Fleet Vanguard (Transcended Book 2), page 7
Nation grimaced. He was aware that his mission objectives were becoming increasing tenebrous. It was exceptionally unlikely that a lone operative could inflict significant damage upon a warship like Xur’kd, which left him with the twin tasks of finding intel and then escaping. On top of that, Lieutenant Miller and his squad were somewhere inside the ship and Nation had no idea how he was going to locate the trapped soldiers. Had they been the primary objective, he would have phase jumped past the door through which they were first taken. Unfortunately for Miller, he was down the priority list, no matter how bad that sounded.
And now there was this – a room full of crates containing Istoliar.
I’ve found hardly any intel and it’s time to step it up. If I’m lucky, I bought myself a few minutes by coming through that duct.
He chose a crate. Its silvery surface had no markings on it and its lid was sealed with a hidden lock. Nation tried to get his fingertips into the gap under the lid, but the crate was too well-made for him to get any leverage.
My kingdom for a crowbar.
Then, he noticed the circular indentation on one face of the crate, similar to what he’d seen next to the lifts earlier. It seemed likely this was a Trivar interface port and Nation activated his number cruncher. He was wary of triggering alarms and hoped something as mundane as a crate wouldn’t have ten layers of security on it.
The ISOP had the crate open in two seconds and the lid hissed as it lifted a few inches. Nation hooked his fingers underneath and lifted. The lid was a few inches thick and heavy. He opened it all the way.
What the hell?
JN> Keller, you’ve got to see this.
Keller wasn’t answering.
The inside of the case was heavily-padded with a yellow sponge-like material. Nation reached in and pulled out the single object. The display case was a little over one foot to each side, and cubic. Along each edge ran a slender piece of metal, which Nation knew to be gold.
The case contained the heart from a creature unknown to the Space Corps’ databanks, and the heart was beating. Nation stared at it in revulsion. The organ was a little larger than a human heart and it floated in the middle of its display case without anything to hold it up. Its major veins and arteries were cropped short, whilst the vessels supplying the heart muscle itself pulsed gently.
It didn’t take long to determine what kept the heart beating. The waves of chill coming from the case told Nation that there was some type of Istoliar device embedded inside the organ, designed for this single task.
What kind of sick bastards?
Space Corps officer training taught you to accept that not every species in the universe thought, acted or possessed the same motivations as a human. This here was the perfect example of it.
Why can’t there be a benevolent race out there? Nation thought bitterly. Aliens we can trust, rather than ones that want to kill us or stick pieces of us into a display cabinet?
Nation cast his mind back to the Confederation Council’s arrival on Xur’kd and how the Trivar called Juntar had introduced itself as Chief Cataloguer. It had struck Nation as an unusual title, but he hadn’t given the matter much thought at the time.
He targeted a second crate with his ISOP and this time it took less than a second to burn through the security. Nation threw up the lid and this time he let it drop to the floor with a thud. Inside, he found another display case, this one larger than the previous.
Lungs. Maybe lungs. Maybe something else.
With mounting anger, Nation opened a third crate, this one the largest of the three. When he saw the severed head of a lizard-like creature with green skin, pointed teeth, its eyes still blinking and its mouth forming soundless words, Nation bowed his head. He forced himself to look again and stared into the creature’s eyes. He told himself it was dead, but part of him was sure life – of a sort – still existed within the alien’s brain.
This is what they want from us. This is what we’ll become. The Trivar believe themselves to be cataloguers of life in the universe, except they kill in order to preserve.
He dropped to his haunches, gripped by another chilling thought.
What if they add a species to their library and then they kill that species? What better way to make their library unique?
Nation pushed himself upright, aware he was attempting to guess at the motives of the Trivar with only this limited evidence as backup. What if the creatures in these display cases were dying and had willingly volunteered their bodies? He growled in fury and lashed out with a foot, catching the nearest crate with a thump.
Not a damned chance of it. These bastards are here to murder every last one of us.
JN> Keller? Answer, damnit!
The neural link remained silent and Nation sent out an encrypted comms signal to see if there was another Space Corps ship in the vicinity, covering the Gundar’s duties. Once again, he got no reply and he cursed. His comms augmentation was powerful enough to get a signal to Vinxe, so he packaged up some data and sent it to the Bastion military base, letting them know what he’d discovered.
Joe Nation didn’t look inside the other crates. With renewed determination, he crossed to the exit door and used the number cruncher on it. The door whisked open, to reveal a corridor in near-darkness. He checked both ways and listened. The only sounds were the creaking of the walls. On another occasion, it would have been reassuring. Now it only added to the menace.
The corridor extended for thousands of metres towards the front of Xur’kd and thousands more towards the rear. Nation got a ping off the furthest solid surface, which confirmed what his 3D map already told him – he was more or less in the centre of the Trivar capital ship.
On both walls, he saw more doors and above each was an unlit sign. His language module could read the words readily enough. Each sign began with the word Storage and was followed by a number. The door opposite was Storage 81345.
Holy crap, how many of these rooms are there?
Xur’kd was a big ship and the potential number of store rooms was much higher than Nation wished to contemplate. He thought for a moment and ran a check for Istoliar emissions. The concentrations were slightly larger towards the front of the spaceship, though he got the strongest readings from below.
After a final check for hostiles, Nation entered the corridor and hurried towards the front of the spaceship. After passing four doors, he reached an intersecting corridor.
Access Corridor 97.
He stared along this new passage and realised that it cut from the spaceship’s port to starboard sides. Other corridors intersected this one, forming an extensive grid pattern of store rooms and passages. It was like a warehouse of death and misery and Nation didn’t want to guess how many species were stored here.
The Vraxar did this, only differently. They killed everything they met and the Trivar do likewise.
Underlying this was the realisation that the Vraxar’s original main target was not humanity, but the Antaron. The Vraxar had believed the Confederation to be an easy, soft victim, to be taken out on the way to the real prize. Humanity had defeated the Vraxar and now the Confederation was left dealing with everything.
Why couldn’t the Vraxar, Antaron and Trivar have found each other first and done so much damage nothing remained to trouble the rest of the universe?
It was a line of thought which would never provide any kind of satisfactory answer, other than to lay blame at the feet of luck or cosmic forces. Nation didn’t dwell. He jogged past Access Corridor 97 and ignored the other doors. No Trivar appeared and he quickened his pace, wondering if this storage area was off-limits for most of the ship’s personnel.
Joe Nation had a new plan. If it worked, it wouldn’t defeat the Trivar, but it might piss them off and at the moment, it was the best he could offer.
He wasn’t able to put his plan into motion without interference from the rat-like aliens. An alarm sounded and the lights in the storage area turned to a red so deep it was almost black. Nation swore and ran on.
Chapter Nine
Lieutenant Becky Keller was hard-pressed. The Antaron was a foe unlike anything she’d faced before. This example was a little smaller than the last one she’d fought in Estral space, but she guessed it still weighed close to twenty billion tonnes. It was amorphous and didn’t stay in one shape for very long, though most of the shapes it adopted were what could be called streamlined.
Not that there’s any drag in space, she thought.
After taking the Gundar through seven short-range lightspeed transitions, Keller recognized that the Antaron had two distinct modes of travel. The first method was a low multiple of lightspeed, without the alien needing to make any apparent transition – it simply flew at incredible speed, in defiance of the laws of physics. The scientists of the Confederation had long since learned that these laws were not quite as rigid as was thought even fifty or sixty years ago. The Gundar’s sensor arrays didn’t rely wholly on light in order to gather data on a target, but they still found the Antaron hard to track.
The second, and more puzzling, method of travel used by the Antaron was trickier to counter. Whenever the Gundar got too far away, the alien simply vanished and then reappeared within a few thousand kilometres of the fleeing spaceship. Keller was absolutely convinced that a tiny amount of time elapsed during these jumps, but now wasn’t the best time to study the sensor data.
On the eighth SRT, Keller held the Gundar at lightspeed for a fraction longer than before, until she was outside the bounds of Zircon’s solar system. The sensors didn’t detect the Antaron until it emerged into local space, this time much closer than the previous seven times.
Four thousand klicks. It’s getting better with each jump.
A quick check of the data showed her thought to be true. The Antaron got closer each time it followed the Gundar, and every time it was that little bit harder to execute the next short-range transit to get the Retaliator away to safety.
Keller activated the ninth SRT, just in time to avoid the Antaron as it raced towards the Gundar. Once again, she held lightspeed for a little longer.
I’ve got to draw the bastard away from Zircon. Shame this method isn’t going to work forever.
Something changed. The Gundar exited lightspeed and Keller held ready for the next jump. It didn’t take long to realise there was a problem.
Where is it?
The Antaron didn’t appear. Keller frantically checked the sensors to find out where the hell it was. She located it and swore.
It’s gone back to Zircon.
It didn’t look as if the alien was going to fall for the obvious plan of drawing it progressively further away from the planet. The plan wasn’t a great one, but it was all Keller had. The Antaron had taken a good sniff at the bait and then returned to its original target. Keller had no idea if the creature operated on instinct or if it was possessed of enough intelligence to make decisions.
One thing was for sure – she couldn’t let it stay anywhere near Zircon. Keller activated another SRT and watched the Gundar’s Istoliar power core gradually slide. The spaceship could perform a lot of transits, but if its power source wasn’t given a chance to recharge, it would eventually run out of juice.
The Gundar appeared in high orbit over Zircon. The Antaron had gone straight for the surface and planted itself right on top of the Aror-7 facility. It was a relief to find the creature trying to suck Istoliar scraps out of an abandoned processing plant instead of going directly for a major population centre.
The underside sensor array showed the alien far below. It covered the entire Aror-7 facility, leaving none of the buildings visible. Something about the creature made Keller feel revulsion – like it was a cancer that would never do anything other than bring misery and death. The Antaron was a pointless, unwanted parasite.
Keller hit the alien with the overcharge particle beam. She saw no evidence the weapon did any harm, but it was the only thing she had besides high-explosives which would kill everyone on Zircon and probably leave the Antaron unharmed. A moment after Keller fired, the alien launched itself towards the Gundar. The creature’s speed was no longer a surprise and she took the spaceship into lightspeed.
This time, Keller managed four lightspeed jumps away from Zircon before the alien gave up the chase and returned to the planet.
This isn’t going to work. It’s going to get bored of Istoliar fragments soon and then it’ll go for a big city.
Keller piloted the Gundar to Zircon, fired the particle beam and tried to lure the Antaron away once more. After three lightspeed jumps, it went back to the planet.
Damnit!
The situation was grim. The combat was proceeding at such a rate that Keller was unable to check in with base to ask for ideas or strategies. She didn’t usually require assistance, but this was a unique situation which required backup. The Antaron wanted to consume the Istoliar in the Gundar, yet without sufficient desire to pursue the spaceship halfway across the universe. Keller’s early hope was that her Faor implant would be completely irresistible and would keep the Antaron hot on her heels until she could enter an extended period of lightspeed which would take them both outside of Confederation Space. So far, the creature didn’t seem interested enough.
Maybe it can only detect Faor from a close range, in the same way that it did during the first attack on the Gundar all those months ago.
Keller guessed there was some accuracy to this idea. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of a way to capitalise. She wasn’t even sure what the outcome would be if she did manage to keep the Antaron coming after her. Eventually the Gundar would run out of power for short-range lightspeed transits, or Keller would slip up on the timing and the Antaron would engulf the ship. Worst of all, she was pretty sure that whatever she accomplished, the alien would end up back at Zircon one way or another. The Confederation lacked data on the Antaron, but it was clear the aliens knew how to navigate through the universe.
The Antaron remained on Zircon, with Aror-7 hidden somewhere beneath the creature’s massive bulk. Keller didn’t want to leave it there for any extended period of time – if it did so much damage the refinement facility wouldn’t start up again, it would be a disaster which would set the Space Corps’ shipbuilding program back a decade or more.
Take this, you alien slimebag.
Keller fired the particle beam once again, knowing her current tactic was only delaying the inevitable. Since no backup was coming, it seemed pointless to keep plugging away, other than as a method of showing defiance towards a creature which certainly didn’t give a damn one way or another, even if it was familiar with concepts such as defiance. The Antaron leapt away from Zircon and Keller sent the Gundar into the longest lightspeed transit she dared.
In that tiny, short moment, an idea came to Keller. It arrived with such pure, unadulterated clarity that it tightened her chest in the same way as her most potent psi insights could do.
Take the damn thing back to the Estral.
Questions and doubts flooded her mind, but she couldn’t allow them to divert her. She had no other way out and even if her idea failed, she’d done something which might buy the Confederation some time.
Keller brought the Gundar out of its SRT and immediately tapped into all of the available sublight output from its Istoliar core. The spaceship accelerated harshly. While the Retaliator fought its way towards full speed, Keller activated the lightspeed catapult. An SRT would cancel the warmup and the Gundar’s maximum velocity of 38,000 kilometres per second was going to be insignificant in comparison to the Antaron’s considerably higher speed.
One whole, entire minute to warm up this catapult. It’s going to be tight.
The Antaron travelled at such speed, it emerged into normal space before the Gundar had exceeded a speed of twenty thousand kilometres per second. Keller thought she detected the faintest hesitation from the creature and by the time it started after the Gundar, the spaceship was thirty thousand kilometres distant.
I just bought myself a tenth of a second. Way to go me.
The Antaron crossed the intervening space and crunched into the SC Gundar. In a split second, every one of the Retaliator’s external sensor arrays was blocked by the colossal form of the alien. The sensors did their best to gather data on the Antaron’s make-up, but they turned up a blank, the same as happened on the previous encounter.
50 seconds to go. Isn’t this exciting?
The Gundar’s core had fallen to 68% of its maximum capacity following the series of SRTs. It was the core’s recharge potential which was important and as soon as the Antaron made contact with the spaceship’s hull, the Istoliar suffered damage.
99%, 98%. This won’t be a cheap fix.
Keller did her best to breathe deeply and evenly as the seconds counted down. The lightspeed catapult required a big chunk of power to fire and at the moment it was hit-and-miss as to whether or not there would be sufficient left in the tank.
The lightspeed catapult whined. Keller closed her eyes and let the sound wash over her. In her mind, an insidious voice whispered that it was absolutely, completely impossible for anything to accompany the Gundar through the wormhole and that her plan was doomed to fail. Keller did her best to ignore the voice, but it was insistent and refused to be silenced.
40 seconds. Maybe I should see how Joe is getting along.
She didn’t want the distraction and stayed off the neural link. The Gundar’s Istoliar core potential gradually sank, until it was at 90%. The first time Keller had encountered the Antaron, she’d been left with a feeling – nothing more – that it was interested in her Faor. She reached out, more assertively, to try and get some kind of sense about what the Antaron wanted. Surely it had more than the base desire to simply feed and nothing else.
Keller’s consciousness extended beyond the walls of the Gundar. She couldn’t read minds, but she could often detect fleeting hints of emotions as they formed in the head of a sentient being. With the Antaron she found no hunger, no yearning, no anger, no compassion. The only thing she felt was nothingness. The alien was a dark void, so remote from anything else that Keller couldn’t forge even the most tenuous link.
