Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(84)
A lean, square-jawed man, clad all in black, walked up to him. “General Wilson. I’m Bob Chavez. I lead this team.”
General Wilson’s eyes took in the whole man. Typical Delta. Fit. Cocky. More civvy merc than military. The type of man most special operators wanted to become.
“You got time to give me a tour?”
“All the time in the world, General. No more bad guys.”
“Any alive?”
“A couple got away before we got here. The rest are dead. Couldn’t keep seventy-two virgins waiting.”
It was the answer Balls had expected. No real tragedy. They’d long since extracted all the information they were going to get out of the Arabs. It saved the government the expense and aggravation of a bunch of public trials. That would more than compensate for the cost of rebuilding this facility. The real loss was the three Gregory accomplices.
“Find any Anglo bodies?”
“Hard to tell. You’ll need a good forensics team for that.”
They started at the bottom, taking the main stairwell down to sublevel four, and worked their way up, stopping to let Balls examine every cell, room, and laboratory, Chavez providing a full briefing as they walked. All the violent action had happened on sublevels three and four, and on the ground floor. Those were a blood-spattered, bullet-and explosive-shattered mess. Damage on sublevels one and two seemed limited to water damage from the sprinklers. The labs all appeared in good shape, the reason they used halon fire suppression systems. Ironic. People be damned. At least the electronics were safe.
Balls paused in the first-sublevel electronics lab, walking to Eileen Wu’s workstation. As far as he could tell, nothing had been disturbed. The Gregory laptops still occupied the top of the workbench, their guts attached to an electronic forensic array. As he stared down at it, the thought occurred to Balls Wilson that in an android world, Eileen would be the perfect medical examiner.
Well, she and the rest of the team would get their chance to see what equipment still worked after the real MEs finished with the slaughterhouse.
Turning back to Bob Chavez, Balls nodded. “Thanks, Bob. I can show myself out.”
“Couldn’t have that, General. You might trip on the stairs. How would that look on my report?”
The image of the grinning Chavez stayed with Balls Wilson all the way back to NSA headquarters.
Dr. Donald Stephenson wasn’t happy. The accident had killed three people. More importantly it had set back construction two weeks. Now he had a bunch of unionized French construction workers complaining about how the aggressive work schedule was jeopardizing worker safety. He’d just finished explaining to that collection of morons that if they didn’t get back on schedule, a black hole was going to jeopardize worker safety a hell of a lot more. Besides, if they did their jobs as they were supposed to, there wouldn’t be any more accidents.
Luckily none of the new equipment had been damaged when the crane cable had broken, dropping a section of dismantled muon detectors back into the ATLAS cavern, crushing three members of the construction crew. But the collapse had damaged needed construction equipment, thus the delay. Well, they’d just have to make it up.
But not all the news was bad. Stephenson turned to the latest progress reports from the matter disrupter construction team. Apparently that foreman knew his ass from a hole in the ground. Having already completed the electrical conduit work, his team was actually ahead of schedule. At this pace they’d be ready for the first small-scale matter-to-energy conversion test in a month.
He logged into his computer, using a biometric fingerprint scan followed by a sixty-four-character password that changed on an hourly basis. It was a formula Dr. Stephenson had designed and that only he knew. Since the Nancy Anatole incident, he’d made a number of security enhancements so that he no longer had to worry about a hacker accessing his private system. Still, it was an inconvenience, one that didn’t elevate his current mood.
All his work, these last forty-odd years, had boiled down to this offshoot of the Rho Project. He actually felt like shaking Freddy Hagerman’s hand for pushing up his schedule. Thanksgiving night, when everything had gone so wrong, it had forced him to use Raul to generate the anomaly, even at the cost of completely depleting the Rho Ship’s power cells, effectively killing it. But in six months, the world would wake up to a new dawn, a golden age of knowledge and enlightenment. Nobody knew this gateway’s real purpose and no one would dare try to stop him now. The November Anomaly had made sure of that.
Failure wasn’t an option. Either this project succeeded on schedule, or the Earth, and eventually the entire solar system, would disappear into a new black hole, as its event horizon gobbled up anything that happened to pass within its reach. And with each gulp of additional matter, that horizon would expand.
Shrugging aside all thoughts of the unthinkable, Dr. Stephenson set to work modifying the construction plan in the ATLAS cavern to remedy today’s setback. The workers weren’t going to like it, but they hadn’t liked anything about the project so far. Of one thing he was certain. They’d do what he demanded. Like it or not.
The homes off of New Cut Road were widely spaced, the lots deeply cut into the thick woods, giving each a sense of being its own manor. Heather crouched in the woods beside Mark and Jennifer near one of these houses, and settled in as the dawn colored the eastern sky with a peachy glow. They’d traveled a little over fourteen miles on their circuitous route through the Maryland woods, placing them about five miles from Fort Meade, as the crow flies. Heather would have liked to cover more distance, but had settled for being careful, doubling back on their route and spending part of the night in streams on the off chance that dogs picked up the trail.