‘No. The ship was made available to them, by who or what I have no idea.’
The end of the corridor opens into a massive, onion-shaped control chamber. Rounded walls radiate a faint electric blue. At the very center of the cathedral-style, domed ceiling is a five-foot-wide passage, which rises straight up like a chimney.
‘Is this vessel… operational? Jake?’
Jacob is standing at the center of the room, his eyes closed.
A pencil-thin blue laser light blinks on above his head, its beam kissing his white hair.
Manny jumps back as the chamber instantly powers to life. Blue LED lights illuminate from behind the tinted walls and floor panels, revealing a myriad of alien conduits and circuits, machinery and biochemical plasma ducts.
‘Listen and learn. We’ll call this first lesson Guardian Astronomy 101.’
A volumetric projection takes shape just above the polished floor, the image-a spiral galaxy, rotating like some luminescent cosmic pinwheel in the vastness of space, hauling more than 500 billion pinpoints of light around its slowly swirling vortex.
‘Welcome to the Milky Way.’ Jacob points to the galactic bulge, a swirling cloud of brilliant cosmic dust. ‘Computer, magnify galactic center ten to the power of six.’
In a dizzying zoom, the galactic bulge expands across the entire chamber.
Immanuel stands within the projection, looking down upon a mist of three-dimensional penny-sized fiery red and orange stars, all clustered around the heart of the rotating maelstrom.
Dead center of the galaxy is a black hole. Like the slow-moving hub of a wheel, the black hole appears to be churning the entire galaxy, every so often inhaling one of the tiny stars into its monstrous onyx gullet.
‘The black hole is our galaxy’s power train. Like the nucleus of a great atom, its gravitational pull serves as the glue which provides the cluster of stars its mass. But beyond the human eye, beyond the third dimension, the black hole provides an even more magnificent service. Computer, invert.’
Instantly the stars blink out, their luster fading to a deep purple hue, as if illuminated by a black light.
Manny stares at the black hole, which now glows emerald green. From within its slowly swirling whirlpool of gravity sprout tiny conduits-veins of energy that span outward throughout the darkened heavens of the Milky Way like cosmic subway tunnels.
Splintering away from these gravitational veins are capillaries, which glow a luminescent crimson. Unlike the larger, thicker veins, these thinner spaghetti-like strands seem to be floating through the dark matter of space on their own, their free ends twisting and rotating around the cosmic pinwheel like twigs caught in a drain.
‘You are now looking at the galaxy the way it appears in the nexus. Black holes that originate at the center of galaxies were created in the early days of the universe. If you could survive passage through their vortex, you would enter a parallel universe-a higher dimension of spiritual energy where time no longer exists. When we physically die, our souls pass through these higher dimensions and enter-’
‘Heaven?’
‘Something like that.’ He points to the twisting branches shooting out from the black hole’s steep gravitational well. ‘So powerful is the black hole’s mass that its throat, or event horizon, cannot sustain all of its energy. The pressure-relief conduits branching out across the galaxy are called white holes. White holes violently eject matter into space. Those red squiggly lines that move in proximity to the ejected matter are wormholes. Notice that each wormhole has two mouths located in different parts of the galaxy. The Balam possesses an antigravity field powerful enough to counteract the effects of a wormhole, allowing the starship to use it as a cosmic shortcut across the Milky Way.’
‘And that’s how you plan to get to Xibalba? Through a wormhole?’
‘Now you’re catching on.’
‘But everything’s constantly moving. It’s like… it’s like jumping on a cosmic merry-go-round. How do you even know when and where its entrance and exits are going to show up?’
‘The positions of the wormholes change in relation to the rotation of the galaxy. Each passage has been precisely charted. The Balam knows when it’s time to leave.’
Manny pinches his brow, struggling to deal with this information. ‘Where are we? Where’s Earth? Where’s this Xibalba?’
Jacob closes his eyes. The astrotopography reverts to the original volumetric image. ‘Computer, magnify the Orion spur ten to the power of nine.’
A section of one of the Milky Way’s long outer arms leaps outward, the magnified projection again swimming around them. Below and to Jacob’s right appears a yellow speck. As Manny watches, the area magnifies, revealing Earth’s sun and its planets.
Jacob points high above their heads to three bright pinpoints set in a familiar alignment, the pattern identical to the formation of the three pyramids of Giza.
‘Al Nitak, Al Nilam, and Mintaka, the three belt stars of the constellation Orion. Look just below the stars. Can you see that tiny crimson-and-silver world? According to the Guardian, that planet is Xibalba. Now watch.’
Jacob points to their right. Moving slowly through the three-dimensional cosmos is a paper-thin looping slash of scarlet laser light, running north-south through the Orion arm. ‘Here comes our wormhole. Its proximal orifice will pass between Earth and Mars in seven days, its distal mouth whipping around in time to deposit us in the vicinity of Xibalba. The last time a wormhole intercepted our solar system in this manner was on 4 Ahau, 3 Kankin, the winter solstice of 2012-the last day of the Mayan calendar. The time before that was almost 65 million years ago.’
‘Wait… this thing will arrive in seven days?’
‘No, I said the wormhole’s closest mouth will pass near Mars in seven days. To rendezvous in time means we’ll have to leave Earth in ninety-eight hours.’
Immanuel swallows back the bile rising from his throat. ‘No way… no fubitshitting goddam way, Jacob Gabriel!’
‘Manny-’
‘No!’ The dark-haired twin bolts out of the control room, then races down the passageway, searching for the camouflaged exit. ‘Open up, goddam it! Jacob, let me out! I can’t breathe!’
A panel retracts, revealing the gantry and the inside of the warehouse. He looks down to see the lift rising slowly to meet him.
Desperate to escape, he leaps forward and grabs hold of one of the aluminum tower’s horizontal support beams, using it like a fireman’s pole to descend quickly to the concrete floor – the armed guards already in position as he reaches the bottom.
Meteorology Lab, University of Miami
Tuesday Evening
The Meteorology Center on the University of Miami’s main campus is the latest in a new line of ESD (Environmental Shield Designs) sprouting up along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The building has a second exterior consisting of a domed outer shell, composed of reinforced concrete and steel, designed to withstand hurricane winds up to 220 miles an hour. Inside this barrier is the mainframe, each door and window housing retractable steel shutters that seal automatically at the touch of a switch. Backup generators situated on the first floor can power the entire thousand-room building for two weeks, while satellite relays, wired directly into the curved roof, provide ample reception for the Center’s lines of communication.
Besides its role as a teaching facility, the Meteorology Center also serves as the United States southeast regional headquarters for the Earth Systems Management Agency, an organization that assesses, predicts, and monitors all environmental catastrophes across the globe.
Bruce Doyle rubs his sleep-deprived eyes, then drains the remains of his now-cold coffee. Although the effects of global warming had become increasingly apparent as early as the late 1980s, the U.S. government’s response to the problem was too little, coming too late. Doyle, the regional director of the ESMA, often equates the public’s delay with sticking one’s hand in a pot of cold water on a simmering stove. Because the changes in temperature happen so gradually, the victim never realizes the danger until flesh starts peeling away from the bone.