The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1)

by Richard Phillips

  Dgarra was extremely excited about the defensive potential of the stasis field generators. That was the reason why Jennifer had been assigned to temporary duty at the Northang Research Laboratory. She’d been working around the clock for the last thirty-five days, helping scientists and engineers build a working prototype of a stasis field generator.

  Crouched beside the completed prototype, Jennifer carefully compared the end product to the detailed design specifications stored in her memory.

  When finally she stood, Chief Engineer Broghdon looked at her expectantly, his alloy-orange engineering uniform smudged and clinging to his large body.

  “Well, human?” he asked, no longer able to contain his curiosity.

  Jennifer smiled. She liked this big engineer. Even his refusal to call her by her name was endearing. So far, only he and Dgarra had come to completely accept her claim that she was human and in no way associated with the Kasari Collective.

  “I think it’s ready for a test run.”

  She’d rarely witnessed the Koranthians openly displaying emotion, but the congratulatory backslapping that followed as Broghdon made the rounds of the assembled engineers, scientists, and technicians reminded her of a celebration in a NASA control room after the success of a difficult mission.

  When Broghdon turned his attention to her, his hearty backslap almost sent her rolling across the floor. Before he could repeat the enthusiastic gesture, Jennifer held up a hand and laughed.

  “Okay. Enough. As much as I hate to put a damper on this celebration, just because the stasis field generator looks good doesn’t mean it’ll work.”

  Her words sucked the life out of the party, allowing Broghdon’s normal seriousness to reassert itself.

  “Of course not,” Broghdon said, clapping his hands. “Okay, staff. Move this device to the test facility and hook it up to power. Let us find out if our work is truly worthy of celebration.”

  As Jennifer watched the group move into action, a worrisome thought elbowed its way into her consciousness. She’d been working so hard this last month, she hadn’t taken the time to retry establishing contact with Raul through her SRT headset. Ah well. The odds that Raul was out there listening for her call weren’t good. She just wished that Heather were here to calculate them for her.

  Jennifer sighed as the thought pulled forth a memory of the McFarlands and Smythes all gathered around Mrs. McFarland’s abundant breakfast table, passing around a plate stacked high with steaming pancakes, followed by urns of melted butter and syrup. Dear God. She could still smell it.

  Blinking away a tear before anyone could notice, Jennifer reapplied her stoic mask and followed Chief Engineer Broghdon out of the lab. Those days were gone.

  The view from the far side of Scion’s largest moon wasn’t good. In fact Raul felt lower than at any time since he’d created VJ. Even her hearty attempts to cheer him up weren’t working. Not only had there been no contact from Jennifer through her SRT headset, the worm-fiber viewers showed that the isolated mountain lake where she’d been captured was completely frozen over.

  In fact, the entire mountainous region that occupied the far eastern third of the super-continent was being continuously blasted by super-blizzard conditions, with two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit. From what Raul observed, nothing could survive that unless it was hibernating in a cave.

  There was no sign of anyone. The winged race and their Kasari masters had clearly retreated to their cities nestled between the vast inland seas, relying on the shelter provided by the high mountains for their moderate conditions.

  “Where the hell have the mountain warriors gone?” he muttered aloud.

  “It seems pretty obvious to me,” said VJ. “Underground.”

  Raul had come to the same conclusion, but there was a problem with that logic.

  “An entire civilization? There aren’t that many caves on the planet.”

  “You mean there aren’t that many caves on Earth,” VJ said. “We don’t know a damn thing about Scion’s subterranean structure.”

  The realization kicked him in the teeth. Damn it! How could he be so stupid? The worm-fiber viewers weren’t limited to surface viewing. Not for him and not for the Kasari. That last thought raised a million questions, among them: Why hadn’t the Kasari performed a thorough reconnaissance of the mountain people’s defenses? And if they had, why hadn’t they identified the weakest point in those defenses to attack?

  Considering that he gained nothing by mulling what the Kasari should have or could have done, Raul shifted his focus back to his efforts to find Jennifer.

  “VJ. Concentrate the worm-fiber sweep in concentric circles centered on Jennifer’s last recorded location and extending outward through the mountains and at varying depths belowground. I want to build a complete 3-D mapping of any concentrations of the mountain people as well as any cavern or tunnel networks that may exist in the region.”

  “Glad to see you’ve finally stopped moping around and started thinking again.”

  “Thank you. Any estimate on how long this will take?” He was being lazy, letting VJ do the calculation, but he liked the feeling of being the captain of this starship and its motley crew of one.

  “I won’t be able to make any projections until I start getting results back from the survey.”

  “Good enough.”

  Raul leaned back in his invisible captain’s chair, linked his hands behind his head, and allowed himself a smile. Finally he had a plan that had some chance of working.

  Sheltered behind a wall in one of the Northang Research Laboratory’s test chambers, Jennifer leaned in beside Chief Engineer Broghdon to look through the blast-resistant window. This room, like most of the others in this artificial cavern, had ceilings and walls made of steel-reinforced quickstone, which Jennifer thought of as concrete’s stronger brother.

  Although her head was well below Broghdon’s shoulder, her view was good. Twenty feet away, in the middle of the empty chamber, sat the stasis field generator prototype that was the subject of today’s test. A thick black power cable snaked from the far wall to the stasis field generator and another bundle of wires ran from the SFG to the control panel upon which the chief engineer’s hands rested.

  The SFG was larger than any of its counterparts on the Rho Ship, not because it was more powerful, but because the Koranthian technology couldn’t match the efficiency of the Kasari world ship’s nano-manufacturing capabilities. Regardless, this device was a pretty impressive rapid-prototyping effort for which she had to give Broghdon a lot of the credit.

  “Ready to apply power,” he said, fingering the control panel.

  “Go ahead,” said Jennifer, a part of her marveling at how her station had changed among the Koranthians. Most of them might hate her but they were forced to accord her the power and respect due General Dgarra’s aide-de-camp.

  Jennifer’s sensitive hearing caught Broghdon’s elevated heart rate, up from its normal thirty-three beats per minute to seventy-two. When he pressed the power button, a low hum arose in the other chamber, which would have probably been inaudible to anyone without her enhancements. No cause for concern.

  “All readouts are within the normal range,” said Broghdon.

  “Let’s give it a minute,” said Jennifer.

  Broghdon nodded in approval. He knew as well as she did that it was best to play it safe when dealing with an experimental piece of equipment that made use of revolutionary technologies.

  After the allotted time had passed, Broghdon verified his next action. “Generating circular stasis plane perpendicular to test chamber floor. Diameter . . . one hundred thousand chroms.”

  The size of this first stasis field was what they’d discussed. The Koranthians based their measurement system on the longest wavelength of light visible to them, one that was in the infrared, making one chrom approximately equal to ten microns. This stasis shield would be about three feet across, its center six feet above the
floor, as if strapped to the arm of a Koranthian warrior.

  On the control console, the stasis field generator’s readings fluctuated, staying within the normal range, but just barely. Jennifer watched for them to stabilize but they didn’t. She glanced up at Broghdon and noted the concern on his furrowed brow.

  “Let’s give it another minute to see if it stabilizes,” Jennifer said. “In the meantime, run some diagnostics to see which components are out of tolerance.”

  “Reasonable.”

  But as Broghdon initiated the diagnostic routines, the invisible stasis shield shimmered in the air, acquiring a beautiful blue tinge that was brightest at the outer edge.

  Jennifer’s heart leaped into her throat. “Shut it down!”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Broghdon’s hand stab at the power button as if in slow motion. Within the test chamber, the round shield doubled in size, then doubled again, slicing into the stone ceiling, floor, and walls. Then, as the shield winked out of existence, Jennifer heard the deep rumble from above. Looking up, she saw the stone ceiling give way.

  She grabbed Broghdon and launched the two of them into the corner where the blast shield met the stone wall. Then, as heavy stones battered her body, everything about this failed test ceased to matter.

  The Koranthian rescue team formed two lines, passing back the heavy blocks of stone and reinforcing steel rods from the test chamber’s collapsed ceiling. And at the front of the rightmost line, General Dgarra labored. Having arrived at the scene one full span after the accident, he had angrily dismissed entreaties from his subordinates to let them do that work and plunged in with a fury that surprised those around him.

  Dgarra’s pulse pounded in his veins, partially from the labor, but mostly from the dread he felt at what he would surely find beneath that pile of rubble. After all of this, to lose the Smythe human to an accident was too cruel a twist of fate. Surely the dark gods of the underworld could not allow it. Not when the fate of the Koranthian Empire, yea, all of Scion, depended upon the knowledge stored in this human female’s mind.

  But the realization that his dread had a much deeper origin filled Dgarra with a terrible longing he could not deny. In the months that he had known this alien female, she had proved herself indomitable of will, a valiant warrior, and a loyal ally to a reluctant people. More than that, despite his subconscious denial of the fact, Dgarra had come to care for her deeply.

  He had made her his ward, not merely to stick a thorn in the eye of his rivals, but as a symbol of his feelings. He had made her his aide-de-camp as a symbol of his respect.

  Dgarra gritted his teeth and increased the speed at which he worked. He forged ahead. His warriors struggled to keep up. He grabbed a huge block of the fallen quickstone and grunted, the mighty muscles in his legs, arms, and back cording into knots. He martialed all his prodigious strength for the lift. For a handful of seconds, the block refused to budge, but when it moved it did so with the unique scream of crumbling stone and rending metal. Dgarra backed up, tearing the rock loose from the reinforcing bars before handing the load to two of his warriors.

  When he turned to grab another stone, Dgarra felt relief flood his body. There inside a hollow space in the corner where the blast wall met the room’s outer wall, Smythe’s body lay beside Chief Engineer Broghdon. He struggled to widen that gap, and a new sight replaced his relief with fear. Smythe lay faceup. A steel reinforcing bar staked her chest to the quickstone floor. A heavy slab lay propped against the wall, tilted at a steep angle over her body, having driven the reinforcing bar that extended from its underside through her body.

  With redoubled effort, Dgarra fought his way through the opening, taking a deep cut on his left shoulder in the process. When he reached Jennifer’s side, he was surprised to see that she was still breathing, a testament to the nano-machines in her bloodstream. They had stopped the bleeding, but as Dgarra examined the wound, his hopes that she could survive this sank. Smythe herself had told him how the quantity of nano-machines in her system had decreased over time. He had personally witnessed how much more slowly she healed as compared to when she had first been captured.

  Broghdon’s voice brought his head up. “I am sorry, General. I think she is dying. Removing the bar from her chest will almost certainly kill her.”

  Dgarra kept his face impassive. “How badly are you injured?”

  The chief engineer pointed at his lower left leg that was pinned beneath a quickstone slab. “My lower leg is crushed. You’ll have to cut it off.”

  Dgarra turned to yell at the Koranthians still working to widen the hole into the small space.

  “Hand me a steel cutter and then brace this slab with your body. Do not let it shift when I cut the bar.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Within seconds, one of Broghdon’s engineers passed in a long cutting tool and then braced his back against the underside of the slab. Dgarra took the tool and moved to Smythe’s right side. Positioning the cutter a hand’s width above her chest, he shifted his eyes up to the engineer.

  “Be ready.”

  The engineer nodded and Dgarra squeezed the cutting lever, snipping the steel rod in two. The engineer grunted under the weight as the slab shifted on his back and Dgarra raised a hand to steady him. Dgarra set the tool aside and rose to help the engineer carefully lift the slab and set it down away from Smythe’s body.

  Then he picked up the cutting tool and lowered himself to the ground beside Smythe. Ever so carefully, he guided it beneath her body. Despite his care, he couldn’t avoid shifting her body slightly, renewing the blood flow from her chest wound and pulling a low moan from her lips.

  “Help me steady her,” he commanded the engineer.

  The engineer moved to Smythe’s left side and together they steadied her as Dgarra finished positioning the steel cutter. With a squeeze of his right hand on the levered cutting handle, the reinforcing bar parted just above the spot where it had embedded itself in the floor.

  A stretcher was passed in. Dgarra and the captain carefully placed Smythe’s body atop it, before passing the stretcher back out to the waiting medics who hurried her away toward the field hospital. Dgarra remained behind to oversee the amputation of Broghdon’s left leg and his medical evacuation.

  Dgarra could not remember the last time observing a wound had made him physically ill, but the sight of that ragged metal spike jutting from Smythe’s chest had done so. Dgarra exited the collapsed test chamber and made his way toward the hospital, feeling a strange reluctance rob his legs of their strength, as if Scion’s gravity had trebled.

  That feeling dogged him every step of the way.

  In her dreams, Jennifer stood in the Rho Ship’s command bay, her body a transparent ghost helplessly trying to get Raul’s attention. No matter how hard she tried, his legless body continued to float about, his thoughts locked on some new upgrade to the Rho Ship, completely unaware of her presence. When the stalk of his artificial right eye swiveled toward her, hope sprang up inside her, only to die out as that eye swiveled upward to study the ceiling.

  Jennifer concentrated, putting all her effort into making her voice heard. She focused on her ethereal vocal chords, working to give them the solidity to make a real sound. With absolute certainty that to remain silent meant that she would remain a ghost forever, Jennifer fought her way from the dream back to consciousness. But with her return to the land of the living came a searing pain that tried to deny her the breath required to speak.

  Though her vision blurred badly, Jennifer found herself looking up into the concerned face of the general as she managed to gasp out one final request.

  “Please, Dgarra. Give me my headset.”

  General Dgarra, wearing disposable gray overgarments, looked down on Smythe’s naked body, stretched out faceup on the surgical table. The looks on the faces of Dr. Trabor and his staff as he passed the medical scanner over her wound were far from reassuring. When the doctor lifted his face to look into Dgarra’s eyes
, his voice confirmed the general’s fears.

  “The spike has passed through the outer edge of her heart. If we try to remove it, she will die before the few nano-machines in her blood can heal the wound.”

  “And if you don’t remove it?”

  “Then she might last a few more spans, but that’s it.”

  Dgarra shifted his gaze to look down upon Smythe’s delicate facial features, feeling sadness carve a hollow place in his chest. As he prepared to turn away, her eyes suddenly fluttered open. When she spoke, her voice was a barely audible rasp.

  “Please, Dgarra. Give me my headset.”

  Understanding her meaning, Dgarra turned to the medical staff. “Where are her personal things?”

  A gray-clad female nurse spoke up. “All her things are in a bin in the surgical prep station.”

  “Show me.”

  With a bow the nurse led Dgarra into the adjacent room and pointed out the bin. The general dug rapidly through her bloody uniform until he found the pocket with the human’s headset, extracted it, and turned to walk back inside the operating area.

  “General, I will need to disinfect that before it can enter the surgery.”

  Dgarra walked back into the surgery, paying the nurse no further attention, the delicate band with its two beaded ends clutched in his right hand. When he reached Smythe’s side, he slid the headset over her head, letting the beads settle over her temples, just as he’d seen her do.

  Then, as he watched, she closed her eyes. Beneath those lids, her eye movements became rapid.

  When Raul felt Jennifer’s mind connect with his neural net, his surprise shocked him out of his review of the worm-fiber video feeds. Then he noted her condition and his shock turned to panic.

  “My God!”

  Her thoughts were scattered but she projected an image of herself lying atop what appeared to be some sort of surgical table, surrounded by a group of mountain warriors who were all wearing a rough approximation of medical scrubs.