Chapter 69
2:30 a.m.
Donald Stephenson moved through the near darkness of the cavernous room with his head bowed in thought. One of the advantages of not needing sleep was that it gave him more time for thought, and deep thought was something at which he excelled.
Everyone knew that he worked long hours and slept very little, but only he knew how little he slept: never. And judging by the incompetence of the team of scientists that worked for him on the project, it was a very good thing he did not need any rest. Complete morons, the lot of them.
It really irked the deputy director to have to disrupt the truly challenging work that lay before him to have to deal with trivial things, like the formulation of the nanite suspension fluid. But no amount of pressure could drive Dr. Frederick’s team to an adequate solution.
So tonight, in a matter of four hours, Dr. Stephenson had interrupted his own work, made his way to Dr. Frederick's section of the lab, and devised his own working formulation. Then, having left a disparaging note with the description of the production process, Dr. Stephenson made his way back to the Rho Ship. Idiots.
As he moved up the ramp and through the inner passageways of the ship, Dr. Stephenson glanced up at the arrays of sensors and video monitors that had been installed throughout. Nothing happened on this ship that was not recorded, scrutinized, and analyzed to the nth degree. Not just by himself, but by the assortment of government watchdogs for the program, some of which were under his direct influence while others were not.
Because of this detailed monitoring, Dr. Stephenson had added a few after-hours enhancements to the system’s inner workings. A sequence of post-processing algorithms ran the data constantly, usually just passing the input signals, unmodified, to the recording and analysis systems.
But anything that involved Dr. Stephenson’s passage into or out of his private third of the Rho Ship did not show up. During these times, the video, audio, and other assorted systems showed him moving about other areas of the ship, working on typical, mundane tasks.
The same was true for those rare instances, such as with Dr. Nancy Anatole, when he had taken someone else back with him. The systems within the inner portion of the ship alerted him whenever an unexpected visitor approached, allowing him plenty of time to make his exit and greet them.
Tonight his long, lanky stride carried Dr. Stephenson rapidly to the wall that blocked access to the ship’s rear third. He stopped, his hands tracing out the complex fractal pattern required to gain entrance. The door whisked open, snapping shut again behind him, leaving him immersed in a light as colorless as shadow on asphalt.
The apparatus that drew him through the narrow rows of equipment and cables occupied the very center of the large room. It was by far the largest single mechanism on the Rho Ship. To develop an understanding of what it did and how it had once worked had taken him thirteen years.
But the onboard power systems had been so badly damaged by the subspace weapon that brought the ship down that they would never again be capable of powering the device. And even if it worked, it simply was not large enough for his needs. Still, it had provided the blueprint.
Running his hands lovingly across its brutish lines, Dr. Stephenson smiled, his face contorting like a Mardi Gras mask.
This coming project was going to take time, but that was something the deputy director had in abundance. In the meantime, global acceptance of cold fusion was going swimmingly.
Very soon now, he would undertake the government release of the second alien technology. It would sweep the planet like wildfire, as the people of nation after nation demanded to be the next to get it. After a long procession of petty dictators’ misguided attempts, Stephenson had finally set mankind’s train in motion. Next stop…Utopia.