The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) 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

  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: 9781503933538

  ISBN-10: 1503933539

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant/SOS CREATIVE LLC

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

  CONTENTS

  CHARACTER LIST

  SCION

  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

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHARACTER LIST

  Jennifer Smythe (19) – Sister of Mark Smythe, she is one of four young people who have been altered by the technology of an alien race called the Altreians.

  Mark Smythe (26) – Husband of Heather Smythe and brother of Jennifer Smythe, he is one of four young people who have been altered by the technology of an alien race called the Altreians.

  Heather McFarland Smythe (26) – Wife of Mark Smythe, she is one of four young people who have been altered by the technology of an alien race called the Altreians.

  Robert (Robby) Brice Gregory (8) – Young son of Jack Gregory and Janet Price, he is one of four young people who have been altered by the technology of an alien race called the Altreians. He is named after Jack’s long-dead brother.

  Jack “The Ripper” Gregory (37) – An ex-CIA assassin who revived from his deathbed in a Calcutta clinic, sharing his mind with an alien rider known as Khal Teth, a.k.a. Anchanchu. Husband of Janet Price, he is Robby’s father.

  Janet Alexandra Price (35) – An ex-NSA operative, she is Jack Gregory’s wife and Robby’s mother.

  Khal Teth, a.k.a. Anchanchu (immortal) – A former member of the Altreian High Council, Khal Teth was found guilty of an attempted assassination of the High Council Overlord. His body confined in a chrysalis cylinder, his memory was wiped and his mind cast out into a multidimensional void. Millennia ago, he discovered the ability to link with a human mind at the moment of their death and return them to life, thereafter becoming a rider, able to experience his host’s thoughts and emotions. He only chooses hosts with a special destiny—among them, Alexander, Caligula, Attila, and now, Jack Gregory.

  Raul Rodriguez (19) – A young man who was experimented on by Dr. Donald Stephenson, the deceased head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s top-secret Rho Project. The experiments turned him into a legless, one-eyed cyborg who can interface directly with the alien starship known as the Rho Ship.

  Dr. Donald R. Stephenson (deceased) – The Nobel Prize–winning scientist and head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Rho Project who successfully reverse engineered advanced alien technologies from the crashed starship known as the Rho Ship. He led an effort to build a wormhole gateway to link Earth with the Kasari Collective, the alien empire that sent the Rho Ship to Earth. He was killed in the nuclear blast that destroyed the Stephenson Gateway.

  Alexandr Prokorov (61) – The ex-head of the Russian FSB, he is the minister of the Federation Security Service (FSS) for the United Federation of Nation States (UFNS), an alliance of Earth’s four superpowers. He and the UFNS as a whole desires to rebuild the Stephenson Gateway that will connect Earth to the powerful alien empire known as the Kasari Collective.

  Daniil Alkaev (40) – The top FSS assassin, he reports directly to Alexandr Prokorov.

  Galina Anikin (32) – An FSS assassin and partner of Daniil Alkaev, she is slender, wiry, and lethal.

  General Dgarra (middle age) – A seven-foot-tall, powerfully built, brown-skinned humanoid on the planet Scion. Like all Koranthians, he has a bony unibrow ridge that turns upward at the outside of each eye and extends over the top of his hairless skull. He commands the Koranthian Empire’s northern front in its battle against Scion’s other inhabitants, the winged humanoids known as the Eadric, and their Kasari allies. He is also the nephew of Emperor Goltat and first in line for the Koranthian throne.

  Senator Freddy Hagerman (55) – The United States senator from Virginia and past winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting about the Rho Project, he is the founder of a movement that seeks to stop the UFNS from rebuilding the Stephenson Gateway.

  Dr. Eileen Wu, a.k.a. Hex (26) – The NSA’s top computer scientist and former Caltech prodigy.

  Jamal Glover (30) – Former top NSA hacker, he is a handsome black man with a penchant for 1920s-style clothing. He currently designs proprietary high-speed trading software for the Maximum Capital Appreciation Fund.

  Dr. Denise Jennings (69) – Former NSA computer scientist and designer of the NSA’s data-mining artificial intelligence known as Big John.

  President Ted Benton (62) – President of the United States, he was instrumental in securing the necessary votes in the U.S. Senate to approve the treaty that made the U.S. one of four member nations in the United Federation of Nation States (UFNS), alongside the European Union, the New Soviet Union, and the East Asian People’s Alliance.

  Levi Elias (63) – The NSA’s top analyst.

  Dr. Hanz Jorgen (60) – The current head of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Rho Project, having replaced the deceased Dr. Stephenson.

  Yachay (55) – A member of the Quechua tribe and descendant of the Incas, she has worked for Jack Gregory for years and is Robby Gregory’s nanny.

  Eos – An artificial intelligence designed by the Altreians, Eos was accidently downloaded into Robby’s brain when he was a baby.
It now shares Robby’s mind.

  Gil McFarland (58) – Heather’s dad is a former chief technician at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is tall and likes to wear a floppy old fly-fishing hat.

  Anna McFarland (56) – Heather’s mother is a nice-looking, motherly woman with graying brown hair.

  Fred Smythe (58) – Mark and Jennifer’s dad is also a former technician at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a gray-haired, blocky former college football player.

  Linda Smythe (56) – Mark and Jennifer’s mother is a tall, slender woman with short gray hair.

  Group Commander Shalegha (indeterminate age) – The four-armed, two-legged member of the Kasari Collective commands the Kasari forces on Scion.

  Admiral Connie Mosby – The first black female director of the NSA, she is a very smart and aggressive military officer.

  Minister Tsao – Head of the Ministry of State Security for the East Asian People’s Alliance.

  Jim “Tall Bear” Pino – The six-foot-six Navajo ex-cop was the first president of the Native People’s Alliance (NPA), an organization that has united the native peoples of North, Central, and South America into a nation within nations. He now serves on the NPA council in La Paz, Bolivia.

  Mary Beth Riles (70) – Wife of the deceased NSA director, Admiral Jonathan Riles, for whom Jack Gregory, Janet Price, Jamal Glover, and Dr. Denise Jennings once worked. Gray haired and somber, she lives in an old house in Annapolis, Maryland.

  Dr. Stan Franklin (45) – The Rho Project scientist in charge of studying the Altreian starship known as the Second Ship or the Bandelier Ship.

  Major Kamkin (37) – Commander of a Spetsnaz commando unit.

  General Magtal (middle age) – A typical Koranthian warrior, the seven-foot-tall general is General Dgarra’s chief rival and is second in line for the Koranthian throne, behind Dgarra.

  Chief Engineer Broghdon – The big Koranthian is General Dgarra’s chief weapons designer and engineer.

  CHAPTER 1

  “My God!” Raul gasped. “You’ve killed us both!”

  Jennifer Smythe turned her back on the legless apparition who had once been a handsome young man. As she adjusted the alien headband over her temples, its translucent length shifted colors, almost disappearing into her short, spiked blonde hair. Feeling the Altreian headband pour its power into her mind, a barely audible whisper slipped from her lips.

  “I know.”

  Inside the Bandelier Cave, a dozen miles southwest of Los Alamos, New Mexico, a coffee mug slipped from Dr. Hanz Jorgen’s fingers and shattered on the stone floor, spewing its hot wetness up his pants leg. As a brilliant white glow replaced the alien starship’s normal soft magenta, he didn’t even notice.

  Hanz didn’t know how he knew, but he did. Something powerful had just grabbed control of the Altreian starship’s computer, drawing every cycle of its immense processing power. He could practically hear the alien circuits groan under the terrible demand being placed upon the system. Staring at the starship, he wondered what could tax it so intensely. Then, as a shudder traversed his body, Hanz decided he didn’t really want to know.

  They were as good as dead. Raul felt the awful knowledge rip at his brain. No living thing could survive the awful g-forces of reentry from an unanchored wormhole transit. But somehow this Altreian-altered mutant had tricked him into activating the Kasari world ship’s wormhole engines. An unstoppable sequence had been initiated that would soon complete the gravitational wave packet meant to fold space-time and thrust the world ship through it. And when the Rho Ship emerged on the far side, its two quasi-human passengers would be little more than organic splatter in the ship’s forward compartment.

  Thrusting aside the panic that had immobilized him, Raul called upon his connection to the Rho Ship’s neural net and initiated a desperate query, one final attempt to stop what was happening. The nano-crystals embedded in his human brain delivered the perfect connection that wedded his mind to the Rho Ship. Unfortunately, the answer that formed in his consciousness left him shaking. Not good!

  Once again he felt Jennifer’s thoughts touch his, a caress that left him with a sense of calm determination accompanied by a vision. How the hell was she doing that? But before he could attempt to eject her from his head, the vision resolved into a plan. Not a great plan, but one that might have the barest theoretical chance of saving their lives.

  Raul focused the Rho Ship’s neural net on the proposed work-around, trying to ignore his mental countdown. Only a few seconds remained until the gravitational wave packet stabilized, but on the timescale at which the starship’s neural net operated, that would be enough. It had to be.

  His mind one with the massive neural net, Raul felt the solution lock in, marveling at its simplicity. In all the millennia that the Kasari Collective had been sending out these robotic world ships to find new civilizations and instruct them on how to build a wormhole gateway, the aliens had never managed to solve the central problem. They could send the ships across the galaxy in an instant, but because the far end wasn’t anchored at a gateway, they couldn’t send living passengers.

  So instead of performing one space-time fold between here and there, the solution Jennifer had proposed involved breaking the entire trip into a series of much smaller folds, sort of like a Chinese fan. If everything went right, the series of space-time coordinates would produce a jitter in the gravity distortion drive, resulting in a sequence of minor wormhole steps that should be individually survivable.

  Wrapping himself in the ship’s internal stasis field, Raul glanced at Jennifer, tempted to leave her to be thrown about. But the terror at the idea of being the lone survivor of a trip to a random point in the galaxy ended the thought before it fully formed. With a flick of his mind, the stasis field tightly cradled her body, locking it in place.

  Then the universe came apart around them.

  Standing inside the Kasari starship that rested within the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Rho Division, Jennifer felt its wormhole engines ramp to full power. In seconds, a gravitational wave packet would thrust this ship through the resulting wormhole to an unknown destination, hopefully somewhere in this galaxy. Raul had used the Rho Ship to interfere with Jennifer, Mark, and Heather’s efforts to destroy the Stephenson Gateway, thus forcing her to take drastic action.

  The sudden vision of what the wormhole would do to the surrounding high-bay and the scientists who were on duty left her sick to her stomach and almost made her lose focus. But if she was to have any chance of surviving this, she couldn’t allow her concentration to lapse.

  The connection through her headset to the Altreian starship that rested inside the Bandelier Cave, a dozen miles southwest of the Rho laboratory, had provided her with the solution she’d mentally transferred to Raul. But that didn’t mean it would work.

  When the force field draped her body, it startled her so badly that she almost succumbed to a panic attack at her inability to move even a finger. But then she understood. Raul had caused the Rho Ship to generate the field that immobilized both their bodies and suspended them inside this compartment. Not a bad idea considering what she feared was about to happen. And then it did.

  The first of many thousands of mini-steps was instantaneous. It was a sudden unintelligible shift in perspective as the cells in her body tried to tear themselves apart. Pain exploded in her mind and she lost sight in her left eye. Only the extensive neural augmentation she’d received when she’d first tried on the headset allowed her to restrict the blood flow to the ruptured vessels.

  Then it happened again. And again. And again. The transitions happened so quickly that she barely retained consciousness and then wished that she hadn’t. She experienced an endless battering that left her blinded and gasping as overstressed bones cracked and splintered within her body. Jennifer felt a scream crawl to her lips and bubble out in a bloody froth that spread along the invisible force field encasing her.

  Despite the best efforts of her augment
ed mind and musculature, she was dying. A part of her begged for death to release her from the agony, but Jennifer refused to let death take her without a fight, although she knew this was a fight she wasn’t going to win.

  Despite the amazing regenerative powers his nanite-infused blood granted him, Raul felt as if he were being hammered into pieces. Although each individual wormhole transit was instantaneous, the unanchored step into a new piece of space-time generated g-forces that the human body couldn’t handle. And the pauses between those steps unleashed an unending sea of agony. But as he glanced across at the bloody mess that was Jennifer Smythe, he had a hard time feeling sorry for himself. She was still alive but, given that she lacked the nanites that worked to repair his wounds, he really didn’t know how.

  When the series of transitions came to an abrupt end, Raul endured several seconds of dread that the wormhole transits would begin anew. The knowledge that he had made it, that his nanites would be able to fully heal his injuries, sent a wave of relief that brought bloody tears to his eyes. Another look at Jennifer Smythe’s suspended body swept that warm feeling away in a fresh wave of terror.

  Manipulating the stasis field, Raul lowered her body gently to the alien compartment’s gray floor, where her blood pooled around her. The neural net told him many things, all bad. Jennifer wasn’t breathing and her heart had stopped beating. Worse, she had taken so much damage that chest compressions were out of the question. But she still had brain function.

  Suspended by the stasis field, Raul floated to her side, gasping from the pain even this gentle movement caused. Forcing himself to concentrate, Raul visualized a thin tube tapping a large vein in his left arm and connecting to a similar vein in Jennifer’s. The stasis field complied, funneling his nanite-infused blood into her body.