Free Chasing The Dawn (Luke Temple - Book 2) (Luke Temple Series) by James Flynn Page A

was the last time you saw Vittorio?”
    Then, in a tiny move of the pupil, Luke saw Brun flick his eyes up to the left, just for a moment, then he responded. “I saw him last Tuesday, which is the last time anyone seems to have seen him. Everything seemed normal, an uneventful day revising some data analysis. We had worked late, until 11 p.m. I said goodbye to him at the laboratory and we went our separate ways … that is the last time I saw him.”
    Luke rested against the counter. He could sense Brun was beginning to harden. “Professor, tell me about the work you and Vittorio were doing together.”
    Brun took another hit of lager. “You want me to talk about years’ worth of research in one evening?”
    “No, I want the condensed version. It seems to me, Professor, you are not so shocked that a man has shown up here with a gun demanding to talk to you, which leads me to believe that the work you have been doing would have been a cause for Ernesto Vittorio to disappear in a suspicious manner … talk.”
    Brun said nothing for a long time, he focused only on the lager bottle, frozen in thought, eventually he spoke. “You asked me if I was a religious man, and I suppose the answer must be yes. But I worship God in the purest form, I do not worship God as an entity with any physical representation. I worship the very essence of all Gods and all religions and that is the giving and taking of life.” Brun rested back in the chair, his eyes were unfocused. “Ancient civilisations used to look at the giver of life and drop to their knees. That giver of life was the sun, and it provided two important outputs that allowed it to be all-powerful: one was heat, the other … light. I have spent my life studying or worshipping the sun.”
    The semi-preacher rhetoric was a personal monologue; he continued: “But it is the detail, the minutiae of what makes up those outputs …” he let out a long breath. “If I were to ask you what the fastest thing known to man was what would your answer be?”
    Luke raised his eyebrows. “I would say the speed of light.”
    Brun nodded. “Exactly, as would most people on the planet, it is what we are all taught from a very young age, two plus two is four, the sky is blue and nothing can go faster than the speed of light.”
    Luke’s memory jumped back to a time before he had transformed into a new being. Alex Rowland was sat in a science class in his teens being taught about Einstein’s theory of relativity. “I assume you are talking about E = MC 2 ?”
    ‘Very good, Mr Reid, that is exactly it. Where E is energy, M is mass and C is the speed of light in a vacuum. I shall not give you a science lesson but that formula always stated that nothing with a mass can move faster than the speed of light.”
    “How does this relate to Vittorio?”
    “Because it relates to all of us.” Brun had drifted. He seemed to wake gently from his reverie and saw Luke staring. “Put simply, Einstein was wrong, and Vittorio proved it.”
    Luke vaguely remembered reading something a few weeks ago in a newspaper. “I see, so you found something that does move faster.”
    Brun shook his head. “You say that so flippantly, such a discovery changes everything as we know it, across the whole universe and our understanding of our limitations within it.”
    “I remember reading something about it a few weeks ago …”
    “I fear you are indicative of the mass of human society, not fully grasping the concept. Six years ago Vittorio and I discovered ghostly sub-atomic particles called neutrinos that we clocked arriving at our facility billionths of a second faster than light. This was not a one-off, this happened over 15,000 times.”
    Luke sat and processed the information. “A neutrino?”
    “Yes … a most beautiful particle. It streams through the earth in abundance, multi-trillions. We had once believed it to be a massless particle as it can pass through solid matter … but that is not the case …