Violet Odyssey- Chapter 10

 

As I passed by the skywalk overlooking the lobby, a number of uniformed faces locked onto me from below.

The security detail in the atrium had increased significantly. Hands tightened around rifles as a pack of combat-dressed soldiers muttered to one another, too far below for me to hear. But their gestures in my direction weren’t comforting.

Are they planning on fighting a fire with bullets? I wondered as I quickened my pace, smothering a cough.

My eyes stung as I accidentally wiped soot into them from my stained wrists. The headache throbbed on, as eerily present as ever. The consistency would have been comforting if I weren’t having such a hard time.

I stopped at the door to the shared labs, bracing myself on the frame and waiting for my vision to clear. I took a few stabilizing breaths and wiped my face with the inside of my lab coat. The outside had left sterile white behind for troubled gray, oddly reflective of the condition of the night behind me.

Quick footsteps pounded up the stairwell behind me.

I jerked my head over my shoulder but didn’t wait to see who was coming up the stairs. I scanned into the door and pushed against the closer piston, forcing it closed.

Two dozen stunned faces stared quizzically back at me from the quiet lab.

I returned their stares with a dumbfounded look of my own.

I’m sure I look like an absolute maniac, I realized. Like Santa Claus caught climbing back up the chimney.

The Rocketry clump had returned, at least partially, and the three of them began muttering to one another inaudibly. I walked toward the back, where the restrooms were, my eyes fixed uneasily on my feet. Whispered voices picked up with varying levels of attempted secrecy.

“Rich—Doctor Ryan.”

A strange female voice wrestled me from my trance. It was odd, strangled and caught in the back of the throat, a mixture of quickened alarm and hushed restraint.

I looked up to see Evelyn, her face pale, looking me up and down.

“What h—where did you go? Why are you—why do you—” she stammered uncharacteristically.

Doctor Alvarez and Tran were rising from the Linguistics workstation and making their way over, dark concern painted on their faces.

“Jus—just a second,” I managed, raising my hands warningly.

“Just a second nothing,” Evelyn snapped, her confidence returning. “You disappear out of nowhere, no one knows where you went, then there was gunfire and a fire alarm, and you look like you climbed out of a steel mill?”

Her face tightened, her hand coming toward me slowly. She brushed a dark spot from the sleeve of my coat before she thought better of it and returned her hand to her side.

“Hey, where’ve you been, man?” Tran caught up to us first. “You went to the department labs, didn’t you?”

I shook my head, the lie practically billboarded across my forehead.

“No, I just needed some air. I went to the lobby so I could step—wait, did you say gunfire?”

My eyes snapped back to Evelyn.

Tran and Evelyn exchanged a glance, an odd, unreadable expression passing between them.

Doctor Alvarez walked up, sizing me up with a dark look.

“Richard, sit down.”

I waved in dissent.

“No, Miguel, it’s fine. I need to tell you something.”

“Sit down, Richard.”

“You aren’t listening. There’s something seriously bad going on,” I continued, dropping to a low voice.

“Sit down, Doctor Ryan.”

He said it in a voice I had never heard from the aged researcher. His hand gripped my shoulder tightly, the other pulling out a chair before pushing me down into it.

As I began protesting, he looked at Evelyn and Tran, who were staring at me like I had Ebolavirus, and waved them away.

“Give us a minute, will you please? I’ll speak with you both in a moment.”

They withdrew to their respective desk clumps, Evelyn’s eyes never leaving me as I blinked dumbly at Doctor Alvarez. He glared pointedly at a couple of researchers from Thermodynamics and Gravitics who were lingering, pausing their conversations to glance in our direction. They made poor shows of looking as though urgent business had called them elsewhere.

Looking up at him, exhaustion began to settle into my bones and joints. I sank into the chair, cracked my neck from side to side, and rubbed at the back of my head.

“Miguel, did she say gunfire? What gunfire? I didn’t hear anything.”

“Shush.”

He lowered both hands in a hushing motion.

“Relax for a second. You’re being too loud, and we can’t go anywhere to speak privately.”

I scrunched my nose.

“Why not? I just came from outside the shared labs.”

“Exactly. That’s why everyone is staring at you. You came in looking like Smokey Bear while we’re on lockdown. I can’t believe no one was guarding the door outside. You didn’t see anyone? No soldiers?”

I thought about the lobby and the quick footsteps on the stairs. My face must have betrayed me.

“I assume that’s a yes. Well, if they didn’t come in after you, it’s safe to say they’re just happy you’re in here now with the rest of us.”

Miguel’s face relaxed a little.

“Yes, there was gunfire about five minutes after you left. From the lobby. The couple of soldiers in the room went flying out the door, there were more shots, and someone came in here yelling that we were on lockdown. The internet went down, and our badges won’t scan us out of the lab. Then, five…” He thought for a moment. “Five-ish minutes later, the facility fire alarm went off.”

His eyes went up and down my smoke-stained clothes.

I blinked quickly, tears stinging the corners of my eyes, stress and tension beginning to take their toll. I recounted what had happened in ACH, trusting Miguel more than anyone else in the facility at that moment.

I knew in my heart he would never have anything to do with destroying research. He lived and died by his work. A more dedicated researcher there would never be.

His face weathered as I went on, his eyes jerking back to mine when I mentioned the codes on the alarm panel. As I recounted the maintenance doors and access hall, his expression lightened again. The corners of his mouth flinched upward in amusement, and he pursed his lips, nodding in approval.

“Quick thinking, Richard. I don’t doubt a thing you’re telling me. Again, though, the alarm was in WALK TEST when you first checked it? And the heat detector in the server room was disabled, point by point?”

I nodded.

His face darkened again, and he shook his head.

“That can only be done locally. If someone had set it that way from the cloud control system, or from a panel anywhere else, the whole system and every panel in the facility would have been beeping steadily, like the ACH one was when you first arrived. And we would have noticed.”

He gestured to the alarm panel on the east wall, next to the giant pane of glass overlooking the BAF1 launch platform.

The sun had properly risen now, the translucidus orb visible beyond the polarized glass. The violet and coppery-green clouds of the Brass City were still visible, albeit dimmed by the morning light. The half-opaque walls of the Incursion were cast in slightly more detail by the light of day. Fixtures of some sort of metal formed along the crenellations, standing out more clearly than they had at night. The twisting filigree was impossible to make out with any clarity.

Astronomers and optics specialists had spent entire Odysseys attempting to study the metal formations, theories abounding that they held information ranging from the City’s construction to some sort of message. No one had succeeded in discerning anything usable so far, but it had been a major driver of mankind’s desire to study the Violet Incursion since Galileo published Mare Stellarum.

The tops of the brass buildings within the Violet Incursion, frustratingly, glinted with the morning sun as though they sat just out of reach in the stratosphere. As though you could reach them with a jet or specialized balloon.

And Odysseys past had certainly tried.

It was this kind of interaction with local stimuli that stumped researchers the most. How could something behave so in line with the natural world around us, but retreat from our reach the closer we should have been getting to it by balloon, airplane, rocket, or camera-equipped Vulture?

The latter being admittedly stupid.

I leaned on the desk and hid my face in my hands.

“I don’t know what to do now. It wasn’t an accident. Someone was in there with me. What do I do with that information?”

I looked up at Miguel, throwing my hands in the air.

“I still haven’t gotten past the fact that I heard my dad’s voice coming out of the V-IC. What do I do with that information?”

“Richard, shh,” Miguel warned. “That’s not common knowledge, remember? Only Doctor Loise and I were briefed after the meeting.”

“Right.”

I scowled.

“Add in the fact that there might be data hiding in the message we got, and there are days of research to do, and only hours of Odyssey to do it in, while someone wants it gone, or me dead, or both.”

“Actually, there’s some news about that.”

Miguel nodded, raising his eyebrows.

“That’s what we need to talk to Tran and Evelyn about.”

He gestured to the Linguistics desk, where Tran was staring past his monitors, bloodshot eyes locked on Miguel and me, a vein pulsing on his forehead.

“But it’s not all good news. I’ll, uh, let Tran explain.”

I rose and followed Miguel to Tran’s desk. As we passed, Evelyn excused herself, the curious eyes of her fellow Gravitics team following her as she left, disdain settling on my dirty lab coat.

I must look like Pigpen from Charlie Brown, I thought.

Miguel patted Tran on the shoulder with a kind smile.

“Doctor Silas, fill us in. And please keep your voice down.”

Tran tilted his head back and rolled his eyes up to meet Miguel’s.

“I was right, wasn’t I? The fire alarm? Burning Man here? The fire was in ACH.”

He shifted his eyes to me.

“Please tell me my metal albums are okay.”

I stammered, caught off guard.

Miguel shook Tran’s chair warningly.

“Doctor Silas.”

“Aghh, okay. Look at what I uncovered before Leo went AWOL.”

Tran gestured at the empty desk across from him, where Doctor Halsted had been before I left for ACH. I frowned at another disappearance but shook it off and studied Tran’s monitors carefully.

“Alright, see the amplitude peaks? The phase gives us timing, and the inverse is carrying the negative space between the two. You know this.”

Tran popped a gummy bear into his mouth.

“You’re gonna have to ask Evelyn here about the displacement. I didn’t get it.”

“Of course you don’t, band geek.”

Evelyn’s voice made me jump. I hadn’t realized she was standing behind me.

Tran kissed the air in Evelyn’s direction and ate another handful of gummy bears.

“Anyway, when you subtract the predicted acoustic cancellation pattern, there’s residual coherence left over. Which isn’t normal. Like, at all. Normally, that leaves silence. Like with noise cancellation. We’ve had that since the thirties. But here, there’s definitely sound.”

He looked at me, an eyebrow raised, waiting for my response.

I eyed the monitors in disbelief, my earlier stress melting under the corona of intellectual curiosity. My mouth hung open as my eyes surfed the waveforms and shadows.

“I can’t believe it. This is… we’ve never seen anything like this. Not one time.”

Tran rocked in his seat.

“Killer, right? But there’s where the party stops. I need to decode this jazz, and I can’t.”

“Why not?” Evelyn asked impatiently.

“Because it takes processing power. More than these server terminals can give. We need an actual lab tower. One of the Armstrongs from the hot labs, or my Zip Spyder from ACH, assuming it’s not a pile of ash by now.”

He lamented the thought for a moment.

“Something like that. But we’re on lockdown.”

“And I have advised Doctor Silas and Doctor Strauss to keep this between us for now,” Miguel added. “Since we aren’t exactly sure who can be trusted with the information.”

Evelyn held out her hand.

“Badge. Doctor Silas and I already backed it up on ours.”

I removed my lanyard and handed it to her.

“What good will that do? It’ll flash when we leave.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes.

“I don’t know what to do about that yet. None of us do. We didn’t exactly wake up expecting you to try and set the place on fire, the military to go crazy and start shooting up the facility, and the Brass City to start sending us voicemail.”

I snorted despite myself. Humor like that was rare from Evelyn.

She took the badge back to her terminal and began copying the data.

“I have a brief rundown of why the waveform presents differently under simulated gravitational loads. That shouldn’t happen. Sound can be distorted by the medium it travels through, but not by a modeled gravitational profile that exists only as a projected variable. Unless the signal’s phase relationships are somehow gravitationally indexed before we receive it.”

She removed my badge and thumb drive from her terminal. I reached for them, but she snapped them back, fixing me with a cold stare.

“You’re hiding something. Even that idiot coworker of yours sees it. Miguel is sweet, but a bad liar. There’s something the two of you know that we don’t.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I don’t need to know what that is to do my job. But if I wind up suffering for my ignorance, I swear to God, Richard, I will find you and find out the exact pitch your skull makes when it hits reinforced glass.”

She shoved the badge into my hand, ignoring my hanging jaw, then frowned over my shoulder.

I heard Tran curse in Vietnamese, which he only did when he was really upset, followed by the bang of his keyboard.

I spun around and hurried over.

“What’s going on?”

Miguel looked at me with worry in his eyes.

“Tran’s console just locked him out of the server. Right after it wiped his program and everything it was working on.”

“Thằng chó đẻ!” Tran repeated. “This is bullshit!”

Fear ran through my body like ice. My eyes darted to the door.

“We have to get out of here.”

“What? Why?” Evelyn snapped, stress tainting her confident voice. “Ryan, why?”

Miguel met my eyes, comprehension spreading across his brow.

He ran past the desks toward the front.

“Miguel, wait, wh—”

The door to the lab flew open, armed soldiers filing in, pushing their way through the shocked researchers.

“Oh God,” Evelyn gasped quietly.

A rough hand yanked me backward by the elbow, pulling me to the floor. Evelyn and Tran followed, dropping to the ground next to me. I swung wildly at the source of the invasive heaving.

A gloved hand smacked my arm away, and another covered my mouth.

“Quiet. Get yourself together. The three of you need to follow me, right now. Zero questions.”

I twisted around to see SSG Rivers glaring down at me with his trademark placid expression.