“That’s a problem,” Seichan mumbled.
“Why?”
“We were ambushed in Iceland by Guild operatives. That means they’re keyed into the same information stream as we are. Since we thwarted their efforts on that island, they’re not going to sit idly by and let the same thing happen again. I know how these guys think, how they’ll react. I worked long enough in that organization that I share their DNA.”
“Then what’s their next move?”
“They’re going to shut down our access to any new information, dry it up so that only they have the critical intelligence from here on out.” Seichan stared up at Gray, ensuring that he understood the gravity of her next words. “They’ll go after our assets in Japan. To silence them.”
June 1, 6:14 A.M.
Gifu Prefecture, Japan
Riku Tanaka hated to be touched, especially when he was agitated. Like now. He had donned a pair of cotton gloves and had inserted earplugs in order to tone down the commotion around him. He tapped a pencil on his desk as he stared at the real-time data flowing across his screen. Every fifth tap, he would flick the pencil and expertly flip it in his grip. It helped calm him.
Though it was early in the morning, his lab—normally so quiet, buried at the heart of Mount Ikeno—was bustling with activity. Jun Yoshida-sama had summoned additional support staff after the huge neutrino surge was picked up: four more physicists and two computer technicians. They were all gathered around Yoshida at a neighboring station, attempting to coordinate data from six different labs around the world. It was too much to take, so Riku had retreated to the lone console, away from the others, at the back of the lab, as far from them as possible.
While they worked on the larger puzzle, he concentrated on the smaller one. With his head cocked to the side (it helped him think better), he studied a global chart that was glowing on his screen. Various small icons dotted the map. Each represented a smaller neutrino spike.
“Not worth our time,” Yoshida had declared when Riku had first presented the findings to him.
Riku thought otherwise. He knew Yoshida was wasting his energy, stirring and making so much noise. He would fail. The new surge detected out along the western half of the United States was beyond pinpointing. While it bore the same heartbeatlike pattern seen from Iceland, this surge was 123.4 times larger.
He enjoyed the sequential numbering of that magnitude.
1, 2, 3, 4.
The sequence was pure coincidence, but the beauty of it made him smile inside. There was a purity and exquisiteness in numbers that no one seemed to understand, except him.
He continued to stare at the map. He’d detected these anomalous readings after the first neutrino blast in Utah. While that blast had ignited something unstable in Iceland, it had also triggered these smaller surges, little flickers from spots around the globe. He’d recorded them again after Iceland went critical.
Not worth our time . . .
He pushed aside that nagging voice, staring at the small dots, looking for a pattern. One or two were out west, but the exact locations were obscured by the tsunami-like wave of neutrinos from out there, a flood that washed away all details. That was why Yoshida would fail.
“Riku?”
Someone touched his shoulder. He flinched away and turned to find Dr. Janice Cooper standing behind him.
“Sorry,” Janice said—she preferred to be called Janice, though he still found such informality uncomfortable. She removed her arm from his shoulder.
He pinched his brow, trying to interpret the small muscle movements in her face, trying to connect an emotional content to them. The best he could come up with was that she was hungry, but that probably wasn’t right. Due to his Asperger’s syndrome, he was wrong too often in his assessments to trust them.
She slid a chair over, sat down, and placed a cup of green tea near his elbow. “I thought you might like this.”
He nodded, but he didn’t understand why she had to sit so close.
“Riku, we’ve been trying to figure out why this surge out west happened.”
“The Iceland bombardment of neutrinos coursed through the planet and destabilized a third source.”
“Yes, but why now? Why didn’t this deposit destabilize earlier, following the Utah spike? Iceland went critical, but not this new deposit out west. The anomaly is troubling the other physicists.”
Riku continued studying his screen. “Activation energy,” he said, and glanced to her as if this should be obvious. And it was obvious.
She shook her head. Was she disagreeing or not understanding?
He sighed. “Some chemical reactions, like nuclear reactions, require a set amount of energy to get them started.”
“Activation energy.”
He frowned. Hadn’t he just said that? But he continued: “Often the amount of energy is dependent on the volume or mass of the substrate. The deposit in Iceland must have been smaller. So the quantities of neutrinos from the Utah spike were sufficient to cause it to destabilize.”
She nodded. “But the neutrino burst from Iceland was much larger. Enough to destabilize the deposit out west. To light that fatter fuse out there. If you’re right, this would mean that the western deposit must be much bigger.”
Again, hadn’t he just made that clear?
“It should be 123.4 times larger.” Just speaking the numbers helped calm him. “That is, of course, if there is an exact one-to-one correlation between neutrino generation and mass.”
Her face went a bit paler as he gave this assessment.
Uncomfortable, he turned back to his screen, to his own puzzle, to the tiny flickers of neutrinos.
“What do you think those smaller emissions are?” Janice asked after a long moment of welcome silence.
Riku closed his eyes to think, enjoying the puzzle. He pictured the neutrinos flying out, igniting the fuses of the unstable deposits, but when they hit the smaller targets, all they did was excite them, triggering minibursts.
“They can’t be the same as the unstable substance. The pattern is not consistent. I don’t see any parallelism. Instead, I think these blip marks are a substance related to those deposits but not identical to them.”
He leaned closer and reached to the screen but dared not touch it. “Here’s one in Belgium. One or two again out in the Western United States—but they’re obscured by the new burst. And an especially strong response from a location in the Eastern United States.”
Janice shifted forward. “Kentucky . . .”