Free The Omega Project by Steve Alten Page B

allowed anywhere on McMurdo Station. See you after the briefing.”
    “Major, wait. Where can I find the woman from the Omega team?”
    “Hell if I know. Try the women’s room.”
    I slammed the truck door, muting Gazen’s laughter. Hustling after my uncle, I followed him up a concrete ramp leading to the Crary Center’s air-locked double doors.
    The interior of Phase I resembled a modern hospital without the smell of sick people. Its corridor was white tiled, its doorjambs trimmed in pink. There were labs and equipment rooms and offices, everything open—but no one to be found.
    “Like a ghost town,” I muttered.
    “The sun may be up, but we’re still four months away from the Ross Sea opening to ships,” my uncle explained. “I bet there’s less than a hundred people on this entire outpost. I need to find a bathroom.”
    “I need to find Andria.”
    Leaving my uncle, I followed the main corridor until it connected to a long sloping ramp that led into the building known as Phase II. The structure was divided into an Earth Sciences pod and an Atmospheric Sciences pod. Entering the latter, I hurried through a maze of offices, quickly lost my bearings, and found myself in a short hall that dead-ended at closed double doors.
    A nameplate identified the interior as TELESCOPE . I could hear someone speaking inside and entered.
    The chamber was dark, save for the fluorescent glow emanating from four computer monitors mounted in a staggered formation above a sophisticated GPS station. A silver-haired man who looked to be in his late seventies was working at the terminal, conversing with another party on a landline.
    “… according to the last set of images, Arthur, the absolute magnitude of 1997 XF11 has changed. Either the asteroid’s a lot bigger than we thought, or its trajectory was altered when it passed Jupiter. Either way, I want you and Carol to recalculate the error eclipse for the pass on October twenty-sixth.”
    Hanging up the phone, the scientist swiveled around in his chair to face me. “Another visitor? It’s getting pretty crowded around here. Lowell Krawitz, International Astronomical Union.”
    “Robert Eisenbraun. Would one of the other visitors happen to be a woman? Dark hair. Athletic. About my age.”
    “Last time I saw her, she was working in the aquarium. Follow the main corridor to Phase III.”
    “Thanks. So, this asteroid … how close will it pass to Earth?”
    “Close is a matter of perspective. She’ll miss us by a scant three hundred thousand miles, give or take. Roughly the distance to the moon. It’s not a threat, but it’s a bigger hunk of rock than we expected, so we’re keeping an eye on it, just to be sure.”
    “Have fun.”
    I left the chamber and realized I was still lost. Remembering ABE, I had my bio-chip access the schematics to the Crary Center. Within seconds the internal GPS was directing me out of the Phase II maze and back to the main corridor.
    Mental masturbation, my ass …
    Descending another long ramp, I pushed past a set of air-locked double doors and entered the smallest of the three buildings.
    The aquarium was more research facility than exhibit, a two-thousand-square-foot structure containing a touch tank, five large oval holding tanks, walk-in refrigerators and freezers, workstations and several labs.
    My heart fluttered. She was standing before a three-thousand-gallon saltwater aquarium with her back to me. The hourglass figure was concealed beneath a gold and navy blue University of Delaware sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. She had rinsed the blue streak from her jet-black hair, which seemed longer than when we had last held one another four weeks earlier.
    “Hey, beautiful.”
    She turned into my kiss, my tongue probing the inside of her mouth—her smell and my lips alerting me too late that I had just frenched the wrong woman.
    She removed any doubt by slapping me hard across the face.
    I backed away, my heart racing. “Oh God, I’m