The Black Echo
Michael Connelly
Orion, 1997http://www.michaelconnelly.com
Ban Rocketships
Mojave Desert. The Near Future.
Mirror-polished wings reflected the noon's full force. Sharp California sun blinded the lucky astronauts' eyes. "This historic day marks commercial spaceflight's first fully-automated journey," announced the CEO. Even he was roasting and cut his own self-congratulations short. Muttering thanks under labored breath, the astronauts sweated along the wing and into the hatch, leaving the gathered hundred's cheering and flashbulbs behind.
"Why in God's name do the reporters need flashbulbs on a day so bright?" swore pampered socialite Veruca, cooling in the ship's leather seats with the ship's perfectly chilled Dom Perignon.
Bestselling sci-fi author Langdon R. Danbrown missed that this question was rhetorical. "Plain as day, the whole notion of God is a myth- it's a bald-faced fallacy to inquire anything in his name!" Veruca caught the eye of German astronaut Augustus and electronics tycoon Mike as Danbrown waffled out his pseudo-intellectual conspiracy theories. They rolled their eyes.
When hot desert air had been replaced by a cool, invigorating atmosphere of 100% oxygen, the great engines' echo shook the cabin. "All tray tables to their upright positions, ye mammyfeckers!" cheered Bucket, the most unlikely astronaut. Bucket was an Irish six-foot four transvestite. He had chosen to voyage into space wearing the pink ball gown that Jade Goody had worn at her eviction from the Big Brother house. He joyfully slapped seatmate Violet on the back of her custom Versace-designed spacesuit. "Drop your book, lovey! We're in for the best ride since… well… me!"
Peeved, Violet retrieved her signed first edition hardcover and buried her nose in it as the gleaming new spacecraft roared into orbit.
"Yee haw! Outer space! Two hundred and six point eight miles above sea level!" Mike read an expensive-looking instrument from one of his spacesuit's many pouches.
"Oh!" Veruca exclaimed. The black majesty of the universe took their breath away. Even if they were still earthbound, the stunning views were sufficient to make the six passengers feel weightless.
"Ach! Look! Ze moon!" Augustus pointed a finger as thick as bratwurst.
"Wha, that oul' dose a cheese? You want to see a bleeding moon?" Bucket lifted his Jade Goody hem and dropped his black lace thong. "Whoo hoo! Earth has two moons in orbit!"
"Mind your manners! That's ugly as sin! I'm shocked and appalled-" Danbrown began his protest.
Bloof! exhaled Bucket's hairy, mooning arse.
"Whoo hoo!" cried Ireland's most unusual Civil Servant, guzzling the last of the champagne. As the luxury spacecraft's air filters automatically whirred into overdrive, four of the other astronauts gasped their complaints bitterly. Violet remained in her seat, nose buried in the Michael Connelly book.
"Cry all ye like, lovies. The lucky promotional ticket I found is just as good as the ones ye blew fortune on. I can do whatever I like up here."
No one laughed. It wasn't that funny.
Bucket scoffed. "Billionaires! Mad as ducks." A shadow passed over the spacecraft, and just as quick the cabin rocked violently. Their hatch exploded outward. The six astronauts were blown from the ship.
Aboard the black steel alien vessel:
In darkness each suffered suffocation. The thin, frigid air made speech a superhuman labor. Veruca would not stop screaming. How is she finding the strength? The breath? Her floating companions wondered. The screaming choked and faded like hope.
A razor of magnesium light seared. Was it a door inching open, then stopped? Hands rose to shield against the terrible burning, but quickly fell again. A deafening cloud swirled into the chamber that was their prison, diffusing the glare. Seconds later screams and cries echoed the black chamber.
"They're all over me! Wee buggers are crawling all over!" Bucket hollered. Augustus shrieked in German as Veruca moaned exhausted, rasping sobs. Suits, legs, swatting hands, faces- all were covered in swarms of sharp-legged beetles.
"SILENCE!" a great hiss commanded. The booming came from all directions. The captive astronauts were shocked into obedience.
"Ah! The taste of human flesh!" the voice formed from one trillion of rustling wings, chattering mandibles. "For millennia we have waited!"
"You speak English!" Danbrown spoke the perennial alien encounter question. "Or is, by some universal coincidence, your language the same as ours? Or are you reading our minds so that we hear you in our native tongue? Is it a universal translator like off Star Trek?"
"Tens of thousands of revolutions around their sun. This one supposes that the entire time we did not look down and monitor their government regulations? NO! FOOL!" Danbrown fell silent as the clichéd grave. "We know everything about your science, all your waste management statutes, your tax procedures. We know the brutal, clacking gears upon which your apelike society turns."
"Ye said it, lovey! That big-mouthed bollocks has been getting on my tits too."
"SILENCE!" commanded their captors.
Bloof! replied Bucket's hairy, mooning arse.
Human spirit- despite all- impelled the six captives to laugh.
The swarm buzzed into a frenzy. The message shot around the alien steel chamber. "WARNING! WARNing! Warning! Trace levels of poison earth gas detected!"
"That was a good one, pardner!" Mike chortled at the story. "Butt-ugly space monsters capture and gag mankind with super-advanced alien technology. Sent scurrying by an old-fashioned no-tech fart!"
A pained, enraged buzzing drowned out the redoubled laughter.
"Who are you icky beings?!" Veruca cried at the mass. "Bugs! Bloodsucking space bugs! Worse than horseflies!"
"The scrumptious one is correct!" the swarm swirled in triumph. "Far worse than the cross-breed children we have introduced to your planet."
"My God! I see it clear as day!" Danbrown exclaimed. "Early human recorded history includes bison, dragons, deer, and all manner of other creatures- except flies! Insectoid parasites were introduced later- not evolved on Earth at all!" The swarm swept in angry waves, knocking the astronauts about like corks on a clichéd ocean.
"Ach!" exclaimed Augustus. "I always asked my mother in Bavaria why God invented mosquitoes! They were not part of His Eden after all!"
Danbrown was on a roll. "And all cultures contain references to bloodsucking monsters! A collective shared memory of these terrible creatures flitting around us now."
"SILENCE! FOOL!"
"Yes! The myths were true all along! The Aztecs and Incas, Mayans and seafaring Phoenicians did not originate on Earth at all! Earth is a shining blue place where our forefathers found refuge. A great conspiracy has hidden the truth. We are all- cough, choke- originally from… beyond… the… stars!"
Swat and spit as he might, Danbrown's insightful protest was no match for crushing, countless billions. He died without a scream, his lungs full of the ancient alien foe. In minutes the swarm cleared, leaving not a scrap of flesh on bones that gleamed white as snow as they drifted across the searing magnesium light.
Later:
The chamber swirled with 218 billion aliens, and every one of them wanted to feel long-lost human flesh for themselves. The writhing, unceasing proboscis touch oppressed the wiser yet helpless captives. The only sound beside the maddening hum of wings was the insectile panic of Bucket's infrequent bloofs.
Violet closed her book. "Damn!" she exclaimed.
"SILENCE!"
"Whatchu gonna do, eat me?" Violet taunted. "We the only humans in all of infinite space. We be worth a mofo'in twenty-four carat fortune!"
The horde had no answer.
"Like cattle! We're going to be sold like cattle!" Veruca's hoarse shriek rose again.
"You get a grip, girlfriend! Yo, here!" Violet wound up like the pitcher of the Versace corporate softball team. Michael Connelly's The Black Echo sailed through dim light, knocking aside swirling aliens by the miniscule dozen, out to where Veruca's grasping hands were spinning weightless. "Read that. You'll soon forget all about the vampire cacaroaches, girl."
"Vampires! Sure as shootin'!" Mike cried. "That's what Danbrown was referring to with his memory of bloodsucking monsters!" The astronauts who had read Bram Stoker's Dracula recalled how the Count several times appeared as a swirl of mist. "Unless there's a planet out there with oceans made of holy water, Earth- always half in poisonous daylight- was mankind's perfect refuge from these bastards!"
"Um-" Bucket began, but it was too late.
"Back!" Mike screamed, sweeping an object from the leg pouch of his hi-tech suit. A crucifix? A laser gun? No! "This here prototype solar illuminator is fully charged with the power of the sun! Sunlight itself, at the flick of a switch! Release us, you dadburned extraterrestrial pests, or die!"
"Sweetie-" the transvestite tried again, but it was the Texan geek's one chance to play Clint Eastwood. He would not be denied.
"Alright, I'll tell you buzzing bastards a thing or two! This one time, in eighth grade, marching band jocks beat the snot out of me! With thirty years of interest, here comes payback time for Mikey!" The swath in a familiar spectrum cut through the swarm. Blazes of color illuminated like flares. Aliens afterbits glowed like Skittles. Not a single one turned to dust.
"Hello… outer space?" Bucket pointed out. "Cop the feck on, Mikey, no planets blocking the sun from the bleeding spaceship? If its light was any good against these wee gurriers it would've long since fried whatever's flying this piece of shite."
Their cerci and labium rattled and thrummed. "We desire revenge for your attack. To consume you would be costly." Extra bands of the swarms roped around the screaming electronics tycoon, tearing first Stetson then flashlight from his grip. "But we can still sell you if you are a little…. smaller."
"Violet, you really seemed to enjoy that book!" Bucket commented over Mike's anguished wails. "Violet. Violet! Tell us about The Black Echo! Hello, Violet! Fer feck's sake, answer me!"
"It's da bomb!" Violet overcame the diversion of Mike's slow dismemberment. "Series character Harry Bosch's first instalment was way th' feck better than Connelly's notable stand-alone novels, The Poet and Void Moon."
"What was it about, lovey?"
Their legion of alien captors were doing far worse things to Mike than the marching band ever dreamed. Bucket coughed from his mouth. Violet turned away and stammered loud enough for all to hear.
"This disgraced-assed Hollywood cop, dismissed from LA's elite Robbery / Homicide division, must solve a 187 that's most baffling. His only hope is a teenaged witness who know a thing about dodging five-oh. There's a white girl love interest and action in the Oriental part of town, a screenwriting connection-"
"Ach! Nein!" Augustus cried. "You describe Kill Ze Messenger by Tami Hoag! Ach! Scheiss gedichte!"
"Shut th' feck up! The Black Echo is former crime reporter Michael Connelly at his best," Violet assured. "It was his first novel, first it the streets in 1992 (respect to that riots, ace). If there are similarities, that ho Hoag must have done ripped Connelly off badly."
The swarm had taken on an unpleasant, angry hue unheard in all their previous malice. "SILENCE! SILENCE! SILENCE!" they swirled in disarray, their attack on Mike forgotten.
"Veruca!" Bucket lilted. Danbrown's craven skeleton drifted by, tendrils of alien wings, legs and thorax weaving from ribcage to eye socket. "Why don't you read to us for a while, petal? Go on! Start at the beginning like a good little girl…."
The Black Echo:
Her sweet voice rasped hoarse by screaming in thin Argon/Oxygen air, Veruca began with the gruesome discovery in a pipe at Mulholland Dam. Detective Harry Bosch- loner, outsider, insomniac- was soon at the scene. But despite the planted heroin, this was no ordinary hypo overdose. The victim was by bizarre coincidence an old Vietnam buddy of Bosch's, back when they were Tunnel Rats venturing into the hostile and booby-trapped unknown of an alien war.
In clumps of hundreds, the aliens slumped immobile and drifted like corpses. Augustus took up the story as Veruca's voice failed. "Ach! The Tunnel Rats! I remember once reading an article in Life Magazine about them- they caught my fascination. In college, I included Tunnel Rats in my own beschuessene gedichte."
"Read, Augustus!" Bucket suggested as the skyscraper-sized swarms of bloodsuckers advanced. Augustus read.
The story quickly involved all within earshot. The forensic evidence- accurate detail, delivered in layman's language- was delivered in exactly the proscribed dosage, in easily understandable terms. This was no arcane procedural or unresearched Hallmark Channel excuse for soft-core cop porn. The Black Echo left all readers with an increased understanding and a compulsion to explore deeper.
His autopsy revealed that Billy Meadows had been tortured prior to the lethal injection of high-grade H. The skid-row apartment had been hurriedly turned, but the pawn ticket overlooked. And what item had Billy had pawned but… the only piece ever to emerge from an infamous bank vault robbery? A daring tunnelling job that had baffled a full-scale FBI investigation?
Bucket himself took the book from Augustus' exhausted sausage fingers. By the harsh magnesium light, breathing lungfuls of Argon and scant oxygen, he carried on the tale of how Boshe and his unwilling FBI partner tracked the vault raiders, tracks that led deep into the scars of America's own past. This fiction hit a nerve. Not just a human, American nerve either. Faced with quality literature that proved impossible to ignore, the bloodsucking alien throng wheeled aimlessly in the void, listless and vapid. Thanks to Michael Connelly's fine fiction, the space vampire horde were captivated by their own captives.
By the sex scenes, millions of the odd foe had stopped buzzing air across its armor-shrouded gills. By the realization that an insider was leaking information to the murderous vault raiders, billions of baffled foes had sunk their suspicious proboscis into their own abdomen and avenged themselves dry.
Violet swam through tons of listless, hovering bodies and seized The Black Echo from Bucket's exhausted fingers. Reading with a convert's gusto, she carried the story through the capture and initial interrogation of troubled teen Sharkey to shared recollections of Bosche's own Vietnam to the attempt on the investigators' lives. She read straight from their first big break toward the novel's thrilling conclusion.
"Excellent stuff!" Mike declared in his agony. It was indeed.
"SILENCE…. SILence…. Silence, sile…..ence…" the alien protest's gradually echoed.
When the novel's last word had been read, silence reigned.
Epilogue:
Despite his truncated appendages, Mike successfully piloted this first orbiting alien ship down to Edwards Air Force Base. His company's stock soared. Mike harvested the alien technology for human use. His stock soared even higher.
In respect, compulsory reading of Danbrown's novels was henceforth enforced on all airline travel.
Veruca appeared on a record of nine hundred and eighteen successive covers of Hello magazine. From "Aliens Invaded My Every Orifice" alone, her lifelong fame was assured.
Violet had a dramatic career change and devoted the remainder of her life to studying the insectoid spacealiens and their physiognomy. Two years later, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering that the element Nitrogen- comprising 78% of the Earth's atmosphere- was utterly toxic to all alien anatomy. Mankind's extraterrestrial forebearers had indeed found a retreat safe from the aliens.
European Space Commissioner Augustus reconfigured radar and discovered more than one hundred thousand alien vessels- the undisputed conquerors of all the Galaxy- in Earth orbit. He spearheaded the worldwide campaign to Ban Rocketships. Every human being thereafter remained safely shielded under Earth's protective layer of Nitrogen. Humanity actually began assigning environmental and social issues their rightful priority and stopped treating this goddamned planet like a kleenex.
Incredible as it appears, Bucket was not categorically terminated for abandoning, without any notice, his post in the Irish Civil Service. As quick as a first-class flight could return the lucky ticket-winner to Gort, Co. Wexford, Bucket wore Violet's Versace-designed spacesuit into the office. He drank forty espressos, produced unearthly nitrate odors and referred to every single human within sight as "lovey." The man who had first noticed what the aliens had treated as most threatening- engaging narratives- was quoted as incessantly saying, between coffees; "What, monsters that can be undermined by good stories? Alien intelligence whose buffers overflowed when attempting to compute a sustained, multi-leveled, interconnected chain of cause and effect? Ye consider that weirder that monsters that eat only virgins? Kiss me Jade-plated backside, lovey!"
Notions that sound impossible do come to pass like the turning of leaves. But there truly is no way to be fired from the Irish Civil Service.
In an obscure footnote to these world-changing events, Michael Connelly's The Black Echo was quietly added to the Critical Mick Best Book Read in 2006 shortlist. A distant, unlikely human dared, picked the novel up, and began to read.
This has got to be the strangest review that Michael Connelly has ever received. If it conveys how much I enjoyed his novel it has done its job. If it steers even one sci-fi fan his way, so much the better.
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