“But what has this got to do with this robot here, this ECN 1 thing?” Karis asked.

  She’s being willfully obstinate, Captain Eliard Martin thought. Like she doesn’t want to see the horror for what it truly is.

  “Ponos called Alpha little brother, meaning that it already knew him. It already regarded him as a relative,” Eliard explained further. He didn’t know if he could explain adequately how he knew what he was about to say was true, but he knew it all the same. This was true. He could feel the truth of it as deeply in the marrow of his bones as the Q’Lot virus was fundamentally entwined with his DNA now. There was no arguing it.

  “What’s the name of this lander?” Eliard asked, then waited for her face to fall.

  “The AC990alpha,” she quoted the name stenciled to the front door that they had walked through to see that grisly sight.

  “Alpha.” Eliard nodded. “If Armcore were to merge some human-built machine intelligence with Valyien code, then they had to build that machine intelligence somewhere, right? And Ponos didn’t know everything about it, it seemed to me, so it couldn’t have been grown in the code-labs on Armcore Prime.”

  Karis was nodding, finally catching up to speed with what the captain was suggesting. “They grew him here. As a robot. Inside a robot.” She nodded, tapping her chin. “I’ve heard of this kind of thing before, but I had thought that the practice had been proven outdated and foolish, that human intelligence can be recreated only through bodily sensations, haptic processing, they call it, and that you get a different type of machine intelligence if you create it solely in a memory server.”

  It sounded feasible to Eliard at least, but he wished that he had Irie down here with him now. She would know what was going on here, he was sure.

  “And they tried to do something with that new intelligence, they tried to teach it new ways to grow and to think…” Eliard stated.

  “Only it just wanted to kill people,” the section manager said dryly.

  Was it something about being an Armcore program? Captain Eliard wondered. Was it because Alpha was the errant son of a military-industrial complex that it couldn’t help but grow up to want to be a soldier? Or was it something about this place, he thought darkly. This harsh, austere planet on the edge of nowhere that had its monsters prowling the ice fields that had imprinted that cruelty into it at an impressionable age?

  “Whatever happened, it didn’t work,” Eliard continued, thinking through the last entries of Captain Nkolos’ log that they had so recently read. “Or maybe it did. Maybe that was precisely what Armcore wanted to happen. The Alpha ECN1 was going to be a meld of ancient Valyien anyway, right? Maybe that was why they wanted to send it down to the ruins. Introduce it to its godparents, so to speak.”

  “The Valyien are all dead,” Karis said suddenly and vehemently, standing up tall. “Everyone knows that. They died centuries before humanity even discovered jet propulsion!”

  “Are you sure about that?” Eliard asked. He couldn’t help it. It was a nagging suspicion that had been growing in him ever since he also had the Q’Lot virus growing in him. He raised the Device so that the section manager could see it clearly. “These beings are supposed to be a myth as well, but look at me!” The captain managed a wry smile.

  “The Q’Lot fought against the Valyien and their slave-race the Duergar, and they canceled each other out,” Karis restated the traditional wisdom. “Maybe some of the Q’Lot ships survived, and so became the premises of the deep space and Frontier ghost stories, but not the Valyien. The Valyien all died. They’re extinct.”

  “It sounds to me as if you are working awfully hard to convince someone that isn’t me,” Eliard said evenly. “Just for the record, I hope that you’re right. I hope that the Valyien are really gone, and that all that’s left of them is their smoldering ruins.” He looked up at her sharply. “But humanity has been living off those ruins, and Armcore in particular, ever since we made it to the stars. Every single breakthrough in science, meson manipulation, plasma control, warp drive, energy generation, data-space and quantum entanglement? It all comes from Valyien tech!”

  “So? Why shouldn’t we use a tool if we find it lying on the ground and its owner had died hundreds of years before?” Karis said, but she didn’t sound anywhere near as sure as she had just a few minutes ago. If anything, Eliard thought, she sounded terrified.

  “How would a second-rate pirate captain know all of that stuff about technology anyway?” she scoffed. She didn’t seek to deny his claim, Eliard noted, but she scoffed.

  “I have had the benefit of two very knowledgable women teach me a thing or two,” Eliard said quietly, thinking of Irie Hanson, now infected with the Q’Lot virus, and Cassandra Milan, now dead because of that very same virus. Maybe I’m beginning to learn something, he thought. Maybe all this time zooming around space has finally taught me something.

  If it had, then he was sure that the message that Cassandra, Irie, and even Ponos in his own way had been trying to hammer home to him was a simple one: always expect the universe to kick you when you least expect it.

  “So they failed with Alpha ECN1 here maybe.” Eliard coughed and came back to his argument. “But they tried again on Tritho.”

  “If you’re right, Captain,” Karis said, “then I bet you there will have to be some kind of retrieval logs of the experiment. Armcore will have had to replicate, duplicate, or upload the Alpha ECN intelligence to take to Tritho.” She turned quickly to go back to the console where they had just been, and after a few moments of urgent swiping, tapping, and clipped voice commands, he saw her shoulders eventually slump.

  “Final report,” she read out. “Epsilon G3-ov visited by Armcore drone-fleet comprising twenty-three hunter drones, three weapons platforms, and twelve logistics drones.” She sounded crushed. “There is a report here of finding all of the bodies, including the Captain Nkolos…”

  Eliard considered asking which one he was, but then realized that he didn’t want to know.

  “The drone-fleet report says that they did not manage to isolate the ECN1, so instead they reinstalled the meson security barrier and duplicated all files from the AC990Alpha Lander—” A pause. “—including a complete copy of the ECN1 machine intelligence. They set the lander on an automatic maintenance cycle, so that it would permanently keep the barrier up and running.”

  “Holy stars…” Eliard almost choked on the revelation. “They didn’t destroy the original machine? The original ECN1?”

  The section manager reread the section again, carefully, and even conducted another careful search of the logs. “No. There is no record of the original ECN1 having been destroyed, either by Captain Nkolos and his crew, or the drone-fleet that Armcore sent.”

  “I guess it’s too much to hope that it wandered off onto the surface of the planet and froze to death?” Eliard hazarded. The universe always finds a way to kick you when you least expect it. “Because…what you just told me means that the original copy of Alpha is still roaming around down here, inside a metal robot body, and it sounds like when Ponos brought us here, he asked us to retrieve it.”

  And, a part of him thought, the section manager blasted the meson security barrier apart just half a watch ago.

  Alert! Alert! Alert!

  At that precise moment, a warning alarm sliced through their conversation like a knife.

  12

  Brothers

  Alert! Alert! Alert!

  They both jumped suddenly as Karis’s wrist computer broke into an alarm, flashing warning orange lights.

  “Holy heavens! What is it?” she shouted at it.

  Immediate Attention Required: We have lost contact with Armcore Operative Dalyn… Immediate Attention Required: We have lost contact with Armcore Operative Brown…

  They are dropping like flies. Eliard was already on his feet, the Device on his arm mutating and its scales sliding back to reveal a multi-fanged weapon. “Where were they?” he barked, heading for the stairs up.

  “Back in the atrium. Southern passage!” Karis had her heavy rifle low and ready to use at a moment’s notice.

  “South?” Eliard said in exasperation as he got to the doors, ducked and swung out with the Device raised but saw nothing more than the corridor filled with bodies.

  “Just turn right!” she called out derisively behind him.

  Eliard’s mad rush slowed as he made his way over, and sometimes through, the frozen crunch of bodies to squeeze through the half-open door of the lander once more. There, on the other side, was the passage with the frozen servicemen still stuck in the ice, and the central atrium with its hole in the floor, leading down toward the Valyien ruins.

  Where are they? Where are the other two Armcore guards? Eliard was thinking, swinging across the atrium toward the right-hand passage

  Just as a shape burst out of it.

  It was large, far larger than Eliard, and it gleamed darkly with the sheen of metal. The captain caught a glimpse of a curiously humanoid face, but one that was cast out of sleek black metal, and expressionless, like a statue. Not even any LED lights in the place of eyes.

  It lashed out with a hand, metal servo-fingers expanding to grab at him.

  Phab-BOOM! Eliard fired, and the corridor was filled with the white and orange flash of plasma as something hit him, throwing him against the wall.

  “Martin!” Distantly, through ringing ears, he heard the section manager shriek, but he was still rebounding from the wall to collapse on the floor and roll across the hard ice, the salt and iron taste of blood in his mouth.

  Whumpf! Whumpf! He heard the report of the section manager’s meson rifle, the sound of smashing and the pounding crunch of heavy metal feet on the ice, and then it was gone. Silence flooded over the passage like a blanket, apart from the hiss of steam from the ice walls.

  “Martin?” Karis’s voice was far less sure then it had been before, as Eliard groaned and turned over. His chest felt tight and it was painful to breathe, but he could blink, and then he could see. He was lying with his back on the southbound passageway that led out of the atrium, and the section manager was crouching at the mouth, her rifle pointed at the ice chute.

  “It went down there. Just jumped as fast as anything…” Her voice was tight and small.

  “It was the ECN?” Eliard said, pushing himself up. His right hand ached, and when he looked at it, he saw that the Device’s toothed maw was cycling down, the bright red glow of its fangs slowly returning to green, to blue, and finally to the solid scales as it recompacted itself.

  “Crap, Martin, are you alright?” Karis had turned to spare him a look, and the worry and shock that he saw on her face was enough to make him look down on his chest, where his encounter suit was horribly crushed.

  Oh, crap. That’s supposed to be where my air filter is, right? He looked at the crushed ends of the molded plastic housing that would regulate and filter the oxygen from his surroundings.

  It was crushed in the five-digit splay of a hand, as if he had been pushed with such force that it should have been enough to crush his ribcage, but he didn’t feel like anything was broken.

  “Can you breathe?” Karis called over her shoulder as she turned to train the rifle on the ice tunnel in case the thing came back.

  “Yeah, pretty easily actually…” Eliard laughed. Epsilon G3 had a slightly higher than Earth normal oxygen ratio, so he didn’t even need the visor on, but the Armcore operatives had kept theirs in place, claiming that it helped all the same. In fact, he didn’t know why he was bothering now, as he swept the visor back from his face. “All good,” he said with a thumbs-up as he stood up.

  “Just don’t do any spacewalks in that thing,” she muttered.

  Irie will kill me for getting her beloved suits damaged, Eliard thought. “Did you get it?” he said. “Did I?”

  “I know I hit it at least once, and there was a lot of glare and steam, but it didn’t seem to even slow it down.” she was saying.

  “Did you get a good look at it?” Eliard said. “The thing was too fast for me…”

  “Mecha,” the section manager stated. “Smooth and precision built, not militarized like the Ponos avatar is. Human-normal, but much larger.” She shrugged. “If that is all that it is, then we can take it out for sure.”

  The captain thought that the likelihood of that being all that ECN1, the prototype of Alpha itself, was would be highly unlikely, but he had other concerns than that.

  “I’m not sure we’re supposed to destroy it,” he heard himself say. “Despite how much I want to right now.”

  She nodded. “You think Ponos meant to capture it? Learn from it?”

  The captain shrugged. “There might be something to it, there might be a clue or a weakness that Ponos can discover from it, or use it as a way to manipulate the Alpha-machine?” He really wished that he had Cassandra or Irie here, as they would know a whole lot more about what the game-plan could be. But we have the opportunity to get our hands on a prototype Alpha. An Alpha before it was upgraded with Valyien technology?

  “Dalyn and Brown,” Eliard said, turning to the last metal frame at the end of the corridor. There was light inside, but it wasn’t any sort of in-built station light. It was light that was haphazard, and cast in beams, like from a heavy tactical encounter suit. A suit that was currently on the floor.

  The room inside wasn’t made of metal, but it had metal supports stretching around its edges. Braces that Eliard could see had hydraulic centers so they could be lowered or raised according to what was needed. It was a rough-hewn ice cavern, filled with crates and boxes stamped with Armcore numbers and serials.

  “Food. Medical supplies.” Karis cast an eye around the crates skeptically. They were stacked in rows, and the light shooting up across them was behind one of the chest-high ‘walls’ of storage.

  “Oh hell…” The section manager pushed past the captain, turning the avenue of storage crates and Eliard joined her, to see that Brown was dead. His heavy tactical suit had several large rents and dents in it, as if pummeled by a massive metal fist, but the worst past was that his visor was also crushed and his head had been turned at a horrible ninety-degree angle as easily as someone unscrewing a bottle top.

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” Eliard watched Karis move to his side and flip open the side panel of her soldier’s suit, where a small display and a series of buttons were indented. He watched as she pushed a configuration of green, red, and blue buttons, to see the entire body jerk several times.

  It was no use, Eliard saw. She was trying to use the sophisticated Armcore suit’s controls to restart the dead man’s heart and brain, flooding his body with stimulants and micro-nano drones to rush to the sites of damage to perform their cellular repairs.

  “He’s gone, Karis,” the captain said softly as he saw the realization settle over the woman on the floor beside him. She sat back heavily on her haunches with a heavy groan, and, for the first time since they had been forced to depend on each other, Eliard saw just how much Karis cared for her crew. Or how she took her responsibility seriously. How many did she lose in the crash? the man thought. He and Irie had been frustrated and angry with her for taking control of the Mercury Blade and appearing so ruthless, but now he was forced to wonder if that had been a reaction to losing so many.

  “I’m sorry, but we can do something about it,” he continued gently. “We can make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “It already has.” She tapped her wrist computer. “They were in pairs, and Operative Dalyn was supposed to be with him, but he’s gone too. Somewhere.”

  “And the others?” Eliard asked. There had been four Armcore guards with them when they had broken into the station, he thought.

  “August and Roberts? They should be…” They moved, heading back to the atrium, both pairs of eyes nervously looking at the hole in the floor, and headed to the left-hand side passageway. This led to a similar storage ice cavern as before, only this one was completely dark, only illuminated by the lights of the section manager’s suit.

  Nothing. Only the Armcore crates, still stacked and frozen in place as perfectly as if they had been left there just a few hours ago.

  There’s still enough food here to keep the entire station running for months at a time… Eliard thought. It was clear that their mission had been cut off early, by the imposition of the murderous ECN.

  “They’re not here,” Karis said a little uselessly. Not even their bodies. They had just disappeared from the station as if they had never been at all.

  “Scan?” the captain asked, watching as the bluish holographic light of the section manager’s wrist computer revealed the station just as it had done before. There were now two of the large snow-manta lifeforms circling the station, but nothing else.

  “Wait a minute,” the captain said. “The ECN is a mecha, right? So there should be electrical readings of it below us…”

  “You’re right,” the section manager said. “Computer? Electrical scan.”

  The bluish hologram lit up with specks of green and a faint glow where the lander’s warp cores were, the lander’s computers, their own suits, but nothing below them. The glare of the electrical field just slowed and diffused to nothing about halfway down the ice chute.

  “But we know that it went down there, and that it generates electrical impulses, just like our encounter suits…” Eliard said, remembering the captain’s log of what lay below. A sunken pyramid. A concourse, a dais, with two strange pillars.

 

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