The Meridian Ascent (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

Mark picked up Heather and sprinted for the room they had first entered, followed by Janet, Rob, Jennifer, Dgarra, and VJ.

  As she neared the room with the active Earth gate, Jennifer gave the mental command that opened a hole in the stasis field that shielded it, closing the shield again as soon as all were inside. She turned to watch as beam weapons began to paint the shielded Meridian Ascent in green, blue, and orange. So beautiful. Then her ship was gone.

  “Come on,” said Janet. “We’re done here.”

  Jennifer glanced at her blood-soaked comrades and nodded. Then she followed them back through the Earth gate into New Zealand.

  Heather opened her eyes and blinked. She looked up at Mark’s blood-caked face.

  “Hello, darling,” he said. “For a few minutes there, I thought I’d lost you.”

  She lay on a bed, her naked body covered by a sheet and blanket. Lifting her hand to her chest, she felt for the wound. When she didn’t find any sign of a bandage, she lowered the sheet and lifted her head to see what had happened. All that remained of the wound was pinkish new skin. The sight sent a shudder of revulsion through her body.

  “Nanites?” she asked.

  Leaning back from her accusing stare, Mark held up his hands. “Jennifer did it.”

  “And you let her.”

  She heard him suck in a deep breath and exhale.

  “Yes, I did.”

  She dropped her head back onto her pillow. After all these years fighting this abomination, she now had a swarm of micro-machines not of her own design crawling through her veins, arteries, and organs.

  “How could you?”

  Mark held her hand between both of his, lifted it to his mouth, and gently kissed it.

  “How could I not? Jennifer saved you. And in doing that, she saved me, too.”

  Heather raised her eyes to the stone ceiling and remained silent for several moments, letting her revulsion run its course. She could undo this by undergoing a special dialysis procedure to remove the nanites. She shifted her gaze back to Mark.

  “If you want me to stay nanited, you have to get them, too.”

  He smiled. “Already done.”

  Then she asked the question that she’d been dreading. “So, did we win?”

  “VJ uploaded the virus and we got out alive.”

  Something in Mark’s tone belied his words.

  “But?” she asked.

  “But something is wrong. Jennifer said that when they uplinked the free-will virus on Scion, there was an immediate reaction. Fights broke out among those who had been assimilated. Kasari command and control broke down completely. We saw nothing like that happen inside the North Korean cavern.”

  The vision that filled her head told Heather why.

  “The Kasari have developed an antivirus,” she said.

  “That’s what we think.”

  “Damn it. After all of this, we accomplished nothing.”

  Mark merely shook his head.

  A new thought struck her. “Nikina tried to shoot Janet, but she shot me.”

  “And Janet killed her for it. It’s over.”

  “No, it isn’t. She must have been working for Prokorov all along. He may know where we are.”

  Mark leaned down and kissed her. When he sat back in his chair, he said, “Get some rest. We’ll worry about that when you wake up.”

  Heather started to argue but failed to summon the energy. When she closed her eyes, a wave of fatigue swept her away.

  Alexandr Prokorov stepped over the corpses and body parts that littered Friendship Cavern to reach the body of Galina Anikin. She lay faceup in a puddle of blood and brain matter, her remaining gray eye staring sightlessly at the distant ceiling.

  Shalegha had given Prokorov access to the thousands of battle recordings stored within the hive-mind. They had been collected from the minds of all involved as the combat had unfolded. He had seen Galina die from several different vantage points.

  She had tried to take out Janet Price but had shot Heather Smythe instead. Then, as hard as it was to believe, Janet had bested Prokorov’s top operative in hand-to-hand combat. Now he would never know what Galina had learned about the Smythe operation.

  Unless . . .

  Prokorov knelt by her body and began rifling through her pockets, starting with those in her black utility vest. Except for tactical supplies and magazines filled with ammunition, he found nothing. But in the cargo pocket on her right pants leg, he found a small notebook. He flipped it open and smiled. There was only a single two-line entry, but it was exactly what he had been hoping for.

  SMYTHE TASMAN MINING CORPORATION

  41.715179S 172.172935E

  Having uplinked the coordinates to the hive-mind, Prokorov stood, tossed the notebook into a pool of Galina’s blood, turned, and walked away. He and the collective now had the information they needed.

  Janet had just climbed into bed and closed her eyes when her phone rang.

  “Damned thing,” she said, scrubbing her face with both hands as if that would wipe the gravel from her eyes.

  She sat up, leaned over to pluck the phone from atop her nightstand, and then froze.

  “What the hell?”

  The displayed ID came from one of dozens of special chips that were quantum entangled with QT phones given to other key people. This one put a tremor in her hand. Her finger pressed the answer button, and she raised the phone to her ear. She found herself unable to speak. The voice on the other end was one she had never expected to hear again.

  “Hello, babe. I’ve come home.”

  CHAPTER 22

  PARTHIAN, QUOL, ALTREIAN SYSTEM

  TBE Orbday 18

  Jack had begun what he called the Twice Bound Tour three orbdays ago. Officially it provided him, as overlord, an opportunity to visit parts of the Basrillan and Janiyan continents that no overlord had ever visited. The tour also gave the Khyre residents of those vast lands the opportunity to join the Twice Bound, thus increasing Jack’s power and influence. But this trip also had a much darker purpose. It allowed Jack and Captain Moros to disappear for long enough to undergo the Lundola Procedure that they both dreaded.

  Over the strenuous objections of General Zolat, Jack had embarked on the journey accompanied only by Captain Moros and Santiri. Slightly shorter than Moros, the Khyre female’s emerald-green eyes shone with intelligence. A former commando in the Altreian space fleet, she was a petite but imposing presence. Jack liked her.

  Santiri had selected the Twice Bound Khyre surgeon who would be performing today’s operation. And it was Santiri who would be standing guard before, during, and after the surgery. That suited Jack just fine.

  So now he and Moros lay naked on two iridescent Altreian medical tables, similar to the ones onboard the Second Ship. The surgeon moved between them, manipulating the 3-D displays that appeared to hang in the air above each patient. Jack understood what was about to happen. There would be no bone saws or scalpels. The surgeon would control the medical tables with his mind, allowing the apparatus to perform the operations.

  Suddenly thousands of glass-like tendrils sprouted from Jack’s table, their needle-sharp points finding their way to nerve endings on his chest and head, even penetrating his open eyes. His head and upper torso appeared to be covered in exceedingly fine, multicolored hairs.

  He felt his form go numb. Being fully conscious but unable to move any part of his body, even to blink, was a new and unpleasant experience for Jack. But in a strange way, it was eerily like being the rider when Khal Teth had controlled this body.

  If the surgeon wanted a muscle to twitch, it twitched. Otherwise, it did not. There was no pain when the tendrils opened a small incision in his upper chest and crawled inside the cavity. He knew that they were painlessly bypassing his heart and lungs—spreading, cutting, and reknitting as they removed half of the Dhaldric psionic lobe from where its own tendrils entangled the upper spinal column. The fluid needles then worked their way through the brain stem and into h
is brain.

  When the final snip happened, Jack experienced the room dimming around him, although he knew the lighting had not changed. What had diminished was his connection with the Twice Bound. That wasn’t quite right. He was still linked to his followers, but he had lost half of his ability to channel their power. And he missed it.

  Time passed, but he did not know how long the surgery lasted. The tendrils knitted back together what they had cut away, repaired damaged veins and skin, and then, as if someone had blown on the giant puffball named Jack, the flexible needles floated away, reabsorbed by the medical table upon which he lay.

  Feeling returned with a vivid tingle that spread through his entire body. Jack blinked and turned his head to look at the ongoing surgery on Moros. From this angle, he couldn’t see deeply into the hole in the captain’s chest, but there was no sign of blood. Apparently the delicate fur of needles that extended inside that small opening was clamping and repairing cuts so efficiently that no fluid escaped.

  Still, his operation was taking longer than Jack’s. He could feel the worry in the surgeon’s mind. It was one thing to extract part of an organ from a Dhaldric patient, quite another to splice genetically modified DNA and a partial psionic lobe onto Moros’s spinal column.

  The graft would kick-start Moros’s psionic powers while the modified genes would cause the spliced lobe to regenerate itself over time, extending more and more tiny tendrils up into his brain.

  As Jack watched, a sudden wave of fatigue swept over him, and he settled back, letting the table remold itself to his new position. Was it warming him? Whatever was happening, it felt very, very good. He blinked once, twice, and then his eyes stayed closed.

  General Zolat paced slowly back and forth through the Altreian Operations Center, keeping his mind strongly shielded to mask the furor that raged within. The overlord who called himself The Ripper had disappeared, despite the rebellion assets that Zolat had assigned to track him. Just when all the pieces of Zolat’s assassination plan were coming together, the overlord had decided to take this lengthy trek through the harsh homelands of the Khyre.

  Since the Khyre made up 73 percent of Quol’s population of 1.2 billion, this trip through that race’s outlands effectively blanketed The Ripper with his supporters. The overlord was a traitor to everything that had made the Dhaldric great. And his flight into the lands of his Twice Bound proved one thing: he was also a coward.

  His absence would have created a wonderful opportunity for a coup. But one problem was insurmountable. The first step to overthrowing any leader was eliminating the object of the coup. While Zolat could take over the Parthian and the island chain that roughly traced Quol’s prime meridian, with more than three-quarters of the planet’s and the space fleet’s population being Khyre, such a move would be short-lived.

  No. First, the overlord must be eliminated, thus breaking the power of the Twice Bound. Then, and only then, could Zolat restore the natural order.

  Jack’s recovery from the surgery was swift. Within an orbday, he had begun to feel like his old self. Moros, however, had not been so lucky.

  The captain remained in a quasi-comatose state, occasionally broken by a bout of uncontrollable shaking. But it was the periodic moans that most disturbed Jack.

  The doctor assured him that Moros’s vitals were fine and that the side effects he was experiencing were most likely the result of the psionic lobe’s tendrils worming their way upward through the brain stem. But as Jack listened to the sounds that issued from Moros’s mouth, sounds that seemed to indicate horrifying dread, he wished he hadn’t talked the captain into undergoing the procedure.

  For the next three orbdays, Jack remained in the clinic, taking turns with Santiri watching over Moros. Jack was surprised at how the medical table performed various nursing tasks, keeping Moros clean, monitoring his vital signs, and periodically snaking down his nose to funnel liquids and nutrients into his stomach. But as time passed, the doctor’s expression showed what Jack felt in the man’s mind, a growing sense that the procedure had been a failure.

  The holographic imagery that hovered above Moros’s body clearly showed that the tiny tendrils that had sprouted from the grafted lobe had threaded their way up through the brain stem and invaded his brain. Although Moros’s vital signs remained good, he hadn’t regained consciousness.

  Then, on the fourth orbday, just as Jack was about to lose all hope, the captain startled him by speaking.

  “Who be the gromling?”

  Jack moved to his side. The skin of the Khyre ship’s captain appeared even grayer than normal, and he wobbled as he raised himself into a sitting position. Jack reached out a hand to steady Moros and keep him from tumbling off the table.

  “What gromling?”

  “The one who be kicking me in the head.”

  Jack laughed with relief. If the captain had retained his sense of humor, he was going to be just fine.

  “Headache, huh?”

  Moros merely massaged his temples with his fingers.

  Having been alerted that the patient was awake, the doctor entered the room and walked to Moros’s table.

  “I am glad to see you awake, Captain Moros. How are you feeling?”

  “Like pugada dung.”

  The doctor examined the additional holographic images and readouts that appeared before him. Without bothering to give an explanation as to what he was doing, he set the medical table back into action. This time the blown-glass tendrils attached themselves to Moros’s head and remained there. Almost immediately, the tension lines in the captain’s face relaxed. The treatment lasted for less than five minutes, but when the tendrils withdrew, Moros sighed in relief.

  Then Jack felt his friend’s thoughts touch his mind directly.

  “Worry not. I be fine.”

  CHAPTER 23

  LA PAZ, BOLIVIA

  22 March

  As evening gave way to night, Khal Teth pulled the old jeep to a stop outside a two-story house on the eastern outskirts of La Paz. Walking up the front steps, he pressed the doorbell. When the door opened, his eyes were drawn to the six-and-a-half-foot form of Jack’s old friend Jim “Tall Bear” Pino, who extended a hand, his long black hair cascading over his shoulders.

  “Jack, you crazy son of a bitch. I thought you were a goner. When I got Janet’s call saying you were back, I almost keeled over.”

  Khal Teth let Jack’s memories guide him. He gripped hands with the bigger man.

  “Good to see you, too, Jim.”

  Tall Bear ushered him inside, then glanced right and left along the dark street before shutting the door behind him. Khal Teth followed him into the living room where a roaring blaze crackled in the fireplace, sending long shadows dancing across the room as it hissed and popped. The pungent smell of wood smoke tickled his nostrils.

  “Can I offer you a beer?” Tall Bear asked.

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Tall Bear stepped out of the room and returned with two bottles, handing one of the ice-cold brews to Khal Teth. Tall Bear seated himself in the leftmost of the two leather chairs before the fire, and Khal Teth took the other. Feeling the condensation trickle onto his hand, Khal Teth followed Tall Bear’s example and tilted the bottle to his lips. Jack’s memories told him that the amber liquid was good, and surprisingly enough, he found the slightly bitter taste pleasant.

  For several minutes, small talk and old memories dominated their conversation, something that humans regarded as necessary but Khal Teth found annoying. Then the subject shifted to the matter at hand.

  “I don’t suppose you want to tell me where you’ve been all this time,” Tall Bear said.

  “That’s a long story.”

  “And one, I take it, that you don’t want to talk about.”

  Khal Teth took another drink, feeling a warm glow blossom in the pit of his stomach.

  “Not right now. To tell you the truth, I’m exhausted.”

  “Fair enough. Maybe tomorrow,
then, on the way to the Earth gate warehouse.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Can I offer you some food before bed?”

  “No, thanks. I grabbed something when I got to La Paz.”

  “Okay, then,” Tall Bear said. “I’ll show you to your room. After all this time, I imagine you’re excited to walk through that Earth gate and get back to your lovely wife and son.”

  Khal Teth rose to his feet alongside Tall Bear, feeling a rush of adrenaline course through his veins. “Jim, my friend, you have no idea.”

  Inside the Federation Security Service War Room, Prokorov sat at the head of the small conference table, studying the satellite imagery of New Zealand. He glanced over at the only other person present, General Dimitri Zherdev.

  “So, what do you think, Dimitri?”

  “Our analysts disagree. Some say this cannot be the location of a huge operation like the Smythes certainly have. It is wilderness. Even if the facility is underground, there would have to be significant deliveries of materials and supplies, and they see nothing like that looking back through the satellite records.”

  “And the others?”

  “The other group argues that given the technological superiority the Smythes have demonstrated, we can’t rule out some sort of high-tech wizardry. We have nothing to confirm that this is the actual site, but I think we need to assume that Galina Anikin’s note is accurate.”

  Prokorov nodded. His respect for this man’s judgment had been the reason Prokorov had appointed him as chief of FSS military operations.

  “I agree, General. I want you to send in a team to confirm.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get them in the air.”

  As the general stood and turned to go, Prokorov added one more thing. “And put an airborne division on alert. If confirmed, I want that site surrounded.”

  The general turned back toward Prokorov. “Why not target the location with Kasari high-energy beams?”

  “I plan to. But it’s going to take some time to deploy. The weapons will need to draw power from matter disrupters, and those will need to be shipped in as well. Group Commander Shalegha’s priority will continue to be getting assimilation centers set up around the world, so we can’t interfere with that.”