“Yes, sir,” Bill said, standing up and walking to the door of the shield room.
“Weaver.”
“Sir?” Bill replied without turning around.
“We’ll talk when you get back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir,” Eric said, nodding into the phone. “Yes, sir. Aye, aye, sir. Yes, sir. Understood, sir. Gung ho, sir. Yes, sir. Good night.”
“You sure weren’t saying much,” Brooke said. She’d combed out her hair and changed into a nightgown but stayed up, yawning, as long as her husband did.
“I’m a lieutenant,” Berg replied, finally getting a chance to strip out of his uniform. “We generally just take orders. The difference between a private first class and a second lieutenant is that a PFC’s been promoted twice.”
“What’s happening?” Brooke asked. “Is it a mission?”
“Sort of,” Eric replied. “But not the way you’re thinking. I’ve got to go to DC tomorrow. Something came up.”
“And you can’t tell me what,” Brooke said.
“Honestly, I probably could and get away with it at this point,” Eric said. “But I’m still under orders not to discuss anything I do with anybody. Can you… ?”
“I’m fine with that,” Brooke said, stretching in an arch that drew down the front of her already low-cut nightgown. “Among other things, I suspect it would be a long conversation. And I’ve got other things on my mind.”
“What were we talking about?” Eric said, hurrying with his boots.
“Miss Moon,” Weaver said as the slight linguist exited the Looking Glass. “I see you redyed your hair.”
Union Station was the central hub for the increasingly defunct Washington Metro Line. The Chen Anomaly generated dozens of Looking Glass bosons per minute. They then proceeded on a path more or less parallel to the surface of the earth in apparently random zigzags and eventually came to rest. There they generally sat innocuously, still in rare cases opening up a gate to an unexplored world.
However, the millions of inert LGBs that the Anomaly had generated over the past years could be moved to another spot and then linked to any other boson of the same frequency. By moving two to two separate points that the movers wanted to link, a portal could be established between any two points on Earth.
Moving an LGB was no simple technical feat. The boson first had to be charged with static electricity using a massive Van der Waal static generator. The generator was similar to a plasma ball but much harder to construct, requiring a formed ball of metal with an absolutely blemish-free surface. Given that the minimum size to be of any use was over ten feet across, the first few had been enormously expensive. But as time went on, manufacturing processes and technologies improved to the point that creating one cost less than a million dollars.
Then the charged LGB had to be moved. To move it required massive electromagnets to maintain a holding field and the power to run them. But the value was there. Using more and more systems, gates were being opened at the rate of over forty per day in the U.S. alone. Even the first few hundred had killed the airlines as every hub airport got linked to every other. As time went by, those hubs were connected to more and more cities, more direct links were established and even links internal to cities became common.
Them that has, gets: Washington, DC, had become a poster city for LGB gates. A series of them had been set up around the city, each in pairs to prevent collisions, permitting rapid movement across the entire city by simply stepping through the right portals. There were over thirty on the Washington Mall, alone, and a coffee-table book that consisted of nothing but pictures of the reflected images lasted surprisingly long on the bestseller lists.
Furthermore, through Looking Glasses at the defunct Dulles Airport, the city was connected to other countries and even to Adar. More portals then moved the incoming to Union Station, which was the central hub for all domestic arrivals and departures.
Miriam Moon actually lived in Dalton, GA, and had taken over fourteen minutes to get to the portal in Washington, including waiting for the connecting portal in Atlanta. Bill, on the other hand, lived in Huntsville, AL, and had a direct link.
“It was getting washed out at the wedding,” Miriam replied, surprisingly calmly. Bill had expected her to be nearly hysterical. He knew she’d be all right once she had to don her public personna, but he figured he’d have to hold her hand up to that point. “I’d been thinking about redoing it, was going to before we left. This just gave me a reason.”
“Did you get any sleep last night?” Bill asked, gesturing to the escalator and taking the handle of her rolling bag.
“No,” Miriam said, her voice shaking slightly. “But it gave me time to do my hair. And get over the panic. I could use something to eat, though. I was throwing up most of the night.” The linguist was particularly pale.
“Well, everybody’s waiting in the restaurant top-side,” Bill said. “None of us has eaten, yet.”
“I hope you weren’t waiting for me,” Miriam replied. “I nearly sent my regrets. Right up to the point I was getting ready to step through the gate.”
“The CAO was rather pointed that he wanted you to be there,” Bill pointed out.
“I’m not a Navy officer,” Miriam replied tartly. “Greg Townsend can kiss my white butt if he thinks he can order me to do anything.”
“I understand,” Bill said, rolling his eyes behind her back.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, Bill Weaver,” Miriam said.
“Sorry.”
“I think we should have gone public from the beginning,” Miriam continued as they walked past a newspaper stand. Normally, there would have been a line for the Washington Post. Today, she was being heavily outsold by her more conservative brother. There was only one Times left on the rack and as they walked past someone grabbed it and got in line. “Why do we always have to do things as a crashing emergency?”
“The Chinese and Russians asked for more time,” Bill said. “I can imagine their reactions. We’re going to have to wait until the third documentary until we know their full reactions.”
“Hi, guys,” Miriam said, slipping into the booth. “I need a waffle.”
“You going to be shiny, ma’am?” Red asked. The group was in civilian clothes but everyone had a suit bag with them holding their uniforms. “The hair looks great, by the way.”
“I’ll be fine, Red, thanks,” Miriam said. “How’s married life treating you, Eric?”
“Good,” Berg replied, shaking his head. “It’s a bit of an adjustment, but… good. Really good.”
“I need to give him a jar and a bag of jelly beans,” Lurch said, grinning.
Eric looked around as the older members of the group, and Red, who was long married, all chuckled.
“I don’t get it,” Eric admitted.
“Get a jar,” Red said. “A big one in your case, probably. And a bag or a dozen of jelly beans. Each time you fool around the first year of marriage, put a jelly bean in the jar. After the first year, each time you fool around pull out a jellybean and eat it. The legend says that no matter how many years you’re married, you’ll never empty the jar.”
“And for some reason, you only put in the licorice ones,” Weaver said. “Let’s order, then I’ll lay out the agenda. There’s not much today, honestly. We’re probably not even going to be put on display until after the third documentary comes out. But it’s going to get rocky later in the week.”
“Are you shiny, Brooke?”
Tom was one of the older waiters in the restaurant, a pro of the old school. Brooke had tried to learn his moves, but it was like a tyro painter trying to copy a grand master; it just wasn’t the same. She knew she’d need decades of experience to come close. And, frankly, she’d rather be a cook.