by J. N. Chaney
Dash moved among the consoles, stepping around and over fallen Verity, checking. Sure enough, it seemed that every data core had been removed.
“They must have done this before we flooded the place with gas.” He glanced at Leira. “So they knew they were beaten and had time to extract the data modules—but not just blow the whole thing up?”
Leira gave a nervous nod. “Yeah. And what did they do with the modules?”
“Yeah, I’m more worried that they set a timed self-destruct to try and catch any of us who tried to board.”
“Like us, standing here on their bridge, having this conversation.” Leira licked her lips. “Dash, we should go.”
“Yeah, I—”
“If I may,” Tybalt said. “I do not believe you need worry yourselves unduly about any potential self-destruct function operating on the platform.”
“Oh, and why does the massive, armored, shielded mech that’s not currently standing inside the damned thing in a squishy vac suit think that?” Leira asked.
“Because I have managed to penetrate the platform’s data network. No systems remain operational, aside from emergency power and basic life support.”
“Oh. Can you control anything?”
“To the extent that any other systems remain functional, yes. With the removal of the data cores, however, those systems are few, and relate to basic operations, such as cycling airlocks or fire suppression.”
“Well, that’s a relief—” Dash began, but Benzel cut him off.
“Dash, we flashed that scrambler mine as soon as those missiles or pods or whatever they are translated. One got away; it was just too far from the blast. We stopped the other one dead, though, so those mines work.”
“Hey, that is good news. You need to recover the one you stopped before it regenerates its translation drive.”
“Already on our way. Intercept in fifteen minutes.”
“Got it. Good work. Keep us plugged in.”
Cradling the pulse gun, Dash looked around the bridge. “Okay, so if we’re not in imminent danger of being vaporized, then let’s see what we can retrieve from all this, shall we?”
It wasn’t much. As Tybalt had said, with the data cores gone, the remaining systems were mostly dumb—ready to do things, but without any means of doing them.
Dash turned and found Leira poking at a console on the other side of the bridge. The Verity—there must be almost two dozen of them—still lay slumped in heaps. The incapacitating gas would supposedly keep them under for at least a couple of hours, but Custodian had made it clear there were a lot of variables—the concentration of the gas, the effectiveness of ventilation, the particular body mass and chemistry of those subjected to it, and so on. Realistically, it would last a couple of hours—give or take almost a couple of hours.
“Okay, Leira, I think we’ve done pretty much all—” Dash started to say but sudden movement snagged his attention. A panel had just slid open in the ceiling a couple of meters above and behind Leira.
“Leira, look out!”
She turned just in time to face something that uncoiled from the opening above her. And it did uncoil, like a nest of fire snakes Dash had once stumbled across on a desert planet while racing to get back to the Slipwing, just ahead of some unhappy business partners and their partners, who were even more unhappy.
The thing, or things, lashed out at Leira with a flash of metallic tentacle. It struck her and she toppled back with a yelp; Dash saw sealing foam spurting from her suit, meaning it had been breached. He raised the pulse-gun and fired, just as the thing—yes, he could see it was s single thing now—whirled to face him.
It was two meters tall. Humanoid, as it turned out, but with flexible tentacles for arms and legs, and a similar tail for balance. The head was like a flattened sphere, with a straight bar of light where its eyes would be. It moved with a dangerous, fluid grace, flowing around a console and striking toward Dash.
He dodged back and fired again. The pulse gun shot slammed into it, blasting out a metallic chunk. It drew back and spun around again, racing away from him and toward Leira, who’d fallen somewhere out of Dash’s line of sight.
“Oh no you freakin’ don’t,” Dash snapped, pumping out pulse-gun shots. Three struck the bot from behind and it toppled across a console. Dash charged at it, just in time to see it lever itself around again, that bar of light facing him. A tentacle swept out; Dash jumped aside, moving with it, so it struck him with a solid, but not punishing blow. He slammed hard enough into a console to rattle his teeth but raised and fired the pulse-gun directly into the light bar, blowing the thing’s head apart.
It went still, viscous fluid bubbling from the smashed ruin of its head.
Dash fired another shot into it anyway, then he hurried to find Leira.
He found her levering herself to her knees, groaning. Hardened foam coated her upper right arm, doing its job of not just sealing off the breach in the suit, but also any wound beneath it with an instant bandage that was both antiseptic and painkilling. Dash knelt beside her but kept the pulse gun ready in case there were more automated surprises.
“Leira?’ There were a hundred questions in that one word. “You okay?”
She blinked at him through her faceplate. “Okay? Let’s see, the last time I was really okay was right before you rescued Viktor and me from Clan Shirna. Since then, it’s all been a blur of ‘holy crap I’m still alive.’”
Dash frowned at her, and she gave a weak smile. “I’m fine.” She glanced at her arm. “At least, most of me is.”
Dash let out the ready-for-disaster breath he’d held in reserve. “Okay, well, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by Mister Tentacles over there—”
“Uh, Dash?” Leira said, “I hate to rudely interrupt you again, but…” She nodded her head toward something. Dash turned to look.
One of the Verity was stirring.
In fact, most of them were.
They were deep inside the middle of the missile platform, it was just the two of them, Leira was wounded, and now the two dozen or so Verity all around them were waking up.
Dash glanced at the airlock where they’d entered the bridge. There were at least a half-dozen Verity between them and it.
One of the Verity sat up, looked at them, stared for a moment, then began pushing itself behind the cover of a console while reaching for something hanging from its battle harness.
Oh. Right. That was something else. He and Leira had never disarmed them.
Great.
“Dash, we need to—” Leira began, but Dash cut her off.
“Tybalt, you said you had control over basic functions, right?”
“That is correct.”
“Including airlocks and environmental.”
“Again, correct.”
Several Verity now stood across the bridge. Dash snapped out a pulse-gun shot, hitting a console and provoking a shower of sparks. The Verity dove for cover, drawing weapons as they did.
“Good. Open the bridge to space. Wide open. All of it, every vent and airlock.”
“Dash, I—”
“Just do it!”
Two Verity popped around a console a few meters away, guns raised. One of them snapped out an energy pulse like a rippling wave; it missed, but even being brushed by the fringe of it made Dash’s head suddenly feel stuffed full of cotton wool. A stun gun of some sort. Shit. They could not be taken alive by these assholes.
There was a roar, and the air turned to whitish vapor, which quickly whipped away. Dash saw Verity pulled along with the sudden rush of venting air, faces a rictus of panicked terror. Leira clung to a console with her good arm. Dash found himself being dragged toward the nearest airlock, but he grabbed the first thing he could, one of the tentacles from the downed bot. He now dragged it along with him, but it slowed him enough that the weakening gale could barely move him. Then the gale was a breeze, and then a whisper, and then deep silence fell, and Dash no longer moved at all.
“Leira, have to ask this again. Are you okay?”
“Again, holy-crap-I-didn’t-die kind of moment right now.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dash said. He stood and looked around. About half the Verity were gone, sucked into space. As for the rest, well.
They were no longer a problem.
Dash gratefully yanked off his helmet and took a deep breath of the Archetype’s atmosphere. Sentinel kept it at a state that was supposedly perfect for Dash’s particular physiology; it definitely tasted much sweeter and fresher than the recycled body odor that was what passed for air in a vac suit.
“Dash, Benzel here. We’ve snagged that Verity—I’m going to call it an escape pod, but it looks more like a big missile.”
He started clambering into the cradle. “Okay, so who’s on board? And what makes them so special they get to try to run away?”
“There’s no who on board it. There’s just what’s on board.”
“Okay, what’s on board?”
“We’re still figuring that out, but it looks like we found your missing data cores. Some of them, anyway. And then there are a bunch of canisters containing something being kept really cold—like almost zero Kelvin, liquid helium cold.”
An image flashed on the heads-up, transmitted from the Snow Leopard. It showed the escape pod, a tapered cylinder at least ten meters long, and about two in diameter. Through an open port, Dash indeed saw racks of metallic canisters, a meter long and about half that around, coated in frost and wisping off vapor that hinted at intense, cryogenic cold.
“Those canisters match the dimensions of what appears to be a pneumatic transport system connecting various parts of the missile platform,” Tybalt said. “That system was offline, but it would appear to have been designed to quickly move these canisters from one section to another.”
“What’s inside them, I wonder?” Leira said.
“That’s something we need to find out,” Dash said, narrowing his eyes at the image. “Whatever they are, though, I’m sure it’s going to turn out to be something awful.”
“What makes you say that?”
“They belong to the Verity. I doubt it’s some rare artwork they’re trying to save. Every time we uncover something new about them, it turns out they’re worse than we ever thought. Think this is going to be any different?”
“Good point,” Leira replied. “Also a creepy one, but definitely a good one.”
“Dash, the other escape pod broadcasted a request for help,” Sentinel said. “A Verity patrol answered and is now inbound. It consists of at least three contacts, but the actual number of approaching ships is uncertain.”
“How long until they get here?”
“Approximately one hour.”
“Benzel, you and Wei-Ping rig up this missile platform for tow. We can’t pass up this much Dark Metal, more reactors, and a whole pile of missiles.”
“Those damned petawatt lasers, too,” Leira added.
“Yeah. Anyway, let’s get it back to the Forge.”
“What are you doing?” Benzel asked.
“Leira and I are going to greet our new friends before they arrive, keep them off your backs until you can get underway. We’ll each grab a scrambler mine from you before we go.”
“Just the two of you? Let me take over the Herald and come with you, Wei-Ping can—”
“Sorry, my friend. I need the Silent Fleet ships here, covering you, in case anything else shows up in response to that Verity distress call.”
“But—”
“Benzel, do you hear that?”
“What?”
“That sound. That’s the sound of me pulling rank on you.”
After a pause, Benzel replied, “Know what? I’m glad you never decided to join the Gentle Friends, Dash.”
“How come?”
“Because you’d have taken my job in no time. Go give ’em hell, guys.”
“Oh, hell is the least of what we’re going to give them,” Dash replied, thinking of those enigmatic, frozen canisters and whatever horrors they no doubt contained.
Dash looked at the icon representing the Swift on the heads-up. “Leira, you ready?”
“Any time you are.”
They dropped out of unSpace on the trajectory of the incoming Verity ships, spacing the mechs about a million kilometers apart, the system containing the missile platform about thirty light-minutes behind them. Sentinel calculated they had about a one-minute window to set their trap.
“Okay,” Dash said. “Bombs away.”
He wound up like a server in a game of grav-ball and flung the scrambler mine as hard as he could. Sentinel fired thrusters and nudged the main drive, keeping the Archetype in place. Dash then drove the mech back, opening up distance between it and the mine. The heads-up told him Leira had done the same.
“Detonation in ten seconds,” Sentinel said.
“Five.”
“Mark.”
There was a dull flash. The scrambler mines didn’t create much of an actual blast, but it was still enough to damage a few kilometers around it. Dash wasn’t interested in that, though. He watched for the effects—and he wasn’t disappointed.
Three ships abruptly dropped out of unSpace less than a hundred thousand kilometers away.
“So there’s our—” he started, then frowned. “What the hell are those, now?”
Dash didn’t recognize these Verity ships, nor did anything come up in their databases. They were smooth ovals, like giant, metallic eggs, each with three bulbous protrusions from what must be their stern. They moved in perfect unison, like a school of fish Dash had once seen on a water world named Hydra.
“We are receiving a transmission from them,” Sentinel said.
A flat, toneless voice that seemed both human and mechanical hummed across the comm.
“Surrender, that you may live on.”
“Yeah—no. And aren’t you supposed to say we’re going to be Elevated or something like that?” Dash asked the voice.
“Not for you. Sainthood awaits in a cradle of alloy, Messenger.”
Dash shrugged, fired the dark-lance at maximum power, and immediately began breaking hard toward these new targets.
“Guess we’ll see about that.”
17
“Okay, these things are no fun to fight at all!” Dash said, flinging the Archetype through another tight, wrenching series of pitching turns. Rapid-fire pulse cannon shots streamed out of the Verity ships, converging on the mech. Dash lunged aside again, but not before he caught part of the barrage, which burned through the last of the shield and landed several hard blows on its hull. He groaned as the Meld communicated the damage to him, across his chest and side.
“Dash, talk to me!” Leira shouted.
“Kinda busy,” he growled back, firing the dark-lance over and over at one of the ships. But they nimbly dodged, quickly switching places, making it hard to land more than a single hit at a time. At this rate, both the Archetype and the Swift would be pounded into scrap before they managed to take down even one of these bastards.
“Shit!” Dash snapped it out reflexively as another stream of pulse-cannon fire slammed into the Archetype. The Verity ships spun and dodged and whirled in such unison they might as well have been one ship that could be in three places at once. The degree of integration put the networking of even the Silent Fleet to shame.
Dash raced away from combat, opening the range to take a quick breather. Systems faltered throughout the Archetype, Sentinel giving priority to maneuvering and weapons and letting everything else go for now. Scanners were intermittent, the power sword had gone offline entirely, several actuators were seized, and big chunks had been gouged out of the armor despite his shields still flickering with each impact. For the first time since originally mounting the mech, he faced the distinct possibility of having to run away from battle.
Or defeat, though that was unthinkable.
“Sentinel, give me some options!” he
shouted.
“The disruptive effect of the scrambler mine on this region of space precludes translating for approximately another eleven minutes. Therefore, the only options are to fight or flee.”
“Can we flee?”
“Based on the performance of the Verity ships, no. However, if the Swift and Archetype flee in different directions, then the Verity will either have to break up their remarkably integrated formation or only pursue one of the mechs.”
Dash let out a sigh. “Fine. Leira, I don’t think we’re going to win this one. I’m going to take off on”—he aimed the Archetype onto a particular heading— “this trajectory. You go exactly the opposite way. You go now. I’ll keep these assholes from chasing you.”
“Nope, not this time. We can’t afford to lose you, Dash—Messenger.”
“We can’t afford to—” Dash broke off, cursing as he dodged another fusillade from the Verity. The energy expenditure of these ships was beyond extravagant; he saw no way they could keep it up, and yet they did.
“We can’t afford to lose you, either. At least one of these mechs has to survive.”
“Like I said, you’re essential. This is all your show.”
Dash saw the Swift suddenly accelerate directly toward the Verity squadron.
“You go. I’ll clean up here,” Leira continued, her tone like iron.
“Leira!”
“Kinda busy!”
The Verity ships spun about and charged at the Swift. Dash saw their crazy-rapid fire pulse-cannons open up and reach for the Swift like glowing fingers. Leira flipped and swung and dodged, but some of the shots hit home, blasting glowing chunk from the mech.
Dash swore again. Leira had given him a chance to escape. A little over ten minutes and he could translate away.
He even started to gather himself to make a break for it.
Then he threw himself back toward the fight.
“Dash,” Leira pleaded, naked panic in her voice. “No.”
“Kinda busy,” he muttered, firing the dark-lance and loosing all the Archetype’s remaining missiles. Maybe they’d get lucky, maybe it would be enough.
