Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  “And your interest in this crom is, if I might ask?

  “They hijacked my email. I want to know why. I want them researched with extreme prejudice.”

  “You can’t imagine any reason the Energy Department might be after you?”

  “Not offhand. I’m all paid up on my utility bills. Oh, and—Mycroft? There’s one other search criterion.”

  “All grist for the mill, Jonathan.”

  “Right. I’m particularly interested in any connection between this CROM crowd and an outfit goes by the name of Grishin Enterprises International. Them, I could find. They’ve got a corporate website at www.gei.ru.”

  The “dubbya-dubbya-dubbya” keyphrase inadvertently triggered the desktop’s speech recognizer. A browser-window popped up to display the GEI homepage. Knox left it open. He’d already paid the site a cursory visit, but a re-look couldn’t hurt.

  “Ru for Russia?” Mycroft was saying, “Mightn’t this have to do with your former life?”

  Knox didn’t answer immediately. He was looking at the home page logo now filling the browser window: the stylized image of an Ourobouros, crushing the world in its great green coils.

  Boris Petrovich Volin watched instant replay of the ultralight landing on the rooftop of his plant. Nicely done, that. He spoke the words that switched his large-screen monitor back to real-time display. Now it showed a uniformed guard escorting pilot and passenger down the access stairs toward the headquarters suite. Volin leaned forward, taking the opportunity to study his guests.

  The woman was nondescript, hardly worth a second glance. A dumpy dishwater blonde waging her lonely battle with middle age, and losing.

  Her companion was another story altogether.

  Perhaps it was just the contrast with the pallid skin and hair of the woman, perhaps some trick of the stairwell lighting or the closed-circuit video, but the man seemed . . . dark. A darkness somehow more than physical, though it started with physical attributes, with the black leather flight jacket hugging the hulking frame, with the swarthy complexion of the grim, heavy-boned face, the straight, sable hair and black slashes of eyebrows and mustache, the empty black eyes.

  Darkness personified. Volin repressed a shudder.

  He swiveled in his chair and called up the instructions he had been emailed regarding this visit. What was the man’s name again? Ah, yes, Geladze, Yuri Vissarionovich Geladze. A Georgian—that explained it. Explained both the dusky Transcaucasian cast of his features and the aura of a ferocity barely held in check.

  Volin had keyed his monitor off and was striding out from behind his rosewood desk by the time the visitors were shown into his suite. His Armani suit rustled silkily as he extended a hand.

  “Welcome to Resource Recovery Systems. Boris Petrovich Volin, General Manager, at your service. We have been expecting you.”

  “Very pleased. Zolotova, Natalya Petrovna.” The woman all but curtseyed. Her dark companion merely grunted.

  The woman looked simultaneously shaken and relieved. Good. More manageable that way. Merkulov had chosen well: she seemed only too willing to be led by the nose, like a lamb to slaughter. Only too willing to take everything around her at face value.

  Including Volin himself. Not that he did not look the part of a chief executive for a major GEI subsidiary: tall and slim and polished, his angular features framed by wavy brown hair just going gray at the temples. Certainly neither he nor his operation bore any resemblance to the low-tech competition in the greater metropolitan area’s thriving waste-disposal business. Still, if pressed, he might have acknowledged more than a little kinship with his rivals of Sicilian extraction, under the skin.

  “Your driver just phoned in,” Volin said. “He has encountered congestion at the Lincoln Tunnel.” He smiled an apology. “Unfortunate, but only to be expected during peak traffic hours on a weekday. We now estimate your vehicle will not arrive for another forty-five minutes.”

  The dark man shrugged and nodded, the barest minimum required to keep up his side of the charade. The woman, predictably, acquiesced.

  “Since you must wait in any case, please permit me to show you our facility.” Volin grasped the woman’s arm and motioned her companion to follow.

  The flooring underfoot changed from noise-absorbent parquet to ringing steel grating as they walked out into the main bay of the plant and up onto a narrow catwalk. Ten meters below them, the floor was crisscrossed by a maze of color-coded piping, most of it leading into a mammoth stainless-steel cylinder standing on end in the middle of the hall. At evenly-spaced intervals along the catwalk, eight enclosed tubes angled down like opaque water-slides to intersect the top of the cylinder. Every surface in the room sparkled and shone in the overhead fluorescent lighting, lending the facility an air of obsessive cleanliness.

  “Just a skeleton crew on duty this afternoon.” Volin leaned on the catwalk’s rail and indicated three workers in Day-Glo orange enviro-hazard bunnysuits tending widely-scattered control stations down on the plant floor. “All reliable men. In view of the sensitivity of your presence here, the rest of the day shift has been sent home early.”

  “Night shift?” the dark man said in Georgian-accented Russian. He could speak after all.

  “Instructed not to arrive until eight P.M. I trust that is satisfactory?” Would a hired killer appreciate the economics of the situation? “We here at RRS are, of course, eager to support the goals of the parent organization in any way we can. But that does not relieve us of responsibility for our own contribution to the GEI bottom line. And canceling tonight’s shift altogether would have had an unacceptable impact on quarterly earnings.”

  Volin trailed off. The man was staring at him now.

  He swallowed. “It—it would have meant shutting down the catalytic reactor, you see.” He pointed at the huge cylinder. “And we would then have lost a good ten hours, and many kilowatts, cold-starting it back up to operating temperature.”

  The dark man made no reply, simply continued to fix him with that baleful glare.

  A palpable silence descended, stretched out uncomfortably.

  “You must understand,” Volin began again, “how essential it is to keep a plant like ours running continuously. Our EPA-approved recycling process involves immersing hazardous waste in a “bath,” as it were, of molten iron. As has long been observed in steel mills, red-hot iron possesses solvent and catalytic properties able to break down organic waste products into their component elements. In a triumph of Russian metallurgy, our Resource Recovery business unit has harnessed this effect in the service of environmentally-friendly conversion of toxins into useful raw materials.

  “This means, however, that it is far more energy efficient, far more profitable, to maintain the bath at constant temperature on a twenty-four-by-seven duty cycle. It becomes prohibitively expensive to allow the reactor to cool down overnight, only to reheat it next morning to the melting point of iron, or higher.”

  “Higher?” Did the gravelly voice betray a hint of interest for once?

  “Well, yes. Normal operating range is around fifteen hundred fifty degrees Celsius, but we can bring the bath all the way up to seventeen hundred for special decontaminations—chemical demilitarization of VX nerve gas, for instance.”

  The woman paled.

  “No, no, nothing like that going on right now,” Volin said, all reassurance. “Today’s run is quite routine: carcinogenic byproducts from local pesticide and chemical plants. Never a dearth of dioxins and PCBs here, you know. Here in New Jersey we are sitting on a gold mine of toxic waste.”

  The dark man spoke again: “This waste goes in how?”

  “You see these eight chutes?” Volin pointed to the tubes angling down to the giant cylinder. “They empty out over the molten metal pool at the core of the reactor vessel. We simply load them with hazardous material, solid or liquid, and let gravity do the rest.”

  “Show me.”

  “Of course. If you will just step this way.” Any momen
t now. Why was the man waiting? Surely he intended to do it before—

  Volin led them to where the catwalk flared out into a rectangular balcony. To their right, thick red piping ran up vertically from the floor below, then elbowed toward a chamber occupying the center of the platform.

  Volin strode over to the chamber’s solid steel door. “Behold: the Vestibule to Hell!”

  He chuckled at his small joke, then sobered when no one joined him. “Nothing so dramatic, actually. Merely an airlock. The hazmat is loaded through this outer portal into the holding chamber.” Volin entered a code into a keypad set into the jamb, and the door swung open soundlessly to reveal a cubical interior two meters on a side. “Then, when the run is ready, the chamber is sealed, the floor retracts, and the material slides down the chute into the bath. Any questions?”

  “No,” said the dark man.

  And with that, he seized the woman by the nape of her neck and hurled her bodily into the chamber. He swung the heavy door closed on the beginnings of her scream.

  He turned to Volin. “How long?”

  “To, um, ah, cycle through, you mean?” Volin was having trouble getting the words out. “As, as soon as an airtight seal is reestablished. Twenty seconds, no more. Y-you can watch the countdown on the display over here.”

  He led the dark man around to a control console built into the right side of the chamber. Away from the incoherent sobs and frantic pounding now issuing from the other side of the door.

  Alive! She was going into the bath alive! Volin’s stomach heaved. He fought to keep his rising gorge down, fearful of losing control in the other’s presence.

  Calm, calm. Nothing too unusual here. After all, total, traceless obliteration of inconvenient bodies was RRS’s most lucrative sideline, a premiere service offered to a select East Coast clientele.

  But up until now the bodies had always been dead first!

  Oh, Volin understood the logic of not simply putting a bullet through her brain: Someone at the top, perhaps Arkady Grigoriyevich himself, had required there be no evidence of this woman’s passing, not even so much as a spent cartridge casing. But surely she could have been stabbed or strangled or—anything but this!

  The futile pounding ceased; in its place, an equally futile pleading began. The woman had evidently understood enough of Volin’s orientation lecture to guess what would happen once the airlock’s cycle completed, and its second door—the entire floor of the loading chamber—swung open to dump her down the steeply-sloping shaft.

  Then she had no need to guess. The countdown stood at zero.

  Yuri watched status lights flashing red, indicating the load chamber’s second, inner door was swinging open. Above the blaring of the klaxon he could hear a series of clangs as the floor retracted, then a dull thump as the woman dropped into the lance.

  The engineers who designed the Resource Recovery plant had seen no need to soundproof the walls of the chute feeding into the molten metal bath. Until today all of the bulk solids slated for destruction had gone mute and unprotesting down its throat to the inferno. So it was perhaps understandable if the heat insulation lining the chute could not contain the echoing wail that accompanied Natalya Petrovna Zolotova’s scrabbling slide toward the red glow of the bath below. A wail that rose freakishly in pitch as the cascaded ventilation system pumped hydrogen into the tube in place of oxygen.

  Out on the plant floor, two of the orange-suited workers raised their heads at the surreal scream. Yuri glared down at them. They quickly bent to their instruments again.

  Yuri turned back to the RRS manager. The man’s face was ashen. With all his fine talk of quarterly earnings and EPA approvals, the administrator here had forgotten what business he was in. No matter. The squeamishness of others was what ensured there would always be a market for Yuri Geladze’s services.

  He looked the man in the eye. “I must see.”

  “See her die,” Yuri said. Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin, CEO of Grishin Enterprises and their mutual employer, had ordered Yuri to confirm personally that the Galina stand-in was gone without trace. Now there was a man who did not flinch from what must be done.

  “We, we cannot really see into the reactor vessel, as such,” the manager stammered. “It is much too hot inside for conventional optics.”

  Yuri frowned. The man added hastily, “There is a monitoring capability employing high-resolution ultrasound. It can image both above and below the surface. Will that be satisfactory?”

  “Show me.”

  In response to the manager’s keystrokes, the console’s main display came to life. Grayscale images depicted the interior of the cylinder below them in ghostly relief.

  “I-I think we should see—yes, there!” The manager pointed to where a writhing shape, rendered in halftones, plummeted from a dark aperture near the top of the screen into the molten metal occupying its lower half.

  The liquefied iron was far denser than water, its surface tension much higher. That made for an unexpectedly small splash, followed by a slow but inexorable engulfment of the thrashing victim—the briefly thrashing victim. Like a worker caught in a steel-mill spill, she might last a second or two but the outcome was never in doubt.

  The woman’s mouth was locked open impossibly wide, as if for one last scream. Nothing came out—her lungs and diaphragm, together with the rest of her soft thoracic and abdominal organs, had already burst and dissolved in the metallic flux. Bodily fluids vaporized into gouts of superheated steam. Sudden gaseous ventings animated what was left of the limbs in a grisly parody of life. Finally, the spinal column collapsed, scattering vertebrae like poker chips and plunging the skull itself into the incandescent broth.

  Yuri watched the skeleton dissociate into individual bones. They bobbed a while on the red-hot surface before they too dissolved. He shrugged. He had seen worse. Had done worse.

  “No burning?” he asked idly.

  “No, no, of course not.” The manager removed his spectacles and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his expensive-looking suit jacket, “The whole decomposition process takes place in a reducing atmosphere. Burning is impermissible: there can be no oxidation whatsoever, or we would lose our EPA certification as a nonincinerative waste-disposal technology.”

  Yuri turned back to the display.

  “The bones are the last to go,” the manager was saying quietly. “Those, and the teeth, of course. Almost pure apatite: the same material rocks are made of.” Color had returned to his cheeks. He no longer looked as though he were going to faint or vomit. This part he would have seen many times before.

  “What is that?” Yuri pointed to a small blob on the screen. It was sinking slowly through the melt, jostled from side to side by convection currents.

  The manager put his spectacles back on. “I—hmm, I don’t know. Most metal objects lose their integrity in the bath. But there are tapping nozzles installed in the base of the reactor unit for just such eventualities. If you will wait a moment, we shall see.”

  The manager dispatched one of the orange-clad workers to retrieve the curious object from where it had settled at the bottom of the reactor tank. Yuri continued to watch the now-unchanging display.

  “Yes, here it is.” The manager took a silvery lump from the worker’s gloved hand. Its true shape was hard to make out, so much iron had congealed around it in its trip through the molten bath.

  “What is it?”

  “It appears to be a, ah, pendant of some kind.” The manager handed it to Yuri. “The woman must have been wearing it beneath her clothes.”

  Yuri lifted it to the light. It was still warm to the touch. “Silver?” he asked.

  “What? No, no, silver would have dissolved. No, my friend, from its weight, its color, and especially its high melting point, I would say this is made of purest platinum.

  “Keep it, if you like.” The manager smiled wanly. A souvenir of your visit to Resource Recovery Systems. It is worth more than gold.”

  3 | S
chworischild Radius

  WHERE IN HELL could her prole have been going?

  For maybe the fifth time that night, Marianna Bonaventure sat up in bed and turned on the nightstand lamp. Not that her cramped government-rate hotel room was much to look at, but the light helped push back the thoughts that kept crowding in on her in the dark. Thoughts that began prosaically enough, on a sidewalk in lower Manhattan—not so many hours ago, not so many city blocks away from where she now lay, sleepless at three in the morning—thoughts that then mutated into a nightmare montage of breathless cross-town pursuits, rooftop confrontations, elevator shafts—

  Shit! Even the light wasn’t helping. She switched it off and flopped back against the pillow again. Think about something else, Marianna, think good thoughts. Good thoughts like . . .

  Ghostly scrawls inscribed the darkness: S-curves and tridents, angle-brackets and lissome, leaf-like glyphs. Puzzle-pieces from a primeval alphabet known as Linear A, whose still-undeciphered secrets, and those of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization that devised it, had held a lifelong fascination for her father, Jeremy.

  Her eyelids fluttered closed. Behind them formed another vision—a cratered crescent rising out of the sea. Marianna’s lips shaped a word, though no sound came out: Thira.

  The isle of Thira, where everything was to begin, was where everything had once come to an end. In the year 1450 BCE, it had been the locus of a volcanic eruption, one so great it not only vaporized the core of the island itself, but spawned the earthquakes and tidal waves that brought the Aegean Golden Age to a cataclysmic close, and gave rise to legends of lost Atlantis.

  What little remained of Thira might have gone on slumbering in the Mediterranean sun forever, save that in 1967 the ruins of the ancient Minoan seaport of Akrotiri had been discovered there, entombed like Pompeii beneath tons of lava and ash. With new inscriptions being unearthed almost daily in the ongoing excavation, Thira became a magnet for Linear A scholars from around the world. Including, in the mid-seventies . . .