Granted, Cassie and Irie had both been—miraculously—granted another chance at life, and he was going to do everything he could to ensure that the Val Pathok of the past didn’t have to die, but it still made Eliard’s blood boil. He had helped put them through all of that suffering, and all that each of them had ever wanted was to do their job.
Maybe this is what my father was always telling me, about noble responsibility, Eliard thought as he strode through the open archways of the Martin Palace, heading for that secretive little door off the main atrium.
I have been such a fool, all my life, Eliard thought as he strode past the place where he would run around, playing with toys of space fighters, or the place where he would stare out of the elaborate windows long into the night, trying to name all the stars.
No. Not a fool. Eliard paused by the window, feeling once again just an echo of the wonder that he had felt. He felt changed, different somehow. Like he could both accept the child he had been and even agree with his father.
He had run away from this place because of his father’s harsh strictures and rules, and lectures about responsibility. He had to run away, Eliard now accepted. He would never have lived a happy life as some milky noble overseer, or even as a captain in his father’s air fleet.
He was born for that wonder he had felt, but he had gone about getting it in all of the wrong ways.
Everyone was right about me in that respect, at least. Eliard abandoned the window and kept on his steady march. He had been reckless, and young, and self-obsessed. He had only cared about making a name for himself, and only later had come to care about his crew.
But now? From the vantage point of the future? Eliard could see what his father had been trying to drill into him: that we all have a duty to each other, and that any man or woman can only be as good as the crew—or friends—that they have around them. That was why the noble coalition was what it was—corrupt and bureaucratic and dull, yes, but in its best of moments, it was about people standing up to protect their families and friends.
Eliard found the bust-open archway and slipped inside, moving down the narrow steps that led to the deserted underbelly of the palace. His black synth-leather boots crunched along the hall as he found the broken-open entrance to the hidden Valyien gate.
All I have to do is work out how to get this thing operational, he thought as soon as he had crawled through the tunnel, to find, a little surprisingly, that it already was.
“Huh?” He paused, watching the milky-white play of light and energy in the air above the inscribed circle. Once again, he could see the strange inscriptions and runes that seemed to dance and hurt his eyes as he looked at them. There didn’t appear to be any mechanical or other devices to generate the stable warp field, and yet nonetheless, it was still there—a floating cloud of light.
Eliard walked up to the edge of the circle and stared hard at the stable warp field— the thing that shouldn’t even exist yet somehow did.
How am I going to tell it to take me back? He had no idea.
How am I going to tell it where to take me? He still had no idea.
The captain tried to think back to his initial travel through the warp, unaided by a navigational computer or spacecraft around him.
He had fallen in, for one thing. Or pushed… He had been pushed through the warp gate by one of the spider-drones, and he had fought it there in the deeps of warp space, or between-space, or wherever it was. He had thought that he was dying. No, he was sure that he was dying.
And the pain and the confusion had made him yearn just to be home.
Branton and the Martin Palace was home, Eliard realized. Or it was a home, anyway. Would his next journey be so simple as just stepping inside and thinking the words ‘take me back’? Somehow, Eliard was almost certain that it would be more complicated than that. It had to be, didn’t it?
When he had wanted to be anywhere but inside that crushing pain, he had yearned to be home, but he had meant the Mercury Blade of course, surrounded by his friends. Instead, he had been transported ten years into the future to his childhood home, but with what remained of his friends.
In one of those intuitive leaps that made Eliard the Dread Pirate Captain El, he realized that perhaps there was some sort of logic to using the warp gate.
“It is a little like using warp coordinates,” he whispered. The warp gate had taken him to the next available place that was both homes for him: the Martin Palace on Branton, and his sole remaining friend, Val Pathok. What were the chances of Val arriving here on Branton at the same time he managed to jump in?
The Valyien have been planning this for a long time. He remembered what he had realized about the warp gates. He knew that the strange minds that had built them didn’t think like his own. They weren’t human in the slightest.
“If the Valyien knew that it was possible to travel both forward and backward through time as well as across distances by using warp travel…” Eliard reasoned out loud, “then they must have thought about time and space in radically different ways.” Their technology, like these gates, thought about time and space in different ways.
“The gate must sort of pick out what you mean and try to match it up to the best possible coordinates,” he continued. Like it read your mind… Was that even possible?
Anything is possible with the fourth-dimensional ancient Valyien, he thought.
Which left Eliard with only question left to answer before he stepped into the warp, of his own free will—and with all available human science telling him that he would only burn himself up in an instant—and that was: where did he want to go?
Eliard thought about the moon of Tritho, and the moon where he and his crew members had first seen Alpha. “I can think about that, for sure…” But he would have to go back to before Armcore had raised Alpha, wouldn’t he? And do what? Shoot a hole straight through the Armcore computers?
I can do that, but…
Wouldn’t Armcore just do it all again? And who was to say that the next possible Alpha wasn’t even more powerful than this one had been?
“And there is Ponos, too, to destroy…” Eliard thought of what future-Val had told him about the new Ponos-Omega, and what it had become as soon as it had defeated and eaten Alpha.
“Back to Epsilon G3-ov, then…” he considered. Where the ECN, the prototype of Alpha, had been made. He could certainly go back and destroy that before it even started to develop.
But the Valyien would still be out there in that ab-universe, just waiting for a time to get in… Eliard knew, and now he had to consider the fact that he knew about the galaxy-spanning network of active warp gates that presumably the Valyien would one day step through again…
He had to go back further. He had to go back to a time when he could destroy the warp gates entirely, and thus destroy any possibility of the ECN or Alpha coming into existence.
Eliard hesitated for just a moment. That would be a one-way trip, he knew. He would never be able to travel back from there if he destroyed the network of warp gates, would he? He would never be able to fly the Mercury Blade again. He would never see Irie or Val again.
He would never see Cassie again.
The corners of eyes crinkled as he frowned. Was this what his father had always meant about the responsibility of a noble? To do the right thing, even if it meant throwing away every friend and good thing you ever had?
Eliard took a deep breath and straightened his much disheveled, burnt, torn, and scratched black captain’s jacket. And then stepped into the warp field, and dissolved…
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading A.I. Apocalypse, the eighth story in the Valyien series. I am happy you took the chance to read it and I really hope you liked it. If you could leave a review for me, that would be awesome because it helps me tell others about my books.
Things are really getting crazy for Eliard and the Mercury Blade crew, aren’t they. The next (and last) story in the series is gonna be a doozie. It
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A I Apocalypse Page 13