Or turn it into a weapon, Carter thought, imagining Fallon as a little boy, using a magnifying glass that looked like the Black Knight satellite to incinerate an anthill. Even if he wasn’t malicious, Fallon was reckless. “And it never occurred to you that something like that might be dangerous?”
Tanaka spoke up, his tone defensive. “There’s not a shred of proof linking these earthquakes to our test.”
“I’m not here looking to assign blame. I just want to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Ever. Off the record, is it possible that there’s a connection between your experiment and the earthquakes?”
Tanaka glowered but said nothing. Fallon spread his hands. “I’m afraid it’s more than just possible. It happened.
“Earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of energy stored in the Earth’s crust, usually from the movement of tectonic plates.” He pressed his fingertips together to simulate the oppositional forces. “The energy builds up over long periods of time — thousands of years — and then it’s released in a sudden sharp movement that sends out seismic waves. Something we did today must have caused all that stored energy, in faults all over the world, to be released simultaneously.” He allowed his fingers to slip past each other with an audible snap.
“Could disrupting the Earth’s magnetic field do it?” Carter asked. “A lot of people were worried that HAARP might trigger a pole reversal.”
“Magnetic pole reversals have occurred many times in the past. On average, every million years or so. There’s no evidence that those pole shifts were accompanied by seismic disturbances, though, and in any case, there’s no evidence of severe electromagnetic disturbance. No, I think the culprit is gravity, specifically, tidal forces.
“You probably know about ocean tides. As the Earth rotates, the sun and moon exert a constant gravitational pull on the oceans. But the tides also affect the Earth itself, not just the crust, but the whole globe, creating a measurable bulge that moves as the Earth turns. We don’t notice it because it’s happening on a global scale. Over the last few billion years, the planet has reached a sort of equilibrium — seismically speaking — with these forces, much the same way a spinning top will straighten up after an initial wobble. But imagine what would happen if that equilibrium were to be disturbed by some external force. It would be like bumping the top.”
Carter nodded. “So the Black Knight didn’t just bend sunlight. It bent the sun’s gravity waves, too?”
“That’s my working hypothesis.”
“But it’s over now, right? The top is spinning normally again?”
“I see no reason why it shouldn’t. The sun’s tidal force is less than half that of the moon. I know it may not seem like it, but the bump was slight. These earthquakes would eventually have happened anyway. Some of them might have been much worse, so in a way, this is a good thing. I don’t think we’ll see the same level of seismic activity moving forward.”
It took Carter a moment to digest what Fallon was saying. “Moving forward? Are you serious?”
“Progress only moves one way. And if the data support this hypothesis, we might be a step closer to cracking the problem of artificial gravity.”
Carter narrowed her gaze at him. “What would have happened if the ‘bump’ had been a little bit harder? What would have happened if you had kept it turned on for two minutes? Or five? Or an hour?”
Fallon looked away, unable to endure her scrutiny. “That’s not going to happen.”
“You need to shut this down. Put the genie back in the bottle.” The exhortation was as much for her own benefit — and hopefully for Dourado’s eavesdropping ears — as for Fallon’s. His cooperation was unlikely at best, and even if he agreed to suspend his research, that was no guarantee that he or someone else wouldn’t pick it up again at some future point — uncorking the bottle and letting the genie out once more. “You said you needed the Roswell fragment of meta-material to activate the Black Knight. That’s the only way to do it, right?”
“Technically any piece of it would work, but that’s the only fragment I’m aware of.”
“So we get rid of that and problem solved.”
Fallon bristled. “I’m not going to just throw it away.”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” Carter took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders like a lioness preparing to pounce. While her unique…condition…was not something she could exercise with surgical precision, the mere fact of its existence, of the fury she could unleash, allowed her to project strength, menace even, and that was a force almost as powerful. “Right now, the governments of every civilized nation on Earth are asking themselves if someone has invented an earthquake weapon. I figured it out. They will, too. They probably already have. They’ll be coming for it and for you, and unlike me, they won’t ask nicely.”
When Fallon did not reply, she pressed her attack. “This is how you save the world, Fallon. Bury it deep before someone uses it to start the next arms race. Because if you don’t, you’ll be responsible for whatever happens next. Today was an accident. Tomorrow will be mass murder.”
Fallon sagged a little under the verbal assault, which did not escape Tanaka’s notice. “You can’t be considering this.”
Fallon was silent for a few seconds. When he spoke, his manner was subdued. Defeated. “If Einstein had known, at the beginning, what his research would lead to…” He leaned back in his chair, leaving the thought unfinished. “Maybe we did move a little too fast with this.”
Carter forced herself to relax. It wasn’t the decisive victory she might have hoped for, but it was a huge step in the right direction. Now I just need to figure out how to get that meta-material away from him.
Tanaka, who had been glowering at his employer, looked down at his computer screen, his face registering consternation, then alarm. “This isn’t right.”
“What is it, Ishiro?” Fallon asked.
Tanaka tapped a few keys and the picture on the wall screen updated with a flicker. It still showed the Black Knight with the curve of the Earth behind it, but from a different angle, which altered the satellite’s appearance. A moment later, Carter realized it was more than just a change of perspective. The Black Knight was expanding again.
The transformation was more gradual than before, like the slow movement of a clock’s hour hand, where before it had been as quick as the sweep-second hand.
“What’s happening, Ishiro?”
“I don’t know. It may be responding to Earth’s magnetic field or background radiation.”
Fallon’s anxiety was palpable, as was Tanaka’s helplessness. Carter shared both emotions. “What will happen when it finishes changing? Another bump?”
“It depends on the timing,” Tanaka said. “If full deployment happens on the nightside, probably nothing, provided it cycles down again. If it deploys on the dayside or stays that way when its orbit brings it back around…” He shrugged. “A really big bump.”
“You turned it on,” she said. “Can’t you turn it off again?”
Fallon passed the question to his scientist. “Can we?”
“Another pulse perhaps.” Tanaka seemed to be thinking aloud. “An attenuating frequency.”
“Do it.”
Tanaka nodded and started tapping keys on his computer, but after a moment he slammed his fists down on the table. “I’m locked out.”
“Locked out?” Fallon and Carter asked the question simultaneously.
“We’re being hacked. Someone is overriding our system.” Tanaka looked up. “That must be why the satellite went active.”