Boundary (Field Book 3)

by Simon Winstanley

  “Sorry, Leonard,” she massaged the deep scratch on her cheek, “I know you and Eva are a thing, and that’s fine, but…”

  “Not anymore,” came Leonard’s voice, “She’s locked me in Chamber 6.”

  Cathy was about to reply when she noticed something was wrong.

  “Now, how did I already know you were stuck in Chamber 6?”

  There was a brief delay, as though he was carefully considering his answer.

  “I told you a moment ago,” came his voice, “maybe you hadn’t fully woken up. She must have hit you pretty hard.”

  Cathy rubbed at her cheek again.

  “I guess,” she agreed hesitantly, no other explanation appeared to fit.

  After a brief silence, Leonard’s voice came from the panel again.

  “OK, Cathy, you hold tight, and I’ll see if I can use Floyd’s legacy systems to open Chamber 4’s internal airlock.”

  Cathy had a fleeting thought - she hadn’t actually told him that she was trapped in the airlock; but this soon gave way to a rising sense of relief that help was on the way.

  “OK,” she sighed, “Thanks Leonard.”

  “Keep this comm channel open,” his voice sounded, “We’ll speak again.”

  After what seemed like barely a minute, Leonard’s voice returned.

  “OK Cathy, I’ve had to use the analogue system,” he apologised, “Sorry I was gone for so long, I bet you’ve forgotten what I look like!”

  It seemed an odd thing for him to say, but she found herself recalling an image of Leonard, standing in the FLC Drum.

  “Course I remember you,” Cathy approached the console, “I -”

  The internal airlock door opened and she saw him standing there, exactly as she remembered him.

  “Miss me?” Leonard smiled and took her hand, “Come on, we have to go!”

  Cathy allowed herself to be led back to the Drum where the pathetic attempts at paper Christmas decorations still littered the walls.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “The ISS is calling,” Leonard smiled, “I’m routing their call to Chamber 6.”

  “But where are the others?” Cathy attempted to pull her hand away, but he maintained his grip.

  “They’ve gone,” his expression was a picture of regret and his grip softened, “It’s just you and me now, Cathy.”

  “But, Mike? Lana?” she persisted, “Eva? Where did they go?”

  “Shh,” he said softly, “I’ll explain afterwards. We shouldn’t keep their good crew waiting. We’re in this together.”

  “Together,” she smiled, feeling a rush of recognition run through her.

  He gestured for her to go through to Chamber 6.

  “I’ll be through in a moment,” he gave a tight-lipped smile of encouragement, “Floyd’s still being a little uncooperative with the communication relays.”

  She left the Drum behind and made her way into Chamber 6.

  She couldn’t remember when it had last been this quiet at the FLC - except perhaps during the nights. But even then, there was always the background noise of the O2 pumps, and the sound of the others breathing from within their improvised bunks above the Drum.

  Like the breathing sound that had arrived behind her now.

  CLOCK

  T -07:05:21

  Standing on the balcony overlooking the Observation Deck, Colonel Beck looked out at the busy activity below. Having retrieved the necessary video processing equipment from the various last-minute storage places aboard the Node, the teams were still working on assembling a message from Douglas Walker. The highly-compressed data had arrived as a set of hand drawn pages, painstakingly delivered by Douglas as he stood outside the Field. Inside the Field, Douglas’ daughter had recorded them in a matter of seconds on a set of digital recording binoculars.

  Kate had apparently only turned away from her father just before the main tsunami had hit the Node. In every important respect, she had watched her father give up his life in order to ensure that the data made it safely aboard.

  He’d once helped Douglas Walker to escape from a burning hangar. Now it seemed that Douglas was about to save his life; if the pages could be decoded before Siva arrived.

  Outside the Field, time progressed at the same rate it always had; for those outside, the main disastrous event was still around a year away. Inside the Field, this translated to just over seven hours in which to prepare the Mark IV Field.

  During normal operation, the Observation Deck’s curved window allowed a spectacular view of the world racing by. To focus people’s efforts, the window had been switched opaque. The massive curved window was now a theatre-sized projection screen, on which all the available data was cycling; but so far, the combined efforts of the Node’s personnel had yet to yield a breakthrough.

  “Page 29!”

  Colonel Beck turned to face Kate Walker who had just shouted out one of the page numbers. The noise below the balcony diminished and after Roy Carter had cycled the pages again to arrive back at page 29, Kate pointed at one of the diagrams.

  “There, what is that?” she asked Scott Dexter who was standing nearby.

  Colonel Beck watched as Scott fetched the two Field Core lead engineers. He couldn’t follow the Node Eversion point theory being discussed between Kate and the others, but he did notice a sudden change in Kate herself. She seemed suddenly unable to balance properly, holding out her arms slightly to steady herself.

  “Grace,” she said and then her eyelids began to flicker.

  Colonel Beck was just beginning to step towards her when she suddenly sneezed, spraying a bloody mist from her nose all over Scott.

  “Kate?” Scott suddenly froze.

  “Medic!” Beck shouted, continuing his short dash to intercept her as she fell towards the floor. As he caught her mid-fall, she seemed incoherent but managed to say three words before she became unconscious.

  Scott dropped to her side, “Kate?”

  “What did she say to you?” Marshall Redings dashed to Scott’s side.

  “I think she said ‘Grace’,” said Scott, hesitantly.

  “Redings,” said Beck, while checking Kate’s neck for a pulse, “It was quiet but she said ‘Hotspot gravity debt’ does that mean anything?”

  “Hotspot…”

  “It sounded like three separate words…”

  The doors to the Observation Deck balcony flew open and Caroline Smith dashed across the floor, accompanied by two servicemen carrying a stretcher.

  “Over here, Doctor,” Beck called.

  “Heard the shout, I was on the lower deck so I had-,” she stopped talking when she caught sight of Kate lying on the floor and the fine sprays of bright red blood on Scott’s shirt, “What happened?”

  “Unidentified seizure,” Beck reported, “Loss of balance, nose bleed, collapse.”

  “Head trauma?”

  “No, I caught her,” Beck stood to allow the servicemen to manoeuvre Kate onto the stretcher.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Caroline replied, then turned to make eye contact with the servicemen, “Let’s get her to the infirmary. Ready?”

  The two of them nodded and then, on a count of three, they lifted the stretcher.

  “I know she’s Walker’s kid,” Caroline looked directly at Beck, “I’ll do everything I can.”

  He watched the doctor dart ahead of the departing stretcher and open the doors. A second later they were gone, leaving only Marshall and Scott standing nearby. A two-tone bell echoed throughout the Observation Deck and the digital countdown clock on the window display updated.

  “Seven hours left,” said Scott, somewhat unnecessarily, “Marshall? I saw her spot a link between pages 29 and 74, but what the hell does ‘Hotspot Grace Debt’ mean?”

  “Hotspot Gravity De-” Marshall began to correct him but then stopped, “Of course!”

  “What?” Beck replied.

  “She was talking about the GRACE gravity mapping project… the Node’s fo
unded on one of the gravitational hotspots!” Marshall elatedly began to explain, “Our Field uses a high-density mag field to open the Eversion point but then we also use local gravitation to pull it closed behind us. It’s why the Node site is here and not somewhere else…”

  Marshall then seemed to narrate his own rapid thoughts.

  “There’s no longer a discrete lunar mass, so surface ‘G’ is gonna fluctuate more… then Siva adds itself to the mix…” he now seemed to emerge, “We need to re-phase the Whitney-Graustein topology transform.”

  “Keep working with Trevor Pike,” Beck instructed him, “Can we get this done in time?”

  Marshall seemed confused.

  “Is seven hours enough?” Beck clarified.

  “Without Kate’s input, it might have taken us longer to solve,” Marshall replied, “but we would have got there. She’s just saved us a ton of time -”

  “How long, Redings?” Beck felt his frustration beginning to flare.

  “Sorry, Sir. With everyone on it, we can do it in two, maybe three hours.”

  “Can I be clear here?” Beck reiterated, “You’re saying this solution can be implemented in three hours?”

  “Absolutely,” Marshall shrugged, “Now we know where to look, the necessary calculations are, well… pretty specific. With, I dunno, five or six teams, we should have it covered.”

  Colonel Beck dismissed them with instructions to give feedback every quarter hour and he returned to his position looking out over the balcony. The mood below changed again as the conversations moved from the hushed tones of theoretical discussion to the more structured-sounding plans of action.

  The clock continued to count down.

  Although it was no longer necessary, he kept the clock running; he knew it would help focus the work effort. It also gave him a visible time-frame for a decision he must reach himself.

  The Node’s departure had been a reaction rather than a planned exit through time. They were underprepared. The Node should have been under the control of General Napier, but when the base’s perimeter fence was breached, Beck had been forced into launching without him.

  Arguably, his decision to launch the Node had saved everyone aboard from being overrun, but he had never wanted to be the one to make that call. He’d been quite prepared to take his place within a chain of command, but he was not prepared to be its highest link.

  The fact of the matter was that since the influx of last minute guests, the Node was now populated by a higher proportion of civilians than military personnel. When the Node completed its intended temporal leap, ten years from now, these people would form the basis of a new world population. He’d spent the last few hours considering the idea that Kate Walker would possibly make a good civilian figurehead, but her current condition meant he could no longer rely on that.

  While the clock continued its countdown, he continued to weigh his options.

  ANALYSIS

  13th April 2014

  The operations crew of the Sea-Bass were assembled in the cramped forward control room. Barely five minutes had elapsed since their confirmation of a circular ice anomaly near the North Atlantic continental shelf, but already they were deep in conversation. Assembled around a table display surface, they reviewed the data they’d gathered and discussed the large structure that dominated the view beyond the room’s bubble window, the magnification effect of the thick glass only compounding its apparently massive scale.

  “Pav, Station-keeping?” Tristan turned to Pavna Jones.

  She pulled up a diagram on her touchscreen tablet and sent it to the display surface.

  “This is the last five minutes -”

  The display surface showed the position of the Sea-Bass and the circular anomaly. The submarine’s position altered slightly during the time-lapsed playback, and the display reported the instances that their manoeuvring jets had been triggered.

  “We drift a little in the swell, but the mano-jets are giving us fairly decent station-keeping. But that thing out there?” Pavna looked out of the window, “It’s not moving. Period.”

  “Probably a dumb question,” Mat Kaufman rubbed at his eyes, “But are we sure that the thing out there is the same thing that showed up on sonar an hour ago?”

  “Take a look for yourself,” Pavna handed him her tablet, “Same location, same size. Jacobs ran a full diagnostic on the pattern comparator.”

  “Lucy?” Tristan looked in her direction for confirmation.

  “I thought the same as Mat,” Lucy replied immediately, “so I double-checked it against the Breadcrumbs navigation log from two hours ago. I ran a differential plot of the sonar scan against the Sea-Bass contour data.”

  “And?” Pavna folded her arms.

  “Two hours ago, for this exact region,” Lucy pointed to the display, “the differential came out blank. The anomaly wasn’t missed, it simply wasn’t there.”

  Despite the sub’s temperature controlled environment, the ice anomaly beyond the window seemed to add a chill to the room. The four of them fell quiet, leaving only a low ventilation hum filling the air.

  “Makes sense,” Tristan was nodding to himself.

  Almost as one, the others turned to face him.

  “What?” Mat voiced the others’ thoughts, “The world’s largest bloody ice sculpture arrives in a split second, and somehow that makes sense?”

  “Sorry,” Tristan looked at them apologetically, “I was getting a little ahead. Mat, you remember me saying that it was massive?”

  “You said it had a lot of mass.”

  “Yes. Now,” Tristan cleared the display surface and loaded a sketch pad program, “Do you remember what was happening just before we discovered the anomaly?”

  “We got caught in the swell of another tsunami,” Pavna spoke before Mat could reply.

  “Even now, three months after the lunar fragment impacts, we’re still getting aftershocks. We’ve sort of become used to the idea. But what if…” Tristan sketched two equations on the screen, “What if it wasn’t just another tsunami? What if it was the sudden displacement of seawater as the anomaly arrived?”

  He pointed to his equations: the volume sum of a sphere and an intersecting torus.

  “I don’t know the volume equation for ‘n’ circumferentially entwined helices,” he shrugged, “but as a guess, this’ll be pretty close. The mass of seawater displaced by the anomaly is well in excess of the Sea-Bass. It explains the short duration of the swell and the timing fits.”

  “But considering the size of the Atlantic,” said Mat, “Doesn’t anyone else find it insanely odd that it only happened when we were so close to it?”

  “I told you, Mat,” Tristan said, “I was seeing this symbol everywhere for hours before the anomaly even emerged.”

  “So, what? You’re suggesting you were being primed to look out for the main event?” Lucy scoffed, “That’s a stretch…”

  “No, I think he’s got a point,” said Pavna, “For one reason or another, we’re all tuned into looking out for that symbol. The Exordi Nova have got everyone looking over their shoulders. Our sensitivity to the symbol means it was a perfect way of getting our attention.”

  “We’ll I’d say it worked. Attention - check,” Mat mimed ticking a checkbox, then looked out of the window at the anomaly, “Message - er…?”

  Lucy pushed back from the display surface and put her hands behind her head.

  “In the old days, we could’ve just up-linked to the GRACE satellite and checked local ‘g’ against bathymetric data for hints of, I dunno,” she shrugged, “…something exotic. But we’ve only got whatever’s aboard.”

  She spotted an expression on Tristan’s face that she recognised.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Well,” he began, “The simplest form of communication only works if the receiver knows the message format.”

  “What are you getting at?” Lucy frowned at him.

  “Well, given the coincidences involved,” Tris
tan began, “Let’s assume for a minute that this is a message, and we are the receiver.”

  The idea met no resistance from the others, so he continued.

  “The sender must already know how we’ll receive it.”

  Tristan nodded to himself as though refining a further thought.

  “Or more specifically, the simplest way we can interpret it.”

  He reset the display surface to show the diagram of the Sea-Bass and the anomaly nearby, but then seemed to hit a problem.

  “Pav, are we exclusively on sonar overlay navigation?”

  “Er, yep,” Pavna squeezed past Mat to get to her controls, “When GPS got scrambled, we switched off standard navigation. Here you go.”

  There was a quiet beep from her console, then Tristan instructed the display surface to include standard navigation.

  “You said it yourself, Lucy, we don’t have access to exotic measuring devices -”

  The display updated to show magnetic north.

  “- but we do have access to one of the world’s oldest measuring instruments.”

  For most of the screen, lines of magnetic force still ran from top to bottom but in the immediate vicinity of the anomaly, the lines were different.

  The reactions of the others ranged from covering their mouths to swearing out loud.

  In their immediate area, magnetic north now ran northeast; directly through the centres of the anomaly’s ring and sphere.

  “It’s a bearing,” said Tristan, “Zero Four Five.”

  DAY ONE

  DAY01 : 31JUL2017

  In the privacy of his room aboard the Node, Alfred Barnes considered the events of the last few hours.

  Despite the brevity of Douglas Walker’s instructions, or perhaps because of it, the alterations to the Field emitters within the central cylindrical core had been completed without fuss.

  There had been no last-minute dash to save the Node; Douglas had conveyed the Field corrections with perfect efficiency. When it came to Kate’s survival, he thought, Douglas had left nothing to chance.