dazedly at the stripped-down interior of the former military helicopter. The sun was low on the horizon outside, flooding the interior with ruddy morning light. His jaw tightening, Stone blinked a few times before apparently forcing himself to relax.
By his own account, the dream was always the same, its familiar images having solidified over the years into a kind of half memory. Stone described it as a gruesome stream of blood, wine-dark, flowing over white desert sand. The spreading stream stopped, suddenly still, wrong somehow, as the surface of the blood seemed to congeal all at once, the gleaming slick shrinking in on itself and solidifying into tiny grains of ocher dust—fine particles of dried blood that swirled up and away on the oven-hot breath of desert wind.
Stone shook his head to clear it.
Putting the dream out of his mind, he focused on the brightening jungle outside. He must have felt a sense of raw anticipation. As a child raised by a daredevil scientist, he had finally, at the start of his fifth decade, found himself joining an adventure to rival his father’s.
Briefing documents lay spread out on the empty seats beside him, covered in dire warnings and classifications. Among them was a stiff, waxy photograph accompanied by a few pages of technical readouts.
It was truly a stunning image.
The ultra-high-resolution picture had been created by the army’s adaptive super-resolution image reconstruction algorithm, which combined multiple video frames, still images, and radar-generated topographical information to construct a three-dimensional image and paint it with light in spectacular detail.
Even so, it still looked like a hoax.
The structure reminded Stone of his trips to the ancient Mayan temples of Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula. How the surprisingly intact rock edifices peeked their heads out of misty jungles, like giants frozen midstride over a primal landscape that had grown up around them.
Similar, except that the appearance of this particular structure had triggered the scrambling of an international coalition of esteemed scientists to the most remote jungle on the planetary surface. It was apparently worth hiring a black-market chopper for a surely outrageous price, and sending a trio of polite but firm active-duty soldiers to retrieve Stone from a guest lecture before a college class, midsentence, confiscating his phone and firmly escorting him away.
And yet Stone had only glanced at the glossy image. The structure was obviously interesting, but it wasn’t what had piqued his curiosity. That would have been the other readout:
MASS SPECTROMETRY RESULTS
/// These data were collected by [redacted] High-Resolution Spectral Analysis suite and are intended for AFSPC USE ONLY. ///
*** UNAUTHORIZED USE PROHIBITED. CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET—DISSEMINATION IS SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL PENALTIES INCLUDING SUMMARY EXECUTION WITHOUT TRIAL ***
Unknown reading /// Unknown reading. N2. Saturation. /// Composition analysis …
… Incident in PIEDMONT, ARIZONA. MATCH *** MATCH *** MATCH ***
The atmospheric readings were startling in that they very nearly replicated the exact composition of air rising off the sunbaked plains of Piedmont, Arizona, in the aftermath of the Andromeda incident.
And with that, a haunting name was invoked:
PROJECT WILDFIRE * PROJECT WILDFIRE * PROJECT WILDFIRE *
The words would have undoubtedly caused deep, conflicting feelings in Stone. Over fifty years before, his father had played a significant role in stopping the spread of the Andromeda Strain. While under preliminary consideration for inclusion on the Wildfire roster, James Stone had been given access to a slew of classified documents. He had used the opportunity to pore over every detail of the incident—and especially his father’s part in it.
Yet to try and discuss it with the old man would have been impossible—literally illegal.
In all the years of traipsing around the globe together, there is no indication the father and son ever conversed about what happened in Piedmont. With his balding crew cut and thick-framed glasses, Dr. Jeremy Stone seemed never to have left behind the 1950s tradition of stoicism. He took his top-secret status very seriously. Jeremy Stone did not speak of the classified portions of the events that occurred during that five-day period—not to his son, not to any of his ex-wives, not to anyone else in his life.
The father was distant, and yet in many ways the boy worshipped him.
As an adult, James had grown up to be quite distinct from his thin, balding father. Tall and athletic, the younger Stone had a head of thick dark hair (graying now) and a quiet, driven personality. He had reached the highest level of professional success as a roboticist and artificial intelligence expert. Where his father had operated within the hallowed traditions of academia, James had become an industry darling, a perpetually single workaholic who consulted across a variety of high-tech corporations—both start-ups and venerable institutions—wielding a razor-sharp intellect to collect massive paydays.
The elder Stone passed away still a bachelor, having married (twice to the wives of his colleagues) and divorced four times. James Stone apparently decided to forgo the entire process, never marrying or having children of his own. Despite their differences, James was his father’s son in so many ways.
According to Stone, after receiving contingent approval to join the modern-day Project Wildfire early in his career, not telling his father about it was one of the hardest things he had ever done in his life.
But it’s exactly what his father would have done in his place.
THOUGH RECORDS OF the Sikorsky H-92 pilot and copilot do not exist, word of mouth indicated that they were Brazilian narcotraficantes—subjectively a pair of criminals, but objectively the best in the world at navigating the largely unpoliced cross-basin routes favored by the Colombian cartels.
The pilot did not understand why he was flying an americano, much less during the daytime; he also did not know of the huge, unmarked cash payment made to his superiors; and he was not completely sure he would make it out of this job alive.
This last concern was actually quite valid.
At Peterson AFB, the Sikorsky was under constant surveillance. An F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter had been hastily launched from just off the Pacific coast, where it was stationed aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). The carrier strike group had been dispatched under the guise of a joint American and Peruvian emergency response exercise. If the Sikorsky helicopter were to show any sign of contamination, the high-altitude fighter was one trigger word away from launching a bevy of AIM-120 AMRAAM long-range air-to-air missiles.
The helicopter pilot was unaware of this information, but certainly suspected something was wrong. Wisely, he chose not to deviate from the prescribed course in the slightest—despite what was about to unfold.
“Agora, nos descemos,” the pilot said to the American. “Brace. Brace yourself.”
In the cabin, James heard the static-filled voice of the pilot over his headphones.
“Why here?” he replied, scanning the unbroken jungle below. “We need to be closer.”
“Quarantena. Thirty miles.”
Quarantine zone. So the government had learned something since Piedmont. If the AS-2 plastiphage microparticle were airborne near the site, it could infect low-flying aircraft. In recovered cabin video, James can be seen hastily checking the rubber of the window gasket—running a finger along the soft plastic seal and examining it.
Still intact.
The second evolution of the Andromeda Strain,