Luca didn't breathe. The cryogenic transfer line pressed against his back through the Phantom's nano-weave. He held perfectly still, and the suit's passive camo did the rest, bending light around him until he wasn't there. Sowhere to his left, Zoe had vanished into the sa nothing.
The monorail ca into view. A service cab, painted safety orange with hazard striping along the base, hung from ceiling rails and swung gently as it rounded the curve. The thing sat right in the middle of the tunnel, filling the gap between the equipnt racks and the concrete wall with barely enough clearance on either side.
What the fuck was that.
The muon map had shown a vehicle with a human-density blob on top of it. Luca had pictured sothing on the ground. Sothing with wheels. Sothing he could step around if he had to. Instead, this orange monstrosity dangled from the ceiling and occupied every available inch of tunnel space, and nobody in Karen's entire intelligence apparatus had thought to ntion it.
A man in blue coveralls and a yellow hard hat sat inside the enclosed cab, one hand on the controls and the other propping a phone against the instrunt panel.
The cab crawled overhead at maybe ten kiloters per hour. Close enough that Luca could have reached up and touched the hazard striping. Close enough to read the na badge on the man's coveralls through the glass. The driver looked straight ahead, his face lit by the phone screen, glazed with the boredom of soone who'd made this trip so many tis he'd stopped seeing the tunnel years ago. He didn't look down or sideways.
Luca watched it go, the orange cab shrinking toward yrin.
Luca exhaled. "Clear."
Emily's voice broke the silence first. "Was that the monorail?"
"Nobody told there was a monorail," Luca muttered.
"It was in the packet."
The packet... of course! He had skimd it on the flight over and tossed it to Emily because reading briefing docunts ranked sowhere between dental work and listening to Ryan explain junction boxes. Emily had probably morized the thing cover to cover.
Zoe's shimr reappeared fifteen ters ahead, already in motion. She hadn't waited for the call.
"Ghost One, report." Erik's voice didn't waver.
"Maintenance vehicle. Single occupant, heading toward yrin." Luca peeled himself off the wall and started walking. "Ryan, he should hit your caras in about two minutes."
"Overwatch," Erik said.
Overwatch. Because they had call signs now. Luca had accepted Ghost One without a fight, which made him a hypocrite for thinking Overwatch sounded cringe.
"Ghost One, copy. Already tracking." Ryan's voice ca through without missing a beat. "He just popped up at marker two-point-one."
"Great," replied Luca. "So we weren't noticed."
"Just be glad it wasn't TIM," Ryan added.
Luca kept walking. "What. Is. TIM."
"Train Inspection Monorail. It's unmanned and runs on the sa ceiling rails at about six kiloters per hour. Visual caras, infrared imaging, radioactive probe." Ryan sounded entirely too pleased about this. "It's basically a robot that patrols twenty-seven kiloters of tunnel looking for anomalies." He paused. "There are two of them."
"And you didn't ntion this before we went in?"
"They ntioned it on the tour and it was also in the packet."
Emily's voice cut through. "Twelve hundred ters to the junction. Keep moving."
The tunnel curved northeast under fluorescent strips that turned the concrete walls flat white. They walked twelve hundred ters of cryo lines and equipnt racks before the tunnel widened into a service alcove with a steel ladder climbing through a ceiling hatch.
"Junction," Zoe said.
She climbed up the ladder before he could respond. Luca followed. He counted fifteen rungs. The hatch at the top opened without resistance, which ant either CERN didn't anticipate intruders coming through their inter-site tunnel or the maintenance staff had gotten tired of carrying keys. Luca accepted both explanations.
They erged into a corridor with more concrete walls and cable trays running along the ceiling.
His visor showed nothing. Nothing moved. The North Area sat empty.
"Overwatch," Luca mumbled. "Caras."
"North Area feeds are looped. You're clean," said Ryan. "Forty minutes before the tistamps cycle and soone notices."
"Ghost One, you're topside." Erik again. "Next patrol pass at EHN1 in twenty-six minutes."
Twenty-six minutes. The opening ceremony was that afternoon, and they needed to be showered and playing VIP before that. That left maybe two hours total, minus everything they'd burned getting here.
"Copy. Moving to EHN1."
EHN1 was a warehouse. Three hundred ters of concrete shielding blocks and steel truss ceiling, with overhead cranes on rails and cables climbing from the floor in thick bundles. The hall stretched long enough to make the Triumph's hangar look modest. Every overhead light was on, and the hall sat empty for lunch break. The machinery in the bays along both walls humd to itself, waiting for the physicists to co back.
The FTL drive waited below them in ECN3.
Luca's visor had other ideas. The muon overlay, still running from the tunnel, tagged iron at the eastern end of the hall. Massive blocks of it rose two stories tall.
The Blue Giants. He rembered that much from the briefing: CERN's radiation shielding, iron blocks the size of shipping containers, arranged in walls to absorb whatever the particle beams threw at them.
The blocks were dense enough that the muon flux barely penetrated, leaving sared shadows on his visor where the tomographic display should have shown clean structure. But faint readings bled through the iron anyway.
Multiple objects registered on his display, each tagged with a question mark he had never seen the helm produce before. Whatever sat behind those walls was punching through two stories of iron shielding on his display.
Luca switched to private comms. "Zoe. You seeing this?"
"Yeah." She stopped near the eastern wall. "Karen didn't ntion anything behind the Blue Giants."
"No. She didn't."
The FTL drive sat fifteen ters below their feet. Every rational impulse in Luca's body said to get down there and start the scan. But three distinct anomalous signatures, maybe four, appeared behind the iron wall in separate bays.
"Control, Ghost One. Minor detour, obstructions in the hall. Routing around."
Erik didn't question it. "Copy, Ghost One."
"Let's check it out," Luca said to Zoe on private comms.
The access gap between the Blue Giant stacks barely fit his shoulders. Luca turned sideways and squeezed through. The gap opened into a larger space the size of a conference room, sealed from the main hall by the shielding wall itself. Caras at the ceiling corners tracked slow arcs across the space.
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"Overwatch, caras behind the shielding wall."
"Standalone system," Ryan said. "Air-gapped. Can't loop them from here."
Luca tracked the nearest cara's arc. It panned left, sweeping toward the far wall. He moved. Three steps to the center of the bay, then froze as the second cara swung back toward him. The passive camo locked in. Perfectly still ant the camo had nothing to give away, and the lens tracked right past him without registering anything but empty floor.
The titanium stand in the center of the bay was harder to handle.
A chunk of tal sat on it, two ters long and jagged across the edges. The surface was a dark bronze with veins of deep violet running through it, and the alloy didn't match anything he'd seen before. It just sat there. Inert. A piece of sothing much bigger, cut or broken and placed on a stand like a museum exhibit.
Luca didn't recognize the alloy. He hadn't seen anything like it in almost five years of system tech.
"Scan it," Zoe said.
Luca drew the multitool from his hip holster and aid it at the fragnt. The scan engaged from two ters out, and data started filling his visor. Atomic structure first, then molecular bonds, then material properties, each layer feeding the next.
The schematic resolved in forty-five seconds. Then the multitool detected the slight curvature, extrapolated the full structure, and projected the result across his display.
[Schematic Scan Complete — Fragnt 1 of 256]
Object: Structural Fragnt (gastructure Component)
Designation: Unknown — Insufficient Data
Tech Level: Full Classification Unavailable
Composition: Unknown Primary Alloy
tal Content: Unrecognized Elent (68%), Trace Iridium (4%), Unknown Secondary (28%)
Crystal Structure: Unknown
Formation Process: Anomalous
Fragnt Dinsions: 2.0m x 0.4m x 0.3m / ~9,890 kg
Extrapolated Structure: Partial Arc — Estimated Diater 620–810 km (Low Confidence)
Schematic Status: INCOMPLETE — Additional fragnts required
Coordinates: Logged
[Field Catalogue Integration Complete — New Schematic: "Unknown gastructure" catalogued. Completion:
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