Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  Earth Prime, Old Earth… He toyed with the names in his head. If his calculations were right, then right now in this timeline, that was where every human in the Milky Way Galaxy would still be. They probably hadn’t even discovered that the universe didn’t revolve around their own sun yet…

  Old Earth, Ereka-3… He didn’t like how similar those names could be. Three, as in, third rock from the sun… Which was just like Old Earth.

  One near star, one local cloud, and in the third arm of a medium-sized spiral galaxy… Eliard continued. Just like Old Earth’s nearest star was Alpha Centauri, and that Old Earth was nearby to the Oort Cloud, and yes, it was in the third-most commonplace arm of the Milky Way spiral galaxy.

  Drekkit, Eliard thought. Ereka-3 must be the Valyien name for Old Earth.

  “You DO know of what I speak,” the Valyien managed to say, raising the two parts of the blood-draining contraption and putting them together. “Your tests have indicated that you are ‘human’ and that your biology was once from Ereka-3. But now it is not. It is…Q’Lot.” The speaking Valyien gestured with the contraption over to the unconscious form of Cassandra, too. “Both of you. Once human. Now Q’Lot.”

  “You tested us!?” Eliard suddenly shivered. He didn’t remember any of them sticking a needle or attacking him with drones at any point, but then again, he had also been unconscious for enough time for the Device to heal him…

  Which it would have done, if he had that thing sticking out of his chest… Eliard’s hand moved to the still tender patch under his old encounter suit and found it still sensitive to the touch. He had thought that it was one of the kicks of the Valyien that had attacked them, but maybe it was actually the healing puncture marks of one of those contraptions. Eliard shivered again in involuntary disgust as he imagined himself unconscious, while those creatures shoved that thing into his chest, for his own precious blood to pump and bubble up inside of it. He wondered if it had been red, or the blue of the Q’Lot?

  “Where have you come from?” the Valyien asked once more, stepping forward.

  “Stay back!” Eliard’s horror at the blood-draining contraption only intensified, and he took a step back until he had thumped against the wall, holding out the Device in front of him.

  “And…that.” The Valyien paused and gestured towards the Device that was levelled straight at him. “More Q’Lot technology. We have already nullified it, dampened its viral load.”

  Eliard growled through his teeth. So that was why it wasn’t responding to the dangers he was in.

  “You have been uplifted by the Q’Lot, haven’t you?”

  “What!?” Eliard shook his head. What on earth is it suggesting!? But then again, another fear blossomed in the pirate captain’s mind: what if he did tell them that he came from the future Imperial Coalition? Wouldn’t that just make them all the more intent on conquering it, from here?

  “Why? Why would the Q’Lot empower you to attack their own allies?” the Valyien said.

  Even though Eliard Martin had always maintained that the most important lessons he ever learned were all self-taught, and all learned in the deeps of non-aligned space as he’d had to rely on his wits and his fellow comrades alone, he did have a modicum of training in the noble arts.

  In fact, being the scion of a great and powerful noble house, he had an awful lot of training, when compared to the average citizen of the Imperial Coalition. Not as much as other nobles did, of course, but still a lot.

  He had learned the history of Old Earth and the noble houses. He had learned hand-to-hand fighting techniques, although he had learned what sort of dirty street fighting techniques actually worked when he was a pirate. Eliard Martin had also learned enough mechanics and astrophysics to get by, as well as enough strategy and tactics to help him plan a skirmish.

  He had also learned a little diplomacy, which was actually one of the prime noble arts, and one that he had always been spectacularly bad at. But in later years, his piracy naturally led him to add to those skills with what he had learned at the gambling tables.

  You never reveal your hand. You always protect your assets unless you can afford to sacrifice them for a greater win…

  This Valyien was certain that Eliard and Cassandra came from Old Earth—Ereka-3, he thought—and seeing as they had far superior knowledge and near-impossible biological skills, there was only one way that could have happened. In this Valyien’s mind, they must have been plucked from the surface of Old Earth and genetically programmed by their closest allies and perhaps masters—their sister species known as the Q’Lot.

  And the fact that Cassandra herself had been revived by the Q’Lot meant that she too must have some of the Q’Lot biological technology running around in her bloodstream. Eliard saw the perfect opportunity.

  “The Q’Lot did this to us,” Eliard said, drawing his chin up. He wasn’t technically lying, as both he and Cassandra had been infected by the Q’Lot blue-scale virus. “And we were sent here to kill you,” he said, which was also true—just not in the way the Valyien now took it.

  “Sssss!” It suddenly recoiled, its mandibles flaring and flexing wide as it hissed and gurgled at the distant chimney ceiling. “Treachery!” it hissed and shouted, before adding a string of its stranger, whistling syllables as it barked orders at the others. With answering grunts, the other two Valyien lowered themselves onto all-fours and proceeded to race out of the room, leaving this one behind, who stood upright on bipedal legs for a long moment before it reached up and snatched the white and silver headdress from its head and threw it to the ground, then stamped its middle legs down to tear heavily at the fabric.

  I was right about the colors having something to do with the Q’Lot, then, Eliard thought with grim satisfaction. Which must have meant that this small conclave of Valyien were like trusted ambassadors or courtiers or liaisons for their sister species.

  And now I have just started a war between them, he thought happily. That had to be enough to halt the Valyien in their tracks, right? To make sure that they never develop, or even survive, long enough to start creating warp gates all over the Milky Way Galaxy, and then eventually use them to possess the Alpha machine?

  Surely.

  “You have aided us. We recognize the hard work of our servants,” the curiously bald Valyien now said in harsh, guttural tones before turning and marching from the room on four claws just as the others had done. But this time, the blue meson field did not return to cut the sight of Cassandra Milan’s cell from his, but instead, it wavered into life across the large rhomboid doorway.

  “It’s letting us live so that we can act as witnesses or something when it comes time for them to prove that the Q’Lot have been trying to kill them…” Eliard surmised, crossing over immediately to the meson field box that Cassandra was currently trapped on the other side of.

  How long do I have, he thought, before there’s an outbreak of hostilities? Would the Valyien imprison the Q’Lot travelers or ambassadors or rulers that they had seen making their way through the city? Would they use the blood-siphoning device on them, too?

  Or maybe the Q’Lot, if they are so powerful now, will just bombard this rocky little drekkpile of a world from near orbit! The next thought worried him. He had started a war, and now he had no idea how it would go.

  Either way, whatever happened, the pirate captain was under no illusions. As soon as they had given their ‘testimony’ or whatever they did to pass for legality around here, the Valyien would most likely just execute them, or turn them into blood-pump fast food for the nearest Valyien…

  We have to get out of here. Now.

  13

  Battle Intelligence

  The expanding ball of white spilled over the Alpha-vessel, covering almost a full third of it before the light of chain-reaction neutrons started to fade away. If the effect that the thermonuclear warhead had on the Alpha-vessel was minimal at best, then the effect its invisible but scouring radiation had on the upper atmosphere of the de
sert planet of Esther was incandescent.

  As the giant mutant warship shook and turned on its side, something terrible was happening behind it to the thin envelope of skies that surrounded Esther. There had already been a coronal glow of green, blue, and yellow as Alpha’s own gravity well attracted and scattered electromagnetic radiation—creating its own aurora borealis above the planet—but now those dancing colors were scattered in a widening circle over the planet, and in its place came ripples of white and gray like a stone had been dropped in milk. The shockwave of Ponos’ thermonuclear blast had scoured the top atmosphere of its precious Van Allen Belt and had drawn up the clouds and stormfronts from further below.

  From this great height and distance, the scene would almost look beautiful—an ever-undulating, expanding halo of white and gray that flared over the planet—but it didn’t look or feel so tranquil on the surface.

  The near-orbit blast had done several things, first disrupting the delicate electromagnetic energy fields that swam around any planet large enough to control its own gravity. Of the Imperial Coalition citizens that still huddled in their cities on Esther, all of those in the middle northeastern continent started experiencing technical glitches as their satellites were knocked out, radio waves were torn apart, and even their subspace transmitters—a technology that encoded itself directly into the sub-quantum layer of reality and was thus usually immune to such overt physical damage—were taken offline.

  Of the citizens that dared to step out of their buildings or look up through their crystal-glass windows, they would have seen a sight above their heads that was beyond strange. The usually high and white skies, sometimes scudding with strips of white clouds, had been replaced by a hole in the sky.

  It was an oval of darker blue, almost midnight at its heart, which was gradually becoming lighter and lighter until it met a perfect oval line made of white clouds. What the Imperial Citizens probably didn’t understand was that they were looking at the atmospheric crater that the explosion had created. All of the animals in the cities went quiet. The desert dogs shook and cowered at this strange sight. The brightly -colored parrots and parakeets that usually flocked across the city’s rooftops went eerily still as their delicate internal organs sensed the shift in the planet’s equilibrium.

  For the first time in any human memory, all of the planet underneath that invisible crater in the sky went suddenly, inexplicably cold.

  FTHOOOOM! A long way off, past the walls of the city, something screamed to earth, trailing a blackened tail like a meteorite, attached to a glowing red cinder. The projectile screeched as it darted through the air from the strange hole in the sky before striking the desert outside the city with a smaller, but no less devastating, blast that sent up dark clouds of grit and sand.

  It was one of the larger satellites that the Imperial Coalition had seeded around all of their home worlds, knocked and torn from its course by the shockwave above. A tiny speck on the other side of the horizon revealed that it wasn’t just one satellite that had been hit, but all of the northeastern quarter of the planet.

  So began, for the remaining human residents of Esther, a scene like one out of an ancient religious play. Blazing satellites and even space platforms that had been unlucky enough to be orbiting near the battle of Alpha and the Q’Lot were jolted from their positions, suffering ever more critical failures before eventually giving up to the constant pull of the planet’s gravity.

  Several of these once-human projectiles hit the various cities of the Imperial Coalition, and with no satellites able to triangulate the tracking computers of the various defense systems, the towers, domes, spires and streets were at the mercy of fate itself. Some of the satellites were little bigger than human-normal chairs, or a small transport, and luckily most of them broke up in re-entry, doing little more damage than scattering fragments of molten metal against buildings.

  Crystal-glass—a special synthetic material made by quick-growing ‘plates’ of crystals on a substrate—was a pretty strong substance, but many panes and windows were cracked and shattered in a sound like a gunshot.

  Unluckily, though, not all of the satellites were so small, and several would be classed as miniature platforms, used to stack many different relays and transmitters on their broad, wedge-like surface to be more efficient. These were the sizes of some entire houses, and when they hit buildings, they impacted like bombs.

  Fires started to catch and spread throughout the human settlements. The emergency klaxons of the alarm systems started to wail. But where to go? many people must have thought. Esther was a designated safe world, far from the depredations of the non-aligned frontiers. Its mandatory number of approved shelters were few and far between, and many citizens had never dreamed of installing their own bunkers.

  Esther would never be the same again, and that was before the real damage had even begun…

  The oval of white clouds started to fade, and the dark, cold shadow of the atmosphere was lightening back to its normal color. Perhaps it was over. Perhaps—apart from the screaming satellite-projectiles, of course—the worst of the damage had been done, people might have thought. But if they had, they would have been very wrong indeed.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the laws of physics are indisputable—at least, unless you’re the Valyien, that is. In the vacuum left by the nuclear shockwave in the upper atmosphere, as it dissipated and gases and air rushed back in, so started a chain reaction of climate, weather, and storms.

  The skies above started to darken, seemingly of their own accord. Where the strange shadow-crater had been, there started to appear an ever-darker swell of clouds as the distant upper atmosphere was pulled into the vacuum that had just so recently been created. It was like watching the re-entry of some massive ship as the clouds boiled and darkened downwards, and brought with them stronger and stronger winds. Little did anyone know what was to happen, but even if they couldn’t guess, this was a foretaste.

  Amongst the fires and the final crashes of the last satellites, the walls and the jagged, cracked plains of crystal-glass started to rattle with the flying particles of sand from the deserts all around. The rattle became a sigh, and then a rising hiss as the sky everywhere started to darken.

  One of the many peculiarities of living on a desert world is that the storms that occur are usually never just storms. They are sandstorms and desert-tornadoes. Whereas wetter human-populated worlds might gather water from the seas and the rivers and wetlands all around to throw and deposit as driving rain, on a predominantly arid world like Esther, all that the wind had to throw was sand and more sand…and now it did so with great, great abandon.

  The skies of the cities of the northeastern quarter of the planet grew darker and darker as they turned into heavy storm clouds that were pregnant with accumulated desert stuff, turning them into stacked cliff-faces of yellow, ochre, and black before they engulfed the lands with their ire.

  And even then, amidst the fires, the streets and buildings pocked and torn by falling satellites, and amidst the raging sand-winds that could fill a room with grit in minutes, even then it wasn’t the worst of what to come for the human inhabitants of Esther.

  Far above these unsettling scenes on the surface, there was still a war being waged. The monolithic shadows of the Armcore Avalanche-class war cruisers swam through the stars, built-up buttresses on each of the arms that made their W-shape glittering with light as they discharged lasers and torpedoes at their enemy.

  But their enemy was fast and supremely calculating. Even though it inhabited the body of just one of the Armcore war cruisers, one versus four, it had the advantage of never having to relay orders through biochemical minds or wait for fleshy bodies to understand and respond.

  The machine intelligence known as Ponos-Omega also had the inestimable advantage of once having been the caretaker intelligence of the military industrial firm of Armcore itself, and so already had every strategy and tactic that was being used against it memorized and countered, as wel
l as being able to intimately know the weaknesses of its adversaries.

  Flash! A pinpoint spear of light from the central buttress of the Ponos war cruiser, a heavy meson cannon that was usually used in barrage fire, but Ponos’s intelligence, married with that of half a dozen or so other house intelligences that it had successfully ‘eaten’—as well as the confounding circuits of the ECN prototype—fired just one shot as it swam past one of its enemy.

  The beam of light didn’t hit any weapons pod or module, or even seek out the command deck of the opposing ships, even though Ponos knew exactly where each of these things were, and their power outage and shielding potentials.

  Instead, the blast of concentrated meson energy was angled past all of these things, burning in a solid lightning bolt past crystal-glass portholes and sensing arrays, to hit the underside of one of the opposing ship’s arms, where a set of heavy rounded tubes sat briefly on the surface of the hull before entering the housing of the rear 2 engine boosters.

  This was the heat exchange overflow system to the rear 2 engine, designed with 35% lighter alloy material to allow the hazardous gases that it contained to cool quickly and efficiently in transit.

  The meson beam stayed burning in place for a heartbeat, then flickered off. Not enough to blow the tubes apart, but it left a glowing red burn, scabbed with black.

  The Ponos war cruiser had taken a chance flying this close to one of its enemy, and immediately the other human captains had attempted to take advantage of it, one moving in front and the other below and underneath to get clearer shots at the treacherous craft.

  Alert! Damage to Port Buttress!

  Report: Weapons pods 12-16 inoperable. Port stabilizer efficiency reduced to 38%

  Alert! Damage to Section 8 Undercarriage!

  Report: Section 8 outer hull integrity reduced to 53%

  The underside and higher arm of the Ponos war cruiser were scored with torpedoes and meson railguns, sending up washes of fire and short-lived plasma as the Ponos war cruiser shook. It was a sacrifice, and one that meant it would have to compensate for the damage done to its undercarriage, but a moment later, it became worth it.