The convict’s hands flew to his head as he tried to block his eyes and mouth, but then he was writhing in agony as the bots burrowed into his facial cavities. Andaim swivelled to aim at the convict, but a heavy hand belayed him as Qayin shook his head.
‘Not yet, wait until they’re all in his head.’
Andaim waited until the convict’s hands slumped by his side, and then a blast of plasma fire hit the convict and vaporised his skull in a cloud of blue smoke. Qayin lowered his rifle and then turned it back to the remaining crewmen still advancing upon them in stiff ranks, tumbling over their fallen brethren or walking into the hail of lethal plasma fire.
‘You were right!’ Qayin yelled as he fired. ‘They’re stiffened up by the cold. The bots can’t make them move fast enough.’
The remaining crewmen were shuffling toward cover but Andaim saw the convicts cut them off, firing quick and precise blasts that severed legs and immobilised them before taking the more difficult head–shots.
Moments later the deafening blasts were silenced and the hangar fell quiet, littered with the bodies of perhaps fifty former crewmen of the Avenger. Andaim looked over the barrel of his rifle for movement.
‘That’s it!’ Andaim shouted. ‘Torch men, finish them off and then get aboard your ships!’
With a ragged cheer the convicts sprinted to either side of the hangar, where the ranks of sleek Raython fighters stood waiting, their cockpits sealed shut.
Andaim dashed across to the hangar control room and accessed the computers there, the keyboards glistening with frost as he tapped keys. A wall–drive hummed into life and he hit a button.
Across the hangar the cockpits of the fighters opened up one by one.
‘Now we’re even,’ he smiled grimly.
Andaim shouldered his rifle and dashed for the nearest vacant cockpit.
***
XL
Home.
Evelyn saw her home.
The image of the house that she had been raised in was dreamlike, high above a river valley where other similar houses perched on the forested hillsides. She saw her parents’ faces, her kindly mother and strict but loving father, saw memories that brought both delight and grief rushing upon her soul in equal measure.
The soft orange glow of the sun rising above the mountains into the pink sky, the winding trees that turned slowly on twisting trunks with the sunlight as the days passed, the colour of their leaves denoting the time of day, the folding of their branches warning of the long dark nights. She saw the river that she had played beside as a child, her friends, their school, the ceaseless blinking lights of commuter craft ascending into the sky from the spaceport a few leagues away, crossing the arc of the gas giant around which her home planet orbited.
Caneeron was tidally locked in orbit around Titas, the gas giant. As such, one side of her home world was in darkness for much of the day, lit only by long twilight periods as it caught the sun across Titas’s horizon as it orbited the giant. On Evelyn’s side, Caneeron was aglow for much longer periods but it remained a cold planet, much of its heat derived from the gravitational flexing of its core as it orbited Titas. Volcanism wracked the equatorial regions, leaving only about a third of the available land mass truly habitable and largely powered by geo–thermal forces. The rest was a mixture of oceans, ice sheets and searing volcanic plains.
Human life had not evolved on Caneeron, although the mountains and ice sheets were home to a wild variety of animals and predators. The planet represented a valuable mineral resource for the colonies, her father a prospector who surveyed there for a major mining corporation on Ethera, the home world of all her kind.
Images flashed through her mind and she saw the family she had been forced to forget, her husband and their little boy: smiling faces, happiness, the peaceful existence of the colonies.
Then the mood changed, the images darkening. Evelyn saw the office where she had worked for many years, for the media. An investigator. She had done well, uncovered corporate espionage, exposed corrupt politicians, crushed unjust convictions.
Then the Word emerged from the battle between militarised nanotech swarms. The belief that somewhere, somehow, the police were showing signs of becoming militarised without government or democratic consent. The increase in political conservatism, the sense of always being watched, an invasive series of laws being passed that served no purpose but to increase military spending and classified projects and protect those projects from independent or even political oversight.
She had investigated for months, uncovering an ever growing network of incidences of deaths involving whistle blowers, government employees and unfortunate bystanders to what were described as unfortunate accidents in remote regions of both Caneeron and Ethera. Then, the emergence of tremendously potent like devlamine: her interview with a convict bearing the Mark of Qayin, the luminescent tattoos on his face and his braided gold and blue locks outshone by the rage infecting his massive frame.
Eventually she had gone too far. The threats began against her life, against the lives of her family. The media company she worked for suddenly fired her, her long–standing and honourable boss turning into a tyrant who almost physically ejected her from the building.
Drugs had been found in her home. Police arrived, arrests were made. She was questioned, recalled nothing of how the drugs had gotten into her home: she and her husband hated such things. She was released, her disgrace covered by the media company she had once worked for, no mention that the police found no evidence of her or any of her family being habitual drug users.
She saw herself at home that night, her husband’s kind words, saw her sleeping child, recalled feeling so afraid for him. And then the morning. The blood, everywhere. The confusion. Her husband dead, his head a mess of blood and bone where he had been shot. Her son, likewise dead. The crushing grief. The sirens, the arrest, the drugs scattered across her kitchen, the weapon found in the trash.
The tests followed. She was positive for drugs in her system even though she had not taken even pain killers for weeks. The charges for the murder of her entire family. The incarceration, immediate and high–security. The restraints and the mask, for her own safety and that of her gaolers.
And then…
… Evelyn jolted as she saw the man hovering in her field of vision in a laboratory of some kind, and the tiny seething ball of bots being inserted into her mouth, powerless to prevent them from surging into her body.
The pain.
The fevers.
The hacking, blood splattered coughs.
And then then bots being ejected from her mouth to tumble onto the floor of her cell, their tiny metallic bodies silent and still in a pool of blood–stained bile.
Evelyn jolted awake.
Tyraeus was watching her with interest as the visions faded. She saw his hand reach out, felt her throat and nose itching painfully and then the bots poured out of her. She coughed, her chest heaving, the only sound that of air wheezing as it was sucked in and expelled from her lungs.
Evelyn slumped back onto the tactical display, tasted blood in her mouth as Tyraeus looked down at her.
‘Your body rejected the bots, Evelyn,’ he said as he held in his metallic palm a ball of damaged bots that writhed there. ‘You’re immune system isolated them and ejected them. You fought them off, and they were unable to infect you. We need to know how, and why.’
Evelyn tried to speak, desperate to ask more questions: why? Why do this to so many people? Why attempt to eradicate an entire species? But her voice was trapped once more inside, her pained expression veiled by the steel mask.
Tyraeus looked over his shoulder at her, his red eyes glowing.
‘There were others, of course,’ he said, ‘but they were killed or chose to take their own lives and their secret with them. Many, I suspect, did not even know that they carried such an immunity. But you, you were alive on the Atlantia’s prison hull, and when we realised that you were immune we knew we had to
have you back.’
Tyraeus’s metal shoulders sagged slightly.
‘Alas, the Word was already under suspicion and we had to initiate the occupation. The Atlantia escaped with you and your fellow inmates attached, one of the few vessels isolated enough not to have been sufficiently infected. Our only assets aboard were Hevel and Governor Hayes, shallow men interested only in power and self–preservation. At the very least, they enabled us to catch up with you before their demise.’
Tyraeus turned his back to her again.
‘Now that we have you, we can finally dispense with the Atlantia and its crew.’
Evelyn peered left and right at the troopers standing silently either side of her. Both were staring into space as though immobile unless fed with a command. She kept her entire body still as she shifted one hand toward the holster of the soldier to her right.
‘Command,’ Tyraeus said, and she heard a hum as though the ship were coming alive all at once. ‘Charge weapons, all plasma turrets engage Atlantia, point–blank range!’
Evelyn reached out and snatched the pistol from the soldier’s holster, whipping it up as the trooper looked down at her in surprise in time for her first shot to smash into his warped face in a blaze of blue–white plasma. The trooper staggered backwards as Evelyn rolled off the tactical display and aimed at her other captor, blasting him in the centre of his chest even as he was raising his own weapon.
The soldier spun aside and fell, leaving a column of blue smoke hanging in the air as Evelyn whirled and fired at Tyraeus.
Tyraeus turned as the three plasma rounds blasted his chest, his huge form staggering backwards as a plume of molten bots spilled like a waterfall of tiny sparks from his body and littered the deck at his feet. Molten plasma and metal hissed and spat sparks and smoke from his body as he regained his balance, and to Evelyn’s horror he smiled at her.
‘Defiant, to the last,’ he said.
Evelyn saw thousands of bots scuttling across the ceiling to drop onto Tyraeus’s head and pour like liquid oil into his wounds, filling them as swiftly as they had been blasted from him. His immense bulk righted itself and he stormed toward her.
Evelyn fired again as she retreated across the bridge, but Tyraeus ducked aside from the plasma rounds that whistled past him, or whipped armoured hands up to deflect the searing hot balls of energy, the metallic pads on his palms instantly glowing red hot.
Evelyn’s back hit the wall of the bridge and she saw bots scuttling toward her across the ceiling in a shiny black flood.
‘You cannot be turned, Eve,’ Tyraeus snarled at her, ‘but you can be destroyed.’
A metallic hand shot out and gripped her throat, Tyraeus’s palm still hot from the plasma rounds as he lifted her off of her feet and glared straight into her face as the flood of bots swarmed toward her down the wall.
‘Let me taste you, Evelyn,’ Tyraeus growled.
The metallic head moved closer to her and she smelled a bizarre waft of fumes emitted from his mouth as he opened it and a black tongue swarming with bots probed for her lips.
Evelyn lifted her arm and fired the pistol.
The plasma round hit Tyraeus’ in the side of his head, blasting through bots and bone and spraying the contents of his skull across a work station to her left. Tyraeus’s huge hand fell away from her throat and she hurled herself from the wall as the bots plunged down onto Tyraeus’s body instead of her own.
Evelyn staggered away, the bots roiling in a black mass around Tyraeus’s body as she staggered across the bridge toward the communications station. She blasted the immobile crewman standing there, the smouldering corpse hurled into the back wall of the bridge, and then she tapped a message into a keyboard before her, a monotone robotic voice speaking on her behalf.
‘Atlantia, this is the Avenger, Evelyn has the bridge.’
A hiss of static filled the bridge, and Evelyn saw the other infected crewmen slowly turning toward her, red eyes glowing in the darkness. She hit the transmission button agian.
‘Atlantia, this is the Avenger, Evelyn has the bridge.’
More static, and then a reply that came not from the microphone but from the bridge.
‘No, Evelyn, you do not.’
Against the banks of coloured lights and instruments she saw Tyraeus climb to his feet, his huge bulk silhouetted against the lights. There were no longer any glowing eyes in his head, and his voice sounded even more distorted than before as he stomped awkwardly toward her.
The overhead lighting glinted off the roiling mass of bots that now made up his head, a seething swarm that had assumed a bizarre caricature of Tyraeus’s features. She recoiled from his advance, turned and fired at the nearest crewman in her way. The crewman dropped as his head was blasted from his shoulders and she retreated further, but Tyraeus merely stepped up onto the communications deck and followed her.
‘There is no escape,’ Tyraeus intoned, his lips rippling as he spoke. ‘You will become one with the Word eventually, Evelyn, whether alive or dead.’
Across the ceiling the swarm of bots expanded like a gigantic black spider, their tiny legs rustling as they scuttled toward her. She shot another crewman, dropping him as she made her way toward the bridge exit.
‘You cannot survive out there, Evelyn,’ Tyraeus assured her. ‘You will be consumed.’
The bots were flooding across the ceiling, within a few feet of her now as she lowered the pistol and looked at Tyraeus. Evelyn stared at the commander for a long moment and then she made her decision.
She lifted the pistol and pointed it toward her own head.
The bots above her stopped moving as though frozen in place. Tyraeus stopped barely a few cubits away, his head undulating and flexing as the bots shifted position and their bodies caught the light.
‘No,’ Tyraeus said, ‘you will not go through with it, for now you know the value of your immunity to your own people, those whom you care for. The Word is too strong for you to fight forever, Evelyn: our name is Legion, for we are many. Even if it costs us a billion of our number, even if the unbearable pain of repeated infection robs you of your sanity, we shall forge on until we learn everything that we need from you. And then, Evelyn, then you shall be consumed.’
Evelyn felt her legs turn to what felt like mist, buckling beneath her as fear seethed through her veins like ice. Behind her the bridge doors opened. She turned, and there she saw a thick morass of bots swarm into the bridge, the commingled sound of their millions of limbs like distant, rushing water.
She turned to Tyraeus and knew that there was only one remaining option for her.
Evelyn leaped over the tactical station and grabbed hold of a support pillar. She aimed her pistol at the bridge windows and fired several shots straight at them.
‘No!’
Tyraeus’s voice was drowned out as the plasma blasts fractured and then blasted the window out and the air screamed out of the bridge and into the deep vacuum of space. Around her a dense cloud of bots was sucked in a spiralling black vortex toward the shattered window, plunging into oblivion as Tyraeus sought a handhold nearby.
***
XLI
‘She’s charging weapons, sir!’ Jerren yelled.
Captain Idris Sansin whirled as he directed orders across the Atlantia’s bridge.
‘Evasive action, all turrets fire at will! Launch all fighters!’
A series of alarms blared through the ship as it suddenly lurched forward under power and pitched up out of plane with the Avenger. The captain saw the big cruiser’s hull ripple with blue–white flashes as plasma turrets opened fire, blazing salvos toward them.
‘Multiple launches to port!’ Jerren shouted.
‘Full ahead, hard to port!’ Idris yelled in reply. ‘Decrease our profile and brace for impact!’
The Atlantia’s thrusters surged her forward while turning her toward the incoming fire in an attempt to minimize strikes. She lumbered around, and Idris watched through the viewing ports as sever
al plasma blasts sailed harmlessly by aft of her engines.
The hull shuddered as four plasma charges impacted her, distant rumbles audible on the bridge as the hull was bombarded.
‘Damage report!’ Idris yelled above the alarms.
‘Hull intact, plating damaged starboard–stern quarter, no leaks!’
Idris whirled, his fist clenched before him. ‘Return fire!’
The hull shuddered again as the huge cannons along the Atlantia’s hull thundered their response. The viewing screen showed the dozen immense plasma balls streaking toward the Avenger.
The battle cruiser dropped down, her nose diving beneath the salvo of shots, but six of them peppered her stern quarter and Idris thought he saw debris ejected from one of them.
‘Hull breach in her stern quarter sir!’ Lael yelled in delight.
‘How is that possible?’ Idris demanded. ‘She’s tougher than that!’
‘Not right now sir!’ Jerren shouted jubilantly. ‘Lack of maintenance maybe? Either way, her hull plating must have degraded somehow.’
Idris Sansin got out of his chair as a pulse of vengeance made itself heard more clearly with every passing beat of his heart.
‘Get behind her, away from where the bots are protecting her hull!’ he said. ‘Go for her engines!’
The bridge crew began labouring to turn the Atlantia around to break the Avenger’s line and get in behind her.
‘All power aft engines!’ Idris yelled. ‘Ignore her shots and go for the kill!’
The Atlantia heaved around, swinging her nose high over the Avenger’s hull as she made to reverse course and dive down to direct a salvo of blasts at the cruiser’s engines. Beneath her, the Avenger was rolling to one side to bring her biggest guns to bear on the Atlantia.
Like two giant whales dancing deep in the black depths of an ocean, the two battleships vied for position as from the Avenger’s hull poured a tiny flotilla of metallic specks that flashed in the light from the nearby star.
Atlantia Series 1: Survivor Page 28