CHAPTER 17
I know what you’re thinking: Easy sold out to save his own skin. I admit that’s what it felt like I was doing, and I hoped that’s what it looked like I was doing, but it was subterfuge, not surrender. I was in a bad spot; cooperating with them, at least for the time being, was the only hope I had for finding a way clear of the whole mess.
That night, they didn’t send me back to my cell. I was escorted to the housing unit Dagny told me about. It was attached to a larger research complex in a fenced off compound near the Canopy, which is what they called the huge structure built over the excavation site. The interior was laid out like a small dormitory. We each had our own rooms, but we shared common areas and the bathroom. The place had half a dozen bedrooms, but Dagny and I seemed to be the only ones staying there. More rapidly fabricated clothing was waiting for me in my assigned bedroom. In what I guessed was an attempt to get on my good side, they returned my hat and my jacket. I was happy to have them back. I’ve had that hat for years, and that jacket is made from real cowhide leather and it wasn’t cheap.
The residence was nice enough, furnished about like you’d expect from a budget motel, but we weren’t allowed to leave. The windows were made of heavy industrial safety transparency and the doors were metal. There was an exterior balcony we could go out on, but the gap between the roof overhang and the railing was covered by a heavy mesh material. Even if I’d been willing to brave the three-story drop to the ground, I couldn’t get through that without power tools.
It was quiet in the residence that evening. Dagny and I hadn’t said much to each other and Cassandra was nowhere to be found. On top of everything else going on, I figured the place was bugged and that we were being monitored. We were not allowed access to any electronic devices save one big video screen with a library of shows and a couple of e-readers full of books.
I laid on the bed in my room, listening to the howling wind outside, trying to figure out what in the hell I was going to do next. The exterior temperature was below freezing again, and snow was mixed in with the dust and grit buffeting the side of the building. Dagny was in the living room and was watching a show on the video screen. She had the volume turned up too loud for my taste so I’d left the room.
I was surprised by a knock on the door. Dagny was waiting for me when I opened it. “I’m going out for a smoke. You want to come with?”
“A smoke? In this weather?” I caught myself and thought for a second. Dagny knew I didn’t smoke. “Yeah, sure, let me get my coat.”
“I’ll be waiting for you on the balcony.” She turned and left.
I found her out there a couple minutes later. The wind was blasting the balcony from the front, and I had to hold my hat down to keep it from being blown off my head. Coarse, volcanic dust stung my skin. Dagny had the collar of her coat turned up and was facing the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“Hey,” I said, quietly, huddling up next to her. With my face inches from hers, we could barely hear each other over the wind. I figured that’s why we were out here, why she had the volume turned way up on the screen inside—all that background noise would hinder attempts to listen to what we were saying, and we could speak freely for a few minutes.
She puffed her cigarette and looked at me. She had dark circles under her eyes. “I’m sorry, I haven’t . . . I haven’t been sleeping well. There’s so much I want to tell you, but we have to be careful what we say.”
“I get it,” I said. “Where’s your sister? I thought you said she was being kept here.”
“She is, but they keep her in a separate room, under guard, in a lower level. They don’t let her into the common areas very often or for very long.”
“What’s going on? What did they do to you while I was in that cell?”
“They didn’t do anything,” she said. “It was the Seraph.”
“I don’t follow.”
“They took me down into the pit to see it, to be with Cassie while she was interfacing with it.” Another puff of the cigarette. “It’s a monster, a weapon more powerful than we can even understand.”
“Slow down. They took you into the pit. What happened then?”
“There are VR headsets where you can watch some of the interaction, even if you don’t have a neural link. It isn’t the same without the link. Most of it is raw data that doesn’t translate very well into a visual medium, but sometimes it shows you things.”
“Like what?”
“I-I don’t know. Cassie thinks they’re memories. They might just be it thinking about things. They think it deliberately chooses what to show us.”
“Okay. What did it show you?”
Dagny looked up into my eyes again. I could see the fear in them, and I put an arm over her shoulder. “Cassie was right about what they did to the First Antecessor Race. I saw it. It showed us what happened. Th-they wiped them out, all of them, exterminated their entire race. I saw . . . I saw planets being burned from space, oceans boiling away, alien cities being reduced to dust. I . . . I heard them screaming as they died. That’s why they aren’t around anymore. The Seraphim hunted them to extinction.”
“Good God. Did it say why?”
“They picked the wrong side in the war, the war Cassie told us about. They sided with the enemy. The Seraphim showed them no mercy.”
“Is that why you’re doing this, working with Taranis?”
“I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to. But . . . after what I saw, we can’t risk setting that thing free, ever. Cassie says it was a memory, but I think it was also a threat. They need to bury that thing and never let anyone dig it up again.”
I held her a little tighter. “We’re going to find a way to get out of this mess—you, me, and Cassie.”
“You don’t understand,” Dagny said. “Cassie . . . that thing has infected her mind. They call it psychological contamination. She says she’s fine, but she’s not fine. She’s not the same. She’s not well. Since we got here they’ve had her run interface sessions with the Seraph three times already and I think . . . I think it’s using her, making her dance like a little marionette.” She looked up into my eyes again. “I’m scared, Easy. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to lose my sister again, but Taranis is desperate. Sooner or later he’s going to offer to pull the second Spear out in exchange for immortality. If that happens, that thing could kill us all, the entire planet, and it might not stop there.”
“I understand,” I said. I tried to sound as reassuring as possible. “We’ll figure this out. Come on, let’s go back inside. I’m freezing.”
The next morning I was woken up by Ascension security guards pounding on the door of my room. They told me that they were running an interface session that morning and that Cassandra wanted me there to observe. Not that I had any choice, but I was excited to go. I wanted to check on Cassandra and wanted to finally see the Seraph for myself.
Once I had my coat and hat on, the two guards escorted me through the laboratory facility and out to the parking lot. The wind had died down to a light breeze with occasional gusts. The sky was overcast and snow had drifted up against the side of the building, and black smoke rose angrily from Mount Gilead. A mix of snowflakes, fine, gray dust, and volcanic ash blew in the wind. The security guards were wearing respirators but didn’t give me one.
My escorts led me to a parked truck and told me to get in the back seat. They climbed in the front and off we went, leaving the lab complex behind and heading directly toward the Canopy. There were multiple entrances into the gigantic structure, including a huge set of doors that must have been for the heavy earthmoving equipment. We turned toward a smaller but heavily guarded entry control point and parked in a gravel lot nearby. My escorts got out of the truck and told me to follow them.
It took us a couple minutes to get through the security checkpoint. Despite technically being a prisoner I was still scanned for recording devices, including going through a full-body X-ray. Past security was another set of doors that led into the main chamber.
I found myself in the biggest room I’d ever been in. The Canopy was larger than I’d estimated to be from the outside and easily had a bigger footprint than the largest stadium on Nova Columbia. It rose maybe a hundred feet over the excavation site, creaking and groaning in the wind. The roof, supported by steel arches and buttresses like a bridge, had large, opaque sections and let in some natural daylight. It was slightly warmer in there than it was outside but the air was no less dry.
I was so distracted with my gawking that I didn’t see Professor Farseer and his entourage approach. “Mr. Novak, so good to see you!” the space wizard said. He had on a coverall like the rest of us, but over it wore a long, flamboyant coat with a fur collar. A top hat completed his bizarre outfit.
“Professor,” I said, giving him a nod. He had a couple flunkies with him, as well as three more armed security guards. They all wore Ascension coveralls, but these guys carried themselves a little differently than the others did. They were more deferential to the professor and seemed almost suspicious of the guards who brought me in. I realized that all of them were wearing little pendants with the emblem of the Cosmic Ontological Foundation.
One of the two guards who escorted me in gave me a tap on the shoulder. “He’s all yours,” the guard said, as he handed me off to his counterparts in the professor’s entourage.
“Please, come with me, come with me!” the professor said, gesturing for me to follow him. “I’m so pleased you agreed to come today, Detective! I can’t wait for you to see it for yourself.”
“I didn’t exactly have a choice,” I muttered, but the professor paid me no mind. There was an eight-foot wall around the rim of the excavation site, blocking it from view as we approached a large elevator. It was one of those ones you usually see at construction sites, a metal cage with a steel floor and no frills.
“We descend!” Professor Farseer said, as the six of us piled into the elevator. “Prepare yourself.” The shaft was covered with paneling and I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to get a good look at the thing. As we descended, however, the shaft opened up, and I got a bird’s-eye view of the entire dig site.
The pit itself was gigantic, easily five hundred feet deep, cut in layers and steps like a quarry. A long ramp, big enough for heavy equipment, spiraled around the outside wall of the hole to its floor. Above it was an array of lights and half a dozen large cranes.
I’ll never forget that moment for as long as I live, and I’d already seen a lot in my life. I fought the Ceph on two planets and even saw the ugly, tentacled bastards up close a couple times. I thought having encountered aliens before would prepare me for what I saw that day, and I was absolutely wrong. I never felt so small and insignificant as I did when I first laid eyes upon the Seraph.
Professor Farseer put a hand on my shoulder. “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” he said, quietly. “Isn’t it magnificent?”
Arthur Carmichael had been right when he called it a leviathan. The Seraph was huge, bigger than I imagined it would be. Its body, made almost entirely of the silver-white metal, caught the light in strange ways despite being covered in dust. Like the small sample I observed, it seemed to shimmer more than it should in the ambient light. As the elevator descended, changing the angle of my observation, the Seraph’s carapace seemed to shift slightly.
It looked both artificial and organic at the same time. Some parts were angular and faceted, like cut gemstones, where others were smooth and curved. The Seraph appeared to be lying on its right side, its visible appendages positioned like it was sleeping. The right-side appendages were still hidden beneath the rocky floor of the pit. From the proportions of the limbs, I guessed that it walked upright, but that was only a guess.
Its shimmering carapace was segmented, comprised of distinct sections like a suit of ancient plate armor, and they all fit together perfectly. In the gaps between plates there was a black material that I imagined had to have been more elastic, so the thing could have moved. A long tail stretched away from the main body in the direction of the volcano. Along its back were rows of spines, which varied in size and shape from spikes to something reminiscent of an airplane wing. The neck was armored and segmented, like the tail, but was shorter. It curved forward as if the Seraph had been curling into the fetal position when it fell.
What I assumed to be its head was lying on the floor of the pit at the end nearest the elevator. Half buried, it was wedge-shaped and angular, with a crown of horns around it like you see on some lizards from Earth. There were no discernable facial features, no nose or mouth, only five dark holes in a staggered row on the side. Were they eyes, or something else? I didn’t know.
On its back, between what may have been its shoulders, was a bulbous, roughly teardrop-shaped apparatus. It was made of a different material from the rest of the body and was dull gray in color. Protruding upward out of the Seraph’s left side were three tapered “wings.” The other three, the ones on the right side, were still buried in the black volcanic rock.
Just as the Carmichaels had said, one of the two Spears was still embedded in the Seraph’s body. The Spear, made of a dull, black material, had been plunged into the being’s chest between its shoulders and was protruding out its back. As we neared the bottom, I got a good look at the massive mechanical pulley system they had used to pull the first one out. It was connected to the second Spear by a pair of heavy cables. The first Spear, the one they removed, had apparently been taken out of the pit because I couldn’t see it anywhere.
“As you might imagine,” the professor said, “when we realized that removing the first Spear elicited a response from the Seraph, my colleagues were hesitant to remove the second one. In fact, the controls for the apparatus we removed it with are locked out, and cannot be accessed remotely.”
“What do you think about all this?” I asked. “You’ve heard what Cassandra said, right? That the Seraph wants you to pull out the second Spear?”
He was quiet for a moment as the elevator came to a stop at the bottom of that pit. “From what Cassandra reported, it had been, on some level, conscious the entire time, trapped in its own . . . its own quiet hell . . . for eons. It would have remained buried here for billions of years, until 18 Scorpii itself expanded into a red giant and consumed the planet, if Ascension hadn’t stumbled upon it.”
He looked up at the imposing alien as we stepped out of the elevator onto the rocky floor of the pit. “If that is truly the will of the Seraph, I would see it done, but I believe it’s not so simple as it seems. We are being tested,” he insisted. “My colleagues can be contrarian but their concerns are valid. We must proceed with the utmost caution.”
Two more people were waiting for us at the bottom of the pit, a man and a woman. Both of them wore Ascension coveralls and had COF pendants around their necks. I guessed they were the drivers for the pair of open-top 4x4 trucks parked near the elevator shaft.
“This is our ride,” the professor said. “They will take us to the Lambda Facility.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Forgive me, it’s the research lab where Cassandra conducts the interface sessions with the Seraph.” He pointed across the floor of the pit to a cluster of buildings near the Seraph’s head. “You can see it, there.”
“Lead the way,” I said, and got into one of the trucks. As we approached, the posture of the Seraph suddenly made sense: its body was in the position it was because it had been impaled by the Spears. The thing had been curling in agony, maybe trying to pull them out, when it fell. It laid there, frozen in something resembling death, for tens of millions of years, helpless as it was slowly entombed by volcanic rock.
It was a lot to process. I found myself gazing up at the incredible bulk of the Seraph as we drew near, wishing for a drink.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” the professor asked. He was holding his hat in his hands so it wouldn’t blow off his head. “Sometimes I’ll sit out here for hours, pondering it, meditating, wondering what secrets it can teach us.”
A few moments later we came to a stop near the Lambda Facility. Like everything else at Site 471, it wad made out of prefabricated building modules, linked together and stacked on top of one another. A thick cluster of cables ran from the facility, along the floor of dig site, up the wall to the surface.
Being close to the Seraph really drove home how huge the thing was—it had to be hundreds of feet long from end to end. There was more to the feeling than just the being’s immense size; it had an overwhelming presence, somehow, that I could feel in the back of my mind. I understood, for the first time, how the COFfers could look upon the Seraph and believe it to be holy. Professor Farseer led the entourage as we entered the Lambda Facility.
In the very back of the building, through yet another security checkpoint and a set of reinforced doors, Cassandra Carmichael was waiting for us. “Easy!” she said, happily, her voice transmitted over a speaker. Her eyes lit up but the girl looked like hell. She was dressed in sweats and sneakers. Her head had been shaved and there were dark circles under her eyes. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
They had her sealed in a large room with a big observation window at the front. “I owe that to you, kid.” I leaned in and put my hand on the glass as I spoke to her. “They treating you alright?”
She forced a weak smiled onto her face. “They’re taking good care of me,” she said. She motioned at the room behind her. “As you can see, I have top-shelf accommodations.”
“Good morning, Miss Cassandra,” Professor Farseer said, bowing his head slightly.
“Good morning to you as well, Zephram,” Cassandra said with a smile. “Thank you for bringing Easy to see me.”
“It was my pleasure,” the professor said, beaming.
I knocked on the glass. It was thick, probably ballistic-rated. “What’s with this setup? Are you locked in there?” In the center of the room behind her were two reclining chairs, the kind you’d see at a dentist’s office, except there were restraints for the arms, legs, waist, and head. Each chair had a bulky virtual reality headset sitting on the seat, and through a mess of cables was connected to a monitoring station off to the side. That station consisted of a couple of desks cluttered with multiple computers and half a dozen screens of different sizes.
Cassandra glanced past me, the professor, and his entourage. “It’s for safety. We just finished conducting some calibration tests. I told them I wanted them to bring you here to see me when we were finished.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the professor asked.
Cassandra stepped closer to the window and put her hand on the glass. “As a matter of fact, I have a favor to ask.”
“Name it, my dear, and it shall be done.”
“Leave us for just a few moments, would you?”
That surprised him. “Leave . . . you?”
“Yes, Zephram, if you please. Take your attendants and leave the test chamber. Only for a few minutes. I get very little privacy as is and I want to assure Easy that I’m being treated well.”
The people in the professor’s entourage looked at one another anxiously. “I, uh, we’re not supposed to do that,” he said, holding his hat in his hands and nervously fiddling with it.
Cassandra smiled again. “Oh come on, it’ll be fine. I was in here alone until you arrived. There’s security right outside the door and my vitals are being monitored. I would just like a few moments to speak with my friend.”
“I was . . . I’m sorry, I was told not to leave him unsupervised.”
“Oh, Zephram, it’ll be fine. He’ll be under my supervision, and you’ll be right outside. Don’t worry so much. If you can do this for me, then tomorrow you will join me in the session.”
That got his attention. “As an observer?”
“No, silly,” she said, “as a participant. You will be in here with me.”
Farseer’s eyes went wide and he dropped his hat. He stepped closer to the glass. “Truly?”
“Truly,” Cassandra said. “I’ve been telling it all about you and the Foundation. It is ready to commune with you, if you’re willing, via your neural interface. I believe your eyes will be opened.”
For a moment I thought the old man was going to faint. “Deus ex stellaris!” he said, happily. “Come, everyone, let us leave the Avatar with her friend. Mr. Novak, when you’re ready to go, use the touchpad by the door. It will be secured from the outside but we will open it for you.” With that, the professor and his entourage filed out of the room and sealed the door behind them. I was alone with Cassandra.
“I was beginning to worry that wouldn’t work,” she said.
“Can we, uh, talk? In here?”
“Yes. There are no cameras or audio recording equipment here. They are brought in only during interface sessions and are physically removed the rest of the time. My vitals monitor is the only device in here that is currently connected to the outside. After what you managed to do, they’re even stricter about information security than they were before. There is one uplink to the planetary network on-site, and its use is strictly controlled.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I asked the Seraph to see if it could access the outside world. No luck.”
“You, uh, really have a rapport with that thing, huh?”
“I don’t know that it experiences emotions in the way we do, but it seemed pleased to have me back.”
“Well, you’re certainly using it to get what you want.”
She gave me a weak smile. “I assure you, I’m harmless. Hey . . . you want to see something really interesting?”
“Uh, sure.”
Cassandra walked to the back of the room, where a thick plastic curtain hung from the ceiling. She pulled it to the side, revealing the back wall of the chamber. It had an odd shimmer to it. It took me a couple seconds that I was looking at the carapace of the Seraph itself. It was the very edge of one of its massive external plates. The cables from the monitoring station ran under the edge of the silver-white metal and disappeared into the black substance behind it.
“Holy hell,” I said, quietly. “They just ran the cables right into it, huh?”
“The soft tissue, if you want to call it that, under the exoskeleton is much easier to drill into,” she explained. “This connection is how I am able to communicate with the Seraph.” She closed the curtain and came back to the window. Her smile faded.
“Are you doing okay, kid? You look like hell.”
She took a deep breath and her shoulders slumped. “I’m tired, Easy. I don’t sleep much. I’ve been having memory problems. They’re keeping me under for longer sessions and making me do them more frequently.”
“They’re going to kill you.”
“They might,” she said, matter-of-factly. “The Seraph itself studied my neural signature and said I was in danger.”
“The old man wants his immortality and doesn’t mind killing you to get it.”
“He’s wasting what little time he has left. The Seraph can’t grant him his wish. With enough time, years, maybe we could come up with life-extension technology based on stuff we learn from studying the Seraph, but it won’t be of any use to him. It sustains itself through direct vacuum energy. It’s not biological. It doesn’t have cells that decay or neurons that die.”
“All of this for nothing.”
“It’s not for nothing, Easy. We can still do the right thing.”
“I’m going to level with you, kid. They told me that you want them to pull the second Spear out, but they’re worried it’ll cause an explosion or something called a resonance cascade.”
“I told them it won’t.”
“Can you blame them for being cautious?”
“They don’t understand!” she snarled, slamming a fist onto the thick glass. Her demeanor changed so quickly it startled me. “They keep making me do this but they don’t listen to what it’s telling them!” She relaxed her fist, lowered her head, and leaned on the glass, breathing heavily.
“You alright?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking back up at me. There were tears in her eyes. “This has been . . . hard . . . for me. I’m holding on as best I can but I can’t do this much longer. I told them they need to stop and they won’t listen. It’s suffering, you know.”
“The Seraph?”
She nodded her head, slowly. “It wants to die if it can’t go free. The Spears, both of them were needed to imprison it. Together, they forced it to stay alive while imprisoning it in its own mind. We disturbed that equilibrium when we removed one.”
“So . . . if we don’t set it free, it will die here? I don’t mean to sound harsh, but is that really so bad?”
That set her off again. “This is what is wrong with humans!” she barked, her spittle hitting the glass as she spoke. “We are willing to kill anything that isn’t convenient for us!”
“Hey,” I said gently. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you know, wouldn’t that be the safest thing? Just put it out of its misery?”
She regained her composure once again. “If it dies, the vacuum-energy engine is no longer contained. There’s no telling what it will do. It might just shut down or it might be ripped open and cause an uncontrolled reaction.”
“Good God. The whole planet really is in danger.”
“It could be. That’s why you have to help me. Nobody else will listen, not even Dagny.”
“She’s afraid. She told me you had her down here to observe one of your sessions, and that the Seraph showed them exterminating the First Antecessor Race.”
“I know. To be honest, it frightened me, too.”
“Are you sure freeing this thing is the right choice? What if, I don’t know, it comes back in a hundred years and decides we’re the enemy now? Like you said, it’s capable of wrath, and we haven’t exactly been endearing ourselves to it.”
“I told you what will happen if it dies. I don’t know what else to do.”
“Are you sure it was telling you the truth?”
“What?”
“Just hear me out. Dr. Ivery told me she wasn’t sure it could die at all. It’s been sustaining itself somehow despite being buried for sixty-eight million years. What if it’s just telling you that to try and scare you into letting it go?”
“No. It wouldn’t. I mean . . .” She held her head in her hands. “I can’t think straight half the time. I’m so tired. This isn’t fair.”
“I know it’s not, kid. It’s a hell of a thing, what they’re making you do.”
“I’m going to have you come back tomorrow to observe the session. I want you here. Dagny won’t come back, not after last time. Professor Farseer and I will go under. There are VR headsets there in the observation room that will allow you to watch what I see. You won’t get the full experience, not being neurally linked, but you might see some interesting things.”
“Like what?” I asked.
She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Depends on what it feels like talking about. Sometimes I get nothing at all. Sometimes it shows me a lot. Very often, what it tells me doesn’t really translate without a neural link, and even then I don’t always understand it.”
“They’re going to let me watch while you plug the professor into that thing?”
“That’s right,” Cassandra said. “Xavier Taranis is getting desperate. He grants me almost anything I want now, except the one thing I really want.”
“Why don’t you bring him down here? Let the Seraph talk to him itself?”
“He won’t do it. At his age, the neural strain would kill him.”
“Why not just tell him that if he removes the second Spear, he’ll get what he wants? That’s what Dagny’s worried about.”
“It won’t work. He’s too shrewd to give up his only leverage.”
“You’re probably right about that,” I said. “Anyway, what am I supposed to do while observing?”
Before Cassandra could answer, the door behind me beeped and slid open. Dr. Sarkar angrily strode into the room, his red smart visor making him look like a cyborg. Professor Farseer was right behind him, as was his entourage.
“I’m sorry, Miss Cassandra,” the professor said. “He insisted on coming in.”
“It’s alright, Zephram. Good morning, Arjun.”
“What are you doing?” Dr. Sarkar demanded. He pointed at me. “What is he doing in here alone with you?”
“We were just talking, Doc,” I said. “What, you worried she’s going to run off? She’s locked in there.”
“This is against protocol,” the scientist said. He pointed a gloved finger at Cassandra. “You know what the rules are.”
Cassandra’s eyes flashed angrily and she lunged at the glass, pounding on it with both fists. “I don’t give a damn about your rules!” she shouted. “You keep me locked up like a fucking animal! Is it too much to ask that I have ten minutes to myself?”
Dr. Sarkar pulled a small tablet from his pocket and checked the screen. “Cassandra, I need you to calm down. This much strain isn’t good for you.”
“Fuck you!” Cassandra screamed.
“Telling a woman to calm down never works, Doc,” I said.
“Why are you still here?” He turned to the security men. “Get this man out of here.”
“I want him down here tomorrow,” Cassandra said. Her face was so close to the glass it fogged up every time she exhaled. “To observe. The professor will be going under with me.”
The scientist didn’t like that. “What? Absolutely not.”
“How dare you!” the professor said. He got in Dr. Sarkar’s face. “The Seraph has requested that I commune with it! Who are you to deny its will? Have you forgotten why we’re here?”
“We’re here to study it!” Dr. Sarkar said. He was agitated. “To conduct scientific research, not your pseudoscientific, mystical nonsense!”
That comment outraged Professor Farseer and his entire group, who were all COFfers. “I will be taking this up with Mr. Taranis at once!” he said, huffily, and turned to leave.
“Take Mr. Novak back to his residence,” the scientist said, dismissively.