Halon-Seven (2 page)

“Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag,” Pellagrin muttered to himself. No longer concerned with stealth and no longer having to hide from security patrols, he walked across the room and flipped the series of switches on the wall.

The light banks anchored to the concrete ceiling sprang to life driving a stabbing pain into Pellagrin’s eyes. He’d been working for hours in the muted light of the lab. Now the room was lit with what felt like the full power of the sun. Shaking off the eyestrain, he returned to his improvised workbench. He’d been discovered and time was running out, but at least he could see the color of the damn wires.

The two soldiers outside were joined by four more. One of them, clearly an officer, took charge and began barking orders. Moments later a security klaxon rang out through the facility. Despite his improvised door locks it was only a matter of time before the lab was breached. Pellagrin paid the soldiers only peripheral attention as he finished attaching the last of the color-coded leads. Time was of the essence and he had a mission to complete.

Flipping the control panel right side up, Pellagrin glanced at the three controls. He turned the large power toggle knob back and forth between the on and off position. The knob was large, black, and industrial. It was the kind of thick exaggerated control a person could use even while wearing a heavy insulated glove. The other two controls shared a similar industrial look. One was an oversized toggle switch covered by a hinged glass cap designed to prevent the switch from being accidentally triggered. The last control, the most obvious of the three, was a massive red button larger than a man’s fist. It took up the entire left end of the control panel.

Pellagrin clicked the large on-off switch back and forth several times; satisfied with the healthy mechanical click he heard when the switch reached either of the two positions. With a sweep of his arm, he knocked the tools from the top of the cart and gently set the control box upon its top shelf. Wheeling the cart to the side of the platform, he was careful not to kink or fray the heavy black cable stretching between the platform and the control box.

Gunshots rang out drawing Pellagrin’s attention back to the six soldiers gathered in the hallway. Dark bullet smears pockmarked the glass wall. Even through the heavy transparent layer he could hear the ricochets bouncing between the glass and the concrete walls of the hall.

“Not smart,” Pellagrin muttered with a grin. He made eye contact with the commanding officer on the far side of the glass. The Russian was furious. Pellagrin’s grin only deepened as he shook his head in a knowing manner. The man was a fool.

Pellagrin had done the calculations. Barring any structural flaw in the glass barrier, there was no way the soldiers were getting through it with anything less than three full sticks of TNT. The thought made him look back to the commanding officer. The man was once again shouting orders at someone out of Pellagrin’s field of view.
TNT…
Pellagrin didn’t like the thought of it. For some reason he had a feeling it was only a matter of time before the guards did something foolish. But would they risk damaging, even destroying Fire Star?

Of course they would—these were the same men thoughtless enough to fire rifles at a glass surface several inches thick while standing in a concrete-lined box! There was also a very good chance the officer in charge had no knowledge of Fire Star let alone its residence in this lab.

It’s time to get the hell out of there.

Returning to the sink, Pellagrin grabbed the large jar and set about another thirty seconds of vigorous shaking. He put the bottle down on the counter and pulled the largest pipette from a stand near the sink. After removing the cap from the glass jar, Pellagrin was instantly confident he’d attained the proper chemical reaction. The caustic smell had been reduced to a mild, easily tolerable, pungent aroma.

The pipette was essentially a glass version of a drinking straw. Dipping the pipette into the bottle, he placed a finger over the top end. This trapped a measure of the solution in the hollow core of the long glass wand. Turning to the fortified plate steel box marked ‘Fire Star,’ Pellagrin placed the bottom end of the glass pipette over the top edge of the heavy steel hinge along one side of the cabinet. When he removed his finger from atop the pipette it allowed the solution trapped inside to drain out the bottom, washing over the massive hinge.

Pellagrin returned to the bottle three more times, each time drawing another measure of the caustic liquid and dispersing it over each of the remaining hinges. Once finished, he placed the pipette in the sink the returned the cap to the jar before placing it, too, in the sink. It was a volatile mixture and something he didn’t dare spill by mistake. Just dispersing the material with the pipette made him twitchy.

Funny
, he thought. He’d infiltrated a foreign nations most secure military installation and locked himself inside one of their most secret laboratories after a month long cram session to learn anything and everything he could about Russian culture. Even after all that, he was concerned about spilling a bottle of chemicals for fear of burning his face off. That bottle should be the very least of his concerns.

Speaking of which…
turning back to the glass wall, he’d just realized the soldiers outside had become disturbingly quiet. Now they were nowhere to be seen. Somehow that was even more troubling than his caustic chemical brew.

Cautiously, Pellagrin approached the glass wall. Glancing to the left he found the troops gathered around a satchel on the hallway floor. One of the men reached into the bag and pulled out a spool of wire. Setting it aside, he retrieved a three-stick bundle of TNT.

Dynamite…

Dammit!

Pellagrin darted back across the room. He grabbed the pry-bar from the wreckage of the crates and headed for the steel Fire Star locker. Wasting not a single step, he wound up and smashed the pry-bar across one of the cabinet’s top hinges. The hinge exploded as if made of porcelain. He followed this with another powerful swing that reduced the second top hinge to dust. Pellagrin stepped back as the weight of the doors and gravity did the rest. The plate steel doors tipped forward as the lower hinges shattered under the stress of their load. The doors smashed to the floor. Amusingly, the doors were still intact, their locks still securely in place.

Inside the cabinet was a large two-foot wide glass cube. This was Fire Star. Looking closely at the craftsmanship of the glasswork, Pellagrin was impressed. The flawless transparent glass box had no visible seams. Surely the cube was an assembly of six individual panes fused along their perimeters, but for the life of him he couldn’t find a hint of a joint. This leant credence to the intelligence SIS had gathered. The report indicated that the glass box was air tight and under vacuum…containing absolutely no atmosphere.

A small innocuous looking rock sat on the bottom of the cube. It was irregularly shaped, dark gray in color, and about the size of a baseball. A thick black cable ran to the left wall of the cube and was affixed to the exact center of the cube’s left wall. A mirror opposite of that cable was attached to the right wall of the cube. So far all of the intelligence was absolutely correct.

Looking over his shoulder, Pellagrin saw two soldiers taping three sticks of TNT to the outside corner of the glass wall.
This was good
, he thought. They were placing the TNT at the corner of the glass where it met the base of the wall. If they were smart, they would’ve placed the dynamite in the center of the pane. There was a chance, however remote, that the TNT wouldn’t breach the wall on the first try.

Gotta love the Russians!

His work almost done, Pellagrin returned to the glass cube. To the right of the cube, also mounted inside the cabinet was a large metal switch box. It had heavy gauge wire leads affixed to each side and a large red handled circuit breaker lever in the center. With a deep breath and one final prayer for luck, he pulled the power lever down engaging the circuit and sending a rush of electricity into the vacuum-sealed cube.

There was a distinctive hum of electricity that instantly made his skin tingle. Pellagrin felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand at attention. Even through the oily moisture of his perspiration, the surge of power in the air was unmistakable.

His eyes went wide as the chunk of ore rose from the bottom of the cube and floated freely in mid air. It took up a stationary location, vertically and horizontally, at the exact center of the cube. Then, after floating for several seconds without movement, the stone began to turn slowly on its axis.

The stone spun slowly for almost a minute before Pellagrin realized he’d been holding his breath. Intelligence reports hadn’t detailed this phenomenon. He was unprepared for a reaction of this nature. He’d never seen anything like it. After another minute he realized the size of the stone had changed. Somehow the chunk of ore was growing smaller.

His mind swam as he considered the possibilities. Was the density of the object increasing? But as he looked closer, he realized that an ultra fine particulate matter was beginning to spread inside the cube. It seemed the stone was somehow shedding its outer layers in the form of microscopic granules that floated freely inside the cube. They quickly began to gather in small foggy clouds.

As a scientist, Pellagrin found this amazing. He’d never read of such a thing. A hundred questions collided in his mind. What was the strange ore? Why was it reacting to electric current in such a way? If it reacted to the present power flow in this way, how might it react to current of different voltage—or a different amperage? He’d come here to use the Russian’s Fire Star because intelligence suggested the device could power his platform. Reportedly, Fire Star was capable of generating massive amounts of electricity by amplifying a relatively small current when it was fed into the device. But what Pellagrin was seeing was beyond anything he’d ever imagined. Whatever the Russians developed defied explanation.

A tapping sound drew Pellagrin’s attention away from the contents of the cube. The sound was coming from the gauge mounted on the back of the cabinet. Rapid tapping was made by the gauge’s display needle slamming against the right most wall of the device’s display, well beyond its maximum value. The power level had surpassed the max reading so quickly that the needle slammed against the end of the display area so hard that it bounced several times before coming to rest solidly against the display’s wall. Whatever was happening here, the device truly was generating a massive level of energy. This was encouraging! His gamble might pay off. If anything was able to generate the power level needed to fuel his platform, surely it was Fire Star.

Pellagrin’s eyes jumped back to the cube just as the last layers of dust separated from the object that had been buried at the core of the stone. While whisking clouds of fine particulate matter continued to circulate inside the cube, at its absolute center now floated a perfectly spherical black orb about the size of a child’s marble. It was so perfectly shaped and uniform in color that Pellagrin found it impossible to tell whether the object was spinning as the stone had been.

Pellagrin wanted to observe the process further. He wanted to take notes. He wanted to understand what he was seeing. In all his years of scientific endeavor, he’d never conceived of such a thing. Where in the hell had the Russians found this? Or worse—had they built it?

The thought of spending time watching the strange orb snapped him back to the present. His concerns jumping back to the soldiers still working to breach his fortified position. They could detonate the TNT at any moment. In fact, why hadn’t they done it already? He spun around to assess the soldiers’ progress.

To his horror, he found that a soldier had just attached a second, three-stick bundle of TNT to the opposite corner of the glass wall. No wonder they hadn’t stuck their first bundle to the center of the glass—the crazy bastards were going to detonate six sticks simultaneously! That much TNT would not only breach the wall, but the back pressure in the confined space would turn every one of them into human stew.

That it, time to get the holy hell out of there…

Pellagrin knelt down before the cabinet containing the glass cube and pulled open a heavy steel drawer. Inside was just what he expected, a pair of very heavily insulated power leads. With no time to waste, he pulled both cables out at the same time. Each cable was as big around as his wrist and had a heavy industrial alligator clip on the end.

Pulling the wires the short distance to the platform, he dropped to his knees. Very carefully, he removed a metal panel from the back of the platform to reveal a pair of stout metal flanges—one marked with a plus and the other marked with a minus. Taking great care as to not cause a spark, he connected the lead wires; one to each terminal on the platform.

Jumping upright, Pellagrin returned to the cube. Giving it another fateful glance, he pressed the large green button located under the large red circuit lever beside the cube. As soon as the button was pressed he could hear the surge of power reach the capacitors on the transport platform. Glancing once again at the TNT strapped to the glass wall, he knew it was now or never.

Stepping to the transport platform’s small control panel still atop the small-wheeled cart, Pellagrin turned the ignition key and flipped up the glass cap protecting the toggle switch. He flicked the heavy switch, then slammed his fist down on the big red button. Without so much as a breath, he spun on his heel and stepped onto the platform.
 
With great care and precision, he took a position at the very center of the raised circle.

A five second delay had been built into the system. It was designed to give him enough time to activate the device and move into position before it engaged. But now he was very concerned those five seconds would cost him his life. As he stood waiting for the device to engage, his eyes were glued to the sticks of TNT taped against the outside of the glass
 
less than ten yards away.