Violet Odyssey- Chapter 4

 

I felt warm sunlight on the side of my face as I lifted it from the desk, blinking and yawning loudly. I groaned and rotated my wrist. My forearm was numb and red where my head had been resting. Wiping a line of drool from the corner of my mouth, I looked stealthily around the room.

"Good morning, sleepyhead."

Evelyn's voice made me jump.

I grimaced, peeled a damp research assignment off my elbow, and looked over my shoulder.

"Nrrhhh... Is Professor Falk still out?"

"Lucky for you, yeah." She smirked. "What's wrong with you? Falling asleep in waveforms again? It's a nine o'clock class. Even the party houses can slug through that."

Her usual frown settled back onto her face as a strand of ash-blonde hair slipped across one eye.

Evelyn Strauss was uncommonly pretty for a graduate student in Stellar Orbit Numerology. Most women who looked like her had already escaped academia with two- or four-year degrees in law, communications, or maybe aeronautics sales if they had the right connections.

Not usually research.

Less money.

More work.

"He was up laaate again. Too much caffeine and anime, am I right?" our other classmate, Clair LeDoux, chimed in, joining my character assassination.

Clair was two years younger than me.

Six younger than Evelyn.

Sometimes she acted like it.

Her light-brown hair was cropped short.

It suited her.

I rubbed my face and put on a melodramatic pout.

"I was working. Not playing. I'm going to earn another half-credit before the end of the month while you two waste time harassing me. Careful, or I'll graduate before both of you."

I finished with an exaggerated nod toward Evelyn.

She scoffed, the playfulness disappearing from her voice.

"Working on what? Acoustics and Harmonics again? Ryan, you're twenty-four years old. Far too young to be studying tired, dead sciences—and far too old to keep ignoring the facts."

She reached into my desk, snatched the magazine sticking out of the drawer, and held it aloft.

DR. SCHMID IN THE HOT SEAT
THE €700 MILLION MISTAKE

HAS ACOUSTIC HARMONICS FAILED SCIENCE?

VISIONARY OR FRAUD?

"If you graduate early because you padded your transcript with pointless electives about failed science, don't come looking to me for applause."

She tossed the magazine onto my desk and slung her purse over one shoulder.

"Focus on your major. Photon Telemetry has a future. The world is moving too fast to waste time in band camp, Richard."

Her voice softened slightly when she used my first name.

She still didn't look back as she walked out.

The handful of students lingering in the classroom watched her leave before quietly returning to their own conversations.

Clair looked at me with soft eyes, absently tugging at her earlobe like she always did when she was uncomfortable.

"I'm gonna go make sure she doesn't forget our group project in AdCalc." She smiled. "Don't let her get to you, Rich. You're exactly where you're supposed to be... doing exactly what your dad would've wanted."

I stiffened.

She caught it immediately.

"And for God's sake," she added with a grin, "eat something healthy for lunch. You're going to die of a diabetic coma before your fourth Odyssey Year if you don't quit living on Coke and chili dogs."

She darted in, pinched my side, and skipped toward the door, throwing me a wink over her shoulder.

I answered with the most deeply offended glare I could manage while gathering up my drool-soaked papers.

"Bro," one of my classmates muttered without looking up from his book, "pass the controller if you're not gonna play."

 

The security door slid shut behind us with a heavy clunk. SSG Rivers stepped to the left, folded his hands behind his back, and settled into a silent watch beside the entrance, apparently content to remain there for as long as Gravitic Applications required us.

The lights were kept deliberately low. Only a handful of ceiling fixtures were illuminated, leaving the individual desk lamps to do most of the work. Geeks tend to like it dark, and the prismatic glow of the Violet Incursion poured through the department's long clerestory windows high along the wall.

The perfect setting for a war room, I thought.

Brooding.

Tense.

Packed with people who didn't particularly like one another—but liked an unsolved mystery even less.

Normally, the room was laid out with three neat columns of lab tables, equipment stations lining the walls and fume hoods tucked into the corners. Tonight, everything had been shoved together into islands. Maintenance was going to have an aneurysm. Instruments had been borrowed, cables stretched across aisles, and departments that normally communicated through carefully worded emails were suddenly sharing workspaces.

Four Odyssey Projects were underway around the globe this cycle.

Peru was testing a new array of ultraviolet lasers against the Incursion, just as they'd tested infrared during the last cycle.

Boring.

Milan was dispatching survey teams to thirty-seven countries to study the Incursion's effects on local wildlife. Almost nobody cared. There'd even been talk of canceling the project to free up funding.

I liked it, though.

It was nice that somebody still remembered we had a planet underneath the sky.

Beijing had added a new dosimeter package to their three-person orbiter, Fēi Dá. I was pretty sure it translated to Successful Flight.

Or maybe it was a takeout restaurant.

Either way, they were hoping to gather better data on cosmic radiation during the Incursion.

Then there was us.

Naturally.

While the rest of the world was conducting careful experiments...

...America had decided to throw a small nuclear device at the problem.

Well...

Not at the City.

Technically.

The plan was to detonate a low-yield fission device at eighty thousand feet, generate a massive electromagnetic pulse, and observe the results.

Truly the stuff of scientific wonder.

The people in Gravitics and Magnetic Applications were thrilled, of course.

I wasn't.

To me, our Odyssey Project was little more than filler. Some cycles were like that. The world found itself knee-deep in theory when an Odyssey Year rolled around, but the public wouldn't tolerate letting the City come and go without somebody trying something.

So...

The show had to go on.

The various cliques around the room regarded me with varying degrees of curiosity.

Facilities lurked around the perimeter like gargoyles, toolboxes at the ready to repair whatever expensive equipment the engineers inevitably broke. They glanced at my military escort, collectively decided it wasn't their problem, and returned to hovering around the Thermodynamics group, who were far too busy to notice me anyway.

Ballistics and Rocketry had merged with Navigation and Charting into the largest cluster in the room. A few familiar faces offered tentative smiles that died almost immediately beneath Colonel Killough's expressionless stare.

Gravitics and Magnetics occupied the center of the room.

It was from their tables that the challenge to my presence had come.

Surrounded by graph paper, glowing monitors, and a ring of equally unimpressed colleagues stood Evelyn Strauss.

She looked directly at me.

Then she continued.

"Of all nights for the MPs to come barging into the research wing, you picked an Odyssey Night. And on top of that, you bring more distractions from ACH—who, by the way, is already represented."

She gestured toward a lone desk conspicuously devoid of computers or equipment. My research lead, Miguel Alvarez, sat there with one hand running through his thinning hair. His tired face betrayed no amusement as he looked at me over pursed lips.

Miguel had always been patient with me.

Fair.

Our department consisted of three junior researchers and one senior researcher. Miguel oversaw all of us, despite not actually belonging to ACH himself. He'd come from Cryptography—a department that had been folded into Communications and Linguistics back in the nineties after decades of producing precisely zero breakthroughs.

This was his sixth Odyssey Year.

He'd probably live to see eight before he retired.

Evelyn stepped around a containment hood someone had dragged into the middle of the room.

"We have three hours until the operation begins. Unless you actually have a reason to be here, go back to the dorms... and take your grunts with you."

She stopped barely a foot from me, her eyes flicking between mine and Colonel Killough's.

Fearless. And entirely too confident.

I chuckled to myself.

I never got the chance to answer. Colonel Killough simply walked past her with his trademark refusal to acknowledge obstacles, giving a short jerk of his head for me to follow.

I slipped around Evelyn, almost able to feel the heat radiating off her.

The Colonel paused beside a table occupied by three uniformed officers I'd somehow missed.

He snapped to a razor-sharp salute.

The man in the center wore two silver stars.His name tape read HASS.

Stars…That means General... doesn't it?

My stomach tightened.

What was a General doing here? The military hadn't been this involved during the last Odyssey.

"General, I'm escorting J.R. Ryan to the NSA conference room for briefing and questioning," Colonel Killough reported, every trace of his earlier exhaustion gone.

"Understood." General Hass nodded. "Let me know what you find. I've got to stay here and argue with Thermodynamics about the payload. Damn lab monkeys can't be trusted with a hand grenade, let alone a fission weapon."

He lowered his voice.

Not nearly enough.

"They still don't understand why we're stalling the EMP plan, Colonel. Get this signal business sorted out. Fast. Then we can get this show on the road."

Colonel Killough saluted once more before continuing toward a heavy door marked:

SECURE — NSA PERSONNEL ONLY

A hand clamped around my elbow.

I turned.

Evelyn's face had gone crimson.

"Great. Your name gets you into the room with the rest of us yet again." Her voice had dropped to a venomous whisper. "You don't belong here, Ryan."

Her grip tightened.

"You never belonged here."

She leaned closer.

"Go back to Northright. Play Guitar Hero. Leave the research to actual researchers."

Another hand calmly peeled hers away from my arm.

Staff Sergeant Rivers.

He'd materialized beside us with his usual ghost-like silence.

For the briefest moment, he looked at me strangely—head tilted, mouth slightly open, as though trying to place me.

Then it vanished.

He turned that same expressionless stare on Evelyn.

She recoiled almost immediately, muttered something under her breath, and stalked back toward the Gravitics group. One of her colleagues said something that made the entire table laugh.

Their eyes followed me.

Like a pack of feral cats sizing up an injured bird.

Rivers gave my shoulder a gentle shove.

"Go on."

I rubbed the back of my neck.

If wishing could've opened trapdoors, I'd have happily fallen through the floor and emerged somewhere warmer.

Somewhere kinder.

Instead, I hurried after Colonel Killough, carefully avoiding the General's gaze.

He was still watching me.

I couldn't begin to guess why.