Apocalypse Read online

  Joaquin must have learned from reading countless popular science books that black holes coalesced when they came into contact, creating larger black holes and in doing so, greater time dilation. Out in deep space, Aubrey knew that truly gargantuan black holes dance in terminally declining orbits as they spiral in toward each other, causing tremendous warps in time and space so violent that they form temporal ripples that spread across the entire universe. The largest yet found possessed the mass of twenty billion suns. By contrast, Joaquin’s black hole was a tiny speck, but a speck that nonetheless could produce truly dramatic results.

  ‘How do you translate that into the ability to see into the future?’ Congressman Goldberg demanded.

  Joaquin looked up at the plasma screens surrounding them on the walls of the dome.

  ‘That, gentlemen, is down to both the ubiquity of global news channels and something that you may have heard of before, a legend of science fiction, if you will, that was once considered the stuff of fantasy and yet is now known to be real. It is the barrier between existence and oblivion, and is called the event horizon.’

  46

  ‘What in the name of God is an event horizon?’ Reed asked. ‘And what the hell does it have to do with those news channels?’

  Aubrey gestured to the plasma screens as he spoke. Joaquin clearly knew enough of the physics to understand that the black hole’s mass governed how much space, and therefore time, would dilate around it. But the legendary event horizon was another matter.

  ‘All objects reflect light under normal circumstances, but a black hole is different,’ Aubrey said. ‘When vessels like the space shuttle seek to reach orbit, they have to do so with tremendous force in order to reach a velocity of 17,500 miles per hour, the speed required to break free of earth’s gravity. This velocity is known as the escape velocity. The more massive the planet, or star, the greater the velocity required to escape it.’

  He turned, and gestured to the containment sphere.

  ‘A black hole compresses enormous amounts of mass into an infinitesimally small space,’ Aubrey said. ‘So much so that the fabric of space-time becomes so tightly twisted that the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light and a darkened barrier forms between the black hole and the outside universe: the event horizon. Should an observer cross the event horizon there is no going back, for nothing can travel faster than light. It is for this reason that black holes neither reflect nor emit light, for anything they consume is, by the laws of the universe, forever trapped within. The bedtime stories of black holes “sucking” unwary travelers inside are a fallacy – the hole simply wraps time and space around itself so tightly that, once close enough, there is no path to follow but one that leads directly into the singularity itself.’

  Joaquin’s voice rang out in scarcely concealed delight: ‘Dennis here has calculated the black hole’s mass, and therefore its Schwarzschild Radius. This has given us the precise location of the event horizon, and the precise amount of time dilation the black hole can produce.’

  Congressman Goldberg peered up at the plasma screens.

  ‘So if you’re close to this event horizon, time moves at a different rate?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ Joaquin clapped. ‘That’s precisely what happens.’

  ‘The video cameras inside the chamber film the news channels . . .’ Murtaugh said.

  ‘Go on,’ Joaquin encouraged.

  Aubrey realized that Joaquin was getting more excited by the moment as the devious nature of his device was revealed. But Murtaugh’s knowledge allowed him to go no further, so Aubrey picked up the explanation.

  ‘But the cameras are close to the black hole’s event horizon, and so time moves at a different rate for them because the black hole’s immense mass twists both space and time around it so tightly. Therefore, time beyond the horizon appears to run more swiftly. We retrieve the cameras after they’ve been in the chamber for a certain amount of time and replay what they’ve seen.’

  ‘They play the future,’ Joaquin said. ‘They tell me what’s going to happen next via international news broadcasts.’

  Governor MacKenzie looked up when Aubrey had finished speaking.

  ‘And how far, exactly, can this thing of yours see into the future?’

  ‘Approximately twenty-four hours,’ Aubrey replied. ‘The mass of the black hole limits how far we can see into the future. Currently, for every hour of time that passes, a further hour into the future is seen by the cameras.’

  MacKenzie turned away.

  ‘It’s time for me to leave,’ he said. ‘This crap isn’t worth the risk or the hassle.’

  ‘The ability to look into the future does not interest you, Governor?’

  ‘Of course it does,’ MacKenzie growled over his shoulder at Joaquin, ‘but twenty-four hours is not enough notice to swing voters or settle economic markets. This has no real use for my office, and what about events that don’t make the news? All you’ve got here is major breaking stories, disasters and the like. Sure, big government might be all over you if you told them about this, but on a state scale it’s just not enough for me to risk my tenure by doing whatever dirty little deals you’ve got in mind, Joaquin. I’m done here.’

  MacKenzie took another two paces before Joaquin nodded at his guards. The soldiers moved in front of the governor and blocked his path.

  ‘Oh, right,’ MacKenzie uttered, turning back to face Joaquin. ‘So now you’re going to keep us here? You know you can be a real ass sometimes when you . . .’

  ‘I haven’t finished yet!’ Joaquin bellowed, silencing the governor. Aubrey watched the tycoon struggle to gain control over his sudden rage. ‘Seeing the future is only the beginning of what this device can achieve.’

  Harry Reed peered up at Joaquin from beneath his broad-rimmed hat.

  ‘An’ just what might that be?’

  Joaquin gestured to the black-hole chamber.

  ‘The black hole is maintained in stasis, carefully balanced, by magnetic fields. But when we were building the device it was discovered that by temporarily destabilizing it we can direct its gravitational energy wherever we wish. Carefully manipulating the electromagnetic field produces powerful pulses of energy.’

  Benjamin Tyler glanced at the metallic sphere. ‘How much energy?’

  Joaquin shot Tyler a mischievous grin and whispered theatrically as though imparting a childish secret.

  ‘You will recall the earthquake that I showed you yesterday.’

  A shocked silence descended upon the five men before him as they digested what he had said.

  ‘You’re going to cause that earthquake?’ Goldberg uttered.

  ‘I am.’

  A flutter of Jesus Christs whispered amongst them as they looked at Joaquin.

  ‘You’ll kill millions,’ Harry Reed pointed out.

  ‘Only a few thousand, in the end,’ Joaquin replied without emotion.

  ‘You’ve lost your mind,’ MacKenzie muttered. ‘No matter how hard you try, this place will never remain totally secret forever. Sooner or later the military will uncover what you’ve done here and before you know what’s happened you’ll be locked up in Guantanamo for the rest of your miserable little life.’

  Joaquin ignored the governor as he focused instead on the other men in the group.

  ‘Electromagnetic weapons deliver heat, or mechanical or electrical energy, to a target. They can be used against electronic equipment, military targets and even humans. We adjust the fields within the tokamak chamber to act like a parabolic reflector, to direct the energy of the black hole wherever we wish, much like more conventional electromagnetic weapons.’

  ‘Is there any defense against such an attack?’ Congressman Goldberg asked.

  Joaquin, caught off guard by the question, glanced up at Dennis Aubrey.

  ‘A Faraday cage would provide protection from most directed and undirected electromagnetic pulses,’ Aubrey said, ‘but against gravitational forces there is absolutely n
o defense.’

  The men remained silent, apparently unable to form a cohesive opposition to Joaquin’s remarkable achievements. Aubrey watched as Joaquin took a deep breath, sucked in the moment and let it fill his lungs with the first scent of victory. Now, terrifyingly, everything that he had sought to achieve was at Joaquin’s fingertips, the first steps on a final journey toward ultimate power.

  ‘And what happens once you’ve installed us in the White House?’ MacKenzie asked. ‘What happens if any one of the many people you must have employed to build this facility decide that they will blow the whistle on you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Reed joined in. ‘What’s to stop you getting some of your own goddamned medicine?’

  Benjamin Tyler stepped forward.

  ‘Speaking of medicine, why am I here? You told me that I will die, soon. I want to know how and I want to know how to stop it.’

  Joaquin looked down at Tyler for a long moment.

  ‘I can answer all of your questions at once by answering just one of them,’ he said, before looking at Tyler. ‘I cannot stop your illness, Benjamin,’ he said. ‘You have a malignant tumor deep within your brain stem that is the cause of the headaches you’ve been having over the past few weeks. It is inoperable. I can only make your suffering swifter and less painful.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Tyler snapped, his fists clenched by his side.

  Joaquin grinned mischievously. He turned to a DVD player laying on a table nearby, connected to a television screen. The screen lit up and a news article, distorted like the ones they had viewed in Miami, showed a news anchor, her voice silent but the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen as clear as day.

  BENJAMIN TYLER COMMITS SUICIDE

  AFTER TERMINAL ILLNESS CONFIRMED

  The group read the news bulletin and gasped as one. Aubrey watched in horror as they all turned to look at Tyler. Benjamin Tyler stared at the screen in confusion.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ he uttered.

  Joaquin Abell smiled, his face contorted into a chilling chimera of pity and delight.

  ‘Your obituary, Benjamin,’ he replied. ‘The results of a routine health check will arrive tomorrow, revealing the presence of your malignant tumor, but it will be assumed that you already knew you were a dead man and took your own life.’ Joaquin looked at Governor MacKenzie. ‘You asked about how I would deal with whistle-blowers?’

  Joaquin raised one hand and clicked his fingers.

  Before anybody could react, ten armed IRIS troops lunged into the crowd and grabbed Benjamin Tyler. They lifted him bodily off the ground and carried him toward the chamber.

  47

  ‘What the hell are you doing?!’ Tyler bellowed in terror as he struggled. ‘Put me down!’

  Congressman Goldberg tried to grab one of the guards, who whirled and drove the lawman back, slamming him to the ground with a savage blow from the butt of his rifle.

  ‘Stop them, Joaquin!’ MacKenzie shouted. ‘This is insane!’

  ‘There was only one thing missing from my presentation to you,’ Joaquin replied, his features hardening as he spoke. ‘A demonstration of my determination to succeed.’

  The guards carried Tyler to the black hole’s outer chamber, opened the access door and roughly bundled the businessman into it before slamming the steel door shut. Tyler banged desperately on the thick glass, but like the news broadcast of his demise, no sound reached the horrified onlookers. Quickly, one of the soldiers carried a video camera on a tripod and stood it outside the chamber, this one looking in. Almost immediately, one of the giant plasma screens showed the black hole, flares of searing energy writhing in blue-white coils against the walls of the chamber.

  Joaquin looked up at Dennis Aubrey, whose heart had begun to hammer against the walls of his chest. Prickly heat tingled across his collar as he stared back at Joaquin.

  ‘Dennis, if you will, prepare to destabilize the black hole as soon as our unfortunate friend Mr. Tyler has been . . .’ Joaquin searched for an appropriate word, ‘cured.’

  Aubrey, unable to believe what he was seeing and yet unable to intervene, flipped switches like an automaton on the console before him. Joaquin turned to face his guests, his expression cold.

  ‘Gentlemen, should any of you be tempted to interfere with my campaign . . .’

  He let the sentence hang in the air for a long moment and then nodded at one of the soldiers now standing beside a control panel at the black-hole chamber. The soldier flicked a switch before him and then yanked down on a large handle, tiger-striped with yellow and black chevrons.

  Wailing sirens echoed around the hub and beacons span and flashed. From his vantage point Dennis Aubrey watched the screen, frozen immobile with horror, as the chamber’s interior door opened agonizingly slowly.

  Benjamin Tyler was hauled off of his feet by an incredible force, flying through the air toward the terrifying chamber beyond. His hands managed to grab the inside of the door as his body was held horizontally in the air as though in the grasp of a hurricane, but he wasn’t able to hang on for more than a split second before the immense gravity of the black hole yanked him away.

  A bright flare of electrical energy shone within the chamber, and Aubrey watched with morbid fascination as Benjamin Tyler’s body shot toward the black hole. Aubrey glimpsed the tycoon’s face, laced with a sheen of sparkling ice crystals as the latent heat of his body was vacuumed out, his flesh turning hard as stone and his horrified eyes turning to brittle balls of ice. Tyler’s pain-racked face froze with fear as, in a millisecond, his body was unwound from its normal height to an infinite length, stretching him around the black hole’s orbital axis at the speed of light as he was torn apart, atom by atom, in a flare of radiation that glowed in a brilliant disc around the black hole’s circumference.

  The last thing Aubrey saw was the image of Tyler’s head turn a deep red as it vanished beyond the black hole’s event horizon, the time dilation red-shifting the light to the extreme end of the spectrum until it could no longer emit radiation and Tyler disappeared altogether.

  Aubrey realized that his breath was fluttering awkwardly in his throat, his caged heart now hammering like a convict trying to batter down the bars of a cell. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and felt cold sweat on his skin. With everybody below him staring at the screen on which Tyler had vanished, Aubrey reached out and grabbed the satellite phone from the control panel and slipped it into his pocket. Joaquin spoke to his horrified guests below, his voice devoid of any emotion.

  ‘Gentlemen, Benjamin Tyler no longer exists. Every atom that made up his body has been destroyed within the oblivion that is the black hole.’

  Joaquin turned to Aubrey and pointed at the control panel.

  ‘Begin the second part of the demonstration,’ he snapped.

  Aubrey took a breath. If ever he had needed confirmation that Joaquin Abell had lost his mind as well as his humanity, then this was it. He could hear Joaquin’s words ringing in his ears. Katherine has gone to work on one of our charity projects in the Dominican Republic. She won’t be coming here. Joaquin was not only demonstrating the power he wielded: he was attempting to murder the only person left ashore who knew what he had achieved. Dennis made a decision that he knew could threaten his own life, but which was unavoidable.

  ‘I’ll need all of the staff’s door passes,’ he replied, as he grasped for the most confusing scientific terms he could summon. ‘The gravitational cavitation we’ll experience is capable of scrambling the polarity of the magnetic access chips at this close range.’

  Joaquin glared up at him. ‘You did not tell me about this.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were about to cause an earthquake,’ Aubrey shot back, finding his rhythm. ‘So I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about the effect that the ensuing gravitational waves will have on magnetically polarized circuitry, or on our communications hub. The frequencies will be so high that they could rupture antennas, reverse mag
netic polarity and maybe even fry circuitry. I hope that nobody here has a pacemaker? Or cares about the life-support systems that keep the air breathable down here and the lights on?’

  The gathered dignitaries gawped at Aubrey as he stepped down from behind the control panel holding a small box.

  ‘I have a pacemaker,’ Murtaugh said, and tapped his chest with one crooked finger.

  ‘This is a Faraday cage,’ Aubrey explained, holding up the box. ‘It will protect the access cards. Once the experiment is over they can be retrieved and will be none the worse for wear. I’ll go to the communications hub and shut down the antennas and re-route the power to life-support until the experiment is over. Mr. Murtaugh, I advise you to remain at least twenty feet away from the chamber, just as a precaution, when the experiment begins.’

  Aubrey boldly reached up to Olaf Jorgenson’s chest and unclipped his card. Without any further prompting, Joaquin Abell removed his own and dropped it into the box. His men automatically followed suit, and Aubrey sealed the box shut and turned for the exit.

  ‘Olaf will take the box,’ Joaquin said. ‘You will go to the communications hub. Olaf?’ The big man raised his chin questioningly. ‘Shut off the comms from here.’

  Aubrey reluctantly handed the box to Olaf, who smirked down at him. Aubrey walked up to the control panel and with a heavy heart pressed a single button. Immediately the chamber began emitting a humming sound, and on the screen above them the black hole began deforming into an oval.

  ‘It’s stretching,’ Congressman Goldberg said, pointing at the screen.

  ‘No,’ Joaquin corrected him. ‘We have reduced the magnetic field in the lower right quadrant of the chamber. The black hole is now cavitating within the chamber at immense velocity and releasing its energy. As you may recall from high school, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.’