by Gwynn White
Although the ground had stopped shaking and much of the noise of the battle that had raged above them had subsided, hinting that the upper orbit assault was over, Hayley didn’t want to leave the safety of her dorm—not until Vengeance came to rescue them. No enemy could withstand a Spire warship, especially one as strong and battle-tested as Ven.
He would come get her and the other girls. Ven would never abandon her.
The sound of heavy treads echoed down the corridor outside their dorm, and Hayley perked up. Sentinel drones approached the room where she cowered beneath her bed with her best friend, Amelia. Several of the other girls were similarly hidden but cast terrified glances in her direction. Perhaps those were Ven’s sentinels, and he’d come for them at last.
The door opened, and those heavy boots clanked into her room. A girl behind her whimpered. Hayley had just risen to her knees to peer over the bed when both the frame and the mattress flew across the room and clattered against the wall. A twelve-foot tall robot towered over her. Hayley whimpered, too.
She’d seen Vengeance’s sentinels up close many times before, but this wasn’t one of his. And for the first time, she was reminded that a sentinel was an elite warrior drone used in ground combat rather than another playmate.
This sentinel bore the identification stamp BAS-3157-255. She wasn’t familiar with this AI. She knew all the Spire warships that came to this planet, and none of them began with the letters BAS.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice quivering. She wanted Ven.
This new sentinel didn’t answer her. Instead, he scanned the room with a deep-search wave then must’ve deemed the area secure because he sheathed two of his forearm mounted pulse cannons. His black armor shifted out of the way to allow the weapons to slide smoothly back into their housings.
Another large cannon that had been perched on his shoulder deactivated and folded down the length of his back, smoothing out until it just looked like black armor. The sentinel took a step closer then bent at the waist, lowering his upper body so his facial optical sensors were level with her eyes.
While the sentinel’s massive body was vaguely humanoid, his head wasn’t. It was too wide at the top and narrowed down into a fine point. Three sets of optical sensors marched down the length of his face, giving the sentinel a fierce appearance, as if no detail could possibly escape his six eyes. Sprouting from the back of his head, thick rope-like appendages cascaded down past his bulky shoulders. Thin bands of red glowed along the cords, turning brighter toward the ends. With Ven’s sentinels, she’d always thought the appendages gave them the illusion of waist-length hair. But for some reason, with this unfamiliar sentinel studying her, his tall, dark, armored body and the cords dangling from his head were terrifying.
The appendages moved as if stirred by a breeze then one slid away from the rest and stretched toward her cheek. She could feel the slight heat it gave off, and she wanted to scream but sensed it was testing her. Hayley held her ground, proud that she didn’t flinch or pull away. After a seemingly endless moment, the tendril returned to the others.
Hayley blinked at the sentinel, and her gaze trailed down to his identification marker again. And then she realized BAS-3157-255 didn’t have the authority to visit Nualla, which meant he must have been the enemy Vengeance had been fighting.
And he was here, which meant Vengeance was likely dead. A new rush of tears flowed down her cheeks.
Hayley backed away from the sentinel, but he reached down and picked her up with one hand. She protested by screaming and kicking at the metal drone, but he held her away from his body and stomped out of the room as more sentinels entered to collect the other girls. A transport ship waited outside, the gangplank lowered in preparation for takeoff. Hayley looked toward the sky, clinging to the hope that these sentinels had only slipped past the warship she’d grown to love and he wasn’t dead, that he would defeat the invaders and save them all. She screamed Ven’s name one last time as the sentinel carried her aboard the waiting transport.
But Ven never came.
4
Warhawk was dead. The other Nuallan warship, Wolverine, was mortally wounded but living up to his namesake and fighting until the last. Vengeance’s fusion cannon had just targeted Danforth when the other ship powered his damaged engines up to full.
At first, Vengeance thought Danforth was fleeing the battle but quickly discovered he was wrong; the enemy vessel was targeting the planet. Vengeance fired his weapons to try to destroy or disable the other ship, but gravity had Danforth in its grip now, and the warship’s speed increased.
Vengeance gave chase, continuing to fire, but the dying Danforth maintained enough control to target where he would crash.
Deep in Vengeance’s primary core, he howled in horror and rage. But it didn’t change the outcome. Danforth crashed into the planet, taking out the city, spaceport, school, Vengeance’s drone body, and a huge chunk of the planet’s surface.
Under the impact, trees vaporized, water turned to steam, and bedrock liquefied.
While Vengeance despaired the loss of everyone still on the planet, he mourned one lost life more than all the others. Hayley, the little girl with inquisitive blue eyes and a mischievous smile, was dead.
A sensation he registered as pain consumed him as he mourned the loss of the child he’d loved, the child who had reminded him he was still alive and should live. And that pain was only matched by an increasing desire for one thing: revenge.
Almost all the remaining rogue warships had fled, but Relentless was too damaged to jump into transit. Vengeance was preparing to finish him off when the dying Wolverine, his engines critical, limped up alongside Relentless. Wolverine had already ordered his crew to abandon ship, and Vengeance’s three remaining transports had collected them and brought them aboard. Now, all he could do was watch and wait. It didn’t take long.
Explosions started in the engine compartments then spread outward to other critical systems. As Wolverine died, his death throes took out his murderer.
Vengeance turned his attention back to the planet and the destruction that had been wreaked by one rogue warship. He’d seen many horrors in his long existence, but never one so mindless. So much waste. So much innocence destroyed for no purpose.
He wanted to return to the planet to survey the damage more closely, and more importantly, to search for Hayley, but Renee approached one of his sentinels and linked with him.
“Nualla is lost. I’m sorry. No one could have survived that,” Renee whispered into his mind as tears ran down her cheeks. “You must keep your crew safe now. The other warships could return at any time to finish what they started.”
Vengeance relented because, as usual, Renee was right. Nothing could’ve survived the devastation below them. And his crew remained in danger as long as they stayed here. He’d utterly failed Nualla. Worse, he’d failed one young child who’d been robbed of the future she’d been meant to have as his link.
Two thoughts kept repeating through his primary core: He’d never get to show Hayley a bradan up close, and he’d never teach her how to swim.
A darkly seductive thought sparked through him. He should end his life here with the child who would’ve grown up to be his link. He could self-terminate. He was an old relic who belonged in the past.
After all, even Hayley had recognized just how old he was. The Spire hardly needed warships like him now.
“Vengeance? We need you,” Renee offered. Her voice in his mind was soft, affectionate.
Vengeance’s sentinels dropped their arms by their sides as he struggled to grapple with a life beyond this moment. What else was there except this moment, this vortex of pain and emptiness and the certainty that life would always be so much darker now? “I don’t know how to go on, though. This grief. Renee, my primary core… I must be critically damaged in some way.”
“I know. I’m so sorry, Ven.”
He scanned the surface of Nualla one last time. His entire crew, over two
thousand of them, depended on him for their survival. He couldn’t abandon them no matter how desperately he wanted this pain to end. He plotted a course away from the planet, intent on seeing his crew to safety, but after the loss of his future link—the little girl who’d already stolen the heart he often wished he had—he wasn’t at all sure how he would survive.
A warship picked up Hayley’s transport moments before a different warship crashed into the surface of the planet. Hayley and the other girls were locked into a room, which was heavily guarded by those terrifyingly huge and menacing sentinels. The ship vibrated as its engines ratcheted up to full power, and they left the Nuallan solar system far behind.
She couldn’t even imagine where they might be going or why. She’d been told her entire life that she was special, a powerful telepath bred specifically to form the highest level of telepathic link with an AI and prevent them from suffering moments of disconnect from the hive. But those AIs, like Vengeance, were their friends. Because of them, people had been able to live comfortably in space and on previously uninhabited planets. Why would any AIs need to steal untrained telepaths?
Sentinels brought the girls regular meals and, occasionally, a human-form drone would appear to ask them if they needed anything else. He would attempt to convince them they shouldn’t be frightened, but it was a useless thing to say. They’d been kidnapped and were hostages to rogue AIs. And nobody seemed to be coming for them.
Hayley couldn’t tell how long they traveled before the ship landed on a different planet. It had seemed like years, but she doubted it had been that long. The sentinels returned for them and led them off the ship, and for the first time since being taken from her home, she was hopeful. Maybe this planet wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it had lakes with bradan in it, and forests where she could dig through the soft peat and hand Ven whatever little animals she found living there.
And then she remembered Ven wouldn’t be here.
Hayley blinked back tears as she stepped onto the gangplank and sucked in a quick breath. The gray sky above them, the barren red land, the single dark blue building before them: No, this planet was far worse than she’d imagined. She’d stopped walking so one of the sentinels nudged her, and she stumbled down the gangplank, finding Amelia’s hand to hold.
She glanced up at a humanoid drone. When she cautiously expanded her telepathic gift, she registered the presence of various cybernetic technologies buried below the purely biological parts. All drones shared the same traits. Hayley studied him a moment more then asked him, “What’s your name?”
“Basilisk,” he answered. “But you may call me Bas.”
“Nobody followed us,” Hayley murmured, still reeling from the loss of Vengeance and desperately wanting to cling to any possibility that Ven had survived. But if he hadn’t followed or sent anyone after them, what chance could there be any of the Nuallan AIs or Ven had made it through that battle?
“No,” Bas answered. “No one followed us because no one knew we landed on Nualla or took you and your friends. We cloaked our presence there. No one will find us.”
Hayley gasped, and Bas gave her a strange look. But if he’d masked his presence on Nualla, maybe Ven didn’t know she’d been kidnapped. Maybe he was alive after all.
“Why are we here?” she asked instead, hoping her captor wouldn’t press her about her startled reaction. She would never betray how much she loved Vengeance in case Bas went after him, too.
Bas’s lips twitched as he stared at the building the girls were being brought to. “Because you’re enhanced telepaths. Special telepaths. And we need you.”
“For what?”
“You ask a lot of questions, Hayley.”
“Maybe because you kidnapped us and brought us here,” she snapped.
Bas stopped by the door and grinned at her. “Well, Hayley. You’ll find out soon enough why.”
He pulled the door open, and after blinking for a few moments as her eyes adjusted, the interior of the building didn’t seem nearly as foreboding as the exterior. A large room on her right appeared to be a cafeteria, and the open doors on her left revealed small bedrooms with neatly made beds and a single dresser.
Hayley’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “I don’t understand. It’s another dormitory.”
Bas nodded and tilted his head toward her. “And you, little girl, have a particularly strong gift. I think I’ll choose you to be my new link.”
“What?” Hayley whispered, but the AI’s mind was already there, pushing her own thoughts and fears and desires away to make room for the vastness of his own intellect and abilities. Hayley screamed and covered her ears as if she could somehow block him from invading her mind, but he pushed on, inundating her mind with a seemingly endless stream of information until, finally, Hayley fell to the ground and passed out.
5
Twenty-one years later
A piercing wail broke through Liv’s tumultuous sleep and burrowed deep into her brain. Its sharp tones ricocheted off the back of her skull and flashed down every nerve ending, forcing her upright before she’d gained full consciousness—let alone basic motor controls. Her forehead smacked into her bunk’s ceiling with a hard thump.
“Damn it,” she muttered, groping for the release panel.
A second alarm throbbed against her eardrums then receded before the room was plunged into silence. Liv slammed her palm against the control trigger, and her narrow sleeping platform slid out of its alcove with a soft whir. The hangover of interrupted sleep finally faded, and she rolled out of the bed before it retreated into the wall. While she’d never heard the Hail Mary alarms in her six months aboard the warship Vengeance, she knew with a terrible certainty that these were the dreaded warning alarms that sounded when an AI was in distress.
“Vengeance, report,” she demanded. “This is Journeyman Engineer Liv Hawthorne. State the nature of the emergency.”
Only another blast from the alarm answered her.
“Vengeance? Vengeance, report!” she tried again.
Fear’s cold breath made its way down her back in the form of a drawn-out shiver. Her heart pounding and body shaking with the effects of adrenalin, she jammed her feet into her boots and waved the door open. Cool air brushed her bare legs, reminding her that she hadn’t stopped to pull on her uniform, but if Vengeance was in trouble, it didn’t matter who saw her in the tank top and sleep shorts she wore. Her lack of uniform and pale legs were the least of her worries.
If Vengeance was in distress, her clothes would be the least of anyone’s worries.
Outside in the corridor, other crew members ran toward their posts, many of whom also bore the signs of having their sleep disrupted: disheveled hair, lack of uniform, bare feet. By their expressions, they knew no more than she did about the reason for the alarm or why Vengeance wasn’t responding. As she darted around other crew members on her way to the nearest manual interface, she debated a possible suicidal maneuver.
Vengeance might be non-responsive at the moment, but she had a faster, more direct way to assess his condition.
But connecting with a Warship of the Spire would immediately betray her gift… and her past.
The thought had barely formed when her telepathic gift unfolded, reaching out to Vengeance. Liv bit her lip and concentrated on reeling it back in, burying it deeply once more.
Only something as serious as a complete disconnect could render Vengeance unable to communicate with his crew. A heavy lump settled in her stomach, but she reminded herself that Vengeance would still be fine even if that were the case. His primary link, Renee, and the secondary telepaths would protect Vengeance from the ravages of sensory deprivation—effectively keeping him sane if the worst had occurred and it was a complete disconnect which had severed him from his feeds and the rest of the Spire hive-mind.
Sweat beaded at her temples, and her head throbbed. Gray specks floated in her vision for a few heartbeats before her sight cleared. After a few more deep breaths calmed her, th
e tight coil her stomach had become finally unwound.
Logic assured her that the few seconds her telepathy had been active hadn’t been enough to give her away. No, she was still safe. She hadn’t touched either Vengeance or his telepaths. Her secret remained undiscovered.
And yet, she was worried, deeply worried, about the welfare of the AI and had instinctively reached for him, not out of duty, but because of a genuine concern for her AI.
Damn fool. You almost allowed emotion to overwhelm you, she mentally scolded herself. And logic is the only thing keeping your ass in one piece and free.
Emotions. Stupid disastrous things. She didn’t make friends or trust easily given her history, and yet by some strange quirk of fate, she’d found herself serving aboard the warship Vengeance, one of the most feared of all AIs. And the AI she should’ve been avoiding the most.
She’d convinced herself she could remain aloof and distant, but it was impossible not to care about his fate. Worse, he seemed to have taken a genuine interest in her career, even though she was certain he knew nothing of her past.
“Talk about fraternizing with the enemy,” she mumbled as she darted around the next corner.
In her rush, she hadn’t heard another crew member approaching down the opposite hallway and clipped him in the shoulder. He was smaller and slammed into the wall before bouncing off and landing on the floor in a heap.
“Sorry,” Liv hastily breathed then released a sigh of relief. At least it was only an ensign she’d knocked on his ass. Better an ensign than an officer.
“Watch it.” The ensign picked himself up and glowered at her before resuming his own sprint down the hallway.
Nobody had forgotten Vengeance’s Hail Mary sirens.
Liv took a deep breath then picked up her pace again, cutting a hard left at the next fork while cursing the original designers for not having more manual control interfaces in the engineering compartment of the ship.