Jennifer forced her attention back to the task at hand. With the completion of the final matter disrupter modifications and the reassembly of the Earth gate within the moving van–sized container, they were almost ready to mount the attack on the Kasari wormhole facility in North Korea. For this operation to succeed, they had to get the Earth gate down there and active so that Janet could send the combat robots through, providing the distraction that would let Raul land the Meridian. Then it would be up to Dgarra, Jennifer, and VJ to fight their way to the primary router.
Once there, VJ would upload the free-will virus. Jennifer hadn’t asked Heather about the odds of this complicated scheme working, but the emotional vibes she was picking up from her friend did nothing to ease her growing dread. It was one thing to pull a rabbit out of the hat as they had barely managed on Scion. It was quite another thing to pull out an elephant. Thus, considering the imminent challenge her team faced, Jennifer had placed two syringes filled with the latest nanite serum in one of her utility vest’s pockets.
When they had stood alone in the engineering bay, Dgarra had taken her in his arms and held her close. If she could have stayed there for eternity, Jennifer would have happily done so. But she had Kasari to fight and another world to save. Hopefully there would be time for such tenderness afterward.
Crap. What was it with her emotions today? If she didn’t focus and get her act together, she was going to get the people she cared about killed. And yes, she had to admit that even included VJ.
Nikina struggled to contain her growing frustration. Given free rein to roam the Smythe compound, including the area within the stasis field bubble that shielded the region outside of the underground facility, she had learned precisely where in New Zealand she was. Her current problem was that she had no way to communicate that information to Prokorov.
Janet Price commanded a cyber-intelligence apparatus that was far more advanced than anything available to the NSA, CIA, FSB, or other agencies available to the Federation Security Service. She even had three of the NSA’s former top experts—Dr. Eileen Wu, Jamal Glover, and Dr. Denise Jennings—working directly for her. The Smythes had created a robotic production facility powered by multiple matter disrupter-synthesizers that also had the capability of transforming any type of matter to energy or converting that energy to other forms of matter.
That meant they could convert all the rock and dirt their robots were mining directly into whatever elements they needed to feed their molecular assemblers. Over the last week and a half, those capabilities had received a major upgrade with the return of the Rho Project starship and the crew who had stolen the vessel from Los Alamos National Laboratory all those years ago. And that crew had apparently made breakthroughs beyond those of the Smythes.
All communications to and from the Smythe compound were via quantum-entangled phones or subspace communications systems. And that was routed through the Smythe supercomputers. Although Nikina had handed over an Earth gate and a quantum-entangled phone to Prokorov, she had no means of contacting those devices. So right now, she was merely a knowledgeable double agent trapped within the Smythe snow globe.
Perhaps tonight’s attack on the Friendship Gate would deliver her the opportunity she needed to accomplish her mission.
Janet stood in the New Zealand Earth gate chamber feeling her pulse throbbing in her veins. She had felt this on hundreds of occasions, but somehow, tonight felt different. As the clock ticked toward 4:00 A.M., it was almost midnight in North Korea. Even though she tried to dam the river of emotion, the vivid memory of another midnight flooded her mind.
The third-floor hallway of the shabby apartment building was almost completely dark, all but one of the light bulbs having burned out, that single orb illuminating a small circle near the hallway’s far end. A sliver of light shone beneath the third door on the right, and Janet already knew it belonged to the assassin she had come here hunting. Walking directly to the door, Janet knocked three times. The door opened as her hand came away from the last knock, and she found herself staring directly into the round, black muzzle of a 9mm H&K. She ignored it, extending her open right hand.
“Hello, Jack,” she had said to him. “Janet Price. NSA.”
It had been the first time she had met the six-foot-tall killer with the brown hair and eyes with pupils that glinted red at times of intense passion.
She wiped her eyes and adjusted the SRT headset over her temples, letting the supercomputers fill her mind with status displays. The combat robots were all in standby mode, ready to activate and launch themselves through the Earth gate and into the fray on her mental signal. On the east side of the high-bay, Jamal, Eileen, and Denise all sat in control chairs while Rob manned the Earth gate control station. Mark and Heather stood immediately to Janet’s left, assault weapons at the ready.
Janet had no illusions about tonight’s mission. This time the forces protecting the Kasari gateway would be ready and armed with much more potent weaponry than had been available to the military around the Frankfurt Gateway. Everything depended on the Meridian’s crew. If they failed to deliver the remote Earth gate inside the North Korean complex, this operation would be over before it got under way.
No matter how much she wanted to get this fight started, she would have to wait for Jennifer to send the remote gate’s activation request. These tense moments before battle always left Janet with the same feeling. Waiting flat-out sucked.
“Status?” Raul asked.
Jennifer’s mind spoke through her SRT headset. “Dgarra, VJ, and I are inside the moving van. We’re strapped in and ready.”
“Set us down easy,” said VJ.
“That’s the plan,” said Raul. “Commencing momentum vector synchronization maneuver in five seconds.”
It was too bad that they had yet to come up with a solution for delivering subspace packages without having to match the Meridian’s velocity vector with that of the target point on the planet’s surface. No use crying about it. Raul jumped the Meridian into subspace, brought the starship out again a hundred thousand miles from the moon, and immediately initiated the sequence of commands to the gravitational distortion engines that would accomplish his goal.
Without a doubt, the Kasari would detect this.
Commander Shalegha directed her full attention to the series of alerts cascading through her cortical array and into her brain. The sensors on the planet’s surface had just validated the reports from the fast-attack ship in low Earth orbit. The stolen world ship had arrived and was accelerating to match the velocity vector of Friendship Cavern. That could be for only one purpose: a subspace weapon attack.
Shalegha issued the mental command that alerted all combat forces and activated the subspace defense countermeasure. She steadied herself against the platform railing as thousands of worm fibers shifted through the underground chamber in a random pattern. The strength of the shifting pinholes was insufficient to damage people or equipment, but if the tactic worked as the Kasari theorists predicted, the roiling fibers should reduce the accuracy of any subspace transition into the area. Subspace transitions and wormholes of any size did not play well together.
Hopefully, the experiment would not destroy her headquarters.
As her SRT headset pumped data and imagery into her brain, Jennifer felt Raul create the two dozen worm fibers that would provide the imagery of their target just before the rectangular vehicle in which she sat transitioned into subspace. The Kasari would detect those probes, but they had already detected the Meridian.
Seven seconds of data would have to be enough.
“Okay, VJ,” said Jennifer. “Take us there.”
As she felt the moving van shift into subspace, Jennifer twisted slightly in her stasis chair to look back over her shoulder at the Earth gate at the rear of the craft. For a brief moment, she got the impression that they sat at the prow of an oversized Everglades fan-boat inside a crate.
“Strap in tight,” said VJ.
Jennif
er reoriented herself and draped her body with a stasis cradle. As VJ performed the subspace acceleration and calculated the precise timing for their normal-space reentry within the Kasari gateway cavern, Jennifer knew that Dgarra was monitoring the same data feeds that she was.
“Uh-oh,” said VJ.
“What?” asked Jennifer.
“Detecting multiple anomalies in the subspace-to-normal-space interface at our target area.”
Then Jennifer saw them, too. And they were screwing up their ability to compute the precise time of reentry.
“Overlay the anomalies with the worm-fiber imagery.”
When VJ did, Jennifer saw that the distortion was concentrated in the Kasari gateway cavern. With time running out, she made her decision. “New target. Set us down in the room just north of this one.”
The hiss of VJ’s breath didn’t improve Jennifer’s confidence. Unlike the original target, this was going to be a very tight fit.
A new idea hit her. Jennifer draped the interior of the van’s hull with a stasis field and held her breath.
Then they came out of subspace.
VJ had made her best estimate of the revised timing for the vehicle’s normal-space reentry. Still, this last-second workaround had introduced a tiny error that sent the craft careening into the nearest rock wall, ripping away the exterior hull before it came to a sudden stop. The interior stasis field protected most of the equipment from catastrophic damage.
She looked out through that transparent bubble at the devastation their reentry had wrought on this subterranean room and extended the external stasis field, using it as a virtual scythe to kill the few surviving occupants. Then she shielded the entire room to prevent the arrival of Kasari reinforcements. That would give her team a breather, but once the Kasari could bring heavy disrupter and beam weapons to bear, the power drain on the shielding would overwhelm the primary matter disrupter.
Alerts cascaded through her mind. The subspace field generator was offline, so there would be no getting back to the Meridian. And Jennifer and Dgarra had both suffered minor injuries. Since VJ’s latest version of the nanite formula had worked on Dgarra, he and Jennifer were already healing. Pain pulled VJ’s attention to her broken left wrist. At the current rate at which the nanites in her blood were repairing the trauma, she wouldn’t have full functionality for another three minutes. She couldn’t wait that long.
She dismissed her stasis cocoon and moved to the Earth gate controller as Dgarra and Jennifer powered up their personal shields, grabbed their laser assault weapons, and moved out into the rubble-strewn room. With a rapid sequence of mental commands, VJ powered up the Earth gate and sent the subspace request for its remote activation.
Then she created her own stasis shield and weapon and stepped out into the cavern to await the arrival of the Smythe robotic army. By now, the Kasari would have activated the stasis shield that protected the Friendship Gate, its controller, and the primary communications router.
In New Zealand, Janet and her team would be seeing the imagery the Earth gate’s sensors were sending. That meant that she would activate the portal only to provide VJ, Dgarra, and Jennifer with an escape route. The tension on Dgarra’s and Jennifer’s faces told VJ that they had all come to the same conclusion.
Unless someone could work magic, this mission had already failed.
Janet reviewed the video and telemetry from the Earth gate in North Korea twice before speaking.
“Jamal, can you and Eileen hack the Kasari systems and bring down their stasis field?”
“We have the coordinates of the cavern, but all our attempts to take control of the Kasari systems within have failed.”
“Without the subspace field generator working,” said Heather, “there’s no way to get our robots past the Kasari stasis shield.”
“I’m scrubbing the mission,” Janet said. “Let’s get our team out of there while we still can.”
Rob’s deep voice pulled her attention to where he sat at the gateway controls.
“Actually, I think Eos and I can do it. But I’ll need to go in there to try.”
As tempted as she was to say no, Janet felt the need to hear him out. If there was any chance to accomplish what they had set out to do, they had to take it.
“Tell me how.”
“Remember I told you about how Eos and I took control of the combat robots after our remote hack failed?” said Rob. “My telekinesis allowed Eos to override their programming. There’s no reason that wouldn’t work on the Kasari stasis field generator. But I have to be within my telekinetic range of its control system.”
“Which is?” asked Janet.
“I don’t know,” Rob replied. “A hundred yards. Maybe twice that.”
“It’s worth a try,” said Mark. “We can always run back through the remote Earth gate if it fails.”
Janet found herself reluctantly nodding, struggling with the thought of putting Rob back in the line of fire. Decision made.
“Okay. Activate the gateway. Mark, Heather, Nikina, and I will escort Rob. Jamal, you take over the primary Earth gate controls from Rob. I want as many robots as will reasonably fit into that chamber to follow us in. Eileen, you’re in charge of everything else on this end.”
Rob turned over the control station to Jamal and made his way to Janet’s side, a broad grin on his face. “Somebody hand me a gun.”
Shalegha felt the shock wave that emanated from the adjacent cavern rattle the headquarters platform upon which she stood. As she issued the orders that would put the Kasari shock troops under her command into motion, she smiled. The rogue crew had endured a rougher-than-expected landing.
Below her, forty-three of the eight-legged Graath commandos raced toward the source of the boom, accompanied by three times that number of her own race. What transpired next surprised her.
The commando charge came to a sudden halt as the lead elements slammed head-on into a stasis field that draped the entrance into the smaller chamber. Perhaps the rogue landing hadn’t been as bad as she had thought. Before she could issue a new set of orders to her troops, several of them opened fire on the doorway; the green beams scattered off the protective stasis field, cutting down some of the soldiers and threatening to damage the critically important equipment in the cavern.
Shalegha issued the cease-fire command as she raised a stasis field across the southern half of the chamber, protecting the wormhole gateway, its supporting equipment, and her headquarters platform. Another mental order put two battalions of human soldiers on the move along a passage that led to the far side of the smaller room where her enemies were holed up.
With a low growl, she whirled on her subcommander. “I want high-energy-beam weapons moved into position to fire on the enemy stasis field. Make sure the deflection paths don’t damage anything important.”
Without bothering to answer, the Kasari male moved off to personally direct the emplacement of the artillery pieces. Shalegha shifted her gaze back to the broad entry into the room where her enemies awaited. And through that portal she saw three figures whom she recognized from the hive-mind’s upload of Jennifer’s memories: the Koranthian general named Dgarra, the virtual being called VJ, and the one Shalegha most wanted back under her power: the human, Jennifer Smythe.
The time to end this had come.
The Kasari fast-attack ship came around the far side of the moon firing, just as Raul pulled out of the maneuver that had launched the subspace vehicle that carried VJ, Dgarra, and Jennifer to Earth. The Meridian Ascent lit up like a shooting star, bright enough to be seen from Earth as its shields deflected the beam energy.
Raul brought the gravitational distortion engines to full power, dropping the Meridian and jerking it to the right, lowering the shields just long enough to fire the vortex weapon that had punched a hole through the Second Ship. He knew such a maneuver was risky, but when the incoming craft broke off the attack to throw up its shields, he fist-pumped the air.
Then he shif
ted the Meridian into subspace.
Until he could figure out another plan, his crew would have to survive on their own.
When the North Korean Earth gate activated, Jennifer spun toward it just in time to see Mark, Heather, Janet, Rob, and Nikina run through, followed by dozens of combat robots as hundreds of others waited in the room beyond.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jennifer yelled as the others raced past her toward the stasis field–draped opening into the other cavern. “It’s shielded.”
Not getting an answer, she ran to catch up as the room behind her became full.
“Janet,” said Jennifer, “the Kasari have raised their own stasis field around the equipment we need to reach to deliver the free-will virus. Even if we can fight our way past all those troops, we can’t get through that shield.”
“We may not have to,” said Janet.
Rob stepped up to the shielded opening that glowed bright orange from the incoming barrage and stared out into the room beyond.
“Can you do it?” asked Heather.
“Give me a moment,” said Rob. “Eos is working on the heavy weapons.”
Even as he spoke, the multiple beams that had been targeting the opening shut off.
“Send in the bots,” Rob said. “Enemy stasis shielding going down now.”
Finally understanding what was happening, even if she had no idea how, Jennifer responded, “Tell me when to drop our shield.”
“Everyone get to the side,” Janet said. “Okay, do it. I’m sending in the robots now.”
Jennifer did as she was ordered.
A dozen autonomous motorcycles roared through the opening, lasers targeting the startled Kasari and human troops who returned fire with their own beam weapons. The thunder of charging machinery and the sounds of combat were drowned out by explosions as the larger robots released magnetically attached crab-bombs that scurried forward to detonate themselves.
The Meridian Ascent (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 3) Page 14