The traitor’s ships had been too coordinated. Too precise. Almost as soon as Lord Aster had given the order to fire the engines, the Imperial Coalition ships that had decided to attack them had already started moving, peeling away from each other in small groups of perfectly-timed thrusters.
Aster shouldn’t have been surprised that Alpha had given his newfound allies various upgrades to their ships. It was the strength of the Alpha-machine, after all. They had access to unparalleled processing and manufacturing power, clearly.
But what Lord Aster and the rest of the allied fleet hadn’t been prepared for was what Alpha’s external fleet had done next. They had moved with robotic precision, flying through the gulf of no-man’s space, only accelerating as they shot out like man-made asteroids towards their targets.
They were sacrificing themselves, he had thought, a moment before the first of the impacts had hit their targets. The treacherous ships hadn’t seemed to care at all as they had torpedoed into the two waves of the allied forces—but not against the mighty bulk of the Armcore war cruisers, as Lord Aster might have expected if he were to perform such a reckless move.
No, instead, they had hit the Noble House battlegroups. The flagships and attendant vessels of House Selazar, House Xin, House Martin, and the others.
“NO!” Aster had cried out when he had realized what they were doing—that their acceleration was too fast, that no vessel would be able to control a turn at that velocity.
But then had come the ripple of warp light. Of purple and red and blue plasma as each of the ships had cycled up their engines at precise times that no human would be able to call. In the instant that the treacherous ships had hit their loyal contemporaries, they had managed to fire their dual, triple, quad, and octo-cored warp engines. Not soon enough to jump through, but quick enough so that their targets couldn’t escape their fate.
The resultant mix of smashing hulls, depressurizing atmospheres, exploding ammunitions, and rupturing warp cores released billows of warp plasma whose only possible function in the physical universe was to react, like anti-matter, with the physical. Dazzling clouds of light burst along the face of the advancing allied line, explosions that could easily level cities from the largest of the treacherous ships, and smaller eruptions with the force of an earthquake.
The Noble House ships that were lucky enough to be too far back from the original explosions quickly had to contend with spiraling metal, plasma-flares, and energy shockwaves, all of which sent a secondary wave of explosions rippling through the allied forces.
How could Alpha do that? How could THEY do that? Aster had thought, again and again, as the chaos raged around the Polaris. He knew many of those Noble families that had been in charge of the Constance, or the Judgement. They may have been weak, petty, small-minded, and greedy sorts of Nobles, but they had never been so suicidal or fanatical.
What had Alpha done to them?
The answer came in Vincentius’s own battle, as a cluster of the smaller treacherous vessels was attempting to do exactly the same to Aster as had been done to Xin, Selazar, Martin, and the others. Perhaps luckily for the Polaris however, the battlegroup that had been opposite them had been one from a much smaller Noble House – one of the many that dotted Imperial space and who might only control one system, or even just an asteroid. House Johns, he had thought, remembering nothing more about them.
House Johns’s ships weren’t as powerful as the Constance or the Judgement.
“Take out her engines!” Aster had roared. “Cripple her!”
No time for evasive action, his deck captain had taken the controls himself to expertly fire their meson cannons at the approaching House Johns craft.
Fa-THUDUDUDD! Vincentius could feel the echoes and reverberations of the Polaris cannons ripple up through the old metal of the hull and under his feet, as a line of corresponding fire appeared along the side of the House Johns craft. Not enough to destroy it, but his deck captain had taken out all of their left-side boosters, sending the Johns craft spiraling to one side as the Polaris just twitched on one arm-wing and whisked past.
Even luckier, the cannon shot had managed to break some small vital piece of technology that powered House Johns’s warp core, and so the flagship of House Johns did not half-jump as the others had, and could not create an explosion as bright as the sun itself.
Aster had roared and barked orders as all around him on the command deck, the controls glitched and rebooted while a thousand warning messages from both his own and the other vessels had sounded everywhere.
“Taking heavy flak!” his deck captain had shouted. It wasn’t any other ship firing at them however, but the bits of debris from the many torn-apart ships. Something had hit the Polaris, something large enough to physically spin them around and flush the lights red with emergency warnings.
Suit Survival Protocols Activated. The words had flashed across the lord’s interior vision as it felt to him as if he were lifted off his feet and momentarily blinded. The heavy tactical suit had activated, responding to some sort of threat that it did not have the time to translate into words and transmit to Vincentius’s brain.
Plates of poly-carbon and graphene slid and interlocked across his body as Lord Aster was thrown across the command deck. When he pushed himself up, he realized that he was floating.
Hull breach! He looked around and saw that of his fifteen-person strong command deck crew, perhaps six were now also encapsulated into their own heavy tactical suits, floundering in zero-gravity. Of the other eight, some never had the chance for their suit’s protocols to activate and were even now gasping, freezing, and changing color, whilst others had appeared to be plucked out of the command deck and disappeared for good.
How did it come to this…
Lord Aster magnetized his boots so that he clanked back to the deck of the wreck that had once been the Polaris, to now look up and see that the entire ceiling had vanished. He could stare straight into the fires and voids of space above him, and when he turned, he saw that the Polaris itself had a tear that almost severed the command deck from the body.
What are the chances of that? Aster had thought, before his gaze then took on the battlefield outside.
Or what was left of it.
Plasma flame was still burning and reacting in drifts across the arms of the allied armada, and everywhere there were great, splintering holes where ships should be. Even as he stood and watched, he saw the wreckage of ships as well as unknown, anonymous parts spinning and tumbling everywhere. Their armada was in complete and total disarray. Who could have predicted an all-out suicide attack?
What sort of enemy does that? Weakens their own position in order to win?
But then Aster realized something else: there were far less Armcore ships than there should be, even after the warp explosions.
Where were they? Where could they go? How could they be destroyed so completely?
All of the Armcore war cruisers—the large inverted W-shapes that had enough firepower to pacify a planet, should they need to—had all vanished.
No weapon could unmake them so completely, in such a short time, Aster realized. Not even some super-weapon devised by the most powerful machine-intelligence ever seen.
Treachery, Aster realized then, in those final moments of the battle. That was why the treacherous Noble House boats had flung themselves at the other loyalist Noble House battlegroups. It wasn’t out of misplaced pride or some ancient feuds between the Houses, it was because they had known that Armcore was about to turn tail and run.
Or all of the senior Armcore officers, anyway, Aster realized when he saw that there were still Armcore battle stations and attack crafts screaming through the wreckage and searching for an enemy to fight. Pinpoint and blinding-white lasers snatched them out of the void as the Alpha-machine itself fired from its four-pronged snout to take them down.
“Senior Tomas had known,” Aster had growled to himself, already turning and trying to remember where the n
earest escape pods were. Or would be, if the Polaris was still intact. He had to save his crew. He had to get the word out to the rest of the Imperial Coalition that Armncore had sold them out.
But no sooner had Lord Vincentius Aster taken a few steps that he realized that there were no escape pods left anywhere near his position. The rest of the Polaris was breaking up in front of him, and already the hiss of the distant Polaris pods in the hangar bays were leaving.
He would never get his command deck crew to them in time.
The Johns vessel. Turning on his heel, he saw that the incapacitated House Johns vessel was still where they had left it—slowly spinning just a few hundred meters to one side of the ruined Polaris.
We can make it. Aster grabbed what crew he could and led them, launching through the void in zero-G suit-flight as shrapnel and wreckage spun around them, until they were hitting the hull of the House Johns vessel and scrabbling to the nearest airlock for a way in.
“Just get to the escape pods. Nothing else!” Lord Aster had commanded his crew, because he hadn’t wanted them bogged down into lengthy blaster duels with what must have survived of the House Johns traitors.
In that, at least Aster and his command deck crew were lucky. The ancient man finally found out just how the treacherous Noble Houses had been able to throw their lives away so easily and completely.
They had all the fanaticism of the dead.
Inside the craft, all of the House Johns members that they ran into (quite literally), every human that they saw was, in fact, dead. They floated through the corridors like a macabre ballet performance, no signs of violence on any of their bodies, but they were clearly showing the signs of suffocation or poisoning.
Alpha must have hacked their systems and stripped them of their oxygen. Aster snarled as he led his crew to the nearest batch of escape pods.
“Lord-sir, you first! You’re too valuable to lose!” It was the deck captain, now without a deck to control as Aster had ignored the man and shoved him back into the nearest escape pod. Vincentius had long since decided that he would do one thing at the very end, at least, he would continue to act with honor and would act like a stars-damned human, at least. Not a robot. Not a machine intelligence.
“LORD COMMANDER!” a scream came from behind Aster before he could shove the next crewmember into one of the House Johns escape pods. It was the sensor technician, himself another lucky survivor of the downfall of the Polaris.
Turning, Aster had seen the first wave of the enemy. The real crewmembers of the treacherous boats that Alpha had staffed instead of the humans.
Drones. Each with four limbs at angles to each other over a tiny, bulbous, black metal body. They surged towards him up the passageway with insect-like movement, pouncing from wall to floor to ceiling and back again. At the ends off their arms sparked small utilities and implements—blades or prongs or plasma cutters.
Had the Alpha-machine been cannibalizing this vessel even as it sent it to die?
It was then that the full horror of what he was facing finally hit home to the Lord Commander Vincentius of House Aster, Order of the Silver Star, Knight-Defender and Imperial Overseer. The Alpha-device was no mere enemy that wanted to invade Coalition space. It was like a queen beetle of a hive. It was like a virus, endlessly replicating itself. It could not be threatened or reasoned with. It could not be bullied or bargained with. How could the Noble Houses or Armcore—if the military industrial corporation had even ever wanted to—hope to defeat such an alien force of nature?
But an old man like him didn’t know how to give up anymore. Maybe he had forgotten how to. Maybe he just wanted to go out in one final, blaze of glory, as his suit flooded his system with Offensive Survival hormones, painkillers, and stimulants, and he obeyed some primitive genetic impulse buried deep within humanity, to spit in the eye of a tormenting, uncaring universe anyway.
“For Aster! For Empire!” Lord Vincentius Aster drew his nanosword—a polysteel weapon whose edges were a constantly moving, slicing edge of nanobots, and charged.
1
Resurrection
Captain Eliard Martin hissed in agony as, once again, the section manager and lately captain of the downed Armcore war cruiser the Endurance attempted to bandage his leg. He sat in one of the Endurance’s many medical bays, which would have been able to respond to any illness or injury no matter how life-threatening—if the Endurance wasn’t operating on reserve power and currently split in half over almost a mile of frozen tundra.
Epsilon G3-ov. That was the name that hovered over the glitching screen of the medical bay, overlaying a digital schematic of the barren ice world that Section Manager Karis had pulled up.
Eliard knew why she had decided to do that of course, not booting up the medical software of the Endurance and instead spending the valuable energy resources they had on long-range scans of the planet.
Because of the warp plasma. He remembered the glittering gales of purple, blue, and red as he had been plucked from the depths of the buried Armcore Research Station by rescue drones. Down there, half a mile under the ice, and Armcore had once built a scientific laboratory—a landing craft that had been the home to a complement of only fifteen crew, who had something to do with what lay even further beneath them.
The ancient Valyien ziggurat.
Armcore had been excavating the long-dead alien structure just as they did the same for every piece of ancient Valyien technology that they came across in Imperial Coalition space. It was hardly surprising, as it was from these relics and ruins that the Imperial Coalition of the Noble Houses of humanity had unlocked the secrets of the universe. From nano-technology to meson and warp plasma manipulation, to warp-jump drives and energy generation.
Although it had just looked like lumps of rock, he remembered, before wishing that he hadn’t thought about it at all. Down there, under the research station, had been the same sort of Valyien ziggurat where Eliard had seen Armcore recover the Alpha Device—a rare Valyien ‘hub’ or computer node into which Armcore had poured their own embryonic machine intelligence—to create the Alpha itself.
What idiots, Eliard mused, happy at least that his hatred and rage was taking his mind from the taut compression bandages that the section manager was even now winding around his calf.
As if they couldn’t see that they were messing with something that they didn’t understand. Even from his limited time in the ziggurat under the G3-ov Research Station, he had seen how unsettling, how dangerous, how other it all was. The walls had been decorated by strange mural motifs of the four and six-legged Valyien creatures with their mandible-like jaws, standing in strange poses like dead gods. Creepy to say the least.
But that wasn’t even the worst part of what he had seen down there. The central chamber of the Valyien ziggurat had comprised of what he could only call a throne room—a high hallway at the apex of the pyramid, with stone steps rising and rising to a platform with two pillars.
And in between those pillars had been the impossible: a stabilized warp field, without seemingly any meson fields to contain it. It hadn’t been like anything that Eliard had ever seen before, since his only experience with warp fields came through the dual core warp engines of his own vessel, the hacked racer known as the Mercury Blade. It should have been impossible to be able to create an uncontained warp field, and one that seemed to not have any electrical apparatus or fuel injectors to power it.
But, somehow, the Valyien had done it. That was why the section manager was keeping an eye on the Endurance screens. As soon as they had gotten out of there, the warp gate of the Valyien had started to react. To convulse. Its dangerous anti-matter elements agitating and reacting. At any moment, one half of the little ice planet could blow, and they were stranded there.
“Rising meson fluctuations,” Eliard hissed as he noted the scan results. The digital schematic showed endless white plains punctuated by darker topographical images of mountains, and threading through it like a running stain were t
he spiked readings of the Endurance’s sensors. Lines an alarming red, only visible to the sensors, washed out and contracted, looking like some sort of convulsing spider.
The woman in front of him, still in her battered heavy tactical suit—matte black and metal-silver, the colors of the Armcore intelligence division that she had been assigned to—and with her wiry hair escaping its braid, looked tired. She had been battling beside him down there, and it had only been the Q’Lot Device on Eliard’s arm that had kept them alive. Eliard watched her carefully say nothing, but her jaw tensed in frustration. They both knew what rising meson levels meant. An imminent collapse of whatever eldritch and alien technology was holding the warp plasma in check. An imminent explosion.
“Leave it, I can walk now.” Eliard lifted his leg, wincing as the pain once again shot up to his hip. He had no idea what the robot creature they had fought down there had done to him, but it didn’t feel good.
And why isn’t this Device thing repairing me? He half-raised his right arm—the one that ended in the ponderous, blue-scaled pod that could morph and recombine itself to create almost any tool or weapon to match the danger. That, too, had been an experiment of Armcore’s, and one that Eliard had been told would somehow help to bring down Alpha, although now he very much doubted it.
The Device was the product of a mixing of another ancient alien race, one that was almost mythical—or would be, if Eliard hadn’t seen them with his very own eyes. The Q’Lot. A race that was the stuff of legends. They supposedly were locked in a millennia-long war with the militaristic and strange Valyien, and were a race whose technology seemed all based around genetic manipulation, in contrast to the Valyien’s energy manipulation.
Warp Gate (Valyien Far Future Space Opera Book 7) Page 2