Chapter 1

"C'mon, Andy. You're acting like you've never flown before." Wilma squirmed in the hard plastic seats. She wondered why they would call a place a waiting area, and then make waiting there so uncomfortable. Zoned out passengers drifted by, trying not to be seen looking at Andy, who was emitting miserable groans. Wilma smiled apologies to an elderly couple who tsked-tsked past. When she turned back, two grey-suited men caught her attention by trying too hard to blend in with the crowd. They sped up as she stared, noticing spatters of dye staining their blond hair dark.

"There must have been something wrong with the QuAcc drives," said Andy. His voice struggled out through deep breaths and swallowed nausea. "Maybe the quantum field effect wasn't properly contained," he theorized weakly.

"You know that's not possible." Wilma lectured as if to a school child unable to produce a satisfactory answer. "The quantum fields in the QuAcc drive are less than 17 microns across. They can't possible reach the cabin area."

"Of course, why didn't I think of that? You know? I feel better already." Oddly, he did feel better. As if his body was pulling itself together for the argument.

Andy shut up while he struggled to get his nausea under control. The fact was the he didn't know a quantum field from a Feynman diagram. He had managed to avoid questions about the fundamental nature of the universe by studying geology. For him, the universe was made up of minerals, liquids and gases. He liked the fact that he could touch these things and describe them with adjectives about hardness, color and texture. Wilma didn't require such tangibility. For her, the world was made of mathematical concepts with metaphorical attributes. She didn't need to see a quark to be perfectly satisfied that it existed.

"Don't tell me you can say for certain what goes on with those drives," Andy interrupted, "There's like a billion fields in there, right? And they're all flinging themselves all over the place. That can't be safe. Didn't I read that flight crews have a higher rate of autoimmune disease?"

"Where did you read that? In some supermarket checkout? Maybe it was in the Journal of Stupid Things to be Scared of. There are fewer than 10,000 quantum fields in most designs and they are inside a reactive matrix that keeps all the quantum effects sealed off." Wilma was getting ready to describe the equations that proved her point when she noticed the glazed look that meant that Andy wasn't listening. "Maybe you're just feeling the stress?" Wilma patted the laptop significantly. Every record from the last two months of data gathering at the NARC lab in Arizona had been moved to that laptop. The lack of a backup alone was enough to give anyone a case of nerves. But the real stomach churner was what the data meant.

"I'll sure be glad once we get to Big Lake and I can get rid of this thing. How much longer until the connecting flight?"

"Excuse me, Drs. Jamison and Jefferson?" A tall man in a grey suit stood over the couple. Behind him was an identical man who watched the whole room from behind his dark glasses. "There has been a change of plans. Please come with us."

Andy moved slowly, hoping to keep his stomach under control as he got to his feet.

"I can't quite place your accent, are you from Minnesota?" The question brought Andy to a halt. Among Wilma's many extraordinary talents was knack for placing accents. She was a regular Professor Higgins right out of Pygmalion. Why would she have trouble placing the distinctive lilt in the grey suited man's voice?

"There's no time for that, we have a car waiting outside." As the grey suited man's impatience grew, even Andy could place the man's round vowels and bouncing emphasis of a Scandinavian.

"Andy, I think we should leave," said Wilma tugging his sleeve as she tried to move away from the grey suit. In an instant the second man made his move. A little girl holding her mother's hand watched the dance-like step that somehow ended with the attackers on either side of the scientists. Andy winced as his hand was bent at an odd angle that exposed sensitive nerves to the pressure of a probing thumb.

"Come quietly and you won't get hurt." Definitely from Denmark, thought Andy. They sounded just like the evil spies from the movies. To his left he felt Wilma struggling against her captor. The man countered her twists and turns until he got her arm wrapped behind her and shoved up to her shoulder blades. "Really, Dr. Jefferson, we don't want to hurt you." He pushed her hand up until her shoulder made a faint popping sound. Pain flared across her back and showed on her face as a film of sweat and a grimace. "Now, if you are done, let us proceed quietly."

The unpleasant government agent who had come down to NARC after their discovery had been very clear about what to do if something like this happened. There was a hidden button on the laptop to push, then, five seconds later the pain, along with everything else, would be over in a blast of high explosives. At the time, the careful instructions on how to detonate the explosive seemed melodramatic and exciting. He never believed he would ever have to use it.

Thoughts of what would happen when he pushed the button had been on his mind ever since the trouble getting through security. They were standing in line with their shoes and identity papers in their hands next to a sign that listed banned items. Explosives were not specifically mentioned, but neither were rocket launchers or poison gas, some things could be assumed. They made it to the front of the line where a bored security guard pointed at the conveyor belt and told him to place the laptop in a plastic basket. Andy showed him the chain and the manacle on his wrist and shrugged.

There must have been a page somewhere in the TSA training manual on how to handle such situations, but the high school drop-out security guard had not read it. He insisted that the laptop must go in the basket despite the flawless logic Wilma and Andy applied to the situation. Unless he wanted Andy to go through the x-ray machine too, there was no way to get the laptop on the conveyor belt. It took ten minutes for the ruckus to bring a supervisor out of a hidden office to see what was holding up the line. She had read the manual. It was simple, she explained to the guard, all that was required was to run Andy's papers through a scanner to see that he had clearance to bring an unexamined bag aboard. As easily done as said, the guard waved them through and ordered them to have a nice flight.

The button was easy to reach, but the mechanism required a specific movement that was designed to be awkward to reduce the possibility of accidentally setting it off. Andy had practiced the procedure and was certain that he could pull it off even with the goon clamping down on his arm. That only left the question, was he ready to blow himself up for his country? He flashed a look at Wilma. She had given up struggling, a move that Andy interpreted as acceptance of what they both knew he had to do.

It wasn't fair, really, to expect a couple of scientists to sacrifice themselves like this. Sure, that possibility was part of work for the government at NARC. The campus agent who approached Andy back in grad school made it sound like a great adventure. Foreign spies, secret formulas and the threat of danger sounded more interesting than spending a dull life in a university lab like most of his fellow students. When he told his mother about the move to Arizona, he pointed out that it was very unlikely that a geologist would ever be in any real danger. Heck, he wouldn't even be out in the field where a boulder might fall on him. He would spend his life in a well equipped lab staring at a computer.

Yet, here he was. He had no choice. The agent from Big Lake had made it clear that if he let the information in the laptop fall into enemy hands, he would be executed for treason. He might as well go out in a blast of glory. His senses took in every detail of the strong thin fingers of the hand that held him fast. The goon's other hand held a nasty looking pistol made of plastic, no doubt, to get through security. The strong smell of cologne drowned out Andy's own travel funkiness. He turned so that Wilma would be the last thing he saw and twisted his fingers towards the detonator.

"Hvad er han gør?" Andy's goon grabbed the laptop and pulled it away from the reaching fingers. The manacle bit into the soft flesh of his wrist, making Andy scream.

"What's going on there?" yelled a security guard, reaching for his radio.

"Løbe!" ordered the first grey suit. The second took a moment to reach into his pocket for a tool that cut the hardened steel chain as if it were string before disappearing with the laptop.

"Thank you, officer." said Wilma to the security guard. "I think those men meant to kill us."

The guard was shouting into his radio while he gestured for the couple to raise their hands.

"No, you don't understand..."

The security guard cut off any further explanation by repeating his pantomimed order. Andy shrugged and raised his hands. "Please get us away from here," insisted Wilma. "There may be more of those agents in the airport." Andy gave her a startled look. The idea that there might be more trouble had not occurred to him.

"She's right. We could all be in serious danger." He reached for his papers, but failed when the guard shoved him up against the wall and ordered him to hold still. "Got any ideas?" he asked Wilma, who shook her head, earning another shove and an order to keep quiet from the guard.

The voice from the radio was nearly unintelligible, but the security guard acknowledged the message before he slumped to the ground. Wilma shouted a warning to Andy as a blur swept into the corner of his vision. A strong hand wearing a thin glove gripped the back of his neck and pushed him to the wall before everything went black.

 

Chapter 2

When Andy and Wilma came to, they were inside the stark cabin of a military helicopter. They slumped together on hard benches welded to the floor along the side of the cabin. Wilma saw Andy’s lips moving, but the sound of turbine engines made hearing impossible. She put her hand to her ear and wagged her head to show him the problem. Andy, a known charades dolt, kept speaking until Wilma pulled a headset off a hook near his head and settled it over his ears. There was another set above her head that she hoped was connected to the microphone that now traced Andy’s jaw line. She put on the headset, immediately cutting the sound of the engines to a tolerable level.

"You'll have a bit of a headache from the transdermal. It'll go away soon," said a disembodied voice in the headset. It must have come from figure seated across from them. His face was concealed behind the dark visor of a helmet that Wilma thought looked like a giant insect head.

"You drugged us?" The after effects of the drug felt like the morning after a night of mixing cheap scotch with cheaper beer. "Wasn't that a little over the top?"

"No," stated the voice. The figure shrugged slightly. "Letting you run around on your own was what got you into trouble in the first place. Having you unconscious simplified things." There was something familiar about the voice, but Wilma's drug fogged mind couldn't connect the required memories. She rubbed at her throbbing temples and tried to think. Her life had become surreal over the last week.

“Agent Riley?” she asked the figure. Riley appeared at the lab shortly after they informed the chief scientist of the anomalies in the seismic data. She found him at her computer one morning downloading files onto the laptop. He looked up at her and introduced himself without apology. The way he seemed entitled to snoop in her data made her angry. His claim to be the agent in charge of her discovery didn’t impress her in the least. But the easy I-kill-people-for-a-living look in his eyes kept her from saying anything. She seethed as he explained that they needed to move all the data on their discovery to some military base in Minnesota that she had never heard of. He promised that the trip to Big Lake in Minnesota would be completely routine. A short flight, meet with General Allison, turn over the data and they would be home in time for dinner. Wilma didn't trust him, especially after he told them about the explosive device. "If nothing can go wrong," she asked, "Why do we need an exploding laptop?" he smiled like a politician at a fund raiser when he assured her that it was just a routine precaution. He didn't say anything about agents in airports, transdermal knock out patches or getaway helicopters. What else had he hid from them?

"Who were those guys back at the airport?"

"Danes," said the disembodied voice. Andy nudged Wilma and mouthed the name Riley. Wilma patted his leg to compliment him on his insight.

"How did they find out about our discovery?"

"They didn't. One of their operatives in Arizona had a file on all the people at NARC. When they saw you with the laptop, they decided to intercept you. Kidnapping people who might know something is their favorite trick. You would have been the eleventh and twelfth people they snatched this year."

Andy rubbed his wrist where the manacle had cut him when the goon grabbed the laptop. "Then they got lucky. Now they know we found out about their operation," said Andy.

"I wouldn't call them lucky." The air in the helicopter went cold as the scientists realized how bad it could be to have your luck run out around Riley. "They had some technical difficulties with the computer," he said. The headset distorted his voice, but Wilma was certain she heard him chuckle slightly. Riley held up a wrist monitor, its screen glowing in the dark. "We tracked the laptop to one of their safe houses. They must have used the wrong password or something because there was a police report of an explosion at that address ten minutes ago. With any luck we got four or five of those guys."

Andy felt his skin crawl as he listened to Riley speak of the deaths like a gourmand who has just finished a banquet.

"All our data was on that laptop," complained Andy. "That's the whole reason for this trip, no backups, nothing on the network. That was the idea, right?" He turned to Wilma and continued, "Now we have to convince the General that something is happening with no data to prove it. Not only that, but how is the General going to do anything about it if we can't give him the precise locations of the anomalies?"

No one spoke for awhile as the chopper droned on. There was a smell to the antique airframe that Andy couldn't quite place. It had an edgy sweetness to it that was nauseating and pleasant at the same time. There was some old memory hidden in that scent, something from when he was a boy. His class went on a field trip to the history museum. It must have been in the third or fourth grade. Andy and his friend, Skylar, slipped away from the group to investigate a truck that was getting attention from most of the museum staff. On the open flatbed of the truck was a cylindrical object covered in a complex pattern of pipes, wires, pumps and valves. It was the most marvelous piece of machinery either boy had ever seen. Unlike modern devices with microscopic circuits hidden in plastic boxes, or the plain looking containers that held QuAcc drives, this machine proudly displayed its guts for all to see.

The museum staffers were just as excited as the boys. A small group listened carefully as a wrinkled and grey hair mechanic walked them through the principles of the turbine engine. He moved from the high bypass fan to the compressors, combustion chambers, turbines and exhaust before he revealed the big surprise. The boys moved in closer to examine the drum that was as tall as they were and bigger around than their young arms could reach.

"Is that what I think it is?" asked a museum worker.

"If you think it's Jet A fuel, it is what you think it is," grinned the mechanic.

"Where did you get it?"

"I know a guy up in Canada. He hung on to a few barrels after the thing in the mid-east." The museum workers looked at their shoes for an awkward moment. Even back then it was traditional to be ashamed when the subject of what would later be referred to as, the regrettable solution came up. "Made a fortune when supplies ran low. Damn QuAcc technology put him and me out of business though. Big mistake if you ask me. Man isn't supposed to be messing with the fabric of the universe. That's what I say." There was polite silence from the museum staffers. "Anyway, my friend had a few barrels left over, and I thought you kids might enjoy seeing what a real machine looked like."

Eager hands came forward to help with the fuel, then the electrical system and pre-start checks. The group took a respectful step back before the mechanic ran through the start sequence and brought the engine to life.

When Andy told the story, he always talked about the noise and the hot wind that came out of the back of the engine blowing out a window. Now, it was the distinctive smell of burnt jet fuel that he recalled as the most significant sensation. The smell had disappeared with the last of the petroleum fuels in the two decades since that day.

800 gallons of fuel later, the helicopter landed in a clearing next to a squat cinderblock building on the shore of Big Lake. The woods were deeply silent after the turbines shut down. Andy took Wilma's hand to steady himself, not trusting his legs after the rough trip. "What do you think we should tell the general?"

"Don't worry," smiled Wilma, "I have a plan."

 

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