Atlantia Series 2: Retaliator

by Dean Crawford

The Marines dashed across to their general, their faces grim as they listened to him.

  ‘We’re heading aft,’ he said. ‘Fire teams on point, and I want at least two flame–throwers on hand in case we have to clean up.’

  ‘Who’s back there?’ Djimon rumbled. ‘Apart from the Legion?’

  ‘The Veng’en prisoner and Dhalere. He may have taken her hostage.’

  ‘Wait,’ Djimon said, ‘Kordaz was alone when we saw him on the camera.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s alone now,’ Bra’hiv pointed out, ‘and if Dhalere went back to forage for supplies he may have come across her.’

  ‘We should leave them,’ Qayin said. ‘Kordaz is a Veng’en and better off dead, and the councillor’s plain crazy bein’ back there in the first place.’

  ‘You giving the orders now, Qayin?’ Bra’hiv challenged him.

  ‘Just sayin’.’

  ‘Stop sayin’ and start doin’,’ Bra’hiv ordered. ‘You’re up front. Move!’

  Qayin shouldered his way to the front of the platoon as Bra’hiv checked his rifle.

  ‘I’ll come,’ Evelyn said. ‘With Andaim down you could do with the support.’

  Bra’hiv looked at her. ‘You want to die or something?’

  ‘I can help,’ Evelyn insisted. ‘I can’t do much up here, but Kordaz talked to me. He might be more willing to compromise with me than a bunch of convict–soldiers.’

  Bra’hiv flicked his head in the direction of the exit and Evelyn jogged to follow the Marines as they began descending the main stairwell down into the darkened, freezing bowels of the ship.

  ***

  XXIV

  The cold bit deep into Kordaz, his limbs stiffening with each and every step and his eyes itching as the cold air dried them out. The corridor ahead was illuminated by evenly spaced lights in the ceiling, but a dense mist had settled to obscure the view ahead.

  Kordaz’s uniform provided little thermal insulation, designed not for the cool atmosphere of a human vessel but for the tropical temperature of a Veng’en cruiser. He would have sprinted down the corridor but he knew better than to rush into what lay ahead.

  He could hear the hum of the massive generators that lined the aft bulkheads of the Sylph, the resonation created by the huge engines idling behind them. Kordaz had known that to shut the Sylph’s engines down entirely would be suicide, and anyway he had needed somewhere for the Word’s Legion to retreat to, an alternative to hunting him down through the lonely vessel’s empty passages. Thus, the huge turbine generators turned at low revolutions, keeping the engines ready should they be needed, as they now were.

  His sharp eyes caught sight of small scratches smothering the walls, like the lines left in the sand of a creek bed as the water shaped its contours. The scratches were formed by the flowing masses of Hunters, the nanobots that sought out biological life forms and consumed them with terrifying speed, as though they were a boiling fluid of acid poured onto living flesh and melting it into nothingness.

  Kordaz had seen what had happened to the crew of the Sylph who were abandoned with him and his men. He had seen what had happened to his own brothers in arms when the Legion had surged upon them with merciless, precise and murderous intent. The humans did not have the slightest clue what was waiting for them down here and he knew that if the Legion were to escape, it would destroy them all. Shutting the generators and engines down and letting the entire ship freeze was the only solution now, regardless of what happened to him.

  He slowed.

  The mist swirled in faint eddies through the air ahead, a subtle but sure sign that something had passed this way in front of Kordaz. He gripped his plasma rifle tightly, steeled himself against his own fear as his race was so proud to do, and then took one careful pace after another down the corridor.

  He had heard the Marine general, Bra’hiv, reporting that the Legion was moving out of the engine bays and advancing through the ship despite the bitter cold. The humans could not fathom how this was possible, but Kordaz could. The Word had not pursued him because he was but one individual in an entire, vast vessel: a target too small and too versatile to hunt down. But now there were many people aboard the ship, and the Word would have calculated with its soul–less and yet coldly precise mind that the gains were now worth the risk.

  The Word acted in the same way as the vicious Seethe Ants that populated his homeworld’s dense jungles. There was no single brain among them, no definable centre of thought that controlled the masses in the way a captain controlled the crew of a ship. Instead they acted on mass impulse, based upon information shared among the whole, an isocracy of sorts that forged an unbreakable single–minded determination far stronger than the will of any human. Or Veng’en.

  As one tiny bot learned a new route through an alien vessel or a new weakness in a prey and acted upon it, so that information was copied or otherwise acted upon by other bots within a close vicinity and radidly spread throughout an entire colony. By such means did the Legion alter its methods and tactics with frightening rapidity, as though a single super–intelligent mind were guiding it.

  But aboard the freezing Sylph there was only one way for the Word to spread its tentacles now and he had to stop it.

  It was the hissing he heard first.

  It sounded like sand being poured onto a tin deck, the whisper of countless metallic legs rushing to and fro. Kordaz detected warmth permeating the air, the mist billowing and swirling in diaphanous whorls through the pools of white light ahead.

  He edged further forward, the rifle pointed ahead of him as he saw a pressure hatch to the engine bays wide open before him. The illumination from the open hatch was bright red and contrasted sharply with the cold white lights of the corridor. Kordaz moved closer to the hatch and then he realised that it was not open at all, the handle still sealed firmly into its catches on one side of the frame.

  Instead, the centre of the hatch itself was missing. The edges were smoothly curved, polished as though molded that way, the centre missing where the swarms had eaten through it to leave a perfectly symmetrical hollow through which he could pass.

  Inside, Kordaz knew, were the generators, and then behind them the engine room with its immense exhaust vents, fuel lines and cloying heat. More of that warmth wafted into the corridor as he stood and peered into the gloomy red light of the generator room.

  Slowly, carefully, he stepped through the hole in the hatch.

  The hissing sound grew louder and he saw them.

  The metal deck of the generator room was stained black, a glistening pool of what looked like oil that rippled and seethed before him. Kordaz took another pace into the room and watched as the oily lake receded before him, rippling back on itself like the black breakers of an ocean rolling in reverse, clambering over themselves to escape.

  Kordaz did not fear the Infectors, the smallest of the Word’s vile instruments. He never had. Despite his genuine disgust when Evelyn had threatened to infect him in the sick bay, Kordaz knew that the Infectors could not hurt him. The highly toxic saliva and blood of the Veng’en was lethal to the Infectors: their tiny metallic frames dissolved in it long before they could gain control of vital organs, the bacteria–laden saliva an evolutionary trait that allowed Veng’en to bite prey and then follow them until infections ravaged and killed them. No, the Word had never been able to control a Veng’en in the way it had learned to control humans.

  Instead, the Word had initiated an all–out attack on the Veng’en race.

  What Kordaz feared was the swarm, the Hunters. The size of large insects, Hunters were programmed only to detect, consume or otherwise destroy all biological life. Kordaz glanced over his shoulder at the pressure hatch with the hole in it. There was no debris on the floor around the hatch, meaning that the door had been entirely consumed.

  Infectors could achieve such a feat without difficulty, taking the raw materials of the hatch and building new Infectors from the metal, converting everything they found into new ve
rsions of themselves and thus swelling their ranks. But they could also build Hunters from the debris too.

  Kordaz crept to the engineering panels on one wall of the generator room, and eased them open. Within, a series of ordinary circuit breakers were fixed in the open position where he had left them. Kordaz reached up and closed the circuits, reactivating the links to the engine controls on the bridge, and then closed the panels once more.

  Kordaz looked around the generator room, his senses detecting movement in the far reaches of the shadowy, steam–filled chamber but unable to tell whether the movement was a threat or not. Then, slowly, he saw the shape of a human amid the darkness as it shuffled toward him.

  Kordaz stiffened again as the man emerged into the dull red light.

  It was hard to tell how much of him remained. His uniform was hanging in shreds from his emaciated frame and his flesh was likewise dangling from his bones like the tattered rigging of an old ship. Kordaz could see the shape of the man’s skull poking through the taut skin of his pale face, his eyes dull orbs in sunken sockets, scoured of the will to live.

  A long groan of unimaginable misery laboured out of the man’s lungs as one painfully thin arm reached out toward Kordaz, skeletal fingers with hooked nails struggling to function. Kordaz saw the man’s greying skin ripple across his chest as the Infectors scurried beneath his skin, and the reason that the Word had been able to move beyond the generator rooms without succumbing to the cold was revealed: human hosts. The Legion was using the crew of the Sylph as a source of warmth while moving around the ship.

  ‘So, you found them.’

  The voice leaped out at Kordaz and he whirled, the rifle in his grasp aimed at the woman who stood now in front of the pressure hatch. Kordaz kept the rifle aimed at her as he spoke, a small pistol held in her hand pointed right back at him.

  ‘I knew that it was you,’ he growled.

  Councillor Dhalere’s exotic eyes slanted in a smile as she looked Kordaz up and down. ‘And what would you know of it? You’re not even a civilised species.’

  Kordaz activated the plasma rifle, the magazine humming into life.

  ‘Your body temperature,’ he replied. ‘The Infectors increase it slightly and we uncivilised Veng’en can detect it. We can taste your sickness on the air.’

  Dhalere raised one perfectly curved eyebrow as she smiled again.

  ‘Perhaps we have underestimated you,’ she purred. ‘But then again, perhaps we know you better than you know yourself.’

  The rustling sound suddenly filled the generator room and Kordaz glimpsed from the corners of his eyes the lake of black Infectors flow like a river toward Dhalere. They veered around Kordaz as they flooded toward her, and she stood with the smile still fixed to her features as the black flood rushed upon her and climbed up her legs.

  Kordaz kept his gaze fixed upon Dhalere and her pistol as her body was entombed by the bots, swarming over her as though she were some kind of mother to them.

  ‘You cannot win,’ Dhalere said to him, her white teeth bright against the surging black skin of bots covering everything but her mouth and eyes. They even flowed through her hair, causing it to ripple as though it were a mane of oily black snakes. ‘It is inevitable that you and the humans will fall, Kordaz.’

  Kordaz could not grin like a human but he gave it his best shot as he pulled the trigger.

  ‘Not without a fight.’

  The plasma round blasted from his rifle in a blaze of bright light that rocketed across the distance between them in the blink of an eye. Kordaz saw the shot impact the dense cloud of bots around Dhalere and a bright blast of orange embers burst like an exploding star as they were vaporised in their thousands by the shot.

  A dense cloud of blue smoke cleared and Kordaz felt something cold slither inside him as he saw Dhalere still smiling at him, the bots filling the void left by his shot and the woman herself entirely protected beneath them.

  ‘Now, it’s my turn,’ she replied.

  Kordaz leaped to one side as the councillor fired her pistol. The smaller plasma round skimmed his side and he roared in pain as he hurled himself onto the deck and rolled, aiming his rifle as he did so. Dhalere’s cloak of bots shimmered as it changed shape, the bulk of the bots remaining between him and the councillor. Kordaz shifted his aim up to Dhalere’s unprotected eyes.

  And then he heard the groaning, right behind him.

  Kordaz flipped over as the horde of infected crewmen loomed over him, their decaying flesh stinking in his nostrils and their agonised cries of pain filling his ears. Their hands reached out for his body as they shuffled en masse out of the darkness, their uniforms bearing the Sylph’s name, and he fired on instinct.

  The rifle’s plasma blasts hollowed out the nearest man’s stomach in a sizzling blaze of light and hurled him backward into his companions. Kordaz kicked out at another and knocked his legs from beneath him before blasting his head from his shoulders in a flare of plasma light.

  Kordaz scrambled to his feet and fired again as the stench of burning flesh filled the generator room, smashing a young woman’s arm clean off and sending her screaming to her knees. The decimated crew shuffling from the shadows retreated in panic and pain, melting bots falling from their wounded bodies and their faces twisted in agony as they moved despite their appalling injuries, their bodies controlled by the Infectors.

  ‘Help me.’

  Kordaz heard Dhalere’s voice from behind him and whirled to see her face stricken with fear, her body trembling beneath the blanket of Infectors. Behind her and tumbling through the hatch were dozens of Marines with Bra’hiv at their head, all of their weapons pointing at him as they saw the smouldering remains of the Sylph’s crew at his feet.

  Dhalere’s voice whimpered out again, her eyes now quivering with fear as she looked at Bra’hiv in terror.

  ‘Help me, he’s gone insane. He’s killing everyone! He’s infected!’

  ***

  XXV

  ‘Communications status?’

  Captain Idris Sansin glanced at his HandStat and knew that there were scarce moments before the Veng’en commander’s deadline expired.

  ‘The Veng’en jamming is modulating through multiple frequencies,’ Lael replied, ‘switching periodically. The computer is trying to predict the next frequency in line and develop a pattern recognition sequence that will break the signal but it’s taking time sir.’

  ‘Time is the one thing that we do not have,’ Idris snapped.

  ‘Five minutes,’ Mikhain reported. ‘The Veng’en are not manoeuvring into an attack position yet, sir.’

  Idris looked at the tactical display that dominated the main viewing panel, overlaid so as to provide battle information as well as revealing what the enemy vessel was doing.

  ‘It’s only a matter of time,’ the captain replied. ‘They’ll have repaired the damage by now and won’t be so easily caught out again. We won’t be able to withstand a full bombardment from their cannons if they manage to corner us.’

  ‘We’re more manoeuvrable,’ Mikhain pointed out, ‘and their hull relies more on ray–shielding against plasma fire than ours, which has a physically tougher plating. If we can prevent them from hitting us full on, we might prevail.’

  ‘Not long enough to finish them,’ Idris said. ‘We can’t risk the lives of our civilians over this.’

  Mikhain looked at the captain. ‘Are you suggesting that we abandon the Sylph?’

  Idris drew a deep breath. ‘We have to choose between protecting over a thousand souls or risking them all for the sake of less than a hundred. That’s no choice at all.’

  Mikhain glanced at the screen. ‘We could appeal for their mercy.’

  ‘It will not make any difference,’ the captain said. ‘They will destroy the Sylph regardless of any casualties. It’s how they have chosen to fight this war and as we started it, however unwittingly, there’s not much more that we can say to stop them.’

  Mikhain’s features looked strai
ned as he replied.

  ‘Sir, you said it yourself that as soon as they’re done with the Sylph they’ll pursue us across the damned galaxy if they have to.’

  Idris nodded.

  ‘I’m aware of that, XO,’ he replied. ‘What is our best time to return to coordinates Delta–Four–Seven?’

  Mikhain blinked in surprise as he looked down at his instruments. ‘An hour or so, but why would you want to go back there?’

  ‘We need to even the odds,’ Idris replied. ‘If we can’t face that cruiser in open battle then we need to use our smaller size and greater manoeuvrability to gain an advantage.’

  Mikhain exhaled noisily.

  ‘What do you want to do about the fighter screen? We’ll have to bring them in before we can make any jump.’

  ‘Bring them in closer to the ship,’ Idris replied, ‘as subtly as you can. They’ll have to recover aboard damned fast.’

  Mikhain nodded and hurried to his station as Idris checked the time once again and hurried away.

  ‘XO, you have the bridge. I’m going to see if Meyanna has anything we can offer Ty’ek to hold him off.’

  *

  Meyanna Sansin hurried across her laboratory, a vial of blood in her hands as she sat down behind a scanning microscope.

  The blood was some of the last of Evelyn’s samples that she had remaining. Beside it, sitting on her workbench, was a sealed vial of Dhalere’s infected blood.

  Meyanna’s plan was simple enough. She intended to extract bots from Dhalere’s sample and inject them into Evelyn’s blood to see whether happened was any different from when she had taken Infectors from their tiny supply in the magnetic chamber and run the same experiment. She already knew that most likely Evelyn’s white blood cells, those that fought off infections, would swamp and attack the bots in much the same way that they would attack foreign bacteria. The small size of the Infectors meant that they could in theory be overcome by immune cells and prevented from attaching themselves to major organs, thus preventing infection.