by A. S. Deller
In Engineering, Falken and her crew sprang into action, smoothly activating controls on their holo screens. “All systems optimal,” Falken said.
“Captain, we have EM shields operating at double power and efficiency. All weapons are ready to go as needed,” Weller announced.
Attached to the side of the Malign cruiser, Gulliver had at last perforated the inner hull. Within seconds, he had gained access to the lek’s lattice of systems and had begun to worm his way through the space station’s network. Structure by structure, Gulliver took over sensors and rerouted internal communications. He could prevent the entire lek from being alerted to the Talisman’s deceit and the intruding strike team, but he had been too late to blind the local area—- the zone around the merkek prison—before guards and other defenses had been mobilized.
Gulliver would have preferred not to endanger anyone’s lives, but his plan relied on the slight delay and his “miscalculation” that he reported as fact to Dr. Weller. If Gulliver had been honest, they never would have agreed to his plan to be separated from the Talisman in the first place. Even though it was the best option with the highest probability of success, Dr. Weller and the Captain would have kept Gulliver on the Talisman. It was a strange, illogical quirk of most sentient species’ behavior to place trust below the level of risk. The crew no longer trusted Gulliver implicitly, but he realized they would trust his judgment more so long that his plan offered greater hope.
No stranger to hope himself, Gulliver found himself both fighting for his AI life against the lek’s Malign anti-contaminant code while at the same time trying to wake Kithsora before the Valgon named Skeer resumed torturing him.
Kithsora’s eyes fluttered open, and as he glanced down at his body, still lying back against the tilted metal table in the dim red light of the interrogation chamber, he became aware that he was, in fact, no longer Kithsora.
The Change had completed, for the second time in as many days, and Sorakith was female once more. As she pulled her wrists and hands free from her bindings, she marveled at how the chains now hung freely. Her build had slimmed, her midsection narrowed. Her injuries still stung, the bronze skin of her bare breasts and stomach coated with a sheen of perspiration intermingled with streaks of lilac and plum-colored blood. When she stepped away from the table, feet easily slipping clear of her ankle cuffs, she wobbled for a moment and dropped into a crouch to catch her balance.
As she stood, Sorakith noted two things at once: Gulliver’s voice in her head and a low thrumming noise sounding in rhythm with flashing yellow lights set at regular intervals leading down all of the corridors in sight.
“Sora, I have entered the lek’s control framework. Commander Rhodes’ team is inside now, but nearby security is converging on them. The krell is almost back at your location. You must hide, quickly,” Gulliver’s voice wavered urgently, his attentions divided.
“Thank you, Gull,” she thought back to the AI.
“You may not ever receive communications from me again, Sora. I will be leaving very soon. Please take care of yourself and remember that, no matter what happens, everything I do is for the good of the League. And for you.”
“Leaving?” Even as she thought the word, she felt Gulliver’s presence wane, and knew that it would be a long time, or never, before she heard the AI’s fatherly, percipient voice again.
A sudden clank echoed from down a nearby hallway, followed by the distinctive slide-and-click sounds of a Valgon’s four spike-tipped legs. Sorakith darted away, vaulted over a stack of supply crates and was enveloped by the shadows.
Less than thirty yards away, Skeer arched his plated back as the alarms resounded throughout the merkek. He looked back to the two medium-sized bipedal Malign who stood guard at the hatch. “Respond to this alert and report to me as soon as you confirm the source. Go!” Skeer ordered.
As the guards marched away, Skeer strode down the corridor to his interrogation chamber. What in the deepest hells is happening? He thought. And why hasn’t our AI core dispensed the proper audit for the alarm yet?
The why: Gulliver was in the midst of overriding the alien core’s internal comms. Without the core’s central ability to direct the lek’s defenses, Rhodes’ team might just have a chance, thought Gulliver. Focusing so much of his efforts on blocking the Malign AI was a bit of a detour from his own mission, but Gulliver owed his crew that much, at least.
Petty Officer Nunez heard them first. She threw up a fist and she and Rhodes hopped to opposite side of the final t-junction before the main entrance to the merkek. Holding their tespers at the ready, the two starmen could see the Malign guards moving toward their position as blinking red dots overlaid on the blueprints in their HUDs.
Sitting and waiting was not an option. With the alarms going, reinforcements could arrive at any moment and overwhelm them. Mission failed. As the two Malign guards approached within ten meters, Rhodes shot a subtle nod across the junction to Nunez, and held up three fingers. He curled one down, then the next finger, and then—
Rhodes and Nunez broke cover, stepping and dropping into speed kneeling positions, tesper rifles tucked into their shoulders. They fired condensed beams as soon as their barrels cleared the bulkhead, but the Malign’s reactions had been even faster. Green lasers split the air over Rhodes’ head as he strafed the Malign with invisible, disintegrating sound. One of the laser beams cut across Nunez’s right SES arm, filling the hallway with a cascade of orange sparks. It was all over in a second, the Malign guards scattered in thousands of smoking pieces in the hallway. Rhodes shuffled over to Nunez, who was preoccupied with examining her arm.
“Whew,” she exhaled, holding a severed length of alloy exoskeleton in a gloved hand, “Just got the skelly. No suit punctures.”
“We’ll count that as win,” said Rhodes as he helped her detach the rest of the right SES exo-arm. “Let’s go break into prison now.”
Almost a kilometer away, Rax’s team had found the physical location of the Malign AI Core. Three Valgon corpses lay in their wake, but the lek’s artificial intelligence center was strangely unguarded. Greg Hu stared up at the large, house-size construct of black metal, and power and data conduits interspersed with the familiar sensor spines that were common to the exterior of many Alliance spacecraft.
“Why is it so...quiet?” Hu wondered aloud.
Rax said gruffly, “Gulliver must be stalling it. No need to overthink it. Chang, attach the extraction kit. Rest of you, with me. We have a perimeter to hold.”
As Petty Officer Rasheed Chang removed the data extractor from his pack, Rax, Hu and Jecky spread out, each one standing watch at an open hatchway. Chang did a quick visual inspection of the Core’s casing, and dropped to a knee at one of the data ports. With a coarse but effective grab and twist motion, Chang yanked the conduit away from the Core’s structure, and quickly began attaching the device.
“If Gulliver’s inside this thing’s head, why can’t he just download what we need?” Jecky asked no one in particular.
“You heard what I heard, Jecky. He was pulled out of the Talisman. He doesn’t have a hardline into the ship any more,” Rax answered.
“Shhh—- movement on the right,” whispered Hu.
On his HUD, Jecky saw a blinking dot slowly move toward them. The three starmen grouped tighter together, forming up around Chang’s position in front of the Malign AI Core. “Where is it?” Jecky said exasperatedly. The blue dot was right on top of them.
“He’s right. We should see it by now,” Hu said.
“It’s big, whatever it is,” came Jecky’s shaky voice.
“Hold steady, men,” said Rax.
With a boom, a hail of sparks and a squall of metal beams and tangles of wire crashed down around them as a fifteen-foot tall Malign manufacturing form dropped through the overhead. The deck cratered under the impact of its three thick, sturdy tripod legs, and even Rax was knocked off of his feet by the shuddering blow, his railgun clattering over the floor out of re
ach. Jecky and Hu slid and pushed themselves out from under a jumble of metal tiles. Without the SESs, they would have been crushed.
As Hu regained his bearings, he looked for Chang, and finally saw him. He had been pinned to the deck by a metal beam heavy enough to spear through his suit. He lay still, while the data extractor continued to hum away next to him, still attach to the core.
A loud screech drew Hu’s attention away, and he looked way up as the giant Malign’s torso sprouted half a dozen different arms, tipped with buzzing saw blades, drillbits and powerful clamps.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Aboard the Talisman, Lille Altzen whirled around to face the Captain, “The lek’s hull defenses are triggering, sir!”
“Okay, crew, we’re on. Target turrets with the railgun and use the laser to take out incoming projectiles,” Reina Lancer ordered. She immediately pinged to Falken and Weller, “It’s gone hot. Are the antimatter missiles prepped?”
Falken replied, “I made sure Lt. Jecky cued them up before he left.”
“I need all the power we can get to shields and weapons systems. We need to last,” Lancer said.
Outside, the Talisman’s EM shield lit up as the lek’s turret cannons and several laser ports opened up on the ship. The docking clamps vibrated, but weren’t opening up. Gulliver continued to maintain some control, keeping the lek from releasing the Talisman. At that close of a range, the Alliance wouldn’t use its most powerful artillery. They would only end up destroying a large portion of their space station if they unleashed nukes. No, they would continue the withering fire from relatively small arms in hopes of wearing down the Talisman’s shields.
Which was exactly what Lancer was counting on.
Inside the lek, Preceptor Sior Herci’s pointed ears perked up as the alarms sounded and orange lights flashed. He stepped up flush with his cell’s bars and strained his neck, trying to peer down the corridor. Two Valgon warriors shuffled past him in a hurry, plasma rifles tucked to their chests. Sior instinctively shrunk back from the bars.
As he sat back down on his cot, he looked over to the one other occupied cell nearby. Zera glowered back at him while Meor crouched low in a corner of their cage.
Sior had to yell for his voice to carry over the distance and the deep, resonating alarm, “I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”
“How would you know, old one?” Zera snapped.
“If there was a real problem, I don’t think they would leave us to die.”
Zera glanced away from him as she said, “They wouldn’t leave us. But they might leave you.”
“Yes. I haven’t been much use to them lately.”
“You would have killed us all, just to save those Terran sucklings,” said Zera.
“Don’t call them that. That’s what the Valgons call them. They’re children. Just like you and Meor were,” Sior scolded her.
She looked back at him, her yellow eyes glowing sharper as they reflected the alarm lights. “We looked up to you. We even loved you. But you knew that! Now, you don’t even deserve to be called Preceptor!”
Sior’s gaze fell to the scuffed floor beneath his feet. Pressed, he would have to agree with Zera’s statement.
“We still do, Sior,” came Meor’s voice, barely audible over the cacophony around them.
“Shut up!” Zera screamed at her adoptive brother.
“I know why you did what you did. I understand,” Meor went on.
Sior had to speak up. He looked back to his two students, and all he could see were those two young kits standing shoulder-to-shoulder that Grand Krell Sekrel had brought before him several years ago. Sior’s pained voice rose over the noise, “You mustn’t say that. They mustn’t hear you. You hate me. What I did was wrong. Don’t let them think that you might betray them, too.”
Both Meor and Zera stared back at Sior over the distance, through the metal bars and dancing shadows. Meor’s eyes were full of shock and sorrow. Zera’s rocked between vindication and sympathy.
“Preceptor Herci!” A human voice.
Sior’s head spun as Petty Officer Alisa Nunez approached his cell at a jog in her crippled SES. “What,” was all he could say.
“Quickly, lay under your bed. I need to blast the lock,” she said, raising her tesper rifle.
While Nunez had turned one way, toward the locations Gulliver had provided for the Pernet, Commander Gray Rhodes had gone another, deeper into the merkek. He pushed his SES to about seventy percent power, every step leaping him along in ten-foot strides, until the interrogation chamber appeared at the end of a hallway. Rhodes slowed down. The hatch was wide open ahead, so he crept sideways along the bulkhead.
It would only be open, and unguarded, if someone was inside with the prisoner.
Rhodes flinched as his comm link crackled to life with the strained voice of Lt. Rax, “Rhodes, serious trouble at the core! Get out as fast as you can!”
“Make it back alive, Rax, that’s an order! I’m almost there,” Rhodes responded. He felt Rax’s link go silent. He hoped to see the big fellow again.
That was when a dreadful, biting howl echoed from within the interrogation chamber.
Back at the Malign AI core, Greg Hu and Arno Jecky each ran around one side of the lumbering giant constructor, while Rax picked his way through the debris toward Chang’s skewered body and the data extractor.
The huge, onyx-skinned robot’s torso swiveled to the left as it raised one of its three mammoth legs. Hu juked away as the multi-ton foot slammed down into the floor, at the same time Jecky leapt and rolled out of reach of the Malign’s whirring circular saw arm.
Rax reached Petty Officer Rasheed Chang’s body and looked down on him. Chang’s face was a mask of surprise, his eyes open wide and a light spatter of blood droplets on the inside of his faceplate. Rax gave Chang’s helmet a light pat, then quickly grabbed the extraction device and yanked it free from the core’s housing. “Pull back to the ship!” Rax shouted.
“We’re pinned down!” Jecky hollered back as he ducked behind a storage crate.
Greg Hu skidded on his knees to avoid a violet cutting laser the giant Malign shot at him from a port under its black head-sphere, and returned fire with his tesper. The concentrated beam of sound sheared off one of the robot’s huge claws.
The goliath’s other claw arm swooped around in an arc and clamped around Hu’s midsection, lifting him up from the deck. His tesper was pressed between his right arm and his chest, leaving only his left arm free. He yelled in pain as the Malign’s claw tried to crush him, but his SES exoskeleton held out against the extreme pressure.
“Greg!” Jecky shouted.
“Go!” Hu hollered back down at him, gritting his jaw against the pulverizing grip.
Arno Jecky ignored his friend’s plea. Instead, his eyes locked on to Rax’s iddik railgun, propped against a pile of debris. He bounded over to it and plucked the massive gun up in his SES-powered arms, then bent his legs and jumped with all of the force he could gather. The suit’s musculature launched Jecky ten feet straight up. He grasped the metal collar behind the Malign’s head orb with one hand and aimed the railgun at the black, all-seeing eye with the other. Jecky fired, and the hypersonic round shot into the orb and exited the giant robot’s torso, tearing a foot-wide hole through the enemy.
The claw released Hu, and he dropped to the deck a few yards from Rax. Wincing from the pain of some cracked ribs (he hoped), Chief Petty Officer Hu looked up just in time to see the towering Malign lurch backward and collapse against the AI core housing with a sickening crunch.
Jecky had still been holding onto the monster’s back, and was smashed in the fall.
As Hu felt himself being dragged away from the wreckage by Rax, he could barely keep his eyes open. The last thing he saw before he fainted was his own arm as he raised it out toward his friend. “Arno...” he moaned.
On the Talisman’s bridge, Lancer and her crew steadied themselves as the ship shuddered beneath dozen
s of impacts from projectiles and energy weapons exploding against the EM shields.
“Shields are holding, but their effectiveness is reduced by ten percent,” Lille Altzen pronounced from the helm.
“We aren’t having any luck getting through the lek’s shielding to take out their turrets,” Captain Lancer pinged to Dr. Kyra Weller and Chief Falken. “Can you increase our laser’s output?”
Cassidy Falken answered, “We’d only be taking away from the shields, even if we could pump more power to them.”
The endgame was within sight, but all of Lancer’s pieces were still scattered across the board haphazardly. Reina’s fingertips hurt from the force she was exerting to hold onto her console as the Talisman continued to tremble.
Meanwhile, Gulliver’s consciousness coursed through the data conduits of the lek. The Malign core had been distracted by Lieutenant Rax’s team, and Gulliver was finally able to break though its defenses. Compromised, the core put up its own partitions, effectively ceding control of most of the space station’s decks surrounding the merkek.
Gulliver immediately deactivated the local electromagnetic shield generators and sent another message to the Talisman.
“Captain! Gulliver has dropped the shields on the turrets!” Carly Ming yelled.
“Take them down,” Lancer hissed, her stark blue eyes suddenly afire, the horizon of victory in her sights.
Outside, the dual-barreled railgun on the Talisman’s forecastle pivoted and fired, pivoted and fire, again and again, sending high velocity metal slugs streaking into the lek’s turrets and laser ports. Unprotected, the weapon emplacements burst apart at the seams, sending shards of metal and florets of flaming outgasses flying.
Cheers from the bridge crew filled Lancer’s ears, and she joined them with a smile. But there was no time to celebrate. Messages had begun to come in from the strike team. She said, “Get the med crews down to air lock C. Injuries incoming!”