IMMUNE(Book Two of The Rho Agenda) By Richard Phillips
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my lovely wife, Carol, for her support, encouragement, and feedback throughout the telling of this tale. Many thanks to Alan Werner for the long hours he spent going over the story line and providing me his fresh perspective. Finally I want to thank the wonderful staff at Synergy Books, for all their fine work in shaping the final product into a smoother and more enjoyable read.
1
The naked teenage boy lay flat, suspended in the air as if he rested upon an invisible examination table.
If he could have blinked his eyes, he would have. But that was not possible. The stasis field that held him suspended four feet above the floor permitted no such movement. Instead, his eyes stared upward, unable to close, unable to blink, his movements now subject to a will other than his own.
Gray light from the conduits that snaked overhead illuminated the jumble of machinery crowding the room. The teen’s ears thrummed with the low, throbbing pulse of the machinery that surrounded him. He wasn’t sure how long he had lain there. Except for the thrumming, his only full-time companion was pain. He dared not think about his other visitor.
A subtle current in the air wafted around his body, a passing coolness that gently brushed the hairs on his arms and alerted him to the visitor’s arrival before the other man passed into his peripheral vision. The arrival confirmed only one thing: God had abandoned him. A lifetime of belief had been stripped away; the awful truth lay bare. No loving God would allow his child to endure this. Not this.
The face of Dr. Donald Stephenson, deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, swam into the boy’s view. The scientist's eyes swept him as clinically as a medical examiner studying a corpse. An apparatus the size of a small screwdriver dangled from Stephenson’s fingertips. From one end, a bundle of hair-thin wires extended for an inch and a half; the other end terminated in an odd-shaped lens that swiveled about on a pivot. Leaning in close, Dr. Stephenson held the device to the teen’s face, reaching out with his left hand to touch the skin that covered the orbital socket of the boy’s right eye. Satisfied, the deputy director set the device to one side and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
Stephenson's hawkish face leaned in once more.
"Good morning, Raul. Shall we begin?"
Clamped within the grasp of the invisible lines of force that draped his body, Raul's mouth could not even twitch to release a scream as the scalpel removed his right eyelid, then scooped deeply into the socket. A single spurt of blood splattered Raul's face before his nanite-infested bloodstream could stem the flow. Moving faster than Raul's healing process, Dr. Stephenson thrust the end of the lens device into the empty socket, sending the hair-like wires squirming into Raul's head, burrowing deep into the exposed optic nerve.
Having abandoned his prayers for death, Raul hurled his mental curses at the God who had abandoned his son to an altogether more horrifying crucifixion.