Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(117)

Mark slammed the door shut, stretched Heather out, grabbed the medic bag, and began prepping a plasma IV.

“Jennifer?”

Mark’s voice caught in his throat. “She didn’t make it.”

Jack reached back to place a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Mark nodded. “We’re going to need some distance.”

“How long?”

“Twelve minutes, eighteen seconds.”

“OK. Got one more pickup on our way out.”

Swabbing Heather’s forearm with an alcohol swab, Mark slid the needle into her vein. “Good, maybe Janet can help me get the bleeding stopped.”

Jack glanced back at Heather’s bloody body, her pale face, and the purplish tint of her lips, then turned to face front, extracting every bit of speed the chopper could manage. He wanted to say he’d seen worse, that he’d been worse, something to assuage Mark’s rising panic.

But no words would help Mark, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

Shut up and fly, Jack. Just shut up and fly.





After Donald Stephenson had pulled himself out of the pile of rubble that was all that remained of his primary control station, a quick glance around the chamber had brought home the extent of the destruction inflicted by the McFarland girl. In addition to destroying the primary control station, she’d used the secondary stasis field to sever the main lines that supplied power to the gateway and to the stasis field generators.

But she’d overlooked one thing. The stasis field generators had a bank of emergency capacitors modeled on the advanced Rho Ship capacitor design. They couldn’t store enough power to activate the gateway, but they had plenty of capacity to provide twenty minutes of secondary stasis field operation. And twenty minutes was all he needed.

Dr. Stephenson moved across the cavern floor, passing directly in front of the gateway device, its interior dimly lit by the red glow of emergency lighting and the reflected glitter of electrical lines arcing within the damaged power cage, where severed cables hissed and spat like angry cobras. Mounting the three tiers of steps that led to the secondary stasis field control station, he glanced at the blood pooled in and around the chair bolted to the steel grating. He dipped his fingers into it, raising them to his nose. Dr. Stephenson wasn’t sure that it was enough to prove fatal to the McFarland girl, but it brightened his day.

Ignoring the blood, Dr. Stephenson seated himself in front of the terminal. The workstation was still powered on, drawing on its uninterruptable power supply’s fifteen-minute backup battery. The battery indicator showed just over half of that charge remaining. Pulling up the emergency override panel, he switched power sources from primary to the emergency capacitor backup. As he tapped this new source, the battery warning indicator disappeared.

Dr. Stephenson’s fingers danced across the keyboard, entering the commands that would bring the secondary stasis field generator back online. While he wasn’t as quick as Raul’s neural net, he was far from slow. An invisible bubble expanded across the cavern until it encompassed the area around his workstation, the stasis field generators, the gateway device, and, finally, the damaged portion of the power cage.

With that protective barrier in place there would be no further outside interference. Manipulating individual stasis field tendrils, he began repairing damaged power cables, making use of the network of cameras and instrumentation available to him. And without his having to worry about killing the power in the hot lines, his repairs proceeded far faster than any team of electrical engineers could have made them.

His first priority was to restore power from the matter ingester. That would allow him to dump a full charge back into the backup capacitors, as well as providing the power he needed to reopen the Kasari gateway.

Suddenly the outside of the stasis bubble went white. Despite the nearly perfect shielding, Dr. Stephenson felt his retinas burn out, momentarily blinding him before the nanites in his bloodstream could repair the damage. Only one thing could account for that flash, a nuclear detonation. And while the stasis field had protected him from the initial radiation and blast effects, all hope of restoring power had just evaporated, along with the unprotected parts of the ATLAS cavern and all the surrounding facilities.

Without being able to see it, Dr. Stephenson knew that only the stasis field kept him safe from the intense radiation and the super-hurricane force shock wave that hurled debris outward from the blast. In a few minutes those same winds would rush back to fill the void they had left behind. And although the emergency capacitor power would probably last long enough to protect him from that, no amount of nanites could save him from the hell that awaited when the stasis field began to die.

As his vision slowly returned, Dr. Stephenson rose to his feet to stare at the surreal scene. Like a child’s snow globe, a dome of protection surrounded the undamaged section of the cavern while a roiling inferno altered the surrounding landscape. The ATLAS cavern was gone, the walls vaporized for hundreds of meters in all directions, the rock beyond that reshaped into a bowl of glowing molten glass.

With the scope of his failure burning his brain like a hot tong shoved up his nose, Dr. Stephenson turned in a full circle. In a handful of minutes, the secondary stasis field would slowly begin to fail, bathing him in a radioactive dose equivalent to that of a bad sunburn, painful but nothing his nanites couldn’t repair. Then, in a decaying exponential, the radiation would keep rising, and, as when an egg was boiled in a microwave, there would come a point when fluids burst through the skin as his juices boiled away.