COMPETE: The Atlantis Grail (Book Two) - Preview

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (draft)

​CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

For a few seconds neither one of us says anything. And then Kassiopei goes to his desk and sits down in his chair. He leans back and puts his hands behind his head.

"Sit down, Lark. We need to talk."

I approach his desk stiffly and take one of the visitor chairs. I sit motionless, watching the level of his chin, because right this moment I find it very hard to meet his eyes. Because again, the feelings inside me are churning . . . such an unstable mixture of joy, relief, terror. . . .

"All right, what really happened out there?" he says in a hard voice, watching me. "Tell me everything."

And I do. I speak haltingly, trying to skip the parts where Hugo and I froze up so badly and lost valuable moments at the very beginning. When I'm done, I look up.

Aeson's expression in that moment is raw and terrifying. I see that he is now leaning forward, with his elbows resting on the desk, and one of his hands is clenched in a fist, pressing hard against the polished surface.

"What you did," he says. "It is not something that has ever been done by anyone who is not of Imperial Kassiopei blood."

I blink. "Oh. . . . What did I do exactly?"

"You keyed the Quantum Stream to yourself." His gaze sears me like fire. "It had nothing to do with the shuttle you were piloting. It was all you. You did not merge back into the Quantum Stream by matching its natural frequency. You did something that forced the Quantum Stream to match its frequency to yours!"

"But—" Suddenly I am feeling breathless and faint. "How does that work? I thought you could only key orichalcum objects?"

Command Pilot Kassiopei exhales. "Orichalcum can be keyed because it has unusual quantum-level properties. It happens to be uniquely unstable at the quantum level, permanently. Orichalcum is a transitional metal, always in quantum flux, and for that reason it can be manipulated in unusual ways."

He pauses, runs his fingers slowly along the surface of his desk. "To acoustically levitate an object in regular 3D space, sound waves must bombard the object from three directions, surrounding it. Orichalcum, being in quantum flux, entangles itself with sound waves at a molecular level so that at any given moment its particles instead surround the sound. It 'wraps' itself against sound, creating the same effect. Instead of being surrounded by sound waves, it surrounds sound waves at the quantum level."

"That's wild," I whisper.

"The reason I tell you this is because you need to understand that quantum level manipulation lies at the heart of everything—all our technology." He never takes his gaze off me. "What I've just told you is something no other Earth scientist, no Earth human being knows. And the reason I tell you this is because your abilities are amazing—even for an Atlantean."

I breathe very slowly. "Wow. Thanks—I guess?"

Aeson Kassiopei continues watching me, and after a time his face darkens. "I—" he says suddenly. "I didn't know what to think in that moment when you were gone. That moment when your shuttle dropped off the Fleet Grid, was—"

His words trail off.

There's silence.

I meet his eyes.

"In short—I am very glad you made it back," he speaks at last, almost gruffly. No, that can't be right. . . . Is he in some kind of discomfort? No!