Who knows what effect these will have on the blue-scale? he thought, first spraying the man almost head to foot in sealing wound spray. The patches of translucent gunk turned into an antibacterial resin over his wounds almost immediately, stuffed full of skin nutrients and enzymes that he might need. Next, Val looked at three different injector pens that he had saved, each loaded with powerful stimulants. Battlefield medicine was dirty and to the point.
He stabbed all three down into the only bit of the man that wasn’t covered in scale, which happened to be his cheek.
“Argh!” The captain convulsed, his jaw clenching and his eyes watering as they rolled white.
“Maybe I should have aimed for the heart,” Val thought distractedly as the captain’s body shook and tremored, appearing to have a seizure.
“What’s happening? Is he okay? Will he live?”
“The captain’s dying. No, he’s not, and no, he probably won’t,” Val answered stoically, before leaning down to hold the captain as still as he could as he thrashed and shook.
“I’m getting us out of here. Ponos can kiss my ass…” Irie shouted, making another dramatic turn upwards, back towards the exit ports.
Incoming Narrow Band Transmission! Unknown Source – Accept: Y/N? The communication board in front of the pilot lit up.
“I said, Kiss. My. Ass!” the Duergar heard Irie snap as their boosters only increased in intensity, and he grunted his approval. There was a distant chime, and the piloting engineer suddenly swore effusively, and very, very well.
“It’s bleeding well overridden my controls! I didn’t even know it could do that!”
The lights flickered, and the voice of the Armcore intelligence burst from all of the internal speakers.
PONOS: I have been monitoring your situation, and it is imperative that you dock with Welwyn Habitat.
“I don’t think you heard the lady,” Val grunted, studying the seizing Eliard below him. The captain’s shakes appeared to be lessening, but now there was a white foam bubbling from between his clenched teeth.
“It’s over, Ponos! We’re out. Send Armcore after us if you want, but I’m not as dumb as the captain is. Was,” Irie defiantly roared back.
PONOS: You fail to understand, Irie Hanson. You are close to completing your mission. Just dock, and then the captain will receive the best medical treatment that my intelligence can give him.
“It’s lying,” Val grumbled. He wasn’t sure if the Armcore intelligence could lie, but he knew what a bad deal sounded like. Ponos needed them to do something, and that might be good enough reason not to do it.
“Alpha can have the galaxy if it wants! We just want to live!” Irie said, her voice cracking a little. She had a softer heart than Val did.
PONOS: You do not mean that, but then, that is not what I am talking about. Right now, if you dock, I will see to it that all three of you survive.
“How can you promise that? Have you taken a look out of the screens today?” Irie demanded. Val raised his great, shovel-like head to look up the stairs towards the cockpit and out the windows, towards where the hexagonal window of the field-gate was growing larger and larger. Around it was the crystal-glass of Welwyn’s dome, and the giant, hanging super-stations of the other Imperial intelligences.
PONOS: The captain’s life, and your own, for one docking procedure. The voice of the Armcore machine intelligence was flat and serious. They had reached the end of the negotiations, and they had to make a choice.
“Val?” Irie called back.
“You know the rules, Irie,” the Duergar said, a touch of cynicism in his voice as he already knew which way Irie was going to jump. “You’re at the wheel. You get to make the call.”
Those were the rules of the Mercury Blade, a democratic dictatorship, as the captain would always boast. He was the one in charge. He called the shots, but if someone else was at the wheel, then they had the final say over what the Mercury Blade did in that moment. ‘Without the ship, we’re nothing. And where the ship goes, we follow,’ the Duergar remembered Eliard saying. Looking at the man’s face as it paled and took on a sickly greyish hue, he wondered if the captain would ever say those words again. Probably not.
“Drekk!” Irie shouted in frustration as the Mercury swerved suddenly in mid-air, looping away from the port window and back towards the docking tower that spiked the bottom of the habitat.
“Hm.” Val shrugged, considering. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but then again, the thought of flying on this bird without the captain wasn’t something that he could imagine either. It had always been them, almost right from the start. Captain Eliard at the helm, with the Duergar being recruited first to man the newly-fitted guns, and then just a short while later, it was Irie who had been added to run the engines. Val didn’t know what would happen without the captain. He couldn’t fly worth a darn, and he didn’t know the first thing about warp cores. So he would still remain the gunner under whatever new crew members replaced the old… Only Val couldn’t see that working, either.
I’d go back to the frontier, he thought. But a life working as a mercenary? It seemed like a small prize after the adventures that the captain had taken them on.
PONOS: Wise choice, Miss Hanson.
“Shut up,” Irie said as they swung towards the tower, aiming for the first of the landing gantries that were extended like a welcoming hand—or a grabbing claw.
15
The Feint
“You are a disgrace to your line!” the words of Eliard’s father swam in his mind.
I’ve never cared much for family pride, he responded to the memory, surprised at his own vehemence.
“You’re too sentimental. All you care about are your reckless adventures!” his father berated him, his voice preserved in the amber resin of memory from many decades ago, locked inside the captain’s psyche where they had festered and turned into an infection.
And my friends, the captain responded, realizing that what he said was true, now. It had taken him a long time to figure that out, the man recognized. It was true that he had been a spoiled, reckless brat. How different had he been from any other noble’s son, only concerned with his own prestige? Wasn’t his drive to be the fastest, and the most daring space pirate on the frontier of non-aligned worlds, part of that pride?
But pride isn’t the same as honor, he now knew. He wasn’t sure what it had taken for him to see this. All of the near-death encounters, the loss of Cassandra, of Freddie, of everyone who had put their faith in him.
“I see who I am, now,” Eliard spoke to the shade of his father. “I know who it is I have to be.”
He had never wanted to be Eliard Martin, the scion of a noble line. All he had wanted was to be free.
“And the only way I am going to be that is if I have my friends to help me,” he said, and opened his eyes.
BWARAOWARAO! The Mercury Blade’s alarms were blaring all around him, and the main cargo bay of his beloved ship were flushed with the alternating warning lights of orange and red.
“What have you done to my boat?” he wanted to say, but all that came out was a croak, and the sudden pain of needles in his throat. His face felt like it had been stung by a hundred wasps, his jaw ached as though he had been hit by the Duergar, and his body felt heavy and awkward. Blinking his groggy eyes, he managed to push himself up into a seated position to feel pain ripple across his back. Oh yeah. Voyager and Sirius-23 were using me for target practice, he thought as he winced.
Then the man saw his body. The torso of his encounter suit was ripped and torn, and he could see past the shreds of mesh to his bare skin—only it wasn’t his skin, it was the large, interlocking iridescent sheaths of blue-scale that the Device had given him. His body looked more powerful, developed. Like a cross between that poor infected scientist Argyle Trent back on Adiba Station and Val Pathok.
Why hasn’t the Device returned to my arm? he wondered, looking at his right forearm to see it completely altered. From his e
lbow to beyond where his hand should be was a pod of scale, ending in the drooping ‘teeth’ of the Device, from which sprouted a number of brittle, old-looking stems, broken off at the end. The Device looked dead…but if it was, then it hadn’t returned to what it had once been, or fallen from his body in flakes. It had stubbornly retained its shape, as if unwilling or unable to do anything else.
Oh, marvelous. Outstanding. The captain’s horror was only matched by his ire as he attempted to push himself to his feet, only for the pain in his back to drive him back down again.
WHUMPF! The Mercury shook, and Eliard would recognize blaster-fire anywhere. They were under attack. But from whom? And where?
The last thing that the captain remembered had been falling through the air after meeting the ‘coalition’ of the other house intelligences eager to negotiate with Alpha. After that, it seemed that the recent history had become a bit of a blur. Was it the blue-scale virus? He wondered if it was damaging his mind somehow.
Whumpf! Once again, the Mercury shook, and this time, he heard the unmistakable roar of Val Pathok coming from outside.
“Ach!” In pain and with a terrible groan, he lurched, stumbled, and flailed towards the side of the hangar bay, where a porthole looked out in the direction of the violence.
Outside the Mercury, Irie was huddling against a control panel set against the railings of a metal landing dock, attached to the same spike of tower that he had fallen from. The sides of the panel were burning and exploding with sparks and exposed wires as it was hammered by blaster shot from the loading bay ramp and doors. Up there, the captain could see the black metal of defensive shields that had been deployed across the floor, blocking the passage apart from small gaps through which their attackers fired.
“Rargh!” A powerful roar came from the other side of him, and the captain turned his head to see that Val had taken shelter behind the nose cone of the Mercury (now a blackened and cracked nose cone, he saw in horror) before popping from the edge to fire a volley at the shield with his personal meson cannon.
Whumpf! Whumpf! The shots buckled one of the shields, but they did not break, and in return, a series of shots came back—and not all of them from the hangar bay doors.
“Hsss!” A hiss of pain as the Duergar was spun backwards behind the nose cone, by the needle-sharp laser of a flying drone, rising on the winds.
“Val!” he could hear Irie shout.
What are they doing? Why are they trying to get in there? Eliard thought wildly, seeing that Irie was holding the end of a black pipe, ribbed poly-metal that snaked from her cover and back to the underside of the Mercury Blade.
That’s the connection hose, the captain knew. It was a mandatory procedure whenever the ship docked—and you wanted to be civil, that was—for the connection hose to be deployed to the docking apparatus, to allow the ship’s warp engines to be powered up.
Was the Mercury out of juice? he managed to think as he pushed back from the window, reaching for the only weapon he had at his disposal. As he lunged towards the hangar bay doors, falling across it with flares of agony, he figured that if the Mercury’s engines were fried, then that would certainly explain why they weren’t flying away from this firefight, but whatever his crewmates were doing out there, it was insane. Getting juice in the middle of a battle?
But sometimes all of the choices you have left are bad ones, he thought as he snarled, dragging himself up the side of the wall, panting. His one good human hand reached for the door controls—
“Val! Answer me?” he heard Irie wail from outside.
This was it, he was hearing the last, defiant stand of his crew. My friends, he thought. No one else was going to die for him. No one else had to die for him.
His hand grabbed the lever and he hung from it as the door hissed and started to unfold.
“Wha—” he heard the confused cry from Irie outside as the wind of the shaking and chaotic Welwyn downside buffeted him.
“Hold your fire!” he called, his voice sounding curiously clear, despite the agony he was in as he hung from the door handle and shouted at the distant attackers. “It’s me you want, isn’t it, Xal? I’m the one you want to trade to Alpha? You can have me. I give up!”
“Captain, no!” Irie half-stood from her crouch, but dropped back down as a laser blast seared the top of the control unit she was hiding behind.
“I said, hold your fire!” the captain shouted furiously. “My life for theirs! Allow my crew to charge the Mercury’s warp engine and let them go, and I promise I’ll do whatever you want!” He breathed, waiting for the final hail of laser fire, but, miraculously, it didn’t arrive.
“Captain Martin. I see you have embraced your…new biology,” the suave voice of Xal emanated from the small torpedo-shaped drone that had shot Val. As the captain watched, it hovered through the air between the distant shielded hangar and the Mercury.
“And what is to stop us from just killing you anyway?” Xal reasoned.
Eliard’s eyes were blurring. “Nothing, I guess, but that will only make me mad, and you’ve seen how difficult I can be when I’m mad.”
“I don’t think you have the strength to be difficult anymore, do you?” the drone Xal moved forward a few feet.
“Then I’ll force you to kill me,” Eliard said stubbornly. “You’ll still have to take my crew to get on board the Mercury, and I am certain that I can make your life hell so that you will have to kill me.”
“I told you before that I don’t think Alpha cared if you were alive or a corpse,” Xal countered in a voice that was as soft and as menacing as a snake, as it moved gradually forward just a little bit more. It almost had line of sight on where Irie was hiding now, and Eliard had no cards left to play.
Apart from one. The Captain of the Mercury Blade had always been very good at negotiating. “Maybe not, but I am sure that Alpha will be even more impressed with a living specimen of this Q’Lot Device, don’t you think?” he said, trying to sound resolute, but knew that he was clutching at straws.
There was silence from the drone for a moment, so Eliard continued.
“You’re a machine, you know the odds, Xal, and you can calculate the risks better than me. Isn’t it better if you can take your hostage willing, alive, and peacefully with no more damage to your systems than to offer Alpha a corpse? Who knows what the Device will do once I’m dead. I don’t know. Ponos didn’t know. Do you?”
The small drone blinked its warning orange light once, twice, and on the third, it started to draw backwards. “Follow me, Captain. Slowly and steadily, and I promise that your crew is free to go from Welwyn space.”
“Captain, no!” Irie whispered, looking up at him in horror as Eliard let go of the door handle and instead half-lurched, half-crawled down the ramp towards the gantry. Every shuffling movement was agony. I don’t think that I’m going to be alive to see Alpha anyway, he thought. At least I will have saved my crew. My friends.
“Captain!” Irie was saying.
“Just get my damn ship hooked up and get Val, understood?” he whispered to her as he reached the bottom of the ramp. He paused, panting as he looked up into the mechanic’s eyes. She didn’t deserve this. “And get that Babe Ruth back up and running. At least do something with your life before…”
“Before Alpha kills us all?” Irie said with tears in her eyes, flicking the access port on the control panel behind her and attaching the connection hose.
“Time, Captain,” Xal said, and Eliard looked up to see that the shields had pulled back to reveal who their attackers had been. A cluster of military drones, with the russet cube of Voyager and the friendly white bubble of Sirus-23 in the middle.
“Okay, don’t get your circuits in a twist,” Eliard managed to cough, pushing himself up to his feet despite the sudden waves of nausea and dizziness. He took another few steps forward.
Behind him, on the control panel, the green LED lights over the connection port fired up one by one. The Mercury Blade’s compute
rs requested access to Welwyn Habitat’s power grid, and the habitat complied. Energy surged through the connection hose and back to the warp core, charging the vacuum chambers and gaseous compressors with enough of a bite to kick-start the warp engines. That was all it took. Enough of a quantum charge to get the chain reaction rolling again…
But that wasn’t the only data that flowed between the ship and the habitat.
Blink. The lights over the hangar door flickered briefly, as if there was a surge in the mainframe. It would be understandable for there to be such small errors, given the vast levels of destruction and infrastructure loss that Welwyn Habitat had suffered over the last twenty-four hours.
Blink-blink. The lights flickered once more, and this time, the drone ahead of Eliard wobbled in mid-flight—
And the grid of lights below them, in all of the factories and the processing plants of the downside, started to click off, one by one.
“What did you do?” the voice of Xal glitched as the weapon ports on the defense drone it was using extended, swerving towards the captain.
Thock. The drone fell out of the sky and onto the metal railing, lifeless. In perfect unison, all of the Welwyn security drones that were flanking the house intelligences fell to the floor at the same time.
“Captain Eliard, explain yourself!” This came from the ancient machine intelligence Voyager, still floating beside its fellow conspirator Sirius-23.
“I-I don’t know,” the captain said dazedly, sinking to his knees. He was tired. Was it the damage that the habitat had suffered? Had it caused some critical collapse of systems? What did it matter now anyway, now that he was so near death…
“I know,” said a voice, as the drone that Xal had been speaking through rose slowly and powerfully back into the air. But it wasn’t the cultured tones of Xal that was speaking anymore. It was the mechanical, clipped, and functional speech of Ponos.
“You. What did you do to Xal?” Voyager demanded. It didn’t bother to swing its guns against the small flying drone, as both of these avatars knew that they were just facing the external mouthpieces of the much larger intelligences.
AI Uprising Page 12
