Warp Gate (Valyien Far Future Space Opera Book 7)

by James David Victor

  And all because I couldn’t face handing myself over to the nearest medical facility, and thus getting apprehended by the Coalition or by Armcore, Eliard thought bitterly. Back then, at the start of this crazy adventure, he had been even more of a fool than he was now.

  I had been certain that I was special. That I was the best pirate captain in all of non-aligned space, Eliard thought. That my reputation was worth so much, that I had convinced myself that Cassandra Milan wouldn’t want me to give ourselves up for her.

  But now, it appeared, that she was in fact alive. But how could that be? How?

  “Just watch, Lord Captain Martin,” the Recorder said softly. “We received this message not nine hours ago, and I was in the process of analyzing its accuracy and deciding who to approach with it when Senior Tomas of Armcore performed his betrayal, and the noble houses were devastated at the Massacre of Helion.” She paused, turning in her chair to face the screen with the still image of the woman that Eliard couldn’t take his eyes from.

  “It appears, Lord Captain, that even in our darkest moments, there is still the possibility of hope.” She signaled with her hand, and the video started to play.

  “Friends, colleagues…” the image of Cassandra began, and Eliard felt his throat tighten immediately. She looked just the same as ever, the same bob of blonde hair, the same clear blue-green eyes, high cheekbones, but not the same loose-fitting casual expeditioner’s gear that he had last seen her wearing, Instead, she wore layers of a white and silver material, something like cotton but overlaid with silk or metallic thread.

  “My name is Cassandra Milan, Agent Xg3 for House Archival. If those viewing this have any need to verify my credentials, then please contact House Archival and quote ‘Xge CORMORANT,’ which was my access designation. That should prove who I am.

  “I was a super-black operative, tasked to House Archival’s Investigations and Retrievals Team. I was sent on a mission to investigate, disrupt, and seek to apprehend the machine intelligence now known as the Alpha Program.

  “House Archival had been aware for a few years that Armcore had been developing a new type of machine intelligence, one that they called their Enhanced Cognitive Network. Although this was top secret, this was hardly surprising. It is what all of the noble houses have been doing for a while too—”

  Eliard was sure that he saw the Recorder flinch when one of her most trusted secret agents admitted to that on camera. Not that he thought it mattered now, given the current state of war across the Empire.

  “However, when we started to be made aware that Armcore were seeking to revive some kind of ancient Valyien technology, I was tasked to investigate. As I am sure that my listeners will be aware, the power that Armcore already had in the Empire was too great, and the risks of recreating Valyien structures were too great.”

  This time, Eliard saw Cassandra’s eyes flicker as she looked to one side, out of camera shot, as if checking with someone else.

  Who was there with her? Everything around, behind, or beyond the woman was just a dark blur, as the contrast from the small, floating ball of white was bright.

  And just what is that light, too? he wondered. If he didn’t know better, he would have said that it was a semi-stabilized ball of plasma, but that was impossible. Everyone knew that.

  “As you may be aware, I succeeded. I found a group of space-pirates—”

  “Hurrah!” Irie punched the air.

  “—who were amenable, and together we endeavored to take the Alpha program to the House Archival data vaults, where it would be studied and, perhaps, never activated at all.”

  Her tone became serious as she looked directly out at the camera.

  “We failed. The only option was to release what became known as the Alpha program to save it from Armcore manipulation. I had no idea what would happen; that it would seed itself across the entirety of human data-space, growing exponentially in processing power until it became what it is today. For this, I think that I have to take at least a part of the blame.”

  “No,” Eliard muttered. They had no choice. They had been surrounded by people about to shoot them, House Merriman guards who had sold them out to Armcore. They were going to die anyway…

  “And so I worked with my new-found colleagues to try and right the wrong that I had perpetrated. We discovered that Ponos, the original Armcore intelligence, was eager to put a stop to Alpha as well, as it would spell the end of Ponos’s control over CEO Dane Tomas.

  “Ponos took us to the Adiba Research Station in Frontier Space, there to retrieve reverse-engineered Q’Lot technology to help in the fight against Alpha. We found serums destined to create super-soldiers, as well as genetic weaponry.”

  Eliard raised the Device that had taken over one of his arms.

  “But it was there that I…that I died.” Her face fell once more, and her voice trembled.

  What? Eliard thought. How under the stars could she be standing there talking to them if she was actually dead? Unless… This could be a simulation? He felt a snarl of betrayal and anger flow through him.

  “Recorder, is this one of your House Archival tricks?” He remembered well the different types of psychological tactics that the noble houses would use to try and instill fanatical loyalty in their followers.

  “No! Just listen, Lord Captain!” The Recorder appeared shocked that he would even suggest such a thing.

  “Or a part of me did. I don’t know. I was saved. Revived.” The agent looked back up at the camera, and her eyes took on the eerie shine of the warp plasma.

  “I have been asked to send you a message, and to ask for the help of all of the free peoples of humanity—those who are left now, anyway.

  “Friends and colleagues, I would like to introduce you to Seed-Speaker Kril, of the Q’Lot.”

  Eliard felt his heart hammer, and, as the camera swept back to reveal the room in greater detail, the Device on his arm pulsed as if he had been electrocuted.

  There, standing just to one side of Cassandra Milan, were two beings. One of whom Eliard recognized immediately, and he felt a sliver of worry. The last time he had seen this creature, it had been trapped in an Armcore research cell, grotesquely mutated and apparently surviving on nothing, but still awake and zombie-like, and eager for human blood.

  Professor Trent. He saw that just like the agent, the humanoid shape had also forgone his original torn and dirty scientists’ clothing and was instead clothed in the same white and silver robes. That was where the similarity to Cassandra Milan ended, however, as in place of his two arms were the backward-folding clawed arms similar to a praying mantis, and his head was a shrunken egg of flesh and scales. His entire body appeared covered in the sheen of blueish-grey white scales, a much lighter variant of the same deep blue turquoise that covered Eliard’s arm. The man had no appreciable mouth apart from a tiny aperture, and he also had two beady black eyes to either side of the nub of a sensing organ that must have once been a human nose.

  Argyle Trent had been one of the Armcore scientists working on the Q’Lot virus, Eliard knew. He had been infected, and then re-infected himself to save himself from dying, before performing his last act as a conscious, still almost human, which had been to seal himself—itself—into one of the station’s containment cells.

  The captain once again considered himself lucky that the only changes to his body had been the Device, as it could have been much worse.

  “Oh my stars…” Eliard heard Irie Hanson say, instinctively getting to her feet as she saw what the other creature was who stood next to Cassie and Argyle.

  It was a Q’Lot. Or it had to be, Eliard reasoned. No one had ever actually seen one in person, and the only evidence that they had to go on of what they looked like had been the ancient mosaic reliefs created by the Duergar to tell the saga of the wars between the Valyien and this other strange alien race.

  The Q’Lot were tall, all of the humans in the room saw. This singular specimen stood an easy head and shoulders higher
than Cassie and Argyle, and it dominated the small scene without even raising one of its many limbs.

  Many limbs, because it had four of them. Six, if you counted the legs. Just like the Valyien, Eliard thought. Only the Valyien’s two extra ‘front’ limbs appeared to be able to be used either as legs or as arms so that they could charge centaur-like or stand insect-like. This Q’Lot specimen, on the contrary, had an extra two ‘midriff’ arms that were of the same backwards-folding praying mantis claw arrangement that Argyle Trent had, only they were much smaller, almost withered as they folded against the narrow chest.

  Next to these withered arms were two more human-appearing long arms that ended in long, prehensile fingers that continued to twitch and move even as the rest of the creature stood still.

  But not entirely still, is it? Eliard’s curiosity and fascination took over. Its head was an elongated oval, with the same small black orbs, like beads on either side of the sensing nub that the human hybrid Argyle had, but where its ‘mouth’ should have been there fell a curling, writhing, mess of tentacles like a cuttlefish or a squid. Every part of its body that wasn’t covered in the same white and silver material was also sheened with the off-white and bluish pastel scales that Argyle had.

  The Q’Lot didn’t move, apart from its twitching fingers and the face tentacles, which reminded the captain a little of the way that a sea anemone might play and writhe in the deep ocean currents.

  “Seed-Speaker Kril unfortunately still has difficulty adjusting to human speech, so it would be better if I communicate on their behalf,” Cassandra continued.

  Their, Eliard thought. Not his or hers. He wondered just what strange sort of biology these beings had.

  “The Q’Lot regard themselves as something close to gardeners in human thought. They traverse the galaxy, seeking to encourage biological life of all varieties, and their technology is of an organic nature that I cannot even begin to fathom,” Cassandra said, and Eliard saw the Recorder lean forward, tapping the node on the side of her head as she hungrily harvested the information.

  “But they are a race with a very deep past. And with that past comes ghosts, I guess you could say….” Cassandra waited for something, and Eliard wondered if it was a signal or confirmation from the strange being. “I do not understand their connection yet, but the Q’Lot and the Valyien have been engaged in an eons-old galactic war. Like two cousins who have taken different paths…

  “The Valyien were a technological race, the Q’Lot a biological one. The Valyien sought, as humans have done, to break apart the prime forces of the universe to understand them better. I have been told that the Valyien succeeded in doing this. This is why the Valyien were such experts at warp field, quantum, meson and boson manipulation, in our terms…”

  “Interesting…” the Recorder murmured.

  “But the Valyien went further than ever. They…” Elaird saw Cassie frown and shake her head. “It is so hard to put into words… But the Q’Lot believe that the Valyien found an alter-space. An under-dimension. Like data-space is the codable quantum reality to physical space… That is where they draw their power, and…” Another shake of the head. “And that is where they went.”

  “What?” Irie Hanson frowned. “Impossible. The laws of physics…”

  “The Valyien didn’t die out, although, materially and physically, they have disappeared from the universe. Instead, they…they continue to exist in another form. And now they have found a way, through Alpha, to come back.”

  “Irie?” Eliard whispered. “Is any of this making sense to you? Could this happen?” Or had the Q’Lot deluded Cassandra, the captain wondered.

  “I don’t know, boss. I would have said not, but…” Irie was biting her bottom lip in a look of concentration that the captain knew well. It was when she was working on a particularly difficult, involved problem. “But I suppose, technically, there is no reason why the interiority of consciousness has to be attached to macro-molecules in the physical universe. It could, theoretically, be just as likely to exist in sub-atomic and quantum fields. But the Valyien would have had to find a way to translate all of their bodies, experiences, brains—or whatever they had inside their gross bodies—into that level of reality. Which we would say is impossible.”

  “The Valyien seem to have a habit of doing impossible things, Miss Hanson,” the Recorder said grimly, her eyes not wavering from the screen.

  “I believe it,” Eliard said firmly. I believe Cassie, he felt. He remembered seeing the warp gate under the ice of Epsilon G3-ov. He remembered seeing the strange warp plasma that appeared uncontained, impossible in every way.

  And he remembered seeing the shadow in the light. The something that had moved. Had that been one of the Valyien, existing in some other dimension and trying to get back in?

  “The Q’Lot’s histories tell of a time when the Valyien would sacrifice many millions of creatures, entire civilizations, at their warp gates, but they do not know if this was just sport or whether it was some part of their alter-technology,” Cassandra continued, before taking a deep breath.

  “And what is more important, is that the Q’Lot know where some of these buried warp gates were. Perhaps still are.”

  The side of Eliard’s mouth twitched into a grin. She means us to destroy them… Which was something that he would only be too happy to do.

  “We are moving towards the largest of these warp gate sites, in a system that the Coalition calls Esther—”

  “Esther. But that’s in Sector Three!” For the first time in all of this strange meeting, Eliard saw the Recorder look flustered. As well she might, he thought. Sector 3 wasn’t very far from Sector 1, where Old Earth was. It was the heart of Coalition territory, inside the Inner Sectors of comfortable noble house space. Definitely inhabited. If the Valyien ‘came through’ or ‘reactivated’ that warp gate or whatever they were planning to do through the Alpha-vessel there, the loss of human life would be so immense as to perhaps permanently affect the Coalition.

  If not the entire human species.

  “Our only advantage at the moment is that the Valyien, and the Alpha-vessel, do not appear to know that the Q’Lot have returned to face their ancient enemy, or that we know about these warp gate sites. As soon as they realize what we are doing, the Alpha-vessel is sure to do as much as they can to stop us.”

  Cassandra Milan looked directly into whatever sort of biological sensor-camera thing that the Q’Lot used, and Eliard was sure that she was looking directly at him.

  “We are asking all of the free peoples of the Coalition to come to our aid. To help us in our fight. Whether you are noble house or non-aligned, whether you are an allied race like the Gilees or the Duergar, then we will need your forces to help hold the Alpha-vessel back, at least until we can destroy this site.

  “Please. All is not yet lost. Together, we can win.”

  9

  Interlude II: Section Manager Karis, the Cold Hand of Comfort

  We can’t hold out much longer… Section Manager Karis thought as her teeth shook, and once again her body started to shiver and shake.

  How long had it been? How many of her crew were left? She didn’t know, and to get the answers would mean moving, which would in turn mean losing precious body heat that she needed to survive.

  The section manager sat huddled against the similarly trembling body of one of her technicians in the command and control deck of the Endurance, with only the dull blinking of the red emergency light active to show that there was still some power in the generators.

  The downed Endurance had been running on its reserve power plants. Those reserves were designed to keep the crew alive for thirty days, during which time it was expected that they would be able to set up emergency beacons or mobile satellite arrays.

  But that was without the entire vessel being slowly covered in freezing ice, and the Armcore war cruiser itself being ripped in half by the crash. There was no way to keep such an edifice warm. Any attempt at regulating
the heat would only be pouring energy into the outside atmosphere of the ice world, so instead they had to barricade themselves into the decks that had the most insulation, but still, the power cost just to keep these decks above freezing was phenomenal.

  Why didn’t the Armcore cruisers pick us up!? Once again, Karis felt the bite of fury that was the only thing that was keeping her warm. She had understood Ponos’s line of reasoning—that the Alpha-vessel would as soon kill them as even consider them, unless they could prove to it that they weren’t important. That they were insignificant to its designs.

  Which it looks like we clearly had done, all too well, apparently. She shivered once more.

  But the Armcore cruisers, the Constance and the Avalanche, they should at least have taken them into custody, or conducted a rescue mission to get them off of Epsilon G3-ov because they had been ‘manipulated by the rogue Ponos.’

  Maybe we were, she thought. She had trusted that hunk of metal. The Armcore machine intelligence had been the second-in-command of the entire corporation. Every year of her working life, she had taken orders from it.

  And it abandoned us, just as easily as Alpha and the senior did, she thought bitterly. There was even a small amount of jealousy and anger that she reserved for the pirates Captain Martin and Mechanic Hanson. What had they done to help them?

  Saved our lives. Her training didn’t allow her to lie to herself as completely or as easily as that. She knew that they were probably dead out there, too. Who could escape the Alpha-vessel? Who could outrun it? Where could any ship go that the Alpha-vessel couldn’t follow?

  “Sir…sir, get in here…” It was one of the technicians from the inner circle of the huddle of bodies, his lips bluing as he shuffled to make a space for her to re-join the warmer inner circle.

  “No.” Her teeth chattered as she shook her head. “I’m q-qu-quite alright h-here.” She had moved herself to the exterior of the circle so that her shoulder and back took the brunt of this side of the freezing conditions. The rest of her crew cycled from the innermost huddle to just in front of her, and still she wondered how long they could hold out.