At least, you couldn’t according to the contemporary Imperial Coalition. Not to normal science. Not to human science.
But what sat above them—indeed, everything built around them—wasn’t human. Instead, it was built by long-dead race called the Valyien, a galaxy-spanning super species that had dominated and enslaved every sentient race they found. When they eventually fell in the ancient wars fought against their adversary the Q’Lot, the Valyien had left behind a scattered and complicated legacy of artifacts and ruins, into which the eager humanity had grown.
It was by dissecting and jury-rigging sites like these that the Imperial Coalition had discovered how to harness warp plasma to power their ships. And it was by resurrecting the relics that the human military company Armcore had found in sites such as these that they had played a part in creating the machine intelligence that was attacking them.
Alpha. We should have destroyed it when we had the chance… Cassandra scowled, looking not at the stilled spider-drones that surrounded them, but instead at her sand-scuffed shoes. It was hard to not feel responsible for what their situation had become.
“I had held that stars-be-damned calculator in my hands,” she muttered in a conversation with only herself. Her superiors in House Archival had asked her to steal the hybrid intelligence that Armcore had created. She had succeeded, with the help of the Captain Eliard and his crew of the Mercury Blade.
And I could have put an energy bolt through that thing when I had the chance… Cassandra cursed herself, although she knew why she hadn’t done that: those weren’t her orders. Back then, back before Cassandra had died and been resurrected by the ancient Q’Lot, Cassandra herself had been as controlled and loyal to her House Archival tutors as the spider-drones opposite her were loyal to what the Alpha program had become above them.
“…” her nearest companion didn’t say.
Cassie’s nearest companion was the mutant known as Argyle Trent. He had once been an Armcore research scientist who had experimented with Q’Lot biology on himself, but now he was a pale, ghoulish version of a man with small, bug-like eyes and two folded-back claws like a praying mantis instead of arms. Although when she had first seen him she had been sure that he was an enemy, he had become an almost friend during her treatment by the third of their party—the tall and gangly Q’Lot who sat awkwardly on the steps. It was no wonder that the thing appeared awkward, as it was easily over eight-feet tall and elongated, vaguely humanoid in general appearance, apart from the same hairless and ghoulish flesh that reminded Cassie of some strange sea creature. Added to this strangeness were the two extra midriff arms—smaller versions of the giant claws that Argyle Trent boasted—as well as the face that ended not in a mouth, but in squid-like tentacles.
“If that thing is agreeing, you should have put an energy bolt through Alpha when you had the chance. Heck! I would have helped you pull the trigger!” said the fourth and final prisoner: Irie Hanson, the Chief Engineer of the Mercury Blade. She was the shortest of all of those seated, but also clearly the angriest.
Cassie nodded miserably. “Not that it matters now, I suppose…”
“No…” Irie agreed, shuffling across the step that she had been sitting on towards Cass. There was the slight thrum of electronic machinery—if that is what they are powered by, the agent thought—as the spider-drones tracked Irie’s movements.
Cassie froze. “Aren’t you scared?” she hissed at the engineer.
“Petrified,” Irie agreed, giving their guards a dark look. “But if there is anything that I have learnt in all my years of mecha work, you can’t let them bully you around…”
Alpha’s self-created spider-drones had kept pouring into the ziggurat, seeded into the atmosphere of the desert planet, Esther, by the Alpha-vessel directly. Cassandra and the others had been locked into a fierce battle for their lives as they had failed to shut down the warp gate—one of the very portals that the ancient Valyien were somehow, mysteriously, using to manipulate the Alpha machine intelligence above. Cassandra didn’t understand the science of it, only that the military company, Armcore, had made some terrible mistake when they had tried to use old Valyien technology to create a new breed of sentient machine intelligence—far superior to the humans’ already sophisticated house artificial intelligences.
Somehow, the creation, and more importantly her failure to contain Alpha, had led to some sort of portal back through to this ab-universe, this pocket-dimension, this other-place which the ancient alien species had learned to travel to.
“Did we win?” Cassandra muttered to Irie, nodding to the silenced pillars behind them. She had come here thinking that they would destroy the gate physically—maybe break up the pillars or the dais, or even the entire ziggurat itself. If they had wanted to stop the warp gate, they had succeeded, but it had only happened when Eliard had fallen through the gate and vanished.
After Eliard’s disappearance, Cassandra and the others had continued to fight the drones. There were still blast marks and tiny fragments of spider-drones they had scattered. But the Alpha-vessel had kept on manufacturing them and dispatching them at a dizzying rate which the two humans and two something elses had never been able to beat.
“As soon as Eliard went…through…” Irie grimaced. “…they changed.” She nodded at the spider-drones.
Cassie nodded. “They were no longer trying to kill us, just swamp us,” she murmured, trying to reason what that meant with her high degree of analytical training.
The spider-drones had been trying to kill us to stop us getting to the warp gate… Then they had merely seized our limbs to immobilize us and take our weapons…
“Alpha doesn’t want us dead,” Cassie realized. “Which is weird.”
“I’m not complaining,” Irie said.
“No, of course, but remember what Ponos used to say? That all machine intelligences, even Ponos himself, don’t give two drekks about human life. They see everything as functional tools. If we were in the way of its plans, then it would have killed us. Easily.”
Cassie saw the engineer nod. She of all people understood the strictures of code and metal.
“So, either we are useful to Alpha in some way, or we aren’t. We don’t serve any purpose whatsoever.”
“And Alpha won’t waste resources on anything that it doesn’t need to do, like kill us,” Irie caught up with the thinking. “So, what does it want from us?”
“I don’t know,” Cassie said. And that, she knew, was the problem…
2
Interlude I: Ponos-Omega, Disturbed
Ponos-Omega, the machine intelligence that had once been the curator and manager of the military complex known as Armcore, was concerned.
Machine intelligences do not get concerned. Or at least, no normal artificial sentience should. They are run by complex layers of multi-variant code, able to respond and predict to a near infinite variety of situations depending upon the amount of memory servers that they have access to. Even with all of this processing power and complicated randomizers, however, any machine intelligence is still a machine. It calculates. It predicts. It acts.
They do not get confused as to what to do, nor do are they ever disturbed by a new piece of information.
Ponos-Omega, however, was no ‘normal’ machine intelligence. Once it had been ranked as the second most powerful, efficient, and ‘intelligent’ of all of the AIs, after House Archival’s intelligence, as Ponos had been the core computer of Armcore. Since it had been ousted by its replacement Alpha, however, Ponos had been busy gathering to itself more memory servers from the other house intelligences, and finally, it had merged its programming with something called the ECN—the Enhanced Cognitive Prototype, the first generation of the alien-human hybrid that eventually became Alpha.
Now, Ponos-Omega and Alpha were brothers in more ways than one. They were both originally produced by Armcore. They were both now melded with ancient alien coding structures, and with that came swathes of strange equations and
internal experiences that Ponos traditionally had never experienced.
There are thoughts that no human can think. There are deep landscapes of code that even I do not understand. Ponos conducted its own internal service check in a fraction of a microsecond, aware that its physical body, which was a sleek black gigantic mecha humanoid, was plugged into a command chair at the Old Earth Coalition station—the floating structure of space stations and habitats that girdled the home world of humanity like a cage.
Ponos-Omega had initiated this self-checking system routine because outside the Old Earth-protecting station, the battle with its rival and enemy had lulled.
The alien ship known as Alpha had attacked them as soon as Ponos-Omega had announced itself, because Alpha knew that Ponos-Omega might be advanced enough to stop its trail of conquest on the behalf of its otherworldly masters.
The Alpha-vessel had brought with it its new fleet of allies: all of the war cruisers and battleships and attack craft and attack-drone stations that Armcore could offer. Despite the fact that Alpha represented an aggressive, invasive alien species intent on taking over the Imperial Coalition, the Armcore CEO Dane Tomas had long ago realized which way the tide of victory had been turning. He had even commissioned the creation of Alpha after all, hadn’t he?
What fools these mortals be… Ponos-Omega quoted from the ancient Earth playwright William Shakespeare. Despite its strange state of existence, Ponos-Omega knew that even it was mortal. All things suffer the effects of entropy, it had to admit.
The Armcore-Alpha fleet had battered the encircling grid around Old Earth. The Armcore forces alone were strong enough to level planets, as Ponos-Omega knew since he had directed them to do so himself.
But this time, Ponos-Omega had known the tactics of its enemy. It knew the ways that the gigantic Armcore war cruisers prioritized their targeting assignments. It had known how every Armcore flight group would be organized into one war cruiser, several battleships, and at least three wings of single-person attack craft. Ponos-Omega knew that it could allow the OEC Station to take the brunt of the one-person attack craft as it worked instead of trying to disable the war cruiser’s power-converters and exhaust outtakes—all very insubstantial things in the scheme of a battle, as meson and laser blasts and torpedoes screamed through the void and the vacuum was splashed with angry colors of exploding gases.
The Ponos-Omega did not concentrate on the armaments, or on the control decks or the weapons systems of its enemy, but the much smaller, inconsequential operational industries… Those that helped the war cruisers to navigate or to manage the energy flow throughout the vessel. By conducting a thousand such specific, almost surgical strikes with the Old Earth Coalition station’s defense lasers, Ponos-Omega had been able to create a barrage of technical faults in all three of the Armcore war cruisers, with at least two of them having to withdraw to logistical roles rather than front line attacks…which was just how the Ponos-Omega had planned it…
Armcore War Cruiser-Class Risk Assessment:
Damage Potential: High
Threat Analysis:
Meson Rail-cannons x 8
Nuclear Armaments—3 deployment pods, 8 warheads (standard equip)
Conventional Torpedoes (Combustion)—28 payloads (standard equip)
Defense Laser x 1
Close-Support Laser Turrets x 12
Ponos-Omega wasn’t winning, not by any definition in the acres of tactical and strategic manuals that it had access to, but it had fought off the Armcore threat to a level that it would once have called ‘Diminishing Retreat’ when it had been ‘just’ a military computer…which was a fancy way of saying that it had inflicted enough damage to allow space for a retreat, evacuation, or a change of position on the battlefield.
But with the fact that the OEC was a stable station, no retreat was possible, and the only possible evacuation was to send the Old Earth Coalition staff inwards to the blasted wastelands and feral townships of Old Earth.
Which is unacceptable… Ponos-Omega had immediately calculated. If it did that, if it sounded the alarms and sent its human staff away, then Armcore would annihilate the OEC station, which in turn would bombard the surface of Old Earth with debris, further endangering the Coalition refugees. Besides which, without the station there to protect them, there would be a greater likelihood of Armcore going after the refugees on Old Earth.
Strategic Analysis: Orbital Bombardment Scenario #7
Operational Procedures: 0%
Non-Authorized Operations: 94%
The Armcore war cruisers would bombard Old Earth, Ponos-Omega considered. Although any attack on Old Earth or even against of the Noble Houses of the Imperial Coalition, wouldn’t be allowed in their operational procedures, which the machine intelligence knew because it had written most of them. However, it also knew that now that Senior Dane Tomas had sided with the Valyien, nothing was off the table.
Mission Objective…
Ponos-Omega reconsidered its current position.
Mission Analysis:
Defeat of the Enemy? 6% Likelihood
Tactical Truce/Stalemate? 14% Likelihood
Defeat of OEC? 80% Likelihood
That was not a good situation for humanity to find itself in.
Mission Objective:
Retreat Possible? Negative.
Truce Possible? Negative.
Re-positioning of Forces? Negative.
Legacy Scenario: Selected.
With all the options on the table, that meant there was only one possible outcome for the Old Earth Station, and the last hope for a humanity free of alien control.
Legacy Scenario.
Ponos-Omega hadn’t informed the rest of House Archival’s chief staff or the other noble houses that this was the play it was deciding to make. It knew that humanity had an insane addiction to the idea of hope, which in itself was a powerful motivating factor to achieve the Legacy Scenario that it needed.
Legacy Scenario, definition: to achieve a lasting legacy-impact on the enemy, so that future conflicts between enemy and unknown forces will be influenced.
Which, in short, meant that Ponos-Omega’s only option now was to fight long and hard enough to cause so much damage that, after Alpha and Armcore had destroyed them and enslaved humanity, at least the ground-down humanity would be given some time as their oppressors rebuilt their forces.
There is no ‘hope’ for humanity’s freedom, Ponos-Omega considered. There is no ‘hope’ for the Old Earth Coalition station to survive this onslaught.
But if Ponos-Omega marshalled its forces well, and acted as efficiently as it could, then it might be able to make sure that the disparate, far-flung noble houses would be able to band together.
Legacy meant a fight to the last soldier standing. It meant glory through the ultimate price…
Death.
Which was why, given all these computations, that Ponos-Omega was quite frankly stunned by the turn of events that changed the fate of the OEC station, turning a Legacy Scenario into one of a Stalemate!
The Alpha-vessel had warped out, and the Alpha-vessel was the most dangerous opponent of all.
It wasn’t that Ponos-Alpha hadn’t rationalized why the Alpha-vessel had left. The machine intelligence had, after all, been the one to help send the crew of the Mercury Blade to Esther to dismantle or destroy the warp gate that was fueling the Valyien’s connection to this dimension. The mecha inside the OEC knew that as soon as the Alpha-vessel realized what Captain Eliard and the others were doing, it would attempt to stop them…
But now what? That was what made Ponos-Omega confused, distracted, and disturbed. Had Captain Eliard Martin and the others succeeded? The mecha didn’t know. None of his scans or sensors revealed any data information coming out of Esther at all. And even if they had succeeded, what did that mean the Armcore forces attacking the station would do next?
No, the Ponos-Omega intelligence didn’t know what was happening, or whether Eliard had succeeded or fai
led.
And that made the strange hybrid intelligence not merely confused or disturbed…but scared.
3
Eliard, a Strange New Land
Something grabbed me…
Captain Eliard Martin screamed, and his voice fractured into a thousand sonic beats and tones, dizzyingly complex and varied, and completely, utterly, drekk-crazy…
He flailed his limbs, but it was like moving in a dream, where he couldn’t feel what he was doing or whether they were responding to his thoughts or not, but that they were there anyway…he hoped.
Colors washed against his eyes. At first, the captain had been blinded by the milky-white glare that had been emanating from the Valyien warp gate, but then the colors shifted, becoming a kaleidoscope of purple, yellow, crimson, green and blue, as well as many colors that his normal human eyes had no name for.
Something grabbed me, and I fell into the warp gate…
The thoughts were coming back to him as he struggled and fought, just like waking up groggily and having the tiny elements of sanity remerge. Somehow, everything that had happened before this swirling color-scape, here and now, felt like a blur.
How long have I been in here? He opened his mouth to scream. Had it really only been a few seconds? Or was it a few lifetimes? Time meant nothing here, and Eliard had no way of knowing if he had fallen just through the warp gate to the other side of the dais or whether he had in fact found a crack in the fabric of the universe and was even now falling between dimensions.
Something grabbed…
What had it been? One of Alpha’s spider-drones? The image swam into his mind of the thing’s metallic chitin as it filled his vision—
Valyien Boxed Set 3 Page 14