General Zherdev nodded. “The Eighty-Second Airborne Division has been completely assimilated. I will put them on alert. But I also recommend having some heavy bombers ready. Bunker-busting conventional bombs might be able to take the Smythe Fortress out, or at least interdict their supply line.”
Prokorov liked what he was hearing. “Agreed. Make it happen.”
As the general turned and walked out of the room, Alexandr Prokorov shifted his attention back to the satellite imagery of the remote mountains northwest of Murchison, New Zealand. He was only hours away from confirmation that he had finally found the Smythe rat hole.
Janet stood alone inside the Earth gate chamber wearing her SRT headset, trying to control her pounding heart. Where the hell was her vaunted self-control? She knew that Tall Bear had said that he and Jack wouldn’t reach the Bolivian Earth gate warehouse until 7:00 A.M. Bolivian time, midnight in New Zealand, but she hadn’t been able to keep herself from coming to this room thirty minutes early. Now as the clock ticked closer and closer to the witching hour, she was hyperventilating. Dear God, where was that subspace request to activate the Bolivian gate?
When the request came through her SRT headset, she resisted the urge to immediately energize the Earth gate. Instead, per standard operating procedure, she switched on the Bolivian portal’s cameras, microphones, and speakers, piping the images and sounds directly into her mind. A gasp escaped her lips. There, beside Tall Bear, stood the man whom she had believed she would never see again, looking exactly as he had when she had left him standing atop the Altar of the Gods beneath the Kalasasaya Temple. In the background, the robots that guarded the unmanned facility moved about their assigned duties.
Shifting her thoughts, she draped the master Earth gate with a stasis field, allowed the barometric pressure to equalize, and opened the portal. Now she could see her husband with her own eyes. And Jack’s familiar grin was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
“You going to let me in?” he asked.
The greeting pulled a laugh from her lips. She dropped the stasis field and rushed through the gateway into the Bolivian warehouse, throwing her arms around Jack’s neck as his strong arms encircled her waist and his lips found hers. Unable to dam the tears that flooded her face, Janet pushed him away. Her hand lashed out to slap Jack hard across the cheek.
“Never do that to me again,” she said.
He lifted his left hand to his lips to dab away the trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth, and just for an instant, Janet thought she saw rage flash in his dark-brown eyes. But then Jack’s smile returned as his eyes once again met hers with no trace of what she had imagined.
“I wouldn’t dare.”
How could he do that, instantly rob her of her fury? Once again, she kissed him, letting her body yield to his embrace.
“Ahemmm.”
The sound from Tall Bear suddenly brought her back to the realization that she and Jack were not alone. Releasing her death grip on Jack’s neck, she turned to hug Tall Bear.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For bringing him back to me.”
“No problem. I’m an excellent driver.”
When she stepped back, Jack shook hands with the bigger man. Then Janet and Jack turned away and walked, hand in hand, back into New Zealand.
Having left Janet alone for her reunion with Jack, Heather enjoyed a midnight repast with Mark, Jennifer, their parents, and Rob in the kitchen within a group of rooms that they had transformed into the new Smythe and McFarland underground living quarters. Dgarra and VJ had opted out in favor of letting the Smythes and McFarlands enjoy a little family time. As much as their parents had resisted moving into the subterranean fortress, the discovery of Nikina’s treachery had made matters too dangerous for them to continue to occupy their houses.
The move had impacted Anna McFarland and Linda Smythe the hardest. But the addition of large video windows throughout their quarters had helped . . . that and an extensively appointed kitchen. Tonight, Anna had prepared a wonderful meal of chicken fried venison, mashed potatoes, and gravy, the smell of which pulled them all to the table.
Despite the nanites in her system, or maybe because of them, the hard day’s work of testing the new matter disrupter and stasis field generator upgrades had left Heather famished. From the way Mark and Rob heaped food on their plates, she could tell that they felt the same. Heather made a mental note that she would have to save some of each dish so that the food synthesizer could analyze and record them for future use. That new machine had been just one of the technological wonders that Jennifer and her fellow crew members had helped the Earth team build, with major security and quality-of-life implications. Leaving the facility to go shopping or hunting had suddenly gotten much more dangerous.
Heather studied Rob. Despite being only ten, he had become a young man in both body and mind. As much as he had wanted to join Janet in welcoming his dad home, he had agreed to give them this honeymoon night. His understanding of his parents’ sexual relationship made another thing very clear to Heather: they had to figure out how to help Rob get started dating before the hormones raging through his body made him attempt something dangerous.
That was going to be hard to do considering that they were all hiding out in an underground fortress, protected on the outside by a large stasis shield and an Altreian holographic cloak. And the just-completed upgrades had allowed them to erect shields that draped the facility’s interior walls. There would be no tunneling or blasting into this fortress from outside. The only burrowing allowed down here was handled by their own boring machines and engineering robots.
Unfortunately, the massive energy demands of all this shielding and nano-manufacturing meant that they were forced to keep digging and expanding, if only to feed the hunger of the matter disrupter-synthesizers. Somehow everything they did seemed to produce more negative consequences than positive returns.
Heather shook her head to try to clear these troubling thoughts from her mind, drawing a concerned stare from Mark.
“You okay?” he asked.
She forced a smile. “I’m fine. I was just thinking about Jack and Janet.”
“Aren’t we all?” asked Gil with a wink that drew loud laughter from Fred, Mark, and Rob.
Anna and Linda merely shook their heads as if to say, “Men!”
Having successfully deflected Mark’s question, Heather returned her attention to her plate, only to discover that she had lost her appetite. Oh well, she would just have to fake it, which she seemed to have been doing a lot of lately. At least Janet would be finding some release from her tension right about now.
The thought lifted Heather’s mood.
“Where is everyone?” Khal Teth asked as the portal winked out behind them.
Janet turned to him, once again putting her arms around his neck, this time far more gently.
“They gave us a night to ourselves.”
Suddenly Khal Teth found himself excited at the prospect, but not for the reasons Janet suspected. He had come here to ravish Jack’s wife, then use her as a bargaining chip to force the body thief to make the exchange that would put the former overlord back in charge of the Altreian Empire. If he killed Jack and Janet in the process, so much the better. And now he had just been handed the perfect opportunity. Tonight, fate had been kind to him.
He reached up to stroke her cheek, tracing his fingers up toward her earlobe as her soft lips met his. But when he tried to seize control of her mind, his failure to even touch it startled him. What was wrong? He had used Jack’s mind to defeat Commander Broljen, a psionic Dhaldric. When the answer came to him, it did not improve his mood. The genetic procedure Khal Teth had performed on this body in the AQ37Z’s medical lab was beginning to take effect. Unfortunately, as Jack’s new psionic lobe began to develop in his upper spine, its tendrils appeared to have already begun rewiring his brain, temporarily blocking all psionic ability. With a mental cur
se, Khal Teth shifted tactics.
With a sudden movement, he snatched the woman’s SRT headset from her temples and hurled it across the room as his left hand closed on her pretty throat and lifted her off the ground. He grinned. These new headband alterations were already paying dividends.
When Janet’s kick to his groin dropped Khal Teth to his knees, pain exploded through his body. But he did not lose his grip on her throat. He tried to focus but found that he could not. It was as if he were back on Quol, in charge of the body that Jack had put through hell. Only this was worse. Here, he could not flee into the background, leaving Jack to deal with the agony.
Janet’s hand flashed out and down, spearing the hand that gripped her throat with something shiny and sharp as a new pain fought for ascendency in his reeling mind. His grip loosened, releasing her. But she did not let him go. Instead, she grabbed both ends of the six-inch needle and twisted hard, dropping Khal Teth to his knees as a bone inside his palm cracked. He pulled the countermove from Jack’s memory but too late. Janet twisted his arm behind his back and forced him facedown on the ground, locking the arm in place with her left knee.
He knew that if he could just endure the pain of a shoulder dislocation, he could overcome that hold with his augmented strength, but fear robbed him of the initiative. She moved so quickly that he had no time to search Jack’s memory for a better option. By the time he knew what to do, the opportunity for the counter had already slipped away. Now she was on his back, her right arm locked around his neck as her left hand pressed the needle against his carotid artery. The tip penetrated the skin, pulling his breath forth in ragged gasps as he tried to fight back a rising tide of fear.
“You’re not my Jack,” she hissed.
Her teeth clamped down on his left ear, hard, drawing blood and threatening to rip it from the side of his head.
Khal Teth screamed and went limp in submission.
“You’re not my Jack.”
The words hissed out through Janet’s clenched teeth. Then she opened her mouth and bit down hard, feeling cartilage give way beneath her grinding teeth. The scream that issued from this thing that she pinned to the floor only confirmed what she already knew. She lifted her head, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the floor, where he could see it.
“Khal Teth. What have you done with my husband?”
“If you kill this body, Jack will never come back to you.”
“No. But I see you don’t deal well with pain. Your new problem . . . pain is one of my specialties.”
She shifted the needle and pressed, punching it through the flesh just beneath his front jaw and up into the base of his tongue. Another scream echoed through the empty chamber. Such sweet music to her ears.
“Your nanites will heal that,” she whispered, “but this is only going to get worse for you. Like I said, I’ve got you to myself tonight.”
This woman who tortured Khal Teth was a demon. Despite how he had come to know her through the mind of Jack Gregory, he had never understood the nature of her depravity. She doled out pain as if she enjoyed it. How else could one accept the reality of Janet Alexandra Price?
With each stab into an exposed body part, she increased his agony. She knew that she was torturing Jack’s body. But somehow she disassociated from that reality, working the needle into his neck, then stabbing it into his bicep, always thrusting, sometimes twisting, until Khal Teth could stand the agony no longer. He did not doubt that Jack Gregory could have endured this. But he could not.
“Stop!” he gasped. “I will help you get Jack back.”
Janet pulled the bloody needle free from his arm and wiped it on his shirt. “I’m listening.”
“Jack stole my body and made himself overlord of the Altreian Empire. But I control the AQ37Z research vessel. I can take you to him.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because I need you to convince Jack to swap back to this body, thereby returning me to mine.”
Keeping his arm clamped in place with her knee, she returned the needle to her hair and pulled his gun from its holster. Then she rose to her feet, leaving him panting with relief.
“Get up,” she said, keeping the weapon aimed at his torso.
It took Khal Teth three tries before he managed to rise, and then he wobbled uncontrollably. Janet motioned toward the far door with the gun.
“Get moving. It’s time we had a little chat with the others.”
Having retrieved her SRT headset before leaving the Earth gate room, Janet followed the still-limping Khal Teth to the conference room to await the arrival of the rest of her team and the crew of the Meridian. Once inside, she motioned for Khal Teth to take a seat on the opposite side of the table. Then she waited for the others to assemble for the hastily arranged meeting. She had given all of them, including Rob, a heads-up that this Jack was actually Khal Teth in control of Jack’s body. That would give them a few minutes to get their minds wrapped around the inconceivable.
As she had expected, Rob arrived first, doubtlessly having run the whole way. With his augmentations, he was almost as fast as Mark. When he stepped through the doorway, he stopped, his eyes widening as he stared at his father’s face, smeared with dried blood. Then he stepped forward to tower over Jack’s seated form. Rob leaned down until he was nose to nose with Khal Teth. Janet made no attempt to stop him.
“What have you done with my dad?”
“Nothing. Your father did this to me.”
Rob pounded the table with his fist. “Bullshit!”
“Rob, have a seat,” said Janet. “I want everyone to hear this.”
Rob scowled but nodded, seating himself beside Khal Teth.
In small groups, the others entered the room until Mark, Heather, Jennifer, Dgarra, VJ, Jamal, Eileen, and Denise were seated around the conference table. Janet summarized what had happened inside the Earth gate chamber. Then she turned her attention to Khal Teth.
“Okay. Tell them what you told me.”
For the next ten minutes, Khal Teth talked, explaining what Jack had done on Quol and how he had helped Khal Teth kill Parsus to become the Altreian overlord. But Jack had betrayed Khal Teth by imprisoning his mind back in the extradimensional void. Jack just hadn’t considered that Khal Teth could reverse the situation by taking control of his body.
Khal Teth leaned forward, Jack’s eyes burning with intensity. “So, you see, I need Janet to accompany me back to Quol aboard the AQ37Z research vessel so that she can convince Jack to swap bodies one last time, returning each of us to our proper destinies.”
“And that is precisely what I intend to do,” said Janet. “I just needed all of you to understand why I have to go.”
“I’m going, too,” said Rob.
Janet turned to meet his gaze, placing a hand on her son’s strong arm. “I want you to stay here.”
“If you can take the risk to save Dad, so can I.”
“It’s not the risk of this trip that makes me say that.”
“What, then?”
“Look around this table, Rob. These are our friends. In the coming weeks, they’ll need your special talents far more than I will. Here is where the real danger lies.”
He did what she said, meeting the gaze of each member of their team. When, at last, he looked at Janet again, he slowly nodded. “Okay, Mom. For them, I’ll stay.”
It had been a long time since Rob had called her Mom. And that single word helped thaw the chill that had settled in Janet’s gut. When nobody in the room tried to talk her out of her decision, that thawed the rest.
CHAPTER 24
MERIDIAN ASCENT
23 March
Having retreated to a point in space beyond Neptune’s orbit, Raul wanted his crew back aboard the Meridian. The problem he was working to solve was how to do that without drawing the attention of the Kasari attack ship. He could bring the crew aboard by connecting the Meridian’s wormhole gateway with the Smythes’ master Earth gate, but he would have to get wit
hin the Earth gate’s range.
One option was to attempt to hide on Earth’s moon as he had done before. But the odds that the Kasari attack ship wouldn’t detect his location didn’t seem appealing. There was just no good place in space to hide that was still within range of the Earth gate. But on the just-completed subspace call to the Smythe Fortress, Heather had come up with an idea that wouldn’t require Raul to use the portal.
He could bring the Meridian out of subspace within the Smythe Earth gate chamber, more than a mile underground. Since the Smythes hadn’t yet refilled the caverns with robots and equipment, his ship had plenty of room to land. And the Kasari would be unable to detect a subspace transition shielded by Earth itself. Then VJ, Jennifer, and Dgarra could walk back aboard.
Since Heather had given Raul the precise coordinates for his landing spot, he used the ship’s neural network to calculate the required normal-space velocity vector to match that of his target at the time he would exit subspace. He completed the maneuver that lined his ship up and then shifted into subspace.
Although Tall Bear had driven the semitruck that carried Janet, Khal Teth, the robots, and their equipment to the ruins of the Kalasasaya Temple, he had merely dropped them off. Unsure whether the departure of the AQ37Z into subspace would trigger a collapse of the ruins above, she had asked him to leave the area for his own safety.
Now as she and a dozen humanoid-looking robots passed through the opening in the wall of the ruin and into the cavern that led to the altar chamber, the smell of decay clung to her nostrils. The beams of their twin flashlights cast moving puddles of light on the uneven floor, leaving a curtain of darkness beyond.
With their multispectral optics and lidar, the robots needed no illumination. Half of these were engineering bots who carried the equipment she and Khal Teth would be needing aboard the AQ37Z. The other six were combat machines, there to make sure Khal Teth didn’t try anything stupid.
The Meridian Ascent (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 3) Page 17