49
Janet Price stared across the small central room of their hogan at Jack, his eyes locked on the laptop computer that sat on the wooden table, which alternately served as dining table, workbench, and desk. As she studied his lithe form, she could almost feel the tension that rippled the muscles beneath his skin. Like a coiled cobra, Jack was ready to strike.
As Janet looked at him, a lump rose in her throat. She had always been independent, someone who lived on the ragged edge, a full rush of adrenaline her only addiction. Now she had acquired another. She had always thought of love as a myth, an illusion adopted by people who needed a crutch to help them through their boring little lives.
Janet knew the precise instant when she had tumbled over that mythical cliff. It had been that terrible moment when Jack had come for her, when she had stared up into those eyes as he told her to stay awake, the moment on that wooded ridgeline when he had turned back to hunt her pursuers. Perhaps she had allowed herself to fall because she had known she was going to die.
But Jack had not let her die. Even the unbearable pain he had inflicted on her with the injection of the nanite-tainted blood vials only made her love him more. Jack had come back for her, using every means at his disposal, demanding that she stay with him. With those actions, Jack had robbed her of her independence, enslaving her as surely as if he bound her in chains. She should hate him for that, but she couldn’t.
Now Janet had another reason. She was pregnant. Leave it to those damn little nanomachines to fix everything. Even the relatively small dosage Jack had absorbed during his bloody fight with Priest Williams had apparently reversed his vasectomy. Since Janet now had her own nanite infection, she doubted that the pill would have worked either. Pretty soon the world would be left with condoms as the only viable means of birth control.
Jack didn’t know, and Janet wasn’t going to tell him until it became obvious. Her killer angel had enough on his to-do list without having that bombshell dropped on him.
Right now, the information on the laptop was at the top of that to-do list. That they had managed to charge the laptop batteries was a minor miracle of engineering. Despite the periodic assistance and supplies provided by Tall Bear, electric lines didn't run this far into the reservation's interior. And Jack hadn't wanted to attract the attention that the purchase of a generator might provide. So, using a variety of junk parts Tall Bear had scrounged up, and using the windmill to provide the rotary power, they had built one.
One thing about this high New Mexico country, wind was something available in abundance. A bank of a dozen car batteries provided enough storage to cover the brief periods of calm.
All of this had taken considerable time and effort, and only for the last two days had they been able to achieve a power signal clean enough to risk connection to the laptop's transformer. And even though they had power, an Internet connection was a bigger problem. There were no telephone lines, ditto for television cables or satellite equipment.
Still, Jack had been determined to get the computer operational. He wanted to review every bit of data on the system, on the off chance that there might be some clue as to who had betrayed Jonathan Riles and the rest of the team. Jack had always had a knack for disappearing from sight when he had to, sometimes for months at a time. But Janet could tell that this wasn't going to be one of those times.
Janet had been at the keyboard, having just started the computer up, when she saw it. There on her computer desktop sat a file that hadn't been there when she turned it off, a file with the ominous name, "Jack You Need to Read This."
Since they had not been connected to the Internet, and since the computer hadn't even been powered on, there was only one reasonable possibility for the creation of that file. Some sort of virus had been inserted on her system that had been triggered when the system had restarted.
But that didn’t check out. Janet had run a complete set of diagnostics, including state-of-the-art virus checks, all of which reported nothing unusual. More disconcerting was the creation date on the file. It had been created as the system was completing its initial boot-up sequence. That pointed back to a virus, something that she was convinced was not present on the system.
Jack finally shrugged. "Well I guess we should find out what it says."
"That's what I was thinking," Janet replied, sliding back into the chair in front of the keyboard.
She opened the file. It was simple text, short and sweet.
"Jack. I am the NSA's original source about the Rho Project. I assure you that this communication is completely untraceable by any technology, earth or alien. I have placed a chip on top of the CPU in this machine. It sends no signal and receives none. It works by means of what is called a quantum twin, a device for which there is only one counterpart. The quantum states of these two devices are always identical. If you apply a signal to one, it is applied to the other at the same instant. There is no intermediate signal to be detected. I tell you this so that you will know that this was originally an alien technology that I have mastered. No one besides myself is even aware that it exists, other than in theory.
"I tell you this so that you will not destroy this computer or remove the chip. I cannot trace you. I cannot tell where you are. All it offers is an instant means of secure communication.
"I also tell you this because I need you, and I believe you need the services that only I can provide. I am sure you are aware of my capabilities for penetrating secure networks, using other technologies at my disposal. You are, no doubt, cut off from your traditional lines of support and communication. Let me be that line. All you have to do to contact me is to replace the text in this file with your answer. I will be monitoring. Think it over."
"What do you make of that?" Jack said, turning toward Janet.
"I think we need to open up the back of the computer and take a look at that chip. For all we know it might give away our location."
"Oh, we're going to do that, but I don't think we're in much danger of them finding us. If they could do that we would have already had some unwelcome visitors."
Janet closed the screen and flipped the laptop upside down. Extracting a small tool from the case, she removed the cover. Sure enough, there it was, a small chip glued directly atop the CPU.
"Well, that much of the message is true."
Jack nodded. "I have a feeling that most of it is true, although we can bet that this source has its own agenda."
Janet bent closer to the laptop. "I can't see any direct connections to the circuitry. The chip just looks like it was attached with superglue. The connection must be some sort of induction circuit."
"That doesn't seem possible using a chip of that size."
"If we buy the quantum twin thing, then maybe it is possible."
"You've got a point there." Jack grinned.
Janet turned her attention back to the exposed circuit board. "So what do you want to do? Do we deep six the whole laptop? It may have been tampered with in ways that aren't this obvious."
Jack paused. "The laptop doesn't have any external connections, so the technology being used to communicate matches what the message said. Before we do anything else, I want to find out just how useful our new friend can be."
"How so?"
"Slap the cover back on that thing. We're going to ask our source for a good faith deposit."