Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(145)

Ready or not, the fallback plan had been activated.





149


For a moment, Raul thought he must be dreaming. By the time he had completely accepted Dr. Stephenson’s statement as real, the deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory had broken the audio-video link. But there it was in his neural network, a coordinate accurate to within ten meters.

Medellín, Colombia?

What in hell had taken Heather there?

Not that it mattered. In a few seconds, he would know whether she was really there or not. And if she was…Well, he couldn’t allow himself to think about that until he had confirmation.

Creating a worm fiber viewer had become almost trivial to Raul. For the last several weeks, he had worked around the clock to repair as many of the Rho Ship’s power cells as possible. And the more he fixed, the faster his repairs had gone. Even though he had only scratched the surface, according to his calculations, he had achieved enough power to open a small gateway to any spot on the planet. Big enough for a person to walk through.

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 f*ck? 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.