Alpha Rises Read online

  Past the metal-scape of the first container, and through a gulf in the belt and curving down the thin corridor between two more. It was a labyrinth in here, and the captain knew that without his own tracking computer, he might never have been able to remember all the twists and turns to his destination.

  He checked his wrist console. How much time had elapsed? Two and a half minutes. That meant that he had five and a half left to get there, prime the device, and get back. Or another two out, and about four minutes to get back. I’m going too slow! He increased the burn on his suit’s propulsion systems, flashing past the steel walls like a shooting star.

  He felt a moment of apprehension as a shape filled his peripheral vision, and Farlow managed to turn in mid-flight as one of his own X3 drones flashed past, narrowly missing him.

  What the… He kept on barreling forward as he saw it turn in its flight and come back around for another attack run. The thing had no armaments, thankfully, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t crush him against one of these containers. It was one of two hacked spy drones he had sent out. Alpha must have put them on guard for just such an action as this.

  The drone’s rear rockets blossomed as it shot toward him, growing larger and larger by the second. Farlow managed to roll to one side once more, but this time, the suit’s sensors along his collar flashed a warning amber as they were washed with the propulsion burn.

  Farlow was spinning, almost out of control, until he steadied himself against one of the nearest container walls. Where did it go? The hacked drone had swept around in a wide arc and was returning for another run. He would have to time this perfectly—

  The thing was drawing closer, closer—

  Now! Farlow fired his rockets and swept up just in time. The drone smashed into the container below him. There was a blossom of orange light and a flash as the delicate interior components burst into the vacuum of space. Farlow was hurled up, head over heels, spinning fast with the opposite container walls rolling around and around. How many G’s am I pulling? he managed to think as he felt his head throb with pressure.

  WHAM! He hit another container flat on his back, and this time, he really did feel the pain. His vision went black for a moment, and then he was blinking. He saw that there were droplets of blood along the inside of his visor. He must have hit his head against his own helmet when he was thrown against the metal. While such a minor injury meant nothing to the man, the captain knew that inside a suit it could mean terrible things indeed. Blood could get into his eyes, obscuring his vision, or it could work its way down into the rubber seals.

  His hands moved to his wrist console—noticing as he did so that the suit’s damage lights on his own collar were now flashing an alert red. 3.5 minutes. That meant thirty seconds to get there.

  But hopefully, I won’t run into any more drones on the way out, he thought. He might have saved himself an extra thirty seconds if he was lucky.

  The only problem being, there was nothing about the last few days that indicated that Captain Farlow was on a lucky streak.

  Not wasting any more time, Farlow flew through the last avenues of the container field, turning his head this way and that to shake the blood that pooled on his cheek as well as search for any more signs of interceptors. Nothing. He didn’t know whether he should be glad or feel even more wary of that. This Alpha is smart, he told himself in understatement. Much smarter than he was. Wouldn’t it have already planned for him to do this?

  But using one of our own warp cores to try and blow the thing up? The captain would never have thought of that. In a weird way, Merik’s protocol was almost a good idea, in the sense that it was the last thing that any sane captain or pilot would do—seriously cripple their own ship in an attempt to stop the enemy.

  But there was no turning back now. The captain saw a gap in the container belt around Sebopol up ahead. It was dark at first, dark compared to the container field, but then his eyes adjusted, and he saw the drifts of mauve and deep crimson gases, like there was a nebula surrounding the planet itself.

  “Think, man!” he barked at himself, pausing for a moment even though the seconds were ticking away. He fired his propulsion rockets, then turned as he did so to skim the surface of the shell. “I’ll try to hide my signal against this metal,” he whispered to himself, carefully jumping and gliding along the last of the floating trash containers as he looked down at his target.

  “Dear gods…”

  There it was. The thing. His brain wanted to call it Alpha, but he also knew that he had no way of figuring out if what he was seeing was actually the hybrid intelligence itself, or whether it was a tool or a weapon.

  “What in the starry heavens is it building?” he murmured.

  The device looked bigger than it had just a scant few hours ago on the drone’s surveillance cameras. It now appeared to be a vast humpback of chitinous shell, plates of blue and verdigris metal alloys, the likes of which Farlow had never seen. But extending from it were two prongs of metal like a tuning fork. These were as yet un-skinned, and the captain could see different globules and vaguely ox-like units, all bolted and connected on a central frame support of shining silver metal. Flurries of smaller, purpose-built drones washed up and down these exposed arms, moving between the supports and attaching themselves like a hungry swarm to various parts of the craft.

  It is a craft, the captain thought. Almost as large as an Armcore war cruiser. But he knew that it might indeed get bigger still. Crackles of static electricity and washes of light played over its form as strange manufacturing processes were used. This was like nothing the captain had ever seen, or even heard of. He knew instantly that in the Coalition, there would be scores of scientists and engineers who would devour each other to get a look at the processes happening here.

  So this is what a ship looks like, being designed and made by an artificial intelligence, he thought, turning towards a part of the shell that seemed the least busy and firing his rockets.

  How much time? Ten seconds to get there. He wasn’t going to make it, he thought. Unless he added the time that he had taken out to deal with the hacked drone. That had been, what, thirty seconds?

  Forty seconds. He burned his propulsion rockets for a few seconds more, before he clicked them off and just let his frictionless acceleration carry him forward. He couldn’t afford for his rocket signal to be detected and for him to be waylaid on his mission to deliver this deadly gift.

  Looking at the primed warp core strapped his chest, he thought that it looked like a tiny, miniscule thing compared to the behemoth in front of him. Can one little warp core take out something as big as an Armcore war cruiser? He thought it might, though. He hoped that it might.

  At least it would slow the thing down. And besides which, this thing had tried to disable his ship. It had hacked his drones, almost crippled his ship, endangered his crew, and then had attacked him with his own drone! There was an unwritten adage that he lived by, a famous maxim that Armcore shared with its recruits.

  “Give more than you get.” It was a simple phrase, and Captain Farlow had had it drilled into himself as well as drilled it into generations of recruits underneath him. That was the entire secret to a successful life in Armcore. Give more than you get. Give more loyalty and service to the company than you expect to receive, and you will be rewarded. Give your brothers and sisters in arms more than they expect in terms of service and bravery and support, and you will forge links of steel that will protect you through any adversity. And last of all, when in battle, give the enemy more hell than you are given. If you can do that, then you will win. That is all that you have to do. Give more than you get.

  As Alpha’s ship dominated the tiny human’s view, Captain Farlow found his willpower wavering just slightly. It was a maxim that he had believed all his adult life, but where had it gotten him?

  Twenty seconds left, and then he would have to turn around and high-tail it out of here if he was to make it back to the ship in time to escape.
r />   He had given every enemy that he’d ever faced more hell than they had given him. He had risen through the ranks because of it, but now, where was he? He had given his colleagues, his brother and sister soldiers, more than he got. Even accepting this dangerous mission on their behalf. And where was he now? Could he guarantee that Merik wouldn’t endanger Lupik and Reus without him there?

  Captain Farlow had given Armcore everything. More than it had ever given him, and for that, he had been demoted. Almost as low as he could go. Four-star general all the way to a captain-without-license on a tiny frontier mission, with a crew that could only barely function as a unit. How was that being rewarded?

  His jaw tightened slightly as the blue-green walls rushed up toward him. He saw movement. There, along one of the golden-edge seams of shell, moved an object, and another, and another. Small drones glided with rounded backs, firing tiny positional rockets, and with dangling mechanoid legs. Were they coming for him?

  No, he appeared to be safe, but watched as they settled along the edge of the shell and seemed to anchor themselves to it. Are they sensors? Mobile armor plating? he wondered in awe, turning his attention back to the nearest wall that he was heading for.

  Ten seconds.

  Suddenly, something was different about the wall and the seam in the metalloid shell that he was heading for. Had it changed color? Was it moving?

  It was moving.

  What he had thought was just refracting colors was actually shifting plates, as the shell directly before him started to crack and open outwards, welcoming him—

  “No!” He reached for the warp core, just as a fiercely bright light, brighter than any sun, dazzled and blinded him. “Argh!” Even forcing his eyes shut, it was still blinding. He shook his head and thumped his heavy gauntlets down to the primed warp device on his chest. He tried to detach it, even though the light was driving into his brain, hurting him, making his head throb. He couldn’t see anything that he was doing as he fumbled. I’ll have to set off the device now, and here. He tried to recall where he had put the transmitter. Attached to my utility belt.

  But when he reached for it, it was gone. Where was it? What happened? He couldn’t see anything as he reached for his other hip, but his glove hit something else. Something that shouldn’t be there.

  It was one of the scuttling drones. It was on his suit, and he hadn’t felt it. What was it doing? He tried to bat it off, but it was stubbornly attached and wouldn’t move at all.

  This time, he did feel the other thing that landed on his flailing arm. And the others congregating on his legs. They were all over him. The robot drone-like things. What were they doing? He was being pushed and pulled, drawn somewhere—

  The brilliant, dazzling light washed over him like an embrace, and suddenly the light changed, became muted. He was inside the thing, he was sure of it.

  “Captain Farlow,” a mechanical voice greeted him.

  13

  Cornered

  It was hard work, shuffling on hands and feet through the tunnels of Armcore Prime. It was also made harder by the fact that El was trying to keep his blaster pointed ahead as well as shuffle awkwardly in his encounter suit. So far, they had seen nothing more dangerous than a colony of space weevils, which had slithered their chitinous-like bodies away in fluid motion as soon as they had turned the corner.

  They were following the Archival schematics that resided in Cassandra’s wrist computer, taking obscure turns at intersections that seemed to make no sense to the captain, but he presumed that she was following some sort of pattern already planned out by the House Archival analysts. I just hope that they are as clever as everyone says they are… He gritted his teeth. The captain’s knees hurt, his back hurt, and he would have given anything to be able to stand up and stretch out. He spared a thought for the poor Duergar bringing up the rear behind them. Val must be scraping the walls on either side of them with his massive frame.

  “Cass, we’ve been crawling for ages. How far are we from the mainframe now?” he snapped.

  “Not far, I promise. We’re almost above the server vents,” the agent’s voice echoed behind him.

  “‘Server vents. That sounds just exhilarating,” El mumbled, before his grumbles were cut off by the sudden flash of a red light. “Oh, crap.”

  “What is it?” Cassandra asked.

  “Uh… I think we’re going to have company very soon,” El paused, transfixed by a little red blinking light just over his head. A second ago, there had been nothing there, but as soon as he had crossed its path, it had started flashing wildly. Internal sensors.

  “Change of plan. We get to the nearest hatchway and lose ourselves in the station.” The captain looked ahead. The tunnel seemed to branch into a T-junction up ahead. There had to be a way out of up there.

  “What? But the place is crawling with soldiers!”

  “That was an internal sensor! They’ll know that we’re here!” he said, all previous pains and aches forgotten as he started to crawl with ever more dedication.

  It was already too late, as from behind them he could hear something humming closer. “Val? What is it?” The captain couldn’t see what it was. He couldn’t get to it.

  “A light coming… Drone!” the Duergar grumbled, and they could hear him heaving one way and another as he tried to get a look at what was approaching.

  “Move it!” El hissed, moving faster—

  —as a red warning light flared to life at the end of the T-junction, and a sleek, hovering torpedo-shaped body floated into view. It was made of a shiny black metal, and the red sweeping light flashed into El’s eyes, blinding him for a moment as he raised his blaster pistol. The thing had extended a fringe of small mechanical arms around its nosecone, each one whirring with buzzing blades.

  FZAP! El fired, and he saw the thing recoil and shake, but it was still moving forward, the blade-like attachments on its arms starting to whirr and whine. It had an ugly burn of metal along its nose where his laser had hit.

  F-THOOOM! There was a dull boom that shook the corridor from behind them as Val fired his heavy rifle.

  El fired again as the drone lunged closer. This time, he managed to shear off two of the arms in a flower of sparks. The thing wasn’t dying, though, and continued to advance, now only a couple of meters away.

  “Captain! Down!” Val was roaring, and El knew instinctively what his man was intending to do. He hit the deck as one of the drone’s blades hissed past his descending face, just as the whole world lit up a dizzying purple-white.

  F-THOOOM! Val fired his heavy rifle at the approaching drone, and it was impossible that he could miss it. It was thrown back with an electronic squeal of dying components, and the wall of flame that was produced swept over the captain and Cassandra’s prone bodies.

  “Argh.” El coughed, managing to turn over onto his back when the smoke had cleared. His encounter suit was scorched, and his ragged hair was singed and wild-looking. “While I’m thankful you did that,” he groaned, “I can’t say that it was the best experience I have ever had…”

  “Better burned than dead,” Val grumbled, patting the dust and soot from his own clothes.

  But now there were other problems. The way ahead was blocked by the smoldering wreckage of the drone. “I can move the one behind us,” Val growled, crabbing back to where he had dispatched the previously deadly machine. He shoved it with his boot until he had kicked it into a side passage. “Here.” The Duergar disappeared down one tunnel fork, and Cassandra and El followed him, to see that he was hovering over a square hatch.

  “Where does this go?” El whispered, his ears still ringing from the explosion.

  “I don’t know,” Cassandra said in horror, raising her wrist to show him the schematics that House Archival had sent them. There was nothing there—one of the blank voids in the prints. “This is one of the areas that House Archival couldn’t get any details on. Look here. It just says ‘R and D’.”

  No wonder Archival couldn’
t pull the secrets out of Armcore Research and Development, El thought. That would probably be one of the most highly-protected secrets that the entire organization had.

  “We haven’t got a choice. It’s either through there or wait for the next load of Mr. Slice-and-Dice drones to come find us,” he said, then lowered his blaster to the square hatch and fired.

  Val jumped down into the room first, landing in a crouch and raising the impossibly large rifle to cover the space. Eliard had hoped that the sudden appearance of a very large, very angry Duergar would give most humans a pause for thought.

  As it turned out, there weren’t any Armcore staff or soldiers in the room directly below them anyway.

  “Clear,” Val growled. Eliard jumped down after him, then Cassandra. They found themselves in a pristine white and chrome room, with a glass wall covering one side and a few glass doors leading out.

  “It’s some kind of laboratory,” El stated.

  “Or a museum,” Cassandra corrected, nodding to the nearest of the glass cabinets that sat here and there. Each one contained an object that was both familiar and strange. The nearest looked to be some kind of weapon—it had a handle and a trigger mounted under its body—but that body didn’t even look like metal. It looked like the cerulean chitin of some strange sea creature, formed into a flaring tube. As Cassandra walked nearer to it, she saw that the wide ‘mouth’ or ‘barrel’ of the thing was frilled with red and pink fronds like lichen or corral, and she was sure that she saw them sway gently.

  “What is this stuff?” Eliard asked, in both vague awe and disgust. He had turned to look at what was undoubtedly a visor, but it had no apparent glass or crystal mask. Its fluting sides reminded him of an ancient earth helmet. Again, it was made out of the same coruscated, chitinous material, but this time, a burnished brass and verdigris, like a seashell.