A Sword Into Darkness

8: “AN UNEXPECTED GUEST”

April 5, 2043; Windward Tech Development Facility, Ingmar Rammstahl Ltd. Shipbuilding; Santa Clara, California

The ship’s hull rang like a bell as the supercavitating torpedo narrowly roared by, detonating 100 yards off the destroyer’s beam. Everything strapped down moved along with the hull as the underwater explosion battered the ship, shocked but survivable. Anything not strapped down kept its position within three dimensions, in harmony with the laws of the universe, but suddenly at odds with the realities of war.

Captain Anthony “Tony” Jones flew through the air, over the tightly packed consoles in Combat, and crumpled to a heap next to the padded steel bulkhead, his head at an odd, telling angle. Sparks fountained outward from power panels and consoles, lighting the dark, somber contours of the captain’s suddenly lifeless face. From his seat in front of the TAO console, LT Nathan Kelley had an unobstructed view of his commanding officer’s resting place, and he could not help but think about how serenely artful the terrible scene was.

Then the regular lights went out, the brighter lights of the emergency fluorescents came up, and the artistry was gone, snuffed out as quickly as Captain Jones’ existence. Nathan turned back to his console, barking orders he no longer remembered, feeling the shudder as another torpedo detonated, this one further away. Despite the deaths and destruction, they were still in the game. They had gotten their shots off and they were surviving the attack. Nathan felt as one with the surface warriors of the last century, akin to the fighting sailors off Samar in WWII.

He turned to Senior Chief Edwards, a question upon his lips. What had he been about to ask? What had he been about to say that could not wait until they were out of danger? What could Nathan have done differently to avoid what happened next?

Edwards smiled, but not as preface for one of the bad jokes he always had at the ready. A ferocious, teeth-baring grin overwhelmed the bottom half of his face, counterpoint to the angry glare from his eyes as he punched buttons and watched the tracks move on his flickering display. Then the last torpedo struck, detonating below their after keel.

There was a moment of discontinuity.

The world ceased to be, and then came back to Nathan in bleary flashes of sight, sound, and sensation: the screams over the sound-powered phones; the spider web pattern formed by his forehead on his blank tactical display; the chairs and consoles broken free of their mounts, crushing their occupants against the forward and aft bulkheads; the insane rolling of what remained of the Rivero …

And Edwards lying on his back atop his broken chair, his console snapped free and slicing into both of his broken legs . . . .

Nathan opened his eyes into darkness, now so familiar with the dream-memory-nightmare that it no longer made him jump. He had also passed the stage of crying out into the night, but that did not mean his heart no longer experienced the terrifying trip-hammer flutter it always had upon waking.

The vision did not come for him every night, but more often than not, and it was always the same, never clouded by fantasy or revisionism. He sometimes prayed for a little dramatic license, for something to blunt the continuing horror of the attack, but after 12 years dealing with it, the memory was burned into unchanging stone.

Waking up was slightly different this time, however.

Nathan lay back on the couch in his shipyard office, having fallen asleep working, yet again. The hours he had devoted to figuring out the kinks in their ship design took a heavy toll. He found himself spending more nights here on his hated couch than he did in his Santa Cruz apartment. He usually woke up in the pre-dawn hours with a horrible crick in his neck and a desperate need for a shower and a direct infusion of caffeine. This time, though, he did not find himself clambering desperately off of the couch.

A warm, fragrant presence lay against him, inviting him to stay for a while, and Nathan found himself heeding the call. Kris had taken to working late with him as well, but she usually left before it became too late. This week, though, there had been a lot of integration issues with the environmental systems, the reactor, and the drive, so she had been staying later and later. Tonight, she had apparently stayed too late.

Her loss of sleep was evidently his gain.

Nathan leaned forward and inhaled deeply from her wavy, bright maroon hair, partaking guiltily of the fruit and spice essences the strands hinted at. He laid his head back and closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation of her warmth against him, his arm conveniently draped across her as she breathed in and out, ever so softly. However had she wound up on the couch with him?

His eyes snapped open, narrowing. Nathan was no idiot. He knew exactly how she wound up there, and why. A blind man would have noticed the way she looked at him, the way she acted around him. She actively sought opportunities to work closely with him and had changed her manner of dress, losing her nose and brow rings, and wearing conservative, long-sleeve blouses and shirts in order to cover the tattoos upon her arm, features that he had honestly never minded. He might have assumed she was just maturing, trying to be more professional, but there were also the looks she gave him, all the sly double entendres, the flirting. She had done everything but throw herself at him, and anyone else would have done something about it by this point, whether that meant bowing to the seeming inevitable or putting an end to her coy advances.

Only Nathan would have kept himself utterly oblivious on purpose.

He carefully slid out from her side, laying her down with hardly a stir from Kris. He stood and stretched, wincing as his vertebrae and joints snapped and popped. Nathan stifled a groan and turned back to look back at her peaceful face, feeling an unwanted, but undeniable longing.

Things were safe and simple between them. She had the ideas they needed to make the mission a reality, he had the design and organizational skills to see it to fruition. It was coming together. They would be ready to intercept the Deltans. They would. All they needed was the data from the Promise—that, and no complications.

He and she, either together or as a dead issue, were a complication.

Nathan forced himself to look away and walked to the clear glass wall that separated his darkened office from the building’s fourth-floor circumferential walkway along with the open construction bay it surrounded. Down on the bare concrete first floor, pieces of their future had started to become reality. A radiator panel here, an allocarbium structural member there, with photon drive components, radar sets, hull-plates, environmental scrubbers mixed among them in a jumbled, disordered mess that nonetheless made complete sense to Nathan and the rest of the Windward Special Projects team. The only system obviously by itself was a laser diode emplacement, undergoing power drain testing and well cordoned off from the rest of the mess.

Nathan could look at all the various components in their various states of completion and imagine the realized whole: a spaceship in the truest sense of the word—not the fragile, spindly constructs of NASA and the ESA, but a real workhorse, capable of rocketing them out of the solar system and into destiny, ready to face whatever fate handed down to them, be it for good or ill, war or peace.

He sighed in frustration. He could see a future of science fantasy made fact, but he could not see the way ahead for himself and Kristene, not one in which they both got what they clearly wanted and deserved, and also allowed them to complete the ship with little to no derailing personal drama.

Kris murmured softly in her sleep and rolled over. Nathan turned and let his eyes linger over her, so close, yet firmly isolated by his own mores and idiosyncrasies. They had orbited around each other for four years now, engaging in brief and not-so-brief opposing relationships, relationships that the other always remained discreetly apprised of. And when each of these dalliances with the outside world invariably failed, they always found themselves circling closer and closer about one another, whether the other was completely available or not. And it was always Nathan who kept them frustratingly and unreasonably from coming together.

Nathan found himself wishing she would just take the hint and move along—even as he dreaded her ever giving up on him, not when their future after the ship was finished was so wide open.

He turned back to his view of the construction bay and approached the window, shaking his head at his own screwed-up train of thought. Waking up with her like this had made him excessively maudlin. All-in-all, it would have been easier to keep a firm resolve if she would just stick to taking naps in her own damn office across the way.

He looked into her third floor office as he thought this and noticed that it alone of all the glass-fronted rooms had light spilling from it. Her computer monitor, dormant for hours, inexplicably lit the otherwise darkened level. A mild buzz of alarm crawled across the nape of neck, but the monitor could have been left on for any number of reasons.

Then the light shifted as someone walked in front of her screen.

Nathan jumped back into the uncertain security of deeper shadows. The telltale monitor glow shifted in color and brightness as whatever it displayed changed. No one came to her window, though. Nathan remained undiscovered, apparently.

He turned and picked up his phone. Relief flooded through him as the dial tone called out strong and clear.

Four digits later, the phone in the complex’s security office rang. And rang, and rang, and rang with no answer. Nathan stifled a nervous curse, his mind conjuring all manner of dire images, foremost among them the vision of his night guard’s lifeless body, lying only inches from the incessantly ringing phone.

Nathan hit the hook and dialed again, this time calling the shipyard’s security office. There was no ring though—only the insistent, staccato buzz of a busy signal. But their office was never busy, especially not this late at night. Dismissing further visions of a trashed office filled with bullet-riddled bodies, Nathan dialed the number again. This time, instead of a busy signal, he received three strident, piercing tones. “We’re sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please—”

He slammed down the phone, wincing at the sharp crack it made. He looked down at the phone that had somehow become his enemy and shook his head. He was loathe to do what necessarily came next, but he had little choice.

Nathan picked up the phone gingerly and dialed 9-1-1. Whatever technical secrets their potential intruder failed to uncover would undoubtedly be compromised by the police and their eventual investigation. There went all their remaining operational security.

The phone did not ring or answer, though. Instead, he heard, “We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check—”

Nathan set down the handset in its cradle with a mixture of relief and anxiety. Something had obviously screwed with the landlines, no doubt as a preface to the break-in itself. He briefly considered the cellular suite in his pocket, but knew that was a bust. Security for the project had been as tight as they could make it. They were dealing with world-changing ideas and technologies, and Gordon had been adamant that none of it get out until he was ready to release it. As a result, none of their sensitive computers had a connection to the outside world, and the entire place was wrapped in the electromagnetic cocoon of a Faraday cage. Wireless signals would never make it outside their complex.

There was no help coming.

Crouching down, Nathan shuffled back to the couch and leaned in toward Kris. He shook her lightly, and then harder as she stayed asleep. Eventually, her eyes fluttered open, confusion and annoyance at being woken up drifting smoothly into an expression of coy innocence as she saw how close he was to her.

She smiled at him, the corners of her mouth amused by the potential of their relative positions. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I fall asleep?”

Nathan placed his hand over her mouth and received a flash of renewed annoyance from her eyes. He whispered, “Kris, there’s someone messing around in your office and the phones have been fucked with. I think someone’s trying to steal the secure files.”

“Who?” she demanded, her loud whisper muffled by his hand.

Nathan pulled his hand away and put a finger to his lips, glaring at her to stay quiet. “I don’t have any idea, but there’s definitely someone down in your office, working in the dark. I tried to call security, but no joy.”

Kris jumped up and approached the office’s glass front, only to be jerked down to her knees by Nathan, still crouching. She pulled her arm free of his grasp, her annoyance now the beginnings of anger, but he only shifted around to grasp both of her shoulders firmly.

“Stop!” he said, firmly but quietly. “Wait a second and listen to me! We don’t know who it is and we don’t know what they’re prepared to do, but they seem to be trying to stay covert. Otherwise, they’d just pull the drives and steal whatever wasn’t nailed down, but that’s going to change if whoever it is realizes someone’s still up here. You go off half-cocked, you’re going to make things worse and you might even get us killed.”

Kris turned toward him, hissing her words in the barest semblance of a whisper. “Nathan, we can’t let them have our designs! Another company would be bad enough, but what if this is some other country? Can you imagine the Chinese mass-producing these systems? The world would change overnight, and not for the better if my opinion is worth anything!”

“Don’t you think I know that!? I’m not proposing we cower up here.”

“Oh. Then what do you propose?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

“We’re going to stop him—or rather I’m going to stop him while you get outside and call for help on your suite.”

She looked at him, saying nothing, and he could read nothing from her expression. Soon, the corner of her mouth turned up slightly. “Really, Rambo? You’re going to stop the professional industrial super-spy all by your lonesome? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t your military specialty surface warfare rather than special warfare?”

His eyes narrowed in exasperation. “I’m not going to jump him or anything, but I can’t let him just break our encryption and download anything he likes.”

“So what are you going to do, and why couldn’t I do it too? What happened to not dividing your forces before the enemy, oh great tactical wizard?”

Nathan shook his head and held his own suite out to her. “Don’t mangle aphorisms at me. And I don’t know what I’m going to do, yet, but I do know what you’re going to do. You’re going to take our phones and you’re going to get to the open and you’re going to call in the damn cavalry. You’ve got the critical job here. I’m just going to try to keep him on the premises until security shows up. Do you understand or do you just want to keep arguing?”

She responded by snatching the cell suite from his hand and pulling out her own phone. Both phones worked, and both showed zero signal strength. “Reception sucks out here, even beyond the building. It may take a few minutes to get the word out.”

“Whatever. Just call them in before I get my ass shot or garroted or whatever it is super-spies do these days.”

“Who do you want me to call?”

Nathan smiled, but failed to keep the nervousness from his eyes. “Everybody.”

Kristene smiled back, then darted in before he could turn away, kissing him.

Surprise and his own rationalized objections aside, he found himself kissing her back, a hand on the back of her head, his fingers tangled in her brightly colored hair. Eventually, his misgivings and the mission at hand reasserted themselves, and he pulled away with a flash of guilt.

Before he could say anything, she turned away and crawled to the door, favoring him with a suddenly more enticing view. Kristene slowly swung the glass door inward, then crawled out and to the right, headed for the distant stairwell exit.

Nathan followed along behind, but turned to the left instead, heading toward the mid-platform stairwell, the shortest route to Kristene’s office and whatever fate awaited him.

He rose from a crawl as soon as his knees hit the diamond grating of the industrial walkway, his joints crying in protest. Crouching low and keeping close to the shadowy wall, Nathan made his way to the stairs, cursing the sound of his footsteps, but utterly unable to make them any quieter. He tiptoed down the stairwell, splitting his attention between Kristene’s partly lit office and the darkened stairwell he was trying to negotiate. To his credit, he made it all the way down with barely a misstep, except for when he misjudged the distance down from the last step and slammed his foot on the grating with too loud of a footfall.

To Nathan’s ears, the sound of his shoe on the metal walkway reverberated through the building, ringing and clanging on and on like church bells at noon, but he convinced himself a moment later that most of the sound was only in his worried head. Whether it was or not, no one emerged from Kristene’s office, ready to deliver the same unknown fate to Nathan as he had to all the facility’s guards.

Now moving even slower, he crept up to her office, approaching low and close to that level’s wall. He stopped immediately before the glass-fronted face of her office, close enough to hear the clicking of keys and a mouse, but unable to see the intruder directly without giving himself away.

Nathan crouched, slowly beginning to fume with doubt and self-recrimination. Here he was, mere feet from the possibly murderous thief who threatened to steal all the research they had devoted themselves to, who would undoubtedly release it to a known enemy, giving them a capability even the US did not enjoy, and he could not see a damned thing. He now knew less about what was actually going on than he had from cowering in his own office across the way. The impotency built and built until he gave a silent curse and allowed himself to peek around to peer into the glass front of the office.

Seated in front of Kris’s desktop, a man in a Windward security uniform typed a few letters, grimaced, clicked upon a mouse and shook his own head with frustration. The thief looked disconcertingly bland: Caucasian, slightly out of shape, brown hair and eyes, with soft features and a not-too-intelligent look about him. Nathan winced. He could describe this man exactly and still have trouble distinguishing him from a host of others. In fact, from a distance, he would look like their own usual night security guard.

Arrayed in front of the fake guard, alongside the keyboard and mouse were a number of things that were forbidden from the building because their very nature was counter to ensuring security. There was a high volume flash deck, probably upwards of a 100 terabytes of storage, but only the size of a pack of cigarettes. Beside it was something that appeared to be a standard cell suite, but was undoubtedly not, judging from the wisps of vapor streaming off it and the tiny steel gas vial plugged into its side. Only one kind of computer would need active cooling, one that was infinitely more powerful than a suite, or even the desktop the device was plugged in to.

Nathan panicked, but also felt a rush of geeky envy. The thief had his own “quacker.” A quantum code-breaker, it could make short work of any encryption system or security algorithm, pitting its super-cooled qubits against a normal computer’s registers of logical ones and zeroes. It essentially performed in seconds the same code-breaking feats that would tie up a near-AI level supercomputer for months or years. It was only due to Gordon Lee’s infuriating insistence on multiple layers of encryption (despite the way they slowed going from one file to the next) that the thief had not already absconded with everything on the entire server. It was just a matter of time, though.

Only one thing kept Nathan from charging the false guard immediately. Next to the linked flash deck, quacker, and desktop was a slender, lethal, semiautomatic pistol. Before he could even make it through the door, Nathan was sure he would find out just how destructible he was. The fate he had narrowly avoided twelve years before would be all too ready to catch up with him, at least with this guy’s able assistance.

He could hardly allow the man to continue using the quacker with impunity, nor could he stop him directly. And there was no way to tell how long it would take Kris to alert the authorities, or how long it would take them to get here. By that time, the thief might well have enough time to decrypt all of their research and designs and get away clean. Once again, no help would arrive in time. It was up to Nathan.

There was no reason for the grin that began to spread across his face, but it appeared nonetheless, unbidden.

Abandoning any semblance of cover, Nathan jumped to his feet and pounded loudly on the glass partition, over and over again, yelling as loud as he could. The doughy man in the security outfit almost fell from his chair, his arms flailing in shock. He succeeded in knocking the keyboard, quacker, and pistol from the desk, leaving only the mouse and the flash deck hanging from their cables.

For the briefest instant, Nathan considered trying for the door and entering the office, to search for the gun before the thief could recover it. Before he could complete the thought, however, the man reached down and pulled the pistol up from the floor. Nathan grimaced. Doughy and surprised though he might be, the man was no amateur. Seeing the gun come up, Nathan dove to the left, landing hard on his back upon the diamond steel grating. He looked up to see spider-web cracks blossom from two points of impact in the glass office front, along with a blue flash and a shower of sparks.

Sparks. Nathan groaned and rolled over, coming to his feet. He now felt the grin fully upon his face. Their thief had all the latest gadgets: high capacity flash decks, quackers, and even capacitor stun rounds for his weapons. Whoever the man worked for, murder had not been high on their agenda. The capacitor rounds, plastic bullets which carried enough piezoelectric-induced charge to knock a man unconscious, were the ultimate fusion of gun and stun-gun. Nathan’s prospects were not much improved, but it did mean he would probably survive the night – which opened up all sorts of new possibilities.

The door opened and Nathan ran, weaving from side to side unevenly along the walkway. Two capacitors exploded on the railing and stanchion next to him as Nathan darted down the path, leaving his left side tingling from a brushing of the charge they carried. He cried out and dodged again as a capacitor round hit the opposite wall, even closer this time.

But that was enough. Nathan’s brief stint as an action hero was over. He stumbled and rolled, passing right beneath the lower railing on the open side of the walkway, and fell. His hand lashed out and grabbed, clutching for a moment on the diamond grating, but his fingers slipped. They held him just long enough to check his headlong dive into open space, and he swung back toward the catwalk below.

Nathan fell atop the railing on the next lower walkway, the second floor. The topmost safety rail slammed into his side and he felt the crunch as his ribs cracked, something of which he had a passing familiarity given his earlier experience. He fell further, but this time on the proper side of the walkway, safe on the floor below his attacker.

Not that the thief had any further intention of going after him. Nathan heard frantic steps upstairs, unknown movement and unknown labors, and then the thief was out of the office and pounding down the walkway in the opposite direction Nathan had run, in the same direction Kristene had gone, toward freedom and the loss of all their secrets.

Nathan had already paid too much to keep those secrets safe only to let him get away now. He struggled to his feet and limped toward the mid catwalk stairway that the first and second levels alone shared. “Screw this. You wanna play with capacitors, I’ll show you some goddamn capacitors.”

He reached the production floor just as the thief reached the far stairwell, only three flights and a short jog away from the exit. Nathan looked around frantically among the jumbled pieces of the ship, nowhere near being put together, and some of them still in the midst of testing. One system test stood out in particular.

Beyond a number of high-voltage danger signs and two perimeters of caution tape, one of the intended weapons of the ship stood at full power and readiness. Part of a capacitor bleed test, the CMEDLA (Collimated Multiple Element Diode Laser Array) had all of its components installed, from the many farads worth of ultracapacitors, to the pulse stretching power inductors, and even the diodes and optics assemblies. Any component that could potentially bleed off a trickle of power from the fully charged ultracap bank was present, in order to see how long an effective charge could be maintained in the array, a very important tactical consideration. Everything was there except for the complicated operating system, but Nathan had no need for complexity with what he planned to do.

Passing by the lens trunk, Nathan shoved the rolling concrete safety target out of the way and then eyeballed the base of the stairs. He bumped the trunk with his hip for a gross aim adjustment and shrugged as the thief jumped down onto the last flight of steps. Nathan limped back to the trigger assembly that separated the power section from the beam-forming section and frowned at the delicate tangle of diodes and relays, all useless without their operating systems and the computer programs on the eventual bridge.

“I always said this was an unsafe design,” he mumbled. With that, Nathan picked up a long wrench and tossed it across the trigger assembly, shorting the ultracapacitor bank to the 100 megawatt elements of the diode laser stacks.

There was a purple flash and a crack of lightning, followed closely by a blast of heat and ozone-soaked air that knocked Nathan on his back again. He cried out as his cracked ribs ground against one another, paralyzing him with pain for several breaths.

Looking up from his back, his eyes saw only a green afterimage of the shorted capacitor bank and heard a continuous series of sizzle pops from the wrecked bulk of the laser array.

Soon, though, the pain in Nathan’s side faded just enough for him to notice the dull pain over all his exposed skin, especially along the front half of his body. He struggled to his feet, disregarding his fresh flash burns, and found that he could see, after a fashion. He began to limp forward, heading toward the hazy, far end of the building. He could make out very little detail, given the smoke and his temporary flash-blindness, but something was definitely different.

He approached and saw that his aim had been a little off – not bad considering the haphazard way he had fired the system. The laser beam, only partly collimated by the inactive lens trunk had not confined the beam to a tight, parallel stream or a devastating pinpoint, but rather more of an irregular oval. He knew that because that was the shape of the hole.

The hole through everything.

The bottom half of the last flight of stairs was gone, either melted, or blasted, or vaporized to nothing. Also gone was the base of the steel girder supporting the weight of the stairwell, the lower portion of the outer wall bounding the stairwell, and the right foot of the person who had been climbing down the stairwell.

The malformed beam had caught the thief just as he had been stepping onto the last run of stairs, destroying his foot and cauterizing the stump. Then the accompanying heat bloom of the beam in atmosphere had blasted him off the stairwell to crash into the opposite wall, where he now lay unconscious.

Nathan checked the burned and blasted man’s pulse, found it satisfactory to his layman’s touch, and then rooted around for the flash deck. He found it just as the tactical team from Windward security burst through the doors at both ends of the building. Standing above his victim, and holding the deck high in the air for the benefit of all the automatic weapons pointed at him, Nathan gave them a lopsided grin. “S’all right. I got it.”

Whereupon, he immediately passed out.

“Hey there, Tex. You just waking up from your little siesta?”

Nathan opened his eyes to half-slits, and even that hurt. Kristene looked down at him, a smile playing along her mouth, but a nervous cast to both her eyes. He closed his eyes and reopened them a moment later, disliking the way his eyelids felt papery and stiff, as if he had received a massive sunburn. He licked his parched lips and coughed, causing a flash of pain all over, but especially from his side where he had fallen.

He glanced around, taking in the hospital room in which he lay, and then looked back toward Kris. She still appeared concerned beneath the mask of her smile. “How long have I been out?”

“Not too long – just a few hours I’d guess. They’ve got fluids and a bitchin’ cocktail running into your arm. They said you’d wake up when you felt like it, but nothing was hurt too badly.”

Nathan moved a tentative hand toward his side, feeling his skin crinkle slightly. She saw the movement and gently pushed his hand back down by his side. “You broke three ribs, but nothing got punctured. Aside from that and a hell of an impromptu tanning session, you’re okay. You look a damn sight better than the other guy, believe me.”

She smiled for real this time, her nerves relieved. “Listen, just lay there and let me tell the nurse you’re awake. Okay?” Kris turned and left, with Nathan watching her as she walked away, his mind a tumult.

A minute later, Gordon walked in, with Lydia Russ following close behind. She was slowly becoming a more common feature around the offices, but whether that was for government oversight or because of the bond she obviously shared with Gordon, he did not know. Nathan nodded to her and turned to focus upon his boss.

Nathan thought the man looked worse than he himself felt. Lee’s skin was deathly white with a grayish-yellow pallor, and he looked panicked, worried beyond all hope of recovery. He looked like a man who had very nearly lost everything.

Upon seeing Nathan, the corner of his mouth turned up in a grin and he sighed audibly, relieved. Gordon reached up and fished around in his jacket pocket, producing a small bottle of pills. He popped a couple into his mouth, dry, and winced as he swallowed them down.

Gordon sat down beside Nathan’s bed, color already returning to his pained face. He placed a hand over Nathan’s and gave it a light squeeze that Nathan tried not to cry out from. “You had us worried, boy.”

Lydia nodded sagely from across the room. "That's right."

Nathan smiled as far as he could without involving the muscles in his cheeks. In a raspy, dry voice he said, “I just wanted a little R & R, Boss. I figured this was safer than asking you for time off.”

“Well, next time just route a request like everyone else. Damn, it’s good to see you awake – even if you do look like hell.”

Nathan thought that was a bit hypocritical. It was not often that Lee showed his age, but today he seemed far older than his actual mid 60’s. “I’ll bet, Gordon, but I’ve at least got a reason. Have you looked in a mirror lately? Is there something wrong?”

Lee let go of Nathan’s hand and stood, pride making him suddenly closed and distant, though he was only inches away. “I’m fine, so don’t you join the nagging crowd of my doctors. It’s like they worry the smallest little emotional roller coaster will send me into palpitations. I've got pills. It’s nothing you need to worry about. It’s nothing at all.”

Lydia frowned. "So you say, Gordon."

Nathan tried to make light of it. “As long as you don’t keel over on me, I won’t nag. My skin is very sensitive right now and your dead weight might make me un-comfy.”

Gordon’s eyes narrowed. “Your compassion and concern are noted.”

At that point, Kris reentered, ahead of a wave of nurses and doctors. She and Gordon stood off to the side with Lydia as Nathan was poked, prodded, queried, and quizzed. Soon enough, his IV bag was changed, a fresh round of pain killers and antibiotics administered, and his guests were cautioned not to keep him up for too long.

Kris saw the last of the medical staff out and then closed the door, leaving the four of them alone. Gordon had grown far fresher during Nathan’s examination, so his medication was apparently effective. The man’s health and his own discomfort no longer his primary concerns, Nathan could hold back his questions no longer. “So what the hell happened at the shipyard? Who was that guy? Have we questioned him, found out who he was working for?”

Gordon’s slight smile dropped. “Before I tell you, I want you to keep in mind that as soon as you’re better, I’m going to beat you unconscious again. You blew up an entire laser emplacement and burned a hole through three buildings. You’re supremely lucky no one was killed, including yourself! What were you thinking?”

Kris appeared to have no concern over Nathan’s chosen method of stopping the thief, her approval obvious from her expression. “Yeah, good shootin’, Tex, but talk about overkill. You gave us a new north exit, and made our unexpected guest footloose and fancy-free. What were you planning on doing if the laser didn’t work? Nuke him with a ship-to-ship missile?”

Nathan grimaced. “I really hoped I’d misremembered that. Did I really burn his foot off?”

She shrugged. “Let’s just say Hopalong’s going to be stepping very carefully around you from now on.”

“Enough of that,” Gordon interjected. “This was a serious security breach. We’re hoping that we were lucky and this was the first such incident, but just because you caught him last night doesn’t mean he hasn’t been stealing from us on every previous night.”

“How did he even get in?”

“Well, you may not have even noticed, but he bears a striking resemblance to Bill Blake, our night security chief – rather, our former night security chief who had a bad habit of drinking himself into a stupor when he was supposedly on watch. Last night, your thief made sure Bill was drugged enough that he wouldn’t wake until morning, dropped a virus in the telecom server so no one could call in or out, and made the rounds himself. We don’t know who this man is yet, or who he worked for, or even whether he’s a spy or just an industrial agent."

Lydia spoke up. "He's been taken into DOD custody. So far, Under-Secretary Sykes has clamped down on even my access to info. We don't know anything about the thief yet, but when we find out, you'll be among the first to know."

“One thing is for certain, though," Gordon said, "and that's that not everyone believes our pots are cracked. Someone out there, besides our late-arriving government sponsors, believes in what we are doing and they want that tech for themselves. This is the first attempt we’ve stumbled across, but it might not be the first attempt and it certainly won’t be the last. Between the launch of the Promise and your somewhat open use of an offensive laser, we are building up some actual stories to go along with our crazy theories. People are going to continue to try to get access.”

Nathan winced. “Let me guess: tighter security?”

Gordon nodded. “At the very least. More encryption, more electronic and manned security, more government oversight, whatever it takes.”

“That means slower work and more frustration, and that’s not even counting the time lost due to the laser ‘malfunction’. Can we afford that?”

“It’s a little late to be asking that question, Nathan! It will take whatever time it takes, time we have less and less of every day. Soon, we should get our first close-up pictures from the probe. What we’ve received thus far hasn’t been much better than what we’ve already gotten from the SSBA, but I guarantee the new data will impact our timeline. The closer we get, the more we define the threat, if there is one, the more pressure we’re going to start getting from above. We either adapt to it and continue to show progress, or we risk them ‘nationalizing’ us and removing us from the process entirely. Understand?”

Nathan wished he was not lying down. He wanted to reassure Gordon, and he could not do that very well from such a position of weakness. “Yes, sir. We’ll tighten things up and we’ll get back on schedule. We’ll get our ship operational before the probe makes contact. I guarantee it.”

Lee’s stern expression softened a bit. He gripped Nathan on the shoulder, one of the few places he was not really burned. “I know you will. Rest now, work later.”

With that, he nodded to Kristene and then turned and left. Lydia came up and gave him a gentle, motherly kiss on his flash-burned brow, then followed Gordon out, closing the door behind them. Kris watched him leave and then sat next to the bed, carefully holding Nathan’s hand. She looked down at him, a smile rising on her cheeks. They were alone.

She was about to say something, to do something. Nathan could see it, and now with all the new pressures being put onto their construction, his reasons for putting things between them on hold made even more sense—damnable, terrible, hatefully cold sense, but sense just the same.

He hated it, hated himself, but he still rushed to speak before she could say anything. “Kris, about last night . . . .”

She smiled. “I was just about to mention that. I know it might seem a bit sudden, but when you look at it another way, it’s been a long time coming.”

“Nothing happened.”

Her smile faltered. “Well, something obviously happened. I seem to remember us kissing in your office.”

“Nothing happened. We’re coworkers and friends, and we both work closely together. Sometimes that … closeness is easy to misinterpret. And with everything going on last night, we got confused.”

Her mouth was now set in a firm line. “I wasn’t confused.”

“Kris, we can’t afford to mix work with … whatever else. I just don’t have time for a relationship right now.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you just break it off with your latest? Or was it the other way around?”

“I’m sorry. I mean that we don’t have time for a relationship, not a relationship like that.”

She fumed now. “I’m perfectly capable of keeping my job and my personal life separate.”

“Good. Then this won’t be awkward when I get back to work.” Nathan closed his mouth and stared back into her glaring eyes, refusing to look away first.

She broke contact, stalked to her purse, and went straight to the door. “You can be such an ignorant ass, Nathaniel Kelley. I know what you want and what you can and can’t afford to do better than you do. Hopefully, you can get a fucking clue before I’m done with you and this project.” She slammed the door behind her as she left.

Nathan was alone. He laid his head back carefully, his skin no longer painful, but still noticing the stretching and tingling of his epidermis. He closed his eyes and tried not to think. He tried to banish all thoughts of the new pressures the project was under, the thief he had injured, the way Gordon had looked, and Kris, Kris, Kris.

His will failed. All his thoughts wrapped around those central ideas and spun faster and faster, sucked down a dark drain. An hour later, still awake, he felt numb with self-loathing, and he wished for anything else to dwell upon, even the nightmare-memory of the Rivero’s death.