The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(73)

Mark glanced toward the window. Something was there, blocking his view of the night sky.

An irrational, deep-seated dread consumed him, constricting his chest in bands of iron. The dream. Something in his dream had made its way into his room, had somehow attained physical form in the non-dream world.

Mark struggled to gain control of his thoughts. This was stupid. He was one of the quickest, strongest, and most coordinated people on the planet, with neural enhancements that seemed to be continually growing and refining themselves. But here he sat, bathed in sweat, petrified into inactivity by a dream he couldn’t even remember. And all because of something draped across his window.

Mark forced himself to move his hand toward the lamp on his nightstand, feeling carefully for the pull chain, while keeping his eyes firmly locked on the window.

With a quick tug on the chain, the lamp illuminated a scene that brought him to his feet, his heart thundering in his chest. One of his red sheets had been tied between the curtain rod and his Olympic weight bar, which now lay directly below the window. The other sheet had been tacked to the window frame.

There, silhouetted against the darkness beyond, was the bloodred image of an inverted cross.





Chapter 51





By the time he boarded the bus for school, Mark felt exhausted. It had not taken him long to pull down the bed sheets and remake his bed, but he had been unable to go back to sleep. He had also had no luck in trying to remember the dream.

It was funny, really. He could replay every minute of every day if he so chose. He could read a book he had merely glanced at, even if that glance was a month ago. But the details of his dream whispered at the corners of his mind, only to dissipate like smoke in the wind when he focused on them.

Finally he had given up, pulled out his school books, and done all the assignments for the coming week. That, in itself, was a frightening thing.

Raul. There was something about that little creep that had his subconscious working overtime. It wasn’t that Heather seemed to be infatuated with him. Well, that might have something to do with Mark’s dislike of the guy, but it wasn’t enough to send him into the land of the walking dead.

No. Something else was going on with that dude, and Mark was determined to find out what it was.

The thought of Heather did little to brighten Mark’s mood. He glanced across the bus to the seat where she sat beside Jennifer, smiling and talking to his sister as she always did. She hadn’t been that talkative at the dance last night. Every time he had seen her, she had been draped around Raul out on the dance floor.

A vision of his fist smacking Raul hard enough to send him spinning across the dance floor brought a grim smile to Mark’s lips. Then he shook his head. What was wrong with him today? He didn’t normally take pleasure from imagining beating the crap out of his classmates. With effort he turned his thoughts to other things.

The cold fusion science project was coming along very well. They now had the tank built and were working on the construction of the radiation detection probe, which would also contain what Mark called the subspace tuning fork. In reality it was a doped quartz crystal, carefully mounted in a programmable oscillating circuit.

According to Heather, when in the presence of a small gamma flux, the thing would produce a subspace carrier wave that could be focused wherever they wanted. And that focused subspace signal would induce a real signal at the far end. If Heather’s calculations were correct, which they always were, it would let them put signals on any network in the world. But first, they had to get the damned thing finished.

Mark’s frustration had been building for weeks. There was so much to discover about the Second Ship that he wanted to spend most of his time there. But that wasn’t possible. He, Heather, and Jennifer had to be careful, so they rarely visited it.

Then there were their expanding new abilities. As much as Mark loved playing basketball, it practically made him sick to his stomach to have to hold back from what he could really do. Even his aikido practice wasn’t as good as it could be, mainly because he couldn’t take real classes. He had to rely on what he saw on videotape and read in books for his training. Frustrating.

In the meantime, the Rho Ship sat out there, probed and prodded by people under the domination of Doctor Stephenson, a man who was up to something that he was keeping from the US government. From what Mark had learned about the Rho Ship aliens, that could not be a good thing for this planet.

Flying blind. That was what the three of them had been doing for some time now. They hadn’t even checked if there were more QT recordings. And now this new fling Heather had going with Raul was taking more of her time. Christ. There was just too much important stuff happening for her to be getting involved with anyone right now, much less that dweeb.

Mark squeezed his right hand until his knuckles popped.

“It wasn’t me.” said a voice from across the aisle.

“What?” Mark asked, turning to look at the speaker.

Roger Frederick, a bookish sophomore stared across the aisle of the bus at Mark, his hands raised in mock defense. “Whoever did something to make you mad, it wasn’t me,” Roger said.

“What on Earth are you talking about?”

“Well, the way you were scowling and popping your knuckles, I figured you were about to start cracking heads.”

Mark laughed. “Just thinking about playing the Rockets tonight.”