At its core, the MDS was based upon the Kasari technology that Dr. Donald Stephenson had used to design the matter ingester that had powered the stasis field generators and the wormhole gateway in Switzerland. Stephenson had revolutionized physics by reworking the old ether theory. It wasn’t that space-time was filled with a substance through which light waves traveled; space-time was a substance made up of quantum-sized grains.
Stephenson had postulated that certain rare combinations of frequencies could form harmonic standing-wave packets within the ether, those chords resulting in all the various types of matter. The practical applications were obvious. With an understanding of the set of frequencies that made up each specific type of matter, it was a relatively simple process to add a set of canceling frequencies to form an anti-packet that would cancel out the original. Thus both sets of energy would be released in a matter/antimatter reaction.
A perfect anti-packet wasn’t even necessary. If a sufficient subset of canceling frequencies were added, the harmonic chord of the stable packet would be disrupted to the point that the particle would tear itself apart, again releasing excess energy as it moved down to a set of simpler stable chords or particles. This process was composed of a few discrete steps: analyze the target matter to determine its frequency set, add a sufficient subset of canceling frequencies, harvest the released energy, and repeat.
Heather stepped aside and watched Mark lift the end of the thick power cable and connect it to the wall socket. Then he placed a metallic hand on the breaker switch handle, ready to lift it into the closed position at her signal.
“Do it.”
Mark lifted the handle into place and Heather saw the MDS status panel light up as it initiated its boot sequence. But the vision that suddenly formed in her mind startled her. One second everything was fine and then it wasn’t. She had just started to yell at Mark to pull the breaker when a sudden flash terminated her subspace link with the robot, leaving behind a sensory overload that felt like a lance through her brain. She was momentarily blinded.
On his command couch, Mark gasped. “Shit! What just happened?”
Ignoring his question, Heather tried to establish a direct link to the MDS despite knowing the probabilities that told her it wasn’t going to happen. A power glitch had activated circuits that caused the MDS to start the matter conversion process while it was still in the boot-up sequence, which should have been impossible. And both she and Mark had lost their robotic links at the same time, meaning only one thing: the malfunctioning MDS had generated a local electromagnetic pulse that had fried both robots’ circuits.
Now there was no way to remotely shut the MDS down until the boot-up sequence completed, something that would take another forty-two seconds. When she met Mark’s eyes she could see that he understood.
They didn’t have another forty-two seconds.
“Shit!” Mark gasped as he turned to look at Heather. “What just happened?”
But her eyes had gone milky white as she delved deep into one of her savant visions. The strain on her face told him all he needed to know. Whatever it was, she wasn’t finding a quick solution. Her words soon confirmed it.
“Some kind of EMP just fried everything in the MDS chamber.”
“Won’t that shut down the disrupter?” Mark asked.
“The disrupter and its power cable are shielded. The robots weren’t.”
“Neither were our dads.”
“They don’t have pacemakers, so if we can get this stopped, they should be okay.”
“What about bringing in other robots?”
Heather’s voice went cold. “It’ll be over before we can get them in there.”
“It won’t hurt to try.”
Mark turned his attention back to his headset, issuing the mental command that shifted his subspace link to one of the robots working in the warehouse. The sensory link stabilized through a moment of haze and then Mark was running, having tossed aside the large crate that the robot had been carrying. Without slowing down he hit the door, blasting it off its metal hinges and sending it cartwheeling along the floodlit gravel path ahead of him. As he entered the cloaking field, he heard Heather’s robot racing to join him.
He wasn’t surprised to see that the mine’s titanium outer door was closed. But when it opened on its own, he skidded to a halt. What the hell? He’d expected to have to stop and shift his connection to the door’s controls to give the open command. But when Heather passed him and raced into the mine he understood. She’d managed a dual connection without breaking concentration on her primary link, another new trick that his wife had just pulled from her savant hat.
But as his metal body raced after her, Mark knew that this time even her wizardry wouldn’t be enough to save their dads.
One second Gil was watching RoboMark push the circuit breaker handle into place and the next the ceiling lights spit sparks and went out. The dim screen on the matter disrupter still glowed with the words SYSTEM BOOT IN PROGRESS . . . PLEASE WAIT.
“What the hell . . . ?” Fred asked the question in Gil’s mind.
Unable to see anything except the dimly glowing panel, Gil yelled, “Mark! Pull the breaker!”
When Mark didn’t answer, Gil lunged forward, racing through the darkness toward the spot where the breaker switch was mounted to the wall. Before he reached it he ran directly into the big Mark robot, the impact sending him sprawling on the floor.
“Aaaahh. Goddamn it!”
Fred moved past Gil as he climbed to his knees, his eyes adjusting to the near darkness so that he could see his friend grab the breaker switch that was still held in the robot’s grasp.
“Shit! The robot’s holding it closed!” Fred yelled as he threw his whole body into the effort.
The switch didn’t budge and Gil scrambled to help him. Behind him the MDS made a sound that he was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to make.
“Not the switch,” Gil screamed. “The robot! Help me push it over.”
Fred released the breaker switch and ducked into a football lineman stance, driving his thick shoulder into the big robot’s chest as Gil threw his weight into the entity as well.
“Mooove, you metal bastard!”
For seconds that seemed like an eternity, the thing refused to budge. But when the robot finally toppled, both he and Fred came down on top of it. A quick glance upward brought a gasp of relief from Gil’s lips. The lights on the MDS panel had winked out, leaving the room in total darkness. Even better, the only sounds he heard were his and Fred’s panting breaths.
“Did I ever tell you how much I hate robots?” Fred’s disembodied voice asked.
Gil harrumphed. “You kidding me? You’re the one who loves robots.”
“Yeah. That was yesterday.”
“You got your flashlight?”
“Must have fallen out of my pocket during the tussle. Yours?”
Gil shook his head, knowing full well that Fred couldn’t see him. “Not working.”
“Funny how the MDS didn’t fry its own circuits.”
“Must have been its shielding.”
“Makes sense,” said Fred, his voice scornful. “The only part of the damn system that worked almost killed us.”
Gil climbed back to his feet, feeling a twinge in his left shoulder from where he’d landed on top of the robot.
“I think I’ve had enough fun for tonight,” he panted, hearing Fred rise beside him. “What do you say we get the hell out of here?”
“Sounds good. I’ve got a cold six-pack down at the house that’s calling our names.”
“We’ll need to call Mark and Heather to let them know we’re okay.”
Gil started moving carefully through the dark in the direction of the door. Behind him, Fred’s response brought a relieved grin to his face.
“I say we crack open a couple of brewskies before we make that call. Won’t hurt them to sweat for a few more minutes before they find out their old dads aren’t so stupid after all.�
��
As Heather raced through the opening into the rebuilt mine, the robo-sensors filled her head with information. The traction pads on her metal feet hammered the floor, producing a thunderous sound that echoed down the titanium-walled corridor. When she turned into the tunnel that veered off to her right, what she saw brought her to a sliding stop that ripped grooves in the concrete floor and almost caused Mark to crash into her from behind.
Ten feet ahead, her dad and Fred Smythe walked down the hall directly toward her.
“Coming to save the day?” Gil asked as he passed them without stopping.
“Too late,” said Fred. “We already did.”
“You two can clean up the mess.”
Heather stood rooted in place, trying to process the mixture of relief and confusion that flooded her. The two men disappeared around the corner, lost in conversation about the cold beers awaiting them in Fred’s fridge.
CHAPTER 5
It had taken four hours of frantic work, but with Jennifer placing the design specifications into Raul’s mind, he’d managed to build a rudimentary terminal with an interface to the Rho Ship’s neural net. She felt a touch of awe at the capabilities of the nano-materials to form themselves into whatever Raul instructed them to create. Advanced 3-D printing on steroids. Mistakes and setbacks arose, but eventually they got the thing working.
Jennifer was confident that she could recreate the subspace receiver-transmitters that she, Heather, and Mark had designed based on Altreian technology. If she and Raul built the transmitters into an Altreian-style headset, they should both be able to mentally communicate with the ship’s neural net. Even better, they should be able to link up from great distances. But those grandiose plans would take time that, right now, they just didn’t have.
With Raul watching, she slid into the seat that faced the terminal. It was definitely old school, a simple keyboard and a monitor that was only capable of displaying monochrome text. That’s what a time crunch did—made you take shortcuts that involved scrapping everything except basic functionality, leaving her sitting in front of something that belonged in a museum instead of a starship.
“Wow,” Raul said as he floated up behind her. “Impressive design.”
“Yeah? You built it.”
His laugh carried a genuine ring. Jennifer was surprised that she liked the sound of it. Not looking at Raul helped her forget the horrifying transformation that Dr. Stephenson had inflicted on him.
“You still sure it wouldn’t be faster for you to get inside my head and let me do whatever you need done?”
Jennifer snorted. “By the time I show you what I want and then watch you stumble around trying to pass those instructions to the neural net, then analyze the results you get back, I’ll go crazy. Besides, I type faster than I can talk . . . even mentally.”
Seeing Raul shake his head, Jennifer turned her attention back to her workstation. Her initial interactions consisted of a series of queries and responses as she slowly felt her way around the system. As her familiarity with the data structure and programming interface grew, so did her speed. Each advance opened a new level of understanding, a process that resulted in an exponential increase in her capacity for interaction with the neural net.
In her mind, the keyboard and monitor disappeared as surely as the words did when she read an engrossing book. Instead, she strode through worlds of data that formed pictures in her mind. At this point she wasn’t trying to do anything fancy, just exploring. She recalled how Jack Gregory had directed them to explore the Second Ship’s data banks through their Altreian headsets. That journey had turned very nasty, almost getting Mark killed when they attempted to bypass the ship’s security protocols and drawing an attack from that starship’s resident artificial intelligence. The memory sent shivers up her spine.
Although she had not detected any evidence that this ship’s neural net contained an AI of its own, she had no desire to repeat the experience by acting prematurely here. But events would soon force her to attempt to override the ship’s preprogrammed instructions. She only hoped that, when that moment came, she had acquired adequate understanding.
As Raul watched Jennifer work, his attitude evolved from skepticism to appreciation and to slack-jawed wonder. If he hadn’t been observing her actions through the neural net as well as with his eyes, he was sure that he couldn’t have kept up with the words and symbols that flashed across the simple monitor. She flitted through his neural net, a hummingbird among honeysuckle blossoms, sampling this and that with unnatural control.
For someone’s fingers to move that fast and accurately was quite simply impossible. At least it should have been. He had no doubt that Jennifer Smythe was every bit the freak that he was, albeit one with demonstrably different abilities and vastly superior packaging.
Turning his attention from what she was doing, Raul focused on the ship’s dwindling energy supply, which moved him to drop their latest refuse bags into the small matter disrupter. He considered scrounging up the remaining pieces of the Rho Project instruments that had been left on board and battered into scrap during the wormhole transit, but that amount of matter wouldn’t compensate for the energy the Rho Ship was expending to maintain the gravity distortion field that cloaked them.
In the moments immediately prior to their sudden departure from Earth, the ship’s stasis field generators had gobbled up a large portion of the Rho Project high-bay where the ship had rested, along with some scientists, a big chunk of cement foundation, and the ground beneath. Those items had then been transferred directly into the primary matter disrupter to fuel their jump. Under normal circumstances, assuming you could call any wormhole transit normal, there would have been plenty of reserves left after the trip. But Jennifer’s survival work-around had burned through almost all of it.
As the hours passed and the ship’s energy reserves sank deeper and deeper into the red, Raul changed his mind and directed the stasis field to gather up all the scrap metal, feeding it into the command bay matter disrupter. It helped, but not by much. If Jennifer didn’t manage to bypass the security protocols that continued to prevent Raul from overriding the ship’s mission plan, they’d have to start feeding nano-materials into the ingester. The depletion of that precious resource would leave them unable to build devices or make necessary repairs.
An hour after the Rho Ship slipped into an elliptical orbit around Scion, Jennifer let out a whoop that would have made Raul jump if he still had legs.
“Got it!” When she turned to him, her smile was radiant. Jesus, she was beautiful. “You should now have complete administrative control of all systems.”
And as she said it Raul felt his mental control of the ship expand. Engines, weapons systems, shielding, sensors . . . even protected portions of the ship’s database that he’d had no idea existed filled his head. Damn. He’d never realized how blind he’d been before this moment.
“You’re a goddess!” he said and, at least for the present, he meant it.
Jennifer’s laugh held the relief that flooded through him. Yet he also detected an undercurrent of worry.
“Do we have enough energy to make it to the nearest asteroid?” she asked.
Raul pulled up all the sensor data, feeling a lump rising in his throat as he did.
“Not without dropping our gravitational cloak. Even then it’ll be damn tight.”
“Crap!” Jennifer paused. “What about space junk or dead satellites? Do you see any of those?”
Raul checked. “These people have a bunch of satellites in different orbits. As for space junk, I don’t detect anything.”
“What about the moons? Can we reach one of them?”
“We can get there, but we won’t have enough power left to land. No use asking if we can land on the planet.”
With every idea that failed them, Raul felt his desperation increase. They might just have to drop the cloaking field after all.
Jennifer rose from her workstation and began pacing slo
wly across the open portion of the command bay. Suddenly she stopped and turned back toward him.
“Fine. We’ll just have to ingest one of their functioning satellites . . . preferably a big, unmanned one.”
“They’ll damn sure detect that.”
“It can’t be helped. Hopefully they’ll think it was hit by some space junk.”
“I just told you, they don’t have space junk.”
He saw Jennifer throw up her hands in frustration. “A meteor then. Whatever.”
Raul nodded, turned his attention back to the sensors, and began a much more detailed set of scans focused closer in to Scion, prioritizing potential targets by their mass and ease of access. When he identified a wonderful target not far inside their own orbit, he felt a grin spread across his face.
Just as he was about to adjust their course, his attention was drawn to a sensor scan of the planet’s surface.
An anomalous reading radiating from just outside one of Scion’s largest cities pulled a groan from his lips.
“Oh no!”
He felt Jennifer slide into his mind and felt her recoil in horror. The signature of the anomaly was unmistakably familiar.
There, on the planet’s surface, was an active Kasari gateway.
CHAPTER 6
As if her insides had frozen solid, Jennifer struggled to breathe. Goddamn it! Had she and Raul survived only to have the Rho Ship return them to one of the Kasari home worlds? Tears fell from her eyes and she wiped at them angrily with the backs of her hands. Was the rest of her life destined to be one hopeless, unending suck?
“You okay?”
Raul’s thought brought her head up to see the pain and worry in his face. Shit! She’d been so shocked she’d forgotten to drop her mental link with him. He knew exactly what she’d been thinking and feeling. But she saw in his mind emotions that matched her own in their bitter intensity. If anything, he felt even more lost and alone than she did. For a moment, she felt the urge to hug him, to share some small bit of human comfort.
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