Wormhole (3 page)

As for Mark, Jen, and Heather, they had been kept busy doing whatever the Quechua midwife demanded. When the baby finally came, it had been Mark who assisted with cutting and tying off the umbilical cord, but not before a panicked few moments of wondering if the baby boy would start breathing. Although Mark had thought all new babies cried as a part of taking that first breath, this one hadn’t made a sound. Only a sharp word from Yachay had snapped him out of his frozen state and gotten him moving as she directed.

By the time they had finished all the post-birthing tasks, the three young friends hadn’t even bothered to eat, dragging themselves off to their rooms for rest and recovery, more bone tired than at any other time in their training.

“Heather, you’re up.”

Jack’s words brought Mark out of his reverie as Heather stepped forward and Jennifer stumbled onto the seat beside him, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Although she hadn’t been bloodied, she was clearly teetering on the edge of muscle failure.

Every Friday was evaluation day, during which Jack tested their mastery of the training they had received thus far. Mark knew one thing for certain: never again would he think TGIF. Fridays flat-out sucked.

Suddenly Mark’s attention shifted to the center of the padded mat that covered the small gym’s floor. One of Heather’s punches had managed to penetrate Jack’s defenses, her small fist striking his chin a grazing blow. As the two combatants shifted stance, Mark caught a glimpse of Heather’s eyes. They’d turned milky white.

Shit. She’d gone deep, fighting Jack in the now as her savant mind gazed into the future.

Once again she lashed out, but this time Jack slipped the blow. For the briefest of moments, Mark thought Jack’s eyes glinted red. Then, as Heather whirled into an axe kick, Jack chopped her sharply in the solar plexus, sending the air whooshing from her lungs in one great burst. Heather doubled over on the mat, then rolled on her side, simultaneously struggling to draw breath and rise to her feet—for the moment, failing to do either.

As Mark and Jennifer started to move, Jack’s stern gaze sent them back to their seats. As he stood above Heather, watching her intently, Jack made no move to assist her. A month ago Mark would have been unable to contain his anger. Now it all made sense. For Jack to baby any one of them would be to dishonor that person. Before they’d started training, Jack and Janet had briefed them on the rigors of the program they would endure, and they had each consented. Too late now to back out.

With a Herculean effort, Heather raised herself from the floor, once again moving into a ready position.

“Excellent.” Jack said. He motioned to Mark and Jennifer. “Everyone have a seat out here on the mat.”

As they complied, Jack walked to a corner closet, retrieved a box from the shelf, and then seated himself on the mat directly in front of Heather.

“You have a unique ability,” he said to her. “All of you share various talents as a result of the neural augmentation you received
from the Bandolier Ship headbands. But your minds have their own natural strengths and preferences.

“Heather, I’ve watched you play chess. There’s not a person in the world that can beat you, certainly no computer can. You see all the possibilities and know what is most likely to happen from any setup. It’s why you were able to hit me just now.”

Jack paused to remove a chess set from the box, setting it on the floor between them. Mark watched closely as Jack removed several pieces, arranging them into an endgame in which each side had four pieces.

White had its king trapped on the first row by the black rook and black had its king similarly limited to movement on the eighth row. Black had another rook and pawn while white had a queen and pawn remaining.

Jack spun the board so that Heather played white.

“What are the odds white wins?” he asked.

“Whose move?” Heather asked.

“White.”

“Checkmate in one move.”

“What are the odds of white winning?”

“One hundred percent,” Heather said.

“Show me.”

Mark saw Heather glance at him and shrug, as if to say,
This is too easy
. “If you insist.”

As she reached for the white queen, her hand accidently touched the white pawn. Heather froze, then reached for the queen.

“You touched the pawn. By rule, you must move it.” Jack grinned.

“Accidental touches don’t count.”

“You touched the pawn and lingered. That counts as an intentional touch.”

Heather frowned. Mark could tell she was confused about what had just happened. A winning move had just become a losing move. She had reached for the queen, but something had distracted her. Mark saw a light dawn as she swung toward her friend.

“Jennifer!”

Jack laughed. “Before you get angry with Jennifer, I want you all to think about what just happened here. The most talented savant mind on the planet just calculated the odds of winning a simple chess endgame at 100 percent, an absolute certainty. But she lost. Why?

“I prearranged for Jennifer to nudge Heather’s subconscious when she least expected such interference, forcing her to accidently bump the white pawn. I did it to teach you the most important lesson you’ll ever get. Before I let you off early today, I want to burn this into your minds.

“Don’t trust anyone, not even your best friends. Love them, but never trust them completely. At critical times, they can be influenced to do things you don’t want. Mark would throw away his life to save Heather, even though she’d hate him for it. Heather would do the same for him. In your own ways you would all betray each other, just like Jennifer betrayed Heather in this little game.”

Mark’s face clouded. “Wait just a minute! Jennifer didn’t betray her.”

“No,” Jennifer said, giving Mark a thankful look. “I didn’t.”

“Oh, you had good reason,” Jack continued. “I manipulated you by telling you it was a critical part of the lesson I’m teaching, but you still betrayed her by making her lose. Given the right reasons you would all do the same. Remember it.

“And remember this. No victory is certain. No situation is hopeless. When you find yourselves in a hopeless situation, change the rules.”

“You mean cheat,” Mark said.

Jack grinned. “Like the devil himself.”

President Leonard Jackson stared across the conference table at Dr. Rodger Dalbert, the scientist meeting his gaze with an unflinching calm that belied the nature of the briefing he had just presented. No one on the National Security Council spoke, an event almost as unusual as the subject of the briefing. But maybe it was a sign that they’d begun to get used to his leadership style. At least, that’s how he chose to interpret it.

“So let me get this straight,” President Jackson said. “Dr. Stephenson rejected our request for his help in return for my commuting his sentence to time already served.”

“That is correct. He wants a full pardon, a public apology from you, as president of the United States, for the grievous errors that resulted in his imprisonment, and full reinstatement of his security clearance. In addition he wants to be appointed
special scientific envoy to CERN and to be placed in charge of the November Anomaly Project.”

The secretary of state hissed. “Pretentious bastard.”

President Jackson held up his hand to quiet the expressions of outrage that echoed around the table.

“There’s one other thing,” Dr. Dalbert continued, fanning out several pages filled with scribbled notes. “You may recall that on my initial visit to Dr. Stephenson’s jail cell a week ago, I left him with a number of papers describing the measurements taken by the ATLAS detector. At the end of my subsequent visit yesterday, after making all his demands, Dr. Stephenson handed me these pages filled with handwritten equations.”

“And?” the president asked.

“And they are nothing short of incredible. I have run these by the top scientists on the ATLAS program and they were stunned. Given rudimentary information and with only pencil and paper, Dr. Stephenson produced a mathematical model of the anomaly that is far more accurate than the project physicists have been able to generate using all their supercomputer simulations. And he did it in less than a week.”

The president leaned forward so that his palms pressed flat on the table. “Are you going to tell us what the paper predicts?”

“The anomaly is gradually spiraling into instability.” Dr. Dalbert took a deep breath. “We have nine months, two weeks, and three days until it reaches the tipping point.”

“Which means?”

“Game over.”

His human eye lay dead in its socket alongside its artificial partner, the impenetrable darkness rendering both of them as useless as his missing lower extremities. But his nose still worked. The stagnant air concentrated the stench around the freshly used camp toilet so powerfully he could taste it.

Raul tied the plastic baggy full of his steaming business and tossed it onto a heap of its mates, piled beside the nonoperational disposal bin. If not for the huge stash of Meals Ready to Eat, water, and supplies that Dr. Stephenson had stored in this secret section of the Rho Ship, Raul would have perished long ago. Lord knew he had tried to kill himself, but the damned nanites that populated his bloodstream wouldn’t permit it, repairing each self-inflicted wound almost as quickly as he had carved it into his flesh. And starvation was out of the question.

The nanites required energy, and when they were denied food, they took fuel from his body tissue, using that energy to keep him alive. The process slowly depleted his body, but the nanite-augmented food and water cravings consumed him.

Once Raul realized he didn’t possess the will to starve himself, he’d given up, resigning himself to this dark hell in which Dr. Stephenson had imprisoned him. But his busy mind refused to allow him to just lie there.

Instead he set about exploring every square centimeter of the large chamber by touch. Blindly pulling himself along, he felt his way along conduits and cables, and over every piece of alien equipment. Only a few months ago, with the power of his connection to the starship’s neural network, every piece of this stuff had been as much a part of him as his own hands and arms. Now the ship was dead, drained of power during Stephenson’s hijacking of Raul’s attempt to create a transitory gravitational gateway.

Why had Stephenson done it? At first Raul had thought it was punishment for his challenge to Stephenson’s authority. But that made no sense. Dr. Stephenson never did anything that didn’t fit into some grand scheme. Yet what benefit could come from completely draining the Rho Ship’s power reserves?

Raul’s mind fingered the questions like worry beads, sliding them back and forth in his brain until his head throbbed with a dull heat. If only he could access the ship’s neural net he could figure it out. Not a likely scenario. The last time he had felt a connection had been the moment he accessed the ship’s maintenance protocol to shut down Stephenson’s program. But he’d been just a moment too late. As the override kicked in, Raul had felt his connection to the Rho Ship die.

Even if the maintenance protocol had succeeded in shutting down the pathways to the remaining power cells, it left Raul no way to restore those channels. It wouldn’t take much power to
do it, but he didn’t even have a watch battery. Just some cases of MREs, a few hundred gallons of distilled water, and a growing pile of festering shit bags.

Festering shit bags. The thought caught in his fevered mind like an annoying song he couldn’t get out of his head.

Festering...shit.

Raul stiffened. Methane gas.

If he’d still had legs Raul would have kicked himself. He had wasted so much time wallowing in self-pity, and the dark-induced madness gnawing at his mind had made lucid moments a rarity. All the while he had had potential power sources lying all around him. Not just methane either. Every MRE came with its own flameless heating pouch. All he had to do was add water to the mixture of magnesium, dust, and salt and in seconds it was hot enough to blister his hands. If he stuck the pouch back in the box along with the MRE, in ten minutes he was rewarded with a hot meal. It was his one remaining luxury.