And their ship was slowly being covered by the blue-scale vines.
“Come on!” Eliard shouted at his crew, running with them into the hangar and racing along the gantry that was quickly being taken over by the alien lifeform. Eliard raised the Device, but then realized that he couldn’t fire it, not at the Mercury—he might end up destroying his own ship!
No! He watched as the vines snaked their way up the landing legs, and started to explore the lower hull, seeking the ports and windows—
“What?” Eliard felt the Device change on his arm. Not just physically, but he could also feel it inside of his head somehow. His frustration sharpened as he realized they were about to be trapped, and it turned into a mental image of a blade.
Huh? When he shook his head, he could see that the Device had once again compacted down into its glistening, bone-shell state, but now it had grown over his hand and wrist, forming a curving blade that gleamed like obsidian, with a smaller, pointed backwards blade extending behind it.
The Device had adapted itself to my requirements, he thought as he leapt, sweeping his arm out in an arc that brought the alien blade into contact with the vine. The blade seemed to emit its own fizz of white energy as it sliced through the growth with ease.
“Ahah!” he shouted gleefully, turning to hack and slice at the rest of the material threatening to cover his precious ship.
This is what makes the Device so important, he realized. It’s like the blue-scale virus, but truly weaponized. Turned into a weapon that would adapt itself to whatever enemy you were facing…
And that was why Ponos thought that it might be able to kill Alpha.
With the engines and the cargo bay doors freed, Eliard hit his palm to the release mechanism to see the metal doors of the Mercury slide down. He helped Irie inside as Val bounded in behind them.
“Get us in the air!” he called to Irie, who was already flinging herself down the rear steps to the engine room as Val Pathok collapsed into one of the gunnery seats and slid down the targeting visor. He didn’t need to be told what to fire at, as he started blasting the under-slung cannons at the great drifts and approaching mountains of the blue-scale.
Eliard spared a brief look at the empty, interlinked gunner’s chair where Cassandra had so recently sat, before he clamped down on that misery. There’s no time to mourn. There’s no point grieving over something that you can’t do anything about, anyway.
He jumped up the small flight of metal stairs to the cockpit and started flicking the switches and pulling the levers that would get the Mercury into the air.
“Engine’s cycling. All systems go!” Irie’s voice came over the internal ship communicators, and Eliard nodded to the blackened hole that had been the bulkhead door. He half-expected to see her standing there for some reason, alive and her face full of determination, but she wasn’t. Cassandra Mila, the House Archival Agent and lately a crewmember of the Mercury Blade, was dead.
“Buckle up.” The station suddenly swayed and rocked once again, sending the Mercury sliding across its holding gantry with a screech and a squeal of sparks.
“Firing landing thrusters,” Eliard called as one hand held the wheel and the other flicked switches to one side. The Mercury Blade started to lift from the gantry, even as more of the blue-scale growth reached for it. “Firing directional boosters. I want full power ahead, and I want those doors opened, Val!” he shouted as the Blade wobbled into the air and swung out across the open space.
“Aye, aye, boss.” Val punched his wrists forward and back, and both of the meson rail canons underneath started firing in tandem, shooting globs of purple-white fire at the closed and blue-scale-matted doors.
“Engine cycling at sixty-two percent,” Irie called. That would be enough to outpace most everyday Armcore fighters, and even the raiders. His bird was fast, Eliard thought.
The bulkhead before them started to glow with the repeated explosions, and then, with a burst of escaping gases and flame, the external doors that had opened automatically exploded outward under Val Pathok’s barrage. The sudden loss of pressure shot the Mercury forward, at the same time Eliard fired the main thrusters.
The rockets roared from the back of the Mercury Blade, and the golden-red wedge-shaped vessel was flung out into space, burning through the void as it did so—to see just what had been attacking the station.
It was the Q’Lot.
13
The Q’Lot
The ship was unlike anything that Eliard had ever seen, even unlike the rumors and the stories that washed around the Trader’s Belt of what the Q’Lot must be like. After everything that he had already seen today, a part of the captain was surprised to discover that he was shocked.
The Q’Lot ship was more like an event, or a weather pattern—if deep space could have weather—in the way that it defied the mind and confused the eye.
It glowed, like a nebula, and it was bright, refracting and oscillating colors so that it was like staring into a prism. Behind it, or rather, inside of the glow was a suggestion of a shape. Eliard peered, wondering if what he was seeing was real, but yes, it was a shape, like a subtle change of the oscillating light, almost a shadow inside the nebulous brightness. It was strangely shaped—like a deep-sea starfish or some strange bracket-creature with many flaring points pointing in all directions. As the captain watched, he saw the points quiver, flowing toward and away from each other in gentle, undulating waves.
It’s alive. He was sure of it. He wasn’t looking at a ship, or a vessel, or even some kind of light phenomena, but a living creature—it had to be. How else could any ship move like that? Like the blue-scale had been alive inside the station.
And then the light pulsed, and a torpedo of light swept out from one of the strange, glowing tentacles and burst across the short void of space, hitting the research station. In response, the Armcore station rocked, but Eliard also saw the energy diffuse over the hull, flaring wide like thrown water, then vanishing as it seemed to be absorbed by the structure.
Eliard got the strangest sensation that he wasn’t watching an attack. Or rather, he wasn’t watching only an attack, but that these energy bolts were also doing something to the station itself.
There were no great big smoking burns, holes, or cracks from each energy blast, the captain saw in a moment, as the Mercury Blade continued to roar as far as it could away from the strange dance of mega-structures behind it: one alien, and one slowly becoming more alien as the blue-scale virus took it over from the inside.
“No, if the Q’Lot wanted to destroy the station, then surely they could do so in an instant,” the captain muttered. A civilization that advanced, capable of warp-jumping here into the middle of null space where no other civilization could, and capable of such strange and extreme modifications of biology itself…
Eliard became convinced that such an advanced civilization could destroy a mere unarmed station like they had been on if it wanted to. So, then the question becomes—what did they want to do with it? The direction of the Mercury Blade’s flight pulled it away and out of the glow of the Q’Lot ship and pointed it back toward the graveyard of ships, but the captain pulled up the rear viewing screens and sent their broadcast through the rest of the ship so that both of his crew members could see what was happening out there. The Q’Lot continued to ‘fire’ its energy beams at the research station, growing fainter and fainter behind them as they fled.
Neither of the crew said anything, each of them lost in their own thoughts as they stared at the strange occurrence. Eliard realized that he didn’t even have the words to describe what he was seeing. Was it an act of war or the gesture of an ally? He didn’t know.
“It is fitting,” Val murmured behind him.
“Huh? What did you say?” Eliard looked at him like he was mad. Did the Duergar know something about the ways of the Q’Lot that he didn’t? Probably, he thought.
“Whatever it is they just did, that is a fitting tribute to our comrade who fell
,” Val said seriously.
Cass. Eliard looked again at the fading spectacle. “We won’t be able to say that until we know what it was they did, Val,” he said as much to himself as to the Duergar.
14
The Negotiation
“This is a terrible idea,” Irie hissed to Val at her side.
It was a bright and scorching hot day on the planet that the captain had chosen for their landfall, and the mechanic felt uncomfortable and parched. The Duergar beside her however, with his blue-grey skin, had thrown aside his tunic and appeared to be loving the dry heat.
The planet of Shambar was a shambles, Irie thought miserably. It was little better than a rock, but somehow, it had managed to get for itself a breathable atmosphere to human-type normal. And that meant that if the Imperial Coalition could colonize it, they would.
Shambar was in Imperial Coalition space, but thanks to the esoterica of trans-galactic space lanes and the vagaries of dust clouds and nebulas, it was effectively an out of the way planetoid. There was nothing but way stations and deep-space satellites for light years in five out of a possible six directions, which meant Shambar was an expensive world to travel to and from. The only thing that saved it from complete obscurity, the mechanic thought, was that the world must have once had plenty of carbon-based vegetation before some catastrophic climate event had changed its temperature or it had been hit by an asteroid strong enough to tilt its axis, or similar. And plenty of ancient carbon-based vegetation meant that, underneath these sand dunes and desert planes, were vast stores of oil. In itself, it was an outdated fuel, but money could still be made from it, and polymers and plastics could still be synthesized from the black stuff.
And so here we are, the mechanic thought as she looked at the giant walking towers that looked like long-legged giraffes whose long necks were actually drilling pipes that they would brace against when they sensed another easy-to access well. These walking oil platforms spent their lives robotically roaming over the surface of Shambar, filling up their leg containers, returning to the spaceport when they were done.
All of this made Shambar a great place to conduct an out-of-the way business meeting, Irie had to admit as she stared at the image of their captain striding ahead of them through the sand, his ragged grey and brown shawl covering him from the worst of the dust-laden wind. And covering the humped shape that had taken over his arm, she thought with a shudder.
Up ahead, she saw that they were approaching their destination: one of the many flattened platforms of natural rock that existed here and there across Shambar, which had been turned into very basic navigational arrays. A trio of antenna and metal dishes sprouted from the rock and stood a few hundred feet tall, casting long shadows on the desert around them.
Someone had even gone to the trouble of carving stairs into the rocky platform. They trudged slowly and surely up, with Irie feeling more and more tired with every step. The captain had made sure that they had made planetfall a long way behind them, so that no Armcore operatives would see them coming ahead of time.
“You ready?” Eliard waited at the top as the two remaining crew members completed their ascent. He had changed since the Q’Lot, Irie thought. It had taken them almost ten days to get back here, and three of those days had been trying to get back to regular Imperial Coalition territory. The raiders hadn’t bothered them again, but Irie had still felt threatened along every hour of that journey.
It’s like he has lost all hope, she thought, looking at him as she sat down heavily on the edge of the rock. She took out a pouch of water and had a sip before she started unpacking her energy rifle. Gone were the rakish smiles, or the small jokes, or the teasing. Instead, Eliard had just been cold and determined—a lot like Cass had been, strangely. He wouldn’t talk about the agent, even when Val tried to offer a drinking toast to their fallen comrade on one of their automated flying cycles.
No, Eliard wouldn’t grieve, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge that they had lost anything or anyone of value. If anything, Irie frowned as she darkened the auto-shade on her visor to much more acceptable levels of gloom, it was almost as if Eliard was reveling in the fact that they could make a lot of money out of this mission.
It’s like he’s trying to be this super-pirate, Irie thought. Super cold. Super mercenary. Super calculating and ruthless. That wasn’t the Captain Eliard Martin she knew. In fact, one of the few things that she had always liked about him—apart from the fact that he was one of the best fliers that she had ever seen—was that there had always been a streak of…if not sensitivity, then at least naivete about the man. He may have stolen cargo from innocent merchants, he may have held entire barges to ransom until they gave up the codes to their secure boxes, but he was never a cruel pirate, as far as she knew, anyway.
Eliard had overwhelmingly enjoyed what he had done, too, and now it seemed that he didn’t. Every time that they had received one of the mandatory ship’s checks that you got every few days in Imperial Coalition space, he would react with venomous hatred, whereas before, he had always been delighted at another chance to try and lie, scheme, and coax his way out of a tight situation. And the things he said about both House Archival and the Coalition… Irie sucked her teeth in shock, or near-shock.
‘It would serve them all right if Alpha comes along and enslaves them all!’
‘Don’t worry, the Q’Lot is going to turn them all into blue-scale compost food one of these days.’
He had taken on a cruel and venomous air, and one which Irie was sure would make her leave the Mercury if she had to listen to it for much longer.
And then there was this plan, she thought, seeing Val take the opposite position from her on the stone platform, and level the Judge out across the sands. It was a ridiculous plan. One that could not only get them all killed, but was an insult to the memory of their friend Cassandra. Maybe that was why the captain was so intent on pursuing it. The mechanic kicked a bit of grit from the side of the edge, to watch it go spiraling down and down the many meters and poof in the golden sands below.
But Val, of course, would not see her reasoning, Irie thought as she checked down her sites at the steps, at the near desert. Nothing except for some weird winged lizard things. What do they even eat out here? Val Pathok had seen this plan as a great return of the captain’s courage, because he was a Duergar and thought that fighting was pretty much the pinnacle of any mortal existence. What an idiot, she grumbled. But then again, who is the bigger idiot—the Duergar that was brought up to solve things with his claws, or the human mechanic who knows that this is a crappy idea but still goes along with it?
“We’re ready. Prepare yourselves,” the captain said, walking up to the bottom metal legs of the antenna above.
“Prepare ourselves for what?” Irie called out. “We don’t know how they’re going to react.”
“Then prepare yourselves for anything. Or are you scared of a challenge, Irie Hanson?” Eliard snipped over his shoulder as he reached the emergency interface, unlocked it, and started hitting buttons and reattaching wires on the control board displayed inside.
Wonderful. I didn’t even get to see Babe Ruth fight again. Irie thought of the tournament mecha she still had safely in the hold of the Mercury Blade. That would have been nice, she conceded, as the words of the captain behind her floated back to her ears.
“Initiating server contact…”
Irie heard a hiss of static, vying with the wail of the wind, before a repetitive beeping that Irie knew was the signal that these sorts of transmitters gave for contacting their host satellites.
“Gentlemen, robots…” The captain must have made some sort of contact, since his voice took on a pleased, self-confident tone as he performed for the small camera inside the transmitter.
“You both know who I am. Captain Eliard Martin, of the Mercury Blade. This is a message for the being known as Ponos, Armcore Prime, and if you are unaware, I have also patched in my contacts in House Archival to this call, so play
nice.
“As you are both aware,” he continued, “you are both under the impression that I and my crew are working for you. This would be an incorrect impression, as the Captain Eliard Martin only ever works for himself. The Mercury Blade flies free, or it doesn’t fly at all.” A dramatic pause, and Irie really wished that the captain hadn’t have given that ultimatum. Ridiculous idea. It will get us all killed, she grumbled.
“Both of you have employed my services to seek information about the artificial intelligence known as Alpha, and a means to stop it. I have that means now.” He pulled aside his ragged cloak to reveal his arm, encased in the large, scaled form of the Device.
“I know that it might not look like much, but I’ve been practicing…” Irie saw the captain turn and fling out his gun-hand toward the desert. There was a bright flash and a boom that almost sent Irie over the edge of the rocky platform and sent gales of dust into the air.
“Crudding hell!” Irie coughed, thumping her chest and waiting for the dust to settle before seeing that an entire dune before them had been blown into a blackened and smoking crater, with slagged rocks.
“Impressive, huh? And I think that isn’t even at full power!” Eliard turned back to the camera, before leaning in to wipe away a bit of the dust and grime from the lens.
“Now, as I was saying. I have the Device. So, by every law that matters, that means that I am the person that you should be trying to keep happy, and just what, I hear you ask, would make me happy?” Eliard struck a pose, scratching at his own chin. “I think I will leave the particulars up to both of you, but needless to say that I have already been offered one million Imperial Coalition credits, and so the next offer will have to be substantially higher—especially when we consider the second set of items that I am offering up for auction…” At that point, he knelt down to the small space just under the transmitter and out of sight of the camera, instead bringing into the light the small tray of the Q’Lot serum that Armcore had been synthesizing into Blue, Red, and Green variants
Alien Evolution (Valyien Book 3) Page 8
