THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  “How much will that be?” Professor Lovell asked as he made notes.

  Gary stroked his tablet to move down the list of income items. “100 million US Dollars gross. The ARCs earnings would be 50%, or 50 million US Dollars,” he revealed.

  “We’re in the black then,” Dr Cannon said dryly as she took notes.

  “Just as long as the Howard twins and their three university professors don’t blow up too many of their tests. Their last outing wiped 10 million from our asset register,” Michael pointed out sourly.

  “And probably added three times that to your kudos, Michael,” she pointed out. “As a college, Rolle College leads every one of the tables we aspired to be on, and we’re less than a month into the academic year. Students with Rolle College credentials can expect to get the top research jobs absolutely anywhere in the world. We should triple our fees for next year.

  “Considering the college as a research facility, since news of the latest breakthrough, Rolle College is high on the list of top facilities,” she advised.

  “The group you’re supporting by having the SUVs travel through the Mesosphere with their test equipment is loud in their praise of your support. They have yet to publish, and their paper is still months from completion, but we already have learnt more about that area of our atmosphere than all the material gathered up until now,” Dr Cannon pointed out. “Another month or two of continued findings, and you’ll probably knock CERN off of their long held position as the number one place to do research.”

  “Then let us look at extending a scholarship program. We shouldn’t just take the richest kids, but the brightest too,” Michael stressed. Dr Cannon and Professor Lovell nodded with vigorous agreement.

  “What else needs discussion?” Dr Cannon asked. “How will the proposed change to the Outer-Space treaty affect you?” she asked, answering her own question.

  “Very badly, if the resolution proposed by the Russians is passed.”

  “You don’t think it will be?” Dr Cannon asked.

  Michael shrugged. “Let me put it to you; how many countries have the natural resources that everyone wants, and how many countries need the natural resources of others in order to satisfy their needs? I’ll wager that demand is greater than supply. And I’ll wager that those making demands will gladly accept a cheaper alternative, especially one that’s not about to make an ugly open cut mine out of their neighbourhood in order to provide it.

  “It’s not as if we were to blemish something visible from earth either.” Michael pointed out.

  “So how’s your water problem coming along?” she asked.

  Mickey groaned. “There is just no way that we can make a vehicle large enough to transport back the amount of water we’d really like,” he explained.

  “But you have an alternative?” Professor Lovell predicted.

  The Essex gypsy nodded and grinned. “Some of your astronomy students are helping us. We’ve launched a dozen small telescopes out in space and they hope to find us an asteroid that’s passing close by. They reckon that some of them will be made up of mostly water. We catch it and bring it up close to the ARC. That will be a lot easier than having to go to the moon each time we want a bath,” he explained.

  “You can do that?” Professor Lovell asked.

  “Sure,” Gary answered. “A couple of companies were formed a decade ago to do that very thing. They just couldn’t get the funding together to do it,” he explained.

  “And if the asteroid we pick is not water based, then it’ll be rich in minerals,” Mickey told them, grinning even more brightly.

  “Mickey wants to be a millionaire before he turns 30,” Michael explained with a smile.

  “How far away is that, Mickey?” Professor Lovell asked.

  “Six months,” Mickey grinned.

  “But you still plan to go to the Asteroid Belt?” Dr Cannon asked of Michael.

  “Oh yes,” Michael agreed. “The ferry will take off in a couple of weeks time to be tested for about a week,” he confirmed. “Why have Mickey and his team waiting around on the off-chance of a passing asteroid, when we can arrange to have them pass by on a schedule?” he asked, and noted Stan making a note on his tablet.

  +++++++++++++

  Thomas and David Howard stood before a large screen in their laboratory. Anyone taking a casual glance at them might have thought they were playing some form of game on the large screen. Rotating shapes, and linking them together to create new and larger, more complicated shapes, discarding some of them to try different permutations, a few whispered words to each other all it took to pass information back and forth.

  To another chemical engineer though, the twins were browsing through the various categories of chemical building blocks and scaffolds in the initial search for probable solutions to converting HYPORT into a liquid crystal structure. In particular, they were looking for a polymeric material with rigid rod-like macromolecules that they could use to attach the HYPORT to, in order to achieve their desired effect.

  Their problem was that to achieve the bond they required would undoubtedly cause the chemical to become thermotropic; its components would only come together within a range of temperatures. To be of any value to them, the range would need to be broad, easily operable and supportable.

  The additional problem they faced was that HYPORT might only display its unique properties at a particular phase, a certain temperature. It might not be the same phase that would produce its other ability; transport outside the normal laws of space and time, those postulated by Einstein and that had passed rigorous testing – as far as it was possible to test them. This was where the twins were having difficulty, in that they had gone beyond Einstein and into unknown territory. At the very least it meant that testing would be extremely interesting.

  They used an alarm to tell them when to stop, otherwise they would have been there well beyond the ten hours they had set aside for the task.

  +++++++++++++

  “Mr Bennett, Mr Bennett!” Sally Locke cried from down the passage as Michael and Heather re-entered the ARC from the docking bay area.

  “Sally. Hasn’t anyone told you yet; I only respond to Michael or some other names that are not repeated in mixed company?” he asked in good humour.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you. I need to show you something,” she told him, all but pulling him into the large meeting room beside the control-room.

  Since learning of the use her first satellite had been put to, Sally had begun to keep close tabs on her satellites, reviewing the logs daily, even after Allan and Tony had given her assurances that they had produced automated processes to do the same.

  “Must be something important,” he said to Heather as both he and she began to feel something of Sally’s nervousness.

  The Electronics major and experienced satellite designer and builder, woke the main monitor and began to access her files.

  “When the meteorological satellites aren’t in use, I park them somewhere of interest, so people can use the images as ‘window’ images on their screens. It’s often places like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, or Mount Everest, sometimes even busy train stations. Well, this one, I parked over Cape Canaveral, right above the Mars Laboratory,” she explained, starting the sequence she had cut earlier on.

  It was night and the sequence had used some form of thermal imaging. Michael didn’t know all the various tools the scientists used to ‘see’ in near darkness, but the image was clearly at night, and the Mars Laboratory was a dark cube edged with a small amount of colour.

  “This is the night of 8th, 9th October, the day before the crew began habitation,” Sally explained.

  “Who are they?” Heather asked as she saw two figures enter the frame, both crouching low while they ran quickly towards the corner of the laboratory from the vast area of reed and grass that was common to the flat area bordering the sea. Sally fast-forwarded the video, and in moments the two figures reappeared, but without the packs they had bee
n wearing on their backs.

  “They planted something,” Heather quickly concluded. “They planted bombs!” she gasped, reaching for Michael.

  Michael was already tapping at Glen’s icon to learn he was at home. It was still the early hours of the morning on the east coast of the United States, but Michael put the call through anyway.

  +++++++++++++

  Glen was standing beside one of NASA’s fire trucks as Michael and Heather were dropped off by Mickey’s SUV. Work on the laboratory seemed to pause for a moment as all eyes turned to the oversized and adapted road vehicle as it descended to the ground, then took off again with not so much as a sound or a down blast of hot air. Glen could well imagine the envy they all felt at not having that technology. He pulled his mind away from such thoughts. Such thoughts led to a world he didn’t want his daughter growing up in.

  “Did you find anything?” Heather asked from ten metres away as they ran towards him, Michael stumbling as he tried walking in one direction, and looking in another. It was now late at night for the pair from the ARC, yet neither would be able to sleep until they had satisfied themselves that the Mars Laboratory and staff were alright.

  “Yes,” Glen agreed. “Tucked behind one of the main air lines. Would have demolished life support totally and put the project back at least six weeks, had it have gone off,” he nodded.

  “It’s safe now then?” Michael asked, watching the yellow clad crew of astronauts re-enter the laboratory, some still looking concerned, others looking glad to be going back into a viable project. All showed that close camaraderie that comes from close association with the things you shared.

  “Yes. Our bomb disposal teams have given it the ok. We don’t believe it has delayed the project. We’re still good to lift on the 14th, for the final push on the 17th,” Glen confirmed.

  “That’s good,” Michael agreed.

  “How big was the bomb?” Heather asked.

  “Big? I don’t know. Big enough to fit into a backpack, I suppose,” Glen shrugged.

  “They were both wearing backpacks,” she recalled.

  Glen realised the meaning of her words a moment too late. In that moment, there was a sudden movement of air from the large garage doors of the laboratory, followed practically immediately by an explosion of sound that physically bowed them with its pressure.

  Heather and Michael, like he, had their hands over their ears and were stooped down as a hot wash of dry air swept over and around them. As it died, leaving a strange tinkling sound in his ears, there were shouts from the firemen and bomb disposal teams as they rushed towards the smoking mouth of the laboratory. Although sounds seemed oddly muted, their note of urgency was not.

  “Oh God,” Glen sobbed, remembering the twenty team members as they re-entered the laboratory just moments before. “Get an ambulance here, now!” he cried, running to join the emergency teams while Michael, behind him, got in touch with his people to get their help too.

  October 11th.

  “Hello Frank,” Michael said, finishing Samuel’s report by writing emails to various people so as to ensure coordination of activities over the next week. It was already tomorrow for Michael, and still he’d not been able to go to sleep. If he closed his eyes, images of a burning car appeared, images interlaced with the scenes of carnage he had witnessed, no more than an hour ago.

  “You all ready for tomorrow’s leave-taking?” he asked, still preoccupied by the many things he had to do that day, obscured by flash-backs of the moment the bomb had gone off inside the manned laboratory.

  Michael wondered which had been worse, seeing a picture of their burnt out car, the one Wendy had died in, or seeing the inside of the laboratory after the explosion while there were still crew members screaming in pain and crying in grief.

  “You alright?” Frankie asked, sitting down to watch him.

  “Me? Sure. What’s up?” he asked. He hadn’t thought of Wendy and her untimely death for some time, and all of a sudden, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He wondered why, his mind somehow struggling with even the simple tasks.

  Frankie licked his lips. “I was going to tell you I was going to join the mars trip,” he explained.

  “Were you? To be with Juliet?” Michael asked. Of the twenty who had re-entered the laboratory, 6 had died, and 8 had been seriously wounded. None had walked out unhurt. In fact, only two had been able to walk, and only with another’s assistance.

  “You knew?” Frankie asked.

  “What, about you and Juliet? You spent every non-working hour with her mate,” Michael pointed out. The blood had been the worst part; so much of it, and over such a wide area. Heather had tried shielding him from it, but he had wanted to see, needed to. Perhaps he had been looking for similarities with Wendy’s death, but the burning of their car had sort of sanitised it, although that was hardly the word he’d choose. He tried thinking of a better word, but the effort was too much for him. His mind kept returning to the images of the inside of the laboratory.

  “She thought me and Maddy…” Frankie said lamely, the sentence unfinished.

  “You told her, did you?” Michael assumed. Glen had been as affected as he. They had just wandered around the carnage until Heather had pulled them both out and taken charge, creating a no-go area until the forensic people could step in and retrieve whatever they could of what was left. Michael wanted to empty his stomach all over again, just with the memory of it, of the pieces of body.

  “You knew?” Frankie asked.

  “Stan found out some time back, thought I should know, don’t know why,” he admitted. Glen and he hadn’t been the only stunned people wandering around. The ground team had hurried over from their building to stare, shake their heads and empty their stomachs on the hard asphalt. A lot of police cars had arrived with a lot of armed police with nothing to do but hold back the growing number of concerned NASA personnel.

  Heather came in, Samuel behind her. “Hello Wendy,” Michael said, and wondered why he’d called her Wendy. “Heather,” he amended, shaking his head to dismiss his momentary confusion. He was so tired; perhaps that was it.

  “You should be in bed, Michael,” Heather sighed, going across to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him gently on the cheek.

  “Not yet,” he argued. Too much to do, and too many memories to accompany him. He turned the monitor on and called up Bing for headlines from the various media outlets. More than one had headlines suggesting the ARC may have been involved in the incident.

  “Bastards!” he muttered. He flung himself from the chair in his urgency to get to Oliver and have the media retract their filth.

  He was out the door and into the corridor, and all of a sudden he was crying, deep racking sobs that swelled from low in his belly and shook him. For long moments he could do nothing but allow himself to weep. He was just a conduit for a level of grief he had never imagined. Then, as quickly as it had come, it passed, and Michael wiped at his eyes and nose and strode into the control-room, once more in control of himself.

  “Oliver? What can you do with those imbeciles?” he asked angrily, anger helping him dispel his own ghosts. Nonetheless, he was incensed that anyone could imagine the ARC to be involved in such a deed.

  October 12th.

  It was a subdued team that strapped themselves into their respective seats, checked their screens and the information on them before nodding towards Ricky and Frank.

  “We’re all green,” Ricky murmured, checking his own section one more time.

  “In your own time,” Frankie told him, taking a moment to check all the major systems.

  “Here goes,” Ricky said, once again glancing at his screens. Then his finger had touched the app, and while they didn’t feel anything, they could see changes on their screens, measurements moving at astonishing speeds, the ARC dropping rapidly behind them on their radar.

  “Speed on the green,” Ricky confirmed.

  “Direction, green,” Joyce added her confirmation.<
br />
  Life support, green,” Jerry nodded.

  “Communications, green,” Matt told everyone.

  “I guess that means I make the tea,” Frank admitted, releasing himself from his seat so he could reach for the thermos and prepare the cups. “I hope you brought more than just Marmite sandwiches this time Matt,” he murmured, trying to lighten the mood in the cabin.

  “And just what’s wrong with Marmite?” Matt asked, reaching for the container full of sandwiches.

  +++++++++++++

  “Oliver, what’s happening?” Michael asked from his suite, watching the monitors, each showing feeds from different media organisations.

  Oliver sighed, his meeting and hot argument with Michael the previous day still too recent to be put behind him. “Michael, what do you mean?” he asked while he continued to monitor the social media platforms and the wealth of conversations occurring, a mix of positive and negative views that he was trying to keep abreast of.

  “I mean Matt, for Christ sake!” Michael stormed. “Does he have to lower the tone of every endeavour?”

  Oliver stopped for a moment and wondered if he should suggest to Michael that he was being overly critical once more. He wasn’t in the mood for another argument though, and let it pass.

  “Matt? Matt is being Matt,” Oliver defended the senior student instead. Certainly, the boy’s attitude irritated some people, but overall, he was liked by the younger audience. He also helped keep his blog up-to-date, something Frankie seemed incapable of doing.

  “Tell him to grow up!” Michael snapped, stabbing the Off button to look angrily up at Heather as she returned with a cup of tea. “What?” he asked stubbornly.

  “Nothing,” she told him, putting the cup down while continuing to look at him worriedly. It wasn’t like him to hold a mood for so long. Normally, no matter how heated a conversation, he could turn away from it and regain his normal good humour. Sometime over the last day he had lost that.