Dark Oracle (12 page)

“It’s for therapeutic purposes,” Martin finished.

“Therapeutic purposes,” Harry repeated.

Martin swatted the back of Harry’s head. “If you were luckier in getting your own therapy, young man, you’d have less time to worry about mine.”

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. About that password. . .”

Tara brought the book, looked at the star in Cassiopeia’s chest. “Try
Segin.
”

Keys clattered as Harry tried the password. “No luck.”

“Capital
S
, small
e-g-i-n
. . . one hour, fifty-four minutes, twenty-three point sixty-eight seconds.” She added the ascension to the star name.

“No.”

“Segin. . . Here, let me show you in the book.” Tara pointed to the star’s ascension in the book:
01
^h
54
^m
23.68
^s
.
“And here, the declination. . .”
+63 °, 40' 12.5'.

Harry typed, paused. He looked up at her, a smile spreading over his face. “We’re in!”

Tara, Cassie, and Martin crowded behind Harry, peering at the screen. Harry opened Magnusson’s recent documents, and they scrolled before him in a flurry of diagrams and notations. It was a foreign language to Tara, but she could see Cassie studying them intently for a long time, tapping her bottom lip with a chipped thumbnail.

“Holy shit,” she whispered. “Go back.”

Harry scrolled back to a list of equations, and her eyes scanned over them.

“What is it?”

Cassie chewed her bottom lip. “I think. . . I think my dad may have proven the presence of dark energy. . . and opened a black hole to do it.”

Chapter Eleven

B
ACK THE
truck up. Explain this to me again.”

Cassie rolled her eyes, flipped out a fresh sheet of paper, and drew on it with a pencil. She sketched an atomic nucleus and a small solar system of electrons around it. She’d spent the last few hours staring at her father’s laptop and trying to translate to the non-physicists. “The particle accelerator takes a heavy atom stripped of electrons”—she erased the electrons—“and collides the nuclei together at high speeds using magnetic force. Stripping the electrons results in a positive atomic charge. Since a positive charge is magnetically attracted to a negative charge, the collider uses that magnetic attraction to move the nuclei at high speeds.

“The collider my father used is a variant of the storage ring collider.” She drew an infinity loop and indicated the intersection of the track. “Particles are accelerated in opposite directions and collide at the intersection, here.”

“Then what?” Harry asked.

“Then, if superstring theory is accurate, these collisions could result in mini black holes.”

“So. . . what’s keeping these black holes from devouring the planet? We didn’t see any while we were at the lab. Space and time seemed relatively safe.”

“Theoretically, these black holes would only exist for a brief period of time before they would annihilate themselves in radiation caused by the collison of matter and antimatter. But they might exist for just long enough to attract particles of dark energy to them, enough to measure and collect them.”

“And dark energy is supposed to be all around us?”

“Well, it accounts for about seventy-two percent of the stuff in the universe. It just isn’t particularly common in our neck of the woods. The particles in our solar system are rare, and far between.”

“What does it do, exactly?”

“Dark energy is the force that keeps the universe pushing outward. It’s the driving force of the Big Bang. It creates negative pressure, expansion. Think of it as gravitational repulsion.”

“So. . . it’s explosive?”

“In a manner of speaking. There’s the idea that dark energy has quintessence—the density of the energy increases over time, and creates a sort of phantom energy. Dark energy is usually not terribly dense. But as the density decreases, it could cause an amplification of the Big Bang, a Big Rip, which could eventually tear the universe apart.”

Tara blinked. “Your dad was ripping the universe?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so. What his notes show is that he was using the particle accelerator at Los Alamos to create these mini black holes to analyze dark energy. He had visions of storing these particles in a kind of cell or battery for energy usage. . . and DOD seems to have told him it was interested in powering aircraft carriers and subs through this type of technique.” Cassie bit her lip. “It looks like they wanted this for another purpose: to use the cells to harness that gravitational repulsion, to weaponize the expansive power of dark energy. It’s pretty explosive stuff, theoretically.”

“Do you think he tried to sabotage his own research?” Harry asked directly.

Cassie spread her hands. “Maybe. If he cranked the collider up far enough, if he allowed the mini black holes to exist for longer than they should. . . if he overloaded the dark energy storage cells he’d built. . . it could have happened.”

“That might explain the lack of debris at the explosion site,” said Tara. “There were walls, ceiling missing. . . but not enough rubble to account for them.”

“Tell me about the cells. What do they look like, and how do they work?” Harry slurped his coffee, and Tara could almost see the gears in his brain whirring, trying to keep up.

Cassie drew the infinity loop again on the paper. “As near as I can determine, it’s based on the shape of the infinity-loop collider. The dark energy particles race in the same direction around the track until the energy is released, by making a contact or connection with the circuit.” She drew a slash in the infinity loop. “I don’t know how big or small they are. They could be as big as a water tower, or as small as a microchip. It depends on how many particles are stored.”

Martin had been silent so far, running his thumbs over the lip of his coffee mug. “So your father basically unzipped the underbelly of the cosmos, took the invisible force out of it that keeps the universe going, and stuffed it in a can that explodes when it’s opened.”

Cassie nodded. “Exactly.”

Harry leaned back in his kitchen chair. “Shit.”

Cassie agreed. “Shit.”

Tears glistened in the girl’s eyes. Tara leaned forward and rubbed her shoulder, while Martin reached to grab her hand. Harry pushed away from the table and left the kitchen.

“Look, the military is trying very hard to find him. That means they think he’s still alive,” said Tara. She believed that much to be true.

Cassie sniffled. “But do
you
think he’s still alive? I mean, a black hole could have eaten my father! It sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi movie.”

“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”

Martin patted Cassie’s hand. “No parent would leave his child without answers. You’re going to have them.”

Harry stuck his head back into the room, holding Martin’s powder-blue corded phone. He’d been checking his cell messages remotely, reluctant to turn on his cell phone in the event cell towers could triangulate their position. He gestured for Tara, who slipped out from behind the table to join him.

“Another message from Corvus?” she asked. He’d gotten several. The calls had progressed from requests for status updates to threats. She thought he’d been ignoring those, but wasn’t certain.

“No,” he answered, pressing the receiver against her ear. “Listen.”

Tara cupped the phone, hearing a familiar voice:

“Agent Li, this is Barbara DiRosa. I want to talk to you about Lowell Magnusson. . . I’ve found some information you may find useful, and I don’t. . . I don’t want to send it up the chain of command. Please call me right away.”

She left a number, and an electronic voice proclaimed this to be the end of the message. Tara handed the phone back to Harry. “What are you going to do?”

Harry blew out his breath. “I’m going to have to talk to her.”

“It could be a trap, to try and find out our position.”

“Quite possibly. But what if it’s not?”

The question hung, suspended. Tara reached out, tentatively, and put her hand on his sleeve. He slid his warm hand over hers.

“We’ll just have to hope no one’s watching.”

H
ARRY BLOCKED THE CALL, TRANSFERRED NUMBERS TWICE
through two different operators, but wasn’t confident at all that the call to DiRosa wasn’t traceable. Tara sat beside him on Martin’s couch, listening through the volume cranked up on Martin’s 1980s receiver. Frankly, he was amazed Martin even had phone service out here.

“Hello.”

“Dr. DiRosa? This is Agent Li. You said you had some information for me.”

“Yes. . . I wanted to talk to you about Magnusson.”

Harry paused, waiting for her to fill in the silence. She seemed to take her time answering. Not a good sign. He glanced at his watch. It took at least thirty seconds to establish a good trace, and she’d already taken up ten.

“I’ve been able to retrieve some of Magnusson’s correspondence from our e-mail server backups, and I think you might want to see them.”
DiRosa blew out a nervous breath. Harry couldn’t tell if she was anxious to be talking to him, or ill at ease to be participating in a phone tap.

“It seems Magnusson had some conflicts with the chain of command here. . . and it seems there were some threats, in both directions. I’d like to meet with you to give you the information. I’m concerned that the info is going to be destroyed.”

“When and where?”

“Tomorrow. . . at Bandelier National Monument? At the first scenic overlook. . . Five-thirty?”

“Why not today?” he challenged. Harry knew he couldn’t get there from here so soon, but he didn’t want to give any eavesdroppers additional clues to their location.

“I think. . . I’m being watched. I can get away from work tomorrow.”

“All right.” Harry hung up, staring at the sweep hand on his watch. Not quite thirty seconds. Still, he didn’t feel safe.

Tara was watching him under that thick fringe of eyelashes, watching him sweat. “You’re going?”

“Yeah.” He could nearly hear the jaws of a trap scraping shut, but there was no choice. He scrubbed his hands through his hair, thinking. In the kitchen, he could hear Cassie and Pops talking over the clink of dishes in the sink. He needed to form a strategy with Tara, but didn’t want to have to censor what he thought for fear of Cassie overhearing.

“C’mon,” he said, standing and offering Tara a hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”

She took his hand and shrugged into her coat. Harry stuck his head in the kitchen.

“We’re going out for a little while. Be back soon.”

Pops gave him a knowing look, a smirk Harry wanted to wipe off his face. Pops dried his hands and stabbed a thumb in the direction of his library of practical and esoteric information. “You can still borrow my book, if you want.”

Cassie chortled.

Harry resisted the urge to tell the old man exactly what he could do with his book. He snatched his coat and headed out the door behind Tara, letting the screen door bang behind him. Maggie nosed through the door and followed.

The day was crisp and cold, snow still clinging to the shady spots under the trees. Harry had been so focused on cracking the computer that he’d forgotten to look outside. He saw no planes overhead, not even contrails. That could either be a sign they’d stopped looking in this area, or that their location was already known.

Maggie vigorously sniffed the ground, inhaling ferociously enough to get snow up her nose. She snorted and took off into the brush, tail wagging. In her dog’s imagination, surely a rabbit had become a great and fearsome beast in need of a good chasing.

Tara stuffed her hands in her pockets. “Your dad has quite the sense of humor.”

“My dad. . . sticks his nose in a lot of things. Pay him no mind.”

She nodded, following him down the porch steps into the woods. Underfoot, where snow had melted, the exposed patches of pine needles were soft and rotting. The branches that still held their needles cast fringed shadows over her face. She was an enigma to Harry. . . She spoke little, seeming to strive to blend into the environment and soak it up. Harry never knew what was really on her mind, behind that face as blank as a porcelain doll’s. But he found her impossible to ignore. Try as she might to fade into the background, Harry always saw her in his peripheral vision.

“We’re going to have to move Cassie,” he said. “And I am all out of secret hollows in the woods.”

Tara was quiet for some time as they walked. She seemed to be chewing on something, and her words were reluctant when she spoke. “I know someone who can take her.”

“You trust this person?” He didn’t know how to read the reluctance in her voice.

“For this one thing. . . yes, I do.”

“That’s not a resounding endorsement.”

“She was an old friend of my mother’s. If anyone can keep Cassie hidden, Sophia can.”

Harry nodded, kicked at a broken branch. If she trusted this Sophia, that would be good enough for him. She’d trusted Harry to take them to Martin. “If you can get in touch with her, we’ll take off in the morning. You take Cassie to Sophia, and I’ll head south to meet with DiRosa. Martin has a truck. It’s old, doesn’t have heat, but it’ll get you where you need to go.”

“And then?”

“And then, we’ll meet back up at Los Alamos.”

“This assumes, of course, that DiRosa isn’t the bait in a trap.”

“We don’t have much choice.” Harry kicked at the stick. “Better one of us than both of us walking into it.”

“Harry.” She put a hand on his chest, and he hoped she couldn’t feel its quickening under his coat. “You don’t have to be chivalrous and fall on your sword.”

He put his hand over hers before she could draw it away. “Nothing chivalrous about it. I’m being practical here. Somebody has to protect Cassie and Magnusson’s laptop. We don’t want to think about what would happen if they got into the wrong hands.”

She nodded, and a curtain of hair fell over her face. “Just be careful, Harry. And please remember what I said about Corvus.”

“Hey.” He brushed the hair back behind her ear. That motion revealed the beginning of a scar curling behind her jaw and disappearing into the collar of her coat. Instinctively, she shied away. “I’m not forgetting.”

He supposed he could understand that, her shyness about those marks that disappeared into her clothes. He couldn’t imagine the trauma behind them. But he wished he could make her understand they made no difference at all to him, that whatever suspicion she held surrounding the Division need not extend to him.

On a gut level, he could understand her dislike of Corvus. And there was clearly some bad history there. But Harry had no evidence to show that he should not trust Corvus, that the man was anything other than what he seemed. Corvus might be a perfect jackass, but he was still Harry’s superior jackass.

But he wished he could somehow wipe it all away, that unknown thing that kept her awake at night, that thing that caused her to look away from him with sad, downcast eyes. Harry wanted her to see what he saw: the powerful, insightful mystery, that beauty wrapped in scars of thorns. He was drawn to her like metal to a magnet, to the way she challenged him, forced him to think. . . and yet was unconditionally behind him.

He wanted her. Impulsively, he reached out for her, kissed her. Her cheeks were cold against his palms, and he felt her eyelashes fluttering against his skin in surprise. He felt her melt against him, fingers wrapped in the collar of his coat, yielding to the kiss that scalded him with its intensity. His fingers brushed over the scar on her neck, sliding to the warmth of her collar. He trailed a kiss behind her jaw, feeling her pulse thud against his lips, and wrapped his arms around her. He could feel his heart beating against the cage of his ribs, and he wanted, more than anything, to feel her bare skin against his hands.