Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(39)
Zeta’s atmosphere was an oxygen-nitrogen mixture, although the increased oxygen content and atmospheric density would have given humans a continuous high. The oceans teemed with sea life, although very few species bore any resemblance to fish, the majority looking much more like some of the odd creatures found at extreme depths in Earth’s oceans.
But it was something else entirely that took Heather aback.
The land masses were covered in cityscapes, advanced so far beyond Earth technology that they looked more like CPUs viewed through an electron microscope. The continent-cities teemed with activity, although little ground space had been allocated to vehicular traffic. Vehicles moved up and through the air to their appointed destinations.
The indigenous population was an amalgam of species, varied in physical form, but working in a unison that implied shared thoughts, vaguely resembling the kind of mental sharing that she, Mark, and Jennifer experienced through the alien headsets. Her mental link to the Bandolier Ship’s computer supplied a name. The Kasari Collective.
Another oddity attracted her attention. The vast majority of the people on this planet were soldiers, perhaps all of them. Unlike the military organizations of Earth, in which the soldiers were backed by huge logistics tails, this organizational structure seemed to be mostly composed of teeth. The beans-and-bullets part of the operation was supported mostly by autonomous machines that delivered what was needed at the specified place and time.
Although these beings tended to be larger than humans, many of the species looked distinctly humanoid, walking upright on two legs, some with multiple pairs of arms. Everywhere she looked Heather observed males and females of military age. Clearly the actual ages of these people differed from Earth ages by a factor of several lifetimes, but she had expected to observe children and the aged. But there just weren’t any. Not on Zeta.
Not one sentient being on this Earth-sized moon with its population of eighteen billion actually came from Zeta. The entire moon was nothing but a giant interconnected hub of military bases, one of many worlds that served a similar purpose for the Kasari.
Each base formed a wheel around a central debarkation center, manned to maintain readiness for the moment when that particular center would go active. From an engineering perspective, it was an extremely effective system.
Heather was reminded of one of her history lessons. In Israel, the once-mighty fortress of Masada sits atop an escarpment, its walls dropping away in sheer cliffs. In Roman times, it was stocked with years of supplies, absolutely impregnable. But the Romans crushed Masada in typical Roman fashion by applying an engineering solution. They built a huge ramp to the top of the cliff walls and used human shields from the local population to stop the defenders from raining down arrows and hot oil, using the resulting road to overwhelm their enemies in the castle.
The Kasari seemed to be familiar with similar modes of military thought. Of course, even the mighty Romans had ultimately been defeated.
Heather shifted her virtual position to inside the massive central facility at one of these hubs. A huge machine occupied the center of the stadium-size room, a great ring structure that rose up like a mighty wheel. A gateway. The technology that made the gateways possible was uniquely that of the Kasari. It was their strength, but it was also their weakness.
To generate gravitational forces great enough to form wormhole gateways required extraordinary matter-to-energy conversion, the process consuming resources on a scale that bled planetary systems dry in just a few hundred years. That was problem number one. The second problem was that no one had ever come up with a solution that allowed a wormhole spawned from just one gateway to be stable enough to allow a living being to survive the trip through it. To damp the inertial forces enough for someone to survive the trip, you needed a gateway at each end.
Once again the Kasari had come up with an engineering solution. Find a world with intelligent life that had acquired nuclear technology. Then send a robot ship through a one-ended wormhole to seduce its population with the offer of wondrous technologies, the ultimate being the construction of a gateway. Once the gateway was complete and came online, the Kasari would connect a matching gateway and the waiting army would pour through.
But the system wasn’t perfect. Many of the robot ships were destroyed by the Bandolier Ship’s makers, the Altreians, another name supplied by her newfound computer access. Some worlds never succumbed to the technological temptations provided by the robot ships. Even in the best scenario, large numbers of soldiers had to be kept at the ready for many years as they waited for the far-gate to activate. But when it did activate, there was no stopping the invading Kasari force. They poured through, securing the immediate area around the far gateway, methodically extending their control until another world’s population had been absorbed into the collective.
On the other hand, the Altreians had advanced technologies of their own, including a mastery of subspace that allowed faster-than-light transport of their own starships, and these could carry living crews. But starships were expensive things and couldn’t compete with gateways when it came to rapidly moving large numbers of soldiers to new worlds. And though the Altreians experienced frequent victories, every loss extended the Kasari empire. The Kasari had been spreading for centuries, with no sign of slowing down.
As Heather stared at the alien soldiers going about their tasks near the dormant gateway, she suddenly froze. She knew what Dr. Stephenson was up to in Switzerland.
Suddenly the prospect of a world overrun with nanites seemed the least of their worries.