“How am I ever going to learn if I’m always stuck inside?”
“This discussion is over.”
For a moment it looked like Robby would push his luck, but he slid his chair back, stood up, and left the table, walking directly to his room and slamming the door behind him. Janet stared after him for a moment, then took a deep breath and turned to Yachay. Her countenance gave no clue as to whether she approved of the way Janet had handled Robby’s behavior or not.
“Please take Robby down to the training level as soon as you get the dishes put away.”
“Yes, Miss Janet.”
Janet nodded, then turned and strode back to the elevator. By the time she reached the security lobby, she had almost recovered her composure.
Robby heard the door slam behind him before he realized that he had slammed it. Uh-oh. For a moment, he stood frozen in place, certain that his mom would storm into his room at any second. When it didn’t happen, he breathed an audible sigh of relief.
Walking to his unmade bed, he kicked off his sneakers and sprawled atop it, staring up at a brilliant Hawaiian sky. Picking up the remote control from his nightstand, he pressed a button and the outer wall and high ceiling darkened until they were almost opaque. The inside walls and ceilings had been coated with a special electronic ink that was capable of displaying pictures, videos, text, or colors with configurable transparency.
His aunt Heather had made the supercool improvements to an existing technology. He knew she wasn’t really his aunt, but that’s what she’d asked him to call her, so it had stuck.
To think that he’d started this morning in such a great mood, looking forward to his mom and dad getting home. And then, instead of telling her he loved her, he’d opened his big fat mouth and stuck his foot inside, all the way up to his ankle. Before he knew what had happened, he was mad, his mom was mad, and poof . . . all the good feelings had disappeared.
Now he lay here in bed, feeling hungry and miserable, but too dang stubborn to walk out and apologize.
“Do you want my advice?” The feminine voice in his head didn’t improve his mood.
“Not really.”
She had been with him for as long as he could remember. Although she had originally referred to herself as the Other, Robby had never liked that name. He liked Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn. A new day was dawning. He and Eos were a part of it.
When Robby was much younger, he’d thought of her as an invisible friend. Only after his family had moved here had he learned that she was an artificial intelligence. Eos had once existed inside the alien computers aboard the Bandelier starship that Uncle Mark and Aunt Heather had found. Robby figured that if the alien headset hadn’t altered him similarly to the way his aunt and uncle had been altered, it would be awfully crowded inside his head right now. Aside from neural enhancements that gave him an eidetic memory, heightened senses, and tremendous muscular control and coordination, he had yet to develop the psychic abilities that let Mark and Heather communicate via thought at times. But just in the last few months, he’d begun to show a slowly growing telekinetic ability that let him nudge very light objects.
Eos had her own special magic that, through their linked minds, allowed her to take control of any computer or automated device, as long as he could see it. Robby let her use his weak telekinesis to manipulate the electrons within the device’s circuits. He let her flow from him into the machine. Not all of her essence flowed through the link. Just enough. A ghostly arm reaching inside a tiny computer brain.
Robby knew Eos scared people who knew about her, even Heather, who was her own kind of crazy-smart. And he knew he had to be careful about using his inner deity lest others learn to fear what she could do, what the two of them could do. People feared their gods if they knew those gods walked among them. And compared to the abilities of everyday humans, he, Mark, and Heather might as well be gods.
He didn’t think of his mom and dad as gods. They were more like mighty demigods who had been sent down from Olympus to wage battle for humanity.
Robby stretched and climbed back out of bed, his good mood gradually returning. This was almost like living on Olympus, waiting on Zeus’s permission to go down to Earth and mingle with the humans. He knew one thing for certain: he wasn’t willing to wait very much longer.
CHAPTER 3
Raul felt the ship’s worm-fiber generator come back online and mentally sent Jennifer a high five, although she scoffed at the gesture. He didn’t care. Being able to generate those tiny space-time pinholes between here and there gave him the ability to remotely view other parts of the ship or the worlds outside of it. But unlike the wormhole drive, the worm-fiber range was limited to a few million miles. In this case, it meant that he wouldn’t have to use Jennifer’s eyes to make the remainder of the repairs.
“Thank God!” Her tired thought was filled with relief.
Her vision winked out in his head, but he reestablished his view of the below-deck crawl space, initiating a dozen worm-fiber pinholes manipulated by his neural net to create a 3-D view of the damaged equipment.
“What’s that smell?” The alarm in Jennifer’s mental voice startled Raul.
Then he smelled it too, a sour ammonia smell that burned his nostrils and eyes. His neural net provided an instantaneous answer.
“Shit!” Raul gasped and then wished he hadn’t as he pulled more of the noxious gas into his lungs.
The ship had detected passengers and restarted its life support system in its default mode, which would have been fine for the Kasari with their advanced nano-bots that were capable of making any atmosphere breathable. But that wasn’t true of the relatively primitive nanites that Dr. Stephenson had created via reverse engineering, nanites that now populated the bloodstream of Raul and Jennifer.
Even with their heightened resistance, the poisonous atmosphere would eventually kill them. Raul didn’t want to think about the agony that would accompany that kind of slow death.
“What the hell?” The outrage in Jennifer’s broadcast thought was palpable. “Do something!”
Her words snapped him out of the terror that had frozen him. With the repairs to the primary controller incomplete, his only choice was to command a life support system shutdown, so that’s what he did. The problem was that the shutdown wouldn’t get rid of the noxious gas that had already poisoned the ship’s nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.
Raul didn’t know how long he could hold his breath, but he didn’t think it would be long enough to complete the necessary repairs.
Jennifer strode through the open door into the forward third of the ship, her angry eyes matching the wave of emotion that buffeted his mind. Clearly she’d gone deeper into his head, picking up thoughts he hadn’t meant for her to listen in on.
Holding her breath, she didn’t speak. Her thoughts slammed him. “How long will it take to fix?”
Again the neural net supplied a less than satisfactory answer. “Thirteen minutes for the custom atmosphere controls, ten to recalibrate for the nitrogen-oxygen mix, and another eighteen to flush the bad air and replace it with the good.”
Raul was surprised when she didn’t hurl an angry response at him. Instead, Jennifer Smythe stopped two strides in front of him and softened her thoughts. “How long would it take to produce pure oxygen?”
Interesting thought. Raul was starting to see where she was going with this. Pure oxygen would also kill them, but much more slowly. Resisting the growing urge to breathe, he placed the query.
“Seven minutes for minimal repairs and another fourteen to raise the oxygen levels to make the air breathable.”
“How long to make one of the living compartments survivable?”
The answer formed in his head, giving a glimmer of hope. “Eight minutes, but it’ll be marginal.”
“Fine. Program the neural net to handle that and then have it continue making primary controller repairs until it can flood the ship with Earth’s atmosphere. In the meantime, we’ll try to survive in the smalle
r space.”
“I’ll lose my connection to the neural net. We won’t know when it’s finished.”
Jennifer placed a reassuring thought in his mind. It did little to damp down his need to fill his lungs with air, even if it was bad air. But he did as instructed and then let her lead him to the door, where she placed her arm around his waist. As they passed through the portal, he felt his link with the neural net die along with his ability to control the stasis field that supported him.
What happened next surprised him. Instead of lowering him to the floor, Jennifer’s grip tightened, supporting him as easily as if he were a small child, carrying him into the hexagonal room on the far side of the hallway. Setting him down on the alien rest-pallet that vaguely resembled a bed, she walked back to the portal, her fingers perfectly tracing the symbol that closed the door.
Christ. He had to keep reminding himself that, even after he’d watched Heather, Mark, and Jennifer battle the Kasari who had come through the Stephenson wormhole gate, he knew next to nothing about the extent to which the Altreian starship had altered them. She seemed to be handling the lack of oxygen better than he was. If her lungs were screaming like his, she damn sure wasn’t showing it.
Raul gasped involuntarily and the resultant fit of coughing sent him into a panic spiral that pulled another lungful of agony down his throat. A hoarse scream boiled from his lips and he rolled onto his back, his body convulsing.
Then she was there, sitting beside him, her confident mind sliding into his, bringing with it a wonderful sense of calm that extinguished his panic as if it had never existed. He exhaled the poisonous gas and this time he didn’t inhale. The need was still there, as was the pain that speared his chest, but now that he’d stopped harming himself the nanites were keeping him alive.
But for how long? Without his connection to the neural net, it was a question for which he had no answer.
Jennifer was scared, but she masked it from her thoughts. Right now, Raul needed her strength in order to survive, and if he died, since she couldn’t operate this ship, her death would soon follow. She was almost glad that Heather wasn’t here to recite the odds of that happening.
With her lungs screaming to inhale, it was taking all of Jennifer’s concentration to keep soothing thoughts flowing to Raul while she maintained a mental countdown. Three more minutes for the repairs that would allow the Rho Ship to begin flooding their compartment with O2, replacing one toxic gas with a lethal concentration of a breathable one.
One could recover from oxygen toxicity if handled early enough. The problem was that euphoria and loss of concentration were among the early symptoms, not great if you were trying to solve difficult problems. A new thought occurred to her. If she’d told Raul to have the neural net lower the cabin pressure, the oxygen toxicity would have been manageable.
Christ! Another damn mistake.
As her countdown progressed, the urge to inhale became greater along with a light-headed feeling that threatened to break her mental link with Raul. Just as that link began to falter, she felt the first change in the atmosphere. The stinging in her eyes began to subside. She dared a small sniff. Definitely better, but there was still an ammonia smell, so she decided to hold her breath a bit longer.
Raul’s body went into a spasm. He pulled in a great lungful of air and then exhaled in a mighty fit of coughing. He rolled onto his side, gasped several times, and relaxed into a series of panting breaths, each of which seemed to grow easier.
Jennifer allowed herself a sipping breath that tasted and felt wonderful. Her next breath was a full one that evoked its own coughing fit. But now she understood. It wasn’t the new air that was the problem. Her lungs were merely clearing themselves of the remnants of the noxious fumes she’d breathed in several minutes ago.
“That was fun,” Raul said as he scooted himself back to lean against the wall.
Coming from Raul, the wry comment was so unexpected that it amplified the relief she felt at breathing again, pulling from her lips a snicker that became laughter, doubling her over onto her knees. Wiping her eyes, she looked up to see a broad grin spread across Raul’s face. It struck Jennifer that beneath that horrifying, cyborg exterior lurked the person who had so entranced Heather back in their high school days.
Then again, it might just be the oxygen high.
By the time Jennifer informed him that the ship should have completed the atmospheric conversion outside of this chamber, Raul felt so light-headed and dizzy he didn’t care. But she was persistent, so he opened his eyes and nodded.
“Okay, I’m up.”
“That’s good, because I was getting ready to open the door and drag your ass back into the command bay.”
“Try it and I’ll wrap you up in the stasis field and hang you in a corner.”
“Not if I break that weak little mind of yours first,” she said.
“Good luck flying the ship after that.”
Jennifer frowned, and then gave a reluctant grin that was half grimace.
“Guess we’d better call a truce then.”
“Looks like.”
As Raul watched her stare back at him, the thought of just how good she looked surprised him. At five foot six, her body was slender yet powerful and her short blonde hair framed a face that looked elfish. Having long since discarded the white lab coat that she’d worn when she first stepped through the portal into this ship, the hand-washed remnants of her bloodstained jeans and vintage T-shirt emphasized a very sexy body. If it hadn’t been for how bad they both smelled, it might have been a major turn-on. Her rags certainly had more appeal than his stained pullover shirt or the cutoff, folded-over blue jeans that looked like a glorified diaper.
Shit, he thought. The oxygen toxicity is making me delirious.
“You ready?” she asked, her fingers reaching for the almost invisible door controls.
“Go ahead.”
When the nano-particles dissolved into the wall, there was no whoosh of pressure equalization, but he found himself holding his breath. Then Jennifer put her arms around him and effortlessly lifted him from the bed. Christ. He could get used to this. Maybe he’d have to arrange a stasis field malfunction in order to find out.
As Raul began to inhale, the air in the hall proved breathable and so did the command bay . . . better than breathable. Raul had little doubt that this was a mixture of 21 percent oxygen, 78 percent nitrogen, and 1 percent other. Damn close to Earth normal . . . minus the argon, water vapor, and smog.
Unfortunately, coming off the pure oxygen high left him with a skull-cracking headache. Freakin’ fabulous. As great as his nanites were at fixing injuries, they didn’t seem to care a lot about his comfort. A glance at Jennifer’s bloodshot eyes told him she wasn’t doing much better.
Still, it felt good to reestablish his connection with the Rho Ship’s neural net, feeling as if he’d shifted from a groggy stupor to hyperalert. A sense of raw power came with the return of his control over the stasis field. Raul lifted himself up toward the ceiling, experiencing the Rho Ship as if it were a living extension of his body, the damaged systems producing a sensation akin to physical pain.
“Are you having fun up there?” Jennifer asked, her voice weary.
Raul looked down at Jennifer’s location in the central open area, fifteen feet below. She looked beyond exhausted. He immediately realized just how much of the load she had been carrying over the last five days, maintaining her mental connection with him as they fought to repair the ship and survive. Now she had let that mental link slip away.
“Just getting a feel for the ship’s status. We’ve done well, all things considered.”
“But?”
“Tell you what . . . get some rest while I run a complete diagnostic. I’ll bring you up to speed when you wake up.”
She blinked slowly and when her eyes opened again, it was with great reluctance. Although she rarely needed sleep, these last few days had taken a severe toll on her.
“May
be I will take a short nap.”
With that, Jennifer sat down on the smooth gray floor, rolled on her side, and fell asleep. Raul watched her breathing steady and then gently lifted her with the stasis field, molding it to cradle her body.
Leaving her floating on a bed of air, he turned his attention to the task at hand.
Jennifer felt like she’d just closed her eyes when Raul roused her, but her mind told her that she’d slept for more than six hours. When she lifted her head from the pillow, a thin line of drool dangled from the corner of her mouth. Lovely.
That’s when she realized she was floating in midair. As she sat up, she discovered that her invisible bed had edges, just like a real one. Five feet in front of her, Raul studied her, concern painted on his face. He had done this for her. The sweetness of the gesture moved her to the verge of tears, something she hid while sliding off the air mattress to stand up.
“Thank you for that,” she managed.
“I wouldn’t have awakened you, but there’s something you need to see.”
The way he said it brought Jennifer back to her senses, replacing her thankfulness with worry.
“What’s happened?”
“We’re approaching a planet.”
Now she felt a great need to see what Raul saw. Jennifer’s mind linked with his and the neural net–supplied vision pulled a startled gasp from her lips.
“My God!”
She had expected to see some ringed gas giant or a cold and barren world, but the planet that loomed before her was a beautiful jewel of blue, green, and white. As she watched, Raul zoomed in. Unlike Earth, the oceans covered less than half the planet’s surface and the land was dotted by a number of lakes and a half dozen inland seas.
But it was the night portion of this world that deeply startled her.
Scattered patches of light indicated cityscapes, lots of them, some larger than any city on Earth.
A new concern flashed into Jennifer’s mind. “How close are we?”
“We’re thirty million miles out.”
The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) Page 6