Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(71)

Swinging his legs off the bed, Smythe arose, moving straight toward the fiber. At a distance of a couple of feet, he paused, circling slowly around Raul's viewport, his gaze never wavering from the lock it had on the target.

Raul adjusted his own viewpoint, increasing the zoom on the face that leaned closer. Amazingly, Smythe seemed to be trying to see through the worm fiber from the other side. If he could see the pinhole then perhaps he could get a glimpse of what lay beyond.

Raul moved, letting the stasis field sweep him toward the spot where his end of the worm fiber hung amidst the machinery. So the bastard was trying to see him. Fine.

Raul leaned in, moving his one remaining eyeball within an inch of the worm fiber, his anger boiling through the neural net.

View this, bitch.

Raul held the pose for a full ten seconds before initiating the command that dissipated the localized gravitational distortion. He continued to stare at the spot long after it had gone.

Smythe. What was it with that guy? Applying every bit of the neural network that now augmented Raul's brain, he forced himself to calm down, focusing his thoughts on his enemy.

For the longest time Raul had known there was something unusual about Mark Smythe. It was amazing he hadn't analyzed it before now. Smythe had shown oddities that went beyond being just an amazing high school athlete.

Coordination was one thing, but Raul had seen the guy slam the captain of the football team up against a locker and hold him there with one hand. At the time, Raul thought that Doug Brindall had let Mark get away with it to avoid a suspension for fighting. But now, thinking back on it, a different conclusion presented itself. Smythe had been the one holding back. The power in that grip was enough to snap the quarterback's neck, and Doug had known it.

What had the tabloids said about Smythe? Something about his being an alien. That was ridiculous. But he was a freak, and his dad worked on the Rho Project, something that Raul knew a bit about.

But how much did he really know? While he was now a part of the alien ship and had access to the functional portion of its neural network, that didn't mean he knew much about the rest of the Rho Project. Despite last night's enlightening conversation, there was no doubt that Dr. Stephenson was keeping many things from him.

The nanite research was one piece of the puzzle. Certainly, other people had been subjects for that testing. It only stood to reason that Smythe must have undergone some additional type of modification.

A new wave of anger swept through Raul’s neural network. So Dr. Stephenson thought his other pet pupil was good enough to let out in public, made into some freakish superstar athlete, while Raul was having his legs amputated and being locked away in the ship.

Well f*ck him. Fuck them both.

The stasis field lifted Raul up toward the ceiling, to a spot where he could survey the entire room, a thin smile splitting his lips.

If it meant he had to bring more of the ship back online to be able to reach out and touch them, then that was exactly what he was going to do.





74


It was a subtle change, barely noticeable, even to Mark's enhanced synapses. One second the tiny disturbance was there, hanging in the air three feet from his bed; then it was gone. Without having to look around, he knew it had departed. As strange as his room had felt only a moment earlier, the space now radiated normality.

If he hadn't been able to replay the events in his mind, Mark might have thought that he had just experienced a waking dream. But the aberration had been all too real, a tiny window to another place. Mark had peered through it, although his glimpse had been severely limited by his narrow field of view. With such a small, short look, he didn't have any idea what the purpose was of the equipment he had seen, nor of the strange cables that snaked around it.

Mark did know one thing. Someone had been watching him from the far side, and he had to assume that their view was superior to his.

Walking to the window, Mark looked out across the fifty feet of lawn that separated the side of his house from Heather's. The sky had lightened to the point that the predawn contrast made the ground look darker than before.

Outside, the darkness seemed to thicken as he watched, moving between the two homes like a living thing, coiling around Heather's house, seeking entrance. The burned-out bulb of the nearest streetlamp provided no opposition to the encroaching blackness.

Mark shook his head to clear the illusion. Unable to shake the morbid sense of dread that assailed him, Mark grabbed his sweats from the back of the chair, dressing quickly. He left the room and made his way silently downstairs, then out the front door into his driveway.

The eastern sky was much lighter now, laced with streaks of pale lavender where it touched the mountains. A car moved along the street headed toward the main highway, its headlights sweeping past his house in twin beams that pushed at the shadows. Then it was by, its twin red taillights flashing brighter at the stop sign before disappearing around the corner.

As the car’s headlights receded, the sense that the darkness was a living thing flowing back between the houses returned stronger than before. Mark turned toward the McFarland house, making his way toward the gap he had observed from his window. Unlike some of the newer residential areas, no wall separated the two houses.

An unofficial lawnmower boundary was barely visible, its location changing from week to week depending on whether Mark's dad or Heather's had been the last to operate their riding mowers. Mark paused at the grass boundary.