‘That ain’t gonna hold,’ Graham said. ‘We need to wake him. Give him 20ccs of dextroamphetamine.’

As he spoke, the steel railing gave way with a metal snapping sound usually only heard in heavy industry accidents. Alex’s arm broke free and whipped back and forth across his chest. His clenched fist connected with a solid steel cabinet alongside the cot and sank six inches into the metal.

‘Lieutenant, get in there,’ Graham ordered.

Marshall had a look of incredulity on his face. ‘You want me to go in there with just a syringe? Are you shitting me? I’m not going in there with anything less than an elephant gun.’

‘For Chrissake, I need you to buy me some time,’ Graham snapped. ‘I don’t know how, Lieutenant – sing to him if you have to – just get in there. That’s an order.’

Captain Robert Graham picked up the phone and, without taking his eyes off the carnage behind the glass, spoke just four words.

‘Get me Hammerson, now.’

FIVE

Tel Aviv University, Israel – Astrophysics Department

Zachariah Shomron’s hands shook so much he nearly spilled his cup of hot chocolate on the new oxide crystal radiation unit – OCRU for short – that the department had just acquired. It was a delicate and beautiful machine – a blend of sci-fi aesthetics and high-tech pragmatics. Gleaming silver-steel casing and glass domes held rosettes of gadolinium silicate-oxide crystals – the best option for detecting gamma rays and high-energy X-rays. The OCRU displayed the invisible heavy particles as light pulses within the vacuum domes – the more brilliant the glow, the greater the strength of the radiation and its proximity. The visual display was accompanied by a computer application that translated the light pulses into radiation sievert strength, and also calculated distance and direction. Ohhh yeeessss, Zachariah mouthed as he ran his long fingers over the glass domes. This was a work of art with a scientific purpose. And it was his paper on geo-astrophysical gamma ray bursts that had swayed the university budgeting committee to pass the funding for the purchase of the expensive Swiss precision device.

Zachariah began the software load into the OCRU, watching the lines of code scroll up the screen. Gamma rays had a well-deserved deadly reputation, but their power and prevalence throughout the universe meant that the first to harness their cosmic muscle would have access to an energy source that was infinite in quantity and strength. Perhaps he could be the first to design some sort of stellar mining project – now that would be really cool.