THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY Read online

  THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

  Comprising of:

  BOOK 1: THE BEGINNING

  BOOK 2: GROWING PAINS

  BOOK 3: ASTERIOD MINING

  By Peter Damon

  Copyright © 2012 by Peter Damon

  Cover design by 1348design

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by Amazon, Kindle.

  Contents

  BOOK 1: THE BEGINNING

  September 12th

  September 20th

  October 12th

  October 13th

  October 15th

  October 17th

  October 18th

  November 12th

  November 16th

  November 26th

  December 12th

  December 20th

  January 7th

  January 10th

  February 15th

  February 22nd

  February 23rd

  March 4th

  April 1st

  April 5th

  April 10th

  April 11th

  April 13th

  April 17th

  April 22nd

  April 26th

  April 27th

  April 29th

  May 2nd

  May 5th

  May 6th

  May 8th

  May 12th

  May 14th

  May 15th

  May 16th

  May 17th

  May 18th

  May 19th

  May 21st

  May 22nd

  May 23rd

  May 24th

  May 25th

  May 26th

  May 28th

  May 29th

  May 30th

  June 1st

  June 2nd

  June 3rd

  June 4th

  June 5th

  June 6th

  June 7th

  June 8th

  June 9th

  June 10th

  June 11th

  BOOK 2: GROWING PAINS

  June 13th.

  June 14th.

  June 16th.

  June 18th.

  July 2nd.

  July 10th.

  July 12th.

  July 13th.

  July 15th.

  July 16th.

  July 17th.

  July 18th.

  July 19th.

  July 20th.

  July 23rd.

  July 24th.

  July 26th.

  July 27th.

  July 28th.

  August 2nd.

  August 3rd.

  August 4th.

  August 5th.

  August 6th.

  August 7th.

  August 8th.

  August 9th.

  August 10th.

  August 11th.

  August 12th.

  August 13th.

  August 14th.

  August 15th.

  August 16th.

  August 19th.

  August 22nd.

  August 24th.

  August 27th.

  September 4th.

  September 9th.

  September 10th.

  September 11th.

  September 12th.

  September 13th.

  September 14th.

  September 17th.

  September 19th.

  September 20th.

  September 22nd.

  September 23rd.

  September 24th.

  September 26th.

  September 28th.

  October 2nd.

  October 5th.

  October 8th.

  October 9th.

  October 10th.

  October 11th.

  October 12th.

  October 13th.

  October 14th.

  BOOK 3: ASTEROID MINING

  Prologue

  October 15th.

  October 17th.

  October 18th.

  October 19th.

  October 20th.

  October 21st.

  October 22nd.

  October 23rd.

  October 24th.

  October 26th.

  October 27th.

  October 28th.

  October 30th.

  November 2nd.

  November 6th.

  November 10th.

  November 14th.

  November 18th.

  November 20th.

  November 22nd.

  November 30th.

  December 1st.

  December 2nd.

  December 22nd.

  December 25th.

  February 15th.

  February 16th.

  February 20th.

  March 12th.

  March 14th.

  March 27th.

  April 20th.

  May 7th.

  May 24th.

  June 22nd.

  July 4th.

  July 5th.

  July 18th.

  August 9th.

  August 10th.

  August 15th.

  August 20th.

  August 22nd.

  August 24th.

  September 6th.

  September 20th.

  September 27th.

  October 5th.

  October 10th.

  October 20th.

  November 12th.

  November 18th.

  November 19th.

  November 21st.

  November 23rd.

  November 24th.

  November 26th.

  November 27th.

  November 28th.

  November 29th.

  November 30th.

  December 1st.

  Epilogue

  BOOK 1: THE BEGINNING

  September 12th

  Cambridge at the onset of autumn. The city of approximately 150,000 residents lies some sixty kilometres north of London, the M11 motorway running north and south on its western edge and the river Camb meandering through its centre. A fast train out of London will get there in an hour. A slow train will take a half hour longer.

  On this particular day in early September, the weather had begun to turn cold as autumn loomed. Although the sky was still bright, clouds were gathering from the north-west and threatened rain later in the day. The trees looked heavy and dark as they prepared to shed their leaves. Students moved from one college building to another, sporting colourful jumpers discovered by their families over the summer and designed to be as distinctive as possible.

  Two such students were David and Thomas Howard. The boys were twins and in the final year of a postgraduate degree course in Particle Physics, their original degrees having been in Astrophysics, Chemistry and Chemical engineering. Patents on two solvents and one synthetic chemical helped the boys continue their studies free from financial worries.

  The twins had risen early to ensure an uninterrupted time in the Particle Physics library, located in the basement of the brand new Particle Physics Laboratory on J.J. Thompson Avenue. It was only a four mile bike journey from their flat on Thoday road in the south of Cambridge, through the old town and past the Cavendish Laboratory where the High Energy Physics Group were located, to the impressive new building at the end of the road.

  The three-story building had been built in record time, as the bare steel girders and glas
s slabs woven around a core of concrete that was both the lifts and plant room testified. This minimalist, modern and somewhat sterile environment for staff and students, was nonetheless eye-catching, and very frequently photographed.

  Within the large, imposing and well-lit facility were conference rooms and state-of-the-art tutorial facilities, a feast of computers and computing power that were primarily installed to assist students in digesting and analysing the stream of data that came from the CERN Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. The facility was one of a number situated around the globe that helped store and distribute the huge amount of data produced by the CERN experiments.

  Parking and locking their bikes, the twins entered through the glass doors and waved towards the security guard. The uniformed woman waved back before returning her attention to the book she was reading, leaving the twins to make their way down the broad stairs and into the basement.

  She would have liked to call their names, as she did with many of the other students she had got to know during her employment with the university. But the boys just couldn’t be told apart, no matter how hard she tried to find some difference.

  The boys shared the same dusty hair colouring, the same long and lean faces from which bright brown eyes gazed, often with laughter and never with malice. Their body weight appeared identical, with long arms protruding from un-ironed shirt sleeves, trainers of the same size, belt buckles fastened to the same point. Even the shading of their denim jeans appeared similar.

  They shared a vast intellect too, and when they weren’t in the Particle Physics Laboratory engrossed in the data held there, they were in the Department of Chemistry, Materials Chemistry research block on Lensfield road, some three miles away towards the town centre.

  They were the only two students in the library early that morning, the security App on their phones having admitted them through the electronic security on each internal door. The long white benches with their large-screen computer stations were closed and dark. Automated ceiling lights activated as they walked under them to get to their preferred seating, and switched off after their passing to leave them centred in small pool of light around where they sat. Sharing the keyboard and mouse, they quickly became engrossed in the single lit screen.

  At the far end of the large room stood an army of automated food and drink dispensers, and the lighting from one blinked occasionally as the florescent tube within it started to fail. The soft click as it went from on to off and back on again could be heard in the silence as the boys worked.

  The boys sat close together as they pored over the information, now and then highlighting short paragraphs to cut and paste the material onto their tablets. Their voices rose and fell without rhythm but in response to the information they found, and always in harmony with each other. Had there been anyone there to watch them, they may have thought that light actually emanated from them rather than from the ceiling above them, as it too seemed to vary in intensity with their voices.

  The twins worked solidly for nearly two hours, seemingly unaware of the occasional student who came in or went out. Then, having obtained the information they wanted, they closed their station and hurried out, stowing their tablets in their rucksacks and taking out light raincoats to protect them against the rain that threatened from the north-west. Engrossed in their new knowledge, and still talking between themselves in the half sentences that were all they needed to communicate with each other, they hurried out to their bicycles to take the much travelled route to Lensfield Road where they were experimenting with Fast Atom Bombardment.

  FAB was not a new science. Ion bombardment had begun back in 1910 by the man whose name now graced the road on which Cavendish Laboratory, and now the new Particle Physics Laboratory stood, but the CERN Hadron collider was providing a stream of new data on the fundamental structure of matter, and the twins believed that this information, together with their chemistry knowledge, could produce something different. What it would be, they weren’t too sure, but something new, nonetheless.

  The experiment they planned to conduct at Lensfield Road wasn’t their first. Nor did they believe it would be their last. The goals they strived for might not even be realised in their life-time; they knew this. Discovery alone was their daily goal, and discovering what would not work was as important as discovering what would.

  Arriving at the Lensfield Road laboratory they once again secured their bikes, and hurried down into the basement where they used their Personal Ident key, transmitted through their phones, to gain entry to the secure laboratory. Locks turned from red to green to allow them access, closing with soundless precision behind them.

  The laboratory was small but modern and the twins rapidly shed their outer clothes before bringing to life the equipment they would need. They had used this laboratory for almost ten years and knew every inch of space, every detail of its facilities.

  They worked in near silence, each twin intimately aware of the other, each having a unique insight into how the other thought. They prepared their test, taking notes on their tablets to ensure it could be replicated should the need arise, and checked with each other to ensure neither of them had missed anything. A security guard looked in on them a couple of times, but did not disturb them as he did his rounds.

  The experiment itself didn’t take long; bombarding their prepared solution using hard ionisation techniques and observing the results. They had prepared a number of tests to identify the change to their solution, each taking just moments to conduct, but producing a large amount of data that they stored on their tablets for later review.

  The testing complete, Thomas and David began to clean the equipment they had used, discarding the waste and returning the smaller items to the drawers and cupboards from which they had come. Thomas, cleaning the counter on which they had placed the used batches of chemical solutions, took the last container and threw it towards the nearby toxic waste bin. The lid made a satisfyingly loud clank as it shifted under the weight of the waste and Thomas returned to wiping down the work surface he had just cleared. Hence he didn’t see the flip top lid reverse on itself as something was forcefully and loudly propelled outwards.

  With the instincts learned by all chemistry students, Thomas and David fell into a crouch, their heads lowered and their hands raised, eyes wide as they waited expectantly for a further explosion. When it didn’t arrive, Thomas reached for the fire extinguisher while David moved hesitantly towards the now lidless toxic waste bin.

  “What did you do?” he asked his brother, his breath held as he leaned forward to peer cautiously into the thickly lined bin.

  Thomas, a couple of paces back, and with the fire extinguisher held at the ready, licked his lips and shook his head. “I threw away the used chemical from that last batch,” he explained.

  “There was nothing in it to make it react like that,” David murmured thoughtfully.

  “I know,” Thomas replied.

  Standing further back from his brother, Thomas was able to appreciate the force with which the lid had been knocked from the bin. It now lay some ten feet away, the cantilevered opening forced into a 180 degree angle.

  “Any ideas?” David asked, peering still closer into the depths of the bin.

  “You could try that,” Thomas answered him, pointing to the small object he’d just seen, apparently embedded in the ceiling directly above the bin.

  David moved back a pace to better view the small cylindrical object that had glued itself to the ceiling, its metallic surface thickly coated by the gel-like chemical solution they had used in their last test.

  Thomas put the fire extinguisher down to pull one of the stools out from under the nearby work bench, but it was David who lifted his foot onto the chromed footrest to begin the climb onto its seat.

  With Thomas’s help, David cautiously straightened atop the stool and peered more closely at the small and flattened cylinder against the ceiling.

  “What is it?” Thomas asked.

  �
�An AA Battery, or was,” David told him. “Can you pass me a set of gloves?” he asked, but Thomas was already offering him a pair.

  With the gloves protecting his hands from the chemical, David tried to pry the battery from the ceiling, grunting with the effort and breathing deeply as he gave up.

  “It doesn’t look that deeply embedded,” Thomas observed from below.

  “It’s not,” David told him, and idly wiped away some of the chemical coating the cylindrical battery. Almost immediately the metal object dropped into his hand and David stared at it, astonishment written across his face.

  “I think we need to make another batch of that last trial,” he told his brother.

  Thomas sighed. “You sure you don’t want to quit for the day and buy a pizza?” he asked teasingly. As if either of them could relax until another batch could be produced and tested.

  David got down and held the remains of the battery in the open palm of his left hand. With his right forefinger, he re-spread the remaining gel across it.

  Even when anticipating what was going to occur, he still jerked back as the small object shot into the air again, thudding against the ceiling, this time narrowly missing one of the long strips of lights.

  “Well?” David asked his brother, once again climbing onto the stool to retrieve the now well dented battery.

  “Definitely make another batch,” Thomas agreed.

  Two hours later, with the underside of an old diary painted with their test chemical, David attached the end of one wire to a new AA battery and waited for something to happen.

  “Change the polarity,” Thomas suggested, but he knew he was snatching at straws. Turning the battery confirmed it; nothing happened.

  The twins returned to their earlier notes and reviewed each line, looking for uncontrolled variables and making notes as they did so. When done, they prepared fresh batches of their compound, and put each one through the same ionisation processes.

  Beginning to grow tired from the long hours spent in the lab, the twins prepared pieces of waste cardboard with the fresh batch of chemical and passed a low current through each one.

  The piece labelled number seven flew into the air where, losing its contact with the wire, it lost its momentum and fell to the floor.

  Thomas and David looked towards one another and nodded. Wordlessly, they began preparing a new batch of material, this time following the detailed instructions they had written for batch number seven. Both boys were excited, and yet they schooled themselves to prepare their solution with care, aware of the necessity for accuracy.