A I Apocalypse Read online

  The chamber wasn’t large, but bigger than either of the two women who floated, oddly, in its center. The lights around them were in fact tiny LEDs or transmitters, forming a regular sphere like a net of stars above them, beneath, and to each side.

  Why would Alpha keep a zero-G isolation chamber here? What’s the point? Cassie opened her mouth to ask Irie if she was okay, but no sound came out. How had Alpha done that? There had to be oxygen in here, right? Instead, the agent reached out to steady the slowly-spinning engineer and grasp her floating hand. Her skin felt cold and clammy, and her eyes were wide with worry.

  “I don’t know what this is,” she mouthed the words slowly, “but I’m here….”

  In just that moment, it became clearly obvious what this chamber was, as the tiny star-like lights all around them started to glitter and flash in complicated rhythms, making Cassie’s eyes blink and her head spin.

  Hypnosis? Hallucination?

  And that was when Alpha pushed itself into their minds, and Cassie screamed.

  9

  Old and Future Friends

  “I said HALT!” the voice growled, deep and menacing from the shadows, and Captain Eliard heard the pound of running feet coming towards him. Dark shapes were charging into the stables hangar, and they were large, very large, the captain saw. Far bigger than a regular human. Heavy tactical suits? Armcore?

  Eliard jammed the final connector home and twisted it tight before pushing himself back from the top of the Aeon modular craft, allowing his body to slide down the far side. He didn’t have time to put the protective plate on, but he could do that when he had gotten the thing airborne and away from these looters.

  I’ll land out on the old Ferrari Plains. Eliard’s boots hit the floor and his heart was thumping a sharp staccato rhythm in his chest. Fix the rest of the craft. Replace the plate. Fine-tune her for warp flight…

  THAP! THAP! There was the sharp crackle of sparks from the metal floors of the stables as the looters fired at him, but not the incandescent glows of energy weapons. This was the sharp ricochet sparks of projectile weapons.

  Guns!? Eliard almost swore. Only the meanest and cheapest mercenaries used projectile weapons, and usually that meant that they were planet-locked. Weapons that shot solid bolts or caps of metal were insanely dangerous in space. Whether in the void or on a spaceship, you had a far greater chance of rupturing some vital part of the ship, or the metal-on-metal ricochets would just as easily kill you and your side as any of those you might be facing.

  But Eliard had been a pirate captain for a long time. He knew what this meant: the people who were after him were probably bandits of some kind, maybe they had been stranded on Branton when Armcore had attacked, or maybe they were even ex-Brantonites themselves, looking for a bit of money and payback now that they had the city and the palace to themselves.

  Using projectiles also meant that they were probably poor.

  THAP-THAP! Another couple of sparks ricocheted off the hull of the Aeon.

  Not my boat! Eliard thought in alarm. He couldn’t afford to lose the only means he had to get off-world. The tubular craft was even now starting to shake and rise on its low-output thrusters, gales of steam being forced into the room as its engines started to cycle.

  “STOP!” the heavy, croaking and growling voices roared as more shots were fired, some hitting the vessel and others hitting the back wall.

  But the captain thought that he must have some advantage, at least. For one, the steam was obscuring the boat and him from his attackers, and two, if these were looters down on their luck, that meant that they had probably never seen the like of the Device that was Eliard’s right forearm. He could probably rout them and break their morale easily when they saw what it could do…

  “Prepare to die!” Eliard screamed his most blood-curdling pirate cry as he leapt up to grab the small access handrails on the side of the Aeon’s housing to the porthole, intending to fire a deadly barrage with the Q’Lot Device through the thruster smoke, before opening the hatch and dropping inside.

  Eliard straddled the Aeon, swung his arm in front of him—

  He felt the Device changing even as he moved it, a strange, organic feeling like grating bones and pulling muscles as the iridescent-blue scales reconfigured, slid, and relocked into position, reacting to Eliard’s anger and anxiety.

  The Device had appeared to be an almost club-like pod that engulfed his entire lower right forearm, but now the end had flared open with bone-like nubs of teeth, crackling and glowing with crimson-pink energy as Eliard leveled the weapon at the shadows and silhouettes running across the stable floors towards him—

  In just a split-second, the smoke cleared, and Eliard gasped as he fired.

  They were Duergar! He saw their clear forms that were larger than the average human, slab-like shoulders and hunched forms with no appreciable neck attaching their monumental bodies to their shovel-like heads.

  The Duergar was one of the few other races that the humans of the Imperial Coalition had encountered early on in their advance into the galaxy. They were colloquially known as ‘trolls’ thanks to the whitish-scaled skin and their tusked mouths and tiny eyes, which had reminded the first expeditioners of the creatures from ancient Earth legends. These Duergar happened to be every bit as dangerous, if not more so, from the creatures of those myths. They were an intensely warlike and martial race, following a war chief in their territorial disputes and crusades against any perceived wrong.

  Eliard knew all of this, and he jerked the Device a fraction higher because Eliard had more than a passing familiarity with the Duergar.

  Fa-THOOOM! A pink and crimson ball of energy exploded out of the Device on the pirate captain’s arm, with the recoil kicking his shoulder back like a blow from, well, from a Duergar. The energy bolt seared through the steam, narrowly missing the heads of the approaching irate, trollish fighters and instead tearing out a metal gantry above their heads, sending it crashing against the far wall, melting in a heap of twisted girders and slag.

  Eliard had tried his best to not kill them because the chief gunner of his beloved Mercury Blade had been a Duergar named Val Pathok. Val had been the one who had taken the elite racing craft and turned it into a serviceable pirate ship, adding the twin-mounted railguns and overseeing all of the defensive armaments throughout the ship.

  Val Pathok was also just about largest Duergar ever. The troll-like warrior had saved Eliard’s life on more than one occasion, too many to count, probably, and together with Irie Hanson, the three crewmembers of the Mercury Blade had forged a friendship that had seen them rise to become one of the best pirate-smuggler outfits across all of the non-aligned worlds.

  And besides all of this, Eliard didn’t want to murder these attacking Duergar because just recently in cosmic terms, Eliard had seen Val Pathok installed as the new war chief over the entire race.

  What the drekk!? The recoil on Eliard’s arm had thrown him back a little down the length of the Aeon housing. His thoughts were a mess as he tried to figure out what this meant, as the modular craft rose and thrummed underneath him.

  What is a Duergar force doing on Branton? He was confused as he heard roars of surprise and anger from the heavy warriors below, scattering from both the crashing balcony behind and the roar of the thruster rockets as the next cycle started up…

  Eliard knew that it had taken a long and bloody war to get the Duergar to treaty with the Imperial Coalition, way before his time. It was in the days of his father’s youth, in fact. But after that fact, the Duergar had never gone to war nor acted against the Imperial Coalition in such an overt way.

  They live by their honor, and their bravery. Eliard remembered the confrontation that he had seen on the home planet of Dur between Val and his father, the old war chief. It was almost impossible to think of these Duergar as a renegade or a bandit force. You might get one or two of them seeking out their own legendary tales of heroism—like Val had done, the captain knew—but never a who
le complement of fighters. Val had left his home world in disgrace before he had joined my crew. The captain slid a little further down the Aeon craft as it juddered and shook. He needed to get up to the porthole and inside to manage the engines before the ship spent too much of its precious plasma fuel…

  Val had hated his own father, and perhaps that was what had bonded the odd brothers-in-arms of the human noble house scion Eliard and Val Pathok. No other Duergar would ever dare dream to do such a thing, and certainly not an entire warband of them.

  “Get off the drekking ship before you kill us all!” one of the Duergar shouted in alarm.

  What? Eliard was clambering back up towards the porthole. He was almost there, leaning on the Device and reaching for the door with his hand.

  The Duergar weren’t firing at him anymore, that was at least one thing. But could Eliard trust them?

  “Get out of here!” Eliard shouted at them, seeing their massive shapes backing away from the boat that was even now wobbling and rising in the air. Two meters from the floor, now three… “I am Eliard Martin, rightful heir and owner of this palace, and this drekking world! I am also a war-friend to your own War Chief Pathok, so unless you want him to throw you into the Challenge Pits, I suggest you leave my world immediately!” Eliard sat up to level the Device at them again, with no intention on firing it, but the massive energy blast that it had produced should be enough to spook even them, shouldn’t it?

  But the Duergar ARE a very stubborn bunch… Eliard thought as he looked down at them, one hand on the porthole handle for the Aeon’s singular compartment.

  As he looked at them, Eliard realized that these Duergar were no mere looters. What he had first thought were heavy tactical suits were mostly the lightweight battle-harnesses of the fighting Duergar, giving the impression of a much larger foe thanks to their natural size and stature. Although not elaborate and all-fitting, the battle-harnesses were made of the Duergar red and steel colors. They gleamed. They all had the official colors of Dur. Of Val Pathok, Eliard presumed now.

  What was even stranger however, was their weaponry. They didn’t have the energy-firing ‘lances’ that most of the ‘official’ warriors of the Duergar used, complete with heavy reinforced blades attached to the barrel. No, these Duergar each had archaic machine-rifles that looked absurdly small in their hands. Human weapons? Antique human weapons? Eliard frowned. The Duergar below him still had their preference for more direct physical violence, however, as each had strapped across their backs, strapped to their thighs or hanging from their belts a variety of heavy bladed weapons.

  “Turn off the drekking boat!” One of the Duergar looked the most confused, twitching and shaking as it was clearly engaged in some internal war with its own honor and battle codes. It raised the machine-rifle towards Eliard…

  “No!” one of its partners claimed. “The human claims it’s Eliard Martin. The war chief will never sanction this…”

  Ah, so they have heard of me then… Eliard smiled, using the moment’s opportunity to flip open the command hatch of the Aeon and drop inside. He was more than half tempted to power down the engines anyway, now that he knew it was Duergar outside who had mistakenly thought he was some kind of enemy. But I haven’t got time for Duergar politics, Eliard thought about the distant desert planet of Esther, and Cassie and Irie and the attacking Alpha-vessel. He was stuck in this decision when the porthole slammed shut above him, and the lights of the console lit up in front of the ship’s chair and wheel, and familiar voice crackled over the ship’s communicator.

  “Lord General Martin, there you are. I have found you at last.”

  Coalescing into existence in the air in front of the ship’s wheel was a small red triangle with a singular dot of an eye at its heart, projected by the holographic controls that every ship used in the modern era.

  It was Ponos.

  “Ponos!” Eliard settled himself into the ship’s seat and gripped the wheel, finding it stiff. Damn newbuilds, he thought. He felt relief flood through him.

  “Or should I call you Ponos-Omega now?” Eliard said. “I don’t know how you got here so quickly but am I ever glad to see you! I don’t know why the Duergar have an expeditionary warband on Branton, but right now, I don’t have time to care either. I need to plot a course for Esther, as quick as I can get there!”

  Ponos had been the Armcore intelligence that had once plotted all of his actions and courses in the continuing fight against the Alpha program, and, without Irie Hanson at his side, Eliard was certain that the super-intelligence would be able to re-program the Aeon’s warp cores to achieve the next best result…

  “You won’t be going to Esther, Captain,” Ponos-Omega said steadily as Eliard felt the ship’s wheel moving underneath his hand, and the view outside the cockpit window slowly turned and turned, going past the open arches of the stable flight-openings and the Ferrari Plains outside—

  “Hey, is there a problem with this thing’s navigation?” Eliard smirked a little worriedly as the Aeon continued to spin, pointing not towards the outside at all but instead pointing towards the nearest wall…

  “Ponos, run a diagnostic and cut this thing’s engines for me, will you?” The captain’s voice rose a notch.

  THAP! THAP! The entire hull of the vessel reverberated with the sound of projectile fire from the Duergar’s rifles outside. Eliard clearly couldn’t hear their shouted voices inside, but the ping of metal on metal was like a hammer hitting the ship.

  “Those drekk-heads! They’re firing at us!” Eliard snarled. “That’s probably why the guidance and navigation system is shot! Ponos!”

  “I’m afraid it wasn’t the petty weapons of Pathok’s renegades that is causing this, Captain,” Ponos-Omega stated. “Their projectiles have inflicted only minimal damage to the ship. I am afraid that this is your final voyage.”

  The ship had stopped turning as the movement boosters abruptly cut off, and the small tubular Aeon craft was pointing directly at the rear rock wall of his father’s stables.

  A shiver ran through Eliard. It Watches. That was what all of the vandals’ messages had said, followed by a rough icon of the floating Ponos eye that was glittering at him right now. It Watches. Like whomever had written it had been writing a warning, or a threat…

  “Ponos? What in the name of every fixed star are you talking about?” Eliard started yanking on the ship’s wheel and hitting whatever buttons he could. There had to be a manual override, didn’t there? There was always a manual override for when the computers malfunctioned—for that was precisely what Eliard realized must be happening.

  Ponos had merged with the ECN to become Ponos-Omega. It was Valyien technology. The Armcore intelligence had clearly gone mad…

  “It has been a very interesting study of human ingenuity, knowing you, Captain,” Ponos-Omega said with finality as it started to cycle up the warp engines.

  Eliard knew that it wouldn’t take long, even on a modular craft that relied on three separate, smaller plasma injectors, to form one larger chain reaction. The warp engines would fire, and the Aeon would shoot forward…straight into the wall on a tail of burning plasma that would explode, and probably take out him, the Duergar, and the entire stables that occupied this hill…

  Ponos-Omega has malfunctioned. Eliard gave up trying to wrest control from the ship and instead jumped up from the ship’s chair to hit the release mechanism for the porthole airlock that he had so recently fallen through.

  Locked, the red indicator flashed. Eliard hit the release again, but nothing happened.

  The holographic readout in front of the wheel revealed a tiny green circle slowly filling up as the warp engines cycled to their full capacity… The circle was already over halfway.

  Thonk! Something hit the top of the porthole and the rounded metal dented. It was something very, very heavy. Thonk! Another strike and the dent arched down towards Eliard’s head, but the metal still held.

  Someone’s trying to get me out! Eliard tho
ught, and in a heartbeat realized how foolish he was being. He raised the Device arm and, focusing his mind on something, anything, that could cut metal, felt it change its shape and instead narrow into a smaller point, bursting with concentrated plasma fire.

  A torch! Eliard thrust it up to the bending and jagged hinges of the porthole.

  Thonk! Another blow.

  The green circle was now three-quarters complete…four-fifths complete…

  Hssss! Eliard’s chest and arm burnt with sparks as there was another mighty crash from above as something hit it.

  The holographic circle edged towards its fully-cycled, twelve o’clock position—

  “Gragh!” A guttural, heavy grunt as a white-blue-scaled hand that ended in jagged and cracked talons seized Eliard’s Device arm, heedless of the still burning plasma torch at one end, and pulled—

  With the warp cycle now complete, the Aeon threw itself forward, shedding purple and crimson light as a massive form leapt from the hull of the Aeon and straight out through the open archway, and the stables behind them exploded…

  10

  Back

  “Tell me what Ponos-Omega sent him to do!” The words of Alpha repeated their firm and insistent refrain.

  Not that Cassie had much choice to refuse the Alpha, as her mind was now a blur of images seemingly activated by the Alpha-vessel through the use of some cognitive retraining device. It was the lights. She saw swathes of contradictory and complicated patterns flowing from the star-like chamber.

  She shut her eyes, but it was no good. Alpha had already gotten into her mind.