“With greatest respect, Senior, and I applaud your commitment to being personally involved, but I have already run over five thousand different scenarios of our possible interactions with Alpha, and every element of data that I can have access to, from what the cameras saw of the ship, I can deduce what its operational capabilities are,” Ponos stated again, and the senior wondered if the machine knew how to be condescending.
“I said no, Ponos.” The senior groaned, pressing a button on his throne—command chair—to allow a small phial of a greenish synth liquid to be produced. Venusian Liquor. Strong, thick, and sweet, it tasted like apples and menthol. He took a sip, and felt his ragged nerves ease just slightly.
“If I may, Senior, I have to inform you that of my scenarios, none of them returned a favorable outcome for Armcore vessels, or for the Imperial Coalition as a whole…” The machine intelligence paused. “The hybrid intelligence is an amalgam of ancient Valyien relics, and if it even has zero-point-six percent Valyien influence, then every one of my scenarios indicate that it will endeavor to wage war against the Imperial Coalition.”
Dane had heard this argument a hundred times before from Ponos of course, but he was too weary and slightly addled to think clearly enough to just mute the creature. “Oh, do tell me why you reason that again, one more time…” he said sarcastically.
Ponos, although well programmed with the full range of human mannerisms and colloquialisms, chose to ignore the rhetorical emphasis of the request. “Every study of the Valyien has confirmed that they were the most warlike, expansionist race in the history of this galaxy. It is only a blessing—if you forgive the inexact expression—that they managed to deliver themselves to extinction before humanity took to the stars.”
“I thought it was the Q’Lot that wiped them out?” the senior said.
“Another common misapprehension. The Q’Lot and the Valyien were apparently at war, but neither side won, from what we can glean from the tales preserved by the uplifted races, the Duergar and the Ghalees, etcetera.”
“They survived, didn’t they? The Q’Lot, I mean. I call that winning.” Some days, it felt to the senior that the most he could do would be to survive until the end of the day, given the acres of opportunity for his assassination.
“Perhaps, but the Q’Lot have no discernible empire, territory or goals, from what we can gather. They exist as rare encounters in deep space, with seemingly no motive at all for their interactions with us,” Ponos stated. “It is a mystery why such a quixotic race was ever at war with the Valyien in the first place.”
“Everyone hates the biggest guy in the room,” the senior stated, before a flash of anger took over his small and compact features. “Why am I discussing this with you again! I told you that I would be taking the personal lead on this matter alone.”
“Of course, Senior. I am not questioning your commands, merely offering you more data. Because more data is always useful,” the artificial mind stated pointedly.
“Mute,” the senior snapped. He’d had enough Ponos’s concerns and ‘calculations.’ He had a tired headache that was starting to thud at the edges of his temples. He stabbed short, fat fingers on his wrist computer to allow the release of neuro-dampening compounds into his system. A moment later, a warm feeling spread throughout his massive frame like he was being surrounded by a fuzzy blanket. The man took another glug of the Venusian menthol-wine, waiting for his pitch of inebriation to reach the comfortable and relaxed levels. Everything became a little easier, and a little kinder on the eyes, and he could finally think.
“Ponos appears to be jealous,” he stated out loud as he hit the controls to activate his private logs. A single red activation light appeared on the chair near his wrist, telling him that it was recording. These private logs contained a stream of notes and observations and to-do lists, personally narrated by the senior himself. The stars alone knew what they would be worth in the wrong hands. They contained his suspicions and reasons for firing, executing, or hiring thousands of people, as well as his own, slightly foggy, analysis of the Alpha situation.
“Maybe Ponos realizes that Alpha is destined to replace him. I mean it,” the senior mused. That had always been the plan, anyway. Create a super-intelligence married with ancient Valyien tech, so that they could recreate the technology that humanity was only scavenging and backward-engineering right now. It was recovered Valyien relics that had given them warp-jump capability. It was Valyien relics that opened up the science of genetic splicing and manipulating. Of meson engineering.
“Maybe I will keep the old thing around. Let him manage Prime’s navigational array,” the senior said. “Or maybe I will sell it? I must remember to look into the what the market price might be for Ponos…”
His words slurred and his eyelids drooped slightly, as the sea of sleep threatened to rise over him once more.
No. He shook his head, pushing himself back up in his seat and ordering his wrist computer to match the neuro-dampeners with some stimulants. A few seconds later, he felt the thrill of excitement and confidence spread up from the base of his neck, bringing with it a tide of jittery alertness. He didn’t want to sleep. He couldn’t allow himself to sleep, not after the dreams that had been tormenting him solidly every time he closed his eyes.
Once again, the senior wondered whether he should consult with a priest. Not that he was a religious man. If Senior Tomas had any sort of religion at all, then it would be one of himself. He was the only thing that mattered in his life, and the entirety of Armcore was a shell that rotated around his star.
Armcore was something that he had been born into, raised from childhood to be its next CEO. His father—may the stars forget him—had always claimed that his only son had been ‘born into Armcore,’ like he was a prize stallion to be trained in the best stables. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, in fact—especially when Dane Tomas had turned out to have the physique and the mentality not of a warrior or of a tactician, but that of a spoiled child.
Instead, Senior Tomas always thought that Armcore had been born around himself. It ultimately existed for him and him alone, which made his current predicament slightly confusing. He couldn’t turn to the Armcore doctors with his strange nightmares, as then the word might get out that he was suffering from some sort of nervous malady. What strength that would give to his detractors!
The notion of seeking out a priest however, even from one of the smallest and most inoffensive of cults, felt wrong to the man. It was like accepting that Dane Tomas wasn’t the most powerful, the most important, and the only being that really mattered.
But the dreams were terrible, even Tomas had to admit. He would ‘wake’ inside the dream, lying on the hard floor and looking up at an ugly, clouded sky. He was no expert on skies, having spent most of his life in space, but he was sure that the heavy, loaded grey, black, and purple clouds weren’t healthy. Chain lightning would flash across the underside of the clouds, scaring him. Why was it so loud? Hadn’t any scientist worked out a way to control lightning yet?
Standing up, the dream-self of Dane Tomas would realize that he was on a rocky plain, whose surface was pitted and hard stone, shiny in places and rough in others, without even the whisper of sand or dirt. There would be nothing around him, no living things or human buildings or any sign of anything at all, and the CEO of Armcore would be struck with a deep, existential fear. Where am I? he would think every time. He had been abandoned. He had been discarded. His enemies had finally moved against him, and left him on some hellish, desolate world.
At that point of the dream, he would hear the clash of rumbling clouds and would start off, jogging as fast as his large form would carry him in almost any direction. He had to find something. He had to find a way back to Prime!
The thunder would clash, the lightning would flare, and a ghastly wind would pick up, howling over flattened rock forms like a pack of hunting dogs. This phantasm would occupy him, and he would struggle to run faster—only he wo
uldn’t be able to, given his form.
A sound! It was then that the panicking CEO would hear a different sound than the howl of the winds, the thunder and the lightning. It would be a murmur, off to one side. It sounded like engines!
And Dane Tomas would reason, every time, that engines meant civilization, and if there was civilization, then there would be people who would gladly receive a lot of money to escort him back home. He would set off, every time, toward the sound of rumbling, until he would see the sky start to lighten on the far horizon.
A monumental flash of lightning, and the senior would stagger, his feet stumbling on the rocky ground as he blinked and rubbed his eyes—only to see that the land had dropped away, just feet ahead of him. He had almost run straight out, over the lip of the precipice that shot down for many hundreds of meters. He had never been running on a plain, but on a plateau that overlooked the true plains, and he had never been alone, either.
The plains writhed and moved with bodies. There were so many of them, there had to be whole races, whole cities, perhaps even whole civilizations down there pushing and grappling with each other. At first it was hard to make out quite who they were or what they were doing, their numbers were so overwhelming.
They were humanoid, at least, or some of them were. He thought he could make out bodies with four arms and two legs, as well as others with a more regular two. They wore all sorts of encounter suits, but together, they formed a mass of drab color rather than a spectacular display. He saw whole hillsides in ochre and brown, close-fitting scale suits, and other rivers of people in black pointed carapaces driving apart knots and factions of others who wore no armor at all, or else wore light mesh.
The senior would realize at that point that he was looking at a battle, and it was a battle the size of which that he could never, would never, be able to comprehend.
A small flash in one corner of the battlefield, and he watched a small red cloud erupt, sending combatants many feet into the air, only for the smoking, burned earth behind them to be swamped by other fighters seeking advantage. The explosions would then happen elsewhere, and again.
Dane saw the flash of rifle fire, of lasers and blasters like the twinkling and sparkle of dew on grass.
Dane saw desperate last stands as well as forward marches. He saw stampedes and rear-guard actions, defensive squares and skirmishes. Fighters fought with curved blades as well as guns, they fought with pikes and spears, as well as grenades and rocket launchers. The fighting was total, and it was inescapable. No one could win out there. There was no strategy or design, just complete, mad, churning chaos.
It was then that the sky would split open, and the senior would feel the ground shake. Far off, and far over the battlefield, the clouds would boil, becoming agitated as if they were the wavetops of a storm. The senior would watch as crackles of blue-purple-white lightning would appear from the disturbed thunderheads, only for the clouds to start to shred and be replaced by a burning glow.
What is that? the senior would think, before realizing that the same effect was happening elsewhere in the sky as well. In two other places, some which were many miles away, he would see the same dazzling glow burn its way through the clouds as three ships made entry.
The fighters on the battlefield made no attempt at all to slow their combat, or even to take notice of what was about to happen. In the certainty of dream logic, the CEO of Armcore knew that whatever he was looking at, it would be terrible.
The patches of brightness flared to brilliance, and there, breaching the atmosphere, appeared the culprit vessels. They were large, vast even, if their scale could be trusted over this battlefield.
The ships also glowed and were unlike any craft that the Senior of Armcore had ever seen with naked eyes. They looked like stars, in the way that they shone with brilliance, and they had many ‘rays’ expanding from the glowing heart of their structure. They were not sleek, nor machines, not precision-engineered at all. In fact, their distant surfaces appeared to be over-grown, humped, rooted, encrusted with nodules. It was like looking at vast, cruiser-sized pieces of ocean coral, if coral could glow with an internal bioluminescence.
The Q’Lot, the senior always realized at that juncture—never before that moment, no matter how many times he’d had this exact same dream.
The Q’Lot were always rumored to have those kinds of strange, biological vessels—somewhere between coral structure, shell, and lichen. It was assumed that they grew their ships and technology, or that maybe their ships and technology were just other, larger beings that they farmed and lived inside. No one knew for certain.
But that had to be what he was looking at, which meant that he was watching some act of war either with, or by, the Q’Lot. Why were they here? What did they intend to do? Were some of those human-ish fighters down there Q’Lot themselves? These were all the sorts of questions that washed over the senior as he saw them lower towards the ground, illuminating the battlefield in brutal accuracy, but still the fighting continued, and still no one started to flee or fire on them.
The nearest Q’Lot ship fired first, and then the next nearest second, and then the third. Their ‘weapons’—the senior had no doubt that was precisely what he was looking at—did not appear to be devastating, even given their ship’s relative size compared to an Armcore vessel. Instead, the senior saw three floodlights of rolling white-yellow light spear downward to hit the ground, forming columns of brilliance. It was impossible to tell what was happening at their base, where these light-weapons hit the surface of the world, as their glow was too intense, but Dane knew that it couldn’t be good.
These columns of burning light held for just a brief moment, then Dane felt their effect: an answering rumble deep in the bones of whatever planet this was, shaking upward through the miles of rock and into the CEO’s knees.
He didn’t like it. It felt like the tremors of an earthquake, or a volcano. It was also a steady, exact vibration harmonic that set his teeth on edge and made his head begin to pound with pain.
He took a faltering step backwards, only to find that as soon as his foot touched the surface, the same vibration frequency shot up from his feet to his spine. There was nowhere he could escape. Nowhere he could run to this time.
There was something funny happening on the distant horizon opposite him, past the battle-plains. It looked like a line of dark clouds, but even the mostly sedated brain of Senior Tomas recognized that it wasn’t right. It was too low for clouds, the thick line of black hugging the horizon like someone had drawn a marker line across it.
It was also getting bigger.
The dark shape stretched all the way across the battle-plains, and as it grew closer, it also grew larger. The senior started to see differentiation along its wall, lighter flecks, sudden flashes of light where the Q’Lot light reflected on something shiny, tossed up from the battle-floor below.
The dark line was now covering one entire side of the world, and it was racing forward. Dane realized that he was looking at the largest shockwave that he had ever seen. It was dark because the rolling clouds of debris and dust were made up of the burnt skin of the planet that it was destroying. The senior saw that it was maybe two hundred feet high, and it appeared to be growing taller as it picked up speed.
Dane saw great boulders thrown up at its base, along with the charred remains of bodies. It was the largest bomb or armament that he had ever witnessed—and the Q’Lot, he had no doubt, were powering it with those three columns of burning light.
The wave of mutilation swept closer, breaking through the war-field at Dane’s feet, and nothing could survive its passage. Whole battalions and regiments were swept away, obliterated or cast into the sky in the blink of an eye. A part of the Armcore CEO could even admire the pure destructive capabilities of such a device, but he didn’t understand it. It was also a terrible loss of life. If the Q’Lot did have fighters down there, then they were just as happy to throw their lives away as well as their enemies’.
/> It didn’t make any sense, Dane thought, apart from that terrible, final sort of sense. The Q’Lot’s ships were still too high to be hit by their flooding wave of force, but they were obscured by the dust all the same.
In the last few moments of the dream, Senior Tomas would find himself looking at the wall as it crossed the plain below his plateau. Nothing was surviving, and there was nowhere to flee. Even at this great height, there were still many hundreds of feet of shockwave rising over him as it slammed against the plateau he was standing on, wiping it from the face of the world, and from history itself—
“Dane. You can stop this. You will stop this,” a voice thundered in his ears, as if the apocalypse about to engulf him had spoken.
“Urgh!” The senior coughed awake once more, his mouth full of the taste of ash, and his eyes blinking as if filled with acrid dust. His heart was hammering, and he felt terrified.
What did it mean? Why am I dreaming of this, hour after hour?
4
Pirate-Style
“What do you want to go down there for, anyway?” the youth asked after the pair had passed the third picturesque villa on their way to the entry to the downside.
These people have no idea what’s coming for them, Eliard thought as they tramped, still wearing his Shahasta robes and the youth still in his incongruous garb. The villas were faux-old Earth, with real wood and white-daubed walls, but with ‘bubble’ rooms of sleek chrome and glass sprouting from them like a machinic virus. They were built on several levels, often cut-away into the rolling hills and surrounded by trees and shrubs that were gene-spliced between a hundred different varieties. Right now, they were walking on the crushed gravel path past a rambling hedge that displayed honeysuckle and rose blossoms. Its heavy scent made Eliard gag, and dream of a home that he had run away from.
A. I. Uprising (Valyien Book 4) Page 4
