Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(97)

But this assignment had come from Jacob Kroner himself. No way could Charley tell Paladin’s hard-nosed president he didn’t want the woman. That was all right. Just because she made it on to the team didn’t mean she’d last long enough to be a thorn in his side.

Charley rose to his feet, slid into his coat, and stepped out into the cold parking lot where he’d assembled his team for this announcement. As he looked at them, seventeen cocky bastards, each one a major ass-kicker, he grinned.

“We’ve been assigned Bruce’s replacement. Her name is Inga Hedstrom. She arrives this afternoon.”

He held up his hand to quiet the low mutters.

“You know I like to choose my own people. This one’s out of my hands. But she still has to measure up.”

Charley clasped his hands behind his back, the posture thrusting his massive chest forward. “I’m sure you gentlemen will show her a proper welcome.”

Artan Yuzman, the larger of the team’s two Turks, chuckled. “You can count on it, boss.”





Mark wouldn’t have imagined ever wanting to thank Dr. Stephenson for anything. But he’d been responsible for Mark’s reassignment to the ATLAS electrical construction team. That would have happened without outside help, but after Stephenson had looked at the Gantt charts, he’d immediately seen the correlation between Mark’s assignments and a tremendous increase in productivity. So now Mark was the ATLAS team foreman.

He began his new job by instructing his crew to continue as planned while he spent a couple of days familiarizing himself with the Cage, a monstrous construct of steel supports and metal grating that extended from the cavern floor to the ceiling, ninety meters above. The Cage housed all the power cables routed into the ATLAS cavern from the MINGSTER and provided support for the cooling equipment required to maintain superconductivity in the primary power lines. It was a towering steel structure so tightly packed with cable and equipment that workers had to worm their way through crawlways that some of them refused to enter.

Mark traced every inch of cable that had been run and every electrical component already installed, comparing each item against the memorized plans. Although he found a number of minor variances or shortcuts, he found no significant deviations until halfway through Wednesday’s second shift. Deep within the most densely packed vertical section, he identified a cable that wasn’t on the plans.

Fascinated, he stayed on into the third shift, following the mysterious line down toward the cavern floor. The way it meandered down through other cable groupings, it had clearly been installed with the intent of making what Mark was doing almost impossible.

At floor level the cable split into four lines, made to look like standard 220-volt, fifty-hertz power lines, that disappeared into groupings of similar lines. The third shift ended at midnight, but Mark continued. At four thirty a.m. he finally stopped, convinced that he knew where each of the four cables terminated. The odd part was that they disappeared into four separate prefabricated load-bearing steel-and-concrete buttresses. There was nothing electrical in these buttresses. At least, there wasn’t supposed to be.

Returning to the spot high up in the Cage where he’d first discovered the mysterious cable, Mark began tracing it back the other way, toward the spot where the Cage exited the cavern roof. Reaching the level of the skywalk, the scaffolding walkway that connected the Cage to the steel scaffolding lining the cavern walls, Mark squeezed between two trusses and stopped. High up, along the backside of one of the trusses, the cable passed through an encyclopedia-sized, unmarked metal box.

Working his way back out of the tight space, Mark moved to one of the electrical tool cabinets mounted at regular intervals throughout the Cage, grabbed the tools he needed, and returned to the mysterious box.

Unfastening the cover, Mark took extreme care to avoid tilting or vibrating the case, easing it open while holding the penlight in his teeth, just enough to give him a glimpse inside. Not good. Attached to the inside of the removable front cover, a small glass ampule held a silvery liquid bubble at one end. A mercury switch. If he’d just pulled the thing open, that shiny little bubble would have rolled to the other end. Mark didn’t care to find out what would happen if the silver globule made that trip.

Mark removed the cover, keeping its angle unchanged, and examined the wiring inside the case. It formed a simple circuit connected to a currently unset digital timer. Whether the mercury switch was rigged to bypass the timer or send an alert wasn’t immediately clear and Mark didn’t feel like putting in the effort to figure it out right now. He’d already figured out what this whole set of cabling represented.

Some government, probably the United States, had rigged a fail-safe device. Within each of those four prefabbed buttresses was a nuclear bomb. It was the only thing that made sense, even though it didn’t make any. They had to know that a nuclear detonation would just feed the anomaly, turning it into an instant black hole. So they’d put these here as a last resort.

So long as Stephenson’s wormhole device worked, they’d never be used. Replacing the cover, Mark wormed his way out to the railing surrounding the Cage’s top level and onto the skywalk. It was time to take a moment to meditate and contact Heather. He’d let his personal savant figure out what she wanted him to do about the nukes.





“A training accident?” Charley Richardson slammed his fist down on the desk as he looked at his executive officer.