“That is where I might be able to do something,” Ponos declared. “The Recorder has been so good as to give me full access to both Old Earth’s bank of memory servers, and my own processing power. In just a short while, if the preliminary tests prove profitable, I will also be adding the coding of the ECN to my own framework.” Ponos then lifted one over-large, shiny black-metal arm to point to a stand on the other side of the room, which lit up in an answering glow of blue LEDs. Inside of a crystal-glass containment box was the impassive, statuesque head of the ECN, its neck spilling wires and cables that looked suspiciously like the exact same ones coming out of Ponos.
Eliard looked in alarm at the House Archival Recorder, whose face was carefully impassive.
“Although I am not currently at the same capacity as Alpha, with my additional memory servers, I am still able to maintain the security firewalls for a time. And with the added functionality of the ECN that you recovered at Epsilon G3-ov, then I believe that we will be able to pose a very real and perhaps even an existential threat to the Alpha-vessel. As soon as I reveal my new capacities to Alpha, then it will be forced to come here to eradicate me.”
It was strange, Eliard thought, hearing a consciousness talk so eloquently about its own demise. But he knew why Ponos and the Recorder thought that this was necessary.
“That’s why you stripped it of Armcore protocols,” Irie realized beside them.
“Yes. It was one of the prerequisites of our own machine intelligence, Archival. It would not even dream of allowing us to connect to any machine that still operated under Armcore’s aegis,” the Recorder said.
The captain looked at the seated giant mecha in a sort of awed nervousness. They are going to restart the ECN. The Enhanced Cognitive Network. The thing I almost died trying to defeat. Weren’t they about to do just the same sort of thing that had caused this entire mess?
“You can’t,” Eliard said. “There has to be another way.”
“Lord Captain Martin, there is no reason for you to be concerned,” Ponos stated. “I myself have supervised the tests. We are able to isolate the apparently corrupted parts of the ECN, and I have enough processing power to contain any of its protocol directives.”
“Corrupted parts?” Eliard almost exploded. “You mean the parts of the code of that thing that has been influenced by that bloody warp gate, and the ghost-Valyien on the other side!?”
“That is a crude estimation, but yes.” Ponos almost sounded like his old self again. “But the ECN has no memory capacity in the same way that Alpha does. It is just a framework set of programming functions.”
“So was the Alpha-program, before it got free into data-space.”
“Before it was released, Lord Captain,” the Recorder said heavily. “Ponos here, with its much stronger processing power, has erected the firewalls necessary to stop any such future contamination…”
It sounded like wishful thinking and desperate measures to Eliard. He shook his head again. Cassie would never agree to this. “I don’t agree,” he said defiantly.
“Fortunately, you don’t have to,” the Recorder said quite frankly. “We have no choice. We need bait to draw the Alpha-vessel and every Armcore war cruiser that we can here, and this is it. While they are attacking Old Earth, you will have a clear shot at destroying the warp gate on Esther.” The Recorder’s logic was like a machine’s, infallible.
“Archival,” the pirate captain blurted out. “Your House Archival intelligence. You could give it up to Ponos instead. The same way that it ate Welwyn intelligence, and the others. Surely, with all of the memory servers that Archival must have…”
“How dare you!” The Recorder’s eyes flashed, and for the first time since he had met her, Eliard saw her carefully-controlled visage crack.
Everyone knew that each noble house jealously guarded their house intelligences. They were, after all, the main processing power behind the success of the Coalition. And Archival, the being that collected and guarded all of the information of the House Archival of analysts and historians, was deemed to be one of the brightest of the machine intelligences out there.
And House Archival weren’t going to give up their prized possession so easily.
“Never. It is bad enough turning Ponos into a super-intelligence. But to give up our beloved Archival as well? When all this is over, and if any humans have survived this bloodbath, we will need Archival to help us rebuild. To remember the story of humanity, and the Coalition.”
Eliard felt white-hot fury burn in his chest. “You’re making a mistake. Now is the time to make those sacrifices, if we are to have any hope of surviving at all. Just please don’t, for the sake of all the stars in the heavens, reawaken that Valyien-tainted thing!” He ended on an almost shout as he pointed the Device at the containment box, holding the impassive ECN head. He wondered if he was actually going to fire the Device, and he wondered if the Device would even obey him.
“Eliard. Don’t!” This came not from the Recorder, but instead from his trusted chief engineer. Her eyes were wide with worry at what her captain was about to do.
Eliard didn’t know himself what he was about to do. But what if they just end up creating two Alphas? Would he be saving the galaxy from a worse fate if he destroyed the thing now? Or would he be dooming humanity to an existence as slaves, just as the Duergar had been under the Valyien all of those hundreds and hundreds of years ago?
“Captain… It’s the only way,” Irie said gently, stepping forward softly to put one of her gloved hands on the side of Eliard’s Device. He swore that, even through the scales, he could feel the warmth of her palm. It was an oddly touching gesture, and it was ultimately what broke Eliard’s heart.
“Fine,” he whispered, hanging his head as his shoulders slumped and the Device lowered to the floor. They were right. If they were to have a chance against Alpha, they had to trick it, and the only way too trick it was to use the ECN.
“Phew,” Irie said, patting him gently on the shoulder.
“Initiate the transfer!” the Recorder called, before turning to the pirate captain. “You have the stubbornness of your father, Lord Captain. Which, although frustrating, I am very thankful for. I understand your concerns, believe me I do as I share them. But now is not the time for concern. It is the time to survive.”
Eliard was surprised at the cold attitude of the woman, and the noble house that she ultimately represented. How did it come to this? he thought grimly. All of the noble houses were willing to risk everyone else’s lives—all of humanity, perhaps—for a chance to complete their goals.
“I’ll destroy this warp gate of yours,” he whispered to the Recorder. “But I won’t be doing it for you, or the Coalition. I’ll be doing it for my crew.” What new evil are we about to create by merging the ECN with Ponos? Eliard thought darkly. It was something that he wanted no part of, as he turned to leave the room and prepare his ship for takeoff.
“Come on, Irie,” he murmured over his shoulder. “If you don’t want to stay here, that is.”
“You idiot,” Irie responded. “Of course, I don’t want to stay here—” she was halfway through saying, when Ponos suddenly let out an inhuman, blood-curdling shriek.
11
The New Ponos
“What is wrong with it!” Eliard was shouting as he turned on his heel, automatically bringing the Device up in front of him. He had fought the original ECN before, and it had only been the Q’Lot Device on his arm that had saved him.
In the giant data-chair ahead of them, Ponos the once-Armcore intelligence screeched an inhuman howl that was half-electronic, half-whine and made Eliard’s teeth grate. It also convulsed, as if overdosing on a powerful drug.
“I don’t know. It must be some kind of coding conflict…” the Recorder was saying hurriedly.
“You mean the Valyien code is trying to take over Ponos, right?” Eliard pointed the Device at the mecha in the chair. He would kill it if it showed any signs of turning into Alpha.
“Wait, El! Wait!” Irie was shouting, although he noticed that she had also drawn her laser blaster and was pointing it in the same direction. “Ponos said it had installed firewalls. He’s good. I should know. Give Ponos a chance to fight back…”
Eliard clenched his teeth. He would rather put a hole through the thing’s chest, but he did as his chief engineer bade him. That was what it had always been like on board the Mercury, and he couldn’t change those habits now even if he wanted to. He deferred to her in all technical matters, and she had generally found a way to ignore every command he gave. But this situation seemed to work, somehow. They survived.
He waited as the Ponos machine juddered and shook. Everyone in the room, from the technicians to the Recorder, were standing in frozen shock as they, too, realized the import of this battle.
“Be ready to cut the hard-line connection.” The Recorder nodded to the nearest technicians, who moved nervously to the back of the throne-like chair and its mess of cables.
As if that would stop it… Eliard found himself sneering. The thing with data was that it was quick. Especially quantum data. How long had it taken for Alpha to develop fast enough so that it could create its own city-killer, station-killer craft from scratch, purely from hacking old industrial equipment?
“TZZZ!” Everyone jumped as there was a burst of electrical sparks from one side of Ponos’s neck, like a human whose blood pressure was too high.
“It can’t contain the Valyien code…” One of the technicians was panicking. “Madam Recorder, we have to cut the power…”
“I’ll cut the thing’s damn power…” Eliard strode forward and leveled the Q’Lot Device inches away from the forehead of the shaking mecha. At this range, he wouldn’t miss, no matter what computer-accelerated reflexes the Ponos-machine had. At this range, he would blow the thing’s head clean off.
The technicians hurriedly stepped back. No one dared move.
“Irie? What’s your diagnosis?” Eliard called to his chief engineer. It was her opinion that he trusted, not any House Archival or Coalition technician.
“I think—” Irie started to say.
Just as Ponos woke up.
Ponos’s singular eye flared into existence, but now it wasn’t red, it was a brilliant glaring white.
“I see them, Eliard,” it said in a voice that was not its own.
The captain was not trained for this. He had been trained by some of the sharpest (cruelest) strategic minds of the Empire. He had also spent many years learning how to think with his gut, and how to read a situation on instinct alone out in the non-aligned worlds.
But I have no idea what to do with a possibly haunted artificial intelligence.
“What do you see?” he hissed, not moving the Device from the forehead of the mecha.
“The Valyien. They are…not alive, but also not dead.” The voice sounded lighter, weaker, wishy-washy in a dreamy sort of way. “They are pressing close to the gate. There are so many… So many…”
Eliard grunted in scorn and stepped back but did not lower the Device. “This is the creature you want to defend the Empire?” he said to the Recorder. “You’ve doomed yourselves. You’ve driven it mad.”
“I…” The Recorder looked stunned, confused, even.
“I am not insane, Eliard,” Ponos said, once again not using his titles or his official name as the previous versions of Ponos had done.
“You could have fooled me,” the captain said. He might just shoot it out of pure frustration.
“No. If anything, I can see clearer now than ever before. It is like we have been blind, all of us here in this dimension, for so long. There are other forces out there, Eliard. Other places. There are whole other creatures. Beings. Cities under strange stars…”
“It’s space-junk crazy.” The captain sighed heavily.
“What have we done?” The Recorder’s hands swept to the sides of her face.
“Do not doubt my new abilities, Recorder,” Ponos said in its new sing-song voice. “I see what needs to be done. And now I have an insight into what the Valyien part of Alpha’s programming is trying to achieve. It requires the large-scale farming of humanity. Of every race, in fact. The Valyien left their relics behind on purpose, so that we would reawaken the portals. So that we would bring them back.”
“What? But that doesn’t make any sense,” the captain stated. “Why under the stars would the entire race of mutant alien bug monsters leave this reality, only to come back?”
“They are like farmers, Eliard,” Ponos explained, reminding him eerily of what Cassie had said of the Q’Lot. ‘The galaxy’s gardeners.’
“They create civilizations by seeding technology into star systems, waiting for the races to find them and to develop strong enough until…until they harvest them. Transmuting their energies to their dimension, and fueling their ceaseless conquest of the universe….” Ponos’s voice had gone far once again. “Think of it as a seesaw, Eliard, or two sides of a coin. The ab-universe. The other-dimension that the Valyien migrated to? They are growing it, populating it with the energetic transformations of this one.”
“Like black holes…” Irie said, grasping what he meant.
“What?” Eliard, however, still didn’t,
“Black holes suck up matter and star stuff, right? Well, no one has been able to describe where it goes, as there was nowhere else for all that energy to go. So, either it gets transformed into another part of energy, or it goes somewhere…else,” Irie said.
“And you’re telling me that the ancient Valyien got so annoyed that the Q’Lot were playing in their sandbox, this sandbox, this galaxy, that they decided to throw the mother of all tantrums, running off to another entire dimension, and populating it themselves?” Eliard said.
“A quaint way of putting it, but essentially, yes,” Ponos stated. “I have the coordinates of all of the warp gates and Valyien relics. I know the equations necessary to create the stable free-standing warp field. Alpha will not allow this information to be free.”
“Alpha will not allow anyone else to get the monopoly on this galaxy, you mean,” Eliard said, finally lowering the Device. He might only be some pirate captain, but he still knew how the universe operated. He knew about bullies.
“I will announce my new self to the Alpha vessel, and afterwards I will use my secured firewalled communications to contact the other noble houses still alive or still fighting Armcore,” Ponos stated, turning its head slightly as it settled back into the mighty throne-chair. “I am not as strong as Alpha, but at last we can meet almost as equals. I will make it hard for my little brother to destroy Old Earth.” Ponos appeared to take pride in what it was saying. “You do not have long, Captain. Leave now and fly as fast as you can!”
The captain spared a brief look at the Recorder, who nodded, but he didn’t need any more confirmation. He turned smartly on his heel and left the technical laboratory at a jog, with his chief engineer only a step behind him.
12
Interlude III: Rivals
Contrary to popular belief, space is not dark. In fact, it is anything but. In a psychological trick played against any terrestrial species, the void looks distant and pretty, but ultimately pretty empty from within the container of any planet’s atmosphere. But as soon as that species manages to escape the trap of their own gravity well, then they see the void for what it truly is: full and bright.
The stars that appear just as cold pinpricks of light on the surface now blaze with glory. The nearest arms of the galaxy, which on a planet might just appear as a faint mist in the night sky, is a bright, flowing river that tumbles through and over everything. A hundred thousand other stars are now visible, un-occluded by oxygen and carbon dioxide or a hundred thousand other gaseous elements.
The void is not a dark place, it is a bright, almost silvered gallery, studded with diamonds.
But now, in one part of this great fabric, a darkness did appear, and it was confusing and threatening for
its sudden arrival. The spectators—a strung-out handful of satellite surveillance drones, in their constant deep-space orbits about the nearest objects—had already analyzed and understood what this was. The first stage of a warp jump, where the photons of available light are momentarily sucked away into a micro-event similar to a black hole. This was to be expected, but it was not as impressive as the next stage of a warp jump.
Light like multiple lens flares bloomed in the void, and their edges turned an easy purple, blue, and scarlet as traces of warp ‘fire,’ or plasma, were burnt off in the break in mundane reality. The surrounding stars and silvered clouds rippled, doubled, and twisted as they were refracted through multiple pocket dimensions and the rules of physics were broken.
And then, there at the heart of the fading lights, sat the Alpha-vessel.
Outgoing Transmission: Armcore War Cruiser Class X1 Constance to Alpha-vessel.
Through the void, small at first, a series of dark specks cut across the river of stars, growing larger as they did so. A cloud of Armcore cruisers, their large plasma-boosters glowing and burning at their joints and corners, as they powered towards their new master.
And in their lead was the Armcore cruiser known as the Constance, current mobile home to none other than Senior Dane Tomas, CEO of Armcore.
“We have the reports coming in of the destruction of New Eden and the others. Are you ready for the next stage?” the digital communications swam through data-space to the Alpha-vessel. If a ship could look indignant, it managed it now.
Warp Gate (Valyien Far Future Space Opera Book 7) Page 10
