“Putting it on now, tohunga.”
The recorded message had frozen on its last frame — depicting a hopeful-looking Glenn Spivey smiling into the camera. That image now vanished, replaced by the familiar cutaway Earth, resplendent in fiery complexity. From three northern points at its surface, pulsing columns of light thrust inward toward a rendezvous far below. The dot where they converged wavered as the beams kept sliding off each other.
“I’ve never seen those sites before,” one Tangoparu scientist said. But another commented, “I… think I might’ve. A couple of quick pulses yesterday, just after we hit the glacier. But the traces looked like those strange surface echoes we’ve been getting, so I assumed…”
To a trained eye, the intruder beams could be seen hunting for alignment in the energized, field-rich lower mantle. The Beta singularity, still orbiting through the enigmatic electricity of those zones, obliged by serving as their mirror, focusing the combined effort. The purple dot shimmered.
“They’re less experienced,” somebody near Alex muttered. “But they know what they’re doing.”
“Extrapolating now… Gaia!” The first tech cried out. “The amplified beam’s going to come this way!”
Alex was too busy to turn his head, which would throw off the subvocal anyway. Using the delicate input device was a lot like running full tilt along a tightrope. Ironically, it was easier to order up a simulated image of his face than to use his own voice to shout a warning.
“Rip!” the imitation self cried out as he worked. “Get everyone but the controllers out of here. Take them west, you hear? West!”
Someone else might have had some romantic impulse to argue, but not Teresa. She’d evaluate the situation, decide there was little she could do here to help, and obey without hesitation. Sure enough, Alex heard her voice of command driving the others outside leaving his truncated team to work in relative peace.
The peace of a battlefield. Alex sensed the big, cylindrical resonator swing about at his command and begin throbbing its own contribution to a struggle being joined thousands of kilometers below. There followed something like a gravitational fencing match — his own beam countering and parrying the opposing three as they attempted to unite. Bouncing off Beta’s sparkling mirror, they passed through threadlike filigrees of transient superconductivity, which of late had taken on new orders of intricacy, rising from the core boundary in gauzy loops and splendid, shimmering bows.
Some time ago, Alex had likened the loops to “prominences” — those arcs of plasma one saw along the sun’s limb during an eclipse, which drove fierce currents from the star’s surface into space. Similar laws applied near the Earth’s core, though on vastly different scales. The comparison would have been interesting to contemplate if he weren’t busy fighting to save their lives.
Thousands of the mysterious strands vibrated as fingers of tuned gravity plucked them, stimulating the release of pent-up energy. Some rays scattered off Beta, sending augmented flashes spiraling randomly. There was no time to wonder how his opponents had learned to do this so quickly, or even who they were. Alex was too busy fending off their beams, preventing them from combining to create something coherent and cohesive and lethal.
Alex watched more and more shimmering filaments pulsate in time to his rhythms. Other flashes sparkled to the melodies of his unknown foes. Each flicker represented some great expanse of semimolten rock, millions of tons altering state at the whim of entities far above.
“We can’t hold them much longer!” One of the techs cried out.
“Wait! We have to work together,” Alex urged. “What if—”
He stopped talking abruptly as ripples flowed across the display, and the subvocal sent his amplified speech throbbing deep into the Earth’s interior. Alex switched to communicating with slight tremors in his larynx, letting the machine transmit a message to the others.
Take a look at this! He urged, and caused the Easter Island resonator to suddenly draw back from the acherontic struggle.
His opponents’ beams floundered in the abrupt lack of resistance, momentarily discomfited in overcompensation. Then, as if unable to believe the way was now clear, the three columns came together again tentatively.
Everybody else… out! He commanded. I’ll take it from here!
He heard chairs squeak and topple as his assistants took him at his word. Footsteps scrambled for the door. “Don’t wait too long, Alex!” someone shouted. But his attention was already focused as it never had been before. The enemy beams touched Beta, hunted, and at last found their resonance.
At that same moment, though, Alex felt a strange, fey oneness with the monster singularity. No matter how much the enemy must have learned — no doubt by snooping his files — he still knew Beta better than any living man!
If I wait till the very last millisecond…
Of course no human could control the beam with such fineness. Not in real time. So he chose his counterstroke in advance and delegated a program to act on his behalf. There was no chance to double-check the code.
Go! He unleashed his surrogate warrior at the last possible moment. Behind him, the resonator seemed to yowl an angry, almost feline battle cry.
It was already too late to flee. Alex quashed the adrenaline rush — a reaction inherited from ancient days when his ancestors used to seek out danger with their own eyes, meeting it with the power of their own limbs and their own tenacious wills. The last of these, at least, was valid still. He forced himself to wait calmly through the final fractions of a second, as fate came bulling toward him from the bowels of the Earth.
The Snake River Plain stretches, desolate and lined with cinder cones, from the Cascades all the way to Yellowstone, where outcrops of pale rhyolite gave the great park its name. As near Hawaii and several other places, a fierce needle here replaced the mantle’s normal, placid convection. Something slender and hot enough to melt granite had worked its way under the North American Plate, taking several million years to cut the wide valley.
That pace was quick, in geologic terms. But there was no law that said things could not go faster still.
• EXOSPHERE
They stopped running a kilometer or so to the west, but not because it was safe. No amount of distance offered protection against what might now be hurtling their way.
No, they halted because sedentary intellectuals could only run so far. Teresa took some satisfaction watching June Morgan pant, pale and winded. The woman was in pathetic shape. Serves her right, she thought, rationing herself a small dollop of cattiness. Since she was in charge, Teresa counted heads and quickly came up short.
Manella. Damn! She turned to the Maori security chief, “Keep everyone here, Joey. I’m going after Pedro. The jerk’s probably recording it all for posterity!”
She finished the thought as she ran downhill. Recording what it’s like to be at ground zero. The only ones to view his tape may be ETs at some distant star!
Halfway to the resonator building, she saw a dozen men and women suddenly spill into the late-afternoon sunlight, tripping and scrambling as they fled her way. Good. Alex shouldn’t have stayed in the first place.
Then she realized that neither Pedro nor Alex was among them. “Shit!”
Now she sprinted, rushing past the fleeing technicians so quickly they seemed to blur. But then, the blurring wasn’t entirely an effect of motion. A tingling in her eyeballs and sinuses barely preceded a sharp ringing in her ears, which grew until church carillons seemed to boom around her. Even the dry grass bent and swayed to the pealing notes. Her feet danced of their own accord across the shifting surface.