Inversion (Riven Worlds Book Two)

by G. S. Jennsen

  “We don’t have time to parse every single file through the Reor strings. I’m brute-forcing this.” She jogged over to the wall that protected the bridge server and internal systems hub, where she took out her plasma blade, activated it and cut a half-meter square out of the wall, then wiggled it out and set it on the floor.

  “Done this before, have you?”

  She shot her dad a smug look over her shoulder. “Not this exactly, but yes.” She paused and glanced back again. “Watch this.”

  She turned to the open square and studied the interior. An intricate matrix consisting of hyperfine traces of darkness divided the light in a rigid, ordered pattern. Deeper, the circuits fed into stacked slabs of Reor. The Anadens were nothing if not set in their ways. She plunged her left hand inside.

  “Milaya….”

  “It’s fine.” Her voice came out tense from concentration, and also because her whole body had just absorbed a nasty wallop of both data and electricity, but in her world this counted as fine. “Valkyrie, go to town.”

  ‘Going to town.’

  Alex removed her hand, mercifully free of singe marks, and returned to the overlook as a steady stream of legitimately useful data began scrolling up the control panel. Power systems and atmospherics, nominal. Engine status…nominal. Most excellent.

  ‘I have control of the bridge.’

  “Yes, you do.” Her fingers flew across the control panel. “We’re in luck. Since the ship is officially undergoing maintenance and repair, it’s hooked into the station’s network. I’m tunneling through the network to the automated station systems. The last thing we want to do is get into an argument with a Machim ela supervisor entertaining delusions of promotion.” She raised her hands in triumph. “Aha! As I thought. The core Concord infrastructure is intact. Dad, if you would do the honors?”

  Her father appeared at her side to study the blinking cursor.

  Authorization required for undocking request:

  He scratched at his head, sighed and punched in a complicated string of letters, numbers and symbols.

  The floor shifted smoothly beneath her feet. “Valkyrie, confirm the clamps have released.”

  ‘Confirmed.’

  “Terrific. Start up the engines and ease us away from the station.”

  The station began receding in the viewport, revealing a suitable tableau of stars beyond it. “Take it slow. No need to draw unnecessary attention to us—”

  Dry Dock 9 Security to CCOV-14C88V: “Your departure is not authorized. Cease all activities immediately and allow a Security squad to escort you back into dock.”

  She groaned. “I knew this was too easy.”

  “I thought you said we weren’t taking the ship into battle?”

  “Very funny. Valkyrie, how long until we can superluminal out of here?”

  ‘Fifty-two seconds.’

  “That’s too long—” Something slammed into the hull, and the bridge canted fifty degrees to port. She grabbed for the railing too late; her fingers slipped across the slick metal as she landed hard on her shoulder and skidded head-first into the far wall.

  Her father was at her side the next second. “Alex!”

  “I’m all right.” She let him help her to her feet, wincing as she worked her shoulder around. It wasn’t dislocated, but owww. “Valkyrie, get that vaunted shielding operational. Dad—” she waved her good arm toward the weapons station “—start shooting at things.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” He studied her for another beat, gaze brimming with parental concern, then pivoted and hurried to the weapons station.

  By the time she reached the overlook and had strapped into the chair, belatedly, he was muttering half-formed phrases as his hands flew over the controls.

  A wide cadmium-hued beam shot out from beneath the viewport and slammed into the broadside of the station. Cracks spread out from the point of impact in an expanding web, and faint wisps of atmosphere seeped out into space. “Damn, this is a powerful weapon. I might recommend stealing more than the shield tech.”

  “I say we take whatever the hell we want.” A second blast knocked the ship hard to starboard, but the restraints held her in place this time. “Valkyrie….”

  ‘A moment…shield operational.’

  A prismatic shimmer rippled across the viewport, and Alex’s shoulders sagged in relief—first that they wouldn’t shortly be blown to bits, and more generally at the confirmation the Imperium’s shielding was functional and this little adventure hadn’t been an exercise in futility.

  Beyond the shimmer, two missiles swept in and shattered against the force field. The bridge didn’t so much as vibrate. There was a reason why they needed the shielding.

  “Taking out the defense drones, which almost seems like a waste of one impressive weapon.” David glanced over his shoulder to wink at her. “Almost.”

  He was amazing on the bridge of a ship, just as she’d always suspected. She understood the many reasons why he’d never returned to active service, but it was the military’s loss.

  ‘Ready to engage the superluminal drive in five seconds.’

  She slid the control panel closer and punched in destination coordinates. “Take your last shots, Dad, then we are in the wind.”

  ‘Engaging.’

  The damaged station and an incoming swarm of fighters blurred away and vanished beyond the superluminal bubble.

  CONCORD HQ

  Kennedy dragged into Connova Interstellar’s satellite office at Concord HQ still rubbing at bleary eyes. She’d been here at the office until well after midnight the night before, then had arrived home to find Jonas and Noah camped out in the lavatory, Jonas vomiting up pink gunk because he’d eaten a Dankath ‘delicacy’ while at the market. His starter eVi insisted a visit to a hospital was not required, merely a lot more vomiting to fully eject the unwanted substance.

  Braelyn was gleefully taunting her brother’s misery from the open lavatory door, so after a soulful plea from Noah, Kennedy had scooped Braelyn up and carried her off to bed, then fallen asleep curled up next to her daughter.

  And now she was here at the office once again, as ready as she was capable of being to spend this day, like the last several days, trying to accomplish the impossible. Untold lives depended on her finding a way, so she needed to inhale another cup of coffee before—

  Hey, I brought you a present.

  Alex? What?

  Look out your viewport.

  Too tired to ask why, she went to the viewport and peered out—then almost screamed in surprise. Hovering above the daisy chain of ships docked closest to her office was a Machim Imperium. No alarms were pealing through the halls of Concord HQ, which suggested Security wasn’t deeming the vessel an immediate threat, which suggested…. Wariness gave way to resurgent hope.

  Are you on board the Imperium?

  Yep. Where do you want me to park it?

  Kennedy met Alex—and David, it turned out—at the airlock of the Imperium, which she’d directed to the closest open docking port to her office. She laughed when she saw them together. “Did you two have a fun daddy-daughter date?”

  “If getting shot at by station defenses is fun?”

  David nudged Alex in the side. “Come now, milaya. We had a smidge of fun, no?”

  Alex rolled her eyes. “We did. How could stealing an Imperium out from under the Machims’ noses not be fun?” She laid a hand on Kennedy’s shoulder. “You understand what this means, right? Get inside this ship and figure out how the double shielding operates once and for all. If you can’t replicate its functionality in less than a day, rip the modules out of this ship and install them on Mom’s new one, but make it work.”

  Kennedy nodded eagerly, all thoughts of sleep deprivation vanishing beneath the excitement of finally wrestling this beast to the mat. “Oh, I will. Count on it.”

  PART III

  THE TIES THAT BIND

  ASTERION DOMINION

  35

  * * *r />
  NAMINO

  Camp Burrow

  They sat in a semi-circle on the floor near the center of the bunker, with new cam feeds from the roving drones hovering in the center.

  Caleb silently considered those assembled, for he was still trying to get a proper read on the players. Marlee sat beside him, practically vibrating with eagerness and enthusiasm at whatever they were about to learn. Beside her sat Selene, the no-nonsense cop, then Joaquim, the rebel with a renewed cause and more than one rough edge. Ava, the walking weapon with attitude; Xyche’ghael, the reticent and reserved Taiyok; Rogers, the soldier out of his depth; Grant, the…Caleb wasn’t certain how to characterize him. A good-hearted man in search of purpose, maybe? But if his planet being invaded by rapacious aliens didn’t provide him with sufficient purpose, then nothing would.

  The leaders of the group had welcomed him into their midst with the intensity of the desperate. Most of those trapped here weren’t fighters, which meant he represented a weapon they could use. They’d quickly armed him with additional archine blades and one of their Glasers, an electricity-based gun not dissimilar to Alex’s conductivity lash, modified to target and disrupt Rasu electrical signals.

  In his heart, he wanted to dissuade them from their notions about his nature, but it would be a lie. The harrowing journey across the city to reach the bunker had stripped away the last soft, comforting layers of Akeso’s peace and tranquility, leaving the raw nerves beneath exposed. If he stayed here much longer, there might be nothing left of him except the weapon.

  But Marlee needed him to stay. And she wasn’t wrong; these people needed him, too. The old him, the man who excelled at killing without hesitation to protect others.

  Three virtual screens flickered to life—apparently they’d lost one drone to the Rasu—to display live feeds from various parts of the city.

  It took only seconds to classify the scenes relayed by the drones as uniformly devastating. People being rounded up, herded into cages and ferried into the sky. A massive Rasu compound expanding in height and breadth on the outskirts of the city. The few structures of any size that still stood being ransacked and pillaged before being reduced to rubble. Three Rasu leviathans, dozens of cruiser-sized ships and a host of smaller vessels watching and directing it all from the sky.

  “Well, shit. Things have not gotten any better.”

  “That’s not a helpful attitude, Lacese.”

  Joaquim scowled at Selene. “No? How would you characterize what’s happening outside?”

  “I only mean…if you’re going to be fatalistic, at least keep your voice down. We have to keep spirits up in here.”

  “With what?”

  “With—”

  Grant interrupted their bickering. “Hey, wait! On the third screen—that’s near here, isn’t it?”

  Joaquim shot Selene another withering glare before checking the small virtual panel in front of him. “About six blocks away. Why?”

  “Because I just saw people. Three, or maybe four, stumbling into here.” Grant pointed at the blown-out windows of a corner business. A restaurant, perhaps, or a shop, once upon a time. “Rewind it.”

  “This is a live feed.”

  “Are you telling me you’re not recording it?”

  “I am, but I’ll have to pull it up separately.” Joaquim entered several commands on his panel. The third screen flickered, then again displayed the feed from a few seconds earlier. Sure enough, several shadows scurried around the corner and climbed through the broken storefront windows.

  Selene nodded sharply. “Good eye, Grant. We need to go retrieve them if we can. Lacese, Ava, Rogers….” She shot Caleb an arched eyebrow.

  “I’ll go. And…” he checked beside him to see Marlee had already stood and was latching one of the archine blades to her pants “…so will she.”

  “Thank you. Everyone gear up. We leave in five.”

  Caleb stood and placed a hand on Marlee’s arm. “You stay behind me, do you understand? And if we see any Rasu, you run all the way back here to the bunker.”

  Her face screwed up at him, so like the way it had when she was a little girl and he’d said something silly. “What would be the point of me coming on the mission if I ran away at the first sign of trouble?”

  “The point of keeping you alive.”

  Her lips quirked around in defiance as she stared at him, unflinching.

  Dammit. “Just stay behind me.”

  Namino One

  The voluminous dust and debris generated by the Rasu’s bombing out of the city had settled into a persistent low cloud layer, turning everything a charred gray in color. It was dusk going on night, as near as Caleb could determine, and the shadows were long.

  He let Selene and Joaquim take the lead. They knew the neighborhood far better than he did, and they both seemed to be capable warriors, even if they approached the world in vastly different ways.

  His skin prickled painfully. Nerves on edge, straining to act yet recoiling at the psychological pain they knew would inevitably follow. His arm still hurt, as the wound was annoyingly reluctant to stitch itself together. But his eVi retained enough functionality for him to load the Rasu-specific signature as a visual filter, and he focused on detecting movement cast against the dusty fog and monochrome environment.

  Marlee’s hand touched the small of his back, and he flinched more overtly than he meant to.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No, and I won’t be all right until we are safely back underground.”

  She didn’t snap a retort, instead scanning the street ahead. Good.

  Thanks to the quantum block, none of them had any way to communicate except verbally, which made their progress slower, not to mention more dangerous.

  At the next intersection, Selene waved everyone ahead, and they dashed across the street. When they reached the block where the survivors had been spotted, she crept forward, flattened against the building and peeked into the blown-out windows—

  —laser fire shot out from the interior. She jumped away, then risked raising her voice. “Friendlies! Cease fire!”

  A voice answered from the darkness. “Sorry!”

  She turned and indicated for them to advance. “We’re coming inside now.”

  Selene entered with her hands high in the air. Joaquim did the same behind her, though Caleb noted he had a grenade cupped in one of his hands. “Is everyone all right?”

  “Joaquim? My man…you are a sight….”

  Joaquim scrambled over to the source of the comment. A man lay sprawled on the floor, both hands clutching a bloodied and bandaged leg. “Parc? The hells are you doing here?”

  “Nothing good, for certain.”

  “You’re hurt.”

  “Yeah. These people—” the man gestured weakly to a couple talking in anxious whispers to Selene “—found me a couple of hours ago. I told them there was a bunker nearby, then promptly fainted before I could share the directions. A lot of good that did. Woke up in time to stumble in here when some Rasu passed nearby.”

  “We’re from the bunker. You were almost there.”

  “Yay me….” The man’s voice trailed off, and his head dropped to his chest.

  “Ava, get over here and help me carry him. We need to get him to the bunker before he bleeds out.”

  Selene whipped around toward Joaquim. “Wait. We all move together.”

  “Then we all move now.”

  “In ten seconds. We need to check the perimeter first.”

  This sounded like a job for him. Caleb started to return to the street, then searched around in a sudden panic. Where was Marlee?

  He spotted her stepping through the blown-out window, weapon at the ready. Checking the perimeter. He sighed, recognizing she was far too much like him for her own good, or his. He moved to join her—

  —a menacing shadow lurched off the sidewalk to cross the street, its caster a bipedal Rasu easily three meters in height. Time careened to a stop as the
Rasu veered toward them. Caleb sprinted forward, both hands grasping for his blades.

  “Wait!” Marlee planted her feet and stood directly in the Rasu’s path. “We don’t have to kill one another. We can learn from each other, if only we understood what you want from us.”

  The Rasu halted, and a low, screeching sound emanated from it. Caleb’s translator deciphered the shrill sound waves while he moved.

  “To give up your secrets, then die.”

  The Rasu pointed an arm toward Marlee, and the metal comprising it slipped and slid and transformed into a gun—

  —Caleb flanked the Rasu, dropped one arm low and raised the other, and scissor-cut the weaponized arm off with dual slices of the archine blades.

  The Rasu jerked its body toward him, its other arm swinging. He dropped into a crouch as the arm swept above him, brought both hands tight together and yanked upward through the center of the alien’s body. The archine blades cut through the metal like butter, splitting the creature in half.

  He kicked one half as hard as he could, sending it skittering down the street, then spun toward the half that teetered off balance but remained standing. He grabbed the stub of an arm with one hand and cut diagonally through what approximated a shoulder, down and out through the severed torso. The motion tore open the wound in his arm, but he filed the surge of pain away for later.

  The Rasu’s head and neck toppled to land at his feet, and he hurled the mass of metal down the street in the opposite direction from the other half—

  —sprouting limbs stretched out from the torso and leg that remained to claw insidiously at him. He slashed blindly, a whirlwind of finely honed blades slicing through every appendage and sending chunks of Rasu flying through the air like confetti. The grasping limbs finally stopped moving, and the last disparate pieces fell to the ground…and as soon as they landed, melted into pools and began slithering toward one another. Christ, were the Rasu truly unkillable?