Free Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4) by Brandt Legg

Gaines and his Sphere that the entire Foundation was on high alert. All of its many assets —money, connections, control, power—were being mobilized, but the Foundation’s most powerful tool—a young, brainy woman and the object she studied—were secreted away in a highly secure, yet unassuming office park in northern California.
    Savina, thin, beautiful, and brilliant, commanded the attention of everyone who shared the same room as her. It didn’t matter if it was filled with men, women, scientists, billionaires, or dogs. With long brown hair, dropping below her shoulders, and an affinity for wearing blue jeans and striped tee-shirts, she looked eighteen instead of thirty. The Foundation had paid a lot of money to retain her.
    As one of the brightest physicists in the world, she’d been extremely sought after. No one would have guessed by her parents—her mother a librarian, father a plumber—that she would turn into a child prodigy, but even in her crib, as she counted and organized toys, the signs were obvious. Savina was reading by two, and at four she’d devoured a couple of years’ worth of National Geographic magazines from the family bookshelf. When her mother gave her some advanced math and science books, the spark really ignited.
    Savina looked into the smooth, highly-polished dark ball in front of her, and waited as it cycled through the Sequence. Watching it always made her smile, not because of the remarkably impossible show it displayed, she was long over the dazzle of that, rather her smugness came from the advantage she had over her adversary. Savina now knew there was another Eysen-Sphere on Earth, but the newly no-longer-dead Dr. Ripley Gaines, she believed, did not know another Eysen-Sphere remained.
    Each day for nearly five years she’d begun her studies of the ancient object watching the Sequence, trying to decode the universal depths of knowledge contained within its infiniteness. Every one of those days had been an adventure, expanding her already genius mind.
    As recently as two weeks ago she’d requested a larger staff, but as always the Judge said no. “The Judge,” as she called the wealthy man who’d hired, and inspired, her out of grad school, was not truly a judge, at least not in the legal sense. His philosophy of what the world ought to be had changed her life, and in turn, she had changed his. With this new information that the other Eysen had not been destroyed, she was certain he’d give her the staff she needed.
    The Judge’s denial of her request had nothing to do with cost. He’d given her everything else she’d ever wanted. The facility in which she studied the Eysen-Sphere was among the most advanced in the world. No, it was a matter of security. Savina and her two assistants had been vetted, investigated, and triple-checked in every manner available. Unbeknownst to them, he also kept them under around-the-clock surveillance, monitoring their phone, email, mail, Internet, and their physical locations and actions.
    Savina would not have been surprised if she’d known, nor would she have cared. She knew the future was at stake—everything—and she believed the Judge knew what was right. If anything, her work had proved his prophetic genius even more. The future she’d seen inside the Sphere showed a potentially humanity-ending plague emerging soon. The views changed radically when the Phoenix Initiative was added to the equation, and the closer they came to the launch, the higher the survival rate became.
    “Hello, Dr. Ripley Gaines,” she said into the Sphere as her two male assistants looked surprised.
    “He’s alive?” one of them asked.
    “Apparently,” she replied, adjusting her large tortoise shell eyeglasses. “And we’re going to track him down.”
    “Is that possible?” the assistant asked. “I mean to find him inside the Sphere?”
    “Remember the research? The Eysens can connect to other Eysens.”
    “Yes, I remember the theory based upon