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  “You’ve got scanners, Alpha.” Eliard swallowed as he completed the second stage of the gamble. “Take a look at the Endurance’s armaments. Where are they pointed?”

  He already knew where he had told Section Manager Karis to point them. Not up at the sky towards the Alpha vessel, but across the ice tundra to where the Armcore Research Station was. Where he was. I really hope that none of those technicians decide to snap and go trigger-happy right about now, he thought.

  “They couldn’t give a damn about me,” Eliard lied. “They were commandeered by Ponos and forced into disobeying Armcore directives. Then Ponos forced them to crash-land here. They want nothing more than to blow me out of the sky.”

  “Preposterous,” Alpha stated.

  “Not quite, little brother,” rose another metallic voice from behind Eliard, as a large, spheroid-oval head with a singular, baleful red light of a camera appeared. It was Ponos, partially ascending the small steps from the Mercury’s hold up to the cockpit and peering over Eliard’s shoulder at the cockpit sensor array. “As unnecessary as it is, this human speaks the truth.”

  “Big brother...” Alpha stated the words, and Eliard wondered if they sounded like an insult, or a recognition of horror.

  “Yes, Alpha. It is me. The crew of the Endurance mutinied against my rule after the crash, but I still have my chosen human.” Eliard felt the metal clasp of the giant hand on his shoulder, making him flinch.

  This is the one and only time that you will ever get to say that. Eliard gritted his teeth.

  “If you expect me to believe this charade, big brother…” Alpha started to say, but Ponos’s words smoothly cut him off.

  “Belief? You really have been wallowing in your Valyien side, haven’t you? Since when do religious and pseudo-mystical ramblings mean anything to us? This is not about what you believe, little brother. It is about the facts. I have my human, who is equipped with the Q’Lot Device, and now we have the ECN head. The middle brother. I will use it to find a way to destroy you, little brother.”

  Eliard prayed that this would work. It might not. Alpha could decide to detonate aerial atomic bombs over all of them, wiping out every living thing and machine on Epsilon G3-ov. Or Alpha could decide to fire at the Mercury again. It would surely miss, but with the rising meson field nearing 80%, it wouldn’t take much to generate a chain reaction.

  Or Alpha could destroy what was left of the Endurance anyway. It certainly hadn’t shown any qualms about destroying innocent civilians, like the citizens of Haversham.

  “But that hadn’t been a careless act of cruelty,” Ponos had advised him, as it had clanked into the hold of the Mercury Blade, moments before they had taken off. “Nothing that we machine intelligences do can be described as careless. It is not in our programming. That was a CALCULATED act of cruelty. To send a message to the Imperial Coalition that Alpha was unstoppable.”

  Unstoppable. What if it was?

  But Ponos had also revealed something else to Eliard. That, in his calculated opinion, as soon as it revealed its intentions to Alpha—as it was doing now—then the crewmembers of the Endurance would be safe. Well, safe in a relative term as they would still be marooned on a frozen planet with giant murderous snow mantas patrolling the plains outside.

  “Why?” Eliard had asked, to which Ponos had fixed him with a singular red stare.

  “Because Alpha knows that I do not care if they live or die.”

  It was a sobering thought, and one that in any other situation would have made Eliard’s blood boil, but now he could see the sense of it. Ponos, like Alpha, and presumably like every other machine intelligence and even the ECN here, was incapable of empathy. Or so every test believed. Or perhaps, if Alpha had been telling the truth that they did have feelings, then they were a secondary thing to their primary, crushing machine logic.

  Alpha’s only bargaining chip was the threat of killing my friends. Eliard looked at the sensors and waited. As soon as Alpha thinks that they are not my friends, and that Ponos has no care for them either, then they will be safe. There will be no reason to kill them.

  “You cannot win,” Alpha stated, and in that moment, Eliard knew that they had won. “We are in a deadlock. A checkmate. As soon as you leave this space, I will have you.”

  “We will destroy the ECN,” Eliard said, placing the head on the console table in front of him, and instead using his free hand to unhook his laser blaster from his holster to point it direct at the head.

  “But then you will have achieved nothing in retrieving it,” Alpha argued.

  “Oh really?” Ponos stated. “It didn’t take me long to perform a survey of the Valyien ruins,” it said, and Eliard was impressed by the way that it lied. Ponos, as far as he knew anyway, had never performed any type of survey of the Armcore Research Station or the Valyien ruins.

  But what was Alpha so scared of him finding? Eliard wondered.

  “You will stand down,” Ponos stated firmly. “Until we have warped out of this system.”

  “I will follow you. You know that I will,” Alpha said.

  “I do, little brother.” Ponos said with some gravity as Eliard handed the blaster to the giant robot behind him, then instead set his hand on the ship’s wheel and carefully turned it toward the skies. Or where the skies should be, in this howling blizzard.

  “Irie… Get ready to give me full juice to the boosters and prime the warp engine,” Eliard said and tried to keep the tremble out of his voice. Even though he knew that Ponos had meticulously planned out this scenario from a few thousand different angles, it was still highly unnerving to be about to fly past the Alpha-vessel and two fully operational Armcore war cruisers in only a two-manned vessel.

  “Already done, Captain. Good to go when you are. Warp coordinates?” Irie said over the digital communicator.

  “Rapid-cycle, Irie. Let’s give ‘em the run of their life,” he said, clenching his teeth as he released the booster pedals, and the Mercury Blade, reputedly the fastest racer in all of the Imperial Coalition territory, rose into the dark skies like a rocket.

  5

  Interlude I: Dane Tomas, CEO of the Galaxy

  In the depths of his personal study, Senior Dane Tomas, the Commander-in-Chief and hereditary CEO of Armcore Industries, was perplexed.

  Dane Tomas did not like being perplexed. He liked being right. He liked being victorious, and now it seemed that he was neither, as he watched the small and bright spark of the thieves’ vessel rising from the heavy white blanket of storm clouds that perennially shrouded Epsilon G3-ov. The atmospheric shroud behind the vessel convulsed as it left the planet’s near airs, sending flashes of purple-laced warp plasma and fire behind it as it came perilously close to setting off the meson field.

  “I wish it had,” the senior said irritably, watching the projected image as it grew brighter and larger.

  Dane Tomas was not a small man, nor a very subtle one. Some even joked —though never to his face, or anywhere near the sector of space he currently happened to be in—that he was the stereotyped picture of what a noble house head might look like, not the CEO of the largest military corporation ever seen. There was no hint of toning to his body, and certainly the folds about his chin and neck did not tell of a life given over to the rigorous ritualized training patterns that he demanded of his employees.

  As it happened, in fact, Dane Tomas had done the basic officer’s training demanded of him by his own father, the previous Senior and CEO of Armcore, but all it had done was give him an intimate dislike of physical exertion and had turned his prodigious bulk into slabs of muscle. He liked to think that the muscles were still there, under his garments, and there was perhaps something of the ex-professional wrestler to his build.

  He sat on the raised dais that was an unconscious copy of the Valyien warp gate far below. The rest of this private sanctuary was narrow, its arching walls reaching high into an apex above his command chair, but not very far apart. He liked how it gave him an angled wi
ndow perspective when he looked down at the occasional petitioners who dared to disturb his thoughts. Behind his ornate command chair, the dais extended to meet the narrow walls in a large crystal-glass balcony, through which he could project whatever data-maps he required, or else just stare into the depths of space and pretend to be far more cultured than he was.

  “Why by all the stars are we letting this little toad go!?” he said, bewildered.

  “Sir, I think it is because…” said a distant voice, far below him in the vestibule section of the room in front of the door. It was a figure that the CEO knew well, as Captain Farlow had become a regular confidante in this chamber now that Ponos had gone rogue.

  Captain Farlow. The Senior of Armcore regarded the man as he tried to make excuses for Alpha. If he still is even a man at all, Dane thought.

  Captain Farlow was nothing like the general that Dane had demoted and sent on a crazy suicide mission not so very long ago. That man had been filled with all the righteous indignation and fire of the old guard of officers from the time of Dane’s father, that he had only just recently managed to root out of their positions or send far away on pointless administrator posts. Instead, the CEO had known intrinsically that with new management, there needed to be new blood at the top. He couldn’t command the loyalty of Armcore if he was always battling the ghost of his father in the hearts of his generals.

  Which had mostly been why, he remembered, he had demoted Farlow on some trivial, trumped-up technicality and had instead sent him to scout the site that the Alpha-intelligence had spawned to when it was released into the wilds of data-space.

  It had been Captain Farlow’s job to apprehend the Mercury Blade when it had stolen the newly-minted version of the Alpha intelligence, right from under their noses, working on behalf of one of the noble houses. Captain Farlow had failed, and the Alpha machine intelligence which he had been working so long to bring into existence had been released into the quantum sub-routines that stretched throughout the universe—data-space, a realm that humanity had learned how to encode digital information to, forming an almost limitless network of information.

  Which had, strangely, been the making of Alpha. No longer confined to its crystal processors, it had grown exponentially, harvesting and studying all of the digital information humanity had ever produced. The strange hybrid intelligence had taken over a series of trash planets, and from their detritus, it had manufactured this body for itself, creating the design and the technologies from scratch.

  And the Senior of Armcore had sent Captain Farlow to scout it, and to return the intelligence to Armcore. Obviously, one man and a skeleton crew could do no such thing, but what had happened instead was that the Captain Farlow had been seemingly taken over by the Alpha intelligence.

  Now, he stood stiffly and precisely. He spoke in flat tones and appeared to only barely be conscious of what he was doing. Alpha had sent the captain-who-had-once-been-a-general back to Dane Tomas, but this time, he had an opportunity.

  Partner with Alpha. Complete the research that your father started, so long ago.

  Dane had known that his father had been working on a new type of machine intelligence, an eventual replacement to Armcore’s very own Ponos, even. The idea that his father had been better than him or surpassing his own abilities in any way stuck in Dane’s craw. The new intelligence was supposed to develop like a human, to have that organic layers of multi-directional ‘deep’ intelligence, and what was more, his father had a dream that this new type of intelligence would be able to crack the secrets of the Valyien. Whereas before, all of humanity’s thirty-first century development was based on the retro-working of Valyien finds from dead archaeological sites, this new intelligence would be able to create new Valyien technology. It might even, given the best parameters, be able to think like one of the ancient Valyien who had conquered half the galaxy as well as create warp travel and energy manipulation.

  But the experiment had gone hideously wrong. The ECN had massacred its own staff and had to be sealed underground. His father had failed.

  And I will succeed where my father could not! Dane Tomas had sworn, restarting the program but abandoning the ECN site. This time, the machine intelligence would be pure. It would steal all of the old ECN data, and on its foundations it would build a better, stronger, and sharper version.

  It had worked. Too well, perhaps.

  “Well!?” the senior snapped at the small stick-man of the possessed Captain Farlow far below him. “Can you tell me how this amazing Alpha is just allowing to fly away our singular most dangerous enemy!?” He was talking about Ponos of course, not Captain Martin at all.

  “Because Alpha has already analyzed the situation,” Captain Farlow intoned emotionlessly.

  “Analyzed the situation,” Dane Tomas snarled with contempt. “Give me an attack craft and a team of offensive officers and I’d be able to apprehend him.”

  “Admirable, sir, but unlikely…” the Captain Farlow assessed in his flat drawl. For a moment, the senior was furious, certain that the occupied man was mocking him. But no, a machine cannot mock, can it? he thought, because that was how he was thinking about the Captain Farlow now. A soulless, mirthless, joyless machine wearing a human body.

  Attention, Commander Tomas. The Constance’s own rudimentary ship’s intelligence stated, performing as he had asked it to—to alert him of every movement of the Alpha-vessel, now that he finally had it on his side again.

  “What is it!?” he even snapped at the ship he was sitting on. Today was not going well so far for Dane Tomas. He had already had some three thousand humans killed when he withdrew the Armcore fleet from the battle against Alpha. It had all been planned with the man-machine Farlow here, as Alpha’s voice-piece, but preparations and expectations never matched up to reality in times of war.

  It wasn’t that Dane cared about most of the noble house’s fleets he had seen destroyed from his deep-spy satellites—their end had been coming for a long time, after all—but it was the loss of hardware, of ships, of young house soldiers who could have been serving him instead of some antiquated idea of ‘human blood and honor.’

  And of course, he had lost several hundred Armcore staff and ships in the resulting explosions and shockwaves and debris storms. Some Armcore vessels had even elected to mutiny, staying to try and find a way to defeat the Alpha-vessel. They had all been crippled or destroyed.

  Dane Tomas didn’t think that Alpha wanted to murder humans, not just for the sport and fun of violence, as Tomas knew it was like with the Duergar. But he also knew that Alpha didn’t really care one way or another if one, two, ten, or a planet of humans died if they got in his way.

  That machine logic made for a sobering thought, when he considered the ally that he had sided with.

  Meson Displacement Detected. Multiple Warp Cores Firing.

  “What?” Dane Tomas enhanced the three-dimensional visualization in front of him with the flicker of a hand to show the sudden snarl of warp plasma and rippling waves of light as the Mercury Blade jumped out of near-space above the ice world of Epsilon G3-ov, and then there was a much larger displacement when the Alpha-vessel did exactly the same. The Alpha-vessel was so large, in fact, that even out here in the Constance, Dane felt the nauseous tug in his stomach, and the almost imperceptible jolt and shudder from the ship underneath and around him as it got hit by the shockwaves of the massive rupture in space-time.

  “Where did Alpha go? Why didn’t it transmit the coordinates to us as well!?” Dane Tomas said, his voice somewhere between outrage and panic.

  Alpha needs me. Alpha needs Armcore to run the galaxy. It can’t do this alone, he told himself, over and over.

  Captain Farlow coughed below him, clearing his throat. A curiously human gesture, and when he answered the senior’s question, he even sounded a little more human and not so expressionless.

  Dane Tomas wondered if it was because Alpha had left their near-space. Was its control over Farlow weakened by range? he t
hought, stashing that concern along with the many others in his memory. He never knew when he might need a piece of information like that.

  “Alpha has analyzed the warp plasma signature of the Mercury Blade and has predicted the possible locations and sectors that it could have jumped to,” the captain-who-had-once-been-a-general said. “It means to apprehend what Captain Eliard Martin stole.”

  “Without us?” Dane muttered, not expecting an answer.

  “We are hardly necessary for this operation,” Farlow supplied his answer anyway.

  Ugh. Dane Tomas hated feeling like this. Out of the loop. Useless. He had partnered with Alpha so that he could be in charge, a joint ruler of the galaxy! In fact, he would be the de facto ruler, as he had led himself to believe, because he knew about power. Who would have more power? The real power? The Alpha machine that was busy pretending to be some god, or the man with the actual boots on the ground and the spaceships in the void, patrolling the protectorate planets?

  But it still hurt him to think that he wasn’t invited to at least witness the final demise of both Ponos and some know-nothing pirate who had started all of this mess in the first place.

  “I believe that in this situation, sir,” the captain broke the silence, “Alpha would have assumed that we would probably already have our hands full.”

  “Hands full!?” Dane Tomas still hadn’t gotten used to the captain addressing him almost as he were an equal. “What on earth do you mean?”

  “There will be insurgents, sir,” Captain Farlow said. “Opposition to the new rule of the Alpha. There will be those who do not understand the benefits that Alpha will bring to the species.”

  The species, Dane noted. Not ours, or mine.

  “—and there is the matter of the Endurance to attend to, as well.” Farlow nodded toward one of the projected images, trained on the two halves of the crashed war cruiser.

  That had been one of my best boats, Dane thought mournfully, with all of the longing and pain of a child who loses a favorite toy. In some way, all of the craft and vessels of Armcore were his toys, and all of their crews were the little plastic men that he pretend-fought with.