“I’d rather you didn’t sit on it,” Dane said, moving forward quickly to level his Field Blade at her throat, causing the murderous alien queen to freeze.
“I kind of have a thing about handing over powerful spaceships straight back to the person who ordered tens of thousands of my people’s deaths,” Dane said, and the queen snarled in response.
“It will do you no good anyway! One way or another!”
“Show us what happened to your ship!” Dane demanded. “It was Okruk, wasn’t it?”
The queen’s mandibles flared, making a quivering, shivering motion. Dane realized that the queen of his enemy was laughing at him.
“It was not Okruk, although I am sure that he was the one who ordered the coup.”
“Sarge.” It was Farouk, once more being the technical genius. Dane turned to see that he was sitting at one of the nearby “ministerial thrones” and that there was even a smattering of dull orange lights across its control arms.
“Now that she’s got some power running up in here, I think I can work out a way to get the flight logs accessed,” Farouk said.
“By all means, Marine!” Dane said, before turning to point the Field Blade back at the queen. “Help him!” he demanded.
The queen held herself still, and then acquiesced, spilling a stream of Exin words that were nearer to clicks and whistles than they were to a language. In response, the air before them flickered and hazed in front of the glass, and Dane realized that it was activating a holofield.
The entire craft was deeply incapacitated, so that the image flickered and the lights crackled throughout the throne-command room. There was even a sudden shower of sparks from the ceiling further back—but eventually, between them, the marine and the queen managed to get the flight records working.
The new holo, picked out in blues and greens, depicted images of alien worlds coming and going. They were ghostly snap-shot images, as if taken at random from points along their journey—until Dane realized that these had to be embarking and disembarking shots. They showed a flicker of the vastness of the empire, along with the musters of seed craft that met them and accompanied this ship whenever it came to planetary port.
“You were on some kind of muster? A grand tour?” Dane inferred, looking towards the queen.
“Politics,” she managed to say, and in such a tone that Dane took it to mean that she and her (previously loyal?) crew had been trying to shore up her power base.
“Okruk was moving against me,” the queen confirmed. “Only I did not know how far he would dare go . . .”
Dane immediately thought that this was a surprising moment of weakness from a species that appeared to pride themselves as apex predators.
The holoimages changed to those of the security cameras of the mother ship itself. Seed craft were tumbling out of the many hangars, and many were then bursting into flames almost immediately. The shots were replaced by those inside the corridors, as Exin rose up against Exin, and there were scenes of bloodshed and revolution.
“He had already sent his people to infiltrate my ship. My ship!” The queen said hotly, waving her hand as the image changed once more.
It showed the mother ship, with the rising corona of purple starting to eclipse its outer shell.
“You were jumping. Where to?” Dane asked. And in the midst of a shipwide mutiny? he thought.
“It was them. The traitors,” the queen said. “Okruk had decided that he would take over my ship from afar and make an example out of me.” The queen’s voice went quiet. “Or perhaps not an example . . .”
And what she said next shocked Dane even more, as the screens ahead flickered away from the revolution happening inside the corridors themselves, and then to a scene of rippling lights and dying plasma. It was a scene of the mother ship jumping out of warp. Arriving somewhere.
“War Master Okruk had planned a revolution to overthrow me and steal my ship and crew’s loyalties from me—and finally, he was going to offer me as a sacrifice.”
The screen ahead showed a deep red planet, and across its surface there stretched a spiderlike tracery of glowing white lines. As if the entire planet had been covered by a giant, geometrically-obsessed web. They were oddly latticelike much in the way that termite mounds and beehives were.
It was some kind of a structure, built across the face of the planet.
“This is one of your worlds? Your home world?” Dane asked warily.
“Ours!?” The Exin queen scoffed. “Even we cannot hope to create something like that. No. This is the home world of the Passed On, of the Travelers. A race far, far older even than my own.”
And then, in the ship’s holo recordings, from the place where the traceries and connections were the densest, lines of burning white fire erupted from the surface, spearing up towards the Exin mother ship.
10
The Passed On
What!? Dane blinked at the holoscreens as they flickered and scrolled with white noise, showing glimpses of corridors filling with steam and of Exin bodies being thrown this way and that—before the corona of purple fire once again started to crackle over the mother ship’s hull in the footage before them.
“They fired on you, these Travelers,” Dane muttered, thinking to himself that at least that explained why this ship was in the state it was in. But Dane wasn’t just thinking about what had happened. But why.
“They did,” the queen grumbled.
“These Travelers, or Passed On, or whatever you call them, have no love for your people,” Dane said, his mind alighting on a possibility. It was a soldier’s thought. A tactician’s thought.
“Love is such a mammalian concept,” the queen drawled, but Dane was already turning to Farouk and the others.
“Can you patch in our suit comms with this beast?” Dane nodded around them at the mother ship. “A priority message to Central Marine Servers,” he was saying, as Farouk indicated he was working on it.
“What are you thinking, Sarge?” Hendrix asked warily, throwing looks between the queen and his superior officer.
Fight fire with fire, Dane was thinking. “We may not have the capabilities to defend against the Tol’rumaa,” he said out loud. “But another highly advanced civilization might have. Probably has.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Isaias caught on, and Dane could hear in his voice the same wolfish grin that he himself was wearing.
“Maybe,” Dane agreed and turned back to the queen, who was sitting at his side. “I want every scrap of intel you have on these Travelers. Their home world. Who they are. What they have said. Why they seem to hate the Exin so much.”
“Fools.” The queen was characteristically unimpressed. “Do you believe that the Passed On will even register your existence? To a species such as theirs, you will be nothing more than insects, a mere spark in the history of the galaxy.”
“Even a small spark can start a mighty fire,” Dane muttered back. “I want that intel. Now.”
He didn’t have to add any threat to his words, as Hendrix was already leveling his own pulse rifle. It was clear that Hendrix had far fewer qualms about pulling the trigger than Dane and any of the others had. With a snarl, the queen’s taloned hands (which appeared surprisingly dexterous, despite the pointed black claws of hardened bone at their ends) started to flicker over what still worked on her command chair, or throne.
“The Passed On are an older species even than ours,” the queen muttered as she brought up holo-information and files, and Farouk added them to their local-group, AMP-suit network. On the inside of Dane’s faceplate, his HUD lit up with the newly acquired and translated information.
“Their primary sector is much nearer to the galactic center than ours,” the queen informed them. “And hence, they evolved—if they ever were biological constructs at all—long before most other intelligent life in the galaxy did.”
“Holy crap!” Isaias whistled low. Dane could only agree that the time spans that they were talking abo
ut had to be truly immense.
“But our information on them is minimal indeed. We cannot even accurately tell if different moments of contact were all the Travelers or from different species entirely,” the queen said. “They appear to occur in a similar region of ancient space, and they appear to have stellar-engineering capabilities.”
“What do you mean? They make stars?” Dane pressed her for answers, earning the Exin equivalent of an exaggerated sigh from his counterpart (really, a form of rasped clicking).
“Stars that have unusual orbits, shapes, or qualities that cannot be explained by astrophysics,” the queen said, but did not go into it any further. “Entire instances of ships—or satellites or space habitats—that appear and disappear as if they have wormhole technology, but at a fraction of the cosmic disturbance that ours, or that of any known civilization, produces.”
And then, what the queen said next was truly unsettling to Dane’s ears.
“I have had a long-term research project devoted to the subject of the Passed On, so-called because it appears that they have traveled beyond normal evolutionary constraints.”
“You don’t say,” Dane muttered.
“. . . and my team believe that it is entirely plausible, if not indeed likely, that some of the effects that our scant few probes and drones have observed of the Traveler’s behavior indicate that their technology could harness not only the powers of subspace, but also that of time as well . . .”
“Time.” Dane croaked. “I beg your pardon? Are you about to tell me that these Passed On or Traveling Whoevers can time-travel?”
As it turned out, the queen was about to say no such thing or anything, as Farouk mumbled instead; calling their attention to something.
“Uhr . . . Sarge? You should get eyes on this,” the provisional tech specialist was saying.
“What is it?” Dane said.
“I’m into the other ship’s comms array, but there’s something not right about this here . . .”
“If you’ve done anything!” Hendrix took a step forward with his rifle at the queen.
“Do you take me for a fool!?” she snarled back.
“Easy, people!” Dane roared at them both.
“No, sir, it’s not the, uh, the queen,” Farouk was saying hastily. “I’ve got another user on the comms mainframe array. This whole thing is a mess, but I can only assume that we’ve got another user online, and they’re not patching in from this room here.”
Another user. Dane blinked in surprise. The other Exin. “It has to be the others. The ones from cryostasis.”
“Trying to isolate their signal, sir,” Farouk said, his voice betraying his uncertainty.
“It is a wonder your species ever crawled out of the swamps!” The queen’s voice twittered and shrieked. “Did you not think to lock access to the command suite alone!? To change the access permissions!? Give it here!” she said, starting to rise to another warning shout from Hendrix.
The queen paused, and all eyes fell on Dane to see whether or not he would let the queen have further access to the ship that had once been hers (and had once rained fire down on my fellow marines, Dane had to admit).
“Sarge, the other user has the comms! They’re transmitting a message!” Farouk said in consternation.
“Let her at it,” Dane decided, and as soon as the words had left his mouth, the queen was moving across the dais to the lower desks that Farouk occupied. He quickly scrambled out of the way as the queen’s talons started flickering across the controls. She worked for a few breaths, snarling and hissing all the time, until she finally spat her findings as the room’s speakers blared in an alien tongue.
“Shg’k-ul Tkh’a’larr! Shg’k-kekh Vha’rimaar! Nst’ul Sckh-khrekh!”
The queen listened, and then with a snarl, kicked one of the seats across the control room in a fit of rage.
“It is the traitors. They are sending a subspace call to Okruk!” She instantly started to roar in her own tongue into one of the overhead microphones. Dane’s stolen translation bug conveyed the words. The queen was saying that she would find them and make them pay for their crimes against the throne, promising a hundred thousand different punishments, all largely biological in effect.
“Where are they!?” Dane demanded, nodding to Isaias, who was moving towards the doors. “And how can they even do that? Transmit a message all the way to the Exin home world from here!?” Which Dane thought was particularly unfair, since the marines had to use deep space transmitter arrays to get a message even to their nearest HQ in the same solar system!
“We have an on-board ansible, you simpletons!” the queen snapped. “They’re in the secondary cargo hold, three floors down.”
“Got it,” Farouk said, flinging the coordinates to Dane’s suit.
>AMP 023 / Sensors and Scanners / . . .
>>New Targets Acquired! . . .
A flashing orange danger vector appeared on the HUD of Dane’s faceplate, and he was already turning to the door. “Isaias with me—the rest of you have three priorities: stop that broadcast, get our own to Central Marine Servers, and don’t shoot the queen until I say so!”
He heard an angered groan from Hendrix, who was particularly miffed about the last order, but Dane didn’t have time for backchat. If this ship had an ansible, then that meant that Okruk, however many thousands of millions of light years away, might already have their message, and with their individual ship jump capabilities, could already be mustering a response.
In short: an Exin attack squadron could be here in minutes.
11
Cargo
“Straight ahead, Sarge!” Isaias whispered over their shared suit-to-suit comms. The two marines ran through the mother ship, their heavy metal boots clanking on the alien floors and every pounding step taking them towards the flickering orange vector of danger.
“I got something!” Dane said, an instant before his faceplate magnified the hazy patch of brilliance ahead. So far, their hunt had taken them out of the command room and down a central, arterial corridor that was lined on both sides with more of the overlarge Exin statues. Then, upon reaching an open gallery, they had followed the flickering danger ahead downstairs and stalled escalator-type machineries to this smaller warren of corridors.
Which now opened out on one side, into large, vaulted spaces. Cargo holds, lit by faint bluish glow from . . .
“Skrekh!” A garbled snarl, and a sudden fzzz of energy as a bolt of angry purple-and-red energy shot back towards them.
“Frack!” Dane heard Isaias gasp out. He jumped to one side just in time, for the energy bolt to slam into the floor behind him with a dull boom and showering sparks.
“Looks like they found some damn weapons,” Dane growled as he rolled on the floor, popping back up to a knee to take aim.
There, on the edge of the cargo hold and the corridor, was some kind of digital control board with at least two shapes scattering away from it. Four-armed shapes that were bringing up their own shell-like pulse weapons in response.
Dane fired, almost on instinct, hoping as much to distract them as to kill them. It worked on one of them, who jumped out of sight into the voluminous hold, but the second merely ducked to one side and continued firing.
Fzzt!
In almost slow motion, Dane saw one of the volleys of the enemy’s fire flash past him, and he automatically turned his head to look—
“Ach!”
One of the bolts had caught Isaias square in the upper chest of his Orbital AMP suit and sent him flying to hit the corridor floor and skid backwards.
Just as hatchways back the way that they had come popped open, and two more Exin warriors started crawling out of them.
“It’s a trap!” Dane gasped, turning to snap-fire at the remaining Exin in the corridor as he threw himself towards Isaias’ body.
“Sarge!? Sarge—you’re breaking up. Repeat that!” Farouk’s voice was glitchy over their suit-to-suit local network. Even though they could o
nly be three or four hundred feet away in direct line from the control room, Dane could tell that there had to be something about the alien metals used in the construction of this place that interfered with their suit comms.
“I said CONTACT! We’ve got contact!” Dane shouted as he slid to Isaias’ side, grabbed the younger marine’s pulse rifle in his other hand and fired both weapons at the Exin in front of him. Isais appeared to be groaning and only semiconscious, so the weapon was no good to him right now, but it was a lot of good to Dane. The Exin could not dodge both sets of volleys and was blown backwards into the hold.
The Exin behind them in the corridor were snarling as they skittered to their feet.
“Get up, Private Isaias, for the love of all that is holy!” Dane fired behind them as he nudged Isaias as forcefully as he dared.
“Urgh!” With a spluttering sound, Isaias was coughing and pushing himself to his side. “What . . . oh!”
“Here! At least another contact ahead!” Dane was shouting as he threw the recovering marine his rifle and fired again at the would-be ambushing Exin behind them. Both marines scrambled for the main cargo bay. At least there might be cover back there, Dane was thinking.
And hopefully not a squad of four-armed killing machines, either.
“Cover!” Dane commanded as they skidded into the cargo, and Isaias—as winded as he was, moved immediately to the nearest of the metal pillars that sprouted across the sloping-roofed room.
It was a hall, really, open to the corridor along one end and extending out towards multiple sets of half-circle metal doors in the gloomy distance. Interspersed across its length were metal pillars and collections of stacked octagonal crates.
And at least one angry Exin.
Metal Warrior: Ring of Steel (Mech Fighter Book 7) Page 7