Hospital, Irbzrk Orbital Factory
“God. Fucking. Dammit!” Jen raged, smashing her fist against the wall until it hurt. She seethed in fury, cursing at the pain before repeating the process, all the while fully aware of how the Corti doctor and the other aliens kept their distance.
She was pissed off. Beyond pissed off. She was boldly exploring new lands in being pissed off. She was angrier than she had ever been in her entire life, and she didn’t have the first idea how to properly express it.
She’d tried crying uncontrollably, and that hadn’t fucking worked either!
“None of you fuckers better know where he is and are keeping it a secret!” she snarled at the terrified onlookers, although at this point she was sure if anybody knew they would have told. From what they had told her, Adrian had dropped her off here for medical attention while she was unconscious, and had then pissed off to god knew where.
She still couldn’t believe he’d strangled her! She’d trusted him, and she’d thought he’d felt something for her. What kind of fucked up person strangles someone they like?
It was time for another bout of uncontrollable sobbing!
The situation was just such a horrific mess that even Trycrur and Chir, normally on Adrian’s side no matter the situation, had empathised with her on this one.
Empathy was another thing you couldn’t expect from a broken human being. She made a mental note to go over every situation where he’d seemed even the least bit empathetic, starting from when he’d first rescued her from the Blue Encounter.
“Trix?” she called out, looking around for the Rauwryhr girl until she saw the bat-like form hiding awkwardly in the crowd. “Trix… please come here, I promise I won’t hurt you.”
Trycrur hesitated, and that managed to make Jen feel worse, like she was some kind of monster. “Please,” she beckoned again, more gently.
That seemed to have been enough because Trycrur made her way over, albeit warily, and stood just out of thrashing distance.
“Trix,” she said, “I can’t just leave it like this. It’s doing my head in! Please, is there anywhere you think he might have gone?”
Trycrur shook her heard sadly. “He’s not aboard the Zhadersil, I know that much. He took the ‘Shopping Trolley’ out again after he’d dropped you off here. Chir just went out to Affrag to scan for him there, but if that’s where he is he’s got it cloaked.”
“Fucking cloak,” cursed Jen, running trembling fingers through her hair, then across her still-sore throat where Adrian’s arm had been pressed. She could still feel it, the raw terror of suffocation, the feeling of dying in the arms of someone you had trusted. “Fucking spaceships…”
She sighed. “As soon as you hear anything…”
Trycrur nodded. “You’ll be the first to know.”
“Thank you,” Jen said quietly. “And Trix… did you ever think he could do something like this?
Trycrur sighed, looking away contemplatively before answering. “I always knew he was incredibly dangerous. That was always the exciting bit. But when you hear stories about humans on the networks, you only hear about how dangerous they are, or the impressive things they have done, or on the other side of it the sacrifices they have made to protect others. You don’t think of them as real people, it’s almost as if you’re all too big to be real. Everyone calls your race ‘psychotic’, but now I’m wondering if that perception just helped to mask actual problems Adrian was having.”
“I treated him like a protector,” Jen said, a little absently. “Like my knight in shining armour, so strong, so capable…”
She smiled involuntarily, a sad kind of smile. “A bit shy. He didn’t like to talk about himself. That really should have been a red flag.”
Trycrur nodded silently, and remained there as though she sensed there would be more.
“I wondered if he might have problems early on, you know,” Jen continued. “He was a soldier, after all, and when I met him he was so fierce, he could go from friendly to cold in half a heartbeat. It took ages for him to mellow around me… to open up at all. Now that I think about it, I wonder if we weren’t just helping each other heal?”
“You seem less angry now,” Trycrur observed.
Jen laughed bitterly, and balled a fist. “If I ever see him again…”
If.
Zhadersil
“What do you think?” Chir asked as they returned to the Zhadersil. “Now that we’re safely back here?”
“The same thing I said to Jen,” Trycrur replied. “But I also think that if we don’t get Adrian back, this ship is not going anywhere.”
“I’ve already got two ships out on patrol to try and find any trace of him,” Chir replied. “I don’t want to commit too many resources to this when he’s likely to just turn up again by himself.”
“I don’t know, Chir,” Trycrur said with clear concern. “I think there’s something really wrong with Adrian. I don’t know when or if we’ll see him again, and if we can’t find him we can’t help him. Not that I’d have any idea where to start.”
Chir thought over that for a moment. “I’ll commit a third ship.”
“I hope they find something,” Trycrur said. “If they don’t we’re in a real bind.”
“How are your weapons coming along, by the way,” Chir asked, changing the subject. “The explosives are okay?”
“They’re fine, thank you,” Trycrur told him, “although I am now well underway with the process to become my own mining company. Hooray.”
“Then the weapons…”
“Are currently being built by some people I trust not to screw up,” Trycrur told him. “The Zhadersil will be fully armed in a few short (days).”
“A piece of good news amongst all the bad,” Chir said, glad to hear something pleasant for once. “Now if only we could attract a real crew for this thing and get the repairs complete in a reasonable time, I could start being happy again.”
“What about our doctor?” Trycrur asked. “It’s not every day you meet a Corti who admits to working for the Directorate before demanding a place on your crew.”
“He did well enough,” Chir admitted. “I even let him explain his reasoning.”
“Oh?” Trycrur asked, overflowing with curiosity.
“He was intending to speak to Adrian,” Chir said, pausing for long enough to make Trycrur wonder if that was the entire reason. “He thought that if he revealed his affiliations right away, Adrian would not be inclined to kill him, and if he did choose to let him on board would also be aware of that information to avoid sharing in the Doctor’s presence.”
“So the Doctor was attempting to be the worst spy in the galaxy?” Trycrur asked, clearly baffled. “That makes no sense.”
“It makes more sense if you understand he had no choice in the matter,” Chir told her. “He will be happiest if we keep him out of the loop on anything not relating to medical care.”
“So you think we can… trust him?” Trycrur ventured.
Chir laughed. “We can trust him to be untrustworthy in a very specific way. And at least when it comes to him we won’t need to worry about who he’s really working for. We’ll already know.”
+++++
Shopping Trolley, vicinity of Zhadersil
It was quiet aboard the Hunter vessel, aside from the gentle hum of power that turned a bunch of parts into a starship. That hum seemed like the breath of life that gave each vessel its character, its own personality. The Shopping Trolley’s hum was ever so slightly more significant on the port side than its starboard, and not for any reason Adrian had been able to ascertain.
He’d been listening to that hum for hours now. Sitting in what was otherwise silence aboard the cloaked Hunter ship. Here he was cursed with only his own company. Here he was able to think.
Part of him was starting to think how that gun of his would taste.
He caught those thoughts, though; froze them in his mind and set them aside. They were familiar, evil things in a mind built for the unmaking of things, but they only appeared when he’d really fucked up something big.
The rest of him, the larger part that was less suicidal than it was homicidal, was considering his next course of action. He had, in effect, just run away from home with no idea what he was doing or where he was going. All he had known was that he hadn’t wanted to be around for what happened when Jen woke up.
There were conversations that would be had, and he didn’t think he was going to improve things by being any kind of part of them.
He did have to go somewhere, though. It was clear that he could not just stay here, indefinitely floating around the Zhadersil and the orbital factory. He had considered going to Affrag, but he knew that if there was any place they’d go looking for him it was there. They were already looking for him.
Why were they already looking for him? They must know that he didn’t want to be found right now. Was there a problem? Did they need his help with something?
Had something happened to Jen?
That last thought troubled him more than all of the rest of them. That would be guilt piled upon guilt, should something happen to her because he had fled. Maybe that was why he hadn’t gone anywhere else? Because he couldn’t just leave Jen again?
“Fuck,” he groaned, slumping forward in his chair with his head in his hands. “I’m really fucking hopeless, aren’t I?”
Nothing responded to his self-rebuke, nothing was there to respond.
The gentle hum of the Hunter vessel continued unabated.
Date Point 2 Years 3 Months After Vancouver
Another ship had been lost in orbit of the cursed world. It had been a mere scout, surveying what might be surveyed of the cursed world and its surrounding star system. It had been expendable, but Alpha-of-Alphas still seethed in fury as it learned the finer details of what had occurred.
A missing Hunter vessel, belonging to one of the five broken broods, had been detected, and the Alpha of Brood Procui had wisely been cautious in the investigation it had committed.
Regardless of its caution, Alpha Procui had not survived the encounter. Instead it had been shredded with shrapnel, along with all of its most senior Brood members. The Procui vessel had been finished by a pair of coilgun bolts that had punched holes in the hull and deprived the rest of much-needed atmosphere.
It had been a very capable slaughter.
Alpha-of-Alphas knew… it knew it had been a human. That human. The Cursed Human.
Alpha-of-Alphas chittered in crazed laughter, startling its subordinates who knew nothing of its thoughts.
The other humans it had encountered, they were only predator by virtue of their flesh. They had hidden themselves away from the Swarm of Swarms. They had fought in desperation, they had died in desperation.
They had tasted of desperation, and Alpha-of-Alphas, who had reveled in ecstasy upon its first taste of the rich, dense meat, could now taste only their fear, their uselessness, their complete and utter failure to truly threaten the Swarm.
Alpha-of-Alphas longed to taste the flesh of the Cursed Human. That one was a predator in every sense of the word. That one carried death with it on a scale that dwarfed any but the Alpha-of-Alphas itself.
That one would surely be delicious!
And now that the Alpha-of-Alphas had finished investigating the data recovered from the Procui vessel, it knew exactly where the Cursed Human would be.
Two hundred vessels would be enough, and one of them would belong to the Alpha-of-Alphas.
The Alpha-of-Alphas broadcast: +<jubilation; command> The Cursed Human has been discovered! Ready the Swarm! It is time to taste Cursed flesh! Meat to the Maw!!!+
+++++
Affrag
Adrian scratched at his beard. It had been a long time since he’d shaved. It’d been a long time since he’d seen a mirror for that matter. The Hunter vessel didn’t have any, but he supposed if, like the Hunters, you had a face like a bag of smashed crabs you didn’t really want to look at it.
He wondered if it still counted as living like a caveman if your cave was air conditioned and filled with advanced alien technology? Probably not, even if it was parked inside a cave.
Under cloak, of course. He didn’t want to be found that easily, by the Hunters or by anyone else. He wasn’t sure, though, that he didn’t want to be found at all; he had come to Affrag after all, where he knew they’d be looking for him.
He really didn’t know what he expected to happen if they ever found him. Surely they’d all be really pissed off? Not that he could blame them for that.
The solitude was helping though, in its own way. There was nobody making demands of him, no serious dangers to encounter on his excursions out to get food or to simply be outside. Affrag was beautiful. Affrag was calming.
Affrag was boring and lonely.
He’d made his bed, though, and now he’d have to sleep in it. He couldn’t imagine simply going back to the Zhadersil. The recriminations that awaited him there… Jen awaited him there…
He couldn’t face her. Boredom and loneliness were preferable to seeing the accusation he knew she’d have in her eyes. The sheer, fucking reproach she’d hold against the man she’d trusted, and had broken that trust.
It scared him shitless.
But, he wondered, how long could he go on living the Robinson Crusoe lifestyle? How long before all his fuck ups caught up with him again?
How long before Affrag was made dangerous?
Affrag, Sixty Five Million Years Ago
Xagh turned the switch on the grenade, tossing it around the corner and waiting for the satisfying explosion before he charged, Zheron Gun spraying death against the invaders.
He was old; far older than a V’Straki had any right to be, and frail because of it, but Xagh still had the spark that made him a soldier and right now that spark burned furiously. He hadn’t felt so alive since he’d left the Zhadersil. Maybe not even since he’d been leading boarding parties.
If only it hadn’t taken the destruction of the Affrag colony to bring his blood to such fullness. The V’Straki here had worked so hard, pushed so far to reach that point where the future of their children was not full of darkness, where their race had a destiny once again. That future was gone now, destroyed as a final insult by the Igraen Alliance. Their final genocide.
The invasion itself had come without notice, ten thousand new stars hanging in the night sky and descending in thunder and flame. The stars had been silent for so long – for nine full decades – and they had begun to suspect that they were the last bastion of intelligent life that remained in a war-blasted galaxy.
In a way they had been right; these things did not possess the true intelligence of V’Straki or even of the races of the Igraen Alliance. They were weapons only, albeit ones still capable of fulfilling their original purpose even after the Alliance was nothing more than dust.
The purpose of purging the galaxy of all V’Straki. The mad Igraen purpose of total genocide. Xagh hoped that these things were the last of their kind as he was of his; he did not like to think of succeeding here today only to have been defeated on the greater stage. Today saw the end of the V’Straki and all their works, it was poetic that it should see the end of all that remained of the Alliance as well.
He roared as he pressed forward, sweeping the wide firing arc of his Zheron gun across each group he came across. The gun was a legacy of his time aboard the Zhadersil, and on its current setting was a wide-arc deck-sweeper. Today it was sweeping these kin-breeders aside like a damned broom!
With thirty of the creatures dead before they could respond, Xagh paused to catch his breath and to admire his handiwork. The Zheron gun was an older model, lacking the cooling bolts built into the newer types that the Zhadersil had never been provisioned with, and a rest gave the weapon a chance to cool off. A fain plume of plasma lifted from the barrel when he pointed it skyward, a visual effect he had always enjoyed and would have missed were it gone.
“Kothri,” he grunted as he picked over the creatures. They were a race of sub-sentient insects that had been enhanced with cybernetics to the point that they were now more than sixty percent robotics. That left thirty or forty percent as weak flesh, and while Xagh was no scientist he could still tell that the flesh that remained was crucial.
He flexed his elderly body as he waited, not wanting to let the joints grow stiff once the rush had left them. “I’m getting too damned old for this,” he complained to his gun, “and so are you… why couldn’t these guys have come thirty (years) ago? What else did they have going on?”
He sighed. They had probably been busy building all of those ships in orbit, a full army to slaughter a bunch of colonists and a few old soldiers. By now the others must have fled, and maybe they’d gotten away – he hadn’t heard any screams in a while, now – but the most likely situation was that he was the last V’Straki left in the whole universe.
Didn’t that just make him special?
“Let me tell you kin-breeders something,” he growled to the dead creatures. “There’s no doubt you’ve killed my kind, but you have not beaten us. I’m going to make you burn, and that’s a promise!”
There was, Xagh was well aware, a single and intentional point of failure in a Kothri swarm, built in by the Igraen to ensure that if their creations turned against them they would have the killswitch. They were not a hive mind, that would have allowed each member of their swarm to contribute to its intelligence, but rather a vast number of drones controlled by a single entity, the over-mind, and unless something had changed there was no method for the over-mind to divide its force. If the swarm was here in numbers, and if they were working with the strategy that they were, then the over-mind was here as well.
The door to the room he was resting in burst open under the weight of a group of them, and by pure instinct Xagh threw himself behind the barricade the dead Kothri had been busily constructing. Their eyes had long since been replaced with metal components to provide high-definition night vision. The cybernetics glowed a deep, bloody red that also served to intimidate, but more usefully it let him pick out their number even when they were in full shadow.
His gun was still cooling off, and although Xagh hadn’t used it so much since well before he’d made Shiplord, he’d still be counting down subconsciously. They were swarming the room, and there was still a full (minute) left to go.
He slipped out another grenade, one of the last few that the Zhadersil had had remaining in its armory when they had left. This one was painted bright yellow; not intended to be used in small spaces like a colonial hall. He turned the dial and put his hands over his hearing canals; today was a day to live dangerously.
One (minute) later he was walking out through that same door like a hero from the propaganda stories, giving the few who remained outside a last goodnight from the Zheron gun. That was a damn sight more fight than they’d been looking to have, and it was over for them before they could recompose their strategy.
There was one more failure that over-minds were prone to having. They were singular, but their attention was divided and had to be focused on the locations of most need. You hit hard, you hit fast, and you hit them where they weren’t expecting it, and then when they were distracted you hit them where it really hurt.
Xagh entered the hangar at last, finding it empty for the moment, save for the last of the landing crafts he had to visit. The others ships were all ready.
Everything was ready.
Now it was time for fireworks.
Zhadersil, Present Day
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, still looking good, still rather pissed off, and still stuck in space. Homesick, too, but it turned out that was just another thing that she couldn’t get to.
Although at least she knew where that one was now. Not that it really helped when a bunch of xenophobic aliens had stuck a big cage around the whole solar system and called it a day.
You might have thought that that was the sort of thing that Adrian would have told her about, but then you would have thought wrong.
“Well,” she said, unhappily after Trycrur had filled her in on all the details, “at least his stupid ship is heavily armed now, so even if we can’t really use it properly, we’ll at least be safer than anywhere else we might be.”
Trycrur had agreed with that assessment at least. “Missiles on every rack, and more besides. Additional coil guns harvested from the extra Hunter vessels have been mounted on the hull, but will need to be controlled from the Endless Sequence until I can get them to properly integrate with the Zhadersil.”
“That’s the problem with old software,” Jen replied. “Lots of dependencies that may simply no longer exist.”
“I’m sure it’s possible,” Trycrur said, “but with everything else going on…”
“With everything else going on, it’s been at the bottom of your very long list,” Jen finished. “Nobody can blame you for that, Trix. Without you, the Zhadersil wouldn’t be half as ridiculously dangerous as it is now.”
“You and… well, you know, are as much to thank for that as I am,” Trycrur told her, omitting the name that caused Jen so much tension, but not realising that a simple omission didn’t help when you lived in a place where reminders existed in every corner. “Your human ideas are what I put my skill to building.”
“I’m just telling you what we have on Earth, Trix,” Jen said. “I’m not some kind of military genius. I’m just a girl in I.T. who makes poor life decisions.”
“We all make poor life decisions, Jen,” Trycrur reassured her. “That’s why we’re all here and not somewhere else enjoying fabulous wealth.”
That was not as reassuring as Trycrur might have hoped it would be, but at least it made Jen laugh. In the time since Adrian had left, she’d become better friends with both Trycrur and Chir. She’d even taken charge of organising various operations that Chir and his expanding group were to embark on, spreading the name of ‘Zhadersil’ throughout Celzi-controlled space, and liaised with Doctor Grznk – or ‘Doctor Grizzles’ as she’d come to call the cantankerous Corti, much to his chagrin – over anything he might need to run the medical section.
Grizzles was alright as Corti went, maintaining a ridiculous level of honesty about what he was reporting to the Directorate and when he was doing so. He even made special efforts to remain unaware of things that were going on so that he could carry out his orders to the letter but no further. He’d also been the one responsible for treating her Adrian-sustained injuries after she’d returned to the Zhadersil.
Jen waved goodbye to Trycrur and proceeded back towards the Endless Sequence. It was a more comfortable vessel, in her opinion, and she’d taken up residence there after discovering just how much more comfortable it was. It beat the pants off of the old, outdated dinosaur sleeping quarters that Adrian had preferred, and it was also on board an actual, fully-functional starship, so if she ever needed to abandon the Zhadersil for whatever reason she already had a really good way to do it.
“Jen!” Chir called out, striding across the flight deck towards here. It looked as though he had just come back in from one of his frequent visits to the orbital factory. The Zhadersil was far too large to fit in any of its regular docks, so special efforts had been made to rebuild the damaged sections. That still meant that if they ever needed to get to the station, they needed to use one of the smaller ships to make the quick journey.
Jen turned to face him quickly. It looked as though he had something important to say, and for the last month ‘something important’ had seemed like it could only ever be one thing. “Chir,” she greeted him, “what is it?!”
“Word from the orbital station,” he said, and she could tell right away that whatever news it was was bad. “A message from the Hunters was intercepted. The Swarm of Swarms has a new target.”
Jen went cold. She’d spent the last few weeks catching up on all the misery that Adrian had apparently been shielding her from, and the details of the Swarm of Swarms was chief among them. Thousands of ships, all descending on a location at once; there was nothing in the galaxy that could stop it once it arrived.
“What is it?” she asked. “Are they coming here?”
“They’ve made the orbital factory aware of their demands,” Chir said. “They’ve made the whole Dominion aware of their demands. They know that Adrian was here. They want the ‘Cursed Human’ or they intend to take the whole of the station with him.”
“But we don’t have any idea where he is,” Jen protested, although protesting that to Chir would be of no help. “All these people are going to die because Adrian ran away?”
“All of them,” Chir said, “including us if we don’t get out of here. An evacuation is already being planned, and they want to fill the Zhadersil with refugees.”
Jen nodded. “Of course we’ll-“
“They won’t allow you to come with us,” Chir interrupted. “They don’t want a human anywhere near them when the Great Hunt arrives. They think they’re better off leaving you here, Jen.”
“What do you think, Chir?” Jen asked him, deeply unsettled at the prospect. “What do your men think?”
“We will not allow you to be ejected into space, or left for devouring, Jen,” Chir replied fiercely. “You should not need to ask us such a question! Not ever!”
“Ach, I don’t want to be left behind,” Jen said, “but I can’t run away with the Zhadersil and leave so many of those people behind. Not when we could be saving them. How many are there?”
“Around fifteen thousand,” Chir replied. “we have room for a very decent fraction of that figure, and other vessels in the vicinity or in dock may render limited assistance. It is possible to fully evacuate.”
“But they won’t let me stay,” Jen said. “If that’s the case, I will have to go. I can take the wee vessel you brought…”
“I will go with you,” Chir immediately volunteered.
Jen shook her head. “I can fly it, I’ve been practicing, and you’ll be more useful if you’re here.”
Chir sighed, and to Jen it seemed as though a great weight had fallen on him. “Very well,” he said. “I will begin making the arrangements.”