Two more soldiers at that door.
Raine walked out of the elevator. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Captain.”
Captain Stephen Hill, a man Raine had always respected even if he didn’t always agree with him, laughed. “To be honest, Raine, never expected to see you here as well.” The smile faded. “In fact, I never expected to see you again.”
“I-um-”
“I know. You’ve got questions. Well, I’ve got answers. I have an office down here. It’s small and a bit of a mess, but it will serve.” Hill took a breath.
“I’m ready to tell you everything.”
Hill had his eyes locked on Raine’s.
Like-he’s sizing me up.
For what?
“I think I’m ready for that.”
A bit of a smile returned.
“So, Lieutenant, you think… you can handle… the truth?”
Such a line. An old movie scene that every officer Raine ever knew could quote verbatim.
“Always preferred truth to its opposite, Captain.”
“Yeah. I know that about you. Okay-follow me and we’ll get started. ’Cause, you see… you don’t have a lot of time.”
As they walked toward Hill’s office, the captain pointed to a little kitchenette off to the side. “Coffee? Glass of water?”
“No, sir. I’m fine.” Why is he stalling?
They reached his office, and Raine took a seat facing Hill’s desk. It was piled with papers, stacks of photos, and an open laptop. Behind the desk, another computer screen. On it was a paused video, cued to run.
“Tell me, Raine. What do you know about Apophis 99942?”
“Asteroid. Doing a flyby of our planet. Big. Seen the pictures.”
“Right.”
Hill hit something on his computer, and the frozen video on the screen began running. It showed a massive object moving through space. The asteroid.
“That animation?”
“No. Real. We’ve had some deep solar system projects out there. Not public knowledge, but they do intersecting loops of our solar system. Give us video feeds. Mainly to watch what other countries might be doing in space. At least, that was the idea.”
“Jesus, Captain. That is mighty big.”
Raine stared at the live image. This careening hammer threatening to destroy anything in its path.
If this rock from space actually was to hit Earth, we wouldn’t have a chance.
“God. The size of a city. Over three miles wide. Good thing it will miss-”
“But here’s the thing, Raine. It’s not going to miss. It’s going to be a hit. A direct hit.”
The words hung in the room like the pronouncement of a death sentence.
Because in that instant… Raine knew that’s exactly what they were.
“An asteroid that big? It would be-”
“A slate wiper.”
The screen changed. Now it was animation, showing the asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere, a massive shock wave racing before it, walls of ocean water rising up, screaming away from the impact well before the asteroid hit.
Then- impact.
No sound. But there might as well have been, as the animation showed an explosion that seemed to bite off a massive chunk of the planet, sending country-sized pieces of Earth flying upward.
Hill touched his laptop.
The animation paused.
Raine shook his head. Hill had been his captain for two major counterinsurgency efforts, a by-the-book officer who stood by his men, and definitely stood by the truth.
So Raine didn’t question what he’d just been told.
But it seemed unbelievable, unreal… impossible.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “The whole world thinks we’re safe. They’ve been told.”
Hill nodded, and gestured to the control room they had passed.
“See out there?”
“Couldn’t miss it. Like Canaveral.”
“Yeah. This is just one of many sites with a similar purpose. Here in America, and in other countries, too. Apophis is coming, and there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about stopping it.”
“So…” Raine took a breath.
The whole mad night had turned surreal. Maybe he’d blink, wake up, and find himself sleeping off the boilermakers from The Hook.
“… we’re doomed?”
Hill sat down. He leaned close. Raine thought -God -that he saw something in the captain’s eyes he’d never seen before. Not in all the bloody streets and valleys of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as bad went to worse.
Were his eyes watering up?
“We couldn’t stop Apophis,” Hill said. “But that didn’t mean we couldn’t do anything. ”
He had looked away, and only now looked up at Raine.
A small smile, and Hill looked away again.
Something else was going on inside his captain, Raine realized.
“Ready for your orders?” Hill said.
Raine actually hesitated before responding. He was a soldier, though, and an officer was about to give him a mission. Somberly, professionally, he said, “Yes, sir.”
Hill stood up.
“C’mon, then.”
And Captain Hill led the way out of the office.
FOUR
They walked up the stairs behind the bank of workstations, toward a door Raine had noticed when he first descended into this command center. The way was illuminated by a mammoth screen that hovered above everything. The only thing on it was some sort of timer: 2d4h37m37s.
The seconds rolling back, flying away, the time left until Apophis hit.
The time left until doom.
The two guards at the door moved aside as Hill waved a pass and the door opened.
“What you’re about to see is not something a lot of people have.”
Hill went in and Raine followed.
And what was there-Raine couldn’t even put a name to it.
He and the captain stood side by side at a railing, looking down at a dark, massive object. One end came to a cone-shaped point. The sides had razor-toothed metal tracks, like what you’d see at a mine operation, ostensibly for digging into the ground and moving rock.
The base looked flat, and wider, like the bottom of a mammoth bullet. And-at that base-a door.
“Captain, I have to admit: I don’t know what that is.”
People in white coats walked around, holding tablet computers, touching them, looking at other screens.
And-surrounding the room-were the ever-present soldiers in full combat gear, holding their machine guns at ready.
As if they were expecting a raid.
“You’re not supposed to,” Hill said. “C’mon-I’ll show you.” He led Raine down another flight of stairs, so that they were on the ground next to… whatever it was. With it looming above him, Raine was impressed by just how tiny it made him feel. They walked around it, and he noticed little details without knowing what they were for. Finally, they completed their circuit.
“It’s called an Ark, Lieutenant.”
“Like Noah?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s why they picked the name. The French call it L’Arche, the Chinese-with no connection to Noah-a chun jia. Means ‘life pod’ or something.”
“Everyone has these?”
“Those with the tech. Those that the scientists who discovered the truth about Apophis 99942 thought could be trusted. Lot of countries still don’t know. They still expect the flyby.”
“An Ark. You’re going to put people in there?”
Hill turned to him. “People are in there. Deep cryo. This one’s hours away from insertion.”
“And that means?”
“Each Ark gets buried somewhere, some nearly a mile deep-depends on the strata and rough predictions of seismic activity over the next century. Each one goes in with the survivors in cryo sleep-”
“Hang on. You call them survivors. This is to save people?”
“Right. Like Noah. Save some of humanity. The best and the brightest. Scientists, doctors, scholars. Each country with an Ark program formed a committee, also top secret.” Hill looked at Raine. “I’ll tell you-it’s fucking amazing no one has found out.”
“Sure is.”