Chapter 75
“You won’t believe what that brother of mine is up to now.”
Heather glanced up from her book to see Jennifer’s spectacled face peering through her bedroom door.
“What?”
“You'll never guess in a million years.”
“But you’re going to make me try?”
Jennifer walked into the room and plopped down on Heather’s bed. “He joined a society.”
“You mean like the Moose Lodge or the Masons?” Heather shifted in her desk chair to keep facing her friend.
“Something like that.”
“Jen, are you going to tell me or not?”
“Mark is now a card-carrying member of POOTNAS, the Patriotic Order of the Needle and Spool.”
“The sewing circle? The old ladies whose ancestors sewed uniforms for the civil war? You’re kidding, right?”
“That’s what I thought when I heard it, but it’s true.”
“Is it some scheme to meet girls?”
“Not unless he’s really desperate. The youngest member of the Los Alamos Chapter, except Mark, is sixty-seven.”
Heather set her book down behind her on the desk. “So what’s his angle?”
“As far as I can tell, he likes sewing.”
“Since when?”
“All I know is, a couple of days ago he was watching a program on the invention of various stitches and he got very interested. You could just see his face light up. Since then he has been a fanatic on the whole subject. He even went to the library.”
“We are still talking about your brother, Mark, right?”
Jennifer shrugged. “At least it looks like my brother. Currently he’s deeply immersed in articles on slip stitches and the effects of temperature variations on threads.”
“Have you asked him why?”
“Of course. He was shocked that I could even ask. The Sisters of Mercy couldn’t have looked more innocent.”
Heather shook her head. “Well, there’s no making sense out of anything guys do.”
“Oh. Mark distracted me so badly I almost forgot what I came over to tell you. I wanted to tell Mark too, but he told me to quit interrupting him and to get lost. Sometimes he makes me so mad I can’t see straight.”
Heather grinned. “So what did you want to tell me?”
Jennifer propped up two pillows and leaned back against Heather’s headboard. “Something’s been bothering me for a long time now, something that I’d seen in the data the last time we were on the ship.”
The topic of the ship brought Heather to full attention. Though they had thoroughly swept her room for bugs, it still made her nervous to talk about it.
“Bothering you? Why?”
“At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. But this morning I was playing the whole thing back in my mind and I found it. Then I went on the Internet to get some data about the Aztec Crash back in 1948, and it all started to make sense to me.”
Jennifer paused, lacing her fingers behind her head. “The debris they found outside of Aztec wasn’t from the ship at the lab. The debris came from our ship.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Think about it. Both ships were involved in the Aztec Incident. They shot each other down that night, didn’t they? But the ship the government found didn’t have a hole punched through it. Ours did. I think when the Rho Ship’s weapon penetrated the hull of the Second Ship, the decompression sucked out some debris. I also wondered about the missing crew. I think they got sucked out through that hole.”
Heather nodded. “Like the imagery we saw. Sucked out into the vacuum of space.”
“You know what that debris means? The government knows there was a second ship, and Stephenson has probably figured out that both ships shot each other down. Our subspace hack into the NSA’s secure networks might put him onto us.”
Heather chewed her lower lip, the odds of such a thing working themselves out in her thoughts.
“Possible, but not likely. I still believe the NSA folks think they’re getting a warning from someone working on the Rho Project with access to its technology. I don’t think they would have tipped off anyone on the Rho Project while they are checking into it.”
“Let’s hope not. In the meantime, I suggest we be even more careful when communicating with the NSA.”
Heather stood up. “Okay. Let’s go interrupt Mark from sewing a Superman cape or whatever he’s up to. It’s time to bring that brother of yours back down to this planet.”