Wormhole - 03

by Richard Phillips

  Deep within Mark’s mind, a spiderweb of cracks spread across the tranquil meditative scene, rapidly widening into fissures through which the blackness poured.

  “Ten...”

  Mark felt the vibrations pulse through the muscles in his arms, up into his shoulders, and across his back.

  “Nine...”

  He inhaled deeply through his nostrils.

  “Eight...seven...”

  Let it out slowly through his mouth.

  “Six...five...”

  The chains binding his wrists came apart with such force that multiple chain links splattered outward, shattering the wall projection screen like the impact of forty-five-caliber slugs. As his right hand grabbed Dr. Krause’s throat, his left leg rocketed out, caving in the chest of the guard to his left, sending the body flipping head over heels into the far wall.

  The guard by the exit moved instinctively, bringing up the Tazer even as Mark hurtled up the steps toward him. The guard was fast. Really fast. And with anyone else his quickness would have been enough.

  Mark felt the electrical jolt take him in the center of the chest, the involuntary muscular shock freezing him in place for the merest fraction of a second. Then his enhanced neuromuscular system shunted the effects aside and he swept inevitably onward, his left fist caving in the side of the guard’s head as he reached the top of the steps, Dr. Krause still clutched in his right hand’s powerful grip.

  Seeing that the electrically controlled door was sliding closed, Mark hurled Krause’s dying body into the gap, paused to grab his phone, then plunged through the door. Without a moment’s hesitation, he raced down the hallways along which they had brought him to the theater room. He remembered a janitor’s closet off to the right two corridors down. Reaching it, Mark threw his whole strength into the door, ripping it from its hinges.

  Stepping inside, Mark concentrated on the phone, his fingers flying across the keypad. With a sigh of relief, he verified that Jennifer’s worm had infected the phone’s Android operating system. That meant someone had powered up at least one of their laptops, releasing the worm into every computing system in this facility as well as all those within the specified search radius. Typing in a series of quick commands, Mark crushed the phone in his palm and hurled it against the far wall, sending fragments showering out across the corridor.

  Then, leaning his head back against the wall, he relaxed, resuming his previously disturbed meditation. He was ready. Let them come.

  For several days Heather had felt the frustration building, but she continued to shunt it aside, walling it away from the work it threatened to disrupt. It wasn’t that she hadn’t made progress in her quest to establish a mind link with Jennifer. She had gotten very good at detecting Jennifer’s attempts at a link and had been able to establish an improved mutual awareness. But that awareness amounted to little more than an increased sense of presence, akin to catching sight of a ghost from the corner of her eye. When she tried to see it directly, it was gone.

  Heather had begun to question her initial analysis of how telepathy worked. For one thing, if it had just been a form of normal electromagnetic wave communication, even directed by an extremely sophisticated neural phased array, the signal would have been attenuated by intervening objects and wouldn’t have worked at all in a facility replete with TEMPEST-approved Faraday cages.

  Besides, when Jennifer and Mark had felt her thoughts when she’d been carried off by the Rag Man, she’d been a long way from them and without the line of sight required for a directed signal. It struck her that her initial assumptions had caused her to proceed down an erroneous path in her efforts to make a connection.

  A baby didn’t learn to walk by mentally calculating which nerve endings to fire and which muscle fibers to twitch. He did it by trial and error, with a picture in mind of what he wanted to do, and then by releasing that desire into a brain that remembered little successes and built upon those. It happened automatically, but not instantaneously.

  Rather than think about the night when the Rag Man had grabbed her, Heather let her thoughts drift to the morning at her mother’s breakfast table when she’d heard Jennifer’s thoughts as clearly as if she’d spoken them aloud.

  Suddenly Heather found herself back at the table, tasting the pancakes, smelling the warm maple syrup as it pushed melted butter down the sides of the stack. Jen’s voice in her head made it sound exactly as if Jen had spoken those words. Except something was missing. The auditory signals from her inner ear held no memory of vibrating under the sound waves from Jennifer’s voice.

  It was more as if she’d been inside Jennifer’s head, with no distance separating their minds. It was like the alien headset link. Heather replayed the memory again and again, each time noticing some new detail of that mind link. The thoughts Jen had been thinking loudest were what she’d noticed at the time, but there was more. Drowned out by the volume of her surface thoughts were layers of thought and feelings, like whispers in a crowded room. Heather’s mind had shared all of that, it just hadn’t stood out.

  But what had initiated the link? Heather felt the frustration bubble up again as she strove to understand it. The pattern was there, nibbling at the edges of her memory, but despite all her talents, she just wasn’t seeing it.

  One thing each of the instances of psychic communion had in common: each time she’d managed it, Heather hadn’t been consciously trying to achieve a link.

  Heather took a deep breath, slowly let it out and visualized what she wanted, then released it, pulling forth the memory of one of her favorite meditations, feeling her alpha waves smooth out in long, slow ripples. She felt her consciousness drift in blackness, zooming her perspective out until she was a distant, flickering flame, alone in an infinite black expanse. As she let herself drift deeper, she spotted another pinprick of light, then another, and another. As she became aware of these other tiny light sources, she noticed something else. The blackness that separated her from them wasn’t uniform. Waves rippled outward through the void from each pinprick, as if from pebbles dropped in a still pond. Only these waves radiated super-spherically.

  Also, this void wasn’t four-dimensional space, but consisted of one or more additional dimensions, each of which touched all points in space. The void was full of these ripples, crossing over each other, waves of varying frequencies and amplitudes, most completely unfamiliar. Heather let her mind drift, scanning the wave sources in an expanding spiral until she recognized a familiar pattern. Jennifer.

  Heather felt her as surely as if they had touched, the strength of the feeling jumping in intensity as she focused on the flame that was Jennifer. Rather than try to establish a connection, Heather relaxed further into the meditation, letting her mind center on the wave source in its own way.

  Then it happened. It was as if their two candle flames merged, hers with Jennifer’s, and in that moment their minds joined as thoroughly as if they’d just slid into the alien headsets. Only this time neither of them threw up any mental blocks, joyously accepting the complete mental union.

  In her padded cell, Heather’s readings underwent a remarkable shift, as if she’d suddenly entered a terrifying dream. As Dr. Jacobs turned his head away from the monitor to gaze into Heather’s milky white eyes, he was startled to see tears streaming down the sides of her face to dampen her brown hair.

  He briefly considered trying to rouse her from the hallucination, but rejected the idea. Better to watch and see where this went. Perhaps whatever mental trauma Heather was experiencing in her fugue could be turned to some future advantage.

  Leaning back in his chair, Dr. Jacobs let the electronic data collection continue.

  General Balls Wilson was pissed, more than pissed. He was mad as hell. As he stared at his assembled staff, his usually jovial brown eyes seemed ready to spit bolts of liquid lightning that would leave only charred skeletal imprints of each person who had attracted the full force of that gaze.

  “Who the hell authorized making t
his video and showing it to Mark Smythe?”

  As the silence in the room acquired the density of a thick London fog, his long stride carried him around the NSA conference room, first clockwise, then counter-, until the weight of his presence became unbearable.

  “Gentlemen. Maybe you aren’t hearing me. I want to know who gave the OK for this piece-of-shit video to be produced and shown to my prisoner without my direct authorization. Unless I get an answer in the next thirty seconds, every one of you bastards is going to be looking for a new line of work.”

  Carl Christenson was the first to respond. “Sir, it appears that Dr. Krause ordered the video production and showed it to Mark Smythe in person.”

  “Then he’s lucky he’s dead, because if he was still alive, he’d be mine.”

  Balls Wilson’s powerful stride carried him back to the front of the room, where his hungry hawk’s gaze swept the assemblage. “Three NSA men dead. And you know what? After what I’ve seen, I don’t know how Smythe managed it, but I don’t blame him one little bit.”

  His eyes turned on Dr. Jacobs. “How did Dr. Krause get the original video of Heather McFarland for his little greenroom production? Aren’t you in charge of her interrogation?”

  “Yes sir, I am. Dr. Krause asked for access to the video. I assumed it was to assist with the Smythe interrogation.”

  “You assumed.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Goddamn it. I assumed I had a competent staff. I guess we’re all a bunch of idiots.” General Wilson’s chest heaved as he fought to bring his emotions back under control. “I’m not running some sort of half-assed Abu Ghraib operation here. If I find another instance of someone trying out an interrogation technique without my explicit approval, you’ll wish you never heard my name. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yes sir!”

  The thunderous response from all those in the briefing room lent credence to their answer.

  General Wilson’s eyes locked, person by person, with each individual in the room.

  “Good. Make sure you don’t disappoint me again.”

  He let several seconds of silence hang in the air between them before speaking again.

  “Dismissed!”

  In less than thirty seconds the room, save General Wilson, was empty. Turning once more to the frozen image of Heather McFarland bound to her bed as three convicts were about to be released into her room, Balls Wilson hurled the remote control into the video screen with enough force to shatter the glass display into a thousand pieces, the falling fragments creating a sound like freezing rain on a car windshield.

  Balls Wilson stared at the mess, his hands clenched so tightly that the muscles in his upper arms bulged with the effort. Then he turned and strode from the room.

  Louis Dubois had come to despise Donald Stephenson on a personal level. But he had to admit the man had intellect and drive that went beyond any conventional definition of genius. He was an asshole who unveiled glorious theoretical and practical breakthroughs, seemingly on an as-needed basis.

  The latest scientific marvel was a design for a device that Dr. Stephenson called a stasis field generator that, if it worked as the theory predicted, could create powerful force fields, manipulating them with incredible precision. Louis had worked around the clock the last forty-eight hours reviewing Dr. Stephenson’s white paper, trying to find something wrong with his theoretical derivations, but all he’d done was confirm Stephenson’s work.

  And Dr. Dubois wasn’t alone. He’d had another team going over the equations at the same time. Louis had just returned from a meeting with Dr. Freidrick Haus, Nobel laureate mathematician and team lead. As he’d expected, Dr. Haus’s team also confirmed Dr. Stephenson’s work.

  Louis leaned back in his chair, shoving his fingers under his reading glasses to rub his red eyes. As hard as it was to believe, the American physicist was rewriting the world’s understanding of physics at a pace that had shocked the thousands of scientists working on the ATLAS project to their core. And Louis had no doubt that, when those papers were released to the public, they would have the same shocking impact on the scientific community at large. If the world survived the current crisis, there’d be a lot of textbooks heading directly to trash bins, which was precisely where they belonged.

  Louis rose from his seat and walked across his office, pausing to retrieve his black London Fog raincoat and umbrella before heading for the building exit. A cold, steady rain had drenched most of Europe for the last three days and the weather report held little promise of improvement. A massive cold front cut its way across the EU map, its blue curve sporting eastward, facing blue triangles stretching from Finland down to Italy’s booted heel. Right now it was stalled, blocked by a massive high-pressure system that had set up shop over western Russia.

  Nodding at Elynn Stadich, the front desk security guard, Louis pulled up his raincoat collar, unfurled the umbrella, and stepped out into the gray wetness of the Swiss morning. He’d decided to make the walk to the ATLAS facility to clear his mind. Five minutes into the hike, he regretted his decision. The temperature hovered in the low forties, which wasn’t so bad, but the whirling wind made his umbrella less than useless. As one of these gusts almost succeeded in springing the umbrella inside out, Louis gave up, stowed it into its handle, and accepted that his head was going to get a thorough drenching. He didn’t really think it could get much wetter anyway.

  As he stepped into the entrance to the surface facility that led to the ATLAS cavern, Louis removed his raincoat, then leaned over to wipe and shake the moisture from his head and neck.

  “Dr. Dubois, I thought they provided you with a car and driver.”

  Louis turned to see the grinning face of Gary Levin, one of the top graduate students assigned to the program.

  “Looked like a nice day for a stroll.”

  “Guess I don’t want to walk with you on a bad day, then.”

  Gary handed him a white hard hat, waiting as Louis adjusted it to fit his head. “Guess I should have brought you a towel too.”

  “I’ll dry off on the way down to ATLAS.”

  The smile faded from Gary’s face as if it had been wiped from a blackboard. “When was the last time you were in the ATLAS cave?”

  “Tuesday. I’ve been holed up reviewing Dr. Stephenson’s latest paper for the last couple of days. Told Sophia I didn’t want to be disturbed unless a critical problem came up.”

  The grad student inhaled deeply, frowned, and then continued. “I probably shouldn’t be the one to tell you, but you’re not going to like what’s happening down there.”

  The cold hand of dread grabbed Dr. Dubois’s esophagus and squeezed. “What do you mean?”

  “I guess I’d better show you.”

  Passing down a narrow hallway with a silver conduit running down the center of the eight-foot ceiling, Louis paused at a locker to hang his raincoat and umbrella inside. Turning, he followed Gary through several more rooms and hallways, the noise of heavy construction equipment growing in volume as they made their way toward the ATLAS cavern.

  They stepped onto scaffolding high up on the cavern wall. As always, the scene affected him on multiple levels. All those years building this place, and now they were working at breakneck speed disassembling the massive detector and enlarging the cavern to make room for Dr. Stephenson’s wormhole generator, all the while making sure nothing disrupted the containment field isolating the November Anomaly.

  Suddenly Louis froze. One large section of the ATLAS detector’s massive end cap dangled from a ceiling crane, trailing metal scraps and cables, as if a gigantic maw had grabbed the device and ripped out a huge chunk.

  “What in God’s name?”

  A wave of nausea and dizziness almost buckled Louis’s knees.

  “Dr. Stephenson’s order. He’s personally supervising the dismantling operation.”

  “Dismantling?” Louis sputtered. “That’s wanton destruction. Where the hell is he?”

  As Ga
ry pointed to a tiny figure gesturing to the construction crew on the far side of the cavern, Louis cursed, then clambered down the stairs leading to the cavern floor. By the time he reached Dr. Stephenson, his breath hissed out in short, ragged gasps.

  Grabbing Dr. Stephenson by the shoulder, he spun the American scientist to face him.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Stephenson’s gray eyes took in Dr. Dubois as casually as if he’d just asked to schedule a meeting.

  “The crew was falling behind schedule. I am changing that.”

  “By destroying billions of dollars in instrumentation? We’re supposed to be dismantling ATLAS so that it can be reconstructed once we’re done here. You’re ruining decades of work.”

  Dr. Stephenson pursed his lips. “Dr. Dubois. What portion of this piece of junk do you think needs saving? Since you probably haven’t understood a word I’ve presented in my papers, this may not have occurred to you, but your little science project is over. The technologies and energies we are about to create in this cavern go so far beyond anything ever contemplated on earth; they make the Large Hadron Collider laughable.”

  Dr. Dubois’s eyes widened as if he’d been slapped in the face.

  “Face it, Louis,” Stephenson continued. “No need to search for more standard-physics-model validation. That model is dead.”

  With that dismissal, Dr. Stephenson turned to yell more instructions at the foreman. Behind him, Dr. Louis Dubois stood frozen in place. As he stared up at the beautiful, intricate machine that was ATLAS, his eyes misted over. Stephenson was right. Like Louis, in the blink of an eye, it had become a dinosaur.

  Dr. Rodger Dalbert slid into the indicated seat in the small breakout room adjacent to the White House Situation Room. President Jackson was seated in the opposite chair, Cory Mayfield, the director of national intelligence, sat to his right, and James Nobles, the National Security Advisor, sat on the president’s left. The arrangement had Rodger seated with his back to the door, a position that left him feeling exposed and vulnerable.