The Altreian Enigma (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 2) Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

  “Richard Phillips has led such a life that he absolutely nails the science aspect of this new sci-fi classic [Immune (Book Two of the Rho Agenda)] and yet also gets the action and the political aspects exactly right as well. Speaking as an old sci-fi writer myself, I know how hard it is to do what Phillips has done. . . . I’ve read Immune to its brilliant and completely satisfying end—but only because this new writer is so skillful and this storyline is so inventive and moving that I don’t want to miss a chapter of it. . . . As good as any science fiction being written today.”

  —Orson Scott Card

  Also by Richard Phillips

  The Rho Agenda

  The Second Ship

  Immune

  Wormhole

  The Rho Agenda Inception

  Once Dead

  Dead Wrong

  Dead Shift

  The Rho Agenda Assimilation

  The Kasari Nexus

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Richard Phillips

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503935273

  ISBN-10: 1503935272

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  I dedicate this novel to my lovely wife, Carol, who has been my best friend and companion for thirty-five years.

  CONTENTS

  Map

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  As the bitter winter wind howls through the night, attempting to prevent me from entering the cavern housing the Altar of the Gods, its chill pulls my breath forth in smoky puffs that I barely notice. I crawl through the opening, light a torch that I take from its wall sconce, and allow my feet to carry me through the passage that leads to the altar. There my footsteps halt.

  The beautiful golden orb that graces the end of the Incan Sun Staff captures my gaze. Its intricately carved rings and complex arrangement of gears and shafts that form its inner workings hold me in a spell that I am unable to break. With my gaze locked to the symbols that cry out to be rearranged, a slow boiling fear floods my soul. Even as I stand alone, frozen in terror, in thrall to this wonder of wonders that rests atop the altar, I feel my hands move toward the orb of their own volition.

  The touch of the staff sends a strange current through my body, and the feel of the golden metal beneath my fingertips shifts my perspective and causes the cavern to shrink around me until I can see myself. It is as if I have become the cavern and everything within it. The thing in my head screams in a way that I have only heard in my dreams, and my body shakes like the boughs of the trees out in that howling wind. Yet my hands continue to stroke the orb.

  Now they twist it, first the bottom ring, aligning the symbols with new counterparts on the silver staff, before skipping up several rings to repeat the process. And as my hands turn ring after ring in a seemingly random order, the intricate engravings grab the torchlight so that its flames crawl across the golden surface and into the orb’s interior.

  Shaking uncontrollably, my hands nevertheless turn the penultimate ring until all the symbols feel wrongly right, so much of the torchlight now absorbed by the orb that the cavern grows dark around me.

  My right hand now wraps the last of the rings in a death grip as my left hand clutches the silver staff; the muscles in my hands and arms bulge and slither beneath my skin as they war with each other for control. Cold, more deadly than ice, slides through my veins and into my chest, cramping my lungs, on its way to my heart. Then with a final convulsion, my fingers twitch, imparting to the topmost ring one last shift. As the golden orb pulses with power, a doorway slides open at my feet.

  It summons me forward, down the metallic ramp that leads into a large chamber illuminated with a soft magenta glow. As I step into the room, the knowledge that this place was not built by the hands of men is absolute. And at its center, five translucent pedestals rise from the floor as if extruded from the end of a glassblower’s pipe, molded into the form of chairs.

  The recognition of this place floods into me from the being who shares my mind. I stand inside a massive alien research craft, sent here centuries ago with a dual purpose: to conduct a scientific mission to observe and record humanity’s advancement and, should humans adopt the banned wormhole technologies of the Kasari Collective, to summon a planet killer to cleanse Earth of all life before it can be completely assimilated.

  CHAPTER 1

  Jack Gregory opened his eyes, exiting the dream that wasn’t a dream. He didn’t dream anymore. Not like ordinary people. Instead, these strange lucid visions now dominated his sleep.

  This latest one had recurred nightly since Jack, Janet, and their eight-year-old son, Robby, had accompanied Mark and Heather Smythe on their flight from Peru to the couple’s secret facility in New Zealand. Jack rolled onto his left side, placing his right arm over Janet’s naked body. She sighed softly and snuggled into him without waking. That was good. He didn’t want to inflict his sleepless nights on his wife.

  In this vision, he once again stood in the altar cavern beneath the Kalasasaya Temple in Bolivia. And the space looked exactly the same as the last time Jack stood inside it, except that he now stood alone in the torch-lit chamber instead of locked in a death match with the neo-Nazi albino, Dolf Gruenberg. Jack should have felt comforted by the memory of the explosion that had collapsed the cavern, burying the Incan Sun Staff and the altar atop which it had been mounted. But he knew that no amount of crashing rock could destroy the Altreian artifact or the monstrous craft that rested beneath it. And being buried beneath tons of rock wouldn’t prevent the thing from accomplishing its ultimate purpose should humanity pull the trigger.

  Years before, as he bled out in a Calcutta clinic, Jack had accepted the alien mind into his brain for one more chance at life. Jac
k had no doubt about why that banished Altreian being, known as Khal Teth, was amping up the threatening nature of these visions.

  Humanity’s life span was growing short, and there was only one way to prevent the coming catastrophe.

  Unfortunately, that would require Jack giving up everything he loved. As he pulled Janet’s body more tightly against his own, he gritted his teeth. Even though she and his friends would doubtless think he’d lost his mind, Jack could no longer delay the inevitable.

  It was time to honor the bargain he’d made.

  Having just donned her black yoga outfit, Janet Price stared into Jack’s brown eyes, too stunned by the words that had just spilled from his lips to fully process them. When he had stepped up behind her, clad only in his jeans, and taken her in his arms, she’d thought he was trying to seduce her away from her morning workout. But the sadness in his eyes told her something very different. That look, combined with his words, froze her heart inside her chest.

  “You’re not leaving me behind,” she said, her voice having dropped so low she didn’t recognize it. “I won’t let you.”

  “Where I have to go, you can’t follow.”

  “Bullshit!”

  The hurt in Jack’s eyes tried to rob Janet of her sudden fury but failed. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

  “I had the dream again, but this time, it was worse.”

  Janet found herself sitting beside him without realizing that she’d moved, a profound sense of dread having doused her anger. A decade ago, when the NSA director, Admiral Jonathan Riles, sent her to Germany to convince the ex-CIA assassin known as “The Ripper” to join her black-ops team, she learned that there was something strange about Jack. That first mission had taken them through Europe and into the heart of Kazakhstan. But in Bolivia, in the cavern beneath the Kalasasaya Temple, she became convinced that Jack had lost his mind.

  Three months later, during a raid that stopped the Chinese assassin, Qiang Chu, from releasing a rogue artificial intelligence on the world, Jack convinced her that he shared his mind with an alien being who called himself Khal Teth. Back then, she helped Jack block out the disturbing influence that threatened his sanity.

  But six months ago, in her desperation to rescue their eight-year-old son, Robby, Janet had begged Jack to unleash that alien presence once more, knowing the risks.

  Janet swallowed hard and said what she didn’t want to. “Go on.”

  In the excruciating half hour that followed, as she listened to what Jack had to tell her, Janet’s dread found its source.

  Deep inside the abandoned New Zealand gold mine that he and Heather had transformed into their secret compound, Mark Smythe watched as an army of robots worked on expansion. He glanced over at Heather, who stood beside him on the platform overlooking the central manufacturing hub.

  At twenty-seven, his wife was more beautiful than ever, radiating power in a way that he found incredibly sexy. If anyone could save the world from the Kasari invaders that would soon come through the gateway that the United Federation of Nation States was building, it was his beautiful savant.

  To think how far they’d come from the little Los Alamos, New Mexico, bedroom community of White Rock, where they’d grown up next door to each other and been best friends long before they were lovers. Their life had been low-key, comfortable, blown sky-high when they had stumbled onto the crashed Altreian starship and put on the alien headsets. Not only had the devices linked their minds to the starship’s computer, revealing the intragalactic warfare between the Altreians and the Kasari Collective, but the three headbands had altered Mark, Heather, and Jennifer in different ways. A year and a half later, Jack and Janet’s baby, Robby, accidently slipped the fourth of the Altreian headsets over his temples and underwent a similar transformation.

  As Mark looked at his wife, he knew that he wouldn’t have chosen a different path, despite the horrors they had been through.

  He redirected his gaze across the thirty-thousand-square-foot room that they had hollowed out of the bedrock a mile beneath New Zealand’s Tasman District. What was happening inside the facility had never before been achieved on Earth.

  They had created this broad variety of robots from Heather’s designs. They weren’t artificially intelligent but could be remotely controlled through virtual-reality headsets. And whatever task the operator performed using the robot’s body, the robot learned. Not just that robot either. The knowledge was uploaded to the supercomputer network, where it could then be downloaded to other robots. During the last several years, the automatons had learned to build and operate everything within the compound, including the manufacture of new robots.

  Since Mark and Heather had returned to their New Zealand compound, accompanied by Jack, Janet, and Robby, the pace of construction had reached an exponential tipping point. The automated systems now only needed new tasks to perform, something that Heather excelled at doling out. And as she did so, the designs produced by her augmented savant mind grew more and more advanced.

  Once finished, the room would house sixteen large-scale additive-manufacturing machines, also known as 3-D printers, capable of producing the next generation of devices and components needed for the fight that they both knew was coming. Among her latest innovations, Heather had designed a series of micro-bots that weren’t quite self-organizing nano-materials but perhaps the next best thing.

  Swarms of these mite-sized bots could be directed to create or modify electrical channels down to the circuit-board level. The micro-bots could cut through insulation or interconnect to create new conductive paths, adding an enormously useful capability to Heather’s growing robotic manufacturing toolkit.

  While the rapidly increasing power demands would have placed a strain on the original pair of cold-fusion reactors, the redundant array of matter disrupter-synthesizers or MDSs barely noticed the load. Considering the pace at which Heather’s plans were coming to fruition, that was a good thing.

  The warble of Heather’s quantum-entangled phone brought Mark’s mind back to the present. Seeing her smile fade, Mark felt concern replace the satisfaction he’d experienced only moments before. She hung up and turned to him, raising her voice to be heard above the clamor of ongoing construction.

  “Janet wants us topside right away. Something’s going on with Jack. From her tone, it’s not good.”

  For a moment, Heather’s eyes turned milky white, as they often did when one of her savant visions consumed her. That didn’t surprise him, but he was taken aback when she broke into a run toward the elevator.

  Mark, making use of his augmented speed, sprinted after her, reaching her side just as she pressed the call button. The elevator door whisked open, and they stepped inside the waiting car. The space was industrial sized, capable of carrying any of the equipment that was brought to or from this level, big enough to make him feel small.

  Heather punched the button for the top level, the doors whisked closed, and the car accelerated upward. Despite the speed at which the electromagnetic drive propelled the elevator, the trip to the surface took almost five minutes, Mark’s ears popping several times along the way.

  Whatever had happened, he had no doubt that it involved that otherworldly weirdness that draped Jack “The Ripper” Gregory like an aura. A decade ago, that force had ruled their lives for two and a half years. And now, as Earth spiraled toward its destruction, that part of Jack had once again been summoned. A crazy thought.

  The muscles in Mark’s arms and back tensed. He pulled forth the perfect memory of how he felt in deep meditation, letting it wash away the tension. But the technique failed to cleanse his mind.

  Janet heard the door open and turned from Jack to see Mark and Heather enter the small conference room. As Heather took her seat at the table, she asked the question that Janet had been expecting.

  “What’s going on?”

  Janet turned to Jack, struggling to keep her expression from showing the emotions that churned beneath the surface. �
�Tell them.”

  Jack’s chiseled face showed no hint of what Janet knew he was feeling, but a chill had crept into his voice.

  “Last night I had another of my lucid dreams.”

  “The Incan Sun Staff,” said Heather.

  “This was different. I know what it does.”

  “You’ve already convinced us that the Sun Staff is important,” Mark said. “It’s why we’ve funded the Kalasasaya dig to retrieve it.”

  Janet watched as Jack shifted his gaze from Mark to Heather.

  “It opens a portal into an enormous Altreian research vessel buried beneath the Kalasasaya Temple.”

  “You think another Altreian starship crashed in Bolivia?” Mark asked.

  “The vessel that lies beneath the Kalasasaya Temple arrived centuries ago, but it didn’t crash,” Jack replied.

  “What’s it been doing all this time? Hanging out?”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed, a clear indication that he didn’t like the tone of Mark’s question. But Janet couldn’t blame Mark. She didn’t want to believe it either.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, “but I do know what it’s going to do if I don’t stop it.”

  Heather leaned forward to rest her elbows on the conference table. Janet hadn’t seen her eyes turn white. Jack clearly had her complete attention.

  “Tell me.”

  Again Janet saw the rigidity in Jack’s body as she watched the muscles move beneath his skin.

  “If the wormhole gateway that the UFNS is building goes active and the Kasari come through, the buried Altreian vessel will summon an Altreian planet killer to destroy all life on Earth before the Kasari can bring through enough military might to prevent that.”

  “If that’s true,” said Mark, “why didn’t it summon the planet killer when Dr. Stephenson’s gate opened a wormhole and the Kasari came through?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” said Jack. “Maybe because you nuked it.”

  “We didn’t find any reference to a planet killer in the Second Ship’s database,” Heather said.