Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(91)

Again, the lad had subjected himself to an intensive round of self-modification, intended to integrate himself more closely into the alien ship’s neural network. This latest operation had been drastic and involved such dangerous surgery that Dr. Stephenson had considered making Raul stop. Unfortunately, by the time he had checked in on the cameras monitoring Raul’s activities, the operation had progressed beyond the point where it could be halted safely.

Besides, Raul would certainly resist any effort to stop him. The boy had acquired an amazing level of control over the alien stasis field and was using it to perform the self-operation with finer control than his own hands could have achieved. There was little doubt that Raul could use that same field to atomize anyone who entered his compartment, if he chose to do so, although that didn’t necessarily apply to Stephenson.

Working on the theory that the ship itself was driving Raul to perform the dangerous surgery, Dr. Stephenson had decided against trying to interrupt its progress. Instead, he had spent the entire night closeted in his private office, watching the monitors in fascination as Raul worked.

By 3:00 a.m., Raul had completely removed his skull above his eyebrows along a line that passed just above his ears and then all the way down to where his neck connected to his head. From the way he screamed, it was clear that he needed to feel every nerve in order to feed that data back through the Rho Ship’s neural network. Apparently, the pain formed the data that told him exactly how deep to cut, and the accuracy of those cuts had to be perfect. Almost as fast as each section of the skull was cut away, the nanites in his blood stopped the bleeding, although they could not regenerate the major tissue losses.

Once Raul had exposed the entire top and side portions of the brain, he paused to remove a large number of small crystalline chips from the Rho Ship’s circuitry. Actually, the stasis field opened the panels and removed the chips, large numbers of them seeming to disconnect themselves and float randomly around Raul. Satisfied with his preparations, Raul rotated himself in the air until he floated facedown. Then, as if they were an attacking swarm of small insects, the chips descended on his exposed brain, inserting themselves into exactly positioned micro-cuts created by Raul’s manipulation of the stasis field, it’s razor lines of force acting like a thousand tiny scalpels.

And in his pain, Raul’s screams were replaced by a high-pitched mewling sound, a sound that Dr. Stephenson would have thought human vocal chords incapable of producing for more than a few seconds without inflicting permanent damage. The vibration of Raul’s vocal chords intensified until Stephenson could almost hear them tear and reknit themselves as the nanomachines worked to repair the damage.

The operation ended midmorning, the final steps of the procedure the most fascinating of all. Having completed the insertion of the thousands of micro-crystals into his brain, Raul removed the umbilical cable that connected him to the ship. His new freedom left him floating freely in the air, legless, his one artificial eye swiveling about on its hinged arm, his brain sitting naked in the open dish of his lower skull.

Raul moved across the room, pausing in front of a machine, the purpose of which Dr. Stephenson had never determined. The mechanism pulsed, producing a transparent gel which Raul extracted into a clear blob, barely larger than one fist. The gel floated up until it hovered just above Raul’s head, then began to flow out and across the surface of Raul’s brain, spreading so smoothly that it completely covered every exposed section of gray matter.

Suddenly, Dr. Stephenson knew why the gel looked so familiar. It was the same transparent stuff that wrapped the conduits that ran throughout this section of the ship: flexible, but so hard that a diamond drill bit was unable to scratch it. Although he couldn’t be certain, the deputy director thought he understood how it worked. It was a nano-material, something that could harden instantly once given the proper command or become as flexible as silly putty given another.

The jolt as the helicopter touched down disrupted Dr. Stephenson’s recollection of the scene. As he stepped down, feeling the rotor wash swirl around him, the deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory smiled. Whatever had suddenly driven Raul to connect himself so extensively with the Rho Ship had just accelerated Stephenson’s timetable. He’d let Raul explore his limits just a bit longer before he reminded the young man who was really running the show.





92


Power! The sensation storm in Raul’s brain crawled through his body like an overdose of crystal meth.

If he had thought himself connected to the Rho Ship’s neural network before, what was he now? Yesterday he had felt like the massive alien neural network was a part of him. Now it felt like the brain and body of Raul Rodriguez were only tiny pieces of what he had now become.

As he scanned the data storage, fragments of memories floated before him…the Rho Ship hurtling through the wormhole that had brought it to this solar system…the attack by the Enemy…the direct hit of his gravitational vortex weapon on the Enemy vessel…the shock of impact from the Enemy’s subspace distortion beam.

Raul tried recalling more of the confusing imagery, but the damage to the data storage elements was too great, yielding only unintelligible fragments for his examination. Without much more significant repair, the rest of the historical data would remain inaccessible.

A detailed systems check revealed the true extent of damage from the Enemy subspace weaponry: power production at 0.000352 percent capacity, the neural network operating at 9.317 percent of normal, 0.1231 percent of data access capability online, weapons systems inoperable, navigation systems inoperable, propulsion systems inoperable, communications systems barely functional.