“No,” Val said, suddenly vehement as he swept aside the tapestry with one great arm, revealing the view outside.
Their window looked out onto a small terrace of spiked trees, and then a wide amphitheater of stone, set into the ground. Around the edges, Eliard could see more of their small stone buildings positioned like villas or viewing-rooms. The amphitheater was empty at the moment, but already the captain was starting to get a very unsettled feeling about this.
All of their eyes were naturally drawn to the only other building that was different from the rest, a larger version of their smaller rooms, with round stone walls and a peaked wooden roof, out of which rose smokes of cookfires. Tattered banners of red flapped and hung from the low eaves. “I guess that’s your daddy’s house, is it?” Eliard asked.
Val growled. “War Chief Pathok is no father to me,” he said fiercely. “He got me on one of his harem and had me farmed off to the training halls as soon as I could hold a blade. He never even spared me a thought until he discovered that I had learned how to use it.”
Good grief, the captain thought. “But, Val, the man—Duergar, sorry—is still your father. And do I need to impress on you why we’re here? The galaxy is being taken over by an alien military intelligence?”
“We don’t need Chief Pathok to beat it.” Val was adamant.
“Ponos seems to think so,” Eliard said, and Val turned around with a roar, just as the doors to their stone hut buzzed and were peeled aside.
“Val Pathok, and his companions. You are to come with us. The war chief will see you now,” barked the guard, levelling the pike-laser blasters at them.
“Val, why aren’t your people being very friendly to us, given that, you know…” Eliard said, not realizing that in just a short while, he was about to find out.
“Son,” grumbled what would have been the largest Duergar that either the captain or Irie had ever seen, had they not seen Val first.
Pathok Ma, the war chief of the capital city off Dur, was a mountain of pebble-scales where he sat on a stone throne, at the back of his large audience chamber. He had a heavy belly, and a face that hung with sagging folds of scaled flesh, but the captain could clearly see the thick slabs of muscle on his arms and shoulders as he leaned on one of the stone armrests. Val’s father might have been old, but he still exuded power.
They had been taken to the largest building that Eliard had guessed was the chief’s abode, to find the door lined with guards, and inside was a dark and smoky atmosphere, with further metal doorways in the stone walls around the audience chamber that led to other rooms in this immense place. A long metal table of coals stretched from the throne almost to their hallway, and on either side were benches where similarly large Duergar sat and feasted. The stone walls between the doors were covered in tapestries or further displays of military might, such as ceremonial pikes, swords, or shields, even though the old chief himself wore no armor, but instead only lightweight robes. Val’s father was marked by countless battle scars, the captain saw—patches and lines of cracked, white pebble-scale that crisscrossed his bare shoulders. He even had one impressive scar running from his bald shovel-like head to the right side of his jaw, neatly segmenting an eye, which now stared out at them with milky white opalescence.
“Did you appreciate the room I had you put in? You remember the Battle of Chenga, don’t you?” Pathok Ma sneered at him.
“I remember, Father…” Val said, matching his father growl for growl.
“Please, sir, if I may speak,” Eliard began. “We have come a long way, on a dire mission—”
“Silence!” Pathok Ma shouted. “No, you may not speak, human! Do you think I stopped my feasting to listen to one of your kind?
“Father…” Val growled.
“It is not the first time that you have begged for me to listen, son, and what happened that first time?” Pathok Ma said.
I don’t understand. The ordinary Duergar think he’s a hero, but in here, everyone hates him! Eliard shared a worried look with Irie.
“You had a chance then to listen, as now,” Val said, before adding a little quieter, “I have thought about that day often, Father.”
“Bah!” Pathok Ma threw his gold goblet against the wall. “Eruk the Bloodthirsty was a tyrant, and he deserved his punishment.”
“But not his people,” Val argued back. “His clan warriors, yes, I can understand the need to discipline them. The soldiers of his uprising, yes, I can even understand that. But his hearth-steaders? His servants? The farmers and merchants of his occupied lands? What ill did they ever do to you?”
“They were supporting an usurper, fool,” Pathok hissed. “Their labor and their toil, their taxes and their food, went to feed Eruk’s armies. They went to power the entire uprising.” The larger chief’s hands gripped the stone armrests of his chair and Eliard saw the knuckles of the Duergar’s hands glow white with the stress. He wondered if the chair would even shatter under such a figure, but no, it held.
“I did what any war chief would do. I visited unto the people the crimes of their chief, as I would expect any of the other war chiefs to do to mine,” he stated loudly, proudly, Eliard thought, although it sounded like they were talking of a massacre of innocent civilians. To his shock, he saw the assembled feasting Durish guards shout their approval of such a bloodthirsty strategy.
“Then you are still the old fool, stuck in the past, that you were when I left,” Val said heavily, not taking his eyes from the chief.
Eliard gulped as War Chief Pathok Ma lunged to his feet, his great bulk making the flagstones vibrate as he stabbed a clawed talon over the long feasting bench at his own son. The rest of the Duergar revelers suddenly went very, very quiet.
“And I should have drowned you at birth, Val. Who would think that a son of mine could display such weakness? It is only because of your actions at the Chenga Pass that you are still alive and allowed to even set foot inside this hall of heroes and champions!”
“I don’t care about your heroes and champions,” Val stated, his claws bunching into fists.
“Val…this isn’t helping our cause at all…” Eliard hissed through the side of his mouth, and in return received an annoyed grunt, and his father continued his tirade.
“Well, maybe you should. Because you have lost the right of your birth to be here, in my city. Your words alone are enough to have me execute you.” Pathok drew himself up to his full height—an easy seven and a half feet tall. “You will have to fight for your right to be here, Val Pathok.”
“No!” Eliard couldn’t contain himself any longer. I have the Device, I can fight. “Chief, sir, it isn’t your son’s fault that we are here, he came on my command, because we need to ask for your aid—”
Before the captain could finish, there was a nod from the War Chief of Duric, and the nearest of the Duergar guards swept to his feet and, faster than Eliard could have thought possible, backhanded the captain across the side of the face.
“Ouf!” It felt like getting hit by a sledgehammer, and Eliard spun back toward the wall, landing in a heap. But the shock of violence was enough to trigger the change in his altered system and the Device took over, its mutant genetics rippling and changing, its scales widening and interlocking, creating a fist of blue-scale with reinforced rods of bone. The captain was barely in control of himself as he jumped back to his feet, driving his alien fist into the Duergar that had hit him, for the alien to give an awkward, surprised snarl as he was thrown clear over the feasting coals and into the sitting Duergar guards on the other side.
Howls of rage and fury erupted from the table as the other guards jumped to their feet.
Oh hell. The captain felt the Device on his arm changing once again, creating an ache deep in the marrow of his bones as it fed on his energy and lifeforce to do so. As the first Duergar drew his blade, the scales of the Device finally clunked into place, and the captain leveled an arm that now looked like a snarling canon, dripping blue-white gobbets of pl
asma—
“STOP!” the war chief roared suddenly, pushing his way through the crowd of his guards to look at the captain with his one good, cunning eye. “What is this? Some sort of bio-weapon?”
“Armcore special.” Eliard kept the Device leveled on the crowd of angered Duergar. He didn’t want to have to kill any of them, but if it meant the difference between them getting out of there alive or them getting out of there dead, then he knew which option he would rather take. “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you about. There’s a danger coming. A bigger danger than me or your pride or anything else that you’ve ever had to face.” Eliard could feel his heart thumping, and the eagerness of the Device entwined with his own biology for violence. It would be so easy to fire. He might even be able to kill them all…
“Son? Explain,” the war chief stated.
Val was standing braced for combat, his arms at his own monumental meat cleaver, but Eliard could see that his eyes were switching from the guards to his father, to him, as his gunner must have been wondering who the bigger threat was right then. “It is the overlords. The Valyien,” Val finally said. “They’ve come back.”
And that was when the outcry really started.
“What nonsense is this!?” Eliard watched as the war chief turned on his own son. It was no secret that the Duergar hated the memory of the Valyien. Despite the fact that the strange aliens had uplifted them from their primitive origins to a space-faring nation, the Valyien had also turned them into slaves, and some would say that it was Valyien society that the Duergar now imitated, with their own slaves and servants.
But the Valyien had lost against their enemy the Q’Lot, and many hundreds of millions of Duergar had died, or so the legends stated.
“The Valyien have returned, or something that came from them has. The humans, Armcore, they brought one of them back, in the form of a machine intelligence,” Val stated. It was one of the longest sentences that the captain had ever heard him speak.
“Armcore.” The chief’s good eye swept back to the captain. “The same company that gave you that arm?”
“The same.” Eliard nodded. “But they bit off more than they can chew. They want to put an end to Alpha—that is the Valyien tech—and they can’t do it without the help of your people.” The Device flexed, venting its spare plasma.
“Interesting,” the War Chief hissed. “The humans think that because we Duergar served the Valyien, and that we know what their rule was like, that we would be eager to fight them again? In whatever form that they have come back in?”
“That’s about right.” Eliard nodded slowly. He couldn’t tell if this negotiation was going well or not. He was used to drinking a lot more wine when he was haggling.
“Maybe Armcore should fix its own problems,” the war chief said seriously, just as something very heavy, and very painful, fell on the back of Captain Eliard’s head. The Device tried to erupt into action, but the blinding pain was too intense for the captain, and as he fell to the floor, the darkness welcoming him eagerly. He could hear the angered shouts of Val Pathok, and the screams of Irie Hanson.
4
Interlude: The Burning of Haversham
The CEO of Armcore mulled. He stirred. He bit his fingernails—a habit that his father had said was disgusting, and so he had only practiced it with increasing vigor. He knew just what his father, the old CEO of Armcore, would advise him.
“Tell them to go to hell! And get back to work!” That had been his motto. The CEO unwillingly flinched, even now, even here, surrounded by safe metal and many years after his father had died.
In the glass wall of the hall that he had been walking through, his reflection curled a small smile. It had taken a lot to kill his father in the end, far much more nerve toxin than one man should be able to endure, but the Tomases were always made of stern stuff.
Dane Tomas, the CEO of Armcore, paused along the balcony-bridge that stretched over one of the wide halls, as his attendant guards formed a phalanx ahead and behind him. It wasn’t very often that the senior stepped out of his ‘Contemplation Chamber’ anymore these days, and the stir that it caused, he could feel rippling through the distant, scurrying people.
He was dressed in his orange and red encounter suit with gold braids. He didn’t need to wear the full-dress uniform for this engagement. His legend preceded him. He looked at his reflection in the wall of glass. His vast corporeal form had transformed into something like a ghost, as he could clearly see through himself to the large shapes of the tankers and cruisers on the other side of the wall. Only some of them held the Armcore badge of the stylized A and star, which made the CEO frown, just a little. Although he had been assured by the delegates that he was about to meet that he would have premium safety at all times, he was nevertheless pleased to see the distant zip and crackle of personal field drones hovering around him, extending invisible energy shields that would turn aside most medium-to-heavy laser blasts.
If anything happens, I’m going to blame HIM. Dane looked back the way he had come, to where the reason he was here stood solidly in the hallway that led up to this bridge: Captain Farlow.
Why am I even listening to him? he wondered once again, hearing that echo of rage and disappointment from his late, murdered father in his own thoughts.
But the answer was immediate, and simple. Because he knew. Not about Alpha, but about him, the CEO of Armcore. Farlow, the captain who had once been a general, knew things about Dane’s nightmares that the senior couldn’t explain. And something that he couldn’t explain always intrigued him, and frightened him in equal measure.
“Senior?” hummed the electronic device near his collar—a small gold chip that looked like another button or filigree. It was in fact a personal communicator to the Armcore intelligence, Ponos itself.
“I’m busy, Ponos,” Dane hissed, pulling himself back from the glass to smooth his encounter suit jacket and clear his throat.
“Precisely, sir. I just wished to inquire why you had scheduled a meeting with the Imperial Coalition? Is there a trade negotiation that I have not been made aware of?”
“Of course there isn’t. You know, Ponos, when you try to act naïve, you only sound dumb. Which I think we both know that you are not,” Dane muttered under his breath.
“Then you are meeting with them to discuss the Alpha situation,” Ponos said. “If I may, my tactical analysis will be extremely helpful—”
The senior cut him off. “As I told you before, Ponos. I am taking personal command of the Alpha situation. Any more of this interfering and I will have you code-locked to Prime.”
“That would be a severe underestimation of my abilities, sir,” Ponos replied, before the communication cut off abruptly.
“What do you mean?” the senior had a chance to say, but the Armcore machine mind was already gone. Was that a threat?
Still, there was no time to consider the linguistic challenges of Ponos, as the CEO saw that the delegates had already arrived and were standing on the floating platform that this bridge ended at. It was a ridiculous affectation really, he thought as he looked around the large room that the bridge and the platform sat within, seeing other skybridges leading to other similar platforms suspended high in the air. All an attempt at that ‘open rulership’ model that the Coalition was always harping on about. He didn’t like it. In his school of thought, a ruler should be seen rarely and then only by a select few. Scarcity bred necessity, as they said. It was, quite strangely, one of the few opinions that he had shared with his late father.
Not that his father would ever have agreed to this, either. The Senior of Armcore, Dane Tomas himself, had made a state visit to Earth Prime, here to discuss various important matters to a delegation of some of the Imperial Coalition’s leading figures.
There wasn’t much to see of the home world of the human species out of the windows, the CEO thought as he swept along the bridge toward his destination, flanked and surrounded by his elite Armcore guards. Earth Prime
, although still regarded as the ancestral home of the Imperial Coalition, was little more than a logistics planet in these later years of the human race. Whole landmasses had been covered with industrial units, housing conurbations, and factories—not to mention their conjoined wastelands and slag heaps. Earth Prime had been the cradle that had spawned the human race, but just like spiders, humanity had eaten their egg in order to thrive outside of it.
The only saving grace, Dane thought, was the fact that you could barely even see Earth Prime anymore, given that its near orbit was almost entirely surrounded by orbiting platforms such as the one his personal carrier was attached to. The windows showed the complicated docking and shipping arrangements of thousands of miles of metal—more platforms, more docking stations, and the occasional sleek crystal-glass transit hall such as the one that he was walking through right now.
“Lord Selazar, a pleasure to see you recovered,” Dane called out to the nearest lord, standing with the aid of a bulky robotic contraption attached to his lower back and legs.
Lord Selazar looked ancient, because he was. He still had a few wisps of nearly-blonde hair, but the rest of his form was given over to emaciated skin stretched over bone. Only his eyes retained their feral brightness.
“I hadn’t realized that you had been following news of my health,” Lord Selazar noted dryly, and Dane once again had to suppress a quiver of rage. Just like all of the Imperial Nobles, he inwardly sneered. So entitled. So arrogant. As strange as it was, Senior Tomas regarded himself as a working man.
“Oh, I try to keep informed of everything,” Dane replied, turning to the other assembled lords.
Five in all. Not even a full council meeting. Was that all that had agreed to meet him? Another shiver of fury. It was no secret what the Imperial houses thought of him, but that was something that Tomas knew was in his favor. The Imperial Coalition needed his warships. Every one of the lords and ladies here, from Lady Martin, Lord Carstan, Lady Xin, and Lord Aster, used Armcore services to protect their own home worlds and commercial interests.
Insurrection Page 4
