Lion caught her gaze, their eyes both shifting in Eastwood’s direction. “Yes, who knew?” he said slowly.
Though the cabinet held a dozen of the weapons they took only eight, enough to equip their squad of seven and put a spare into their own lab for reverse engineering. Their London base had some bright kids on secondment from Longcoat detachments in India and China, individuals who had a gift for taking things apart and reproducing them in volume.
When they were finished Eastwood shut the doors, which relocked automatically, and they started back the way they had come. Glancing over a shoulder, Tucker noticed that the newcomer was hanging back.
“C’mon, Eastwood. We got what we came for.” Seeing the look on his face she added, “Didn’t we?”
“I guess we . . .” He paused. “This all looks so familiar.”
“Well, duh,” Jax jeered. “Looks like you’ve been here before, alright. Was daddy a researcher here? Or were you a hacker in your past life? I just wish you could remember how and why you know all this.”
“Yeah,” Tucker added, “though for now I’m pretty happy to settle for the new toys. They will be helpful, Eastwood.”
“It just seems that there’s so much more to be learned here,” he murmured.
Lion had reached the door and opened it slightly to check the stairwell beyond. Everything Eastwood claimed thus far had turned out to be true, but that did not mean he was ready to forswear the group’s normal cautionary procedures. The way was clear, the overhead lights still dimmed to save electricity. He activated his coat.
“Any reason we can’t make further sorties?” he inquired.
Eastwood brightened visibly at the notion. “No. Sure we can get in again. That’s a great idea, Lion!”
“I have them occasionally,” the group leader replied dryly. “Coming back here again might help us both. Besides, you look like this lab is your home away from home.”
“He is kind of like a robot at times.” Jax glanced over at their young guide as the four of them exited the weapons lab and sprinted upstairs to the surface. “You’re not some cyborg they made here, are you?” Reaching over, she punched him in the shoulder. He yelped most convincingly.
“Nope,” declared Tucker as they prepared to enter the corridors and go silent. “He’s just a confused little sweetheart.”
In front of her Lion flinched slightly at the use of the affectionate. As group leader he ought to be above such things. But as a young man not yet twenty who had grown used to being looked up to and admired, he was not. He said nothing, however, and once more allowed the mystifying newcomer to take the lead through the labyrinthine corridors and out past the razor wire that surrounded this unpretentious and unsignposted facility.
“WE’VE HAD another break-in?”
Alex McGregor, Burroughs Labs’ Chief of Security, stood facing the open door. Within the underground vault were kept the alpha versions of the laboratory’s especially sensitive projects. Not sensitive because they were likely to break, but sensitive because the less the public knew about them, the better.
Accompanied by lab chief Dimitri Hemmel, he entered the laboratory vault and paused before a shelf labeled ‘Detrusion Project XII’. Atop the shelf was a small case of transparent polycarbonate. The case was empty.
It contained, or had contained, two-dozen small cylinders not much bigger than a fingernail. Each tube represented thousands of hours of development. The extraordinary little batteries were being built to power military communications in the field for weeks on end without the need for troops to recharge. Substituting another, far more common element for the rarer lithium to be found in similar batteries, they were less prone to overheating and designed to last far longer. The battlefield applications were numerous, the commercial potential profound.
There wasn’t a military or industrial concern on the planet that wouldn’t have given anything to gain access to the battery’s design specifications. Likewise there was no limit to what outsiders would pay for an actual sample.
So who had paid for the theft of all twelve prototypes? That was a question for the industrial forensics specialists, McGregor knew. As Security Chief, he was far more interested in how the vault had been entered again. Not to mention the matter of the lock on the polycarbonate box itself, to which only three company scientists supposedly had access.
All three, including Hemmel, had been subjected to rigorous questioning. Despite the exhaustive interrogation none of the three had protested at their treatment. A bad sign, he knew. It meant that all three were likely innocent. It meant that he had no leads.
Coupled with last month’s disappearance of the microwave pistols from the same complex, it also meant that his job was in jeopardy.
He had not risen to his present position by being a careless man. If anything, his reputation for being overly cautious, plotting every conceivable way to beat his own security measures and then plugging those gaps, had earned him the industry’s accolades. Since the theft of the pistols he had personally reviewed every security protocol, every personnel dossier, every unexpected means of entry. He had even assigned the task to several think-tank teams in different countries, concerned that as designer of the security systems he might be too close to the problem to see something obvious.
The results were discouraging. No omission could be found. No method of illegal entry presented itself.
How did one go about rectifying an oversight that could not be identified?
“When was the last time you yourself saw or worked with the batteries?”
Hemmel had a bad habit of cracking his knuckles when he was nervous. In the confines of the vault the sound was doubly irritating.
“Two days ago.” He pointed at the case. “They were all in there two days ago. Every one of them. I know; I counted.”
“So you were the last one to see and work with them, then?”
The scientist nodded, sipping at coffee long cold in the cup. “My team was together, yes. The devices are fully functional already, but we think we can reduce the weight even further by shaving the casing.” He looked helpless. “Now the whole program is going to be set back by months while we develop a new set. Not to mention how this impacts my budget.” He eyed the Security Chief. “Who do you think took them, Alex?”
McGregor shook his head irritably. “We haven’t a clue. The security recordings don’t show a single unauthorized entry. Not even a mechanical mouse could escape scrutiny.”
Sometimes commercial espionage was carried out by remote-controlled ‘mice’ that scuttled on caterpillar tracks, with extendable arms and tiny cameras. They could carry off a battery or two, but not all of them.
Hemmel’s response was characteristically analytic. “No matter how strong their servos it would take several to make off with all the power cells, not to mention lifting the guns.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” With a sigh McGregor turned to leave.
The eyes of the physicists, engineers, and technicians in the outer lab followed the two men as they exited the vault, but no one said anything. All were aware of the disappearances of valuable company material. None had been able to offer any ideas as to how the thefts had been carried out.
“If we only had some idea where the stolen material was going,” Hemmel murmured as the two men headed for a lift.
“Company really wants to know that. So does the government. Me, I’m a lot more interested in the how.” McGregor looked over at the scientist. “But just to keep you in the loop, Hemmel, you should know that we’ve put out discrete inquiries. The Russians, the Chinese, even Interpol. Evasiveness would be a clue in itself. But the responses are of bafflement. Nobody knows what the hell we’re talking about. Even the usual government and private sources draw a blank. CIA, FSB, Mossad, the S.A.S—it’s a classic case of nobody knows nothing. Except in this instance it appears to be true.”
Hemmel considered as they entered the lift and started toward the surface. “A private
concern, then. Another company.”
McGregor looked dubious. “To penetrate the kind of security we have here at Burroughs would require techniques of which we and every one of those other state agencies is presently unaware. Something new.” He was first out of the lift when it stopped at the surface.
“So what are you going to do now?” Hemmel asked him.
“Keep digging. Show I followed due diligence procedure looking for a breakdown in our sec-tech. Continue putting pressure on those who, however absurd it appears, might be in a position to compromise lab security. Maybe someone will crack. Oh, and one other thing.” He paused as the two men prepared to go their separate ways. “You’ll probably get a visit from GRID.”
Hemmel looked bemused. “I’m familiar with general security procedures, of course, but that’s a name I don’t recognize. Who is he?”
“Not who. What. One of Burroughs Labs most important customers, if somewhat covert. They pay a premium and pay on time. You’ve probably developed electronic or optical products for them without ever knowing it.”
“Really,” Hemmel murmured, “I’ve never heard of them. And we never deal direct with customers in this lab. Let them talk to their account manager.”
“Yes, well I doubt it will play out that way. These are heavy guys, like a global version of the CIA. They usually deal through third parties, but this is the type of gaffe that will probably draw direct contact as they try to find out why some of their special devices are now in the hands of someone else. I expect they’ll be quite thorough.” He smiled flatly. “That’s security at work.”
Hemmel nodded slowly, his mind turning. “I do trust we won’t end up in orange jumpsuits over this. You’ll be posting round-the-clock guards in the most sensitive parts of the complex, like this lab for instance?”
The Security Chief nodded. “Of course, Dimitri. If the cameras aren’t seeing anything, maybe good old fashioned human beings with a K9 detachment will be harder to fool. I know it’s a nuisance but they’ll have strict orders just to watch and not to touch anything. My people are well-trained, the dogs even more so: they’ll keep out of people’s way. And they’ll watch over you if we have any customer site visits.”
The scientist wrung his fingers until they cracked some more, nodding vigorously. “Good. That should make a difference. So what about the equipment that already disappeared? Will we get it back?”
McGregor let out a grunt. “You have any coins on you?”
Hemmel was taken aback. “Some. Why?”
“Find a wishing well. Drop them in. Make a wish.” He turned to depart. “I have a feeling that’s the only way you’re ever likely to see your missing products again.”
BEYOND AND ABOVE
FJÆRVOLL, NORWEGIAN COAST
OCTOBER, 2007
GLASS UNENDING.
To a visitor capable of seeing through dimensions, such would the palace of Queen Fae’Elayen appear. As it stretched outward from the cliff to the sea its occupied splay of vitreous arms leapt in upward curling arcs above the first waves, there to hang like the branches of a lop-sided white and gold tree. A thousand-meter opaque glass tower rammed into the solid rock landward, a gigantic pin that kept the entire complex from collapsing into the ocean below.
As physics it was elemental, as engineering simple, and as architecture sublime.
Within the gently rising arms lay the offices of State, and at the very tip of the longest and highest arm was the Conclave, flanked by viewing rooms that included this chamber. Not a place for those afraid of heights. Or of the sea, which churned far below the nearly transparent floor. Everything within, from furniture to instrumentation, from walls to ceiling, was fashioned from silicon in one form or another. Though carbon-based themselves, the Fae’er were masters of its close relative, able to bend it to their will as a poet does words.
They’d had nearly 26,000 years to perfect the art.
Not all was transparent, of course. The audience chamber was as colorful as any decorated with more prosaic materials. Great crimson chandeliers did not hang from the convex ceiling so much as they flowered organically from it. Some furniture was movable while certain seats and benches erupted from the floor like glistening fungi molded for purpose. Through floor and walls not enhanced with integrated sculpture, water and land were always visible. Overhead, the roof darkened or grew light in tune with the weather.
What shot through the waves below and whirled in the flaxen-tinged air above was not of Earth Prime but that of the Fae’er and the dimension they now occupied, a remnant of when they were the first masters of the planet. Before the physical became ethereal. Before the Fall.
Slender, almost willowy, Queen Fae’Elayen brooded before the polished ovalurn floating in the air before her. Her dark green eyes slanted upward, her nose and ears were smooth and perfect, and her white hair swept vertical and back like the castle branch in which she stood. Though her feet touched the glossy floor, she seemed to flow more than walk. The long fingers of her right hand held tight the Scepter of Balance, joined to her wrist with a single strand of spun Tiametian gold, a reverential observance her office demanded every dawn.
Facing the cresting sun that now bathed the crescent-shaped room, she held the two-meter staff aloft and silently intoned the wordless mantra, speaking more by a projection of feeling than by voice:
“As we think, we attract. As we do, so we act. Grant us the wisdom and the balance, from lives without beginning, to worlds without end.”
Tapping the scepter three times to the echoing floor, she cast her emerald gaze to where golden sky met roiling grey seas and willed the glass sheet absent. Obediently the window was no more and frigid wind blasted in, thrumming in her ears as it swept over her, eyes now closed.
She let the ions blow around her body, and wipe through her mind. Eyelids squinted tight, ears filled with sound, her senses were cut off from the world without as she slid into the world within, sucking the salt air deep into her lungs as she had been taught centuries ago; in, out, in, out—the rhythm of a beating heart, a mortal heart, as hers had once been.
As the stillness of the moment washed over her, she felt back to another ocean, another time. How she had loved the sea gales! A bittersweet smile creased the corner of her lips as she allowed the rare indulgence.
IN HER MIND’S EYE she was home again, a mortal on Earth Prime of the First Age, a thirty-six year-old mother raising two daughters on the Rhodallian Cape where sand met surf and all manner of treasure could be found if the girls rose early enough for beachcombing before breakfast.
As they paddled in the shallows that bright morning, that last morning, the girls clutched buckets in hand and picked through the bobbleweed and jellies, a thousand nesting rooks and gulls spinning like daisy seeds in the cobalt blue sky above.
The morning had been warm, she remembered, and her girls darted away from each burst of incoming tide with perfect pink faces and girlish gales of laughter.
All the survivors remembered where they were that day, and what they were doing in the moment when the canopy had burst. She had been there, on the white sands, with the girls.
A flash, a thunderclap, and the first drops fell from a clear sky.
Let’s go inside girls. Quickly, it’s going to rain.
Pales of sandy treasures in hand, they were stepping around the rockpool when drizzle turned to downpour.
But where are the clouds?
Another flash followed as they reached the path that wound up the cliff-face to their home, a converted lighthouse cottage on the bluff, which once signaled warnings to mariners in their outriggers, but held no signal for the disaster to come.
Above, a sound struck unlike any other heard before by human ears. It stopped all people in all nations and drew gazes skyward.
Some remembered it as the grinding of metal, others said it was the snapping sound, like the creaking fibers of a felled tree, a mournful groaning that shook the very air as the hydrosphere cleaved
apart on the outer edge of their atmosphere. All had watched, open mouthed and shaken to their knees, as the blue sky parted like a curtain and exposed them to the vacuum beyond.
Those facing spaceward saw ink and stars for the first time, a black eternal gullet opening before them. Those facing toward the gas giant that Earth orbited in those days fell in terror as the red-orange bands of a tiger’s eye peered unblinkingly down.
Then came the winds, spiraling upwards in inverted cones, reverse tornados sucking hungrily from the surface as atmosphere vented from a punctured world.
She had managed to hold tight to her girls as sand, sea-grass, rock and palings tumbled with them into the sky. Round and round they had spun, one of her arms thrust up the back of Avril’s cotton top, long fingers clamping down on the girl’s shoulder, pressing her grimly to her breast. Her other hand jabbed through Salamay’s belt line and curled up tightly under the girl’s ribs.
Stay with me, babies. Stay together, stay together! Builders Above, what is happening?
She didn’t remember if it was the violence of tumbling or the maelstrom of broken debris lashing their heads that stole consciousness from her ragdoll body. Maybe it was the thinning air as the ground fell away. Or the crashing sheets of water that slammed them Earthwards again as the High Sea of the hydrosphere fell, all four billion cubic kilderkins of it.
She had woken groggily several times and finally long enough to tip the balance in favor of staying awake, though her first movement threatened to send her back to the dark. One arm still worked, but all other limbs were bent at odd angles, short breaths being all she could manage.
Turning her head to where water lapped into her ear and sprayed chokingly across her face, she found herself adrift on a heaving ocean, impossibly snagged on what may have once been a shingled roof, the flotsam of a flooded world stretching to all horizons, land nowhere to be seen as the heavy sky bore down.
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