Immune (24 page)

Ducking under a spot where the edge of the starship wedged against the wall, Stephenson made his way to where an MP stood beside a stepladder. Accepting the flashlight offered by the MP, the deputy director paused, sweeping the beam upward.

A smooth hole had been cut through the craft’s outer hull, extending upward through multiple decks and out the top side. As impressed as he had been with the damage done to the Rho Ship, it was now clear which had more power. This ship had been penetrated in a way that implied that this section of hull had been disintegrated, although Dr. Stephenson doubted that was the case. As he examined the smooth contours of the hole’s lower edge, his confidence in his guess about the physics that produced it grew.

Disintegration had nothing to do with what had happened here. A section of the ship had been transported elsewhere, as if a wormhole had torn the space-time fabric at that location. It had to be an instantaneous, bounded singularity, otherwise the effects on the rest of the ship, and on the earth for that matter, would have been catastrophic.

Climbing upward, Dr. Stephenson moved through the craft with a precision born of refined purpose. Unlike the alien ship back at Rho Division, this one appeared to be completely powered down, not particularly surprising given the way it had been punctured. And although the military people had erected stepladders to allow access to each deck, large sections of the ship were closed off.

As he completed his tour, the deputy director shook his head in amazement. Each step of his inspection had increased the awe he felt, not for this ship, but for the technology of the Rho Ship. Although it had been brought down in the fight, it had survived with its power source at least partially intact, whereas this ship had died. It was no wonder. Everywhere he looked on this ship, smooth-flowing artistic lines gave ample evidence of wasteful inefficiency. While there was plenty of investigation to be done here, it was the type of work he could delegate to underlings.

As he turned to climb back down the ladders, a smile creased Dr. Stephenson’s thin lips. Unless something far more interesting turned up here, he would keep his attention focused on his work on the third alien technology.

Heather knew that time was running out, that they only had three days until Jack's deadline for information expired. And although she had worked out a theory that should allow them to modify the subspace transmitter so that it no longer required a gamma flux, they were having great difficulty getting the damn thing to work. Even if they managed to solve the technical problems, they still had no idea how they would find the information Jack wanted, and they couldn’t even agree on whether or not they would give it to him if they could find it.

The only good thing was how the work took her mind off her other problems. Heather had hoped the last experience on the Second Ship would give her control over her visions, but it hadn't. If anything, they were worse than before, now that she no longer required sleep. A random glance could trigger an experience so intense it seemed as if she had been transported to another time and place. The disconcerting glimpses were showing events further out in the probable future.

Before she had been seeing things only seconds before the event happened; now her visions placed her somewhere minutes or even hours in the future. And during the time Heather was lost in the visions, her body went into a glassy-eyed trance from which no one could wake her.

Heather's first visit to the psychiatrist, a tall brunette woman in her mid-forties, had consisted of nothing more than a seemingly innocuous set of background questions. Most of the appointment, she had been kept in the waiting area while Dr. Sigmund, "Call me Gertrude," had interviewed her parents.

Dr. Sigmund. What were the odds of getting a psychiatrist with that name? Although the answer to her own rhetorical question popped into her mind, Heather ignored it. At least she hadn't zombied out during the interview, thank the Lord. Still, her answers had been inadequate to prevent a follow-on series of appointments from being scheduled.

Heather turned her thoughts back to the work at hand. Jennifer was focused on constructing the computer simulation that would allow them to model Heather's latest equations, while Mark had gone off to research news stories on the FBI raid that had killed most of Jack's team.

The trouble with communicating through subspace was the quantum energy leakage across the normal space to subspace boundary. That leakage rate could be calculated easily enough by assuming that the average redshift of observed stars at a given distance from earth came primarily from energy leakage into subspace as opposed to Doppler shifting.

With a bit of oversimplification, each time a light wave took a step, it lost a tiny fraction of its energy to subspace. Since the most energetic light waves had the shortest wavelengths, they took more steps to go the same distance. And more steps meant more energy loss to subspace.

In the past, the three teens had needed the high energy of gamma rays to make the subspace transmitter work. It had only been after Heather had returned from the visit to Dr. Sigmund that a new idea had come to her.

If they could combine the right sets of normal wavelengths, it should be possible to form an interference pattern that would efficiently create high-energy wave packets. It was like the old science film of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. A very ordinary forty mile per hour wind had torn the bridge down because gusts were timed so that each one made it oscillate higher, just like pushing a swing. Weak waves could add up if they were timed just right.

Jennifer had already written a program to control the hardware that would make this happen. The tricky part was to manipulate the standing wave packets to generate a useable subspace signal. The computer system clock was nowhere close to the required accuracy. So Jennifer had built a circuit board to provide an oscillating crystal’s feedback signal that her program used to correct the system clock.

The sound of the Smythe kitchen door opening into the garage brought Heather's head up in time to see Mark stride in, a broad grin spreading across his face.

"I've figured out how to give Jack the information he wants, but not in the way he expects."

Jennifer looked up from her computer on the workbench.

"Okay. How is that?"

As Mark's gaze settled on his twin's face, a brief glint of anger darkened his features before he turned back toward Heather. She didn't know how long his bitterness toward his twin would hang on, but at least they were still working on the same team.

"I've read everything that is available in the public record, and I couldn't come up with anything that would point us to the classified computer network that might have the information. Then it hit me. Only someone with Jack's experience would know how to do that."

Heather nodded slowly, the light dawning in her mind. "So we just need to provide Jack with a link where he can find the information himself."

"Right. We need to let him feed in the coordinates of a building, and then we establish a link from here, feeding the information across the QT link to Jack's computer."

"I can do better than that if we can get the subspace transmitter working in time," said Jennifer. "I can drop a program on Jack's machine that will let him log in to our system here and do the search himself."

Heather's eyes narrowed. "I don't think it's a good idea to give him that kind of control of our subspace transmitter."

"We would still be in control," Jennifer continued. "We could limit him any way we wanted to. Maybe we would just give him a couple of hours of access on certain days. And we could monitor whatever he was doing."

Mark sat down on a stool on the other side of the workbench. "Jack would figure we were monitoring him."

"Sure. That's his problem."

Heather shook her head. “I don’t like helping Jack search for people he is probably going to kill.”

Before Mark could respond, Jennifer leaned toward Heather. “We can’t control what Jack does. We can only hope that he’s on our side.”

As the three teens glanced from one to the other, Mark stood up.

"Then I guess you two better get this thing working before we run out of time."

"Where are you going?" Jennifer asked.

"For someone who does whatever she wants without telling us, you're awfully nosey."

"Fine. Forget it."

"I will."

The door slammed behind Mark before Heather could interject. Jennifer scowled after him, then turned her attention back to the computer. Deciding there was nothing she could say to break the icy quiet, Heather focused her thoughts back on the theoretical problem at hand.

Three days to produce a breakthrough of this magnitude wasn't much time. But if they were going to have any chance to pull it off, Jennifer was going to need her help. Maybe if she focused hard enough, she could forget about the psychiatrist and the possibility that she might be going crazy.

Mark's pace quickened, his anger rising as the front door slammed behind him. As he stepped out onto the street, he broke into a ground-burning jog, nothing fast enough to attract attention, just enough to burn off some of the energy building up within him.

He could feel his heart thundering in his chest, pumping blood through his body in massive pulses, which only fed his need to hit someone. Mark knew something was wrong with him. He had known it since their last experience in the alien ship. Ever since that day, his emotions had been jacked up, leaving him feeling stretched taught, a pinprick away from an explosion.

It wasn't just anger either. Every emotion had been amplified so heavily that he felt like someone had shot him with an elephant-sized dose of adrenaline. Right now, the only thing he knew to control it was to get away from everyone.

In addition to his becoming an adrenaline junky, there were other changes going on with his body. For one thing, Mark wasn't sleeping. He just didn't feel the need. That was one change that didn't bother him. Although he had to stay in his room so that his parents wouldn't discover his sleepless nights, he had used the time to practice his speed reading. The only problem he had run into with that practice was difficulty in turning the pages fast enough.

Another nighttime activity he had taken to was meditation. He had thought that if he could improve his already considerable meditation skills, then perhaps he could get control of the emotional thunderstorms that raged through his brain and body. However, when the adrenaline rushes hit, he had no time to begin a meditation, and once he was in thrall to the attack, it took several minutes of concentration to restore a quiet to his mind.

His workouts helped, so he had thrown himself into a routine that even an Olympian would have found exhausting. Now, as Mark turned off the street, cutting out onto a bike trail into the woods, he could feel the muscles rippling beneath his skin. He had certainly put on some more muscle mass, but he wasn't bulked out. Ripped was the word that popped into his mind.

A stiff breeze had sprung up, carrying with it eddies of coolness that hinted at a coming storm. As the trail opened out onto the ridgeline, Mark could see the line of thunderheads in the distance, dark streaks of rain hanging like a curtain below them.

Good. Let the rain come. Maybe it would cool his overheated brain.

Mark increased his pace. It felt good to stretch out into a real run. His sister's angry face swam into his mind. Shit, after the way he had treated her, Jen had a right to be angry. Mark knew he should already be over his own anger at what she had done. Shutting down the ship had probably been what they would have done even if they had talked it over first. He should have already forgiven her, but he just couldn't.

The first drop of rain smacked him in the face, the big, fat globule splattering on his forehead as twin forks of lightning split the sky across the canyon. Mark's eyes focused on the scene ahead. Christ. He didn't think he had been running that long.

Half a mile ahead, the finger of land they called The Mesa came to a point, below which the Second Ship rested in its cave. But the spot no longer resembled the place they had come to know so well.

Military vehicles had been parked in precisely aligned rows just inside a newly erected chain-link fence topped with concertina razor wire. A guard bunker abutted the gate, and though he could imagine guards with machine guns pointed outward, Mark was unable to see them in the gathering darkness of the storm.

Another gust of wind brought a swarm of droplets splashing down, a swarm that was followed by a downpour as the sky opened up. There at the edge of the wood line, as bolt after bolt of lightning ripped the black clouds, Mark stared in the direction of their lost ship, his tears washed from his cheeks by the rain.

Freddy stared through the Nikon's viewfinder, the image magnified by the zoom lens until it seemed that he could reach out and touch it. The gothic-style mansion looked as out of place in Podunk, California, as an igloo in Miami.

Built by a New Yorker named Winston Archibald, who had struck it rich selling dry goods to miners during the California gold rush, the place looked like he hadn't been able to decide whether to build a cathedral or an English castle. Desirous of seclusion, Mr. Archibald had chosen a location near the rural community of Porterville for his monstrosity.