The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  Jennifer blinked and dropped her mental link. Jack and Janet hadn’t trained her to give in to weakness when the situation called for strength. She flashed back to what Jack had told the three of them on that Bolivian morning, replaying the scene in perfect detail.

  “No victory is certain. No situation is hopeless. When you find yourselves in a hopeless situation, change the rules.”

  “You mean cheat,” Mark said.

  Jack grinned. “Like the devil himself.”

  The memory of that cocky grin, of the power that radiated from Jack “The Ripper” Gregory, stiffened her spine. Taking a deep breath, Jennifer forced a semblance of that grin onto her own lips. The result was miraculous. She felt as if she’d been pummeled to the ground only to spit out a mouthful of blood and rise up stronger than ever.

  “Yes,” she answered Raul’s question. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  “What now?”

  “Now we get busy.” She let her new sense of determination flow into Raul’s mind. “Our ship’s hungry. It’s about time we feed it.”

  Dumah subconsciously shifted his wings as he stared at the frozen satellite telemetry on the large display. The surprised buzz in the control room increased the shift leader’s disquiet.

  He turned his attention to Sable, his primary console operator. “What just happened?”

  The female lieutenant shifted in her chair to stare up at him, looking as if she wanted to unfurl her own wings and take flight.

  “Sir, we’ve lost all telemetry from Dastron.”

  “Get it back, right now.”

  Her fingers moved across the control panel with all the expertise that Dumah demanded of his crew. Then she pushed back, raising her hands in an expression of frustration that his nano-bot neural array confirmed.

  “Sorry, sir. It’s not responding to commands. One instant it was there and then it just wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not just the telemetry. The Dastron satellite is gone. There’s not even a blip on the tracking radar.”

  Puzzled, Dumah scanned the tactical feed the nano-bots delivered to his mind. “Was it hit by rebel fire?”

  Sable shrugged, a habitual reaction that the Kasari nano-bot injections had rendered unnecessary. But a lifetime of habits took time to replace, much like the need Dumah felt for physical conversation.

  “Our sensors didn’t detect any beam firing. Even if the rebels detonated it, we should be seeing debris, but there’s nothing. It just disappeared.”

  A message appeared in Dumah’s mind in the form of a summons from the group commander, as he’d been expecting. Not good.

  “Keep searching. Broad spectrum scans. I want confirmation from every sensor that can put eyes on that orbit.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Turning on his heels, Dumah strode directly toward the rear wall, which slid down into the floor as he approached. With two running strides, Dumah leaped out of the tower into the crystal-clear afternoon sky, letting the wind whistle past him as his gray-feathered wings unfurled. With powerful flaps, he began the climb toward the top of the tower.

  If he was very lucky, Sable’s nano-bot linkage would provide him with more satisfying answers before he reached the group commander’s office.

  “City of angels?” Skepticism dripped from Jennifer’s voice. “Right.”

  “My mind’s right here for the taking,” Raul offered. “Just reporting what one of the worm-fiber viewers is showing me.”

  There it was again, that cool breeze as she slipped into his mind. He made a mental note to get her to teach him the blocking technique before he got addicted to her presence.

  “Wow!” she breathed. “So beautiful. Hard to believe they’re part of the Kasari Collective.”

  The images Raul observed filled him with the same awe Jennifer expressed. This city by the lake was filled with gleaming, high-rise buildings, each adorned with stunning balconies, none of which had safety rails. And soaring onto or off of those balconies were the closest things to angels he could imagine.

  They were beautiful. If not for the huge wings that sprouted from behind their shoulder blades, they looked almost human, although a bit slimmer, taller, and with fine feathers where humans had hair. They wore shimmering, skintight uniforms that seemed designed to reduce drag. Made sense. Why be a slow angel? There were certainly no fat ones.

  Lovely plazas and parks separated the buildings. There were no roads. Vehicular traffic traveled through the air, albeit at a much higher rate of speed and along different routes than the flying pedestrians . . . wingestrians? Whatever.

  A full planetary scan would have to wait. With the ship having ingested a sufficient supply of matter to get them safely to the nearest of Scion’s three moons, Raul wanted to find a safe place to hide and finish refueling.

  “Yep,” agreed Jennifer. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Raul’s neural net calculated their new acceleration vector and engaged the gravity distortion engines. Despite the external acceleration, the resulting force as experienced inside the ship wouldn’t have put a ripple on his coffee, if he’d bothered to make some from one of the MRE instant-beverage packets.

  For a change, the journey to their chosen destination proved uneventful. They touched down gently inside a deep crater on the far side of the tidally locked moon. They rested on a barren, pockmarked rock roughly half the size of Earth’s moon. Scion’s natural satellite reflected a burnt-orange color from sunlight, striking Raul as odd since the moon had no atmosphere to produce oxidation.

  It didn’t matter. For now, at least, they were safe.

  “So what the hell do we do now?”

  Jennifer didn’t have an immediate answer to Raul’s question. The ship had ingested enough matter so that energy was no longer their primary concern, and they were sitting on an abundance of moon matter. Their food and water stockpiles were dwindling, although she estimated that they had more than a month’s supply of each. They could certainly find ice on asteroids or other moons within this planetary system, but food was an entirely different matter. There was only one place to restock that critical item, but it would require landing on a planet that had an active Kasari gateway. Her skin grew cold.

  “We need to find out everything we can about that planet before we do anything else,” she said. “But I’m afraid the Kasari have technology capable of detecting our gravity distortion field if we orbit Scion long enough to do a full scan.”

  “There’s no need to leave this spot,” said Raul with a grin. “The worm fibers fold space-time just like the wormhole engines do, only on a microscopic scale. It’s like making a pinhole between here and there with nothing in between . . . not even this moon.”

  That made sense. But a new worry slipped into her mind. “How many worm-fiber views can you create at the same time and how long will it take to scan the entire planet?”

  “I’ve controlled a few dozen before. How long the planetary scan will take depends on how high up we position them. To get good detail we’ll have to ease them in fairly close to ground level and that will limit the surface area shown by each fiber.”

  Jennifer bit her lower lip. “Do you think the Kasari will detect that many fibers sweeping over the planet?”

  Raul shrugged. “It’s their tech. Whether they do or not, they won’t be able to tell where the scan originated.”

  “Why not?”

  “If they detect anything, it will just be a swarm of moving pinholes above the planet. Like I said, there’s nothing between here and there . . . no trail to follow back to us. Besides, it’s not like we’ve got a lot of choices.”

  “No shit.” She didn’t end the statement with Sherlock, but she was thinking it. When Raul didn’t rise to the bait, she took a calming breath and shifted gears. “Okay then, let’s start with an edge-of-space mapping survey. Once that’s done we’ll zoom in on interesting areas to fill in the details.”

  Raul nodded in approv
al and began the required manipulation of his neural net to make it happen. Jennifer slipped into his mind to observe.

  The initial world map took twenty-three minutes to complete. Her mind absorbed the image perfectly. Even from this high-altitude perspective, they learned a number of fascinating details. With its much larger percentage of land to water, Scion had one huge continent, an ocean about a third as large, and six inland seas. The biggest of these was about the size of the United States mainland, while the smallest was roughly the size of Texas.

  “Okay,” she whispered into Raul’s mind. “Start the low-altitude scans over the heavily populated areas, then map the coastlines.”

  “On it.”

  The shift in every worm fiber’s viewpoint was instantaneous, the sudden change leaving Jennifer briefly disoriented. Although her mind had no trouble processing the multiple data flows coming into the neural net, she still felt a bit queasy.

  The winged people ruled the vast majority of this world, but not all of it. She was surprised to discover a land-bound species of intelligent beings who had technology equal to their winged counterparts. This was another quasi-humanoid species, but these guys looked like the warriors that they were, with powerful, big-boned bodies. Their broad faces had thick brows that turned upward in two ridges running along their temples to the rear of their hairless skulls, a “don’t screw with me” look if ever Jennifer had seen one.

  The two species clearly didn’t like each other. Long demilitarized zones stretched along the boundaries between their lands, separating heavily armed forces on either side. Jennifer also noted that the truce wasn’t holding everywhere.

  This was a major surprise. Everything she’d learned about the Kasari from the Second Ship’s data banks indicated that they assimilated worlds and added those diverse species to their harmonious collective. When she’d first put on the Altreian headband and absorbed the alien computer’s initial data dump, she saw the general protocol . . . a lone Kasari world ship arriving at a planet, seducing the population with its beneficial technologies, and enticing the people to build a Kasari gateway to welcome their new partners.

  But in the early days, there was always resistance.

  Since this Kasari gateway had been built in the heart of the angelic lands, she deduced that the warrior species hadn’t been a party to the Kasari invitation. Jennifer filed the knowledge away for further investigation. Maybe they had some potential allies. Right now, though, she and Raul had a lot more to do before they had enough information to form a plan.

  She felt the first warm glow of hope since leaving Earth. She let the feeling seep from her mind into Raul’s.

  Crossing the upper two of her four arms, Kasari Group Commander Shalegha felt her nano-bot communications array trigger a grade three alert as she stood at the edge of the high balcony, looking out over the city. Of course, having arrived through the recently activated wormhole gate, she was technically the alien. It didn’t matter. At the rate at which the assimilation of the willing local population was progressing, they would all soon share the collective mind.

  Turning away from that view, Shalegha mentally engaged a three-dimensional strategic overlay of Scion, the name the winged people had given their planet.

  There could be no doubt. One of the Kasari world ships had entered this system and was conducting a worm-fiber scan of Scion. The vessel kept itself cloaked with a gravity distortion field to prevent detection, standard procedure prior to landing on a Kasari-targeted world. The problem was, it shouldn’t be here.

  Although she couldn’t be certain of the source of the malfunction, she had an idea of what was happening. There had been occasions when an Altreian starship had managed to intercept one of the Kasari Collective’s world ships as it entered a targeted system. If this one had sustained damage in such an encounter, it may have decided to jump to another system in its target database.

  Shalegha accessed the incident log, rapidly scrolling through the list of actions taken by her subordinates since the probes had been detected, nodding to herself at the efficiency displayed. The tactical duty officer at the Kasari staging base had immediately made the same determination as Shalegha and, after failing to locate the malfunctioning world ship, had attempted to contact it through normal communications channels. When the vessel had failed to respond to commands issued over those channels, the TDO had issued the grade three alert.

  Right now Shalegha couldn’t devote resources needed to consolidate the Kasari hold on this planet to finding and fixing the malfunctioning world ship. She could less afford to have it land on Scion and disrupt ongoing operations that were still at a sensitive stage.

  With a thought, she transferred her instructions and the emergency override codes to her TDO, allowing a moment as her officer processed the details and echoed back his understanding. Moments later, when her mental projection showed that the worm-fiber scans had terminated, Shalegha allowed herself a satisfied smile.

  One more unexpected problem solved.

  One second the planetary scan was progressing normally and then the Rho Ship’s stasis field controller began carving large chunks of matter out of the lunar crater in which they sat, feeding them directly into the primary matter disrupter. Worse, the starship’s engines began their wormhole initiation sequence as new coordinates locked into place, coordinates that Raul’s neural net recognized. As soon as the ship finished refueling in preparation for the wormhole transit, it would make the jump to the nearest of the Kasari staging planets.

  “What’s happening?” Jennifer’s voice in his head sounded as panicked as he felt.

  “The ship just received some sort of emergency override authorization code. It’s going to jump.”

  “Stop it!”

  “I’m trying, but it’s ignoring my commands.”

  “How long do we have?”

  Raul calculated. “Fifty-three seconds.”

  Jennifer lunged into the seat at her workstation. If he’d thought her fingers fast the last time he’d watched her work, he’d been mistaken. Now they were an impossible blur accompanied by a clicking drumroll. For a moment he imagined the smell of smoking circuits.

  Raul watched her manipulate the neural net and marveled at her ability to intuit the inner workings of the alien computing system as she sought a weakness in the firewall that denied Raul the administrative authority to countermand what was happening. As skilled as Jennifer was at mental manipulation, her Altreian-augmented abilities achieved their full potential when it came to computers. Every time she worked her way past one obstacle, a new software barrier awaited her.

  Just as his desperation began to give way to hopelessness, Raul felt a flood of exhilaration fill his mind. She’d just granted him full control of the Rho Ship.

  But when he tried to shut the engines down, the hopelessness came crashing back in. The wormhole was forming and there wasn’t enough time to stop it. Visualizing a point in space just beyond this solar system, he triggered the wormhole jitter transition that had allowed them to survive their previous jump, hoping that this much shorter trip wouldn’t punish them so badly.

  As engines ripped a new hole in the space-time continuum, Raul wrapped himself and Jennifer within the stasis field. Then as the Rho Ship slipped across the threshold, their screams mingled in a bloody duet.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the two and a half weeks since the almost disastrous malfunction of the New Zealand MDS, Heather had worked around the clock to identify the causes of the failure, to correct the design, and to fix it. For the last several days and nights, she’d enlisted Mark’s help in rebuilding faulty components, the two of them remotely manipulating the industrial 3-D printers and robots to build the redesigned parts and install them.

  In preparation for this test, Heather had added some new fail-safe mechanisms within the MDS chamber itself. The first of these was a new breaker system that would mechanically disable the circuit if it didn’t receive a confirmation code from Mark or Heath
er through its subspace receiver-transmitter. The second modification was to the robots they would be using to activate the system, shielding their circuitry from EMPs. The stray pulse shouldn’t happen again, but it shouldn’t have happened the first time either.

  Heather had done her best to hide her increasingly worrisome visions from Mark, but he’d noticed. They were spread too thin, trying to do too many things at once, the kind of schedule that led to oversights and errors even for someone with their Altreian augmentations. Still, what choice did they have but to pick the highest-priority items from an unending to-do list and try to knock them out as quickly as possible?

  Heather removed her SRT headset, leaned back in her command couch, and stretched her arms up over her head. Looking over at Mark, she caught him in the middle of a similar stretch and felt a smile warm her lips as he turned to look at her. They’d done it, crossed one more problem off the list. And this had been a big one.

  “What do you know?” Mark asked, grinning. “We didn’t blow up New Zealand.”

  “Miracles happen.”

  “How about letting me take you out for a celebratory dinner?”

  “Steaks?”

  “A couple of big, juicy ones. Maybe a nice Maine lobster too. Sea Market Grill?”

  “Sold.”

  Heather replaced her headset in its compartment and slid off her command couch. Until Mark had started talking about food she hadn’t realized how hungry she was, and the prospect of a date with her lover sounded pretty darn good. It had been a long time since they’d taken any time for themselves, too long. She savored the prospect of some music, a glass of wine, and a lovely meal in the lounge. But first she wanted to shower and slip into a little black dress that would put a hungry look into Mark’s brown eyes.

  The first sign of trouble came after they were both dressed and headed for their car. She’d anticipated this. Waiting for them in the security lobby when they stepped out of the elevator stood Jack Gregory, a less than pleased expression on his face.