Road Less Traveled (5 page)

Jo much preferred working alone. She wasn't good with partners, even—maybe especially—if they were her friends. Even Carter drove her nuts sometimes, particularly when they shared a case. At least Carter was a trained law enforcement professional. But a civilian like Fargo? She was going to have to devote way too much time, energy, and willpower to not throttling him every time he opened his mouth.

And she could really use her full concentration right now.

She reached the door to bio lab twelve-B just in time to see someone else disappearing into it ahead of her. Damn! She picked up the pace, breaking into a short sprint, and was just shy of the doorway when she heard the shriek from within.

“My lab!”

Okay, so not the thief coming back to snatch anything he'd missed the first time around. Probably.

Jo ducked through the door and studied the figure in front of her. Female, average height or just a bit above—which meant she'd tower over Jo—solid build, glossy black hair.

“Dr. Korinko?” It was a safe bet on Jo's part. She knew the other Thunderbird researcher, Dr. Boggs, was a guy.

“What?” Dr. Korinko turned, saw Jo, took in the uniform, blinked, blinked again, and then twisted around fully, the concern on her face collapsing into relief. “Oh, thank god! Someone's trashed my lab!”

“Yes, I know.” Jo gestured behind her. “Why don't we talk in the hall, where it's . . . cleaner?” She backed up, and the researcher followed her. Fargo almost smashed into them as he skidded to a stop in the hall outside.

“I'm sorry, Dr. Korinko, but there was a break-in,” Jo explained. She experienced a brief thrill from the statement, which she did her best to hide. It wasn't often that she got to deal with a standard crime. Escaped robots, marauding viruses, mutated experiments, absolutely. But a break-in? Almost never. “Someone broke into your lab and stole one of the Thunderbird eggs.”

Dr. Korinko was naturally pale, but now she turned white. “They're gone? Oh, no.”

“One of them is,” Jo corrected. She took a deep breath. “The other one . . . There was a gas leak when the thief shattered the containment field. The sprinklers took care of the gas, but the combination—”

“—caused the egg to hatch prematurely,” Korinko finished. She sighed. “We'd been working on ways to increase stability in order to prevent exactly that situation. So far we haven't found anything without sacrificing viability and other key factors.” She glanced around. “What happened to the fledgling?”

“Destroyed,” Jo admitted. “It attacked us, and Sheriff Carter was forced to siphon off its energy to prevent that. The entire Thunderbird came apart at the seams.”

The doctor was nodding to herself. “Yes, it would,” she agreed. “That soon after birth, and especially a premature one, its energy matrix would still be highly unstable, as would its physical cohesion. It was more energy than flesh to begin with, and even more so at that point.” She met Jo's eyes. “I'm sure you had no choice. I'm glad no one was hurt.” Her gaze flicked to Jo's shirt, then back up, and narrowed. “You didn't get hurt, did you?”

“Not enough to matter.” She'd gotten a hefty shock from the blast, but the uniform had absorbed a lot of it. Beyond some intensive hair repair and a clean uniform and maybe some salve for any bruises, she was as good as new.

“Good.” Korinko stood. “Does Sean know yet?”

That was Dr. Boggs's first name, Jo remembered. Sean. “Not yet. It only happened an hour ago, and we wanted to inspect the lab before contacting either of you.”

“He should be in soon,” Korinko mentioned. “But of course, do what you need to do.” Her mouth pursed. “Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet.” That's what Jo was hoping to find out from looking around the lab.

“And whoever it was, they got away with the second egg?”

“Yes.”

“You'll need to be careful when dealing with it,” the researcher warned. “That egg was unstable to begin with, and taking it from its containment field will only make matters worse. It could erupt at any time, especially if subjected to loud noises, heavy vibrations, rapid changes in temperature, or any other altered stimuli.”

“Erupt?” Jo didn't like the sound of that.

“Yes. Explode. Hatch.” Korinko smiled. “Unfortunately, when you're dealing with a creature that's mostly electricity, one is much the same as the other. When it tears free from its shell there will be a burst of energy that accompanies that escape. Here in the lab we have equipment to absorb most of that discharge, and to shield against it. If the thief doesn't have similar preparations . . .”

Jo nodded. “Things could get messy.” She thought about the first egg and its former inhabitant. “What about the Thunderbird itself? If it does hatch, how stable will it be?”

“Very,” Korinko replied, “if it has twenty-four hours to stabilize. Before that?” She shrugged. “These two eggs are numbers one forty-eight and one forty-nine in our attempts. So far we've never had one survive more than an hour past birth. Sean and I were hoping these two would be different.” She sighed again. “It could disintegrate the second it breaches the shell, or the instant it tries to use its lightning. Or it could survive the next fifty years. There's no way to be sure.”

Jo rubbed her stomach. “Well, if the first one's anything to go on, shooting lightning won't kill it.” Which didn't necessarily improve matters. In some ways, they'd be better off if the remaining Thunderbird did fall apart the minute it broke free. Then they wouldn't have to worry about a sentient, enraged miniature thunderstorm wandering Eureka, electrocuting anyone who got in its way.

“There is one good thing in all this,” Fargo pointed out, and both Jo and Korinko glared at him. He gulped, but continued. “The egg's going to require constant attention. Otherwise, it could hatch early, just like the first one. And whoever stole it wants it for something, or they wouldn't have taken it in the first place. So they're going to be busy monitoring the egg, which should distract them.”

Jo hated it when other people noticed something before she did, but she couldn't deny Fargo's logic. The thief obviously knew the egg was valuable, and so he'd want to keep it intact. Which meant he'd be busy watching the thing like a hawk—and would never see her coming.

Assuming she could figure out who he was and where he was hiding, and get to him before he had a chance to sell the egg or whatever else he had planned for it. If he was smart and he was looking to sell the thing, he'd have lined up a buyer first and stolen it second, which didn't give her a whole lot of time. But he may not have counted on having to babysit the thing, and she'd take whatever advantage she could get.

Fargo was watching her closely, clearly waiting for her to acknowledge his contribution, and Jo forced herself to smile and nod. He beamed like he'd just won first prize at the county fair.

Great.

“Any idea how long we have before it hatches, assuming it's cared for correctly?” she asked Dr. Korinko quickly.

The Thunderbird researcher frowned. “Within the week, I'd say,” she answered after a moment. “The eggs reached full maturation just a few days ago.” She looked torn between tears and rage. “All that work, and we didn't even get to see it hatch!” Her reaction further convinced Jo that Korinko, at least, hadn't had anything to do with the theft.

Which left the glaring question of who did.

The first thing Jo needed to check was the door panel. Every door in GD had one—some required everything from a password and voice match to a retinal scan, while others had a simple OPEN/CLOSE button. But it was the perfect place to look for fingerprints, and it also kept a record of when it was opened and by whom.

But she had to stifle a groan as she turned to the panel and saw instead an array of wires protruding from a gaping hole in the wall.

“Where is the door panel?” she asked softly.

“I had to pull it off to get to the controls,” Fargo explained. He glanced around and frowned. “I'm not sure where it went. I set it down somewhere nearby, but I was a little busy with the programming to worry about it. I suppose the janitorial staff may have swept it up already.”

Jo closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, and counted to ten. A crucial piece of potential evidence, swept up with the trash because Fargo had tossed it aside like, well, trash. Great. Even if she could find it, any prints would probably be long gone, and no doubt its circuits had been broken or lost as well. The overall security log would have records for the door, but there were ways to bypass those. She'd hoped the actual lock would be more foolproof. She hadn't realized it would also need to be Fargo-proof.

Well, she'd check with the janitorial staff just in case, but most likely the panel was a dead end. At least she still had the lab itself to look over. Preferably alone.

“Fargo, why don't you stay out here and discuss technical details with Dr. Korinko while I inspect the lab,” Jo suggested as sweetly as she could. He started to argue, then saw the look on her face and instead nodded quickly. Good. That would keep him out of her hair for a few minutes, anyway.

Leaving the two eggheads to natter on about wavelengths and chemicals and whatever, Jo carefully stepped back through the lab door. The place was a disaster—no wonder Korinko had screamed. Between whatever the thief had done to get in initially, the damage from the containment field's collapse, the additional damage from Fargo's attempts to contain that, the explosion of the Thunderbird hatching, the energy blasts from its attacks, and the detonation when it blew apart, the place looked like . . . well, like it had tried to cage a small but powerful hurricane.

Which, in essence, it had.

That didn't make investigation very easy, though. Jo picked her way through shattered test tubes and fragmented beakers, past blackened, twisted cages and charred, waterlogged notes. The tables were still mostly intact, as were some of the chairs and stools, but almost everything else had been destroyed. She assumed Korinko and Boggs had backed up their research, but that could only do so much. They'd probably lost months, if not years, worth of work.

And a lot more than that if Jo couldn't recover the Thunderbird egg.

But even after scouring the room for twenty minutes, Jo had to admit she was coming up empty. There was nothing to go on. Any fingerprints that might have existed had been washed away. Same with any footprints. The security cameras were fried as well, and though she'd call up any recent footage, Fargo had already mentioned that the thief had disengaged the cameras when he'd bypassed the alarms. She might have been able to tell if the door had been forced open, though with all the additional damage during the thief's escape, it would now be impossible to tell which damage had occurred when.

She could try tracking security footage in the hall as well, she realized. Fargo had mentioned that they'd been blanked all the way from the lab to the front entrance, but maybe that was only for as long as the thief thought he would need a clear path. Maybe he'd gotten careless and missed a second on the way in. Still, even if she got that lucky, Jo wasn't sure that a brief glimpse was going to be enough. And this thief had definitely come prepared. All it would take was a scrambler of some sort, or simply learning the cameras' sweep patterns and ranges and pulling on a mask and gloves while standing in a dead zone, and they'd never see anyone suspicious. She might have better luck on the departure, since the thief had exited in a hurry and it would be harder to disguise something the size of the Thunderbird egg. Though it wasn't impossible; she could think of at least three ways to get that egg down the hall and out of GD undetected.

She sighed.

This day was not off to a good start.

And to make matters worse, Fargo was still waiting when she returned to the hallway. His whole face lit up when he saw her, and he trotted over to her at once. Just like a puppy dog. A big, annoying, yappy puppy dog. That kept getting underfoot. And chewing your favorite slippers.

Wonderful.

Allison laughed as she led Carter through the GD corridors. “Extradimensional visualization.”

“And what is that when it's at home, again?”

“Quantum physics shows us that there are other dimensions beyond our own,” she explained, falling into lecturer mode. Carter didn't mind—he was pretty sure if he'd ever had a teacher who looked like her, he'd have shown up for every class.

“Sure. This is the third dimension, right?”

That earned him one of her “are you kidding, or really that dense?” looks. It was an expression Carter knew all too well. “No, Carter—there are three physical dimensions to any solid object. That's different. I'm talking about dimensions as in planes of existence. Everything we know—this world, the planets, the stars, all of it—that's all the same dimension. The same reality.”

“Oh. Gotcha. So other dimensions mean other realities.”

“Exactly.”

“And whoever we're going to see has figured out a way to take us to them?”

Allison laughed at him again. At least when she did it, it wasn't mean. “No, though that could theoretically be possible someday; scientists have been working on ways to link two dimensions together. But extradimensional studies are still in their infancy. Up until now, it's all been theory and numbers. Dr. Russell is hoping to get past that.”

“How so?” They took the stairs down one level, and then headed through another corridor. It was easy to get lost in GD—it was larger than most shopping malls.