by Barry Kirwan
The Queen didn’t seem surprised. “I will send word to have her killed as soon as the fleet reaches Hell’s End.”
The pieces fell into place for Micah. His tone didn’t hide his disappointment. “You are changing sides, joining Qorall’s ranks against Hellera.”
“An offer of accelerated enhancement to Level Twelve, taking over from the soon-to-be-annihilated Rangers and intermediate species. And if Qorall loses, he will destroy the galaxy. It was not a hard decision.”
Micah said the words, though he guessed they were to no avail. “You could have honoured your commitment, stayed loyal to Hellera.”
“I fail to see why the Tla Beth allowed you humans to survive during your species’ trial. You revel in Level Three thinking. I studied your world before we culled it; your lions and antelopes had a better grasp of the true order of the universe than you humans. You will not endure for much longer as a species.”
Gabriel stood next to Micah, then spoke to the Queen in a strange voice; the intonations were all wrong, rising and falling randomly. It sounded so… inhuman. Micah had heard someone speak that way once before. Hellera.
“The Tla Beth re-engineered you, bred you for aggression, the perfect soldiers. They should have explained the rest: that you would never progress beyond your Level.”
The Queen rose from her pillars to her full height, her upper legs flexing outwards. Ebony wings, like those of a bat, began to unfurl. “Enough! Qorall has given us Level Sixteen technology. No one can stop us now!”
The guardians began to close around Gabriel and Micah. Without warning, Gabriel placed a hand on Micah’s chest and pushed, sending him flying across the room, until he landed and skidded across the floor. On his back he saw a second Queen, smaller and yellow in colour, high above Gabriel, hanging upside down from the ceiling. Winded from the push, Micah tried to warn Gabriel, but barely a croak emerged.
Gabriel continued to speak, unrushed, in Hellera’s oscillating tones. “Technology does not equate with intelligence. These lowly humans, as you think of them, will dance on your unmarked graves.”
The guardians attacked. Micah’s vision could barely keep up with the blur that was Gabriel; frenetic movement interspersed with images of decisive slices from his nanosword, blue blood spraying in all directions as Gabriel decapitated each guardian in turn. But the smaller Queen hanging high above him dropped silently, her six claws stretched out, ready to thresh Gabriel to pieces, while the larger Queen watched.
Micah knew that although Hellera might be viewing events from inside Gabriel, she was still limited by his perceptual abilities. He yelled, but Gabriel stood his ground, and in the last instant threw the nanosword in Micah’s direction.
The yellow Queen crashed onto Gabriel. Her lower claws nailed his torso to the ground while her mid and upper claws made short work of severing his arms and legs from his body.
The hilt of the de-activated nanosword rolled next to Micah. He picked it up as the yellow Queen’s gash of a mouth yawned wide then clamped down on Gabriel’s skull. A gruesome sucking noise reverberated around the chamber. Micah began walking backwards toward the entrance, unable to take his eyes off the scene. The Queen released Gabriel’s cracked open head and swiped his corpse aside in the pool of human and Q’Roth blood. Her head tilted back as she emitted a roar that sent chills down Micah’s spine, then turned her head to look at him. But the larger Queen spoke.
“This one is mine.”
Micah turned and sprinted for the exit, his resident snapping into action, showing him the way forward into the catacombs. He heard the slow beats of giant wings flapping in the windless chamber, but dared not turn around. Micah increased his speed to maximum, barely able to breathe in, desperate to reach the temporary sanctuary of the tunnel.
A strangled cry erupted behind him, and the beats changed, faster, and he realised the Queen was hovering in mid-air above him. Then she suddenly turned and flew back to the centre. Micah raced through the tunnel entrance and skidded to a halt. Forcing air into his lungs, he dared to pause to see what had happened. The yellow Queen – he had an intuition she was young – staggered left and right as if drunk, clawing at her head wildly before collapsing on the ground, legs twitching and flailing as her head bubbled and disintegrated, chunks of flesh sloughing off until she stopped moving. Micah understood. Hellera had used Gabriel as a weapon to take down the Queen, most probably using nannites. Sandy had been right all along. But Hellera hadn’t factored in the appearance of a new Queen.
Micah knew what came next. With a sense of dread, he took a deep breath and bolted down the tunnel. He heard a long, gut-wrenching scream of anguish from the larger Queen, followed by the beats of powerful wings, and a heavy thud as she landed at the tunnel entrance. Micah then heard a sound he’d not heard in a long time; the jackhammer galloping of a Q’Roth running him down. Micah pumped his arms to run faster, navigating each turn as his resident showed his progress towards Shiva, and the Queen’s position behind him, closing very fast. No chance. He needed a Plan B.
Micah’s muscles strained to maintain his speed. The Queen was right behind him, and he imagined her raising her sharp upper claws for a slash that would stop him in his tracks without killing him. His resident flashed a sharp left turn. He didn’t question it, darted to the side and ricocheted off the wall where, a moment later, a single Q’Roth claw slammed into it as the Queen skidded noisily behind him. Micah dashed through the passage. It was narrowing, but not enough.
He entered a bowl-like chamber, its walls sloping slowly upwards from the floor to a flat ceiling. A dead end. He tripped over something and ended up in a pile of bones and rotting hides. His panic peaked as he clambered over skeletons to the other side of the bowl.
He searched the walls frantically, but there was no other way out, only the entrance. He imagined the Queen chasing prey in here, watching them run up the walls in fear, only to slide back down to their doom. The Queen’s steps were measured; she knew he was trapped. Micah willed himself to push down his fear and think. He wasn’t Ramires, nor Gabriel. His only weapon was his brain. He focused. One entrance at the base of the bowl, the walls behind the entrance also sweeping up slowly to the ceiling. A blind spot.
At first he hoped she wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the passage, even though the morgue around his feet testified otherwise. Her head appeared through the opening, and tilted towards the ground, then peered at him with all six eyes. One claw reached through the hole, then another, leveraging against the inside wall, readying to pull her body through. Micah knew it was now or never. He gripped the nanosword hilt, and ran around the rising edge of the bowl, obliquely at first, gathering speed. He ran up the sloping wall as he neared her, going high enough to be out of reach of her claws, then slid down the wall behind her, and activated the sword. He landed with his two feet either side of her neck, and rode her as he plunged the sword through the back of her head. She thrashed wildly, trying to reach backwards with her claws, but Micah held on, and dragged the sword to the left, and then to the right, until the top half of her head toppled to the ground.
He fell off the quivering body, and landed in the pile of bones now slippery and steaming with blood. He got to his feet and then chopped at her head again and again, recalling the billions killed by her command. Her body stilled, but it blocked his exit. Taking a deep breath, he used the sword like a machete, and hacked and chopped his way through her carcass so he could get back out into the tunnel. To keep going, he intoned a name with each slice, someone he knew and cared about who’d been butchered back on Earth twenty years ago. Tears ran down his face for all the people who’d been snuffed out. He continued to hack. It took him five minutes to get through. He didn’t hurry.
As soon as he was through, his sword arm shaking, his breath ragged, he sagged to the floor, his back against the wall. He guessed there would be more Q’Roth warriors waiting for him outside, and that these were the last moments of his life.
While h
e waited, and his body calmed down, he recalled his father, the famous Grey Colonel, the WWIII hero who’d branded his fifteen-year-old son a coward all those years ago, during the first bombing of LA. Ever since, Micah had looked to role models like Blake and Vince, knowing he could never be like them. They’d had courage hardwired into them, Micah didn’t. But for the first time in a long while, he thought of his dead father, wondering what he would think now.
Micah got up to go and meet his fate. There were four more Q’Roth Guardians outside, but they were all dead. The Spider stood over them, one of its legs twitching, the Hohash hovering behind. It flashed historical images from Shimsha, showing the Q’Roth invasion and culling of the Spider’s ancestors a millennium earlier. Micah knew they had let the culling take place and offered no resistance, in order to protect their hidden egg fields on Esperia, as well as the whereabouts of Kalaran’s ship; he’d been vulnerable at that time. The Tla Beth, who would have sanctioned the cull, must not have known about the Spiders’ true nature, or that Kalaran was there, his ship hidden in the underground ocean. Strategy and sacrifice. Micah still didn’t know the final role the Spiders – Kalaran’s secret weapon – would play. But it was harrowing to watch an entire generation of them being slaughtered, their once-rainbow city bleached in the process. As if sensing his discomfort, the images shut off.
Micah glanced at the Q’Roth, trying to see how the Spider had killed them. The only clue was that their heads seemed to have caved in, as if their brains had been removed. He walked up to the Spider and placed a hand on top of its body, and stroked it. Then he gazed back towards the chamber where Gabriel had died. The clone had been less than a week old. Micah knew nothing of Sentinel protocol, but he bowed, then turned and led the Spider back towards Shiva.
At the bottom of Shiva’s ramp, he noticed gossamer strands around the outside of the ship, almost like a web; the Spider had been busy. Both the Spider and the Hohash remained apart from the vessel; they weren’t coming. The Hohash showed Micah an image, and tapped into his resident, depositing a sizeable chunk of information there, which made Micah stagger for a moment. At first Micah couldn’t make out what he was being shown, but then he understood.
“I don’t blame you,” he said, then walked up the ramp and sealed it behind him.
When Micah entered the bridge, Sandy paled at the sight of him, and Vashta rushed to his side to check him over.
“Gabriel?” Sandy said.
“Dead. The Queen, too. We have to go. Now.”
Vashta replied. “The Spider and the Hohash are still outside, and Shiva has not yet determined a way to destroy or evade the Nchkani ship.”
“They’re staying,” Micah said. He took his position and activated the neural interface.
Shiva contacted Micah directly via his resident.
Micah didn’t reply, as the info-packet from the Hohash was still unfolding in the background of his mind. Shiva gave him manual control.
“Are you alright?” Sandy asked.
Micah lifted Shiva off the cavern and tilted her until she was vertical, facing downwards. He fired two missiles back up the shaft towards the Nchkani ship, and at the same time lasered into the rock below. The ground beneath crumbled and melted away, until a pit opened up. Micah drove Shiva straight down into it.
“The lava is on the outside,” he said. “The planet is largely hollow.”
He slalomed his way through a honeycomb of caverns, Sandy grabbing onto his shoulder despite the inertial dampers doing their job; there was no appreciable G-force – yet. A beeping commenced, signalling the Nchkani vessel chasing after them.
They passed several subterranean installations, one or two of which fired at them, but Micah had no intention of slowing down, and when his reactions were too slow or the turns too hard even for Shiva, he blasted through solid rock, carving a way through the planet.
The beeps grew closer in time, the Nchkani ship almost upon them, and then there was a succession of flashes, throwing everything into grey relief.
“Shiva, give it everything you’ve got, get us out of here on a direct vector, maximum speed.” He concentrated on an image the Hohash had shown him, and transmitted it to Shiva via his resident.
This time there was a sudden thrust forward. Micah grabbed Sandy’s wrist to prevent her flying backwards, and felt himself squeezed back into his chair. He heard a grating noise as Vashta extended metal claws to grip the floor. Micah’s shoulder tore at him as he hung onto Sandy.
Rocks exploded in plasma fire up ahead of them, and they roared right into it, Shiva lasering an escape route through liquefying rock. It was like staring straight into the sun, and then suddenly there was the darkness of space in front of them; they had broken through the other side of the planet. The acceleration eased off. Shiva wasn’t slowing down, but had reached her maximum in-sector velocity.
Sandy got up from the floor, and Micah rubbed his shoulder.
“What’s going on, Micah?”
He touched a pad to bring up the aft view. The planet still occupied most of the screen, and the Nchkani ship chasing them was visible, but slipping backwards. Planetary rivers and seas of boiling magma were fading, and then were gone.
“Talk to me, Micah!”
But Micah didn’t feel like talking. Instead his chest felt heavy, as if he was being sucked back towards the planet. For sure the Spider and Hohash were already dead.
Vashta drew alongside Sandy. “A black hole is forming,” she said. “Inside the planet.”
Blotches of red mushroomed on Korakkara’s surface, then vanished, as if the planet was being shot from within, its blood immediately sucked back inside itself. Micah knew what came next. The Nchkani vessel tried to open a Transpace conduit, a bad idea, one the Hohash had made clear not to attempt until well away from the planet. The Nchkani ship shimmered for a second, then plunged like a silver nugget deep inside the planet.
Sandy whacked Micah’s shoulder. “You did this! You’re destroying their home planet, like they did to us. We should be better than them!”
“Not my doing, Sandy. The Spiders are exacting revenge.”
The planet had grown smaller and without warning shattered, briefly exploding before imploding into a smooth black disk – a black hole. Shiva’s engines strained with a grinding noise that increased to a shrill whine. In reality it was the Spider’s web that would save them: the Hohash had conveyed the idea that it would help act as anti-gravity against a black hole, since the strands were from a different universe, exotic matter that didn’t behave according to the local laws of physics.
Micah was still gaining knowledge from the Hohash transmission; it felt odd, as if he was remembering facts he had forgotten, but in reality had never known. The Spiders were from a different type of space, a different universe, one where violent gravitic storms were commonplace. Over countless aeons they, and several other indigenous species, had adapted to be able to counter gravity. He realised that Kalaran’s interest in the Spiders hadn’t necessarily been altruistic; he had probably wanted to learn from them, to understand how they could manipulate gravity and space so effectively.
He judged that the black hole was far enough away now, but still he watched, knowing what came next.
The fleet of Q’Roth ships that had engaged him earlier were dragged towards it. Many of them also tried to jump into Transpace, only to be pulled in faster. In the end, it made no difference. Micah knew that the other two planets and asteroids in the system, and eventually the sun, would suffer the same fate.
“Genocide,” Sandy said.
Micah recalled something the Queen had said, and adapted it. “Lions like the Q’Roth will never stop hunting antelope,” he said. “This was the Spiders’ plan all along, and Hellera’s too, I believe. We’re barely a pawn in this war, and Hellera has just taken out a Queen and a whole host of her pieces.”
He checked the distance. According to the equation the Hohash had sh
own him, it was safe. He signalled Shiva to prepare to enter Transpace for Hell’s End.
After a while, Sandy spoke again. “The clone… Gabriel... How did he die?” She seemed closed in on herself.
Micah stood up, and dug something out of his pocket. “On his feet, fighting.” He handed her the nanosword hilt, offering it holding both palms upturned, one of the very few Sentinel gestures he knew.
Sandy stared at it, then placed her hands on its smooth surface. Her fingers closed slowly around the hilt, remaining in contact with his palms. Micah closed his own hands gently around hers, and she looked into his eyes, just as her face and every surface around her turned quicksilver as they slid into Transpace.
Hell’s End, Micah thought. This is where it all ends, one way or another.
He was ready.
Hellera surveyed the warscape. Qorall’s asteroid ship hovered just off the event horizon of his customised black hole, a few million miles from a rip in the galactic barrier’s fabric. Surrounding him in space tinged a ghostly green were three fleets, the first two cannon-fodder, Level Seven and Eight species she no longer cared about. Some had very large, Mega-Class ships, ten times the size of her own Crossbow, but after Level Fourteen one learned that bigger ships only meant easier targets. The third fleet was more of a challenge: Nchkani vessels, a hundred and eighty of them. They were manned by Q’Roth, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous, and Qorall’s greenspace neutralised Hellera’s gravity-based weapons.
On her side were a dozen fleets, the ones that mattered being the twenty-seven remaining Tla Beth Gyroscope ships, forty-seven Rangers in assorted small but well-armed scout ships, and fifty Ossyrian Diamond ships. The latter had drawn her attention, not because of their firepower – they were no match for the Nchkani – but because the Ossyrians had obviously retrograded, escaping their pacifist yoke, and had quickly fabricated war ships that had terrorised the galaxy many aeons earlier. Each Diamond ship was fashioned from the joining of the bases of two hospital pyramid ships. Hellera reflected that directive evolution was painstaking, requiring careful steps over hundreds of millennia, whereas species regression, by comparison, was as easy as falling off a cliff.
