The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  The Kasari female would soon answer Dgarra’s pressing questions. The general wondered just how much pain a Kasari could endure before breaking. And break this female, he would. The survival of the Koranthian Empire depended on it.

  Turbulence slammed the aircraft up and down, buffeting Jennifer back toward wakefulness. Aircraft! She was in an aircraft. She opened her eyes, blinking away the fog that shrouded her vision. Christ, her head hurt.

  She moved her hands, surprised to find them unfettered. A harness secured her to web seating that ran along both sides of what appeared to be a troop compartment. Indeed, twenty-three sky-high soldiers filled the other seats, including those on either side of her. Her first impression was that they looked even bigger and meaner than the worm-fiber view she’d gotten from space.

  Although it was difficult to be certain while they were sitting down, she guessed that both the males and females averaged nearly seven feet in height. All were bald, emphasizing the bony unibrow that turned upward along the outside of their faces to form two bony ridges that extended all the way to the back of their skulls. And they all wore identical black tactical gear.

  The male directly opposite Jennifer studied her closely. The others ignored her. They’d taken her weapons and her headset but had left her arms and legs free. The harness that secured her to her seat had a quick release exactly like those that strapped the aliens to their seats. Why would they be so lax during the transport of a prisoner?

  As if in answer to her own question, she noticed the collar around her throat, a thin loop that felt like cold metal against her skin. She started to reach up to touch it, but the soldier across from her growled something and shook his head. Even though she didn’t understand the word, his meaning was clear. Hands off.

  “Screw you,” Jennifer said, reaching up to grasp the collar.

  Then her body exploded.

  The pain went beyond anything she’d experienced since the first time she’d put on the Altreian headset, cramping every muscle and blasting her optic nerves so hard they sizzled, generating a blinding flash that she knew was only in her head. She would have screamed, but her jaws were clamped tight and her tongue refused to cooperate.

  When it stopped, she found herself curled in a fetal ball on the metal floor, having broken the restraining harness in her convulsions. Someone was shouting and she felt herself lifted and shoved back onto the seat. Disoriented, Jennifer felt hands working to tie her there. Not tied up, just belted in. She gulped in a shuddering breath, unable to repress the tremors that shook her body as her nerves worked to recover.

  She looked up at the soldier who was apparently her handler and saw a derisive grin on his face. There was also a hint of awe in his mind, something tinged with disbelief that she could break the straps of the seat harness. Jennifer let her mind slip into the alien’s, being careful to avoid notice. Although she couldn’t read his thoughts, she could sense his feelings.

  As their eyes locked, she gently amplified that feeling, then refocused on getting her own body under control, just as the aircraft banked right and began a steep descent. Apparently they had reached their destination. Less than a minute later, the vehicle leveled out and settled vertically to the ground. When the rear ramp lowered, the soldiers stood and filed off, leaving only Jennifer and her handler. He stepped across the aisle, cut the strap that tied her to her seat, and nodded toward the ramp, rasping another incomprehensible command.

  Jennifer got to her feet, glad that her shaky legs managed to complete the task, and walked to the ramp, followed closely by her handler. A biting wind stung her cheeks and pulled tears from the corners of her eyes. Lowering clouds brought with them a darkness that felt like twilight. At the bottom of the ramp, she looked around. The military encampment was situated high on a cliff ledge that appeared to have been carved into native stone, a flat slash across the face of the mountain. How deeply it penetrated into the cliff, she couldn’t tell.

  Over the howling wind, she heard the distant rumble of thunder. No. Not thunder. The sounds of distant battle echoed through these mountains.

  When Jennifer stepped off the ramp onto the naked stone, her handler said something and grabbed her left arm. A clear signal to stop. Jennifer halted behind the soldiers, who had formed two ranks.

  Another small group of soldiers approached from the center of the encampment. The one who walked two paces in front carried an aura of authority that marked him as important. One of his captains barked a command and each of the assembled soldiers slapped fist to chest in salute.

  The commander halted in front of the formation, returned the salute, and then barked an order that dismissed all the soldiers except for Jennifer’s handler. Then the commander turned and walked up to Jennifer. For several seconds he studied her, all the while engaging in a running conversation with her handler, who then handed the commander her SRT headset. After a brief examination the commander placed it in one of the large cargo pockets on his pants leg and then returned his attention to her.

  Jennifer kept her face expressionless as she studied his feelings. He was curious about her, but there was something else: the deep-seated worry of a commander whose forces are losing the war and a powerful underlying desire to lash out at his enemy. Unfortunately, the anger that shone clearly in those gold-flecked brown eyes now targeted her.

  She could cool that feeling, but it would take a level of effort that he would notice.

  When he spoke to her, his tone indicated he was asking questions. Jennifer tried to match the sounds to the images in his mind. It had something to do with the Rho Ship but she failed to determine the underlying query. In an attempt to elicit more information, she played back his words in her mind, trying to replicate the sounds he had uttered.

  She saw the blow coming and could have dodged it, but the thought of the shock collar stilled her. The back of his right hand struck her in the mouth, splitting her lip, and though she staggered, she managed to keep her feet. Instead of shrinking away, Jennifer straightened and again met his eyes. There it was, just for a second, the fleeting look of grudging respect.

  Then he reached out and touched a finger to her bloody lip that was already beginning to heal. Shit. A snarl curled his lips. He turned away, issued a command over his shoulder, and Jennifer felt herself shoved along in his wake.

  And as she followed the alien commander into the depths of the artificial cavern, the howl of the wind dropped to a low moan.

  It had been four hours since Raul had shifted the Rho Ship into subspace, each hour a seeming eternity. Time enough for the beings who had attacked them to have departed. Dread of what he might find upon his return had made Raul procrastinate. If Jennifer was captured, that would be horrible. Finding her dead body would be infinitely worse.

  Damn it, Raul. It’s not going to get better with time. Get it over with.

  Taking a calming breath, Raul shut down the subspace generator.

  The view that the sensors projected into his head left him gasping in disbelief. The ship was in space, more than three thousand miles above the planet. What the hell?

  Then he understood. According to Jennifer’s third law of subspace transitions, anything shifted into subspace will retain its previous normal-space momentum vector upon transition back to normal-space. Scion rotated on its axis once every twenty hours. At the latitude and elevation of the meadow, it had a rotational velocity of just over one thousand miles per hour. At the instant the Rho Ship transitioned into subspace, that momentum vector became fixed. This entire time the Rho Ship’s normal-space echo had been traveling in a straight line that extended from the planet’s surface on that tangent vector.

  That wasn’t good. The Rho Ship had just materialized close enough to Scion to be easily detected. And it wasn’t cloaked. Just as Raul came to grips with the ramifications of his current situation, three spacecraft accelerated out of Scion’s atmosphere, headed directly toward him. His neural net gave him worse news. They were small Kasari attack c
raft, each one perfectly capable of taking out a world ship such as the one in which he now floated.

  Shiiiiiit!

  No way to outrun the more maneuverable craft at sub-light speeds. With no time to think, Raul reacted, engaging the wormhole drive, targeting a system ten light-years distant. As the engines ramped to full power, folding space-time in preparation for thrusting the Rho Ship through the wormhole, Raul realized his mistake. He hadn’t commanded the vessel to break the trip into survivable segments.

  He was a dead man.

  His mind hammered the neural net in a desperate search for a solution. Then it hit him. There might be a way to dampen the g-forces generated upon exit from an unanchored wormhole transit after all. As the neural net finished the required calculations, Raul locked in the event trigger that would engage the subspace field generator. Too early and the Rho Ship would transition to subspace and never step through the wormhole. Too late and the g-forces would kill him before the subspace transition happened.

  The transition had to happen at the precise moment that the sensors detected the gravitational spike, when the Rho Ship emerged on the far side of the wormhole. Only an automated trigger could do that.

  Raul wrapped himself in a stasis field cocoon, gritted his teeth, and waited. Then the odd feeling of disorientation arose, followed by pain. But this wasn’t the bone-shattering pain of his last two wormhole experiences, more like a sudden constriction that almost knocked the breath out of him.

  For several seconds, Raul waited for the tightening to get worse. When it didn’t, a yell of exultation escaped his throat.

  “Yes!”

  He’d done it, figured out a solution that even Jennifer hadn’t thought of. And it had worked . . . or had it?

  A new worry blossomed in his mind. What if the Rho Ship had transitioned into subspace too soon? Despite his confidence in the accuracy of the neural net’s calculations, there was only one way of knowing for sure. He had to shut down the subspace field generator and transition back to normal-space. He just hoped he wouldn’t find himself in range of the Kasari attack ships.

  Raul brought the Rho Ship out of subspace.

  Releasing himself from the constricting stasis cocoon, he turned his attention to the sensors, allowing a 3-D image of the surrounding space to form in his mind. The vision pulled a gasp of wonder from his lips. He was in the midst of a binary star system on the outer edge of a nebular cluster that painted half of his field of view in swirls of scarlet, purple, and blue.

  His calculations confirmed it. He had just jumped ten light-years from Scion.

  CHAPTER 13

  Eileen Wu rested her fingers on the keyboard as the message she wanted to send came into proper form in her head.

  She remembered the sense of awe she’d felt when she’d first discovered the impossible hack that Heather McFarland, now Heather Smythe, had pulled off from within the NSA’s supermax interrogation center known as the Ice House. She now felt that awe again, having just learned from Denise Jennings information that Admiral Riles and Dr. David Kurtz had taken to their graves, the knowledge that just over a decade ago, the NSA had acquired a copy of a fully functional AI. Unlike Big John, it had been an uploaded copy of Jamal Glover’s mind, an entity that thought like a human and possessed human memories.

  For the last two hours, the story had spilled from Denise’s lips as if a dam had broken in the old computer scientist’s mind.

  Admiral Riles and Dr. Kurtz, the NSA’s chief computer scientist, had actually managed to spawn a variation of the Virtual Jamal AI on an NSA supercomputer. But after a contentious meeting with President Harris and two of his top advisors, Riles had been ordered to shut the AI down and wipe it from existence. As far as Denise knew, they had done what the president had directed.

  Apparently, Alexandr Prokorov, the UFNS minister of federation security, had discovered information that made him question this. So, if Big John was to be believed, Prokorov had sent a team to track down all of the people who had participated in that distant event. Denise believed Big John. And now, so did Eileen.

  It was why she rested her fingers on her keyboard . . . to still the tremors that threatened to spread from her fingers up into her hands and arms. If Denise noticed her hands shaking, the woman would lose whatever hope she had that Eileen could fix this.

  The obvious solution was to bring this to Admiral Mosby’s attention and let the current NSA director handle it. But despite her confidence in the admiral’s abilities, Eileen had a bad feeling about that. The famous nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz had posited that war was the continuation of politics by other means. This UFNS witch hunt felt very much like politics by other means.

  What the hell was she doing? This kind of thinking could lead her down a treasonous road where only death or prison awaited. But Eileen had never been able to let go of a problem that fascinated her. And this one fascinated her. Besides, Admiral Mosby was already trying to find the missing Levi Elias.

  Eileen just needed to save three lives: Denise Jennings, Jamal Glover, and Caroline Brown. Make that four, counting herself. Even if Levi Elias was still alive, he was beyond her capacity to help.

  Jamal Glover had once been the NSA’s cyber-warrior extraordinaire, with Caroline Brown a close second in hacking ability. But that was before Eileen’s day and at twenty-six, the Caltech prodigy known as Hex didn’t take a backseat to anyone.

  Denise was safe for now. Now to alert the other two.

  She turned to the scientist, who sat on the leather couch, looking emotionally drained.

  “My spare bedroom is just down the hall on the left. You might as well get some sleep. This could take a while.”

  Denise rose and grabbed her overnight bag, then dragged herself down the hall. Once she was gone, Eileen turned her attention back to her laptop and gave herself to the problem at hand, hoping that, no matter what kind of cyber-search was currently underway, she would get to Jamal and Caroline first.

  Whether it was night or day didn’t matter to Jamal. The thirty-year-old software genius glanced at the clock on the corner of his desk. 1:04 A.M.

  His office was his home, quite literally. The Manhattan-based hedge fund had set aside an entire suite to allow him to live and work in a secure environment, right inside the company headquarters. One entire walk-in closet was dedicated to his beloved 1920s style. Chalk stripe suits, spats, fedoras . . . the works.

  And the pay was outstanding. In the ten years he’d worked at the Maximum Capital Appreciation Fund, he’d seen his salary rise from six hundred thousand to more than three million dollars per year, and that didn’t include bonuses. He was worth every penny.

  No matter what some experts said, in this new world, money compounded only if it was properly managed, using the best automated trading algorithms running on the world’s fastest networks. And Jamal wrote the best algorithms.

  Actually, he only gave them their start, gradually coaxing his latest self-modifying genetic code through its training phases before putting it in competition with other algorithms. The winner gobbled up the best pieces of the loser and the contest repeated itself, with Jamal making fresh tweaks here and there along the way until he judged the code ready to go live on the international exchanges. Survival of the fittest on a grand scale. Get it wrong and your assets suffered the fate of the dinosaurs.

  The technologies that had evolved from the Rho Project had altered the planet. The term “disruption” didn’t begin to describe the global macroeconomic consequences resulting solely from the advent of cold fusion and the Stephenson matter disrupter technology.

  And, as with most people who could afford the procedure, Jamal’s bloodstream sported the latest version of the busy little nanites that kept him alive and healthy. Those poor souls without the means could still get nanites. Their injections were just a lot more painful and lacked the benefits of the newer research. Jamal was a fine example of what the latest generation of nanites could
do. Having been the victim of an illegal operation that had left his head horribly scarred, he’d been amazed when the damage had simply melted away after the treatment, leaving his face as fresh as when he’d been nineteen.

  Since he no longer needed sleep, Jamal worked an average of twenty hours a day, six days a week. That left plenty of free time for vigorous workouts, meditation, some leisurely meals, and the periodic sexual relationship. Unfortunately, wine was another casualty of such progress. The nanites metabolized alcohol so efficiently that its mythical buzz was nothing but a distant memory.

  Another industry decimated. The same was true for drugs. For all those who chose to participate in the nano-revolution, drugs had lost their appeal. An odd side effect of all this was the burgeoning industry of nanite removal through a special form of dialysis.

  People had to decide which was more important, a long, healthy, sleepless life or getting their daily buzz on. Some had solved this dilemma through the growing practice of cycling, not getting nanited until they were ill, injured, or dying, then having the nanites removed as soon as they were healthy again. As a part of its Better Society program, government health care would pay for basic nanite infusion but not for nanite removal. There was, however, no limit on the number of times a person in need could get a new nanite infusion. And so the cycle turned.

  A video-chat window popped up on his screen, startling Jamal from his musings. What the hell? That someone had managed to hack into his system was unthinkable. Before he could recover from his shock, the pretty woman’s words froze him in place.

  “Hello, Jamal. I’m Dr. Eileen Wu with the NSA. Dr. Denise Jennings and I believe that someone is targeting those with knowledge of the artificial intelligence once called Virtual Jamal.”