Empire Games Series, Book 1(62)
“Our best theory is it took a gamma ray laser. Fired from low orbit, pumped by a megaton-range hydrogen bomb. But c’mon, let me show you the Gate. It’ll top anything you’ve seen so far.” Julie waved her toward the escape hatch/doorway and the ladder beyond.
Rita followed her, duck-walking laboriously in her protective suit. World-walkers with death rays and H-bombs. A hollow sense of dread gnawed at her sternum. What could top that?
CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, JULY 2020
On the other side of the cinder-block wall that bisected the floor of the dome, there was another dome. It was a dome within a dome, Rita noted, but this one lacked the strangely smooth curves and textures of the forerunner ruins. A bunch of modular buildings nuzzled up around its rim. Beyond them the excavation area on the dome floor took on a chaotic, jumbled geometry, as if the forerunner installation had been badly damaged there. “That’s where the mach wave converged,” Julie explained. “When the forerunners’ adversary cracked the outer dome the radiation pulse created a shock wave of superheated air. It expanded, hit the inside of the dome, and rebounded, focusing on this area. If you were standing anywhere else on the apron when it hit, you’d have been fried and blasted: but at the focal point you’d have been crushed instead, just by the overpressure.”
Rita shuffled along behind her in mild shock, her thoughts whirling. “What’s in the, the small dome?”
“That’s ours: we built it. Follow me and I’ll show you.” Julie led her along a reverberating metal catwalk that spanned a ten-meter-wide excavation site. The arachnoid shapes of archaeology robots crawled back and forth below their feet, ablating and recording everything as they drilled slowly down through the wreckage. “This is where I work most of the time,” Julie added brightly. “It’s an archaeologist’s dream job.”
“Most of the time? What else do you do?”
“Write reports and position papers. I don’t get to play at spy stuff except when something unusual happens, like when the Colonel roped me in for that thing with Gomez and Jack because he needed another body with all the right clearances. The talent pool’s tiny when you get down to it.” She sounded irritated.
“So that’s why you were along with HaptoTech?” Rita asked, biting back her instant angry response. Was the entire trade show job a ploy to get me into a sandbox, surrounded by DHS agents? It seemed excessive, even knowing about the JAUNT BLUE technology.
“Partly. We use their motion capture implants for driving bots around, some of the time.” Rita couldn’t be sure, but she thought the other woman was shaking her head inside her bulky headgear. “Come on, we need to de-suit before we can enter the clean room.”
A door gaped open onto another white space, a NASA-esque vision of a space station airlock vestibule. A bench ran the width of one wall, occupied by empty suits with their backs docked to small hatches. Julie helped Rita sit down and showed her how to lean back against the suit-lock. “Duck down to get your head out from under the helmet rim, grab the overhead rail, and swing yourself out,” she advised.
After a minute of mild claustrophobia Rita managed to worm her way down and out through the back of her radiation suit. She found herself in a cramped robing room. “Ms. Douglas?” A lightly built man was waiting for her. He wore a skintight but weirdly quilted outfit that left only his face bare. “You haven’t been here before so I’m going to have to authenticate you. Hi, Julie, you can go in, but you’ll need to help Ms. Douglas suit up for the Gate.”
“The Gate?” Rita looked from face to face. “Is that radioactive, too?”
“No, but you need vacuum protection. I’ll hang around, Jose.”
“Wait—‘vacuum’?” It was one too many surprises for a single afternoon: Rita was beginning to feel petulant and resentful at the way it was all piling up.
“Yes, like I said, all the air in the valley was being sucked out through the Gate when we found it.”
Jose took Rita through the increasingly familiar DNA sample and password authentication routine. “Okay, in the next room Julie will help you into one of these,” he explained, pointing to his own outfit. “It’s a mechanical counterpressure suit—it compares to a normal space suit the way a wet suit is to an old-school canvas diving suit. Keeps you from blowing out in vacuum because it’s elasticated and squeezes you, while a regular NASA suit is an airtight bag. The reason we use them is we have to work in confined spaces beyond the Gate, and ambient pressure suits are too bulky.” He raised his left arm and pointed to an intricate tracery of red seams stitched across the fabric around his torso. “Got to get it skintight first, though.”
Rita swallowed. “What is this Gate?” she asked, trying to keep a plaintive note out of her voice.
“They didn’t tell you?” Jose stared at her. “It’s the Gate. Uh, it’s a para-time portal. The one that nearly vented all the air in this time line into vacuum, except we caught it before that happened and it’s small enough that it would have taken tens of thousands of years anyway.”
You have got to be kidding me, Rita thought as Jose, with Julie’s assistance, strapped her into a space suit that felt like an inch-thick body stocking, hung a slim life-support vest around her, and screwed a helmet onto the steel ring that hung around her collarbone. I’m going to wake up any moment now, she told herself uncertainly. This is just crazy. World-walking she could handle: she could do it herself. But she’d never heard even a hint that the government was sitting on top of some kind of gate between time lines. She felt numb. The implications of what she was being shown today were too big to get her head around: she ought to be freaking out, she felt, but over what particular aspect of the whole shocking secret?