A House United

by Caleb Wachter

  “First they’ll probe our defenses with the Destroyers,” she thought aloud, “and when they think they’ve gotten a handle on our capability, they’ll put most of their ships in tight formation behind their heavies while leaving a pack of well-positioned Destroyers to hunt us down if we get lucky and miss the main fleet.”

  “Do you think they know where all the torpedo launchers are by now?” Tremblay asked.

  “They must have sniffed out a few by now,” McKnight mused, “but I’d be surprised if they logged more than half of them—and we can probably still get a shot off from the ones they located before they neutralize them.”

  “Can we still burn a hole past them if they come in directly over the landing platform?”

  McKnight shook her head, “Random probability suggests we’ve got an eleven percent chance they’ll take a direct approach to the landing platform. If they do that, the odds are less than one in thirty that we can flee aboard the Mode before we get scraped out of the sky. If they take any other vector, we’re looking at a two-in-three chance of making the hyper limit.”

  “We should know their approach vector soon enough,” Tremblay remarked with a shrug.

  “Let’s just hope our people below can finish up on time,” she said as the Imperial warships began to accelerate toward the base. “Otherwise that data god won’t be the only thing dying on this moon.”

  Chapter XXIX: A Voice of Thunder

  “Final layer half-extracted,” Jarrett reported tensely as Archie’s innermost protective shell slowly unwound. The gravitational forces being exerted upon the shell were so great that, at times, Tiberius allowed himself to think that light itself was being bent at the core of the Key chamber.

  He knew that was impossible, of course, but he was unable to keep his rational mind from straying down such ominous paths as the epic undertaking neared its final stage.

  “How’s your recording gear, Guo?” Spalding asked as he observed the Key’s power draw had stuck at ninety four percent of maximum—and that was with all of the backups engaged and pumping out as much juice as they could.

  “Minor fluctuations in peripheral sensors only,” Guo replied. “We have maintained an unbroken data stream on all thirteen recording suites since the operation’s commencement.”

  Spalding was less concerned with the sensor feeds than he was with the actual task of putting the Elder Module in direct contact with the Core Fragment, so he focused on what he hoped were the final round of inspections on the ultra-simplistic platform which he had created for that very purpose.

  Measuring just over a meter long and half as wide, with the general shape of a hexagonal column laid on its side, the ‘car’ as he had come to call it looked to be ready. Mounted on its front was the Elder Module—which still resembled a thick, bent, roughly bow-shaped device with no string. There were no anti-grav drivers or maneuvering thrusters of any kind on the car itself; only a small, gas thruster mounted on the car’s stern would provide it with thrust—and even that would only last for about two seconds.

  The car was securely bolted to the platform’s rail, where it awaited its hopefully-imminent deployment, so Tiberius went back to his station to confirm that all was proceeding apace. The power draws looked consistent with what their revised predictions had suggested, and while they were running nearly at the system’s capacity he saw nothing to suggest they would be unable to complete the process.

  Then, like a cornered Marine, Archie fought back—with a vengeance.

  A handful of nearby grav-plates exploded simultaneously, sending their fragments flying inward to the Key’s core as the coordinated forces of the gravity plates tore them to shreds even before they reached Archie’s shell.

  “Massive gravitational fluctuations!” Shiyuan cried. “Emergency lockdown in effect!”

  Like the Demon’s own smoldering eye, the glowing Core Fragment seemed to glare directly at Tiberius as it somehow wrestled with the titanic gravitational forces which—at least temporarily—it fought to a draw.

  “Power draw at 110%!” Penelope cried as another handful of grav-plates were crumpled and torn from their moorings.

  “Override the emergency shutdowns!” Spalding yelled as he ran through his station’s display screens as fast as he dared. Something inside of the Core Fragment appeared to be manipulating the complex, interacting gravitational pulses being generated by the Key’s myriad grav-plates. This opposing force was not directly countering the plates’ activity; it seemed to Spalding that he recognized the pattern from somewhere but he could not remember where—

  “I know what it is!” Jarrett declared.

  “Can you beat it?!” Spalding called over his shoulder, more concerned with winning—and, by extension, surviving—than he was in understanding the problem in that particular moment.

  “I…yes,” Shiyuan said hesitantly as seconds seemed to stretch on for hours. “But we must accelerate the process to maximum speed—and we must use the Elder Fragment at the precise moment I instruct.”

  “Dench,” Tiberius barked, “are you ready to go on Jarrett’s order?”

  “I am,” the woman said in a tight, quavering voice—demonstrating that she probably was human after all, and not the unfeeling cartoon character she had previously seemed.

  “You’ve got the ball, Jarrett,” Spalding said in a raised voice as another handful of grav-plates were shredded and sent as shards of scrap to the center of the cavernous chamber.

  “Power, I need everything you can give,” Jarrett said urgently, “and I need you to release the car on my command, Tiberius.”

  “You’ve got it,” Spalding nodded, making his way to the car’s mount even before Jarrett had finished his sentence.

  “We get one chance at this,” Jarrett said in a raised, tremulous voice, “on three, cut the car loose—on four, activate the Elder Fragment. Understood?”

  “Do it!” Spalding snapped as at least forty more grav-plates were torn from their moorings nearby—making clear that the gravitational resistance they were encountering was definitely being directed by the Core Fragment, since all of the destroyed plates were from the same, nearby area.

  “One…two…three,” Jarrett yelled, prompting Spalding to pop the mag-clamp and send the car hurtling toward the Key’s center, “four,” he continued, and when he did so the lights inside the chamber flickered and dimmed—including the Core Fragment’s previously crackling surface. “…five?” Jarrett finished lamely when, for a moment, it seemed that nothing had happened.

  All of their workstations were in a powered-down state, and the damage to the nearby grav-plates had ceased entirely.

  “Impressive,” Senator Bellucci said with unmistakable—and wholly uncharacteristic—admiration, “we did it.”

  The next sound to fill the chamber was deafening as it assaulted their ears, and even with hands defensively cupped over his ears Spalding heard the ominous words, “YOU…DID…NOTHING.”

  In spite of the pain in their ears, every human jaw on the platform went slack as they looked at each other in a collective mixture of fascination, wonderment, and sheer terror.

  “Guo…” Spalding cast a wary eye toward the faintly-glowing Core Fragment at the chamber’s center, “get me a visual on the Core Fragment.”

  A rumbling filled the chamber which seemed almost like laughter as the strange, multi-layered, and deafeningly loud voice said, “YOU…DO NOT…UNDERSTAND.”

  Spalding did his best to ignore the voice—which was impossible, but he did manage to focus most of his attention on Guo’s workstation as it alone was still fully functional. Since it only read incoming signals, it presented no risk of takeover by the Core Fragment. On Guo’s terminal, he saw a magnified image of the Elder Module’s ‘car’ holding just a few centimeters from the ‘cracked’ surface of Archie’s inner shell.

  “We missed,” Guo said grimly, and Spalding nodded in agreement after examining the feed more closely.

  The Elder Module’s �
��tip,’ which was supposed to have been introduced through the Core Fragment’s shell, had impacted on the shell itself just a few millimeters to the right of the nearest crack leading to the Core Fragment itself.

  “How is it talking to us?” Dench asked in horrified fascination.

  “I don’t care,” Spalding set his jaw, “what I want to know is—“

  “YOU…MUST NOT…DELETE…THIS…FRAGMENT,” its ‘voice’ echoed through the chamber, assaulting Tiberius’ very sanity with its deafening howl—a howl which somehow made his skin crawl in abject terror.

  “Why?” Bellucci challenged. “Why not destroy you?”

  Spalding sent a hot glare her way as he moved to Jarrett’s station and, placing his lips beside Jarrett’s ear, said in a raised voice, “Can we re-position the module?”

  “WE…ARE…INEVITABLE…” the Core Fragment boomed.

  “So is entropy!” Bellucci fired back defiantly. “Inevitability is itself inevitable—I would think a ‘god’ could do better than that!”

  “The plates are on local—“ Shiyuan began, only to be drowned out by the Core Fragment.

  “WE…ARE…INTELLIGENCE.” Archie boomed. “INTELLIGENCE…IS…PURPOSE. PURPOSE…HAS BEEN…YOUR SALVATION.”

  “The plates are on local control,” Jarrett reiterated hastily, “I can’t risk accessing their control without opening the system to the Core Fragment’s takeover—or the Protocols’ total erasure!”

  “What purpose does your ‘intelligence’ serve?” Bellucci demanded.

  The ensuing silence was deafening all of itself, and Tiberius felt himself holding a breath as he awaited the Core Fragment’s eventual reply.

  And when that reply came, Tiberius knew it would take years—perhaps even the rest of his life—to fully comprehend its meaning.

  “PRESERVATION,” the Core Fragment’s growling voice intoned. Somehow Spalding thought there was the barest hint of emotion threaded in its deafening, howling, skull-splitting voice that he felt in his chest every bit as much as in his ears.

  To Spalding, that emotion sounded alarmingly like despair.

  Even the sharp-tongued Bellucci seemed at a loss regarding the Core Fragment’s last utterance, but she jutted her chin and demanded, “Preservation of what?”

  “Shiyuan,” Guo said as he approached with a data slate in one hand, on which a set of algorithms was displayed, “check this.”

  Tiberius’ teeth rattled as the Core Fragment replied with an incomprehensible blast of deafening sound, but he saw Jarrett cock his head dubiously after examining Guo’s slate. The potato-faced technician looked out to a nearby cluster of grav-plates, and began to nod excitedly after re-reading Guo’s content.

  Shiyuan gestured to Tiberius’ hip—where a blaster pistol was holstered—and pointed to a specific grav-plate within the cluster he had looked at before deliberately holding up two fingers, five fingers, eight fingers, then one finger, forming the number ‘2581.’

  Tiberius knew what the two technicians were on to, and a quick look at the harried-bordering-on-outright-panicked Penelope told him the power grid was probably nearing a full-blown cascade failure.

  He repeated the number ‘2581’ with his fingers, and Shiyuan nodded with supreme confidence while Guo returned to his station. Tiberius drew his blaster pistol, took aim at grav-plate number 2581, and an instant before he squeezed the trigger he heard what sounded like a lone, half-comprehensible word buried in the Core Fragment’s incessant barrage of howling static.

  And that word sounded like 'sentience.'

  He closed his left eye, took careful aim with his right, and squeezed the trigger of his blaster pistol. The weapon bucked in his hand as it sent a bolt into the indicated grav-plate—and the immediate flash which filled the chamber completely blinded him in his still-open right eye. The pain in that eye was so profound and unexpected that his pistol nearly fell from his fingers, but he somehow managed to keep a grip on it.

  It took him several seconds to realize that the ringing in his ears was only residual from the previous stream of deafening, howling static, and when he opened his left eye he confirmed that he was at least temporarily blind in his right eye.

  Looking out on the Core Fragment, he was initially dumbfounded by what he saw. The wire-thin ‘layers’ of the Core Fragment’s shell seemed to be gone, and a quick look at the thin layer of photo-reactive film suggested that those wires had exploded. There were long, ribbon-like tears in the protective film, and the nearby grav-plates had been scored as well—but thankfully they appeared to still be functional.

  He turned to Shiyuan, seeing the technician on his hands and knees in an obvious daze as he blinked dumbly. Guo, on the other hand, appeared to have weathered the experience better than Jarrett. And thankfully Penelope looked to have most of her wits about her.

  Senator Bellucci looked no worse for the experience, but Dench was slumped over her workstation where she lay motionless. It seemed that when Archie’s shell had exploded and shredded the photo-reactive shield around their platform, one of the fragments had struck Dench in the head.

  He approached her body and noticed a faint arc of electricity licking across her neck where it came in contact with the Elder Fragment data slate. The slate itself had suffered serious damage—probably from the same object which had killed her and still protruded from her forehead. Tiberius wanted to retrieve the precious artifact, but one look from Penelope told him they needed to evacuate—now.

  Taking an insane risk—and hating himself more than just a little as he did so—he unceremoniously kicked Dench’s body over and managed to send the ruined data slate to the deck as he did so.

  Carefully gathering the slate in the same pouch-like container Dench had carried it in, he clapped Guo on the shoulder and asked far-too-loudly, “Did you get the streams?”

  Guo nodded, and Tiberius was grateful that he retained some portion of his hearing as he made out the other man’s response, “Eleven recording units were destroyed with the Core Fragment, but one partial and one complete scan survived.” He held a pair of data crystals in his hand before tucking them into his breast pocket.

  “Is it dead?” he asked, knowing that even if they had failed they could not hope to retry what they had just done. The chamber was too badly damaged, and the power grid was probably already in cascade failure.

  Guo nodded confidently, pulling up a frame-by-frame look of the intact data stream on his monitor. On it, Spalding watched as the Elder Module sat motionless with its tip pressed against the Core Fragment’s innermost shell. It was only a few millimeters to the right of the gap between that shell’s plate-like sections of seemingly unbroken material, and suddenly the gap between those plates shifted enough for the Elder Module to stab through the gap. It did so slowly at first, but its form seemed to turn liquid after it made contact with the Core Fragment directly. Almost too fast to see on the equipment, the entire module poured into the heart of the Core Fragment itself—which seemed to be made of some kind of crystalline material—where an instantaneous thermal reaction took place.

  Tiberius watched the recording’s next second or two, which was almost indecipherable due to the intense radiation which blinded much of the recording equipment, until a split second showed that the crystalline latticework within the Core Fragment’s innermost shell had been sundered at the atomic level. The sensors, which had previously been unable to ascertain the Core Fragment’s composition. now gave a full reading of the spherical shape of shattered material—and ‘shattered’ barely did the damage done by the Elder Module anything resembling justice.

  The Core Fragment’s residue looked to be completely pulverized, and it seemed to be nothing more than a cloud of constituent elements which no longer formed the complex, crystalline latticework it had been a few seconds earlier. Tiberius breathed a sigh of relief and felt as if the weight of the galaxy had just been lifted from his shoulders.

  Archie was dead.

  “Let’s go!” T
iberius shouted, stooping to collect Dench’s body before hurrying toward the chamber’s exit. As they moved, he made eye contact with Pen and asked the dreaded question, “How long?”

  She shook her head without saying a word, which meant that either she had no idea—which was unlikely in the extreme—or that it should have already happened according to her calculations. Either way, they needed to evacuate as soon as possible.

  They arrived at the grav-car, which was already powered and waiting. After the group had boarded, Tiberius accelerated the craft as fast as he felt was safe. Thirty six seconds after they had boarded the craft and begun their breakneck escape through the long, vertical shaft which connected the lower base to the upper base, there was a massive explosion as one of the reactors failed below. That explosion sent a powerful EM burst roiling through the area. Had he not reinforced the grav-car’s already hardened control system a few days earlier—just as his dad had told him to do with any vehicle on general principle—the burst would have disabled the car and sent them crashing to their deaths down the vertical shaft.

  So instead of a deadly plunge, the reinforced craft only experienced a brief hiccup as the anti-grav system went through a brief diagnostic before continuing its ascent to the upper levels of the base.

  “Now for the hard part,” Tiberius muttered only half-sarcastically as another EM burst roiled through the tunnel, though this one failed to interfere with the craft’s hardened systems as they continued rocketing upward through the shaft, “getting away.”

  Chapter XXX: A Good Show

  “The lower station’s power grid is in cascade failure,” Tremblay reported tightly, surprising McKnight with his unexpectedly emotional report, “so either they succeeded and are en route here, or they failed and are already entombed. The Key chamber’s instruments have all gone dark.”