Page 26 of A Time & Place for Every Laird (A Laird for All Time #2)
Day Five
“Wow. No wonder they want to keep this secret,”
Sorcha said, setting aside the binder filled with the information Danny had printed for them the previous day as Hugh looked up from the stack of old newspapers he had been working his way through while she read through the technical report.
She rubbed her eyes with a sigh before lifting her head to stare out the window, but Hugh wasn’t certain if she was truly seeing the misting rain and rolling waters at all. She looked dazed and introspective, but since Sorcha had spent the whole of the previous evening and most of the morning poring over the contents of the thick binder, Hugh couldn’t blame her.
Nor did he rush to ask about what she had discovered. A part of him wanted to know, but as he had conceded the previous day, there was probably nothing in the report that would be able to change his circumstances. Perhaps the only good they might truly derive from it was the knowledge of what they were up against.
So, instead of asking, Hugh went into the kitchen and poured her another cup of coffee, preparing it as he had learned she preferred it, with little coffee and large amounts of sugar and flavored cream. Returning to the library, he pressed it into her hands and went to the fireplace, stoking the flames and adding more wood to fight the lingering morning chill. He loved the room with its huge stacked stone fireplace, clean white painted shelves, soft green walls, deep, comfortable furniture, and wealth of books.
With Sorcha there with him.
As she had said, it was easy to become spoiled.
“Are you going to ask?”
She was hugging her mug in both hands, peering at him curiously over the brim as Hugh returned to the sofa they had been sharing and sat next to her. Not too close; Hugh was finding that her permission to flirt had made her proximity an almost unbearable temptation. “I’m sure ye will tell me when yer prepared tae do so.”
“But you don’t really want to know any more, do you?”
She was coming to know him so well. “I believe I need tae know.”
Sorcha nodded solemnly. “So do you want the gritty details or just the Cliffs Notes version?”
“One day ye might hae tae tell me what these ‘Cliffs Notes’ are,”
Hugh teased, reaching out to tweak her chin but pulling away before he made contact. A brief caress of that silky skin would not be enough now. “’Tis a rainy day with little else tae do, so tell me all if it pleases ye tae do so.”
“What? Oh, right,”
she said, casting him a sidelong glance, as if the request was at odds with her thoughts. “Let me start with the basics then. Do you know what a wormhole is, Hugh?”
No, but Hugh didn’t ever want to admit such ignorance again. Instead, he only raised a brow. “Okay, how about a black hole?”
she asked, then sighed. “Gravity?”
Hugh scowled at that. “As ye said, I am nae simpleton, Sorcha.”
“Okay, imagine a body in space with a gravitational pull stronger than light,”
she said, prompting a vague recollection.
“Aye, there was a man, an Englishman, I cannae recall his name but he was a rotund, dark-faced man … a member of the Royal Society, who experimented with gravity and magnetism. He theorized such a thing,”
Hugh said, tapping a finger on his lips as he tried to remember the details of the brief discussion. “Something about a heavenly body so massive that light couldnae escape it. Is that what you are referring tae?”
“Right. A black hole.”
“He said ye cannae see it. ’Twas only a theory.”
“That has become truth. The reason you can’t see it is because it won’t reflect light, but we know where they are because they pull on other objects around them.”
She paused, then asked, “With me so far?”
Hugh nodded, and she continued. “Jump through history to the theory that a black hole is a region of space/time. A combination of the two, okay? A wormhole—and I am going to be incredibly simplistic here so don’t beat me up over it after you read a textbook on the subject—would be like two black holes meeting in the middle, like a tunnel with each end in a different space/time, connecting two points even a million miles away from each other with a pathway between. They always use the example of a folded piece of paper where two ends that were far apart are suddenly right next to each other.”
Sorcha drew two dots on the back of one of the pages in the binder, representing them as black holes and bending the page so that the dots met as a demonstration.
Hugh nodded again. He could visualize that. “Carry on.”
“These wormholes aren’t constant. Again, it’s all theory—I mean, we don’t know, because we haven’t been there to see it—but we think they form and collapse pretty quickly and they exist at a Planck-scale level. I mean, it’s far below subatomic levels …”
She paused at his petulant scowl. “It’s really, really, really small. So small that it is pointless to try to physically measure them. Anyway, at that level it’s believed that space/time is unstable and chaotic. They call it quantum foam, and the wormholes form pretty easily in those conditions.
“Most of the quantum wormholes in the foam lead only a few Planck-lengths away. About this far,”
Sorcha said, pressing her thumb and forefinger together with no space between. “But sometimes they can span light-years or even across the universe. Well, one theory leads to another and someone gets the idea that you can cross through it. Then comes the idea of a transversible wormhole that says you should be able to go back and forth across it. But all in all it’s a naturally occurring event.”
“In space,”
he clarified.
“Yes, in space. That’s what makes this whole thing so weird,”
Sorcha told him, picking up the binder and idly flipping through the pages. “There’s this organization called INSCOM—it’s an acronym; the military is big on them. It stands for U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Basically they are the covert sector of the Army tasked with counterintelligence, information warfare, and electronic warfare.”
“They’re spies?”
Claire waggled her hand back and forth. “It’s a gray area. It’s hard to be an Army wife without getting a feel for these kinds of things. I would say they are spies as much as they wage a little warfare electronically themselves. These days you can cripple a nation with just a few keystrokes.”
Hugh only raised his brow. “Verra well. Carry on.”
“Okay, so this whole thing started when INSCOM contracted DARPA—another acronym that stands for Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. DARPA is a military think tank paid by the government agencies to just spout out new ideas. Mark-Davis works with them a lot, kind of like two brains in the same head. Apparently there are places already that can create a wormhole, but DARPA has been trying to develop a way to take one of those short-lived wormholes, stabilize it, and expand it for macroscopic use … Making it big enough to actually see. They want to trap one end and stabilize it using negative energy. Theoretically, negative energy is the stuff that caused the initial inflation of the early universe.”
“The early universe?”
“Are you too early for the Big Bang Theory?”
she asked, but read Hugh’s closed expression well enough to know there would be no answer forthcoming. She rubbed her eyes again, tiredly. “Oh, I so don’t want to argue creationism with you right now. Let’s just leave it at the idea that with this negative energy, you could open one end of a wormhole and expand it, okay? Are you with me so far?”
Surprisingly enough, he was. Other than a few of her terms, Sorcha’s explanation had been simple enough so far. “So how are they employing this power?”
“DARPA hooked up with Dr. Fielding to start developing new surveillance technology for INSCOM using wormholes. Basically, they started out wanting to be able to open a tiny wormhole into a room or area where bad guys are meeting or whatever. From their end, they could open a large enough one to send through a small camera or a microphone so they could see and listen to conversations even in bunkers far underground. It would be virtually undetectable.”
“Would they truly attempt something so far-fetched?”
Hugh asked after a moment’s thought. “It doesnae sound like ye believe it either.”
“I wouldn’t normally but since INSCOM is part of the same organization that tried to develop parapsychologic methods in the seventies and eighties, I guess I can’t be too surprised. They were trying for this thing called remote viewing, where a psychic or seer could look into the minds of people across the world and see what they were planning.”
Hugh snorted at that. “And ye think my time was filled with witchcraft and other such nonsense!”
“I agree with you on that point.”
“But if a wormhole is a natural phenomenon, how are they controlling it?”
Sorcha shuffled through the pages once more, obviously not searching for an answer but occupying her hands. “An electrical charge—we’ve gone over electricity, right?—well, the charge steers the destination end of the wormhole, which stays on Earth rather than taking off across space because it is the nearest gravity well to the opening. I mean, it could go somewhere else but the tendency is for it to stay on Earth. But it requires vast amounts of power. We’re talking a whole grid devoted to keeping this thing running for just a few minutes, so they can’t keep it on all the time.”
Hugh nodded as he processed the information she had provided. “So how did I get involved in all of this?”
“Well, now that’s where Fielding really screwed up—or I guess found their moneymaker, depending on how you look at it. They found out through a little trial and a lot of error that if the power was shut off abruptly rather than slowly backing it down, the negative energy construct—the force that was holding the wormhole open—would just collapse. As the negative energy collapses, it momentarily enlarges the wormhole. Think of it as an implosion followed by a larger explosion. When this happened, the opening would enlarge and last for a second or two, leaving no trace once it was gone. Fielding stumbled onto a gold mine here, Hugh. That is why the NSA was called in on this whole thing. The government agencies are notorious about not wanting to share their toys, and INSCOM obviously doesn’t want this ability to become common knowledge among the other agencies or our allies. Can you imagine the power in being able to get somewhere, knowing that there was no way for anyone to track your movements?”
she asked. “I mean, they can’t keep this thing open for long with their current energy source. It wouldn’t be long enough to send troops through, for example, but it would probably stay open long enough to kidnap or assassinate someone. Or at least long enough to toss a bomb through.”
“Or to have an innocent passerby fall into it.”
“Yeah, that too,”
Sorcha said, her voice ripe with sympathy. Hugh pushed off the sofa and went to the window, staring just as blankly as she had before. She continued softly, and he knew that the worst was yet to come. “I think that the trouble my friend Darcy was referring to is that Dr. Fielding hasn’t been able to nail down the destination point at all, and if he can’t do that, then what’s the point, right?”
“What do ye mean, he cannae control the destination?”
Sorcha bit her lip hesitantly. “The other end just bounces all over the place … and time, apparently, each time they power it up. As far as I can see, the targeting software is showing that it opens up at different destinations with no discernible pattern.”
“So I just walked into this wormhole when it ‘bounced’ into the Drummosse Muir two hundred and fifty years ago?”
Hugh asked unnecessarily. He already knew the answer. By God but he had always thought he had lived a fairly charmed life. How unlucky could a man be to happen upon such an occurrence with such incredible bad timing?
“And you and that Native American probably startled Fielding to death when he realized that his wormhole didn’t travel through space alone,”
she told him. “I didn’t see anything in there about anticipating time travel.”
Hugh grimaced at that. “And the reason he dinnae simply send us back through the hole is because he cannae duplicate the destination,”
Hugh said dully. He had been expecting that, of course, but it didn’t make the truth any easier to hear.
“And the reason he kept you was because there was no way he was going to go public with such a huge mistake.”
Lovely, Hugh thought. How terribly comforting to know that it was all nothing but an innocent mistake.