The Fall (32 page)

And now Salolitite,
thought Dr. Richard Salazar, inside a Class-1000 clean room in the Materials Science building of Project SkyLeap.

He stared at a new sample of the germanium-armalcolite-dolomite compound he had accidentally created the day his furnace thermostat malfunctioned, nearly doubling its interior temperature, damaging the furnace's dolomite lining and fusing a dozen germanium-armalcolite samples he and Olivia were annealing in search of a more energy-efficient alternative to copper in the manufacturing of particle accelerators.

But as Olivia cleaned the interior of the large furnace to replace the charred dolomite—a heat-resistant mineral composed of magnesium, calcium, carbon, and oxygen—Salazar had noticed a purplish film coating the bottom, beneath melted glass and other charred compounds, and was surprised by the way it had reacted to her flashlight, pulsating in a way that almost resembled sheet lightning.

At first they thought that the furnace had short-circuited and was damaged beyond repair, but upon closer inspection, the former CERN scientists noticed that it wasn't the furnace reacting to the light.

It was the crystal substance lacing its interior walls.

And just like that, salolitite was discovered, a compound with the ability to generate orders of magnitude more energy per cubic millimeter than uranium-235, but without the deadly radioactive side effects.

Salolitite was a clean energy source, easy to handle and manufacture, and capable of truly changing the energy landscape much in the same way that electricity had modernized our world.

Assuming Hastings allows it to see the light of day,
he thought as he used a pair of long pliers to handle the sample, a glowing cylinder twelve inches long and an inch in diameter.

Beyond agreeing to name it after Salazar and Olivia, Hastings had pretty much controlled every aspect of the discovery, letting in only a selected few at SkyLeap in a need-to-know basis.

And the number of insiders had just decreased by one.

News of Olivia's tragic death—a home burglary gone bad—had reached Salazar just an hour ago via a text from Hastings.

A fucking text message.

Salazar fed the salolitite cylinder, or ingot, to a machine that would use a laser to slice the thin wafers that formed the upper and lower sections of the diminutive particle accelerators for a new batch of tokens for this week's quota of Orbital Space Suits. The day before he had retrieved another batch, which he had atomized over a dozen Velcro pouches laced with gold micro wires used to protect the tokens as well as to act as a solar antenna, boosting the energy level of the token to achieve the desired harmonic level for optimum particle acceleration.

He entered a code on the digital pad of the front of the large laser, starting the day-long process, which in addition to slicing several pairs of matched upper and lower halves, would also etch twelve thousand teeth in a circular pattern to form the cavities, each six hundred nanometers long and spaced by another six hundred nanometers.

He made his way back to his office. It was nine o'clock at night and he had been at it nonstop for almost sixteen hours. Another downside of Hastings's zealous control of the discovery meant a lack of technical personnel to assist him in these critical steps, which he hoped would be automated just like the assembly of the suits and of the ISS module back in SkyLeap's main building. But for now he had to handle the salolitite himself, and with Olivia dead, it probably meant that Hastings would also make him handle the suppliers of raw materials, including the relationship with the owners of the armalcolite mines.

He sighed as he approached the front of the lab.

The materials building wasn't that large actually, just two floors of labs and offices housing a half-dozen scientists and twice as many security guards. In fact, it seemed that anything associated with SkyLeap had a similar ratio of brains to brawn.

But who was he to complain? As with Olivia and so many other scientists lured to work on Hastings's pet projects, the general was quick to develop leverage in the form of threats to the well-being of loved ones. Olivia had her daughter. For Salazar it was his elderly parents, living in comfort in nearby Vero Beach courtesy of Hastings's arrangements with a premier ocean-front retirement community.

For as long as I do my job right,
he thought as he reached the exit and pressed his right thumb against a small screen while looking into a camera, which scanned his retinas and matched the results to the thumbprint, releasing the magnetic locks and automatically opening the doors.

Salazar frowned, having never in his life seen a building that was so incredibly high-tech on the inside, yet appeared like a weathered, decrepit warehouse on the outside.

Leave it to Hastings and his obsession for secrecy,
he thought as he continued down a long hallway, where multiple cameras connected to a guard station on the first floor monitored his movements.

There was really no place to hide, not even in the bathroom stalls as Hastings had also installed cameras there to make sure his scientists remained loyal to him even while taking a dump.

Salazar shook his head as the elevator door opened automatically for him at the end of the hallway, taking him down to the first floor, right next to the guard station, where six soldiers as big as the now-missing Captain Riggs sat behind their stations monitoring all activity in the building, including the small parking lot and surrounding woods.

News of Riggs had also reached Salazar via text, but he hadn't given it much thought. Salazar had never liked the oversized bastard anyway, and couldn't care less what happened to him.

He waved at the guards before walking to his office, where another door automatically opened for him, revealing a spacious office with a private bathroom, a single bed, and a small refrigerator, a microwave, and even a small flat screen hanging on the wall.

His home away from home.

Although he owned a nice condo just ten minutes away in Cocoa Beach, Salazar seldom spent time there during the week, and not just because of the long hours, but also because he actually had no personal life, and he wasn't sure he wanted one while working for Hastings.

But as much as he deeply despised the general, the scientist in Salazar absolutely loved the cutting-edge work he was allowed to do. The technology being developed under Hastings's watch was nothing short of groundbreaking, revolutionary.

The discovery of salolitite had the potential to open technological doors that until his furnace malfunctioned belonged in science fiction novels. Many fields, from Einstein's theory of relativity, to quantum physics and string theory now had the concentrated energy to be tested, to be developed, to be applied. And the latter, applied physics, was the world that ignited Salazar's passion.

As revolutionary as it sounded, dimensional jumps based on salolitite crystals was just the tip of this amazing and quite deep iceberg. If reaching the right harmonic allowed a jumper to leap from one dimension to another, it was just a matter of more experimentation before the physics of salolitite could be applied to time and space, enabling the rest of Einstein's concepts. Traveling to other worlds, or even other galaxies, could become a matter of a jumper achieving the right harmonic, obsoleting the need for expensive spaceships and new propulsion systems.

And the same principle could apply to the always-elusive but real—at least according to Einstein's theory—time travel.

In many ways, salolitite was in as much an infant state as was electricity and magnetism for William Gilbert, the physician who served Queen Elizabeth I in the 1600s and whose pioneering experiments and publications inspired countless scientists and engineers in the decades—and centuries—that followed, applying the properties of electricity and magnetism to develop our modern society.

Gilbert had triggered an inflection point in the human race, and once world leaders grasped the power of electricity, there was no going back.

And that, of course, was the reason Hastings kept this technology so damn close to his chest. It explained the ratio of guards to scientists, the secrecy, the internal police within his ranks—the ruthlessness with which he governed his operation.

History was full of instances when technological superiority resulted in world domination, giving nations an unfair advantage over their neighbors. From gun powder to the nuclear bomb, those who possessed the technology thrived while those who didn't withered away or were assimilated.

And salolitite provided a revolutionary new platform to trigger a technological revolution as profound as the industrial revolution of the late 1700s.

As he sat behind his desk with a can of soda and opened his e-mail, Salazar wondered how far he would see this technology evolve in his lifetime.

Just as salolitite was discovered by accident, so was the harmonic that enabled the leap to a parallel dimension. Using the glass accelerator, they'd managed to get objects across, but the size of the transport was directly proportional to the energy level required to achieve the leap. And that energy level was proportional to the frequency of the light exciting the salolitite compound.

They had started at the midrange of the spectrum, using microwaves and infrared light as the stirring agent, before moving up to the ultraviolet and X-ray range, progressively increasing the ability to transport larger objects, including different types of recording devices, dropping them from various altitudes to document their journeys before they vanished. After a while, they learned to control the energy levels to bring their data probes to the very edge of the portal, getting a peek into the beyond, before cutting off the power source to pull the devices back for analysis. The images were stunning, depicting what looked like a parallel world beyond the intense lightning flashes of an electrical storm.

But the real inflection point came when the experiments reached the gamma-ray range, and the even faster cosmic-ray end of the spectrum, the world of the twelfth harmonic.

Their ability to miniaturize the portable accelerators to control events grew exponentially, allowing them to immerse data probes across the edge and bring them back with regularity, recording this fascinating parallel world with detail, with precision, laying the foundation for Project SkyLeap, for the glass accelerators now being mass-produced for the Orbital Space Suits.

Salazar frowned, disappointed in the loss of their last probe, whose primary objective was to record the physiological effects of the leap on a human being.

But Dr. Taylor had altered the descent profile, sending the glass accelerator, along with the OSS and its wearer, fully across the dimensional boundary, past the point of no return, beyond their ability to throttle back the energy level and pull him back.

Still, all of the data collected up to the leap strongly suggested that the jumper had made it across, albeit in a state of semiconsciousness, according to the vitals they were gathering right before the dimensional change. And assuming that the automatic parachute deployed properly, Jack Taylor probably even made it to the ground in one piece.

But Salazar wasn't sure about Jack's odds after landing since he carried nothing with him but literally the suit on his back.

Hastings's jumpers would bring along the means to set up an infrastructure, from new identities, bonds and currency, to—

The room suddenly went dark, including his computer screen, before an emergency light came on above the door.

*   *   *

“Something's wrong,” Riggs said as he stared at the warehouse from the edge of the forest. The lights atop the chain-link fence beyond the long meadow separating the compound from the surrounding trees blinked once and went off.

“You're sure this is the place?” Pete asked, lowering his binoculars. “Doesn't look like much.”

“That's the point. I came here once with the general to pay a visit to Dr. Salazar, who's in charge of the building. But never got past the front lobby.”

“What do you think's in there?”

“Based on the security I saw, my guess is that Hastings is keeping something pretty important in there. But like I told you before, we can't touch it … legally. In fact, we're not even supposed to get this close. We're technically trespassing.

Pete frowned and slowly shook his head at Hastings's reach. The man owned people everywhere, including a number of Florida politicians and law enforcement chiefs.

“But that doesn't seem to matter much to whoever's screwing with them,” Riggs added, when the lights inside the compound also flickered and went off, replaced a few seconds later by emergency floodlights.

And that's when they noticed a shadow rushing across the meadow.

Riggs saw it first and an instant later Pete said, “Holy shit.”

*   *   *

“Talk to me, Art,” Angela said, speaking into her earpiece while running in a deep crouch toward the back of the compound, just as Jack would, dressed in black, her face smeared with grease, eyes scanning her surroundings.

But that's where the similarities ended.

Unlike Jack, Angela didn't have a weapon.

At least not in the traditional sense.

But that didn't mean she wasn't ready for this particular fight. Angela carried enough high-tech weaponry in her backpack to start a small cyberwar.

The meadow was quiet, almost peaceful, secluded, away from highways and towns, under a blanket of stars. A thin layer of early evening fog hovered a foot above the ground.

Angela cruised through it, approaching the fence slowly, with caution, measuring her steps, her eyes inspecting the outer perimeter, the security cameras that Dago and his gang had just disabled the old-fashioned way: by breaking into a nearby power substation and shutting down the grid for a three-square-mile area encompassing this warehouse and a handful of farmhouses.