Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 84

2069, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

‘Still nothing?’

The technician shook his head solemnly.

Dr Yatsushita watched the proxy density display on the main holo-screen. It was flatlining. The density equivalent of white noise. Just an interdimensional soup. He took his glasses off and rubbed weary eyes. It was return-time plus over three hours. Even at one minute past due, the implication had been pretty clear. Just as there was no such thing as being ‘slightly pregnant’, there was no such thing as being nearly successful with time translation.

We lost them. Dr Anwar and that ridiculous customized lab unit of his.

He sat back down in his chair. The other technicians in their monitor-high cubicles sat up to get a look at the project leader, wondering how to read his body language. Their heads bobbed above partitions like a coterie of meerkats.

Yatsushita balled his fists. He’d just lost the brightest mind on his team and in a limited field like this… where do you go to recruit a replacement?

‘Dr Yatsushita?’

He looked up. One of the beacon deployment team was standing over him. ‘We uh… we picked up a faint signal. One of the beacons squawked a signal for about a minute, but that’s all we got.’

‘Nothing now?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s like it just got switched off.’

‘Or it malfunctioned?’

The man shrugged. That was probably a more likely answer. The translation of Dr Anwar and his armful of beacon markers and that stupid yellow robot probably ended up with them being fused into a layer of rock in the middle of some mountain range or simply lost in that horrific subatomic broth that reduced the calculations of the world’s best particle physicists to little more than eeny-meeny-miney-mo guesses.

Their system was still far too unreliable for human transmission. It appeared that Dr Anwar had been too confident with his own calculations. Yes, their system could send an apple fifty minutes, fifty hours… fifty days, even fifty years into the past. But once every two or three times, they lost it; that or they brought back apple puree.

‘All right, shut it all down.’ He sighed. They were burning gigawatts of power that couldn’t be wasted endlessly. Not in this resource-poor time anyway. ‘Shut it down!’ he snapped louder. The deployment team technician nodded and turned away quickly.

A few moments later, the deafening hum of power surging through the giant Faraday cage running across the roof of the hangar died away, leaving a hollow echo behind.

Losing Rashim was going to set them back months. Maybe even years. If they couldn’t even reliably send a single human test subject there and back without losing him, they certainly weren’t even close to ready for the proposed party of three hundred.

‘Let’s get the diagnostics running!’ he called out. Overall the system had been powered up for a total of three hours and twenty-nine minutes — when Dr Anwar had stepped confidently into one of the translation grids and disappeared. They had countless terabytes of diagnostic data to sift through. Hopefully somewhere in there they might locate a single solitary variable that was miscalculated. But he doubted it.

Time travel seemed horrifically, frighteningly random.

More like magic than science.