Читать книгу Time Raiders: The Seduction - Cindy Dees - Страница 5

Not long ago, in the early days of Project Anasazi

Red Rock University

Flagstaff, Arizona

Athena Carswell jolted upright in her leather recliner as a jovial male voice shattered the lab’s deep silence. “Sheesh! You guys look like you’re putting on a funeral! Who died around here?”

“You’re about to,” she snapped. “You just ruined two hours’ worth of data collection and a week’s worth of setup.” She carefully removed an elaborate headband with trailing wires from her head, then whirled in irritation to throw the intruder out.

Wow. She stopped abruptly. The intruder was a serious hunk. Her gaze swept down, then up again. He was tall, athletic and ruggedly gorgeous, with neat brown hair and a sportsman’s tan. But it was his piercing blue eyes that stopped her cold. He was going to make a beautiful corpse when she finished strangling him.

He had the gall to sweep his own gaze assessingly down her body. Abruptly, she was aware of her silk blouse and the way it clung to her curves, the constriction of her bra beneath it, the way her wool skirt hugged her hips rather more closely than she’d like at the moment.

His eyes lit with heat. And that was a definite smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. She didn’t know whether to fan herself or be mortally offended.

Pretty Boy snorted skeptically. “Didn’t seem much like data collection going on. Looked to me like you were sleeping on the job.”

She scowled, insulted at the insinuation that she’d been goofing off. She retorted, “I was trying to control my brain wave output and sync it up to the computer. Being relaxed and comfortable helps.”

He strolled over to the console that housed the powerful mainframe computer they were trying to program to duplicate and amplify human brain waves by several orders of magnitude. She watched him warily. He glanced up at her suddenly, catching her staring at him like a drooling idiot.

Collecting herself, she said sharply, “Uh, excuse me. But didn’t you see the big red Keep Out sign posted on the door? You’re not supposed to be in here.”

He spun to face her, flashing a thousand-watt smile straight off a daytime soap opera. “Ah, but I am. Supposed to be here, that is. I just inherited this outfit.” He made eye contact and purred at her, “Which is to say I’m your new boss.”

Athena stared. “Some colonel is being sent out from Washington to oversee our project.” This guy was altogether too young and…hot…to be a stuffy army colonel specializing in advanced sine wave resonance research.

“Colonel Peter Grafton, U.S. Army, Advanced Research Center, at your service.” He executed an exaggeratedly gallant bow that looked as if it belonged in a Cinderella movie. “You can call me Pete if you like.” His eyes twinkled devilishly as he added, “Or you can just call me sir.”

Hah! She retorted, “I’m a civilian. I’m not required to ‘sir’ anybody, thank you very much.”

He shrugged. “I’ve always thought being called sir is a sign of respect that should be earned, anyway.”

Athena bit back a snarky comment about the likelihood of his ever earning the title from her. But now this cocky jerk happened to control the purse strings to her continued research, and she couldn’t afford to antagonize him. She mumbled a curse under her breath. She’d hated the idea of going to the military for funding, but her team had had no choice. It was that or shut down. Their previous grant from the government was about to expire, and their work was too classified to take to the public sector to fund.

Project Anasazi was so close to success. Just a few more months, maybe even a matter of weeks, and she’d find the last remaining piece of the puzzle. And then…

…and then mankind would have mastered time travel.

With a little help from a piece of alien technology recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash, of course. It hadn’t taken sixty years plus to crack the technology…it had taken almost all of those years to figure out what the crown-like apparatus found on the alien pilot’s head actually did. But after that, it had been a simple matter of learning to interface with the crown. Well, not simple. The math behind brain wave amplification was horrendous. But today’s computers made the calculations possible, and at speeds rapid enough to make using the crown a possibility.

Her studies showed that if the user was a psychic of sufficient power, it should be possible to project an object, or even a person, back and forth through time.

“So. Is that the famous crown I’ve read about?” Grafton commented from shockingly close by. A faint whiff of his aftershave tickled her nose. The subtle scent was green and woodsy. And manly. And wholly addictive.

She tucked the crown carefully in its protective nest beside her chair, making sure not to catch the wires on anything. “Yup, that’s it.”

“Have you figured out how to duplicate it yet?” he asked.

She retorted, “First we have to figure out how the crown works. Then maybe I can build you another one.”

Grafton frowned. “So, there’s no backup if something happens to this one?”

She sighed. That worried her, too. “No. We’d be dead in the water as far as time travel goes. For a while, at any rate. However, we’ve learned the general principles of time travel from the crown, and given what we’re learning now about brain wave amplification, I’d think in another fifty years or so we could figure it out for ourselves.”

“But your report said you don’t think we have that long until something bad happens—”

She cut him off sharply. “My office. Now.”

His eyebrows shot up and he studied her far too intently for comfort. It felt as if he was all but stripping her naked with his burning blue eyes. And at the thought, her body suddenly felt entirely too hot.

She tried to cover up her gaff by adding hastily, “Cup of coffee, Colonel? I can give you an overview of the program and then walk you through where we are now.”

Thankfully, the good colonel was not slow on the uptake. “Coffee. Great. I had to get up at the crack of dawn to fly here this morning.”

Athena caught the curious gazes of a couple of the computer techs. She really hoped they hadn’t heard that ‘not long until something bad happens’ comment from Grafton. She’d deliberately kept that part of the project from her team. They were already under enough pressure what with all the funding problems they’d had. They didn’t need to know that the fate of the world rested on their heads, too.

The moment her office door closed, Grafton whirled to face her. “What’s up?” he asked shortly. Impatient energy poured off of him, and her breathing accelerated to match it. He was such a man’s man. Definite alpha male.

She replied, “The staff hasn’t seen the classified document you have. They’re not aware of the deadline looming over this project.”

“Why the hell not? They’ll work faster if they know what they’re up against.”

Facing him felt like trying to stand against the force of a hurricane. Lord, he was overwhelming. She was a scholar and an academic, and lived in a quiet world of study and thought. She wasn’t up to dealing with this tornado of a man. But she didn’t have much choice in the matter. Funding and Grafton…or no Project Anasazi.

She tried to explain her decision. “They already give me a hundred percent. And what we do takes tremendous attention to detail. Absolute precision. I can’t afford to have anyone racing through their work and making a mistake. Lives depend on us getting this right.”

“If you’re correct, the future of the world may depend on us getting this right.”

Athena knew that. She’d already bet her reputation and her career on that fact. And as soon as they tried to use the crown, she might very well be betting her life on it.

He made no further argument for the time being, but she got the feeling she hadn’t heard the last of it. After a moment he asked, “Where are we on the project?”

“Close, but we’re missing something in the algorithms, and my brain waves aren’t being exactly duplicated. We’re within a few microns of the right amplitude variations, but we’re not quite there.”

“Have you sent anything back in time yet?”

She jolted. “Good Lord, no. We don’t want to chance breaking the crown by using it incorrectly.”

“Seems to me that at some point you’ll just have to jump off the cliff and give it a go.”

Humph. Military thinking. “That might work when you’ve got a hundred more tanks to blow up where the last one came from. But we’ve got one crown. One shot at getting this technology right.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You might very well discover that last missing bit if you just use it.”

“Too risky.”

He gave her a long, hard look, then said tightly, “That’s not your call anymore, Dr. Carswell.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. A surge of resentment warred with a wave of desperation in her gut. She’d known she was selling Project Anasazi’s soul to the devil. She just hadn’t expected to be confronted by the consequences so soon. She’d hoped to have a couple more weeks before Uncle Sam swooped in and took over. And she definitely hadn’t been counting on this force of nature landing in her lap.

Grafton startled her by saying, “Tell me more about you. The report didn’t say much about your talents beyond the fact that you’ve shown a knack for using the crown.”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “My particular skills seem specially suited to it.”

“You have the ability to astral project, is that right?”

She squirmed, abruptly aware of how perceptively that sapphire gaze was drilling into her. “Well, yes.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“It’s akin to dreaming, but a great deal more vivid. I project my awareness to someplace other than my own body and experience it with exquisite sensory accuracy—as if I’m actually there.” Thankfully, he made no editorial comments on how whacky that sounded. She continued reluctantly. “With the crown’s help, I can project an image of myself to another location so that people there can see me.”

His eyes definitely widened at her assertion, but she pressed on doggedly. “I’ve recently mastered sending an image of another person to a specific site. When we perfect the computer program and can boost the signal more, I should be able to send not only the image, but the physical person. Eventually, we hope to parlay that into sending people into different times entirely.”

He responded, “That’s…incredible.”

“I know it sounds crazy. But it’s true,” she blurted. “Every bit of it. You can see for yourself. We’ve got an astral projection experiment scheduled for tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

At least he was suspending judgment on her sanity—or lack of it—for now. Silence fell between them. Eventually, he murmured, “So. You’re unique, as well, then.”

His voice was a caress across the back of her neck, intimate, sensual. Surely he was only talking about her psychic ability. But something in his tone hinted at a deeper meaning.

“I highly doubt that.” Damn. Did she have to sound so breathless? “I’m sure there are other psychics in the world who can do what I do. Probably better, in fact.”

“Maybe. But none of them are here and involved in this project. What effect does the crown have on other types of psychic abilities?”

She blinked. That was actually an insightful question. “We have a telekinetic gal on staff. Using the crown she can zip stuff all over the room, but has had no luck sending an object out of her direct line of sight. Apparently, her skill is tied to seeing where she’s sending the object. We’ve pretty much given up trying to further develop her relationship to the crown.”

Grafton looked surprised. “Are you saying the device is sentient?”

Another insightful question. Athena frowned. “I’m not quite sure how to answer that. You’d have to try the headgear on yourself to know what I mean. Whether it’s some other part of my own awareness that’s being enhanced, or whether there’s actual intelligence—artificial or organic—within the artifact itself, I couldn’t say. But I’m definitely

not…alone…when I use the crown.”

“I’d like to try it.”

Alarm shot through her. Maybe it was fear that the crown would like the new boss too much, or maybe fry his brain. Or maybe she just felt proprietary toward it. Either way, she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of him using it. She answered quickly, “Most people who put it on experience a blinding headache for several days thereafter. The crown seems to have an affinity for certain brains.”

“Have you determined what it is about those brains that it likes?”

“Everyone it has not bothered has been strongly psychic.” She added with a certain satisfaction, “And everyone it has liked so far is female.”

Grafton’s gaze narrowed. “Are you jacking me around, or are you serious?”

She allowed herself a small smile. “Oh, I’m serious, all right. The crown likes women.”

He grinned. “Can’t say as I blame the thing. I like ‘em, too.”

A shiver rippled down her spine, leaving her body tingling with…something. Oh, good grief. She didn’t go for all that ridiculous boy-girl foolishness. She’d sworn off dating by the time she graduated from college, throwing herself into her research almost to the exclusion of all else. And as a result, her life was calm. Peaceful. Serene. Just the way she liked it. Severely lacking in annoying, overconfident males who oozed testosterone and sex appeal. At least until now.

He asked casually, “When will you be ready to try sending something somewhere? It looked to me like you’ve got all the equipment set up—the quartz booth to contain whatever you send, the computers, the amplifiers.”

She resisted an urge to wince. She’d known it would come to this eventually. Just not yet. She answered reluctantly, “We still have to figure out where we’re going wrong in the programming.”

He said briskly, “I think we should go for it. The numbers I looked at seemed more like minor tweaks than actual errors.”

“It’s your career on the line.”

He laughed, sharply and without humor. “Like I still have a career. I’ve been shunted off to a kooky research project in the middle of nowhere with zilch for funding and run by some crazy civilian chick who claims she can time travel. I’d say my career has effectively tanked, wouldn’t you?”

Damn. She’d been hoping the guy at least had a sense of self-preservation she could use to rein him in. Curious, she asked, “What did you do to get stuck with this assignment?”

He threw her a withering look. “Office politics gone bad. I tried to do the right thing, and took the moral high ground. I came out on the losing end.”

“Nothing like being a small, replaceable cog—with a conscience, no less—in a very big machine, eh? That’s why I could never have joined the military. I would’ve gone crazy or gotten court-martialed, or both.”

He made no reply to that.

She said quietly, “As tempting as it is to rush to the end result on this project, I think caution is the best course. We’re close. Let’s not blow it now.”

He bit out. “I’ll take your opinion under advisement, Dr. Carswell.”

She actually felt her teeth gnashing.

“Introduce me to the rest of the staff,” the colonel ordered briskly.

She was half tempted to argue further, but instead, behaved herself. “Let’s go. And call me Athena. Everyone else does.”

The staff was small: two graduate students coming out of the fields of physics and math to analyze brain waves and crunch numbers, two student programmers to translate the equations into computer code, and two hardware technicians to keep the computers up and running. At one time, the best scientific minds in America had worked on the crown in secret, along with the other artifacts recovered from the Roswell crash. And now they were down to this.

A handful of geeks in a basement lab, a crazy psychic chick and one outcast colonel.