Chapter Sixty
The Tune
Thursday, March 22. 125 S.A.
Chapey. Natural Park of Broye. France.
The sky was still dark and the only sound at that moment was that of the drizzle hitting the glass of the vehicle, along with the whisper of the wind. Two restless souls were traveling on a lonely road in the middle of that place where no one was driving.
It was a road so little traveled, and abandoned by civilization, that even the route they were driving on was not adapted for driving by magnetic levitation. Therefore, they had had to resort to the secondary electric motor and wheels to drive on the asphalt cracked by the passage of time.
They were now just over a hundred and fifty kilometers from Geneva. Perhaps it was time to start relaxing.
Stan and Rum had abandoned the military vehicle before crossing back into the French zone and had boarded a free vehicle, which had been disconnected from the locator and other security systems. That always used to take Rum minutes, now it was a matter of seconds thanks to the new extra functions in the Neurowire.
They had reverted to their original looks and deactivated the transformation in Stan's case and the holographic camouflage that Rum was wearing.
Nothing could go wrong now. They would simply have to change vehicles probably in another three hundred kilometers and from there they could decide where to go and what to start doing with the fortune they now had. They had not yet decided where to go, it was more important to put miles of separation.
They could have escaped faster, but they didn't want to alert any security system that might have detected the high speed. For this reason they had not activated the airborne system in the vehicle either. Rum hadn't detected any nearby, but neither she nor Stan wanted to take any chances in case there were long-range detection systems in the nearby hills or camouflaged on the side of the road.
Rum had been observing some suspicious rocky shapes over the miles they had traveled. At first she had thought that these might well be police detection systems. A quick scan on the Neurowire proved her wrong. Those rock formations were common in the area. Those huge boulders on the side of the road, or tucked into the thicket of the nearby woods, were just menhirs.
The wind blew with ominous serenity as the vehicle crossed miles and miles of green landscape. There was no lighting on that part of the road, and they had the low beams illuminating just enough to highlight the shadows around them and the solitary bushes. Given the hour it was strange that it was so dark. It looked like it was still night, but it was nothing more than heavy clouds. About twenty kilometers from where they were they should be out of those clouds by now.
Stan, driving, turned and looked at Rum quizzically. "What are you doing?"
"Huh?" Rum looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
"Don't get weird," Stan said, with an annoyed look on his face.
"What are you talking about?"
"Aren't you?"
Rum twisted her face as she looked at him worriedly. "What's wrong with you?"
Stan looked around quizzically. "It's not you? I'm hearing something…"
The vehicle pulled over to the side. Stan looked around and put his pinky to his ear. Then he looked around and turned to look back the way they had come and then looked at Rum.
"Something's not right," Stan said, putting on a confused expression.
Stan's heart was pounding in his chest as his eyes scanned the darkness for any sign of what might be the source of the mysterious sound he was beginning to hear.
What was it? It wasn't music, but it sounded like it. It was and wasn't at the same time.
"What's the matter?" Rum asked, as she watched Stan uneasily.
"Can't you hear it?" replied Stan in a strained whisper, his senses alert to something invisible that seemed to be lurking around.
Rum frowned, listening intently, but all that reached her ears was the pattering of rain on the vehicle.
"No, I don't hear anything," she said cautiously. "What are you hearing?"
Stan closed his eyes for a moment, trying to focus on the sound that seemed to manifest and fizzle out amidst the whispers of the wind and the rustling of tree branches. "I'm not sure..." he murmured, struggling to find the right words. "It's like... like it's whistling. It sounds like it's in my ears. Are you sure you're not playing a joke on me?"
"I'm not in the mood for jokes, unless we've gone off the radar completely."
Stan looked around and an uneasy feeling came over Rum, as she watched her partner with concern.
Was Stan experiencing some kind of hallucination? Perhaps fatigue? The last few days had been hectic enough for both of them.
"I think we should move on," Rum suggested after a moment's hesitation. "Maybe it's just your imagination playing tricks on you. There's nothing here. If you're tired let me drive."
Reluctantly, Stan nodded letting out a tense sigh, as he go out of the vehicle and Rum crossed over to the driver's seat. Because they had disabled several safety systems they had no autopilot and had to drive themselves. Rum started the vehicle, but Stan never got in.
Stan had stopped and looked around him quizzically. He didn't seem to mind the drizzle at all.
"Is that some kind of flute?" he asked. The persistent whisper kept lurking in the corners of his mind, a ghostly presence that refused to be ignored.
The sound came and went at different frequencies between both ears making him feel confused. He ran a scan of his ears with the Neurowire, but there was nothing there. That indicated that it could only be psychological.
The sound certainly sounded like a flute, but there was something unsettling and ominous about the way it came and went, so he couldn't be sure it was. If it was from an instrument he couldn't be sure that its shape was indeed a flute, even though it reminded him of that sound.
"What is it now?" asked Rum, as she looked at Stan and then around anxiously.
Stan gulped, feeling his pulse racing in his temples as he struggled to identify the source of the sound. "What the hell is wrong with me?" he muttered, his voice barely a whisper in the darkness. "Something's wrong. Very wrong."
Rum huffed and turned off the engine and stepped out of the vehicle.
"You still hear something? Maybe you need to get an ear enhancement. Who knows if the transformation isn't affecting you every time you use it."
"It's not that!"
Stan was desperately searching for some sign of what might be causing the problem in his ear, or in his mind. But he found nothing. Rum tapped into Stan's Neurowire and made a quick diagnosis. There was nothing abnormal. No problems with his hearing, no tinnitus or anything like that. But what was going off a bit was Stan's anxiety.
It was absurd for him. He had been through many hairy situations but he had never had a feeling like that. Was it fear? Yes, it was. But of what? There was nothing there. It was the sensation of that sound as if it was being produced by an invisible predator in the forest. No. Stan was sure of it, he had never felt anything like it.
"It can't be..." muttered Stan, feeling a shiver run down his spine as he stared up at the sky. "What's going on here?"
Rum approached, eyes wide open, searching for some outside reason for his companion's anxiety. There was only them, the vehicle, the forest and the rain. Nothing else.
"I think we should get out of here. Right now. Let's go," Rum suggested. She didn't think it was likely, but maybe that place was some epicenter of Dark Events. If so, they would have found signs, but the fact that there was no one there for miles couldn't rule it out either. Who knew if it could not be that it was some unregistered anomaly and they were just at ground zero.
With his heart pounding in his chest Stan nodded, feeling a weight he couldn't shake off. Together, they climbed into the vehicle and resumed their journey, leaving the place behind and hoping that it was just a momentary problem with Stan's ears.
But even as they drove off into the darkness, the persistent whisper continued to echo in Stan's mind.
It persisted for a few minutes until it disappeared as quickly as it had come. But Stan wished that at least his uneasiness had also faded when the sound disappeared.
***
Siren Island.
SID Technology Development Area, Dormitory sector.
Kotori fell off the bed and a choked scream escaped from her throat. The stuffed toy of a capybara, which she had on the nightstand, was knocked off the bed and rolled across the floor.
She was in her room, but she was sure she had been struggling in her sleep in the dark when suddenly a sharp pain jolted her out of her lethargy. Cramps made her writhe in bed with a groan of pain. She had tried to jump up, but had failed and hit the floor.
She hated them. Kotori, above all things, hated cramps in her legs. More than any kind of pain, a cramp sometimes had the power to ruin her day even though she hadn't had one for quite some time.
She had never minded them when she was a child. Until that fateful day a few years ago when she still lived with her family in Bulgaria.
Memories of that horrendous night crossed her mind.
The desperate screams in the middle of the night, of an eighteen-year-old Kotori, had awakened her father, who rushed madly into the room when he heard them. The Dantesque scene her father had seen was something no father should ever have to see.
Kotori was screaming in pain, writhing on the bed, while the white sheets turned into a spider lily painting completely red.
Her legs had been torn off and were nowhere to be seen. Only she was in the room, screaming in pain as the blood left her body.
The quick action of her father and older sister had made it possible for her to reach the nearest hospital before her remaining thread of life was definitively cut off. The medical monitoring support systems through the Neurowire had helped her body generate anticoagulants before she lost all her blood, but that night she had nearly died.
No explanation one hundred percent certain was ever found, but there was no doubt.
A Dark Event.
Possibly she had manifested a nightmare in the real world. After all, almost all the women in her family, through the paternal line, had inherited that strange ability for several generations to have lucid dreams and be oneironauts at will. Something that to some extent could even be seen in her family name, Yumekawa. That gift had skipped a few generations, but had reappeared when she was about ten years old.
Her father only knew the family stories, but he never imagined that it could be so dangerous that his little girl could somatize the damage of a nightmare in such a way.
The doctors were able to grow new legs for her and in less than a month she had new legs. But there was something in her body that rejected them at first. She couldn't move them and felt that her old legs were still there.
Phantom pain.
Rehabilitation treatments for walking didn't work and that's when Nevermore came into her life, almost in her early twenties. It hurt to be separated from her father, but he wanted to give her the best so she could get her old life back.
What her father didn't know was that she would end up going to college on the island and joining Nevermore, all in less than three years. As time went on, she had decided that she would live on the island. She liked the island. Her father hadn't objected to it, but he hadn't been very happy about her joining Nevermore.
Beyond that, the treatments had worked and, including the therapy, had helped her not to have any more nightmares. Or at least if she did, they were no more dangerous than the dreams anyone else might have.
But still, Kotori hated the cramps since she had started to get used to her new legs. The cramps made her wake up terrified that her legs had disappeared again.
She hadn't had a cramp in quite some time, maybe a couple of years.
Adolescence was over and, after college, Kotori had become quite athletic and did a lot of physical activity on a daily basis as training to tone her body and join the city's security forces on the island in the future.
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Being on Nevermore was also a step towards gaining experience in it as well. But it worried her a little because of the recent events in her romantic life. Despite that, she continued with her job as Shin's assistant for the time being.
Maintaining a strong body was part of her routine now and there was no reason for her to have suffered a sudden cramp.
"What a nice way to start the day," Kotori said, looking around the room.
The room was quite large, like most of the staff dormitories. She did not belong to that sector, but that had not prevented her from living there. Most of her friends were in that sector. The walls were lined with photos in a section near the bed, all taken by her. The desk in front of the bed had some old era cameras on it and it was with those that the pictures had been taken.
With her eyes wide open and almost tears in her eyes, Kotori slowly sat up, feeling the pain gradually fade away as her mind fully awakened. She looked around in the darkened room, where a diffused brightness was entering from the window, and walked around to move her muscles a little, trying to figure out what had brought on that sudden attack of cramps.
She couldn't remember the dream she had had. The sudden pain had made her forget that she was dreaming. But then, again, not remembering meant it wasn't a lucid dream and she wasn't being indiscreet with someone else's dreams.
That's when she heard it: a faint, barely audible sound, like a distant whisper filtering into the room from somewhere unknown. A shiver ran down Kotori's spine as she stood still, listening intently to the sound that seemed to dance on the edge of hearing.
That was strange. She did not know how to explain it, but there was something in that sound that was familiar and at the same time frightening. It was a melody that went up and down in pitch at different frequencies.
Where had she heard that?
It wasn't pretty or anything like that. The tone of the notes made her even more repulsed. Could it be a flute or maybe a sakuhachi? No, she couldn't be sure it was that.
"Liv?" asked a slightly high-pitched voice.
The door to the room had opened and there stood a fey girl of small build, but quite a bit more toned than Kotori. She had matted black hair and blue eyes. Her pointed ears were hidden in her hair, but what caught the attention were her other two cat ears, although those were appendages to hear other kinds of sounds. The girl's name was Alexia, and she was wearing only a black top that revealed her belly button, very marked abs, and white underwear.
Kotori turned around and looked at Alexia who approached her while scratching her belly button.
https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/dhgidpf-78d5e1bb-13a6-4b47-bdae-2359334a0ffe.jpg/v1/fill/w_1063,h_752,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_60_by_hasegawakein_dhgidpf-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9OTA2IiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNDJkZDgwZjktNWFjNi00MmQ1LThjY2MtYmNlYTAyMGI2MTUyXC9kaGdpZHBmLTc4ZDVlMWJiLTEzYTYtNGI0Ny1iZGFlLTIzNTkzMzRhMGZmZS5qcGciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.YkLc_suqxkJ_dtS5c2N61RBP9dJdLWAwVwOgvx32hc4 [https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/42dd80f9-5ac6-42d5-8ccc-bcea020b6152/dhgidpf-78d5e1bb-13a6-4b47-bdae-2359334a0ffe.jpg/v1/fill/w_1063,h_752,q_70,strp/nevermore_enygma_vol_5_chapter_60_by_hasegawakein_dhgidpf-pre.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9OTA2IiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNDJkZDgwZjktNWFjNi00MmQ1LThjY2MtYmNlYTAyMGI2MTUyXC9kaGdpZHBmLTc4ZDVlMWJiLTEzYTYtNGI0Ny1iZGFlLTIzNTkzMzRhMGZmZS5qcGciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTI4MCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.YkLc_suqxkJ_dtS5c2N61RBP9dJdLWAwVwOgvx32hc4]
"I heard you scream and a thump. What happened?"
" Do you hear that?"
"The what?"
Kotori found herself concentrating on the sound, and noticed something strange: it seemed only she could hear it. The whisper slipped through the shadows with an eerie delicacy, as if it was meant only for her ears. If Alexia had heard it she would have told her, for she was very sensitive.
Kotori ran a quick diagnostic on the Neurowire but found nothing wrong. It didn't seem to be anything physical, nor did she have any strange ambient music applications activated.
And it disappeared.
No, it was as if it had slowly faded out. She stopped listening to it, as if the music had suddenly cut out. It was as if it had never been there to begin with.
Alexia looked at her worriedly and grabbed her shoulder. "Hey, what's wrong? Did you have any nightmares?"
Kotori looked at her and nodded, then looked down at the ground. She bent down and picked up the stuffed animal Lizbeth had given her some time ago and looked at it.
With her heart still pounding in her chest, Kotori approached the mirror in front of the bed , and gazed at her own reflection with hesitant eyes. There she was with her hair a bit messy and the T-shirt she used to wear as pajamas to sleep. She still felt pain in her leg so she knew she was awake, not dreaming.
What was that strange sound, or music? Had it all been an illusion, a trick of the mind to scare her in the dark of night and force her to wake up?
Whatever it was, it had just disappeared.
***
Meyrin. Geneva, Switzerland.
Subterranean facilities of the CEEN Supercollider.
The Director, along with the small team of doctors, had been engaged in the last moments of the final procedures on the man named Lee Reubens and Griffin.
The team of mind-benders had effectively taken care of Lee Reubens, applying their control to modify the memories, following the Director's orders. He, in turn, was carrying out the orders Janus had given him for the procedure.
They were simple orders for the mind-benders: implant memories and erase others. They had to erase basically everything related to what that professor had lived in the last years, leaving almost intact the intellect, although modifying small parts as well.
That was to replace the experiential memory with new memories. Another era, other years. It was easy for a specific reason. That man named Lee Reubens had no childhood memories. So it was easy to give him experiential memory simulations that had been prepared in advance by Janus.
It would have been much easier to do it through a Neurowire, but the man didn't have one. They had to resort to a cruder method, but because of the memory gaps it was not a problem.
Griffin, on the other hand, wasn't much of a problem. The homunculus had been receiving special treatment from mind-benders for years. Modifying the last parts of his memory so that he wouldn't screw up was easy. And on the other hand, he no longer needed to be Griffin. Where he was going he could recover his identity to make himself known to the right people.
Yes. That was to be expected.
That homunculus real identity in the past was Jack Pierson.
And Lee Reubens had just been rewritten as Leteo Waters.
In the case of the mind of the girl named Oxy it had been a pain. That fey knew how to protect the secrets of her mind. The mind-benders had to go deep into her memories to find what they wanted. It was data from the measurements of the experiment that had been conducted the night of the Tokyo explosion. More specifically measurements from the Pening traps.
Those devices had been ready for some time but, for some reason, Janus had requested the construction of three, with particle decelerators. Two might make sense, but three? The Director didn't understand why, but he wasn't going to argue either. Those had been Janus' final encrypted orders.
The Director left the medical room and rubbed his eyes. Those who said that a synthetic body didn't get tired were liars. He was already feeling more than tired. It was fortunate that in just a few minutes or a hour it would all be over.
"Director," a droid's voice called out to him and he turned to look at that expressionless face.
"What is it?"
"The courier has arrived."
"Just in time. Have her bring the package."
The droid nodded and sent the order to the surface.
***
EVE left the landed ship in a sector where the grass had grown out of control but, by the looks of it, in the past it must have been a parking lot. There were some ships and vehicles with optical camouflage in the surroundings. Although the vehicles appeared to have few guards, there was surveillance and movement all over the place.
She had finally exited the cockpit to head to the rear.
Removing the target from the sphere had not taken any work. As she approached the sphere itself she had modified parts of it again, and EVE came across a sort of cube that was nothing more than part of the fractium material that had been modified to take that shape. Inside the cube rested the two pieces of that core that EVE had not seen at any time. But she didn't care either. It was finally over.
With steady hands, EVE reached into the cavity of the sphere and took the cube and headed for the landing ramp, ready to fulfill the final part of her mission. All around her, mercenaries and droids came and went, busy with their assigned tasks.
EVE looked around.
The place was guarded on all sides. Near the entrance she had come through she could judge that there were even tactical security mecha.
The mercenaries nearby had told her where to land, but they were looking at her with a serious look on their faces. That could well be due to the striking symbiont armor. EVE paid no attention and turned to the one closest to the ship.
"Where is the one you call Director?"
The mercenary looked at her with a furrowed brow, noting that gaudy armor that looked more like a richly decorated skintight suit. "The Director is downstairs with everyone else in charge of the operation. We already told him you arrived."
"What do I do with this?" EVE asked showing the cube.
"Take it downstairs, the entrance is that way," the mercenary pointed a finger at a vague spot in the distance.
"Where is the entrance?"
"Four hundred meters or so."
EVE clicked her tongue. "Why did they make me land here if it was farther away?"
The mercenary frowned. "Hey, pink hair. You were the one who got close to this point. The entrance to the sub-surface parts is on that side only. It's not much."
EVE snorted and set off. The ship's map had confused her and she had approached an area that was somewhat further away from her final objective.
That was definitely a city of buildings in various states of disrepair and the place she had to go was next to what was a semi-derelict sphere that had once been called the Globe of Science and Innovation. Nature had eaten away parts of the place and trees and weeds had invaded what had once been one of the neuralgic centers of science in the Ancient Era.
EVE passed by a complex of buildings, which had once been hotels within the research center. A corroded bronze statue, that once greeted the site, was now covered with a turquoise sheen due to oxidation. The statue was the God Shiva, depicted with four arms in the form of Nataraja, The King of Dance.
EVE did not know the history of the complex, but it seemed that in its time it had been an important place.
She passed by a restaurant, whose structure had collapsed and trees had raised the roof of the place. Then she passed one more building on her way and finally arrived at the building.
A security droid was waiting for her and she followed him inside. The place inside was in a deplorable state, which made her wonder what they wanted to accomplish with all that. But it was better not to inquire.
It was all over now. Delivering the cube was the only thing left.
The droid led her to an elevator and they both descended into the depths of the supercollider. EVE was watching the digital elevator display as she descended. She didn't know that thing was that deep. 1500 meters below the surface and it was 118 kilometers in circumference, mostly over French territory.
As she watched the numbers descend, something else caught her attention. It was an indicator of where she was. The map showed how much territory the supercollider occupied, but she didn't know that there was a smaller one next to it.
That collider was a hadron collider and had a linear accelerator as well. But it was much smaller and from what the sign indicated it had stopped working when the larger one was finished.
Many could speak of the 21st century as having been one of disaster, but that did not take away from the fact that human civilization had made great engineering achievements, before the climate disaster and wars began.
They finally reached the first level and the elevator stopped. EVE followed the droid as she looked around. There was quite a bit of movement in that place. The control stations were busy. EVE noticed that many of the humans there had something strange about them. She didn't know what it could be but it almost felt as if they were synthetic bodies around. But there was something strange about them. EVE's green eyes scanned their aura, but it felt abnormal for some reason. Almost as if they were incomplete.
She was thinking about that when she was distracted by something else.
Was there something in her ear? EVE put a finger to her ear. She didn't seem to have anything.
Where was that annoying sound coming from then? She could hear it now in both ears and, for some reason or another, it bothered her. It didn't seem to be coming from anywhere and there didn't seem to be some sort of directional sound device.
That music didn't seem like something that could be heard in that place. It didn't fit in with the environment. Not that it was dissonant, but it just made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.EVE frowned, her instincts alert to a possible unseen presence that seemed to lurk in the shadows. She looked around, but none of the mercenaries or droids around her seemed to notice the sound that had stopped her in her tracks.
It could only be in her mind.
But as she watched the flurry of activity around her, EVE couldn't help but feel a shiver run down her spine. There was something unsettling about the way the scientists and droids moved with mechanical efficiency, their movements fluid and coordinated like the gears of a well-oiled machine.
That coupled with the sound gave her an unpleasant feeling.
But she could not dig into it any further. As rarely as it had appeared that sound or melody disappeared and was replaced by the alarms and a female voice in the place.
[Anomaly detected in the orbital belt. The event is starting].
EVE looked around in bewilderment. "What's going on?"
The droid escorting her was looking up as were many. But the movement intensified as she heard the voices of the scientists giving orders.
"All hands to your stations, no time to run any more simulations!"
"The hydrogen tank and reserve has been put in place."
"Sectors 2 and 3 are ready!"
"Systems are on stand-by."
Once again, the voice that had accompanied the alarms spoke. [A perimeter lockdown has been established, all entrances from the surface have been closed until the event is over. All personnel should proceed to their stations, ring personnel should ensure they wear radiation protection in case of any eventuality. It is recommended that droids exit the ring tunnels while the procedure is underway].
"The rooms with the mirror boxes are ready!" shouted someone peeking out from a room to the side.
EVE was disoriented as to what was happening. Whatever it was, it must be dangerous. She had heard something about radiation.
"Miss EVE!"
EVE turned and looked. Near her approached a slightly older man with graying hair and a moustache.
The Director.
"You've arrived in time!" Said the man coming toward where she was standing, looking as if he had run all the way. "Did you bring it?"
EVE held out the cube with both hands and the man took it.
"Thank you very much," he said and then turned to the droid that had been standing still the whole time. "Take the core to the collision point!"
The droid simply took the cube and ran away at full speed.
"What was that?" EVE asked.
The man who took the cube turned to EVE with an affable smile, inviting her to stay in place while the operation continued. "The facility has just closed," he explained in a now calm and confident voice. "We will not be able to open until the operation we are conducting has been concluded."
Fuck it, EVE thought in annoyance. She wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and now it turned out she would have to stay.
Despite the man's offer, she knew she was caught in the middle of something much bigger and more dangerous than she could imagine. The image of that map in the elevator came back to her mind, how big was what was happening and what did it have to do with what she had done on the plane?
"What am I supposed to do in the meantime?"
"Just don't get in our way. You were only supposed to be a messenger and that part was supposed to end once the object was delivered."
EVE sighed in annoyance.
"Want to come see the final part? I guess you'll at least be curious what this is all about."
EVE wasn't interested in any of it at first, but she'd been curious at last. After all, she had simply agreed to help because Benjamin had asked her to. But after what she had seen on the plane she could at least see what it was all about.
Reluctantly and poutingly she shuffled behind the man.
***
The director glanced sideways, feeling EVE's gaze on his back.
The alarm had been a half lie.
There was no way to detect the savitronic particles from the Sun. Only by the core could they know that they were reaching the Earth. There was also no method of detection in the Orbital Belt.
The alarm was to keep EVE down there.
But it was true that they were in the final part and that the others on site should go to their posts to set everything in motion and synchronize with the three control points in French territory.
Now they could only wait for the core to activate itself, so that they could carry out the final collision and extract the particles from that collision to send them to the two final targets.
And that last part could happen at any time.