Read Online The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) by Erik Hanberg - Free Book Online

him.
    “Yes, sir. Have you recovered the sphere yet?”
    Braybrook hesitated. “No.”
    “Did Ono dump it somewhere before getting to the Installation?”
    “No, he carried it with him right through our security. It didn’t seem special in any way and wasn’t flagged.”
    “So why don’t we have it yet, if he carried it all the way to the Lattice? Shouldn’t it be there?”
    “It … ah. It disappeared.”
    “ Disappeared ?”
    “A few minutes after Ono left his duffle, it … shrank. Vanished into thin air. Same with the one the hovercraft pilot had.”
    “He had one too? In the hovercraft?”
    “No. He left it in the hangar. A few minutes after he began piloting the hovercraft out of the hangar the sphere shrank and vanished, same as the other.”
    “Where did Ono get it then? I’m sure you had someone trace it back to when he got it.”
    “We did.”
    “And?”
    “It grew. It grew out of thin air and was waiting for Ono on the table when he came home. I’ll add the date to your list of tags.”
    Shaw was stunned. “It just showed up? How is that possible?”
    “We don’t know yet. I have the boys in white lab coats working on it. They think it’s … entangled, I think is the word they used. With another sphere somewhere else.”
    “Even if we don’t have one in front of us, can’t we study Ono’s or the pilot’s in a jump?”
    “Of course. We already know—just a sec. I have it here. Nitrogen. It’s solid crystallized nitrogen, apparently only made with very high pressure. A nitrogen diamond, essentially. I’ll send over the weight and density. But forget the chemistry. It’s a fucking glass sphere. It’s sensitive to heat, which is how messages can be passed back and forth—the surface is like a touchpad and it just picks up your body heat. But the sphere itself doesn’t seem special. It’s how it was sent and retrieved that has my boys stumped.”
    “There’s no way to trace it?”
    “We tried tagging it in the jump before it shrank to see if we could follow it, but it got us nowhere. The jump box just lost the tag. However the sphere moves, we don’t have a way to track it after it disappears.”
    Shaw tried to think of a question, but he couldn’t. “I’m at a loss for words.”
    “Everyone is.”
    “No one in the preliminary jumps caught them last night?”
    “It wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. Not a normal call or conversation. The news feeds found it at about the same time we did this morning. It’s all anyone’s talking about. But don’t go watching a feed right now. Your instincts were right. Follow this thing on your own. No one’s isolated any more—maybe a lone genius can get somewhere.”
    “I’m no genius, sir.”
    “You live with one, that’s good enough for me. Ask Ellie what she’d do. Because we’re at a loss.”

Chapter 6

    While Shaw waited for Ellie to come home, he went back into the jump box and once again pulled up the Lattice Installation. Instead of scrolling inside of it, he swiped to the west, and eventually found the remains of a very recent nuclear detonation—clouds in the air, a small crater, and a glass desert surrounding it where the sand had melted together, now reflecting the sun.
    Shaw rewound time again, the hovercraft emerging from a nuclear mushroom cloud and backing up across the desert. He tagged it to follow it, and as he flew along beside it he couldn’t help but marvel at its beauty. Certainly its mission didn’t require it to be beautiful—the craft would have flown fine without the sleek body style. But someone had taken the time to design it, to make it look worthy of the Paris Air Show, even if its only mission was this one.
    Shaw followed it back to the small town of Beatty, where it had launched from the back of a horse trailer. Once it was back on the trailer, the lone pilot reversed back to a small desert airport. A few hangars dotted the runway, and the horse trailer wheeled into one.
    Inside,