by Worth, Dan
Gunderson scrambled up the dirt slope towards the array and screamed into the comm. link to the Alcibiades to open fire on the co-ordinates he had given them. The enslaved were washing over the first line of defences as Major Durham’s forces held the second line and kept up a barrage of increasingly desperate firing into the packs of wild figures. The waves of attackers were swarming up the slopes towards their assailants, charging into the men even as they unloaded their weapons at point blank range into the enslaved. The enslaved tore into their opponents with their augmented limbs, shattering bodies even inside their armour and breaking men like fragile dolls as the wave rolled over them. Switching to the channel used by his men, Gunderson kept running as he bellowed his desperate orders.
‘Incoming tactical fire: danger close! All units take cover! Repeat: incoming fire from orbit!’
Gunderson kept running toward the array, the domed buildings ghostly in the night. There was a brilliant flash somewhere behind him, a sound that was so loud that his ears could barely comprehend it, and what felt like a giant hand picked him up bodily and flung him up the slope. His suit systems saved him, protecting his body and shielding his ears and eyes from the worst of the explosion and overpressure.
He landed heavily on his front, scrambled to his feet and looked wildly about him, then down the slope where a gigantic glowing crater had opened up at its base and where a huge fountain of dirt, trees and body parts was still raining back to earth. The enslaved had halted. They stood as if dumbstruck. There was a moment of silence as his men clambered back to their feet and then Gunderson heard the terrible screams and sobs from the mob of enslaved, sounds that were cut off by the hammering of gunfire.
It was as if the two Shaper ships had been wounded. To Chen it seemed as if they both flinched simultaneously from actual physical pain when the missiles struck San Domingo. They halted in their attack for a moment, ceasing fire and flying away from the Commonwealth vessels, manoeuvring sluggishly and shuddering as if trying to shake something off. She didn’t need to order her captains to react. The crews aboard the vessels under her command knew to seize the initiative. A dozen spatial distortion cannons simultaneously vomited forth twisting tunnels of space-time that tore into the wounded vessels, tearing great chunks from their terribly beautiful hulls. One fell to a coup de grace from the Leonides as the great carrier swung around and struck it amidships with a sawing motion from its main gun that clove the enemy vessel in twain. The other was hammered by three destroyers and then had its bows smashed by the Nelson, an action that left it dead and drifting.
Chen’s hand was clenched into a victorious fist as she relished the death of the enemy vessels. She watched them die, watched them burn, watched them plummet towards annihilation.
The plains were awash with bodies. Shale’s men cut down the enslaved in their thousands. It was a massacre. As connections were re-established across the enemy force, the Shaper consciousness re-asserted itself slowly, but it was too late. There was no overall co-ordination and as ad-hoc connections were made, they were cut again and again as individuals died under the barrage from the ground and space borne forces. Many of the enslaved did not resist. Some even walked calmly towards the Army positions as if inviting the troopers to kill them and end their torment. It was a grim duty, one the troops did not relish, though they had little choice but to carry it out lest the Shapers resume their attack. The other two columns eventually joined up with Shale’s own adding their weight of fire to the task and speeding up the destruction of the enemy.
Shale watched the Shaper destroyer fall from orbit. It broke up in the upper atmosphere, scattering into burning fragments. The largest remaining chunk of the vessel, around a kilometre in length, struck the sea somewhere in the northern hemisphere and fell into deep water, the impact creating a tsunami that inundated coastlines that were mercifully uninhabited.
They had achieved victory, but at a terrible cost. It was difficult to say how many of his own men had died, and the true death toll amongst the civilian population of Valparaiso would perhaps never be known. Perhaps they might find some survivors within the city, barricaded within cellars or other hiding places, but Shale didn’t hold out much hope. The Shapers were a fearsome opponent, using their slaves without pity or remorse. They had expended troops as mere cannon fodder in human wave attacks, attempting to bury his forces under a mountain of corpses. In the rest of the Commonwealth, there were plenty more bodies to feed the Shaper war machine with raw materials.
Major Durham had disappeared. Gunderson ordered a search for him and other men listed as missing, but there was no sign of his body amidst the piles of dead and injured. The marines had cut down the remaining enslaved where they stood, moving back down the slope to retake the forward positions that they had earlier abandoned, then raked the slopes with fire until nothing moved. The screams of the wounded cut the air as medics rushed to attend to them. Some could not be saved. Even in these days of advanced medicine, they were beyond hope and the corpsmen did their best to make them comfortable.
Gunderson approached the array building and saw a figure emerge. It was Specialist Rollins.
‘Sir, is it safe? Did we win?’ said the man, nervously.
‘We’re still alive at least,’ replied Gunderson wryly. ‘So yeah, you could call it a victory. What can I do for you, Specialist?’
‘The array. We’ve got it working at last. Sir, I think you should see this.’
The Nahabe had arrived at last, profusely apologetic that they had not been able to contribute to the battle, although Chen thought that they sounded more disappointed that they missed the fighting. Their ships took station above the Commonwealth fleet and assisted in the hunt for survivors as well as guarding against unexpected attacks. Chen bade the Lord Protector of the Order of Void Hunters come aboard the Churchill.
She and McManus rode the lift down to the hangar deck together. Chen stood ramrod straight, her hands clasped behind her back, her expression serious and apparently lost in thought. After a moment, McManus broke the silence.
‘You weren’t to know,’ he said in what he hoped was a consoling tone. ‘About the Shaper ambush: you weren’t to know.’
‘It was still stupid of me,’ said Chen. ‘I should have prepared for...’
‘Prepared for what?’
‘They know,’ said Chen, meeting his gaze. ‘The Shapers know how we can track them and they used it against us.’
‘We don’t know that for sure.’
‘Maybe from when that thing came aboard... maybe before that...’
‘Or maybe those new sensors just don’t work as well as we thought,’ McManus suggested.
‘Perhaps. In any case, it cost the crew of the Pericles their lives, not mention who knows how many troops on the ground...’
The lift reached the hangar deck and they stepped out into the busy bay filled with recovered craft being serviced by the deck crews. An angular, dark green shuttle craft sat among the fighters and bombers. They walked towards it.
‘I’ve ordered Singh to go over the sensor logs for anything that might give us a clue as to what happened,’ said McManus. ‘We need to know how the enemy can still evade us.’
‘Good.’
‘Admiral, don’t be too hard on yourself. Considering what we were up against, we did well today. Cartwright reported far heavier losses in the Chittagong system and he had the advantage from the start.’
‘Perhaps,’ Chen replied. ‘But it doesn’t get any easier sending men and women to their deaths.’
‘Yes,’ said McManus. ‘I know.’
The shuttle’s boarding ramp swung open, and the Lord Protector of the Order of Void Hunters emerged, clad in his armoured finery.
In a briefing room off the main hangar deck they showed the alien warrior what the sensor array, now fully modified and working on the planet below, had now detected. In the Achernar system, in orbit around the moon of Orinoco, was the massive Shaper vessel that the Nahabe had
encountered in deep space, a truly gigantic vessel around five hundred kilometres in length that resembled some sort of terrible sea monster. But there was more: elsewhere in the Achernar system, far above the ecliptic, a fleet of Shaper vessels was gathering, concealed in hyperspace. So far the array had detected just over fifty vessels but more could be seen en route. The Shapers appeared to be gathering for another assault.
‘I will inform my government,’ said the Lord Protector, suit sensors swivelling and focusing. ‘We should begin formulating plans for a pre-emptive strike. I expect that this has been passed up to your superiors.’
‘It has,’ said Chen.
‘And?’
‘No response as yet. They’re still considering their options. Cartwright has secured the Chittagong system and its anti-matter production facilities intact. He took heavy losses, but the system is ours.’
‘Aye, we’ll be needing those AM warheads soon enough,’ said McManus. ‘How else do you think we can kill that thing?’ he added, jabbing a finger towards the image of the vast ship above Orinoco.
‘Indeed,’ said the Lord Protector. ‘We will need every weapon at our disposal to defeat that ship. Tell me: have you managed to establish why some of your ships suffered catastrophic system failures during the battle and how the Shapers managed to evade our sensors?’
‘As to the former, our Chief Engineer believes there to be design differences between some of the power systems on the destroyers. Those with the older relays were the ones that suffered the outages when they fired their new cannons. He’s compiling a full technical report as we speak, but preliminary details have been forwarded to Command,’ said Chen.
‘Something of an oversight,’ commented the Lord Protector.
‘And nearly a fatal one,’ Chen replied. ‘As to your second question: no, we do not know how the Shapers managed to conceal both their starships and their enslaved troops from us. Singh has a theory that they temporarily turned off or somehow disguised their communications links from us, but one thing is for certain: they’re learning about how we can hunt them and managed to use it against us. Whether they achieved this by deduction or by hacking into this vessel’s systems we can’t tell, but we may have lost what slim tactical advantages we had.’
Chapter 45
There was nothing but ice and snow and bare, black rocks as far as the eye could see. It was a sea of ice, tens of metres thick beneath a leaden sky and swirling blizzards. Amidst the whirling flakes, strange shapes could be seen hovering low over a range of jagged mountains that climbed erratically into the sky near the planet’s southern pole. The silvered hulls of these alien vehicles glinted dully in the half light of the winter storm as they moved. Closer in, humanoid figures and more craft parked on the ice could be seen. The former were swaddled in thick, protective clothing and the latter were strangely resistant to the snow and ice that swirled about them, yet failed to settle on their hulls.
The Arkari were digging.
Katherine squinted through the blizzard. She was clad head to foot in an insulated suit of many finely woven layers. Her eyes were obscured by a pair of tinted goggles and her head encased in the suit’s thick hood, almost completely obscuring her features. Rekkid stood off to her right, his slender form similarly clothed in the Arkari made garments. Steelscale, meanwhile, remained cowering from the cold inside one of the grounded shuttles. The Arkari had tried to dissuade him from coming down to the surface, but he had insisted and eventually they had relented. The ship had manufactured suitable clothing for him, but the cold had still proved too much for a being used to far warmer climes and eventually he had given into the inevitable and sought the shelter of one of the parked craft. Like the others, he had been unable to resist the opportunity to step onto the surface of the Progenitor home-world.
Katherine and Rekkid stood and watched the machines of the Arkari as they tunnelled down into the ice, through packed layers that represented centuries of snow-fall, the beams from the hovering ships turning the tonnes of frozen water into clouds of rolling steam as they carefully peeled away the layers until a great bowl shaped depression had been sliced from the mountainside.
‘Almost there,’ said the perfectly modulated voice of Aaokon in their ears. ‘Not long now. Eonara’s machines just need to cut a little deeper...’
‘I’m still not detecting a structure,’ said a second voice, that of the ship, emanating from one of its drones that sat coiled on multiple centipede-like legs in the snow, sensors twitching on its segmented head.
‘I assure you: it is there,’ said Aaokon. ‘It has remained hidden ever since the Progenitors sealed it before their great exodus. I am sure of the location. Keep digging.’
Katherine and Rekkid stood in silence and watched clouds boiling into the sky.
The image through viewers was pin-sharp. From her vantage point on the plateau, once the top level of a vast arcology now decayed, half collapsed and overgrown, she peered down into the centre of the sleepy village that nestled in the lush green valley below. Waterfalls poured in streams of maiden-hair down the sides of the vast ruins that had once housed thousands and now formed a semi-regular range of mountains riddled with caves and buried secrets. The streams gathered to form a gentle river that wove its way through the hamlet. Katherine looked down upon a cluster of a few dozen buildings fashioned from locally quarried blocks that the locals took for stone, but which was actually the composite material that ruins all around had been built from. All but the richer dwellings and few public buildings sported sagging roofs of thatch or wood. The former had roofs made from glazed tiles of various colours. Wisps of smoke drifted from chimneys into the morning air.
The sky above was clear, with only wisps of cloud at high altitude. Above the clouds, above the blue of the sky itself, were faint patterns of light and shade, reflective and gleaming and dark and glowering. Swirls of what sometimes looked like other clouds, or shining patches of water were occasionally visible. The local people often looked up at those patterns beyond the sky and wondered what they signified, especially at night when they were clear and bright above them. Was that land that they saw beyond the sky? Were there people up there just like them? Was that –whispered some – where the gods lived, watching over them like doting parents over their children?
Katherine watched those self same local people now as they emerged from their dwellings. The men carried implements as they walked towards the fields, the women scolded their children and herded them towards the temple at the centre of the village and its small schoolhouse. Here were the remnants of a race that once bestrode the galaxy, tamed the stars and the planets and toyed with the very stuff of life itself and now they eked out a meagre, medieval existence amidst the ruins of their ancestors, ignorant of their origins, on the world that had given birth to them.
She was looking at the faces of the Progenitors.
There was the shadow of something visible beneath the ice now. The Arkari had cut almost down to the rock beneath, and against the uneven shapes of the mountainside, there was something else, a more regular shape of some dark material that jutted outwards. It was blacker that the rock that surrounded it, and as the ice was stripped away, it became clear that it formed some sort of bunker like structure that was half buried in the ground.
‘See?’ said Aaokon. ‘I knew that it was here. Not long now.’
‘And yet it is invisible to my sensors,’ said the ship. ‘Interesting.’
‘Yes. Some things should remain hidden. The research facility that you can see emerging before us is manufactured from a similar material to that which the Shapers use to construct their ships, though somewhat more refined. It exists in multiple dimensions and is invisible to conventional sensors. It was an experimental technology at the time, one developed by the Progenitors and copied by the Shapers. The base has been sealed ever since the great exodus, however I alone possess the means to open it.’
‘Is that why the base was placed here, to keep it from pryi
ng eyes?’ said Katherine.
‘It was hardly out of reach, but most people had no wish to come to the polar regions because of the intense cold. The main reason was that it was hoped that in the event of a mishap, the cold environment would prevent any rogue biological materials from spreading into the biosphere. However, the base was concealed to prevent the Shapers from finding it. Although the research that led to their creation took place in a number of locations across the galaxy, it was collected here and wiped from all other locations, including the minds of the AIs involved such as myself and Eonara.’
‘You mentioned biological materials?’
‘Yes. This place was once known as the Life Forge, a complex of subterranean laboratories dedicated to the exploration of artificial entities of one form or another. When the war started to go bad for us, the Progenitors began to look to maintaining their legacy somehow. Our research here had led directly to the program to seed worlds with nanomachines and this was deemed to be a possible way in which the species might endure. We conducted numerous experiments in which they were used to subtly alter living cells, but we had no wish to repeat the accident that had released the virus into the wider population to decimate the Progenitor people. Of course when the program was begun, we did not know that the release of the virus was intentional. That revelation only came later.’
‘Some of us had suspected, as soon as it happened’ said Eonara, her voice also emanating from the ship’s drone. ‘We warned that the Shapers were plotting against us. No-one listened to us.’
‘No, and we paid for our hubris,’ Aaokon replied sadly.
‘Research into the development of the Shaper race was initially moved here to isolate them in the event of any ‘mishaps’ also. Many had raised ethical concerns about the creation of an artificial race. Not only did people question whether we had the right to do such a thing, but there were fears about what such a race might become. In the end, our over confidence and greed won out. The universe was ours for the taking, it was argued, and we needed the necessary tools to achieve that. There would be no end to the Progenitor Empire as it spread outwards from this galaxy to others. We were wrong.’