The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  Jennifer collapsed to her knees, sick to her stomach, sick to her soul. My God, she thought, I’ve become El Chupacabra. She didn’t try to deny it. She’d just used the same technique the vicious psychopath had tormented her with, and she’d used it on someone who was uniquely vulnerable, someone who had already suffered more than anyone should ever have to.

  Scrambling across the floor to where Raul lay, Jennifer wrapped her arms around him and pressed her face to his, letting her tears wash his away. Too horrified by what she’d done to even attempt an apology, she just lay there with her body wrapped around him, letting her shaking sobs merge with his.

  Raul struggled to regain control of himself, to push away the mutant who’d just forced him to relive his life’s worst moments. The shock of her intrusion had left him so weak that he couldn’t even manage that. Even worse was the reason for his weakness. Despite his shame and embarrassment at having lost all self-respect in front of this woman, being wrapped in her arms as she wept atop him felt strangely wonderful.

  God, what a pathetic loser he’d become.

  Pulling himself together, Raul gathered the stasis field around him, carefully separating himself from Jennifer, and rose up into the air. Below him, Jennifer rose to her feet to stare up at him, her face still a mask of agony.

  “Raul. I’m so sorry.”

  Gritting his teeth, Raul managed an answer. “I don’t need your pity.”

  There it was again, the flash of anger in those dangerous eyes. Knowing what she was capable of, Raul knew he should tread carefully, but he just couldn’t make himself do it.

  “And I don’t want your consolation,” he continued.

  “Fine,” she practically spit the word at him. “Penance then.”

  Again he felt her enter his mind accompanied by a rising wave of panic that he momentarily misinterpreted as his. But as the ship dissolved around him, replaced by a filthy cell, he realized she had pulled him into her memories, opening herself in even more detail than she’d managed in her invasion of his mind.

  From her barred window, Jennifer watched the backslapping, laughing men below, several carrying rifles slung loosely across the crooks of their arms. From the look of the activity, preparations for some sort of celebration were well underway. Heavily laden workers moved back and forth, dropping off supplies and setting up tables and chairs beneath a large awning that had been erected between the wings of the hacienda-style mansion. A glance at the sky revealed the reason for their hurry. Rain was coming, and from the look of the thick clouds creeping down from the peaks of the surrounding mountains, it was going to be a gully washer.

  She pulled back from the bars, the tears that had dripped from her cheeks leaving damp spots on the stone windowsill, precursors of the coming storm. She lingered for several moments, then stepped down from her perch atop the single bed, her eyes making a circuit of the tiny room that was barely large enough to hold the bed. A foul-smelling bucket occupied the farthest corner at the foot of the mattress, across from a heavy wooden door. Moving across the space separating the bed from the door, she twisted and pulled on the handle, but it was useless.

  Backing into the corner farthest from the chamber pot, Jennifer slid to the floor, her hands rising to cover her face as sobs shook her body.

  The memory dissolved into a new one and Raul felt her desperation give way to unbearable panic. She had barely touched the mind of Eduardo Montenegro, the serial killer known as El Chupacabra, but what she felt there was beyond horrible. Something rubbed against her, sending her mind recoiling, struggling to find its way back to the light. She was so deep in shock that she’d lost the thread that could guide her back. She only knew that she had to get away from the horror she’d mentally embraced.

  The thing touched her thoughts again and she retreated, scrambling ever deeper into the darkness, erecting barriers in her mind, wall after wall, each higher and thicker than the last. But instead of blocking the thing that pursued her, her panic seemed to feed the monster, drawing it onward like a beacon in the night.

  Then a mental count began to tick down, starting at ten, and she knew that if she didn’t find her way back to her own head by the time that count hit zero, she would be pulled into a madness from which there was no escape. El Chupacabra’s mind was a blackness where unthinkable desires squirmed and wriggled, each of its tendrils seeking to pull her deeper into the abyss.

  Her terror reached a crescendo that broke their mental link and left Raul soaked with sweat, panting, his hands clamped so tightly into fists that his forearms cramped. He glanced down at Jennifer, who had sunk to her knees, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. In that moment he knew she had relived something she’d never mentioned to anyone else, something she’d buried deep in her psyche, something that held such terror she’d never before revisited it.

  Now she’d shared that horror with him . . .

  Thank you very much, Jennifer Smythe!

  Jennifer knelt motionless and numb, staring sightlessly down at the floor as the memory she’d spent so long burying wormed its way back through her mind. She knew that she needed to calm herself, that all she had to do was allow her perfect memory to replay the way she felt after deep meditation. She’d done it hundreds of times. So why couldn’t she manage it now?

  The memory of the things she’d seen and felt in El Chupacabra’s mind doubled her over in violent heaves. She vomited her most recent MRE onto the gray metal floor. After the attack subsided, she pushed herself away from the mess, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and rolled over onto her back to stare up at the curved ceiling. She still felt sick, but lying on the cool floor seemed to help.

  “You okay?”

  Raul’s voice shifted Jennifer’s focus to him.

  “Give me a minute and I’ll let you know.”

  With a nod, he floated away to allow her some privacy. It was the taste of bile in her mouth that drove her to her feet. That and the god-awful smell. Right now she missed a toothbrush and a bath more than anything in the universe, so she made do, filled a cup with water, gargled, and spit the mouthful into the matter disrupter that also served as their garbage disposal. After draining the remainder of the cup, she opened an MRE packet and went for the twin white Chiclets chewing gum in its accessory packet.

  The mess cleanup took her another ten minutes thanks to the piss-poor cleaning supplies that were available. Only after she finished scooping the last of the vomit into another empty MRE packet and wiping her hands with moist towelettes from more accessory packets had she realized that Raul could have easily accomplished all of this with the stasis field.

  She would normally have been pissed off, but the physical labor, disgusting as it was, had finally cleared her head.

  Turning toward Raul, she saw him watching her intently. Jennifer didn’t need to invade his mind to know that he was in the midst of a vigorous mental debate. Not surprising. During the last half hour Jennifer had managed to thoroughly humiliate them both. He had to be wondering if she was a complete psychopath or just mostly crazy. If they were going to survive each other’s company, she had to set some boundaries.

  “Look,” she began, “I know I was out of line earlier.”

  “Out of line? Is that it?”

  “No, that’s not it. And there’s nothing I can say to take it back. But there’s something I can do to keep it from happening again.”

  Raul raised his left eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

  Jennifer studied Raul, well aware that the offer she was considering would shift the balance of power aboard this starship. Then, taking a deep breath, she spoke the phrase that scared the crap out of her.

  “I can teach you to block my mind.”

  CHAPTER 9

  For two weeks, the Rho Ship’s gravity distortion drives propelled Jennifer and Raul back toward the planet they’d so ingloriously departed. From their current location, it would take the Rho Ship another six weeks to reach Scion.

  Raul did
n’t know how it had happened, but in the days since Jennifer Smythe’s core meltdown, they’d learned to work together. Not that the mind-blocking training was going well . . . it wasn’t. Jennifer Smythe was indeed trying to train him and he was getting gradually better. But the power of her mind seemed astronomical.

  Even though she’d told him that it had taken weeks of practice for the altered trio to learn how to block each other’s minds, that hadn’t provided much encouragement. If it was that hard for them, with their Altreian alterations, how could he hope to master the technique?

  The duo had spent two hours of every day in practice sessions that had turned his brain into bread pudding. If it hadn’t been augmented by the Rho Ship’s neural net and protected by nanites, he was quite sure that his head would have exploded. If this were piano lessons, so far he’d barely mastered “Chopsticks.”

  Fortunately he and Jennifer had made excellent progress in other areas. First of all, they’d formulated a plan, one which relied equally on Jennifer’s familiarity with Altreian subspace technology and Raul’s ability to control the Rho Ship’s neural net, nano-particle manufacturing, and stasis field generators. Just as importantly, they had prioritized tasks and established a project timeline, although it felt more like a ticking clock than a plan.

  Since water was readily available in the solar system, the need for food drove their planning. The tricky part was figuring out a way of getting down to the planet’s surface without being detected by any of the inhabitants or their new Kasari bedfellows. The Rho Ship had its gravity distortion cloak and a means of optical cloaking that made it very difficult to see from more than a few feet away, but it was Kasari technology and couldn’t be counted on to work against its creators.

  Of course Jennifer had come up with an idea. While they couldn’t build something as massive as the Altreian starship’s subspace engines, they could certainly recreate the SRTs that Jennifer had built with Heather and Mark. With some modifications to that design, also scaled up both in size and power, the Rho Ship could be wrapped in a subspace field. The modifications wouldn’t give them warp capabilities, but theoretically, the changes should make the ship undetectable to technologies not based upon Altreian physics.

  Raul pulled himself out of his thoughts and looked over at the spot where Jennifer sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, her eyes closed as if in deep meditation. But he knew she wasn’t. Everything she’d read, indeed everything that Jennifer had experienced since she’d been altered by the Altreian headset, was stored in her eidetic memory. That included all the information she’d gleaned from her study of the Altreian starship’s data banks.

  She was in the final phases of putting together the initial design for the subspace field generator. Once she was satisfied with her mental diagrams, she would pass it to his mind and Raul would relay the visualization to the Rho Ship’s neural net. Then it would begin the process of growing the subspace field generator from the nano-particles. As familiar as he’d become with the Kasari manufacturing technology, it still felt fantastic . . . additive manufacturing taken to the outer limits.

  At its core, the system relied on the Rho Ship’s MDS to produce elements the molecular assembler needed during the production process. The MDS would use the electromagnetic energy from the disrupter to generate a standing-wave packet, like a musical chord. Each unique chord created a different type of matter.

  The process could be broken down into discrete steps: feed matter to the disrupter, analyze the wave packets contained, add disrupting frequency sets, harvest the released energy, and then generate a new frequency set to form the desired element. Alchemy at its finest.

  Although the nano-manufacturing process was amazing, it wasn’t fast. Complicated systems could take days or weeks to create, which was why Jennifer was spending extra time breaking down the overall design of the subspace generator into replaceable components in case a specific part malfunctioned. The goal was to avoid regrowing the whole contraption.

  Suddenly Raul felt Jennifer’s mind touch his. On a whim, he focused his thoughts in an attempt to block her out. For a heady moment, he succeeded, to the point that he actually felt her surprise. Then she swept his resistance aside.

  “Raul!” her mental voice said. “That was outstanding.”

  The unexpected compliment made his head spin, his feelings so obvious that she smiled. Raul cleared his throat, mortified to find himself grinning like a dog that had just had its head patted. Not trusting his voice, he stuck with the thought conversation.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you ready for me to transfer the design?”

  “Anytime you are.”

  When the design appeared in his mind, he marveled at its detail, rotating the three-dimensional diagrams for each component in his head as the neural net absorbed them. When assembled, the subspace field generator would be about the size of a refrigerator-freezer, with an external interface to the primary matter disrupter in the engineering bay. But before they went whole hog, they decided to build a one-third-scale model to test that could be contained in a stasis field and that, hopefully, wouldn’t blow a hole in their starship.

  “How long will it take to build and assemble?” Jennifer asked.

  Raul let the answer come to him. “Three days for the scale model. Once we have that working properly, another twenty-seven days to build and install the full-sized subspace field generator. The big question is how many iterations it will take us to work out any kinks in the scale model.”

  “I wish we had Heather here.”

  “You and me both.”

  She frowned and then, recognizing the irony in Raul’s attempted humor, managed a slight smile and a nod, as if to say, Okay, you got me.

  Rising to her feet, she rubbed her palms together. “Let’s get started. This thing won’t build itself.”

  “Actually, it will.”

  Jennifer just shook her head and turned to walk away.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “I’m hungry. If you care to join me at Chez MRE, I suggest you get those micro-bots of yours off their lazy little asses.”

  While she waited for the scale model to be completed, Jennifer had come up with a new idea. She thought that, instead of just using the nano-manufacturing process to build machines, it should also be possible to combine elements into generally useful molecules such as water. Unfortunately, the modifications required time for design, manufacture, and testing, time that they just didn’t have right now, not if they were going to accomplish all of the higher priority tasks on their “I Want to Survive” list. Still, she roughed out the initial design and had Raul store it in the ship’s data banks for later refinement.

  The sight of Raul’s mechanical eye swiveling toward the command bay’s exit startled her out of her thoughts. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to the unsightly appendage’s odd behavior.

  “The scale model’s finished,” Raul said, turning toward the door. “I’ll bring it to us.”

  “Don’t. If something goes wrong on this first test, I’d rather have it happen inside one of the central compartments instead of inside the command or engineering bay.”

  “I don’t see why. The stasis field bubble I’ll put around the model could contain a nuclear detonation.”

  Jennifer squinted at him. Why the hell did he have to argue everything with her?

  “Doesn’t mean it’ll contain a subspace field. Subspace exists between the grains of Dr. Stephenson’s ether, the grains of space-time itself. You can think of it as a new set of dimensions with its own physical laws.”

  “So?”

  “So the speed of waves in subspace is much faster than the speed of light. It’s why Altreian starships shift into subspace, where they can travel faster-than-light speed to their destination before shifting back into our space. We’re going to try to create a similar shift. If everything works right, the scale model will wink out of existence and then reappear a few seconds later
when its super-capacitor runs out of energy.”

  “You know the Rho Ship’s moving, right? After the scale model shifts into subspace, we’ll be long gone when it shifts back.”

  “Not according to Altreian physics,” Jennifer said. “Think of space-time as having muscle memory. When an object shifts into subspace, it’s as if our universe remembers it . . . its mass, its momentum, everything. If the shifted object doesn’t do something like engage subspace drives to change its state within subspace, then it will reappear precisely where it would have ended up if it had never shifted.”

  “That’s just weird.”

  “Says someone who uses a Kasari neural net to build machines from nano-materials. Not to mention the whole traveling-through-wormholes thing. We passed weird a long time ago.”

  Her words pulled a melodic chuckle from Raul’s lips and he nodded. “You got that right.”

  Jennifer touched Raul’s mind and this time he didn’t resist, focusing a half-dozen worm fibers on the subspace field generator. The oblong, two-foot-high object rested inside the compartment where it had been built, undergone component testing, and assembled. Unlike the full-scale device that would have a direct connection to the primary matter disrupter, this small model needed its own temporary power source since it wouldn’t be taking the rest of the ship along on its interdimensional shift.

  The scale model had been extensively instrumented to record everything that would happen during the test. If the Rho Ship’s neural net detected any anomalous readings from the subspace field generator as it ramped up, it would immediately disconnect the device from its capacitor, aborting the test.

  If the test succeeded, Jennifer and Raul would review all the collected data to determine whether the power consumption matched what her theory predicted. Just as importantly, they needed to make sure nothing happened that would kill them.