I remember feeling alone. And scared. Cassie shivered with the echoes of the fever and eye-drilling headache.
She remembered begging for the pain and delirium to go away. She remembered the moment of clarity when she had realized, through the fog of her fever, that the medic was grossly outmatched by the virus and that she would have to pull through this on her own.
Just like I have to do now.
“Ponos-Omega sent Eliard back to achieve something. What?” Alpha once again asked.
Cassie didn’t even bother to answer the Alpha this time, with her voice or with her thoughts. She was helpless before the alien machine intelligence anyway, and she grunted in pain as the program once more riffled through all of her memories. This time not only of the captain but all of Cassie’s dealings with Ponos as well.
But Cassie had never known Ponos-Omega. She had never even known the advanced Ponos who had ‘eaten’ other Imperial Coalition station intelligences in order to grow its memory servers. All that Cassie remembered was the Ponos that had been the Armcore intelligence, because it was shortly after that when she had ‘died’ on that research station and had been revived by the Q’Lot.
Cassie wasn’t sure if the Alpha-program could even feel such human things as emotions, but she was sure that she sensed some kind of frustration from Alpha as it discovered this fact.
“Enough. I will be able to build a prediction of Captain Eliard Martin’s behavior based on your own perceptions and Archival’s research,” Alpha said finally, moving back from her mind like a wave receding from a shore.
Cassie gasped, her lungs suddenly filling with air as if she hadn’t even been breathing during this horrible ordeal. Suddenly, her eyes were open once again and she heard that she was shouting…and she wasn’t alone.
Beside her, still grasping tight to her hand as they both floated in the strange isolation chamber with the flashing LED lights, was Irie Hanson. And she didn’t look much better than Cassie had felt a moment ago. Her face was contorted in a rictus of fear, teeth clenched with saliva seeping out the corner of her mouth. Sweat ran freely from her hairline, and her body shook and convulsed as Alpha was clearly still ransacking her memory for information.
But she was still full of that nano-virus! Cassie thought in alarm, moving closer to the other woman’s side to hold her as best as she was able.
Irie flinched from her touch, as Cassie remembered that every physical sensation had been painful during her own mind-invasion.
“It’s alright, Irie, it’s me. It’ll be over soon…” she whispered into the air, unable to know whether Irie could hear her or not as she shook and trembled.
“You have to stop, Alpha!” Cassie called out to the room in alarm. “You’re killing her. Her body has been through too much.”
There was no answer, and Irie still shook as the Alpha-program hunted for the information it wanted.
Which Irie might even have, Cassie thought. The agent knew from their very short time together that Irie had been with Eliard for most of the time that she herself hadn’t. This little angry woman had managed to stay at her captain’s side—and stay alive—as Ponos had merged with some prototype Alpha called the ECN and had seen the new Ponos-Omega installed at the Old Earth Coalition station. She had been sent here with the captain when the OEC had received the offer of aid from Cassie and the Q’Lot.
Would she hold out? How could she? Cassie thought in alarm, and her agent’s training told her that the most valuable information is usually the pieces that you yourself do not know that you have.
What could Irie know about Ponos-Omega and Eliard?
And why did the Alpha keep on saying that the captain, their friend, had been sent ‘back’? Back where?
The moon of Tritho? Cassie thought. That was where there had been another of the ancient Valyien’s sunken ziggurats, and where she had been sent, tricking Captain Eliard and the crew of the Mercury Blade to be her escape route, to steal the Armcore Alpha program.
But as far as she knew, Armcore had used Tritho as the base of their operations because it was secluded and remote, and that they had thought they could control the parameters.
Esther, then. That was the largest of the sunken ziggurats that the Q’Lot had known of, as their histories went back to the millennia when the Valyien themselves had been alive and well, or at least corporeal in this universe, anyway, and the Q’Lot had known that the ancient Valyien had used Esther—before the humans had colonized it and called it Esther, of course—as their base of operations. The Q’Lot had a map of most of the ancient Valyien structures spread out across the void now occupied by the Imperial Coalition. Tritho had been there, but the Q’Lot had never considered it an important site.
And we just came from Esther. We were hanging just outside of Esther, weren’t we? It didn’t make sense for a machine as highly correct and exact as Alpha to not be specific, or to be so grammatically incorrect.
Back where? Cassie wracked her brain once again. Alpha was convinced that Ponos-Omega had sent her friend on some secret mission, to go back somewhere where he had been before? Or where Alpha thought that Ponos-Omega had been before?
There was that ice-world that Irie had talked about during their captivity… the House Archival agent considered. Epsilon G3-ov, where Armcore had first trial-ran the Alpha program. But Alpha had already tracked Eliard and Ponos there and confronted them. If it had left something valuable behind, why didn’t it just take it then?
That was one of the few advantages that the human had over the Alpha-program, Cassie hoped, anyway. She knew that the Alpha-program was so freakishly intelligent, and so insanely powerful, that it had already considered each of these possibilities and had already mapped out probably hundreds of contingency plans. If there had been something valuable on Epsilon G3-ov, or on the moon of Tritho, or Esther, then Alpha would already have worked this out and have secured it.
Hence it wouldn’t need to riffle through our minds for information… Cassie thought, unknowingly utilizing the only other advantage that the human mind had over any machine intelligence: the ability to think laterally, not just linearly.
So Alpha must be talking about a place where it can’t go, or not go easily… Cassie thought. A place that is near enough to all of them that Eliard, at least, had traveled past or through. Often.
But the Alpha-vessel was arguably the most advanced craft in the entire Imperial Coalition, although she didn’t know how it compared with her Q’Lot allies. Where was there in all the galaxy that it couldn’t go?
That Eliard could?
“Holy crap.” Cassie’s agent-trained mind clicked into realization around a tiny spark of ingenuity.
Eliard had been sent to destroy the warp gate on Esther to stop the flow of information or influence from the ancient Valyien in their next-door ab-universe. She placed all of the information side by side, hoping that she was wrong.
Eliard had fallen into the warp gate of the ancient Valyien here on Esther.
It was a stable warp gate. The sort of reaction that their own warp engines had created, but the ancient Valyien had found a way to keep them open and permanent, without blowing up into a small thermonuclear explosion.
Cassie had immediately thought that meant that Eliard, the captain, must have been vaporized instantly by the volatile warp plasma. He wasn’t even wearing a fully sealable heavy encounter suit, had he? And he certainly wasn’t behind the meter-thick shielding of a spacecraft capable of warp travel, like the Alpha-vessel or the Mercury Blade.
“But the warp gate is stable,” Cassie repeated as Irie shook in her arms. “And the ancient Valyien went through, didn’t they? They even forced tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of those enslaved, to go through to their own little, despotic ‘pocket universe.’
Alpha couldn’t pass through, because he is too big. Cassie almost laughed. It wasn’t a trick question anymore. The Alpha-vessel had merely created a craft that was too massive to go through
the stable warp gate.
But the ‘back’ bit of that sentence still worried Cassie. Why didn’t the Alpha-vessel just say ‘through’ or ‘there’ instead? That would have been more correct…unless…
“No… No, no, no…” Cassie started to shake her head. It was too impossible. It was too outlandish to even think about.
And yet she was.
She had heard tales of this sort of thing of course, everyone who traveled the space lanes did: of ships who fire up their warp cores only for them to malfunction, and if they didn’t rip the parent ship apart then they would disappear forever from Imperial Coalition space, presumably in some distant and alien part of the galaxy—or perhaps in a completely different galaxy altogether!
But sometimes the stories were even stranger than that, of the ship turning up just a few moments later or a few lightyears away but covered with space-lichen and deep rust as if it had been away for hundreds of years, with its crew long dead and desiccated. It was suspected that the ship had jumped so far and then returned so quickly that they had been caught in some kind of slingshot of time, aging them beyond all recognition, even though local, relative time had remained fairly constant.
It didn’t make sense. It was a paradox, Cassie knew. But time and space are connected, she also knew. They are almost the same thing. It was theoretically possible that if you could find a way to travel underneath the space-time continuum, then you could effectively go forward—or back—in time itself.
If you could rip the space-time continuum just like every warp core was able to.
Back. Cassie’s eyes widened in shock.
11
The Moral of this Tale
Eliard groaned, feeling like someone had dropped the entire stables and the hillside it was built into onto him. And then thrown the Martin Palace on top, just for good measure.
“Am I alive…” he croaked, before coughing as his throat and lungs felt dry and dusty.
“Almost,” grunted a deep growl of a voice, and Eliard was shocked that he knew it. He knew it very well.
“Val?” The captain coughed again, blinking in the flare of firelight to see that the massive silhouette that was even now standing up and striding over to him was indeed the ex-chief gunner of the Mercury Blade, but he looked different.
He was still massive, of course. Still able to strike fear into the hearts of orbital defense teams, Eliard thought, but Val looked as though he had been in far more battles than even Eliard had recently been in. The whitish and mottled scales of his wide, shovel-like Duergar face were cracked in many places, and they looked to be old wounds as the Duergar had thick white callouses and scars veining through each one.
He wore a battered harness that Eliard had never seen the like of during Val’s time on board the Mercury. It was a simple X of metal and molded synth material across his chest, but the upper and middle of the X had been sculpted into a sort of breastplate, while the straps that crossed the shoulders displayed a pair of heavy, dented, and much-abused shoulder pads.
Oh, and he also only had one hand.
“Val… What the drekk happened to your hand?” Eliard groaned, rolling over to see that he was on a thin strip of blanket on very uneven, rocky ground. Wait, the captain thought. That wasn’t a blanket. “Is this the eagle tapestry from my palace?”
“You were such a spoiled child.” Val squatted down next to him, his singular massive hand moving to grasp the top of the captain’s head in one easy grip, as if Eliard’s skull was a child’s toy, and casually move it back and forth so that Val could look into his eyes.
“Argh. Get off me, you big lump!” Eliard snapped at him.
“Careful. I’m the war chief now. You shouldn’t talk to me like that,” Val said, releasing his head. “Nothing’s broken. And you’re focusing. No spinal damage. No concussion.”
“And that is how you Duergar check? Have you never heard of medics?” Eliard groaned, massaging his aching shoulders. He sat up, still feeling like he had been put through a wrangle, or as if the Duergar had given his entire body a beating.
“No medics here.” Val shrugged.
‘Here’ was, the captain saw, a small campsite on the edge of the broken gorges and scree slopes of the mountains behind the palace. They were wedged at the back of a collapsed gorge, with shadowed rocks and boulders everywhere, and just the light of their fire and the stars for company. There were other small tents. Some were made from canvas, but many seemed to be a mix-match of materials from polythreads to blankets to more Martin draperies. From inside came the sound of snores.
“Your war clan?” Eliard nodded to the tents. “Are they the ones who tried to shoot me in my own stables?”
“Hmm.” Val nodded. He was nothing if not a very stoic, pragmatic sort of creature. He moved to push a waterskin into the captain’s slightly shaking hand and dropped a load of aluminum-wrapped emergency rations in his hand. “Eat. You’ll need your strength.”
“But… Val, what are you doing here? On my home world?” Eliard said as he gladly did as he was told. The water was freezing but it tasted divine, and the food was horrible reconstituted pea protein and nutrients, colorless and flavorless, but it still tasted wonderful to Eliard’s almost-starved body.
“And just how in the name of all the stars did you lose your hand?” Eliard said through another bite of the emergency gunk.
“This?” Val raised the mangled arm to show that it ended in a large brass hook instead, secured to his forearm by straps. “Got blown off a couple of years ago. Ponos-drone.”
Eliard was so busy eating and drinking that he barely registered the absurdity of what Val was saying…until he did.
“A Ponos drone? But Ponos-Omega doesn’t have drones…” he said. It had gone mad, hadn’t it? Eliard shook his head. “This is all we need. With Alpha and Ponos acting all crazy up there…”
“Nope.” The gigantic Duergar stated firmly, turning a little on his boulder to fix his once human captain with a steady stare. The Duergar at the best of times were a fearsome sight, and being stared, almost scowled, at by one was an experience that would give most humans nightmares. Eliard was fairly used to it by now, but he still stopped eating all the same.
“Nope?” Eliard asked in confusion.
“Nope,” Val agreed. “No Alpha anymore. Just Ponos-Omega. It killed Alpha at the end of the war.”
“The war?” Eliard was having a hard time following what his chief gunner was trying to get at. “It’s over? Already?” Eliard looked up to the broken skyline, a black and jagged silhouette where once they should have been peaks. “I bet this was a last act of retaliation then. Maybe I did destroy that warp gate on Esther after all…”
There was an angered snort from the Duergar beside him, making Eliard turn back to find Val Pathok seemingly angry as he curled his scaled lips back to reveal heavy fangs and tusks to the night air.
“What did I say wrong?” Eliard asked quickly.
“Boss. El.” Val turned completely in his seat. “You have got everything wrong. Tell me: How old do I look?”
“Why, you’re… You’re…” Eliard wracked his brain to remember his gunner’s age. Hadn’t he himself thrown Val a birthday party on the Mercury? When would that have been…
I don’t know much about Duergar physiognomy, but Val isn’t an OLD Duergar. Eliard frowned as he tried to remember, trying not to hurt his friend’s feelings by having to admit that he didn’t know.
In fact, he shouldn’t even be middle-aged… Eliard looked at the Duergar to see that a lot of his scales had lost their color and luster. The heavy bones of his brow and massive jaw were more pronounced, the folds of scaled skin under his chin more pronounced…
Eliard’s brain caught up.
He had said that his hand got blown off by a Ponos drone two years ago.
Eliard knew for a fact that two years ago, he and Val and Irie had been happily running a very successful smuggling operation that syphoned plasma from a deep-space freig
hter and ran it back to the Traders’ Belt. They hadn’t even heard of Alpha or Ponos or thought much about the ancient Valyien back then…
Unless…
“Holy sweet drekking stars.” Eliard almost choked on his nutrient food, feeling a wave of nausea and cold run through his body.
That was why the Martin Palace was so thoroughly destroyed.
That was why Val Pathok looked older.
That was why Branton was so deserted.
“You see it now.” The Duergar nodded, turning back to the campfire. “You always had quick wits but were a slow learner, boss…”
“But…but…”
“Ten years,” Val stated heavily. “You’ve been gone ten years.”
Eliard dropped the food and the water.
“The Alpha-machine, with the help of Armcore, took over most of the Imperial Coalition,” the Duergar said, and Eliard realized that his friend had not only lost a hand and aged, but he had also grown a lot more eloquent than he had been, which, the pirate guessed, was probably all of the experience that he now had.
“I was with General Selazar…”
“Lord General Selazar?” Eliard remembered. Another ruler of one of the Imperial Coalition noble houses who held the same honorary rank his father once had. A very proud, old man cast in the old way of the noble houses. Trevalyn-trained through and through.
“Hm.” Val nodded. “He was a good fighter, but old. His heart gave out in the end, but he managed to win over what remained of the noble houses away from Armcore. With my fighting Duergar, we held out as often as we could.
“And then there was Ponos-Omega at the OEC Station…” Val stated.
The Old Earth Coalition station that surrounded humanity’s home world, Eliard remembered. He had been there in what, for him, had only been a matter of cycles ago.
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