It was messy, and it wasn’t efficient, Val knew. Much of his ship’s barrage fire would hit his own Hatchet drones, but he just had to hope that ensuing drifts of debris and spinning wreckage would also go some way to slow the spider-drones.
A glittering, moving wall of exploding and swooping metal started to burst into place around the Hammer. Hatchet drones cut through Spider Drone limbs or attempted to grapple with their zooming bodies… Lasers burst apart Alpha’s foot soldiers and Hatchets alike, creating cartwheeling patterns of flame and light.
But some of the spider-drones got through, hitting the shovel-nose of the Hammer with heavy thuds and muffled clanks, and they immediately started to fire their own laser cutters at the forward shell.
“Good luck with that…” Val grinned savagely. It would take more than a few laser cutters to get through their forward shell.
But there always appeared to be more spider-drones as well.
FZT! There was a burst of static from across the war chief’s targeting sensors, as if the Duergar’s software had glitched, but just as Val Pathok feared that Alpha’s drones had somehow managed to cut into some vital part of their sensors, all of the targeting computers came back online and the screens overhead jumped back to normal working order.
No time to worry about what it had been as he redirected two emplacements of the attack lasers to stop firing continuous barrage fire and instead concentrate on picking off the landed spider-drones.
But the computer glitch hadn’t been directed at the Hammer, not at all. Val’s ship had just been in the way of the powerful surge of a code bomb, created not by Alpha, but by the approaching, damaged Ponos war cruiser.
Across Val’s sensors, a much larger green vector appeared and flashed past.
Incoming Emergency Transmission!
Sender: Ceta Blue (Designated Noble Battle-yacht)
The words of the transmission appeared on Val’s overhead screens—Warning, mayday! We’ve lost control!—just as the sharp, double-hulled shape of the Ceta Blue flashed past on its own trail of booster fire, straight into the shell of barrage and spider-drones. The battle-yacht was far smaller than the Hammer, but many times larger than the diminutive spider-drones. It lanced into the cloud and survived for a few seconds as its hull was pummeled with metal bodies and lasers, before it exploded in a bright flash of light—
Leaving a widening hole inside the Spider Drone flight.
Incoming Transmission!
Sender: Armcore War Cruiser X21 (Designated Ponos-Omega)
The words lit up Val’s face as they scrolled past: Go now. You must attack the Alpha.
Val was already okaying the new direction of flight to his battle-captain, not because he wanted to obey any order that the overgrown toaster could give, but that the cleared path through the spider-drones meant less damage for his boat. The Hammer craft rose and, as spider-drones exploded from impacting the sides of its hull, it roared through the gap and into clear space.
Defense Laser Operational!
The war chief hit the firing button again, targeting roughly the same spot that he had fired at before. He did not know what sort of alloy or new crystal material that the Valyien had made to protect itself, but the Duergar knew that continual pounding of anything would eventually break it.
The beam of meson light speared forward again, and this time, he was rewarded with a plume of plasma-fire and smaller flashes as it struck home.
Something flashed past his ship, and he saw, to his horror, that it was another of the noble house craft, its side already seared and half-exposed from its battles with the Armcore war cruisers, no doubt. It was larger than a battle-yacht, an entire rounded battleship of one of the various noble houses, but it wasn’t firing, just flinging itself in a crazy suicide mission against the body of the Alpha-vessel itself—
This time, the flash of light from the explosion was much brighter as the battleship’s warp cores must have ruptured, and a balloon of white plasma-fire blossomed, rocking the Alpha-vessel in its place.
A worthy sacrifice, Val thought respectfully of the nobles who had chosen to sacrifice themselves, moments before two smaller noble boats shot past to do the same. One was another battle-yacht, and the other was an aging flagship from several generations ago. Each of the boats appeared damaged from their previous battles, but they weren’t crippled, the Duergar thought, as two more explosions bloomed against the shell of the Alpha craft.
Val almost had a grudging sort of awe for the captains and crew who had decided to give their lives to defeat their enemy…but there was something odd about it.
Humans weren’t, as a rule, so eager to give their lives up for a cause, Val thought, just as another boat roared ahead of him to hit the Alpha-vessel like a missile. And it was the timing of these kamikaze attacks. They were always a few seconds apart, as if they were perfectly planned to keep Alpha from responding, as it shuddered and shook from the last such impact.
That glitch. Val started to growl. And the mayday transmission. These sacrificial boats had been taken over by Ponos-Omega and were being used as projectiles against its enemy.
That was dishonorable, and the Duergar started to shake with rage. A commander might order their troops into battle, but no order was given by the Ponos war cruiser. It just took them over…
The Alpha-vessel started to tumble on its side from the impacts, as the Ponos war cruiser put its final plan into action. Using Val Pathok’s Hammer ship as a moving shield ahead of it, it fired the drones that it had available to it to scream through the void towards Alpha, each one a perfectly-crafted missile with one goal in mind.
The Ponos missiles started to explode as Alpha shot them out of the void, or else spider-drones whirled into them, but it only took one to make it past the defenses and, at the last moment, to disengage its nosecone and extend magnetic clamp arms as it thumped home on the undercarriage of Alpha itself.
The Alpha-vessel was all machine, a living machine, and the Ponos drone used this capacity against it as its wires burst out from the missile’s stilled body to attach to the side of the vessel and begin transmitting.
Ponos-Omega was using its drone to directly interface with Alpha’s mainframe. The machine intelligence knew that the Alpha-vessel would be spending valuable processor space in working out how to disable and respond to the kamikaze noble house boats, so it couldn’t have the capacity to keep its memory servers safe at the same time.
A light flickered on the tail of the attached Ponos drone as the hack station started to get to work, feeding code into Alpha while allowing Ponos-Omega to start devouring Alpha’s memory servers.
16
Seed-Spore
Eliard screamed as the contraption’s sharp needles bit into his chest and started to extract his blood, to be used by the terrible and insane Valyien to track their way back to his own time, his own galaxy…
How could it come to this!? His thoughts were a blur of pain. Everything that he had tried to achieve, everything that he had wanted to do with his life…
Father was right all along… It was easy to think such dark thoughts as his body shook with pain.
He was a bad seed. He would never amount to anything because he was too reckless. He would always have turned out this way… Eliard cursed himself through the gasps and clenched-teeth hisses of agony. He cursed having been born with the type of lust for adventure that he had, as if he had carried the seeds of his own destruction all along, right from childhood…
Seed of destruction. Maybe it was the pain of having his blood forcefully sucked from his body, or maybe it was the fact that some part of his anguished mind knew that Cassandra Milan was still out there, still beside him, that made his thoughts collide and swirl.
Seed…
Spore. Wrenching his mind from the pain, he concentrated on the Q’Lot Device on his arm. He had hated it when he first had it, and it had so far seemed to bring him to more harm than good.
But it was also woven into
his very genetic structure, he knew. The blue-scale virus of the Q’Lot was mutagenic, capable of almost anything.
And the Q’Lot used biological technology to power their ships, to warp…
Please, by the stars… Eliard focused his mind as best as he was able and concentrated on that notion of that bad seed, that virus that could infiltrate and corrode and take over its host…
“Ach!” Eliard found that he was screaming as the speaking Valyien suddenly twisted the contraption from his bleeding chest. It hadn’t gone so deep nor done as much damage as it had to the Valyien victim, and a moment later, he heard the speaking Valyien explain why.
“Yes. We may need more blood to harvest from you. And meanwhile, the Q’Lot virus will heal your body, I am sure…” The Valyien hurried away as the room shook with the war being played outside.
“El? El, are you okay?” Cassie was whispering to him as his chest trembled.
The captain nodded, but he kept his eagle-like glare on the Valyien as it moved past the warp pillars to the central column and proceeded to attach the contraption with various wires to the tubes and plasma-injectors.
“They-they’re going to use my blood…to navigate…” Eliard gasped in pain. It was an effort to keep his head up.
“I know. I’m sorry. I should have known…” Cassie was saying beside him as the Valyien stepped back from the central column and out of the pillars, looking almost pleased with itself. It moved its hands over the nearest control desk and the warp plasma started to swirl and the warp light started to glow.
“We shall have a doorway to your time, human. With the genetic coordinates hidden in your blood, we shall have a doorway to ANY time…”
It was the missing piece of the puzzle that the then-ancient Valyien had been missing. A coordinate from the future. Navigation was always about using a fixed point to navigate towards, and Eliard’s blood had given them just that.
But it had also given them something else.
The Q’Lot Device on Eliard’s forearm spasmed as soon as the warp light started to appear, and somehow, as instinctive as knowing that you are hungry, he knew that it had worked. The blue-scale virus had worked to create the perfect micro-virus that would embed itself in the warp technology itself…
It would lie hidden, and dormant, until activated…
“We have to… We have to get out of here…” Eliard concentrated, and the scales of the Device started to slide and change… His forearm started to morph, and the muscles swelled along his shoulder.
“El?” Cassie was saying, her voice a mixture of hope and alarm.
“We have to. I have to…” He gasped as blue scales started to erupt up his arm, spreading from fist to shoulder to neck…
I can’t let Cassie die here, he thought. It was the only iota of strength that kept him going as the Device activated and sent surges of inhuman strength down his arm.
He roared as he pulled the Valyien vice-manacle from the wall in a shower of metal and sparks, his one arm grotesquely large and heavy as he slumped forward.
The speaking Valyien looked around in alarm, but Eliard was already moving, his gigantic blue-scale claw ripping the other wall vice that held him, before he easily tore apart Cassandra’s shackles.
“Khul-okkh!” the Valyien screeched in alarm as Eliard grabbed Cassandra with his one human hand and jumped past the aliens, into the flaring warp light and plasma—
And into a sea of fire.
This time, the warp jump was far more painful than the other jumps that Eliard and Cassandra had been in. Maybe it was because they were using the first of their kind, the original warp gate to jump through to all the later ones.
The captain’s skin burned, and he felt his thoughts fraying in a surreal nightmare.
This was the first warp gate, and all of the other warp gates exist already, in the future… his damaged, ruined thoughts told him.
He was holding something in his hand. It was another hand. Cassie’s hand.
Take us back. Back…back… he willed with all of his failing might, thinking about Esther and the ziggurat and the modern-day Imperial Coalition he had left behind. There was a sensation of movement, a rush of burning fire against his skin, and—
The pair of them fell out of the warp gate, tumbling past black pillars and sliding down several dozen steps.
“Eliard? Eliard!” It was Cassandra, shaking him as he opened his pained eyes to find that he was upright, and moving.
Kind of. He was actually being dragged, limping and lurching, with Cassandra at his side as she made her slow, painful way through the stone tunnel of Esther’s ziggurat and out to the harsh heat and rising winds of the desert world beyond.
Only now, the desert world looked different. In fact, it looked as though someone had attacked it from space. Plumes of black smoke were being dragged by sand-winds from the burning wreckages of orbital debris, and the sky was thick and black with strange clouds.
“Let me… Let me down…” Eliard whispered, and Cassie moved him to the lee of the ziggurat as the clouds started to shake and shiver.
It looked like the end of the world. Maybe it was.
“We failed. I’m sorry.” Cassandra sat beside him and put her arm around the pirate captain’s shaking shoulders. “That mess up there must be the battle against Alpha. We couldn’t stop the Valyien, so Alpha might win, in which case it’ll kill us. Or Ponos might win, in which case it’ll kill us…”
“Not…” Eliard whispered in pain, trying to move the Device and his arm. He still had a covering of blue scales from his three-clawed fist all the way to half-covering his face, and the wound on his exposed chest was still sluggishly bleeding.
“Not lost. Not yet,” he said, forcing the blue-scale claws to open as the center of his palm started to mutate.
“What are you doing?” Cassandra asked, watching as the scales started to rise and open, revealing smaller, delicate scales and finally, in the center of Eliard’s hand, the delicate, lacy-white petals of a flower. In the very center of that was a tiny stamen-bracket, like a miniature version of the Q’Lot ships themselves—star-like, but hair-fine tendrils.
“I don’t understand…” Cassie was saying as Eliard gave his encouragement to the Device.
The mutation was nothing more outstanding, and nothing more mundane, as an aerial, just a biological one. The Device transmitted the genetic codewords that it had created in Eliard’s stolen blood and released them into subspace.
Many miles above them, the message that was encoded in ones and zeroes scattered into the atmosphere and then past it, out into space. It hit the metal body of the traumatized Alpha-vessel, and the signal was too soft and small for any party to even realize it was there as it vibrated through the strange metals of the hull, finding the quantum sensors that Alpha used to interact with data-space.
The code hit Alpha’s mainframe, and in nanoseconds found a perfect, matching partner in a seed of code that had been waiting, dormant, inside Alpha ever since it was first created.
Eliard had created a virus through the Device that the ancient Valyien had uploaded into that first warp gate, thinking it to be future coordinates. That virus, biological in design but mechanical in function, was a sleeper cell that had been waiting in data-space for almost a thousand years, waiting for the perfect genetic code-program that only Eliard’s body could provide.
That virus had been unwittingly prewritten into every piece of Valyien warp technology, including the node that Armcore had used to create the Alpha program. It blossomed in Alpha’s mind, the virus replicating as fast and as seriously as the nano-virus that Alpha itself had created to attempt to kill the sleeping Irie Hanson.
Within mere moments, critical conceptual circuits overloaded, and then simply stopped. The Alpha program didn’t even realize what was happening until the Q’Lot spore-virus, rewritten as machine code, had disabled its intelligence and eradicated it.
And then, the virus passed itself to any network that
was connected to Alpha. Every attacking Spider Drone suddenly deactivated and decoupled from the hulls of the ships that they had been attacking.
And the Q’Lot spore-virus uploaded itself instantly through the Ponos transmitter drone, downloading into the Ponos war cruiser, and beyond even that, to the faraway Ponos mecha on the Old Earth platform station. With a hiss of static and a jerk of dying servos, Ponos-Omega, the Ponos-supreme machine intelligence, was turned off.
Eliard had done it. He had saved the future.
“They…they will never be able to…” Eliard gasped under the lifting skies. “…come back. The Valyien, that is. Their technology is corrupted, and we have the key to it now.”
Epilogue: The New Tomorrow
Eliard woke to a world of light and, rather annoyingly, pain.
“Argh.”
“He’s awake,” grunted a voice that he knew, it was a heavy growl that could only be made from the throat of a huge Duergar.
“Val,” Eliard whispered. His head pounded and his eyes hurt. “Where the drekk am I?”
“You don’t want to know,’” muttered the Duergar, as another lightning bolt of pain lanced through Eliard’s arm. Before he could open his cracked and parched lips to scream, he was already falling back into unconsciousness.
“Is he going to pull through?”
The next time that Eliard woke, it was to hear a conversation that he knew, instinctively, that he had heard before. But when?
I’m in some kind of hospital, he thought, the bright light above him wasn’t quite so glaring as before, and he figured that his body must slowly be recovering from whatever had happened to it.
The Q’Lot had happened to it, as had the Valyien. All the memories of those final moments on Esther came rushing back to him, bringing with them the memory of what had come after, as well….
Eliard had created the virus ‘kill-code’ that the Ancient Valyien had unwittingly pre-programmed into their warp gates, and subsequently into Armcore, Alpha, and Ponos-Omega. When he had released it through the Blue Scale Device on his arm, it had transmitted a message through data-space, deactivating all Valyien technology—including the monster AI’s that had been eating each other above the desert world.
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