The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  Dgarra manipulated the sensor controls, scanning the surrounding area. There had been a fight here. Just within the edge of the woods, a dead brengal lay on the ground next to its severed head. Now he understood what covered the female. The animal’s blood. Despite her small stature, she’d killed the beast in close combat. So why had it been necessary for someone to fire a disrupter weapon?

  He scanned across the meadow toward the two Kasari aliens, then halted. What he’d originally mistaken for muddy ground was an assortment of dissected body parts that lay in black pools of their own fluids. He’d just answered his own question. Cave bears hunted in packs. When the female had killed the one, its pack mates had come for her and she, or her partner, had been forced to fire.

  The female rose to her feet and began walking back toward the center of the meadow, accompanied by the floating half-man. Suddenly she began climbing up into the air as if she walked an invisible ramp. Seconds later, she disappeared, swallowed by the air itself. She merely winked out of existence and shortly thereafter, so did the legless one.

  Dgarra felt his hands clench and forced them to relax. What technology was this? He zoomed in on the spot where the two Kasari had disappeared. There was nothing there. Wait. Had he just seen a ripple in the air? He moved the camera slowly.

  There it was again, the faintest of distortions, just a shimmer in the morning sunlight. But, for a moment, he’d seen the outline of something familiar. Its curves matched the robotic starship that had seduced the Eadric with its Kasari technologies. Only this one had a crew.

  The general turned, his voice carrying all the power of his newfound desire.

  “Send a raiding party. Tell the commander I want him to use absolute stealth. He can assume that the Kasari starship is heavily armed, so he should not approach it. The female has already ventured away from it, so she probably will again. When she does, I want her captured and brought back to me . . . alive.”

  The captain slapped her right fist to her chest in salute, and then turned and strode from the command post.

  General Dgarra turned his attention back to the video and whispered the question that consumed him.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER 10

  Robby looked up as Mark and Heather entered the command center. Then he gasped. They looked old, late forties. Maybe fifty. And his neural augmentation verified that the lines in their faces weren’t from makeup.

  His mom was the first to comment on their appearance.

  “Been a while since you two used that trick.”

  Mark nodded. “It’s been a while since we’ve been on the run.”

  Then Robby remembered one of the things he’d learned in his training. Mark and Heather had such fine muscle control they could make those lines appear completely naturally. Once they had perfected a look, they stored it in their memories, making it available for immediate recall. Add some loose, older-people clothes to hide their athletic bodies, and a touch of gray to their hair, and they became different people.

  Since they were still dressed in their workout clothes, it didn’t quite work, but he knew that would change shortly.

  They’d rehearsed this scenario dozens of times, although this was the first time Robby had been allowed into the real command center. Today was the real deal. The thought of it made him quiver with excitement.

  Heather walked to her command couch, placed the Altreian headset in her go bag, and put on her SRT headset. Immediately a curved section of the wall slid open, revealing shelves stacked with weapons, laptops, clothing, and an assortment of other tactical gear.

  She walked to a wall safe and pressed her hand to the control panel. It opened to reveal several stacks of documents that he recognized, documents that represented new identities for everyone. Then Heather turned to Robby.

  “I need Robby for a few minutes. Everyone else, gear up.”

  Robby noted a brief frown come and go from his mother’s face, but she nodded and moved to the shelves, as did the others, including Yachay. When he shifted his gaze back to Heather, she smiled and pointed to his command couch.

  “Put on your SRT headset and have a seat. Let’s find out what you and your Eos can really do.”

  Robby sucked in a breath and slid onto the couch. Finally! Deep within his head, he felt Eos stir in anticipation.

  Heather watched Robby sit down on his command couch and then slid onto hers. Through their joint link to the supercomputer in New Zealand, she felt the boy’s excitement, which was understandable. But it also worried her. Then again, lots of things about Robby worried her. Normally her savant mathematical and pattern-matching abilities enabled her to project the actions of those around her into the near future. But Robby was a blank slate, a disconcerting blind spot. It would have been nice to allow him a while longer to develop complete mastery of his abilities, but the world wasn’t a nice place.

  Right now she had a number of things that needed to be done in order to make their escape easier. While some of those could be accomplished while they were on the road, some just could not wait. She touched Robby’s thoughts.

  “Robby.”

  “Yes?”

  “Just like we practiced, follow my lead. Until I tell you to do something, just watch.”

  “Got it.”

  She tried to feel her way deeper into his mind but, as usual, she found herself blocked by his Eos. While she might have been able to work her way past Eos’s guard if the AI had been on its own, Robby’s added resistance made that impossible. Perhaps that was a good thing. She hoped so.

  Shifting her attention to what was happening aboveground, Heather accessed the sensor array. As she’d expected, the FBI had been temporarily stymied by their building’s heavily plated exterior. Ramming the outer doors with one of their armored vehicles had dented CTC defenses but hadn’t come close to creating a breach. That would require shaped charges.

  The number of helicopters in the sky revealed that this morning’s events had attracted the attention of all the Austin TV channels. No doubt those feeds were being echoed to the national media outlets.

  It was time to change the recorded message playing on the outside of the building to something more newsworthy. She issued the command that replaced her image with a gigantic scene of the United States flag being folded into a triangle by a military funeral detail. Then, as “Taps” played in the background, an officer in dress blues and white gloves handed the flag to someone off camera and saluted. The camera panned back, revealing a four-armed alien accepting the flag, dropping it to the ground, and then grinding it beneath its boot, backdropped by the Stephenson Gateway.

  Consider carefully where your leaders would lead you.

  The message replayed itself over and over again, each time with a different nation’s soldiers presenting a different flag.

  “Are you ready, Robby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then, make it happen.”

  The sensation of Robby extending Eos’s touch into the web was familiar, but vastly larger in scale than anything hinted at in their off-the-grid practice sessions. Suddenly the visions that her headset was projecting into her mind shifted. She found herself looking at a vast web of worldwide television feeds, well beyond anything she’d envisioned. The numbers continued to grow as Robby’s AI penetrated more and more networks. He was taking control of every last feed and then transferring that control to her.

  Heather felt a tremor work its way into her hands and balled her fists to keep the others from noticing.

  She issued the command that replaced all those broadcasts with the video that now played on the exterior of the CTC headquarters. For several seconds, she watched as the clip spread through the television feeds before turning her attention back to Robby.

  “Besides the FBI, who else is involved in this raid on us?”

  Robby tilted his head slightly and once again Heather felt the AI slither through the net.

  “The Joint Te
rrorism Task Force has the FBI and ICE here. It’s being directly controlled from Washington, D.C.”

  Heather had expected this, and it meant one thing. Their lives had just gotten a hell of a lot easier. Thank God for centralized micromanagement.

  “Can you take out their communications?”

  She saw a grin spread across Robby’s face. “Be happy to.”

  Again her headset vision shifted to the assembled law enforcement and antiterrorism units. For a moment it seemed that nothing had happened, but then people began exiting vehicles and gesturing in confusion. A particularly angry-looking official stepped out of the back of a black van and began yelling at some subordinates.

  Heather had seen enough. Time to go. With a command directed through her headset, she opened the secret panel in the floor, revealing a staircase that led down to the escape tunnel. Waiting there were the electric vehicles that would carry them to safety.

  New Zealand was calling, but they had an important stop to make along the way. She and her allies hadn’t started this war, but she would do everything in her power to see that they didn’t lose it.

  “What the hell just happened?”

  NSA director Admiral Connie Mosby glared across the small conference table at the two most trusted members of her staff, her primary focus directed at Dr. Eileen Wu, the organization’s chief computer scientist.

  Eileen wasn’t bothered by her boss’s assertiveness, one of the traits that had enabled the slender black woman to rise to the pinnacle of a male-dominated profession. Although Eileen knew the answer to Admiral Mosby’s question, not knowing how the hacker had done it bugged the hell out of the slender, twenty-six-year-old Caltech legend.

  “Somebody just hacked television broadcasts around the world and then killed all communications between the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

  “Why didn’t we detect something like that in its early phases?”

  “We did. The problem is that it all happened nearly simultaneously.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It’s not. But it reminds me of something I’ve seen once before. As you may recall, a little more than seven years ago, your predecessor, General Wilson, suffered an impossible attack on a wide range of secure systems with no physical connection to the Internet.”

  “You’re talking about the attack on the Ice House interrogation facility.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We never figured out how it was accomplished, but there is one common factor with what just occurred. During that event, Heather McFarland, Mark Smythe, and Jennifer Smythe escaped from that supermax facility. Heather McFarland is now known as Heather Smythe, president and cofounder of CTC.”

  Admiral Mosby leaned back in her chair and nodded in understanding. “The same company that was raided this morning.”

  “Looks like we know who did it. But I haven’t got a clue as to how they pulled it off.”

  Admiral Mosby shifted her gaze to Levi Elias. The analyst’s curly salt-and-pepper hair framed a face like a hawk’s. He was one of the few people who Eileen completely trusted.

  “Okay, Levi. Has the JTTF got the Smythes in custody yet?”

  “No. As far as I can tell, they haven’t even gotten into the CTC headquarters building yet. Once they lost communications with D.C., they locked down the entire complex. Now they’re waiting until someone at JTTF headquarters approves a course of action. When that happens, it might have to be sent by courier. Either that or the JTTF is going to have to put someone on the ground there in Austin who has the authority to make decisions.”

  Mosby snorted. “President Benton likes to sign off on those types of decisions.”

  “Which is exactly why everything out at the CTC complex is completely hosed and likely to stay that way for a while.”

  “Can we trace the hack back to its source?”

  Levi shrugged. “I’ve got our entire cyber-warfare unit searching for the breach. But as soon as we make a little headway, something notices and we find our own systems being compromised.”

  The admiral looked at Eileen. “What about Big John?”

  Eileen had been expecting that question. The massively parallel supercomputer known as Big John had only one purpose—to mine all available data on selected targets and then cross-correlate that data with all other available information. Big John’s tendrils extended into everything.

  The most amazing thing about Big John was that nobody comprehended exactly how it worked. The scientists who had designed the core network of processors understood the fundamentals: feed in sufficient information to uniquely identify a target and then allow Big John to scan all known information—financial transactions, medical records, jobs, photographs, DNA, fingerprints, known associates, acquaintances, and so on.

  But that’s where things shifted into another realm. Using the millions of processors at its disposal, Big John began sifting external information through its nodes, allowing individual neurons to apply weight to data that had no apparent relation to the target, each node making its own relevance and correlation calculations.

  No person directed Big John’s complex genetic algorithms that supplied shifting weights to its evolving neural patterns. Given enough time to study a problem, there was no practical limit to what Big John could accomplish. The retired Dr. Denise Jennings’s software kernel had been inserted into antivirus programs protecting millions of computing devices around the world. And although those programs provided state-of-the-art antivirus protection, their main activity was node data analysis for Big John.

  Big John was a bandwidth hog. No matter how big a data pipe fed it, Big John always needed more. Dr. Jennings’s software had provided an elegant solution to that problem. Commercial antivirus programs scanned all data on protected devices, passing it through node analysis, adding their own weighting to the monstrous neural net. It didn’t matter if some devices were turned off or even destroyed. If data nodes died, more and better processors constantly replaced them. In a strange way, the entire global network was Big John.

  “Eileen?”

  Hearing the irritation in the admiral’s voice, she cleared her throat and refocused. “Sorry. Nothing yet. The attack doesn’t seem to have a signature that is similar to anything he’s seen before.”

  “He?”

  Damn it. Eileen knew that she’d slipped into the subtle trap that Dr. Jennings had so often succumbed to, thinking of Big John as a person when it was just a neural net, albeit an incredibly large one. When she wasn’t careful, that thought pattern wormed its way into her speech.

  “I meant it’s like nothing Big John’s observed before.”

  Admiral Mosby paused, rubbing her chin with her right hand. When her eyes again met Eileen’s, she asked the right question.

  “And if the same hacker strikes again?”

  Eileen smiled. “Everyone has a signature. If he strikes again, Big John will own him.”

  Alexandr Prokorov walked down the long hallway toward his meeting with the East Asian People’s Alliance, his face a mask that hid the emotions roiling beneath. The damn American bureaucracy could screw up a wet dream.

  Ten hours! That’s how long it had taken the JTTF to force their way into the CTC building. Only after wasting another day had they discovered the lower elevator shaft and broken through its defenses to gain entry to the secret underground level.

  And what had they found belowground? Not a goddamn thing. Nothing worthwhile anyway. Some computers, some robots, a laboratory, and training facilities, including an underground shooting range. But the only designs that the Americans had discovered were products for which the Smythes had already submitted patent applications.

  Mark and Jennifer Smythe, along with Jack Gregory, Janet Price, and their son, had disappeared. And they hadn’t escaped through the tunnel that ran to the CTC’s Shipping Facility One.

  Obviously there was another secret tunnel hidden somewhere inside the underground complex and the JTTF would eventually find it. But the h
ighly skilled fugitives were already gone and Prokorov had no illusions that finding them would be easy.

  In a cascade of incompetence, American law enforcement had emasculated his plan to implicate the Smythes in an international conspiracy. His ultimate goal was to shift the jurisdiction for their case to the International Court of Justice. That could still happen, but without having the targets under arrest, the gambit had failed in its primary purpose: to get control of the Smythes. They were still out there and, as their global propaganda telecast had so effectively demonstrated, they were a major threat.

  Prokorov found the two officials from the EAPA Ministry of State Security waiting inside his private conference room. He leaned across the small conference table, shaking each of their hands and welcoming them to the Federation Security Service headquarters in fluent Mandarin. As they resumed their seats, Prokorov seated himself in the chair at the head of the table.

  Prokorov didn’t know the exact purpose of the EAPA visit, merely that it concerned yesterday’s worldwide cyber-attack. Beyond that, Minister Tsao, the head of state security, had been unwilling to discuss the matter until they met in person.

  Prokorov leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table and linking his fingers. Ignoring the two MSS bureau chiefs that accompanied Minister Tsao, he focused his gaze on the EAPA intel chief. Despite being in his mid-fifties, Tsao looked much younger, his body lean and fit. No trace of gray showed in the general’s black hair and Prokorov knew that Tsao didn’t color it. This man’s intellect and drive reminded him of himself.

  “So, Minister Tsao,” Prokorov said, still in Mandarin, “what brings an official of your stature all the way from Beijing to The Hague?”

  “Do you mind?” Tsao asked, nodding at his aide.