Renegades (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Two)

by Dan Worth

  ‘Hadar.’

  ‘Oh, right. Frontier mining system, yeah?’

  ‘Something like that. Look Anita, I’m going to track down my wife, she could be in a lot of danger and I don’t think she’ll appreciate, well… ‘

  ‘I thought you were separated.’

  ‘Yes, well…’

  ‘You’re thinking of getting back with her?’

  ‘I don’t know, look, this isn’t what this is about. This isn’t a fucking sight-seeing trip you know. Things could get a little hairy.’

  ‘I can handle myself. You should see where I grew up. You never know, maybe I could come in useful.’ She moved across the galley and looked at him hopefully.

  Isaacs sighed.

  ‘Alright, have it your way. The ship’s locked into its jump now, so there’s not much I can do about it anyway. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘Okay, great. So, how long until we get to Hadar?’

  ‘About a fortnight.’

  She moved a little closer to him, until they were touching. He felt her hand on his arm.

  ‘A fortnight, huh?’ she said. ‘I hope we don’t get bored.’

  He burst out laughing.

  Chapter 11

  Mentith stood in the viewing gallery, looking down on the lab below. The containment unit with the body of the former Lord Steelscale and its inhabitant lay bathed in bright light. Arkari technicians moved among the various workstations and equipment arrays; checking, scanning, probing. It was a form of interrogation. If they could only pry open the secrets held within that cold alien intelligence... Unfortunately, the creature of the Shapers had remained silent since it had taunted Admiral Chen. It lay in its gory nest in silence, watching them, studying its captors. Mentith had doubled the security measures around the thing just in case.

  The door behind him opened, admitting a tall, grizzled human male.

  ‘War Marshall,’ said the man, in a gravelly voice. ‘It’s been a while. Good to see you again.’

  Mentith turned to face the craggy features of Fleet Admiral George Haines, supreme commander of Commonwealth forces during the war against the K’Soth, and now head of the peace keeping operations in the liberated territories. He and Mentith were very much alike. Both of them were born for war, although Haines had seen action rather more close up than his Arkari counterpart, having lost an eye to a K’Soth warrior whilst repelling a boarding action over fifty years previously. He had refused a replacement, wearing his ravaged face like a battle honour.

  His legendary status amongst the men and women of the Commonwealth military had only grown since the outbreak of the more recent conflict and the Commonwealth’s rapid victory over the K’Soth. Haines’s lifespan had been extended by genetic treatments and some half-joked that he was indestructible. Given the fact that his ship the Abraham Lincoln was almost always in the thickest of the fighting and that he was still alive after all this time, some were starting to believe it.

  ‘It’s been too long, Admiral,’ Mentith replied. ‘How goes the peace keeping?’

  ‘Like hell,’ snorted Haines. ‘God damn it, the Empire collapses and all its former oppressed subjects can do is settle old scores that they’ve been bottling up since they got conquered.’

  ‘Hmm, it seems that little ever changes.’

  ‘Most days I have half a dozen representatives – half of them self appointed - bickering in my office about stuff neither I, nor anyone else for that matter, has a clue about. Most of the time I feel like wringing their god damn necks, or whatever they have. Short sighted idiots mostly, always looking out for number one and screw everybody else.’

  ‘I gather that some of the planets you liberated have even devolved back into nation states again.’

  ‘Depressing isn’t it? I’ve tried getting help from back home, but the government’s only interested in the commercial side of things as usual. Corporations have bought half of Parliament. I’m a soldier, not a diplomat, but the situation’s so volatile that there needs to be someone out there with his finger on the trigger just to maintain the semblance of some sort of order and keep our supply lines open. We must be involved with or trying to prevent about a hundred civil wars right now, from tribal level right up to interstellar.’

  ‘It’s that serious?’

  ‘You’re damn right it is. On one hand I’ve got one set of guys with swords trying to conquer another set with different coloured scales, on the other I’ve got two planets pointing strategic weapons at one another that they liberated from the K’Soth. Ah, listen to me.’ Haines laughed bitterly. ‘You invite me here and all I do is lay my troubles on your shoulders. This Dyson sphere you’ve found here, Mentith, is very impressive. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. The level of technology the Progenitors possessed never ceases to amaze me. I thought the portal device at Maranos was incredible, but this… how can a race have the power build such things and yet be defeated?’

  ‘Defeated by the very same enemy we face now,’ said Mentith darkly. ‘The Progenitor’s empire was eaten away from within like a body riddled with cancers.’

  ‘We are sure of that, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes. From what we’ve uncovered so far it seems that this Dyson sphere acted as a staging post of some kind during the war that tore the Progenitor’s empire apart. From what we can tell from the evidence that we’ve gathered so far, it seems that a political movement backed or manipulated by the Shapers were behind the initial rebellion rather than there being any sort of general disorder resulting from misrule. From the tone and content of the accounts that we’ve retrieved so far, it seems that they had a definite agenda to usurp the existing order and seize power for themselves, rather than merely achieve liberation. This was aided by what we believe was the deliberate release of an engineered virus into the general Progenitor population.

  In addition to this, some of the medical reports describe creatures similar to the ones we’ve found inside the brain cavities of key individuals. Presumably the technology the Shapers now possess is far more sophisticated than that which they employed five billion years ago. Despite their apparent periods of dormancy, their modus operandi remains the same.’

  ‘You did say we had a lot to talk about,’ Haines commented.

  ‘We certainly do,’ Mentith replied, indicating with a nod to the lab below. Haines peered down at the containment unit.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked. ‘Our honoured guest?’

  ‘The very same.’

  Haines seemed to visibly shudder. ‘That thing down there, it’s an abomination against everything we’ve striven to build; an offence to your people and mine. If I were a religious man I’d say that thing came straight from hell.’

  ‘You may not be far wrong. From what we know, the domain of the Shapers is more akin to the abyss than even the most fevered imaginings of the insane. Admiral, our scouts have returned.’

  ‘Alive and uninfected?’

  ‘A few, yes.’

  ‘How many, Irakun?’

  Mentith looked downcast. ‘Less than ten per cent. Some others made it back but it became clear that they were hosts for those creatures. We attempted to place several in stasis like our friend down there, but all self-terminated once they were restrained.’

  ‘I guess the K’Soth can beat us at something,’ Haines mused ruefully. ‘I wonder how they managed to catch that one?’

  ‘The survivors have brought us grave news indeed: the Shapers are moving much more quickly than we anticipated. The presence of their agents within the K’Soth Empire is evidence of that, and perhaps they have extended their reach elsewhere also. Our agents reported seeing massive levels of activity in hundreds of core systems. Ship construction programs on a scale even the Arkari yards can only dream about. It seems that the Shapers and their servant races have harnessed the power of the black hole at the centre of this galaxy to power their war effort. They are gearing up for a massive offensive. The ha
mmer blow may come soon.’

  ‘I’ll start putting together a defensive plan, for what good it will do us,’ said Haines. ‘Give me all the intelligence data you have, I’ll need to brief the Joint Chiefs and the President. I trust you have briefed SOC.’

  ‘I have, and the data is yours,’ Mentith replied. ‘However I would surmise, given the methods employed against the K’Soth, that the initial strike will come from within, rather than without. The K’Soth were easy for your forces to defeat because their Empire had already been eaten away from within. We must not let the same thing happen to us.’

  Haines nodded in agreement. ‘That had occurred to me too. The trouble is; who can we trust? Those things could have infected our own people, just like they did the K’Soth. Any plans we make will have to be kept from all but a few of our most trusted people. People we know intimately. I hasten to add that I will envisage strategies that involve fighting our own people under the sway of these things. I suggest you do the same.’

  ‘Of course. I plan to meet in person with a number of the other Meritarchs that I can trust, including my superior. Fleet Meritarch Beklide is most anxious to begin moving our people towards a war footing.’

  ‘We must move quietly, subtly. We cannot afford to let the Shapers see what we’re up to,’ said Haines.

  ‘Agreed. There is more however. Our scouts confirmed what we had long suspected, that the Shapers have at last found unity. Whether any of them can truly be considered individuals or whether each tendency merely represents a different hive mind we do not know, but we do know that for millennia they fought - their own greed and lust for power pitting them against one another, their numbers dwindling until they became reliant on subject races. These are the less advanced civilisations towards the galactic core that they brought under their thrall. Many of them worship the Shapers as gods, whilst the Shapers twist and pervert their subjects in turn. The Shapers view these enslaved peoples more as raw resources for their war machine, rather than as loyal subjects.

  Now, it seems, something or someone has united them. Whether through leadership, force, fear or subterfuge, it has caused the Shapers to act as one. Their gaze has turned outward, towards the systems of the spiral arms, zones teeming with resources both mineral and biological and innocent, pliant minds.’

  ‘Then we’d better make sure we’re ready for them, hadn’t we?’ Haines replied. ‘I’ve never lost a war yet and I don’t intend to change my habits. These subject races you spoke of may be less technologically advanced than their masters.’

  ‘Let us hope so, though they appear to be very numerous. What our scouts have witnessed made it clear that if the Shapers were to win, then the humans, Arkari and other races in this part of the galaxy would cease to exist in any true sense that we would recognise. The Shapers have acquired their name for a reason. They not only shape societies and peoples through their machinations, but they directly remodel life itself through biological tinkering and more brutal forms of augmentation and cybernetic integration. When I told you that some of our scouts survived, I neglected to point out that although a number had come back alive, many of them were in a state of near nervous collapse caused by what they witnessed.’

  Haines shook his head and grimaced.

  ‘One gave a ragged account of an entire world turned into a great charnel house, a production line where innocent victims were dissected alive, their limbs, organs, cells and very minds used in vile, twisted creations of flesh and metal. Another merely screamed himself hoarse when we asked him about his experiences. We attempted to neural scan him, but the memories we recovered were so incoherent that they were of little use. Whether he will ever recover we can only guess.’

  Haines’s face darkened. ‘Irakun I saw a few things during my career that keep me awake at night, things I never discuss with anyone… but if what you say is true.’

  ‘It is, unfortunately.’

  ‘Then I’d rather see humanity extinguished than become the tools of those creatures. I, for one, would not go down without a fight.’

  ‘And I am willing to fight at your side, my friend,’ said Mentith, laying a comradely hand upon Haines’s broad, epauletted shoulder. ‘We must plan for any attempt to destabilise our civilisations, through rebellion, plague, invasion or other means. Tell only those that you trust implicitly.’

  ‘I’m glad that you managed to get Admiral Chen up to speed. She would be my first choice for a leading role in frontline operations in the event of a crisis.’

  ‘She has gained quite a reputation since the war.’

  ‘A reputation she earned the hard way, let me tell you. Chen has guts as well as tactical skill. I had hoped that she would still be here when I arrived.’

  ‘Yes, unfortunately I was forced to dispatch her on a mission of some urgency. We may have inadvertently overlooked a lead in our efforts against the Shapers. Admiral Chen is hoping to rectify this error.’

  ‘I see, and where is she now?’

  ‘Allow me to explain. Chen and a number of other SOC commanders have been pursuing a policy of utilising freelancers for missions which do not directly involve nor require any knowledge of the threat we face. These freelancers were subject to extensive background checks and surveillance before being approached and have been employed in situations where the presence of military craft or personnel would pose a problem.’

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of this.’

  ‘Chen employed a man by the name of Caleb Isaacs, a former Navy bomber pilot with a somewhat chequered history, who apparently abandoned what seemed to be a promising military career to pursue the shady existence he now leads. He completed the mission assigned to him, which incidentally resulted in the acquisition of the subject you see in the lab. However when Chen asked him about his military career in conversation he became rather agitated and mentioned my people as being the only ones who knew the truth about what had happened to him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It turns out that approximately fifteen of your years ago, Isaacs was the only survivor rescued from a mysterious alien vessel by an Arkari destroyer, the Star Ascendant. His flight had been reported missing in Commonwealth frontier space by the carrier Saipan almost a day before, however he was found within Arkari space. He was returned to the Commonwealth, but despite receiving treatment for the post traumatic stress disorder he was evidently suffering from, he resigned his commission.’

  ‘Why was none of this picked up by Chen’s people before?

  ‘Because,’ said Mentith. ‘The file had recently been reclassified to a higher clearance level following the realisation that the ship in question was in fact a vessel belonging to the Shapers. At the time it was simply logged as ‘unknown alien craft’ by the crew of the Star Ascendant, but our recent intelligence gathering efforts have given us clues as to what some Shaper craft look like and the status of the file was changed. Isaacs simply slipped through the net I’m afraid and it seems that the Navy failed him, to some extent.’

  ‘My god… I’ll have our people go through the Navy’s records. We’ll see if anything in our archives matches this incident. If the Shapers sent one ship, they sure as hell could have sent more in the last fifteen years. This Isaacs guy, do we knows if he’s one of them?’

  ‘Apparently he is not. He was scanned when he came aboard the Churchill and registered as a negative. Isaacs himself seems quite loyal to the Commonwealth, despite his misgivings about the military.’

  ‘We need to track him down, get as much information from him as we can. Anything that he can tell us about the encounter would be of help.’

  ‘Chen has undertaken this task. She has the resources of the Churchill and her crew at her disposal. He should not be too hard to find, I hope.’

  ‘Perhaps he can tell us what the Shapers were up to.’

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid we already know that… his squad-mates were found dissected in the ship’s lab. Some of them were still alive, after a fashion, but the unfortunate individuals,
or what was left of them, died soon after in the Star Ascendant’s medical bay. It seems that the vessel was on an intelligence gathering mission. Doubtless they found out much about human physiology and biology from those poor individuals, and the file also says that he saw the occupants of the vessel attempting to implant parasitic creatures into the skulls of his comrades.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Haines grunted. ‘This could provide vital clues as to how they manage to spread their agents among us. They can be beaten in a straight fight?’

  ‘Yes. Although it seems that this particular ship was not built for combat, rather it appears to have been a scout of some kind. Even so it put up quite a fight and would have slipped away had the Star Ascendant not disrupted its attempt to utilise its own peculiar version of jump drive technology. The Shapers can move between dimensions rather more smoothly than we can. There was even some suggestion from the sensor record that they can exist in more than one dimension simultaneously, although how and why we have not yet managed to ascertain.’

  ‘It must give them an edge, allowing them to slip in and out of combat, lurking in one dimension with their sensors in another like a submarine poking its periscope above water.’

  ‘Yes. If I’m following the analogy correctly, that was our assessment also.’

  ‘Give me all the data you have. I’ll pass it on to people I can trust and we’ll begin running combat simulations. We have to be ready for these sons of bitches once they do decide to come knocking.’

  Mentith nodded slowly in agreement.

  ‘One other thing, Admiral. I have certain concerns about certain Navy operations currently underway in the Hadar system.’

  ‘Oh? I wasn’t aware of anything unusual happening down there other than a bit of local pirate trouble in the cluster.’

  ‘One of your colleagues, a man by the name of Admiral Cox, claims to have found a very ancient star-ship on the surface of one the system’s volcanic moons. There something about the whole thing that troubles me. Naturally I have sent my very best to investigate.’