Oblivion Stone

Lakesh stroked at his chin in fascination. “You tested it?” he asked.

Brigid made a sour face. “It kind of tested me,” she admitted, still conscious of the tingling feeling on her skin where the tendrils had tried to consume her just an hour before.

“That doesn’t sound so good,” Lakesh mused. “Would you care to elaborate?”

Brigid began to explain about the strange chair that had held her in its unshakable clutches, but Kane interrupted. “That can wait,” he said. “What’s going on with the Commtacts?”

“And the transponders?” Grant added. “My tracker’s still operating but it couldn’t even locate my own frequency blip while I was out in the field.”

Lakesh indicated the satellite monitoring and communication desks where Brewster Philboyd, Donald Bry and several others were working in unison on what was evidently a fraught and urgent project. “The satellite feeds went down fifty-three minutes ago,” Lakesh explained. “We’ve lost all external comms, including Commtacts, monitoring and general analysis and prediction software.”

“You ‘lost’?” Kane asked.

“It’s still down,” Lakesh told him. “Our best guess is that something has taken out the Comsat and Vela satellites, and Donald and his team are trying to backtrack over the unmonitored feeds to see if we can find any evidence as to what.”

Tucking a lock of her red-gold hair behind her ear, Brigid asked hesitantly, “Do you think this was a deliberate sabotage?”

“We haven’t ruled out that possibility yet,” Lakesh said ominously, “but at the same time it may just as easily be a natural phenomenon or a massive internal failure of the satellites themselves.”

“Affecting both of them at once?” Brigid asked, clearly dubious.

“Freak weather conditions, such as a magnetic storm, could result in a block to all our signals,” Lakesh suggested. “Until we can locate the specific data, we’ll be hard-pressed to give any definitive answers.”

“And in the meantime,” Kane observed, “you don’t know who’s coming through the mat-trans, be they friend or foe.”

“Hence the security detail,” Lakesh said. “Though some people seem less understanding of the need for it than others.” He inclined his head toward Edwards, who continued to rant about having a blaster pointed in his face when his team had arrived home.

Kane shrugged. “You know as well as I do that Edwards will be on his feet and covering your back at the first sign of trouble,” he said quietly. “Leave the man to let off steam for a while—he’ll be there when we need him.”

Lakesh looked at Kane and smiled, reminded of the natural leadership qualities that the ex-Mag possessed.

While the men explained how Kane had come into possession of the ceremonial blade and outlined what had happened with Ohio Blue out in Louisiana, Brigid took it upon herself to assist Donald Bry and his brain trust in sifting through the data to verify the nature of the satellite disruption itself. Brigid had been a crucial player in many of the Cerberus team’s technical advances, including the understanding and development of the interphaser, a portable teleportational device that exploited naturally occurring geomagnetic energy. With her uncanny memory and natural intelligence, Brigid’s contribution of both facts and intuitive leaps had served the operatives of the redoubt well in their continued defence of the people of Earth.

When she joined them, copper-haired Bry was flicking through screen after screen of raw data along with two other computer operators, analyzing each page as quickly as they could, looking for possible errors or glitches. While it was true that Cerberus monitored much of the activities on Earth at any given moment through a variety of data streams, it would be impossible to assign an individual to continuously monitor each of those feeds, particularly given the redoubt’s personnel limitations. Instead, the vast majority of the system was automated, requiring staff only to engage in the more time-responsive feeds, such as the real-time communications that the Commtacts offered.

Brigid rested against the side of the desk next to Bry, sitting on its very edge. “What do you have, Donald?” she asked brightly, gazing at the scrolling data on his terminal screen.

“A headache,” Bry growled, shaking his head. “Something like this should be obvious, but I just can’t pinpoint what it is.”

“Looking too hard, maybe?” Brigid suggested as she peered at the data screen for a few more seconds, feeling Bry’s frustration. “What time did this happen?” she asked.

“We have it as 15.37 and eight seconds,” Bry responded. “But I’ve looked through all the satellite footage and data leading immediately up to that point and nothing is showing up.”

“Both satellites went down at the same time?” Brigid asked.

Bry shook his head. “There’s three seconds in it,” he explained. “The Keyhole sat went first.”

Brigid considered this for a moment. “What if you flip the search?” she asked. “Look outwards instead of in?”

“We’ve checked sunspot activity,” Bry told her. “In fact, it was one of the first things that Lakesh suggested—but there’s nothing.”

“Do you have footage?” Brigid asked.

At a nearby desk, lanky Brewster Philboyd overheard Brigid’s request and called up something on his own computer monitor with a quick tapping of the keys. “This is what we’ve got,” he told her.

Brigid dropped down from where she perched by Bry’s desk and stepped over to watch the footage playing on Philboyd’s monitor. It was a fairly standard satellite photo, showing an unspecified terrain of yellow-brown color, coupled with the dark blue edge of water to one side, and a white blush of clouds drifting across the center. Brigid watched for a few seconds, noticing the slightest movement of the shadows of the clouds on the terrain beneath, confirming that it was not simply a static image. After fifteen seconds, the image abruptly cut to static.

“15.37.08,” Brewster told her.

“Play it again,” Brigid instructed, her eyes still on the monitor’s recorded satellite feed.

Brewster tapped at his keyboard for a moment, and then the image seemed to reset itself before the sequence repeated. He ultimately played it a further seven times before Brigid caught what it was she was searching for.

“There’s a shadow,” Brigid told him.

By this stage Donald Bry and several of the other techs had joined them to watch the sequence for themselves, wondering at what Brigid’s eerily insightful mind might discover that they had missed.

Brewster ran the fifteen-second sequence once more, and Brigid closed her eyes and counted it down in her head. “Sun’s roughly overhead. Watch the cloud to the bottom right of the screen,” she instructed, not bothering to open her eyes. With her exceptional memory, Brigid was able to reconstruct the sequence with incredible accuracy in her mind, and she used that facility to focus in on the information she wanted, magnifying the image in her head. “Twelve, thirteen,” she counted to herself, and then she pronounced in a louder voice, “shadow.”

Then the feed went dead once more, the clock indicator showing 15.37.08.

A smile played across Brigid’s lips as she opened her eyes and saw Donald, Brewster and the others turning from the static-filled screen to stare at her in openmouthed bewilderment.

“It’s there for a second,” Bry said.

“Less than that,” Brewster corrected. “What is it?”

Brigid’s brow furrowed as she thought it over, trying to transform the half-second shadow on the uneven surface of the cloud into a three-dimensional object. “Pass me your notepad,” she instructed.

Brewster Philboyd did so, handing her a pen, as well. Still standing, Brigid bent over the table and sketched hurriedly on the pad until she had roughed out a side view of a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Then she drew the shadow that they had seen upon it, recalling the details from her mind while Brewster brought up a static frame for reference for the others. Sketching three quick lines out from the shadow, she extrapolated its form, interpreting the shape of the object that must have cast it. It was roughly circular, fat at its girth so that it appeared to be more like a flattened or squashed circle. The edge seemed ragged, deliberately so, for Brigid’s penmanship was precise. When she had finished she showed the others her sketch, and the notebook was passed around the handful of technicians standing around the desk.

“What is that?” Donald asked as he gazed at the ragged, circular object that Brigid had drawn.

“Unless it’s been severely damaged, it’s almost certainly nothing mechanical or man-made,” Brigid said. “It’s too irregular. I think it’s a meteor.”

“Couldn’t be,” Bry muttered, shaking his head with disbelief. “It would have to be pretty big to knock out both satellites so completely.”

When he looked up, Donald Bry found Brigid staring at him with her piercing emerald eyes. “Is there a new rule?” she inquired coquettishly.

“What do you mean?” Bry asked.

“Meteors can only get so big now?” Brigid suggested.

In spite of himself, Bry laughed at her comment. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just so unbelievable. We’ve had trouble coming at us from every which way since Cerberus was established—aliens and parasites and insane tribal killers. I just never expected to lose everything so suddenly because of a natural phenomenon.”

“Meteors don’t always travel alone,” Brigid pointed out. “Could be a storm, with two separate rocks knocking into our equipment.”

As the discussion continued, Lakesh, Kane and Grant came over to see what the commotion was. When Bry explained Brigid’s extrapolation based on the data, Lakesh looked concerned.