Alpha Rises

by James David Victor

  “Hogan, you can’t do this. I’ve got one million Coalition credits coming to me, straight from House Archival!” he begged, remembering the deal he had made with Agent Simmons. The guards knelt on him, crushing the air of him. At least they weren’t punching him anymore.

  “Really?” Hogan mused. “Isn’t that a coincidence. I watched my home get blown up by Armcore battleships, Martin.” Hogan’s eyes flared in rage. “Too bad you haven’t got a million Coalition credits right now in front of you, right?”

  “But I can get them. We can get them, me and my crew and the Mercury…” El gasped under the weight of the two thugs in stolen Mela security outfits.

  “Too late, Martin. You had your chance. You blew it.” With a nod, they were hauled to their feet and shoved back up a small metal gantry with a wire-mesh floor.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” El hazarded a look behind him. It was one of the rose-petal airlocks. They are going to throw us out of the airlock? He thought in alarm, turning back to fight the thugs as Cassandra fought beside him.

  But with a painful thump and a cruel laugh, El’s face connected with a heavy fist and he saw stars and lost balance. There was the bleep and screech of metal opening behind them and then he felt the electric tingle as his body passed through an energy field—and into the heavy wet of the Mela ocean.

  5

  Hacked Ticket

  “Captain? Captain!” Irie tried the ship’s communication array one more time, but, just like all her attempts with their wrist communicators to reach Eliard, it resulted in blank static.

  Frack. She cursed the controls once more, as she heard the pounding steps of the Duergar behind her. He was getting, as he called it, ‘tetchy,’ which was not an idea that filled her with confidence. Tetchy Duergars had been known to start wars, or at least to end them.

  “Something is wrong,” Val muttered, his voice like crushed rocks.

  As much as Irie didn’t want to admit it, she had to agree. “I think you’re right. Maybe Armcore found them?”

  Val growled, reaching for his large meson rifle, what would be a cannon to any smaller humanoid. “We’ll see how long they can keep them for…” He grinned savagely.

  “Val, we’re talking about an entire platform full of people—guards, mercenaries, and who knows what else. Need I remind you that we still need to make it past the orbital satellites and out of here? We don’t want to cause a major disturbance on a Coalition home world!”

  Val just grunted and shrugged. Such things weren’t much of a priority to a Duergar, she saw.

  Phzt! There was a bleep from the ship’s console behind her, and she turned to see an electronic message scrolling across one of the screens.

  CODED MESSAGE RECEIVED. SECURITY CONTROLS BYPASSED. MESSAGE DOWNLOADING IN 3…2...1. Received!

  “Oh, great.” Irie knew that there were only a few servers capable of overcoming a ship’s weak AI to force messages into their system. It would have to be the Mela infrastructure computers, or Armcore, or something Coalition-sanctified. Clenching her teeth in annoyance, she clicked the buttons under the screen to see what it was they had sent them.

  And then she stopped, her face puzzled as the digital light of the words played across her face.

  “What is it? The captain?” Val grunted from the steps up to the cockpit of the Mercury.

  “No, it’s schematics. Plans.” Irie frowned. She was looking through a collection of highly technical documents showing both the internal layout of a building—a very large building, from the looks of it—as well as the layout of a sensor grid around the outside of it.

  This is an artificial moon, she thought, looking at the vaguely hexagonal shape that rotated on the black field, and around it was a sea of satellites and drone sensors, from which extended dotted red lines to form an almost impenetrable net around the station. But not entirely impenetrable, she noticed, the red dotted lines flashing green in a seemingly random rhythm as the system had to manage the energy field load or else start blowing their generators.

  She swiped her way into the station schematics, finding that large areas were blanked out. The plans did not give any details as to what were in those areas, but the plans did show that the station contained galleries wide enough for spaceships to fly straight into and dock with a huge variety of loading platforms. There appeared to be processing and manufacturing areas, as well as layers and layers of barracks and training grounds.

  “Oh, crap,” she whispered when she saw the logo on one of the documents that the Mercury had been sent. It was Armcore.

  “What is it?” Val repeated.

  “We’ve just been sent a map to Armcore Prime. No, a map of Armcore Prime,” Irie confirmed. “Along with shift rotations and even some security codes.” Her fingers tapped the edge of the console nervously. “Whatever the captain and Cassandra have been up to in there, they don’t seem to be playing things quietly…”

  “A new job,” Val said in a pleased manner. “I, for one, will be glad to get off of this planet, and go somewhere where I can use my gun freely!”

  “Well, I’m not sure that Armcore Prime will let you walk around with a gun any more than Mela did,” Irie muttered, but the transmission had given her an idea. It had been sent through sub-quantum protocols, with a high level of sophistication that could download direct into the Mercury Blade’s navigational computer. It made her think of how the Mela platform’s navigational computers were probably the largest anywhere nearby. If she could find a way to hack into them, she might be able to boost the signal to the captain.

  I could find out where they were.

  “What are you doing now?” Val glowered. “We have to go searching for the captain!”

  “You go,” she said in annoyance. “I have an idea how to find him.” She realized a few seconds too late that that was the last thing she should have advised the Duergar to do as he angrily seized his heavy metal shod mace and stalked toward the hatchway door.

  “But don’t start a riot!” she called after him. The hatchway hissed open and the gunner climbed out.

  “Dammit!” she said again, turning back to the computer to try and find a way to locate the captain, and quickly. She knew that there had to be a way. There was always a way, and she could speak to machines in the same way that others might speak to plants. The only thing different about Irie Hanson was that most of the time, the machines responded.

  There. She knew that every ship, upon being allowed to board the Mela platforms, would have to accept an electronic ‘ticket,’ a small piece of code that Mela central computers ‘gave’ to each ship so that they wouldn’t be classed as a hostile. This was a standard procedure and operated in the same way that data-cookies registered precisely where you had visited inside the data-space. Within just a few moments, she had found the electronic ticket and was starting to break it open to find a way to reverse-hack back into Mela computers.

  “It doesn’t have to a big hack,” she muttered as she worked. The master engineer often talked to herself, or the machines, when she worked. She found that the central Mela computers requested that the electronic ticket announce itself at certain intervals, so that they could keep up to date which ships were docked, and which ones were quarantined or had committed offenses. It was a simple enough process to write a tiny bit of code to piggyback inside that ticket, and one that requested access to their navigational array.

  Hiss-thunk! The hatchway closed loudly behind her and she heard the Duergar climb back inside.

  “Uh… Irie?” Val called.

  “I’m busy!” She kept working on the code.

  “I promise that it wasn’t me,” the Val grumbled, and Irie kept working for a full ten seconds before his words sunk into her consciousness.

  Oh no. “Val? What have you done?”

  “I didn’t do anything! You have my word on that, but you might want to take a look out of the window,” the Duergar said heavily. She could hear him thumping and barging around in the main
hold behind her, apparently seizing weapons and ammunitions belts.

  No, no, no… She looked out of the nearest cockpit window to see a line of white-suited security guards approaching at a steady pace across their hanger, their blasters held up to their shoulders.

  “What the…” She turned to look out the opposite window, to see that yes, the line extended on all sides around the Mercury Blade. “They must have found out about Armcore,” she said. “Or that snake Primateur Hyle turned on us.”

  “Don’t worry. They won’t get into the ship,” Val growled savagely.

  Irie didn’t doubt for a moment that the Duergar was right. The hull of the Mercury should be able to take a good amount of laser shot from regular blasters, that was for sure—but they still didn’t have the captain and Cassandra on board, and the Mela platform was bound to have armaments big enough to laser-cut a hole through the Blade’s armor.

  Which meant that she still needed to find out where the captain and Cassandra were, and quickly. “Don’t kill any of them yet!” she shouted at Val. “Let them waste their energy for a bit. Hopefully, that will buy us some time.” She worked on the code. Nothing too dramatic, but something insidious enough to spread quickly.

  Thok-thok-thok! The hull of the Mercury Blade rang with the heavy thumps of the Mela security team outside. “Open up! In the name of Mela Security!”

  “Go eat a Gleesonian!” Val shouted back cheerily. There was a fizzle of blaster fire, and the hull shook.

  “You don’t have to exactly make them mad, either, Val…” she sighed as she worked. Almost done, almost… There!

  She waited for the next announce from the Mela central computers, searching through the base core commands until it flickered to life.

  Thok-thik-thok! More bangs on the side of the hull, and the ship rocked as security guards tried to grapple, burn, and search for any weakness they could.

  Announce Protocol: Mela Station Identification Check.

  The process appeared on the list of incoming commands, and the Irie crossed her fingers as she saw it computing, waiting, and then complete.

  Identification Check Complete. Status: HOLD.

  “Oh, frack,” she whispered. It seemed that the central Mela computers had already identified them as a dangerous vessel, which was no surprise, given the security staff outside, but still, it would make her job a lot harder when they had to leave. Anyway. Let’s see if this bad boy got home… She started clicking on the coded backdoor that she had left inside the electronic ticket.

  THUD-THUD-THUD! The banging sounds were getting louder, and now a low whine had been added to it.

  “They’re trying to cut their way in!” Val called, but he sounded happy. She didn’t turn her head but imagined that the Duergar was pleased at the idea of being able to rip heads from shoulders in the not too distant future.

  “Come on, come on, come on.” She worked feverishly.

  ACCESS GRANTED! She smiled at those words. She was in. The screens blanked, and immediately rebooted to display the Mela Main Navigational Controls Network. Now it was Irie’s turn to go on the offensive. She could do a lot of damage in here, if she wanted to.

  “But first, let’s find the captain.” The engineer keyed the captain’s communicator callsign into the main station navigational system, and, at that precise moment, about twenty-seven satellites, as well as hidden cameras and drones, turned their attention to finding him.

  TARGET ACQUIRED! The system bleeped happily.

  6

  Wet

  El thrashed and struggled, clamping his mouth shut but still losing half a lungful of air as the metal hatchway in front of him re-folded in on itself, leaving him outside of the Mela platform, underwater.

  Everything was green and grey, apart from the orange-brown immensity that was the Mela 2 Platform, curving away from him. Spears of metal towers sunk down into the sea and extended over him far above, dotted with the windows and lights of the platform itself. El wondered, absurdly, if he there would be anyone standing at one of those windows who might see him and the woman beside him, and…what? Call for Mela security to help?

  But he was sinking too, he realized, as the platform started to slide up in front of him. His fingers scrabbled at the sides, slid off the surface. His chest was starting to burn and he knew that his body would react at any moment, trying to snatch a breath even though it couldn’t.

  I am going to die out here. We’re going to die. This is it. The end of Captain Eliard Martin of the Mercury Blade…

  El had never been a great fan of water.

  Suddenly, hands were pulling his shoulders around, dragging him away from the platform.

  He shook his head in confusion. He would sink!

  And Cassandra was pushing her face to his, forcing her mouth onto his to blow air into his mouth. He blinked, feeling sick but a little better as he forced bubbles out of his nose.

  They were still sinking, though, and faster now. It was just the platform’s stabilizing towers that were around them. El clutched Cassandra’s shoulders as she was hastily fishing for something out of her belt. What? It didn’t look like anything. A small rectangle of white.

  With a flick of her wrist, she snapped it and pulled at the rectangle’s edges. El watched as it blossomed like elastic, wavering and almost translucent before she slapped it around El’s mouth and nose.

  “Urk!” He thrashed, letting go of her as he tried to back away from the thing, but it was already too late. The light film had adhered to his face and stuck to it like a mask. He coughed, opened his mouth, his fear of suffocating forcing his body to react—

  And amazingly, he could breathe.

  What the… He turned to prod at his face, feeling a soft, resisting plastic membrane over his features. “What is this?” he opened his mouth to say, but the words didn’t come out.

  The captain realized that he was still sinking, however, as he awkwardly tried to doggy-paddle. He had always hated swimming. He had been far more concerned with being up there in the stars, flying through the gulfs between the stars, and not the waters of terrestrial planets. But he managed to rise a few meters, before the graceful form of Cassandra, moving sharply and gracefully with small movements of her wrist and feet, she joined him. She too had the odd transparent, plastic-rubber mask over her face, distorting her features. El gestured to his own, and Casandra shook her head, pointing upwards instead.

  Well, we can’t talk anyway, the captain thought, accepting her arm as she helped him swim back up the legs toward the body of the Mela platform once more.

  It must be some kind of oxygen filter, he thought as he flapped and kicked. A membrane that let oxygen in, but not water. He found that it stretched with every movement of his face, and the only thing that he could feel of its presence was a slight, cool tingling on his skin.

  Thank the stars that Cassandra is some super-secret spy, he thought gladly, despite the fact that he had cursed that very same fact multiple times in the last few hours.

  The platform grew larger before them, but it did so very slowly. El had forgotten how much hard work swimming could be. They started to look for a point of entry. There was a cloud of smaller, whizzing shapes moving back and forth from the platform’s legs, which El took to be the subaquatic craft that he had seen before. They moved up and down the same platform before entering new portholes.

  It’s probably quicker to move by water than it is to navigate all the corridors and avenues inside, the captain theorized. Still others were zooming out into the murky shadows of the water, presumably heading for the other Mela platforms on their own business.

  Could we hijack one? he thought, but quickly realized they were moving too quickly. They were more likely to get run over by one than they were to catch hold of it.

  A shape moved in the darkness underneath them. A large shape. El panicked, flailing his arms and feet.

  It was one of the Lobo Worms, the long ridge of a head and the serpentine body rising from the dep
ths to reveal a circular, eyeless face. The thing was massive and looked, to the captain at least, like something out of his worst nightmares.

  “Run!” he screamed silently, thrashing in the water as Cassandra noticed the thing undulating toward them. Cassandra tried to make calming gestures, but El was too far gone for that. Instead, he kicked and paddled, willing his body in awkward butterfly-frog movements toward the nearest arm of Platform 2. The captain really didn’t care where he was or where he ended up. It might be back at the very same airlock that he had been thrown out of, with Trader Hogan and his goons and the entire Mela security force waiting to kill him on the other side, for all he cared.

  His hands hit and scrabbled at metal. He had found one of the many portholes, but there was nothing that his hands or feet could do to budge it open.

  Were there any controls? A button? A lever? He searched the nearby circle of the hull, but there was nothing apart from the old stencil marks of numbers, indicating something that he didn’t even understand.

  I’m going to die out here. Eaten by a hellish worm-thing!

  His desperate scrabbling moved along the hull, his brain panicking as he tried to rip apart metal plates, with no effect. The petal porthole was gone, and he was now over a ledge in the metal, and the smooth, colored-crystal glass of one of the windows.

  This could be it! he thought, seizing the rims of the frames and peering inside.

  Inside was a silent and respectable restaurant, with Mela citizens quietly sitting at hover-tables, sharing demure conversation between plates of brightly-colored seafood.

  “Help me!” he opened his mouth to scream, banging on the colored glass.