Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(107)

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.