Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(22)

A low chuckle bubbled up to Raul’s lips. There was something hysterically funny about a guy who’d recently been doing his best to commit suicide finding himself scared shitless by the possibility of instant death. It just didn’t get funnier than that.

His human eye moved twenty centimeters to the left, to where the power cell awaited the burst of energy that would bring it back to life and, with any luck at all, restart the matter converter, also known as the waste disposal system.

Now he just needed to make it happen without getting fried.

To make that happen, Raul had made the contraption that was wedged in place above the power cell. It looked like one of the old-style switches that the mad scientist pulled down to bring Frankenstein to life. In a way, that was exactly what he was attempting. Only he had no intention of pulling down this switch. Gravity would take care of that for him. All he needed to do was pull out the long plastic rod that prevented the switch from falling down and making contact with the super capacitor.

Raul took a deep breath, in through the nose, hold two seconds, out through the mouth. The kind of breath that drops your blood pressure five percent. Then, leaning so that he was certain to fall away from the panel, Raul pulled the plastic rod with all his might.

Someone grabbed every hair on his body, pulling so hard that it seemed about to come out by the roots. As lightning split the superheated air between the capacitor and the power cell, Raul felt his head strike the floor. Behind him, the lightning storm faded into nothing.





Dr. Elsa Wesley stared at the computer monitor without really seeing it. A long, slow shudder worked its way along her limbs and into her core. It began as a tingling on the skin of her arms and legs, the flesh tightening, crinkly little goose dimples raising the fine hairs erect, continuing to strengthen until she felt herself trembling on the verge of tears.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew she was suffering severe stress trauma. A psychiatrist would diagnose her condition as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Only he’d be wrong. This was ongoing traumatic stress disorder. Increasing traumatic stress disorder. A hair’s breadth from a complete nervous breakdown.

Forcing her eyes to focus, Elsa glanced out across the monstrous jumble of equipment around the ATLAS detector and the tiny embryo of destruction gestating in its belly. The unbelievable thing was that wasn’t what had her at her wit’s end. The monster behind her mental condition was named Stephenson.

The man didn’t seem to sleep. Nothing went unnoticed. No error went unrebuked. And she wasn’t the only one in this kind of trouble. Far from it. Stephenson had everyone at LHC jumping at shadows.

How was that even possible? The project overflowed with the world’s most brilliant minds, many of whom sneered at peers as if they were morons. Egos the size of planets. All that had changed in less than a week. Hell, it had changed at the introductory meeting in the main conference hall.

Dr. Stephenson had been introduced by Dr. Louis Dubois to the assemblage of project scientists as the new man in charge, an introduction met with audible murmurs of displeasure. Scientists, especially physicists, hated sudden change, even worse when that change involved an outsider being elevated above the true experts, people who had lived and breathed this project every day for years. Men and women who knew every weld in the tunnels, the magnetic field strength of every superconducting coil.

When Dr. Stephenson had stepped to the center of the stage and offered to take all questions, the hall had gone silent, like the Jurassic Park moment just before a cow was lowered into the raptor cage. Then the full wrath of the storm had assailed him, aggressive, detailed questions designed to show how little the famous Dr. Stephenson actually knew about the Large Hadron Collider, about its myriad of detectors and experiments. ATLAS. CMS. ALICE. LHCb.

For three and a half hours, Dr. Stephenson stood there, taking question after question. He hadn’t just answered them, he’d quoted directly from papers written by each questioner, often going to the whiteboard to point out previously undetected errors in the papers themselves. As the meeting went on, the anger and outrage filling the conference hall gradually transmuted into grudging respect. Then awe. Then fear.

By the third hour only the project’s most renowned scientists dared ask another question, each desperate to find something the target couldn’t answer. And when, at last, they fell silent, Dr. Stephenson continued standing center stage, staring out at them like some Mafia don who’d just executed the godfather and all his top enforcers.

The message was clear. There was a new boss in town. And he was merciless.





Wind whistled through the rafters as Heather watched the first fat raindrops spatter the windows of the Frazier comm center. The outbuilding was laid out like a grid, simple rectangular tables formed into rows on the raised metal flooring. The tables themselves held computer workstations, laptops, and specialized communications gear, acquired by Jack over the last two years, but much of it now modified by Jennifer, Heather, and Mark’s electronic wizardry.

When they’d first arrived at the Frazier hacienda, reliable power had been a periodic problem, the power provided by a combination of wind and solar electrical generation. One of their first tasks had been to build a replica of their cold fusion device. What had taken them several months the first time, they’d managed to accomplish in a month, despite the vast majority of their time being devoted to Jack’s training regimen. And with this version of the cold fusion device, they’d made a number of improvements, providing it with the capacity to supply all the hacienda’s electrical needs.