Mr. Grey stepped out into the shuttle bay of the Archive and drew in a single, shuddering breath.
The air was still, almost solemn. It was an appropriate atmosphere for the day, which was one that the Cause would celebrate in generations to come. He knew it was the day centuries of injustice and lies would be corrected, and his name would be inscribed along with its story for all of time.
He should have felt elation at that fact. The victory should have brought triumph with it. Instead, Mr. Grey felt numb. His face was still slack, his neural centers still recovering from the damage the Great Voice had wrought inside his skull. It had been fortunate that the Contact had not attempted to direct him after the experience, though he suspected they were just as overwhelmed and crippled as he was.
Behind him, the Resources were preparing themselves. The normal modifications were hard at work, each one preparing one of the specialized units for deployment. Those combat Resources were waking now, the stimulants and other concoctions quickly rousing them from their slumber. He could hear the first of them beginning to twitch to life, the hard metal of their close combat weapons squealing against their caskets. Whirs and clicks announced their more destructive weaponry powering up and calibrating themselves. Before long, he and the rest of the Resources would be able to travel along in their carnage-strewn wake, to claim what the Cause had known was theirs all along.
He tried to rejoice in that fact, but all he could manage was a kind of weary, listless relief that it would all be over soon. Mr. Grey struggled to focus and began an inventory of the rest of his preparations. The jammers onboard the shuttle were quite functional; without them, he wasn’t entirely sure that his craft would have been able to dock. When he cast his mind still further, with the aid of his implants, he found that the various Resources that he had sown throughout the fleet were still busy about their work.
There were at least three dozen ships that he had substantially infiltrated, with at least that many more with a handful of Resources aboard. He sent a detailed set of instructions to each of them. They would be the harbingers of the Contact’s assault, designed to bring down the Device even as they provided enough chaos for him and the Archive to escape. He even thought there might be a chance the heretics wouldn’t even notice the little ship making for the open void—at least not until it was entirely too late.
Mr. Grey hesitated. There were other precautions he needed to make, but he was no longer as confident in them as he once was. The subspace beacons would help the Contact’s assault, of course, but the Sirens had not done a very reliable job at ensnaring the Device’s attention. He knew they would be better than nothing, so he activated half of them and kept the rest in reserve. A reasonable precaution, in case it led the Device to underestimate him. He would need that trump card.
“Ah, Mr. Grey. I thought I would find you here.”
The voice brought Mr. Grey up short. It hadn’t come from the Resources; the combat versions were beyond spoken words, and the normal modifications were too absorbed in their task for such things. Besides, it had come from behind him.
He turned and found a familiar-looking woman staring at him. Her eyes were cold; he almost shivered at the contempt and anger in them until he remembered how such things paled before the might of a Great Voice. His lethargic mind finally identified her a moment later. “Admiral Delacourt. You’re here.”
“So to speak.” She inclined her head. “Are you not well, Mr. Grey? Captain Wong indicated you were a bit quicker on your feet than this.”
The courteous question actually drew out a laugh from him; his skull ached afterward, but he shook the agony away. “It has been a rather trying day. I assume you’ve noticed our work here?”
She nodded, and he forced himself to grin. It felt more like the rictus of a corpse, but he trusted the effect would be the same. “Then you already know that there is no hope of stopping us. Whatever troops you have aboard this vessel will not be enough. The Archive will be ours again.”
“Oh, I doubt that.” She smiled. There was no humor in her expression, either. “Though you should know that there are no troops aboard the…Archive as you call it. Only one person lives there, after all.”
Mr. Grey felt a moment of confusion, but he pushed it aside. “Lies. No matter. We will find the control room, and then this ship will return to where it belongs.” He threw out one finger. “Nothing your Device can do will stop us. We will be victorious!”
He saw her eyes widen as the first of the combat Resources stepped down the ramp from the shuttle. His smile grew; he even felt the first faint hint of joy come to him. The Great Voice might have shown him his folly, but at the very least, he was superior to a heretic flea like this woman. Those of the Cause would enjoy triumph and perfection that she would never know.
Then she seemed to recover. She shook her head. “I’m afraid you’re right. The OMNI grants a bit of crude control over other ships’ systems, but the Compass is far more advanced than that. The Keeper’s automated system defenses would keep me from trying anything here.”
Yet when she met his gaze again, the Admiral’s eyes seemed to glow with satisfaction. “Then again, I’m not who you need to worry about, Mr. Grey. They are.”
She vanished. Then Mr. Grey became aware of a group of people watching him. They stood in the entrance to the rest of the ship, and their steady gaze sent a chill through him. One of them, dressed in the antique version of a Directorate uniform, stepped up beside the leader and murmured something. The leader nodded, and as the other stepped back, he looked Mr. Grey directly in the eyes.
“Welcome Mr. Grey. If you surrender now, we will end things quickly. Otherwise, may the Lord have mercy on your soul—for we will not.”
There was a moment of silence, and then another of them, a mousy-looking woman, laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh Arland, you were right! He can still feel fear. How interesting!”
Mr. Grey snarled and signaled for his Resources to charge. Utter chaos was unleashed a heartbeat later.
Gabriel Miller watched as the monsters clawed their way forward in the Compass.
They did not get very far before the first obstacle presented itself. He saw those thick blast doors smash shut, later than he expected, but quick enough to utterly crush one of the freakish things that Mr. Grey had brought aboard. It died, but the others continued to stream forward, howling for blood.
One of them got more than it had bargained for a moment later, when the Ancestors set their next trap. A gravitic tether, guided with as much precision as Nakani had from a full rig, caught it as it charged down a corridor. The thing screamed in rage as it was plucked from the floor. Then another tether attached to its legs, and the thing was ripped in half.
Gabe shuddered and pivoted away from the sight. It was clear the Compass was more than capable of defending itself, and there were other concerns to tend to.
It was as if he was looking at everything through a window, one that shifted every time he concentrated on a new place. Aside from that window, there was only a featureless void, one that might have scared him if he wasn’t so used to the experience of flying a rig. He pushed his awareness out, marveling at the complexity that he was seeing. His body was still locked in the OMNI chamber alongside Susan, that strange crown of a neural interface settled on his head, but it hardly registered for him now. There was just so much to focus on, and so much to try to understand.
Every aspect of the fleet seemed to glow before him, from the Compass to the Concord and more. He felt like he could see them all, all at once, and the prospect of doing so was both intimidating and enticing. All he had to do was reach out, and more information than he had ever expected to know would be his.
As he realized it, he became aware of even more. The reality he saw was being highlighted by a roiling layer of chaos that he could barely comprehend, much less describe. He focused on one such spot, frowning as it became more coherent. What was that? Why was it so hard to look away?
“Careful, newcomer. Those have ensnared better men and women than you.”
Gabe jerked back from that impossible color and looked behind him. He found Arland Schreiber watching him, seemingly standing in the void next to him. “You? How are you…”
“The Concord has established a data connection with the Compass. It is on a very different channel than what the Wild Colonies can jam, so we can converse freely.” Arland glanced back at the window. “You need to be careful. The OMNI system is more than capable of destroying your mind if you are not vigilant. You must be the buffer for the person who directs it.”
He nodded slowly. “This is how you used it, right? Before you had your personality inscribed on one of those orbs and installed in it?”
Arland scowled slightly. “Yes. It is.” He glanced at the window and then looked away once more. “I had helpers that tried to assist me, but many of them were killed by the system. Others died from Wild Colony spies or rival admirals. Two of the systems were lost by the time I resorted to including my own personality as a safeguard. The path you walk is a treacherous one.”
Gabe smiled. “That’s the story of my life, honestly.” He looked back towards the window. “What is that?”
“A subspace echo. Actually, multiple echoes, set up in a deliberate pattern.” The Keeper’s Ancestor grimaced. “Towards the end of my life, I believed the enemy had learned how to burn out intelligences that were attached to the OMNI system. It might have been for that reason that the OMNI was shut down. My memories do not include that reason, however.”
“So it’s a trap, then.” Gabe grunted sourly. “There’s no way to know where these echoes are located?”
“Not within my knowledge.” Arland hesitated. “It might be effective to ignore the echoes. Your admiral has been effective at fighting these enemies.”
“Yeah, so far.” Gabe thought back over the losses they had taken. “She needs help, though. I think there’s something else coming. Otherwise, that spy wouldn’t be trying so hard to take the Compass, now. He probably wouldn’t have all the little distractions set up, either.”
“A fair point.” Arland seemed to consider the possibilities for a moment, and then nodded. “I believe another of us may be more useful to you. This is Samantha Schreiber, one of the oldest among the Ancestors.”
Gabe grinned slightly as the woman who had spoken so frequently aboard the Compass appeared. “Thanks. We’ve met.”
Samantha frowned at him. “Perhaps we have.” She showed no sign of recognition, but she didn’t seem all that bothered by it. “What problem do you have?”
“Arland was saying there was no way to tell where these signals are coming from.” He motioned to the window. “Do you know anything about how to tell where subspace transmissions are coming from?”
“Active subspace signal tracing? No, nothing short of the most advanced artificial intelligences are capable of that.” She grinned slightly. “Even then, they tended to have a bit of trouble with it, and very few of them were stable long enough to work on it for long. The discrepancies within subspace are too disordered to allow you to determine that kind of information without knowing where at least one of the transmitters was located.”
Gabe blinked. He moved the window’s view to where the Compass was hanging in space. “What if we do know the location for one?”
Samantha glanced at Arland before continuing. “Then things get much simpler. If you have the exact location of one data point, predicting the location of the others becomes a product of comparative analysis. You could even use the disturbances created by that first transmitter to refine your data and build a map of the local subspace area.”
Arland grunted sourly. His resemblance to Hartwinn seemed to grow more distinct. “I have a bad memory of Cowpens attempting that kind of analysis with the OMNI system resources. It did not end well. Both the system user and the ship itself were destroyed.”
“Unsurprising.” Samantha waved away the objections. “Using the system to do that would be likely to burn out available computing resources, including the user’s brain. You’d need more specialized tools to carry out the calculations. Something like a system that was set up to calculate novel hyperspace location data.”
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“You mean like for new resonance cascades?” Both Schreibers looked at him, and Gabe raised his eyebrows. “That’s what we use hyperspace for, right? For resonance cascades.”
“It is.” The Ancestor seemed to be turning over the idea in her mind—or whatever system now passed for it. “Resonance cascades would actually be a fair comparison to the work you would need to do. The calculations needed to link your current position with a distant one through hyperspace would be a similar framework to what would need to be done to link one subspace position to another.”
Then she gave him a steady look. “Using the Concord’s navigational systems for it would risk burning them out as well. I would not recommend that action.”
Gabe grinned. “Fair enough. Thank you both for your help. Please ask the other Ancestors to not kill the Wild Colony infiltrator onboard the Compass. At least, not yet. All of his friends can go, though.”
Arland’s eyes narrowed, but Samantha offered up a sudden laugh. “Ah, I see! I will relay your request to the current Keeper, and he will remind us.” She turned to Arland. “Time to go, youngster. The living have work to do.”
The other Ancestor glared at her a little—perhaps offended by her casual address when he seemed much older than she was—and then turned to Gabe. “Good luck, newcomer. You are not alone.”
“Thank you.” He offered them a small bow, which the Schreibers returned. Then he concentrated, and the window changed.
This time, the void around him disappeared, and he found himself standing in a vaguely familiar laboratory. A lab tech walked through him with her head down, which made him shudder slightly. The motion attracted the attention of the others nearby, and there were a few muffled gasps and a startled curse.
He looked around at the analysis lab on the Surveyor until he saw the person he was looking for. “Professor Jimenez, I have something for you to do.”
Susan looked around the bridge of the Concord and wondered where exactly Gabriel had gotten to.
The reports from the Compass told her that the enemy boarding party was being decimated. She had actually been a little taken aback by how effective the Keeper’s ship was at such a form of combat, but Hartwinn Schreiber had been quick to reassure her that there would be no trouble handling the remaining enemies. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to worry about that particular problem again.
In the meantime, she had projected herself to the bridge, startling the watchstanders there for the first time in weeks. It was almost refreshing. Even Commander Mesic had struggled to take it in stride for the next few moments.
After that, however, she had been forced to settle into an uneasy wait. There were still no signs of the enemy, not since the moment their scouts had vanished from her screens. She knew they were coming, though; it was as if she could sense the same desperate fanaticism that was driving their boarders on the Compass coming from their spaceborne friends. They were still out of sight, true, but they were on their way, and when they arrived, she intended on being ready for them.
Her ships were still on high alert, with their rigs ready for launch. Wong’s WGCs were circling the fleet, providing a thin screen of scouts for the rest of her ships. Her eyes drifted to the images of the rest of the civilian ships. How many of them were going to be suborned and turned to the side of the enemy?
As she watched, however, the display flickered slightly. She frowned, wondering what could have caused the disruption. With a flick of her hand, she moved to the engineering sections around her chamber, appearing in the midst of a group of technicians that were crowded around a large group of monitors. “Chief Kowalski, are there any irregularities in the OMNI system?”
“Are there any irregularities? That’s like asking if there are stars out here.” The technician’s voice was equal parts baffled, amused, and worried. He gestured to the monitors, which remained completely inscrutable to her. “We’ve never seen readings like this, not since the system was shut down. And there’s another new data connection that just opened up. Was that your doing?”
“No, Chief, that was me.” Suddenly, Gabriel was there, wearing a wide grin. He took in the now doubly startled expressions on the technicians’ faces and his grin widened. “Sorry, I’m going to have to learn to be a bit more polite about that.”
Susan turned to face him. “Gabriel. You were supposed to be keeping OMNI stable. What are you doing?”
“Getting some outside help, Admiral.” He hesitated and then made a broad gesture. The image of the fleet appeared again, the hovering shapes taking form in the corridor. He nodded. “I think I might be getting the hang of this.”
The images flickered again, and Susan frowned. “Captain…”
“One moment, Admiral. I think the data should start to come through right about… now.” He laughed, and a pinprick of red abruptly glowed on one of the nearby civilian ships. It burned angrily in a compartment close by the bridge, as if the craft had taken damage. “There they are!”
Susan watched the red light warily. “Captain Miller, is that—?”
“Some of Mr. Grey’s friends.” He glanced at the technicians and coughed into his hand. “Sorry, Chief, I need to borrow her for a moment.”
The scene shifted, and they were abruptly back in the OMNI chamber, with the holographic images still glowing around them. Susan felt a momentary burst of disorientation; she hadn’t appreciated it when Arland had seized temporary control of her position, and she found that didn’t enjoy Gabriel’s sudden transition either.
He didn’t seem to notice her discomfort, however. “I have the Surveyor feeding OMNI’s subspace data through their predictive models. They’ve been more than capable of calculating new hyperspace jumps for us to use with each resonance cascade, so this should be easy. Now that they have two reference points, it should—”
Another red point burst into life on another ship. Gabriel pointed at it and grinned.
Susan looked at the points of light, and understanding dawned. “You are finding the infiltrators. The ones that Mr. Grey is still controlling.”
“Yeah. Or at least some of his equipment, but I’m betting that each subspace echo is caused by or guarded with some of those zombies of his.” Gabriel shook his head. “The Ancestors on the Compass said they would keep him alive for me until we have this all figured out, but I think we are running on a clock here.”
She nodded slowly. Another red light appeared as she turned back to the fleet. “Can they locate things that are beyond the fleet? I think that Arland was saying they would use subspace transmissions to communicate regularly.”
“I think, maybe…” Gabriel tilted his head to the side, his eyes staring into space as if he was seeing things she couldn’t. “Maybe once we have a few more relevant points of data. The more we find, the quicker this should be.”
Susan shook her head. It had to go quicker than that. If the enemy really was barreling in for the kill, there was no time to waste. “Maybe even just an approximate location.”
He gave her a slightly frustrated look, as if she wasn’t as impressed with his accomplishment as she should have been. “I guess so, but you’d still probably be off by quite a bit.”
“That might be close enough.” She grinned, feeling a little cold. “I just need a heading to face. If I can get that much, then I can organize the ships to where we need to be.”
His eyes widened in understanding, and he nodded. “I understand, Admiral. Give me a minute.”
She waited while he closed his eyes. His forehead wrinkled as if he was focusing, and she glanced back at the image of the fleet. Yet another red light had appeared, and another as she watched. They were all over the civilians, distributed in several spots, but she was already seeing a pattern. At least one cruiser or frigate was near each of those infiltrated ships. She could easily imagine them trying to force their compromised vessels into some kind of collision, crippling half her forces before the battle had even started.
While Gabriel was occupied, she decided she would take care of that problem, at least. She focused on the closest one, a former luxury yacht that was floating in space near the Deliverance. An instant later, she was on the ship’s bridge, where a surprised group of watchstanders were rising out of their seats. She ignored them and focused on the shocked woman in a civilian captain’s uniform. “Captain, I have a job for your security teams.”
As she spoke, she could feel the time counting down. It would not be long now, and then the battle would really begin.
Mr. Grey ducked down as yet another of his allies fell.
It would have been easier if the normal-modification Resource had been killed by simple gunfire. Mr. Grey had been present for many boarding actions, both simulated and actual. He was infinitely used to seeing beings claimed by death, especially those Resources who had not been optimized for combat, or whose performance had not been up to a standard that would have guaranteed their survival.
This fight was very different, in a way that unnerved him to his core. The Resource that had been charging along the corridor with him was not struck by projectiles or flayed by energy weapons. Instead, one moment the Resource was staggering along an intricately carved corridor with him. The next heartbeat saw the Resource being smashed backwards, as if by a gigantic invisible hammer. By the time the thing had been pulverized against the wall at the end of the corridor, it had already ceased functioning.
Mr. Grey snarled. He felt a hatred burning within him that had started to thaw the ice and cold within him that the Great Voice had left. Anger was a sweet medicine for his mind; no matter the damage he had sustained, he could at least still feel rage at the defiance of the ghosts of this vessel who continued to deny their destiny.
“You still will not surrender, Mr. Grey?”
The question, phrased with excruciating politeness, came from a balding, middle-aged man that would not have been out of place in an average planetside grocery store. He peered at Mr. Grey with a curious, stupefied expression, as if he could not comprehend Mr. Grey’s dedication to the greater Cause. “You know that this assault is doomed. Why continue?”
With a single command, Mr. Grey turned one of his combat Resources on the man. He still had three of them left, along with two of the normal ones. The others were all scattered and broken along the path they had taken.
The screaming combat Resource spun in place. A projectile cannon had been mounted to its right arm, while the left held a boarding torch. The weapons spun up with hellish shrieks, and the Resource charged with a terrible roar.
It was useless. The bullets simply passed through the bald man without making any impression. His only reaction was to frown and sigh as the impacts deformed some of the etchings on the corridor behind him. “Really, this is childish.”
“Silence!” Mr. Grey did not call back the Resource, not until it had swept the combat torch through the space the phantasm occupied. The hologram stuttered and faded as the plasma spout carved through the air, and Mr. Grey allowed himself a hollow, wracking cough of amusement.
“You must know that this behavior is not going to be effective.”
Mr. Grey spun with a cry of despair and malice, unloading his own pistol on the bald man. Once again, the bullets simply sparked off the far wall as the ghostly apparition shook its head.
“Fine, then. I will visit you once you are in a more reasonable mood.” The bald man sniffed, as if mortally offended, and then vanished as if he had never been. Mr. Grey was left staring in sheer animosity at the place he had been. He might have stared longer, had there not been a sudden grinding sound behind him.
He spun around just in time to see a segment of the wall fold outward, as if it were the jaws of some predatory beast. The combat Resource had just enough time to howl in surprise before the metal closed in all around it. Within a heartbeat, the Resource was gone, vanishing into the gears of the Archive with a squealing, crunching noise. Its implants reported the cessation of its operational ability a moment before they went completely offline.
Mr. Grey drew back in horror and felt coldness wash over him. The rage that had fueled him was doused, leaving him once again cold. How could he have thought he would be able to achieve the victory the Cause had sought for so long? The Archive was as dangerous and overwhelming as the Great Voice had been. It was toying with him, taunting him with his own powerlessness. Why had it not ended it?
A moment of despair washed over him as he stood with his few remaining Resources, uncertain where to go next. Instinctively, he reached out through subspace to the rest of his Resources. Perhaps once they accelerated their missions, he would see some form of triumph over these accursed heretics.
What he found in the void shocked him. The Resources were still there, but they were being cornered. Security teams from the heretics were closing in on each nest of Resources, cutting them off from their escape routes. Others found themselves being raided and restrained. Equipment that had taken him days of effort to assemble and distribute was being torn from circuits and cut from data networks. His beautiful array of Sirens, which he had used to hide from the baleful influence of the Device, was being destroyed before his eyes.
Panic began to break through the numbness of despair. He was trapped, isolated aboard a vessel he could no longer feel confident that he could control, and his pawns were being rapidly removed from the board. His only hope was that the Contact could salvage things by crippling or destroying the Device, and then reinforcing him aboard the Archive, but how could he be confident of that now? Perhaps it had all been a trap, anyway.
Trying to keep the frantic mania from his mind, he tried to focus, reaching out across the subspace connection. He needed to know, needed to feel the reassuring presence of his would-be rescuer.
agent grey request assistance device and archive undoing infiltration repeat request assistance please respond
Gabe jerked upright as a new point bloomed out in the void. It was not inside the fleet; it was a contact far to the port side of the Concord, closing fast. He grinned. “Admiral, looks like we’re in luck!”
She grinned. “Confirm it for me. I’ll get the fleet turned around.”
He nodded, and then concentrated. OMNI was a very different beast compared to his rig, but he was getting the hang of it now. As he reached out across the void, he could feel the distractions of the Sirens lessening. Susan had security teams tearing them apart all over the fleet. A good thing too; if they had still been active, he might not have had the focus to reach so far away.
The void around him vanished and was replaced by a hangar of some kind. In some aspects, it resembled what he had known onboard the Concord and other rig carriers. It had the enclosures for rigs to stand in, the quick launch systems that most rigs used to get into space, and even some spaces for technicians to access them.
In every other way, though, it was as if he had stepped onto a completely alien craft. There weren’t as many open spaces as there had been aboard the Concord. Where he would have expected technical readouts and repair bays, there were insectoid robots huddled in small alcoves, and large machine arms like he would have expected in some kind of factory. Instead of the humanoid shapes of CTRs, AWORs, or RSRs, he saw the inhuman frames of the spider-rigs he’d fought before, as well as some of the bulbous, tentacled ones that had been such effective jamming platforms. There was no sign of any human beings in the vicinity.
There was, however, a sign of something more. He caught sight of a half-disassembled pile of rig parts nearby. A mere thought brought him closer without bothering to pass through the intervening space. He recognized the severed limbs and weapons of CTRs, and the half-butchered bulk of an SAR beneath them. He’d found the remains of the flight the enemy had taken, or at least what remained of them.
He could feel anger building in him as he reached out to those discarded wrecks, but he shoved that aside so he could focus. Susan and the others needed him to pay attention, to find where the threat was located. Every bit of data helped, and he knew exactly what he needed to get it.
Gabe established a link between the OMNI and the sensor platforms still in the destroyed rigs. They flickered to life for a brief moment, sending out a pulse that had to have sent every alarm onboard the enemy ship screaming. He grinned as he heard a screech through subspace and tilted his head to look at the ceiling. “Found you. Now it’s our turn.”