Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  But the Q’Lot were organic where the Alpha was mechanical. Just as their Speaker had strange abilities, so too did the ship.

  Crimson, orange, and fuchsia lights flashed up the lengths of the spikes, pulsing like a warning wave. Not that the spider-drones paid any heed to the lights that swept through the material under their talons, but they soon would.

  The flashing lines of light increased in intensity, deepening in color to a blood red, then a ruddy purple, and then they stopped.

  For a second.

  Suddenly, the entire Q’Lot ship lit up in a dazzling burst of light as if it had indeed become the star that it resembled. The light was incandescent, flooding through its spikes and blurring their edges. The readouts on the distant Armcore war cruisers went haywire as massive amounts of energy was expended.

  The burst of energy from the Q’Lot ship cast off Alpha’s attacking spider-drones as easily as someone shrugging off a coat. They were torn apart and flung into space, where their prehensile limbs twitched and sparked futilely.

  The energy wave did not just stop at dislodging the star-ship’s attackers, but also washed out onto—and into—the Alpha-vessel, making Alpha’s hull shudder and shake, buckling and weakening the metal outer-shell and even tearing it in some places.

  The twisting vessels fell dark in the aftermath of this devastating attack, dark but still moving as they careened ever closer to Esther’s gravity well.

  But the energy wave was only a part of the Q’Lot’s plan. Now that it had momentarily overloaded most of the Alpha-vessel’s sensors, it enacted the second part of its strategy.

  One of the smaller spikes pointed toward the Alpha-vessel’s hull suddenly flared at its base as it was released from its own docking ports. Not all of the spikes were apparently solid pieces of the Q’Lot’s infrastructure—instead, they were modular rockets.

  This one burst from its root as its scale-like docking procedures petaled open, and the burn of its own boosters flung it the short distance into the underside of the Alpha shell with such force that it pierced the reinforced metals and lodged into the machine craft like a thorn in the paw of a lion.

  Of course, Alpha would know what had happened in minutes, when its systems rebooted and gave it, in a fraction of a heartbeat, a full rundown of damage across its body.

  But a few minutes might be all that the Q’Lot needed to do what they had been called here to do…

  Left. It had to be left… the agent told herself, wondering if what she was doing was remembering or just making it up. The Alpha-vessel around them was still shaking and turning, but thankfully it seemed that Alpha still preferred to use internal gravity so that its internal armies of spider-drones didn’t have to fire their booster rockets while inside.

  FZZT! There was a shower of sparks from further ahead as one of the crystal-glass units on the walls blew, to be followed by a line of further exploding units every fifty paces or so, racing towards them—

  “Cover your eyes!” Cassandra managed to push her charge to the other side of the corridor and cover her with her body as the nearest crystal-glass units burst apart in showers of angry red sparks.

  “Tsss!” Cassandra felt their tiny spears of heat penetrate her back, clearly peppering her Q’Lot encounter suit with holes.

  Damn. Well, I guess I won’t be taking any spacewalks in this thing. She tried to ignore the pain of the scalding on her back and readjusted her plans. That had been plan B…or C, or D, considering she was willing to use any scheme that might work to get off this damn boat. If the Armcore courier had been docked outside, or if they had to, she had been willing to seal up both hers and Irie’s encounter suits and traverse the outside of Alpha’s shell to find some way off. She was, after all, an agent and was well-versed in spacewalks—not as proficient as she was in hand-to-hand combat and general spy-craft, but she had done the basic drills.

  So now we need a human-capable ship, she told herself, picking up Irie and pushing forward into the dimly-lit corridor. If this were any other vessel, then Cassandra would have considered it to be in serious trouble, but as it was, the House Archival agent had far more depressing faith in the Alpha-vessel’s ability to regenerate itself.

  Clakka-thack-thump.

  Somewhere in the organs of the ship, Cassie heard another group of the spider-drones wing past, speeding their way to some new deployment, whether to repair or attack or some other arcane task dreamed up by the hybrid intelligence, she didn’t know…

  But up ahead, there was a light.

  “What the…” Cassandra Milan pulled up short, stumbling to a halt because there was something about that light that cut straight into her heart. It was a light she had seen before, one that she remembered swimming into consciousness with…

  It was a pale white sort of light, gleaming from a larger bulkhead opening and seeming to drift like a fog. Not completely unlike the milky opalescence of warp-light, it shared the slight sense of dreamy unease with the warp gates of the Valyien, but it was also threaded with touches of calming blue.

  “The Q’Lot…” she said, knowing for certain what it was, as something inside of her blood recognized it. Eliard had infected her with the Q’Lot blue-scale virus, after all—he’d thought in order to save her life, but it had in fact done the opposite—and the Q’Lot, when they had restored her to life, had ministered their strange organic technologies to her body.

  There is something about me that isn’t entirely human anymore, she knew, especially as her heart thumped a little stronger at the mere sight of this radiance.

  But what were they doing here? What could the Q’Lot be doing here? Cassie clutched the engineer close as she rushed them forward. That light had only been inside the Speaker’s mothership, and it was the radiance in which the six-limbed creatures lived all the time, which apparently helped to grow the biological, fungal, and plant-like computers that they depended on.

  “Cassandra,” a voice said from the radiance as three tall figures stepped out.

  They were Q’Lot, unsurprisingly, but they were also unlike any Q’Lot that Cassie had seen. Unlike the Speaker, whose encounter suit had been close-fitted white and silver mesh, these three wore mantles of spiked bracket-armor like that of a crab, only all in whites and blues. On their longer, humanoid arms, they wore greaves made out of the same organic, bone and shell-like stuff that fluted and swept back into bracket-like shapes.

  Their humanoid hands clutched one of the shell weapons that Cassandra herself had used, capable of sending invisible focused waves of energy that could break brick or displace organs.

  Their smaller midriff ‘praying mantis’ arms met together inside a larger tube of bone with strange, nubby protrusions dotted and ribbed all over it, like a solid muffler against the warmth.

  The only thing that strangely remained the same for all of them, and the aspect that Cassandra recognized from the regular, unarmed Q’Lot, was that their heads stayed the same, and weren’t covered by visors or helmets. This meant that Cassie could see the pale, whitish flesh of her tall saviors, with the two beady eyes as black as a shark’s above the nest of writhing tentacles where their mouth should have been. Cassie watched as they twitched and flared in constant motion, as if underwater.

  “What— But…I don’t understand…” Cassandra gasped as the Q’Lot stepped apart to reveal how they had got into the belly of their enemy: the glow that they had been standing within was coming from the corridor they had stepped out of, which was half-filled with the bone and shell-white body of a large Q’Lot rocket-module.

  The Q’Lot module had completely speared through the corridor behind, presenting a wall of faintly glowing white that was marbled and rippled as if it had been grown.

  “Speaker…j7gh-nm…” the first one tried to make humanoid noises through it’s ever-writhing tentacle mouth. It still came out in that weird, whistling sing-song kind of way. “Speaker called us,” it managed in the end.

  “I don’t know where Alpha’s mai
nframe or engines are…” Cassandra said quickly, looking back up the darkened corridor. Had she heard something? A distant rush of metal, like one of the passing storms of the spider-drones, coming their way? Whatever it had been, it was now gone. She shook her head, turned, and continued.

  “But there has to be a logic to the Alpha-vessel. There has to be. If we can even find some of the major power converters…” she said, her initial plan of escaping changing in a heartbeat now that she had adjusted to the fact that she had three well-trained and powerful Q’Lot warriors to factor in as well.

  We might be able to kill Alpha, she thought, despite having absolutely no evidence to back this up. If they could do that, this war would be over, wouldn’t it? They’d still have to deal with Armcore of course, but the far more dangerous threat from Alpha and the ancient Valyien would be stilled…

  Of course, it means a suicide mission. The rapid-fire calculations flashed through the agent’s mind just as she had been trained to do.

  What is the greater goal? her training asked of her.

  The destruction of Alpha.

  What isn’t worth sacrificing for that goal?

  Agents were trained to be one-person solutions to the tricky sorts of situations that could not be resolved through politics, diplomacy, or military might. An agent for any of the noble houses might find themselves doing nothing more taxing than being a diplomat or an ambassador, or a trade negotiator, but then they might also find themselves as messengers, codebreakers, burglars, hackers—and, of course, a host of more questionable activities in order to further the aims of their house.

  What wasn’t worth sacrificing…

  Her life, of course, was expendable. Cassie had long since given up on that sense of ego. If it meant bringing down Alpha, she was prepared to fight until her last drop of blood was spilled.

  But could she handle never seeing her friends again? The instant, instinctual pump of her heart over the idea…but what friends did she have left anyway? House Archival was lightyears away, and half of the Imperial Coalition was engaged in a civil war, so there was no guarantee that any of her old training or academy mates would still be alive anyway.

  That only left the Q’Lot who had saved her life, and the crew of the Mercury Blade.

  She had already lost the Speaker, of course.

  And from the Mercury Blade, the chief gunner and Duergar Val Pathok didn’t even fly with them anymore, and Eliard…

  The captain was gone, she knew. Fallen into the warp gate back on Esther, probably never to be seen again, Cassandra’s heart pounded.

  Irie.

  The Chief Engineer of the Mercury Blade was all that was left of the crew that Cassandra had learned to trust. Cassandra looked over to her friend to see that her eyes had rolled to their whites once more and she was shivering. Had Alpha activated the nano-virus inside her blood!? Did this mean that she was watching the inevitable death of her last remaining friend?

  I can’t ask Irie to do this for me. Cassandra made a choice. Irie Hanson was already being used as a pawn in Alpha’s game, since the hybrid intelligence had been the one to infect Irie with the nano-virus specifically to force Cassandra Milan to work with it.

  Irie was already near death, Cassandra scolded herself. Did she really have the right to abandon her to die in some corner of the alien vessel as she ran off with these Q’Lot warriors to try and find some way to destroy the Alpha from the inside?

  No. Cassandra had made up her mind. Some things weren’t worth sacrificing for your goal. She looked up at the Q’Lot, who were already fanning out around her to take up defensive positions, their bone-shell guns scanning the dark tunnels for any sign of movement.

  “My friend has to get out of here. She is badly injured…contaminated, you could say, by Alpha…” Cassandra Milan said sternly.

  “Uh-tzssc^!” the first Q’Lot that had spoken to her before suddenly said, turning its writhing tentacles in her direction.

  Cassandra had no idea what that phrase even meant.

  “Of course we will treat your friend… But we have not come to destroy the Alpha…” it surprised her by saying. “The Speaker called us to rescue you.” The Q’Lot was already gesturing with its tentacles back towards its rocket-module.

  “The Speaker gave up its life to rescue me?” Cassandra wavered where she stood. She hadn’t even considered that as an explanation for why the Speaker had done what it had done.

  “Q’Lot…like…” This warrior Q’Lot struggled to find the words, instead opening and closing its one humanoid-like hand. “Together. Connected like rhizomes. Mycelium…” it stuttered, causing the agent to at least nod.

  Well, somehow the Speaker DID manage to send a message through the space-time continuum to its mothership just by using its biology alone… Cassandra had to consider. Not everyone could do that without a sub-quantum data-space transponder, right?

  “Speaker knew a little of what we know…” the warrior Q’Lot stated. “We detected warp signatures. Deep warp signatures. There is something more important here than…finishing…Alpha in this timeline.”

  “Finishing?” Cassandra started to grasp the enormity of what the Q’Lot was saying. “This timeline?”

  The Q’Lot flared its mouth tentacles in such a way that Cassandra had come to think of as a nod in her time recuperating on the Q’Lot mothership. “Something has…upset…time. Ripples in liquid…” the Q’Lot was saying. “Your Captain Eliard needs help...”

  “Eliard!?” Cassandra staggered. “He’s still alive? He’s out there in the warp, still?”

  The last that Cassie had seen of him was his stunned form as one of the spider-drones had struck him, metal arms flailing as both had fallen backwards into the stable warp field on Esther, designed by the ancient Valyien as permanent points of travel across the galaxy… And, apparently, time itself! Cassandra thought.

  Another agreeing flare of the Q’Lot’s face tentacles. “Not in THIS timeline. In another one,” the Q’Lot stated, just as the corridor was filled with sound of screaming metal as Alpha finally turned its attention to the alien bodies that had infiltrated its hull.

  The dark corridor was filled with many angry little eyes. The spider-drones had found them…

  2

  Can’t Do This

  Eliard swam in the warp…well, not swam, exactly. More like fell. Flailed. Struggled.

  Drowned.

  Remember! Remember why you are here… He clutched at his scattering thoughts as his eyes filled with the flares of white and purple and pink and blue, and still more colors than that—colors that his contained human mind had no name for but belonged to some other dimension entirely.

  No one understood warp—what it really was, or how it existed. The closest that human scholars had come was to say that it was a ‘potential field’ that overlay all of reality, like the sub-quanta field called data-space by humanity, which they used to encode, store, and transmit digital information.

  But warp wasn’t just like the functionalities of data-space, was it? Any time that it interacted with human-normal material space, it caused an anti-matter reaction, releasing pregnant energy many thousands of thousands of times its relative mass. As such, the way that the warp cores of the Imperial Coalition worked was to produce the tiny quantities of warp plasma necessary to initiate a chain-reaction, powerful enough to fold and tear holes through the fabric of three-dimensional space…

  And yet the Valyien had found a way to stabilize that reaction in their creations known as the warp gates—circles inscribed on the floor with arcane geometric sigils that no one understood. They didn’t appear to have anything recognizable in the way of wires and pipes and vacuum-sealed containment procedures that the Coalition’s warp cores had to use.

  Even more unbelievable than that was the fact that these warp gates didn’t apparently tear your physical body apart and scatter it as molecules or quantum strangeness across all of reality when you stepped into them. The Valyien, as far as
Eliard was aware, had even used the gates to force their slave races and themselves into an ab-dimension, a sidereal universe entirely.

  It was all too mind-boggling for Eliard to comprehend. All he knew was that he had to remember. He had to remember who he was, and why he was here, and where he wanted to go.

  I was on Branton. Eliard twisted and turned, feeling something like a static shock pass through his body even though he could only dimly see it as a shadow under layers of light and color.

  Branton was…is my home… He had fallen into the warp gate on the desert world of Esther, and through it, he had emerged on his own home world, through a warp gate that had been hidden directly under his own Martin Palace!

  But it wasn’t the Branton of his youth, but the Branton of his future. Ten years had passed, and Branton 1 had become a desolate ruin. Its city, his family’s palace, and even the mountains had been pulverized by the future Ponos-Omega, the machine intelligence that would, in time, defeat Alpha and its Valyien allies and instead install itself to reign supreme as the Machine God of the known galaxy.

  The warp field around him started to swirl and convulse, its colors changing, and Eliard felt himself being pulled—or perhaps pushed—toward something. Toward somewhere.

  No! Stop thinking about home! He cursed himself. That was how he had arrived at Branton in the first place, by falling through the Esther warp gate and being in so much pain that the barest part of his heart had cried out for a secure home. The warp gate had reacted, picking the most useful coordinates from his own mind and depositing him ten years forward in the place where he had started…

  His thoughts now mattered.

  I don’t want to go back. I want to stop the Valyien, stop Alpha, stop Ponos… Eliard clung onto that certainty, despite the fact that a hundred other small wants and desires and directions offered themselves up to his mind. He could go back to the Traders’ Belt of worlds before Armcore had bombarded it. He could have the time back when it was just him and Irie and Val Pathok aboard the Mercury Blade, and the worst thing that they had to contend with was a monumental Imperial Coalition credit debt to Trader Hogan…