The Eternity War: Dominion

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Problem solved,” said Riggs.

  The flare’s light finally gave out, and the background hissing was silenced. Carcosa’s glowing face was visible through the view-port set into the airlock hatch. It threw a pale illumination across the bay, catching Riggs’ features very precisely.

  “So, Jackals, who wants to go first?”

 

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  GAME CHANGER

  Riggs’ face showed obvious signs of confusion as the voice touched his mind.

  The effect didn’t last long. He whirled around, his pistol up, and fired off a round without even taking proper aim.

  P lurched out of the shadows.

  The shot would’ve been true, had it not been for P’s even faster reflexes. The xeno coiled, flinging a clawed hand at Riggs in response. The swipe had enough force that it punched through the combat-armour at Riggs’ shoulder. Riggs yelped, but didn’t go down. He whirled the powered wrench in his left hand, the element glowing bright blue, sparking as it charged up. He smashed the tool into P’s carapace, momentarily illuminating the xeno’s outline.

  The look of horror and realisation that dawned on Riggs’ face was precious.

  “Christo and Gaia…” Feng whispered.

  P had changed again. It was a Krell on steroids, big as a warden-form, evolved. Its body was covered in pleated bio-armour, and an enhanced musculature rippled beneath. Not even scar tissue remained of the injuries that P had suffered on Sanctuary. This creature barely resembled what had gone into the chrysalis, but I knew it was the same alien. P’s presence was in my head again, anchored in place as though it were a natural state of being.

  The alien absorbed the kinetic impact from the wrench head. In reply, P tossed Riggs against the bulkhead. His armour produced a startling crunch as he hit the metal panelling beside the airlock hatch. The collision wasn’t yet enough to end him though and he slid to the deck, still fumbling with his pistol and the wrench.

  “Go, P!” Zero yelled.

  Riggs scrambled backwards against the wall. He aimed his gun, and fired off a volley of hard rounds. P’s carapace sparked as bullets bounced off. When that didn’t work, Riggs turned the pistol towards the nearest prisoner: Novak, still dangling from his chain.

  “Fuck you, fish!” Riggs yelled. “They’re not leaving here alive, either.”

  P broadcast.

  The xeno’s armoured crest had grown, and blazed into its skull-plate was a chemical burn pattern. A Jackal-head badge. Novak’s handiwork, before we dropped to Vektah Minor. When P spoke, the words formed in my head as clearly as any data-transmission, and from the expressions on the faces of my squad, I knew that they could hear it too. P’s communication abilities had changed and the mind-link we had shared was no longer exclusive.

  Riggs fired, but P intervened. It slammed a claw into Riggs’ arm, disrupting his aim, and the round harmlessly ricocheted somewhere in the deckhead.

  Then P punched into Riggs’ torso unit, into the weak spot between armoured plates. Riggs gasped impotently. Dark blood welled in his mouth—he’d suffered some critical internal injury—but the simulant technology was durable, and he wasn’t out. Never one to give up, he grappled with his wrench again. Swung it in a wide arc against P’s head.

  The wrench made contact with skull-shattering force, but P wasn’t troubled by the blow. It summarily batted aside the wrench with enough strength that Riggs’ arm made a sickening crack. The alien then turned a clawed foot on Riggs’ other hand, and stamped down on it. His Widowmaker pistol clattered to the ground.

  “Waste him!” yelled Ving, coming out of his shellshock. “He killed my squad!”

  P said.

  One clawed hand still planted into Riggs’ stomach, the xeno bodily hauled him to the view-port. The white orb of Carcosa was visible beyond. Riggs tried to speak, but he was silenced with a mind-communication.

 

  P smashed Riggs’ head into the hatch so hard that I thought the armourglass might break. He probably died after the first impact, but he was certainly dead after the fifth. There was no question he was extracted. P tossed the battered corpse aside, and I tried not to look at the remains.

  “We’re sorry that we were late,” said a familiar voice.

  Two figures emerged from the service hatch at the back of the bay. Captain Heinrich and Dr Saito. Both looked worse for wear, but alive. In the circumstances, I called that a victory.

  I swallowed in relief. “Cut us down, P.”

 

  “What happened to you?”

  P said.

  “Your voice-box…”

 

  Where the crude voice-modulator had once been grafted to P’s thorax, there was now only hardened carapace. P glanced at me, reading my bewilderment.

 

  “They killed Dieter,” I said.

  “The commander is gone?” asked Heinrich, in disbelief.

  “Spaced,” I said. “They’ve taken Lopez, too. We have to hurry.”

  The Valkyrie had been comprehensively trashed. There were bodies everywhere. Some compartments had been ransacked, others opened to vacuum. The boarders had done a proper job on the ship.

  There had been many casualties during the attack. Some had put up a fight, and there were sailors slumped in the corridors. Elsewhere, techs were draped over their consoles, murdered where they worked. But the attackers hadn’t killed everyone. Dr Saito and Captain Heinrich put out an all-hands call across the decks, searching for survivors, and a pitiful few emerged from hiding. They had evaded capture by using crawlspaces and emergency air-shelters. Some had got lucky.

  Dr Saito led the charge into the Command Centre, a sidearm clutched in both hands. I wasn’t even armed—I just followed in P’s wake, confident that nothing was going to stand in the fish’s way. Soon, we were a reasonable-sized group of personnel, large enough to get the Valkyrie moving at least.

  The CIC was abandoned. Whether they were properly trained to man them or not, the remaining Navy crew took up posts. It spoke of their discipline that none of them questioned why P had been let out of its cell.

  “Seal us in, Captain Ving,” Dr Saito said, waving his pistol at the hatch.

  “Affirmative,” Ving said, locking the CIC down. “Do we still have boarders on the Valkyrie?”

  “No,” said an officer. “I’ve run a bio-sensor sweep. We’re the only survivors.”

  “Fucking shame,” Ving snorted. “I’d like to get my hands on one of them.”

  Ving’s eyes were red-rimmed and sore, and he stalked the CIC like a wounded animal, hands constantly rubbing the back of his thick neck. The loss of his team weighed heavily on his shoulders, and I tried not to think how close the Jackals had come to the same fate. War could be cruel, but what had happened to Phoenix Squad wasn’t war. It was execution.

  “Weapons hot,” I ordered. “Null-shields charged.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” voices chorused back.

  “Where’s their ship?” I asked.

  An officer read from her console: “The hostiles engaged the portside airlock using an emergency override code, then disengaged five minutes ago. I have ID on the ship: the RFS Svetlana.”

  “That’s the same ship that duped us at Sanctuary,” Feng hissed.

  “We need to find that ship, and fast,” I said. “We can’t let them take Lopez.”

  “They won’t kill her,” said Novak, anguish rippling through him. “They will do much worse.”

  said P.

  P’s hide was still flecked with brain matter from Riggs’ busted head, and it impassively watched the CIC’s open view-ports. The Valkyrie’s orbital path was decaying, and Carcosa now filled the view-ports. Something had changed down there…

  The ice-shelves that co
vered the surface were no longer uniform. The plains were rupturing, creating wide fissures in the planet’s surface. Vast fractures soon formed. What couldn’t be seen with the naked eye was relayed back by the Valkyrie’s surviving probes, and data scrolled across the tactical-display. Starships—like those Dr Saito had shown us, during the briefing—rose from the ice.

  Aeon ships.

  Six vessels broke the planet’s crust. Liquid dripped from their frozen flanks, and huge chunks of snow and ice fell from their hulls. The ships left breaches in the planet’s outer ice shell that resembled the impact of warheads; a symbolic reminder that the Aeon had abandoned the safety of their hiding place.

  explained P.

  The game had changed. A stunned silence spread across the CIC for a moment. The Aeon ships pivoted in unison, falling into formation, and then broke the atmosphere. Their lethargy thrown off, they moved with impressive speed. The ships’ thrusters glowed a muted blue as they went, leaving streaks across the pale sky. Soon, the fleet was in orbit around Carcosa.

  “Truly incredible…” voiced Dr Saito. He slapped his pistol down on the terminal next to him, his eyes pinned to the view-port. “We’ve done it. We’ve awoken the Aeon.”

  P nodded.

  Captain Heinrich sighed. “Mission accomplished.”

  “Not until we get back my trooper, it isn’t,” I said.

  Captain Heinrich looked like he might argue with me for a moment, but then shrank back into his seat. A taste of combat—up close and personal—had obviously cowed him.

  There was a chime across the CIC.

  “Incoming transmission,” said an officer.

  “Alien?” asked Captain Heinrich.

  “No, sir.” The officer grimaced. “It’s coming from the Svetlana.”

  “Get a trace on that broadcast,” I ordered, “and put it on the display.”

  A tri-D of Major Vasnev’s face sprang to life on the main console. The image was crippled with distortion, rapidly shifting in and out of focus, but clear enough for our purposes. Vasnev was on the bridge of her stolen ship, and she looked angry.

  “You lied to me, Lieutenant,” she said.

  “I want my trooper back. No harm comes to Lopez.”

  Vasnev’s lips curled into a weary snarl. “Disciple Riggs says that the pariah-form lives.”

  Of course, as soon as Riggs had extracted, he would’ve informed the Sons of Balash of what had happened.

  “I’m glad he figured that out. Ask him about his headache. Hand over Private Lopez, immediately.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “This is an Alliance Navy strikeship,” I said. “Our weapons systems are locked onto your position.”

  I looked sidelong at the weapons station, hopeful that was at least partially true. The female officer manning the post nodded, sending her results to the main display. Rail guns, missile launchers and point defence lasers were all online. The mystery of the Svetlana’s location was solved by Zero. She motioned to the scanner-returns, and the weathered outline of a freighter, projected in computer-reproduced tri-D, appeared there. The RFS Svetlana had never been a beautiful ship. There was no grace in her blunt features, and her boxy shape told of a design purely for travel through the deeps of space, where friction and form were irrelevant. The ship was nestled among the debris surrounding Carcosa, running so dark that her outline was almost indistinguishable from those of the wreckage.

  “You must think me very reckless,” Vasnev drawled, “communicating with you like this. I take it that you have traced this transmission, back to source, in order to find me? All that firepower, trained on this one ship.”

  “That, and the Aeon fleet,” I declared triumphantly.

  All six vault-ships closed on the Svetlana’s position. The Valkyrie registered energy readings consistent with weapons charging up. What abilities the awakened aliens might possess—given what they had done on Carcosa’s surface, during their hibernation—remained to be seen.

  “You misunderstand me,” Vasnev said. “Why would I give up the Secretary’s daughter, when she is my only gambling chip?” The ghost of a smile twitched at her lips. “We both know that you will do anything to kill Daneb Riggs. We both know that Leon Novak would do anything to kill me.”

  A heartbeat passed, and the smile grew. Inside, my resolve faltered.

  “And we all know that you would not endanger the Secretary’s daughter. This, of course, will happen, unless my ship is allowed to leave here untouched.”

  “Do not listen to her!” yelled Novak. “We go, and we chase this ship!”

  My anger was so intense that I shook with the heat of it. What could we do? If we took out the Svetlana, then Lopez would be in mortal danger. Vasnev or Riggs would kill her, and even if they were bluffing, there was no guarantee she would survive the conflict between the Svetlana and the Valkyrie…

  “No, Novak,” I said. “We can’t do that.”

  “We must go to her,” Novak said. “She cannot get away with Lopez!”

  Ving’s brow contorted in a tortured expression. “I agree with the lifer. We waste that bitch.”

  “Call off your allies,” Vasnev’s tri-D image ordered.

  P glanced at me, and we made a private mental connection.

  The Aeon ships clustered together at a safe distance from the Svetlana. We were still registering their weapon signatures, but for now they watched and waited.

  “You are going to allow us to pull out of this debris-field,” Vasnev said. “Then you will allow us to leave the Ghost Maker Nebula. Do not follow.”

  Novak went to say something but the words died in his mouth. He sat back in his seat, his anger simmering but not yet dissipated.

  I sighed. “I’m going to find you, Vasnev. And when I do, I’m going to rip you limb from fucking limb.”

  Vasnev clucked her tongue as if in amusement. “I doubt that very much, Lieutenant. Greater women than you have tried.”

  The transmission ended.

  The RFS Svetlana retreated through the ring of wreckage, her own weapon systems tracking us, her null-shields activated. She rapidly headed to the system’s edge, moving at full thrust, then activated her Q-drive.

  “I expect she’ll jump to the next Shard Gate,” Zero said. “The Spiral have full control of those. Her tachyon trail will become almost untraceable.”

  “We have to give chase,” Feng insisted. “We… we can’t leave Lopez with them.”

  P said.

  “We still have a mission,” Captain Heinrich piped up.

  The captain sat, pale-faced and withdrawn, next to Commander Dieter’s vacant command terminal. I’d almost forgotten that Heinrich was nominally in charge of this operation.

  Dr Saito nodded. “The captain is right. We’ve made contact with the Aeon, but now we have to bring them to the Alliance fleet.”

  “The ship will need repairs before we go anywhere,” a senior Navy officer said. “She suffered a significant impact to the ventral thrust unit during boarding. Several compartments have been breached; we’re open to vacuum on the lower decks.”

  “That will need to be rectified as quickly as possible,” Captain Heinrich said, regaining a modicum of his former self. He repositioned his cap, straightened his uniform. “Get to it immediately.”

  The Navy officer nodded. “I’ll organise a work crew and make a start now.”

  P said.

  “You’re in direct communication with them now?” asked Zero, excitedly.

  P said.

  I let out a long wavering exhalation of air. “The Aeon seemed pretty crazy when we were on the surface. Can we trust them?”r />
 

  An alert spilt across the Command Centre’s main terminal, and we gathered around to see what had happened. To my surprise, I realised that we weren’t being threatened, or blown up, or shot at. New electrical signatures registered inside and outside the ship.

  “Anomaly detected,” came the Valkyrie’s synthesised voice. “Await update.”

  P explained.

  “Will they know what needs to be done?” Zero asked.

  said P.

  “The Jackals need some medical attention as well,” Dr Saito said. “You should get those injuries treated.”

  I knew Dr Saito was right. I’d been trying to ignore the pulsing throb in my head, as well as the patch of dried blood I could feel beneath my hairline.

  “Hold up, hold up,” I said. “Before we get there, I want to know what happened on the Valkyrie. How did you survive, P? And you too, Dr Saito? Vasnev’s gang searched the ship. They surely wouldn’t have missed you.”

  “It’s complicated,” Dr Saito said. There was something different about his presentation; he seemed very far from the mild-mannered science geek that had initially been assigned to the Valkyrie.

  “Try me,” I replied. “Complicated, I can deal with.”

  The more I studied Dr Saito, and the more time I spent around him, the less he looked like a Science Officer. There was a hard edge to the guy that was at odds with his professional front.

  “When the boarders breached the ship, I moved P’s chrysalis into hiding. We used an air-shaft. The pod suppressed P’s life-signs.”

  P volunteered.

  “Right,” I said, frowning, “but that doesn’t explain how Dr Saito and Captain Heinrich managed to hide as well.”

  “I had some help,” Dr Saito said. “I used this.”

  He produced a band from around his neck. It was a heavy choker, made of solid metal, with a control box on the side. A light on the box was currently flashing red, maybe indicating that the device was deactivated.