“I’m too old to be starting out again,” he muttered to himself, rubbing a hand through his short-cut hair. It was longer than his usual buzz-cut now, and he hated it. He hated pretty much everything about his new position as the captain of this dissolute, lowest-of-the-low Armcore vessel. He hated that he had lost his pips and his medals when Senior Dane Tomas had demoted him. He hated the fact that he now wore regulation blue encounter suit, not the blacks and reds that he had been used to as a general.
But still, Farlow wasn’t the sort of man to take a challenge lying down. There was a feathering of white scars across his right temple from a Duergar War Claw that he had received back in the border wars. His left leg had a knot of scar tissue on one side of the knee as large as his palm, when he had to disable a rogue mecha bandit. The general was a veteran of a hundred skirmishes and at least a couple major conflicts. He might not have destroyed colonies or irradiated planets like the senior’s younger cohort of generals bragged about, but amongst the older echelon of Armcore, he had garnered a reputation for himself as a good fighter.
Not daring enough, he thought dryly, remembering the phrase that would often repeat on his report cards. That was why he had been the one tasked to find the Mercury Blade, he knew. That little worm Dane Tomas, Jr. had had it in for him ever since he had succeeded as commander-in-chief from the old man. Dane Tomas was not commander material. Farlow wondered if Dane even remembered how to throw a punch.
For a second, the man who had once been a general glared at his reflection in the mirror, willing the hate he felt burning a hole through his heart to warp-jump several thousand light-years away and strike the senior down.
But then his eyes alighted on his Armcore badge, the stylized ‘A’ with a star piercing through it. It was the same brass insignia that had been first clipped onto his uniform some forty-eight years ago—tarnished and losing its pristine edges from the years of use, but still gleaming as bright now as the day that he had first put it on.
The problem with a man like Captain, once-General, Farlow was this: he was a traditionalist. He felt a surge of shame at his errant hatred toward the CEO and stuffed his bitter feelings down in the dark places of his heart that he never ventured. He might allow himself to internally criticize the current commander-in-chief and CEO, but he would never act on it. An old dog like Farlow knew that an army ran on order, and it ran on discipline. As much as he might hate it, he was a cog in a well-oiled machine, and a senior like Dane Tomas was the lynchpin in the center. Armcore must have had terrible seniors before, but the machine had carried on. From his long experience training the younger recruits, he knew that one bad egg could spoil a bunch, but he also knew that the bunch would soon regulate that bad egg in turn. Dane would find out that he needed the old Armcore cohort for his company to run. Armcore was a bigger project than just him. The machine would continue to run.
The once-General wondered if he should have been harsher on the younger Dane back when he had passed through his training center. Had he been too soft on the son and next-in-line to the Armcore throne?
We all need discipline, he told himself. At that, he pooled some water in his hands and washed his hands, then patted his hair back into position. And speaking of which…
When he returned to the main crew area, he saw the pilot that he had been forced to knock on his ass was now back in the pilot’s chair and holding a gel pack to the side of his face. The man’s name was Reus, and he was one of the three-personnel team that had come with the clipper. An Armcore gunner named Claire Lupik, and a specialist named Merik, both of whom were still inside the main cargo hold-become-mess hall.
“Sir.” Claire stood and saluted as soon as the captain walked into the room. She was a fine-looking marine, tall and broad-shouldered with shaved hair apart from one braid down the back. Even though she was half his age, she was the kind of woman that he would have gone for, back when he had time to consider such matters.
“Sir.” Specialist Merik was a fraction slower, his movements much more languorous, graceful. It was a mark of disrespect to not be prompt, of course, but Farlow sensed something in this one that was dangerous. He was a small man dressed in the dark robes of a specialist, with covering over the top of his head, revealing just a sharp nose, tanned skin, and two gleaming eyes. Farlow decided that he wasn’t going to pull the man up on his almost-insubordination, not yet. In truth, the captain wasn’t entirely sure how much authority he had over the specialist, since they generally operated under their own orders from senior management.
“At ease, Soldiers.” He nodded to them, before turning to Reus.
“Captain-sir.” Reus nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on the consoles ahead.
Good. You know now not to mess with me, and that this old dog can still bite. “How close are we, Pilot?” Farlow said in his deadpan voice. The pilot’s actions were already in the past. Not forgotten, but dealt with for now.
“Just a few clicks, Captain-sir,” the pilot said, wincing through the pain. “I’ll put it on the overheads.”
“You do that, Reus.”
On the large screen over the entrance to the cockpit there flickered an image of outside the vessel. A sea of blocky objects many times larger than the clipper-scout vessel, slowly spinning on their axes. Trash containers. As large as a residential block, with reinforced hulls and spray-burned numbers and shipping details. They formed a web of metal around the object in their center.
Sebopol. The captain could just see it as a dull shape behind its spider-web of refuse. A planetoid that gleamed and darkened at odd moments, doubtless because of all the metal trash littered across its surface.
“Scans?” Farlow ordered.
“Uh, we haven’t got a clear reading of the surface, Captain-sir.” Reus flinched as he said so. “It’s this trash field out here. It’s interfering with our scanners.”
“Hmm.” Just what the thing wanted, no doubt, Farlow thought. Any thought that Alpha hadn’t done this on purpose flew from his mind. It’s digging itself in, he thought. Preparing for a siege?
“What does the database say about the world?” he snapped, and Reus rattled off the facts and observations about Sebopol that were listed in the Armcore servers.
“Designated trash-world, accepting some eight thousand tons of material every day, thin atmosphere, carbon-heavy, unbreathable to humans. Atmosphere has changed over the last twenty years to be methane-heavy, and yearly scans indicate high amounts of radiation and heavy metal particulates across the surface. Sebopol is rated a High Danger for biological life and is quarantined from anyone other than official refuse staff.”
“And are there any staff down there?” the captain asked.
“One. Just says here Worker Three-Two-Seven. No name or rank,” Reus said. “They should be on a long-term, six-month contract at the planetary station there.”
Alpha probably killed him, the Captain once-General thought. “Can we hail this Worker Three-Two-Seven?”
Reus turned to the task as Farlow studied the map. These containers would be hazardous to fly through, but he knew that this clipper-scout could do it. But that would mean they would be going in blind, without scanning data.
“I can’t reach him, Captain-sir. Our signals just keep bouncing off of the orbiting containers,” Reus said dejectedly, probably thinking that the captain was going to hit him again. But I won’t. I’m not cruel like the senior. I just believe in discipline.
“How many drones do we have on board?” he snapped to his crew.
“Three, sir,” Specialist Merik answered, joining him to look up at the screen. He spoke as if he was of equal rank to the captain. Overly familiar. Farlow’s lip curled in distaste. “Unfortunately, they are rather standard ones. Search and surveillance drones, X3 types.”
“Fine. Send them out. I want them to scout the surface for activity. Try to hail this Worker Three-Two-Seven, before reporting back. Got that?”
“As you wish, sir.” The specialist slipped to
one side of the room, where a console folded discretely out of the wall and Specialist Merik’s fingers glided across the keys. There was a slight shudder as three sleek, torpedo-shaped X3 drones were ejected into space. On the large screens above, Farlow watched them trace out from their boat, before their own rockets fired and they turned in divergent arcs toward the net of orbiting trash. In a moment, they were gone.
“Signal cut,” Specialist Merik said, faintly happily, the captain thought. “But I’ve programmed them to do as you suggested and loop back. It won’t take long for them to circumnavigate the planetoid.”
“Good.” Farlow turned his attention to the only other crew member here, Gunner Lupik. “I want you suited up and ready to deploy, with me, at my command, Soldier,” he said. She was the only one that he trusted to have his back on an away mission here. Lupik saluted, and the pair moved to the side of the room where the larger carapace armor was stored, with magnetic clamps that held it together and displacers that allowed them to carry the much larger guns that he intended to carry with him.
“Sir?” whispered Specialist Merik behind him. “Are you planning on actually setting foot on the surface?” he dared to ask, incredulously.
“Excuse me, Specialist?” Farlow turned to say as he fitted the heavy shoulder pads on and shuffled so that their internal padding gelled and molded to his own frame. Ah. It’s good to be inside one of these again, he thought.
“Well, the mission parameters are to scout and report back, sir. Not make direct contact with…” The Specialist’s eyes glittered.
He knows, Farlow realized. This man knows what we’re doing here. Neither Lupik or Reus had shown any sign whatsoever of knowing that they were on the trail of a highly developed, experimental AI, one that had been designed to be the thinking mind of Armcore.
“Contact? Are we expecting un-friendlies, Captain-sir?” Reus turned to ask, his eyes wide.
That insolent boy has probably never been in combat before, Farlow thought. “Eyes back to your job, Pilot!” Farlowe snapped at him, earning a panicked look as Reus did as he was told. The side of his face was bruising up nicely.
“I like to have firsthand information to put into my reports, Specialist,” Farlow growled at the specialist. “Have you got a problem with that?”
“No, sir.” The specialist turned back to his console smartly.
Wise-ass, the captain thought, hitting his carapace controls so that it cinched tighter, and a line of alarms and alerts flared on the collar. Green lights for oxygen, gravity, full battery cell, ammo clips. No red lights, yet. He turned to heft his heavy rifle and his battle sword, and saw that Gunner Lupik was doing the same, but that there was a note of wariness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. He would tell her, as she was a real soldier, one who was prepared for danger.
“We will need to be prepared for any eventuality, combat or strategic,” he said sternly. “Although I have to tell you that there are no mission projections for what we are going into.” Which was a polite way of saying that absolutely anything could happen.
“Yes, Captain-sir.” Lupik took it well, and added another belt of small grenades to her carapace.
That’s what I like to see, Farlow thought. “Any news on those X3s?” he barked. “Shouldn’t they be back by now?”
“No telemetry received, sir.” Merik was leaning over his console. “But there is a disturbance half a click away. Rocket signal…”
“On the overheads, now!” The captain moved to see the curve of the trash-field, and then a sudden closeup when a plume of sparks and gases burst out from behind one of the containers as a very small shape hurtled out into space. It was one of the drones, flying erratically.
“She’s home, sir.”
“Download the material in her memory banks and bring her in to dock.” The captain thought quickly. If only one had made it back, then that meant that the other two had met with resistance of some kind. He needed to know what it was they would be facing down there.
“Downloading from drone three… The data is pretty heavily damaged, but we have some video files and scan reports,” the captain heard the specialist say as the drone slid back toward them on an awkward path, making for its original deployment hub. With any luck, they would be able to salvage more and send it off for tests at Armcore Prime.
On the screens above, the map image flickered and was replaced by the data from the third drone.
The third drone peeled away from its brethren, arcing toward the entry point into the trash-field. The large blocks of the container walls loomed in front of it, like an impossible cityscape of floating buildings. In a heartbeat, it entered this new domain, its sensors pinging off the nearest obstacles as its on-board computers recalibrated its path and fired its positional rockets accordingly.
Nearest Objects: 1
Dimensions: 80m X 160m
Metal Composition: Poly-steel 92% Graphene 6% Rubber 2%
Sonar Results: 17% space. Metal compounds make up rest.
Systems Reading: Active. Tracking computer. Propulsion systems.
The drone was surrounded by floating castles filled with metal rubbish. It diverted its flight to pass by the first and into a zone much more densely populated. Its preliminary readings reported the same thing, time and again. More containers. More metal. No movement other than slight axial and gravitational drift.
Alert! Telemetry lost with mothership!
Alert! Telemetry lost with X3 drone 1 and 2!
But the third search and surveillance drone did not slow down or halt its procedure. Backup routines that had been pre-programmed into its small body kicked in, overriding any abort commands or alarm signals, and instead told it to carry on with its mission. Reach the planetoid of Sebopol, conduct an orbital pass, sweeping the body of the planet for all available information.
The small robot swerved to one side, out of the way of a slowly tilting trash container, and silently turned through a gap in the next layer, never finding anything different in its readings. Its scans pinged off the nearest metals and rebounded back to itself, but it could not reach any further. Of what it was racing toward, there was no warning or sign.
Another tight aerial turn, and the small body avoided being crushed and was suddenly clear of the shell of fragmentary metal around Sebopol. From its angle, it looked like it was piercing down toward a dark world.
Alert! Connection established with X3 drones 1 and 2!
Off to one side, the other two bodies of the surveillance drones broke through from their own shells and speared down in unison with their sibling.
But they were not alone.
The world ahead was dull ochre, bronze red, and black with swathes of dusty white where there were still some dust-plains yet to be filled with humanity’s rubbish. In other parts, all that could be seen were plains of jagged bronze and steel, black and grey. A miasma of thin opalescence enshrouded the planet, as its thin atmosphere reacted with the decades of elements cast at its surface. It was a Vulcanic, Promethean world in the making. A world slowly being transformed into a metal ecosystem, fit only for machine life.
All of this information was registered by the X3 drone in a matter of nanoseconds, but their collective course was already shifting away from their original target and to what was firing their alerts in rapid succession.
Alert! Movement detected at grid reference…
Alert! Propulsion systems active…
Alert! Unknown scanning systems detected…
In the space over the planet, the X3 drones were witness to a sight that no other living or mechanical creature had ever seen. It was like watching the universe give birth to a god…or was it what it would be like if a god had decided to torment its creation?
Gouts of flaming gases were vented with precision into the near-orbital space between the trash shell and Sebopol. Strange purple and white static energies were playing over monstrous forms. Shapes like metal arms, hooks, and grapples convulsed and churned against ea
ch other, locked in a thumping, mechanistic embrace.
The drones had nothing in their limited databanks to describe what this was. An industrial process? A space station? A warp engine malfunction?
From portholes and docking ramps, new chains of metal emerged, flailing in the air as if tasting the vacuum for the first time. Clouds of other, smaller drones like the X3s swarmed them, picked them clean of scraps and finished them. And still the floating monstrosity convulsed and ground its heavy gears. Large shells of metal, cast in curves and dressed in iridescent patterns never before seen in human manufacturing, locked and closed over this intimate display of industrial organs. Bursts of flame and energy played roughly throughout its own exoskeleton.
The third drone was collecting data on this new creature. It had engines, but they were not of a type known to the drone’s database. It had fins, so it could fly. The power signature that it was radiating was of a magnitude a hundred times larger than the clipper-scout that the drone had come from. Enough power to run a small space station. Enough to power a battle group of Armcore vessels.
But then a wave of data-signals swept over each drone, simultaneously smelling them, tasting them, assessing them for what they were.
Alert! Invasive protocol! Firewall breached! Security protocols activated!
The immense computer intelligence swept over the drones’ infantile code-defenses with ease, disabling them and reprogramming their computers—all but one.
The third drone somehow, miraculously, managed to fend off this attack by reiterating its fundamental programming. Get data. Return to hub. It had made the calculation that its mission was over, and it was already turning and firing its rockets erratically.
Maybe the strange god-machine was already too busy with its birthing procedure to fully devote its attention to the task, or maybe drone 3 was just lucky. Whatever the reason was, the third drone careened off the nearest orbital container, damaging its thin body as it spiraled into the shell of metal. Behind it, its last scans revealed that its two siblings had hung motionless for a moment, before slowly speeding toward their new father, the alien machine god, and they radiated completely different signals than any X3 should be capable of.
Valyien Boxed Set 1 Page 16
