“Huh?” He paused, watching the milky-white play of light and energy in the air above the inscribed circle. Once again, he could see the strange inscriptions and runes that seemed to dance and hurt his eyes as he looked at them. There didn’t appear to be any mechanical or other devices to generate the stable warp field, and yet nonetheless, it was still there—a floating cloud of light.
Eliard walked up to the edge of the circle and stared hard at the stable warp field— the thing that shouldn’t even exist yet somehow did.
How am I going to tell it to take me back? He had no idea.
How am I going to tell it where to take me? He still had no idea.
The captain tried to think back to his initial travel through the warp, unaided by a navigational computer or spacecraft around him.
He had fallen in, for one thing. Or pushed… He had been pushed through the warp gate by one of the spider-drones, and he had fought it there in the deeps of warp space, or between-space, or wherever it was. He had thought that he was dying. No, he was sure that he was dying.
And the pain and the confusion had made him yearn just to be home.
Branton and the Martin Palace was home, Eliard realized. Or it was a home, anyway. Would his next journey be so simple as just stepping inside and thinking the words ‘take me back’? Somehow, Eliard was almost certain that it would be more complicated than that. It had to be, didn’t it?
When he had wanted to be anywhere but inside that crushing pain, he had yearned to be home, but he had meant the Mercury Blade of course, surrounded by his friends. Instead, he had been transported ten years into the future to his childhood home, but with what remained of his friends.
In one of those intuitive leaps that made Eliard the Dread Pirate Captain El, he realized that perhaps there was some sort of logic to using the warp gate.
“It is a little like using warp coordinates,” he whispered. The warp gate had taken him to the next available place that was both homes for him: the Martin Palace on Branton, and his sole remaining friend, Val Pathok. What were the chances of Val arriving here on Branton at the same time he managed to jump in?
The Valyien have been planning this for a long time. He remembered what he had realized about the warp gates. He knew that the strange minds that had built them didn’t think like his own. They weren’t human in the slightest.
“If the Valyien knew that it was possible to travel both forward and backward through time as well as across distances by using warp travel…” Eliard reasoned out loud, “then they must have thought about time and space in radically different ways.” Their technology, like these gates, thought about time and space in different ways.
“The gate must sort of pick out what you mean and try to match it up to the best possible coordinates,” he continued. Like it read your mind… Was that even possible?
Anything is possible with the fourth-dimensional ancient Valyien, he thought.
Which left Eliard with only question left to answer before he stepped into the warp, of his own free will—and with all available human science telling him that he would only burn himself up in an instant—and that was: where did he want to go?
Eliard thought about the moon of Tritho, and the moon where he and his crew members had first seen Alpha. “I can think about that, for sure…” But he would have to go back to before Armcore had raised Alpha, wouldn’t he? And do what? Shoot a hole straight through the Armcore computers?
I can do that, but…
Wouldn’t Armcore just do it all again? And who was to say that the next possible Alpha wasn’t even more powerful than this one had been?
“And there is Ponos, too, to destroy…” Eliard thought of what future-Val had told him about the new Ponos-Omega, and what it had become as soon as it had defeated and eaten Alpha.
“Back to Epsilon G3-ov, then…” he considered. Where the ECN, the prototype of Alpha, had been made. He could certainly go back and destroy that before it even started to develop.
But the Valyien would still be out there in that ab-universe, just waiting for a time to get in… Eliard knew, and now he had to consider the fact that he knew about the galaxy-spanning network of active warp gates that presumably the Valyien would one day step through again…
He had to go back further. He had to go back to a time when he could destroy the warp gates entirely, and thus destroy any possibility of the ECN or Alpha coming into existence.
Eliard hesitated for just a moment. That would be a one-way trip, he knew. He would never be able to travel back from there if he destroyed the network of warp gates, would he? He would never be able to fly the Mercury Blade again. He would never see Irie or Val again.
He would never see Cassie again.
The corners of eyes crinkled as he frowned. Was this what his father had always meant about the responsibility of a noble? To do the right thing, even if it meant throwing away every friend and good thing you ever had?
Eliard took a deep breath and straightened his much disheveled, burnt, torn, and scratched black captain’s jacket. And then stepped into the warp field, and dissolved…
Continuum
Valyien Far Future Space Opera, Book 9
1
Strange Friends
“OUEEOAEEOUEE-!”
The scream of the dying Speaker of the Q’Lot had turned into the scream of distressed metal, somehow vibrating through the grillwork of the corridor floor on which Cassandra Milan, House Archival Agent, and Irie Hanson, Chief Engineer to the pirate vessel the Mercury Blade, huddled.
Neither of the women were in any shape to deal with this new sonic attack. For starters, Cassandra—a slim, athletic blonde woman in her mid-twenties—had sustained an almost full blast of the mutant noise made by the dying alien that had once been her friend…if it was even possible to be friends with a creature that had been so alien to her. The agent shuddered and clutched at her ears, rocking against the metal bulkhead.
Irie—the much shorter, stockier mechanical genius with frizzy hair and a perennially bad attitude—was doing nothing to mask the pain she was feeling. She was already infected with a nano-virus created especially for her, which could be activated to multiply throughout her blood or eat away at her organs in minutes. The engineer without a boat was in agony, and this strange noise was almost enough to tip her over the edge into either madness or unconsciousness.
But perhaps the worst part of this situation wasn’t just their injuries or the attack but that they were still trapped in the belly of the hybrid behemoth that was the Alpha-vessel.
We’re both going to die in here, a small sliver of sanity thought in Cassandra’s mind. They were inside a sentient spaceship that had successfully created itself out of spare parts and strange computer physics that only it, in the entire galaxy, seemed to understand.
The ironic thing was that the alien known as the Speaker was in fact an ally of theirs…or it had been, before it began its death rattle. As traditional enemies of the ancient race known as the Valyien, the Q’Lot had come out of their deep-space migration and returned to this fertile patch of the galaxy where they had once fought the ancient Valyien but was now occupied by the Imperial Coalition, made up of humans and other races. As soon as they had heard, or realized, that the ancient Valyien were influencing an artificial machine intelligence known as the Alpha, the Q’Lot had returned.
The Speaker had been captured along with Cassie and Irie when their companion, the pirate captain Eliard Martin, had disappeared through an impossibly stable warp-gate while attempting to find some way to stop the Valyien from influencing Alpha from wherever their home ab-dimension currently was.
But the Speaker was being experimented on by Alpha intelligence and in its last throes of life, it had called on the only defense that it possibly had left: this strange vibrational call that was destabilizing the Alpha-vessel itself…
And had successfully called upon the mothership that it had once called home.
Far outside of th
eir thrumming corridor, and unknown to Cassandra and Irie, a strange vessel with many splayed points from its central hub swooped through the void and slammed into the whorled shell of the gigantic Alpha-vessel’s hull.
The Q’Lot vessel was nothing like Alpha’s—it was made of some kind of whitish, bone or coral-like material that almost appeared to glow from inside as it flashed soundlessly through space, looking to the Armcore war cruisers like some massive deep-sea anemone.
The Alpha-vessel, on the other hand—larger than even the human Armcore war cruisers, each one capable of leveling cities or entire space stations—was far larger than the Q’Lot but no less strange. The Alpha-program, a hybrid of Armcore artificial intelligence and ancient Valyien technology, had developed entire new technologies to best suit its purpose, so that half of it appeared to be a vast, iridescent, snail-like shell, and from the ‘mouth’ of this shell stabbed forward a prow made of four points, clustered with octagonal and spheroid modules. Each ship looked strange to a human’s eyes, and each was far more capable than any human craft ever devised.
With a flash of static, explosions, and flares of plasma, the spikes of the Q’Lot vessel impaled the place where the ‘shell’ of the Alpha-vessel met the prow, sending the larger machine-vessel and its limpet-like attacker barrelling through space.
Several of the smaller bone-like spikes of the Q’Lot vessel snapped off, spilling precious white plasma flames before quickly crumpling and shrivelling as if they were aging rapidly. Lines of white and purple lightning raced out across the Alpha-vessel’s shell, boiling metal in moments and sending cracks racing along the intricately-grown metal…
“What the hell is happening!?” Cassandra gasped, moments after she was thrown to the far side of the corridor, with Irie Hanson thumping into the metal beside her.
This wasn’t just the Speaker’s dying attack, Cassandra realized. The light of the corridor had changed, flushing from warning orange to a deep red, casting both women in their own version of mechanical hell. There were no alarms on board the Alpha-vessel, of course. Who would the self-automated ship need to warn?
Instead, it’s ‘crew’—the strange breed of spider-drones with their eight flaring tentacle legs, as well as the units of task-specific robots the vessel had created—were all interlinked with the thing’s central intelligence. The House Archival agent heard a rush of metal wind as another phalanx of the spider-drones swept past them, using the floor, walls, and ceiling of the rounded chamber equally to hurry to their destination. They were like antibodies inside a host, and they had no time for such minor organic irritants as the two collapsed humans in the corridor.
“We’re under attack,” Cassandra hissed through gritted teeth, and immediately felt a savage sort of joy. Maybe whomever was attacking the Alpha was strong enough to destroy it…
But then we’ll both die in here… the next thought reminded her. Drekk.
“Come on. Get up.” She seized Irie under the shoulders and hauled her to her stumbling feet.
“Where are we going?” Irie moaned, although her tone made it clear that what she meant to say was where CAN we go?
“Never mind. Away from here…” Cassandra’s head was still ringing from the Speaker’s cry, and sweat plastered her hair to her forehead, but she still managed to half-carry, half-walk the engineer to the mouth of the nearest corridor—
—just as another wave of the spider-drones rushed past, totally heedless of them. Cassandra saw a flash of metal limbs and speeding bodies and gasped, but they passed them by.
“Now,” she urged the woman, moving out into the corridor and taking the opposite direction from the spider-drones had.
The corridor wasn’t long, and it ended in a T-junction, with pristine and exactly uniform corridors sweeping off to either side. She tried to remember the route that the spider-drones had walked them when they had first been captured.
It was left… It had to be the left… She turned, bemoaning the fact that as well as having no need to facilitate humans, the internals of the Alpha-vessel had no compunction to label its routes or departments, either.
But all ships have to have some similarities, right? the agent thought as she moved. There were ceramic and crystal-glass pipework and housings embedded along the edges of the walls. Surely, she might be able to work out what they were for? Maybe she could understand if they were part of the power needed for the docking and access ports that a ship housed?
Maybe not, she dourly reminded herself. Maybe the Alpha-vessel was so advanced that it had entirely different systems and technologies to that of a normal spacecraft. If only Irie was better! She cursed the nano-virus that Alpha had injected her with. She might be the one to work out where the nearest docking bay was.
“If this thing even has human-capable craft…” she muttered as she came to another T-Junction, and this time was sure that she had to turn right.
Thuddududduhr! The Alpha-vessel shook and vibrated, but Cassandra couldn’t hear the screaming howl of the Speaker anymore. Did that mean that the thing had died? Had been killed?
But the ship was still clearly in distress, she realized as the corridor tilted and they were slammed against the nearest bulkhead.
“Augh!” Irie groaned in agony.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry… Just a little bit further…” Cassandra promised, not knowing if she was actually lying or not.
Just what we’re going to do when we get back to the docking bay is another question, she tried to stop herself from thinking, already too late. They had been brought here by a team of Armcore heavy tactical soldiers in one of their courier vessels, and Alpha had opened an external bulkhead door to allow their vessel to lock into place, before they had been handed over to the spider-drones.
Is the Armcore vessel still here? She hoped desperately, knowing that it was probably a futile wish. Why would they stay, after all?
And just how long have we been in here? She had to evaluate. She and Irie had been taken to the isolation chambers where Alpha had pierced their minds with its hypnogogic machines, and then Cassie had been taken to the Speaker to act in a series of the Alpha’s ‘tests’. In one sense, it didn’t feel like much time had passed at all—a few cycles of a watch perhaps—but in another way, it already felt like she had been here for years.
That’s what imprisonment does to you. She recalled her agent training. It messed with your sense of time, making you doubt what your body was telling you…
And even if the courier is still there… she thought as she hurried, bearing the pained engineer beside her, …then it’s still filled with a squad of heavy tactical Armcore soldiers. Some very angry Armcore soldiers. And she had nothing on her—no weapons, no tools. How was she going to overpower them, or convince them to take her and Irie off the boat?
One impossible situation at a time, Milan, she fiercely told herself, and kept going. The corridor started to slant, and the agent was sure that she had remembered climbing up an incline on the forced march into the vessel. Once again, it wasn’t built for human legs, and Cassie found herself skidding downwards, past strange oval holes in the walls—
Not holes, bays… They were clustered along each wall in groups like a bee’s honeycomb, and none of the scooped-out ovals were larger than a meter or so. Even as she slid past, she had a chance to see that each bay was clustered with ports and access points like a charging station.
These must be for the spider-drones, she realized, and then saw how each one was empty—in this corridor, at least. Did that mean that the Alpha-vessel was in far worse state than she had first thought? Had it scrambled all of its available workers in whatever fight it was currently in?
No way of finding out, and no way of knowing as she skidded to the flat T-junction bottom corridor—once again without any identifying markers but a little wider than the previous tunnels.
Right or left? She tried to recall, but the ache of the Q’Lot scream in her head was still disrupting her thoughts, and she didn�
��t know…
Outside in the torment of space, the two alien ships were locked in a battle of life and death.
The dome of the desert planet of Esther was their backdrop as they rolled and turned, the Alpha-vessel still far larger than the embedded Q’Lot star. Flashes of plasma-fire and light flared from the place where their strange materials met, interspersed with the bright plumes of sparks as some other intimate internal working was exposed to the horrors of the vacuum.
But Alpha was throwing new forces into the fight. From up and down its shell, releasing into the night like the spores of a vengeful plant, tiny blackened dots burst out under gasps of booster-fire and escaping air, rising a few meters above the iridescent shell before suddenly flaring their prehensile arms.
Spider-drones, their limbs cycling up around them in complicated helicopter patterns as they maneuver through the void, before burning small bursts of their own booster rockets and being hurled at the attached Q’Lot vessel.
The spider-drones, each barely over a meter tall, were miniscule compared to the Q’Lot mothership—but there were a lot of them.
And Alpha clearly thought that they were expendable, as they flung themselves on what remained of the glowing spikes, their arms still whirling furiously. Only a fraction of their number managed to grapple onto the parasite craft, with the far larger part simply exploding and breaking apart in bursts of flame and light.
Despite this apparent vast expenditure of resources on Alpha’s part, every burst-apart spider-drone body served a purpose, burning, weakening, or occasionally even fracturing the spikes of the Q’Lot vessel.
Those spider-drones that managed to attach themselves immediately clamped their arms to the strange organic material of the Q’Lot spikes, their vice-like claws grabbing the bone and shell-like protrusions that made the star-ship’s hull. Flares of orange lasers illuminated the spider-drones’ bellies as they started to cut their way into the vessel…
Valyien Boxed Set 3 Page 26