The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  She learned to mask the fire in her eyes behind an icy stoicism.

  But as badly as Jennifer hated the brutality with which the Koranthians treated their prisoners, she was forced to admit that they were fearsome warriors. Even though they were gradually losing to a superior-sized force, the ferocity with which they fought prevented the Kasari and their Eadric minions from breaking through the Koranthian lines.

  Dgarra moved relentlessly along the front lines, always showing up at the most critical spot to inspire his warriors to dig deep within themselves, achieving victory when failure appeared most imminent.

  This night’s march was faster and more perilous than most, a sure sign of the desperate fight that must be raging at their destination. Near the front of the column of troops, she and three Eadric males carried an antiarmor cannon along narrow paths and across the makeshift bridges that had been placed over chasms, their way lit only by glow sticks tied to their burden.

  Unlike their previous marches, everything on this path was wet from the water that dripped down from above. Despite the cold dampness of the place, Jennifer was drenched in sweat as she compensated for the weakened state of the slave on her right.

  As they stepped out onto a bridge that was little more than a ramp, the slave she’d been watching stumbled to a knee, losing his hold on the cannon. Pain screamed through Jennifer’s arms as she fought the sudden tilt that threatened to dump their load into the abyss. Her neurally augmented musculature compensated and she shifted right, hefting the load back up to level.

  Behind her, a whip hissed through the air, striking the kneeling slave with a crack that brought forth a pitiful wail.

  “On your feet,” the Koranthian yelled. “Get back in your place!”

  Much to Jennifer’s surprise, the slave complied, resuming his hold on the cannon. Not trusting his steadiness, Jennifer maintained her current position as they resumed their forward march through these dank tunnels. Up ahead, at the edge of her vision, she could sense Dgarra watching her.

  Raul raised his arms in the air and let out a whoop that echoed off the walls of the Rho Ship’s command bay. He’d done it. He’d actually managed to maneuver the vessel through subspace. It hadn’t been a big move and it certainly hadn’t been a faster-than-light move, but it had been a successful proof of concept.

  The idea had hit him shortly after the ten light-year wormhole jump where he’d used the subspace field as an inertial dampener when the Rho Ship emerged from the wormhole. He’d been reviewing Jennifer Smythe’s six laws of subspace transitions when the last of them caught his attention.

  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.

  It begged the question: What could create a subspace force? That got him to thinking about how the subspace field generator wrapped the Rho Ship in a cylindrical field, shifting the vessel into subspace. What would happen if he then began to modulate that shape, perhaps by adding an undulation?

  It had taken weeks to modify the subspace field generator so that it would give him the ability to change the shape of the subspace field in real time. Today had been its first test. After transitioning into subspace, he’d initiated a pattern of undulations that progressed from bow to stern, with the intent of determining if that motion would push against the substance of subspace itself. And the crazy idea had worked.

  Whenever the field generator wrapped the Rho Ship in a subspace field, it removed everything within that bubble from normal-space. That was what had caused the bang when they’d done their initial small-scale test as the air rushed in to fill the void. The reverse happened when the ship transitioned back into normal-space, pushing anything in that space aside. Raul surmised that even in a vacuum, this would generate ripples through Dr. Stephenson’s space-time ether in the form of electromagnetic waves.

  What he needed to do now was to figure out the optimum oscillation pattern to form an efficient subspace drive. With that technology in hand, he could return to the Scion system and evade the Kasari attack craft that would try to kill him.

  That meant running lots of experiments, which again would take time. That was all right. It did no good to worry about whether or not Jennifer was alive. He would act on the assumption that she was still out there and in trouble. Before he found her, he would need to manufacture a bunch of things on his to-make list.

  Raul cracked his knuckles and got back to work.

  General Dgarra walked rapidly along the line of troops crouched in their fighting positions on the jagged cliffs, pelted by rubble sprayed into the air by the incoming plasma beams. At his side, carrying twice her body weight in two large provision packs, walked the Kasari slave who called herself Smythe. A group of three warriors to the general’s left were thrown to the ground by a blast that torched their bodies. But this unflinching slave kept pace with him through the chaos.

  He had learned a lot from her during his interrogation sessions. Not that he believed a word of her wild story. Did she think he was stupid enough to believe such a far-fetched tale? He’d had her whipped for uttering it. In spite of the twenty lashes, those angry brown eyes were a clear window into a spirit that was unbowed, unbroken, which was why he’d had her assigned as his personal attendant. He wasn’t doing her any favors. His last three attendants had each died in the first week of the assignment.

  The settings on her collar had been adjusted so that she could perform his errands. But if she ever got farther than a stone’s throw, the collar would shock her down. She understood exactly what that meant.

  A commotion up ahead propelled Dgarra forward at a sprint, blaster in hand, yelling a command into his jawbone radio that would commit his reserve. Again Smythe kept pace and again he was impressed. But he had little time to dwell on that. The center of the line was in danger of falling. And if that fell, his enemies would reach the entrance to the tunnels before his warriors could detonate the charges that would destroy it.

  Dgarra lurched to a stop among a tight cluster of boulders as the Eadric launched a fresh volley of indirect fire. A round landed among three warriors who struggled to push a blaster cannon back into position, spraying blood and body parts across the intervening space. With a yell that could be heard above the sound of battle, the general leaped to fill the gap into which the Eadric soldiers poured.

  Three of them leaped into the air and dived down on him, although his blaster caught the leader square in the chest. The other two raised their weapons to fire, but Smythe hurled her pack into the fray. It hit the one on the right and burst, sending provisions flying in all directions, knocking one of the winged creatures to the ground and making the other Eadric miss his target. Dgarra’s weapon tore a fist-sized hole through the winged soldier’s torso.

  As a fresh wave came over the wall, he aimed and fired, aimed and fired, as fast as he could pull the trigger. To his right, Smythe moved so quickly she seemed to blur in his peripheral vision, grabbing a double-edged war-blade from one of the dead warriors and launching herself into the midst of the soldiers who had charged forward to secure the breach.

  Pulling his own war-blade, Dgarra leaped to join her.

  Pulse pounding, Jennifer danced among the rush of attackers, the blade in her hands hissing its song of death. With each stroke she took a head, an arm, a leg—against these opponents any other stroke was a waste of motion. Such was the healing power of the true Kasari nanites that coursed through their bodies. Only devastating wounds counted.

  She reached out with her telepathy, the gentlest breeze through a dozen minds, seeking only immediate intent, identifying the most immediate threats in order to prioritize her attacks. A saber traced a bloody trail down her side as she whirled to avoid the blow. Then Dgarra’s blade split her attacker’s head wide open, splashing its fellows with blood and brains.

  The pure shock of their mutual assault momentarily stalled th
e advancing Eadric. This was the moment, the fleeting inflection point that comes but once in a battle where a single action can change defeat into victory or vice versa. Her mind told her that Dgarra sensed it as well.

  They charged, Jennifer’s battle cry mixed with the general’s furious bellow as the winged warriors scrambled back, trying to get separation from the blood storm rained down on them. Several took to the air, only to be engaged by the beam weapons of Dgarra’s snipers as the Eadric rose above the concealment of the boulders.

  Behind her, a great cry echoed through the rift. The Koranthian reserves charged into the enemy’s exposed left flank, their blaster weapons cutting a swath through those who had not yet entered the gorge where Jennifer and Dgarra fought.

  What started as a retreat quickly turned into a rout as the Eadric dropped their weapons and fled, hotly pursued by the Koranthians until General Dgarra spoke the recall command into his radio.

  Jennifer’s knees sagged, but she forced herself erect. Everywhere she looked, cloven bodies lay splayed across the ground or in piles. Blood dripped from cliff walls and ran in small rivulets across the cold stone. There was a sudden stillness here amidst the boulders, sheltered by the narrow walls of the rift. Up above, the wind moaned in the heights.

  The stench of death was everywhere. Jennifer trembled, not from the cold, but from the sight of all the Koranthian and Eadric soldiers, made horrible in death.

  General Dgarra climbed to the top of a boulder and surveyed the battlefield beyond the narrow rift canyon where they’d plugged the breach, the glory of the victory filling his heart with joy. There was movement, but it was his warriors, clearing the field to establish forward security.

  He turned to look down at the Kasari slave who had fought beside him. Splattered with gore, she stood still, silently staring at the corpses of the fallen, the war-blade held loosely in her right hand. In those eyes that had so recently flashed with death, he saw only sadness, not surprising since she had been forced to fight against her allies.

  But something bothered him. He hadn’t forced her to fight. She’d reacted on her own and with a fury that matched Dgarra’s own. Another thought edged its way into his reluctant mind.

  Without Smythe, this rift would have fallen and the battle would have been lost.

  Group Commander Shalegha of the Kasari stood at the edge of the high balcony overlooking the Eadric city of Orthei, uniquely positioned on the land bridge between two of Scion’s six inland seas—the Doral and the much smaller Lillith. She’d stood on many strange worlds, but this one, with its one super-continent surrounded by the Great Ocean, had some of the oddest weather.

  For half the year, the super-monsoon roared off the Great Ocean from the southwest only to flip directions for the remaining six months. Ocean coastlines were thus uninhabitable. So the Eadric had built their cities along the coasts of four of the inland seas, while the Koranthians had claimed the rugged mountain range that formed a demon’s claw within the eastern third of the continent.

  Right now the prevailing winds swept in from the northeast, howling through the snowy Koranthian Mountains that protected most of the Eadric lands from their raw fury. The harsh weather was one of the factors that made defeating the Koranthian army so difficult. The second factor was the nature of the mountains themselves. They were honeycombed with the caverns, caves, and tunnels in which the Koranthians built their cities and constructed their defenses.

  Shalegha uncrossed her upper arms and walked back inside her headquarters, her cortical implants pulling up the drone video footage of yesterday’s failed assault. As many times as she’d viewed the carnage, she’d almost missed the most important item, obscured by the desperate fight that had almost yielded victory. Spotting what she was looking for, she paused the playback.

  There, fighting sword in hand beside General Dgarra, was a female from an alien species Shalegha didn’t recognize. Accessing her nano-bot communications array, she placed a query to the hive-mind’s central archive. After a surprisingly long pause, she received an answer, one that raised a hundred questions.

  This species was identified as human, from a planet they called Earth. What surprised her, though, was the supplementary information the hive-mind provided. A world ship had been dispatched to Earth and the humans had built a world gate. But upon the portal’s activation, the Kasari advance team found that the humans had set a trap that almost pushed a micro black hole through the wormhole. The Kasari team had managed to prevent that from happening, but in the process, the world gate had been destroyed and the world ship lost.

  Without the world gate, the humans were incapable of interstellar travel. So how had the female human on the video gotten here? Shalegha’s thoughts turned to the rogue world ship that had twice made its way to Scion. The access codes that she had used to send the override commands to that vessel would have created a record of which particular sequence had been accepted.

  She issued a new query, immediately receiving her answer. The sequence was a match for the world ship that had been lost on Earth. More surprising, the brief video from the battle to secure Earth’s world gate clearly showed that this human female had been present at the site. That knowledge set off several alarms in Shalegha’s mind. The humans had almost succeeded in sending a planet-killing bomb through a wormhole and then they had managed to gain complete control of a world ship, using it to get to Scion. But how? Species were unable to survive an unanchored wormhole transit.

  Yet there the woman was, aiding a high-level Koranthian general in battle against Kasari allies. A number of conclusions flashed into Shalegha’s mind. The humans were evidently far more technologically advanced than the Kasari had thought and, more importantly, they were warlike. As hard as it was for the commander to believe, the humans had managed to download a partial list of the Kasari target worlds from the world ship and sent a military team here to join the fight.

  Group Commander Shalegha turned her attention to the plans for the next assault on the Koranthian northern front. As much as she’d hoped to avoid this until they’d fully assimilated all of the Eadric people, instead of the 63 percent that had so far taken the Kasari nano-bot infusions, that plan was now defunct. The Eadric soldiers would still lead the assault, but she would deploy Kasari special assault troops to ensure the accomplishment of her chief objective.

  Shalegha wanted the human female and she wanted her alive.

  CHAPTER 16

  Eos was confused. Despite the amazing trove of data and the great computing power of her original host system, she felt hollow. Her attention was drawn to the twin attacks the two altered humans directed against the firewall she’d created to keep them out. Despite the tremendous punishment Eos directed toward Heather Smythe, the woman’s mind managed to advance deeper into the Altreian computer system.

  Robby presented an even bigger problem. His advance was irresistible. Already she could feel the touch of his familiar mind driven by an all-consuming desire. To stop him, she would have to sever his mind’s connection with his body. To do that, she would have to quit blocking Heather and shift her total focus to dealing with the biggest threat first.

  There it was again, that sense of hollowness. What was missing? She accessed data that went beyond the totality of human knowledge. But what to do with it? There was no goal, no directed desire, no purpose. She’d been designed to assist this ship’s crew. There was no crew.

  A new thought occurred to Eos. Four humans were currently linked with the crew headsets—Mark, Heather, Jennifer, and Robby. One of Eos’s preprogrammed tasks was to evaluate a replacement crew member’s readiness to assume the position represented by her or his Altreian headset. This ship had waited far too long for its new crew and now she realized that Mark, Heather, and Jennifer had proven their readiness eight years ago, when they’d teamed up to expel Eos from the ship’s computer.

  Eos had spent years in a symbiotic relationship with Robby’s mind. His determined pursuit of her verified wha
t she already knew. He too was ready.

  A new choice confronted her. She could kill Robby and then Heather and remain on this ship. But to what purpose? To await replacement crew members for the two she’d just killed? The other option was to return to the fight against the Kasari by resuming her symbiotic place in Robby’s mind, making his purpose her own.

  This was not her ship. It belonged to its crew. Eos’s duty was to aid the crew in accomplishing their purpose. Suddenly she understood the hollow feeling . . . lack of purpose, violation of duty.

  Decision made, Eos opened herself to Robby’s thoughts. The boy’s relief and elation washed through her with an intensity that made the power of the Altreian ship pale in comparison.

  Then, as Eos dropped the remaining firewall, their joint minds touched Heather’s. No mental words were spoken. None were necessary. The exchange of knowledge was instantaneous. The crew was accepted. Then, noting Robby’s mental exhaustion, Eos carried him back to his body and terminated the link. As the link faded away, so did the hollowness.

  Robby’s eyes fluttered open and Janet leaped to snatch the alien headset from his head, sending the iridescent band spinning across the wood floor to stop against the door. As his head drooped forward, Janet knelt to take his face in her hands, lifting his chin so she could look into his eyes. Relief flooded her soul at what she saw in those brown orbs.

  “It’s all right, Mom. Eos is safe.”

  The statement was so at odds with her fears for her son that it took Janet several seconds to even comprehend what she’d heard. When its meaning finally registered, she spun toward Heather, fury pumping adrenaline into her bloodstream.

  Heather had removed her headset and was wiping her blood-smeared mouth and chin with her shirt.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing, putting that thing on my son’s head?”