Paradigms Lost (53 page)

Achernar unstrapped, having set the plane on autopilot, and came back. “Okay, we’ll start the briefing. First, the summary of what we know so far.

“At 7:02 GMT, sensing stations at various locations registered a shallow seismic pulse located in Mwagne National Park, near the border between Gabon and the Congo. Fortunately, one of our low-level satellites was in position to get a picture within ten minutes of detonation; this is the image you see here.

“The diameter of the primary crater is one thousand, seven hundred forty meters. From this, surrounding blowdown effects, and initial seismic pulse, we estimated a detonation on the order of eighty to one hundred megatons.” He looked at me and Syl. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

I thought a moment, then pointed to the trees. “Only some of them are on fire. The thermal pulse from a nuke—or from a meteorite, for that matter—should have cooked
everything
closer than a certain distance, and I’m thinking that distance should be quite a ways out.”

He nodded. “
Very
good, Mr. Wood.”

“And mundane explosions don’t send out mystical pulses, either,” Syl said firmly.

“Agreed,” Achernar said with a wry smile, “but I can’t put
that
into a
For General Release
report. In fact, I probably don’t want to put it in more restricted reports, either. The fact that you and I—and probably a number of other people—sensed something cataclysmic at the same time is very important to us, but not something we want known outside of a
very
limited circle.”

I was studying the picture carefully. It had the usual distortions and limited resolution of satellite images; contrary to popular myth, you can’t just whistle up a satellite and read the newspaper over someone’s shoulder. But there was still a fair amount of detail . . .

I got up and walked to the screen. “What’s
that
?” I asked, pointing.

In the very center of the crater, almost obscured by drifting haze, was a darker object, maybe greenish.

“Good eyes, Mr. Wood. That is very much what we want to know, and why we are trying to get there as fast as humanly possible—before anyone else can, hopefully.”

“You mentioned a team; you have people other than us, I hope. I’m no forensics expert, and this would be out of even a normal forensics guy’s league.”

“Oh, I’ve got
several
more people coming.” He looked back at the crater and grimaced. “I wish I had even more, but there’s a limit to how many I can trust . . . and how many I can get there. One more thing . . . what do you think it was that we
didn’t
find so far?”

Given that they didn’t have boots on the ground yet, that left remote monitoring of various sorts. So . . . “Radiation. You haven’t picked up any increase of radiation.”

“Not one extra click on the geiger counters, no,” he acknowledged. “Mystery enough for you?”

“Mystery enough, yes. Hopefully we’ll learn something useful.”

“Oh, we will, Jason,” Sylvie said, and her voice had
that
tone in it. “We will.”

CHAPTER 74

Smoking Gun

“Well,” I said finally, as staring failed to make sense of what I saw, “it’s . . .
definitely
not what I expected.”

Achernar’s expression probably matched mine—the dumbfounded expression of a man who’d opened the hood of his car to find that the engine consisted of three hamsters running a giant wheel at three thousand RPM.

Syl didn’t look quite as surprised, but she was obviously overwhelmed by the sheer scale of destruction . . . and, I guessed, the lingering traces of the power that had echoed to her halfway around the world.

A crater over a mile across was impressive enough from the air, but on the ground the sheer scale was terrifying, especially as we’d had to pick our way through flattened forest giants that had been smashed like dry grass in a tornado.

But what held
my
attention was the answer to our mystery—an answer, however, that gave us more mysteries. In the precise center of the crater was a small patch of untouched greenery, no more than three feet across, on a pillar of earth and stone that rose from the bottom of the mile-wide bowl. That little bit of green was at the exact level of the remaining jungle floor surrounding it.

I looked at Achernar. “You have any idea what the heck happened here?”

“It
looks
,” he said, slowly, “as though the blast was centered right above that untouched column, and somehow didn’t touch
anything
in a narrow, narrow cone—maybe a degree or so—from that region, and blew completely outward from there.”

“I don’t think you could pull that off with explosives.”

Achernar shook his head. “I know something about demolitions, and I don’t think you could even come close to that. The nearby concussion would shatter the stone at the base and the whole thing would have collapsed before we got here. I’d
really
like to get a good look at the top of that, but I’m afraid it’ll fall down if anyone tries to climb it.” He pulled a small satellite phone from his pack. “Sif, this is Thor.”

A pause. Then a contralto voice answered, “Sif here. Go ahead, Thor.”

“Did you pack Hugin and Munin?”

“We did. You want them deployed upon landing?”

“Yes. What’s your ETA?”

“Seven minutes to land, ten to unload, ten to your current position.”

“Acknowledged. Thor out.”

“What was all that about?” I asked, as he put away the phone.

“My other teammates will be arriving in about half an hour. With a couple of UAVs—Unmanned Air Vehicles—which will give us a chance to get a good look up on top of that column. Until then, let’s just look around—carefully.”

I was sweating, but the open area allowed a reasonable breeze, so walking the perimeter of the crater wasn’t that bad. I honestly didn’t expect to find anything; if a bomb or something like it had gone off, I couldn’t imagine that any pieces would be left; aside from bomb fragments, I had no idea what I could be looking for.

“Syl?”

She gave a start. “Oh! Sorry, Jason.” She was following me, but her gaze was clearly not exactly
here
.

“Getting anything?”

“It was . . . magical. That’s all I can say, so far anyway. The traces of magic are so intense I can’t make out anything else; even my . . . talent feels fuzzed. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever felt before.”

“No sign of anything . . . well, anything that
did
this?”

“I haven’t got any sense of . . .” she paused, frowning. She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to . . .
extend
herself somehow, without actually moving in a way I could describe. When she opened her eyes, she looked confused.

“What?”

Syl glanced around quickly, eyes scanning the area, focusing on one particular location about two hundred yards away. “
Something
was watching. I think. But it’s
gone
now.”

I drew my pistol and moved forward carefully. It took several minutes to work our way to that area.

At first, it didn’t look any different than the other parts of the crater rim: fallen trees, flattened brush and blasted dirt. Then I looked closer.

In the thin layer of dirt I saw footprints. Shoeprints, actually. I knelt down and stuck the little yellow marker flags Achernar had given us into the dirt just off to the side of each print, then studied the actual pattern.

“Looks like . . . whoever it was . . . came up out of the crater,” I said finally, not without some reluctance. There seemed to be some scuffmarks right at the edge, and maybe even some smears and smudges on the glassy surface of the crater itself. “Then he or she sat down on this tree trunk.” The footprints bent towards the trunk, which showed slight smudges in the coating of dust that covered it. New footprints faced out from the tree and seemed to overlap those that had approached the tree. I knelt again, looking carefully at the prints. “Looks like sneakers or maybe running shoes. Size . . . six or seven in men’s, maybe.”

“So someone a little small if they were a man, but normal-sized for a woman.”

“Right.” I looked back across the crater. “Damn. Camera’s over there. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d find anything. C’mon, let’s go get it and tell Achernar what we found.”

She glanced at me. “You have that ‘I know something they don’t’ look on your face, Jasie. What is it?”

I grinned faintly, but the situation was too serious for me to find it amusing. “Strange mystical events intruding on our world makes me think of a certain incident . . .”

“Oh.
Oh
. And . . . ?”

“Near as I can tell from Verne’s sketchy guesses, we’re standing right on top of one of the sites of the Seven Towers.”

“But why in the
world
would one of them . . . explode or whatever
now
?” Syl muttered as we made our way back around the crater.

“Not a clue. Maybe Verne will have one, when we get back. But we’d better not say anything more; don’t want to drag them into
that
mess.”

Syl nodded. Project Pantheon might
think
they knew what was hiding behind the façade of normality in our world, but we knew that there was another, much more dangerous layer, and the last thing we needed was government agents poking into the history of Atlantaea.

Getting back was a little quicker. Finally, I caught sight of Achernar about fifty yards away, a pretty woman of about his own height talking to him while two men—one a tall black man, the other large, solid, with short bright-red hair and the pale complexion to go with it—unpacked a couple of crates nearby.

All four of them instantly stopped and glanced in our direction, seemingly aware of everything going on around them.
Definitely from the Super-Spy Academy of Paranoia
, I thought.

“You found something,” Achernar said as we got closer.

“How’d you guess?”

“Aside from your expression? You’re back much faster than I expected.”

I supposed that made sense. “Found footprints. Coming
out
of the crater.”

His eyebrows climbed skyward. “Really. You marked them?”

“Flag for each print and for a couple points of interest. Came back for the camera.”

“Very good. We’ll go check it out. Let me just introduce you to the rest of the team.” He turned first to the black-haired woman, who I could now see was, at least partially, Japanese and maybe Chinese, too. Something about the way Achernar looked at her gave me the feeling that he thought of her as more than just a colleague. “Bambi Inochi, Jason Wood.”

I tried not to grin at the name, but she caught it. “Blame my parents’ love of Disney,” she said as she shook my hand. I recognized her voice as the one that had answered to the codename “Sif” earlier. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Wood.”

“Thanks, Ms. Inochi. This is my wife, Sylvia Stake.”

Achernar then quickly introduced us to Derek Fairchild (the tall black man) and Donovan Grant (the red-haired man). “You finish getting the UAVs set up,” he said, grabbing the camera case. “I’ll want a flyover of that . . . column as soon as possible. I’m going to accompany Mr. Wood to—”

His and Sylvie’s heads snapped around, and I turned just in time to see a flash of light. When it died down, dust was drifting in a thick cloud near the edge of the crater.

Just about where we’d found the tracks.

Achernar’s gun was already out, but Ms. Inochi was
moving
—cutting across part of the glassy crater at a high sprint, somehow not slipping on the steep, slick slope. The other two stayed back with the equipment.

I thought I was in pretty good shape overall, and I’ve certainly learned how to run fast when the occasion demanded, but Achernar was outdistancing both me and Syl, and by the time he was halfway around the edge, Bambi Inochi was already standing at the point where the flash had occurred. But I was already close enough to be sure.

The entire area had been wiped clean as a blackboard with an eraser. There wasn’t a trace of the footprints . . . or of the flags. Achernar looked at me. “You’re sure this was the place?
Exactly
the place?”

“I’m afraid so. The prints came from down there,” I pointed, noting that even the surface was now pristine, “to up about here. They walked to here, and whoever it was sat down on this log, which now is missing its bark for about three feet on either side of where the person sat, and then continued on.”

Achernar frowned. “And both Sylvia and I sensed . . . something, just as this happened. Someone’s here, or was here just minutes ago.”

“Syl said she felt someone watching before.”

“Whoever it was must have realized you found clues there, and when you went back for the camera, did . . . whatever that was . . . to erase the evidence.” He looked to his companion. “Bambi? You got anything?”

The black-haired spy walked lightly across the ground, jumped onto one of the fallen trees and followed that for a while, surveying everything around her. Finally, she came back. “Sorry, James. Not a thing. The evidence says someone had to have been here . . . but I’m not seeing a trace. Whoever it is . . . they’re
good
.”

“And might still be watching us. Dammit.”

I looked around a little warily. To instantly strip something like eight feet of bark from a big tree and wipe everything else clean over forty feet in one shot . . . that would take a hell of a lot of power and control. Verne could probably do it; he’d shown some impressive telekinetic abilities. But this was someone and something else, and the thought they might be waiting there, watching . . .

But there was another side to this. “You know, he or she
could
have done a lot worse.”

Achernar glanced at me, then his eyebrows came down slightly. “I suppose they could have, yes. Whatever did this would probably be easily capable of injuring or killing us. They made sure that no one was nearby before doing . . . whatever this was.” He looked around slowly. “Not inherently hostile, then. Sylvia, what was it you sensed?”

She gave an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Mr. Achernar. Most of my senses are overwhelmed by the power still lingering. I just suddenly sensed something was
going
to happen. What about you?”