The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  He could tell immediately that it wasn’t going to be enough to save her. The damage was so widespread that by the time the nanites spread throughout her form, she would be dead. And then Raul would be alone, trapped on this lonely robot ship in the vastness of uncharted space with no idea of how to get home, even if Earth still existed.

  A new idea formed in his mind, one that just might kill him, but his desperation left him no choice. Raul changed his visualization and hundreds of the virtual transfusion tubes sprouted from his body to Jennifer’s, delivering his blood to all parts of her body simultaneously. And as it did, Raul felt himself weaken. Missing legs, he just didn’t have the blood capacity of a normal person.

  As he felt his vision narrow and his consciousness fade, Raul terminated the flow and let himself settle to the alien floor beside her. His fingers touched her right wrist and he held his breath. Nothing.

  Damn it!

  Then he felt it, the faintest of pulses beneath the bruised skin of her forearm. Raul took her hand gently in his, felt the broken bones of her fingers shift beneath her skin, and withdrew his hand in horror.

  Dear God!

  Raul caught himself as a new horror filled his mind. God had nothing to do with any of this. The light of religious belief he’d always held to so tightly had finally been snuffed out, and along with it, any relief that prayer might have brought.

  Weak from blood loss, Raul rested his head on the cool gray floor, closed his eyes, and wept.

  Lying on her back, Jennifer blinked her eyes as her red-limned vision swam back into the light. Everywhere she looked, things were a very blurry red, no doubt a consequence of the ruptured blood vessels in her eyes. Christ. It was a miracle that she could see at all. She rode a tidal wave of pain but, for the first time, its intensity seemed to lessen. Perhaps her nerves had merely passed their pain saturation threshold. But no. The fact that her sight had returned meant that she was getting better.

  She raised her hands to gently rub her face and then froze. What the hell? She’d felt the bones in her hands and arms break under the stresses produced by the wormhole transitions. But now, as she held up her hands, she could see that they were whole and functional. Despite the fact that they still hurt like hell, they were healing. And apparently, so was the rest of her body.

  A sudden panic seized her. There was only one thing she knew of that could produce this type of healing. The Rho Project nanites. And there was only one way they could have gotten into her system.

  Lying on her back, she tried to raise her head, but a fresh wave of agony made her suck in a breath and threw her into a paroxysm of coughing. It took all of her augmented neural control to avoid a bout of the dry heaves.

  Jennifer longed to scream but couldn’t have managed it even if she’d dared try. Only a weak gasp escaped her lips.

  Raul! What had that crazy son of a bitch done to her? Why couldn’t he have just let her die?

  Jennifer saw Raul’s legless form float through the air toward her, raising a question in her mind. If the Rho starship was in the void of empty space, why wasn’t she also floating instead of lying on the floor?

  He came to a stop an arm’s length above the spot where she lay, his artificial right eye extending on a short, metallic stalk from its socket and moving independently of his human eye. The top and back of Raul’s skull had been replaced by a translucent material through which his brain was vaguely visible.

  This being the first time she’d had the opportunity to study him, Jennifer found his cyborg appearance so fascinating that it momentarily distracted her from her pain. As consciousness gradually slipped from her grasp, a new idea assaulted her. Was that what he had in mind for her? But even as she mulled it, the horror of that thought failed to keep her awake.

  Floating above the jumble of gray alien conduits that filled almost half of the Rho Ship’s forward compartment, Raul approached the large empty space where Jennifer Smythe lay, his body propelled by his control of the stasis field. Technically, the field was controlled by the Rho Ship’s neural net, but his mind was so thoroughly integrated into the net that it was a distinction without a difference.

  After having awakened briefly three hours ago, Jennifer had slipped back into unconsciousness. Considering the extent of the injuries that her blood-transfused nanites were working to repair, it was probably for the best.

  Other than his terror of being alone, he wasn’t sure why he cared. It all went back to his junior year at Los Alamos High School, when the madness had begun.

  Raul had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, the reason his father, Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez, had secretly injected his son with Rho Project nanites even though the serum had only undergone animal testing. The treatment had worked, but his dad hadn’t revealed what he’d done, letting Raul believe that his supernatural healing powers were a miracle, a gift straight from God Almighty.

  He had gone back to school and fallen in love with Jennifer’s best friend, Heather McFarland. And despite his dislike of her brother Mark, Raul had thought Jennifer quite nice.

  He paused to study her, not only in the human-visible spectrum, but in the ultraviolet and infrared too. There was little doubt that she would recover. Raul just wished he could say the same thing for the Rho Ship.

  On the positive side, the gravity distortion engines were still functioning, as evidenced by the one g that held Jennifer and the various supplies down. Of course, Raul could have achieved the same effect with his ability to manipulate the stasis field generator. But why bother when the vessel’s gravity distortion drives determined the direction and magnitude of its acceleration vector? Inside, a different gravitational manipulation gave you a consistent floor-ceiling reference and allowed you to stand and move about irrespective of what was happening to the ship as a whole, although even that bit of gravitational wizardry couldn’t provide enough inertial damping for a survivable wormhole transition.

  The distortion drives were operational . . . fabulous. Unfortunately, all sensor systems were off-line, so they were flying blind. And from his examination of the data provided by his neural net, that was the least of their problems.

  Decades ago, the Rho Ship had battled its Altreian counterpart in the skies over the American Southwest, with both ships ultimately crashing to Earth. But as badly as the Rho Ship’s control systems had been damaged in the fight, it was Dr. Donald Stephenson who had almost destroyed it. The scientist had abused its gravity distortion engines to generate an anomaly inside the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, an extinction threat that had forced world governments to build the Stephenson Gateway to transport the nascent black hole into deep space.

  Raul had spent a year gradually restoring the systems that enabled the robot ship to repair itself, although he’d made those repairs while it rested safely inside Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Rho Division, not lost somewhere in the void of space.

  The thought of Dr. Stephenson brought a low growl from Raul’s throat. The head of the Rho Project had surgically altered Raul, removing his legs and replacing his right eye, all in an attempt to build a cyborg interface to the Rho Ship’s neural net. The procedure had worked, but at the cost of Raul’s humanity, transforming him from a vital nineteen-year-old man into a neo-Frankenstein monster. The horror he’d seen in Jennifer’s eyes when she’d looked at him brought that truth thundering home.

  Raul shook off the self-pity accompanying his thoughts of Dr. Stephenson. After all, Stephenson had merely been a tool of the Kasari Collective, the alien empire that had built this robotic world ship and sent it to Earth, packed with technologies designed to seduce humanity into building the wormhole gate. Almost every horrible thing that had happened to Raul—the loss of his family and sacrifice of his form—could be traced directly back to the Kasari.

  As he watched, Jennifer stirred and groaned. She opened her eyes and met his gaze with a new clarity.

  “Is there any water?” she rasped.

  Her question made Rau
l realize just how thirsty he was. Hungry too. The nanites worked hard to fix anything that was wrong with your body, but they also heightened hunger and thirst.

  “Lie still. I’ll bring some.”

  Jennifer ignored his advice and struggled to her knees, her head drooping from the effort. Raul floated to the stack of supplies Dr. Stephenson had stashed in the compartment more than a year ago, shocked at how few of the cases of ready-to-eat meals and five-gallon water bottles remained. But then Raul hadn’t planned on leaving Earth so suddenly.

  Thank you, Jennifer Smythe!

  He filled a plastic glass, drank greedily, refilled it, and returned to Jennifer, who was now seated with her back against the stasis field generator. When she took the glass from his outstretched hand, she sniffed it warily and then took a small sip.

  Raul felt the heat rise to his cheeks. “What? You think I poisoned it?”

  Jennifer glared back at him. “Crossed my mind.”

  “I just saved your ass!”

  She started to respond, shrugged instead and took a deep drink, pausing to see if the water was going to stay down. It did and she finished the remainder. When her gaze again met Raul’s, he realized her eyes were brown, just as he remembered from high school. But back then her hair had been brown too.

  “Your eyes.”

  “What about them?” she asked.

  “When you stepped into the ship they were blue.”

  “Ever hear of colored contact lenses?”

  The muscles in Raul’s jaw tightened. “What’s with the attitude? If anyone’s got a right to be pissed, it’s me.”

  Jennifer struggled to her feet, standing so that she faced him. “Really?”

  “You damn near killed us both!”

  “Bullshit!” Jennifer jabbed a finger at him. “You caused this.”

  For a second, Raul was tempted to fling her across the room with the stasis field. But she was partially right, though Dr. Stephenson was the chief cause of the disasters that had led to this. He and the Kasari Collective.

  Years ago, shortly after the first test of the atomic bomb, humanity had attracted the attention of the two biggest players in the galaxy, the Kasari Collective and the Altreians. They had each sent a starship to Earth with very different agendas.

  The Kasari were engaged in the most aggressive expansion of its recorded history, assimilating the populations of world after world, leaving the Altreians scrambling to stop that advance. Both alien empires had extremely advanced but vastly different technologies.

  The Kasari had mastered the manipulation of gravity and thus could create wormholes through which they could send unmanned starships. No living being could survive the g-forces involved with exiting a wormhole that was not anchored at both ends by a gateway. The Kasari sent these world ships to populated planets that had acquired sufficient technology to be of interest. Those world ships landed and offered the local population technologies that could extend lifetimes and solve clean energy problems, along with a host of other scientific breakthroughs. Once they had sampled those goodies, few civilizations could resist the final enticement . . . to build a wormhole gate that would form a doorway to connect the populace with their alien benefactors.

  The genius of the Kasari scheme was that it allowed them to assimilate whole populations into the collective without the massive cost of huge wars. The military principle of economy of force was thus applied on a massive scale. There were, of course, clashes with parts of the population, but these usually could be put down by providing advisors and equipment to the pro-Kasari elements of the targeted world. And that efficiency allowed the Kasari to expand on multiple worlds simultaneously without having to gather a large force to conquer one world at a time. Willing recruits were far more valuable to the collective than those recruited by force.

  As for the Altreians, they employed a technology that allowed them to shift their starships into subspace, where faster-than-light travel was possible. More importantly, the process allowed them to send starships with living crews to distant worlds. The feat was impressive, but the Altreians had no chance of scaling to the extent that the Kasari Collective could manage through their approach. So the Altreians tried to detect when a Kasari world ship was sent forth so that they could launch a starship of their own, hopefully intercepting the enemy vessel before it could reach its target population.

  In the late 1940s, the Kasari craft in which Raul and Jennifer Smythe now found themselves had been intercepted on its way to Earth by an Altreian starship. The two ships had shot each other down over the American Southwest. Only the Kasari vessel had been found. The U.S. government had spirited it away to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where a top-secret effort known as the Rho Project was tasked with reverse engineering the damaged ship’s technology.

  Over the decades that followed, the project’s legendary lead scientist, Dr. Donald R. Stephenson, had been wildly successful. Unfortunately, along with the ship and its technologies, he’d resurrected its Kasari agenda.

  Jennifer’s voice pulled Raul from his reverie.

  “Earth! Did it survive? Is it still out there?”

  Raul felt his gut clench as he looked into her terrified eyes.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jennifer struggled against her rising panic. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  Five feet away, Raul shook his head.

  “The ship’s sensors are off-line. I have no idea where in the universe we are and, until we get them working, we can’t figure it out.” Raul’s human eye locked with hers as a sad look settled on his face. “Even if we get them working, we’re almost certainly too far away to check on Earth.”

  The realization stunned her. The Rho Ship’s gravity distortion engines had created a wormhole and thrust them through. In all likelihood this ship was now many light-years away from Earth. Even if they could see Earth, the light they would be seeing had been traveling across space for all those years that it took to get here. They would be looking back into Earth’s past and glean nothing about the planet’s present.

  A new idea gave her sudden hope. She was still wearing the Altreian headband. It communicated with the crashed Altreian starship in the Bandelier Cave through subspace, and the speed of waves through subspace was far greater than the speed of light.

  So why wasn’t she feeling the familiar connection to the Bandelier Ship?

  It had been three years since she, her twin brother Mark, and Heather McFarland had first stumbled upon that crashed ship in the steep canyon country near Los Alamos, New Mexico. They’d discovered the alien headbands on the damaged craft and foolishly tried them on. She could still feel the pain of that first experience. Each of them had been left altered, with their neural connections and physiological abilities enhanced in different ways, even after they removed the headbands. Once a headset had attuned to an individual mind, it would never link to another for as long as that person lived.

  The trio had been rewired with eidetic memories, enhanced senses, fine control of their neuromusculature system, and some ability to communicate telepathically with each other. But even though the iridescent headsets had looked identical, they were each programmed for one of four different crew positions on the Altreian craft.

  Mark had been altered for the security officer role, his muscle coordination and strength augmented beyond any of the others, along with his ability to learn languages and mimic voices. Heather had chosen the commander’s headset, gifting her with savant mathematical abilities that included instantaneous calculation of the odds of upcoming events.

  Jennifer had chosen the communications officer headset, gifting her with strong empathic and telepathic abilities.

  The fourth headset was designated for the crew’s political officer, the one assigned to keep an eye on the rest of the crew and make sure they were complying with the will of the Altreian High Council. Jennifer didn’t know its full capabilities and didn’t really care to. Truth be known, that headset scared
the hell out of her. The amazing enhancements imparted by the other headsets had ensnared the three of them in the Altreian agenda, destroying their once-comfortable lives.

  But whenever they put the headbands on, no matter where they were, they could interact directly with the Altreian starship’s computer, and that was an awesome experience.

  Now she wasn’t feeling that connection. Perhaps the Altreian headset’s subspace communications capability was range limited. Right now, Jennifer really, really hoped that was it.

  For the last hour, Jennifer had felt herself getting stronger as the amazing nano-machines healed her body. Despite her knowledge that her mentors, Jack Gregory and Janet Price, had been the recipients of Dr. Stephenson’s nanite infusions, she couldn’t shake her revulsion at the thought of thousands of tiny machines derived from Kasari technology crawling around in her bloodstream.

  After consuming two MREs and a quart of water, she’d let Raul bring her up to speed on their situation.

  The Rho Ship’s matter disrupter, the device that transformed any kind of matter to energy, was fully functional. Having studied the theory behind the disrupter that Dr. Stephenson had built at the Large Hadron Collider site, she understood how it worked.

  She and Raul had power, working gravity distortion engines, food, water, and a portable camp toilet. So much for the good news.

  “None of the onboard sensors are working?” Jennifer asked.

  “We’re flying completely blind out here.”

  “And life support is failing too?”

  “No, there’s nothing wrong with the life support system,” said Raul. “It’s just not running.”

  Normally, Jennifer would have used her computer skills to help identify and fix these problems, but since Raul was the only interface to the Rho Ship’s neural net, she was stuck asking frustrating questions. His answers weren’t improving her mood.