The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(13)

The pain embraced her, squeezing so hard that her vision narrowed to a straw's-eye view, a view outlined in red. Into that narrow tunnel swam the deputy director's face peering down at her, his features lined with concern.

“My dear Dr. Anatole. Your breath is bringing a bloody froth to your lips. Now I am not a trained physician, but that can’t be good. One or more of your ribs must have punctured a lung.”

As Nancy struggled to breathe, the sound of footsteps moved away from her, ringing loudly through the floor her ear rested upon. The steps stopped for several seconds, then returned, growing in volume until she thought her eardrums would explode.

Then his face was back, leaning down very close as he took her head in his hand, twisting it up to face the dull gray ceiling. His other hand moved slowly down toward her neck, a long hypodermic syringe clutched in a three-finger grip. And within that syringe a dull, gray viscous liquid quivered with an energy all its own.

The needle pricked her neck, and Nancy surprised herself by finding the strength to scream, the sound echoing out of the ship into the darkness of the empty lab.





Chapter 8





Heather staggered to her feet, her brow wet with a cold, stinging sweat that dripped into her eyes.

Mark cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled. “Jennifer! Hey, Sis, can you hear me?”

Heather joined the yelling, fear clutching at her heart. Suddenly, the doorway leading out of the room snicked open. Framed against a multicolored backdrop, Jennifer smiled calmly at them, her alien headband still firmly in place, its coloring now a shifting rainbow pattern that made Heather a bit dizzy looking at it.

“Jen! Get that damned thing off your head. It nearly killed Mark and I.”

“Relax. It didn’t try to kill us.”

Mark shook his head. “It may not have tried, but it came damn close to doing it. I thought my head was going to explode.”

Jennifer stepped into the room, the doorway sliding closed behind her. “It scared me too. But once the download started, I sort of got the hang of it.”

“Download? What the hell are you talking about?” Mark asked.

“Well, it just came to me. All that imagery and strange symbology. You saw that too, right? Well it seemed like a link to the central computer system, so I focused on visualizing questions. That caused me to get new imagery back, most of it incomprehensible. But I managed to open the door.”

Heather glanced down at the floor where her own headset lay. “Then why did it hurt so bad?”

Mark nodded. “I’ll tell you why. The damned thing puts off so many microwaves that it cooked part of our brains.”

“No. I don’t think so,” Jennifer said. “I think the aliens used the bands to communicate with the ship's computers. Instead of keyboards and monitors, they put these on and their thoughts were tied in to the system. The computer ‘talked’ back with images, sounds, maybe even feelings.”

Heather nodded. “That makes sense. We haven’t seen anything resembling manual input devices to the onboard systems. No keyboards, joysticks, mice, nothing.”

Mark scowled. “What’s the point of a system that fries your brain in the process?”

“Maybe it didn’t hurt the aliens,” Heather said. “I’ll bet the connections to our brains are different than the aliens’. Maybe the computer had to explore its way around our heads to figure out how to link up.”

“And so it has. Now put your headsets back on and follow me. I want to show you something,” Jennifer said.

Heather hesitated. “I don’t really want to go through that again.”

Mark took a deep breath, then placed the band back on his head. After several seconds he looked over at Heather. “It’s okay. No pain this time.”

Heather stooped to pick up her own small band. Sliding it into place, Heather focused on the doorway, which cooperated by sliding open. “Interesting. One other thing before we proceed,” Heather continued. “Did anyone else see imagery of the ship crashing?”

“Sure did,” said Mark as Jennifer nodded in agreement.

“Maybe the computer automatically gives a dump of the last entries in the ship’s log whenever it detects a new user,” Jennifer ventured.

“Hard to say,” said Heather.

Mark headed toward the door. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s take a look around.”

Heather would rather have taken a bit of time to analyze the amazing amount of information that had already presented itself before going a further. Certainly the computer link theory cried out for investigation. Still, Jennifer had already been inside the next room and Mark was not about to be slowed down, so her theoretical musings would have to wait.

While not as spacious as the room below, this one bled beauty. It reminded Heather of the Museum of Modern Art at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Abstract table shapes, as though blown from a glass blower’s pipe, grew from the floor, still pulsing with the colors of the melting flame.

Several of the tall slender shapes pulsed in rhythm with their own heartbeats, each alive with cascading colors.

Heather touched one of the structures rising from a single pedestal, the feel as soft and smooth as baby oil. As the pressure of her hand increased, the material molded itself to match the shape. No doubt if she lay atop the thing, it would cradle her body in complete comfort.