by Rupert Segar
“This is just meant to scare you,” said the metal man to the centaur. “Yelena does not want you near.”
“It is not what she wants, it is what she needs that’s important,” said Art. “Come on, we’re near the top.”
The orange colour clouds had turned black and grey by the time they reached the summit. In front of them, the clouds thickened and rain was being blown on their faces. Behind them, there were beams of sunshine and a bright soft landscape made up of meadows and hayfields. The rocky climb they had just ascended had disappeared.
“This is beginning to irritate me,” said Art. “I put a lot of effort into climbing that mountain.”
He strode between two interlocked boulders and began his descent. The others followed, they were barely able to see Art in the mist and fog that blowing in. The entire landscape had disappeared and the three of them were walking in a grey bubble where all they could see was the ground a couple of metres about them.
“How do we know we’re going the right way?” said the centaur, in a undulating whinnying voice that reflected her uncertainty.
“Because it’s dark up ahead,” said Art. “Come on.”
Art marched on relentlessly through rain, hail and snow. The centaur needed to be encouraged every five minutes or so. The golden humanoid remained largely impassive. Art wondered whether it was regretting giving up its omniscience. This version of the entity could not see what was happening. Here, in this realm, the Ship no longer had all the answers.
The light began to fade. For all his confidence, Art was becoming concerned. If it became dark, how could they make any progress at all? It doesn’t make sense, he thought. If Yelena really wanted to stop us, she could imagine a wall of flame or an impossible crevasse. So far, every obstacle has just been a hindrance. Yelena wants us to find her, of that I am certain.
The sleet stopped and the mist cleared as Art stepped into an open pasture. The day was at an end and in the twilight gloom all colour had been drained from the land and sky. Everything was grey: The grass, the clouds, the hills opposite; and the brick dome standing only ten metres away.
“This is it,” said the centaur, “but I don’t understand, before it was just a high wall. Now there’s a roof made of grey bricks.”
“Yelena has sealed herself in,” said the golden automaton.
“There is always a way in,” said Art, striding towards the dome made of stones and bricks.
Art tried calling for Yelena, then he shouted her name at the wall in front of him. He reckoned the dome was five or six meters high and roughly twelve metres in diameter. It looked as solid as the Bank of Crandos. The metal man refashioned his hands, turning them into picks. It started hammering at a section of the wall. At first only small chippings came away but with persistence some larger chunks fell to the ground.
A scream echoed across the landscape. A mound of bleached white bones appeared from nowhere and rattled down the sloping wall in front of the entity and Art. The centaur took fright and galloped away disappearing around the curve of the dome.
The metallic man swung his pickaxe hands, left then right, left then right, until a large stone fell away into the interior of the dome. Much larger than life, a 2-D, blown up, black and white picture of Yelena’s face appeared behind the opening.
“No, no, you’ll let it out,” screamed Yelena’s voice.
There was a crashing sound of bricks and rocks collapsing, followed by a cross between a whinny and a scream. The metal man ran towards the source of the sound. Art was two strides behind him. As he rounded the curve of the dome, he saw the centaur lying on the ground with a hideous black creature tearing at its side. The monster looked like a giant bat with a hugely fat body, short stubby wings and razor sharp claws. Its bloated face had a beak with teeth which were ripping at Sy’s stomach.
The metal man reached the monster and leapt at it without hesitation. The two pickaxes were remoulded into golden sword blades and the automaton stabbed and slashed at the beast. The monster roared and turned on the golden man. It flipped the automaton over and engulfed the entity with its bulk. The metal man had clearly been crushed
The beast turned and looked at Art as if to say ‘You’re next,’ then it roared loudly as a sword blade emerged from a fold of its fat stomach. The black creature arched its body looking downwards. The golden man rolled out from under the creature then sprang up and renewed the attack. With two wide sweeps of a blade the creature lost both claws from its wings. The black obscenity was hooting with pain when the automaton stood before it and drove both blades into its eyes. The creature’s bloated body bag deflated like a football bitten by a dog.
Art ran round to the centaur. Sy’s flanks had been raked by the creature and her stomach was an open wound with her intestines sticking out. She was barely breathing.
“It was … stalking me … all day,” said Sy between deep breaths.
“What can we do?” shouted Art at the metal man.
“Absolutely nothing,” said the entity, waving his arm towards the dead monster. “Remember this is only a sensorium.”
The black beast slowly disappeared. Art looked round and saw Sy, the centaur, also fading away.
“Art, my brave man, I tried to stop you getting here but still you came.”
Heart bursting, Art span round and there was Yelena, her straight blonde hair hanging down over her wide strong shoulders. She was standing with her arms wide open. Art took two steps and fell into her arms. This may be a simulacrum, he thought, but Yelena feels real to me. Their embrace lasted minutes then Art decided he needed some answers.
“What was that thing?”
“I am not sure,” said Yelena. “The creature attacked me when I was a prisoner. You remember Colonel Garth. He delivered me for interrogation on the Kargol flagship at Chimera One. My security engrams took over the AI computers on the flag ship. That’s when it appeared, a black beast hunting me down. I had to use all my mental defences and intellectual resilience to protect myself.”
“Yet you don’t know what it was?” said Art.
“Oh, I know what it was,” said Yelena. “It was pure evil, a malevolence designed to destroy every essence of my life force.”
“That is a very dramatic way of describing what it was,” said the golden automaton.
“This is the Ship,” said Art to Yelena. “Our friend here killed the monster.”
“Of course, I know that,” replied Yelena smiling. “This is my subconscious, after all.”
The golden man stepped in front of the couple and put a golden hand on Yelena’s arm.
“I am delighted we have found you,” said the automaton. “Can we now begin to wake you up?”
“Yes. I was only hiding from the beast, and waiting for my brave and noble knight. I take it I have been in a coma. How long?”
“More than three weeks,” said Art, “ever since you were on Dreadnought at Chimera One.” Art relaxed his embrace and turned to the metal man. “Now, Ship, tell us, what was the beast you destroyed?”
“Looks can be deceptive,” said the golden man, almost laughing. “I think it would be wrong for me to take the credit, especially as the real hero is a good friend of yours.
The golden man stepped aside to reveal a bright red pod hovering above the ground.
“Mr Angry!” squealed Yelena in delight.
“Yelena, I am delighted to see you once again,” said the red pod. “I have asked the medibot surgeon to begin waking you.”
“Look, enough of all this polite niceness,” interrupted Art. “For Einstein’s sake tell us about the black monster.”
The red pod hummed for a couple of seconds. Now I’m really beginning to get annoyed, thought Art. By contrast, standing smiling at the pod, Yelena seemed content to wait.
“You have to remember that everything we see around us is a metaphorical representation, you, Art, the wall and the black beast,” said the red pod. “The monster was, in fact, a rather malicious computer
programme, the likes of which I have never seen before. In some ways it was similar to the heuristic engrams we encoded into your comms unit, Yelena. Despite your security engrams trying to block it in Ethel’s medibot box, part of program got through. That was when you had to go on the run, mentally.”
“So I was right thinking it was inside my head. It was trying to get me?” said Yelena, clearly relieved at the confirmation. “I thought I was going mad.”
“And such thoughts were just one facet of its attack,” said Mr Angry. “The programme was highly inimical to all forms of life, organic and inorganic.”
“But the golden man here managed to kill it,” said Art.
“Yes and no,” said Mr Angry. “The battle took place in cyberspace. I and two of my siblings battled with the programme. It was the most malevolent software I have encountered, worse even than the Great Plague. All three of us pods were hit by it. Had we been fighting separately, it would have defeated all three of us. However, we were able to repair each other’s damage. In the end, I was able to utterly destroy the programme.”
“So what we saw here, the golden man fighting the monster ….” Said Art
“It was just a shadow of the real battle,” said the automaton, turning his golden face toward the red pod. “And may I say how disturbingly terrifying it was being here as your puppet, Mr Angry.”
“But what about Sy’s centaur?” asked Art. “She died.”
“Only in the sensorium,” said a voice behind him.
Art turned to find Sy Chang standing in human form on the grass. She was wearing a long summer dress and had sandals on her human feet. She wore her long black hair down and Art saw that her eyes had beautiful chestnut brown irises. Her face was radiant as it creased into a smile and her eyes twinkled.
“Mr Angry and the medibot took me offline when the pain became too great. In any case, I had done my job. The flighty, emotionally vulnerable centaur was there to attract the beast. We knew it had a blood lust for destruction. I was the sacrifice, the diversion, to allow you and the golden man to find Yelena.”
Sy rubbed her arms holding them aloft. “You know, it is a great pleasure to be human again, even though it is only …”
Art saw the world around him break up and fly about. Despite the disorientation, he felt remarkably stable. The grassy field, the hedge and the dome all folded up into nothing. The grey cloud evaporated and he was back in outer space. Art hung at the centre of the pilot’s sensorium. The simulacrum of Yelena’s subconscious had been dismantled. Art felt a gentle click at the back of his head as his widgets disengaged. He was back in the pilot’s chair. Mr Angry, the real red pod, was hovering at his side.
“Yelena is awake,” it said
Art ran down the ramp towards the medical bay and the woman he loved.
Chapter 11: Spiders in the Machine
On board Orion, the largest spaceship ever, ‘Mad’ Peter crouched rocking backwards and forwards on the end of a control desk. Close by, a large spider attached wires and couplings to a grey metal box. The Kargol Emperor looked at the seemingly chaotic scene. The Brood King had turned the far end of loading bay 7 into a junk yard. It is worse than that, thought the Emperor. At least in a junk yard you only have smashed up machines. On the floor of the loading bay, there was another layer of detritus: rotting flesh and other organic flotsam and jetsam washed up on some grim beach. A group of tiny spiders would nibble at one rotting joint then, for no apparent reason divert its attention to an eyeless head or an indescribable bit of human offal. Everywhere there were jury rigged cables and conduits linking one piece of partially dismantled equipment with another. It was as if the Brood King was the Nutty Professor and ‘Mad’ Peter was his apprentice.
The Emperor stood, waiting patiently in front of the control panel. Waiting in silence was a new skill for the King of Ten Thousand Worlds. He marvelled at how his right hand man, Colonel Garth had managed to do it for all those years. For a moment he wondered where Garth was. His preoccupation with the Brood King had supplanted any though of his faithful Enforcer for days. Then he remembered Garth had been sent off on a ‘special’ mission to Old Earth. The Emperor suspected it was because the Brood King did not trust his Enforcer. No one in their right minds trusts Garth, not even me, he thought to himself.
“Peter, Peter,” called the dismembered human head hanging under the spider’s stomach sack. “Turn on the power.”
‘Mad’ Peter turned over onto his knees and pushed two couplings together connecting two broad power cables. The control desk lit up, The Emperor thought it looked as if it had been ripped out of the command deck of an imperial cruiser. The spider heaved its sagging bulk from one side of the panel to the other, adjusting nobs and dials all the while.
“Now connect the Sentinel and persuade it to provide the simulation we discussed earlier, Peter. Remember what I said?”
‘Mad’ Peter scurried over to the coffin sized machine and started attaching wires and cables to it. The Sentinel was capable of taking command of any guardian ship it was part of. Reports of encounters with guardian ships showed time and again how effective these AIs were in defending their vessels. This computerised intelligence was the first of three that had been captured. Normally, Sentinels preferred self-destruction to surrender, even if the human crew had to be sacrificed in the process. The coward, ‘Mad’ Peter had cut all power to the Sentinel preventing it from blowing up Valliant after it was ambushed. Locked in a cell with its betrayer, for months on end, the only data input the machine had were images from a grainy black and white CCTV camera and the incessant burbling of ‘Mad’ Peter on a pick up mic. The Emperor was convinced that both the Sentinel and the boy were equally insane.
Lights on the control panels started flickering and a warning bell rang out. Above the panel suspended by spiders’ webbing and heavy cables was a ship’s vid screen, which blinked on showing multiple screenshot images.
The Emperor read the information with practised ease. The ship was above a planet, it appeared to be one of the Alliance strongholds. The imperial vessel was taking hits from ground based ion cannon. The impact of each beam was lessened by the fact it had to drive through 90 kilometres of atmosphere but there were multiple rays coming from the surface.
“The shields are holding, but the power drain is significant” said the Brood King, laying a loving long leg over the grey metal cube crudely attached to the centre of the control panel. “What is my little box going to do?”
A klaxon sounded. An insert appeared on the vid-screen showing a warship. Data scrolling at the bottom of the picture indicated 5 missiles had been fired. The picture was replaced with a strategy board showing trajectories, estimated blast yields, and times to impact.
“This was not in the plan,” coughed the head hanging below the Brood King. “We shall have to teach Peter and Sentinel a lesson. However, it has to be admitted that it is a rigorous test. So, let us wait and see.”
The big black arachnid heaved its body round to face the Emperor. The hanging head was bashed against the side of the desk. It made no complaint and merely spoke its master’s words.
“What would you do in this situation?”
The Emperor was about to reply when the command console dispatched a dozen or more missiles of its own, not towards the enemy ship but down to the surface of the planet. Simultaneously three ion beams concentrated on the first three of the incoming missiles from the enemy ship. They exploded. The ion beams switched targets and focused on the remaining two rockets. Each was protected by stronger shielding and seemed to withstand the ion beams. The strategy board showed the console ordering a barrage of chaff mines to spread an umbrella of metal scraps in front of the attacking missiles.
“I would not have done that,” said the Emperor. “If a missile is that heavily screened then its field generators must be huge. There would be little room left for explosive devices. I would let them hit our ship, we still have strong shields.”
“Hmmm, i
nteresting,” said the Brood King’s mouthpiece, while its master stared at the King of Kings. “The guardian control buoys are heavily shielded and they still manage to disable your ships with flux bombs.”
“Even a guardian buoy would be destroyed by the ion beams fired from this desk. The incoming missiles have more extensive shielding than that and gravity motors as well. They’re all show and no poke.”
“Let us see,” said the Brood King, heaving itself back round to watch the vid screen.
The image switched to a view of the planet showing a scattering of mushroom clouds erupting at the ion cannon positions. There were a few more nuclear explosions, where there was no cannon firing. Clearly they had been designated as strategically important targets. The Emperor read the figures at the bottom of the screen. An estimated 17 million people had been incinerated, a quarter of the planet’s population.
The screen flicked back to the near space strategy board. The first of the two remaining incoming missiles was about to meet the outward expanding umbrella of chaff. The Emperor held his breath. The missile passed through the defensive screen unharmed. On the vid screen, next to the strategy board, was the ship’s view of that portion of space. The screen flared white and went dark. The second missile had collided with a sizeable piece of metal with a relative velocity of several hundred kilometres a second. The figures at the bottom of the screen showed a yield more than twice that of a Guardian buoy flux bomb.
“Looks like you were wrong, Emperor,” said the Brood King’s mouthpiece. “I wonder what my little box is going to do to stop that deadly missile getting closer.”
The vid-screen showed rail guns firing more chaff bombs. All three ion cannon concentrated their beams on the incoming missile. A score of decoy missiles were launched while the Imperial Vessel itself began to accelerate on a lateral vector away from the missile’s trajectory.
Had there been a human crew on deck during this encounter with the enemy emotions would be running high. The Emperor would like to think that everyone would act with perfect professionalism. However, he knew proximity to death often gave rise to anxiety and panic: people would shout and scream orders at each other. The control desk in front of him was eerily quiet without a human sole taking part. Lights flashed on the control desk and little buzzers sounded, but overall there was a calmness he found almost unnerving.
