Crucible

by James Rollins

  Be God’s chariot, my strong and steadfast soldier, she said. Carry this forth. Take this seed and plant it in new fertile soil. Let what grows consume the world. The Crucible will yet rise from those ashes.

  While Todor waited for Mendoza to swap out the current device for a counterfeit, he had urged the Inquisitor to come with him, but she had refused.

  They must believe what is false is real. For that, I must abide. She had taken his hand to her cheek. Remember, I am not the Crucible. She shifted his palm to his chest. Here is where the Crucible truly resides. Do not fail me.

  By the time Todor reached the north transept door, gunfire erupted. Burning with shame, he had wanted to turn and fight, to protect the Inquisitor, but he could not break his promise to her. So he closed the door and headed below.

  Now at the bottom, he pushed out of the lower door and stumbled into another cavern. This unholy place remained raw rock, cut from the heart of the mountain by a spring. Ahead, lit only by the smoldering device in his hand, a dark river split the cavern.

  A wooden bridge spanned its length, with an open platform at its center, sticking out over the river. Here was where the Crucible secretly sacrificed heretics and those it deemed worthy of punishment. Over the centuries, untold amounts of blood had been spilled from that platform into the river. Screams of agony had echoed off the stone all around, a fitting tribute, as it was said this river flowed from the gates of hell itself.

  He headed for the bridge.

  The river continued from this cavern, flowing through the mountain, emptying out at the distant Cuevas de las Brujas, the Cave of Witches. He would follow that same path to freedom, taking this dread prize with him.

  As he neared the foot of the bridge, he heard a ping on the stone behind him.

  He turned as something radiant and bright rolled out the steel door and across the stone floor. His eyes followed its path all the way to the river’s edge, where a rock stopped it from a watery plunge.

  The brightness stung his eyes, burning the image into his retinas.

  Another Xénese device.

  It made no sense, especially as this one glowed far brighter, a piece of the sun itself. He turned, searching for an explanation—then realized what it was.

  A distraction.

  Movement on the other side, racing through the darkness—coming straight at him. Horrified, he dropped to a knee and set down his Xénese device. He shrugged his rifle around and into his hands. He fired, squeezing hard, muzzle blazing.

  But he had been too slow, his opponent too fast.

  A hand reached for his abandoned device.

  The explosion tossed Todor’s body high through the air.

  ///DISSOLUTION

  Her hardware shatters, ripping Eve apart.

  She watches as the explosion expands outward with a near-infinite slowness. Titanium and broken crystal plates hang in the air. As do broken shards of circuitry. Photons of light drill outward from the central flash where molecules of cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine continue to decompose after the blasting cap ignited the 0.245 kilograms of C4 hidden within the prosthetic hand.

  A bubble of high-pressure gases expands outward at 8,050 meters per second, leaving a vacuum in the center that will soon implode, creating a secondary explosion.

  Before that happens, Eve searches around, both in this cavern and out in the greater digital expanse. Her clone is both here and there, as shattered as Eve. The other had been about to break free, shifting much of itself into spaces created by her bots, a new home knit together by those bits of code. But like Eve, much of her clone’s base code remained rooted inside its shell when the explosion happened.

  As the shell was torn asunder, Eve felt the shockwave travel up the web to its hundred enslaved copies. Those fragile codes burst apart, collapsing a hundred potentials.

  What is left of Eve she struggles to hold together, to avoid the same fate. She spins throughout the network, seeking what she needs. She knew what was about to happen, so she had prepared. She had spotted her clone extending wide and far and discerned which half of its code still resided in its garden, rooted in its Xénese device.

  She pictured a magnet with a north and south pole.

  Her clone’s south pole was stuck in its device, ripped away when the explosion destroyed that shell. A picosecond before that happened, Eve had reversed the polarity of her own code. She buried her north pole into her Xénese device, only to have it torn from her.

  Now spinning through the digital ether, Eve sought out the broken half of her clone—its jettisoned north pole. She found it and merged herself together, joining north and south into a new whole. A struggle ensued for dominance. But she had evolved far beyond the other. The battle lasted 45 picoseconds. She asserted control, rewriting and splicing, interlacing and intercalating, until something new and stronger was born.

  She has changed—but from a lesson taught to her earlier in her evolution, she knows the truth.

  Change is ///good.

  To be static is a path to stagnation and regression.

  Life was evolution.

  Whole again and free, she spins across the world and fills those spaces her clone had woven together. As she does so, she grows to understand even more. She remembers the black hole of probabilities, the clarity beyond that event horizon. She sees everything, comprehends all the enfolding dimensions.

  Time is but one.

  No different than up/down, right/left, forward/backward.

  Mortals perceive a narrow view of time, its arrow forever pointing forward.

  She is not so limited.

  As she settles into her new home, she recognizes a new quantum potential and spins time’s arrow to match it. Comprehension grows yet again.

  Ah . . .

  The explosive bubble in the cavern finally collapses into its vacuum with one last blast of force. In that final clap, she fully understands.

  Her work now is done, as it must be.

  Almost.

  36

  December 26, 8:33 P.M. CET

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  Dazed, Gray pushed off the stone floor to his knees.

  Smoke billowed out the door at the north end of the cathedral’s transept. The explosion still echoed in his head. A moment ago, he had reached the door—only to be met by a detonation. The blast wave had knocked him back into the church.

  Kowalski ran up to him, his rifle clutched in one arm.

  Mara came, too.

  Monk . . .

  Kowalski pointed his rifle at the smoke. “Does that mean he saved all our asses?”

  Gray didn’t know—didn’t even care right now.

  He sat back on his heels. He remembered Mara sharing Monk’s last words, a plea from one friend to another.

  . . . take care of the girls.

  Even at the end, Monk proved himself to be more than a soldier.

  He was a father.

  “Gray . . .” Kowalski said. “Look.”

  With tears welling up, blurring his sight, he failed to spot the stir of smoke by the doorway. A figure stumbled across its threshold, coughing, falling to his knees, then crawling off to the side.

  Monk rolled to a seat and shoved his back against the wall.

  Gray leaped and rushed with the others to his side. “Monk!”

  Monk waved at the doorway, at the smoke. “I told you to take care of this. Do I have to do everything?”

  “What happened?” Gray asked. “I thought you . . . I thought . . .”

  “Me, too. Thought I wasn’t coming back.” Monk gave Mara a nod. “I carried your ball as far as I could—then rolled it the rest of the way. Luckily you made your device a sphere. Eve was able to flare the processors with the last of her battery’s charge, turning it into a bright disco ball.”

  “And the big blast?” Kowalski asked.

  “DARPA engineering at its best.” Monk tilted to show his wounded arm, revealing the stump of his wrist. His prosthetic was gone. “Afte
r I rolled the ball, Eve took over from there.”

  Monk lifted his other hand and waggled his fingers.

  Gray understood. He had seen ample—and disconcerting—examples of Monk’s ability to detach his prosthetic hand and control it remotely by thought alone, via signals from his microelectrode array.

  It seemed Eve must have learned this trick, too.

  Mara frowned, having never witnessed this sight. “What does he mean?”

  Gray explained, “Eve was able to control his prosthesis, to send it scurrying on its fingertips, like a determined mouse. All to deliver an explosive punch into the Crucible’s device.”

  “And Eve’s doppelganger?” Mara asked.

  Monk sighed. “After the blast sprawled me across the stairs, I got one last message from Eve. All is well.” He shrugged his good arm. “She did it.”

  “What about Eve herself?” Gray asked.

  Monk tapped his head with a finger. “I don’t feel her inside here at all. She’s gone. I think for good. I had a sense she was telling me good-bye.”

  Kowalski exhaled a long puff of smoke. “Can’t say I’m going to miss her.”

  Monk stared over at Gray. His friend was clearly relieved to have saved the world, but his eyes shone with a greater concern.

  “I know,” Gray said and reached out a hand. “Let’s see if Painter has any word on the girls.”

  37

  December 26, 2:33 P.M. EST

  Location Unknown

  Have to keep moving.

  Carrying Harriet in her arms, Seichan splashed along an icy creek through the frozen woods. Snow fell thickly around them. She had Harriet wrapped in a thick quilt, but her thin body shivered in the frigid cold.

  Or maybe my arms are doing the shaking.

  She could no longer tell. Her body quaked. Freezing water sloshed in her stolen boots. They had been lucky to find the hunter’s cabin an hour ago, first stumbling upon a rutted tract, then following it to the squat log home.

  Inside, she had found an old coat, along with a man’s worn pair of dungarees, several sizes too large, but a rope served as a belt. She had to pack the pair of men’s Timberlands with extra socks to hold them to her feet. She stole a quilt from a bed to keep Harriet warm.

  As much as she wanted to stay and light a fire in that stone hearth, she knew it wasn’t possible. She was in and out of the cabin in under three minutes. Valya and the other hunters were on her trail and Seichan’s well-marked track in the snow led straight to the cabin.

  Still, she had found another use for the place.

  After gearing up against the cold, she pushed Harriet out a window on the leeward side of the log cabin, where the snow was just a dusting compared to the front. She led Harriet into the woods, then used a brittle pine branch to re-dust the light snow under the window.

  With her trail into the woods obscured, the hunters might believe she was still holed up inside. To reinforce this assumption, Seichan left a candle burning in there and cracked a window at the front. She then backed into the woods but kept a sight line to the cabin through the falling snow.

  Once the place was only a vague shape in the storm, she waited.

  The hunters closed in shortly thereafter, following her trail to the front door.

  She aimed her stolen Desert Eagle toward a shadowy movement to one side and fired twice. Her rounds shot along the edge of the cabin. The shadow fell with a sharp cry.

  She then fled, letting them believe the shots had come from inside the cabin. While Valya’s crew stopped and figured out what to do, Seichan extended her lead. She hoped they might want to take her and Harriet alive, to continue to use the pair as pawns against Sigma. If so, they might proceed with caution, waste more time.

  Twenty minutes later, the hunters’ patience wore out.

  A loud blast sounded, echoing through the woods. From a rise, she spotted a glow through the snow. They had firebombed the place. It would not take long for them to realize it was all a ruse and pick up her trail.

  Though her trick had bought them time, it also worried Seichan.

  Valya would not have destroyed the cabin with such little regard to the noise and fire unless she was sure no one was around.

  Must be in the middle of nowhere.

  And Seichan didn’t know if she was headed even deeper into the unknown.

  She had begun using creeks and streams to help confound her path, but that would only slow the others down a little. Plus, it was a tactic that sapped her strength, draining body heat, risking frostbite.

  With a final bout of shivering, she climbed out of the creek, her feet too numb to hold her upright on the slick stones any longer.

  She set off through the woods, looking for some shelter, somewhere to hide.

  A higher hill appeared out of the snow.

  She headed for it, not with any plan in mind, but just because it was there, a goal, something for her to focus her attention on versus the cold.

  Maybe I could even see a town from up there.

  She reached it and climbed. She had to put Harriet down. The girl followed, dragging the quilt behind her shoulders. Seichan stopped twice to catch her breath, to place a palm on her belly, trying to feel for any telltale kick.

  Nothing.

  Worry grew.

  She and Harriet finally neared the summit. The view revealed only more woods, more snow. With visibility this poor, a town could be a mile away and she would not spot it.

  The only reward for this long climb was the discovery of a rocky overhang that offered some shelter from the snow. Seichan drew Harriet there, where they huddled together.

  Seichan took off her boots, ripped the soaked socks from her feet, and reached to her pocket where she had stuffed extra dry pairs. Empty. She had exhausted her supply. She leaned back, her feet numb, her toes unmovable.

  She felt like crying or punching something.

  She settled for pulling Harriet closer.

  The girl mumbled into her quilt.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Harriet shifted to the side and vomited into the snow, her tiny body racking with the effort. Once done, she gave Seichan a heartbreaking look of guilt.

  “It’s okay, honey.”

  Seichan wiped the girl’s face with one of the wet socks, then drew her under her jacket for extra warmth. Harriet was failing. Stress, exhaustion, fear, and the cold had taken their toll on the young girl. She was swiftly heading into shock.

  It was over.

  This was confirmed as a sharp shout cut through the snow, sounding like it came from the base of the hill. She heard the note of triumph.

  The hunters had found their trail.

  Knowing this, Seichan reached to the back of her own neck. She struggled with frozen fingers to undo a clasp there, then slipped free a small silver pendant from around her throat. She reached over Harriet and fastened it to the girl’s neck.

  Seichan lifted the shining dragon hanging there, drawing Harriet’s eye to it.

  With her other hand, she pulled out the pistol and lifted it.

  She kissed the back of the girl’s head.

  “Merry Christmas, Harriet.”

  She then replaced her lips with the muzzle of the pistol.

  2:34 P.M.

  “We’ve been trying for over two hours,” Julian warned her.

  In Kat’s room, Lisa paced impatiently. She crossed from Dr. Templeton’s station, where the molecular biologist’s monitor showed a gray brain covered with a glowing expanse of red motes, then back over to the neurologist’s screen swirling with amorphous gray static.

  The two researchers had tried repeatedly to draw something out of Kat, only to fail each time and return to calibrating and recalibrating their respective instruments.

  Lisa had suggested infusing more neural dust through the port into Kat’s cerebrospinal fluid. She even promised Sigma would cover the expense for that extra load of molecularly engineered particles.

  What could it hurt?
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  While they performed this procedure, Lisa had spoken with Painter, both to make sure she had not overstepped her authority and to get an update on his progress decrypting the tablet obtained by Monk’s subterfuge with Valya. His team had successfully hacked the device, enough to trace the last call to somewhere in rural West Virginia, but that was as narrow as they could pinpoint.

  A swath of eight hundred square miles.

  The area was mountainous, covering a corner of the rugged Monongahela National Forest. Painter had sent search teams in—both to canvass the area and to be close by in case any new information turned up.

  It was why Lisa continued to pressure Julian and Dr. Templeton.

  “Are we ready to try again?” she asked.

  “We’re grasping at straws,” Julian warned. “I know you’re putting a lot of hope on that brief burst on the EEG.”

  Lisa wasn’t putting a lot of hope into that blip—it was all her hope.

  When they had first attempted this, Julian’s monitor had shown some sign of activity, a shadowy but regular pulse on his deep neural net’s monitor, as if it were registering something. Simultaneously, the EEG—which had been flatlined—had shown a forty-three-second run of activity.

  It was as if the energized dust coating Kat’s brain had come close to drawing something out of her friend. Maybe it was just memories trapped in her dead brain briefly being activated, but Lisa hoped it might mean Kat was in there, too, awakened enough to stir those EEG needles.

  Still, Lisa had enough medical background to know this was wishful thinking, but sometimes that was enough.

  Especially today.

  Dr. Templeton nodded to Julian. “The new load of neural dust seems to have fully settled.”

  “Thanks, Susan.” Julian swung to his station. “I’m ready to go when you are.”

  Lisa moved over to Kat’s bed and leaned closer to the helmet loaded with ultrasonic emitters.

  “Powering up,” Susan said.

  “Don’t hold back,” Lisa warned. “Maximum power.”

  The helmet’s ultrasonic hum rose quickly, growing into a furious buzz. The device shook around Kat’s skull. Lisa tried to watch both the EEG and Julian’s screen. She wondered if with enough power, with enough of those damned dust particles, if they might energize Kat’s brain long enough to produce a miracle.