Jaunt (30 page)

One by one, the blobs became somewhat recognizable, losing their luminosity as tangibility increased. The staff soon brought their hands down to see a variety of objects emerge from the white soup, the first being a surprisingly good facsimile of concrete walls altogether different than the gallery’s trademark pyramids.

The team found themselves in a stark facility, devoid of personality, but full of industrial sterility. Dingy, rusted pipes lay above them, stretching on for several meters ahead into a corridor. Handwritten Cyrillic signs were bolted to several doors along the way, leading into a larger section of the facility, perhaps a laboratory.

“Irkutsk?” Gilmour asked.

De Lis nodded. “It would appear so, although I expected more, for some reason.”

Marlane walked ahead of the group a few steps to inspect a holographic handcart left in the corridor. She faced de Lis. “Doctor, this hologram appears rather...well, flat. No movement, nor sound.”

Gilmour took note of this inconsistency as well. He felt an unnaturalness, but couldn’t place it. Marlane had pinned it, though; nothing made a peep...not a squeaky gear, nor moaning, overworked equipment. It felt dead, perhaps even more so than the holograph Valagua had constructed of Nepal those many months ago.

“Carol, this is a static image just obtained from the web....” a voice out of thin air began to explain, which they all recognized as Valagua’s.

The team then scanned the corridor, for the first time noticing that Valagua was
nowhere to be found
. Somehow he had vanished between the flash and the first appearance of the holographic corridor.

Valagua continued, “...Programmed to orient the gallery’s systems. In actuality, what you are seeing is merely a nanosecond, a single frame of time imprisoned in the gallery now.”

To the staff’s right flank, the corridor wall rippled, stunning them. Light itself curved around an object which now approached the assembled group. A foot, then a leg, followed by a swinging hand, then a second foot and an arm pushed through. Finally, Valagua was reconstituted, or more correctly, uncovered.

“Pardon my entrance,” Valagua said. “I should have warned you that I’d be hidden for a moment over there.” He jutted a thumb backwards. “The holographic simulation doesn’t quite extend to the gallery’s fullest perimeter.”

“Nice trick. I’ll have to keep it in mind,” Gilmour quipped.

De Lis interrupted Valagua’s unintended diversion. “Javier, when can we have a full datastream available?”

“At your command, Richard.”

De Lis nodded. “Let’s allow Agent Gilmour to get to work. Everybody out.”

With that command, Dark Horse, Waters, Marlane and de Lis himself stepped away from Gilmour and instinctually headed for the nearest metal door to exit.

Waters was about to set a hand on the door knob when Valagua asked, “Where are you going?”

Stacia looked at the door askance. “Out...?”

“That’s the gallery’s north wall. Door’s over here,” Valagua said before breaking away from the group and walking straight into what at first appeared to be a water pipe junction laid next to the wall.

The team exchanged bewildered glances, then decided by following Valagua that the man knew what he was doing.

Gilmour watched the light bubble around the group as they filed out, one after another. The entire exit was one more bizarre moment to add to his ever burgeoning list.
How do I keep getting myself into this?

“Take it easy, Alpha...you’re doing great.”

Gilmour’s head spun in all directions; the Alpha illegal’s line of sight was bouncing all over the place, leaving the special agent near nausea just by virtue of being privy to Alpha’s own point of view. Then again, how often has a man been able to practice keeping his eyeballs steady so that someone else piggybacking on them wouldn’t get sick? Gilmour would have to get over it, and fast; there was no time for whining.

“Just get us near the loading bay.”

Alpha pushed open a set of double doors, then walked past several fleeing lorries. Red and yellow motion lights flickered and strobed throughout the bay, lending the entire dock an unearthly sulfur pall. Scores of Russian dockworkers, decked out in white radiation suits and yellow hardhats, scurried past Alpha towards another section of the bay. The traffic here was incredible, Gilmour thought, leading him to believe an operation was undeniably imminent; all the better then that the DoD had proceeded as swiftly as they had to relocate the illegals.

“Okay, Alpha, could you do a sweep of the loading bay?”

The holographic loading bay screamed past Gilmour’s eyes in a 360-degree panorama, fleetingly registering to his brain.

“Aahh!! Take that swing a little less harshly next time, please.”

After giving himself a moment’s pause, Gilmour consulted his weblinked holobook and decided on the next course. “Head for that metal door straight ahead. Remember, we’re just one of the boys here, nothing to see....”

In front of them was an overhead door, large enough to allow a lorry inside. Walking over to a closed door next to the overhead, Alpha spied a sign adorned with an ominous message: “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ADMITTED ONLY. UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS WILL BE

SUBJECT TO USE OF DEADLY FORCE.” The curt warning stuck in Gilmour’s thoughts, reminding him of the stakes if he failed; he imagined Alpha’s nerves were chilled by now.

Alpha’s right glove disappeared from Gilmour’s view, then quickly reappeared, producing a pass key. Swiping the card through the door’s panel, a green light clicked on overhead, admitting Alpha into what appeared to be a small holding chamber, lined with grey shelves along the concrete block walls.

“Head for those huge, reinforced grey metal shelves to your right.”

A few meters away, packed horizontally onto the shelves, were what Gilmour took to be the
Strela
warheads. He looked at them again; they were packed horizontally. Hell, all three agents had drilled the last few days with them standing upright. No one thought to know that the
Strela
s were being loaded to ship immediately; they must have had only hours to spare.

“Uhh...okay, Alpha, slight problem.”

For a second, the scene froze, giving Gilmour the stomach-sinking sensation that perhaps the uplink had developed a glitch.

“All right, bear with me here.” Gilmour took a deep breath, then consulted his holobook before he continued. “Haven’t worked with the
Strela
horizontally before, only vertically. Should be the same, though,” he hoped.

Alpha’s white-gloved hands, cut-off from the elbow up, reappeared again just below and ahead of Gilmour’s body, waiting for Gilmour’s next instructions.

“Next, I you need to pass the interlock on the cone sheath. Here’s the encryption code.” Tapping a blue button on his holobook, Gilmour transmitted a complex numerical sequence through the weblink.

There was a brief pause before Alpha’s gloved hands reached for the bottom-first
Strela
and entered the code onto the nosecone sheath’s encryption lock. A green LCD lit-up on the cone sheath, and the gloved hands took off the cone and set it down on the floor. The next stage below the nosecone sheath was the taut red and yellow fluorescent foil Gilmour remembered from their drills.

“All right, this is the security housing for the radiation hood. Swipe the pass key through the microlock,” he said, the procedure by rote in his brain. “Underneath that chamber is a blue disk, the QPU. I am going to give you the code to reprogram the disk.”

Gilmour tapped another button on his holobook, transmitting the second code halfway around the world.

Watching his holobook for confirmation, Gilmour wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. Time itself seemingly had stopped...seconds seemed to melt into hours. What was taking so long?

A chirp broke his rumination; his eyes looked to the holobook. Confirmation, finally.

“Yes! Get that warhead back into shape! We’ve got a whole set of other ones to do before we can get the hell out of here!"

“Excellent work, Agent Gilmour,” Rauchambau lauded. “I have to add that I’m not easily impressed.”

Gilmour stepped out of the gallery, two hours and several minutes after entering the room, to find de Lis, Dark Horse, Rauchambau, Waters, Valagua, Marlane, Constantine and McKean waiting for his exit in U5-1.

“Hell, I never thought it’d work. I have to hand it to you, Gilmour,” Constantine said.

Dark Horse crossed his arms. “Not to deflate your elation, gentlemen, but we’re only a baby step into this operation. Agent Constantine, I believe you are slated for the Beta shift?”

“Yes, Colonel, I am.”

“Then we have no time to waste,” de Lis concurred. “Javier, get the gallery set-up for Beta.”

“Already on it.” Valagua raced past the group and headed back into the gallery, followed by Constantine.

Gilmour invited himself along to the gallery’s observation anteroom, where he, McKean, Waters and the others reconvened. Peeking through a hole made by the bystanders, Gilmour witnessed the gallery shift from its normal mode to a dark corridor, not too dissimilar from the corridor he was in, but clearly a different location. Constantine did not seem to be distracted by this shift, Gilmour noted; the special agent consulted his holobook, just like he had been trained, and immediately commenced his shift.

Constantine’s voice sounded crisply through the anteroom’s speakers as he instructed the Beta illegal through his first leg of the operation. Gilmour again marveled at the humanity of the holographic Russian dockworkers passing by Constantine—every movement was fluid, not stilted as he still expected, perhaps due to the synthetic nature of the holograms the special agents worked with during the drills.

From his new vantage, Gilmour remarked to Waters just how bizarre the floating gloves of Beta looked ahead of Constantine.

“At first, you’re right,” Stacia answered. “But after the numerous drills you three put yourself through, it’s kind of become normal, in a theoretical studies sort of way, just like everything else here since you gents arrived.”

Gilmour forgave himself for cracking a smile. “I’ll take that to be a compliment.”

Back on the monitor, Constantine and Beta’s gloves happened upon a well-lit assembly bay. Constantine turned about the bay as he encroached it. “This must be where the
Strela
s are assembled.” He double-checked his holobook.

To Gilmour, the bay resembled every old photograph of the twentieth-century-era NASA probe facilities, the ones where, as a kid, he watched the rocket scientists poring over the tall machines, checking every system before a launch. They impressed upon him a sense of the supremacy of technology, of how humanity could make out of all that cold metal and circuitry a better understanding of our place in the greatness of life, of the universe. Now watching Constantine walk over the grey cemented floors of that Confederation facility, he longed for that juvenile wonder, wishing humanity would strive for that achievement again, not the furthering of Armageddon.

Constantine strode past a cadre of white bunny suits, all of whom seemingly took the illegal as normal. Gilmour’s partner went left and headed towards a raised platform. The holographic view spun 360 degrees around Constantine—taking Gilmour aback—then returned to the forward position, giving the special agent a feel for the assembly bay. Arriving at the platform’s grated metal steps, the hologram of the bay dropped a step down, providing Constantine and the observation viewers the illusion they had ascended the platform. Several more drops like this followed before Constantine and the holographic gloves made it to the two-meter-high top step, which overlooked two dozen buffed and scintillating titanium warheads.

“Okay, Beta,” Constantine said over the observation speakers, “take one more view of the surroundings here. I’m not too sure about us sitting atop here.”

Constantine was right to have reservations. Seeing the 360-degree swing one more time from Beta’s POV, Gilmour was convinced the illegal was as close to a set-up as he could be. Having the high ground was ideal in a battlefield situation, but in the assembly bay, everyone and their brother could see what they were doing up there. Beta had to be great, better than just damn good, like Gilmour’s counterpart a while ago.

Once the two began their disassembly of the first
Strela
, Gilmour noticed himself—

along with the others in the observation anteroom—giving a recitation of his instructions to Constantine and Beta, so ingrained had the training become over the past few days. All his years of service to the Agency couldn’t defeat his natural human tendency to keep his thoughts to himself; it was a sense of duty Gilmour wouldn’t allow to be taken away.

Watching Constantine instruct Beta, Gilmour kept time on his wrist chrono, mentally tallying the list of instructions Constantine read aloud, then timing the holographic gloves per each step of the way. The first warhead disassembly was long by about four seconds; seeing a close-up of Constantine’s face, Gilmour read the bottled anxiety that perhaps no one, save he and McKean, could detect.

Dark Horse shot a concerned look to Gilmour, but the special agent saw nothing but Constantine. The colonel counted from his own chrono and returned his gaze to the monitor. A rapid twitch in the back of his mind broke through his shielded sense of repose.