Dark Rivals

by Amy DuBoff

  Ruby began altering the chemical mixture in her body and brain to mimic the state that had triggered past transformations. With the physiological change, Ava had the sudden urge to punch something, but she kept the impulse in check.

  I’m in control. I dictate what I do with these powers.

  Tingling spread from her fingertips and forehead toward her core. She looked down at her hands and saw coarse hair extending from under her shipsuit’s sleeves, and her nails had thickened and elongated into razor-sharp claws.

  I don’t feel any pain, she commented to Ruby.

  >>I’m blocking it in your brain. I haven’t been able to figure out why it causes you discomfort when the other Weres don’t experience it, but I can at least push it to the background.<<

  Thanks.

  Ava flexed the augmented muscles on her arms and legs when the transformation was complete, her shipsuit taut around her broader shoulders. While not as strapped as the Weres on her team in their Pricolici form—likely due to the vampire influence of her new physiology—she stood at least eight centimeters taller than normal, and her limbs were thicker and more toned.

  She opened and closed the elongated jaw of her short snout, running her tongue along the back side of fangs where her incisors used to be.

  Even her senses were enhanced—the metallic scent of the filtered air, picking out minute scuffs on the deck tiles from where a crate had been dragged, or even the faint echoes of the conversation in the hall that had previously been undetectable.

  The amount of sensory input at her disposal threatened to overwhelm her, so she did her best to block it out and focus on her own physical state.

  All right, let’s see what I can do.

  As a baseline, she began by jumping straight into the air. The first attempt was a little under two meters, close to her standing height.

  >>Based on your muscle configuration, I believe you’ll see the best results with a running start toward a leap,<< Ruby recommended.

  Ava ran halfway across the depth of the bay, then turned back to face the elevated entry platform. I apologize in advance if this fails miserably.

  >>It’s the only way we’ll learn! Go for it.<<

  She took off at a brisk jog, careful to hold herself back from going into vampiric speed mode. Ten meters from the platform, she bumped up the pace a notch, then leaped for the platform.

  The air whooshed past her as she extended her clawed hands for the railing. It was so close—almost within her grasp. Her claws grazed the bottom lip of the platform.

  Oops.

  She plummeted downward.

  The deck met her face and chest, knocking the air from her lungs. “Ow,” she moaned, rolling to her side.

  >>Why didn’t you land on your feet?<< Ruby chastised.

  Lost my bearings, I guess. I was so sure I was going to make it.

  >>You dialed back a little too much.<<

  Ava rose to her feet and gingerly rubbed her sternum, careful to keep her claws angled away from her flesh. Yeah, I got that.

  >>You’re not hurt. Let’s go again.<<

  For the second attempt, Ava took a faster pace and also waited an extra stride before pushing off the deck. This time, she sailed through the air and was able to easily grasp the upper rung of the railing.

  >>Good. Again.<<

  Ruby had her complete the exercise another five times at various speeds and leap points to establish the variables.

  >>Now, try leaping over the top of the railing,<< she instructed.

  The first two attempts resulted in Ava’s face becoming acquainted with the deck of the entry platform, her foot having caught while trying to clear the rail.

  “Oof.” Ava picked herself off the deck. “I didn’t think this exercise was going to beat me up.”

  >>You’ll heal in less than an hour, quit complaining.<<

  Are you sure you weren’t a drill sergeant in a past life?

  >>Quite sure, but it does sound like it would be fun to push bodies and minds to their limits.<<

  ‘Biomedical specialist AI’ just moved to the top of my list of drill sergeant types you don’t ever want to get, for what it’s worth.

  >>Oh, this isn’t boot camp, Ava. You get me all the time, and I’m in your mind so I know exactly how much you can take. Now, jump off this balcony!<<

  With a heavy sigh, Ava complied.

  >>Sprints, far wall and back.<<

  She dashed across the room, closing the hundred meters in a second.

  Truth be told, she didn’t mind being put through her paces. It was exhilarating to finally be able to let loose outside the context of facing down an enemy gun, to practice in a place where failure didn’t mean death for herself or her teammates.

  Ava hadn’t had such a free session in years. She regularly trained with her team, sure, but she’d always had something to prove to them, with her smaller stature and no physical modifications. With them, she’d never wanted to misstep, so she always played it safe.

  Alone in a room with Ruby, however, she could fall on her face repeatedly, and no one would know.

  >>Good. Quick rest, and then we’ll go again,<< Ruby told her.

  Ava stopped to stretch.

  “Impressive,” a voice said from above, startling her.

  She spun around to see Colonel Kurtz looking over the railing. “Sir! When did you get here?”

  “A minute ago, maybe. I could barely tell it was you, you were moving so quickly. That, and the fangs, of course.”

  Right, that.

  Ava reverted to her human state. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to look in on this session,” she said, once her usual self again. At least he hadn’t shown up while she was a crumpled heap on the deck.

  “I thought you might like some company,” Kurtz said. “Maybe some sparring? There aren’t many Weres on board.”

  >>I have most of the data I need to guide your state while we’re in the ship,<< Ruby said. >>The next set of sprints was intended as a means to keep your heartrate up for an extended time, but sparring would work just as well. Actually, you could practice going from human to Hochste while in combat.<<

  Ava tilted her head as she looked up at Kurtz. “What would it do for my career prospects to land a few blows on a colonel, sir?”

  He smiled back. “You sound awfully confident you’ll be able to hit me.”

  She smirked. “You saw that blur running across the floor. Still want to extend the offer?”

  “What kind of officer would I be if I shied away from a challenge? Bring it on.”

  She waved him down. “All right, sir, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Kurtz winced as he eased into the desk chair in his temporary quarters. While he’d expected Ava to have speed and strength on her side, he had figured he’d still be able to hold his own next to her. He hadn’t yet decided if he was pleased or miffed that she’d bested him in both his human and Pricolici forms without breaking a sweat.

  Considering that the future of an entire system is presently in her hands, I can only count her prowess as a win for all of us, he decided, setting aside his bruised ego.

  The sparring session had been an opportunity to check on her state of mind, how she was handling the stress of having an entire mission hinging on her. She had given him no cause for concern; if anything, she seemed to be in good spirits, considering.

  That bolstered his confidence in the mission being successful, but he couldn’t neglect the contingency plans.

  Beyond the danger to the Alaxar Trinary, the FDG was at risk. The Dyons had broken in once, and though they’d been blocked from reentering the system for now, the aliens could potentially get an infusion of new resources from Alaxar that could bolster their strength. As sickening as it was to think about that potential, Kurtz needed to make sure the FDG finished getting its own augmented defenses in place.

  He established a secure comm link to FDG headquarters and initiated a video call with De
nise.

  The chief of security picked up. “Sir, what can I do for you?”

  “How much have you heard about my mission on the Hellfire?”

  “I know it’s connected to the Dyons and the attack on headquarters, but not much beyond that.”

  “Well, it’s time I explained,” he replied.

  She nodded her understanding while Kurtz laid out the details for the first iteration of the plan to take out the Dyon ship. When he got to the part about the Arti-Sun not working, Denise’s composure broke.

  “It what?!” she exclaimed, her eyes bugging out. “Sorry, sir, it’s just…”

  “I know, I haven’t been able to make proper sense of it myself. But we are about to implement a plan to disable those countermeasures, which we’re hopeful will allow us to use the weapon. If we can’t for whatever reason, though, we’ll need a way to keep FDG headquarters and the ship’s computers from being hacked again, to ensure we have a secure command center from which to command our counterattack.”

  “Network patches are in progress.”

  “Is there anything else we can do?” Kurtz asked. “I know this is far from my area of expertise, but they’ve broken through the digital security once. Are those patches a certain fix?”

  Denise was silent for a moment. “You’re right. We were approaching this from a ‘this should work’ standpoint rather than reengineering the system to make it a surety.”

  “My guess is you don’t have time for a complete overhaul.”

  “No, we definitely don’t—at least not before that ship hits the Alaxar Trinary.”

  “Any ideas, or are we in wait-and-see mode?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Sir, I wish more than anything I could offer a solution that would set our minds at ease. Truth is, though, they got their hands on some of our best tech. The FDG on its own doesn’t have the resources to implement long-term safeguards. The system needs to be rebuilt from scratch, and that will take the original programmers months to complete, if we go that route.”

  “In other words, taking out the enemy is our only viable security measure,” Kurtz concluded.

  “Yes, sir, that is my professional opinion. Otherwise, if they come for us, there’s not much we’d be able to do to stop them.”

  He scoffed. “The perfect storm of components to hit all our vulnerabilities at once.”

  “And, to be clear, those weak points are very minor. But our security was designed to keep out the kind of enemies we know. Dyons don’t operate like them. When they got access to that external processor, we gave them the keys to the backdoor.”

  Blowing up Gidyon was supposed to take care of that problem. Are there more of them out there besides this one ship? Kurtz nodded. “I’ll leave you to finishing the patches, then. After we get through this successfully, we can work on that overhaul.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll do our best.”

  Kurtz ended the call, then swiveled around in his chair to stare out the window.

  The alien planet-ship appeared no larger than her fist at their pursuit range, a dull gray sphere against the velvet blackness. Aside from its size, it didn’t look like much—maybe an industrial colony ship, but certainly not the potential system-killer that it was.

  When he thought about the threats facing the Federation, his biggest concern had always been a massive fleet augmented by armored foot soldiers. Perhaps venturing from another galaxy, this foe, in his nightmares, would present an overwhelming force the Federation would have no way of defeating. His imaginings always led to the Federation and the enemy fleet squaring off against one another, but he didn’t know if they’d fight until the bitter end or find another solution.

  The Dyons defied that worst-case scenario vision. This was a single, massive ship, capable of travel from system to system within the Federation, capable of wiping out those worlds.

  He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but Kurtz was terrified that their preparations would be for nothing. Any ship capable of negating an Arti-Sun blast would certainly be able to cut through planetary shields. No matter what protective tech they gave the worlds in the Alaxar Trinary, it was only for show, something to make them feel better—something to give them hope.

  In reality, the alien ship could level everything that the Federation had been working so hard to build.

  Ava has to succeed.

  Kurtz hated to put pressure on one individual, but it all came down to the ensuing hours. If the mission failed, they’d be in serious trouble.

  * * *

  “This is nuts, right?” Luke said to his team. “I mean, communicating with a bunch of dust?”

  “No and no,” Jack replied. “Actually, I feel pretty dumb now.” He pulled his hands out from the rubber gloves in the glove box containing the sample vials of Gidyon debris.

  “I’d think you’d be used to that state.” Tess smirked.

  Jack playfully narrowed his eyes. “Sure, laugh all you want, but you didn’t think of it, either.”

  Luke raised an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

  “All the assessments we’ve been doing for the last month. We were testing all the wrong things,” Jack replied.

  “Please, enlighten me.” Luke crossed his arms.

  Jack flourished his hand. “Well, for starters, we were focused on where the debris was from—cross-referencing mining records, radiation patterns, and the like. The entire time, we assumed the material was dead.”

  Luke’s brow knit. “It’s… rock.”

  “Wrong!” Jack declared triumphantly, pointing his right index finger into the air. “This entire time, the material was something other than what we thought. Each one of those little granules is part of a linked system. They may have started out as raw rock fragments, but they’ve been imbued with a connection to the Etheric. When that signal ran through headquarters, the fragments remembered what they used to be in the dwarf planet and were trying to rebuild it. However, as soon as the signal went away, they returned to their dormant state.”

  “How does that conversion process happen, from raw mineral to… whatever these things are?” Luke asked.

  “Beats me.” Jack shrugged. “Ultimately, it’s irrelevant. What matters is that we now know that every little granule here has the ability to communicate with others of its kind.”

  Luke perked up. “Great! That means Ava doesn’t have to go inside that thing to establish a connection.”

  Jack winced. “Not exactly. I said ‘communicate with,’ not that any given point could act as a transmitter.”

  Tess nodded. “The materials are different, but it’s still part of a larger collective. Just because the cells in our bodies work together, doesn’t mean all of them can relay sensory feedback.”

  “Okay, so we still need to tap into the brain,” Luke surmised, wishing he hadn’t let himself get temporarily hopeful.

  “Not the brain, necessarily, but at least a nerve,” Jack continued. “Working with these granules will let us learn how to speak the language—building on the frequency we recorded while they were active before, we can see if the particles respond when we feed it data. But once we figure out how to talk to them, we’ll still need a connection to a central node that has a direct link to the other components.”

  “And how do we identify one of those nodes on the ship?” Luke prompted.

  “There should be a reaction,” Tess jumped in. “The entire purpose of this mission is to disrupt the ship’s systems, not make friends with it, right? So all we’d have to do is feed it some poison. If the reaction is localized, the particles will just be filler material. But if the effects of that poison are observable elsewhere, it’s tapped into a ‘nerve’. Once that location is identified, Ava will know where to plant the hacking tool.”

  Luke looked between the two techs. “Sounds great, but if each of these particulates have some degree of smarts and they can move around into different shapes, how do we make sure the hacking equipment stays connected? The ship
could just spit it out.”

  “Uh…” Jack scratched his head.

  “We could disguise it,” Tess suggested. “If we can isolate what makes the particles appear dormant and disconnected, maybe we can give the hacking gizmo a skin that will make the ship think it’s just another component.”

  “That sounds awesome. But how?” Luke asked.

  “Frequency patterns,” Jack said, getting a distant look in his eyes. “Hold on, I think I have an idea.”

  He ran back to his work console and started making furious entries on the desktop.

  “Should I be doing anything?” Tess asked tentatively.

  “Probably best to let him work,” Luke replied. While his own skillset had certainly broadened in recent weeks, this wasn’t a job for a geneticist or a xenobiologist.

  Luke and Tess returned to their own stations, while Jack worked on whatever brilliant solution had come to him. After twenty minutes, the researcher finally pushed back from his desk.

  “Damn, I’m good.”

  “All right, Jack, tell us how amazing you are,” Tess said with an exaggerated eyeroll.

  “Well,” Jack grinned, “I went over the frequency patterns we’ve observed across various media. While many of the signals appeared to be the same as in our prior analysis, there were… undertones to some of them, which were only apparent when looking at the signals together. I cross-referenced those against the Hellfire’s sensor data, and I believe I’ve devised three signals that will interact with the engineered structures within the alien vessel.

  “The first is, essentially, a ‘don’t-mind-me’ signal, like the general matter puts off. I think we can use this to disguise the hacking device so the ship doesn’t see it as a threat.

  “The second frequency is a counter-wave that should function like a poison. It’s not an exact opposing frequency to break apart the structure, but it will disrupt the bonds. Ava can use this to trace the nerve fibers. I believe this would also be an effective frequency to use in the skin of Ava’s suit, so they can’t grab her.”