The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  “So,” Jennifer asked, “you ready to try this?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Feeling her pulse quicken, Jennifer pulled forth the memory that shifted her heart rate to its normal fifty-three beats per minute. The subspace field gently raised the scale model three feet in the air and then wrapped it inside the invisible bubble that Raul insisted on creating despite Jennifer’s earlier argument. Fine. It wouldn’t hurt to indulge him.

  Heard via the worm fibers that terminated inside the stasis bubble, the bang that accompanied the scale model’s disappearance made her jump. It made sense. An object with a volume of slightly more than eight cubic feet had just winked out of existence and the air within the bubble had expanded to fill the empty space. Micro-thunder.

  When thirty seconds passed without the scale model reappearing, Jennifer felt the tension increase in her shoulders. Thirty seconds after that, she found herself pacing.

  “You still sure about that muscle-memory theory?” Raul asked.

  “It’s not my theory. And, yes, I’m sure about it.”

  She hoped her voice didn’t communicate the doubts that had begun to nibble at her mind. Whether or not it did, her gasp of relief when the subspace field generator popped back into the stasis bubble gave the lie to her professed confidence.

  “Thank God.”

  She heard Raul’s laugh but ignored it.

  “All right,” she said, clapping him smartly on the back. “On to the next problem.”

  General Dgarra moved along the front line of his Northern Battle Group. He ignored the bitter wind that howled down from the glacier-covered mountain peaks, savoring the sense of pride that his warriors, both male and female, inspired in him.

  The Koranthian Empire carved a clawlike swath across most of the southeastern quarter of the Scion super-continent, from the Great Ocean in the north to the Briny Sea at its southernmost boundary. All in all, its borders touched three of Scion’s six inland seas and the Great Ocean that covered half of the world.

  Theirs was a harsh land that had spawned a harsh people. Rugged mountains were routinely buffeted by extreme winds and weather. Members of the winged Eadric race dared not enter this region of peaks and valleys, not even in their flying war machines. Their new off-world allies were another matter altogether.

  Luckily, in the few months since the idiot Eadric Nation Alliance had finished building the world gate, the Kasari had played their hand very cautiously, proclaiming that they had come here to help and wanted only to be accepted as friends and allies. General Dgarra was well versed in politics by other means—namely, war. Open with the art of diplomatic seduction, and only after that effort has resulted in the assimilation of the willing do you move on to the art of war, now facing a much weakened foe.

  To be sure, there were some within the Eadric camp who were attempting to mount an organized resistance movement, but these groups had been successfully marginalized and were too weak to form a credible threat. That could not be said of the Koranthians.

  Trained to be warriors from birth, Koranthians were forged for battle. Daily they contended with the elements, and since the Koranthian Empire encompassed less than a third of the landmass and an even smaller percentage of the total population, they had to fight the Eadric Nations just to maintain their independence.

  Thanks to the thriving manufacturing centers in the deep caverns that honeycombed the Koranthian mountain range, their war technology was the equal of anything the Eadric Nation Alliance could throw at them. It didn’t hurt that this vast warren of facilities was practically impervious to attack.

  General Dgarra stepped out onto a narrow ledge that jutted out beyond the outpost carved into the steep slope below. Just beyond the distant foothills, the Eadric divisions had gathered in preparation for a coming assault, all in the hopes of gaining access to the tunnels that led to the northernmost manufacturing plants. It was folly, of course. Then again, the general’s spies hadn’t been able to tell him what the small company of Kasari who accompanied the Eadric were planning.

  The freezing wind tugged at Dgarra, attempting to fling him from his perch, but he shifted his weight automatically to counter its pull. As he gazed out over the lowlands, a disquieting vision filled his mind. In past assaults, the Kasari had stayed clear of the fray, acting only as advisors.

  This time things would be different.

  Sitting at her crude terminal, Jennifer worked on refinements to her latest design. Having tired of the necessity to link minds with Raul in order to transfer her schematics and associated instructions to the ship’s computer, she’d convinced him to bump this latest project up on their list of things to accomplish prior to arrival at the alien planet.

  It hadn’t been easy. When she’d pointed out that it would be critical to maintain communications with the ship when she left to hunt and gather food, he’d argued for a simple modification to the SRT communications devices that the altered trio had made on Earth. He relented only after she pointed out that unless they implemented an SRT headset interface that would allow either of them to remotely connect to the neural net, he would still be trapped in the command bay. Still, he’d insisted on retaining the administrative authority to override her remote connections if he desired.

  It was petty. Then again, this was Raul she was thinking about, and she really wanted the interface that the headsets could provide. To make it work, they would have to build three devices. First they needed to build a new shipboard interface to the neural net, with its own SRT circuits. Then they needed two headsets, one attuned to Jennifer’s brain waves and the other to Raul’s. And that meant more testing and tweaking.

  The waiting was the most frustrating thing for Jennifer. It wasn’t that the Rho Ship’s molecular manufacturing system couldn’t build more than one thing at a time. The problem was the complexity of the full-scale subspace field generator that it was currently building. If Raul diverted part of the nano-manufacturing capability to work on something else, he would introduce unacceptable delays in the completion of that critical system.

  So here she sat, thinking, planning, and designing other things they were going to need and then uploading those designs into the neural net through Raul.

  Raul’s voice startled her out of her reverie. “I’ve detected an asteroid with water ice on the surface.”

  “How much?”

  “Most of the surface is covered in it, several miles deep.”

  “Yes!” She stood up, held a hand high, and slapped palms with him, visions of stasis field bathtubs filling her head.

  A broad grin spread across Raul’s face and Jennifer realized that she wore a similar, idiotic expression. She didn’t care.

  “It’ll take us two and a half hours to get there, but it looks like there are plenty of good spots where I can set us down.”

  “And then we start ice mining.”

  “Sort of like talking to you.”

  The twinkle in Raul’s human eye took the sting out of the dig.

  “Hilarious.”

  The asteroid was large enough to classify as a small dwarf planet, a spheroid with so many holes punched through the surface ice that it reminded Jennifer of a sponge. In certain places impact craters had filled in to form frozen lakes that made excellent landing spots. Raul set the ship down gently near the center of one of these and, after draping the hatch with a stasis field to prevent depressurization, lowered the ramp.

  Now, as Jennifer watched Raul manipulate multiple stasis field tendrils to carve out chunks of ice and float them back into the ship for storage, a sudden realization kicked her in the head. All this time she’d been mystified as to how a ship capable of producing a variety of atmospheric mixtures didn’t have a water recycling system, one more of the critical items they’d added to their to-build list. But watching those chunks of ice being collected in a water storage bubble, the answer became clear.

  The ship didn’t have a water recycling system because it didn’t need one. A s
tasis field formed the perfect water recycler. Impure water could be forced through a stasis field membrane with micro-perforations that would allow water molecules to pass through sans contaminants. All they had to do was fill a stasis bubble with dirty water, generate the membrane, and force the liquid from one end of the bubble toward the other until all the contaminants had been strained. That material could then be fed to the matter disrupter for conversion to energy.

  Jennifer hissed.

  Apparently, being hammered into pieces by two wormhole transits and an ongoing struggle for survival hadn’t been conducive to clear thinking.

  Or maybe she was just an idiot.

  Oh well, it wouldn’t hurt to have a good supply of extra water. But that wasn’t what troubled her so deeply. She wondered what other obvious solutions she had failed to consider. For the thousandth time she found herself missing Heather, Mark, and her mom and dad, knowing that it was a feeling she had the rest of her life to get used to.

  The day of reckoning had finally come. Raul should have felt brave or resolute or determined, but all he really felt was afraid. And though Jennifer’s face didn’t show it, he was pretty sure that she felt the same way.

  With all they’d accomplished in the last few weeks, they should have at least been experiencing some pride. After all, they had completed the full-scale subspace field generator and had survived its initial test. They had an abundant water supply and had managed to get the SRT headsets working, even though Raul’s had taken several tries. They had even built two Kasari disrupter pistols based upon information contained in the Rho Ship’s data banks, although they hadn’t been bold enough to test them on board the ship.

  Now they coasted through subspace toward Scion. Even though their destination had slightly less mass than their home world, Jennifer had adjusted the shipboard gravity to three times Earth normal in order to super-train her muscles prior to landing.

  Raul had to give Jennifer credit for her understanding of the Altreian subspace physics model. The first five of her six rules of subspace transition, the only ones they had been able to test, had all checked out. And since those six rules had been uploaded to the Rho Ship’s neural net, he knew the list by heart.

  The speed of subspace waves is orders of magnitude greater than the speed of light.

  Anything contained within a subspace field is shifted into subspace but retains its previous rate of time’s passage.

  Anything shifted into subspace will retain its previous normal-space momentum vector upon transition back to normal-space.

  No normal-space force can act upon an object in subspace.

  If an object in subspace is not acted upon by a subspace force, it will return to normal-space at the location where its previous momentum vector would have taken it.

  If an object in subspace is acted upon by a subspace force, such as a subspace drive, it will return to normal-space at an entirely new location, but retain its original, normal-space momentum vector.

  That meant they just had to accelerate to a desired velocity, shift into subspace, wait long enough to reach their intended destination, then shift back into normal-space for maneuvering. They could shortcut the trip by going directly toward their target, thereby ignoring obstacles such as planets or gravitational forces. They would be limited to sub-light speeds because they didn’t know how to accelerate while in subspace, but it was still a cool way to travel.

  His thoughts turned to their current situation. Very soon now, the Rho Ship would shift back into normal-space in order to decelerate for landing on the planet’s surface. For this last portion of the journey they would be forced to rely on the Kasari cloaking mechanisms to keep the aliens from locating them. That was okay. The Kasari couldn’t determine the Rho Ship’s location, nor could they invoke an override command that would launch the vessel through another wormhole. At least he hoped not.

  Raul turned to look at the freshly bathed Jennifer Smythe. She’d just returned from a stasis field bathtub she’d partially filled with water, looking and smelling much more like a goddess than the bloody and bedraggled beauty he’d grown used to during their first several weeks together. Using her new headset interface to the neural net, she’d also transformed a stasis bubble into a small washing machine that had done a respectable job of cleaning, wringing out, and pressing her clothes.

  During the months Raul had spent on this ship, he had always washed his clothes by hand. Yet another obvious idea that had never occurred to him probably because he’d spent too much time hating Dr. Stephenson and feeling sorry for himself.

  Raul felt a slight shudder as the Rho Ship transitioned back into normal-space and the gravity distortion engines came back online. The image of the colorful blue world they were rapidly approaching formed in his mind, triggering an electric thrill.

  Assuming that anything on that damn planet was edible, they’d soon have full bellies for the first time in weeks. And the food wouldn’t come wrapped in army-green plastic.

  With any luck at all, it would taste just like chicken.

  With her mind linked to the neural net through her new SRT headset, Jennifer studied the sensor data, forming it into a live 3-D display as if she stood at the center of a clear stasis bubble looking directly out into space. As the Rho Ship entered its temporary orbit around the beautiful planet, her heart hammered her chest, energized by adrenaline. Jennifer didn’t try to fight the excitement. For the moment, she felt more alive than at any point since she’d left Earth.

  After studying the maps they’d made on the initial survey of Scion, she and Raul had finally agreed on a landing spot—a meadow near a secluded mountain lake, located in the rugged regional home of Scion’s wingless warrior species. The two had also agreed to use only the passive sensors until just before they left orbit to begin their descent. One thing the last visit to this planet had taught them was that extensive use of the worm-fiber viewers could attract the wrong kind of attention.

  But the time for that type of caution had ended. It was critical that they confirm that no members of any intelligent alien species lingered anywhere near the place where they planned to touch down minutes from now.

  Jennifer felt Raul activate a single worm fiber, its far end opening a few dozen feet above that distant meadow. A soft gasp escaped her lips at the beauty of the evening setting. Jagged, snowcapped peaks cupped the small lake whose waters splashed gently against the shore. The meadow floor was covered in a mix of green, grasslike vegetation and abundant purple and red flowers that swayed in a strong breeze.

  Surrounding this idyllic space, green-leafed trees climbed up the slopes of the mountains and pushed against the lake’s edge, some even extending out into the water. They reminded Jennifer of the huge banyan trees she’d seen in Lahaina, Maui, with wide spreading branches that dropped prop roots down to the ground for support and nourishment. Many of these supporting roots had grown so large that they were indistinguishable from the main trunk of the parent tree.

  As she looked more closely, Jennifer realized that the notion of a parent tree might not apply in this dense forest, with larger branches becoming part of adjacent trees to form an interconnected landscape.

  A flash of movement caught her attention, a rapid shadow that was almost ghostlike in the dark forest. Soon she noticed other animals of various shapes and sizes moving through the undergrowth as birds gathered on the tree branches in anticipation of the coming night. Every single bird she spotted seemed to be midnight black. For some reason, the combination of the congealing shadows beneath the trees, the darkening sky, and the thousands of black birds made her jumpy.

  On the positive side, there was no sign of the people who dominated this eastern interior section of the super-continent.

  “It looks like we’re a go,” Raul said.

  “Okay. Take us down.”

  The vessel’s gravity distortion engines kicked in, starting their descent with a smooth deceleration. Unlike the return to Earth of NASA spacecraft, the
Rho Ship wouldn’t make use of air braking. It didn’t need to and the shipmates certainly didn’t want to leave that kind of heat signature.

  Instead, the Rho Ship settled into the atmosphere more smoothly than Jennifer had imagined possible, any turbulence completely damped by the vessel’s internal gravitational field. The process reminded her of coming down in a hot air balloon, despite the fact that this descent was a hell of a lot faster. She checked their speed and was surprised to discover that they had entered the atmosphere at a subsonic velocity. Jennifer had known that was the plan, but the internal acceleration damping had fooled her senses.

  As they’d observed during their previous visit, the atmosphere was a breathable mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and other trace elements. The air was a bit heavy on oxygen concentration but not to the extent that it was toxic. She wasn’t sure what kind of pathogens she might encounter, for which she had no natural immunity, but she doubted that it would be anything that the nanites in her bloodstream couldn’t handle.

  With the glorious purple sunset giving way to twilight, the Rho Ship settled to rest three feet above the meadow, it’s electro-optical cloaking making it invisible from more than a dozen feet away.

  Jennifer heard Raul exhale and realized that she’d also been holding her breath, evidently for quite a while. She released it and smiled at him.

  “Good landing.”

  Raul inclined his head slightly. “Thanks. I guess it’s about time for you to suit up.”

  Jennifer shook her head. “Not yet.”

  Although she’d made a tough but flexible nano-material tactical suit and boots, all black, she didn’t have any desire to make her first outing into the depths of the alien night. Whether or not her enhanced eyesight could make her functional didn’t matter. Unless they got desperate, she’d wait for morning. Since this planet had a twenty-hour rotation period, that meant she’d have about ten hours to prepare.