The four heavy laser weapons of the thing’s snout fired in relay tandem, pulverizing one section of the OEC platform. These weapons devised by the alien machine intelligence had no official designation, as they had been uniquely designed, but they were far more powerful than the OEC’s orbital defense lasers.
At the same time, the Alpha-vessel opened its other weapon ports as smaller lasers needled towards the same spot on the OEC platform, and hundreds of tiny objects were cast into the void by the Alpha with a shake of its solar wings.
When it was just the OEC platform and craft versus Alpha, Ponos-Omega knew, then they had a chance. The OEC could concentrate all of its firepower just on Alpha, but now that most of the OEC platforms’ defenses were taken up with firing at the Armcore war cruisers, battleships, attack hubs and crafts?
Alpha pulverized that one unprotected section of the OEC platform, and there was a ripple of light and the flashes of explosions as it collapsed under the stress. Thousands of tons of orbital metal started to tear itself apart, grinding out of alignment with the others as it twisted.
Modules that contained offices and habitats started to glow red, yellow, and green as they fell towards Old Earth, doubtless to create thermonuclear explosions that would further wipe out whatever was left of the mother planet’s indigenous inhabitants.
Free from the tight orbital calculations and control, the swiveling section of platform was thrust against the next nearest H-shaped platforms arms and units. Spinward gravity was unstoppable, as the damage now being caused wasn’t caused by Alpha but by the gravitational rotation of Old Earth itself. The next ‘plate’ of platforms started to crumple, explode and twist as they too were torn apart. Lights flickered off across the near sections of the OEC, orbital defense lasers flickering off to be replaced by warning exclamation marks as their power lines were cut.
PARTIAL COLLAPSE OF OEC PLATFORM in 2.2 HOURS! SIMULATION OVER – YOU LOSE!
The sight flickered to be replaced by the early stages of the simulation, now in real time. This was just one of almost a hundred such live-responding scenarios that the Ponos-Omega intelligence was running, micro-seconds ahead of the real events.
FULL DECOMPRESSION OF PLASMA PORTS 27-29
Seconds ahead of that terrible calamity playing out, and just as the Alpha-vessel flickered out of existence in a micro-jump that took it to the unprotected far side of the platform, Ponos-Omega blew open the venting seals for three of the plasma-storage units located at the site he had predicted that the Alpha-vessel must attack.
In real life, a minute judder was felt rippling through the platform as purple, red, and green-blue warp fire plumed into space like a colorful solar flare. Great gobbets of the plasma were thrown behind the OEC, reacting with material reality as they did so to glow and burst in dazzling light displays of tremendous power.
The Alpha-vessel reappeared just as Ponos-Omega had predicted and was instantly struck by some of the multiple detonations of warp plasma that shook it on its axis and tore great holes into one of the thing’s solar ‘fins.’
With a barreling roll that was incongruous with its size, the Alpha-vessel moved further out and away from the vented, igniting material, far above the battle. Ponos-Omega had correctly predicted what the Alpha-vessel would do and had managed to avert complete disaster, but then another simulation, and Ponos-Omega had to analyze that in nano-seconds to prevent a further disaster.
How long could Ponos-Omega keep this up? There were great dark wings of Armcore war cruisers rotating in flights far above the battle, before plowing down to replace those war cruisers destroyed or damaged. Then there were the great clouds of Armcore attack craft, tens being blown out of the void every second, but still always replaced by more. Armcore had hundreds of thousands of troops to commit to the war. Perhaps millions.
Signal Hijacked!
But it appeared that none of the Ponos-Omega’s simulations could predict what would happen next.
Transmission Intercepted between Armcore War cruiser Righteous Storm and Alpha-vessel:
Ponos-Omega’s own stable of spy satellites had managed to descramble and pick up this message as it was relayed across data-space, mostly because the sender, a far-off Armcore war cruiser called the Righteous Storm, hadn’t bothered to use top-security protocols.
“Urgent Alert: Code Red. Righteous Storm. We are engaged in a battle against a Q’Lot ship over Esther, Sector 3. They appeared out of nowhere. Down to 38% functionality. Sending crew to escape pods now.”
The Alpha-vessel glowed with the dazzle of warp fire and blossomed out of existence. It had begun, some part of Ponos-Omega’s observational programming indicated. Alpha knew what they were up to and this was just a diversion.
The Mercury Blade, Lord Captain Eliard, and the others are on their own now, Ponos-Omega reflected.
16
The Gate
The skies over Esther exploded with fire.
“What—” Eliard heard Irie shout behind him as a roar erupted into their ears. The captain didn’t hesitate. He threw himself forward down the ramp and rolled through the gusting sand towards Cass and the others.
“Get down!” he shouted, just before the shockwave hit.
Fa-THUUUMP!
A wall of black swept across them all, obliterating all sound, sight, and thought that wasn’t its roar. The captain felt himself turning, lifted off his feet as his hands grappled with something—someone—and then the world was a blur of noise and light.
“Captain! Captain!” He could hear Irie’s voice as the roar passed by overhead, and he realized that he wasn’t dead, but was lying on the ground, attached to someone else.
“Eliard…” A face was close to his. A human face, with deep blue eyes and bob of blonde hair. His limbs were entangled with Cassandra Milan’s, and the Device had created an interlocking circle of Blue-Scale plates over his arm, which they both huddled behind.
“I got you,” the captain whispered.
Cassie smiled.
“Captain, get the drekk up!” Irie was screaming at them, and the moment was broken as the panic intensified.
“What was that?” Cassandra was struggling to her feet as the captain did the same beside her, dusting sand from his body as the Device shivered and retracted organically back to the nodule at the end of his arm where his hand should be. Eliard felt that familiar stab of pain and nausea that appeared to happen every time he used the Device now, and he staggered on his feet before Cassandra steadied him.
All around them, the hillside had changed. The sand had been thrown back to reveal the weatherworn edges of ancient, blackish rocks in terraces that climbed the mound to its summit.
The Valyien ziggurat. Eliard gasped. “You would almost think whatever that was did us a favor…” he managed to cough.
“You reckon, do you?” Irie was pulling at the sleeve of his human arm. “Look!” She pointed out across the desert, where something was coming towards them.
“Holy stars…” Cassandra swore.
There was a great disturbance on the skies of Esther, a swathe of boiling clouds that flickered with lightning that every pilot and navigator knew to be a craft attempting orbital entry. Underneath it there was a thin line of clear air, and then chaos once more as the distant floating solar platforms had been hurled to either side of the advancing craft, crashing far out in the desert and sending up great hurricane winds of dust.
“It’s Alpha.” Cassandra’s voice was small. “It’s come to stop us itself.”
“Where’s the entrance!?” Eliard was calling as the five figures clambered and in one case, hopped down the terraces, following the loping, gangly form of the Q’Lot who appeared to be almost unaffected by the sonic shockwave that Alpha’s entry into Esther skies had caused. The mutant creature known as Argyle Trent, however, was in worse shape, with multiple grazes and scrapes across one of its praying mantis claws and the side of its face where it had tried to shield itself.
“-y^’-lo!�
� the Q’Lot creature made a clicking and hissing noise through the blue ovoid dome of its mask, which looked strangely as though it was regular crystal-glass that had been filled with some sort of blue liquid.
It was gesturing towards where a section of the black-stone terraces had collapsed, and Eliard saw a small aperture that they could crawl through to get inside.
“Everyone, in!” Eliard said, turning to look back at the approaching danger above them.
“I’m with you.” Cass stopped at his side and raised a strange cream-white contraption that looked more like a sculpted and fluted piece of seashell then it did a weapon.
“No. Get in.” Eliard was adamant. “Unless that thing there can bring down space-cruisers.”
“Never tried,” Cass shot back, but she nodded as she followed the Q’Lot, Argyle Trent, and Irie to scramble through the hole as Eliard backed towards it.
What the stars am I doing… he thought, standing with his Device leveled. Ponos—the old Ponos—had believed that this Device held the secret to destroying the Alpha-vessel, but given what he was looking at right now, it was impossible. The Device on his arm, no matter how powerful or mutagenic it might be, could never destroy a vessel of Alpha’s size.
The craft in question was now pushing its snout through the clouds of its own making as underneath it, the air was thick with the devastation, smoke, and fires from the crashing solar platforms.
It looked cruel, Eliard thought. Like the beak of some ancient alien bird, pressing itself into their reality. He saw lights scintillating along its side, eerily glowing against the backdrop of thunderclouds.
“Eliard, come on!” It was Cassandra’s face at the mouth of the tunnel, calling back to him.
Eliard cast one last look at his foe, just as he saw nodule-like bubbles open all along the snout and mechanical drones burst into the air, like flying spiders with long, prehensile metal tails that whipped through the air. He had no idea how they flew or whether they were so tough that they were just jumping to the ground, but these new clouds of drone-fighters were flying straight towards them.
Eliard ran for the gate.
Inside, there was a surprisingly smooth tunnel, free from the omnipresent grit and sand that was everywhere outside. A glow illuminated the long, triangular-shaped tunnel, but it wasn’t just the glows coming from Irie and Eliard’s battle harnesses, it was a glow that Eliard at least had seen before.
The distant glow of a warp gate, somewhere ahead.
“Come on!” Cassie was shouting as the group ran down the tunnel.
Whump!
Whump-whump!
The ceiling and walls above them shook as Eliard was sure that the Alpha-fighter drones had landed on the outside of the ziggurat, desperate to find a way in.
“Wait!” he shouted, turning to level the Device at the tunnel opening behind them just as the thin light of the outside was eclipsed by a chittering metal body.
Wha-THOOOM! Eliard fired, the Device opening and reacting as it worked in tandem with his instincts to send a burning ball of meson at the end of the tunnel walls and ceiling. There was a roar and an almighty crack as stone split and dust filled the chamber, but the blast had collapsed the entrance, and they were sealed inside.
“I bloody well hope there’s another way out of here…” Eliard grumbled as he turned and ran after the others, boots pounding on the stone floors as they charged deep into the body of the ancient structure, the glow becoming more and more brilliant in their eyes.
The tunnel opened out, and there it was. The warp gate of the ancient Valyien.
If anything, this one was bigger than the others that Eliard had seen, but it had the same configuration as the others—a vast, pyramidal room with a series of steps up a dais in the center, where this time, four great black-stone pillars sat on the topmost platform. Each stone looked whorled and gnarled, almost organic in shape, and dotted with strange flutes and encrustations that Eliard couldn’t tell if they were plant, sculpted, or naturally occurring.
And in the middle of the square was the source of the light.
It was dazzling, a field of light that shone and shimmered, its edges refracting into the purple and blue glows of semi-stable plasma.
Whump. Whump.
More heavy thuds from overhead, although much more muffled than previously, as more of Alpha’s attack drones hit the side of the edifice. The captain could hear a dull vibration coming from the ceilings. “Are they tunneling to get to us?” he asked in horror.
“This is what it’s all about, is it?” Irie snarled, raising her heavy blaster.
“sk!-0p>!” The Q’Lot swept to her side, raising one of its more ‘regular’ arms in horror and shock to stop her.
“What?” Eliard heard his engineer say as he marched forward. “Do you want us to destroy this thing or not?” Irie shouted, but the Q’Lot was pointing not at the human engineer, but instead at the Device on Eliard’s arm, and the organic shell-bone gun that Cassandra held.
“Right. No energy weapons near a warp field, gotcha,” Irie grumbled, turning instead to point her blaster straight back down the tunnel that they had just run through, as there was a vibrational hum coming from there too.
“You ready?” Eliard said to Cassie, who nodded as she raised her own gun, and—
CRACK! The stone slabs of the ceiling broke open, releasing great chunks of black stone as the first of the Alpha attack drones poured into the room.
“Get SOOOME!” Irie was shouting in rage and panic as she opened fire, sending large bolts of charged meson particles at the first of them, knocking it back across the chamber and ripping several of its mechanical, serrated legs off.
But that attack drone was just one of many that infected the room. Eliard found himself having to turn to fire the Device at one that landed on the stone steps near to him, as Cass fired her strange Q’Lot weapon. It released no energy beams or blasts, just ripples through the air, like a heat wave. Where they struck the approaching enemy, however, they crumpled metal shielding, broke limbs, and threw the creatures back just the same.
“We need…to get…to the warp gate!” Cassandra was hissing between firing the Q’Lot weapon.
We’re going to die here, Eliard thought. There was no way out. The Alpha-vessel was above them. All we can do is hope to destroy this gate and end the Valyien’s plans… Eliard raised a glance to where Cassie was already trying to ascend the steps to the gate.
I can’t let her sacrifice herself. Not again. He used the Device on his arm like a club to batter away another of the attack drones. In the opening that he had created, he jumped up the steps, the Device seeding his body with strange, heightened Q’Lot hormones and chemicals as he reached the top.
“Get back!” he called desperately to Cass as he lowered the Device at the nearest pillar and fired.
Wha-THUMP! Eliard had only ever had a fraction of control over the Device. Usually, all that he could do to command its mutations was to think about how much he really wanted to kill whatever thing was coming for him, and the Device would change either into some sort of blade, or a club, or what he thought of as a heavy-blaster configuration, or worse.
This time, however, the Device must have sensed just what was called from it, as it rearranged its scales into a fearsome maw with teeth-like nubs around the outside and shot a singular, burning purple-white beam of power at the pillar, and it didn’t stop.
The pillar shook but did not break. The white shimmer of warp light just past it started to cloud and convulse, as if sensing that something was attacking it. Lines of purple-white light started to thread over the pillar as it shook, and Eliard got the sense that the Device was trying to overload it somehow.
“El!” a scream from Cass, forcing him to turn his head.
One of the Alpha’s attack drones had landed on the steps below her and had latched one of its metal legs tight around her foot. Her Q’Lot blaster was a few feet away from her, and she couldn’t reach it.
“Cassie!” Eliard could no more change what he did than he could stop himself from breathing. He swung the Device and its burning line of light against the creature, neatly cutting it in half before turning back—
Just as something grabbed him. One of the Alpha attack drones had wrapped a chitinous-mechanical, slightly greasy appendage around his arm and was attempting to leap away, but Eliard was writhing and struggling, and—
Both Eliard and the Alpha-drone fell into the convulsing warp field of the ancient Valyien gate, and they disappeared.
A. I. Apocalypse
Valyien Far Future Space Opera, Book 8
1
He’s Gone
“He’s gone,” House Archival Agent Cassandra Milan repeated, this time in a softer tone than last time. The silence of the ziggurat around them made her words sound small and alone.
The leaping, mechanical creations of the alien hybrid warcraft Alpha far above their position had stilled, their attacks ceasing abruptly as soon as Eliard had fallen through the Valyien gate.
Gate. Door. Whatever the drekk you call that thing… The blonde woman shot a dark look to the top of the dais behind which her dissolute company sat, where the four black, strangely-carved and whorled pillars, almost like organic shapes, had fallen into a stolid lifelessness.
Less than a watch before, as the alpha spider-drones had attached, the pillars had been glowing with a strange ethereal aura; opalescent whites, shot through with warp plasma’s purple, red, and blue, formed between their corners a field that shouldn’t exist. No one could stabilize warp plasma, this much the highly-trained House Archival agent knew. You could regulate the energy transfer and combustion rate between matter and anti-matter, but you couldn’t stabilize it—allowing it to exist within its own steady state, free from decay or explosion.
Valyien Boxed Set 3 Page 13