Valyien Boxed Set 3 Read online

  “We could try the nano-treatment again?” Karis suggested, moving back on her swivel chair to the medical bay where small pullout pumps were pre-loaded with nanobots of various programming parameters.

  “What’s the use?” Eliard grunted in pain as he slid his legs to the floor and tried to stand. Ow. His head thudded, and his limbs ached. This was getting worse, not better.

  “You’re probably right, but still…” Karis thumped the small plunger-syringe on the end of the black-plastic pump tubing into the exposed meat of Eliard’s leg.

  “Argh! Warn me first, will you?” Eliard hopped back, and almost fell before steadying himself on the table again.

  “Suck it up, Martin,” Karis muttered under her breath as she checked her wrist computer pensively. “And we have infiltration of nano-recovery bots…” she murmured. From where Eliard stood, he could see the small display on the woman’s wrist tracking a cloud of green which he guessed must be the miniscule robots entering his bloodstream. The man swallowed nervously, feeling oddly nauseous at the idea.

  It wasn’t that Eliard was against the current trend in using nano-delivered gene technology. He was the scion of House Martin, after all, and he’d had his fair share of genetic treatments to correct slight changes in his organs or hormones, or anything, really. But it was just that he had never had much of it in the past. The Martins were the sort of ‘traditional’ family that didn’t spend a lot of time investing in genetic treatment and research, and his father Lord General Martin had been adamant that ‘a man needs to stand on his own two feet!’ Which Eliard had always thought was a little strange, given that nano-delivered gene therapy could ensure that those feet were stable, strong, and able to hold said man up.

  But it was what it was, and after his prolonged period of youthful abstinence through his childhood, as soon as Eliard had fled to the Traders’ Belt worlds he had never had the money for gene therapies. If he had got injured in a run—most of which weren’t even remotely legal—then he and his crew had to heal the hard way. They had to scrounge credits together for chemical medications, or the rare capsule-cures with nanobots impregnated into sugar solution, with predesigned tasks such as bone remanufacture or white-blood cell production.

  Now, though, what he felt as the Endurance’s tiny robots swept through his system wasn’t a relief that he had access to the world’s most advanced medical technology, but a creeping sickness instead. It was creepy, being able to virtually turn off the aging clock, he thought.

  “Drat. It’s happening again,” Karis sighed as she showed Eliard her wrist. The rivulets of blipping green nano-creatures were coagulating into small clumps as if herded, pressing together, and then one by one, they all winked out of existence.

  “It’s the Q’Lot virus from that Device.” Karis nodded to it. “It sees the nanobots as a threat, and it’s hunting them down in your system.”

  “Wonderful,” Eliard groaned. “I knew that I felt sick.” If only the virus would do what it’s actually supposed to and actually heal me, then I wouldn’t care what it does inside my bloodstream, he thought irritably, before sighing.

  “Worth a shot. No time to fret, though.” The section manager stood with her athletic, graceful ease and turned to the overhead screens.

  Meson Readings: Variable +/- 30%. Steady Increase of +12% Every Hour.

  “That’s a pretty wild fluctuation. It might just settle down, you know…” Eliard attempted.

  “Huh.” The section manager did not seem impressed. “Come on, we’d better see how that mechanic of yours is doing on Ponos.”

  “Engineer.” The diminutive and rather irate form of Irie Hanson looked up from where she sat surrounded by cables and the flat lozenges of memory servers. “Chief engineer, actually. That is what it means when you’re the only one in charge of a boat’s total engine, mechanical, electrical, and stars-damned sensing equipment.” She glared at the section manager after she had swept into what was left of the command and control deck, with the limping Eliard at her side.

  “My apologies,” Karis drawled. Eliard didn’t understand the hostility between the two—other than that Irie was a vagabond ex-mecha engineer who had been living on the edge of space for the past few years and had never even sat through one official mechanical physics exam.

  She was still the best engineer that he’d ever seen, though. And right now, given that almost the entire engineering team of the Endurance had died in the crash, she was the best un-qualified person to do pretty much everything to keep them alive.

  Right now, however, that ‘everything’ entailed trying to reboot the rogue Armcore intelligence called Ponos, who sprawled opposite her like a drunkard at a two-bit space port. Well, if that unconscious drunkard was wearing a mecha-suit of svelte black and looked like a murderous death-android, Eliard thought.

  This was Ponos’s second body that Eliard and Irie knew about. The first had been a vehicular type of contraption, designed to only trundle around the central axis of Armcore Prime, dispensing its analysis and strategic wisdom primarily to the Senior of Armcore entire, Dane Tomas.

  But since Ponos had discovered that it was about to be replaced by the new Valyien-Armcore hybrid Alpha, it had gone rogue, commandeering this Intelligence Division war cruiser under the ever-annoyed Section Manager Karis and refashioning its own body into an eerily humanoid giant.

  Already, Ponos had managed to ‘eat’ or steal at least two other house intelligences’ memory servers thanks to Eliard and the Mercury Blade, and by any normal sort of logic should be approaching the most intelligent being in the Galaxy. The verdict was out on the question of whether the intelligence of House Archival—a noble house obsessed with the cataloguing and recording of information—would be brighter, were it not for Alpha, or the crash of the Endurance here on Epsilon G3-ov, which had obliterated half of Ponos’s stolen memory servers.

  But we goddam need you now, more than ever. Eliard gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to kick the metal humanoid. It would only hurt his leg even more, anyway, he reasoned. They were on a barely-registered ice planet about to suffer a cataclysmic explosion at any moment, and the only operational ship they had was the Mercury Blade, capable of stacking thirty or forty people at the very most.

  Out of a surviving crew of 92. Eliard was a captain himself, so he knew that difficult decisions would have to be taken to preserve the mission or the crew, but he did not relish Karis’s duty. Which fifty crewmembers would she doom to die here? Either from the biting cold that was eating up their reserve power or from the monstrous snow mantas, or the explosion and resulting earth tremors, earthquakes, and hurricane-level blizzards that followed…

  “Okay. We’re almost there…” Irie stated. “I think I’ve managed to isolate the safety protocols. That means it shouldn’t go into full murder-death-bot any time soon.”

  “Again,” Eliard added. As the first time that they had done this, Ponos had launched into his fundamental BIOS programming, which was all Armcore. All military tactics and efficient killing strategies.

  “I’ll handle him if he does,” Karis said quickly, picking up the handheld meson rifle that Irie had stacked by one of the control desks. She scowled at Eliard. “I don’t want you using that thing of yours again and taking out its other arm!”

  “I don’t think I could even if I had to.” Eliard shrugged, feeling the unresponsive weight of the alien device on his arm. Which is another reason to wake the brute up, he thought. It was Ponos who had worked to graft it onto him. Eliard needed to know why the thing had stopped working.

  “Stand back,” Karis ordered, and the captain was only too keen to, but instead he stepped to one side of his chief engineer, ready to pull her back with his own good hand if Ponos showed any sign of aggression.

  “Three… Two…” Irie hit one of the virtual buttons that flickered above her wrist computer, which was connected by thin micro-filament data cables to the nearest batch of memory servers, which were chain-linked to the n
ext, and the next, and the next until the cables finally spliced into one massive data conduit that plunged into the back of Ponos’s elongated head.

  TZZRK! The metal body convulsed, its heavy metal limbs shaking and clanging on the floor.

  “Crap!” Irie jumped as Eliard grabbed her shoulder, but the intelligence didn’t move.

  “Gave me the scare of my life,” Irie grumbled.

  “Is it dead? Why won’t it wake up?” Karis grimly sighted down the meson rifle.

  “It just needs a push…” Irie said as she hit the virtual button once again.

  TZZRK! Another heavy convulsion, and this time when it subsided, there wasn’t silence but a high-pitched whining noise.

  “What the… If you’ve fried my machine intelligence, mechanic…” Karis was saying angrily.

  “Chief engineer. I keep telling you!” Irie hit the juice again, and this time, the body started to twitch and shake as the power surged through its neglected sensors.

  “A vibration hum,” Eliard diagnosed that high-pitched whine, nodding towards the Armcore intelligence’s leg wobbling back and forth across the metal floor. “Are you sure, Irie…” Eliard was halfway through saying as the vibration suddenly stopped and Ponos sat bolt upright.

  Ponos had an elongated head like a spheroid cone, ending in the multi-lens single red eye that it had kept from its previous incarnation.

  “Get to your battle stations,” the machine intelligence said with all the presumed authority of a creature that had been ranked second only to CEO and Senior Dane Tomas himself. “Alpha is already coming.”

  2

  What Alpha Wants

  “What do you mean, Alpha is coming!” Eliard shouted, panic spreading through him. The Valyien thing had burned a whole planet. It had already killed thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands even.

  Ponos’s strange head with its single, unblinking camera eye turned to focus on him. “Captain Martin, I may be operating at a fraction of the available intelligence that I once enjoyed, but I still have access to data-space, near-space, and satellite-relay communications. This is not a guess. Or an estimate. Or a calculation.” Ponos moved, with just the barest judder running down through its limbs to tower over all of them.

  “The Alpha machine has defeated the assembled Coalition fleet, and its own extensive access to data-space has already informed it of our presence here, in the place where it all started. My own access to data-space has told me that it has defeated the Noble Houses and is on route to our location as we speak. We have minutes.”

  Ponos held up its one good hand—the other arm had been shot off by Eliard’s Device just a few hours earlier, when Ponos had tried to eliminate them. In the center of the giant metal palm, a port opened, and a red light blinked. Eliard flinched, as he knew from past experience that it could also be a gun port when it wanted to be, but instead of a laser blast, there was a projected image all in glittering red light.

  “Is that…Was that…a battle?” Eliard looked at the picture. It looked like space, and it looked as though there were lots of whizzing objects here and there, but it didn’t look like a battle. Great swathes of energy burst across the lines of vessels, and shockwaves rippled through their formations that tore apart their hulls and snapped their engines from their bodies.

  “No, Captain Martin, this was not a battle. This was a massacre.” Ponos’s voice was steady, machine-like, and callous.

  “What navigational array have I got?” Karis was shouting at who was left of the senior technicians and officers piled into the already crowded control deck, having to stumble and jump over the various memory servers that Irie had hooked up.

  Despite the terror racing through his limbs, Eliard was impressed by the way that the section manager’s training had kicked in. She didn’t shout or prevaricate as he felt like doing, but instead called all senior staff to the command and control deck and issued orders for everyone else to suit up.

  Armcore training, he thought. It was better even than his own training at the distant and long-ago Trevalyn Academy.

  Now, I guess I just run on fumes and luck, he thought as he tried to sidle out of the way of the busy Armcore operatives. Everyone here bore the signs and marks of the crash and the near-freezing conditions of Epsilon G3-ov. The captain saw bandage-wrapped arms, legs, and heads. It seemed that either others had their own reasons to turn down the recovery nanobots or their use had been rationed only to the critically injured. What was worse, though, was the stares that he had seen on their beaten-down and beaten-up faces, along with their chapped lips and borderline frostbitten ears.

  These men and women are exhausted, and near the end of their endurance, he knew. With a shiver of dread, he wondered how long they would be able to hold out against any sort of sustained attack.

  In scant moments, the section manager had appraised them of the situation—the Ponos-calculated arrival of the most dangerous machine intelligence in known space, and that it would probably be angry.

  “We got near-range,” called a technician from his desk, where only half of the lights were lit.

  “That’s good enough for atmospheric tracking.” Karis nodded. Eliard understood, along with everyone else in the room, what that meant. That they would be able to use what armaments they still had left to target and fire on the approaching ship.

  But we can’t win, he kept thinking. Alpha is too fast. Too strong. Too much in a league so far beyond the capabilities of one torn in half war cruiser.

  So, think, Eliard! he commanded himself. What do you do? If you can’t win, what do you do? He tried to recall every lesson that his old father had taught him, and even every lesson that the Trevalyn had tried to beat into him, many years ago.

  There is always a way to win. Both trainings basically reiterated the same thing. That the power of the noble houses was immeasurable because it was deemed pure and therefore it would always be possible to win.

  Which was a load of space junk, really. Eliard shook his head. He had given up such archaic thinking a long time ago, and instead had learned every valuable life lesson from the life-and-death choices, the near-misses and skin-of—the-teeth escapades of the non-aligned worlds. Out there, you had to make your own luck, he knew. You had to find a way to turn a situation to your advantage, and sometimes you even had to admit when you were beaten.

  Eliard had never been very good at that last part. Maybe it was some hangover from his noble house days, some sort of insane pride that led him believe that he, Eliard Martin, could always find a way.

  “Captain?” Irie was at his side, still ostensibly feeding in more data-streams from the recovered memory servers into Ponos.

  He knew what she was going to say almost before she said it.

  “We need to think about getting out of here,” she muttered under her breath. “We still have the Mercury Blade…”

  “No.” Eliard shook his head. Shocked by the vehemence of his own sudden beliefs.

  What do you do when you can’t win? You run, every second of his Traders’ Belt years screamed at him. Run so you can build a better scam next time. Run so that you can save whatever you’ve managed to keep—his crew, always his crew, and the Mercury—and run so that you get to survive for one more cycle.

  “No,” Eliard repeated. “We can’t leave them.” He looked over at his chief engineer. “Ninety-two.”

  “What?” Irie was frowning at him as though he had gone mad. He wondered if he had.

  “Ninety-two crewmembers here, who’ve all gone through the same things as us. Ninety-two reasons why we can’t run.”

  He was aware that he was having half of an argument with himself, as Irie’s look of confusion only deepened. “I didn’t say run and abandon them, Cap’!” She shook her head. “I was thinking that we could load the Mercury Blade with all the injured, even with the tincan here and that uptight section manager, and get out of here. Now. You know that the Mercury’s still got a working warp engine. We can be on the
other side of Coalition space in a heartbeat.”

  “But the Mercury will only hold thirty, forty people tops. And I don’t know how the life support will cope with that many,” Eliard said.

  How do you choose which fifty crewmembers to die? He remembered his earlier conundrum.

  “No, Captain. We move all that’s left out to the other section of the Endurance, across the tundra.” Irie shook her head. “This Alpha thing might be a total alien, or half-alien, at least, but it’s still a machine intelligence, right? Why would it destroy a load of lesser-ranking Armcore crew who pose it no harm? It’s illogical.”

  “Witnesses, Chief Engineer Hanson,” Ponos smoothly interrupted them, even though their conversation had been one of tense whispers.

  I forget that Ponos must have machine senses, Eliard thought.

  “What does a hybrid intelligence care about witnesses?” Irie turned on the thing that she had brought back into life. “Who is it trying to impress?”

  “Not witnesses to its slaughter, I’m afraid,” Ponos said. “But witnesses to its abortive beginnings.” The gaze of the giant mecha-intelligence swept across the room and the singular camera-eye lit up one object still sitting on one of the smashed-open control desks, lighting it up like a baleful red spotlight.

  The head of the ECN.

  The object that Ponos had asked them to consider was a metal head called the ECN, or Enhanced Cognitive Network—or Experimental Crap-ass Nothing, as Eliard was thinking of it currently. It was not, thankfully, the entire creation, since Eliard had managed to rip off the android’s head down there in the sunken ziggurat as it had been trying to drag Section Manager Karis to the Valyien warp gate.

  It was a perfectly proportioned human face, but perhaps 25% larger in every respect, and without any of the fine enlivening details that made a face come to life. Here were no aging lines, no laughter lines, and no wrinkles. Only the flat space where the eyes should be, the nose, ears, and mouth. It looked like one of those prehistoric Old Earth statues from classical times, apart from the fact that it was made of a bronzed poly-metal, and from its neck there exploded a mess of data cables and servo-systems.