Deep Storm

"So it's a division statement?"

Marris nodded.

Asher felt surprise and mystification mingle with the sudden, intense excitement. "Don't hesitate, man. What's the number they're dividing?"

"One."

"One. And it's being divided by what?"

Marris licked his lips. "Well, you see, that's the problem, sir…"

26

The door was one of a half dozen along the corridor in the northeast quadrant of deck 3. It bore the simple legend RADIOLOGY-PING.

Commander Korolis nodded for one of the accompanying marines to open the door, then stepped inside. Glancing over the commander's shoulder, Crane made out a small but well-equipped lab. If anything, it was too well equipped: most of the available space was crammed with bulky instrumentation. Just inside the door, an Asian woman in a white coat was sitting before a computer, typing rapidly. She looked up at Korolis's entrance, then stood, smiled, and bowed.

Korolis did not respond to her. Instead, he swiveled around, one eye staring disapprovingly at Crane, the other looking at some point over his left shoulder.

"This should serve your purposes," he said. He glanced around the lab once more-as if mentally checking off items Crane might steal-then stepped back into the hallway. "Post guard outside," he said to the two marines, then turned his back and walked away.

Crane watched the commander's retreating form for a moment. Then he nodded to the marines and entered the lab, shutting the door behind him. There was a low squeal of rubber as the grommeted seal around the door snugged tightly into place. He then approached the female scientist, who was still standing at her lab table, smiling.

"Peter Crane," he said, shaking hands. "Sorry to barge in like this, but I don't have a work space down here and they said this lab had a light table."

"Hui Ping," the woman replied, her smile displaying brilliant white teeth. "I've heard of you, Dr. Crane. You are looking into all the sickness, right?"

"Right. I just need to examine a few X-rays."

"It's no problem; feel free to use anything." Hui was small and thin, with sparkling black eyes. She spoke flawless English with a strong Chinese accent. Crane guessed she was about thirty years old. "Light table's over there."

Crane glanced in the indicated direction. "Thanks."

"Let me know if you need anything."

Crane walked over to the light table, snapped it on, and then drew out the X-rays he'd just ordered on several of the workers in the Drilling Complex. It was as he suspected: no problems. The radiographs were depressingly unremarkable. Everything looked clear.

Over the last twenty-four hours, he had performed informal examinations on several people from the Drilling Complex. And he'd found their complaints were like those in the non-classified section of the Facility: amorphous and maddeningly diverse. One complained of severe nausea. Another, blurred sight and visual field defects. Some complaints appeared psychological-ataxia, memory lapses. None of the cases seemed in any way severe, and-as usual-there was no interrelation. Only one was genuinely interesting: a female worker who had exhibited remarkable disinhibition of character. Normally a timid, quiet teetotaler, she had over the last few days become profane, aggressive, and sexually promiscuous. The day before, she'd been confined to quarters after being found drunk while on shift. Crane had interviewed the woman and spoken to her coworkers, and would send a comprehensive report to Roger Corbett for evaluation-suitably filtered, of course.

Crane pulled the radiographs from the light table with a sigh. He had ordered MRIs and taken blood, and he would send them to the lab for analysis. But he feared the results would be the same as before: inconclusive. A part of him had hoped for a breakthrough here. Although the last thing he wanted to see was more illness, if there had been a disease cluster in the Drilling Complex-where the real work was being done-that would have provided a clue. But they seemed no worse off than their fellows upstairs.

No: it was clear to him that Spartan's sudden concern was not due to severity but selection. Before, only non-essential people had been affected, and the admiral had shown little interest. But now that people directly responsible for the digging were falling ill, Spartan was sitting up and taking notice.

He snapped off the light table. Even if these new complaints proved inconclusive, they had given him a major break: he now had access to the classified levels of the Facility. This effectively doubled the number of people he could monitor, not to mention more opportunities for seeking out possible environmental factors.

Hui Ping looked over. She was a study in black and white: black hair, eyes, and glasses; white lab coat and pale, almost translucent skin. "You don't look happy," she said.

Crane shrugged. "Things aren't fitting into place as quickly as I'd hoped."

Ping nodded as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves. "That goes for me, too." Her glossy hair, cut short, shook as she moved her head.

"What are you working on?"

"That." And Ping pointed toward the far side of a hulking piece of equipment.

Crane walked over, peered around its edge. To his surprise he saw another of the thin sentinels-twin to the one Asher had shown him-hovering in midair, shimmering with myriad shifting colors. The same whisper-thin beam of pure white light led from the object's upper edge up to the ceiling of the room.

"Jesus," Crane said, awed. "You've got one."

Ping laughed lightly. "They're not exactly rare. More than twenty have been retrieved so far."

Crane looked at her in surprise. "Twenty?"

"Yes, and the deeper we go, the more we find."

"If you've found so many just in the path of the drill shaft, the crust around here must be saturated with them."

"Oh, they're not in the path of the drill shaft."

Crane frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Well, the first one was. But since then, the rest have come to meet us."

"Meet you?"

Ping laughed again. "I don't know how else to put it. They come to the Marble. Almost as if they're drawn to it."

"You mean these things drill through solid rock?"

Ping shrugged. "We don't know how they come, exactly. But they do."

Crane looked at the object more closely. It looked impossibly strange, floating there in the middle of the lab, coruscating with a deep i

"What are you studying?" he murmured.

"That tiny beam of light it emits. I've been ru

"You mean, because you have to move your equipment around to suit it-not the other way around?"

Ping laughed again. "That, too. But no, I mean what's happening to you is happening to me as well. The pieces just aren't fitting together."

Crane folded one arm over the other and leaned against the bulky equipment. "Tell me about it," he said.

"I'd be happy to. Only the scientists are taking much interest in these sentinels. The rest are just eager to get to the mother lode. Sometimes I think I've been given this non-essential assignment just because Korolis wants me out of the way. I was brought down here to program the scientific computers, not run them."