Chapter 26 - The Mill Creek Excavation
The rain did not follow us north, but the cold did.
By Tuesday dawn, we were standing in the weeds behind the rusted chain-link fence of the Mill Creek Industrial Complex, thirty miles outside of Scranton. The site had been abandoned since the autumn of 1999. Nature had spent a quarter of a century reclaiming it: sumac trees pushed through the cracked tarmac; wild blackberries strangled the rusting fire hydrants; the corrugated steel siding of the main warehouse groaned under the weight of mountain winds.
Beside me stood Marcus, my chief of logistics, accompanied by a four-man technical team equipped with ground-penetrating radar and heavy hydraulic saws. Henley walked the perimeter, her eyes sweeping the ridges that encircled the valley.
"No thermal signatures within two miles," she radioed down. "Montfort kept his word about the tactical team. For now."
"He didn't have a choice," I replied into my collar mic. "If he moves against us, the default notice triggers automatically from Zurich. But he wasn't lying about this site. My father spent twelve million dollars pouring the foundation for this building in 1974. That’s ten times the structural requirement for a steel-framed warehouse."
Marcus knelt beside the central expansion joint in the warehouse floor, running a hand-held scanner over the gray, moss-stained slab.
"He wasn't pouring a floor, Julian," Marcus said, looking up from the digital readout. "He was pouring a radiation shield."
"Radiation?" Henley’s voice crackled over the radio, sharp and urgent.
"High-density baryte concrete," Marcus explained, tapping the slab with an iron chisel. The sound was flat, dull—no ring, no echo. "Mixed with lead aggregate and iron filings. You only pour concrete like this if you’re shielding an experimental nuclear reactor... or if you’re trying to prevent high-frequency electromagnetic emanations from leaving the room."
"Paul Vance’s logic engine," I muttered, looking at the surveyor's coordinates marked in the journal. "He wasn't using silicon transistors. Silicon wasn't fast enough in 1974 to execute the recursive math."
"Then what was he using?" Marcus asked, motioning for the saw team to bring up the high-pressure water-jet cutter.
"Mercury-delay lines," I said, remembering the cryptic equations from the patent application. "Cryogenic superconductivity before the universities even had a name for it. He built a non-volatile quantum prototype using military-grade isotopes stolen from the Oak Ridge stockpile."
The saw team went to work.
The high-pitched scream of the diamond-tipped water jet tore through the silence of the valley. A slurry of black water and gray slurry sprayed into the air as the nozzle sliced through four feet of reinforced concrete along the fault line my father had marked forty years ago.
It took four hours.
Four hours of mechanical groaning, the smell of burnt mineral oil, and the bitter mountain wind freezing the sweat on our foreheads.
At 1:15 PM, a three-ton block of concrete dropped six inches with a hollow, concussive *boom* that shook the soles of our boots.
A gust of air rushed up from the dark void below.
It didn't smell like earth. It didn't smell like mold or stagnant sewer gas.
It smelled like ozone.
Fresh, sharp, metallic ozone, as if a lightning strike had been trapped in a sealed bottle for fifty years and just uncorked.
Marcus shone a million-candlepower searchlight down into the darkness.
Beneath the warehouse floor sat a subterranean chamber fifty feet square, completely lined with riveted copper plates to form a colossal Faraday cage. And in the center of the room, bolted to a granite plinth that extended deep into the bedrock, sat an iron cylinder six feet tall, covered in frozen frost that defied the autumn heat.
Thin, rhythmic clicking sounds emanated from within the cylinder.
*Click... click... whir... click.*
Fifty years after Arthur Mallerie poured the concrete.
Five years after my father died.
May you like
The machine was still running.
***
