“No,” she said, slowly shaking her head.
“Wait,” Lee said to Clay. “You mean…”
“Your computer system has done something that no other has,” Clay said grimly. “It has data that can now point back to that mountain and what may lie in Africa.” He was still looking at Alison. “And that data needs to be protected.”
Alison instantly hardened. “They’re not taking it, John! They’re not taking IMIS. If they do, it’s going to be over my dead—”
“Easy, Ali,” he said, interrupting her. “Langford and Miller are right on this, but that’s not what they’re saying. If the rest of the government can’t know what we’re up to, then they certainly can’t have access to IMIS. No one can. But here, in this research center, it’s not safe. It can’t be protected here.”
“So what do we do?”
Even on his crutches, Clay’s blue eyes were strong and determined. “We move it.”
“Move it? Where?”
“Borger is working on that. But that’s not the part you’re not going to like.” He paused again while the others stared at him impatiently. “It’s not just the data… it’s also the work.”
DeeAnn was the first to understand. And while Alison and Lee were still pondering his words, she spoke up with a smirk. “You mean our achievements.”
“That’s right.”
Alison looked back and forth, confused. “What?”
“He means what we’ve done. Our achievements… and our press releases.”
They still weren’t following.
DeeAnn stared at them wryly. “Don’t you see? They want us to retract everything.”
They all turned to Clay, dumbstruck.
“Is that true?”
Clay had been waiting to break it to Alison at the right time. And this particular moment was clearly not it. He nodded apologetically. “Yes.”
“Retract? Do you have any idea what you’re saying?” Alison asked. “A retraction is like saying we’re incompetent. To the entire world.”
Clay’s voice became low. “I know.”
“I don’t think you do,” she said, crossing her arms. “And I’m not going to do it.”
He frowned. “They’re going to come for IMIS, Ali. Sooner or later, someone is going to connect the dots. When they find out what IMIS is and what it can do, and what’s in the data, they will descend on this place with a vengeance and a single goal.”
“Not if it isn’t here,” offered Lee.
Clay turned to him. “We’ll move it, but ultimately it won’t matter where it is, Lee. Even if we hide it, once someone realizes this, they’ll find it. All secrets eventually come out, and this one leads directly to IMIS.”
“No,” Alison said. “There’s got to be another way.”
But DeeAnn shook her head, thoughtfully. “No. The world already knows what IMIS can do. At least partly. The best way to avoid creating a path to IMIS… is to make people think it never worked in the first place.”
“No,” Alison argued. “We can do it without destroying our careers! We can do something else. We can announce that IMIS is damaged, irreparably. Or the data was lost. Or—”
“Computers can be repaired,” Lee mumbled. “And data can be recreated.”
“Then think of a way it can’t!”
He shook his head. “There isn’t a way, Ali. Even if we thought of a cover, and hid the system away, we still need a connection to it. And all connections are traceable, eventually. And if we broke that, we wouldn’t be able to communicate with it either. Hiding IMIS isn’t as easy as it sounds.”
“The only way,” DeeAnn said, “is to convince everyone that it doesn’t work.”
“But too many people have already seen it work!”
“I don’t think that’s what DeeAnn means,” Lee said quietly. “We’d have to claim the translations themselves were faulty. That the results themselves were wrong. That’s the only way the scientific community would dismiss it. The only way the world would dismiss it.”
This time, Alison didn’t reply. She simply stood, facing them in utter astonishment. Her sudden anger with Clay was already fading to helplessness. Her mind tried desperately to find a way that he was wrong, but she couldn’t. She knew as well as they did how critical IMIS was to all of this.
It was the catalyst that had changed everything. That was still changing everything.
But she just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t throw it away. Every bit of recognition she’d fought so hard for. Every bit of acceptance by those who had criticized her efforts and claimed it could never be done. The same people who mocked her in their own papers. She had proven them all wrong! And now she was faced with the prospect of letting them all think they were right. While simultaneously becoming a laughing stock of the entire scientific community. The very idea was simply horrifying, and it left her utterly speechless, standing before Clay and the others.
That kind of retraction would take more humility than she could even imagine.
All to protect a secret, resting on the bottom of the ocean.
6
“What do you think it is?” Caesare asked, peering intently at the screen.
Borger slowly shook his head from side to side. “I have no idea.”
Together they watched the video footage again with Caesare in the foreground, next to Lightfoot, one of Captain Emerson’s engineers. The two men floated almost motionlessly underwater, facing the large, smooth gray wall. In the video, Caesare continued to probe the wall’s surface with his black diving glove, watching the illumination appear and linger for a moment before fading away once again. He examined the glove through his mask and rubbed his fingers together. He then turned and presented his glove to the camera. After staring into the lens for several long seconds, Caesare turned back around with an afterthought and silently withdrew a diving knife from the black sheath strapped to his calf.
The large blade glistened only briefly before Caesare held it up close to the ship. Then something happened. The blade unexpectedly sprang from his fingers and stuck itself to the wall in front of him. It was there that the video froze.
Borger turned to face Caesare. “What kind of knife is that?”
“Stainless steel.”
“I thought stainless steel wasn’t magnetic?”
“Most knives are. Not enough nickel in them.”
“Hmm,” Borger mused. “Well, I guess the thing is magnetic then. But that glow — it doesn’t appear to be any kind of bioluminescence. Or film.”
Caesare nodded his head in agreement. “Nothing came off on the glove.”
“And we still haven’t found any marks on the thing.”
“None.”
“Strange,” Borger muttered, instinctively reaching for a sip of Jolt cola only to find a bare desk top. Disappointed, he reached instead for the keyboard and began typing.
“Well, this is what we have so far.”
The frame quickly zoomed out and into place among dozens of others. Combined, they presented a picture similar to a jigsaw puzzle, with most of the pieces still missing. But even without the rest, the parts they had were already intimating at the ship’s overall size and shape.
“The damn thing is big.”
“Very,” Borger agreed, nodding. He leaned back, staring at the curvature of the alien hull. It wasn’t as long and straight as they had originally thought. Instead, the edges were a bit rounded. Somewhat like a softly shaped rectangle. And even though most of it hadn’t been thoroughly mapped yet due to all the underwater vegetation, the thing was undeniably huge.
Caesare ran a hand through his black damp hair, and then dropped it to cover his mouth, pondering. “How could it not be damaged at all?”