Alpha Rises Read online

The plan should be a simple one, El thought to no one but himself. He was currently sitting in the small canteen, with Irie on one end of the table and Cassandra on the other. Val had said that he was happy to take watch at the cockpit. They were in cruising mode anyway, taking the long way past the Andis Gas Fields, where they could hope not to run into many Armcore patrols. Outside the porthole windows seas of lurid colors from the nebula washed by, studded with the blackened rocks of asteroids or wandering moons. In the rare moments that the ship fell quiet—very rare, as there was always a tetchy Val Pathok on board, alongside a host of smaller computerized systems running in the background—but in those rare moments, it was possible to hear the very faint hiss of stellar dust cascading across the hull.

  It might even be peaceful out here, El thought. You know, if we weren’t criminals on the run from the most powerful military-industrial complex in the universe.

  “So, let me get this straight… You want us to just waltz into Armcore Prime, the very center of our enemies’ powerbase, and have a chat with their head computer?” Irie asked once again.

  “Hey, I’m not asking you to throw yourselves into the Double-Suns of Pharos now, am I?” El said. It was, of course, already a done deal. Val had said that he would gladly do it. It meant that he had more chance to challenge those who sought to kill him (Armcore), and Cassandra of course had said she was going ahead with the plan because it was her House Archival who had come up with the idea in the first place.

  But I need Irie on board with this, he thought a little worriedly. The captain knew that he could order her to do it. But he wouldn’t, not on something this big.

  “It’s because of Alpha,” El said. “And a million Coalition credits.”

  “Well…” Irie shrugged. “The money’s good, but the danger?”

  “We have House Archival’s very best intelligence on Armcore Prime,” Cassandra pointed out.

  “Yeah, I’ve taken a look through it, and its patchy intelligence, actually,” Irie muttered. “Whole areas of the station haven’t been mapped. Apart from a few preliminary access codes, we have no idea what sort of patrols or scans they are running inside there…”

  “But with what we’ve got, could you figure out a way in?” El pressed her.

  “I could,” Irie mused. “But it wouldn’t be pretty. I could only work out a strategy to get us past the front door. After that…”

  “I can do the rest.” Cassandra nodded.

  The captain turned back to look at Irie. “So…will you do it? For the money? Against Alpha?”

  “No,” the master engineer said, and frustration roared in Eliard’s blood. “I won’t do it for the money, and I don’t give two galactic coordinates about this Alpha AI. But I will do it for this one reason, Captain.” Eliard watched the woman’s eyes glare with hatred. “Revenge. Armcore were the ones who were behind my father’s assassination—or ‘accident’—or, if it wasn’t them, then they set up the situation for it to happen,” she said devoutly. “It was Armcore that wanted Babe Ruth, and it was Armcore that wanted my father’s mecha designs. So, that is why I will give you my support on this mission, Captain…despite how absolutely crazy it is.” Irie drained her cup and banged it back down on the table. “I think I can speak for everyone here when I say that Armcore owes us, right?”

  “Yeah,” El heard Cassandra say quietly, under her breath. What’s her beef with Armcore, other than coming from a noble house? But it was a mystery that would have to wait for another time, as the proximity alarms went off, and the crew members had to rush to their positions.

  “What’s going on, Pathok?” the captain joined the Duergar at the cockpit.

  “Gas-harvester.” Val nodded at the screens, and then at the cockpit windows ahead as a vast, dark shape appeared through the mists. Many hundreds of times larger than the Mercury, it was a large triangular-cone, moving through the Gas Fields as it sucked up the precious stellar stuff to be processed and shipped off for energy and fuel generation. Even the well-travelled Eliard had never seen one of the super-massive industrial ships before. It was a bit like watching a god at work, and hard to think that his bipedal species could have helped create something so truly gigantic.

  A corona of odd-colored light shimmered down its hull where it nudged through the gas and dust fields, and Eliard saw a few small bursts of flame and light as some of the smaller asteroids were pulled into its gargantuan wake.

  Something about that sight gave the captain an idea. “Val, can you check where its manifest is intended for?”

  Val scowled at him, but his large fingers flickered over the controls all the same. The Duergar was not as savvy with computers as Irie was, but he had learned how to survive out here in space.

  “Central Coalition space, Lashar System.” He tapped the screen, which showed the general details about the gigantic ship ahead of them.

  “And I bet that Lashar System is a main distribution center for all those lovely stellar gases, right?” El started to grin.

  Val shrugged.

  “Well...” El pointed a long finger at the harvester. “One of the things about being the biggest navy in the world, and the biggest military contractor, and the most relied upon, is that I bet it means that you need an awful lot of stellar gas.”

  “Ah…” Val nodded, grinning to reveal his many fangs and tusks.

  “The distribution center at Lashar will be one of the main Central Coalition ones, which means it has to ship out to Armcore Prime. All we have to do is hitch a ride…” El excused the Duergar from the controls, settled in behind the wheel, and started to flick switches off and on. The Mercury Blade began to quiet as non-essential systems powered down, and even the engines cycled slower.

  Before long, everyone could hear that hiss as the ship pushed its way through the stellar dust.

  “With a ship this massive, they won’t even register us,” Eliard said confidently, slipping the Mercury back through the nebula, falling behind smaller asteroids before he micro-controlled the booster rockets and glided toward the belly of the gas-harvester. He matched the orbits and the thrust of the Mercury Blade and the harvester perfectly, snugging as close as he could to a series of block-like protuberances from the lower hull without actually touching the giant vessel. When he was sure that he had matched their engine output, he locked the controls to follow the harvester and leaned back.

  “They’ll have a hard time finding us with all this dust and energy diffusion from their own ship.” El said with a smile. “We’ll hitch a ride to Lashar, and then do the same to the containers heading out to Armcore Prime!”

  9

  Interlude II: Captain Farlow

  Once-General Farlow massaged his sore knuckles and wondered if he should have hit the man quite so hard. His knuckles were scuffed and grazed, and he was sure that they would probably swell up before the shift was out.

  Oh well. The man on the edge of his sixties sighed. Sometimes, discipline comes at a price. He looked at himself in the mirror in the clipper-scout’s bathroom. Crow’s feet. Tightly drawn skin stretching over his cheekbones. Several days of white stubble already spreading along his jawline.

  “I’m too old to be starting out again,” he muttered to himself, rubbing a hand through his short-cut hair. It was longer than his usual buzz-cut now, and he hated it. He hated pretty much everything about his new position as the captain of this dissolute, lowest-of-the-low Armcore vessel. He hated that he had lost his pips and his medals when Senior Dane Tomas had demoted him. He hated the fact that he now wore regulation blue encounter suit, not the blacks and reds that he had been used to as a general.

  But still, Farlow wasn’t the sort of man to take a challenge lying down. There was a feathering of white scars across his right temple from a Duergar War Claw that he had received back in the border wars. His left leg had a knot of scar tissue on one side of the knee as large as his palm, when he had to disable a rogue mecha bandit. The general was a veteran of a hundred skirmishes and at
least a couple major conflicts. He might not have destroyed colonies or irradiated planets like the senior’s younger cohort of generals bragged about, but amongst the older echelon of Armcore, he had garnered a reputation for himself as a good fighter.

  Not daring enough, he thought dryly, remembering the phrase that would often repeat on his report cards. That was why he had been the one tasked to find the Mercury Blade, he knew. That little worm Dane Tomas, Jr. had had it in for him ever since he had succeeded as commander-in-chief from the old man. Dane Tomas was not commander material. Farlow wondered if Dane even remembered how to throw a punch.

  For a second, the man who had once been a general glared at his reflection in the mirror, willing the hate he felt burning a hole through his heart to warp-jump several thousand light-years away and strike the senior down.

  But then his eyes alighted on his Armcore badge, the stylized ‘A’ with a star piercing through it. It was the same brass insignia that had been first clipped onto his uniform some forty-eight years ago—tarnished and losing its pristine edges from the years of use, but still gleaming as bright now as the day that he had first put it on.

  The problem with a man like Captain, once-General, Farlow was this: he was a traditionalist. He felt a surge of shame at his errant hatred toward the CEO and stuffed his bitter feelings down in the dark places of his heart that he never ventured. He might allow himself to internally criticize the current commander-in-chief and CEO, but he would never act on it. An old dog like Farlow knew that an army ran on order, and it ran on discipline. As much as he might hate it, he was a cog in a well-oiled machine, and a senior like Dane Tomas was the lynchpin in the center. Armcore must have had terrible seniors before, but the machine had carried on. From his long experience training the younger recruits, he knew that one bad egg could spoil a bunch, but he also knew that the bunch would soon regulate that bad egg in turn. Dane would find out that he needed the old Armcore cohort for his company to run. Armcore was a bigger project than just him. The machine would continue to run.

  The once-General wondered if he should have been harsher on the younger Dane back when he had passed through his training center. Had he been too soft on the son and next-in-line to the Armcore throne?

  We all need discipline, he told himself. At that, he pooled some water in his hands and washed his hands, then patted his hair back into position. And speaking of which…

  When he returned to the main crew area, he saw the pilot that he had been forced to knock on his ass was now back in the pilot’s chair and holding a gel pack to the side of his face. The man’s name was Reus, and he was one of the three-personnel team that had come with the clipper. An Armcore gunner named Claire Lupik, and a specialist named Merik, both of whom were still inside the main cargo hold-become-mess hall.

  “Sir.” Claire stood and saluted as soon as the captain walked into the room. She was a fine-looking marine, tall and broad-shouldered with shaved hair apart from one braid down the back. Even though she was half his age, she was the kind of woman that he would have gone for, back when he had time to consider such matters.

  “Sir.” Specialist Merik was a fraction slower, his movements much more languorous, graceful. It was a mark of disrespect to not be prompt, of course, but Farlow sensed something in this one that was dangerous. He was a small man dressed in the dark robes of a specialist, with covering over the top of his head, revealing just a sharp nose, tanned skin, and two gleaming eyes. Farlow decided that he wasn’t going to pull the man up on his almost-insubordination, not yet. In truth, the captain wasn’t entirely sure how much authority he had over the specialist, since they generally operated under their own orders from senior management.

  “At ease, Soldiers.” He nodded to them, before turning to Reus.

  “Captain-sir.” Reus nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on the consoles ahead.

  Good. You know now not to mess with me, and that this old dog can still bite. “How close are we, Pilot?” Farlow said in his deadpan voice. The pilot’s actions were already in the past. Not forgotten, but dealt with for now.

  “Just a few clicks, Captain-sir,” the pilot said, wincing through the pain. “I’ll put it on the overheads.”

  “You do that, Reus.”

  On the large screen over the entrance to the cockpit there flickered an image of outside the vessel. A sea of blocky objects many times larger than the clipper-scout vessel, slowly spinning on their axes. Trash containers. As large as a residential block, with reinforced hulls and spray-burned numbers and shipping details. They formed a web of metal around the object in their center.

  Sebopol. The captain could just see it as a dull shape behind its spider-web of refuse. A planetoid that gleamed and darkened at odd moments, doubtless because of all the metal trash littered across its surface.

  “Scans?” Farlow ordered.

  “Uh, we haven’t got a clear reading of the surface, Captain-sir.” Reus flinched as he said so. “It’s this trash field out here. It’s interfering with our scanners.”

  “Hmm.” Just what the thing wanted, no doubt, Farlow thought. Any thought that Alpha hadn’t done this on purpose flew from his mind. It’s digging itself in, he thought. Preparing for a siege?

  “What does the database say about the world?” he snapped, and Reus rattled off the facts and observations about Sebopol that were listed in the Armcore servers.

  “Designated trash-world, accepting some eight thousand tons of material every day, thin atmosphere, carbon-heavy, unbreathable to humans. Atmosphere has changed over the last twenty years to be methane-heavy, and yearly scans indicate high amounts of radiation and heavy metal particulates across the surface. Sebopol is rated a High Danger for biological life and is quarantined from anyone other than official refuse staff.”

  “And are there any staff down there?” the captain asked.

  “One. Just says here Worker Three-Two-Seven. No name or rank,” Reus said. “They should be on a long-term, six-month contract at the planetary station there.”

  Alpha probably killed him, the Captain once-General thought. “Can we hail this Worker Three-Two-Seven?”

  Reus turned to the task as Farlow studied the map. These containers would be hazardous to fly through, but he knew that this clipper-scout could do it. But that would mean they would be going in blind, without scanning data.

  “I can’t reach him, Captain-sir. Our signals just keep bouncing off of the orbiting containers,” Reus said dejectedly, probably thinking that the captain was going to hit him again. But I won’t. I’m not cruel like the senior. I just believe in discipline.

  “How many drones do we have on board?” he snapped to his crew.

  “Three, sir,” Specialist Merik answered, joining him to look up at the screen. He spoke as if he was of equal rank to the captain. Overly familiar. Farlow’s lip curled in distaste. “Unfortunately, they are rather standard ones. Search and surveillance drones, X3 types.”

  “Fine. Send them out. I want them to scout the surface for activity. Try to hail this Worker Three-Two-Seven, before reporting back. Got that?”

  “As you wish, sir.” The specialist slipped to one side of the room, where a console folded discretely out of the wall and Specialist Merik’s fingers glided across the keys. There was a slight shudder as three sleek, torpedo-shaped X3 drones were ejected into space. On the large screens above, Farlow watched them trace out from their boat, before their own rockets fired and they turned in divergent arcs toward the net of orbiting trash. In a moment, they were gone.

  “Signal cut,” Specialist Merik said, faintly happily, the captain thought. “But I’ve programmed them to do as you suggested and loop back. It won’t take long for them to circumnavigate the planetoid.”

  “Good.” Farlow turned his attention to the only other crew member here, Gunner Lupik. “I want you suited up and ready to deploy, with me, at my command, Soldier,” he said. She was the only one that he trusted to have his back on an away mission here. Lupik saluted
, and the pair moved to the side of the room where the larger carapace armor was stored, with magnetic clamps that held it together and displacers that allowed them to carry the much larger guns that he intended to carry with him.

  “Sir?” whispered Specialist Merik behind him. “Are you planning on actually setting foot on the surface?” he dared to ask, incredulously.

  “Excuse me, Specialist?” Farlow turned to say as he fitted the heavy shoulder pads on and shuffled so that their internal padding gelled and molded to his own frame. Ah. It’s good to be inside one of these again, he thought.

  “Well, the mission parameters are to scout and report back, sir. Not make direct contact with…” The Specialist’s eyes glittered.

  He knows, Farlow realized. This man knows what we’re doing here. Neither Lupik or Reus had shown any sign whatsoever of knowing that they were on the trail of a highly developed, experimental AI, one that had been designed to be the thinking mind of Armcore.

  “Contact? Are we expecting un-friendlies, Captain-sir?” Reus turned to ask, his eyes wide.

  That insolent boy has probably never been in combat before, Farlow thought. “Eyes back to your job, Pilot!” Farlowe snapped at him, earning a panicked look as Reus did as he was told. The side of his face was bruising up nicely.

  “I like to have firsthand information to put into my reports, Specialist,” Farlow growled at the specialist. “Have you got a problem with that?”

  “No, sir.” The specialist turned back to his console smartly.

  Wise-ass, the captain thought, hitting his carapace controls so that it cinched tighter, and a line of alarms and alerts flared on the collar. Green lights for oxygen, gravity, full battery cell, ammo clips. No red lights, yet. He turned to heft his heavy rifle and his battle sword, and saw that Gunner Lupik was doing the same, but that there was a note of wariness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. He would tell her, as she was a real soldier, one who was prepared for danger.