Space Station in geosynchronous orbit of Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
There was blood everywhere, spilling out to flow into empty space like an undulating river in air. Except of course there was no air, and the blood was crystalising almost as soon as it escaped flesh, the water therein boiling away into the void.
But she was still alive to witness it, because she wasn’t the one whose blood was rushing out. That had belonged to Margarita, the small corpse still attached to Jen’s back. It was hard to imagine that such a small body could hold so much blood, but no further proof than this was required. Or wanted, for that matter.
The last thing Jen had heard over the communicator link was a scream of horror being sucked away with the air that made it possible. A scream Jen was sure she would remember until the moment she died, even if that moment was only seconds away.
The impact of the blow had sent Jen tumbling forward, spinning down the corridor in wild, out of control twists and turns that had sprayed Margarita’s blood in all directions. Even with her much improved reflexes it had taken her valuable time to counter the spin, and the machine was upon her once more as she did.
Except this time it wasn’t invisible. This time it was rendered in the crimson of Margarita’s blood. A last, sanguine gift from the small Spaniard.
It was like a huge mechanical spider, red and angry. Its limbs looked fearsomely sharp – she recognized the distinctive addition of fusion blade technology to the wicked edge – and it floated freely under the aid of kinetic technology. It was a horror made real, and Jen thought that if you’d told her it ran on nightmare fuel, she would have believed you.
But she didn’t hesitate; she picked out somewhere important looking and the bullets did the rest. The spiderbot recoiled as a half dozen rounds tore through its core, spasming wildly until the power left it and revealed the gleaming metal once more.
Jen took a moment to correct herself once more, countering the effects of the recoil and catching her trembling breath.
She removed Margarita’s corpse, fighting against the wave of nausea the that threatened to fill her helmet and whispered a quick prayer while doing her best to avoid a second glimpse of entrails spreading into the void.
She glanced everywhere else though. She had no idea how many of those things there were out there. How would she see them coming?
How would Adrian see them coming?
She was opening the communicator link almost before she had finished the thought.
“Adrian?!” she called out fearfully. “Adrian are you there?”
“Jen? I’m here.” he replied after half a moment, his voice full of worry. “What’s wrong?”
Relief flooded her at the sound of his voice. “Adrian,” she said quickly, feeling the urgency of getting the warning out. “There are spiderbots! Invisible spiderbots! One got Margarita. Oh god, it tore her open, Adrian!”
She was babbling, letting the horror of it spill from her as desperate words. There was silence on the other side, silence for too long, and she hesitated. “Adrian?”
“I’m here,” he said again, but now his voice was hard, as it had sounded that time on the island when the Hunters had come for them. Jen had remembered that voice, had hated the memory of it, but right now she welcomed it. If that was what was needed to save them – that darkness that lurked behind his eyes – she damn well welcomed it.
“Keep moving forward,” he said, his tone flat and dead. “Get to the service vessel, you can leave the rest to me.”
“Will you be alright,” she asked, ashamed of needing to rely on him again, but terrified of facing more of those things.
There was a heavy pause on the line, and then he disconnected, leaving her feeling sick.
He hadn’t been willing to lie.
+++++
Adrian had felt the Soldier take him the moment Jen announced Margarita’s death, and he hadn’t resisted. He needed the cold logic, the cool head and the iron will the Soldier commanded; he didn’t trust Adrian the Man to do whatever needed to be done. There was a line right down the middle of him, but whatever mistake either made, the Man endured it for both.
That was not a problem the Soldier needed to think about, however, and therefore he didn’t. The Soldier only thought of winning. He began by cutting his arm free from its sling, careful not to puncture the suit. In zero gravity he could use the arm freely if he could ignore the pain – the Soldier could – and the ability to use both hands provided enough incentive when his life was on the line.
He took the blade by his good arm, figuring a break in the bone would make its use impossible, and gripped the submachine gun lightly by the other.
Then he started to move again, his eyes unfocused and thereby watching all.
“Askit,” he said, connecting to the link. “How many breaches in total?”
“Four,” Askit replied. “Jen just described the machines to me. I believe only one could fit in each, so three remain.”
“Guide me to them,” Adrian told him.
Askit hesitated. “Are you sure?”
Adrian stared dully ahead, watching the apparent emptiness of the corridor for any sign it was otherwise. “I’m sure.”
Askit didn’t argue further, and began issuing instructions on which corridors to use. The machines were most likely hunting him, as they hadn’t yet started attacking the service vessel. That was fine, of course, since if they knew where he was he didn’t need to go searching.
But he could make preparations.
Askit told him when Jen finally made it back to the vessel, covered with frozen blood and wet with fear. Deep within, Adrian the Man was pleased to hear it. The Soldier was pleased too; it was one thing less for the machines to hunt.
They didn’t reach him before his traps were laid. He had taken up residence in a bend in the corridor, filling the space either way with quickly rotating fusion blades. It was a gamble, the machines might pluck them from their places and turn them against him, but from what he had seen the aliens themselves were so disinclined to think along those lines that he would have been amazing to find their machines do otherwise.
Indeed, the first of them that came for him tried to push its way through and mostly destroyed itself in the process. A single burst of gunfire sent it the rest of the way, and he spent the next few moments snatching up wayward fusion blades and returning them to their positions.
He doubted the next would be destroyed so easily. He doubted the aliens that built things like this were the type to allow all of them to fall into the same trap.
He licked his lips; they’d gone dry with anticipation.
The next one to arrive proved him right. Unlike its predecessor it didn’t try to push through the whirling blades. Instead it struck them down with its own; he learned then that they would drop their cloak to attack, whether by design or by power constraints that prevented a machine of its size from powering kinetics, its fusion blades and the cloaking system all at the same time.
That was good to know, as was the fact that they couldn’t move fast enough to avoid being annihilated under a hail of bullets. It seemed as though they were lightly built, intended as stealthy assassins rather than heavy combat machines. Adrian doubted they were audible even if there was atmosphere to hear by, and set against small, unsuspecting groups they would be lethal.
A pity for them they were set against him.
+++++
Undisclosed Location, Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
Zero looked at the live feed and he swallowed. Hard.
The first prototype had done well, hunting down a pair of the humans and managing to kill one – he couldn’t be sure which – before the other managed to destroy it somehow. He still hadn’t figured out the cause of the failure before another reached the human who was cowering in a corridor.
The second prototype had registered massive damage before its signal cut out, and Zero studied the feed ferociously for what had gone wrong. Had the cloaking system failed, and allowed the human to destroy the prototype from a distance? No notifications of that.
Could humans see through cloaking technology?! That was an alarming prospect, if true, but there’d never been any sign of it as a natural ability. Perhaps the Cruezzir in their systems had somehow-
Zero saw the reason. The prototype had encountered debris; the prototype had attempted to pass through, and the prototype had failed. It wouldn’t be the first time the humans had used weapons disguised as debris to achieve their goals, and it seemed likely that the same had happened here.
There was no need to worry; the next prototype would adapt.
The next prototype failed even faster, its signal vanishing as it attempted to swat away the debris with its fusion blades.
Zero hissed air out between his teeth in frustration. Doing that would have required the cloaking system deactivate, and the human would have been quick to take the initiative.
There was only one prototype left, and if it was destroyed then Zero would be destroyed along with it. He had burned far too much of his credit to recover without absolute success, and he couldn’t leave his life in the hands of a useless machine.
He connected himself to the system directly, and became the machine. His vision expanded to take on the multi-sensor suite built into each prototype, and a virtual cortex connected him to all eight of its limbs.
It was as though Zero was aboard the station, and the sensor suite revealed it to him in more detail than he’d ever seen it in on his infrequent visits.
But there was only one thing Zero cared to see. One thing that stood – not in cowardice, but in wait – between two walls of spinning plasma blades.
The human was cunning.
Zero was cunning too. He watched, and waited, and thought until he had a plan. A most cunning plan.
It would work, he thought with a predatory eagerness. Oh yes, the plan would most definitely work.
+++++
Askit had never been so on edge. He was keeping one eye on the sensors that told him that Adrian was still alive, and the other on the scanners that told him they weren’t expecting any more company. Somewhere between the two he kept an eye on the low-grade sensor data the service vessel was supplying about itself, and the results were at least consistent if not encouraging.
They were all tense, and handling it in different ways. Askit threw himself into his work, with as many simultaneous distractions as possible to stop him from just sitting there and thinking about the situation they were all in; Gdugnir sat and stared at her instruments in something approaching a meditative state, and Jen – most annoyingly – paced back and forth while she pondered the situation, and kept glancing over at Askit like he was some form of oracle.
“Yes, he’s still alive!” Askit snapped most recently. “And no, he’s not responding to my questions with anything helpful.”
“But he took down another two, yes?” Jen said. “So that just leaves one.”
“One that should have reached him by now,” Askit replied, having been considering this fact in the back of his mind as the rest focused on other things. “If it was going to attack, it should already have done so.”
Jen frowned, biting her lower lip as she did in what Askit had come to recognise as ‘troubled thought’. “How long will his air last?”
“Not long enough to stand there forever,” he replied. “But long enough for an army of backup to arrive. We don’t have an indefinite amount of time.”
“We need to get the wormhole drive started,” Jen said. “I… suppose I could go?”
“I believe that if I were to let you out of that door,” Askit said dryly, “that Adrian would actually kill me.”
“Then he has to do it,” she replied. “And he has to do it now.”
Askit sighed in frustration, and turned back to the console to re-open the pointless communicator link.
“Adrian, this is Askit,” he said unnecessarily. “Jen is demanding that she goes to activate the wormhole drive if you don’t get moving.”
“No,” Adrian replied flatly.
“The longer you stay there the more time the authorities on the surface have to pull a real defence together,” Askit argued. “And you don’t have an endless supply of air.
There was silence on the line for a while. “Fine, I’ll be a few minutes.”
The communicator link ended, and Adrian’s signal began to move.
“I’ll put him onto the main display,” he told Jen. “We can both keep an eye on him that way.”
She nodded her thanks, and he turned back to his own console, tapping it with an impatient finger. None of this seemed to sit right with him, and he was waiting for that fateful moment when the signal ended.
He had no idea what he would do if that happened, and he doubted Jen would be in much of a condition to go out and finish the job, even if she managed to avoid the same fate.
But nothing interrupted the progress of the dot indicating Adrian’s progress. There was no pause in his movement, save for when he stopped just outside the purple area that indicated the service vessel the rest of them were on, and then another when he finally reached the room containing the wormhole drive.
“He got there!” Jen said in relief. “Maybe the other spiderbot just didn’t work?”
Askit frowned, but kept his doubts to himself. There was no way that was the case, not with all that had been thrown at them as they’d been making their escape, and the knot of dread in his chest just grew tighter.
Even when the jackpoint lit up, there was no change in that cold lump of worry, and it was only his detachment that allowed him to focus on his work.
“We’re in,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to where Jen stood behind him. “I’ve just uploaded the parameters to the wormhole drive, so now we just need to wait.”
And of course to hope that things didn’t turn to shit for a change. A Corti could dream.
“Adrian,” he said, reactivating the communicator link, “the Drive is powering up now. Start making your way back, but keep watch out for ambushes. I have a bad feeling.”
“There should have been four,” came the terse reply, “but I still haven’t seen any sign of it, and I’m not lucky enough for it to have fucked off somewhere.”
“None of us are that lucky,” Askit agreed, “but the sequence will complete within (ten seconds). I’d expect a fast response from the Celzi, so we have to move quickly.”
“And hope this works,” Jen added, crossing both her fingers in a gesture humans apparently used as some sort of ‘luck’ creator.
“And hope this works,” Askit repeated, white-knuckling the console as the wormhole activated. He’d never been through one before, and although he’d heard that the process produced no sensations whatsoever, and was an exceedingly mature technology, he still felt unnerved by the idea of being simultaneously destroyed and then reconstructed halfway across the galaxy.
But again, nothing went wrong, and the navigation systems repeatedly beeped as they tried to re-align themselves to the new location and failed each time. An orbital service vessel only required local starcharts, after all, and there was no way it was going to have them for Celzi space.
“We’re through,” Gdugnir told them, exhaling the breath she’d apparently been holding. “We just dropped into low orbit around Vezha. Several Alliance cruisers are already hitting us with hard scans. Coilguns will be next.”
Askit nodded. “Get ready to go as soon as-”
The service vessel’s damage sensor gained a new alert. He read it, and then he read it again, and when he was done re-reading it Askit looked up at the others with his eyes widening in slowly dawning horror. “Helmets on! Now!”
That was when the gravity went away…
+++++
Aratas, Celzi Heavy Cruiser, low orbit of Vezhan Homeworld
Fleet Master Cizziz had been as surprised as anyone when the Dominion space station had dropped into low orbit after the sudden appearance of a wormhole. The Celzi Alliance had taken pains to alter their beacon codes so that that sort of thing couldn’t be done, and in the early days of the war had used the unmodified enemy beacons to their advantage.
If this was proof that the Dominion had access to their codes, that was very bad news, and Cizziz had not wasted any time in ordering heavy bombardment of the space station.
It was half-destroyed before the scans were being called to his attention. Zero atmosphere, zero kinetic control, zero attacks made. By all observable evidence, a dead space station had just pushed its way through a wormhole to get here.
“This makes no sense,” he muttered to himself, twisting his long, crane-like neck around to see all of the data. “Even as a Dominion trick this is bizarre! Sensor tech, what is this minor expulsion of atmosphere?”
“A disintegrating orbital service vessel, sir,’ the Sensor tech responded. “I was just scanning it, and what came out with it.”
Cizziz focused on that information. Three vacuum suited figures, two unknown bipeds – one of which was armed with a fusion blade – and a Corti, an unknown configuration of ruined machinery, and a dead Chehnasho in an unhelmeted vacuum suit.
Normally he would have let the void have them, leaving them to drift or to re-enter atmosphere unprotected, but there was a mystery here and they may have the answers.
“Send a retrieval craft to collect them,” he ordered. “And ready them for interrogation. I’m interested in what they have to say.”
+++++
Undisclosed Location, Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
Zero was satisfied with the report. It should be enough to keep the Hierarchy from ending his life, even if he’d be working to rebuild what he’d spent for the rest of his cycles.
But the humans were dead. That was the most important part, and before it had been destroyed by unknown factors, the final prototype had used the station quantum transmitter to send the message that its programmed task was complete.
The prototype had waited until the wormhole had transported them before destroying the engine of the service vessel and killing their kinetic drive. They wouldn’t be going anywhere as the Celzi fleet began their bombardment.
Everything would be destroyed; the station, the service vessel, the ultra-harnesses and the prototypes.
The humans.
And Zero could walk away in the comfort of knowing that he had personally ended the two humans actively involved in an effort to bring the war to a close before the Hierarchy was ready. Two humans who had humiliated the low-level efforts of the Hierarchy to carry out its grand agenda.
The Hunters could continue their Grand Hunt; what better reason to keep Earth sealed away then for its own good? And by the time the Hunters could be dealt with, they could be allowed to fall upon the Earth and scour it clean.
And then, with nobody left to oppose them, the stage would be set for the Hierarchy to move on to the next step in their grand agenda.
And as always, they would continue to rule from the shadows. The true founders of the Corti Directorate, and the secret rulers of the Interspecies Dominion.