Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three)

by Worth, Dan

‘We can hear you, ship,’ said Katherine. ‘Can you get us out of here?’

  ‘The other AIs and I need you to do something for us. Specifically, we need Steelscale. You must return to the hall of mechanoids that you passed on your way in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We need you to remove the head from the Shaper prototype within. It is still coupled to the Life Forge’s network. We’re going to attempt to capture the Shaper AI within it. Lord Steelscale is the only one with enough strength to tear it from its body.’

  ‘What about getting cutting gear from the Arkari teams?’

  ‘There’s no time. The main entrance is locked and beyond our control. Please, we need you to do this quickly.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Katherine. ‘Steelscale, do you think you can manage this?’

  Steelscale nodded.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I will try.’

  They hurried through the maze of corridors, back to the room filled with silent ranks of mechanoids, whose brooding presence now seemed all the more sinister with the suspicion that they might spring to life at any moment and turn on them. They stepped up to the seated figure and examined it. The neck of the ancient Shaper was surprisingly slender, the flaring, tapered skull perfectly balanced atop the complex joint. Steelscale took hold of the skull and then, pinning the figure to the chair with the weight of his reptilian body, began to pull and twist.

  The lights were flickering wildly now, strobing in an eye-aching manner that made it difficult to see. At first, nothing happened to the ancient Shaper. Steelscale’s massive muscles bulged under his scaly skin as he strained, the tendons along his neck standing out like hawsers. He gritted his teeth, and then with one final effort and a deafening roar, ripped the skull from the neck of the ancient Shaper and held it aloft like a trophy.

  Rekkid was already looking at the rest of the room in alarm. He’d seen movement there out of the corner of his eye, had heard the sound of ancient motors coming to life.

  ‘Ship, Steelscale has managed to do as you ask,’ said Katherine into her comm. ‘Whatever you were about to do: now would be a good time,’ she said as one by one, every single ancient mechanoid in the room began to turn slowly to face them.

  ‘The Shaper has gained access to the hall of mechanoids!’ said Aaokon. ‘Eonara, I hope you know what you are doing. It is beginning to assert control over the machines inside there.’

  ‘Do what you can. Slow its progress a moment longer!’ said Eonara and she dove into the ancient systems within the skull, reconfiguring some, disabling others. The Shaper must be able to enter but never leave, never communicate unless prompted. The skull must be the perfect prison, the Shaper AI the genie trapped inside the lamp. She tested the communication links and disabled all others save for one, frying the systems so that they could never be re-activated and then switched the only remaining conduit to a one way path into the skull. She withdrew.

  ‘Aaokon, relinquish your defences in the direction of the skull. Pull back! Look as though it is wearing you down but shore up all other routes!’

  Aaokon did as he was asked, giving up systems whilst strengthening his defences around the link to the other mechanoids. He hung on for a microsecond to make it look as though he was putting up a brave defence and then withdrew. The Shaper took the bait. It poured itself into the waiting vessel.

  The skull came alive in Steelscale’s clawed hands. The black crystal suddenly began to glow as if light were flooding into it, changing it from the appearance of smoky glass to a living ice sculpture. It writhed in his hands like a newborn grub, struggling against his grip.

  Too late, the Shaper realised that it had been trapped, that it had no access to any systems at all. It tried to retreat and found the way back barred - all links to the outside cut. After seventy million years of isolation, its taste of freedom had lasted only moments. It screamed in impotent rage, but no-one could hear it.

  The mechanoids in the room froze, resuming their motionless vigil. The lights came back on and stayed on. Nothing moved except the Shaper skull in Steelscale’s hands. The archaeologists could hear nothing except the tinkle of broken crystal chips onto the floor from the torn neck joint and Steelscale’s laboured breathing.

  ‘So what do we do with that thing now?’ said Rekkid, eyeing the wriggling skull with suspicion.

  ‘It is truly helpless,’ said Eonara, over the comm. ‘I intend to use it as a weapon. I intend it to carry to the Shapers a virus that will destroy them forever.’

  Chapter 48

  Bolivar City was alive with light, but the sky above was their main concern. They could see the police AG cruisers clearly against the glow of the city, red and blue lights flashing as they descended towards them. But there was something else too.

  High in the sky, hung the great Shaper vessel. It shone in the light from Achernar, glowing ghostly pale above the city-lit clouds and the looming, banded sphere of the gas giant, Tethys around which Orinoco orbited. The ship was pregnant with energy. Having gorged itself upon anti-matter it was now ready to open a bridge across the galaxy. It had finished building the artefact that it had been spinning between the tips of its limbs like a vast, space faring arachnid. The ring was complete. It was a slender bracelet of super-dense matter almost as wide as the Shaper vessel was long. It held it delicately with those five massive limbs that jutted forward from its bulbous body. Those limbs started to pump energy from its huge internal reactors into the chains of nodes around the ring.

  There was a flash, as of distant lightning, but no thunder followed. Isaacs looked up and saw the ship.

  ‘Shit, look at that thing!’ he said, grabbing Steven by the shoulder and pointing.

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ said Steven.

  ‘What the hell is that ring that it’s holding?’

  ‘My guess is that it’s a wormhole portal of some kind, or a weapon,’ said Steven, quickly. ‘That ship isn’t a battleship, it’s a constructor vessel. It might explain why the Shapers have been collecting anti-matter and bringing it here: if it’s a wormhole portal they would need massive amounts of energy to activate that thing and Achernar is too unstable to use as a power source. Let’s move. We need to get what we know back to the Commonwealth, and we can’t do that if we’re dead or captured.’

  ‘First thing is to get off this roof then,’ said Isaacs. ‘Then we need to find some transport.’

  ‘Not the truck. They probably know it’s ours and it’s parked right out front. We’ll need to steal another one,’ said Steven, then added: ‘Come on. Before they spot us.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Steven. Anita... I can’t believe what they did to her, she...’ Isaacs looked at Steven wildly.

  ‘They’ll do it to you too if we hang around here, Cal. Come on!’

  ‘Sure, I...’

  ‘Come on!’

  They set off running across the flat rooftop, the only cover being the vents for the air conditioning and piping. The club abutted another building, this one’s roof slightly lower, and they jumped the two metres onto the lower rooftop and kept going. There was a crash behind them and the armoured cops finally blew the door off the office they had just fled.

  ‘Keep running!’ panted Anna. ‘Don’t look back, Cal. Just keep running!’

  They reached the edge of the second building and half ran, half fell down the metal fire escape to the ground as a police AG cruiser swooped in low, its lights flashing, its sirens blaring and its sensors sweeping the ground beneath it. They kept running, sticking to the back alleys, Steven urging them on whilst booted feet thundered on the rooftops above and behind them. Police ground cars sped by on the main roads, their sirens wailing in the night.

  A figure leapt down from a rooftop behind them and started to run towards them, its bulky armour making it cumbersome. As the figure raised its weapon, Steven turned and shot it clean through the skull, through the open visor of its helmet. The figure stumbled backwards and fell as its comrade descended after it. Isaacs shot the secon
d trooper, catching him in the shoulder with the first round and spinning him round. He appeared uninjured, his armour taking the force of the blow until Steven put a round through his skull and dropped him like the first.

  ‘Nice shooting,’ commented Isaacs grimly as they turned and ran.

  ‘Aim for the head,’ said Steven.

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’m better with a rifle, really. A pity we left them in the truck,’ said Isaacs ruefully.

  ‘They’d have been a bit obvious in the club,’ Steven replied. ‘Quick - in here,’ he hissed and led Isaacs and Anna into a side alley between two warehouses. It was filled with rubbish and with weeds growing from the cracks in the concrete. It was only a metre or so wide, the sky above a sliver of darkness and the alley so dark itself that they could barely see.

  ‘Where the hell are we going?’ whispered Anna.

  ‘I had a look at possible escape routes before we came here in case everything went pear shaped – which of course it did,’ said Steven, keeping up the rapid pace. ‘There’s a long term parking garage down here that services the spaceport. We should be able to acquire suitable transport inside.’

  ‘You mean steal somebody’s car?’

  ‘Sure. After I’ve bypassed the security systems and disabled the tracking. It should be a cinch. I’ve done this a tonne of times. Trust me.’ He turned suddenly right into another alley that led to the back of a large square building with unfinished concrete and metal walls. They followed the wall until they reached a corner, where the globe of a security sensor cluster jutted out from the building. Steven removed a small, silvery looking pistol from beneath his jacket and pointed it at the globe, then grunted with satisfaction, before holstering the small weapon.

  ‘Directed EMP gun - Arkari made,’ said Steven, in response to Isaacs and Anna’s quizzical looks. ‘It’ll have fried the electronics in that thing.’

  The heavy footfalls of booted feet echoed back down the alley, and then there was the sound of men carrying equipment and armour squeezing into the narrow alleyway.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Steven under his breath. ‘We haven’t got much time.’

  A locked fire escape proved little impedance. An old fashioned device linked to magnetic seals, Steven opened it in moments with a small, flat disc shaped device that he pressed against the face of the lock, which opened after a couple of seconds with a dull click. Isaacs guessed that it was another tool of the trade. Closing the heavy steel door behind them, Steven re-locked it.

  The interior of the long stay parking garage was dark, save for slivers of light leaking in from the extreme edges of the building. Vehicles, both AG capable and otherwise of all sorts of makes, models and types stood in silent ranks in the gloom. Steven started to walk along them, glancing at each in turn.

  ‘What, they don’t have the colour you like?’ said Anna. ‘Just pick one and let’s get out of here.’

  ‘I need something that performs well if we’re going to make a successful break for it. Maybe this one...’ Steven replied, eyeing a sporty looking ground car.

  ‘I have an idea, why don’t you let me drive one of these AG cars?’ said Isaacs. ‘It’s not too different from piloting a ship, after all, and I can keep us low and moving faster than anything on wheels.’

  From the far side of the garage there was a clatter of the steel shuttered front gates rolling open.

  ‘Listen, we don’t need subterfuge, the bastards have already found us. We need speed,’ Isaacs urged.

  ‘You have a point,’ said Steven as flashing lights and the noise of engines outside signified the arrival of airborne police units. The beams of coloured light strobed inwards from the edge of the garage, creating dancing shadows amidst the silent vehicles. Steven hurried over to a jet black AG car with chrome finished detailing. It was obviously its owner’s pride and joy. Polished to a mirror-like sheen, the grilles and intakes of its nose snarled like the snout of a wild animal, whilst a bulky engine block and rakish fins adorned its rear, where gaping Venturi exhausts gleamed.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ said Isaacs, and Steven got to work. Using a handful of key fob sized devices of different shapes, he defeated the car’s security system in moments and had the door open and the engines started. Having gained access to the driver’s controls, he switched the car over to entirely manual operation, and then put two bullets in the dashboard. Ripping off the panel revealed a tightly packed arrangement of processing units. Steven squinted at them in turn, and then put another round through one of them.

  ‘Okay, flyboy. Get in and drive,’ he said to Isaacs. Anna piled into the back as Steven leapt into the front passenger seat and began buckling himself in.

  ‘Okay...’ said Isaacs, running his eyes over the controls. It had been a while since he’d piloted anything except his own ship, but these things were made so even an idiot could fly them. He activated the AG and the car rose gently off the concrete floor until it floated about half a metre up in the air. Isaacs gripped the controls and eased the throttle forward and felt the car respond quickly. As he turned the vehicle out of its parking space, black clad figures began to appear from between the rows of parked vehicles and run towards them. Then there was sudden, shattering bang from behind them, followed by the clattering of falling metal as the fire escape door that they had entered by was blown off its hinges by shaped charges.

  ‘Cal, now would be a good time to stop driving like a little old lady and get us the fuck out of here!’ cried Anna.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Isaacs and, aiming the vehicle at the onrushing group of enslaved, suddenly ramped the throttle up, hurling the car forwards.

  High above the surface of Orinoco, the massive Shaper construction vessel held the now glowing ring in its grip. Its forelimbs pulsed with energy. Around it, Shaper warships waited in packs, eager for what was to come. The ring shone with a brilliance that made the distant Achernar star seem tawdry by comparison. There was a blinding flash of energy and nearby craft rocked in the backwash like boats on a stormy sea as a hyper-dimensional surface appeared within the ring, rippling like water before it puckered and stretched and became a vortex extending ever further as the wormhole was spun off. The geometry appeared impossible: the surface held within the ring was two dimensional, yet the tunnel to which it formed the entrance stretched far across the galaxy. It reached out through hyperspace, joining the ring to a location in the galactic core in an instant. At first a microscopically slim hyper dimensional thread stretching across the galaxy, the wormhole was wrenched wider by the ring, until its open ends gaped like hungry throats.

  A deathly light began to issue from within the ring. A portal to the centre of the galaxy now stood open, a door into that hellish region where dying suns whirled in the grip of the Maelstrom as they spiralled into its ravenous embrace. Against the light of doomed stars there were forms of light and shade, ghostly things that reflected the corposant glow against their gleaming hulls. A vast fleet of Shaper craft and ships belonging to those races enslaved to their indomitable will lay gathered there. The Singularity had called them together from across the core of the Shapers’ domain. The destruction of the larger portal that had been previously constructed above the Maelstrom had only of course been a temporary setback. It would be replaced, near-endless legions of slaves were available to the Singularity’s command, and in time, many more portals would be built to provide instant transportation for their numberless forces. For now though, the smaller device above Orinoco linked that far flung world to the core, the wormhole providing a shining path for the Shapers’ forces to travel along.

  The Shapers had offered humanity a chance to join with them willingly. Humans had failed to do so except under extreme duress or deception. It mattered not. The humans’ home-world would be destroyed utterly, wiped clean of life and then the rest of their worlds would be enslaved. They would provide yet more raw materials to feed the Shapers’ endless war engine and swell the ranks of their legions. Then the other races would be c
rushed also, and finally the Shapers would once more turn their attention to the Arkari. That defiant race had turned them back once. The Shapers would not make that same mistake again. The Arkari were to be exterminated, each of their worlds burned to ash in turn.

  On the far side of the portal, the Shaper fleet was now on the move. Close to a million enslaved ships and countless shepherding Shaper craft were all moving as one towards the newly opened wormhole that led to the Achernar system.

  The car careered wildly, its front wing catching a couple of the charging enslaved police and knocking them flying. Isaacs wrenched the controls around to the right and headed for the ramp up to the next level as the car sped through a hail of gunfire that peppered the previously pristine paintwork and shattered the rear windscreen. Reaching the top, he continued his crazy ascent, whipping the vehicle around through the rows of vehicles and concrete pillars and heading for the next up ramp. Charging figures followed them.

  ‘Everyone okay?’ cried Isaacs, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the view ahead. ‘Anyone hit?’

  ‘Just a scratch,’ said Steven. ‘Nothing to worry about. Anna?’

  ‘I’m fine!’ Anna reported. ‘Jesus, Cal. Where are you taking us?’

  ‘Onwards and upwards,’ Isaacs replied. ‘How many floors does this place have?’

  ‘Three, I think,’ Steven replied. ‘Why?’

  The car was already fishtailing through the next level, its front and rear racing dangerously close to the parked rows of vehicles. Glancing backwards, Steven could see figures moving with inhuman speed and agility, almost managing to keep pace with them.

  ‘I’m always better in the air than on the ground,’ Isaacs answered. ‘This thing can fly. I intend to see what it can do.’

  ‘Well hurry up,’ said Anna. ‘Those fucking things are gaining on us.’

  As the car leaned into another turn towards the next ramp, Steven twisted around in his seat and took aim at the charging figures over the cowls and vents of the car’s engine. His first shots went wide, the movement of the vehicle and the fast moving targets confounding his efforts. He adjusted his aim as Isaacs threw the vehicle up another ramp to the top floor and fired again at the closest figures, smiling grimly as he saw them go sprawling.