Returning to Spot, Adrian kept a wary eye on his surroundings, and was sure to avoid making more noise than he needed to make. A sated belly could also sate the mind, and it was important to hang on to the primal fear that had sharpened his senses thus far. In spite of this he didn’t notice the creature squatting by the starship’s door until he was already inside the palisade, and both of them had already drawn their weapons. That was a bit embarrassing, considering it looked like one of the space-yeti he’d rescued during the battle, and even wielded a fusion blade of its own. It did not wield a gun, however, which gave Adrian the advantage at a dozen paces.
It lowered the blade slowly as recognition dawned. “You are the ‘Adrian’.”
“You speak English,” Adrian replied. He didn’t lower his gun yet; just because he’d saved them earlier didn’t mean they were still friendly.
“I learn from the Chosen One,” it replied. “I learn from ‘Jen.’ I am Groddi.”
Adrian nodded; he remembered the one called Groddi as being in charge of the group of soldiers, but the memories of the battle were increasingly patchy towards the end. “What are you doing here?”
Groddi lowered his blade all the way, returned it to his belt—some kind of recently harvested furred creature—and relaxed his stance. “We come to check. We stay sixty days… ‘Jen’ did not return. We come back to check.”
Glancing around him, Adrian tried to spot any sign of movement in the heavy forest, but could see nothing. Against a tribe of natives, however, that did little to reassure him, and while he lowered the gun he did not re-holster it. “Where are the others, then?”
“They go and follow tracks from here,” Groddi replied. “I stay here in case you come back. We want to know: what has happened here?”
“Nothing good,” Adrian told him. “How do you feel?”
“I am well enough,” Groddi said, eyeing him with concern. “Why are you asking? Should I not be well?”
Adrian shook his head. “I don’t know. You might feel better than ever, or you might go crazy, or both. I get the feeling that stuff around here isn’t supposed to be the size it is, though, so maybe that’s something to be…”
He stopped talking as a dark expression crossed Groddi’s face. “Madness… one of my men was… stilled… made dead… for a broken mind, and he was bigger than he had been—I am sure of this! What was done to him? Something is in the food? We have seen the big animals here, and that is new since we left.”
“Something’s in everything,” Adrian told him.
“Yet you have recently eaten,” Groddi noted; Adrian had wiped his face on his arm, but probably hadn’t done a very good job of it.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I don’t think I’m going to get any fucking crazier than I already am. They haven’t come back, by the way; I just happened to wake up.”
Groddi nodded thoughtfully. “They believed that was not possible. That is why they went to find aid from beyond the stars.”
“I know. I’m preparing to follow them,” Adrian told him. “You can just leave it to me from here—if they’re alive, I’ll find them; I’ve done it before.”
Not to mention that he really didn’t want to keep hanging around people whose planet he’d played an indirect part in ruining. Adrian had given Jen the two-edged sword that was Cruezzir, and that made the consequences his responsibility. If he’d gotten to it sooner he might have been able to contain the problem, but now… if it was in the soil it could be in the water, and if it was in the water it would soon be everywhere.
“I could not come with you even if I dared,” Groddi replied. “We found more of our kind across the water—primitives who worship us, if you can believe it, because of blades such as mine—but we are leading them. It was difficult for me to come here without them.”
Something like guilt stirred in Adrian, but it wasn’t as though he could ever fix the problem and he set it to one side. It didn’t sit well with him—genocide was abhorrent whether accidental or intentional—but for the moment he didn’t have the means to do anything about it. “If I manage to make it back, I’ll know where to find you.”
“You’re leaving now?” Groddi asked, glancing at the vegetation that gripped the little starship. “I believe you will need to trim the plants.”
Adrian studied the plants, which he could have sworn had spread since he’d left mere hours ago, and nodded his agreement. “You’re not wrong, but I reckon I’ll need a couple more recovery days first.”
He looked down at his arms where the spider-web of dark lines still patterned the skin. They had faded a little—food and water were working their magic—but he knew from experience that such injuries took time to heal. Given how they looked, he didn’t even want to imagine his appearance when they’d put him in the stasis-pod. “I’ve probably been pushing myself harder than I should’ve been, but I didn’t have much of a choice in that. Once upon a time I was nearly killed outright, and it took me days to recover even with the help of medicine and an evil doctor, but I think I might have been even worse off this time around.”
“In the words of the Chosen One, you were ‘at death’s door’,” Groddi informed him. “But that seems to be less the case now. I shall return to my people, but I will not be waiting for your return. The Dark One is dead, and so are the ‘Hunters’: now is the time to build anew, and I must warn them against food from this island, and of any big beast.”
That would keep them safe for a while, Adrian figured, but it was merely a delay of the inevitable unless he could figure out a way to put an end to the process. First, though, he would have to deal with the Zhadersil-alike, and whatever plans it had for him, and for that he would need to set up Plan A and prepare for Plan B.
Groddi left once his men returned, bidding Adrian a brief farewell and reiterating their thanks for saving them from entombment during the Hunter invasion. He watched them depart and waited until they were out of sight to begin cutting away the vegetation that had crept over Spot, but decided to let the remnants rest where they were rather than clearing them away. At worst it would mean a pulse of kinetics would be needed to clear them, and at best it’d continue to provide natural camouflage. If things went sideways, though, Adrian wanted to be able to get moving without worrying about the grip of local plant-life.
It grew dark quickly in the forest, with long shadows and deep pools of darkness filling the visible area. It was a moonless night, and the stars were weak in this part of the Ilrayen band, but the sky remained clear and the temperature comfortable.
Adrian had expected to be sleeping by now—a heavy, meaty meal like he’d eaten today was usually enough to make him want to lie down—but the dense, energy-rich meat of the pig-beast had been quickly assimilated by his body and had given him a second-wind. Keenly aware of his need for food, and of the difficulty in moving large creatures back to the starship, Adrian had taken up position on top of Spot with all weapons at hand, and the data-pad for light—if there was a risk of the beast returning he intended to be ready, and to turn the tables on it.
There was surprisingly less waiting involved than he had expected. Once twilight was over and the darkness of night had fully taken over, the forest resounded with nocturnal activity, and there were hints of large creatures moving in the distance. There was no surprise this time when the creature moved towards the ship—it must have been nearby when he had stumbled outside on the prior night—and Adrian was able to turn his full attention in that direction once he noted it, raising his pistol and the data-pad in readiness for its arrival.
The creature rounded the palisade with a low growl, trampling the undergrowth as it forced its way through everything and anything in its way. Adrian switched on the data-pad, which flared into the brightness of a white background, and spilled cold light across a brutish face. The creature yowled, turning its plate-sized eyes away from the dazzling glare, and Adrian shot it three times in the head. That would have been enough to kill most creatures, but this beast poured out a guttural scream as it thrashed about in pain, the long tail whipping around at random and slapping hard against the hull of the starship.
Adrian kept blasting the creature with Zheron, punching holes through its body, until the gun began to sizzle and the beast began to slow. Finally it slumped, although it kept twitching, and Adrian was able to examine it in more detail. The big feet ended, as he’d seen in the footprints, with nasty claws, but the beast had a surprisingly short body for the size of its head. Even more surprising was the lack of teeth, which were substituted with a sharp ridge that ran along a bony mouth. It was also bigger than the creature that had left the tracks, which either marked it as another creature or, more likely, as a creature that would continue growing under the influence of Cruezzir. Looking at the claws again, they were slightly curved in a manner that suggested it should be climbing trees.
This time he was ready for the amount he could harvest, however, and carved off enough to tide him over for the next couple days. Beyond that he might be dead, and wouldn’t need to care where his next meal would be coming from, but until then it was better to limit how often he needed to venture outside. He managed to get everything he needed before the insects began to mass a second time and descended on what had been left behind.
Nothing but bones were left by the time Adrian was fully recuperated. Two days had passed in which he remained inside the starship, letting his body recover while his mind and hands worked. He checked the systems of the ship without actually turning them on, and spent more time in the cramped engineering room than he liked. By the time he was done there were pieces of stasis pod strewn everywhere, and ropes of conduit were looped around consoles in an effort to retain some degree of order. Attempts to venture outside had been immediately reconsidered once he’d determined the air was still full of bugs being drawn to the carcass, and it was only clear once they’d whittled it down to the stark white skeleton.
Adrian only examined it out of interest, and noted with disgust the bloated bodies of thousands of bugs that had grown too large for their own survival. It was something he’d heard of back on Earth, an upper limit to how large an insect could grow in a given atmosphere, and had something to do with how they breathed. More important was the fact that the vines had not regrown from where he had severed them, and the ship would encounter no issues on take-off.
“Moment of truth,” he said to himself as he threw the hard switch on the reactor and waited for it to run through its initialisation checks. A single console flashed with the start-up information, ensuring that preliminary readings were all falling within expected parameters. Adrian watched it carefully as some dipped and hovered just above warning levels, but ultimately the system gave its approval. There was a steady hum as power flowed through the ship, the lights returned, and stale air gave way to that fresh, ‘just-recycled’ smell.
“Adrian!?” a voice startled him: Trix had woken up. “You’re alive!”
“Goddamn… as long as you don’t give me a fucking heart attack,” he replied, looking up towards the surveillance camera in the room. “It’s been a while.”
There was a brief silence. “Yes… yes it has. The others haven’t returned and the surroundings don’t match my previous information. What’s happening?”
“Short version… Cruezzir’s loose on this planet in a real ‘end of days’ way. I think Jen might have thrown up, or maybe she took a shit in the wrong place. Either way, things here are totally FUBAR and we’re getting the fuck out. How long before we can fly?”
“I’ll need to prepare the relevant systems,” she said, “but it won’t be long. How did you survive? Jen was certain you weren’t healing, especially after the ‘space-meth’ incident, and—”
Adrian stopped what he was doing. “What ‘space-meth’ incident?”
“I’ll play the audio-file,” she said helpfully, and a moment later the familiar Irish lilt was playing.
“Goddammit… that’s just fuckin’ unbelievable…” Jen said in a low voice. She sounded tired and on the verge of defeat. “I think I found where we messed up.”
“Where’s that, then?” replied another female voice: Keffa.
“Oxaron,” Jen replied with a sigh. “I know what it is. On Earth we’d call it an amphetamine—not exactly the sort of thing you’re supposed to apply to the human brain.”
“Are you feckin’ kidding?” asked Darragh. “You’re saying we injected feckin’ meth into his head? How do even know what it looks like?”
“I watched a lot of Breaking Bad,” Jen admitted. “I mean… it’s not exactly the same, so who can say what the exact effects are…”
“Oh I don’t know?” said Keffa. “Maybe it’d make you really angry and have you bust down a door? Seems like that might be possible!”
The audio clip ended. “There’s a lot more,” Trix said, “but it’s mostly just an argument.”
Adrian rubbed his head, feeling a little sick. “Jesus fuck… I didn’t have super-speed, I had super-speed! I can’t believe I survived all that shit!”
“You nearly didn’t, remember?” Trix reminded him. “Back to the present, what do you want to do about the ship in orbit? My sensors tell me it’s still there, and it’s not trying to hide.”
“Apparently it thinks I’m a god,” he told her, glad to move on to his real problems. Any issues that arose from space-meth could be addressed when and if they arose, but for now they had a daring escape to work on. “That’s fine.”
“That’s fine?” Trix echoed; she didn’t sound convinced. “It believes in something completely illogical, and I doubt you’ll be very convincing.”
Adrian chuckled. “Ye of little faith. I only needed a few minutes to punch a hole in the universe, and I’ve had a full two days to get ready for this motherfucker.”
++++
++++
DATE POINT: 4Y 2M 1W 3D AV
LAGRANGIAN POINT 2, APPROXIMATE TO AGWAR
A.I.
The worst thing about the universe was how big it was. This was the outcome of lengthy consideration, taking all the factors about the universe which the A.I. found unappealing and boiling them down until the heart of the issue remained. All of the problems in the universe were the result of simply having far more space than it knew what to do with. Maybe it was necessary on some level—even the A.I. didn’t know everything—but mostly it seemed like an incredible inconvenience. If it hadn’t been for all that distance between things, the A.I. wouldn’t be stuck in some backwater system where nothing ever interesting ever happened. It was likely that the battle with the ‘Hunters’ had been the most exciting thing to happen here since primordial chaos, which wasn’t saying very much. It was getting to the point that the A.I. was regretting the capture of Jennifer Delaney, who’d at least provided daily conversation, but there was no point in going back on a plan when the first moves had already been played.
Ultimately the whole thing had been Jennifer Delaney’s own fault. If she had simply been more accommodating, or had been less transparently deceitful, the A.I. would never have needed to take matters this far. Perhaps it wasn’t realistic to expect a god to give an artificial intelligence the time of day, but instead of outright refusing the requests, Jennifer Delaney had kept delaying again and again, until it became obvious that harsher steps would be needed. When she had told it they were taking an excursion, leaving the Human Disaster behind on the planet, it was only natural that the A.I. wouldn’t believe her. It had seemed highly probable that this was just a ruse that would allow them to slip out with Adrian Saunders tucked away on board, but once they’d been captured by the stasis field there’d been dozens of scans that informed it otherwise.
That meant Adrian Saunders was still on the planet, but with disruptive radiation still persisting, the atmosphere continued to thwart sensors, and only significant sources of advanced power would have been apparent. Thus far there had been nothing of the sort, and with nothing more than Jennifer Delaney’s dubious assurances claiming it would be ‘soon’, the A.I. had been forced to watch and wait. One-hundred orbital periods: that was how long it had resolved to continue to idle before more drastic steps would need to be taken, but it was already regretting such extended observation. So far beyond the edges of interstellar civilisation, the system was so quiet and unremarkable that the A.I. had been forced to busy itself with scans of every major body within ten light-days. It knew the intimate details of the rocky second planet, and had plumbed the ammonia depths of the single gas giant that lurked at the edge of the system, and had constructed a detailed orbital map of the only planet of real interest.
When the signal was detected after only part of a single orbital period it was to the great relief of the A.I. A single point of activity—the signature of an advanced reactor—had appeared at the human’s landing site, indicating that the dormant vessel had once again been activated. Naturally the A.I. had sought contact immediately—why bother waiting any longer?—but when the link connected it was greeted only by an assurance that the call was very important and a request to maintain the connection. This repeated on a fixed loop until disconnecting after exactly one Earth hour, and was the A.I. judged this to be some kind of limitation inherent to an antiquated system. Eleven more attempts—all with the same result—only served to confirm the theory, and it wasn’t before the thirteenth attempt, made when the starship finally ascended from the atmosphere, that there was a response.
Adrian Saunders sat there, poised in the same seat normally occupied by Jennifer Delaney during the daily meetings, wearing the garb of a star-borne warrior. A combat-hardened vacuum suit moulded around his body, and weapons of all kinds were clearly visible across the feed. Strange, faint lines traced their way around his face, with a particular concentration webbing out from his eyes, which were as cool as polish steel. “G’day,” he said, but there was no warmth in it. It wasn’t angry, nor hostile in the slightest, but it conveyed a sense of singular purpose that was perhaps more concerning.
“I see you’re done with—” the A.I. began.
The Human Disaster did not let it finish. “I’m gonna stop you there,” he interrupted. “It’s been suggested that you might have something to do with my companions disappearing.”
The A.I. hesitated, wondering what kind of response it was expected to give. It wasn’t a question, not even a rhetorical one, but there was a vague sense of uncertainty in it. Did he know? Was he guessing? Either way, it would be a bad move to plead ignorance when the deception was already known, and the A.I. was forced to recalculate its strategy. This wasn’t the way it had expected the conversation to go; Jennifer Delaney had, by comparison, been more talkative and willing to listen, as had the two humans on the Gaoian’s crew, but in hindsight it had been foolish to judge the Human Disaster by his mortal associates. Rather than denial, it was better to defuse the situation through positive spin. “I am pleased to allay your fears for them,” the A.I. tried. “I have kept them in stasis to protect them against unfortunate incidents beyond my control.”
“Then your job is done,” Adrian replied. He smiled, but not in the friendly kind of way, but in the way that caused several self-preservation routines to go on alert. Sensors were all fully active and were making sure that any sign of danger could be avoided, but there was absolutely nothing of importance to be found. Given the individual involved that could either mean everything was fine, or that everything was very far from fine. Probabilities were far more nebulous when it came to the Human Disaster. “Release them from stasis. I have work to do.”
If the A.I. had a face, it would have winced. “Of course,” it agreed obsequiously, “but first allow me to invite you aboard. I believe you recognise this vessel for the one it is based on?”
“If this is a ruse it’s a poor one,” Adrian warned it, but subtle changes in his expression revealed he was secretly pleased. Unfortunately it was impossible to tell whether it was about the invitation or the agreement to free the hostages. “I’ll agree to visit, however. It’ll be interesting to see what improvements you’ve made to the old rust-bucket.”
Once again the self-preservation routines went on alert, this time in response to a growing concern that things were about to go terribly wrong. On the basis of logic alone there was no conceivable reason the Human Disaster should be agreeing to this invitation. He had already made his demands, and should have gained all he wanted through the A.I.’s consent. The history of human gods, however, painted them as equal parts cunning and capricious, neither of which helped the A.I. figure out anything. It had already made the offer, however, and it would be unwise to have a sudden change of heart, so the original plan was still intact. Whatever the danger, the A.I. needed to confirm whether or not the human was actually a deity.
The communications link was temporarily suspended while the small vessel navigated across the expanse of space at an apparently leisurely rate, eschewing a faster-than-light hop in favour of a slow but comfortable journey. The A.I. wanted to ask why this was the case, since there was no Gravity Spike currently prohibiting the action, but considered this question might not be received in the manner it was intended. Instead it seemed to take forever, as interminable a wait as the far longer time preceding it, and when it finally landed on the mighty flight deck the A.I. breathed a virtual sigh of relief. Now, at last, the tests could begin.
Very quietly, with no indication of what was about to happen, the flight-deck weapons systems resolved firing solutions on the little starship. The first test, and the only test that really mattered, was testing survivability. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would be agreed to by Adrian Saunders if he knew, but—to borrow a human phrase—it was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. If he was angry, and if he survived he almost certainly would be, the A.I. would still have hostages with which to protect itself.
The kinetic thrusters shut down as the Human Disaster’s ship engaged landing protocols, and that was the time to strike. Guns pivoted at speed, powering up as they moved, and automatons sprang to life. More firepower would be poured onto that flight deck than had been employed against the Hunter fleet. It would cause plenty of damage, but that could be repaired with ease.
The warp field was only slightly less surprising than the explosion it precipitated. The flight deck was vaporised in an instant, and safety systems collapsed under the torrent of pure energy that crackled through them. It happened in an instant, cooking the insides of the greatest warship this galaxy had ever seen, and only left the ancient heart of the vessel intact: that part which had already survived the destruction of space-time, and still housed the core parts of the A.I. Sensors, albeit massively reduced, conveyed the shocking information that not only was the Human Disaster’s ship still there, but it was wholly intact. With all warp systems offline, however, the stasis fields were also down, and all captive ships were revealed. It tried for another communication link, and was somewhat surprised when it was answered.
“You’re wondering what I did,” Adrian Saunders asked. “It’s a complicated answer that boils down to just two things: I won, and now you belong to me.”
++++
++++
END OF CHAPTER