Shadow Of The Past Trilogy ∞ THE DISPLACED

113 ∞ the breakdown

Day Twenty ∞ Wednesday night (PST)

MASSAGING THE BRIDGE of his nose, Gray drew a long, deep breath.

"Maybe you should lay off the porn on a school night?" Baldie commented from the station on his right.

Gray grunted and lifted a brow at him. "I was watching your wife. She's quite good." 

Baldie snorted a chuckle and reached for one of the secure telephones blinking silently beside his new, slim-line monitor.

Grabbing his mug, Gray got up and headed for the refreshments hub. This was his third steaming refill in as many hours, black with no sugar. When he returned to the senior station, he paused and drank a sip as he swept his gaze around the large room. The operations base was manned by a full team of agents tonight, some night-shifters just in, others doing double shift, keeping eyes on several ops across the world. But he had only three operators including his senior agent Baldie monitoring the antimatter containment mission at the moment.

He raised his mug at Baldie who turned to him after putting down the receiver. "You know you've had too much Joe when you can smell it coming out."

Baldie grinned. "Just got word from our asset at Mount Palomar: the target's only just now risen into line-of-sight."

Gray grunted and took another sip as he scanned the multiple views displayed on the huge wall screen. He was beat but sleep wasn't even on the drawing board until he'd seen this phase through. Fourteen markers doing their mock training maneuvers on radar, a fifteenth just entering to rendevouz with the two SR-71s that soon needed refuelling. Three covert-satellite views and two infrared of the target, the failing, other-Earth factory now stabilized. The zoomed-in view of one end included one of the EBE ships. Barely a rice grain compared to the target, and it had grown wheels glowing almost white from antimatter on the infrared spectrum. 

And a satellite image of the mysterious ancient orbiter that had inexplicably diverted from its polar orbit to station itself between his planes and the target... That told him it wasn't simply passively orbiting Earth. Someone, -thing, somewhere—if not in the solar system, then way beyond—was still monitoring this planet. It was an unknown, and he hated unknowns.

"Should I give the word?" Baldie asked.

Gray put down his cup, sat down, and scanned again. "What's our asset at Kavalur saying?" 

"That it's the same as it's always been. Just there."

"Just keep eyes on it. Don't want to start something stupid." Turning the chair toward his upgraded console, he slid his finger on the rectangle next to the virtual keyboard, selecting one of the satellite icons on the impossibly flat screen. A duplicate of the end view filled his screen, now with two dark rice grains with wheels stationed at the tail end of the factory. He hesitated, uncertain of how to zoom in on the image on this new, futuristic system.

Then he remembered. "Eva, zoom in on SAT-9 feed."

"Affirmed," the too human-like computer voice said inside his ears, and the gray rice grains grew on his screen. "For your information, Admin, to zoom out or in, just pinch or spread your fingers on the pad."

Having that sultry tone so intimately close inside his skull sent a shiver down Gray's spine. An entertaining voice, but even the remote possibility that it could distract his trained agents during a critical operation was undesirable.

"Eva, can I ask you to change your voice?"

Baldie threw him a glance. "Seriously?"

"Yes, I can," the computer replied in Gray's head. "What kind of voice would you like?"