STORM: The Infinity Code

It was abominable. Inconceivable. Excruciating. Insane, thought Caspian Baraban.

There was a wooden chair in the corner of the room but he could not use it. He paced up and down, up and down, so frustrated he could almost have hit his head against the cement wall—but of course he would do nothing that might injure his brain.

Two hours! Two hours he had been here! And how much time had he wasted, when the railway-station taxi driver had no idea of the location of the base but had pretended, of course, and they had ended up at a meat-processing plant in the bleakest of all the world’s most miserable industrial zones.

For all his brainpower, Caspian Baraban had made two mistakes. First: He’d believed the idiot taxi driver when he’d claimed from Caspian’s rough instructions to know the location of the base. Second: He had brought no rubles.

Caspian tried at once to call his father for help, but there was no response. Worse, the irate driver had decided that in lieu of rubles, he would take Caspian’s PDA. He had snatched it from the boy’s fingers and driven off, leaving him alone, lost somewhere on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, on the verge (though he would never admit it) of tears.

It had taken another half an hour for him to hitch a lift back into the city. The truck driver might have stopped, but his kindliness ended there. Caspian’s attempts in his imperfect Russian to request that he be taken at once to the base—or if not, a taxi stand—were greeted with dull silence. The driver chewed and drove, chewed and drove, while Caspian’s anger seethed inside him.

At the precise moment that Will sat on his grandmother’s sofa and said he needed to talk to her about space, Caspian found himself once more abandoned. But this time it was near the Hermitage Museum. Here, there were tourists. And where there were tourists, there were taxis.

The first driver looked criminal, Caspian decided. It was the uneven shape of his head that gave it away. The second was more promising. This man was young. He actually listened.

“Ah, the base?” he said. “Where the drunks had their throats cut.” And he pursed his lips. “You want to go there?”

Caspian could have screamed. “Yes! Yes, I want to go there.” He yanked open the back door and threw himself inside. “Drive!” he ordered.

“Whatever you like,” Caspian promised. “Whatever you want, I can pay.”

Or his father could, he thought. As the taxi pulled away, Caspian cursed the sun. If it hadn’t been for those flares, he would have been in Petersburg twenty-four hours ago. He could be with his father right now . . .

Thirty minutes later, the cab arrived at the gates to the sprawling base. Caspian could make out the tip of a launch pad, beyond a vast hangar. It looked grim, and gray, lit by a blaring white light. Signs showing stick figures in the throes of electrocution were pinned to the fence.

Two guards sauntered out of their box, holding back two slathering dogs. Caspian had been impatient to jump out to explain. Noticing the dogs, he rolled down the window.

“My name is Caspian Baraban!” he shouted through the snow-stinging wind. “My father wants to see me. Let me in at once.”

“Call him!” Caspian almost screamed. “Get on your radio and call him now!”

“All right, all right,” said the second guard. “Calm down. There’s somewhere warm in here where you can wait—”

“Where you can wait while we contact your father,” the first guard finished.

Your father. And Caspian’s chest swelled suddenly as he imagined the look of pride that would light up his father’s pale face. His son—the genius. His son—who had produced the greatest code in the history of humanity. The code for something beyond infinity. The code for a black hole.