Immune (38 page)

Staring at the empty place on the bench in their garage workshop, Mark felt as if he had been repeatedly kicked in the stomach. It was gone. Jennifer had taken the newly modified laptop, the one containing the miniaturized subspace receiver-transmitter.

“Jesus!”

Heather’s exclamation caused him to look toward her as she scrambled to move the folding stepladder across the garage.

Suddenly, a deeper understanding widened Mark’s eyes. Racing to Heather’s side, Mark helped her position it. After spreading the metal legs and sliding the locking hinge into place, he scrambled up.

With one hand, he raised the ceiling panel and slid it aside. The attic space was dark, but to his eyes, it appeared dimly lit, the slatted two-by-fours separated by faded yellow foam insulation. A quick shove of his powerful arms lifted him up and into the attic, where he crawled along the support slats until he reached the lowest point in the overhang.

Mark reached out, sliding his hand under the insulation until it came to rest on the long flat box they had placed there weeks before. Pulling it free, he backed up until he could sit erect. Heather moved into the attic beside him, staring down at the closed box, which now lay across his lap.

For an instant Mark hesitated, his eyes fixing on Heather’s as he worked up the nerve to look inside. Heather beat him to it, reaching across to tilt up the lid. At first, he thought it was okay, that they were still right here, safely hidden away. Then the lid came fully open.

Heather rocked backward, a soft moan of dismay escaping her lips.

Unable to believe what he was seeing, Mark could only stare into the box. Of the original four alien headsets, only two remained.

“God damn it,” Mark breathed. “Jen! What the fuck have you done?”

Hearing no response from Heather, Mark glanced sideways. Staring straight through him, she leaned back against one of the roof support frames, lost in a vision that clouded her eyes. If it hadn’t been for the intensity of the look on her face, Mark would have shaken her, would have tried to bring her back to the present. But somehow, pulled forward by a fascination that he couldn’t fight, Mark leaned in close.

As he watched Heather’s jaw clench in determination, Mark knew this was no random fugue that had come to claim control over his beautiful friend. As strange as it seemed, deep in her savant mind, Heather was hunting. And although it raised the hair along the back of his neck, this was one hunt Mark was unwilling to interrupt.

Dr. Hanz Jorgen, chief scientist in charge of research on the recently discovered Bandelier Ship, had set up a makeshift office inside the cave that housed the dead starship. The name had come from the press, Bandelier being the national monument adjacent to where the second starship had been discovered. Now, as the setting sun cast deep shadows through the steep canyon outside, a darker shadow crept across Jorgen’s plump face.

Dr. Stephenson sat on a folding metal chair, directly across from Dr. Jorgen’s desk, watching Dr. Jorgen struggle to control his emotions.

“I don’t at all agree with that characterization of our status.”

Dr. Stephenson’s eyes narrowed. “Well, Hanz, how would you characterize a total lack of progress?”

Jorgen ran a plump hand across the top of his shiny bald dome, as if seeking some hair to pull out. The dampness at the armpits of his rumpled white shirt seemed to grow darker by the second.

“Just because we haven’t managed to open the doors into the inner compartments or power up any of the ship’s systems doesn’t mean we haven’t made progress. My report documents the results of our tests on the composition of every part of the ship we can reach, both interior and exterior. By the way, I seem to recall there is a large section of the ship you have at Rho Division that your team has been unable to access, despite decades of work.”

“Ah, yes, your report.” Dr. Stephenson smiled as he extracted the thick document from his attaché case, leafing through pages he had covered with red markings. He flipped to one of the dog-eared pages. “‘Exterior chemical composition…unknown. Material defies all efforts to extract a sample.’”

Stephenson turned to another page. “‘Although the texture of the materials comprising the interior surfaces, couches, and panels indicates a much different molecular composition than that comprising the ship’s outer hull, we have, as yet, been unsuccessful in extracting samples for chemical analysis…All efforts to power up shipboard systems have proven ineffective.’”

Glancing up at the ruddy face of Jorgen, Dr. Stephenson sneered. “Unknown…unsuccessful…ineffective…everywhere I look in this piece of garbage you call an interim progress report, that’s all I see. Those aren’t my words, they are yours. Let me tell you something, Dr. Jorgen. I don’t call lack of success progress. You give me one example of something tangible that your team has come up with, and I’ll get off your ass.”

Jorgen’s plump face had gone well past red, acquiring a deep shade of purple, his blue eyes bulging as if they were ready to shoot forth like potato pellets from a spud gun.

“Did you even read our conclusion?” he sputtered.

“That’s why I came to pay you this visit.” Dr. Stephenson flipped to the last page. “Let’s see…‘Based upon the failure of all of our tests to identify any of the materials from which this ship is constructed, we have concluded that they are of extraterrestrial origin, the result of a superior alien technology.’”

Dr. Stephenson rose from his chair and tossed the document onto Dr. Jorgen’s desk. “Extraterrestrial. No fucking shit. Consider this your six-weeks’ notice. Get me something useful or start shopping around for someplace else to work.”

Without giving the hyperventilating scientist a chance to respond, the deputy director turned and exited the cavern.

While the steps that had been cut into the hillside leading to the top of the canyon had greatly improved ease of access, it still left most people huffing and puffing, but for Dr. Stephenson, the hike didn’t even stir his heart rate from its steady forty-six beats per minute. Passing the military guards without bothering to acknowledge them, he made his way back to his helicopter and was soon airborne for the short flight back to Rho Division.

It occurred to him that his pressure tactics might backfire with Jorgen. The man was a heavyweight in more than physical appearance, having won a pair of Nobel Prizes for his work in basic material science. There was no questioning the man’s intellect, possibly a close second at the laboratory to Dr. Stephenson’s own. In addition, Dr. Jorgen exercised a tight network of political connections from his days as scientific advisor to the president. And although President Harris was dead, those connections had not died with him.

Still, in Dr. Stephenson’s experience, anger was sometimes a more effective motivator than fear. That Jorgen was one of the few people on the deputy director’s team who didn’t fear him only spurred Stephenson’s aggressive nature. In most cases, he would have wanted to discuss several interesting aspects of Jorgen’s report, but today Dr. Stephenson found himself distracted by the amazing changes in Raul.

Again, the lad had subjected himself to an intensive round of self-modification, intended to integrate himself more closely into the alien ship’s neural network. This latest operation had been drastic and involved such dangerous surgery that Dr. Stephenson had considered making Raul stop. Unfortunately, by the time he had checked in on the cameras monitoring Raul’s activities, the operation had progressed beyond the point where it could be halted safely.

Besides, Raul would certainly resist any effort to stop him. The boy had acquired an amazing level of control over the alien stasis field and was using it to perform the self-operation with finer control than his own hands could have achieved. There was little doubt that Raul could use that same field to atomize anyone who entered his compartment, if he chose to do so, although that didn’t necessarily apply to Stephenson.

Working on the theory that the ship itself was driving Raul to perform the dangerous surgery, Dr. Stephenson had decided against trying to interrupt its progress. Instead, he had spent the entire night closeted in his private office, watching the monitors in fascination as Raul worked.

By 3:00 a.m., Raul had completely removed his skull above his eyebrows along a line that passed just above his ears and then all the way down to where his neck connected to his head. From the way he screamed, it was clear that he needed to feel every nerve in order to feed that data back through the Rho Ship’s neural network. Apparently, the pain formed the data that told him exactly how deep to cut, and the accuracy of those cuts had to be perfect. Almost as fast as each section of the skull was cut away, the nanites in his blood stopped the bleeding, although they could not regenerate the major tissue losses.

Once Raul had exposed the entire top and side portions of the brain, he paused to remove a large number of small crystalline chips from the Rho Ship’s circuitry. Actually, the stasis field opened the panels and removed the chips, large numbers of them seeming to disconnect themselves and float randomly around Raul. Satisfied with his preparations, Raul rotated himself in the air until he floated facedown. Then, as if they were an attacking swarm of small insects, the chips descended on his exposed brain, inserting themselves into exactly positioned micro-cuts created by Raul’s manipulation of the stasis field, it’s razor lines of force acting like a thousand tiny scalpels.

And in his pain, Raul’s screams were replaced by a high-pitched mewling sound, a sound that Dr. Stephenson would have thought human vocal chords incapable of producing for more than a few seconds without inflicting permanent damage. The vibration of Raul’s vocal chords intensified until Stephenson could almost hear them tear and reknit themselves as the nanomachines worked to repair the damage.

The operation ended midmorning, the final steps of the procedure the most fascinating of all. Having completed the insertion of the thousands of micro-crystals into his brain, Raul removed the umbilical cable that connected him to the ship. His new freedom left him floating freely in the air, legless, his one artificial eye swiveling about on its hinged arm, his brain sitting naked in the open dish of his lower skull.

Raul moved across the room, pausing in front of a machine, the purpose of which Dr. Stephenson had never determined. The mechanism pulsed, producing a transparent gel which Raul extracted into a clear blob, barely larger than one fist. The gel floated up until it hovered just above Raul’s head, then began to flow out and across the surface of Raul’s brain, spreading so smoothly that it completely covered every exposed section of gray matter.

Suddenly, Dr. Stephenson knew why the gel looked so familiar. It was the same transparent stuff that wrapped the conduits that ran throughout this section of the ship: flexible, but so hard that a diamond drill bit was unable to scratch it. Although he couldn’t be certain, the deputy director thought he understood how it worked. It was a nano-material, something that could harden instantly once given the proper command or become as flexible as silly putty given another.

The jolt as the helicopter touched down disrupted Dr. Stephenson’s recollection of the scene. As he stepped down, feeling the rotor wash swirl around him, the deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory smiled. Whatever had suddenly driven Raul to connect himself so extensively with the Rho Ship had just accelerated Stephenson’s timetable. He’d let Raul explore his limits just a bit longer before he reminded the young man who was really running the show.

Power! The sensation storm in Raul’s brain crawled through his body like an overdose of crystal meth.

If he had thought himself connected to the Rho Ship’s neural network before, what was he now? Yesterday he had felt like the massive alien neural network was a part of him. Now it felt like the brain and body of Raul Rodriguez were only tiny pieces of what he had now become.

As he scanned the data storage, fragments of memories floated before him…the Rho Ship hurtling through the wormhole that had brought it to this solar system…the attack by the Enemy…the direct hit of his gravitational vortex weapon on the Enemy vessel…the shock of impact from the Enemy’s subspace distortion beam.

Raul tried recalling more of the confusing imagery, but the damage to the data storage elements was too great, yielding only unintelligible fragments for his examination. Without much more significant repair, the rest of the historical data would remain inaccessible.

A detailed systems check revealed the true extent of damage from the Enemy subspace weaponry: power production at 0.000352 percent capacity, the neural network operating at 9.317 percent of normal, 0.1231 percent of data access capability online, weapons systems inoperable, navigation systems inoperable, propulsion systems inoperable, communications systems barely functional.

One piece of the data excited him. A subsection of the communications apparatus appeared to have survived with only minimal damage, a testament to the extreme gravitational shielding that had protected it. Housed within the most heavily protected area, the Rho Ship’s intelligence-gathering capabilities pulsed with a healthy heartbeat, only awaiting sufficient power to perform the information gathering and scanning capabilities for which the system had been created.

One other interesting piece of information introduced itself to Raul. The Rho Ship hadn’t had a crew for its last mission, its operation controlled by the onboard artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the purpose of that mission was lost in the damaged databanks, hidden away as effectively as a single grain of sand at White Sands National Monument. But it was still there, and Raul knew that, given time, he would uncover it.