“Hey, I think we need a break,” Lars suggested. “We’re supposed to be practicing Noriko’s climbing trick anyway, right? Let’s go do that for an hour.”
Cameron got to his feet so fast air vacuumed in his wake. “Great idea.”
Noriko came into work the next evening to find the office empty. Noriko was beginning to wonder about this. Did anyone actually use their desks? Sit in them for more than an hour? Or were they constantly running about doing other things instead? Since no one was there, she stuck her head in the library next, then the conference room, but those were both empty as well. They had been working in the holo room the day before, maybe they hadn’t finished?
With that thought, she went to the end of the hallway and out the door, into the one outside building that was not directly connected to the rest of the station. She left stark bright sunlight for a very dim interior. She did not enter the room proper but instead came into a small entry foyer that separated her from the rest of the room by a glass- paneled wall and door. There was a keyless security pad next to the door and a sign above it that read: Please do not enter without booties over your shoes.
Booties? Casting about, she spotted two bins to her left, one with plastic booties in sealed pouches, the other for disposing the used booties. Just how sensitive was this holo room, that even the floor could be damaged with regular shoes?
She ripped open a package, snapped the plastic on over her workboots, and then very timidly put her hand against the door lock. It scanned her print, made a happy beep, and the door clicked open. Phew, okay, didn’t fry that one. Poking her head inside, she found that a holo program was already in motion. It looked like 2A, still intact and pristine, and the remake was so realistic that she could actually feel the heat from an artificial sun beating down on her. Noriko had seen state of the art holo programs before, but never quite to this extent.
“Ah, Noriko, come in,” Goudie invited with a wave of his hand.
With her wonder at the program, she’d missed that Goudie and another man were inside. Shutting the door, she crossed to them, taking in this new person. He looked very international, thick dark hair cut close, dark eyes, a light skin tone, and relatively short stature. He probably could look her right in the eyes, they were so similar in height. From his looks, he could be Cuban, Spanish, Italian, or something else entirely. His looks were so versatile any spy would envy them. “Hello, I don’t think we’ve met yet?”
“I don’t know you,” he confirmed with a smile that said he didn’t mind that. Holding out a hand, he introduced himself, “Anthony Pacheco. I’m the lord and master of SHRR.”
The way he said it, it sounded like ‘sure’. “Noriko Arashi, Team Pathmaker in the GF.”
“Oh, one of the newbies? Nice t’meetcha.”
“Nice to meet you too.” Not sure if she should ask, but wanting to clarify, she repeated, “Sure?”
“Simulation Holographic Reconstruction Room,” he elaborated. “SHRR. I don’t normally see anyone from the GF, like maybe three times a year, as you guys don’t deal actively with investigations like this. How did you get pulled into it, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Severe ley line fluctuations have been happening recently,” she explained without a qualm. After all, he was a fellow officer, she could discuss things with him. “One of them occurred just as the explosion happened at the test cell.”
Anthony gave Goudie a strange look. “I thought the ley line burst was an effect of the explosion, not a cause.”
“I’m not sure which it is,” Goudie denied.
Oh? He must not have heard from Banderas yet. “Ah, sir, we’re 95% sure that it was done deliberately. We have not been able to find any natural disaster or anything like it that would cause the line to go berserk like that.”
Goudie let out a low breath, more like a condensed stream of air, and rocked back on his heels. “That would coincide with my findings. I have to tell you, I don’t like what I’ve discovered.”
Noriko hadn’t liked it either, when she’d made the logical conclusion yesterday. “If you don’t mind, sir, can I watch the re-enactment you’ve programmed here?”
“Not at all, not at all. Anthony, if you’d do the honors?”
“SHRR,” Anthony stated calmly to the room in general, “restart program. Play 2x speed.”
The test cell was peaceful, calm, the sunset sinking slowly into late evening. Noriko watched as men went about in a fast forward mode, doing the various tasks they needed to prepare the test cell for testing. Then night did fall. There were two elements that jarred her out of the virtual reality she was standing in. On the floor near their feet were numbers: one was the time, the other was a large zero that made no sense to her.
She saw Wesson and Landers come in, do their transferring of power from the ley lines as they said they had, then leave again. The lights near the gates flashed red to show the test cell was in testing mode, the engineers and techs all went inside the block house, and the engine fired.
What happened next was so fast that she couldn’t follow it with the naked eye. It seemed as if the engine just blew up on its own, and a wave of light and fire swept over her. There was no wind or physical force, which caused her body some disorientation, as it felt as if there should have been because of all the other stimulation. In its wake, there was the destructive scene that she knew well.
Taking in a breath, she glanced down at the floor again and found that the time now read 9:02 p.m. and there was another, much larger number beneath it. “Sir. Am I reading that right?”
“250 gigajoules,” Goudie read for her with a sad smile. “That’s the force of the explosion in total.”
Her breath came out in shaking gasps. That sort of force was unimaginable to her mind. In fact, her brain refused to compute it for a moment and kept trying to shut down on her. “250 gigajoules.” She found herself incapable of saying anything else.
“This was the number that the simulation came to, and one I’ve confirmed myself.” Goudie huffed out a breath and shook his head sadly. “I think I’ve found the answers I need here. Thank you, Anthony, your assistance was invaluable.”
“Anytime, sir.”
“Well, Noriko, shall we go?” Goudie extended a hand toward the door as he ushered her out. “I think it’s time we all got together and shared what we’ve learned.”
21st Merlin
“250 gigajoules?!” Charlotte repeated in complete astonishment. “That’s—that’s—”
Cameron let out a whistle. “That’s an insane amount of energy.”
“It is that. Hence the complete destruction of the 2A Test Cell.” Goudie gave the team a shrug, although he seemed to enjoy their flabbergasted surprise.
They’d come into the conference room to report their own findings and hear what Frank Goudie and Anthony had figured out. But no one had suspected this bombshell to be dropped on them. No one aside from Noriko, at least.
“Captain Banderas,” Goudie’s chair creaked a little as he swiveled to look at the man more dead-on, “I understand that a merlin of your power is basically equivalent to a joule of energy?”
“That’s correct. Which is why we’re all so surprised. It would take a Level 1 to be able to manage a megamerlin of power, which is rare enough, and now you’re saying that this explosion was in the giga range.” Banderas tapped the report he had nicely printed and stacked in front of him with a blunt fingertip. “And it doesn’t match our findings at all.”
“It won’t.” Goudie gave a shrug, one hand splayed. “Most of the blast energy wouldn’t go into the ground. It’s like water, or air, it will take the path of least resistance. So most of this energy went out and up. What I couldn’t easily figure out was how much went down into the ground, and the ley lines, which was why I asked you to go look for me.”
Now their expedition made more sense.
Banderas spun his report around and pushed it toward the other two men. “This was our finding. The Rich
ter scale showed the earthquake to be just under a 3, mostly a localized earthquake, which the outer area supports. We showed that level of energy through the ley lines. The immediate area is another thing. It was more like a 4 or 5 on the Richter scale. I believe anyone on the hill would have felt it and it probably knocked more than one picture off the wall.”
“It did that,” Mike Yockey agreed somberly. “Is that why our equipment in the Block House was knocked loose and thrown around?”
“That and the shock waves,” Goudie confirmed, flipping through the report. “You make sketches of the ley lines like this?”
Banderas nodded. “On at least a weekly basis. Until some scientist can find a way to actually measure ley lines and merlins, we have to keep our own records. As you see, there was an abrupt shove of power into the ley lines right around the test cell area, which splintered off in every direction before burning itself up and settling into the known ley line paths. Even the ones further out were broadened slightly.”
Mike especially seemed fascinated by this, as he was leaning sideways in his chair in order to read over Goudie’s shoulder. “How much energy went through there?”
“We can’t give you an exact number, but from our own readings and charts, we think it was between 28 to 30 megajoules/kilomerlins. Outside this immediate area at the base of the hill, it tapered off to about half that.”
“So, roughly the size of about a half ton of dynamite going off,” Goudie translated to himself.
“There is a mystery still lingering.” Banderas flipped several pages, switching to a map of the general area. “We’ve had two other instances in the past month where ley lines went berserk, much like what happened at 2A.”
Goudie’s attention sharpened. “What’s the reason?”
“I was hoping you’d have one for me. The only explanation I know of is not a good one.”
With a slow shake of his head, Goudie denied, “I don’t know. This might be a fluke, but I’d like an answer to that question. Unknowns are rarely a good thing in circumstances like these.” He pondered that page for several seconds before flipping back to the previous one.
Noriko had been trying to follow all of these numbers flying about, taking notes as fast as her hand could write them, but at this she stopped and looked up. Goudie’s expression made her think that something was not quite right. “Something wrong?”
“Hmm?” His eyes had been trained on the ceiling, staring off into space as he thought, but when he realized he was being asked a question, he glanced down at her. “I have a curiosity of my own pestering me. I would have expected less power to go into the ley lines. After all, it’s not like the test cell is in the ground. It was exposed completely to open air. Very, very little of the energy should have traveled into the ground at all.”
“Especially since the tanks are propped up above the ground?” Mike asked him, the wheels clearly turning in his head too.
Charlotte lifted a hand. “Sorry, some of us aren’t following this. What tanks?”
“The run tanks,” Mike explained to her. “You’ve been up to the test cell before, right? I thought so. Remember those large, white tanks that were sitting off to one side of the test cell? There was one that was very large, one that was about a third of its size sitting close by. Those are—were—the run tanks. See, we never put a lot of fuel in the engine itself when we’re testing it. Too dangerous. These things are in the experimental stages, anything could happen, and if the engine goes we don’t want it to turn into a bomb. So we have a run line connected from it to the tanks, which supply the fuel. That way, if something goes wrong, we can shut down the run tanks from the Block House and prevent anything from seriously blowing up.”
Noriko silently applauded this thought process. The Air Force had obviously thought this through. Under normal circumstances, it would have prevented a disaster from happening. Although that begged the question, what had happened this time that was abnormal?
“The tanks are actually what caused the massive explosion this time,” Mike continued when he realized he had the whole table’s riveted attention. “Well, I shouldn’t say “caused,” but they’re what magnified the explosion. You see, between the two of them, they contained about twenty thousand gallons of fuel. Since we only test rocket engines in that test cell, that means there were twenty thousand gallons of liquid hydrogen in the tanks.”
Cameron let out a low whistle. “Liquid hydrogen would make a pretty big bomb.”
“The equivalent of sixty-three tons of dynamite,” Goudie agreed in dark humor. “I had not known until Mike explained the standard operation procedures to me that the engine itself wouldn’t have the fuel to create an explosion of this nature. Now, at least, I understand why there was a chain reaction in the evidence I was finding. I thought that something had used the engine as camouflage to ignite the tanks and make them explode. Now I realize that’s not necessarily the case.”
“It could be the reverse,” Mike suggested. “It could be that there was an ignition source near the tanks, and because of the run lines, the engine was blown up along with it.”
Goudie gave him a frustrated glare. “I do not want more possibilities to explore, thank you very much.”
Only slightly abashed, Mike gave him a small grin. “Sorry?”
“It’s a theory I have to investigate, though, as it’s very possible.” Goudie rubbed at both eyes with the pads of his fingers for a long second. “Anyone else have something they want to tell me?”
“In the case of the ley line, we are almost completely convinced that it was deliberate sabotage,” Banderas announced grimly. “Like I said, we’ve already had two similar cases pop up recently. So unless you tell me that the explosion caused this one, then I’m inclined to think we have someone running around doing it on purpose.”
That made the room grow very still, almost funeral quiet. Goudie slowly shook his head and said quietly, “I have no explanation to offer.”
“Then we’ll have to work under the assumption that this was sabotage until proven otherwise.”
Goudie growled out a curse. “Now that leaves me with a whole new set of questions. Was the off-set of the ley line done deliberately with this timing? Was it intended to help blow up the test cell? Or did it happen without our saboteur realizing the consequences? I believe, Captain Banderas, that you told me before that if someone is too careless, they can set off an explosion without intending to.”
“That’s correct. I’m not sure in this case if it was intentional or not. It could well be that the ley line wasn’t unstable enough to blow yet, that it was priming itself to do so, when the test cell explosion happened. I can’t imagine that the GF pairing on the rock wouldn’t have noticed such elevated ley lines and done nothing about them.”
Goudie rocked back and forth in his chair, eyes returning to the ceiling. “So either the GF pairing is in cahoots with the saboteur or the power surge had not arrived in the ley line by the time they left.”
“Those are our two options,” Jack admitted. “The GF does not experiment with how much time or energy it takes to make a ley line unstable. We’re actively trying to keep them from doing so, after all. Would it help if we ran simulations with SHRR to come up with possible answers?”
“That would help tremendously, Jack. I don’t know enough about your abilities or merlins to be able to come up with the right questions, much less the right answers.”
“Then we’ll do that for you, try to give you some models and numbers to look at,” Banderas assured him.
“I did have a thought,” Jack offered. “Mr. Goudie, as I understand it, all base personnel are basically under suspicion except for those caught in the blast. Is that correct?”
“That is correct, sir.”
“In that case, do you want us to double check the reports coming in to make sure that people actually did what they said they did? Especially on the GF side of things, this team would be able to tell if someone is lying or not. Or at l
east, if we compare reports, we’d be able to see the inconsistencies.”
Goudie brightened slightly. “That would certainly help me. I don’t have the time to run down every lead and then research the answers. Captain Banderas, can you do that?”
“Of course, Mr. Goudie, we’re at your disposal.”
“Excellent. I have a stack of reports here that I need double checked.” Goudie shoved his chair back, spun to grab a stack of folders from the edge of the table behind him, then propelled his way back to hand them over. “I’m currently waiting on lab results, so aside from shifting through what I have on hand, there’s not much any of you can do. I don’t know what questions to really ask right now until I get more information.”
Noriko had followed most of that explanation except that first line. “Lab results?”
At her question, Goudie seemed to remember this was her first investigation. Snapping his fingers, he said, “Of course, I’d forgotten. In cases like arson or explosion, Noriko, we always take an undamaged sample from the area nearby as a ‘standard reference’ if you will. We do so in order to make sure that there was nothing in the area that was inherently flammable. We also do it in order to set a baseline for what should be in our destroyed remnant. Anything outside of the standard reference is considered to be evidence.”
So that was why he kept scooping up dirt into those little jars. “I see. So the samples you sent to the lab aren’t back yet. How soon do you get results?”
“Entirely depends on how backlogged the labs are. Right now, we have a higher priority than usual because it was a government facility that blew, and we need to know if this was terrorism or not. I had an email from the lab this morning and they promised results by the end of the week, or the beginning of next. Apparently they have a machine down and they’re not sure how long it will take to fix it.”
Call to Quarters (A Gaeldorcraeft Forces Novel Book 1) Page 20