Invardii Box Set 2

by Warwick Gibson

  Fedic decided The Collector might be more accommodating if it understood why his mission was so important. He explained to the creature why he was there.

  He stressed the need to stop the Invardii coming to the Caerbrindii planet, or any planet. He was relying on the fact The Collector already knew the Invardii as ‘horrible orange things’.

  Then he told it that the secrets of the Caerbrindii – the information in the database above – could decide who would triumph in this war across so many worlds.

  The Collector was silent for a long time.

  “I need access to the database, so I can help my people fight the Invardii,” pleaded Fedic, when the silence had gone on too long.

  “That is not the problem,” said The Collector. “The problem is one of, mmmm, time. To build a dwelling place like this, a rakrath, a storeroom as you call it, takes hundreds of years.

  “It is the task of an Old One to prepare a safe place for the time of birthing. Everything here,” it said, both pairs of eyes swiveling about the room, “was taken from the building above, bit by bit, so its absence would not be noticed.

  “If you bring the orange monsters to the data base I may lose this place, and have to prepare a place for the birthing all over again.”

  Fedic understood. He was asking too much of The Collector.

  “Still, Old Ones have died in the past because of these ‘Invardii’ you talk about, and it seems right they should be punished,” continued his large, fleshy companion. It hoisted itself up into a new position, the light green patches on its hide becoming noticeably paler.

  “Perhaps the risk that comes with helping you is worth it.”

  Fedic told The Collector that he could move as swiftly and silently as the reptilian predators he had seen on the mountain slopes, and he would need very little time inside the database.

  The Collector seemed to find this funny. Its sensory terminal bobbed up and down, and when it spoke it wheezed out the words.

  “You seem not the right shape to move like the vermyk, the killers that roam the mountainside, mmm, but I have the meaning of what you are saying.”

  And so a plan was formed. The Collector would seal off its dwelling place and hope it wasn’t discovered if Fedic did trigger an alarm in the data base. It would then move through the cave system until it arrived at a safe place it knew, much further down the mountainside. And before it went, it would show Fedic a way into the data base.

  The preparations took several days, but at last The Collector was ready. Fedic followed its undulating bulk as they squeezed through minor passages and made several circular detours.

  “Nothing will track us back to the storeroom I think,” it wheezed at last, and entered a large underground cavern with a lake in the middle. The exercise had brought out a good sweat on The Collector, and Fedic had to move several steps to one side before he noticed the smell of machinery over the alien smell of his new ally.

  “Data base needs constant temperature,” said The Collector. “This is dumping ground for, mmm, you say, water vapor reducing?”

  “Dehumidifier,” said Fedic, supplying the word for the alien creature. It made sense. Cool air taken into the data base from here would be at a constant temperature, regardless of the weather outside the building, and excess moisture would be dumped back into the lake in the middle of the cavern.

  “This way,” said The Collector, and set off around the lake toward an artificial-looking wall on their left. As they approached, it became clear this was a maintenance area. The Collector stopped by a panel in the wall and produced a box-like tool from somewhere.

  Fedic was surprised. Did it have the equivalent of a tool belt somewhere under its many folds of flesh?

  The Collector unlocked the panel, and placed it to one side with two of its rubbery arms.

  “In there,” it indicated with another arm, “is the platform, mmm, lift? The way up into the floors above. Your species is, mmmm, agile enough to climb up inside the structure.

  “When you get to the top, the controls for the doors can be over-ridden. Then if you push them apart with your hands the alarm system will not register an unauthorized entry.”

  The Collector used the control system at the bottom of the lift to show Fedic how to over-ride the doors at the top. When it had done that, Fedic was ready to go on alone.

  “Thank you, my friend,” he said, not sure how to show his appreciation to this Old One.

  “It is a gift, do not count it as a cost,” said The Collector. It lifted one arm, with the back of the delicate paddle-like hand at the end toward its companion. Fedic pressed the back of his hand against The Collector’s.

  “Balance is restored,” said The Collector enigmatically. “The Invardii came to our planet to destroy, and now you have come to help. The Spirit of the Living Ground go with you.”

  It dropped its arm, then turned and headed back around the lake, its imposing bulk undulating over the rocky floor.

  Fedic turned back to the panel. He lifted his equipment through the hole, and stepped through after it. He lifted the panel into place, and heard it seal itself behind him. He donned an optics helmet, and turned on the infrared. When he looked up, he had to suppress a wry chuckle.

  The Collector had a lot of faith in his climbing ability. There was one thick cable hanging down the middle of the shaft, and narrow guiding rails for the lift on two of the walls – nothing he could easily ascend. Still, he had better get on with it.

  It was an exhausted Fedic who finally made it to the platform at the top, some time later. He sat on the floor and stretched out his legs to control the cramping that had started near the top of his climb. That damn shaft has to be at least three storeys high, he muttered.

  The next step was the over-ride on the doors. That worked perfectly, just as The Collector had shown him. He forced the doors far enough apart to throw his equipment through, then squeezed into the aperture himself. He let the doors close behind him, and looked at his new surroundings.

  The data base was more like a warehouse than he had expected. The Rothii archive on Ba’H’Roth had been heavily worked in an abstract art form, but this place could have been Earth in the 21st century. Square bays were connected by avenues in a rigid pattern that seemed to go on forever. It was a place well before the pluraformist revolution made any desired shape possible.

  Fedic tried to work out when the data base had been constructed. The Rothii archive had been built about 300 thousand years before the Rothii disappeared, and it seemed reasonable to think the Caerbrindii must have preceded that by at least half a million years. So, the data base was over a million years old. It was a staggering number.

  Fedic made his way toward an interface ahead of him. He was counting on the data base being heavily alarmed against approaches from the outside, but not on the inside. The inside should only be protected against instrument failure or fire.

  He walked over a floor reminiscent of an early terracotta mosaic. The air smelled clean, and a gentle breeze brushed by him, moving from right to left.

  It didn’t take long to set himself up at the terminal, a straightforward affair built for a creature much taller than himself. There were stacks of hexagonal shelving along the wall behind him, and he was able to build a platform in the shelves at head height. From there he could access the data system through the back of the terminal.

  Fedic let his code-cracking software do most of the work. He fed images of the internal circuitry into the software, and watched as it figured out which terminals must be responsible for which functions. Finally, it stopped searching, and two small bridges on the central circuit board lit up.

  Right then, said Fedic to himself. The data input goes here, and the silencing system there. He did so, and waited quietly for signs the security systems had recognized his handiwork. No alarms went off, and nothing changed in the cavernous vaults of the data base.

  I’m in! he thought, triumphantly, and opened up a research line into the
memory vaults. Next thing would be to learn the early Caerbrindii language, and he began to scroll through the files while the translation program built up a basic repertoire. It took less time than he had expected. Then he was faced with the dilemma of where to start searching the Caerbrindii records for information that might be useful to the Alliance.

  If there’s anything like that around, it might be in the political section, he muttered, as he wrestled with the index system, or possibly biology.

  The data base remained quiet. He was now halfway through the planet’s day, and that gave him another six or seven hours to go before he would need to sleep. He stretched. This was going to be interesting, and he turned back to work the terminal again.

  Above him, perfectly camouflaged against the high ceiling of the data base vaults, a single lens watched him at work. Fedic had been wrong in one of his basic assumptions. The interior of the data base was, in fact, closely monitored.

  CHAPTER 28

  ________________

  The data base security system came alive. Recognizing an ‘unauthorized use of terminal’ situation, the alarm system sent a silent message to the nearest of the abandoned Caerbrindii cities. The message lit up on the surveillance board of an Invardii monitoring system.

  A squad of light, fast, electronic hounds rolled out of the security base and began the long trip to the data base in the mountains. Fedic would have less time to search through the base’s memory banks than he had anticipated.

  Some time later he was sitting on his home-made platform behind the terminal, and trying to concentrate on the screen in front of him. It had been three hours now, and his position on the roughly-constructed platform wasn’t all that comfortable.

  He sighed. He was going to have to take a break.

  The last days of the Caerbrindii were particularly interesting. In an effort to keep the three rapidly diverging species together, numerous solemnly sworn treaties had been signed, and for the most part kept.

  That was something he was learning about the Caerbrindii, and, it seemed, the Druanii, Rothii and Invardii. They were extremely legalistic, and they did honor the agreements they made. Perhaps the alternative had been mutual annihilation, so the honoring of treaties had become almost inbred in them.

  Now, thought Fedic, how could the Alliance use that to its benefit?

  Something made the skin on Fedic’s back crawl. Survival in a thousand hostile situations had given him a sixth sense that rarely proved wrong. Had he heard something so faint it was only at the subconscious level?

  He dropped to the floor and landed like a cat. Shouldering his field kit he looked for a hidden place to use as a base. He scaled a cable against a pillar further along, and headed across the data storage cabinets to a lower, better hidden, maintenance area. Then he froze.

  It took his brain a moment to register what he had heard. Mechanical tracks perhaps. No, not that, but soundproof tread of some sort. It was only the fact the treads were cornering at speed that he had heard them.

  He eased himself flat on top of the storage cabinets, just in time to see several AHUs arrive at the terminal. He had never seen this type of Autonomous Hunter Unit before, but the idea was much the same in every civilization. They didn’t look that different from ones he had seen on other planets.

  They had two functions – move fast and kill on sight – and that pretty much defined how they were built.

  The first of the deadly machines blasted the platform Fedic had been sitting on, and that seemed odd to Fedic, because there was nothing there to shoot at. Then he realized they were hunting by infrared. The platform showed up as a target to them because his body had warmed it.

  Fedic touched a small, square panel on his field jacket, and it set itself to the surrounding temperature. He flicked the hood over his face and pushed the optics and re-breather into place. They weren’t going to find him by infrared.

  The other two AHUs started to scout the surrounding area. Securing the position, thought Fedic to himself. It was standard military procedure.

  Then the first one raised its sensor turret and looked straight at him.

  It can’t do that, screamed a part of Fedic’s mind. He was hugging the top of the data cabinets and shouldn’t have been detectable from the floor, by sight or heat. The other two AHUs fanned out and went left and right. How had they found him?

  The damn terminals were being monitored after all, swore Fedic to himself. It had to be that. He moved his head slowly, searching the shadows above him for signs of a recording unit.

  There! That must be one. He reached into his field kit and set up a small search and destroy device on top of the data cabinets, aiming it at the unit. The AHUs must have just about finished their surrounding maneuver, and Fedic dived for a recessed area between the cabinets as he triggered the device.

  The search and destroy unit shot out the recording unit it had been aimed at, then quickly located and destroyed two more, further away. The AHUs opened fire on Fedic’s position – as last seen by the recording units – and obliterated the search and destroy device while tearing the top off the data cabinets.

  Fedic breathed a sigh of relief as silence descended, and the AHUs started searching randomly again. They didn’t know where he was any more. The search and destroy must have found all the units in this area.

  On the other hand, the AHUs weren’t above planting cameras on high points themselves.

  As if they had read his mind, the first machine put up a telescoping arm to fix a camera high on a supporting column behind the terminal.

  Fedic continued loading up on armaments from his field kit, and various gadgets he thought might be useful. He did it while keeping his noise level to an absolute minimum. When the telescoping arm of the AHU had fixed the camera to the column, and was withdrawing, he sighted along one of his laser scopes and fried the camera’s circuits.

  Then he rolled in one swift motion to the edge of the data cabinets and looked down on the AHU. Its sensory turret was still turning toward him when he hit it with three super-dense slugs. It groaned, and sat down awkwardly while the remains of the turret collapsed gently forward and rolled across the floor.

  Fedic dived off the storage units and hit the floor running. Then he made for the doors at the far end of the corridor. The other two AHUs were somewhere in the maze behind him.

  The plan seemed to be working, until he saw movement through the glass doors ahead of him. It was more of the damned AHUs!

  Turning right he disappeared behind a row of data cabinets, scanning the surroundings for possibilities as he ran. There! Some sort of major ventilating shaft connected this floor with the one above it. It was a way out. He changed direction, and accelerated toward his new target.

  He was half way there when he changed his mind. If he let the AHUs drive him out of the data base now, he might never get back in. It had taken three hours for the AHUs to arrive. If he managed to neutralize these units, he might get another three hours – probably less – before reinforcements arrived.

  They would be some pretty heavy duty units, he figured, so he better be gone by then. But a few hours was better than none at all.

  He started to plan his defense as the shaft loomed ahead of him. How many AHUs had there been on the other side of those glass doors? The one thing he desperately needed to know now was the size of the force pitted against him.

  He had to make the machines believe he had used the shaft to climb up to the next level. On his way there he grabbed a large, light-weight box and snipped it off the cables that wired it into the data systems.

  Arriving at the shaft he slapped a contact explosive to the door in front of it, and counted off as he dived behind a row of data cabinets. At a count of three it vaporized the door and most of the surrounding wall.

  Dragging the box quickly through the gaping hole, Fedic slung an automatic piton up the shaft. At the top of its arc it opened and punched itself through the nearest flat surface.

  F
edic attached the box to the other end of the cable and hit the climb sequence. The box winched itself up the shaft as Fedic scrambled back out of the hole. Then he used another terminal to vault himself onto the top of data cabinets nearby.

  Then he settled down to wait.

  Drawn by the noise of the explosion, and the clanking of the box as it was winched up the shaft, four of the AHUs rolled down the central aisle toward the ventilator shaft.

  Fedic cursed silently. There would be the same again making their way to the floor above to intercept him there. The one thing you could count on with artificial intelligence was the predictability of its thinking. They would have split their forces evenly to contain a threat that had only two exit points. But artificial intelligence also had no concept of ambush.

  Fedic waited until the AHU’s had split up and surrounded the ventilator shaft. Then he lobbed an electronic version of a flash grenade overhead. It was meant to overload the AHUs optics in both visual and infrared, and it would give him precious seconds in which to act.

  He punched three neat holes in the back of the nearest AHUs sensor turret and rolled back onto the data cabinets, before the grenade went off. The AHUs were turning toward him when they were blinded, and Fedic rolled back to the edge of the aisle and took out another one. Now it was going to get tricky.

  He threw an empty magazine case over the central aisle and into the maze of cabinets that lay beyond. One of the AHUs swerved round a nearby pillar and edged down a lane between the cabinets to investigate.

  Thanks for that, said Fedic silently, to whatever powers ruled the universe. He waiting quietly as he heard the sound of treads moving further into the maze after the magazine case. He didn’t believe in luck – you made your own luck – but he wasn’t above taking advantage of a situation that had moved in his favor. He turned to take out the AHU left behind him.

  He didn’t know exactly where it was, but he hadn’t heard it move yet. Where had he last fixed its position? A moment later he had orientated the visuals in his mind to the scene in front of the ventilator shaft. He’d hit targets here, and here. The one closest to the maze on the other side of the aisle should, logically, have gone after the magazine, which left this AHU, here, as his next victim.