“When did he give you this book?”
“It came from a used bookshop in Hawaii. It was illustrated, showed all the constellations and the legends behind them. We sat outside and Dad showed me the constellations in the sky and, by flashlight, in the book.”
Tara thought of the Star Tarot card, how often it had shown up in her readings. She felt they were getting close. “Your father named you after a constellation?”
“Yes, after Cassiopeia. The beautiful queen, seated on her throne. I will never be as beautiful as the picture in the book. When I was a little girl, I imagined she was my mother, watching from the sky.”
“What did he tell you about Cassiopeia?”
“He said Cassiopeia was very proud of her beautiful daughter. He pointed up at the stars and told me that all I ever needed to know was in Cassiopeia’s heart. It sounded really lame at the time, and I told him that. But it was really kind of sweet.”
Tara paused, intuition humming, pen poised above the paper. She reached behind her, noiselessly reaching into her bag slung over the headboard for her Tarot cards. She flipped through the deck, searching for the image Cassie had painted in her mind, the image of the seated queen.
A-ha. The Empress. The Tarot card showed a beautiful woman seated on a throne, holding a scepter, and looking serenely out on the world. Her loose robes draped over the curve of her pregnant belly, symbolizing motherhood and fertility. At her breast dangled a pendant, and Tara looked very closely to make it out. It was in the shape of a star. She tucked the cards back into her purse, and her thoughts buzzed with excitement. She was very close to the answer; she felt it.
“Please thank your memory of your father for the assistance, Cassie. You’ve done very well.” She thought she saw a tear forming in Cassie’s eye.
“Wait. There’s someone else here,” Cassie said.
Tara’s brow wrinkled. She tucked the card into the bottom of the deck. “Tell me.”
“It’s not someone I know.”
“Describe the person.” This wasn’t part of the script. She wondered where Cassie’s mind was taking them.
“She’s short, shorter than me. Black hair, black eyes. She’s wearing a long dress, but no shoes.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She’s just standing, watching us. She’s smiling.”
Dread washed over Tara. “Ask her. . .” She steadied her voice. “Ask her what her name is.”
Cassie paused. “She says her name is Pythia.”
Tara leaned protectively over Cassie, touched the girl’s wrist. Her skin was fever-hot. There was no way Cassie could know about the Pythia. Was there? Was the Pythia powerful enough to project herself into the girl’s trance? Tara kept her voice low and even. “It’s time to come back now.”
“Not yet.” The girl’s voice changed in timbre, lowering, and an accent flickered through her words. “We’re not finished here.”
Tara recoiled. She knew that voice. “Pythia.”
Cassie’s lips curved upward. But it wasn’t her smile. It was the voluptuous smile of the Pythia. “I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you. Let go of Cassie.”
“Then listen instead.” The Pythia’s voice was harsh. “There’s someone coming for you.”
“There are a lot of people after us. That’s not news.”
“Not just men after the girl. One of us. After you.”
Tara’s brows drew together. “Who? Why?”
“Adrienne. She wants what you have.”
Tara shook her head, not understanding. “Why the hell would she want anything of mine? And who sent her?”
“Not I. But you’ve been warned. You must fight.”
Cassie’s eyelids fluttered, and her chest rose and fell in a sluggish rhythm.
“Pythia?”
No answer. The Pythia was gone.
Tara brought Cassie out of the trance, stepping up the mental staircase to full awareness. Cassie opened her eyes, stretched.
“That wasn’t nearly what I thought it would be.”
“How so? I promised you, no chicken dancing,” Tara said lightly. She didn’t know if the girl had any memory of the Pythia’s voice. And she didn’t want to scare her.
“It was like you said, like daydreaming. . .” Her voice trailed off, and Tara could see she was thinking of her father.
Tara patted her sleeve. “Take some time to wake slowly, and come out when you’re ready.”
Tara left the bedroom in darkness. She closed the door behind her and nearly ran into Harry in the tiny hall.
“Did you get anything?” he asked, arms crossed over his chest. Behind him, Martin sawed logs on the plaid couch, his hands folded softly on his chest. The sound would have been enough to blot out the voices from the bedroom. She hoped. She didn’t want to explain the Pythia to Harry. Not now. Not ever.
“I’m not sure yet.” Her eyes roved the stacks and stacks of books lining the walls. “Does your dad have any books on astronomy?”
MARTIN’S PERSONAL LIBRARY COVERED AN ASTONISHINGLY broad array of subjects, from mammals to music to mechanical engineering. Tara and Harry dug through the stacks behind the couch, while Martin searched in boxes tucked in a closet. The books were organized in no discernible order other than Martin’s lines of imagination: An Apprentice’s Guide to Metalworking lay beside Battle Strategies of World War II, interspersed with well-worn vinyl LPs.
“What the heck?” Harry picked up a book and held it up for his father to see. It was titled The Ambience of Sensual Massage, depicting a hirsute man with 1970s sideburns and mustache in a romantic clinch with a woman with waist-length hair and a flower tucked behind her ear.
Martin popped his head around the corner, narrowing his eyes. “You snooping, or are you asking to borrow it?”
Harry dropped it like a hot potato.
Martin’s muffled voice emanated from back in the closet. “I thought so.”
Tara smothered a grin and pulled aside a stack of paperback spy novels to find a blue book titled promisingly enough: The Stargazer’s Catalog. She flipped through, scanning for Cassiopeia.
“Found it.” The constellation sprawled across the page in a loose W pattern. Superimposed on the stars was a picture of a seated queen on a throne. With her finger, Tara traced the constellation to the star in the queen’s chest, labeled Segin. The next page listed its ascension and declination, the coordinates of how the star moved through the night sky.
Harry powered up the laptop, and Cassie wandered into the living room. “What’s going on?”
“We’re wildly chasing the geese of Tara’s imagination,” said Harry.
Cassie stepped over The Ambience of Sensual Massage, paused, and picked it up. Her nose wrinkled as she opened it to a dog-eared page. “Feathers. Interesting.”
Martin cruised through the living room, plucked the book from her hands. “You’re not old enough for that.”
“I’m old enough to drink, drive, vote. . . What’s the deal with a little smut?”
“And you’ll never be old enough to do all that at the same time, young lady. And it is not smut. It’s. . .”
Harry looked up, the picture of attentiveness.
“It’s for therapeutic purposes,” Martin finished.
“Therapeutic purposes,” Harry repeated.
Martin swatted the back of Harry’s head. “If you were luckier in getting your own therapy, young man, you’d have less time to worry about mine.”
Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. About that password. . .”
Tara brought the book, looked at the star in Cassiopeia’s chest. “Try Segin.”
Keys clattered as Harry tried the password. “No luck.”
“Capital S, small e-g-i-n . . . one hour, fifty-four minutes, twenty-three point sixty-eight seconds.” She added the ascension to the star name.
“No.”
“Segin. . . Here, let me show you in the book.
” Tara pointed to the star’s ascension in the book: 01h 54m 23.68s. “And here, the declination. . .” +63 °, 40' 12.5'.
Harry typed, paused. He looked up at her, a smile spreading over his face. “We’re in!”
Tara, Cassie, and Martin crowded behind Harry, peering at the screen. Harry opened Magnusson’s recent documents, and they scrolled before him in a flurry of diagrams and notations. It was a foreign language to Tara, but she could see Cassie studying them intently for a long time, tapping her bottom lip with a chipped thumbnail.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. “Go back.”
Harry scrolled back to a list of equations, and her eyes scanned over them.
“What is it?”
Cassie chewed her bottom lip. “I think. . . I think my dad may have proven the presence of dark energy. . . and opened a black hole to do it.”
Chapter Eleven
BACK THE truck up. Explain this to me again.”
Cassie rolled her eyes, flipped out a fresh sheet of paper, and drew on it with a pencil. She sketched an atomic nucleus and a small solar system of electrons around it. She’d spent the last few hours staring at her father’s laptop and trying to translate to the non-physicists. “The particle accelerator takes a heavy atom stripped of electrons”—she erased the electrons—“and collides the nuclei together at high speeds using magnetic force. Stripping the electrons results in a positive atomic charge. Since a positive charge is magnetically attracted to a negative charge, the collider uses that magnetic attraction to move the nuclei at high speeds.
“The collider my father used is a variant of the storage ring collider.” She drew an infinity loop and indicated the intersection of the track. “Particles are accelerated in opposite directions and collide at the intersection, here.”
“Then what?” Harry asked.
“Then, if superstring theory is accurate, these collisions could result in mini black holes.”
“So. . . what’s keeping these black holes from devouring the planet? We didn’t see any while we were at the lab. Space and time seemed relatively safe.”
“Theoretically, these black holes would only exist for a brief period of time before they would annihilate themselves in radiation caused by the collison of matter and antimatter. But they might exist for just long enough to attract particles of dark energy to them, enough to measure and collect them.”
“And dark energy is supposed to be all around us?”
“Well, it accounts for about seventy-two percent of the stuff in the universe. It just isn’t particularly common in our neck of the woods. The particles in our solar system are rare, and far between.”
“What does it do, exactly?”
“Dark energy is the force that keeps the universe pushing outward. It’s the driving force of the Big Bang. It creates negative pressure, expansion. Think of it as gravitational repulsion.”
“So. . . it’s explosive?”
“In a manner of speaking. There’s the idea that dark energy has quintessence—the density of the energy increases over time, and creates a sort of phantom energy. Dark energy is usually not terribly dense. But as the density decreases, it could cause an amplification of the Big Bang, a Big Rip, which could eventually tear the universe apart.”
Tara blinked. “Your dad was ripping the universe?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. What his notes show is that he was using the particle accelerator at Los Alamos to create these mini black holes to analyze dark energy. He had visions of storing these particles in a kind of cell or battery for energy usage. . . and DOD seems to have told him it was interested in powering aircraft carriers and subs through this type of technique.” Cassie bit her lip. “It looks like they wanted this for another purpose: to use the cells to harness that gravitational repulsion, to weaponize the expansive power of dark energy. It’s pretty explosive stuff, theoretically.”
“Do you think he tried to sabotage his own research?” Harry asked directly.
Cassie spread her hands. “Maybe. If he cranked the collider up far enough, if he allowed the mini black holes to exist for longer than they should. . . if he overloaded the dark energy storage cells he’d built. . . it could have happened.”
“That might explain the lack of debris at the explosion site,” said Tara. “There were walls, ceiling missing. . . but not enough rubble to account for them.”
“Tell me about the cells. What do they look like, and how do they work?” Harry slurped his coffee, and Tara could almost see the gears in his brain whirring, trying to keep up.
Cassie drew the infinity loop again on the paper. “As near as I can determine, it’s based on the shape of the infinity-loop collider. The dark energy particles race in the same direction around the track until the energy is released, by making a contact or connection with the circuit.” She drew a slash in the infinity loop. “I don’t know how big or small they are. They could be as big as a water tower, or as small as a microchip. It depends on how many particles are stored.”
Martin had been silent so far, running his thumbs over the lip of his coffee mug. “So your father basically unzipped the underbelly of the cosmos, took the invisible force out of it that keeps the universe going, and stuffed it in a can that explodes when it’s opened.”
Cassie nodded. “Exactly.”
Harry leaned back in his kitchen chair. “Shit.”
Cassie agreed. “Shit.”
Tears glistened in the girl’s eyes. Tara leaned forward and rubbed her shoulder, while Martin reached to grab her hand. Harry pushed away from the table and left the kitchen.
“Look, the military is trying very hard to find him. That means they think he’s still alive,” said Tara. She believed that much to be true.
Cassie sniffled. “But do you think he’s still alive? I mean, a black hole could have eaten my father! It sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie.”
“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”
Martin patted Cassie’s hand. “No parent would leave his child without answers. You’re going to have them.”
Harry stuck his head back into the room, holding Martin’s powder-blue corded phone. He’d been checking his cell messages remotely, reluctant to turn on his cell phone in the event cell towers could triangulate their position. He gestured for Tara, who slipped out from behind the table to join him.
“Another message from Corvus?” she asked. He’d gotten several. The calls had progressed from requests for status updates to threats. She thought he’d been ignoring those, but wasn’t certain.
“No,” he answered, pressing the receiver against her ear. “Listen.”
Tara cupped the phone, hearing a familiar voice:
“Agent Li, this is Barbara DiRosa. I want to talk to you about Lowell Magnusson. . . I’ve found some information you may find useful, and I don’t. . . I don’t want to send it up the chain of command. Please call me right away.”
She left a number, and an electronic voice proclaimed this to be the end of the message. Tara handed the phone back to Harry. “What are you going to do?”
Harry blew out his breath. “I’m going to have to talk to her.”
“It could be a trap, to try and find out our position.”
“Quite possibly. But what if it’s not?”
The question hung, suspended. Tara reached out, tentatively, and put her hand on his sleeve. He slid his warm hand over hers.
“We’ll just have to hope no one’s watching.”
HARRY BLOCKED THE CALL, TRANSFERRED NUMBERS TWICE through two different operators, but wasn’t confident at all that the call to DiRosa wasn’t traceable. Tara sat beside him on Martin’s couch, listening through the volume cranked up on Martin’s 1980s receiver. Frankly, he was amazed Martin even had phone service out here.
“Hello.”
“Dr. DiRosa? This is Agent Li. You said you had some information for me.”
“Yes. . . I wanted to talk to you about Magnusson.”
Harry paused, waiting for her to fill in the silence. She seemed to take her time answering. Not a good sign. He glanced at his watch. It took at least thirty seconds to establish a good trace, and she’d already taken up ten.
“I’ve been able to retrieve some of Magnusson’s correspondence from our e-mail server backups, and I think you might want to see them.” DiRosa blew out a nervous breath. Harry couldn’t tell if she was anxious to be talking to him, or ill at ease to be participating in a phone tap.
“It seems Magnusson had some conflicts with the chain of command here. . . and it seems there were some threats, in both directions. I’d like to meet with you to give you the information. I’m concerned that the info is going to be destroyed.”
“When and where?”
“Tomorrow. . . at Bandelier National Monument? At the first scenic overlook. . . Five-thirty?”
“Why not today?” he challenged. Harry knew he couldn’t get there from here so soon, but he didn’t want to give any eavesdroppers additional clues to their location.
“I think. . . I’m being watched. I can get away from work tomorrow.”
“All right.” Harry hung up, staring at the sweep hand on his watch. Not quite thirty seconds. Still, he didn’t feel safe.
Tara was watching him under that thick fringe of eyelashes, watching him sweat. “You’re going?”
“Yeah.” He could nearly hear the jaws of a trap scraping shut, but there was no choice. He scrubbed his hands through his hair, thinking. In the kitchen, he could hear Cassie and Pops talking over the clink of dishes in the sink. He needed to form a strategy with Tara, but didn’t want to have to censor what he thought for fear of Cassie overhearing.
“C’mon,” he said, standing and offering Tara a hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”
She took his hand and shrugged into her coat. Harry stuck his head in the kitchen.
“We’re going out for a little while. Be back soon.”
Pops gave him a knowing look, a smirk Harry wanted to wipe off his face. Pops dried his hands and stabbed a thumb in the direction of his library of practical and esoteric information. “You can still borrow my book, if you want.”
Dark Oracle Page 13