“Look on the bright side. You can spend all of eternity sampling different brews and never get a hangover.” kitten’s partner quaffed down the remains of a can of beer. “Speaking of which, can I get you guys another round?”
There was a slight stir of discontent at the words and he looked nervous, wondering if he’d said something wrong. McElroy grinned at him reassuringly. “Sorry kid, its just that kitten’s – and your – money isn’t good at any military base in Hell. Nobody’s ever going to forget what she did to keep us all going in the early days. So you two sit tight and the bar will bring another round over.” kitten flushed with embarrassment and looked downwards. She was about to say something when the light over the airlock door went red, showing that somebody was coming in from outside. She could hear the machinery cycling, pumping out the dust-contaminated air and replacing it with clean. Tucker had told her that even the dead, who could breath the dirt-laden air of Hell without ill-effects, preferred to live in clean-air surroundings. For the living, of course, there was no real choice.
“kitten, I’m sorry to have to break up your party, but we need your help over at headquarters.” The aide quietly waved to stop McElroy and the rest of his unit getting to their feet. “We need a lot of gates pushed through fast and General Petraeus wants you to look after this end of it.”
“Sir, with respect sir, hasn’t kitten done enough? She needs a long rest.”
“It’s all right Tucker, it doesn’t hurt to push a gate through from this side.” She smiled shyly, “and its what I’m paid for after all. Look on it this way, it gives us an excuse for another meet later. We’d better go Dani.”
Her boyfriend picked up the end of her leash and tugged it. Obediently she stood and he led her out to where a V-22 was waiting. McElroy drained his can and shook his head slowly. “Well, people, it looks like our break is over. Cassidy, get everybody else rousted out, we’ve got to get set up for our next job.”
Chapter Eighteen
Section 18, DIMO(N) Field Research Facility, Camp Hell-Alpha, Hell
“Are you quite comfortable, kitten?” Doctor Ilya Muromets asked the question almost on autopilot. He was too concerned with getting his equipment set up and stabilized to be really interested in the answer.
“Yes, thank you Doctor. But shouldn’t we be over at the operational base, I thought there were troop movements to get started?”
“There are, but the units aren’t ready to move yet. It’ll be a few hours before the military portals will be needed so we’re going to run a few experiments into portal opening. Portal science is a big thing now, several of the big universities have opened up departments to study all the new physics we’re running into out here.”
“Hurry up and wait.” Dani repeated the time-honored phrase with gloomy relish. “What are we doing here anyway?”
“That’s right, but these experiments have a long term significance. We’re looking into how the other end of the portal gets established, or more specifically, what part the contact at the other end plays. Then, we’re hoping we can automate it so we don’t need a sensitive at both ends to push a portal through.”
“That’s easy, I just relax and let my mind search. When I get an echo, I hold it and the equipment pumps energy into the link. That’s the bit that hurts, when the power goes right up, it feels like my brain is being torn apart. Like the worst migraine you ever had. It’s not nearly so bad here in Hell though.”
Muromets nodded in acknowledgement. “Most of the work being done right now is insulating the sensitive from that power transmission, to reduce exactly what your describing. But, I’m more interested in the echo you mentioned. You see, if I’m right, there isn’t a transmission of any sort from the sensitive back to you. What you’re feeling is a sort of resonance of your own transmission. The better the sensitive the other end, the stronger the resonance. My belief is that the resonance strength is determined by the degree of Nephilim ancestry the sensitive has. You’re the best because you have a high level of such ancestry.”
“That would make sense.” kitten giggled. “Where I come from, family trees don’t have many branches.”
“My equipment has settled down now.” Muromets sighed. “The trouble is that the signals we are getting are so weak that they’re lost in the electronic noise unless we’re really careful. That’s why they escaped detection for so long, nobody ever believed something that slight could be so important. People saw the signals but dismissed them as artifacts of the equipment. Just random noise caused by statistic uncertainty. The evidence was there, right in front of us the whole time and nobody looked at it.”
“Just like tinfoil hats.” Dani tossed the remark in with quiet satisfaction. The critical, proven, importance of wearing a tinfoil hat was a serious embarrassment to the entire psychiatric profession who had once used wearing one as a trademark of insanity.
“Just like tinfoil hats. Now, kitten, I want you just to scan with your mind, relax and try to find a contact. There’s no need to communicate with them, what we’re interested in is the signal you send out and the one you get back. If my theory is right, we should be able to compare them and determine that the return is a resonance from your transmission. If that isn’t the case, we’ll have to dump my hypothesis and start again.”
“How many times have you done that Doctor?”
Muromets paused and counted on his fingers. “We’re run through eleven hypotheses so far and every one of them failed to pan out. Each time we got off to a good start but we ran into things the hypothesis couldn’t explain and we had to start over. My hypothesis is number twelve. I’m hoping that if this one works out, we’ll be able to build transponders that each resonate on a slightly different set of transmission characteristics. Then, we can build those transponders into things like cell-phone towers and install them all over Earth and Hell. That’ll mean we’ll be just like the naga, we can open a portal more or less anywhere we want to. Only, unlike the naga, we will be able to do it with pinpoint accuracy.”
“Why don’t we study naga then, rather than kitten?”
“Because we don’t want the Baldricks believing they are actually useful to us. We’ve got our foot firmly on their necks right now and that’s how we want it to stay.”
“And the Generals realize what a weapons system that will make.” Dani was impressed.
“That’s right, one we want to keep very much to ourselves. But, there’s another point to this. At the moment we have only got one reference point for these signals, transmissions from Earth to Hell and back. That tells us something but not much. If we can really analyze these signals and understand them, as soon as we get the Earth to Heaven and back signals, we can really get to work and start to develop a proper theory of why portals go where they do. And what portals are of course, we don’t really understand that yet either.
“I’ve got a contact Doctor.”
“Well done, kitten. Hold it, just don’t do anything with it. The equipment is making records of everything.”
Section 12, DIMO(N) Field Research Center, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
“Now this is very interesting indeed.” Doctor Crosby tapped the charts in front of him.
“What’s up doc?” Colonel Warhol couldn’t resist the line.
“We’ve got power readings from vehicles and aircraft that passed through the portals. Remember that U-2 that crashed a few weeks back? Well, we all thought it lost power as it was transiting the Hell-Alpha portal and went in. U-2s are prone to that sort of thing after all. But, the accident investigation board found that its engine was actually running when it crashed. Choked up with dust, certainly, its filters had failed. Still getting power though. It was right on the borderline of flying and crashing when something pushed it over the edge. So, amongst other things, we started measuring engine power outputs as the platforms they power pass through the portals.”