Mark looked up as Jennifer closed her briefing folder and rose to stand beside the kitchen table.
“I’m sorry, guys, I’ve got to get some sleep.”
Mark bent a questioning gaze on his sister. “Sleep?”
Jennifer shrugged, and in that motion Mark noticed the slight tremors traversing her body. “Heroin’s a bitch. Sleep helps, even for me. OK, Jack?”
Jack studied her closely, then nodded. “I guess you can catch up with the others in the morning, but you’re going to have to bring it.”
It wasn’t exactly a gracious dismissal, but Jennifer appeared not to notice. A glance at Heather’s concerned face told Mark that she had. He understood Jack’s need to drive them all hard, but Mark didn’t have to like it, especially when it came to ignoring what the NSA bastards had done to his sister.
After all, they’d worked on the plan for sixteen straight hours. Mark knew the construction plans for the ATLAS cavern and for the matter ingester power station nicknamed the MINGSTER, knew the blueprints, knew every aspect of the electrical wiring, knew what companies had which contracts. Still Jack wasn’t satisfied. Now they were working their way through the dossiers of all personnel currently assigned to the November Anomaly Project. Still on the docket for the night, Mark had to learn the stasis field generator wiring and construction plans. Heather still needed to study the rest of Dr. Stephenson’s papers.
Jack had selected their future project roles, but he was waiting for them to complete the background work before he took them through his plans for getting them the right jobs with the appropriate firms, and for getting them assigned to the desired positions on Gateway Day.
Mark found his future role intriguing. He would become Gunter Fogel, a hotshot young electrical technician with Kohl Engineering. His mission was to impress the lead engineer, Gerhardt Werner, and get himself assigned to the construction team inside the ATLAS cavern. Jennifer would take on the role of Dr. Nika Ivanovich, a Russian postdoctoral scientist working on Dr. Peter Trotsky’s team specializing in the theory and operation of the stasis field controllers.
Heather’s mission would place her in the role of Inga Hedstrom, to become one of the Swiss security guards in the ATLAS cavern on G-Day. Dr. Stephenson had insisted that no military be assigned near the wormhole device through which the anomaly would be transported on G-Day, the military’s role being to ensure security of the entire site, preventing outside forces from disrupting construction or operations. Only a couple of guards would maintain watch within the cavern, typically two or three to a shift, and those would be provided by Paladin, a Swiss private security firm. The inside guards were only there to do Dr. Stephenson’s bidding, including evicting unwanted personnel from the premises.
This would leave Heather with little to do on G-Day, exactly what Jack wanted. It put her in position to use her unique abilities to recognize unanticipated problems and to take immediate corrective action. While her position would be the least complicated, it would also be the most difficult to set up ahead of time.
Rising from his seat, Mark walked over to the coffeepot and refilled his mug. Rolling his neck, he felt it pop and crackle. Definitely too much sitting. But as he raised his cup to his lips, feeling the hot liquid flow over his tongue, he held no illusions. The butt-flattening had only just begun.
The stasis tendrils swarmed to complete the last of the repairs, each delicate line of force its own thread of execution within the massive neural net that was Raul. He was so close now to accomplishing something Dr. Stephenson had never imagined, bringing the Rho Ship back to full functionality.
Not that he intended to go anywhere in his starship. Although he could explore the solar system, he couldn’t get to the stars, not and survive the trip. The one advantage the Altreians’ subspace warp technology had over the power of the wormhole drive was the way it enabled the ship to travel to the stars with living occupants. While the subspace engine allowed faster-than-light travel, it was nowhere near as fast as making the distance between here and there cease to exist the way his wormhole drive did. Still, the whole dying thing limited that sort of travel to unmanned ships.
Raul knew what Stephenson was trying to accomplish. He knew what Stephenson had done when he’d used Raul to unknowingly facilitate the November Anomaly’s creation. He knew how Stephenson had used that to force the world to build his gateway. With access to the history of the Kasari Collective, Raul knew all about how things were supposed to work and what had gone wrong here on Earth.
Theoretically, the Rho Ship’s wormhole drive could connect to a gateway, forming a survivable transport portal. The real problem was the portal size. In such a configuration, the portal would have to be inside the ship, and the wormhole drive would have to be configured to operate with a reduced footprint. Where it normally ramped up and thrust the starship through a newly formed wormhole, it didn’t have to maintain that wormhole for very long. But a gateway needed to remain open for extended periods and had to be large enough to allow the transport of troops and heavy equipment. That kind of extended operation required a large matter disrupter facility and a massive portal, the kind Stephenson was building in Switzerland.
Raul’s neural network roamed the World Wide Web via worm fiber connections, just as it monitored satellite and radio frequency broadcasts. It had allowed him to learn the details of Dr. Stephenson’s plans. More importantly, it had led him to an inescapable conclusion about Heather and the Smythe twins. Stephenson didn’t know about their altered abilities. The Rho Project hadn’t had anything to do with that.
That left only one other possibility. They had found the Altreian ship long before the government had discovered its cave. Somehow, that ship had altered them. Everything the Altreians did had a purpose, and the only purpose Raul could see in enhancing these humans had been to turn them into soldiers, soldiers whose only mission was to stop the Rho Ship from accomplishing its agenda. That now meant stopping Dr. Stephenson.
Raul knew enough about the Kasari Collective to know he didn’t want them on Earth. Not because he thought their assimilation of the human race would be harmful to the Earth’s population. The Kasari merely wanted to add to their numbers and resources. In doing so the human population would be augmented, illness eliminated, life spans extended for millennia, wars a thing of the past...at least internal wars. None of that bothered him. But if the Kasari came through, Raul would lose the special power he’d worked so hard to achieve.
If Stephenson hadn’t created the November Anomaly, Raul would have put a stop to his plans. But turning the Earth into a black hole wasn’t an option. So now he had the same problem Heather and her friends had.
Since Dr. Stephenson had to be allowed to succeed in creating his gateway in order to get rid of the anomaly, Heather and the Smythes would be irresistibly drawn to the November Anomaly Project. They would have to be on-site to have any chance of shutting down the gateway after the anomaly was transported, but before Stephenson could synchronize it with its sister Kasari gateway. On what Stephenson was calling G-Day, Heather would be inside the ATLAS cavern, close enough to Stephenson’s portal for Raul’s purpose.
And then he would never be alone again.