Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  Even though the file is already saved, she screenshots both sides of the blackboard and verifies an encrypted backup has been copied to the cloud. Henrietta then turns, gropes for the door, and when she snaps on the plasma-tube lights, she is smiling. There isn’t even any evidence to erase, clean up, or destroy. She takes a moment to breathe and to calm herself down and to appreciate the fact that she has just done what was previously believed impossible: stolen some of the most highly classified and sensitive information from one of the most secure cleanrooms in the world. It is as though her entire life has guided her toward this exact moment, all made possible by an exceptionally rare congenital genetic disorder.

  She walks briskly down the hall, leaving the yellow plastic sign in place behind her, then abruptly stops. The colors used to render the equation were obviously not accidental. Although her CIP is documented in medical literature, now that her parents are dead, Henrietta is the only one who knows the exact combinations that trigger it. That means The Static was not just addressed to her; she was also its author.

  But the realization that she sent herself a message across time is not what she finds so astonishing. Some part of her knew that all along. The fact that she will one day attempt to murder the only friend she has is what Henrietta finds so enticing about the future.

  38

  KILONOVA

  HARD HATS, IT seems, are a study in personalities.

  Vanessa Townes is dutifully wearing hers—with the optional attachable chin strap. Moretti’s is on backwards, but intentionally so, like he ought to be sporting a neon reflective safety vest and issuing catcalls while lewdly clutching his balls. The tall, thin, dark-skinned kid in the lab coat is wearing a high-tech, matte-white helmet with an indistinct logo on the side, a retractable metaspec visor evocative of a fighter pilot, and either built-in ear protection or some pretty serious headphones. The black carbon-fiber model offered to Quinn by the junior officer who escorted her from the entrance into the belly of the massive building got slapped out of his bewildered grasp into a wall of lockers in protest of Quinn’s having been abducted by a ruggedized and eerily silent Cadillac Escalade. The only other one besides Quinn who has audaciously foregone head protection is the man she pursued around the globe and until this very moment believed was spending the rest of his life at the bottom of a deep dark hole.

  The Elite Assassin stands off to the side, self-separated from the pack, leaning casually in his black slacks and silver coat against a console that has been bolted into place but not yet lit up. Whatever all this is, Ranveer seems to know that it is not his show. His arms are crossed, and he unknots them just enough to give Quinn an almost offhand wave before cinching them back tight across his body.

  In retrospect, Quinn realizes, she should have figured it out. Of course he works for the CIA. What self-respecting, internationally recognized villain, at some point in his distinguished career, hasn’t? She can tell from the way he is standing there that he has never seen the inside of a prison cell, and that he is pompously confident he never will.

  “Mitchell!” Moretti barks. He, Van, and the tall guy are all standing at what appears to be the only functional console in the place. He beckons her over with an exaggerated gesture. “Glad you could finally make it. Come on in. We got a lot to talk about.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Quinn asks in a deceptively calm tone.

  “Same as you. He works for me. Don’t worry about him. He’s as docile as a pussycat.”

  Moretti’s comment has the dismissiveness of a man who believes he is in total control—and who will continue to believe such right up until the moment he is brutally proven wrong.

  “You sent me on an errand to recover a rogue asset?”

  “I sent you,” Moretti says, “to do exactly what you did: nail that sonovabitch.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he stole my Epoch Index, that’s why. Because his instructions were to find me someone who could decrypt it, not disappear and go on a goddamn global killing spree.”

  “You’re welcome,” Ranveer glibly interjects.

  Quinn looks at the assassin. His hands are in his pockets now, and he crosses his ankles like he is modeling for a European men’s lifestyle brand.

  “Why’d you run?” Quinn asks him. “Once you found out what the Epoch Index was, if you were working for the CIA, why’d you disappear?”

  “Because the CIA doesn’t have the stomach for this kind of thing.”

  Quinn gives him a dubious look. “For going around the world assassinating foreign terrorists? Do you even know what the CIA does?”

  “Even the U.S. government has lines it won’t cross,” Ranveer says. “That’s why the world needs people like us.”

  Quinn watches him through glaring, narrowed eyes. “Us?”

  “Hey,” Moretti says, “you two can have drinks and catch up later. Right now, I need to show you something.”

  “Not until we get one thing straight,” Quinn announces. Her feet remain planted. She is speaking to no one and to everyone. “No more bullshit from this point forward. If everyone in this room is not one hundred percent honest with me, I’m walking right out of here and going straight to the media with everything I know. Is that understood?”

  Moretti’s former joviality is no longer in evidence, and he squints at Quinn across the distance. “That would be a very serious mistake,” he tells her. He reaches up and resets his hard hat.

  “Dial it down, Al,” Van says. “No more games, Quinn. You have my word. Come on. He’s right. There’s something you need to see.”

  Reflexively, Quinn looks to Ranveer for direction. For reasons she does not yet understand, he is the only one in the room she trusts. The subtle gesture he makes with his head tells her, in his understated way, not to worry. Whatever this is, it’s safe.

  So she goes.

  It is only now that Quinn really begins to see where she is. Whatever this place may look like from the outside, it is definitely not a data center. At least not a traditional one. It feels much more like a control room. It seems to still be months away from being ready to do whatever it’s eventually going to do, and the smell is unmistakably that of construction. There are clusters of metal studs awaiting stacks of drywall. Ductwork, plumbing, and a red interconnected fire suppression system exposed overhead. Conduits and thick bundles of color-coded fiber-optic cabling are laid out along suspended wire racks, dangling here and there at designated drops above blank, bolted-down consoles.

  Everything is oriented in a semicircle like some kind of high-tech henge—all of it facing what has to be one of the most expansive curvatures of black plasma glass in the world. The dropped ceiling overhead abruptly ends as Quinn approaches, opening up at least four or five additional stories, and the black glass goes all the way up to the top. She is synthesizing what she remembers seeing of the building from the outside as the SUV crept through the checkpoint—comparing the outer dimensions with what she is seeing on the inside—and from what she can tell, the glass wall doesn’t just encircle the core of the structure, but also seems to contain the overwhelming majority of the building’s entire volume.

  The scale of what is in front of her doesn’t make any sense. All that plasma glass can’t possibly be intended as display surface. In fact, you can make an effective control room out of a building a tiny fraction the size of this one. With a shared metaspec space, you don’t even need to be co-located. Modern situation rooms are virtual, augmented, and decentralized. But the thing about plasma glass is that it’s also incredibly strong. And its conductive properties can be used for more than just bundling photons together into pixels. The only explanation is that its purpose is not digital, but physical. It is there not to display, but to contain.

  She stops a few paces from the console.

  “Quinn, sweetheart,” Van says, her tone attempting a reset. “I am s
o sorry about James.”

  Quinn’s eyes pause on her old boss, and she can see that Van wants to come forward in order to embrace her. And for a moment, Quinn wavers. She could go that route. She could allow herself to be hugged, and she could break down right here in front of everyone. She could collapse, and Van could lower her to the cold, concrete floor and sit with her and rub her back and pet her long blond hair. They could all stand there and watch her sob for a lifetime defined by unimaginable loss.

  But the impulse is fleeting. It no longer fits. It does not feel like who she is anymore. Maybe you only get to do that so many times in your life before it loses its benefits. Maybe there is a finite supply of catharsis for any one of us, and once it is spent, instead of permitting yourself to feel pain, your impulse is to find ways to inflict it.

  “What is this place?” Quinn asks by way of deflection. “And where’s Henrietta?”

  Moretti seems relieved that they are not to be derailed by the whole emotional, dead ex-husband thing. Quinn sees that his arms are folded across the tops of two impact-resistant, injection-molded cases—the kind of luggage you use not for weekend getaways, but for highly specialized, foam-cushioned weapons.

  “I sent Henrietta to Paris,” Moretti says.

  Quinn looks to Van as if for confirmation, then back at Moretti. “Why the hell is Henrietta in Paris while I’m still here?”

  “You’re about to find out,” Moretti says. “Quinn, this is Simon Baptiste. Simon, I’d like you to meet Quinn Mitchell.”

  “It is a pleasure to finally meet you,” the kid says, his accent unmistakably French. His lab coat is at least two sizes too small, and as he extends his hand, his sleeve rides up to just below his elbow. Simon is a handsome young man with a big, bright smile, and behind the glitter of pixels projected against his metaspec visor are a pair of warm, dark eyes.

  Quinn is in no mood to make new acquaintances, but she can see that Simon is not part of their bizarre, fucked-up clique. At least not yet. And one day, all of this might just come down to picking sides, so she decides it would not hurt to have another ally. He wraps her hand in both of his in a way that could come across as sleazy, but that he manages to do with charm. In his soft eyes, Quinn can see a touch of compassion for her loss.

  “Go ahead, Simon,” Moretti says impatiently. “Show her.”

  After a quick, final smile, Simon steps back behind the console, hitches his sleeves, and addresses the built-in keyboard. He cycles through a deep and hesitant breath, which Quinn guesses is about as close to a prayer as a quantum physicist gets. The console’s plasma glass slab illuminates his visor in a sheen of terminal-green as he proceeds to unleash short controlled bursts of succinct command-line verse. Quinn leans to the side to get a better look at the vinyl decal on the side of his helmet. The logo suggests a spiral galaxy, but at the center of its radiating arms, rather than a single core, there are two black dots seemingly in a tight binary orbit.

  As the control room begins its dramatic fade, Quinn realizes that the lighting is inverting—that, as it gets dimmer on their side, the plasma glass is clearing and revealing what the massive capacity contains. From as close as she is, she can’t even see the curve in the surface anymore, and as it goes from black to a deep indigo glow, she senses movement. On an incredible scale. It is so imposing and disorienting that she involuntarily takes several steps back.

  The two colossal objects are perfect, mirrored spheres, orbiting each other like marbles circling a drain. They are revolving clockwise, off-axis by about 20 degrees. The chamber extends so far down that Quinn can’t see the bottom, and the spheres seem to consume all of its volume. It is impossible to tell how thick the glass is, or how close the spheres come as they alternate their approaches, but it looks to Quinn like everything is touching—like they are ball bearings in a machine that keeps the planet smoothly spinning. Everything is so tight and precise that her instincts tell her it can’t be real. That it has to be a building-scale hologram. Yet the spheres cast bright blue, hypnotic light across the control room at every pass. And she swears she can feel them. She can’t quite name the sensation, but her entire body senses some kind of force that is at once nauseating and intoxicating.

  “Welcome,” Moretti says, “to Kilonova.”

  To which Quinn responds, “Fuck. Me.”

  “Impressive, no?”

  “What…is it?”

  “Simon?” Moretti prompts.

  “In some ways,” Simon begins, “Kilonova is the most complex machine ever built. And in some ways, it is also one of the simplest.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It generates gravitational waves.”

  “Gravitational waves,” Quinn repeats. “As in…”

  “Ripples in spacetime.”

  “How?”

  “By exploiting certain properties of quantum gravity. We cause the two bodies to orbit each other very, very quickly inside the vacuum chamber, then we transfer mass between them in order to create asymmetrical gravitational perturbations.”

  Quinn reapproaches the glass. She lifts her hand, and since nobody stops her, she presses her palm against the smooth surface. It is warm and feels electric. Somehow alive. Now that she can see what’s behind the glass, she also feels like she can hear it, but not exactly with her ears. It is as though a pulse is being transmitted directly into her brain—as though it is her neurons doing the vibrating instead of her eardrums.

  The source of all the rhythmic distortion.

  “They can move faster than this?”

  “Oh, yes,” Simon tells her. “Much faster. This is only standby mode. Once it is fully operational, you won’t even be able to see them. We’ll have to use synchronized plasma strobes to track their movement.”

  Quinn leans in closer and squints through the glass. “Are they also spinning?”

  “At 222 rpms. I’m impressed, Ms. Mitchell. Most people can’t see that.”

  “How do they…stay up?”

  “They are dynamically stabilized using the strongest and most complex electromagnetic fields ever generated. We have our own nuclear power plant in the basement.”

  Quinn turns and looks up at Simon. “Does this thing do what I think it does?”

  Simon’s expression changes as he defers the question to his superiors. In the CIA, there’s what you’re allowed to know, and then there’s what you’re allowed to say. But what really messes with your head is what your imagination does during long, drawn-out, awkward silences when the truth gets left unsaid.

  “Jesus Christ,” Quinn finally says. “You guys built a fucking time machine, didn’t you? Right in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.”

  Moretti’s mouth slides into a one-sided smile. “You’re goddamn right we did,” he says with more arrogance than pride. “Right under everyone’s noses. And we did it to save their sorry little lives.”

  “The theory,” Van interjects, “is that building a machine capable of sending messages across time enables us to receive information about present threats that the machine will send in the future.”

  “You’re telling me that you built a machine that, in the future, sends the names of terrorists back in time, just so you can get those names now?”

  “Bingo,” Moretti says.

  “Well, too fucking bad it doesn’t fucking work,” Quinn says.

  “Oh?” Moretti asks pointedly. “And what makes you say that?”

  “What do you think? Maybe the fact that my ex-husband was just killed in a fucking terrorist attack.”

  “After which…” Moretti teases. From the inside pocket of his jacket, he retrieves a dark, oblong object, raps it on the top of one of the cases like a miniature gavel, then places it with a snap against the black plastic. “We received this.”

  A flash drive.

  “What the fuck is that?”
<
br />   “Proof that Kilonova works,” Moretti says. “That is the next Epoch Index.”

  It takes Quinn a moment, but she begins to see how all the components fit together. Her training disguised as pursuit; the capture of the Elite Assassin, only to have him be redeployed; a second blockchain of names placed deliberately on top of cases of modern, exotic weapons. Kilonova is just one component in the real machine the CIA is building: a clandestine, global team that uproots anything the government finds threatening long before it has a chance to grow.

  “How did you find it?”

  “As soon as we started building Kilonova, we also started monitoring the backlogs of gravitational wave detectors using Henrietta’s AI from the LHC. Never found anything. Until yesterday.”

  “What happened yesterday?”

  “The exact same data suddenly appeared in the backlogs of four different gravitational wave detectors located in four different parts of the world—simultaneously.”

  “How can that happen?” Quinn asks. She looks to Simon, but he seems to know that it is not his place to speculate.

  “Quinn,” Van says, “just like Seoul was the beginning of a persistent nuclear threat, we believe Paris is the beginning of something completely new. Something possibly much worse.”

  “How can something be worse than a nuclear threat?”

  “Easy,” Moretti says. “Whatever created that hole in Paris, it was a hell of a lot smaller and lighter than a nuclear warhead. Or a dirty bomb, for that matter. It was cheaper and easier to build, and we don’t have any technology that can detect it. And its blast pattern—or whatever the fuck you want to call it—is perfectly spherical, and apparently cuts through absolutely anything, which means from the air you could take out entire buildings, and from the ground, you could erase the most secure bunkers ever built. Imagine one of those things being detonated from a drone over the White House or the Capitol. That scary enough for you?”