It took a bit longer than expected to get the hatch back open since the Commodore had to re-equalize pressure on both sides of the airlock. Rene put those precious minutes to good use. The ceiling was too high up for him to reach alone, so he got Neroth to climb onto his shoulders. Working together they could just about reach the damaged ventilation shaft.
“I’ll work on slipping a malscript into your subconch routines,” Exar said as they lifted him up, “We’ll crack this joint open from inside, you’ll see. You’re our trojan horse now, Rene!”
“Whatever you say. Now get lost!” Rene hissed. Neroth shoved Exar unceremoniously back in through the hole.
“…our trojan horse!” Ear repeated as he rolled and bounced out of sight. Neroth hopped back down and said:
“What now?”
“Let’s get our stories straight,” Rene said quickly, “There was an accident, some kind electrical malfunction. The pair of you subdued me and used the opportunity to make your escape,” he pointed at the rent in the ceiling above them, “But you couldn’t quite fit through the gap, so you gave it up as soon as he cut off the air supply. Simple as that.”
“That won’t fool him,” Zildiz shook her head, “Too many holes.”
“Then we’ll improvise,” Rene snapped, knowing only too well that she was right.
The airlock swung out and open. A quadrupedal drone craned its serpentine neck over the rim of the hatch, cautiously surveying the interior. Rene bent over and clutched his ankles as instructed, Zildiz and Neroth reluctantly following suit.
The scout retracted its head. No sooner had it done this when about a dozen flat black simulacrums fluttered on sets of rotors, dragging behind them thin wires unwinding from spools fixed to their underbellies. Without warning they began emitting a series of sharp concussive blasts and blinding flashes of light that seared Rene’s retinas with white-hot afterimages.
Before he knew it Rene’s cheek was pressed flat against the cold floor, the weight of his body coming down on the side of his neck as something held him suspended by his ankles.
He twisted around to look over his shoulder and saw a chrome goliath standing over him, a headless, stalking thing that was all torso and torsioned limbs, slender in frame but possessed of frightful agility. Two others just like it were pinning Neroth and Zildiz to the ground. Rene wasn’t even convinced they were real at first—during the pyrotechnics they had simply blinked into the room with the speed of apparitions. They were nothing like the clumsy gun carriages, and moved with grace of living creatures, complete with artificial musculature and dextrous paws. One pair of arms cradled compact projectile weapons while the rest held them in place without much effort.
They walked bandy-legged, hunched over to support a ribbed, flexible abdomen which they kept folded beneath them like the deflated bladder of an accordion.
Like the hovering ones they too trailed a length of cable from a spool attached to their rear ends. The reason for this became clear when the Commodore’s amplified voice boomed from each one of the machines, stuttering from being slightly out of sync:
“I’ve got these units hooked up via fibre optic cable, so don’t even think about trying to hack them. Speaking of which, I’d like to know who it was that jammed the signal to my sentry drones. And don’t say it was the ensign here, because we all know he hasn’t got the brains for it. No offense,” he added, the simulacrum flipping Rene back onto his feet and dusting him off by way of apology.
“None taken,” Rene replied, his bruised feelings stating otherwise, “I tried to talk them out of escaping, but they got ahold of the sentry’s gun and subdued me.”
He tried to come up with an explanation for the downed drones, but floundered hopelessly until Zildiz intervened.
“If you examine my inner ear you’ll find an implant,” she said with frigid distaste, “A magnetosynaptic organ capable of high-power transmissions in the 65.9 megahertz to 5.8 gigahertz range.”
“Interesting. I wonder why that didn’t show up when I scanned you earlier. Then again, perhaps I was searching in the wrong places.”
The Commodore held her up by the ankles like a meat cricket that was to be dressed for the pot. Rene had a sudden vision of the goliath whipping its hands outwards and tearing her bodily in half. But the headless stalker only raised her up until her head was level with its torso, where a swivelling lens set into the centre of its chest examined her closely.
“As I suspected: I was looking too far ahead the timeline. Your implant is still fused to the cochlea. Towards the end of the war your predecessors had their implants wired directly into their brain stems, to shave off a few milliseconds from the latency. Which may not seem like much, but in close combat situations those milliseconds could mean everything. I suppose your iteration isn’t too far along the evolutionary arms race yet.”
“Our predecessors?” Neroth brows knitted together in curiosity, “You’ve met other Gallivants?”
“Quite a nasty encystment you’ve got growing around it,” the Commodore continued with a curious detachment, “It’ll have to come out, of course. That goes for you too,” he told Neroth. Abruptly the stalkers straightened out their elbows, double-edged punch daggers shooting out from internalized sheathes in their forearms. Rene felt his throat tighten, said quickly:
“I’d advise against that, sir.”
“Rene, I understand that you harbour a certain misplaced sympathy for these specimens,” came the Commodore’s frigid reply, “But my patience has its limits, limits which they’ve now firmly exceeded. I charged you with keeping these prisoners in line, and yet here I find them repaying my mercy with acts of sabotage. This cannot go unanswered. In accordance with catechism 8, we must excise with extreme prejudice.”
The stalkers forced the two squirming cosmophages onto their knees and held the blades against their heads, the edges emitting a low hum exactly like Rene’s monomachete.
“They’ve made a grave mistake. But you’re on the cusp of committing one even worse. Execute them and we’ll lose this war once and for all.”
Without releasing their hold on their captives the stalkers all turned to look at Rene, doing a marvellous job of looking both amused and disdainful despite their blank features.
“A tad melodramatic, even for you,” the Commodore said with a bark of laughter. But Rene thought he saw the punch daggers waver a little—only for a moment, but it was enough of a tell.
“The electrical systems went on the fritz. They took it for an opportunity and attempted to escape. Because of course they would. You said it yourself: you don’t even consider them people. They have every reason to hate and oppose us.”
“I’m not running for captaincy. I don’t need anyone to like me. I need only win.”
Rene stepped within reach of the stalker nearest him and whispered rapidly under his breath:
“And for that we must learn the disposition of the enemy’s forces. I have something, sir. They’ve started talking…”
He let his words hang in the air for a spell, praying that the Commodore would take the bait.
“Just give them another chance to prove their usefulness,” he said aloud. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a wild-eyed Neroth struggling in the grip of his executioner, the blade drawing a line of blood as it dimpled the base of his neck.
“Rot and die, you worm-ridden corpse!” Zildiz spat, “You’ll get nothing from me, you hear? Nothing!”
The rest of Zildiz’ tirade was cut short as the stalkers uncurled their hanging abdomens and spewed torrents of grey ooze over her and Neroth. The ooze hardened upon contact into strands of rope with which the stalkers bound them, their many arms turning them over until they were encased in glistening cocoons.
“That’s quite enough out of you,” the Commodore said as the drones hauled two twitching bundles out through the door.
“But what are you going to do to them?” Rene asked, listening to their muffled screams receding down the passageways.
“Relax, will you,” the remaining stalker gestured for Rene to start walking, “I’ll have the medic bots dig it out of them in the surgery ward. So long as they’re talking to you, I can’t afford to lose them. They are talking to you, aren’t they?”
The Commodore’s extended a hand and brought him to dead stop by placing a palm against his chest, hard enough to bruise Rene’s ribs.
“Of course, sir,” he wheezed.
“How many targets did you identify?” the Commodore hammered bullet-point questions at him as they swung along at a brisk pace, “What do they look like? Do you think it’s possible to coordinate a strike mission with what they’ve given you?”
“I think so. Uh, I’m not sure. I really don’t know,” Rene answered in sequential order.
The Commodore uttered an incoherent snarl of frustration and demanded: “Do you actually have new intel, or do I have carve your friends up after all?”
“There are these places which Zildiz’s people call Dawning Chambers,” Rene blurted, “They either pray there or speak with the Vitalus directly, I’m not sure which. It’s sort of a cross between your command centre and a big-arse church. And I mean huge. Huge!” he repeated for emphasis, “Each one can apparently house a fleet of Hollowores. I don’t know if that qualifies as a major neurocilial node. Though it seems to fit the bill.”
“Why, you conniving little cunt,” the Commodore’s said admiringly, “Beautiful work, ensign. We’re onto them now!”
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
The stalker broke into an eager lope, its locomotion a strange mix of ground bat and arthropod. Rene had to jog to keep up now and do his level best not to trip over the fibre optic cable, the motorized spool winding it back up as they sped along,
They reached the platform of the train (or rather, the platform of the ginormous gun that was pretending to be a train) and one gut-wrenching movement later arrived back at the command centre, his head still spinning like a top.
Rene leaned over the side and nearly upchucked up his breakfast eggs. But the stalker impatiently took him under the armpits and pulled him into the amphitheatre with its walls of glowing screens. Some of the desks and chairs had been stacked into a corner to make space for a monolithic slab of metal that now dominated the centre of the room. It reminded the Rene of the Engine’s safety pod, but larger and sepulchral. Beside it stood the Commodore himself in his gun carriage, furiously mashing buttons with his long fingers and frowning at the holographic display.
“Something that big should’ve showed up on the false colour imagery,” the flayed man tapped dirty fingernail against his incisors, “Unless of course they’re completely subterranean. Did they indicate any important landmarks?”
“No. But they didn’t say the nodes were underground, either.”
“You didn’t think to ask?”
“No. Why does it matter?”
“Because the catapult munitions can’t penetrate past a certain depth. Not without modifying the payloads into proper bunker busters, but that’ll come at the cost of shrinking the blast radius.”
Rene raised the point that if the objective was only to destroy just the nodes themselves, then surely the relative size of the explosion itself was irrelevant. But the Commodore explained that the mass catapult had been designed to sling giant ice cubes into Arachnea’s oceans, and that both its hardware and computers could not guarantee the precision strikes required of a tactical ballistic weapon.
“Well, maybe they just need more time at the range,” Rene suggested.
“Excuse me?” the Commodore broke off in the middle of his lecture and stared at him.
“Don’t mean to brag,” he boasted, “But I’m a pretty good shot myself. Not as good as Harmer, but I could still teach your computers a thing or two about marksmanship.”
“Who the hell’s Harmer? Never mind. Listen, the catapult doesn’t quite work like that—”
“It’s all about the three-point shooting stance, my good man,” Rene adjusted his feet and brought up an imaginary rifle, squinting down the iron sights, “Find that nerve cluster, exhale, then gently squeeze the trigger—”
“Enough!”
The Commodore hissed and held up a hand for quiet, spittle flying through the gaps in his slatted yellow teeth, “I’m sorry, but your ignorance has become unbearable!”
“Only trying to help—”
“Shut up!” the Commodore held up a hand and the lid of the metal sepulchre swung up and open with a jet of cold air. The interior was filled with a sinister gelatinous substance, masses of cabling sitting at the bottom of it like a coiled-up ball of sleeping vipers reclining on a river bed.
“Get in there! Shoo!”
“But—”
“That’s an order ensign! I’m going to be busy with target acquisition for the next few hours, but by the time I’m done I want you up to speed with 26th century sensibilities. Because right now this feels a bit too much like jibber-jabbering with Gilgamesh of Uruk. Now go educate yourself.”
Rene had no other choice but to climb into the wet, clammy embrace of the sepulchre. The lid closed over him with a bang and for a moment he was left to grope in utter darkness, unable to shake the feeling of being entombed alive. Squelching slime coated his limbs and back. He sat in the dripping quiet for what seemed a long time, unsure of how to proceed.
This uncertainty lasted only a moment, replaced with horror as the wires suddenly took on a life of their own and began to curl around his chest. Rene snatched at them in a slippery panic as they crept upwards, oozing inexorably for his throat, pulling at his cheeks.
Bright pastel colours splashed across the inner walls of his coffin, painting a vision of a bright and sunlit field awash with dandelions.
“Welcome to the Mark 14 audiomemetic learning module,” chimed the warm female voice. Rene could almost imagine it coming from a jolly plump schoolmarm, the kind who brought biscuits for all the children just because, “For your own safety, please don’t damage the neural couplings. Allow the couplings to find your implants. If you’re experiencing distress, follow these instructions. Ready? Breathe in…”
Overriding his instincts, he did as he was told and went slack, allowing the moist tendrils to creep up to his face, pulling insistently at his eyelids and ear canals. He sucked in a sharp breath as they folded aside his lids and stabbed past his orbital, reaching somewhere impossibly deep.
“…hold for five seconds…”
It began as a trickle of light and sound worming up from out of the grey matter of his brain. Like a voice within a voice, not that of his inner consciousness but that of a stranger melding with his own, as impossible as two rivers winding back to merge with the fountainhead from whence both had sprung.
“…and breathe out.”
The river roared, his sense of time and self washing away in the flood. He was sitting slumped over in the front of a classroom, knees knocking uncomfortably against a desk three sizes too small for him. Before the dusty chalkboard stood a cinnamon-brown woman in a frock who was very spitting image of the mental likeness he’d conceived from her voice.
“Uh…” he began, bits of drool leaking out the sides of his mouth, “Guugh?”
“I’m sorry honey,” she beamed at him, “Is this your first neural pairing?”
Rene blinked and shook his head, still having trouble finding his voice. He’d gone through a similar sensation when he’d taken mental control of the Divine Engine, but that had been nowhere near so raw and vivid as this.
“Oh, you poor baby,” she simpered, “Don’t you worry, we’ll go easy on you.”
“I know this can’t be real,” he said, clearing his throat, “Whose life am I living?”
“Everyone’s,” she said sweetly, “And nobody’s. It’s a composite engram file, compiled from thousands of lessons taught in a hundred different classrooms recorded by students who volunteered to contribute to this program. They had to learn things the hard way back then, through lessons and aptitude tests. Thanks to them, you get to skip all the long boring parts.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a construct that your subconsciousness is instinctively layering over the composite. Put simply, I’m a figment of your imagination.”
He nodded as though it all made sense.
“Call me Mrs. Figgy.”
“I like figs. They put them in all the good ration bars with molasses and cricket meat. I wish they’d put more fruit in our dry rations, but it’s mostly lard and nuts. I hate lard,” he confessed, though he couldn’t really say how he knew all these details. Shyly he put forward a more pertinent question:
“Who am I, again?”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Mrs. Figgy winked, “In here, you can become whoever you want to be.”
They began with the alphabet. Or rather, two alphabets, only the first of which he actually knew. The second writing system was called Cyrillic, and was the same one that was scrawled all over the walls inside the lunar base.
“A is for apple and б is for бáбушка,” Mrs. Figgy said. The blackboard behind her rippled like a green pond kissed by the breeze, there appeared an animation of a snaggle-toothed grandmother biting into a crunchy apple, juices dribbling down her chin.
Somehow the combination of visual and audible cues linking the writing systems together made things easier to remember. He repeated the words perfectly on the first try and was astonished when his tastebuds suddenly registered the sweet richness of dried fig bars. Mrs. Figgy saw the look of amazement on his face and laughed:
“That’s the nootropic reward system kicking in,” she explained, “Your pleasure centres get a treat each time you answer correctly. Now let’s move on to vocabulary.”
The pairing of two languages continued, Russian and English tied together with funny illustrations made ridiculous on purpose. This went on for only ancestors knew how long, though strangely enough Rene never once felt bored. He never got any questions wrong, either; the ‘treats’ were simply too nice to pass up. The lesson ended too soon and he found himself ravenous for more. Mrs. Figgy was only too happy to oblige.
Next up was maths, which he breezed over with the same ease until he reached the uncharted territory that lay beyond algebra. At the academy only the top honour students went on to take advanced mathematics courses before being drafted into various research and development programs. But while the underlying proofs for calculus themselves were devilishly difficult, the actual computations themselves were trivial, with differentiation boiling down to the memorization of a few key tricks and manipulations. And memorization was never a problem with Mrs. Figgy’s magic blackboard.
The sciences posed even less of a challenge. The nootropic reward system seemed to have the added side-effect of cementing every new memory in place just as soon as he formed them, and so what would have taken him years by rote became simply a matter of repeating things once before moving on to a practice problem or two.
They were in the midst of finding the angle required for a projectile of a certain mass and initial velocity (neglecting air resistance) to reach its target when Mrs. Figgy said:
“Of course, it’s one thing to figure this out on paper, but quite another to do it for real in a non-permissive environment.”
“Is that a challenge?” he said. Pride welled up in him from some inexplicable source of confidence.
“Sure. Why not?” Mrs. Figgy coaxed him on with a mischievous playfulness she hadn’t shown before.
“I accept. Say, do I get to blow things up now?”
“I thought you’d never ask…”
The walls of the classroom fell away like the sides of a cardboard box. They stood beneath a smoke-wracked sky, the air rent by an unearthly shrieking that went on unceasing, breathless and insane. The mud quivered beneath them, pummelled by enormous impacts of explosive shells going off in the distance as well as some deeper sustained refrain. Through the clouds of rising dust and sheets of flame he saw a living carpet of what seemed to be white maggots moving over the blackened earth. They came a little closer and he made out the outline of their gourd heads and the waving forest of their spears, and then he realized that he was looking at the single largest horde of Amits that mankind had ever faced.
On second thought, I’d rather go back to doing differentiation, he thought dismally. Then the Amits shouldered their weapons and pointed them in his general direction, and the ends of what he’d mistaken for crude lances began to erupt into puffs of smoke.
Bullets zipped overhead. Terror seized him. He’d been shooting at gourdies all his life, but never once had they shot back. Unmanned, he took shelter in the nearest hole, a gun emplacement lined with piles of sandbags, just one among hundreds of howitzers drawn up along the line.
Soldiers in khaki uniforms climbed into the emplacement alongside him, their appearance outlandish but familiar, defined by stamped wide-brimmed helmets which clattered as they got into position, their bare faces uncovered by masks.
“The boches are coming,” one cried, “Fritz the Hun, come to kill for the Kaiser! Quick, boys, let’s knock ‘em dead!”
Mrs. Figgy came in swishing a riding crop, her frock replaced by baggy fatigues.
“Quit kissing dirt and get up, Rene,” she snapped. Her warm voice had taken on the rough timbre of a drill sergeant.
“Are you talking to me?” he asked blearily.
“Well, you’re the only here,” she replied, “Me being your subconscious and all.”
She flicked the riding crop at the advancing swarm of Amits and called out:
“Target, that column of infantry. Fire at will!”
The crews moved like clockwork, cannoneers lugging the pointed projectiles which they slammed and locked into the breeches of the rear-loading guns. Rene thought they’d made the silly mistake of forgetting to ram down the powder charge before the projectile, but the booming retort of the guns seconds later told him otherwise. It was an ingenious innovation to have both the shell and explosive housed in the same metal casing—Rene filed it away for future reference as the batteries went off in thunderous unison.
In an instant what had seemed like a hopeless situation completely reversed as the horde was dispersed by a line of cotton-candy clouds. What few stragglers broke through were cut down by scattered shots from the trenches on the other side of the hill where companies of riflemen held the line.
His side waved their helmets in the air and jeered at the foe as they retreated, leaving their dead in awful heaps in the craters. The stench of cordite stirred his memory, fragments of his old self bobbing back up like river flotsam.
He was Rene Louvoture, a pathfinder, and while the men around him were not soldiers of the Fleet, they were still comrades in the only struggle that had ever really mattered.
Seeing Amits again roused his hatred of them, and that hatred brought clarity. It was all quite clear to him now: humanity was at war with the universe itself. Since before the inception of the species the mute, uncaring laws of nature had conspired to render his kind extinct. Nowhere was this fact better exemplified than with the Amits.
They were creatures of a separate and alien provenance, a race to whom evolution had absent-mindedly assigned the duty of erasing the remnants of a civilization that had once spanned the stars. This was a struggle between two opposing forces, with mankind on one end and all of creation on the other.
Fortunately, his side had the better artillery.