Chapter Twelve: Antibody II

Until now, the inside of the Arkolt ring had been a mystery, unseen by any sentient being in existence. Anyone who did find a way to enter, somehow bypassing the ludicrous amount of external security, would remain oblivious to whatever internal measures might await them. Because of this, our journey through the ring was probably the only time I’d ever felt appreciative of Zanzekai’s presence, though certainly not happy about it.

“There’s actually far less security on the inside,” he’d said, “because they – rightfully of course – assume that a regular person could never infiltrate their defences. Naturally they weren’t expecting an intellect of my scale, but I can hardly blame them for that now. The inside is far less guarded, but that doesn’t mean they’re helpless. My influence will keep them from swarming, but we need to be smart about this. For some of you that might be a problem, but thankfully you have me.”

And so, we’d bundled as many fighters as we could into a small Arkolt repair skiff he’d emptied out for this exact occasion and detached from the transport, leaving behind the Ultimatum of Infinity for our return. I couldn’t say why, but it felt like maybe I never would.

“How are you feeling?” I asked Konzor, who was pressed into my shoulder by the sheer volume of people squashed into the skiff.

“What kind of question is that?” the big man chuckled, “I’m absolutely ecstatic, that’s what I am.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Many have claimed so, some I’ve killed myself!” He boasted.

“You aren’t scared?”

“Madness, fear, they’re all the same chemical coursing through my veins.”

“You’re insane,” I marvelled, “but you’re somehow the calmest person I’ve ever met.”

“Well think about it like this, little Greenie, if you came up to me and said, ‘I’m not terrified of the gigantic portal and the universe-sized computer on the other side’, I wouldn’t be calling you the sane one.”

“I… Guess that’s true.” I fell silent for a few minutes, casually shifting my weight from foot-to-foot. I had no idea what was going on outside; there were no windows and the inertial dampeners only served to mute our sense of motion, leaving us standing in what felt like a stationary room. The entire ring could collapse, and we wouldn’t know until the wreckage punctured our ship. “Do you think we’ll make it back out?”

“Our survival doesn’t matter. It’s bigger than that now. Bigger than I could ever imagine.”

“Yeah. But I hope someone makes it.”

“Of course they will! We’ll make damn sure of it!”

“There’s a reason to fight now. Light at the end.”

“I have your back, Greenie. Always.”

“Me too.”

“Alright,” Zanzekai announced to the craft, “we’ve gone as far as we can in this thing. We travel the last leg on foot.

‘On foot’ was somewhat misleading, as it turned out. The Arkolt ring lacked artificial gravity, and their inertial dampeners served only to stabilise the structure, so I was finally getting to use the armour-mounted thrusters we’d been trained with in boot-camp. It took most people years to come to grips with zero-gravity combat after a lifetime under gravity, but I’d spent mine fixing spaceships, and even before that I’d spent countless of them living in all kinds of environments. Most of the memories had left my head, but most of the instincts endured. We carefully manoeuvred down some kind of narrow ventilation-shaft, always keeping our eyes out for Arkolt defences. By now they must have known we were here, it was impossible to assume otherwise, but it was safe to guess that they had bigger problems outside, problems constantly translated into the occasional bang or shudder of the superstructure around us. Besides, we were inside them now. The worst things they could do to us would hurt themselves even more.

“Hostile left!” Dagger barked, and before we could react, Zanzekai’s four arms shifted around his body so they were stacked on top of each other, and fired all four lasers at once into the Akolt drone, destroying it and marking the wall behind with a pattern of fine black burns.

“Clear.”

“Do you even need us?” She gaped at the dispersing cloud of ash.

“Soon, yes. But for now, you’re here to witness my victory,” Zanzekai rubbed his legs together in glee.

The journey probably only lasted minutes, but I could feel every second like an hour, frantically staring around at the Arkolt’s guts, waiting for electric insects to pour out and devour us. There wasn’t a scratch on nearly any surface, no writing, no seams, no controls. Everything was automated, everything was perfect. It was like living in a world carved from a single block of immaculate marble.

“Here we are,” Zanzekai brought us into the final chamber, “I designed this place as part of the wormhole generator, tied it so deeply into the heart of the construction that they couldn’t detect its true purpose. Even if they ever did, they couldn’t remove it without dismantling the entire machine. This is where I do it. This is how I beat the Arkolt at their own game!” He cackled, spreading his arms.

It was less impressive than he’d made it sound.

A big, empty chamber, cube-shaped, twice as spacious as the Zanzekai Two's cargo hold, and filled with little more than seven ship-sized cylinders. My hair stood on end from a feeling of static dispersal, but aside from that, it felt like just another Arkolt server bank.

Around us, the ring shook harder than ever before.

“Whatever you’re doing,” Dagger said, clutching her gun hard enough to bend metal, “do it soon as you can, please.”

“Patience, little monkey. To kill a god, you need tact, not sticks and clubs.” From his bag Zanzekai brought the Arkolt headset and a small folding chair. Konzor frowned impatiently as he carefully unfolded the chair, fixed it to one of the cylinders, and collapsed backwards into it, four legs bunching together in front of him.

“There’s patience, and then there’s waiting to die,” Dagger scowled as Zanzekai strapped in tightly.

“Yes, that should do it.” He plugged the headset into the cylinder, and once again placed it atop his head. “From here, I’ll be capable of connecting to the Arkolt intelligence entire. I don’t know how long I can retain control – long enough I suspect – but after that, I should be capable of turning the ring against them.”

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“Whatever you say,” Dagger nodded, “but how long do you expect this to take?”

“Fifteen minutes until I establish a stable connection.”

“Fifteen?”

“Give or take. And before that, I suspect the Arkolt will notice my tampering and send their forces to our location.”

“Oh, well that’s just brilliant. Any further insights, professor?”

“No, that’s all. I need you to guard me until I succeed. When it happens, you will know.”

“Well, that’s all you needed to say from the start,” she reloaded her weapon, “everyone, form a perimeter. No idea where these things will show up, and when, but be on guard and don’t hold back or I’ll throw you at them myself.”

“Time to fly,” Zanzekai sat back in his seat, “good luck.”

“Yeah. You too.”

The headset lit up, and the professor’s insectoid body fell limp.

Everything felt silent then. We were no longer ferrying along to the next place, nor were we fighting for our lives, not quite yet. We were just drifting there in an empty room, not far from the limp scientist, waiting for the battle that would inevitably leave some of us dead. The only sounds came from the very distant rumbling of battle as projectiles pummelled the station’s crust from outside.

“Remember when this was just a goddamn search-and-rescue operation?” Dagger grumbled.

“You say that like it was particularly safe and cuddly even back then,” I responded. She smirked.

“No rest for the good, I guess.”

“No rest for me either,” Konzor smiled, “this reminds me of the battle of Kalvori, don’t you think?”

“I’ll take your word on that one.”

“Vastly outnumbered, holding the line.”

“Oh! Like the battle of Themopylae?”

“It could well be! Cultures tend to celebrate this kind of battle!”

“I mean, the Greeks lost at Themopylae.”

“You remember them though, presumably billions of years later, and I’d call that a definite victory.”

“Of course, of course you’d think that.” She looked at me, “what about you Greenie. I know it’s a bit hazy, but in there somewhere you must have something like that.”

I felt my face flush. This wasn’t the sort of conversation I was used to having.

“It isn’t that I don’t remember them well, it’s that the memories simply don’t exist anymore,” I began, “I-” something clicked in my mind, a distant hazy memory deemed important enough to maintain over all this time. “The battle for DeepNight. One of our last battles against the Arkolt. Just four of our battleships against an entire fleet, using the rings of a planet to stop them from dashing us. We were eventually defeated, but it had delayed the Arkolt enough for us to destroy the infrastructure of three systems. With that infrastructure, it would have been far harder for the other races to fight.” My eyes were wet. This was one of the few specific memories of my distant past that I’d been able to recall, and probably the only positive one I’d experienced in since arriving at this star.

“Everyone has a stand to make,” Dagger said, “everyone has a stand, and this is ours. This is the stand we make together. They can’t take that from us. They can’t take that.”

“Never,” Konzor agreed.

They came soon enough. One of the intruder-type Arkolt drones, plopping out through a pipe like a marble, drifting through the space without any kind of propulsion. Before any of us could do anything, one of Zanzekai’s arms rotated in the air and blasted the thing to bits, before returning to his side like a sentinel.

“We’re just a fifth gun to that man, I tell you,” Dagger said, with a face like she’d bitten something sour and slimy.

“Can’t say I disagree,” Konzor happily responded, as another drone dropped into the room, which he blasted until it fell dead.

After that, we didn’t have much time to talk. They came four or five at a time, with no regard for their own well-being. We did our best to take cover behind the cylinders, which the intruders were hesitant to risk harming, but ultimately our goal was to cover Zanzekai, so there was only so many options we had. I gasped as the air warmed near my head, an arc of Arkolt energy beam firing through the helmet of a human behind me, who subsequently became the first fatality of the battle. Dagger wearily directed us towards the robot she deemed the highest risk, while Zanzekai’s arms twisted around him like a crazy storm, blasting them to pieces faster than we could react.

“Greenie!” Konzor screamed as another beam seared my already-damaged armour. He rocketed towards me and scooped me up with one claw before it could penetrate, saving my life as Dagger had before. I kept firing on the enemy still in his arm, whilst he used the other to one-handedly fire a stream of plasma-bolts. We shot through the air together, a spinning ball of carnage, protecting each other from the end of the world.

We came to a stop near Dagger, who was setting up as many defences as she could, shields, turrets, and mines. She took the time to lob an anti-matter grenade our way, which Konzor caught and tossed around a corner towards the largest cluster of Arkolt drones. She smiled as the explosive went off, taking out two and crippling two more.

“I know it doesn’t exactly fall into your vocabulary,” she roared over the carnage, “but we’re fighting for survive here. Stop messing around and watch my six!”

“Aye aye captain,” Konzor rolled into a magnetised crouch, pulling me down beside him. Dagger’s shields weren’t nearly as powerful as the ship-versions, but they muted the Arkolt beams enough to buy us a few seconds.

“How long is he taking in there,” I looked towards the comatose Zanzekai, twitching and fidgeting within his seat.

“Who knows. Too long,” Dagger tossed another grenade, the shields shimmering as it passed through, “I seriously hope he didn’t knowingly bring us here to die.”

“Would a coward like him do that?” Konzor asked.

“I don’t think he intended to die,” I said, huddling behind the others as I clumsily reloaded my weapon, “us perhaps. His body maybe. But him? Probably not.”

“Is his plan even possible?”

“I don’t know. I never had the chance to find out.”

From above, two ship-sized apertures opened up, each dropping a sphere with a diameter almost equal to the Ultimatum of Infinity’s length. No less than twenty beam weapons glowed on the surface of their body, equal or greater to that of the intruder type.

“Fall back!” Dagger screamed into her communicator, and together we retreated towards Zanzekai, the diameter of our defensive formation shrinking. As we concealed ourselves behind the cylinders, we fell outside the attack range of these new Arkolt frigates, which lumbered towards us as Zanzekai’s arm-beams fruitlessly bounced beam-after-beam off their pure white shell.

“Now?” Came a nervous voice from Dagger’s comm.

“Now!” Dagger pressed a button on her belt, and a good fifth of the room exploded with a wave of hot-white antimatter and nuclear fission. One of the frigates bulged for a second before exploding, whilst the other was almost entirely stripped of its shell. Zanzekai’s arms kept blasting as we all jumped out to join them, small explosions like pimples popping up on the naked robot’s skin, before it finally fell still.

“You,” Konzor slapped Dagger so hard she almost went flying into the death-zone, “are one of the most impressive people I’ve ever known.”

“Yes I am. But,” she splayed her arms, “those were all the bombs we had.”

“In that case,” Konzor smiled sadly, “it has been an absolute honour, and I know we’ll meet again on the battlefield of Kadath. Maybe I’ll even kill you there.”

“You’d better dream you could ever kill me, Kon-kon. You’d better dream.”

“Greenie,” Konzor took me by the shoulder, “the Arkolt was a fine foe. Whatever anyone else says, I’m glad I got to fight it! Because, because I got to meet you. Thank you.”

“You too. Thank you too.”

Up from above, a third frigate dropped from the sky, and stared at us with twenty glowing eyes.

At once, the eyes went out. And so did the eyes of the dozen or so remaining intruders.

Again, everything was silent.

“I’ve done it,” Zanzekai said quietly, and then louder, “I’ve done it!” He cackled like a classic mad scientist, ecstatic in his victory, “I’ve made connection to the Arkolt hive mind! My gods, it’s, it’s so beautiful!”

There was a slight cheer of relief, as we closed in on the scientist, everyone wanting to watch as the universe was finally saved.

“What does it look like?” I asked, tentatively. If he was right, then a plan billions of years in the making was finally about to come true.

“Like… Like... It’s like a whole universe of twinkling stars… Except everything is star, there’s no empty space – so fascinating, so beautiful… I think the stars are blocks of information. I can see it all… I can see it all. And it’s all mine. I just need to find the controls. I can control everything… I’ll just take a closer look at this bit.” His body contorted a little, “it isn’t just a star, it’s more like a galaxy. A galaxy of stars… And the stars are galaxies of stars. Of galaxies of stars. Of galaxies of stars of galaxies of galaxies of galaxies of stars. So much. So much. Universes. There’s a whole universe in here. I can see it all.”

“Are you okay?” Dagger approached, “can you turn off the portal?”

“It’s too much,” Zanzekai started giggling, tears running down his face, “it’s too much. Oh gods it’s too much. It’s too much it’s too much it’s too much. Get me out of- ” He started screaming, every muscle in his body tensing, the joints in his limbs crackling as he struggled, bones splintering, blood pooling into his suit.

Dagger started towards him, but I held her back. It was too late.

The professor lay dead in his chair, his four powerful arms drifting powerlessly through space.

We had lost.