42
A wave of weakness assaulted Raul, something that he hadn’t felt in a long time. If anything, he felt stronger with the passing of each day. His success in tapping into the external Internet had provided an exhilaration that drove him to speed up his work.
Despite his growing familiarity with the shipboard neural net, Raul had to admit that understanding the alien technologies that made this ship possible remained well beyond his grasp. Perhaps he would never completely understand them, although he didn’t really believe that. Every time he was able to fix another of the ship’s circuits, more of the neural network came back on line. And as that network improved, so did his mental capabilities. After all, he was thinking with it. At this point, it was merely an extension of his own brain.
What Raul had learned about the ship’s technology fascinated him. Apparently, the alien race that had created it, whom he had come to think of as the Makers, had mastered a technology other alien races regarded as dangerous and unstable. The data records he had been able to piece together referred to those other races as the Enemy. And unlike the Enemy, who had adopted the use of subspace technologies, the Makers had learned to manipulate gravity.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right. They manipulated gravitational effects, completely in the absence of matter. The Makers specialized in what earth scientists were just now beginning to investigate, the science of black holes and wormholes, where conventional mathematics breaks down.
Unlike a black hole, where anything that passes across its event horizon is crushed out of existence, wormholes created rips in the space-time fabric so that the distance between two places disappeared. It was the theory behind star gates—a way to travel from here to there by merely stepping through an opening.
It was the use of one minor aspect of the wormhole technology that had allowed Raul to tap into the Internet. He had managed to bring just enough of the ship’s systems back online to produce the tiniest of these distortions, not so much a wormhole as a worm fiber.
In some ways, it helped him to think of these tiny wormholes like the optical fibers used in standard fiber-optics. Only these fibers were not limited to light passing back and forth. They made it possible for any signal to pass through.
The process of directing the worm fibers was as natural to the shipboard control systems as tuning a radio. But it had still taken Raul a considerable amount of time and effort to learn to examine and tap into earthbound computer networks. He had no possibility of plugging in a network cable, but the worm fiber link established a virtual splice into existing lines.
The downside of the gravitational technology was the massive amount of energy required to make the magic happen. From what Raul had learned, it was the reason the Enemy hated the Makers so ravenously. The Makers had created technologies that directly consumed matter, converting it to pure energy, and that energy provided fuel that had made the impossible practical, creating a thirst for resources that grew with their expanding capabilities.
Even the creation of the tiniest of worm fibers, such as what Raul had accomplished, drained power from what remained of the ship’s systems in a frightening manner, each attempt requiring a lengthy recovery period to recharge. Raul was filled with a worry that if he tried too much he might completely drain the reserves, something that might kill his ship permanently.
Still, he had managed to store up just enough power for this one experiment. Raul had tapped into the Santa Fe traffic management computer system just long enough to take control of the traffic cameras and signal lights at a busy intersection. At the key instant, he had extended the yellow light on one signal while allowing the other to go green, something that had produced the most amazing results.
Raul wished he could maintain the connection just a little longer so he could watch the response as emergency crews arrived, but he had already overtaxed the system. As he killed the worm fiber link and switched all non-essential systems to standby, Raul grinned.
Successful test.