Nala laughed. “Pretty handy to see inside things, huh? How much did NASA spend on that Saturn mission? And look what we found out in just a few minutes.”
Daniel shook his head. “Planetary research will never be the same.”
Behind them, the lab door swung open and Jae-ho Park walked through. He was followed by two others. The bald man looked friendly enough, even familiar, but the woman exuded authority—never a good sign as far as Nala was concerned.
Nala reached out to Park. “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”
Park held both of her hands in his. “I am so sorry, my dear—this Stetler business. You stood up and did what was right. Had I recognized the problem sooner… nevertheless, I will make it right.”
He’d always been good to her, in many ways a father figure. Flaky at times, but kind. “Thank you, Jae-ho, you know how much I love what we’re doing.”
Daniel shook hands with the unannounced visitors and introduced Nala to Spencer Bradley and Christine Shea. “I’m glad you’re here,” he told them. “We’ve learned a lot in the past few hours. I think we have a realistic opportunity to resolve this mystery.”
Shea nodded but made no comment as she looked around the room. Nala recognized the authority type immediately. Give away nothing and observe everything. It was a style designed to be intimidating.
Park looked subdued, like he’d just returned from a whipping at the woodshed. She imagined the sparks in that meeting. Poor Jae-ho. Well, maybe he deserved it.
Shea walked quietly around the small lab, examining the shelves of equipment and picking up the blue plastic tesseract. She had clearly not been here before. Bradley pointed to the pipes overhead. “I hear the protons. You’re in 4-D space now?”
“We’re testing a software change,” Nala replied. “And some additional hardware. So far, it’s working well.” She recognized him; Bradley had been at the lab, many months before.
“We’ve decoded the star map,” Daniel added. “We have a known destination.”
Shea leaned against the work table and stared up into the plexiglass box above her. The radio’s coaxial cable entered near the top and disappeared into nothing. She didn’t seem to be concerned. “Soyuz first, Dr. Rice. We’ve had several calls with Colonel McGinn at Ellsworth, including a disconcerting call just now. The device they have quarantined there is counting down, and it will reach zero in just a few hours, I believe. What do you make of it?”
Daniel sighed. “Honestly, we don’t know what it’s doing. The precautions are wise, but it would be a mistake to jump to any conclusions.”
Shea’s voice was clear and cold. “The device revealed its intent just a few minutes ago. Your partner in this investigation, Ms. Kendrick, was nearly killed by it.”
A surge of anxiety hit Daniel hard. “What the…?”
“She escaped the attack unharmed. But it was an attack. The device apparently contains a laser.”
Daniel already had his phone out and was typing furiously. “You’re sure she’s safe?” His face reddened and his fingers fumbled on the keypad. A few seconds later, he looked up from his phone and sighed deeply. “She’s says she’s fine.”
Well, that was tactless, Nala thought. She tried not to convey any negative body language toward Shea, but it was impossible not to feel antagonistic.
Shea leaned against the lab table and folded her arms. “I wish Ms. Kendrick hadn’t put herself at risk by going into that capsule. We’re taking action to secure the area and will destroy the device if needed.”
Daniel looked up from his phone. “Destroy it?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re preparing as we speak for a Modified EOD—explosives ordnance disposal. They’re moving the capsule to an old missile silo near the base. Once it’s at the bottom, they’ll place a high explosives pack on top.”
“And you intend to blow it up before the count reaches zero?”
“Possibly.”
Daniel became animated, waving both arms. “But you have no idea what it’s going to do when it reaches zero.”
“No, I don’t. Do you?” Shea’s eyes were piercing, her expression deadly serious.
“Of course not. But if we’re being attacked, why would it count down? Why give us a warning?”
“Why does any enemy give warning? We surrender, lay down our arms, and they don’t have to fire a shot.”
Shea had intentionally put Daniel on his heels by suggesting Marie was in danger. This woman was a menace. Maybe paranoid, too.
Daniel seemed to be in agreement. “Do you really believe that ludicrous scenario?”
Shea turned a cold face to him. “The president expects me to consider all possibilities, and to protect the country and its citizens.”
Daniel raised his voice. “Then consider this possibility. We’ve been contacted for the first time by another intelligence who has so far been nothing but helpful. We’ve been greeted by a declaration of scientific knowledge and we’ve been invited to a place of some significance. Exactly what we’ll find there, I don’t know. That’s our risk, the risk of the unknown. But if we’re wise enough to set aside the irrational worst-case scenarios, we might recognize that this is also our opportunity.”
Shea listened with no reaction.
“Ms. Shea,” he continued, “just in the past hour we have determined the precise location of the destination, and thanks to Dr. Pasquier, we have the technology to go there.”
He glanced at the clock on the wall. “We have about two hours left in the countdown. Yes, you could proactively destroy Soyuz, and along with it, one of the devices they sent to us. Or… we could take a different course of action. We could seek out answers to our questions, including where those astronauts went.”
Shea remained impassive, but she wasn’t stopping him.
Daniel picked up his laptop and turned it toward her. “This is what we found when we projected the map image from quantum space. Labels, axes, and a coordinate system. Over the past several hours, we’ve decoded it. It’s a star map, and we now know which stars are represented here.”
Bradley and Park drew in closely behind Shea. Daniel pointed to the hand grenade. “I believe this is where we’ll find those answers, the hand… the… the hub. The origin. Grand Central Station, whatever you want to call it. All lines lead to it, and it’s located in quantum space. A fourth dimension where only the scientifically literate and technologically advanced can go.”
Nala laughed to herself. Nice pivot on the name, Daniel. No explosive devices around here! She caught his eye and smiled. Daniel shrugged.
“Look… here’s the bottom line,” Daniel said. “I believe there’s a relationship between this invitation, this place, and our missing colleagues.”
Shea lowered her head and tapped all ten fingers together. After a minute, she lifted her eyes. “Find this place and we find the astronauts?”
Daniel nodded. “Something like that.”
Park had remained in the background through the debate, but he finally spoke. “Compression of space is understood, theoretically. But we have not attempted such distances.” He looked toward Nala and his brow lifted.
Nala rolled her chair to one side, revealing the computer display behind her. “Jae-ho, I made the software changes we’d talked about. All of them. The oscillation amplitude changes, the beam directional control. It all works.”
Park moved closer to the screen, with Bradley and Shea not far behind. Nala reached for one of the joysticks and panned the camera across the rings stopping on the curvature of the enormous planet. “Saturn,” she said.
“You have a camera at Saturn? Right now?” asked Bradley.
“Controllable, too.” She beamed. “I rigged up new equipment that Rohrs designed—he’s our team engineer. Works like a charm.” She pushed the joystick further, and the view moved to the planet’s polar region. The recently discovered polar vortex with its hexagon shape stood out bold and bright. Daniel gave her a thumbs-up.
Daniel motioned to the plexiglass box. “Nala, can you bring the equipment back?”
She nodded. “Everyone might want to cover their ears. At these distances, the pop is loud.” She typed a few keys and everyone did as she instructed. It sounded like a small gun had fired and the radio in its thermal blanket with webcams on top materialized inside the box. The coaxial cable magically reconnected to the radio repeater on its other end, as if denying that it had ever been involved in anything unnatural.
“A lot louder than I remember,” Bradley commented.
“Daniel and I learned the hard way when we sent this equipment to Saturn,” Nala replied. “Pushing to greater distances does involve more energy.”
Daniel pointed to the cable. “Normally, communicating outbound to a device in 4-D space is impossible, but this little setup was ingenious. We can send and receive both voice and data, and control the cameras. This setup is protected by a firewall at the receiver on the shelf, so our only risk is to the equipment we’re sending. We get it too close to a star and it’s fried. Relatively cheap stuff, though. Expendable. Did I get all that right, Nala?”
She nodded.
“Devil’s advocate,” Bradley interjected. “What do we know, theoretically, about expanding further than we’ve gone into quantum space? I understand the compression part, that’s how we’re jumping off to a star. But are we at risk of doing some irreparable damage? Tearing a hole in the universe? Anything like that?”
All eyes turned to Nala. “Dr. Bradley, I’m sorry, I’m not the theorist. For that, we need Jan Spiegel in here. But I can tell you that Dr. Park and I were both in several sessions where Jan presented, and we all did our best to blow holes in his theory. Somebody even asked a question similar to yours—we called it the Donnie Darko scenario. I think Jan did a good job of taking it down.”
Park nodded in agreement. “I agree. The mathematics of expanding quantum space work precisely the same way whether you’re growing space by one micron or one kilometer.”
“Except the pop is louder,” Shea said. “Larger scale is obviously different.”
It was a valid critique, and Park responded. “We believe the pop is a local phenomenon only, related to the oxygen molecules in the test chamber. A flash fire, so to speak, but at the atomic level. We conducted a test a few months ago, replacing the air in the box with pure nitrogen. There was no pop.”
Shea had no reaction, but she wasn’t saying no. “Can we do this incrementally and abort as needed?”
Nala had the answer and was surprised to find common ground with Shea. “Got it covered. The destination on this star map is nearly four thousand light years away. I thought the same thing—a single large jump could be dangerous to the equipment, not to mention what the pop might do to our ears. So, I set it up to move in increments, a software loop. The system will push the equipment in steps, while we watch. From the camera view, I think it will look like we’re zooming in.”
Bradley’s face was distorted. “Four thousand light years? You’re proposing we send a camera that far into space? Can you even do that?”
Daniel nodded. “The hub, our destination, is near a star called VY Canis Majoris. It’s one of the largest stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and there’s something in orbit around it, or near it, in 4-D space.”
“And remember,” said Nala, “we’re not really going that far. We’re only sending the equipment a few thousand kilometers in the kata direction. But from the camera’s perspective, the space between Earth and the destination will compress by a factor of…” She looked down at her notes. “More than a trillion. From the camera’s perspective, the Earth will be about a thousand kilometers away—satellite distance. And so will this… hub.”
The room became quiet. Shea looked at the floor, her hands clasped together. She looked up at the clock on the wall. “You’re sure you can abort?” Nala nodded. “Quickly?” Nala nodded again.
“Jae-ho? Spence?”
Both men appeared in agreement.
Shea took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s do this.”
44 Hub
The Soyuz capsule hung precariously at the end of a steel cable and wobbled in a small circular motion as the hoist operator positioned it over the center of the flatbed truck. Marie watched from a safe distance on the hangar floor and wondered how all of this would turn out. A spaceflight disaster, an international incident between superpowers, and the intentional destruction of Russian property. The terrestrial issues alone were stupefying. When she added alien messages and a device counting down to who-knows-what, her head was swimming.
She took out her phone and connected to a secured Wi-Fi network for the Air Force base. She located a link to the camera she had positioned inside the capsule. The live video feed displayed a somewhat different scene than she had escaped less than an hour earlier. The yang was now inert. No laser, no protruding silver spike, and its panel once again closed. Three characters were still displayed on its surface, and she quickly translated them to 057, base eight. Just under two hours.
She closed the video window, opened Daniel’s last text message and responded.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daniel heard a beep and reached for his phone.
Really, I’m fine. We’ve got bigger things to worry about. They’re taking Soyuz out now, camera is working. We have to see what happens at zero. Tell her—convince her to wait. McGinn will do what she says. No explosions, please!
He typed back and her response was immediate.
Hogwash, it wasn’t trying to kill me. Think about it, the countdown was at 100. Not sure what was going on, but seems more like a preflight checklist than a murder. Convince her.
Convincing Shea wouldn’t be hard. She was being cautious, but she wasn’t stupid. If a portal was about to open with Klingons pouring out, they probably wouldn’t be stopped by C-4 explosives. It was a ridiculous scenario, and he refused to believe she would carry it out. He could convince her, he was sure.
More useful, and more believable, would be a holographic ambassador that popped out of the yang at zero hour and provided a much-needed lesson on first contact etiquette. He was beginning to think he’d rather be in South Dakota. It might get interesting there very soon. He typed to Marie. Got the camera working? Send a link.
He switched thoughts to their destination—the hub, formerly the hand grenade. What would they find there? He had no clue.
Nala was busy cleaning the lens on the webcam. The “flight” to Saturn hadn’t caused any obvious damage. Daniel laughed to himself. Things had moved quickly in the past forty-eight hours. He was intensely curious to see where they would go from here.
Nala placed the equipment pack back inside the plexiglass box, the coaxial cable trailing out and to the radio unit on the shelf. “Ready to go when everyone else is,” she announced.
“Marie’s on a secure connection out at Ellsworth,” Daniel told her. “Can we get a video link set up?”
Nala nodded and sat down in front of the operator’s console. It wasn’t long before another window appeared on a second monitor with a text box: Waiting for connection. A few seconds later, Marie’s face appeared in one half of a split screen. In the other half was the camera view from inside Soyuz. Nala spoke into a computer microphone on the desk. “Marie, good to see you. We’re receiving the Soyuz cam on this end.”
The video link was reasonably good, with only a few motion interruptions. “I’ve got you too, Nala. Thanks for connecting me in.”
Nala typed, and two more windows popped up on her main screen. The video feed presented a live view of the lab. “Can you see the lab cams now, Marie?”
“Got the feed, thanks, and I can see everyone in the room.” Daniel had kept his promise to Marie and they had gained a view of Soyuz at the s
ame time. “Ms. Shea,” Marie called, “I just want to reiterate what I know Daniel has already said. In my view, the security of Soyuz is critical, now more than ever. We’d all benefit, I believe, if you’d ask the military to stand down.”
Shea answered quickly. “Not just yet, but thank you, Ms. Kendrick. I am in contact with the president, and he has authorized me to make the decision.” She added, “Yes, he’s awake and aware of what we’re doing.”
Daniel watched the exchange and felt proud to call Marie his partner. Shea will hold off. She’s not crazy.
Park walked around the lab and handed each person a set of earplugs. “I picked these up from the maintenance shop. I suggest we use them.”
Nala looked around after each person had inserted the plugs. “Everyone ready?”
At two o’clock in the morning, from a laboratory outside of Chicago, with five people in the room and another watching remotely, Earth’s first interstellar flight launched. There was no rocket, no ion engine, no warp drive and no hyperspace jump. But there was a sharp sonic boom that rattled everything in the lab that wasn’t screwed down.
The plexiglass shook but didn’t break, the plastic tesseract cube fell off the shelf, and Nala’s cup of coffee sloshed out onto the desk. “Wow!” she yelled. “Love that effect!”
“It makes it pretty clear we’ve jumped a long way,” Bradley said, smiling.
The target box was now empty and the cable disappeared at its midpoint. The jump was clearly their largest yet. Daniel looked at the webcam window and saw nothing but darkness. “Where are we? You didn’t jump all the way to VY Canis Majoris, did you?”
Nala shook her head. She studied a panel that displayed rapidly changing numbers. “Nope, moving incrementally, just as planned. Tau is now 2.9 x 10-4, just approaching the bottom of the Spiegel curve.” She pointed to the graph on the wall. “We’ve still got a long way to go.”
“Are we out of the solar system?” asked Bradley.
“You can’t really think of it that way,” said Nala. “We’re not flying through space. It’s better to think of space collapsing in front of us. Our solar system is collapsing, the stars beyond are collapsing, but it’s all still in front of us.”
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 26