Exiles (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book One)

by Dan Worth

  There was a ship emerging from the portal, long spikes encrusted with weaponry around fifty kilometres in length. Varish hurled himself around its looming bulk and activated what stealth measures he could to mask his presence. The long spikes began to close, forming a single energy weapon which chewed into the bows of the Sword of Reckoning. Varish settled against the wall of the portal, angling himself to that he came to rest on the road that encircled the mid-point of the tunnel. There were access points here into the portal’s systems. This was what he needed. He extended probes and plugged himself into Maran.

  ‘Your Arkari friend is only still alive because of the data he carried. We were curious to see if he knew about us. Perhaps others do. Do sympathisers of our cause still exist within the Arkari?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Katherine. ‘No-one had admitted any knowledge of the civil war until we found that ship. Officially, Arkari interstellar history began tens of thousands of years ago, not millions.’

  ‘No!’ cried the Negotiator. ‘Not one Arkari remembers us? No-one knows of the sacrifices we made? They wipe us from their history because they are ashamed! Ashamed of themselves! They were too weak to act, someone had to… we did what we did for the good of the species! We suffered for all that time… and they have no idea.’

  ‘What you did was kill billions. You know, we had people like you on Earth, who did what they thought was right and it didn’t matter how many died in the process.’

  ‘Shut up, it doesn’t matter anyway! Soon the Arkari will fall before our might, before the Shapers. We will make them beg for death for what they did to us!’

  ‘The Arkari are about to destroy the system!’ said Katherine. She looked at her watch. It was three hours and forty six minutes since Mentith’s announcement. ‘In fourteen minutes we’ll all be dead because of you! Everyone on this world, gone! I don’t want to die! No-one wants to die!’ she began to shout at the silver figure. ‘I’m sick of this, I’m so sick and tired of feeling like a pawn in someone’s stupid sadistic game. How will killing billions of innocents make the galaxy any better?! Well, how will it!? Answer me!’ she leapt forward and grabbed hold of the woman. The metal beneath her hands felt warm to the touch, it felt like flesh.

  ‘There’s one thing that you realise when you study history,’ she continued. ‘That for millions of years all everyone has done is be unspeakably unpleasant to one another. Why!? You have the technology to create miracles and all you do is create death! Over and over it’s always the same!’

  The woman brushed her aside.

  ‘You do not understand,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps I was being optimistic when I hoped that you would. The Arkari will be stopped. Do not trouble yourself. Already the breakout from the portal has begun and we are negotiating an alliance between ourselves and your people. You will join the Shapers in their endeavour, or you will be eradicated.’

  Varish stood in empty space. It was another of Maran’s virtual images. The battle raged around him; ships fought and died all over the sky. The Arkari were starting to lose their grip on the battle. The dreadnoughts were actually retreating from the portal exits, their gorgeous hulls scored with deep furrows and craters. The figures of Maran floated above the battle, arms outstretched as if waiting for something. So far he had ignored his visitor. Varish could hear voices, machine language that chirruped and twittered ever louder in the background. The Banished Arkari were trying communicate with Maran. They were close to succeeding.

  ‘Maran!’ he cried. ‘Shut down the portal!’

  Maran looked at him, and smiled. ‘Oh, you’re back. Enjoy your trip?’ he replied and laughed. ‘And no, I will not shut down the portal. The Banished Arkari will free me. In exchange I will give them control of this facility and together we will take our revenge on our tormentors.’

  ‘So be it,’ said Varish. ‘I’m sorry it has to end to this way,’ he said, and unleashed the virus program he had been engineering all this time.

  ‘Admiral Chen you must choose. In one hand you have the life of Commander Ramirez and the future of the human race, in the other you have death and oblivion. Which is it to be? I would have thought it was an easy choice.’

  ‘Please just let him go.’

  ‘Really, do you think I will? Come to your senses! Our races are not too dissimilar, we were like you once and you could be as great as we are now. You despise those aliens who threaten your species, those vicious K’Soth, those patronising Arkari always holding you back from true greatness, those secretive Esacir! Show them! Show them who the true master of this galaxy is! Or I will kill him…’

  Chen looked at Ramirez’s prone form, so vulnerable. Maybe if she bought him some time, she could always go back on her word…

  ‘Come now,’ said the Negotiator. ‘I delved into your mind whilst you slept. You and I are alike. I know that you are prepared to act decisively and aggressively when circumstances demand it. When your ship was attacked at Urranakar for example? You slaughtered them all. How magnificent!’

  ‘That was a mistake, an error of judgement. I have to live with what I did there.’

  ‘But at the time you enjoyed it, didn’t you?’ the Negotiator said slyly. ‘Didn’t it feel good to wipe those filthy savages out of the sky, to take your revenge for your friends, and rightfully so!’

  ‘No! That’s not true!’

  ‘You cannot lie to me Michelle. You’re a monster, a vicious sadistic killer. We all are. All of us have the capacity to wreak bloody vengeance, to commit the most violent of acts. We will celebrate this facet of your personality, not punish you. We will use you; help you if you join us. We need people like you. We need you to lead humanity in a great crusade against all others who would seek to weaken you. Choose now, or the Commander dies. I hope you make the right decision, for all our sakes.’

  She looked at the broken body of Ramirez. She couldn’t think straight. What the Negotiator had said was true, she couldn’t deny it. Deep down she knew she was a killer, but she knew that she had always done what she believed was right, no matter how others might judge her. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. Not now, not after everything. If she refused she would have to watch him die, along with the rest of her species. What choice did she have?

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I accept.’

  The Negotiator laughed softly.

  The image began to crack around Varish. Broad sweeps of chaos engulfed the vista of stars and ships and spread like wildfire. Swathes of fractals and static began to fill the sky. The three figures of Maran himself began to distort horribly, switching between misshapen body parts and corrupt blocks of graphics, trails of static images and transparent skeletal models.

  Maran howled as he was torn apart in AI death. He tried to fight, tried to employ his own programs to eradicate Varish’s but it was too late. Gradually, his mind began to devour itself. His personality fragmented. Tortured beyond comprehension he screamed horribly and then he was gone. There was silence.

  The AI cores of the portal were now empty, they awaited an inhabitant. Varish knew what he must do now. He quickly copied his personality into the three cores and took control of the great device.

  What happened next was the source of much conjecture for decades to come. In a single instant the entire Banished Arkari fleet and ground forces vanished. Millions of tiny wormholes were spun out from the portal and snatched every ship and every single individual member of the machine race from the surface of Maranos and the space around it. Each vanished suddenly with a small blue flash as it was cast back through the portal.

  Inside the planet, the small ship that held Varish detached itself from the walls of the tunnel and after the portal rippled briefly, it passed through the shimmering disk, never to return.

  The personality copies he had left behind then shut down the portal and deleted themselves, but not before infesting the portal’s systems with viruses and logic paradoxes and triggering self destruct mechanisms on millions of key component
s that rendered the device useless.

  The rings that floated above the surfaces of the stars shattered and fell, plunging their exotic materials into the infernos that they had defied for aeons. The streams of plasma dissipated, the pillars of light winked out and the holes in the ocean and land resealed themselves for good.

  Then it was over, and there was silence.

  Katherine stood in the sudden quiet that had descended upon the temple. She could scarcely believe what had happened. The silver woman had vanished before her eyes just as the K’Soth Inquisitor had. She looked around the deserted temple. Not a single one of the Banished Arkari remained.

  She ran over to Rekkid and Steven and shook them from the sleep that had been artificially imposed upon them. They were groggy, as she had been at first upon waking, but she managed to quickly explain to them what had happened.

  In the bowels of the earth beneath the temple Chen wept with grief. When the Banished Arkari had vanished, the individual keeping Ramirez alive had gone with them. It was too late for anyone to save him. Chen howled and sobbed over his rapidly cooling body, desperate for any signs of life in his blank, sunken eyes. There was none.

  She had lost everything, her ship, her crew and now the man who mattered more to her than any other. She kissed his forehead and smoothed his thick black hair, as her lonely cries and sobs echoed in the empty chamber.

  The hour of Maranos’s destruction came and went, and nothing happened. Instead the sleek form of an Arkari shuttle settled quietly outside the temple and deposited a single person who walked wearily over to the three figures sat on the steps of the building.

  ‘Good day to you all,’ said Admiral Mentith. ‘The dreadnoughts have been withdrawn. I was wondering if any of you could shed any light on what went on here.’

  ‘To honest Admiral, we were wondering if you could answer a few questions of our own,’ said Rekkid.

  Chen tried to move him. On the smooth metallic floor it was relatively easy to drag his stiffening form. But the climb back up to the temple defeated her. She broke down again and wept in despair, reluctant to leave him here. In the end she gave in to the inevitable and hauled herself out of the pit. Her tear streaked face emerged moments later into the dimness of the tomb.

  ‘Yes it’s true what they told you. The Shapers are seeking to take over this galaxy. They pre-date all other species that still remain here and we believe that, having finally settled their internecine conflicts, they are on the move. But they do not seek to civilise the galaxy, all they seek is power for its sake alone.’ Mentith sighed. ‘I’m sorry for the trouble that we caused you. It was imperative that you not activate the portal. They had intended that you do so all along.’

  ‘You’re sorry for the trouble you caused us?’ said Katherine incredulously. ‘You almost managed to kill us all!’

  ‘Yes, I know. But we had to make a decisions based on our calculated outcomes of other options. It was not an easy decision to make from a moral perspective, but it was the correct strategic one.’

  ‘Oh. Well that’s alright then.’

  ‘Please, you have to understand how desperate we were. You saw how sophisticated the Banished had become. Up until their disappearance we were losing the battle. You were lured here to let them out of the prison that we had consigned them to, rightly or wrongly. They were to be used by the Shapers to cause maximum disruption and devastation in this area of the galaxy, leaving us all ripe for an invasion.’

  ‘Could you not have just warned us away?’

  ‘No. At first we thought that you yourselves might be under the control of the Shapers. By the time it became clear that this was not the case and that you were being manipulated by others it was too late. We knew that the Shapers had sent at least one agent to this planet, however we moved too slowly.’

  ‘It tried to kill me.’

  ‘Yes, I know. We had some assets on the planet, nanotech spies mainly, and we used them to observe you. When it became clear that you were in danger of activating the portal we dispatched drones and agents, but they did not reach the planet in time. We were not aware of the origin of your ship’s AI and hence did not anticipate that you would be able to re-awaken the device so quickly. We were too late.’

  ‘What happened to the Banished, where did they go?’

  ‘We think, judging by our sensor readings that your ship succeeded in docking with the portal from the inside and then used it to transport them back through somehow. It followed them in.’

  ‘Varish!’ said Rekkid. ‘He saved us, this planet, the Commonwealth, everyone…’

  ‘We Arkari also owe him a great deal. I don’t know how long we could have held off those ships. We don’t know where he went though. The destination of the portal appears to have altered briefly before it shut down.’

  ‘Well, I hope he finds what he’s looking for,’ said Rekkid. ‘I think he went to find to his people again.’ He smiled wistfully.

  At that moment the small figure of a woman emerged from the temple. Steven recognised Michelle immediately, but she seemed utterly defeated and downcast. As she came closer he could see that she had been crying.

  ‘Please help me,’ she said in a small voice. ‘They killed him, they killed Al. His body is… it’s at the foot of the entrance under the temple. I tried to lift to out but I couldn’t he… he was too heavy and I….’ Her tears began to flow again. Steven put a hand on her shoulder as Mentith sent two aides to collect Ramirez.

  ‘The Banished tried to force me to join them,’ said Chen, through choking sobs. ‘They claimed that you were the real enemy.’

  ‘Yes, well. The Arkari are the only race who can hope to oppose the Shapers in this spiral arm of the galaxy, we are the only ones whom they fear at all,’ said Mentith. ‘You have to understand that the Shapers are few in number now. They work by manipulating other races to their own ends. They brought down the Bajenteri purely out of jealousy for the power that race wielded and they coveted it for their own. When they found that there was a missing half of the Arkari race beyond the portal it no doubt represented a golden opportunity for them. They had found someone who could oppose us.’

  ‘I agreed in the end you know,’ said Chen. ‘I had to they… they were going to kill Al. Much good it did us too. He died anyway as soon they disappeared. Their systems were the only thing that was keeping him alive. He’d lost too much blood.’

  ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ said Mentith. ‘The death of a friend is never easy to bear.’

  ‘He was more to me than that.’

  ‘Yes, I thought so,’ he said softly. ‘But perhaps you can console yourself with this. It seems they have been sent back to that hell our forebears consigned them to. For now, this part of the galaxy is safe. Genocidal maniacs all of them and good riddance I say.’ Chen said nothing. Mentith turned to the others. ‘Professor, Doctor, didn’t you ever stop to consider that it was an astonishing coincidence that you discovered both that ship’s log and the portal it describes?’

  ‘Yes we did,’ said Katherine. ‘We were so naïve. We pressed ahead anyway.’

  At that moment heard she the sound of Dendratha movement and turning, she saw Priest Ekrino emerging from the temple behind them. He was dusting down his robes and smiling awkwardly with relief.

  ‘Hello everyone,’ he said. ‘Ah, I don’t know how you did it but thank Maran you got rid of those evil things.’

  ‘It was Ekrino,’ said Katherine. ‘He was the one who wanted us to come here. Everyone else in the priesthood mistrusted us. No-one else wanted us to come here.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mentith, then pulled out his pistol and shot Ekrino in the head. Mentith strode over toward the still twitching corpse.

  ‘What the..? War Marshal, you just shot him!’ said Steven, aghast. ‘Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Look!’ said Mentith. He had his foot on Ekrino’s neck, the priest was still moving. Mentith shot him twice more directly into his skull at close range, t
hen stamped on the shattered cranium. Something moved inside. Katherine caught a glimpse of an all too familiar maggot-like creature wet with gore that sprouted a series of writhing tentacles. It made a desperate attempt to squirm free of the priest’s body before Mentith shot it.

  ‘You see?’ he said. ‘The Shapers had an agent here all along and none of you suspected.’

  ‘We didn’t… how could we?’ Katherine began.

  ‘How many of these things could be lurking in key positions in the Commonwealth?’ said Steven. ‘Imagine the chaos they could cause.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mentith. ‘Which is why we must be vigilant. I think it is time that we briefed your government fully. In the meantime, you must keep this to yourselves. You two can publish your findings, as long as you omit the Shapers. You can expect to hear from my people. There are many fascinating sites for exploration on the rim of Arkari space and we could use good archaeologists.

  ‘Fascinating how? Dangerous fascinating?’ said Rekkid.

  ‘How does the remains of a Progenitor Dyson Sphere strike you?’ said Mentith.

  Rekkid looked at Katherine and grinned; she grinned back.

  ‘Mr Harris, you’re a capable man from what I hear. Since you know of the Shaper threat I don’t see a better plan than you be inducted into the special operations unit already being set up to deal with them.’ Mentith looked at Chen. ‘Admiral, I have spoken with Fleet Admiral Haines and he is very impressed with you. You handle yourself exceptionally and your crew respects you immensely. Needless to say we have picked up most of the ones who escaped onto the surface of this planet. The Saturn class carrier Winston Churchill needs an admiral to command her, apparently. She will be at forefront of covert operations to counter the Shaper threat. If you want revenge for your fallen friends, I can’t think of a better post to be in.’