Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(146)
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.
150
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.