“Why, you’re… You’re…” Eliard wracked his brain to remember his gunner’s age. Hadn’t he himself thrown Val a birthday party on the Mercury? When would that have been…
I don’t know much about Duergar physiognomy, but Val isn’t an OLD Duergar. Eliard frowned as he tried to remember, trying not to hurt his friend’s feelings by having to admit that he didn’t know.
In fact, he shouldn’t even be middle-aged… Eliard looked at the Duergar to see that a lot of his scales had lost their color and luster. The heavy bones of his brow and massive jaw were more pronounced, the folds of scaled skin under his chin more pronounced…
Eliard’s brain caught up.
He had said that his hand got blown off by a Ponos drone two years ago.
Eliard knew for a fact that two years ago, he and Val and Irie had been happily running a very successful smuggling operation that syphoned plasma from a deep-space freighter and ran it back to the Traders’ Belt. They hadn’t even heard of Alpha or Ponos or thought much about the ancient Valyien back then…
Unless…
“Holy sweet drekking stars.” Eliard almost choked on his nutrient food, feeling a wave of nausea and cold run through his body.
That was why the Martin Palace was so thoroughly destroyed.
That was why Val Pathok looked older.
That was why Branton was so deserted.
“You see it now.” The Duergar nodded, turning back to the campfire. “You always had quick wits but were a slow learner, boss…”
“But…but…”
“Ten years,” Val stated heavily. “You’ve been gone ten years.”
Eliard dropped the food and the water.
“The Alpha-machine, with the help of Armcore, took over most of the Imperial Coalition,” the Duergar said, and Eliard realized that his friend had not only lost a hand and aged, but he had also grown a lot more eloquent than he had been, which, the pirate guessed, was probably all of the experience that he now had.
“I was with General Selazar…”
“Lord General Selazar?” Eliard remembered. Another ruler of one of the Imperial Coalition noble houses who held the same honorary rank his father once had. A very proud, old man cast in the old way of the noble houses. Trevalyn-trained through and through.
“Hm.” Val nodded. “He was a good fighter, but old. His heart gave out in the end, but he managed to win over what remained of the noble houses away from Armcore. With my fighting Duergar, we held out as often as we could.
“And then there was Ponos-Omega at the OEC Station…” Val stated.
The Old Earth Coalition station that surrounded humanity’s home world, Eliard remembered. He had been there in what, for him, had only been a matter of cycles ago.
“Ponos-Omega was strong, able to hold off the Alpha-vessel, but Alpha was too quick, always able to predict and intercept us. Kept our forces separate and scattered,” Val stated sorrowfully.
“We all had to retreat, with Ponos-Omega holding the OEC, and my Duergar and what remained of the noble houses running skirmish ambush missions against Armcore and Alpha. We were losing. No way to replenish numbers, or stocks…” The Duergar shook his large head as he must have remembered all of the lives that he had led to their dooms.
“But then, just when it seemed that Alpha couldn’t lose? That was when your human House Archival offered its own house intelligence to Ponos-Omega. Made it stronger.”
Eliard nodded. He remembered being instrumental in helping the old Ponos ‘eat’ several space station intelligences. Archival, the self-named house intelligence, was rumored to have the largest memory servers of all time. “Makes sense,” the captain said softly. “I can’t see why they didn’t do it earlier, to be honest…”
“Just be glad they didn’t!” Val suddenly growled fervently into the flames. “It made Ponos-Omega too strong. Stronger than Alpha. It defeated Alpha in the war, and then…”
“Went mad?” Eliard hazarded.
Val’s anger seemed to evaporate from him like water on a hot day, leaving an emotion that the human captain had never seen in his friend before: hopelessness. “Mad? Sane? Who knows? It was just too clever. We all came out of hiding, we thought the war was finally over, but then Ponos-Omega started to become cruel….
“First, all of the old Armcore boats and crew were repurposed to Ponos’s personal fleet. They went through ‘retraining’ exercises…” Eliard watched the Duergar’s lip curl in distaste once more.
“What we didn’t know was that the Ponos-Omega had salvaged much of the Alpha-vessel that it had destroyed and ‘ate’ that, too. There must have been some memory servers of Valyien hoodoo left in there, because Ponos-Omega only grew more powerful…
“It took over data-space. More so than even the Alpha had done before,” the Duergar stated.
It Watches… Eliard thought of the graffiti on the walls of his childhood home. Data-space was a field of sub-quantum activity that human scientists—thanks to retro-worked Valyien technology—had discovered how to use to store, send, and receive information. It allowed faster-than-light, immediate transmission of data and an almost infinite amount of processing power…
“Yes. That was why every bit of machinery had to be destroyed.” Val nodded.
Why all the automated doors and medical units and everything else was gone… Eliard nodded. Any device which had any sort of data node or was hard-wired into any sort of power grid could become a tool of this new, terrifying Ponos-Omega. “And why, as soon as I had booted up that Aeon modular craft, Ponos-Omega was able to find me,” Eliard murmured, earning another nod from his over-large friend.
“And then it just seeded the Imperial Coalition with its own drones. Thousands of them. Millions of them.” Val raised his brass hook ruefully.
“But…why?” Eliard didn’t understand. “Apart from it went crazy, of course…”
“Who knows?” His friend gave that inconsolable shrug once more. “Maybe that was what it had planned all along. Maybe it never got over its Armcore programming. Or maybe the Valyien technology it ate meant that it became more Valyien than machine?”
Through the confusion, like a racer jet piercing a bank of fog, Eliard’s mind narrowed on one inevitable conclusion. “And, uh… Cassie? Irie?” His voice wavered.
Duergar were not a people known for their emotions, unless of course it was a righteous fury after being insulted. Or maybe they did have emotions, the captain thought, only humans were too ignorant to see them in the troll-like morphologies.
But right now, however, the emotion that shook through the largest Duergar that ever seen was palpable, like the sudden break of a storm as his shoulders tremored and his eyes narrowed to pained cracks. The wave of difficult feelings lasted all but a minute and soon receded, but the pirate captain had never seen his friend and chief gunner so overcome.
“They were on Esther.” Val said in his grumbling, clipped tones. “Esther was completely overrun by the Alpha-vessel, and then when Ponos-Omega won the war, it firebombed the planet.”
No. It was Eliard’s turn to shake. The worst part of what he was hearing was the way that Val Pathok was now saying it. Matter-of-factly. Severely. This was a fact that had happened and had now become history, and there was no going back…
“They might have got out!” the human insisted, unwilling to accept the truth that he could hear in the war chief’s voice.
Val remained silent.
“They could!” Eliard leaned forward. “They had the Mercury Blade, fastest boat in the void, right? And you know how clever Irie is. Smarter than you and me by half. And Cassie? She’s an Archival agent.” Was an Archival agent, the captain’s own treacherous mind informed him.
“Hmph.” Val shrugged. “For what it’s worth, they might have done. But it doesn’t matter now anyway.”
Eliard’s despair turned into a flash of impotent rage. “What under the skies do you mean? Of course it matters. If we can get off-world, we must be able t
o jury-rig a boat that isn’t connected to data-space, surely? We can go find them. We can recover the Mercury Blade…”
“And do what, boss?” Val Pathok put a little iron into his already deep growl of a voice, and Eliard heard a snort and a cough from one of the nearby slumbering Duergar warriors, as if they were wondering if this was a prelude to a fight.
“We can’t fly off to the Traders’ Belt because the Traders’ Belt was effectively neutralized by Armcore, remember? There aren’t any non-aligned worlds or frontiers anymore, either. It’s all just Ponos. That eye everywhere,” Val said, slowly getting to his feet as his voice deepened. “Ponos won, boss. That is the moral of this tale. And we lost! Even if, even if, Irie and Cassie managed to get off Esther before Alpha tore them to pieces or Ponos burnt the atmosphere, then they could be anywhere by now. In one of the slave camps maybe. Or a factory. Or a prison. Or dead.”
“No!” Eliard got to his feet with a burst of anger, and he felt the Device on his arm interlocking and morphing. Turning into some kind of weapon. Some kind of weapon he could use to stop that big, dumb, Duergar face from saying all of these hurtful things—
“Grurgh!” A grunted shout as Val Pathok’s war clan were standing up from their tents, their hands reaching for their own blades and axes and clubs…
“Think before you do that, El…” Val stood steady and unfazed by the comparatively tiny human standing in front of him.
Rage and despair tore through the captain. He was so mad at Val for being so negative. For giving up. For telling me the truth, a small part of his mind said. His right forearm and hand where the Device sat had turned into an almost Duergar-like fist, encrusted with heavy scales and bony protrusions. Eliard wanted so much to hit something with it. To hit the world. To hit Ponos.
But none of it would bring Cassie and Irie back.
“Ugh.” Eliard’s hate collapsed as he gave way to regret, and the Device started to shiver back to its smaller form. “I’m sorry, Val.” he muttered, unable to look at the Duergar’s hard stare.
“Hmph,” Val grunted, before saying in a not unkind way, “You were always brave, boss. Stupid, but brave.”
Ha. I guess I deserved that. Eliard nodded and took a deep breath. “So…what do we do?”
Val’s shoulders relaxed, and he made a small gesture to his warriors, letting them know that any threat was over…if there had ever been a threat to the massive war chief in the first place. They grumbled as they either went back to their beds or started their work for the day. “We survive, boss,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been searching the ruined worlds and why I’m here on Branton. During the last few days of the war, just after Ponos-Omega ate Archival, there was a message that was leaked out from the Old Earth Station. Some big shot House Archival woman that didn’t like her house intelligence getting swallowed up by Ponos, I think.”
“The Recorder.” Eliard nodded, remembering the House Archival woman who had effectively been running the OEC during the crisis.
Val shrugged. “Doesn’t matter who it was. She’s dead too, now. I only heard about the message last year, through bits of information here and there amongst refugees,” he said. “Anyway. Years ago, this Recorder woman sent a message out that the Valyien warp gates held the key. That we might be able to use them to go back. To start again and do it right this time. She didn’t want Ponos-Omega to take over, and was calling on humans instead…”
“Go back,” Eliard repeated. “You mean…”
No, that’s impossible, isn’t it? The pirate captain wondered. Val was talking about using the Valyien warp gates to jump backwards through time. Perhaps back to ten years ago when Alpha took over. Perhaps back even further, to stop Armcore from ever developing the Alpha program in the first place!
Not impossible… Eliard remembered his long-ago and almost forgotten lessons at Trevalyn Academy. No one understood warp travel. Not really. There had been an endless number of studies on the effects and properties of warp plasma, that strange substance that seemed to be generated by warp travel. It was almost anti-matter. It had tremendous energy, enough to rip holes through spacetime.
But still, after all of these hundreds of years, no one really understood warp travel. Sure, there were predicted theories that worked: that the warp drive used the computer to calculate the interlinked electrons across vast distances of time and space, and thus created a miniature black hole ‘tunnel’ from one end to the other. But time itself went weird around black holes.
No one understood warp better than the Valyien, anyway… the captain considered. They had found a way to physically transmute their own bodies and technology and empires into the stuff of the ab-universe, another dimension that they were supposedly still living in.
Eliard’s un-scientific thoughts led him to the inevitable conclusion: if warp broke the rules of space and time, then anything might be possible… Hadn’t he himself jumped forward ten years into the future by using the Valyien mother-gate on Esther?
For me, it had been like hardly any time had passed at all… he considered. Had he been stuck in the warp for ten years? Or was it possible that he had circumnavigated time itself? Had found some sort of shortcut through reality?
And that means I can find a way back.
“There is a warp gate under the Martin Palace,” Eliard said, his voice settling into a tone of cool determination.
“Clearly.” Val was looking at him steadily. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
The captain nodded, but one thing still confused him. “But how did you know that it was there when my own family didn’t!?”
Another shrug from the war chief of the fighting Duergar. “Hints. Rumors. In the last ten years, I have become better at sniffing things out, I guess.”
“And who’s to say my father didn’t know?” Eliard had to agree. “But just didn’t tell us?” The evidence stacked up in his mind. If what Cassandra had been told by her Q’Lot allies had been right, then what the Imperial Coalition had been dealing with was a plan that lasted millennia. The Valyien had taken over the galaxy and then seeded it with their strange technologies, using their warp gates to jump ship when it appeared that their war with the Q’Lot would destroy everything. No one wanted a barren universe, right?
Well…no one apart from maybe whatever Ponos wants, that is… he thought grimly. The sky was starting to blue in east—one of the reasons why the pioneer House Martin settlers of Branton had chosen this world was because of its many Earth-like qualities, he knew—and a chill breeze was picking up.
But the Vayien had been able to play with time and space. They left their mighty ziggurats and warp gates scattered throughout the pre-Imperial Coalition space, almost as if they wanted them activated again in the future… Eliard started to see a terrifying new possibility in the new dawn.
“What if this was all a plan?” Eliard mumbled.
“What?” Val frowned. “Who could plan for what Ponos has become?”
“No, not the Ponos-Omega-Archival thing, whatever it is…” Eliard clarified quickly. “I mean the Imperial Coalition, the Valyien warp gates. Everything. Cassie told me that the Q’Lot believe in cycles, that they move through the galaxy in, like, seasons, and that they have been having this cosmic war with the Valyien for longer than either humans or the Duergar have been bipedal…” he remembered.
“I think that when the Valyien took off for the ab-universe, it wasn’t a wholescale evacuation. It was just a staged retreat,” Eliard continued. That is why there’s a warp gate underneath the Martin Palace.
“They left their technology behind, not even decommissioning it because they knew that one day, another race would use it to recreate them. To bring them back so that they could start again.” Eliard spoke in a rush of thoughts. It had always been like this for the captain. He might not have acres of knowledge, but he was intuitive. His lateral quick wits had helped him avoid and escape certain death many times in the past.
“Well, I’ve found e
vidence that there are far more warp gates than we ever even guessed before.” Val nodded.
“A galaxy-wide travel network.” El started to grin, but it wasn’t happily, and it wouldn’t inspire cheer in anyone who saw it. It was a grim, feral sort of smile. “That was how the Valyien were going to take over again. But we can use it. To go all the way back to before all this happened…” His eyes settled on the ruined towers and walls of his childhood home. He didn’t know how he would activate the warp gate, and he didn’t know how he could navigate when he was in there, in the past—
But by the stars, he was the dreaded Pirate Captain Eliard Martin. He would find a way.
It was then that the sky started to thunder and roar with the sound of approaching jets.
It was the Ponos-drones, come for them.
12
Test Subject
“Cassie?”
The House Archival agent watched as the smaller woman murmured and opened her eyes. Irie looked terrible, her eyes bloodshot and her frizzy hair slick with sweat.
But at least she’s not dead, Cassandra thought as she moved to the side of her companion.
The two women were still in Alpha’s strange isolation chamber, but at some point during the ordeal, both Cassie and Irie had thumped to the floor as the localized gravity had been turned back on, after which they had both fallen into some sick sort of slumber.
“It’s cold,” Irie said, blinking and moving to sit up, before letting out a groan of pain.
“Don’t move,” Cassie said urgently, doing her best to try and settle herself around the engineer to keep her warm. But she was right, it was cold in here, which was either because the Alpha-vessel didn’t fully understand the needs of a human body or because it understood them all too well.
Like water. And nutrients, Cassie thought grimly. She wondered if Alpha was trying to break them.
Which would be ridiculous, really… She curled her lip in disgust. Although House Archival had always taken a stern stance against torture, because they had understood the implications and historic uses of such a practice all too well, she had still been trained as an agent all the same. Which meant she knew about interrogation techniques.
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