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

  A relieved sigh escaped Jennifer’s lips as she replied. “Okay.”

  “I’m monitoring all movement in the dungeon tunnel system through the worm-fiber feeds. Calculating the optimal course for you to take now.”

  Jennifer saw scores of video feeds blossom in the ship’s neural net along with a 3-D map corresponding to what she was seeing. The selected path appeared as a green line running down a series of passages to the distant cavern where the Rho Ship had reemerged from another subspace jump. Unfortunately, the path wasn’t entirely clear of Koranthian prison guards.

  “Ouch,” said Raul, having also seen what Jennifer observed.

  “Sorry,” said VJ, “but we couldn’t really expect my diversion to completely empty the prison of its guard force. It’s also unsurprising that they heard my arrival. I suppose I should spend some time designing a subspace-transition sound buffer.”

  “Forget about it,” Raul said as he raced along behind Jennifer. “Focus on the task at hand.”

  Jennifer had to admit that his robo-legs were an impressive improvement.

  “Careful,” VJ said. “You’re coming up on the first group now.”

  “Got it.”

  Jennifer slowed to a walk, her laser pistol held in a double-handed shooter’s grip as she moved to the next corner, scanning ahead with her own telepathic senses. Four guards were moving down the passage that branched off to her left, coming toward them.

  In one quick motion, she spun around the corner, firing a rapid sequence of pulses that dropped the first three guards, but the fourth dived into an open cell before she could target him.

  “Damn it. Cover me.”

  Then she sprinted forward, keeping her pistol leveled at the cell’s doorway as she launched herself into a headlong slide on her right side. A laser pulse heated the air above her just as she depressed her own trigger. Her first pulse took off the guard’s gun hand. The second hit him in the center of his face, sending the Koranthian’s limp body slumping to the floor.

  As she climbed to her feet, she saw Raul step up beside her. He looked at the smoking face of the Koranthian and stifled a gag, but didn’t puke. Not bad for his first combat action.

  “If you hurry,” VJ said, “you can beat the rest of the guards who are headed this way.”

  Jennifer noted the route modifications that came through Raul’s mental link and picked up the pace, hearing his footfalls right behind her. Two turns later they entered the large natural cavern where the Rho Ship waited.

  As she and Raul sprinted onto the ship’s ramp, Jennifer thought it was the finest welcome mat she had ever seen.

  Waiting at the top of the ramp, Dgarra saw the real Jennifer Smythe run toward him. A boiling stew of emotions left him immobilized. Despite how thoroughly the virtual construct who had introduced herself as VJ had explained Smythe’s betrayal, he hadn’t been able to let it go.

  But then Smythe vaulted upward, wrapping her arms around his neck with a strength that belied her delicate frame. She buried her face against his as she gasped out the words that pulled down his barriers.

  “I’m sorry I let you down. So . . . so sorry.”

  His arms reacted of their own accord, squeezing her to him as he tried to sooth the tremors that racked her body. A warm wetness trickled down the side of his neck, and he realized that it leaked from her eyes. A human reaction he had only observed from her once before, during another instance of intense emotion. Right now it did not seem like a bad thing.

  “Uh . . . love birds,” VJ’s voice intruded, “transitioning to subspace in thirty seconds. I suggest you get your asses back to the command bay so I can wrap you up tight before that happens.”

  Dgarra realized that he had barely been aware of the Koranthian guards whom the stasis field had blocked or of the retracting ramp that had sealed the Rho Ship. He lowered Smythe to the floor, and she stepped back awkwardly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  But she managed a smile and then turned and led the way onto the command deck. They were met by a scowling Raul, who impatiently waved them forward. Then, as Raul settled back in his translucent blue command couch, Dgarra once again felt the stasis field enfold his body as, beside him, Smythe also floated into the air.

  “Transition in five seconds,” VJ said. “Say your good-byes to Scion.”

  By all the dark gods, Dgarra didn’t like the sound of that. But since there was nothing he could do to change the events that had brought him to this point, he settled back and relaxed, letting the Rho Ship carry him away from the only world he had ever known.

  Kasari group commander Shalegha didn’t understand how this could have happened. Jennifer Smythe had been a sacrifice she’d been willing to make in order to help bring General Magtal to power. But from the reports her other Koranthian spies had delivered, the Smythe woman had somehow escaped in the stolen Kasari world ship, taking General Dgarra with her.

  The apparent use of subspace technology to cause the starship to materialize in the ArvaiKheer cavern, deep beneath the Koranthian Mountains, was mind bending. But even more disturbingly, Jennifer Smythe had apparently found a way to neutralize the nanobot cortical array linking her brain to the hive-mind, something that, until now, the Kasari had considered impossible.

  Still, the bad news was limited to one rogue starship, two rogue humans, and one rogue Koranthian general. And by all indications, they had fled the Scion system. Shalegha’s alarm had gone out to the entire Kasari Collective that these dangerous rebels were to be destroyed on sight. As badly as she wanted to capture the stolen ship and investigate the hybrid Kasari-Altreian technologies the humans had created, the ongoing dangers they presented made the risk involved in such an attempt far outweigh potential rewards.

  But she had also received much better news. Emperor Goltat had been killed during Dgarra’s escape, and General Magtal had been crowned emperor in his place. Shalegha had subsequently pulled back the Kasari support she had provided the attacking Eadric army, gifting Emperor Magtal a series of small victories that had resulted in an armistice between the Kasari and the Koranthians. The war was not over, but the cessation of hostilities fulfilled Shalegha’s bargain with Magtal.

  More importantly, instead of expending so much effort on battle, the Kasari could now focus on the assimilation of the Eadric, who composed the vast majority of Scion’s population and controlled a corresponding percentage of the world’s territory. Granting the Koranthians control of their subterranean empire also gave the Kasari Collective power over Scion’s surface, the airspace above it, and the space beyond that. All in all, not a bad bargain.

  Shalegha leaned back in her chair, surveying her strategic-operations center, and smiled. She had no doubt the Koranthians would violate the armistice sooner or later, but by the time they made that decision, she would be ready to hammer them into extinction. For now, she could afford to be patient.

  CHAPTER 37

  In the weeks since Janet had escorted Jamal into the New Zealand secret facility, he had remained in a perpetual state of awe. The robotic technologies that Mark and Heather Smythe had created beneath the mountains were incredible. The facility’s computing and subspace hacking capabilities were what really triggered Jamal’s interests, and he knew that Eileen felt the same way.

  Although Denise claimed that all of “this alien-inspired insanity” scared her, she had been one of the true AI pioneers, having created the NSA’s massively parallel supercomputer known as Big John. The entity had only one purpose: to mine all available data on selected targets and then cross-correlate that data with all other available information. Big John’s tendrils extended into everything.

  Nobody comprehended exactly how Big John worked. The scientists who had designed the core network of processors understood the fundamentals: feed in sufficient information to uniquely identify a target, then allow Big John to scan all known information—financial transactions, medical records, jobs, photographs, DNA, fingerprints, known associates, a
cquaintances, and so on.

  But then things shifted into another realm. Using the millions of processors at its disposal, Big John began sifting external information through its nodes, allowing individual neurons to apply weight to data that had no apparent relation to the target, each node making its own relevance and correlation calculations.

  No person directed Big John’s complicated genetic algorithms that supplied shifting weights to its evolving neural patterns. Given enough time to study a problem, there was no practical limit to what Big John could accomplish. The retired Dr. Denise Jennings’s software kernel had been inserted into antivirus programs, protecting millions of computing devices around the world. Although those programs provided state-of-the-art antivirus protection, their main activity was node-data analysis for Big John.

  Big John was a bandwidth hog. No matter how big a data-pipe feed, Big John always needed more. Dr. Jennings’s software had provided an elegant solution to that problem. Commercial antivirus programs scanned all data on protected devices, passing it through node analysis, adding their own weighting to the monstrous neural net. If some devices were turned off or even destroyed, no matter. If data nodes died, more and better processors constantly replaced them. In a strange way, the entire global network was Big John. Dr. Jennings had come to regard Big John as a specific type of artificial intelligence known as an oracle, whose sole purpose for being was to answer the questions of those who were authorized to ask.

  But several months ago, a nine-year-old Robby Gregory had used the alien AI in his head to take down Big John, keeping the oracle from reestablishing its network ever since.

  The Smythe operation was as compartmented as any of the programs concocted inside the copper-infused, black-glass Puzzle Palace at Fort Meade, Maryland. Jamal approved of the way the Smythes were careful with their secrets. After all, he, Eileen, and Denise had their own secret, and it slept inside a half-inch holographic data sphere that Senator Freddy Hagerman had once thought of as a lucky marble.

  Far from being lucky, that small device had gotten a lot of good people killed, two of whom had been Jamal’s former lovers. Even though Jillian McPherson and Carolyn Brown had been slain a dozen years apart, both murders were so clear in his mind’s eye that they felt like they happened yesterday. If Jack Gregory and Janet Price hadn’t fought their way into Steve Grange’s California research facility to rescue him, Jamal would be just as dead as his two girlfriends.

  Threatened by the weight of those blood-soaked memories, he shifted his thoughts to the job at hand. He was reminded of his time in the NSA, leading the group of superhackers that Admiral Riles had nicknamed the Dirty Dozen, as they each climbed into their Scorpion full-immersion workstations. The Dirty Trio just didn’t have the same ring to it, and the Three Amigos was already taken.

  But as cool as the Scorpions had looked, they couldn’t compete with the setup Heather had created for the three former NSA superstars. She had made each of them a headset that looked something like a color-shifting Alice headband with small beads at each end designed to be placed over the temples. And once those little beads settled into place, the real mind trip began.

  As the headset connected with his mind, the real world dropped away, his senses experiencing the virtual world created through the subspace linkage of his brain to one of the three Smythe supercomputers within this facility. Keyboards? A thing of the past.

  Jamal glanced at Eileen, who had just settled into her comfortable couch, one of three that had been placed in a triangle, each facing the center. The setup facilitated discussion whenever they weren’t lost in the virtual worlds of their minds. They could still communicate while connected through the headsets, but that was more like invading each other’s dreams than popping open a video-chat window.

  With Denise catching some sleep, her couch remained empty.

  “Better bring your A game, Eileen,” he said. “Otherwise you’re about to find yourself eating my dust.”

  “Keep telling yourself that. Maybe someday you’ll believe it.”

  Jamal grinned. Eileen was the second woman he had met who was as confident as he was. He slipped his headset on and performed a rapid diagnostic, knowing Eileen was performing her own system check. As expected, everything was working perfectly.

  “Janet, you out there?” he asked.

  “I’m here. You ready for action?”

  “Donuts and coffee have me all charged up. What did we miss during our break?”

  “So far so good in Hanau. According to Robby and Eos, there have been no breaches in Mark and Heather’s security. The operation is still a go.”

  “Okay, then,” said Jamal, “Eileen and I will focus on the security perimeter around Prokorov’s Frankfurt Gateway, but I don’t see how the FSS can pack any more troops and weapons into that area.”

  “Find me a weakness that Mark and Heather can exploit,” Janet said. “I’m counting on you two.”

  Jamal felt his excitement ebb under the pressure of that last statement. The time had come for the hackers to prove they were as good as Jamal had boasted.

  Forty-eight hours before the scheduled activation of the Frankfurt wormhole gate, Alexandr Prokorov settled into his chair, having just returned to The Hague after an inspection of the site’s security forces. Per his instructions, no security personnel were allowed into the man-made cavern where the gateway had been constructed. Earth had already made that mistake at the site of the Stephenson Gateway, something that had resulted in armed conflict with the lead elements of the aliens whom Dr. Stephenson had meant to welcome to the planet.

  If not for the threat posed by the Safe Earth resistance, he wouldn’t have allowed the military or police anywhere near the gateway cavern located sixteen miles northeast of Frankfurt. Prokorov knew that the Smythes would try to stop the scheduled activation of the device. In fact, he was counting on it.

  He was surprised they had managed to remain hidden for so long, despite the assets that Prokorov had pressed into service in an attempt to find them. But if he couldn’t find their hiding place, he would pull them to him.

  Since he had insisted on extreme precautions to prevent the possibility of the Smythes hacking into the gateway remotely, they would have to try a physical assault on the facility. The air and ground forces the Germans had put in place were ready to take out the Smythes and their allies. And if the Smythes didn’t attempt such an attack, Earth would make contact with its alien benefactors. Either way, a big win for the UFNS and for humanity as a whole.

  What high-tech tricks would the Smythes pull from their bag of treats? He looked forward to finding out.

  Heather answered the call on the second ring.

  “Hello, Aaden. What have you got for me?”

  “It’s an abandoned construction site seven miles south of the UFNS wormhole gateway. The upper part of the structure is incomplete, but the underground parking garage is adequate for our purposes and the range to the target meets your criteria. Best of all, it’s isolated from other structures by a half mile of woods.”

  “Good. That gives us our final staging area.”

  “A team of my people will keep the perimeter secured until you get here. I’ll text you the coordinates as soon as I hang up.”

  “Okay,” Heather said. “Time of execution is still midnight.”

  She switched off the phone and turned to Mark. “We’ve got three hours.”

  “More than enough to get these last few trucks dispersed,” he said.

  She turned to look at the row of self-driving big rigs still waiting to be deployed from the warehouse compound, each with a logo from a different shipping firm, none of which was Hanau Trans-Shipping. They had been preloaded inside the main warehouse with combat robots, just as the trucks sent out at varying intervals throughout the day had been. Some of those vehicles had been driving for hours along routes that would bring each to its unique destination in time to release its bots. The supporting drones would be automatically release
d from special launching rails mounted inside other trucks.

  The storm of death she and Mark were about to unleash on the outskirts of one of Europe’s major population centers horrified her as much as the memory of the nuclear detonations they had triggered to destroy the Stephenson Gateway.

  She felt herself momentarily swept into a vision of soldiers fighting and dying before swarms of enemies unlike any they had ever faced, EMP-hardened machines that had been designed for one purpose: to kill humans. Even worse, the kill decisions would be left up to these robot swarms, allowing them to continually optimize the paths to achieving their designated objectives. And, unlike humans, they would make those calculations without emotion, on a nanosecond timescale.

  Part of this was being done to provide a diversion for the act that only she could perform, but that Mark had refused to let her do alone—an action very likely to get them both killed.

  Private Lance Falk had been a member of the German army for less than a year, but these last four weeks had felt like four months. His unit had been stuck in the most boring place possible, assigned to guard a portion of the perimeter around the world’s favorite new science project. Day and night he had watched construction equipment and busloads of scientists and engineers come and go without incident, knowing that the Frankfurt nightlife was a mere sixteen miles from the farmer’s field where he was stuck.

  If he had been part of the rapid-reaction force stationed closer to the site where the Frankfurt Gateway was being built, he would have at least been sleeping inside a real building instead of catching catnaps in a tent between his six-hour shifts walking the triple-strand razor wire that formed the outer perimeter. Those KSK guys got all the fat duty. He spat into the dirt. Kommando Spezialkräfte—bah. Lance could have qualified for the special forces if he had wanted to. He was sure of that.

  This time of night was the worst, especially with the evening fog that had become a consistent companion since the beginning of October. Visibility was so poor that he and his squad mates had to be careful to avoid wandering into the concertina wire. Even the standard-issue night-vision goggles were of little use in the swirling soup.