Deep Storm

26

The door was one of a half dozen along the corridor in the northeast quadrant of deck 3. It bore the simple legend RADIOLOGY-PING.

Commander Korolis nodded for one of the accompanying marines to open the door, then stepped inside. Glancing over the commander's shoulder, Crane made out a small but well-equipped lab. If anything, it was too well equipped: most of the available space was crammed with bulky instrumentation. Just inside the door, an Asian woman in a white coat was sitting before a computer, typing rapidly. She looked up at Korolis's entrance, then stood, smiled, and bowed.

Korolis did not respond to her. Instead, he swiveled around, one eye staring disapprovingly at Crane, the other looking at some point over his left shoulder.

"This should serve your purposes," he said. He glanced around the lab once more-as if mentally checking off items Crane might steal-then stepped back into the hallway. "Post guard outside," he said to the two marines, then turned his back and walked away.

Crane watched the commander's retreating form for a moment. Then he nodded to the marines and entered the lab, shutting the door behind him. There was a low squeal of rubber as the grommeted seal around the door snugged tightly into place. He then approached the female scientist, who was still standing at her lab table, smiling.

"Peter Crane," he said, shaking hands. "Sorry to barge in like this, but I don't have a work space down here and they said this lab had a light table."

"Hui Ping," the woman replied, her smile displaying brilliant white teeth. "I've heard of you, Dr. Crane. You are looking into all the sickness, right?"

"Right. I just need to examine a few X-rays."

"It's no problem; feel free to use anything." Hui was small and thin, with sparkling black eyes. She spoke flawless English with a strong Chinese accent. Crane guessed she was about thirty years old. "Light table's over there."

Crane glanced in the indicated direction. "Thanks."

"Let me know if you need anything."

Crane walked over to the light table, snapped it on, and then drew out the X-rays he'd just ordered on several of the workers in the Drilling Complex. It was as he suspected: no problems. The radiographs were depressingly unremarkable. Everything looked clear.

Over the last twenty-four hours, he had performed informal examinations on several people from the Drilling Complex. And he'd found their complaints were like those in the non-classified section of the Facility: amorphous and maddeningly diverse. One complained of severe nausea. Another, blurred sight and visual field defects. Some complaints appeared psychological-ataxia, memory lapses. None of the cases seemed in any way severe, and-as usual-there was no interrelation. Only one was genuinely interesting: a female worker who had exhibited remarkable disinhibition of character. Normally a timid, quiet teetotaler, she had over the last few days become profane, aggressive, and sexually promiscuous. The day before, she'd been confined to quarters after being found drunk while on shift. Crane had interviewed the woman and spoken to her coworkers, and would send a comprehensive report to Roger Corbett for evaluation-suitably filtered, of course.

Crane pulled the radiographs from the light table with a sigh. He had ordered MRIs and taken blood, and he would send them to the lab for analysis. But he feared the results would be the same as before: inconclusive. A part of him had hoped for a breakthrough here. Although the last thing he wanted to see was more illness, if there had been a disease cluster in the Drilling Complex-where the real work was being done-that would have provided a clue. But they seemed no worse off than their fellows upstairs.

No: it was clear to him that Spartan's sudden concern was not due to severity but selection. Before, only non-essential people had been affected, and the admiral had shown little interest. But now that people directly responsible for the digging were falling ill, Spartan was sitting up and taking notice.

He snapped off the light table. Even if these new complaints proved inconclusive, they had given him a major break: he now had access to the classified levels of the Facility. This effectively doubled the number of people he could monitor, not to mention more opportunities for seeking out possible environmental factors.

Hui Ping looked over. She was a study in black and white: black hair, eyes, and glasses; white lab coat and pale, almost translucent skin. "You don't look happy," she said.

Crane shrugged. "Things aren't fitting into place as quickly as I'd hoped."

Ping nodded as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves. "That goes for me, too." Her glossy hair, cut short, shook as she moved her head.

"What are you working on?"

"That." And Ping pointed toward the far side of a hulking piece of equipment.

Crane walked over, peered around its edge. To his surprise he saw another of the thin sentinels-twin to the one Asher had shown him-hovering in midair, shimmering with myriad shifting colors. The same whisper-thin beam of pure white light led from the object's upper edge up to the ceiling of the room.

"Jesus," Crane said, awed. "You've got one."

Ping laughed lightly. "They're not exactly rare. More than twenty have been retrieved so far."

Crane looked at her in surprise. "Twenty?"

"Yes, and the deeper we go, the more we find."

"If you've found so many just in the path of the drill shaft, the crust around here must be saturated with them."

"Oh, they're not in the path of the drill shaft."

Crane frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Well, the first one was. But since then, the rest have come to meet us."

"Meet you?"

Ping laughed again. "I don't know how else to put it. They come to the Marble. Almost as if they're drawn to it."

"You mean these things drill through solid rock?"

Ping shrugged. "We don't know how they come, exactly. But they do."

Crane looked at the object more closely. It looked impossibly strange, floating there in the middle of the lab, coruscating with a deep inner glow: a glimmering rainbow of infinite hues. Staring at it, Crane felt a sudden, deep conviction that Asher's fears were unfounded. Perhaps the unsettling eyewitness report he'd read the night before was false or referred to something else entirely. Surely, whatever was making people sick here had its roots elsewhere. This object had to be benevolent. Only a morally advanced culture, beyond war or aggression or evil, could have fashioned something of such ineffable beauty.

"What are you studying?" he murmured.

"That tiny beam of light it emits. I've been running it through refractometers, spectral radiometers. Analyzing its components. But it's difficult."

"You mean, because you have to move your equipment around to suit it-not the other way around?"

Ping laughed again. "That, too. But no, I mean what's happening to you is happening to me as well. The pieces just aren't fitting together."

Crane folded one arm over the other and leaned against the bulky equipment. "Tell me about it," he said.

"I'd be happy to. Only the scientists are taking much interest in these sentinels. The rest are just eager to get to the mother lode. Sometimes I think I've been given this non-essential assignment just because Korolis wants me out of the way. I was brought down here to program the scientific computers, not run them."

For a moment, she was unable to hide the bitterness in her voice. So Korolis has taken her off the important work and stuck her in this backwater of a lab, Crane thought. Wasting her talent on theories and secondary measurements. "Why would he do that?" he asked. "Doesn't he trust you?"

"Korolis doesn't trust anybody, especially someone with a degree from the Beijing University of Technology." She stood up, came over, and pointed at the hovering object. "Anyway. That beam of light it's emitting? It appears to be steady, right? But when you process it, you can see it's actually pulsing on and off, incredibly quickly: over a million times a second."

"Yes. Asher mentioned that to me."

"That's not all. It looks like ordinary light, right?"

"Except for how white it is, yes."

"But it's far from ordinary. In fact, it's paradoxical. Just about every test I've run has come back with anomalous results."

"What? Light's just light, isn't it?"

"That's what I used to think. But my tests are proving otherwise. Here, I'll give you an example. That piece of equipment you're leaning against? It's a spectrograph."

"I've never seen one so big."

Ping smiled again. "Okay, it's a very special photoelectric spectrograph. But it does what all its brethren do, just a lot faster and with greater detail. You know how spectrographs work?"

"They break light up into its component wavelengths."

"Right. When matter is ionized-by heat, say-it throws off light. Different kinds of matter throw off different kinds of light. They're called 'line emissions,' and the spectrograph can pick them out and sort them. They're very important to astronomers. By studying the line emissions of a star, they can determine what that star is made of."

"Go on."

"So I used this spectrograph to analyze the beam of light that thing's throwing out. And this is the result." Ping reached around for a sheet of paper and handed it to Crane.

Crane scanned the readout. He didn't see anything particularly unusual. It showed an erratic line, full of peaks and valleys, wriggling from left to right across the page-not all that different, he thought, from an EKG.

"I don't know much about photoelectric spectroscopy," he said, "but I don't see anything strange about this."

"Not strange for a distant star, maybe. But for this little object? Impossibly strange. These"-she pointed at several sharp spikes on the graph-"are absorption lines."

"So?"

"You only get absorption spectrums when there is something in front of the star you're looking at. Like a cloud of gas, or something, that blocks some of the light, absorbs specific wavelengths. You would never see such results from a beam of light in the same room with you."

Crane looked at the plot spectrum again, frowning. "So you're saying the kind of light this thing is emitting could only be seen from a faraway star."

"That's right. The spectrum of light this sentinel is giving off is, fundamentally, impossible."

Crane fell silent. He handed the readout back to Ping.

"And that's just one of a dozen paradoxes I've discovered about this little fellow. Every test I try yields incomprehensible results. It's fascinating-but frustrating, too. That's why I bothered using a spectrograph in the first place-I figured something normally used by astronomers would be safe, at least." She shook her head. "And then, there are its physical components. Why is it emitting a beam of light in the first place? And did you notice how the beam always shines in the same direction-up-whatever way the object is rotated?"

"No, I didn't." Crane reached for the floating object and, half distractedly, turned it over with his fingers. Although it swiveled obligingly under the gentle pressure, the beam of light it emitted stayed in place, rock-solid, pointed constantly at the ceiling, its point of origin moving smoothly over its surface as it rotated. The object felt cold to his touch and strangely slippery.

"Curious," he said. "The light shines from the same relative position no matter how it's oriented in space. As if the entire surface is capable of illumination." He pulled the marker closer. No doubt it was his imagination, but it seemed to be growing a little warmer in his hand. He glanced over at Hui Ping. "I wonder if-"

Then he fell silent abruptly. She had stepped back from him, and a look of shock and dread had suddenly come over her face.

"What is it?" Crane asked.

Dr. Ping took another step back, moving behind a large piece of equipment. "Gloves…" she said in a strangled voice.

Suddenly, Crane became aware of an almost painful heat in his fingertips. He quickly jerked his hand away. Released, the sentinel glided smoothly back to its former position in the precise center of the room.

He stared at it, rooted in place by sudden fear. Ping had spoken only one word, but her meaning seared its way through Crane's consciousness:

Nobody has ever handled it without gloves…

As the burning sensation in his fingers sharply increased, he felt his heart accelerate and his mouth go dry. He had just committed a cardinal sin, made the most glaring error any rookie researcher could. And now…

But further thought was cut short by the sudden call of a loud Klaxon. Metal screeched against metal: all around the lab, air vents slammed closed. The overhead illumination snapped off, replaced by red security lighting.

Ping had pushed an Emergency Alert button on the wall and sealed them both inside.