“Wonderful,” Eliard muttered, casting one last look at the empty doorway where his engineer had been. It looked as though they had finally started to land on their feet. They were back on track with what they were doing in order to survive, his own aches and pains had gone, and his body even feeling rested for the first time in weeks. So then why did he feel like he was in way, way out of his depth?

  “We managed to recover the coordinates for the observation station.” The section manager stood below and behind the captain, leaning on the railing that led up to the Mercury Blade’s cockpit. Behind her was the main hold that occupied the central portion of the upgraded racer—a large and roughly triangular room with its two gunners’ chairs now holding Armcore staff from the Endurance.

  Not Val Pathok, Eliard thought grimly. Each chair was linked to one of the dual meson cannons slung in weapons ports under the belly of the Blade, extended and swiveling in time with the gunners’ chairs as they tracked the surface of the ice-blown planet.

  Side cabinets and lockers sat along the walls of the main hold, with an array of a pirate’s useful equipment safely stowed away inside: micro, poly, and metal filament ropes, spare laser blasters and ammo, medical kits, and added to this stash were the Armcore-stamped crates tied down to the metal grid floor, filled with everything an Amrcore intelligence expedition might need. The captain wondered if that meant they would be prepared to face whatever unnatural and eldritch encounters they were sure to face in a Valyien ruin.

  Out the back of the main hold sat a short metal corridor that eventually reached the engine room and the dual warp cores of the Blade, now staffed not with one but two Armcore intelligence engineers. Not Irie Hanson, Eliard grumbled. From this main artery of a corridor were the small berth rooms, one of which was his own—and which some small sense of outrage meant that he had triple-locked when Karis had commissioned his ship for this—as well as a canteen and a small medical bay with room only for two very cramped medical beds.

  The captain was proud of the Mercury Blade, however. It was small, designed as a medium-to-heavy endurance racer, and many years of refitting and fabrications with Irie and Val had turned it from a three-man craft to a possible pirate attack ship for six people. He now had six Armcore guards alone, besides the section manager, behind him as well as himself, standing in front of the ship’s wheel. He could sit down on the command stool/chair, but he had pushed it back as he usually preferred to stand when on an active mission.

  They had left the rear body of the Endurance just a few hours ago in the early morning, after Karis had ordered more of the flatbed drone-carts to drive from the still-standing section of the Endurance across the tundra to them. This time, she protected them by breaking out the heavy encounter suits that they had recovered from the Endurance, each with heavy metal armor padding and inbuilt weapons systems that were only one step down from the full tactical mech armor that the front-line Armcore units wore. They came equipped with long-range rifles and short-range heat-seeking micro-missiles, which she pulverized the ice plains to either side of the rescuing drone-carts with, to ward off possible attacks from the snow-mantas. Either she had been right about the snow-mantas preferring to attack at night, or they had sensed the impacts and wisely decided to stay well away.

  “Actually, it was your engineer that recovered the coordinates, I thought that you’d like to know,” the section manager said irritably. Did he detect a grudging undertone of respect for Irie there? She continued, “She managed to crack the security controls on the memory servers with the gold chair clearance. Heaven alone knows how she did that…” Karis muttered.

  I know, the captain thought as he kept one eye on the holographic readouts that overlaid his ice-covered cockpit screens. So far, he had just identified buried mountain ranges and stacks of rock underneath the snow and ice plains, but no sign of habitation, past or present.

  But the captain did think he knew how Irie had cracked the highest level of Armcore clearance. She’s the best engineer that I’ve ever seen, he thought, which was saying a lot, since he had spent the majority of young adult life out on the Traders’ Belt, a place where skill was celebrated, and where impossible and dangerous tasks, whether physical, mechanical, or purely criminal, were performed cycle by cycle.

  And she is now infected… His gaze flickered to the Device that was his lower right arm. It was more than just a weapon, he knew that now. It had infected his entire body with its Q’Lot, mutant DNA. He was sure that it had many benefits that he was unaware of, and he didn’t really want to run a medical scan to find out, either, since anything Q’Lot still freaked him out. He had put his body through the worst sort of challenges. He’d done everything from falling down cliffs to freefalling through the atmosphere, and somehow he was still alive. He knew that he had broken bones and suffered terrible, mortal wounds that would have spelled the end for any regular human biology, and yet here he was, all of his old wounds healed. The only thing that didn’t heal was the exhaustion and system shock that plagued him every time he ‘activated’ the Device.

  I bet that Irie’s mutation made her better at engineering, he realized, surprising himself at the revelation. Ponos had said that the Device and the Q’Lot Blue Serum would act to make him more adaptable and resilient. Did that mean that he was now better at being a pirate captain, while Irie was better at being an engineer?

  “Captain?” Karis called again, disturbing his train of thought.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, seeing the green vector slowly rising on the horizon. “We should be nearing the coordinates now.”

  The Mercury Blade screamed through the freezing airs, high over plains of glittering snow and ice that stretched as far as the eye could see. They weren’t just white, but the crystalized water also reflected blue, purple, and silver. Great lines like frozen waves swept across the plains in curiously uniform patterns, actions of the ceaseless alien winds.

  Sprays of fine silver ice dust played from the tops of the frozen ridges like the foam on a liquid sea, occasionally forming ice-devils to spiral and scour the softer sand settled on top.

  The topography of the ice world was anything but monotonous and boring, Eliard thought. In several places where the land gave way to ridges of black rock, in their lee side Eliard saw perfectly oval, frozen meres of the most cerulean blue water that he had ever seen. The rocks themselves were fluted and shaped in wondrous curving, spiraling stacks by the merest action of water crystals, abrading the rocks for millennia. From these rocks swept back forests of icicles, some almost as long as the Mercury Blade was and looking like the crystalline growths of some fantastic creature.

  It was beautiful, in a way, but that word was too small for such a landscape. It was awe-inspiring, humbling, and terrifying in equal measure, and Eliard knew why Armcore had never hoped to permanently settle here. It was too far away, too alien, and if nothing else, this world was too unforgiving to survive for long.

  Right Booster 3 at 55% Function! The basic machine intelligence of the Mercury Blade (non-sentient, thankfully) continued to update him on the impact that Epsilon G3-ov was having on his craft.

  My boosters are clogging with ice and dust. Eliard scowled. Even though his boosters, powered with plasma, should be able to burn through any such atmospheric action on an oxygenated world, the temperatures were so cold and the outer winds so severe that they were literally being slowly turned into ice cubes.

  And when they were full? He spared a glance at the ongoing damage reports from the other boosters. R.Booster 2: 82%. R.Booster 1: 38%. Luckily, his left-side boosters were all still operating somewhere in the ninety percent efficiencies as the ice gales seemed to be sweeping across the Mercury Blade from the right. But when the right’s are all full, we’ll barrel-roll, and when they’re ALL full, we’ll drop like a stone… He didn’t like how fast they had got like that, too. Just a couple of hours of flying had done this. He could ask the ship, of course, to go a whole lot faster, but he knew that it was wiser not to beg disaster as they were thrown against the onslaught of the ice gales.

  They were nearly there, however. Up ahead of them, and fast approaching over the broken ice plains, was a hump of black rock, and it was right beside this that the green vector that the Mercury navigation computers said was the site of the Armcore Observation Station. Or had been, once.

  “Full scan,” Eliard called. Small lines of code flickered over the Mercury’s screen.

  Full Scan Initiated.

  Electrical…No Readings.

  Seismic Data…No Readings.

  Human-Specific Biome—Gravity, Oxygen, Water…FULL

  Bio-readings…Multiple Targets. 7 moving forms.

  “Seven!? Show me,” Eliard said, and on the holographic overlay there appeared seven small flashing green tokens, out on the tundra. But the captain couldn’t see them, even when he magnified the sight. They must be under the ice, he thought. The same creatures that they had faced before—the snow-mantas.

  “Okay, track them and alert me if they get to within a hundred meters, and resume full scan,” the captain said.

  Tracking Started.

  Plasma Readings…Significant.

  “Damn it…” Eliard ordered the computer to show him just what it was talking about, and the map flushed a monochrome grey, all apart from the center, right over where the observation station was supposed to be. There was a large, deep purple glow emanating from under the surface.

  “What is it?” Karis said, half-climbing the stairs so she could look over his shoulder.

  “Plasma readouts. Enough to be a ship, or…” Eliard shrugged. Or what? He knew that his warp core engines would kick out signatures like that, but he wasn’t sure what else would.

  “It could be a lander.” Karis squinted. “In some of the earlier Armcore explorations, they would land a space-lander on the surface, where it would automatically dig itself into the planet’s surface and become the functioning station for later arrivals.”

  “But wouldn’t they remove the warp cores, rather than having them sitting around?” Eliard muttered angrily. He could understand leaving engines on the thing if they planned on getting off-world again, but leaving functioning warp cores untended and unmanned could lead to a poisonous leak, or worse still, a small thermo-nuclear explosion.

  “That’s the only explanation I’ve got.” Karis shrugged.

  “Okay, final reading. Echo-magnetic, please, computer,” Eliard said, and the screen flashed with multiple ‘waves’ of blue as the Mercury Blade used its multiple radar, sonar, and magnetic pulse scans to build a picture of the buried structure where the station was supposed to be.

  Luckily for them, the top few hundred meters—almost a kilometer in fact—was a thick shelf of compacted ice and snow, with just a few spires, ridges, and cliffs of rock branching out into it from the distant bedrock. That meant that, apart from the rock formations, the Mercury Blade’s scanners could penetrate the crystalline water easily.

  In the space between the ship’s wheel and the cockpit screens, there was built, layer upon layer, a hazy, flickering, three-dimensional hologram of the structure revealed beneath the surface.

  The Armcore Observation Station was submerged under years of snow and ice build-up, but it was still comparatively near the surface. Compared to what was even further below it, the captain thought in somewhat vague horror.

  There was a cluster of reinforced blocky shapes under the surface of the ice, seemingly connected to each other by tubes, then connected to a larger, bulbous structure.

  “That’ll be the lander, see? I told you,” Karis pointed out.

  “Fine, but what’s that?” Eliard pointed to a faint discoloration in the image, a slightly heavier blue of the image that was already drawn in blue light, leading straight down, down, and down many hundreds of meters below the surface.

  “An ice shaft,” Karis murmured as their eyes followed it way down to where the nearest branch of actual rocks stuck out. “It leads to that under-ice mountain…” she pointed out.

  “You don’t say.” Eliard looked again at the heavier blued-out shape of the mountain. It looked a little like a great blobby triangular hump of rock, fatter at the base so it wasn’t equilateral. One of it’s ‘faces’ appeared flattened, perhaps scoured by the millennia action of ice shelves.

  Triangles, something teased Eliard’s mind. Triangles and pyramids.

  “Tritho,” the captain burst out.

  “What?” The section manager looked at him sharply. There was something in her eyes that was wary, that showed the captain she knew what he was talking about.

  “The moons of Tritho,” Eliard stated again. It was where he had been hired on ‘an easy job’ to scavenge a set of ruins ‘before anyone else got there.’ Or so he had been led to believe at the time. Actually, he had thought that he had been given the opportunity to ransack some ancient alien ruins before anyone else had gotten the chance, but the truth was that it was House Archival setting him up to act as their agent to steal from an already active, and highly classified, Armcore excavation mission.

  On one of the quiet, out of the way but not remote moons of Tritho had been discovered a Valyien set of ruins, and it was there that Armcore had retro-hacked Valyien software to create Alpha.

  “The Valyien ruins on Tritho were a ziggurat.” Eliard eyed the mountain speculatively. If that had once been a ziggurat structure, it was massive, and the ice shelves must have obliterated its terraced sides, smoothing it and compressing the artificial mountain until it had become a real one.

  “How do you know that name? How do you know that?” the section manager asked angrily.

  “Of course, you’re Armcore intelligence division.” Eliard nodded to himself. “You would have known about where Alpha was born, wouldn’t you?”

  A look of anger flashed over the intelligence officer’s usually carefully-calculated and calm features, before they collapsed back once more into stoic unreadability. “Actually, no. I knew that there were top-secret Valyien ruins on Tritho, but I didn’t know that was where they created the Alpha.” From the slight sound of hurt in her voice, Eliard rather thought that she was telling the truth. “All Valyien ruins are top secret, and if Ponos was right that there is a Valyien ruin there,which it looks like there is, then it would have immediately been classified as top secret.”

  “Gold chair secret?” Eliard asked. He found the name somewhat ridiculous.

  Karis looked away. “No. Not usually that secret.”

  “I was there,” Eliard answered her question. “Me and my crew. On Tritho.”

  The section manager squinted, then nodded. “So it was you. I had thought that you had played a part in the release of Alpha…”

  “I had tried to stop Armcore from getting the most dangerous intelligence in the world, yes,” Eliard said with unusual and sudden vehemence. That was what Cassandra had strived to do. What she had believed in passionately, and had made me believe in, too. Before I killed her.

  “Look where that got us,” Karis murmured at his side, and the captain growled with annoyance. What could she know of what he had been through?

  Eliard tried to control his temper, studying the holographic map of the observation station and its submerged Valyien mountain. It still didn’t make any sense, Eliard thought. Where it all began, Ponos had said before he had to switch off to save him from reverting to his mainframe killing machine state. But didn’t it all begin on that distant Tritho moon? That was where Armcore had injected some sort of ancient Valyien computer, or crystal or whatever that floating orb had been, with the military sentience known as Alpha. That was where the Alpha-machine was borne that built for itself the most advanced space cruiser anyone had ever seen.

  Then why had Ponos stated that it had begun here? And, just as importantly, if not more so, the captain thought with a shudder, why had Armcore abandoned something that was so important? Had they intended to leave it empty? Had they wanted to? Or had they been forced to?

  There was only one way to find out.

  The Mercury Blade crunched to earth in an ice storm of its own devising. The white gales swirled around it as the top layers of uncompacted snow were blasted by the Blade’s boosters.

  And not soon enough too, the captain thought as he eased down on the lever that lowered the landing stabilizers and carefully eased off the booster power. He had almost completely iced up the entire right side of his craft, and his left wasn’t getting much better.

  “Engine room?” he called over the ship’s communicator.

  “Aye, Captain?” he was met by one of the gruff voices of the requisitioned Armcore guards. It felt wrong to not hear a swearing Irie Hanson and the distant crash of something in the background.

  “The Mercury’s got a burn-off capability. Divert some fuel into the booster array, and run a three-second burn,” he ordered irritably. He wouldn’t have to tell Irie to do this, and Irie would have doubtless already come up with some ingenious plan how to save the Blade from choking up with ice.

  “Aye-aye,” he heard, and the communicator clicked off, before there was the sudden crunch as the ship settled deep into the ice, and a jolt as all the boosters at once flared, rocking the ship. It was enough to dislodge or melt most of the current ice she had on her, the captain could see through the cockpit window, and the heat as well as the fuel might help to keep it off for a bit longer, but the Blade would still be pretty caked by the time he got back. Unacceptable, the captain thought. What if we need to hightail it out of there? It could take hours to free up the ship from the amount of ice that will have accrued on it. He thought of those long, fifty-foot tentacles of ice that he had seen on the rocky walls during the fly in.

  “Karis? I’m going to have to ask your engineering men to stay behind,” he called out as he performed the final systems checks, before setting the navigational abilities of the bird to automate.

  “I’m sorry?” The section manager was already finishing putting on one of the heavy tactical suits, alongside the four other Armcore guards. They now stood almost at seven foot and looked like bipedal tanks.

 

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