Chapter 100. Earth’s Expiration Date
“Tom, I just remembered something kind of funny,” Selina said lightly. The light had barely turned green before the slim heel of her shoe eased onto the accelerator, and the powerful engine answered with a smooth, velvety growl. “I've already been to your little apartment, but you've never been to mine. It's about time we fixed that.”
I turned to look at her flawless profile, framed by the glow of the city lights. “Selina, we were talking about the end of the world a minute ago. Were you even listening?”
“I heard every word,” she replied, a trace of firmness entering her voice as she kept both hands on the leather-wrapped steering wheel. “I just don't see the point in debating the apocalypse while we're doing sixty in traffic. We'll be at my place in five minutes. We can talk there.”
“So you're not denying it,” I said, turning my attention back to the capital's streets racing past outside.
At the next intersection, while we waited for the left-turn arrow, Selina pulled out her phone and scrolled through her contacts. Years of working with numbers and paperwork had trained me to notice details. I had just handed a major information of the highest possible classification, and instead of giving orders or grilling me, she was making a phone call. I shut down the first stab of paranoia immediately, but my fingers still tightened against my knees.
“Who are you calling?” I asked, keeping my tone as casual as I could.
“The best restaurant around,” she said with an amused smile, pressing the phone to her ear. “I hate cooking, and it would be rude to let a guest go hungry.”
I simply nodded. While she ordered pasta and Parma ham with the effortless confidence of someone who practically lived in upscale restaurants, I listened with quiet skepticism, sincerely hoping that “go easy on the garlic” was not code for sending in a cleanup crew.
The convertible drifted to the curb and stopped beneath the grand entrance of a high-rise wrapped in dark glass and granite. A uniformed doorman hurried over before the engine had even gone silent. The place practically screamed old money.
“Tadeusz, take her down to the garage,” Selina said, tossing him the keys without even looking his way. “And a courier from the restaurant should be here soon. Send him straight up.”
“Right away, Miss Langstrom,” the doorman replied with a practiced nod before hurrying toward the elevator.
Inside the elevator, the gulf between my bank account and hers became impossible to ignore. The elevator in my building usually smelled like damp concrete and cheap disinfectant, and nobody piped soft jazz through hidden speakers. Here the air carried the subtle scent of expensive perfume with hints of jasmine.
The final touch was the key chip the elevator required before it would even move. A penthouse. Selina had bought the entire top floor, sparing herself the inconvenience of neighbors altogether.
The doors slid open onto an interior straight out of an architecture magazine. One enormous open living space. Designer lighting. Polished concrete, wood, and leather. On my way to rinse my hands, I passed a bathroom with a Jacuzzi big enough to qualify as a small pool. Through the frosted bedroom door left slightly ajar, I caught a glimpse of a walk-in closet spacious enough to fit her convertible alongside her entire designer shoe collection. The wall of floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the glittering city completed the picture.
The irony was hard to miss. With my obsession for order and quiet, I belonged among Washington's gray, forgettable bureaucrats. Selina, with her taste for luxury and excess, belonged in Hollywood surrounded by A-list celebrities. Fate, apparently, had a strange sense of humor.
“All right,” Selina said, settling gracefully onto a white leather sofa and tucking her long legs beneath her. A satisfied smile curled across her lips, like a cat that already had the mouse pinned beneath its paw. “Start talking. Where'd you get this information about the planet being destroyed?”
I had barely opened my mouth when she lifted a perfectly manicured hand to stop me.
“Hang on. Give me three guesses. If I don't get it in three, I owe you five bucks.”
I sighed, feeling irritation bubble up again. She had a remarkable talent for turning serious conversations into games.
“Two guesses,” I said. “And make it twenty.”
“Oh? Somebody's feeling confident,” she purred, leaning toward me. “Fine. First guess: you overheard someone from military intelligence?”
“No.”
“Second guess: somebody from the other side told you?”
“Yep.” I pulled a crisp twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and laid it on the glass coffee table.
“You really shouldn't have challenged me when it comes to deduction, Tom,” she said with a smug grin, snatching the bill and slipping it into her pocket in one smooth motion. “All right, you got me curious. But how do you understand their language? Did you find some kind of decoder?”
“The decoder's sitting right in front of you,” I said evenly. “I speak Loz'an.”
“Seriously?” Every trace of her relaxed attitude vanished. She sat bolt upright, lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose, and stared at me with the unfiltered excitement of a scientist who had just stumbled onto the discovery of a lifetime. “But how? Wait... You went through my archived research on their phonetics and grammar? Those were nothing but fragments. There wasn't nearly enough there to learn the language. Your brain actually reconstructed the whole thing from those scraps? That's incredible.”
“Selina,” I cut in before she disappeared down another academic rabbit hole. “I didn't come here so you could analyze the cognitive abilities of a former accountant. I need an answer. Is the end of the world a real possibility, or am I chasing ghosts?”
“It's real.” She sighed patiently and leaned back, giving me the same look a professor might give a student who had interrupted a graduate seminar to ask what two plus two equals. “Constant S-Power radiation is destabilizing the planet's core. The degradation is happening faster than our projections predicted.”
“And you're saying that like you're ordering takeout.”
“Tom, this is news to you. I've been living with it for almost ten years.” She looked at me the way an adult humors a child asking why the sky is blue. “The people at the top of the Pentagon and the White House have known for thirty years. So no, you didn't discover anything new today.”
The apartment's silence was broken by the ring of a landline sitting on a nearby console. Selina reached over and picked up the receiver.
“Hello... Perfect, Tadeusz. Send him up.”
A couple of minutes later, the elevator doors opened, and the doorman carried in two paper bags bearing the logo of an upscale restaurant. Selina accepted the delivery and, with an effortless flick of her wrist, tipped him using my twenty-dollar bill. His face lit up with gratitude before he headed back downstairs.
The food was transferred onto plates. Selina's kitchen was equipped with every high-end appliance imaginable, but the polished chrome surfaces gleamed with such flawless perfection that it looked as though nothing more complicated than a kettle of water had ever been heated there. She clearly preferred keeping her hands clean.
“How is it?” Selina asked, wielding her knife and fork with effortless grace as she took another bite of salad. “Best chef in the city.”
“I don't really have anything to compare it to,” I replied, matching her smooth movements as I cut into my steak. “I haven't had a chance to work my way through the local restaurants yet.”
“You'll bankrupt yourself doing culinary field research,” she teased, never taking her eyes off her plate. Then she paused with her fork halfway to her mouth and narrowed her eyes. “You've got surprisingly good table manners for a guy who spent half his life behind a calculator. Let me guess, another side effect of your ridiculous learning speed?”
“I got bored once and watched a video about fine dining etiquette,” I said evenly. “But let's get back to the planet dying. Or, more importantly, to the source of your almost supernatural calm.”
“All right, one thing at a time.” She popped a piece of aged cheese into her mouth and chewed with obvious satisfaction. “The people at the very top found out Earth was living on borrowed time thirty years ago, after they got the first alien prisoner to talk through the very first portal. As you can imagine, nobody was about to share that with the public. Panic would've destroyed civilization long before the planet's core did. Honestly, most presidents and prime ministers still don't know. The complete picture is limited to the Corps' highest leadership.”
“Like who?” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the table. “Does Megan know?”
“Ross, do you have a thing for her or something?” Selina asked with a mischievous arch of one eyebrow, studying me with obvious amusement. “You somehow manage to bring Megan up every chance you get.”
“I'm trying to figure out the clearance level,” I replied calmly, ignoring the jab. “She is a colonel.”
“No, Megan doesn't know,” Selina said, sounding faintly disappointed that she hadn't managed to get under my skin. “A pair of eagle insignias isn't enough to earn a seat in the club that knows when the world ends.”
“Danny Kim?”
“That magazine-cover pretty boy?” Selina snorted, rolling her eyes. “Come on. Of course not.”
“He has the highest destructive potential in the Corps,” I said thoughtfully. “So exceptional combat ability doesn't earn you access either. Leon Stewart?”
“Oh, that crafty old fox has heard about the end of the world at least a couple hundred times,” she said, absentmindedly waving her fork. “He's in operational intelligence. He personally interrogates alien prisoners. They tell him everything.”
“In their own language? Using that translator you mentioned?”
“My own invention,” Selina said proudly, lifting her chin. “You feed it a massive library of recordings from an unknown language, and after enough processing the algorithm starts producing reasonably accurate real-time translations.”
“And I'm guessing only a select few are allowed anywhere near that device,” I said with a crooked smile.
She met my eyes and nodded knowingly.
“All right. According to your estimates, how much time does Earth have left?”
“That's impossible to pin down exactly. Every alien civilization we've studied experienced a different rate of core degradation. Based on the average across our models... we've probably got somewhere between three and thirty years.”
I stopped with my wineglass halfway to my lips. “And you're sitting here eating salad like nothing's wrong? Doesn't it scare you to think about the future? About bringing children into a world that's already counting down to the end?”
“The world isn't dying, Tom. One particular rock is,” she corrected patiently. “Sure, when I first learned the numbers, I broke out in a cold sweat too. But humanity adapts. We're pulling technology out of those portals faster than anyone would've dreamed possible thirty years ago. NASA isn't making any public announcements because they don't want to send the financial markets into freefall, but they've already built a spacecraft capable of delivering colonists to Mars in a matter of weeks without putting the crew at risk.”
“Mars isn't livable, Selina,” I said firmly. “It's a dead desert. And there's no guarantee we'll build atmosphere generators and climate shields straight out of science fiction in just a few years.”
“The planet isn't going to fall apart in three years,” she said with a sigh, giving me the look of a professor correcting an undergrad. “In three years, the regular alien portals will simply stop opening. After that, we'll still have another three years before anything else happens.”
“And what are those three years supposed to accomplish? A massive expansion? Conquering alien worlds?” I leaned toward her. “You know the pattern as well as I do. Once a portal opens on a planet, that planet is doomed. We'd only buy ourselves another decade or so, and we'd lose half the population in a pointless planetary war.”
“You're missing the most important part.” A faint, almost predatory smile spread across Selina's face. “When Earth's final countdown begins, a permanent portal generator will appear here to keep the war going. But what if I analyze that generator with my [Engineer] skill? What if I can build a modified version that opens a gateway not to another nightmare, but to a clean, resource-rich planet that's perfectly suited for human life?”
I sat quietly, turning her words over in my mind. Suddenly, her composure made perfect sense.
“All right,” I admitted. “I have to give you that. It's one hell of a plan.”
“You're damn right it is.” She lifted her chin again, looking immensely pleased with herself. “You might just be sitting across from the woman who's going to save the human race.”
“And if your plan doesn't work? If you can't crack the generator?”
“Then every available resource gets redirected to the Mars project,” she said with an easy shrug, as if she were talking about changing weekend plans. “The more alien hardware I get my hands on, the faster our work moves. The only problem is...”
“What problem?” I asked, frowning as I caught the change in her tone.
“Our special forces are barbarians!” Selina burst out, genuine anger flashing in her eyes. “They destroy an unbelievable amount of priceless technology during every operation. There's incredible equipment down there, but those idiots vaporize everything because they don't know how to conduct a clean extraction. Oh, that reminds me...”
“What?”
“I happened to overhear a few details about your contract. The Loz'an Citadel was left almost completely intact. Their servers and technological infrastructure are being packed up and shipped straight to my lab. Outstanding work, Tom.”
“What's so impressive about that?” I muttered. “The Loz'an are considered small-time by Corps standards.”
“Maybe, but finesse is practically nonexistent among most of our field operatives. Most of them burn half a base to the ground, write it off as 'unforeseen combat conditions,' then dump a pile of scorched scrap on our desks and expect us scientists to somehow pull revolutionary technology out of it.”
While Selina vented about the military's heavy-handed methods, my mind quietly organized the facts. We had two possible paths to survival: a lifeless Mars or cracking the portal system. As a practical man, I had very little faith in the second option. If the mysterious Master had granted Selina those abilities, there was probably some kind of built-in safeguard against exploiting the system. Colonizing Mars seemed like the only realistic chance, but that future depended entirely on the tools Selina could create.
Which meant there was no time left to play it safe.
“Selina,” I interrupted, cutting off her rant. “I'm ready for the Omega Plus injection.”