Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(66)

“Nine...”

He inhaled deeply through his nostrils.

“Eight...seven...”

Let it out slowly through his mouth.

“Six...five...”

The chains binding his wrists came apart with such force that multiple chain links splattered outward, shattering the wall projection screen like the impact of forty-five-caliber slugs. As his right hand grabbed Dr. Krause’s throat, his left leg rocketed out, caving in the chest of the guard to his left, sending the body flipping head over heels into the far wall.

The guard by the exit moved instinctively, bringing up the Tazer even as Mark hurtled up the steps toward him. The guard was fast. Really fast. And with anyone else his quickness would have been enough.

Mark felt the electrical jolt take him in the center of the chest, the involuntary muscular shock freezing him in place for the merest fraction of a second. Then his enhanced neuromuscular system shunted the effects aside and he swept inevitably onward, his left fist caving in the side of the guard’s head as he reached the top of the steps, Dr. Krause still clutched in his right hand’s powerful grip.

Seeing that the electrically controlled door was sliding closed, Mark hurled Krause’s dying body into the gap, paused to grab his phone, then plunged through the door. Without a moment’s hesitation, he raced down the hallways along which they had brought him to the theater room. He remembered a janitor’s closet off to the right two corridors down. Reaching it, Mark threw his whole strength into the door, ripping it from its hinges.

Stepping inside, Mark concentrated on the phone, his fingers flying across the keypad. With a sigh of relief, he verified that Jennifer’s worm had infected the phone’s Android operating system. That meant someone had powered up at least one of their laptops, releasing the worm into every computing system in this facility as well as all those within the specified search radius. Typing in a series of quick commands, Mark crushed the phone in his palm and hurled it against the far wall, sending fragments showering out across the corridor.

Then, leaning his head back against the wall, he relaxed, resuming his previously disturbed meditation. He was ready. Let them come.





For several days Heather had felt the frustration building, but she continued to shunt it aside, walling it away from the work it threatened to disrupt. It wasn’t that she hadn’t made progress in her quest to establish a mind link with Jennifer. She had gotten very good at detecting Jennifer’s attempts at a link and had been able to establish an improved mutual awareness. But that awareness amounted to little more than an increased sense of presence, akin to catching sight of a ghost from the corner of her eye. When she tried to see it directly, it was gone.

Heather had begun to question her initial analysis of how telepathy worked. For one thing, if it had just been a form of normal electromagnetic wave communication, even directed by an extremely sophisticated neural phased array, the signal would have been attenuated by intervening objects and wouldn’t have worked at all in a facility replete with TEMPEST-approved Faraday cages.

Besides, when Jennifer and Mark had felt her thoughts when she’d been carried off by the Rag Man, she’d been a long way from them and without the line of sight required for a directed signal. It struck her that her initial assumptions had caused her to proceed down an erroneous path in her efforts to make a connection.

A baby didn’t learn to walk by mentally calculating which nerve endings to fire and which muscle fibers to twitch. He did it by trial and error, with a picture in mind of what he wanted to do, and then by releasing that desire into a brain that remembered little successes and built upon those. It happened automatically, but not instantaneously.

Rather than think about the night when the Rag Man had grabbed her, Heather let her thoughts drift to the morning at her mother’s breakfast table when she’d heard Jennifer’s thoughts as clearly as if she’d spoken them aloud.

Suddenly Heather found herself back at the table, tasting the pancakes, smelling the warm maple syrup as it pushed melted butter down the sides of the stack. Jen’s voice in her head made it sound exactly as if Jen had spoken those words. Except something was missing. The auditory signals from her inner ear held no memory of vibrating under the sound waves from Jennifer’s voice.

It was more as if she’d been inside Jennifer’s head, with no distance separating their minds. It was like the alien headset link. Heather replayed the memory again and again, each time noticing some new detail of that mind link. The thoughts Jen had been thinking loudest were what she’d noticed at the time, but there was more. Drowned out by the volume of her surface thoughts were layers of thought and feelings, like whispers in a crowded room. Heather’s mind had shared all of that, it just hadn’t stood out.

But what had initiated the link? Heather felt the frustration bubble up again as she strove to understand it. The pattern was there, nibbling at the edges of her memory, but despite all her talents, she just wasn’t seeing it.

One thing each of the instances of psychic communion had in common: each time she’d managed it, Heather hadn’t been consciously trying to achieve a link.

Heather took a deep breath, slowly let it out and visualized what she wanted, then released it, pulling forth the memory of one of her favorite meditations, feeling her alpha waves smooth out in long, slow ripples. She felt her consciousness drift in blackness, zooming her perspective out until she was a distant, flickering flame, alone in an infinite black expanse. As she let herself drift deeper, she spotted another pinprick of light, then another, and another. As she became aware of these other tiny light sources, she noticed something else. The blackness that separated her from them wasn’t uniform. Waves rippled outward through the void from each pinprick, as if from pebbles dropped in a still pond. Only these waves radiated super-spherically.