Chapter 6
The air grew heavy around them, enfolding them in a blanket of false silence and separating them from the bustling activity in the main hall.
Silence.
Neither could look the other in the eye, but neither wanted to break the spell.
Slowly, as if drawn by some inexplicable force, Jenny raised her eyes to Nick's face. He was watching her. Watching her reaction and trying to make sense of it. Or perhaps he was searching for something in her eyes. Something... Or maybe someone.
So many questions found themselves forming in Jenny's mind. How alike was she to Claudia? How different? Had she loved him in return? And, if he loved her, did that mean...
"Oh, you found him!" Abby's voice cut through the tangled briar of the moment to bring Jenny and Cutter back to the present.
"Oh!" Jenny glanced up at Cutter and put on her best conspiratorial grin. "Yes, we just happened to bump into one another. Literally. I think I may have a broken wrist. Lester's in his office apparently. Shall we pay him a visit, then I can get one of the medics to have a look at this."
XXXX
All was peaceful. All was calm. In a small circle at the far end of the room, six minds chewed over the problem of how to close an anomaly that wants to stay open. They'd been there for the past hour, although part of that had been spent eating as it was now well after eight o'clock. They had just over three and a half hours before high tide and the sooner they closed the anomaly, the better.
The silence that ensues when great minds are thinking alike... ensued.
"I've got it!" The front two feet of Connor's chair slammed down on the floor of the Panorama Bar and he grabbed the ball he had been idly throwing from hand to hand. All eyes in the group turned to him.
"Why is it, right," he began, looking around the small circle of IT experts, "that a compass goes completely mental when it gets anywhere near an anomaly?"
"Anomalies have a strong magnetic field: we know that," Peta shrugged, looking puzzled.
"Yeah, but," Connor held up a finger to illustrate his point, "the needle doesn't just point towards the anomaly, or away from it: it goes round in circles or back and forth. Why?"
Five pairs of eyes looked blankly at him. Eventually light dawned in one pair.
"The field is unstable," Peta hazarded. "The polarity keeps changing?"
"Exactly!" Connor grinned triumphantly.
"Okay... But how does that help us control it?"
Connor's face fell slightly and his brow creased.
"Dunno," he shrugged. "Not yet, anyway." The grin returned. "But it's a start!"
XXXX
Abby stepped out of the lift and looked around the new control room. The meeting with Lester had gone as well as could be expected. She'd explained what the findings said. Jenny had backed her up. Lester had announced a state of rejoicing as it now appeared that at least there would be nothing to eat us alive while we drowned.
Cutter had stayed unusually quiet and pensive.
She was worried about him when he did that: it usually meant one of two things. Either he was thinking about how Stephen or Helen would react to the information they had, or he was thinking about what might be in the information they hadn't!
Abby wasn't quite sure which option was worse.
Shrugging off a feeling of unease that she hadn't felt since she had come face to face with her first Mer while hanging over the side a boat back in London, she resumed her surveying of the room in search of Connor, from whom Lester was anxious to have an update.
The ease with which her thoughts slipped from the encounter with the Mer to Connor brought Abby's mind round yet again to a moment that had plagued her memory since its occurrence. She took a deep breath and forced the memory from her, focussing on the task in hand.
The greatest buzz of activity seemed to be at the far end around the stage. She watched as the group split and started working on different things at different computers. As she had expected, Connor was at the centre of the group, gesticulating madly at the new anomaly detector and being watched reverentially by an equally hyper redhead.
"Oh, God! There's two of them!" Abby groaned.
She turned away. He was happiest when he had a new toy to play with and, by the looks of things, Connor and his new fan club had just had a minor breakthrough. She would have to go over there and drag him downstairs to Lester's office, but maybe not just yet. Besides: she needed to call Sam and tell him she wasn't going to be home for a bit and what to feed which lizards. She also needed to work out how to explain to him how to feed Rex!
XXXX
"Do you really think there's nothing there?" Becker asked, closing the door behind him as he returned to the office.
"I would be a fool to assume," Lester sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, "that simply because we have not yet found anything, this means that there is nothing there."
"So what will you report to London?"
"Until we know more, the flood warning is our priority. We can worry about what might be in the water once we've solved the problem of how to keep it out of the country!"
Becker raised his eyebrows at this.
"So far our flood defences seem to be going well. The Thames barrier was raised at the first sign of trouble and has remained that way since. It's caused a bit of minor flooding when the tide tried to go out against it, but it's holding. What's more, it's keeping that water separate from the north sea, which stops any intrusion into it by whatever may or may not have come through the anomaly as well as preventing it joining with the north sea to exacerbate the higher tide.
Our other defences around the country also seem to be progressing steadily. We should have almost everywhere solidly sandbagged well before high tide. After that, it's just a case of making sure the defences hold."
"Almost everywhere?"
"Our weakest points are where the population is lowest: many hands make light work! Or where the geography itself poses a problem. Unfortunately, that means a large chunk of the land surrounding the Wash, where the defence wall is at threat of being undercut, and right here, where we simply do not have the manpower to keep up with the rest of the country. There are also fears that places such as Aldborough may suffer further erosion damage."
"You don't seem particularly worried that this base is on your list of weakest defences."
"We should be able to get our defences up to eight and a half meters with time to spare. The real issue is making the wall secure enough to hold under pressure, especially at the slipway."
"Hence the move upstairs."
"Quite."
Lester nodded, his brow furrowed in thought.
"Have you given thought to the possibility of a threat from micro-organisms?" Becker said, breaking Lester's concentration.
"It was the first thing to spring to mind when Miss Maitland delivered her conclusions."
"And if it is a microbiological threat?"
Lester shrugged. "As you know," he said, leaning back to resume twirling his pen, "I am not completely without experience of such things."
Becker nodded in agreement and the two men fell silent once more. Their air of quiet contemplation was broken by a sharp knock at the door.
"Enter!" Lester called.
A young secretary timidly but urgently stepped into the room.
"The Aplysia has returned to dock, Sir James," the young woman reported. "Captain Johnson is overseeing the unloading of equipment and samples."