Chapter Fourteen
Portal Ship
Sorilla slowly picked herself up off the ground, dazed a little by the effects of the sudden motion of the deck below her feet.
It had taken her by surprise. Frankly, there hadn’t been any hint of a shift in the local spacetime to warn her of the movement. On board a ship that was pretty unusual to the point of a near impossibility in fact. Most of the time, with modern SOLCOM ships and the vessels used by the Ross, if you felt the ship move then you were probably dead. Inertial compensation could handle hundreds of gravities worth of movement, and anything that could overload them wasn’t going to be particularly nice to the human body.
The shockwave seemed to have taken the Goblins by surprise as well, which was good for her at least. She stumbled over to the door, noticing that the ship was slightly off angle.
Something must have happened to the ground the ship is on, and they haven’t activated the drives yet, Sorilla decided. If the ship’s drives were intact, down would be toward the deck, no matter the orientation of the ship.
Leaning against the wall she slammed a hand into the controls, trying to get the door closed again, but they weren’t responding. There didn’t appear to be any damage, so she had to assume that the crew had locked the controls out.
Well, shit.
She risked a look out, getting a quick headcount of the Goblin mechanoids. They weren’t exactly drones as best SOLCOM had been able to determine, but they weren’t living creatures either. The debate among SOLCOM operatives over whether they were robots, or something more, had gotten legendary in some circles during the war.
There were a couple full squads, at least, gathering out there, getting ready to come in and pry her out of the dead end she’d tucked herself into.
She had some time, however, if only a few minutes while they were getting organized.
Sorilla ducked back, leaning back against the wall as she checked her inventory. Her right- hand pistol was half loaded, give or take a couple rounds, while the left hand had a full assembly loaded and ready for action.
Most of her remaining munitions were back on the little puddle jumper she’d appropriated from the insurgents on Allah’s Word. That left her with six-barrel assemblies spare strapped to her armor.
Call it three hundred and seventy-five rounds, she thought grimly. No grenades, more’s the pity, and a SOLCOM issue knife. Battle rifle is back on the ship along with everything else. Yee haw. Why did I think this was a good idea again?
That was a really good question, she decided, but not one she was going to spend any time on at the moment. Later, if there was a later, she would be certain to chastise herself thoroughly.
And lie through my teeth if I ever tell the story to anyone else, Sorilla laughed softly as she pushed off the wall and quickly fed an overlay of the ship’s likely layout, based on her previous adventures.
She needed to avoid the areas of the ship that were sized to allow the Golems access. Without some serious anti-armor kit, she didn’t want to be tangling with those and that was the truth. She wouldn’t be able to avoid them entirely, though, not if she wanted to get out.
This is going to be fun.
*****
The conclave were almost as shocked by the explosion as everyone else seemed to be, though farther removed.
What caused that?
We did.
We did? How?
The Infiltration species triggered the fallback plans for disabling production and eliminating traces of our impact. The explosion was a power supply losing containment and entering thermal runaway.
Impressive.
The conclave agreed with that to some degree. Certainly, compared to the Spacetime Formulae it wasn’t particularly destructive, but the fact that the explosion and destruction hadn’t registered on spacetime sensors or the senses of any of their fellows on the afflicted vessel had made it more impressive in person at least.
What is the status of Entropy?
The conclave shifted focus back to that priority, tensing for a moment before they located the threat where she had been last going off, the dispatched security having effectively sealed her in place in preparation for dealing with her properly.
The relief was almost embarrassing when they realized that she hadn’t once more managed to slip their gaze.
Order the advance.
The conclave agreed, the command was sent.
Entropy was to be eliminated.
*****
The sound changed from the hall when the mechanoid goblins got themselves organized again and shifted their stance from containment to assault.
Sorilla ducked behind a console, hoping it was valuable, mentally toggling her pistol over to semi-automatic as she drew a bead on the door from where she was covering.
Her pistol barked twice as the first two breached the doorway, dropping the little mechanoids in their tracks, but there were a dozen more right on their heels. They clambered over the bodies of the few she’d taken out earlier, as well as the pair that had just fallen, completely oblivious to her continued fire even as it picked them off one by one.
They fired on her position. She could feel the warping of spacetime as the weapons discharged and curled up behind cover as the blasts pelted in around her. The Ross and Alliance weapons were destructive, but their anti-personnel weapons didn’t have much in the way of armor piercing capability as a rule.
Granted, it wasn’t normally needed since whether you were wearing armor or not, they’d just warp you, your armor, and anything else in their range all at the same time, snapping chemical bonds and generally just making a mess of whatever they hit.
That didn’t hold quite as true when it came to cover, mostly because the average things people tended to use for cover weren’t as tight to the skin as body armor. Keeping out of the range of the effect was the first thing you had to do to survive a barrage of Alliance small arms fire. Avoiding being perforated by shrapnel was the second, hence the curling up on the floor and making sure that her joints were as tight to her body and covered by the thicker armor as possible.
The blasts slowed a moment later and she got a foot under her and uncurled up into kneeling position, this time bringing both weapons to bear as she unloaded a return fire fusillade that tore up the enemy front line with brutality. Unfortunately, even as she did, Sorilla could see the next line pushing through to take their position, firing as they came.
The console she was hiding behind was a pulverized mess by that point, so Sorilla was well aware that it was time to leave.
She kicked off, diving into a roll that brought to cover across the room as the warp blasts followed her, further tearing up the room as she went.
Need to get past them, back into the corridors. This is a death trap.
That was easier thought than done, of course, but Sorilla would find a way. She had to.
The pulse blasts slowed again, turning from an angry fusillade to a slow and steady staccato that forced her to keep under cover while she could hear the footsteps of the Goblins approaching. Slowly, deliberately, Sorilla slid her off hand weapon back into the holster and let the magnetic strap lock it in as she got her knee and foot under her, then she waited.
The projector of the Ross small arm nosed its way around the cover as one of the Goblins took point in an attempt to flush her out, something that Sorilla considered brave enough an action to be deserving of a reward, so she let it get exactly what it wanted. Her armor enhanced hand snapped out, grabbing the weapon in an iron grip and yanked.
The Ross Goblin mechanoids were fairly heavy, their construction lightweight by human standards of similar robots but still having some significant armor. However, against her armor enhanced musculature and the shock of the moment, it didn’t have much of a chance. As she yanked on it, the Goblin was pulled off balance at first, then completely off its feet as she exercised the leverage she’d cultivated.
Sorilla planted her pistol in its neck while it was still in the air and fired a pair of depleted uranium slugs that ripped through the alien construct instantly, mangling everything they encountered on the way past.
Disabled, the Goblin lost its grip on the weapon in hand, so Sorilla flipped it casually about and examined the controls briefly.
During the war, captured Ross weapons had been only of occasional use. No one had been able to figure out how to change the settings, so if the safety was on, for example, no human could disable it. If the weapon was set to low power, the weapon would stay there. Whatever you captured was what you got, and even researchers hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of the damn things.
That was then, however, and Sorilla had come a long way in the intervening years.
Holstering her right-hand pistol, Sorilla slid her hands along the alien weapon until she found exactly what she was looking for. A small set of special warps that intersected the weapon but protruded enough to be manipulated, if you could feel where they were and understand the way they reacted.
She braced the weapon against her hip as she stepped out from cover, able to aim by lining up the sensation of the weapon’s special warp as she swung it to bear, and opened fire.
Space warping weapons were the specialty of the Ross, ranging from literal planet killing monstrosities all the way down to small arms like the one she was wielding. On the upper end, a Ross gravity weapon could force all matter in a region into a space so small, so quickly, that even normally stable materials would intersect and split apart, shattering nuclear bonds in the process. The longer the Ross held the warp, the more extreme the chain reaction would become, until even simple rock and dirt would explode with nuclear force.
The small weapons either didn’t have that power, she hoped, or they were tuned down for obvious reasons. They couldn’t snap atomic bonds, but that didn’t mean they were underpowered in the slightest. The same forces at play in the larger weapons could, and did, cause a snap back on the small scale with more than enough force to shatter chemical bonds.
When intersecting with squishy humans that could range from nasty bruising to something of a red smear on the environment, but with mechanical constructions, like the Goblins, even the lower settings tended be a little… spectacular.
The warp pulses from the captured weapon snapped across the room, tearing into the line of Goblins, blowing them apart with shattering explosions.
Time to get the hell out of here.
Sorilla broke cover, firing as she ran. The room was a morass of conflicting twists in spacetime, almost overwhelming her ability to localize the warping even with her unique interface with her implant suite.
Her processor could localize and map every single pulse, of course, but it took the computer almost half a second to crunch the numbers, then another quarter second to display them to her and then, crucially, it took her several more seconds to read the display and comprehend it.
Too long by far.
Her more instinctive interface was faster, significantly, but less precise… less detailed.
And more easily overwhelmed.
Sorilla did her best to parse what she was feeling more than what her instrumentation was seeing, moving through the storm of fire like a dancer twisting between the raindrops, working her way toward the door… and the enemy.
She wasn’t as skilled a dancer as the legends spoke of, however, and she barely made it halfway before a pulse slammed into her armor and sent her spinning through the air, the whole world seeming to rush around her before she slammed into the ground, coming to a brutally sudden stop.
Thankfully her armor was made of Graphene, with a tensile breaking point of one hundred and thirty-two gigapascals, compared to a mere four hundred megapascals for structural steel, and more than strong enough to resist the forces being exerted on it while keeping her shoulder intact.
Mostly intact.
She could feel the bruise forming where she’d been struck, her flesh having been warped even inside her armor. Spacetime pulses weren’t technically armor piercing, but if your armor was all but skin-tight it didn’t matter much. When space time was twisted, it didn’t matter if you were protected by graphene or spandex. Distance was the only real protection, either don’t get hit or let something else take the blow for you.
Ideally.
If you couldn’t do that, well having something strong enough to take the forces involved encasing you would at least keep your body in one piece.
The pulse would still do a hell of a job on your internals, however.
Sorilla clutched at her shoulder with one hand while holding the weapon to her chest as she rolled clear of follow up fire, kicking herself across the floor until she was behind another console.
Gingerly she tested her shoulder, deciding that the damage was superficial. Her bones hadn’t snapped under the stress, ligaments were still intact and connected.
Tenderized, but that’s about it.
Her implants were already nudging her glands, pushing adrenaline into her system. She felt the world get that slow motion feel as the fight or flight hormones really got juicing. Her heart was pounding but she felt steadier than ever as she got her feet under her and reset her grip on the alien weapon.
Stress affected people differently. The chemical cocktail that flooded the body drove some people to superhuman responses, and others to shaking, quivering, messes unable to do more than sob and cower. Humanity was odd that way.
For Sorilla, the rush always left her alert, calming more and more with each thud of her heart. The shakes would come when she came down off the high.
Sobbing, well that would be later.
Much later.
*****
The conclave analyzed the fight as it occurred, watching and re-watching every movement Entropy made as they operated in compressed time.
Entropy… can see the warp.
Impossible. Her species does not have the capacity.
They are environmental manipulators. Like us. Impossible is not a word to apply to them easily.
The Conclave flinched slightly at the rebuke, their focus shifting to the speaker.
Is the suggestion that these… creatures are like us?
They were like us, once, perhaps. Long ago.
That is… an offensive suggestion.
Reality often is.
The conclave considered that, still reviewing the fight. A thrill of victory surged through them as they watched Entropy finally struck down, thrown hard to the deck. Mild shock rippled through them when she crawled to cover and quickly made it clear that, while struck, she was largely uninjured.
Impressive material science. Carbon polymer?
Pure, at a minimum. Hydrocarbon polymers most primitive species use for armor would not survive a warp implosive pulse.
That fits with the species use of orbital tether materials, unusual that we had not been able to analyze this material from captured material.
We never seized any. None of the humans wearing it were ever captured intact.
The Conclave considered that briefly until one speaker summed up their thoughts.
Impressive.
Their focus shifted back to the surveillance.
The fight was continuing.
*****
Sorilla twisted under a barrage of fire, returning in kind as she charged the door again, this time laying down enough suppressive fire to put a battalion’s heads in the dirt. The Goblins didn’t even blink.
Fucking mechanical menaces. No survival instinct.
The warp pulses may not have made them drop for cover, but survival instincts or not, no one and nothing could easily see through that kind of barrage.
The momentary loss of their senses was all she needed. Before they could react, she was in their midst.
The Goblins were bipedal, much like the Ross themselves. It was a good design for a multi-function platform, though not particularly good at specializing in any one area in all reality. Human drones, robots, tended to be built for specialized tasks. It was easier to build them that way. Building effective multi-purpose platforms was exponentially more difficult.
The Ross were good at it.
The Goblins were more than just ranged fighters, and as she engaged them in close, they reacted like trained combatants might, only faster and stronger.
Sorilla intercepted fists coming her way, powerful and fast enough to shatter concrete, twisting them into joint locks. Where, on humans, she would use the leverage to put the targets off balance and force them to the ground, against the Goblins Sorilla just kept on twisting past the point of breaking.
The arm shattered, pieces fracturing off and flying as shrapnel as she wrenched it loose from the mechanoid with enough force to continue the motion and use it as a club against the next closest target. Sorilla pushed to keep her momentum moving, fighting through the resistance as she breached the door and broke out into the hallway beyond.
The mass of Goblins clutched at her as she moved, causing her to break their grips where necessary but mostly she just twisted and turned as needed to slip past.
Once in the open, Sorilla broke contact and sprinted for the closest corner as the enemy mechanoids once more opened fire. With spacetime warp pulses hammering at her heels, she dove around the corner and slid along the deck into cover.
Behind her she could hear the enemy regrouping and shifting their direction, coming after her with the implacable determination of programming.
*****
Kris glowered from the back of the room as Sienele stared serenely at the enemy from where he was sitting just in front of the Sirhan soldier.
From what they’d been able to gather from the few other prisoners who’d survived the destruction of the Alliance facility, Sienele knew that this one was the commander of the insurgent forces, and the one in charge of this particular operation, however narrow the scope of that leadership might be overall.
He was also clearly unwilling to speak.
That, fortunately, was an irrelevant point. The Alliance had better methods for getting intelligence from captured enemy forces than any crude means of interrogation that might be the preference of younger and more primitive races.
He just wanted a simple conversation with the man before they took that next step because, while the means of pulling the needed information from a mind was largely non-invasive and quite harmless in and of itself, a well-trained counter-interrogation subject could necessitate some rather nasty efforts to get the person to think of the information needed in the first place.
Sienele had a feeling that this one was well trained enough that he was… unlikely to come out of the experience unchanged.
“Your people have an interesting sense of gratitude,” He said mildly, leaning back in his seat as he looked across at the enemy leader with an affectation of boredom.
In reality, he was very interested in the proceedings and in particular the little flash of indignation he saw behind the man’s eyes when he made that statement.
Interesting.
The soldier, of course, said nothing.
“The alliance offered defense, even sent its own forces to die while protecting your world, and this is how you respond?” Sienele sighed, making a Sirhan gesture of sadness that he had been forced to look up specifically for this meeting.
The same flash of irritated indignity was there. He did not like the implication that his people had betrayed a debt to the Alliance, not in the least.
Kriss grunted behind him, “What else is to be expected of a species so incapable of their own defense. I’ve had better fights with children on Luca. The woman he killed in that explosion was worth his entire species so far as I’m concerned.”
Oh, that got a reaction, Sienele mused, seeing fire in the eyes and a tension in the posture that hadn’t been there. He smiled languidly, waving dismissively over his shoulder.
“Don’t mind my friend there,” He leaned in, lowering his voice. “Lucians are a… what is the word? Oh yes, a very martial species. A lack of skill at fighting is very nearly a mortal sin to them, but I know it isn’t your fault if your species is… lacking in certain skills.”
“None of your people were doing any better against the beasts before…!”
A click of teeth signified the enemy leader sealing his mouth shut as he looked sharply away from Sienele’s gaze and the flash of victory he might have seen in it.
Before… of course, before the Ross intervened.
Sienele berated himself privately. He should have seen it before. The Ross must have presented themselves as separate from the Alliance, aid and succor coming from them and not the Alliance as a whole.
That made sense.
He made a note on which buttons to mentally push, so that when proper interrogation began, they would be able to skip right to the salient points and reap what they needed from the man’s mind without undue damage that might impugn on later interrogations.
“I see,” He said aloud. “So that is the lever they used. I suppose I can understand how a desperate…”
“… foolish…” Kriss grunted from behind him.
“… uninformed people,” Sienele continued smoothly. “Might make that connection.”
That earned him, and more directly Kriss, another hate filled glare from their prisoner.
Sienele, though privately amused by the emotions, maintained his equanimity as he mentally began mapping out the pre-interrogation on the fly. He didn’t need any real intelligence from the prisoner, that was what the interrogation itself would supply. He just needed to know how to elicit responses so that the interrogators could do so with a minimum of mental damage.
It was always such a pain when the subject lost their mental faculties before you got to the information you truly were seeking.
“Let us speak about the… beasts, as you call them then, shall we?” Sienele asked, smiling openly as he once more leaned in.
*****
The conclave split their focus as they watched the Alliance ship leave the surface of the production world, transporting several prisoners up to the waiting vessels in high orbit, and the fighting that was going on within their portal ship at the same moment.
Decisions needed to be made concerning the future of the plan.
The current threats were a minor impediment to the continued operations, but minor impediments could become major singularities if left unchecked and uncorrected.
The Alliance vessel will not be able to report back to the central command system until it enters an administrative system. Eliminate them when they jump.
The conclave considered the suggestion before acquiescing.
Agreed. Extract any of the principles involved?
Negative. They are all of no matter to the plan.
Agreed.
The Conclave issued orders, activating assets in the region to carry out the decision.
Entropy continues to evade elimination.
Irrelevant. She is within out purview now, there is no escape.
Agreed. Continue with dispatching security, draw further forces from other points in the network as needed. Drown her in them if needs be.
Agreed.
*****
Map indicates equipment storage is up ahead, some type of hangar, Sorilla thought to herself as she pushed ahead, working hard to keep the Ross security from catching up to her.
Her shoulder was throbbing, and she knew she had deep and significant bruising, but her implants were still saying that there weren’t any other issues so she was fairly confident that there wasn’t any damage to the arteries in the area.
No internal bleeding, that’s always a plus, she thought sardonically, as she got to the security door that led out of the corridor network and into the hangar she’d been aiming for. Sorilla was unsurprised to find that the door refused to open for her.
They’ve stopped humoring me, I guess, she thought as she dug her right thumb into a small catch in her right wrist, drawing a cable out. Normally used for direct interface, when it was ill advised to use even low powered transmissions, the cable was also capable of channeling power. She drove her elbow into the controls for the door, shattering them, and reached in to find the conduits she knew were there.
The Ross ships didn’t use electricity, so she couldn’t overload the system directly, but with the right use of the supercaps in her armor she could still discharge some significant voltage through the system. One of the interesting things to note that they’d found while studying Ross technology, and the ship systems they’d managed to get looks at in particular, was that the Ross didn’t bother shielding against electricity at all, or any EM fields.
It made sense. There was no reasonable way any sort of short could happen in them, and the ships themselves were so well shielding against pretty much everything from the outside that it likely never even occurred to them.
A hundred-thousand-volt arc with some pretty heavy amps behind it could melt an awful lot, though. Including the power conduits that ran to the door, all in about a fraction of a second.
The sealed security door faded a bit, then vanished altogether as Sorilla sucked back from the minor explosion that blew out the controls and left the wall smoking as she walked past it and into the hangar.
She didn’t even see the blow that lifted her off her feet and threw her right back out, slamming into the wall on the other side of the corridor with a crunch.
*****