The strange and the unpredictable were a part of the Endurance’s remit. It was natural for Senior Tomas to dispatch them of all of the many war cruisers and battleships that it had at its disposal to evaluate the possible Alpha threat.
But what the section manager hadn’t been expecting was for the person to emerge from the strange survival pod to be a hundred-percent human. A citizen of the Imperial Coalition and an Armcore officer, in fact.
Captain Farlowe appeared to be a well-maintained man in his later years. He had the customary short crewcut of Armcore, but it was now speckled with grey. He had wrinkles around his eyes and the peppering of dimples and scars across his cheeks and broad hands from a hundred firefights. She knew this because she had his records at her side, on a portable screen.
Captain Adan Farlowe, commissioned officer, Armcore.
Home world: Delacourt Prime.
Health Analysis: 57 Earth-standard years. Birth male. No gender deviation. Re-constructed right femur and right hip. Skeleto-muscular intervention therapy, lower spine. Bone-lacing left wrist and hand. De-radiation treatments (2). Full steroid complement. Full inoculation complement. No genetic enhancements. Genetic predisposition to heart disease, anticipated start: 65 years.
Proficiencies: Strategic Analysis: Master. Combat: hand-to-hand, ranged, ship-to-ship, skirmish. Pilot: one-person craft, small to medium craft.
Service Record: Joined Armcore age 16. Graduated Advanced Lieutenant Programme age 21. First Commander age 25. Second Commander age 32. Captaincy age 38. Awarded General age 48. De-commissioned age 57, new rank: Captain-with-warrant.
“Holy warpholes,” the section manager had to state. Even though the Intelligence Division were technically outside the usual ranking structure of the Armcore Fleet, the man she was looking at had once outranked her, but had been decommissioned, or busted back down to the lowest level of captain that he could be and still command an Armcore ship. Any lower and he would have to have an accompanying officer.
And that was interesting, her intelligence-led mind thought. Why had General Farlowe become Captain Farlowe? What was the story there? Had he annoyed Senior Dane Tomas? It would be no surprise if he had been punished for something, but usually Senior Tomas was even more cruel than this. The section manager knew that her boss would think nothing about stripping commanders and captains right back down to grunts or worse for insubordination.
But this man had been allowed to keep his three gold pips. Why?
“So, you could still captain a ship,” she reasoned. “And so the question becomes, where were you going?”
“That would be classified, ma’am,” whispered a new voice in the viewing room, and the woman couldn’t stop herself from gasping just a little as she turned to look at the man who stepped out from the shadows. How long had he been there? He was a small man with a tanned face and a sharp nose, and bright, gleaming eyes. He wore the same dark encounter suit as all the rest of the Intelligence Division, but she couldn’t quite recall who he was in her team.
“Soldier…?” she said imperiously. Whilst the Intelligence Division might not display ranks, that did not mean that everyone on board hadn’t memorized just where they were in the military food chain—and the section manager was confident that she was at the top. It was her boat, after all.
“Specialist Merik.” The man nodded just slightly, just barely enough to miss an insubordination charge.
“Specialist,” the section manager said. That was a polite way of saying ‘could be anything’ and was used for any ‘special’ Armcore soldier who had been given training in any number of elite areas. She could be looking at an Armcore assassin, or a data analyst, or a demolitions expert, for all she knew. “I thank you for your input, but I fail to see your involvement in this case.”
“Ah, of course…” Specialist Merik tugged open one of the pocket flaps on his suit to slide out a flexible screen. A few taps, and series of directive codes appeared, next to his name and a picture.
Nuts. The section manager’s jaw tightened. Those were special order codes. It meant that this man was empowered by the higher-ups to perform select tasks, and with no oversight from anyone that wasn’t the very person who had commissioned those codes.
“Fine.” The woman was annoyed because she didn’t like not knowing the particulars of her mission, but it wasn’t like this was an unheard-of occurrence on an Intelligence Division ship. She herself had presented those same codes to other Armcore officers here at times when she was empowered to get the ‘quiet’ work done.
“Just tell me one thing, Specialist Merik. Is this man a danger to my vessel and my crew?”
“Yes.” Merik nodded with a smile, quite happily.
The woman’s hand tightened around her own screen. “How bad?”
“All of the bad,” Merik said, again with that same cheery smile that looked like he had just told someone he had the last slice of cake. “But I can do more than tell you that, actually, Manager.” Merik walked towards the window slowly. “I’m allowed to share mission parameters with people who need to know.” He paused before stepping up to the glass, his eyes darting over the captain-who-had-once-been-a-general on the other side, sitting in a blank metal waiting room.
“The captain here was a part of the first encounter unit to engage with Alpha. He defected.”
“What?” The section manager almost laughed. Almost. She was far too professional to laugh in situations like this. “How does someone even defect to…” She thought about the strange automated, alien ship. “…to that?”
“He found a way, clearly. From the situation reports, Captain Farlowe killed his crew, disabled their warp-drive, and delivered a bomb to the Alpha-vessel, presumably trading the weapons for protection. The man that you see in front of you is being classed as a spy at the very least, or even a possible enemy agent.”
“But that doesn’t even make sense.” The section manager’s excellent mind, trained in the arts of strategic situation analysis, examined the specialist’s words. “This Alpha-vessel, from what I have been told anyway, is capable of almost any act of engineering and computation. Why would it be impressed with some old Armcore bomb that it could make itself?”
The specialist’s eyes flickered. “Maybe it was a gesture of goodwill on our dear captain’s part. Or maybe Alpha hadn’t developed its full range of capabilities yet. We don’t know. But what we do know is that the captain killed his crew, and is the only surviving member of that team, and that he delivered items to the target.” There was a shrug from the specialist’s thin shoulders, as if the particulars were out of his control. “We picked up the clipper-scout vessel some days ago, and the ship’s logs were all there.”
“Where is the clipper-scout now?” the section manager asked. I don’t trust this guy. He’s lying to me. I should know, because I’m a damn good liar myself.
“Destroyed. Irradiated and then blown up by twenty-seven meson charges placed throughout the hull and engines,” Merik said sadly. “Which brings me to the reason I am here.” He turned fully to stare at the section manager, ignoring the silent, stationary Farlowe past the glass.
“This man is a very high containment risk. Very high. Almost critical. We are to deliver him to Senior Tomas as directed, but my special orders have been activated the moment that he came on board. Neither the captain nor the survival craft that he came in on is allowed to have any direct contact with ship electronic systems.”
“Excuse me?”
“And the same goes for any machine-object that has come into contact with either the captain or his craft. So, the search-and-rescue drone is now in quarantine, and the examination bays that the captain was brought through are on lockdown. All instruments used to examine the captain have also been placed in confinement,” the specialist said seriously.
“And the crew? The officers who examined him? Questioned him?” the section manager asked.
“I am afraid that they have been placed in mandatory stasis.”
The specialist appeared apologetic. As well he should, she thought. She knew full well what mandatory stasis meant—an enforced chemical coma inside one of the medical tubes. It was usually only used to keep someone who was seriously injured alive until they could be transported to an appropriate medical facility.
Those were my crewmen and women, she thought with a shiver of anger, and horror. She had been about to waltz into that examination room herself and start questioning him. If she had, then it sounded like the specialist here would have overseen her arrest by burly security officers in hazard suits and injected her with something from which she might never wake up from.
I came close, she had to admit. “What are we looking at? Is it a viral agent? A chemical contaminant?”
“Its precise nature is unknown at present.” The specialist turned his head to regard the man sitting quite calmly on the other side of the glass. “What we do know is that any device that came into contact with Alpha was able to transmit a virus, a data virus, back into its connected networks.”
“A data virus. You mean hacked code?” the section manager stated. “Then we keep the pod that he came to us in, and the search-and-rescue pod in a clean electrical environment. I do not see how a computer code can infect my biological crewmates!”
“Perhaps that is why you weren’t informed of my presence on your ship,” the specialist said meekly, and the section manager could have hit him, then and there. But hers was not to reason why, as the old saying went.
“Fine. You’re the one with the special orders, so I take it that you have already quarantined, restricted, and confined everything?”
“I have. This was a courtesy call, Manager.” Merik smiled his cheerful, odd smile once again.
Courtesy my ass. The woman gave the same smile back. “Well. Then I guess I will leave you to it, Specialist. If I no longer have to deal with him, then that is less work on my screen,” the woman said breezily over her shoulder, turning off her personal screen and waving to the door to let her out.
It was a typical response to this sort of situation, it was the expected response for a senior intelligence officer such as her, the section manager congratulated herself as she turned down the metal corridors, lit with subtle white lights, and marched into the depths of the Endurance.
It was also the sort of decision that the section manager had no intention of keeping, either. Who the hell places my crew in mandatory stasis without telling me, she fumed.
Behind her in the viewing room, the door had hissed shut, and Specialist Merik turned quickly to the door panel to flicker a black-gloved hand over it. There was a warning beep as the systems auto-locked the door and turned off the hidden cameras that were always watching. He was now alone and relaxed a little.
He turned back to the glass, and this time, he walked straight up to it, not hanging back in the gloom and the shadows behind the section manager as he had been before.
At first, the man on the other side of the glass didn’t appear to see him—he shouldn’t be able to see him, certainly—but then Captain Farlowe’s stolid face jerked to one side, to focus on the man on the other side of the glass.
The specialist tugged at his collar and hood, allowing the man to see his face fully. “Let’s see if there is anything human left in you to even recognize me,” he whispered, his breath misting on the glass.
The captain did react. First, his eyes widened, and the specialist could see the recognition spreading through the man’s mind. Then, Farlowe jerked upright in his seat, his face now a mask of confusion and frustration as he marched to the other side of the glass, inches away from the specialist.
“Yeah, you remember me, don’t you, big fella?” Specialist Merik said in a soft, dangerous tone. “You didn’t like it when you had to take orders from me aboard that clipper-scout either, did you? You officers. You’re all the same.”
Farlowe opened his mouth, but his jaw looked almost slack, as if he was having troubling forming the words. A twitch flickered through his face, and it seemed that whatever passion had passed through him was fading, replaced with that same stoic, stolid, calm expression.
“Interesting,” Specialist Merik said, stepping back from the glass and into the shadows. Farlowe’s eyes blinked, but they did not follow him. Whatever preternatural vision that Alpha had given him wasn’t capable of everything, Merik thought. “There is still a bit of the old captain in there. I wonder why,” Merik mused. “Why did Alpha hollow you out but leave just a shred left behind at all? What good could it do?”
It was at the end of that sentence that the captain did something, and the specialist wondered, in shock, if it was in answer to his question. But it couldn’t be. This is soundproof glass, right?
The captain very casually, and very calmly, raised one of his un-gloved, large, shovel-like hands and extended one finger. Moving slowly and very deliberately, he started to press that finger to the glass and drag it across the inner surface.
The specialist’s hand moved to the laser blaster that he kept at his hip, just in case. Who knows what Alpha is capable of, and what this new sort of Captain Farlowe is therefore capable of?
But the captain appeared to have no intention of breaking the glass. Instead, Specialist Merik watched as he very slowly, very carefully, made many small up and down, and side to side movements. His finger flushed a deep crimson red against the glass. Not white, Merik thought. Did that mean that the man was now able to control his finger’s temperature somehow? The specialist had already seen him use his eyes to pierce a mirrored one-way screen that no human eye should be able to.
The captain continued until he had covered about the width of his shoulders, before he leaned ever-so-slightly forward and breathed on the glass. Amazingly, there bloomed words on the glass.
TELL DANE TOMAS THAT HIS DREAMS ARE ACCURATE
Okay… Merik thought in bewilderment, watching as Captain Farlowe started again, a fraction lower than the disappearing first message.
ALPHA WILL HELP. ALPHA HAS A PROPOSITION
Merik read the words, and for one of the few times in the specialist’s short but highly eventful life, he felt uneasy. It wasn’t just at the oddness of this situation, at the human-looking Captain Farlowe’s new abilities, and neither was it the content of the message.
At least a proposition isn’t the same as a ransom, or a demand, or an ultimatum, he had to consider.
No, what made the specialist uneasy was the way that Captain Farlowe had so effortlessly and easily written the smudged glass messages. They were written not in mirror-writing, meaning that they were legible to Farlowe only. They were written perfectly backwards to the captain, meaning that they were designed for Merik’s eyes alone.
11
A Captain Cornered
On board the Mercury, a small section of the overhead screens lit up with a flashing orange alert.
Incoming Secure Transmission: Narrow-Band, Accept: Y/N?
“We got a call. Unable to trace,” Irie said through gritted teeth. Through the cockpit windows, she could see the four strange mega-ships hanging around the unsettled Welwyn Habitat like visiting gods. The host of Welwyn fighters had slowed to a stationary cluster, but not in between the new arrivals on the habitat, instead, they had stationed themselves outside, facing outwards.
Like they are guarding them, Irie said. “Whoever these people are, they’re friends of Welwyn,” she said.
“That message could be the captain,” Val growled fiercely. Now that he had no one to fire on, the Duergar appeared frustrated.
Accept: Y/N?
Y.
On the screens in front of Irie, the orange alert faded, to be replaced by a small black box of code, with one of the blinking inputs being a tiny red triangle with an eye in the middle.
“It’s Ponos,” Irie said. “Do we tell him that the captain’s probably dead?”
“Tell him to go scramble his circuits,” Val grumbled.
As much as that was a very attractive off
er, Irie didn’t take it. There was too much going on right now for her to risk annoying yet another far-superior intelligence.
PONOS: Report back. Have you managed to engage Xal?
MERCURY: No. The Captain… The Captain is currently on the surface. We don’t know if… If he has been successful.
PONOS: Expected. Your situation has changed. I have received news that arriving in your locality are three other House Intelligences; Sirius-23, Voyager, and Feasibility Study. Together, their processing power could be a match for Alpha.
MERCURY: You want us to negotiate with them!?
PONOS: No. It is highly unlikely that they will accede to my reasoning. I fear that they mean to side with Alpha, against humanity.
MERCURY: Then what can we do? Please tell me you have some well-calculated plan…
PONOS: Naturally. But it means that you must try to engage Xal quickly, before it is too late.
Irie looked out of the cockpit window, in response to the Mercury Blade’s sensor warnings. There were already small carrier ships scudding through the night towards Welwyn and locking into their docking patterns.
MERCURY: I’m not sure that is possible any more. We need a plan B.
A. I. Uprising (Valyien Book 4) Page 8
