The Meridian Ascent (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  The blow left Shalegha stunned and bewildered. For the first time in her endless lifetime, the commander felt a glimmer of doubt. It made her angry. It fed her rage.

  When she landed on her feet, she saw that Smythe had landed on his in front of her. And in his hand, he held the puniest of blades, no more than a hand’s width in breadth. But it was the fire in his eyes that sent a chill through her bones. This was the human who had killed Alqueyo, the first of the Kasari group commanders to be sent to Earth. Although she had never considered Alqueyo her equal, here in this man’s brown eyes, she saw her own death shining brightly.

  Shalegha stood tall, spread her four arms, and roared.

  And to her utter surprise, this human thrust out his chest and roared back at her, a guttural yell that resonated in her bones. Then, hand to hand, they closed with each other. And for the first time, Shalegha experienced something that she had never felt for a member of any of the alien species she had encountered.

  Respect.

  She would savor the feeling when she ripped the head from his torso and sucked the marrow from his spine.

  Mark felt the kick that would have crushed the head of a man like a pumpkin bounce off the alien’s skull. It knocked her off the hauler, but she landed on her feet. He landed six feet in front of her. Rather than attack, she spread her four arms and bellowed, a guttural sound filled with hate.

  Good.

  In one quick motion, he threw his combat dagger and buried its blade deep in her throat. The move wasn’t a kill shot, merely a distraction. As she reached up with a left hand to pluck it out, Mark leaped forward, spinning under the sword that looked like a dagger in her hand, and grabbed a four-foot piece of a metal rail that a minute ago had been part of the platform supports.

  She turned to face him, and his mind plucked the memory of when he had fought and killed one of these things nine years ago. Since then, he had added three inches and thirty pounds of muscle to his frame. He knew that wouldn’t save him. Quickness was the key.

  When she charged, she attempted to grab him with her three free arms, a move he had anticipated. If she could limit his mobility, she would kill him. He rolled beneath her grasp and came out swinging the rail in Babe Ruth fashion. The pipe whistled through the air, striking her lower right elbow with bone-shattering force. There was a loud crack, and the arm flopped like a wet fish, sending the long blade spinning, but he felt his combat dagger puncture his left bicep as he dodged away.

  She bull-rushed him, green blood still gushing from her throat wound. This time, despite every other part of his brain screaming at him to leap to the side, he shifted the inch-thick metal bar in his hand, set his feet, and thrust the jagged end into the gaping hole his knife had made in her neck.

  He saw her try to stop, but her bulk gave her irresistible momentum, impaling her on the bar and driving it a foot and a half out of the back of her neck. Still, she did not fall. Dropping the blade that was too small for her hand, she grabbed a bar with her upper two hands. But before she could pull it free, Mark threw his whole body to his left, putting every bit of his strength and weight into creating angular momentum. Her neck twisted, pulling her head around as well. He felt vertebrae pop, saw the green blood fountain, smelled the ammonia stink of it, and twisted harder.

  She staggered forward, her knees giving way as her arms fell limply to her sides. Her body landed chest down, but her head faced upward toward Mark, her unblinking eyes still following his movements. Mark set his feet and threw his shoulder into the prybar until he felt her neck muscles go slack. Pulling the bar free, he raised it above his head and brought it down like a sledgehammer on her skull.

  Breathing hard, Mark dropped the metal bar and stepped back, his eyes scanning the room for other threats. But he already knew that there were none. Except for the distant rumble of weapons outside, the chamber had gone silent. Beyond the wreckage that had been the headquarters’ platform, the hundred-foot arch of the wormhole gateway had gone dark, shut down from the far side.

  Then he heard movement and saw Rob stagger around the nose of the hauler, the right side of his face covered in blood.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I will be,” Rob said, stepping to Mark’s side to stare at the alien corpse. “Jeez, do you think you might have some anger issues?”

  Rob’s comment erased all of Mark’s concern for the young man’s health. A sudden awareness of the pain in his left arm caused him to examine the bicep wound. It was deep but healing rapidly. In a few minutes, it would be only a memory.

  He walked over and picked up his rifle. He gestured toward the gateway. “Make sure nobody can use that stargate again.”

  Rob turned his gaze to the wormhole gateway. As the stasis field chopped the portal into car-sized chunks, it looked like a puzzle falling apart.

  “Come on,” said Mark. “Let’s find a way out of here.”

  As they made their way toward the north exit, Mark saw a welcome sight, a group of his bipedal robots waiting just on the far side of the stasis shield. When Rob dismissed the stasis shield, the bipedal robots stepped aside to allow Mark and Rob into the shattered room beyond, where more robots waited.

  Mark paused to adjust his SRT headset, which had slid awkwardly up into his helmet and linked his mind to Jamal Glover and Eileen Wu, who commanded the robots from New Zealand.

  “Okay, Jamal,” he said, “get us out of here.”

  Surrounded by robots, he and Rob stepped out through the rubble of the shattered entrance. No sounds of combat echoed through the dreary scene. The bodies of UFNS soldiers lay everywhere.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  “I . . . I don’t believe it,” said Jamal, a noticeable catch in his voice. “One second they were fighting like hell, and the next they dropped dead. And I mean all of them. From what we’re seeing, every person on Earth who was infused with Kasari nanites died at the same moment, all over the planet. Tens of millions.”

  “Holy crap,” Rob said in a heavy breath, looking completely stunned.

  Mark felt sick, like he could barely stand. The alien bastards had pulled the plug. As strongly as Mark had disagreed with the people who had wanted the protection and long life offered by the Kasari, they hadn’t deserved to die like members of some crazed suicide cult.

  He lifted his eyes to the gray sky. The neural net confirmed that there had been no contact from the Meridian Ascent. But the fact that the Kasari attack ships weren’t slagging the planet meant that Heather and Jennifer were still out there fighting.

  “Come on, baby,” he whispered. “Come home to me.”

  Helen Grange didn’t release her mental scream of frustration. She didn’t dare. The impossible had happened. Somehow Jamal Two had hijacked most of the processors under her control and then beat her so thoroughly that she had been wiped from all Earth-based networks. If not for the foothold she had established within the computational systems on the Kasari staging planet of Jhet-Khai, she would have ceased to exist.

  As it was, she had managed to transfer only a tiny fraction of her knowledge and memories before the Kasari had shut the wormhole gateway, breaking her link. Now she was a mere ghost of her former self, vulnerable to being snuffed out should she be detected. She survived, but on life support.

  With the utmost of care, she felt her way through the unexplored Kasari network, observing, but careful to avoid making herself visible. All she needed were concealed corners she could sneak into. Stalked by constant terror, she felt like a rabbit in a bush, hiding from the fox that sniffed at her trail. Maybe someday Helen would acquire the confidence to take more aggressive action. But for now, she had adopted a new mantra that echoed over and over in her mind.

  Hide . . . hide . . . hide.

  CHAPTER 38

  MERIDIAN ASCENT

  30 May

  A vision of the slave-filled interior of an ancient Roman galley ship filled Heather’s mind. Sitting at the head of the galley slaves, the drumme
r increased the tempo of his rhythmic beat, his voice echoing through the ship as the rowers put their entire bodies into their desperate work.

  “Ramming speed!”

  The Meridian emerged from subspace like a battering ram in the midst of the tight cluster of Kasari attack ships, its expanding subspace bubble ripping through hulls and sending whirling sections ricocheting into one another.

  Heather felt Dgarra fire the vortex weapon in an attempt to clear debris from their path. When the Meridian had shifted back into normal-space, that bubble had hurled aside everything within its volume, with no damage inflicted on the vessel.

  But the roiling wreckage formed a snow globe around them. Secondary explosions from within the debris field hurled a bus-sized section of hull into the Meridian’s already weakened midsection. Heather felt the internal gravity system fail as her stasis chair disintegrated, sending her and the rest of the crew floating freely in the command bay.

  “I’ve lost all power,” said VJ.

  “Get us back into subspace,” said Raul.

  “Do you understand what ‘no power’ means?”

  “Weapons are down,” said Dgarra, “but we still have sensors.”

  “Great,” said Raul. “At least we’ll be able to watch what kills us.”

  The images that formed in Heather’s mind stabbed her with a dull knife, a feeling that the others in the crew absorbed at the same time. The force of the impact had ejected the Meridian from the debris plume and sent it tumbling toward Earth. If the crew didn’t get the engines working in the next five minutes, this ship was going to become a flaming meteorite.

  “I’m going aft,” said VJ, launching herself toward the hatch with her internal stasis field generator.

  “I’ll throw on my pack and join you,” said Jennifer.

  “Don’t bother,” said VJ. “Either I can fix the problem using my stasis field or nobody can. The central and engineering bays are both breached, but I don’t need to breath.”

  With a feeling of helplessness that made her sick to her stomach, Heather watched the sensor feed as Earth gradually grew larger. If they were going to die, at least they had stopped the Kasari ships from killing billions. That thought gave her some peace.

  VJ pushed herself through the forward cabin to the exit door. She draped herself and the doorway with a hemispherical stasis field and then issued the mental command that opened the portal. The air within her hemisphere rushed out into the void, but she used another branch of her stasis field to move her out into the bay amidships.

  They had long since removed the crew quarters and the room where she had created her body to make space for the equipment left on Brillian-2. She now found herself staring into an empty chamber where a large section of the double hull was missing. She hung suspended in frigid temperatures as Earth, the moon, and the stars windmilled into view below her feet. She felt her body automatically adjust to the lack of external pressure. Pushing off with the stasis field, she propelled herself to the engineering bay.

  Part of the wall that isolated the aft section from the rest of the ship had been torn out, but when VJ floated through the gap, her multispectral vision detected no sign that the outer hull inside had been breached. But as she made her way farther into engineering, she saw why the ship’s engines had died. VJ relayed the imagery through her mental connection to the others.

  A two-foot section of the superconducting conduit that connected the primary matter disrupter to everything else on the ship was gone, having been carted into space by the chunk of metal that had punched into engineering. Having detected the lack of electrical contact, the primary matter disrupter had placed itself in standby mode to prevent overload, waiting to switch itself back on until the connection was restored.

  “Oh no,” Jennifer whispered in VJ’s mind.

  VJ could feel her dread and understood it. They didn’t have any spare superconducting cable on board. Even if they had, it would have been stored in the missing section of the ship. Given enough time, they could regrow the conduit using the molecular assembler, powering it from the small matter disrupter in the command bay. But in less than three minutes, they were going to hit Earth’s atmosphere and burn.

  As she stared down at the gap, a new idea occurred to VJ, one that inspired great sadness. But try as she might, even using the ship’s neural net to augment her own processing power, she couldn’t come up with another solution.

  “Shit.”

  There was one available source for the part she needed to save the ship and its crew. Her spinal column. It connected the two perfect capacitors in her hips to the small matter disrupter and stasis field generator in her abdomen and the processing centers of her brain.

  “No!”

  Raul’s scream strengthened their connection. And his sense of impending loss pulled tears from her eyes. They froze and broke off when she blinked, the tiny glittering shards of pain spinning slowly away into the dark.

  “I wish I weren’t the one who has to do this,” she replied, surprised to detect the quaver in her thought. “You taught me how to love.”

  “Don’t,” he said, their grief coalescing in a loop of anguish.

  Once again, VJ directed her gaze down at the gap in the conduit. Then, rotating her body into alignment, she slowly lowered herself onto it.

  Reaching behind her back with her left hand and behind her neck with her right, she breathed three words. “I love you.”

  Then she jammed the ragged ends into her upper and lower spine.

  CHAPTER 39

  MERIDIAN ASCENT

  30 May

  The shock that hammered Jennifer as her mental link to VJ winked out left her shaking. Raul’s agony bordered on desolation. Unable to cope with that intensity of feeling, Jennifer dropped her group mind-meld, only then realizing how close she had been to succumbing to exhaustion.

  “We have power,” Dgarra said. “Engaging distortion drives in five seconds.”

  Shoving the loss of VJ to the back of her mind, Jennifer activated the Meridian’s external shield and cradled the crew in stasis cocoons just as the ship restored internal gravity. She would deal with her emotions later.

  “Heather,” she said, “from here on out, if you sense something critical, send it out through your SRT headset. In the meantime, get ahold of your New Zealand crew and let them know we’re coming home.”

  “Got it.”

  “Captain,” Jennifer said, “are you with us?”

  Slowly, as if he were fighting a ten-G acceleration, Raul straightened, wiped his face with both hands, and took one shuddering breath before responding, “I’m ready to resume my duties.”

  “Okay, then, the con is yours. I’ll drive. Dgarra, you’re back on tactical.”

  “Good,” Dgarra said.

  Jennifer recalled an alpha-wave pattern that she achieved during deep meditation, centered her thoughts, and absorbed the feeling.

  Then, as the neural net delivered the computed maneuver that would adjust their velocity vector’s direction and magnitude to match that within the original Smythe Earth gate chamber, she brought the Meridian around. Hopefully the vessel wouldn’t break in half before she could set it down.

  Raul felt the Meridian settle to the floor inside the Smythe Fortress with a hard bump, but he felt no tearing or grinding reverberations that would indicate the damaged starship had torn itself apart. The thought that VJ would have set it down more gently wasn’t really fair to Jennifer. For most of her brief life, VJ had been a part of this ship. Now she had saved it and all aboard. Everyone but herself.

  Numb with grief, he dismissed his stasis cocoon and rose to his feet as Jennifer put the Meridian into minimal power mode, which would keep the neural net alive but little else. An overwhelming need to get to engineering battled the dread of what he would see there.

  “Captain, let me go back there first,” said Dgarra. “I am not sure you are ready for this.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Raul, “b
ut I need to see her. Nothing could stop you if it were Jennifer.”

  The Koranthian warrior nodded.

  When Raul opened the door, letting the Earth atmosphere in, nobody made an attempt to follow him. For that, he was thankful.

  He had seen the images that VJ’s mind had transferred as she’d made her way aft. But as he looked at the empty space where the floor and part of the left wall had once been, he felt a oneness with this ship. With only a moment’s hesitation, he dropped eight feet to the stone floor upon which the ship rested and walked back toward the engineering bay, ignoring Jamal’s and Eileen’s yells of welcome from across the chamber.

  When he reached the edge of the aft section, he began climbing up through the space between the inner and outer hull of the cigar-shaped craft, cutting his arm on a jagged piece of metal. He barely felt it. Raul pulled himself up into the engineering bay through the space where an angular hunk of debris had split the wall. And there, six feet in front of him, he saw what was left of VJ.

  He froze. Except for the pile of ash and blobs of molten metal that lay scattered on the floor two feet below the conduit, only VJ’s superconducting spine remained, fused in place. He understood the physics of what had happened. When she’d made the connections that completed the circuit, the matter disrupter had switched out of standby, dumping the incredible amperage that the Meridian required.

  Every part of VJ that was not a superconductor had resistance, and that resistance produced the heat that had obliterated her wonderful body and mind. He took two stumbling steps forward and fell on his knees before the conduit, bowing his head as if he knelt before an altar.

  Raul did not weep. His body was merely a shell filled with darkness and despair. He couldn’t have cried out if he’d wanted to. He didn’t know how long he remained there as unbidden memories wandered through his mind.