Deep Storm (35 page)

Thats it. Hui turned off the devices, removed the ribbon cable, placed the case back on Cranes laptop. She turned toward him. Your hard drive should now be a replica of Ashers. Ready?

Fire it up.

She pressed the power button and they both crowded around, watching the screen. For a moment, it remained black. Then there was a brief chirp and the OS splash screen appeared.

Bingo, Hui said softly.

Crane waited as she loaded a file management utility from one of her CDs and began exploring Ashers documents.

Everything appears to be intact, she said. No data dropouts.

Whats there?

Its as I suspected. E-mail, a few scientific articles in progress. And then a large folder titled decrypt.

Take a look at that.

Hui typed a series of commands. It contains several utilities Im not familiar with probably language translators or decryption routines. There are three subdirectories, as well. One called initial, another called source, and a third called target.

Lets see whats in initial.

Hui moved her mouse over the icon. It contains just one file, initial.txt. Let me bring it up. She clicked the mouse and text window opened.

-

Judging by the length, she said, Ill bet its the very first signal the platform workers discovered, the high-frequency seismic ping. The one that led us here in the first place.

You mean, the one transmitted from beneath the Moho.

Thats right. Dr. Asher doesnt seem to have made an attempt to decipher it.

He was concentrating on the signals the sentinels were transmitting. They were shorter, easier to work with. And my guess is theyre located in the source subfolder.

Lets check. A brief pause. Looks like youre right. There are about forty files here, much shorter.

So Asher and Marris only parsed forty of the signals for decryption. What do you want to bet the other subfolder holds the translations? Crane felt his excitement grow.

I wouldnt take that bet. Lets check the contents. Hui moused over the screen. A new folder opened, containing a list of the contents of target:

1_trans.txt

2_trans.txt

3_trans.txt

4_trans.txt

5_trans.txt

6_trans.txt

7_trans.txt

8_trans.txt

There they are, Hui said, her voice almost a whisper.

So Asher and Marris had translated eight of the forty messages when they called me. Hurry, open the first one.

Hui moused over the icon, clicked. A new text window opened, containing a single line:

x = 1/0

Wait a minute, Crane said. Theres something wrong here. Thats Ashers old, original translation. The one he got wrong.

Ill say he got it wrong. Anybody who could build something as complex as those sentinels must know you cant divide by zero.

He told me the decryption had gone so smoothly at first they figured theyd made some tiny mistake. So they wasted days trying to figure what they did wrong. When they went into the hyperbaric chamber, theyd given up on that and were taking a new direction entirely. Crane frowned at the screen. This is old news. There must be another folder somewhere.

There was a pause while Hui consulted her file utility. Nope. This is the only viable folder.

Take a look at the second file, then. Maybe he just didnt bother to erase his wrong guess.

Hui opened 2_trans.txt:

x = 0 0

Zero to the power of zero? Crane said. Thats just as undefined as division by zero.

Another thought struck him. Can you check the time and date stamp on those files?

A few clicks of the mouse. Yesterday afternoon.

All of them?

Yes.

That was when he was inside the chamber, all right. So they are new, after all.

Crane lapsed into silence while Hui opened the six other files. Again and again, they were simple mathematical expressions; again and again, they were illogical, impossible.

a3+b3 =c3

x = a/b

x = In (0)

A cubed, plus b cubed, equals c cubed? Hui shook her head. There are no three numbers that will satisfy that expression.

Or how about the natural logarithm of zero? Impossible. And pi is a transcendental number. You cant define it by dividing one number into another.

And yet it seems Dr. Asher was right the first time. About the translations, I mean.

He clearly thought he was. But it makes no sense. Why would those sentinels be broadcasting a series of impossible mathematical expressions? And why would they consider them so important theyd be transmitting on every known frequencyand then some? I think that

Crane abruptly fell silent. From outside in the corridor he could hear muffled conversation, the sound of tramping feet.

He turned toward Hui. She looked back, eyes wide.

He pointed toward the back of the room. Into that closet. Quickly.

She ran to the equipment closet and slipped inside. Crane turned off the lights with a quick slap of his palm, then followed as quickly and silently as he could. At the last minute he stopped, stepped back out of the closet and into the room, and plucked the fire-suppressant drop cloth from its hook.

The footsteps came closer.

Crane spread the drop cloth as evenly as he could over the laptops and equipment on the table. Then he raced to the closet and shut them both in. A moment later, he heard the lab door open.

He peered out of the grille in the closet door. Two marines stood in the entrance of the lab, silhouetted by the glow of the corridor.

One of them snapped on the lights. Crane leaned back into the darkness. He could feel Huis warm, rapid breath on his neck.

Footsteps again as the marines stepped into the room. Then silence.

Slowly very slowly Crane leaned forward again, until he could just peer through the grille. He saw the marines standing by the lab table, doing a slow recon of the room.

Theres nobody here, one said. Lets try the next lab.

In a minute, the other replied. I want to check something out first. And with cautious deliberation the man stepped toward the closet.

Chapter 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.

Lets go, Barbosa said.

What is it? asked the other marine.

Korolis. Theres been a sighting.

Where?

Waste Reclamation. Come on, lets 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 Huis 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? Weve gone over all the decryptions. Theyre just a lot of impossible math expressions.

What about that other file, initial.txt? The longer one thats being transmitted from beneath the Moho. Youre sure theres 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. Ill open the browser, bring up the history. A brief clatter of keystrokes. Crane rubbed his chin, puzzled. Well 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 Internetbut why?

Heres 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. Thats 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 Facilitys 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.

Thats 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. Its going to be the nations 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: thats a heavily guarded site in southeastern California, a geologic depository for spent nuclear fuel and decommissioned weapons of mass destruction.