Blackout ck-3 Read online

  “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.

  To do that, it needed a proxy, and so cleaving off a hint of its own substance, it fashioned the manifestation, and sent it forth into the world.

  30

  The journey from the ruins of the exhibition hall to the front exit of the Louvre was a blur to Fiona. She moved in a daze, struggling to make sense of everything that had happened.

  First, there was Alexander’s dire prognosis: Gamma radiation… A lethal concentration…

  What did that even mean? She didn’t feel any different. Maybe he’d been wrong. Or maybe the gamma rays would affect them differently. Maybe they’d all get mutant superpowers…like Bruce Banner in the Incredible Hulk comics.

  Then the world had turned upside down.

  Sara’s flashlight, augmented by the occasional glow of battery operated emergency lights scattered throughout the corridors, revealed rubble strewn corridors that bore little resemblance to the ornate museum through which she had passed only a few minutes before.

  Along the way, they encountered other museum patrons being guided to safety by Louvre personnel. The need for an alternate evacuation route became apparent when she stepped out into the Cour Napoleon-Napoleon’s Courtyard-and caught a glimpse of the twisted steel frame that had once been the elaborate glass pyramid guarding the front entrance to the Louvre. The seventy-foot high structure groaned and creaked in the grip of tidal forces, the sound punctuated every few seconds by the noise of another glass pane breaking free and shattering on the ground below.

  Fiona expected to find a cordon of emergency vehicles lined up outside, and beyond that, a world unaffected by the chaos that had swept out of the exhibition hall, but to her dismay she discovered that the legendary City of Lights was almost completely dark.

  Alexander separated them from the crowd, but did not take them far. He directed them to sit on the ground, well away from any hazards, and without preamble, launched into a story. Although Sara had been the most vocal in demanding answers, Alexander’s gaze remained fixed on Fiona as he spoke, a fact that did not escape the girl’s notice.

  “Nearly seventeen hundred years ago, the residents of the Bamiyan Valley, in what is now Afghanistan, encountered a strange phenomenon. They called it Angra Mainyu, believing it to be the devil of Zorastrian mythology. In reality, it was something even stranger: a micro black hole.

  Julia shook her head in confusion. “I thought black holes were the remains of collapsed stars.”

  “The term ‘black hole’ applies to any region of space where the local gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape. It has long been believed that when a star uses up all of its fuel, its own gravity causes it to become a black hole-a concentration of stellar mass in something perhaps only a few miles in diameter. But that is only one type of black hole. Almost forty years ago, scientists posited the existence of very small black holes, caused spontaneously by cosmic rays or particle collisions. They have even tried to produce micro black holes at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.”

  “They’re making black holes in a laboratory?” Fiona said. “That doesn’t sound very smart.”

  “Most micro black holes are unstable and cease to exist in a matter of nanoseconds. Unlike stellar mass black holes, they don’t have enough mass or energy to do any harm, much less achieve any kind of stability. The anomaly encountered by the Bamiyan villagers was different though. It was stable. Though probably only a few molecules in diameter, it had a mass equivalent to Mount Everest. The gravitational effects were localized; the event horizon was probably only about a meter, but anything-even particles of atmosphere-caught in the event horizon would have been added to its mass, increasing if only incrementally, the gravitational attraction. In time, it would have grown large enough to consume the entire planet.”

  “Hang on,” Sara said. “You said this micro black hole was stable. What made it different?”

  “And what stopped it?” Fiona added.

  “I can no more tell you the reason for its stability than I can explain where it originated. But to answer your question Fiona…” Alexander cast a glance at Julia, and then chose his words carefully. “According to one report, the evil of Angra Mainyu ended when a traveling group of Buddhist monks taught the villagers a mantra.”

  “A mantra?” Julia made no effort to hide her skepticism.

  Fiona however understood. Alexander had been there; one thousand seven hundred-odd years ago, the immortal Hercules had witness these events, had actively participated in them. Fiona also understood all too well the power that could have been unleashed with something seemingly as commonplace as a chanted mantra.

  “A black hole is not simply super-condensed matter. If that were true, there would be little to fear from them. A black hole with the mass of a star would have the same gravity as the star itself-zero net change in the regional gravity equation. But at their core, black holes, and particularly micro black holes, consist of something called ‘strange matter.’ Strange matter appears to contravene the laws of physics governing the conservation of energy and matter. When strange matter interacts with normal matter-which is exactly what happens beyond the event horizon of a micro black hole-a change in mass occurs without the corresponding change in energy described by Einstein’s famous equation.”

  Alexander must have sensed Fiona’s confusion because he immediately left off the technical explanation. “When a black hole adds a ton of matter, its mass might increase by a thousand tons…or by nothing at all…depending on the specific frequency of the strange matter at that exact moment.

  “My hypothesis is that the monks’ chant found the specific acoustic frequency that cancelled out, and possibly even reversed, the strange matter reaction.”

  Realization dawned and the words were out before Fiona could stop herself. “They sang it to sleep.”

  A faint smile crossed Alexander’s rough visage and he nodded. “That’s exactly what they did.”

  “You’re serious about this,” Julia said. She glanced at Sara and then at Fiona. “And you believe him?”

  “I believe what happened in there,” Sara shot back. “So unless you’ve got a better answer…”

  “What did happen?” Fiona asked.

  “The black hole was dormant, but it had not destabilized. Instead, it simply lay there on the ground, smaller than even a mote of dust. The people of the region converted to Buddhism, and consecrated the ground where the struggle with the black hole had occurred. Hundreds of years later, they fashioned two enormous statues of the Buddha, the bodies carved from the sandstone cliffs and the features molded of a stucco. The black hole itself was incorporated into the stucco, perhaps intentionally, as a way to prevent it from accidentally being reawakened.”

  Julia sat up straight, realization finally dawning. “Until the Taliban came along and blew them up.”

  Alexander nodded. “It’s a wonder that the explosions didn’t reactivate the black hole.”

  “So what caused it to happen tonight?” Even as Fiona asked it, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. “You knew it was going to happen. That’s why you were here. That sound you were playing…that was a recording of monks chanting, wasn’t it?”

  Alexander nodded guiltily. “I arranged for the pieces of the Buddhas to be brought out of Afghanistan in hopes that I could identify and isolate the black hole. I thought that I had taken sufficient precautions-the recorded mantra, as you have so astutely deduced-but it seems I miscalculated.”

  Then a conspiratorial smile settled on his lips. “However, there may be-”

  A sudden cry from the courtyard interrupted him. His head swiveled to locate the source, and Fiona looked as well.

  A stampede was in progress. A group of museum patrons who had been huddled in a corner of the courtya
rd formed by the meeting of the Denon and Sully wings, was now moving as a panicked mass toward them. Behind them, Fiona saw what had prompted the terrified exodus.

  An enormous dark spot, easily ten feet high, had appeared on the exterior wall of the palace. Fiona knew that it was no mere shadow because there was no light source outside to create such a powerful contrast; indeed, the dark spot was only visible because, unlike the rest of the museum, it reflected not even a hint of moonlight. It was absolutely black, the complete absence of light. It was exactly what she imagined the black hole must look like.

  And it was moving.

  Fiona watched in stunned silence as the dark spot detached from the wall and began moving into the courtyard. She saw that it was not simply an amorphous void; there was the suggestion of a central shape, surrounded by radiating tendrils of darkness, which writhed like snakes in every direction. Her first thought was that it resembled an octopus or jellyfish. The tentacles wiggled out ahead of it, seeming to grasp the ground and pull it forward into the courtyard. As it advanced, Fiona saw that the part of the museum wall from which it had issued was gone. It hadn’t broken apart, but simply erased from existence as if it had evaporated into smoke.

  Alexander jumped to his feet and scooped Fiona up with one massive arm. “Run!”

  His shout galvanized Sara and Julia into action, and they followed as he darted out of the path of the onrushing crowd.

  The black shape continued forward, no faster than a jogging pace but relentless as a heat-seeking missile. Beyond the edge of the perimeter of the courtyard, the crowd began to disperse in all directions but the dark thing did not alter course to pursue any of them.

  Alexander halted as soon as they were clear of the mob, and he turned to observe the shape’s journey. From his embrace, Fiona saw that several other evacuees had stopped as well, their curiosity evidently overcoming the instinct to flee. A few, like bystanders viewing the aftermath of a traffic accident, actually began moving closer to the thing.