ALPHA WILL HELP. ALPHA HAS A PROPOSITION
The section manager read the message and shuddered, although she couldn’t quite explain why. She was looking at the first, faltering steps of a negotiation, surely? A diplomatic resolution from Alpha? But it also displayed how eerily interconnected Captain Farlowe and this Alpha were.
“But maybe this is all a good thing,” the woman muttered to herself. “Maybe all that this Alpha wants is to form an alliance with Armcore?” She shook her head at the strangeness of the message. “‘Tell Dane Tomas that his dreams are accurate.’ What does that even mean?” She had been told that Alpha was a rogue form of machine intelligence, though she had never expected its emissary to be quite so lyrical. “Does it mean his hopes for the future? Fears?”
But what it did show, for certain, was the fact that this Captain Farlowe was working for Alpha. He wasn’t a victim or a hostage, he was a bona fide emissary.
The section manager sighed, stepping back from the one-way mirror to continue her examination of the room. On a whim, she crouched down to examine under the table, just in case the captain had dropped something vitally important while he was here. Nothing, of course, but it was while she was crouched on her knee that her wrist computer chimed urgently.
Narrow-Band Transmission to Section Manager Karis. Accept: Y/N?
She thought that it must be her higher-ups over in Prime. “What do they want now?” She was surprised to see that it wasn’t any Armcore general or an admiral at all.
In fact, the person at the other end of her wrist communicator could be called the second-in-command of the entire Armcore empire.
PONOS: Section Manager Karis, thank you for receiving my call. I need a full download of your mission parameters, as well as your findings, immediately.
“Of course,” the woman said, her hand flicking over her forearm to forward the appropriate files to the machine intelligence at the heart of Armcore. She barely breathed as she waited the heartbeat it took for the AI to get back to her.
PONOS: What is the meaning of these black-outs in your reports? Need I tell you that I have full security access to the Endurance mission?
“Uh…” The section manager was confused for a moment, until she realized just what Ponos was referring to. “That was mandatory. Special directives supplied by Specialist Merik—that Farlowe had to be kept in electrical isolation from the rest of the ship.”
PONOS: Specialist Merik. The intelligence stated the name as if musing.
PONOS: And I take it that this is the first time that you have been allowed electronic and machine devices into this room?
“Yes, of course, sir.” She always wondered whether to call this thing sir or not, so she erred on the side of caution. “We followed the directives to the letter.”
PONOS: …
Another pause, before the machine intelligence responded. If it had been a human, or anywhere near human, then Section Manager Karis would have thought that it was worried.
PONOS: I have updated your mission status. You are to leave Armcore Prime for the coordinates that I have input in your navigation systems, straight away.
“Sir?” The section manager didn’t understand. “Can I ask why? We only just arrived, and we haven’t had a full debrief yet. The Endurance still needs to restock and resupply as well…”
PONOS: This is imperative, Section Manager Karis. The Endurance has been reassigned, and you must keep to complete confidentiality about your orders or whereabouts, even from other senior officers.
“Code Black?” she asked, meaning the deepest level of security that the Intelligence Division operated under. Not even other admirals or generals would know what the specifics of a Code Black was, and she would be under duress and explicit regulations to ensure that they didn’t know.
PONOS: Code Black. Your orders will now continue to come from me alone, and no one else, understood?
“Aye-aye, sir.”
PONOS: No one else at all, Section Manager. Not even any specialist bearing special directive codes. I will inform you on the journey as to what the particulars of your mission are, but for now, you have a job to do. Out.
Section Manager Karis was left looking at the holographic screen blankly as it faded back to black. “What was that all about?” she said to the thin air, turning to shuffle out of where she had still been crouching on the floor. The shock of talking to the second-in-command of the entirety of Armcore had wiped all other considerations from her mind.
That was when she saw it. As she stood up, she saw something out of place on the arms of the plastic chairs. Wait. She fell back to her knees to look properly. The arms of the chairs had been hidden under the desk as she had walked in, but now she could see that the armrests had two perfect sets of long scratches, one on each arm. One set had four clearly visible gouges in the plastic, while the other had three. The Section manager leaned closer to look, noticing the rough edges, the way that each gouged rut had been made over hours.
Captain Farlowe’s fingers did this, the section manager thought in horror. But her memory told her that the man had been calm. Perfectly calm, in fact. Only he hadn’t been, had he? It was almost like he had been two people—one who had been calm and eerie, sitting there for hours during their travel back from Sebopol, and the other that was scratching the plastic chairs of the arms in minute gestures.
Section Manager Karis shivered and turned to leave the room as the Endurance started to disengage and move off on their new mission.
14
Trading Lives
Captain Eliard screamed as he fell. Thoughts of his errant, disreputable life flashed through his mind…of the comfortable home on the House Martin world, of racing across golden plains in boats stolen from his father’s hangars, and later, of being sent to the Trevalyn Academy, there to ace every flight test, to not do too badly in fencing, sharp-shooting, a hundred other disciplines but still finding the place difficult to breathe in. “You’ll never get anywhere with an attitude like that!” his instructors would shout at him. “Idiot boy!” His father would beat him.
And then the dizzying freedom of escape, across the stars with the Mercury Blade, of hiring an equally as disreputable Duergar named Val Pathok, and turning their new boat and zero reputation into one of the most famous of the space pirates operating on the frontiers.
All of these thoughts flashed through his mind in a second as he fell, twisting and flailing head over heels. What good has any of it done? Have I thrown my life away?
And then there was Cassandra Milan, the House Archival Agent who had cajoled him, inspired him, challenged him, and spurred him on to become something better. To not just work for the money but to try and put the galaxy first. To help fight Alpha and Armcore. She had made him see something. That the galaxy was bigger than him. That the galaxy was more than just what happened inside the shell of the Mercury Blade.
And he had led her to her death, out there on the Adiba Research Station. She had become covered with the Q’Lot blue-scale virus and had died. All because of him, his decisions, and his actions. What added salt to the wound was the fact that he had gone and done almost exactly the same thing to the boy here in Welwyn. Freddie Oberman had died trying to protect him, and for no other reason than you protect your friends.
My father was right.
Eliard stopped screaming and closed his eyes. The ground wouldn’t be far away now. It would all be over, and then—
Hang on a minute, a part of him thought. I’m taking an awful long time to die, aren’t I? Even with the many hundreds of feet that he had to fall, hadn’t his Trevalyn lessons in terminal velocity taught him that it should only take a few seconds, at most?
He risked opening his eyes, to see that he was no longer falling. In fact, he appeared to be rolling through the air upwards.
What?
He had no time to try and work out how this miracle had occurred, as instead he saw that there was something falling upwards towards him. It looked
like a length of pipe, open at both ends and larger in diameter than he was tall. It spun hand over hand as it shot upwards into the air.
The Dyson ring! He remembered his terse conversation with Val, just a few hours earlier. “What did you do?” he said as the large fragment of industrial tubing spun towards him on a collision course. Underneath it, he could see other, smaller fragments of industry—anything that wasn’t bolted down—rising from the ground in sudden air-spouts as zones of gravity started behaving very strangely, very quickly.
The Device on his right forearm reacted and exploded into a large, tubular shape itself, its mouth parts opening to spit tentacles of dark vines at his approaching disaster. Eliard had a moment to wonder what it was doing, before the vines slapped around the tube and he was being thrown violently around and around the spinning pipe, winding closer as the Device drew him to thump painfully against its metal. The captain knew that he had next to no control over the Device, and Ponos had told him that it could take on almost any form to perfectly adapt to the situation. And this is what it chose!?
The captain was now flattened to the spinning pipe as it hurtled up to the dark night of the outer dome, the ferocity of his ascent stripping the scream from his mouth and the air from his lungs.
A sudden lurch in the air and the man felt his stomach drop suddenly. The pipe he was riding continued to rise as if thrown for a few more meters, and then he felt gravity reassert itself as it turned balletically, slowly, before starting to fall back towards the distant downside factories.
We must have passed out of the gravity well, or into a new one. The captain had a moment to think as this time he wasn’t tumbling, but now spearing downward. This was what terminal velocity felt like—
Schtock! One of the Device-vine’s suckers popped, and Eliard could see the tendril shivering and flailing in the air as the ground grew clearer and closer beyond it. Schtock! Schtock! Another, and another decoupled from the pipe.
“What are you doing!” Eliard gasped, looking at his own arm. He had thought it was the hurricane-level g-force that was tearing him from the pipe, but he could tell that it wasn’t. He could feel that the Device wanted to part with their death-borne carriage. Maybe it was going to detach itself from me as well, find some other poor schmuck to infect who had less of a habit of dying so often…
Schtock! Schtock! Eliard’s body suddenly raised and thumped back down on the pipe’s metal. He was now only attached by one, taut vine from the head of the Device, and he could see that quivering and shaking as it tried to detach itself.
And unless this thing can make me grow wings in a second… The captain thought that even that was beyond the Devices capabilities.
Schtock! The last vine gave up and Eliard was thrown back from the pipe, spinning once more as the pipe crashed through the metal roof of a factory below to a great, shuddering boom.
“Aiiii!”
But once again, the captain was not killed. The Device threw his arm back over his head, the splayed vines casting out like whips or fishing lines to sucker onto the only other body of swooping metal matching their trajectory.
Schlick! They slapped onto the metal plates and the housing units of one of the twin meson railguns underneath the thundering shape of the Mercury Blade, and the captain was hammered against his own bird’s sharp wings as the Mercury swooped low, passing through the rising plume of smoke and weaving past buildings and factories and processing units to rise once more into the dangerous airs over the downside of Welwyn.
“Get him inside! I don’t care how you do it, just get him inside!” Irie was shouting, since she didn’t dare to take her eyes from the screens. She was running an overlay of the local graviton field and using that to navigate. She knew that she wasn’t a good enough pilot to do it by eye alone, like Eliard could, and so she relied on the florescent green and orange displays to warn her of the sudden drops and pickups in gravity. It looked like she was flying through a sea storm, with multiple tornados forming in seconds, before dissipating just as quickly.
Right! She spun the ship’s wheel and hit one of the rear boosters, throwing the Mercury into a curve that scraped the edge of one of the gravity ‘spouts’ as something heavy and industrial clanged off the underside of her hull.
Warning! Outer Hull Impact: Integrity holding at 76%.
“I hope that didn’t hit the captain!” she managed to shout as she swerved once again in the storm of flying metal.
Irie had no idea how the captain had done it—or she did know, but she couldn’t explain it. The Mercury Blade’s sensors had picked up their captain and pilot holding onto a bit of falling debris and about to throw him into the roof of a corrugated building, and she had swerved towards him with no idea of what she could do to stop his demise.
But that thing on his arm had reacted, throwing out lines towards her hull, and then they were swooping away, and the captain was presumably somewhere underneath them.
Right! She breathed, swooping to one side once more to avoid a metal box the size of a truck that had shaken itself loose from its foundations.
“Ragh!” With a powerful shout, Val kicked out the last panel that stood between him and the outer hull, seeing below him the large belt-feeds of cartridges leading to the railguns’ loading mechanism. The Duergar knew these guns inside and out. He had installed them, and he had spent a lot of his life on board the Mercury looking after them in one way or another.
He pulled on the security override lever that unlocked the access port to the outer guns and pulled on the chrome handle to suddenly feel the blast of fierce wind from outside. With a creak and a clang, the access port was pushed back, and Val was leaning out onto the underside of the Mercury Blade as it swept and turned, sighting down the barrels of the ten-foot-long railguns to see the captain clinging to one of them.
Only Eliard no longer looked human. His encounter suit had burst and frayed and was hanging over his torso in tatters—a torso whose back and shoulders were almost as developed as the Duergar’s.
It was also a deep, ultramarine blue and plated in sheaths. The blue-scale grew smaller and subtler as it almost completely covered his neck and up onto his jaw, leaving the small window of the captain’s human face peering out of it like the virus was a suit he was wearing. One of the captain’s arms—the one that had been given over to the Device—had transformed into a large pod, from whose spikey mouth grew thick black-brown tendrils that wrapped and knotted around the barrels of the cannon.
Nonetheless, even despite the impressive change, the Duergar could see that the captain was seriously injured. The man’s back was scored with deep, blackened burns, and in those patches, the blue-scale was cracked and horribly torn, revealing pulsing, fibrous, and wet-looking growth underneath. Val wondered if the captain was about to die, or about to become something else entirely.
No time to think, Val was already hitting the release on his belt to draw clips on poly-steel lines from their spools, essential spacecraft equipment for space walks, only now the Duergar was using them to hold his bulk in place as he leaned out and levered his body through the access port and onto the mount of the railgun itself.
The wind was a fury against his own scales—far smaller, comfortable, and grey compared to the large sheaths of blue plate that the captain had sprouted. The Mercury was banking, and Val was holding onto the gun at his feet and the underside of the Blade as the pressures tore at him. “Captain! Give me your, uh, hand?” Val leaned as far as he could go—which, given his eight feet in height and long-proportioned arms, was quite far—to offer his talons to Eliard. The gunner wondered if the captain even had hands anymore, but then there was a groan of pain and the captain reached up to grasp his own. The captain’s hand was gloved in black mesh, but it was normal human-sized, as if the blue-scale was concentrating all of its efforts on the Device and the captain’s back.
The Duergar wondered if he should pull, as the vines extending from the captain’s other hand looked as tightly kno
tted as the roots of a gnarled, ancient tree, but then he pulled anyway. He’ll either die out here or inside anyway, the Duergar’s stern pragmatism advised him.
He yanked, and the captain screamed as several of the vines tore and broke under the force. The captain looked weak, barely able to do anything but hold on, and the vines appeared to be lifeless and unmoving. He’d overextended himself, asking the Device to do too much in too short a time. Val was an expert in battle strains and knew full well the flows and ebbs of physical energy that occurred on a battlefield. Even given the captain’s strange abilities, he could recognize that the man’s mutant, hybrid body did not have the resources for anything else. If he were a regular combatant—a sworn guard of the Duergar army, perhaps—then Val would be certain he was looking at a man who was about to give up and die. Anything could kill you at this point: exposure, shock, stress, fear.
And so could falling, the Duergar reasoned as he pulled once again. This time, the knotted vines snapped, eliciting another scream from the captain as the man was catapulted against Val.
“Got him!” Val grunted, grappling and shoving the captain back through the access port and into the main hangar above.
“Urgh…” Eliard sprawled, still unchanging from his mutant form as sweat appeared across his brow and he started to shiver and shake. Val yanked the port panels shut behind him, then grabbed onto one of the gunner’s chairs as the Mercury banked hard to avoid more gravity spout debris.
Val looked at the captain, and realized that he had no idea what to do with him. The man was changed. There was no telling what his body needed or how to treat these sorts of injuries. It was a miracle that he was still alive, even given the Q’Lot blue-scale virus protecting him.
But a Duergar was never often in doubt, as such emotions were useless. Val vaulted the gunner’s chair to the nearest medical kit, released it from its wall catches, and grabbed a fistful of implements and injectors.
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