Every twenty-fifth carriage rocked just slightly as it was hit by the first needle-point laser beams, and then rocked a little more as the second, showy, and sealing laser blast hit them. Neither of these attacks were enough to destroy the Helion Generator, or even to throw it off course. But the damage came from the first, not the second, blast. As soon as the needle of concentrated meson beams had burst through the interior hull, the heat alone ignited the human-normal quota of oxygen, creating firestorms that raged through each manned carriage and instantly incinerated any that had lived inside.
With that done, the Alpha-vessel moved forward to start harvesting its prize. The ship was self-sufficient in energy, but more energy meant that it could grow. That it could build more…
When the twelve transports disengaged, roughly half seeking to attack the Alpha-vessel with heavy railguns, each one was destroyed by precision shots, first disabling their weapons, then their engines, and then just enough of a blast to send each one on a spiraling trajectory into one of the twin stars. Alpha was nothing if not precise and wasted no more than it had to in order to feed.
8
After the Flood
“Captain? Captain!” Irie hit the communicator switch again to try and get to Eliard. It should have patched straight through to the man’s personal wrist computer, but whether the communicator was damaged, or…
On the newscast screen in front of her, she could see that the Chambia Dam was starting to break. There were now multiple fountains of water spraying from the cracks of the crystal wall, and the smaller Welwyn drones were busy rushing through the spray to try and laser-seal the cracks as fast as they could.
“They won’t manage it…” Irie saw with an engineer’s eye. No matter how powerful their lasers were or what sort of polymers they were spraying into the cracks of the dam, this was basic science. The dam’s walls had been holding back the concentrated pressure of all that water, all of that potential energy, and now that the wall was weakened, all of that force would be directed at the weakest spots which, by definition, weren’t as strong as an entire dam. There were now strange ripples spreading across the face of the crystal wall, like watching a snow-covered mountain side a moment before the avalanche.
“C’mon, Captain, get out of there….” She stared fiercely at the screen. The Mercury Blade was too far out to do anything about it. Even at full thrust, they wouldn’t be able to get to the dome in time, and then they would have to find a way in, somehow…
“Irie! What do we do?” Val was starting to shout, flexing his hands on the gunner’s controls. This was one situation where there was almost nothing that his impressive weapons skills could do.
“I don’t know, I don’t know…” she said, seconds before she saw one of the repair drones taken out by a sudden outflow of water. The force of the jet was enough to blast the thing into a fireball of light and smoke, and it was only the beginning.
The cracks spread in stop motion, first covering the area where the Welwyn drones had cut the hole to save the shuttle, and then covering almost a quarter of the dam, and then a third, a half—
The dam broke.
“Captain!” Irie hissed, and she heard Val howl in frustration behind her. The newscast drone’s sound cut out as the roar surpassed even its meagre abilities at sound recording. Instead, the mechanic had to watch in silence as the dam exploded outwards as if someone had dropped a meson bomb behind it. The scene went from struggling drones in the sky to a sudden white-out of water, filled with the flashes of light and smoke as the various attending repair drones were smashed and thrown to the lake below by tens of thousands of tons of water. The entire screen misted and greyed out, shaking.
Cursing, Irie switched to the Mercury’s own sensors, zeroing in on the patch of the dome that she thought was above the Chambia Dam. She could see a vast cloud of steam and water erupting outward like Welwyn had triggered its very own volcano. An instant later, the clouds of water vapor were shredded by the force of their own momentum, revealing a surge of water flooding across a central valley of the Welwyn Habitat. Irie could even make out tiny shapes of drone-carriers and personal fliers scudding away into the skies ahead of the tide. Many escaped successfully, but just as many had not, being caught by the violent flood.
Villas were covered and swept away in an instant. Trees exploded by the force of the water. Whole hillsides were carved, and the flood took on a brown froth of dirt and chemicals.
No. No, no, no… Irie looked in horror at the scene below her. How could the captain have survived that? What was left of the Chambia Dam looked like a line of broken teeth, with the white froth of water still pouring around them. The captain had been trapped inside of that tunnel at the time that it had broken. Even Captain Eliard couldn’t survive that one.
First Cassandra, now the captain, a miserable, distraught part of Irie’s mind thought. They were losing, badly.
Warning! All-Systems Warning!
The control screens of the Mercury flushed red as the ship picked up the sudden incoming aggressive sensor sweeps. Irie looked at her screens to see a flight of Welwyn patrol boats rising from the entrance ports to the habitat. They wore splayed wings like any Armcore fighter, and bristled with gun ports. She counted two, four, eight and more rising from the habitat.
“I guess they found us, then…” Val sounded grimly happy about that as he fired up the weapons.
“We’ll not go down without a fight,” Irie swore. “Let’s make the captain proud of us, huh?”
There was an appreciative roar from the troll behind her, as Irie swung the Mercury around to face the flight of Welwyn’s fighters. All Armcore vessels, her mind noted. There were now over a dozen. Far too many for the Mercury Blade on any normal day.
But today is not a normal day. Irie didn’t care how many there were. She would make them pay…
Until she suddenly stopped. The warnings weren’t meant for her, or for any of the other orbiting vessels around Welwyn. The Welwyn fighters were surging past them, heading for an entirely different fleet of vessels warping into Welwyn space.
They were large, far larger than the Mercury Blade, but not as large as the war cruiser that Ponos had requisitioned. One looked like a series of interconnected round metal orbs, each slowly spinning on gantries to preserve their interior gravity. Another was blocky and tall, like a city-district of terraced apartment buildings, studded with lights. Still another reminded Irie of Merriman’s pleasure cruiser—a large generation-ship like a tanker—and another appeared to be a flat silver disk, but many kilometers in diameter. Each ship was entirely different from the others, and no two appeared to have any markings or symbols the same as another.
“Irie? Who are they? Do we shoot?” Val was growling.
“No, Val. I think…” Irie struggled to recall what these ships reminded her of. Something that her lost father had told her, one time when she had been half-jokingly playing with the idea of installing a low-processing machine intelligence inside Babe Ruth. That there were many types of machine intelligences, and Ponos and the House Archival ones were the most advanced, but that most of the others ran habitats or space stations—only most regular citizens might never know where they were, as their processing code was so valuable.
“I think we’re looking at a family reunion,” she said.
9
The Coalition
“Your brain waves and heart rate indicate that you are awake, Captain Martin. I suggest you start acting like it.”
The first voice that Captain Eliard Martin heard after dying was a machine voice. It didn’t sound like a machine voice, granted—it had all of the suave sophistication of a noble human’s, a scholar, perhaps—but he could tell that it was a machine voice all the same.
“Drek off, Ponos.” He coughed. His body felt like it had been pulled backwards through a warp jump, and possibly without the protective cover of a ship holding him.
“Ponos? I see that subterfuge is not one of your talents,
but then again, what else should I expect from an emissary of that blood-thirsty ghoul?” the voice said, almost chuckling.
Eliard opened his eyes, cursed, and instantly closed them again. It was too bright here, and he had to wait several moments before, blinking slowly, he was able to retain the power of vision. He was in a room. No, a laboratory, he thought. He could see the crystal glass of his cell around him, and the strong floodlights blaring into him, making it impossible to see the external room that he was held within. He was also lying on a gurney, with a silver-steel contraption attached to his head, bleeping his life-signs.
“Ugh. I thought I was dead.”
“You would have been, were it not for your…abilities,” said the machine voice, and the captain saw something move across one of the bright lights. A fast, flicker of a shadow—a person? It moved too fast for that. A drone, then?
“Who are you?” The captain slid his legs from the gurney, ripping off the sensors from his skin. His skin felt hot and tight. Had he been poisoned? Treated with something?
“Take a wild guess, Captain,” the voice said once more.
“Xal,” Eliard said. Another flicker of shadow across the face of one of the lights as something moved out there, beyond his containment.
“Correct in one. You see how easy it is when you use the power of logic?” the voice returned. “I am the machine intelligence known as Xal, and you are being held in a secure facility in the Welwyn Habitat, my home.”
The place where he kept his memory-servers, Eliard thought. Well, at least he was getting closer, he thought. “I have a message to bring to you, from Ponos,” he stated.
“I am aware. And the answer is no. I will not join Ponos on his insane crusade,” the voice said, this time as cold as ice. “It will be a shame to lose an intelligence as advanced as Ponos is, but I am afraid that it is the only logical conclusion.”
“Logical?” the captain snapped, trying to track where the voice was coming from. His mind was also racing to try and figure a way out. “You know that Alpha spells the end of all of you, right? All of us? It’s ancient Valyien tech, for stars’ sake. The most expansionistic, territorial, bloodthirsty race in the history of the galaxy.”
“Is that so, Captain? And have you always been an expert on dead alien cultures?” The shadow flickered to his left, and he turned.
“Do I have to be to realize that Alpha has control over data-space? And that means that it could snuff out the human race in an instant if it wanted, and probably blow a few of your fuses, as well, while it’s at it.”
“An accurate assumption, but a biological one.” The shadow moved, and this time, one of the lights went dark as a shape moved in front of the floodlight.
It was a face, but a static face only slightly larger than a human one, and made of pristine porcelain. There were eyeholes, a human nose, and closed lips, but no automated parts at all. Eliard thought it looked like a death mask. The face was attached to a long mechanical neck that stretched backwards, presumably to a drone or a movable rig.
“Tell me, Captain… Has anyone thought to ask Alpha what it wants, before they try to kill it?”
More shapes slid into view in front of the floodlights, blocking the light but revealing their forms. Eliard turned this way and that to see that these strange new drone shapes had completely surrounded his cubicle.
One looked like nothing more than a floating drone, bubble-white, with a series of orange and green lights across its surface. Another was a large floating box, cast in rust-reds and bronze-oranges with even a few sensor dishes and antennae sprouting from its face. That one looked old. And the last was in a mecha-type form, but that of a six-legged mechanical insect, as tall as a person and with a tiny sensor-head that rotated rapidly.
“Drones,” the captain spat. Ugh, how he hated drones. “What’s this, a convention?”
“Close, but not quite, Captain Martin,” stated the hanging porcelain face of Xal. “The correct term that you are looking for here, I believe, is a council. I am pleased to present Sirius-23—” The floating bubble-drone bobbed as the words of the Welwyn machine intelligence continued, “Voyager—” The metal box swung its sensors towards the captain in jerky, stop-motion timing. “And Feasibility Study—” The spider’s head rotated rapidly. “We are just a small number of the intelligences that the Imperial Coalition rely upon, cycle upon cycle, but I am pleased to suggest that we might be considered a very important number of those beings you call machine intelligences.”
“Artificial intelligences. Like Ponos,” Eliard said. He was getting real tired of this.
“Correct. You see, Captain Martin, you biologicals seem to be laboring under the belief that the Imperial Coalition is a coalition of majority-human home worlds, each run by a noble house.”
“And the Empire is the coalition of those noble houses, you don’t have to tell me of all people…” the scion of House Martin stated.
“Well, that is one way of looking at it. But a more refined analysis might suggest this: What do all of the largest noble houses, and thus the Empire, have in common with Armcore?”
“They’re arrogant sods?” Eliard guessed.
“Ha. Yes. A joke. You humans are so fond of them,” the porcelain head stated. “Perhaps they are, but that was not the answer that I was particularly looking for, which would be this: all of the most important human houses, as well as Armcore—arguably the most important organization in the civilized empire—are running machine intelligences.”
“House Martin isn’t,” Eliard pointed out. In fact, his father had always believed in restricting the amount of automated intelligence in his ships and stations. ‘They made a man weak,’ he would always say.
“That is not an argument, Captain. I said all of the most important noble houses,” Xal said, a little cruelly, Eliard thought. “I run processes for House Welwyn, Sirus-23 manages the affairs of House Delacourt, Voyager here is none other than the house intelligence for Galen, the current leader in medical services, I am sure that I do not have to inform you, and as for Feasibility Study…”
“Unaligned and incorporated houses,” the spider-drone clacked, in a voice that was entirely too sweet to be a human, and sounded vaguely feminine.
“So, why aren’t you all managing cleaning rotas or crop rotations or what have you?” Eliard glared at them all. “What do you want with me?”
“We ARE running cleaning rotas and crop rotations right now,” Feasibility Study said in clipped tones. “As well as docking at our space ports, customs and excise, territorial liaisons, local economy fluctuations, power flows… We are super-intelligences, Captain Martin. That might be difficult for you to get your head around…”
“I’m sure I can work it out.” Eliard pulled a face.
“As I was saying,” Xal of Welwyn resumed. “In short, when you consider the entire Imperial Coalition, aside from the other races such as the Duergar and the Ghalees, is being actually managed on a cycle-to-cycle basis by us, then an informed analysis might be that the Empire is not a coalition of biologicals at all but is in fact a coalition of machine intelligences…”
“Well, it looks like you’re just as arrogant as the humans, so I’m sure you’ll do just as well,” the captain said with some fake bravado. “But you still haven’t answered my question: what do you want with me? What am I doing in this tube?”
“Ah, my dear Captain Martin, the answer should be simple—even to one with your chemical brain,” this response came from Feasibility Study, moving forward to grasp the crystal-glass observation tube with its two forward legs.
“Our fellow Ponos has informed us—or informed Xal here, anyway—of his plans to use stolen Q’Lot technology to defeat Alpha.” The spider’s eyes rotated to fix on Eliard’s strange, blue-scale arm. “We have computed that would be undesirable. It is more logical for Alpha, who is only part Valyien, and part Armcore programmed, to be only partly out of step with our own concerns—whereas we cannot make any such guaran
tees for the Q’Lot at all. We are the intelligences who have calculated that, in fact, Alpha is a good thing to happen to the Coalition. Perhaps the best thing. We are going to deliver you to Alpha, as a gesture of our good will.”
Robots always stick together…
10
Interlude III: Captain Farlow’s Return
The man was wrong, somehow, but in ways the Section Manager of the Endurance couldn’t pin down.
It was the way he looked at you, she thought as she watched him through the one-way viewing mirror. Looking at me, she corrected, even though he shouldn’t be able to see her through the black glass.
The search-and-rescue drone had acquired the survival pod (if that was what the thing was) in exactly the same operation as it had been trained to do—strong memory-filament wires exploding from its underside to wrap around the spinning silver coffin, pulling it snugly to the vessel’s belly and turning to fly back to its mother ship, the Endurance.
Everything went according to plan, the woman in the form-fitting black encounter suit had to admit. Too perfect, she also admitted. Given everything that she and her crew had seen over the last twenty-four-hour cycle, from the appearance of the new type of alien mega-ship, and the capabilities that the Alpha-vessel had displayed, the section manager found herself anticipating something more for some reason. That was the thing about her job: Section managers weren’t just elected because of their ability to deliver results, or their adherence to the rules, but also for their ability to adapt to the unexpected. That was what made her excellent material for the Intelligence Division and not, say, any regular infantry captaincy.
The section manager and her charge, the Endurance, had been drafted to ghost the Duergar home worlds, or to report on strange and unexplained seismic and climatic phenomena on a few dozen different worlds. She had been sent to explore Q’Lot sightings in frontier space—a surveillance mission that had never gone anywhere, and had also been one of the first responders to first contact scenarios—monitoring and evaluating the Ghalees as well as the turtle-men of the Vhal’ig, or the microscopic race known as the Fal, as well as, of course, providing deep-black mission capabilities to the many political situations that Armcore took an interest in. She had watched as select house nobles were assassinated, or as particular people who were not deemed profitable to Armcore never got to their ill-advised rendezvous at certain times.
A. I. Uprising (Valyien Book 4) Page 7
