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

  Mark’s face lit up slightly. “We make them. We feed the matter disrupter-synthesizer with rock, dirt, or whatever we’ve mined. The MDS then transforms that matter into raw energy that’s converted into the wave packets that form whatever material we want to produce.”

  Aaden turned to stare at Mark. “Sounds a lot like alchemy to me.”

  “It’s just changing energy from one form to another. It’s not perfectly efficient, but we use the excess energy to power other things.”

  “How many of the MDS devices do you have?”

  “One is all we really need, but we have three to support expansion and to provide redundancy in case of failure.”

  “And when do you plan to help us build one?”

  Mark hesitated, then decided Aaden had a need to know. “We don’t.”

  The man’s blue eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

  “The cold-fusion reactor will provide plenty of power for this facility.”

  “You know that the UFNS is building its own matter disrupters based on Rho Project technology.”

  “Yes, but we’ve made a number of breakthroughs that we don’t want getting into their hands. Don’t worry. We’ll send you supplies, robots, and other equipment through this gateway.”

  Aaden shook his head. “Don’t you think that’s being shortsighted? You’re risking everything by keeping this tech bottled up inside that secret base of yours. All the UFNS has to do is capture one of these gateways you plan on scattering among the Safe Earth resistance cells. They’d just have to activate it and pour through to overrun you.”

  “No. The remote gateways can only be activated or shut down from our master control station. When the operator on this end requests activation, the remote gateway sends a subspace signal containing an embedded three-hundred-sixty-degree audiovisual feed to our station. If we like what we see, we power up both gates and initiate the connection. Otherwise, nobody gets through.”

  “We won’t be self-sufficient. I don’t like it.”

  Mark sucked in a deep breath, held it for a bit, then released slowly. He knew he wasn’t showing good faith, but Heather had calculated their odds of success, and they had agreed that this was the safest way to proceed. He would remain firm.

  “You know, my friend, I didn’t really expect you to.”

  “One thing I don’t understand. If you have a working wormhole gate on your end, why didn’t you just enter the coordinates for this warehouse and push the equipment through instead of risking yourself making the trip here? So long as you’re not sending living things through it, you shouldn’t need another gate on this end.”

  “Actually,” said Mark, impressed with the extent of Aaden’s knowledge, “that’s not true. Unless it’s firmly anchored at both ends, the unanchored end of any wormhole thicker than a hair waggles through space. It’s impossible to know precisely where anything you send through it will arrive.”

  “But the Rho Ship came here through an unanchored wormhole.”

  “That’s true, but it only got within the vicinity of our solar system. After that it used its sub-light gravitational engines to travel to Earth. The error factor is nonlinear. The longer the wormhole transit, the worse the accuracy problem becomes.”

  As Aaden started to respond, Mark’s cell chirped a message alert. He retrieved the phone from his pocket, glanced down at the screen, and smiled.

  “Good news?” Aaden asked.

  “The robots just finished your gateway. How’d you like to be the first to try it out?”

  With a nod, Aaden turned and headed back toward the stairs that led down to the warehouse floor. Mark followed, his worries washed away by his rising excitement. Although they had tested two gateways within the New Zealand compound, this would be the first try of any significant distance. As they reached the wormhole gate, Mark stepped past Aaden and seated himself at the control panel to power up the system.

  Now this was going to be fun.

  CHAPTER 24

  Heather stood next to the master station, where Robby sat surrounded by status displays and computers. The controls remained untouched. He didn’t need them. The readouts changed as Robby and Eos manipulated the computerized devices with their shared mind, the sight sending a thrill through her as she watched them work.

  When Mark had called to say the remote gateway was ready for a trial run, she and Robby had hurried to the pressurized Earth-gate laboratory and powered up the system. Unlike the Stephenson wormhole gateway that she, Mark, and Jennifer had destroyed with a nuclear detonation eight years ago, this one only required a single supporting stasis field generator instead of two. Even that wasn’t absolutely necessary except as a safety precaution.

  Despite the remote gateway also being on Earth, there would be a pressure differential between the two locations. The atmospheric pressure at the far end was embedded in the data that streamed through the subspace communications link, enabling Robby to adjust the pressure in this laboratory to match. Nevertheless, he would seal the gateway with a stasis shield before activating it. Not only did that protect against a faulty reading, but it also ensured that nothing undesirable could pass through the Earth gate.

  Heather felt her ears pop as the air pressure equalized.

  “Ready,” Robby said, eagerness in his voice.

  “Okay,” she said, shifting her gaze to the gateway. “Raise the stasis shield and open the door.”

  The gateway had been built into the far wall. The inverted-horseshoe-shaped opening was ten feet tall, six feet wide, and three feet deep, ending in the solid rock from which the underground complex had been excavated. The rock wall behind the opening shimmered and disappeared, replaced by a view of two smiling men standing in a large room, Mark and Aaden Bauer.

  Even though their appearance was what Heather had expected, her heart thundered in her chest. Mark’s mouth moved, but she heard nothing. Of course. The stasis field was blocking all sound.

  “Put them on speaker and turn on our microphone.”

  Robby nodded and Mark’s voice picked up midsentence.

  “—for sore eyes.”

  Heather smiled. “I didn’t catch all of that, but it’s wonderful to see you. I can’t wait to hold you.”

  Aaden cleared his throat, pulling Heather’s gaze to him.

  “Sorry, Aaden. I’m happy to see you, too.”

  The big man gestured at the gateway. “So what’s the deal? When can we step through?”

  “Give us a minute to run some tests, and then Robby will drop the stasis shield.”

  “Eos says everything checks out,” said Robby. “Dropping the shield now.”

  A cool breeze signaled that the pressure and temperature match hadn’t been exact, but Heather didn’t care. She rushed to Mark as he stepped through the opening. He swept her up into arms of rolled steel, his warm lips seeking hers in a kiss that took her breath away.

  Aaden’s voice pulled them out of it. “You two can get a room later.”

  For the first time in weeks, Heather laughed. Mark lowered her so that her feet once again rested on the floor, and she turned to shake hands with Aaden. Had it really been only six months since she’d last seen her European ally? So much had happened that it seemed like forever.

  Heather stepped back. “Welcome to our Fortress of Solitude.”

  Aaden’s sweeping gaze took in the rail-mounted overhead crane and the open area that led to the sliding steel door that sealed the rear of the large chamber, coming to a stop at the master control station where Robby leaned back in a swivel chair.

  “I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be so empty.”

  “This room is designed to move equipment through,” said Mark. “Don’t worry, we’ll show you around a bit before we wrap things up today.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll let me in on where this base is located, will you?”

  Heather shook her head. “It’s safer if you don’t know, but there is something we want to show you. Robby, send in the bots.�
�

  Aaden watched as the large steel door slid open, disappearing into a slot in the far wall, surprised at the lack of pressure differential between the two rooms. Apparently the two large spaces acted like airlocks. But the sight that confronted him on the far side of that door made him forget all about air pressure.

  Dozens of car-sized drones raced overhead and through the gateway, followed by a swarm of much smaller counterparts. Behind them came hundreds of robots, many of them humanoid in appearance, while others took the form of quadrupeds. Some, shaped like forklifts, carried equipment through the gateway and into the warehouse back in Hanau, accompanied by driverless flatbed trolleys loaded with metal shipping crates. These moved to an open area where teams of robots worked to unload their contents, efficiently stacking them in accessible rows.

  Pulling up the rear of this parade came several hundred of what could only be combat robots of various shapes and sizes, who promptly lined themselves up along one side of the Hanau warehouse and powered down. Some were eight-foot-tall bipeds with humanlike arms and hands; others looked like large dogs with feet that could uncurl to be used as hands. More drones scurried around on multiple legs like Alaskan king crabs. Mark had told him about these crawling bombs that could curl up and magnetically attach themselves to the larger robots by the score.

  Aaden realized that his mouth hung open, and closed it. “How did you build all of these?”

  “We didn’t,” said Heather. “The robots built all of this, with help from the additive-manufacturing machines.”

  “Three-D printers?”

  “Big ones. You’ll see. Those robots will build one inside your warehouse this week. The machines work fast, twenty-four hours a day. If one of them breaks down, others repair it. If you need more robots, they build them. All we have to do is keep you supplied with the raw materials.”

  A new concern sprang to the forefront of Aaden’s thoughts. “What powers the robots? Batteries?”

  “That, my friend,” Mark said, “is the holy grail. Perfect capacitors that recharge as fast as a power supply can dump power into them. For our power supplies, that’s only a matter of seconds. And we’re talking about a lot of storage capacity. During typical usage, one charge will last several days. Best of all, the robots know how to interface to any power source. They can steal it when they need to.”

  The transition from here to there was so seamless that Aaden didn’t realize he had walked back through the wormhole gate into the Hanau warehouse until Mark and Heather stepped up beside him. Everywhere he looked, the engineer robots were working, deftly avoiding bumping into obstacles or each other.

  “How are you manipulating them?”

  “Robby uses Eos to give directions to one of our supercomputers,” said Heather, “and it downloads the required knowledge to each of the robots through a subspace link. The robots then cooperatively accomplish their tasks using swarm computing algorithms. The supercomputer monitors their progress and, when necessary for optimization, updates their instructions.”

  “And if the link with your supercomputer goes down?”

  “They will continue to operate autonomously until the job is finished. It just might take a little longer.”

  “If you let these things loose in the world, nobody will have a job.”

  When Heather shrugged, Aaden glanced over her shoulder at the combat robots standing in tight formation along the walls, a new concern blossoming in his mind.

  “Do those operate autonomously, too?” he asked.

  “If we tell them to.”

  “And that doesn’t terrify you?”

  “Hard times call for hard choices.”

  He studied her face, noting the bend in her shoulders and worry lines at the corners of her beautiful eyes. And then he stopped. There was a thin streak of white in her hair at the center of her forehead. What kind of pressure could do that to such a strong, talented twenty-seven-year-old? Her appearance made him feel confused and weak, as if he had been failing to carry his part of the load within the Safe Earth resistance.

  Mark’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “I’m hungry. How about a little lunch?”

  A smile returned to Heather’s face. “Good idea. Come on, Aaden. Let me introduce you to our robot chef. Her name is Julia.”

  Turning away, she took Mark’s hand, and the two of them led Aaden back through the Earth gate into their underground laboratory. As the gateway winked out behind them, he felt like Alice after stepping through the looking glass.

  CHAPTER 25

  Janet stood outside the protective stasis field as the lowering clouds and light snowfall hid the surrounding mountains. But lost in her memories, she didn’t notice the accompanying cold.

  Despite knowing that he would have taken her with him if he could, she wished she could hate Jack for leaving her behind. They were a team—the best in a bad business. Now she just felt broken.

  If she had still been with the NSA, she could have buried herself in the job, working him out of her mind. But she was in New Zealand, a glorified security guard for Heather and Robby, when what she really wanted to do was kill someone.

  “You okay?”

  Gil McFarland’s voice startled her, but she managed to hide it with a smile as she turned toward Heather’s father.

  “Just bathing myself in beauty.”

  The knowing look on the slender man’s jovial face told her he wasn’t buying a word.

  “Fred and Linda are coming over for lunch,” he said. “Anna’s making tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. We’d love to have you join us.”

  Janet started to refuse, but the thought of that warm and homey meal with dear friends lifted her spirits. It wasn’t as if she had pressing work.

  “That sounds great.”

  Gil turned away from the concealed entrance to the underground facility, his footsteps creating a trail through six inches of fresh snow as he led her toward his four-wheel-drive white SUV. As she approached the vehicle, she noted that Fred had installed his snow chains. No doubt that task had been why he had been out here. Another set of fresh tire tracks led down the canyon toward the swale that sheltered the handful of homes housing the compound’s inhabitants.

  Janet headed for her own vehicle, but Gil stopped her.

  “Ride with me. Fred and I will be coming back to work after lunch.”

  “Deal.”

  She opened the passenger door, brushed most of the snow from her hair and clothes, and stepped in. As they started down the gravel road, a thought bothered her.

  “What about Heather and Robby?”

  “I invited them, but they’ve got company down below. Mark and Aaden.”

  That news stunned Janet. Mark had finished the remote Earth gate, and it was activated. Seemed like a pretty damned critical thing that the chief of security should know about. How did Heather expect her to do her job if she was kept out of the loop?

  That was just it. Janet hadn’t been doing her job. Since losing Jack, she had descended into such deep depression that she had only been going through the motions, pretending that providing security for a compound protected by an alien force field and the most sophisticated computing and robotic facility on Earth was an essential job. All she had been doing was working out or killing time. Robby knew it and did his best to cheer her up, trying to pass along his certainty that his dad would find a way to come home to them. For Robby’s sake, Janet should have been the strong one, should have been able to make herself believe that Jack would once again pull off the impossible.

  Heather hadn’t said anything to her, but she must have noticed the change in Janet, and that meant this little encounter with Gil was far from random. This was an intervention.

  She gritted her teeth, stifling the angry words that tried to crawl from her mouth. If Gil sensed her sudden change in mood, he didn’t show it. This situation wasn’t his fault; it was hers. Although such recognition didn’t lift her spirits, she would endure this lunch gathering wit
h as much grace as she could muster.

  She would save her harsh words for Heather.

  CHAPTER 26

  The unexpected transition from subspace back to normal-space froze Raul in place, but VJ immediately reacted to engage the Rho Ship’s cloaking field. The sight of her ghostly form studying the tactical displays that she created in the air around her somehow reassured him, although it should have done the opposite. VJ had evolved to the point that she was taking defensive actions on her own initiative without waiting for input from Raul, even though he was the captain. At least he hoped he was still the ship’s captain.

  Raul dismissed that disturbing line of thought and shifted his focus to what the tactical displays were telling him. As he’d expected, the Rho Ship’s momentum had carried it out into space, although the short amount of time they’d been in subspace meant that they were well inside the orbit of Scion’s nearest moon. Not good.

  “Captain, our trajectory is suborbital.”

  Her mode of address made him feel a little better, although the information she conveyed immediately wiped that feeling away.

  “Can we correct that?”

  “Not without being detected. We’re too close to the planetary defense systems.”

  “How long do we have until we reenter the atmosphere?”

  “Seven minutes and forty-two seconds . . . forty-one . . . forty—”

  “Stop! I don’t need a countdown. Why did the subspace field generator fail?”

  “Diagnostics indicate that the system abort was caused by a minor software glitch.”

  That was the first piece of good news he had received in what felt like a hell of a long time.

  “Can you fix it?”

  There was a brief pause before VJ looked at him and smiled. “I don’t need to. A simple reboot should correct the problem.”

  “You’re telling me that turning the damn thing off and back on fixes Altreian computer systems, too?”

  Her brow furrowed in a way that felt distinctly human. “It’s possible that our repairs of their technology introduced the error. Regardless, I highly recommend that we give it a try before my countdown reaches zero.”