Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  That seemed a paltry thing now, compared to his current troubles of trying to save the future…

  But in that past, there would still come Alpha… Eliard shook his head from that sweet little dream. Armcore would still be experimenting with their prototype Enhanced Cognitive Network—a new type of machine intelligence that was plugged into the warp gates. From there, the ECN would still naturally be upgraded to Alpha, and then all of this cycle would happen all over again…

  No. Not the Traders’ Belt.

  This time, the warp colors flashed and swirled, reds mixing with blues and turning a darker, uglier sort of color. He felt like his body was rolling in a tempest. Pain lanced through him—a neurological, nerve sort of pain that made the captain wonder if it was his nerve endings being eaten away by the strange proto-molecules of the warp field he was in.

  He opened his mouth to scream, and he was sure that he did, even though he couldn’t hear himself in this chaotic place.

  He could go back to when he was just a young man, either back on Branton (no!) or at the Trevalyn Academy. His mind scrabbled for a solution to his predicament. The Trevalyn Academy that he had hated? No. That was the place where noble sons and daughters of the great noble houses went to learn the art of warfare and statecraft, and to be nigh tortured by the vice chancellor.

  Eliard wasn’t going to go back there.

  Esther. His heart prompted him, delivering an image of the desert planet that had started this merry-go-round through reality. That had been the largest of the warp gates, and the one through which the ab-dimensional influence of the Valyien was flowing into their constrained human reality.

  But no, he couldn’t even go back there, could he? If he did, then he would still have to find a way to defeat Alpha, and what Ponos-Omega would become…

  But Cassie is there… His heart pulled him, and the warp responded, swirling and churning as he was rushed towards his intention.

  Cassandra Milan, House Archival Agent. Cassie. A blonde bob and sharp eyes. Defiant, clever, and questioning. He wanted nothing more than to go back to her, to help her. He had last seen her surrounded by Alpha’s spider-drones as they had poured through the roof of Esther’s sunken ziggurat, intent on stopping his attempted destruction of the warp gate…

  But I can’t go back there… That won’t stop all of this! a part of him thought desperately. Was he courageous enough to try and push himself back even further? To Tritho? To the ancient Valyien?

  In an instinctive move, he tried to push his hands to his face, the pain and this dizzying experience making him want to be sick or to scream in rage, but his hands in front of his eyes were blurry, indistinct. Just like before, it looked as though his body was one of those life-sized, perfect sculptures of a man, and yet made out of filament dust. All of his edges were being tattered and blown away from him—

  And it hurt.

  I can’t do this, he internally screamed.

  I can’t do this alone.

  3

  Go Back

  “Yzhg! M3le! ^^etko!”

  The strange, musical shouts of the Q’Lot warriors had turned into sharp chirrups of alarm as they fired at the approaching horde of spider-drones.

  “Give me a weapon!” Cassie shouted, but the nearest and the tallest—the very one who had been speaking to her—moved quickly to block her view of the battle and pushed her back with its humanoid hand in a surprisingly strong gesture, sending her and Irie stumbling back toward the Q’Lot rocket-module.

  But even as Cassandra’s back hit the glowing and strangely cool organic hull of the module, she could still see the terrible calamity they faced. Both of the corridors that met theirs were filled by the writhing, darting metal bodies of the spider-drones, each one climbing over and squirming around the bodies of its siblings in an attempt to swamp the few invaders in Alpha’s body.

  Whumpf! Whumpf!

  But the Q’Lot weren’t just standing there, they were fighting back, using all four ‘arms’ and the two weapons that each one held. Their larger, humanoid arms held the two-handled shell-bone gun, and she saw their shoulders recoiling as they fired the heavy devices, for the air to shimmer from its snubbed nozzle, a heartbeat before the wave of force hit their targets. The effect was like watching a pressurized sonic boom, only one that was silent. The metal bodies of the spider-drones were bent and ruptured, cracking in sprays of electrical sparks.

  But then the Q’Lot fired their other weapon that they held in their smaller, praying mantis-like midriff arms. The jack-knife folds of these strange arms were hidden by the large bone-like tubes that they held, each one encrusted with bone-like protrusions. Cassandra saw each Q’Lot raise the tube ‘muffler’ in front of it, and light spilled out from the organic metal itself—

  Vreeeee-WHUMPF!

  It was the same technology as their shell weapons, clearly, but this time, the pressure waves were matched by a singular flood of light from the tube that lanced into the boiling mass like a torch, tearing and breaking and rending the struck spider-drones. This second tube-weapon was much more powerful than the first, but it’s area of effect, Cassie saw, was smaller. Each tube whined after it fired, and the midriff arms thumped back to each Q’Lot’s chest. Cassie figured that these weapons needed more time to recharge whatever eldritch power source they used.

  Whumpf! Whumpf! The tides of the spider-drones were in uproar, caught up in the tangles of their ruined fellows as they sought to overcome this barrage.

  But there were so many of them.

  “Look out! Above you!” Cassandra cried as she saw a snaking tendril of two or three of the spider-drones that had clung to the apex of the corridor’s roof to avoid being hit. They had broken out from the crowd and turned the junction until they were almost close enough to—

  Whumpf! The talking ‘captain’ of the Q’Lot—at least, that was what Cassandra thought of him as—angled his shell-bone gun at them and fired. The first climbing spider drone burst apart in a shower of sparks, and the one behind it was thrown back in a tangle of metal tentacles.

  But the third in the line had all the processing power of a machine, and it had the spare nanoseconds available to dodge out of the way and onto the back of one of the forward Q’Lot.

  There were only four of them altogether, including ‘Captain’ Q’Lot. Cassandra’s scream stilled in her throat as she saw for one terrible moment, in the stop-time slow motion of high adrenaline, that the fallen spider drone was latched onto the back and shoulders of one of the Q’Lot soldiers, and its metal vice-tentacles were crushing its flailing limbs as the alien staggered and tried to dislodge it.

  Before the soldier thumped to the floor, with the obscenely writhing spider drone still on top of it—

  Whumpf! Whumpf-whumpf! The three remaining members of the Q’Lot team were firing at will now, their unified barrage broken by the loss of one of their comrades, and the spider-drones were clutching to the sill of their corridor entrance and hauling themselves in—

  “Ty-e4chk!” The ‘Captain’ Q’Lot said a very bad word in its native tongue, before adding, “Go back, Cassandra Milan! GO BACK!” It released one hand from the shell-bone gun and made some complicated hand gesture at her, as if flinging something from its long fingers, and Cassandra felt the rocket-module react at some hidden command it had given.

  Just as Eliard’s blue-scale Device arm might have done—on a much smaller scale, of course—Cassie saw the rippled bone and rock patterns of the rocket-module break apart and resolve themselves into large overlapping scales, sliding over each other as they revealed a rounded opening—an access port. The message was clear. Cassandra, in her panic, heaved Irie Hanson through before clambering in after her, turning as soon as her feet were in to see the scales of the hull re-knitting themselves behind her, and the diminishing form of the Q’Lot as they fired their bone-tube weapons again—

  Vreeeeeee-WHUMPF!

  Despite the power of these weapons, and the dazzling display of light, th
ere were only three of them, and the spider-drones were falling from the ceiling and rising from the floor and jumping from the walls all around the brave Q’Lot soldiers.

  Snap. The scales knitted together, and all sound outside was muffled to a dull, distant hum of thunder.

  “But I don’t even know how to fly one of these…” Cassie looked around to see that the tunnel of the access port met a larger internal space, with ribbed walls like the inside of a shell. The surfaces were either an iridescent mother-of-pearl, or they were multi-colored by strange protrusions of fungal and lichen-looking matter.

  Computer banks. Cassie recognized the distribution of these ‘tables’ of frilled, tentacled, leafed green, purple, and blue organisms. The Q’Lot had found a way to use biology as their prime technology. They genetically and molecularly engineered species that could do the things that machines could, and more.

  Thud-thud-thud… But Cassandra’s personal misgivings at her abilities were unnecessary, as the different tendrils of blue-green lichen twitched and flared in a dreamy sequence. This boat had been programmed already, and it was shuddering and moving, rolling both Cassandra and Irie around in their little access tube.

  Where is it taking us? Cassandra thought, knowing that she was helpless to stop it anyway.

  Outside the desperate fight that was going on between the spider-drones and the Q’Lot, Alpha was still locked in its own desperate fight—but one that it appeared to be winning.

  Despite the Q’Lot ship’s monumental discharge of energy, the Alpha-vessel had recovered quickly and thrown many more of its drone warriors with their eight tentacles at it. Storms, gales, and clouds of Alpha’s spider-drones burnt through the near-space of the Alpha-vessel’s hull to smash into the jagged spikes of the Q’Lot ship, many exploding, others grappling and using their laser-clamps as soon as they could.

  The Q’Lot mothership even looked smaller than it had before, having lost approximately half of its tines to the attacks, which were now withered and twisted, rotating free of their body above the battle.

  But the Alpha-vessel was still rotating on its axis, and something strange was starting to happen to the far edge of its shell.

  It was starting to glow, and a very pale orange was scudding there, like a trick of the light, and the body of the desert planet of Esther was filling the background with its bulk.

  Alpha and the Q’Lot vessel were starting to turn into the gravity well of the desert world, and Alpha’s vast shape was large enough, and charged with enough solar particles, that it was causing drifts of electromagnetic radiation to burn off its hide. If it didn’t manage to correct its course soon, Esther’s gravity well would start hungrily plucking at it, revolving it faster and faster towards itself, and that harmless aurora borealis would turn into the burning gases of re-entry…

  Not that re-entry into a planet’s atmosphere should particularly cause problems for the Alpha-vessel. It had, after all, only recently exited the skies of Esther, causing vast stormfronts and thunderhead clouds as it did so. But every ship, even a highly advanced hybrid alien one run by the galaxy’s most advanced machine intelligence, had to at least consider the laws of physics. An unplanned, unmitigated re-entry into a planet’s atmosphere might not kill Alpha, but without stabilizing rockets and shielding and proportionate forces used, it would certainly give it something to think about.

  Maybe that had been the Q’Lot plan all along.

  In the middle of all this canopy of threat, there was a tiny flash from the side of the Alpha-vessel, where its now-cracked shell met its elongated prow spikes. If a viewer could zoom in, they would see that from a blackened hole in the side of the shell, there were bursts of light and plasma-fire and escaping gases as something shook itself free from where it had been embedded, and it burst out into space—

  It was the infinitesimally small splinter of white that was the Q’Lot rocket-module, turning in flight so that its humped tail-end could burst with plasma-fire as it arced under the rolling Alpha and Q’Lot vessels, heading on its predetermined route, which wasn’t back to its mothership, and not out to the relative safety of deeper space.

  No. It arced down toward the ruddy desert planet of Esther as the battle raged behind it.

  “Where are you taking us!?” Cassandra couldn’t stop herself from calling out as she levered herself over the groaning form of Irie Hanson and into the main compartment of the rocket-module. Instantly, her nose was filled with the fresh, ozone-laden scent of the air as the living computers recycled their strange nutrients, giving back more than just complicated space-time algorithms.

  But for all her time convalescing on board the Q’Lot ship, and for all her many years of training to be one of the most observant and resourceful agents in House Archival, the biological computers were still a mystery to her. They looked like a garden—or more precisely, a terrarium that had been given over to rare, miniature cacti and desert plants, twists of greenery beside nut-like protuberances. Green and brown sponges, spiked leaves… Each bio-computer sat on its own stand and was interspersed with branching brackets of the same milky-white bone-coral that the Q’Lot seemed to make much of their equipment from.

  But it didn’t just appear to be an elaborate plant nursery in here, Cassandra thought. There were lights amongst the plants, and patterns of light and color that seemed to come from small nodules embedded or grown in each of the various flora, flaring gently into white, blue, or orange. As the rocket-module shook around her, Cassandra saw patterns of the light grow in intensity and wash through the plants, most of which were completely different species, and yet somehow working in concert to create rhythms of light like a computer readout.

  Maybe Irie could understand it… Cassie thought, knowing that it was a long shot, since Irie Hanson was one of the best mechanical and electronic engineers that she had ever worked with, but the House Archival agent had no idea whether she was any good at gardening.

  Cassie turned to see that the mere possibility was off the cards, since Irie Hanson was in the process of disappearing.

  “Irie!?” Cassie rushed back to the small access port to see that the small, angry woman with the frizzy hair was now almost completely taken over by what she recognized as the Q’Lot blue-scale virus—blue lichen-like scales that overlapped each other quickly, traveling along a network of fine, thread-like blue tendrils…

  Cassandra knew all about the Q’Lot Blue Scale virus, because she had been sent to the Armcore research station along with the rest of the crew of the Mercury Blade to recover the weaponized Blue Scale for Ponos—now Ponos-Omega. It was there that she had first met Professor Argyle Trent, whose experiments with the Blue Scale had turned him into a monster, and it was there that she had seen the other creatures of the station that had been transformed into rabid, mutant monsters by the Blue Scale.

  It was the exact same substance that now covered Irie’s limbs and her lower body up to her midriff, and she could see its thread-like tendrils slowly creeping up into the woman’s scalp—

  “Irie!” Cassandra gasped in recognition of the terrible fate, pulling herself up short before she touched her. The Blue Scale had webbed itself to the very wall of the access tube, until it was starting to make a humped dome that had once been the human engineer…

  This has to be some kind of internal healing system of the ship itself… she wondered. As there appeared to be no other patches of the Blue Scale coming for her after all…

  But how will my friend emerge from the other end of her chrysalis? Cassandra thought. Is she going to become like Eliard, imbued with strange new powers, and with a Device at the end of her arm?

  Or was she going to emerge like Argyle Trent, hideous to the human eye and so completely changed that Cassie had never seen any shred of human sanity in him.

  But I came back, Cassandra thought. And she didn’t even appear strange. She might feel it sometimes, but she didn’t appear any different from the woman she had been…

  “Maybe that�
��s because the Q’Lot got to me first…” she said, trying to remember a time when she had been first revived. It was so difficult. Her memories of that terrifying time were hazy and strange, but her reasoning made sense, at least in her head. Argyle Trent had synthesized the Blue Scale and self-administered it, without knowing anything about its true properties or by talking to the actual beings who had created it in the first place. Maybe he overdosed on it?

  With a scowl, she knew that she just had to accept whatever this Q’Lot ship was programmed to do. They had looked after her well, after all.

  Thud-dud-dudhr! There was no time to worry left anyway as the rocket-module hit the golden dunes and started to skid along the surface, sending up sprays of golden sand on either side of them.

  Without any guidance or navigation controls, Cassie was thrown back and forth in the small, confined space until she eventually found a ridge of the white shell-bone to cling onto for dear life as it seemed that the world was doing its best to shake the teeth from her head.

  These things must have seatbelts… she thought in panic, before wondering if she had ever seen a Q’Lot person using a harness or a seatbelt or any kind of webbing at all.

  No.

  Just when Cassie thought she couldn’t take any more and that she might be sick, the rocket-module plowed to a stop with a heavy crunch, and there was a hissing sound from somewhere that turned to grating as the access port opened on the other side of the bluish mound that held Irie within.

  “I’m sorry.” Cassie lightly touched Irie’s Blue Scale shell and just hoped that whatever it was doing inside of there, it was making the engineer better and not killing her.