The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  “Why not?”

  “This ship’s only designed to carry living passengers for sub-light journeys. Since nobody can survive an unanchored wormhole transit, the life support systems automatically shut down whenever the wormhole drives engage. They don’t come on again until the ship takes on new passengers.”

  “But it has passengers.”

  “And if its sensors were operating, the ship would probably detect that.”

  Jennifer felt her teeth grind and forced her jaw to relax. “Seems like a pretty important problem. What the hell are you doing to fix it?”

  Raul scowled at her. “That’s just it. I can’t fix it.”

  “You’re not even trying!”

  “Bullshit. The sensor systems are located in the aft, along with the gravity distortion engines and the weapons systems. Normally I would use the stasis field or the nano-material controls to make repairs throughout the ship. But without the worm-fiber sensors I can’t see a damn thing back there.”

  “Then float your ass back there and fix it!”

  Jennifer watched as Raul floated toward her, invading her personal space. “I can only connect with the neural net in the forward compartment. Without that, I won’t be able to control the stasis field or the nano-materials. I’d just be crawling around on the floor, even more worthless than you.”

  Jennifer took a deep breath and pulled forward the perfect memory of how she felt during deep meditation, feeling her alpha waves smooth out as she centered. This bickering was only using up more of their precious oxygen, getting them nowhere closer to a solution. If they were going to survive, she needed Raul’s help. And whether he recognized it or not, he needed hers. It was time for her to step up and take control.

  “What if I could be your eyes?”

  Raul looked surprised at her sudden change in tone and she subtly reached into his mind, amplifying the warm feeling but not so much that he would notice her influence.

  “You want me to let you back inside my head?”

  Jennifer almost smiled at Raul’s naiveté, thinking that he could block her if she chose to force her way in. Yet that approach wasn’t likely to lead to a cooperative working environment for the longer term, assuming they survived long enough for that to be a possibility.

  “Unless you can think of a better plan.”

  Raul hesitated, his robotic eye elongating to scan the wall behind him, reminding her of a sea snake wriggling out of a coral hole. Jennifer imagined that the move enhanced his interaction with the massive computation systems behind the wall.

  After several seconds, he shrugged. “I guess it’s worth a try.”

  “Are you sure the rest of the ship has air?” she asked.

  “Unless there was a hull breach, it should still have the air that was trapped inside when the outer hatch closed.”

  “So you’re just going to open the door and hope for the best?”

  “I’ll seal the entrance with the stasis field before opening the door.”

  Jennifer followed Raul’s human eye, looking toward a spot on the rear wall of the compartment where she could just make out the vague outline of a door.

  With all that had happened, she’d barely taken notice of the alien equipment that crowded the back half of this forward compartment. There was nothing beautiful about the ship. Everything was gray, shaped for efficiency and utility, not aesthetics, functionality trumping beauty at every twist and turn. The Kasari had made no attempt to group equipment in any way that made its functionality apparent, instead positioning everything so that the translucent tubes and bundles of conduits that connected the various apparatuses optimized efficiency. Very narrow walkways led through, around, and over an assortment of machines and instruments, all built to be operated by the Rho Ship’s neural net and manipulated by the nimble fingers of the stasis field.

  Floating over the equipment, Raul beat her to the closed door, its outlines barely visible in the cool, gray light. “You ready?” he asked.

  “As ready as I’m going to be.”

  Behind Raul, the nano-particles that made up the door melted away into the surrounding walls. Although she knew the opening was draped by the invisible cloak of the stasis field, Jennifer still found herself holding her breath. Then she heard a slight hiss as Raul opened a tiny hole in the field. It wasn’t a significant air leak, just a slight variance in the relative air pressures between the rest of the ship and the sealed-off forward compartment.

  Jennifer stepped forward until her outstretched fingers touched the repulsive barrier, located the tiny hole, and sniffed. Air was definitely entering the forward cabin instead of leaving it and, as judged by her enhanced senses, it smelled just fine. Two positive signs. During the time the air replenishment system had been off-line, the CO2 levels in the forward compartment had been rising as oxygen levels decreased. Allowing outside air to mix in would buy them a considerable amount of additional time to try to make repairs before the atmosphere became toxic.

  “You can drop the stasis field,” she said. “The air’s good.”

  Raul complied and Jennifer felt a gentle breeze as the air pressure equalized.

  “I guess it’s time to try your mind trick again,” Raul said.

  Jennifer noticed a tightness in his face and knew he was recalling the mental force she’d brought to bear when she’d forced her way into his head a few hours earlier. That psionic talent to enter another person’s mind to share thoughts and feelings was another of her Altreian alterations, perhaps the most powerful of them all. Her power had simpler beginnings, starting as an empathic ability to feel and alter the feelings of others. Then had come the occasional flashes of mental communication between Mark, Heather, and herself while they weren’t wearing the Altreian headsets.

  Still, it had taken the psychopathic Colombian assassin known as El Chupacabra to show her just how little of her abilities she was using. She hadn’t gained full control of her power until she, Mark, and Heather had been imprisoned in the secret NSA supermax facility known as the Ice House.

  The thought of her twin brother and best friend brought a sudden tightness to her throat, but she pushed the feeling aside. Now was not the time for grief.

  Although Raul didn’t like submitting to this experiment, he would have to remain in the forward compartment, seeing into other parts of the ship through her eyes as he manipulated the stasis field and nano-materials to fix the damaged systems.

  Jennifer inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and centered. For better or worse, the time had come to test her limits.

  Raul felt Jennifer step across the boundary to his mind like a cool breeze. Although he knew it was just her manipulation of his feelings, it still felt wonderful.

  “I need you to show me the ship’s layout.”

  Raul watched her in fascination. Her thoughts sounded exactly as if she’d spoken to him but her lips hadn’t moved.

  He tried thinking a response. “Can’t you access the neural net through me?”

  “You still have free will. I can delve into your thoughts and emotions, but I can’t make you do something you don’t want to.”

  A sudden coldness brought gooseflesh alive on his arms. “How deep can you dig into my head?”

  Again, Raul felt a sense of warm reassurance as she answered. “Until you learn to put up some mental blocks, I can go as deep as I want.”

  The horror returned, only to ramp down to mild concern as Jennifer continued. “You’ll know exactly what I’m accessing in your mind whenever I do it. But I promise not to poke around too deeply inside your head, at least until we get this ship fixed. Then, if you play nice, I’ll teach you how to set up those blocks.”

  Despite the reassuring feelings, Raul didn’t trust her, although right now that didn’t matter.

  Accessing the neural net, he pulled up a detailed 3-D diagram of the ship and felt Jennifer’s mind absorb it. Interesting. Through their mental linkage he could actually sense what she was feeling as he focused on it.
Right now he sensed amusement at his amateurish exploration of that linkage. Shit. She was laughing at him.

  Raul rotated the diagram around the x-axis and then around the y and finally around the z, observing it from multiple angles. The cigar-shaped ship was designed with a single deck, divided into thirds. The forward compartment housed the vessel’s neural net, along with control interfaces to the engines, sensors, weapons, and maintenance/environmental systems. The middle third of the ship was a honeycomb of compartments, most of which were nano-particle adaptable living quarters, automatically configured for whatever species occupied them. A narrow hallway circled this hexagonal collection of inner rooms. The external hatch and ramp were located in the exact center of the ship on the starboard side.

  Raul thought of the rear third as the engineering bay, home to the gravity distortion engines and guts of the other systems controlled from the forward command bay. The rest of the ship’s systems, as well as the connections between them and the controlling neural net residing below the main deck, were accessible via narrow crawlways. If the interior gravity system failed, all the passages would become float-ways.

  “Okay,” she thought, “that’s enough to get me started.”

  Raul watched as Jennifer turned and walked out the door into the warren of middle compartments. As she disappeared around the corner, a wave of dizziness assaulted him. A disorienting vision filled his head. He found himself seeing through her eyes, amazed at the clarity of it. She paused before a closed doorway that had no apparent means of being opened.

  “Well?” Her irritation was readily apparent in the thought. “Are you going to make me wait all day?”

  Catching her meaning, Raul visualized the operating instructions, watching as she traced the intricate command on a panel and entered one of the passenger compartments. Then she paused. A single platform bed stood in the center of the room, with facilities arrayed along the port wall that appeared to be configured for humanoid use, something Raul’s neural net immediately confirmed. Not surprising since the ship’s last detected occupants were human.

  Jennifer stepped back out into the hallway and continued along the starboard side, past the compartment that housed the exterior hatch and the instrumentation that the Rho Project scientists had used to study this ship. With each step closer to the engineering bay that held the key to their survival, Raul felt his tension rise. They were about to find answers to some very weighty questions.

  He just hoped those answers weren’t all bad.

  Jennifer remembered her excitement when she, Mark, and Heather had first climbed aboard the crashed Altreian starship they had come to call the Second Ship or, subsequently, the Bandelier Ship, its smooth flowing lines and abundant colors so wondrous they had taken her breath away. But this ugly monstrosity filled her with a cold dread, as if it were a ghost ship that had been drained of all life and beauty. Without viewports to let her see the stars, the inner honeycomb structure left her with the feeling that, at any moment, a nano-particle wall would dissolve to unleash one of the Kasari horrors they had battled for control of the Stephenson Gate. Her skin crawled.

  When she rounded another of the outer hallway’s hexagonal turns, Raul’s voice spoke in her mind.

  “Stop. This is the place.”

  Again she traced the symbols and the wall on her left melted away, revealing a room filled with hulking machinery that towered from floor to ceiling, all dimly illuminated with the same shadowless gray light as the rest of the ship. Lovely.

  Just inside the engineering bay, Jennifer stopped to listen. The room pulsed with a deep thrumming sound, a slow heartbeat that made it feel alive. She stood in the dull light, breathing hard and dripping sweat despite the chill that clawed its way into her bones.

  Only one thing required her attention, but she found herself having difficulty focusing. The strain of maintaining her mental link with Raul was starting to take a toll on her. The ceiling was fifteen feet above her head and as she looked around and through the strangely shaped machinery, draped with thick, translucent conduits, she felt as if she stood in the narrow confines of a lava tube. A wave of claustrophobia assailed her, but she shoved it aside with an angry thought. Christ! What the hell is wrong with me?

  “Take the passage on the right,” said Raul’s mental voice.

  Jennifer slipped between bulbous columns of machinery and Raul’s thoughts tagged them with their shipboard functions. The huge matter disrupter occupied the centermost portion of the room, containing a belly chamber that could open to ingest external items. The conduits that draped its exterior ran to the gravity distortion engines or disappeared into the floor or walls, carrying power to the ship’s other systems.

  When a portion of the floor panel dissolved away two steps in front of her, Jennifer halted.

  Raul’s next thought confirmed her fears. “The sensor system’s primary power coupler is below deck. You’ll need to go down there.”

  A tight crawl space. Wonderful!

  The thought that Raul might be playing games, guiding her forward along the most difficult route possible, occurred to her, but a deeper glimpse into his mind dispelled that notion. This was the only way to get to the likely cause of their sensor problems.

  Swallowing hard, Jennifer climbed down into the tight space, knelt, and then slithered forward, crawling around, between, and over the tightly packed conduits and hard-edged equipment. Although the light down here was much dimmer than it was above deck, it was more than sufficient for her neurally augmented vision. As she looked around for the easiest spots to squeeze through, she almost wished she couldn’t see what was coming or what lay behind. If she hadn’t seen the large gorilla-spider pursue Heather in the Atlas Cavern electrical cage, contorting its body through tight places, she would have had trouble believing that large species could traverse this part of the ship.

  Then again, robot ships should be able to repair themselves. And this one probably would have if she hadn’t forced its engines beyond their design limits.

  Raul’s mental voice pulled her out of her thoughts. “There it is, on top of the crawl space six feet ahead.”

  “I see it.”

  “Get me a better view.”

  Jennifer crawled to the indicated spot, lay down, and rolled onto her back. The nature of the machinery that surrounded her had changed. Directly above her a rectangular gray access panel shifted as the nano-material flowed aside to reveal the workings within.

  She felt Raul’s query to the neural net return an answer in the form of a three-dimensional wireframe diagram that seemed to float before her eyes. The image expanded, twisting to exactly match the orientation of the equipment she was looking at, then moved so that the wireframe draped the equipment, changing colors so that red indicated the problem areas. Unfortunately, she now found herself looking at a lot of red. Several of the lines that should have matched the arrangement of equipment weren’t even close, pieces having been torn from their moorings or snapped off completely.

  “Shit!” The panic in Raul’s thoughts hammered her.

  “How long?” Jennifer asked.

  “What?”

  “How long will it take to fix it?”

  The neural net performed the required calculations and the answer formed in Raul’s mind.

  Jennifer froze. “Sixty-three hours?”

  “That’s the estimate,” Raul said.

  “And how long until the CO2 level gets toxic?”

  “No problem there. This ship holds a little over 108,000 cubic feet of air, which should keep us alive for at least a hundred days.”

  A wave of despair engulfed Jennifer. There was no chance she could lie here and work for six straight hours, much less sixty. Even if she could force her mind to maintain the link, her physical demands would require periodic breaks. With that factored in, this repair job would take a minimum of four days. Lying on her back for that long in this claustrophobic space wasn’t something she looked forward to.

  I
f only Heather were here, her savant mind might be able to arrive at a better solution. But Heather wasn’t here, so Jennifer would have to come up with some ideas of her own, even though her mind was already tiring from the effort of maintaining her mental link with Raul.

  Okay, Jen, she told herself, just relax and breathe.

  Her mother had always reminded her of how you eat an elephant—one bite at a time. Jennifer repressed the memory before it could deepen her depression. Over the next four days she was in for a hell of a lot of chewing.

  The breakthrough came on the eighth hour of day three. As Raul felt Jennifer’s mind near the point where she could no longer maintain their mental link, the first of the sensor systems came back online, this one an electro-optical array on the Rho Ship’s outer hull. The sensors delivered video imagery across the wavelength spectrum, from deep IR all the way into far ultraviolet.

  With the delivery of that imagery into his mind, he could feel Jennifer sigh in delight at the shared view of the beautiful, star-filled space that surrounded them. Raul felt it too, that feeling described by inmates upon their release when they stepped out through the prison gates and inhaled that first breath of freedom. Marvelous.

  “Where are we?” Jennifer asked, awe lacing her voice.

  Raul manipulated the view, searching for a known point of reference. They were in the Milky Way, but where exactly, he couldn’t tell. Definitely not in one of the outer spiral arms, and he had no idea in which of those distant arms Earth resided.

  It was odd. He would have thought that the Rho Ship’s data banks would contain detailed star maps of the galaxy, but they didn’t, at least not in any of the areas Raul could access. That thought worried him. Was it possible that he was still being denied access to key portions of those data banks, even with his enhanced connection to the neural net?

  Of course, it was also possible that the Kasari intentionally omitted uploading their robotic world ships with information that could be used against them should a ship be captured by an advanced species such as the Altreians.