Hui walked across the tiny kitchen, past the cold storage unit, and pulled open a metal hatch in the rear wall. A narrow metal stairway lay beyond. Ducking through and closing the hatch behind them, they made their way quickly up three flights of stairs to deck 6. The stairway ended here-no doubt, Crane realized, because directly above lay the Barrier, the no-man's-land between the classified and non-classified areas.
On the landing, Hui paused to collect herself. She reached for the handle, took a deep breath. Then she opened the hatch.
An empty corridor lay beyond.
She gave a sigh of relief. "The lab's just down this hallway."
She led Crane past a maintenance room and an unoccupied office, then stopped outside a door labeled MARITIME APPLIED PHYSICS and opened it briskly. Crane made a final scan of the hall, making doubly sure there were no witnesses or security cameras. Then he followed her into the darkened lab, closing the door quietly behind him.
Hui snapped on the lights, revealing a large, well-appointed space. There was a central table on which sat a stereozoom microscope and an autoclave. A couple of lab stools were snugged up to one side. An open door in the rear wall led to an equipment locker; to either side stood racks of oscilloscopes, galvanometers, and other gear Crane couldn't identify. A large drop cloth of some unusual material hung from a hook beside one of the equipment racks. It gave off a silvery sheen under the fluorescent light.
Crane walked over to the drop cloth, rubbed it between his fingers. "What's this?" he asked.
"Fire suppressant cloth. Just in case an experiment goes awry."
He nodded. "And why isn't this lab being used?"
"Dr. Asher had planned to take this opportunity-being on the Facility, I mean-to run some deep-water tests. Capillary-gravity wave analysis, current sedimentology, that sort of thing. After all, having a resource like this is the chance of a lifetime."
"What happened?"
"He was overruled by Spartan. Needed extra manpower for the excavation, it seemed. Lost bunk space for half a dozen of the scientists he'd been counting on." She walked over to the lab table, placed her laptop and tool kit on it. "You can set Asher's laptop here," she said. "As gently as possible, please. This kind of work should really be done in a class one hundred clean room: if we raise any dust, or if dirt gets on the exposed media, our chances of retrieving any data will become that much slimmer."
Crane set the laptop case carefully on the table. Hui rubbed her hands together for a moment, orienting herself. Then she began rummaging through various drawers, assembling a small arsenal of equipment: latex gloves, surgical masks, scalpels; a high-intensity work lamp; a magnifying lens in a tabletop stand; cans of compressed air. She opened her tool kit and spread the contents out on the table. Then she slipped a grounding strap over her wrist and glanced at him.
"What are we looking for, exactly?" she asked.
"I don't know for sure. Somehow, we have to reconstruct Asher's final journey of discovery."
Hui nodded. As Crane watched, she slowly unzipped the case and pulled out the damaged laptop. One end was badly burned, the plastic housing partially melted. Scorch marks and smoke covered its surface. Crane's heart sank.
Hui pulled on the pair of gloves, fixed the surgical mask over her face. She handed another mask to Crane, gesturing for him to follow suit. Using the can of compressed air, she gave the already-spotless table a cleansing blast. Then she used a screwdriver from her tool kit to remove the laptop's back plate. This was followed by the motherboard and the power supply. Now the hard drive itself was exposed.
"We might be lucky," she said. "The hard drive was away from the worst of the damage."
Moving to her own laptop, she disassembled it in turn. The work, the challenge, seemed to calm her. Watching, Crane was impressed by how quickly and skillfully she was able to break the computer down into its component parts.
Now, taking Asher's hard drive carefully in hand, she carried it over to her own laptop and substituted it for her drive. She quickly reassembled her laptop, plugged it in, turned it on. There was a loud clicking sound, followed by several beeps. An error message appeared on the screen and the computer refused to boot.
"What's that noise?" Crane asked.
"At the data recovery facility I interned at, they called that the Click of Death. It usually means a servo failure or something similar."
"That's bad, right?"
"I don't know yet. We've got to open up the drive."
She powered down her laptop, disassembled it again, and removed Asher's hard drive. Setting it carefully on the table, she motioned Crane to step back. Using a series of tiny screwdrivers, scalpels, and some tools that to Crane looked more suitable for a dentist's office, she coaxed off the top half of the housing. Bringing the work lamp close, she aimed it at the hard drive. The inner workings stood revealed in the glare: a series of thin, gold cylinders stacked one atop another, each sporting a tiny read/write arm, the whole surrounded by a tiny green forest of integrated circuits.
Hui leaned in with the magnifying lens, giving the drive a close inspection. "There doesn't appear to have been a head crash," she said. "The platters look like they're in good condition." A pause. "I think I see the problem. There are burned chips on the PCB."
"PCB?"
"Primary controller board."
"Can you repair it?"
"Probably. I'll swap out the board with the one from my laptop."
Crane frowned. "You can do that?"
"Every laptop on the Facility is precisely the same model. You know the government-always buy in bulk."
Working through the magnifying lens, Hui used jeweler's tools to remove a tiny portion of the drive mechanism. "It's really fused," she said, holding it up to the magnifying lens and turning it this way and that with a pair of tweezers. "We're lucky the platters themselves weren't melted."
She put it aside. Opening the hard drive from her own laptop, she carefully removed the same piece, attached it to Asher's drive, and replaced the top of the housing.
"Moment of truth," she said, returning the damaged drive to her laptop. She quickly reassembled the computer, plugged it in, gave the interior a gentle blast of canned air, and switched it on again.
Crane drew close, staring eagerly at the screen. The same error message reappeared.
"Damn," he said.
"But the Click of Death is gone," Hui replied. "And did you notice there were no warning beeps during the POST?"
"What's that mean?"
"The laptop sees the hard drive now, no problem. It just can't find any data."
Crane swore under his breath.
"We're not done yet." She slipped a jewel case from her tool kit, opened it, and took out a CD. "This is a bootable disc with an assortment of diagnostic tools. Let's take a closer look at Asher's hard drive."
She slipped the disc into the laptop and restarted it. This time the screen came to life. The disc drive trundled for a moment, then several windows opened. Hui took a seat at the lab table and began typing. Crane peered over her shoulder.
For several minutes, Hui moused her way through a variety of windows. Long series of binary and hexadecimal numbers appeared, scrolled up the screen, then disappeared again. At last, she sat back.
"The hard drive is operable," she said. "I can't detect any further physical damage."
"Then why can't we read it?" Crane asked.
Hui looked at him. "Because it appears somebody has erased all the data on it."
"Erased?"
She removed her face mask, shook out her hair, and nodded. "Based on the electromagnetic pattern, it seems somebody used a degausser on it."
"And this was done after the fire?"
"Must have been. Asher wouldn't have done it himself."
"But why?" Crane felt stunned. "That makes no sense. For all anybody knew, the laptop was ruined."