The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(2)
It made no sense for the ship to be glowing with Cerenkov radiation. Estimates of the speed described by the witnesses were no greater than Mach 2. If Cerenkov radiation was present, it must have come from some of the starship’s control or power mechanisms. And if those systems gave off that radiation, perhaps they would give off some measurable response to the right combination of Cerenkov waves.
Don had no doubt that it was only because the research team had made no progress in all these years that he had been given permission to conduct his own experiments over this Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Those experiments had been running around the clock since last night.
As he seated himself at the keyboard, above which thousands of light-emitting diodes twinkled, his eye caught on a flashing error indicator. He leaned forward.
“What the hell?”
Several of his experimental instruments were giving bad readings or were off-line altogether. There was also an error reading from the instruments that controlled the alignment of the Cerenkov mirrors.
Don cursed softly as he examined the data on the long computer printout that dangled from the printer to form a pile on the floor. Scanning down the pages, he identified the time of the malfunction. 18:53.
“God damn it!”
The entire system had gone off-line shortly after he had left to go make himself some dinner. More than two precious hours lost, not counting how long it might take him to find the cause of the malfunction and fix it.
Having satisfied himself that the malfunction lay not in the computer controls but in the instrumentation itself, Don walked rapidly around the scaffolding toward the spot where the particle injection tube fed electrons to his apparatus, high up on the far side of the ship.
As he rounded the tail of the cigar-shaped craft, Don caught his foot on a cable and would have fallen if he had not managed to grab the scaffolding. Righting himself, he gazed upward to where his instruments hung. The cables and mountings were broken and twisted, the Cerenkov mirrors torn from their brackets and tossed to the cement floor below. But the state of his instruments barely registered in his mind.
He stared at the large ramp that had lowered from the side of the ship all the way to the floor, crushing the scaffolding beneath it. A faint glow issued from the opening.
Don locked his knees to prevent them from buckling as hyperventilation threatened to knock him unconscious. Gasping, clinging to the crumpled scaffolding, Don surveyed the instruments along the near wall, the ones that monitored air quality and radiation levels. All normal. He might die today, but it wouldn’t be from something so mundane.
He knew he should pick up the red phone and call the duty officer back at the main base. That would begin the recall of all the scientists and military people currently working on the project. Anything less risked him being kicked off the project, possibly even having his security clearance revoked.
Sweat dripped down his forehead and stung his eyes as Don looked up the ramp toward the doorway.
Why should he make that call before at least walking up and taking a look inside? After all, wasn’t it his work that had triggered the breakthrough?
If he walked over and placed that call, he had a pretty good idea that he would never get his chance to look inside the ship. No. The same morons who had been scratching their heads for thirty years would come out of the woodwork and lock the whole thing down, tight as a snail’s ass. Only the most senior scientists and intelligence types would be permitted anywhere near the ship.
Don was not about to let that happen, at least not until he had taken a look for himself. His pulse pounding in his temples, he strode up the ramp, paused at the top to take a single deep breath, and then stepped across the threshold, disappearing inside.
A single oscilloscope in the instrument racks along the far side of the room registered a momentary electronic signal flux before settling back to normal measurements.
Five miles away, in a small room just off Hanger One, the duty officer, an Air Force Major named Stuart Greeley, made another entry in his duty log.
21:15, 24 Nov 1977, Groom Lake, Area 51, Nevada. All quiet.
Chapter 1
The magenta glow of the Ark Cave bathed the rail-thin figure in a light so pure it seemed to drip from his dirty, blond dreadlocks.
Perry Symons had first heard the voice of the Lord in July of 1998 as his fish knife sliced into the throat of his beautiful Vanessa. So much blood, bubbling out across his arms and hands, hot and slick, making it difficult to maintain his hold on both her hair and the blade as she flopped beneath him.
Vanessa had been the sacrifice that brought him to the Lord's attention, the act that made him worthy. Perry had sacrificed the love of his life, his sweet Vanessa, so that God would recognize the new Gabriel, the one to lead His children through the coming apocalypse.
There in the back of his green Volkswagen van, as Vanessa’s lifeblood wept into a five-gallon bucket, God had spoken in his mind.
“Await ye the sign of the end of days.”
At Bottomless Lakes State Park, just outside Roswell, New Mexico, Perry had carried sweet Vanessa’s plastic-wrapped body out to the rowboat and paddled far out onto the lake before dumping her chained form over the side. Although he had bled it well, the corpse bobbed briefly on the surface before tilting down into the salty depths, trailing tiny red bubbles behind it.
Another sign. Even after making the ultimate sacrifice, sweet Vanessa’s corpse was reluctant to leave him, struggling to stay afloat even as the weight of the chains pulled it inevitably down into eternal blackness.