Broken Trust by Shannon Baker

She laughed at her own cleverness .
    Nora stepped to the table and bent to the maps.
    “You know,” Sylvia explained. “Is the climate driving the beetles or are the beetles driving the climate?”
    Tappity-tap, tap, tap . Petal worked away.
    Nora lifted the corner of one of the maps and leaned on the table to scrutinize it.
    Sylvia slid the map from Nora and thrust a finger on it. “You see? These overlay colors and shading indicate not only temperature and cloud cover but times and trends, followed by these stills.” She pulled out another map from underneath and spread it on top of the first. “These indicate the spread of beetle kill. When I combine them in an animated digital process, I can illustrate the actual correlation between climatic factors and beetle spread.”
    “That’s amazing. And you created this technology?”
    Sylvia laughed. “Oh, not all of it. I used some of what I developed with my team at the HAARP facility in Alaska.”
    “Isn’t HAARP something like an array of towers that shoot energy into the atmosphere? People think it’s some sort of weather - altering thing or mind control or doomsday weapon?”
    Sylvia laughed. “There are a hundred and eighty towers and they send out a ping , but the energy used is much less than any sun burst. What happens is that the towers send a billion watts of energy into the atmosphere. That’s about a hundred times a thunderbolt. It excites the ionosphere and creates a plume and then bounces back to the surface.”
    “What is the point of the research?”
    Petal quit typing. She sat still as if listening.
    “What does it matter? All major scientific breakthroughs have come about with research for the sake of pure knowledge. We don’t know what we’ll discover that will create real good. For instance, there is hope that some of the HAARP technology will actually facilitate ozone repair.”
    “You get information from HAARP for the beetle kill research?”
    “Oh no. I’ve developed a tower using similar HAARP technologies. It’s an advance on the work of Nikola Tesla. I’ve developed the technology to use only one small installation on M ount Evans, not far from here.”
    Oh. Where Nora met Petal.
    Petal started tapping on the keyboard again.
    “It’s one of Colorado’s tallest peaks. The highest electron density is on tall mountains because the negative charge is reaching for the positive charge in the atmosphere. My tower sends extremely low frequency waves, ELF waves , and the waves that bounce back create the raw data I use in the modeling software I created.”
    Didn’t she say earlier she’d bought the software with donor funds? Maybe she worked with Al Gore when he invented the Internet too .
    “So it’s a matter of tweaking the tower’s angle of refraction to gather the matrices to compile the complicated 3D images.”
    Nora pulled another map from the bottom of the pile and slid it on top. A red Sharpie circle marked a map of South America. “Are you researching Ecuador?”
    Sylvia shoved another map over the South America one. “No. Of course not.”
    Petal typed away, not appearing to pay any attention to their conversation.
    Sylvia eyed Petal and placed a hand on Nora’s arm. “It’s a lovely fall day. Let me show you the friendship garden. A garden club donates their time to give us a place for reflection by the creek.”
    They walked through the kitchen, out the back door , and into the yard. The brown grass crunched underfoot. “How are you settling in?”
    My office looks like a volcano of paper erupted in it. The previous F inance D irector was murdered. The star scientist is a prima donna. The E xecutive D irector is a creepy loser from high school. The sanest person here is a dreadlock-wearing woman of indeterminate age.
    “As well as can be expected for a first day,” Nora said.
    “That’s good.” Again, no mention of Darla. Sylvia stopped well short of the promised garden. “I’ll need that check