Eternal Enemy Read online

  “Great,” Patch grumbled.

  “All we gotta do is stay ahead of them,” Anders said, before murmuring to Moriarty. “How far is the Gene Seer facility?”

  “My deep-field registers high radiation, as well as field and electro-wave energy, at five-point-two klicks, sir. Enough to be a permanent installation.”

  “On me.” Anders nodded as another flare shot into the air behind them, but this time, it arched high over the forest canopy, turning into a whine as it crossed through the evening skies. It released a plume of crimson, flaring light backward…

  And the whine of motors.

  “Oh, frack it!” Anders swore.

  “What!? What is it?” Dalia was the first to respond, as the whining sound of motors revealed themselves to be small, silver shapes falling into the forest around them.

  “They’ve dispatched seeker drones! We need to find cover. Move!” Anders shouted, suddenly bounding into a run over the humped earth and roots. The ground ahead started to fall in a steep decline, with trees erratically clutching at the embankments and exposed concrete blocks.

  The gulley, Anders thought, seeing how the ground swept down to a wide, curving sweep of a valley floor—perhaps even a dried-up riverbed, with its far side a much steeper cliff, mounded with vines and creepers.

  And, at the far end of the gulley, there appeared to be an arched tunnel opening.

  Anders’s feet skidded and slipped as he ran, with the other three breaking into a run behind him as the whine of the seeker drones whizzed and spat through the forest behind.

  “They’ll broadcast our location when they find us,” Anders gasped as he had to kick out into a jump to avoid tripping, then back into a slide that scattered earth and leaves and the lower layer of gravel beneath it.

  Gravel? a part of Anders’s mind thought.

  He could hear the grunts and gasps of the others as they followed him down the slope, with Dalia losing her usual cat-like grace as she tried to keep the shivering, barely-conscious Jake on his feet. It was too slow a process, Anders realized as his boots crunched onto the ground, spraying more of the gravel and hitting something solid, half-exposed at the bottom of the gulley.

  A long and thin ribbon of metal, a line that was one of a pair, perfectly equidistant to each other at the gulley’s floor.

  A tramway? Anders thought, just as he heard a shout of alarm and the sudden whirr of one of the seeker drones as it crested the rise above them.

  Dammit! Anders snarled, seeing the small lozenge of steel on its tiny thrusters soar across the roof of the gulley before performing a wide turn into the gulley toward him.

  “Weapon ready!” Anders snapped, one knee hitting the ground as he raised his heavy rifle and took aim at the thing. If he could destroy it before it managed to broadcast their position…

  PHZT! Anders fired the rifle, for a perfect bead of crimson-purple light to shoot outward at the screaming slab of metal, striking it near-perfectly, and causing it to petal into a floret of flames and burning metal.

  But no sooner had Anders shot down one over the heads of the scrambling, lurching Dalia and Jake when another two appeared, clearly drawn by the explosion of the first.

  Anders saw Jake look up sharply in fear, and Dalia hissed, “Breathe, Jake, breathe!”

  “They have your location, sir,” Moriarty informed him, which was a tad too late Anders thought, as he saw one of the racing drones spin in the air, releasing two needles of micro-missiles. It seemed that these little drones weren’t just tasked for surveillance but offense, too.

  “Frack!” Anders threw himself to one side as one of the micro-missiles slammed home onto the rails he had been kneeling over. He kept on rolling, pushing himself up into a leap as the second one exploded beside him.

  Warning! Suit Impact! Right Leg Plate -15%

  Patch had managed to slide to the gulley floor and was now copying Anders, firing a salvo of shots at the drones as they whizzed past. It took two salvos of flaring meson fire before Patch managed to catch one of the drones, sending its flaming, impaired body to the forest floor. The other had fled into a wide, high barrel-roll before arcing down out of the sky, straight for them, and releasing its micro-missiles as it did so.

  “Into the tunnel!” Anders called, already taking aim to fire bursts up at it as—

  FLASH!

  Another of the crimson flares erupted over their position, high in the night sky and slowly dropping, casting them all into a deep, ruddy, hellish glow.

  They’ve isolated us, Anders thought as the ground in front of him exploded with one of the micro-missiles, while he saw the flicker in the air as the other swept straight past him.

  WHAM! It exploded a meter out from Dalia and Jake after Jake had extended his palm straight at it. Anders saw a brief moment of the flames unfurling over an invisible dome like a field-generated shield in front of Jake and Dalia, without one tongue of fire reaching them.

  Keep it together, Jake, please! Anders thought in panic as he took aim to shoot the last drone out of the sky.

  Not that it helped, because that was when the hunting Throne Marines started bombarding their location…

  “Into the tunnel! Get under cover!” Anders shouted, pushing Patch ahead of him as the gulley rise blew outwards with the thunderous strike of some ballista or launcher.

  Anders heard the whine through the air just before there was another, corresponding plume of dirt, tree, gravel, and rock as the opposing cliff of the gulley blew apart with a world-shaking crack.

  Dalia and Jake were the slowest, and Anders leapt forward as stone and dirt fell all around him to put one arm under Jake’s other and turn back to haul them toward the tunnel.

  PHOOOM! The ground shook and rose behind them, sending them all barreling into the dirt as the wave of heat blew over all of them.

  They scrambled, Anders seizing Jake and hauling him to his feet as the Marines relied on battlefield weapons to do their work for them.

  The arched tunnel entrance was just a little way ahead of them, and Anders pushed with every fiber of his being.

  “Incoming, sir!” Moriarty said, a little unhelpfully in Anders’s opinion.

  Anders heard the whine overhead, and he, Dalia, and Jake jumped.

  They fell into darkness just as the ground shook, and fire and rock flew over them all. Anders lost his grip on Jake as he rolled and was thrown deeper into the tunnel, the ground shaking and groaning all around him. Dust was everywhere, completely covering his suit visor in a thick layer. The noise of the explosion was abruptly cancelled by the suit’s sensors, plunging Anders into the dark.

  “Moriarty, report!” Anders breathed. He was finally still, and only the lights of his suit revealed that he, and the others, were in a wide, semi-circular tunnel.

  “Everyone alright?” Anders breathed. He could feel some aches and bruises about him, but he didn’t think that anything had been broken.

  “Okay,” Dalia returned.

  “Hmph,” groaned Jake.

  “Ugh. Alive. Just.” Patch’s voice was the most annoyed of all.

  “Sir? Your report is as follows: you are in a tunnel with one end collapsed, after the Throne Marines dropped a tactical explosive on your location,” Moriarty informed him.

  3

  The Improved Cread

  “Imbeciles!” hissed Commander-General Cread, although there was no one to bear the brunt of his ire. The attendant Throne Marine physicians had already beat a hasty retreat from the medical bay that housed quite possibly the second most powerful man under the entire Reach of the Golden Throne.

  Well, Cread was one of three such people directly under the Eternal Empress, including the other commander-general, Darius, and Architrex Vasad Aug’Osa, the Primarch of the Gene Seers. The Herald of the Eternal Empress didn’t count of course, because that strange being was only a computer program—albeit a very physical one.

  Of the three men at the heart of humanity’s empire, it was perhaps Cread
who was known to be the most vengeful, the most vindictive, and the most likely to take out any of his frustrations—personal or professional—on anyone around him. Throne loyal or not.

  Which was why the physicians and healers of the Throne Marines had vanished from the medical facility at the top of a tower in Port Helena, Old Earth, and instead had left the man to wake up inside his own iso-unit.

  I’ll have their jobs. And their heads… Cread was thinking—a little groggily, it had to be said—as he realized that the misty view in front of him was actually due to the heavy crystal-glass plate of the coffin-like box that they had put him in, before abandoning him here like a piece of meat.

  Cowards. That was the problem with the Old Earth Marines, Cread believed. They were all cowards. They didn’t have the rigors of interstellar warfare and conflict and policing to toughen them. They weren’t sent on three-year-long training expeditions to the ice worlds of Beta-Lagini, for instance, or the dangerous mineral-capture of the molten fire worlds of Sapho.

  Yes, he did have to admit that the Throne Marines stationed here in the ‘secret sector’ of the Eternal Empress’s empire had to put up with a guerilla insurgency—those would-be Marines who called themselves the Outcasts, led by some ancient man-robot thing ‘Commander Malady,’ and there were of course the indigenous human populations who had never seemed to learn what was good for them. But none of that was a challenge for a true Marine.

  Which is why they let Corsigon and his heretic crew escape, Cread thought sourly, struggling to wake up his limbs in the medical sarcophagus. His arms and legs felt heavy after the crash, and he presumed that they had flooded his system with tranquilizers.

  Idiots, imbeciles, and cowards... Cread settled for. That about summed up the Old Earth lot. But perhaps the one good thing was that he was here now. And he could start to put things right.

  Like the LOHIU. Cread managed a very small, private grin. He allowed himself this small gesture of self-satisfaction, at least. The LOHIU—or Local Object Human Interface Unit, as it was more accurately known—was perhaps the very reason why Old Earth was kept on as a throne colony at all. A place to house her. It.

  A psychic human-A.I. interface, like a living ansible, Cread thought with a little shiver of...not awe, but possibility.

  The empress had been powerful even before the LOHIU of course, but after it had been created, the Eternal Empress could telegraph her power throughout all of the seven sectors of space that made up the Reach of the Throne.

  And now that the Red Judge worlds, and the Proximian Republic, and every damn exo-race has risen up in revolt against her? Cread wondered.

  “You know, Commander-General? I never especially took you for a lazy person,” murmured a voice in the room, earning a startled hiss of outrage—and embarrassment—from the commander-general.

  It was him. Of course it was. Who else?

  “Open,” Cread said, breathing a heavy sigh through his nose as the crystal-plate screen started to rise, revealing the rest of the plush, silver-and-white walls of the Port Helena medical bay.

  The bay itself was actually made of different ‘lounges’ with each one shaped vaguely into a large wedge, different bays just like his own sitting in each one. His was the only one occupied, and at which buttons and lights glimmered and gleamed. Each medical iso-bed had automated controls that would be able to deliver surgical injections, implements, lasers, or narrow-band field frequencies to any part of the body, providing a range of treatments, whether genetic, chemical, or radionic—depending on what was required.

  And, of course, the only other gleaming thing in the room stood almost directly in front of his medical bay.

  A small person, little more than a youth with perfectly golden skin, golden curls of hair, and a small peaked cap, jaunty and golden. He wore a sleeveless jerkin, also made of golden thread and leather, as well as short-legged trousers...the same color as the rest of him.

  It was the Herald of the Empress, who looked entirely physical and living—even panting slightly with agitated emotions—unless of course you knew his secret. Which Commander-General Cread did.

  The herald was a simulated intelligence, just like Orestes that commanded and controlled the Port Helena, and the countless other almost-sentient A.I.s that the Golden Throne allowed to exist.

  To be fair, he is a one-of-a-kind computer program, Cread momentarily considered. He could be materialized anywhere under the Reach of the Throne to deliver the Eternal Empress’s proclamations. Cread had always assumed that he was a holographic emission, and one that had such a powerful range, presumably thanks to the LOHIU itself.

  “Lazy enough to come all the way to this backwater to deal with the rogues,” Cread answered the herald angrily, seizing the edges of the medical unit to pull himself up. He felt a little weak, and when he tried to swing one leg over the lip of the bay, he found it curiously unresponsive.

  “Gutter-trash!” Cread cursed the work of whatever doctor had administered the tranquilizers and anti-inflammatories. He knew that he had been in a crash. His military intelligence Reaver ship had been just about to apprehend Lieutenant Corsigon, the Ilythian spy, the Voider dissident, and the escaped PK test subject, when that test subject had used his powers to seize the Reaver out of the air and smash into the waiting hills and forests of humanity’s home world.

  He was lucky to be alive, and Cread knew some idiot was going to pipe that up to him at any moment, or some such vapid statement like that.

  “Try turning it off and on again,” the demure voice of the herald returned. It sounded, if anything, like a snigger.

  What under the stars is that demonic little thing talking about? Cread shook his head and tried again. Drugs or no, he wasn’t going to let his own body resist him!

  Clank.

  His leg did indeed move and swing over the lip of the medical iso-unit, but when it hit the edge, it did so with a heavy thud. A clang like metal hitting metal.

  What?

  Cread looked down, seeing the white-and-gold-striped service suit that the doctors had placed him in—basically a large boiler type suit with popper buttons down the middle of the upper section, and with a light set of trousers for the lower. He even had those ridiculous paper-plastic shoes that the patients were supposed to wear to protect their feet.

  Idiots. Cread thought of the ineptitude of the throne doctors here on Old Earth and swung the other leg out of the medical unit to the floor beside the first. That leg had a lot more life in it, and he guessed that this one had been more severely damaged in the crash.

  Cread didn’t remember the crash. All he remembered was the instrumentation of his already-damaged Reaver suddenly glitching and going haywire as J-14’s wave of psychic power hit it, and then blackness. He presumed that meant that the crash had been enough to destroy his beloved ship.

  “Or you could try some oil?” the herald suggested smugly.

  “Shut up with your nonsense.” Cread batted back at the thing. He knew that he shouldn’t really talk to the mouthpiece of the Eternal Empress this way, but over the years, they had developed a mutually hateful relationship…

  Cread pulled himself into a sitting position, and then pushed himself upward, to hear a dull, mechanical hum…

  Coming from his still-sleepy leg.

  What!?

  Apprehension, dread, and realization all arrived in Cread’s mind at the same time, like a bunch of unruly party guests.

  “No. They didn’t…” he murmured as he leaned down, a little slowly, reaching for the stupid little paper-plastic shoe on the foot of the leg that still felt half-asleep. The commander-general whipped the medical wrapper off…

  …to reveal a smooth, metal foot, cast in silver steel, aluminum, and gold.

  Of bleeding course there would be gold in there. Cread glowered at the metal foot. The Eternal Empress was obsessed with the stuff, the color and the material. She had taken his flesh and recreated it with gold. Her gold.

  The man fe
lt violated in a way that decades and decades of service for the maddened almost-corpse of the Eternal Empress hadn’t made him feel before. Not until now, anyway.

  It was as if the empress had now not only claimed his service and his loyalty but his very flesh.

  Cread muttered a not very nice word.

  “You know, if I told her gloriousness you said that, I’m sure she would have your body parts sent to the different corners of the galaxy,” the herald purred in a very self-congratulatory voice.

  Cread said something else to the herald about what part of the galaxy it could go to, which was also not very nice.

  “Oh, Cread,” the herald laughed in mock sympathy. It was a sarcastic, sharp type of sympathy. “Mortals. At the end of the day, I can understand why the Eternal Empress wishes to leave the world of physical wants and needs behind. Despite all of her technology, all of the throne’s protections and advances, the flesh is always just so transitory, isn’t it?”

  Cread just growled at the gloating, glorified calculator as he pulled the bottom hem of his medical trousers up to reveal that there was indeed more gold-looking metal, alongside at least a little bit of gun-metal grays in the cogs and coiled tendons that shaped his now-metal calf.

  “Why did they take my leg!?” he hissed. “They could have just used gene therapy to regrow my old one!?” It wasn’t the fact that he had lost a leg in the crash—or had to lose a leg, Cread neither knew nor cared when it had happened. He was one of the premier citizens of the Golden Throne, and therefore, he was used to regular treatments of gene therapies and serums, to increase his vitality, stamina, longevity, muscle and mass ratios… His eyes were new, as were his liver and his pancreas. Anything, in short, could be regrown and made better now that humanity had the biological arts of the Gene Seers.