It seemed a small miracle, but it wasn’t. Parting the Red Sea was a small miracle. Walking on water was a small miracle. What Raul had accomplished made those feats pale in comparison. Legless, stranded alone in the dark, he had brought the Rho Ship back from the dead.
What had started with the lightning bolt from the capacitor into the power cell had progressed to the point that Raul had acquired complete control of the starship’s maintenance system. Then, taking great care to prevent the emission of any signal that would tip off the scientists who thought the Rho Ship dead, Raul had brought a total of thirteen power cells back online. More importantly he’d restored the matter disrupter to full function, feeding it the bags of human waste for the initial fuel to power up those cells.
Today would mark the next major milestone in the restoration of his power. Today he would reassume control over the ship’s neural net. Raul felt a quiver pass through his body at the thought. But this time there would be nobody who could wrest its control from him, no hidden daemon processes running beneath his awareness. He’d taken extreme care to ensure that all systems were restored to default settings, having run a maintenance-level wipe that guaranteed no trace of a Stephenson infection remained in any of the starship’s systems.
Raul initiated one final diagnostic, anxiously awaiting the result. Around him the maintenance lighting seemed to emanate from the air itself, the soft glow revealing the jumble of alien equipment that covered the bulk of the room’s floor, a floor that, if all went well, he’d no longer be required to slither across on his arms and ass. He’d once again feel the awesome mind meld to the central computer, and that would enable his command of the ship’s stasis field.
The alien maintenance computer piped the diagnostic results directly into his brain. No anomalies detected. Primary system access ready.
Raul hesitated the merest fraction of a second before giving the command. Primary system engage.
The suddenness of the transition momentarily disoriented him. There was no gradual boot-up process. It was as if he’d never been cut off from the main neural net. One moment he was only Raul, the next he was one with the Rho Ship, able to feel every aspect of its physical state, experiencing the small percentage of the ship that was currently functional, while feeling the pain of its damaged subsystems.
With a thought, Raul accessed the stasis field generator, rising into the air as he dimmed the light until the room was no brighter than a moonlit night. The exultation that rippled through the Raul part of himself felt good, really good. Looking out over the inner chamber, Raul smiled. Pulling thousands of strands from the stasis field, Raul shifted his attention to restoring the Rho ship to full health.
Just outside the Rho Ship, Jill McMartin, a UC graduate student, glanced up to the spot where the Rho Ship lay cradled on the huge U-shaped steel supports. She could have sworn she’d seen something. A glance at the monitors told her she’d just imagined it. As sad as it was, all her wishing couldn’t bring the alien starship back to life. It remained just as dead as it had been since that late November night. And with Dr. Stephenson off in Europe, dead was exactly how it was going to stay.
Ketaan-Ra studied the data streaming in through his cortical implants, four-dimensional imagery supplemented with thousands of channels of audio and multispectral data. Pulling forth a galactic hologram, he allowed the signal to pull him into a tight zoom toward a yellow star in one of the galaxy’s outer spiral arms.
The view tightened, centered on the third planet from this sun, a watery world that had been deemed of sufficient interest to warrant the sending of a world ship. Scanning through the background data, Ketaan-Ra pulled up the specs he already knew by heart.
Planet K3VX789ZL10-X, the X indicating lost or abandoned world ship. After pinging steady progress reports for the last 2.319E19 cesium cycles, the world ship had gone silent, remaining so for long enough that the High Council had deemed it lost. That designation had resulted in the standing down of the invasion cohort assigned to its attuned gateway, which had been placed at a low-grade monitoring status.
Of the tens of thousands of soldiers assigned to his command for all those cycles, only Ketaan-Ra remained, even that commitment a testament to the council’s reluctance to accept defeat. Leaving him assigned to an empty command, tethered to his dead world ship, was merely a repudiation of his mission’s failure, one failure wiping away a lifetime of heroic deeds in the service of the Kasari Collective.
Now, as he immersed himself in the sea of data cascading through his external sensory feeds, Ketaan-Ra allowed his cybernetic augments to release a slow flow of chemicals into his adrenal system, an indulgence this discovery justified. Removing the trailing X from the planetary designation, he rerouted the data stream to Zaalex-Ka, the High Council’s data minder.
As another surge of chemical warmth coursed through his system, he leaned back in his data couch. Out there on that distant and primitive planet, someone had managed to bring his world ship back from the dead, resurrecting, along with it, the career of one Cohort Commander Ketaan-Ra.
Heroin.
The word wormed its way into Jennifer’s clouded mind. She tugged at the strings of her memory, pulling up the drug’s symptoms, running a systematic cross-check against her own bodily functions. She channeled the haze away, searching for clarity, achieving just enough focus to remember Mark’s trick. She turned her thoughts to a memory of how it felt to be bright and alert, wrapping herself in the perfect recollection of that chosen moment.
All the comfortable fuzziness was gone, shunted off into a space with which she no longer had a connection. Jennifer felt her old self click into place. As unbelievable as it was, the US government was funneling high-grade heroin into her veins and it didn’t take a hell of a lot of imagination to figure out why. They wanted her physically addicted.
“Well that does it, Mr. President. You can forget about my vote.”
Feeling the fuzziness filter back into her thoughts, Jennifer recentered. Suddenly she found herself really, really pissed off. The goddamned US government had decided it was OK to treat her worse than Don Espe?osa had. And they justified it how? Probably the same way they’d justified the hatchet job on Jack’s team.
It was time to figure out where she was, how she’d gotten here, and how she was going to get herself, Mark, and Heather out. A coldness, like ice on an arctic trawler, crept over Jennifer Smythe.
Jennifer clenched her jaw. One thing was certain. These people had no idea whom the hell they were screwing with.
She opened her eyes, her gaze coming to rest on Eric Frost, the NSA employee whose twisting fingers controlled the heroin drip line.
Frost found his latest duty boring at best, slightly disturbing at worst. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done his share of black ops, but hooking a teenage girl on drugs didn’t seem like something he would be spotlighting on his résumé.
Then she moved unexpectedly, her head turning toward him. His eyes widened in surprise as he felt his body tense. As he stared down at the suddenly smiling girl, he felt a sense of gentle peace envelop his soul.
“That’s right, Eric. No use fighting it. Now you’re mine,” she said.
And she was right.