Wormhole by Richard Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

be swept away before they could finish their work.
    The thought of losing Heather forever hit him in the chest like a battering ram. After all they’d been through, most of it for and because of this damned ship, to have it betray them was too much to handle. Anger bubbled to the surface of his mind, tingeing his vision with red.
    Suddenly, the mental attack faltered ever so slightly, seemingly confused by this new neural stimulus. Mark went with it, throwing himself into a memory buried deep in the darkest corner of his mind.

    Mark pulled forth the perfect memory, walling it away at the corner of his consciousness...
    The drug lord turned his attention back to Heather. “So you care about this boy, huh? OK. Then we’ll let him watch before we kill him.”
    With a grin that became a sneer, the don signaled four of the thugs forward. “Uncuff her hands and stretch her out here on the floor.”
    To Mark’s horror, the men released Heather’s handcuffs, and although she struggled mightily, they pulled her down onto her back, one pinning each of her arms while two more spread her legs. Don Espeñosa knelt down between them, reaching forward to slowly unbutton Heather’s blouse, one button at a time.
    “Ah, Smythe. I bet you’ve never had a chance to do this. Don’t worry. I’ll let you watch.”
    To Mark, the panting breath of the men, the sound of the racing hearts pumping blood into the bulges in their pants, the smell of their sweat, felt like the rupture of hell’s gate, and from that gate poured a firestorm of rage that scorched his brain.
    Mark’s heart pulsed in his chest, sending a massive surge of blood and adrenaline coursing through his arteries.

    Channeling that memory and turning his attention to the mind link that was burning a hole in his brain, Mark centered.
    OK, you artificial alien bastard. You want my mind. Get ready. Here it comes.
    Releasing the memory, Mark let it engulf him, bathing the logical alien mind in a torrent of red liquid rage.

    The change happened so suddenly that the Other struggled to understand it. An instant ago it had been within a few cycles of completely overcoming the Mark human’s final defenses, the outcome logically assured. Now all logical links within the human’s brain had vanished, as if they had suddenly been burned out of existence. Not that there wasn’t any data in the millions of synaptic links that connected the Other to its opponent; data cascaded across the links in such volume that it threatened to overwhelm all the meticulously trained node weights stored within the fractal matrix.
    Attempting to restore the last saved state it had achieved in its effort to overwhelm this human, the Other dumped pain into the alien mind using exactly the same pattern that had yielded its earlier success. But this time, the data storm coming from the human intensified, infecting not just its brain, but migrating outward into the beautifully ordered fractal data matrix that formed the outer layers of the Other’s being. Like firing a high-energy weapon into a young black hole, the Other’s attempt to restimulate the Mark mind had only added momentum to its rapidly expanding event horizon.
    So great was the Other’s surprise at this unanticipated result that it was slow to recognize the growing danger. Now the human’s infection had spread through every one of the millions of synaptic links to its mind, disrupting the intricate fractal maps connected to those links so that they also radiated the infection. The corrupted nodes immediately added their strength to the Mark mind, increasing its power by several orders of magnitude.
    The Other instantly dropped all other priorities, marshaling its massive computational power to develop an understanding of this infection. But the human attack defied logical analysis. It wasn’t madness. The Other had explored the depths of human madness through its link to the Rag Man. Madness had its ownspecial logic, far more easily