Wormhole - 03

by Richard Phillips

  With an electric click, the door opened to admit two men in medical scrubs, a tall, blue-eyed blond wearing a stethoscope around his neck and a short bald man holding an Apple iPad. The one with the stethoscope stepped up beside her bed.

  “Hello, Heather. My name is Dr. Jacobs. This is my physician’s assistant, Frank Volker. It’s good to see you decided to come back to us.”

  Heather let a slight slur creep into her voice. “Did I?”

  Jacobs smiled. “Yes, and you should be proud of that accomplishment. Most people in your condition never find their way back.”

  Heather glanced down at her hands. “Why am I tied down?”

  Jacobs patted her right hand, giving it a slight squeeze. “It’s for your own protection, at least until we’ve formed an understanding of just where you’re at.”

  “For my protection?”

  Jacobs sat down in the chair next to her bed. “Just until we’re sure you’re stable, that you’re not going to suffer an immediate relapse. It’s why we’re keeping you mildly sedated. Do you remember anything at all about your stay here?”

  Volker tapped away on the iPad’s touch screen.

  Heather frowned. “I remember Bolivia.”

  “I’m not talking about your alternate reality right now. I’m talking about the months you’ve been in this facility.”

  “The first time I ever saw this place was when I woke up to see Dr. Sigmund standing over me. Like I told her, I want to see my mom and dad.”

  A serious expression settled on Dr. Jacobs’s face. “Believe me. I want that for you too. We all do. But you’ve been through a hell of a mental trauma these last few months. And, as hard as it is for you to understand why, we’re going to go slow and careful about reintroducing you to the real world. For now that means no TV, no radio, no Internet, and unfortunately, no friends or family.”

  Heather squeezed her eyes shut. “So I’m just supposed to lie here, drugged and chained to the bed, and trust you?”

  “I didn’t say this was going to be easy.”

  A bitter laugh escaped Heather’s lips.

  “Tell you what,” Dr. Jacobs continued. “I’ll get you out of these restraints as soon as we finish a battery of tests. Then, if you work with me and learn to recognize the difference between what’s real and what’s not, then we’ll get your parents out here to California for a visit. But Heather, you’re going to have to trust me.”

  Dr. Jacobs rose to his feet, patted her hand again, and turned toward the door. Volker switched off his iPad and followed.

  “Can I at least go to the bathroom?”

  “I’ll have a nurse bring a bedpan.”

  “Doctor.” Heather raised her voice just enough to cause him to turn back toward her. “Right now my alternate reality looks pretty damn good.”

  Jacobs’s face acquired a sympathetic cast. “You can’t beat this by yourself, Heather. But we can. You just have to let me in.”

  As the door closed behind them, Heather concentrated on their footfalls, the sounds plus their echoes rendering an image in her mind. A hallway, all right. Eleven and a half feet wide, ten feet tall, and really, really long. Another piece of her facility blueprint filled in. And when the nurse brought her the bedpan, Heather would see whether it was the same one who had assisted Dr. Sigmund.

  Heather looked up at the camera, then closed her eyes, gradually letting her vital signs drop. They expected her to be exhausted, so she’d feed them the data they wanted.

  Heather smiled inwardly at the thought.

  Just like training Pavlov’s dog.

  Deep in her drug-induced dreams, Jennifer found herself at the McFarland breakfast table, seated beside Mark and Heather as Mrs. McFarland set the platter, stacked high with her golden-brown pancakes, at the table’s center. She recognized the scene. It was the morning after she and Mark had shared Heather’s dream about the Rag Man. She watched it unfold around her, a disembodied ghost, unable to make herself known to any of the participants. With a pang of regret, Jennifer knew those days were gone forever.

  The dream shifted to another morning at the McFarland table. Her other self glanced at Heather, who seemed unusually distracted this morning.

  “What’s up with Heather?” she heard herself think.

  Heather lifted her gaze to Jennifer’s. “What was that?”

  It was as if Heather had heard her, even though she hadn’t said the thought aloud.

  Again the dream shifted, this time to the night she’d run from her room to meet Mark at the top of the stairs. Heather had called out to them in pain and terror, her thoughts reaching into their minds as she’d been carried off by the Rag Man. And her thoughts had guided Mark through that dark night to find her.

  These experiences were completely different from Jennifer’s ability to read and influence people’s emotions. She, Mark, and Heather had been able to share their thoughts. And they’d done it without wearing the alien headsets. How? And why hadn’t they managed to do that same thing on demand?

  Her questions focused her thoughts, pushing back the drug haze as she called upon her brain for answers. She felt a chill run down her spine. Finding the answers to those questions suddenly acquired an importance that drove her to an ever-tighter level of concentration.

  Jennifer shoved the drug haze aside, isolating its effects to a small portion of her mind as she called upon the full extent of her analytical abilities. The alien headsets were the key. She was sure of it.

  The first time she’d stood inside the Bandolier Ship and felt the headset establish a link between her brain and the ship’s computer, she’d felt it alter her brain, not exactly rewiring the connections, but forcing activity across the entire structure. Neural connections that had been so weak that they were dormant had come to life, able to be accessed and put to work in ways that had previously been impossible.

  When she, Mark, and Heather put on the headsets, they could share thoughts. In fact, if they weren’t careful, the others could penetrate into private areas, accessing thoughts and feelings not meant for sharing. Jennifer thought about that. The headset picked up the thoughts from their minds, transferring the impulses to the Bandolier Ship via a subspace link. But how had they occasionally managed to establish a similar link between themselves without the headsets?

  Distances weren’t the same in subspace. It wasn’t the same as the way gravitational effects warped the space-time fabric. Instead, subspace had its own wave transmission speed, and that relationship between time and distance defined their meaning just as the speed of light did in our universe.

  Jennifer had seen it for herself, had used it to hack into remote networks, accessing their data through the subspace receiver-transmitters or SRTs. In the case of the computer hack, the system hadn’t required a physical device at the far end to achieve a tap.

  A sudden excitement coursed through Jennifer’s nerves, presaging a great discovery that nudged the corner of her awareness. She only had to relax and let down the wall that held it back. The answer was right there, so frustratingly close she could almost reach out and touch it.

  Why did the computer subspace hack work? You focused the SRT on an exact coordinate and then scanned for computer signals in the vicinity. Since all signals leaked a small fraction of their energy into subspace, it became a matter of efficient tuning and filtering to pick out the desired information from the background noise.

  But the headsets provided the powerful alien computer with a target for its subspace probe, providing exact coordinates for the link, as well as a unique personal encryption key that tagged each of the starship’s crewmen, akin to credentials for a secure wireless network connection.

  Once the link had been established, the Bandolier Ship’s computer remembered it, recognizing that crewman’s signal whenever it encountered its subspace signature. But did the computer really need the headset to make contact after that?

  At the edge of her awareness, Jennifer felt a new surge of drugs enter her
bloodstream, and although she shifted her attention to try to wall off its effects, a warm wave of foam swept her up, swirling her away from the answer that bobbed just beyond her grasp.

  The cuffs bit into Mark’s wrists and ankles like a gnawing dog, stretching his naked body tight on the board, tilted down at a twenty-seven-degree angle. Water ran off the board in streams, yet clung tightly to the shammy-like cloth sack that covered his head. The air that struggled through the wet sack with each breath pressed the cloth tightly against his nose and mouth, the restricted air flow so damp that it felt as if he breathed in liquid water.

  Inside the hood Mark smiled and relaxed, letting his heart rate fall from its normal forty-three beats per minute to thirty-five as he moved into midlevel meditation. He didn’t know where Heather and Jennifer were being held, but he knew his role. His captors expected him to be the leader of the group, the tough guy. Mark didn’t intend to disappoint them. The best thing he could do right now was to give the bad guys a target to focus on, something so interesting it might draw part of their attention away from the girls.

  A hand struck him across the face, a stinging, openhanded slap that rolled his head to the side, bringing the copper taste of blood to his tongue. A deep voice snarled close to his left ear.

  “How long do you think you’re gonna hold out, kid? I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  Mark felt a fresh gush of ice-cold water pour down onto his face and chest, temporarily shutting off all airflow through the sack. Then the voice next to his ear was back.

  “You might as well face it. Sooner or later you’re going to tell me everything I want to know. The quicker that happens, the easier it’ll go for you. So what’s it gonna be?”

  Inside the hood, Mark’s smile returned. He lay in green grass beside a gurgling mountain stream. Surrounding the sunlit meadow, snowcapped peaks rose up to carve a cloudless blue sky. He smelled the sweet scent of flowers, heard the buzz of a hummingbird, felt the gentle breeze press damp grass against his face.

  Tied to the dripping board in the frigid cell, Mark felt his heart rate fall another five beats per minute.

  “You watching this?”

  Harlan Redding’s voice held an edge Channing Grail had never heard before. Shifting his view from the image on the video monitor to the readout of Mark Smythe’s vitals, he felt a sudden chill.

  The kid hadn’t eaten in three days. He’d been chained to a high ring in the center of the frigid concrete cell, a position that gave him two choices, remain standing or dangle by his manacled wrists. A single drain in the floor below him served as his toilet. By now, sleep deprivation alone would have driven most men into a hallucinatory dream state somewhere between waking and sleep. But not Mark Smythe. He had remained standing as if it took no more effort than lying in a feather bed.

  The decision to proceed to waterboarding had received reluctant approval from the higher-ups, but based upon the results of the last four hours, Channing was beginning to think they might as well not have bothered.

  “Jesus.”

  “Resting like a baby.”

  “Never seen anything like it.”

  “Not an ounce of fat on that body either. From the look of him, I’d say he could win the Olympic decathlon.” Harlan nodded at the computer display. “Based on those readings, his mental control’s completely off the charts.”

  “Gregory trained him.”

  “Yes. But it’s more than that.” Harlan pointed a thick finger at the video monitor. “Down in that cell, we have one hell of a specimen.”

  “Yeah,” Channing replied. “Too bad he doesn’t work for us.”

  Tall Bear watched as the thirteen tribal chiefs emerged from the largest sweat lodge on the Santa Clara Reservation, sweat dripping from their bodies onto the hard-packed dirt just outside the mud lodge. They passed him without a word, slight nods in his direction the only acknowledgment of what had just happened inside.

  Very few outsiders understood native ceremonies, especially the yuppies that paid self-professed shamans to conduct purification ceremonies. The US government showed even less interest and understanding of their importance. That combination of ambivalence and naiveté made a native sweat lodge an excellent place to discuss matters of a sensitive nature.

  Tall Bear wasn’t sure how he’d assumed his role as the unofficial leader of the Native People’s Alliance. It had started with the rebellious act of helping Jack and Janet escape their federal pursuers. Then, like a desert arroyo suddenly filled with a distant storm’s roiling floodwater, anger at the unbridled power of the central government had filled his soul. The abuse of that power, illustrated so clearly in the way the government had framed Jack and his team, had burst the dam holding back Tall Bear’s rage at the injustice dealt his own people. Not just the Navajo people.

  Many tribes had suffered genocide. Oddly, that didn’t bother Tall Bear as much as the systematic theft of his people’s dignity. The great American government, with its spirit of free enterprise, had imposed communism on the Native Peoples, and like the system the Bolsheviks had imposed on the Soviet Union, it had yielded the same harvest. The once-proud native people learned to accept government handouts, then to rely upon them. The subsequent loss of pride, self-reliance, and initiative led inevitably to the current plague of alcoholism, obesity, and hopelessness infecting modern tribal societies.

  His thoughts turned to the football game he’d been invited to last fall, the New Orleans Saints at the Arizona Cardinals. With the domed stadium filled with Arizona’s red-clad fans and the Cardinals driving, the words that sent a shiver down Tall Bear’s spine thundered through the huge stadium’s public address system.

  “Rise up Red Sea!”

  As Tall Bear watched the tribal leaders climb into their pickups and cars, fire up the ignitions, and drive off down the dirt road, spewing plumes of light brown dust in their wake, his jaw clenched in determination.

  Rise up Red Sea!

  It could have been his story.

  So why did Freddy feel like a world-class fool for not breaking this one himself?

  Maybe because it was the biggest story in history and he’d known about it for weeks. But instead of pouncing on it, he’d stayed quiet, letting the president make the announcement in a televised prime-time Oval Office address. Maybe because he had the deep-seated feeling he was on the trail of something even bigger. Or maybe he’d gone all soft and patriotic. One thing he knew: if his editor ever found out he’d sat on this, he’d be looking for a new line of work.

  Leaning back against the pile of pillows stacked against the wood wall-board—he couldn’t bring himself to think of the brown wooden thing fastened to the wall as a headboard—Freddy stared at the television that blared breaking news on every channel.

  The president had come right out and told the American people that a black hole was forming at the heart of the ATLAS detector in Meyrin, Switzerland. He’d also announced that effective immediately, he and the leaders of all the G7 countries were imposing martial law to ensure public safety and order during this crisis. The National Guard had been called out and the US military had been ordered to its highest readiness level, DEFCON 1. In addition, under his martial law decree, the provisions of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 were being temporarily suspended, thereby enabling the branches of the United States military to enforce the law.

  As the nation watched in stunned silence, the president shifted to a gentler tone, assuring the public that the world’s major powers had developed a plan to deal with the black hole using technologies derived from the Rho Project. The plan involved the most ambitious construction project ever conceived: a project to build a device that would transport the micro black hole deep into space, far from our solar system, where it could no longer pose a threat to Earth. He, in conjunction with EU leaders, had placed Dr. Donald Stephenson, the man most intimately familiar with the alien technologies, in charge of the project to construct the Rho Device.

  Then, cl
osing his address with the typical May God be with us all crap, the president signed off to pandemonium.

  Martial law? Did the US government even have a plan for implementing martial law on a national scale? Freddy didn’t think so. And he didn’t think the plan would be a very effective one even if it existed. Maybe it could be done in Europe, where everything was close together, but this was America, and America was one big-ass place.

  Simultaneously with the president’s announcement, leaders across the EU issued proclamations of their own, timing that must have been forced on them considering that prime time in the US market hardly corresponded to a similar situation in Europe. Then again, maybe the early-morning hour facilitated martial law implementation. Most Europeans would just wake up to find it in effect.

  As Freddy continued watching the breathless commentary, stories about the black hole began to be replaced by news of looting breaking out in communities across the nation, gun shops and outdoor-supply stores being among the early targets. In some cities the police found themselves deluged with calls, having to pick and choose which situations they would respond to. The National Guard had been called up, but that took time.

  Outside the Holiday Inn Express, Freddy heard the wail of distant sirens break the stillness of the Los Alamos night.

  Shit, I hate being right, Freddy thought as he strapped on his walkabout leg and reached for his pants. Well he was a reporter. Might as well get out there and cover what was sure to be the beginning of the end of the America he’d known and loved. For all he knew, reporting the news might violate martial law. As he buttoned his shirt and grabbed his digital recorder and camera, Freddy paused one more time to listen to the sirens. If that was the case, he wouldn’t be the only one engaged in criminal activity.

  Then, striding across the red-yellow-and-orange-striped carpet, Freddy exited his hotel room, letting the door slam behind him.