An unexpected feeling of free fall exuded sheer terror in Carl and the fact the fall was in utter darkness and rain didn’t help.
Thankfully, the fall only lasted long enough for his stomach to feel it. Crashing through treetops slowed him until dense vegetation finally brought him to an abrupt stop. Never making it to the ground, he hung suspended in a tangle of vines.
"Tris! Tris!" Carl shouted.
Raindrops thumped on nearby leaves as his eyes gradually adjusted to the moonless night. He tried to survey his surroundings, but blackness encircled him at arm's reach.
"Tris!" Carl called again.
He carefully tried to move his feet and legs. Extracting the KA-BAR
from its sheath on his right leg, he cut himself free from the vines. He descended slowly and found himself only a meter above a large boulder.
Big and small miracles, he said to himself sliding down and over the slippery, wet surface. His left hip protested angrily as he felt solid ground.
He knew he would spend the night on Mount Piquet. He slumped next to the boulder finding little cover from the continuing downpour, but the rain soothed his right cheek and hand that were stinging from Pelee’s burns. The stench of the volcano still permeated his clothes.
He pulled his sat-chron from its pocket by its chain and thumbed it open. It glowed ‘29 March 2075, 02:31’.
Plus. No wonder the SECDEF’s not here, he thought, And who the fuck was the blood-caked man with the TIA? He had seemed vaguely familiar.
Carl had made transit from the Mountain’s new hub at Peterson to Plus where Major Timberin had arranged covert transport to Martinique.
He then made transit from Plus to Prime by way of the same old villa the last mission had used. It was under construction when he arrived, but recon had previously secured the location ensuring a clean transit.
He wondered where the TRs were. It surprised him the mission clock was off by less than a year given the different transit locations. He considered Higgs’ new monopole modifications might be responsible.
He couldn’t sleep, but the time gave him an opportunity to consider his options in Plus. He knew the primary invasion had begun over four years ago and the catastrophic attack on DC was only six months away.
Plus was now a very dangerous place.
He and the SECDEF had long discussions regarding the inherent risks of a paradox and he had spent ten years living another life just to avoid those risks. He finally came down to one option: find Ms. Scott here. She probably knew the situation in Plus better than anyone.
The rain had stopped by first light and although stiff and sore, Carl was thankful his hip wasn’t worse. He searched the area where he had fallen; there was no trace of any equipment. He had only what he was carrying. Everything else appeared lost to Pelee.
His hike down Mount Piquet took him close to the Andrew’s home.
He stayed out of sight until he was close enough to tell it was now only a burned out shell. Remains of two bodies lay in the rear bedroom, hands bound behind them. He sat on the house’s steps for a time before continuing to the villa.
Carl did not see anyone on the road. Martinique looked deserted. As he approached the villa, he hoped the rescue locker was still there that Major Timberin had insisted the recon team bury in 1902.
Making his way around the southern corner of the villa, he dug the sand away until his knife hit the something hard at almost a meter deep. It was the locker. His hip only slightly complained as he hauled it up and out of the hole.
He broke the seal and scanned the contents. There was ample mission cash, two new model Beretta M9s with extra clips, rations, a passport, drivers license, military ID, and a pad. There was also a set of TRs, but without a working monopole sleeve.
Carl took the pistols, ammunition, money, IDs and pad. After careful deliberation, he left the TRs in the locker and re-buried it.. He would not go back to Prime that way. Any information on the pad about the status of the war in the Caribbean was lacking. He was on his own.
He left the villa and headed to Fort-de-France hoping to find a way off Martinique. He encountered several vehicles along the coast road, even an old tractor- their batteries long dead like their occupants. He wondered if this was the work of nano weapons. In what he guessed must have been a tourist bus, he grabbed a daypack and several bottles of unopened water. Shoving the bottles in the pack, he continued east along the road trying to ignore the death and destruction in his path.
The docks in Port-de-France were in shambles; obviously thousands had tried in vain to escape the island. It was a gruesome scene even after four years since the primary attack. Carl heard a few parrots overhead, squawking as they flew past. Except for the mosquitoes that harassed him next to the boulder, they were the only animal life he had seen since his fall.
Wandering through the main dock complex, he noticed a catamaran in dry dock. This will be an adventure, he said to himself and wondered how he could get it into the harbor.
Prime: 12 Oct 2068
John's screen activated in his quarters announcing a final notice for a general meeting. The Deputy Director of Intelligence, Anthony Morris, would address the remaining STS personnel in ten minutes. John was
looking forward to the first review of the Pelee data with Higgs and Jenny, but that would have to wait.
Entering a side entrance of the Mountain's auditorium, John saw most of Jenny's team sitting together across the hall. As he was making his way over to them, General West and the new deputy director entered through the main doors.
"Attention!" someone shouted.
"At ease. Take a seat," West said after reaching the microphone. "It's good to be back under the Mountain, even for a short time."
He scanned the hall, looking into the faces of his previous command.
"I'd like to commend Major Rodney Higgs on his interim command.
These are difficult times, and he has served with great distinction," he said and then received warm, enthusiastic applause.
The general continued, "For those of you that haven't met the new CO; I'd like to introduce Colonel Tony Morris, Deputy Director of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency."
"How can he be a deputy and a colonel?" John whispered to Jenny.
She subtly shrugged her shoulders.
"You know him?" John asked in a whisper.
"We go way back," she replied softly.
"Your work has given our country a chance that Plus never got,"
Morris said. "You have given the enemy a major setback, and we now have time to prepare for war."
He paused surveying the hall. "I'll get right to the point: the new primary STS mission is to provide training and technology transfer to newly forming operational units under the command of Major General West."
"That's a relief," John whispered to Jenny.
Morris continued, "Many of the teams have already transferred to the first of these units. I know we'll be short of warm bodies for a while
until we can back fill with your trained personnel. Colonel Scott's command will expand its scope to investigate and expand tactical applications for TR technology with emphasis on weapon systems'
development."
"Sounds fun. What does it mean?" John asked Jenny.
"Hopefully, pretty much anything," she replied.
"But not everything is changing," Morris said. "Major Higgs will still command the Chronos TR research efforts."
John could sense relief sweep the auditorium.
"My office is always open," Morris said. "And consider the culture under the Mountain officially unchanged. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!" the hall chorused.
"Dismissed." Morris ordered.
"Still on with Higgs in the lab?" John asked Jenny.
"Yeah, I'll meet you there." She left following West and Morris out of the auditorium.
"Higgs is late," John told Jenny as she entered the lab.
"Hi Tye," Jenny said.
"Afternoon Colonel," she replied.
"Word's out," John told Jenny.
"So, who won the pool?" Jenny asked. Leaving her rank behind after the State Department, she had chosen to work as an administrator, relying on personal relationships rather than rank to lead her mostly scientific staff.
Tye and John exchanged awkward glances then Tye finally admitted it was Carl.
"Anything?" John asked Jenny.
"Nothing," Jenny said sensing his concern. There had been no word of Carl for weeks since the eruption and most assumed the worse, but
Jenny suspected John still clung to hope. Trying to lighten John's mood, she said, "The President really appreciated all the work you did."
John looked at her and smirked.
"He did," she said. "Ask the SecDef."
"No mention of Kate?"
"Sure. She got a commendation and a grade promotion."
"Well thanks anyway for passing those kind words on from the President," he said and then chuckled.
"Don't mention it." Jenny said smiling from behind a workstation and hiding from John's view.
"Higgs says he will be five minutes," Tye announced.
John sat down at the workstation next to Jenny. "Any word on your AWOL twin?"
"No. The locals are continuing to investigate," she said tersely.
Jenny was certain she was going to have to find her herself, and she had already re-arranged her schedule for the mission. She had mixed feelings about which sister to find first: Plus or Minus. But decided her Minus sister would be easier to find and would be a welcomed ally when searching Plus.
Jenny looked up at the opening lab doors to see Robert.
"Hi guys!" he said leaning over Jenny's workstation. "You said there was a facial recon script you wanted me to construct."
"It was John's idea," she said focused on a Minus search routine running on her workstation in hopes of finding her Minus twin.
"The lens thing. I remember," John said getting up and selecting a cup of coffee from the lab's dispenser.
"I want to run my facial reconstruction for Luinan through the Mountain's personnel images," Jenny said looking up from her workstation.
"Simple enough," Robert said. "But hasn't it been run already?"
"The facial-feature algorithms have, but not eye color," Jenny explained.
"Again simple enough. Just query purple, violet or even blue eye color in the personnel database. There can't be too many hits."
"For eye color behind a possible lens," Jenny said.
"Ah, I see," Robert said thoughtfully.
John chuckled again, keeping his eyes on his workstation.
"If a person had bright purple eyes what color lens would they have to make them look brown, hazel, green or blue...normal?" Jenny asked.
"Sometimes a lens will overlap the sclera," she explained, "and personnel images are taken at high resolution for security reasons. If we assume whatever the person's eye color is, it's the product of both bright purple eyes and a lens. Maybe we can work backwards from the combined eye color, subtracting out purple and see if that color matches the bit of the lens on the sclera. If we get a match, we get a suspect."
"First, that was not my idea at all," John said locking his workstation and then taking a seat at the lab's worktable, "and second, what is a sclera?"
"The white of the eye," Robert replied. "Sounds doable. Basic color subtraction. I'll get started right away." Robert booted his workstation just as Higgs arrived.
"Keep Mikael in the loop on that, please," Jenny said to Robert as she got up to join John at the worktable.
"No problem," Robert said.
"Sorry I'm late," Higgs said practically falling into a seat across the table from Jenny and John. His curly, red hair seemed even more entangled than usual. It was in stark contrast to the immaculate, white lab coat he always wore over his CDU.
Jenny liked this living scientist stereotype called Higgs. It was hard not to. Besides being a genius and a bit quirky, he was always working
and hardly ever slept. And oddly, he was a good administrator- a rare and valuable asset at the Mountain as well as in the scientific community.
"Are we ready?" Higgs asked.
John and Jenny nodded.
Higgs activated the table's projector and entered the required security keys to access the Pelee eruption's data collected by Carl and the young SecDef. "We received all datum streams with only minor transmission errors and out of all the experiments- results from three are the most interesting.
"As you know, Newtonian forces cause temporal gravity changes, but earth tides and crustal loading or in this case unloading can have significant effects, too. The most interesting gravity measurements were of atmospheric pressure changes relating directly to the Newtonian attraction of the local air mass. We had to correct for the density change from solid to fluid of the local strata. It wasn't too difficult."
Higgs displayed a three-dimensional cloud of data points floating above the table.
"It looks like a bloated banana standing on end," Jenny said.
"These points," Higgs continued, "represent all measurements over the collection period and represent an accuracy of better than one-hundredth of a micro Gal. Time's the vertical axis. The horizontal axes are a corrected gravity derivative and corrected barometric pressure.
"The gravity anomaly, or the bend in your banana," he said looking at Jenny, "was caused by the mass shift associated with the new volcanic crater forming. It's abrupt and continues to the end of data transmission."
"So, we did capture the eruption," John said.
"Definitely," Higgs replied. "The continuation of the anomaly is still under debate. And because we are plotting a derivative of the gravity field against barometric pressure, the effect's continuation suggests the air mass became less dense after the eruption."
"Kind of counter intuitive," John said.
"Or, the local gravity field increased," Higgs added. "That would be consistent with a southerly vector of the nuée ardente and towards Mount Piquet but doesn't match the density models for a mainly westward flow."
"Does this have any relation to transits?" Jenny asked.
"The overall effect is almost ten to the sixth times less than the monopole effect on the old TRs," Higgs said.
Jenny looked at John.
"Probably not," he said with a sigh.
Higgs nodded agreement and pushed the data cloud aside. He displayed another data set, but this time he graphed each datum in only two-dimensions. The data formed a jagged, roughly horizontal trend.
"John, you may be aware of the new quantum accelerometers in use for several years now," Higgs said.
John shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
"Anyway," Higgs continued, "the new QAs record high-resolution changes in the local gravity field. This graph shows time in the horizontal plotted against a corrected gravity derivative. The sharp bends are probably caused by the dislocation of Mount Piquet itself as the solid Earth field is affected."
Jenny looked at the data points and then back at Higgs.
"Probably not," he said. "Don't worry, I've saved the most interesting for last," he said. "The first experiment Dr. Watkins initiated was a prototype of a quantum Hall-effect Teslameter I've been tinkering with for a while. It recorded data for almost a week while we worked out transmission problems with the QAs."
"And a quantum Hall-effect Teslameter does what?" Jenny asked deadpan.
"It predicts electron-electron interactions as a quantum field, but for this experiment, it records changes in the local magnetic field."
"And?" Jenny asked wondering how long it was going to take to get to meaningful answers from these two.
"The magnetic intensity was many times stronger than today's field and highly variable with time," Higgs said displaying a graph, this time in three dimensions.
"Time is vertical, magnetic force and flux density are the horizontal axes," he explained.
Each successive data point joined to the next point in time with a thin line. As Higgs slowly rotated the data cloud above the conference table, the lines twisted and bent around themselves into intricate shapes.
"Now let me display positive and negative polarity," Higgs said and the live graph became more complicated as the lines changed to either red or blue within the intricate shapes.
"I don't understand," John said. "Pelee's eruption caused the local magnetic field to change polarity repeatedly?"
"Definitely not," Higgs replied. "These values for flux density and force were recorded a week before the eruption and although significantly greater, they are still similar in magnitude to values for the Earth's magnetic field."
"I'm lost again," Jenny said.
John said to Higgs, "Pelee could not cause the Earth's magnetic field to reverse several times over the week."
"The data show the Earth's magnetic field was locally flipping,"
Higgs replied, "but it was probably because of an instability occurring coincidently over Martinique during the eruption."
John looked at Jenny then added, "Besides the north and south magnetic poles that wander around the geographical poles, often the earth's inner geodynamo produces relatively localized magnetic-field instabilities. These can drift across the globe, flipping polarity and changing intensity for decades. The earth can have two or more north or south poles at any latitude at any one time."
"Instabilities are a recognized compass-based navigation hazard on the world's oceans, and they have recently increased in number," Higgs added.
Jenny had an epiphany. "Tristan's rooks move was not caused by the mass effect of Pelee's eruption but by magnetic-field instability at Martinique at the time."
John smiled at her and nodded.
"How's this relate to our Rook's move?" Jenny asked Higgs.
"It's impossible to rule out a contribution by a mass effect on the active TRs to produce a rook's move, but I think the instability would overwhelm any such affect," Higgs said.
"Maybe the TRs being damaged during the transit could produce the same effect," John said.
"We could investigate that theory, but something tells me it was nothing short of a miracle you both made transit with damaged TRs,"
Higgs said.
John said, "I've been keeping up on the Prophesy translations and there are a few citations that reference the Earth's magnetic field with regards to disruptions of transits. Sounds like the same thing."
Higgs cleared the remaining data projection and stuffed his pad in his lab coat's breast pocket. "If you're thinking of a weapon application, direct manipulation of the Earth's magnetic field is way beyond our current technology. But we might try a test transit within magnetic shielding. See what happens."
"Thanks Rodney," Jenny said rubbing her temples.
John gave Higgs a playful salute as Jenny and he left the lab. "We need to continue this conversation," John told Jenny.
"Okay, but only in the Officers' Club," she said.
The corporal behind the bar began pouring a pint of Guinness before John sat down and was reaching for the bottle of Talisker just as Jenny
pulled herself up on the next bar stool. He poured her a generous double and set a small, white porcelain jug next to her glass of the single malt.
John waited for the ritual splash of water from the jug to the otherwise neat scotch before speaking. "Higgs is right—"
"He usually is." Jenny injected and then smiling at John's enthusiasm.
"I mean about the increased instability activity. It's overdue."
"What's overdue?" she asked just as Tye entered the OC.
"Mind if I join you?" Tye asked as the Corporal handed her a soda water and ice with a lemon twist.
"Sure, we were just talking about how unstable things are," Jenny said and then took a sip of her scotch.
John explained to Tye, "Higgs was right; the Earth's geodynamo is creating more and stronger magnetic instabilities than typical."
"And the significance of this is?" Jenny asked.
"The Earth's magnetic field has become increasingly weak in just the last hundred years as well as unstable," John explained.
Jenny winced as Tye sucked her lemon twist.
"And we're half a million years late," John added.
"Late?" Jenny took a drink of scotch and saw Tye take a deep breath.
"For a magnetic pole reversal," he said after taking his first sip of ale.
"As in the magnetic poles?" Tye asked.
Jenny had heard of the phenomena before, but could not remember where or when.
"When the magnetic poles flip polarity," John explained, "the North Pole becomes the southern, negative pole and vice versa. However, there is a time before a reversal when numerous, smaller poles called instabilities roam all latitudes. The biggest is over Calgary right now, having migrated across the US from the Atlantic during the last fifty or so
years. A primary, global reversal has not occurred in over seven hundred thousand years."
"And how often do reversals happen?" Jenny asked.
"They average about every two to three hundred thousand years, but the geodynamo is so chaotic that the average doesn't mean much.
Reversals can happen repeatedly every fifty thousand years or quiet periods can last for millions of years," John explained. "On the other hand the sun's magnetic field flips almost every solar cycle and can also produce some interesting effects here on Earth."
"So exactly how would the Earth's magnetic field flipping help?"
Tye asked and then finished her drink.
"There are upline translations in the Prophesy that suggest the Earth's magnetic field can disrupt transits. But more to the point, the enemy's supply chain would terminate as well," John said just as Tye accidentally toppled her empty glass trying to slide it across the bar to the Corporal.
She hastily scooped up ice cubes and the remains of the twist and put both back in the glass.
Jenny saw the Corporal give Tye a concerned look; she was normally as steady as a rock.