The clouds of Hatchets spun through the night to the Armcore vessel already rocking from internal explosions, moving too quick and too fast for the war cruiser’s lasers to pick them off. With loud and heavy thunks, they hit the side of the war cruiser and got to work, their arms dragging them to the nearest portholes or bulkhead doors or crystal-glass windows and proceeding to cut them open with miniature meson laser cutters.
They were probably annoyances to the much larger vessel, but every now and again, if they were released at just the right time, they could have truly great effects.
Val had indeed chosen precisely the right time, just as his Hammer ship had turned in a roll under the rising arm of the injured Armcore war cruiser. The Hatchet drones flew themselves upward to the nearest exposed bit of enemy metal, which happened to be one of the many engine departments, and proceeded to cut and burrow their way in.
There was a shockwave that rippled through the metal as dangerous plasma containers were breached and reacted violently, igniting the plasma injectors, and the fuel cells.
One entire arm of the Armcore war cruiser exploded, sending it into a death spiral into the near form of another Armcore war cruiser.
Val Pathok smiled grimly. If there was anything that he understood about battles and about fighting, it was that there was a kind of advantage when you were surrounded, like he had been at the Chenga Pass. There were so many enemies around you that they end up clogging each other up. Stumbling over each other. Falling. Accidentally stabbing each other.
And it also meant that you could attack anywhere you liked.
Val Pathok hit the firing mechanism of the orbital laser again, this time targeting the second Armcore war cruiser that had been hit by the first. It shuddered and rocked, spilling metal and flames as it took out its own smaller craft and battle drones, falling away from the battle-space.
To reveal there, up ahead, the Alpha-vessel itself.
14
Seed of Destruction
“Cassie?” Eliard moved as close as he dared to the blue meson containment box that held the House Archival agent, seeing her stir at the sound of his voice.
“El… Where?” she grumbled as she pushed herself up on her elbows, then immediately saw the forcefield that was around her. “Oh.”
“I know, I’ll explain later, but I’m going to get you out…” he said, just as the room shook with a violent vibration.
What the…. There was a rising sound of thunder, but it was muffled and far away. Dust sifted down from the chimney roof above.
“Oh no…” Eliard suddenly realized what he had done.
“What is it?”
Fada-dada-THOOOM! This time, the next explosion was far closer and far louder, making the floor shake so hard that Eliard fell. There were no portholes or windows in this cell aside from the tapering chimney above them, but Eliard had already guessed what must have happened.
“El, what is it?” Cassie was already crouching, trying to stop herself from being tumbled into any of the four meson field walls.
“I think I just started a war…” he said, as another tremor shook the room. No, not a war… THE war…
“What!?” Cassie’s eyes were wide with panic. “I don’t know how long I was out for, but I wake up and you’ve already started a war? Between who!?” She appeared to be quite annoyed, which Eliard couldn’t really blame her for, considering she had been attacked by one of the Valyien trying to save him, and had then woken up in a containment cell while at risk of being blown apart.
“The Valyien and the Q’Lot…” Eliard said, raising the Device on his arm. “The Valyien knew that we were humans, and that we had Q’Lot technology. I just kinda told them the truth…” He winced. “That the Q’Lot were helping us try to destroy the Valyien…” And they hadn’t taken the news very well, apparently, the pirate captain thought as another tremor shivered rock dust from the chimney above.
“The Q’Lot of our time did, not this lot!” Cassie said, shoving a hand through her hair in exasperation. “We have no idea what the ramifications of this will be. Whether the Valyien will destroy the Q’Lot before humanity ever gets the chance to get out into space, or whether the Q’Lot will destroy the Valyien…” she was saying, using her impressive analyst’s training.
“And then humanity will never have warp technology, yeah, I see that now…” Eliard said quickly. “But what if this is how the future war between the Valyien and the Q’Lot starts?” he was starting to say, just as the floor rose and fell.
Fa-THOOOM! This time, the explosion appeared to be much closer, Eliard cried out a warning to Cassie as the room tilted, and a great cracking sound could be heard.
Darkness rolled into Eliard’s eyes as he slid, and he coughed with dust and smoke. He rolled over, tried to reach back to where the meson field was, with Cassie behind it.
“Augh…” There was a groan from nearby, and Eliard feared the worst as he wiped the soot from his eyes.
The prison room that they had been kept in was in disarray. One whole side of the wall had fallen in, and the floor was now slanted at an extreme angle, with cracks fracturing the rock as if it was no more solid than porcelain.
And the meson containment fields, both the one that had held Cassandra Milan and the one that had filled the door to the corridor outside, were gone.
“Cass?” Had she fallen into her meson field before the explosion had deactivated it? Would he find her horribly burned, just as he had found the future Val Pathok?
I can’t lose anyone else, not in this time or any other…
“Eliard. Are you there?” A shape was moving in the gloom, getting clearer as the dust settled.
Flash! Suddenly, her form was illuminated by the bright, searing blast of whitish-blue light from somewhere. From outside, Eliard thought, raising his head to see that the roof had half caved in and one of the walls was now a tumble of giant stone blocks, offering a view of a complicated wreckage-field of Valyien stone structures around them, and the terraces of the city spreading down lower and lower. Eliard realized in a quick moment that they had to be near the top of the ziggurat-city. In fact, maybe they were in the same complex that was creating the Hawking radiation.
Flash! Another light lit up the sky outside, but it wasn’t the ball of light that the Valyien were firing at the distant black hole. It was from much lower down, a burning ball of energy that arced across the top of the city terraces to illuminate, a fraction before it hit—
—a Q’Lot ship, approaching over the black and darkened plains, its star-like spikes ghostly and pale.
Fa-THOOM! The explosion blossomed on the side of the Q’Lot ship as the Valyien defenses waged war with their own allies, and the pirate captain and House Archival agent saw the Q’Lot ship roll and judder as spikes and tines were broken from it, spilling gases and plasma.
Pheeet! In response, the Q’Lot ship fired one of its tines, like a crystal-glass torpedo, at the city. Eliard saw it scud high over the lower terrace, crossing their view like a thrown javelin before it buried itself in the part of the dark Valyien ziggurat that had fired at it.
Fada-THOOOOM! A massive plume of fire and plasma shot up into the sky, and Eliard flinched as boulders the size of houses rained down on the city below.
“Come on. We have to get out of here…” Eliard was rising, reaching for Cassie’s hand.
“You’re not going anywhere,” a guttural, whistling voice snapped, as a massive, dark, quadrupedal shape jumped into the wreckage that had been their room.
“Grarrr! Get off!” Eliard struggled, but the large alien hands that had clamped onto his shoulders, holding his arms out, were too strong. The middle leg-arms of the Valyien also held him around the chest, and he could feel their talons biting through his captain’s jacket and breaking skin.
The white-hatted Valyien—who Eliard had taken to be some kind of overseer or leader—had come back, bringing with it two much larger, burlier Valyien soldiers. Across from him, Cassandra wa
s similarly held, and Elaird wondered if he could use the Device to save them both.
There was a sensation of movement from his arm, but when he looked across, he saw that all that had happened was the scales flexing and changing a deeper color. Whatever drug that the Valyien had injected into him, or however much blood that they had drained from him, it still appeared to be having its effects on the Device.
But it’s getting better. I’m regaining my strength. I just need to buy some time…
“Where are you taking us!?” Cassandra was shouting, but the Valyien were ignoring them both, hurrying through the large corridors—many now with cracks in their walls—to turn abruptly, and abruptly again as they raced to their destination.
“Yzgh-skrakkh!”
“Ehkuul-ietjha…” They spoke in their strange, snappish, and whistling tongue as they raced, which sounded like orders or warnings as they took first one corridor, then stopped, turned, and took another.
The Q’Lot ship must be hammering the city… Eliard thought as they reached a ramp and started up.
They moved toward radiance, and it was a radiance that Eliard knew well by now, because he had spent, it seemed, the last few days in and out of its glow. It was the somewhat sickly white glow of a warp gate, flushed with the rainbow colors of crimson, purple, and blue warp plasma, and it was emanating from the room that they were entering.
This….is where it all began… Eliard saw a large octagonal room with a vaulted ceiling. In the very center was a column of twisted cables and silvered rods as well as long, clear tubes that swirled with crimson warp plasma. Around this central pillar were the far more familiar warp apparatus that Eliard had seen on Esther, on Epsilon G3-ov, as well as underneath Branton—what appeared to be a circle of black rock pillars around the central column, forming a kind of containment field.
Outside of this strange structure were other Valyien, moving between desks and control boards around the walls in a hurried and agitated manner.
Flash! Suddenly, the air between the column and the smaller pillars started to fill and glare with swirling light, almost obscuring the wires and tubes, until a wave of pure blue-white light rippled up through the column, then the light faded.
“We’re directly under that generator,” Eliard gasped to Cassandra, seeing that she too had come to that conclusion. This was the device firing meson energy at the black hole, and then collecting the Hawking radiation that was created, to…
To generate a warp field, of course. Eliard saw it. This was how the Valyien had cracked warp technology. If he could find a way to destroy it, then…
“Stand there.” The speaking Valyien shoved Eliard against a wall with such force that his head rebounded off the back, and he didn’t have time to struggle as something clamped onto his wrists.
“Hey! What?” He looked up to see that what he had thought was solid rock had in fact been metal, and hatches had flipped open to extend metal vices, like the talons of the Valyien’s feet, to grip onto his wrists so hard that he couldn’t move them.
“Eshig-ul..ma-ve!” The speaker turned to one of the other working Valyien, and a quick, tense argument appeared to break out.
“What are they doing?” Eliard hissed, as Cassandra was similarly shoved against the wall beside him to have a similar fate.
“It’s the warp gate. They’re trying to do something before the Q’Lot damages it. Or them…” Cassandra’s eyes scanned the room. She appeared to be right as, a few moments later, the speaking Valyien had turned back to them. In his hands, he held the two tubular devices of the blood-draining contraption.
Oh no… Eliard remembered the terrible sight of the other Valyien being drained alive by one of its own. Was that what they were going to do to him and Cassandra? Was this to be their punishment?
“You are spies. From the Q’Lot.” The speaker advanced on them, snapping the two rondels of metal together with practiced efficiency. “You came to stop the Great Work.”
Eliard was about to open his mouth and protest that they hadn’t, but then stopped. That was precisely what he had led them to believe earlier, and what had started this war between the two races, hadn’t it?
“We checked.” The alien struggled with the human phrases. “Your DNA. Heavy with Q’Lot spore.”
“I already told you that…” Eliard muttered under his breath. He might be about to have a slow and agonizing death, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
“And your genetic sequence is…out of date.” The speaking Valyien casually flicked one of its midmost arms across Eliard’s chest, and he felt a score of pain as his encounter suit and jacket was torn apart, revealing his pale chest as the alien raised the blood-draining contraption.
“What are you talking about?” Cassie snapped at the alien, trying to prolong the inevitable.
“Your genetic sequence. Almost forty generations of DNA mutations unaccounted for,” the Valyien hissed.
Eliard didn’t know what that meant.
“You are from the future,” the Valyien declared angrily.
“You have Q’Lot technology. The Q’Lot sent you back to destroy us.” The Valyien took a slow step closer with the blood-draining contraption. Eliard started to struggle, even though he knew it was useless.
“This means that our warp experiments are correct. There IS a way to create stable warp gates! And to travel throughout the universe! Throughout time!”
The Valyien appeared not outraged by the truth of their mission, the pirate captain thought, but overjoyed.
“Your DNA will give us what we need to know about WHERE and WHEN you came from. You thought you were our assassin, but it turns out you will be our savior!” the Valyien said as the room shook with the sounds of the distant battle.
“Oh no…” Eliard breathed in horror. What if this was the very way that the Valyien managed to influence the future Alpha? What if, in not only coming back in time and starting the millennia-long war between the Valyien and the Q’Lot, he had also become the catalyst for everything that happened later? The Valyien now knew that stable warp travel was possible. They knew that the future was a place they could influence. Maybe this was why they seeded the human galaxy with their warp gates and their technology during the war with the Q’Lot, because they would now know that the future was always open for them—
“No!” Eliard kicked out, his booted feet striking at the Valyien in front of him. It was pure desperation that fueled his movements, and there was no real accuracy or damage done by his kick against the hissing Valyien, who casually batted his feet aside.
I can’t stop it! Eliard was near frenzied in panic. You can’t change the past, and you can’t change the future! Just coming back here had rewritten himself and Cassie into the story that had already played out. The Valyien would still seed the galaxy with their technology, which Armcore would still seek to recreate, which would bring Alpha into being, who would destroy the Imperial Coalition, just before Ponos-Omega destroyed it and took over to become the final god-machine of all history…
I’ve failed. I never had any choice whatsoever! Eliard thought in alarm, as the Valyien stepped forward and plunged the contraption into the dread Pirate Captain El’s chest.
Eliard screamed, and Cassie wept.
15
The Making of a God
“Fire!” War Chief Val Pathok roared as he hit his own firing buttons on the command chair. They had clear space between them and the Alpha-vessel, which was still releasing jets of plasma from up and down its body as the embedded Q’Lot ship continued to fire its tines into the belly of the ship.
The defense laser on the Duergar’s Hammer ship lanced forward in a straight line, hitting the Alpha-vessel along the great whorled shell and sending up a small explosion of plasma and gas. From the multitude of weapons ports up and down the shovel-like prow of the battleship, the Duergar warriors fired everything they had—torpedoes, twin-mounted railguns, and even the smaller attack lasers.
Val had
no idea which, if any, of these armaments would do any damage to the great beast of a vessel. Were it an Armcore war cruiser, they might hurt it. The small laser fire would break off antennae and damage sensors, the torpedoes—if they breached the hull—would flood whole decks with fire, but against a behemoth of this size?
Light and gouts of short-lived plasma-flame glittered along the shell of the Valyien-inspired Alpha-vessel, but it didn’t rock or tumble in its precarious orbit above Esther. Maybe all that they were doing was keeping it occupied, the war chief thought.
Defense Batteries Cycling… his internal readout told him.
He knew that it would take time to have enough available energy generated by the ship’s quad warp cores to fuel the main defense laser. Time that he didn’t have, as he saw shadows blinking across the plasma-lit battle-scape towards his craft.
Alpha had dispatched flights of its spider-drones to attack him. The sensors on his targeting visor filled rapidly with the glaring red vectors of the smaller drones. Far too many to halt.
“Hatchets! Full barrage fire!” he snarled as he felt the ship start to accelerate forward. The Hammer ships were designed for full combat assault, and unlike the smaller attack craft, they saw no need to try to swerve out of the way of oncoming fire. Their forward wedge-shaped hull was so densely packed with layers of poly-steel and crystal-glass plates that they were almost impregnable.
Almost.
As the twin flights of spider-drones boiled through space, constantly jockeying for position on their own small but powerful rockets, the spinning cross-bars of the Duergar’s Hatchet drones burst from their weapons pods to meet them, at the same time as, up and down the edges of the Hammer, the far smaller attack lasers started to fire in syncopated rhythm.
Valyien Boxed Set 3 Page 37
