Final Assault

by Stephen Ames Berry

  Smoke from burning bodies and machines drifted over the charnel house of hangar green alpha 13. Dead AIs and Kronarins lay sprawled along the deck, their twisted and shattered bodies mute testimony to a battle all but over. The human assault had met the AI counterassault a few hundred paces from Implacable. Outnumbered and outgunned, the attack had faltered, swept by blaster beams and security blades knifing through soft flesh. The survivors knelt among their dead, reloading as the blades regrouped for their own final assault.

  “Here they come,” said Satil, slipping home her last chargpak.

  Fresh blades were knifing through the smoke, moving toward the small knot of humans standing amid the blasted remains of their shattered assault.

  Of the original attack force, few survived, among them Kyan, Satil, Detrelna and Lawrona, all of them wounded.

  “One last volley, gentlemen,” said Kyan, gamely shifting his M11A to his good hand. The others fell in beside him, waiting among their dead as death swept in.

  “Aim,” said Kyan, raising his pistol

  “Hanar,” said Detrelna, taking careful aim at the lead blade, “finally a cheery word for you.”

  “What?” he asked as the blades closed.

  “Volley … !” cried Kyan.

  “War’s over!” said the commodore.

  A long line of gray-uniformed figures appeared between the humans and the blades. The blades vanished. There were no AIs left alive on the hangar deck.

  “Secure the entrance,” order Satur, holstering his pistol. He turned and saluted. “My Lord.”

  “That was too close,” said Kyan as Satil sprayed coagulate on his bleeding neck.

  “We had to talk among ourselves, reach a decision. We’re all here, My Lord.”

  “And the AI blades?”

  “We flitted them into space.”

  “Stop fussing, Botul!” snapped Detrelna as the master gunner tried to tend to his cut shoulder. “I’m fine.”

  “No you’re not,” said Botul, continuing to fuss.

  “What are you doing here, Satur?” said the commodore. “And what are you?”

  “A living myth,” said Lawrona wonderingly. “Imperial Biofabs—the Emperor’s Guard.”

  “So many old legends come to life,” said Detrelna. “They’re not Scotar?” he asked with sudden concern.

  “No, Commodore, they’re not Scotar,” said Kyan. “They are as they seem—biologically fabricated proto-humans, held by Line in augmented stasis.”

  “They’ve all the powers with which the Scotar made us painfully familiar,” he said uneasily.

  “Not for long. They’re genetically death-tripped. Fighting beside us earns them the surgery to remove that and their special abilities. Courtesy of Line.”

  “Line?” said Lawrona. “Is Line yet another crazy relic we have to worry about, Satur?”

  “Line’s an eminently sane Imperial cyborg, not a mindslaver. He’s always treated us with cautious respect. And he’ll make us mortal—preferable to dead.”

  “And what will you do, as mortals?” asked Detrelna.

  “We’ll do fine, Commodore. We already have an employment offer.” He looked at the Heir.

  “‘Every emperor needs an Imperial Guard,’” quoted Kyan.

  “Besides,” said Satur, “we have 15,000 years of back pay coming, with interest. My Lord, we must press on. Enemy reinforcements are massing.”

  “We must counterattack,” said Orlac.

  “How?” said Sutak. “You saw what those gray ghosts did? Four companies of blades gone. What are they? They only look human.”

  “Biologically fabricated humans,” speculated Orlac. “Biofabs. Probably the product of their old Imperial High Science. Contemporary Kronar couldn’t have produced that,” he said, as one of the Kyan’s new Guardsmen disappeared, only to reappear an instant later with a medkit.

  “If we’d known, we’d never have met them in open combat,” said Jnor. “Their goal’s the bridge and you, First Leader. Let them come—automatic defenses will tear them apart.” They were on the flagship’s bridge, watching the humans preparing to move out.

  “No, the plague will do that,” said the Sutak. “It’s unseemly to kill each other when death will soon take us all. Look at them forming ranks so bravely, ignorant of our mutual doom. Enough. Follow me.”

  Kyan led his Guardsmen and the Fleet commandos at the double, a column of fours beelining toward the wide portal from which the blades had sallied. They were halfway there when three figures, two human-seeming and a security blade, emerged and moved toward them. Behind them flights of security blades deployed, spanning to parallel the bulkhead in three long layers.

  “My Lord?” said Satur.

  “Not yet. We can posture, too. Deploy!” Kyan ordered. The Kronarins swung into a long line facing the blades.

  “Perhaps they’re surrendering, My Lord?” suggested Lawrona.

  “They’ve several hundred thousand crew, Hanar,” said Kyan. “Oh. Humor. You?”

  “A recent acquisition.”

  “And a refreshing change, Hanar—though it may be short-lived. Whatever do they want? Let’s ask. Hanar, Detrelna, Satur, with me. The rest of you, stand fast. Don’t fire unless they do. Gentlemen,” he said, leading them toward The First Leader’s party.

  They met a few meters apart. “Sutak, First Leader,” said Sutak with a nod.

  “Kyan. I command here. Not complaining, First Leader, but why aren’t you busily destroying humanity? You’ve been vowing to kill us for a very long time.”

  “We can still do that. A farewell gift, as it were. But something else will soon destroy us all. It’s made us into a plague fleet.”

  “The plague?” said Detrelna. “The one you used on the Trel?”

  “I didn’t. Others did. They thought it funny, being the Trel’s own design. It’s wiped out most of our fleet and is now loose on this ship.”

  “Our analysis shows most of your ships to be uncrewed. The plague?” asked Lawrona.

  A wail of pain and despair rose from Orlac as he fell spasming to the deck. All but Sutak moved away from him. “Orlac!” he cried bending toward him, only to be buffeted aside by Jnor, the security blade, banking into him and pushing him away. “No, First Leader!”

  “Aside, Jnor! He’s my friend. He’s not going to die alone.”

  “We all die alone, First Leader,” said the Security Commander, not moving. “You can’t save him.”

  Orlac imploded, shrinking in on himself, his form losing definition, contracting into a large molten lump that lay hissing on the deck, a steaming putrescence sending the humans away, gagging

  “That,” said Sutak, turning from his dead friend’s remains, “is the plague,” he said to the humans.

  “It can jump to us?” coughed Detrelna.

  “It already has. Make your peace—you don’t have long. In your species, it manifests as a virulent hemorrhagic fever. You’ll spew blood through every orifice and die shrieking in your own fluids.”

  “Anticipatory glee, First Leader?” said Lawrona, face pale.

  “No vaccine, no antidote?” asked Kyan.

  “Our only success has been in immunizing a few of our ships—the plague’s not fond of the tachyon pulses we’re flushing through our command-and-control matrixes. We couldn’t adapt it to ourselves, though. Our battleglobes are reeking necropolises trailing us to our doom.”

  “My Lord!” came the call. “We’ve people down!”

  Humans and AIs quickly covered the distance to Implacable where Botul and Satil lay dying.

  “Nothing?” asked Laguan again.

  “Nothing, Admiral,” confirmed Line. “Not since they landed on the presumed enemy flagship.

  “The biofabs?”

  “Shield and jamming blocks them, too. A thought. Moment, please.”

  It was a long moment. “There’s a tight transmission wave getting through—from Captain Lawrona’s High Imperial sidearm. It has a dataleech node linked to Im
placable’s sensors. Finding the right codebase, I can thin-stream Implacable’s sensor scans.”

  “When?”

  “Now,” said Line, a holovid scan filling the floor in front of Laguan. They watched as a circle of concern surrounded Botul and Satil, lying near each other in mingling pools of blood. Kyan knelt beside Satil, shaking Satur’s hand from his shoulder and taking her in his arms. “Medtech!” he called, knowing it was futile. She was coated in the blood that had poured from her, horribly pale and barely breathing. Blood still dribbled from her nose and mouth. She managed to focus on Kyan’s face. “Didn’t mean this kind of getaway.”

  “We’ll get you fixed,” he said, trying to mask his grief.

  “Silly,” she said and passed out.

  “The plague,” said Laguan, sinking into his chair. “That explains much. Can you confirm it’s the plague, Line?”

  “No corroborating data,” said Line, analyzing the information flowing from Lawrona’s blaster. “If we’d had the plague, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “FleetOps,” said Laguan. “Withdraw all but one destroyer squadron insystem. All other available ships to aid in evacuation to redoubt planets. Station the destroyer squadron to await Implacable. If she leaves that AI battleglobe, destroy her.”

  “We can’t destroy a Fleet vessel unless it’s gone corsair!” protested Admiral Awal.

  “She may be carrying the plague—The Plague that destroyed the Trel. Tell no one, Awal. Only death would stop the panic.”

  “Bridge. Captain,” said Lawrona into the commnet. “Upshield. Full quarantine. Full biohazard protocols.” The shimmer of a forcefield capped Implacable’s hangar bay launch port, followed an instant later by the blue haze of her shield.

  “Medtech’s Aage’s dead,” said Detrelna, joining Kyan. “And Master Gunner Botul.” Lawrona thought he looked shrunken, and for the first time ever, defeated.

  “I’ve had some medical training,” said a familiar voice. Humans and AIs turned toward the small group hurrying toward them across the deck. “Tolei! No! Go back!” cried Lawrona. “Take them away!” he said to Guan-Sharick as she approached, John, Kiroda and Zahava with her. “The plague’s here!”

  “Steady, Hanar,” said Kiroda. “That’s why we’re here. Show them,” he said, as more humans crumpled and a security blade soared at speed into a far wall, showering those below in flaming debris.

  “You,” said Sutak staring disbelievingly.

  “Sutak,” nodded Guan-Sharick, opening the case John held for her. “And First Leader, too,” she added, glancing at the gold torque circling the AI’s neck, a fused bit of silver metal hanging from it. “That silly reliquary still denotes First Leader?”

  “It is That-Which-Remains,” said Sutak stiffly.

  “The venerated remains of a waste disposer, according to the Trel. They joked that you all began as a failed line of overly-ambitious garbage disposers prone to ancestor worship.”

  “We had the last laugh.”

  “Really? You think your race’s demise laughable?” she asked, carefully removing a short stubby tube from the case. “Why aren’t you butchering everyone here? It’s what you do, what you are.”

  “Pointless, as you can see. Your gift came with us.”

  “I gave that to no one. You killed for it, you killed with it, now it’s killing you—death by irony, Sutak. Sorry I have to save you and yours, but I’m fond of the humans.”

  “If you hadn’t made that horror …”

  “And you hadn’t gleefully used it. But I did make it. And you did use it. So here we are. I can make amends. Can you, First Leader? Watch and learn.” She looked at the vaccine, but saw faces and places and wonders long lost. Gathering the Tau energy that sustained her, she released it into the tube.

  “Why is the Kronarin fleet withdrawing?” asked Second Leader Hasi. “Not a rhetorical question,” he added into the long silence.

  “Redeploying to aid with Kronar’s evacuation?” speculated Tactics. His name was Motal and he looked human but wasn’t. Of an especially powerful Grouping important to Hasi’s political ambitions, the Second Leader tolerated Motal’s decadent presence. (Hasi believed every rumor he’d ever heard of AIs dallying with and diddling humans—why else take on all the physical attributes of an animal other than bestial pleasure?) “Do we pursue, Second Leader?”

  “No. We’ll wait until Sutak and his forces are dead.” There’d been no outbreak of plague on Hasi’s six battleglobes, the forward part of the AIs’ hollow armada. This he credited to his strict no-fraternization policy that had kept his crews, picked for ideological purity, from mingling with the rest of the fleet. A policy in place long before the plague, it had kept them alive as death swept battleglobe after battleglobe, phalanx after phalanx, an endless dirge of annihilation filling the commweb. Now the commweb was unusually silent, only automated reports from the trailing battleglobes with their putrefying contents, orders from Sutak, status reports from Hasi’s consort battleglobes. There’d been nothing from their mindless First Leader since the humans had breached his flagship. “Anything from Sutak since the plague warning?”

  “No.”

  “Why’s that Kronarin destroyer force not withdrawing?” asked Hasi, watching the tactical display.

  “It’s taking up station nearer Sutak’s flagship.”

  “But not supporting the attack. Interesting.”

  “Do we attack them?” asked Motal.”

  “No. Let the plague, the humans and Sutak all stew together aboard Avenger. Advise our consorts to standby for now.”

  He hovered—a translucent red ball—weighing options. Much as he longed to destroy the humans, needed to, could—ships, planet, all—contagion from the ruined Fleet would eventually seep down to Kronar and kill them. Hasi knew well the effects of the plague, having been the commander who long years ago had released it, without orders, on the Trel worlds—an action for which he was long venerated by his fellow conservatives.

  Hasi sadly decided to forgo the delights of slaughter. To save his command and his race, he’d leave doomed Kronar behind and slip after the evacuees, stalking them to wherever they were fleeing. Nothing the humans had left could touch his battleglobes. He would seize those haven worlds and their refugees. From them the AIs would be reborn—wiser, strengthened by their ordeal. Much culling and genetic engineering would craft a docile mankind, shorn of aggression and creativity. And no AI would ever again take human form.

  Patience has always been our strength, reflected Hasi. Reborn, we’ll be better. Our great die-off will signal our rebirth. He turned his attention to the commnet—from Sutak’s battleglobe, still nothing.

  “She’s gone,” John marveled, staring at Guan-Sharick’s soft leavings: a gray tunic, trousers and a silver amulet, a small pile on the deck beside a seemingly empty transparent tube.

  “She won’t be back,” said Detrelna, picking up the amulet. At his touch, the blue stone gave of a life-sized hologram: Guan-Sharick, a smiling man he recognized as Lan-Asal, and a boy who looked like them both. The image flickered and vanished, the amulet crumpled to dust. “I’m glad she knew happiness.” The commodore gently blew the last of the dust from his hand then looked at the tube.

  It was glowing brighter—unbearably so. “What’s it doing?” asked Lawrona, looking from Sutak to Satur, the two oldest among them.

  “Propagation device?” the biofab asked the AI commander.

  “Maybe. Nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Stand away!” commanded a voice on all their communits—Line’s voice. “Everyone back. It’s a biophage broadcaster. Don’t look at it! First Leader, ensure all you’re vessels are commlinked. Implacable, drop shields. Now!”

  “Who are you?” asked Sutak.

  “It’s Line,” said Kyan, looking up. “Do it, Sutak.”

  “Done,” said the AI an instant later.

  Implacable’s shield winked off.

  They waited in silence and mutual dread—a silence b
roken by Satil’s labored breathing as death slipped through the hangar: the soft fall of two more humans to the deck, exsanguinating in a gurgle of blood; more security blades going wildly mad, destroyed by their comrades, ranks closing to fill the gaps.

  The broadcaster wailed, spinning, sending a white nimbus flaring through the vast hangar, reaching out through bulkheads to fill the battleglobe, touching all within, flashing along and across the invisible tendrils of networked commwebs, coursing into every ship in the Fleet of the One, its radiance bursting from instruments and equipment banks to fill every vessel, touch every being, gone as quickly as it came. From the nexus of the combined battleglobes it pulsed out into space, moving far faster than light.

  It was over. Dull and lifeless, the tube lay on the deck.

  “Gods of my fathers,” said Detrelna, rubbing his eyes to clear them of the dancing white spots.

  “I think you’ll find the plague’s gone. Everywhere in this universe,” said Line.

  “Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t that,” said Kiroda.

  “Did it help the sick?” asked Lawrona.

  “I think so,” said Kyan, fingers feeling Satil’s strengthening pulse. Helped by others, the two fallen crewmen were sitting up, dazed, pale but alive.

  “I was on a long trek, alone in a place of green hills and streams that sang of dead kings,” whispered Satil, opening her eyes.

  “You’re home now, Corin. Welcome back,” said Kyan. “Help me get her to sickbay.”

  “Let me take her, My Lord,” said Satur, lifting her. “You’re needed here. I’m medically qualified. Line, can you transport us to your sickbay?” In answer, they were gone.

  “The dying’s stopped,” reported Sutak. “Throughout what remains of our fleet.”

  “Fine,” said Detrelna. “Now we can return to killing each other.”

  “May I guess, Commodore, that your superiors don’t always appreciate your wit?”

  Detrelna shrugged. “They’re rarely graced by it, First Leader. My crew and I are usually sent on missions far from home, driven I’m sure by my superiors horror at seeing me in The Uniform.”

  “Aren’t those ribbons on your tunic valor awards?”