The Interlude

CHAPTER ONE

NASA Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C.

Magdalena del Rosa looked into the Raman Spectroscope pondering the ethics of what she was seeing. She was the lead scientist for a top secret NASA research project, and her time lines were very specific. They didn't allow for wobbling, waffling, or dilemmas of any kind.
Unfortunately, she was doing all three.

"Is there a problem, Maggie?"

Startled, she knocked over her can of soda, quickly moving her papers out of the way. Damn it, she hated being called Maggie and Gene Bertram knew it. That he refused to call her Magdalena reflected how much he cared about what she thought.

Which sucked, big time.

She needed to talk to someone about what she'd just found, and there was no way in hell it would be Gene. That he was the lab supervisor made it even more complicated. She should tell him, yet a niggling voice kept her quiet.

Unfair, probably even unwarranted, but that didn’t change her feelings.

She grabbed a towel, catching the giant drip of soda hanging off the lab counter, thoughts racing. Tell him, or not?
Gene grabbed the towel from her hand, tossing it into the trash. "Maggie?"

"Sorry, sir. I was distracted," by my loathing of you, Magdalena thought.

She'd never say it out loud; she was a major wuss when it came to confrontation. But she'd kicked his ass a number of times in her mind.

"Let me know if this is too much for you." He gestured around the lab, particularly at the multi-million dollar microscope. "We don't normally have someone at your...level working in this lab."

And there it was.

The root of their conflict. Her age and his inability to accept that she was a hell of a lot smarter than he was, and a woman to boot.

"It won't happen again." No it won't, because hopefully, you'll get eaten by a giant rabbit, or accidentally drive yourself off a cliff on the way home.
A girl had to have hope.

"See that it doesn't. I need your report on the Nakhla specimen as soon as you have it ready. Projects that come through my lab are going to stay on deadline and on budget and you are already behind on both." He glared at her.
She was behind schedule and over budget but neither were her fault. She’d had to shuffle things around because the source of her experiments, the Eye of Nakhla, had been recalled to the Museum of London unexpectedly.

Why was he so interested in her project? Gene had been dogging her since the day the Eye of Nakhla arrived, hounding her to move faster, go farther than the research scope allowed. That alone had put her on edge. Now, given what she'd found, she was over the cliff, hanging on by her fingertips.

"About that..." Magdalena hesitated, caught on the reality of keeping something this...huge… a secret.

"I don't want to hear your excuses, Maggie. Just get it done."

His tone and his assumption that she hadn't finished her work decided it for her. She'd keep it to herself.

Just until she had more time to think. Her attention in general was short, and when she was
working she was beyond focused on her project. She wasn't going to waste any more energy trying to figure out what to do. Instead, she'd just...do.

She pulled a new notebook out and made notes in her own shorthand, barely noticing when Gene left the lab.

Had she really seen independent movement? Taking another glance in the scope, she realized that yes she had. These things were alive. Alive.

Jesus, freaking...Christ.

She'd just discovered life on Mars.

The crowds roared…in her head.

To be specific, and she was always specific, not life on Mars, per se, but defiantly living, oxygen eating, self propelling microorganisms happily tooling around on a hunk of meteorite that started on Mars before crashing into the earth hundreds of years ago.

Even more astounding, the little fellas were still alive. And that was a puzzle. One her Mensa level IQ wasn't going to let her ignore. Why were they still alive? What was sustaining them? Were they dangerous?

Wow. She took a moment to wrap her mind around this discovery. This was big-Albert Einstein big, Nobel Prize big, gonna-be-famous big. Not bad for the child genius, if she did say so herself.

Get it under control, girl, a cynical voice whispered. The one that popped up at moments just like this to drag her down into the dumps.

She'd hold her enthusiasm until she had more proof. And for that she needed data, lots and lots of data.

As the day progressed, she heard doors closing as her coworkers left for the day. She worked on, oblivious in her little cubical of a lab. She ran a series of tests, each one leaving her more puzzled than the last.