As a younger man—almost ten years ago now—he had fled that place in order to start a new life out there in the Trader’s Belt, working his way up from just a petty courier on his stolen Mercury Blade racer to become one of the fastest and best pirates in the entirety of Imperial space. Or at least, that was what he thought, anyway.
But something had happened to him since meeting Agent Cassandra Milan. What was it? Was it the fact that he had to win her trust? To make her respect him? It was different with Irie and Val—they were crew. They might argue like cats and dogs, but they were also together no matter what. Them against the universe.
But with Cassandra, it had been different. She had saved him when he had been drowning in that water world. She had fought alongside him, she had made him see that there was a life beyond what he wanted for himself—the riches, the money, the loot.
Damnit, she had given me a mission, he thought, hating himself even more. And look what it had done to her, and to the rest of them. Before, when Eliard had been uncaring and unfeeling about the victims and the peripheral people his activities made him trample over, he had been Captain El, the feared, the brave, the daring.
But Cassandra had made him see that Alpha and Armcore both posed a far greater threat to Imperial space than he could fathom. She had made him think about the little people that he had ignored, that his noble house upbringing had made him ignore. Seeing Senior CEO Tomas of Armcore, and before that Trader Hogan—how they hadn’t cared for all the people they destroyed in their pursuit of power—had made Eliard realize that he didn’t want to end up like that. He didn’t want to end up like his father, of all people. His father, who had been the General. His father, who had been powerful but hated, who had died with a wife and children, but no one who even liked him.
I don’t want to be that guy, he thought. I want to do something right, for once.
FZT! There was a hiss from the door, and Irie looked over. “I’ve got the controls. Are you ready?” She had the computers in her hands, and El had Cassandra in his. That meant that there was only Val able to defend them when the door opened.
“Wait,” the Duergar grumbled irritably, releasing the handle of the Judge for a moment and beckoning to Eliard. “This isn’t going to work. Put her on my back. We need your guns.”
“She’ll fall off!” Eliard clutched Cassandra a little tighter. Just don’t die. If there is one thing I can do, then please, for the love of the stars, don’t die!
“Tie her feet and hands if you have to,” Val growled. When a Duergar growled, it was the sort of thing that couldn’t be ignored. Seeing the sense of his suggestion, as there was no sense in them all dying because they couldn’t defend themselves, Eliard worked quickly to make a haphazard sling from his own utility belt. Within moments, he had the agent strapped to Val’s back like she was a sack of goods.
“Sorry…” Eliard winced as the agent moaned and mumbled feverishly.
“Okay, Irie. Good to go,” Val said, raising the Judge toward the door as the mechanic hit the button.
9
Interlude: Evolutionary Advantage II
In the hidden spaces and the darkened corners of the research station, shapes moved. The creatures had once been human, but now, their genetic structure had been almost entirely taken over by the Q’Lot virus spreading through their bodies.
It had happened fast, as soon as they were infected—whether by accident or by the directives of the Armcore E.B.L.U laboratory. The changes had first wracked their bodies with pain, but then, within just moments, the virus had invaded their pain receptors and changed them. Trained them. Some sensations were not to be thought of as pain, but as possibilities. Most sensations were beneath their new genetic directive.
Their human selves had started to disintegrate as fast as their human DNA, leaving creatures with alien desires, alien thoughts. The only motivations that were recognizable were the residual animal ones, the evolutionary urges encoded in the base of their amygdala thanks to some thousands and hundreds of millennia of mammalian evolution.
Hunt. Fight. Eat. Kill. Survive.
Perhaps the Q’Lot virus did not have such impulses and imperatives—their ships certainly did not always destroy everything that they encountered. But when married to the human animal genome, they formed a new and terrifying breed of predator, able to adapt in hours, to mutate and change their morphology until they had the upper hand.
In one darkened space under a metal gantry, one of the creatures lay cocooned in a bed of scale-like bluish lichen. The Q’Lot virus had broken out across the entire station, waiting for more biological life to infect. The scales cracked, started to open, petals of shell and leathery skin fragments until the creature that had been sleeping in stasis suddenly reacted. The quantum message of its fellow had reached it, and its own quantum bone organ was even now shivering and twitching into life on its back.
But more than that, like an insect or a spider explodes into life at the nearness of its prey, so too did this Q’Lot hybrid—strange ichor pumping through remade veins that had once housed human blood. The tentacles on its chest and neck writhed in anticipation of the meat and flesh that it would consume. Its delicate senses registered heat, and movement, as it climbed out of its crawlspace to taste the air.
There. It had found them. The intruders.
The prey.
10
The Device
“Clear!” Val boomed, sweeping his rifle across the empty space of the room on the other side of the bulkhead. It looked to be some sort of staging area, a metal spiral of stairs heading up, and three more corridors extending in different directions.
“Where’s the medical bay?” Eliard hissed in annoyance. There was more of that blue-scale lichen (as he was starting to think of it) over every conceivable surface, and now he knew what had happened. It had broken out of its containment when the Q’Lot had attacked, and effectively taken over the station.
“Which way?” Irie was calling.
Eliard didn’t know. But there were three corridors, and a set of stairs. That meant… “We split up. The search will be quicker that way. Remember, we’re just after medical supplies, nothing else, okay?”
“Sure thing, boss,” Val said, already stomping forward with the agent strapped to his back. Eliard paused, watching her. She was probably safer with the Duergar than she was anywhere else in this station, after all. Still, it didn’t feel good leaving her.
“Captain,” Irie said to him, again, gesturing to his left as she indicated she would take the nearer right passageway. “Go.”
The captain did.
The left-hand passage appeared to lead to more official rooms than the ones in the outer station, the captain thought. No guard lockers or loading bays here. Instead, the first room appeared to be some type of situation room, with its bulkhead door already open onto an octagonal space, surrounded by working console desks. There were smashed console screens on the floor, a flipped chair. The overhead screens were cracked and appeared to be barely hanging from their supports.
“Well, it looks like there was action in here…” Eliard took a step in, his old training kicking in. He wasn’t sure if it was his time spent at Trevalyn Academy or all his years spent as a pirate, but as he looked over the scene, he could make out the signs of sudden threat, and formed a quick assessment. He imagined crew rushing to their consoles, hurriedly responding to reports. But what happened after that? No signs of blood on the walls, or the scorch marks of weapon fire.
It was the whole station that was rocking and shaking. Heavy attack? But once again, Eliard couldn’t remember seeing any signs of damage on the exterior of the station when they had docked.
He paused, standing over the nearest console. A part of him wondered whether he should try to access the servers, see what had happened. But, no. He shook his head. He was here to find medical supplies for Cassandra, and nothing else.
But the computers might have a schematic of where the medical bays are,
he argued with himself. And if I can get the transmitters to work, I can send a distress call to the nearest medical ship.
He hit the nearest keyboard, holding his hand over the sensor to see the green lights flare into a dimmed existence. One of the overhead screens start to flicker with static for a moment, before an android voice broke the silence.
WARNING! MANDATORY EVACUATION! ALL CREW MEMBERS MUST REPORT TO THE LOADING BAYS IMMEDIATELY! MANDATORY EVACUATION!
The words blared into the room.
“Dammit!” Eliard hit the console, trying to turn it off.
WARNING! SECURE THE DEVICE BEFORE DISEMBARKING! WARNING!
“The Device?” Eliard looked up at the singular working screen. That was what Ponos had sent them here for. A mysterious weapon that was rumored to be able to kill anything. He had thought that it had been the virus, but that was apparently wrong. He saw, flickering in and out of existence, the schematics for a teardrop-shaped item, revolving on the screen with lines of code and notes streaming around to it, pointing out various features. None of it made sense to Eliard, but as the console fuzzed with static and then came back to its looped recommendations, Eliard stared intently at the thing that could have been a torpedo or a bomb or a pod of some kind—only this time, he was sure that he saw a handle sticking out the underside of it.
A handle…like for a rifle?
The warning was so loud that he didn’t hear the scrape of approaching claws—talons that had once been feet, and had once been housed in security boots but had long since broken out.
“Shut up!” the Captain was saying, as the creature from under the metal gantry slid into the room.
This isn’t right, Irie thought as she looked at the room she found herself in. It was another kind of laboratory, but this one was…different.
There were five apparent heaps of the blue-scaled material on the floor, their fronds joining with the floor and spreading across it like moss. One might think that it was some kind of alien garden that had taken over this room, apart from the fact that thick cords of roots stretched from each of the low mounds to the others, and ‘branches’ like bone coral had erupted from their tops to arch inward, like a bower.
And there, hanging in the middle of the bower, was what could only be called a cocoon. It was about the size of Irie’s forearm, and was tear-drop shaped, with a fine interwoven lattice of green and blue scales across its surface. What was even weirder was that the fat, bulbous end appeared to be stubbed with small horn-like projections. On its underside was something that could only be called a handle. She could even clearly see, in the leather scales, the grip positions for a hand.
“What the hell…” Irie walked around it, looking at it.
The construction of the thing, although organic and bizarre, struck a chord with her somewhere. The root-like cords going from one mound to the next, and then the coral-like supports holding the cocoon. To her, this made sense as a machine, not as some strange type of plant. On a whim, she took out a small emissions reader and flicked the top, knowing that it would pick up on any large or subspace frequencies.
It did. There was energy flowing between the mounds in the roots and shooting up the coral brackets in rhythmic bursts that were far too regular to be purely animal.
Irie was looking at an organic machine occupying the laboratory. She wasn’t even sure if the Armcore scientists had installed this, or if the Q’Lot had.
And what was worse was that there was something terrifyingly exact about the proportions of each of those mounds. About six-by-two feet wide, a foot or two high.
Just like a body…she thought, kneeling closer to change the frequency of the emissions scanner, recalibrating it to ping x-rays. It was a hunch, but Irie had always been good at hunches. She opened her wrist computer console as she moved the emissions meter over the nearest mound, and received, in hazy, blurry blue lines, the picture of an object inside the softer layers of alien tissue.
It had a spine, and a rounded head. Two arms, and two legs.
“Oh my god!” She staggered back, looking at the thing once more. This was something that had been powered, or made, or was even—she hated to think—born from five human bodies. She didn’t like this at all. Whatever it was, it did not fit into her perfectly-ordered world view of nuts and bolts and physical laws.
—mandatory evacuation—
The alarms were muted and distant and made Irie raise her head to the doorway in alarm. She was lucky in that regard, although Irie Hanson might not have felt it right at that moment. The sudden distraction had meant that she saw the creature’s shadow as it slid around the door, and the sound was so muted that she could hear its hiss when it realized that it had been spotted…
“Crap!” She raised her rifle to fire at it, three quick blasts. The thing was moving too fast, though, already flashing across the room, behind a line of steel cabinets.
THWAM! THWAM! The mechanic was taking no chances. She flicked the rifle over to full-clip mode and started firing at the cabinets and the thing behind it. There was an inhuman screech as a cabinet buckled and exploded, but the thing was still moving, jumping behind the mounds.
No! Irie paused her firing for a split-second, as she did not know what would happen if she shot the strange alien machine, but her pause was enough for the thing to vault over the coral and the mounds and land beside her, one backward-pointing claw extending and lashing out in a heartbeat—
“Argh!” Irie felt the pain score across her arm as the force of the blow sent her head over heels back against the opposing wall, knocking the rifle from her hands and sending it skidding across the floor…
The mechanic was in pain and confused, wondering if she was concussed as she heard the heavy claws of the creature land just behind and above her.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The captain exploded into the room, quite literally as he held up his two blaster pistols and fired it at the creature. The thing screeched and fell back, twitching and turning to attack once more.
“Get up!” Eliard screamed as another of one of the creatures emerged behind him, half of its face smoking from laser blast but still very much alive and very much angry. They were surrounded. Only one of them had a weapon. “Here.” Eliard threw the wounded, groggy Irie one of his blasters as he kept unloading his energy clip at the one he had saved Irie from, and, with both hands, the mechanic fired the borrowed pistol at the creature that had been chasing the captain.
They were humanoid, but only just. These ones, unlike the Argyle Trent creature in its cage, had lost their human clothes and instead revealed a loping body some seven feet tall with heavy blue and brown carapace scales over their shoulders, arms, and back. A pronounced ridge of bone tines swept down their backs into small, stubby tails, and their heads were little more than nubs of scar tissue and horn. But what was terrifying about them was the fact that they all had the same throat-neck tentacle arrangement that the mutated rat things had, writhing and quivering around a maw of serrated teeth.
“Die, damn you!” Irie shouted at the creature that had been chasing Eliard. She was lucky, perhaps, that this one had already been seriously injured. She managed to shoot it several times before it flipped to one side, as fast as an acrobat. She followed it, but—
Eliard was trying to fire on the one that he had hit before, but as many of his shots were seeming to crackle over the scales in a blue flare of sparks as they were making the creature squeal. It’s adapting to them, he had a moment to think, just as the creature bounded through the air to land at his side and backhand him and the firing blaster across the face.
TZAP! Eliard felt the powerful kick of energy as the thing’s forearm hit him, as the creature discharged the blaster energy that it had managed to absorb and store. He was thrown backward, skidding into the pile of scaled mounds and coral.
“Captain!” Irie screamed, trying to track the creature in front of her and rolling out of the way of the creature that landed behind her. She kicked one of the cabinets in its
path. It was limping, but it still had the strength to kick it out of the way.
Irie’s back hit the opposite wall of the laboratory. She was cornered, but at least she had one of the monsters straight in her sights. Click. Irie pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. It was out of energy.
“Tssss!” The second creature that had been following the Captain landed on its backward-jointed legs beside its kin as they both turned, limped, and took a step toward their prey.
“Skreeeach!” A sound like a meson torpedo firing at close distance, as a bolt of burning white energy hit the pair of monsters and sent them flying through the air. The flash was blinding, and Irie felt herself picked up and slammed against the wall once again by the force of the explosion. She saw stars, and her ears were ringing.
“Irie? Irie?” When the smoke and the dust had cleared—and Irie could hear again—she saw that the two alien creatures were gone, but in their place was a jagged hole in this room burned clear through to the level below. Melting metal glowed and dripped, and wires fizzes and popped.
“Captain? What happened?” the mechanic coughed as the captain limped out of the smoke, skirting carefully around the hole that he had made.
“It looked like a weapon, and I didn’t have anything else, so…” She saw that attached to the captain’s right arm—no, covering the captain’s right arm—was the entirety of the strange teardrop-like device that had been hanging in the center of the organic machine. Irie could see that overlapping scales had fixed smoothly around his forearm, and that his hand was invisible inside of the thing. The handle that she had spotted must have grown over the captain’s hand or else been drawn back inside the body of the device.
She watched as the ‘mouth’ of the thing—pronounced nubs of crystalline bone—started to close and stop glowing, although a wisp of steam was coming out of it.
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