by Scott Mackay
The three went to the surgery.
John Quang lay strapped to one of the hinged-down gurneys. His face had been badly beaten and his left eye was swollen shut. In his other eye—a haze. He was in the half sleep of Fye’s insidious truth cocktail. As Cam floated up to him, Quang lifted his chin. Lesha hovered in the background. Ochoa looked on from his workstation.
Quang was a middle-aged Chinese man with broad flat cheeks, a strong chin, and small rosebud lips. His scalp, shaved bald at the beginning of the voyage, had now developed a blue-black stubble. Cam had to wonder what drove a man like Quang. Why jockey for position in a politburo that had seen its day? Did Quang truly believe that despite his reckless course of action he could save the day for Po Pin-Yen? Or was he ultimately afraid of what Po Pin-Yen might do to his family?
And, speaking of family . . .
‘‘Lieutenant Colonel Fye tells me we’ve located your wife and children in Beijing, Dr. Quang. We’re holding them in a safe house. Pearl, May, and Kingsley—we have them all.’’
Quang’s good eye widened as Cam listed family names.
‘‘We have our own implants,’’ continued Cam. ‘‘And these particular implants are set to eat brain tissue. Slowly. Over the course of a few days. So that as the sun bloats like an infected pustule thanks to the misguided attempts of Po Pin-Yen, as well as the monopolizing efforts of my own government . . .’’ Fye put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Cam glanced over. Fye gave his head a covert shake. But Cam was beyond caring. ‘‘Thanks to your own deposed regime, and the grasping and nearsighted strategies of the Langdon Administration, as the sun bloats, these implants will make a leisurely dinner of your family’s cerebral tissue. They’ll suffer horribly.’’
He sat back and contemplated Quang.
‘‘I’ve just made an interesting discovery, John, only I don’t know how to go about utilizing it. I hope you have the good sense to help me with that. If you don’t, your family dies. I’m sorry about this. I apologize for using this kind of barbaric coercion on you, and I don’t condone it at all. I’m a scientist. I’ve never understood political violence. But what I do understand is that this corrupting code Mark’s entered into the Guarneri nodes can be reversed using a tumbler mechanism. This tumbler mechanism can break strategic information links with a single turn. I’m not sure if it works on a node-by-node basis, or if you can turn all the nodes at once. Let’s find out. Here’s the keyboard, John. Help us. You can still be a hero in all this.’’
Cam and Quang stared at each other for several seconds. He saw fear in Quang’s one good eye. It seemed as if Quang was questioning everything he had ever done in his life, had reached that moral crossroads where it wasn’t enough simply to follow orders, and to bolster the old dogma no matter what the cost; he had reached that threshold where he had to think for himself.
‘‘And my family?’’ The Pin-Yen agent’s voice was raspy with emotion.
‘‘You can save them,’’ said Cam. ‘‘Isn’t that right, Lieutenant Colonel?’’
Fye nodded. ‘‘Dr. Conrad’s right, John. It’s all up to you.’’
Quang turned away. ‘‘Dr. Fuller’s implant malfunctioned.’’
Cam nodded. ‘‘We suspected as much.’’
‘‘Its stealth element failed. Dr. Fuller was never meant to get caught.’’
Cam thought of his own unusual prescience. ‘‘What about the background language?’’
Quang shook his head. ‘‘You Americans, you’re all alike.’’
‘‘John, you’ve been taught to think that way all your life.’’
‘‘America suffers in the chains of its own political ideology.’’
‘‘None of that’s going to matter if you don’t disable the sabotage codes and make Guarneri operational. Don’t you realize that this is your last chance? Politics has nothing to do with it. We’ve measured the rate of change in the sun. It’s documented. You’ve seen it. Time is running out.’’
But Quang insisted. ‘‘We have our own modules in place. It won’t take our technicians long to modify them. We’ll make First Contact.’’
‘‘I don’t think so. I’ve checked the log. Mark wasn’t able to send half of what your people need before I stopped him. And has it ever occurred to you that the Builders wanted me to stop him? The old PRNC regime hasn’t got a chance. None of us do. Not unless you enter this tumbler language.’’
‘‘I’m sorry. I can’t do that.’’
Cam turned toward Fye. Fye took another needle from his bag and jabbed it into Quang’s arm. Quang went all rubbery. Then Fye took out a combat knife and unexpectedly stabbed Quang through the fleshy part of his thigh. Quang jerked upward, his face scrunching in agony as the spill-mites came out of the walls again and fed on his blood. Cam felt nauseated. Lesha groaned behind him. Ochoa watched impassively, as if he had seen a lot of this kind of thing as a doctor for VIP-Med.
Fye reached for a floating waferscreen, pulled it in front of the Chinese, and tapped it to life.
A small living room in Beijing. A woman, boy, and girl—tied to chairs. Fye spoke at the waferscreen. It took a while because of the transmission distance, and because the new pierce array had to reassemble the radiation-fractured signal, but soon, American operatives cut the boy’s ear off, then the girl’s, then two of the woman’s fingers. Lesha left. Cam wanted to leave but knew he couldn’t.
John Quang looked at the screen in alarm. His shoulders sagged and he nodded. ‘‘Give me the keyboard. They have to be unlocked one node at a time. It might take a while.’’
Fye pulled the keyboard from the wall and shifted the gurney into a sitting position. He moved the waferscreen out of the way and unhinged the input monitor so that Quang could see it clearly. Cam maneuvered around to follow the PRNC operative’s work.
Because Quang was so drugged, and weak from blood loss, he made a number of mistakes, but he always corrected things. He worked first on node 5, shifting back and forth from normal script, to superscript, to mathematical script.
Over the next half hour, Quang unlocked node 5. He also helped untangle a lot of node 1. Cam believed that he might yet succeed. But then Quang hesitated. He glanced up at the floating waferscreen, then at Fye, and finally at Cam, and seemed to have an epiphany of sorts.
Cam felt his uncanny prescience again. ‘‘He’s going to try something.’’
Before any of them could reach Quang, Cam saw the operative’s tongue shift in his mouth and dislodge something from behind his molar. A second later, Fye grabbed Cam and pulled him to the access chute along the surgery floor. Ochoa dove too.
A second after that, he heard a small detonation.
He looked up. Blood floated everywhere. Also brain tissue.
The spill-mites swarmed with renewed vigor.
31
Loftus Hua pledged cooperation the instant Fye showed him the linkups to his own family. As the Chinese second-in-command lay there strapped to the gurney, tears collected in his eyes, then floated free. His family moaned on the waferscreen. Cam glanced at Fye, then at Ochoa.
Ochoa leaned forward and administered a shot of something. ‘‘To steady his nerves and focus his concentration.’’
A few minutes later, Hua—short, chubby, with cherubic features—settled and asked Cam where he wanted to begin.
‘‘We’re going to work on the tumbler software hampering node four. Here are the schematics from the node one and five tumblers. I know you’re not as well versed in the system as John was, but John’s already helped us with these, so you might get some ideas from what he’s done.’’
In spirit and inspiration, the node 4 tumbler mechanism was similar to the mechanisms in nodes 1 and 5. In other words, it was a key. But all keys were cut differently, and the difficulty lay in the details.
Fye got tired—Ochoa had been keeping him up on special drugs for the last seventy-two hours—and, as the situation now seemed stable, the Orbops man went to the dorm for some much-needed
sleep.
Ochoa, too, went to rest.
Blaine and Lewis stayed with Cam, acting as guards.
Lesha came in for a while. ‘‘We just got another communication from Blunt. Earth’s meteorological systems are experiencing further heat-related hyperactivity. The oceans are awash in hurricanes. Five in the Atlantic, and eleven in the Pacific. Shipping has been halted. All air traffic has been grounded. There have been catastrophic temperature rises in Brazil. It’s reached sixty-two degrees Celsius in Rio de Janeiro, and that’s in the shade. People down there are doing anything they can to get away, and we’re now faced with a massive refugee problem. The ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and there’s been significant flooding along all coasts. Langdon and his advisers have left Camp David and are now in their underground bunker in New Mexico.’’
Cam now felt the burden he carried more than ever, but tried to stay focused on the task at hand. There was no use in panicking. He needed a clear head.
He and Hua worked all day and finally managed to get node 4 untangled. Ochoa gave them both a stimulant, and they worked through the night.
By morning, node 4 tumbled over, and they were starting to get the hang of it.
At that point they had a short rest, waking up two hours later to begin work on node 3. But node 3 seemed to be derived from a different plan altogether, and they got no further than two sequences when Cam said, ‘‘I’m lost.’’
Hua kept going. ‘‘I recognize some of it.’’
So the PRNC agent continued, and Cam was sure he was going to succeed.
The short, chubby Asian was just deciphering the last strand when he began to shake. His chin went back, his eyes rolled into his head, and his eyelids quivered. Hua’s hands jerked away from the keyboard. Cam saw the code on the screen tangle itself up again. He lurched forward and tried to stop the code from reinstalling itself, but there was nothing he could do; he simply wasn’t familiar enough with this particular design to arrest what was happening to the Guarneri software.
Hua, meanwhile, went into further convulsions. He finally started choking.
Out in the hub, the alarm pinged. Cam maneuvered to the hatchway and looked at the security console. The screen had defaulted to three views of the survival pod interiors, where the rest of the Chinese team members were imprisoned.
Foster Chong was having his own seizure; it was as if Foster couldn’t get enough air. Carol Ng convulsed. Betty Hum quivered from head to foot, even as she bit her tongue. It became quickly apparent that the Chinese were under attack, that they had nanogens lodged in their bodies they perhaps didn’t know about, and that Po Pin-Yen, understanding the operation was blown, had turned these nanogens on to stop further compromise.
It was over in a matter of minutes. Hua’s arms floated lifelessly away from the keyboard. The Chinese in the survival pods were like dead hatchlings inside large white eggs, skin blue, eyes wide with burst blood vessels, the latest casualties of the PRNC War.
Any chance of figuring out the rest of the tumblers was all but gone.
They ejected Hua’s corpse quickly. ‘‘Those macrogens could have multiple-target capability,’’ explained Fye. They unhooked the survival pods and let them drift away. ‘‘We should seal the observer bay as well. I’m afraid we’ll have to make it a dead zone.’’
Cam felt a pang when they tumbled Loftus Hua out the hatch. It didn’t seem fair. Loftus was an unlikely hero, and he had met an uncalled-for end.
Twenty minutes later, everyone congregated in Cremona.
‘‘We go ahead,’’ said Cam. ‘‘We know that three of five nodes have been purged of corrupting software. This might be enough to operate at least some of the generators safely. I think at this point we salvage what we can. We haven’t got the time to do anything else.’’
They alerted the rest of the fleet.
Half the engineering crews, now that all the work was done, set a course for Earth. The operational crews stayed behind, a total of ninety-eight people spread out over many millions of kilometers in five different spacecraft.
In a coordinated chain of start-ups, one field after another was sequenced. Cam watched the readouts on the Station A terminal. Accelerators 1 through 6, indicated by square icons, flickered into the green one by one. But generator 7 surged into the red. The operations craft Geronimo reported an explosion, followed by a chain reaction, which resulted in the entire obliteration of the accelerator. Eight and 9 fired the way they were supposed to, but 12 and 11 fed back, with the same resulting obliteration, some of the PRNC code still working its ugly sabotage. As for 12, it blinked into the yellow, and Cam worked furiously with some additional background language. He finally got it into the green. By the time he turned to Fye, his forehead was moist with perspiration.
‘‘It’s not optimal. But the readings tell me we’re seeing gravitational anomalies consistent with the theoretical properties of anti-Ostrander space inside the target zone. This window here indicates the target zone is expanding to reach those alien-created zones closer to the sun that show similar gravitational anomalies.’’
Fye studied the readings. ‘‘With three of the generators down, we must be experiencing a reduction in strength. What about the hydrogen band?’’
‘‘It’s too early to tell. I’m going to send our first probe.’’
He sent their first probe, really no more than a superfast projectile with an odometer linked to Tecumsehby laser relay; and as the probe entered the anti-Ostrander space field, it began to send back atypical readings, so that it didn’t travel as it would through normal space, covering only millions of kilometers, but reported traveling distances that measured 1.4 light-years, the readings sent back instantaneously, not in 1.4 years, in keeping with the whole hyperdimensional setup. In other words, as theorized, anti-Ostrander space was smaller on the outside than it was on the inside, an indication that a curved space-time phenomenon was in effect. And within this wide region of curved space-time, some of the hydrogen bleed from the sun at last showed the reversal Cam had promised. The data came in, and the boomerang effect was proven. He realized, with a sense of awe, that he was viewing the universe in a fundamentally different way.
Fye wasn’t convinced. ‘‘All I see is space.’’ His tone wasn’t calm anymore. His face had gone red, and he peered out Cremona’s polycarbonate dome with a mix of perplexity and annoyance, as if he thought he had been outsmarted.
‘‘It’s not out there,’’ said Cam. ‘‘It’s here, on the screen, on the instrument readings. In the interplay of quarks and gluons at the boundary of the field. And we have something else here. Something I’ve only wildly speculated about but which we’re seeing at the boundary’s edge. Do you know anything about virtual particles, Oren?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘Virtual particles are particles that don’t exist yet, but have the potential to exist. This is what I find so exciting about this. Some of the sun’s hydrogen is twinning itself. We’re seeing something here that’s never been seen before. The creation of matter. There’s an old scientific maxim: matter can be neither created nor destroyed. But all the matter in the universe had to come from somewhere. We now see that virtual particles are leaping into existence out of the hyperdimensionality of anti-Ostrander space.’’
‘‘Uh . . . okay.’’
Cam’s lips tightened and he grew momentarily impatient. ‘‘As a species, you and I are equipped to live only in a particular space and time. Here, matter can be neither destroyed nor created. But the Builders live simultaneously in all times in all spaces, including the one you and I now inhabit. In the higher planes that the Builders also inhabit, matter seems to be created all the time. Just as it is destroyed. Existence and nonexistence. The only two propositions that make sense in an overall theory of the universe. It’s a crazy theory,’’ he said, thinking of Niels Bohr again, ‘‘but maybe it’s just crazy enough to be the only theory that can explain it all.’’
Fye remained
unconvinced. ‘‘How does this stop the sun from going red giant?’’
Cam wanted to tell the Orbops agent that the slowing of the hydrogen drain was beside the point. He was tempted to finally admit to Fye that Guarneri was the equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk, and that what they really needed was something like an airbus because they were dealing with the sun, and the sun was huge, and this whole question of concrete political and strategic gain was nothing but Langdon-speak anyway.
‘‘Guarneri is a lens, Oren. It’s going to bring the Builders into focus. But more important, it’s going to bring us into focus for them. The Builders are actually going to see us for the first time through a medium they can understand. They’ve tried numerous ways to contact us, but they’ve finally dismissed us because we were too indistinct for them. If we can prove that we’re capable of showing ourselves, we just might stop this whole situation.’’
A pathological coldness came to Fye’s eyes. ‘‘You’ve lied about this, haven’t you? The hydrogen reversal is going to turn out to be incidental and insignificant, isn’t it?’’
Cam peered at his equations. ‘‘I haven’t lied. I’ve told you, Blunt, and the president what you needed to hear so I could get this job done.’’
‘‘You’re not reversing the hydrogen. And that’s how you sold this mission.’’
‘‘I’m reversing some of it. And I had to sell it any way I could because it’s the only chance we have.’’
‘‘The only chance you think we have, at least.’’
‘‘Once we have meaningful communication with them, I’m convinced it will work itself out.’’
A line came to Fye’s pink brow. ‘‘Yes, but what if it doesn’t?’’
‘‘If anybody else has a better idea . . .’’
‘‘Excuse me. I have to contact New Mexico.’’
‘‘About what?’’
‘‘About how you’ve lied to us.’’