Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(59)

As if waves of probability could physically interfere with each other. Typical scientific nonsense.

The true comedy was in the way earth technology attacked the problem of determining the structure of matter. In order to understand how particles were pieced together, they built giant accelerators to smash particles into one another at high speed so they could watch for what pieces flew out. It was like jamming a stick of dynamite up someone’s ass and setting it off so you could examine his organs. What remained after the explosion was quite different than before.

Matter really had little to do with the notion of particles. The universe was actually made of stuff through which energy waves traveled, a substance with very tiny grains. Those waves traveled through the substance at only one speed—the speed of light.

Certain combinations of waves could combine to form stable vibrational packets, something like musical chords. Only a limited number of frequency combinations formed stable packets, and these produced the elements in the periodic table.

But there were other wave packets that did not form harmonically stable chords. Unstable packets tried to get rid of the clashing frequencies, giving off radiation as they attempted to move to a more harmonious combination.

Most human nuclear reactors were fission reactors, which packed unstable elements tightly together so that the splitting packets combined with others, producing a chain reaction. Fusion reactors crammed together two relatively stable wave packets into one massively discordant jumble. The resultant mess radiated hard in its attempt to cast off the incompatible frequencies.

Both these processes were inefficient in the extreme. The way the disrupter technology worked was different. Since every particle is composed of a specific set of vibrational frequencies, it merely had to know what those frequencies were. Then it could send a complete set of canceling frequencies, an anti-packet, which would result in an instantaneous and total release of all energy. Or it could cancel selected frequencies in the particle, resulting in controlled instability, which bled off energy at a controlled rate.

The disrupter cell could do either equally well. It could use any type of matter as fuel, although some elemental wave packets were easier to manipulate than others. Its other function was to collect the energy that had been released from the particle and pass that energy to the ship's systems. There was no need for energy storage. Matter was the stored energy.

Actually, that was not completely correct. The disrupters did require energy to start the entire process once they had been shut down. It was the one thing that had worried Raul about this test. The ship had a store of energy reserves, but these had been heavily depleted by Raul's worm fiber experimentation. And even though a single disrupter cell was tiny, there was a risk that attempting to restart the repaired cell could drain the remainder of those shipboard reserves.

Fortunately, that had not happened. Now he had power. It wouldn't be enough to let him do everything he wanted, but it would increase the amount of time he could operate the systems.

There was something he needed, and this was going to help him get it.

Raul crawled higher along the wall, the set of umbilical cables that dangled from his amputated legs trailing along behind him. Extracting a specially designed tool from a hidden niche, Raul returned to the floor, propping himself against the near wall.

Taking a deep breath, he brought the instrument down to his leg stumps, slicing deeply into the skin around the umbilical. Dr. Stephenson’s crude connections had served their purpose. It was now time to establish a more complete linkage with the ship. Besides, a tail was no fitting appendage for a child of God.





58


Shift.

Heather struggled to make sense of the sudden change of surroundings although she had no doubt what had happened. A fugue. It wasn’t quite right, but it was the word she had come to call the eerie dream state into which her conscious mind was sometimes summoned.

The place where she now found herself was like nothing she had ever imagined. In the gray light, it was hard to focus her vision, almost as if she drifted in a fog. All around her strange machinery filled the room, odd conduits snaking between them in a jumble of chaotic connections.

She heard something, a skittering noise, but when she tried to turn toward it she found herself unable to move, draped with some sort of invisible force that held her suspended above the floor.

Heather gasped. She hung in the air, face upward, completely naked.

Concentrating her efforts, Heather struggled, her renewed efforts having no more effect than her first. Something was with her here in the room, something that moved along the walls just outside her vision, something that was getting steadily closer.

A deep-seated dread consumed her, rising in intensity with each passing second. Heather increased her concentration, casting away the self-image-imposed limitations that usually blocked her from using all of her neurally enhanced strength. Straining until it seemed that she would tear every muscle in her body, Heather failed to produce the slightest change in position. She couldn't wiggle so much as a finger or a toe.

As a small child, she had once tried to crawl through a drainage pipe and had gotten stuck, her arms pinned to her sides. It had taken the fire department two hours to get her out. The sense of claustrophobic panic Heather had felt in that pipe washed her once again, hyperventilation further constricting her chest.

The other thing in the room was close now, so close she could feel the subtle current in the air from its excited breathing. In that air, Heather could feel a sick desire radiating toward her.