Wormhole - 03 Page 32

  “Sounds like the deflector shields on the starship Enterprise.”

  “That’s one way to think about it.”

  “So what is the second stasis field generator for?”

  “Good question. Once the primary stasis field generator has captured the anomaly, scientists will activate the Rho Gateway Device to create a wormhole into deep space. However, an opening into the vacuum of space would immediately depressurize the facility, sucking out the air and all of us with it. The secondary stasis field generator will form an invisible door sealing off the Gateway Device opening, before the gateway is activated. Once the wormhole has formed, scientists will confirm the far end coordinates to ensure it’s not too close to Earth or within a star. Then they will use the primary stasis field generator to move the anomaly to the gateway, modulating the two stasis fields to allow the first to pass through the second and release the anomaly into the wormhole.”

  “And after that?”

  “I would guess there’s going to be a big party.”

  The camera shifted back to Ted’s nervous smile. “Let’s all hope and pray that happens.”

  “Approaching final countdown to anomaly capture.” The last ten seconds of the countdown echoed through the cavern. “Initiating anomaly capture.”

  With a sound like thunder, the huge steel anomaly containment device came apart and crashed to the concrete floor. For several seconds, the only sound that could be heard was the reverberating echoes of its fall.

  Then the alarm sounded.

  “Warning...primary stasis field generator power at eighty-two percent and falling. Stasis field degradation detected.”

  At the ATACC, a bearded Scandinavian technician ran toward one of the large electronic racks, his long blond hair flowing out behind him as he leaped up onto the second level of equipment, ripped out a panel, rolled onto the floor, and slid his torso inside.

  On his perch, high above the others, Dr. Stephenson shifted from one keyboard to the next, pounding his fist on the desktop in frustration. Suddenly his voice took over the PA system.

  “Initiate procedure to swap primary and secondary stasis field generator controls. Dr. Trotsky, override the con from your position. Now!”

  As the pulsing alarm blared, Ted stared in horror as the air surrounding the point where the anomaly containment device had previously been suspended acquired a pale-blue glow within what he could only imagine was the failing spherical stasis field.

  A flurry of activity along the near side of the ATACC pulled his eyes away from the glowing sphere. Several people had moved to surround a gray-haired scientist at one of the ATACC workstations who had slumped forward over the controls.

  Remembering who he was, Ted pulled himself together and pointed. “Get me a camera on that.”

  The video feed shifted, zooming in on the group of scientists gathered behind the workstation. A young woman in a white lab coat pushed her way through, physically lifting the scientist from the chair, handing his unconscious body to two men, then sliding into his chair. The woman’s hands moved across multiple keyboards, her actions a blur, backdropped by a bank of flat-panel displays. The movements of her lithe body, the way her short, spiked, platinum-blonde hair framed her face, gave Ted a déjà vu moment, reminding him of a hot pop star rising up into the sky above her European concert audience.

  “Warning...primary stasis field generator power at forty percent and falling. Stasis field failure imminent.”

  As he continued to watch the exotic young physicist work, Ted heard a low moan of dread rise up from the other scientists, a moan that entered the microphones and drifted out to a network audience of billions.

  President Jackson stared at the CNN broadcast, surrounded by his national security team. General Smith’s tense voice sounded through the encrypted satellite speakerphone.

  “Mr. President. We are out of time.”

  Looking around the room, meeting the eyes of each member of his staff, each head nodding in affirmation, the president swallowed, then spoke with reluctant authority.

  “General Smith, I authorize you to immediately implement Anomaly Fail-Safe Plan Bravo.”

  “Mr. President, I read back. General Smith, I authorize you to immediately implement Anomaly Fail-Safe Plan Bravo.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Roger, Mr. President. Smith out.”

  Raising his eyes once again to the television screen, President Jackson spoke again, his voice barely rising above a whisper.

  “God help us all.”

  General Raymond Smith swiveled his chair and nodded to the only other person in the command and control bunker beneath Ramstein Air Base, just outside Kaiserslautern, Germany: Major Bob Glendale.

  “You heard the president’s authorization?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Open your envelope.”

  As Bob reached for the envelope on the workstation in front of him, General Smith turned to face front, picked up a knife, and slit open his own brown manila envelope, spilling the contents onto his own workstation.

  He glanced at the checklist, but he knew it by heart. This wasn’t Anomaly Fail-Safe Plan Alpha. This was Bravo. That meant there would be no warning to the poor bastards inside the ATLAS cavern. The president had just given the nuke-it-now order.

  Picking up the cylindrical red key with the #1 tag dangling from it, the general glanced over at Major Glendale, who had his own key in hand.

  “Insert keys.”

  The major inserted his key in the console as General Smith mirrored his action.

  “Activate on my mark. Mark.”

  As the keys turned in unison, a bright green LED lit up on the panel in front of General Smith. Flipping up the red trigger guard, General Smith took a single deep breath, pushing from his mind the thought of the innocents soon to die. Then he thumbed the toggle switch to DETONATE.

  Watching the imagery from a dozen separate worm fibers, Raul rubbed his hands in anticipation. Despite the heady stew of arrayed forces that had long been destined for this moment—an alien armada, Dr. Stephenson, three Altreian ship mutants, and the combined intellectual might of the Earth’s best and brightest—only Raul had put it all together.

  Here, floating in his own fortress of solitude, he could feel the power bubbling up through his neural net, the awesome force of God’s will. Right now, at this singular moment, there was only one archangel, and Raul was it. Not God’s son as he’d earlier believed, but his mighty right hand. His entire life had been in preparation for this.

  Raul had checked and rechecked his preparations. After all, he’d only get one chance at this, and the tolerances were very tight. If he hadn’t had complete access to the alien invasion plan right within his starship’s archive, what he was going to do would have been impossible. But he had the gateway synchronization codes and the stasis field modulation codes from the original plan. And since Stephenson was intent on bringing the aliens through the gateway, he was going to have to match those codes.

  The image of Dr. Stephenson calmly strolling through Raul’s stasis field formed in his mind. Yeah, Raul had enjoyed a front-row seat at a demo of just what someone with knowledge of the stasis field modulation codes could accomplish. He just hoped Stephenson got to try that little number again.

  It wasn’t just Stephenson that was going to get a little surprise. The Kasari Collective had done this thousands of times on worlds across the galaxy. But they hadn’t counted on their world ship being shot down on Earth, hadn’t anticipated Dr. Stephenson’s crazy plan to force world governments to build the gateway by creating a micro black hole.

  That’s what made the tolerances so tight. Stephenson was counting on a brief delay before he applied the gateway synchronization codes after creating the wormhole, just enough time to use a second stasis field to push the anomaly into deep space before locking down the other end of the gateway. It wouldn’t do to have the alien Wehrmacht charge right into a blossoming black hole.

  R
aul didn’t particularly want to be sitting on an ex-planet either. That meant he couldn’t just sync the Rho Ship’s own wormhole generation engine with Stephenson’s gateway. So he had to let the initial stages of Dr. Stephenson’s operation go as planned, before he made his play. And so did Heather and the Smythe twins. It was why they had to be on-site. Glorious.

  Back when Raul had first gained complete access to the rebooted Rho Ship’s computers and discovered that no living thing could survive a one-ended wormhole transit, he’d wondered why the Kasari hadn’t just sent their robotic world ship through and then utilized it to form the far end of the gateway. After all, each ship had its own wormhole generation engines.

  The problem was that, while the world ships could generate their own transit wormholes and could even establish a temporary link to a full-sized Kasari gateway, they couldn’t produce one of the size and stability capable of transporting a Kasari invasion force and its equipment. And while their population seduction technique didn’t always work, the Kasari had never experienced a failure, once a gateway had gone active. Until today.

  As Raul watched the worm fiber imagery play out in his head, a slow grin crept across his face, his artificial eye firmly locked onto the feed of a black-garbed security guard.

  “Hello, Heather.”

  Weapons specialist Inga Hedstrom cradled the M25 counter-defilade target engagement rifle in the crook of her left arm as she scanned the ATLAS cavern. All the guards carried the M25, although they were only allowed to load the same goober nonlethal rounds that had been used to capture Heather and the Smythes in Bolivia. The thinking was that if anyone freaked out on G-Day, they could freeze him in place without running the possibility of damaging critical equipment. But today she had substituted high-explosive air burst rounds for the goobers.

  Nodding to her Spanish teammate on the metal walkway twenty feet up and to her left, she let her visions take her.

  Mark and Jennifer were in the cavern, going about their assigned duties, taking no notice of her. Today they all carried the Bandolier Ship headsets, wearing them around their necks, hers hidden beneath the black uniform’s collar. Just one more precaution among the many they had taken. Heather just hoped they would be enough.

  The countdown to anomaly capture was progressing normally, Dr. Stephenson on his perch at the primary command console, high above the rest of the scientists and technicians manning the ATACC workstations around the gateway’s base.

  “Approaching final countdown to anomaly capture.” The announcement was replaced by the final countdown. “Initiating anomaly capture.”

  The anomaly containment device came apart, its parts crashing to the floor less than fifty meters from where she stood. Heather tensed. The culmination of all their planning was seconds away, and just like Mark and Jen, she was ready.

  The blaring alarm gave way to an even louder PA announcement.

  “Initiate procedure to swap primary and secondary stasis field generator controls. Dr. Trotsky, override the con from your position. Now!”

  As Jennifer shoved the unconscious Trotsky aside and took over at the secondary control console, Heather saw Mark rip away the metal panel covering the electronics powering the primary stasis field. Mark had less than a minute to restore power to the primary field generator in order for it to pick up the secondary stasis field generator’s initial mission, which was as important as Jennifer’s taking control of the anomaly with the secondary stasis field.

  As she watched the anomaly pulse energy into the containment field, equations cascaded through Heather’s mind. The handoff from the primary to the secondary field generator had been expertly handled, but matter had leaked in, sending the anomaly into a death spiral. Until the primary stasis field regained power to seal the portal, Stephenson couldn’t activate the wormhole device. If Mark was late by even a few seconds, none of this was going to matter.

  “Primary stasis field power back online!”

  A cheer went up from the ATACC as Dr. Stephenson shifted at his console.

  “Immediate wormhole generation commencing.”

  No time for a countdown. Just enough to create the wormhole and validate the far end’s space-time coordinates; then Jennifer would modulate the secondary stasis field to allow it to pass the anomaly through the primary and out into deep space. Then Jen would use the secondary field to destroy the gateway before Stephenson could open it up to the invaders.

  Heather refined her calculations. Five minutes and seventeen seconds until the growing event horizon spilled out of the containment field and swept everyone to his or her ultimate destiny. If everything went according to plan, they should have two minutes to spare.

  If everything went according to plan.

  “Why don’t we have detonation?”

  General Smith’s voice over the secure telephone unit carried a tension that Captain Everett could feel like static electricity.

  “Sir, we’ve lost comms to the nukes.”

  “Captain, I don’t care if you have to manually initiate, I need that detonation. Whatever it takes.”

  “Wilco.”

  “Captain. Your country is counting on you.”

  Captain Everett set the handset back in its cradle, then began running toward the doorway that led to the ATLAS cavern. He was going to die today anyway. But maybe, just maybe, he could pull the plug on the thing that was about to eat his wife, his baby girl, and the whole damn planet.

  “Far-gate active!”

  The notification entered Commander Ketaan-Ra’s mind through the nano-bot communication swarm distributed throughout his brain.

  “Synchronization?”

  “Not yet initiated from the far end.”

  “Why not?”

  “It appears the wormhole is directed at a point in galactic zone 3AF2344XZ.”

  Ketaan-Ra hissed. He’d waited too long to have something go wrong now.

  “Override from this end. Lock it down now.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “Do it.”

  “As you command.”

  As power was diverted to the activating gateway, Ketaan-Ra’s detachment came to the ready. When the synchronization reached its final stage, Ketaan-Ra braced himself as the millions of nano-bots throughout his body compensated for the new world’s atmosphere, gravity, and pressure differential. The process was straightforward. Start the change as the gateway went final, charge through the opening as the change progressed, arrive in the new world ready to breathe its air and function in its environment. It always hurt and this time was no different.

  Unable to remember the atmosphere he’d been born breathing, Ketaan-Ra exhaled his final lungful of the ammonia-methane mixture he’d come to regard as normal, and leaped through the portal into a nitrogen-oxygen world.

  Mark tossed the steel panel onto the floor behind him, flipped onto his back, and pulled his head and shoulders into the electrical access duct. To his neurally enhanced eyesight, the limited ambient lighting seeping into the electrical panel from the cavern was more than adequate.

  Since he’d rigged the power circuits for the primary and secondary stasis control panels, he knew what he was looking for without need of the normal test and evaluation procedures. Snapping open the cover on the primary control circuit panel, he found the faulty circuit immediately, a bad amplifier module on the main circuit board. Funny, all that power controlled by a tiny transistor. It took only a trickle of current to the transistor to turn on the main power channel. Conversely, the denial of that trickle cut the main power in an instant. Mark had counted on that when he’d installed the module with the faulty resistor, one chosen to build up heat and burn out within a minute of primary stasis control power-up.

  The pungent odor of burned insulation tickled his nostrils as he grabbed the correct screwdriver from his tool belt and spun the first of eight screws free, catching each in his palm as it fell. Snapping the module free of its mounts, Mark snapped the ribbon cable free and tossed the useles
s circuit card out onto the floor by his feet.

  Grabbing his toolkit, he popped open the top, selected the replacement module, and began reinstallation. The kit contained replacements for several of the high-priority circuits, but it didn’t hurt that Mark had known exactly which one would blow and when.

  As badly as they’d needed the primary stasis control to fail, they needed it back online shortly thereafter. Just enough downtime for Jen to tranquilize Dr. Trotsky and take over operation of the secondary stasis controls. Dr. Stephenson already recognized that she had far more talent than the older man. If not for Russian political pressure, Trotsky’s uncle being the president of the Russian Federation, Stephenson would have already replaced Trotsky with the postdoc she impersonated.

  Snapping the new module in place, Mark tightened the last of the screws, and thrust himself out of the compartment and back into the cavern.

  As he watched, twenty meters away the portal activated. The effect was instantaneous. One moment the black steel interior was empty, the next a star field replaced it, the view into space so spectacularly clear that Mark expected to be sucked out into the endless expanse. The fact that he wasn’t confirmed not only that the primary stasis field was back online, but also that Dr. Stephenson had used it to seal the gateway. Nothing would be passing through that field without the correct modulation code, and even then, after passing through the film, the object would be subject to the instantaneous changes in pressure, gravity, temperature, and atmosphere that the far side had to offer.

  All Stephenson needed to do was validate that the space-time coordinates of the far end were far enough from Earth that the anomaly would pose no further threat, a near-certainty given the vast expanse available; then Jennifer would use the secondary stasis field to thrust the forming black hole through the portal. Immediately after that she would use the stasis field generator to destroy the gateway. After that they’d have fifteen minutes to get to Jack’s rendezvous point.