Valyien Box Set 2, page 37
part #4 of Valyien Series
“Karis?” Eliard whispered uncertainly. He didn’t feel cold, and he could feel his heart thumping in his chest. He didn’t know if it was the depth that he was currently at, or whether it was the adrenaline or the ministrations of the Device inside of him that was keeping him warm. He looked around, suddenly nervous of this great and strange landscape, but there was nowhere for the section manager to be.
The rope. He turned quickly back to the poly-filament rope to see what had happened to it, and yes, his suspicions were confirmed. He found that the end was frayed and torn—something that shouldn’t technically be possible to do to this strong substance. Well, not without a very, very powerful amount of force.
Such as a mecha.
Scrape. There was a sound from somewhere through the blue-lit opening ahead of him, and Eliard gritted his teeth in agitation. It sounded like something heavy being dragged over stone.
The captain started to run forward, into the light.
He was met by a high, narrow passageway built through the pyramid, the blocks fitting perfectly, too perfectly for such a heavy structure, a part of his mind thought. He was used to seeing precision engineering in the modern age of course, but this was prehistoric. This was thousands of years old.
Even as the captain raced toward the light, he felt something pricking at his eyeballs. It’s those carvings, a part of him registered. They were creepy. They were wrong in a way that he found it hard to characterize.
The carvings on the wall were immense, many times the size of him, and each depicted tall, elongated figures that somehow had six limbs and were holding bizarre objects that he couldn’t quite determine what they were. Some of the figures were standing on four of their limbs and holding their ‘front’ two like great arms upstretched, holding orbs or twisted squiggles that could have been snakes or staves or weapons. Still others stood on their hind limbs and had their front four limbs splayed out, like a spider, or a priest.
It made Eliard’s head buzz, and when he saw what comprised their faces above the creatures’ long necks, he almost choked. They had elongated heads, but the front of their faces were exploded outwards in four mandibles like an insect.
But…
In a brief moment of clarity, Eliard knew that he hated them. That he detested them. The Valyien, that was what they had to be, right? But aside from tangling with the Alpha-machine, he had never had any dealings with the Valyien, no living human had in the galaxy, either before this point or now, as far as he knew. So where was this rage coming from that was threatening to clamp the heart in his chest?
It’s the Device. He could feel the heat radiating off the thing, and he knew instinctively, with every fiber of his being, that it was the Q’Lot virus reacting to the nearness of all of this Valyien technology. He felt as though his insides were itchy, and the captain imagined every genetic particle and molecule of the Q’Lot virus inside of his body reacting, shivering, and shaking.
This was what the Q’Lot have set their entire genetic code against, the thoughts came hard and fast as he ran. He knew this in the same deep, bone-marrow way that the body recognizes the sea when it dives in. The Q’Lot were about life, and mutation. Adaptation and growth.
And the Valyien were the reverse of that. They had been the masters of warp technology, and it was from their ruins that humanity had learned to ape their exploits and step in their paths between the stars.
Eliard didn’t feel like himself as he ran through the long passageway to the gloomy, eerie light up ahead. He felt like a new being. He felt like an emissary of an ancient time…
Scrape. The sounds from up ahead were much louder now, and as Eliard ran into the final chamber, he finally understood what they were. It was the ECN1 machine. The mecha was climbing high stone stairs that swept up to form a miniature ziggurat inside the pyramid, at the top of which were those two strange black pillars that Captain Nkolos’s log had talked about.
The stairs were wide, and the entire chamber was filled with this one structure. No other doors and no other adornments save that top platform and the eerie pillars to which the ECN was climbing, step by step. Its passage was hindered by the fact that it was dragging a heavy body almost as large as its own—a human figure made massive by the encapsulating heavy tactical suit.
Karis! Eliard thought with a gulp. It was her, he recognized her suit and the pips of her designation as she scraped upward, and then thumped against the next step. The woman was out cold, but the captain couldn’t see any smoke from her heavy tactical suit or blood on the floor. Whatever the ECN had done to her, Eliard prayed that she was just unconscious in there.
The captain could make out the thing clearer now, as well. It was humanoid, but an overlarge one. It was cast in a faintly reddish-black metal, but whatever engineers had worked on it, they had performed their task with an almost obsessive attention to the human form. It was androgynous, but every other aspect of the form was male to speak of. The metal had been sculpted into joints and muscles, and around the edges of the carapace, the captain could see the pump and movement of silvered muscles and pipework tendons. Its head even had the frozen curls of short-cropped hair, like a Michelangelo’s David—perfect in its casting in every way except that of life. But its long years of senescence had taken some toll on the form, Eliard saw. There were signs of the myriad scrapes, dents, and scratches across its shoulders, back, and thighs from whatever it had been up to down here, and the captain even saw several old or new scorch marks that could have been the section manager’s or Captain Nkolos’s meson rifle attempts to exterminate the brute.
They had both clearly failed.
Captain Nkolos never said anything about that, Eliard thought as his eyes moved above where the ECN was dragging Karis, toward the top of the steps where the strange bluish glow was emanating from. The air between the black pillars appeared to writhe and swirl, as if from a heat miasma, and although there was no source of the light, a strange glow was coming from the top of the steps.
“What the—” Eliard’s stomach turned over as he knew what he was looking at was wrong, and he felt that rising sense of nausea and the thud of his head that he had only ever associated with warp travel.
But how did the ECN have an uncontained warp field? he thought, looking at where the air shimmers glinted with the purple and blues of plasma. It was an impossibility, every part of his rational mind told him. An uncontained warp field, or plasma that was not held and maintained by a warp core, exploded and evaporated—usually with enough force to create sonic booms and firestorms—and yet the captain was looking at a swathe of self-sustaining warp plasma that wasn’t ripping a hole through the fabric of space-time itself.
Or so he thought, anyway.
And somehow the ECN had managed it, through the long years that it had been trapped down here, alone, underneath the meson barrier that Section Manager Karis had ignorantly destroyed.
No, the Valyien did this, Eliard knew. This was Valyien technology, it had to be. Had the ECN worked out how to reactivate this Valyien whatever-it-was? The pyramid? The temple? A city?
A warp gate.
At the top of the dais, the captain saw a series of shapes mounded under the pillars. At first, he thought they had been a part of the black rock themselves. Some sort of decoration or mutant technology that he did not understand, but now that he was moving closer to the steps, and his Q’Lot-changed eyes allowed him to see into the plasma, he could see that the humped forms were bodies, forming a litter of the dead piled on top.
The ECN is dragging bodies up there and leaving them there, but for what? Eliard couldn’t work it out. There were far too many to be just the work of the creature’s attack on their mission. Eliard wondered if one of them would be Captain Nkolos, and the other Armcore scientists that had first been sent down here.
And then the drone-fleet resealed the meson security barrier, and the ECN couldn’t collect more of its grisly trophies. The captain saw what had happened in a flash. Mechas, robots, machine intelligences didn’t rest. They didn’t sleep. As long as they had a constant power source, then the thing that had once been called the Enhanced Cognitive Network would continue its dark purpose, safely hidden down here thanks to the Valyien warp technology’s ability to mask all scans.
And when the meson security barrier was lifted, it resumed whatever crazy task it had set itself…
Eliard raised the Device on his hand. “You’d better stop right there, fella…” His voice sounded like a growl, echoing in this strange room.
The captain wasn’t quite sure what he was expecting the ECN to respond with, or what you were supposed to expect when talking with a sentient machine intelligence experiment gone crazy, but he hadn’t been expecting for the ECN to drop Karis in an instant, turn, and leap off the stairs toward him in a gigantic arc.
“Hyurk!” Eliard leaped, but there wasn’t much of anywhere to go to. He rolled across the floor to the side of the temple-gate room as the ECN mecha crashed to the floor where he had been, landing on one foot and one knee, with enough force to crack the solid stone.
Eliard spun into a crouch, raised the Device, and fired.
He didn’t even know what he had been intending when he had fired the mutant weapon that had colonized his arm. It was an instinctive, gut reaction that the Device was feeding off, and Eliard didn’t have time to focus his thoughts on what he had wanted it to do, but the Device had reacted all on its own, transforming itself into a configuration that Eliard had never seen before, still the blue-scaled and pendulous form of the ‘pod,’ but instead of ending in tooth-like ‘beaks’ as it usually did, it flared open at the end, with thin tendrils like coral brackets around a flaring maw of twisted horns.
From these horns erupted writhing beams of white-blue meson, entwining and combining together as they shot forward like a lightning bolt to hit the thing across its shoulder as it spun around to leap again at its adversary.
Pha-BOOM! The blast of the meson beam struck the ECN, lifting it from its feet and spinning it around to smash into the opposing wall. There was a shriek of tortured metal and even a flare of sparks, and the thing slumped to the floor.
Was that it? Did I kill it? Eliard stood up, his head throbbing in pain either from the massive explosion of force from the beam weapon on his arm or the Valyien warp gate above him.
He took a step forward, but the ECN was still. There was even a hiss, as of servomechanisms winding down inside of it.
Another step, and Eliard was only a couple of meters away. The Device flared softly on his arm as he held it directed at the mecha, but it didn’t move.
“El?” There was a cough, a groan from above, and his head spun to see that it was Karis, two-thirds of the way up the stairs toward the shifting layers of warp light, and slowly shaking her head as she tried to push herself off the floor.
“It hit me like a galaxy-ship…” she coughed, her arms shaking despite the massive suit that held her.
“Karis, we should get out of here. I don’t know what that thing is…” Eliard was saying as he started up the nearest of the steps—each one was almost two feet high, so they were a struggle—
“Martin!” he heard her scream in alarm.
WHAP! Something hit him in the small of a back, and it felt like he had been hit by a galaxy-ship. Horrible, Eliard felt something intrinsic and important inside of him break. It was a pain unlike any other that he had experienced, and he had experienced a lot in his short time as Ponos’s super weapon. It made him feel sick and giddy all at once, and it was so all-encompassing that he didn’t even feel the stone steps as he hit them bodily and rolled over.
“Urk…” He was in a world of agony. His vision was blurring and sharpening to the rhythm of his pounding heart, and he couldn’t move his legs. That thing’s broken my back. ITS BROKEN MY BACK!
The thing that Eliard was referring to now loomed over him, one side of its torso smoking and crumpled, and one shoulder hideously torn, with one hand hanging useless by its side. Worst of all, as it jerked first one leg on the step and then another toward the captain, was that its impassive, expressionless human faced remained just the same.
Eliard couldn’t move. He felt sick. He was gritting his teeth to stop himself from screaming. The thing had hit him in the small of the back. He was just a man, and the ECN was a monster. C’mon, Q’Lot, just this once… He was certain, as the thing eclipsed his vision, that he could feel the Q’Lot virus seeding its way to the site of his worst injury, but would it be too little too late?
The ECN raised its one remaining hand and clenching it slowly into a fist.
Blap! Blap-BLAP! Blasts of energy fire sparked across the thing’s chest, and it took the captain a moment to realize just what he was looking at. It was Karis. She had lost her meson rifle somewhere on the steps, but she still had some kind of miniature service blaster in her suit’s carapace. She had drawn it and was firing it uselessly at the ECN’s chest and face, where it did nothing to penetrate the armor, just left blackened scorch marks.
Eliard’s back twitched in agony as he saw the ECN raise its carefully-composed face to regard the blasts of the woman that it had so recently dragged, and even as the blasters exploded across its face, the thing turned back to its current task. It must have calculated that the pathetic belt weapon couldn’t hurt it.
“Yagh!” But the pause had given the powerful mutagens of the Q’Lot virus just enough time to rebuild the captain’s spine. Eliard sprang forward, pain still rippling through his body as he swung the Device around in a murderous uppercut, hitting the ECN in the face.
“Eliard, no!” He heard the section manager dimly calling from behind him, but the rage of the Q’Lot Device now that it was able to attack its genetic enemy was too much. He followed the ECN as it staggered backward down the steps, one-armed versus one-armed, as the ECN swiped out with its own fist—
Phwoosh. Eliard ducked back just in time, turning on his heel to backhand the thing against the head and shoulders in a clubbing motion. He drove it down another step. There was no finesse to their fight, no skill or proficiency, just a deadly game of fists where even one of the ECN’s blows could crush Eliard’s skull like an egg, while Eliard would have to hit it several times just to injure it.
“Oof!” The ECN connected a sweep against the captain’s abdomen, and once again Eliard felt the crackle and snap of ribs as he was driven back to fall over the steps, with the wobbling, dented, and shaking ECN clawing its way beside him, its terrifying face just a foot or more from his own, before raising its one working fist—
No! The captain did the only thing that came naturally. He pushed out in fear and outrage at the ECN that was so close to him, the Device wrapping its tendrils around the thing’s face.
The captain didn’t know what he was doing. He was locked in a life and death struggle, trying to avoid the flailing hammer-blow of the ECN as he yanked the thing’s head first one way and then another.
“Die! Die!” Eliard screamed, as he thought of everything and everyone that he had lost. He thought of where he was now, stuck in some submerged temple to alien gods. He had never wanted any of this. He had never wanted to become this. All of that fury poured down his arm, amplified by the Device.
“SZZZZT!” There was an explosion of sparks as Eliard pulled, and the emotionless head of the ECN was entirely torn from its seat in the mecha’s body, trailing pipework tendons and wires like the snake-wrapped head of a medusa.
There was a roll of purple-red light behind him as the body of the ECN tumbled with a heavy clank down the stairs, one after another. The captain was still holding the head aloft as he panted and gasped, his brain screaming something at him.
Red light. Red-purple light. Warp plasma.
“Oh, crap—” He looked up to see that Karis was already scrabbling down the stairs as the space between the black pillars at the top of the steps was indeed changing color. The air was swirling and boiling with a tempest of force and plasma. It didn’t look good.
“Bring that. We have to get out of here…” Karis managed to get to her feet, using a hand to help the still-pained captain to his feet.
“But what…” Eliard looked at the head of the ECN. He felt like he was in shock. Did I do this?
“Move it!” Karis pushed and cajoled him, before slumping against his shoulder as they both hurried and hobbled down the passageway with the warp storm behind them boiling.
They passed into the alien-fresco passageway, with the softer, more naturally ice-blue light of the distant cavern and the ice chute beyond. Some perverse instinct made Eliard turn around to look back at the warp plasma and the dead body of the ECN behind him just before they jogged and lurched out of view. The purple and red plasma was still swirling, turning, frothing, and sparking with flashes of energy.
And there was something in the light, Eliard thought, horrified. He knew it was impossible. He knew that nothing lived in a warp field, and yet he was certain that he saw a shape, a shadow inside the storm, maintaining its shape and raising first two appendages, and then another two, as it remained standing on two hind legs…
“No!” Terror iced his screaming spine and the backs of his legs, lending more impetus to their desperate flight as they reached the outside of the sunken pyramid, across the stone shelf and into the ice tunnel.
“Here, here, connect up…” Karis was fixing what remained of the poly-filament wire he had rappelled down on to his suit. He could see that her own heavy tactical suit had servo-assist, meaning that she could zoom up the rope on auto power, but he would have to climb hand-over-hand as a human normally would.
“Take the head,” Eliard said quickly, shoving the expressionless visage that still dripped mechanical fluids and sparked in his Device-hand. “You can get up the surface a whole lot quicker than I can. At least Ponos will have something to work with…”
