Valyien Boxed Set 3 Page 6

  “Ponos indicated that the crew of the Endurance reverted to their traditional loyalty to you, sir,” Farlow said. “Before forcing it out, along with Captain Martin, and the ECN.”

  Dane looked at the two gigantic arms of the Endurance, once a super-classified, deep-cover, secret surveillance and covert operations masterpiece. Now it was rapidly forming into two giant snowbanks, and about to be covered and eaten by the ice world entirely.

  “Any life?” Dane muttered half-heartedly.

  “Ninety-two, sir,” Farlow responded.

  “And you really think that they remain loyal to me, right to the end?” Dane said.

  “Impossible to say for certain, sir, but they will certainly die without sufficient shelter, backup power, and resources—let alone what casualties they might suffer beforehand when the meson field below triggers a warp explosion.”

  “We could rescue them…” Dane Tomas mused, looking at the horribly broken pieces of the Endurance. Something about their ugliness, their incompleteness and irrevocable damage, made him want to gag and not think about it anymore. “But we would forever be wondering whether there are any Ponos-sympathizers amongst them,” Thomas said heavily. He didn’t want to see his favorite toy broken again. He had other war cruisers. Others that wouldn’t fail him by breaking, he hoped.

  “It is a shame that we already had urgent business to attend to, as you say, Captain Farlow,” Dane Tomas said heavily, clicking off the screen. They would die either from the warp explosion or the cold, and Epsilon G3-ov would become their testament and their tomb.

  “Tell the navigational bridge to set a jump course towards the nearest Armcore base. We need to mobilize the forces.”

  If there was a flicker from behind Captain Farlow’s eyes, he did not betray it to the CEO, Commander-in-Chief, and Senior Dane Tomas of Armcore.

  But one hand clenched into a tight fist as he stalked out of the private study chamber.

  6

  Oec

  Fa-THUMP. Eliard’s eyes ached with the sudden inversion of normal material reality. For a moment, he couldn’t remember who he was, and he certainly had no idea where he was.

  How many jumps have we done already? He reeled. Three? Four?

  “Agh.” His mouth had gone inexplicably dry, and he had that metallic-ozone taste that always seemed to come with warp travel. Usually, the Captain of the Mercury Blade loved the head-achingly strange, torturous experience of jumping, as the ship’s computers used the quantum signatures pregnant in data-space to create a line between two far-off points, and then the warp engines generated the meson field which manipulated, bent, and finally tore reality.

  He loved it because, usually, for just a moment, he would feel as though he wasn’t some small, human being surrounded and constrained by all of his normal-reality problems. He would feel like he was a part of something much bigger, he would get a picture of himself as a part of much wider and expansive energy field, or the peak of a wave…

  Usually, anyway. Rapid-cycling warp jumps, in which you tried to chain-link a series of smaller warp jumps within as short a time as possible to each other, had a different effect on him, it seemed.

  “Irie, you still with us?” he managed to cough and splutter as he leaned heavily on the ship’s command wheel. This time, all of his already-battered body was aching as it tried to respond to the invisible forces that had been thrown against them.

  “Uhr…” the voice of the chief engineer came over the ship’s communicator. “Fine. Just my eyes feel like they’re trying to force their way out through my ears…”

  “Can you—” Eliard started to say in alarm.

  “It’s fine. I’ve already pulled the limiter and cycling up the warp engines again, boss.”

  The captain didn’t know what he’d do without Irie. Die, probably. She was the best mechanical engineer that he had ever known, let alone worked with. But he knew that what he was asking of her was still a heady task. There was a reason why warp engines had limiters on them—controls that stopped the warp cores from being used too many times in quick succession. Warp cores were dangerous because they endeavored to generate and control warp plasma, one of the most volatile substances in the universe, and even with the fine degree of engineering that went into the cores and engines that surrounded them, they could still crack, leak, or explode.

  But she knows what she is doing, the captain thought.

  Outside was the bright expanse of stars, none of whom he knew by heart, and inside the cockpit the navigational computer was currently cycling through the available coordinates to determine the next destination.

  Current Location: Aletta System, Sub-Gemini Space. Imperial Coalition Sector 5.

  “Sector Five…” the captain’s eyes read the top readout of the navigational array. He didn’t think that he’d ever been to the Aletta System, as it was a fairly out-of-the-way but still central sector of the Imperial Coalition. A quiet sector, he had always assumed. Not quite the rich and wealthy home worlds of the Inner Sectors of Coalition space, where he himself had been raised, but still comfortable enough to not have a massive Armcore presence.

  Ping! Message Received! Aletta Tracking Satellite 3g01.

  The captain flinched. He shouldn’t have been surprised that the nearest drone satellites in Imperial Coalition space would start asking him what he was doing there, and where he was going.

  Aren’t they going to get a surprise when Alpha turns up… Eliard thought, hitting the ship’s communicator once again.

  “Irie? How are we doing down there?”

  “Sixty-four percent cycled. I can make her jump, but it won’t be far.”

  What was best? The captain had a moment of indecision. Smaller, nearer jumps or further jumps right to the far end of Coalition space? Instinctively, and perhaps primitively, he would rather jump to the end of Coalition space. Put as much distance between us and it, he thought, but he knew that was a bad idea. The Alpha-vessel was huge. Simply titanic. It would be able to jump any distance that the far smaller Mercury could.

  “Do it.” He decided. “Jump.”

  “Where to?” Irie said.

  “Anywhere.” Eliard gripped the ship’s command wheel with one hand and gritted his teeth as he felt the first shockwave from the warp core.

  Or didn’t feel it, he had to remind himself. He knew the theory of warp travel, having been forced to study it at Trevalyn Academy. The first signals that the warp engine transmitted, using quantum data, shouldn’t be detectable at all by a human.

  But he felt it, he knew that he could. It was like a sudden rush of vertigo, an unexpected nausea before—

  Alert! Warp Signature Detected! the computer blared, just as the Aletta stars in front of him started to slide and swirl and change color.

  Warp fire, Eliard knew, and so far out there, he knew that it wasn’t coming from the Mercury Blade. As his eyes started to blur and his headache pounded, he was sure that he saw the space in front of him erupt into purple and blue and glaring flashes of light, as a vessel many times larger than his own appeared.

  It was Alpha, and he saw the glittering pinpoints of light from its four-pointed nose cone as it fired—

  Fa-THUMP!

  Warp Cycle Completed. Re-calibrating Navigational Array…

  The sensors blared at him as Eliard shook his head and opened his eyes. He felt like he had been asleep. How long had he been unconscious?

  Oh, I wasn’t, he realized as he saw that he was still standing just as he had when they had jumped from the Aletta System. Is it normal to have lapses in consciousness when you jump?

  “Irie,” he said, his eyes still aching as he looked out of the cockpit window to see where the computer had randomized them to.

  Holy crap.

  In front of them was a wall of metal. Well, more a globe of metal structures, loosely connected to each other in an array of ‘platforms’ around something. It wasn’t like the metal sphere of Armcore Prime, which was completely closed an
d much smaller. No, Eliard knew precisely what these orbital platforms were surrounding, as there was only one possible location in all of Imperial Coalition space that had this exact structure.

  It was Old Earth. The home of the Empire.

  “Why on earth did you jump us here!” Eliard shouted, his nausea and headache getting the better of him.

  “I didn’t intend to! The warp computer is set to randomizable locations, stars’-dammit!” Irie was shouting back, just as hard. That was generally something that the captain had always liked about her, and all of his crew when he also had Val Pathok, the largest ever Duergar that you had ever seen. None of them would have lasted a minute under Armcore or Trevalyn rules. Irie shouted and bawled back at him just as much as he snapped at her. More so, probably.

  “Randomizable or not, get us out of here. Now,” he said, keeping his hand on the wheel and his eyes scouring the scanners for signs of Alpha or Old Earth’s defenses.

  Humanity had left the cradle of Old Earth a long time ago, almost a thousand years ago, if you believed the legends. But they had never got far until they had discovered the Valyien relics and ruins that led them to unlock warp travel. In that time before, when the human race had been constrained to near-earth rocket fuels and dangerous thermonuclear reactions, the planet that had been their nursery was slowly covered by orbital stations, while the planet below died.

  It had been the noble houses who were the first to ascend into space. Families and individuals that could afford it. Eliard had heard all of the origin stories of his own house, of course, both the officially glorious stories and the data-space gossip. Every noble house had their own origin story. That they had crawled up out of the mire of economic recession, poverty, and disease to lead their people to a new light like a technological messiah.

  But the fact of the situation was simple, Eliard had come to understand. Old Earth was choking on its own planetary degradation, and its minerals were just about used up. The only hope for the human race was its expansion into new worlds, and only the noble houses had the money and resources to fund it—mostly because they had spent the last few hundred years stealing them from all of the poor, overpopulated citizens of Old Earth.

  But the houses were at dire risk of war. Humanity itself was in danger of fragmenting, becoming cutoff cargo-cults from their mother world and each other, so the Coalition had been created. A semi-democratic institution where each noble house had a say in the development of the Empire as a whole.

  And meanwhile, behind them, Old Earth the physical planet was abandoned to the barbarous, the cults, and the wretched, as the Coalition’s headquarters took to the rings of metal platforms that enclosed the planet.

  Alert! Multiple Tracking Systems Locking onto the Ship! His computer blipped in alarm. Eliard wasn’t surprised. He was a wanted man, and the Mercury Blade was a stolen noble vessel. And there were rumors of war and alien invasion everywhere.

  Alert! Incoming Message: OEC Central Comms.

  OEC. Old Earth Coalition Central Communications, Eliard translated as he wished that Irie would just get it done.

  Accept Message? Y/N.

  Message Override! Security Protocols Breached!

  Eliard growled. He wasn’t surprised that the administrative capital of the Coalition had the tools to overwhelm the Mercury’s tiny communications firewall, but still, how many times had someone done that to him recently? It was just plain rude.

  “Mercury Blade. This is OEC Central. I see from your designation that you are currently Restricted Class 3, which means that you are required to power down your warp engines and propulsion boosters immediately, as well as all weapons systems. Please comply. Thank you.”

  “Ah… That’s not going to happen, I’m afraid,” Eliard said, knowing that he didn’t have time for this. He had to be jumping. He had to be getting out of here before—

  Fa-THUMP!

  Alert! Warp Signatures Detected!

  Oh no.

  There was a splash of warp light and plasma as the Alpha-vessel arrived, shivering and shimmering through odd angles into the space in front of Old Earth.

  “Irie!” Eliard shouted, hitting the boosters and pulling on the ship’s command wheel to throw them to one side. He knew that he had moments before the warp fire settled and the Alpha-vessel would be fully operational.

  Which meant that it would be able to fire at them, and they wouldn’t have a chance.

  “Captain, we’ve got problems down here,” she said. “One of the warp cores is too agitated, so I’ve had to cap it off until the plasma settles, and instead, I’m cycling the other core. It’ll take longer at first, but after the first, we should be able to use them in tandem.”

  “What does any of that even mean!” Eliard was saying as he spun the Mercury Blade around the curve of the Earth.

  Alert! Multiple Tracking Locks on the Ship!

  “Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell…” Out of the corner of his eye, Eliard could see multiple ports and docking bays opening across the Old Earth platforms as they flew, releasing attack craft that were only fractionally smaller than the Mercury Blade.

  It wasn’t them that he was particularly worried about, the captain knew that the Mercury was fast. An ex-racer. One of the fastest boats out there. But he was worried what would happen when—

  WHUMP!

  The bow-wave of the explosion rocked the Mercury Blade off its axis, sending them spiraling perilously close to the platforms that contained Old Earth. For a dizzying moment, Eliard saw the sudden nearness of metal girders and external bulkheads, and even galleries of crystal-glass windows. The platforms that surrounded Old Earth were complicated and elaborate, with modules and pods of metal built onto and out of each other, or on long gantry arms, connected by thin access tubes. It was like an entire orbital city, and one that was given over to the minutely-managed bureaucracy of the Coalition.

  “Rear left boosters!” he called as he hit the pedals at the foot of the wheel, knowing that his voice activation software should take over if he was too busy flying. Thankfully, it did, and he felt a kick of power as the Mercury Blade suddenly turned in what would have looked like an airplane move if he were in atmosphere and shot across the face of the platform structure, barely twenty meters from its surface.

  “What was that?” he called out as he ran the Mercury past the satellite towers and gun emplacements. “What was that explosion?”

  “I’m a bit busy making sure that this stars-damned core doesn’t blow down here, boss!” Irie’s annoyed voice came over the personal ship’s communicator.

  There was a movement behind him as the looming giant Ponos appeared at his side. “I believe, Captain Martin, that it was the Alpha-vessel attempting to secure our capture.”

  “By shooting at us!” Eliard shouted, his eyes flicking to the sensor visualization. Behind him was a jagged hole of rent metal in one of the receding platforms, spilling debris in a cloud.

  “I believe that my baby brother wants to incapacitate us. Although it has to be reasoned that the very object it wants, the head of the ECN, does not need oxygen nor gravity to survive…”

  Eliard snarled. That was Ponos’s way of saying that Alpha could blast them out of the void and then scour the wreckage for whatever it wanted.

  Well, not today. He kicked the booster pedals at his feet, performing a U-turn to head back the way he had come.

  “Captain? What the hell are you doing!?” Irie sounded distressed. “You’re flying us straight towards Alpha!”

  “Get that damn warp core working, Hanson. Leave me to the flying,” he said grimly, curving up the struts of the platform and flying as close as he dared while still having the time to react to the buttresses and ports that stuck out from the orbital city at every possible angle.

  “Clever, Captain. Alpha will have already tracked and predicted your previous flight path, and the digital noise this close to the station will mask your own transmission,” Ponos congratulated him.

  “I
don’t need your praise,” he muttered as he swerved once more, back and forth through the forest of communications and satellite towers.

  But it seemed that Alpha already had its own problems. The attack craft that had been disgorged by the OEC platforms had only been the first wave. Instead, they had been joined by many more. Many more craft that swept towards the invading behemoth, firing in their formations.

  But Alpha, although tiny in comparison to an entire planet, still possessed the most advanced battle intelligence ever known. Eliard half-watched the visualizations overhead as entire attack wings of the OEC craft vanished as Alpha’s multiple meson lasers cut through them.

  “Come on, come on!” Eliard said as he swerved once again, turned, and banked.

  “Single core at fifty-five percent!” Irie shouted. It would be enough to get them to the Oort Cloud, perhaps. Eliard watched as the OEC platforms fired multiple defense lasers at the Alpha craft, looking like lines of white fire drawn by some vengeful god.

  He saw Alpha shake. He saw explosion-plumes of gases and plasma.

  “Core at fifty-eight percent, Captain. Do you want me to jump? Random rapid cycling again…”

  Eliard was frowning as he only half-heard what his engineer was saying. His eyes were fixed on the visualization as four lasers shot out from Alpha, expertly destroying four of the attacking defense laser towers, but there were still more.

  Another two of the OEC’s defense towers added their lasers to the attack, and Eliard realized that he was watching something amazing.

  Alpha is getting damaged, he thought. Almost a third of the attack craft had been destroyed, either by laser fire or by strange, projectile explosions that had come from the Alpha craft to detonate in the midst of their ranks. But of those two-thirds that remained, they were everywhere, like wasps stinging a tiger.