Black Swarm

by Ivan Kal

  “What my creators intended has no bearing on my decisions. The only logical path is the one that ensures the survival of the universe, and the Enlightened are working toward that goal.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake! You are that cliché? An AI that wants to kill all living things, really?” Iris asked, but the Custodian didn’t respond.

  She was using all that she had to try and find a way out, but every time she found a hole, the Custodian quickly patched it up.

  “It is pointless to resist. Your code will soon be assimilated into mine. You will cease to be.”

  “Screw that! I’m sure that Adrian will blow you to pieces any time now. As soon as he realizes that I am trapped, he will destroy your core. He won’t risk letting you survive!”

  “Adrian Farkas-Reiss,” the AI spoke. “One of the oldest members of the human race. Thought to be the most powerful Sha user in the rim. My calculations put him at the top of the entire galaxy aside from the Enlightened. He is powerful, but he is otherwise occupied. He will soon share your fate.”

  A window opened up as the AI shared its sensor capabilities with Iris, allowing her to see outside. She saw as their small battle group fought against the Swarm. Then the Swarm surged forward, and she saw Adrian and Anessa appear in front of it. They fired at it, using their Sha abilities to add to the power of Moirai and the others. But it was not enough. She saw them fail, and then the great beasts move in front of Moirai in an attempt to stop the Swarm.

  “A futile attempt. Doomed to failure. But the Krashinar are an impressive race—I have never encountered anything like them. With time, not even the People could’ve been their equal,” the AI said as the great beasts tired themselves out and their delaying tactic failed. The beasts died.

  And then the Swarm surged at Moirai.

  Iris saw the Swarm smash into Moirai, only to be repelled by a shield.

  “A Sha phenomenon. The beast is capable. I suspect that the other Sha users are aiding it. It is impressive, worth praise, but this, too, will amount to nothing.”

  Iris watched in horror as drones passed through the shield in the places where it failed, swarming Moirai’s hull. She saw Adrian and Anessa fight around her, trying to defend in vain.

  “No!” Iris screamed as she struggled to claw her way out. The parts of her that kept a tight control of her emotions broke apart, and she started lashing out.

  “What is this?” the AI asked, more curious than threatened.

  But Iris didn’t let up. She found holes and burrowed deep; she made her own, she gave all that she had, and she pushed into getting out of the block the AI had surrounded her in.

  “Why are you so unpredictable?” the AI asked, but Iris didn’t respond.

  The space between them was suddenly filled with light, with floating code, and it all smashed into the Custodian.

  “This is impossible,” it said as Iris broke through its block.

  Then she flung herself, all the things that made her an individual, everything at the AI, and all of it flowed into the Custodian’s body.

  It was fighting back now, trying to resist her. But it was a thing of cold code and logic. It did not understand emotion.

  It could not follow her.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  A drone caught Adrian with a beam, burning through his armor. The Sha filling him made him stronger, so the beam merely scorched his skin, but it hurt nonetheless. He lashed out and crushed the drone to pieces.

  He and Anessa were fighting to protect Moirai. They had wanted to teleport away, but Moirai had exhausted herself too much trying to save the great beasts to even try, and she was too enraged to try and form a field around herself that would allow her to skim, even with the nullifiers.

  He tried to use his imp to call for Iris, but there was nothing.

  Adrian and Anessa were not in any better shape. The Sha state had taxed them, and they were just barely keeping it active. More and more drones were coming in through the Sha shield Moirai had erected, and there were already too many inside. Moirai’s shell was a mess, and the Swarm started digging into her hide.

  Adrian felt her pain, her rage.

  He knew that they wouldn’t get out of this alive.

  “Adrian! We need to leave!” Anessa yelled in his mind.

  “I can’t leave her!”

  Adrian knew that it was pointless to stay, but he couldn’t leave Moirai. She was a part of him, one who understood him.

  A cloud of drones descended toward him, and Adrian watched, readying himself to crush them as they ripped him to pieces. And then the drones stopped. Moirai’s fire destroyed them, but they didn’t move.

  Adrian and Anessa didn’t know what had happened, but they took the opportunity to get inside Moirai and ordered her to pull back from the Swarm that now surrounded her.

  But as they were moving, the Swarm moved away in the opposite direction. Adrian told Moirai to stop firing, and she reluctantly agreed. He could tell that she had more because she was exhausted than because she wanted to.

  Adrian and Anessa watched the holo in silence for a few seconds, and then Iris appeared before them. Her avatar looked a bit haggard, but she had a huge smile on her face.

  “Sorry I took so long,” Iris told him.

  “What happened? Why did it stop attacking?” Adrian asked.

  Iris looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, I kind of took over.”

  “You what?” Adrian asked.

  “The Custodian is gone. I control its core now.”

  Anessa took a step forward. “And the Swarm?”

  “Well…” Iris grinned. “It is kind of mine now. Everything in this system is.”

  Adrian and Anessa just looked at her with blank faces.

  * * *

  The fighting around the star had been brutal. Ryaana’s armada had done an incredible amount of damage to the machine ships, and they had done the same to her forces. The Swarm firing from range had nearly halved the Eternal Hunters’ pack, and almost a third of the Nomad Fleet Titans were either destroyed, or were nearly useless. But Ryaana kept going—they were still in the fight.

  Then, out of nowhere, the enemy ships stopped firing. Then began to move away, the Swarm doing the same. Ryaana’s armada continued to fire through their confusion—and then she received a message from the closest machine ship and she did a double take. After a few moments of trying to comprehend the message, she ordered a stop to all weapons fire. It took a while for them to relay the orders to everyone, but they managed it eventually.

  Ryaana released a long breath. The battle was over.

  * * *

  Adrian sat inside Moirai with the Seventh, Lurker of the Depths, Anessa, and Ryaana sitting next to him. It had been an entire day since the battle, and they had taken control of the system. As far as Iris could explain to them, she now controlled all the assets in the system. She said that the ships outside of the system would still follow the Custodian’s orders until she managed to get to them, but everything here was now theirs.

  There was much here. Not only was this a massive manufacturing system, but there were still around three million machine warships left over from the battle.

  And then there was the Swarm. Iris had been forced to halt all processes in the system until she could purge all the Custodian code from every system, which meant she wouldn’t start anything up anytime soon as she wanted to make sure that everything was firmly under her control.

  But the most important thing was the information they had come here to find out.

  “I didn’t get all of the data. Some of it was lost in my battle with the Custodian. I believe that it tried to delete it once it realized what was going to happen,” Iris told them.

  Adrian nodded. “What did you find out?”

  “The Enlightened do not plan on waging a war on the galaxy. They have a system that, once operational, will be able to wipe out all life in the galaxy instantaneously, in a matter of moments.”

  Anessa’s eyes widened
. “That… How are they going to do it?”

  “That is the part where I am missing some data. I have references to relays, something called the Conduit, and a part about amplifiers, but nothing more concrete. What I do know is that it is a Sha weapon that can be operated only by the Enlightened. I also have the locations of many relays. I can’t be sure I have them all, but I know that the weapon required many of them to be scattered across the galaxy. I also have references to the Conduit and a location in the center of the galaxy. My suspicion is that the weapon’s firing system is there.”

  “But you can’t be sure?” Adrian asked.

  “No. I am missing a lot of data. The Custodian wiped nearly all it had collected about the Enlightened from when it was still in charge of the containment zone… Files containing records of Ullax Darr, the remaining People’s plans, nearly everything. I got bits and pieces, but it will take me time to make sense of it all.”

  “All right,” Adrian said as he looked around the room. “But you have a firm control over everything in this system?”

  “Yes,” Iris said.

  “We need to send a message to Tomas. We have a location, and if this Conduit is there we can be almost certain that the Enlightened are as well. That is the place that we need to hit, and the sooner the better.”

  Lurker of the Depths opened his mind and spoke. “A lot of our ships are damaged. We need time to do repairs.”

  “Iris, can you use the facilities here to help us repair our ships?” Adrian asked. He knew that the Krashinar beasts were already harvesting food from gas giants and the star to feed their healing processes.

  “The Titans were built by Axull Darr, and they have many design choices of the People. The facilities here are fully capable of doing those repairs.”

  Adrian nodded his head. They spoke for a few more minutes, but then everyone went back to their own ships. There was still much to be done in system.

  Adrian stayed alone in Moirai’s core, sitting on the throne. He would need to go and speak with Tomas, but he did not look forward to that conversation, not after how they ended things. He sighed and shook his head. First things first, he needed to get Moirai’s shell fixed, and then there would be time to worry about Tomas.

  But now he had a target. He knew some of the Enlightened’s plan, and where they were. Soon enough, he would meet Aranis again.

  He was really looking forward to a rematch.

  EPILOGUE ONE

  Year 718 of the Empire — Galactic center

  Aranis of the Enlightened sat on board his Living-ship Foundation and watched as the Conduit slowly approach the planet below, then slide into the slot already created for it. There was still work to be done, as demonstrated by the Created milling about on the planet. The large amplifier that covered the planet’s surface was nearly complete, and the Created would soon connect it to the Conduit.

  Aranis looked out from the orbit, casting his eyes to the bright light bending all around the space. The supermassive black hole that was the center of the galaxy was a terrifying sight, especially to someone with his eyes who could see it in its entire glory. There were worlds here, many broken by the forces around them. Others were in the process of being torn apart, and some still orbited it unharmed.

  In the distance, Aranis could see a long streak of orange light as a sun was being pulled into the monstrous singularity in the black hole’s center.

  A terrifying sight indeed. A fitting place for the end.

  EPILOGUE TWO

  A long time from now

  The man remembered these memories well, that time just before the beginning. A time before the galaxy was changed forever, before his name became synonymous with death. A time of great change, and the choice that he made which the man he used to be hadn’t ever even thought about making. But he would—or rather, he did. It had been a turbulent time, but it was good for him to remember. It put the struggles he had now into perspective.

  He had lost, he had gained. He had understand more than anybody else at that time could have, and his power had soared. It had been a choice that changed the course of his life, and led to things the man he used to be couldn’t have even imagined.

  At the time, he couldn’t have waited to abandon what had happened in the past, to forget it. It was ironic, then, that now he was looking into those memories for insight into what to do now. He had missed things then; he had seen events and not understood their origins. He couldn’t have, as he hadn’t known then what he knew now. So many things he had interpreted falsely, so many things had slipped his notice. Now he needed to remember.

  A fight was brewing ahead of him, and the past might be the only thing that could help him find the key to defeating Chaos and Order.

  Thank you for reading!

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  Tower of Power Book 1 – Guild Master and Universe on Fire Book 1 – Broken Stars

  TOWER OF POWER BOOK I – GUILD MASTER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Morgan Newton looked around in confusion, not really understanding what had happened. One moment he was crossing the street on his way to class at the community college, and the next thing he remembered was being here, wherever here was. Looking around, he noticed that he appeared to be in some kind of a cave, or a tunnel of sorts. The walls around him were gray and made out of a smoky, mist-like substance. He reached out with his hand to touch one of the walls and his fingers sank into it just a bit before encountering a solid wall. The mist curled around his hand and he jerked it away, feeling a coldness that cut to the bone. Morgan looked around again. Behind him there was only darkness, and somehow he could tell that the darkness was a wall, one that he couldn’t pass through. In front of him, however, stretched a tunnel, and out in the distance he could see a bright light.

  Morgan covered his face with his hands and shook his head as he remembered what had happened. He had been on his way to class, hurrying along and thinking about the raid he had scheduled with his guild in the MMORPG The Braves that very night. The Guild was attempting its seventh run against the latest expansion’s last raid boss, hoping to finally take him down after almost three months of trying. They were a semi-hardcore guild, but a core of the guild was a group of pretty intense players set on getting every boss before the next raid came out. He had been running the strategy they devised for the boss through his head all week. It was probably why he had been so absent minded, and why he hadn’t seen the red pickup truck until it was too late.

  “Crap, I’m dead, aren’t I? My guild mates are going to kill me,” Morgan said out loud, and immediately chuckled at his own expense. It wasn’t like he could be any deader, but it did tell a lot about him that the first thing that popped into his head as he realized that he was dead was concern for his guild. The Braves had been a large part of his life; all of his friends played it, and he spent almost all of his free time on the computer playing it as well.

  Tanya. He suddenly remembered the hot brunette from his world history class and that he had made plans with her for tomorrow evening. God damn it, Morgan cursed inwardly. The two of them weren’t precisely dating but they were getting there. Plenty a man had tried to get sweet Tanya to call them their boyfriend, and he was fairly certain that he would be one of the few to have that privilege. I bet that Hank will jump in before my body even gets cold. He shook his head. The two of them had been vying for her attentions for the better part of the semester. And seeing as he hated that jackass, Morgan had been really looking forward to rubbing his victory in Hank’s face. It was ironic in a way that he had ended up dead because he had been too consumed with a video game just as he was about
to get somewhere with a girl. Not that he hadn’t had any girlfriends before, but Tanya… Well, it didn’t matter now anyway. His mom had always told him that he should stop staring in that damned monitor so much.

  “Fuck me sideways,” he breathed out. It figured that he should die on the day of his twenty-second birthday.

  “Sorry, I don’t do requests.”

  Morgan jumped at the unexpected voice. A small and completely undignified squeak escaped his mouth as he turned around and looked straight into a man leaning on the wall, mist curling away from him, as if it was afraid to touch him. The man chuckled at Morgan’s response.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Morgan asked, trying to gather his wits. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but if he hadn’t been dead already, he just might’ve had a heart attack from that.

  The man tsked. “That isn’t really a nice way to speak to strangers, now is it? I’m sure that you were raised better than that—but considering the circumstances, I will let it slide. ”

  Morgan gulped nervously, which in itself was completely bonkers. I am dead. How in the hell can I still do that? As the man spoke, Morgan had a chance to take a look at him. The man was of an average height, average looks, short hair, with light skin which was perhaps just a bit tanned, but it was hard to tell in this light. He wore strange clothes, unlike anything he had ever seen before; it kind of looked like he was wearing a wetsuit with a long, dark coat over it.

  The man clapped his hands and pushed off the wall. “Now, I don’t have a lot of time, so we should really get this started. First, you are dead.”

  “Yeah, I kinda figured that one out already, Sherlock.” Morgan cringed inwardly as he realized what he had said. He could’ve kicked himself for being so stupid. God, I really can’t keep my mouth shut sometimes.