“Looking good,” Jack said. “Thirty-two seconds until the next transition.”
He felt Janet settle into her mental precombat ritual, achieving the sniper-calm that made her so deadly. Meanwhile, Moros pulled upon the power of his Twice Bound to wash away his worries. Jack opened his mental tap just a bit, sampling the feel of their channeled minds. It created a burning itch in his brain that had a wrongness. Perhaps the neural pathways that the Lundola mutation was creating in his head needed to become accustomed to this new stimulus.
As the ship’s momentum vector acquired the desired direction and magnitude, Z took the AQ37Z back into subspace, activating the shielding that would protect the hull from what was about to happen.
When a ship enclosed in subspace reentered normal-space, its emergence automatically pushed aside whatever had occupied that spot. That required no protective shielding. However, the hypersonic shock waves generated upon shoving aside whatever matter was in the way often led to violent reactions. When reentry happened below ground, it triggered earthquakes and subsequent collapses of bedrock.
The force shield was required to protect the AQ37Z’s hull from such calamity while also providing a mechanism for clearing a tunnel to the planet’s surface. In just over a minute, Jack, Janet, Moros, and his commandos were going to need a way out of this ship.
“Get ready,” Jack said, feeling Moros’s mind echo the warning to his troops.
Then, with a rumble that shuddered through the ship, the AQ37Z returned to Quol.
“What was that?” Janet asked.
Z filled Jack’s mind with the bad news. Apparently the glancing strike from the enemy graser had weakened a hundred-foot section of the hull where one of the biolabs connected to the outer ring. The shock waves from the below-ground reemergence had caused the biolab to buckle and collapse, killing 304 of Moros’s Twice Bound commandos and injuring more than 200.
Jack felt the minds of the dead wink out of existence even as the screams of the badly injured and dying echoed in his head. His feet hit the floor as he commanded Z to wield the force shield to bore and brace a tunnel from the engineering bay to the surface and then lower the engineering bay ramp.
As they had planned, Captain Moros sent a subspace message to the portion of the local Altreian space fleet who had pledged to him, directing the starship crews to block any reinforcements that might try to reach the Parthian. That would most likely draw enemy ships into combat in the sky above the Parthian, but that couldn’t be helped. Jack, Janet, and Moros would either win today’s battle or the Altreian Empire would return to its old order.
Khal Teth was what Clausewitz had referred to as the center of gravity, the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act. Killing the overlord was the key to victory.
Jack led Janet and Moros along the hub that connected the bridge to engineering. As badly as the wounded needed medical attention, he had no time to devote to them. The window of surprise his action had just opened wouldn’t remain so for long.
The time for violent action was right now, and Jack had no intention of letting it pass him by.
Khal Teth felt the Parthian shudder from the hypersonic shock waves that preceded the quake that threw him and all those in the operations center to the floor. Cracks spiderwebbed through beautiful walls and ceilings. Blocking the mental screams of the injured and terrified occupants of the Altreian seat of government, Khal Teth grabbed the edge of a table and pulled himself back to his feet.
All power within the operations center was out, including the backup systems. The glow from Altreia’s magenta orb penetrated the room’s ceiling, providing the only illumination. Looking around, Khal Teth saw that he had been luckier than most in that he had suffered only minor bruises. Three paces to his right, Zolat struggled to his knees as blood from a cut high on his forehead painted the right side of the general’s face and dripped from his chin.
With a clarity that cut through the mental haze of all the personnel inside the Parthian, Khal Teth scanned for the information he needed, quickly verifying his own theory of what had just happened. This extensive damage to the Parthian had not been caused by a natural quake. There were no surrounding faults. And this had not been the result of an attack from a subspace weapon. As he looked through the eyes of thousands of Parthian occupants, a clear picture formed in his head.
A very large object had thrust the ground beneath the building upward with such tremendous force that it had buckled the strongest alloys that Altreian technology could produce. The blast had torn the entire building from its foundation and tossed it several strides into the air. And when the Parthian had dropped back to the ground, it had come to rest at a six-degree tilt. That double jolt had knocked out the power to the Parthian’s force shields, leaving the building vulnerable to external attack. Khal Teth knew what had inflicted this damage. Research vessel AQ37Z.
The damage within the hovercraft bay on the Parthian’s lowest level was the worst he had seen. The bay had absorbed the bulk of the energy the hypershock and quake had unleashed, crumpling its supports like springs that then failed to decompress. Through the eyes of one of the hovercraft-bay survivors, Khal Teth saw something that confirmed his worst fears.
Through a rent where the bay’s floor had once been, hundreds of heavily armed Khyre poured into the ruins with impressive tactical precision, their pulsed-beam weapons putting down anyone who tried to oppose them. But that was not the sight that froze Khal Teth’s soul. The Ripper and Janet Price strode among the rubble, their own pulse rifles held at the ready.
Suddenly Jack shifted his gaze toward the Dhaldric guard whose eyes Khal Teth was using to observe the action. Thrusting his mind outward, Khal Teth seized control of The Ripper’s consciousness. At least that was what he attempted to do. Instead, he encountered something he recognized. A psionic who wielded the power of the Twice Bound. With growing frustration, Khal Teth commanded his guard to kill this human.
He saw the Dhaldric raise his weapon, but it was as if the guard moved in slow motion. The Ripper blurred into action, his shot burning a hole through the guard’s head, ending Khal Teth’s vision of the events taking place far below.
Khal Teth turned his attention back to Zolat, who had fought through the unsteadiness produced by vertigo and the tilted floor.
“If we are going to stop this,” said Khal Teth, “you need to get me down there right now.”
General Zolat turned to his major, who had called in the fifty elite guards tasked with protecting the overlord. “You heard the overlord. Let’s move!”
Keeping her six combat robots lumpy with their attached crab-bombs in reserve, Janet wished that she had loaded a couple hundred of them onboard the AQ37Z. She had thought that she would just be arranging the swap of Khal Teth’s mind for Jack’s and then making the run back to Earth. She hadn’t expected her husband to launch a combat raid to overthrow the government of an alien empire. Then again, this was Jack she was thinking about.
Janet aimed and fired, hearing the sizzle-pop of the beam rifle’s discharge that punched a hole through her target’s chest. Damn, she missed the recoil of her old SCAR-H. But she didn’t pine for the weight of all that 7.62mm ammunition she would have had to carry.
Moving into position beside a collapsed greenish-blue metal support structure, she covered Jack as he raced forward. With Moros commanding his forces, Jack and Janet were free to do their own thing. While the Twice Bound commandos cleared one level at a time, Jack intended to take advantage of the initial confusion to penetrate into the very heart of the Parthian.
Jack had unleashed his insanity, allowing his intuition to sweep him toward his primary target. A memory came to Janet, unbidden. The crime-scene photo was taken in a Calcutta back alley. A half-dozen members of a Nepalese gang who had called themselves the Ghurkaris lay dead, some still clutching the boomerang-shaped knives called Khukuri. Armed with only his knife, Jack had butchered them all.
His uncanny sense of what was about to happen had enabled Jack to kill all those seasoned knife fighters in that dark alley. A sudden realization sent a shiver through her body, and Janet reveled in the feeling. For years she had thought that Jack’s intuitive ability had leached from Khal Teth’s mind into his. But the memory of that Calcutta crime scene told her something very different. That fight had happened before the Altreian being had hitched a ride in Jack’s mind.
It was crazy—Jack’s kind of crazy. And as she followed him into the broken turbo shaft that led to the Parthian’s upper levels, Janet found that she was just fine with that.
As General Zolat worked to gather enough of the Parthian Defense Force to create a formidable resistance against the Khyre invaders, Khal Teth surrounded himself with eleven others with enough psionic ability to form a Circle of Twelve. With almost half the High Council injured or dead, this group was not nearly as impressive as the one that had imprisoned him inside the chrysalis cylinder for thousands of cycles, but it would have to do.
Maybe The Ripper would make a mistake and try to kill Khal Teth on his own without the direct support of Moros and his Twice Bound. That would certainly align with The Ripper’s standard operating procedure that Khal Teth had come to know so well . . . launch a major diversion and then split off to personally cut off the head of the snake he was hunting.
The fact that Khal Teth tried and failed to mentally track his enemy worried him. The Lundola genetic mutation must have taken hold within The Ripper, and he had used his new psionic abilities to join his mind with that of Captain Moros. Moros had brought several thousand of his commandos on this raid, and Khal Teth had to assume that all of them were also Twice Bound.
If they were all infected and in the process of developing their own psionic powers, Moros was every bit as dangerous as Khal Teth feared. After all, half of Khal Teth’s psionic lobe had been transplanted into the Khyre captain, giving him the ability to channel a large amount of Twice Bound energy, which could be added to his own psionic power. And even though the thousands of Dhaldric within the Parthian had Twice Bound with Khal Teth, the overlord was far from sure that he could defeat Moros in mental combat. Thus the precaution of assembling a Circle of Twelve.
While The Ripper had by now developed a psionic lobe of his own, he did not have the advantage of having a piece of Khal Teth’s lobe. The man would be unable to channel all the power of Moros and his Twice Bound.
Khal Teth, accompanied by the eleven others who would complete the Circle of Twelve, followed the guards toward the stairs. Then, as he headed down toward the combat that raged far below, Khal Teth hoped that the Dhaldric defenders could contain Moros’s attack until reinforcements arrived from other military bases on Quol. But due to the fusion torpedoes that Khal Teth had launched to destroy several of those bases, reinforcements might be a long while in coming.
Because of the psionic power that Captain Moros could now channel, Khal Teth’s presence was required below. It was either that or let the Khyre mutant turn Khal Teth’s own soldiers against him. The muscles in the overlord’s neck bunched and corded, producing a ripple in his gills.
He would deal with The Ripper, his wife, and Captain Moros in one stroke.
Whereas Captain Moros’s commandos now fought their way up the thirteen stairwells that were still passable, Jack, with his pulse rifle slung over his back, climbed hand over hand up one of the damaged turbo-lift shafts, with Janet and the six combat robots she controlled with her SRT headset climbing behind him. While the captain’s men would pause to clear each level they reached, Jack intended to bypass all of that action, making his way directly to the topmost of the Parthian’s thirty-seven floors.
Due to his enhanced vision, he didn’t need to light the dark space, and since Janet was accessing the video feeds from the robots’ multispectral cameras, she didn’t either. With his strength, he could have outdistanced her, but that would have been the height of stupidity. He was going to need Janet’s sniper skills when he exited the lift shaft and encountered real resistance. And Janet needed him to shield her mind from the Dhaldric pricks who wanted to kill them.
Despite his best efforts, a worry had wormed its way into his thoughts. If he could turn this into a physical fight, Khal Teth would fall. If not, Jack wasn’t sure he could channel enough of Moros’s Twice Bound power to survive the encounter. On the positive side, he had thus far successfully shielded both his mind and Janet’s from Khal Teth’s probes.
Jack remembered what it had been like when he’d inhabited Khal Teth’s body, wielding so much psionic power that he could easily identify all those who wandered nearby hallways or cowered inside their offices or residences. Today, shielding himself and Janet from that same type of mental probe was the best he could manage. Channeling any more psionic energy produced a burning pain in his upper spine that scared the crap out of Jack. Turning himself into a microwaved vegetable wasn’t on today’s menu.
A movement drew Jack’s attention as a Dhaldric guard swept the shaft with a flashlight beam. As he reached for his pistol, a bolt of laser energy stabbed upward to slice the head from the guard’s neck, sending it bouncing down past the duo in a spray of blood as the body spasmed in the opening above.
“Time to find another exit,” Jack said as he prepared for the fellow’s partners to join the fight.
“On it,” Janet said as she aimed her Glock up toward the distant opening.
When another arm emerged to point a weapon downward, the boom of Janet’s gun accompanied the softer sounds of lasers from Jack and the lead robot. All three weapons punched through an arm, sending pieces of another body flopping down upon them.
Ten feet below Janet, one of her robots pried open a lift door, firing its laser as it leaped out into the hallway beyond, followed by four of its fellows. Without hesitation, Janet swung down and out of the shaft, leaving the last robot to cover Jack’s retreat. He joined her, and they moved out with five robots leading the way past a dozen dead bodies as the sixth emerged to guard their rear.
What the big Smythe combat robots gave Jack and Janet in firepower, they cost them in stealth. There was nothing silent about the way these things moved through these metallic alien hallways. But from the sounds of combat that made their way up from below, the bulk of the Parthian’s troops had charged down to stop the advance of Captain Moros’s commandos.
Jack’s group would have to use the nearest of the emergency-access stairs. But to get there, he would need the robots to clear the way.
Khal Teth had descended the emergency-access stairs for twenty-three levels when he heard the explosions in the stairwell far below and saw the answering flashes of laser energy. Shifting his thoughts to one of the lead guards, he watched through the Dhaldric soldier’s eyes as a swarm of the Smythe crab-bots scurried up the steps toward the guards. Despite the withering laser fire from his soldiers, two of the crawling bombs reached Khal Teth’s forward troops and detonated themselves. He felt six of the Dhaldric guards die.
A thrill surged through his body as the meaning of the attack became clear. Janet Price was the one with the headset that controlled these machines. And since she had brought only six of the combat robots that carried these smaller ones, she would not have sent them off on an autonomous search-and-destroy mission. They had come hunting him. Janet was nearby. And where Khal Teth found her, he would also find The Ripper.
He linked his mind with Zolat’s.
“General, The Ripper is down there. Destroy those robots and kill him,” said Khal Teth.
“What do you think your guards are trying to do?”
Khal Teth shoved his arm out and down, his forefinger pointing toward the combat raging several levels below. “I want this stairwell cleared right now. Whatever the cost.”
A snarl curled Zolat’s lips, but he issued the order to his major. Then, ignoring the screams of the dying, a company of Quol’s best surged into the maelstrom. Khal Teth and the rest of his Circle
of Twelve followed them down.
With Jack at her side, Janet stepped over a half-dozen Dhaldric bodies, some of which had been cut in two by lasers. Thirty feet to her front, the lead robot reached the open portal that offered access to the nearest of the stairwells. But as it stepped inside, several laser beams burned into the machine. As the robot fell, it released its attached crab-bots. Although most of these were burned to slag, three scurried up the stairs and detonated, sending smoke boiling out of the opening.
Keeping her pulse rifle sighted on the stairwell, Janet gave the order that put four of the five surviving robots into autonomous assault mode, keeping the last one back as rear guard. The lead two released their crab-bombs, sending them racing forward one after another. They didn’t form a single file, instead scurrying around the corner and up in an offset pattern as they attempted to make themselves more difficult to hit.
The detonations that followed indicated that some of the mobile bombs were reaching their targets, but not nearly as many as Janet had hoped. The unit they had encountered was highly trained and disciplined.
To her right, Jack stepped into a bisecting passage, and Janet took cover at the corner of the opposite hall, keeping her sights on the spot where the furious battle raged. Having expended its bombs, one of the robots swiveled its laser away from its body, its blue beam slicing through the smoke to cover the assault of the next wave of crab-bombs that the three trailing bots released.
Although she was allowing the robots to determine their own tactics, Janet approved of what they were doing. To retreat now was to die. This was the place where she and Jack would make their stand. Taking a calming breath, she readied for the counterattack that she sensed was coming.
As the elite guards battled to break through the robots defending the hallway two levels below the spot where Khal Teth had assembled his Circle of Twelve, Khal Teth’s mind merged with those of the other eleven high-functioning psionics, making his purpose theirs. The rush of power drowned out the sounds and smells of combat, turning his thoughts into a blade.
The Meridian Ascent (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 3) Page 28
