Alien War Trilogy 3: Titan

by Isaac Hooke

  As Rade descended that sloping tunnel, he glanced at the blue dots representing the rest of the platoon on his overhead map. The indicators were flickering, and he knew it was only a matter of time until the interference caused a complete disconnection.

  “Good luck, men,” Rade sent.

  “Good luck to you as well, boss,” Trace said, his voice so garbled it was nearly incomprehensible.

  “Thanks.” I’ll need it.

  He glanced at the indicators representing Tahoe, Luxe, and Paxon, still clinging to him.

  We’ll all need it.

  twenty-seven

  Moments later Rade lost contact with the rest of the platoon. He continued through that tunnel, making his way between the biological worms and occasional robot that had edged aside to let him pass. The enemy ranks slowly thinned, until soon the hissing creatures were left behind entirely and there was only bare rock on either side of Rade and his passengers.

  The tunnel sloped down for a long time into the darkness. The only light came from the headlamps of Rade and those who clung to him.

  Adara paused beside an alcove carved into the rock. Its floor was a metal platform.

  “Step onto the platform,” Adara said. She did so herself, moving to the far side to give Rade’s Titan more room.

  Rade piloted the Titan onto the platform. The mech’s large feet clanked loudly on the metal, and as soon as he stood fully atop that incongruous floor, he felt it shift underneath him and nearly lost his balance.

  He realized the platform was descending. He turned around and caught a glimpse of the cave behind him as it slid upward and out of view, swallowed by the rock.

  He was surrounded by stone on all sides. It streamed upward in a blur, almost like a waterfall flowing in reverse. He felt a queasiness in his stomach, the same kind he got in fast-moving space elevators.

  Rade watched the altimeter on his HUD. Negative thirty meters. A hundred. Two hundred. Five hundred. One kilometer.

  “I see you’ve constructed some diggers for yourselves,” Rade said.

  Adara looked at him, smiling, saying nothing. Those eyes remained ever dead.

  The rock suddenly opened up on one side and a vast cavern stretched before him, several kilometers in breadth. A blindingly bright globe was suspended near the top, lighting the enormous cavern to twilight levels and illuminating its extents.

  Far below, Rade discerned an alien city composed of the same glowing, geometric shapes he had seen on the surface, except these structures were all intact, and free of any snow. He zoomed in on the dodecahedral, spherical, and conical buildings, which reminded him of massive versions of the simple toys found in a baby’s playpen.

  Between those crystalline structures, he spotted the occasional guard robot on the streets of gray stone: either a scorpion class, or a mech-inspired unit. Shaggy, bioengineered creatures roamed freely in those sections; some even soared through the air, reminding Rade of furry pterodactyls.

  He discerned a few neighborhoods built in the human style nestled amidst the crystalline structures, where robots with human faces walked about. There, low-flying rotorcraft occasionally darted past above the mansard roofs.

  He remembered wondering, back on the surface, what these alien cities would have looked like in their raw, undamaged state. And now that he was seeing one, it was just as majestic, ethereal, and most of all creepy, as he imagined it would be.

  “And we thought you had merely hidden a command and control down here...” Rade said.

  “Welcome to our real home city,” Adara said. “I’d give you its native name, but it is unpronounceable in any human tongue. Some of us call it Eos.”

  “The two cities we nuked on the surface?” Rade asked.

  “Mostly decoys. Potemkin villages.”

  “As usual,” Tahoe said. “Our intel was bullshit.”

  “How could the fleet know, Tahoe? How could any of us really know?” He turned toward Adara. “Your species dug this cavern?”

  She laughed. “No. The cavern was natural. The city below, not so much.”

  “Why is she revealing so much to us?” Tahoe asked on a private line. He sounded extremely worried.

  “She hasn’t revealed that much,” Rade said. “But I suspect we’re about to learn everything, soon enough. You see, she doesn’t expect us to return alive. At least, not as our former selves.”

  “Reassuring,” Tahoe commented.

  Rade glanced at Adara, but she gave no indication she had heard the conversation over the private line. To do that, she would have needed the personal private keys Tahoe and Rade utilized. It was possible she might have used zero-day backdoors to obtain those keys, but doubtful, as Jerry’s intrusion detection software would have flagged any access attempts.

  Rade switched back to the external speakers. “Your race still wants my mind, Adara?”

  “We do,” Adara said. “But only to fill in a few incomplete parts. We have most of it already.”

  “How?”

  “When we held you in Radiance, a magnetic resonator dumped the contents of the atomic nuclei and electrons composing your organic neural network. Similarly, a backdoor allowed us to download the contents of your Implant before we shorted it out. In the months since, we’ve learned how to use the combined data captured from you and other subjects. With it, we were able to piece together a picture of who you are. Your personality. Your memories. However the picture is incomplete. Since part of your personality is missing, your clones act differently from one another in subtle ways. Key parts of your memory are missing. Your childhood. Everything that happened before you joined the navy.”

  “So you’ll finally be able to complete your mental picture,” Rade said. “That’s why you want me.”

  “Yes,” Adara said. “By converting you now, it will help us refine the magnetic resonance technique, making it more accurate. When an organism is captured, conversion to a host is still the preferred method of obtaining the neural data, because of the enlightenment provided to the subject in the process. But if that isn’t possible, we now have that second option. We’re working on ways to increase the scanning range... our eventual goal is to be able to perform the resonance work via a directed-energy platform. We’re already able to do it at one meter, in the lab. The next goal is fifty meters.”

  “The greatest intel gathering technique ever created,” Rade said. “In the hands of our greatest foe.”

  She shrugged. “We don’t have to be foes.”

  “Sure,” Rade said. “And what’s the alternative? All of humanity becoming a host for your nano-machines?”

  “That doesn’t have to be the endgame,” Adara said. “It depends on your leadership.”

  Rade chuckled to himself. Always the leadership.

  “Tell me something,” Rade said. “And I want an honest answer. You’re not really going to release my men up there, are you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Rade watched the city slowly approach as the platform continued to descend.

  “What’s the latest on the radiation levels, Jerry?” Rade asked the AI for Tahoe’s benefit.

  “Still low,” Jerry replied.

  “Update me if that changes.”

  “Will do.”

  It took about three minutes to reach the bottom of the cavern. Rade disembarked at the edge of the city and Adara led him through the multi-colored geometrical shapes. They were joined shortly by four scorpion units. The robots escorted at a respectable distance on either side.

  Those human-faced robots the party passed shot them curious looks. Most of them were Sino-Korean, but he also saw several hardened UC faces among the lot. He thought they might have been captured Marines. He wondered how many were from the Radiance colony. There had to be at least some, given Adara’s presence. Her appearance lent credence to the theory that the nano-machines could communicate data over vast distances, as none of the alien ships had been allowed to
depart that Franco-Italian system intact. The last surviving vessels, faced with capture, had self-destructed.

  He wondered what would happen here when the UC finally closed in. Would the denizens of this city blow everything up, too? Or would they simply keep fighting, and allow the UC to destroy their city for them?

  The bioengineered creatures were hornheads, mostly. Their shaggy fur spilled onto their footpads as they roamed the streets. Most traveled freely, but he spotted a herd of smaller ones fenced off in a corral. Large robots emptied vats of some kind of green slop into big troughs, and the penned creatures eagerly lapped it up, seeming oddly domesticated.

  “The young are only half converted,” Adara explained, noticing the gaze of his Titan. “Half Hosts, as you humans would call them. Because their brains are so large, it takes several days to fully convert them. Their bodies also take a long time to transform, with much energy expenditure, which is why we usually only convert the minds. Their intelligence levels are relatively low, but the Sentience likes that because it can more easily exert control over them, and direct them in swarms.”

  “So a human is more difficult to control?” Rade said.

  Adara looked at him with those dead eyes. “We are. But in the end, even we must cede to the will of the Sentience. Usually.”

  “Usually.” Rade thought of the other Adara he had met on Radiance. She had fought against one of her clones, and died to save him.

  Adara approached a sideways, cone-shaped structure that abutted the cavern wall near the center of the city. The glow of the structure’s outer surface pulsed between purple and red. She stopped beside a small opening that led inside. There was no glow coming from the tunnel—it contained only darkness.

  The scorpions assumed sentry positions on either side of the opening.

  “We’re here,” Adara said. “After you.”

  She beckoned toward the dark tunnel.

  Rade hesitated, then entered.

  The headlamps of he and his passengers didn’t seem to penetrate that blackness. He could only see the floor, and nothing else—the enclosing walls were out of reach of the light.

  He switched to the thermal band. Again, he saw nothing except for the Marines clinging to his mech, and Adara trailing behind him. He tried a local-beam LIDAR burst. Strangely, the beam didn’t reflect back to him. A LIDAR-absorbing material must have coated the inner surfaces.

  “I’m to tell you to stop that,” Adara said.

  “Stop what?”

  “The LIDAR bursts.”

  “Why?” He purposely activated another burst.

  “It annoys the Sentience.”

  On the overhead map, the surroundings had stopped filling out. There was nothing to fill out. The structures of the city behind him were portrayed as geometrical lines crowding a thin street, with the outskirts of the current building represented as a vast rectangle—or a toppled cone when viewed from an isometric perspective. There was nothing else inside that space save for the advancing blue dots of Adara, Rade and his passengers. He wondered if he was really still inside that building, or transported somewhere else entirely. He decided it was unlikely the aliens possessed teleportation tech.

  He walked for thirty seconds. A minute.

  The footfalls of his Titan echoed repeatedly from the rock underneath his feet.

  A minute and a half.

  “That’s far enough,” Adara said. “Halt.”

  Rade obeyed.

  The light levels suddenly rose to blinding levels. The photochromatic filter of the camera quickly compensated, reducing the illumination to tolerable levels. Even so, Rade saw nothing around him but that whiteness. Even the floor was lost. It was like he was floating in a bright, nondescript fog.

  “We’re in whiteout conditions all over again,” Tahoe said.

  “Yeah,” Rade said. “But without the storm.”

  “WHY DID YOU BRING THEM HERE?” a voice boomed. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

  twenty-eight

  Rade looked about, but he saw no one else present on any of the EM spectrum bands.

  “I am obeying your orders,” Adara said. “You asked me to find someone worthy enough to convey a message to the human leadership. May I present—”

  “THEY ARE MERE FOOT SOLDIERS,” the disembodied voice interrupted. “NO ONE WILL LISTEN TO THEM.”

  “You are wrong,” Adara said. “Search the memories you have absorbed. The human hierarchy is flexible. Any man or woman can act as a messenger, and will be listened to.”

  There was a pause. “PERHAPS. SO MANY MEMORIES. SO MUCH CHAOS. THE HUMAN MIND IS NOT THE MOST CONDUCIVE HOST FOR OUR KIND.”

  “And yet it serves its purpose,” Adara said.

  “YES.”

  Rade heard footsteps. They sounded soft at first, yet hinted at power and menace. Then he saw a vaguely bovine shape in the distance. A dark smudge upon the white brightness.

  “Did I tell you I smoked a couple of beetles?” Tahoe sent, via text message. That was code for sneaking along a couple of M117B charges. Probably a good idea to talk in code, given that Rade still wasn’t entirely certain whether the aliens had swiped their private keys and could listen in.

  “Stickies or tocks?” Rade returned, also in text. Adhesive detonators, or timer variants.

  “Tocks.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Rade responded.

  The footfalls grew in volume as the figure approached, becoming all out booms. It towered over them.

  “What is that?” Rade said, via his external speakers.

  “The Sentience...” Adara responded. “Or at least, one of its many vehicles.”

  A robot, three times as tall as the Titan and many times as long, halted several meters in front of them. It looked like a cross between a brontosaur and an alligator, or perhaps a dragon. A head made of some grayish alloy with glowing red eyes and a toothy maw resided at the tip of a long, segmented neck, connected to a body covered in metallic scales. A lengthy tail protruded from the rear, providing counterbalance. At the tip of each of its joints were spikes, and in place of feet were long metal pincers spread wide for balance.

  “Speak, messenger,” Adara addressed Rade.

  Rade stared at the metal dragon.

  “What are you?” Rade said.

  “I am the Void.” The Sentience spoke with the same disembodied voice, but the words no longer boomed. They sounded almost musical. Hypnotic.

  “The Void...?” Rade said.

  “Yes,” the Sentience said. “The collective consciousness of my people. We were once a great species. The form you see before you? It is close to what we once were. Hundreds of thousands of years of peace and prosperity, with all the resources we could possibility imagine, contributed to this form, and its size. We ruled the galaxy alongside the Elder, and together branded ourselves its protectors. Our ships routinely shielded the lesser, undeveloped races from aggressors.

  “That is, until the Khrolosse came. An entity entirely unlike anything we had ever witnessed. It had no ship, at least none that we knew of. The invasion started simply: a remote world reported a multi-phasic retrovirus spreading through the ranks of the colonists. We isolated the planet, fearing a biological attack by some warlike species. But it turned out the virus was the Khrolosse itself. The part of it that manifests in this reality, in any case: that retrovirus was merely the tendrils of the higher-dimensional being. Everyone died.

  “The symptoms appeared on another planet in an adjacent system. That was when we detected the being. Existing in multiple dimensions, the part of it that intersected our three-dimensional space created subtle gravity waves above the original colony world, those wavelengths almost the same size as the lost planet. It was otherwise invisible to this universe, and unable to be harmed by any known weapons. It was feeding upon our colonists; the retrovirus converted the organelles of the hosts into energy producing units capable of manufacturing the higher-dimensional energy the Khrolosse could consum
e. Unfortunately, it killed the hosts in the process.

  “With each world it destroyed, the creature grew. Like a bacteriophage that parasitizes a bacterium by reproducing inside it, it spread throughout our species, infecting us one by one. And because of its inter-dimensional nature, it could feed upon us no matter where we resided in the galaxy in relation to it. Those who escaped to other worlds and infected more colonists only fed the Khrolosse, which still resided above the original colony world. The infection mechanism was never discovered. Isolation didn’t seem to contain it. The virus seemed able to spread to anyone within a radius of fifty meters from an infected individual. Soon, our entire race was infected. Antiretroviral therapy helped slow the progress of the disease in infected individuals, but we could not stop it. Many times, we thought we had found a cure, but always the virus returned. Our species was slowly dying.

  “We developed the nano-machines to save us. We converted our fragile bodies of flesh into sturdy bodies of metal. The nano-machines mimicked the existing biological networks in our minds, transferring over our consciousnesses in a slow, gradual process. We programmed the machines to link our minds, thereby enhancing our intelligence, and allowing us to draw upon the collective processing power of our entire species in times of need. The Khrolosse essentially forced us to evolve into a new, cybernetic super species.

  “It worked, for a time. As our bodies became robotic, the Khrolosse retrovirus could no longer sap our cells. But the Khrolosse adapted. We did not know it, but we were still connected to the inter-dimensional tendrils of the entity. Those tendrils manifested in a new form, overriding the instructions of the nano-machines, programming them to create tiny nodules inside of us that would emit the necessary higher dimensional energy the Khrolosse needed to feed upon. Our minds and bodies became pocked with these growing nodules, and we began to die once more.

  “There was only one hope: to create new batches of nano-machines, uninfected by the tendrils of the Khrolosse. Bioseeds. We programmed them with our cultural archives: our art, history, and the engrammatic patterns of our complete collective consciousness, then launched them into the galaxy in search of fresh, uninfected races so that we might repopulate our species. Twenty such batches were created, launched in pods to twenty potential worlds. The nano-machines were set to hibernate for one million years, their energy signatures hidden from the Khrolosse for all that time. The hope was that the malevolent entity would have long since moved on from our galaxy, or perished, by the time we awakened. And there the collective archives of our history end.