Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(92)
The stasis tendrils swarmed to complete the last of the repairs, each delicate line of force its own thread of execution within the massive neural net that was Raul. He was so close now to accomplishing something Dr. Stephenson had never imagined, bringing the Rho Ship back to full functionality.
Not that he intended to go anywhere in his starship. Although he could explore the solar system, he couldn’t get to the stars, not and survive the trip. The one advantage the Altreians’ subspace warp technology had over the power of the wormhole drive was the way it enabled the ship to travel to the stars with living occupants. While the subspace engine allowed faster-than-light travel, it was nowhere near as fast as making the distance between here and there cease to exist the way his wormhole drive did. Still, the whole dying thing limited that sort of travel to unmanned ships.
Raul knew what Stephenson was trying to accomplish. He knew what Stephenson had done when he’d used Raul to unknowingly facilitate the November Anomaly’s creation. He knew how Stephenson had used that to force the world to build his gateway. With access to the history of the Kasari Collective, Raul knew all about how things were supposed to work and what had gone wrong here on Earth.
Theoretically, the Rho Ship’s wormhole drive could connect to a gateway, forming a survivable transport portal. The real problem was the portal size. In such a configuration, the portal would have to be inside the ship, and the wormhole drive would have to be configured to operate with a reduced footprint. Where it normally ramped up and thrust the starship through a newly formed wormhole, it didn’t have to maintain that wormhole for very long. But a gateway needed to remain open for extended periods and had to be large enough to allow the transport of troops and heavy equipment. That kind of extended operation required a large matter disrupter facility and a massive portal, the kind Stephenson was building in Switzerland.
Raul’s neural network roamed the World Wide Web via worm fiber connections, just as it monitored satellite and radio frequency broadcasts. It had allowed him to learn the details of Dr. Stephenson’s plans. More importantly, it had led him to an inescapable conclusion about Heather and the Smythe twins. Stephenson didn’t know about their altered abilities. The Rho Project hadn’t had anything to do with that.
That left only one other possibility. They had found the Altreian ship long before the government had discovered its cave. Somehow, that ship had altered them. Everything the Altreians did had a purpose, and the only purpose Raul could see in enhancing these humans had been to turn them into soldiers, soldiers whose only mission was to stop the Rho Ship from accomplishing its agenda. That now meant stopping Dr. Stephenson.
Raul knew enough about the Kasari Collective to know he didn’t want them on Earth. Not because he thought their assimilation of the human race would be harmful to the Earth’s population. The Kasari merely wanted to add to their numbers and resources. In doing so the human population would be augmented, illness eliminated, life spans extended for millennia, wars a thing of the past...at least internal wars. None of that bothered him. But if the Kasari came through, Raul would lose the special power he’d worked so hard to achieve.
If Stephenson hadn’t created the November Anomaly, Raul would have put a stop to his plans. But turning the Earth into a black hole wasn’t an option. So now he had the same problem Heather and her friends had.
Since Dr. Stephenson had to be allowed to succeed in creating his gateway in order to get rid of the anomaly, Heather and the Smythes would be irresistibly drawn to the November Anomaly Project. They would have to be on-site to have any chance of shutting down the gateway after the anomaly was transported, but before Stephenson could synchronize it with its sister Kasari gateway. On what Stephenson was calling G-Day, Heather would be inside the ATLAS cavern, close enough to Stephenson’s portal for Raul’s purpose.
And then he would never be alone again.
The cold rain that had blown in two days ago showed no sign of going away. Freddy pulled his black London Fog raincoat’s collar up, slammed the car door, and walked toward the quaint old house in western Annapolis. Mary Beth Kincaid had met Jonathon Riles while he was a midshipman at the Naval Academy and they’d fallen madly in love, getting married immediately after his graduation. Her father had been a navy captain and she’d married another one. It was no surprise to Freddy that she’d moved back to her old family home after Admiral Riles’s reported suicide. The house looked like something an old sea dog would be comfortable in.
From all reports, Mary Beth was a strong woman, volunteering all her free time for community charities. Strong, but heartbroken. Her old friends said she’d lost her zest for life, isolating herself in the old house when not at work. Neighbors checked in on her, but it was clear she wanted to be by herself, to be left alone with her grand piano and her grief.
Walking up the three steps, he stepped onto the open front porch and raised the brass knocker. The haunting notes of “Greensleeves” drifted out, making him reluctant to interrupt her playing, but his damned reporter’s nose had led him here, and maybe, just maybe, he could help this wounded lady find some peace.
As the song ended, he finally brought the knocker down in three sharp raps. The woman who opened the door little resembled the one in the picture he’d seen of Admiral and Mrs. Riles. It was a photo taken when Admiral Riles had just been appointed director of the National Security Agency. In that picture, the laugh lines around her sparkling blue eyes were the only lines on her face, a face framed by blonde hair elegantly highlighted with the first streaks of gray.