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"Apparently—there is something very, very odd going on at the CERN facility in France…."

Lucien and Weinberg glanced at one another in complete confusion for a second or two—then, as one, they turned towards Sebastiano.

"CERN?" whispered Lucien.

"Biggest particle accelerator in the world." whispered Sebastiano in reply.

Lucien nodded his head and turned back to the speaker again.

"Uh—can you elaborate on that?"

"Wish I could. Things there are really confusing. All we’ve got are some bits and pieces of info. What we’ve got so far is that they were getting ready to run some big experiment there – "

"Large Hadron Collider" piped up Sebastiano.

"Don’t tell me you’re a nuclear physicist in addition to being a dino expert, Mr. Lomagno?" said Howery, a vague hint of amusement in his voice.

"Ummm---actually just a big science geek." replied Sabastiano, blushing. "I can’t believe I actually forgot about that experiment.", he continued, shaking his head in annoyance.

"All of us have had a lot on our minds the last few hours, unfortunately." replied Howery.

"In any case, there was that big experiment that went off. Fortunately, there just happened –" – again with the sarcastic tone in his voice – "—to be a few brand new Russian spy satellites flying over western Europe at the time. The Russians, of course, claim that the brand new spy satellites—whose existence was a big surprise to everyone here, I might add—was not indicative of any new shifts back to the Cold War mentality that they’ve been threatening to do for the last little while and that it merely was an absolutely amazing coincidence that every single one of those satellites happened to flying over military bases at the time. Right after the…whatever…one of the satellites snapped some pictures of the CERN facility—which got a whole bunch of Russian eggheads and engineers scratching their heads in confusion. They were the ones who convinced the military dudes to start sharing some data with us, in fact."

"The damn thing is glowing, Lucien –it’s lit up like a fuc…er…freaking Christmas tree!"

"Uh…" said Sebastiano hesitantly. "How can it be glowing? The LHC is 100 metres underground. For it to be glowing so much that it can actually be detected from space…"

"It just is. Trust me on this. I’ll have some of my people send you the pics later on. It actually looks rather pretty, to be honest…"

"Looking forward to seeing them. Thank you, Mr. President." replied Sebastiano.

"Acting President." said Howery, automatically. "You’re welcome. In any case—the big freaky glowing particle accelerator didn’t escape the attention of the local French and Swiss police. With all the dinosaurs suddenly showing up as well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist for figure out that there might be a connection between the two. So a couple dozen cops managed to break into the complex. That was about half an hour or so after everything went all freaky."

"What happened?" asked Lucien.

"Nobody seems to know for sure. The final transmission they got from the cops was them yelling ‘Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!’, followed by lots of screaming and gunshots—then the line went dead. Granted—my French is a bit rusty and maybe I’m jumping to conclusions but that doesn’t sound to be a very encouraging sign to me."

Lucien exchanged a glance with Weinberg and Sebastiano.

Weinberg was frowning, as usual. Lucien was beginning to suspect that Weinberg had just two standard facial expressions: vaguely irritated and extremely annoyed. Right now Weinberg appeared to be in ‘extremely annoyed’ territory and was now well on his way to what appeared to be a third expression – ‘royally pissed off’.

Sebastiano had a weird half smirk/half pondering look on his face – like he had just found the world’s most unsolvable puzzle, had been told that it was unsolvable and was now adopting a ‘wanna bet?’ attitude.

Lucien turned back to the speaker.

"What happened afterwards?"

Howery let out a deep sigh.

"Eventually word of that little incident made its way to the French government --or what’s left of it. When we finally managed to contact them an hour ago, they brought us up to speed on what’s been happening. We just received confirmation a few minutes ago that they’re planning to insert some kind of special forces team into there—some group called the…uh…Premier Re…uh…Regiment… de Pa…ra…chu…tistes…-"

"Let me guess, Mr. Lomagno – you’re, like, an expert in Trivia Pursuit?" One can almost hear Howery grinning.

Sebastiano blushed even more than before. In a quiet voice, he replied "Ottawa champion." In a much more quieter voice, barely audible even to Lucien, he continued "Three years in a row."

Weinberg nodded his head in obvious approval "Those SpecOps guys are good. Very good. They’ve been officially tasked with all Counterterrorist and Hostage Rescue missions outside France. Unofficially—maybe even inside France as well but they’re tight-lipped about that stuff." Weinberg went back to his default ‘vaguely irritated’ facial expression. Weinberg turned to face the speaker.

"When will they be doing it?"

"Within the hour. We’re trying to see if we can get a live video feed from them when they go in but the way the communication systems are like right now, that might be iffy."

"I went to school with some of the officers in that regiment. Is it possible to hook up a three way communication link between the three of us?"

There were faint sounds of mumbling voices from the speaker. Then a new voice broke in.

"Special Agent Edwards here. Yeah—not a problem. Have your techies talk to our techies and we’ll go from there."

Weinberg nodded his head and started making notes in a folder in front of him.

Lucien leaned back.

"I guess we now have to just wait and see what happens now, don’t we?"

"Looks that way, Lucien." replied Howery.

"Any ideas what you think they’ll find in there?"

"No idea but some of the younger Agents here are taking bets that they’ll run into some guy named Gordon Freeman. Any clue what the hell they’re talking about?"

"…and we managed to cordon off an area of about six blocks around the North York Anomaly. A lot of the smaller dinos managed to get out and are running loose through the rest of the city. Police and army units are slowly picking them off one by one but it’s taking quite a bit of time obviously. Most of the larger dinos—especially the plant eaters—seem content to stay inside the area. For the moment at any rate."

Lucien nodded his head.

"What’s the situation like in Montreal?"

"The usual standard plea for people to stay in their homes until the situation is resolved seems to be being followed for the most part. But hundreds of thousands of people were caught on the streets or in the subways or at businesses inside the city when the Event occurred. A lot of them don’t have homes anymore. We managed to get over a dozen emergency settlement camps set up outside the city in Laval and the South Shore in record time –we learned our lessons from the Ice Storm and the Blackout—and every road and tunnel out of the Island is manned with an assortment of personnel – a hundred army units we managed to fly in from Quebec City, a couple of thousand surviving police from inside the city and surrounding municipalities, a hundred or so reservists, a bunch of security guards and even a couple of dozen hunters from the area we sort of, uh, deputized. Basically anybody with a pulse and knows how to hold a gun are there."

Lucien raised an eyebrow in confusion.

"I wasn’t aware that the army can deputize civilians."

"Ummm…we can’t. But the civvies don’t know that and we needed as many warm bodies as we can dig up. If you like sir, I can hand in my letter of resignation for this illegal act within the hour." replied Weinberg. There was—for the briefest of moments—a smile on his face.

Lucien smirked "We’ll just let that little incident slide for now, Weinberg. What’s the situation in Montreal like there now?"

Weinberg went back to his Serious Face. "Pretty chaotic obviously but we’ve got some control over the situation. We managed to successfully evac about one hundred thousand civvies off the island—although there’s been quite a few casualties. A few civvies were killed by dinos while they were literally steps away from the bridges and tunnels, unfortunately -- and god only knows how many of them are still holed up inside the city itself. We’ve got a few helicopters flying around picking up anybody still on the streets but until we kill off all the dinosaurs in the city, those people are going to be trapped in there."

"How are the people in the unaffected areas in Toronto and Montreal reacting?"

"Pretty well, all things considered. We’ve even got a few reports of block parties going on. The Casino on Ile Notre Dame is even having a dinosaur drinking game for its customers. "

Lucien couldn’t help but smirk at that.

"Anything else?"

Weinberg shuffled through some documents in front of him and pulled out another sheet. Nodding his head as he glanced over it, he raised his head and spoke to Lucien.

"Some good news on the power situation. We managed to get about five percent of the grid in Ontario back up."

Lucien blinked in confusion.

"I thought that was impossible – didn’t we lose all kinds of generators and power lines?"

"We lost a few plants sir and god only knows how many kilometres of lines are damaged but a large chunk of the system did make it through the Event intact."

"Then why did everything shut down?"

"Same reason everything shut down back during the Blackout in 2003. With the power fluctuations on the grid, power plants automatically went into safe mode to prevent damage in the case of an overload. This caused a cascading failure to the whole grid and within a few seconds everything shut down. But a lot of those power plants are still intact now. There have been teams working around the clock to get those systems up and running. It’s been a very slow and touchy job though—too much juice too fast and it may cause another cascade failure again."

"So—we can actually get the whole grid back up?"

Weinberg shrugged his shoulders.

"Too soon to tell but everyone seems to be confident that we can get at least some of it back up over the next few days. Of course it will make everyone’s life easier if we can get rid of all those dinosaurs running around so that they can actually fix all the damaged stuff without fear of being eaten."

Lucien leaned back, sighing and grinning slightly.

"Well—at least we’re getting a few good breaks today, General. Maybe we’ll be able to get through all this and actually still have a country to run next week?"

"I sincerely hope so."

"Any word on the French team?"

"Nothing so far but we managed to get a permanent communication link going between us, the States and France. Between the three of us, we’re slowly re-establishing contact with the surviving governments in the rest of Europe."

"The Brits?"

"As I said when you first arrived here—" - Weinberg paused and looked at his watch – "—about 12 hours ago, the Brits have the exact same problem with the line of succession as we do. They too have been aware of this shortcoming and have come up with the same ideas that we have. As near as we can ascertain, the new PM is a guy by the name of Thomas Anderson, formally the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills. We’re trying to get a hold of him as we speak."

Lucien nodded his head.

"Looks like we’re going to have one very busy day, General."

"I for one am very glad about that. I was going crazy being in the dark."

"Any thing else on the agenda?"

"Not right now but I can tell you this much—sleep won’t be on it for any of us today."

Lucien nodded his head again.

"Better get someone to bring me over a pot of coffee—I’m going to need it. By the way—where’s Seba?"

"He walked into Boardroom C about two hours ago with an armload of maps. Every few minutes he walks out then returns a few minutes later with more maps and print-outs. Been asking around for any books on…uh…I think he called it Fortean events."

"What the hell are Fortean events?"

"Beats me."

Weinberg stood up and collected all the scattered documents in front of him and stuffed them into a file folder.

"Now if you’ll excuse me, Prime Minister—I have about twenty different things to check up on. You’ll have another report in three hours."

"Contact me immediately if we manage to get a hold of the Brits."

"Yes sir"

Lucien walked into Boardroom C – and suddenly stopped.

Sebastiano was sitting behind a desk that was practically groaning under the weight of a massive pile of maps, books and print-outs. He had a pencil in each hand and another one between his teeth.

Sebastiano looked up.

"Mmmmmf! Mmmmf! Mmmft!"

Sebastiano spit out the pencil that was in his mouth and tried again.

"Morning Mister Prime Minister. Anything I can help you with?"

"Maybe. I’m rather curious to know what you’ve been up to in here for the last two hours."

"Had a few ideas that I wanted to check out."

"Such as?"

"Come here and look at these maps."

Lucien walked over and sat down at a chair. Sebastiano handed him a map.

It was a map of Canada—but oddly coloured. There were numerous circles of various sizes drawn all over the map. It took Lucien only a few seconds to realize that the circles corresponded to the areas of the country that had been replaced. The caption of the map was labelled ‘Mineral Deposits of Canada’.

"What does this mean?"

"I was wondering if all the areas that were replaced were truly random, so I overlayed the areas we know about over different types of maps. I did on topographic maps, sedimentary maps, geological maps, infra-red maps, magnetic anomalies maps, --"

"Ok, Ok—I get the picture! What did you find?"

"The areas were not exactly random. The replacement areas were 53% more likely to appear in areas with high amounts of transition metals."

"Transition….?"

"Metals like titanium, iridium, mercury, zinc—stuff like that."

"Fascinating. And that means….?"

Sebastiano grinned and nodded his head for a few seconds, like he was about to impart some major earth-shattering information. He stopped nodding and started shaking his head instead and replied "Actually I have no fucking clue what it means, to be honest. But it definitely means something!"

Lucien sighed and decided to try a different subject.

"What about all this stuff on Fortean events?"

Sebatiano blinked in surprise and leaned back.

"Oh that. Well—I was thinking. If parts of our world went back in time, then wouldn’t there be some evidence of that in the fossil record? So I started digging through all those silly ‘Mysterious World’ and ‘Secrets of the Past’ books and magazines. The local library in this town here has a whole shelf on stuff like that. Do you know that there’s all kinds of stories of stuff like sparkplugs being found in million year old coal, bullets holes in dinosaur bones, weird coins found in geological layers where they shouldn’t exist and so forth? There’s even a term for them – ooparts."

"Ooparts?"

"Out of place artifacts. There’s like, a million books on the topic. Ok—99.99% of the stuff in them are fakes or sloppy science or whatever—but there’s just enough stuff left over to make a person go ‘hmmmm’. And when I was thinking about that stuff, I started coming across all kinds of references to other weird shit—animals appearing where they shouldn’t, people and ships disappearing supposedly into thin air and all that other freaky stuff."

"And?" asked Lucien. He was finding this topic perversely fascinating.

"What if small scale stuff like what happened last night has been happening all along in recorded history? What if what happened last night was something that had been slowly building up and that CERN experiment made whatever it was really cut loose once and for all? And that layer of iridium they found at the K/T boundary—the one that gave all those scientists ideas about it being an asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs."

"What about it?"

"Well—iridium is found – in its natural state – only in deep volcanic rock or in extraterrestrial rocks. It’s extremely rare in surface rock—which was what got them thinking about asteroids."

Lucien stared at Sebastiano for a second or two.

"And in its non-natural state?"

"All kinds of electrical equipment like spark plugs, LEDs, cell phones, digital cameras…and nuclear weapons."

Lucien stared at Sebastiano for a very long moment.

"I’m not sure I like where this is heading. You mentioned yesterday that there seems to be a lot of debate over what killed off the dinosaurs—about how just the asteroid impact theory doesn’t seem to explain everything. Now you’re saying that that iridium layer that marks the end of the dinosaurs can also have a man-made explanation."

Sebastiano nodded his head.

"So—", continued Lucien, "—what exactly are you implying? That the people who got sent back are stuck there? That the dinosaurs that got sent here are here to stay?"

Sebastiano shook his head.

"I honestly don’t know, sir. There’s five different explanations for everything and every time I think I managed to narrow it down—five more show up. The iridium could have come solely from an asteroid. We found the crater and everything. And it could be that we just have lousy data that’s mucking up all our theories that’s making us think that something else was responsible. Then again—the dinosaurs that have been sent here could have been the survivors from the asteroid impact—and we’ve been slaughtering them like crazy. So even if we find a way to reverse the Event, lots of them have already been killed off or ran off from their original areas and that could be the explanation we’re looking for as to why so many of them died off. On the other hand—maybe we don’t find a way to reverse everything. So our people are stuck back there and eventually they die off—but not before leaving a few bits and pieces of their existence and killing off a whole bunch of dinosaurs. And all that electrical equipment that got sent back there ends up getting exposed to sixty million years worth of geological events until there’s nothing left except the iridium."

Lucien sat there, blinking in confusion and trying to make sense of all that Sebastiano said. He just shook his head and leaned back, sighing.

"How the hell are you able to keep all that stuff straight in your head without getting a migraine?"

"Actually --I don’t."

Lucien sighed again, staring idly into space. After a few seconds, he shook his head and turned to Sebastiano.

"Seba—tell me—did you…lose…anyone? Anyone special?"

Sebastiano stared at Lucien for a few seconds before replying.

"Actually—I think I’m luckier than most people. Both of my parents are dead and I’m an only child. I have a whole bunch of aunts and uncles and cousins and whatnot in both Montreal and Toronto but—truth be told—I hardly ever see most of them except at weddings and funerals. To be honest—I think I have more online friends than I have in real life. That reminds me—I hope they get the internet up and running soon. There’s two or three people that I’m a bit worried about."

"So—no special people in your life?"

"People? No. Pets? Yeah. I’m worried about my cats."

"Oh? What are their names?"

"Jinx, Lynx and Stinx."

Lucien stared at Sebastiano for a very long moment.

"Three cats?"

Sebastiano bowed his head in embarrassment.

"I’m a very lonely man."

Sebastiano glanced up and stared at Lucien for a few seconds.

"And you, sir? Someone you’re worried about?"

Just as Lucien was about to respond, a soldier walked into the room.

"Sir? We have the British Prime Minister on the line now."

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

"Loud and clear, Prime Minister Anderson. How are you?"

"As well as can be expected. Apologies for not getting in touch with you chaps sooner. But as you can imagine, things here have been rather…hectic."

"Understandable. Things here have been rather crazy as well."

"I would imagine so. How badly did you fare?"

"Not as worse as it could have been but still rather bad. We estimate our losses at about three million missing and about ten thousand dead. You?"

There was a long pause from the speaker. Finally the PM spoke.

"We lost Cornwall. Complete devastation. Hit by a 100 meter high tidal wave as near as we can ascertain. Best estimates at this point is about thirty thousand dead—and that’s expected to rise. Missing? Aye—damned if I know but we lost 2 million just in London alone."

"My sincere condolences."

"And mine as well. I understand that you’ve been in touch with the Yanks."

"Yes. Like everyone else, they’ve suffered some appalling losses. We seem to have narrowed down the source of all this to the CERN facility in France."

There was a long pause.

"Bloody hell—again with the French?! God—best we keep that our little secret for now, alright? I’ve got some nutters here as part of my advisor staff I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw them and if they find out about this…"

Lucien smirked.

"Let’s just say that it seems to be the result of unusual stellar phenomena and leave it at that for now, shall we?"

"I heartily agree."

There was a long pause. Then Prime Minister Anderson spoke again.

"I feel rather uncomfortable about imposing on you at this point but I was wondering if I could ask you for a favour?"

"Of course—ask away."

"We have a frigate - HMS Campbeltown - that was damaged and is floundering just off the coast of Greenland. Is it possible to render assistance to it? Normally we’ll have one of our ships do it but…ummm…we seem to have … lost … a few of them right now…."

Lucien glanced over at Weinberg. Weinberg nodded his head.

"On its way." replied Lucien.

"Greatly appreciate this. Now to return the favour somewhat. We managed to get in contact with the governments in Portugal, Spain, Israel, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Here is the contact information –"

Weinberg appeared in Lucien’s office.

"Sir? We have President Howery on the line."

"Prime Minister?"

"Hello. What news do you have?"

"Quite a bit in fact. We may have also come up with a way to reverse the effect."

Lucien raised his eyebrows in shock and glanced at Sebastiano and Weinberg. Both were as surprised as he was.

"That is good news!"

"Not totally good news, unfortunately." replied Howery, with a slightly depressed tone in his voice.

"What do you mean?"

"It involves a rather…unorthodox plan."

"Such as?"

"We’ve decided to drop a nuclear bomb on the CERN facility…."

~~

On to Chapter 25

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