Implacable Alpha Read online

  With each set of corners, I’d glance at the mirrors, seeing the BMW right with me, leaned to the point the cylinder heads were almost skating on the asphalt.

  The lady in black was good.

  Hitting the straight at Tracy Hill, I had open road ahead of me. I’d like to say the Diavel made me do it. But it was probably macho shit hardwired deep in my brain. With no traffic for as far as I could see, I twisted the wick wide open and downshifted. As the Diavel hit its powerband, the front wheel lifted. With all hundred and sixty of the Ducati’s horses unleashed, the BMW receded in the mirrors.

  But damn!

  At one hundred and fifty miles an hour, that two-lane road thinned into a mighty narrow ribbon. At the junction sign with US 24, I laid on the brakes. The Diavel—having the best Brembo discs and calipers in the business—tried to toss me headlong over the bars. Slowing, I made the stop, figured what the hell, and headed west. At Hartsel, I turned south on 9, missing the black BMW and its gutsy rider’s company. When I reached the US 50 junction west of Canyon City, I rode out to Royal Gorge Bridge.

  Seeing a parking spot with a bike taking up half the space, I pulled up, backed the Diavel in next to the black motorcycle, and cut the ignition.

  Lifting off my helmet, I studied the black machine beside mine. No way.

  The BMW RS gleamed in the sunlight, a faint tinking sound coming from the engine as it cooled.

  Hey, there were a lot of black BMW RSs in the world. Well, okay, maybe not that many on the few roads west of Colorado Springs on that particular morning. Had to be coincidence.

  Hanging my helmet on the Diavel, I unzipped my jacket and wadded it between the dip between the handlebars.

  After I made the requisite pitstop in the men’s room, I bought my ticket and walked out onto the bridge. The view really is stunning. Royal Gorge is a narrow crack in the earth, and the suspension bridge across it used to be the highest in the world. At the center, I stopped, staring at the distant Arkansas River below. It’s nine hundred and fifty-six feet down those sheer rock walls. Less if the river’s up.

  I stood there, thinking of time, and space, and wondering how many worlds there are that have this same bridge, and how many “me’s” were staring down like this. If I could believe the theory, there were thousands—and more splitting into their branches of the timeline each nanosecond.

  The whole idea just comes across as baloney. You’d think, if you were splitting into clones, reflections, copies, or whatever you want to call them, you’d feel something. Catch a glimpse from the corner of your eye.

  I tried. Shot a quick sidelong glance. And froze.

  She wasn’t more than five feet away, trim black leather riding pants conforming to muscular legs, her jacket unzipped, hanging open, as were the cooling vents in the sleeves of her Icon jacket.

  Her gleaming black helmet rested on the walk beside her booted feet. The pack that had been strapped on the BMW’s passenger seat now hung from one shoulder. Wind teased the auburn hair she’d tied into a ponytail. In profile, her face was tanned, thoughtful. I’d have classified her features as Mediterranean.

  So, last I’d seen, her RS was disappearing in the distance behind me when I whacked the Diavel’s throttle wide open. And, believe me, I’d have known if she passed me. Other than that, she’d have had to fly the RS over mountains, or taken one of the Jeep roads to beat me here. Not only was the RS not suited to gnarly backcountry dirt roads, the bike would have been dusty.

  Okay, I had to ask.

  I stepped over. “Excuse me. Sorry to intrude. But you’re on that RS, aren’t you?”

  Her attention still fixed on the stunning depths below, I could see the quiver of her lips as she smothered a smile. Her voice carried a curious accent as she said, “And you want to know how I beat you here, Doctor Ryan?”

  “You know me?” I felt the first tingle of warning in my blood.

  “The answer to that can take many forms. Here, I have something for you.” She turned slightly away, unslinging her pack and reaching inside. I fixed on the box she withdrew, maybe the size of a thick hardback novel. A series of lights gleamed on one side.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered. “That’s Fluvium’s cerebrum. It’s supposed to be locked away in the vault in Ward Six. How the hell did you . . .” I looked up as she placed the device in my hands. Stopped short at the hardened green eyes that bored into mine. Realized—up close like I was—that she had a dusting of freckles across her nose. What might have been the faint ghosts of scars lined her cheeks, nose, and chin. She was thirty? Maybe younger. Somehow fresh and healthy. But for her eyes; I’d seen that look before in the faces of combat vets who’d spent too much time in the shit. It was the hardened gaze of a woman who had seen all of hell and lived.

  “You want to know how it works?” she asked, her voice a baritone. “Look closely at that blue button. If you place your finger over it, you’ll feel the heat.”

  I stared down at the heavy box, hardly aware that she still had one hand in her pack. Feel the heat? A blue haze of figures—some sort of holographic display—appeared in the air above the top.

  I carefully extended my index finger, expecting . . .

  Everything went gray. The sensation was like my arms, legs, and head were being pulled from my body. And then there was . . . there was . . . vertigo spinning me into . . .

  17

  Kaplan

  Maxine Kaplan stared at the readout. She should have been dead on her feet. Together with Wixom, she had been at it, catching catnaps only, for the last twelve hours. Didn’t matter that she’d been up for thirty hours straight and should have been reeling. The data were too engrossing.

  She sat on the steps in Lab One. The two guards up at the security door watched her with bored eyes. Before her, the hemispherical hollow in the concrete, the partial base of the research station, and the severed cables mocked her. The bright overhead lights left her squinting.

  Wixom was working with the detector on the other side of the hemisphere, checking yet again to make sure that the machine was functioning correctly.

  To her right—precisely positioned—the particle “gun” with its magnets rested atop a heavy frame. Positioning had taken hours.

  Maxine had insisted that its beam pass through the exact center of the time-traveling sphere, figuring that if anything could be detected, it would be at the heart of the phenomenon. If they failed to measure anything of note, they could play with the margins of the hypothetical field at their leisure.

  But they’d detected an anomaly from the beginning. Their spin-up, spin-right qubits—despite passing through atmosphere and across the twelve meters separating the gun from the detector—had registered without issue on the control test before placing the equipment in Lab One. They’d detected an estimated ninety-eight percent of the generated qubits.

  Maxine ran anxious hands through her hair, blinked. Wished she had another cup of coffee. Her butt hurt from the concrete stair tread.

  Wixom walked carefully around the hemisphere, veering wide where Pete McCoy’s body had been. Maybe he thought that stepping on the spot where Pete had died would bring bad luck or affect the quantum future?

  Seating himself on the step beside her, he said, “The detector’s functioning well within parameters. It’s not a mechanical error. Everything’s set correctly.” His weary blue eyes were fixed on the hemisphere, as if he were imagining the machine they’d built based upon Nakeesh’s drawings and descriptions.

  Maxine switched from fiddling with her hair to massaging the back of her neck, kneading the tired nuchal muscles. “Doesn’t make sense. In the control experiment we were getting ninety-eight percent recovery. Shooting through the sphere, we’re getting right at two percent spin-down, spin-left above background. We’re not getting hits for any of the generated qubits.”

  “At least it’s a reliable two per
cent. The measurement doesn’t fluctuate while the gun’s on. Turn it off, even the two percent of spin-down spin-left qubits vanish.”

  “So, where are our generated qubits going?”

  Wixom, still staring dully at the emptiness between the gun and detector, said, “I want to try something.”

  Standing, he skirted the area of the sphere. Unlocking the wheels, he carefully pushed the detector around the hollow, picking a place roughly ninety degrees off the electron beam’s axis. Clicking the wheels in place, he carefully leveled the detector. Flipping it on, he watched the monitor.

  “Got anything?” Maxine fully figured he was going to say no. Hell, he was at right angles to the path traveled by the . . .

  “Two percent spin-down spin-left,” Wixom called. “Just wait.”

  He turned the detector off, unlocked the wheels, and rolled it to a point that might have been forty-five degrees from the beam’s orientation. After he’d locked the wheels, leveled and aimed the detector, he flipped it on. Studied the monitor. “Two percent of our bad boys are still there.”

  Maxine stood, walked over, and switched the gun off.

  At his monitor, Wixom dully said, “They’re gone. Just reading random background now.”

  Maxine took a deep breath, did some quick figuring of the radius from the sphere’s center compared to the surface area on the detector. “They’re bouncing back from the center of the sphere, but they’re changed. Mirror copies of the qubits we’re generating.”

  Wixom rubbed his chin as he studied his monitor. “The photons didn’t react because they have no mass. Good call to try the experiment with particles. Wonder what we’d get with straight neutrons?”

  She studied the empty space above the crater. “Okay, so we didn’t get a wake, as such. But something’s definitely there. We can’t detect the faintest lick of a magnetic field, but our reflected qubits come back as if they’ve been run through a Stern-Gerlach magnet. Doesn’t make any damn sense.”

  “Maxine?” Wixom was frowning at his monitor. “Not only were the qubits changed, but they were accelerated. And, compared to the first of our readings, these last had a seventeen percent velocity increase.”

  “Almost makes you think something’s coming, doesn’t it? Like some sort of Doppler.” She frowned. “Looks like we’ve hit the jackpot, Virgil. Now, all we have to do is figure out what it means.”

  “You going to tell the team?”

  “No. And I don’t want you to, either. Not until we understand what’s causing the acceleration. And I don’t think we’re going to figure that out until we get a solid eight hours of rack time. So your orders are to go home. Knock yourself out with Ambien if you have to and come back Monday morning with your game face on and ready to do some hard math.”

  Wixom nodded, shut off the detector, and stared vacantly at the dark screen. She knew that look. The guy was uncomfortable, mulling data. But was he thinking of their mirror qubits, or what she was up to?

  “Go, Virgil.”

  The guards straightened as she followed him up the stairs, paused at the top, and looked back at the quiet room with its smooth crater. Then, nodding at Grazier’s two security guys, she stepped out.

  Wixom was halfway down the hall, headed for the exit.

  Good. She had a phone call to make. She could only think of one thing that would be accelerating those changed qubits.

  18

  Karla

  Smacking sounds accompanied each impact as Karla Raven hammered the heavy bag. She leaped back, pivoted on the gym floor, and smashed kick after kick into the hundred-fifty-pound bag. Panting, she danced away, flicked the sweat from her eyes.

  The heavy bag swung from its chains, casting shadows across the gym floor. The damn thing seemed to mock her.

  The flashbacks had brought her awake that morning after a nightmare-filled sleep. She’d been back on that fucking road, headed out of Talach 3, her Humvee in the lead . . .

  “Stop it.” Karla forced herself to kill the image forming in her brain. Instead, she repeated the mantra that Dr. Ryan had taught her: “You didn’t go to Jabac Junction. You took another road. You didn’t drive down toward that shithole of a town. Didn’t see that spilled basket of clothes . . .”

  But she did. She was back . . . bouncing and swaying in the canvas passenger seat as the Humvee hammered down the rutted excuse for a road.

  Behind her, Pud Pounder was standing, his upper body propped in the turret behind Ma Deuce, the Browning fifty-caliber machine gun.

  The desert looked as flat as a lake bottom, but the terrain was illusory. Rains had carved patterns of narrow drainages across the flats. No more than ten to twenty inches deep, a person could still lie down and essentially vanish from as far away as thirty feet.

  The late afternoon sun slanted toward the craggy and steep mountains in the distance. From up there, Haji would be watching her dust as Bravo Platoon raced out from T-3.

  Karla was planning on that. She and her LPO, her light petty officer, had spent the last two days planning this op. They’d picked the series of rocky outcrops that stuck up from the flats just outside of the canyon mouth. The reason wasn’t the outcrops themselves, but the deeply incised drainages that ran beneath them and met just east of the main highway.

  A Marine convoy would pass over that road sometime around midday tomorrow. Not that it was any kind of secret, since an Afghan detail was accompanying the Marines. Given an Afghan’s dedication to security, that meant every insurgent within a hundred klicks knew when and where that convoy would roll.

  “We’re on all their scopes now,” Weaver said as he laid his right hand atop the steering wheel. He glanced at the driver-side mirror. “Socket’s sniffing right up our ass. That reaming you gave him sure cured his lollygagging attitude, Chief.”

  “Just a reminder, boys,” she said as she keyed her mic. “Sloppy means dead.”

  Golf’s voice came through her earbud. “You sure they’ll be able to figure out where we’re going, Chief? Or should we send them a pajama-gram with a map?”

  “They’re not stupid.” She allowed herself a grim smile. “Mostly. Their spotters are banging jaws as we speak. If we’re unlucky, they’ll figure out who we are and what we’re up to. They do that, and they’ll treat the whole operational area like a plague zone. We’ll be bored stiff watching that convoy pass. But if we’re lucky, they’ll think we’re a no-threat routine patrol, and they’ll filter right down through those drainage channels. If they do, they’ll pop up right under our noses. Air strikes will take out any we don’t get to kill first.”

  “Jabac Junction ahead, Chief,” Weaver said.

  She could see the squat mud-and-stone huts. Flat-roofed and colorless as the hardpan her Humvees roared across. Hovels built out of the desert clays. Only a few families still lived there, tending a couple of gardens, a handful of goats.

  Weaver was roaring down on the junction, the engine whining . . .

  “No!” Karla screamed. She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her hands to her ears.

  Gasping for breath, she forced her eyes open.

  Struggled for control.

  She came to, crouched in a hunched ball, arms clamped over her head, on the polished vinyl floor in the Ward Six gym at Grantham. The heavy bag swung lazily on its chains.

  Sweat ran down her skin, soaked the gray T-shirt she wore, trickled out of her hair and down her neck. Her hot breath kept coming in gasps.

  Grantham. She was in Grantham. Not Afghanistan. Not Jabac Junction.

  She hated flashbacks. They made her weak. Sucked away parts of her soul.

  “Oh, fuck.” With all the strength in her body, she staggered to her feet. Hammered the heavy bag, pain lancing up from her knuckles, through her arm and into her shoulder. She’d lived on pain. It had carried her through the brutal BUD/S selection, through S&T, throug
h the hazing. Had allowed her to turn off everything that was Karla Raven so that she could be the first woman to make the Teams, to pass sniper school, to be promoted to command.

  And she’d lost it all when her platoon was blown away at Jabac Junction. The roadside IED had been hidden in a basket of spilled clothes. Something she should have recognized as a threat.

  “My . . . fucking . . . fault,” she whispered.

  Driven by rage, she attacked the heavy bag. Punched, kicked, body slammed it, until she sagged on the floor, sucking breath, her muscles trembling.

  If only she could exhaust her memories the way she did her body.

  She heard the door open, the sound of steps on the gym floor. Wearily, she forced herself up, turned, and shook her head as Sam Savage came striding her way.

  “Taking a little rest?” he asked, curious stare absorbing her sweat-soaked wear, her flushed and wet face, the damp hair.

  “Yeah, recharging myself so I can knock that superior-assed smirk right off of your face. What are you here for, Major?”

  Savage’s dark eyes flashed, then mellowed as he apparently thought better of it. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have mouthed off. We’ve got a problem.”

  Karla wiped the sweat from her forehead. “What sort of problem?”

  “Just got a call from the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office. Two motorcycles were left in the Royal Gorge parking lot. The park called them in, was going to have them towed. The SO ran the VINs. One was stolen. The other, the Diavel, belongs to Dr. Ryan.”

  “I’m on it.” She turned for the locker room, calling over her shoulder. “Fifteen minutes. I’ll take the Tahoe.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “Then get your shit wired, Major. This is the Skipper, so I’m rolling in fifteen.”

  She had to shower, dress, grab her gear, and clear her head. No way the Skipper was going to abandon that bike. Whatever this was, it was going to be bad.