by Skyler Grant
"It's a whole new world," Anna said, taking it in before adding, "But there doesn't seem to be much here. Are you finding anything, Emma?"
I wasn't. There was a lot of iron in the environment, but nothing that suggested any structures. I was hoping that once we got closer I'd detect some sort of energy reading or something.
"Patience really isn't your virtue. Complicated tasks take time and I'm still scanning," I said.
"I've got something," Forge said, pointing. "I've got a sense for tools that can be worked." Forge's armor was anything but standard. She'd insisted on including her own and weapons and so I'd wound up installing a life-support system into what looked like an antiquated suit of knight’s armor.
"Lead on then," Anna said.
Forge led the way and the rest stepped into place behind her. I still wasn't detecting whatever her power-given senses were picking up. I had no doubt they were finding something. Abilities often included some sort of sensory component.
I didn't see what Forge was sensing, but I was detecting interesting traces in the environment. Organic components, long dead, but there once had been Bio-matter of some sort here. Mercury had been a living world.
"Do you always detect tools? That is fascinating," Mechos said, alongside Forge.
Was he flirting? Although he was with Minerva now I really wasn't surprised. For a useless coward Mechos managed to fall into a lot of beds. I thought at one time he and Anna might become a couple. Even she had seen the error of that.
"You got something I should be detecting?" Forge asked slyly.
Human mating rituals were disgusting.
"If you fuckers make me conceive the first baby on Mercury I'm going to be pissed," Ophelia said.
Ever since absorbing the powers of a fertility Goddess, accidental and unintentional pregnancy had kind of become a way of life for Ophelia. Too much flirtation in her general vicinity was sometimes enough.
"Down there," Forge said, taking us to the lip of a large crater. The bottom was shrouded in shadows and I detected ice. Even on Mercury it could form in places out of the sun.
"Let's go then," Anna said. The fine-grained sand made the descent hazardous and tricky. The clumsiness of the suits didn’t help, and the sand could play havoc if it got inside any of the mechanisms.
It was part-walk and part-slide to the bottom of the crater, suit lights triggering when we passed into the darkness and out of the harsh glare of the sun.
Stone was visible here, cracked and striated. There was still a distinct lack of any sort of technology. I ran my scanners over every feature of the ground and picked up nothing.
"This is what we get for taking the advice of a blacksmith, when what we needed was an engineer," I said.
"There is something here, I'm telling you," Forge insisted, as she looked around and finally pointed at an expanse of rock. "Behind there."
"One way to find out. Everyone keep back, I don't want to use the beam cutters or we might bring the whole thing down on us," Anna said.
The others stepped back as Anna raised her arm containing the projector cannon and green telekinetic force erupted, hitting the wall. Cracks appeared as she lifted the entire rock face away, lowering it gently to the ground in the distance.
Behind was smooth metal carved with some sort of writing. Perhaps Forge wasn't totally useless after all.
75
"Your sensors need an upgrade," Forge said.
Perhaps they did. I was detecting metal in the plate, but not the writing and nothing beyond. Were it not for the actual visual feed from the drone I inhabited, I wouldn't know those things were there at all.
It wasn't the first time I'd encountered something like this, The Sword of Light had been hidden beneath a tree that played havoc on both biological and electronic sensors in different ways.
"It is cloaked from my sensors," I said. Fortunately, I could work with what I had, translating the drone’s visual sensors into data I could analyze on Earth as I compared the glyphs against known languages and attempted to divine some sort of meaning.
"It isn't just a wall. This is a door," Forge said, her eyes closed. "I can’t ... I can't get anything more from it."
Anna gestured with her cannon and again a green glow erupted. The wall trembled, but nothing else.
"I was able to grab on for a moment, then it was like it slipped away from me. I can try blasting our way through," Anna said.
"While we are all very impressed by your ability to go straight to destructive means, do let the creative thinkers have their chance," I said.
"I can power up whatever systems there are. I can't tell what effect it will have though," Forge said.
Mechos said, "I can sense some sort of dormant circuitry. Giving it some power might help."
Great, a team of Earth's most powerful people and intelligent minds were being stopped dead in their tracks by a door.
There simply wasn't enough data for me to manage any sort of translation of the glyphs. It was a message that was supposed to be understood, and not by whatever electronic technology the Mercurians might have used. Perhaps this was Venusian script and this door was a trap for the invaders.
If so, either shooting or activating it was a risk. Still, without risk there was no reward and we'd come all this way to find something.
"I'm having no success translating the glyphs. If you want to blow it up you can, but I'd suggest we let the gruesome duo try it their way," I said.
"Do it," Anna said.
Forge nodded and reached out a hand. A pale white glow surrounded her for an instant, and a tendril of light extended to the door.
The glyphs began to glow, a dizzying array of color flickering across them. There was a pattern in the colors and in the timing, a language all its own and probably one different than that of the glyphs. Messages for multiple species then, perhaps others in the solar system that the Mercurians had some contact with.
"The colors are a language by itself. One I still lack the syntax to translate," I said.
"There are systems here. I can sense them, contact them. I can open the door, but I think some kinds of defenses are in place," Mechos said.
"So, shut them down," Anna said.
"There is more than one. From what I'm feeling, if this door is breached, there is one defense that destroys the complex beyond while another attacks those who forced the door. I think I can only shut down one," Mechos said. “Which one?”
Why was he always so useless? The answer was obvious, there was no point opening the door if the complex beyond was destroyed.
"We'll face whatever the door throws at us. Just make sure we have a prize waiting at the end of the fight," Anna said.
Mechos nodded and extended his hand, an aura of power around him pulsing red.
The door warped and twisted, metal flowing and shifting.
It transformed into two massive golems. The glyphs covered their bodies from head to toe, still running in a torrent of color.
One swung a fist at Mechos, who stumbled backward to hide behind Anna.
"I'll take the one on the right," Anna called over to Forge, aiming her projector cannon. A burst of electrical energy leapt forth to slam into the golem. It wasn't fazed by the elemental attack, lumbering forward to deliver a punch to Anna that sent her soaring backward in the low gravity.
Forge drew her sword. Her power involved upgrading her equipment and this blade showed it, a red pulsing glow surrounding it, and she dodged her golem’s attack while swinging low and hard towards its midsection. The blade rang as it hit metal and scraped a small incision in the metal flesh.
"Well, I'm impressed," Forge said.
The blow had crumpled Anna's armor and she was stripping out of it, form-fitting Bio-armor replacing it. It left Anna without any sort of life-support, and there was nothing in the way of breathable air. With Anna's accelerated healing, and being this close to Ophelia, it seemed to make her only a little winded.
Anna closed with th
is golem again and this time traded blow for blow. With her superhuman strength each punch she landed left dents in the metal form. The golem was fearsomely strong in its own right and where it hit Anna, her Bio-armor chipped away to reveal the flesh beneath.
Anna tried to speak but couldn't—an atmosphere really was useful for some things. I had enough of a connection to her physiology I could pick up the sub-vocals. I simulated her voice and put it through the comms.
"I'm not loving this fight, and I'm not loving that I'm about to be bare-assed naked on a hostile alien planet. Mechos or Emma, do something useful," Anna said.
It made me sorry I'd bothered really.
Forge's enhanced armor was holding up better, although there was some strangeness there. Her suit of armor was starting to display a few of the multicolored glyphs from the door.
76
Anna took another hit to the side, armor fracturing, and a pattern of glyphs appeared on her flesh. I was barely paying attention at this point, because I seemed to be under assault from Anna’s discarded suit of armor. There was a connection from her suit tracing back to one of my computing cores.
There was a touch of familiarity about what was happening. When I'd come under assault from Compulsion cores it was a lot like this. Enforced obedience, systems failing to respond to commands and instead beginning to answer to a new framework. Because it was something I had encountered in the past I had defenses to deal with it. The connection with that core was severed and I even went so far as to physically isolate it.
That was the right call. Its surface was showing a glowing glyph. If those markings were an attempt to communicate with aliens, it was an aggressive and hostile message, but more than likely they were simply a means of attack—a weapon. Physically imprinting them upon another surface spread some sort of contagion, and it might be that if they were understood it would have caused a similar form of mental contamination.
If this had been happening to a ship in orbit, it seemed likely in short order the vessel and crew would be quickly under control. If I wasn't careful, our entire civilization would be dominated through my connection to everything. While I wanted to place the core in a laboratory to study, I had to take a zero-tolerance approach. I'd done the same when it came to those with compulsion gifts who proved able to control me.
I flooded the core with superheated plasma. I burned it and the entire tower to the ground. It was one of my major processors—most of those were located in Aefwal—but it had to be done. I killed further inputs from Anna's armor, and once the computing core was dealt with I sent a kill signal through Ophelia's. The Bio-reactor in Anna's armor detonated, so the contagion hadn't reached that far yet.
I reoriented on the battle. Forge was doing better than Anna, which was strange given that Anna packed a lot more power. Still, the golem Forge was fighting was moving a good seventeen percent slower than Anna's and seemed to be losing motor control.
It had to be the choice of weapons, Anna was going bare-handed. Forge was working with a sword and the blade was defacing those glyphs. In Earth lore golems were controlled by a set of instructions within their mind, perhaps these were controlled by the glyphs on their flesh?
"Switch to a sword and deface the markings," I called to Anna as I moved to check on Mechos.
"You've connected with their systems. How are you feeling?" I asked him.
"Fine," Mechos said. It seemed to be true, yet also didn't. Although his flesh was showing no hints of the glyphs, the circuitry that was ran over his flesh was showing the same rainbow iridescence.
It was distributing fast. From Anna's armor and my own system I could see the rate of infection and either Mechos was especially vulnerable because of his nature, or some other process was underway with him.
Anna had forged herself two Bio-swords with her abilities and became a whirling dervish of destruction as she attacked her golem. The same wasn’t true of Forge who was slowing down, the reason clear. More glyphs were starting to adorn her armor. I checked on her bio-signature through the life-support system. Whatever was happening to the outside of her armor wasn't happening to her yet. I needed to make sure it didn't.
I only saw one way and I didn't have time to get her assent. I keyed a command to the faceplate of her armor and it hissed open, exposing Forge’s face to the Mercurian air. More importantly, to the touch of my drone. I lunged in and activated her teleport.
This was a refined procedure, I was teleporting the drone and Forge simultaneously—swapping each into the other’s set of armor. A gasping and wheezing Forge materialized in the new suit and I issued the kill command to my drone who slumped lifeless within Forge's armor.
"What are you doing?" Forge growled, once she had air in her lungs.
"Their touch is a sort of compulsion. Your armor was infected and for some reason I thought it worth saving your pathetic life," I said.
It also wasn't staying down. Forge's armor might be surrounding a corpse now, but that wasn't stopping it from moving, the glyphs spreading rapidly as it turned to face Anna who was just finishing off the first golem.
"You have to stop my armor—kill it,” Forge said urgently. “My equipment is specially prepared to be effective against Anna."
It wasn't a surprise, not really. Of course, the highest ranking member of the Scholarium had a means at hand to kill Anna.
I had a drone ready her energy rifle and delivered a series of targeted blasts at the junctures of the animated armor. It had no discernible effect. Anna grabbed the remains of the first golem and spun it, slamming it into the second. The force of the blow sent it spiraling upwards and out of the crater, soaring high in the low gravity. Perhaps enough to achieve escape velocity in this environment. That was one way to deal with the problem.
Forge's armor advanced forward and drove its sword into Anna's midsection where her Bio-armor had been chipped away. The blade buried itself deep, blood welling as the armor twisted the sword.
Anna should have healed from the blow almost instantly. The wound remained as the armor drew back to plunge the weapon in again. Mechos stepped forward, putting his hand on one of the armor’s glyphs, and light flared brilliantly before fading. The armor collapsed to the ground.
77
As soon as the armor was out of the way Ophelia was moving, her power projector arm aiming at Anna's midsection and a beam of radiant light erupting as she projected her healing powers.
Even with the most powerful healer on Earth focusing her powers it took several minutes for the wound to close. Anna glared at Forge the whole time. Had she been capable of speech I imagine Forge would have gotten an earful, but Anna was still without a suit. A few shards of Bio-armor clung to her flesh, but largely there was nothing protecting her. Only her own regenerative abilities were keeping massive cellular damage at bay.
Ophelia helped Anna to her feet when the abdominal wound had sealed, and Anna led the way through the now open doors.
Anna wasn't well. Even with that chest wound closed, several glyphs still glowed on her ribcage. The infection didn't seem to be spreading, but she was infected. Regardless, contaminated by alien software and mostly naked in a hostile atmosphere, she was still the biggest weapon we had at our disposal right now.
Lights came on as we passed through the doorway, harsh and overly bright. The walls were smooth metal, featureless. The corridor, angling downward, was broad enough that everyone could have walked side by side comfortably.
It ended in a large room that looked like nothing so much as a warehouse with bars of metal stacked high on shelves.
"Well this is ... still pretty boring. Aliens suck," Ophelia said.
Mechos frowned and raised his hand. Metal flowed and sealed the corridor we'd just come from behind us. The lights dimmed to a more comfortable level and there was a hiss of changing pressure and atmospheres.
Anna took a deep breath. "It doesn't smell very good, but that is oxygen."
It wasn't quite an Earth normal mix.
>
"While your cookie-fortified physiology might be able to handle a host of toxic gasses, I'm going to suggest the others keep their helmets on," I said.
"Agreed," Anna said with a grimace. "So what the hell did that thing do to me? I'm holding it off, but I'm burning a lot of power to do it."
Drawing too much on the Agate inside of her brought Anna considerable pain. If she was grimacing, she really must be using a lot of power.
"It is some kind of virus that takes over a host. It infected Forge’s armor and made its way through your armor back to Aefwal and one of my computing cores. I contained it there," I said.
"If I'm going to wind up naked and infected with an alien virus on an alien planet, there should have been a lot more fun ways for it to happen," Anna said.
"I'm so sorry I didn't pick alien worlds to visit based on their sleeping-around potential," I said. "Mechos, you seem to be able to interface with their systems. Give me a good reason not to detonate your suit."
"Because I saved Anna's life?" Mechos asked.
"Try better," Forge said.
Anna said, "It works for me. While on the subject, how about we talk about one of my subjects seeming to devise weapons just for the purpose of murdering their empress?"
"You gave me the Scholarium to watch over and protect, and you are the greatest single threat to it. Of course I spent time making sure I could hurt you," Forge said.
Anna gave her a flat look.
I said, "I have access to her social calendar and while I can assure you that nobody at all will miss her, I feel like I should remind you that Forge didn't actually betray you. Her armor got infected and acted on its own."
"If I made a move you'd know it," Forge said.
Anna considered her and nodded. "Fine, I want a sword though. You do good work."
Forge frowned. With her armor and weapons destroyed she would already be a long time making up for what had been taken from her today. Still, Forge had a basic grasp of what was necessary for her own survival. "Of course, Empress."
