Free Breakthrough by Michael Grumley Page B

known that someday, it would eventually come down to this.  “We have to play the game.  At least for now.  We have no choice.  We have a big lead in this field but if we get closed down all of our information will be made available to everyone and they’ll be where we are in a matter of months.”
    Her shoulders relaxed slightly.  “You think they would cut us off just like that?”  He made no effort to answer.  He didn’t have to.  Alison could not believe that she’d even uttered the words. 
    She walked slowly to the window and stared out at the palm trees jutting into the air from the next street like a row of towers.  It was amazing how mad she still was.  It was almost ten years ago and she still hated to think about it.  Her first serious research project, her first meaningful project was in Costa Rica and the world’s first serious attempt to map and document the complete breeding and migration patterns of ocean tortoises.  They had spent three years tagging, tracking, and caring for thousands of tortoises, sleeping in tents with virtually no money, and in the end they had accomplished something that no other ocean biology team had been able to do.  God, they were so idealistic.  And at the time they considered the Navy, and the US government for that matter, a godsend.  They provided the equipment, the computers and the tracking devices.  Without their grants, Alison’s team would not have been able to track the mammals off the damn beach let alone across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 
    They knew beyond a doubt that if the program was extended, it would allow them to study not just the routes but eventually their to rtoise’s entire life span from birth to death.   They were finishing their papers, some, including Alison were finishing their doctorates when the hammer fell.  In one coordinated effort, the Navy confiscated the majority of their work.  Anything that was deemed in the interest of national security was permanently moved to government research teams in various fields.  She and the team were stunned, unable to imagine how on earth a population of tortoises qualified as a security threat.  It never made any sense and they were all sure it was just some monumental misunderstanding.  Through a friend she had found out that the Navy had another agenda from the start.  Their intention was to learn how they could use the tortoises affixed with small but powerful transmitters to obstruct communications to and from enemy vessels based on proximity of an agent tortoise.  Agent tortoise .  It still sounded as absurd today as it did then.  Absurd or not, it was a shock to find out that the Navy’s support was a sham from the beginning.  They never cared about the biology, they simply wanted to deem whether it had a viable military application. 
    Of course it didn’t.  The migration routes were helpful but the logistical complications around the geographic management, speed of migration, and power needs to adequately block a signal were simply insurmountable.  In the end the Navy dropped the idea and after two full years of legal arguments, relented and made the whole of the data available to the scientific community.  But by then the idea of a longer, more comprehensive study was too difficult to fund and was as good as dead.  The results were well received eventually, but a complete behavioral understanding from birth to death would have blown the doors off of anything that was known about the species.  By the time they could have picked up the pieces, the excitement was gone and most of the researchers had found other projects.  It was less than a year after giving up that she met Frank and his crazy idea about the science of language translation.
    She turned from the window and stared at him.
    He shrugged.  “Besides, these guys could just be genuinely interested in helping.” 
    She rolled her eyes and shook her head.  “The Navy has money and resources that