Implacable Alpha Read online

  Jaime grinned. “Batch of whackos, sir. Half of them were in tears.”

  “Like I thought. They were a diversion to keep the heat off the real operators.” Stevens paused. “Very well, gentlemen. Want to find out what’s going on? Get your lives back? If you’re in, I can have you placed on special assignment. Classified. You would report only to me and my team leader.”

  Hanson Childs felt the hammer slamming down, crushing anything like a normal life. This was “deep state” Washington. Where the real power lurked. And Stevens was a major player. Childs could feel the jaws closing around him. “Become a pawn in the game?” he asked softly, heart thudding.

  Jaime sucked down a draft of his coffee, worried eyes fixed on Stevens.

  Stevens slipped two sets of papers across the battered desk. “These are documents outlining your duties, mission, and privileges, along with a presidential authorization. What they used to call a ‘get out of jail free’ card. In short, as long as you follow orders, you’re untouchable. It’s payback. All it takes is a signature.”

  Hanson finished off his coffee and set the cup to the side. Taking the papers, he read through the legalese, squinted at the president’s notorious zigzag signature.

  “What do you think?” Jaime asked him, voice husky.

  Despite the little voice in the back of his mind that shouted Don’t do it!, Hanson asked, “Sir? What’s this really all about?”

  Stevens nodded slightly, as if pleased that Hanson had hesitated. “What you were part of in Colorado and New Mexico? Those were the opening shots in a campaign that will decide the future. I don’t mean what the future might bring. Oh, no. I mean that whoever prevails, he or she will actually control the future. That’s what the research at Skientia was all about.”

  Still, Hanson hesitated, could see the disbelief in Jaime’s expression and posture.

  “Hey,” Stevens added, “I know it sounds crazy, but in Santa Fe, Eli Grazier jerked your shorts up tight and past your ears. For the moment, he thinks he’s got me by the balls. My bet is that he’s behind your latest problems. Sign those papers, and you not only get an expense account with a suite at the Mayflower until you’re activated, but you get your chance to hunt down Eli Grazier and the culprits that caused all that mayhem in the Rockies.”

  Hanson took the offered pen and signed.

  14

  Ryan

  I considered the Capresso machine to be one of my greatest triumphs in the post–Santa Fe days. I’d placed the requisition in with all the other equipment that my team had requested. After Eli waved his magic funding wand, the American taxpayer—and who knew how many future generations—picked up the bill.

  Karla’s trick SEAL equipment, ET’s computers, Cat’s biochem lab, all totaled up to a wince-inducing sum, but the price tag for Winny’s new helicopter, not to mention the aircraft she could co-opt on a moment’s notice, left me speechless.

  What the Capresso machine cost wasn’t more than the equivalent of a subatomic particle in the universe of Ward Six’s new budget.

  I knew better than to ask Eli, who oversaw funding for all this. Plus, when you think about it, the notion that we were now the first line of defense against inter-dimensional raiders was sobering. The reality that Alpha and Fluvium had appeared in our past, were using our branch of the timeline to conduct bioweapons experiments on a global scale, went beyond anything Mengele could have contemplated during his most devious days at Auschwitz.

  Imagine it if you will: You want to test a vaccine against a particularly vicious strain of smallpox that you’ve cooked up in a lab. Pick an alternate branch of the timeline, pop into their past, inoculate the population, and release your insidious plague. Pop back to the present in your branch and write up the notes. Pick a time a few hundred years in the study population’s future and pop back in. Viola! An entire two-hundred-year epidemiological study has run its course. See who’s alive and who’s dead. Just record the data, take your samples, and pop back to your original branch. It’s all there, an epidemiological record of evolution, morbidity, mortality, side effects, and vaccine efficacy covering two hundred years.

  I had to admire the cold-blooded elegance of it. Even if it begged the question: So what if you inflicted misery, suffering, and slow and hideous death upon millions? After all, it wasn’t your world, just an alternate branch somewhere in Hilbert space.

  Did that make the suffering, death, and horror any less morally offensive?

  Those thoughts were rolling through my head as I cradled my cup of fresh-brewed foam-topped Capresso coffee and walked through the gleaming halls to Harvey Rogers’ lab. It was once a suite of rooms where we kept the worst of the OCD patients. After knocking out a couple of walls, pouring concrete into forms over an insane amount of rebar woven into lattice and adding a three-hundred–pound security door, we had a place to safeguard Fluvium’s cerebrum, the brain that calculated the N-dimensional pathways that allowed the navigator to find its way between the infinite branches of timeline.

  The navigator, of course, was still somewhere in the future with Alpha. Eli’s plan was to grab it and Alpha the moment they popped back into the present. Eli considered keeping the two pieces of alien equipment in any kind of proximity to Alpha would be a security risk of the highest sort. So, while research proceeded at Los Alamos, Harvey ran his own analysis of the top-secret cerebrum here at Grantham.

  The door was open, voices audible as I approached and called, “Anyone home?”

  “Just us mice,” Rogers called back.

  I stepped in to find Harvey Rogers perched with his butt on the corner of his desk. In the swivel chair he reserved for visitors, Sam Savage reclined with his muscular legs crossed. Didn’t matter that the guy was dressed in Dockers, a button-down shirt, and loafers, he still looked like he’d just stepped off the reservation. But meet those quick black eyes and any doubt vanished about the man’s West Point education—he’d finished first in his class—or the PhD in indigenous religious studies from Georgetown. As a specialist in covert operations, first in the army and then the CIA’s clandestine forces, Savage had excelled.

  Rogers was just the opposite: a beanpole of a physicist, he—and his lab—had come to us from Aberdeen Proving Ground. The guy was a stereotypic geek with bottle-bottom glasses, wore a stained lab coat, and had one of those thin and pale faces covered with a week’s scraggle of patchy beard. Rogers’ specialty had been in the study and analysis of communications equipment, specifically that which was being developed by our geopolitical adversaries. Two generations ago, he would have been Alan Turing’s alter ego at Bletchley Park, jazzing over an Enigma machine. The difference between then and now was that Enigma could be defeated by the technology of the time. Rogers hadn’t a clue as to how the N-dimensional qubit matrix for the cerebrum had been manufactured, let alone how to program it.

  It frightened him.

  If Harvey Rogers was frightened by a piece of technology, I was smart enough to be terrified to my roots.

  “Am I disturbing anything?” I asked, coming to a stop inside the door.

  Harvey had his desk and chair in the back. One wall—covered with oversized shelves—sported all kinds of electrical gizmos; the other wall consisted of solid computer, its nodes all stacked and wired together. A separate dish on the roof connected it to the cloud somewhere. The intimidating vault door dominated the imposing concrete wall. Behind it lay the lab and cerebrum. The latter resided in yet another safe.

  Savage was in the cushy chair, so Harvey rolled his desk chair out and shoved it in my direction, apparently happy to keep his perch on the desk corner.

  “Not a thing. Join us,” Harvey told me, blinking through his thick glasses.

  “Trying to get my brain to accept this Many-Worlds hypothesis,” Savage explained to me, a scowl on his face.

  “Theory,” Harvey corrected. “We’re long past hypothe
ses. They’ve all been tested extensively since Hugh Everett published his Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics paper in 1957. The idea that the universe was constantly branching into different timelines wasn’t something people like Bohr could accept at the gut level.”

  “That makes two of us,” Savage growled. “The way you explain this, I’m splitting into identical copies of myself thousands of times a second.”

  Rogers reached out one of his pens. I figured he was going to draw a diagram. Instead, he just clicked the button on the end. “You’ve flown in an airplane at low altitude?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fast?”

  “Double yeah.”

  “Then up the game. So, let’s say you’re riding a hypersonic missile through the Utah Canyonlands. You know, all those deep, steep-walled winding canyons that branch in all directions. You’re traveling at Mach Five. The walls are flashing past in a blur as you wind through the maze of sandstone rock. At each branching canyon, you can go one way or the other. Let’s say you go left. Making that choice splits you. You don’t feel it. All you can see is straight ahead. Tunnel vision. The canyon rushing toward you, past you. You aren’t aware that other ‘yous’ are racing down their own canyons, splitting. For them—like you—there is only the canyon they’re in, unwinding before them. The splitting happens so fast you can’t see it.”

  “So, it’s all about perception?” I asked, sipping my coffee.

  Rogers fixed on me. “You’re seeing the timeline you’re following because this is how it looks, how it feels when you live in a Many-Worlds universe. People thought the sun moved around the Earth for millennia because it felt like they were standing still when they looked up at the sky. It wasn’t until it was proved that the Earth was moving around the sun that people understood that this was how it felt to be standing on a rotating planet moving around a stationary star.”

  I gestured with my coffee. “So, Harvey, how many of these branches of timelines are there?”

  “Depends on how many dimensions there are in our universe. They call that Hilbert space. The number’s probably big enough that you could consider it endless.” He tilted his head at the locked vault. “Like that cerebrum in there, if my understanding is correct, it can make more calculations than there are particles in the universe. Maybe by a factor of ten.” He clicked a staccato on his pen. “And that, Dr. Ryan, is one of the things I lie awake fretting about.”

  Savage threw his arms up. “All right. How does Alpha find her way through the multitude, and once she does, what lets her and this Fluvium character flit between them?”

  “I don’t know. Not for sure. Somehow, the navigator finds the way and the cerebrum computes the course. The interaction between the two pieces of equipment allows the field generation that carries her between branches.”

  “But they’re separate worlds, right? Like different. As I understand it, once the separation takes place, the copies don’t touch.”

  “Goes back to Everett,” Rogers told me. “His fundamental assumption was that the universe is a single wave function. That’s the tie.”

  I said, “Being a psychologist, I’m a little hazy on this wave function thing.”

  Rogers twiddled with his pen. “Wave’s kind of a misnomer for the lay person. Think of it more as a cloud. The cloud can be thought of as energy vibrating in all dimensions. Where the cloud is thickest is where—if you happen to measure it at the right time—you have the highest probability of observing a particle.”

  “So,” Savage asked, “where’s the particle that’s the universe?”

  “It’s everywhere,” Rogers said, exasperated. “Here’s the thing: I was trained in the Copenhagen tradition. Observation created the reality. Many-Worlds was something we scoffed at. I can still give you a dozen reasons why it doesn’t work: like the law of conservation of energy, for one. I’m supposed to believe that each time the universe branches, energy is halved? And it happens, for all intents and purposes, infinitely? That means that each version of you must, under the law, contain half the energy you did prior to the split.”

  “I don’t feel like I’m wasting away,” Savage replied.

  “And there’s entropy,” I added, delighted to toss in what little physics I might have actually known about.

  “Entropy isn’t really a problem,” Rogers told me. “It works the same in either interpretation. Look, if you want to know all about the details, Google Hugh Everett and the Many-Worlds interpretation. Google the physicists David Deutsch and David Wallace. You can knock yourself out learning the theory, all about decoherence and entanglement. Me, I got a problem. Behind that vault door I’ve got a box locked away that shouldn’t exist. Some lady just vanished from Lab One in a time machine, and she’s got another box that shouldn’t exist. The Mayanists are studying a guy who’s supposedly from another timeline. All of that points to the fact that Alpha and Fluvium really did come from an alternate branch in the timeline. My problem isn’t proving Many-Worlds; it’s figuring out what to do about it.”

  “Makes you wish all those physicists hadn’t spent the last century shrugging off Many-Worlds, doesn’t it?”

  Rogers just gave me a humorless scowl.

  KA’AAK

  I stare at the fire. It burns brightly in the desert night. Crackling, popping, it sends sparks and smoke dancing and twisting up into the darkness. I like using the Yucatec term, ka’aak, rather than the Latin term, fuego. Yucatec is a more descriptive language. It sees fire as something alive, more of a force of nature with magical properties.

  I can make these distinctions. Being of noble blood, I can trace my ancestry back six centuries to Claudius Varinus Brutus and his marriage to K’awil K’an Tun, sister to Ahau Wak Chan, or Lord Six Sky, the ruler of Tikal. My family’s history is so tightly interwoven with Ti’ahaule as to be one. Some of my relatives even rose to the rank of Ahau in the days before the Lords became immortal.

  Given my understanding of history, I am fully aware of the responsibility that now lies on my shoulders. The Ultima Ahau ordered me to find Fluvium and Nakeesh. To ensure the return of their navigator and cerebrum. And, if possible, I am to run down and kill or capture the Ennoia and recover her stolen devices. I am not to rest until that task is completed.

  Across the fire, Sak Puh is watching me. She has removed her helmet, letting her dark hair drape down her back. She is Yucatec, commoner-born, from a lowly agricultural lineage consisting of farmers and cacao growers. Subservient menials. She remains cowed in my presence. Wary as a forest deer forced to walk at the side of a jaguar. By whatever freak matching of genetics, she was born with a remarkable mathematical and computational ability that earned her a placement in academy. Her proficiency there garnered her a position as a novice ah tz’ib, or scribe recorder.

  Given the danger of jumping timelines, she was assigned to me. For this mission. I would have preferred a higher-ranking scribe recorder, one who understood what it meant to be noble, to share lordly blood and heritage. Instead, I got Sak Puh. A simple-minded peasant with the mud of the fields still stuck between her toes.

  The turbulence in her soul is reflected from her doe-large eyes. I can see it in her set of her chin, the tension in her moon-round face.

  “You have questions?” I ask.

  At their fire, twenty paces away, I can see the quinque glance in our direction.

  In the distance, a jackal howls.

  “Was it really necessary?” she asks. “You destroyed an entire world.”

  “The world is not destroyed,” I reply. “It will be there if we ever need it.”

  “But all those people . . .” She frowns, which does nothing for her features. “An entire planet’s population . . .”

  “They were a threat.” I point at the cerebrum where its outline is visible in her pack. “You understand the power contained in these devices? Why we are on this m
ission? Nor are we the only team searching for Nakeesh and Fluvium, or for the Ennoia.”

  She nods, clearly disturbed. Asks, “You have done this many times before, haven’t you?”

  “A few,” I reply.

  “Have you ever gone back to a timeline you’ve sterilized?”

  “I have.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Rather pleasant, actually. Walking among the ruins, all you hear is birdsong.”

  The look she gives me in return is even more troubled. I am of the growing opinion that if she survives this mission, I will have to dismiss her with prejudice.

  But then, standards have to be maintained.

  15

  Kaplan

  Maxine Kaplan was hunched at her desk, a cold cup of coffee having sat for long enough to leave a scummy ring inside the white ceramic. She pinched the bridge of her nose as if she could force understanding into her muzzy brain. On her large Apple monitor, lines of numbers flowed in vertical columns. The data—collected by the detectors monitoring the crater in Lab One—might have been nothing more than random noise. If there was a pattern, the statistical programs couldn’t pick it out.

  She blinked, saw what might be a pattern begin to form . . . only to have it fade into the endlessly random assortment of numbers. Or was she just imaging things? She blocked the numbers. Tagged them. The statistical program immediately analyzed the data, declared them a chance occurrence at the .05 level of confidence.

  When Kaplan and Wixom had originally installed the detectors, they’d expected to find patterns of energy, like a wake left behind in the passage of Domina Nakeesh’s time travel. That they hadn’t was forcing her to think about time in a different way. Nakeesh hadn’t “accelerated” through time, or at least hadn’t left any trace of momentum in the classical sense. Instead, the transition appeared to be instantaneous. One moment she and Tanner Jackson were there; the next they—along with the machine, most of Nakeesh’s workstation, and a chunk of the floor—were gone.