It was for Crichton, too. But he at least had manuals to go by. And he’d boned up, fast, as soon as he got detailed to the mission. He knew the sections on ground survey backwards and forwards but all he knew about aerial survey was from the books and they assumed that the helicopter had been fitted with external systems. No external systems were available so, leafing to the back of the manual, he’d found the section on “field expedient aerial survey.” Which was much less detailed than the standard methods. Get close to the destroyed zone, staying upwind from the site, kick up some dust and get a reading. If it was hot, back the fuck up.
His counter was reading normal.
“This isn’t a nuke,” he muttered.
“What?” the pilot shouted. There were internal headsets but they wouldn’t fit over his gear.
“It’s clear!” he yelled back. “Go in closer.”
“How close?”
“As close as you can get,” Crichton said. “Or set it down and I’ll walk!”
The chopper inched forward, slowly, as Crichton kept his wand out against the prop-wash. Still nothing.
“Set her down!” Crichton yelled. “We’re still clear! I need a ground reading.”
“You sure?”
“There is no radiation!”
“I’ve got the same,” the Emergency Services guy said, looking over at Crichton. “This doesn’t make sense!”
“No, shit,” the specialist muttered.
“Wait,” the copilot called back. He had been looking out to the front as the pilot searched for a reasonably flat place to land. “You can see something at the base of the dust cloud.”
The base of the cloud was dark, obscuring the light from the sun that still hadn’t reached zenith. But near the ground there was a deeper darkness. There was a crater as well, one that looked very much like an enormous bomb hole. The darkness, though, wasn’t at the bottom of the crater. Then an errant gust of wind pushed some more of the dust aside and the darkness was revealed. It was a globe of inky blackness, darker than the spaces between stars on a cloudless night. It seemed to absorb the light around it. And it was hovering above the base of the crater, right about where ground level had previously been.
“It looks like a black hole,” the copilot yelled. “Back away!”
“No!” Crichton yelled. “Look at the dust! If it was a black hole it would be pouring into it!” For that matter, he suspected that if there was a black hole that large the helicopter and most of Florida, if not the world, would be sucked into it faster than it could be seen. The dust wasn’t being sucked in but he noticed that what dust went in didn’t seem to be coming out.
“I’m calling the news service choppers and getting one in here for a visual,” the pilot yelled. “You’re sure there’s no radiation.”
Crichton glanced at the counter that had been forgotten in his hand and then shook his head. “Still quiet.”
“Okay,” the pilot yelled then switched frequencies and muttered on the radio. Crichton looked out the window and noticed one, and only one, helicopter inching closer; apparently the need to get a scoop did not outweigh common sense. He turned back to look at the ball, which didn’t seem to be doing anything and shouted in surprise as something dropped out of the bottom and hit the base of the crater.
It was a giant insect.
No.
It was… It had black and red markings, mottled, not like a ladybug but some of the same color. It was… his sense of perspective zoomed in and out oddly. It couldn’t be as large as it looked, but if it wasn’t, then the pilot in the front seat was a child and his head the size of baseball. Crichton shook his head as the thing, using too many legs, wriggled and got to its feet. It was the shape of a roach, colored red and black and it had… more, way more, than six legs. It looked… wrong. Everything about it was wrong. It scared him more than any spider, however large and they got pretty damned large in Florida, he’d ever seen in his life.
It wasn’t from this world. Not in this time. Or from any time in the past. And, hopefully, not any time in the future. It was from… somewhere else.
It was alien.
“Oh, Holy shit.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Most of the faculty of the university was, presumably, off-campus when the event occurred.” The briefer was from the FBI, which was one of a dozen agencies trying to make sense of the “event.” No name had stuck to it, yet. It was not “Pearl Harbor Day” or “9/11” or “the Challenger.” It was just “the event.” The day still hadn’t passed. By tomorrow, or the next day or the day after that some glib newsman would hang a moniker on it that would stick. But for right now, glued to their TV, tying up the phone lines, people just referred to it as the White House spokesman had as “the event.”
“Presumably because many of them lived near the campus,” the briefer added. “The president, however, lived in Winter Park, outside the blast zone, and one of our agents contacted him. The center of the event, where the…”
“Globe,” the National Security Advisor prompted. “Or hole, maybe.”
“Where the globe now… floats… was where the high energy physics lab used to rest.”
“Industrial accident,” the President said, then laughed, humorously. He’d by now seen the Defense Department estimates and the “updated” estimates from FEMA, which were climbing higher as the day progressed. “The mother of all industrial accidents. Who?”
“The president was unwilling to directly point fingers but we believe that it was probably an out-of-control experiment by this man,” he said, flashing a slightly Asian-looking face onto the screen. “Professor Ray Chen, Bachelors degree and Ph.D. in physics from University of California. Third generation American despite his looks. Formerly a professor at MIT. Professor of advanced theoretical physics at University of Central Florida. He apparently moved there, despite a cut in pay and relative prestige of the facility, because of the weather in Boston.”
“Why not California?” the President asked then waved his hand. “Never mind, irrelevant.”
“Only slightly Mister President,” the national security advisor said. “Thank God it was UCF and not MIT or JPL. We’d be looking at a million dead if it was either of those. And I know, vaguely, about Dr. Chen. But not enough.”
“Bob,” the President said, turning to the national science advisor. The science advisor was not normally part of the inner circle but he’d been called in for obvious reasons. His degrees, however, were in molecular biology and immunology; he’d been chosen for his background in biological warfare against the possibility of such attacks from terrorists. He knew he was out of his league.
“The security advisor probably is as good as I am at this. We need a physicist, a good one, that can think on his feet. Soon.”
“Mr. President?” the defense secretary said. “When the high energy physics building was noted as the location I told my people to scrounge up a physicist. He’s got background in advanced physics and engineering and holds a TS for work he does with my department. He’s a consultant with one of the defense contractors.”
“How soon,” the President asked with a smile. “How soon can he be here, that is?”
“He’s in the building, sir,” the defense secretary said, quietly. “I’m not trying to step on toes…”
“Bring him in,” the President replied.
“Academic egghead,” the Homeland Security director muttered, smiling, while they waited. “No offense,” he added to the national science advisor.
“None taken,” the scientist who hadn’t published in seven years said. “What is his background Mr. Secretary?”