If there is, hopefully you enjoy this much-belated addition to the story.I guess we'll see, though.
~
Chapter 6:
“The Eye watches us. The mausoleum rises. It can’t be stopped. We can’t be stopped. This is divinity! We are looking upon the very face of destiny! The Black Angel stands against us, but she cannot stop what is transpiring here. There are Blessed among us. They will save us. They will save us all through rebirth. Glory to them!”
- intercepted broadcast from Natias Three during testing of final-stage embers on indigenous population. Results deemed encouraging.
~
Standing on the bridge of some strange alien craft. Its bridge. Her bridge. Standing there and watching. She felt its hate. Its will. Its need to conquer, to dominate. To survive. She felt everything it felt. Even the fear.
Beneath the anger, under the imperative to control and subjugate, was a solid core of writhing, naked terror.
It was afraid.
She could see why; its ship orbited a dead planet. Only days ago it had been living, thriving world, but it was now despoiled and laid to waste. The killers had been thorough here; the atmosphere had been burned off. The oceans had been boiled into vapour. There were massive rips in the surface, kilometers wide and deep as if inflicted by the claws of some celestial beast. Vast craters were spattered across the planet like lesions on diseased skin, each of them marking the former site of a city. Magma had surged to the surface through breaches in the planetary crust, forming glowing boils, venting into the airless skies. This was a monument, this rotting corpse of a world. Left for all to see, so that they could understand its message as succinctly as a body, impaled before a city’s gates, might announce.
You are not welcome here.
She could feel its uncertainty at this atrocity, the gnawing worry in its gut that they might have overreached themselves, that they should not have extended into the Iosin Expanse. She half-remembered the old Seers’ tales, superstitious fables of demons and deities that lay sleeping in their darkness, their nightmare lord slumbering upon its black throne.
It tried to calm itself, stifling the anger, dampening down on the fear. A hand that wasn’t hers reached out to a control panel and banished the image of the dead world. But a single planet, she could hear it – hear herself – think. We have more. And they, surely, do not. No one had ever challenged the Race and survived. They would endure. They would thrive.
Because of you, she heard its voice call to her. Death is only the beginning. Inheritance brings Ascension. We are your children. It turned to look at her, violet eyes gleaming as its monstrous visage twisted in an expression she somehow recognized as a smile. Death is not the end.
Darla awoke with a startled scream, jerking upright and covered in sweat. The sheets were matted and tangled, her clothes stuck to her skin. She shivered and pulled herself out of bed, wishing that Joshua was here, but his work at the dig was running him ragged; several small camp sites had been built, but they weren’t enough for all the technicians and scientists working on the Spire, so by the time he got back to his place, he was exhausted. He hadn’t said anything, but Darla knew he wasn’t sleeping well either. They’d been getting snappish with each other, picking fights. Joshua had even been making quips about her beliefs, which he’d never done before.
No, if either of them had had a good night’s sleep since their aborted trip to Thresher Lagoon, Darla couldn’t remember it. Andrew hadn’t been doing well, either. He’d been acting out in school and having nightmares. Darla had gotten him to see Dr. Klausewitz, but it didn’t seem to be helping any. Nothing had been going right since the alien probe had come here. She wanted it gone. She didn’t care how, she just wanted things to go back to the way they’d been.
The young woman pulled herself out of bed, running her hands through her hair, pulling her sweat-matted bangs off her forehead. She startled as she looked up, noticing Andrew in the doorway. He looked frightened. “Are you okay, mommy?”
“I’m fine,” she smiled as best she could, but it came out more like a grimace. She held out her arms to him, holding Andrew tight. “I’m fine,” she lied.
“It’ll be all right,” her son replied. “They’re here now.”
Darla’s breath caught in her throat. She wanted to weep, to scream or wail, but instead she held her son closer in the darkness and tried to banish her fear, but no matter how hard she tried, its words still echoed in her head.
We are your children.
~
“Welcome aboard Valour Unending, Captain Harlock. Captain Maynard,” Andrea smiled, extending a hand to each of her guests. Harlock seized her hand in one of his own huge paws and squeezed, as if to prove that he was determined to treat her as a naval skipper and not like the young, inexperienced officer she appeared to be. Blessedly, Maynard’s grip was firm, but nowhere near as tight and the dusky-skinned woman smiled thinly as she thanked Blake for having her aboard her ship.
“I’m pleased you both accepted my dinner invitation,” the young officer replied. Since both ships were remaining on-station for the foreseeable future, she’d decided to invite their skippers over, just for a friendly get-together. A courtesy call, really. Almost.
Captain Jacob Harlock, skipper of the LISPS Wild Bill was a huge man, with tanned, leathery skin and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. By contrast, Maynard of the much smaller Court of a Thousand Suns, was actually slightly taller than the huge Harlock, but far more slender, her light olive skin smooth and unsullied by the lifetime of physical labour that Harlock had gone through prior to buying the Wild Bill. It had started life as Confed tramp freighter, but had been seized by the League and auctioned off when its owner fell into arrears. Even with his savings and several investors, Harlock hadn’t had anywhere near the capital to purchase the ship, so the League government – always trying to stimulate economic development and trade – had extended him a line of credit.
Given what Harvey had told her, Harlock was doing well for himself and even looking to add a second starship to his name. If he kept his profits up, he’d soon have a small freight cartel of his own, which was a testament to the big man’s business acumen. A hyper-capable starship was not an insignificant expense; even in the far wealthier Confederacy, to purchase and operate a hyper-capable vessel was beyond the means of most private citizens, but many individuals had could afford a sublight ship; in-system space of Inner Worlds like Sol, Centauri or Eridani was often filled with hundreds, even thousands of small personal ships. Yachts, cutters, solar-sailers; there were even sublight arcologies trekking across interstellar space on centuries-long journeys, massive starships with populations greater than some planets.
The smallest hyper-capable ships built by the Confederacy were hyper drones, couriers and a few specialist classes of corvette. The former classes were virtually nothing but hyper systems, and even using cutting-edge military technology, a great deal of the latter’s hundred-meter length still had to be sacrificed for the necessary hyper systems. It was rare to find hyper-capable civilian vessels shorter than 300 meters and massing less than a hundred thousand tonnes. Wild Bill was one of these smaller freighters; Confed and corper megafreighters could exceed the size of a dreadnaught or battle carrier and ship millions of tonnes of material between worlds.
By contrast, a ‘tentonner’ like Maynard’s Court of a Thousand Suns was more like a courier than an actual freighter, with a cargo space to match. In fact, it seemed as if her ship was too small to be hyper-capable. At least by League standards. It was possible the woman used a mothership – the Confederacy and its merchant cartels operated massive ‘carryalls’ that could transport dozens to hundreds of sublight craft between different star systems. If Andrea remembered her history right, it was those carryalls that the Resurgency had converted into the first battle carriers, using them to deploy first-generation HAVOCs – over-gunned, over-engined attack craft. Fighters in the loosest sense of the word, each HAVOC was the size of a corvette with firepower far in excess of what a ship its size normally carried.
The League didn’t have any battle carriers – making an effective HAVOC design was still several generations away – and only a handful of motherships. Those carryalls that they did have did tended to stay around the Industrial Worlds, where the bulk of their traffic was located. It would take a lot to get a mothership to divert this far off the beaten path for one tentonner, and Blake didn’t recall any reports of ships that size stopping in Theron. So, one way or another, the woman was hiding something.
Andrea met Maynard’s eyes, forcing herself not to look away. There was just something unsettling about them. Not even the colour; even in the League, minor adjustments to eye colour were quite common. It was what she saw in them. Or, rather, didn’t see.
The other woman’s smile widened a fraction as if she could sense Blake’s discomfiture. Well, Simon had always told her that she had a lousy poker face. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll give you the five-penny tour,” Blake said. “Naturally, parts of Valour Unending are off-limits to visitors, even other starship captains.”
Harlock made a grunt of acknowledgement and Maynard dipped her head in a courteous nod. “I would be honoured to see more of your vessel, Junior Captain.”
Blake narrowed her eyes at the smuggler’s – alleged, she corrected herself – gesture. Despite the respectful nature of her words and the utter lack of anything approaching sarcasm, seemed indefinably wrong somehow. Something about the other woman gave Andrea the creeps. That’s because us Blakes are pack leaders, she could almost hear Simon’s teasing voice. We don’t get along well with other alpha males and females. Maynard was one of those; Andrea could see it in her eyes and body posture. Her… subservience was not what Andrea expected and the contrast was probably just what was weirding her out. She’s a smuggler captain aboard a League destroyer, her brother’s voice said. Of course she’s going to be polite and courteous and go out of her way not to piss you off, right?
Only if she’s trying to hide something. If she was clean, she wouldn’t care. Might even try to provoke me into searching her ship, just to prove ‘harassment’ or something like that.
See? My little sister’s smart all on her own.
Even though ‘Simon’s’ input was just a figment of her imagination, Andrea felt a slight warming in her cheeks at ‘his’ compliment – one that her brother had echoed in life several times, whenever he thought his littler sister needed an ego-stroking. Well, we’ll just see if I can’t come up a reason to take a closer look at you, Maynard. Andrea smiled toothily as she addressed both private captains, but her gaze remained locked on Maynard’s unnatural eyes. You’re an alpha too, aren’t you, girl? “Then if you’ll follow me, we can start the tour.”
~
“Hey, Jeffery.”
“Hey, Josh. Working late?”
“Something like that. I’ve been thinking about this thing all day; can’t seem to get it out of my head.”
“I hear that. Director’s put me on public relations. It’s all, ‘Christ, woman. I’m fat, I’m going bald and my idea of formal wear is the T-shirt with only one stain on it – why am I the public face of this shit? Don’t we have a publicist?”
“Two reasons, Jeff. First – yes, we do have an official public relations manager. His name’s Darren Ralston and he gets the brew shakes as soon as he wakes up.”
“Yeah, I know. Fucking lush. Kee-rii-st. You’d think that the only planet excavating alien ruins in the whole God-damn Perseus Arm would draw a bit more from the top ten percent.”
“In scientists? Sure. In everyone else? Yeah, not so much. War or no war, we’re still a collection of ornery individualists who left one massive government and ain’t too happy about seeing one here, home-grown or not. Feds are still fighting with the League for every spare credit they can get and all the Colonies still get twitchy when the words ‘government’ ‘spending’ and ‘federal’ come up in the same sentence. They need all the decent suits to sell things like federal medical care, education, shipbuilding, taxes. No one’s going to question the scientific value of Theron, especially on our budget. So Ralston’s job is pretty much superfluous. If we ever find something besides broken pottery, especially something we can use, then we’ll get more attention and a higher quality of suits.”
“Thanks for the history lesson. I had absolutely no idea that there were multiple layers of political and sociological agendas at work on our happy little colony. Wait – what’s the second reason?”
“Delmont knows you’re not nearly as incompetent as you try to look.”
“How’d I let that slip?”
“You’re fat, you’re going bald and your idea of formal wear is the T-shirt with only one stain on it and you’ve still had more girlfriends everyone else in any three departments.”
“Damn this silver tongue of mine. Can I help it if Ascendant chicks love a man in a labcoat?”
“Heh. Get used to it, buddy. Your mask slipped. Now that she knows you’re not the dumb, lazy slob you’ve tried to appear, Delmont’s going to ride you hard.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t mind it. Serena’s a ball-buster, but I bet she’d be a fucking demon in the sack.”
“Yeah. The kind that leaves a shrivelled husk in its wake.”
“Hmmm… worth it. So, you’re our resident cunning linguist – least as far as I’ve heard from a couple friends of Darla-”
“I will come to your house in the dead of night with duct tape, rope, a tire iron and a pair of pliers.”
“Bring the girlfriend. We can make it a party.”
“Sick bastard.”
“Never denied it. So, before I was so rudely interrupted with threats upon my person, I was going to ask what are we doing here?”
“You’re annoying me. I’m thinking I’ve got a theory.”
“You and everyone else.”
“Yes, but mine’s right. I’ve been studying the markings here. There’s a pattern, I know it.”
“There is?”
“Yes. At first I thought I was going crazy, but it came to me in a dream.”
“That still sounds pretty crazy.”
“Archimedes was taking a bath when he came up his brainstorm.”
“Archi-who?”
“…look, just bear with me. I think I’ve deciphered the writings. I was just about to test that theory.”
“How?”
“Watch and learn.”
“Jesus!”
“Brilliant, isn’t it?”
“That’s a door!”
“You have such a remarkable astute grasp of the obvious.”
“We’ve been over this thing a dozen times. There was no fucking hatchway there before. Not even a seam in the God-damn metal. How the fuck did you get it open?”
“I listened.”
“Josh, you’re kind of creeping me out.”
“Oh, I’m not even started yet. Call it in. We’re going to see what’s inside this thing.”
~
Andrea wasn’t surprised at Harlock’s appetite; he was originally from Nova Terra Secundus, one of the planets that the Creed-Weston Agricultural Collective had tried to turn into nothing but another world-sized farm, its people little more than modern-day serfs, toiling on their ‘lord’s’ lands, with just as much value to their corper princelings as the robotic harvesters they worked alongside. As a result, the older Secundans tended to be weatherbeaten men and women with strong hands, simple tastes and big appetites.
Blake didn’t know what world Maynard hailed from, but the other woman certainly gave Harlock a run for his money; she’d more or less inhaled everything on her plate and was now staring the League captain with the same sort of look a half-tame animal might give its master, subservient but watchful, ready for any sign of weakness.
~
Joshua pulled on his helmet, hooking it into the encounter suit’s neck seal with a click, the suit’s power supply bringing the HUD to flickering life.
“You’re looking good so far,” Control’s voice crackled in Joshua’s ear. “Vitals normal, telemetry’s clear. You’re good to go.”
Jeffery was sweating behind his helmet. “So tell me why we need these fucking moon suits. Or for that matter, why we’re the ones going in?”
“Because you geniuses cracked open an alien ship filled with God-knows-what in the air,” Project Director Serena Delmont’s voice came through the comm. “And because I subscribe to the theory of ‘waste not, want not’, I figured I’d send in the people who already exposed themselves to whatever pathogens, allergens and alien crotch-rot that happens to still be viable.”
“Aw, shit.” Jeffery paled a little, mouthing. I didn’t know the comm was on! at Joshua.
“So are the helmet cams, bright boy,” Delmont said. “I can read lips, you know.”
“I should just stop trying, shouldn’t I?”
“Well, you may want to try digging up,” Control interjected over the snickers of the rest of the team back in the ‘command’ trailer. “That might work.”
Joshua smiled at Falken. “C’mon, Jeff. Think of this as a learning experience.”
“Yeah, never to hang around you.”
“Well, that and just think of all the Ascendant girls who are going to be hanging off your every word as one of the first men inside the Spire.”
“Yeah, we’re all dripping wet,” Delmont cracked. “Just get in there. Your escort’s waiting. I’d let you face the Spire on your own, but I figure that our Navy guests might as well earn their pay. Now get in there.”
~
Deep inside the ember’s unliving mind, it sensed the bioforms clustering about it, acoustic sensors sampling their vocalizations, passive sensors listening to their communications. It had deciphered their language some time ago and now listened to every word eagerly, watchful for intent to do it harm. But none had come and the ember had allowed the bioforms to mill about it, poking and prodding. Whatever they learned would be turned to its cause soon enough.
If it were capable of the emotion, it would have been pleased at its imminent violation; its child had learned faster than it had believed possible, enough to decipher the instructions it had taunted the bioforms with. Only the Select could read this dialect. Come to me, lifeless neural circuitry whispered to its child, cooing in sounds just beyond the bioforms’ perception, touching them silently and drawing the first of its children closer. I have something for you. But first… you must earn it.
It had no lips with which to smile, nor any true conception of the emotion of pleasure, but if had both of those things, the ember would have been grinning from ear to ear in anticipation.
It had always known a simple truth, a simple fact central to its operation. The very reason for its creation.
Death was not the end.
~
“Entering the door now, control.”
“Signal’s still strong, Josh. We’ve got your suit telemetry on our screens. Sensor feeds are still clean.”
“Confirm that, control. We’re heading in.”
The party moved into the alien probe, sweeping lights back and forth across the entryway. One of the Valour Unending’s armsmen accompanying Banks and Falken whistled. Josh swung his lamp over to the woman, who looked mildly abashed. “Sorry.” He smiled at her, nodding in understanding. It was… beautiful.
They stood in a massive entry chamber with no purpose that any of the humans could identify at first glance; it was an extraordinary waste of space in a probe even as large as this one. The glow from the floodlights spilled through the doorway, devoured by the thick, choking shadows inside the Spire. The walls seemed to gleam red, the bloody light spilling through hatchways and hallways without any distinct light source, casting everything in an indistinct hellish light. Clear pipes thrummed softly, their fluid contents bubbling along deeper into the vessel, like a living being’s blood vessels. Joshua blinked, feeling an unusual pressure in the back of his mind, like a headache that hadn’t quite developed. He shook off the sensation, tapping the suit’s comm.
“Control, are you seeing this?”
“We are, Josh.”
One of the hallways glowed brighter than the others as if to welcome the intruders, the non-existent lights pulsing in invitation. “I guess it wants us to go that way,” Joshua said.
“Seems like,” Control answered back.
“Thank you. Very helpful,” Joshua sighed. “Jeffery, let’s get something up the side tunnels. If there are horrible alien monsters lurking there, I’d like to have some forewarning before I end up webbed to the ceiling.”
“Check. Deploying discos now.” Far larger than ‘bugs’ – the insect-sized Short-Range Reconnaissance Drones that the Confederate military had developed (and the League military had stolen and cloned) for the use of their soldiers, the hovering ‘discos’ were about the size of a human fist, a round ball fitted with an expensive miniaturized antigrav drive and many sensor arrays. Falken held out his datapad, calling up the discos’ control system. With a soft thrum of their drives, the small spherical drones vanished down the darker passages. The datapad’s main screen fractured into four different subdivisions, each showing telemetry from one of the probes. Jeffery’s head came up and he nodded to Joshua. “Discos are good. No monsters so far. Looks like – sweet mother of fuck!”
“What? What?” there was a burst of static as Joshua, the armsmen and the AOCS controllers all tried to get answers at once. In the confusion, it took several moments before they realized how much Falken was laughing.
“Got you,” he said, laughing harder, despite the glares his companions were shooting him. “Oh, that was too easy.”
“You’re fucking high-lair-ee-us,” Joshua drawled.
“Asshole,” he heard the female armsman mutter.
“Just get the fuck in there,” Delmont’s voice crackled through the comm, the project leader sounding more irritated than normal.
“Confirmed, control,” Joshua sighed. “Come on, everyone. Laughing time is over.” The ranking armsman filed past the two scientists, the entire party heading into the hallway, deeper into the Spire. As he headed deeper into the alien construct, Joshua could swear that he thought he heard someone calling his name.
~
The inside of the Spire was unlike anything Jeffery Falken had seen before, a labyrinth of access corridors, hallways and passages that seemed to wind about one another with no rhyme or reason. His suit’s tracking software was fretting and spitting back false readings, unable to do something as simple create a map of where the team had been. Twice it had claimed they’d doubled back on themselves, when that was clearly impossible. The data from the discos was just as unhelpful; one of the probes had simply died shortly into its voyage. Cheap worthless shit, the scientist groused as he tried to bring it back on-line, but the connection was down completely. I’ve told them we needed to replace our discos with the 700 series, but they keep saying the 500s are ‘good enough’. Yeah, once all of them crap out – oh, there goes another one – in the middle of the mission, who’s going to get shit for that? Not Delmont and the board.
He suppressed a sigh, wishing heartily that he could rub his sore eyes; the walls burned, glowing with sourceless light and, occasionally, symbols that had ghosted over the Spire’s inner hull, taunting the humans inside to decipher them. He had no idea what they said; Joshua did, but Jeffery felt himself hesitant to bother Banks; the man was leading them deeper – if deeper it was – into the Spire with a surety that Jeffery certainly didn’t feel. Whenever he caught a glimpse of Josh’s face through the other man’s faceplate, he was pale and sweating, his lips moving but whatever he was saying wasn’t being picked up by the comm.
Corporal Derby, one of their two escorts from Valour Unending had asked Banks twice if he knew where he was going and twice, he’d received only a short, clipped affirmation. Private Augusta Lichenstein – whose first name Jeffery only knew because he’d flirted with her – didn’t seem to care where they were; under her visor, her expression was one of rapt fascination as they travelled through the Minoan corridors. When talking to her earlier, Jeffery had seen a pendant of Ascension around her neck, the three-helixed symbol of the Church of Inheritance. She’d occasionally touch a hand between her breasts, where the item was likely to lay.
The AOCS scientist paused, taking a moment to gather his breath. He wasn’t used to these sorts of treks. The most exercise he got was wandering around an already-cleared dig site or intercourse with a particular energetic lass. He looked back the way the group had come. Was it his imagination or did the corridor look different? Was that possible? Was the Spire actually reconfiguring itself as they went? What would be the point of that?
To make sure silly buggers like us never find anything important, he chided himself.
Derby nudged Jeffery’s shoulder. “Are you all right, sir?”
“Never better. Just a little out of breath,” he admitted, smiling up at the Marine. No, security officer. Destroyers didn’t carry Marines. At least, that’s what he’d overheard from someone else. “Not used to this kind of marathon.”
“Maybe we should turn back?” Derby asked, looking up at Banks and Lichenstein, each lost in their own worlds.
“It’s all right. As long as we’re not in here long enough to consider cannibalism, I’ll be fine.”
“That’s the spirit, sir.”
~
Conquer. (everything, domination, control, desire)
Joshua let his fingers trail over the wall, watching the ephemeral alien script ghost across the bulkheads, fading into the red haze that filled the Spire’s insides. He looked up, hearing voices calling to him, trying to differentiate them from the buzzing that filled his head. “What?” he asked through parched lips. It hadn’t been that long since he’d had something to drink, had it?
Service. (glory, submission)
Someone was asking him something, a question. It wasn’t important… was it?
Survive. (endure, thrive, await)
The researcher touched a hand to his helmet, trying to rub his pounding skull. No. No, it was. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, pulling his attention away from the markings on the walls, on the whispers calling to him. “I let myself wander. You were… saying?”
Reclaim. (what was lost)
Corporal Derby stared back at him. “Have you had any luck in translating the rest of these?” he gestured to the words on the walls. Joshua turned back to the bulkhead, letting one hieroglyph flow over his hand.
Select. (honour, chosen few, firstborn, elite)
“No,” he replied, watching as another scrolled into view to replace it. “No, I can’t read them.”
Awaken. (now)
~
“My God…”
“I don’t think He had much to do with this, Jeff.” Banks smiled; normally his features were welcoming and friendly, but the sweat pasting his hair to his forehead and the gaunt look to his features made the gesture more of a macabre grimace.
“What is this place?” Derby asked, his searchlight playing out over the walls. The chamber was the largest they’d come to yet, and definitely important. Cryo tanks lined the walls, each one no larger than man’s finger, each one containing some organic mixture, labelled in the same alien script found throughout the Spire. The clear pipes that had run throughout the ship’s length seemed converge in this room, smaller conduits tapped into the pulsing fluid, running into the machinery that surrounded the cryo tanks. It was impossible to tell whether it was some arcane power transfer system or exchanging fluid for some other purpose. The entire room seemed to pulse with the subtle thrum of ancient machinery, a disjointed noise leaking through the vibrations; to Jeffery’s ears, it sounded almost like voices.
Awaken. (need, desire, hunger)
“The Beginning of Tomorrow,” Joshua replied breathlessly. He looked over at his companions, his gaunt features drawn taut with an expression that Jeffery would not have cared to call a smile. “Do you know what this place is?”
“I, uh, just asked that,” the corporal replied, shooting a glance towards Lichenstein, hoping for some camaraderie against the oddities that were AOCS personnel with a find, but the private was just as caught up in what she was seeing as Banks. Goddamn Ascendants.
A moment passed before Banks seemed to remember the question Derby had asked. “It’s a repository.”
“For what?”
“Everything. Knowledge. Technology. Art.” Banks ran a hand along one of the cryo machines. “Even life.”
“How do you know this?”
Banks offered another gaunt, tight smile. “It told me.”
Jeffery turned towards Banks. “You’re freaking me out, Josh.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” The thinner man seemed to shake himself. “It’s just… this place. I mean… it’s not a scout probe or a research device. This – it’s all that’s left of a civilization. A way for them to rebuild.”
“Like a Von Neumann?”
“Not quite. More like a… blueprint.” Banks leaned in to inspect one of the machines, running his gloved fingers over the smooth metal surface. He frowned, touching his hands to his helmet; his head was pounding. It wasn’t a normal headache, either. It had been getting worse since he’d entered the Spire. It felt like someone was scratching at the back his mind, whispering in words he couldn’t hear.
Awaken. (now)
~
One its firstborn had returned home. Though escorted by unaltered bioforms as it was, the ember had allowed it to delve deeper within its frame, to see the instruments of resurrection and drink in the last, glorious hope of its murdered creators. It whispered to the firstborn in the flickering, ghostly images of its lights and in spectra of sound beyond audibility, drawing the bio-form to it like an angler’s lure.
Within the bioform, it could feel the Select’s presence, betrayed by minute muscle tics, lingering glances, and other small gestures that the ember’s makes had told it to look for. Like a proud parent, the ember directed its systems to closely monitor the emergence, cajoling what it had lain within the bioform to some semblance of awareness.
It had chosen carefully, ensuring that the firstborn would be the finest stock it had. And if it had been rushed, if it had selected for speed over an assurance of functionality, that was acceptable. It would make those same finest live again. And again. And again, until it got it right.
The ember could feel the presence of the bioforms’ weapons, internal sensors licking at their crude power sources. Crude, but effective. They could be an impediment. Their own automata had been an annoyance and it had silenced them, but the bioforms would be harder to subdue. Not if it wanted to use them, so some… delicacy was required. Circuitry pulsed with the need to fulfill, tempered by the need for caution. It would wait, until an indefinable moment passed. Then… then it would have them. Still, until that threshold was crossed, it would hold back. It had not waited thousands of years to act in haste. Crude but effective; they were still a threat to it.
Not as much as the one it had sensed before, the one that had taunted its probes. The ember’s, cold circuitry-forged mind was not a vessel of emotion. It calculated. It considered. It analyzed variables. It didn’t know joy, knew nothing of sorrow or guilt, love or despair. At best, it could feel distant shadows of these sensations, muted and distorted like an image seen through a window of stained glass. Still, those pseudoemotions were enough.
Julie Maynard had been correct; as much as the ember was capable of it, as much as it could hate anything, it hated her.
But now, as the ember observed the action within its armoured shell, part of its gestalt mind looked down upon the actions of the as-yet-unborn Select and smiled, a simulacrum of parental pride. The next step of the resurrection had begun. The moment was here.
An impulse flickered throughout the ember’s body, stirring sleeping forms to life. Diagnostics ran through start-up check-lists, capacitors dispensed power and limbs stretched, carrying bodies silently through the ember’s form.
~
It was in his hand.
It was in his hand and he didn’t know why.
A syringe; the needle armoured, intended to pierce through light armour, just like the NBC suits AOCS used.
Fulfill. (now)
His fingers were wrapped tightly around it as it moved in a flashing arc, coming up under the back of the helmet, where there was none of the relatively heavier plating found in military suits, only a thin body glove. Most civilian HAZMAT, EVA and NBC armours were not intended to offer the user much protection in combat. That they did at all was a happy byproduct of their primary function and not, in any meaningful fashion, an intended result.
Action. (undertake, complete, carry out)
Consequently, the body glove covering the base of Falken’s skull offered absolutely no defence at all, and the large man pitched face-forward, a single short, surprised gasp coming from his comm. With an effort, Joshua prevented his heavyset partner from falling to the floor, bracing him upright as the syringe depressed, injecting its contents into Falken’s nervous system. Jeff made a plaintive, surprised gasp of astonishment and pain before he went limp, Joshua dropping the bigger man like a sack of flour.
Conquer. (everything)
“Join us,” Joshua heard someone whisper in his own voice. “Know the glory of our resurrection.”
He saw the uncomprehending fear and shock in the eyes of the soldiers, saw the flicker of movement around them. He tried to scream a warning, but he couldn’t find the words and before he did, it was too late.
For all of them.
~
“Jesus Christ!” Derby’s eyes widened as Banks picked something up and, before anyone could ask him what he’d found, stabbed Falken in the back of the head. The big man made a surprised little squeak and went limp, crashing to the ground. On instinct, the soldier raised his gun. “What did you do? What the fuck did you just do?”
The AOCS scientist looked up and Banks froze. His eyes… his gaunt sunken eyes were full of horror, even as his mouth twitched into a macabre grin, lips struggling to form words. Instead, his eyes drifted up over the soldiers’ heads.
The corporal looked up. Something with a dozen bright purple LEDs hung from the ceiling, staring back at him, a metal exoskeleton glittering like chitin. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as he brought his gun up, his mouth working in a startled scream, but then there was only a flicker of movement, the rending sound of his armour being torn open, the staccato belch of a gun on panicked full autofire and the sound of someone screaming. Before everything went dark, he only just realized that it was him.
April 19th, 4222
