“Super-weaponry.” Eliard clapped a hand to his forehead. Of course. That was where he had seen those colors and a similar style of iridescent, almost mollusk-like keratin. “Val, do you remember that laboratory we saw in Armcore Prime? With all of those weird breastplates and visors?”
The Duergar’s upper lip twitched in annoyance, and he nodded. That had been when they had to break in—to corner the Armcore intelligence Ponos to seek its aid, but had only succeeded in becoming its puppets against Alpha.
“They had a lab full of just the sorts of things that this poor schmuck was talking about.” Eliard said.
“And this is where it all started,” Cassandra breathed, looking over at the still-twitching form in the containment unit—the scientist Argyle Trent. She wondered what had happened to him to turn him into that thing.
“There’s only one good recording left,” Irie said as she browsed through the broken bits of corrupted code. “You ready for this?”
The rest of the Mercury’s team nodded, and Irie pressed play. The screen flickered, revealing not a text blog, but video footage of the very laboratory they were in now, only it looked very different.
The lab was flushed with orange warning lights, and there was the heavy mechanical whine of a klaxon rising and fading, incessantly. Distant console screens flickered with static, and there were bangs and crashes.
“EBLU Update Log…” a voice hissed as a shape in off-white overalls suddenly fell into view. The scientist Argyle Trent looked weary, exhausted, and scared. His dark hair was disheveled, and he had the look of a man who hadn’t slept for a week as his hands moved around the screen to adjust it, pull it back up into an upright sitting position.
“I don’t know what time it is, or what number log this is at now. I guess it might not matter in a few hours…” he said hurriedly, the whites of his eyes showing.
FZZZZT! Trent flinched as something behind him suddenly exploded into a shower of sparks under the klaxon’s baleful wail. There was something terrible happening to the laboratory, and it seemed the entire station as well, the viewers surmised as the room shook and wobbled.
“They’re close, and all the fighters have been scrambled,” Argyle whispered. “I am keeping this record in the hopes that maybe, even if we don’t get through this, someone will find use of my research…
“It started just last night, uh…minus six hours ago. The specimens started to react, become agitated. Their shells were flashing with colors that I didn’t even have a name for, and they were far more violent than I had previously seen. The specimens were attacking each other, killing each other, and those that won ate their fallen siblings, becoming stronger, changing, seeming to take on some of their characteristics…”
Argyle Trent had an almost terrified expression as he looked off camera to the far side of the room. Whatever he had seen there must have been terrible, because he averted his eyes just as quickly.
“There are only a handful left now, three or four times the size that they were. One of them is starting to shed the carapace, like it was a shell… Something is behind it… It’s got tentacles, uh…squid-like, five? Ten? I can’t see from this distance. I don’t know if the graphene-glass cells are going to hold them…”
Trent went quiet as he looked at the morphing, unknown creatures. He seemed to have come to a decision, as the room suddenly rocked and shook once again.
“I think they came back for them. I think the Q’Lot want them, their hybrid children…” He looked around the room, rushing off to reappear for a moment with a heavy guardsman’s rifle. “The battle outside has been raging for the last couple of hours. Nothing is stopping the enemy ships, but we’ve managed to slow them down. Maybe if I gave them these specimens back, they would let us live?”
He didn’t even bother to turn the recording off as he moved across the scene and out of sight. There was a moment of silence, and then the hiss of pressurized doors, and the wail of a human voice.
THWAP! THWAP! The sound of the energy rifle being discharged at close range, a rising, terrible hissing sound—
“Argh!” A shape was thrown across the floor, wearing the unmistakable off-white overalls of Argyle, and another shape flashed across the screen—impossible to see clearly, but it appeared humanoid, taller than any mere human, and its skin was textured and laminated so that it shone in places, or was dull in others.
For a moment, Eliard thought he saw a mass of tentacles flaring from the creature’s chest, just like the rat things, but much, much bigger.
KAWAOAWAOO—
The sirens continued their relentless, unceasing refrain for a long moment as the room shook and trembled with invisible detonations. The crew of the Mercury thought that was it, and Irie moved toward her wrist keypad to kill the recording, until a shape fluttered in front of the camera.
It was a hand, covered in blood, followed by the semi-ruined face of Argyle Trent. Something had hit him across the temple, ruining his hair and face, and Eliard thought it was a wonder that the man was still even conscious.
“I…ach…the creatures are too strong… I do not know if I have saved us or doomed us all… I think it is the end for me, unless…unless I can take advantage of the serums. Use them to heal my wounds…” Argyle coughed, struggling to keep his eyes open. He was ever the scientist to the very end, it seemed, Eliard thought. “…But…it will have to be the red, or the blue serum. My injuries are too severe. The green will not heal them quickly enough…”
“No! Don’t do that!” Irie burst out, as the video image of Argyle crashed to the floor again, followed by the sounds of him groaning and crawling across the laboratory floor. “Look where it got you, huh?” Irie turned to scowl at the twitching, silently shouting shape in the containment box.
FZT! There was a flash of static, and the video log ended abruptly.
“I guess we know what happened,” Eliard drawled, following Irie’s speculative gaze. “Argyle must have taken one of those serums and locked himself into one of those containers, and there we have it. He’s still there, for how many years?”
“It doesn’t say, but the rumors of the Device go back decades.” Cassandra winced through her pain.
That means that Argyle was right, that the Q’Lot bio-specimen they stole made him nigh unkillable. He hasn’t eaten or drank in decades, and he’s still standing. Eliard shook himself. “And this is the Device that Ponos wants us to use against Alpha? How?”
“Maybe they weaponized it, like at Armcore Prime. There were those Q’Lot gun things…” Cassandra said.
“Or maybe Ponos thinks that hybrid Q’Lot technology would be a good weapon against hybrid Valyien technology,” Eliard muttered. “I don’t know if I like this. I don’t know if I want to use this. Or even could.” He pointed at the thing that had once been Argyle Trent. “I mean, look at him! Is that what Ponos thinks we have to turn into in order to defeat Alpha? Because I won’t. I don’t care what that glorified can-opener thinks.”
“Ponos did say it would set all of Armcore on us if we failed, Captain…” Irie said gingerly.
“Wow. What a great choice. Become an alien mutant or spend your life running from the Imperial Coalition’s largest army?” Eliard laughed sarcastically. “I’ll take my chances with the army, thanks. At least that way I still get to keep my opposable thumbs…”
The captain took one last look at the graphene-glass containment unit and shook his head. “C’mon, crew. We’re out. I am terminating our contract.”
“But, Eliard!” It was Cassandra, her eyes burning and sweat on her brow as she clutched at a table. “You know what the stakes are. Not just Ponos, but Alpha, too. Alpha is a hybrid intelligence of an alien race that could easily wipe us all out any time it wanted to, and bastardized with Armcore, of all things—the most aggressive military outfit ever!” She struggled.
Eliard sympathized, a little, with what he knew was House Archival’s mission. That she had committed to stopping Alpha’s ascent to pow
er. But was this the cost? He still couldn’t agree to this.
“I don’t mean we throw away our humanity.” Cassandra coughed weakly. “Just that we keep on searching. Maybe the Device isn’t the Q’Lot virus or whatever that thing is. Maybe there is something else down here that Ponos wants us to use.”
“Maybe this was a trap to get us infected by that thing!” Eliard countered, just as Cassandra fell to the floor.
7
Interlude: Evolutionary Advantage
In its graphene and glassy containment box, the eyes of the creature that had once been a human, had once been a human named Argyle Trent, twitched. In front of it was prey—human and non-humans that its claws could rend, that its teeth could eat. Even in here, in this sealed unit, he could feel the distant vibrations of their fragile bodies as they moved.
And Argyle was so hungry. The creature didn’t remember the last time it had eaten. It didn’t even remember what food tasted like anymore, but with the arrival of these beings, something had awoken inside of it.
The past was a blur. A long, long time of something like sleep, or death. Something that had been punctuated by strange, feverish dreams of flesh and lights and voices that spoke in garbled clicks and whirrs. If there was anything left of Argyle Trent now, it was buried far beneath what he had become.
But the creature did know one thing—that it was awake, and that meant it had a terrible, divine mission yet to do. It had to feed. It had to grow. It had to change. It had to keep on growing and changing—becoming better in every way until all of its prey were destroyed.
But the creature knew that it could not do those things from within here, this place.
Under its overalls that it had worn for generations, its skin itched. It needed to get out to eat, but it could not. With all of the determined relentlessness of evolution, the thing started to morph and change, to adapt.
Unseen from it or the prey, the ridges of the creature’s spine started to develop, to concentrate their structure. Pain speared through it, but the creature didn’t react other than to twitch and shake. This evolution was taking valuable essential resources and nutrients, but it was necessary. As the prey looked at screens and hissed at each other, the creature shook, the spine ridges developing tiny tubule holes, and then smaller ones branching off from them, and smaller still. Soon, the creature had a trio of reptilian-like scales sheathing a structure that was fantastically fragile, like a wasps’ nest made out of paper-thin threads of bone.
Invisible to the naked eye, the structure kept growing ever more complex on smaller and smaller levels, like one of those fractal holographic images that endlessly repeats the same patterns inside of itself. Finally, eventually, the last cells were jostled into position and the organ had been created. The thing that had once been Argyle Trent twitched and shivered, its back feeling hot and electric, and the organ woke up. Tiny particles of light emitted by the overhead lights were bombarding him at every moment, passing through the graphene and glass window with no effort at all, and in turn proceeding to pass between the thin fabric weaves of the creature’s overalls. Particles of light were sleeting constantly through the universe, of course, thrown out by stars, but this patch of null space made it harder to catch them. Instead, the creature’s biology relied on much more mundane lights to capture the particles and funnel them down the tunnels and lattice structure, the smaller particles continuing like a sieve as the larger ones stopped.
More refinements and more microscopic tunnels further subdivided and sieved the particles until just the rarest and smallest remained, moving in complicated ways, generating sparks of energy as they struck each other and interacted.
The lattice structure was designed with an eerie precision. At this level of subatomic reality, there really was no difference between one patch of space and another. It was all just a sea of energy, and each particle that interacted was interconnected with vast systems of matter and energy many distances away.
The creature that had once been Argyle Trent shivered its back once more, and the message had been sent. Somewhere, in the depths of the station, other creatures—similar in size but not in exact morphology to Argyle Trent—opened their eyes, awoken by the sudden chemical and quantum arrival of information. They in turn started to shiver and twitch as they realized that they were hungry, and that they had to build the organs to save them. Their own backs mutated and developed, and, like worker bees communicating, they shivered in turn and in tandem, giving speed and force to their quantum message to travel the spaces underneath space, until it connected with an object that was at once a sort of creature and a spaceship, brightly glowing and covered in frilled, bracketed corals.
The Q’Lot.
8
Reckless
“Cass? Cass!” All previous anger and frustration vanished from the captain’s mind as he hunched by the agent’s side, with Irie checking her pulse on the other. Val was grumbling in the back of his throat as he stood guard, sweeping the Judge back and forth from the room’s exit to what had become of Professor Argyle Trent.
“What’s wrong with her?” Eliard whispered urgently. It was clear, even apart from her current unconscious state, that there was something deeply wrong with Cassandra. Her skin was pale and sweaty, and her eyes were roving back and forth underneath her eyelids. Even her hands and body were making tiny twitching movements. “Is she poisoned? Sick?”
“How am I supposed to know, Captain? I’m an engineer, dammit, not a doctor.” Irie huffed, dropping the agent’s shaking hand. “But her pulse is through the roof. I couldn’t even count how fast it was going, and I have no idea if that is something that a human can survive or not, but she doesn’t look as though she’s doing too great.”
“It’s the bite from that thing. It has to be. Something toxic. A poison or an infection. Who knows what sort of weird, crazy germs those things are carrying?” Eliard said in alarm, reaching for his water bottle to start dripping it over the agent’s face.
“Urh. Hyurk…” Cassandra spluttered. Her eyes fluttered and then closed again, but at least she was moaning now and almost-awake.
“We have to get her back to the ship. Get her to a medical facility.” Eliard was sliding his hands underneath her, lifting her up.
“She might not even make it, Captain,” Irie pointed out. “We’re in null space. We can’t jump anywhere at the moment. The best we can do is try to find some medical supplies right here.”
“What are you suggesting? Just letting her die?” El snapped harshly. He was even surprised at himself, at the strength of emotions that he felt for this harsh-tongued, difficult House Archival woman.
“No! But this is a research station, right? There has to at least be some antibiotics and tranquilizers, right? Maybe there’s even a full genetic sequencer. We can activate her own healing processes in there and give her a fighting chance!” Irie said steadily. “Like I said, Captain, I don’t know about human bodies, but I know about machines. There’s nothing on board the Mercury that will keep her alive for the time it will take us to get to the nearest medical facility. And that is even without Ponos sending waves of Armcore interceptors or raiders coming at us on the journey, either.”
“Is that your professional opinion, Engineer?” Eliard frowned at her. What does she know? She said she didn’t understand human bodies anyway.
“It is. Just tranquilizers if need be. Something to slow her heart rate down, lower her temperature, and give her system something to fight back against whatever this is,” Irie said practically.
“Fine. Move.” Eliard stood up, holding Cassandra to his chest as he turned to the door. “Val? Change of plan.”
“I heard. Find medical supplies. Get out. Deal with the consequences later.”
“You got it,” Eliard said tersely, as they hurried back into the waiting corridor outside.
“Irie? Any time now would be good…” Eliard was snippy, his eyes fixed on the murmuring agent in his arms as they stood outside the mai
n bulkhead door that led into the station.
It looks like you’re going to get your wish, Eliard thought to the woman who looked only a few heartbeats away from death. We’re going to go through the station and find the thing we came here for.
Why did he suddenly care? A part of his mercenary heart rebelled. There was a time when he would have ignored Irie, stuffed the agent onto the deck of the Mercury, and flown off for the nearest medical station, willing to take the risk that she might die.
But things have changed now, haven’t they? the man thought, as images of the Trader’s Belt exploding into flames was fresh in his mind. That had been Armcore, searching for him, and her. How many people had lost their lives because of him that day, and his insistence on his ridiculous, reckless adventures?
If I hadn’t cheated Trader Hogan then I wouldn’t have been so desperate to steal that Valyien tech. If I hadn’t thought that I alone, of every ship’s captain and pirate out there, was so brilliant as to outwit the entirety of Armcore, then the Trader’s Belt wouldn’t have been so devastated as it had been.
It just seemed like everywhere he went, and everything he did, he was only bringing bad luck on himself and everyone around him.
‘One day, this reckless behavior will catch up with you, Eliard!’ The words of his dead father, now many years in the grave, reverberated through the years. ‘You will amount to nothing. You don’t care about anything or anyone but yourself!’
It had been true, the captain thought as Irie worked tirelessly ahead of him, patching her wrist computer to the main bulkhead door panel and trying to break the code that would unlock it. Well, it had certainly been true about him not caring for the Martin family name, or the Trevalyn Academy, or his father the Imperial General.
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