Wormhole - 03 Read online

  Then the wormhole shifted.

  Dr. Donald Stephenson clenched his jaw, lines of concentration burrowing fresh fissures in his forehead. He could be angry later. Right now he had to fix this giant mess they found themselves in.

  The almost disastrous handoff of anomaly containment to Dr. Trotsky’s station had shocked him. If not for the decisive actions of Trotsky’s impressive postdoc, taking over the secondary controls when Trotsky fainted, they’d already be dead. She hadn’t wasted a second checking on Trotsky’s condition, practically throwing the unconscious man out of his chair as she slid in to replace him.

  As he finished sealing the portal with the primary stasis field, Dr. Stephenson activated the gateway. A tremor shook the cavern floor, rattling the scaffolding, and producing a momentary fluctuation in the power grid. Stephenson adjusted the controls to compensate, allowing the wormhole to come into being at its own pace. A glance at the impedance and temperature measurements for the thick super-cooled power cables brought the barest hint of a smile to his lips. Superconductivity was holding, despite the awesome current flowing into his gateway.

  From his perch he could see the entire ATACC, had a direct view down into the portal itself. The scientists looked frozen in time, eyes locked on the anomaly trapped within the secondary containment field, the glowing blue orb reminiscent of a giant fortune teller’s crystal ball.

  In front of Stephenson, beside the computer keyboard, the gateway controls looked like a concert equalizer, an assortment of sliders and knobs that could be adjusted manually or set automatically via the computer. Dr. Stephenson leaned forward and pushed the largest slider all the way to the top. Within the gateway a star-field appeared, wavered, stabilized.

  As he prepared to validate the coordinates, they changed, an altogether different scene appearing within the portal. What the hell? This wasn’t supposed to happen yet. As Donald Stephenson stared at the army assembled in the vaulted chamber on the other end of the gateway, three alien creatures leaped across the threshold.

  Then the portal shifted again.

  “What the hell?”

  The imagery unfolding in Raul’s sensor array made no sense, momentarily freezing him into inaction. Despite the initial glitches, the gateway had gone active, the far end of the wormhole targeted into empty space. The anomaly should have already been shoved through the portal. Instead, the gateway had somehow synchronized with the Kasari gateway. And, much to his horror, the lead members of the assault cohort leaped through the portal.

  The first one through, the apparent commander, never hesitated, grabbing the nearest scientist with two of his powerful arms, the third pistoning a jagged blade into the man’s torso as the fourth arm pointed toward a nearby security guard. Two spider creatures lunged out of the portal, one of them launching itself toward the black-clad female soldier, the other racing up the scaffolding toward a second black-uniformed military man.

  As he saw the first of the spiders close on Heather, Raul snapped out of his brain freeze. Although the timing was all wrong, he couldn’t let the Kasari continue to pour into the ATLAS cavern. Activating his own wormhole engine, Raul applied the synchronization codes, locking onto the ATLAS gate to seal off the Kasari portal.

  Raul adjusted his worm fiber feeds from the ATLAS cavern. Where seconds earlier the portal had opened into the Kasari staging area, Raul’s legless body now hung in the air within his Rho Ship’s command center. Above the ATACC, a startled exclamation escaped Dr. Stephenson’s lips. Raul ignored him, shifting his attention to the nightmare leaping toward Heather.

  As it reached her, she blurred into motion, rolling sideways, regaining her feet with a nine-millimeter Glock in her left hand and her heavy rifle cradled in her right, the Glock firing so fast it sounded like an automatic, each slug penetrating her alien opponent’s misshapen body as it spun to face her, knocking it backward, but not down.

  Raul’s neural net supplied him the reason she wasn’t firing the larger weapon. It was an M25, the programmable explosive shells designed to engage at distance, each one exploding with the force of a small grenade, allowing its wielder to destroy enemies hiding behind cover but almost useless at close range since the round didn’t arm itself until it had traveled thirty meters downrange. It was still a big bullet at point-blank range, but not one you wanted to waste unless absolutely necessary.

  Enough of this shit. Time to grab Heather and bring her home before she got herself killed. As he shifted part of his own stasis field to reach through the gateway and pluck her from the madness of the ATLAS chamber, his lock on the ATLAS gateway destabilized, then resynchronized, this time on the Kasari gateway. Immediately, nine Kasari warriors spilled into the Rho Ship.

  Dr. Stephenson hesitated, but only for a second. Three Kasari commandos had entered the cavern, but not the entire assault unit. There should have been at least a dozen to rapidly secure the Gateway Device. And now gunfire had broken out, as one of the two multi-legged Graath killers had failed to instantly terminate the female commando.

  Worse, the not-so-dead Raul had somehow diverted the gateway, synching it to the Rho Ship’s wormhole star-drive engines. Shifting his attention to the anomaly decay calculations, Stephenson grimaced. If he didn’t get control of the gateway in the next minute and a half, everyone involved was about to have a very bad day.

  A glance down at the secondary stasis field control station gave him a rush of relief. Dr. Nika Ivanovich, the postdoc who’d taken over for Trotsky, remained at her station, maintaining containment of the anomaly and ready to launch it through the gateway if he could get it pointed away from Earth and not at the Kasari staging base. Stephenson had no intention of shoving an emerging black hole up the ass of the collective.

  Throwing the gateway controller into maintenance override while the wormhole was active was a crazy risk, purging the synchronization codes as it performed a controller reboot. The theoretical effect on the wormhole was indeterminate. It would certainly break Raul’s connection to the gateway, but would also deny the Kasari an immediate reconnection. That meant that the three Kasari who had already come through would have to try to gain control in the cavern until reinforcements could arrive.

  While there was a very heavy NATO, French, and Swiss security presence on-site, almost all of that force was outside the building, its mission to protect the project from any attack from outside the secure perimeter. That meant the small special ops team on duty within the cavern was on its own until the rapid response force could get here.

  As he initiated the gateway’s maintenance override, Stephenson glanced down at the portal. The image of Raul floating inside the Rho Ship winked out, replaced by dancing star-fields. Damn it. The uncontrolled wormhole was waggling through space-time like a dog’s tail. If it leaped deep into a galactic core before the controls rebooted, the primary stasis field draping the portal couldn’t protect them. Still, the odds of survival were in their favor. Big sky, little stars.

  Ignoring the continuing rattle of gunfire, Dr. Stephenson focused his attention on preparing for the moment the reboot completed, when it would allow him to lock the wormhole to its original coordinates.

  Thumbing the microphone, he spoke into the PA system.

  “Dr. Ivanovich. Prepare for anomaly transport within twenty seconds. Initiate on my mark.”

  One minute fifty-seven seconds until the end of the world. And, at the moment, all he could do was sit there and twiddle his thumbs.

  Mark stared into the wormhole device in disbelief. A vast chamber yawned before him, most of its floor space filled with the vanguard of the alien army they were here to stop. Before he had finished digesting this new circumstance, three aliens plunged through the stasis field. The first, a bipedal, four-armed being, standing a full seven feet tall, leaped onto the first tier of the ATACC, grabbed the nearest scientist from his workstation, and impaled him on a two-foot jagged blade.

  As the man opened his mouth to scream, the powerful arm stabbed him a
gain, transforming the sound into a bubbling wail that followed the man into death.

  Two other creatures skittered across the cavern floor toward the surrounding scaffolding draping the walls on either side of the ATACC. From Mark’s viewpoint they loped along like eight-legged gorillas, thick bodies the size of sofas, open jowls screeching a keening yowl. If they had eyes, he couldn’t see them.

  Mark started moving, his hand suddenly filled with the heavy hammerhead lineman’s pliers from his tool belt, his legs driving him toward the four-armed alien that had just tossed the dead man into the panicked scientists scrambling away from the assault. Mark reached the thing’s back as gunfire erupted behind him.

  Off to his left, the wormhole shifted again.

  Adrenaline flooding his system, Mark swung the pliers with every ounce of strength he could generate, the force of the blow caving in a section of the thing’s skull, sending it crashing into the next row of elevated workstations. It slipped, arms flailing, but somehow regained its balance, whirling to meet its attacker with a wide sweep of its knife hand.

  Mark threw himself sideways, barely avoiding the weapon’s jagged tip. The creature turned to fully face him, rising into a crouch as it assessed its opponent, its head wound repairing itself as Mark watched. The smell of the thing filled his nostrils, an ammonia–diesel fuel perfume that made his eyes water. Its orange-and-black-flecked eyes blinked twice, lids closing bottom-up.

  Then it plunged toward him, a second blade filling another of its hands. Mark accepted the charge, dropping to his back as he struck out with both legs, propelling every bit of his power into the quick thrust. Based upon the shock of the impact, he judged the alien’s weight to be better than six hundred pounds. It didn’t matter. The being might be big and able to heal in a way that made Priest Williams look like a sickling, but compared to Mark it was moving in molasses. The blow landed directly on the groin area, redirecting the alien’s charge into a flailing heels-over-head flight over Mark and back out onto the open cavern floor.

  Whipping his legs around, Mark landed back on his feet before the alien stopped rolling, his breath puffing out of his mouth and nose in twin attempts to clear the stench that threatened his oxygen supply. As blood wept down his face from a fresh scalp wound, Mark hurled the pliers at the rising creature’s lower left hand, the tool opening as it spun through the air, its momentum tearing the long blade from its grip and sending it spinning along the floor toward the portal opening.

  The alien ignored it, moving toward Mark once again, this time in a controlled fighter’s crouch instead of a charge, its remaining sword at the ready, its other three hands swaying in a wrestler’s pose. Mark turned and ran. Behind him the alien followed, and although it wasn’t nearly as quick, it was fast. Halfway to the scaffolding, Mark turned hard right, then again, allowing his larger opponent’s momentum to carry it past him.

  The maneuver gained him five meters. Focusing on achieving all the speed he could generate, Mark let his legs propel him toward the alien’s dropped blade. The slap of heavy boots on concrete behind him told him the race was going to be close.

  Raul’s moment of hesitation almost cost him his life. The first alien to spill through the portal into his command center hurled a spinning blade with such force it would have passed all the way through his torso if it had reached him. Instead it glanced harmlessly off the invisible stasis shield he erected in front of his body. Seeing eight additional Kasari jump through the portal into the Rho Ship, Raul sealed it behind them.

  Despite their training, the Kasari assault team wasn’t prepared for the legless apparition that hung suspended in the air before them, wielding a stasis field for which they lacked the modulation codes. Neither did they expect his mind to be seamlessly interconnected with their own world ship’s neural network.

  As Raul looked beyond the nine members of the trapped Kasari assault team and into the vast expanse of the invasion staging chamber, he knew he didn’t have much time. While the assault team offered no threat to him, even the stasis field could not long defend him against the advanced heavy weaponry available to the army in that facility. Its commanders had been stunned into inaction by the gateway’s unexpected shift, but unless he enhanced the impact, their lack of coordinated response wouldn’t last long enough.

  Manipulating his field with long-practiced expertise, he filled the surrounding chamber with a tight grid of microscopic force planes, dicing the nine Kasari so rapidly even their super nano-bots had no chance at compensating. Collapsing the force grid, he packed the orange-green Kasari soup into a ball and shot it back through the portal, where it exploded into the midst of the assembled troops like a giant paintball.

  Raul didn’t wait to watch it, turning his full attention to the worm fibers inside the ATLAS cavern. He couldn’t just terminate his end of the gateway. The modifications he’d made to the Rho Ship’s wormhole drive consumed so much power on initiation it would take weeks to recharge the reserves for another attempt. Disconnecting from the far end would shift his wormhole engines to some random point in space, throwing the starship’s drive into its primary mode of operation, transporting it through the wormhole, a trip no one could hope to survive.

  No. He had to stay linked to a far gateway until he brought the system down in a controlled fashion. That meant that if he wanted to get Heather, he had to stay linked to the Kasari gateway until he could reacquire the one in the ATLAS cavern.

  Stephenson had done something to regain control of his portal, something that Raul needed to counter. And he needed to make it happen right now.

  Ketaan-Ra hurtled through the gateway, landing in the dimly lit cavern, accompanied by two Graath shock troopers just to his right. His shared nano-bot tactical display showed only two armed humans, one at floor level, another high up along the metal latticework that draped the walls.

  He wasn’t surprised by the lack of human military at the gateway. Of all the worlds they’d assimilated, most had had no armed presence at the portal. The whole point of building a Kasari-inspired gateway was to welcome the benevolent species that offered a world so much astounding technology. It made no sense to open the gateway and present a threatening presence to one’s benefactors.

  Motioning with an arm, Ketaan-Ra issued a mental command, sending the two Graath scurrying to eliminate the soldiers as he focused on understanding every aspect of his tactical display. Something was wrong with the portal behind him. He didn’t need to look to confirm that it had lost the link with the Kasari staging planet. Only he and the two Graath had made it into the cavern. By now he should have had his entire dozen-member team already moving through the coordinated dance they’d rehearsed hundreds of times.

  Worse, a bright red rotating threat matrix highlighted something he’d already seen with his own eyes, a glowing orb contained within a stasis field a handful of strides in front of him. The energy readings showed the field contained an asymptotic gravitational event with a rapidly expanding event horizon.

  A bomb.

  As hard as it was to believe what he was seeing, he couldn’t deny what the data was telling him. Somehow this species had rejected the beneficial concept of assimilation and responded by using the Kasari technologies to construct a gravity bomb with a growing singularity at its core.

  As the scanner displays flashed through his mind, instantly identifying each piece of equipment in the cavern along with its probable purpose, his initial assessment was confirmed. The stasis field containing the singularity was programmed to thrust it through the gateway upon a command from its operator. And if he didn’t get control of that station very quickly, the humans might just succeed in destroying a Kasari staging planet, along with multiple gateways and millions of highly trained warriors.

  A scowl spread across Ketaan-Ra’s face. Not happening. Not through his gateway.

  Turning to the left, Ketaan-Ra identified the human female operating the workstation on the third stair-stepped platform that wrapped behind the g
ateway. With a red numeric countdown in the corner of his sensory display, he leaped onto the first platform and grabbed the human male who had just begun to rise from his seat, impaling him on the dual-edged kedra and tossing the body aside as he prepared to leap to the next level.

  A tactical alert triggered his attention, a human moving up behind him, fast. Very fast. The force of the blow staggered him, caving in the right rear section of his skull as he started to turn toward his attacker. For a matter of seconds Ketaan-Ra lost all tactical, while the nano-bots swarmed to repair the brain injury. Ignoring the loss of awareness, he whirled toward the human, pulling the second kedra from his equipment belt and driving his bulk forward with all the power his legs could deliver.

  As his upper two arms reached to embrace his opponent and pull him into the sweeping blades, the human dropped to his back, his feet catching Ketaan-Ra in the junction between his legs with surprising force, adding a vertical component to his forward momentum, launching him over his target, one blade barely nicking the human’s head. He hit the ground and rolled to his feet as tactical came back online. Ketaan-Ra knew he’d failed to compensate for this planet’s lower gravity. Compounding that error, the human showed startling dexterity, far greater than anything he’d seen from the world ship’s periodic reports on this planet.

  One of the Graath had taken out a guard, but the other was having its own problems, taking fire from a human female who displayed traits similar to the one he was fighting. The tactical network incorporated this new data, adjusting the team’s tactics as they moved.

  A projectile flew from his opponent’s hand so fast that it hit his lower left hand before he could move it out of its path, breaking the bone just below his wrist and sending the kedra skidding across the floor toward the portal. Again his tactical display shifted dramatically, showing a gateway connection to another point on this planet, a connection to the Kasari’s own world ship.