Goliath

admiral can see the dark silhouette of the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG 64), and, looming farther in the distance, the hulking outline of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Ivashuk gazes below as another SH-60R Seahawk antisubmarine helicopter lifts away from the flight deck. The Sixth Fleet’s gauntlet has been in position at the Strait of Gibraltar for ten days, but the admiral’s mission remains unclear. He has been ordered to actively search for Goliath, but he has not been given permission to engage the enemy—unless his forces are clearly provoked.

The admiral pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to ease the pain in his eyes. High command has placed him in a no-win situation, and Ivashuk is less than pleased. On February 2, sonar buoys lining the Strait had detected a whisper of movement, something unidentifiable, yet something potentially quite large, heading east into the Mediterranean along the seafloor. For some inexplicable reason, Ivashuk had been ordered not to launch an attack.

The advantage was lost. Three days later, Baghdad and most of Afghanistan had been wiped off the map.

At first there was shock. Then waves of elation ran through the ship as the crew realized. Saddam was dead, the threat of his biological weapons crushed, along with terrorists cells financed by the trusts of Osama bin Laden. Chants of “U.S.A … U.S.A.” rose from every deck. Sailors gathered around televisions as CNN broadcast from the streets of Manhattan, where New Yorkers were hugging each other, honking horns—all swept away by the sudden release of emotion.

“My husband was one of the firemen who died at the World Trade Center, so yes, I’m glad those animals finally got what was coming to them.”

“Let ’em rot in hell, those Arab bastards!”

“Good for Covah. The man did what we’ve been wanting to do for decades!”

“The hand of God crushed our enemies today!”

“TIME should make Covah its Man of the Year.”

But then, as the days passed and the first scenes of the nuclear fallout were made public, America’s sentiments changed. Horrific scenes brought back memories of September 11. Entire cities had been charred and leveled, over a million humans instantaneously vaporized, with hundreds of thousands more—including children— dying every day.

The face of revenge had changed. Elation was replaced by disgust, followed by a call to action.

But what could be done? And where would Covah strike next?

Admiral Ivashuk stares at his vessel’s wake. He knows the Goliath is still in the Mediterranean. He also knows the killer sub must pass back through the Sixth Fleet’s gauntlet in order to escape into the open waters of the Atlantic. What Ivashuk doesn’t know is whether he will be allowed to engage the enemy should the opportunity again present itself.

Goddamn bureaucrats … They’re hesitant to take any course of action that might provoke the launching of another Trident missile, yet they’re willing to place their aircraft carrier in the direct path of an attack sub that has already sunk an entire CVBG. Muttering under his breath, he heads aft and outside onto the overlook place known as Vulture’s Row. Even with her three attack subs, USS Miami, USS Norfolk, and USS Boise guarding her from below, Ivashuk knows the Enterprise is a sitting duck.

The naval veteran inhales the salt air, swallowing back the bile rising from his gut.

Aboard the Goliath

Gunnar follows Simon Covah aft, then down a steel ladder to middle deck forward.

Within the small alcove is the impassable vault door.

“Sorceress, open your control chamber.”

IDENTIFICATION CODE REQUIRED.

“Covah-one, alpha-omega six-four-five-tango-four-six-five-nine.”

IDENTIFICATION CODE VERIFIED. VOICE IDENTIFICATION VERIFIED. YOU MAY ENTER CONTROL CHAMBER.

The vault door swings open majestically, revealing a dark chamber within.

Gunnar follows Covah inside, the door sealing shut behind them.

Ten paces and the deck becomes a steel catwalk. Middle deck forward is a double-hulled, self-contained tunnel-like compartment, its curved, watertight vault walls thirty feet across, rising twenty feet high. Dark and heavily air-conditioned, the fortresslike nerve center is ringed with electronics and equipped with its own primary and secondary power sources. Illuminating the chamber, running beneath the catwalk, are lengths of clear, plastic pipes. Within these man-made arteries flow a series of bioluminescent liquids, the elixirs color-coded lime green, phosphorescent orange, and electric blue.

Continuing forward, Gunnar and Covah arrive at the end of the compartment, a large cathedral-shaped alcove, at the center of which is a gigantic Lexan hourglass-shaped configuration radiating light like a bizarre aquarium.

“Say hello to Sorceress,” Covah announces with a rasp. “As you can see, the Chinese and I reconfigured quite a few things.”

The centerpiece, resembling a see-through version of a nuclear cooling tower, stands twenty feet high, its narrowing middle twelve feet in diameter. Mounted above and below to rubber support sleeves, the object extends down from the ceiling through a circular cutout in the walkway, continuing eight feet below the catwalk. A padded support rail encircles the object, further immobilizing it.

A spider’s web of plastic pipes originating from a series of perimetermounted generators feeds directly into inlets atop the glowing object. A similar configuration of pipes flows out of the bottom of the Lexan glass container, dispersing below the deck and out of sight.

Gunnar peers through the glass. Inside, the lime green, phosphorescent orange, and electric blue biochemical elixirs twist and contort like oil in a maelstrom. “Sorceress’s biochemical womb? It’s much larger than I imagined.”

Covah nods proudly. “We found that silicon-coated bacteria reproduced DNA within a womb this size at rates far exceeding even those found in nature. The vat’s solution feeds into millions of different column compartments, each one consisting of a series of chambers where the DNA is sequentially extracted from the bacteria in milliseconds. The bacteria are then fed into gold bead-packed filters as the algorithms are executed. The filters extract the potential solution strands, which are then read in magnetic resonance columns.” Covah points to a series of pipes feeding into an adjacent alcove of equipment. “The extracted information either gets shunted into synthesizers, where plasmidlike DNA is generated at lightning speed for data input, or goes back to the silicon- based hardware, where the last steps in processing convert the answers evolved by the bacteria into a form that we hear as the voice of Sorceress.”

“Incredible.”

“Yes. I believe even Dr. Goode would be proud.”

“Would she? I wonder.” A sudden, frightening thought. “Simon … the system’s self-replicating program—what did you pattern the physical concentration features after?”

“Only the most sophisticated features ever discovered—the very embryological processes found in Nature herself.”

“The life sequence?” Gunnar feels his insides tightening, his blood pressure rising. “Dammit, Simon—”

“Lab tests in China confirmed the cloned bacteria’s behavior became far more vigorous using this type of —”

“Vigorous?” Gunnar slams his palms against the padded rail in frustration. “The entire process grew out of control. Don’t you remember Dr. Goode’s warnings? We agreed never to use those parameters again.”

Covah’s demeanor darkens. “I agreed to nothing. I don’t work for Elizabeth Goode, I work for science.” He points to the vat, his voice cracking as it rises. “Look at it, Gunnar, swirling within that vat is the very elixir of life. Our primordial oceans once teemed with similar broths, only far less complex. At some point those chemical elixirs organized, their evolution no doubt stimulated by an outside catalyst. It was this single event that initiated the explosion of life on this planet. Now, two billion years later, we’ve created artificial intelligence using Nature’s own