Grabbing the tied man’s head between his palms, Mark gave a quick and violent twist.
Crack.
The suddenness of the unprovoked attack and the volume from the neck bones snapping surprised Raul.
A glance at Heather’s horror-filled face told him all he needed to know. Mark Smythe had somehow hijacked her to Colombia, probably associated with whatever drugs he was on. Well, she wouldn’t have to live in fear any longer. Raul was coming to the rescue. And if Smythe tried to stop him, he’d find out what it was like to be diced into centimeter cubes of jelly.
Raul’s neural network reached out, manipulating the restored power-cell arrays and routing the energy into the gravitational distortion engine. At first, it felt little different than the production of a new worm fiber. Then the power pulsed higher as one gravitational wave interfered with the next until they formed a standing gravitational wave packet of the next order of magnitude. Another pulse. Then another as more and more power cells came online.
Now the entire ship hummed with the strength of the growing distortion, each increase in magnitude accompanied by a brief pause as stability was reestablished. Raul monitored the energy production, letting the energy equations cascade through his mind. It was close now, another few seconds and he could damp the power output and activate the wormhole. After that, it would be a simple matter to extend the stasis field through that hole, grab Heather, and pull her through. And if Smythe tried to interfere, Raul would shield Heather from the splatter.
A mental countdown filled Raul’s head.
Ten…
Nine…
Eight…
Another power pulse shook the ship, this one much larger than any so far. What the hell was that?
Raul shifted his attention to the problem, applying every bit of his massively parallel processing to finding the source of the power spike.
There it was again, another power spike. Every one of the repaired power cells was ramping up to peak power.
Dammit! If he didn’t find out what was causing this, and soon, he was screwed.
Now another difficulty attracted his attention. The coordinate lock he had achieved on Heather’s location had broken, a new three-dimensional setting taking its place. What the fuck? Somehow, the thing had aimed itself somewhere in Switzerland.
The next pulse rumbled through the gravitational distortion engine, sending a shudder through equipment and dimming the uniform-gray lighting in the room. To Raul’s horror, the wormhole narrowed instead of expanding to human size, focusing all that power into a tinier and tinier spot.
Throwing the full weight of the neural network at regaining control of the ship’s instruments, Raul suddenly became aware of a new issue. A large portion of the neural network had restricted his access, refusing to respond to any of his queries. And the level of neural activity within that section correlated perfectly to the rapidly growing gravitational distortion.
Raul tried to override the lock, but his attempt was blocked. He tried again, with the same result. Suddenly, a light dawned in his mind.
Stephenson! What had that bastard done?
A new analysis of the readings gave him an updated estimate of the magnitude of the wormhole being attempted. This was no intra-planetary doorway. Stephenson was trying to open a star gate.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
The ship didn’t have anywhere close to enough working power to try something like that. And at the rate that power was being pulled from the working cells, some of which had already begun to fail, every bit of the Rho Ship’s power would be sucked away, leaving it with no reserves to power his neural network. It would be rendered completely and irreparably disabled.
Another pulse rumbled through the gravitational engine, but this one was weaker than the others.
Raul redoubled his efforts. If he couldn’t break the encryption on the protected section of the neural network, perhaps he could find another way in. The subnet was focused on controlling the distortion and on drawing all available power to support that effort. But what about a maintenance bypass, something that would switch the power cells into maintenance mode, forcing a power down.
Another pulse sent a shudder through the dying ship.
There. As he’d hoped, the maintenance circuitry hadn’t been included in the security system override.
Working as fast as he could, Raul began sequencing the commands to shut down all power cells that hadn’t already burned out. A scan of the array status shocked him. Ninety-eight percent failure and rising.
Suddenly, the stasis field, which held him suspended, gave out, sending him tumbling onto the equipment below. The force of the impact knocked the wind from him and opened a cut on his left eyebrow that dripped blood into his eye, a cut that his nanites closed almost as fast as it had opened. As Raul struggled to prop himself against one of the machines, the dim gray light that had always lit the room went out, taking his connection with the neural network along with it.
Raul froze. He was absolutely alone. Trapped in his former castle. Only now, that castle had been transformed into a dead, black cave.
“Stephenson!” Raul’s yell echoed from the walls. “You hear me? You will be punished. for this sin. By my Father’s name, I will find a way.”
Then, as the weight of the darkness pressed in upon him, Raul dragged his legless body into a corner, curled himself into a tight ball, and wept.
150
Dr. Hanz Jorgen stared at the newspaper spread across his desk, the corners rippling in the wind that swept in through the cracks beneath the door of his temporary office, high on the cliff above the Bandelier Ship’s cavern. The last two days had been filled with news, each story building on the last.
First had been the Freddy Hagerman bombshell that exposed the secret, and probably illegal, scientific experiments being conducted in the warrens beneath Henderson House. That had led to the arrest of Dr. Donald Stephenson, now currently on administrative leave pending the result of ongoing investigations.
Right behind that had come the news that a terrorist cell had somehow managed to uplink satellite commands that had shut down all the nanites the United States had spent the last several months working so hard to deliver. That was not quite true. Some people had been shielded from the GPS broadcast of the shutdown code, but those numbers were tiny when compared to the number of people who had been injected.
Now this. Just as the House of Representatives had begun impeachment proceedings against the president of the United States, President Gordon had been found dead in his quarters at Camp David, having apparently blown his head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun, a present from his former Naval Academy roommate, Admiral Jonathan Riles.
Hanz arose from his chair, walked to the door, and stepped outside. As unusually warm as the Thanksgiving Day weather had been, today had turned brutally cold. Wind howled down the east slope of the continental divide, whistling across the high canyon country of New Mexico as if trying to blast the earth’s surface clean. It sucked Jorgen’s breath away, instantly removing his desire for a short walk to stretch his legs. His legs didn’t need that much stretching anyway.
As he ducked back inside, the strongest gust so far almost ripped the door from his grasp. Throwing his considerable weight into it, Dr. Jorgen slammed the door closed, then moved across the room to poor himself a cup of coffee.
The Channel 7 weatherman, Tom Karuzo—Hanz could never think of that name without chuckling—said the first blizzard of the year was less than six hours away. One good thing about that, the snowdrifts would fill the chinks beneath his door, helping his heater fight the good fight.
And if he got snowed in for a few days, no big deal. His work was his only family, and he had plenty of scientific papers to review, along with a report he was preparing for congress. He had coffee, beanie-weenies, and crackers out the wazoo, three of his many weaknesses. Funny how most of those were food or drink related.
Dr. Jorgen lowered himself back onto his ch
air, careful not to spill the hot coffee on anything, and began methodically flipping through the pages of the Albuquerque Journal. A page-eighteen story caught his attention.
Among all the other Thanksgiving Day oddities, a group of CERN scientists had just completed correlating new data from testing being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider. The huge super collider, commonly called LHC, occupied the center of a monstrous tunnel, its fifty-three mile circumference crossing the Swiss-French border in several places. Physicists from around the world were counting on the LHC to accelerate protons so close to the speed of light that the energies produced by their collisions would rival those produced in the Big Bang, theoretically creating particles that had never before been observed. The granddaddy of home runs would be finding the Higgs Boson, otherwise known as the God Particle.
Unfortunately, the LHC had suffered a series of break-downs and delays. The latest of these occurred early in the morning of what was still Thanksgiving night in Los Alamos.
According to the article, LHC testing had gone well until a large number of instruments began reporting measurements well outside the expected norm. Program scientists had shut down the LHC and it remained offline indefinitely, while they investigated the cause of this latest malfunction.
What made the article especially interesting to Hanz was a section concerning a group of independent scientists who had begun raising questions about the lack of public information on the malfunction. Despite vociferous protests, the European Organization for Nuclear Research spurned all requests for external review, stating that the top experts in the field were already working on the problem.
Although Hanz didn’t have any evidence upon which to base his suspicions, it smelled like a cover-up. Not that it really mattered what he thought. The problem would be sorted out during the LHCs winter shutdown. He’d leave those concerns to the thousands of scientists CERN already had working on the Large Hadron Collider.
Hanz pulled a big sip from his coffee cup. Crap. Already, it had almost cooled to room temperature. And at the moment, this room wasn’t all that warm.
Walking across to the pot, Dr. Jorgen poured the full cup into the sink, and grabbed a refill. This time he decided he would remain standing until he had finished the whole thing. With his predilection for getting lost in thought, that was the only way to avoid a repeat of the coffee-cooling experiment.
His thoughts returned to the paper’s headline story. Although it was never good for the nation to lose its president, he had a feeling this time was the exception. As for the arrest of that self-important bastard of a deputy director, well…
Dr. Jorgen raised his coffee cup in mock salute.
“Dr. Stephenson, this one’s for you.”
With a long, slow, satisfying sip, Dr. Jorgen let the hot liquid slide across his tongue and down his throat. The warm glow in his stomach felt very good indeed, although he had to admit: not all of that feeling could be attributed to the coffee.
151
Heather McFarland stared across the neatly lined rows of soybeans that extended almost to the horizon and smiled. She was so tired. And it felt so good.
The Robertson family farm had become her home away from home, the Mennonite family having taken them in, accepting them on nothing more than Jack’s word. She didn’t know what the mysterious killer had done for them, but it was clear that they loved him, completely and unconditionally. And Heather had grown to love them too. Norma and Colin had taken them in, treating them exactly as they treated their own kin.
The Canadian family had migrated to Bolivia, along with a large number of their fellow Mennonites, in 1967. And in loose cooperation with the Bolivian government, they had bought a large section of land northeast of Santa Cruz, a short distance from Quatro Cañadas, where they and other Mennonites had built farming communities. Now they sold their soybeans to ConAgra and supported MEDA, the Mennonite Economic Development Associates, helping the poorer members of their sect establish credit and buy their own land.
Life at the Robertson Farm these last six weeks had been like stepping out of the modern world and being transported back in time a hundred and fifty years. Although the Mennonites avoided modern technology, many families in the area used tractors to farm their lands. Not the Robertsons. Their love of the old ways allowed for nothing more than plowing the land with teams of oxen, driving to town in a horse-drawn carriage, and performing a good, hard day of physical labor.
By night, things changed in an almost magical way. The multigenerational family assembled around the candlelit dinner table, thanked the Lord for their abundance and for each other, and then dined in a spirit of appreciation that Heather thought truly wonderful. Something about coming in after a day of hard work made the shared repast even more special. In a sad-happy way, they reminded her of her own family.
Heather glanced across the field at Jennifer and Mark as they worked their weeding hoes. Their run from the Espeñosa Estate to Cartegena and then to Santa Cruz had resulted in two more deaths, both at Mark’s hands, as they struggled to escape Don Espeñosa’s grounds.
As Heather looked at Mark, a lump rose in her throat. When she had fallen in love with him she didn’t know. Maybe she’d always been there. Sometimes she thought she should tell him. After all, his feelings for her were so clear they could have been stenciled on his forehead.
But somehow Heather couldn’t bring herself to do it. As much as Mark thought she blamed him for the people he’d slain, she blamed herself. Everything Mark had done had been part of her visions. She had chosen the path they all walked. And while they were all still alive, the pain they had experienced could only be laid at one doorstep. She could have chosen differently. She could have chosen better.
If it hadn’t been for the success of their operation to shut down the programmable nanites, Heather might have started questioning herself more harshly. While their success in that was great, something about it worried her. Had she made her savant choices in a way that placed the good of the many over the welfare of her friends and family? She didn’t think so, but until she knew for sure that she wasn’t exercising some subconscious, Joan-of-Arc agenda, her feelings for Mark would have to remain hidden.
Suddenly, her attention was drawn to a plume of dust rising along the dirt road toward the farmhouse. A dusty, black Ford Explorer pulled to a stop in front of the house, the sound of its engine dying as the driver-side door opened. It had been six weeks since Heather had even seen a motor vehicle, and she found herself walking toward the house with an air of expectation.
A lean, handsome man in a brown leather bomber jacket and khaki slacks stepped out of the SUV and removed his sunglasses. Jack!
“Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack!” The excited yells of the two Robertson grandchildren drifted across the fields in an echo of Heather’s own feelings. Jack grinned as he bent down to scoop them both up, laughing as the two girls wrapped their arms around his neck, covering his cheeks with kisses.
“What did you bring us?”
The universal question brought a smile to Heather’s lips. Even with the Spartan self-discipline the Mennonite lifestyle taught, kids were kids. As she got closer she could see Jack reach into his jacket and pull out two small bags of Hershey’s Kisses, handing one to each child and then placing a conspiratorial finger to his lips. The chocolates immediately disappeared somewhere inside their skirt pockets. Then, with their chocolate treats calling them to a more private place, they raced off, each stopping for one last wave before disappearing around the largest of the barns.
Jack’s eyes caught Heather as she stepped onto the gravel driveway, the warmth of his smile setting her at ease in a way that surprised her. Instead of the awkwardness that usually came with reunions, the bear hug with which he embraced her just felt right. Not exactly like family. More like the celebratory hug of a teammate after you scored the winning goal.
As he stepped back, his eyes swept her appraisingly.
“Let’s see. Tan face. Stron
g, tan arms. Farm life seems to fit you well.”
Heather nodded. “The Robertsons have been fabulous. They’ve treated us just like family.”
Jack laughed. “Meaning they put you to work.”
“Exactly,” said Mark as he and Jennifer rounded the corner.
“Ah, I was wondering where the other two amigos had run off to,” Jack said, hugging Jennifer, then gripping forearms with Mark in a way that reminded Heather of some old Viking movie.
“Can I help you with your bag?” Mark asked.
“Not necessary. As a matter of fact, you’re the ones who need to start packing. After I visit with Norma and Colin for a bit, I’ll be taking you all with me.”
Heather asked the question before either Mark or Jennifer could open their mouths. “Taking us? Where are we going?”
Once again, Jack smiled that devilish smile of his. Heather had a momentary flashback to the first night they had met Jack and Janet Johnson at her house. And although the memory was tinged with sadness, she had to admit, being around the man made you feel good to be alive.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? We’re going to my ranch.”
“You have a ranch? In Bolivia?”
“Long story. I’ll tell you about it on the way. Don’t worry. We’ll have plenty of time for that on the world’s crookedest straight road.”
The front door of the house opened, and Norma Robertson leaned out, her gray hair elegantly pinned back beneath a small, round cap.
“Jack Frazier! Are you going to stand outside talking with your young friends or come in and have a proper visit?”
Jack winked at Heather and then strode to the door as they trailed along behind him.
“Never fear, Nana. I was just saying how we should step inside.”
“Humph. I could see that.” Despite her mock reprimand, the older woman hugged Jack like a long-lost son. “Please come in. I’ve sent Jonny to fetch Colin. Oh, and you are staying for dinner, so there will be no arguments.”
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