“What in the hell just happened?” Sara demanded.
Julia looked at her again, aware now that her appearance had changed dramatically. Her face was caked with dust and sweat, and a trickle of blood ran from one eyebrow and down her cheek like a tear.
When she observed how different the woman looked, it was if the scales fell from Julia eyes. Not just her, she thought. Everything is different.
Indeed, as she looked around, she couldn’t see anything that looked even vaguely familiar. Part of that might have been attributable to the inadequate illumination provided by the LED flashlight, but even that was an important detail. No lights. Were they even still in the museum? Her surroundings looked more like mineshaft after a cave in. Dust swirled in the air, coiling away as if caught by a draft, but she felt no breeze. Still, amidst the chaos, she began to discern familiar features of her environment. They were still in the Louvre; in fact, although nearly every trace of the exhibit was gone, she saw that they were still in La Chappelle gallery.
The wall coverings were gone, the old stone underneath riddled with fractures and in some places, gaping holes. The most dramatic difference however was the floor. An enormous crater had appeared in the center of the room, its focal point almost exactly where the display case had been. She had no memory of moving away from the area-perhaps Carutius had carried her, carried all of them-but the place where they had been standing was now a void, falling away into darkness. The dust motes, illuminated by the flashlight beam, were spiraling into the hole like water running down a drain.
She struggled to sit up. The disorientation she had felt upon waking persisted. Despite what her eyes told her, she had the feeling that if she moved the wrong way, she might pitch forward into the pit. The sensation reminded her of a carnival funhouse, but this was no mere trick of architecture or perspective.
She found the girl, huddled near Sara, and then she saw Carutius. The big man, who always seemed so confident and in control, now looked positively defeated. He knows…
“What did you do?” The accusation was out of her mouth before she knew it. “You caused this. Or you knew it was going to happen.”
Carutius raised his head and met her stare. “I was trying to prevent it.”
“Prevent what?” Sara demanded. “What is going on?”
The big man took a breath and let it out with a sigh. “It’s not safe here. We should get outside.”
“Screw that,” Sara retorted. “We’re all dead already. Lethal concentration of gamma rays…that’s what you said. So the least you can do is answer my question.”
Julia realized that her fingers were curled around a thin piece of plastic. It was the film badge dosimeter. She held it up and inspected it in the diffuse light, certain that she would discover that it had returned to normal…that she had only imagined the color change.
The center of the disk was dark.
Gamma ray exposure…followed by some kind of explosion… She knew of only one explanation for that: an atomic bomb.
Carutius considered Sara’s demand for a moment. Then his gaze moved to Fiona and gradually the despair in his eyes was replaced by a measure of resolve. “Very well. I will answer your questions. But we must move away from here. It may be that we can do something…” His voice trailed off, unwilling or unable to elaborate. “Stay low. Crawl on the floor. The effect will be less pronounced as we move further away from the event horizon.”
Event horizon? Had she heard that right? A point of no return, from which not even light could escape, and where time would appear to stand still.
Julia was an anthropologist, a student of history, not a physicist, but she knew what an event horizons were, and she knew that they could be found only on the edge of a specific gravitational anomaly.
A black hole.
29
King angled the Zodiac toward the riverboat’s gangplank and killed the outboard, letting the craft’s momentum take it the rest of the way. The brightly lit exterior deck of the floating casino was crowded with passengers gazing out in shocked amazement at the darkened city skyline, but it was a sure bet that at least some of them had noticed the approaching inflatable, and it was only a matter of time before Brown’s security men were alerted to his return.
He slapped Brown’s face a few times to rouse him, and hauled him into a sitting position, the barrel of the Uzi pressed against the base of the gambler’s neck.
“Keep your mouth shut and you just might live through this,” King growled. He didn’t like the idea of walking in the front door using Brown as a human shield. There were too many variables in the situation, too many ways it could end badly. During the trip back to the riverboat, he’d racked his brain to come up with a better alternative, but there simply weren’t any other options.
Brown offered no resistance as King guided him onto the gangplank. An armed man in formal wear, easily identifiable by his burly physique as one of the Alpha Dog mercenaries, stood at the top of the ramp. King stayed behind Brown, but made sure that the Uzi was visible.
“You know how this works,” King called out. “Anyone makes a move against me and your boss is dead.”
The man raised his hands in a placating gesture, his pistol pointing skyward, and offered a strange smile. “You’ll get no trouble from us.”
King did not relax his guard as he manhandled Brown up the gangplank and onto the reception deck. “Take me to Pradesh.”
The security man slowly holstered his pistol and gestured for King to follow. The murmuring crowd parted to allow them through and a few moments later, they entered the deserted casino. “What’s going on out there?” the guard asked. “An earthquake or something?”
King wondered if the inquiry was an attempt to distract him as a precursor to some treacherous action, but the man’s tone sounded genuine. Brown probably hadn’t shared the details of his plan with his hired guns. “That’s what I’m here to find out. Your boss here knows, but he’s not telling. That’s why I need to talk to Pradesh.”
“He’s not my boss,” the mercenary replied. “At least I don’t think he is. We get all our orders by text message, and right now no one’s answering.”
“Don’t expect that to change. Brainstorm is finished.” King appraised the man a moment longer. “But if you’re not ready for the unemployment line, I could probably find some work for you.”
The mercenary gave him a sidelong glance. “You work for the government, right? A white hat?”
“Something like that.”
The man chuckled. “Hell, why not? The name’s Rick Chesler. I’d shake on it, but I can see you’ve got your hands full right now.”
King nodded. He still had reservations about Chesler’s abrupt change of loyalties, but he was a mercenary-changing loyalties to whoever cut the checks was part of the job. Plus, King’s instincts told him the man was genuine-not all mercs were cold-blooded-and right now he needed all the help he could get.
The awakening was not merely an end to the long period of dormancy-something which itself possessed no meaning for the entity. It had not “known” that it had been sleeping any more than it was aware that it had existed at all prior to this moment in time. But now it knew.
It was not alive, not by any human definition at least. But like a virus, following the inexorable dictates of its internal chemistry, the entity was attuned to its surroundings and possessed of a singular purpose.
As with everything else in the universe, it was bound by the laws of nature. Existence required energy, and while the entity did not hunger for sustenance, the infusion of raw matter triggered a positive feedback loop; as mass was added, its internal gravity increased, which in turn attracted still more material, exponentially increasing intensity.
But that was not the purpose that now defined the entity.
It did not yet perceive the physical world, but it was self-aware, and it further grasped that this awareness was fractured, divided into several different parts. Though this essential awareness derived from the fractured parts of what it would eventually recognize as its mind, it understood that to take that next step, it would be necessary to bring together those parts, joining them to each other, and joining together with them.