“Give more than you get.” It was a simple phrase, and Captain Farlow had had it drilled into himself as well as drilled it into generations of recruits underneath him. That was the entire secret to a successful life in Armcore. Give more than you get. Give more loyalty and service to the company than you expect to receive, and you will be rewarded. Give your brothers and sisters in arms more than they expect in terms of service and bravery and support, and you will forge links of steel that will protect you through any adversity. And last of all, when in battle, give the enemy more hell than you are given. If you can do that, then you will win. That is all that you have to do. Give more than you get.
As Alpha’s ship dominated the tiny human’s view, Captain Farlow found his willpower wavering just slightly. It was a maxim that he had believed all his adult life, but where had it gotten him?
Twenty seconds left, and then he would have to turn around and high-tail it out of here if he was to make it back to the ship in time to escape.
He had given every enemy that he’d ever faced more hell than they had given him. He had risen through the ranks because of it, but now, where was he? He had given his colleagues, his brother and sister soldiers, more than he got. Even accepting this dangerous mission on their behalf. And where was he now? Could he guarantee that Merik wouldn’t endanger Lupik and Reus without him there?
Captain Farlow had given Armcore everything. More than it had ever given him, and for that, he had been demoted. Almost as low as he could go. Four-star general all the way to a captain-without-license on a tiny frontier mission, with a crew that could only barely function as a unit. How was that being rewarded?
His jaw tightened slightly as the blue-green walls rushed up toward him. He saw movement. There, along one of the golden-edge seams of shell, moved an object, and another, and another. Small drones glided with rounded backs, firing tiny positional rockets, and with dangling mechanoid legs. Were they coming for him?
No, he appeared to be safe, but watched as they settled along the edge of the shell and seemed to anchor themselves to it. Are they sensors? Mobile armor plating? he wondered in awe, turning his attention back to the nearest wall that he was heading for.
Ten seconds.
Suddenly, something was different about the wall and the seam in the metalloid shell that he was heading for. Had it changed color? Was it moving?
It was moving.
What he had thought was just refracting colors was actually shifting plates, as the shell directly before him started to crack and open outwards, welcoming him—
“No!” He reached for the warp core, just as a fiercely bright light, brighter than any sun, dazzled and blinded him. “Argh!” Even forcing his eyes shut, it was still blinding. He shook his head and thumped his heavy gauntlets down to the primed warp device on his chest. He tried to detach it, even though the light was driving into his brain, hurting him, making his head throb. He couldn’t see anything that he was doing as he fumbled. I’ll have to set off the device now, and here. He tried to recall where he had put the transmitter. Attached to my utility belt.
But when he reached for it, it was gone. Where was it? What happened? He couldn’t see anything as he reached for his other hip, but his glove hit something else. Something that shouldn’t be there.
It was one of the scuttling drones. It was on his suit, and he hadn’t felt it. What was it doing? He tried to bat it off, but it was stubbornly attached and wouldn’t move at all.
This time, he did feel the other thing that landed on his flailing arm. And the others congregating on his legs. They were all over him. The robot drone-like things. What were they doing? He was being pushed and pulled, drawn somewhere—
The brilliant, dazzling light washed over him like an embrace, and suddenly the light changed, became muted. He was inside the thing, he was sure of it.
“Captain Farlow,” a mechanical voice greeted him.
13
Cornered
It was hard work, shuffling on hands and feet through the tunnels of Armcore Prime. It was also made harder by the fact that El was trying to keep his blaster pointed ahead as well as shuffle awkwardly in his encounter suit. So far, they had seen nothing more dangerous than a colony of space weevils, which had slithered their chitinous-like bodies away in fluid motion as soon as they had turned the corner.
They were following the Archival schematics that resided in Cassandra’s wrist computer, taking obscure turns at intersections that seemed to make no sense to the captain, but he presumed that she was following some sort of pattern already planned out by the House Archival analysts. I just hope that they are as clever as everyone says they are… He gritted his teeth. The captain’s knees hurt, his back hurt, and he would have given anything to be able to stand up and stretch out. He spared a thought for the poor Duergar bringing up the rear behind them. Val must be scraping the walls on either side of them with his massive frame.
“Cass, we’ve been crawling for ages. How far are we from the mainframe now?” he snapped.
“Not far, I promise. We’re almost above the server vents,” the agent’s voice echoed behind him.
“‘Server vents. That sounds just exhilarating,” El mumbled, before his grumbles were cut off by the sudden flash of a red light. “Oh, crap.”
“What is it?” Cassandra asked.
“Uh… I think we’re going to have company very soon,” El paused, transfixed by a little red blinking light just over his head. A second ago, there had been nothing there, but as soon as he had crossed its path, it had started flashing wildly. Internal sensors.
“Change of plan. We get to the nearest hatchway and lose ourselves in the station.” The captain looked ahead. The tunnel seemed to branch into a T-junction up ahead. There had to be a way out of up there.
“What? But the place is crawling with soldiers!”
“That was an internal sensor! They’ll know that we’re here!” he said, all previous pains and aches forgotten as he started to crawl with ever more dedication.
It was already too late, as from behind them he could hear something humming closer. “Val? What is it?” The captain couldn’t see what it was. He couldn’t get to it.
“A light coming… Drone!” the Duergar grumbled, and they could hear him heaving one way and another as he tried to get a look at what was approaching.
“Move it!” El hissed, moving faster—
—as a red warning light flared to life at the end of the T-junction, and a sleek, hovering torpedo-shaped body floated into view. It was made of a shiny black metal, and the red sweeping light flashed into El’s eyes, blinding him for a moment as he raised his blaster pistol. The thing had extended a fringe of small mechanical arms around its nosecone, each one whirring with buzzing blades.
FZAP! El fired, and he saw the thing recoil and shake, but it was still moving forward, the blade-like attachments on its arms starting to whirr and whine. It had an ugly burn of metal along its nose where his laser had hit.
F-THOOOM! There was a dull boom that shook the corridor from behind them as Val fired his heavy rifle.
El fired again as the drone lunged closer. This time, he managed to shear off two of the arms in a flower of sparks. The thing wasn’t dying, though, and continued to advance, now only a couple of meters away.
“Captain! Down!” Val was roaring, and El knew instinctively what his man was intending to do. He hit the deck as one of the drone’s blades hissed past his descending face, just as the whole world lit up a dizzying purple-white.
F-THOOOM! Val fired his heavy rifle at the approaching drone, and it was impossible that he could miss it. It was thrown back with an electronic squeal of dying components, and the wall of flame that was produced swept over the captain and Cassandra’s prone bodies.
“Argh.” El coughed, managing to turn over onto his back when the smoke had cleared. His encounter suit was scorched, and his ragged hair was singed and wild-looking. “While I’m thankful you did that,” he groaned
, “I can’t say that it was the best experience I have ever had…”
“Better burned than dead,” Val grumbled, patting the dust and soot from his own clothes.
But now there were other problems. The way ahead was blocked by the smoldering wreckage of the drone. “I can move the one behind us,” Val growled, crabbing back to where he had dispatched the previously deadly machine. He shoved it with his boot until he had kicked it into a side passage. “Here.” The Duergar disappeared down one tunnel fork, and Cassandra and El followed him, to see that he was hovering over a square hatch.
“Where does this go?” El whispered, his ears still ringing from the explosion.
“I don’t know,” Cassandra said in horror, raising her wrist to show him the schematics that House Archival had sent them. There was nothing there—one of the blank voids in the prints. “This is one of the areas that House Archival couldn’t get any details on. Look here. It just says ‘R and D’.”
No wonder Archival couldn’t pull the secrets out of Armcore Research and Development, El thought. That would probably be one of the most highly-protected secrets that the entire organization had.
“We haven’t got a choice. It’s either through there or wait for the next load of Mr. Slice-and-Dice drones to come find us,” he said, then lowered his blaster to the square hatch and fired.
Val jumped down into the room first, landing in a crouch and raising the impossibly large rifle to cover the space. Eliard had hoped that the sudden appearance of a very large, very angry Duergar would give most humans a pause for thought.
As it turned out, there weren’t any Armcore staff or soldiers in the room directly below them anyway.
“Clear,” Val growled. Eliard jumped down after him, then Cassandra. They found themselves in a pristine white and chrome room, with a glass wall covering one side and a few glass doors leading out.
“It’s some kind of laboratory,” El stated.
“Or a museum,” Cassandra corrected, nodding to the nearest of the glass cabinets that sat here and there. Each one contained an object that was both familiar and strange. The nearest looked to be some kind of weapon—it had a handle and a trigger mounted under its body—but that body didn’t even look like metal. It looked like the cerulean chitin of some strange sea creature, formed into a flaring tube. As Cassandra walked nearer to it, she saw that the wide ‘mouth’ or ‘barrel’ of the thing was frilled with red and pink fronds like lichen or corral, and she was sure that she saw them sway gently.
“What is this stuff?” Eliard asked, in both vague awe and disgust. He had turned to look at what was undoubtedly a visor, but it had no apparent glass or crystal mask. Its fluting sides reminded him of an ancient earth helmet. Again, it was made out of the same coruscated, chitinous material, but this time, a burnished brass and verdigris, like a seashell.
“I know this filth, or something very like it, anyway,” Val muttered in disgust. “Q’Lot.”
“Q’Lot?” El stammered. They were a myth, weren’t they? He had heard the stories, of course. All space pirates and smugglers spread stories of the fantastical and strange sights that they had seen out there on the edges of Coalition space. Of worlds made entirely of crystal. Of stellar gases that seemed to palpate and follow an intruder, filling the crew with strange nightmares and visions until they fled back to safer regions of space.
But the Q’Lot deserved their own special category of space legend. That there was an intelligent race out there, who moved on ships of gleaming, crystalline-corral, emitting an eerie singing that could drive hardened sailors mad.
Ridiculous, clearly, El had always thought. He was a man who was used to hard facts. He trusted his blaster, he trusted his eye and his judgement, and he trusted his ship. The legends of the Q’Lot had grown over the centuries, changing from deep-space sightings to kidnappings and disappearances. Eventually, the Q’Lot were blamed and judged complicit for every strange abandonment of outpost colonies or disappearance of a deep-space trawler. Scouting vessels into regions of space that they were rumored to inhabit never returned, or returned empty at least.
But space is dangerous, the captain had always reasoned. Especially deep space. The further the Coalition pushed itself into the unexplored universe, the more it found things that defied its previous models of thought. Mega-suns that shouldn’t be able to exist without going supernova. Nebulae fields made of strange and noble gases that the best Coalition scientists had never dreamed possible. Double and triple wormhole systems, locked in endless cannibalism. Anything could happen to a deep-space scout or trawler, from mutiny to madness, to virus or malfunction.
Or at least, that was what the captain had always thought.
“Are you telling me now that you believe in the Q’Lot?” Eliard shook his head as he walked around the room. Another exhibit just had a selection of small puffball-like globules, gently floating in their container. Orange, pale cream and white, and dotted with nubby extrusions.
“I’m telling you that the Duergar know about the Q’Lot,” Val said dryly. “You know that we were an uplifted race by the Valyien.”
“Ah yes, another ancient mystery.” Eliard rolled his eyes. “Use one to explain the other, right?” Eliard did, of course, believe in the Valyien. There were any number of sacred sites that he had been to, and could return to, to see their ruins. Vast pyramids and ziggurats, odd monoliths of seemingly random worlds and moons. It was from this race that humanity had salvaged most of their greatest achievements, after all. And then there was Alpha.
“The Valyien raised the Duergar from our humble beginnings to be slaves, and to be warriors,” Val said emphatically. “To fight the Q’Lot.”
“Why doesn’t everyone know this, then?” Eliard asked stubbornly. It wasn’t like the Duergar were an unknown race. There were plenty of mercenaries like Val Pathok in Coalition space.
“Maybe because our ancestors’ time in slavery is a great source of shame for us,” Val said. “And besides which, we were not allowed to record our histories back then. What we know is passed down from storyteller to storyteller.”
“Right…” Eliard turned to look at something like a glove, only it was molded like a massive crab’s claw and dotted with strange organic sensors like eyes.
“The Valyien were in a cosmic war against the Q’Lot, and I guess that the Q’Lot won, because the Valyien are now dead,” Val announced.
“But I thought you Duergar overthrew your masters?” El asked doubtfully, tapping the glass of the crab-claw. Did one of the sensor-eyes move?
“We did,” Val said with a glimmer of apparent happiness. “The Valyien were on their last legs from the war, and then they fled known space.”
“Outstanding. So, this is all Q’Lot technology, is it? That Armcore has been hiding from everyone for the past few hundred years? Is that what you are suggesting?”
“I don’t know. I am saying this is like the Q’Lot. The stories of my people tell of them moving like sea creatures and wearing shells like land crabs that cannot be broken with axe or mace,” Val recounted.
“Wow. You never thought to just use a blaster?” El said, before Cassandra hissed at them.
“Boys! Quit it, we’ve got company!” She ducked behind a very large plate of chitin that could have been a shield, or a type of clothing for all Eliard knew, just as there was a flash of red light turning to green in the room beyond the glass wall.
“Great.” Eliard rolled across the floor, and Val crouched as low as he could underneath the crab claw.
“Intruders! They must be here somewhere!” Eliard heard the shout of an Armcore captain. From his crouch, he could see a team of heavily armed soldiers with bulky armor rushing into the laboratory on the other side, their own rifles raised as they scanned the ceilings.
The ceiling which we just blasted a hole through. El’s eyes flicked to the still-dangling hatchway. Could he get to it in time before…
“Look, over there!”
No.
/> “Command override, laboratory Zed-four,” the captain shouted and the glass door hissed open, just as both Cassandra and Val moved.
The Archival agent had been flattened against the wall beside the door, and now she swung out to deliver an elbow to the face of the captain, and Eliard winced as he heard the audible crack. The man fell back on his fellows as Gunner Pathok let rip with his heavy rifle against the glass wall.
F-THAP! F-THAP! F-THAP! The Duergar must have set it to repeating shot rather than cannon shot as he had used against the drones, and he swept his inhumanly large rifle in an arc against the opposing room. The glass shattered in an instant, turning white with cracks and exploding outwards with purple flames. The sound of glass bottles smashing and computers exploding could be heard as Eliard gracefully swept to his feet, raising his blaster.
But it seemed that the Armcore soldiers—those that had survived, anyway—had jumped, rolled, and fallen back to the doorway, out into the corridor, as Val laid down covering fire.
We can’t get trapped in here. The captain ducked from the traded shots with the soldiers, seeing a distant glass door that led to the warren of laboratories on the other side. “Come on!” he shouted, blasting the door into smithereens as he ran, covering the room on the far side into another empty laboratory, waiting for Cassandra to run through.
“Val!” he hissed, as the Duergar snarled at his enemy. He started to stalk backwards, firing as he went.
“Here.” At the last moment, Val ripped one of his improvised, home-made ‘flash-bangs’ and hurled it at the Armcore guards, before turning and running with the captain, following hot on his heels. They felt the explosion even two rooms away as they knocked over laboratory tables and spilled equipment in their desperate escape.
Valyien Boxed Set 1 Page 20
