Crouched over a console in his private quarters, Pope muttered under his breath as he hammered out yet another enraged e-mail directly to Admiral Tony Kevin, commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Command. It was the ninth such e-mail he had sent in forty-eight hours. Each had elicited a standardized reply, not from the admiral himself mind you, but from some trained monkey on his personal staff.

Pope typed, stabbing at the keys:

Need I remind you of the support this Project elicits at THE VERY HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT. I would not wish to be in your shoes, Admiral Kevin, when I explain to your superiors that we have gone over budget while being dragged into this pointless fiasco. The NAGOYA is a research vessel, not a warship, and we should have been allowed to continue our trials unmolested in the perfectly safe testing range off Perth. As small as they are, the Australian navy are more than capable of fending off any drunken fishermen who might have strayed too close.

Therefore I DEMAND that we be freed from this two-penny opera and allowed to return to our test schedule as originally planned. I await your earliest reply. And that means YOURS, Admiral Kevin. Not some junior baboon!

That’ll put a rocket under his fat ass, thought Pope. Bureaucrats hate it when you threaten to go over their heads. It means they might actually have to stagger to their feet and do something for a change.

Spleen vented for the moment, he keyed into the vidlink that connected him with the Project control room. A Japanese man with a shock of unruly, thick black hair answered the hail.

“How do we look for a power-up this morning, Yoshi?” Pope asked. “I’m anxious to get back on schedule.”

Standing at a long, curving bank of flatscreens Professor Yoshi Murayama, an unusually tall cosmic string theorist from Honshu, blew out his cheeks and shrugged. “I can’t see why not from this end. We’re just about finished entering the new data sets. We’re good to go, except you know that Kolhammer won’t like it.”

“Kolhammer’s a chickenshit,” Pope said somewhat mournfully. “I really don’t care what he thinks. He’s not qualified to tell us what we can and cannot do. You are.”

“Like I said,” the Japanese Nobel winner responded. “I don’t see a problem. Just a beautiful set of numbers.”

“Of course.” Pope nodded. “Everyone else feel the same?” he asked, raising his voice so that it projected into the room beyond Murayama. The space was surprisingly small for such a momentous undertaking, no bigger than a suburban living room really. Large glowing monitors shared the area with half a dozen senior Project researchers, each staffing a workstation.