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  June 30th, 1908—In the remote Tunguska region of Siberia, the most violent cosmic collision in recorded history flattened ancient forests over an area half the size of Rhode Island. Yet after a hundred years of international scientific research the cause of this impact remains a mystery.

  A MAVERICK ASTROPHYSICIST

  Jack Adler thinks he’s fingered the culprit: a submicroscopic black hole, smaller than an atom, heavier than a mountain, older than the stars. What’s more, that fantastic object is still down, deep inside the Earth, burrowing through the mantle in an ever-decaying orbit that will end only when it has devoured the entire planet.

  A ROOKIE SECRET AGENT

  Marianna Bonaventure is tracking three missing scientists suspected of involvement in weapons of mass destruction research. The trail leads to Rusalka, the luxurious floating corporate headquarters of billionaire Russian industrialist Arkady Grishin. Determined to prove herself, Marianna creates an elaborate ruse in order to infiltrate the megayacht—a dangerous gambit that requires the coerced cooperation of a rather special civilian . . .

  AN UNCANNY CONSULTANT

  Jonathan Knox is one of the country’s most sought-after analysts; his knack for intuiting hidden relationships among seemingly disparate events serves his Fortune-50 clients well. But when Marianna compels the reluctant Knox to join her undercover mission, he must grapple with puzzles of a whole different order of magnitude.

  Against violent and cunning opposition, the three of them unearth a scheme to capture the submicroscopic black hole that caused the Tunguska Event and use its awesome power to transform the world—or end it altogether.

  Bill DeSmedt’s debut is a tour-de-force of breakneck plotting, complex characters, and cutting-edge science. From the trackless wastes of Siberia to the rooftops of Manhattan to the stygian depths of the North Atlantic, Singularity weaves a richly detailed and intelligent tale, meticulously researched and elegantly told.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SINGULARITY. © 2005 by William H. DeSmedt. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  “The Aleph,” from collected fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, © 1998 by Maria Kodama; translation © 1998 by Penguin Putnam Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  “Coasting,” from the moon and other failures by F.D. Reeve, © 1999 by F.D. Reeve. Used by permission of Michigan State University Press.

  Designed by Karawynn Long

  Edited by Jak Koke

  Printed in the U.S.A. by Phoenix Color Corporation

  Published by Per Aspera Press, a division of Viridian City Media, Seattle. Visit us online at www.perasperapress.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeSmedt, Bill.

  SINGULARITY / Bill DeSmedt.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-9745734-4-2 (hardcover)

  1. Tunguska meteorite-Fiction. 2. Siberia (Russia)-Fiction. 3. Meteorites-Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.E759S56 2004

  813'.6-DC22

  2004018210

  FIRST EDITION: NOVEMBER 2004

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ted DeSmedt

  friend, father, ancient mariner

  —’Tis not too late to seek a newer world

  Introduction

  The Tunguska Event

  Suddenly the sky split in two, and high and wide above the

  forest the whole north of the sky was covered with fire.

  —S.B. SEMYONOV, EYEWITNESS

  THE REMNANT HAD sailed the empty spaces between the stars since time began. Had journeyed far, far in space and time from its birth at the beginning of all things, far from its forging in the primal fires of Creation.

  There was no destination on this voyage, though there were occasional ports of call. Here and there throughout the void tiny orbs circled their parent primaries, huddled close against the cold and the dark. Most such solar systems were bypassed without incident. Still, every once in an eternity, some unlucky world would chance to swim out into the remnant’s path.

  As one is doing now.

  In this, the summer of 1908, there is no science or technology anywhere on earth that might avert the impending catastrophe. Heavier-than-air flying machines have only just begun their conquest of the skies, and space flight remains but a distant dream, the exclusive province of visionaries like Jules Verne and Herbert George Wells. The controversial theory that the entire physical world might be made up of tiny particles called “atoms” is still waging an uphill battle for scientific acceptance, against the strenuous opposition of influential physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. It will be another fifteen months before a young Albert Einstein will leave his safe berth at the Bern patent office and devote himself fulltime to generalizing the theory of relativity he first broached a mere three years earlier. For all the secrets that nature has yielded up in the two centuries since Newton, the scientists of Earth still stand helpless before the threat posed by the remnant.

  But they can, just barely, detect its approach.

  In the main physics lab at Germany’s Kiel University of Applied Science, beginning at six in the evening on June 27th and continuing over the following two nights, Professor Ludwig Weber has been observing faint but regular disturbances in his magnetometer readings. After ruling out streetcar vibrations and Northern Lights, he concludes that a powerful magnetic point-source must be nearing the Earth from somewhere out in space. But when Weber points the observatory telescope at the likely region of night sky, he sees—nothing.

  What could be close enough and charged enough to interfere with the magnetic field of the Earth itself, yet remain invisible to the most sensitive instruments early twentieth-century optical technology can muster? This is the question that confounds Weber throughout the evening of June 29th as he watches the magnetic disturbances grow in strength. He is still wrestling with the riddle when, at 1:14 on the morning of June 30, 1908, the frenetic jitter of his magnetometer needle comes to a sudden dead stop.

  Six time zones to the east of Kiel, far out on the Central Siberian plateau, there yawns that vast, silent emptiness known as the Stony Tunguska basin—three hundred thousand square miles of watershed, peopled, even in this eighth year of the new century, by fewer than thirty thousand souls. Here, in this land of expatriate Russian frontiersmen and nomadic Evenki tribes, there are no telescopes, no magnetometers, precious little technology of any kind. Here in Tunguska, nothing but a dying shaman’s vision has foretold the remnant’s coming, and nothing more than the naked eye will be needed to witness its arrival.

  Here in Tunguska, the morning of June 30th has dawned bright and clear, scarcely a wisp of cloud in the sky. By seven, the sun has been up for hours, banishing the chill of the brief subarctic summer night, promising another sweltering noontide. Herds of domesticated reindeer, lifeblood of the Evenki nomads, are already grazing on new shoots in the thickly-forested taiga. Dense veils of mosquitoes swarm the pestilential bogs of the Great Southern Swamp. The living world goes on unchanged, just as it has for centuries. Despite the sham
an’s warning.

  Perhaps no one finds more comfort in the very ordinariness of this fine summer morning than a young Evenki herdsman by the name of Vasiliy Jenkoul. For today Jenkoul must tend to his father’s southern herds. And that will mean riding down the long Silgami ridge, directly into the Tunguska heartlands.

  Into the lands where—to believe the shaman’s deathbed prophecy—on this morning, the great god Ogdy, Old Man of the Storms, will send forth his thunderwinged minions to visit death and destruction upon the clans of the Stony Tunguska.

  7:14 A.M. The forest falls silent. Even the ceaseless susurration of the Great Swamp’s insect life fades. Far off in the southeastern skies, clearly visible in broad daylight, a bright blue star appears.

  The remnant is close now. Four hundred miles out and a hundred miles up, just beginning to brush the lower edges of the ionosphere. The resulting shockwave fluoresces in the ultraviolet. Thickening atmosphere absorbs the radiation and re-emits it at longer wavelengths. Trailing a plasma column of cerulean blue, it descends.

  Scattered outposts throughout the sparsely-inhabited Tunguska region awaken to a cannonade of sonic booms echoing down from the cloudless sky. Villagers pour into the streets to watch in amazement as a blindingly bright blue “pipe” bisects the heavens. Old women burst into tears, crying that the end of the world has come.

  Fifty-seven miles southwest of ground zero, on the outskirts of a ramshackle of sod-roofed wooden huts that styles itself the Vanavara Trading Station, Semyon Borisovich Semyonov is sitting on his porch, trying to tamp a new hoop onto a cask of flour using nothing more serviceable than an axe. Nothing to be done for it; out here on the taiga one learns to make do with what is to hand. “If you have no plow, you must furrow with a stick,” as the Siberians say.

  He fumbles the hoop into position. There. He is just raising the axe for a final blow, when the sky brightens directly overhead.

  Semyon arrests the axe in mid-swing and looks up. The sky—the sky splits in two! A broad streak of impossibly brilliant blue cleaves it from south to north. Semyon clambers to his feet. As he watches, the blue line touches the horizon.

  The closest human being to the event this summer morning is not Semyon, but a young Evenki herdsman. Yet, with his view of the heavens obscured by dense forest canopy, Jenkoul is the last to see it coming. Nor, even in this eerie silence, will he hear the rumble of its approach, for the remnant’s speed far exceeds that of sound. No warning will have a chance to reach his senses, before—

  Impact!

  A patch of sky framed by the empty arms of a blighted birch suddenly flares blue-white. Jenkoul reins to a halt, begins to dismount, and is nearly thrown from the saddle as the first in a series of thunderous concussions hits him.

  Ogdy! The Old Man of the Thunder has unleashed his terrible winged minions against the clans. Peal after peal deafens Jenkoul, as all around him ancient stands of larch and pine crash to the ground, uprooted and smashed flat by the hurricane-force blast wave. Beyond toppling trees, a mountains-high tongue of flame reaches up.

  Ogdy is kindling his lodge-fire in the heartlands of the Stony Tunguska.

  Only the lore of the Evenki saves Jenkoul now. It is said a hunter caught in the open by a blizzard can survive by hunkering down alongside his mount, using its body as a shield against gale-force winds. Perhaps this will work for fire as well as ice. Jenkoul yanks his steed to the ground and cramps into the lee of its torso. The thunder is one continuous roar. Jenkoul exhales and holds his breath, lest his lungs be seared by the superheated air now washing over him.

  Fifty-seven miles away, at Vanavara Station, Semyon’s axe clatters to the floor. His eyes squeeze shut against a flash too bright to look at. The northern half of the sky erupts in flame. The sky has split open, and, in opening, has disclosed not the heavens, but the fires of hell.

  Semyon opens his mouth to call out. A monster wind stirs the trees. Suddenly he is running off the porch, tearing at his clothes. His shirt is smoking, so hot it burns his skin. As Semyon clears the stoop, the blast wave hits. It picks him up and flings him like a rag doll all the way across the yard. Fissures open in the ground around him. Flat on his back now, it is all he can do to throw an arm across his face and block out the sight of the hideous sky.

  Directly above ground zero a pillar of fire punches a path twelve miles up into the stratosphere, creating a partial vacuum at the blast site that sucks thousands of tons of earth and ash skyward. A churning black pyroclastic column ascends fifty miles into the sky, pumping tons of particulate matter into the upper atmosphere, to an altitude where the mesospheric air currents can sweep it up and circulate it around the world.

  Sunlight scattering off the high-altitude debris will paint the night skies with noctilucent clouds. In London on the night of June 30th the air-glow illuminates the northern quadrant of the heavens so brightly that the Times can be read at midnight. In Antwerp the glare of what looks like a huge bonfire rises twenty degrees above the northern horizon, and the sweep second hands of stopwatches are clearly visible at one A.M. In Stockholm, photographers find they can take pictures out of doors without need of cumbersome flash apparatus at any time of night from June 30th to July 3rd. These strange “white nights” will continue, gradually fading in intensity, throughout the month of July 1908. Scientists across Western Europe, unaware of events thirty-five hundred miles to the east, are at a loss to explain the phenomenon.

  But here in Tunguska, where the cause is clear, the sky is far from bright. Darkness descends at mid-morning, as the heaviest clumps of dirt and ash precipitate out in a black rain.

  The force of the blast continues to propagate outward, though it must traverse hundreds of miles of taiga before coming into contact with the first outposts of twentieth-century science. At the Irkutsk Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory, the free-swinging weights of hermetically-sealed Repsold balances chart the onset of a massive earthquake five hundred and fifty miles to the north. Instrumentation as far west as the eastern seaboard of North America will soon follow suit.

  But it doesn’t take a seismograph to detect these seismic effects: close in, the isolated encampments of the Stony Tunguska clans are smashed flat, their birchbark choums sent flying as the subterranean pulses slam into them. Further out, houses sway and windowpanes craze throughout a circle two hundred fifty miles in radius, centered on ground zero. On the newly-completed Trans-Siberian railway line three hundred seventy five miles southwest of The Epicenter, a locomotive screeches to a halt lest it be thrown from the tracks by the tremors; the terrified engineer tells the conductor to get out and check for signs of a boiler explosion.

  Magnetometers at Irkutsk Observatory, five hundred fifty miles due south of ground zero, record the raging of an unprecedented geomagnetic “storm,” beginning at 7:23 A.M. local time and lasting nearly five hours. Echoes of the storm are picked up at the observatory at Pavlovsk, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg two thousand five hundred miles away. Even as far west as London, the Times will report “a slight, but plainly marked, disturbance of the magnets on Tuesday night.” The next time the world will witness disruptions of the Earth’s magnetic field on such a scale will be in 1958, following the detonation of an H-bomb at Bikini Atoll.

  Moving at the speed of sound, a massive airborne shockwave thrums the coda to the event. Thirty minutes after and two hundred miles downrange of the impact, the barometers at a backwoods meteorological station in Kirensk record its passage. It will reach Irkutsk Observatory a quarter of an hour later. Attenuating with every mile, the concussion still retains enough energy to be heard as distant thunder a thousand miles away.

  And even after dropping below the threshold of audibility, the pressure wave travels on. When it finally dies out twenty-five hours later, it will have circled twice around the globe, and left traces of its passage on barographs in Potsdam, London, Washington D.C., and Djakarta.

  Miraculously, the event has expended its fury on one of the most desolate r
egions on the face of the globe. Had the impact occurred five hours later, the Earth’s rotation would have shifted the impact zone to the outskirts of populous St. Petersburg, and the death toll would have risen into the hundreds of thousands.

  But, here in Tunguska, the only human casualties are from secondary effects: heart attacks and strokes suffered by a few of the Evenki tribesmen closest in. No one has died as a direct result of the catastrophe’s hellish violence.

  Jenkoul uncrouches from behind the steaming carcass that had been his mount. The young Evenki braces himself and—slowly, so as not to inflict further torment on his parboiled flesh—rises to his feet. In so doing, he attains what is now the highest vantage on the ruined Silgami ridge. The old-growth forest that had soared above his head has been leveled to the ground. He can see the whole of the sky.

  And, in that sky, a towering black column shot all through with lightning—the lodge-pole of Ogdy—rises up and up forever.

  In years to come, a multitude of explanations would be advanced for what became known as the “Tunguska Event.”

  Most scientists initially assumed a giant meteorite had crashed that summer morning in the forests northwest of Vanavara Station. That hypothesis stood unchallenged for the nearly two decades that separated the event itself from the first on-site investigation of it—two decades during which scientific inquiry languished in Russia, preempted by war, revolution, and socio-economic upheaval. The few expeditions that did set forth in the intervening years were forced to turn back when their Evenki guides refused to enter the blast zone, fearing to trespass on the abode of the storm-god Ogdy.

  Finally, in 1927, a team of researchers headed by mineralogist Leonid Kulik reached the site of the impact, where surrounding hills cupped the sloughs of the Great Swamp to form a landscape Kulik dubbed “The Cauldron.” The Epicenter itself was easy enough to identify: for hundreds of square miles all around the Cauldron, across an area half the size of the state of Rhode Island, the ancient forests of the taiga had been scorched and flattened by the blast. Hundreds of thousands of trees had been toppled like matchsticks in all directions, forming a radial “throw-down” pattern in the shape of a gigantic target, with the impact site at the bulls-eye.