Immune (28 page)

“Marjorie? Jesus Christ.”

“She must have stumbled on the killer as he exited the house. He cut her throat so violently her head almost came off. The house was a god-awful mess. The president wants you at the White House ASAP. He’s gathering the whole cabinet for an emergency meeting.”

“My driver?”

“He and the rest of your security team are already waiting outside.”

“Okay, Sam. Let the president’s people know, I’ll be on my way as soon as I throw on some clothes.”

The secret service man nodded, then turned and exited the room. Vice President Gordon waited until he was gone, then turned and picked up the encrypted Secure Telephone Unit, more commonly called a STU.

The STU secured call was answered by an odd-sounding voice, the slight delay and echo indicative of the heavy encryption on the line.

“Yes?”

The vice president spoke softly. “Is the cigar ready?”

“The Columbian, just as you requested.”

Vice President Gordon paused for just an instant, the code words that would change his life forever rising to his lips of their own accord.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

Surrounded by the machinery that filled this part of the ship, Raul hung in the air, suspended by the stasis field, which now responded to his mental commands as easily as his missing legs once had. His connection to the Rho Ship was better now, evolving in a way that changed with each of his repairs to the damaged shipboard systems. With each of the micro-power cells he managed to bring online, his abilities increased. Not his mental abilities; those were tied solely to the neural network that formed the starship’s computerized brain.

But each power increase allowed Raul to bring new systems online, giving him better control of the gravitational worm fiber technology with which he had been experimenting. Initially, the worm fibers had provided a tiny point of access to a distant location, so small that he could only tap into existing communication networks. The power required for even those tiny space-time singularities was monstrous, each attempt bringing him close to draining his shipboard reserves. If he totally drained the power, then the neural network would fail, leaving him without the knowledge to repair the system.

That danger should have been enough to stop him from trying anything else until he had totally solved the power problem. But a stronger impulse consumed him: Heather.

In his darkest moment of despair, while he had briefly been disconnected from his starship, one thought had saved him, giving him a reason to reconnect. A new purpose seized his mind, a purpose that drove him to restore much more of the ship’s former glory.

At this point, Raul didn’t even have a good plan of how he was going to accomplish what he wanted. He wasn’t worried though. He would figure it out. Somehow, Raul would get Heather to come to him. Then he would introduce her to the power that came from a true connection. He would perform the operation himself so there would be no need to sacrifice those lovely legs.

Raul glanced down at his own legless torso. It wasn’t so bad. He still had all the necessary equipment to slide between those legs. Then Heather would find out just how well he could manipulate the spectral fingers of the stasis field. It was a shame he hadn’t yet had any sexual experience to draw upon, but there would be plenty of time for practice when he had his soul mate. Once he hooked her into the ship, he would be able to monitor exactly what felt good and what didn’t. Raul took a deep breath. He’d have Heather begging for more before she knew what was happening.

Noticing his rising heart rate, Raul turned his attention back to the task at hand. He could daydream later.

With the new matter conversion cell operational, he’d been able to recharge the ship’s energy storage units. With that reserve power added to what was produced by the two operational matter conversion cells there should be enough to create a larger worm fiber, one that could serve as an optical pinhole. Maintaining the worm fiber viewer for several minutes should be possible.

The problem was that Raul didn’t have enough power to do that and to completely mask the external effects such a worm fiber would produce. The best he could do was to reduce the gravitational signature to a minimum.

Raul reached out with his mind, his neural network bringing the power cells up to maximum as he began the worm fiber generation sequence. A tiny gravitational wave pulsed outward as the singularity came into existence, its extraordinary potential well contained by the alien technology that brought it into being. It hung there in front of him, so tiny that no human eye could see it, no broader in diameter than a molecule, a place where here and there touched.

No longer aware of his own body, Raul’s mind manipulated the massive computing power of his neural network, viewing and correcting for the changes in the singularity so that it stabilized despite nature’s best efforts to destroy the microscopic abomination.

Raul shifted the controlling fields, drawing much more heavily on the power available to the system. Once again a gravitational pulse swept outward, this one larger than the last, possibly even detectable by Dr. Stephenson’s instruments. The worm fiber bulged, quickly expanding to the size of a visible pinpoint as Raul fought to reestablish control, something that required him to divert all available computational resources to the task. For several seconds the outcome of his efforts remained in doubt; then, as if it had just given up the fight, the new, larger worm fiber stabilized.

Without hesitation, Raul focused on the pinhole, changing the visible zoom level until he could see through it to the far side. It was a perfect peephole, one side of which was here in the ship while the other side was wherever he chose. Raul recognized the outside of the building that housed Rho Division, but he did not have time to linger. Shifting the containment equations slightly, Raul experimented on moving the far end of the worm fiber. The first shift took him too far, the dense evergreen forest outside producing a momentary disorientation as he recalculated his position. British Colombia.

Three more jumps provided the necessary calibration of his equipment. Raul shifted the fiber back to central Los Alamos, moving it along rapidly now. The view froze on a familiar house, the windows now broken out by vandals, the flowers that had once graced the window boxes long since dead.

A momentary pang of remorse surged through Raul’s mind at the thought of his dead father. Where was his mother? As Raul lingered, a sudden awareness of his rapidly dwindling power supply caused him to reassert self-control, once more moving the viewer along the highway at a speed no car could match. Reaching White Rock, Raul positioned the worm fiber outside another familiar house. It passed through the front door as if it had no more substance than a dream.

The living room was empty, as was the kitchen. A peek into the garage revealed that the family van was missing. So Heather must be out with her mom and dad. A wave of disappointment assaulted Raul, but he refused to allow it to slow him. Moving the viewer upstairs, he once again passed through a door, this time into Heather’s bedroom.

Her bed was a double, the pillow covers and duvet done in beautiful hand-stitched floral patterns. As the power alarms sounded in his mind, Raul lingered just an instant longer, feeling his heart thumping in his chest as he stared at the place where Heather slept.

Allowing the worm fiber to collapse in upon itself as he powered the system down, Raul smiled. It would take several days to restore the energy reserves he had just used up. But when he did, he would be looking in on his old girlfriend once again. And next time he would make sure it happened around bed time.

With only the dim glow from the twin flat-panel computer monitors to combat it, the darkness crept through the room, a physical presence reminiscent of fog swallowing the Golden Gate Bridge. At the inner edge of the battleground where light and darkness struggled, the mahogany furniture was barely visible, the outlines blurry and indistinct. The smell of furniture polish hung in the air, adding a thickness that enhanced the room’s claustrophobic contraction.

Dr. Donald Stephenson, deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, leaned back in his chair, studying the recorded video stream from the starship’s inner sanctum. Raul was performing as well as he had hoped, possibly even better.

Initially, Dr. Stephenson had been disappointed by the amount of time it took Raul to access and begin repairing sections of the starship’s neural network. By the time he had gotten around to performing a self-modification to his own umbilical connection, Stephenson was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake in selecting Raul as his subject. The lad was certainly bright enough to come to terms with his newly enhanced mental powers. The only question was the depth of the boy’s psychosis, something that could either drive him to incredible achievement or could leave him paralyzed with phobias from which there would be no recovery.

The operation that removed Raul’s legs had been entirely unnecessary. That and the crude manner in which the umbilical connections had been established were done to provide motivation for change. Dr. Stephenson had been hoping to see Raul drive himself to redo the operation much sooner than he had. But now that the self-upgrade had been completed, the pace of Raul’s advancement had quickened in a most gratifying manner.

The deputy director entered a command and the computer screens shifted, the one on the right showing a new view of Raul hanging in the air, supported by the stasis field, which he now controlled. At the bottom of the screen, a timeline displayed exactly when each frame of the recording was produced, the times calibrated through an atomic clock for accuracy before being closed-caption encoded into the video stream.

The other computer monitor was filled with instrument readings, each matched to its own timeline. The upper right corner of this monitor displayed a special set of readings. These had been received from the Ulysses spacecraft, now approaching the August 18 perihelion of its orbit around the sun.

The synchronization of all the data was tricky. It wasn’t just a matter of matching the timelines. The times had to be adjusted based upon the location of the instrument and the velocity of the waves reaching them.

More of a problem was the sensitivity required of the instruments. He was looking for gravity waves, and those waves were weak. To measure a gravity wave required instruments to be calibrated to measure movements smaller than the nucleus of an atom. Getting rid of background noise generally required incredible efforts in vibrational shielding and damping. In addition, the devices had to be super-cooled close to absolute zero.

Only a few gravitational wave experiments were being conducted around the world and those were looking at relativistic objects such as supernovas or black holes. Fortunately, Dr. Stephenson’s position allowed him to access all available data for the time period in question.

Raul had managed something truly remarkable. Two bursts of gravitational wave activity had been measured during the day of this recording. The first of these was quite small and might have passed unnoticed if not for the Doppler anomaly with the Ulysses spacecraft.

The second wave was extraordinary, several orders of magnitude larger than any gravitational wave ever measured, a clear indication of a relativistic event in the near-earth vicinity. Although scientists around the world struggled to decide if the unexpected data was real or the result of faulty equipment, Dr. Stephenson knew precisely where it had occurred and the mechanism that had produced it. He had watched it happen.

Combined with the power surge his instruments had detected from the starship, Dr. Stephenson had been able to establish an exact timeline for the process. And that timeline confirmed his equations describing the third alien technology. If Raul could solve the power limitations under which he was currently operating, the starship would soon be supplying data that would provide the final answers Stephenson needed.

At that point, given the worldwide success of the first two alien technologies, the world governments would have no hesitation in providing him the resources required for the next step. If they refused…well, he had another way to deal with that eventuality, although it would take every penny now flowing into his offshore bank accounts.

The image of the second alien starship popped into his thoughts. It was a lucky thing for the scientific team heading that investigation that Dr. Stephenson had been so busy with his work in Rho Laboratory. Otherwise, he would have had their collective asses in a sling long before now. He hadn’t expected much, but those morons hadn’t accomplished a damn thing.

Only the knowledge that the Second Ship’s technology was far inferior to that of the starship here at Rho Laboratory kept him from taking direct control of that operation. That and because the Second Ship was dead as a doornail while his was alive and under repair.

Dr. Stephenson stared at the image of Raul floating in the air, his gaze turned inward in concentration. It had been three weeks since the deputy director had set foot inside the inner section of the starship. Since Raul had gained control of the stasis field, it was prudent to wait.

So the deputy director would content himself with his observations and measurements, while he let Raul keep working.