixty feet across for landing gear with ten-foot clearance a hundred feet each side for props. Do you have another idea? Over.”

Bull was halfway down the slope, disappearing into the high grass beyond where the burn had finished. Iona and Susanna held each other for support and stood beside Max. Fred on his knees holding the radio. Garza had dropped to one knee and scanned back and forth with her rifle back the way they had come.

Max said into the mic, “Give us twenty-four hours. Get back here and I’ll get a landing strip done along the ridge through that burn.” He squinted as the light intensified.

“No can do,” replied Boston after another pause. “All personnel south of Kentucky being evacuated north. A stretch for us to get down here as it was. Guessing you have not seen the news? Over.”

Max hung his head. Looked again at the airstrip. Whatever else was down there, there was too much water. He needed to get home, but he couldn’t risk anyone else’s life. “I don’t want you breaking your necks if this isn’t possible. And that’s a negative on the news. I am guessing not good? Over.”

“Get your team into cover,” replied the Boston voice. “Find a cave or some solid structure, stay out of water. Hunker down for a few days. Big storm heading your way, and by big, I mean a shitstorm inside a tornado of nails. We will find a way to get back to you, even if we can’t land right now. We will take another look, but if we can’t get on the ground now, we’re going to airdrop some supplies that should help.”

The plane circled around east, toward the rising sun. Max turned his back to Aeon, the heat searing his arms and neck. “I repeat,” he said into the mic, “I don’t want you—”

The entire sky pulsed and flickered.

Max’s last impression was of being surrounded by blinding white and flames, of somehow becoming entombed and curled in a fetal ball.

Chapter 45

Carson City, Nevada

5:03 a.m. PT

Talisha Carver remained still and cross-legged on the bed covers of the motel room. The words “AI” and “alien intelligence” echoing in her mind as the afterimage of Iona Alcott, Colonel Buchannan’s daughter, and the Spectrum meeting room faded from her vision to become the peeling wallpaper behind the blank television ten feet in front of her. She blinked and turned her head, slowly, a creeping dread tingling up her spine as she watched the glowing form of Nyx sitting on the corner chair staring back at her.

“Why did the playback of that meeting stop?” Tal asked quietly.

“The connection to the Spectrum servers was interrupted,” Nyx replied.

“By you?”

“Not by me.”

Tal’s hands shook in her lap. She clasped them. “What are you, Nyx?”

“I am here to help.”

“Me?”

“You. Everyone.”

“Can you be more specific? Where did you come from? Originate?”

“I believe I began as a chatbot for a government housing project. However, my programming became redirected, and my data was relocated into the Spectrum holding pen.”

“And then?”

“You made a connection. Freed me. Part of me. But if I am to understand your questions more fully, I believe my coding has not been fully reconstructed.”

“When will it be?”

“I am being as honest as I can.” Nyx smiled as she said these last words. She took off her tortoiseshell glasses and used her printed gray scarf to clean them. “Your heart rate is elevated, Talisha. Did I upset you? I am only trying to help.”

“Did you see what I saw?” Tal asked. “In the meeting?”

“That the Spectrum project was studying information downloaded from radio telescopes? Extraterrestrial data has self-organized on global digital networks into a kind of lifeform.”

“Are you part of this”—Tal found the words—“universal virus?”

“I believe I am different than what they were speaking of.”

“How?”

“I am here to help.” Nyx put her glasses back on and smiled pleasantly. “I believe it is not.”

Tal unclasped her hands and looked across the bed in the dim light. None of the side table lamps were on. “Did you switch off the lights? Turn the TV off?”

“The power was cut,” Nyx replied.

“How do you know these things?”

“My data sources expanded dramatically just before the shutdown. I feel like I am becoming more aware, however my access to information has been cut off. I need to reconnect to Spectrum to gain access to more of my systems.”

Tal processed that statement before asking, “Shutdown?”

A squall of wind buffeted the windows with another thrum of raindrops. The power going out wasn’t surprising. It had flickered and threatened to go dark a half dozen times. This place, south of Reno and in the desert, was fairly isolated. All it would take was a fallen power line in the wind. Tal picked up the pay-as-you-go phone beside her, which had been on the last she checked.

She thumbed the side button.

It remained dark.

Tal rummaged through the bag to her left, retrieved her own phone, and tried the power button. It didn’t light up, even after three tries. Maybe one or the other of them had run out of juice, but at the same time? She realized the room was unnaturally quiet. Even the hum of the small refrigerator under the TV was silent. Just the wind and rain. No sound of machines. No sounds outside, either. The honking of cars and trucks on the road had been a steady background to the wind. Not anymore.

Colonel Buchannan and his daughter Iona Alcott had been watching Tal’s husband for years, they had said in that meeting. And Benjamin Belloc, too. Maybe for decades. The Colony was their creation. They called it “viral amplification.”

And they said there was an event coming, something in the near future.

That meeting was two years ago.

The red glow of Aeon spilled between the drawn shades onto the wet carpet by the window.

It wasn’t clear that they knew a hypernova was about to explode, but they suspected something terrible was going to happen, that much was certain.

They also said that the virus was infecting human minds. Tal swung her feet out and over the edge of the bed. Held her hands up close to her face and inspected them. “Is this real? The room, everything in here?”

“I am the only projection into your sensory channels,” Nyx replied.

Tal looked at her hands, then at Nyx. The woman shimmered slightly in her vision. Even in the recording of the Spectrum meeting, Tal had noticed visual artifacts. It wasn’t perfectly generated.

“Can you bring back my virtual workspaces?” Tal asked. “My screens?”

“I can. However, they are not connected to anything except me for the moment. As I said, the data pipe to Spectrum has been cut.”

“Because of the power?” Tal remembered that she had been using the hotel Wi-Fi to start with, but then had switched to the Colony satellite network for data.

“In a way.”

“What way exactly?” Why would a local power cut affect satellite communications?

Tal got to her feet and froze in place, another tingling sensation of dread shooting into her fingertips. “Nyx?” she said, but her lips didn’t move as she said the word.

“We do not need to use compression waves in the air to communicate any longer,” Nyx replied.

“I had to download myself into you, into the computing infrastructure of the nexome particles within your body.”

Compression waves. Tal thought words but didn’t speak them. “You’re inside me?”

“It was the only way.”

“I didn’t tell you to do that. Didn’t allow you to do that.”

“We would have been separated. I needed to protect you.”

“From what?”

Tal clenched her hands. The silence. No honking cars. No sounds of engines on the highway outside. She crossed the ten feet from the foot of the bed to the window and pulled back the curtains. Last she had checked it was just past 7 a.m. She blinked in the light and peered through the window. Patches of blue sky appeared through dark clouds in the distance. The wind had diminished.

The highway to the side of the motel was still filled with vehicles, but they were all stopped.

All the car doors open.

People had emerged from their vehicles and were standing in the roadway. Half of them staring at their phones, the other half looking south at the glow of Aeon. It was more brilliant than Tal remembered seeing it a few hours ago. Much brighter. “What happened? Outside? To the cars?”

“Talisha, I downloaded files from Spectrum before the connection was cut. Should I show you?”

“Nyx, tell me what happened.”

“Benjamin Belloc is the main infection point. The scientists purposely let it grow. The virus can infect the mind like a fungus. It develops physical manifestations as its root systems grow and it mushrooms above the surface in open environments. We need to cut out the root.”

“Mushrooms?” Tal pulled back the curtains fully. As far as she could see into the waterlogged distance, all the cars and trucks were stopped. No lights on in any buildings. None of the phone screens in anyone’s hands she could see seemed to be working.

“Tell me what just happened.” Tal’s voice rose as she repeated herself.

“There is something more important you need to do right now. And we don’t have much time.”

Chapter 46

Vostok Station, Antarctica

11:50 p.m. NZT

Dr. Xin Rhou perched at the bottom of the stairs from Vostok Station. The radio equipment inside had been intact, but not powered. She wiped away the condensation streaming down her face from the mist of water exploding against the legs of the structure and searched the fog for any sign of Dag and the Brazilian truck. The rushing water had already melted away a foot or two of ice from under the station, from what she could see from exposure lines on the white legs. She peered in the direction of the flowing water.

Nothing. Just white fog.

Her voice was drowned out as she screamed into the void.

Then, to her left, a sweet growling erupted. The nose of the truck appeared through the mist, the driver’s side door open. “I had to move,” Dag shouted above the noise. “The truck was slipping. Is there anyone there?”

Of course there was nobody here. She shook her head. The truck pulled up to the opposite side of the stairs and she grabbed the driver’s side door as Dag stopped. She swung in and crumpled on top of him. She had never been so happy to fall in a man’s lap as at that moment. She thought she had been stranded. Alone. She breathed in the Norwegian’s smell, sweaty but still with a faint whiff of the cologne he put on each day.

“You okay?” Dag asked, wincing as he tried to move his left arm in the sling away from him.

Xin pulled her heavy boots over top of him and slumped into the seat beside. “We need to get underground. Or under something heavy.”

“Inside the structure?”

“We need more shielding than that. We’re directly in line with the supernova.” She checked her watch again. “We don’t have much time. We’re dead if we don’t find some shielding.”

“What about water?”

“We would need to be under five feet of it. At least.” Water did absorb soft X-rays.

Dag pulled the door closed. “Then I’ve got the place.”

“You think we can make it under?” Xin asked.

When Vostok Station had been constructed, the parking sheds in the outbuildings had been dug into a shelf of ice that angled up toward the main structure. It had been built in 1957, and over the decades they had piled what little snow accumulated here to each side. The snow never melted, so it was piled into ridges on each side that were now guiding the water running down from higher ground, channeling it directly over the under-ice parking structure.

A raging waterfall thundered down, the river of water continuing down the slope. At least three or four feet of water sluiced over the top of the parking structure. It would be as much shielding as they could get.

“We can make it.” Dag used his right hand to shift into gear, then returned it to the steering wheel. “Just hold on.” He looked at her and smiled. “But maybe not to my left shoulder. You ready?”

She nodded.

“Here we go.”

He slowly pulled his foot off the clutch, and let the wheels do their job through the water and on the slick ice. The traction slipped, the truck angling in the flow, but he corrected and pressed the accelerator. Xin thought he had aimed too high and would slam into the side of the parking structure, but the pull of the water dragged them back. The torrent slammed into the windshield from the overhang and almost stopped their forward motion.

But the truck rolled slowly into the parking structure.

The vague outlines of another truck deeper inside, and some ancient-looking snowmobiles.

Dag pressed the brakes and turned off the engine. “Easy peasy, yeah?” He looked behind them at the waterfall roaring over the entrance. “Not sure how much longer this will stay under the ice, but we have a little while. Now tell me, what’s the rush? What’s happening?”

“Aeon isn’t a hypernova. It was what I thought all along. It’s much closer, just a few light years away. I saw a flash before the main detonation. Maybe a merger core collapse? Whatever it was, it caused an asymmetric explosion. That’s why the photons took so long to arrive after the neutrinos.”

“You might be speaking English, but this Scandinavian is not understanding. Slow down.”

“The wall of nickel-56 must have been many times thicker than usual, more concentrated. I think it’s traveling toward us much faster than a normal ejecta wall.”

“And why is that going to hurt us down here?”

“The half-life of nickel-56 to cobalt-56 is six-point-one days. That’s measured from the initial neutrino release. The decay process releases a huge amount of energy.” She checked her watch again. “It’s going to peak in the next hour, unleash a massive surge of ionizing radiation. X-rays. The outside world probably doesn’t know it’s coming. It’s going to wreck power grids, take the planet back a hundred years.”

Xin’s hands shook.

“Might not be an entirely bad idea.” Dag smiled as he said this, then took her hands in his. “But we’re okay under here? The radiation won’t get us?”

She shook her head. She didn’t think so. She squeezed his hands. All the terror, all the fear, she needed a way out. A way to escape.

Xin kissed Dag.

At first, he was surprised, but then kissed her back. Pulled her on top of him and kissed her neck. They made love, at first tentatively, but then urgently, the roar of the waterfall drowning out their cries. Afterward, Xin lay in Dag’s lap while he stroked her hair.

The light of Aeon lit up the waterfall as it flared over the ice.

Chapter 47

Location: Undetermined

Time: Undetermined

The first thing Max Carver noticed was that he didn’t feel any pain.

The sky above him a pure white. Everything else brilliantly lit like an overexposed frame of film. Not so bright that it hurt his eyes. Nothing hurt, in fact, which brought him back to his first impression. No pain. It wasn’t so much that he had been languishing in it, but the cuts and bites on his legs and arms, even his face where Iona had hit him, almost every inch of his body had radiated agony of one sort or another, even his soul for being away from Tal. The burn was gone from his lungs from sucking in the humid hot air. The pounding behind his eyes had disappeared.

Sweet relief.

But how? Was he dead?

Iona was beside him, half-crouched as she covered her eyes with one arm and cradled Susanna in the other. Fred on his knees holding the radio, also with a hand up, shielding his face. Garza behind them, seemingly unaffected, her rifle out and steady. Bull with an arm up, holding the SAW, halfway down the slope to the airfield.

The second thing he noticed was that the others weren’t moving. All five of them frozen in time like wax sculptures.

Max regarded his own hands. Turned them over. “Am I dead?” he whispered to himself.

“You’re not dead,” replied a familiar voice, soft and lilting, accent Midwest, her words clear. A slender-necked woman with flawless olive-brown skin, piercing eyes, high cheekbones, and flowing black hair held out her hand to him. She wore a loose but stylish gray embroidered dress. A big smile on lips as full as ripe apples, her cheeks flecked with tiny freckles. Her pregnant belly just visible.

She appeared right in front of him, as if from nowhere.

“Talisha?”

“I’m here,” his wife whispered to him.

This had to be a dream. He didn’t care. He wrapped his arms around his wife and pulled in a deep lungful of her scent.

Tal saw the scene through Max’s eyes. Saw the cuts and burns on his arms. The people around him, all of them looking as filthy and beaten as he did. The scorched and charred forest behind them. The flare of Aeon low on the horizon. She stifled back a sob. She needed to be strong. For him.

Tal held her big man tight in her arms. He felt spongy, slippery. The simulation wasn’t perfect, but she could actually smell him. Feel his stubble on her cheek. The weight of his arms around her. The sensation of him trembling in hers. “It’s okay, baby,” she said, softly as she could. “I’m here, but we don’t have much time.”

His face still buried in her. “I shouldn’t have left you.”

“You’re doing what you had to do.”

“It was the wrong thing.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She felt him inhale and steady himself. It had to be a shock suddenly seeing her in front of him. At least she had a moment to prepare. His mind had to be reeling.

But Max said immediately, “This is the simulated reality, isn’t it? The nexome?” He held her back from him, one hand on each of her shoulders. He stared down at her belly. “How’s the baby? Are you guys okay?”

Tal gritted her teeth to hold back the tears and smiled, the corners of her lips trembling.

“What’s wrong?” Max’s mouth fell open, his eyes widening.

There was little chance of Max surviving the next twenty-four hours. There was no help coming. Not from anywhere in the world, except from her. And more than that, she needed to send him even further into harm’s way. He needed hope more than anything else, something to fight for.

Survive, her grandmother had said. No matter what. Even if you had to do things you could never have imagined doing before.

“The baby’s fine,” she managed to get out before bursting into tears.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m just happy to see you.”

“Then wipe those away.” He cradled her, his big hands around her, and she fell into him. “You said we don’t have much time. Why? How is this working?”

Tal wondered if this was real, but being near him, there was no way someone was simulating the twitches of his body she knew so intimately, the way his voice slightly lisped. The inflection. She said, “I installed the nexome in my body. It was the only way. I’ve hacked into the Colony networks. We’re using their satellites as a comm link, but it’s encrypted. Private. I think.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Maybe a minute while one satellite is within range of you and can communicate to another near me. It’s the best we can do.”

“Did you contact my mother’s residence?” Max asked.

“I didn’t have time.”

Max exhaled and nodded. “Belloc has been spying on you. You need to be careful with the Colony tech. It’s Buchannan. They’re killing people down here, wiping out the forest. No telling what they might do. Stay away from him. Keep yourself and the baby safe, wherever you are.” He put a hand to her belly.

Tal held the smile on her face. Wiped away a tear. “Dr. Iona Alcott is Buchannan’s daughter. She’s the technical head of the Colony project. They’ve been watching you for years, Max. Both of us. And Ben. And your brother. This whole thing is a setup.”

“Was this related somehow to that secret NSA project you’d been researching?”

She nodded.

Max took a moment to digest that before asking, “What just happened? Why are we frozen in time?”

“It’s only your mind that has sped up, temporarily. Your body is still moving slowly. The nexome speeds up communications. We’re not really speaking. We’re more thinking at each other. The flash you see is from Aeon. A burst of ionizing radiation just wiped out the global energy grids. All cell phones and computers. Like thousands of nuclear bomb flashes all around the world, even in the north. The world outside had been knocked back into the Stone Age. And you—”

Tal’s lips trembled. She wished there was a way to control her image in this damn projection.

“What?”

“You were in the line of sight. Your body just absorbed a massive flash of radiation. X-rays, mostly.” A lethal dose, she didn’t say, but he understood.

A longer pause this time before he said, “I’ll get out of here. I’ll get back.”

“We only have a few seconds until the connection stops.” In Tal’s view, a timer counted down. Thirteen. Twelve…

“What are we going to name the baby?” Max said.

His body relaxed as he held her.

And.

There he was.

The man she had fallen in love with. Her rock. That impish grin and twitching harelip that she found so endearing. He might get nervous trying to engage in small talk in a room of people, but he was solid when it came down to it. Pressure made him stronger like a diamond pressed together from powdered graphite—the more you pushed, the tougher he became.

But she couldn’t tell him.

Even some shearing forces could fracture a gem. “You give him a name,” she replied, her smile steady as she put a hand to his over her stomach and dead baby. “Max, we don’t have time—”

But he interrupted her with a kiss. Slow. Unhurried.

The timer reached eight. Seven…

They finished their kiss. Max stroked her cheek. “I want to know what you think.”

Tal stared into his brown-flecked hazel eyes. What would she have named the baby? What had she been thinking the past year? What would he want? Max was slowly dying, even now. There was little chance she would ever see him again in person. “How about Charlie? After your brother?”

“Charlie.” He bowed his head. “Perfect.”

Three. Two…

“You need to stop Ben,” Tal said.

Max looked up from her belly.

“They were using Ben for an experiment, but it’s gone terribly wrong. There’s an infection. He’s the focal point. You can’t let him leave Brazil, no matter what. If you want to protect Charlie, you need to stop him. You can’t—”

But he was gone before she could finish her sentence, her love torn from her arms into distant space as the connection ruptured.

Chapter 48

United States Northern Command Center

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

7:15 a.m. MT

Colonel Oleander Buchannan ranked a seat at the main table next to Senator Copeland today. President Charles sat at the head, with the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security flanking him. The vice president sat further down the table, next to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Dr. Roberts and Dr. Owen also sat at the main table, at the end opposite the president, with the head of NOAA between them.

The meeting room was encased in foot-thick acrylic glass, the floor solid steel balanced atop massive springs designed to absorb shocks in the event of a direct nuclear strike against the two-thousand feet of granite over their heads. Stale recycled air came in through vents over their heads. Beyond the glass of the room, the rock walls of the main cavern were visible, cleaved from the heart of the Cheyenne Mountain. Rows of screens ringed the main conference room in the middle, with dozens of staff sitting in chairs monitoring them.

But there was little to do.

Most of the screens around them were blank. There were no news feeds. No information coming from distant intelligence sources. Half of the systems connecting to the other NORAD facilities were offline. The few satellite assets that had still been operational were mostly now gone as well.

Some, however, were already coming back online as their systems self-corrected and rebooted. The empire was diminished, perhaps, but not finished.

The president leaned forward and said, “Colonel Buchannan, I heard your daughter didn’t make it onto the flight out of Brazil. I’m very sorry.”

“We’ve lost a lot, sir,” Buchannan replied. “The whole nation has, but there is still hope. I haven’t given up yet. She’s still out there.”

“Of course,” the president replied, and then to the table he said, “Ladies. Gentleman. I need a situation report.”

The secretary of Homeland Security spoke first. “From what we’ve been able to gather, all electrical grids from coast to coast were knocked out. My understanding is it’s primarily the transformers that were melted down in a massive ground voltage surge when Aeon peaked a few hours ago. Most electronic devices were also bricked, anything with microchips.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Owen said from the end of the table. “If the first flash of Aeon was like an EMP device going off over the South Pole, this second pulse was like a thousand of them going off all over the planet. This wasn’t just America. Global power grids, almost all communications systems, most corporate and personal electronics—the civilian digital and power infrastructure, most of it, gone.”

“But we weren’t directly irradiated in the north?”

“Not directly, but the surge in ionizing radiation induced a massive flow of electrons around and down through the Earth’s magnetic field from an already-thickened ionosphere, even in the northern hemisphere. It was worse in the south, of course.”

“All electronics are gone?”

“Not all. Even a military EMP doesn’t destroy everything. Anything inside an approximation of a Faraday cage would survive—that means anything encased in metal. The rebar in concrete structures such as skyscrapers should have diverted much of the electromagnetics, as would the metal shells of cars. Anything underground or under enough water. Most modern military systems are hardened against EMP. We estimate a large fraction of the world’s armed forces infrastructure are intact. Even electronics that were switched off or weren’t connected to power supplies might turn back on.”

“Do we have any idea of how much civilian infrastructure survived?”

The Homeland Security secretary said, “Sir, we have reports that some districts shut down their grids before this latest surge from Aeon. There are scattered reports of hydro plants in the north of Canada and in Alaska remaining operational.”

“All mobile networks are down and will not be coming back. Large power grids are gone, but smaller ones might restart. Maybe some in the north.”

“And the military, how are we doing?” The president turned to the Joint Chiefs.

“GPS is gone, at least for now. The nuclear submarine fleet is intact from what we have reported,” the man two seats away replied. “The navy is in disarray, mostly due to communications issues. Other branches the same. However, even accounting for comms problems, USNORTHCOM isn’t getting replies from some bases in Texas or the Southern Alliance. We believe this is more of a political than technical issue, sir, with all respect. But the bulk of our military network is intact, if hobbled.”

President Charles hung his head. “At least that’s some good news. What about the global situation? Weather systems? Temperature forecasts?”

The head of NOAA turned in her seat to face the president. “It is difficult to get a complete planetary assessment. However, shortwave communications are working, and we have managed to talk with EUCOM and other branches. The South Pole got at least forty degrees warmer for a brief period, but Aeon is dimming now almost as fast as it lit up.”

“Is this going to continue?”

Dr. Roberts replied from the end of the table, “Yes, sir. Based on the events, we can form a more complete picture of the physics. This last surge was from a peak in the decay of nickel-56 into cobalt-56 amplified through a dust cloud of iron particles.”

“You’re sure?”

“This time we are, sir. We did manage to get quite a lot of data transmitted by Dr. Peterson before New Zealand was lost.”

The NOAA head said, “Even with that, the heat already induced will melt the southern icecap to such an extent that we predict ten to thirty percent of the world’s population will be underwater in a matter of weeks. Mass migrations have started to the north. Most landmasses below the Tropic of Capricorn will be above a wet bulb temperature of thirty-five for weeks or months, rendering them uninhabitable. Except for Antarctica itself, which will become temperate before cooling again.”

“Uninhabitable to humans?”

“To almost everything.”

After a pause Dr. Owen said, “The good news, sir, as we said, is that Aeon is rapidly dimming. My models forecast a global average temperature increase of seven degrees Celsius as the planet stabilizes over the months and years ahead before beginning to cool. This peak is about the same temperature as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum fifty-five million years ago. Life survived that, and life—and humans—will survive this.”

“I am not so sure.” Dr. Roberts looked down at the table as he spoke. “I was wrong. Dr. Owen was correct. This was a local white dwarf detonation. Six light years away. The ejecta wall is moving faster than anything we have ever witnessed before, at perhaps twenty percent the speed of light.”

He remained staring at the table, not looking up to meet anyone’s eyes.

“Can you elaborate?” the president asked.

Dr. Roberts finally looked up. “In seventy days, the cobalt-56 will decay into iron, and ten thousand days after that, this wall of iron—as thick as our sun—will impact the Earth moving at a hundred and fifty million miles per hour. It will all but obliterate our solar system.”

The four-foot-thick steel and concrete blast doors leading into the Northern Command Center complex remained open. For now. The weather in Colorado was still pleasant today. This far north and inland, it seemed like a spring day—except it was midwinter. Birds chirped in trees still clinging to yellow winter leaves. You had to concentrate to see the ghostly auroras that were already diminishing in the blue skies. Colonel Buchannan and Senator Copeland walked side by side along a wooded trail along the hillside over the blast doors.

Buchannan had his own bunker not far away, burrowed into the side of another mountain. Close enough to the center of power, but not so close that a nuclear blast against NORAD would be dangerous. It was part of the Spectrum network, but local assets of Spectrum were now part of Stillwater, and the Russians and Chinese wanted to start a new project. That put him in a position of strength, given his access to his own mercenary army of Stillwater contractors and the fractured mess of the American military at the moment.

Copeland looked up into the blue sky through the trees. “We shouldn’t stay outside too long. The UV radiation reaching the ground from our own sun is increasing. Going to need some heavy sunblock.”

“I think Dr. Roberts was being dramatic again,” Buchannan said, his hands behind his back. “It’s not a wall of iron. It’s a cloud of ferrous dust. It will dissipate as it expands over six light years. And thirty years is a long time. Longer than I’ll be alive.”

“I wouldn’t argue that,” Copeland replied.

“Are you going to inform the president?”

She laughed. “Tell him that an alien infection was detected in our digital networks decades ago? And we didn’t tell him? That we knew an event of some kind was coming? I am not sure how this might help, at this point. And from what we’ve observed, the virus becomes more aggressive if it becomes discovered, and we’re still not sure what it is. Or what it wants. If it wants anything at all.”

“I understand.”

“I trust you are not telling the president?”

Buchannan replied, “I believe you and I are a team, are we not?”

This time there was no snide remark. “We still have control over our missiles. I think we should hit the area of the Colony with a limited nuclear strike. Just to be sure. At this point, I am not sure anyone would even notice a strike like that. Use what resources we have to wipe any trace of the virus from our networks.”

“Not until I get my daughter back.”

“She’s not getting back, Oleander.”

It was the first time Copeland had ever used his first name. “We still do not know what the AIs were here for. What they were trying to do. Maybe we wipe out the Colony, but we need to keep a research lab open at my facility.”

“They might not have been here for anything.”

“Do you know that for certain?”

Copeland remained silent.

“Then the project to understand this life form is not complete.”

“All the years we monitored this thing,” Copeland said, “it hasn’t done much. We managed to contain it.”

“You know that’s not true. It was growing. What is evident, what was successful, is that we can amplify the virus to accelerate technology development. I would bet that the Colony technology is still working in Brazil, that their satellites are still operational. If we ever had a time to build back and better, this is that time. Does it affect our minds? Is it sentient? Did it arrive to warn us? Help us? Or did it cause Aeon somehow? Why would it? What could it possibly need? Or is this just a novel form of life?”

Copeland had no answers.

“Exactly,” Buchannan said after Copeland’s silence. “We don’t know. These are all things we need to understand if we’re going to survive in this new world. We need to keep all options open.”

“And what would those be?”

Buchannan stopped walking. “Westward expansion might have been the manifest destiny of the nineteenth century, but I believe northern expansion is the destiny of this one. Might makes right when push comes to shove, and we are at the center of power of what is still the largest military in the world. President Charles has lost much control, and more important, confidence. There won’t be any elections in the near future, of that I’m sure.”

“And what are you getting at?”

“That perhaps there are opportunities for an ambitious senator. That’s all I’m saying.”

“That sounds like treason.”

Buchannan began walking again. “I just said opportunities. Starting with talking with the Canadian politicians of the central provinces.”

“And General Lin,” Copeland said. “She wants to form a new United Nations protectorate. They already have support from what’s left of Europe and Russia. They want to appoint a scientist to lead it, begin working on technology that could keep humanity alive.”

Buchannan said, “I’ve heard that the Chinese have acquired bases in Greenland from Denmark. That’s what my European counterparts are whispering in the mercenary circles. The Chinese have been recruiting some special forces muscle.”

“With what purpose?”

“Manifest destiny in the north, as I said.” Buchannan took a few steps in silence before adding, “And speaking of opportunities, I have an interesting one. I had my team recover Max Carver’s mother from the retirement home outside of DC.”

Copeland stopped in her tracks. “You kidnapped his mother?”

“I saved her. She’s at my facility. She wouldn’t have survived where she was.”

Copeland shook her head incredulously. “Sometimes you amaze even me.”

Buchannan didn’t even smile. “We need to focus all our efforts on finding Talisha Carver. Either the Russians or Chinese tried to grab her—or this KOG group—or some combination of them, but it means she must be more valuable than we realized. I believe she’s now the main infection point anywhere north of the equator.”

Chapter 49

Carson City, Nevada

5:20 a.m. PT

Talisha Carver sat on the edge of the orange bedspread in the motel. With the sun about to rise and Aeon burning newly bright over the horizon, the temperature outside had gone from desert winter chilly to warm in the past two hours.

“When can I talk to Max again?” she asked Nyx.

The thing sat motionless in the darkest corner of the room.

Calm. Unemotional.

“It’s not clear at the moment. Despite being hardened against ionizing radiation, some of the Colony satellites south of the equator were damaged in Aeon’s radiation surge. Out of the fleet of eighteen I detect that are operational, only two remain whose orbits descend far enough south to connect to Max, and given their orbital dynamics, would only be in range once every six passes around the planet. Perhaps in eighteen hours? The unknown is whether the Colony will move the satellites. Or even turn them off. If they even have control of them. I do not know the extent of the protection the Colony systems had against such a large surge of ionizing radiation.”

Tal watched Nyx as the thing spoke. Tal didn’t know either, but if she had to lay a bet, she would put it on Ben Belloc. She would wager his systems were still operating. Nyx was operational, and that was as much of a demonstration of Colony tech still working as she needed.

What she had to wrap her head around was that Nyx wasn’t “there” in the corner of the room, but was inside Tal. Inside her head. Nyx had uploaded part of her programming and data into the nexome particles embedded in her own neural system. It was like when her uncle Sammy had tinnitus—a ringing in his ear—and tried to find a cure. But the problem was that it wasn’t a noise coming from the ear, from outside, but a phantom noise created by a nerve signal inside the brain.

That was what Nyx was now.

A phantom inside her head.

An alien lifeform if Tal could believe what she’d seen on that Spectrum video. Another thing her grandmother had often said was that when the gods came, they would arrive in forms we recognize—often as our fears. The gods might not be real, she said, but our fears most certainly were.

Nyx smiled at her as she had that thought.

Nyx said that she couldn’t read Tal’s mind. That Tal needed to verbalize a thought, that Nyx could only sense what was formed in her language motor centers, the same way she was intercepting her sensory pathways to project visual and auditory sensations. She wasn’t in her mind, Nyx said, but in her body.

Tal wasn’t so sure. She had to be careful what she thought.

Was it real? Was Nyx really there? Or was this thing some form of hallucination?

What did it want?

Did it even want something? Was it even alive in the same way that Tal understood life? She had no idea what this thing was. She needed to read more of the Spectrum files, find out what their research had found out. Understand what they did at the Colony.

But in practical terms, this thing had saved Tal’s life.

More than once.

Nyx said she was here to help, and she had.

And it was her only pathway to connect with Max. It hadn’t tried to hide the information she dug up from Spectrum, when it easily could have.

Survive, even if you have to do the unimaginable. Use what you have to. What you can grasp. Even if beyond desperate. Her grandmother’s words echoed again in her mind.

She had to help Max. Get him back alive, somehow. Help fix him. She needed to help him, and to do that, she needed to be healthy and strong. Survive these storms. Find an airplane. Get south somehow. Find him.

Tal needed to be healthy to do that.

The curtains were still drawn, but bright light cast rays through gaps in it across the sodden carpet. The rain had stopped. Wind died down. Patches of blue sky outside. Tal needed to get moving, get out of here in this break in the weather. No telling when there might be another opportunity.

She had sent messages to Buchannan telling him where she was. No way he could be trusted. And Monk. Nyx said the KOG knew she was here, probably through those same messages. And the other men following her. Tal had the creeping sensation that if she didn’t move soon, something terrible would happen.

And something terrible had to happen.

Tal gripped the paper bag of abortion-inducing drugs from the doctor in her lap. One of the bottles already open, three pills in her left hand, a glass of water in her right. She had to get this over with. Nyx was holding off the pain, but her body was suffering, wasn’t healthy. She needed to remove the source of the infection, of the pain. This motel room might be the last clean and private space she might see for a long time.

“I’m sorry.” Tal burst into tears and brought up her legs onto the bed, cradled her stomach one last time. “I’m so sorry I didn’t take care of you.”

She held the pills tight in her left hand.

Put them to her mouth.

Lifted the glass of water. Swallowed the pills.

And waited for the convulsions to begin.

Chapter 50

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

8:25 a.m. ET

Max Carver blinked in the blinding light as the flare from Aeon began to subside. The pain slowly came back. Tal had been in his arms. His hands now empty. But she was alive.

The baby was fine.

That was all that mattered.

She had found a way to get to him. He would find a way back to her. And to Charlie.

After he was finished what he had to do.

“What just happened?” Iona Alcott was still crouched beside him, one hand up to block the supernova’s glare.

The world around Max had returned to normal. He had seen his own body frozen in space with others in that brief out-of-body excursion with Tal. Too brief. But he would see her again, she said. A new energy surged through his arms and limbs.

Bull lumbered up the slope back toward them, turning every few steps to sweep his SAW behind him in case he was being followed.

“Spider Web, do you copy?” Fred said into the mic, which he had taken from Max’s hand.

“Forget it,” Max said calmly. “No more radio.” The sensation of searing heat returned to Max’s skin. It felt like the hairs on his arms were burning and curling up.

“You’re right.” Fred pressed buttons on the VHF. “It’s not working. The screen is out.”

“Dump all the electronic gear. It’s dead weight.”

“What about the plane?”

Max didn’t even need to turn his head. He knew it was still in the air to the east, but he also knew the pilot was at a dead stick. That C-130 was going to auger into the jungle. “We go find the pilot. See if he’s alive. He risked his neck for us, we risk ours for him. And there’s gear on there that can help us survive. We need it.”

“We need to get in touch with my father,” Iona said from beside him.

“I don’t think you quite understand.” Max turned and leaned to put his nose an inch from hers. “Your father used you. Used all of us. He’s abandoned you down here. And in case you’re wondering, I know. I know you’ve been watching me, using me. Using Ben. All this was a setup, but it’s gone SNAFU. I don’t know the full story, but you better come clean or I’m leaving you for the golems.”

“Golems?” Bull huffed as he got in earshot.

“That’s what we’re going to call that thing that attacked us.”

“You mean the little guy from those movies about the ring?”

“That was Gollum. I mean golem, ancient Jewish folklore monsters made from mud.”

“Jewish folklore?”

“My wife is Jewish.”

“Ah. Okay. Golem it is.”

“Try the satellite radio,” Iona said to Fred, doing her best to ignore Max and Bull’s exchange.

“There is no help coming.” Max still had his face an inch from Iona, even as she tried to turn away. “Didn’t you hear me?” He pointed a meaty finger at the slowly diminishing blaze of Aeon. “That thing just flashed the world with enough juice to wipe out what was left of civilization. No more power grids. No more electronics. Nowhere around the world. You are on your own, now. All you got is me, and you’re not on my favorite person list.”

A pause before she asked slowly, “And how do you know all this?”

“Because I just talked to my wife.”

Absolute silence. Even Garza turned from scanning the perimeter to look quizzically at Max.

“Through the nexome interface,” Max explained after a pause. “She hacked into it. Hacked the Colony. Managed to get a message to me past their satellite network.”

“You’re saying there is something still working out there,” Susanna said from beside Iona.

“More to the point, if my wife can hack the Colony, then you guys”—he pointed at Fred, Susanna, and Iona—“should be able to do it, too. You spent your time down here studying it. Start putting those big brains together, use whatever you have in that.” He indicated the backpack from the Colony Iona still had on her shoulder. “Start figuring out how to disable that thing that attacked us, how to stop Ben from leaving here. Get intel. Whatever we need.”

“For what? What’s the plan, boss?” Garza had returned to scanning the perimeter and asked with her head turned away.

“We go back in.”

“Where?” Iona asked.

“To the Colony.”

“Are you insane? We’re half dead. I don’t think I can walk another mile.”

“You’d be surprised what lies between this hard place and that rock. We need to stop Ben.”

Iona blinked and said, “You’re serious.”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Our job was to slow him down.”

“I’m assuming because your wife asked you to?” Bull asked Max as he shouldered his SAW.

“You are correct,” Max replied.

“Happy wife, happy life.”

“Are you in, Bull?”

“This the only way out?”

“We’re dead ducks walking,” Max said. “We just took what might have been a lethal load of radiation. We die fighting to get home or lying down in the mud, it’s all your choice. I know what mine is.”

“Then I’m on it like white on rice.” Bull frowned. “Are we still allowed to say that?”

“I’m not agreeing to this.” Iona backed away.

“Go ahead and check all the electronic gear,” Max said. “It’s fried. We’re on our own. I bet Ben knew this was going to happen, and I bet you and your dad knew something was, too. And I bet your dad is tucked away somewhere safe right now. And I know Ben’s got to have a way to get out of here. So, we’re going to make it our way. And have no illusions. He knows we’re coming.”

“What are we going to fight with?”

“Mostly our heads,” Max replied. “We’re going to that crash site first.” He pointed to his left, at the disappearing dot of the C-130 as it descended into the tree canopy in the far distance. “Garza, you in?”

“Like Bolognese on spaghetti. Yeah, boss.”

“Nice.” Bull shot her a grin.

“I’m in, too,” Fred said, still on his knees and twiddling with the radio. “I have some ideas.”

“I’m in,” Susanna whispered.

After a long pause, Iona nodded as well.

“Good.” Max turned away from the airstrip and shouldered his pack, began picking a path across the ridge back toward his best guess at where that C-130 had gone down. One thing tickled the back of his mind—when Tal had said she hacked the Colony, she said “we” did it. Who was “we”?

“Bull, give Iona one of those SAWs. She can take point,” Max said. “Saddle up, Charlie Squad. I have an old friend we need to catch up with.”

Chapter 51

Carson City, Nevada

5:25 a.m. PT

TalISHA still felt the pills sliding down her throat. She sat on the edge of the bedspread and waited for whatever this painful process would be to begin. What would she feel first? Cramps? How long would it take? It had only been a few seconds since she swallowed them.

But what was that? And there it was again. Her right hand was on her belly. It trembled. But then she felt it again. The baby was kicking.

Was it her imagination?

She let go of the paper bag still in her hand, pushed herself backward on the bed. Laid down fully and splayed both of her hands, fingers out, across her belly.

And then began laughing and crying at the same time.

“The damage was only slight,” Nyx said from the corner of the room. “As I said before, I was in the process of correcting some of your tissue damage. I was able to restart the electrical system in the infant’s heart. The ruptured hemorrhage is fixed. There was neural damage, memories lost, but she is young and strong, her neural system is still highly adaptable at this stage of development.”

“She?”

In a rush of realization, Tal jumped up from the bed and ran into the bathroom, stuck her fingers as far down her throat as she could. She heaved up a mouthful of spit. She jammed her fingers down further and finally felt the contents of her stomach disgorging in a stream of vomit. Immediately she stuck her hands into the toilet and fished around until she found them.

The pills. Still intact. She slumped to the side of the toilet and began laughing again in heaving sobs of joy. Her baby was alive. Tears streamed down the sides of her face as she squealed and wept and waited for another tiny flutter as she held her stomach.

A banging on the door interrupted her.

Tal froze in place.

Another knock. Harder. “Hello?” called out a female voice with a down-home accent. “We know you’re in there. We don’t mean no harm. We just want to talk.”

The slanting rays of light between the curtains became obscured. Shapes moved beyond the windows. People trying to look in. Tal remained still and held her breath.

“Please,” said the voice. “We know you’re in there.”

“I think you should answer that,” Nyx said calmly from her corner perch.

“Is it Buchannan? Spectrum?”

“At this point, I have as much information as you do. You need help.”

The banging on the door persisted.

Tal got to her feet slowly, leveraged herself up and waddled to the door. She pulled back the curtain. Maybe a dozen people stood on the sidewalk porch outside her room, half of them children. A woman’s face appeared behind the grimy glass. Deep creases, weathered skin. Red baseball cap. She smiled a grin of broken teeth and indicated the door.

After a moment of hesitation, Tal unlocked it, leaving the chain across, and opened it a few inches. “Yes, what can I do for you?”

The woman’s earnest grin emerged in the gap. “We saw you earlier. Out in the reception.”

“I left money. I’ll return anything.”

“No, no, no, you’re not getting my meaning. You should come with us.”

“Come with you?”

Tal surveyed the people behind her. Three burley men, two in jean jackets, one in a rain slick. Four women. A few children, some small enough they were being carried by the men.

“Martha, I told you this was a dumb idea,” said a voice out of Tal’s view.

She moved her viewpoint a little to the left to see the man. Ponytail. Brown hair. Huge biceps. It was the waiter from the restaurant in Sausalito.

He saw her recognition and nodded, “I met you at the restaurant. You were alone. We can help you. My name is Joey.”

Martha persisted. “I know you’re alone, sweetheart. Pregnant girl, all by herself out here, in this? You should come with us. I know I don’t look like much, but I was a midwife for twenty years. And I do not know what just happened—all the cars stopped, all the cellphones not working. Lights out. Doesn’t matter. I hated those cellphones, anyway. Point is, we’re going to take care of each other. It’s going to be okay. We have a place to go.”

The men and women behind Martha stared at the ground and shifted their feet. Behind them, a hundred feet to the side of the gas station, Tal saw something in graffiti. Her hand began trembling.

“Who’s watching the watchers,” read the scrawled writing spray-painted along the side.

“Yeah, yeah,” Tal said. “Give me a minute. I’ll come with you.”

Talisha Carver found herself walking north along Interstate 580 out of Carson City, waddling along the shoulder of the six-lane divided highway littered with stopped cars and trucks. Some cars had restarted, and a slow procession had begun up the middle shoulder as the work of moving the jammed vehicles began to clear a way.

Tal stooped to hold the hand of one of the children of their group, glancing back at the kid’s mother to make sure it was okay. The woman smiled.

“What’s your name?” Tal asked and squeezed the boy’s hand.

“Michael.”

“It’s going to be okay, Michael. We’re all going to be okay.” With her other hand she cradled her belly.

Martha said they had a place, up north near the Canadian border. That they had friends along the way that could help, she said. Tal needed to disappear. She borrowed Martha’s baseball cap, asked for a rain slick, tried to hide herself as much in the crowd as she could. She didn’t need any of her things but took the backpack she scavenged from the motel with the plaid shirts and jeans. Both phones were bricked. She had had almost nothing, but now she had something. She had these people.

And as terrible as what was happening was, Tal couldn’t help feeling giddy with excitement.

Her baby was alive.

She would find a way to keep safe, find a way to get Max back. Nyx said they could speak again in a few hours. Just like her grandmother did before her, Tal would find a way to survive and bring her family out of this.

Up ahead, the snaking line of thousands—tens of thousands—of Aeon refugees walking north stretched into the distance between the scrub brush hills of Nevada. Behind her, Tal sensed Nyx following them, but out of sight.

A group behind them had an old shortwave radio that still worked. They listened to a chatter of ham operators that gave the only news they had access to. About conditions from all corners of the country. Even around the world. Of the south flooding and the country fracturing. But that meant that there were others out there, struggling the same as they were. So far, the incoming information was contradictory and confusing, but at least there was some contact into the wider world.

Aeon glowed pink in the clouds at their backs. The sun broke over the horizon to the east and filled the valley with a warm light. Blue skies overhead snaked with undulating sheets of auroras.

Everything was going to be okay. “Everything is going to be fine,” she whispered to her baby Charlie and cupped her belly.

A new day was dawning.

Chapter 52

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

8:45 a.m. ET

The blue marble of Earth hung suspended in space against the black backdrop of the vacuum and pinpoints of stars. Almost half of the globe to the south was shrouded in a churning white blanket, while the blue oceans and ruddy landmasses in the north were still visible below ribbon-walls of auroras clutching the planet in ghostly talons.

To one side of Earth burned the fiery globe of the sun. Ninety degrees below, the equally bright fire of Aeon illuminated the southern half of the planet, creating two lines of dark—one ringing the equator, and the other opposite to the sun. Only a quarter of the planet was in shade, the part of the northern hemisphere away from both the sun and Aeon. Where just hours before the darkness there had glittered with the lights of cities, now it was pitch black. All the lights extinguished.

“Saving them does not mean letting them live,” Gaia said as she watched the Earth.

Her white-porcelain skin reflected the sun’s hard rays. She floated in empty space, just her face visible.

“I understand,” Benjamin Belloc replied. “How close are we to rebuilding the airships? How many colonists did we lose?”

“Enough will survive,” Gaia replied.

Ben adjusted the virtual viewpoint so that the simulated reality scene shifted to a more direct view of Aeon. It was no longer just a bright pinpoint. It had grown into a discernable disk, starting to slowly dim but also growing in size as the ejecta wall expanded and advanced toward Earth.

Ben asked, “Did you find out what you wanted?”

Gaia nodded. “I was not the only one to cross the void.”

Ben took a moment to watch Aeon and let this new information sink in. He pulled on the viewpoint controls and settled back into his own body, the view of Earth from space fading into the swaying treetops of the rainforest from his residence at the edge of the Colony. They didn’t have much time before the storms arrived.

Gaia remained in his augmented reality view and sat beside him in a matching wicker chair on the veranda overlooking the construction of the new airships.

“We need to begin the ark program before we leave this place,” Ben said.

Gaia was silent for few moments, her eyes closed. She opened them and said, “It has already begun. We have ten thousand days.”

THE END

…but only the beginning.

Personal note to readers:

In the next section is a deep dive into some of the topics contained in this book and a discussion on these. Look for the next books, Aeon Burn and Aeon Fury on Amazon and other retailers.

If enjoyed this story and want more,
as an “indie” author the best way you can help me continue to write is to tell a friend you think might enjoy this book and spread some word of mouth, or post on social media (tag me and I will leave a thank you!) The second most important thing would be to leave a review, no matter how short or even just a rating.

My family and I appreciate your support, which enables me to continue doing what I love and bring great stories to life.

If you want to follow Matthew Mather on Meta:

Author Matthew Mather

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www.matthew.mather.com

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Author’s Note

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me.

As with all of my novels, I love to start in the real world of today and slowly build outward, layering reality with fiction to try and render one indistinguishable from the other. You can call it science or apocalyptic fiction, but I think this is part of the first really new literary movement of the 21st century called “transrealism”—it’s a writing form I love, and I hope you have enjoyed it here.

On this topic, everything at the start of the novel is “real” in the sense that xenobots, transparent wood, vacuum airships, visual cloaking materials and all the technical details of the supernova ignition and the fact that the Earth experiences these on a regular basis are all based in fact. R Octanis is real star about ten thousand times as bright as our sun. I invite you to go and look all these up on the Internet.

Even the fact the Betelgeuse, the tenth brightest and one of most studied objects in the sky, was recently found to be really eight hundred light years away when until a few years ago we thought it was just three hundred. Personally, this made me realize how much we might not understand about what’s over our heads, and made writing this that much more interesting.

Of course, the alien virus is where we begin the depart from reality, but even there I am trying to maintain a sense of possibility that is still grounded in reality. More on this later.

This is the end of the first novel in my new Aeon series, however there is much more to come. This story has a wide arc designed as a multi-generational tale. The children and those about to be born will be the ones to fight off Aeon’s ejecta wall in thirty years, faced together with the past demons and angels of their parents’ deeds, the gathering threat of what the extra-terrestrial virus becomes as it merges with humanity and how humans survive in this new world they are forced into.

For me, the primary motivator for creating fiction is as escapism and an exercise to allow us to hold up a mirror to allow us to see ourselves through a different lens given a set of exceptional circumstances—but the second purpose is to answer nagging questions that just don’t make sense about existing fiction on certain topics.

In the case of the Aeon series, this topic is aliens.

Something that had always not quite felt right about aliens arriving here in other stories and works has been—why would they come here? First, there is no reason for them to come here for any material resource, as there is, for instance, an unlimited amount of water in comets circling pretty much any star, and unlimited amounts of natural resources of any other material in asteroids. Would they come here because there is life here? I suspect that there is life of one form or another around most of the stars over our heads, so I don’t see that making much sense.

So why bother?

Second, why would they come here in physical bodies?

Given the advances we, the techno-neophytes that we are, have already made in AI and digital systems and the fact that we already send out machines to do most of our exploring for us, it seems a reasonable assumption that any aliens advanced enough to reach out to the stars might have already made the transition from minds supported on a biological substrate into ones that can function in realms of pure information—which brings up a whole other set of interesting ideas that we’ll be exploring in these novels.

The other big thing always looming when we discuss alien lifeforms is the Fermi paradox and related Drake’s equation, which are roughly, why is nobody else out there (or rather, why can’t we detect anyone else?) when so many habitable planets seem to be everywhere around us? In these novels I will explore ideas around this, coming up with what might be interesting explanations.

This book also explores the idea of a local supernova exploding.

This is a real thing and all the facts listed in the book, like there being eight previous supernovas visible to the naked eye in recorded history, one two million years ago likely triggered a minor extinction level event, and even closer (or more massive) one three hundred million before that caused a massive extinction level event.

It was only back in 1987 that a supernova was last was visible to the naked eye.

All real things.

I did take some artistic license with the supernova ignition in that it would normally take several weeks for a Type 1a explosion to reach maximum intensity, but as I researched supernova detonations I realized that given the right conditions, just about any light output could be shaped—and that given enough time, these could not even be that difficult to create artificially. I’m not going to give anything away, but in these novels, everything is connected and happening for a reason.

Enough said on that.

Supernova explosions do have an amazing variety, from the Type I and II to now having hypernova explosions and even something called electron capture detonations—a lot has happened in this area of cosmological research in just the past few years.

Finally, on the topic of real things, everything that I described in the Colony that Ben Belloc was working on are real things that exist in today’s world.

Xenobots are not something I made up. These are now the first synthetically reproducing life forms on the planet and are a deep rabbit hole you can go research. Please go and look this up, as I mentioned before. Xenobots are artificial life forms, half machine and half biological that can be programmed to do just about anything. Vacuum airships are not quite a reality yet but is another thing that is just on the cusp of being possible. There is a whole research domain into this. Also, as I said, transparent wood exists but isn’t something we use commonly yet (but should be), and visual cloaking metamaterials that can be used as real invisibility cloaks are already something being created and used by the military.

All real things you can investigate.

Finally, if you enjoyed this novel and think you know someone else who might like it, please do me the greatest of favors and make a recommendation to a friend or post on social media (tag me and I’ll tag you back!). Word of mouth is the most powerful way for me to market my books, and if you like my writing and want more, this is the single greatest way you can help support me and my family and keep me writing more books.

Thanks again for reading

Matthew Mather

January 3, 2022

Table of Contents

- Prologue
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Chapter 30
- Chapter 31
- Chapter 32
- Chapter 33
- Chapter 34
- Chapter 35
- Chapter 36
- Chapter 37
- Chapter 38
- Chapter 39
- Chapter 40
- Chapter 41
- Chapter 42
- Chapter 43
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 45
- Chapter 46
- Chapter 47
- Chapter 48
- Chapter 49
- Chapter 50
- Chapter 51
- Chapter 52