Wormhole (55 page)

He didn’t have a lot of faith he could crush that skull or break its neck, but he could damn sure try. In the meantime he began flexing his pinned right wrist, making short sawing motions with the sword blade within the alien’s torso.

Adopting Mark’s tactic, the alien twisted its head and sank its teeth into the flesh of his thigh. Shrugging its shoulders up, it shoved hard with its three good arms, breaking Mark’s grip and sending him tumbling across the cavern floor.

Ignoring the pain shooting through his leg, Mark rolled to his feet, prepared to meet the charge that didn’t come. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why. Watching the alien’s fist and injured stomach knit themselves back together, he knew this was a battle of attrition he couldn’t hope to win.

Mark spat the alien blood onto the floor, trying not to swallow any. Well, if killing the thing the old-fashioned way wasn’t going to work, he’d just have to see how it got along without a head. As he readied himself for his next attack, high up, near the top of the
massive power cage, a loud explosion sounded, its echoing report followed by the blare of a new alarm.

“WARNING. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD COOLING SYSTEM MALFUNCTION. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD POWER FAILURE IMMINENT.”

Feeling his ears pop from the pressure change, Mark dropped the alien sword and lunged for the portal’s titanium edge, his fingers closing on its lip as a blast of hurricane-force wind lifted his feet from the ground, trying to suck him into the wormhole behind him.

A quick glance over his shoulder made the situation clear. The alien had managed to grab the portal’s far edge, but several of the scientists had been swept from their workstations as they and some of the monitors and keyboards tumbled into deep space. A glance up at Jennifer showed that she had managed to wrap her arms and legs around a steel rail, while, at his command perch, Dr. Stephenson clung to the elevated support structure.

Meanwhile, the November Anomaly sat unmoving, held in place by the stasis field containment bubble, glowing considerably brighter than the last time he’d looked at it. Now was the time to thrust it through the portal. Unfortunately, neither Jennifer nor Stephenson was able to let go to enter the required commands into a control station.

The howl of the wind nearly drowned out the screams of those swept from the scaffolding along the walls, but not the screech of tearing sheet metal and the crash of equipment flung against structural steel and concrete on its path into the wormhole. As Mark clung to his handhold he knew the wind wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon, not with the LHC’s twenty-seven-kilometer primary beam tunnel providing plenty of air, not with everything ventilated from the outside.

As a steel-case desk ricocheted off the portal five feet above him, Mark’s thoughts turned to Heather.

Hey, babe. If you have any last save-the-day ideas, I’d appreciate them. Cause I’m fresh out.

Donald Stephenson screamed into the microphone connected directly to the secondary stasis field control station. “Dr. Ivanovich. I told you to move the anomaly through the portal. Do it now!”

She didn’t respond.

Glancing down at the containment bubble around the anomaly, he saw the problem. One of the technicians was fighting the Kasari in front of the gateway portal, blocking the anomaly’s path.

He leaned closer to the mike. “Ivanovich. Move the anomaly now. We have less than a minute to get rid of it and redirect the gateway, or everyone on Earth dies.”

No response.

Shit. The woman had frozen up.

To make matters worse, the sensor array had detected unusual gravitational variances moving around within the cavern, variances consistent with Rho Ship worm fiber technology. Raul.

For reasons beyond Stephenson’s ken, the young idiot was trying to subvert the gateway for his own ends. So far he hadn’t managed to grab gateway control again, but using the Rho Ship’s neural net, he might manage it at any time. And if the anomaly was still sitting here in the ATLAS cavern when he did, everything Donald Stephenson had spent forty years working on would wink out in one sudden cosmic gulp.

Rising to his feet, Stephenson stepped toward the grated steel steps leading down to the third tier. If the Russian bitch couldn’t do it, he’d take over her station himself.

The alarm sounded as he reached the bottom step, and if he hadn’t braced himself against the structural support railing, he’d have been one of the first people sucked through the unprotected wormhole. Above his head, a large section of his primary control station tore free under the force of the explosive decompression, tumbled into the portal, and disappeared.

Death didn’t scare him. Failure did. And as he clung to the railing, watching his staff and equipment being sucked out through the gateway, for the first time in his life, he found himself staring failure dead in the face.

Multiple worm fiber views into the ATLAS cavern so horrified Raul that he began to shake. Not only had the Stephenson team lost the portal stasis field, they had failed to move the anomaly through the portal. With the damage being done to systems throughout the cavern, he couldn’t project how long the gateway would remain functional. Worse, Heather was badly injured, barely clinging to a steel railing eighty meters above the cavern floor. If he wanted to get Heather, it had to be now.

As his neural net locked in the last of the gateway override codes, he restored his connection to the ATLAS portal, breaking away from the Kasari gateway. As the gateway connection synchronized, inside the ATLAS cavern it was as if a door had been slammed against a storm. Clinging to opposite edges of the portal, Mark and the Kasari he’d been fighting dropped to the floor. The Kasari recovered immediately, closing the gap and bringing
his sword down in a sweeping blow Smythe barely managed to deflect. Then the Kasari closed with Mark, his momentum pushing Mark back against the portal’s black wall.

Raul ignored them. Manipulating the stasis field, he reached out into the cavern, plucking Heather from her high perch, bringing her floating gently down to floor level as he pulled her toward the portal.

He was so focused on his task, he failed to notice a second young woman leap through the portal until she was already in the ship. With a shock of recognition, he released Heather, sending her tumbling onto the cavern floor, and shifted the stasis field to meet this new threat.

Then Jennifer Smythe was inside his head.

Raul had been hard to miss as Jennifer had gotten up, her ears hissing and popping from yet another rapid change in atmospheric pressure. He’d been so obvious he’d even made her take her eyes off of Mark and the alien locked in close combat. That horribly misshapen figure, floating inside the open portal to the Rho Ship. He had been intent on Heather, who was floating through the air down toward the portal, trapped within a stasis bubble.

Jennifer’s decision was instantaneous. She’d give him something to be intent about. Vaulting the two tiers of workstations that separated her from the cavern floor, Jennifer took three running strides and leaped through the portal, sliding to a stop in a clear area between a jumble of alien equipment. Ten feet in front of her, Raul locked his eyes with hers. Feeling a deadly intention replacing his initial surprise, Jennifer thrust herself into his mind.

For three seconds it seemed the shock of her mental assault would give her the upper hand. But now, as his alien neural net worked to eliminate her foothold, the balance of power was shifting. A thin smile spread across Raul’s disfigured face, the appendage that had replaced his right eye shifting in anticipation.

Feeling her mental control slipping, Jennifer lifted the Bandolier Ship headband from its place around her neck, letting the buds settle over her temples. Whereas before she’d felt the power of Raul’s neural net beginning to dominate her will, now Jennifer felt his mind recoil in surprise as he sought to understand what had just happened. Rather than try to take control of the Rho Ship’s neural network, she focused on Raul, exposing the layers of desires, fears, and insecurities that made him who he was. And with every penetration, she released gentle waves of pleasure, a sense of her acceptance, even admiration.

And Raul reacted like a man dying of thirst who had just stumbled upon a stream of Rocky Mountain spring water. He drank her in.

So lonely. If she’d had more time, Jennifer would have pitied him. Instead, she ramped up her exploitation of his needs and weaknesses, encouraging him to show off his knowledge of the Rho Ship and its systems.

She concentrated on the Rho Ship’s wormhole generation systems. As the knowledge of their design and function filled her mind, she saw what he’d done, reprogrammed the starship’s wormhole drive to connect to the ATLAS gateway, bypassing its primary function of creating a wormhole and shoving the Rho Ship through it.

His will subject to Jennifer, Raul manipulated his neural net with a mastery that came with intimate familiarity, modifying the wormhole drive’s programming with subtle elegance. The feeling
of awe Jennifer fed him brought a smile to his lips, a smile that died as the realization struck him.

“My God! You’ve killed us both!”

As she turned her back on him, a barely audible whisper slipped from Jennifer’s lips.

“I know.”

Inside the Bandolier Cave, the coffee mug slipped from Dr. Hanz Jorgen’s fingers to shatter on the stone floor, spewing its hot, black wetness up his pants leg. As a brilliant white glow replaced the Bandolier Ship’s normal, soft magenta, he didn’t even notice.

Hanz didn’t know how he knew, but he did. Something powerful had just grabbed control of the Bandolier Ship’s computers, drawing every cycle of their processing power. He could practically hear the alien circuits groan under the incredible demand being placed upon the system.

Staring at the glowing starship, he wondered what problem could tax it so intensely. Then, as a shudder traversed his body, Hanz decided he didn’t really want to know.