Maracaibo, Venezuela, March, 2078, Thursday…

"We're having some problems with the containment field."

Dimitri Falcov, one of the experimental physicists working at the center in Maracaibo, has a red face and sweat on his brow. General John Harrison could see that clearly on the phone.

He wondered what else could go wrong. Earlier that night he had received word that Sergio Battaglia was dead, killed by a terrorist. Their major benefactor was not indispensable to the project but he would be missed.

Harrison knew the history of the project well. He had insisted on it when he took it over. For many reasons, he didn't trust Sergio. Where Harrison considered himself a patriot, he knew Sergio to be an international shaker and mover, a man who had allegiance to no country or to anyone else but himself. Sergio exploited persons and countries to always further his own agenda.

Sergio had been in on the project from the beginning, always the player behind the scenes, manipulating things in order to keep it going. It had a checkered history. Sheila Remington had found out about it and wanted to cancel it. Her mistake had been to meet with Vladimir Kalinin. Sheila Remington had been a smart woman - too smart for her own good. But she had met her match in the wily Russian.

The Russian had then layered a vast web of misinformation, first making Ted Randall believe that it was Sheila's old protagonist Purity that killed her, then convincing Delgado that for the national good it must be Bravo Islam. Delgado had been easy to convince because of his connections to Mundo Domini. A war started by misinformation took a large number of lives of American and European soldiers and countless Arab jihadists and civilians.

Then came the scandals in the Fulton administration. Vladimir, Pentagon higher-ups, and others had decided to transfer some of their special projects overseas. It was the smart thing to do at the time. It took them out of range of the eyes of the local media and protected them from the simmering ethnic strife leftover from the breakup of the EU. With the march of fascist capitalism in South America, the projects could be managed easily by large infusions of cash, otherwise known as bribes.

Now, as he headed for the lab, Harrison wondered where it would all end.

I should retire. I'm getting too old for this. My kids speak more Spanish than English now. It's time to quit. Upon entering the lab, he knew they were in trouble. The sphere had grown twenty percent in size. Instead of the wraith-like bauble from another space and time, it was angry red. Portions were even splotched with purple to black vortices. The roar of the equipment pounded in his ears.

"What the hell is going on?" he yelled at Dimitri.