The Apex Warriors

by Marc Stevens

  He got a fast acknowledgment from all of us. We crouched down and I rapped him on the shoulder as another round of blasts echoed up out of the lift tubes. Klutch activated the device and went through expecting the Prule to be lying in wait. To our surprise, our no-light sensors showed there was only a single Prule occupying the bridge. The size and shape of this Prule was something we had never seen before. It was short and squat with a flattened dome on top. The size of the Bio-machine was somewhere in between the size of a machinery operator’s and a Hivemind’s. The dome had a faint glow that had a rhythmic pulse to it. It made no move to turn on us and stood like a statue just behind the command chair. We split up and slowly circled the control room. When we were on either side of the Bio-machine we saw why it made no attempt to move. A Chaalt was sitting in the command chair. She had tentacles of varying sizes sticking out of the top of her head, face, and torso. They were connected directly to the Bio-machine. The Prule had eight arms that ended in what appeared to be large manacles. Six of them were securely clamped onto the Chaalt’s arms and legs. Her usual dark complexion was now black and wrinkled, she looked dead.

  To our horror, a voice emanated from the Prule. The language was Chaalt. “This is your Captain speaking. I order you to lay down your weapons so the rest of the crew will be spared.”

  Sael was standing close to Tria and me. My sensors could easily make out the expression on her face. She had her eyes closed and was slowly shaking her head. Another piece of the puzzle was now in place. The revolting ugliness of our findings was slowly unraveling the mystery of the Fury's disappearance.

  The voice started speaking again. “The deaths of your crewmates will be…”

  Sael drew one of her pistols in a blink of an eye and shot the Chaalt in the head. Her former Captain’s skull exploded as the energy discharge passed through and hit the Prule dead center. The Bio-machine was blasted backward onto the deck. It savagely jerked its arms and manacles from its captive, spraying us with more gore from what remained of the Chaalt Captain’s body. The Troop Master boosted off the deck and slammed both his armored boots down on the Prule’s domed head, crushing it into a smoking mess. Its flailing tentacles finally went still.

  I stared wide-eyed at Sael. Her face was contorted in rage and she radiated hatred I thought I could feel through my armor. She stalked across the bridge to a place on the command center wall that was vacant of control panels. She touched it in several places that appeared to be random. A small light lit up on the closest instrument panel. It was faint at first but with every passing second grew in intensity. It winked out and the wall opened. Sael entered and a light flashed on revealing her cabin. We gathered around the entrance as Sael went to her bed. She reached down to the edge of it and hit a hidden release. The bed folded back to the wall exposing a hidden cache of weapons and a small handheld control unit. Our attention was torn away from Sael as several jarring thumps came from the bridge blast doors. The Prule Hunters had arrived and it did not take a genius to figure out they were pissed. The thumping concussions started sounding like a steady drumbeat and now we could see several spots glowing orange with heat. With each report, they grew brighter.

  I looked back at Sael and she was holding the control unit in her hand and pushing at the device’s panel with her finger. She finally stopped and looked around. The bridge lit up brightly and the voice of the Fury’s AI blared out from the overhead.

  “Warning! Intruder alert bridge deck! Warning! Anti-boarding systems failure. Warning! Intruder alert! Deck one! Intruder alert! Deck two! Warning anti-boarding systems inoperable! Warning! Invasive AI present in ships main operating systems, AI compromise is imminent, fail-safes activated. Warning! Self-destruct sequence activated! Command personal must override security protocols in nine minutes forty- two seconds.”

  Sael went back to work on her control pad as the AI continued its forecast of our impending doom. The look on her face went from anger to disbelief. She looked up at me and I could tell things were not as they should be. The Fury’s AI continued to count down our demise. One look over my shoulder told me the bridge blast doors were not going to hold up to the beating they were taking much longer. There was a large hot spot on the door that was quickly turning white-hot. I looked at Sael and she dropped the control pad on the deck and shook her head. I no longer wondered how long I had to wait for scat to blow up in our faces. Things had been going our way for too long. As it has always proven in the past, we were going to have to pay a price for all the acorns generously passed our way. This time, however, it was looking more and more like we would never be on the receiving end of good fortune ever again. In less than eight minutes we were going to find out one way or another.

  A Hunter’s spiked appendage clanged loudly through the hot spot on the bridge doors. When it was yanked back, Tria put five rapid-fire rounds through the hole with her heavy rifle. We could hear multiple warbling screeches coming from the Hunters on the other side of the door.

  To our complete surprise, Sael yelled out over the din of explosive blasts. Her voice shrill with rage. “Justice! Are you going to let us all die before you do something?”

  With all that was going on and the horrors we had uncovered, I had forgotten about Justice inserting one of his subsystems into the Fury. The Principal Investigator’s urgent plea slapped my memory into high gear. I opened my mouth to do some yelling of my own, but the Fury’s AI suddenly being cut off mid warning, silenced my exclamation. A very audible hiss started growing in intensity. My HUD showed the atmospheric pressure increasing rapidly from the low readings we recorded when we boarded. The bridge became foggy and the racket coming from the bridge doors abruptly ceased. We all stood looking at each other not knowing what was going to happen next. My eyes locked onto Sael’s face. She looked just as shocked as the rest of us or possibly confused as to what was happening. I was admittedly just as stumped until I heard the voice of our salvation come out of the bridge comms system.

  “Principal Investigator, while I am capable of incapacitating many of the Fury’s AI functions and hacking your trigger codes for the emergency nanite protocols, I cannot however disable the self-destruct sequence. You have two minutes and four seconds until the anti-matter charges built into the Fury’s superstructure are triggered. Your people have done a commendable job with the design of the system. It will most assuredly reduce this vessel to dust upon activation.”

  Sael ran to the command chair and shoved what remained of the Captain’s body out of the way. She sat in the mess that remained and went to work on a touchpad on the right arm of the chair. A panel popped open and another pad slid upward into place.

  Justice’s subsystem gave her a reminder. “Fifty-eight seconds until detonation.”

  “I know you defective machine!” Sael testily replied as she pecked away at the blank pad.

  Sael seemed to hesitate for a second and cursed a blue streak. She started poking again at the pad with a vengeance.

  Justice was not being helpful. “Twenty-two seconds.”

  “Stow that scat you relic!” Sael yelled as she hammered away at the pad.

  Justice ignored the barb. “Ten, nine, eight.” He suddenly stopped his maddening countdown.

  “Security override accepted. Systems resetting.” He said in his usual calm demeanor.

  Sael slumped forward in her chair and put all her hands on her helmet. Tria went to her side and knelt next to her. Something on her armor caught my eye and I looked closer. Some of the gore was slowly disappearing. I blinked and then looked down the front of my battle suit. Some of the grotesque splatters that covered much of my armor were fading away. The nanites were doing their grim jobs with precision and accuracy. They were working hard on erasing all traces of the Prule Bio-machines. Coonts and Klutch were pointing at each other's armor, noting the progress of the micro machines as they busily scoured away the Prule remains clinging to us. I ran to the blast doors ignoring the heat still radiating from its surface. I look
ed through the hole the Hunters had made. What I saw made me smile. The passage was wall-to-wall Prule. They were all on the deck thrashing away at each other and everything around them. They looked like they were rotting away before my eyes.

  “Justice,” I called. “Is there any chance the nanites will attack us if they penetrate our armor?”

  “Negative Commander Myers. Unless you and the members of your strike team somehow become enemies of the Chaalt people, and you are explicitly targeted, you are immune to their attack. The DNA of you and the members of your clan have been specifically exempted from that list by the Principal Investigator. You may however feel a slight discomfort while the nanites determine your identity.”

  I was good with that because we were all feeling a lot more than just slightly uncomfortable as it was. Sael stood up and pushed Tria aside. She made a beeline to where I stood in front of the blast doors. The look on her face said she wasn’t going to give me a kiss and a hug.

  She smashed her fist into my chest plate. “Why didn’t you tell me Justice had integrated himself with the Fury, and why didn’t you order that defective machine to save my ship?”

  Man, was I ever in a hard spot. Answering her question was going to net me a crapload of grief. I was thankful Justice’s subsystem did it for me.

  “Principal Investigator, you have on many occasions acknowledged my presence in the Fury’s systems. If you would like, I can playback some of your numerous slights, insults, and derogatory name-calling. As far as ordering me to save your ship, it would have taken a direct order from you or your Captain to override the AI controlling this ship. This is after all your command and not Commander Myer’s. Your absence and the lack of any communication from you effectively left your Captain and the AI of this ship in command. I would never willingly ignore my primary directives as a subsystem and take control of this ship regardless of the outcome. I would like to also point out that at no time did you discuss the possibility of my presence to your Captain or other command personnel.”

  Sael’s mouth snapped shut on her next rant and she slowly turned away. As for me, I wanted to give Justice’s subsystem a big thank you for the bailout. Tria came close to me and gripped my arm. It could have meant any number of things, but I settled on the one that made the most sense. Keep my mouth closed and my comments to myself.

  Sael finally called to Justice. “Did my Captain have any complicity with the Prule?”

  “You already know the answer to that question Principal Investigator. Your Captain’s only failure was to accept the Prule’s promise of sparing the crew if she surrendered herself. As you can see, it was nothing more than a ploy to take the Fury intact. Your crew fought hard to regain this ship, all the while being subjected to the continuous broadcast of their crewmates being disassembled piece by piece. They fought until the Captain ordered them to lay down their weapons. As you have discovered, it was not a lawful order. Once the Captain was subjugated, the Prule knew to disable the power couplings and eject one of the anti-matter power cells, or the Fury would self-destruct. That course of action effectively stopped any action on my part to aid your crew in any manner. Principal Investigator, I know it is not helpful, but I would also like to state that if you would have given my master program Justice, a thorough briefing on the architecture and programming of your AI, this situation might possibly have been avoided altogether. Justice is not constrained by the narrow-minded parameters that were programmed into your AI.”

  Sael leaned against the bulkhead and digested the painful truths she was faced with. Justice’s subsystem didn’t come right out and say it but the realities of what he just said were plain to see. If Justice thought the Legacy was lost to the Prule he would have destroyed it. The only way for that to happen on the Fury was with direct input from Sael or her Captain. I also doubted if there was any way to decouple the power from Justice or his operating systems without destroying the Legacy. When and if Sael gets back to her superiors, I hoped they would finally realize the shortcomings they purposely installed into their AIs.

  Sael called the AI again. “You have observed the subjugation, do the Prule now have knowledge of my homeworlds and their defenses?”

  “That is unknown. Nineteen minutes thirty-one seconds after the Captain was coupled with the Bio-machine, they started the power shut down process. The ability to safely shut down the power systems aboard the Fury would be classified information only the Captain or Chief Engineer would know of. It would be foolhardy to think the Prule did not discover some or all of that information.”

  Coonts was processing everything Justice’s subsystem revealed to us. “Justice, is it possible for the Prule to transfer that information while we are in hyperspace?” He asked.

  “It is unknown if the Prule have the technology required to transfer information in that manner. I am studying the details of the portal I downloaded from your battle armor. Since the gateway was destroyed when you fled the Prule underground stronghold we may never know its true origins. I do know there is a minuscule chance of the gateway being of Prule design or manufacture. Close examination of your video feeds discloses the presence of mineral deposits on several of the generators. The deposits appear to be from the planet’s ocean that has seeped into the tunnel through small cracks and fissures. The distance you traveled underground to reach the gateway, put you more than a mile off the shore of the planet’s only continent. The accumulation on the units furthest from the portal is significant. Buildups of that nature would take considerable time. It is conjecture on my part, but the build-up might have taken hundreds of years to form. This theory also leads me to believe that the gateway was discovered by the Prule while searching the base and utilized for their own purposes.” The AI replied.

  Sael finally collected her thoughts and asked the question that was forming on my lips. “ Are the Fury’s star drives and weapons still functional?”

  “Yes, but unfortunately in the process of shutting down the Fury’s power, the Prule jettisoned one of the anti-matter power cells. Without it, the Fury will be unable to make hyperspace transitions or generate enough energy to operate the shields without first shunting power from the weapons or drives.” Justice answered.

  “Will we be able to get underway when we reach our destination?” Coonts anxiously asked the AI.

  “I am making the necessary repairs and bypassing damaged systems. If we are allowed the time to complete the repairs we should be able to make light speed.”

  “But without shields or weapons?” Klutch added.

  “That is correct Troop Master.”

  “What about the transporter?” Sael asked.

  “It appears to be undamaged. Since I never had full access to the transporter module, you will have to physically confirm its operation. The module has a separate power source so it should be functional if it has not been tampered with.”

  “Justice,” Tria called. “Is there any way to determine our destination?”

  “Negative Tria. The hyperspace portal the Fury entered has some very unique qualities. The first being, that most warp bubbles are generated by a ship’s power systems, and the destination is calculated by an AI. The generators at the gateway created the warp bubble and I sense that the flow of our transition is one way. The Fury is being pulled to a predetermined destination as was everything else entering the gateway.”

  “Is there a chance we are going to Andromeda?” Klutch asked.

  “While it could be possible, I find that scenario highly unlikely. This level of interdimensional space does not have the qualities required to make a transition of that nature without an extremely long transit time. The more likely scenario is our destination will be somewhere within our galaxy or conceivably another portal just outside of it.”

  We now had a shortlist of options that could change the bleak outcome I was forecasting for us all. At the very top of my list was our security. I needed to know if we were in sole possession of the Fury. “Have all Prule forces been
eliminated?”

  “Yes Commander, the nanites have destroyed the Bio-machines and have reached the end of their programmed functionality. With the Principal Investigator’s permission, I would like to vent the residuals into hyperspace.”

  “Carry on Justice, I am now entrusting you with what remains of my command. I am directing you to make any necessary repairs and to use all the available systems aboard the Fury to insure our safety to the best of your ability.” Sael replied.

  “Does that include access to the transporter module” Justice inquired.

  Sael only hesitated for a second. “Yes.”

  “I will need you to open the module and let your battlesuit scan the operating systems. I will also require you to make hand contact with the transporter's control panel.”

  Sael’s eyes narrowed. “May I ask why?”

  “Principal Investigator, I know you think that I have ulterior motives, but can assure you I am going to follow your lawful order to its fullest. I intend to transfer power from the transporter module to the Fury’s shield systems. I know it will not be of the same output as the Fury’s shield power supply, but any operable shields are better than none at all.”