PONOS: This is the Plan B. I will tell you what you need to do, but you have to follow my instructions to the micro-second. Any delay will result in an 82% chance of my plan failing, and Xal joining with the other intelligences with Alpha…And probably taking their revenge against you and the Captain.
More out of a morbid curiosity than anything else, Irie asked: What chance of survival do we have if we follow your plan?
PONOS: Negotiable. Current estimates are a 49% chance of death if you complete my instructions perfectly.
“Marvelous. Fifty-fifty.” Irie grimaced. While they had worse chances of survival before—a lot worse, in fact, she didn’t like the way that Ponos was willing to risk their lives on his best plan, which still only gave them almost even odds on making it out alive.
“But it might save the captain,” Irie said grimly. “Fine. We’re going to take it.”
PONOS: Good. Now, listen very closely…
Almost thirty clicks below this conversation, under Welwyn’s dome and below the beautiful surface that was now marred with smoke and flooding, the captain was in a similarly tense negotiation for his very life.
Eliard stood with his right forearm extended, pointed straight out at the porcelain face of Xal. The Device had taken over his arm from his fist all the way to the shoulder, and now it had grown to the size of one of the mecha Babe Ruth’s fists, cylindrical, muscular shapes encased in a turquoise and blue scale, with frilled ‘fins’ extending back out behind the Device like antennae, or whiskers. These alien threads quivered even in the stilled airs of the containment tube that Eliard was currently being held in, and the captain knew, on a deep instinctive level, that they were acting as sensors—detecting his environment, calculating what it would need to do in order to destroy the housing unit they were both trapped in.
Eliard’s awareness of the Device’s operations was sharpening, a part of him realized. He was starting to become aware of just what the Device could do, as well as how it would act, even though he had no idea how he knew. He could sense the rearrangement of strange, alien organs and tendons within the thing, and within his arm as different energies were applied and activated.
“If you don’t let me go, I’ll blast you to the other side of the void, and you know that I can do it. You saw what I did to your precious dam up there,” Eliard said, his voice as humorous as a cut-throat razor.
The captain’s previous fear and confusion were still there, but it was pushed aside by the rising cold-white freezing point of his fury. So this is how it’s going to be? He snarled at himself. Everyone I get involved with ends up dead. Everyone who tries to help me, who works with me, ends up dead. The captain was tired of losing, and he had never been very good at taking orders, either.
The captain was also tired of caring. If these overgrown calculators want me to be a pawn for their games, then they’ve got another thing coming.
“Captain Martin, you are not thinking clearly,” Xal, in his porcelain-faced unit, stated in a superior manner. “You may destroy my avatar, but that is only what this creation is. I am a machine intelligence that spans the entirety of Welwyn Habitat. Any destruction of this current mouthpiece will not have any impact upon my existence…”
“Well, it will make me feel a whole lot better,” Eliard said flatly, and fired.
WHUMPF! The ball of white and blue light burst out of the Device, kicking his arm back in recoil as it exploded against the crystal tube containment, and the glowing torpedo of plasma seared a hole straight through and engulfed the porcelain face on the other end.
BWARRAOWW! Klaxons burst into existence as the explosion hit the far side of the interrogation room, and Eliard blinked at the afterglow of the image.
He had been right. That did make him feel a lot better.
“Captain, really…” the cultured, sophisticated voice of the Welwyn intelligence overlaid the Klaxon sounds, but Eliard was already moving and firing.
WHUMPF! The next shot was much smaller, but the exploding flames that it created were fierce enough to scorch the walls as he jumped out to roll across the metal floor. He found that he was standing in the charred and slagged remnants of the vehicle that Xal had been using. Next to him he could see one half of the avatar’s porcelain face, still staring serenely out of its blackened shell.
Crunch. The captain stomped on it fiercely, just as pain erupted across his shoulders. “Argh!”
The man-sized spider-drone that was the mouthpiece of Feasibility Study had seized him in its two front legs, holding him in the air as he kicked and wriggled. The drone’s metal feet had pierced his shoulders and the tops of his arms, clamping them to the sides of his body.
“Captain. You cannot escape this place. It is impossible.” Xal’s voice washed over the klaxons. Eliard had a moment to see that the containment interrogation room wasn’t that big, but it looked like some kind of metal hangar, and with only one door in or out. Half of the floodlights were now broken and spraying sparks onto the floor, and in the center was the destroyed crystal-glass tube that he had been held in.
“I have never understood humanity’s incapability to accept the obvious…” Feasibility Study shook the trapped captain, ten feet up in the air.
Trapped? Eliard thought. But this Device can do anything, isn’t that right? Isn’t that why Ponos wanted to use it to kill Alpha in the first place? Eliard concentrated. What form could the Device take that would allow him to escape?
Hsss… A sound broke his thoughts. This wasn’t just the fizzles and sparking sounds of the damaged wires, there were plumes of an off-white, almost yellow smoke filling the room. Of course, these drones don’t have to breathe oxygen, he thought as the smoke started to reach the captain’s nostrils. Acrid and toxic. Xal and the others meant to knock him out—
At last, the Device reacted with a spasm. Eliard could feel the blue-scale pouring out over his skin, heading up under his encounter suit and spreading across his entire body.
The Device is trying to protect me, he thought—but it was more than that, the man realized as his eyelids started to droop and he started to feel very sleepy, very suddenly. He could feel the way that the Device wasn’t just covering him, but it was also spreading through him, filaments extending out between the pores of his skin and melding with his own nervous system. It hurt.
“Aiii!” Eliard screamed, as a curtain of blue covered his eyes and mouth, and all sound stopped.
He could breath, and when he opened his eyes, everything was tinged with slightly more luminescent colors. No, these were different colors entirely that he was looking at. The walls and the drones around him shone not just with black, steel, russet-red or white, but also with something like ultramarine purple, greenish hazes, and other colors that his normal human mind had no name for.
What is happening to me? He panicked, but the Q-Lot virus that was taking over his body had other intentions. Eliard felt a surge of strength as his muscles and tendons were re-knit and re-woven, laced with a power that he had never felt before.
Smash! One of his boots crunched against the spider drone’s revolving head, smashing the sensitive sensor cameras there. An inhuman shout, and Eliard had burst free from Feasibility Study’s metal arms, pain rippling through him as the steel claws of the drone were dragged out of his body.
WHUMP! It felt like he was getting kicked in the chest as he was thrown against the far wall by one of Voyager’s extended weapon units. Eliard felt sick and dizzy, but still, the virus had other intentions for him, flooding his body with an inhuman strength and energy as he pounced back up to his feet, seizing one of the arms of Feasibility Study and pulling on it until he heard a grinding, grating sound.
WHUMP! Another shot hit him across the shoulders, forcing him to his knees, but the hybrid captain just bared his teeth, braced one foot against the flailing body of the spider drone, and pulled. There was a metallic scream and a whine of electronics as the arm was separated from the thing’s body, spewing sparks and components everywhere. It wa
sn’t much of a weapon, but it would do.
A part of the captain knew that he was injured, and probably seriously. He had been almost drowned, and then sustained two close-range blaster shots of an unknown strength. Eliard had seen what a point-blank shot had done to the kid Freddie Oberman—just how much protection did the Device give him? But the far larger part of the captain’s mind was consumed with a murderous lust. He used the articulated, black-metal arm as a bludgeon to drive back Feasibility Study, smashing another of its five remaining legs, before leaping to bat the russet-red cube that was Voyager out of the air where it hovered. The cube spun wildly to smash against the far wall, but it wasn’t disabled. Eliard saw it start to rise unsteadily back into the air.
But Sirus-23 was still active and unharmed. Thump! The captain was thrown once again across the interrogation room as his back exploded in fire and pain. Even the Device couldn’t protect him from three highly advanced drones. With a snarl, Eliard threw the spider-drone’s arm at the floating bubble-dome of Sirius-23 before leaping for the door and seizing it.
No human should be able to do what he did. The bulkhead doors were closed, and they were locked with electronic devices that had slid steel bolts into their adjoining door.
But right now, at this very moment, the captain was no ordinary human.
Screaaaaar! The protesting metal screeched as he pulled at the locked doors. The Q’Lot virus inside of him worked frantically to reknit and recreate his muscles, turning his back into a triangle slab of muscles that threatened to burst out of his encounter suit. The man could feel his own body yearning to give up, for his own tendons to scream and tear, but all of a sudden, some inner mechanism in the doors gave as a bolt sheared off and the bulkhead doors slid open at once, thumping into place on either side of him.
Whumpf! This time, the captain did not feel the burn of the Voyager drone’s laser. It must have been because his back was already twice the size that it should be, and every muscle in his altered body was already screaming in agony, but still, the blast alone was enough to send him rocketing out of the door. And almost out over a precipice, many hundreds of feet up.
“Crap!” Eliard shouted in his new voice. The hangar that he had been held in was precisely that: a metal room inside a tower of metal, whose bulkhead doors led out to small balconies of corrugated steel. Eliard clutched at the small railing that edged the balcony in an effort to stop from tumbling over the far side. Below him, he could see an impossibly tall tower stretched downward to a black and steamy industrial landscape. Or underscape, he thought. He had thought that the downside of factories and processing units that Freddie had told him about was a warren of rooms and corridors, given the fact that Welwyn was a habitat, but no. Instead, the downside was a whole secondary habitat, and this one was just given over to factories and pipes and blocky, concrete-looking square buildings.
There was no natural light down here, just the gridded shine of electric lights. There was also no life—no birds in these foul airs, no trees or plants, it was the complete opposite in fact, of what the topside of Welwyn looked like, but it appeared to cover the same amount of space.
It was like two alternate worlds had been sandwiched together—one a vision of what heaven could be if we tried, and the other a vision of hell.
And somewhere in this entire mess was where Xal hid his memory servers, the realization flashed through Eliard’s head. How was he ever going to find them? Ponos’s plan had been to negotiate or kill Xal. The captain guessed that the past few hours had counted as negotiations, which had completely failed, and that meant that he had to kill the intelligence, and the only way to do that was to eradicate his memory servers.
I can’t win. I cannot do this, Eliard realized as he looked at the vast industrial cityscape beneath him. All he could do would be to try and get back to the Mercury.
This change in his emotions had brought about an interlinked change in the Device running through his body, and Eliard could feel the scale retracting from his face. His vision flushed with its normal, faded colors.
“You cannot escape, Captain,” said the voice of Xal, piped from the interior of the interrogation chamber out into the cold air. “Stop this. Accept the inevitable. We will be handing you over to Alpha, and there is nothing that you can do about it.”
“Make me.” Eliard turned around and snarled at the voice, but Xal was not there, of course. Instead, there was the shape of the floating cube drone that was known as Voyager. It had extended two weapons ports like the barrels of meson cannons and had them trained on Eliard.
“Stun him, Voyager,” Xal said, and the captain had a heartbeat to react, flinging himself to one side as the flying cube-thing fired.
Voyager’s charge hit the railings where Captain Eliard had been, bursting across the metal and tearing it from its position. The strength of the captain’s leap had pushed him up to the far edge of the balcony, but the entire balcony was now tipping downward. Voyager’s blast had been too strong, and on top of the structural damage already sustained by Eliard firing the Device inside the room, the balcony started to sag as its supports slowly gave up.
“Help!” Eliard’s hands scrabbled on the railing, sliding down to the torn hole in the railings that led hundreds of meters down to the pipe-works and factories below. He lost his footing and fell to his knees, sliding backwards—
“No need. I am sure that Alpha will be just as interested in studying your corpse as your life, Captain…” Xal informed him. As the captain’s grip loosened, all of the pains and laser strikes finally took their toll as he shot backwards through the torn gap in the railings. A desperate scrambling attempt and then that was it. Eliard was falling towards the distant floor, and certain death.
12
Carefully Calculated
This is a dumb idea. This is a dumb idea. This is… Irie unknowingly repeated exactly what the captain had thought upon entering Welwyn.
But it was the only idea that they had. She hit the boosters and the Mercury Blade responded as fast as a hunting hawk, bursting into motion as it sped towards Welwyn. She knew that their sudden movement would raise alarm bells both in the tracking satellites that surrounded Welwyn like a net and the Armcore-hired fighter jets that Welwyn had sent out to escort the motherships towards them.
But Ponos had indicated that they had a very small window of opportunity. The recent destruction of the Chambia Dam would increase the traffic on the Welwyn warning systems, and the arrival of the other intelligences had already created a lot of confusion in the human operators and fighter pilots. Ponos had said that this was not a matter of instinct but of precise calculation. They had to drive that interference of data up. They had to overload Xal’s computer alert systems with warnings if they could have even the slimmest chance of saving the captain.
They had to cause as much chaos as possible, and there was only one way that a ship like the Mercury Blade, against an entire habitat as advanced as Welwyn, could do that.
“Now?” Val asked eagerly.
“Wait. Matching thrusters…” Irie said, her voice sounding strange as the entire Mercury shook with the sudden acceleration. She couldn’t run the booster rockets at full, she needed just enough power for the guidance and armaments computers. 23% capacity, Ponos had told her precisely.
The Mercury cut through the night towards the habitat, arcing to one side as if to side-swipe it. It would be like a fly skimming the surface of a ball, but it brought them to within range.
“Deploy!” Irie shouted when Ponos’s timer clicked to zero.
There was a shout of savage joy from the Duergar behind her, and she felt the thump-click as he activated the twin railguns, popping them out from the undercarriage of the Mercury Blade and cycling their targeting computers up.
3 seconds to acquire the target… Irie looked at the timer. Another precision calculation that Ponos had given her. She hoped that the Armcore intelligence was quite as impressive as it was supposed to be. 2…1…
“Now!” Irie shouted, and Val opened fire.
But I can’t see the target— Irie gasped as, at just that moment, the thin silver-ribbon of the Dyson ring slid across her view finder.
The Mercury Blade was already firing, Val holding and depressing the firing triggers that sent bolt after bolt of the coruscating purple and blue energy from both sets of matched guns. At her feet, Irie could feel the rhythmic chug of the recoil as far below her feet, the railguns repeat-fired.
It was the sort of shot that no biological mind could make out of luck, she knew. It had to be done through computer guidance, and she had the best military computer telling her precisely when to fire. It felt like Val was firing too early, ahead of the target, but she watched as the meson charges vanished into the foreground, disappearing against the brightness of the habitat itself…only to be caught up by the super-fast cycles of the Dyson ring and suddenly erupt into explosions of white light, too bright and painful to look at directly.
Hold course for 4 seconds, 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 1 and… Irie thought.
“Hold!” she shouted as she wrenched the ship’s wheel and hit the forward boosters, diminishing power to the rear thrusters a fraction of a moment later. The Mercury Blade around her responded perfectly, just as Ponos had predicted it would, and they skidded over the edge of the expanding ball of burning gases. Their momentum spun them downward to the dark underbelly of the habitat dome.
Warning! All-Systems Alert!
Her sensors were picking up the distant distress calls from Welwyn as their Dyson ring was knocked off course. The meson railguns weren’t enough to destroy even the silver-steel structure of the Dyson ring that rotated around and around the entirety of Welwyn, faster than the blink of an eye, but if they were shot at precisely the right time, at the right angle, and with enough force, then they could damage it, and they could do even better than that—they could knock it off course.
A. I. Uprising (Valyien Book 4) Page 9