Chapter 1
“I’ve found it!” Nordhausen exclaimed as he rushed into the lab clutching an armful of notebooks and several heavy volumes. “Spent all afternoon on the Arion system, and you’ll need to get over there soon as well,” he admonished with a wag of his finger at Kelly where he sat at a control console. “We’d better get the system up—turn things on, or spin out the singularity and all. Paul’s going to love this!”
Kelly Ramer looked over his shoulder at the professor, his attention diverted from the computer screen he was monitoring, eyebrows raised with a wry smile. “What are you talking about?” he said.
“The research, man! I’ve got the little devil! Oh they were real clever this time, weren’t they. But I found out what they were up to, and they can be damned. Now… We’re going to need to establish a Nexus fairly quickly. I’ve got this in my head now, with considerable data to back everything up, but this might create one of Paul’s certainty effects, and if they get wind of what I’m up to they could start a counter operation. So turn everything on, will you!” He rushed over to a desk near the history console and plopped down the stack of notebooks he was carrying. “Here, I’ll set up at the History Module. I need to run down a few details, but I think I have most everything we’ll need to get started.”
Kelly’s expression went from mild amusement to perturbed bewilderment. “Would you calm down and make some sense? What research?”
“Palma!” Nordhausen said, with obvious frustration. “What else, man? I’ve got the whole thing here on a disk! Now, where’s the drive? Ah, there you are.” He thumbed a button on one of the system computers and opened a Blue-Ray drive, eager to feed in a disk and get to work.
“I was using the Golems to scout out variation data on this altered Meridian. There were a lot of changes after Palma, as you might imagine, but I was looking at time stamped data from the hours just before the event. Everything seemed in order, until I got a strong warning signal from one of the Golem Banks.”
“Just one?” said Kelly. “I had the system threshold set to require three Golem Banks before an alert was issued.” Each bank was a designated cluster of thousands of remote installations of Kelly’s special search program, quietly running in systems all over the world.
“Well I wasn’t going to overlook anything,” said Robert. “So I took a closer look at the data from that lone sentry and began to get very interested.”
“Which Golem Bank was it?” Kelly had segregated the total cloud into nine clusters, and banked these as search teams that would act in unison on a variation, immediately focusing all their attention on that subject if the bank detected a sufficient percentage of deviation.
“What? Does it matter which bank it was?”
“Just curious, I suppose.”
“If you must know, it was Golem Bank number seven, if I recall correctly. Yes, number seven. So I decided to take my initial results and put the Arion system on it.”
“Golem 7…” Kelly thought for a moment. “Those were the lost sheep.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My lost sheep. When we lost contact with the Golem search cloud on the last mission I had a few stragglers that wandered in from new system boots after that event. They were instrumental in helping us continue that operation. So when I set up my Golem search cloud clusters, I banked that whole group as Golem 7.”
Robert raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t want to get bogged down with a load of computer mumbo jumbo here, and pressed on.
“Fine,” he said. “Well, you know the old mystery writer’s credo: who, what, when, where, why. The first thing you do is find out who was involved in the scheme and get your suspect list filled out, and that’s where the Arion system came in handy. It powered through all the searches and the pattern recognition software I was using did a bang up job as well. So I found the bastard! That was no plane crash! It was deliberate. They pulled another D.B. Cooper on us.”
“Robert!” Kelly shouted now, holding up his hand with some annoyance. “I can’t follow a word you’re saying. You’re talking to yourself half the time anyway. Now what in the world is this all about?”
The professor looked over the rim of his reading glasses, about to say something. Then he composed himself and spoke in a level, measured tone. “My Dear Mr. Kelly,” he began. “Now what have we all been about the last three days, eh? Paul’s been haggling all over the city for petrol, you’ve been in here nursing that bloody singularity back to life, and Maeve, God bless her, has managed to lay in a store of food and water, and a truckload of emergency supplies and wardrobe as well. So what have I been doing, you might wonder?”
“Yes, I do wonder,” said Kelly.
“Well, I’ve been at UCB on the Arion sifting through the history, that’s what I’ve been doing. I scanned virtually every news item and document on the whole damn Internet concerning this latest incident at Palma, and then some. And to put a fine point on it all, I’ve found the man responsible for the attack on Palma.” He paused, fixing Kelly with a steady gaze over his reading glasses.
“Ra’id Husan al Din?” said Kelly, confused. “We’ve known about him for weeks, but he doesn’t even exist any longer, at least not on this Meridian.”
“Not him,” said Robert, somewhat annoyed. “I’ve found the new agent responsible. Now… If you would be kind enough to spin up the Arch and establish a Nexus, we can get started.” He waited, folding his arms.
“Did any of the other eight Golem banks contribute to this data set?” The system as a whole was like a supreme court. When focused on a search, each of the nine banks would do independent analysis and return a weight of opinion. If conflicting data marred the results it would take at least five banks to confirm a result. If Robert was acting on the advice of Golem 7 alone, Kelly was suspicious of his findings.
“What? How should I know! I just fed the variations into my laptop and carted them over to the university to use the Arion system. That’s where I got my confirmation.”
Kelly pursed his lips, rubbing his chin and took a deep breath. His lost sheep had found something that all the other Golem banks had apparently missed. He had misgivings about acting on the advice of a single Golem Bank, but those units had saved them once already, and Robert did seem to have further analysis from the Arion system. “You’ve got hard data on this?” he asked.
“Right from the Horse’s mouth—the UCB Arion system. I confirmed it all this afternoon, but I need a Nexus Point here so I can sample resonance and get on with the final research.” He waited, tapping the stack of notebooks with his automatic pencil.
Kelly frowned. He had been spinning up a singularity in the quantum matrix, and was only just now seeing signs of stability. He had good speed, stable rotation and sufficient quantum fuel in the matrix as well. Yet the thought of activating the Arch impacted all this work and a range of other factors as well, and he hesitated, still uncertain of what the professor was saying.
“You think you’ve got the man responsible?” he asked, angling for more information.
“I do indeed,” said Nordhausen.
“What certainty factor?” He wanted a number, something he could quantify and weigh in an algorithm. Yet more, he wanted to give the professor a jab to be sure he was following sound procedures for a possible mission workup. If Robert had done clean research he should have run an integrity check on his final premise and generated a certainty factor. He was surprised when the professor answered with calm confidence.