Then she realised it wasn’t just her acceptance as part of the fighting unit that made her feel good. She realised how angry she really was. Angry at the students who had mocked and embarrassed her when she was young, angry at the world of academia which had given her security but shut her off from life, and just, well, angry at everything.
She tightened the Valkrethi’s massive fists at its sides. For some cantankerous reason or another – fuelled by the anger within her – she was looking forward to the attack on the Invardii flagship.
The formation began to break up, each pair looking for a way to get under the angry red coils that lashed out from the flagship at anything that moved. A wave of Javelins swarmed the front of the flagship, and Celia nodded to the pilot she was paired with, sending his optics an arrival point on the side of the vast enemy ship.
He gave the thumbs up sign, and they looped out from their present position, as if making a bypass of the enemy ship, only to loop round at the last minute and disappear between two giant mountings on the side of the flagship.
Celia moved her orientation through ninety degrees, and the side of the flagship became a level floor under her. The two Valkrethi knelt on the metal deck in a long alleyway. Reaching down, Celia plunged both fists into the deck beneath her, and came to an abrupt halt. It was like running into a brick wall.
It was clear the Invardii had replaced the lighter hub and spar construction of the Reaper ships with heavy duty structural integrity on the flagships. The pilot motioned for her to stand back, and placed his hands a shoulder width apart on the deck.
A current ran from one hand to the other, stripping away the metal like an acid bath. He pushed his hands further into the deck, and increased the current. Celia watched in fascination. The riders were learning things about the Valkrethi all the time, but she had never seen this before.
When he finally broke through the decking, they could see it was more than a hand’s width thick – and that was a Valkrethi hand width at that! Celia wondered if this level of over-engineering continued throughout the flagship. She realised the flagships were meant to be invincible, completely unstoppable. What a shock it would be to the Invardii if the Valkrethi could destroy one!
The pilot opened a comms link to her. “That’s completely emptied my reserves. The internal power plant has started to replenish them, but it’s going to take time. If you want to enter the ship you’ll have to take the lead.”
Celia nodded, to signify that she understood. Then she decided they should go for it. Her reserves were still at full strength.
If any of the other pairs had got this far, they would have used up as much energy, and someone had to try and disable the flagship. She pointed down the hole the pilot had made, and he nodded his agreement. Forcing back one of the sides a little, and then the other, Celia worked her way down through the deck, and dropped into whatever was below.
The two of them landed in darkness. Celia changed her optics to infrared, and looked around at what seemed to be a storage room on a mammoth scale. She checked for atmosphere, and found none. There hadn’t been any on the Reaper ships either.
If the Invardii did use a carbon-oxygen breathing system, they did it by binding the oxygen directly to a transfer molecule and dumping it in the bloodstream. It made sense. Lungs were too inefficient.
Then Celia shook her head at the idea the Invardii were limited to oxygen. It was likely they used the more powerful silicon-sulphur combination, but she also doubted they had any use for a bloodstream. It would be too vulnerable, too weak a link in their hybrid systems.
Checking that the pilot was right behind her, Celia moved to a lavishly carved archway on her right. If she had been expecting some sort of symmetry in the door she was mistaken. Like the ornate fashioning of the Reaper ships, the archway looked like it had been built by an artist under the influence of something mind-altering. It was a badly distorted figure eight.
The two Valkrethi passed silently into a long corridor of enormous proportions, and had to crouch as the ceiling height stepped down half way along. A closed door to their left caught Celia’s attention. It looked like a doorway leading to somewhere important. There was a lot of electronic hardware around it that might be a security lock.
She turned back toward the pilot, pointed to the door, and nodded. He moved aside. Stepping back against the opposite wall Celia lifted one giant Valkrethi foot and rammed it through the door, her shoulders providing leverage against the wall behind.
The door was instantly outlined in circular bars of light. These doubled in speed, and she figured she had set off an electronic tripwire of some sort. There were no audible alarms.
Reaching in through the hole her foot had made, she tore a big section out of the door, and then ripped the door out of the wall. She dropped it to the floor as she stepped inside, and the pilot followed her. They looked around in amazement.
There was no way of telling what shape the room was. It was outlined in a soft blackness with a lifelike representation of stars in all directions. Some of the more prominent stars were connected to others by webs of lines, and Celia wondered if it was a navigational map of the galaxy.
The pilot nudged her, and she looked upward. In the centre of the room a handful of Invardii in their orange, humanoid state hung motionless. Next to them were small orange spheres of various sizes. The largest of the spheres had taken on rudimentary humanoid shapes as well.
“Godsdammit, it’s a nursery!” said Celia on the open channel, then wished she hadn’t. One of the Invardii ‘mothers’ stirred, and turned toward them, away from the orange sphere it was cradling in its rough-shaped hands.
Can’t hear me banging down the door, but it picks up a stray comms signal nearby, said Celia, irritated with herself. Then she began to back slowly toward the door. The pilot followed. Another of the Invardii turned in their direction, and they fled.
CHAPTER 26
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The corridor ended in a large bay, with enormous doors along one side. If her sense of direction was right, the doors would open to the outside of the ship. As the two of them burst into the bay other doors opened, and a flood of orange Invardii poured through them.
They carried a number of large, grey machines, several Invardii to each one. They set them down, and rapidly deployed them. Something that looked unpleasantly like the business end of a weapon was soon pointing in Celia’s direction.
She didn’t like the look of that. The pilot pointed nervously behind him, and it was clear there were more of the hybrid Invardii coming in from that direction as well. Hurrying toward the inner wall of the cargo bay, Celia prepared to dig her way through to another part of the flagship.
As she ripped a hole in the wall, one of the grey machines fired, and the blast slammed her forward. Then the other machines opened up, and she was hit by several discharges at once. The force of it knocked her through the wall and into a dark chamber beyond.
For a moment she blanked out. When she came round, her optics were offline. She went to lift herself up, and found only her head and one arm responded. Great, she thought, as she struggled to rise. Blind and crippled inside an alien flagship, with a thousand or more Invardii on board. This will not end well.
She heard the sound of a number of sickening thumps back in the loading bay, and then some horrendous crunching noises.
It sounds like the pilot is getting his as well, she muttered to herself resignedly. If it had to end this way, she couldn’t think of anything better to be doing than defending the alliance from arrogant pigs like the Invardii.
Except maybe taking advantage of Roberto when he was drunk and would forget what he had done in the morning, she thought with a smile. She wished she’d taken a chance with him now. Now, when it didn’t matter, and no one would ever know!
She was distracted as a number of small lights flickered briefly along the bottom of her optic shield. A moment later it came back online. She watched in growing amaze
ment as the Valkrethi repaired itself.
System after system came back to life. Strength returned to her limbs, and she sat up. Some systems were sidelined, too damaged to repair quickly, while others ran low-grade equivalents to replace them.
She had known the Valkrethi were sophisticated, powerful machines, but now she realised they were far more adaptable than it seemed possible. She stood up, and realised she had just risen, phoenix-like, from her own ashes. Two quick steps took her back into the loading bay, where she found the last of the Invardii in full retreat. The pilot turned and smiled at her.
“They got off some lucky shots at you. I jumped over their heads and came down behind their machines – good thing there’s a lot of room in here – and broke some heads.” A number of bent and broken cylinders lay at his feet. Celia smiled.
He pointed to a set of massive doors opposite, and together they ran through the cargo bay and down the corridor on the other side.
Celia stopped a little further on, and ripped a hole in the wall. She was choosing a direction she thought would take them deeper into the flagship. She began digging her way forward, and for a while she struck hard going. The two of them passed through a series of smaller spaces that were crammed with goods, but then she emerged into an enormous shaft.
It dropped away out of sight below her, and that was the direction she wanted to go. All around the walls were smaller versions of the plasma cables she had seen in the reactor rooms on the Reaper ships.
Yes! Now they were getting somewhere.
The pilot forced his way through the wall of the shaft behind her, and looked down the long descent. He stepped back a little from the edge when he saw how far it went. Celia was about to rip the plasma cables off the walls when she hesitated. These were small fry really, they needed to find a major power plant if they wanted to do some real damage.
“What say we track these back to their source?” she said.
“Makes sense to me,” he answered. “Is that up or down?”
“Down takes us deeper into the flagship,” said Celia. Then she thought to add, “how are your energy reserves now, anyway?”
They were good. Not a hundred percent, but good enough for most of the things they might have to do.
“Down it is, then,” said the pilot resignedly, and swung himself out over the edge. The two Valkrethi descended rapidly, hand over hand, until the shaft made a sudden turn and stopped at a door. The cables ran on through the wall beside the door.
Celia looked at the pilot. He shrugged. She lifted one giant leg and buckled the door inward. It was surprisingly strong, at least as strong as the hull. She didn’t stop to think why that might be.
She grabbed an overhead beam to brace herself, and kicked the door harder. It ripped out of the wall and vanished into the maelstrom beyond. Incandescent plasma roared past the door and licked out toward them.
Celia noticed the temperature reading for the Valkrethi as it skyrocketed upward, and stepped back, pulling the pilot away from the glowing hole where the door used to be.
“It’s the goddammit core! We’re looking straight into the fusion reactor. It’s hotter than a sun in there!”
He nodded. “Then how do we destroy it?”
“We can’t destroy it,” she said, thinking hard. “I bet it’s set up with a number of fail-safes. It would just close itself down if we tried to damage it.”
She stopped for a moment.
“We have to feed it,” she said at last. “If the fire gets too much for the damping mechanisms, we might get a runaway reaction.
“I know! The electromagnets. It must have a containment field of some sort.”
They worked their way around the outside of the reactor, bashing through walls, looking for a control room. The reactor grumbled, managing to contain the breach in its walls but increasingly unstable, and close to shutting itself down.
They found the control room moments later. The pilot dealt with the dozen Invardii in the room while Celia ripped the covering panels from the instrumentation along the wall. The panel were covered in hieroglyphics and glowing five-pointed symbols that meant nothing to her.
The controls were solid state underneath, an assemblage of cubes and rods. Dammit, nothing looked familiar. She went for the most complex part of the board, where dozens of channels seemed to converge. They had to be the safety controls for the electromagnets
Celia ripped an edge off a panel she had already discarded and used it to short different groups of conduits at once. It wasn’t making any difference. Then she thought she heard the hum of the reactor increase in pitch. She punched the metal down onto the conduits, smashing some and shorting out others permanently.
Spinning toward the reactor wall, she booted another hole in it. Beckoning to the pilot she dragged one of the consoles in the room across to the hole and forced it through. It was sucked into the core, and the pitch of the reactor increased.
Yes! She had done it. As the core got larger, it would generate more electromagnetic field, and suck in more of its surroundings. The pull on the Valkrethi – though they were partly composite – was already noticeable in her movements. Desperately she worked alongside the pilot to feed the beast.
They smashed the hole wider, and threw everything they could tear loose through it. The rest of the consoles followed. Then they started peeling off the walls and feeding that to the core.
Suddenly there was a new sound, a deeper roar that grew louder as they listened. Celia worked her way along the wall to the hole, gouging out handholds as she fought against the growing hunger of the core for all things metal. She was finally able to look through the hole at an angle. A sheet of alloy peeled off the inside of the core and disappeared into the furnace.
It was working! The reactor was starting to eat the ship from the inside out. She clawed her way back to the pilot, and motioned frantically that they should get out. They held onto each other as they moved out of the remains of the control room. Then they found a long corridor, and sprinted up it.
Celia took the next left, which she thought would lead them to the outside wall of the flagship. They battered down a large door and found themselves in another of the cargo bays. This one was already open to space, and they activated the dipole systems a moment later.
The two Valkrethi swung out of the flagship and found themselves back in the melee of Javelins and Reaper ships. Celia turned to look back at the flagship, and it ignited into a miniature sun.
The shock wave spun her away, and she remembered thinking how lucky she was to still be alive. Then both fleets were scattered helplessly across space by the blast. It was the first real breakthrough.
Cordez saw the call ID on his sub-space system light up, and noted with interest that it was Cagill’s call sign. The Valkrethi had left Aqua Regis a little after midnight, Earth time, and it was now mid-morning in Cordez’ office in the South Am block. He looked forward to hearing how the engagement with the Invardii forces had gone.
He tapped in his acknowledgement of the call, and nodded a greeting as Cagill’s face came up on the comms screen.
“52 Fire Ships destroyed, and two flagships,” said Cagill, without preamble, “with another flagship extensively damaged. That’s the good news.
“However, there have also been a number of new developments.”
Cordez nodded encouragingly.
“Two of the Valkrethi were destroyed. It now appears they have a fail-safe system for the pilots, some sort of inner shield plus stasis system. We dug the pilots out of the remains of the damaged Valkrethi and revived them.”
“What could destroy a Valkrethi?” asked Cordez.
“Only the flagships,” said Cagill. “Some of the Valkrethi took big hits from combinations of the Reaper ship plasma arcs, but they survived. It taught us something else we hadn’t suspected. We now know the Valkrethi can regenerate themselves, and they can regenerate themselves from quite extensive damage.”
That was the good and t
he bad of it, and it had been mostly good. Overall the trap had worked, and Cordez was pleased with that. He was very pleased indeed!
CHAPTER 27
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Cagill continued with his report, and there were many interesting things in the details.
“The flagships are the real threat to the Valkrethi,” he said. “The plasma strings the flagships wield could probably destroy one, but they’re too slow to do much damage. The problem starts once the Valkrethi get past the defenses and board them. The flagships are carrying some sort of mobile weapon, and the Invardii are quick to use them once the Valkrethi get through the flagship’s hull.
Cordez looked up at Cagill. “Which suggests they’re used to being boarded,” he said suspiciously. Then he thought about it.
“What could be powerful enough to dig its way into a flagship – apart from a Valkrethi?” he continued.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Cagill. “Perhaps it’s a defensive measure left over from conflicts millennia ago.”
“Perhaps,” said Cordez, not convinced. “It’s interesting that they still employ the same strategy. Who upset the Invardii that much, even if it was so long ago?”
Cagill shrugged. “The other thing that worries me is that they’re learning. Once they figured out it was a trap – that the Valkrethi were waiting for them at Aqua Regis – and the first flagship was destroyed, they turned tail and ran. We didn’t get a chance to destroy them all like we did at the ice planet.
“The last of our kills were from Valkrethi who boarded Reaper ships before they entered star drive, and dismembered them when they were going at faster than light speeds. We had to collect Valkrethi half way to the next star system!”
Cordez had to laugh at the picture Cagill painted. Still, the Valkrethi commander was right. The enemy was learning, and that wasn’t good. The alliance had relied on the arrogance and sense of superiority of the Invardii for a long time now. It was good to remember they wouldn’t always make those mistakes.
Rise of the Valkrethi Page 16
