The room and the dais were littered with the burst-apart metal bodies of the spider-drones from the previous battles they had fought here. It looked like a graveyard, or a scrapyard, until one of the bodies moved.
Crap! Cassandra’s hand swept to her belt holster, before she remembered that it was empty and that she had no weapons, or anything, about her person since everything had been taken from her by the Armcore tactical team when she had been captured.
There up ahead, in the jumble of metal bodies that clustered near the top of the dais where the fighting had been thickest, the metal limbs were moving, shuddering.
We didn’t check to see if they were destroyed. There was no time. Cassandra looked around for anything, any weapon that she might use to defend herself from one of the super-fast and super-homicidal Alpha spider-drones.
Her eyes alighted on one of the seared-off metal tentacle arms that had fallen from one of the demolished drones, and she quickly seized it. Not that she had much faith in it, as all that she could do would be to use it like a club or a whip, instead of the pinpoint accuracy that Alpha or the drones themselves could snatch with their vice-grip claws…
But I’ll go down fighting… Cassandra bared her teeth and hissed, just as the broken drone bodies dislodged, and a shape rose from the destruction.
It was a human body.
It was Captain Eliard Martin.
6
Measures and Counter-Measures
In the space just above Esther, with swirls of atmospheric disturbance congregating under the tumbling gigantic bodies of Alpha and the attached Q’Lot, the nuclear warhead raced toward its destination.
The Alpha-vessel was locked in its battle, but an intelligence that spanned all of data-space, and far superior even to that of Ponos-Omega, was able to assess multiple threat targets at the same time.
In a flash of gold-plated transistor chips, the Alpha-vessel had plotted the course of the warhead and dispatched its countermeasure. The Spider Drone nearest to the missile’s trajectory abruptly turned in mid-flight and used all of its booster fuel reserves to speed straight out to the warhead.
But this missile was not targeted in any ordinary way, by ordinary machine intelligences or far more ordinary human minds. This was a warhead that had been sent by none other than Ponos-Omega, acting through its assumed body as the X21 Armcore war cruiser. It had already predicted that Alpha would be able to deploy some sort of counter-measure, and it could easily predict that as soon as the spider drone made contact with the warhead, it would either force it harmlessly off course or could otherwise disrupt the warhead easily by severing available important circuitry.
Ponos-Omega calculated all of this, and so it waited.
The spider drone was approaching fast and Ponos-Omega saw it flare open its metal tentacle arms, ready to capture the warhead as soon as it got near.
Which it did, very quickly.
In that split-second way that all machine intelligences had, Ponos-Omega was able to wait until the spider drone was almost twenty meters away and coming in fast before it sent the subspace command to detonate.
The nuke was still a little way out from the Alpha-vessel, but its expanding bubble of light and flame wouldn’t be. There was a monumental flash like a small star being born, obscuring biological or computer vision for just a moment as the megaton nuke played havoc with all nearby electromagnetic frequencies, but that was just for a moment. It shortly revealed the gold and white shell of particles broadside the Alpha-vessel and its attached, dying Q’Lot vessel, searing across its form and creating bursts of plasma flame.
Ponos-Omega had never intended to actually blow up the Alpha-vessel with a direct attack. It knew that any outright attack would result in the Alpha out-maneuvering it in a heartbeat.
But that didn’t mean that it couldn’t give the Alpha a shove, which looked to be precisely what was happening right now. Alpha spilled spider-drones around it in a whirl as it rolled faster and faster towards the planet’s surface. The wave of the explosion might not have done much direct damage to Alpha, of course, but an impact with an entire planet just might.
And then, of course, Ponos-Omega would get to devour Alpha’s memory servers just as easily as it had done before.
7
When…
“El?” Cassie stumbled where she stood, dropping the metal arm of the spider drone in shock. For some reason, even despite that the Q’Lot captain had told her that Eliard was still alive, she realized that her heart hadn’t believed it until her eyes saw him.
“What…” Eliard coughed, lurching over the drone bodies. “When is it?”
When? Cassie didn’t understand the question. “It’s just been a few days since you went…through…” She clambered over the demolished body parts and up the steps. “What was it like? Where did you go?” The questions spilled from her lips in quick succession.
But then she reached him, paused only a few paces from where he had arrived, and they collapsed into each other, their arms wrapping and hands grasping at each other like drowning people at a life-raft.
“I thought I’d lost you…” El croaked through dry lips.
He looked bad, Cassie saw. He looked as though he hadn’t slept or eaten for a week, and his old black captain’s jacket was burnt and torn in places and spattered with dried blood.
“By the stars, El, is that you? Are you hurt?” She held him by the shoulders as they sat against the topmost step of the dais, meters away from the malefic glow of the warp gate behind and above them.
“No, not me… Val.” El looked distantly at the dried patch of blood on his trousers, before suddenly shuddering as he seemed to come awake to what he had just said. “By the heavens… Val. Ponos got Val.”
“What?” Cassandra was having a hard time understanding what he was saying. Val Pathok is dead? But he was the War Chief of the Duergar now, wasn’t he? Surrounded by a fanatically loyal army of other monolithic, troll-like Duergar, and leader of their ferocious fleet, he was supposed to be helping them fight Alpha and Armcore right then.
But Eliard had just said that Ponos had got him…as if Ponos had killed him! “El, I don’t follow. Why would Ponos go after Val?”
The rakish young pirate captain blinked, and once again shook his head to look up at Cassie. There was a ghost of a weary smile on his features. “No, I mean…not now. Not yet, anyway…”
“Not yet?” Cassandra could feel his shoulders shaking with exhaustion. “El, I don’t know what you saw in there, but I don’t think that Val Pathok is dead…” She wondered whether or not to tell him about Irie Hanson, then thought better of it. Val had once been Eliard and his Mercury Blade’s chief gunner, just as Irie Hanson had been Eliard’s chief engineer. For the captain to think that he might have lost both of his closest friends at this point… Cassie didn’t want to entertain what sort of state that would put him into.
“I was sent here by the Q’Lot. They knew that you were coming out, somehow… They’re attacking the Alpha-vessel as we speak…” Cassandra said, even as her mind raced for solutions.
“We have to get off-planet…” The Mercury Blade. It was still out there, locked into a standby defensive mode by Irie Hanson, the House Archival agent knew. “We can get to the Mercury. We can join up with Val and his Duergar army…”
“We go back.” Eliard’s tremors stilled, and Cassandra could tell that a terrible certainty had flowed over him.
Go back. The exact same words that the Q’Lot captain had used, Cassandra thought, and knew, instinctively, that they meant the same thing.
Where did you go, El? Cassie didn’t want to conceive of the answer, but it was unavoidable.
Back.
“Please…” Eliard’s voice was small as he spared a look straight into Cassandra’s eyes. “I should have been strong enough to do it myself. I don’t want to ask you…”
“I’ll go with you,” Cassandra said simply, knowing that what she said was true. Now that she had sai
d the words out loud, a sense of peace spread over her heart, and she wondered if it was like the stillness emanating from Eliard. Around them the world might be terrible danger, and there was a cosmic star battle taking place just over their heads, and a few meters behind them stood an insane paradox of nature that could wipe them all out at any moment…but she felt still.
“We’ll do this together, Eliard,” she heard herself saying. Her hands that had been supporting him now moved to hold his hands. Neither the captain nor Cassandra were shaking as they stood up, together, and turned to face the warp gate.
“I was sent here to destroy that thing, but that won’t stop the Valyien’s influence and threat,” Eliard said in a calmer, clearer voice. “I know that now.”
Cassandra looked at him questioningly. It was clear that he had seen things while on the ‘other side’ of that warp field, and while she didn’t know what they had been, she trusted the resolve and certainty in his voice.
“All of Imperial Coalition history—heck, maybe all of human history—has been a game for these beings, the ancient Valyien,” Eliard said. “If we stop them here, then they’ll just grow and fester and wait in their ab-dimension until another race comes along, or until humanity ever forgets what happened here…” A small shrug and the captain lifted his chin a little, as if he had just worked something out.
“What?”
“Well, you know what?” He smirked dryly at the warp field. “My father and just about every tutor that I ever had kept on banging on about the importance of humanity’s genetic history… How we nobles were the natural guardians of our entire species, all of that crap…”
“Right…”
“Well, I just realized that in a way, they were on the right track. But the wrong conclusions,” Eliard said lightly. “All of our history is under threat from the Valyien. And all of our future, too. But it’s not just humanity who will lose out, it’s the Duergar and the Ghileesi and all the other races. Even the machine intelligences, I guess…” He finally turned to look at Cassandra with clear eyes.
“That is the terrible future we are facing. The Valyien will always be ready to come and get us, whether through using something like Armcore and the Alpha program or finding a way to walk back through the warp themselves…” he said seriously.
That was when Cassie finally understood what the Q’Lot captain had really meant. Go back.
“We’re going to go back to a point when we can put an end to the Valyien for good,” Eliard said. He waited for Cassandra to nod, then they walked through the warp gate of Esther, holding each other’s hands.
8
Hawking Radiation
Colors assaulted her and light flared into her eyes, but the House Archival agent couldn’t feel anything—well, anything apart from the pain.
“Aiiii!” She thought she was screaming as her body felt like it was coursing with jagged, electric energy. Was she dying? Was this what being consumed by warp plasma was like?
All available and ‘normal’ science told her that whenever mundane matter met warp plasma, there was a cataclysmic reaction, and it certainly felt that way considering what she was feeling right then. But it happened in micro-seconds. A chain reaction that ripped apart time and space.
By the void, is this what dying is like? The agent found herself terrified. Did it happen slowly, terribly slowly, your consciousness aware of every cell and inch of skin as it was eaten away by the destructive energies?
Something pulled at her, again making her body ripple with pain, but it wasn’t like the slow-burn of the electricity. This was something else, a heavier, duller sort of feeling. She looked down—or thought she looked down, it was hard to tell where her body was or what was even happening to it in this confusing interplay of light and color—and saw a darker shape coming toward her. What was it?
A silhouette? A shadow.
The shape moved through the light and resolved itself into an arm. A human arm. Her arm, and its hand was held by another dark shadow, resolving itself into a human hand. Eliard.
Thank the stars. Thank the stars. Thank the—
The rest of the pirate captain’s body swam towards her out of the light. How could he have been so close and yet so indistinct, she thought but didn’t know the answer to. This warp light was like a physical substance. It had properties that normal light didn’t and made Cassandra’s head spin.
But she was glad that Eliard was here, with her, even if, at this close distance, she could now see with terrible particularity the effect that the warp was having on him, and presumably her, too.
He was fraying.
The edges of his body, any protrusion from his hair to his ears, shoulders, or the lapels of his shirt, appeared to be blurring and misting away, and when she concentrated, Cassandra was certain that she could see fine clouds of Eliard’s substance—his very material form—being pulled apart.
“Back.” She saw his mouth open and frame the words, and she nodded, hoping that he could make out her face as well.
The pain was getting more intense, becoming a louder ache spreading up her legs. For a dizzying moment, she wondered just what state they would be in when they reappeared in mundane reality—if they ever did, of course. Would she have her legs, or would they be misshapen and half-eaten away by the warp plasma? Would she ever be able to see again? Feel? Touch another human being?
The colors around them were becoming turbulent, and Cassandra realized that was because they were moving. A sensation of pressure in front of her and drag behind her, and she realized that it was Eliard. Pulling her forward as he must have somehow found a way to navigate, even out here in this hellish realm.
But where are we going? Back to where? What?
When?
The House Archival agent was about to find out, as the warp plasma deepened to a ferocious purple-red and engulfed her vision…
Cassandra and her companion Captain Eliard stumbled out of the warp plasma under a strange, whirling night sky.
“Augh…” Once again, Cassandra’s thoughts were filled with the strange warp memories of dissolving and fraying away, and her body ached with the echoes of the pain that she had been put through.
“It’s… It’s not real…” She heard Eliard hacking and gasping beside her, his hand still clenched tight onto hers.
“What?” she heard herself say, as she was still getting used to having a physical body again.
“The pain. It’s not real. Look.” Eliard gently raised her hand and Cassandra’s head followed it, seeing the shuddering, shaking form of the pirate captain in front of her, completely intact.
He looks like crap, Cassandra had to admit, but he was certainly intact. His face was haggard and pale, and his eyes were wide and staring with the same echo of psychic pain that she was feeling, but everything about him seemed to be all there. No missing bits. No indistinct haze. And of course, the captain’s hand still held her own, each of her fingers still appearing to be where they should be and attached to her slim arm—just in the same shape it should always be, which was attached to the rest of her body, as normal as it had been before she had stepped into the warp gate.
“I think…” Cough. “…if we stayed in there, then it might become real…” Eliard hazarded a guess, but Cassandra was already looking past him to the strange void of the sky.
For starters, there’s a whole lot less stars than there should be… she thought with a sickening sense of unease.
The pair stood on a blackened, rocky plan with no apparent vegetation or even much in the way of soil. Instead, the world they found themselves on was a panorama of black, gray, and silver-sheen rock.
“Just like the rock pillars in the Esther warp gate,” Cassandra murmured as she leaned on Eliard to pull herself up, and the pair wobbled together.
It would have been a dark planet were it not for the silver sheen of strange minerals in the rock, metamorphic, like ancient basalt or rock-glass produced from lava flows. They were on a thin stri
p of a plateau that ended abruptly in the jagged teeth of rocks that fell toward a canyon, and on the other side, there were similar stacks and spires of the same dark geology.
And everything is covered in signs… Cassandra gasped and pointed with her free hand at what sat just next to her boot, inscribed into the stone itself. “El, look…”
It was a carving, perfectly etched like a laser cut: a curl that had been broken and cross-hatched with ugly, sharp lines. The agent had seen such designs somewhere before. It hurt her head to look at, but when she looked away, she saw that there was another, not a foot away, and another, and another…
“The Valyien sigils…” Eliard agreed. “The same ones that are on the warp pillars, and their warp gates…”
Cassandra nodded. “But it looks like the whole planet is covered in them…” she said. “Or at least as far as I can see…”
She was right. Every surface of the black and silver rock, from the uneven floor to the pillars to the walls and even the tumbledown boulders, was similarly etched with the uneven alien designs. Cassandra had no idea how big this planet was—big enough to have human-normal gravity and oxygen, presumably—but the effort it must have taken to do all of this was incredible. More than one lifetime’s work. An eon, perhaps.
But the marked, scarred planet was only one piece of the strange puzzle they faced. The sky was cloudless and seemingly nighttime, and yet even without clouds or artificial lights, there were no visible stars. It was just…blank.
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