‘Did I just see that?’
Ethan nodded. ‘You take the right flank, I’ll take the left.’
***
V
They moved out together, spreading apart as they eased down the hillside, moving from cover to cover. Ethan kept his eyes fixed upon the figure crouched over the prey at the base of the hill. He could not tell whether it was a man or a woman, the shape completely broken up by dense foliage that had been used as camouflage, woven into their clothing to break up their outline in the manner of a ghillie suit and avoid detection by whatever it was they were hunting. The fact that they were hunting at all suggested that whatever had happened to Clearwater, it had occurred long enough ago that there were no longer any food resources within the town. If the person at the base of the hill was a survivor, Ethan knew instinctively that it was essential they were captured and questioned.
He glanced out to his right and saw Lopez moving with silky grace between the tall grasses, staying low and moving almost out of sight as Ethan crept into a glade of trees. A narrow path between the trees led to the base of the hill and the increased cover allowed him to move more quickly, but it also concealed from view his target.
Ethan reached the base of the hill and crouched low, not really seeking to see the target but listening instead. On the faint whisper of a breeze he could hear the sound of a blade cutting skin as the survivor prepared the animal they had caught for cooking later on. He distinctly heard the faint tearing of flesh as he crept slowly forwards through the glade. The sounds stopped as he reached the edge of the tree line, with the open grasses ahead glowing in the sunrise before him.
Ethan squinted and raised one hand to shield his eyes from the brilliant flare of the sunlight as he tried to see where the hunter was crouched.
‘Don’t move.’
Ethan remained silent and still, although he cursed himself as from his right he heard faint footsteps. He swivelled his gaze to see a tall figure completely enshrouded in a make–shift ghillie suit, a powerful–looking rifle in their grasp and a steely gaze directed at him.
‘I’m not here to hurt you.’ Ethan said.
‘Is that why you’re carrying?’ the figure asked, a female voice.
‘It’s licensed,’ Ethan explained. ‘I’m here to find out what happened to the town of Clearwater.’
The figure stood in silence, legs splayed and the rifle pointed unwaveringly between Ethan’s eyes.
‘What would you know about it?’
‘I know that recently this was a thriving little town,’ Ethan shrugged, holding his arms out to either side to show her that he was not about to draw his weapon. ‘Somebody’s made this place look like it’s fifty years old, and I want to know why.’
‘What’s it to you?’
Ethan managed a faint smile. ‘I was about to ask you the same question.’
‘Yeah? Well, I’m the one holding a rifle.’
The voice that replied didn’t belong to the hunter.
‘And I’m the one holding a pistol.’
Lopez eased out of the treeline from behind the hunter, a service pistol aimed at the back of their target’s head. Ethan smiled broadly as he got to his feet and saw the hunter rolled her eyes as she lowered the rifle.
Ethan took a pace toward her and yanked the rifle from her grasp. She put her hands in the air but stared into the distance rather than meeting Ethan’s gaze. Ethan check the rifle over, made it safe, and then looked into the hunter’s eyes and forced her to meet his.
‘If we were here to hurt you, I’d probably shoot you right now.’
Ethan turned the rifle over and pressed it back into her grasp. The woman stared at him with a slightly surprised gaze as she took hold of the rifle once more, and Ethan gestured for Lopez to lower her pistol.
‘Should have known you wouldn’t be out here alone,’ the woman said as she glanced over her shoulder and saw Lopez standing behind her.
‘Yes you should,’ Ethan agreed. ‘But you caught me out. Who are you?’
The woman reached up and pulled the hood of the ghillie suit off to reveal a surprisingly young face and long black hair tied tightly behind her head. A stud sparkled in her nose, and her eye liner was a little too heavy, a look that Ethan recalled as being referred to as emo. Her thick black hair, pale skin and permanently disgruntled expression made her a virtual poster–girl for teenage adolescence.
‘My name is Amber,’ she replied.
‘Does Amber have a second name?’ Lopez asked.
‘Not for now.’
Considering that her entire town appeared to have vanished, Ethan had some sympathy for her desire to remain anonymous until she had figured out who was confronting her.
‘We need to talk,’ Ethan said. ‘Do you have any idea what happened here?’
Amber sighed and then gestured for them to follow as she struck out of the glade across the hillside.
‘I was on a camping trip, part of my college break,’ she explained as they walked. ‘I came back through here four days ago, heading home ready to go back to college the following day. When I got here it was almost sunset, and the town was barricaded from both sides by troops and vehicles. They took something out of here, and when I got a glimpse of it on the back of a truck it was so bright that it blinded me.’
Ethan looked at Lopez, who shot him serious glance.
‘Jarvis mentioned something about an energy burst that got picked up by one of the local airbases.’
‘This energy or light that you saw,’ Ethan asked. ‘Do you have any idea what it was?’
Amber shook her head. ‘No. By the time I recovered my sight it was the following morning. The trucks were gone and the town looked like it does now. I don’t know what the hell happened and I felt like I was losing my mind, like I’d gone back in some bizarre time warp and been left here all alone. It was only when I saw airliners cruising through the sky that I knew something else must have happened.’
‘You’ve been staying out here all alone?’ Lopez asked. ‘You didn’t think to go for help?’
‘From here?’ Amber challenged. ‘Military troops made my entire town’s inhabitants disappear, and then went out of their way to make this town look like it’s been abandoned for half a century. I don’t know what happened to any of the people that lived here, but I have a suspicion it’s not good. I wasn’t about to reveal that I was still alive.’
‘They probably already know,’ Ethan said. ‘Whoever did this will have had a census of the town’s inhabitants, the entire population. They will know that you’re missing.’
‘Which is why I kept my head down and stayed out of sight,’ Amber agreed. ‘I was hoping that perhaps the townsfolk would come back eventually, that this was all some sort of mistake or that maybe Hollywood had hired the entire town to shoot some movie or something. Wishful thinking, I guess.’
Ethan was already thinking himself, although none of his thoughts were wishful at all. Military troops were involved in whatever had happened here and the town’s inhabitants were gone. Yet they had not sought to hunt for the missing Amber, and that suggested to him that they did not have the resources to conduct such an overt operation out here, despite the undoubted sensitivity of whatever it was they were trying to cover up.
‘Small unit, covert operations,’ he said as he looked at Lopez.
‘Paramilitary unit,’ Lopez replied in agreement. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll have wanted to attract attention to this operation using helicopters or heavy lift aircraft of any kind. This would have been a very quiet operation to get everybody out, make the town look old and then just disappear.’
Amber nodded her agreement.
‘I was never camped more than ten miles from the town, and I never heard any unusual aircraft in the area or anything that suggested there were major forces deployed. From what I did see I think there were no more than about fifty soldiers in all.’
Amber crouched down in the grass and lifted a dead rabbit, its s
kin already removed and its guts a slimy mess on a rock nearby. Lopez winced faintly as she watched Amber hook the carcass onto her belt.
‘You’re not going to be able to stay out here forever!’ Ethan pointed out to Amber. ‘Sooner or later we have to figure out what happened here.’
Amber turned to him and raised one delicate eyebrow.
‘How did you know about what happened here?’ she demanded. ‘Why has none of the emergency services or even the media come down here to report on this?’
‘We work for the Defense Intelligence Agency,’ Ethan explained. ‘It’s our job to figure out things like this. If you live here, then why don’t you take us to your home and maybe we can start trying to understand what’s going on?’
Amber’s face fell. ‘My home is gone.’
Lopez stepped forward. ‘Did you have family there?’
Amber nodded. ‘My folks, they’re gone too.’
‘Towns don’t disappear without a reason, nor do family,’ Ethan said. ‘And this is not the first time it’s happened.’
‘What do you mean?’ Amber asked.
‘The DIA has evidence of towns disappearing in remote parts of the world such as Africa and Siberia, and it’s happening more frequently than you might imagine,’ Lopez explained. ‘This is the first time it’s happened on US soil as far as we are aware. If you want to find out what happened to your parents, then we’re going to need an idea of why it was that this town would be made to disappear instead of any other in the United States. Was there anything at all unusual going on in Clearwater before the population disappeared?’
Amber sighed softly and nodded.
‘Four weeks ago, the entire town was cut off from the National Grid.’
Ethan raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m surprised it was connected in the first place, it’s so remote.’
‘A lot of the properties used oil burners,’ Amber agreed, ‘but we also had mains electricity.’
‘So what, the population left after the power was shut off?’ Lopez suggested.
Amber shook her head.
‘No, the town was disconnected from the National Grid but the power wasn’t shut off. That’s what I’m assuming is behind this. Clearwater was generating its own power and no longer needed to be a part of the National Grid at all. None of us were using oil or gas or coal anymore.’
‘I don’t see a wind tower,’ Ethan said as he looked around.
‘That’s because there wasn’t one,’ Amber insisted. ‘That’s kind of the point. We didn’t need any energy at all because we were getting it all for free.’
***
VI
‘Say that again?’
Amber sat down on the lawn of what had once been her home, the rifle resting against her shoulder and pointed at the sky as she spoke.
‘My father was an inventor who worked for the government for almost thirty years,’ she explained. ‘He worked on numerous projects involving nuclear fusion at the National Ignition Facility in California. I don’t fully understand exactly what it was that he did except that it involved novel ways of producing energy.’
Ethan nodded as he recognized the name of the famous facility in Chicago.
‘They're the guys that are trying to produce nuclear fusion on earth right?’
Amber nodded. ‘My father explained it in the sense that they were trying to create a small sun on earth. They have these chambers that are able to contain immense pressures and temperatures just like those found in the sun. If they are able to do so, then the energy produced is far more than the actual energy required to start the process in the first place: dad calls it the “ultimate free lunch”, getting more out than you put in.’
‘I didn’t think that was possible,’ Lopez asked, ‘something to do with the law of conservation of energy?’
Amber looked at Lopez with renewed respect.
‘Dad mentioned that from time to time, that it’s impossible to get more energy out of something than you put in. However, nuclear fusion is the same way that a nuclear bomb works except of course that in a bomb the energy is not contained but allowed to radiate outwards as a blast. He said once that this process is the conversion of matter into pure energy, E equals MC squared and all that techy stuff. That’s why nuclear bombs are so powerful, they convert everything back into raw energy.’
Ethan recalled from a previous investigation for the DIA of just how much power nuclear fusion was able to create. A scientist who had worked at similar laboratories once explained to him that if he was to take the button from his shirt and convert it into pure energy, it would explode with enough force to level an entire city block. Even the largest nuclear fusion bombs that had ever been detonated contained only a fist–sized chunk of matter, usually plutonium, and yet they were capable of levelling cities and laying waste to entire regions.
‘So what happened? Did this ignition facility finally manage what your father was working on?’
‘Not in his time working there,’ Amber said. ‘My father was at the forefront of the pioneering technology being developed to create true nuclear fusion on earth as a power source, but the new scientists coming through from the universities were overtaking him in the understanding of what was happening. My father thought it wiser to relinquish his position to allow them to continue the work while he pursued other avenues.’
‘Other avenues?’ Ethan echoed.
‘My father had become disillusioned with the idea of creating nuclear fusion on earth, chiefly because he thought it was an expensive and inefficient way of generating such vast amounts of energy.’
‘Inefficient?’ Lopez asked. ‘I don’t know much about nuclear fusion, but I did understand it to be very powerful and without any exhaust gases that pollute the atmosphere.’
‘That’s very true,’ Amber agreed. ‘And despite what the green movement says, nuclear fusion is in fact very safe. It’s the opposite of nuclear fission, which is the process of splitting an atom. In that process, if the cooling of the reactor is not maintained then the process can run away with itself. That’s what happened at Chernobyl in 1986. Nuclear fusion, however, is very safe because it’s the process of forcing the atoms together under high pressure. If the process should fail for some reason, perhaps the reactor chamber being breached, the first thing that happens is that pressure is lost and the process immediately ceases.’
‘So what was the problem then?’ Ethan asked.
‘My father was of the opinion that it was possible to produce nuclear fusion without requiring the intense pressures and temperatures of a nuclear fusion reactor. He had done sufficient research, or so he kept saying to anyone who would listen, that he believed it possible to build a reactor that was not the size of a small town but that you could fit in a boiler room at home.’
Ethan glanced at Lopez. ‘Something like that would be worth silencing an entire town for.’
‘If it existed,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Did your father managed to build something like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Amber admitted. ‘After he retired from the National Ignition Facility, dad spent countless months in his workshop labouring on something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was about and was really shady about revealing to anyone what he was doing in there. I didn’t really understand why until now.’
‘Understand what? And was it your father’s invention that was powering the town after it separated from the National Grid?’
Amber rubbed her temples with one hand as she replied.
‘According to dad, many people in the past have claimed to have invented devices that produce energy for free. Most of them are charlatans, snake oil salesman who have ripped off people for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and then disappeared. However, he said that a few people have created devices that have then suddenly disappeared, all trace of their existence vanishing and in one case their house actually being reduced to nothing but foundations literally overnight. News reports would then appear on the Internet
claiming them to have been charlatans that had fled the country with others people’s money, or likewise slanderous comments made denigrating their reputation.’
‘Sounds like conspiracy theories to me,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Any time somebody claims to have invented something spectacular and is then challenged to produce evidence to support their claims, they mysteriously find themselves unable to do so or simply disappear.’
‘My dad is not one of those people!’ Amber shot back. ‘He had a different plan in mind.’
‘Such as?’ Ethan asked.
‘My father was going to give the device away to the world for free.’
Ethan and Lopez remain silent for a long moment as they considered the implications of this. It was without doubt that anybody who could develop such a remarkable device, one that could power the world for free, would become incredibly wealthy in an instant. Like, Rockefeller or Gates or Branson wealthy. Literally every home and every vehicle in the world would want one of the devices, would relish being able to sever ties with power companies that made such gargantuan profits from the populations of so many countries. To give something so valuable away for free seemed literally insane.
‘Nobody ever does that,’ Lopez said. ‘Everybody sells out.’
Amber smiled up at Lopez as she replied. ‘So you’d imagine, but in fact the world is changing much faster than I think a lot of governments and corporations would like. Freeware and shareware is becoming the new norm, with people developing programs and software for computers and not selling them but simply sharing them for free across the Internet with peers.’
‘Software is a bit different from a world–changing energy source,’ Ethan pointed out.
‘Is it?’ Amber challenged. ‘Where do you think the World Wide Web came from?’
‘The United States military,’ Lopez replied. ‘They were using it as a communication device and the technology trickled down to the civilian realm.’
‘Wrong,’ Amber replied. ‘The World Wide Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners–Lee, a British scientist who developed it to communicate with other scientists quickly and then realised the potential of what he had created and resisted all offers from major American corporations keen to profit from the technology. It was he, one man alone, who gave us the World Wide Web and thus the Internet for free. He surrendered the chance of becoming a multi–billionaire in favour of returning something to the world that would benefit the public in more ways than even he himself could have imagined at the time.’
The Fusion Cage (Warner & Lopez Book 2) Page 4
