Victorious Dead (The Asarlaí Wars Book 2)

by Marie Andreas

  Vas didn’t know whether to be comforted or terrified that the Asarlaí scared Marli as much as they did her.

  The decon room where Marwin had dumped the automon was a much smaller chamber with an attached lab and away from the room the buoy was in. Vas was thinking about that issue as well. How in the hell did that thing know how to speak to the Victorious Dead’s core? How did Aithnea know it was going to need to?

  For a brief time, until the job on Mayhira, Vas had thought life might be settling down. She and her crew could lie low, get the Victorious Dead together, and ride out whatever weirdness was going on with the Commonwealth—then everything would go back to normal. Nice to know the Universe had a sense of humor.

  “What are you going to do with two seconds-in-command?” Marli broke Vas out of her thoughts as they walked down the long hallway.

  There were closer decon chambers, but Vas figured Marwin was trying to keep that thing as far away from the rest of the ship as possible.

  “Keep them both?” Vas shrugged and unlocked the door to the chamber. “Not sure at this point. Since neither of them are whole and healthy right now, I’m down to zero.”

  The lab for this decontamination chamber was small but functional. The chamber itself was on the other side of an unbreakable berthen glass wall and filled with a pile of robot parts.

  Robots and automons weren’t unheard of in this part of the galaxy, but they were extremely regulated and all government ships had special software to fry them immediately if robots tried to board them. Considering all the other super-secret advanced things this damn ship had, she was surprised that it didn’t have that. This robot was the first Vas had ever seen. Unfortunately, their relative rarity meant this was one case where she didn’t have an expert on her ship.

  “Gosta, can you check with Grosslyn at Home and see if there is anyone there with robotics as a serious hobby?” Vas looked at the pile behind the glass. “I have a feeling we might need help on this one.”

  “Aye, Captain. Oh, and still no update on a supporting ship for the automon, or how that thing got in. Except that it somehow dematerialized as it moved through the hull and it did not come through where that breach was.”

  That was something anyway. The original idea that it had been a result of the breach wasn’t a healthy one.

  Marli looked up from her scanner and one of the lab’s monitors. “I’d been meaning to ask you about your planet. Why did you name it Home? Drunk when you were thinking of what to call it?”

  Vas laughed and tried pulling up some specs of the machine body before her. “I’d wagered my ship against their empty planet in a card game. Bad idea on my part, but I was exceedingly drunk. When I won it, I had to name it. It was called EX-967. The one thing I never felt I had growing up was a true home, so I named it Home.”

  “But Deven mentioned you never go there.”

  Vas shrugged. “I do go, about once a year or so. But I don’t need to. Just knowing it’s there is enough.”

  A clacking sound came from the automon.

  “I’m not seeing anything on my scanner or this monitor. You?” Marli clicked through different screens.

  Vas’s monitor showed nothing coming from the automon. She removed a hand-held scanner from the side of the machine and walked closer to the glass. While it looked frail, the glass in a level-ten decon chamber would survive anything short of the ship exploding.

  The clicking stopped. But then one of the arms moved.

  “Are you seeing this? We have a problem,” Vas said and shook her hand-held scanner. The damn thing still showed nothing.

  The arm stopped moving but the look on Marli’s face said she’d seen it too. “It looked like it was trying to pull itself up.”

  Vas watched as another piece started to move.

  “I don’t think I like this at all,” Marli said as a very Asarlaí-looking scowl appeared on her face.

  “Your people didn’t have automons?” Vas had trouble believing that. The Asarlaí atrocities were diverse.

  Marli shuddered. “No. That was one area they held in respect. The only one, actually. They might take life without a single second of remorse, even lives in the millions. But artificial life was illegal and immoral.”

  Clacking from the pile before them filled the room.

  The pieces were all moving now. Slowly, since most of them had nothing to move with. But they were moving. Vas peered closer. Each piece appeared to have a set of threads, so thin she almost couldn’t see them, coming from their center. The threads were bonding and moving the pieces apart from each other.

  They were also growing.

  The pieces closest to Vas were from the left leg. There were four sections and as each pulled away from the other, the part began to grow. The automon had been wearing a dark gray flight suit, and the shape of a calf clad in that formed before her eyes.

  “They’re duplicating. It’s made of nanites,” Vas said and hit the chamber’s alarm. Decon chambers were used for dangerous things. Things she didn’t want to get out to the rest of her ship. The slamming of a solid metal perimeter around the chamber reinforced that these things weren’t getting out.

  “But why aren’t they scanning?” Marli was pissed now and her fingers blurred as she entered more commands. “Damn my eyes. Recalibrate your hand-held to match mine.” She raised hers and Vas entered the code there.

  The screen filled with a whole bunch of warnings and intel on the rapidly duplicating twenty Asarlaí robots in the chamber before her. The nanites were increasing at an unheard of pace. The computer calculated that they would be finished within five minutes.

  “Those things can break through the glass,” Vas said. One alone wouldn’t have been able to. Twenty would be unstoppable. Vas didn’t know the strength rating for the steel shield now around the decon chamber. It was meant to withstand an explosion, but she wasn’t sure if it could hold against twenty super-powered robots. The more she looked at the numbers flashing before her, the more she knew it couldn’t.

  They had less than five minutes before twenty robot Asarlaí were going to tear through her, Marli, and her ship.

  25

  V as ran to a panel near the door and started entering codes.

  “Captain?” Gosta asked. “I received a command to expel the decon chamber you’re in. Has something happened?” He wasn’t freaked yet, but he gave the code phrase.

  “Everything is very not okay,” Vas responded. Had this been a different situation, say one where someone was trying to take over the ship, Vas would have responded with ‘everything is right as rain’. A cheesy response, but one she’d never use in real life, so it worked to let her crew know she’d been compromised. They had their orders if that came to pass.

  She wasn’t compromised. Not yet. But she would be very soon at the rate the parts were growing. Whole limbs were beginning to form and move about.

  “The automon has separated and is recreating nineteen more friends. Sending the vid link to your station. We need to release this chamber, then on my command, blow it to hell.”

  All of the decon chambers were on the edge of the ship, from the outside it looked like a smooth rim, but inside they hung, separate from each other, like lumps on a utility belt. The ability to remove them if needed was a special Warrior Wench feature. One Vas hoped the people behind this thing—things—before her didn’t know about. They didn’t need to be close by and take advantage of the ship going dead. This thing was an infection and given a short amount of time, the ship would be theirs for good. Vas had a marginal education on the theory of nanites, but even she knew these things could keep dividing until they took over the entire ship.

  “I don’t think it will come to that,” Marli said. She was staring at the head as it grew a torso. “I can defeat them.”

  That good old Asarlaí superiority. Handy sometimes, not so much when it was misplaced.

  “How? Those things are stronger than you.”

  “Just because they l
ook like me, does not mean they are like me,” Marli said but there was a doubt in her voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  The head of the Asarlaí robot started speaking then, but not in a language Vas knew. But one that Marli knew.

  Her glamoured face turned as pale as her natural one, and she spat out a few words in the same language of the limbless torso and head behind the glass. Then she grabbed Vas’s comm. “Gosta, do what your captain said, now. These things have to die, and if we have to go with them, remember us well.”

  Vas nodded and aimed her blaster at the decon chamber. Too bad she had left her sword up on the command deck. It wouldn’t have lasted long cutting through that metal, but her blades were specially made, and a few heads would have come off before it broke. It wouldn’t stop them, nothing was going to do that, but it would have slowed them down.

  “Captain, I can’t—”

  “That is an order, Gosta. These things are filled with nanites, programmed to create more robots. I’ve erected the outer seal on this entire chamber, but it might not be enough to stop them if they come through the glass. They cannot get on the ship. Eject us now!”

  Gosta didn’t respond, but a series of alarms began building in the hall outside the decon chamber. The orders to clear the hall past the blast doors were faint, and hopefully if there was anyone down here they took them to heart.

  The robots behind the glass either didn’t know or didn’t care about what was happening, and limbs continued to elongate. Even the clothing of the original came back.

  Marli changed appearance, and she also armed herself with a massive blaster Vas hadn’t seen before. Glamours were good for hiding more than just one’s appearance.

  That change did get the attention of the two robots who had full heads so far. In fact, even the pieces that had no eyes seemed to move closer to the glass.

  Marli spat out some more words in Asarlaí. The pieces all flopped around in agitation.

  “What did you tell them?” Vas yelled as the alarms outside grew longer. Clamps could be heard unlocking—it wouldn’t be long now.

  “I told them they would meet their originators in hell,” Marli said with a grin. “Only the words and the place are much worse than what I can translate to you.” Her smile dropped. “It’s not good they knew what I was referring to.”

  Vas kept one eye on the glass, and opened every drawer looking for anything else she could use as a weapon. If they got out of that glass before the ship dropped this room into space she needed to stop them.

  “Gosta, what the hell is going on?” Deven called out in a ship wide comm that echoed over the alarms. Obviously, Terel hadn’t been successful in knocking him back out yet.

  “I was going to ask the same thing,” Ragkor’s voice, groggy and a bit slurry cut in. “Identify yourself and why you’re ship wide. And what are those alarms?” Even blurry from his recovery, Ragkor sounded far more like his former military self than he’d ever done in the past few months.

  Damn it. Vas didn’t have time to deal with this, nor could they take the time to explain it to both of them. “Both of you, stand the hell down,” Vas said. “Gosta, continue what you were ordered to do. For now, both Deven and Ragkor are relieved of duty; Flarik, make sure they stay down and lock down ship wide comms. They can duke it out when we’re gone.” Flarik hadn’t been on deck, but ship wide meant her quarters too. Flarik might or might not know what was going on, but she wouldn’t question Vas.

  “They’re coming through the glass!” Marli yelled.

  “Let us go,” Vas said then shut down the comm and aimed her blaster.

  The automons must have figured out what was going on, or were egged on by Marli’s curses. They’d been content to stay behind the berthen glass, regenerating. But now, arms and feet were hitting the glass. There were only two practically complete bodies. It must take more energy to create some parts as they weren’t duplicating at the same pace.

  One had made a crack in the decon glass and its arm poured out like liquid through it, then solidified.

  Marli was on it immediately. She tore the arm off and ripped it to shreds with her hands. Then she dropped the shreds in front of the rest of the automons. None of the shredded pieces moved.

  “You can kill them?” Vas hung on as the room came free of the ship. The pods were designed to leave dangerous items in space until they could be resolved or blown up. Once they got free of the ship the pod bobbed along smoothly. Vas quickly typed in the command that would allow her to tap into the ship’s screens. A few hits and she had a nice view of the outside of her ship.

  “It appears so, but it would take too long for it to be effective.” Marli stared down the robot head on the other side of the glass. “Shouldn’t we be blown to bits by now?”

  “That is a damn good question.” Vas opened the comm to the command deck. “Gosta? We’re clear of the ship. Take us out before these things get out of the glass.”

  “There’s a problem with that, Captain. Deven is not happy with the turn of events and is currently holding a blaster to my head.”

  26

  V as shared a look with Marli, but it ended in a shrug. “Deven, I know you have no idea what is going on, but trust me, this is for the best. There are things in this pod that we can’t let get out. There’s no way to get us out without risking them getting out as well.”

  “The particle mover,” Deven said.

  “Won’t work, boyo.” Marli hadn’t stopped staring at the robot nearest to the glass, but she stepped back to share Vas’s comm. “Yours can’t get through decon walls, and mine is not in range. Blow us up.”

  “Marli, I can’t remember much, but I do know you have a death wish. I am not letting you take Vas with you. Sorry, Captain.” Deven sounded anything but sorry. He sounded very pissed.

  The robot had finished whatever stare down he was doing with Marli, then grabbed one of the less finished torsos, and started bashing the glass where the original crack was.

  Vas moved closer and held up her comm. “Do you hear that? That is a killer Asarlaí robot, using parts of other killer Asarlaí robots to shatter the decon glass. When it is finished, so are we. Marli’s death wish or not, I’d rather be blown up than have those things rip me apart.”

  “Thank you. Deven has stood down, and Flarik has Ragkor pinned.” Gosta’s voice choked up a bit. “Goodbye, Captain. It has been an honor.”

  The glass around the crack burst apart. Vas didn’t answer but continued a steady stream of firepower at the advancing robot. The second whole one moved forward but Marli grabbed it by its throat.

  “Wouldn’t blasting it be better?” Vas’s small weapon was only slowing the thing down, but Marli’s looked like it could take out half of a cruiser.

  “Not as much fun though.” Marli shook the robot, her fingers digging into the metal neck. It spasmed once, then started smoking.

  Marli dropped it, then lifted her blaster as the rest of the parts climbed forward. “It’s been interesting serving with you, Vas.”

  Vas was about to answer when the world broke up into sparkles.

  “Please let go of the blaster, Captain. You nearly shot my second-in-command.”

  Vas hadn’t opened her eyes, but the voice was familiar. A pressure on her hand pulled the weapon out of it.

  “Are we dead?” She opened her eyes. Marli was back in her glamour, and a fleet of gahan surrounded them. Along with Savan. “And aren’t you supposed to be chasing Rillianians?”

  Not that she wasn’t happy for the last-minute save, but the number of times that she’d been dematerialized in the last few days couldn’t be good for her.

  “They weren’t Rillianians, they met with an accident, and no, neither of you are dead.” Savan seemed remarkably calm considering that Vas saw a long blaster burn along his right arm. She had still been firing when they pulled her in.

  “Do you have them?” That was Ragkor. Good to know her ‘get to bed and stay there’ orders meant not
hing.

  “Yes, we do. Do you want the honors?” Savan said.

  “Aye.” That was Deven, sounding an awful lot like the pirate Deven.

  Savan pressed a button and a screen Vas hadn’t seen before opened in time to watch a full barrage hit the pod. The explosion was impressive and probably far more than what was needed.

  Still, no reason to be hasty. “Gosta, scan for any debris, and fire again if need be.” Vas eased herself off the bed.

  “Debris detected. Firing again,” Gosta said. Another flash of light flashed on the screen, a longer lasting one.

  “Captain, I changed the mix in the beam. This should tag the nanites and destroy them.” Ragkor was showing more and more of his previous training.

  “Thank you, Ragkor. Gosta, my comm got damaged in the transfer. Can you patch me through to Terel?”

  “I’m on the command deck, Captain.” Terel’s tone did not bode well for whoever it was aimed at.

  “I’m very grateful that my two seconds have taken it upon themselves to disobey repeated orders to stand down in order to try and save my life. But, in your professional opinion, should either of those men be standing?”

  “Not at all.” The weight Terel put behind each word should have had both of them running off the deck.

  “But, Captain—”

  “Deven, that means you as well. Especially you. Not going into it at this moment, but you’ve been gone for more than six months. You need to recover. You too, Ragkor. Not to mention you still might be spending some time in the brig.”

  Silence greeted her.

  Gosta’s laughter was a welcome sound. “Well done, Captain. Terel has both of them behind her and is leading them back to the med bay. Do you want me to put guards on them?”

  Vas looked at Marli who nodded with enthusiasm. “My opinion exactly. Armed guards at all times until I say.”

  “As much fun as it has been staying on your ship, I hope you won’t take offense at my remaining here,” Marli said.