Nov 3, 2009, The Arctic Ocean
he’d heard there was an audible crackle, caused by displaced S air, when a laser beam first penetrates Earth’s atmosphere.
Nothing could have prepared her, however, for the sound produced when a power beam impacts the Arctic ice cap. Quite likely, it had never happened before. It was the wet “splat” sound you might expect to hear if a juicy bug the size of an ocean liner hit a windshield the size of an ocean, at 186,000 miles per second. She recoiled so violently in the upended aircraft cabin that she ended up in the foot-well of the right seat, upside down, legs flailing in the air, seeking purchase to right herself. It took twenty seconds to claw out of the hole and pull her head around the open cabin door for a look.
The medium blue, nineteen-inch power beam angled down from the south, almost forty degrees from vertical. Other than the initial “splat,” there was no sound. Ice had already started melting.
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Skipping the water stage, it converted directly to vapor, rising, crystallizing, and moving as the air moved. She pulled her cowl back for a better view, and barely had time to catch her breath when a second splat sounded, and a second beam appeared, this one green, separated from the first by eight or ten inches.
Before she had time to process that event, a third beam, red, and then a fourth, yellow, joined the first two. The last three were arranged concentrically around the first, and while a thoroughly be-dazzled Bell watched in awe, they began rotating as a group, about one revolution per second. A laser drill, Bell thought. The Heaven operator had created a laser drill. The outer edges of the rotating mass defined the edge of what Bell hoped would become a four-foot diameter shaft through the ice.
Giddy despite all the challenges she faced, she thought herself privileged to be witnessing a laser show no other human had seen before, and likely never would again.
Art’s friend hadn’t finished wowing her. The crowning touch descended in the form of a coaxial beam, like a container or cylinder, six feet in diameter, containing the other four beams. It was the palest blue, just visible. The other beams were still visible through the razor thin container wall, so thin that the elliptical shape, where it penetrated the ice at a forty-degree angle, could have been drawn with a pencil. She silently thanked Art’s friend for the help, and for the show. She wished she knew his name.
It was full dark now. The only light source was the rainbow of colors in the beam. As Bell marveled at the sheer physical beauty of it, she realized what the Heaven operator planned to do with the coaxial container beam.
She had guessed the laser would vaporize the ice, and the vapor would crystallize and be taken by the wind, leaving an empty, four-foot hole—50 yards from a six-passenger bush plane. Artifacts like the plane and hole might be spotted as an anomaly by satellites, but she couldn’t think of a solution to either problem, so she had decided not to worry about it. She’d put the plan together hastily while riding in the rear seat of the Beaver. There were a few holes in it.
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The rough landing had been lucky. Tipped on its nose, the plane should present a lower profile to overhead observation than if it were sitting on its skees. And nature itself might help her by moving the hole—she had read that the Arctic ice cap rotates, due to wind and currents, so the hole won’t remain over the same spot very long.
She had hoped nature would assist her further by partially filling the hole, once the entity sank over two miles to the bottom of the basin.
If it sank. If her plan worked.
The coaxial beam might solve the problem of the empty four-foot shaft through the ice, she now realized. The coaxial cylinder appeared to be trapping the water vapor, and as the drill point created new vapor, it rose in the one foot of space between the rotating elements of the drill and the inner wall of the coaxial beam. She guessed that once he switched the drill off, the Heaven operator might plan to leave the coaxial beam energized, allowing the vapor to cool and fall as water, refilling the hole. How the Heaven operator had known to do that, she didn’t know. He’d gone beyond the repayment of a debt to Art. He had thought through the actions asked of him and anticipated a further complexity Bell hadn’t described; another thread connecting her to someone she didn’t know. The Heaven operator had acted without being asked, with no expecta-tion of thanks. Again, she lamented not knowing his name.
Careful not to get too close, Bell went nearer the drill. From twenty yards away, she could see into the hole, and noted that it looked to be about 18 inches deep. The drill had been running for about five minutes. Considering the forty-degree attack angle, she estimated the laser would have to drill through 22 feet of ice to reach liquid water. Doing the math in her head, she estimated a minimum of a full hour more to break through to the abyss below.
She’d been ignoring Hardson for the last eight or nine minutes.
The only effort she’d needed to expend was to mask her presence.
She knew the entity had been trying to force the reluctant Hardson body to move, with no success. With the excitement and novelty of the laser show somewhat lessened, Bell turned now to look at the entity-Hardson thing. It still knelt in the same spot, still unable even 305
to turn its head. Something told her to look up. “Oh shit,” she said, under her breath.
About 10 feet above the ice, a portion of the coaxial beam wall protruded outward, toward the entity. As she watched, it extended further, and formed a funnel shape, with the narrow, finger-sized end pointed toward the entity. The narrow end continued to elon-gate. The spur somehow maintained the integrity of the beam, while it drew itself longer and thinner. It looked as if it had come to life, a grotesque appendage that grew from the beauty of the cylindrical beam, writhed and strained as it sought completion in the entity.
It had tapped into the coax, created a spur beam, she realized, so it could absorb energy from the beam. She couldn’t allow it. She knew the entity was weak from the effort it took to travel here from the ethereal realm, and the Hardson body was useless. In its weakened state, she was strong enough to block it from transferring to her, and there were no other transfer options. She had planned, once the laser was through the ice, to dump the entity/Hardson thing in, where it would sink to the bottom of the basin, nearly two miles down. It would be trapped, might even die someday. It shouldn’t matter. Even if a surface expedition passed over the spot someday, two miles was too far away to transfer. It would be exiled forever.
If the entity contacted the laser spur, it could recharge both the entity and Hardson. She had to stop it. Was there a way to block the spur beam? She found a clipboard in the plane and walked close enough to Hardson to extend the clipboard high enough to intercept the spur. The spur just bent around the clipboard and continued its grotesque squirming toward Hardson. No solution there.
She needed help. The twisting spur was halfway to the entity.
Desperately, she walked around to the other side of the Beaver, searching in the dark for anything she might use to stop the spur.
Focused on the plane, she nearly missed seeing the two red eyes suspended in the darkness.
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