Warp Gate (Valyien Far Future Space Opera Book 7)

by James David Victor

  The technician was too exhausted and frozen to argue, but his reproachful look said it all.

  Okay, that’s enough of that, she thought. She hadn’t asked for volunteers to stay up here on the command and control deck, but a group of about twelve had done so all the same, claiming that she would freeze up here all alone.

  They were probably right, she knew. Some of the interior hull seals must have been broken in the crash, letting the freezing cold temperatures in from the smashed and compacted outer hull, because there was a rim of frost that was on everything that she could see.

  But I can’t wait and watch everyone dying around me, she thought. She had to send the technicians down to the mess hall where the rest of the freezing Endurance crew were holed up.

  “Link up,” she muttered, her voice too weak for it to be a command. Twelve owlish faces looked at her with worry.

  “Y-y-you’re heading down. Through the access corridor to the mess hall. If y-y-you take the service elevator, you’ll be better insulated,” she said, knowing that the elevators had stopped a long time ago, but that her crew could still use the ladders. As the lift shafts were almost in the direct center of the neck of the Endurance, they’d be warmer than they were now.

  “No,” one by one they said. “Not without you.”

  “S-someone has to man the comms,” she insisted. “Link up. That’s an order!” She managed to pour enough regret and frustration into her voice to make them think twice about disobeying her, as they started to shuffle their arms into the crook of each other’s elbows. Grunts of surprise and pain as they tried to stand, cracking the frost and ice that had formed on their legs.

  THUM-THUM-THUM.

  Before anyone had a chance to actually move, there was a noise like a dull banging. A whirr.

  Is that the warp field finally going off? Were they about to get hit by a shockwave that would probably flip the Endurance on its side? If they were fit and healthy and had eaten, they might be able to survive that, but in their current state?

  “There!” It was a voice, she swore that she could hear a voice.

  “Quickly, dammit! We haven’t got long before the field collapses!”

  Something funny was happening to the light in the room, and for a moment, Section Manager Karis didn’t know whether it was her eyes freezing or something else.

  It was something else. Her technicians gasped and murmured as a circle of molten red light was drawn over the near bulkhead door, and their bodies were so sensitive that they could feel the heat from the hissing, molten metal.

  Someone is using a laser-cutter to get in here. Karis felt sick with glee. But who was it? Was it the Captain Martin, returned with rescuers? Or the Armcore war cruisers?

  It wasn’t either of them, she saw as the wide circle of metal fell out into the room with a heavy clang, its sides hissing as it still burned red.

  “Hello?” Karis managed to croak. “This is Section Manager Karis of the Intelligence Division war cruiser the Endurance…” Her decades of training kicked in. “We are non-combatants. We request immediate amnesty…”

  “Damn right you’re non-combatants, at least in the state you’re in,” growled a voice as a thin man hopped, then hobbled into the room as if he were already injured. Karis saw the man lean against one of the tables for support as he raised his head. His had long white hair in a warrior’s braid, disheveled and unkempt, and a personalized heavy tactical encounter suit that already looked as though it was about to fall off his body. Sections of the poly-plate were cracked, dented, and crushed, and dried blood was clearly visible on the man’s aging face.

  He’s old, she thought in alarm. Very old.

  And behind him were lumbering shapes climbing through the hole that they had cut, barely big enough to fit them through.

  Duergar, in their full battle-plate that made them look like trolls, or half-giants. The Duergar were a race with slab-like shoulders, no appreciable necks, and heavy, shovel-like heads encrusted with fangs and scales. They were the fierce, warlike, and once genetically-uplifted slaves of the Valyien.

  “This her?” the old man muttered, nodding towards Karis.

  It was then that the largest of the Duergar activated the release mechanism for his full mask, and Karis realized that she knew him.

  “Val,” her weak voice said with relief. It was the biggest damn Duergar that she had ever seen, and the one that Ponos had sent to its homeworld of Dur to create an uprising among his peoples against the Alpha-vessel.

  It looks like he’s done just that.

  “Where is the boss?” Val Pathok grunted, his eyes unreadable as they swept over her.

  “It’s a long story…” Karis tottered to her feet. “But are we glad to see you!”

  “We haven’t got time for even short stories!” snapped the old human warrior. “We got here as fast as we could, but the warp field is going to ignite any hour now. My name is Lord Vincentius Aster, and the noble War Chief of Dur was good enough to pick me out of the wreckage of my own ship. We’re getting you and your crew out of here, and then you can tell me all about why the war chief here thinks that there’s some pirate captain running around with the key to killing Alpha on his arm!?”

  Karis shivered where she stood. “Just get my crew off this damn planet, and I’ll tell you everything you want you know.”

  10

  Bad Ideas

  Despite Eliard’s sense of urgency, it still took the best part of another twenty-four hours before the Recorder was happy to release them and the Mercury Blade to go to Esther.

  “Our available forces are a fraction of Armcore’s,” she explained as they walked through one of the many long halls towards the outfitting and maintenance docks. “And as soon as we make a move, Alpha will know.”

  “Data-space,” Eliard agreed. Alpha had, presumably, almost total access to the realm of quantum information that the Imperial Coalition used.

  “Yes, which is why we have been forced to take drastic measures…” she sighed as the metal bulkhead doors hissed open to reveal some sort of technical laboratory.

  Eliard had never spent any time here at Old Earth. He distantly remembered some visit when he had been very young, his father taking his family on some rare ceremonial visit along with half a dozen of the other major houses of Inner Space. He didn’t recall what it had been about, only that his father had been surrounded by fawning courtiers and trade-ambassadors.

  As it was, he was surprised to see how developed and advanced the OEC platforms were. I thought this place was a relic, he thought, when in fact, it appeared complicated and sophisticated with the latest meson fields in place over restricted areas or acting as containment fields between the station and the void. The only sign that he was on a collection of orbital platforms came from the strange, almost haphazard and gridded nature of the rooms. Many of the halls were either octagons or wedges of pyramids, which he presumed made sense in some floating architectural way. There were lots of access walkways though, linking the various modular units together, and every few moments, he, Irie, and the Recorder would sweep through a bulkhead door to be traversing a short crystal-glass tunnel, outside of whose clear walls they could see the vast structure of the platform that almost entirely eclipsed their mother planet.

  A mother planet that is dying, or dead, he couldn’t help but think. Almost in spite of himself, his gaze would sweep out during those traverses to the orb of Old Earth far below, to see that it still had its covering of atmospheric clouds, but that they had gone from a milky white to a cement tan ochre. They swirled and gusted unpredictably.

  The Recorder saw him looking. “A reminder of who we are and who we were, Lord Captain Martin,” she murmured. “We must never let any of our worlds become what we did to Old Earth again,” she said.

  It was an ominous sort of pronouncement, the pirate captain thought, particularly considering what was at stake.

  “Lord Captain,” greeted a new voice from the technical laboratory
that they had just walked into. It was a voice that both Eliard and Irie recognized, as it belonged to none other than Ponos, the rogue house intelligence that had once been second-in-charge of Armcore.

  “I see you wasted no time,” Eliard muttered as he saw that Ponos was, slightly strangely, sitting down on a throne-like device in the center of the laboratory, and entwining between the chair and the mecha was a mess of wires and cabling. Beyond the chair hurried other Coalition technicians, back and forth to stands and screens, making minute and hurried gestures in the three-dimensional controls.

  “I am not, as you may be wondering, incarcerated, Lord Captain,” Ponos said, and its voice sounded strangely pleasant. Satisfied, even.

  “What have you done to it?” Eliard said, taking a step forward.

  “I’m sure that Ponos himself can tell you,” the Recorder said with a small smile that reminded Eliard of a cat for some reason.

  “You were there when the OEC overloaded my system, of course…” Ponos stated, quite benignly.

  “They tasered the crap out of you, if that is what you mean,” Eliard said. As alarming as this change in Ponos’s demeanor was, the pirate would have been lying if he said that he hadn’t received at least a little satisfaction from seeing the Machiavellian creature under the thumb of humans.

  “Yes. Quite,” Ponos stated. “My logic circuits indicate that was an entirely unnecessary maneuver, but an understandable one, given the situation. When I was rebooted, the OEC technicians saw fit to perform some programmatic changes to my framework, removing some of the Armcore protocols.”

  “So, is he a regular house intelligence now?” Irie wondered aloud as she stepped closer to inspect him. She might not have been an expert at quantum computing, but she knew more than most technicians did, and she was an expert at mecha systems.

  “I am, indeed, as you say ‘regular’,” Ponos stated, and his apparent equanimity made Eliard’s skin crawl. As much as he hated the machine intelligences which seemed convinced that they were the next leap in evolution—and Alpha was attempting to take over the galaxy, he couldn’t forget—it still did feel a little odd to see a consciousness, machine-based or not, so radically different.

  “My protocols have been updated to OEC standards, meaning that I no longer have the Armcore loyalty directives that I once had.”

  “Are these the drastic measures you mentioned?” Eliard murmured to the Recorder, who hesitated for a fraction before nodding.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Is she lying? Is there something else she’s decided to do? The captain was usually good at detecting a lie at a hundred paces. He studied her face carefully as she carried on.

  “Ponos has been helping us plan our mission to Esther, as well as defend all of the OEC stations left.”

  “Left?” the pirate captain asked nervously.

  “Ah…” The Recorder frowned. “If you will, Ponos?”

  “With pleasure, ma’am.” Ponos’s singular red eye flashed, and on the suite of screens nearest to them appeared an overlay of images, each one more dreadful than the next.

  Get to escape pods!

  No time!

  Eliard watched as a recorded drone image—some sort of space station security cam, he reckoned—showed red emergency lights flashing in white corridors and warning klaxons going off. And people, fleeing for their lives.

  “What’s happening?” he asked, just as the screen shook, hazed white, and clicked to black.

  The scene replayed, but the next screen showed the outside of a space station—one of the early lozenge-shaped ones without crystal-glass domes or habitats, and instead lots of loading ports. In the distance was a watery blue planet like a tear that hung in the eye of space. Eliard thought he recognized it.

  “Is that New Eden?” He earned a nod from the Recorder beside him. It was a hopelessly optimistically-named space station, one of the very earliest in near-space that had been long since superseded by other, more sophisticated habitats and biomes, not to mention the ever-increasing capacity for warp technology to jump further and further distances.

  “It was,” she said, as there was a flare of purple, blue, and red from between the planet and the outdated station as the Alpha-vessel manifested into existence. Eliard saw lights flicker on across the surface of New Eden—the flashing warning of proximity lights as he was sure that the Coalition staff inside the station were hurriedly hitting their communicators and scrambling their pilots.

  But it was all too slow compared to the ferocious computing power of the Alpha. The four-pointed snout shot lines of white fire at New Eden, puncturing it like a knife sliding into cake. In response, New Eden convulsed and, very slowly, started to turn on its axis.

  “Dear stars!” Irie swore beside him as they saw the internal gases plume out into the void, and then the sudden, unavoidable flashes of light as weakened modules and buttresses collapsed in on each other. The revolutions of New Eden continued, picking up speed as the internal and external pressures fought against each other. But the void always wins. Space is everywhere, and unavoidable.

  They watched as New Eden suddenly twisted violently, as if giant invisible hands had taken it and wrenched its component parts. Some vital piece of internal structure had given way, and now the collapse was inevitable. More plumes of light, explosions, and gases as some parts of New Eden imploded and others exploded, scattering debris and the few escape pods that had managed to get out in time.

  “How could it…” Eliard turned to look at where the Alpha-vessel had been, just to see the fading glow of warp plasma. It hadn’t even stayed to witness the fruits of its own crimes.

  On the other screens, the same story was played out at seemingly random platforms, orbitals, and stations throughout the Inner Sectors of Imperial Coalition space. Eliard watched in horror as one after another, each station was attacked by the Alpha-vessel, and the vessel didn’t even appear to wait to see its destruction, or use its full capacity, he realized. Eliard had seen the Alpha-vessel combating a horde of attack craft and orbital defense lasers. Some of these stations were technically smaller than it was, and easily far less advanced. If it wanted to, it could destroy them in seconds… But it never did. It just fired its high-powered laser pulses, which punctured each station and caused it to suffer irrevocable collapse. Slowly.

  “It’s torturing us,” Eliard said with disgust.

  “Precisely, Lord Captain,” Ponos stated. “And you will notice that not once has the Alpha-vessel attacked any of the home worlds, nor the habitat-bubbles.”

  Eliard nodded. The home worlds of the Imperial Coalition he might be able to understand. The Alpha-vessel wasn’t the size of a planet, after all. It had managed to eradicate the world of Haversham primarily because it had set off multiple thermonuclear detonations in the upper atmosphere, creating a chain reaction that had stripped Haversham of a breathable environment. But to attack an entire planet would be insane.

  Why not any of the habitats though? The habitats were a comparatively newer development in Imperial Coalition technology, though still a few hundred years old, but had grown in popularity thanks to their elegance and the ease of transport that they provided. A habitat was still technically a space station, but one who was almost entirely encapsulated in a crystal-glass or even meson-field membrane, with its own sub-orbital drone lights, allowing grass, trees, even meadows, marshes, and forests to be grown inside its carefully managed ecosystems. The advantages of habitats were that they did not even have a fraction of the gravity wells that planets did, thus making a vast saving on energy and propulsion use. A useful side effect of this was that they could grow food that could easily be shipped all around Imperial Coalition space.

  “This may appear to be an undifferentiated attack, a cruel revenge even,” Ponos intoned, “but it is in fact a very exact operation. Alpha is attacking the way-points and docking centers of the noble houses, causing widespread panic and disorientation, all the while leaving the capacity to gr
ow food for humanity.”

  “I don’t understand,” Eliard said. “The Alpha-vessel hates us. Why would it want to keep us fed?”

  “Alpha doesn’t hate, not in any human sense anyway, because it wishes to rule over humanity,” Ponos stated in his newly genteel way. “And one of the most effective ways to do that is to divide and conquer. Without the extended, if outdated, infrastructure of Coalition space stations, the Alpha-vessel can command how the remaining noble houses and human Coalition colonies can travel and transport to each other, presumably installing Armcore as its intermediary arm.”

  “Wow. This thing really is smart,” Irie muttered.

  “How many has it killed?” Eliard asked grimly.

  “In total?”

  “These attacks.”

  “Twenty-two thousand, six hundred, and eighty-nine. Death toll still rising.”

  “So, what do we do?” Irie said, turning to the Recorder. “You said that as soon as we make our move, Alpha will be onto us.”

  The Recorder gave a slow nod. “Correct. Which is why I installed Ponos here. We have him designing multiple firewalls on all of our communications, but Alpha will still be able to breach them in a matter of hours.”

  “A few hours to amass every Coalition vessel to fight?” Eliard shook his head. “Without preparations? Call-outs? Fuel supply and logistics being planned? Impossible.”

  “Lord Captain, I do believe that you are starting to sound very much like your father,” the Recorder said. “Which is why Ponos will be declaring itself here, at Old Earth.” Eliard saw a flicker of uncertainty behind the Recorder’s usually cool gaze. She must realize what that will entail.

  “The Alpha-vessel will attack, again. And this time, it will bring with it the might of Armcore,” Eliard said. “The platforms of the OEC, together, are strong. But against Armcore in its entirety? And even so, why should the Alpha-vessel care about Ponos?” A sidelong glance. “No offense.” Eliard knew that he and Irie had managed to load as many of the stolen memory servers as they could onto his ship the Mercury Blade in order to keep Ponos at the top of his game, but it was still nowhere near the processing power of the Alpha.