Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(6)

“Game over.”





His human eye lay dead in its socket alongside its artificial partner, the impenetrable darkness rendering both of them as useless as his missing lower extremities. But his nose still worked. The stagnant air concentrated the stench around the freshly used camp toilet so powerfully he could taste it.

Raul tied the plastic baggy full of his steaming business and tossed it onto a heap of its mates, piled beside the nonoperational disposal bin. If not for the huge stash of Meals Ready to Eat, water, and supplies that Dr. Stephenson had stored in this secret section of the Rho Ship, Raul would have perished long ago. Lord knew he had tried to kill himself, but the damned nanites that populated his bloodstream wouldn’t permit it, repairing each self-inflicted wound almost as quickly as he had carved it into his flesh. And starvation was out of the question.

The nanites required energy, and when they were denied food, they took fuel from his body tissue, using that energy to keep him alive. The process slowly depleted his body, but the nanite-augmented food and water cravings consumed him.

Once Raul realized he didn’t possess the will to starve himself, he’d given up, resigning himself to this dark hell in which Dr. Stephenson had imprisoned him. But his busy mind refused to allow him to just lie there.

Instead he set about exploring every square centimeter of the large chamber by touch. Blindly pulling himself along, he felt his way along conduits and cables, and over every piece of alien equipment. Only a few months ago, with the power of his connection to the starship’s neural network, every piece of this stuff had been as much a part of him as his own hands and arms. Now the ship was dead, drained of power during Stephenson’s hijacking of Raul’s attempt to create a transitory gravitational gateway.

Why had Stephenson done it? At first Raul had thought it was punishment for his challenge to Stephenson’s authority. But that made no sense. Dr. Stephenson never did anything that didn’t fit into some grand scheme. Yet what benefit could come from completely draining the Rho Ship’s power reserves?

Raul’s mind fingered the questions like worry beads, sliding them back and forth in his brain until his head throbbed with a dull heat. If only he could access the ship’s neural net he could figure it out. Not a likely scenario. The last time he had felt a connection had been the moment he accessed the ship’s maintenance protocol to shut down Stephenson’s program. But he’d been just a moment too late. As the override kicked in, Raul had felt his connection to the Rho Ship die.

Even if the maintenance protocol had succeeded in shutting down the pathways to the remaining power cells, it left Raul no way to restore those channels. It wouldn’t take much power to do it, but he didn’t even have a watch battery. Just some cases of MREs, a few hundred gallons of distilled water, and a growing pile of festering shit bags.

Festering shit bags. The thought caught in his fevered mind like an annoying song he couldn’t get out of his head.

Festering...shit.

Raul stiffened. Methane gas.

If he’d still had legs Raul would have kicked himself. He had wasted so much time wallowing in self-pity, and the dark-induced madness gnawing at his mind had made lucid moments a rarity. All the while he had had potential power sources lying all around him. Not just methane either. Every MRE came with its own flameless heating pouch. All he had to do was add water to the mixture of magnesium, dust, and salt and in seconds it was hot enough to blister his hands. If he stuck the pouch back in the box along with the MRE, in ten minutes he was rewarded with a hot meal. It was his one remaining luxury.

The MREs also contained matches and paper. But the brief light the matches provided merely tormented his biological eye. The darkness was better than that. And even though his ship’s life support system survived in some sort of minimal mode, he doubted it could deal with the smoke of a little campfire. The thought of coughing his lungs out while the nanites kept him alive provided all the incentive he needed to avoid that scenario.

Raul’s brain roiled, churning the possibilities into a sloppy hope soup. He could generate heat. Electricity was another matter. For that he needed a rudimentary generator. For that he needed magnets, wire, and a host of other parts. Tools wouldn’t be a problem, not with the virtual machine shop Dr. Stephenson had created in here over his decades of trying to make basic repairs. And even though they’d been ignored after Raul achieved his linkage with the Rho Ship’s neural net and gained control of the stasis field, those tools now gave him a lifeline. And though he couldn’t access the neural net, that didn’t mean he’d forgotten everything from his previous linkage. Raul knew this ship well enough to figure out how to use those tools to make what he needed.

It would just take time. And time was something he had in abundance.





Janet’s slender fingers slid along the back of Mark’s neck, her delicate touch sending shivers of pleasure down his spine. His own hand responded, fingertips barely touching the hollow of her back, lingering there, the nerves so alert that it seemed each contact produced tiny sparks from her skin to his. He felt her ear touch his, the scent of her bare throat filling his nostrils.

Her body moved against his in perfect rhythm, the feel of her full breasts against his chest robbing him of whatever self-control he still retained. Janet’s skin shone with sweat in the dim light and her breath came in small pants of exertion, barely audible above Mark’s thundering heart. Her bare right leg encircled him and her body swayed. As Mark’s body writhed within her entangling limbs, Janet’s back arched until only his right arm kept her from falling. Then, in a thunderous, climactic crescendo, it ended.