The ship’s camera zoomed out and the world dwindled until it was merely a bright point of light orbiting an orange star. Anticipating her next query, Raul displayed a diagram showing that the planet was the fourth from the sun, just one of eighteen planetary bodies that composed this star’s solar system. The object of their study was tagged with a name. Scion.
She refocused on Raul’s face. “Don’t you think it would have been a good idea to discuss it with me before you steered us toward an inhabited planet?”
Raul shrugged. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. This ship has several planetary systems loaded into its database, one of which belongs to our sun. This is another. From what I’ve been able to learn, when you initiated the unplanned wormhole jump from Earth, the ship picked a destination from another of the systems in its database.”
Jennifer swallowed hard. That answer made sense but it certainly didn’t alleviate her growing anxiety. She knew damned well why Earth was in the Rho Ship’s database. Their home was a target planet for the Kasari Collective, one to which this world ship had been dispatched as a precursor to invasion. The fact that the Rho Ship had now brought them here couldn’t be good.
“Why haven’t you stopped our movement, at least until we get a chance to think this through and make a plan?”
“That’s the problem. The destination is locked in and I can’t override it. Even if I could, we’re low on food and water. We could get water from other planets or asteroids in this system, but the only place to restock our food is where we’re headed.”
“From what you just showed me, that civilization must be at least as advanced as Earth’s. Odds are they’ll detect us before we enter orbit.”
“I don’t think so. The ship has activated a local gravity distortion field that’s deflecting electromagnetic radiation. For now we’re invisible to radar and to electro-optical devices.”
“For now?”
A web of worry lines creased Raul’s forehead. “The ship is low on energy. We can feed some trash into the small matter disrupter in this compartment but if we don’t capture some significant material for the primary disrupter to convert to energy, we won’t even be able to land. And since I can’t steer the ship, we can’t divert to the nearest asteroid field to refuel.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah.”
Jennifer felt her lips tighten into a thin line. She forced herself to think. Computers were her thing, an ability tremendously augmented by her initial headset connection to the Altreian starship. But her hacking ability was useless without an interface to the neural net, and unless she figured out a way around that problem, they would soon find themselves aboard a dead vessel.
Then, despite all their struggles up to this point, she and Raul would follow the ship into the dark.
CHAPTER 4
With Mark at her side, Heather entered the dungeon, what Mark called the underground complex where they spawned the technological miracles that might yet save Earth. But this wasn’t the birthing chamber of those miracles . . . that was in New Zealand. Heather had to admit that, despite the technology layered throughout this facility, it had the ghostly feel of a post-apocalyptic missile silo.
The facility had started as a long north-south tunnel through rock, bored out by robotic mining machines controlled from the surface. The original borehole had been drilled straight down from within the massive building they called Shipping Facility One. A model of efficiency, CTC had built additional manufacturing facilities from the stone extracted during the construction of the underground complex.
Once the tunnel had been extended beneath the construction site for the corporate headquarters dome, a second elevator shaft had been bored out, the one that had just transported Mark and Heather down to the research complex. Upon the completion of the north-south tunnel, the work had shifted to digging out chambers on either side of the central tunnel.
The underground facilities were completed and brought to full operational capacity in two years and three months. Money was no problem, flowing like water from U.S. military contracts and the licensing of CTC patents to other corporations. Profit was supplemented by the sale of materials manufactured in the surface facilities on the Combinatorics campus.
Everything that Combinatorics did was strictly legal. Heather confined her illegal activities to the web of shell corporations they had initially created eight years ago under Jack and Janet’s tutelage while they’d been at Jack’s Bolivian hacienda. During their time in New Zealand, Mark and Heather had extended that web into an impenetrable network of seemingly unrelated companies with no traceable connections back to them.
Two years in New Zealand had laid the groundwork for the creation of CTC. And during the last five years, the monstrous cash flow generated by CTC had enabled Mark and Heather to fund the secret facility in New Zealand.
She shifted her attention to the long hall stretching out before her, its metallic walls lit from above by the soft glow of ceiling panels. She paused at the third door on the left, waiting as sensors scanned her face, eyes, and body. Then the door slid into its wall slot, allowing her and Mark to step inside the command center.
One of the smaller rooms in the complex, the command center was an exact replica of the Second Ship’s command deck that included four gently curved couches, one for each wearer of the four alien headsets. Each couch seemed to have been extruded from the translucent material that composed the floor, curved walls, and ceiling, rising in a single pedestal that flowed outward and up to form a chair that molded itself to your body as you sat down.
Although Robby was still too young to assume his place here, the incredible rate at which he was advancing meant that wouldn’t be true for much longer. As for Jennifer’s command couch, it would forever remain empty in tribute to their missing member.
As always, Mark slid onto the leftmost chair while Heather sank into the one on the right. Heather touched a control pad on her right armrest and a panel opened to reveal two glittering, translucent headbands. U shaped, each had small beads on both ends. She reached inside the compartment, ignoring the alien headband that would provide a subspace connection to the computers on the Altreian starship, instead selecting its doppelganger, this one of her own design. Beside her, Mark did the same.
A sudden memory surfaced of that moment when she and Mark had tried to use the Altreian headsets while they attempted to destroy the Stephenson Gateway, but the headsets had gone dead. They had later discovered that the loss of a link had been caused by Jennifer drawing on all of the Second Ship’s computing power, just before the Rho Ship, with Jen and Raul on board, had been thrust through a wormhole of its own creation. Jennifer’s Altreian headset had gone through that wormhole with her. Heather and Mark had been unable to contact her once their own headsets came back online, confirming their worst fears. Jennifer was dead.
Heather shook her head, drawing a questioning glance from Mark that she ignored.
She slipped the headset on, letting the beaded ends settle onto her temples. The room melted away, replaced by lifelike imagery of a distant place supplied via a subspace link. The computer that supplied this link was located inside an abandoned gold mine in the mountains northwest of the small town of Murchison, New Zealand.
She felt Mark’s link activate and smiled. It was time.
With a thought, the imagery dissolved away, leaving them staring at two men and two women seated in a small office-workshop. The sight filled her with a joy that Mark’s mental link echoed.
“Hi, Mom and Dad,” she said, knowing that their parents were now seeing the projection of her and Mark on a large flat-panel display as their voices played through speakers.
Mark chimed in with greetings to his parents, then the conversation turned to family chitchat. It was a biweekly ritual that kept them close, despite the distance that now separated them. Today’s call was unusual in that the seventeen-hour time difference meant that their parents had stayed up past midnight. Normally,
Mark and Heather would have waited for a more convenient calling time, but the business that would follow this call couldn’t wait.
In their late fifties, all four of their parents looked well. Heather’s dad, Gil McFarland, had added some weight to his tall, once lanky frame, as had her mother, Anna. Linda Smythe was as slender as ever, but it was hard to tell whether Fred’s blocky form had expanded or not. The last few years had added a healthy dose of gray to their hair, but the move to the remote New Zealand mining property had done the parents good, an amazing circumstance considering that they had given up their old lives to adopt new identities.
When the family conversation ended, the two dads remained on the line after Anna and Linda left the room. Gil and Fred had spent years as two of the most important technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory before they had retired, dropped out, and moved to New Zealand. Since that time, Heather and Mark had made extensive use of their expertise. The automated machinery that Heather had designed was incredible, but skilled people were still needed to pick up and transport shipments to the secret facility, to get the robots and computers up and running, and to fix unanticipated crap that went wrong every so often. Today, she and Mark would again be needing those skills.
The last five years of research and plain old hard work had finally led up to this inflection point. In the coming hours, if everything went right, they would bring the rest of the New Zealand mining complex to life.
And then things would get very interesting indeed.
As the conference call with Heather and Mark ended, Gil McFarland stood up, stretched, and looked at Fred Smythe, who had also risen from his chair.
“Looks like we’ve got a long night ahead of us.”
Fred grinned. “Won’t be the first time.”
Grabbing his old fishing hat from the hook and setting it on its normal perch atop his curly, salt-and-pepper hair, Gil opened the door and stepped out of the steel building into the cool New Zealand summer night. Anna had taken one of the two cars and driven herself and Linda down to the clearing where their two houses sat side by side.
Since Mark and Heather’s Tasman Mining Corporation owned this mine and a hundred and ten thousand acres of the surrounding wilderness, the nearest neighbors were eight miles to the southeast, near the small town of Murchison. But the dirt road that wound its way down to the highway made that distance seem twice as long.
Beauty, peace, and quiet . . . the two couples had it. And the mountain stream fishing was out of this world. Linda was the only one who suffered from a bit of withdrawal, missing her beloved Santa Fe flea markets. With that in mind, Anna made sure to accompany her on periodic weekend outings to Christchurch. The South Island’s largest city had a population of more than three hundred thousand people. Hell, it was almost as big as Albuquerque.
Turning his attention back to the task at hand, Gil followed Fred past the large steel warehouse and toward the old mine entrance, twin LED flashlights lighting their way. The night seemed unusually quiet, missing the usual insect or night-bird sounds. The crunch of their work boots on the gravel road was the only sound to break the stillness.
At the point where the road ended in dense woods, Gil switched off his flashlight, put it in his pocket, and turned to look up at the Southern Cross, brilliant in the moonless star-filled sky, actions that Fred mimicked. For several moments, the beauty of the sky held them transfixed. Then, still gazing at the stars, Gil stepped backward through the cloak.
Day or night, the experience was awe inspiring. Although he couldn’t feel the projected alien hologram, the way it altered reality always left him with gooseflesh. Looking at the road from outside the cloaking field, onlookers would believe that it dead-ended into thick brush and trees. But when you stepped through the holographic projection and looked out, the outside world dimmed as if seen through a gossamer curtain. The same alien technology was at work here that had concealed the alien craft Mark, Heather, and Jennifer had stumbled upon ten years ago.
Gil didn’t bother to switch on his flashlight. There was no need. Instead, he followed Fred toward the brightly lit mine entrance that was invisible from the other side of the cloak.
The first time he’d been here, the mine entrance had been completely overgrown with vines that covered the boards and safety warnings that had sealed it for decades. Initial shipments from CTC had consisted of two robots, a Dumpster-sized cold-fusion power station, the cloaking device, an advanced 3-D printer, several racks of blade servers, and the SRTs that provided the secure communications links to the Austin laboratory. But over four years, CTC robots had widened the tunnels, braced them with hardened steel beams, and then walled the area off with titanium.
Gil had to hand it to his daughter. Her robotic designs were an amazing advancement, but they didn’t require full-blown artificial intelligence to function. The robots merely learned to do what they were shown and then memorized that task. It was an old idea, but the real breakthrough was in the virtual reality headsets through which Mark or Heather could establish a subspace link to one of their robots from anywhere. Robots thus became extensions of their own bodies.
Sequenced tasks became activities, and once those activities were saved, the robot could transfer that knowledge to the blade servers or to other robots. The robots learned to do anything that Mark and Heather did, including building more robots. And they only required parts printed on site.
Sensors recognized the two men approaching and the metal door whisked open, giving Gil and Fred access to the labyrinth beyond. Moving from the forest environment into the subterranean, titanium-walled world always jarred Gil’s senses. Despite the extensive ductwork that circulated the HEPA-filtered air, he thought it carried a slightly oily, metallic smell, very similar to his machine shop.
The tunnel didn’t go straight into the hillside but followed winding, branching paths that the original miners had dug through the mountain as they attempted to follow the veins of golden ore. Many of those branches had been hollowed out to form large chambers to house a cold-fusion generator, a computer center, manufacturing facilities, clean rooms, a laboratory, bath and shower spaces, a medical clinic, an armory, and more.
When Gil walked past one of the custom boring machines working in a side passage, a sensor array mounted on one of the four armlike appendages twisted toward him, the sudden movement making him jump.
“Shit!”
Fred’s laugh didn’t help. Never a big fan of underground spaces, Gil had worked through that issue on this project, but he knew why he was jumpy tonight. Just outside the door, Gil paused, took a deep breath to steady his nerves, and followed Fred inside. Tonight they would fire up the device that deeply concerned him. Ten feet from the tractor-trailer–sized machine, Gil halted alongside Fred and two quasi-humanoid–looking robots.
Even though he knew that Mark and Heather would be using them to bring this system online, he and Fred had insisted on being present. If one of the robots experienced a problem at the wrong time, it wouldn’t hurt to have the two dads there to step in. Besides, there was no use hiding out at their houses. If this machine went haywire, everything for miles around would be instantly atomized.
With one more deep breath, Gil looked at Fred.
“You ready for this?”
The grin on Fred’s stout face failed to mask his underlying tension. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Gil turned to face the robots, wondering which was Heather and which was Mark. A weird thought on a weird night.
“All right, guys,” he said to the robots. “It’s your show. Let’s get this over with.”
The avatar projection was something Heather would have thought she’d be used to by now. Logically she knew that her real body sat in one of the command couches in a chamber three hundred feet below CTC headquarters, but that made little difference. Right now all her sensory input was being provided by the robot.
The visual experience alone was startling. With a thought she could alter the
primary visual range from visible light into infrared or ultraviolet spectrums. The robot’s light detection and ranging LIDAR provided enhanced depth perception and her mind provided a heads-up display with exact measurements. Combined with tactile sensors and microphones, this metal body sure felt real. But unlike traditional virtual-reality experiences, she didn’t need to move her real body to maneuver the robot. She merely needed to visualize what she wanted to do and the robot responded appropriately.
Heather turned to look at the identical robot that stood beside her, its seven-foot-tall body gleaming in the glow cast by rows of LED lights mounted on the ceiling. Although these particular robots were roughly humanoid in shape, their heads consisted of horizontal metal mounts for the sensors.
“You ready?” she asked Mark. Her voice sounded louder than she’d intended so she reduced the speaker volume.
His robot body manipulated its fingers in a maneuver that made Heather think it was trying to crack its knuckles. It was funny. Even in these virtual bodies, old habits died hard.
“You bet.”
She turned to look at her dad and Fred Smythe, both men looking small from this perspective.
“We’ll stay out of the way unless we’re needed,” Gil said.
“Fine.”
Heather knew their presence was unnecessary, but she’d lost that argument. Both robots being there already provided safety redundancy. The only manual tasks that needed to be performed were simple—connect the thick power cable to its wall socket and then lift the breaker switch into the closed position to bring the machine to life. Once the boot-up process was completed, Heather would shift her mental connection from her robot to the matter disrupter-synthesizer.
The MDS was merely a scaled-up version of what they had designed and successfully tested in the underground laboratory in Austin. Mark had wanted to call it Deus Ex Machina, but Heather had rejected that out of hand. Still, she appreciated his wit. Without Mark’s unabashedly positive outlook, she would have descended into darkness long ago.
The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) Page 7