Broken Sky

Chapter Four

Doctor Holden Marke was well past retirement age but still actively involved with Seattle-based Naef Dynamics. The company provided an uncommon service—testing of portal crystals—and he was the foremost expert. These days, he normally worked from home and only came to the lab for meetings or when a problem required his expertise.

Field Instability, he thought as he drove into the empty parking lot of an unimpressive three-story structure in the city's industrial section. That's not possible. Not anymore. His intern had reported the warning in a text message sent after midnight.

He'd seen that error himself, thousands of times. But that was thirty years ago, when he was trying to build an ultra-stable portal. Only when he finally succeeded did he realize how dangerous it could be if misused. He'd destroyed his prototypes and buried his research.

Could someone on my staff be experimenting with the same concept? Right under my nose?

It wasn't yet seven a.m. when Holden entered the building, but it was already eighty degrees outside and would top one hundred for the nineteenth day in a row. He hurried through the empty lobby—the business was closed on Saturdays. He passed by the unoccupied reception desk, climbed the vacant stairwell, opened the laboratory door, and froze. All the lights were on, revealing fifteen workstations arranged in a neat grid in the center of the white-walled room. He wasn't alone.

"Sorry, Doctor Marke," Garett said. "Is that in your way?" The intern's electric bicycle leaned against the wall near the entrance. "I can move it."

"It's fine. I just wasn't expecting you here on the weekend." Holden had dressed in faded jeans and running shoes, but Garett was wearing the same casual slacks and dress shoes he wore throughout the week. "Have you been here all night?"

Garett brushed a hand through his unwashed hair. "No, the baby has been crying through the night the entire week. I slept through half of Friday, so I came back to catch up on my journal. Is there anything I can help you with?"

"The circuit board you messaged me about. Where is it?"

"I'll get it for you." Garett headed for the Archive, a shielded room that housed thousands of portal testing rigs on a dozen twenty-foot-long racks.

As Naef Dynamic's senior employee, Holden could have taken a private office on the second floor but preferred to immerse himself in the daily activity of the workshop. He sat at his tidy desk in the corner to review the sensor logs, skipping directly to the section on radioactivity. All normal.

Not only that, the last log entry for the testing platform was for an air filter change, more than a year ago. He leaned back in his chair and relaxed; the error had not been caused by someone trying to pass a radioactive substance through a portal.

His relief was short-lived though. The data in the other sections made no sense.

The sensors had recorded a huge temperature spike on the wormhole's outbound side, but not the inbound one. And the rig was part of an efficiency study that passed only a low-power laser.

Nothing in this configuration can produce that much heat.

Garett returned, carrying a book-sized transparent container, "When I opened the case, I thought I smelled smoke, or possibly gas, but it faded quickly. Later, when I checked the crystals, they weren't cracked or discolored; they were just gone." He set the case on the table next to the microscope.

"Thank you." Holden rolled his chair to the inspection station and withdrew the circuit board from the container. He pushed it into the microscope's receiver, then leaned forward to look through the binocular eyepiece. Seconds passed while the machine's twin probes focused on the mounting rings for a pair of artificial gems—the anchor points for the wormhole.