The Sign

  And then it came. A question that sent a straightening spasm shooting up his spine.

  “Are you ready to serve?”

  His eyes fluttered open, blinking against the soft dawn light. He glanced around instinctively, as he’d done many times before, but it was pointless, as it had been each time before. He was alone up there. There was no one around. Not a soul, human or animal. Nothing at all, as far as the eye could see.

  Despite the early morning chill, sweat droplets sprouted across his baldpate. He swallowed hard, and concentrated again.

  And then it came, again.

  The voice, the whisper, coming from inside his own head.

  “The time of our Lord will soon be upon you. Are you prepared to serve?”

  Hesitantly, with a tremor in his voice, Father Jerome opened his mouth and stammered, “Yes, of course. Whatever you ask of me. I am your servant.”

  There was no reply at first. The old priest could feel the individual droplets of sweat sliding down the rugged skin on his forehead, one after the other, skating across the ridge of his brow before dropping onto his cheek. He could almost hear them trickling down, a slow, tortuous progress across his tightened, weather-beaten face.

  Then the voice inside his head came back.

  “Are you ready to lead your people to salvation? Are you prepared to fight for them? To show them the errors of their ways, even though they may not want to listen?”

  “Yes,” Father Jerome cried out, his voice cracking with equal doses of passion and fear. “Yes, of course. But how? When?”

  A suffocating silence gripped the mountain, then the voice returned, and simply told him, “Soon.”

  Chapter 1

  Amundsen Sea , Antarctica—Present day

  The static that hissed through the tiny, noise-isolating earpiece disappeared, replaced by the authoritative-yet-soothing voice of the show’s anchorman.

  “Talk us through why this is happening, Grace?”

  Just then, another wall of ice crumbled behind her and collapsed on itself, crackling like distant thunder. Grace Logan—Gracie, to her friends—turned away from the camera and watched as the entire cliff plummeted into the gray-blue water and disappeared in an angry eruption of spray.

  Perfect timing, she thought with a glimmer of satisfaction, a brief respite from the solemnity she’d been feeling since she’d arrived on the ship the day before.

  Under normal circumstances, this could well have been a pleasant, sunny, late-December day, December being the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

  Today was different.

  Today, nature was in turmoil.

  It felt as if the very fabric of the earth was being ripped apart. Which it was. The slab of ice that was tearing itself off the rest of the continent was the size of Texas.

  Not exactly the kind of Christmas present the planet needed.

  The breakup of the ice shelf was now in its third day, and it was only getting started. The cataclysm had kicked up a ghostly mist that thinned out the sun’s warming rays, and the cold was starting to get to Gracie, even with the adrenaline coursing through her. She could see that the rest of her team—Dalton Kwan, the young, breezy Hawaiian cameraman she’d worked with regularly over the past three years, and Howard “Finch” Fincher, their older, über-fastidious and annoyingly stoic veteran producer—were also far from comfortable, but the footage they were airing was well worth it, especially since, as far as she could tell, they were the only news crew around.

  She’d been out there for over an hour, standing on the starboard observation deck of the RRS James Clark Ross, and despite the thermals and the gloves, her fingers and toes were shivering. The royal research ship, a beefy three-hundred-foot floating oceanographic and geophysical laboratory operated by the British Antarctic Survey project, was currently less than half a mile off the coast of Western Antarctica, its distinctive deep-red hull the only blip of color in an otherwise bleak palette of whites, blues, and grays. Gracie, Dalton, and Finch had been on the continent for a couple of weeks, shooting footage in the Terra Firma Islands for her big global warming documentary. They had been ready to pack up and head home for Christmas, which was only days away, when the call from the news desk back in D.C. had come in, informing them that the shelf’s breakup had started. The news hadn’t been widely circulated at that point; a contact of the network inside the NSIDC—the National Snow and Ice Data Center, whose scientists used satellite data to track changes in the spread and thickness of the polar ice caps—had given them the heads-up on the sly. With the competition snoozing and the James Clark Ross a day’s sail away from the action and already heading toward it, Gracie and her crew had jumped on the opportunity for an exclusive scoop. The BAS had graciously agreed to have them on board to cover the event, going so far as to arrange for a Royal Navy chopper to ferry them in from the island.

  Several of the ship’s onboard scientists were also on deck, watching the walls of ice disintegrate. A couple of them were filming, using handheld video cameras. Most of the crew were also out there, staring in resigned and awed silence.

  Gracie turned back to face the camera and pulled her microphone closer. In between the irregular, thunderous collapses of the cliff face, the air reverberated with the distant, muffled retorts of the ice’s tortured movement farther inland.

  “This breakup was probably caused by a number of factors, Jack, but the main suspect in this very complicated investigation is just plain old meltwater.”

  She heard more hissing as the signal bounced off a couple of satellites and traveled ten thousand miles to the network’s climate-controlled newsroom in D.C. and back, then Roxberry’s voice returned, slightly confused. “Meltwater?”

  “That’s right, Jack,” she explained. “Pools of water that build up on the surface of the ice as it melts. This meltwater is heavier than the ice it’s sitting on, so—basic law of gravity—it finds its way down into cracks, and as more and more water pushes through, it acts like a wedge and these cracks grow into rifts that grow into canyons, and if there’s enough meltwater to keep pushing through, the ice shelf eventually just snaps off.”

  The physics of it were simple. The highest, coldest, and windiest continent on the planet, an area one and a half times as big as the United States, was almost entirely covered by a dome of ice over two miles thick at its center. Heavy snowfalls blanket it in winter, then spread downward by gravity, flowing like ice-cold lava to the coast. And when this ice floe runs out of land, it keeps going, beyond the edge of land, but it doesn’t sink: It floats, cantilevering over the sea in what we refer to as ice shelves. They can be over a mile thick at the point where they start floating, tapering to a no-less-staggering quarter mile at the water’s edge, where they end in cliffs of a hundred feet or more above the waterline.

  There had been a handful of major breakups in the last decade, but none this big. Also, they were rarely captured live on camera. They were usually only detected long after the event, after scrutinizing and comparing satellite images. And even though what Gracie was witnessing was only a localized portion of the overall upheaval—the collapse of towering cliffs of ice at the shelf ’s seaward edge—it was still an astounding and deeply troubling sight. In twelve years in television news, a career she’d dived into straight after getting her BA in political science from Cornell, Gracie had witnessed a lot of tragedies, and this one ranked right up there with the worst of them.

  She was watching the planet fall apart—literally. “So the big question then is,” Roxberry asked, “why is it happening now? I mean, as I understand it, this ice shelf has been around since the end of the last ice age, and that was, what, twelve thousand years ago?”

  “It’s happening because of us, Jack. Because of the greenhouse gases we’re generating. We’re seeing it at both poles, here, up in the Arctic, in Greenland. And it isn’t just part of a natural cycle. Almost every expert I’ve talked to is now convinced that the melting is accelerating and telling m
e we’re close to some kind of tipping point, a point of no return—because of man-made global warming.”

  Another block of ice disintegrated and crashed into the sea.

  “And the concern here is that this ice shelf breaking off and melting will contribute to rising sea levels?” Roxberry asked.

  “Well, not directly. Most of this ice shelf is already floating on water, so it doesn’t affect sea levels in itself. Think of it as an ice cube floating in a glass of water. When it melts, it doesn’t raise the level of water in the glass.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “I guess I’m not the only one who’s forgotten their sixth-grade physics,” she grinned.

  “But you said there’s an indirect effect on global sea levels.” Roxberry’s voice exuded expertise, as if he were generously allowing her a chance to display her knowledge.

  “Well, this area, the West Antarctic ice sheet, is the one place on the planet that scientists have been worried about most, in terms of ice melts. More specifically, they’re worried about the massive glaciers sitting on land, behind this ice shelf. They’re not floating.”

  “So if they melted,” Roxberry added, “sea levels would rise.”

  “Exactly. Up until now, ice shelves like this one have been keeping back the glaciers, sort of like a cork that’s holding in the contents of a bottle. Once the ice shelf breaks off, the cork’s gone, there’s nothing left to stop the glaciers from sliding into the sea—and if they do, the global sea levels rise. And this melting is happening much faster than forecasts had predicted. Even the data we have from last year is now considered too optimistic. In terms of disaster scenarios due to climate change, Antarctica was considered a sleeping giant. Well, the giant’s now awake. And, by the looks of it, he’s really grumpy.”

  Roxberry quipped, “I’m trying real hard to avoid saying this could just be the tip of the iceberg—”

  “A wise choice, Jack,” she interjected. She could just picture the smug, self-satisfied grin lighting up his perma-tanned face and groaned inwardly at the thought. “A grateful audience salutes you.”

  “But that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely. Once these glaciers slide into the sea, it’ll be too late to do anything about it, and . . .”

  Her voice suddenly trailed off and dried up, as something distracted her: a ripple of sudden commotion, shrieks and gasps of shock and outstretched arms pointing out at the ice shelf. The words still caught in her throat as she saw Dalton’s head rise from behind the viewfinder of the camera and look beyond her. Gracie spun around, facing away from the camera. And that’s when she saw it.

  In the sky. A couple of hundred feet above the collapsing ice shelf.

  A bright, shimmering sphere of light.

  It just appeared there, and wasn’t moving.

  Gracie concentrated her gaze on it and inched over to the railing. She didn’t understand what she was looking at, but whatever it was, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  The object—no, she wasn’t even sure it was an object. It had a spherical shape, but somehow, it didn’t seem . . . physical. It had an ethereal lightness to it, as if the air itself was glowing. And its brightness wasn’t uniform. It was more subtle, graded, intense at its core then gradually thinning out, as in a close-up of an eye. It had an unstable, fragile quality to it. Like melting ice, or, rather, just water, suspended in midair and lit up, if that were possible, only Gracie knew it wasn’t.

  She darted a look at Dalton, who was angling the camera toward the sighting. “Are you getting this?” she blurted.

  “Yeah, but,” he shot back, looking over at her, his face scrunched up in sheer confusion, “what the hell is it?”

  Chapter 2

  Gracie’s eyes were locked onto it. It was just there, suspended in the pallid sky over the edge of the ice shelf. Mesmerizing in an otherworldly, surreal way.

  “What is that?” Finch asked. His hands went up to his glasses, fidgeting slightly with their position, as if it would help clarify things.

  “I don’t know.” A surge of adrenaline spiked through her as she struggled to process what she was seeing. A quick, almost instinctive trawl through the possibilities of what it could be didn’t get any hits.

  This was unlike anything she was even vaguely familiar with.

  She glanced across at the knot of scientists crowding the railings. They were talking and gesticulating excitedly, trying to make sense of it too.

  “Gracie? What is that behind you?” Roxberry’s voice came booming back through her earpiece.

  For a second, she’d forgotten this was going out live. “You’re seeing this?”

  A couple of seconds for her question and his reply to bounce off a satellite or two, then he came back. “It’s not perfectly clear, but yeah, we’re getting it—what is it?”

  She composed herself and faced the camera squarely, trying to keep any quiver out of her voice. “I don’t know, Jack. It just suddenly appeared. It seems to be some kind of corona, a halo of some sort . . . Hang on.”

  She looked around, scanning the sky, checking to see if anything else was around, noting the sun’s veiled position, unconsciously logging her surroundings. Nothing had changed. Nothing else was out there apart from their ship and the . . . what was it? She couldn’t even think of an appropriate name for it. It was still shimmering brightly, half-transparent, its texture reminding her of a gargantuan, deep-sea jellyfish, floating in midair. And it seemed to be rotating, ever so slowly, giving it a real sense of depth.

  And, oddly, she thought, a sense of being somehow . . . alive.

  She stared at it, resisting all kinds of competing, outlandish thoughts, and focused her mind on getting a handle on its size. As big as a large hot air balloon, she first thought, then adjusted her thinking upward. Bigger. Maybe as big as a fireball in a fireworks display. It was huge. It was hard to judge without a point of reference for scale. She ran a visual comparison to the height of the cliff face below, which she knew to be roughly a hundred and fifty feet tall. It seemed to be around the same size, maybe a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, maybe more.

  Dalton looked up from behind the camera and asked, “You think it’s some freaky aurora borealis thing?”

  She’d been thinking the same thing, wondering if it was a trick of the light, an illusion caused by a reflection off the ice. In Antarctica, the sun never set during the austral summer. It just circled around at the horizon, a little higher during the “day,” a little lower—almost a sunset—during the “night.” It had taken some getting used to and it played tricks on you, but somehow Gracie didn’t think it explained what she was seeing. The sighting seemed more substantial than that.

  “Maybe,” she replied, almost to herself, lost in her thoughts, “but I don’t think it’s the time of year for them . . . and I’m pretty sure they only appear when it’s dark.”

  “Gracie?” Roxberry again, waiting for an answer. Reminding her that she was going out live.

  To a world audience.

  Christ almighty.

  She tried to relax and put on a genial smile for the camera, despite the tiny alarms buzzing through her. “This is just . . . It’s pretty amazing, Jack. I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe someone else on this ship knows what it is, we’ve got quite a few experts on board.”

  Dalton lifted his tripod and tracked along with Gracie as she edged over to the scientists and crew members on deck with her, keeping the apparition in frame.

  The others were discussing it in excited, heated tones, but something about their body language worried Gracie. If it was a rare, but natural, phenomenon, they’d be reacting differently. Somehow, she got the impression that they weren’t comfortable with what they were seeing. Not just uncomfortable, but . . . rattled.

  They don’t know what it is.

  One of them, who’d been watching it through binoculars, turned and met her gaze. He was an older man, a paleoclimatologist she
’d met on arrival named Jeb Simmons. She read the same confusion, the same unease, on his face that had to be radiating from hers. It only confirmed her feeling.

  She was about to speak up when another wave of gasps broke out across the deck. She turned in time to see the shimmering shape suddenly pulse, brightening up to a blazing radiance for a heartbeat before dimming back to its original pearlescent glare.

  Gracie glanced at Simmons as Roxberry’s excited voice crackled back. “Did it just flare up?”

  She knew the image on the screen he was looking at would be grainy, maybe even a bit jumpy. The live video uplink back to the studio was always compromised, nowhere near as clear as the original, high-definition footage on Dalton’s cameras.

  “Jack, I don’t know how clearly it’s coming through to you, but from out here, I can tell you, it’s not like anything I’ve seen before.” She tried hard to hang onto her unflustered expression, but her heart was racing now. This didn’t feel right.

  She suddenly remembered something, and turned to Finch and Dalton. “How quickly can you get the bird up?”

  Finch nodded and turned to Dalton. “Let’s do it.”

  “We’re sending the skycam up for a closer look,” Gracie confirmed into her mike, then turned to Simmons, breathless, and clicked her mike off. “Tell me you know what this is,” she said with a tense smile.

  Simmons shook his head. “I wish I could. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “You’ve been here before, right?”

  “Oh yes. This is my fourth winter out here.”

  “And your specialty’s paleoclimatology, right?”

  “I’m flattered,” he smiled, “yes.”

  “And yet . . .”

  He shook his head again. “I’m stumped.”