Wormhole - 03 Page 13

  To generate gravitational forces great enough to form wormhole gateways required extraordinary matter-to-energy conversion, the process consuming resources on a scale that bled planetary systems dry in just a few hundred years. That was problem number one. The second problem was that no one had ever come up with a solution that allowed a wormhole spawned from just one gateway to be stable enough to allow a living being to survive the trip through it. To damp the inertial forces enough for someone to survive the trip, you needed a gateway at each end.

  Once again the Kasari had come up with an engineering solution. Find a world with intelligent life that had acquired nuclear technology. Then send a robot ship through a one-ended wormhole to seduce its population with the offer of wondrous technologies, the ultimate being the construction of a gateway. Once the gateway was complete and came online, the Kasari would connect a matching gateway and the waiting army would pour through.

  But the system wasn’t perfect. Many of the robot ships were destroyed by the Bandolier Ship’s makers, the Altreians, another name supplied by her newfound computer access. Some worlds never succumbed to the technological temptations provided by the robot ships. Even in the best scenario, large numbers of soldiers had to be kept at the ready for many years as they waited for the far-gate to activate. But when it did activate, there was no stopping the invading Kasari force. They poured through, securing the immediate area around the far gateway, methodically extending their control until another world’s population had been absorbed into the collective.

  On the other hand, the Altreians had advanced technologies of their own, including a mastery of subspace that allowed faster-than-light transport of their own starships, and these could carry living crews. But starships were expensive things and couldn’t compete with gateways when it came to rapidly moving large numbers of soldiers to new worlds. And though the Altreians experienced frequent victories, every loss extended the Kasari empire. The Kasari had been spreading for centuries, with no sign of slowing down.

  As Heather stared at the alien soldiers going about their tasks near the dormant gateway, she suddenly froze. She knew what Dr. Stephenson was up to in Switzerland.

  Suddenly the prospect of a world overrun with nanites seemed the least of their worries.

  “We’ve got them.”

  General Wilson looked up to see a rare smile on Levi Elias’s narrow face.

  “Tell me.”

  “It was the bird, all right. Saltator similis, a species of cardinal, indigenous to the hill country bordering the southern Amazon, specifically parts of Paraguay, Uruguay, and northeastern Bolivia. Also the electrical hum from the lights was fifty hertz, so that matches.”

  “Pretty big area.”

  “Yes it is. So we did a check against any of Jack Gregory’s previous assignments.”

  “And?”

  “Several years ago, Gregory was assigned to eliminate a threat against Miguel de Esquela, a senior Bolivian politician on the CIA’s payroll. A communist guerilla leader had placed a contract on de Esquela. Gregory eliminated the threat.”

  “Did he have direct contact with de Esquela?”

  “He did. After assassinating the guerilla warlord, the Ripper killed two hit men inside de Esquela’s house, saved the politician, his wife, and four children.”

  “A man in Gregory’s debt.”

  “Indeed. But there’s no record of any subsequent contact between them. We actually looked at this potential linkage several months ago, but came up dry. However, with this latest information we had Big John take another look.”

  Levi handed Balls Wilson a folder containing six satellite images. The general spread them across his desktop.

  “It’s a ranch about an hour out of San Javier, formerly the property of Nuremberg Trial fugitive and former SS officer Jori Klaus. Turns out that Miguel de Esquela was instrumental in confiscating that property after Klaus’s death, then arranging its transfer to another German, one Karl Jacques Frazier.”

  “You’ve confirmed it’s Gregory?”

  “There’s no photo of Frazier on file. Bolivia isn’t really at the top of the food chain in maintaining digitized records. But Big John thinks it’s him. Correlation 0.803.”

  Balls Wilson studied the photographs more intensely. “These aren’t very good.”

  “No. We don’t have any of our better spy satellites on an orbit that covers Bolivia. These are the best we’ve got unless we retask a U-2 or Global Hawk.”

  The general frowned, leaned back in his leather chair, and closed his eyes for so long that Levi began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. When Balls opened them again, he shook his head slowly.

  “If Big John says there’s an 80 percent correlation that’s good enough for me. Retasking those assets dedicated to southwest Asia would be too visible. As good as Gregory is, I don’t want to risk tipping him off.”

  General Wilson rose to his feet, walked around the big oak desk, and clapped Elias on the back as he walked him toward the door. “Damn fine work, Levi. Looks like it’s time for me to chat with the president. This time he’ll have to make the call.”

  Heather leaned back in the chair and pulled the alien headband from her temples. Half a dozen feet away, Mark and Jennifer also came out of their links. The wind came in off the sloping hills damp and clammy, whipping Heather’s hair around her face as she turned her gaze toward Jack.

  Three months ago she’d been sure the Bandolier Ship’s creators had good intentions toward Earth. Now she was pretty sure that wasn’t true. It was time to give Jack the bad news.

  What began as a conversation among Jack, Mark, Heather, and Jennifer quickly expanded to include Janet as she glided silently out through the screen door. Heather led off, describing what she’d seen in the section of the alien database that dealt with Kasari operations, their thirst for new resources, including new species to assimilate. Many things drove them down a path of conquest, especially their powerful wormhole technology.

  Jennifer went next. She’d focused on gaining an understanding of the motives that drove the Altreians. At the surface, those motives seemed beneficial, to preserve freedom of choice for all species, to stop the Kasari’s rampant environmental destruction, to oppose one society’s aggressive conquest wherever it occurred. But Jennifer had dug deeper, seeking to find out what happened to every planet where the Altreians had engaged the Kasari.

  Again, her preliminary queries had yielded what seemed to be benign intent. If the Altreians’ ships were able to defeat the Kasari starship before a gateway could be constructed, they left the saved planet in peace. However, once the Kasari succeeded in seducing the planetary population to complete the gateway, the planet was lost. What disturbed Jennifer was that these outcomes failed to account for all the planets. Everywhere she looked she found holes, shifted around in the database in a way that made it extremely difficult to trace the connection.

  It had taken a stroke of luck to spot the first hidden data link. Frustrated with her inability to pull up detailed information on what had happened to some of the planets, Jennifer had backed off, reviewing star system information gathered over centuries of mapping and monitoring the galaxy.

  Jennifer filtered this data by narrowing her search to include only planetary systems she’d previously identified as Kasari-targeted systems. Suddenly she began to find cases in which previously teeming planets were now devoid of life. The odd thing was that these weren’t planets killed off by Kasari consumption of resources. Neither were they planets where the Kasari had been defeated before gateway construction had begun. Instead they were the planets on which, according to her previous search, the population had been attempting to build a gateway; then all subsequent military data had disappeared. It was as if that data had been purged from the Bandolier Ship’s database.

  But why had the Altreians purged the military record of how these planets died? If the Kasari had been responsible, then surely the data would have been maintained. Even if the Altreians
had managed to crush the Kasari after they had assimilated the planet’s inhabitants, it would have counted as a victory. So something else had happened. Something they wanted to hide.

  At this point, Jack interrupted the telling. “So what do you make of it?”

  Jennifer hesitated a second before speaking. “I think if the Altreians decided they were about to lose a world, they attempted to kill the entire population before the gateway could be completed.”

  As much as she hated the idea, Heather found herself nodding in agreement. Mark’s silence spoke for itself.

  “So how did they do it?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jennifer. “All that data got wiped.”

  Heather shifted in her seat. “I doubt the Altreians ever loaded that into the Bandolier Ship’s database.”

  Janet turned toward Mark. “What about the AI?”

  “It was a no-show. No sign of it at all, and I was looking.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” said Mark.

  Jack rose, moving to the edge of the porch, looking toward the east, where a sliver of the full moon peeked over the horizon. If someone had painted little hands below it, it would have looked like a neon “Kilroy was here” drawing.

  “We’re in a tight spot.”

  “About to get tighter,” Heather said. “I think Stephenson was behind the November Anomaly, probably using the Rho Ship to generate it. Now he’s going to use that as the reason the world’s governments need to build the gateway. What really sucks is if we stop this Rho Project, the black hole will eat our planet. If we don’t, either the Kasari horde pours through or our beloved Bandolier Ship toasts us all.”

  “That’s one thing I don’t get,” Mark said. “Now that the AI is gone, we have complete control over the Bandolier Ship’s computers. I didn’t detect anything that would be some sort of trigger for a self-destruct system or anything remotely like that.”

  “And we don’t have any idea what really happened on those dead planets,” Jennifer added. “It might have been the AI triggering things or, considering the people who’ve worn that headset, it might have been the fourth crewman.”

  “Careful.” Janet’s voice, low and soft, eased through the night air like a stiletto. Heather had forgotten how intimidating she could be, and apparently Jennifer had too.

  Realizing the implication of her words, Jennifer hastily continued. “Sorry. I forgot. Anyway, it can’t be that. Robby’s just a baby.”

  In the moonlight, Janet’s eyes flashed a silver reflection. Then, without a word, she walked back into the house, letting the screen door slam shut behind her, leaving a lump in Heather’s throat and a dull ache in her heart. It seemed she just couldn’t alter the destiny that made her hurt everyone she cared about.

  Navy Lieutenant Gordon Morrow lifted the night-vision goggles from his eyes. With this level of moonlight, his platoon wasn’t going to need them much tonight, at least if the actions stayed out of the deep bush. If everything went according to plan, they wouldn’t be going into any deep bush on this mission. Of course, in his year and a half commanding SEAL Team Ten’s First Platoon, things had yet to go according to plan. And tonight his platoon was going to take down Jack “the Ripper” Gregory, so this wasn’t likely to be the first time.

  Lieutenant Morrow excelled at two things, mission preparation and mission execution. The first of these had led him to study everything known about the Ripper’s life, from the little boy who had watched his father’s beheading in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to the man who had become the CIA’s most feared killer. Then, after Jack’s own agency had turned him out in the cold, he’d built upon that reputation as a private contractor, finally attracting the attention of NSA director Admiral Jonathan Riles. Riles had successfully recruited Jack to the NSA, and subsequently attempted to harness Gregory’s talents to bring down the Rho Project. That action had spawned the sequence of events that had brought Jack and Lieutenant Morrow to this moment. Now, in a fitting twist of fate, Jack the Ripper and his protégée, Janet Price, were destined to replay Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s final Bolivian act.

  Circling his right arm above his head, Morrow brought his team in tight, so that he could pass along the perimeter in one direction while his chief went the other way, physically touching and double-checking each man, a last personal check that told them more than all the high-tech gear designed to show each man’s location and mission status could ever do.

  The High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) jump had gone perfectly, landing the team in an isolated clearing a little over two kilometers from the GPS coordinates marking the location of the Frazier hacienda. When they had stowed the high-altitude breathing apparatus, chutes, and excess gear, Lieutenant Morrow had been pleasantly surprised that the night jump had yielded nothing worse than a few minor scratches to any member of his sixteen-man team.

  Now they were ready, GPS coordinates marking the objective assault positions for each special operator along with the tight grouping of symbols that showed their current positions.

  Tapping his chief on the shoulder, Morrow gave the signal to move out. Sixteen heavily armored warriors melted into the moon shadows.

  The flashing red silent alarm brought Mark to his feet in the bedroom, his powerful stride propelling him into the hall in time to see Heather already disappearing out the front door. Although they’d rehearsed this scenario hundreds of times, somehow Mark knew that tonight wasn’t another drill.

  When he reached the comm center, he found Jack, Janet, and Heather already inside. Jennifer ran up beside him as he stepped across the threshold. Reaching the weapons locker, he grabbed his M4 assault rifle, shoulder holster with its SIG Sauer P226, and backpack filled with ammo and emergency supplies. Then he moved to his station, making room for Jennifer to arm herself.

  Heather had settled in front of one of the computer consoles that glowed softly in the dark room. A quick sidelong glance verified that someone had already closed all the blinds, eliminating any chance of light leakage outside the building.

  “Situation report?” Jack asked.

  “We’ve got sixteen electronic signatures at two hundred forty-five degrees, distance eighteen hundred meters,” Heather responded, bringing up a map display showing the slowly moving symbols.

  Mark logged into his console as Jennifer reached her own station. “Are we tied into their GPS signals yet?”

  “Not yet. I’m breaking the encryption now. For the moment we’re relying on triangulation from the passive antenna array to plot their locations.”

  Janet moved closer to Mark. “Jen, find out what’s providing the overhead intel. It’s going to be Global Hawk or U-2. Mark, I want to know about the combat air support.”

  “On it.” Mark worked the keyboard, rapidly navigating his way through a listing of satellites capable of seeing the Frazier compound from their current orbital position. Finding what he was looking for, he typed a coordinate into his subspace transceiver, activating the hard link that tied him into the eye in the sky.

  Three thousand miles away, at the SEAL Team Ten op center just off Virginia Beach, Commander Eric Patterson cursed as one of his situational displays filled with static.

  Heather’s blood pulsed through her heart, its heat spreading out through her arteries. She felt the oxygen filter through her lungs, replacing carbon dioxide with the heady mixture that made her feel more alive than she’d ever felt. She knew that with the awesome power of the United States government targeting them, she should probably feel a measure of fear. At this moment a team of the finest special operations soldiers in the world were moving in on their compound, backed by extensive air power that was capable of turning the entire Frazier hacienda into a roiling ball of flame. But all she felt was an electric thrill.

  Off to her left, Mark spoke. “I’ve got a live satellite feed on monitor two. Not a very good one, though. I see three aircraft. Looks like a Global Hawk spy bird an
d a couple of others.”

  Jack glanced at the display. “That outbound aircraft has to be the C-140 that did the HALO drop. That other one’s a B-52. Looks like we rate a heavy hitter, just in case the SOCOM team gets in trouble.”

  “Which they’re about to get into,” said Heather. “I’ve cracked the GPS encryption. Ready to disrupt their signal.”

  Jack studied the map for several seconds before reaching out to point at a spot six hundred meters to the south. “Not too much. Send them just on the other side of this hill.”

  Heather nodded, her fingers entering the commands that would introduce the appropriate GPS positioning error.

  “I’ve got control of the Global Hawk sensors, flight controls, and telemetry. I’m monitoring the incoming commands from the Global Hawk Mission Control Element.” Jennifer joined in. “Want me to make it go dark?”

  “No,” Jack said. “But I want you to replace the live feed with the last two minutes of recorded data from the sensor. Janet and I’ll get Robby, Yachay, and the alien headsets out while you three keep SOCOM confused. Give us fifteen minutes if you can, then same drill. Loop back a recorded feed, set the explosive timers, and get the hell out.”

  “We’re not going to fight?”

  “If that was a B-2 up there I’d consider it. Not with a B-52 in the air. It’s so old there are lots of manual ways to get things done that we can’t override with a hack. They don’t need to be accurate with that baby and we’re so remote, collateral damage won’t cross their minds. The second they think the assault team’s in trouble they’ll blow the hell out of the whole compound.”

  Heather took a deep breath. She was going to miss this place, but she’d known this couldn’t last forever. Thank God the vicious old Nazi who’d built the compound was so paranoid he constructed an escape tunnel from beneath the master bedroom to a thickly wooded ravine thirteen hundred meters to the northeast.