by Shane Black
“They want what is in our minds. The more primal and more powerful our emotions, the stronger it makes them. They see us as a source of primitive vitality. It is something they’ve lost over the millennia, but they never lost their craving for it.”
“If they’re that advanced, they can find their cavemen elsewhere,” Moo replied. “Why did you bring me here?”
“To see and experience what Admiral Hughes has become and to consider your own destiny. You will witness the sheer power at his command and you will join us in our great mission to re-invigorate a thousand ancient civilizations with humanity’s one unique spark, colonel. The resulting conquest will be so far beyond anything we’ve dared dream of I suspect none will command the words to describe it.”
“There’s nothing here for you, Atwell. You’ve gone mad and sacrificed Admiral Hughes to whatever is taking place in there.” Moody glanced at the distant structure and again was almost staggered by the sheer volume of visual information he was asking his mind to process. He closed his eyes and tried to regain his composure.
“End this.”
“Turn my back on the greatest discovery in human history? And you’re the one accusing me of madness? Even if we leave aside the fact we could be witnessing what no other human being ever will, what of the technologies these creatures have gathered? They have been traveling space in their dimension for millions of years! They only seek to rule us like they rule every other species they conquer. The Raleo obelisk is only a tiny demonstration of how they can change our entire reality!”
“Which means only one thing, Atwell. We have about as much business here as roaches have asking me about fuel cell maintenance. We don’t belong here! Now send me back to my ship, or I’ll make it clear to the Admiral and anyone else in this circus you aren’t to be trusted! You turned your back on your own species! The more advanced these Ithis are, the more likely it is they’ll recognize your treachery for what it is!”
“Oh, they already understand it, colonel. They just don’t care. You can bark at them if you wish. If they don’t kill you outright they’ll simply empty your mind and consume what is left of you for heat. It’s not a pleasant process. If you like I will introduce you to the humans its been performed on. Have you ever seen a man or woman with literally no mind?”
“Then what are you waiting for, colonel?” Moo growled, his muscles trembling with a barely-restrained rage.
“Once the two human fleets have destroyed each other, the Core will be unprotected, and our rulers can enter our existence to take what is theirs. Hughes is simply giving the Ithis the savage impulse to invade and conquer. And when the admiral’s mind is gone, yours will take its place.”
Atwell turned to leave. “The overmind will turn man’s flawed nature into his extinction, and we’re going to start with Captain Jason Hunter.”
Fifty-Eight
Not far away from where Moo was abducted, Lieutenant Tixia was holed up in an alcove with one of the intruders’ communications devices. In her lap was a fully armed blaster. She was hard at work trying to figure out how the device functioned so she could listen in on the enemy’s communications, but the mechanism and circuitry were totally unfamiliar to her. The strangely shaped device seemed to be designed to wear on the side of the head near the ear and also seemed to have some oddly biological components of some kind. In fact, it had changed shape at least once since she retrieved it from the intruder she had shot. She was certain it had something to do with their ability to teleport as well, but that was a secondary concern. Right now, she just wanted to listen in.
A row of yellow lights lit up one side of the device, which didn’t tell the young signals officer much. She was just about to give up when a chorus of dissonant sounds came from it. They sounded like screams of pain and only lasted a few moments. Then it was silent again. She turned the device over and continued trying to get it to work.
All at once, the ship’s power shut off completely. The entire deck was plunged into darkness. Even her blaster pistol indicators went dark. Sparks and flashes from the damaged electrical junctions continued for a few moments and then even they were gone.
As she experienced the loss of artificial gravity and felt herself float up off the floor, Zony heard something. It was coming from the device she had commandeered. It sounded like the radio transmission of a creature of some kind breathing. It grew louder as she listened. Finally there was a voice. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up.
“You were all warned, lieutenant.”
Fifty-Nine
Echo’s spinning lightbars illuminated the dim service corridor with flashes of red. She had found her way to deck three and was using the starboard electrical service corridor to bypass most of the damage below. Her little headlights gave her enough visibility to avoid the largest pieces of debris, but she still kept her speed low as she picked her way towards the forward section of the ship.
Occasional explosions and rumbling could be heard in the distance. The ship was ostensibly at general quarters, but intraship communications were out and all of the fleet’s voice channels were being jammed. Artificial gravity was failing intermittently, but the activated electromagnetic plates built into her chassis kept her firmly on the floor. They would continue to do so as long as she stayed on metal surfaces. The damage she had suffered in the Station Nineteen battle was problematic, but not serious enough to affect her combat worthiness. She was still 88% functional.
Echo had the ability to pierce the local interference well enough to establish contact with Fury’s crew, but the advanced programming Jayce had installed for her higher functions argued otherwise. Giving away her position could be catastrophic. Even though she was a medical unit, she still understood battle protocols and she knew well the possible price of not maintaining radio silence.
What Echo’s core programming insisted on was far more important: Go to Acey. From the time she was nothing but a circuit board and a battery on a wheeled chassis, Echo had learned that if anything went wrong, she was to go back to wherever Acey was. That was her top priority no matter what. Years ago, it meant when she got lost in a maze, or got caught in a rainstorm or got one of her wheels damaged, she should return to her builder’s lab for repairs. Now, “go to Acey” meant she needed to locate her commander, because the fleet needed her, and if Acey was hurt, Echo might be the difference between the fleet having a commander and not having one.
The little ambulance was always the one that came home. Commander Hunter had spent hours and sometimes days tracking down her other units. Given their relative weight, flight and amphibious capabilities, that sometimes put them places where it wasn’t as easy to retrieve them as a young cybernetics specialist would have liked. Rebel always seemed to end up disabled in a hole or canyon somewhere. Lunar often ended up without power hundreds of feet above the deck. Then there was the weekend Butterfly got confused during a hide and seek game and went dark. It took four bots and one commander the better part of two days to find and catch her.
But every time one of them got hung up somewhere, or got confused or lost, Echo was always the one to come home. Sometimes it took minutes. Other times it might take days, but she would always find a way, and she would always lead Acey back to the other minibots.
Echo had made several attempts to locate the rest of her minibot team, but so far had been unsuccessful. Having Butterfly around would certainly make it easier for a wheeled vehicle to get past the broken machinery, conduits and junk in the access corridor. Even having Rebel here would help, as he would just push it all out of the way for her.
But so far, the only thing Echo had established for certain was that whatever jammed the fleet communications was also preventing the minibots from reaching each other, and that meant Echo was on her own. She certainly wasn’t helpless, however.
The little ambulance was transmitting a multi-frequency ultra-wideband ECM screen that made her all but impossible to locate with any known tracking tech
nology. She was fleet frequency silent but monitoring nearly twenty thousand channels for any sign of a friendly unit. She also had both of her high-energy subsonic emitters fully charged. A burst from either one could knock a full grown human being unconscious at ranges of up to fifteen yards. Sustained signals from either one could incapacitate an entire room full of people. Her old-style fire truck banger siren was also more than capable of scaring the hell out of her opponents, human or animal, if necessary.
But all of that aside, Echo had a mission.
Go to Acey.
Sixty
The only reason Zony Tixia wasn’t scared out of her mind was the light still emanating from the alien transmitter she had found. When all the other power aboard Argent went dark, the only source of light in the crew quarters corridor was the little row of yellow indicators along the edge of the odd mechanism. Even her blaster pistol had lost its charge, but for whatever reason the transmitter wasn’t affected.
It was then she noticed something unusual. After the strange voice told her “you were warned, lieutenant,” several new indicator lights appeared at what the signals officer now believed was the base of the device. There were a total of eight lights. Four of them were lit up with colors ranging from a light green to a dark orange. Then they shifted, moving the colors around to other lights. Zony watched the indicators shift for a minute or so, looking for any familiar sign the device might have enough of a connection to human technology for her to make some use of its capabilities.
Then it hit her. It wasn’t mechanically activated. It was bio-electric, and the circuitry was activated by sound. It was the only thing that made sense. She turned the device over and over. There was something odd about the small panel lights too. The patterns looked familiar for some reason. By now Zony was seven feet off the floor and wedged into the relatively small alcove above the spot she had chosen for a hiding place. Without light or power, there was no chance she would be able to find her way to safety. The fact the emergency autosystems hadn’t engaged yet was alarming enough without dwelling on the no-power problem.
She decided to test her theory. After twisting herself around to make sure the alien device didn’t float away, she let go of it and let it drift. The yellow lights and indicators went out. She was suspended in total blackness.
“Here goes nothing,” she said quietly.
She put her hands back on the object and the yellow lights brightened back to their original intensity. The tiny indicators at the base of the object began to blink again, repeating the same pattern from when they first appeared.
“Bio electric,” she exhaled. “Hmmm.”
She continued turning the device over, looking for more indicators. Finding none, she returned her attention to what she could see. By now she had two theories. One was the yellow indicators were there to signal a complete charge. They were on the head side of the device in order to make use of the wearer’s peripheral vision without being unduly distracting. If, for whatever reason, the device’s power level dropped, the light would either dim or go out, which would be visible to the wearer without obstructing their view.
The second theory was a little more fuzzy, but the longer she studied the visible patterns in the smaller indicator lights, the stronger it got.
“Alpha, Beta, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot..” Zony watched the indicators change their patterns as she spoke. Eventually different colors appeared and the entire sequence had been altered.
“Zulu, Yankee, X-ray, Whiskey, Victor, Uniform..” Again she watched, and saw almost exactly what she expected to see. The indicator lights were changing their patterns based on her voice print. They were visual indications of the sound patterns they had recorded. She surmised that’s why they lit up when the enemy broadcast was received.
But there was one thing out of place. Every recorded pattern had an identical pattern attached to it. Zony concluded after a short time those were identifying flags there to signify a different voice. Using that as her theory, she began walking the device through all of its possible command sequences, speaking as quietly as she could and starting with the most basic elements. After discovering how the device stored numbers and phonetics, she watched for unusual responses. Then she hit the jackpot.
After replaying the enemy broadcast, she recognized the device had two response flags to the sound it had heard. One was a longer series of values which was very similar to the one the device used for her own identifier. The other flag was shorter and didn’t match anything else she had seen so far. She reversed its values and began feeding discrete values into the device until she was able to duplicate the pattern. Once she did, the yellow lights all switched to green and the indicators did as well.
“Command mode?” she whispered to herself. She tried a number of plausible-sounding commands. “Status? Location? Report? List?”
“List” caused all but one of the indicators to go out, and the one that remained turned yellow.
“Commands,” Zony said. In her own voice, she heard the device begin to list commands. “Position. Energy. Contacts. Coordinates. Stored.”
“Hmmm. Position and coordinates? Why both?” she said quietly. The device answered in Zony’s voice.
“Position is user. Coordinates is destination.”
Everything that had happened for the past two weeks flooded back all at once, but this time, Zony had a different perspective. The intrusion into Argent’s engineering section. The sudden appearances and disappearances of ships and people, especially Colonel Atwell. They all along knew their enemy was using some kind of teleportation device. Now they had one of their own, and if Zony’s suspicion was right, this little device had stored every piece of data the Argent Signals Officer needed to effect a rescue plan of her own. She held the device up and spoke a little louder.
“DSS Argent Engineering.”
And then she vanished.
Sixty-One
Nightwing One raced for the safety of DSS Fury’s flight deck. Although the massive Strike Cruiser was many thousands of miles out of position by now, getting the Perseus fleet’s second-largest weapons platform back in operation was the flag’s top priority.
And that meant it was up to Commander Annora Doverly and her highly trained crew of Search and Rescue specialists.
“We are clear to navigate, ma’am.”
“Very well, steer us fifteen degrees port off Fury approach, arm two cardinal probes and stand by to engage quick quiet.”
“Affirmative. Cardinals are standing by. Course is now three four five relative Fury approach. Speed 1500 FPS.”
War raged all around the Nightwing’s flight path. The frigates Ajax and Minstrel and the destroyer Constellation were pouring beam weapons fire at the remnants of the Agamemnon task force. In the distance, more than a million miles from their position, a huge inbound fleet loomed. Their presence was a dramatic reminder of the price Argent’s relatively small battle line would pay if Nightwing One failed in its mission to get the Hunter family’s ships back in operation in time.
“All stop. Activate signal suppression protocols. Quick quiet.”
The pilot responded with the silent activation of the necessary consoles and controls. Nightwing one slowed and then stopped in space.
“Launch Cardinal One,” Doverly said as quietly as possible without making it impossible for her tactical officer to hear.
The small black probe rocketed forward from the search and rescue ship’s location, instantly assuming Nightwing One’s electronic identity, speed and course. For all intents and purposes, it was Doverly’s SAR vessel, and it was on a course close enough to Fury’s approach that it would likely confuse distant enemies long enough for the real ship to get where it needed to go.
“Bring us about, pilot. Maintain ecliptic approach. Course setting zero one five relative Fury approach. All ahead one-third.”
Again, the pilot responded without a sound. Nightwing One banked in space, turning fifteen degrees starboard off Fury’s ap
proach. The sleek corvette rocketed forward, approaching the drifting strike cruiser on an oblique course.
“Secure from Quick Quiet.” Doverly said calmly.
“Range to Fury now nine hundred miles and closing fast,” the pilot reported.
“All stop. SSP. Quick quiet.”
Again the black SAR vessel stopped in space.
“Launch Cardinal Two.”
Another probe silently surged forward, going live with Nightwing One’s signature the moment it was launched.
“Hold your position, pilot. Stand by.” Doverly said, watching the plot intently and counting down in her mind to the optimal moment for the search and rescue team to make their move.
“Hold your position...”
The vessel waited, suspended in space, ready for anything.
“Hold...”
The pilot flexed his fingers around the maneuvering controls. He knew it was going to be close no matter how good they were at their attempts to deceive any observant enemy ships.
“Course zero by zero. All ahead full!” Doverly snapped. The pilot punched the controls and Nightwing One sprinted towards the Fury’s aft section like it had been fired out of one of Argent’s rail guns. Their destination rapidly grew in size on the screen.
“Sound collision,” Annora ordered calmly. Yellow indicator banks burned from all around the apprehensive crew. Everyone on the bridge fastened their shock harnesses. “Give me a roll thirty-one degrees starboard. Signals, get me Fury’s ILS frequency and do it quickly.”
As the suddenly enormous shape of DSS Fury filled the screen, the entire universe rotated in response to Nightwing One’s starboard roll. The cruiser’s flight bay was visible, but secured.
“Negative ILS beacon, ma’am,” the signals officer replied.
“Then we’ll have to do this the hard way. Pilot, drop your thrusters at ten thousand yards and put me right next to Fury’s ventral soft lock. Schematics are at your station.”