“Yes. Peculiar.” Mac laid two fingers against his own wrist and waited. “Elevated pulse. Hairs are standing on end. Possible auditory hallucinations—could be my brother’s yammering. The object is generating a powerful electromagnetic field. Let’s hope it’s non-ionizing.”
“Hallucinations? I’m not getting hallucinations. At least, I hope not. Maybe I am. Did ya hear somethin’? Pine needles are exploding. Seems normal, though. I mean, the trees are on fire, right?”
“I doubt you’d be able to tell the difference after that much scotch. C’mon, the breeze is shifting. Don’t fancy a dose of radiation before breakfast.”
They moved upwind of the wreckage and sheltered beneath an overhang of dead pine roots. Dred didn’t pester his brother with questions about the probe or Sword Enterprises’ top secret space program, referred to by insiders as Extraterrestrial Reconnaissance, or X-R. Mac refused to speak when he didn’t want to, and, at the moment, his pinched lips and narrowed eyes indicated he surely didn’t want to. Big brother wore that expression when struggling with angles, calculations, and worry. Nobody worried more intensely than Mac, except for Dad, possibly. Dred smoked and tried to figure the dimensions of the probe based on the length of the crash path and how much of the vehicle was exposed.
Eventually, Arthur “Milo” Navarro came along and rescued them from a fatal case of contemplating their navels. The Navarros weren’t wealthy like the Toomses; Arthur’s father, Luis, chaired the Engineering Corp of Sword Enterprises, and so were imbued with a significant measure of means and privilege, nonetheless. Arthur had graduated Graves College with honors. He intended to take a year away from his studies, travel Europe, and intern with the fellows at the Norwegian Academy of Science before plowing forward with his doctorate. His eighteenth birthday landed in August and the Tooms brothers promised him a shindig prior to the commencement of his overseas adventures.
Mac summoned him whenever he needed a big brain, or godly muscle. Arthur could easily have been the brightest kid in New York State. Few outside his circle of friends and associates were the wiser—he resembled a Sherman tank in his customary uniform of Carhartt dungarees (shirtless), and engineer boots. Low-browed, thick of jaw and neck, and grimly reticent, he played the part of a lug to perfection. Few ever got close enough to realize they’d crossed paths with a boy genius rather than a simple bruiser. Slow to anger, the surest way to kindle his ire was to yell, “You’re no Doc Savage!” He’d collected every magazine and every comic, and recorded every radio show featuring the pulp hero. He’d even attempted to concoct a bronzing solution. Nobody with an iota of common sense mentioned the fiasco.
“Hail the crash site! A goodtime gal reported a pair of ne’er-do-wells in need of assistance.” Arthur lumbered into the clearing. He was attended by two of his five younger brothers, Ronaldo and Gerard, and their manservant Kasper, an allegedly reformed Waffen-SS commando. The party members wore reflective hazmat suits and carried toolboxes. Arthur unpacked a Geiger-counter and performed a laborious circuit of the immediate vicinity. He removed his helmet and examined the exposed patch of hull. “We’re clean.” He gave orders to his companions. Kasper and the two boys started in with picks and steadily peeled away dirt to expose a broader plane of smooth, scorched metal.
Mac and Dred climbed down to join the fun.
“What do you think?” Mac asked. A relatively tall and sturdy young man, he was a peewee juxtaposed against Arthur Navarro.
“I think we need to be gone before trouble arrives,” Arthur said.
Dred sighed in exasperation. “For Pete’s sake, who are we expecting?”
“Maybe the Army,” Mac said.
“I thought ya didn’t know!”
“I don’t. I’m making an educated guess.”
“Not sure it’s the military. Not sure of a blessed thing, honestly.” Arthur popped the lid on a toolbox. He selected an industrial-sized hand drill. “I monitored the channels all night. The probe is designed to evade radar detection. Didn’t hear a peep from the Army or the Air Force, which means the stealth system functioned like a champ. There’s action, though. Twenty minutes ago, Ronaldo caught chatter on the emergency band.”
He nodded at his sibling who smiled gamely through streams of sweat. “I thought Labrador had twigged to the deal, at first. The boys at Zircon have stolen loads of our tech and brain-drained enough of our researchers, seems a fair bet they’ve got the codes to track this pretty baby.” He finished locking down a drill bit the length of his arm and squeezed the trigger. The motor shrieked. “Zircon hadn’t the foggiest. The installation Ron eavesdropped on didn’t spot the probe—Zircon intercepted a backchannel message from someone who did. Complete unknowns. A rival corporation, the CIA, hillbillies with a ham radio, anybody’s guess.”
“Swell,” Mac said. He checked the bolt on the deer rifle. “What about my grandfather? Surely X-R is on top of this?”
“Our side isn’t searching for Nancy. Two reasons. One, she’s supposed to splash down in the Atlantic—that’s the game plan, anyhow. Two, launch isn’t scheduled until the 11
th
of June.”
“Hey, hold the phone!” Dred said. “That’s next week! Which means the probe launched in secret and earlier. Wait, wait—unless we’re talking about multiple probes. My skull is aching.”
“Nancy hasn’t launched. Sword Enterprises possesses more resources than God, but even we can’t afford multiple experimental space rockets this sophisticated.”
“Fine. Then this is impossible.”
“Absolutely. Step back, friend.” Arthur snugged his welding goggles. He drilled through a series of rivets, paused to change the bit, and removed the bolts. A small plate came free, exposing a circuit board and toggles. He flipped the toggles in varying orders until an alarm chimed deep within the probe and an oval section of the hull a hand-span wide rolled back. From a maze of wires, Arthur drew forth a pair of slender trapezoidal tubes, each roughly a yard in length and constructed of crystal shot through with black whorls and lightning bolts.
Kasper swaddled the tubes in fireproof blankets. Dawn glinted among the gaps in the branches, a cool reddish glare that disquieted Mac for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on.
“High time to make tracks,” he said as the last of the equipment was stowed.
“Yeah, let’s am-scray,” Dred said. “I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.”
BIG BLACK
The company hustled a quarter mile to where a two-ton canvas-backed farm truck awaited. Everybody piled in. Kasper drove through underbrush and between copses of paper birch, pine, and mulberry, until he hit a dirt road that wound along the valley floor and eventually merged with the highway. By consensus they decided to transport their prize to Mac and Dred’s house. Nowhere more secure except for corporate headquarters, and HQ was a last resort due to the fact Dr. Bole and chief of security Nail would demand an explanation.
Kasper circled past Rosendale and took a secret access road that tunneled through Shawangunk Ridge and emerged at a huge old barn (the boys’ clubhouse) on the edge of the Tooms manor’s back forty. The interior of the barn contained a workshop, lab, a computer, and basement storage. An antenna array poked through the roof. Reinforced with battleship armor plates and powered courtesy of a thirty kilowatt diesel generator sealed inside a soundproof boiler compartment, the barn seemed a likely command post of opportunity.
“Fellows, I don’t understand any of this,” Dred said.
“You’re three sheets to the wind,” Mac said.
“So are you, brother.”
“None of us have a bead on the details,” Arthur said. He glanced at Mac. “Did you notice how slender the crystals are? Those are fabricated in a geovault. Specially engineered and grown. I’ve seen the tubes as they’re inserted into the mainframe. The ones we extracted were mature when the technicians embedded them in Nancy. Which means they should be heavier, fuller. Then there’s the internal composition. The discoloration indicates data saturation.”
“I saw. It’s hard to comprehend. A mistake—”
“My father designed the system. His schematics are unimpeachable. I’ve studied them at length. Get those tubes under a scope and I’ll prove you can trust your lying eyes.”
Mac’s pinched expression only became more severe. “The voyage was—is—scheduled for an eighteen-month loop around Pluto and back. A peek over the edge of our solar system and into the void. Even if Nancy collected data without interruption from every onboard camera and sensor, the crystals possess redundant storage capacity to function for many decades. Saturation should not occur. It defies reason.”
“Correct, Master Macbeth. What do you deduce from these clues?”
“Two impossible conclusions. The first being that Nancy has somehow violated the theory of relativity and traveled faster than light . . . and through time. Secondly, she has, despite the apparent paradox, been out there for much longer than our scientists calculated.”
“Eureka,” Arthur said dryly. “Judging by the data storage consumption, the probe has traveled for several centuries.”
“Makes sense when you put it plainly. However, I refuse to accept the hypothesis.”
“Oh?”
“I dislike where it leads me.” Mac patted his friend’s massive arm. “This is why you do the thinking and we do the overreacting. Convince me, Art. And make it palatable.”
“After I convince myself.”
Dred said to Arthur, “Hang on there, pal. You weren’t tracking Nancy?”
“Not conventionally. My telescope and radio are superior to what you’ll find in most households. Regardless, spotting Nancy would have been statistically more difficult than isolating a grain of sand on a beach. I resorted to an unorthodox strategy. A smidgeon of intuition and a stroke of luck and it came together.”
“Well, if this was supposed to be an ocean splashdown, I’m missing the plot. You told Mac to hang around Woolfolk Valley tonight, and bam, sure enough, Nancy almost drops on our heads. What gives? Heck, for that matter, why don’t we take this back to HQ? Sure, Nail will let us have what-for. Granddad’s eyeballs will pop, though. We’re sure to get a reward for salvaging the probe before Labrador or the mystery goons made off with her.”
“To take your queries in reverse order—it is premature to return our find to HQ. There are . . . complications. As to how I narrowed the landing site—Little Black predicted five reentry zones. Woolfolk Valley was the most likely.”
“You mean Big Black?” Mac removed his glasses. “Art, please tell me you didn’t swipe your old man’s pass card again.”
“No, I mean Little Black. Give me a few moments and I’ll demonstrate.”
Big Black was the supercomputer Sword Enterprises scientists and engineers had developed and refined over the past seventy-five years. Its mainframe occupied a massive subterranean vault beneath corporate HQ in Kingston, New York. Dr. Amanda Bole, director of R&D, and Dr. Navarro had tinkered with BB to the point the machine had evolved into a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. Big Black, a proprietary technology, like so much of Sword Enterprises’ tech, operated within an insulated network. Granddad and Dr. Bole severely restricted access to the computer. When it came to intruders (industrial spies, foreign provocateurs, and meddling kids), the vault guards maintained a shoot-to-kill, ask-questions-later protocol.
“Oh, boy,” Dred said. “Security has no sense of humor. That’s begging to get dusted.”
“Or worse.” Arthur smiled enigmatically. “Dr. Bole has a eugenics fetish and not enough volunteers.”
Mac observed Arthur and his team unloading various tools from the truck and readying the lab equipment. “It’ll require an interface to extract and process Nancy’s data. Our computer is too primitive for delicate tasks.”
“Prep the darkroom. I’ll rig a holographic projector so I can view the images from Nancy in three dimensions. As for collation, interpretation, and projection of the stored data, behold . . . ” Arthur unlocked a metal box and removed a diamond. The diamond measured three inches on a side and shone dark as polished onyx. “My friends, this is a tiny section of Big Black’s intelligence core. A piece of the brain, as it were. With your kind permission, I’ll tap LB into your mainframe and let him proceed with the diagnostics.”
“Oh, boy.” Dred blanched. He stepped back, as if the very notion of accidentally touching the object filled him with dread. “Whoa, Nelly Belle. I am
not
seeing this . . . Ya smuggled Big Black out of the vault?”
“No, no, nothing dramatic. This is merely a fragment—I took a chisel into the vault and chipped a piece while BB cycled through his evening Dreamtime sequence. Won’t harm anything and it won’t be missed. Bits calve every day. BB’s organic crystal structure will replace this within a matter of days. Meet Little Black. He can do everything his father does—except more slowly and on a smaller scale.”
Dred shook his head in a gesture of supreme negation. “I don’t see how this is any less likely to get us skinned alive. Ya claim . . . Little Black predicted reentry zones. Shouldn’t Big Black have done the same? He could have alerted either Dr. Bole or Dr. Navarro that something had gone haywire. Or was going to go haywire . . . ”
“Trick is,” Arthur said, “the AIs are rudimentary, extremely literal. You have to ask the right questions. I heisted Little Black weeks ago and let me tell you guys, I’ve asked him plenty. One of innumerable potentialities was an anomalous event with the probe’s flight.”
Mac gritted his teeth. He sighed. “In for a penny. If this goes south, we’ll
all
get shot. Won’t that be a gas?”
“Or worse,” Dred said.
Arthur said, “Let’s be cool and
not
get busted. I advise rest and relaxation, and definitely a bath. You guys smell like booze and cheap whores.”
Dred sniffed. “He’s right. We do. Woof.”
Berrien met the boys as they sneaked through the servants’ entrance. He crossed his arms and grinned, formidable even in a dress shirt and coat. “Good morning, gentlemen.” His remaining teeth were gold-capped. “Spent the evening in a brothel or a distillery, eh? March straight to your rooms and try not to muck up the floor. Mildred is drawing baths. Breakfast in thirty minutes.”