Second Contact, page 44
part #2 of Not Alone Series
As the global media debated trivial minutiae, almost no one on Earth knew just how precariously their world hung in the balance.
C plus 6
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
In the hours after William Godfrey announced the GSC’s first ever unscheduled summit of leading scientists and government representatives from its primary member states, the world continued as though nothing extraordinary was going on.
No one could bank on how long this calm would last, but the first full post-detection day had passed without any hints of public suspicion and Godfrey had successfully made it through an announcement which Emma had identified as something of a banana skin.
The announcement pleased rather than surprised Dan, who had received a heads-up from Timo via Godfrey himself. Dan — again via Timo — had also been kept in the loop on matters relating to the continued observation of the approaching Comet Conte-Abate. This semi-officially designated name was already falling by the wayside, however, as Alessandro Bonucci’s Il Diavolo name spread from the Cavalieri Observatory and quickly came into common usage among those in the know.
Some of the new observational data shared with Dan came from Timo’s various ground-based observatories, but he was more interested in that which came from the GSC’s orbital telescopes of the kind Timo had long wished to emulate and exceed with his proposed orbital observation platform.
Dan knew that the infamous 1908 blast at Tunguska, the force of which had flattened trees across an area of some two thousand square kilometres, was widely believed to have been caused by an incoming meteor no larger than two hundred metres in diameter. He also knew that the dinosaurs were widely believed to have been wiped out by an asteroid with a diameter of around ten thousand metres.
While awaiting a firm size estimate from the GSC, Dan had prepared himself for news that Il Diavolo’s size would likely fall closer to the dinosaur-killer end of the spectrum than the tree-flattening end. What he hadn’t prepared himself for was the revelation of just how close to dinosaur-killing proportions Il Diavolo would be; what he hadn’t prepared himself for was word from the GSC that its length was “on the wrong side of eight kilometres.”
“At least when they make the movie of this, they can’t quite say the usual thing that it’s the size of Manhattan,” Clark had quipped in an effort to lighten the mood. But in truth, Dan’s mood hadn’t shifted greatly despite the shock of the GSC’s size estimate. To Dan, it was like the difference between being stabbed in the heart with a four-inch blade and being stabbed in the heart with a six-inch blade; either way, he’d be dead if the knife got in… what mattered was parrying it away before it got too close.
With the energy of the impact sure to be heightened by the fact that the comet was approaching at a significantly greater speed than the average asteroid, it wasn’t a case of choosing the strongest adjective among the likes of catastrophic and cataclysmic to describe the level of destruction; if Il Diavolo wasn’t stopped or at least diverted off-course, its impact with Earth would spell destruction that was nothing but total.
The other troubling update, which again changed little in a tangible sense, was that the GSC’s initially calculated impact probability of 99.2% had been increased to 99.7%.
Alessandro’s “essentially one hundred percent” comment, which Emma in particular had quietly hoped to be a frightened exaggeration, was now supported by independent deep-space observation. Alessandro’s 90,000-year estimate of the comet’s orbital period was also well within a reasonable margin of the GSC’s estimate of 95,000.
The description of Il Diavolo’s orbit as “highly eccentric” was a brief source of hope for Emma, Clark and Tara until Dan and Timo clarified that in an orbital context the word eccentricity had nothing to do with erraticism or changeability but rather related to how much an orbit deviated from being perfectly circular.
The data was sound and the conclusions were clear: Il Diavolo was gargantuan and it was going to hit — hard and fast.
Aside from the new data, the main news of the afternoon was that Alessandro Bonucci himself would be among the Fiore Frontiere delegation in Buenos Aires. He was the only name Dan recognised on a list of six which was mainly composed of staff from Timo’s small planetary defence team regularly stationed in South Africa, to whom Alessandro had sent his initial observational data before anyone else.
In a broader and more general sense, Godfrey’s definitive announcement of an imminent summit also removed some of the helplessness-induced anxiety among Dan’s group; the only sensible course of action at this point was keeping quiet about everything while the summit took place. While this didn’t do much to assuage their acute and natural fears about the colossal comet heading their way, the fact that an external one-week timescale was now in place did go some way towards reframing the problem as one which could potentially be addressed in a manageable and linear manner.
This was certainly true for Dan, though he may have overestimated the difference it made to the rest of his inner circle.
Outside of the Birchwood bubble, Saturday’s anti-GSC protests in various cities failed to build on previous turnouts as the announcement of a meaningful summit took the wind out of the protests’ sails in the eyes of many. Godfrey’s concession to allow Timo to send a delegation, meanwhile, had convinced many others that the GSC was ready and willing to change on the back of its recent negative publicity. The issue of the Kerguelen memo wasn’t one which would go away on its own, but no one in a position of informed authority was any longer paying attention to it; as far as they were concerned, it was, if anything, a useful distraction from the real issue.
The afternoon and evening news cycles were dominated by discussions of the upcoming GSC summit and particularly the game-changing invitation that had been extended to a Fiore Frontiere delegation.
Some other exceedingly wealthy individuals who half-heartedly harboured space-related ambitions queued up to bemoan what they saw as a double standard in the fact that one private enterprise was welcome in Buenos Aires but others weren’t. The scale of Timo’s historic investments in the space sector and the sheer amount of money he was willing to throw at planetary defence didn’t seem to register with these individuals as relevant variables, and news networks across the world were frustrated by a day-long failure to reach Timo himself for comment.
Timo had spent much of the day with Dan while conversing with the chosen members of his delegation as they began their journeys to Buenos Aires. None of them knew what the coming week would bring, but all were leading experts in their hyper-specialised disciplines and many politically-neutral senior figures at the GSC were delighted to have them on board.
It would have been a gross exaggeration and an inaccurate statement to say that anyone had truly relaxed when the summit was announced, but there was at least no longer an all-pervading sense of aimlessness about the comet-stopping endeavour.
An invitation to appear on the next night’s GSC-centric episode of Focus 20/20 was swiftly and soundly kicked into touch by both Emma and Dan when the call came, with neither having the slightest desire to participate.
A little while later, with Clark and Timo next door and with Tara having retired to bed, Dan and Emma sat together on the couch watching mindless TV in an effort to forget the world for a few hours. They were doing fairly well at this until he went into the kitchen to fetch a drink and suddenly asked if she had eaten anything all day.
She hadn’t, and she didn’t lie.
Responding naturally, Dan then asked if she was feeling okay.
She wasn’t, and she didn’t lie.
Although he didn’t have to ask what was wrong, the fact that Dan wasn’t used to there being anything wrong with Emma left him racking his brains for a response. He had seen her angry more than a few times and sometimes scared for a few quickly-passing moments, but never deeply troubled like this.
“We’re going to make it through this,” he said, back on the couch. “Think about all of the smart people at the old national space agencies that are under the GSC banner. I don’t mean the Godfreys and the other politicians, I mean the scientists. I mean the astronomers and the military tech kind of guys. They’re all on the same side, with a budget of all the money in the world. We’re going to make it through this.”
When Emma looked up from the floor to meet Dan’s gaze, there was a slow-moving tear in her eye. “I just don’t understand why they would do this to us,” she said, her voice a shadow of its usual forceful self. “Why would they warn us about a problem we can’t solve instead of just solving it? Who does that?”
“It’s way too early to say we can’t solve it. The summit hasn’t even started yet.”
“And why did this have to happen now,” she went on, paying little attention to Dan’s attempt to lift her spirits, “right when we’re finally, you know… when things are finally so good between us?”
Dan watched as Emma’s hand briefly covered her eyes and as a multitude of new and faster-moving tears appeared when she lowered it again.
“I don’t want to see you like this,” he said.
“So don’t! I’m not asking you to look at me.”
Dan hesitated, trying to choose his words more carefully. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t want you to be like this. No, wait… that’s not what I meant either. I don’t want you to feel like this.”
“Feel like what?”
“This! Upset, scared, angry… whatever this is. Feelings like that aren’t going to help us. They’re not useful.”
“I’m not a robot, Dan! I can’t sit down and decide what I’m going to feel based on which feelings are going to be useful. This is me reacting to a giant comet coming towards Earth too fast for us to stop it,” she said, her tone growing acerbic. “Okay? So I guess what you’ve learned tonight is that I don’t react to this particular situation in a very helpful way. Oh, and this is also me reacting to us being abandoned by a bunch of asshole aliens I used to think were on our side. Sorry if that’s not useful enough for you.”
Dan slowly rose to his feet. “Emma, we’re not doing this.”
“I’m not angry at you,” she replied, sighing out the words in a softer but still deflated tone.
“I know. I’m not angry at you, either.”
Emma shifted in her seat, moving more upright. “Are you angry at them?”
“Get your coat,” Dan replied, an indirect yes. “We’re going to the cornfield.”
C plus 7
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Shortly after midnight, with a note left for Tara to explain that they had gone out for a while to clear their heads, Emma and Dan drove slowly out of Birchwood with their headlights dimmed and made the short journey to Richard Walker’s isolated cottage.
They brought Rooster along for the ride, keen to make the most of his well-proven ability to sense that the Messengers either were or recently had been present in any given area. Rooster’s knack for this had first been seen on the night of his owner’s initial disappearance and had gone on to prove priceless in marking out the Messengers’ invisible thresholds in Lolo National Forest on the fateful day that Emma and Dan came face-to-face with the aliens themselves.
A repeat of that day was exactly what Dan was hoping for; a chance to both ask the Messengers what the hell they were playing at with the cryptic clues leading to a warning humanity was ill-equipped to do anything about, and more importantly a chance to ask them to intervene.
On reflection, Dan didn’t know if “ask” was the right word. Part of him was ready to pull no punches and demand a decisive intervention, while a larger part knew that — given the stakes — he wouldn’t be above pleading or even begging.
It was only as the car turned off the main road that Emma raised a question Dan hadn’t even considered: “What if Walker’s here? What if they put him back again, like last time?”
The reason Dan hadn’t considered this question was that he was so sure of the answer. “Walker is gone for good this time,” he said. “There’s a small chance he might be dead in his room, but they’re not going to keep stopping him from talking then putting him back. He had his warning and he ignored it. One chance.”
Emma was quiet for a few seconds. “You think we’re going to find his corpse?”
“Well, no… because we’re not going inside.”
“I am,” Emma said. “While we’re here, I want to make absolutely sure that Clark took everything important. Joe Crabbe is going to be back here with Walker’s usual supplies before long, and there can’t be anything lying around.”
“Crabbe…” Dan thought aloud. “Walker said that if he doesn’t push a button in his kitchen within any 72-hour period, Crabbe will get a notification or something like that. How long has it been since they took him… three days?”
Emma did some quick sums. “I think it must be around 76 hours. Crabbe couldn’t get here in four hours, but now that you mention it… he was doing an interview with Walker when it happened, so he is going to be wondering why he hasn’t heard from him since. He might have already been here. If he hasn’t, we’ll press the button.”
As the house came into view with no parked cars anywhere to be seen, one thing Emma and Dan were at least relieved to be sure of was that Joe Crabbe wasn’t there now.
“Crabbe must have a key for this place,” Dan said, “so if the front door is unlocked, it means that no one has been here since Clark left. That’s what we want.”
Rooster became excited in the back seat as the car drew to a halt near the house.
“He’s not here,” Emma told him. “But will we see if we can find you a toy? Toy?”
The old dog’s tail wagged like a puppy’s.
As Dan stepped outside, his mind ran through the possibilities. He consciously stopped it, not keen on where it was going.
“Well, Rooster seems happy enough to go inside,” Emma commented, reacting to the dog’s lack of fear as they stood at the front door.
Dan attempted to open it and breathed a deep sigh of relief as it swung inwards. It was unlocked, as Clark had left it.
“Walker?” Dan called into the hallway. Unsurprisingly, no reply came.
Rooster then wasted no time in approaching Walker’s open bedroom door. He hesitated at the threshold, as if remembering what he had felt a few nights earlier but no longer feeling it, and eventually went inside. He walked around the bed and back again a few times before ultimately returning to Dan’s side.
While Rooster picked up an old chew toy and carried it to his cushioned bed in the corner of the kitchen, Emma couldn’t resist checking for herself that Clark really had taken care of all of the security footage from Walker’s camera system. She was pleased to find that he had and likewise relieved to see no other potentially incriminating objects lying around and none of Clark’s blood splattered anywhere following his face’s losing fight against what he described as an alien forcefield.
Dan didn’t like the empty feeling of the house, and particularly the kitchen. Only a week had passed since he’d sat at the table with Walker after being spotted in the cornfield, when Walker had looked and sounded far more vulnerable — far more human — than Dan would have ever thought possible from the titanic man.
Now, two empty whisky glasses sat alone on the table’s rustic wooden surface.
“We should get out of here,” Dan called, seconds after pressing the red button next to Walker’s refrigerator. “I don’t like it in here and this isn’t what we came for.”
Emma entered the kitchen having checked everywhere else, then locked the back door and clicked her fingers to encourage Rooster to get moving. As Emma carried the bed, the dog slowly led the way to the front door. He paused at Walker’s bedroom and let out a low groan of what sounded a lot like sorrow.
“I’ll put this in the car while you’re taking care of him,” Emma said, shuffling forward with the large bed in her hands.
Dan crouched down to Rooster’s level and patted him on the head in an effort to pry him away from the spot outside his longtime owner’s bedroom; the spot where he was so used to waiting every morning in eager anticipation of the door opening. Dan opened the door again now to show Rooster that Walker really wasn’t there, and after a few more sniffs around the room, the dog finally seemed to get the message.
Emma returned from the car with a leash and quickly clipped it onto Rooster’s collar. He didn’t mind this and actually seemed to like it, evidently keen on the idea of a midnight walk. Emma had also picked up a large flashlight from the car, and she now handed this to Dan. He stepped outside and pointed it towards the cornfield.
“Well,” he mused, “this is what we came for…”
C plus 8
10 Downing Street
London, England
William Godfrey’s invitation for a Fiore Frontiere delegation to attend the recently announced top-level GSC summit left Prime Minister John Cole feeling decidedly suspicious.
He had by now been looped in on the cometary threat, but the feeling that something wasn’t right wouldn’t leave him. Cole’s paranoid tendencies had been coming to the fore too often and too acutely for Jack Neal’s liking as of late, and he had even privately expressed to Jack his doubts that the comet was real.
Jack responded to Cole more firmly than usual upon hearing these doubts, insisting that people he trusted on a personal level — including several high-ranking Chinese officials with little love for either Slater or Godfrey — had already independently observed and verified the existence of Comet Conte-Abate.
“Something’s still not right,” was Cole’s stubbornly suspicious reply. “And why the hell haven’t you got anything on this Trey Myers guy yet? How did he know where and when that satellite was going to fall? He’s with Ford and McCarthy and they’re with Fiore, so this is obviously all linked. Why aren’t you doing your bloody job and finding that damn link!”
