Wormhole (53 page)

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 gateway. 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.

Shrugging off this distraction, he prepared himself for the human male’s charge. It never came. As Ketaan-Ra’s wrist knitted itself back together, the human broke into panicked retreat. With his legs providing more controlled explosions, Ketaan-Ra gave chase, smiling at the cascading displays in his head. The chase wasn’t going to be a long one.

The human cut to the right and, once again, the absence of sufficient gravity betrayed Ketaan-Ra, robbing him of the friction necessary to match the human’s two tight turns. At least now the other’s plan was clear. Get to the dropped
kedra
. He planned to stop and fight. Ketaan-Ra relaxed, letting his pace slow just enough to make sure the human got there first. It was the kind of fight he wanted,
kedra
to
kedra
, his four hands and superior strength and healing against this human’s quickness. A truly worthy opponent.

Mark’s finger closed around the alien sword’s haft, feeling the grip adapt to his hand. As he whirled to face his pursuer, he measured the weapon’s weight and balance, his eyes caressing the black sword’s three-foot blade. Two razor-sharp edges swept to a Roman point, practically screaming for blood. He liked it.

The big alien came to a controlled stop three paces from where Mark waited, its own sword gripped in its lower right fist, the other three arms reaching toward him like a wrestler’s. Like a couple of wrestlers’.

So it had learned Mark’s momentum tricks. No more bull rushes. Just good old-fashioned man-versus-giant-four-armed-alien combat. A mental image from the classic B movie
Clash of the Titans
brought a grin to his face.

Amazing. The alien warrior appeared to be waiting for him to make the first move. As Mark raised the sword in front of him, another thought filled his mind.

Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you.

Then Mark’s body blurred into motion.

Heather tossed the M25 rifle up onto the third level of scaffolding, swinging herself up along the rifle’s arc, ejecting one magazine and slapping another into the Glock as she landed. Fifteen feet below, the ugly beastie righted itself from the impact of fifteen nine-millimeter Parabellums, the holes in its body healing as it moved to follow her.

With visions filling Heather’s mind, rearranging themselves as she and the alien creature danced their deadly waltz, she emptied the fresh magazine into the gorilla-spider, each round striking a different body part as she sought lethality data. The bullets tore the alien from its hold on the railing, sending it sprawling onto the floor below. And once again, Heather grabbed the M25 and tossed it to a higher level, following it up along the metal latticework with all the speed her body and training could provide.

Her vision shifted and Heather leaped to her left as a long blade flashed through the space she’d just occupied, clanged off the wall, and rattled down through the spaces between the steel walkways. Then, with a thin, mewling squall, the alien propelled itself up after her.

Click. Clack.

Another magazine replaced its predecessor. Once more the Glock spewed its lead saliva into her pursuer, this time targeting the small bulbous knobs Heather believed to be the thing’s sensory organs. And although it continued its upward climb, it failed to follow her as she picked up the M25 and ran east along the north wall.

Realizing it had lost her, the creature paused, allowing the nano-bot healing process to restore its sensory array. It didn’t take long. A mere eight seconds. But as it reacquired her, Heather finished lasing her target.

The projectile armed itself at thirty meters, tore into its target at thirty-two, and exploded with the force of a grenade. The Graath became a fine green-yellow mist, out of which writhing gelatinous blobs and twitching limbs whipped into the cavern below.

Before her exultant yell could make it from her lungs to her lips, one of Heather’s visions stifled it in her throat. Leaning out over the railing, she looked up.

Less than ten meters up and to the right, a second gorilla-spider raced down the steel latticework toward her.

Heather spun left, running along the metal grating, her black boots making the flooring sing as she approached the near corner. Behind her she felt the gorilla-spider land on the walkway, the sound painting a clear image of its powerful eight-legged lope quickly closing the space between them.

The quick look she’d just gotten of this one had been enough. Unlike the four-armed alien fighting Mark on the cavern floor,
the spider thing carried no weapons. Each of its eight legs ended in a hairy hand, each finger sporting raptor-like retractable claws. From the goo, blood, and intestinal splatter that covered its bulbous body, it must have torn apart her partner after wading through the goober munition’s web. And if it got its hands on her, the result would be no different.

With each stride, Heather watched a hundred scenarios play out in her mind. Cradling the short rifle in the crook of her right arm, she hit the end of the walkway, spun and pulled the trigger. The explosive round had no time to arm, hammering into the alien body after travelling only 3.872 meters. And although it didn’t explode, the impact lifted the black, hairy body, sending it rolling back along the walkway as if it had stepped in front of a speeding truck. Since she hadn’t been braced, the recoil flung Heather backward, her left hand just catching the rail as she tumbled backward over it, her beret spinning away like a small black Frisbee.

Seeing the spider-thing right itself, Heather kicked outward, released her grip on the rail, and dropped the twenty-two feet to the concrete floor, transferring momentum into a forward roll as she landed. As she came back to her feet, she squeezed off another round into the alien as it scurried down the steel lattice after her. No time to lase the target or thumb in extra distance. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t gained the required arming distance, and her mind told her the alien had figured it out.

As the twenty-five-millimeter round knocked the alien from the scaffolding, Heather ran toward the Cage, a massive rack-support structure that housed all the heavy cables that carried power from the matter disruptor facility to the wormhole device and stasis field generators. The workmen who had built it, Mark included, all hated it with a passion that bespoke the claustrophobia the Cage generated in those who had experienced its interior.
As big as the thickly insulated cables were, most of the room was taken up with the pipes and cooling equipment required to keep them superconductive. Like everything else on this project, it had been designed with speed of construction and efficiency of operation in mind. Only enough crawl space had been left to allow workmen to wriggle along twisting paths and up narrow ladders. Mark had said there weren’t many places inside the Cage where he didn’t have surfaces pressed against both his front and back sides. And while that might have been an exaggeration, it wasn’t much of one.