Then the lights went out.
The desolate blackness lasted only a fraction of a second before battery-powered emergency lights flashed on, illuminating the path to safety. But they left most of her world shrouded in funereal shadows. She stayed where she was, praying to gods she didn’t even believe in for the ground to stop moving.
One of them must have been listening. Although Carter thought she could still feel the world rocking beneath her, the shattered fragments of glass on the floor laid still. The quake appeared to be over.
She pushed away from the doorframe and hurried down the hall. There would be aftershocks, and she didn’t want to be underground when things started moving again. But getting out of the subterranean complex was not her first priority.
“Cintia?”
“Dr. Carter?” A quiet voice reached out to her from the gloom. “Are you okay?”
Carter felt a surge of relief. “I’m coming.”
A few more steps brought her to Dourado’s office. The room was in disarray, but the strangest part was the absence of light emanating from the multiple LED screens that lined the room. Dourado, her face and fuchsia hair coated with plaster dust, sat in her ergonomic chair surrounded by the lifeless monitors, looking bereft, like someone struck deaf, dumb, and blind.
“Cintia, come on,” Carter urged. “We need to get out of here.”
The computer expert looked up at her and blinked. “The generators should kick on soon.”
“That doesn’t matter. We can’t stay down here.”
“But Dr. Pierce… The team… They need us.”
Carter glanced at the black screens. Dourado’s computers weren’t just magic windows through which she could escape reality. They were her connection to the rest of the team at the Russian archaeological site. More importantly, the computers were the team’s connection to her, their lifeline if something went wrong.
The hardware in the room wouldn’t be of much use to the team or anyone else if the ceiling crashed down on them, though. Carter was about to tell Dourado as much when the screens began lighting up, displaying a welcome message, as the central operating system booted up. The overhead lights flickered to life as well.
Dourado breathed a sigh of relief. “See?”
Carter pursed her lips. “Can’t you do this from your tablet?”
Dourado shook her head. “There are too many systems running. Too much data to manage.”
Carter sank into an empty chair. Dourado was not going to budge, that much was clear. Maybe Pierce would be able to talk sense into her. “How long until you can re-establish contact with them?”
“That’s the other problem. They went underground. We’ll have to wait until they come out. And they don’t even know what’s happening.”
“The earthquake?”
Dourado shook her head. “The Russians. They didn’t buy Dr. Pierce’s cover story. They’re sending FSB officers to detain them.”
Carter forgot all about aftershocks. “And you don’t have any way to contact them?”
“Not until they come up for air.” She frowned at the screens. The welcome message was gone, but now another notification was being displayed:
Unable to connect to network.
“And not if I can’t get online.” Dourado grabbed a wireless keyboard off the nearest desk and began typing.
Carter tried to follow what she was doing, but the dialogue boxes and command prompts were popping up and disappearing too quickly for her to make sense out of any of it. “Maybe the quake knocked out the Internet.”
“It did,” Dourado confirmed. “Local lines are down. But we have a satellite back-up. No way the quake touched that.”
A few seconds later, a new message appeared:
Connection established.
Dourado pumped the air with her fist and then resumed typing. A new page opened on one of the screens, a blank white square, just waiting to be filled up with information. After about thirty seconds, more words appeared:
Connection timed out.
Dourado spat out an oath in her native Portuguese, and started over, but the results were the same.
“Is the satellite out, too?” Carter asked.
“No. I mean, I don’t know.”
“Maybe the lines are jammed,” Carter suggested. “Too many people trying to use it at the same time. That’s a thing, right?”
“For cellular and land-lines, yes.” Dourado’s expression twisted in disdain. “This is something else. Let me try something.”
The woman’s fingers flew over the keys and then she pumped her fist in success. “Yes! I’m on a restricted military satellite. Let’s see how bad this earthquake was.”
She entered a new command, and the white window was replaced with the logo of the United States Geological Survey. A moment later, it was replaced by a map of the world, with the continents rendered in white and the oceans in gray. Both land and sea were marked with dots of varying size.
The dots, Carter realized, were individual earthquakes recorded by USGS instruments over the course of a week, and the sizes of the dots were a measure of the respective intensity of each quake. According to the legend at the bottom of the map, yellow dots indicated quakes older than twenty-four hours, tan meant quakes less than a day old, and red was reserved for quakes less than an hour old.
All the dots on the map were red.
“That’s not…” She glanced at Dourado. “Is that right? All those quakes happened at the same time?”
The other woman didn’t reply, but continued to stare at the map, eyes wide in horrified disbelief.
Carter gave the map a second look. There were several red dots, many of them overlapping, up and down the Italian peninsula. They ranged from small to moderate in size, which Carter supposed was a good thing. There were a few very large red dots scattered around the globe, mostly along the Pacific Rim, but by far the largest concentration of quakes was in an area comprising Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and all of Europe, as far east as the Urals.
Carter let out a gasp as the significance of that hit her. Now she understood Dourado’s concern. A medium-sized red dot covered the border region of Russia and Kazakhstan — the area where the Cerberus team was operating.
Underground.
“I’m sure they’re alright.” The platitude sounded hollow in her own ears. She swallowed, feeling helpless, and turned back to the map. “Did all these earthquakes really happen at the same time?”
Dourado tapped a few keys, opening a sidebar next to the map. There was a list of quakes, with detailed information about the location, depth, magnitude, and time of occurrence, and while the screen only showed the first ten or so quakes, one commonality was apparent.
Every single quake had occurred at almost the same time: 1000 hours UTC.
As if reading Carter’s mind, Dourado brought up several different news feeds from all over the world on different screens. The BBC newsroom was in chaotic disarray, the anchors apologizing for the lack of information and admitting that they were unsure if their broadcast was even hitting the airwaves. The American 24-hour news networks seemed to have a better handle on the situation, with bold graphics and screen crawls repeating what little they knew. Reports were still coming in. Most of the quakes, including the one that had rocked Rome, were minor—5.1 magnitude or less. Enough to break a few windows and crack the sidewalks, but not enough to cause major structural damage. Less developed areas in North Africa and the Middle East, where building codes were lax if they existed at all, had not fared as well. Some places had suffered extensive damage. The number of casualties was unknown, but estimates ran to seven figures. The one clear message they were sending out confirmed what Carter had surmised from the USGS map. The quakes, hundreds of them, had occurred simultaneously, and that was indeed remarkable.