The Alpha-vessel had warped out, and the Alpha-vessel was the most dangerous opponent of all.
It wasn’t that Ponos-Alpha hadn’t rationalized why the Alpha-vessel had left. The machine intelligence had, after all, been the one to help send the crew of the Mercury Blade to Esther to dismantle or destroy the warp gate that was fueling the Valyien’s connection to this dimension. The mecha inside the OEC knew that as soon as the Alpha-vessel realized what Captain Eliard and the others were doing, it would attempt to stop them…
But now what? That was what made Ponos-Omega confused, distracted, and disturbed. Had Captain Eliard Martin and the others succeeded? The mecha didn’t know. None of his scans or sensors revealed any data information coming out of Esther at all. And even if they had succeeded, what did that mean the Armcore forces attacking the station would do next?
No, the Ponos-Omega intelligence didn’t know what was happening, or whether Eliard had succeeded or failed.
And that made the strange hybrid intelligence not merely confused or disturbed…but scared.
3
Eliard, a Strange New Land
Something grabbed me…
Captain Eliard Martin screamed, and his voice fractured into a thousand sonic beats and tones, dizzyingly complex and varied, and completely, utterly, drekk-crazy…
He flailed his limbs, but it was like moving in a dream, where he couldn’t feel what he was doing or whether they were responding to his thoughts or not, but that they were there anyway…he hoped.
Colors washed against his eyes. At first, the captain had been blinded by the milky-white glare that had been emanating from the Valyien warp gate, but then the colors shifted, becoming a kaleidoscope of purple, yellow, crimson, green and blue, as well as many colors that his normal human eyes had no name for.
Something grabbed me, and I fell into the warp gate…
The thoughts were coming back to him as he struggled and fought, just like waking up groggily and having the tiny elements of sanity remerge. Somehow, everything that had happened before this swirling color-scape, here and now, felt like a blur.
How long have I been in here? He opened his mouth to scream. Had it really only been a few seconds? Or was it a few lifetimes? Time meant nothing here, and Eliard had no way of knowing if he had fallen just through the warp gate to the other side of the dais or whether he had in fact found a crack in the fabric of the universe and was even now falling between dimensions.
Something grabbed…
What had it been? One of Alpha’s spider-drones? The image swam into his mind of the thing’s metallic chitin as it filled his vision—
But then, where is it now? He looked around himself in the veils, unsure of what was happening. The colors were changing, swirling; they were physical things, like gases or liquids, although he didn’t feel wet. When he brought what he thought to be his own arm in front of him, it appeared misty and blurred, but it also was not attached to the spider-drone…
Where did it go? Where am I going?
“…!” The colors rippled, and some sort of awareness spiked through Eliard that danger was coming. He didn’t know how he knew, but he saw the colors shift from pastel to darker, uglier shades of purple and red as an indistinct, blurry shape moved towards him…
“…!!” It was the spider-drone, suddenly screaming out of the void as if flung at him, its whip-like prehensile talons reaching for him.
Gah! Eliard raised the Device that completely enclosed his lower right arm from the elbow to beyond his fingers. The Device had been his constant companion on this crazy adventure—a piece of experimental Armcore technology that the old Ponos had sent Eliard to receive, believing it to hold the key to defeating Alpha.
The Device shivered and twitched on his arm, its scales sliding out and interlocking until it turned into a long spike of bone and shell-like horn—
WHUMPF!
—that the spider-drone impaled itself on as the hardened scale pierced metal and plate as easily as cardboard.
That was the evolutionary advantage of this weapon, Eliard reasoned as he was thrown back by the impact, head over heels. The Device was a piece of Q’Lot virus that had been modified by Armcore at the genetic level to act as a virus in the human body, allowing it to adapt and mutate to any threat.
Well, it worked here… Eliard thought as he felt the heat hitting his face from the spider-drone’s sizzling circuits, just inches away from his own body. But the Device had seemed ineffectual and pathetic when Eliard had faced the war cruiser-sized Alpha-vessel. And it was appearing to tax his own body every time he used it, as the virus fed off his body’s essential nutrients.
And why in the holy names of all the stars isn’t it adapting to get me out of this…here…whatever it is that I am stuck within!? The captain tried to raise his hand to kick and shove at the metal body impaled on his arm as he turned over and over through the surreal void.
Whump.
Something was happening. The captain felt a tremor go through his entire body like an electric shock. It had to be this void. It was doing something to him…but what?
Whump. Another of the shocks, although he was sure that nothing had touched him, and the captain saw that whatever the strange attack was, it was also affecting the impaled body of the drone as well.
It was disintegrating.
What!? Eliard flapped and rolled as he saw that yes, the very edges of the stilled robot drone had started to wisp away as if the entire thing was only made of dust, or that it was a sand sculpture being mauled by the wind.
Whump.
What…is that? Could that be happening to…me? Eliard couldn’t feel his body, only the near electric shocks that kept hitting him. It must be this carcass… He redoubled his efforts to kick it from his arm, finding it comparatively easy as his foot passed almost straight through the lower mechanical sections, all of the metal giving way to dust and a silver, simmering grit as if the spider-drone had possessed no substance whatsoever.
Am I dreaming? Hallucinating this? the captain thought. It felt like a dream, and he was sure that he had heard of toxic hallucinations happening when someone was subjected to warp plasma.
Well, actually, I’ve heard of the warp plasma having an anti-matter reaction with matter and creating a localized thermo-nuclear blast, Eliard thought as he did suddenly feel something else in his body.
A crippling, terrible nausea, and then pain.
Whump.
It was a low-level pain at first, like a tattoo or a sunburn or a sprain… And it was happening everywhere, all over his body all at once. Eliard raised his other, still-human hand to his face to see that his worst fears had indeed become realized…
His fingers were wisping at their edges and becoming even more indistinct than they had been in this field of light and color.
I’m going to fade away to nothing. Just atoms or subatomic particles on the stellar winds… Eliard was panicking, trying to swim and kick with limbs that were gradually becoming more insubstantial with every passing heartbeat.
I have to get back to where the edge of the field is… He was certain that he had less foot than he’d had a few moments ago to use to propel himself through this nightmare.
Something grabbed me, and I fell into the warp gate… his addled brain repeated endlessly as Eliard tried to think. Didn’t that mean that there was a way back, too? That he might be just stuck atop that dais, but that somewhere, somehow, there was an edge that he could throw himself through?
It was a very slim and cold comfort, but it was all that Eliard could hope for as he struggled and flailed while more bits of him started to fragment in this surreal void, wisps streaming from the back of his head and his heels, his shoulders and his back.
What would happen when he got out of there? Would it be like an injury, the elements of him scoured to the bone by the plasma? He didn’t know because he could only feel the-
Whump
And the rising sense of nausea and burning p
ain.
Or would all of his extremities just cease to exist in any reasonable way at all? Eliard wondered if he would ever be able to fly again, see again, or even walk again if he ever got out.
Whump.
This time, the shock that shook through him was like a kick to the gut, and he doubled over in pain as he rolled through the plasma field. His eyes were burning, and he wasn’t sure how much he could take.
I just want to go home, he cried out in silent anguish. I don’t want to be here. Please, just take me home!
Whump.
The colors went out, and the pain stopped.
Eliard coughed and gasped, his mouth feeling dry but undoubtedly feeling physical. “Ca…Cah…Cassie?” Eliard croaked, thinking of the blonde House Archival agent whom he had let down already many times since knowing her.
Everything ached, but not in that electric way or the rising burn of whatever the warp field had done to him. He was lying on a stone floor, his body shivering and cold.
Is this Esther? The captain coughed and spat onto the floor, trying to blink open his aching eyes.
It was dark in here, almost pitch black save for a glow at the distant end. The captain wondered if he was still in the ziggurat and where, if so, were the steps that should lead him down to the main room? And where were Cassie and the others? Where was the Mercury Blade?
“If you’ve gone and abandoned me here, you drekkers…” he wheezed, managing to push himself up at least to his knees and into a crouch.
For one thing, he wasn’t on the top of a dais at all. This room was flat.
It was also not entirely featureless. The captain saw strange whorls and swirls on the floor that hurt his eyes to look at, as if they were moving when he knew that couldn’t be the case. Smaller, tight, ugly little marks like runes struck out here and there on their own rambling inscriptions at odd intersections of the whirling patterns.
Those runes… He knew what they were. He had seen them before, he was sure of it.
On the warp pillars of the gate at Esther. Yes, that’s it. Eliard’s frazzled mind tried to remember. He had been so close to them as he had fired the Device at one of them that he had a chance to see the same whorls, loops, engravings, and jagged-edge runes here and there across the black stone.
This had to be some sort of Valyien writing, he thought. I must be somewhere on Esther… He wondered if that was what the warp gates did: that they could act as jump gates too? Just like ship’s own warp engine used warp plasma to create a miniature wormhole through spacetime to connect two different points.
I need to get back to them! Alarm ran through Eliard. He had failed to destroy the warp gate, clearly, since he managed to use it to jump here—wherever here was—and so that meant that somewhere outside, hopefully nearby, Cassie Milan, Irie, and the other not-so-human two would be still battling the spider-drones. He had to get to them.
The captain stumbled to booted feet that were, thankfully, apparently unscathed by the strange disintegrating effect that he’d been certain had been wrecking his body. His hand also appeared to be unscathed, and when he patted down his body, every part appeared to be in the right place.
“What I saw in there must have just been a hallucination,” he croaked to himself as he started to lurch towards one corner of the cavern that appeared a little lighter than the others, fully expecting to see a tunnel or a chink of light falling between two Valyien-constructed boulders…
Firming up his certainty that the experience had all been a dream, Eliard saw that there was no body of the spider-drone anywhere nearby him as he lurched. Surely it would have come through the warp gate with me, if it had been there?
The patch of light up ahead grayed and lightened as he stumbled closer to it. The captain’s body still ached, and he wondered what the exposure to a stable warp field had done to his insides. Had the Device—whose job it was to adapt, after all—protected him? It didn’t feel like it.
It was a tunnel, worn and smooth in the rock, curving gently upwards before turning a corner and abruptly coming to an end. What?
The way was blocked by lots and lots of collapsed blocks, some spilling out onto the floor and looking as though they had been there a long time. But some of the joins between the blocks weren’t sealed and allowed light to filter through in shafts speckled with motes of dust.
Light, real, good honest light. The captain almost swore that he could taste some fresh air coming through the boulder pile as well, which his wearied body wanted to drink if it could, like a thirsty man craves water.
Moving awkwardly, he leaned against the boulders and tentatively pushed with his one good hand and the snubbed end of the Device that was his other. There was a grating sound and a crunch, and a small chink of light grew wider, but it wasn’t enough.
“Well, I haven’t gone through all of this just to end up starving to death in some desert pyramid!” Eliard said, heaving again at the boulders.
Another crunching sound, but nothing else moved. The boulders were too large for him. But luckily, Eliard still had a variety of weapons about his person, including his two side-holstered pistols and of course…
The Device.
“C’mon, don’t fail me now…” He took a step back and raised the Device at the wall. He didn’t know what the Device would do, or how it would react to the current threat. He never knew what the Device was going to do and could only tentatively suggest to it to make a gun or a blade or a…
Pickaxe?
A sickly, nauseous feeling spread through his body as he felt the Device morph in front of him, the thin light revealing his arm reconfiguring itself as blue scales slid and lengthened, grew and contracted, before it had finally reached its final form.
“Agh…!” Eliard wheezed, his chest pounding as the Device sapped away vital nutrients that his body probably needed for a thousand other tasks, like breathing.
But now, he did indeed have a tool to dismantle the wall. His right arm had lengthened into a rod of blue compressed-scale bone that ended in something like a harpoon’s head of gleaming bone metal. The captain saw immediately that he could use the ‘point’ of the arrow as a pike to wedge into the holes and cracks between the rocks, whilst the flaring, toothed edges would work to wiggle and hook at the rocks to pull them apart.
Taking a deep breath, the captain started to attack the boulder wall where the chinks of light were the largest. He jabbed and poked, levered, and braced his legs against the walls to heave and pull until—
Ka-Thunk! Two of the settled rocks slid backwards into the light, creating an alarming judder through the rest of the wall and a plume of rock dust that eventually settled, and now Eliard was looking at a broad swathe of a weak sort of light coming through to the other side. Thank the stars! Poking his head through, the captain saw that on the other side was a simple passageway, and one that had obviously been created by intelligent hands. There were gray flagstones on the floor, and the walls were similarly constructed of sturdy blockwork. It seemed that this passageway ended here and turned at one end as it rose on heavy steps.
It almost looked familiar, the captain thought as he squirmed though the hole and fell to the other side, gasping for breath. He lay there for a moment, allowing the fresher air to fill his lungs. It wasn’t dry and dusty as he had thought that the desert world of Esther had been, but was instead almost sweet, and sharp with the tang of something like salt.
I guess there must be an underground water source nearby… the captain reasoned as he pushed himself up to his feet to follow the passageway up the steps. The thought of the nearby water gave him impetus and even made him forget his bone-weariness a little. It would good to plunge his head into that water, clearing it so he could work out where Cassie and the others were.
And the Alpha spider-drones… Eliard remembered with a spike of shame. He didn’t have time to be tired. He took the steps two at a time, turning as they curled around in a tight spiral once more. A rectangular doorway opening appea
red at the end of the stairs above him, bright and glaring with light.
Something pricked at his memory, insistent and annoying, but the captain ignored it.
The final doorway appeared a little odd to his eyes. The blocks there were complicated and there were strips of metal still attached to them where another original door had been. Eliard shook his head and blinked against the glare of unaccustomed light as he ignored the very Coalition-looking door and stepped out into the brighter light of the room beyond—
To find himself walking into a room that he knew well. Very well.
This was the atrium to the Martin Palace, precisely where he had grown up.
4
Cassie, master/slave
“Just so long as you don’t make any sudden moves…” Irie hissed under her breath as she made a show of fiddling with her boots on the dais.
“If this gets me shot…” Cassie grumbled as she put her hand over the small device that Irie had surreptitiously palmed to the agent’s ankle.
“It won’t. I promise. Kinda.”
“Kinda?” Cassie made a face as she straightened back up, slipping the small rectangle of metal tubing, brass-plated at one end, under the inside of her wrist. “What does it do?”
“Low-range frequency disruption…” Irie muttered. “We might be able to…”
Cassie nodded that she understood, not wanting whatever sensitive sensors that the Alpha spider-drones might have to pick up their intentions.
Given the logic that Alpha wanted them alive, it was Irie’s assertion that the spider-drones wouldn’t do anything to harm them from now on. Which meant that they had a bit more freedom to move, talk, and plan.
And this is Irie’s answer to our plight… Cassandra didn’t move her head but cast her eyes down as if depressed at their confinement to look at the small device against her arm. It appeared to be just a couple of metal tubes, one much larger than the other, attached in a small housing unit with wires moving between the ends, brass caps, and just one plastic-formed red button.
A I Apocalypse Page 2