Alpha Rises Read online

  “I know this filth, or something very like it, anyway,” Val muttered in disgust. “Q’Lot.”

  “Q’Lot?” El stammered. They were a myth, weren’t they? He had heard the stories, of course. All space pirates and smugglers spread stories of the fantastical and strange sights that they had seen out there on the edges of Coalition space. Of worlds made entirely of crystal. Of stellar gases that seemed to palpate and follow an intruder, filling the crew with strange nightmares and visions until they fled back to safer regions of space.

  But the Q’Lot deserved their own special category of space legend. That there was an intelligent race out there, who moved on ships of gleaming, crystalline-corral, emitting an eerie singing that could drive hardened sailors mad.

  Ridiculous, clearly, El had always thought. He was a man who was used to hard facts. He trusted his blaster, he trusted his eye and his judgement, and he trusted his ship. The legends of the Q’Lot had grown over the centuries, changing from deep-space sightings to kidnappings and disappearances. Eventually, the Q’Lot were blamed and judged complicit for every strange abandonment of outpost colonies or disappearance of a deep-space trawler. Scouting vessels into regions of space that they were rumored to inhabit never returned, or returned empty at least.

  But space is dangerous, the captain had always reasoned. Especially deep space. The further the Coalition pushed itself into the unexplored universe, the more it found things that defied its previous models of thought. Mega-suns that shouldn’t be able to exist without going supernova. Nebulae fields made of strange and noble gases that the best Coalition scientists had never dreamed possible. Double and triple wormhole systems, locked in endless cannibalism. Anything could happen to a deep-space scout or trawler, from mutiny to madness, to virus or malfunction.

  Or at least, that was what the captain had always thought.

  “Are you telling me now that you believe in the Q’Lot?” Eliard shook his head as he walked around the room. Another exhibit just had a selection of small puffball-like globules, gently floating in their container. Orange, pale cream and white, and dotted with nubby extrusions.

  “I’m telling you that the Duergar know about the Q’Lot,” Val said dryly. “You know that we were an uplifted race by the Valyien.”

  “Ah yes, another ancient mystery.” Eliard rolled his eyes. “Use one to explain the other, right?” Eliard did, of course, believe in the Valyien. There were any number of sacred sites that he had been to, and could return to, to see their ruins. Vast pyramids and ziggurats, odd monoliths of seemingly random worlds and moons. It was from this race that humanity had salvaged most of their greatest achievements, after all. And then there was Alpha.

  “The Valyien raised the Duergar from our humble beginnings to be slaves, and to be warriors,” Val said emphatically. “To fight the Q’Lot.”

  “Why doesn’t everyone know this, then?” Eliard asked stubbornly. It wasn’t like the Duergar were an unknown race. There were plenty of mercenaries like Val Pathok in Coalition space.

  “Maybe because our ancestors’ time in slavery is a great source of shame for us,” Val said. “And besides which, we were not allowed to record our histories back then. What we know is passed down from storyteller to storyteller.”

  “Right…” Eliard turned to look at something like a glove, only it was molded like a massive crab’s claw and dotted with strange organic sensors like eyes.

  “The Valyien were in a cosmic war against the Q’Lot, and I guess that the Q’Lot won, because the Valyien are now dead,” Val announced.

  “But I thought you Duergar overthrew your masters?” El asked doubtfully, tapping the glass of the crab-claw. Did one of the sensor-eyes move?

  “We did,” Val said with a glimmer of apparent happiness. “The Valyien were on their last legs from the war, and then they fled known space.”

  “Outstanding. So, this is all Q’Lot technology, is it? That Armcore has been hiding from everyone for the past few hundred years? Is that what you are suggesting?”

  “I don’t know. I am saying this is like the Q’Lot. The stories of my people tell of them moving like sea creatures and wearing shells like land crabs that cannot be broken with axe or mace,” Val recounted.

  “Wow. You never thought to just use a blaster?” El said, before Cassandra hissed at them.

  “Boys! Quit it, we’ve got company!” She ducked behind a very large plate of chitin that could have been a shield, or a type of clothing for all Eliard knew, just as there was a flash of red light turning to green in the room beyond the glass wall.

  “Great.” Eliard rolled across the floor, and Val crouched as low as he could underneath the crab claw.

  “Intruders! They must be here somewhere!” Eliard heard the shout of an Armcore captain. From his crouch, he could see a team of heavily armed soldiers with bulky armor rushing into the laboratory on the other side, their own rifles raised as they scanned the ceilings.

  The ceiling which we just blasted a hole through. El’s eyes flicked to the still-dangling hatchway. Could he get to it in time before…

  “Look, over there!”

  No.

  “Command override, laboratory Zed-four,” the captain shouted and the glass door hissed open, just as both Cassandra and Val moved.

  The Archival agent had been flattened against the wall beside the door, and now she swung out to deliver an elbow to the face of the captain, and Eliard winced as he heard the audible crack. The man fell back on his fellows as Gunner Pathok let rip with his heavy rifle against the glass wall.

  F-THAP! F-THAP! F-THAP! The Duergar must have set it to repeating shot rather than cannon shot as he had used against the drones, and he swept his inhumanly large rifle in an arc against the opposing room. The glass shattered in an instant, turning white with cracks and exploding outwards with purple flames. The sound of glass bottles smashing and computers exploding could be heard as Eliard gracefully swept to his feet, raising his blaster.

  But it seemed that the Armcore soldiers—those that had survived, anyway—had jumped, rolled, and fallen back to the doorway, out into the corridor, as Val laid down covering fire.

  We can’t get trapped in here. The captain ducked from the traded shots with the soldiers, seeing a distant glass door that led to the warren of laboratories on the other side. “Come on!” he shouted, blasting the door into smithereens as he ran, covering the room on the far side into another empty laboratory, waiting for Cassandra to run through.

  “Val!” he hissed, as the Duergar snarled at his enemy. He started to stalk backwards, firing as he went.

  “Here.” At the last moment, Val ripped one of his improvised, home-made ‘flash-bangs’ and hurled it at the Armcore guards, before turning and running with the captain, following hot on his heels. They felt the explosion even two rooms away as they knocked over laboratory tables and spilled equipment in their desperate escape.

  “Well, if they don’t realize they have visitors yet…” Eliard groaned.

  “Captain! Val! Come on…this way.” It was Cassandra, in the hallway outside and holding open a service lift. Sliding across the floor, they slammed into the lift and its doors shut as they shot downwards, leaving the smoke and burning research and development suite behind them.

  Back on board the Mercury Blade, Irie Hanson’s day was about to get a whole lot worse. Not that it could have been much worse already, the engineer might have thought, as she was waist deep in the service hatch under the cargo bay, rummaging through her toolkit for the portable arc welder.

  One of the external plates had buckled from the impact between the ship and Armcore Prime, and that meant it was putting undue stress on the interior hull. Another blow like that, and there could be a crack, or a leak, or any manner of terrifying, blood-curdling mishaps inside the Blade.

  So far, she had managed to add in mechanical braces to the interior hull, hoping that would at least hold off the worst of the damage when it came.

  When it came
. The mechanic was under no illusions, from her time spent working under Captain Martin, that it wouldn’t come.

  “And now we’re a sitting duck on the military home station of the Coalition. Just wonderful,” she hissed, folding herself back into the crawlspace, flipping her mask and firing up the welder. White light and flaring heat blazed in the dark as she fixed the supports to the brace. Would it hold? It had to.

  BWARP! The ship’s alarms went off unexpectedly.

  “Dammit!” Turning off the welder, she checked her wrist computer, which was lined up to the Mercury’s mainframe, quickly checking the updates.

  Incoming Signals. Defense Analysis: 2 Scout Drones, approaching rapidly.

  “Agh!” Irie screamed in frustration. Had she done enough down here? Not as much as she would have liked, that was for sure. Not as much as her training would dictate, either, but an engineer with her experience knew that sometimes you only had time to do what was absolutely necessary. Screw the safety protocols, she just had to hope that the weld had time to set before they took another hit.

  Struggling out of the service hatch, she raced up the stairs to the cockpit, still with her welder’s visor flipped open, and started punching numbers. On the screens in front of her appeared an image of two sleek black drones with extended arms approaching the Mercury Blade. Had they seen them yet? Had they discovered the alien vessel hitching a ride on the station?

  The longer-range scans revealed that there was still a lot of noise and activity going on around the crippled gas-transporter ship, which had taken out a section of the drone satellite field. The general chatter that the ship’s arrays were picking up was off the chart. There had to be a lot of very worried engineers and pilots out there trying to work out what had happened, and why.

  But would it be enough chaos to prevent the discovery of an intruding spaceship? One that was on Armcore’s most wanted list?

  Irie flipped open the weapons system. One of the bottom-mounted railguns was out of action, jammed under the belly where the Mercury met the station’s skin. But the other one was free, and a simple diagnostic check revealed that it was operational. She also had the nose-laser, which was pointed in the right direction for one of the Armcore scouts. Irie held her breath, waiting. She knew that if she locked on to it, it would set off a weapons alarm. She had to time this just right—

  The large torpedo-like shape up ahead swept low over the hull, its red and orange light flaring and washing over the hull below. It paused over a section, turned slightly, and Irie saw it extend its mechanical claws to grab at a bit of wreckage from the gas-transporter or the Mercury’s crash, and fold it into its belly compartment—it wasn’t an option to throw it away, as that would only cause more problems for the drone-satellite field up there.

  Maybe it won’t see me. She turned to see the other one approaching at right angles, performing the same operation.

  Irie’s hand hovered over the firing stick. The drone scouts got to within fifty meters, forty, thirty—

  BWARP! Incoming Scan! The Mercury’s computer bleeped, as the nearer of the scout drones rose in the air and turned on its axis to point at her direction.

  “Stars!” Irie swore and punched the firing button. Light flared from under the front cockpit windows as the nose laser fired, and a beam of angry red light shot forward to hit the first scout drone. With a flash of flame, the thing was blown spiraling backwards into space. But now she had the other to think of—

  Irie’s other hand activated the controls for the freed railgun, and a targeting window slid out on an overlay as the second scout dodged quickly to one side.

  “Come on, come on…” Her targeting window flashed green, and she fired, but the Armcore scout was too quick, firing its directional rockets to spin out of the way and start to move backwards, doubtless relaying its coordinates to the defense grid.

  Green. Fire! She pulled the trigger and felt the shudder through the ship as bolts of purple and white light shot in quick succession out into the sky. Half missed, but one was enough to tear off the thing’s carapace, spilling its electronic guts into space.

  “But it’s not going to be enough, is it?” Irie tried hailing the captain.

  Transmission Denied!

  “Hell!” she shouted. Armcore must have had some kind of transmission damper for any messages that did not have their own passcodes. She might be able to hack a passcode like she had done on Mela, but she didn’t have time. Right now, the scout’s diagnostic systems would have triggered the alerts. What should she do?

  I could wait for the captain and the others, but I might be dead by the time they come back. She ground her teeth, widening her defense scan. Nothing coming for her on the horizon yet, but that could change any minute.

  “But what if they are almost out?” She hesitated. Her scans did not reveal any sign of the captain or the others already on the surface of the station. That meant they had to still be inside. They could be captured already, for all she knew. They could be dead.

  Incoming Signals. Defense Analysis: 1 Scout Drone, approaching spinward, 3 Killer Drones, approaching spinward. 1 Battle-hub, approaching north axis.

  “Oh, great.” The Mercury could handle the scout drone, the engineer knew. It might even be able to handle the pounding that the heavier military killer drones could dish out…if none of their missiles managed to hit the damaged section of the hull. But a battle-hub as well? Battle-hubs were really another type of drone, but they were circular and larger rather than torpedo-shaped, and able to deploy a range of lasers, missiles, and jamming technologies in multiple directions. Perfect for when Armcore couldn’t deploy a warship, and mostly bought by Coalition home worlds as sentinels to guard the shipping lanes.

  They would also be enough of a threat to cause a serious headache to the Mercury Blade, even when fully operational.

  “Captain, come on!” she begged the console, but there was no reply.

  Irie had no choice. She hit the propulsion controls and started firing up the booster rockets. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into the cockpit. “But if I’m dead and the Mercury is blown to bits, then there is definitely no way that you will ever get off this station.”

  BWARP! Multiple Incoming Scans! Weapons Systems Detected!

  Irie just had to hope that she was doing the right thing as she hit the rockets, and the ship juddered and started to rise into the air.

  BOOM! The ship shuddered as something hit its side—thankfully not its already damaged lower hull. The Mercury Blade had risen several feet from the decks but was snagged on something. We must have caught some of the antennas and wires in our crash. Irie grimaced, upping the power to the boosters.

  The Mercury Blade shuddered again, straining against whatever was holding it, and then, with a wrench, it was free and swooping over the metal terrain, with its doom following fast behind.

  “Shh!” Cassandra warned them as she crept slowly ahead. On either side of her sat large ceramic pipes, each larger than even Val Pathok, and on the other side of that were teams of Armcore guards searching for them.

  They had made it down as far as they could toward the center of the Armcore station, and then the agent had advised them to climb out of the service elevator and continue their path through the tunnels and access hatches as far as they could go.

  “We should be underneath the server vents now,” she whispered. “Which means that Ponos will be close. The vents are used to keep his mainframe cool.”

  “Whatever,” El said. “Just get us there and I’ll do the talking.”

  “Well, we seem to have run into a slight problem…” She sounded tense, the captain thought. But then again, she always sounded tense. He hazarded a look around the ceramic pipes to see that they had emerged into a wide room with metal gridwork floors, open at the far end, looking out onto…a pillar of light.

  Only it wasn’t a pillar of solid light, but a core of multiple glittering stations. Flashing cables pulsed a soothing blue, alongside the sud
den flares of red and orange brilliance as screen after screen brightened and faded. It was as if they were looking into the gleaming heart of Armcore itself. This core was a column that extended past their level and was in the center of an eight-sided tube, with banks and banks of black-bodied memory units up and down the walls, higher than many buildings.

  “Is that what I think it is?” El whispered.

  “The mainframe. Ponos resides there, I’m sure of it,” Cassandra whispered.

  “Maybe we won’t need to talk to it,” Val growled behind them both, patting his heavy rifle.

  The sudden, dangerous notion filled the captain. Was it even possible? Could they destroy the Armcore mainframe? What would happen? Would Armcore itself be destroyed? With all of its regional offices and district space stations and out-on-patrol fleets? The thought was simultaneously too delicious and too monumental for the captain to get his head around. Could they be the ones to bring down Armcore?

  “It won’t work,” Cassandra hissed quickly. “You see there?” She nodded to where there were dark and ugly-looking gun emplacements swiveling up and down the insides of the tower, trained on the gallery openings like their own. “And besides which, Armcore is so vast, they’ll just rebuild. They’re everywhere.”

  “It’d be a great achievement, though.” Eliard’s eyes narrowed and a gleam came into them. “Imagine that. The biggest heist in history!”

  “Eliard, no.” Cassandra looked at him in consternation. “You’ll get us all killed, and then Alpha will take over the universe and we’ll be just as well-off as the Duergar were as slaves to the Valyien.”

  She had a point, the captain was forced to consider. “I suppose for this to be a heist, you have to actually steal something,” he muttered.