Immune (61 page)

But Stephenson had insisted that he needed more power, enough to allow for redundant failure protection, to avoid any possibility of the gate closing prematurely. So, despite Raul’s desperation to get to Heather, he had agreed to keep working, bringing online many times the power required for his purpose.

Apparently, his efforts to satisfy the deputy director had finally paid off. Tonight was the night.

As he watched, the worm fiber opening stabilized, providing a clear view of a Spanish-style patio area, lit only by landscape lighting and light from inside the huge house.

Except for two guards lounging near an arched opening, no other people appeared.

Raul manipulated the viewer, sending the worm fiber from room to room in the main house, starting with the first floor, then moving it upward to the second. With each empty room, his frustration grew. The occasional cleaning woman did nothing to alleviate this feeling.

Moving the fiber down a broad hallway, he passed through a wall and into another expansive bedroom.

Raul tensed! There was Heather, looking even more beautiful than he remembered, talking excitedly to Jennifer Smythe. Across the room, a man sat tied to a wicker chair, his lips locked in a sneer. What was going on here?

Just as Raul was about to turn his attention back to Heather, he saw the other occupant of the bedroom. Mark Smythe. And just like the last time he had looked in on that jerk, Smythe somehow detected the worm fiber’s presence, moving forward until he was mere inches away from it.

“You son of a bitch!”

As soon as the words tumbled from his lips, Smythe moved toward the seated man. Fast. So fast, Raul had never seen anything like it.

Grabbing the tied man’s head between his palms, Mark gave a quick and violent twist.

Crack.

The suddenness of the unprovoked attack and the volume from the neck bones snapping surprised Raul.

A glance at Heather’s horror-filled face told him all he needed to know. Mark Smythe had somehow hijacked her to Colombia, probably associated with whatever drugs he was on. Well, she wouldn’t have to live in fear any longer. Raul was coming to the rescue. And if Smythe tried to stop him, he’d find out what it was like to be diced into centimeter cubes of jelly.

Raul’s neural network reached out, manipulating the restored power-cell arrays and routing the energy into the gravitational distortion engine. At first, it felt little different than the production of a new worm fiber. Then the power pulsed higher as one gravitational wave interfered with the next until they formed a standing gravitational wave packet of the next order of magnitude. Another pulse. Then another as more and more power cells came online.

Now the entire ship hummed with the strength of the growing distortion, each increase in magnitude accompanied by a brief pause as stability was reestablished. Raul monitored the energy production, letting the energy equations cascade through his mind. It was close now, another few seconds and he could damp the power output and activate the wormhole. After that, it would be a simple matter to extend the stasis field through that hole, grab Heather, and pull her through. And if Smythe tried to interfere, Raul would shield Heather from the splatter.

A mental countdown filled Raul’s head.

Ten…

Nine…

Eight…

Another power pulse shook the ship, this one much larger than any so far. What the hell was that?

Raul shifted his attention to the problem, applying every bit of his massively parallel processing to finding the source of the power spike.

There it was again, another power spike. Every one of the repaired power cells was ramping up to peak power.

Dammit! If he didn’t find out what was causing this, and soon, he was screwed.

Now another difficulty attracted his attention. The coordinate lock he had achieved on Heather’s location had broken, a new three-dimensional setting taking its place. What the fuck? Somehow, the thing had aimed itself somewhere in Switzerland.

The next pulse rumbled through the gravitational distortion engine, sending a shudder through equipment and dimming the uniform-gray lighting in the room. To Raul’s horror, the wormhole narrowed instead of expanding to human size, focusing all that power into a tinier and tinier spot.

Throwing the full weight of the neural network at regaining control of the ship’s instruments, Raul suddenly became aware of a new issue. A large portion of the neural network had restricted his access, refusing to respond to any of his queries. And the level of neural activity within that section correlated perfectly to the rapidly growing gravitational distortion.

Raul tried to override the lock, but his attempt was blocked. He tried again, with the same result. Suddenly, a light dawned in his mind.

Stephenson! What had that bastard done?

A new analysis of the readings gave him an updated estimate of the magnitude of the wormhole being attempted. This was no intra-planetary doorway. Stephenson was trying to open a star gate.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

The ship didn’t have anywhere close to enough working power to try something like that. And at the rate that power was being pulled from the working cells, some of which had already begun to fail, every bit of the Rho Ship’s power would be sucked away, leaving it with no reserves to power his neural network. It would be rendered completely and irreparably disabled.

Another pulse rumbled through the gravitational engine, but this one was weaker than the others.

Raul redoubled his efforts. If he couldn’t break the encryption on the protected section of the neural network, perhaps he could find another way in. The subnet was focused on controlling the distortion and on drawing all available power to support that effort. But what about a maintenance bypass, something that would switch the power cells into maintenance mode, forcing a power down.

Another pulse sent a shudder through the dying ship.

There. As he’d hoped, the maintenance circuitry hadn’t been included in the security system override.

Working as fast as he could, Raul began sequencing the commands to shut down all power cells that hadn’t already burned out. A scan of the array status shocked him. Ninety-eight percent failure and rising.

Suddenly, the stasis field, which held him suspended, gave out, sending him tumbling onto the equipment below. The force of the impact knocked the wind from him and opened a cut on his left eyebrow that dripped blood into his eye, a cut that his nanites closed almost as fast as it had opened. As Raul struggled to prop himself against one of the machines, the dim gray light that had always lit the room went out, taking his connection with the neural network along with it.

Raul froze. He was absolutely alone. Trapped in his former castle. Only now, that castle had been transformed into a dead, black cave.

“Stephenson!” Raul’s yell echoed from the walls. “You hear me? You will be punished. for this sin. By my Father’s name, I will find a way.”

Then, as the weight of the darkness pressed in upon him, Raul dragged his legless body into a corner, curled himself into a tight ball, and wept.

Dr. Hanz Jorgen stared at the newspaper spread across his desk, the corners rippling in the wind that swept in through the cracks beneath the door of his temporary office, high on the cliff above the Bandelier Ship’s cavern. The last two days had been filled with news, each story building on the last.

First had been the Freddy Hagerman bombshell that exposed the secret, and probably illegal, scientific experiments being conducted in the warrens beneath Henderson House. That had led to the arrest of Dr. Donald Stephenson, now currently on administrative leave pending the result of ongoing investigations.

Right behind that had come the news that a terrorist cell had somehow managed to uplink satellite commands that had shut down all the nanites the United States had spent the last several months working so hard to deliver. That was not quite true. Some people had been shielded from the GPS broadcast of the shutdown code, but those numbers were tiny when compared to the number of people who had been injected.

Now this. Just as the House of Representatives had begun impeachment proceedings against the president of the United States, President Gordon had been found dead in his quarters at Camp David, having apparently blown his head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun, a present from his former Naval Academy roommate, Admiral Jonathan Riles.

Hanz arose from his chair, walked to the door, and stepped outside. As unusually warm as the Thanksgiving Day weather had been, today had turned brutally cold. Wind howled down the east slope of the continental divide, whistling across the high canyon country of New Mexico as if trying to blast the earth’s surface clean. It sucked Jorgen’s breath away, instantly removing his desire for a short walk to stretch his legs. His legs didn’t need that much stretching anyway.

As he ducked back inside, the strongest gust so far almost ripped the door from his grasp. Throwing his considerable weight into it, Dr. Jorgen slammed the door closed, then moved across the room to poor himself a cup of coffee.

The Channel 7 weatherman, Tom Karuzo—Hanz could never think of that name without chuckling—said the first blizzard of the year was less than six hours away. One good thing about that, the snowdrifts would fill the chinks beneath his door, helping his heater fight the good fight.

And if he got snowed in for a few days, no big deal. His work was his only family, and he had plenty of scientific papers to review, along with a report he was preparing for congress. He had coffee, beanie-weenies, and crackers out the wazoo, three of his many weaknesses. Funny how most of those were food or drink related.

Dr. Jorgen lowered himself back onto his chair, careful not to spill the hot coffee on anything, and began methodically flipping through the pages of the
Albuquerque Journal
. A page-eighteen story caught his attention.

Among all the other Thanksgiving Day oddities, a group of CERN scientists had just completed correlating new data from testing being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider.  The huge super collider, commonly called LHC, occupied the center of a monstrous tunnel, its fifty-three mile circumference crossing the Swiss-French border in several places.  Physicists from around the world were counting on the LHC to accelerate protons so close to the speed of light that the energies produced by their collisions would rival those produced in the Big Bang, theoretically creating particles that had never before been observed.  The granddaddy of home runs would be finding the Higgs Boson, otherwise known as the God Particle. 

Unfortunately, the LHC had suffered a series of break-downs and delays.  The latest of these occurred early in the morning of what was still Thanksgiving night in Los Alamos. 

According to the article, LHC testing had gone well until a large number of instruments began reporting measurements well outside the expected norm.  Program scientists had shut down the LHC and it remained offline indefinitely, while they investigated the cause of this latest malfunction. 

What made the article especially interesting to Hanz was a section concerning a group of independent scientists who had begun raising questions about the lack of public information on the malfunction.  Despite vociferous protests, the European Organization for Nuclear Research spurned all requests for external review, stating that the top experts in the field were already working on the problem.

Although Hanz didn’t have any evidence upon which to base his suspicions, it smelled like a cover-up.  Not that it really mattered what he thought.  The problem would be sorted out during the LHCs winter shutdown.  He’d leave those concerns to the thousands of scientists CERN already had working on the Large Hadron Collider.

Hanz pulled a big sip from his coffee cup. Crap. Already, it had almost cooled to room temperature. And at the moment, this room wasn’t all that warm.

Walking across to the pot, Dr. Jorgen poured the full cup into the sink, and grabbed a refill. This time he decided he would remain standing until he had finished the whole thing. With his predilection for getting lost in thought, that was the only way to avoid a repeat of the coffee-cooling experiment.

His thoughts returned to the paper’s headline story. Although it was never good for the nation to lose its president, he had a feeling this time was the exception. As for the arrest of that self-important bastard of a deputy director, well…

Dr. Jorgen raised his coffee cup in mock salute.

“Dr. Stephenson, this one’s for you.”

With a long, slow, satisfying sip, Dr. Jorgen let the hot liquid slide across his tongue and down his throat. The warm glow in his stomach felt very good indeed, although he had to admit: not all of that feeling could be attributed to the coffee.

Heather McFarland stared across the neatly lined rows of soybeans that extended almost to the horizon and smiled. She was so tired. And it felt
so
good.

The Robertson family farm had become her home away from home, the Mennonite family having taken them in, accepting them on nothing more than Jack’s word. She didn’t know what the mysterious killer had done for them, but it was clear that they loved him, completely and unconditionally. And Heather had grown to love them too. Norma and Colin had taken them in, treating them exactly as they treated their own kin.