artifact

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“Sir, do not attempt to cross the moat…

“I can hear him just fine!” The President of the University of Miami informs the brightly colored Guard. Then he yells past him toward Jay-L. “Mr. Farnsworth, I am over this nonsense and I’m not going to stand for this anymore…”

The President starts walking toward the shallow black concrete trench with the sparkles in it. He didn’t notice the solid stone sentry columns that sat every ten meters around the perimeter of the Research Park.

But they notice him.

The sphere shaped top of the two sentry columns that were flanking the area that the angry University President was approaching, swing silently toward their prey. They have long since locked onto the moving target. As the president crosses the bright Yellow line that was painted on the street where the University property abuts the former Golf Community, the lasers in the Sentry heads fire a silent and invisible set of beams across the path directly in front of the Head Administrator of the adjacent University.

President John Smitt freezes in his tracks. The high-energy laser beams are hitting a few feet away from him inside the shallow ditch made of a special energy absorbing concrete. It is actually the purpose of the special moat that now surrounds the entire perimeter of the once beautiful and exclusive country club golf course. The lasers make a crackling sound as the nano-material absorbs the laser energy and re-directs it as static charge. As a thin sheet of smoke begins to form above the sparkling concrete, the normally invisible lasers form a perfect X a short distance in front of the wide-eyed President’s feet. The entire surface surrounding the twin laser impact zone is now electrified with enough static Tazer charge to even impress the Orange County Florida Sheriff’s Office.

But that’s 300 miles north of here. In Orlando.

They are in Miami – or Coral Gables actually…

Jay-L versus the President of the U.S. and the NSA…

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Now as Luke and Marshall made their way to the bottom corridor of the vessel, Luke chatted casually. “Those folding berths in the guest quarters look an awful lot like the sleeping berths on a nuclear submarine. Did you know that?”

“Let me guess, more Military Channel?” Marshall was thinking that somebody at the Pentagon ought to check out those guys over at the Military Channel. There seems to be way too much information leaking out of the cable television sets in the country – information that used to take the lives of spies to obtain. And now it seems you could just set your TIVO and become a military expert – well almost.

Luke just laughs. “You should check it out. You’d be surprised what kind of information is floating around out there.” The door to the hyperbaric chamber was still latched open against the side bulkhead. Luke went in first. “I’ll set down the sleeping cots from the wall. We can put the kids on them and keep their IV’s on the latch above the bed.” He stopped a little past the panel that Marshall had used to control the hyperbaric oxygen and lower the pressure.

Marshall stops and turns around as he bends over to set the chamber for the same setting they had earlier. He starts to tell Luke what he is doing – he’ll show him which knobs, too. “OK, I’ll set the gas mixture. Almost pure oxygen and half atmospheric pressure, right?” Marshall turns back around and looks up to show Luke what he’s doing. He didn’t see Luke standing there, like he expected. What he saw was Luke opening the door at the far end of the long radiation shielded pressure tube. Before Marshall can react, Luke has the door open. Marshall jumps up and sprints to the other end of the chamber. He’s cursing himself for not putting a lock on this pressure door as well. It had never seemed necessary. Anyone inside had already passed the keypad security. And anyone coming from the other direction would—

He didn’t have time to finish his thought. Before he can reach him, Luke jumps into the room on the other side of the door. Marshall gets to the door in time to see Luke stand up from the seven step leap. Luke was standing on a platform over another small flight of stairs that went down to the bottom of the boat. Where there should have been a pair of gigantic diesel engines, there were instead…

Marisse makes a satellite telephone call…