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  Above them, surrounding the room, a belt of large screens mounted to the wall, the telltale signs of a serious computer embedded somewhere inside the Ark’s walls.

  Suddenly, a gentle female voice filled the room.

  “Full system initialization completed.”

  Raine turned to Hill. “The computer talks?”

  “Yes, and you can talk back to it. Ask it questions. When you emerge.”

  “Talking computer… that a good thing?”

  Hill grinned. “Might be your best friend when you come out of your pod.”

  Raine now turned and looked away from the monitors. In a circle, sarcophaguslike chambers sat arrayed like spokes; a dozen such chambers. Almost like a bizarre funeral parlor-more like coffins than anything that might save life.

  A spiral staircase curled down. He wondered: storage floors below, holding the tools, the seeds, the bulding blocks needed for a new world? He heard someone come up to Hill. “We’re all ready, Captain.”

  All but one chamber was closed tight. One still lay open, waiting.

  “Everyone else is already in cryo, Raine. This Ark is due to leave soon. So to your questions, who these people are-it’s all in the briefing you will get when you awaken, during emergence. The computer can answer any questions you might have. It will also be able to give you an update on the outside environment well before you reach the surface.”

  Raine nodded.

  “Guess you’re not asking me to go.”

  Hill smiled. “Yeah. It’s an order, Raine. Funny feeling, isn’t it? To know that the whole world will be destroyed except for you and the other Ark survivors. And yet somehow-it doesn’t exactly feel like a gift.”

  “All the Arks come up at the same time?”

  “No. The scientists thought it best-safest-if the Arks came up at staggered periods. That allows for the greatest chance of survival. We don’t know what the world will be like. Some come up earlier, others much later.”

  “And mine-120 years.”

  “Exactly.”

  The doctor with the librarian glasses stepped into the Ark. “All set, Captain.”

  “Okay.” Hill turned to Raine. “Lieutenant, as I said, this one is ready for insertion. Just got to get you in there.”

  “Now?” he asked. Raine hadn’t thought it was going to happen so soon.

  Hill didn’t bother answering. He simply went over to a side wall of the Ark and grabbed what looked like a space suit.

  “This-is an Ark suit. Get into it, if you would.”

  And then he tossed the suit at Raine.

  FIVE

  THE DEEP SLEEP

  Raine lay down on the cool bed of the cryo pod.

  A trio of doctors whizzed around him, checking the fit of the suit, looking at the Ark’s monitors, then coming back to check small readouts on the suit itself.

  Hill had disappeared, and that made Raine uneasy.

  None of the doctors said much, just a “lift your arm, please” and “turn to your side.”

  Their bedside manner sucked.

  Finally, Hill came back. Just in time for Raine to notice that something had begun swinging over the cryo pod from the side, resembling a hypodermic with a dozen wires trailing from it.

  Except this hypo was the size of a bazooka.

  “Mighty big needle,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Hill turned to the doctors. “Can you give us a minute?”

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” one of the white coats said.

  “Just a few minutes.” His tone didn’t leave the impression this was a request. Same ol’ captain, Raine thought.

  They backed off, busying themselves at the consoles positioned around the perimeter of the Ark.

  “In a few minutes this device will implant something in you called ‘nanotrites.’ Experimental. It’s not even something we would use on the battlefield.”

  “Then why do I want them?”

  “Because of their potential. The test cases show that nanotrites do some pretty amazing things. In case of severe tissue damage, organ failure-even a momentary cessation of primal functions-the nanotrites are amazing cellular engines. They promote incredibly rapid tissue growth. They can even restart organ functions.”

  “And the downside?”

  “We don’t know all the side effects. Not in the slightest. Could be there’s a price to pay for using them, but if there is, we haven’t had time to find it. And, they are not the miracle nanomachines we thought they were.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “Nanomachines-biologically engineered micromachines. We’ve been playing with them for decades. These seem to work. And because of that potential, we feel it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. We don’t know what kind of world you’re going to wake up to, but we think these nanotrites will be pretty useful. Everyone who went into the Ark has had them implanted.”

  “I’m guessing I don’t have a choice about them. I mean, you said they haven’t been fully tested. Could be I’d be better off without them…”

  “No. You’re going, so you get them. Consider that an order.”

  “And fingers crossed on side effects.”

  Hill grinned. “Send us a note back.”

  Raine looked at the doctors, waiting, still standing back.

  “Captain…” he said quietly.

  “Yes?”

  “The asteroid. Most of the world predicts a miss. Then a handful of scientists predict a hit. How’d that happen?”

  “That’s the other thing. Can’t say I fully understand it.” Hill came a bit closer. “An astrophysicist at Palomar was the first to see something was off about the asteroid, then someone in the London Observatory. They were professional friends, so they communicated their findings to each other, and as soon as they alerted their governments, they were ordered to keep it quiet. More scientists made the discovery… all seeing something different than what was predicted.”

  “Which was?”

  “The asteroid acted erratically when it passed close to any zone with a measurable gravitational force. Somehow, that gravitational force, which in most cases should have been insignificant, or at least measurable and predictable, caused a dramatic shift in the asteroid’s trajectory, a definite wobble. Most astrophysicists would write it off to random erratic behavior. But for this group, even with Apophis so far away, they saw it as something else.”

  “Captain,” the lead doctor said. “It’s time.”

  Hill held up his hand. “They were finally able to measure it, Raine. Whatever caused the trajectory to wobble and shift… could be measured. And all anyone knew was that there had to be something within the asteroid itself, something due to its unknown mineral makeup, where it came from… what it was made up of…”

  “That caused the effect?”

  “Exactly. Another unknown, Lieutenant.”

  “Seems to be all you have to offer today.”

  “It’s time,” a doctor said, more firmly. Hill nodded.

  Raine, wearing the bulky Ark suit, raised his right hand up as sharply to his brow as he could.

  “Last time I’ll have to do that, sir.”

  Hill nodded, grinned, and then saluted back.

  “Okay,” he said to the doctors. “We’re all set.”

  The long, gunlike device came down slowly, precisely to Raine’s neck.

  The female doctor gave Raine the play-by-play.

  “Lieutenant, you will feel the metal tip press against your neck. The nanotrites need to reach critical velocity within the insertion device. It’s really a minicentrifuge. Once they enter, they will travel immediately to your brain stem.”

  “And you can’t knock me out for this?”

  A small smile from the doctor.

  Guess it’s too late to ask her out on a date, Raine thought. Late, by maybe a hundred years.

  “For the first moments, you can’t have anything in your system to knock you out. No sedation. Full brain activity is required.�
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  “Then full brain activity they shall get.”

  “Moments after they enter your body, the drip into the suit will pump in the sedative. You won’t be awake when the full cryo process begins.”

  “Which I guess is a good thing, hm?”

  “Yeah.” A pause. “Good luck, Lieutenant.”

  Raine felt the metal press against his skin. Cool. Just a bit of pressure.

  Then-something sharp. • • •

  A definite prick, much worse than giving blood or an IV.

  The needle going deep hurt, but it was followed by a burning sensation that made his eyes water.

  It was as if fire filled his throat. He felt it migrate to the back of his neck, near the brain stem.

  Then up.

  The lights in the room took on an intense brightness. The people in the room turned into ghostly shadows.

  He barely felt the injection device pull away… because now his entire skull felt that warmth. He had read somewhere that the brain has no nerves, so no feeling there. Probably a good thing. Still, he wanted to scratch his head, covered by the Ark suit skullcap.

  But that thought was interrupted as the brightness began to build, turning from a simple fire into a white heat that made him feel as though he lay in the dead center of a massive incandescent bulb.

  Then-suddenly-the brightness, the light… faded.

  The sporadic explosions of heat from his head eased.

  He wanted to say something, but saying something had somehow turned impossible. Right, he remembered as the team watched, the sedative…

  Even thoughts were difficult now. One came to him: Close my eyes.

  Then another thought: Sleep would be nice.

  Then: nothing.

  SIX

  BURIED ALIVE

  Hill stood at the door of the Ark, gazing around the vessel with a strange look in his eyes.

  The computer spoke in its muted voice. Designed to be soothing, it was anything but.

  “Full cryo procedures successfully concluded. Ark 38 is now ready for hibernation.”

  Then a pause.

  “Hibernation procedure to begin in 120 seconds.”

  The head scientist came over to Hill. “Captain, it’s time to leave.”

  Hill took a last look and walked down the steps out of the Ark.

  “Sixty seconds to hibernation… fifty seconds…”

  He joined the full team of scientists ringed around the Ark. The guards-while remaining in position, guns held tight-all now stared at the amazing machine in the center of the room. Hill slipped on an earpiece, his radio link connected to the base’s communication network. Totally secure. No one would be able to eavesdrop, to hear the chatter and wonder what the hell the government was so secretly burying in the ground.

  “Thirty seconds… twenty seconds…”

  The entire room counted along silently, lips moving.

  “Ten… nine… eight… seven…”

  Hill looked around the room. Did some of these people look at this and think, There goes the only way to survive the coming cataclysm? Wishing that they were inside? Watching all this happen with such torturous, mixed feelings.

  Including him.

  He had been ready to go. But sometimes nature played tricks. What was the line?

  We make plans. So do fools. The gods… laugh.

  Zero…

  The speakers filled the room with the soft vocal tones of the computer. Then the stairway folded smoothly into the Ark. The door-specially designed to resist extreme pressure from the outside-slid into place and locked tight with a whoosh.

  The computer grew silent.

  The Ark was now sealed tight.

  Hill turned away and called out to the guards by the large hangar-sized doors to the side.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Hill sat in the front passenger seat of the Huey Workhorse chopper. A matching chopper flew beside it.

  Attached beneath the choppers were two massive chains with giant links strong enough to hold a liner’s anchor, or a house, or a stack of cargo containers.

  Morning in the Rockies. A beautiful clear sky. A gorgeous blue sky.

  Couldn’t be more beautiful.

  He looked ahead and saw the Ark building. As he watched, the roof of the building began to move. Even over the sound of the helicopters’ blades, Hill could hear the sound of metal grinding as the roof panels slid back on their tracks.

  His chopper pilot spoke quietly to his counterpart.

  “Ready to deploy, Alpha Two.”

  Hill couldn’t hear the other pilot, but he could guess the man said “Roger,” because the two choppers-the biggest anywhere in the world-banked to position themselves over the opening.

  Hill looked down, into the now gaping maw of the massive building. The Ark sat there, looking like a misshapen black egg.

  Not a bad metaphor, he thought. An egg to give birth to humanity’s only hope.

  If we’re not to go the way of the dinosaur.

  Which made him pause. He had to wonder: did anyone raise the idea that maybe they were meant to disappear?

  Probably had never even been considered.

  It was too late to consider now. The choppers were in position.

  The pilot spoke again: “Alpha Two-ready to lower on your go.” Then: “Lowering now.”

  And the chain started down, a clanking sound erupting loudly from the rear of the chopper. It was hard to see the Ark now that it was directly under the helicopter, but above the pilot, a monitor showed the progress of the chain and its hook.

  Until “Turning five degrees…”

  A small twitch to swing the hook into the top of the Ark.

  “And- locked,” the pilot said, throwing a switch.

  The pilot looked over at Hill.

  “Got it, sir.”

  “Pull her up,” Hill said.

  And together, as if carrying out a carefully practiced ballet move, the two choppers began to rise. After a wobble when the full weight of the Ark hit the two machines-slowing, nearly stopping them-the choppers continued up. The Ark rose out of its birthplace, like dozens of others around the world had already. This was one of the few left to be inserted.

  Buried.

  Finally, the Ark cleared the top of the building, and the choppers set out on a course to the west. Avoiding towns, highways…

  Questions.

  Some Arks had been transported inside the belly of big transport carriers. Still others in oversized freight train cars. The goal: for nobody to see an Ark.

  But here, this late in the game in this part of the West, they would take a course that would give them the least chance of being seen without sacrificing haste.

  And for those who did see… what would they say?

  Besides-in a few days, everyone would have a lot more to talk about.

  The asteroid. The Ark Project concluded-and revealed. Doom on its way. Everyone would know the truth.

  They roared over the nearby Colorado hills.

  The choppers hovered over the site of the excavation, a giant tapered crater in the middle of the desert. The man-made hole narrowed to a point, a massive shaft where the Ark would be inserted-deep, past the bedrock-before being covered with the piles of rubble and dirt by the waiting tractors.

  Would it be enough? Hill wondered. Would there be enough protection in the thousand feet of dirt and sand, the massive chunks of granite and basalt piled on top of the sleeping Ark?

  It was anybody’s guess. The only thing the scientists were clear about was that they couldn’t be sure.

  “Terra incognita,” one said. Estimates of the level of destruction were given with sheepish looks at handheld computers. The numbers seemed to be changing all the time.

  No one fucking knew.

  “Lowering the Ark, sir,” the pilot said.

  “Carry on,” Hill said. The pilot toggled his radio:

  “Lowering Ark station 1138 on my go!” He maneuvered t
he helicopter, making slight adjustments. “And… go!”

  The sound of the winch in the belly of the oversized chopper began groaning, the chains rolling out.

  The chains so long that they had been rolled on mammoth wheels, the rolled spools stretching from the floor to the roof of the chopper.

  Hill got out of his seat.

  He walked back to the winch, where he could look down the opening, watching as the Ark moved smoothly down from the sky-with amazing accuracy-right into the crater that had been made for it.

  The Arks were designed so they could burrow in either direction. But in this case, this deep shaft had been made well ahead of time.

  The scientists’ preference.

  Let’s reduce the chances for a screwup. We’ll place the Ark.

  So the next time-the only time-the thing would burrow was over a hundred years from now.

  The chain kept playing out, and the Ark slipped deeper into the narrow shaft at the bottom of the crater, sliding into it like a bullet into a chamber. A bullet of humanity being shot into the future.

  Could have been me down there, Hill thought for probably the thousandth time.

  Except-fate had other plans. And what of Raine-was he the right guy? he wondered.

  Raine certainly had nothing tying him to this doomed world. No wife, no kids, his own family long gone. Raine kept quiet about whatever passed as his personal life.

  For Raine, it was all about the mission.

  And what exactly was that mission?

  To survive? Yes, but it was more than that. To emerge and locate some of the caches of supplies-the weapons, tools, and precious seeds that might make food on the planet once more.

  And foremost, Raine-and the other soldiers on different Arks-were to keep control and protect the survivors.

  In case things didn’t go right.

  In case everything is worse than we ever imagined it could be.

  Did Raine know that was the real mission? Face the unknown, and-if necessary-lead what’s left of humanity?

  The Ark had disappeared.

  But the winch kept moving, and the chain clanged its way down into the shaft, link by hefty link. Hill squatted there, peering down, watching its progress.