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

  Raul couldn’t argue with that. “Do it.”

  “Initiating.”

  When nothing happened, Raul felt his throat tighten. “What’s wrong?”

  “Relax. It’ll take the system a few more seconds to power up.”

  Had he heard a hint of derision in her response? He replayed the memory and decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. Not that he had time for an argument right now anyway.

  The transition into subspace pulled a gasp of relief from his lips and wiped the irritation from his mind, although it didn’t wholly expunge the worry that the glitch might recur.

  Great. Because of a single error, he was losing faith in his ability to fix what was wrong with the ship, despite all his past successes. Had this self-doubt started with his creation of VJ? Or was she one of those successes, perhaps the greatest of all?

  Raul had a feeling that he was on the verge of finding out.

  Group Commander Shalegha stood on a high ledge that overlooked the recent battlefield, buffeted by a howling summer storm. Lightning forked across a sky so dark that it brought twilight to midday.

  Despite knowing that this had been another in a string of recent victories, Eadric and Kasari losses remained unacceptably high. Too bad General Dgarra was Koranthian. He would have made a fine addition to the Kasari Collective. Although he continued to suffer betrayal by his beloved aide-de-camp, his tactical mastery and sheer force of will continued to deny the Kasari forces access to the warren of caves and tunnels that honeycombed the Koranthian Mountains.

  Fortunately, the tides were turning inside the Koranthian halls of power. Reports from Shalegha’s spies in ArvaiKheer indicated that General Magtal was taking every opportunity to highlight each of Dgarra’s losses, undercutting his support within the Koranthian senate. To strengthen Magtal’s case, Shalegha had launched a series of attacks on Magtal’s central front, attacks that had intentionally failed. Now even Emperor Goltat’s faith in his nephew had begun to show signs of cracking.

  Shalegha turned and walked into the artificial cavern that had just yesterday housed a forward headquarters for one of Dgarra’s divisions. Thanks to an all-out attack by more than a thousand of her eight-legged Graath soldiers, the slaughter inside the cavern had been complete. For a time, she had even believed that they would be able to break through into the central tunnel system, but the arrival of Dgarra’s reserve had blocked that and triggered a number of demolition charges that pulled down a large part of the mountain and made further access impossible.

  She stopped to survey the epicenter of that fight, her nanobot-enhanced vision painting the cavern and its contents in shades of red, yellow, and blue. Despite the ongoing efforts to consolidate this position, blood and body parts lay strewn among the rubble that was all that remained of the original defenses. Ordinarily Shalegha would have ordered a follow-on attack for tomorrow, but the losses that Dgarra had inflicted on the Eadric force, coupled with the death of hundreds of her elite Graath troops, meant that she would have to regroup and await the arrival of reinforcements.

  That was okay. She could afford to be patient. In the meantime, she would absorb the information Jennifer Smythe continued to feed the hive-mind and formulate her next battle plan. Dgarra’s ultimate fall was only a matter of time.

  Jennifer stood stoically behind General Dgarra as he met with his subordinate commanders. She was done with wishing she could cry. She had allowed the situation to push her into a depressed shell in which she succumbed to defeat. A person is only defeated when they accept defeat as an inevitable end state, and that was a condition she could not and would not tolerate.

  Over the last few days, she had learned much about her connection to the hive-mind and how it affected her free will. In essence, she was two people, the real Jennifer Smythe and the Kasari puppet. But the fact that she remained an independently thinking being gave her hope, and that had freed the fight that had almost been choked out of her.

  She did have some control over her body. On those occasions where her will didn’t conflict with the overarching goals of the Kasari Collective, they gave her free rein. Oddly enough, this occurred in combat. And since it allowed her to vent her frustration on her enemies, she fought like a demon. But her fierceness also served the Kasari goal of convincing Dgarra of her loyalty, as the Koranthians knew that someone in his inner circle was a spy.

  That limited freedom to be herself had proved to be useless in combating the mastery the Kasari nanobots had over her physical actions. What had become increasingly clear, however, was that her enhanced neural capabilities had allowed her to protect a significant portion of her mind, including her own thoughts. So she had set about probing her mind to see if she could expand her mental capabilities.

  Most promising, the hive-mind had displayed no ability to make her use her empathic and psychic abilities. That might mean that the Kasari couldn’t stop her from using those powers. Jennifer had used them to make a Kasari soldier jump from a high ledge, but the hive had almost blocked her mind then. She feared that any overt usage would reveal more about her abilities, possibly showing the Kasari how to permanently block those powers, or worse, how to make use of them.

  That meant that she had better make this next attempt count.

  One possibility was to reveal herself to Dgarra as the spy. The downside of doing that was that Dgarra would kill her. While she was willing to die for the cause, that wasn’t exactly plan A.

  She had been enslaved by the Koranthians, now by the Kasari, enough. Any plan she came up with needed to have a reasonable chance of restoring her free will. Without that, she would rather be dead.

  Suddenly a new thought occurred to her: Raul. Not only had he designed a new nanite formula, but the design information for the Kasari nanobots was within the Rho Ship’s neural net, too. But Raul was off planet and had been out of range of her headset when she had last attempted to contact him. Would the Kasari stop her from trying again?

  Jennifer rolled that thought around in her mind. She could propose the idea to them. After all, it had been their ship to begin with. Surely they would jump at the chance to recapture their vessel. Of course, therein lay the danger. She couldn’t just communicate her plan to Raul using the headset. The Kasari would hear whatever she told him.

  No. She’d have to establish a true psychic link. And that meant she’d have to be close to Raul. Once again, she would be placing him in tremendous danger, this time for her last chance at freedom. Despite how much the realization horrified her, she was certain of one thing: for that chance, she would risk anything.

  CHAPTER 27

  VJ stood before Raul, studying his reaction to her new uniform.

  The Rho Ship’s database included several months of data captured when Raul had been browsing Earth’s Internet, including a wide variety of photographs and videos. Clearly he found certain aspects of female bodies attractive, and there was a clear pattern of preference for clothing styles that enhanced this effect. By examining the amount of time he had spent on different images, VJ had developed a rating criterion that she had used to create her own design.

  “Well,” she asked, slowly spinning in a circle, “what do you think?”

  For several seconds Raul said nothing, but from the infrared hotspots on his cheeks and his elevated heart rate, she decided that he found the formfitting faux-leather pantsuit and boots to his liking. She’d also put a lot of effort into improving the opaqueness of her holographic image. The effect wasn’t yet perfect, but she was closing in on it.

  He blinked and shook his head, as if to rouse himself from a trance. “Wow. I mean . . . you look nice.”

  She smiled. “A work in progress. Of course, if you’d prefer to see me naked—”

  His eyes widened. “Don’t even go there.”

  From the shocked expression on his face, she decided that he was uncomfortable with her suggestion. That was fine. Clothing gave her creative liberty with her appearance.

  “Fine
,” she said. “Now that we have that settled, shall we get to work?”

  Raul stared, dumbstruck, as VJ turned to create eight virtual displays in an arc around them—as if what she had just proposed was as routine as asking him out for lunch.

  The offer brought a sudden flashback of Jennifer lying naked atop the Koranthian surgical table. At the time, he had been trying to save her life, seeing her clinically, as a physician would. Her nakedness had registered in his mind, but his focus had been on injecting nanites to save her life. Right now, though, those memories were messing with his head in a way that he didn’t need.

  He sat down in his translucent blue captain’s chair, having added color after forgetting to dismiss the invisible stasis chair and subsequently tripping over it. All around him the virtual screens changed, rapidly cycling through the status of each shipboard system as VJ ran a complete diagnostic. With his mental linkage to the neural net, Raul had no trouble keeping up, but he focused in on the subspace field generator, looking for any signs of what had caused the glitch that had forced its automatic shutdown.

  There was no indication of a power spike, and the sensors had detected nothing out of the ordinary in the subspace environment at the time of the anomaly. By all accounts, the shutdown shouldn’t have happened, but it had, leaving Raul puzzled. He needed another perspective.

  “VJ, have you identified the cause of the subspace-generator outage?”

  “It appears to have been a random event, conceivably caused by quantum tunneling in one of the control circuits.”

  “I don’t like that answer.”

  She didn’t bother to glance at him. “Noted.”

  “Give me a prioritized rundown of our problems, worst first.”

  She gestured toward the display directly in front of Raul, and it moved forward.

  “As you can see,” she said, “the primary matter disrupter-synthesizer will require major repairs, including a complete rebuild of several components. Estimated time to fully repair: thirty-seven hours.”

  “How long for marginal capability?”

  “Sixteen hours, thirty minutes, but I don’t recommend that option.”

  “Noted,” Raul said.

  The odd sense of satisfaction that came with that statement was stupid. What was this, high school? Still, VJ was getting very good at getting under his skin and seemed to take pleasure in it.

  She continued. “The primary stasis field generator is functioning marginally and will take approximately five hours to restore full functionality. After that, the disruptor weapons and gravitational distortion engines each need minor repairs.”

  “Okay, let’s get started on the primary MDS.”

  When VJ hesitated, Raul turned to see her staring at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I agree with that initial priority, but I propose to add a shipboard modification to our to-do list.”

  VJ was never shy, and anytime she didn’t come right out with a suggestion, it made Raul nervous. This time was no exception.

  “Such as?”

  “I’ve been reviewing some of the Altreian physics theory that the other Jennifer uploaded into our neural net. I believe that I can use it to design and build an advanced projectile weapon that will enable this ship to better defend itself against the Kasari fast-attack ships.”

  “It won’t work. They would destroy a missile or any other projectile before it even got close. Even if it somehow managed to get past their weapons, it would detonate harmlessly against their stasis shield. Even the gravitational vortex weapon that the Rho Ship used to shoot down the Second Ship is no match for those attack ships. We would have to get too close, and they are far more maneuverable.”

  “What if I told you there is a way around those problems.”

  Raul leaned forward in his chair, his interest aroused. “Go on.”

  “We can create a small subspace field generator with a super-capacitor that can power it for a specified length of time. If we attach a small warhead to this device, we could use our primary stasis field generator to launch the torpedo from our ship on a desired target vector. The weapon would then shift into subspace for just long enough to penetrate the target’s shields before transitioning back into normal-space. Boom.”

  Raul paused to consider this, his neural net working the problem. “That could work, but if the enemy ship changes course while our dumb bomb is in subspace we’ll miss.”

  “Only if they make a maneuver that we don’t anticipate.”

  “The odds of our precisely anticipating their maneuver seem pretty low.”

  “Not necessarily. We could make an escape maneuver, which would cause them to compute a new intercept course. We are capable of making that same computation. They might detect the launch of our subspace bullet, but then it would wink out of existence on their sensors, thereby posing no threat.”

  Suddenly this sounded a whole lot better to Raul.

  “And,” VJ said, “we can shoot in ways the Kasari won’t anticipate. Do you recall Jennifer’s six laws of subspace transition?”

  The neural net refreshed them in Raul’s mind.

  The speed of subspace waves is orders of magnitude greater than the speed of light.

  Anything contained within a subspace field is shifted into subspace but retains its previous rate of time’s passage.

  Anything shifted into subspace will retain its previous normal-space momentum vector upon transition back to normal-space.

  No normal-space force can act upon an object in subspace.

  If an object in subspace is not acted upon by a subspace force, it will return to normal-space at the location where its previous momentum vector would have taken it.

  If an object in subspace is acted upon by a subspace force, such as a subspace drive, it will return to normal-space at an entirely new location, but retain its original, normal-space momentum vector.

  According to those laws, they just had to accelerate the bomb to match a desired velocity vector, shift it into subspace, wait long enough for it to reach its intended destination, then have it shift back into normal-space at the target location.

  Understanding dawned on Raul. The combination of Jennifer’s second, third, and fourth laws meant that you could think of an object that had been shifted into subspace as having a normal-space shadow that retained its momentum vector but was unaffected by normal-space forces. That meant they could fire their torpedo, shift it into subspace, and wait for it to pass through a planet before having it shift out of subspace on the far side.

  He saw VJ smile. She had seen his expression and knew that he understood.

  “How long will it take us to make one of these subspace bombs?”

  “Approximately forty-three hours for the first one. Then we’ll need to reconfigure the exit hatch to enable the stasis field to carry it outside the ship and perform a test launch. If all goes well, we should be able to optimize construction, potentially cutting that time in half. But none of that can begin until after we’ve repaired the primary MDS.”

  Raul leaned back, feeling his shoulders relax. The process wouldn’t be speedy, but they now had a viable path that just might lead to their survival. He met VJ’s blue eyes, seeing the lift of her right eyebrow.

  “You’re amazing,” he said.

  Her lips twitched into a fleeting smile, then she blinked rapidly and turned back to her work.

  For the briefest of moments, Raul thought that he had seen her eyes shine with moisture. Or maybe his imagination was once again getting the best of him.

  Down here, far beneath the rugged mountain peaks, light was a luxury, even to General Dgarra’s infrared-sensitive eyes. But now that battle had shifted belowground along this portion of his northern front, he was glad to have so little of it. The darkness highlighted the warm bodies of his warriors and differentiated them from his enemies. By far, the hottest body of all stayed at his side, a near-constant presence for which he was thankful.

  Over th
e last several days, it had become increasingly clear that he had a traitor in his midst, someone who was leaking his plans to the Kasari. He had heard the whispers among his people, had seen the suspicion in their eyes whenever they looked at Smythe. Captain Jeshen, the courier who would have become his aide-de-camp had he not placed that mantle upon Smythe’s slender shoulders, was by far the most direct in his accusations. Dgarra did not hold it against him. She was an outsider and therefore deserved the most scrutiny.

  If not for the ferocity with which she fought his enemies, he, too, might have doubted her, despite the powerful feelings she evoked within him. Smythe’s hatred for the Kasari was palpable. It shone in her eyes during combat. She would rather kill one true Kasari than ten of their Eadric stooges.

  Dgarra had just seen her focus that same look on Jeshen. Naturally she would echo the feelings that Jeshen directed toward her. To her credit, she had never uttered a negative word about his courier, but the clear discord between his two most trusted subordinates troubled him deeply. The stress of war, especially one that you were losing, had a tendency to exacerbate petty rivalries and turn them into blood feuds.

  He returned his attention to the task at hand, preparing for the coming battle. Today he would try something new. Rather than formulate detailed plans for how he wanted this battle fought, he would delegate the battle planning to each of his sector commanders, with instructions that they were not to share those plans with each other or with him. Dgarra would maintain command of his reserve but would decide when and where to deploy them at the last possible moment.

  Inhaling the dank air that filled this particular cavern, he straightened.

  Even if the spy was reading his mind, there would be nothing to use against him.

  Jennifer savored the thrill of battle so intensely that she had begun to doubt her sanity. Warfare was the one physical activity in which the hive-mind allowed her free will to come to the fore. Not only did she get to fight beside this man that she had come to care for, but she also got to kill those who had forced her to betray him.