The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free

head. The
newcomer gurgles in his own tongue, and I find I understand him.
    "Must I end it?"
    "No," my tormentor says. His thunderous voice
burrows through me. "Restrain it."
    Taloned hands lift me like a rag doll and throw me over a
broad shoulder, my feet dangling down the alien's back, face buried in his
chest. He carries me out into the gloomy corridor.
    I moan and lift my head to look at him. I recognize the
marks on his face. Now I understand what they are, and how he must have got
them. Even though I'm hardly breathing, a sob breaks loose. Hot tears fill my
eyes and drop on his green velvet fur.
    "Stop that." He adjusts me gently. "You
will dehydrate."
    I surrender, allowing his movements to rock me in and out
of consciousness. Until he shrugs me off and lays me on the floor of another
room. He bends down to inspect me with those small, luminescent eyes. "You
did not listen to me. Why did I lose words to a reckless creature?"
    He turns away, and leaves me alone with my misery.
    I curl into a ball, wipe my face and mouth, and stare at
the clotted blood on my hand. Stars twinkle in the darkening red, three tiny
shards of metal with hair-thin tendrils winding out of them—the three
interconnected nano meshes that used to be my synet, my colonial identity. My
painstakingly hacked ticket to independence.
    Now it's disabled and ejected. Exorcised by an alien
monster, like the rest of my mind. Ripped out.
    Replaced .

4
    Dominant Amharr paces up and down the crux of his vessel,
struggling to bring his nervous systems into alignment again. The soft but
durable structure of his command room, with its control crescent in its center,
and the master Onryss hovering near the exit wall, quivers and fails around him
as if it were a mirage.
    He balls his fists until the tendons in his multi-jointed
fingers stretch beyond their natural ability, and the nanites in his body take
over hardening his fingers into a steely grip. He could easily crush every
obstacle or enemy in sight. But this time, the opposition is inside of him.
    His skin has healed, and the wound in his neck and Phylra
gland closed almost immediately. Nonetheless, damage was done. Despite the fact
that his physical integrity is restored, it is undeniable that his identity has
somehow been violated.
    The feeling of that neophyte—that specimen of the
newly spaceborne race he is meant to assess—lingers unnaturally long. He can
still feel its erratic pulse, smell the organic residues staining his hands,
taste its blood and saliva on his tendrils. He crawls with revulsion.
    The creature's brain was chaos. Worse, its memories mixed
with his own. He is filled with confusion. Pacing doesn't calm him. His senses
run amok regardless of his attempts to reassert control.
    It will fade , he reassures himself. But he knows
it's a lie. Something like this doesn't heal.
    His three interlinked nervous systems approach overload,
overexciting his nanites and making his skin glow faintly blue. The back of his
neck prickles and stings, until the mounting energy reaches a tipping point and
discharges through his nerves and the soles of his feet into the receptive
floor.
    He waits for the calm fatigue that usually comes after he
fuels the vessel with his energy. It doesn't come. He's still on edge. Still
feels that abhorrent creature inside him. It stabbed him just as he was
investigating its memories, trying to understand its motives and nature. When
that horrid mandible pierced into his Phylra gland, it flooded his body—and
through his tendrils, the neophyte's as well—with paired, ultra-sensitive
Phylra particles. It happened precisely as his nervous systems were mirroring
the neophyte's, and the ignorant creature likely caught a glimpse of his mind
as a result.
    How is it even possible? High Emranti are engineered to be
safe from this. They've long evolved beyond such primitive bonds and feral
responses.
    Amharr presses his fingertips against the radices in his
palms. Bitter