Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(56)

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.





54


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."