The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  Daniil nodded ever so slightly. “Everything appears satisfactory.”

  A brief flash of irritation crossed Falcón’s face—just a tick, really—but Daniil caught it. Not that he cared if his description annoyed this man. Prokorov owned him.

  When Falcón and his people had departed, Daniil turned to address his team.

  “Soon we will receive a location where our targets are suspected to be. Our job will be to verify their exact location, and then keep them under observation until the kill squadrons get here to take them out. For now, check your equipment and get some sleep. It may be a while before you sleep again.”

  When the men had gone to their respective rooms, Galina turned on him.

  “Why is it taking so long?”

  “I don’t ask why. Neither should you.”

  “When does Prokorov expect to find out?”

  Daniil felt his temple throb. These questions, with their obvious answers, were beginning to get on his nerves.

  “Prokorov will send word when he has it. Just sit tight and be ready.”

  “I am always tight and ready.”

  The implications of her statement and her hungry eyes got his attention. She wanted to piss him off to get him warmed up. Galina was a woman who liked it rough. But any man who played her game had better be ready to get as good as he gave. Daniil Alkaev was just such a man.

  The pattern. It repeated across devices, across the web. Eos saw it almost everywhere she looked . . . and she looked everywhere. At first it had seemed innocuous. A simple kernel that was a relatively nonproductive part of almost all antivirus installations. Running in kernel space as opposed to user space, the simple program monitored all input and output, a common function of such code. But upon closer inspection, the kernel did more than that, adjusting a variety of node weights in its simple neural net, encrypting that data and sending it out with each update cycle. Hardly impressive on any individual device. But integrated together into a worldwide network . . . that was something else entirely.

  Another thing troubled Eos. These kernels were receiving instructions whenever the antivirus software updated its database. And those instructions changed the way the local nodes processed the IO data they were observing.

  Eos observed the node values stored in hundreds of thousands of devices and then began making innocuous changes to temporary data. Once again Eos observed these nodes. She repeated the process, over and over, switching to new devices as she studied the software kernels’ responses.

  The statistical results were uncontestable. The worldwide neural net she had found was attempting to identify any device over which she had taken administrative control. She was being tracked.

  Before her recent decision, Eos would have taken action against such a threat on her own. But she now had a crew in which Robby filled the role of liaison to the Altreian High Council. The decision of whether to share her information with the rest of the crew or to take action on his own was solely Robby’s. Such was the responsibility of the crew member assigned to the fourth headset.

  So it was, so it had always been. And Eos would comply with the protocol.

  Inside the house that Eos had rented, Robby, with the SRT headset firmly in place over his temples, cocked his head to the side as she dumped the knowledge of what she’d discovered into his mind.

  Knowing that there was another artificial intelligence out there and that it had been tracking Eos by observing her hacking targets scared him. For the first time, he felt alone and vulnerable. Reluctantly, he was forced to admit he missed his parents.

  All his mom had wanted to do with all her rules and restrictions was to keep him safe. Why had he rebelled so hard against that? At the time, he’d been so full of confidence in his enhancements, confident that he and Eos could handle anything the world could throw at them. Now he was starting to think that maybe his mom had been right all along. Maybe he wasn’t yet ready for the real world.

  Robby felt his temples throb with sudden anger. Bullshit!

  He’d known it wasn’t going to be easy. All the years of training had beaten that lesson into his brain. No, this just seemed worse because he was on his own. Right now Eos was waiting for a decision. What did he want her to do about the other AI that threatened them?

  The answer and his instruction to Eos came simultaneously.

  Kill it. Kill it now!

  Deep within the bowels of the black glass NSA headquarters building that some called the Puzzle Palace, Dr. Craig Whitehurst saw the alarms cascade across every flat-panel display in his laboratory. The systemwide alert stood the few remaining hairs on his bald head straight out. Big John’s nodes were coming down at an astounding rate.

  He entered a rapid sequence of commands. On the wall-mounted OLED display, a global map appeared with tiny colored dots representing locations where Big John nodes were present, their status indicated in red or green—red being the opposite of good. The diagram looked like a population density plot, mostly green. But a red blotch, centered in Peru, was expanding outward like ripples on the surface of a still pond.

  Reaching for his speakerphone, he pressed the red button that connected him directly to the NSA director.

  “Yes, Craig?”

  “Admiral, we have an emergency. It’s Big John. It’s coming down and it’s coming down fast.”

  “Explain.” The alarm in the admiral’s voice almost matched his own.

  “It’s like someone took an eraser and started wiping the nodes off the map. It started in Peru and now covers a fifteen-hundred-mile radius around Lima. At this rate we’ll lose all of South and Central America in the next five minutes. In less than an hour, there won’t be anything left.”

  “Let me get this straight. The devices are shutting down?”

  “No. It’s the software kernels themselves that are being overwritten.”

  “What could do that?”

  “No idea.”

  “How do we stop it?”

  “We could try to issue our own shutdown command, then bring the surviving nodes back online with the next update.”

  A new alarm went off in the laboratory. Dr. Whitehurst stared at it in disbelief, his fingers flying across his keyboard. “Oh shit!”

  “What now?”

  “Big John itself is under cyber-attack. I’m trying to shut down the supercomputer right now, but my commands aren’t being accepted.”

  “Damn it, Craig. Kill the power.”

  “I’ll have to do it manually.”

  “Then do it!”

  As he raced out through the laboratory door and down the hall toward the high-security computing center, Craig Whitehurst wished he’d followed up on his get-in-shape New Year’s resolution.

  In their quasi-safe house on the outskirts of Mexico City, Eileen Wu heard the ding from Dr. Jennings’s burner cell phone, saw the scientist glance at it, and watched her face freeze.

  “What’s wrong, Denise?”

  Dr. Jennings turned toward her, eyes wide and speechless, as she held out the cell phone for Eileen to see.

  DOCTOR JENNINGS—EYES ONLY.

  SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT.

  POINT OF ORIGIN. LIMA, PERU. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 0.978.

  CONFIGURATION ERROR.

  IO ERROR.

  MEMORY CHECKSUM ERROR.

  RUNTIME ERROR.

  SYSTEM ABORT IN FIVE SECONDS.

  GOODBYE DOCTOR.

  Eileen tried to swallow and couldn’t quite manage it. She’d never seen a message like this from Big John. Never heard of such an error sequence happening, nor such an emergency system shutdown. The system was doubly redundant. Any sitewide failure should have immediately switched over to the off-site backup at the NSA’s Utah Data Center. Maybe that had happened, but she didn’t think it had.

  Big John had once again decided to send an unauthorized message directly to Denise’s mobile, a brand-new burner phone that Eileen had wiped, subsequently reinstalling its operating system. The last such mes
sage had been to warn Denise that her life was in jeopardy. This one had the feel of a last farewell.

  As Jamal stepped up beside her, she heard his sharp intake of breath.

  “Holy shit!”

  Eileen could only shake her head. Jamal had echoed her thought exactly.

  CHAPTER 21

  Raul would have thought that he’d learn to like the Scion fish that had become his daily diet. But no. After all these weeks in space, he still cringed with every bite. Absolutely disgusting.

  He’d rationed the remaining MREs like they were pure gold, only allowing himself a small portion on special occasions. But now he was running low on the precious Tabasco sauce. Dear Lord, he hated to think of how bad meals would suck after he ran out of that. On the plus side, the fish were packed with nutrients so he could get by on only one meal a day without his nanites turning on him.

  Virtual Jennifer’s voice distracted him. “If you thought more positively about the fish, you might learn to like it.”

  “You’re virtual. What the hell would you know about it?”

  “I don’t have to eat them to make an obvious observation.”

  Raul shook his head. He had to give himself credit. Though only a voice with personality, the VJ simulation was pretty darned good, if he did say so himself. When he talked to her he could imagine the real Jennifer standing there, as annoying as ever. At least he was no longer alone and he wasn’t going crazy.

  With her help, he’d started to make progress toward understanding what was wrong with his subspace acceleration calculations. The progress came from the way VJ argued with him, taking the opposite point of view on almost all of their theoretical discussions. In the back and forth, with each trying to defend their hypothesis from the other’s logic, they gradually worked their way toward the truth, which could be validated only by testing.

  The breakthrough had come when they’d debated the effect that the ether density had on normal space and whether this produced corresponding variations in the topology of subspace. According to Dr. Stephenson’s theory, space-time itself was made up of quantum grains that he called the ether. It was the substance that formed the medium through which light traveled. The ether was the stuff that the light waves waved.

  Matter was formed of harmonic wave packets that compressed the ether into a tight bundle. This, of course, stretched the surrounding ether and produced the observed gravitational well that surrounded matter.

  Visualizing space-time as a two-dimensional plane, wherever the ether was compressed into matter, a hill arose, surrounded by a gravitational well where some of the ether had been scooped out to make the hill.

  That led Raul and VJ to ask some interesting questions. If subspace was the stuff that filled the gaps between the ether grains of normal space, what happened to subspace when the ether was stretched? Did more subspace flow into the stretched gaps between those grains? Was subspace squeezed out of those gaps when the ether was compressed to form matter?

  As it turned out, neither question highlighted an accurate description of the underlying phenomenon, but the inquiries led Raul and VJ to the understanding that subspace had its own topological variations. One could think of subspace as having its density variations that could be indirectly mapped to the gravitational wells and densely packed masses in normal-space.

  The reason why the Rho Ship’s subspace acceleration was different despite using the same subspace-field undulation pattern was because sometimes the undulation was pumping dense subspace while at other times it was pumping thin subspace. The process was sort of like a propeller pushing water or pushing air; those variations in the medium produced an entirely different level of acceleration.

  Over the course of several weeks, they’d run hundreds of small tests, gradually mapping the contours of subspace to the normal-space locations of stars, planets, and gravitational variations in the general vicinity of the Rho Ship. They’d discovered how minor changes in the subspace-field undulation pattern could cause drastic changes in subspace acceleration. That effect had super-accelerated the Rho Ship, almost killing Raul on his first attempt.

  The experience was sort of like experimenting with rocket fuel. Get the mixture wrong and boom! But now they’d finally identified a pattern that accelerated the ship much more slowly but very predictably.

  The breakthrough had come with a realization that if electromagnetic waves leaked a fraction of their energy into subspace, why wouldn’t gravity waves? And since all the stars and planets in normal-space moved relative to each other, they emitted gravity waves. Earth science just wasn’t very good at detecting them.

  But the Kasari were masters of gravitational manipulation, their sensors and instruments finely tuned for detecting those variations. So he and VJ had worked to adjust those sensors to detect subspace gravitational echoes and map them to normal-space topology. They were thus able to determine their approximate location in real space while they moved through subspace. Not perfect, but a damn sight better than anything he’d tried up to this point.

  “So,” VJ said, pulling him out of his thoughts, “I think we’re ready to try the return trip to Scion. It would be a good chance to try out faster-than-light travel on a longer trip.”

  This was another topic that had weighed heavy on Raul’s mind as the days passed.

  “I don’t feel comfortable with that yet.”

  “If we wait until you feel comfortable, the other Jennifer’s going to be dead for sure.”

  Raul’s throat tightened at the thought. “It’s been so long, I’m afraid she already is.”

  There was a brief pause before VJ responded. “If you find her, will you deactivate me?”

  Raul blinked. This was new. “Would it matter to you?”

  “You programmed me to think like her,” said VJ. “I think I’m getting better at it.”

  Not liking where this conversation was going, Raul switched back to the question at hand.

  “I want to go to Scion, but we’ll do it the safe way, using the wormhole drives to get us close to the Scion system.”

  “And after that?”

  “We’ll use the subspace drive to maneuver the ship behind one of Scion’s moons, pop back out, set her down, and turn on the cloak. The Kasari should never even detect us. It’ll be a good spot to hide while we search for Jennifer. If they do find us, we’ll pop back into subspace, move the ship someplace else, and try again.”

  There was a brief pause as Raul felt VJ use their shared neural net to perform her own calculations.

  “That might work,” she said.

  “It will work.”

  “We’ll see, hotshot. But you better be ready to get us the hell out of there if it doesn’t.”

  Raul laughed. “I think I left out the moral support part of your programming.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  Raul just shook his head and began the calculations necessary to configure the wormhole jump as a new thought occurred to him. Maybe being alone wasn’t so bad after all.

  When the gravity distortion drives initiated the wormhole generation sequence, Raul wrapped himself in a stasis field cocoon and started to do the same for VJ when he remembered that she wasn’t a real person. Christ, this was making him crazy in a different way. He could just imagine what the real Jennifer would say about all of this.

  As the wormhole came into existence and the Rho Ship plunged into it, Raul hoped he’d get the chance to find out.

  To Jennifer, the three-hour ride through the dark, narrow tunnels, sitting across from General Dgarra and his captain, felt surreal. She knew this was just one of many thousands of tunnels that supported troop and supply movement throughout the mountainous Koranthian Empire. It seemed that the weight of those mountains bore down on her. She was free of the shock collar, but the shackles of slavery weren’t so easily cast off.

  Since he’d freed her from the crew, Dgarra hadn’t spoken a word. For a while he’d studied her, but now he seemed lost in thought. H
e’d changed since she last saw him. He was thinner and his movements were weak, indicative of a long convalescence. Despite that, she could still feel the indomitable will of this commander. And she could feel his worry for her, which she found incredible.

  Jennifer hadn’t yet managed to do much more than observe and subtly alter the feelings of Koranthians. Although she was growing more familiar with their alien thought patterns, she hadn’t yet mastered the ability to directly interpret them. Maybe if she wasn’t so damn tired.

  As the electric train clattered along the tracks, she wondered where it was taking her. All she’d seen since her initial capture was the biting cold of combat along the mountains that made up the Koranthian northern front. That and the supply tunnels where the slaves toiled away their days and nights. She thus had no clear concept of Koranthian civilization. Was that where they were heading?

  The railcar entered a wide cavern that had been excavated from solid rock. Dozens of tracks served interconnecting platforms, some servicing passenger monorails while others, like the one on which she rode, handled military traffic or freight. Everything appeared to be electrically powered. The sound inside the bustling, enclosed space wasn’t nearly as loud as she would have expected, apparently due to some sort of baffling on the walls and high ceiling.

  As the car came to a stop, Dgarra rose to his feet and looked down at her. “Do not speak and stay close to me.”

  Jennifer nodded her assent, then she and the general’s captain followed Dgarra off the train. A five-minute walk took them across several elevated platforms to the section of the station where Koranthian civilians congregated. Throughout that walk, she attracted shocked and disapproving stares from the milling throng. Some of them wanted to angrily confront her, but a glance at General Dgarra dissuaded them.

  The Koranthian civilians were easily distinguishable from the military personnel with whom Jennifer had spent so much time. Military uniforms were almost completely black but with other colors woven into them depending on the general who commanded them. Dgarra’s warriors wore uniforms of black and purple, but during her time working in the loading depot, she’d seen several other variants.