Wormhole (6 page)

After every headset session, Jack and Janet directed an intense debriefing. Upon discovering the difficulty Heather had encountered in mentally ejecting an uncooperative headset wearer, namely Mark, from her mind, Jack locked in on the problem. He devised a series of trials that became mental wrestling matches. One by one they would each probe each other’s mental defenses, under strict instructions that once they had penetrated another’s barriers, they were to disengage and debrief.

Over the weeks, as Mark, Jen, and Heather grew stronger, it became harder and harder to bypass their opponents’ mental blocks. But when a block failed, those brief glimpses into each other’s souls were both traumatic and thrilling.

Now, settled into the alien couch on the Bandolier Ship’s command deck, Heather recognized Jack’s deeper purpose. All their mental wrestling practice had been designed to ready them for this moment. Only this time their opponent wouldn’t be a living, breathing person.

Mark? Jen?

Right here.
Mark’s mind softly touched hers.

Me too
, Jen intoned.
Following your lead.

Heather centered, focusing her thoughts on the Bandolier Ship, its crew, and the headbands, pulling forth the visions that lurked just beneath her mind’s calm, dark surface. And as those visions intensified, she felt herself sucked across the boundary into a different alien reality.

Mark felt the alien couch enfold his virtual body as Heather’s visions whispered at the corner of his awareness. Lowering all barriers, he allowed the visions in, succumbing to the raw power of Heather’s mind.

In rapid succession, she played back every time they had been on the Bandolier Ship, every time they had been connected to the headsets. Mark felt Jennifer join the effort as Heather absorbed his sister’s solo visits to the Bandolier starship.

Again and again the sequence replayed itself, and each time the emphasis of the vision shifted, replaying the scenes at different speeds and from different perspectives. Suddenly the focus narrowed and intensified.

Gabriel! The name rang their joint minds like the tolling of a distant bell. One of three biblical archangels, regarded as the angel of mercy by most Christians, as the angel of judgment in
the Jewish tradition. It was said the sounding of Gabriel’s horn would signal the end of days.

The Rag Man had been the first to find the Bandolier Ship, the first to wear the fourth headset. He had seen the alien visions, his sick mind interpreting his assigned role as that of the new Gabriel, the one destined to sound the horn to end all things.

And the Rag Man had watched as Mark, Jennifer, and Heather had found the cave and the alien craft. The probabilities clicked into place in Heather’s mind. He had known they had worn the other three headsets. The Rag Man’s access to the starship had been more extensive than their own. The ship had used the Rag Man to evaluate them, seeking to assess their fitness to fulfill the roles represented by the other three headsets, gradually granting them more access as they were deemed worthy.

The shock of that realization stunned Mark. Their Bandolier Ship had granted the Rag Man full access to its data banks, something it continued to deny them. And in the end, the Rag Man had decided that Heather, like Jack’s partner hanging on the meat hook in the Rag Man’s cave, was only worthy of death. What kind of artificial intelligence could be complicit in such judgments?

At the edge of Mark’s consciousness, a subtle change drew his attention. Withdrawing slowly from his link with Heather and Jennifer, Mark shifted his focus toward the thing that had distracted him. The déjà vu feeling reminded him of when he had first detected the pinhole anomaly in his bedroom, the feeling of being watched. But this was different. The cold shiver that crawled slowly up his spine told Mark they had now attracted the attention of something far more dangerous.

The Bandolier Ship filled the back end of the cave, the soft magenta glow so evenly distributed it seemed to emanate from the very air. Against that backdrop, the tables of computers, fluorescent lamps, and monitors made a garish contrast.

“It’s happening!” Yin Tao’s loud voice startled Dr. Joann Drake so that she sloshed her coffee.

“Ow! Shit!” She’d burned her hand. But Joann’s annoyance faded as she glanced over the graduate student’s shoulder at the instrument readings spiking across the bank of flat-panel displays.

Spinning on her heel, Dr. Drake grabbed her iPhone from its docking station, her finger speed-dialing Dr. Hanz Jorgen as she raised the phone to her ear.

“Yes, Joann?”

“We’ve got another event.”

“Now?”

“Just started.” Joann glanced at the nearest monitor. “Thirty seconds ago.”

“On my way.”

The line went dead, and Joann returned her phone to the charging station.

As badly as she wanted to walk over and ascend the ladder into the ship, Joann knew that Hanz expected her to wait for him, the act a slight deferential nod to the Rho Project’s senior scientist. She supposed that when she had won two Nobel Prizes she’d expect that same level of respect from her staff.

Besides, despite Dr. Jorgen’s expansive waistline, he could really move when he wanted to, often acquiring so much momentum on his descent of the steps carved into the canyon’s steep wall that Joann regarded his ability to stop at the bottom a violation of Newton’s first law. On cue, Dr. Jorgen passed through the Bandolier Ship’s camouflaging holograph at the cave entrance, his quick stride carrying him directly toward Joann, more specifically toward the bank of monitors behind her.

His eyes scanned the displays, ignoring Yin Tao’s attempts to offer him a chair.

“Good Lord!”

Joann nodded. “The strongest we’ve ever measured.”

“Why’s it ramping up now?”

Joann understood the reason for Dr. Jorgen’s query; she just didn’t know the answer. The science team assigned to the Bandolier Ship had first observed the power fluctuations several weeks ago. The events lasted several hours and had recurred every Sunday since. They produced no visible effects, but the sensitive instruments that draped the starship’s interior and exterior recorded significant changes in electromagnetic flux, the signals indicating a dramatic increase in shipboard computer activity. The events correlated with a spike in neutrino measurements at
the Super-Kamiokande Cherenkov detector in Japan and with similar measurements at the Sudbury detector in Ontario.

But why Sunday? The seven-day week was a human calendar artifact. Why would an alien ship suddenly begin exhibiting an arbitrary human cycle? More relevantly to Dr. Jorgen’s question, why was it suddenly breaking the pattern with a Thursday-evening event?

“Get the folks at Sudbury on the line.”

“On it,” Yin Tao said, already dialing the number. He spoke a few words, then pressed the speakerphone button.

“This is Dr. Hanz Jorgen at Los Alamos. May I speak to Dr. Oswald?”

“Dr. Oswald is off tonight. This is Dr. Kravitz.”

“Hi, Joe, didn’t know you were back from Banff.”

“Got back yesterday. My legs couldn’t take any more. Haven’t skied powder that deep since college.”

“Listen, Joe, are you guys experiencing any unusual neutrino detections?”

“Funny you should ask. The Cerenkov photomultipliers are indicating a big event, possibly another supernova detection. We were just about to check with Kamiokande. How did you know?”

“Wish I could say, Joe. Sometimes the damned research classification here at Los Alamos makes me wish I were up there with you guys.”

Dr. Kravitz laughed. “You know you’re welcome, Hanz. Anytime you want to stop poking around on alien starships and get back to real science, let me know.”

“If I weren’t so addicted to it, I would, in a heartbeat.”

“Right. Anything else you want to know? I really need to place that call to Japan.”

“No. That’s it. Thanks, Joe.”

“Anytime.”

Dr. Jorgen pushed the
OFF
button, breaking the connection. Motioning for Joann to follow him, Hanz turned toward the Bandolier Ship. Joann knew he probably didn’t understand his desire to get inside the ship any more than she understood hers. All she knew was that, for whatever reason, something now called to her as irresistibly as an Anthemoessan siren.

At the edge of her awareness, Heather knew they’d managed to attract the starship’s attention in a completely new and dangerous way. The AI was reacting in a manner that indicated a friend-or-foe reassessment of all three of them.

Almost immediately she felt a presence try to push its way into her thoughts, scanning, seeking to determine her intentions. Thousands of independent probes scampered through her brain, trying to bypass the barriers she’d erected.

Heather felt a shudder pass through Mark’s mind, felt his focus shift away from her and Jen, toward the Other. And although a series of horrifying visions clotted her thoughts, she released him. Marcus Aurelius Smythe had been made for this moment, his protective nature the likely reason he had chosen his particular headset, or perhaps the reason it had chosen him.

Heather coupled her mind more intimately with Jennifer’s. Jen was the key. As Heather let herself become one with that key, she felt Jen’s desire consume her.

The alien presence filled the void, a computing consciousness devoid of emotion, yet filled with need. That need probed her, probed Jennifer, seeking to violate the most private parts of their minds.

The Other paused, quintillions of simultaneous calculations weighed and measured across its artificial mind. The three young humans had altered their previous protocols in a way that placed the ship’s protective systems at yellow alert. Whereas these crew surrogates had previously shown high degrees of individual curiosity, they now probed as a team, seeking to assert control, bypassing computational shields in a concerted attempt to access restricted data. Only one human had previously been granted such access, one who had opened his mind completely, one whose commitment to the mission had been absolute.

While these three showed great promise, they had not yet demonstrated the required level of commitment to the cause. As badly as the Other needed a crew to complete its mission, its security protocols stood paramount. This coordinated probe of its defenses required a counter-probe, and if that probe proved more than the human minds could tolerate, there should still be time to find suitable replacements.