Janet stood in her bedroom staring angrily at Jack. She couldn’t keep the accusation out of her voice.
“You used to be able to sense these things. Where’s that Jack now that I need him?”
Her husband’s eyes went dead.
“You know where that part of me is. You helped me bottle it.”
The memory lashed her mind like storm-blown sleet: Jack sat in lotus pose at the head of the bed. She watched in a similar pose at its foot. His breathing had slowed to the point that she’d almost considered rousing him from the dangerous meditation. Behind his eyelids, his eyes moved as if he were in REM sleep, dreaming . . . and in a way he was. Lucid dreaming with a purpose, to confront the alien entity that had shared his mind ever since Jack had died on that Calcutta operating table and then been revived with a little something extra.
In those early days, Jack had scared the hell out of her, making her believe he was losing his mind. And Janet had known that he had feared it as well. So what was she doing now?
Janet stepped forward, put her arms around Jack’s neck, and crushed him to her, unable to keep the desperation from her voice as she whispered in his ear.
“Eos won’t let us find him. Please, Jack. I think that other side of you is our only chance.”
Jack went taut, as if every muscle in his body was fighting itself. Then he reached up and gently lifted her chin so that their eyes locked. There it was, not as bright as it had once been, but unmistakable nonetheless—that red glint that reflected in his pupils at moments of heightened emotion.
“You know I can’t control it. What you want me to do, I may not be able to undo.”
Janet heard the truth in his words. They filled her with self-loathing.
“Do it for Robby . . . for me.”
Jack stared at her for what seemed an eternity. Then, with a deep breath, he slowly nodded.
“For Robby.”
CHAPTER 19
To walk again after all this time brought tears of joy to Raul’s eyes. But to actually feel his feet and legs was wonderful beyond belief. He wanted to run. Instead, he settled for jumping. Unfortunately, he almost brained himself in the command bay’s high ceiling and then barely caught himself with the stasis field before he crashed back down atop the Kasari machinery that filled the back half of the room.
Raul made a mental note to calibrate the responsiveness of his mechanical legs to his nervous system’s input. And he’d need to make himself some new pants. Having cut holes in his old uniform bottom had let him slide his new legs into them, but the outfit looked flat-out ridiculous, like he was wearing a black carbon nano-fiber diaper.
Fashion adjustments would have to wait until after the test of his latest modulation upgrade to the subspace field generator. The simulation he’d created in his neural net gave him a high degree of hope that the ship could actually achieve faster-than-light travel for the first time. And the thought of that was even more exciting than his new legs, even though those were highly necessary if he needed to leave the ship to rescue Jennifer.
Raul created a stasis field captain’s chair and strapped himself in, his smile morphing into an excited grin. The thought that Jennifer wasn’t here to share this moment with him threatened to destroy his mood, so he pushed it aside. Focus, Raul, he thought. One thing at a time.
With a thought, he activated the field generator. The now-familiar transition to subspace was almost instantaneous. Raul initiated the undulation cycle. Aboard the vessel, there was no sense of movement, but the sensors told him the truth of it. The Rho Ship was accelerating.
Subspace, unlike normal-space, had no stars or planets, but it was awash in light that leaked across the subspace/normal-space boundary. The light had extremely long wavelengths far below the visible spectrum, but the neural net converted the sensor detections to a visible image.
Raul knew that electromagnetic waves didn’t actually cross that boundary, but where the two spaces touched, some of the energy in those light waves was transferred to subspace. With every wavelength traveled, light transferred a tiny fraction of its energy to subspace. Contrary to popular scientific belief on Earth, this tiny energy loss to subspace was a primary cause of the red shift that man observed when he looked at the stars. The farther away an observed object, the greater the total energy light lost during the trip. Voila . . . a red shift.
By detecting the subspace echo of that leakage, the neural net could estimate the ship’s subspace velocity. Just as with light in normal-space, subspace waves traveled at an apparently constant velocity that formed the upper limit to which any object could be accelerated. On the plus side, the velocity of subspace waves, call it CS, was many orders of magnitude greater than the normal-space speed of light, CN.
As Raul watched, the calculated speed of the starship rapidly increased and, as it approached the speed of light, he felt his heart pounding in his ears. He expected something dramatic to happen at the point where the starship passed the speed of light. Nothing. Complete letdown. Of course, why should anything interesting happen? Here in subspace, CN was a tiny fraction of CS.
Over the course of a minute the Rho Ship’s estimated speed continued to climb until it passed ten times the speed of light. Then Raul stopped the subspace field oscillation, letting the ship coast along at that speed for the next hour, an interval during which the ship should have traveled a third farther than the average distance from the sun to Pluto. It would be far enough to allow him to refine the neural net’s subspace speed estimate after he transitioned back to normal-space.
Raul nodded in self-satisfaction and killed the subspace field generator.
Warnings cascaded through the neural net into his brain with such intensity that they almost stopped his heart.
Shiiiiit!
The Rho Ship had come out of subspace and picked up its previous normal-space velocity vector, as predicted. But now it was plummeting directly toward the surface of a massive red giant, hull failure imminent.
Once again Raul issued the mental command that activated the subspace field generator. His rush of relief at the subspace transition was short lived. What the hell? The sensors indicated that the ship was still traveling at ten times the speed of light, just as it had been prior to the transition to normal-space.
Then it hit him. He was an idiot. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that subspace momentum would be conserved just as normal-space momentum was? The Rho Ship had picked up the same subspace velocity vector it had prior to transitioning to normal-space.
With his head whirling, he tried to come to grips with the sequence of events that had just about killed him. There was no way the Rho Ship could have traveled far enough to reach the distant red giant. Not at ten times the speed of light. Not in an hour.
Then the neural net completed the speed calibration calculations and he felt his heart try to claw its way out of his throat again. The ship wasn’t going ten times the normal-space speed of light. It was going more than a million times CN, a speed that, over the course of an hour, had carried him nearly a light-year from his point of origin. And the Rho Ship was still traveling that fast. Raul reversed the original subspace oscillation pattern, decelerating until the ship’s relative subspace velocity reached zero.
Feeling a warm wetness, he looked down. Just freakin great! At some point during the last few minutes of sheer terror, he’d pissed himself. As Raul tried to calm himself so that he could think straight, a new thought occurred to him.
He should be thankful that it was only piss.
Jennifer didn’t recognize any of the slaves in the work crew she was assigned to. Not particularly surprising since she was a long way from the front lines. If she’d thought the work had been hard before, she was wrong. Having been moved deeper into the caverns, she and the other slaves were stationed at an intersection of eight tunnels, each of which was used by the electrical supply trains that ran along the narrow-gauge rails.
The trains that arrived from four of the tunnel
s had to be off-loaded, the ammunition and supplies stacked according to type. When empty trains arrived from the other four tunnels, they had to be loaded according to a manifest that was managed by the shift overseer. As for the slaves, except for short breaks for food and necessities, they worked around the clock.
There was one thing, however, that Jennifer was grateful for. She was being fed on a regular basis. True, it was the green goo, but it was nourishing.
Jennifer ticked off the passing days on a mental tablet, though she couldn’t be sure of actual time. The damp and the dark beyond the platform lights were constant and the guards weren’t inclined to share information.
The rumble of the trains as they came and went along the tracks produced echoes that never quite seemed to die out. She learned to ignore the intermittent hiss and crack of the overseer’s whip, followed by the keening screams from the Eadric slaves who failed to keep up with the required pace.
And she got stronger, her body so lean and hard that she didn’t recognize it. But she was concerned over the way her healing slowed with each lashing. She understood why. Her body could make more blood, but it couldn’t regenerate the nanites she bled out.
She’d forced herself to stop imagining that General Dgarra would be grateful that she’d saved his life and come to her rescue. For all she knew, Dgarra had died from his wounds. So ever so slowly and carefully, she invaded the minds of the overseers, making herself their favorite. Not so much that she never got lashed. That would have been too noticeable. Just enough to maintain her health.
If Raul was out there waiting for her to make contact, she needed to get the hell out of these caves. Of course, he hadn’t been within range when she’d gotten her brief opportunity to try to connect with him after she’d taken the SRT headset from the injured Dgarra. For all she knew, he’d fled through a wormhole and wasn’t coming back. If so, her chances of ever getting home to her family again were nil, even if they still lived.
Angry at Raul and even angrier at herself, she purged these defeatist thoughts from her head and returned her attention to her escape plan.
Her work alone was enough to bring her a degree of favoritism. She no longer tired and she volunteered for the hardest part of each work detail. But with each passing hour, she watched for the opportunity that would eventually come, when fatigue and random chance aligned to separate the overseer from his guards and make escape possible.
What happened after she killed the overseer and the guards would depend a lot on her luck as she tried to find her way back to the surface world. If she made it that far . . . well, there was no use planning any further than that. As the only human on the planet, she’d just have to wing it. Not a great plan, but it gave her a reason to keep going.
And, right now, she needed a reason for living.
General Dgarra awakened to find an intravenous tube feeding a dark liquid into a vein on his right arm. He pulled it out and then tugged free a long tube that had been run into his nose and down his throat. As alarms bleated around him, he struggled to a sitting position on the bed, although it took every ounce of his strength to do so.
Where was he? Clearly it was a hospital, but where? This was a major health care facility, not one of the field hospitals near the front lines. That meant he’d been evacuated to one of the cities in the great caverns scattered throughout the coastal mountains along the Sea of Koranth.
A concerned-looking male nurse rushed into the room, wearing the disposable gray overgarments of his profession. In his right hand, the portable patient-status monitor buzzed its annoyance.
“General. Please lie back down.”
Setting aside the monitor, the nurse attempted to force him back down, but Dgarra shook his head, backing him off. When Dgarra spoke, his voice was a horse rasp that hurt his throat.
“How long?”
“Sir?”
“How long have I been out?”
The nurse picked up the status monitor and entered a query into the handheld device. “You’ve been in a coma for forty-three days. Frankly, the doctors thought you might never recover.”
“Well, I’m awake now so help me out of bed. Where’s my uniform?”
A doctor entered, her face pinched with disapproval. “I’m afraid that you’re in no shape to get out of bed. You aren’t going anywhere until I run a complete battery of tests.”
“Are you telling me you haven’t already run those tests?”
She stared down at him, flustered at his opposition. “No. But now that you’re awake we need to—”
“No. You don’t need to do anything. I’m not staying in this bed another hour. What I need is to get into my uniform. If you won’t help me, then I’ll do it on my own.”
With great effort, Dgarra stood and managed to take three steps before his knees buckled. He fell to the floor. Evidently his side had healed since no stitches burst open, but he was as weak as an infant. Unable to rise again, he felt himself lifted and laid back upon the bed. Then, despite his best efforts to remain awake, his eyes closed and stayed that way.
When he opened them again, there was a different nurse on duty, a female who was every bit as large as he was. Maybe larger, considering how many days he’d been lying in bed without moving. Fortunately, he didn’t have a tube up his nose, although they had reattached the IV.
“Hello, General,” she said, her voice far more cheerful than either of the previously encountered medical staff. “It’s good to see you awake. Can I get you anything to drink?”
Feeling his stomach rumble, Dgarra nodded. “I’m hungry.”
“Excellent,” she said, turning toward the door. “I’ll have a tray sent up.”
Several minutes later she returned carrying a tray, setting it over his lap after raising the bed into a seated position. The food turned out to be a brothy soup that smelled good but wasn’t what he really wanted.
“I was expecting real food.”
“Your stomach has to get used to digesting again. Believe me, you’ll be thankful that it’s only broth. By the way, you have a visitor who is very anxious to see you. Emperor Goltat was informed that you had awakened and is on his way here now.”
Dgarra frowned. This was worse than he expected. It meant that he’d been moved all the way back to the capital city of ArvaiKheer, hundreds of leagues from the northern front. It also meant that he was in the imperial hospital, which provided care for the emperor and his extended family. Getting out of here and back to his troops was going to be much harder than he’d anticipated.
Dgarra had almost gotten to the bottom of his bowl when the door burst open to admit the emperor. Although his face showed his age, it radiated the vigor of a much younger man. Clad in shimmering black robes, the emperor strode to the side of the bed and slapped a huge hand down on Dgarra’s shoulder.
“Ahh, Nephew. I feared I would never again have the chance to look you in the eyes. The gods have been kind to me this day.”
“And to me, Uncle,” Dgarra answered. He didn’t much care for the formal mode of address, but tradition demanded that the greeting be proper, even among the emperor’s family.
Looking around at his retainers and at the nurse, the emperor waved his hand. “Everyone out. I want to converse with my nephew in private.”
The nurse picked up the tray and followed the others out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Pulling up a chair, the older male sat down and leaned back, his fingers interlaced across his chest. Dgarra didn’t give him a chance to launch into a lengthy stream of idle chatter.
“What is the news from the front lines? From my command?”
A momentary look of annoyance flitted across the emperor’s visage and then was gone.
“Always business first with you.”
Dgarra spread his palms, almost dislodging the IV needle.
“I am who I am.”
“My sister’s son. You are so like she was.”
“Uncle. The northern front? Does it
still hold?”
The emperor sighed. “All right . . . all right. Yes, the line still holds. Though you did not know it, you have returned quite the hero. The commander who held the north until winter secured your victory. When you are strong enough, I will personally hail you at your victory parade.”
Dgarra felt the growl crawl from his lips and couldn’t bite it back. “I want no parade. I only want to get back to my command.”
The frown returned to Emperor Goltat’s face. “I do not care what you want. The people deserve to celebrate every victory that remains to us. And they deserve to celebrate their heroes. Gods know those celebrations may be numbered. General Bralten will serve in your place until such time as I deign to send you back to the front . . . if I send you back. It seems to me you have earned a promotion.”
“I am a battle commander. I want no part of the war planning that takes place in the rear.”
“Then I suggest that you relax and enjoy the upcoming celebration.”
It was a thinly veiled threat, backed by the authority of the emperor. Dgarra took a deep breath and let it out slowly, unclenching his hands that had balled into fists.
“As you command, Uncle. I will play the good soldier. But there is one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“There is a female slave who fought alongside me. When I fell in battle, she pulled me out and carried me, kept me alive for days. Without her, I would not be here. I want her at my side for the victory parade.”
Dgarra saw his uncle’s eyes widen. His request was unprecedented. “There was no mention of a slave when you were brought here.”
“I was unconscious when they found me. It would be standard procedure to return the slave to the work crews.”
“After so many days it is doubtful that she could still be alive.”
“This one is different, not an Eadric. She is wingless but not Koranthian.”
A scowl darkened the emperor’s face. “Kasari?”
The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) Page 23