Deep Storm

43

Crane shrank back into the darkness. Behind him, Hui caught her breath. He reached down, took her hand, squeezed it tightly.

The thin rays of light filtering through the grille were now obscured by the approaching figure. Crane heard the footsteps stop just outside the door.

Suddenly, a radio squawked. There was a brief fumbling, the snap of a button. "Barbosa," came a voice, so close it seemed almost to come from inside the closet. Another brief squawk. Then: "Aye, aye, sir."

"Let's go," Barbosa said.

"What is it?" asked the other marine.

"Korolis. There's been a sighting."

"Where?"

"Waste Reclamation. Come on, let's move out." There was the sound of retreating footsteps, the closing of a door-then silence once again.

Crane realized he was holding his breath. He let it out in a long, shuddering gasp. Then he released Hui's hand and turned to face her.

Hui looked back, her eyes luminous in the dim light.

Five minutes passed without another word. Slowly, Crane felt his heartbeat return to its normal speed. At last, he put his hand on the closet door and pushed it quietly open. Legs still feeling like jelly, he emerged and switched the lights back on.

Hui pulled the drop cloth off the instruments and computers, her movements slow and mechanical. "What now?" she asked.

Crane tried to force his brain back on track. "We keep going."

"But where? We've gone over all the decryptions. They're just a lot of impossible math expressions."

"What about that other file, 'initial.txt'? The longer one that's being transmitted from beneath the Moho. You're sure there's no translation on the laptop?"

Hui shook her head. "Positive. Like you said, Dr. Asher must have concentrated on the shorter ones the sentinels were emitting."

Crane paused. Then he turned toward the laptop. "What could he have discovered?" he said, almost to himself. "He was beside himself with excitement when he called me from the oxygen chamber. There must be something."

He turned back to Hui. "Can you retrace his final steps?"

She frowned. "How?"

"Check the time and date stamps of the computer files. Figure out what he was doing in the minutes before he called me."

"Sure. Let me get a listing of all the files, sorted by date and time." Hui turned to the computer, opened a search window, and-moving a little more quickly now-typed in a command.

"Most of the files he was working on were in the 'decrypt' folder." She pointed at the screen. "But for the last fifteen minutes the laptop was operational, it appears Dr. Asher was surfing the Web."

"He was?"

Hui nodded. "I'll open the browser, bring up the history." A brief clatter of keystrokes. Crane rubbed his chin, puzzled. We'll be able to access the WAN wirelessly, Asher had told Marris, just before they entered the hyperbaric chamber. It was certainly possible they had accessed the Internet…but why?

"Here's a list of sites they visited," Hui said. She stepped back to give Crane room.

He leaned in toward the screen. The list contained a dozen Web sites, most with dry governmental names. "A few sites at the Environmental Protection Agency," he murmured. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Ocotillo Mountain Project."

"The list is chronological," Hui said. "The last sites he visited are at the bottom."

Crane scanned the remainder of the list. "Department of Energy. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. That's it."

He stared at the screen. Then, all of a sudden, he understood.

"My God," he breathed. Comprehension burned its way through him.

"What?" Hui asked.

He wheeled toward her. "Where is the network port in this lab? I need access to the Internet."

Wordlessly, she took a category-5 cable from her tool kit and connected the laptop to the Facility's WAN. Crane moused to the last entry in the history display, clicked on it. A new browser window opened, displaying a text-heavy official site, topped by a Department of Energy seal and a title in large letters:

WIPP-Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

Carlsbad, New Mexico

"Wipp," Hui said in a very quiet voice.

"That's what Asher meant. Not 'whip.'"

"But what is it?"

"A series of huge caverns, dug within a massive salt formation deep beneath the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. Six million feet of underground storage space. Very remote. It's going to be the nation's first disposal facility for transuranic waste."

"Transuranic waste?"

"Nuclear garbage. Radioactive by-products of the cold war and the nuclear arms race. Everything from tools and protective suits to old spacecraft batteries. Right now, the stuff is stored all over the place. But the new plan is to store it all in one central location: far beneath the desert." He glanced at her. "And Ocotillo Mountain: that's a heavily guarded site in southeastern California, a geologic depository for spent nuclear fuel and decommissioned weapons of mass destruction."

He turned back to the screen. "I attended a medical conference on the dangers of nuclear garbage and deactivated weaponry. Where to dump something so lethal is a huge problem. Hence, repositories like Ocotillo Mountain. But what's the connection to the Deep Storm project? What was Asher driving at?"

There was a brief silence.

"Did he say anything else?" Hui asked. "When he called you, I mean."

Crane thought back for a second. "He said it was imperative, absolutely imperative, that we didn't…and then he stopped."

"That we didn't what? Continue the dig?"

"I'm not sure. I never stopped to consider."

And then-suddenly-Crane understood. And as he did, he felt an almost physically overwhelming mix of triumph and fear.

"Oh, no," he breathed.

"What is it?"

"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant? Ocotillo Mountain? That's what we're sitting on top of."

Hui turned pale. "You don't mean-"

"That's exactly what I mean. All this time, we've been positing some benevolent, paternal race that's planted some wondrous technology deep in the earth for mankind to discover when we've become sufficiently advanced to appreciate it. But that's not it at all. The truth is the Earth has been used as a dumping ground for weapons or toxic waste-unimaginably dangerous toxic waste, too, given how advanced your friends from Cygnus Major are."

"That's what Asher was trying to tell you?"

"It's got to be-there's no other answer. That thing encased below the Moho, the thing Spartan is digging toward right now? It's a time bomb."

He paused a moment, thinking fast now. "That medical conference I mentioned? Finding a place to dump nuclear garbage is only part of the problem. The real problem is that the stuff is going to stay radioactive for longer than recorded history. How are we going to warn somebody, ten thousand years in the future, that they'd better stay away from Carlsbad or Ocotillo Mountain? Civilization as we know it will have been transformed utterly. So the Department of Energy is seeding the sites with what they're calling 'passive institutional controls.'"

"Warning markers."

"Exactly. Not just one kind, either, but a wide variety-pictures, symbols, text. To tell our descendants the site has been isolated and sealed off for good reason. There were rumors of active controls, as well."

"But how can you be sure what's below us is dangerous?"

"Don't you see? Those sentinels we uncovered as we've dug-they're 'institutional controls,' too, in their own way. And those signals they're sending out are warnings."

"They're just mathematical expressions."

"But think what kind of expressions they are. They're impossible. When Asher first decrypted the message and thought he'd gotten it wrong, you know what he said? 'Division by zero is forbidden by all the laws of the universe.' And that's the key word: forbidden. Every single expression those sentinals are transmitting-zero to the power of zero, the others-they're all forbidden."

"Because whoever did this couldn't use a warning that was language based."

"Precisely. Only mathematical formulas are universal." He shook his head. "And to think of Flyte, and his talk of irrational numbers. He was more right than he knew. I think."

"Who?"

He gave a soft laugh. "Never mind."

Hui thought for a moment. "Why did they start with just one expression-and then begin broadcasting thousands?"

Crane shrugged. "Maybe they thought that division by zero was the simplest, most basic-that's why it was so pervasive. Maybe my touch triggered new behavior in the sentinel. Or maybe the fact that we hadn't stopped digging convinced the devices that we hadn't taken the hint-that we needed supplements."

He turned abruptly, took a step toward the door. All of a sudden, a sense of terrible urgency filled him: with every new minute, the digging brought them closer to an unthinkable oblivion.

"Where are you going?" Hui asked.

"You're looking at one guy who finally has taken the hint."

"What about me? Where should I go?"

"Stay here. It's as safe as anywhere-probably safer, because it's already been searched." He took her hand again, gave it a reassuring squeeze. "I'll be back for you-soon."

She took a deep breath. "Okay. Maybe I'll take another look at that initial transmission. The one Dr. Asher didn't translate."

"Excellent idea," Crane smiled. Then he stepped up to the lab door, paused to listen, and quickly slipped out into the corridor.