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

  Her future spun out before her. Over and over again, she would be forced to watch herself betray this great man, which is how she had come to think of the Koranthian general. Darkness closed in around her, the walls she had built squeezing her tighter and tighter as words echoed in the tiny space.

  Don’t hope. There’s no room for hope in here.

  CHAPTER 13

  The crackle of energy accompanied an electrical arc that laced Raul’s vision with white afterimages, even though he’d closed his eyes. The acrid smell of molten wire filled his nostrils and he stumbled backward, blinking rapidly as he tried to see the results of his latest attempt to jump-start the forward matter disrupter.

  The data displays that blossomed in his mind almost dropped him to his knees in prayerful thanksgiving. The neural net had just come back online.

  “It took you long enough,” VJ’s voice whispered through the command bay. Raul thought he heard a hint of relief mixed in with the sarcasm.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “How about getting us the hell out of here?” VJ asked.

  “Can’t.”

  “We have power.”

  “Not enough to engage the subspace field generator. Not without the primary matter disrupter-synthesizer.”

  “We will if you kill the cloaking field.”

  Raul slapped his palm against his forehead. Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of that? If they shifted into subspace, there would be no need to stay cloaked. A new worry hit him.

  “Our enemies will detect us as soon as we uncloak. If the subspace generator fails to fire up, it won’t do us any good to cloak again. It might be safer to continue making repairs until we can bring primary power back online.”

  VJ paused. “I estimate it will take us two hours to get the nano-material fabricators working and another three after that to repair the subspace field generator. Do you really want to hang out in the middle of this war zone for the additional thirty-seven hours that will be necessary to repair the primary MDS?”

  “I’ll think about it while we fix the nano-material fabricators and the subspace generator.”

  “Wow. A five-hour decision cycle. Impressive.”

  “Shut it.”

  A low chuckle brought a flush of heat to Raul’s face, and he realized that the VJ simulation had once again managed to pluck his strings. Pretending he didn’t notice, Raul turned to the task at hand.

  The repairs took just over four hours, going much faster once the Rho Ship’s nano-manufacturing capability was restored. After running a complete set of diagnostics on the subspace field generator, Raul sucked in a breath, savoring the fact that he could no longer see it when he exhaled. Life support had restored warmth to the command bay. Of course, if what he was about to try didn’t work, his physical comfort would be the least of his worries.

  “Screw it,” he said, settling onto a stasis field couch. “Get ready to engage the subspace field generator on my mark.”

  “That’s my guy.”

  Shaking his head, Raul killed the cloaking field.

  “Mark!”

  CHAPTER 14

  Aaden Bauer looked up from his laptop to see the two men he’d been waiting for walk through the front door of the old German farmhouse, accompanied by a wiry blonde whom he had heard much about but hadn’t yet had the opportunity to meet. Rising from his chair, Aaden stepped forward to greet them.

  “Bergen, Kolt. No troubles with your journey I take it.”

  “None whatsoever,” said Bergen, a stout bald man with laughing blue eyes.

  Kolt Jacobs, the big sandy-haired Swede, stepped forward. “Aaden, this is Nikina Gailan.”

  Aaden shifted his gaze to the woman to Kolt’s right. At first glance, he had thought her skinny, but he had been wrong. From the cut of her jaw to the muscles that crawled beneath her skin with every movement, she exuded danger, an impression that was magnified by the intensity that sparkled in her ice-gray eyes.

  His eyes were drawn to the part in her hairline, the thin scar a remnant of a bullet wound that the nanites in her blood hadn’t been able to completely repair. Aaden had read her dossier, but the physical presence of this Latvian Safe Earth resistance operative was something he had to experience to truly appreciate.

  Aaden smiled and extended his hand to her. “Welcome to the revolution.”

  Instead of shaking his hand, she reached out and placed a small solid-state memory device in his palm.

  “I believe this is what you’ve been waiting for.”

  As he stared down at the device, Aaden felt his mouth go dry. Could it really be true?

  His impressive guest suddenly forgotten, Aaden returned to his chair, connected the device to his laptop, and attempted to open the compressed file folder, but found himself staring at a password-entry box.

  Nikina leaned over his shoulder and typed a rapid sequence of characters followed by the “Enter” key. It took more than two minutes to extract all the compressed files and copy them to his laptop, a delay that seemed to take much longer. When the process finally ended, Aaden was surprised to find that a tremor had worked its way into his hands.

  He opened one file after another, his excitement growing with each document. As Nikina had promised, these files represented not only the complete specifications and blueprints for the wormhole gateway being built deep underground on the outskirts of Frankfurt, but also an updated project schedule and a listing of all personnel assigned to the project.

  “How in the heavens did you get all of this?” Aaden asked.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to be satisfied with what I’ve given you. I cannot reveal my sources.”

  Aaden looked up. “Forgive me. It is just that this is so much more than I expected.”

  For the first time a smile graced Nikina’s lips, and the change was startling. All the harshness left her face, leaving Aaden with the impression that this was a different woman. The ease with which she made the transformation reinforced everything he had learned about her from his Latvian counterpart. He was suddenly very glad that she had been assigned to him as their operation moved from planning to execution.

  He glanced down at the wormhole-gateway construction schedule on his laptop screen. If the German arm of the Safe Earth resistance movement was to have any chance of destroying that monster before it went active, they were going to need the skills that Nikina Gailan possessed.

  He pulled a specialized cell phone from his pocket, which communicated via two chips quantum entangled with one other. Although Aaden had no idea where in the world that other phone was located, he knew exactly to whom it belonged.

  Pressing the call button, he waited for the connection. When the familiar voice of the movement’s founder answered, he smiled in anticipation of relaying the good news.

  “Hello, Heather, this is Aaden.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Heather didn’t need sleep. But, oh God, how she missed it. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time for such luxuries.

  She escorted Robby to his couch in the newly upgraded command center, the rightmost of the four chairs modeled after those on the Second Ship’s bridge. The room, far belowground in the middle of New Zealand’s boondocks, was as close to an exact replica of that Altreian design as it was possible to build given the current state of the nano-manufacturing infrastructure within the monstrous underground complex. Supported by rooms of supercomputers that put the finest competing human technologies to shame, the robotically constructed, mile-deep facility would soon change the very nature of Earth-based warfare. Hopefully that would be enough.

  Considering the progress that had been made in the construction of the thousands of military drones and robots that were currently stored within the facility, they were almost ready for the task that lay ahead. The exponential productivity made possible by manufacturing robots that created other robots had grown to the point where more was being accomplished in a month than had been done in the first seven years of the facility’
s existence.

  Heather sat down on the translucent couch, sinking into the malleable material until she felt almost weightless.

  Heather, Mark, Jennifer, and Robby had been altered by the four Altreian headsets, gifted with eidetic memories and enhanced neuromuscular systems. But the headsets had also changed them in different ways. Heather had been granted savant mathematical abilities, making her capable of visualizing near-future events based upon an automatic calculation of changing probabilities. Mark had become stronger, faster, and more coordinated than the rest of the group. Able to master new languages very quickly, he could precisely imitate the sound of another person’s voice, whether male or female.

  Although they had all developed some ability to communicate telepathically with one another, Robby could move small objects with his mind. More importantly, he could allow Eos, the artificial intelligence that shared his mind, to use that power to manipulate the electrons within computing devices, thereby taking control of them.

  Jennifer had been the one to master both her telepathic and empathic capabilities. The thought of her lost friend caused Heather’s eyes to shift to the couch that would remain forever empty in her honor. That sad memory pulled Heather back to the present.

  With the doors closed, the ambient magenta lighting in the room seemed to emanate from the air itself. That, combined with the lack of corners, made it very difficult to identify a transition from wall to floor or ceiling. Of course, that was the point of its design, to provide very little visual distraction to the sensory inputs the headsets provided. Today she and Robby would be using the headsets that Heather had designed to connect to their New Zealand supercomputers, as opposed to the Altreian headsets that could link them to the computer aboard the Second Ship.

  The call from Aaden Bauer could not have come at a better time. Heather had been thrilled with the detailed information contained within the thousands of pages of blueprints and design documents that Aaden had transmitted over their QE connection. She had spent last night scanning each document into her memory and reviewing the validity of all the data contained therein. There could be no doubt that this was the real deal, and that meant their time for action was rapidly approaching.

  Heather put on her headset, watching as the room melted away around her as the translucent beads at each end settled over her temples. In response to her mental command, the scene shifted to one of the great natural caverns that their construction robots had tunneled into a little over four months ago. She sent the query through her headset.

  “Robby?”

  “I’m in.”

  “For today’s exercise, you’ve got blue force. I’ve got red.”

  “Roger.”

  Heather smiled at his use of the military term that meant “I understand.” Sometimes she almost forgot that he was only nine, with an understandable hero worship for both his mom and dad, surely the most dangerous couple on Earth. But Jack wasn’t really on Earth anymore, now was he? Not his mind, anyway. The thought wiped the smile from her lips.

  Janet, having left Mark in Bolivia to work with the Safe Earth resistance there, was scheduled to land their corporate jet at the Smythes’ Tasman Mining Corporation’s private airstrip eight hours from now. Heather could only imagine how she must be feeling.

  For that matter, she was amazed to see how Robby was dealing with the loss of his dad. The boy had decided that Jack would find a way to return, just as he had from every other impossible situation in which he found himself. Given the history of the man whom the world knew as The Ripper, Heather could understand how his son would think that, even though her calculation of Jack’s odds told her a different story. Maybe Robby’s optimistic attitude wasn’t so bad.

  Shifting her attention back to the cavern, she studied the layout, piping the feeds from all the red-force cameras directly into her mind. Today’s exercise was going to be different from any of the war games she and Robby had conducted before. All those others had consisted of conflict between two simulated robotic forces. Even though the algorithms that had controlled those sims were the same as what had been downloaded into the two robotic companies that had positioned themselves more than a mile apart within the many rooms and branches of the caverns, today’s exercise would be a full-scale live-fire assault as each side attempted to capture the hidden flag of the other.

  Each side had been assigned identical forces: four platoons consisting of two types of ground-combat robots, a dog-shaped version alongside a larger quasihumanoid model, and an air-cavalry unit consisting of combat-reconnaissance drones. All in all, more than three hundred robots would be used in this fight, each armed with weapons capable of destroying others of their kind. The combat scenario would be destructive and wasteful, but Heather had judged it to be absolutely necessary.

  An old saying was often still applied to simulations, no matter how good: The map is not the territory. No model formed a completely accurate representation of the real thing. So today, she and Robby would observe the real things fighting alongside each other in a life-or-death struggle between evenly matched forces.

  Her thoughts turned to the situation in which Earth found itself. As she had foreseen, the world had fractured along economic and religious lines, spawning unending wars. The Islamic Alliance had become a reality that stretched across the Middle East, the northern two-thirds of Africa, and the island nations that made up greater Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

  In reality the IA was a collection of tribal societies that followed various versions of Islam but had no true central government. The organization was bound together by anger at the collapse of the Middle Eastern oil economies, outrage at their third-world economic status, and hatred of the destructive technologies being released by the four superpowers that formed the UFNS. With millions of followers distributed within the populations of the superpowers, they hadn’t needed advanced technology to seed terror within the hearts of their enemies. Ironically, the distributed nature of the IA made it very hard to defeat.

  The rest of the third world had also grouped together through largely tribal partnerships, the biggest of these being the Native People’s Alliance that dominated South and Central America, even cutting a swath through parts of the fifty-nine United States. For the most part, this alliance tried to keep its head down, preferring to let the IA and the UFNS wage violent warfare against each other.

  The Safe Earth resistance movement had incubated within the NPA’s ranks, gradually gathering sympathizers within the first-world countries as they prepared to launch the strike to destroy the heavily guarded wormhole gateway being built beneath the outskirts of Frankfurt.

  Heather had come up with the scheme that provided funding for all offshoots of the Safe Earth resistance, one that hadn’t required her to use any of the myriad shell corporations within which her own funds were distributed. The unique neural augmentations she had received during her first visit to the Second Ship enabled her to predict equity- and financial-market movements with uncanny accuracy. And through the network of quantum-entangled communications devices that had been distributed to Safe Earth cells, she alerted them to exciting short-term investment opportunities. Of course, the investments by these cells had to be carefully managed so as to avoid attracting the notice of various market minders or intelligence agencies.

  “Ready when you are,” said Robby.

  His words pulled Heather out of her reverie.

  “Before we start, I want to lay out the rules for today.”

  “Okay.”

  “You will issue blue force the following mission: at eight thirty local time, blue force will attack in order to locate and seize the red-force flag while preventing red force from seizing the blue-force flag.”

  “What about intel?”

  “Both forces will have the same mission, but their attacks will be launched with no prior intelligence about the enemy locations or force dispositions.”

  “What?”

  “Our goal in all of
this is to observe the battle from the perspective of our forces. I want you and Eos to identify any problems with the way your blue force responds given complete autonomy to accomplish the mission. I’ll be doing the same for the red force. We’re looking for any problematic autonomous behaviors that didn’t show up during the simulations.”

  There was a brief pause as Robby considered what she had told him. Heather suspected that he was deep in conversation with Eos. When he did speak, she detected excitement in his voice.

  “Won’t the supercomputer that’s running the whole thing invalidate the notion that this is an autonomous test?”

  “Other than uplinking their sensor information so that we can observe what is happening, the robots will be firewalled off from the supercomputer for the duration of the exercise. Also, the caverns will be sealed off from the rest of the facility via a stasis field at the exit.”

  “Wow!”

  “It’s eight twenty-three. Are you ready to get this started?”

  “Get your evil red-force minions ready for a big blue boot in the ass,” Robby said. “Blue force out.”

  As Robby shifted his attention to his blue force, Heather smiled. Despite all his augmentations, Robby couldn’t help turning this into a game that he wanted his side to win. For her part, she was content to know that he could still find the fun in this robot battle, regardless of the knowledge that these devices would soon be put to a much deadlier purpose.

  “Mission statement transmitted,” Eos said.

  “Time remaining?” Robby asked, feeling his heart race with anticipation.

  “Fifty-eight seconds until mission initiation.”

  Despite the fact that he’d run similar simulations many times, this felt different. He was about to unleash these battle-bots, watching as they devised their own plan to search out and destroy the enemy, making decisions derived through a complex set of negotiations between all elements of the swarm. He paused to consider that. Without direction from himself, Eos, or a supercomputer, these robots and drones would rely on swarm computing until only one remained. In that case, the surviving bot would be left to make its own decisions.