Chapter 13: Tragedy

The next morning saw a steady stream of helicopters ferrying Rangers out and returning with supplies and British soldiers. Fowler and Bravo Company’s Captain Kowalski came by and said goodbye to Torvald, saying how much they had enjoyed meeting the Norsemen and how much they would miss them in the future. Lars and Travis explained that their leader had ordered the troops elsewhere, but that the British would continue taking care of their distinguished visitors. Torvald simply commented quietly to Lars how they were still in prison, but it was a very nice prison. Lars simply gave a wry smile and shrugged.

The disaster occurred shortly before noon. Lars and Travis were walking across the tarmac towards the cookhouse when Travis stopped and gasped. “LOOK!”

Lars turned towards what Travis was pointing at. A large black disk was rising up from somewhere out to sea. Then it began moving.

“How is the noise level?” asked Doctor Hammersmith.

“Same as before, Doctor,” replied Joe Magliotti. He was sitting in for his boss at the monitoring station.

“Where is the noise coming from?” asked Stevens, the chief monitor. “We shouldn’t have this level of noise, no matter what.”

“That’s what we are trying to figure out. Let’s see what Jerry has come up with. It’s his programming and his PlayStation,” said Hammersmith.

Everybody looked across the table to their programmer. He had coded a system to move the locus, at either end or synced together, and had donated an old computer game controller to the project. He hit a few keys on his keyboard and picked up the controller. “Ready to go, Doctor. What’s first?”

“Let’s vary the Z axis first. Maybe there’s a surface effect of some sort.”

“Both ends of the locus?”

“Yes. Let’s increase it 500 meters.”

“Right.” Jerry began manipulating his game controller as he kept an eye on his screen. “And 500 meters.”

“Oh, that’s nice!” said Magliotti. “Major drop-off in noise!”

“Which end?” asked Hammersmith.

Stevens answered, “Both ends, but especially from this end.”

“Jerry, let’s raise it another 500 meters,” said the director. Tolson manipulated the controller, singing out when he reached 1,000 meters, and both Magliotti and Stevens were ecstatic with the continued drop in system noise. “Excellent!” said Hammersmith. “Let’s keep the Z-axis static and try the X and Y axes.”

“Yes, Doctor. I also want to test the pitch and yaw controls, see if we have any effect from changing those parameters.”

“Good. We can correlate noise levels with the changes in position and attitude.”

“Holy shit! Look at that!” said Lars. “It wasn’t a half-disk at all, was it?”

“No. At sea level half must have been underwater. We’ve only been seeing the upper half,” replied Travis.

“Torvald must have sailed through the disk, whatever it is.”

“Now what’s it doing?” The two men stared as the disk climbed again. It stopped around a thousand meters up in the air. Then it began moving some more. The disk turned around in a clockwise fashion and then turned back in the other direction. Next it seemed to rotate top to bottom and back. There were several other changes, with the disk spinning slowly on multiple axes. Travis said, “It’s almost like somebody is trying to figure out how to control it.”

Then the disaster occurred. The black disk began to move again, moving left and right. It moved silently and quickly. Unfortunately, though everybody on the ground was staring at it, if you weren’t staring at it, you would never know it was there. A Wildcat helicopter was flying from Cudlow A to Cudlow B, returning from a shuttle run with the Rangers, and the disk was behind it. They never knew what was happening when the disk caught up with them. It sliced through the helicopter like a hot knife through butter. The Wildcat exploded and crashed to the ground below.

“Major event! Noise off the scale! Something happened here, Doctor!” called out Magliotti.

“Hold translation, Jerry,” ordered Hammersmith. He went over to the monitoring station and asked, “Which end?”

“This one, definitely this one,” answered Stevens.

Hammersmith sighed. “Shut it down. We need to figure this out.”

“Shutting it down,” nodded Stevens. He hit a few keys on the computer and they began looking at the results.

“OH, JESUS!” cried Lars. He stood there staring as the helicopter crashed into the bog half a kilometer away. Then he watched as the disk shrank in on itself and disappeared. He looked around and saw he wasn’t the only one staring, but most of the rest were running out into the bog. Lars saw Travis running to the wreck and raced after him.

There was nothing to be done about the crash. The wreckage was fully engulfed in fire, with shredded pieces of helicopter and bodies strewn around the site. Nobody could even get close. They had to wait until the fuel burned out before they would be able to bring in extinguishers and retrieve the bodies.

Travis asked one of the Brits, “How many were on board?”

The Royal Engineer answered, “Six, including the crew. They were bringing back some people to try and figure out how to bring the ship up from the beach. Four sappers and the two pilots.”

“Oh, shit.”

Lars came up to Travis and asked, “How bad is it?”

“Bad enough. Four passengers plus the two pilots, all British Army. Forget about sweeping this under the rug and laughing off time-traveling Vikings. This definitely makes the evening news.”

“Did anybody get any video? Like we did at the beach.”

Travis shook his head. “We can ask, but I know I didn’t. Never even thought about it. I was just watching whatever that thing was doing.”

“And you don’t have any ideas about it?” asked Lars.

“No, but I need to phone home. This is getting too damn serious.” Travis looked around at all the others staring at the wreckage. “Come on. I need to make some calls. You need to explain to the Norsemen what happened.”

Ten minutes later Travis was on the phone to his boss, Walt Brickhouse, and Marianne Jennings, their administrative assistant and chief researcher. “Walt, this is getting serious. It’s one thing to have some bullshit in the London tabloids but we’ve got six dead Brits now. Wait until that shows up in the news. We’re not talking if, but when. Do we have anything at all?”

“Travis we’ve had every programmer and hacker we can hire searching databases from here to Beijing. Nobody is researching time travel. Nobody is that crazy! We have nothing, either government funded, military, or academic. In theory, this could even be somebody in the future doing it. It’s time travel, after all.”

“Nothing, Marianne? No insult to our illustrious boss, but have you heard even a hint? We have to find something!”

“Travis, we have nothing on time travel. Nobody is even thinking about it. It’s just not even under consideration. That being said, we have just a single hint that somebody flagged. It’s a research proposal for something that flagged some of the tags we programmed for.”

“So? What is it? We have to start somewhere.”

“We found a research proposal and the subsequent grant for the research at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland. It’s for energy development, not time travel. The proposal was for something called quantized multidimensional translation. It was sold as part of the fusion research being done. Still, those three words triggered the flags we had on the algorithmic search.”

“Quantized multidimensional translation? Any specifics in that?” Brickhouse asked.

“No. It’s just that the three main elements all match up to the triggers. Quantized implies quantum mechanics. Multidimensions might include time, which might be a dimension. Translation can refer to movement. Those were just some of the flags we set. This project was simply the only one that hit.”

“Glasgow, that’s the Glasgow in Scotland?” asked Travis.

“They’re one of the top universities in the U.K. Lots of famous graduates, that sort of thing. A big history in theoretical physics,” said Marianne. “Anyway, that’s the only thing that popped up, and the algorithms gave it a very low probability.”

“Well, we have to start somewhere. Send me the details and set up something for me to go there and talk to whoever is doing this research,” said Travis.