The crying stopped for a moment, then there were shouts mixed in with the crying. The shouts came from the far side of the room, to his left. He rushed towards the source as bits of the roof began to fall in on him. He held one arm over his head. He tripped over some chairs and ran his stomach straight into the side of a table, nearly knocking his breath out. Then he saw them. Two small children, huddled up against the corner of the house. It was an older boy, maybe six years old, and a smaller girl, a toddler. Both had nearly the same length of hair, dark green and half way down their backs. The boy’s was tied in a small knot, while the toddler’s was in multiple strands. Their light green skin was covered in black smoot.
Gheno looked around. The fire was eating down the wall in the front door. He looked back towards the hole he had made with the plasma rifle and was greeted by the sight of the fire eating away at the roof. He grabbed the kids up in his arms and began towards the hole when the roof began to collapse. He ducked down, tucking the children under him. A smaller beam came crashing down, hitting him across the back. He screamed out from the pain of the impact and the searing heat. With one arm holding the children, he burned himself with the other arm as he moved the beam off of his back. The pain was unbearable. It felt as if his whole body was on fire. In a final push of strength, he got up with the kids and ran through the hole to the outside, crashing into the wall of the house next door.
He began stumbling out of the narrow alley when he was met by Gadoni men, who helped him. They took the kids and then two men helped him out of the inferno that the alley was turning into. As Gheno started to black out, the last thing he saw was the face of Blue Flower as he was being dragged up into the sky.
***
“Provide support. Look for stragglers,” Jayne ordered.
The aerial battle had taken a turn for the better. The Gadoni, to her complete surprise, had an air force of their own. Her pilots were calling them kites, due to the flimsy thin material between the Vs. They had come in the hundreds over the mountains, along with larger vessels as well. Those appeared to be either transports or bombing craft. They had already reported seeing jumpers off of the larger ships.
The smaller ones had taken the fight straight to the drones and the black M drones. The M drones and their close range physical attack did nothing to the Gadoni ships. The men on board simply fought off the attacks. Meanwhile, they attacked the smaller drones with what Jayne could only call sludge. The small V craft fired off round after round of small spherical globs. Jayne watched in satisfaction as the globs would strike a drone, sending it spinning out of control. They also attacked the larger black drones, and while those still managed to continue flying, after a few moments, the sludge would burst into flames, and eat into the thick material.
The Gadoni craft were incredibly nimble. They turned and moved unlike any aircraft, twisting and turning away as if there was no air. Jayne was unsure of how they did that, but she didn’t care. She turned her ships against the larger drones.
She listened with relief as Graham reported in to the Galaxy that the battle on the land was turning as well. A giant army of bears and spiders, along with lightning-wielding soldiers, was routing the enemy force. She had requested images of these bears and spiders, and, again, to her surprise, Graham was not wrong. She knew the Admiral was likely in a similar state of pleasant shock.
“We just may have this one, sir,” she reported in, directly to Marcus.
“Perhaps, but the large spheres are continuing to spew out more and more drones.”
“Then we have to take it out,” she said, “but with what?”
“We are working on that,” he answered.
3127 – Gadoni, over the ocean.
The new ship, eerily similar to the former Midnight Oil, sped out over the ocean. The battle was several hundred miles to their rear.
“This whole planet is one giant computer?” Kale blurted out. Uli remained silent, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat. It was in the same spot as it was in the original Midnight Oil.
“That is an extremely simplistic way of putting it, Captain,” Sentinel replied.
“Well,” Kale said, frustrated, “I'm a simple guy.”
“The whole planet is not one computer. It’s a natural planet, as any other.”
“Other than the whole crazy virus, three suns and super human Indians?”
“Yes,” the AI replied.
“Ok, so then what?” Kale asked.
“The Vahe, this entity I am a part of now, it is artificial. At least, in the same sense that I am.”
There was a pause. Uli had been listening intently. “There are many among the Threadweavers that say the Vahe were not of this world. A tool there, for us.”
Kale caught her gaze.
“She is correct. Kale, when I began uploading into the Vahe, as an experiment, the structure became clearly evident. While still far more advanced than anything mankind has yet come up with, the Vahe is, essentially, one giant core.”
“Is?”
“Yes, the Vahe are...well, they are one entity. All Vahe are initially connected via a biological network to all other growing Vahe all over the planet. The Gadoni identified these networks as conduits of power. Some are even able to tap into them. They do carry power, but also data.”
“A giant computer,” Kale repeated, softly that time.
“The Vahe is, yes. It is why I was able to adapt its structure to mine. My code is incredibly simple compared to the hardware the Vahe presents to me.”
“Nice story, Sentinel,” Kale said, adding “so what are we doing flying way out here?”
“Before I disconnected this Vahe from the main network, I detected incoming data. I really haven’t been able to translate it, but the structure of the code resembles what I can only guess is security protocols.”
“Security? Like the computer’s, um, guns?”
“Perhaps,” Sentinel explained. “But maybe not. It was some kind of reactionary message, asking for instructions. I have the source and a few simple commands. At least, I think so.”
“So again, where are we going?”
“The source had a name. The Mothers. The command structure code mentions waking the Mothers.”
“The Mothers,” Kale said. “This is sounding more and more like a really bad virtuavid.”
“I do understand that everything I have explained is bordering the realm of fantasy. I can only explain what I currently understand.”
Kale sat back in his chair. The ship was speeding mere feet over the water. The spray of an occasional wave was quickly lost against the hull of the ship.
“Did you feel that?” Kale asked, seeing the water quickly vanish from the slowly changing windshield.
“The water? Yes, I felt it. Cold.”
“You're alive now?” Kale asked.
“I was alive before,” the AI replied. “I just now have a body that has more biological type senses.”
“The spirit has found its shape,” Uli said, quietly.
“I hope that’s a good thing,” Kale said.
“You still don’t trust me?” the AI asked. It almost sounded hurt.
“Yeah. I do. I just don’t trust my own brain,” Kale said.
The AI was silent and no one spoke for a while. The ship continued to fly out towards the ocean. Kale took the moment to think back over the events of the last following days, especially to the incredibly intimate moment he had shared with Uli, all within a shared vision. Kale wasn’t a religious man, nor even a very spiritual one. He liked his facts hard and cold. He understood hallucinations and drug induced wackiness. He couldn’t make his brain believe in that which he had seen. The vision of his past that he refused to confront had come forward, and someone else had seen it.
Kale reached out and touched Uli on the shoulder, startling her. She spun around.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I was,” she started, “in thought.”
“You can’t have children?” he as
ked. The thought had been in his mind since the vision.
Uli halted for a moment, losing herself in thought again. Then she began.
“For someone to become a Threadweaver they have to endure a painful process. It is better done as a child. When the elder weavers discovered I had the skills, more than they even had, they put me through the ritual. It was done in the blackness above, in the dark web. They used the most Yua they had ever tried before.”
“That….” Kale started, “changed you.”
“They all said I was the most powerful Threadweaver ever. That I would bring about the greatest change. That I would save them. The ritual, it took my life from inside of me. In doing so, I felt and saw every single thread in the dark web, where it is the darkest to see. As a child, I didn’t understand what I saw. So I pulled on all of the threads. All the Vahe collapsed. My parents died.”
“How…” Kale began.
“I lived, frozen, somehow. Others found me, floating in the dark web.”
“And you remember that?” Kale asked.
“I hadn’t. Not until our vision.”
“So we both had to relive dark moments,” Kale said softly. “You said I had given you life? That doesn’t mean, um. We didn’t do anything, did we?”
Uli smiled coyly. “You lost your reason for life. My life was taken from within me. What we have given each other, Kale, is life.”
“I'm not smart enough for your prophetic style talking,” Kale smiled.
“I don’t know what the vision has done to me, or to you,” Uli said, turning back around and looking out the windshield. “But I do know I feel alive. I don’t know if I ever felt that before.”
Kale nodded. He knew he had lost a reason to live, many times over. But he began to wonder if he had ever felt alive in the past. He had been born a slave, and even when he had manage to escape that, his existence was one of solitude and greed. He had done more than his share of selfish deeds in the past, but he was here now, fighting for a planet. He did feel alive.
“We are here,” Sentinel chimed in through the ship’s walls.
The ship came to a halt and hovered over the ocean. Kale stood up and looked out of the windshield. They were slowly rising.
“Now what?” Kale asked.
“Now we talk,” the AI responded.
Kale raised a finger to say something, but decided against it. They were completely in Sentinel’s care at the moment.
“Wireless link established. This connection, it is like the Gadoni stones. Quantum communications. The implications are….” The AI stopped.
The ship began to rise much faster and then turned and began speeding back to the west. Kale was thrown back into his chair. He would need to get used to not having gravity dampeners within the ship.
“Captain, I have spoken with the Mothers. Defenses are activated.”
Kale thought for a moment. “Sentinel, did we just make first contact? Alien species?”
“Captain, I thought so at first. But the more I communicate, the more I see; it’s just a big computer. There is no AI here, no sentience.”
“Ok, fine, but we certainly didn’t build this thing, did we?” Kale asked.
“No.”
As Sentinel steered the ship back towards the west, the water behind them began to froth and rise.
***
“Admiral?”
“Yes, I'm reading this. Begin feeding this to the commanders planet-side.”
The readings had exploded onto their sensors, at least the few they had managed to get operational in the hours after their attack. They had tried to focus optics onto the surge in the ocean, but there were too many clouds. Instead, they were reading gravimetric pulses off the chart. They resembled large tectonic quakes the most, but there was very little water displacement. It was when the first optics came through and were displayed on various screens that a general gasp was heard throughout the bridge.
It was about eighty miles long and twelve or so wide. It was moving rapidly through the water, yet displacing very little of it, as if the ocean was going through it. It moved just under the surface, so it was impossible to tell just what it could be. Its path was clear though. It was headed to the black spheres.
“Graham, are you seeing this?” the Admiral said in the linked coms with his two sub-commodores.
“That makes no sense to me, Admiral,” Graham shouted in the coms. The background noise was filled with shouts, screams and explosions.
Marcus watched the reports come in from the Marines that had tagged along with the Gadoni army. Their charge had slowed down considerably when they reached the tsunami debris and the flooded coastal plain. The mounted warriors had been slowed down considerably. Their shock was their greatest asset, and not being able to charge took that away. The spider vehicles fared much better. A battle line had formed along where the tsunami had reached inshore and it had become a battle of attrition. Both armies threw numbers at each other.
In the skies, the Gadoni, with the help from the Jaguars, had turned the battle around. While the sphere continued to spew out more and more drones, they controlled the skies and had even begun to attack the ground troops. The flying vessels that had operated as troop transports were now making bombing runs down along the dark spirits line. They were dumping bombs filled with what they were just calling napalm; an incendiary liquid.
Despite their tenacity, the orbital pictures continued to show an endless stream of drones that carried the centaurs and tanks headed towards the shore. Thousands more continued to pour out of the black spheres.
“Sir, it’s moving fast!” an ensign shouted out.
“How fast?” Marcus asked, while tapping the screen himself. The number astonished him.
“Almost the speed of sound,” the ensign gasped, “and it’s still underwater.”
“It’s almost there,” Marcus said softly. “Jayne, we need a better feed of this.”
***
Jayne turned her Jaguar and called for her wingman and two others to join up. She had been following the reports but when she turned the ship to face east again, she saw it behind the spheres. The pyramid spheres were already larger than her brain could easily understand, but behind them, she could see a surge along the water that failed to register as normal in her mind.
“It’s like a whole continent is about to pop up out of the water,” she heard over the coms.
Her formation flew up higher as her wingmen kept them clear of any drones that tried to follow. They were all tied in to her flight command and worked as turrets. That allowed Jayne to focus on their new arrival and send all the data to the Galaxy and by proxy to Graham back on the coast. She ducked her flight path in front of the spheres for a moment, losing sight of the surge behind it. Her wingmen cleared a path and she rose up above the spheres again. What she saw left her speechless.
“That is ...” Marcus had nothing he could say.
The bridge had hushed in awed silence. They were receiving the video feed from Jayne’s Jaguar, but the image looked doctored, like a really bad movie. It, the thing, had stopped and risen out of the water behind the spheres. On a scale they couldn’t describe, it was as if the earth had bulged right there. It was growing out and over the spheres, forming an inverted sphere of its own. It was engulfing the spheres from the eastern side. Their spheres, for the most part, were unable to, or simply didn’t, respond at all to the new threat.
From this inverted sphere ‘mouth’ emerged hundreds of long tentacles. They were dozens of miles long and they began to wrap around the main sphere, scouring the surface, so the spheres closed up. The hangars that had been sending out drones closed up and for the first time since they had crashed into the oceans, the steady stream of drones stopped.
Marcus watched and zoomed in multiple times. He could see tentacles moving rapidly over the surface of the sphere and at one point, saw one nearly reach a hangar before it closed up.
“It’s trying to get in,” the Admiral commented.
“We should help them,” he heard Graham say over the coms.
Marcus began pulling up weapon data. “Do we have any of our orbital guns ready?”
The report came in. No, and they were hours, if not days, from repairing them. Did they have anything to fire down onto the planet? the Admiral asked. The answer was yes.
“We have two G-bombs on board.”
Marcus smiled. “Yes we do.”
The Gravity-bomb was the modern equivalent for the nuclear weapon. It was a large scale weapon on the tip of a missile. It produced a gravity explosion that sucked in everything within range. The incredible buildup of heat from the compression of mass then exploded. They were city busters, weapons meant for strategic purposes.
In this case, the target was as large as a city.
“Start the programing. Change the parameters to implosion. And let’s hope the thing, the island, or whatever it is, isn’t hurt by it.”
Ensigns shook their heads and began working furiously on the task of reprogramming the two missiles they had.
“Let’s see if we can crack that egg.”
Graham stood at the edge of the giant spider Vahe. He could easily see the ocean from the height he was at. The battle had raged along the debris line along the coast, but where he was on the northernmost edge of the city’s boundary along the coast, they had gained a slight edge. The third Cairn of Marines that had marched as fast as possible to setup the flank attack down along the coast had finally shown up. Graham, mostly through gesticulations and hand movements, had shown the pilots of the Vahe where his Marines would show up, and they had pushed hard on that line. The dark spirits must have not had any sense for scouting, because the Marines showed up and began making quick advances down the northern flank of the centaurs. Graham had hoped to just swing the line down towards the south, but he was dealing with a constant stream of drones still skimming in off the ocean.
He was yelling some orders into his wrist tablet when he caught the bright flash in the sky.
The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2) Page 35
