Never Again Read online

  Stryker blinked the dust out of his eyes as he stared toward the cave. “What kind of homicidal assholes are we dealing with?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  From that moment when Bella had first awakened in the hospital and the nurses had told her she’d been in a car accident, life hadn’t made sense. She knew there was something wrong with her; something was missing. It was almost as if she’d stopped believing that she was human. Everyone else seemed to possess an innate humanity, a feeling that had eluded her until she met Dave.

  It was with him that Bella had begun to feel something that resembled normalcy. Yet on the plane, when she’d been taken from Dave, it was as if something inside her shut down. The world stopped existing in a way that made sense, and everything around her became a jumbled mess, just like it had been before she’d met him.

  She glanced at Dave, and even though he remained silent about the gash on the side of his head, she could tell that it still bothered him. Over the years, Bella had managed to learn Dave’s physical cues and could almost tell what he was thinking. Yet the rest of the world still baffled her.

  Bella held onto Dave’s arm as they walked down the well-lit, cinder-block hallway, and sensed the nervous energy coursing through him. A small group of suit-wearing Secret Service agents escorted them through the long hallway underneath the West Wing of the White House, and as they approached a wood-paneled door, one agent turned and pointed to a basket with a series of discarded electronic items. “We’ve arrived at the Situation Room. Please deposit any electronic equipment before entering.”

  Bella watched as Neeta extracted an implant from within her ear, placed it in a small paper envelope, and scribbled her name. As one agent’s gaze turned to Dave and Bella, Dave shook his head and muttered, “I’ve not had a cell phone in years. I may not be an expert in cell phone tech, but even I know that today’s anti-theft sensors are coded against the owner’s DNA. I have enough of a clue how to avoid being tracked.” He sniffed and glanced at Neeta. “Or at least I thought I did.”

  As the agent opened the door to the Situation Room, Neeta glanced backward, “Dave, I’m thinking you’ll have to become a bit easier to get in touch with.”

  With a wry grin, Dave muttered, “Yup, I’d rather not repeat what happened today. I’m done with this cloak-and-dagger crap.”

  Walking into what turned out to be a large, wood-paneled conference room, Bella felt a wave of discomfort as she felt dozens of eyes peering in her direction.

  A voice at the distant end of the room rose in volume above the others. “Neeta, please bring Doctor Holmes and ...”

  “Bella Holmes,” Dave said, loudly enough to be heard across the room, and Bella shrunk inwardly as she followed him. Everyone was staring at her.

  As Neeta escorted them along the edge of the conference room, she pointed toward a man, glanced backward, and whispered, “That’s Burt Radcliffe, the guy I was telling you about.”

  Dave eagerly approached him and smiled as he clasped hands with the tall man, his long, gray-streaked dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. “Doctor Radcliffe, I can’t thank you enough for pulling whatever strings you did—”

  “Nonsense, and call me Burt.” Burt’s face took on a grim expression. “What that asshole did to you is beyond the pale.” He pointed at the gauze on the side of Dave’s head. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Dave waved away the question and turned to Bella.

  She knew what he was going to say just before he said it, and suspecting how unpleasant this would be for her, she cringed.

  “Burt, let me introduce you to my better half, Bella.” Dave wrapped his arm around her shoulder, knowing that she always hesitated when meeting people.

  Burt extended his hand, and for a moment she stared at it and the man attached to it. She couldn’t read anything from his expression, and something inside her quavered at the thought of touching him. She glanced at Neeta, who smiled encouragingly.

  Holding her breath and expecting the worst, Bella braced herself as she touched his hand.

  A strange warmth spread through her as she made skin-to-skin contact. Suddenly, she felt as if she could read Burt’s expressions. He seemed sad. No, not sad, but there was a pain—a deep loneliness that she immediately related to.

  Bella stared at the man’s craggy face. He was unshaven and dirty, and she’d wager that most women wouldn’t have thought him anything but plain. However, none of that even registered with her. Her heart thumped loudly, and something warmed inside her chest. She smiled up at him. “You’re a beautiful person, Burt Radcliffe. I’m glad to know you.”

  Burt blinked as if stunned, glancing at his hand, and Dave laughed. “Burt, you don’t know how much of a compliment that is, coming from her. Bella sometimes has trouble relating to people, but I’ll tell you what,” he leaned down and gave Bella’s cheek a kiss. “In some ways, she’s more brilliant than all of us put together.”

  Suddenly, the loud clack of a gavel repeatedly banging on wood drew everyone’s attention.

  One side door to the Situation Room opened, and a deep voice announced, “Please rise for the President of the United States, Margaret Hager.”

  ###

  Bella smiled as she watched Dave handle the niceties of introduction amongst the more than two dozen people in the room. He was in his element, and his apprehension had vanished after the president announced that Burt Radcliffe would be replacing Greg Hildebrand as the Chief Science Advisor to the President and that Burt would end up representing the federal government on the public stage in all matters of science. While the introductions were ongoing, several people handed out thick copies of a freshly-printed report to all in attendance. Bella’s eyes were drawn to the glaring red text printed boldly both at the top and bottom of the page.

  “TOP SECRET–INDIGO”

  While Dave continued to talk, she reached forward and retrieved the bound stack of papers from the tabletop. She’d always had a love for the written word. Words often spoke to her in ways that held a deep meaning. It was as if each word had its own purpose, and it was Bella’s joy to unravel the patterns that they formed, searching for hidden messages that most might not entirely see.

  As she riffled through the pages, she saw the same red text scrawled as a warning on each and every page. There were many charts of statistics associated with the predicted Earth-orbit crossings. Many of the pages were also dedicated to mapping out the known debris fields between Earth and the incoming black hole. Pages and pages of raw numbers were associated with each map, each line in the report documenting an object’s ICRS coordinate, its trajectory, estimated mass, and its current velocity.

  In her mind, she saw the maps not as the flat images in the printouts. Using the raw data, her mind’s eye plotted the three-dimensional array of inbound objects as they traveled through space.

  She’d watched Dave play pool in one of the Moon base’s rec rooms once, and he’d always explained that the lower gravity made the game even tougher. It amplified errors, required an even more careful touch than the game did on Earth. To Bella, the dark spinning hole that was causing the threat was no different than a cue ball smashing through many targets of varying sizes. However, in this case there was no table holding everything on a flat plane. Instead, everything was located in a three-dimensional mesh.

  Bella easily recalled all that Dave had taught her about how mass correlated to gravity, and how each object influenced the others near them. Over the years, she’d learned about the complexities of angular momentum and the modeling of chaos, which seemed to apply especially to the strong gravitational and magnetic fields that surrounded the black hole.

  She was very good at focusing on something, such as the report in front of her, but a portion of her still paid attention to her surroundings. When the conversation veered from platitudes to something more serious, she put some of her musings over the report in the back of her mind.

  “Exc
use me, Doctor Holmes.” Walter Keane, the Secretary of Defense, waved the thick packet in front of him. “It was very kind of Doctors Radcliffe and Patel to provide us with this, but I’d wager that I’m speaking for most of us in this room when I say that we’re not well-versed in astrophysics, or the nature of what’s heading toward us. Heck, I’m just an old military man who’s trying to understand what we’re dealing with and what our troops can do to help. Can you please explain exactly what the hell is going on in a way we’ll all understand, and tell us what plans you may have to get us out of this damned pickle?”

  Before Dave could respond, the president shifted her gaze to him. “Also, as far as I understand from Doctors Patel and Radcliffe, you were able to predict the presence of the thing that’s approaching us more than nine years before the rest of the world even had a clue. That’s a question that has been haunting me for quite a while. I hate to mention it, but what, if anything, does North Korea have to do with it?”

  With a wry smile, Dave remarked, “No disrespect intended, Madam President, but I sense a bit of Hildebrand’s prejudice and paranoia in that question. However, in your position, I can understand the concern.”

  Just as Margaret Hager was about to retort, Dave held up his hand. “Let me explain. The question deserves a response. I’m a scientist, we all know that—but we scientists still get inspiration at times from unconventional places. Newton had his proverbial apple, a myriad of scientists have in the past been inspired by the work of science fiction authors, and me—I was spurred into action by a dream. Actually a series of dreams. Imagine you’re haunted by images that wake you in the middle of the night. The image of the Earth being torn to pieces as it’s sucked into a two-mile-wide hole in space. Everyone you know, your parents, your children, your friends and neighbors—everything you ever loved—wiped from existence.”

  Bella panned her gaze across the room. Everyone’s face held the same fearful expression. The image that Dave was painting had become all too real for everyone in the room.

  Dave wagged his pointer finger at them. “I’ll tell you what: you have that dream for weeks on end, and you’ll suddenly become motivated to start studying the problem. Don’t they say that necessity is the mother of invention? Well, I absolutely needed to focus on the problem that was haunting me; it’s just the way I’m built. And it was during the time I was being haunted by these images that an old college friend called me with some startling news. When I was in college, there was a South Korean student I knew only as ‘Frank.’ He was brilliant, a savant really. Others are only now researching some of the things that we’d talked about ten years ago. However, it was only after we’d both graduated and gone our separate ways that I learned that ‘Frank’ was in fact the son of the North Korean people’s Supreme Leader, and is, to the best of my understanding, currently ruling that country.

  “Frank and I talked occasionally, but it was nearly a decade ago that he told me about the space probe that his father had launched.”

  “Space probe?” The president asked.

  “Yes. From what Frank said, his father was obsessed with space exploration. Thirty years ago, he’d sent probes to the outer reaches of the solar system, beyond the planets we’re all familiar with and deep into the cloud of debris that surrounds our solar system. I have no idea what his father was hoping to find, but one of the probes had sent back a disturbing set of signals. Frank shared it with me only after I’d sworn to keep the data secret. He needed help interpreting the information, and it only took me a few weeks until I was convinced I knew what it meant.

  “The stream of data I was analyzing was the dying gasp of a space probe as it fell into a black hole. It was then that we knew there was a horrifying danger lurking unbelievably close. I couldn’t be sure about the exact speed and trajectory, but we had some estimates. There was a very strong likelihood that we had not much more than a decade before that black hole drifted across our orbit. I knew that some of the things Frank and I had talked about in college were suddenly going to have to shift rapidly from theory into prototype. That was when my quest began, a quest to somehow evade the fate that the most powerful object in the universe had in store for my world.”

  Dave stood, and as Bella sensed that he was struggling to organize his thoughts, her own mind sorted through the raw data she’d been given. She was running through a complicated game of 3-D pool.

  “That’s really all there is about the North Korea thing. I have no other explanations that are worth talking about for now, but let’s focus on the General’s question. Almost ten years ago, I began to think about the problem we’ve been given. Some of the ideas that Frank and I had discussed helped me stumble onto a seventy-year-old paper by Miguel Alcubierre talking about gravity bubbles, and that got me thinking. It really comes down to the warping of the spacetime fabric that ...” Dave paused, and Bella sensed that he was concerned about how technical his description was about to become. “Make it simple,” she overheard him admonish himself.

  With a grim expression, Dave began to pace back and forth. “Actually, before I go into the solution, let me briefly talk about space and the danger that we’re facing. We’ve all seen the pictures of planets and asteroids. We know that in space, there is great beauty; however, there are dangers almost beyond imagining. Would you believe that there are objects in space that are no bigger than ten miles across, yet if you were anywhere within several hundred miles, its magnetic pull would be so great that it could pull all of the iron out of your blood cells? Well, such things exist, and they’re called magnetars. They’re what can happen to a giant star, much bigger than our own, near the end of its life when it collapses on itself. Yet when such a star collapses, its gravity is so strong that it crushes all the mass of the star together. Even the atoms themselves are crushed, leaving only neutrons behind.”

  Dave glanced at a nearby table that had been set up with coffee. He retrieved a teaspoon and showed it to the room. “Just a teaspoonful of one of those things would weigh billions of tons.” He tossed the teaspoon onto the middle of the conference room table, and it clanked loudly as it bounced halfway along the table’s length, grabbing everyone’s attention. With an ominous tension in his voice, Dave said, “But that’s nothing compared to a black hole. Imagine that there is gravity so strong, that it crushes even the neutrons into nothingness, falling into an infinitesimal dot called a singularity. At the center of the rapidly-spinning black hole is just such a point of unbelievable gravitational forces. Anything grabbed by the gravity well of this celestial monster will either be flung into the far reaches of the galaxy or gobbled up and added to its mass. That’s the fate that awaits us. Our planet will either be swallowed whole or be flung in the cold reaches of interstellar space. I suppose the good news would be that we’ll almost certainly never experience either fate, because before that, we’ll be bombarded by asteroid impacts that will devastate the surface of our planet a thousand times over.”

  Dave turned to Bella and pointed to the stack of papers in front of her. “How long before the first objects cross Earth’s orbit?”

  “About 276 days,” Bella replied confidently.

  While Dave explained the dangers of space, Bella had finished playing her mental game of 3-D pool, the black hole being the spinning cue ball and the 114,483 objects in the report being the wide variety of objects in its way. Some would certainly be swallowed by the black hole, but many would be flung in all variety of directions. Many of those would be launched ahead of the black hole, while some would collide with others. But a good percentage flew unimpeded toward Earth. Those that would arrive first had spawned the answer she gave. Many others would follow, but it would be 276 days before the first ones hit.

  Neeta gasped and turned to Bella. “How could you come up with that number?” She rapidly flipped through the first couple of summary pages of the report. “I was told not to include that number. It was to be reported only verbally. And besides, it took our computers
three days to model all the possible interactions between everything listed in our astral-body census.”

  Dave asked, “Was Bella right?”

  Neeta stared wide-eyed at Dave. “Exactly right, but I don’t—”

  “Remember when I told you that Bella is smarter than all of us put together?” Dave winked in Bella’s direction. “I wasn’t kidding.”

  With a feeling of satisfaction, Bella leaned back in the comfortable leather chair and tried to keep an uninterested expression on her face. Once people realized what she was capable of, they shied away from her, which didn’t bother her in the least. Dave had once explained that most folks were intimidated by people they didn’t understand. He’d lived through that himself. Bella had watched as Dave coped with it, but she wasn’t sure how to react to the praise he tended to heap on her. After all, she was simply doing what he’d learned to do—but just a bit faster.

  Dave bent over the back of Burt’s chair and asked softly, “Do you think we can get a more detailed survey of all the objects between the black hole and us, no matter how small? That’ll help us get a more accurate picture of our timeline.”

  Burt nodded. “We’ve got a dozen of the most capable observatories working full time on that already, but we’ve had to limit it due to security issues.”

  The president, overhearing the exchange explained, “Doctor Holmes, we can’t risk word of Indigo spreading further than it has. There would be panic in the streets.”

  Dave nodded. “I understand.”

  He stood up straight and addressed the others in the conference room. “I know I’ve been nonchalantly describing our impending extinction, but there’s hope. I learned during the flight over here that some of the key preparations that I’d begun while at the ISF were actually continued. That was something I’d really worried about since I’d ... since I’d gone incognito for a few years.” Dave tilted his head toward Neeta. “We can all be grateful to Doctor Patel that she’d managed to convince some of those people that I wasn’t completely nuts, and some key things that we’ll all need are still being manufactured and stockpiled.”