Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three)

by Worth, Dan

  ‘Anita’s?’ said Anna.

  ‘Yeah,’ Isaacs replied. ‘Poor kid.’ He failed to meet her gaze.

  ‘We never did find her body, did we?’

  ‘No, no we didn’t. I expect there’ll be a few things of hers left about the ship. I’ll um... we should...’

  ‘Look Cal, I know about you and her, but it was a damn shame what happened to Anita. It wasn’t right or fair. She was so young... I don’t mind you being upset about it.’

  ‘No, no it wasn’t fair,’ Isaacs replied, his mouth compressing into a narrow line. ‘But you know what? The Shapers can be killed too. It’s payback time for Anita, and all the others as well.’

  The Profit Margin carefully nosed its way out of the shattered bay doors of Port Royal, manoeuvring thrusters firing in short, corrective bursts to angle the sleek craft through the hole left by the impact of the Shaper warship. Outside, the pale, distant light of Achernar played across the badly damaged, roughly spherical hull of the Uncaring Cosmos. The crippled Nahabe warship huddled close the Hidden Hand base, the numerous wounds in its skin attended by swarms of Nahabe in their sarcophagi as well as larger maintenance craft. Beams of light and the occasional flashes of cutting gear played across its surface.

  The comm. crackled into life. It was the Speaker.

  ‘Captain Isaacs, we are currently relaying sensor data from our systems to your ship.’

  Isaacs cast his eye over the relevant screen and scrutinised the map of the system he saw there. There were a large number of angry red dots scattered throughout.

  ‘As you can no doubt see,’ the Speaker continued. ‘There are a large number of hostile ships still within the system. It is imperative that they do not discover this base. Even with your newly fitted stealth capabilities, it is important that you take precautions. We do not know who may be watching.’

  ‘Duly noted,’ Isaacs replied. ‘Here’s what I was thinking. I use a quick burst from the ship’s thrusters to get her clear of Port Royal, we drift for a while, then we engage the stealth module and jump away. We’ll plot in a series of jumps in a looping course that will take us on a heading at a tangent to the most direct route to the Solar System at first before swinging back around.’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s wise.’

  ‘What if we don’t succeed? What will you do?’

  ‘We suspect that Port Royal’s drive core has been lost in the Spica system, so we are forced to remain here for the time being. Hopefully the Uncaring Cosmos can be repaired, in time. If so, we will use it to evacuate Port Royal and take this information back to Nahabe space. It is my intention to try and persuade my government to fight more than a defensive war. It is my belief that our military could make a real difference, particularly if they are able to cut the Shaper’s supply lines into this part of space. Good luck Captain Isaacs.’

  ‘You too,’ said Isaacs. ‘I think we’ll both need it.’

  With that, he fired the Profit Margin’s main engines briefly and the ship sped away from Port Royal.

  Engines off, the Profit Margin drifted, until the Hidden Hand’s base was lost in the blackness at the edge of interstellar space. Isaacs kept a close eye on the sensor console. So far, none of the Shaper craft or their renegade human allies had turned their attention towards his ship. They remained within the inner system. Oddly, a number of civilian ships were also visible traversing the system and jumping for other destinations within this part of space. This surprised him. Had normal traffic begun to resume already?

  No matter, they were now thousands of kilometres away from Port Royal and Anna had finished punching in their jump co-ordinates. He moved his hand deftly across the controls and engaged the stealth module. There was a dull clunk and a series of other mechanical noises that he felt through the deck as the four large radiator panels deployed and locked into place.

  Isaacs took a deep breath, crossed his fingers and engaged the ship’s jump drive.

  Chapter 5

  It was night time. He sat with his back to a tree and looked up at the stars through a hole in the forest canopy. One of those faint, twinkling points of light was home. He couldn’t tell which one. He could only see a small patch of sky and working out what he was looking at was a virtually impossible task. There were plenty of shooting stars to watch too. Normally, he would have taken a simple pleasure from watching such a display, but not now. The streaking fireballs were not of natural origin. They were the debris of battle burning up in this world’s atmosphere, fragments of once proud warships, broken fighter and bomber craft, spent munitions and human bodies streaking through the atmosphere to annihilation. It was a repeated reminder of his failure.

  Other lights moved up there: other ships, the ones who had defeated him. They winked in and out of existence as their hulls caught the light from the system’s sun. Lights could also be seen moving in the sky at lower altitudes as craft swept low across the jungle, their engines whining in the tropical night as their searchlights played across the treetops. They were hunting for survivors.

  He had been several days in the seemingly endless jungle and he didn’t really have a coherent plan for what to do next. First of all, he needed to get a message back to the Navy to let them know he was still alive and maybe someone would come to get him off this sweltering rock but that itself carried with it immense risk. The emergency hypercom distress beacon that he had salvaged from the crash site was a one shot device with enough power to send a single message back home without needing to use the local comm. nets, but it would doubtless attract attention from the very enemies that he was trying to avoid. Beyond that, he had some vague notion of finding a working a ship with jump capability and somehow managing to get away, though he suspected that the ships in orbit above him would soon put paid to that.

  The pain from his injuries sustained during the crash had abated somewhat, though his nose still throbbed and sent shooting pains through his skull if he touched it. For now, he just needed to stay alive and avoid capture. The information he had in his brain would be very useful to the enemy. Tactics, current deployments, force strengths, encryption passwords, security codes, all of it could be obtained from him, and they wouldn’t need to torture him the old fashioned way, they would just implant him with one of their creatures. It would devour his mind and it would know everything and then they would know everything. He needed to avoid capture until the information he held became outdated, until fleets had moved and codes changed.

  He pulled out the pistol he had salvaged and looked at it grimly. If it came to it, this would be his only way out. Better to die by his own hand than become one of their instruments, that way the secrets he held would die with him.

  There was a roaring sound above him. An AG transport outlined in winking navigation lights passed over his head, searchlight stabbing down through the jungle canopy below. He watched it as it paused for a moment to investigate something, and then it moved off to the south. There was no point in running and hiding. It was too dark to move and besides, movement would only make him more obvious. He huddled down further beneath the camo-cloak that he had found in his pack – it would shield his body heat to some extent – and waited for morning.

  He awoke with a start and saw sunlight slanting down through the trees. Some sudden noise had roused him from sleep. He had dreamt of a piercing cry. There it was again, a blood curdling shriek that pierced the silence of the early morning forest. He squinted in the direction that the sound had come from, and saw a long-limbed furry shape gripping the upper branches of a tree to the south west. The thing gave another cry, and was answered now by other calls from more distant trees. He saw other shapes, moving swiftly across the underside of the tree canopy in a loosely dispersed group, dappled greenish fur causing them to blend in and out of the background foliage.

  Local wildlife, huh, he thought. He’d seen enough nature documentaries over the years to recognise the creatures as Orinoco Dryads, a roughly primate symbiont species, but right now his mai
n concern regarding the wildlife was whether any of it was edible. The ration packs he’d salvaged wouldn’t last forever. Eventually he’d need to start killing or picking his own food if he was going to survive out here.

  Orinoco was a strange little world, he mused. There were those who pointed out that the system wasn’t nearly old enough to have developed such complex life and that the entire ecosystem must be artificial and had been imported from elsewhere in the distant past. From where and by whom, no-one had yet established, though there were rumoured to be one or two moss-covered ruins in the deep jungle that pointed to earlier colonisation by parties unknown.

  As the group of Dryads moved closer to his position, he suddenly saw a flock of bird-like creatures erupt through a hole in the floor of intertwined branches where he sat. Their iridescent plumage caught the sunlight in a riot of colour as a chorus of shrieks erupted from the Dryads. They had seen whatever it was on the lower levels of the forest that had scared the flock of avians.

  He shifted his position and leaned forward over the branch in front him so that he could look down through a gap in the foliage to the levels below. Below was another layer of branches then another below that and another and so on. It was difficult to see the ground - the successive layers of tree growth eventually blocking out much of the light to the bottom levels.

  He froze. There was something moving down there. A couple of layers down, through a succession of gaps he caught a glimpse of movement. At first he thought it was a swarm of insects hovering under the trees, but as he looked closer he realised that its shape was far too distinctly defined and the concentration of the individuals in the swarm was too great. As he watched, it moved into a patch of dappled light and the motes that made up the swarm glittered as they reflected the sun. He saw it clearly then. It had definite form. It was a dense, upright, ovoid swarm composed of millions of individual creatures. It moved with a definite purpose, sliding over and around obstacles. Just looking at it, he felt a sense of crawling horror moving up his spine. The thing exuded pure terror. It was like he had knocked open a hornets’ nest and found the hornets rearing up as one sentient thing. A voice whispered inside his head, the words indistinct and just beyond hearing. He gazed at the creature, transfixed in horror, unable to move or take his eyes off it. Then it moved out of the sunlight and disappeared from his view.

  His heart was thudding in his chest. What the hell was that thing? Was it what he thought it was, one of them? He’d seen reports, unverified, on what they were supposed to look like. There was other movement below now: troopers in the uniform of the Marine Corps moving in loose formation, guns held slackly in their hands. There was something very wrong about the way that they moved. Their movements were slow, almost as if they were sleepwalking. As one marine without a helmet moved into the patch of light that illuminated the swarm, he saw the glint of machinery protruding from the man’s skull.

  So, they were hunting him then.

  Carefully, he moved back from the lip of the hole in the branches and sat back down in the cubby hole where he had spent the night, covering himself once more with the camo-cloak. As he took a mouthful of water from the bottle in his pack and grimaced at the taste of plastic and sterilisation tablets, he realised that he was shaking with fear.

  He huddled there for what seemed like hours, watching the beams of sunlight track across the cavernous space, too wary of moving in case he gave himself away, but all the while fighting the urge to run - run the hell away from here. The Dryads had hung from the branches and watched as the haunting figures departed. He was relying on them to alert him to any other intruders into their territory. AG vehicles sped across the jungle a few times but they appeared not to be looking for him.

  Eventually he concluded that it was safe. How had the enemy missed him, with all their technology and resources? Why were they looking for him at the wrong level within the forest? Maybe they were following another one of the survivors from a different escape pod and had simply passed this way? In any case, he figured that he had been extremely lucky not to be detected.

  Carefully and quietly he gathered his things and then moved off across the layer of branches, keeping the camo-cloak about him to shield his body heat from anyone watching from the air. He needed to find somewhere fairly remote from any enemy activity from which to use the emergency hypercom beacon he was still lugging around with him. Doubtless its use would attract their attention and he needed time to make a getaway before they managed to ascertain his location and investigate.

  The Dryads were a new factor, and a mixed blessing. Their calls would stand a chance of alerting him to anything he might need to be careful of; trouble was, he wondered if they might start calling out to announce his presence also, something he could do without. In any case, he made a mental note to be observant of the local wildlife and whether any of it reacted to his presence, or that of anyone, or anything else. His aged body was still stiff from the night spent sleeping in the trees. It protested with twinges in his joints as he hefted his gear and made his way onwards into the jungle.

  He plodded onwards for several hours, the uneven and unsteady surface combined with the heat of the day making the going difficult. As the sun climbed higher into the sky the humidity rose considerably as the moisture that had collected on the jungle’s vegetation during the night evaporated back into the atmosphere. His forehead ran with sweat and he was forced to stop ever more frequently both to recuperate and to collect more water from where it had pooled among the bromeliad like growths attached to the trunks and branches of the endless trees. He grimaced as he picked dirt and dead creatures from the water, before siphoning it into his water bottle and adding sterilising tablets to hopefully kill off anything unpleasant.

  Dropping his pack gratefully on the ground, he sat on a thick, knotted branch whilst he gulped more tepid water from his bottle. The water was vital. He was sweating so much from the heat and the exertion that he wouldn’t last long without it before dehydration set in. This old body of his really wasn’t cut out for this. Despite all the rejuve treatments over the years and his efforts to keep fit, he was still in possession of the body of someone aged around sixty-five, and in reality he was much older than that. He figured a twenty year old would struggle in this place, never mind someone like him.

  He had not made any more sightings of the enemy, and even the skies above him had fallen silent now. There were no-more signs of the frantic comings and goings of earlier, although when he caught glimpses of the sky he could still see the contrails in the upper atmosphere formed by debris from the battle burning up on re-entry.

  The Dryad group had followed him at a distance for a while and then, either because he had left their territory or because they had become bored of him, they left him alone. He had seen a few others flitting among the upper branches since, but if they registered any interest in him, they failed to show it and as the sun rose higher, they seemed more pre-occupied with sheltering from its searing blue-white gaze.

  Later into the afternoon, he started to see a change in the forest. The trees became less concentrated and uniform and the gaps in the suspended floor upon which he walked became large and more frequent, enabling him to see down to the ground more easily, but making the going much more difficult. He was forced to plot a zigzag course from one tree to another along branches where they intertwined with one another. From what he could tell and from the angles of the trees and ground below, the land was steadily rising. Presumably this accounted for the thinning of the trees.

  Now that he could see the trees in their entirety he could properly ascertain their shape. The upper branches were slender and more sparse and the leaves were dark and needle-shaped, able to photo-synthesise but also shielded by their pigment from the worst ravages of the searing sunlight as well as providing more surface area for the collection of dew during the night and allowing light down to the lower levels. As the levels of foliage progressed downwards the branches grew thicker and the leaves
grew larger and paler to gather as much light, and as much precipitation as possible. An alternating pattern of branches ensured that branches from the levels above did not entirely obscure the light to the levels below, the thinner patches of foliage allowing green tinted light through. The trees were almost completely effective at gathering all light and water that fell onto them, leaving the ground below them devoid of all life that directly required sunlight to survive. The ground beneath the densely packed trees was home instead to a food chain based upon forms of life analogous to terrestrial fungi that fed from the decaying matter that had fallen from the branches above. These were fed upon by grazing animals adapted to the low light conditions, which in turn were prey to savage, skulking things that lurked in the shadows beneath the trees.

  He saw a few herds of the grazers. They were stocky quadrupeds with wide mouths filled with small teeth, armoured, knobbly hides that varied from species to species and large bulging eyes that gave them low light vision in almost all directions. He also saw a few sinuous dark shapes lurking around the boles of the trees and stalking the grazers, watching for a chance to grab one for their next meal and paralyse it with venomous fangs so that it could be dragged away for the rest of the pack to feed upon.

  Animals of all kinds went about their business, seemingly undisturbed. It re-assured him that the enemy were nowhere to be seen.

  As the land rose still further, the trees began to reduce in stature until their heights began to be measured in tens rather than hundreds of metres and the distinct layers of foliage that had existed in the deep jungle began to break down. The going became much more difficult, but it seemed at last that he would be able to reach the ground and indeed would need to if he intended to progress in this direction. Gingerly he stepped from branch to branch, heading towards those that would take him lower, using the forest like a gigantic set of uneven stairs and treading carefully upon slippery rounded surfaces covered in decades of moss-like growths. A herd of the grazers watched him descend, their dull witted minds distracted for a moment by the curious bipedal creature making its ungainly progress down from the upper forest. Tails flicking with apathy, they returned to their munching.