Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(38)
As the buzz in the room started to rise, President Jackson held up a hand, immediately quieting the gathered officials. “Let Carl finish, then we’ll all get a chance at this.” And they would, too—he’d work them half to death if he had to. This was too important.
Rheiner continued as if the interruption hadn’t happened. “That brings me to the ultimate point, the executioner’s axe hanging over this planet in Switzerland. Mr. President, as soon as you and our allies in Europe make the joint announcement that a black hole is forming at the heart of the LHC, these global and local pressures are going to explode. It’s a miracle that the secrecy around the November Anomaly has held up this long, but that can only last a couple more weeks. As soon as the world’s richest nations start building Dr. Stephenson’s monstrous new Rho Project device, there won’t be any more denying the scope of our problem.
“Two weeks, tops. That’s what we’ve got to get a plan put together and coordinated with our major allies. In order of priority, we need a plan to protect this new Stephenson Rho Project, a plan to protect our government and key population centers, a plan to gradually reestablish order where we aren’t able to maintain it initially, and a plan to keep our enemies from blowing us to hell before we can get all those other things done.”
Rheiner replaced the stacks of notes to which he’d been referring in the leather portfolio and closed it. “Mr. President, that’s how the CIA sees the world situation.”
The president took a long slow drink from the Waterford Crystal glass at his elbow. He nodded at Rheiner. “Thanks, Carl. Excellent rundown.”
President Jackson had once heard a quote from one of the helicopter pilots who had flown Special Forces into Afghanistan through thick mountain fog. After returning from the mission, when his colonel asked him how he felt, the pilot had responded that he couldn’t drive a toothpick up his ass with a jackhammer. It pretty accurately described the president’s own feelings at this moment.
Turning his attention to his chief of staff, President Jackson said, “Carol, how about sticking your head out and getting someone to round us up some pizzas? Looks like it’s going to be a long night.”
Heather slid the alien headset over her temples, feeling the warmth of its massaging pulse slide through her brain. Sitting together with her in a loose triangle on the Frazier veranda, Mark and Jennifer echoed her action. Cloaked in twilight shadows, Jack leaned back in his own chair, his booted feet propped on a coffee table as he watched them. No pressure.
Heather entered the Bandolier Ship’s computer on point, Jennifer following her lead as Mark took up a virtual overwatch position, alert for any sign of the artificial intelligence that had attacked them on their last visit. Heather calculated the odds of another hostile encounter with the AI at less than 7.3642 percent, but that was still a long way from zero.
The announcement from Russia that it had already begun inoculating Russian soldiers with its own nanite formula hadn’t come as a great surprise, but it had narrowed their timeline, another sign that training days here at the Frazier hacienda were rapidly coming to an end. Despite their best efforts, the nanite genie was now out of the bottle for good. Earth’s population was going to have to learn to come to terms with that new reality or face a very bitter future.
Of greater concern was what they had discovered about Dr. Stephenson’s activities at the Large Hadron Collider. So far the governments of the United States and the European Union had managed to keep a lid on that secret, but that wouldn’t last much longer. Heather didn’t care to think about what was likely to happen as soon as the world learned about the November Anomaly. Her visions hadn’t left her with a warm cozy feeling on that one.
Returning to the matter at hand, Heather traversed the fractal data map with a speed that defied its incredible complexity, ignoring data paths that offered stunning revelations in physics and mathematics, despite their strong tugs on her curiosity. She knew what she was after and it was critical that she maintain a tight focus on that mission.
Within five minutes Heather identified a key nexus, a point at which several related paths branched. A shared thought released Jennifer along one of those paths as Heather’s mind opened itself to another.
The world she had known melted away as she found herself hurled from the Milky Way’s familiar spiral arm. A third of the way toward the galaxy’s core, she swept toward the fifth planet of eighteen that circled a dull orange star. The planet was a gas giant twice Jupiter’s size, one of its thirteen moons slightly larger than Earth. Her view shifted, swooping in on the moon, decelerating until she hung above it like a high-performance reconnaissance drone.
That wasn’t quite right. She found she could spin the globe in any direction, although what was really happening was a repositioning of her virtual camera location. For several seconds she found herself so fascinated by the amazing control she enjoyed over the system that she failed to recognize the significance of the scene unfolding below her.
Forty-eight percent of the moon’s surface was covered in water, the rest occupied by five continents, each considerably larger than Asia. Tied into the computer as deeply as she now was, Heather merely had to think about a topic and her brain immediately found itself immersed in relevant data. Some things, like the names assigned to this particular solar system and its planets, were merely lengthy alphanumeric representations that, although useful for cataloguing, didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Heather decided to assign the huge gas giant the name Jupiter2, tagging its populated moon as Zeta.