A curly wisp of smoke wafted up from the table. An acrid odor emanated from the soldering iron and irritated Heather’s nose, causing it to crinkle as she sniffed away the oncoming sneeze.
“Waiting on you, Mark.” Jennifer’s jibe barely registered, though, as Mark remained focused on bridging the last delicate trace.
Setting the iron back in its spring stand, Mark leaned over and snapped the plastic cover in place. “That’s it.”
He reached across the laptop, plugging the dongle into the forward USB port.
“It hasn’t cooled,” Jennifer said. “You’ll break it!”
“Trust me.”
“You said that last week,” Heather said, although she had considerably more faith in his electrical craftsmanship than her comment indicated.
“Power spike. Not my fault.”
Heather laughed. “OK. OK. Let’s just finish this off and test it.”
Despite the banter, she could see Mark was excited. They all were. If this worked, it marked a revolution in the capabilities of their computer lab, intelligence center, or whatever they chose to call the thatch-roofed outbuilding that housed the Frazier computer and communications complex. They had already modified the circuit boards in all the laptops to add built-in subspace receiver transmitters, but this would enable them to add subspace communications capabilities to any computer, just by plugging in a small USB device.
Heather let her gaze wander the room, pausing at the sealed door leading into the adjacent “clean room.” It represented the culmination of their efforts these last three months. Still, as amazing as their electronics work had become, it only formed a part of Jack’s sci-fi weekends, the other part being their ongoing headset exploration of their starship’s data banks.
When they’d arrived at the Frazier hacienda, it had been mid-January, Bolivian summer. They hadn’t recognized the pressure cooker in which they were about to be immersed. To be fair, Jack and Janet had clearly laid out the training program, and Mark, Jen, and Heather had all volunteered. Knowing what she knew now, she would still have done it...just not with the same degree of enthusiasm.
She still missed her parents, and worried about them constantly. Only fear that contact would place them in danger had prevented communication, that and the fact that Jack had strictly forbidden it. But Heather’s visions had taken on a darker tone of late, bringing her to the brink of a decision that could knock Mark, Jen, and herself from this perch they had worked so hard to attain. Had it been any other topic, she would have consulted Jack and Janet. But not this. It was too important, too personal. Mark and Jennifer were the only ones she would divulge her fears to. But not yet. Not while hope remained.
“Helloooo. Anyone home in there?” Mark nudged her.
“What? Oh, sorry. Lost in thought.”
“Let’s fire it up.”
Jennifer opened the laptop, took a deep breath, and pressed the power button. The Windows logo replaced the black-and-white BIOS screen. From her position behind and to the right of Jennifer, Heather found the 7,204 rpm drive noise disconcerting; still, six hundredths of a percent’s variance from the drive spec was well within tolerance: nothing to worry about. Though Heather succeeded in banishing the small worry from her thoughts, her mind replaced it with another. Would the USB oscillating circuit deliver the required performance? It would if the printed circuit thin film resistors performed within tolerance. Christ. Chinese components.
“So far so good,” Jen said. “Now let’s see if our super Wi-Fi dongle works.”
Mark cracked his knuckles. “After all that effort, it better.”
“It will.” Heather hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. A probability of 73.65847 percent was far from a certainty.
Jen began rattling off the steps from her mental checklist.
“Entering coordinate. Identifying available networks. Selecting network. Sniffing packets...verified. Inserting TCP packets...verifying responses.” Heather found herself grinning even as Jennifer thrust her hands into the air. “Yes!”
Smacking Mark’s hand in a quick series of high fives, Heather finally released the breath she’d been holding.
Mark leaned down for a closer look at the display. “You know what this means? Our bag of tricks just got a hell of a lot lighter.”
“Plug ’n play.”
Mark placed his hand on Jen’s left shoulder. “It’s dinnertime. Let’s shut it down. We’ve got a long night ahead.”
The vision tugged at the mind curtain Heather closed to block it. Mark had no idea how right he was.