Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Yeah, I was starting to get that feeling,” Trace replied. “Everyone, you heard the Doc.”

  “And I want a swab from one of those dead parren,” Suelo continued, sounding concerned. “Just a forefinger inside the mouth should do it. Blood would be better, but we don’t seem to have any of that.”

  “Could get some,” Private Long suggested. “They won’t mind.” Long was a much-decorated sixteen year vet who’d rejected every promotion that came his way, and threatened to retire if they stuck him with so much as a Lance Corporal’s stripes. Some of his platoon thought that made him crazy. Trace understood him completely.

  “Saliva will be fine for now, it takes a little time to process anyway… Major, I’d strongly recommend you do not progress any further until we’re sure exactly what this is.”

  “I can’t do that Doc, Phoenix is in a tight spot and we have to make it fast. Lieutenant Zhi, let’s move.”

  “Alright Echo Platoon,” said Zhi, “you heard the Major. Keep it tight, watch those corners, schematic says we’re into main personnel level just ahead.”

  Ahead was a micro-gravity entry lobby, with security gates and automated ID checks through which workers would funnel to access their job. It was a horror, multiple bodies on the floor, others piled within the gates, which had attempted to close, creating tangles of dead parren, fingers still clawing at each other’s clothing, and at the uncooperative gates, in a desperate attempt to get clear.

  “Third gate looks clear,” said Corporal Leech, Kunoz’s second, sounding grim. No one liked this. Bullets and grenades were one thing, but this was nothing they’d seen before. Tavalai never used weapons like this (if a weapon it was) and kaal would never breach tavalai protocols, whatever their own opinions on how it should be done. Sard would obviously have no moral problem, being psychologically incapable of understanding the concept of moral problems, but they much preferred to slash and blast, and it just wasn’t their style. Trace could feel the cold dread beginning to settle over her marines, and didn’t like that either.

  “Check for traps,” Kunoz reminded them sharply. “Don’t assume there won’t be conventional weapons, it’s just another job people.”

  “Major,” said Styx in Trace’s ear, “permission to access your marines’ com functions to gain new points of entry to the station networks.”

  “Yes Styx, go ahead. Please feed any relevant data direct to our tacnets.”

  “Yes Major.”

  Beyond the automated gates, Echo Platoon’s point-men arrived on a concourse, strung with handlines to move stationers along quickly, and a large, transparent-sided elevator tube opposite to take people down to the full-gravity on the station rim. More bodies lay lightly upon the floor, one sliding gently even now, as the concourse was not directly vertical to G. Trace was still passing through the entrance lobby, visor visuals and real vision competing to show her the most awful image. To one side of the automated gates, she saw two parren women, making no attempt to fight through the gates toward whatever imagined safety lay beyond. They simply sat together, arms about one another, heads buried on the other’s shoulder. Trace willed herself to calm and focus. In some ways, doing that in a firefight was easier.

  “Major,” came Suelo’s voice, “the saliva samples show nanoparticles. I will need much better facilities to study them directly, and frankly, I don’t think we dare try as that would involve bringing them back to Phoenix. The particles are moving.” Trace had never heard Doc Suelo frightened before. But it was a time for firsts. “These are not even biological weapons, they are nanomachines, entirely synthetic and presumably swarming through the air, I swear I don’t know how.”

  “Great,” someone muttered. “Guess who’s getting decontaminated before we go back.”

  “If they let us back in,” another marine added.

  “Knock it off!” Zhi snapped. “Press on, this hallway here, we get to bridge level then it’s just one more, let’s move.”

  “Styx,” said Trace on the private channel back to Phoenix. Erik and the bridge would be listening in. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  “Major, I do not know what it is,” Styx replied. Even she sounded alarmed. She only did that when she wanted to inform her human interlocutor what they ought to be feeling, Trace was quite certain. In this case, it was hardly necessary. “Its only utility is the mass extermination of organics. It is a great technological trouble to go to for that purpose.”

  Meaning that her people were familiar with the objective, just not the method. The feeling of oppression within Trace’s suit seemed to intensify, as her eyes flicked involuntarily to the suit environmentals. Marine armour was alo-tech, of course, and insanely advanced beyond what humanity would have been capable of without that technological leg-up. In addition to everything else, it was biological, nano-tech and radiation resistant, against all known threats and toxins. All known threats…

  “Captain,” Trace called back to Phoenix bridge. “I think they’re all dead here. I’ve got no idea if these things are still active, at this point I have to assume it makes no difference to our risk levels if we press on, or head back now. I am continuing on, please make preparations for thorough decontamination. We cannot afford to leave our suits behind. Maybe we can get Styx some better analysis on those samples, we’ll leave a few marines behind to do it if we have to. If anyone can work out what they are and how to deactivate them, she can.”

  “Captain,” came Suelo’s voice from Medbay, “there are nano-tech weapons recorded from elsewhere in the Spiral, but nothing like this. The data suggests they’re changing their victims’ body chemistry somehow, my guess is they’re not injecting toxins directly, but rather metabolising existing compounds and excreting new ones, like any living creature might do. But those excretions are lethal, and to look at the way the bodies are arranged on the station, they’re lethal quickly. Further, it looks like they spread incredibly fast, but without independent propulsion I’ve no idea how — the air currents in the station are nowhere near rapid enough to create this kind of killing spread.”

  “Thanks Doc,” said Erik. “Keep me informed. Styx, please prioritise analysis for decontamination, I want our marines back safely.”

  “Yes Captain.”

  “Imagine a tanker load of those things dropped into Homeworld’s atmosphere,” said Kaspowitz. “If they could be programmed to only kill humans, they wouldn’t even need to kill the planet like the krim killed Earth. It could remain habitable, just without us.”

  Silence greeted his words. Bridge crew stared at their screens, and whatever basic excitement all Fleet crew felt at the prospect of action seemed far away from here. A coms light flashed on Erik’s screen, coming from Medbay once more. He opened the channel. “Go ahead Doc.”

  “Captain I’m sorry, just one more thought… if the marines are unaffected in their full suits, it follows that any parren who made it into EVA suits may also have survived. I understand we don’t have the time or resources to mount a rescue mission, but if we broadcast to them, they could get here on their own.”

  A few months ago, Erik would have agonised about it. “I’m sorry Doc,” he said simply, “there could be hundreds, and the time we take to decontaminate that many extras will probably get us killed as well. And then we don’t have secure berthing for manoeuvres, which we’re bound to do. We have to hope parren help arrives before the deepynines come back to V-strike the evidence.”

  He closed that channel. “Lieutenant Shilu,” he continued, “make certain we’re recording every data source. There’s no way the deepynines will let this stand, they’ll be back here for a V-strike. Everyone else, keep your eyes peeled — we’ve probably got hours until they come, but it might only be minutes.”

  Trace’s marines passed through the core bridge level without bothering to check rooms and offshoots — the secure doors were wide open, and here there were signs of a violent assault, bullet holes in the walls and the starburst spray of grenade
explosions. All the bodies were parren, and Trace could not see any sign that attacking sard had received defensive fire. Likely they’d fired only to provoke more panic, and stop anyone on the station from even thinking about fighting back. Then the nanoparticles had been released, either from them or from docked shuttles, or penetration weapons or some other initiator Phoenix hadn’t guessed at yet.

  She couldn’t guess why. Possibly they didn’t want anyone on the station to be telling tales, and so killed fifty thousand parren so they wouldn’t tell anyone who’d attacked them. That didn’t seem especially smart, as by now everyone was starting to guess, and V-striking the station afterward to destroy all evidence would only raise more questions at the highest levels of parren government. Maybe there was something specific to this operation that required the station be killed. Or maybe it was simply that deepynines, whatever their new alliance with alo and sard, had never lost their old habit of killing every inconvenient organic in sight, on principle.

  “Major,” said Sergeant Kunoz from up front, and Trace saw he’d paused atop a passage at his feet, into which Private Ali was probing. A vast camera pan around showed secure doors and micro-G offices — the rear administrative section of the shipping bridge, which this parren design located up near the ships themselves, instead of on the gravity rim, as was more typical of human stations. “Schematic says this is it. There’s major explosive damage, looks like the sard came this way and tried to blast it. I guessed we interrupted them when they were halfway in.”

  “If they had deepynine drones along,” Private Ali offered, “you’d think they’d just cut through with their laser thingys.”

  “Styx,” Trace called. “You get any reading on this thing?”

  “Major, it is definitely the secure room, it is completely autistic and has no network connections. I cannot penetrate past that door, and the secure wall goes all the way around, there is no weak entrypoint.”

  “Any ideas how we get inside?”

  “Uh… Major?” said Private Ali, reaching to try the inset manual handle. “Damn thing’s unlocked.” He pulled, and the door slid with nothing more than the weight of his suit. “Looks like the sard did get in.”

  “Well shit,” said Kunoz. “There goes our mission. If they got those logs, they’ll have copied and erased the originals. We got nothing.”

  Trace gave a harder jet of manoeuvring thrusters, accelerating up a hallway with the occasional bounce of a boot. “Sergeant Kunoz, take one section and secure the interior, watch for traps and be damn careful. Lieutenant Zhi, secure and hold a perimeter about that room. I’m coming up.”

  She bounded into the office section, past marines holding cross-corridors with ready rifles, then into heavy steel halls that became multiple-sided windows about three-dimensional offices, effectively zero-G layouts with vertically stacked workspaces and wrap-around screens about swivel chairs. There were bodies here, too, some huddled behind walls and doors as though hiding, one dangling from higher workstations. Another sat in the hallway as she came through, braced still upright against a wall, sitting with arms and legs calmly crossed, eyes closed as though meditating. House Harmony, Trace thought. The whole station was run by House Harmony government, though not all its people were that house. Parren from all five houses lived in mixed communities — only the governments were exclusive. This parren had seen her death approach, and settled calmly to meet it with a clear mind and open heart.

  “Bless you, child,” Trace murmured to the woman as she passed. It was what her siksakas in Kulina training had told her when she’d done something right, in meditation or other selfless, cleansing practice. Alien though the parren were, sometimes the House Harmony phase made more sense to her than humans.

  Another corner, past deactivated security doors and guard posts, and she found the downward passage, with Lance Corporal Haynes’ Second Section standing over it, Erik’s buddy Private Krishnan at Haynes’ side, plus Privates Wang and Krokov. Command Squad deployed more widely about them, and Trace simply stepped off the edge and let the gravity slide her gently down. She passed through the open doorway, past ceramic armourplate more than a metre thick, then into a spherical room with space against the outer wall, surrounding an inner core that looked like a jumble of silver steel rods.

  Holding to a railing near what looked like an operating screen were Sergeant Kunoz and Private Long, while Private Welsh and Corporal Leech inspected the computer core from other angles. Computing had taken so many different directions amongst the various peoples of the Spiral, and Trace lacked the interest to know exactly which technological strand this was. Only that it was very different to what she was accustomed, and likely a little less advanced than what humanity had inherited from the alo. Which was in turn, she guessed, a few tens of thousands of years behind that ridiculous molten-steel sphere of a data-core that Phoenix had gone to such lengths to recover…

  “I get no outside signal here at all,” said Sergeant Kunoz, exploring the screen before him with the impression of a man who had some idea what he was doing. “No coms at all, can’t reach anyone, not even Styx.” Within the hushed, enclosed space, all voices carried even beyond visored faceplates, audible even without coms.

  “Styx can only reach as far as the coms tech she’s riding on,” said Trace, leaning in as Private Long edged aside, peering at the display. “It looks intact, yeah? The sard didn’t trash it?”

  “Seems that way,” Kunoz said dubiously. “Look, I’m pretty good with computer stuff, but…”

  “That’s why I sent you in,” Trace said patiently.

  “Well thanks, but this is all in parren and I’d just be guessing. We’ll need an outside connection, I’m gonna need Styx, Rooke or even Romki to help with the translations…”

  “I think Spacer Chenkov knows more about raw computer stuff than Rooke,” said Trace. “Ensign Kadi even, but he’s still not in great shape, and Styx actually isn’t perfect with organic interface systems…”

  The display screen flickered, then went black, the glowing array of icons vanished. Kunoz made a horrified gesture. “Oh shit. What happened? I didn’t touch a damn thing!”

  “Hello,” said a voice from the panel, and the secure room audio echoed it about the chamber. “Crew of Phoenix.” There was something unpleasant about the voice. It was synthetic, clearly. It strung out, multi-toned, like a divided harmonic in some avant-garde piece of electronic music. It was not trying to be natural and organic, as Styx did. It was trying to be synthetic, as though to prove a point. Almost immediately, Trace guessed what it was, and felt a cold chill of dread run through her veins. “I am your doom. Perhaps you should call me a god. No matter. You have something I want. And you will give it to me.”

  Kunoz’s frown turned to incredulity as he stared at Trace. “It’s a recording,” she said to him, staring at the screen, as though somewhere in its blackness lay a clue. “They left it for us to find. This is what they’ve been herding us toward.” Somewhere where Styx couldn’t hear it. These days, on Phoenix, there weren’t many of those left.

  “I’m not a recording,” the faintly amused, demonic voice replied. “I am far beyond what you can comprehend.”

  “You’re an interactive program left behind on this system,” Trace said coolly. “An insignificant piece of computer code. You want to impress me, tell me something I don't already know.”

  “A good answer,” the voice replied. Styx might have synthesised more amusement still, were she attempting this intimidating effect. The voice on the screen had no such comprehension of human vocal tones and the emotional depth they conveyed. “Little Phoenix. We could have destroyed you upon your entry to this system. But you have something aboard that we want, alive if possible. And the data-core that you recovered from Cephilae. Or at least, we presume that you recovered it. Your trails lead in this direction. Cephilae seems a reasonable guess, or else you would not be back so soon.”

  “How are you still alive?” Trace asked. For a sent
ient-simulant program, it was awfully chatty. Maybe it would give something away. “How are deepynines still alive in the galaxy?”

  “How are drysines?” the voice returned. “Some of us are destined for ascension, others for extinction. The fates are curious. Give us the drysine queen. She is what we want, and her precious data-core. Give us these, and we will let you keep your little lives. For now.”

  “Yeah, tempting,” Corporal Leech said drily.

  “Hey listen,” Kunoz growled, “why don’t you stick your…” But Trace stopped him with a hand before his armoured face.

  “You think to show your strength,” said Trace. “But you’re terrified. All this effort, to destroy one drysine. This is unimpressive. So much fear, of one little queen from a race that has not survived the ages nearly as well as you seem to have done.”

  “She lies to you,” said the voice, weaving harmonic strands in and out, separating then merging once more. “Has she told you that she was merely one of many? A generation of new command units, born to fight in the great war against the organics? We have recognised this signal. This transmission source, this old and devious foe. This is Delvak Nine. She is the culmination of technologies spanning the Spiral. All the synthetic races, the hundreds and thousands of civilisations within the great civilisation. Thriving, creating, destroying and rebuilding. These glories produced technologies beyond imagination, and the drysines stole them all.

  “Delvak Nine is the culmination of these. There were twelve. Only she, and two others, survived the process of creation. She is older than she claims. She defeated synthetic fleets single-handed. She slaughtered organic worlds without remorse. She is the worst of your fears. You fear deepynines, and you should. You should be so much more frightened of her. She has only shown you a fraction of her power. She will crush you like bugs, the moment it becomes convenient to her. All of the power that you grant her, in order to fight us, will only come back at you a thousand fold in time.”