Down: Trilogy Box Set

The gates of hell are open night and day;

Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:

But to return, and view the cheerful skies,

In this the task and mighty labor lies.

Virgil's Aeneid

Emily heard the footsteps coming fast from behind. Before turning to confront the threat she tensed her muscles and held her breath when her lungs were completely full.

She let the air out hard at the sight of a man with a knife.

Since childhood she had always been taught to flee from danger not confront it, but that was not an option now. He was only an arm’s length away with momentum on his side.

Her training kicked in.

She deflected his knife hand with a sharp lateral movement of her left arm and used her right arm to lunge, striking him in the throat with the heel of her hand.

The moment he started to reel back she planted herself and swung her right leg aggressively, catching him cleanly in the groin.

He crumpled to the ground.

The knife was still in his hand but not for long. She kicked again and when her foot connected with his fist the knife flew away.

Then she ran.

The room filled with claps and cheers.

“Now that’s the way to do it. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s Krav Maga,” John Camp said, his husky voice rising above the din. “Good work, Dr. Loughty. Did you see the way she defended and attacked simultaneously? That’s what I want all of you to learn.”

Emily accepted the accolades gracefully and as she passed John she smiled at his discreet slap to her bottom. She took her place with the other students and the attacker adjusted his protective padding for the next victim.

When the class ended the students collected their belongings and filed out of the recreation center. Emily took her sweet time and when only she and John were left he slowly walked over and tenderly grabbed her.

“I could have fought you off,” she said when their lips parted.

“I’m glad you didn’t give me a swift kick to the goolies.”

“My, aren’t you excelling in picking up new Britishisms?”

“Life is all about continuous learning.”

They made a pretty pair. She was tall but he was a foot taller. He was dark with cropped brown hair as thick as a horse’s mane and matching chestnut eyes. She was fair, a natural blue-eyed blonde with a gentle brogue and a stubbornness that came from her Scottish father, and a complexion and stoicism from her Swedish mother. He was American through and through. They were both fit. His work had always been physically demanding and at forty-three he was still in peak shape with long limbs and a broad back. She was thirty-seven. Her work was sedentary. She had to make an effort to keep fit and John’s class in Israeli-style self defense tactics was one of the ways she got it done.

“I have to run,” she said.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“I’ve got to head back to the lab. Hercules is two-days off.”

“I was hoping you’d stay the night.”

“I’m crazy about you,” she said, “but right now Hercules is making me crazier.”

“Nervous?”

“What do you think?”

“There was an article in one of the rags yesterday that Hercules was going to create tiny black holes that were going to destroy the world.”

“Don’t you worry your pretty little head,” she said. “We’re not going to blow up our lovely planet. I’m more concerned we’re going to break a thirty billion-dollar toy. That would make mummy and daddy awfully cross. And by the way, why are you reading the rubbishy tabloids?”

“Page three girls.”

“Thought so.”

“When the experiment’s up and running I want to get back on track with our sleep-overs.”

“They’re getting to be a bit of a habit, aren’t they?”

He ran his large hands over her back. “I’ve got worse habits than you. I’ve been told I have an addictive personality.”

“I believe
I’ve
told you that.”

“I’ve taken the cure on some of them.”

“Smoking: check. Women: hopefully with the exception of yours truly, check. Booze: well, that one we’re working on.”

“My life, reduced to a checklist.”

She kissed him again and pulled away. “Other than pine for me how are you going to occupy your evening?”

“I’ll probably do laundry.”

“Make sure you separate whites from colors.”

“Coming from a particle physicist, I’ll take that advice seriously.”

At eight in the evening the primary laboratory at MAAC was as busy as it ever was during the day. The collider had been idle for two years and there was intense pressure for a successful on-time restart. An electrical fault in a coil had caused a magnet quench with a resulting helium explosion and fire. It had cost sixty million dollars to replace over one hundred damaged superconducting magnets and their mountings and to purge the fouled vacuum pipes. The political damage had not been as easy to repair. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were baying for blood. Spending billions on exotic sub-atomic particle research was a tough sell at the best of times.

As director of the Hercules Project, Emily had the primary responsibility for running the start-up simulations and to do so she had co-opted a good chunk of the mainframe capacity that evening.

“Almost done?”

She didn’t take her eyes off her screen.

“Almost, Henry. Another forty minutes or so should do it.”

Henry Quint, square-jawed and unflinching, never praised or disparaged any of his people directly. Despite the reputation that American managers had of being straight shooters, Quint had a more byzantine way of dealing with organizational behavior, preferring to let people know his thoughts obliquely or via others.

“I see. The engineers are standing by. They need a lot of processing power to test the coils.”

“Forty minutes.”

“So you said. I’ll have them contact you directly if that time frame is problematic.”

Quint, the director-general of MAAC, ambled off leaving her to mumble unkind things to herself. He had been her superior for six years but she had never warmed to him. Unlike her previous boss who was a dyed-in-the-wool particle physicist, Quint, at this point in his career, was more administrator than scientist. In stark contrast to his gregarious predecessor, Emily never socialized with Quint outside of work. She missed Paul Loomis so much it hurt. The only thing keeping her humming was Hercules and the promise of the merger.

Hopefully everything would be rosier after the merger. At least she’d be reporting to a new director-general.

The Massive Anglo-American Collider was the giant cousin to the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The Swiss collider, a behemoth in its day, had a circumference of twenty-seven kilometers of tunnels deep under the Swiss and French countryside. The MAAC was over six times its size, some one hundred eighty kilometers long. The tunnels, roughly following the contours of the M25, ringed greater London, buried some one hundred fifty meters beneath the motorway. The main laboratory complex was east of London in Dartford in an array of architecturally uninspiring buildings on the outskirts of the city.

MAAC had been built to out-perform the LHC in a mine is bigger than yours kind of a way that only the Americans could muster. When it proved politically difficult to find a home for the program under US soil the British were brought in as partners and, after billions of dollars and a decade of construction, MAAC was once again ready to go online. If all went well Hercules I would send protons from its two 20 TeV beams hurtling underneath the British countryside to collide with far more energy than the LHC had ever accomplished. And if the experiment went off without significant problems then Hercules II would up the energy to its maximum theoretical capacity of 30 TeV per beam. And with that amount of power, if gravitons existed then MAAC had a good chance of finding them.

Gravitons.

Sub-atomic particles communicating force had already been discovered for three of the four fundamental forces of the cosmos. Electromagnetism had the photon. The strong force that holds the nucleus of atoms together had gluons. The weak force, responsible for radioactive decay, had W and Z bosons. Gravity was the only exception. All the unified theories of physics predicted the existence of the graviton but it had never been observed. The graviton was the prize.

Gravity was the weakest of all the fundamental forces and the weaker the force the more energy needed to detect it. Enter Hercules. The ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC had finally discovered the elusive Higgs boson. If all went well, the Hercules experiments at MAAC would trump the LHC by discovering the graviton.

Emily finished her simulations and released the mainframe to the engineers. She stretched then wandered across the lab to Matthew Coppens’s work station. Matthew had been her first hire at the lab, an earnest young man with a first in physics from Oxford whom she’d met at CERN where they had both worked on the ALICE program. When Paul Loomis recruited her to MAAC she had pounced on Matthew and persuaded him to join as her top deputy. As it happened, it had been an easy sale since Matthew’s wife hated living in Switzerland. Their oldest son was autistic and they had found the Swiss schools rather cold and uncaring.

Matthew, balding and slight, was hunched over a stack of printouts.

“Still fussing over strangelets?” Emily asked.

He looked up at her. “You know me too well.”

“Look, Matthew, I’m glad that with Paul gone, someone is worrying about worst case scenarios but the chance of Hercules I producing strangelets is about the same as winning the national lottery every week for three weeks in a row. Besides, we’re taking it slow. We won’t go to 30 TeV until we know twenty is safe.”

He nodded and turned his head away.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine. A little tired but I expect we all are.”

“Family okay?”

“Everyone’s fine, Emily.”

His voice had an edge to it so she let him be and headed to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.

John Camp lived in a newish flat only three miles away from the MAAC. He had been there for just over two years, setting the record for his longest continuous residence in adulthood. A certain domesticity had crept into his consciousness and for the first time ever he had started to pay attention to things like matching linen and kitchen utensils. He chalked that up to Emily. Before the Hercules restart had interfered with their routine, she had been staying there two or three nights a week and she insisted on a nicely made bed and a well-stocked kitchen. But the living room was pure Camp with its large Samsung hooked into American sports channels to watch 49ers football and Giants baseball, a well-stocked bar, IKEA bookcases crammed with history and military books and framed photos of him with arms draped around grinning, machine-gun toting comrades in arms.

John was sunk into his sofa, bare-chested in low-riding sweat pants, working on a large can of beer. The TV was on mute and he was reading a book about military campaigns during the Crusades when his doorbell rang.

He smiled and called through the door, “Happy days! Use your key.”

The doorbell rang again and he got up to unlock it saying, “I thought you said you weren’t coming.”

But when he opened the door it wasn’t Emily.

“Hey, stranger,” the tall raven-haired beauty said.

“Christ, Darlene,” he said, hiking up his pants.

“I hope I’m not intruding. Alone?”

“Yeah, at the moment. This is a surprise.”

He ushered her in and gave her an obligatory hug.

“I had a shoot in London today. I go to Milan tomorrow. I thought I’d take a chance and here I am.”

“How’d you find me?”

“Vic had your address but not your new number. You’re unlisted. I didn’t realize Dartford was so far out. I’ve got a hundred sixty pounds on the meter.”

He shook his head. She actually took a taxi from Piccadilly. Typical Darlene. The taxi was still waiting at the curb in case she needed to turn back to central London. She paid the driver and John took her bags.