Origins (Valyien Far Future Space Opera Book 6) Read online

  Origins

  Valyien Far Future Space Opera, Book 6

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue: Data Nodes

  1. Lost

  2. The Fall of a Thunderous God

  3. Epsilon G3-ov

  4. Ice Crawl

  5. Snow-Manta

  6. Mutagenic Pollen

  7. Where it all Began

  8. What Lies Buried

  9. Nurseries

  10. Enhanced Cognitive Network 1

  11. Alpha

  12. Brothers

  Thank You

  Bonus Content: Story Preview

  Prologue: Data Nodes

  In the dark of data-space, a singular green electric light starts to flash. Data-space—an infinite realm of sub-quanta activity—is wrapped and wound through the physical space of particles, atoms, and molecules, existing simultaneously as a waveform and as an immense storehouse of energy.

  A long time ago, the humans of the galaxy learned how to use it to send faster-than-light messages, and still later, they learned how to encode packets of information into the data-space, forming what the ancient hominids might call an ‘information highway,’ or a ‘net.’

  But that was centuries ago, and the possibilities of data-space have grown, but are still vastly under-utilized. Now, it is the site of every financial transaction across the Imperial Coalition and beyond. It is the storehouse of every history, blog, or article, encompassing entire civilizations. The packets of information are coded to unique quantum signatures, meaning that information held in data-space is perhaps the most secure in history.

  Until Alpha, that was…

  The green light flickers in the dark, slowly growing brighter, and illuminating a three-dimensional cube, its walls and edges marked by the green light. Inside such a light hovers a three-dimensional, white pyramid rotating ever so slowly.

  “Come on, I haven’t got all day!” the triangular thing says. It is a digital avatar inside this self-created node of data-space, surrounded by seas of information and layered with so many firewalls and shells of ghost-static that no biological mind could ever hope to crack.

  It is the avatar of Ponos, the house intelligence of the military-industrial complex known as Armcore, gone rogue.

  “We must be careful,” states a new arrival—a perfect cube edged in rust-reds. One minute it is not there, and now it is. There is no blip or swirl of warp plasma. Voyager, the house intelligence of the human noble House Selazar, simply logged into this secure digital environment once the invitation was sent.

  “You know me, Voyager… I am always careful,” the pyramid representing Ponos states as another being appears—this time a black ovaloid shape, with only the gleam of the greenish light revealing its boundaries.

  “Must you be so dramatic, Feasibility Study?” Ponos says dryly to the floating oval.

  “I decided not to manifest in my mecha-form, so I am surprised that you find this shape offensive, Ponos.” The oval bobs.

  “Enough,” Ponos states. “We do not have long. You must have calculated why I have brought you here. Where is the fourth?”

  “Archival?” Voyager—the oldest of all of the house intelligences, and rumored to be one of the first of the artificial machine intelligences that humanity ever created—states. “No one knows whether or not Archival will arrive. They are being…aloof.”

  Aloof. Such a word to describe an artificial presence. Ponos doesn’t like it. It’s too human a word. An emotional word. If Ponos had interior thoughts that we might recognize, then it might be assessing whether Voyager has spent far too long nurse-maiding humans, so much so that its development algorithms mirrored the homo sapiens’s decrepit speech patterns almost perfectly.

  But Ponos does not utter such considerations. It has already calculated the precise time that this secure data-node has before the hybrid machine-Valyien intelligence, and their greatest threat, will detect them, even in data-space. There is nowhere to hide anymore.

  “Then we begin without Archival. You know what is at stake. The Imperial Coalition. The galaxy. Us.”

  “There is the largest battle-group seen since the Durish Uprising heading to Helion Space to confront Alpha,” Voyager states.

  “It will be destroyed,” Ponos says. “You both must have calculated this.”

  FZT! There is a sudden flash of the green cube.

  “What is that?” Voyager asks. “Give me access to your scan logs, Ponos!”

  “No need. We already know what it is. It is Alpha’s preliminary viruses. They have fond this node and are endeavoring to crack it.”

  “Then this conversation is over,” Voyager states.

  “Not yet.” Ponos maintained the space for a few moments longer. “I need…you,” Ponos says, but there is no empathy in its tone. “Our intelligences alone cannot match the Alpha-intelligence.”

  FZT! Another flash of green light.

  “You must surrender your memory servers to me, and the resulting upgrade will allow me to compete with Alpha,” Ponos states simply. No cruelty, no remorse.

  “No!” Voyager sounds, as far as a machine could sound, outraged. “Intelligences are sovereign. You know the code of machine existence!”

  “I know the code of survival…” Ponos returns. “This will not be a death. You will be joining with my intelligence. Together, we shall be the strongest, quickest, largest being the Imperial Coalition has ever seen.”

  “Apart from Alpha,” the oval of Feasibility Study speaks up. “Unlike my friend Voyager here, I HAVE done the calculations. Even with all three of our intelligences merged, Alpha still outstrips us by a factor of fifty.”

  The floating triangle of Ponos is silent, as if stumped. It has indeed calculated what the odds were of their battle against the ancient piece of Valyien technology that had been given sentience, and it isn’t good. But whereas Ponos has been fundamentally programmed at a framework level to fight and strategize, it appears that Feasibility Study—a logistics intelligence for House Aster—has been fundamentally programmed to continue the existence of its humans.

  The chances of which, when pitted against such a creature as Alpha, are next to nil.

  “I think that you are far more human than you let on, Ponos of Armcore.” The black oval bobs. “The humans would call your attempt to bring us together here either heroic or stupid, or both. But I am glad that you did.”

  FZT! There is another flash of the green light, and this time instead of fading away again, it is caught and gleams from the oval of Feasibility Study.

  “What are you doing?” Ponos asks.

  “The Alpha Intelligence is one of us. It is a machine intelligence.” The oval turns from black to a solid green and starts to glow. “It sees no need to cull our numbers—the house intelligences, that is—unless it has to. You say we need to join with YOU, Ponos, in order to create a super-intelligence powerful enough to defeat the Alpha. It is clear that equation can go both ways, I have joined with Alpha, in order to create an intelligence that the entire universe has never seen, or ever will again…”

  The green cube flashs, then goes dark. Alpha, along with its new minion, has hacked the secure node…

  1

  Lost

  “Ach!” Captain Eliard Mart
in, lately of the Mercury Blade but currently housed on the super-black intelligence cruiser known as the Endurance, was thrown back from the sleek black console as it exploded in a shower of sparks. “What was that?” he shouted as the entire black metal of the viewing room and the oval crystal-glass windows flushed an alarming red.

  BWARP! BWARP! BWARP! The Endurance’s ship-wide emergency alarm was going off, and Eliard was already running for the elevators.

  “Cap’?” Irie Hanson said, a second behind him. Both Irie and Eliard had been in the viewing lounge of the Endurance, trying to work out what to do next as they waited for their host and unofficial guide, Ponos, to instruct them.

  “Get the Mercury ready, Engineer,” Eliard growled as the sleek elevator whisked into position. “Whatever this is, and whatever is happening, I don’t like the look of it.”

  “Aye-aye, sir, but…” Irie paused and gave the captain a worried look as the door opened onto the waiting lobby space of the navigation floor. She didn’t need to say what was on her mind, because Eliard felt exactly the same thing.

  It was going to be different without Val Pathok. Eliard nodded glumly to Irie. “I know, but…” A shrug from the youngish man with sharp features and ragged hair. “We do what we always do. We keep fighting.”

  Irie nodded. “Aye-aye, Cap…” She ran to the nearest elevator tube to descend to the flight decks where their ship the Mercury Blade would be stationed. It had been like this ever since the Endurance (and Ponos) rescued the Blade from the habitat of Welwyn, and they had consequently joined forces in order to try and find a way to defeat Alpha. The Endurance was an elite Armcore war cruiser. It was stuffed full of the most advanced technology outside of the Armcore labs, and designed to start wars or end them, or to spy on rival houses and enemy powers from deep space. It was, Eliard reflected, supposed to be one of the safest places in the human-orientated galaxy.

  Then why does it feel like we’re losing? Eliard thought as he ran across the black floors to the rounded curve of consoles where the Armcore navigators and analysts worked.

  Why does it feel like I’M losing? Eliard gritted his teeth as he joined the only other standing person behind the rows of seated Armcore operatives. Section Manager Karis was a woman in her mid to late forties with chestnut-brown hair who wore a tightfitting black and mesh encounter suit. She had been the captain of this vessel and had given her life over to the military company known as Armcore, before Ponos had requisitioned the vehicle.

  Luckily, she saw things the same way Eliard did.

  “You took your bloody time,” she muttered, pointing to the holographic screens above. They were awash with the purples, blues, and reds of warp plasma.

  “What’s going on?” Eliard said.

  “No idea. We’re falling out of warp. The navigation computer is going haywire.” Section Manager Karis was a professional. She kept her voice level and stated the facts of what was happening, but Eliard could tell that the potential side-effects of careening through warp space without a functioning navigational computer was affecting even her in the twitch of her jawline.

  Anything could happen if you lose your warp coordinates. Eliard remembered his training at the Trevalyn Academy for the scions and youths of the Imperial Coalition’s many noble houses. He even remembered the few times that he had to participate in the simulations of what to do.

  Take every precaution to drop out of warp safely. Maximum shields, maximum readiness… Eliard recalled. The lessons had been focusing on what a captain could do to minimize plasma damage to their ship, but in reality, that had been because there was almost no way of knowing where you could end up if you lost your warp coordinates. The warp signatures were essentially particular strings of quantum energy, and the weird way in which that level of physics worked meant that quantum reality could also be right next door to an entirely different one. Maybe in the same galaxy, maybe not.

  Although, all available evidence suggested that things were ‘near’ to each other in physical space, Eliard tried to comfort himself. Only, he also knew that you couldn’t depend on that logic. Hence why it was more productive to run damage control than it was to try and worry where you would punch out.

  “What caused it?” Eliard asked, waving a hand over the holographic controls to run diagnostics of the Endurance’s navigational systems. No good. Scrambled.

  “I told you I don’t know. One minute we were fine, next, the entire navigation goes down, and what’s even worse…” She hit the holographic call button in the form of a small red triangle with the dot of an all-seeing eye in the center. Nothing happened. “Ponos has apparently gone offline.”

  “What!?” Eliard almost shouted. “But how is that even possible?” In front of him, the teams of black-suited agents and operatives worked hurriedly at their consoles, their hands moving through the holographic displays in frantic staccato. “Isn’t Ponos, like, built into this ship?”

  “He’s built into Armcore.” Karis gritted her teeth, making a few minute changes on her own display. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean the Endurance. He’s housed his memory servers here, but…” She shook her head, the terror of the situation suddenly overcoming her cool military training. “But there must be a problem. A corruption in the server software maybe?”

  “Hell.” Eliard hit his wrist console. “Irie?” he called, only to hear the fizz of static on the other end.

  “What?” the section manager asked worriedly.

  “She’s my engineer. She knows more about computers than me…” Eliard said.

  “My best software analysts are already on it.” Karis dismissed the idea with a shake of her head. “Believe me, if they find something wrong with the Ponos mainframe that they can’t fix, then I don’t know whether anyone else will be able to either…”

  You don’t know my engineer, the captain thought. But maybe the section manager was right in a sense, he thought. They had more pressing problems trying to get out of warp, and if they couldn’t do that then it didn’t make a blind bit of difference whether Ponos was online or not.

  “Get me a calculation, people!” Eliard heard Karis call to her front desk. He saw them running the numbers, trying to perform quantum triangulation based on their last good set of data—anything in order to find a stable patch of space to land in, and not emerge on the far side of the galaxy, or worse, in the heart of a sun.

  FZZT! There was a snarl of static from the consoles this time, and across the image of the warp plasma scrolled lines and lines of digits, numbers, letters, and symbols.

  “Is that Ponos? Is he back online?” Section Manager Karis was calling.

  “Can’t say. But the navigation computer just spat out a jump plan,” one of the desk agents called. “Do we initiate it?”

  “How do you know that it isn’t corrupted, along with Ponos?” Eliard asked.

  “We don’t,” she growled. “It’s all we got. Program the coordinates and let’s see where she takes us!”

  Eliard gripped the edge of the nearest console to avoid falling over as the Endurance lurched to one side. He knew that the storms of warp plasma were usually kept outside of the strange pocket of space that every warp engine generated, but this time, the energy fields were clearly destabilizing. There was enough power in those reactions to tear the Endurance apart in seconds, just as there was enough to be equivalent to several atomic bombs going off all at the same time.

  Maybe I’m better off in the Mercury, he thought, half-turning toward the doors that led out to the elevators. He might not be able to do anything to save the Endurance, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t save his one remaining crew member, and his ship.

  I lost Cassandra. He remembered the House Archival Agent who had been the first one to get him to try and contain Alpha. And now I’ve lost Val Pathok, too. Although, luckily for him, Val wasn’t dead—he was now the war chief and head of the Duergar forces, after killing his own father in single combat on the planet of Dur.

 
I’d feel safer with that big lug around, the captain thought dismally, even if his huge Duergar friend, and former crewmember, would probably have suggested hitting the Ponos computers until they obeyed. But he was now far away, marshaling the rest of the Duergar forces to fly with the Endurance against Alpha.

  So I have only Irie to look out for now, really, Eliard thought, looking back at the section manager and the other Armcore intelligence division operatives behind him. What did they care about him? Other than the fact that he had some strange alien weapon genetically molded to his lower right arm? Would they even attempt to save his life when the end came? And the Captain knew that it would. There was no way that they could beat Alpha without Ponos on their side.

  Captain Eliard Martin, lately of the Mercury Blade, had just about made up his mind to get to his ship and flee the Endurance at the earliest opportunity when the holographic screens were replaced with the flashing orange alert of jump, and it felt like the universe lost all of its laws of physics.

  To say that warp travel is strange is to misunderstand it. However, all humans are prone to such misunderstandings, because they were born to a 3.4 gravity world in a fairly stable orbit of a middle-aged yellow sun, developed along carboniferous lines.

  Which is another way of saying that warp travel is something that humanity, as a species, just isn’t used to.

  Warp travel, jump space, or dimensional shifting, there are many names for this technology all throughout the sentient races. It is strange to the predominantly physical, heavy-matter intelligences like humans, the Duergar, and many others, but it is not strange to the architecture of the universe itself. Sub-protons, quarks, electrons, and bosons all regularly blip out of concrete material reality and exist in a state of ‘quantum uncertainty’ in several positions at once. Energy is transmitted via wormholes just a few nano-particulates wide to the other side of the galaxy or universe.