Ragnarok Read online

  All they had been told was that the two tests underway in the ocean between Antarctica and Australia might produce limited atmospheric phenomena.

  “The white-coats say it’s a go. All telemetry was on the money,” Lincoln O’Dowd, Project Director assured, sweeping his hand to include all mission control operators hunched at their monitors.

  “Seismic anomalies within a five hundred nautical mile radius were expected, sure,” Daxton rebutted. “Just about nobody lives within that zone, and yet big questions are being asked at the diplomatic level.”

  “From precisely where?”

  “Hobart, obviously. Perth and Sydney…”

  “Fifteen hundred nautical miles?” O’Dowd’s hand came up to his face and massaged the tension from his jaw. “Okay… That’s a little over spec.”

  “A little… Try two thousand miles… Darwin in the northern territories took a jolt. Grumbles from Auckland.... They’ve all triangulated it and zeroed in on our rig in the Southern Ocean sea….”

  “Fine… but the rest of the telemetry is spot on?”

  “That may be but then why th—”

  “T minus sixty seconds,” the audio-prompt piped in from the operations room.

  The tension in the air grew palpable.

  “I wouldn’t…” Daxton’s voice was an octave high with fear. “I’m strongly advising to abort.”

  DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a US Department of Defense agency responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

  NASA was underwriting these experiments.

  The results from this phase of tests would have implications for humanity’s future.

  Codenamed ‘Time Bandit’, the test firings were, due to technical imperatives, scheduled just ten minutes apart.

  ‘Time’ had just done its stuff, ‘Bandit’ was now mere moments away from popping.

  Together, project Time Bandit would set a new course in interstellar travel. It was the first step to developing an experimental warp-drive engine planned to be NASA’s great leap forward.

  The technology would warp the very fabric of space, allowing a craft to cover the imploded distance between two points instantly—exceeding even light speed.

  Four satellites at the heart of the experiment had been hurtling through space. Time keeping pace just ahead of its partner T-1; Bandit ahead of its partner, B-2.

  All four were a safe 32,786 kilometers out into space, all clipping along on the same trajectory, all at the same orbiting speed of 11,486km/h.

  The speed and distance from earth were critical, as they provided slightly less than a geostationary orbit from the perspective of their rig in the Southern Ocean.

  A geostationary orbit would be precisely three thousand kilometers farther away from Earth than Time and Bandit were.

  But a geosynchronous orbit would be locked with Earth’s rotation. From any spot on Earth, a satellite at that distance would appear stationary in the sky as the Earth rotated in sync below it. A geostationary satellite would not move across the sky, and they needed a bit of movement.

  This experiment required Time and T-1 to move through a very specific patch of sky directly above a rig moored on a sea mound in the Southern Ocean, halfway between Antarctica and Australia.

  The experiment involved antimatter annihilation aboard Time first, and ten minutes later aboard Bandit.

  The detonation was timed to coincide with the most powerful laser pulse ever produced, shot from the rig into the annihilation at the center of the shockwave.

  The theoretical models predicted that the laser would cause the shockwave to spin.

  The spinning shockwave would implode and tear a hole ten miles wide in spacetime like a fleeting black hole.

  Travelling just three seconds and ten kilometers behind Time, was its companion satellite, T-1.

  When Time created the implosion of space, T-1 should leap over the imploded spacetime and instantly appear twenty kilometers downrange on its same trajectory without having to travel the distance.

  And so it had worked.

  Precisely.

  As the dot representing Time had winked out on the monitor, T-1 had leaped one-third of the width of the monitor to the new position.

  The ops room had exploded into jubilant cheers and hugs. But the celebrations were short lived—the bigger experiment was only ten minutes behind and would now go off in less than a minute.

  Trouble was, back on Earth the effects from Time had significantly exceeded the discernible impact predicted.

  Time expended a yield equivalent to two megatons of force, almost twice the 1962 hydrogen bomb result during Operation Starfish Prime in the South Pacific.

  But Bandit was intended to be one hundred times uglier.

  Bandit would yield a 171-megaton event, more powerful than Krakatoa’s eruption.

  Bandit’s companion satellite, B-2, trailing behind would instantly leap over five hundred kilometers—almost the distance from LA to San Francisco—without having to travel through that space.

  “We can’t afford for this to be aborted. Four billion dollars is riding on it… NASA needs the result today if they’re going to keep funding.” O’Dowd paced. The abort button throbbed with a forbidding incandescent urgency on the control panel.

  “You don’t lose four billion dollars if you delay,” Daxton cautioned. “NASA won’t abandon it, not now, not with the result already in—”

  Daxton was science advisor to the project, his authority to order an abort ranking below O’Dowd’s.

  “The test is secret but a mess won’t be!” he cautioned, shrill fear ringing in his voice.

  “T minus thirty seconds, cover and check,” played the prompt.

  Clipped verbal confirmations started rattling in from the operations room.

  “Park insertion.”

  “CHECK.”

  “Max-Q.”

  “CHECK.”

  “L.E.T. jettison.”

  “CHECK.”

  “Cross ratio change.”

  “CHECK.”

  O’Dowd moved to the touchscreen monitor, his hand hovering over the abort button.

  “You’ve got 10 seconds to pull the plug!” Daxton was almost squealing it. He saw O’Dowd’s hand shaking. It surprised him—he didn’t know the man actually had emotions.

  “Inboard cut-off.”

  “CHECK.”

  “Sierra vector staging.”

  “CHECK.”

  “Abort mode four.”

  “CHECK.”

  “End maneuver.”

  “CHECK.”

  “Ignition sequence—and it’s a four, three, two, and one—CONTACT!”

  Bandit’s avatar blip on the monitor winked out, but T-2’s avatar, a sky-blue line on a cobalt representation of earth’s globe trailing behind, kept tracking at the same speed.

  Something was wrong. Had it not detonated?

  It had… Bandit was gone.

  B-2 should have leapt 500km—most of the screen’s width—in that instant.

  A moment later, the shockwave knocked them off their feet. It arrived without a sound and without the freight train signature of an earthquake.

  The earth hadn’t buckled, but it had bucked.

  It felt like the whole world had leapt inches toward the spacetime void.

  The satellite hadn’t moved its track relative to the earth—the whole of earth’s orbit seemed to have bounced toward it.

  “What the FFFFFuck!” O’Dowd was ashen, his hands white, gripping the table to steady himself.

  “I warned you! Told you to pull it.” Daxton was furious.

  All about them was bedlam. Computer monitors tipped over, sirens ringing their private traumas and cautions, too numerous to be attended to. “A really dumb move, Mr. O’Dowd.”

  “Watch your tongue.” O’Dowd was angry too. Angry and frightened. Daxton ranked under him. As an ex-military man, that meant everything. “Remember who y
ou’re talking to.”

  “Yes…. sir,” Daxton said, with little respect.

  Before either man could deal with the pettiness of their interaction, the computer started lighting up with outrage. Every military base, every civilian pop-up warning…every graph and trail of telemetry—both automated and operator-generated—erupted into an orgy of indignity.

  A blizzard of reports of seismic activity came funneling in.

  Like a tennis ball struck by a racket, the earth itself had squeezed and stretched in micro-amounts for fractions of a second, but it was enough to trigger overdue fault lines to relieve themselves.

  Three tsunami warnings went out in the Pacific and one in the Mediterranean.

  Global commercial air traffic control was in turmoil.

  The system self-righted. Then, reports of two planes off Newfoundland rang through. They weren’t responding and their blips were gone from radar.

  The storm of chaos quickly died down, but the media went into a frenzy. All news networks had crimson “BREAKING NEWS” banners emblazoned across their screens, ticker tape headlines awash with speculation and reports.

  Conclusions were wildly leapt to.

  The first conspiracy theorists were already trotting out their pet claims. A cacophony of conjecture began to rise, from alien arrivals to televangelists wasting no time wagging gnarled old fingers and warning of “God’s Wrath”.

  The general scientific, geological and meteorological departments worldwide refused to offer any early opinion.

  Argentia Naval Air Station, Newfoundland reported a sudden and persistent change in atmospheric and sea state conditions.

  An aurora was reported to be dancing in the sky, further south than one had ever been seen before.

  Weather stations up and down St. John’s coast of Newfoundland soon joined the chorus.

  A still and cloud-covered day with swell heights 0.3 meters off Newfoundland had leaped in the opposite direction—in that instant, clouds had evaporated to an aching blue sky and a gigantic swell was running out of the east at 4 meters and more.

  It was more than curious.

  Chapter 3

  Airbus Jetliner, 37,000 feet over Labrador Sea

  Tuesday, 17 August

  Latitude: 47°36'05"N

  Longitude: 48°51'47"W

  It took the captain five minutes to regain control of all aspects of the plane slamming into a shockwave. He was now logging the injury list.

  A broken arm, two cervical and three lumber traumas, several burns from scalding beverages and some significant bruising of those passengers not strapped in.

  Pete and Tegan came out unscathed but for a bath of Perrier from the unfinished glass on the tray. Their lap-straps in place had saved them.

  Five minutes after the first jolt, Pete’s persistence towards her had forced Tegan to give up on work or sleep. She’d slid her paper-slim MacBook Air safely into the pouch of the seat in front of her.

  Five minutes after that, the Boeing had fallen halfway out of the sky—or that’s how it had felt.

  There was a flash—not of light, not of sound, but a body blow deep inside the passengers’ organs and wiring of their brains. It felt like a body-slap from a big, cold, dead fish. Like a demented octopus with four-hundred legs in a B-rated horror film, oxygen masks came cascading out of the ceiling bulkhead.

  People grabbed on impulse for the tube and receptacle, frantically strapping them in place.

  Masked or not, everyone looked around with startled how did we survive that? expressions written across their faces.

  Beyond the ordinary screams that come with the violence of sudden extreme turbulence and injury, this terror was amplified and curdling. Nobody aboard and perhaps nobody in history had ever felt a sensation quite like it before. It struck like an electric bolt, the lingering after effect ringing on with the resonance of a tuning fork echoing in waves through every skeleton and into every cell of every body. It was sickening to the core, as if the very souls of those aboard had been ripped out, pummeled and hurled back in.

  “How weird is this!” Tegan shuddered, her eyes feeling like they were still hopping within her skull.

  “Jezus… weird...?! I thought we Ozzies were owned understatement. Only me ‘n the laundryman know just how weird it feels!”

  All about them conversations along the same lines were being rapidly exchanged.

  The effects abated.

  “And look at THAT!” Tegan pointed out of the window.

  Below them, where a blanket of clouds had lay just seconds before was now clear air to the horizon.

  Evidently it was the same extended out to every horizon as folks on the other side of the plane were doing what Pete was now doing, craning to see past the window seat.

  “Hell of a swell running though,” he remarked.

  Tegan studied it, and it was running huge and lumpy. The longer she stared, the more she got the impression that row after perfect row was heading eastward, away from the coast, directly in their direction. It didn’t mean much, it was just curious.

  All around the plane ran a Mexican wave of infectious lust for news. Blank TV screens were snapped on and those tuned to entertainment were re-tuned to live news coverage.

  A rising murmur carrying the tang and urgency of fear steadily rose in the fuselage.

  From the cockpit, came the signature click of the public-address system. Tegan looked up and saw that the seatbelt sign had never been extinguished.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, from the flight deck I do apologize for the jolt.” Much as it was clear that he was trying to project an air of authority and calm, the Captain’s voice quavered. “We have struck clear-air turbulence again, but all systems check out fine. We are at thirty-fi—” he hesitated a moment, “… that’s twenty-eight thousand feet and the weather looks clear ahead. We are in contact with traffic control and all is in hand.”

  There was a static click of the PA disengaging, but before passengers could mouth their opinions the PA clicked to life once more.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, many of you will by now be watching news feeds. We have been advised by air traffic control that there is no need for concern. We seem to have experienced a minor event that was consistently felt around the planet. Scientists advise that the situation is in hand and everything is being done to understand what has occurred. We ask that speculation being broadcast by some stations be treated as such—as speculation. We are holding course for Los Angeles and awaiting further instruction to the contrary. We have several options for landing sooner if that becomes necessary, but I can assure you on behalf of the crew and the airline that everything is in hand. I will keep you up to date on any new developments.”

  Flight crew evaporated from all classes with just one or two representatives patrolling the aisles with smiles too wide, welded in place.

  “Awww, Jeez. Looks like our dinner plans might get scuppered if it goes on like this.” Pete seemed jovial, almost enjoying himself, and then filaments of rainbow light danced over the wing.

  “Would you take a look at that!” he exclaimed, awe in his voice.

  Beyond the porthole and ahead of them, swirled a phantom of ethereal airbrushed neon that yawned as wide as the horizon and as tall as the sky.

  As they watched, the threads of the portentous cosmic show stole away into the blueness of the sky.

  “Very far south for an aurora… and early in the season too,” Pete remarked.

  Gasps and a hubbub of fear burbled through the cabin.

  “…this was Mathew Redondo reporting live from Washington.” The TV was playing in Tegan’s ears.

  “Thank you, Mathew. In other developments, an emergency meeting of the Security Council in New York has been called. We will be going live to the President for a press conference from his retreat at Camp David. Meanwhile, CNN has learned that Seoul is accusing North Korea of an H-bomb test. Pyongyang denies the charges. A spokesman on North Korean television is giving a State-wide a
ddress at this time, making claims that the United States carried out a nuclear test in space as a resurrected push back toward the long-retired “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. Leader Kim Jong-tam is said to have mobilized his army, now massing on the border of South Korea.”

  The plane was eerily silent, everyone aboard with earphones in, tuned to one or another source of information.

  Parents held babies to their chest with alarmed expressions, families held the hands of their children with fervor, the children looked about in silent distress, picking up on the mood of doom. Lovers held hands, terror in wide and unblinking eyes fixed on news monitors.

  “Check this lot out.” Pete drew Tegan’s eyes to his monitor and offered her his earpiece from that side of her head; she plugged it into hers.

  He’d been hunting the news channels looking for clarity and deviation from the round-and-round political claptrap, accusations, confusion and spin doctoring.

  One of the well-known tele-evangelists was being interviewed on Fox. He was assuring the audience that Armageddon was upon them, that “the Lord is visiting his vengeance on sinners. The homosexuals demanding marriage and perverts having their sex…reassigned, as they call it, is an abomination in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord has had enough. The earth has shifted and the stars will begin to fall from the sky precisely as Revelations foretold it. The blood of the la…”

  She took her earpiece out and watched his gesticulating and the wide-eyed unblinking crowd around him nodding their heads in vigorous agreement and support.

  “Right bunch’a loons,” Pete wrote them off. “It’s hilarious.”

  “Yah…but this is big. It seems global, every station covering it. Something spiritual has happened, I can feel it.”

  “Awww, not you too? It’s gonna be raining madness in Yankland. Jeez, I can only cringe. Can just imagine the nukes swiveling round and round, looking for someone to smoke.”

  “It’s not looking good,” Tegan agreed.

  “But nothing’s actually happened though, eh? Just some kind of natural event and the default to panic.”