After Connor had stormed out of the cavern, Barley had secured for her a private room inside the Housing Complex. But one of the Ranger guards, a sergeant, had objected to the unauthorized procedure, and Barley had turned on the man with an absolutely stunning display of verbal brutality, causing the sergeant to step backward. Then Barley had ushered Beth into the room, locked the door, and ordered that she not be disturbed.
Afterwards Barley ordered the sergeant to escort Connor to the Command Center and then turned on a private to deliver orders that he secure this cavern, alone. The private nodded quickly, accepting the orders without any objections whatsoever. And then there had been the explosion and the chaos at the Containment Cavern, when Barley had raced away.
Since then Beth had been furiously decoding the lockout. But it was difficult because it was an encryption system, and she had to replay from the copied commands of the disk—which translated into something like glob-hits of megabyte blasts—into the relay station by coded single strokes. It was something she had never seen, and it confused her. Then she decided to break down the glob-bytes little by little and re-assimilate them in an image code that could be overlaid upon the NSA imprint, like a mirror, to unlock the relay.
It was a massive task and she was forced to network a dozen Clays utilizing the combined memory. To further hasten the process she fast-designed a unique program that allowed quad-processing of the encryption so that it could be simultaneously attacked from various dimensions. Then she sat back, letting the program work.
She knew she could break the code, but she needed a lot of time unless Frank could somehow order GEO to turn the full scope of its phenomenal power toward the encryption. For, although she had never actually seen the supercomputer, she was confident that if GEO ever challenged this high-tech encryption, this high-tech encryption would not be coded for long.
But she didn't have access to GEO, so she rested, not particularly worried about being locked in the cavern with almost forty men. Most of them were rather unobtrusive scientific sorts, and she felt she could handle them easily enough. And Barley, when enraged, was a terrifying figure, and he had bellowed an order that no one disturb her. For any reason.
Barley's sheer force of will among the weak was a great influence, and Beth made a mental note to thank him if they survived. She turned her mind to Connor and the pain of not knowing what was happening to him sliced sharply through her heart.
If Connor were dead, she knew, then she was dead too. But she also knew that he might be alive and fighting, fighting as he always fought for them. It gave her small comfort to know that if Connor were fighting to defend his family, he would be giving this thing the most ferocious fight of its life.
She closed her eyes with emotion as she remembered all the terrible, terrible times they had shared in their marriage, living at first in virtual poverty with no hopes and no future. But Connor had set his unbreakable will to working and working and working, sacrificing all his strength and life and heart to make for them a good life.
Sometimes he had held three or four jobs at a time to labor without end, until he had finally paid all the bills and had actually begun building a future they would never have known without his strength of heart. His family had been all that mattered to him, and Connor had proven it with his life and blood, year after year after year.
Beth leaned her head back, her entire soul in the single tear that touched the corner of her eye. “Such a heart,” she whispered, shaking her head as the tear moved softly down her cheek. “Such a heart ...”
Pain was all there was, but Beth refused to release it. It came and it went through her, hot and wet and burning and she couldn't stop it. But she gave nothing to it, either. She would give nothing at all until she knew whether Connor was dead or alive. Until then she would hope. And wait.
A soft knock at the door.
Beth opened her eyes, considering. Then there was another soft knock, and she rose to her feet, walking forward. Hesitantly she cracked the door to see the old scientist, the one called Hoffman, standing demurely. The old man held a pipe in his pale hand, a gray stream of lazy smoke spiraling through the red emergency light.
“Mrs. Connor?'' he asked gently.
Beth blinked. Nodded.
“I don't wish to disturb you.” Hoffman motioned behind himself; the guard could not be seen. “I have been waiting for a chance to speak with you. I hope you are successful in what you are attempting.”
Beth said nothing, but something in the old man's bent stance raised her affection.
“Might I come in for a moment?” Hoffman asked, a tired smile. “I have very, very few allies in this cavern. I thought that we might speak for a moment as friends.”