Implacable Alpha Read online

  And there—where that hollow now mocked—Dr. Farmer had taken a couple of shots at Alpha. Maybe even mortally wounded her. The field that propelled Alpha into the future had also swept up the potato-headed Tanner Jackson, Skientia’s ruthless chief operating officer.

  “I’d love the chance to get my hands on you,” Grazier promised the man. Jackson’s attempt to have Eli killed had come within a whisker of success.

  And now Jackson was traveling through time with Alpha?

  “Come on,” Grazier told Ryan as he started up the stairs. “The sooner you and your people are up to speed, the more likely we’ll be able to deal with what’s coming.”

  “And what might that be?” Ryan asked.

  “How does ‘the end of the world as you know it’ sound?”

  At the top of the stairs, the two uniformed guards saluted. Grazier returned it, glanced back. He wondered about those detectors. The room, so bright, large, and spacious, seemed to reek of an evil promise.

  4

  Stevens

  In the security monitor, White House Chief of Staff Bill Stevens watched the Blackhawk lift off from the Los Alamos helipad. The big helicopter swung out over the Rio Grande Valley, rising and curving away to the north. Sunlight flickered along the craft’s aluminum skin before it seemed to vanish against the distant mountains.

  In the beginning, Bill Stevens had begun his rise to power running Ben Masters’ campaign for governor, and then for the senate. Along the way, he’d learned all the tricks, tactics, and sleights necessary to triumph in American politics. Using them, he’d been able to catapult Ben Masters into the Oval Office. Like a satiated spider, he’d been contented in his Washington web. Right up to the day that he learned about the magical appearance of a startled woman in a distant New Mexico lab. It had come across his desk as a mere security alert.

  Circumstances, and a familiarity with Skientia’s research, had provided him with the real implications of Domina Nakeesh’s mysterious appearance in Skientia’s lab that day. Screw Ben Masters! Compared to the power that Nakeesh represented, the presidency of the United States was small potatoes.

  Stevens rubbed the back of his neck. Tricky this, being here at Skientia’s Los Alamos lab at the same time as that bastard, Grazier. Grazier was the only man who stood between Bill Stevens and the control of, well, just about everything.

  “Too bad we know each other so well,” Stevens muttered under his breath as he turned his attention to the other monitor. It showed a high-end conference room with an oversized table of tropical wood surrounded by plush leather chairs, walnut wainscoting, full-wall monitors for AV, and thick carpet.

  People were rising from the chairs, engaged in mixed chatter as they shuffled notes and clicked laptops closed. Scientists, all, including Maxine Kaplan, Skientia’s Team Leader. Knocking on sixty and attractive for her age, the tall woman dressed professionally, her body toned and fit. Her competence in both physics and engineering had earned her the top job on Skientia’s entangled particle program. She’d taken it from the study of entangled photons to the creation and detection of actual entangled molecules. Backed up by Virgil Wixom—another PhD in entanglement who specialized in something called decoherence—they’d built the machine that accidentally had summoned Domina Nakeesh across the centuries. Sure, tardigrades were one thing. But a human being? Talk about mind-blowing.

  Stevens shook his head. He was in the middle of it. Didn’t mean he understood how Nakeesh had appeared in the middle of Skientia’s experiment. The monitors had fuzzed out with snow. Pop. And as the monitors came back online, there she was, holding her navigator, staring around in complete disbelief. She’d been wearing a simple gray tunic, her hair pinned back. Sandals had been on her feet. In stunned silence, she’d gaped, blinked, and immediately began fiddling with her navigator, pulling up holographic fields, running her fingers through them.

  Hadn’t made sense at the time. Neither Kaplan and Wixom, nor the other scientists had understood how she’d gotten into the room. Kaplan, upon seeing the stranger, had triggered a security alert. Two of the techs closest to the Domina had rushed up, demanding to know who she was, how she got into the room. And, of course, not knowing a word of English, Nakeesh had panicked, turned, and tried to run.

  The techs had tackled her, ripped the navigator away, and then the security team burst in and dragged her away.

  Stevens shifted to the monitor that showed Lab One and the ominous divot in the concrete where Nakeesh and her time machine had vanished.

  “Where are you?”

  He shot a glance over his shoulder as Maxine Kaplan stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. “Learn anything?” she asked, indicating the rows of security monitors.

  “Grazier just left with Ryan. Flew off in that helo. He doesn’t have a clue that I was within a thousand miles. Thanks for taking my call. Getting me in here.”

  Her flinty brown eyes might have been scalpels the way they tried to dissect him. “This thing is huge. You understand that, don’t you? One of those watershed moments in human history. Like the atomic bomb, or fire. The moment that woman appeared was a phase shift for our existence. There was before, and now there is after. Frankly, it scares the shit out of me.”

  “Jackson and McCoy had faith in you. More so than just the fact that you were Tanner Jackson’s lover.” He smiled. “Yeah, I know about that. I know a lot of things. But let’s not get distracted. My interest here is what this means for the country.”

  “Bullshit. Your interest is what it means for Bill Stevens.” She raised a hand to forestall him. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have a clue as to what it ultimately means. I’m still struggling. In a blink of an eye, everything we thought we knew about physics was sucked right down the drain. What we thought we knew was called the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ after a meeting in the 1920s between some of the brightest founders of modern physics.”

  “That was Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and that bunch, right?”

  “That’s them. And yeah, there were always problems with the way Copenhagen couldn’t explain the foundations of quantum mechanics. For example, why a wave function collapses upon observation. When does a measurement occur? How macroscopic does an observation have to be? Why do quantum systems evolve in nature as predicted by the Schrödinger equation only to collapse when we observe them? And it certainly doesn’t explain entanglement.”

  “So why didn’t the ‘great minds’ figure it out?”

  “Because the Copenhagen interpretation was pretty good when it came to answering questions about specific problems. Sort of like the calculator in your phone. Tap in the numbers, press divide, and you get an answer, but you don’t have a clue as to how the machine came up with it. It just worked. Same with entanglement. Don’t sweat the small shit.”

  “And that’s a problem?”

  “Only for a minority of physicists. The rest of us were happy to plug and play. Copenhagen gave us the rules to the game. Why tie yourself in knots about the twinky details that don’t make sense? Until Nakeesh.”

  “And then?”

  “Then, in an instant, a supposedly crackpot curiosity of a theory becomes reality. We call it the Many-Worlds hypothesis. Goes back to 1955 and a graduate student at Princeton. The guy was Hugh Everett the third, a student of Wheeler’s. He was bothered by all those aforementioned twinky details, especially because he was interested in quantum gravity. At a late-night drinking party with a couple of physics buddies—and enough sherry to deaden his inhibitions against kicking the holy shrine that was the Copenhagen interpretation—it hit Everett that the universe had to be a single wave function, and it interacted with itself at a basic level. When it did, it split, like two waves running together, bouncing off each other and becoming four waves. Each wave begins as a mirror reflection that in turn interacts and changes, spawning more waves that interact, change, and spawn
more waves.”

  “I don’t get it. The universe is made of stuff, not reflections. That chair over there doesn’t split in two.”

  “Mr. Stevens, seventy percent of Americans are scientifically illiterate, and you’re no different. Your genius is politics. That said, have you ever seen a particle? A wave function? Maybe tossed a field theory from one hand to the other?”

  “No.”

  “And you won’t. That’s because, like the Copenhagen boys and girls, you’re not into the twinky shit. But when you flip that switch over on the wall, the lights will come on. Slam a couple of hemispheres of weapons-grade plutonium together, you will get a fission reaction that will destroy Beijing. At least it will if the missile that’s carrying it happens to be at the right longitude and latitude. Everett’s Many-Worlds hypothesis became gospel the moment Domina Nakeesh popped into my lab.”

  He crossed his arms, studied her. “All right, so we accept that there are other Earths, other timelines, other copies of you and me constantly splitting off. How many?”

  “Speaking theoretically, it’s infinite. Whatever the Hilbert space . . . um, that’s the number of possible dimensions that exist in the universe. Whatever that allows.”

  Stevens rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you know how weird that sounds? Like a million copies of the world? A million copies of me? All existing at the same time? Where are they? Why don’t we see them? Sounds nuts.”

  “Really? So, tell me, Mr. Chief of Staff, how thick is a wave function? How much space does it take to hold a couple trillion reflections? Not that ‘space’ is a good analogy to use.” She snorted derisively. “Forget it. Listen, you don’t need to understand the physics, or anything about the Schrödinger equation, or decoherence, or entanglement. All I need you for is to flip the light switch.”

  “You? Need me?” He felt the old hackles rise. “You know who I am?”

  “Let me rephrase. We need each other.” She nodded toward the monitor displaying the conference room. “We’re at the beginning of this. Trying to figure out what it means, what the threats and dimensions are. The facts—as we know them—are that Nakeesh and Fluvium appeared in Egypt sometime around 1380 BCE to conduct a bioweapons experiment. My experiment to attract entangled particles from the past triggered Nakeesh’s navigator, brought her here, and left Fluvium stranded in the past. He had a second piece of equipment with him. What they call a cerebrum. He died in Egypt over three millennia ago. The hope was that his cerebrum would be found in his tomb. It wasn’t. It’s gone. Vanished somewhere in the past. Nakeesh needs a cerebrum to get back to her timeline.”

  She rubbed the backs of her arms. “Me? I don’t like Grazier. One of his people shot Peter dead. That woman, Karla Raven, manhandled me. But on top of that, on Grazier’s team, I’m nothing more than a pawn surrounded by fools like those idiot archaeologists. I’m relegated to being a mere technician tasked with fitting the pieces together.”

  “And you want more?”

  “The same as you.” Her lips pursed. “We’re talking about the awesome power of jumping between worlds. Through time. What that means—not to mention the ramifications—is immense, and we can barely grasp the possibilities at this point. Huge doesn’t cover it. You have the power of the presidency behind you. You can make things happen.”

  He reached out, took her hand, and shook. “Partners. And don’t worry about Grazier. He only thinks he’s in charge. Play your part for the moment.” He pointed at the monitor where the hollow left by Nakeesh’s time machine filled the screen. “When she comes back, my people will move in.”

  5

  Ryan

  Helicopters weren’t in my comfort zone. Never had been.

  The day I retired from the Corps, I figured I’d left the last of the beasts behind—and good riddance. Since Alpha had entered my life, it seemed like I was in one airplane or chopper after another. And half the time we were either bouncing through turbulence or being shot at.

  So there I was, back in a damned helicopter, feeling those tickly fingers stroking my stomach. You know the sensation—the one that comes just before you hurl your lunch all over the chopper deck.

  It got worse each time Winny piloted the Blackhawk over one of the rugged mountain ridges where the updrafts tossed the big helo up and down. This was my last trip in the Blackhawk. Grazier had just procured one of the new Sikorsky SB-1 Defiant dual-axial birds. Winny was off for training as soon as we landed.

  Great! We were getting rid of a reliable and long-tested helicopter for a brand-new-just-off-the-assembly-line-sure-to-have-teething-problems, dual-axial, super-maneuverable, hyper-complicated stealth bird that was sure to fall out the sky at the most inopportune moment.

  I kept my eyes closed. Didn’t want to look down, see the world slipping this way and that, let alone contemplate what it would be like to plummet out of the sky onto those jagged rocks, peaks, and all that jutting timber.

  “You all right?” Grazier asked, his voice absurdly calm through the headphones.

  I gave Eli a slit-eyed and suffering glare. “I ever tell you how much I hate flying in these things?”

  Eli grinned in return, shifting in his seat to stare out at the scenery as we crossed the Sangre de Christo Mountains and dropped down along the front of the Spanish Peaks.

  “Hey, Skipper,” Winny Swink’s voice came from the cockpit. “Smooth ride this time. What are you complaining about?”

  I craned my neck to see past the bulkhead. Winny was in the right-hand seat, her wiry five-foot-four body clad in wrinkled fatigues. A firecracker redhead, her real name was Winchester Wesson Swink. She’d attained the rank of major in the United States Air Force despite her Antisocial Personality Disorder, or APD. They’d kept her—endured might be a better word—because Winny was gifted with so much raw talent that she could fly anything. She was good enough that she’d tested experimental aircraft at the Skunk Works, taught aerial tactics, been a hot shot at Red Star, and aced it all. Well, all but for washing out at NASA. The space agency tends to have no tolerance for either a surly attitude or miscreant behavior, no matter how good a pilot might be at the stick.

  Eventually, as it always does, her APD caught up with her. See, Winny has two tripwires: One is her cooking. Boiling water is the extent of her culinary abilities, and she’s touchy about it. And worse, she gets especially prickly about women who wear pink. In Winny’s case, the final straw came when she encountered a mouthy four-star general’s wife—a woman who tripped Winny’s trigger at a DC cocktail party. The wife—dressed in dripping pink—had dared to question Winny’s femininity. The reaction was so explosive it took four people to pull Winny off the poor woman, an action that got her grounded pending a psychiatric evaluation. You can guess where that went. In retaliation, Winny stole an F-22 Raptor off the line at Andrews, took it on a joyride around DC, and landed it on I-95 before taxiing onto an off-ramp. They found her at the intersection convenience store, perched on the wing, swinging her feet and sipping from a screw-top bottle of wine.

  The Air Force kept face by claiming that Major Swink had heroically landed a malfunctioning plane, saving countless lives in the process. The moment the cameras were done clicking, she was summarily arrested, committed, and shipped off to my care.

  I considered that as we hit an updraft that sent my stomach down somewhere between my knees. I swallowed hard, made a face.

  I will not throw up. I will not throw up. I will not . . .

  “Ryan, what is it with you?” Grazier demanded. “You’re the one who rides all those hot Italian motorcycles. Tough Marine like you, I figured a short flight like this would be a piece of cake.”

  “Eli, why aren’t you on a plane back to DC?”

  His expression hardened. “You know Bill Stevens, right? The president’s chief of staff? The guy’s been with President Masters for years. Ran his campaigns. Stevens was thick with Skienti
a; they were major donors to the president’s election. Through Stevens’ influence, Tanner Jackson and Peter McCoy both had anytime invites to the White House. The Lincoln bedroom was one of their favorite places to stay when they were in the city.”

  I hated politics.

  Eli paid no attention to my turning green as he said, “Stevens was behind getting you and your people arrested back in Santa Fe after Alpha escaped from Ward Six. He was tight with Alpha, took her to the White House to meet the president. Stevens knows more about this whole time-jumping thing than we do. Understands the awesome power that it gives to whoever controls the technology. With McCoy dead and Tanner Jackson missing, Stevens is angling to get control of Skientia. Now, you can figure out why he’d want that, can’t you?”

  “Entanglement physics,” I told him. “Skientia was working on retrieving entangled particles from the past. The past part is important because using entangled photons for communication in present time, no one can read the message. It’s essentially an uncrackable technology. By the very act of reading the message, it’s destroyed.”

  “Right.”

  “But if you can retrieve entangled particles from the past, you can read secret communications from seconds, to minutes, to days, to weeks ago. Essentially, with the right kind of quantum 3D computer, you can eavesdrop on anyone. Government, military, financial, intelligence—no one is safe. More than that, no one knows that their communications have been monitored. Campaign strategies, troop movements, special orders, confidential memos, eyes-only intelligence—everything is compromised.”

  “Thought we had it all. That we’d beaten the Chinese, the Europeans, and everyone else to the punch. And then Alpha pops into that lab.” Eli shook his head. “In that moment, everything changed. To travel back into the past, cross from timeline to timeline, enter parallel worlds, that’s power like no one has ever seen, let alone contemplated.” He glanced at me. “And you wonder at the struggle that’s about to be unleashed?”