Terminal White. James Axler
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shaking his head.
“No housing nearby,” Philboyd observed, twiddling the image control dial to pull out farther from the storm. “Closest settlement is approximately ninety miles away. If this is your storm, it’s not affecting anyone other than the moose and squirrels.”
Lakesh rubbed his forehead, deep in thought. “Storms move,” he said. “Can we trace its path, backtrack to see if it has caused any devastation?”
Philboyd looked quizzically askance at Lakesh. “With respect, Doctor, I understood that what we were looking for was a past event. This storm is happening very much now.”
“It is,” Lakesh agreed, still thinking, “but hurricanes and tropical storms can rage for days, even weeks.”
Philboyd widened his search area, scanned for signs of devastation. There was nothing obvious—if the storm had destroyed anything it was obscured by the clouds.
Lakesh was still thinking, working through the possibilities in his incisive, analytical mind. “What are those clouds hiding, Mr. Philboyd?” he pondered.
Philboyd didn’t answer, but merely tapped a few commands into his computer keyboard and brought up a surveillance map showing the area. The map showed in a separate window on-screen and it was blank. “Nothing,” he said. “Just wilderness.”
Lakesh bent closer to the screen, studying the map. “Not wilderness,” he decided. “It’s too flat for that.”
“Sir?”
“Brewster—can we backtrack this image twenty-four hours, say?” Lakesh asked. He knew that they could; the satellite would have made a sweep over this area one day before. He was already beginning to suspect something, although he couldn’t put his finger on what.
Philboyd pulled up the records, ran the surveillance footage from one day before. Its time stamp glowed in the lower left corner as it played, moving slowly across the area which Lakesh and Philboyd were looking at now in a standard sweep. As it crossed the particular spot they had been observing, Philboyd let out a surprised laugh.
Lakesh did not laugh, however. What they were looking at, remarkable as it seemed, was what appeared to be the very same storm playing out in the very same spot.
“That’s one persistent storm,” Philboyd stated.
Lakesh pointed to the screen. “But not crossing here, or here,” he said. “It’s fixed to one location. Brewster—take us back another day.”
A few taps of his keyboard and Philboyd had called up the older footage. Once again, the storm was in the exact same spot. They went back further over the next two hours, checking the records going back not just weeks but months. The surveillance satellite had monitored this point every day as part of its routine sweep pattern, and every day showed the same clouds in place. On some days, it would be sunny around the storm, while on others it would be so cloudy all around that they could not pick out the specific clouds that made up the storm. But over time, Lakesh and Philboyd reached the somewhat unsettling conclusion that here, on one single point on the planet, the same storm had been playing out for not just months but possibly years.
“A never-ending storm,” Lakesh said with gravity. “Incredible.”
“But not impossible,” Philboyd stated. “The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is the eye of a gigantic storm—the largest in the solar system—and our records suggest it has run for centuries.”
“But on Earth, with our wind patterns and atmospheric changes...?” Lakesh wondered.
“A holdover from the nukecaust?” Philboyd proposed. The nuclear holocaust had done dreadful things to the Earth’s weather patterns. Holdovers were rare but they did occasionally happen, particularly in areas of high radiation.
Lakesh scratched his chin thoughtfully. “What else do we know about this area?” he asked aloud.
“Right now? Not a lot,” Philboyd confirmed. “There has been no reason to pay it particular scrutiny—”
“There’s your reason, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh said, pointing at the storm cloud on his screen. “Get scrutinizing.”
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, the team regathered in the meeting room, where Lakesh and Bry brought them up to speed with what had been discovered.
“The first reference to the coordinates appears in a backup database from Ragnarville, in a file dating back three and a half years,” Lakesh explained. “The reference is minor and the information attached to it encrypted—”
“The file encryption was a beast,” Donald Bry said, taking up the story, “and we had a lot of trouble getting past it. So much so that I decided to run a search on one of the other databases. To my surprise, the same file with the same encryption appeared on the database of Baron Cobalt.”
“Same encryption means no joy, I take it,” Grant observed sourly.
“But,” Lakesh said, “it meant something. If two barons were looking at the same data, it meant they were collaborating.”
Kane shook his head. “Where is all this going, Lakesh? The barons are dead now.”
“They are, but their legacy is still with us,” Lakesh pointed out. “And what Donald here discovered may be a rather big part of that legacy.”
“So pull the trigger already,” Kane said impatiently.
Bry paused for a moment before replying. “Baron Cobalt’s database was locked just like Ragnar’s, so I tried checking through the other baronial databases. In the Snakefishville database—now Luilekkerville of course—I found the same coordinates attached to something called Terminal White.”
“And who or what is Terminal White?” Brigid asked.
“That is a mystery,” Donald admitted, “but a fascinating one. Once we had the Snakefish link I could backtrack into the Ragnarville and Cobalt databases and look for a link. The phrase ‘Terminal White’ appears in all of them, relating to an area to the north of their territories. It would appear to be a shared project involving all three barons—at least—working together toward some undefined goal.”
“Three-way power grab, maybe?” Kane mused.
Brigid nodded warily. “Hmm, perhaps they were collaborating to take over the other baronies, then split them among themselves. And that all fell apart when the snake gods emerged, changing the stakes.”
“Not just the stakes,” Kane reminded her, “but the rules of the whole darn shooting match.”
Kane turned back to Bry and Lakesh, a look of concern on his face. “So, did you find anything else?”
Bry shook his head regretfully. “We’re still running checks, trying to burrow into the data. We’ve scanned the databases of each of the baronies, well, as much as we can access at this stage. We have the name or term, but everything else is encrypted like a ticking time bomb—if we push too hard we’ll wipe the data entirely.”
“And with a lot of that data already lost or ransacked after the fall of the baronies,” Lakesh said, “much of Donald’s information is already coming from old files that would be regarded as ‘lost.’”
“The data is very high-level security,” Bry added. “I suspect a lot of this information was carried person to person, baron to baron, and not stored on any database. What little we have uncovered is purely relating to the site, but the coordinates and the site match up both with each other and with the storm we’ve observed in satellite surveillance.”
“The barons are gone,” Kane said grimly. “Any research project they started should have shut down, too. Shouldn’t it?”
Brigid shook her head. “Kane, you know we’re going to have to look,” she said. “Don’t try to find a way out of it—that’s beneath you.”
Kane