OceanofPDF.com

Among

Enemies

On Silver Wings Book 9

Evan Currie

OceanofPDF.com

OceanofPDF.com

Prologue

Sorilla hit the ground, sliding feet first under the burst of pulse fire that twisted spacetime overhead. Her metalstorm pistols snarled on automatic targeting, taking two targets down while she focused on the third and snapped her feet across his legs, chopping the big guy down like a lumberjack felling a tall oak.

He barely had time to grunt in pain before she chopped him hard across the skull with her armored elbow, using the force to propel herself back up to one knee as she skidded to a full stop and slowly swept the room.

“Control room, clear.”

“Enemies in the corridors are eliminated,” Kriss said over the radio a moment later.

Sorilla began to wind down slowly as she heard the rest of the Lucian team chiming in with similar messages.

Finally, Kriss came back again, “The target has been secured.”

“I am entering the fighting zone,” Sienele’s voice came along a moment later.

Sorilla was on her feet when the pair made their way into the control room. Kriss noted the bodies and nodded respectfully, but Sienele focused on the machines they’d been fighting to protect.

“Are the computers undamaged?” He asked intently.

Sorilla nodded, holstering her twin pistols. “My weapons were set to auto-target enemies only. No collateral.”

“Excellent,” Sienele shot an amused look at Kriss, “Certain members of the Alliance might want to consider such… subtleties.”

Kriss snorted, “Where would the fun be in that?”

Sienele didn’t bother to acknowledge that. He turned his focus entirely to the captured console system.

They’d tracked the unserialized weapons back to this facility, but it was just a transshipment point, not a manufacturer. The fact that the security was willing to go lethal on them when they showed up with the auditor’s documentation was a good sign that something was rotten, however.

Sorilla watched over Sienele’s shoulder, using her implants to record everything she was seeing and learning Alliance computer controls at the same time.

He quickly made his way through the information, with the sort of speed you only got from tens of thousands of hours of performing a task. It still took several minutes before Sienele straightened up.

“They are smugglers,” He sighed. “Almost certainly a cut-out for our primary targets, they don’t even know who they’re dealing with.”

Kriss growled, “Are you certain?”

“As I can be with only this little time to examine the evidence,” Sienele sighed, waving his hand. “I will pass it on to my department for thorough examination, of course. No doubt more will turn up there, but I doubt that they will find more on our ultimate targets.”

He looked around the room, and the bodies both dead and unconscious. “Likely, there will be more than enough to vastly increase the charges to levy against these traitors, not that additional ones are needed.”

“What now?” Kriss demanded.

Sienele sighed, “We will have to track the components, go to the locations they should have been manufactured, hope to find something there.”

Sorilla shook her head. This is going to take a long time.

*****

Hayden’s World, Sub-Continent

Cassius took a drink from the mug in his left hand, eyes focused up at the stars as he thought about the news he’d just been given.

The SOLCOM boys had been rather officious about it. Snotty was the term he’d have used if asked to describe them, telling him that his daughter had run off with the enemy. Officially, she was retired and had opted to spend time on a ‘cultural exchange’. Unofficially he could read between the lines.

SOLCOM wanted to leave the story unfinished, called her home before she was ready.

There was a time when she’d have sucked it up and done as she was told, but she was retired now. Cassius knew his Sorilla well enough to know that meant she was done taking orders if they didn’t make sense to her. He’d known that from the moment he got the communication about her buying up land here on Hayden.

At least SOLCOM isn’t looking to hang her, He thought darkly.

Not that they could, they’d made too much of a fuss about her heroics in the war. Turning on her would burn them worse than leaving her to do her thing, especially with the Brigadier still in her corner.

Mattan had come and given him the news in person, as much as he’d been allowed at least.

Wily old bastard, that one, Cassius thought.

He’d dropped enough hints for the story to be pieced together and seemed sincere when he apologized for not bringing her back.

Didn’t matter, though, not to Cassius. His little girl was out there, somewhere, and there wasn’t a human alive for lightyears around her.

Cassius laughed, a little drunkenly.

Probably feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven, girl. Come home safe.

*****

Alliance World, Orhkana

Sorilla looked around as she stepped down off the ramp from her ship, the Lucians and Sienele following behind. She lightly fingered the device resting around her neck, feeding filtered air to her as she walked.

Orhkana was a near-human world, as such things went, though not as close as Hayden by any means. Normally she wouldn’t need much, if any, filtration… at least not for a short visit. Unfortunately, it was one of the Alliance production worlds, strip-mined and harvested for generations in order to produce materials for the Alliance habitation worlds.

Unfiltered, she wasn’t convinced that the current atmosphere wouldn’t kill her in a day.

Even if it didn’t, she didn’t need the long-term health problems that would undoubtedly come from breathing the deeply polluted air.

“Welcome to Orhkana, Colonel,” Kriss said jovially from behind her, taking a deep breath of unfiltered air. “The…”

He paused, looking as pensive as a Lucian could while he searched for the right word.

“How is it you humans say it? The asshole of the Alliance?” He asked.

Sorilla nodded mildly, a smile playing at her lips. “The more polite might say the armpit instead, but yes, that does get the point across. I’m shocked that the local ecosphere is still intact.”

Kriss shrugged as they walked away from the ship, “Planetary ecologies are notoriously resilient. Many worlds have taken far worse than this and eventually managed to return to a reasonable state once the Alliance moved out. In a few centuries this place might be a garden world.”

She gave him a disbelieving glance, eliciting a laugh from the Lucian Sentinel.

“It will, of course, be entirely lethal to almost all species in just another few decades,” Sienele spoke up with a hint of what she thought was disgust in his voice. “The Alliance will abandon the world then, seeding it with the foundational flora to turn the world into a feed planet. Such worlds don’t require the resources currently being pulled from the crust.”

Sorilla shook her head but didn’t really have anything she could say about that. She could see the logic, but it made her human sensibilities rebel at the idea. Earth had come close to what she was seeing here, so close that it was still recovering even now. Destroying an entire ecosphere like it was a disposable asset left her guts roiling, but she knew that to the Alliance, it likely was disposable.

Earth didn’t have enough worlds to think like that, and part of her hoped it never did if this was the way that sort of wealth led. For the moment, however, she had other things to concern herself with.

“Where is the factory we’re looking for?” She asked, gravel crunching under her boots as she looked in both directions along the road that led from the landing field.

Kriss tapped her shoulder and pointed over it as she followed his gesture. In the distance, there was a squat, ugly construction that looked like it had been made in Soviet Russia during the Cold War. Solid, she had no doubt, but just looking at the place made her feel like her soul was being sucked out.

“Alright, let’s find these traitors of yours,” She said.

Kriss grinned, gesturing, “It will be a pleasure.”

The pair, followed by the remaining Sentinels, started walking down the road toward the ugly concrete building.

*****

People live here. Crap.

Some of the locals had come out to see what was going on, likely attracted by the unexpected arrival Sorilla supposed. Kriss had told her that usually, the planet was frequented entirely by bulk freighters, completely automated visits that landed, loaded, and left.

The locals were mostly of a species she’d had little interaction with, mostly during previous forays into Alliance space with the diplo-corps. Honestly, she didn’t even know the species name. They just seemed to be around but had never been part of any of the official receptions.

“What species are they?” She asked softly.

Kriss didn’t even look. “Sirhan. Minor culture. Joined the Alliance barely a century ago by your time. They don’t have space travel of their own yet but are always willing to hire out for grunt work. Don’t really remember where their world is, but they joined for protection from some unaffiliated species….”

“The Jara,” another Sentinal said from behind them.

“Right, Jara. I’ve not had the pleasure,” Kriss said.

From anyone else, Sorilla would have assumed he meant the pleasure of meeting them, but from her experience with Kriss and the Sentinals, she knew that he meant the pleasure of meeting them in combat.

“They are not special on the ground,” The Sentinal who spoke went on. “However, their space combat capabilities are apparently formidable.”

“Oh? Even against the Pari?” Kriss asked, interested.

“Very different, but yes even then. The Jara use massive ships that are very difficult to damage. They were causing the Alliance some issue until they encountered the Ross in battle. That… caused them to back off.”

Sorilla snorted, “A massive vessel is nothing to the Ross but a little extra boom.”

The Sentinels nodded.

Against conventional weapons, sheer mass could be a significant defense. SOLCOM ships were Sol-cast nickel-iron hulls with ceramic active armor plating. They could laugh off a nuke going off on the surface of the hull and keep on coming with a grin on their face.

Against a Ross gravity valve, however? All that iron and armor were just extra fodder for the gravity-induced fission explosion that was about to turn the ship into a star for a very brief instant of time. Mass was just more fuel for the fire.

Sorilla watched the locals as they passed them by, but all they did was watch nervously and curiously. They were dirty, but the entire area was coated in a layer of dust that had seemed to get thicker even as they walked through. Sorilla felt it clinging to her hair as she passed and was already rethinking the decision not to wear the suit’s helmet.

She didn’t want to meet people as a faceless automaton, however, as it would cripple many of her skills upfront. The Alliance peoples were not so different from humans in that regard, she’d learned that the hard way. No one wanted to talk to a faceless mask.

It only took a few moments before they reached the security fence for the factory building. Sienele stepped forward and presented the security with his credentials, the automated system automatically parting to let them in.

Sorilla watched the eyes that watched them back as they moved through, up until the fence closed again, blocking them from view. She didn’t quite get the air of despair from them that she had half come to expect, but there was something there. She just couldn’t quite place it.

They don’t see many others here, she thought, wondering if perhaps that was it. Possibly not, she let it go as the gates slid shut and left them inside the perimeter, walking toward the massive factory.

There were people waiting for them when they reached the entrance, none of them venturing out into the unfiltered air of the world and none of them from the Sirhan species. Sorilla filed that away. It was information that part of her was very interested in but, for the moment, it had little bearing on the mission at hand.

Sienele got them into the building through an air-locking system that subtly shifted the atmosphere as they moved through. Sorilla noticed her filtration system adjusting automatically and found herself impressed with the Alliance technology. With as many species as they had, coming into contact in various environments, it made sense that they would have tech devised specifically to allow for survival in as wide an array of environments as possible.

She was a little more impressed, and concerned, that they had something already built that was suitable for humans, however.

Sorilla let herself fade into the back of the group, allowing Sienele and Kriss to take the lead as they introduced themselves and handed over documents that gave them all access to the plant. After the mission on Allah’s Word, it had been clear that somewhere in the Alliance infrastructure, there was a rat in the works. They were playing pest control at the moment.

Weapons manufacture wasn’t, historically, easy to control. Not on Earth at least. Guns, swords, even some of the more esoteric hand weapons that were constantly nibbling at the edge of the mainstream, tended to be simple for a reason. Anything truly exotic was expensive and hard to maintain.

A laser that could cut a tank in half was awesome, but it was a lot less useful if no one could maintain it, power it, or carry the damn thing, for example.

That rugged simplicity was a requirement for a good weapon, but it also made it all but impossible to completely control the production and distribution of weapons. Sorilla was of a mind that this was largely a good thing.

She’d studied the nature of weapons and society, and she was well aware that without guns, or some equivalent equalizer… there was no democracy in any form.

She didn’t believe the tripe that an ‘armed society was a polite society’, or at least she didn’t think polite meant what the people who spouted that idiocy meant. Dueling could be very polite, after all, but people still ended up dead in the streets. An armed society was an armed society, nothing more, nothing less.

Guns, however, were a means of redistribution of power. They took one of the arrows from the quivers of the wealthy and handed it out to the masses. In many ways, the least of their arrows, but an important one nonetheless.

The Alliance had similar issues to Earth in this regard, so far as she could tell. Their gear had to be rugged and repairable in the field. That meant that there were fundamental limits on the control they could exercise over manufacture.

One of the things they could control, however, was power supplies.

Storing power was not an easy thing, especially when they had to interface with proprietary connections. Those were controllable, especially if you were careful about how much information about a given tech you allowed out.

That was why they were here, on this world and in this facility.

Orhkana was the main production point for small arms munitions and power supplies for the entire Alliance.

Sorilla smiled tightly as she watched the expressions on the various species present as they were presented with a legal document from the equivalent of an audit straight from Alliance intelligence, taking notes on the physiological reaction they were having to extreme stress.

Body language reading was stupidly difficult with alien physiology, so she was very happy to get any new data she could.

*****

Sienele stared at the plant supervisor, not showing any emotion as he laid out the documents that gave him full access to the entire facility. He found that he was better able to intimidate with an impersonal persona, and was more than happy to leave the blade sharpening looks to the Lucians.

I believe one of them actually is sharpening his knife, I swear they enjoy acting the fool.

“I… I do not understand, Envoy…” The plant supervisor stammered out. “We’ve filed all our documents with the Alliance as required…”

Sienele cut him off with a gesture. “This inspection is pursuant to evidence located during an operation on a pair of fringe worlds, Supervisor. Certain… items that should only have been constructed here were seized by our Lucian forces.”

He nodded back to Kriss and the others, barely able to avoid a scoffing look when the Lucians all smiled widely as one, and the one with the knife made a show of bringing it up to his face.

Honestly, it was a good thing the plant administrator team were scared, otherwise they’d likely have laughed at that silliness.

The supervisor was too distracted looking over the documents, pale and nervous as he flipped through page after page on the computer.

“I don’t understand,” He said after a moment. “Nothing here is questionable. We produce billions of these every year. It’s impossible to track them all.”

“If you produce billions of military-grade munitions… with no tracking codes embedded, then you and I will have to have a very long discussion.”

The supervisor pulled back, his expression aghast.

“No tracking… no, that’s not possible!”

“And yet, it happened… and we are going to determine, precisely, how… and why.”

Sienele smiled thinly, an expression that seemed to scare the man even more than the Lucian’s behind him had.

Excellent.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter One

Orhkana, Alliance Production Facility

Hours into the investigation, the Lucians were almost to the point of tearing the building apart out of sheer boredom, and Sorilla hated to admit it but she wasn’t far behind.

I used to have so much patience too, she thought with more than a little self-recrimination.

It wasn’t the same, of course. She could spend days, weeks, months even, in the jungle or the field, teaching others her trade. That, she had never found a lack of patience for.

Paperwork?

Not so much.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to run this part of the investigation herself. Honestly, she doubted she’d be allowed to. Her presence in Alliance space was largely due to Sienele’s forbearance and Kriss’ personal amusement. The Alliance government didn’t really seem to care, though she knew full well that just meant they were hiding their suspicion from her.

She would, if she were in their position, after all.

Actually, I wouldn’t have let me anywhere near this place, Sorilla thought with some suspicion of her own.

They knew her specialty now, and letting her have a map to a primary military supplier? That was just reckless foolishness, unless they had something in mind. Which, well, of course they did.

The question was, what did they have in mind?

It was possible that the Alliance was feeding her false intelligence, hoping she’d bring it back to SOLCOM. Possible, but unlikely. Anything that she could bring back was unlikely to be of much use unless SOLCOM was planning an immediate pre-emptive strike, which the Alliance had to know was incredibly unlikely.

They might not be intending to allow her to leave Alliance space at all.

A marginally less unlikely scenario, but while she had no illusions that the Alliance would shed any tears should she meet her fate while hunting her white whale within their borders, Sorilla didn’t get quite get that vibe off the representatives she had been interacting with.

No, the most likely scenario was that they were giving her basic intelligence that, while accurate, was of limited value. In exchange they were availing themselves of her services, a minor thing but she liked to believe that she was competent in what she did, and also gaining more intelligence on her training and what they might have to expect from other SOLCOM units.

In the meanwhile, she was availing herself of their services… and permission to travel within Alliance borders… while also gathering similar intelligence on their spy craft, special operations, and other basic cultural norms.

Sorilla considered the trade to be heavily in her favor, assuming she managed to outplay the locals.

That was the game, after all.

At the moment, however, the game was incredibly boring.

The plant supervisors seemed genuine, as best she could read from their alien body language anyway. If she were reading Sienele correctly, and she had a better read on him than the administrators, he seemed to feel much the same.

The plant was, apparently, on the up and up.

What that meant, she was less than sure.

Sienele and Kriss seemed absolutely certain that there were no other facilities in operation that could produce the kit they’d found during their joint operations. She wasn’t sure how that could be, but for the moment Sorilla was willing to assume they were correct.

What does that mean, then? That the gear had to come from this facility, yet the administrators are apparently and sincerely aghast at the possibility. The grunt workers?

Sorilla walked across the conference room they’d moved into during the overview of all the documentation, to where there was a large window overlooking what she might call a work floor.

It was nothing like any she’d seen on Earth, sprawling for miles from where she was standing, in all directions no less. The machinery was inscrutable for someone whose entire education was in other directions. The people, though, they were just people. They looked different, alien in appearance, but they moved like people. They milled around when they had nothing to do. She could see several groups doing what she assumed was the equivalent of water cooler chatting, for example. They went about their work and, as bizarre as some of that appeared to be, the vast majority was exactly what Sienele and Kriss had said about them.

Grunt work.

Those groups didn’t matter.

Sorilla’s retinal implants glowed as she focused on someone who didn’t fit into any of the groups she’d spotted.

It was one of the grunt workers alright, alone. He was standing around, maybe a hundred meters down the work floor. She focused in on him through the liquid lenses floating over her pupil.

He keeps looking this way. Nervous. Interesting.

If you wanted to subvert a company, or any organization really, there were a couple basic approaches you could make.

Buying the top brass was always effective, but it tended to be expensive and, unless you were very, very careful, it was also terribly easy to spot on an audit. Administrative types had access, but they weren’t generally very good at hiding their tracks. They tended to get clever, misfiling paperwork or hiding records by slipping them into other budgetary entries.

Effective enough against a light audit, certainly, but it had the problem of the information still being filed. A good enough deep audit would dig it all up, and while it might take a long while to properly unfuck the records, but it could be done.

Another option was to go for the lowest level workers.

They couldn’t mask massive purchase orders - or hide production runs in the budget of another department - but they could list a machine as being out of order and down for repairs while it was actually working through the night, producing parts entirely off the record, with materials that had been listed as scrap disposal.

A shift’s production run here, a couple more shifts there, and you could hide a lot of production in the margins of a large facilities normal waste numbers.

Sorilla silently crossed the room, coming to a stop just behind Sienele.

“There’s a floor worker spending a lot of time staring at this room, he doesn’t look happy,” She whispered softly in English, knowing that the Alien had taken the time to learn the language some time ago.

Sienele didn’t react, but as she stepped back Sorilla could see him flick his gaze to the large window.

“I believe that we will need a tour of the facility,” Sienele said after a moment, eyes locked onto the administrator.

“A… a tour? Of course, we can show you the process…” The alien began, eager to please.

“No,” Sienele held up a hand. “Not the process, the facility. All of it.”

The administrator stared at him, uncomprehending for a moment before a look of abject horror bloomed across his features.

“But… Envoy,” He stammered. “I am not sure you understand the sheer scale of the facility…”

Sienele just smiled darkly.

*****

The Administrator had a point about scale, Sorilla thought as they started on their ‘tour’.

The facility was hundreds of miles square, with levels above and below ground multiplying the floor space significantly.

Earth production had moved away from large scale facilities for many things, as she expected the Alliance likely had as well. But certain types of production just benefitted too much from the economy of scale and apparently weapons manufacture was one of those when you were outfitting a galactic empire.

Sorilla ignored the information being given by the guide, though her implants were recording everything. She was most interested in the reactions they were receiving as they moved through the facility.

A lot of curious looks, some angry ones. She ignored those for the most part. Curiosity was normal, and one of the basic rights of anyone doing an honest day’s work was griping about it, so the anger made sense too.

She was looking for fear.

There would always be someone up to some type of no good, of course. A little theft of office supplies, a bit of embezzlement, the sorts of things that companies both prosecuted firmly when caught but also expected and accounted for in their running budgets. What she was looking for was something deeper than that sort of casual corruption.

This is so much easier when I’m dealing with humans.

The Aliens of the Alliance were surprisingly human-like in many ways, she’d found. Sorilla wasn’t sure what that meant really, perhaps certain traits were really universal. Fear, anger, basic emotions were recognizable with minimal adjustment for the species’ differing biologies. A lot of the micro expressions were indecipherable, of course, which made some levels of cold reading all but impossible, but she could still get the gist of things.

The administrator playing tour guide was droning on about details of things, which Sorilla was dutifully recording to her implants, but her mind was elsewhere, focusing on those she could see hanging back and watching them.

Mostly it appeared to be curiosity, but it didn’t take too long to spot someone watching them with clear apprehension.

It was one of the grunts, as Sienele and Kriss had described them.

Sirhan.

There were a lot of them, which made sense. A low-tech culture would value the simple pay that the Alliance would consider trivial, and be willing to do the heavy lifting that wasn’t cost effective to automate.

It happened a lot on Earth, she knew. High tech gadgets tended to have a fast developmental cycle, and the cost of retooling automation was such that it was cheaper to just hire people willing to work for pennies rather than try to build robots to do the job only to have them become obsolete in six months when the next version came out.

People from lower tech cultures were easy enough to train up, and worked for a fraction of what their counterparts back in the World would demand.

They also didn’t have the same loyalties, however, or even the concept of some of them.

Cultures were funny that way.

She spotted one of them looking at the group with undisguised nervousness, but what really caught her gaze was where else he was looking. Sorilla followed the alien’s gaze and stared down that direction pensively.

Sorilla stopped Kriss with a tap to his lower arm, nodding her head down a corridor. He glanced at her, then in the direction she nodded, then grunted curtly before turning back to the group.

“What is in that direction?” He asked, gesturing pointedly.

Sienele and the Administrator looked back at him, then in the direction he’d pointed, both of them surprised by the interruption.

“Oh… Uh, stores mostly,” The Administrator said, confused. “Components from other factories, raw materials, nothing of any particular import in terms of our process here.”

Sienele was staring at Kriss, clearly wondering why the Sentinel had asked such a question, but a twitch from the Lucian caused him to shift his gaze and meet Sorilla eye to eye. He relaxed visibly, nodding.

“Why don’t we take a look,” He said. “A short detour, if you would.”

“We… could,” The Administrator nodded. “I’m not sure there is anything to warrant your attention, but very well.”

The group changed direction, walking down a long length of the facility that quickly became a warehouse organization. As predicted by the administrator, there was nothing of any interest as they walked. Just walls and walls filled with stores positioned such that they could easily be accessed at need.

Sorilla, however, wasn’t interested in the stores themselves. It was possible there was something of interest there. It would be easy enough to hide contraband in such a place, but if that was the secret being hidden, she didn’t much care. She was hunting bigger game.

After nearly an hour of wandering, the Administrator looked to Sienele again.

“As you can see, it is not particularly interesting,” He said, almost plaintive. “Merely storage.”

Sienele nodded slowly, eyes looking over to Sorilla in quick darting glances.

“Yes, I can see that.”

“Perhaps we should move on. A full tour will take long enough as it is,” The Administrator said, obviously eager to be moving on though it did seem that he was just looking to get the entire ordeal over with.

“Very well,” Sienele sighed, acquiescing as he saw nothing to be gained by wandering around the storerooms, “We’ll return to the rest of the tour.”

The group began to track back along the path they followed in. Sorrilla had her implants in pattern recognition mode, searching everything they passed for any hint of something out of place, but nothing was turning up as they began their return.

Then she paused, a feeling twisting in her gut, and she instantly brought up her hand with a closed fist.

The Lucians instantly stopped, fanning out slightly around her as they responded to the gesture, their weapons coming up. Kriss turned sharply to look at her, while Sienele merely stopped in place.

The Administrator was nearly shaking in fear as the armed group of soldiers made their vocation very evident from their actions.

“What is the meaning of…” He blustered.

Everyone ignored him.

“What is it?” Kriss asked.

“Ross.”

One word was all it took. Kriss’ own weapon cleared its holster and Sienele also reached for a small weapon concealed at the small of his back.

“Are you certain?” The spymaster demanded, eyes scanning the area for any signs of enemy action.

Sorilla nodded, “Their tech at least.”

She slowly turned, then pointed deeper back into the warehouse. “There, but down. A long way down.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Two

Sienele found himself staring at the floor for a long moment before he straightened and looked over at the Administrator again.

“How many floors did you say the facility descended?”

“Ten, but I am familiar with every floor. I assure you, there is nothing amiss below us.”

“Mmm,” Sienele nodded slowly, “And how far down is ten floors?”

“I would have to check the records to be precise, but roughly I would say a hundred to one hundred and thirty Lithomets.”

Sorilla blinked at the term she wasn’t familiar with, but based on the height of the floor they were in, she guessed it was somewhere on the order of a hundred meters, give or take a fair percentage. She frowned, “If a… lithomet is roughly what I am thinking, the signal is considerably deeper.”

“Impossible, this planet was thoroughly surveyed before the facility was built. We would have discovered anything of that nature, and they certainly didn’t install anything after the construction was complete.”

She turned to give the Administrator a baleful glare. “Who conducted the survey?”

“Enough,” Sienele cut in, casting a reproachful look in Sorilla’s direction. “Remember you are a guest here.”

Sorilla dipped her head, taking a step back and falling quiet, allowing Sienele to play the good guy role as he worked on the Administrator.

“My… friend is perhaps overly enthusiastic,” He said charmingly. “But she does have a point, I’m afraid. Are you aware of who did conduct the survey?”

“No,” The Administrator admitted. “It will be in the records, of course, but it was finished before I was brought into the project. I assume it was completed by the Development Corporation assigned to this sector.”

Those words meant little to Sorilla, but she couldn’t have missed the sudden exchange of looks between Sienele and Kriss if she were blind.

That meant a lot to them, but what?

“Of course,” Sienele said smoothly. “I will investigate of course, but no doubt you are correct. For the moment, could you perhaps show us the way to the bottom floor.”

The Administrator looked confused, and more than a little put out, but he acquiesced quickly enough, not that he had many other options of course.

“This way.”

*****

The lifts were large, industrial constructions, Sorilla noted as she stepped into the machinery along with the Sentinels. They’d waited for the Administrator to step in first, exchanging mutually amused glances with one another as they recognized the unspoken decision for exactly what it was.

Still, the alien seemed to have no malicious intent despite being a paper pusher, and in moments they were all in the large lift and it began to descend.

Sorilla didn’t feel the acceleration directly, but her sense of the Ross technology gave her an idea of just how quickly they were moving, and she was shocked by the speed. Only seconds after they had begun, the doors to the large lift opened on the tenth sub-floor and they stepped out.

The floor was an expanse of space, littered with what appeared to be fabrication facilities from what Sorilla could tell. She couldn’t be entirely sure, of course. They bore no resemblance to her own little army of MOFABS back on Hayden, but the products being turned out by each did seem to make their application obvious.

She didn’t see anywhere that raw materials were being put into the system, however.

“Fabrication tools?” She asked casually, glancing over to Kriss.

The Sentinel grunted. “Standard commercial fabricators, I believe you would call them.”

“What do they use for raw materials?”

He looked over at her, an eyebone rising, “Energy. What else would they use?”

“Ah,” Sorilla nodded.

Matter energy conversion?

Technically she knew it was possible. SOLCOM ships used the rather high level of power in their reactors to do the same thing, albeit on a very different scale. Slamming a few electrons, protons, and neutrons together into a hydrogen molecule, or an oxygen one, was a good emergency capacity for a ship to have, even if it was far more cost effective to just mine water ice from comets on your way into, or out of, a system.

Using nothing but energy to just turn out completed products like this, however? That was pure science fiction.

The power requirements alone must be insane.

Power was, in many ways, the most basic hallmark of a civilization. The most rudimentary meter by which any culture could be measured was through its power use. Cavemen, barely able to harness fire, were on the first rung of civilization. Harnessing the natural forces of nature, cracking the atom, production of anti-matter… these were what academics would rank a culture by.

Earth had done all of that, to varying degrees, and were considered to be effectively a Type One civilization by the most common scale in popular use, the Kardeshev Scale. But Sorilla was far too aware that nothing she knew of on Earth could possibly have provided the power to do what she was seeing in just this one, albeit massive, room.

How did we not lose the war instantly?

Now, more than ever, Sorilla desperately wanted to know more about what happened to Task Force Valkyrie. That they had been able to somehow stop an Alliance Fleet as they had, however they had, could be considered nothing short of miraculous.

The Alliance personnel around her didn’t seem to notice her thoughts, thankfully, and she followed them out into the large manufacturing floor, eyes alighting on the various bits of gear as they passed, her implants taking notes as she did.

“Colonel,” Sienele said carefully, looking over at her. “Do you have a… location on the Ross signals?”

Sorilla nodded, taking a moment to get her bearing as she slowly parsed the conflicting information she was receiving from her implants.

Her prototype implant suite had included micro-accelerometers as part of SOLCOM’s attempt to give soldiers early warning of Ross attacks. Those largely had failed, primarily because by the time the onboard computer could parse the tiny differential between an accelerometer implanted in her ankle and one in her skull, it was far too late to do anything about it.

What they had not accounted for in her prototype suite was the use of the human nervous system to transmit the information. Standard issue suites used Near Field Communication, a very low powered radio broadcast system that was effective enough but occasionally vulnerable to jamming or to interception if the enemy had sensitive enough gear close enough to the soldier. Her suite had been part of an experimental system that used nerve induction, sending signals along the nervous system using frequencies that wouldn’t interfere with her own reflexive motor control.

It had functioned perfectly, even been set to become the new standard, when Sorilla herself had identified an issue that others in the test group had encountered but been unable to recognize for what it was. The signals may have been on a frequency that didn’t interfere with the human body, but the human brain had no problem recognizing that it was there… and, as it turned out, the brain’s pattern recognition capacity was more than capable of breaching military grade quantum encryption, if only on a subconscious level.

The result was that she could not only feel shifts in acceleration through each of her implants, effective simultaneously, but she could also parse and triangulate general directions with an instinctive ease that put super computers to shame, in terms of speed at least. A good shipboard supercomputer could still pinpoint a target with far greater precision that Sorilla, but by the time it had done so, would already be moving in the right direction.

So she parsed the feeling she had, noting that the Ross technology now felt considerably closer as she focused on it.

“That way,” She said, pointing down and off in the distance slightly. “It’s one of their portal ships, no question.”

“You’re that certain?” Sienele asked, interested.

“Oh yes, I’m intimately familiar with that feeling,” Sorilla admitted. “Been aboard a couple now.”

The Lucians exchanged glances and feral grins that would have made almost anyone else nervous, but Sorilla was familiar enough with them to know that they weren’t hostile. Of course, she was also quite certain that the Lucian Sentinels could cause nearly as much damage to allies as to enemies. Just because they weren’t hostile didn’t mean they weren’t deadly.

“Fascinating, how deep?”

That took her a moment. She had to try and parse both her own instinctive measurement of distance and the unfamiliar system the Alliance made use of.

Her dad had brought her up on feet and inches, while the military had trained her in meters and kilometers, which had given her an occasionally troublesome amalgam of the two. Adding the alien measurement system to the mix without truly understanding what it amounted to was an actual headache in the making.

“I… think…” She said slowly, pointing, “Perhaps another hundred lithomets down and several hundred in that direction.”

Sienele humms slightly, appearing thoughtful, “Troublesome. We will not be able to get close to it without being detected in that case. The Ross will certainly have trigger detection systems all over the subsurface area here.”

Sorilla nodded, agreeing easily. What she knew of the Ross was enough to confirm that without even thinking about it, however…

“If they’re here to control operations within this facility…” She said slowly. “They would need access, wouldn’t they?”

Kriss grunted, “Truth there. The Ross are cowardly filth, however they will have hidden it well.”

Sorilla didn’t say anything to that, as she both agreed and disagreed with the Lucian. Certainly, they would have hidden their access point, however the Ross were not cowards by her definition of the word. They did not engage in personal combat easily, but if forced they could certainly handle themselves… but, more importantly, they didn’t shy from taking great risks if the situation warranted it.

She was hesitant to ascribe either cowardice or courage as descriptors for the species, not without a great deal more information on them than she currently held access too.

“If it is here,” Sienele said firmly. “We can find it.”

“Envoy!” The Administrator objected, “Searching this facility will…”

“Be a small price to ensure its security against all threats.” Sienele cut him off firmly. “Sentinels… you have your orders.”

Sorilla had to exert an iron control over herself to keep from flinching or outright jumping at the enthusiastic roar from the squat, powerful, alien soldiers when they heard that.

“Come!” Kriss bellowed, clearly enthused as he slapped her on the back, “It is time to hunt.”

*****

SOLCOM Central HQ, SOL System

“You let her go?”

The voice was incredulous, completely unable to comprehend the words that had just been said despite them having come from the owner’s own throat.

“Let is a strong word, Admiral,” Brigadier Mattan said stiffly. “She had already been discharged and elected to…”

“Let me stop you right there, General.” Flag Admiral Jeb Islander growled, his gaze passing over to where Admiral Ruger was standing and including him in the statement quite clearly. “That woman is carrying a classified prototype implant suite, more classified intelligence than anyone in SOLCOM under a four-star rank, and she’s a goddamned planetary hero on two planets!”

Islander closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “I do not need to inform either of you of the sheer magnitude of the shitstorm that will come down on every single one of us if she doesn’t return from Alliance territory, do I?”

The pair winced, but shook their heads in unison as a response.

“At least neither of you are complete idiots,” Island sighed. “Alright, consider yourself properly upbraided and pass along the excess shit to the Colonel, if you would? I’d do it myself, but I might be tempted to shoot him, and I have no doubt he’d beat me to the draw if I tried.”

“I’ll… inform the colonel, Admiral.” Mattan nodded.

“Good. Ok, fine. Aida is officially, well unofficially really,” Islander corrected himself. “Over the wall. That means damage control on our side of things, just in case things hit the fan in the worst way. Her codes?”

“Revoked.” Mattan said automatically. “Done on the Sol the instant the Colonel reported her actions, and in every system the Sol has since visited the moment we came into contact with a SOLCOM buoy.”

“Well thank God for small favors. Orders to personnel?”

“She’s officially listed as discharged with an honorable,” Ruger spoke up, “Her security clearance hasn’t been revoked. However, it has been suspended pending a mustering out psyche review that, obviously, can’t happen until she’s returned to SOLCOM space.”

“That will do for now,” Islander grumbled, setting aside a couple stacks of documents before tapping the remaining one. “Now, talk to me about her implant suite.”

“The hardware is not our latest generation,” Ruger responded. “However, it is quite advanced. Still, there’s nothing in the hardware itself that will tell the Alliance anything they don’t already know.”

“Software then?”

“Not particularly,” Ruger shook his head. “I suspect that Colonel Aida has written some advanced interface and subroutines that are decidedly not standard but may, in fact, be better than standard issue… but, overall, she’s running the same basic OS as any of our soldiers that they may have already examined.”

“Then why is hell’s name am I looking at a huge red stamp that reads classified all across her jacket and nothing but black bars in the implant descriptions?”

“Largely because we don’t want anyone trying to replicate what Aida managed to do with her implants, Admiral,” Ruger replied. “The Colonel’s suite isn’t spectacular, aside from being very expensive and having some particularly high-end accelerometers that cost more than the rest of her gear combined… how she interfaced with it, however, is.”

“Explain, please.”

“You’re aware of the neural induction implants, of course?”

“Yes, I was due to have them installed myself before they were pulled. Instability in the design?” Islander asked.

“No, very stable design. Instability in the users,” Ruger countered. “Almost all of the original implant subjects were rendered uselessly vulnerable to any sort of shift in local gravity or motion, making them violently motion sick and unable, at the very least, to endure space travel.”

Islander grimaced.

“That sounds… unpleasant.”

“Projectile vomiting in a power armor helmet is a little more than unpleasant, Admiral,” Mattan interjected distastefully.

“Indeed,” Ruger sighed. “We underestimated the adaptability of the human brain, General. In effect, the new implants provided the brain with an entirely new sense, the ability to sense gravity… It didn’t occur to us that the subjects’ own brains would be able to, in effect, completely ignore military grade quantum encryption, but they did. Instead of being fed the data through the implanted processing units, the subjects began to sense gravity directly through their own nervous system. Most were completely unable to cope with the new sensory feed, provoking extreme motion sickness and essentially disabling the subject.”

“But not Aida?”

“Something about her mind was different,” Ruger admitted sourly. “We still haven’t determined what despite countless man hours dedicated to finding out just that. Somehow, she was able to adapt.”

Mattan snorted.

“Have something to add, General?” Islander asked dryly.

“Adapt might be a strong word,” Mattan said. “Little Sister managed to remain operational, yes, but she was afflicted by the motion sickness as well. I trained her, she never got sick on a boat, a plane, whatever you want to name. We put her through them all, from all the way up to the                                                                  Vomit Comet and beyond. After the new implants? She lost her lunch every single jump. The woman is just so single minded that she kept on working through it, I suspect until her brain got used to dealing with it. Maybe.”

“I’d rather have more than a maybe, General,” Islander sighed. “But for now I suppose it will do. So, there is a minimal risk of the Alliance gaining any sort of technical advantage from her gear?”

“Less than minimal, Admiral,” Ruger responded. “Nothing she’s carrying is any different than our standard issue for special operations during the war. They’ve already seen it all.”

“Assuming she doesn’t fill them in herself,” Islander said with a roll of his eyes.

“Little Sister is loyal, Sir.”

Islander turned to give Mattan the gimlet eye. “If she were as loyal as all that she’d have obeyed the order to return to the Sol, General. When she gets back, assuming she gets back, Sorilla Aida is to be taken into protective custody and thoroughly interrogated. Am I very clear?”

“Yes sir!”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Three

Orkhana, Alliance Production World

This facility is immense.

Intellectually, Sorilla had been aware of that from the start, of course. The specifications available to her before they landed on Orkhana had made that clear, but there was no real replacement for experiencing something for herself.

The lowest floor of the facility, a massive manufacturing floor, was thousands of square kilometers at the very least, and quite probably a good deal more.

While impressive, it did make for finding anything of use a great deal more difficult of course.

Sorilla quietly followed along with the Sentinel group led by Kriss, allowing the more knowledgeable Lucians to lead the way while she took the time to both examine the equipment and the body language of the workers.

Mostly she was examining equipment, something she really shouldn’t have been quite as surprised at as she was. There were certainly workers in the facility, quite a lot of them, but for a work floor of this sheer scale, it felt quite empty of personnel.

Earth had long since gone the same direction, of course, with everything from product manufacturing to food production being increasingly automated. The vast majority of people on Earth, and even more so those on Earth’s colonies, left almost all production to automated systems. Food, particularly on colonies, was grown in cultured tanks. Beef, Chicken, Pork, and other stock were produced entirely by chemical and biological process under the observation of computer systems. Humans didn’t get involved in the process until it came time for chow, and the same held true for the vast majority of other productions as well.

Some traditional groups still maintained the old skills, either for religious or cultural reasons, or just because they felt that the knowledge shouldn’t be lost, but by and large… Factories on Earth and the colonies were far emptier than she was seeing here.

But they are far smaller too.

That was where the Alliance and Earth’s technical development had branched apart. Earth, in the twenty-first century had moved away from centralized manufacture. As machines became more and more capable, community fabrication became the obvious way forward. The mega-factories became obsolete, first for the odds and ends often imported from countries that paid slave wages, and then increasingly more so for higher end products as well.

Every small community on the planet, practically, had a fabrication facility that sat like the old-time corner store, constantly churning out the majority of what that community needed. Anything too complicated was ordered in from specialty factories, of course, but with every passing year the list of what was ‘too complicated’ grew smaller and smaller.

The Alliance, they’d gone another direction. Doubling down, hell tripling, quadrupling, quintupling… and so forth… down on centralized manufacture.

Sorilla’s mind spun as she considered the implications of what she’d learned just thus far since opting to travel with the Lucians to see this mission through.

Worlds like Orkhana would be incredible strategic targets. Even crippling one of them, or blockading the system, would put a serious pinch into entire sectors of Alliance controlled territory.

They were also an example of a type of thinking that was currently considered anathema on Earth.

The disposable planet.

Though, not quite that if she understood it correctly. With so many worlds under their control, the Alliance seemed to be willing to utterly devastate production worlds like Orkhana in order to provide products for the rest. It was hard for her to put her head in that space, given the extremely strong environmental attitudes she’d grown up with.

They did have plans for what to do with the planet after, though, so disposable wasn’t exactly the right term. More… Use and re-use, recycling the world. The Alliance took a long view and were willing to work a world into utter environmental collapse, then sew a few seeds and wait centuries for the planet to recover before moving in with farming or other uses.

It left a bad taste in her mouth, but Sorilla could understand that attitude from a large multi-planet polity.

There was only one Earth and but a few colonies, of which Hayden was the most Earth-like. Protecting the worlds humans lived on had become first nature after the severe environmental issues humans had caused on the home world, and Sorilla couldn’t help but hope that the Alliance attitude never caught on with humans despite being able to understand the practicality of it.

She did find their machines fascinating, however.

I wonder if they sell fabricators like this on their open market?

Sorilla had to assume not, otherwise why bother with a central production planet in the first place?

She was still going to ask, though.

Her thoughts on the subject were derailed by movement in the corner of her eye, and Sorilla tilted her head just enough to center the source in her vision.

Sirhan. One of the grunts the Alliance brought in to work the machines.

The little alien was watching them while trying very hard not to look like he was watching them. Or she. Or it. Sorilla didn’t really have any idea if the species even had genders of course. It was an asymmetrically bipedal species with what looked like fairly thick and wiry fur or hair. Three eyes, or she thought they were eyes, and two likely ears. Not the most exotic species she had seen in recent years, but up there on the list.

This one was pacing them while trying to look busy with various bits of equipment, and she’d initially missed it for just that reason, but the odds were getting pretty slim that its work pattern just happened to be the same one that the Lucians’ were using to search the facility.

Nervous, scared of us… but also someone else? Ugh, reading alien body language is ridiculous. It’s up to something, though, that much I’m sure of.

Sorilla hesitated, informing Kriss, but ultimately there wasn’t much she could do with the information at the moment. The Lucian might have an idea of how to handle it, even if said idea was likely to be incredibly blunt and probably foolish.

She quietly nudged his arm and contorted her fingers into an approximation of Lucian combat signs when he turned to look at her.

Being followed. Single target. Options?

Kriss looked momentarily surprised, then settled so that the surprise was gone almost as quickly as it appeared.

Where? he signed back.

She shifted slightly, exposing the little alien to the Lucian’s gaze while still blocking most of his body from the Sirhan’s gaze in turn, gesturing subtly.

Kriss, while a fierce warrior, showed that he recognized the more subtle skills of the battlefield as he looked past her briefly to spot the alien then let his gaze move on as he naturally turned back around. Sorilla might almost have thought he’d opted to ignore her, if she hadn’t seen him begin signing to the other Lucians just as subtly.

Many of the signs she was seeing were beyond her current skill with their combat signs, but she caught a few here and there. Enough to recognize that Kriss was assigning countersurveillance and having word sent to Sienele for further orders.

That was interesting. Sorilla didn’t entirely understand the relationship between the Lucians and Sienele, or Sentinels and the Alliance. There were the obvious things, bits here and there that anyone could see such as them being the elite ground combat detachment of the Alliance forces, but there was more to it as well Sorilla suspected.

Kriss and the Lucians chafed under the restrictions that the Alliance clearly kept them on, yet she’d seen them willingly defer to Sienele with little hesitation, far less hesitation than she would have expected from a self identified warrior when dealing with a self professed intelligence handler.

Sorilla filed that away with then rest of the details she was gathering, knowing that she would need to work it out… or get the intelligence to someone else who could. Understanding the relationships within the Alliance military would be of vital importance to SOLCOM, Earth, and the Colonies.

For now, however, back to the task at hand.

The Sirhan continued to follow them, and Sorilla began a new file for this Alliance species, documenting body language and what she believed it to mean. Each furtive glance, unconscious movement to shield itself or something else, everything it did was dumped into a file in her processor as she began deconstructing all of it with an eye to how she would insert herself into the little creature’s culture if she were ever assigned to train them up to fight the Alliance.

It was unlikely she would ever be in such a position, of course, but Sorilla was very nearly certain that someone would be.

Unless someone… already has?

Sorilla caught something in his motion, a move that was too practiced, too unconscious, as the little alien spotted one of the Lucians looking in his direction and what appeared to be his dominant hand, a larger and more powerful limb, twitched to his thigh as though grasping for something.

A weapon? Is he military trained, civilian or police, just itchy… or… something else?

This was the hardest part of her job, divining a new culture on the fly and figuring out how to reach them. Not just communicate - that could be difficult enough - but really reaching a new culture took more than merely sharing a language. It meant understanding their motivation, how they trained their warriors and other professions, and all the little cultural nuances that made no sense to an outsider.

Approach a Christian like you would a Muslim, or vice versa, and you were burned from the start. Hell, even within each culture all sorts of deviations could and did set in, meaning that you couldn’t even trust general knowledge of a culture when dealing with any given subgroup within it.

Sometimes, in the field, figuring out on the fly if you were supposed to accept an offer for tea or not was literally the difference between mission success and failure.

 And that was with humans.

She didn’t even know enough to know what she didn’t know when it came to Alliance species.

Not that Sorilla was going to let that stop her.

*****

Sienele frowned thoughtfully as he considered the information he received.

Followed by one of the Sirhan? Curious.

He wasn’t particularly aware of the Sirhan as a species, beyond the very basics. They were from a sector outside his general purview, and he’d not had much cause to interact with them in the past.

A minor species, only members of the alliance after we saved them from the Jara.

That had been a relatively minor war, though it had bordered on becoming a major conflict until the Ross had, for whatever inscrutable reason they might have, intervened and hammered the massive ships of the Jara into retreat.

Very little was known of the Jara as a result of it being over so quickly, though he was aware that the Pari’s considered them dangerous foes in space, a compliment rarely given by the Alliance’s premier fleet commanders.

The Sirhan… they were even more of an enigma to him, he hated to admit, but it was true. A barely space faring culture, he remembered that much, only notable for having been saved from destruction by the Alliance and granted membership as a result. Sienele was certain that there was in depth analysis of them in the files, but he didn’t have time to delve in depth for the moment.

“Very well,” He said into his communicator. “Do not allow him to know you have spotted him. I will bring my team about from the other side.”

One way or another, he was about to learn a little more about the species.

Hopefully enough to solve this little conundrum of ours once and for all.

*****

He’s nervous, but something else… curious? Driven, certainly. But Driven by what?

Sorilla didn’t quite know what to make of the little odd-looking alien as they continued along their search of the manufacturing floor, making it look good while they slowly maneuvered the small alien into a place where Sienele and his group could close the snare and keep him from bolting.

She thought she could probably run him down, at least in a straight race. Her power armor gave her considerable physical advantages over the majority of natural biological systems, but in a crowded factory floor she couldn’t be completely certain. If he got away, even for a short bit, he could lose them and vanish into the crowd of other workers.

Bad as it sounded to say or think, Sorilla was far from certain she’d be able to pick this little alien out of such a crowd, even with biometric scans available. His features were too alien for either her or her biometric software to properly pick out the subtle differences between individuals.

It might be racist to say they all looked alike, but it was also a biological and neurological fact of the human brain. Recognition patterns were optimized during formative years and took a fair amount of work to properly retrain as adults, even when dealing with minor genetic differences between human culture groups. Add alien biology to the mix and she might as well be trying to tell the difference between ants, at least until she had a chance to properly learn the distinctions.

So, we don’t let him get away, Sorilla determined, keeping a close eye on the alien without looking straight at him, a feat that would have been much easier if she had opted to wear her helmet during the inspection. That would have been too intelligent, I suppose.

She disliked interacting with others while wearing the full-face helmet. It made communication somewhat more difficult among humans and the habit had rolled over despite the fact that many of the subtleties of non-verbal discourse were lost on the Alliance races anyway. She supposed that she should consider wearing it more, but at the moment, it was a point to be considered later.

 Kriss caught her eye and gestured a signal she recognized.

Get ready.

*****

Birchee of the Sirhan nervously shifted as he loped to the next machine and made a point of looking over the interface and inspecting the output.

Everything was running as it should, of course. The systems rarely did otherwise, and almost invariably would mount a warning if something had gone wrong. He was there just as a slightly more adaptive version of the automation system, filling in if something had gone just slightly awry to put it all back on the correct path, just like all the workers in the facility.

No, his real interest was the group of inspectors who had arrived on world a short time earlier. Another of the Sirhan employees had quickly sent word up to the line, bringing them to his attention, and he had quickly moved to the floor they were visiting to get a closer look in the hopes of determining just what they were here for.

Something has brought their attention, that much was clear to him. Just what it was had yet to be determined, but in either case it was not a good thing. If they were here for the operation, that was incredibly bad… but even if it was just some minor discrepancy caused by fools in the Administration, well that was nearly as bad.

Word had already been sent to the Saviors, and now the Sirhan were awaiting instructions on just what to do.

Birchee hoped they were issued quickly, because he doubted he could maintain surveillance for long without being spotted… not even with the dismissive attitude the Alliance showed to the junior members like the Sirhan.

He finished his fake examination of the machine as the group continued to move and made his way to the back of the rig while watching to be sure they weren’t paying any attention to him. Birchee completely missed the small group that had come up from around the other side of the fabricator, nearly running dead on into them as he came around the back.

He froze in place, staring wide eyed.

The tall one in the middle of the group of stocky figures smiled at him while holding up a scanner and glancing at it curiously.

“Birchee? Am I saying that correctly?” He asked conversationally. “I do hope so, however regardless, I believe that we need to have a… discussion.”

Birchee’s two hearts felt like they were going to drop out of his chest as he slumped, barely noticing the other group approaching from behind and closing off his escape path.

*****

Portal Ship, Location… Irrelevant

The members of the conclave were irritated when the urgent tagged report came in, forcing their attention to lesser matters.

Other species were difficult to communicate with at the best of times, and their idea of what constituted an urgent situation rarely, if ever, coincided with the definition of the conclave, but that did not mean that such notices could be ignored either.

This one was from one of the minor subject species that had been assigned an infiltration operation within the so-called alliance and its production facilities. The notice reported an inspection in process, which was actually somewhat close to what might be considered urgent.

The conclave called up the information and examined the data.

Ah. The brutes of the Alliance, and one of the spymasters.

Yes.

Options?

Cut off the operation, abandon it now.

Presumptuous. Perhaps they are not there for our actions?

Unlikely. Only so many things could possibly attract attention of this level.

Hold.

What is it?

Look at this member of the group.

The image slid in, focusing on a member of a species that was not part of the Alliance. It was, in fact, a species the conclave was well familiar with. A species they considered among the most dangerous they had ever encountered.

Worse, it was a member of said species that they personally recognized.

Entropy! What is that doing there?

The urgent flag had just become… an understatement.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Four

Orkhana

Sorilla observed from the back as Kriss and Sienele towered over the small Sirhan, demanding answers as to why he had been shadowing them.

They were getting nowhere with the little guy, but she wasn’t particularly concerned with their results as she was gathering more and more information on body language, both from the Sirhan but also from the Lucians’ and Sienele.

Most of that was just being filed away, intelligence for another day, but the Sirhan was keeping her focused as she worked to map out his responses and connect them to emotional drives that she could comprehend.

He was frightened, certainly, but there was steel in his spine… well, if he had a spine, which she wasn’t actually sure of.

Steel in his… her, or its character, I suppose would be better terminology.

Sorilla sighed mentally, pushing that issue of whether or not the little creature even had a gender by human definitions to the side as it was doing her little good at the moment. It was important information, of course, but it wasn’t of current tactical importance.

The steel he was showing, now that was tactically important. She didn’t know enough yet to attribute that to the individual or the culture. Likely, it was a mix of both of course but the exact mix would be vital information if SOLCOM forces ever had to deal with the Sirhan in the future. At the moment, the fact that it existed in the individual was enough.

He’s hiding information, but is being clever about it. They’re not going to break him.

The interrogation had only just begun, much of it in a language she was barely fluent in, but she could already read that in the byplay between the three. Sorilla suspected that Sienele had also made a similar read, as she was seeing more and more frustration bleed off him. She felt sympathy for the Alliance spymaster, but also a fair bit of amusement deep down.

All of the advantages were on his side. He held all the power with the authority of the Alliance backing him up and the muscle of the Sentinels standing right behind him, and he wasn’t going to get the little guy to speak.

That spoke well of the Sirhan, Birchee, Sorilla reminded herself… spoke well of him and caused her to make a note about the species, just in case he wasn’t an exception.

The alliance saved them from these… Jara…

The Jara was not a species that Sorilla felt any need to fast track a meeting of, not if the Alliance had difficulty turning them around, but the story was interesting.

It wasn’t merely the Alliance that had saved them, no… it was the Ross. From the comments made by Kriss and Sienele, she gathered that the Alliance Navy had engaged them, but it was the Ross that turned them back.

Were they recruited then? Are they all part of it, or just a few individuals…?

There were too many variables at play, and the more she learned, the less Sorilla felt she understood the situation, but this was an important piece of the puzzle. It was one that caused multiple other pieces to snap into place.

The Ross are undermining the Alliance from within.

*****

Sienele forced himself to maintain emotional control rather than give into his frustrated instincts and lash out at the Sirhan, Birchee. Birchee was a young member of the species from what he gathered, but for all that had proven himself to be quite adept at maintaining discipline under stress.

Perhaps too adept?

It was a point he had to consider. Resisting interrogation was not something that came naturally to most, it had to be trained. Intelligent and deft deflections of questions that didn’t give away any small tells that an interrogator could use against you were not easily played out, but that was precisely what he was seeing here.

An untrained person might simply refuse to answer questions, keeping quiet. That worked well for a short time, but it also confirmed that you were hiding something and kept the interest in place. Eventually, the time varied from species to species, but eventually the mind lost the ability to maintain that level of single tracked focus. Things slipped.

Deflecting, answering without imparting any real information, those were better techniques by far. They kept the interrogator off balance, trying to determine if there was anything of value in the statement, and thus provided the subject with more breathing room. If they were very lucky, it might even convince the interrogator that they were chasing the wrong Cora and simply let them go entirely.

That wasn’t going to happen this time. Sienele was quite certain that this Birchee knew more than he was letting on for one. He’d been following Lucian Sentinels in the pursuit of their duty for another, and by his manner of response Sienele was now certain he had training as the final point to lock his fate… but under other circumstances, it might have worked.

Finally, Sienele tired of the game and decided that as much as could be accomplished in the moment had been accomplished.

“Secure him,” He growled. “Remove this one to the ship. We will continue with the interrogation in less… hospitable environs.”

“Finally,” Kriss snarled, stepping forward.

A clatter behind them startled each of them, even the trained Lucians, who swung about to see the Colonel picking her helmet up off the ground.

“Sorry,” She said. “Slipped.”

“Stop! Get back here!”

Sienele spun back at the Administrator’s yelling, frustrated to see that Birchee had bolted and was weaving through the equipment even as the Lucians set off in pursuit.

“Alive!” Sienele yelled. “Take him Alive!”

The Lucians barely bothered to respond, but he really hadn’t expected anything different. Exasperated, he turned back to Colonel Aida, more than a little annoyed by the whole thing only to freeze as he saw her finishing mounting her helmet.

“I’ll track him too,” She said, leaping off before he could say anything.

Damn it. That human is going to be more trouble than she is worth, I just know it.

Sienele rather liked the Colonel, actually, on a personal level. However, he was all too aware of just how dangerous she could be, and likely would be. He quietly cursed Kriss for having brought her into the mission within the Alliance borders but couldn’t do so too terribly much since he had signed off on it himself.

He knew that she was gathering intelligence on the Alliance, of course. He’d be foolish not to… however, he was gathering intelligence on her and the humans through her actions. And… distasteful as it was, should she get a little too much information in her pursuits while inside Alliance borders… well, accidents were known to happen, and there would be none to gainsay the Alliance side of the story in that case.

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, of course, but the woman was pushing it.

*****

Sorilla was pushing it, and she knew it, but she wanted some time alone with the Sirhan if possible… or, at least, wanted to see where he ran.

Her implants were locked onto the little alien as she pursued from a distance, keeping the Lucians in sight as well. They were like the proverbial bulls in a china shop as they blew straight through anything between them and the object of their pursuit, only going over or around something if it was too big or solid for them to go through.

That was gaining them nothing in this little run, however, as the Sirhan was consistently edging away from them with superior understanding of the terrain he was running through and clear knowledge of the various shortcuts you’d have to work in the area to know.

She let him go, paying out the line so to speak, while working primarily to keep the little guy in sight instead of trying to catch him. In her suit she was faster than the Lucians’, so she probably could have made the capture, but turning him back over to them wasn’t a priority at the moment.

Sorilla watched the Sirhan slide under a gap in one of the big machines, coming out the other side with little lost momentum, and smiled tightly at the frustrated snarls from the pursuers as they skidded to a stop and had to redirect and go around. Kriss made a good run of it, accelerating instead of stopping and jumping up to climb over it, but that still lost him a decent chunk of time in the pursuit.

Sorilla herself jumped from machine to machine, gaging her leaps with a combination of practice and the kinetic software in her implanted processor to keep her from screwing up in the slightly different gravity than she had trained in.

In a short time both she and the Sirhan had left the Lucians well behind.

Sorilla could see the little alien shifting his strategy, his pace becoming more metered as he began to ease from the panicked sprint to something more sustainable. She dropped from the high ground then, ensuring that she would be out of sight, and increased her own pace as she used the mapping software in her suit and implants to run predictive analysis on his likely escape routes.

Time to throw the dice.

*****

Birchee looked behind him without slowing, careful to keep his breathing regulated as his musculature began to burn. The Alliance inspectors were no longer in sight, so he could slow enough to ensure he didn’t burn out his endurance, but he knew he could not yet relax. He wasn’t sure if he even should be running from them, but it was clear that they were not going to buy into his deflections, so running was the least bad of his options.

The Sirhan wasn’t sure how the Alliance had tripped onto the Operation, but it had happened. That much was clear from the questions the interrogator had demanded of him, but he did not know what to do with the information.

That would not be his duty to determine, however. He merely had to report it and determine if it were possible for him to be hidden or evacuated… otherwise, well, he was quite determined not to be interrogated so the final option would remain in the worst of scenarios.

After a while longer with no pursuit in sight, Birchee slowed as he determined his location and altered his direction accordingly as he chose a true destination beyond the simple desire to escape.

The Commander will know what I must do.

*****

He’s done running like a little rabbit, Sorilla noted as she stepped out from behind a fabricator and watched the fleeing alien make a deliberate turn that also saw a definite shift in his body language. Good. Now let’s see where you’re going.

*****

Portal Ship

We require options.

Destroy the planet. Do it now.

That is somewhat of an overreaction. She is a single entity.

She is entropy! No single entity has every been the direct cause of destruction for so many portal ships before or since! Destroy the planet!

Should we do so, the Operation will be entirely compromised, we would lose another portal ship, and the alliance would certainly retaliate against us, bringing the hated enemy with them.

Silence followed that statement, as it was the truth, and they all were entirely aware of it. The conclave fired ideas back and forth in a rapid-fire exchange of complex formulations of universal mathematics beyond the ken of even the geniuses of most species, but no immediate response was determined to be both effective and have acceptable outcomes.

This species is infuriatingly annoying.

That statement was greeted with general agreement. The conclave had, of course, encountered far more powerful species, the hated enemy for one, but none quite so irritating.

Of course, the conclave was aware that much of the irritation was in the fact that they dared not move on that irritation. There were far too many unknowns at play, and the hated enemy was waiting for them to make a mistake. All it would take was a single misstep and the end war would begin ahead of their preparations, putting everything at risk.

Combined with the unknown method by which the irritant species had eliminated an entire battle fleet, and the fact that someone… presumably the irritant species… had created and maintained a temporal fold loop for a significant portion of time during the brief clash between the species, and making a move against them was fraught with significant known and unknown risks.

And now entropy is working with the Alliance fools. This is unacceptable. Destroy the planet!

That would be foolish and likely would trigger the end war, which we are not prepared for. That is the entire point of this operation!

The conclave argued ferociously, trying to determine the available options that were left to them, but coming to little agreement on the subject.

All they knew for certain was that the current operation was at risk, and with it a great deal of their future plans.

*****

Orkhana

The little Sirhan stopped running, Sorilla noted as she followed while using her implanted and suit sensors to remain mostly out of sight.

It was a smart move. Walking brusquely now, like a man with an assignment rather than a rabbit fleeing for its life, the Sirhan blended in with the others coming and going through the production floor. He made his way to a door in the far wall, checking surreptitiously around him before slipping through it, leaving Sorilla with a bit of a conundrum as she also approached the door.

Now that he felt he’d evaded his pursuers, he was likely to relax, but if he were heading to report back to whoever was involved in this little infiltration scheme then he and their security protocols would come into play.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t following him in a jungle or any sort of natural terrain, and the unfamiliar industrial location put some major limitations on how well she could cover her own approach.

Without any real options open to her, however, Sorilla waited just a few handfuls of seconds before she cracked the door open and slipped a fiber-cam through to take a peek around. With no sign of the target on the other side, she pushed it the rest of the way and slipped through herself.

Sorilla found herself standing in what had to be an access corridor, a length of space designed to allow people to quickly move to any point on the floor without disrupting work. There were others there, but they were all moving as if they had somewhere to be and barely spent any time so much as glancing in her direction.

Security was not something that appeared to be of large concern to the majority of the workers.

She blinked, changing the settings of the liquid lens that floated over her eyeball, and brought her thermal FLIR mode of the corneal implants online.

There.

Footsteps glowed against the composite flooring, fresh and warm against the cool background. She moved off in pursuit, following the fading heat of her target.

*****

Birchee made his way through the access corridors, heading for the Sirhan lodgings. Few paid him any mind as he passed, and that was as he hoped it would be. If the inspectors had put out an alert, then the word would already have filtered down and made it quite obvious. For whatever reason they had not done so… yet.

The inspectors must be attempting to keep the infiltration quiet as well, He supposed.

It would be a scandal, he knew, if it came out that a major Alliance Authorized production facility had been infiltrated as this one had, but Birchee did not wish to wager the Operation on the inspectors preferring to quietly bury the fact rather than dig him and everyone else up from beneath their cover.

He spotted the first of the sentries as he approached, signaling the Sirhan subtly as he passed, and knew that a quiet alert would quickly spread through those in the know of the Operation.

He was met, of course, before he reached the lodgings.

“You have been tagged, an alert posted,” His supervisor said, coming out to meet him.

“Public?” Birchee asked, wincing.

“Not as of yet. We have time. Precious little, but some. Come.”

Birchee nodded and followed quickly.

They made their way into the lodging area, a bare minimum facility for workers to eat and sleep within, accounting for little else beyond some basic entertainment to keep them from becoming troublesome while they should be resting. Birchee ignored it as he passed, well used to the relative squalor of the facility.

Within the area controlled by those in the know of the Operation, things were cleaner and held to a more professional standard, though a casual observer would have a hard time seeing that for themselves. The mess was still there, but it was far less casual and haphazard and now served to hide what was really there rather than simply to exist for the sake of being a mess.

The Commander of the Sirhan Operation was waiting.

Birchee felt himself flush cold, but nodded respectfully and bowed as he came to a stop in front of the Commander.

“Speak.” The Commander ordered, not bothering with any pretense.

“Commander, I was assigned to monitor the inspectors in the hopes of learning what it was that they were looking for,” Birchee responded.

“You were not supposed to be apprehended.”

“I have no excuses,” Birchee said simply. “I did not believe they had seen me. I was incorrect.”

“What did they ask?”

“The inspector is aware of the unmarked production of weapons, and they have traced them back to this facility,” Birchee said. “That was evident from the questions, but I do not believe that they are fully aware of the Operation.”

“That is a poor consolation even if you are correct,” The Commander grumbled. “And still leaves me with the issue of what to do with you.”

Birchee nodded slowly, fortifying himself.

“Commander, if you deem it will aid the Operation, I will allow them to relocate me… somewhere away from here,” He offered. “I will not be taken.”

“Tempting. However, I will consult with the highest before we make such a plan,” The commander told him. “In the meantime…”

“Commander! Sentries have spotted someone approaching!”

Birchee and the Commander both swiveled. Birchee felt his body chill in fear.

“I was not followed, I swear!”

“It would appear that you are not correct concerning that,” The Commander said. “Optics.”

A screen lit up on the wall, showing the corridors outside the habitat. It took some searching before Birchee pointed.

“There, sector Cora Mun.”

The Commander gestured and that image took the place of the composite one, enlarged to the entire wall. They watched in silence as a figure appeared on the optics, at times quite difficult to spot against the neutral background of the shadowed corridors, but clearly moving in their direction.

“I am not familiar with this species,” The Commander said after a moment. “Find the entry in the Alliance database.”

“Working on it, Commander, I am not finding anything!”

Birchee shook slightly. “An unregistered Alliance species?”

“Possibly. An Operations species, perhaps,” The Commander said. “Kept dark intentionally to prevent people like us from learning about them. It is difficult to say, however, it might be one of the blue ones… though it seems short for one of them, and tall for one of the thugs…”

“Too thin as well,” Birchee offered.

“Indeed. Troublesome. This one clearly followed you and will be upon us shortly,” The Commander said. “We must assume that our location has been compromised. Destroy the equipment, burn any identifiers, we’re leaving.”

“Yes Commander!”

*****

Sorilla paused in her approach, noting that the corridors had emptied sometime in the previous few seconds and there was no sign of anyone in any direction.

That would not be a good sign. Damn, I’m made.

She pressed forward anyway. There was too much to be won to give up quite so easily, but a moment later another bit of information became apparent.

Carbon monoxide, carbon particulates, other traces… someone’s burning hydrocarbon composites. Shit.

There was no good reason for anyone to be burning things in a facility like this, well not good for her at least. Sorilla threw caution away and sprinted forward, spotting a sealed door with wisps of smoke curling through the cracks along the floor, walls, and ceiling. She didn’t pause, hitting the door at a full run and blowing through it into the next area, finding herself in the midst of a fire.

“Shit, shit, shit!”

The fire was consuming everything in the area, including what looked like technical gear and sheets that were akin to flimsy screens. She knocked some of it to the ground and proceeded to stomp out the flames on anything she could, with an eye to anything that looked like it might possibly prove valuable. Unfortunately, there wasn’t nearly enough time to get it all.

This place should have built-in fire suppression. No one would be stupid enough to build something this complex and not put that in, Sorilla cast about, her implants locating likely gas emitters in the ceiling, but they had clearly been disabled as nothing was pouring out.

Giving it up for a bad end, she gathered up what little she’d been able to save and left the inferno behind.

Professional operation, Sorilla thought grimly, examining her score as she walked.

Pieces that were too badly-burned despite her intervention she tossed aside, but a few chunks were partially intact. They were standard Alliance tech for the most part, but the encryption she was reading was most assuredly not.

It wasn’t anything she knew of, in fact, but it was somehow… familiar.

What is this? It’s not even close to Alliance encryption… in fact, the closest thing I’ve seen to this was on…

Sorilla trailed off as she recalled where she’d previous seen the patterns she was now examining.

It’s Ross encoding. We were never able to crack it during the war, but… I don’t think we were going about it the right way.

The Ross, she was certain, didn’t see the universe the same way as most species. They might have eyes and ears, the ability to touch and taste, but those senses were not how they viewed the universe as their primary window to creation.

Gravity. Mass. Those were the bread and butter of the Ross. Sorilla had begun to get an inkling of that on Child of God. She knew that Ross technology was littered with interfaces that you needed to be able to sense and interact with gravity to properly utilize. Something no other species could do naturally, so far as she knew… but it was something that she, herself, could manage.

Not naturally, no, but she could do it nonetheless.

However, that ability to use an interface didn’t translate into being able to read their coding.

It might, however, give her a way forward.

Sorilla copied up the encrypted documents, storing them in her own implant digital storage, then casually tossed them back into the flames.

Grudgingly she tipped her hat to the infiltrators.

They ran a tight operation, Sorilla thought with some irritated respect. I didn’t even see the sentry that spotted me.

She would remember that.

Fool me once, Sorilla thought with some amusement as she began to walk back up the corridor, already putting together the story she would tell Sienele and the others. Next time, friends. Next time.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Five

Orkhana

Sienele resisted the urge to fidget as he waited for news of their missing ‘guest’. The Lucians had returned from their attempts to recapture the Sirhan, somewhat ruefully admitting to having been unable to keep the individual from escaping, and now only the colonel was unaccounted for.

An unaffiliated individual, recently an enemy combatant no less, is running loose around one of the Alliance’s primary supply facilities. I am uncertain how it could get worse, and afraid to ask because someone might take it as a challenge if I did.

It was not… yet… a disaster, but it was certainly approaching the realm of such things.

“You should relax,” Kriss rumbled from beside him. “She will return.”

“I am quite confident that she will. What I am concerned about is what she will get up to in the meantime,” Sienele countered quite crossly.

“You worry too much. There is nothing here that could make her any more dangerous than she was.”

“That is not a comfort.”

Kriss laughed, amused by it all. “You lack the drive to fight, my friend, to see yourself challenged. You spend too much time trying to avoid challenging yourself for it to be healthy.”

“The challenge I seek is preventing such challenges from becoming an issue.”

Kriss snorted, shaking his head. “Might as well spit in the air to turn back a storm. The universe supplies challenges for us all. Trying to stop that is like trying to stop the galaxy from turning. Face what comes and be happy for the chance to prove yourself, worrying about what might be in the face of what is? That is the way of children and fools. I count you as neither.”

Sienele half turned to focus his full gaze on the Lucian.

“Why Kriss,” He said after a moment. “That was positively the most philosophical thing I have ever heard from the throat of a Lucian. Going soft in your recent days, are we?”

The Lucian growled, tapping the handle of the captured Terran knife he wore on his belt. “Try me for how soft I am and we’ll see? No? I did not think so.”

Sienele was about to retort when Kriss cut him off with a casual nod of his head.

“Our time of wordplay is ended, here she comes.”

Sienele twisted back to see that the Colonel was indeed returning, casually walking their way. Her helmet had been returned to the snap that held it to her hip, her expression serious for humans he believed. It was the smell that caught his immediate focus, however, and Sienele sniffed at the air as she came to a stop in front of him.

“It’s smoke,” She said in Alliance Standard. “You’ve got a nice little infiltration cell in the facility. Very professional, tight discipline, proactive leadership. They spotted me coming and burned out their gear before abandoning their base of operations. You’ll probably be getting reports of the fire anytime now.”

Sienele huffed. “You should not be chasing off on your own. This is Alliance territory, and you are a soldier of a non-allied polity.”

She just waved him off. “Former soldier, please. I retired even before the last mission. At this point I expect that SOLCOM has probably burned my access to the ground. They’d be crazy to leave any of it in place after I left with you lot.”

“That is immaterial to us, however much it might be of consequence to you,” Sienele snapped. “Do not do this again.”

The Colonel just inclined her head slightly. “Let the bad guys get away. You got it. Anything else?”

Kriss laughed, causing another flare of irritation to burn through him, but there was little Sienele could do about either at just that moment.

“Remember your place,” He said instead. “Do not wander off alone again.”

*****

That’s the entire talking down? Sorilla thought as the alien spymaster chastised her and gave her her marching orders. Not good.

She’d expected more, actually. Threats, promises of imprisonment, an interrogation. Something.

She was, after all, as he had implied. As far as the Alliance was concerned, she was, if not an enemy combatant, then very little removed from one. Keeping her in check was, or should be, an absolute priority. Finding out what she’d acquired in the time she’d been out of his scrutiny, that had to be one of the uppermost things in Sienele’s mind.

If it wasn’t at this particular moment in time, she had to assume it was because the spymaster didn’t intend for her to escape his control before he did know… if at all.

That was not… exactly a surprise, but it was troublesome.

Sorilla began shifting her plans around, moving up the ones that required her to be a little more… proactive… when it came time to take her leave of the Alliance.

She wanted to see this mission through to the end, felt it was important enough to risk her life, but she wasn’t suicidal after all, despite what many might believe.

“Understood,” She said aloud. “In the meantime, I did get some information from the fire. The infiltration cell had what appeared to be Ross tech in the possession.”

Kriss and Sienele exchanged glances at that.

“Not unheard of,” Kriss said thoughtfully. “But concerning.”

“Indeed. The Ross do occasionally sell their technology, but the costs are invariably high, and the access required to even get on the purchasing lists is quite significant.”

Sorilla highly doubted that the cell had either paid for the kit they had or had been on any purchasing lists. If the Ross hadn’t handed it to them personally, she’d wager good money that they’d done so through cut outs.

It wasn’t time to let the Alliance in on that particular theory of hers, however.

Allies of the moment they may yet be, but Sorilla was well experienced enough to know that could change at a moment’s notice and, retired or not, there was never any doubt as to where her loyalties remained.

“If they’re that well funded, then you have a big problem,” She said instead. “When were the Sirhan brought into the Alliance?”

“Not long ago,” Kriss said simply. “By your counter, I believe it was less than ten terran years.”

Sorilla nodded thoughtfully, wondering for a brief moment where they’d gotten the length of a year. But considering all the equipment and people they’d captured during the war it really wasn’t much of a surprise that they had.

“Not long enough to entrench themselves then.”

“No,” Sienele said darkly. “They were clearly backed… and I do not believe any of us have any true doubt as to who those backers are.”

Well, I never did believe him to be stupid, Sorilla thought with some personal amusement. The situation, at least the surface situation, within the alliance was fairly obvious. The Ross was clearly connected to these shadow operations within the Alliance. However, that was blurred a little in her opinion by the fact that they had used it to mount other operations against other groups that were hostile to the Alliance.

She expected that Sienele was currently thinking along the lines of a rogue black ops unit working within the Alliance to further their own idea of Galactic Security.

That would be bad enough, if it was what was happening, but Sorilla no longer ascribed to quite that notion.

The Ross were advancing their own interests, and likely working to undermine the Alliance just as much as they were any other group such as SOLCOM. That made her current situation a lot less stable than she might have hoped, unfortunately. A rogue group that was still working in the interests of the Alliance was something that would be embarrassing for the Alliance to admit to, but only that.

An internal group actively working to bring down the Alliance?

That was a completely different ball game.

Sorilla was certain of only one thing in that regard - she would need to play this very carefully if she wanted to get out the side alive and free to return home. Granted, those were secondary priorities compared to giving the Ross a true and decisive kick in the proverbial balls, but it was a very close secondary priority to her mind.

“If they’re running an operation this dark right under the noses of the local administrators,” She said slowly. “Then they’re running others in other secure locations as well.”

Sienele looked unhappy at the very mention of that, but he grudgingly nodded after a moment’s thought.

“This is going to become… irritating.”

*****

Portal Ship

The subject infiltration species has reported back.

The conclave paused, immediately accessing the referenced report, and consuming it before anyone else said anything.

Entropy again. Destroy that world. End this farce, do it now.

That would be presumptuous, and just as destructive to our cause as even the worse Entropy might achieve there.

Concern is not with what entropy achieves there, but what comes later.

The world is not worth the results of destroying it. Cease your idiocy and focus on solutions.

The obstinate member of the Conclave fell back, his formulations silenced in the swirling mix of space time between the remaining individuals. Others refocused on the issue at hand.

The alliance is coming closer to the operation. However, it is unlikely that they understand the scope. It will appear to them to be nothing more than the games they play with one another.

Agreed. Let them burn this operation. Grant them the minor victory, with the sacrifice of a few of our agents we can satisfy them while maintaining operational stance across the spacetime field and only suffer a minor setback.

The conclave’s formulations became cluttered, messy for a time, before cleaning up again in agreement.

Very well. We will instruct the infiltration species to do such.

Agreed.

*****

Hayden’s World, Subcontinent

The electric flitter landed softly on the large mil-spec pad, dwarfed by the assault shuttle that was sitting there as well. Gil Hayden always felt small when he came to visit the Aidas, either one of them. The Sarge, as every person on the planet would always call her, didn’t believe in doing things halfway. When she built something, it was built to last, and it was built to handle far more than she ever expected to need it to handle.

In the colony a flitter pad was a quarter the size, built from aluminum and composite mesh, spaced out to handle double the lifting capacity of any of the Colony’s private or public flitters and not one bit more.

Here on the Sarge’s land grant?

Well, he wasn’t certain the pad could land an actual starship, but Gil wasn’t one to bet against it either.

“Ho, the pad!”

Gil turned, smiling as he saw Cassius Aida waving as he climbed the small hill to the pad and waved back.

“Welcome back, Gil,” Cassius said cheerfully. “What brings you this far from the colony?”

“Just received an official request from SOLCOM you might want to have a look at,” Gil said, retrieving the pad from his jacket and handing it over.

Cassius accepted it easily and glanced the request over quickly before nodding, “Finally making it official then?”

“They have,” Gil nodded. “The request is for the Colony to expropriate the tether site and the surrounding land for SOLCOM’s use with an eye to creating an embassy location.”

“Hold on,” Cassius said, tapping a few commands into the pad, access the local network and pulling down files, before handing it back over. “Our counteroffer.”

Gil smiled, checking it over. “Ninety-Nine-year lease on the tether site, as well as Embassy buildings, the remaining to be made available for rent at your discretion?”

“Sorilla’s,” Cassius corrected mildly.

“Of course,” Gil accepted that point, it wasn’t one he wanted to argue with anyway, so it was an easy concession to make.

Since Sorilla had opted to remain in Alliance territory there had been some strictly unofficial shifts in her legal status within the Solar Commonwealth. Nothing untoward just yet, but the rumblings among some in the circles Gil traveled boded ill for the lady in his opinion.

He hoped she made it home soon and was able to solidly put an end to that particular line of bullshit.

For the moment, what he could do was help position her land grant for the things she had already set in motion.

“I will be sure this is put under the noses,” Gil promised. “Along with a fairly strong hint that the Colony is inclined to side with your daughter on this. That would be enough, normally, but…”

Cassius grunted, waving off the apologetic tone. “I understand, and so would she. Sorilla doesn’t make decisions without considering their consequences and being willing to deal with the outcome.”

“That is something the colony is well aware of,” Gil smiled. “We have her back, Cash, I promise.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Six

Orkhana

The Commanding officer of the Sirhan infiltration operation stared at the feed from his secondary observation location, a small section of the facility that they’d managed to carve out of the security grid and redirect feeds to as a fallback.

The Alliance was a complacent Bureaucracy at all levels, rarely really caring if the little details were correct so long as the broad strokes that affected the upper tiers of their society continued to draw the path they wished to see. It was not an unusual thing, he knew. Back home was much the same most of the time, and half the rest it was much worse.

Knowing that fact, however, was what allowed for the infiltration operation to go ahead in the first place.

Their Saviors had observed the Alliance for a great deal of time, learning the patterns and the little details that could be manipulated without also altering the broad strokes. That information had been absolutely invaluable to the operation.

Now, however, it was threated, and he wasn’t honestly certain how that had come about.

What brought the inspectors here? They must have located some of the unmarked and untracked weapons. But what we have been provided should still have kept them from following the trail back here. There should not have been a trail to follow.

Unfortunately, Highest had not been able to get a coherent response from the Saviors.

Sadly, that was not an entirely unexpected situation. The Saviors were not… easy to communicate with. Only the very best of Sirhan’s scientists, in some of the most esoteric of disciplines, were able to make much from the communications they did get and even they admitted freely that they were certain that a great deal of the meaning in each communique had been stripped out by the translation.

Still, they continued as they must, and that was what brought him here.

Sitting in a dark room, watching a lethal threat to his operation through pilfered security feeds.

A far cry from the days of being his world’s top military commander before he failed at his duty.

*****

They’re smart, they’re entrenched, and they have a plan they’re working toward, Sorilla thought as she let Sienele and the others go about their business, uncaring as to the immediate outcome short of them actually finding the targets, which she really did not expect.

The Sirhan were working for the Ross, of that she was certain. Perhaps directly, perhaps through cut-outs, that much didn’t matter. What mattered was that the Ross were defining the mission objectives, and that was problematic because no one she knew of had ever been able to figure out what in the hell passed for a thought in the brains of those twisted little greys.

The Ross were enigma incarnate, doing things that made no sense and not doing things that any sane species wouldn’t have even had to think about. They clearly had a goal, one that they were working toward, but ultimately it wasn’t a goal that made any sense to observers… not human, nor even Alliance observers as best she could tell.

Their closest allies, if they had any, couldn’t predict what the hell the Ross were thinking, what chance did anyone else have?

Sorilla was examining the data she’d pulled from the now destroyed tech the Sirhan had attempted to burn before she got to it, examining the encryption with a dark eye as she threw her entire suite of decryption software at it, getting nothing.

It wasn’t a code according to her gear, not that it couldn’t be cracked… but it wasn’t a code.

Then what the hell is it?

Sorilla rubbed her hand along her chin, staring at the numbers that flashed past her eyes on the corneal implants.

They… couldn’t be transmitting entirely in the open, could they?

That was insane, but… it was the Ross.

Ok, so what if it’s not encrypted at all? What is it then? Knowing what I know of the Ross, it’s probably advanced spacetime formulas, manipulated in a way that means something to them. But…

Sorilla stopped, a thought crossing her mind.

It was a stupid thought.

Too stupid… yet…

Proc, she subvocalized, eyes flicking to keep an eye on Sienele and the Lucians. None of them were paying any attention to her as she sat there quietly. Good. Pattern scan, look for…range differentials.

The processors in her chest, head, and armor all got to work, scanning through the data for anything that looked like location coordinates that could be converted to ranging data. It didn’t take long for the first hit.

Bingo. Ok, those are spacetime coordinates… but I can’t make heads or tails of the rest… but what if I group each of those together, run the sim through a space time algorithm and project it in three dimensions…

She was barely able to keep from flinching as her eyes were assaulted by a physically impossible construct. She killed the projection as quickly as she could and fought to keep from retching in response.

Ok, let’s not do that again.

Still, the projection had seemed to be coherent as best she could tell, rather that just some chaotic mess of conflicting data. She didn’t know if that was a promising thing or not, but Sorilla opted to take it as such.

She pensively considered the options, but the only thing she could think of was something she was very much not looking forward to trying.

After a few moments, some deep breaths, and a deep seated attempt to steel herself, Sorilla made her decision.

Proc, adjust for special reference points and… She grimaced, play the data through my accelerometers.

The computers seemed to stutter for a moment, processing the order and preparing to make it happen, giving Sorilla just enough time to truly regret every moment of her life that led to giving that order, and then the universe heaved around her.

*****

Sienele snuck a glance over to the Colonel, where the human was still sitting quietly and not causing any trouble. Irritatingly, that made him more concerned about what she was up to rather than less. He looked away again before she could notice him and leaned quietly in to where Kriss was standing.

“Keep a tighter leash on your pet,” He growled. “She was out of our observation for too long. We have no way of knowing what she was up to, but with her skill set any time is too long.”

Kriss merely leveled an unimpressed stare at her. “Oh please. She is hardly anyone’s pet, as you are most certainly aware, but even her skills would hardly amount to much in the circumstances. There are limits to what an individual can accomplish, even were she Lucian she could not have caused much damage.”

“But she is not Lucian,” Sienele hissed. “A Lucian would think in terms of sabotage, inflicting maximum damage on us directly, now. She won’t. She will be looking for ways to plant seeds, seeds that may take a year, or a decade, or a century to blossom… but when they do, will inflict damage far in excess of what anyone could accomplish in the moment. I know you like her, find her interesting and a challenge… I share the sentiment, but keep this in mind… if she is determined to have learned too much, or the wrong things, she cannot be allowed to leave Alliance space alive.”

Kriss had no response to that, not immediately at least. Sienele almost thought that he’d gotten the message.

“Do you think they might assign the task of ending her to me?” Kriss asked, his tone slightly excited.

Sienele couldn’t quite muffle the groan he let out.

Lucians.

*****

It was… well, eye opening wasn’t the right word since she wasn’t using her eyes, but the phrase did convey the emotions she felt at that moment better than anything else. Sorilla could feel the message as it propagated through spacetime, read the subtle nuances that whirled like eddies in a brooke.

It was communication, but it wasn’t language.

There was raw intent in the data, combined with orders and instructions and… background data on the facility she was standing in. Sorilla twitched and an image of the facility in four dimensions appeared in her mind.

Not merely the blueprints or the layout of the massive production facility, but everything about it as it existed through time. She could see them breaking ground, the concrete… or, whatever it was, being laid down. Floors being constructed, machines being installed. Everything, all at once and yet broken into slices at the same time.

Sorilla was nearly sent reeling when the program finished running the data, slumping back against the wall she was relying on to keep herself from falling over as she stared, wide eyed, at nothing, her mind reeling.

That’s how they communicate. It’s not math, it’s… mass. They talk in spacetime, how mass deforms and distorts the universe.

It explained everything, and nothing, all at the same time. Much, she supposed, the way the communication had shown her everything and nothing. The Ross were the most unique life form ever discovered, she suspected by anyone, Alliance or Terran… but no one realized it because no one could even approach just how unique they were.

She knew, though, or at least knew enough to have a sliver of a glimpse of the truth.

The problem with that was… what did she do with it? What could she do with it?

The Ross were running their own operations, certainly ones that were not to the benefit of the Alliance, but she doubted that they would leave human operations alone in the future either. They were a surprisingly one tracked species, given how multi-tracked their understanding of spacetime had to be, but…

It came down to their motivations. She might have gained a glimpse of how the Ross saw and interacted with the universe, but it didn’t solve why they did things the way they did. That was the missing piece, possibly the last missing pieces that she needed to drop all the rest of the confused chaotic mess into a coherent picture.

Too bad learning their motivations was far easier to talk about than to actually accomplish.

Sorilla took a break, steadying herself, and pushed off the wall to her feet.

It’s time to get back to work.

*****

The Commander twisted intently, staring at the screen.

“Something just happened. What was that?”

“Commander? I do not understand, nothing happened.”

He ignored the confusion of his subordinate, focusing instead on the alien on the screen. He’d seen enough in his life to know when someone had made a decision, reached some sort of understanding. The alien’s entire demeanor had just changed, like some enormous weight had been lifted or…

No, not lifted… shifted.

Something had just changed. He could see it in the way the alien moved, but there was simply not enough information to tell him just what that was. Whatever it was, however, he could tell that the alien was now in motion, with a mission.

That was not something that the Commander expected to bode well for his operation.

Damn it. We did not need any more complications.

“Jirat,” He snapped.

“Yes Commander!”

“Send to the Saviors. I believe the operation to be entirely compromised. Request instructions.”

“Yes Commander.”

That was it. The call had been made, now it was up the Highest to make the final decision.

In the meantime, preparations had to be made.

*****

Sienele spotted the motion and turned back to see the Colonel approaching.

“Yes, Colonel?”

“I’m getting bored,” She told him, the expression making him double back to look at her more intensely. “If you don’t want me running around on my own, mind if I join one of the inspection teams?”

Sienele stared for a moment, mind racing as he considered both the request and the tone in which it had been delivered. There was something there in the way she spoke that he could not quite place. Reading any race’s expressions was difficult at the best of times, unfortunately, and the humans were not yet a fully studied species.

“I believe you have been running around quite enough already,” He countered.

Kriss snorted. “I’ll go with her, if you like.”

Sienele skewered the unrepentant Lucian with a gaze, and was entirely ignored of course.

Scoffing, he gave it up. “Fine. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

“Not until I receive more interesting orders at least,” Kriss said, toothily grinning.

Sienele tiredly waved them both off. He didn’t have the time, nor the patience, for that nonsense at the moment. There were far too many other draws on his focus, sapping his energy. Better to let the two biggest pains in his unmentionables run off and play on their own. Who knows, they might even manage to stir up the little infiltration issue that needed to be dealt with.

Kriss chuckled in a low gravely tone and gestured to the Colonel, allowing her to take the lead as he followed along behind.

Sienele watched them go, a fleeting thought entering his mind that it would solve at least a few of his headaches if the Lucian just put that captured knife through her armor then and there. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, he knew that would not happen. It was too sane a move for the Lucian.

No, if Kriss killed the Colonel, Sienele knew it would be under orders, face to face, and likely with a great deal of injuries on both of them before it was done.

Lucians.

*****

“Well now, Colonel,” Kriss said, voice dripping with what Sorilla recognized as amusement. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

“In mind? I’m just bored, felt like stretching my legs,” She countered.

The Lucian Sentinel snorted. “Tell that to someone else. I can read you well enough to tell that, you’re moving like you just finished a mission brief. What did you figure out?”

She chuckled softly. “I suppose I am. I’ll make a note to be more careful in the future. I might have an idea of where the enemy is located. Maybe.”

“And how, pray tell, would you know that? How could you?” Kriss came up abreast of her and turned his head enough to pin her with a stare.

Sorilla shrugged. “I was able to see some things in the fire before they were destroyed.”

She wasn’t even lying, really, just not mentioning that she’d taken the time to properly scan them before throwing them back into the flames.

“Oh? Interesting. And you didn’t mention it to our dear spymaster?” Kriss asked, his tone almost… teasing.

Sorilla found it disconcerting to hear such a tone from the stocky killing machine at her side, but she easily shrugged it off.

“I wasn’t sure what I had seen, to be honest,” she said, again telling the straight truth though without some rather important context. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since.”

“And what was it that you saw then?”

“A map, of sorts, of this facility,” She replied.

Kriss was silent for a moment. “You should be careful of what things you happen to… see.”

Sorilla paused in her step, turning to look over and down at the shorter and stockier alien.

“Should I now?” she asked softly.

Kriss gestured in the affirmative, his tone becoming serious and guarded. “It is not beyond possibility that orders might be given to ensure you do not return to human controlled space. You must be aware.”

“Orders given… to you?”

“Possible, but unlikely,” Kriss said, sounding disappointed. “No, more likely they would want an accident rather than an assassination or a proper warrior’s death. If it were to come to me, I would likely not bother to tell you this. It would be a great pleasure to once more meet you in combat, Colonel.”

Sorilla nodded, turning back, and starting to walk again. “Understood. Between us, while I’m not so eager for it as you… if we must, it would be an honor indeed.”

Kriss just grinned.

“For now, however, we have a mission.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Seven

Portal Ship

The infiltration subjects have declared the local operation compromised beyond recovery. Do any here object to this classification?

The conclave mulled the report briefly, but none spoke against it.

Very well. Orders have now been initiated to eliminate all traces that might provide a route for the operation to be tracked back to our involvement.

With entropy involved, do any truly believe that they are unaware?

The speaker caused a minor commotion when entering the discussion, but it quickly calmed down.

Of course not, the first speaker responded condescendingly. However, the Alliance are slow to react to all but the most blatant of provocation. They are corrupt and corruptible. It will not be difficult to… encourage them to forgo a direct confrontation.

The conclave agreed with that statement easily enough. The Alliance did not want a conflict with the People and that made them highly amenable to seeking alternate avenues, even when presented with direct evidence of a conflict being inevitable.

This was to their advantage, and it was a factor that the Conclave both planned for and depended on in their ongoing operations against the Enemy.

The irony of it was not lost on even their sensibilities.

Both the People and the Enemy were members of the Alliance. Allies.

It was a joke, of course, as few of the races of the Alliance were truly allied. They banded together specifically because of threats like the People and the Enemy. Existential threats that they believed they could overcome by uniting.

Foolish.

Enemies do not stop being enemies merely because a document claims they do. They merely become more dangerous as they slip beneath the notice of the majority. That was a mistake the People would not make.

The Enemy had to be destroyed.

If it cost every single inhabited world that rested between them, so be it.

End the operation, withdraw the appropriate people through the portal ship in the area and then scuttle it.

*****

Orkhana

Kriss allowed the Colonel to take the lead, watching with thinly disguised interest and amusement as she navigated the facility with an ease that she should not have managed to acquire. He didn’t care what sort of maps she’d seen. It was quite clear, of course, that the woman was hiding information from him. That was fine. He was hiding plenty from her.

They were honest in what mattered.

Both of them would take pleasure in challenging themselves against each other, even if she was less eager about it than he. Both were intent on dismantling the Ross conspiracy that had clearly infiltrated far too deeply into Alliance organization, albeit for their own reasons.

And both knew that if and when the day came, they’d end the other with only a tinge of regret.

For Kriss, that was all he needed to be content with the situation. He doubted Sienele would agree, but spymasters were not warriors for a reason, just as he was not a spymaster for a reason.

Still, it did arouse his curiosity.

“You seem to be quite familiar with the facility and the means of traversing it.”

“I told you,” She said softly…

“Yes, a map,” Kris cut her off. “So you said. You should be less comfortable with your navigation if you want me to believe that you saw a map and now are quite this familiar with the facility.”

“I didn’t see the map,” She said. “I recorded it.”

Kriss was silent for a moment as he considered that. Having a record of the map in the computers he knew she carried, both within her body and in the armor she wore, that would explain much he supposed. He was not entirely certain that he believed it explained it all, but for the moment he would accept the explanation.

“Very well,” he said aloud. “Where are we going then?”

“A currently unused storeroom that has been marked as unusable due to some type of environmental hazard,” The Colonel responded. “I believe that the hazard is likely false.”

“A likely hiding place, are we to take on the conspiracists alone with only our sidearms?” Kriss asked, a hint of his eagerness filtering through to his tone.

“Perhaps,” She sounded amused. He didn’t blame her. “We’ll decide once we’ve seen the forces on site.”

“Of course.”

Kriss noted that they had taken another turn as they spoke, and something about that seemed off, but this time he just let it go. She was keeping her secrets. He was keeping his. At some point he hoped to determine which of them had the more impressive secrets, but he would settle for finding out which had the most impressive martial skill.

*****

Sorilla spoke to Kriss as she moved, but it was difficult for her to manage as she was currently running the Ross map through her accelerometers even as they moved. It was a heady sensation, like the facilities layout was… part of her body?

Proprioception, if she remembered the term correctly. She felt connected to everything in the facility as she moved and could easily point to any given piece of machinery or room with the same automatic reflex as she could if asked to point to her own toes.

She couldn’t manipulate the facility, of course. It was, unfortunately, a passive presentation of the map, but it was an amazing feeling, nonetheless.

The rooms she was navigating them to were as she told Kriss, a series of storerooms that had been sealed off a long while earlier due to a chemical leak. With no real demand for them to be reopened, the Alliance had apparently forgone the cost of cleaning them up, though she had little doubt that there had been some subtle pushes at various levels of the bureaucracy to ensure that happened since she was reasonably certain that the leak never happened in the first place.

It was on the documentation for the facility, but it never once showed up in the four dimensions of the map she was experiencing. The chemical spill just didn’t exist.

Possibly the map was faulty, or she was interpreting it wrong, but Sorilla didn’t think either was true, and so they were on their way… though not through the most direct route, so it would take a little while since she was deliberately avoiding the security feeds. If the infiltrators had gotten deep enough to fabricate a fake chemical spill, she was betting that they’d gotten the feeds as well… and likely much earlier.

She would have.

Really need to get ahold of whatever scanner or software the Ross used to make this map, Sorilla determined.

It was absolutely incredible to experience a location rather than merely observe a depiction of it. If the technology could be adapted for use by SOLCOM, she had no doubt that it would vastly improve combat efficiency, and that was ignoring the obvious applications for pilots and other occupations where such situational awareness was at a premium.

For the moment, though, she was happy to have discovered what she had.

As they got closer to the objective, however, Sorilla slowed and held up a closed fist. Kriss came to a halt automatically, shooting her a questioning look.

“From here forth, we cannot avoid the cameras,” She said simply, opting for the simple truth.

The sharp look he gave her spoke volumes, but she said nothing more and neither did he.

“Very well then” Kriss said with a grin that shifted his entire demeanor. “The fun begins now.”

“Precisely.”

*****

“Commander!”

The Commander paused in his preparations, turning to the aide who had rushed into his office. “What is it?”

“A problem, or precisely, two of them. The unknown alien and one of the Alliance shock troops are approaching.”

“Approaching? Here?” He asked worriedly.

If the enemy knew they were in this location, why send only two combatants? That made no sense at all. A squad would be short handed for this type of operation, two was entirely ludicrously small.

“Yes.”

“Alert all sentries, look for flanking teams,” He ordered. “They wouldn’t send in a pair of operatives for something like this. Find the rest!”

“Yes commander!” The aide rushed out of the office.

The Commander sighed, packing away the last of his personal documentation and closing the case before he crossed the room and plucked a holstered sidearm from where it hung on the wall, strapping the harness to his chest before drawing the weapon and checking its status.

It was lethal and ready so he returned it to the holster before grabbing a combat tunic and stepping out of the room.

“Send a packer to clear my office,” He ordered those in the next room. “I’ll be in the security section.”

“Yes Commander!”

He walked brusquely through the hive of activity. The team had received orders to withdraw and were preparing to do so while leaving the least evidence of their actual activities and presence as possible. Some traces would be impossible to scour, of course, but so long as they left enough confusion it would be fine. The Alliance was a weak polity, most times unable to rouse itself to care about anything because the member races and citizens in general spent most of their time arguing over what they should care about in the first place.

It was a powerful giant, but a slumbering one much of the time, and a stupid and fat one almost for the entire rest. Occasionally, very occasionally, however, the Alliance had shown itself to be capable of more. The giant could fully wake and become aware. That was something he fully intended to prevent if he possibly could.

“Commander in Chambers!”

“Be as you were,” He ordered, ignoring the announcement beyond that simple statement as he walked into the security room.

The feeds were up, the main one focused already on the subjects that brought him there.

The unknown alien was there, walking side by side with one of the Alliance thugs. He believed it was the second in command of the investigation or inspection team.

Interesting.

The unknown had to be well connected for him to be their partner in such an enterprise as this, he realized, but it still made no sense. Even less sense now that he saw that the thug was so highly ranked.

What are they doing?

Beyond the obvious, of course, which was apparently walking right at him and his men as though they had not a single care in the world.

They have to know we’re here, don’t they? Or are they intent on inspecting the ‘chemical spill’?

That… didn’t sound right. It also didn’t matter, aside from providing his men with an element of surprise if it were true. The pair were going to have to be dealt with.

“I want three… no, two security teams in position to ambush them,” He ordered. “All other active teams are to deploy to the periphery and watch for flanking units. Do we have the inspection team under surveillance?”

“Yes Commander,” A security officer pointed to a small display.

The inspection team was indeed still there, all accounted for, and nowhere near the base of operations.

“They must have come with backup we missed,” He decided. “Find them.”

“Yes Commander!”

*****

“You are aware,” Kriss said in a dry tone that rang of amusement to Sorilla’s ears, “That we are violating every procedure in the Sentinels charter? This is clearly an all-hands operation, not one for a two-man strike team.”

“That’s in the Sentinels charter?” Sorilla asked incredulously, turning to look at him, “Really?”

Kriss shrugged, “Lucians were not permitted to write the charter, sadly. It was compiled by five other races as a requirement for our taking up the role we coveted within the Alliance.”

“Ah,” She said, as though that explained everything…

Which, frankly, it did. The Lucian’s, their Sentinels at least, were not the sort to worry overly about rules. They rather enjoyed their jobs too much for that, elevating it to an art form more than a task to be accomplished.

Sorilla understood the mindset a little, but only a little. She had grown fond of her Joan Wayne persona over the years, but if she were honest with herself, she knew it was neither good for mission operations, nor was it exactly healthy for her… mentally or physically.

In any case, that part of her life was almost over.

One way, or the other.

“Well,” She said after a moment’s consideration, “We’re not conducting an assault here, we’re just investigating a section of the facility that is listed as empty. Not our fault if the Administration here was so clearly wrong about that.”

Kriss chuckled, “Indeed. I like that.”

“Somehow I had a feeling you would.”

“Very well, let us… investigate.”

Sorilla nodded, “Let’s.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Eight

Orkhana

“Here they come, they’re almost inside the ambush point. Commander?”

The Commander nodded slowly, “Weapons cleared. When they hit the target point… eliminate them.”

The final order given, the Commander cleared his own sidearm from the holster and began making his way forward.

“Commander… where are you going?”

He didn’t pause as his Second questioned him. “To the front.”

“That would seem to be… ill advised, Commander.”

“There is nothing more I can do here. I may as well be somewhere of use. See to it that the remains of the unit are evacuated according to the plan.”

“Commander! Wait!”

He ignored his second, leaving the other man behind as he made clear he wouldn’t be deterred. He had failed his people before. This task was an opportunity to redeem that failure and yet he found himself forced to abandon it too.

Another failure.

All because of these investigators.

He considered himself a calm being, uninterested in the pursuit of conflict despite his position in life, but he had limits. His pride, it defined those limits, and he was well cognizant of the fact that he had reached one of them.

A brief check of his weapon assured him again that it was prepared for combat, leaving him with only the immediate task in which to occupy his focus.

Infuriating, He thought tiredly. To come so close, and have redemption snatched away… Just… infuriating.

*****

“You see them?”

“See? No,” Kriss snorted. “But I could smell them some time ago.”

Sorilla blinked at that but noted it idly in her files on the Lucian as she prepared for the fight that was to come.

“Nice little ambush,” She said aloud. “I’ve got… fifteen soldiers in the first kill zone. I expect at least as many flanking to setup a fall back kill box behind us once we pass.”

Kriss scoffed at that, “A waste of manpower. I am not going to fall back.”

Sorilla smirked under her helmet, hands dropping to the thigh holsters that held her pair of MsTak-44s, a pair of superposition magazine pistols that she had come to favor as her primary weapons of choice. She mentally put firing control of the left-hand weapon over to automatic, allowing her processors to target through the weapon’s sensors and manage firing control of her off hand. The one in her dominant hand, she would maintain personal control over.

The grips of the paired weapons were a comfort in her hands as she lifted them smoothly from the holsters, letting herself sink into the Ross map that was still projecting through her accelerometers.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a real-time projection, and she couldn’t see the ambushers through it, but she could see the positions ahead and knew where they would be just from that. With that advantage, actually spotting them through her enhanced sensors was almost child’s play.

“They will attack when we reach that open area, where the corridors cross.”

“Yes, they will,” She responded to Kriss’ observation, not changing her pace. “Unless we make our move first.”

“Indeed,” Kriss grinned. “Attack?”

“Attack.”

Kriss was clearly pleased to no end by that confirmation, but he didn’t charge forward quite as impetuously as she had half expected.

“Just before we reach the ambush point,” He said instead. “Handle your side while I handle mine?”

Sorilla nodded slightly, “Deal.”

The ambush point was coming up on them quickly and she started taking a measure of the walls, ceiling height, and lightly crossfire positions. The enemy would be using Ross pulse weapons. She could already feel them charging through her accelerometers, which gave her positional data on the map now that she was running something with spatial awareness. The resolution of the sensation frankly shocked her, before it had been more like getting a general direction on the location of their weapons… now, with the map data being projected, it was like having milspec GPS directions down to the millimeter.

The pair said no more as they closed on the ambush point, neither hesitating, not slowing, not speeding up. That wasn’t to say they were exactly hiding their preparations either, they just felt no need to making any changes in their pace. Not until they were almost on the target.

The moment came and Sorilla was surprised that neither of them needed to say anything. Both she and Kriss began sprinting at effectively the same moment, their weapons clearing the holsters smoothly as he went left and she went right.

There was a shocked pause as they blew past the expected ambush point, no fire coming down on them. But to the enemy’s credit it only lasted a second or so before they opened fire from their ambush positions.

That second or so, however, was sufficient for Sorilla to clear almost fifteen meters further along than the optimum position for the intended crossfire, and more than enough for her to reach the right-hand wall and effectively block fire from that direction as the fire team struggled to shift their arc of fire around the wall.

She brought her pistols up, aiming to the left side, and let her fingers curl around the triggers of both guns. The one in her off hand opened fire first, the computer automatically firing as targets appeared in the gun’s camera sight. She kept manual control of the right-hand weapon, eyes on the camera feed as it broadcast directly to her corneal implants. As it crossed over the targets, she mentally prodded the gun’s firing mechanism and let it roar a few tenths of a second after its twin.

An ambush was one excellent way to maximize the force multipliers in your control. However, in the moments just before one was properly tripped, the ambushers were in many ways at their most vulnerable.

Sorilla and Kriss flipped the ambush on the enemy, taking the element of surprise that had been intended to play against them and turning it upon their ambushers in a few seconds of shock.

Kriss fired with his pulse weapon, whirling coils of twisted spacetime erupting from his weapon to shower the enemy positions with sudden, and shocking, moments of compression and expansion that tore apart chemical bonds with a terrifying ease, though thankfully did not have the power to do the same with the atomic bonds that Ross ship and artillery weapons managed.

Sorilla’s personal weapons were cruder, of that there was no doubt. Heavy depleted transuranic rounds propelled by caseless plasma propellent might be sophisticated as firearms went, but ultimately, she was still just throwing rocks at the enemy.

Heavy, custom designed rocks, but rocks, nonetheless.

For all that, however, the effectiveness was only marginally less as the heavy rounds punched through the concrete that Kriss’ weapon tore to shrapnel and continued on through the targets hiding on the other side with little pause.

*****

The Commander heard the sudden eruption of weapons fire up ahead and knew that the ambush had been tripped, but there was something wrong to the sound.

He paused, holding up a hand to bring his followers to a halt.

“What is it, Commander?” A young officer asked, uncertain.

“Too long.” He said after a moment.

One of his men, an older and more experienced grunt nodded. “Should have ended by now. You hear that, Commander?”

“Explosive weapon, yes,” The Commander nodded. “That is not Alliance issue. Not any that I’ve seen.”

He made a decision, “Ahead slow, be wary. The ambush may have encountered problems.”

The soldiers with him nodded and slowly got moving again, spreading out their formation as they moved to cover the corridor ahead of them.

*****

Sorilla hugged the wall as she came up on the corridor, putting two rounds into one of the Sirhan soldiers across the way with her left hand while firing a trio of armor piercers into the wall on her left with the weapon in her right. The rounds tore through the concrete, exploding out into the corridor beyond, showering anyone there with shrapnel.

“Do not steal my kills!” Kriss snapped as he stepped over the soldier she’d shot, swinging his pulse weapon around the corner as she did the same on her side.

“Then keep up,” She snapped back, eyes and implanted optics sweeping the carnage for any mobile targets. “Clear on this side.”

“Sadly, it is the same here.” Kriss sighed, lowering his weapon as he stepped among the corpses, idly toeing one over unto its back. “Rather unimpressive showing.”

“Complain about their training later, when Murphy isn’t listening.”

Kriss frowned, casting about in all directions, “Who is Murphy? I see no one else here.”

“Murphy is always here.” Sorilla declared, offering no other explanation for the moment.

She knelt down by one of the fallen and holstered her right sidearm to free up a hand to flip over his weapon. She was unsurprised to see that it was of Alliance manufacture, but without any of the markings she’d been told to look for in legitimate production gear.

More interesting was the fact that she recognized the signature the weapon was giving off to her accelerometers.

“Check their weapons,” She said. “The workmanship says alliance, but my gut says something else.”

Kriss shot her an inscrutable look, but nodded and plucked up one of the weapons himself. He flipped it over, checking for markings as she had, but paused almost immediately.

“This is… It is a Ross weapon.”

“Yeah,” Sorilla said, rising to her feet. “That’s what I thought.”

“No, not merely Alliance adapted, it is Ross military issue,” He said urgently.

“Yes, I got that.”

“These are not merely controlled within Alliance space, they’re effectively banned,” Kriss grumbled. “Or would be if the Ross ever made them available for sale. What is going on here?”

Sorilla didn’t answer that question, for several reasons.

Leading the list was the fact that if Kriss and Sienele weren’t bright enough to work it out for themselves. She wasn’t sure she wanted to clue them or their bosses in on what she was fairly certain the Ross were up to.

Pretty close behind that, however, was the fact that she could hear movement coming their way, and that was going to take precedence in short order.

“Heads up,” She called. “Incoming.”

*****

“The firing ceased, Commander.”

The Commander snorted. He could hear that for himself. What concerned him at the moment was whether the firing ceased because the ambush had succeeded, or because it hadn’t.

At the corner before the junction where they’d set the ambush he slowed to a halt and signaled the others to do the same, keying in a recognition signal over the tactical network and waited for the response.

None came.

That answers that, I suppose, He thought grimly.

“The ambush failed. Signal the flankers to close in from behind the enemy,” He ordered. “Have them moving quickly. We will keep their focus here, on us, while the flankers take them from behind.”

“Yes Commander”

I hope that will be sufficient, but I had also hoped that the ambush would have been sufficient as well. I suppose we will see, won’t we?

*****

Portal Ship

The infiltration subjects have engaged the Alliance inspection forces.

Is entropy present?

Uncertain, but likely.

Ensure that they are aware that entropy is considered a priority target. Eliminate at all costs.

The conclave considered that before they unanimously placed their agreement with the order.

Issue the orders. Rewards for entropy’s confirmed death will be issued to both the infiltration species and to the individuals who accomplish it.

*****

Orkhana

Kriss nodded, half turning to look down the way they’d come.

“The flankers have caught on that something has gone wrong with their ambush,” He confirmed.

“Not only them,” Sorilla said, looking the other direction. “New force approaching from the direction of the target. They’re being cautious, however.”

“Foolish,” Kriss grunted. “There is a time for caution, but now is not that time. If they overwhelmed us, likely they could at least eliminate one of us with little issue.”

Sorilla snorted, not missing the slight emphasis on the word ‘one’ as Kriss said it, and having no question in her mind as to which one of them he expected could be eliminated. She wasn’t willing to say he was wrong, of course, but the casual ego amused her. It was very much in keeping with certain forward operation special operations groups she was familiar with.

“True enough,” She said aloud, popping the barrels from her left pistol and letting the partially depleted over/under barrels drop to the ground as she smoothly replaced them with a fresh load before moving to do the same with the holstered one.

The super-positioned nature of the pistols she used combined the barrels and the magazine into one part, removing all moving parts from the weapon and making it one of the most rugged pieces of equipment she carried. Her pistols almost literally could not fail, unlike almost everything else she, or the Alliance as far as she’d seen, had.

With both pistols reloaded, she spent a moment evaluating the approach of the targets she could hear from ahead of them before making a decision.

“Best take out the flankers,” She suggested. “The backup team is holding back too much to worry about just yet. Wish we had claymores.”

“I am not familiar with that term,” Kriss admitted as he turned to move back, lifting his weapon into a ready position.

“Directional mines,” Sorilla said. “Explosives, mostly antipersonnel.”

“Ah, yes I believe we encountered some of those on Hayden,” Kriss said, shrugging with an unimpressed grunt. “Underpowered, if I’m being honest.”

“Only against your thick ass,” Sorilla snorted. “But you probably have a point. They don’t do much against armor either.”

“It is a pointless wish,” Kriss said, dropping to one knee as he brought his weapon up to get a sight picture. “Sienele would never allow us to carry such weapons into an Alliance production facility. He is far too knowledgeable of Lucian Sentinels for us to slip that past him…”

Sorilla nodded, unsurprised.

“… again.” Kriss finished.

The belt of laughter that escaped Sorilla was short, loud, and entirely uncontrolled.

“I will make a note of that,” She said, taking a breath as she got control of herself again.

“Do so,” Kriss said, clearly amused though focused as he nodded. “They are here.”

*****

Weapons fire erupted ahead of them, causing the Commander to curse.

He’d ordered his men forward, but the enemy had been supposed to continue forward to engage his team, not double back.

“Forward! Hurry!” He ordered, not knowing exactly what his soldiers were up against, but fully aware that the enemy had already eliminated a staged ambush with what appeared to be a frankly ridiculous measure of ease.

His team rushed down the corridor, barely able to maintain formation and discipline as they ran.

Who are these people? There should only be two of them!

*****

Sorilla took the measure of the soldiers she was dealing with as she fired, only part of her mind on the fight while she focused the rest on the overarching situation.

The firefight itself was nothing to write home about, enemy soldiers running a very standard assault on entrenched positions this time as opposed to them defending from entrenched positions in the previous fight. Thus far their reactions had been by the books, the sort of thing she would expect from reasonably trained regular forces, and not from a specialized infiltration team.

These Sirhan, whatever else they are, aren’t on the Job, she noted with a mix of satisfaction and annoyance.

The Fifth wouldn’t fight like this, not in this situation, not unless things had gone completely amuck, and she didn’t think that they had for the Sirhan just yet. They were professional soldiers, certainly, but she’d personally rank them as Second World professionals.

That wasn’t, in any way, a put down. It was just a comment on the sort of training she believed they were bringing to the table.

The Second World, on Earth, were those nations allied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. First World nations were allied to the West, and Third world were technically unaffiliated with either.

Certain training philosophies took root in each of those three groups, and they persisted on Earth even into the modern days.

Second World nations tended toward a more brutal and face forward approach compared to the defter touch adopted by the First World, which was precisely what she was seeing at the moment. Sorilla would hold any judgement in reserve for when she had more data, of course.

The firefight dragged on a bit longer before she noticed something that made her reconsider that evaluation, however.

“They’re trying to pin us down,” She called. “Taking up the pressure so the others can flank us to the rear.”

“Agreed,” Kriss responded over his own fire. “Suggestions?”

Sorilla grimaced.

Honestly, there weren’t a lot of reasonable options in the current situation. Calling in backup or breaking contact were the two that were most considered ‘sane’ and by the book, but both were not exactly good options at the moment. That left defending on two fronts… or…

“Split focus, strike both at one,” She offered, knowing who she was talking to well enough by that time.

Kriss laughed, his voice booming over the extended firefight.

“Colonel, if I did not know better, I would swear you were born a Lucian. Let us do this then.”

“Right, you deal with these then, I’ll give our friends sneaking up on us a warm greeting. Break on three. Three!”

The two pivoted and split apart, moving to battle.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Nine

Hayden’s World, Subcontinent

Cassius watched as the inspectors made their way through the small city, really more of a town at this point if he were honest, that Sorilla’s mobile fabricators had been working on.

The rugged little machines had been acquired from a defunct mining operation that the invasion had pushed into total bankruptcy, leaving their equipment floating around a distant and useless planet, obsolete and of far more cost to ship back to Earth than they were worth to the mining consortium now that the Ares facility had been abandoned.

He wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but Sorilla had cajoled some shipping space from a Captain she knew and gotten them trans-shipped to Hayden instead of left for scrap. Most of the gear he saw on her little parcel of land had a similar story behind it, from the weapons to the vehicles.

War had a funny way of doing that, he supposed.

Cassius himself remembered bulk sales of rifles out of certain countries back on earth, where you just pulled as many weapons as you wanted from a small mountain of them, tossed them on a scale, and paid by the pound.

Military endeavors weren’t, generally, conducted with the efficiencies of making a profit in mind. You did what you had to do, never minding the cost, because it would be far more expensive to lose. When the war was over, however, the bean counters came rushing back in to remind you that it cost a hell of a lot of money just to move the equipment a soldier needed to where he needed it, and there were companies already chomping at the bit to offer to replace all of it for bulk discounts anyway.

More than one fortune had been made just by cleaning up after the victor left the battlefield.

“Ah, Mr. Aida.”

Cassius looked up, nodding to the man who was approaching. He was an officious sort. Cassius didn’t much like dealing with his type, but he wasn’t intentionally annoying at least.

“Mr. Grenada,” Cassius said. “I trust everything is to specification?”

“And beyond,” Pierre Grenada said dryly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so many places so massively overbuilt. This little city will be here in five thousand years, assuming it’s not struck by a meteor or some other insanity.”

That was less unlikely than it had been a few years ago, Cassius reflected idly while outwardly he merely nodded.

“Sorilla isn’t the type to skimp, and as I understand it the lifetime cost of building like this is far lower,” Cassius shrugged.

“It certainly is. However, most buildings these days are built by contractors,” Grenada said casually. “And they aren’t concerned with upkeep, since they wash their hands of the building once it’s been completed. Few owners know, and fewer care, since the majority intend to work the building for a few years, couple decades at most, before selling it off. This kind of thinking requires a certain expectancy that you’ll still own the buildings in a century. Not many plan like that.”

“True, and more’s the pity,” Cassius sighed.

The world had come a long way from the early days of disposable living, but while there were many improvements in that regard, most of them were more in ameliorating the damage of disposables rather than simply stop disposing of things. He still owned and used the tools his father had left him, and many of those had been purchased originally by his great grandfather.

Disposable only meant cheaper if you didn’t account for the price over time, but no one really seemed to understand that…

Or care.

“Still,” He said aloud. “I presume that the facilities pass inspection?”

Grenada nodded, “Oh certainly. I expect that there will be some infrastructure requirements that haven’t yet been met, but from what I can tell the designs were implemented specifically to account for those.”

“Oh?”

“Power and communication, mostly, possibly utilities…” Grenada said. “The buildings are properly plumbed to accept all of the above, and water, power, and network communications have already been added…”

“What else would there be?” Cassius found himself somewhat curious despite himself.

“Given that the current contract is intended for an alien habitation? I am quite certain I have no idea,” Grenada admitted.

“Ah.”

Yes, Cassius admitted to himself, that is a point.

“Well let me know if there are any specific requests,” He said. “I will see to it that they’re implemented.”

“I will, though no doubt that will come down through either the Colony or SOLCOM,” Grenada said. “Possibly either or both depending on the nature of the request.”

The officious man laughed softly, “Speaking as a bureaucrat myself, sometimes even I don’t understand how decisions are made and communicated.”

Cassius barked in surprised laughter at the confession, “That puts you one up on me, Mr. Grenada. I’ve never understood how decisions are made by bureaucracies.”

*****

Orkhana

Sienele scowled, annoyed by the sudden drift in the situation.

“Where are the Sentinel and the Colonel?” He growled in a low tone, pushing in to speak to the other Sentinels.

He did not want some incident blowing up in his face while an investigation of this magnitude was being conducted. Things would be sensitive enough once word got out that someone was using Alliance facilities to construct traceless weapons grade materials. The Colonel’s presence alone was adding anti-matter to the flames, and now both she and an experienced Sentinel had gone off on their own?

It was clear they were trying to kill him with an aneurysm.

“Uncertain, Envoy,” The Sentinel said, his tone respectful on the surface but Sienele could easily hear the ‘I could kill you with a finger’ in the undertone.

He ignored it. That was just how Lucians spoke to, well, pretty much everyone.

Not so much the Colonel, His thoughts whispered to him. Not Kriss, at least. Nor those that trust him.

That brought up a whole host of other issues he expected to become problems in the future, but at least the Lucians were simple beasts. Respecting the humans was fine for them, even if he would discourage it among many other Alliance species. For most, respecting and liking someone meant you were less inclined to fight them… for Lucians? It rather worked the other way around.

It made handling them a little different than most, but quite a bit easier from his point of view. As long as the enemy was a threat, you could always count on a Lucian being up to the challenge of taking them on… and if the enemy wasn’t a threat, well you hardly needed the Sentinels in that case, now did you?

At the moment, however, he had a Sentinel running around with an enemy Asymmetrical Warfare specialist, investigating what was almost certainly a clandestine move by one of the Alliance’s member species to undermine the Alliance.

What could possibly go wrong with that scenario?

When she had asked to finish the investigation, despite the objections of the human military, he’d accepted for several reasons. Not the least of which was that he was counting on learning more from her about human military thinking, but also that there was a certain coup to being able to tell his superiors that he had one of the Human’s war heroes working under him.

It was a risk, however, because if it blew up in his face… it was really going to blow up in his face.

 “Find them,” He ordered. “And either tell them to find me, or return and inform me as to their location… and activities.”

“Of course, Envoy,” The Sentinel said, with that same familiar tone in his voice.

Sienele ignored, turning his back on the Sentinel, and stalking back to his task.

*****

The Commander finished organizing his forces, eyes flickering constantly to the stretch of corridor they were preparing to defend. The sound of fighting from up ahead had completely ended and they were now uncertainly waiting for contact, either from the remaining team or the enemy.

He was betting on the enemy.

A slight vibration on his personal comm caught his attention briefly, but he ignored it at first. Until he noticed that everyone else was halfway in the motion of reaching for their own systems, something that struck him as… wrong.

His soldiers had personal comms, but they were on mission and locked out to all non-essential communications. In fact, now that he thought about it, if a communication was important enough to be sent through to him, he should have received it directly, not been apprized by a vibration warning.

He pulled his comm out, flipping it open with a casual twist of his appendage, and blinked in first confusion, then consternation, as he saw an image of the enemy soldier they were currently tracking appear on it.

Species… Human, Affiliation SOLCOM? I’ve never heard of that group, The Commander thought, confused. Was it an Alliance special operations unit?

Further down was the real shocking bit, however, and he had to read it twice.

Reward for capture/Death… substantial? A bounty sheet? Who sent…?

The Commander’s thoughts trailed off as he read the senders tag and realized that it was a direct communique from the Saviors. A sharp look around his unit made it clear that several of the others had opened their messages and had received the same thing and were sharing it around with the rest.

This is…

He steeled himself, not wanting to think badly of the saviors, but it was not an intelligent move, at least not sending that message in the midst of preparations for an actual battle. Now he was going to have to deal with at least some of his men becoming reckless in their attempt to claim a rather nebulous reward.

Not that he entirely blamed them. Honestly, any direct reward from the saviors would be an immense cachet within Sirhan society. Even he, himself, was not entirely free from that temptation. However, he had a task to accomplish at the moment, and this was not helping.

“Comms down,” He growled, closing his own and securing it. “Yes, I saw what was written, and yes I see who sent it. Right now, I do not care! I will personally shoot anyone who leaps the bridge and reveals our position to the enemy. Dream about rewards on your own time, right now you all belong to me.”

He glowered at them until they settled, then quietly sighed as he got back into position himself.

Damn fool thing to send.

*****

Sorilla was again riding the incredible rush of interfacing with the Ross map through her implants, letting the accelerometers tell her brain the shape of the world around her while her brain automatically decoded the information into something useable to her.

Had she tried this shortly after gaining the new implant suite, Sorilla rather thought it would have crippled her with motion sickness. Even now there was a hint of nausea in the background, threatening to emerge, but she had long since gotten used to worse and simply pushed it down as she worked.

There was another ambush up ahead, she could feel the charges from their Ross issued weapons building. Her sense of gravity was, at that point, sufficient enough to identify the weapon types and their positions with relative ease.

The enemy had an eighteen-man squad, equipped with light to medium Ross created Pulse weapons. More than enough to put some serious hurt on anything short of a heavy main battle tank, and even that would take some damage putting them down.

They also weren’t unaware that she was aware of them, unlike the last bunch.

That is going to make this… tricky.

Flipping an ambush, when you know it’s there, but the enemy doesn’t know you know, that was not only possible it was practically one of the hallmarks of infantry legend. Doing the same when the enemy was fully aware that you knew they were waiting? That got a lot harder, since they would generally be on alert and less prone to the fatal flaw of assuming that everything was in hand.

Sorilla paused at the corner of the corridor that led to the ambush, gauging the distance. She could feel the weapons roughly ten meters or so away, which fit with the layout of the corridors as she had come to know them. That meant that the enemy likely had the hallway covered and to get to them, she would have to cross a ten meter long kill box.

Feasible, perhaps, but not what she’d call good odds even if she had a solid squad with her.

Unfortunately, the Alliance wasn’t the sort to build convenient person-sized air conditioning vents into their facilities, nor did they have drop ceilings… though she’d actually tried to hide in a drop ceiling once, it hadn’t gone well. So even if the Alliance were the sorts for that, Sorilla couldn’t see herself trying to sneak through them.

The construction of the facility was not as solid as it might seem, however.

Much of the framework was monolithic, and incredibly strong if she was reading the information correctly through the Ross projection, but apparently the Alliance liked modular and shiftable interior layouts. For that reason, the walls were much thinner anywhere that wasn’t load bearing, and built on what she was interpreting as air bearings or perhaps a mag-lev suspension device so they could be moved.

Sorilla fell back from the corner, armor shod hands brushing along the wall as she considered her options briefly before making a decision.

Her power enhanced punch shattered the concrete and blew through the wall to the other side with an ease that surprised her despite knowing the nature of the construction. It only took a few moments after that to kick out enough of a space for her to slip through into the room beyond.

It was unused storage as best she could tell, thick layers of dust covered old equipment of some type she didn’t recognize as she walked through to the other side and came to a stop in front of the far wall.

She blinked her eyes, activating the infra-red options in her implants and helmet HUD.

It didn’t let her see through walls exactly. It wasn’t like the movies, but she could see a blob of heat near the corner where a hand was pressed up against the wall on the other side… a hand or some other appendage, for lack of better terminology. Another blob exposed the body of a kneeling soldier.

Sorilla smiled tersely under her mask and stepped up to the wall.

*****

The Commander frowned as he heard an odd sound from down the hall.

More fighting? No, that wasn’t weapons fire.

Several moments later he was still trying to puzzle it out as they waited in their ambush position, but nothing was coming to mind. With no repeats, however, he put it from his thoughts and refocused on the situation at hand.

He barely had the time to finish that thought when a sharp crack startled everyone around him. A weapon went off though he was certain that was one of his own soldiers firing from the surprise, and he looked around trying to figure out what happened.

One of the lead elements was on the ground, dead or unconscious, with a large hole in the wall where he’d been standing the only sign of an attack.

He hesitated a second longer, trying to figure out what had just happened, but it was a second too much.

Another sharp crackle of breaking cement snapped the air as two more holes were torn next to another of his soldiers and a pair of armor shod arms reached through and… just pulled the man back through the wall in an instant of violence.

“Back from the wall! Cover the wall!” He ordered, shifting his aiming position as he spoke.

A roar of automatic fire from the other side of the wall was the only thing he heard in response to that order even as the Commander returned that fire with prejudice.

In another instant of violence, the corridor was filed with smoke, dust, and the warping of local spacetime as a vicious exchange of fire ensued.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Ten

Orkhana

Kriss grinned as he slipped into the midst of the enemy with his captured human blade in hand.

He’d originally taken the weapon for a trophy of the war, not with any real intent to carry it in battle, but the design had grown on him in short order. What warrior would not love a blade that both cleaned and sharpened itself to perfection with every use?

Of course, he’d had to figure out how to recharge the weapon’s power core, but that hadn’t been too difficult to work out. Simple electron storage in a stacked supercapacitance core, nothing particularly impressive there.

The blade’s edge, however, that was a masterwork of martial artistry.

A monomolecular edge that constantly renewed itself through the charge held in the hilt, a blade that could chip away at itself constantly, yet keep aligning the edge to be straight and true again almost as quickly as it was damaged.

Perfection.

He now strode through the Sirhan ranks with that perfect blade in hand, slicing into any that got close enough to be a threat while he fired his pulse weapon from the low ready position at any of those smart enough to keep their distance.

Kriss paused only briefly to plant a powerful kick to the midsection of a charging Sirhan, throwing him back off his feet and into a group of others, before he continued forward with gleeful enjoyment of the situation.

The Sirhan were not particularly impressive, martially, he decided much to his disappointment.

Oh, they were competent, no doubt. Possibly even good, but the skill he was seeing was the sort that you drilled into a soldier who really didn’t want to be there. Most races had that issue, few were those who truly lived for war and were suited for it as well. Most of those who loved violence were too prone to idiotic excess, not understanding that violence for its own sake was self destructive by its very nature.

Kriss, like all Sentinels, lived to test himself in the field. He didn’t exactly have no concerns about the cause for which he fought, but he believed that the Alliance was right more often than wrong, at least in reference to its member species.

For those who hadn’t joined, well perhaps they should consider the benefits of joining. Their problems weren’t really his concern, if he were being bothered to think about it at all, which frankly he really wasn’t.

The Sirhan had joined up, which did cast this whole situation in a bit of an odd light. Normally Kriss supposed he should be offering them his protection, or rather offering their enemies the pleasure of meeting him. However, this particular group was working with enemies of the Alliance… or, at least, someone working against the written legal protocols of the Alliance. That made them fair game.

An odd situation indeed, Kriss thought as he slashed through one of the Sirhan’s limbs with ease and kicked the unfortunate soldier across the corridor and into another of his fellows who was trying to aim the Ross pulse weapon his way.

That would be another odd situation.

The standard issue Alliance weapons were based on the Ross design. However, they weren’t a full match for either the power or efficiency of the Ross weapon… and the Ross did not sell their weapons on any open market Kriss was aware of.

If they did, the Sentinels would almost certainly be first in line to equip themselves with the advanced weaponry.

Kriss blinked as an Sirhan soldier nearly got through his guard while his mind was following that track of thought and wrenched his focus back, blocking the wild charge and batting the enemy’s blade away before burying his own into the central body of the Sirhan. He let the soldier drop, nodding respectfully at him for his courage if not his skill, then got back down to the business at hand.

He took cover behind a corner, risking a quick look out to see who and what was remaining.

“My superiors would be irritated with me if I did not offer you the chance to surrender,” He told the five or so who remained upright. “But I would prefer it if you did not. I’ve been healing up, you see, and do need the exercise.”

He looked around, wide grin showing teeth, “Anyone wish to surrender? I promise full Alliance military rights. No? Excellent.”

Kriss flipped the blade over in his grip and dropped it neatly into the sheath tied to his leg as he finally brought out the Alliance issue pulse weapon that had been slung until this point.

“No reason to hold back then, so let us play!”

*****

The Commander fell back from the wall that had been penetrated by the enemy, rallying his forces to his side.

“Massed fire on my command! Weapon’s power to maximum!” He snarled, leveling his own weapon on the wall, and cranking up the power.

“Commander! Desil is within the room!”

“And is already gone! Fire!”

He opened fire just a hair ahead of the massed response of his men.

The resulting destruction was so devastating that he almost missed the blur that dove through the wall just ahead of the blast.

“Ware! Track the target! Shoot it! Shoot it now!”

*****

Every hair on Sorilla’s body stood right up on end when she felt the sudden shift in spacetime from the other side of the wall, recognizing that the enemy weapons had suddenly started warping more than the tiny, though powerful, space folds they had to that point.

She guessed, albeit with some educated means, that meant that the Sirhan had just opted to up the stakes and increase power. Sorilla could feel the weapons swiveling in his direction as she glanced down at the Sirhan she held in her hands after pulling the hapless alien right through the wall.

“Sorry buddy, this is going to hurt… probably won’t kill you, though,” She said as she abruptly spun around to build up speed before she just threw him across the room to the far door and hoped it would be enough to get him clear.

She was going in the other direction, however, and made a little use of Newton’s laws to give herself a nice boost using the throw. Turning as she began to charge the broken wall, Sorilla could feel the enemy weapons charging to their critical state and fire just as she dove through the wall and into the open corridor beyond.

The twisted bundles of space time flew past her, Sorilla twisting out of the way of one that would have torn up her shoulder if she’d remained on course, then landed in a roll on the other side, bringing her right foot down flat to the floor as she slid on her bent left leg, drawing her weapons.

Proc, She sub-vocalized, auto fire, both pistols. Safeties off.

She squeezed both triggers, the final manual check the weapons needed to know that there was a live person and not merely a computer issuing the orders to fire, and just swept both weapons across the enemy line. The computer did the rest.

With safeties off, the system didn’t even check for IFF signatures, substantially reducing the response time. Every time the weapons identified a target in front of them, they sent the detonation code to the next round in the barrels, sending one more round down range as she skidded to a stop.

The sudden barrage of fire was enough to send the enemy scrambling for cover even as she entirely emptied her weapons.

Sorilla thumbed the release catch on both, holding the pistols up so that the barrel assembles dropped out over her shoulders, clattering to the ground behind her with smoking curling from them. She passed the one in her right hand over to her left, then smoothly drew two more assembles from her ammo pouch and dropped them into place in the guns before snapping them closed with a flick of her wrist.

The enemy were only then recovering from the shock of the first barrage, and Sorilla was already coming fully back to her feet with two freshly loaded weapons.

*****

“Fall back!” The commander bit out the order angrily, unable to believe that a single enemy soldier was able to tear through his men quite so quickly, but he’d never seen anyone move like that before.

The soldier the saviors had marked as a priority target was faster than any alien he’d ever seen, and powerful enough to just punch through walls.

Not even the Alliance thugs, the Lucians, were quite so casual with their own, rather formidable, physical attributes.

He was nearly certain that the alien was wearing some sort of enhancing suit, but it was clearly beyond any of the tech the Sirhan military were working on, and he’d not seen anything like it in the Alliance either, though that counted for less than one might think given the sheer size of the Alliance as the Sirhan had been able to learn.

With thousands of lightyears and more stars within their sphere than he’d been able to count, he was well aware that few Alliance races would ever be able to encounter every other race. The Alliance was more of a loose knit association of other associations. Only Species like the Saviors and a small handful of others ever crossed the entirety of Alliance space.

The Sirhan were unlikely to see more than the local member species, and frankly they were happy with that at the moment.

His men, those that had survived the assault, were falling back on his order, sending suppressive fire back to keep the target from following too quickly, but it was clearly only a delaying tactic. Unless they got in a solid hit soon, he was going to be out of men in fighting condition.

The Commander got on his communications device, “Get everyone evacuated. We won’t be able to hold for long! Even if we pin these two down, their reinforcements will be on us before we can blink. We’re abandoning the facility in accordance with our orders.”

“Evacuations are underway, Commander,” the overseer of the infiltration responded. “What of the target? The Saviors want the target eliminated.”

“They can come out here and do it themselves!”

“Commander!”

He grimaced, taking a breath, “With due respect to you, and the saviors, we’re dealing with the Elite thugs of the Alliance and a target skilled enough that the Saviors have not yet been able to eliminate them! If we take the target down, I’ll call it a bonus, but if we don’t I’ll be plenty satisfied with simply escaping. Am I clear, Overseer?”

There was a long delay before the voice ground back to him.

“Clear, Commander.”

He killed the signal, taking a moment to fire a couple blasts down the corridor, intentionally shooting low to tear up the floor and send shrapnel flying as he waved the next team to fall back.

*****

Sorilla hit the ground, peppered by chunks of concrete, rolling clear of a burst of suppressive blasts that were clearly intended to do exactly what they had done… make her scramble for cover.

The enemy were putting together a fighting retreat and doing a decent enough job of it from what she could tell. Far from an easy maneuver, a fighting retreat was one of the more difficult things to train to do, and more often than not went horribly even if you were exceedingly well trained.

This one, however, was going rather well for the enemy for the simple fact that they were retreating from a single aggressor.

She really couldn’t do much more than she was as long as they were detailing people to keep her pinned down while the rest fell back.

Linking the cameras in her right-hand pistol to her corneal implants, Sorilla edged it around the corner she was covering behind, sweeping the scene carefully.

No targets. They’ve fallen back. Damn it.

She retrieved her Alliance issued communications gear, “Kriss, you copy?”

“I am here,” The gravely voice responded. “I do hope that you are having a more enjoyable fight than I, Colonel.”

“Eh, it’s had it’s moments,” Sorilla admitted. “The remaining enemy forces are falling back, and I don’t have enough firepower to break their discipline. More interested in following them to their little nest anyway. You coming?”

“A moment,” Kriss said, grunting something out. “Just finishing… things up here.”

Sorilla had no illusions as to what exactly he was finishing, but that was fine.

“Alright, signal before you come up on my position,” She said. “Hate to shoot you by accident.”

Kriss laughed, “You have best not, Colonel. If you shoot me, it had best be on purpose or I will be rather sore about it.”

“Pretty sure you’ll be sore about it either way,” She said dryly. “Assuming you survive. Just get up here.”

“On my way.”

They closed the comms and Sorilla edged out around the corner, checking to see that there were no more soldiers for certain before she fully exposed herself and started making her way up the corridor. The bodies the Sirhan had left behind were mostly intact. Her pistols didn’t pulp a body they struck, as was their gear for the most part.

Sorilla kicked weapons away from the alien’s grips, mostly by instinct and training more than any thought that they might be faking. Her pistols weren’t particularly subtle, she had to admit that much.

They’re decently equipped, she thought, kneeling to examine the sidearms and other gear the alien soldiers had been using.

Much of it was clearly Alliance construction, making use of the advanced fabrication that allowed for seamless builds and an eerily perfect finish on every piece.

Sorilla was still checking the fallen when Kriss arrived behind her, his approaching causing her to twist, gun in hand, just to be certain she hadn’t missed anyone.

“Intending to shoot me?” He asked, amused.

“Not this time,” She replied dryly.

“Pity. Next time, perhaps.”

Sorilla rolled her eyes in her helmet, rising to her feet as she handed him one of the devices she’d been examining.

“What is this?” He asked, accepting it. “A personal comm?”

“mmm,” Sorilla hummed agreeably. “More interested in what’s still open on it.”

Kriss eyed her briefly, then flicked open the device and found himself staring.

“A bounty chit,” He breathed out. “By the Ross, no less. Long time since I’ve seen one of these. They used to have an open bounty on any Lucian Sentinel, payment on delivery of a body… dead or alive. I admit, however, I have never seen them issue one for a specific individual.”

“A dubious honor,” Sorilla said. “Any idea what the reward is?”

Kriss shook his head, “The Ross only have a passing understanding of economy, so they generally don’t issue specifics. It will be impressive, however, especially for a lower development species like the Sirhan.”

“Well, isn’t that just lovely.”

“Sienele will find this… fascinating,” Kriss admitted. “So will many in the Alliance Command structure. There are many who don’t even believe that the Ross are capable of recognizing individuals from other species… a few aren’t even certain they recognize individuals from their own species.”

Sorilla nodded. That fit with SOLCOM beliefs and even some of her own conclusions concerning the Ross. However, the bounty chit there said otherwise.

“They went that way,” She said, deciding to put that thought behind her for the moment, and nodding down the corridor. “Their base of operations is close now. I can feel it.”

Kriss stared for a moment before closing up the command and slipping it into his belt pouch.

“Very well,” He said. “Then it is time to call in reinforcements.”

Sorilla couldn’t disagree, as much as she was tempted to. She knew that she’d developed a lot of bad habits while working largely on her own during the war. Situations had put her constantly in positions where backup of reasonable training often just didn’t exist, not within any range she could cross at least.

It was hard to break a habit that rewarded you with success, even if you knew it was a bad habit and would lead to bad things if you pushed your luck.

“Alright,” She said, “I’ll scout ahead, but I won’t engage until you get your team into position.”

Kriss eyed her narrowly before he acquiesced, “Acceptable.”

With that grunt he pulled his own Comm and started talking while Sorilla slipped down the corridor in pursuit of the retreating enemy.

*****

“Envoy!”

Sienele glanced up from the documents he was examining, irritated but more so by the administration of the facility than the interruption.

“Yes, what is it?” He grumbled mildly.

“Sentinel Kriss has contacted the squad, requesting reinforcements.”

“What?” Sienele sat bolt upright. “Reinforcements for what?”

The Sentinel reporting to him gave a casual shrug, “He and Colonel located the insurgent base of operations and encountered significant resistance.”

Sienele didn’t both correcting the Lucian’s misuse of the title Colonel as a name, focusing entirely on the content of the report.

He was hardly surprised that the pair had managed to find the insurgents. Kriss was a decorated Sentinel and well seasoned field operative, and the Colonel was a particularly tenacious asymmetrical warfare specialist. This was literally the staple meal of the two. Add in the fact that they were both trouble prone action addicts by his evaluation, and he supposed this outcome was inevitable.

“Go,” He ordered. “I will follow. But inform Kriss and the Colonel that I want prisoners. The dead speak only in the most limited of fashion.”

“Yes Envoy!”

Sienele watched the Sentinel leave swiftly before he returned his focus to the documentation, marking his position with some notes to remind himself of what had come before, then closing it all down.

There were potentially more interesting things to be learned at the moment it seemed.

Far more interesting.

*****

The conclave viewed the situation with both interest and aggravation.

The infiltration species had failed thus far to eliminate Entropy, but that was not entirely unexpected. The conclave was viewing the entire, albeit brief, conflict between them from all available dimensions of viewing across the four they had recordings of it in.

She moves like none we have encountered before, not even of her own species. Anomaly.

The conclave agreed with the statement, murmurs buzzing back and forth as they tried to determine what, if anything, it meant.

It was almost as if Entropy could… see spacetime the way the Ross did, which was blatantly impossible. No species they had ever encountered, even the Sturm Gav themselves, were capable of that. Certainly, the Terrans or Humans weren’t capable of it, either in technology or biology.

And yet…

A warning tone caused many to focus on the speaker.

Speak your mind.

Silence followed the order for a moment before the speaker acquiesced and spoke again.

The humans… we monitored a closed loop system from their space, if you will all recall. A system that, to our knowledge, only the Ross were capable of building. We were forced to collapse our own loops due to extreme targeting by the Gav… and the one in human space has also been collapsed… but if they were able to construct that, perhaps they are more capable than we have been able to determine.

The gathering considered that briefly before rejecting it with near unanimity.

Effectively impossible. The observed technology of even their top tier warships was nowhere near sufficient to create a looped section of space time. The species simply does not have the base technology required.

This is not helping with the current situation, another speaker cut in. The infiltration species is withdrawing as to orders. However, Entropy is in pursuit. Options are required.

Destroy the planet!

Options are required that are not worse than the current worst-case scenario.

Once the infiltration species are withdrawn, the facility itself becomes a liability. Destroy the facility.

The conclave considered that very briefly.

Objection. Destroying the facility results in very nearly the same level of unwanted scrutiny as destroying the planet. If we are to do one, we might as well ensure we clear everything.

Correction. Destroying the facility with space-time equations would do so, agreed… however, the infiltration species has several alternative plans for creating… problems for the facility. Some of which are quite destructive without making use of The Equations.

The conclave was silent briefly as many of them scanned through the plans left by the Infiltration species. It only took seconds.

Agreed. Initiate the most destructive of their plans. If it ends Entropy, we have an excellent outcome. If it does not, it should still properly distract them from the path they are on long enough to scrub any trail clean.

The conclave was in agreement. Plans were activated, and orders given out.

The Facility would be destroyed.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Eleven

Orkhana

Sienele hurried through the corridors, some of the more officious and tenacious of the local administration dogging at his heels as he did. He ignored their continual pestering about where he was going and why. They would work it out once the weapons fire started he expected… or they wouldn’t and it would likely no longer be his problem.

He would take either option, honestly, but the second had a certain appeal that brought an urge to smile to his face.

Sienele was an administration professional himself, but that didn’t mean he liked getting the documentation dance.

The Sentinels were in the lead at any rate and would certainly give more than enough warning for him and any of the local administrators who weren’t entirely brain dead to get to cover. He was privately betting on about half of them needing to be pulled down, but he might be optimistic he supposed.

Optimistic for what exactly, he wasn’t sure himself.

“Sentinel Kriss’ signal is just up ahead,” Sentinel Girr said back to him. “Be wary.”

“Wary? Why should we be wary? Envoy?”

Sienele ignored the nervous sound in the administrator’s voice, instead intent on what was going on up ahead.

Shocked silence fell, blessed silence in Sienele’s opinion, when the locals saw the trail of bodies and what looked like Alliance military specification gear littering the corridor as they passed.

“What happened here!?”

Sienele glanced back, “Have you never seen a Sentinel Operation, Administrator? Be silent. I do not believe this one has been seen through to completion, as of yet.”

The shocked and rapidly cooling Administrator clamped his orifice shut, staring in horror as he walked… seemingly against his will… forward through the carnage.

Sienele spotted Kriss standing up ahead and made his way over.

“Where is the Colonel?” He demanded flatly, uninterested in anything else at that point.

Kriss gestured down the hall, “That way, running reconnaissance for the operation. This facility has been rather impressively infiltrated, I must say. Never seen anything quite like it within Alliance borders.”

“Of course you haven’t,” Sienele snapped, exasperated. “We do not assign Lucians, let alone Lucian Sentinels to such problems. I require prisoners, Sentinel Kriss. We must learn more, find the next level of the conspiracy. Your heavy-handed solutions are not what is best here.”

Kriss shrugged, “Best or not, we are what you have.”

Sienele groaned. “And the Alliance weeps.”

He shook himself, “Alright, fine. Do the job. But take prisoners.”

“Should not be a problem,” Kriss admitted. “They are poor sport at any rate. Marginal soldiers, training on par with conscripts… well, good conscripts or bad volunteers. Take your pick.”

“I am quite certain I do not care. Just try to take some of them alive, preferably ranking officers.”

“Very well,” Kriss nodded. “Sentinels, we have a mission!”

The Lucians rumbled their agreement and checked their gear one last time as Kriss nodded forward and led them off.

Sienele sighed.

Damn it. The Colonel is still out there, doing only the universe knows what. I need to get her under control or orders involving her will quickly become… unpleasant.

He set off, amidst much protest from the locals, and followed the Lucians into the fight.

This time none of the local Administration opted to try and follow.

It was sad, really, but he rather found himself looking towards getting some peace in the midst of a battle compared to what he’d been enduring.

*****

Sorilla knelt at a corner, using her gun’s camera to scan around it without exposing herself.

There was some action going on, she could see, and it looked like the Sirhan soldiers were preparing to pull out. They were packing up what looked like computer systems, generally ignoring anything too big to carry, and ushering some other Sirhan who weren’t in uniform out ahead of them.

Definitely evacuating. Someone pulled the plug on this op, no question. Past time too.

She’d have ordered the plug pulled the second the investigation team stumbled onto the first conspirator. After that there was no hiding it, after all. Once even one conspirator was turned up, it was only a matter of time before the Alliance inevitably tore the facility to the ground to find every last trace.

The sooner they pulled out the more time they’d have to scrub as much evidence as possible of their actions.

She doubted they’d made the call fast enough, but that was better for her goals, so she wasn’t complaining. Sorilla sympathized with the Sirhan, rather quite a bit actually. They were running an operation she’d have liked to have been in on against the Alliance. Unfortunately, they appeared to be backed by the Ross, and she couldn’t just look the other way with them involved.

Through her career she’d not been in this situation, morally speaking, all that often but it had come up.

Sometimes you had to be the bad guy.

Sorilla opened up the communication channel back to Kriss.

“Kris, Aida.” She said simply.

“Go ahead Colonel, we hear you,” Kriss responded.

“The soldiers are cleaning and packing up, pushing what looks like maybe civilians out of the area,” She said. “Where are you?”

“My team and I are approaching from behind you,” Kriss responded. “Try not to shoot us by accident.”

Sorilla snorted, “You got it. I already have a bullet with your name on it anyway, just waiting.”

“No doubt,” the Lucian laughed. “We will see, I suppose, which of us is still standing when that time comes. Check behind you.”

Sorilla glanced back and waved the Lucians forward from where they’d paused at another junction. The team broke cover and quickly closed on her position.

“Welcome,” She told them. “I’ve counted about thirty or so more soldiers visible, along with at least twice that in civilians or, at least, non-uniformed personnel. Not sure what they were doing here exactly, but whatever it was someone called an end to it.”

Kriss nodded, edging past her to risk a glance around the corner.

He grunted after a moment and fell back.

“Agreed,” He said after a moment. “They’re clearly abandoning the operation. Pity, that puts us on a bit of a countdown.”

“Sienele is rather insistent that we take prisoners, Sentinel Kriss,” Girr reminded him.

“Yes, yes,” Kriss responded, sounding much put upon. “It will be of little loss here anyway. These are not particularly challenging warriors.”

“They’re not bad,” Sorilla said, shrugging. “Give me a couple months and I think you’d find some decent sport… or they would.”

Kriss eyed her balefully for a moment, then shook his head. “Do not tempt me with impossibilities, Colonel. No, this batch end here I am afraid.”

“As you choose,” Sorilla said simply. “So, how do you want to do this?”

Kriss considered that briefly, “With these numbers it would probably be best not to attempt a frontal assault if we can avoid it. Do you still have the facility map?”

Sorilla snorted, rolling her eyes under her helm, “It is not something I would delete, Sentinel.”

“Just being certain, Colonel,” He smiled thinly, an expression that was as close as Sorilla believed the Lucians got to being friendly, actually friendly, as opposed to being subtly… or, not so subtly, threatening. “Do you see any ways we could move around and take them unawares?”

Sorilla paused, again loading the map through her accelerometer implants, finding that just gave a far greater intuitive understanding of the material.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “There are… possibly empty rooms that we can access that share walls with the target location.”

“Possibly empty?” Another Sentinal spoke.

“It’s a map, not real time intelligence,” She responded.

“Deal with the issue is and when it arises,” Kriss decided. “Show us.”

Sorilla nodded and dropped the top-down map to the communications channel through the hastily coded interface for Alliance signals. It took several moments to transfer, but in a moment the Sentinels were all looking at their own copies of the simplified diagram.

“If we take these rooms here, and here,” Sorilla pointed. “And coordinate, we can breach from both sides and catch them in a crossfire.”

Kriss nodded, “Workable. Very well, Sentinel Girr take half the team and go to this room…”

He tapped the screen, “I and the Colonel will go with the remaining to this one. Clear?”

The Sentinels nodded as one.

“Excellent. Move.”

*****

Sienele stopped, aggravated when he saw that the Sentinels had split up ahead of his position and were moving again.

What are they up to?

Sentinels were dangerous by their nature, both for their martial prowess but also for the fact that they seemed to have little to no true sense of self preservation. They literally lived for the fight, any fight, it didn’t matter. Combined with their martial skill and the sheer tenacious nature of the species in general, and there were good reasons why the Lucians had quickly been absorbed into the Alliance, not entirely of their own will.

Left to their own devices the species just picked too many fights for little to no reason. Better to give them reasons and keep them aimed at the enemies of the Alliance, all things considered.

There was a directness about them that he, personally, found refreshing… but that was hardly surprising. Most of his species were traders, as his cover implied, but he was all too often immersed in the diplomatic doubletalk of the intelligence community, where at best the friendly greeting you gave tended to be neutral compared to sincere.

The Lucians were at least willing to tell you to your face that they wanted to kill you.

Of course, it was a little disconcerting that, when they did, it was rather meant as a genuine compliment. Once you got used to that, they were actually mostly a pleasure to associate with.

Mostly.

In his experience they were a nightmare to keep directed while working an operation, especially one like this. If given more options, the last group Sienele would have taken for this type of scenario was a Sentinel squad.

However, that was not to be, so he would do the best he could with what he had.

Sienele located the signal belonging to Kriss with his tracker fob and noted with some satisfaction that the human Colonel was there with him.

One less to keep track of at least.

He turned and headed in that direction.

*****

Portal Ship

The conclave watched the preparations with growing interest, their focus increasing with each passing moment. The infiltration species were nearly finished with the preparations for withdrawal, and had already initiated several elements of sabotage.

The conclave could, at any point now, withdraw their support and leave the infiltration teams to their fate, but if possible, they would extract them in accordance to their agreement with the younger species. It was a rarity that they worked with such species, or put more accurately it was a rarity that a species was capable of working with them.

The infiltration species had some rudimentary sensory organs that allowed them to partially communicate on a similar level to the Ross. Not anywhere near as refined, of course, but with an impressive capacity for such an otherwise unimportant species.

Most other species were only ever able to truly communicate through a slow and tedious exchange of formulae that went through several different interpretation computers before anything remotely intelligible came out the other side. It was a slow, frustrating, and ultimately futile means of communication as it stripped all sense of context from messages and more often than not left both sides with no real sense of what the other actually intended to say.

Few in the conclave cared for such species as a result, and those that did were generally not looked upon well. It took a certain mental perversion to want to interact with those you had no hope at all of understanding, and in general the conclave much preferred to simply establish hierarchical dominance or, failing that, simply eliminate the problem.

Occasionally, however, that led to more problems than they started with.

The Sturm Gav, the species that had founded the Alliance almost three thousand lightyears closer to the core of the galaxy were one of those… and these humans, they were another.

The conclave was still split on the humans though.

A significant minority felt that the humans had somehow gotten lucky, and that had they continued the push they would have broken them entirely.

It might even be true, unfortunately the risk was deemed too great. When an entire Alliance battle fleet, supported by no less than four Portal Vessels with full access to space time formulae, vanished without a trace there had really been no choice. The conclave had been forced to call a halt to the advance until the situation could be investigated.

Unfortunately, said investigation had turned up nothing.

The area of space in which the fleet was last seen was unaccountably massive. It had been all but impossible to even locate the exact place in which the fleet had vanished and, though they believed they had been able to do just that ultimately, whatever happened had twisted local subspace into proverbial knots.

One of the local jump points was at the center of the mess, and the conclave assumed that had been the epicenter of whatever the human forces had done, but there was nothing there to find by the time they’d arrived to examine it. Spacetime itself was a degrading mess of entropic whorls, utterly annihilating the local jump point for at least several centuries if their calculations were correct.

Whatever happened was masked by that utter destruction below the quantum level of space and time, leaving the Ross entirely unable to even begin reverse engineering what had caused it all.

All they knew for certain was that a relatively small human fleet had caused an entire Alliance battle group, including four powerful Ross vessels, to simply… vanish without a trace.

That placed the human empire on a very short list of species the Ross were currently unwilling to push too far.

A list of two, to be precise.

Now one of the more prominent humans they’d had encounters with during and since the conflict was involved in unveiling some of the subterfuge the Ross had been implementing against the Alliance in the hopes of derailing some of the threat held over their heads by the number one species on that list.

It was almost enough to make even such as the conclave believing in the machinations of fate or karma.

Almost.

Truthfully, they didn’t even have words for the second, and the first… well that was merely the inevitability of the formulae… and, like all formulae, could be altered once one truly grasped the variables.

The question a very tiny minority were now wondering was whether Entropy was a variable they could… alter.

Silently, they watched and waited.

*****

Orkhana

They breached the room silently, the Lucian’s access to the facility network giving them the unlock codes for the door. With Kriss in the lead, the Lucians secured the room before Sorilla slipped in, letting the last Sentinel close and relock the door behind her.

It was an empty room, as her map had told her. Dusty, not even empty boxes or the like to clutter it up, and thus pretty much perfect for their current requirements. Granted, if it had been full of something, or someone, well they’d have had to deal with it in turn, but it was a relief to not be required to do so.

“That wall,” Sorilla pointed. “They’re on the other side.”

“Focused charge,” Kriss ordered. “Center it.”

The Sentinels quickly broke out what Sorilla recognized as the Alliance equivalent of a shaped charge. Strictly speaking she knew it wasn’t even close to what humans defined as such, the Alliance used their superior space time technology to twist the space around the explosion and redirect it entirely into the target but also not through the target.

It was terrifyingly effective, from her experience on the other end of such things.

They finished setting it up, taking measurements to ensure they knew the thickness of the wall they needed to go through. Everyone nearly lost their cool when a soft tap on the door startled them, however.

Kriss waved to the closest sentinel, drawing his own weapon to cover the door as the Sentinel slipped in to one side and then keyed in the command to open it.

Tension increased momentarily, then suddenly released as they recognized Sienele on the other side. Silently, the Intelligence Agent let himself in and nodded simply to Kriss. Kriss took the gesture for what it was and went back about his business without comment.

“Ready the breach,” Kriss ordered. “On my command.”

“Yes, Sentinal. On your command.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twelve

Orkhana

The Commander packed up the last of his personal documents, leaving everything else to be burned when they left. The orders had been passed down and implemented, causing him to implement the sabotage plans that had long been considered a final recourse, only to be used in the worst outcomes.

He supposed that this was that, then.

“Are we prepared to evacuate?” He asked, leaving his office.

“Yes Commander. Most of the civilian force have already moved down to the sub level.”

“Good. That just leaves us, then,” He said. “Ensure we leave nothing behind that will survive the fires.”

“As you command.”

Indeed. As I command, The Commander was far from a happy Sirhan at that point, but he was the man in nominal command of the operation, and until that changed, he would continue to do his duty.

The Saviors had tasked them with a job, one that he had done his best at but now found himself unavoidably failing to accomplish. The best he could do was clean up the mess he was leaving behind.

It was a poor second place, but it was all he had left.

His team was nearly packed up when everything shook around him and the walls blew in.

The Commander was thrown to the ground by the blast, minimal though it was. He recognized the technology, Alliance issue breaching system. He’d even used them in the past, albeit not officially.

“Take everything you can and withdraw!” He ordered at the top of his voice.

He reached for the detonators he carried, intent on ensuring that nothing else was left, even if his own bones were part of what burned.

*****

Sorilla was third through the breach, following after Kriss and another of the Lucian’s, her guns up and seeking targets through the warping twists in space that the breaching rounds had left that roiled smoke and dust nearly as badly as the concussion through atmosphere would have.

The Lucians immediately fell upon the closest of the Sirhan and rendered them roughly unconscious, but she wasn’t interested in the rank and file. What mattered to her were those that might actually know something. Though she wasn’t certain she would be able to properly delve any intelligence from them, Sorilla knew she had to try.

Her armor and implants were running pattern recognition software, supplementing her own ability to recognize faces which would be badly crippled by trying to spot the subtleties of alien physiology.

Sadly ‘they all look alike’ was a real phenomenon for humans. Her own formative pattern recognition had been focused primarily on Hispanic and Caucasian features, with a decent mix of other races to give her the ability to easily spot subtle feature elements in almost any race on Earth… but none of that helped when dealing with aliens.

It was a biological shortcut that could be overcome, and she was working on it of course, but for now she knew to lean on her computers.

They kicked back a recognized figure quickly, and she caught up a couple seconds later as she looked closer.

Slightly different uniform, seems to be showing dominant traits, issuing commands… that’s my man. Sirhan. Whatever.

Sorilla broke from the Lucian formation as her choice of target waved at the rest and reached for something on his uniform. She didn’t know what it was, but in the mess she was currently striding through, Sorilla had little intentions of leaving it to chance.

She sprinted across the room, ignoring the crossing fire from the slowly resisting group of aliens, charging right at the one she’d decided was in charge.

He saw her coming, however, and scrambled backwards in what she was fairly certain was a dead panic, fumbling more desperately at whatever it was he was trying to grab. Sorilla focused on the object as his grip closed around it and tried to recognize it but couldn’t.

She lunged across the final distance, tackling into him, and bringing both of them crashing to the ground. She felt rather than heard the slight warp in spacetime as the device in his hand triggered, but it wasn’t a weapon. Sorilla rolled off of her target, bettering his limb until the device was sent skittering away, and snapped a hand down over what seemed like it might pass for the species’ throat.

Hope I got that right, be embarrassing to be threatening to choke him out by grabbing something else.

“What was that!?” She snapped in the Alliance language, leaning into his space, and raising the volume through her armor.

He just grinned or maybe spat at her. Honestly, she wasn’t certain, and it didn’t really matter since the only thing she cared about was him answering her question, something he clearly wasn’t doing, so she thumped him back down into the floor before rising up to her feet and lifting him with her single-handedly.

“Let us go have a look for ourselves then, shall we?” She snarled, dragging the struggling alien along with her, the strength of her enhanced armor making a mockery of his attempts to break free.

The device was on the ground where it had clattered into the wall, and she slammed the alien into the wall before letting him slump down as she knelt to pick it up, flipping it over carefully while examining it.

Too small for a tactical charge. Has to be a signaling device, Sorilla decided.

“Stay put.” She planted a foot on the alien, driving him full to the ground, pivoting at the waist so she could signal Kriss. “Sentinal Kriss! Here!”

Kriss quickly passed off what he was doing to another Sentinel and made his way over, “What is it, Colonel?”

“He triggered something,” She said, tossing the device over.

Kriss caught it, examining the small item closely. “That is not good. This is a low power special transmitter. It can send a signal anywhere on the planet with ease, but I strongly doubt the signal had to go that far. I will take him.”

Sorilla nodded, reaching down, and pulling the Sirhan off the ground and handing him over to the Lucian. Kriss easily handled the other alien, making short work of a brief attempt at a struggle before dragging him back to where Sienele was waiting.

“Be wary,” He said over his shoulder. “And be ready to move. If this was a sabotage device, we may not get any warning before whatever he triggered becomes… an issue.”

“Understood,” Sorilla said, already turning to examine the rest of the area as Kriss left with the prisoner.

She checked the computer systems first, easily finding that they’d been rigged with what she expected were explosive or thermal charges based on the hyperspectral analysis from her corneal cybernetics. Chemical accelerants were fairly universal, all things considered. Not being an EOD specialist, she flagged down the closest Sentinel, pointed them out, and moved on.

Whatever he triggered doesn’t seem to be these, which I’m guessing is a bad sign.

If the transmitter hadn’t set off the obvious explosives, she was fairly certain she didn’t really want to know what it had set off.

Too bad I don’t get a say in the matter.

Knowing that they were almost certainly going to get an evacuation order very quickly, Sorilla jacked back into the facility map and examined her surroundings through the mixed reality experience of the four-dimensional scan feeding through her implants. It was, as always, a significant rush to be able to experience the facility as though it were part of her own body, an extension of her senses in a way, made all the more intense by the extension of that sensation through the progress of time.

One thing she immediately noticed was a disconnect that hadn’t been there when she experienced the map before.

Sorilla turned to a dead-end hall and walked down it, staring at the old dust covered wall for a moment before she reached out and brushed her hand against it. The armor shod gloves of her armor came back clean as she rubbed her fingertips together.

The dust is fake.

Sorilla slipped back through the construction of the facility, surprised to find that the wall had been there from the start, built intentionally to hide a corridor that slanted down and vanished below the facility.

Bingo. Now, where’s the control for this thing?

She dropped the map emulation, focusing on what was in front of her, and traced along the wall, looking for any sort of switch or scanner that might open the way through. Nothing obvious popped up, but a slight brush against her senses… like a breath of air across the back of her neck… caused Sorilla to stop.

She’d felt this before, on Child of God.

Sorilla reached out, feeling through the accelerometers for that feeling again as she passed her hands through the space along the wall.

Almost… where… There. Got you.

It was a spacetime twist, the sort of control system she’d found on the downed ship on Child. Sorilla felt it out briefly, then dipped her hands in and began searching out the control interface. She winced briefly as her fingers warped, looking like impossible twisted caricatures of themselves before she found the interface and felt the full impact of it blossom to life before her.

The Ross, and possible the Gav if she were right, used interface systems that were completely invisible to any other species that didn’t have their peculiar spacetime sensory organs. That was her guess, at least, and a theory she’d been working on since the mission to Child of God.

This was the first real secondary confirmation she had of it, however.

The interface was a beacon to her now that it had been activated, however, and that was proof enough that they were doing something with spacetime. Her ability to sense and manipulate it was another point in favor of it being some type of interface.

Sorilla slid her hands along the event horizon of the small space warp, feeling out the sections that were open to manipulation. It was a simple design, much more so than the one of the downed ship, but without being able to see it, she was still largely making guesses.

There… I think…

Sorilla bit the bullet and took her chances, triggering the controls she’d found. Everything around her shifted suddenly. Light doppler shifted and sound became attenuated beyond any hope of understanding as she felt her feet suddenly slide against the floor as she was dragged across it and into the wall.

*****

Sienele examined the device for a moment, recognizing it immediately as he looked sharply at Kriss.

“Are you certain he activated this?”

Kriss merely grunted, “The Colonel seemed certain.”

“Damn.”

Sienele wasn’t one to trust many people, especially not non alliance races that they had only recently been at war with, but he didn’t see any reasons for her to be lying about that.

“Very well,” He said, “Bring him. We’re going to evacuate the facility just to be certain. I do not want all trace of this investigation wiped out. We are withdrawing.”

Kriss grumbled, but nodded, “Very well. Sentinels! To my location!”

The other Lucians quickly formed up and Sienele addressed them sternly.

“We are leaving the facility now,” He ordered. “The prisoner here has triggered what may well be a destructive device, and until we are certain I do not intend to take chances. If there are any prisoners that appear to be of value, take them. We are leaving.”

The Lucians were clearing up when Sienele noticed something or rather, someone, was missing.

“Sentinel Kriss,” He called.

“What is it, Envoy?” Kriss asked, looking over.

“Where is the Colonel?”

*****

A wave of vertigo assaulted Sorilla as she felt her legs drop out from under her. She hit the ground on her knees, clawing at her helmet as she held the urge to vomit back as long as possible. Gas hissed as the pressure equalized once her armor detected a breathable atmosphere and allowed her to break the seal.

She dropped the helmet to clatter on the floor, leaning to one side so that she would hopefully miss spattering it with her vomit, and only then did Sorilla allow herself to stop holding back the pressure that had built. Liquid splattered on the ground as she heaved, the stench assaulting her as she pushed her helmet further out of the way and moved as slowly as possible from the mess while taking deep breaths.

Vertigo hasn’t hit that bad in a long time. What the fuck just happened?

Sorilla gritted her teeth, very slowly moving her head to look around her, trying very hard to avoid making the nausea any worse.

She was in the hallway but…

Is it just me, or… did the wall flip on me?

Sorilla groaned, picking up her helmet and climbing uneasily to her feet as she looked around. She didn’t quite dare to plug in the Ross map through her accelerometers, but she was willing to bring up the overhead view and route it through the cybernetics in her corneas.

Oh crap. I’m on the other side. What the hell…

She didn’t remember a hole opening in the wall or anything of that nature. In fact, what she’d felt there was almost… it was almost like going through a Jump Point.

That’s insane.

Sorilla didn’t know what the hell to think, but she was pretty certain that FTL jumping someone less than ten feet was one of the single stupidest concepts she’d ever heard of, even if it was through a solid wall. There were better goddamn ways to hide the entrance to your super secret evil villain base.

She moaned slightly, swishing saliva around her mouth before spitting it out and taking a drink from her armor’s water cache and doing the same thing again. With the taste mostly gone, Sorilla sighed and fit the helmet back into place, letting the magnetic clasps seal her back in.

Now I suppose I have a choice… I could look for a way back through this wall… Sorilla thought, turning to eye the wall. The interface was likely the same, so she was pretty certain she could figure it out with little issue. On the other hand….

She turned back, looking down the corridor that led deeper down, below the Alliance facility. She could already sense the gravity warp that was down that way. It felt… familiar.

Sorilla started walking.

*****

“What do you mean she’s just gone!?” Sienele asked, incensed.

The human asymmetrical warfare specialist did not get to just vanish. He didn’t particularly care if she lived or died at this point, but if she was dead, he wanted her damned body to present to his superiors as proof they didn’t have another enemy running around stirring up trouble on their hands.

The Sentinels were just as frustrated as he, for once, though Sienele wasn’t entirely certain why that was since they were hardly concerned with the same issues he was.

“Find her!” Kriss snapped. “Or find where she went!”

Sienele glared, standing by the side of the Lucian, until he winced.

“We can’t remain here. Not until we know what that transmitter was for,” He ground out. “They rigged everything here to burn, but it didn’t set any of those charges off. What else is there?”

“I hardly care,” Kriss growled. “The Colonel was with us, whether you like it or not. She could not have simply vanished without giving some warning…”

“Then she likely saw an opportunity to go off on her own,” Sienele hissed. “I know you respect the woman. I won’t even deny agreeing with you there, but she is an enemy soldier.”

“She’s not a fool, Envoy,” Kriss snarled. “She is the one who handed me the transmitter and informed me that it had been used. She knows the risks.”

“We’re withdrawing,” Sienele ordered abruptly. “We will lock this world down and return once the area has been secured. She will be found, one way or the other.”

The Lucian looked frustrated, but there was nothing he could really say against it. He now had his orders, and that was the end of the discussion.

Kriss nodded curtly and waved the other Lucians back.

“It is time, we are going.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 13

Portal Ship

The conclave observed with satisfaction as the sabotage programs were activated, setting the destruction of the facility into motion. While not as… effective or complete as a spacetime formulae, the overcharge being sent through several key machines in the facility would do a good enough job of covering any tracks remaining as well as covering the necessary destruction of the remaining equipment and paths that might lead investigators to their presence.

The Commander of the infiltration species has been captured.

The statement brought their focus to the Alliance frequencies they were following, and then to the live imagery being sent back from the sections where the cameras had not been eliminated some time ago.

A non-ideal solution, another chimed in, however he succeeded in his mission and knows very little… and can provide solutions to yet less. It is of no matter for the moment. Let us review his position and, should he prove to be a liability, a solution can be provided anytime before his delivery to the sector core.

The conclave considered that briefly before they agreed with unanimity.

Hold.

The group paused, turning to the single speaker.

What is it?

Where is Entropy?

That question caused them to stop, everyone turning their focus to the scans again, looking for the target where they expected her to be.

She was not there.

Panic set in shortly thereafter.

Why was Entropy not with the other targets? There wasn’t anywhere she could have gone? Did she run off to investigate the facility on her own? That seemed… odd. Of course, the entire species was more than a little odd, but it still didn’t seem quite right either.

Find her. Scan the entire facility, section by section. If she dies in the coming event, all the better, but locate her or her body! Now!

*****

Orkhana

I must be fifty meters below the facility now, Sorilla noted, eyes glowing under her helm as she examined the corridor she was walking along.

The heat trace of the previous occupants still remained, and she was following their footsteps, though really she didn’t much need to as there wasn’t any other direction she could go. It was either travel down or return to the surface.

Fuck it.

She continued plumbing the depths, one hand always resting on her holstered pistol as she moved.

There was no sign of other occupants of the tunnel, however, not even in the distance to her enhanced hearing and other senses. It was just a poorly lit and, well actually it was a very nicely cut tunnel. Smooth walls, floor, and ceiling… polished even. Far nicer than she could easily have had cut with her Mofab units back on Hayden, at least without sending in dozens more units after with specialized refining and polishing heads.

Critiquing the construction used wasn’t her reason for travelling the tunnel, however, and she was fighting down the urge to impatiently move faster. She wasn’t a sniper specialist, infinite patience was not one of her best traits, at least not when she was on her own. She could deal with students all day and all night if she had to, of course, but when she was moving around on her own, she couldn’t help but want to get to the meat of the situation as quickly as she could.

Sometimes she wondered if she wouldn’t have made a better strike team member.

Not that she would trade her slot in the Special Forces for anything, of course, but it would be really satisfying to get an order to just go wreck some deserving bastard’s day and then just get to it instead of spending the next three years training up a cadre to do the job for her.

That was perhaps why she’d ultimately applied to SOLCOM, as the Solar Colonies Command tended to have less use for forces that had been specialized to absurd levels and tended to deploy on a wider range of missions.

That had turned out…

Well, she couldn’t say it turned out well, or badly exactly… but it had certainly been… a wider range of missions.

Sorilla’s musing came to an end as she noticed a glow coming from ahead of her as the floor began to slowly level out from its previously steady defense. She slowed to a halt, moving over to hug the wall as she then began to edge forward while straining her gear to see the source of the light in the darkness.

*****

An alarm began to wail as the Lucian team made it back to the lifts, then others quickly joined in.

Sienele found the administrators that had come down with him and grabbed the closest.

“What are those alarms for?” He demanded.

The administrator was pale, with chalky moist flesh that was growing cooler by the moment as he stared in shock.

“Power containment failure… but that’s impossible, those systems are completely tamper proof and can’t fail. They’re in use everywhere in the Alliance. I’ve never heard of a containment breach!”

Sienele swore, mind racing to recall everything he could about the power systems that were commonly used by Alliance facilities.

If he recalled correctly, they were spacetime matrices, completely sealed and secured against any sort of mucking about. Nothing in them was user serviceable, nor should it be. Power was drawn from an imbalance in the spacetime warp, and should continue until the warp eventually balanced itself out.

There wasn’t anything that could go wrong with the design, it was so simple… and normally, he’d be entirely satisfied with that.

Normally we aren’t dealing with sabotage perpetrated by individuals equipped by the Ross… the acknowledged masters of spacetime manipulation. This is… not good.

“Everyone move,” He ordered, getting them all onto the lift and putting it in motion. “We are evacuating the facility…. You, Administrator…”

He waved his hand, expecting a response.

“Hirsan, Envoy.”

“Right, Hirsan,” Sienele nodded curtly. “Get everyone out of this facility. Do it as fast as possible.”

“The alarms will have set the signal for the facility evacuation already, Envoy.” Hirsan responded. “Most will be on their way out now.”

“Most?” Kriss demanded gruffly.

“We always have some who ignore the alarms during drills,” Hirsan admitted, chagrined.

Kriss snorted, “If they’re that stupid, leave them to their fate. No great loss for their species if those genes are obliterated.”

Sienele rolled his eyes, exasperated, but frankly didn’t see much of an option either way if he were honest about it.

“Send a second order for evacuation, do it in person if possible,” He ordered anyway. “However, Sentinel Kriss… while not speaking anything I would say in public, isn’t entirely wrong either. If they are foolish enough to ignore orders to evacuate, they are no longer our problem.”

“Yes, Envoy.”

“Now,” Sienele said, eyes on the lift meter as they climbed. “I need to know the potential energy release for the power systems.”

“What? Why?” An Administrator asked, baffled.

The Lucians laughed openly.

“The Envoy would like to be entirely aware of the minimum safe distance we might want to reach before they explode,” Kriss offered with a helpful smile.

Sienele didn’t think that the Administrator found it particularly helpful… or in any way comfortable, considering the close proximity to the sheer number of razor-sharp teeth in the Lucian’s mouth, but that wasn’t his problem. Currently he was more focused on getting clear of what was potentially a rather large explosive… and one where in the abyss the Colonel had managed to get to.

Sienele comforted himself with the fact that she could not get off world at least. Whether she died in the facility, or was found later, at least she was contained.

*****

Sorilla slowed again as the tunnel she had been moving through transitioned from smooth hewn rock to a more natural cavern, jagged edges and dripping water echoing off the distant walls as she listened carefully for any sounds of enemy movement.

The lights were coming from the center of the space, which she was coming to realize was far larger than she’d originally believed.

This place has to be one of the largest caves I’ve ever heard of, she thought as she moved sideways to the cover of a stalagmite formation and cycled through her available scanning modes, staying away from anything active in favor of using passive vision and sonar. Sadly, whatever the cave was when the facility above was constructed, it was not on the Ross map she’d downloaded.

Lights cast long shadows from the center of the cave, however, and she could see the smooth white cast that Ross vessels tended to share, a color that resulted from the exotic ceramic armor they used to coat the exterior of the ships.

She blinked the liquid lens that floated over her eye into action, causing her vision to tunnel in on the source of the lights, automatic filters dropping the glare down as she did, and Sorilla quickly spotted movement.

The Sirhan. They’re… going into the ship. Of course, it’s an evacuation.

She’s learned the hard way that Ross vessels were more than merely spaceships. It was more accurate to consider them a mobile travel hub in a way. The space time warping that allowed ships to jump between stellar jump points was child’s play to the Ross, and they’d obviously learned to do things that made science fiction sit up and look shocked.

In this case, she knew that the ships were interconnected with each other, or perhaps a central hub on the Ross home world. If you could access one, you could seemingly move between them all with impunity.

It was an immensely powerful tactical and strategic asset… one that, in her opinion, the Ross massively underused for reasons she honestly didn’t understand. Any conventional race, from humans to Lucians or any of the other Alliance races she’d encountered, would deploy massive invasion forces through the portal ships, dropping logistical requirements to near nothing, and rendering it almost impossible to truly resist the force they could bring to bear.

The Ross, however, did not do that.

They were holding their strength back, hiding it… not just from the human forces, but also from their own nominal allies. They’d even held back when they were at war with the Alliance races, from what she could gather…

Or maybe this is a new innovation, they didn’t have back then?

Sorilla didn’t know for certain, but it did exist now, and they were using it in a way that she… actually approved of?

Deploying and recovering an infiltration team showed a level of enlightened self interest that she honestly hadn’t seen from the Ross to date. They’d almost always been more of a… force of nature, a physical force of the universe, than actual sentient beings. Uncaring, implacable… something you weathered because you had to, rather that fought outright.

Interesting. What makes the Sirhan different?

Sorilla knew of only one way she might find out. She stealthily broke cover and, staying low, made for the Ross ship.

It wouldn’t be the first time she snuck on board one of those beasts.

*****

Portal Ship

The Conclave was in a state of near panic, or as close as they ever got at least.

While they’d been focusing on the Infiltration species’ evacuation and the activation of the fallback plans for destroying the facility and wiping evidence of their presence, somehow, they’d lost Entropy… the single most destructive individual they’d EVER encountered.

Oh, certainly, other species… The Sturm Gav for one blatant example… had caused more damage to their infrastructure in the past, but never had a single member of any species managed quite so much.

Most species achieved their destruction by sheer power rather than being too small to notice until it was far too damned late!

She is not in the facility.

Did she escape it?

Obviously. The question is not whether she did, but how and where she escaped to.

We have to access the facility’s data center before it is destroyed.

That would be of no use. The imagers in the area were disabled by the attack.

Other imagers would have captured her leaving!

Not if she didn’t leave the way she entered.

She must have. The only other way out of the area is…

The conclave fell silent.

Oh. Oh no.

Signal the alert. Search the ship and the region around it, immediately. Find Entropy!

*****

Sorilla blinked as she heard the alarms sound, figuring that the jig was up as it were.

Tactically it would be smarter to retreat, she knew. She didn’t have backup, nor any real plan, and there was nothing ahead of her but enemy territory and effectively unlimited enemy resources.

Strategically, however, everything was ahead of her… and nothing was behind.

Sorilla cast the dice and broke stealth, rushing the door as it began to seal. A confused mass of Sirhan muddled about, looking lost and concerned as they were locked out of the big ship. She increased her speed to a full sprint, ignoring the shocked yells from the group.

She had no idea if they were shocked at her appearance or even if they’d actually seen her and were more concerned with the fact that the doors were sealing them out. She put full power to her armor and leapt over the crowd, hitting the ramp, and dropping into a slide just before the doors could close enough to keep her out.

There was a shift in pressure as the seal was completed, and Sorilla quickly got back to her feet as she took stock of her location.

You’ve done some stupid Joan Wayne bullshit in the past, girl, she chided herself as she moved, but this takes the whole cake and just throws it on the ground.

There were Sirhan staring at her now, but she ignored them, shouldering past them as she raced through the familiar layout of the ship.

The Ross weren’t big believers in unique designs, thankfully, and the layout of portal ships she’d been on really didn’t deviate in the slightest from one another. That meant she had an idea of where she was going, but she would be much happier if she had more of an idea of how the Hell she was getting out afterwards.

The interior was massive, built to accommodate the Ross’ huge construction and combat engines that she and the Pathfinders back on Hayden had dubbed Golems. Big and slow, the multipurpose machines were good versatile constructs that could do almost any job assigned to them with reasonable levels of efficiency, though not nearly as well as a specialized machine could of course.

The Ross had deployed them immediately after securing their landfall on Hayden, and with the limited weapons available to the colonists, the Golems and their smaller Goblin counterparts had been a major pain to deal with.

Sorilla quickly got off into one of the alternative access paths, however, wanting to avoid tangling with the massive machines if she possibly could.

What she needed access to was the Ross computer system. Everything she wanted to know would be there.

*****

Subject Entropy is inside Vessel XBM998. All available forces are to converge on subject’s location with alacrity.

The calm voice of the announcement was a stark contrast to the reaction of the conclave, who were entirely worked up with the fact that they had the single worst individual threat to their operations running around inside one of their connected spacetime links.

Disconnect Vessel XBM998 from the network.

That would cause massive disruptions across no less than eighteen star systems at this juncture. Do not be imbecilic.

The conclave considered that briefly, checking the formulation before they all grimaced to varying degrees. The spacetime link in question was one of the central hubs within Alliance space. Routing around it was possible, of course, but would take some significant effort and would without question disrupt operational stances on multiple star systems.

The internal security is responding. As problematic as Subject Entropy has been, she is not that capable a threat. Stop panicking, oversee the response like the elders we are.

That chastisement calmed them down, several refocusing their efforts on the situation in a more direct and focused manner. With security now in motion, they watched the live tracking of the target with some interest.

What is she doing? Does she intend to destroy XBM998?

Entropy’s current course of action is not in keeping with that likelihood, Another said after a moment. Subject appears to be navigating toward one of the local computational centers. Does… does she believe she can access them?

Impossible. Not even the Infiltration species can access our computational systems, and they are the closest we have ever encountered to sentient life. Entropy, as dangerous as she is, is merely another beast of the galaxy, with only a rudimentary grasp of the universe at best.

Perhaps. Suggestion… hold security off, surround her, but allow her to move freely until we determine her goal.

The conclave took that in with horror.

Are you mad!?

He has an interesting point. Subject Entropy is worthy of study.

Study is done in controlled circumstances, not with a dangerous animal running loose and looking to destroy whatever it can!

Information is information. We require variable be known if we are to properly calculate a path for dealing with the humanity race. This is an opportunity.

Insanity.

A vote. The suggestion has been made, the cases for and against are available for your consideration. Do so now, then cast your vote.

The authoritative command caused silence to fall as the elders quickly reviewed the data and the arguments, then cast their vote.

*****

Sorilla didn’t like it.

It was like the Ross were avoiding her.

When she’d busted into the ship, she expected a running fight, but was willing to take the chance to gain access… however brief… to a connected Ross computer system. It was an Intelligence windfall that SOLCOM had been praying for ever since they had the slightest inkling of how the alien species had configured their systems.

On Child of God, she’d learned a lot about how their computers worked and how to interface with them, and SOLCOM had taken that intelligence and run with it. She and the Fifth had been issued a series of interface protocols that would allow them to interpret… or at least to record… data from a Ross computer if they got lucky enough to find themselves in that position.

Well, here she was, almost to the location she was reasonably certain held a linked computer terminal… right in the middle of the enemy ship while they knew she was there… and nothing?

That’s not good.

It was never a good thing when the enemy did something you didn’t expect. It either meant they had out thought you, which was bad, or you’d overestimated them… which could be worse by a significant degree.

Stupid people were hard to predict…

But… she didn’t think the Ross were stupid.

They’re watching me. They have to be.

With that thought in mind, Sorilla started turning her focus to what the Ross’ endgame might be while she continued to make her way to the target location.

There weren’t a lot of reasons for them to be watching her, in all honesty. Ultimately, of course, it was to gain intelligence on her and, possibly, to buy a little time before engaging her. To what end, was what bothered her. The Ross had never really shown any interest in significant intelligence gathering on human forces in the past.

Generally, they would simply annihilate them, or at least put a damn good effort of doing so and be done with it.

This, this was a level of subtlety she had not come to expect from them.

Something has changed. In them? In me? I don’t know, need more intelligence myself.

She heard a skittering of sound from ahead of her, but by the time she’d gotten to roughly where it seemed to come from the corridor was entirely empty.

Creepy.

Sorilla mentally added possible Psyops to the list of reasons they might be watching her rather than attempting an engagement, but really didn’t think that was likely. The Ross were too alien for that, or at least they were too alien for her to recognize what their psyops looked like and, she thought at least, too alien for them to properly comprehend effective psyops against human targets.

She came to a stop outside the section she had been heading for, pistols in hand as she prepared for entry.

The door wavered away as she approached it, allowing her access, and it only took a quick glance inside to tell that the room was empty of anything but the equipment she’d come for.

Creepier. Maybe they’re better at Psyops than I give them credit for.

Frankly, it was all rather unnerving, and more than a little aggravating. With them rolling out the proverbial red carpet, Sorilla actually had to consider the idea that any intelligence she gained from within was tainted from the start and simply could not be trusted.

She didn’t think they could have prepped something like that quite so quickly, but frankly she wasn’t willing to bet on it.

Damn it. Couldn’t make this easy on me and just try to kill me like you normally would, could you? She mentally bitched to the imaginary Ross she had decided were watching her. Just had to throw me a curve ball. Well screw you, I’m going to take my swing anyway.

The Ross’s computational systems were… well, to be honest, boring described them pretty well. There wasn’t much of anything that humans would recognize as being integral parts of a computer. In fact, she wasn’t even certain that there was a computer present. Most of the equipment in the room could have been for making puff pastries for all she knew, Sorilla really was only familiar with the pedestal interface she’d used on Child of God, and it was likely just some type of dumb terminal according to everyone’s best guesses.

She wasn’t a fan of the fact that this one was arranged so that her back was to the door as she stepped up to use it, but her armor had omnidirectional video feeds for a reason.

Sorilla reached out to the pedestal and quickly located the slight warps in spacetime as they came to life under, and around, her fingertips. She could feel them form through her implants, the slight tugs in multiple directions giving her incredibly precise sensations at this range as her implants fed what was, basically, triangulated data directly into her brain.

It was so detailed this close up that she could almost see the warps as she began manipulating them.

*****

Portal Ship

Impossible.

The conclave didn’t disagree, despite watching the event through their own systems. This human, a species they had studied rather thoroughly, simply did not have the capacity to do what she was quite clearly doing.

Review the biological data, the order was crisp and clear. We missed something.

Impossible, the response was equally clear. The data was gathered from many subjects across a wide spectrum of the population. We did not miss anything this important.

Clearly, we did.

The figure, the woman known only to them as Entropy, was doing something that only the People could do. She was sensing and manipulating spacetime directly. She was… a person?

That made no sense at all and was instantly rejected by the conclave with unanimity. It had to be a trick. Somehow, it had to be.

What data is she accessing?

The feeds scrolled by in real time as it was being shown to Entropy.

Clumsy. Useless data. What is she looking for?

Unknown. The system is unfamiliar to her. Clearly, it is possible that she does not know how to properly navigate it. Curious, human physiological studies indicate that she is moving through the screens too quickly for retention.

They are Environmental Manipulators another member spoke up. She is likely recording everything while she merely skims through, looking for something specific.

The Conclave mentally agreed with that as they watched.

Enough. Eliminate her, now!

The angry voice pushed again, but this time they were more inclined to listen.

We have learned enough. Signal the security forces to move in, she is trapped. If she does not surrender herself immediately upon confrontation, authorize them to use any force needed to eliminate her.

Agreed.

*****

Sorilla grimaced as she fumbled her way through the interface. The SOLCOM translation software was immensely CPU intensive, needing her implant and armor computers to run at nearly one hundred percent just to barely keep up with the mathematical formulations she was trying to read, and the heat they were giving off was starting to become a problem.

If she kept it up, the system would soon throttle back the processor in her skull in order to keep it from cooking her brain, and the ones in her chest would follow shortly thereafter. Unlike most grunts, she was a good enough coder that she could override those safety features if she wanted but, frankly, unlike many mandated safety features in equipment she used, preventing overheating in her brain was basically non-negotiable. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if she fried her cortex before she got any of this intelligence out.

So, she let the system throttle back before it got that far, instead just focusing on recording everything and translating what looked like file headers. Even that was taxing, however, and took time.

So much time that she knew she wasn’t remotely done when she heard a slight scrape of something moving behind her.

Without turning her head, Sorilla dropped her right hand from the controls to her pistol, smoothly drawing the weapon, extending it behind her inverted, and fired a short burst just as a Ross’ Goblin attempted entry to the room.

Three rounds perforated the mechanoid’s chest, where its primary core was maintained, dropping it in place instantly while she continued to manipulate the spacetime controls with her left hand.

There’s too much information here. I’ll never be able to get it all, even if I had the storage capacity for it.

And that, she didn’t. Her processor was good for five hundred terabytes, while her armor held a couple exobytes, but the sheer information density she was scanning from the Ross system was well beyond that. Every file seemed to be like the scan she’d stolen from the Sirhan earlier… not merely a three-dimensional representation of data, but actually extending… at least… into four dimensions, increasing information density exponentially.

Worse, it appeared to be analog data, which was not playing well with her digital storage systems in the slightest.

Need to find the data on Earth. It has to be here, somewhere…

Unfortunately, nothing she could think of led her in that direction and she had to shoot two more Goblins before Sorilla nearly slapped herself silly for being an idiot.

The Ross don’t know about Earth. They never got close. Hayden? Humans in general? Why did the invade? What were they after?

It was the big question, the one that had plagued humans for the entire war and following peace.

There was no evidence of what the Ross had wanted.

They hadn’t mined resources on the worlds they invaded, they hadn’t taken anything from the system… as best anyone could tell they hadn’t done anything aside from establish small bases and tear up some of the local landscape.

Fine. Forget Earth and Humans for the moment, Sorilla glared at her data rushing past and through her even as she recorded it through all of her instrumentation. What about work orders… ah, there we go.

Unsurprisingly, there was a depth of data beyond what she might normally expect, but Sorilla did manage to locate dispatch files and…

She whistled softly in her helmet as she stared.

Is this a map of the locations of Portal Ships? Wait… that’s Hayden. There, show me that.

The file she pulled up was different than many of the others, somewhat at least. It started nearly identical to everything else she’d seen, the location of a portal ship, in this case at Hayden’s primary colony site. Unlike most of the other files she’d scanned, this one ended abruptly, it’s fourth dimensional line cutting off.

Sorilla presumed that was the point when she had entered the ship and ended the occupation of Hayden’s World.

She dumped the whole file into her system, then started branching out, looking for more.

Three more rounds tore into a goblin, then a second burst clipped another before it could be withdrawn.

Sorilla could hear the sounds outside getting louder.

More backup had arrived, and she was out of time.

The world began shaking under her feet, causing Sorilla to finally drop what she was doing and twist around.

What now!?

*****

Orkhana

The alarms changed as the team, administrators, and a few stragglers rushed out of the building and ran for the perimeter fencing.

“That is a runaway containment alarm!” A worker yelled over the noise. “Don’t stop! Keep running!”

The gate was open, so they did exactly that.

The rumbling in the ground started low, but only stayed that way briefly before a massive crack seemed to rend the very air itself around them and they were thrown to the ground as the dirt beneath their feet heaved up around them.

Sienele hit the ground hard, rolling desperately as he was thrown into the air, landing a moment later in a painful sprawl. He could hear more than see the Lucians and others around him in similar states as he was pelted by dirt falling out of the sky.

Rolling to his knees, Sienele looked around in shock.

The landscape was unrecognizable from just a moment earlier. What had been solid ground was now loose earth that he was sunk halfway into. The shockwave had turned the dirt over and most of them with it.

“Head check!” Kriss ordered, his voice sounding distant to Sienele as a ringing seemed to take precedence over everything else. “Make sure no one is buried in this!”

The Lucians, Alliance bless the obstinate brutes, automatically began to follow orders, and started digging people out of the dirt that they’d been half, or more, buried in while Kriss himself grabbed Sienele was the shoulder and helped him to his feet.

“Luck or good design that the power systems were all that deep,” The Lucian grunted. “The worst of the shockwave was absorbed by the ground.”

Sienele nodded absently, trying to clean himself off more by instinct than intent as his mind wandered.

“Do we need to be concerned with other effects?” He asked. Weapons and munitions, whether conventional or improved, were not his strength.

“Unlikely,” Kriss said easily. “This much dirt? Even dangerous radiated energy wouldn’t get particularly far through it. I would not want to build a home here for a century or two, but for us the risk is minimal.”

Sienele grunted, but was comforted somewhat by that. Few people in the field would know of such dangers better than a Sentinel, so barring conflicting information from a specialist, he would accept the statement as true.

Similar to Kriss, however, he had no intention of remaining in the area any longer than absolutely necessary.

“Come,” He ordered. “Bring the prisoners we managed to keep. I believe that we are done here.”

Kriss nodded soberly, eyes back on the destroyed facility as it groaned and began to collapse inwardly.

“Let us be quick about it, in fact,” Sienele said, suddenly nervous as he wondered just how steady the ground under them was. “No one survived within.”

Kriss grimaced, but couldn’t argue that.

“Agreed,” The Lucian said after a moment. “Pity. I had looked forward to once more testing myself against the Colonel.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

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.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Fifteen

Hayden’s World, Subcontinent

Cassius found that a lot of the color had gone out of this new world he had moved to, the joy he’d felt the first few weeks now almost a faded memory.

He still got up and did his routine, exploring Sorilla’s land grant and cataloging the animals there. That was more a favor to Jerry, though, and his students. They were still a long way from knowing every animal that lived on this world, even after decades of inhabitation, and those on the subcontinent were almost entirely unknown to most of the Colony.

He enjoyed the work, he really did, but since word had come back that Sorilla had opted to go native… as one military asshole had the nerve to tell him to his face, once. Just the once, mind you… well, since then he found that it was becoming something he did just because rather than something he looked forward to.

The sunrise was still lovely, though the deep red as the stellar orb rose over the horizon had him checking with the weather constellation and finding that, yes, of course there was a bad storm coming.

Storms on Hayden were serious business, more so than on Earth, especially after the climate modification constellation had been brought online.

Here, the storms were natural, and they were powerful.

Nothing insane, like one might find on some extreme worlds, but still significantly more so than Earth got up to.

Storms were essentially heat engines, taking the heat energy that was distributed unevenly through the planet and, in areas where there was enough of it, turning that energy into a raging beast that could uproot almost anything that wasn’t affixed to the bedrock.

“Looks like I’ll be tightening everything down for the next few days,” He said to himself as he stepped out of the home he’d picked for himself from those Sorilla’s mobile fabrication units had completed.

There were others in residence now, so he made his way over to the closest of the inhabited buildings, finding that the inhabitants were already up and getting ready to tackle the day.

“Morning,” He called, waving casually as he approached.

“Good morning, Mr. Aida,” the military engineer in charge of making required alterations to the SOLCOM facilities said genially. “It’s a lovely one.”

“It is,” Cassius said. “But we’ve got a storm moving in, so I’m going to make the rounds and ensure everything is battened down. Figured I’d give you a head’s up in case you hadn’t checked yet.”

“I hadn’t actually,” The engineer said. “Thanks. I’ll make sure I seal everything up before I call it a day.”

“Good man,” Cassius smiled. “Carry on then. Potluck tonight?”

“In the community hall, yep. Stew again?” The engineer laughed.

“I was thinking barbeque, actually. I’ve got some steaks from the assembler,” Cassius shrugged. “They’re not off the hoof, but…”

“We’re not in Texas, I’ll take what I can get,” the Engineer chuckled.

“Exactly. Make sure your kit is all battened down,” Cassius advised. “I’ll swing back around in a few hours to check up on you. Storm is about eight hours out according to the constellation.”

“Check on that, pal. See you around.”

Cassius nodded and headed off, waving as he did.

SOLCOM had sent in a team to make changes they didn’t want to entrust to him or anyone without active clearance. He figured Sorilla would have approved, though he wished they’d just get it over and done with.

Cassius rather liked the rank and file they’d sent in, but the guy in charge was a REMF all day long.

Speak of the devil.

“Mr. Aida. Good day.”

“Major.”

Major Barrow, no first name admitted, looked like he was ready for inspection at the Pentagon.

Or the SOLCOM Geodesic at Legrange Three.

Cassius wondered how many times the blasted idiot changed uniforms per day, dressed like that in the middle of the Hayden jungle.

“My teams will have the changes made by end of day. Most of us should be out of your hair tomorrow.”

Cassius smiled vapidly, “Not a problem, Major. Are you certain they’ll be able to finish up before the storm?”

“Storm?”

“Constellation is tracking a depression that’s starting to heat up, couple hundred kilometers to the south east,” Cassius explained. “Looks to be a bad blow.”

“I’m sure we can handle a little weather, Mr. Aida.”

Cassius pursed his lips, but refrained from responded the way he wanted to. “Just watch the blow, Major. This isn’t Earth.”

“I think we have it well in hand, thank you.”

Cassius nodded, “Of course. Be seeing you, Major.”

“Be seeing you Mr. Aida.”

Officious blowhard, Cassius thought as he walked off.

He always hated dealing with people who had to have failed their way upward, but somehow it always happened, whether in the military or political arenas, or even civilian life. Somehow, stupid always seemed to float upward.

Wasn’t his concern at least.

Cassius headed for the first stop on his pre-storm tour. Best way to clean up a mess was to keep it from getting messy in the first place. Less work too.

It is a beautiful sunrise, though.

*****

Portal Ship

Sorilla groaned as she slowly pushed herself off the floor, feeling like she’d just been hit by a truck.

That’s not far from the truth, she realized, eyes on the motion through the door.

The Ross had moved a Golem into the hanger ahead of her arrival.

The Golems had been a major pain in her ass back on Hayden during the initial invasion. The Ross used them for everything from combat to earth moving, and they were decent at both as well as everything in between.

Impervious to conventional small arms, it took anti-tank weapons to drop one, though she had managed it with a blade once. SOLCOM blades could cut through damn near anything if you had enough strength behind the blow.

Not an ideal way to handle the problem if you wanted to, you know, have a reasonable chance of survival.

Luckily, she had a little more than a knife this time.

Sorilla powered the Ross weapon up, manipulating the invisible controls as she rose to her feet and leveled it at the door. She started firing as she walked forward, putting increasingly powerful pulses through the gap, tearing chunks out of the big mechanoid with the first three pulses before it stumbled back, trying for cover.

She didn’t let it get there, ignoring the dizziness she was feeling from suddenly moving after the impact to ensure the Golem went down hard. Once at the door, Sorilla checked quickly inside for any more surprises before she fired three more pulses into the fallen Golem to make sure it was down for the duration.

Only then did she step inside, carefully making her way over and through the debris that had resulted from her assault, and got a look around the hangar proper.

Lots of equipment. Too bad I don’t know what any of it does, she thought sardonically, setting the pulse weapon down as she vaulted the big body of the Golem.

Using the full strength of her armor, Sorilla heaved it over to block the door. Figuring that would buy her a little time, she grabbed up the weapon again and quickly scouted around, looking for a terminal she could use.

She doubted it would have the level of access she enjoyed earlier, but she quickly found what was likely an inventory terminal, since it had to be a job and a half to actually find anything in the massive space she was standing in, piled high as it was with what looked like, well, literally everything.

Would be nice if there was something useful, she thought as she opened up the terminal and got the interface humming along.

It was, as expected, an inventory list. There didn’t seem to be any access beyond that, but she hadn’t expected it anyway. Sorilla had a few bits of Ross mathematical identification equations already saved from previous experiences, so she ran those first. Mostly it was just to be certain the system was what she thought it was, but quickly she turned up what looked like crates of Ross pulse weapons, along with various bits and bobs of more mundane items.

She wasn’t looking for anything like that, however. Instead, she focused on using the results to get a decoding algorithm mapped out for the search interface.

Well now, this is interesting… She blinked as she found what looked like an entry for captured technology.

Is that SOLCOM tech? Why would they have that on a ship in Alliance sp… Oh. Shit. Clever bastards.

There was only one reason she could imagine for them to have a supply of SOLCOM issue weapons and gear, and that was if they were planning on sewing a little discord between the Alliance and the human controlled territories.

Probably it wasn’t an immediate plan, Sorilla expected, but that was just speculation.

The inventory showed a pretty decent supply of infantry gear, including a few mobile combat platforms.

That gives me an idea…

*****

How can one individual be this difficult to eliminate when they’re active within our own controlled space?

The question before the conclave was one that several of them had been asking, quietly, to that point but none had a good answer for. The human was clearly better equipped, physically, than any of the Alliance species, including the People themselves. That sort of physical enhancement hadn’t been something any of them bothered with researching for quite some time.

Vessels of unmatched firepower won the day in every previous war they had engaged in. Thugs like the Lucians enjoyed playing around in the dirt, but they were humored by more advanced species. The Alliance allowed them to play their games, killing in dribs and drabs because it was less of an annoyance to let them have their fun than it was to deal with the irritating whining the species was prone to if forced to be more useful members of the stellar society.

The People themselves hadn’t bothered much with advancing the technology of ground combat for… well, not longer than racial memory, but certainly longer than living memory… and the People lived a long time.

Establishing control of a population was a simple matter, when it was something they needed to do, which was rare. Controlling the orbitals of a lower technology world ensured that no matter how they kicked and screamed and whined, you controlled them.

The humans were an oddly developed species, however. They were still primitive enough to use weapons that were generally only seen on pre-stellar worlds, yet they had built stellar jump ships before the People had met them… and once they’d begun tearing into captured technology, those same ships had advanced remarkably quicky.

They were still not truly a Stellar Force, however, by any measure the People might make.

In time, no doubt they would, but for the moment it was clear that the species was still mired in the mud of their ancestral roots.

Ironically, that made them rather irritating to deal with when it was effectively impossible to bring the full power of the People to bear on them.

Entropy was the ultimate example of that, as best the conclave could determine.

Stubborn. Clever, if not particularly intelligent. Equipped with environmental manipulation technology that excelled in areas that the People had long since ignored as irrelevant.

It was a problem.

Entropy is now within deployment sections of the ship. Dispatch additional heavy combat units to support security forces.

Agreed.

*****

The Heavy Combat units of the People, known to humans by the colloquialism ‘Golem’ were not quite the lumbering oafs that they often appeared. Capable of fine manipulation and dexterity in addition to the heavy-duty manipulations they were designed for, the Golems were the backbone of all planetary operations conducted by the People.

Within one of the ships used to extend the dimensional network, that dexterity was of much higher value than out in the natural environment where they were often deployed as large- scale construction movers.

With a swarm of what the humans called Goblins, running around their feet, a pair of Golems stomped through the massive corridors designed for their deployment, coming to a stop by one of the large access doors to the targeted hangar, pausing as the security figures below them moved into position and prepared to open the door.

An unusual sound caused them to pause, confused.

It was filtering through from the other side of the door, and they quickly checked but found no record that matched it in their records.

Requests for identification were sent up the network, but orders instantly came back to move in anyway and eliminate the intruder, so the paired Golems charged their own massive spacewarp weapons while the Goblins below did the same.

The command was given, the massive door flicking away.

The Goblins moved first, charging in as the noise got louder and more confusing. The Golems ran an analysis, noting the harmonics inherent in the sound even as they searched for the source, right up until the sound was drowned entirely out by a barrage of concussive blasts, heavy fire tearing the Golems apart almost instantly as the ship shook with the force of it.

*****

The strains of ‘Ride of the Valkyrie’ blared at maximum volume over the loudspeakers built into the Cougar Light Battle Tank platforms as the wheeled combat vehicles rolled out, their forty-millimeter autocannons firing on rapid-fire.

Sorilla briefly wished that she could have been riding on one of the tanks when the doors opened, but while she might be known for the reckless acts, that one was probably a bit beyond what she wanted to be pulling off, especially without any real backup.

The Cougars had been patiently waiting to be activated, their regenerative power supplies fully charged. Unfortunately, as they were captured kit, they didn’t have full loads, but she wasn’t going to be complaining too much about that.

At least most of them were at least partially functional, Sorilla mused as she followed along in the wake of the combat vehicles, cleaning up anything they missed before the enemy could properly regroup.

The tanks made for good fire magnets too, for all the good and ill that statement implied. At the least it kept the enemy from paying attention to her for the moment.

Sorilla had them fire off all their smoke cannisters, filling the decks with thick smoke of varying colors, with even a little Willy Pete mixed in, though she didn’t expect it to have much of an effect on the Ross forces given their mechanoid nature.

The burn might mess with them a little, though.

She got moving, though, taking advantage of the distraction to break for her next objective. In the wake of her departure, Sorilla sent a final command to the autonomous controllers of the light battle tanks, then encrypted, secured, and closed the link.

Have fun, boys.

*****

The frustration amongst the membership of the conclave was quickly growing to historic levels.

Few entire species had managed to quite so thoroughly infuriate so many of them at once, let alone single individuals. Certainly, the damage was relatively minor, there was only so much a single person could accomplish, no matter how talented, but not everything was about absolute numbers… not even for the People.

The planet should have been destroyed. This problem would have been dealt with!

Cease your faulty equations. Destroying an entire Alliance production world would be the same as declaring a new war with the Sturm, and the People are not prepared for that.

The arguing had been going on for many looped cycles of compressed time, as they watched the feeds over and over again, attempting to properly predict the next actions of the one they had so appropriately code titled ‘Entropy’.

The human soldier was inventive, acted seemingly at random and with no hint of a plan they could determine, and yet seemed to manage to consistently find and set in motion scenarios that caused a maximum of chaos for a minimum of effort on her part.

It was admirable, if she weren’t doing it to them.

The Conclave hadn’t even realized that human weapons had been stored locally, though the reasoning for it was obvious in hindsight. And even if they had they wouldn’t have considered that the equipment was merely dormant, or that Entropy would find it, recognize the potential, and activate it in the midst of the ship.

Where is she going now?

We lost contact.

We what!?

The smoke and scattered shrapnel that the humans caused chaff disrupted many of our scanners, while the… extreme use of pulse weapons disrupted the remainder. Our own security forces blinded us, and she escaped in the chaos.

Fitting for her title.

Cease admiring her and locate her before she destroys this vessel as well!

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Sixteen

Portal Ship

Sorilla checked around the corner as she made her way deeper into the enemy ship, heading for a place she’d only been once before.

The Ross used their ships for more than just fighting, something she hadn’t known the first time she boarded one. They were powerful warships, of that there was no question, the most powerful any human ship had ever encountered, to the point that while some human vessels had emerged victorious against them… none had survived a direct strike from a Ross ship.

Not one.

During the war, a ship either got out of the focal point of the Ross weapon, or it died. There was no middle ground.

Even planets were not proof against their weaponry if the Ross were put upon sufficiently.

So, when she’d learned that the fire power of a Ross ship was literally its least dangerous aspect, well that had thrown the cat in amongst the mice back at SOLCOM.

The ships were, in many ways, mobile Jump points that interconnected a private interstellar FTL network owned and controlled by the Ross themselves.

They could move forces across lightyears if they had to, or chose to. A single portal ship could provide a beachhead that few military forces could hope to defend against. So potent a strategic asset was that, that SOLCOM had immediately put Ross ships on a destroy on sight list. They were the only thing on that list, but it had been made clear to the Alliance that the Ross were Persona Non Grata to SOLCOM.

Orders were to destroy them where they were found, whether it was in SOLCOM space… or anywhere else.

Sorilla wasn’t certain she’d be able to fulfill such an order, but she was retired anyway. What were they going to do, fire her?

She was heading for the portal room, however, as much for her own interests as gathering any sort of intelligence, and if something came up? Well, she’d be well placed to do something about it, if nothing else.

Let’s see what there is to find.

*****

Alliance Cruiser Upwind

The Parithalian Cruiser that Sienele was working out of at the moment was one of the most powerful Alliance vessels in service, short of those employed by the Ross and the Sturm, but for all that Sienele would feel a great deal better once he was back within an Administrative System and could see to securing his prisoners properly for their interrogation.

The Sirhan were uncommunicative, which wasn’t a surprise even if it were more than a little bit frustrating. He had seen their type before, and knew that breaking them would be a long painful process… more for them than him, of course, but painful enough for him just the same.

The interrogation options on Administrative worlds were easier on everyone involved.

They were true believers, much like the humans on the last two worlds they’d dealt with. The Ross seemed to like making use of such people.

Unsurprising. True believers are the easiest to twist into doing whatever you want. Just convince them that their belief will be served by it, and they’ll leap to your service.

They always believed themselves to be rational, which was perhaps the least rational thing about them. Once they were locked into a course of action they’d convinced themselves was right… well, there was nothing that would dissuade them in his experience, short of death.

The Alliance had its fair share, as he had learned did the humans.

And the Ross are manipulating them all. I would have sworn that the Ross were too unlike any of them to even be able to comprehend basic communication, but they manage this? They have fooled us, deeply.

That was the biggest problem.

That the Ross were engaging in operations that weren’t entirely to the good of the Alliance, that was not a surprise. Nor was it unique to the Ross, for that matter. The member species of the Alliance all had their little games of dominance and such, it was expected to some degree, and tolerated to the same so long as they did not get too far beyond the line.

In part, Sienele’s organization was the watchbeast that curtailed those actions when they got out of hand.

The fact that they had written off the Ross as being too alien to have properly executed the very sort of maneuver that they were supposed to police against was a very dark mark against both his organization… and himself.

He walked through the corridors of the Parithalian vessel, making his way to the observation deck that was generally reserved for Masters of Fleets or visiting dignitaries like himself. It was a place that he could observe the operations without getting in the way of those who were tasked to carry them out.

“Envoy.”

Kriss was already there when Sienele entered the deck, thick arms clasped behind him as he looked over the operations deck and the open space beyond.

The view left much to be desired, Sienele supposed, but deep space was like that. Only when nearing planets, or other objects of interest, was there anything to even look at besides the unblinking stars, and much of that time… well, planets were planets. It did not take long before any majesty in that view was lost to the repetition of the experience.

“Sentinel,” He returned the greeting, stepping over to the observation area so he could look down on the activities of those on the Command Deck of the cruiser. “I trust all is well.”

It wasn’t a question, merely polite words.

Kriss seemed to think otherwise.

“No, Envoy, I find myself rather… disjointed.” The Lucian admitted.

“Oh?” Sienele supposed he had an idea of what had caused that, but even the straightforward Lucians occasionally surprised him.

“A warrior deserves a better end than to be killed by saboteurs in such a cowardly attack.”

“Ah.”

And sometimes they were exactly what he expected from them.

Sienele had rather liked the Colonel as well, despite his misgivings concerning bringing her into Alliance space. In many ways he believed that he preferred this ending for the woman, rather than being forced to have her killed by his own order, but he could appreciate the academic consideration Kriss was making.

“She was an impressive specimen,” He allowed, tilting his head slightly. “One end or another, none of them take from her accomplishments.”

Kriss snorted softly, amused, “This is true. I often joked that I would have liked to meet her in battle again, but…”

The Lucian brought a hand up to his side, grimacing slightly, “I have little doubt how it would have ended. By her hand, that would have been an acceptable cap to my life as a Sentinel.”

“You are not dead yet,” Sienele said, irritated by the attitude of the Lucian.

The species was not all quite as insane as their Sentinels, but they were some of the more fatalistic of the Alliance species by a significant margin. Often, dealing with them was a matter of not quite believing how serious they were when they spoke, despite knowing that they rarely hid much of their thoughts. Lucians didn’t consider it worth the time to lie or exaggerate, not that they had any moral objections to it of course… they just tended to believe that if you were worth lying to, you were probably worth killing instead.

A frustrating people.

“This is my last operation as an active Sentinel. We both know that.” Kriss said darkly. “If the enemy does not kill me this time, they will have lost the opportunity. My injuries assure that.”

“Most would consider that a victory,” Sienele offered dryly. “You survived a career that would kill almost any other sentient in the Alliance. Be proud.”

“Pride. What use is it?” Kriss asked, shaking himself slightly. “You cannot eat it. You cannot spend it. It is not a weapon in your hand… but it is a weapon in your enemy’s. No, Envoy, I have no use for it.”

That… was perhaps a more profound statement than he expected from the Lucian… from any Lucian.

“I always considered you to be quite proud of your martial prowess,” He said softly.

“Perhaps,” Kriss conceded, “We are, none of us, free from sin or foolish mistakes, whether in the blossom of our youth or the stoutness of age. But I think you mistake genuine joy for pride, to some degree at least. I was born to be a Sentinel, Envoy. It was everything I wanted for my life.”

Sienele watched the activity on the Command Deck below as the cruiser continued the long climb out of the star’s gravity well, heading for the Jump Point, while he considered those words.

“What will you do?” He asked finally.

“Train others,” Kriss said. “It… is not a bad end, merely not the end I would have wished for.”

That made some sense to Sienele. Kriss had been one of the first tier Sentinels, both for Luca and for the Alliance for a long time. Longer than most managed, and he had not lived through a peaceful period either. His experience would be of great value.

“I have little doubt that you will excel in that, as you have in your other duties.”

Kriss simply shrugged, now falling silent.

Sienele supposed that there was little else to say. They had finished their mission, well all but for the final delivery. Once Kriss was officially off mission, he would be required to undergo a full medical review. Sienele knew that he was right, the Administrative Board would pull him from active duty once his injuries were made clear.

Ending one’s career by exposing what might be the greatest threat the Alliance has ever faced? It is not a bad end, no matter what he might think.

The two continued to stand in silence, with nothing to do but wait while the cruiser made its way out of the system.

*****

Portal Ship

The conclave were once more splitting their focus, mostly because their primary concern… the human identified as Entropy… was currently evading their attempts to locate her, even within one of their own ships, but also because the Alliance team were approaching the jump point that would take them from the production system to one of the Alliance’s central Administrative systems. Additionally, and unfortunately, they were also sending more forces to curtail the rampage of the humans’ automatons.

However, for the moment, the Alliance ship and its approaching leap into Jump Space was taking priority.

Jump point incidents were… uncommon, but far from unknown, and short of a blatant assault on the vessel that was their best option for eliminating the threat to the plan with minimal consequences to the long-term outcome.

The vessel will reach space warping positional frame shortly. Has the conclave made a decision?

Destroy them.

Agreed.

There were no dissenting voices this time, the decision was fairly straightforward and clear. By ending the Alliance vessel as it jumped clear, the current threat to the long-term objective would be contained. Certainly, some suspicions would remain, of that there was no doubt, but suspicions were not something that the People were unused to dealing with.

The Alliance races had never trusted them fully. They would have been foolish to, in fact. The current state of affairs was less of an alliance and more of an… uneasy cease fire, despite what the popular media within the alliance might want to believe.

Very well. Operation will initiate shortly. Begin adjusting the equations.

*****

Sorilla slipped into another storeroom, this one a little closer to her objective. She had to assume that the Ross were observing her, so she couldn’t remain in any one place for long. Otherwise, they’d swarm her again and she doubted she’d find another supply of cougar tanks to provide a neat little distraction.

The current area was a smaller room, though still quite large. At a glance she wasn’t sure what she was looking at, however. None of the equipment was anything she was familiar with, which she expected probably meant that it wasn’t military kit or, at least, not common issue kit. She’d seen most of what the Ross seemed to prefer to field, or so she felt at least.

Sorilla hesitated, but ultimately her curiosity got the best of her and she gravitated to the console interface, quickly lighting it up and getting access to the local inventory management system the Ross made use of.

This whole situation would be so much easier if they hadn’t sandboxed their inventory systems, ah well.

Without being able to get deeper access from the inventory systems, Sorilla didn’t worry so much about trying to find things she knew wouldn’t be there and just skimmed the listings for anything she, or her computer, might recognize.

The Ross stored everything in mathematical formulae, which was in turn written out in their own language.

That was both easier and harder to deal with than a normal language.

Easier because math was a fundamental ‘language’ of the universe, it was true no matter who you were, where you were, and so on. That made it relatively straightforward to decode.

Decoding wasn’t the end, however, but only the beginning. Math, while a fundamental language in its own right, didn’t supply the context that language did. It didn’t convey emotions, or intent, just reality. And, also, the universe was incredibly complex.

Sir Isaac Newton was a superlative mathematician. However, even if the Ross formulae were converted into Arabic numerals for him to peruse, Sorilla was quite certain that they would make no sense to him at all. He would have been lacking some of the basic variables that were necessary to properly understanding the numbers.

Things like how time and space were one and the same, and relative to the observer. That concept didn’t exist for him, and would have made the velocity calculations she was observing a complete mish mash of nonsense to anyone who tried to decode them prior to Einstein’s work being published.

The universe was, for all practical purposes, infinite… and that meant that there were always variables that couldn’t be entirely accounted for. Knowing which variables the Ross properly understood was key to decoding their math, but of course if those variables were part of concepts that humans had yet to understand… well, it became problematic.

This isn’t weaponry, Sorilla decided as she examined the code as quickly as she could. Environmental scanners? I think this block of numbers is at least.

She paused, turning her head to check the section of the room indicated by the inventory system.

Huh, I wonder if those are the same ones that recorded the map I acquired earlier?

That was something she had a great deal of interest in, and so she took a few moments to check the numbers against the symbols on the storage units, and then made her way over to the one so indicated.

It was a sealed unit, what SOLCOM might issue sensitive gear in, though it looked more advanced than a Pelican Case with non-Newtonian padding. Sorilla pulled one out of the cage it was in and popped the lid with interest.

Let’s see what we have here, she thought with some anticipation.

*****

Entropy has been located!

Where is she?

The conclave shifted focus back, seeing the target displayed on the projection.

Secondary storage.

Weapons?

There was some trepidation in that single word, the voice sounding worried about what might be found and what Entropy might once again turn against them.

No. Recording devices, planetary surveying equipment primarily. Nothing of any particular threat.

The relief was palpable at that statement, and quickly the conclave got back to work.

Summon more security.

*****

This… is not what I expected.

Sorilla drew the… device? She wasn’t sure, actually, but the contents of the case slipped out and into her hands. Visually it was a little uncomfortable to look at, changing as she moved it, like it was folding in on itself or something similar.

What she was getting from her accelerometers, now that was weird. She’d not been able to feel it in the case, but she wasn’t sure if that was due to shielding or proximity. The pull it gave was very weak, only barely noticeable even in her hand where it was right next to one of the sensors buried in her body.

What was strange was that it wasn’t constant, but seemed to fluctuate with the movement she… was and wasn’t seeing. Sorilla honestly wasn’t certain there were words in the English language, or any human language aside from advanced mathematics, to describe it.

What it did have, however, was an interface signal that her armor recognized.

Standard Ross interface too, she determined as she linked into the device and examined the very simple data stream it was sending.

Really nothing more than an opening screen with a few options, the easiest to decode being the ‘on’ button.

Sorilla glanced around, then shook her head slightly.

Screw it.

She turned it on.

Realtime data flooded her suit and implants, almost overwhelming her at first while she and her implants attempted to decode it, but it was far too complex and coming way too fast. Her primary processor started to overheat almost immediately, automatically throttling back to prevent brain damage and was quickly followed by the secondaries as they attempted to take up the load and found themselves in similar circumstances.

Sorilla sandboxed the data quickly, immediately feeling her head clear.

Holy crap that’s a lot of information.

She wasn’t certain if even a supercomputer could decode that in anything resembling real-time, there was so much. She’d only gotten a small fraction of the equations decoded, but could tell that they were more than just scanner data. The unit was attempting to feed… something, something she didn’t understand, through the stream.

Definitely taking this, Sorilla decided as she rose to her feet, tucking the device into a pouch on her belt, pushing it around to the back.

There’s so much here that SOLCOM would love to get their hands on, she thought, looking around the room briefly. Too bad.

It was time to go, before they caught up with her again.

Making her way over to the exit, Sorilla again brought up the map gained from earlier forays into the Ross vessels. She was still aiming for their portal room, but had a ways to go. If the guessing they’d made was correct, there was another security or command relay room a short distance away in more or less the right direction.

She’d head for that next.

The sound of footsteps coming her way prompted Sorilla to move quickly, trying to stay a step ahead of the horde.

*****

Entropy is moving again.

This would be simpler if she would remain still, but I suppose that is too much to ask.

The conclave shared a moment of amusement at the thought of the infamous Entropy politely waiting for them to encircle her. It was somewhat less likely than the Alliance learning to mind their own affairs.

What is her goal?

That was a good question, and one that shifted the focus of the conclave as they began to analyze her actions thus far. She was working her way deeper into the ship, rather than attempting to escape it as one might expect would be considered wise. Her pattern was erratic, but that was likely as much due to her being redirected by their actions as by any choice of her own.

Are we certain she has one? Entropy is… entropy.

A point, another voice conceded, but do not ascribe supernatural malice to her. The title we gave was more due to her effect than her intent, we believe. It is likely that she has no true idea the scope of the… conflicts she has created.

That was an old argument about those assigned to deal with the human female known to them as Entropy. Her actions were bizarre, often at odds with any sort of logical stratagem they might have predicted, yet the results often exploded far above and beyond any reasonable outcome that could have been calculated.

Even for such as the People, the universe was an infinitely complex system… with variables that even they had not entirely identified.

Her next goal appears to be a sub-system convergence a short distance from her current location. Disable the systems there?

No. Leave them active, merely loop all commands so that she cannot initiate anything without our approval. Let us see what she is looking for.

Very well. Order security to keep back? Or press her harder? Do we wish to learn her intent, or eliminate her?

Both. Have her pressed, if she is killed… a victory. If she survives, then we learn more. Also a victory.

Agreed.

With the decision made, the conclave turned their focus back to the other matter immediately at hand.

The Alliance vessel was nearing the jump point.

It would not be long now.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

As they watched the last preparations for the jump were being made. The cruiser would enter the jump point soon, and this mission would be over.

Sienele sighed softly.

It was well past time, in his opinion. They had learned much, and much of it was disturbing to say the very minimum. That there were conspiracies within the Alliance was nothing new, of course. The breadth of this one, that made it unique.

“Envoy, we are exiting the system well,” a Parithalian aide said from behind him. “The Master of Ships will be engaging the jump drive shortly.”

“Very good, thank him for keeping me up to date.” Sienele said casually.

“Yes, Envoy.”

*****

“Charging Drives.”

Master of Ships Jar Nelim nodded his acknowledgement as he reviewed the transport equations for any errors before signing off on them and sending them back to the Navigation console with his approval.

“Secure all hands, all decks,” He ordered. “Prepare to transit to jump space.”

“Yes, Master of Ships. All hands, all decks, secure for Jump!”

Nelim did what was about the only thing he could do after that order was given - he watched the numbers count down as they closed ever closer on the position of universal null-gravitational effect that was a local stellar jump point.

The Upwind was reporting back, deck by deck, that it was ready for the jump and shortly they would be exiting the production system and en-route for the nearest Administrative one.

All very routine and normal.

“Master of Ships…”

“What is it?” Nelim asked, looking over to the speaker, a young officer manning the gravitation scanning console.

“There are… anomalies in the scan.”

I apparently thought about the routine a little too soon.

Nelim sighed, getting to his feet, and crossing the deck. Anomalies were not all that uncommon, most systems had unmapped planets if you bothered to look for them, generally orbiting far out in the outer sphere of the primary’s influence. So far out that they reflected no light and generally took extreme periods to make a single revolution.

That meant that jump points could shift from time to time, even going from extremely stable for centuries only to suddenly dance around like mad when the planet in question finally came around for a visit.

It was a navigational hazard, but one that could be dealt with easily enough by an experienced hand.

“Show me,” He said as he got to the console, leaning over.

“Right here,” Finel, the young officer said, pointing. “It just appeared a moment ago, watch.”

Finel ran the numbers back, showing what the instruments had scanned. Everything was running appropriate to the predictions until, from one moment to the next, the anomaly appeared.

Nelim blinked, leaning in closer.

That’s not… what is that?

Unmapped masses didn’t just appear from one moment to the next like that. Gravity didn’t work that way. It should have shown gradually, likely over years if anyone watching, but perhaps only being noticed when a ship passed through to scan it.

It shouldn’t have appeared like someone flipped a…

Nelim froze.

“Signal combat alert,” He ordered. “All decks, rig for war!”

“Combat alert!” He second repeated the order. “Rig for war!”

*****

Sienele twisted as the alert sounded, eyes flicking over to lock with Kriss who was also moving to the observation deck to get a closer look.

“What is going on?” Sienele demanded of the aide.

“I do not know. The Master of Ships is not able to respond!”

Damn it. Of course, he isn’t, if he’s signaling a combat alert, something far more important is taking up his time.

Sienele hated not knowing what was going on, but he couldn’t be more than frustrated at the fact that the Master of Ship’s was unavailable. After all, there was nothing that he could do about the situation.

It was all the Master of Ship’s play… for now.

He settled in beside Kriss… and watched.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Seventeen

Portal Ship

Sorilla grimaced as she hit the deck, barely evading the warp pulses from the enemy security forces, returning fire with her own captured weapon as she skidded along the deck before coming to a stop and scrambling to the side where she could get cover behind a corner.

The enemy had pushed hard, racing up to catch up with her even as she moved as quickly as she could through the layout of the ship, and they’d managed to catch her in a pincer crossfire just a few meters from her target.

She cast around, finding the doorway to the target room just up ahead and quickly clambered back to her feet before sprinting for it as fast as she could.

It seemed that her burst of speed took the Goblins by surprise. She didn’t feel their weapons pulse until she’d crossed almost half the distance, but then it there was a sudden mass of twisting spacetime behind her, racing right for her.

Sorilla jumped, diving for the controls as she was struck in the back and slammed hard against the wall. Again, the graphene armor she wore was strong enough to take the hit, but she could feel the results pulping her insides even through that.

Leaning against the wall, Sorilla roughly punched open the interface and put a pulse blast through it, shorting the system again and opening the door.

With more pulses following her, she rolled into the room and hit the floor painfully before rolling again to get clear of the door and incoming fire.

Her lungs were on fire now, every breath painful, and while none of her implants were registering the sorts of severe damage they’d been designed to look for, they were showing a massive increase in white blood cells across huge swaths of her body. She didn’t think that was a good sign, and was pretty sure that the damage was worse than her systems indicated.

They’d been designed to sense discrete sources of damage, like bullets. Those weren’t exactly subtle, and were pretty known to SOLCOM medical tech. The Ross weapons were turning out to be somewhat worse than she’d thought.

Sorilla rolled herself to one side, pushing the pulse weapon out from under her, and returned fire through the door, driving the lead element back with losses as she forced herself up to a seated position and used her free hand to helped push herself back to gain some shelter behind the closest computer system.

That could have gone better.

She heaved herself up to lean on the console, bracing the pulse weapon against it as she fired another set of warps into the door single handed and brought up the interface.

*****

What is she accessing?

The conclave allowed the security forces to back off their pressure, just enough to see what intelligence was of interest to the human. The projection came up quickly, flipping through different sections more quickly than even they could read and absorb the data, before it settled.

Current Temporal Scanning Data. Interesting. She’s found the tracking section.

She is looking for active operations in the region. There is only one, now.

She’s found the Alliance ship.

The conclave focused their interest on the action, all of them intently curious as to what the one known as Entropy would attempt to do.

*****

Sorilla snarled under her helmet, glaring at the projection. The Ross were targeting the Upwind if she were reading it right.

She didn’t have any loyalties to the Alliance ship, though she had to expect that they’d probably taken her own stolen ship back on board, so if they were destroyed, she’d lose her little bush plane too.

I was just getting the hang of flying that thing. Damn.

All of that aside, she wasn’t happy about seeing Kriss die, if no one else. The grumpy Lucian was… well, not a friend exactly, but this wasn’t how he’d have wanted to go out.

More importantly, however, if the ship was destroyed, so too went the intelligence they were carrying and everyone currently part of the investigation, aside from her. Which, of course, was the most likely point of such an attack.

Sorilla let her fingers twist in the warp interface, directing commands out.

If I can get to the communications array, I might just be able to… wait…

She swore under her breath, realizing what had happened when all of the commands met dead ends.

They sandboxed me. I can’t send anything out, they just wanted to see what I would do.

The projection chose that moment to go completely dead.

“Fuck!”

Sorilla grabbed up the weapon, twisting to the door. They’d be coming for her, en mass, of that she was quite certain.

*****

A not unrespectable attempt.

The conclave agreed to varying degrees. The communications attempt likely would have warned the Alliance vessel, had it gone through. Whether that would have been sufficient to save it, well that was another matter, but it was possible.

Kill her access. We’ve seen what we wanted.

Agreed. Security is now authorized and ordered to press in fully.

Of course.

The conclave refocused on the Alliance ship, their actions toward Entropy having been made and now outside their immediate control. It was time to finish what they had begun.

Formulate a solution for the Alliance vessel.

Solution is complete, awaiting confirmation.

Confirmed.

Firing.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

“Urgency Maneuvering, all thrust!”

“Yes, Master of Ships! All thrust, Urgency Evasion now being conducted!”

The Upwind fired its thrusters, powerful engines rumbling through the ship as the reserves of chemical fuels were expended with alacrity. Despite the advanced capacity of the Alliance’s space warp drives, for emergency high thrust burns, all Parithalian ships still maintained a supply of high impulse chemical fuels to blow through their thrusters.

Slamming the ship aside like the hammer of the gods, the thrusters managed to slightly overpower the vessel’s inertial management system, making every person on board hang on as they reached nearly one gravity subjective acceleration to the side.

Nelim clutched as his command console, just barely hanging on as the ship felt like it had suddenly been upended and planted firmly on its side panels.

“Warning Report, Ship’s systems just detected a major gravetic anomaly along our previous course!”

Nelim swore, leaning forward, “All hands secure for high stress maneuvers!”

A new alarm sounded as his order was confirmed.

Someone was trying very hard to kill them, and he had a very dark suspicion of just who it was, and it was not good.

*****

“It’s them.”

Sienele snorted, “Of course it’s them. Who else would be this brazen? They’re going to try to kill us before we can report to an Administrative system.”

Kriss bared his teeth, “We should have seen it coming.”

“Not all species are so confrontational as the Lucians, my friend. The Ross… this is not in their normal character,” Sienele disagreed. “Normally they are far more subtle, if considerably more alien, than this.”

“We cornered the vermin,” Kriss countered. “They are reacting as any such pests might.”

“These vermin, as you call them, are equipped with weapons capable of annihilating planets, cornering them might not have been our best idea,” Sienele sighed.

Kriss just snorted.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Sienele went on. “It’s no longer in our hands. Our fate lies with the Pari and their ship.”

“That,” Kriss said, “Is what I despise most about this situation. Cowards could not be bothered to do the job properly. They had to kill us like the worthless vermin they are.”

“Dead is dead.” Sienele had no patience for the Lucian’s absurd warrior ethos just then.

He had to put his trust in the Parithalians and their ships. For most incidents of space battle, he would be happy to do so. Against the Ross, however?

Not the way I wanted to end this day.

*****

Portal Ship

Sorilla grunted, the pain of the deep bruising starting to fade as her armor, implants, and biological instincts all worked in collusion to amp up the production and distribution of natural painkillers and fight or flight hormones, augmented by a little chemical engineering along the way.

She slammed into the wall beside the door, pulse weapon dipping down as she drew her pistol with her right hand and brought it up just as one of the Goblins came through.

The sidearm roared once, dropping the little Mechanoid in its tracks with a round that perforated its chest and took out the central control mechanism that resided there. The mechanoid dropped as she pivoted out, stepping over the body, bringing up the pulse weapon and firing from the hip as she unloaded the sidearm simultaneously.

Combined fire tore through the ranks at close range, where she would have to work harder to miss than to hit her targets, opening gaping holes in the perimeter. Sorilla holstered her pistol empty, whipping the alien weapon in a hard toss that decked a Goblin that got a little too brave for its own good as she sprinted forward.

The Ross security mechanoids were… good, after a fashion. Whatever flaws they had were made up for by the fact that they didn’t have any real senses of self preservation and, she assumed, were probably relatively cheap to manufacture.

The downsides to them were pretty much the same downsides as Sorilla had found in all automated systems. Generally, a significant lack of creativity. It was a necessary result of anything that had a coded behavior. The responses tended to be predictable.

In this case, the Goblins were clearly coded to avoid shooting one another. That meant that they were programmed to avoid flagging each other with their weapons. Not a bad thing to program in, Sorilla figured. She’d have probably coded them the same way, in all honesty.

However, it did leave an exploit that could be turned to the benefit of someone who was willing to get in close and dirty.

An arm bar shattered the limb of the closest Goblin, relieving it of its weapon as Sorilla twisted and sent it flying across the hall into its fellows. She didn’t bother changing the settings on the weapon as she continued her spin while bringing it to bear and opened fire at close range without aiming.

The warp pulses shattered the composition of the Goblin’s construction with ease, sending parts and fragments flying as the security mechanoids automatically began to redeploy to open lines of fire in their formation so they could engage without destroying one another.

Sorilla wasn’t going to allow that to happen, however, dropping low in a spin to sweep the legs of a couple that were shuffling in response to her previous actions, then flopping to her back to deliver powerful elbow blows that crunched the armor of the small lightweight drones.

With each target she took out, unintuitively the danger to her grew significantly worse however, because she was clearing lines of fire for the enemy herself. So Sorilla plotted her motions so that each attack and strike and dodge brought her closer to her actual goal.

Before the Goblins could recover from the attack, Sorilla abruptly broke contact and lunged for an open path, vanishing around a corner, leaving chaos in her wake.

*****

Why did they not simply eliminate her?

The security forces are encoded to avoid damaging the ship or each other. We overrode the ship damage protocols, with limits, so that they could fire when Entropy was hiding behind computer systems, however we did not consider the second set.

The conclave slumped, more metaphorically than physically since they were interconnected on the level of thoughts, but the presentation was much the same.

Remove those restrictions.

Agreed.

The conclave sent out the orders with alacrity.

She does provide us with valuable data, if nothing else.

Few in the conclave appreciated that observation in the moment, which only seemed to amuse the speaker all the more so as shards of irate emotions were flung his way.

The chaos she leaves in passing is utterly unacceptable. She destroyed the order of the universe by her very existence.

Oh, calm yourself. The universe is no more ordered than you are intelligent. Entropy is the natural state of things. She is merely that universal force incarnate.

Both of you are giving her too much credit. She is of a lower species, not some supernatural beast of chaos.

How would you tell the difference between her and such a thing?

The exchange grew more and more heated until a shattering voice entered the fray.

Be silent.

The converse fell quiet, all focus shifting.

Track her. The voice ordered, calmer then. Determine her goal, and plan to accomplish such. Cease the foolishness, stop wasting resources for no gain. Have none of you noticed that the Alliance ship evaded our initial strike?

The assembled abruptly shifted their focus to that, seeing that the Alliance vessel was on a heavy evasion burn.

Not good.

No, it is not. If they are not destroyed within the jump point, there may be evidence of their fate. That is unacceptable.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

Nilem’s flicked side to side as he scanned the scrolling feed from the scanners. The gravity anomaly had vanished, but that wasn’t how gravity worked, naturally. The only way that could have happened was if an unnatural source had appeared in the system, a ship in other words.

No such vessels should be there, and the sudden second anomaly right along their previous course made it clear what that ship’s intent had been.

Attempting to hide will do nothing. They are already tracking, and we don’t even know their location. Running is… an option, but not a good one. They were clearly awaiting us at the jump point itself. That destruction would have been…

He cringed at the thought.

Destruction while they were powering their drives in a jump point?

Debris would have been scattered across no less than a lightyear… evenly.

There would have been less evidence of their existence than there was of a Lucian’s restraint.

That was currently the most popular theory of what happened to the Alliance Battle Group that had been pressing the war with the human forces and ultimately ended with both fleets simply vanishing. Their constituent molecules had likely been spread over a cone several lightyears across, making the location of any wreckage an effective impossibility.

Suffice to say, the Alliance protocols for wartime maneuvers had seen some rather significant changes after that little mess, just in case the theory was true.

That did not leave many options open to them, unfortunately. Fighting was the only one that had any chance, but even that was a poor option indeed. It almost had to be a Ross vessel out there, somewhere. They didn’t even know where it was, and while the Ross were relatively poor at hiding… hiding was not particularly difficult when you had the space of a star system to skulk in.

“Find the enemy ship,” He ordered, “I want targeting solutions, and I want them now.”

“Yes, Master of Ships!”

*****

Sienele gripped the rail in front of him as he looked down on the command deck of the Upwind, unhappy with what he was seeing but entirely unable to add anything constructive to the situation.

“Where are they?” He whispered, shifting his focus up, looking out at the dark reaches of space, pinpoints of steady lights the only thing breaking up the vista.

Kriss snorted from beside him, “Where they always are. Hiding behind their ships and those infernal weapons of cowards. Nothing has changed, not since we first encountered them, Envoy. You know this.”

“I know that they don’t take overt action against us any longer,” Sienele snarled. “This is beyond anything we’ve seen from them in… I don’t even know how long.”

“They fear the Sturm, so they stopped killing from space like cowards and now employ others to kill on the ground for them… like cowards.” Kriss’ voice was calm, entirely without any of the concern that Sienele could feel near bursting from within.

“How are you staying calm?”

“Envoy, there is nothing I can do to affect this battle. I do not like the situation, but there it is. What point is there to be angry about it, or to worry, or panic?” Kriss asked, taking a long deep breath. “Ask me about my feelings when they might have a purpose. Until then, I will wait… and watch.”

Lucians!

Sienele nearly spat the word in his own mind, but ultimately there was nothing more he could do.

Just wait…

And watch.

*****

Portal Ship

Sorilla was running.

She was pacing herself, not attempting to cross the ship in a mad sprint. She knew she would need her strength when she got to where she was going, or before. There was no point getting to her objective a few seconds earlier if she was unable to act when she got there.

Besides, moving too fast would make avoiding the attempts at ambushes through the ship all the harder.

The Ross security was moving quickly, and seemed to have an endless supply of the mechanoid Goblins.

Glad they never fielded them like this on Hayden.

That wasn’t entirely accurate, though it felt like it. In truth there had probably been a lot more of them there, during the early days of the war. She’d just never run into them, or at least not in such dense numbers. The jungle hid many things during the war.

At the moment, however, it felt like she was fighting an endless wave of the damned things, which was something she’d really rather not be wasting time on.

No way to get a signal out to the Alliance ship, and I don’t even know for sure if they’re still alive, but I have to try something.

Just what that something was, well that was a question she was a little fuzzy on the answer for if she were being honest. She had… calling it a plan was really being too generous, but she did have a vague idea that might become a plan, probably in retrospect after the whole situation was over and done with, but that was as good as she was going to get at the moment.

The Ross ship had a small command center near to her position. It was hardwired into the ship’s networked backbone, and so the enemy shouldn’t be able to entirely cut it out. They could probably hard stop the consoles, but she had a way around that.

If she were right, she’d get a chance… maybe… but not more than that.

Sorilla was good with that.

*****

Entropy is moving toward the sector tertiary command room. Interesting.

What is interesting? There is nothing there she can access, we’ve locked everything down. No more games with this creature. End her.

We are… and we have. It is interesting that she does not seem to be aware that we have full control over the systems. Perhaps the human vessels are vulnerable to such attempts?

Possibly. Alliance records are… limited in that regard. Very few attempts at infiltration have been made, but at least one was successful, so the idea has merit.

Worthwhile data, at least. There, she is at the room.

The Conclave observed as Entropy broke through the security door with rather embarrassing ease, accessing the tertiary command center. With everything, even power, locked down however, she was not going to gain anything there.

She just walked past the terminals. What is she doing?

Unknown. Subject Entropy’s goals and actions to achieve same have long defied any attempt at prediction.

The gathered intelligences pulled back abruptly as their target began tearing panels from the walls and floor, looking for something hidden within.

She’s going directly for the warp feed.

Impossible! The humans have not even the slightest shred of the technology they would require to make use of… did she just reach into the feed with her hands?

The conclave didn’t have a response as they watched, unable to entirely believe what they were seeing.

*****

This sucks.

Sorilla gritted her feet as she fought off the conflicting feelings, working to get her suit’s sensors close enough to the Ross main data feed to be able to read what she was looking for.

The aliens’ used a variation of their warp technology to transfer data, which was hardly a surprise, given how much of their technology was based around that particular universal force. It did make for a rather difficult interface with her largely electronic systems, unfortunately.

SOLCOM had done a lot to give her, and other frontline specialists, the ability to gather intelligence on the enemy, however, and one of those things was an interface that could interpret space warping modulation if they could get into the right position to record it.

Generally, that meant using the enemy’s consoles, which was the presumed best way to interface with any technology. However, SOLCOM hadn’t assumed that those would be available for use after a fight, so she had options. The data running through the alien conduit was a bit of a mess at first, she had to manually align her own sensors with the flow in order to make any sense of it, but once she had Sorilla found that it wasn’t entirely incomprehensible.

It was too much, however.

The Ross data conduit was clearly feeding more data than her suit could even come close to managing without computational support… support she did not have. Sorilla threw her own implants into the mix, adding a drop in the ocean to the needed cycles, but focused primarily on filtering out the data she didn’t need.

Much of what was flowing through was operational data on the ship… something SOLCOM would kill for, but she didn’t have any tactical use for it just them, nor did she have the room for storing it anyway. Sorilla blanked that section of the flow entirely out, then did the same for a huge section that looked like it was personnel data, biometrics, neural information, and so forth. She only recognized it because her own system had a telemetry feed that could be linked to SOLCOM repeaters, and the data pattern they put out was sharply similar… even given the different medium they operated in.

Again, interesting, possibly important… but not tactically actionable.

From there she started looking through the rest for what she was really after. It had to be there, of that she was certain.

She would find it.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Eighteen

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

The sensors of the Upwind had been shifted almost entirely to defensive scanning, either looking for the enemy or searching for any hint that the enemy had once more engaged them. The Ross used a space warp weapon that, fundamentally, created a short period singularity by folding spacetime in on itself over and over, breaching the dimensional walls and essentially increasing the local gravitational constant.

The results for any ship caught in the field were somewhat predictable, and quite spectacular.

However, it couldn’t be done instantly, and it wasn’t something that could be swept across space, which gave he and his crew the one good chance they had against the enemy superweapon. By ensuring early detection, the Upwind had a few moments to go to full power on their engines in order to escape the primary field of effect.

If they were too slow, they would become a very small and very short-lived star in the black sky of this system.

“Arc Tangent One Nine One scanned. No signal, Master of Ships.”

“Proceed to scanning One Nine Two.”

“Yes Sir.”

For the moment, at least, the enemy ship was content to wait them out. Elim had no doubt that if he were to attempt once more to escape the system via the jump point, they would make their play, but so long as he was securely trapped where he was, they appeared in no rush to end his life or the lives of those on board the Upwind.

He wasn’t certain that it was something he should be grateful for or not.

The parithalian Master of Ships leaned forward over his command console, glaring out over the vista before him.

He’d studied the war with the Ross, and believed he was fully aware of just what they were truly capable of. It was not something he had ever hoped to fight. But now that they’d chosen to make that fight his, he refused to go silently.

One way or another, Elim was going to ensure that the enemy knew they’d been in a fight.

*****

Portal Ship

The conclave were pouring their focus into the actions of Entropy, noting that she actually seemed to be capable of pulling data directly from a core conduit, something they’d have sworn was impossible just a short time earlier.

The humans were proving themselves to be more dangerous, by far, than any previous calculations had indicated.

When first encountered, the race had been determined to be merely one more barely insignificant species among many in the galaxy. That was not an unusual finding. All of the races of the Alliance, save one, were largely considered the same. Their actions were mostly ignored by the People, until they impacted on territory or operations the People were protecting or undertaking.

Most species learned quickly to simply avoid causing the People any problems, lest they be exterminated quickly and with no concern for anything beyond ensuring that they were no longer an issue. The humans had been considered exactly that when first discovered. Where they had been in the way, they had been exterminated, and where they were not an issue, ignored.

That was how the People treated lesser beasts as a matter of policy.

The humans hadn’t seemed to like that, of course. Few races did, initially. Most learned quickly that it was best to simply move if the People were operating in their proximity.

Humans had not learned that lesson.

In fact, it was they who had forced the People to move. The destruction of the combined battlefleet had thrown shockwaves through the population, leaving many frightened by the unknown.

Thus, the humans elicited a wary caution, one that many among the People and, indeed, the Conclave itself, considered it to be a largely unwarranted caution. The most likely causes of the fleet’s destruction were not through direct human actions, but… no one was certain.

Uncertainty was anathema to the People in general, and to the conclave in particular.

They had to know, to identify and quantify the variables at play, before they could formulate plans that involved the space the humans had established as their own.

There was no other way.

So, for now, they waited and watched.

*****

Got you.

The data feed she wanted had been elusive, but that made sense. Sorilla had finally located it in one of the deeper warps, and very nearly been overwhelmed by the density of data that was contained therein.

She had no doubt that SOLCOM, and corporate entities back home, would very much love to get access to the Ross’ data compression technique… though, thinking on it, Sorilla was uncertain if it even was data compression in the traditional sense of things, or if they were literally compressive spacetime to fit more data within the available bandwidth.

No matter. Let someone else figure that out. I have what I need.

The first part of her find was simply the real time tracking data of the Alliance cruiser. She didn’t want to waste her time if they’d already been destroyed, that would be a hell of a kick in the teeth to find out after she’d spent all that time and energy trying to save them.

Fortunately, the Upwind was still intact and had, apparently, detected the Ross attempt on them without any help from her. They were engaging in evasive action, moving away from the Jump Point if she was reading the coordinates correctly, and running their active scanners at maximum power.

That was understandable, if unfortunately, unlikely to turn up much for them.

Active scanners were good for clearing your immediate local space, maybe out a couple light seconds or so. Beyond that you quickly fell afoul of the Inverse Square Law and the relatively low detection threshold for almost anything that might be floating around in space. Ultimately, she suspected that all they were doing was more securely pinpointing their own locations for the Ross to use at their leisure.

Not really as much of a risk as it sounded, however, since the Ross clearly had them locked in already anyway.

Sorilla pushed those thoughts away. For the moment, all that mattered was that they were still alive… and she’d located the Ross ship that was tracking them.

Now she just had to do something with that information.

Her bones and flesh complained as she pushed herself back up to her feet. The bruises and aches in her bones reminded her that she wasn’t the child who’d originally joined the army anymore.  Hell, she wasn’t even the old woman of the teams now, even that was a few years in her rearview.

Life extension treatment had come a long way, slowing, and even reversing telomere decay, but somehow the years still seemed to weight in on a person.

Sorilla stretched out the aches, letting them vanish into the background as she got to moving again. She’d worry about her age when she had reason to expect she might live to see another birthday.

Until then there was work to do.

*****

Entropy is in motion.

The conclave found themselves fascinated by the observation of the being they knew as entropy. She was not the beast that most of her fellows were, and if she were not… then how many others might not be?

That was a question the People might need to address in the future, but for now they were concerned entirely with determining her next course of action and eliminating the threat she posed. Security had moved into position to block her escape, and they had moved in a few of the more powerful mechanoids to help ensure that stayed true, though they had their doubts that this group would have any more chance of success than previous ones… though, all they needed to do was strike once in the right place and it would be over.

Space and Time were their allies in all things, this most especially.

The conclave settled in to study the coming conflict.

*****

Sorilla leaned around the door and winced under her helmet.

That’s a lot of Goblins and even a few Golems. I think I may have pissed them off.

Normally, she’d be pretty happy with that to be honest. Pissing off the enemy was one of her primary methodologies. Angry combatants made mistakes, and mistakes on the battlefield were just one more tool to be weaponized, if you could leverage them just right.

The Ross, however, weren’t really making mistakes.

Arguably, she supposed she might claim that they were underestimating her… though, that wasn’t an argument she’d love to be making when the other side of the argument was a company of Goblins with Golem support. That actually made her feel like they were overestimating her, if she were being really honest with herself.

More to the point, though, Sorilla was reasonably certain that they had been doing neither. The enemy forces she’d encountered had been increasing in a predictable and linear fashion, neither overreacting to her previous escapes, nor seemingly oblivious to them.

They’re running me through tests, like a rat in their maze, she realized.

That irked her more than a bit. She was gathering intelligence on them, but they were doing the same right back at her. It was a game she was familiar with, one that was played quite often. Two sides, both waiting to commit their full strength, subtly tease out as much intelligence about the opposition as they can, while trying to keep the opposition from doing the same to them.

It was a game that often had no winner, at least not in the moment.

The winner of such games of Intelligence Chicken were only determined a long time later, when the war was concluded in one side’s favor or the other.

That, however, was something she did not have time for at this junction.

How the hell am I going to get through this mess?

Not for the first time, Sorilla wished for grenades. They would have given her considerably more options in dealing with the internal security forces on the Ross ship, though she had to admit that if she was right about the Ross monitoring and slowly escalating their response, that might not actually have been as good a resource as she might have hoped for.

Forcing them to escalate too quickly wouldn’t have ended well for her, she suspected. Confident in her skills though she was, Sorilla was all too aware that she was the one on the short end of a very pointy stick. She just needed to screw up once and it was all over.

The Ross had as many chances as they had security… and she suspected that their security forces might as well be infinite for all practical purposes.

A glance had given her the approximate numbers and disposition for most of them. The Goblins were already lined up to cause her no end of pain, and the Golems were just waiting there calmly at the back for their chance if she got too close.

Not good, she thought grimly.

It looked like they’d pretty much closed all the old holes in their tactics that she’d exploited thus far, which made her suspect that she might not want to get up close and personal if she was still depending on them to not flag and fire one another. She wasn’t certain that the Ross would have altered that bit of code, but Sorilla wasn’t going to underestimate them and assume that they wouldn’t have done something that she herself would have considered an obviously required alteration in the security mechanoid’s coding.

That didn’t leave her with many options, though she still had one.

Maybe.

Sorilla retrieved the scanner she’d grabbed earlier. She’d had an idea for it from the start, but had been hoping to get some time in a more secure and safe area before trying to make it work.

Doesn’t look like I’m going to get that She supposed.

The Ross scanner was a bizarre looking rig. Smaller than it had any right to be, it made her uncomfortable just looking at it. Something about the way it was built made her mind repulse, a feeling she hadn’t understood until she realized that she was getting conflicting data from her eyes as compared to her accelerometers, and again when compared to her sense of touch.

Her eyes said it was a box. Not a particularly big box either. Greyish metal, or maybe some sort of composite. Nothing impressive. Her fingers, they told a different story. There was texture there, but it varied. Sometimes almost frictionless, like she wasn’t actually touching anything, and other times grippy… clinging to her, like it was glued there.

Strange, in other words. Really strange.

The repulsion came from her accelerometers, sending data directly to her brain and her subconscious trying to make sense of it.

Those were telling her that it was big and wrong. There was something there she couldn’t see or touch, but her brain was convinced with absolute certainty that it was there all the same.

The human brain didn’t much like those sorts of conflicts, it evoked visceral reactions. Sorilla was used to those. She’d felt them from early on with her implants, when her mind started decoding the signals and interpreting them for what they were. The conflicting information had been the source of a great deal of misery on her part as she was made actually ill by the differences in how she was sensing the world around her.

This was like that, but also like the Uncanny Valley Effect. That feeling when you saw a moving body that looked almost human, but not quite. She’d encountered it with some of the Alliance membership, but not many. Most were far enough to the alien side of things that they didn’t trigger that repulsed feeling, like you were watching a walking corpse.

This box… somehow triggered that same sensation.

It was disturbing, but she didn’t have time to worry about it for the moment. Sorilla found the interface points, slipping her armor link into it and activating the device.

Here’s hoping this works.

With the scanner active and linked to her armor, Sorilla took a few moments to be certain that the interface was what she’d expected it to be.

Looks like standardized Ross tech, no real changes from what SOLCOM has already cracked. That’s good. Alright, pull the feed… run it to my main processor…

Sorilla winced automatically as her processor tried to make sense of the data from the feed and almost immediately began overheating. She quickly killed that process. There was no way her computer cores would be able to make any sense at all of a Ross data stream directly, not with the current code she had available at least.

No, she had another plan for it.

Sandbox the signal, redirect the tap… Sorilla side loaded an application that could split the feed and introduce delays in it, using pre-programmed delays appropriate to the location of her implanted and armor mounted accelerometers. Split the feed, insert the delays… and send to my implants. Woah…

Sorilla fell back against the wall for a moment as a sudden sensory shift blossomed inside her, in a way she could never have found words to describe even if someone put a gun to her head to demand it. The scanner was feeding a real-time scan through the implants, which were then sending along her nervous system directly to her brain.

The system should have then picked up the signals and processed them in her implanted computer cores… but her brain had other ideas for it instead.

The ship around her snapped into perfect clarity… not visual clarity… but something beyond that.

Like it was part of her own body, she knew everything about the space around her, right down to the positioning of the security forces she couldn’t even see. Sorilla took a deep breath, trying to get used to the new sensations she was feeling. The scanner wasn’t perfect. It had a range that was more limited than the basic accelerometers she used, so she could feel the tug of larger gravity sources that were well outside the range of the scanner, and those put a slight disconnect in how she was perceiving the world that she could feel.

Despite, that, however, the change was… awe inspiring.

She could feel the ship, the security mechanoids, her own pistols and the captured pulse rifle, all without even glancing in their direction, just as easily as she could close her eyes and touch the tips of her fingers together.

It was a rush, unlike anything she’d ever experienced… even the pre-scanned map was different, more… flat somehow, in ways she couldn’t explain.

Sorilla lifted the captured pulse weapon, checking the settings before cranking them up past the restrictions that the security forces seemed to keep… likely to prevent them from damaging the ship, a very good idea that she really didn’t much care about in any case.

Let’s see how well this works.

Sorilla twisted out from behind the cover of the doorway, leveling the weapon in front of her, and sprinted right into the enemy’s guns.

*****

To say that the conclave was… surprised by the actions of the one titled Entropy would be a bit of an understatement. Despite having gotten used to the human pulling all manner of insane options from her seemingly never-ending bag of tricks, they’d honestly not foreseen her option to charge directly into the security forces weapons as though she were seeking her own death.

The surprise of that was only slightly less than the surprise when she managed not to die.

There! That, replay that!

The projection paused, rewinding slightly to replay the section while the real fight continued on in uncompressed time. For the conclave, the time compression meant that they could easily review and predict enemy actions long before it was made.

Normally.

It didn’t work so well when the enemy refused to be predictable, after all.

The projection started forward again, showing Entropy as she charged out of the secure room and into the crossfire that had been established by the security forces. Seemingly without any sense of self preservation she opened fire, dropping three security mechanoids even as the rest opened fire.

That should have ended it, then and there, however, as they watched Entropy dropped into a slide that allowed the pulsed fire to cross harmlessly over her head… well, harmlessly to her. More mechanoids were taken out of the battle by friendly fire.

An impressive maneuver, but not what caught the attention of the speaker, however.

She bent a knee under her as she slid, the friction causing her to transition from a feet first slide to a skidding kneeling position as she continued to fire her weapon with abandon. Then it happened. A Security mechanoid managed to fire from directly behind her, a position that had been determined as one of the least monitored places one could be, given the capabilities of the armor Entropy wore.

The pulse tore through spacetime in her direction, only to flash entirely by as she rolled her neck and shoulders, ducking her head under the warp before coming back up to fire at another target to her immediate right.

That was not possible. She should not have been able to evade that so precisely, not even had she seen the mechanoid before it fired. She is doing something new.

That was the crux of it, the Conclave knew.

Was there no end to what this species could keep pulling out of its bag of tricks?

Entropy was an extreme example, of course, but despite that she hadn’t even caused them the most damage of the humans. Whatever had happened to the battle group had been far more damaging, likely caused by a human, and was still very much a mystery, no matter what sort of theories that might be flying around had to say of it.

All of them echoed the next sentiments voiced, even if they’d not yet said them for others to perceive.

What in the eternal abyss is it with these humans? Can they not just be one thing? Every time we challenge them, they change on us!

The conclave commiserated with the sentiment, but there was too much of the fight left for them to join in the complaints.

*****

Sorilla resisted the urge to actually whoop out loud as she got in among the group and started using her feet, knees, and elbows in addition to the pulse weapon.

The feeling, the perceptions she had, they were unreal.

Like some kind of limited omniscience, or that was the only way she could describe it as she fought. The enemy positions were easily determined, without looking, and the moment they charged their weapons it was like they were signalling their intent. Pulses twisting space in her direction… well, she could feel them like they were her own limbs, and there was little else quite so easy as dodging a punch you aimed at yourself.

That didn’t mean it was a perfect setup. All that information was still overloading her implants/ Sorilla had to sandbox the feed entirely in order to get anything functional out of her cybernetics, letting her brain do the heavy lifting while the computers focused on other things. It was also clear that just knowing about those things wasn’t exactly enough to entirely gift her the fight.

She could be overwhelmed, and there were a lot of enemies there, all more than willing to open fire on her position even, as she’d guessed, when her position and their allies happened to very nearly intersect.

Sorilla grabbed a Goblin, twisting hard to wrench it off its feet and threw it into the path of a blast fired by another. The shrapnel from the destruction of the two meeting pelted her in her armor, but she was already moving forward.

The data stream had brought her what she’d been looking for, and now these forces were between her and her target.

That was not a good place to be, and she was going to make damn well certain that they learned that lesson the hard way.

Warp pulses tore back and forth across the deck as Sorilla wove in and out of the enemy positions, returning fire with her own captured weapon while trying to lead the enemy into destroying their own positions in turn. She was, however, working her way to her goal with every motion.

A duck here, a weave there, sliding under an attack, jumping over another, each move bringing her closer to the back line of the enemy formation as they slowly curled around and fell in on her position.

The Goblins weren’t the threat, however dangerous their massed fire might be, but the Golems were not to be underestimated.

They weren’t incredibly fast in terms of the sort of motions a human might undertake, but once they got moving, they could easily outrun anyone who wasn’t enhanced to some degree at least. In her armor, Sorilla was confident she could evade one of them, but she’d counted six thus far and she was far from certain that her skill and abilities would carry her that far if she got stupid and gave them anything resembling a fighting chance.

Grabbing a nearby Goblin by the head as she passed, Sorilla pulled hard laterally and yanked it off its feet. Few bipedal animals had much choice but to go wherever you wanted if you had control of their heads, and that held pretty much the same for the mechanoid constructions that the Ross fielded for security.

Sorilla yanked it flat out horizontal in the air, then threw her weight behind it as it started to fall, driving the head into the deck with enough force to shatter the composite material it was constructed of as she rolled clear of the trio of pulses that had converged on her location just a second later.

There was little enough left of that particular Goblin after that.

Rolling back to her feet, Sorilla sprinted perpendicular to her previous line of travel, catching the security forces off guard as they continued to track her previous path for a split second before they began to adjust, giving her a sliver of breathing room from which to make her next move.

She skidded to a stop against the wall of the corridor, spinning to bring the warp weapon to bear on the closest of the Golems as she opened fire.

The settings on Ross weapons seemed to be quite varied, she knew that from the war. Generally, they were set to a lethal level for unarmored humans, but one that wouldn’t do too much to significantly stronger materials like those that composed the armor and interior of the Ross starships, for example, but they could go much higher.

Sorilla had pushed the settings on the one she’d captured as high as it would go before she opened fire on the Golem.

The warp was visible as it crossed the distance between then, the twisting of space time actually yanking a couple unbalanced Goblins off their feet as it blew past them and hammered into the much bigger Golem. Sorilla watched the big mechanoid seem to twist and ripple as the forced warping of space intersected with it. For a split second, she wasn’t sure the weapon was enough to do anything, but then the first cracks appeared.

The armor folded in on itself as the pulse peaked, then suddenly snapped back out with enough force that the armor shattered and exploded out into the tightly packed space, sending shrapnel flying in a conical spread right back in the direction the blast had come from.

Sorilla saw it coming and hit the ground in a dive as the devastation ripped past overhead, tearing up the Goblins with a vicious and brutal efficiency. After it passed, Sorilla fell still for a moment… and it felt like everyone else did as well.

Goblins still standing slumped and fell, shattered parts revealing that they’d been hit by the explosion, and Sorilla quickly got back to her feet as she tried to evaluate the situation.

Most of the Goblins were down, but only the Golem she’d actually struck was in a similar state. The rest had clearly been armored enough to handle any of the shrapnel that came their way, which wasn’t exactly shocking.

It didn’t matter too much, though, because Sorilla had gotten precisely what she’d been aiming for with that blast. The path to her destination was now cleared, or close enough for her to exit stage right on this little fiasco.

She took the opportunity and bolted, not sparing the artificial muscles in her armor as she did. Behind her, she could hear the remaining forces scrambling to try and put together a pursuit force.

Good luck. You’re going to need it.

*****

The conclave was silent.

For a short while.

What in the infinite abyss was that?

The destruction of the security force?

No, that was clear. Entropy has already shown that she can interface with our technology, against all sanity. How did she evade fire for long enough to manage it, however? Show the scans again!

The projections ran, multiple clips simultaneously in full spacial reference, for them to examine.

See? Here, here, and here, the complainer snapped, pointing out specific moments in the fight. Those actions are bordering on precognitive abilities!

Calm yourself. This species does not have any such skills or abilities, of that we are quite certain.

That is very nice and of great comfort, we are sure, but look at the projection.

The conclave was near bursting with the contradicting opinions, but the evidence on the projection left them with no way to easily spin off what had been seen. This was a threat level that the People had not seen, until now, in any species they’d encountered.

Not even the Sturm themselves could see the future.

That was reserved for the People, and the People alone… but they were not certain that was what they were seeing now. The argument raged, with nearly as many sides as there were voices, all trying to determine what it was that they’d truly seen.

If it were premonition, that was something that could not be ignored. The People could steal glimpses of the future themselves, but only with great preparation and care not to affect the present outside of closed and insulated time loops. Paradox was anathema to any advanced race, and was a path that had to be tread lightly.

It was nearly impossible to trigger a true Paradox. Normally, the universe simply collapsed any attempt that might lead to such an outcome… but there was evidence of it happening, the People had found the proof… amid the ruins of other, even more advanced, races.

By everything we know to be true about the universe, what she is doing cannot be precognition. There must be another explanation.

That voice of reason calmed them. The conclave was aware of that truth, even if many had forgotten it in the heat of the moment.

Very well. But what is it? We must know.

We will determine it. She has not shown this capacity before. What did she do in the secure room?

Subject Entropy accessed the secure data link, against all sanity and logic, managing to pull data we have not yet ascertained from our records. She then proceeded to leave the room, engaging our forces in a decimation of them, before breaking contact and…

Go back. Before she engaged our forces, look here…

A new image was projected, showing Entropy drawing out a familiar piece of technology and accessing it.

An environmental surveyor. What of it?

Is she accessing it, somehow using it in conjunction with her equipment?

Unlikely, the information density transmitted by the Surveyor is significantly higher than even the better systems we’ve analyzed in use by the humans. Even the shipboard systems would have issues converting the feeds to something useable in anything approaching real time.

Perhaps… yet she still accessed it. Is it active?

Unknown, the device passively scans spacetime via mass interactions.

Follow her more closely. We must know.

The conclave agreed, assigning more forces to monitoring as they began to track her motions again.

Now… where is she going?

*****

Should be right this way, Sorilla thought as she raced through the corridors, now looking to avoid contact where possible and using the scanner to see the enemy as they tried to position forces to intercept her as she moved.

The Ross ship was massive, but even more so on the inside than from without. She didn’t know how they did it, but SOLCOM’s belief was that their mastery of spacetime had reached a point where they could fold it in on itself, creating pockets within their ships that were much larger than the hulls might indicate.

That was great for them, she supposed, but it was pure annoying hell for anyone trying to get around the damn things without a map.

Now that she had a map it was only incredibly annoying, rather then hellishly so.

The scanner was feeding her real-time data literally as fast as he consciousness could interpret it, probably faster even, but the real source of intelligence was the data she’d grabbed from the ship’s information backbone. It wasn’t limited by the range of the scanner she’d stolen, and had been searched out for a specific need.

Sorilla spotted a Goblin unit moving into place to corner her up ahead but their numbers were still low, and she didn’t want to waste time going around them, so she broke into a full power sprint instead. Armor propelling her legs, Sorilla’s strides began eating up deck below her feet as she charged the position without pause nor hesitation.

They’d been unsurprised by her sudden appearance, best she could tell… though, with mechanoids, and alien ones at that, surprise could be rather difficult to read at the best of times.

Sorilla jumped, leading with an armor shod knee that shattered the face and skull of the closest of the Goblins, driving it to the ground where she finished it with the other knee driving into its chest. From there she fired the pulse rifle in her grip, the burst shattering one side of the security formation as she rolled with the motion of her attack, got back to her feet, and continued on without pausing.

Normally, leaving enemies alive at her back when she had no support to speak of would be the height of stupidity in Sorilla’s opinion, but honestly at this point she had enemies at her back no matter what direction she turned, and speed counted more.

It should be just ahead.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Nineteen

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

“Possible contact, Sector Thirty-One Twelve.”

Elim nodded, gesturing quickly, “Locate, isolate, and identify. Full active scans are authorized.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

The Upwind was still evading the enemy, though as best they could tell no farther shots had been fired in their direction. With the Ross, however, that likely only meant that they had decided to settle in for the long wait, likely securing the Jump Point against their return.

If they relaxed and tried to Jump again… well, then there would be a second chance, wouldn’t there?

That wasn’t going to happen, however. That Jump Point was blacklisted as far as Elim was concerned. He had no intention of taking his ship anywhere near it, and that was final. They’d already plotted an alternate course to get them back to the Alliance Administrative Systems, using a longer series of Jumps.

The only thing slowing them from taking that right then was that he wanted to ensure that the Ross weren’t skulking close enough to take them out no matter which Jump Point they used.

Until they found the enemy, the Upwind was going nowhere.

The new scan looked promising, however, and Elim copied it over to his own system to examine while the scanning crews were doing their duty with the raw feeds.

The potential target was an unknown source of warping in the local space time. That might not be the enemy ship. Solar systems were notorious for hiding even significantly sized celestial bodies in their outer shells where the light from the primary was weak and didn’t reflect particularly well, especially off rocky planetoids and larger.

However, this system was reasonably well surveyed, and hadn’t shown that sort of anomaly in any of the recent scans from the last several records. That was a good sign that they had a decently high probability of a match.

It was quite a distance away, however, very much out of the range of the faster systems of scanning. It would take time to get a proper image of the target, time that he would prefer was spent in other ways if it could be managed.

Let’s see what happens when they’re scanned actively…

*****

Portal Ship

The local conclave found itself pulled away from the ongoing and occasionally enlightening, yet always frustrating, situation with Entropy, their attention being redirected by the actions of the Alliance war vessel.

They have detected the vessel pacing them, active scans of that region of space are increasing.

Have they reached detection threshold?

Negative.

Then they believe they might have located it, but have not yet. Take no action until the scans reach the detection threshold. Have the ship maneuvered closer, and prepared for combat.

The conclave considered the suggestion briefly in their compressed time, then gave the assent for it to be undertaken. The Alliance ship was the priority, but really it was a secondary interest for them compared to what was going on right there on the other vessel buried in the dirt of the Alliance Production world.

Entropy in action was… fascinating.

She has been moving erratically, but there always seems to be a goal. What is her next one?

That was a question that was perplexing the conclave incredibly. The human soldier did not seem to like moving in straight lines, despite being entrapped in a ship that was composed almost exclusively of straight corridors it seemed. When she made moves, it had become part of their procedure to attempt to predict where she would ultimately end up… and whether that was where she originally intended.

Thus far, none of them had been particularly successful at predicting the first, nor confirming the second.

Her current path will take her, eventually, to another secure storage.

Anything of note within?

No. Merely supplies for the ship, parts, nothing of military value at least.

Do not assume that means that Entropy will be unable to leverage it into something of military value.

Agreed.

Attention…

They all refocused, turning to the speaker as the project of the subject’s path was calculated.

What is it?

She may be directing for the spacetime core.

That brought them up, confused for a moment. There were few things there that anyone could affect, even the Ross themselves, without significant equipment. While she had certainly surprised them in the past, there was no hint that she had the capability to do any damage to the core.

Likely a misdirect, another finally decided. There is nothing there she could reasonably accomplish.

The transport paths cross there.

That warning left many of them dumbfounded. Not that Entropy might be heading for the Paths, but rather than anyone would even consider it a possibility.

You don’t mean to actually suggest she might be capable of navigating the Paths, do you?

I mean to suggest that we are no longer certain of her actual capacity at all. It harms none if we dispatch more… significant security to the entryways to the Paths.

That caused them to reconsider their incredulity.

Ultimately it didn’t hurt to send forces there, just in case of course.

The order was given.

*****

Sorilla spotted the lumbering Golems moving into position through the scanner long before she could see, hear, or even feel their actions through the deck.

Fuck. They’ve finally outguessed me.

Honestly, she was surprised that it had taken this long. She’d been trying to cover her approach with misdirection, taking longer routes than needed, and even hitting other targets that happened to be close to the path she needed to take, but in the end… she was moving ever closer to her goal, and at some point, they had to recognize what that was.

The portal room.

SOLCOM didn’t know a lot about it. In fact, she was probably the single human in the galaxy who knew the most… certainly the most first hand. She’d been in such a room once before, before her actions led to the destruction of the ship and the room with it.

What they did know was that the Ross had a mastery of spacetime that challenged everyone’s understanding of physics. Their control over gravity was one aspect of that control, but it was arguably one of the least impressive. Being able to warp spacetime, increasing or decreasing the localized effects of gravity, had far more applications than merely turning any matter into a nuclear explosive.

It allowed them to manipulate time, send ships powering across the galaxy at incredibly absolute velocities as well as unbelievable accelerations… but it also allowed them to interconnect their ships, creating a massive portal network that could instantaneously cross lightyears in ways that no other species SOLCOM was aware of could even dream of.

Hell, they weren’t even completely certain that the Alliance knew that the Ross could manage what they did.

It was the great secret that the Ross protected, and one that she had managed to unveil because of one of the more insane missions she’d participated in during the war.

And now, I’m going to use it to my advantage.

Or die in the attempt, of course. But Sorilla firmly kept that thought from actually forming in her mind.

First, however, she had to get through the final defense that the Ross had opted to place in front of her.

And what a defense it is…

Six Golems, heavily armed, and of the combat variety rather than the upscaled earth moving versions she and the Pathfinders on Hayden had initially encountered. Sorilla fingered the captured weapon in her possession, considering her chances against them with only that.

She didn’t really like those numbers.

Should have kept the Cougars as an ace in the hole, I guess. Oh well, hindsight and all that, I guess.

She briefly toyed with the idea of checking and seeing if the Ross had any captured Titans in their inventory, but as far as she was aware none of the big mechs had ever been captured intact during the war, and even if they did have one, the odds of it being on this ship… not great.

Sorilla settled in on one knee, surveying the scene through the scanner rather than with her eyes of her armor’s sensors. In addition to the instinctive understanding of the environment it offered her through her accelerometers and the neural interface they used to communicate with her core processor, she could have her internal computer take the data and crunch it out into a visual representation.

It was slower, taking seconds to render even a still frame image, but it worked.

The small squad of very big mechanoids was waiting just a ways down the range and, from the way they were arranged, they knew exactly where she was. If Sorilla had any doubt concerning whether the Ross were monitoring her… she didn’t… that would have cinched it.

Sorilla found herself a little irritated at the confirmation even so, however, as it clearly established that the Ross were treating her like a rat in a maze… offering up some cheese here and there to motivate her, while simultaneously throwing obstacles in her path to see how she’d react.

Whatever intelligence she was gaining, so too were they in turn pulling back from her.

That was how it worked, of course. You rarely, if ever, got to work in a vacuum where you were gaining all the rewards while the enemy got nothing in turn. She was used to the give and take. She just didn’t like being in such a one sided situation. Letting the enemy control the battlefield was generally a good way to get yourself killed, but she just didn’t see many ways around that at the moment.

Just have to keep playing the game and be ready to grab my chance to break out of the maze when it comes. Then we’ll see who’s the rat, and who gets the cheese.

Sorilla blinked, grimacing slightly as she thought about what she’d just said… well, thought…

Ok, that kinda sucked. Eh, I’ll come up with something better if I ever get to tell this story. Enough time wasted. Let’s get this show on the road.

*****

The conclave watched as subject Entropy took some time, kneeling in place and just stayed there in silence for a time. They assumed that she was interfacing with her own equipment and likely, the scanner she had taken from the storeroom. That being the case, they anticipated that she was aware of the more potent security forces protecting the Paths.

Entropy moves.

They all moved automatically, focusing on the human as she was indeed moving again.

That answers that.

Directly toward the Paths.

Yes, but is it because the Paths were her goal all along. Or is she going there now because the additional defenses have piqued her curiosity?

The members of the conclave froze at that, then glared as one at the speaker.

They hadn’t considered that possibility.

Damn it.

No matter. Deal with her now, enough of the games.

The conclave agreed. More security was summoned, just to close the exits from the area. This was Entropy’s last stand.

*****

The Ross weapon had an impressive power supply, of that Sorilla had no doubts. Unfortunately, at its highest setting… the only setting that was even slightly inconvenient to the Milspec Golems, even as impressive as it was, it was a limited power supply.

She noticed the gage descend below the useful range after only two additional shots that left one Golem smoking and moving slower than the rest, but still active and very much looking for her head.

Shit.

She could fall back, but Sorilla could already feel the additional security moving in to cut off her retreat. Possibly she could fight through them, but that felt like it would be merely prolonging the inevitable. Her goal was right there. She could see the path into the portal room right through across the way.

I can make it, Sorilla thought, steeling herself.

She looked side to side, taking in all of the approaching Golems with care as she stood her ground and let them come, her hands dipping down to her hips and resting on the butts of her pistols where they waited.

Alright, partner… Sorilla thought, smilingly slowly under her helm. Draw.

*****

What is she doing? Does she intend to engage the security drones with her personal weapons?

Impossible, we have thorough scans and analysis of those. They are not capable of harming the combat rated drones.

Agreed, but she clearly seems to think she can do something.

The Conclave agreed with that, somewhat set aback by the subject’s refusal to take actions that they could understand. Fleeing would make sense. Charging would make sense. Neither would necessarily be intelligent, but they made sense.

Standing there?

The conclave was about fed up with attempting to get any sort of sense out of the actions of Entropy.

The woman had well earned her title by this point.

With orders dispatched the end the threat, they settled in to see if some other bit of insanity was about to befall them.

*****

The feeling of the Golem’s weapons powering up was like a massive foghorn alarm going off in her ears. Sorilla tensed, sinking a little as she bent her legs and shifted power to the capacitance that energized the musculature built into her armor.

One chance. That’s all I get.

The standoff didn’t last long. According to her chronometer it was only seconds at most, but Sorilla felt like it had gone on for hours while she waited for the signal to move. That moment, that signal, finally came as she felt the power in one of the Golem’s weapons discharge.

She was moving before the pulse formed in the weapon’s projector, already clear of the area of effect before the blast left the weapon, and charging right in as she drew both pistols and tagged priority targets in the exposed sensory mechanisms on the big mechanoids.

Her super-positioned pistols could empty their barrels so quickly that the recoil wouldn’t even have time to affect her aim before they were empty, but that wasn’t what she needed at the moment. Precision shots took out the Golem’s ‘eyes’, or as best as SOLCOM’s research had indicated would be their eyes. She and the Pathfinders had mapped out many of the big mechanoid’s weak points during the early period of the war, but whether they’d found them all, Sorilla really didn’t know.

She just needed to buy some time, and hoped having their sensory capacity dropped would manage just that.

Another pulse discharged, vectoring right for her, and Sorilla leapt up and to the side, twisting in the air as the warping of spacetime turned the deck where she’d been into a mockery of modern art.

She planted her feet against the wall, running along it slightly to redirect herself before finally kicking off as hard as she could when a third discharge went off.

The wall behind her exploded as she dove through the air, hammering into the head of the closest Golem in a spear tackle that ended much better for the Golem than it did for her. Armor or not, hitting an immovable object hurt if you weren’t an irresistible force.

Ow.

Sorilla managed to hang on, however, even as the mechanoid reared back in response to her landing on it. She didn’t know if it was startled by her arrival, unbalanced by the impact, or actively trying to shake her off… but it didn’t really matter as she locked her arms around the thing’s head and hung on as she lost her grip on one of her pistols, the weapon clattering down to the deck far below.

Bucking around, Sorilla gritted her teeth and jammed her remaining pistol into the neck joint, firing off everything she had left before she let that one drop too and went for her knife.

Just like old times, she thought as she drew the SOLCOM issued blade and slapped the butt against her thigh to activate the carbon alignment of the blade. The edge glowed white as she held on with her left hand and stabbed repeatedly into the neck of the machine with her right.

Metallic screeching filled her ear. The thick, almost stone like structure of the Golem, was incredibly tough, even for a mono-molecular blade like the one she wore, but Sorilla didn’t let up. Within seconds that felt like hours, she sensed the big machine slow and slump, dropping roughly down to one knee as she let go and slid down its back, keeping the bulk of it between herself and the others that were turning on her.

She felt several weapons charge, preparing to fire, and knew that she only had seconds to make her move.

Sorilla kicked off the back of the Golem in a dive and dove straight for the entry way to the portal room, pulse discharges slamming into the big machine behind her as it exploded and the shockwave rippled out across the room, engulfing her in its passing.

The blast wasn’t enough to penetrate her armor, but it was enough to disorientate her as she hit the ground, fumbling the landing as she crashed along the deck and through the entry path to the Portal room.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty

Hayden, Subcontinent

The wind was blowing up as Cassius finished locking down the home stead known affectionately as the ‘Sarges Hacienda’. It was a hell of a storm, he decided as he was buffeted by winds that seemed to come from all sides.

The sky was a deep grey, almost black in places even though it was still well into the daylight hours, and he wondered if they were going to get hail.

Hail in a subtropical environment seemed odd to many people, but it happened… and, often, when it did, it was far worse than the sort you got in colder climates. There, the cold kept the air from gathering much moisture, so there was a limit to how much could form together into an ice bomb.

Hayden’s humidity tended to range somewhere between the Everglades and Holy Fuck is that water I’m breathing, so there was lots of it to be sucked up into the colder upper atmosphere and freeze.

He expected that was probably one reason why Sorilla had opted for the overbuilt nature of her little spread here on the sub-continent.

One reason among many.

Cassius loved his daughter, but the girl made him worry sometimes when it came to preparations for future calamities. She took that stuff seriously. His little measly six months of food and largely self-sufficient lifestyle was practically a joke to her.

He understood the desire to have all your options covered and all, but really, he did believe that the armory she’d collected over the years was pushing things a little bit.

Be getting a visit from the Federal boys in short order if she had put this together back home.

Cassius supposed that was one big reason why she’d picked Hayden for her retirement spot, though her inside knowledge of what was likely coming certainly hadn’t hurt. SOLCOM’s desire for an embassy location in a system known to the Alliance was going to make his little girl a very wealthy woman in time, not that she needed it.

Anything she wanted, she basically could build, grow, or buy very cheap.

He was about back to the Sarge’s Hacienda when he heard a vague noise in the distance and paused, turning around to try and figure out what it had been. With wind buffeting him from all sides, Cassius peered into the landscape around him for a while before a flash of light from up near the ‘city’ caught his eye.

What in the hell… They should be locked down for the night. Goddamn it.

The wind was too bad for a flyer, but most of the way there was well sheltered by thick Hayden jungle growth, so he bundled his jacket in closer and started trudging through the wet and windy jungle, heading for the ‘city’.

*****

“Lock it down!”

The Engineers were struggling with the tie downs on the large drone surveyor that the Major had insisted they keep operating right up until the last moment. The wind was fighting them, however, and the fact that the landing pad was partially open to the elements wasn’t helping matters in the slightest.

A gust of wind swept through, causing the drone to tilt dangerously on the pad as a line snapped with a twang that was nearly swallowed up by the howl of the storm. Men rushed over, grabbing the whipping line, and put their weight into it to pull the expensive piece of equipment back into level.

The price wasn’t the real issue, though, no matter what the cost. The real issue was replacement turnaround. If they lost the drone, it would be weeks, at best, before another could be sourced and delivered to Hayden. Months was a more realistic notion, and years wasn’t out of the question.

So, they fought the wind, wrestling the ties into place and looping them around the anchors as firmly as they could against the swaying of the machine.

It was almost in place when another snapping sound rent the air before being swallowed by the storm, and they had to start everything all over again.

The drone lifted up off its rails, teetering dangerously on one point of contact as the wind got under the rotors and airfoils, only the weight of the machine and the remaining line keeping it from going over completely.

“Watch out!” The lead engineer yelled, waving at men who were right in the path of the drone if it went over. “Get out of there!”

He threw himself at the wildly swinging line, grabbing on, and pulling back with all his weight, barely even nudging the machine despite that. Another gust came in and he was pulled forward, then up off his feet into the air, and he figured that was it. He was going over with the machine and he’d be lucky to wind up in a ship’s infirmary before it was over.

Then his feet were back on the ground, and he felt the slack in the wire being pulled slowly but inexorably back.

Risking a glance behind him, he saw Cassius Aida looping the wire around an anchor bolt and using the leverage to keep drawing in slack whenever it was presented, then locking everything hard with friction when the gusts came back.

The moment of existential terror passed, and the engineer threw himself back into saving both the drone and the men who’d nearly been crushed under it from the storm.

*****

Portal Ship

Sorilla tasted blood as she picked herself up off the floor, wincing at the pain that she could feel in nearly every corner of her body as she did so.

Proc, Health Telemetry.

The subvocalized command quickly set up a chart in one corner of her vision, showing the areas of her body that were showing signs of injury according to her own bodily response. It wasn’t necessarily the most precise indicator of her state of health, but it got the general message across.

Explosions were nasty killers. Generally speaking, it wasn’t the fireball or the shrapnel that took you out, but the overpressure wave they pushed on ahead of those elements. At the speed of sound, a blast wave could turn your insides to jelly and be gone before you had the time to blink.

Armor helped, of course. Power armor like hers, even more so. But her armor was about the lightest power armor imaginable, with more flexible sections than stiff armor by necessity. More than capable of taking even high-powered rifle rounds, and standing up to the twisting of space and time the enemy weapons threw at her, but as with those weapons… some of the force couldn’t be entirely negated or deflected.

She was bruised, bleeding… much of the latter, almost all in fact, was internal because her armor was more than good enough to handle any shrapnel that came her way. Neither she, nor her systems, had any idea yet just how bad that bleeding was. If she were lucky, it was just the equivalent of bad bruising, with no major leaks to worry about.

If she weren’t lucky?

Well, Sorilla would worry about that when it became something she couldn’t ignore. Worrying was for things you could do something about, and at that moment… she couldn’t.

So, limping, she pulled herself to her feet and started moving again, one hand on the wall for support as she walked away from the inferno behind her, and toward the goal ahead.

*****

A blade.

The conclave was rather displeased at the moment, combined with a fair amount of consternation.

How did she destroy an armored combat drone with a blade?

Dispatch projections from this to the construction divisions, A calmer voice interjected. We will expect corrections for this design flaw.

Flaw? Flaw!? She used a BLADE.

Those less personally aggravated among the conclave were working to get the group back on the track.

She is moving into the Paths.

That was all it took to shut everyone up.

*****

The portal room, as so designated by SOLCOM, was a visually insane thing to look upon. Sorilla had felt like her insides were trying to get outside the last time she’d seen it. This time, despite having a lot more time to get used to the enhanced spacetime sense her implants provided her was little better.

The big difference, in fact, was in the scanner she had active. It actually felt like it was sending multiple scans to her. She could feel things that both were and were not there. It took a few moments for Sorilla to realize that was the folds in the local spacetime, showing up both in the scans and her implants, but not to her eyes.

Alright, she took a breath, standing there in the open for a moment as she got her bearings and looked for the path she needed. There.

She could hear the movement behind her. Security forces had rallied enough to come chasing after her. If she were going to move, it had to be then. Sorilla found the mark she had pulled from the ship’s information hardline and pushed off the wall, limping at first but soon breaking into a loping gait that was only slightly uneven.

The twisting mass whirled in front of her, briefly showing her a reflection of herself before it moved on and she saw through to what looked like the other side of the room.

It wasn’t that, however.

Sorilla dove for it… and vanished into the ether.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

Elim scowled as the continued scanning failed to confirm the location of the suspected Ross vessel. He was uncertain if it were there and just managing to stay below the detection threshold of the Upwind’s scanners, or if they’d gotten the wrong location entirely.

Both were possible at the range they were forced to work at, but he couldn’t just leave it at that.

The Master of Ship’s of the Upwind rose to his feet, stepping around his console, “Pilot.”

“Yes, Master of Ships!”

“Make our course for the current sector, half thrust on our main drives.”

“Course set, power set. Ready, Master of Ships.”

“Engage the course.”

“Course engaged.”

The ship didn’t make any sound or even feel like it was moving. Under normal thrust, he’d have been rather worried if it had, but the numbers for the navigation system began to change and so Elim knew they were moving.

It was risky, moving closer to where they believed the enemy was masking itself, especially with an enemy such as the Ross. It was, however, a calculated risk. Running was an option, of course, but without knowing the location of the Ross ship, running could be as lethal as remaining still or attempting to use the targeted Jump Point.

First, we confirm the location of the enemy, and then we decide what to do.

*****

“Interesting strategy,” Kriss said, sounding like he approved.

Sienele didn’t comment on that, as he knew damn well that the Lucian would approve of any strategy that involved closing with the enemy, even if he wasn’t the one leading the charge. As an intelligence specialist, determining proper strategy for combat in space was a long distance from his specialty, but he had an idea why the Master of Ships was taking such a risk, and the answer was his specialty.

Intelligence.

Without it, they were likely dead. With it… well, Sienele wasn’t quite ready to give up, but he was fairly certain that they were not in great circumstances even with complete intelligence on the enemy in this case.

A Ross vessel is just too powerful. A single cruiser has little chance but to outrun and hope they don’t give chase… but we don’t even know for certain where they are.

That made running pointless, particularly since it seemed that the Ross had every reason to give chase in this situation. The Ross vessels were known less for their speed than their implacable nature, but that was only because they rarely cared enough to really unleash what they could do.

He wasn’t completely certain, but Sienele deeply suspected that the Parithalian cruiser had very little chance of outrunning the Ross… not if they truly wanted to pursue, at any rate.

“One way or another,” He said aloud, “We will know soon.”

*****

Portal Ship

I am getting fatigued with someone screaming impossible, as it pertains to Entropy… but that was impossible.

The conclave, most of them shocked to silence, motioned their assent with little other commentary. They were mostly still watching the replaying projection in disbelief.

She… actually navigated the Paths? But to where?

That was the question that was driving them all completely insane by that point. Tracking an object through the paths was… non-trivial, even for them. Doing so off the cuff, with no trackers on the object, and with one as small as a single human soldier?

Well, the word impossible was coming up far too often with Subject: Entropy, but here they were yet again.

Find her! She went somewhere, whether by intent or by accident. Send to all ships and stations, inform all sector conclaves, dispatch her description to everyone. She is in the Paths and we cannot allow that to pass unchallenged!

The conclave acceded to the orders, dispatching the requested commands across the network with haste as they continued to attempt both work out how the human had been able to enter the paths in the first place, given that the very nature of them was that they required precise entry points to even come close, and… admittedly more importantly for the moment, where the blasted creature had travelled to.

If she hadn’t known how to access the paths correctly, or had been off slightly, there was no telling where she’d be spat out.

*****

Sorilla hit the deck in a skid, turning over onto her side and curling up as she careened across the floor and slammed into the far wall. The shock that did transfer through her armor was enough to make her feel every bruise in her body… of which, at the moment, there really only seemed to be one. One very big bruise that covered everything.

Except her middle toe on her left foot. That wasn’t hurting at the moment.

She lay there for a moment, just breathing as softly as she could while she tried to push the pain down. Her body was reaching the limit of which adrenaline and endorphins could really help, even with the boosts from her armor’s small batch supplies of combat drugs and the encouragement of her implants on her glandular hormone production.

Eventually, no matter what toys or boosts you had, it always came down to will. Do you have the will to get up even when everything in the universe was screaming at you to stay down?

Sorilla rolled over onto her belly, bending on leg up under her as she pushed off the deck and got up to one knee.

She looked around, eyes, suit, and scanner examining the room around her.

It looked precisely like the room she’d been in before she took that dive, but that was more or less what she’d expected and hoped for. She planted her hands on her knee and pushed as she forced herself fully up to her feet, swaying slightly as she found her balance was almost entirely shot to hell.

The transition had been… indescribable.

She hoped that the recordings helped SOLCOM with it, assuming she ever got back, because she didn’t have any words to explain what the Hell she’d just experienced, and she wasn’t even going to try.

If I got the right vector… well, I hope I got the right vector, Sorilla thought as she limped out of the room, her next goal the only thing she was keeping in her mind for the moment.

The Ross ships were all alike, carbon copies of one another. That somewhat disappointed her, if she were honest about it. She’d kind of expected that higher technical levels would bring more creativity back into the culture. It seemed like that on Earth and human colonies. Fabricators could make custom versions of any base tech, done to your specifications whether you wanted something with a practical difference or just a stylistic one.

Somehow, she supposed that she had expected an advanced race to be all about custom one off builds.

The Ross weren’t exactly keeping with her image of an ideal advanced race, though, so she supposed she wasn’t going to throw the hope out just yet.

The corridors were empty, unlike the ones she’d left. No security mechanoids were awaiting her as she shuffled through the ship, making her way to the secure terminal room closest to her position.

She wondered if they knew she was there, or if she’d managed to give them the slip for a time?

She was hoping for the second, but realistically it was more likely that the first was true and they just hadn’t been able to scramble security that quickly.

Whatever. She’d take it.

The door to the secure terminal center opened easily enough. She didn’t even need to fry the spacetime circuitry to get in. That was always a plus.

Limping over to the terminal, Sorilla dipped her fingers into the wells in spacetime that made up the interface controls and powered it up. The projection that appeared in front of her wasn’t merely a hologram - it felt as real as it looked, both to her sense of touch but also to the accelerometers and the scanner she still had running.

Sorilla confirmed her location first, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw it was precisely what she’d aimed for.

Now, let’s throw a proverbial little wrench into the gears you don’t use, shall we?

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

Master of Ships Elim could feel the tension mounting as the ship closed on the sector of space they’d originally scanned the anomaly within. Soon they would be close enough to be certain of having detected the ship, if it were there at least. At that point, he’d have a decision to make, and neither option was entirely pleasing to him.

Or at all pleasing to him, in reality.

The best-case scenario, in the short term, was that they detected nothing. False alarm, start over from the beginning.

That wasn’t good, but it was better than facing off against a Ross ship intent on their death, and better even than trying run from a Ross ship intent on same. Normally, then, he’d be rooting for the best case even while preparing for the worst.

However, right now, the best case still meant that the ship was intent on killing them… it just meant that they wouldn’t know where the ship was. Which, to be frank, wasn’t all that good a case. It might even be worse than the worst case.

His head hurt from thinking in twisted knots.

“Master of ships!”

“What is it?” He asked, turning to look at the communications section, surprised that there was anything going on there that might concern him. He hadn’t thought there was anyone in the system to send messages to them at the moment.

“Signal originating from the target sector. The coding is unknown, however.”

“Ross encryption?”

“No. Nothing like their work. We’re applying filters against everything in our computers now, but it will take a while.”

“Fine,” Elim said. “Continue with that. In the meantime, we have at least one response to our question… something is out there, but not it seems it might not be what we thought it was. All stations stand by for change in orders.”

“Yes, Master of Ships. All stations report standing ready.”

Elim scowled, eyes dipping to the data that was feeding through his system concerning the unknown signal.

What in the abyss is going on?

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty-One

Portal Ship

Come on, figure it out. Figure it out.

Sorilla didn’t have access to any of the Alliance codes, for obvious reasons, and there was no way she was getting into the Ross computers to send a signal through their systems, so she’d had to get a little creative when it came to sending a warning to the Alliance cruiser.

SOLCOM pulse code was a simple, emergency coding system that was similar to the old form Morse Code from earlier centuries. It was also one of the first codes that they’d confirmed the Alliance had cracked during the war, though no one really cared much if they had because no one used it for any sort of classified intelligence.

It was more intended for sending mayday calls with improvised transmitters, and if you were in that kind of trouble, you usually didn’t care too much who was answering the signal.

Getting the Ross ship to pulse a transmission that the Alliance ship would pick up was tricky, but not overly so. Every ship, the Ross designs included, were constantly radiating across multiple bands. Heat, light, gravitational waves, and EM bands. Probably more that she wasn’t personally aware of, but those were enough.

Getting into the less secure systems wasn’t easy, per say, but it was certainly doable, and after that it was all a matter of reconfiguring them to pulse out in specific radio bands that the systems were normally designed to suppress. Since it was harder, technically speaking, to make them not transmit than to make them do it, she had a bit of an advantage there.

Unfortunately, there was no way it was going to go unnoticed.

So Sorilla was getting pretty antsy, hoping that someone there got the message before someone here cut it, and her, off.

This would be so much easier if I had enough system access to code in a repeating cycle.

In truth, Sorilla supposed she might actually have that much access… she didn’t know, her understanding of the interface was rudimentary and largely based on SOLCOM reverse engineering since the Child of God mission. Without better understanding, all she could do was the equivalent of standing in one place and flipping a switch to turn the ship’s running lights on and off.

She really hoped it worked, because she still needed to figure a way out of this situation with the intelligence she’d gathered. At the moment, that part wasn’t looking so good.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

“odd.”

“What is it?” Sienele asked, looking over sharply to where the Lucian was staring at the screens rather than the command deck below.

“I would swear that I know this code,” Kriss admitted.

“Lucian? Sentinel?” Sienele asked. “I know it is not Alliance Operations.”

“No, neither. Wait… it’s repeating,” Kriss grunted before suddenly pulling himself upright, looking surprised. “It’s human.”

“What?”

Sienele had a hard time believing that. There shouldn’t be any human source of signals in the entire system aside from…

“You don’t suppose…” He asked, hesitant to even say it.

Kriss grinned, “Oh if this woman were a Lucian… The children we could…”

“Kriss!” Sienele cut that line of thought right off. He did not want the imagery of that particular scenario anywhere near his mind’s eye. Just the hint was enough for him to feel mildly ill.

“Apologies. It is a simple emergency pulse code used by the humans during the war. Not encrypted, but rather intended to be used when you have extremely minimal transmission capacity. Even a reflective surface would work.”

“Interesting, but do you know what it says?”

“Not even slightly, aside from the obvious.” Kriss admitted.

“And that would be?”

“That she, and the Ross ship, are out there?”

“I’ll tell the Captain.”

*****

Elim swore as he closed the link from the observation deck.

A human code. That’s a new one, He supposed. He had not had any interactions with the humans, either during the war or since, but had heard from others in the Parithalian Fleet that they were respectable ship handlers.

The only human for many lightyears, however, was not a Master of Ships, but rather a soldier.

A clearly capable one, but still only a soldier.

He had the ship’s database looking for the code, but he didn’t know if they’d stored the information from the war in the last database update or not. His cruiser was not assigned anywhere near the human worlds, so it would not be a priority addition.

He didn’t need to know what the coded pulses actually said, however, to glean a great deal from them. Most importantly, the human had been lost while investigating Ross presence on the planet, and now was signalling from a sector of space where the Ross ship was thought to be.

It did not take much to connect those points in spacetime.

“Signal all decks, prepare for high endurance maneuvering,” He ordered, stepping back to his command console and settling in.

“Yes, Master of Ships. Signal sent to all decks. All decks cleared for maneuvers.”

“Hard about, full power burn,” He ordered. “We will not make this easier on them by blundering right into their range.”

“Yes, Master of Ships. Hard about, full power!”

The Upwind seemed to list as the ship came about, the maneuver stressing the inertial compensation as much as it dared in order to eke out every last bit of performance possible. Elim held on to his console, keeping himself upright relative to the interface, and kept working through the maneuver.

“Prepare all countermeasures,” He ordered. “Configure systems to counter spacetime anomalies.”

“Yes, Master of ships! Countermeasures online, systems reconfiguring!”

Now, I suppose we wait and see what the enemy does.

*****

Portal Ship

The conclave had a moment that could only be described as a stunned slice of time, during which most, if not all, of them metaphorically blinked as everything around them changed, seemingly at once.

The Alliance vessel is moving to evade our own ship, did they detect us?

Negative. No signals reached the detection threshold. There is no way.

They saw something.

The conclave puzzled over that briefly, trying to work out what happened there when something else was noticed.

Our vessel is broadcasting a signal through waste energy.

What? How?

Silence met that question, since if they’d known how someone would already have pointed out the cause.

Investigation into the cause has begun.

Entropy.

That word caught their attention as the conclave ceased operations abruptly to refocus on the situation in that context.

Are you certain?

Certain? No. However, what else would be disrupting our efforts at this precise moment in this precise manner? Coincidence, perhaps, but Subject Entropy personifies malicious coincidence. It is her.

Find her.

*****

Sorilla could see the Parithalian vessel abruptly turning away from its approach through the Ross vessels’ own sensors and decided that was probably as good a response as she was likely to get. She started shutting her access down quickly but took a moment to start figuring out her exit strategy.

She didn’t have a lot of options, unfortunately.

Her armor was rated for a period of time in hard vacuum, but without a reasonable expectation of a pickup within a few hours at most, she wasn’t going to try her luck just jumping ship. The Ross didn’t seem to believe much in smaller ships, like the little bush plane she’d taken from the terrorist cell on Allah’s Word, so that was out.

Her only reasonable way off the ship seemed to be the portal room, but that left her with the rather large problem of that those portals only seemed to lead to other Ross ships.

Need to pick my path carefully, she knew. There weren’t a lot of good options, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any at all.

A brief scan of the inventory of the ship she was currently on didn’t give her much. They had some captured Alliance equipment, and a few things from SOLCOM, but nothing useable. Likely scrap, almost certainly intended to seed the ground of any attack they pulled off to shift the blame around, or at least confuse matters.

That left the portal room.

I need a map of the ships this thing connects to, and their locations in the galaxy… and, well, rather more than that actually. Here we go…

Sorilla, at this point, didn’t really have much of a plan, per say. She’d already accomplished her direct mission objectives. It was the long-term ones she was still working on.

Wait… what is this?

Sorilla leaned into the projection in front of her, practically feeling the results of it blowing softly across her face as she did, even through her armor.

That…

She swallowed.

It can’t be.

Sorilla had to get off the ship.

*****

Entropy has been located.

Then she did manage a precision passage through the Paths. Impressive.

Cease admiring her, she is a threat. End her!

The Conclave were already attempting to backtrack the actions of the target while she’d been on the ship, but while they were doing that, she had abruptly ceased her actions and left the secure terminal room, moving quickly back toward the Paths.

Stop her! If she gets into the Paths again, we may lose her for too long to prevent her from causing more damage elsewhere!

That command was easier said than done, however. Security had been alerted, and were certainly in motion, but the subject had already proven to be far more capable in close quarters than even significant numbers of their security mechanoids… and there was no chance that any Ross individual would volunteer to get anywhere near the target without rather significant forces protecting them.

Without more preparation time, they could only count on slowing her down.

*****

The portal room was up ahead as Sorilla loped back toward it. She could sense security moving around her, but they weren’t in position to stop her yet, and she had no intention of giving them that chance.

She needed to get off the ship, and out of Ross controlled space… or spacetime, she supposed, with the intelligence she’d acquired intact. That left her with few options, to say the least.

The paths to other ships were open. Sorilla didn’t think they ever ‘closed’ precisely, but that wasn’t as useful as it might be. Most, well practically all, of the Ross vessels were a long way from anywhere she wanted to be, after all. The known ships she could have used to get into safe points in spacetime were destroyed, like the one at Allah’s Word, for example… and after what she’d seen on that star map…

She pushed herself into a run, ignoring the throbbing pain that was coming from every cell in her body. The beating she’d taken was going to be with her for a long time, no matter what, but she didn’t have time to let it slow her down. Not now.

With the portal room in sight, a squad of security Goblins burst from an entry way off to one side, forcing her to move even faster as her muscles screamed at her. The pulses of their weapons charging were the early warning she needed to dive out of the way when they discharged. She hit the ground rolling as they tracked on her position and movement, barely staying ahead of the twisted pulses of spacetime that tore chunks out of the deck and walls around her.

Adrenaline rushed again, her soreness forgotten for the moment, and Sorilla pushed forward as the team charged her position with their weapons blazing. Amid a burst of spacetime pulses and a last desperate dive from her… she vanished back through the portals from which she’d appeared.

*****

Alert to every station. Find her. Find Entropy!

*****

Sorilla hit the deck in a roll this time, coming back to her feet before skidding to a stop on her heels. She looked around, but didn’t see any sign of enemy presence yet, so she had to decide what to do next.

The portals were an interconnected web that spanned all of the Ross’El controlled space, and then some. Their ships had been embedded deeply in worlds that for varying reasons may once have been their space, or not, but now were certainly behind enemy lines so far as they were concerned.

Sorilla didn’t know what it was that caused the lines of their controlled space to change, that was information she hadn’t acquired in her perusal of their database… or, at least, it was information she had not been able to translate. What she did know was that they had ships in sectors of space they considered to be unremittingly hostile… or had once been.

Worse, perhaps, from the point of view of the Ross, was that if she were reading the information correctly, they had neither built, or even designed the portal network. She needed more information, but at this point she was honestly uncertain if it were worth the risk to try to find out more… what she’d already learned would cause SOLCOM to flip their shit if she could just get it back to them.

I have to risk it… I need to know.

Sorilla checked around her ahead before she left the portal room of the ship she had jumped too, heading once more for the secure terminal room she was aware of.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

Elim examined the readouts carefully. Once they’d determined the location of the Ross ship, locating it had became a matter of time and nothing else. While active scanners required a specific threshold of return before an object could be found with them, passive systems really just required that you be looking in the right direction… well, that and that the object in question be in that location at the appropriate time conducive to when you were looking.

The Speed of Information across the normal sidereal universal spacetime was often a bit of an annoyance when it came to that sort of thing, after all.

“Are they following?” He demanded, confused by what he was seeing.

“Not as of the time of this scan, Master of Ships… the enemy vessel almost seems… disabled?” His scanner chief said, sounding confused.

“Fortune may favor us, but not by that much,” Elim countered. “They are up to something. Continue to watch. Navigation!”

“Yes, Master of Ships!”

“Make for the alternate jump point, exceed maximum thrust rules.”

“Very well, Master of Ships, I will need second part confirmation to that order.”

Elim looked over to his second, who just nodded curtly before speaking up.

“Confirm the order.”

“Yes, Master of Ships, Master of Crews, order confirmed. Exceeding allotted maximum thrust. Entry is being made in the Upwind’s maintenance log.”

Elim ignored everything after the confirmation. He knew the consequences of exceeding the set limits on a ship’s acceleration. The Upwind would likely wind up being put in for a full refit after the mission was over, a process that could take… ages, almost literally. However, he felt that it was necessary to seeing to the safety of his crew and the success of the mission.

The deck rumbled under them as the full power of the big military thrusters engaged, and again the deck tilted significantly as they felt the inertial systems pushed just past their limits.

Elim held on, eyes being drawn back to the scans of the Ross vessel.

Just… sitting there.

What are they doing?

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty-Two

Portal Ship

The conclave raged, searches coming back from thousands of ships, all in the negative thus far.

The title of Entropy had been gifted to the human soldier as an almost sarcastic warning that the universe had a sense of humor, and it was a dark one. Elements in the universe often conspired to disrupt carefully laid plans, an example of a universal abhorrence.

The humans had a saying that had shown up during the brief conflict, something that had been pulled from their computers and their minds as the Ross worked toward the ultimate goal.

They seemed to believe that the universe abhorred a vacuum.

That was among the single stupidest thing the Ross had ever heard. The Universe was almost entirely vacuum. Arguably, in fact, the universe abhorred matter because it caused it to be clumped together as much as possible, and segregated away from the clean vacuum that the universe preferred.

No, the universe did not abhor a vacuum. It abhorred complexity.

The more complex a system, whether by design or accident, the faster it would be destroyed by the universe. Subject Entropy was a sly sideway joke about that universal constant, one that the Ross had long fought to overcome and yet still found popping up in one form or another, ruining their work.

But it had been a joke, dark thought it might have been.

Now, however, the joking had stopped.

This human with the title they had bestowed was seemingly intent on living up to the name they’d given her, and there appeared nothing that they could manage was sufficient to stop her!

Conclave after conclave shifted to full alert status, but transmitting the information was taking time… and none of them had any hint of where she had gone.

*****

Sorilla stood in front of yet another secure terminal, now well used to firing the alien computer up and even started to get a feel for the interface beyond the basics.

The Ross seemed to have a largely distributed data system, which honestly surprised her quite a bit. She would have thought that with their capacity to move things and information around the galaxy through the portal ships that they would have had a more… well, alright, distributed but evenly so, perhaps?

Instead, what she was seeing was more of a discrete repository of what was likely primarily localized information rather than some alien equivalent of the internet.

Or maybe I’m just accessing their intranet and haven’t figured out how to tunnel a request out into the wider network yet.

It didn’t matter too much, given the limitations she was currently working with, she supposed. What did matter was that she had once more managed to pull up the network map that she had looked at before.

Sorilla was careful to search through several random entries before she reached the one she wanted.

It showed a Ross ship, or outpost of some sort, on a world located three planets out from its yellow primary.

Sol.

She wasn’t sure she understood what she was looking at, if she were deadly honest with herself, but it had to have something to do with the Ross advance into human controlled territories. They had been there before.

And they left something behind.

SOLCOM had long been considering that the Ross were searching for something, though just what had remained a mystery. The motions through human controlled space had matched a search grid, once you accounted for the location and accessibility of jump points from each star they occupied.

That had matched up with the old ship on Child of God, though that was a bit of an outlier in other way. For one, there was a strong belief that it wasn’t a Ross ship… or, if it was, it was far removed from what the Ross had in service at the moment.

Which, didn’t matter, really. It might have been another race, someone the Ross had once fought, or traded with, or any number of other things. None of that mattered. What mattered was that it was important to the Ross.

Just like that spot-on Earth was.

Sorilla recorded the file into her system, then moved on exactly as she had from the previous entries, calling up the next one in line almost at random and checking that out as well.

They’re looking for something, but now the question is not only what, but why?

Well, perhaps a more important short-term question remained ‘how the hell was she going to get out of this mess?’, but Sorilla was trying not to bring herself down.

A quick check showed that there was no active connection to the ship or whatever it was on Earth. That was both a pity, because she’d like to have just teleported home… but also a relief, because she didn’t want the entire Ross military to follow her.

Either way, though, it still leaves me with a serious problem.

Sorilla started looking for another path through the portals, something that would take her somewhere… useful.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

“Movement on the Ross’El vessel! It is accelerating on an intercept vector with our course!”

Elim swore softly, trying hard not to unnerve his people, but that was not what he wanted to hear. He’d almost felt like they might escape this mess before the Ross got over whatever it was that had caused them to, do whatever it was they were doing.

We have far too little information about this situation for my liking.

The Upwind was moving fast already, and still accelerating, toward the secondary jump point. They had the lead, and a good build up under them… but the Ross were faster.

It was going to be a race, and he wasn’t certain which of them would win.

“Signal the Envoy,” He said. “I would have a word with him.”

“Yes, Master of ships.”

*****

Sienele made his way down to the Master’s private office, where the Upwind’s Master of Ships was waiting. He nodded to the Parithalian guards on either side of the door as he approached. One of them silently reached behind him to key the door open, and Sienele walked through without fanfare.

Elim was seated behind his workspace, projections open all around him aside from directly between himself and Sienele as the intelligence officer came to a stop. The Master of Ships turned to him, a grim look on his face.

“I have been running the vectors,” Elim said. “And I believe that the Ross will be able to bring us to engagement before we can reach the Jump point proper. Our odds of victory are… not good.”

Sienele nodded impassively. He was aware of that. The Parithalian cruiser was a mid level combat vessel, capable of dealing and enduring, great damage in battle… but the Ross weapons were such that endurance meant nothing.

“I understand,” He said aloud.

“I am not certain you do,” Elim said, keying a file over to his projection and flipping it so Sienele could observe it correctly. “You brought this ship on board the Upwind, correct?”

Sienele nodded, slightly confused. “I authorized it, yes.”

“It is an older model,” Elim said. “But it is one of ours… We can refit it for an accelerator launch. Envoy, take your staff and get them ready to evacuate. Whatever you have is worth killing my ship for, and that means that it is of vital value to the Alliance… if the Ross are willing to risk war to keep it from getting out, then it must get out.”

Sienele nodded slowly, “I understand now. Yes, have the vessel refitted.”

“It is already being done. Go.”

Sienele, for once, didn’t try to remind the Master of Ships who was truly in charge.

He went.

*****

Portal Ship

Entropy was spotted on a vessel in the Sigma Nine Eight Three system.

Was?

She raided the ship’s secure terminal room, accessed several files on other vessel locations, then vanished back into the Paths.

This is becoming ridiculous.

Have all vessels advised to assign security to the secure terminal rooms adjacent to all entryways to the Paths.

New report, she was on a vessel in Xina Twelve Nine Three. Already vanished back into the paths.

What did she do there?

Unknown, they were only spotted shortly before she once more accessed the paths. One security drone was reported disabled, its weapon is missing.

The conclave groaned as one.

She was armed once more.

In reality it didn’t particularly increase her threat level, but it still felt like a step backward.

Inferior races were not supposed to be able to do this sort of thing. Yes, occasionally they were dangerous. Pests of all sorts could cause serious harm to the ill prepared, but this was simply beyond any reason.

She is searching for a way out.

Likely, but we have no way of knowing what her requirements for an acceptable… exit path might be.

But we do.

None of our vessels are within human controlled space at this time, as per standing orders since the loss of the fleet. She cannot escape there.

No, but she could escape to the Alliance. They are working together on this. What ships do we have near worlds that subject Entropy is familiar with?

The conclave paused, considering that question as they quickly refreshed the file they had on the one they called Entropy.

Not many. That was the answer they were hoping for.

*****

Sorilla hit the ground in another skid.

These landings are hard on the body, she groaned to herself as she slowed to a stop and rolled quickly to her feet.

Slipping through the twisted folds of spacetime that the Ross had turned into a transport mechanism was a visual cacophony and a sensory mind-fuck of the first order. At least if you had the sort of implant suite she was making use of, Sorilla supposed.

It felt like she was simultaneously being twisted in four different directions, folded into three, and stretched across a dozen more.

Only with more blue smell, somehow.

She didn’t understand it at all, and was trying her hardest not to think too much on it.

Sorilla didn’t think she could continue for much longer before the orders and warnings filtered out, so she had to move quickly to her ultimate target, but before she could hope to get anything there, she needed just a couple more pieces of information.

They were smartening up, though. She’d had to skip the last two ships she had jumped to because they had security already in place, locking up the secure terminal room tight as a drum. She might have been able to fight her way in, but Sorilla would prefer not to bring that much more attention to her actions at this point.

She had plenty already, after all.

So, she made a random jump… well, not random exactly, since she picked a target based on the data she had already stolen, but it was to a ship that was nowhere near anywhere she might be expected to try to get to. She was hoping that the Ross were like humans in that regard, slow to react and kind of dumb if they thought that the threat didn’t apply to them.

She hit the jackpot.

With the secure terminal room unguarded, Sorilla once more slipped in and got into the computer system.

If they’re looking for Earth, or something on Earth, I’d love to make life harder for them by erasing the relevant data but that doesn’t seem possible, Sorilla thought as she worked. She was scanning relevant information concerning the paths now, trying to improve her own understanding of them when she stumbled upon something.

She almost skipped over it. It was just a simple history file as best she could tell, but a translated phrase made her stop and look twice.

The Paths are the ultimate creation of the enemy, and the People have turned them to our own use, but beware that they are not as secure as we might wish, Sorilla read silently before backtracking and scanning the whole file into her OCR suite for later translation.

They didn’t build the portals, they stole them from an enemy…

That was interesting, and it explained a lot about how the Ross used, or perhaps misused, a technology that Sorilla would have assumed was an outright force majeure in almost any conflict. They didn’t have full grasp of the possibilities, or perhaps the execution. She didn’t know which.

Admiral Ruger will flip over this. Whoops, Sorilla heard the scrape of boots on the deck. Time to go.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

“Flight deck has cleared the vessel for launch, Master of Ships.”

Elim nodded, “Signal them that we’re ready, hand launch controls over to the pilot.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

The Ross vessel was approaching on their stern at a ferocious closing rate, one that had actually startled him when he saw it. There was no way that the Upwind could avoid engaging the enemy, and so the sooner the intelligence acquired by the Envoy was off his ship, the happier he would be about things.

“The vessel is launching, Master of Ships.”

Elim could feel it, faintly, through the deck. The accelerator was throwing the ship out of the bay at a high rate, something generally used for slowing incoming vessels if they’d lost control of their thrusters but was easily modified to do just the opposite. On the screen he watched the old hull lance away from the Upwind, heading for the jump point at several times the acceleration it normally could have managed.

He doubted anyone on board was happy in that moment, but most of them were Lucians… and the rest would survive it.

Probably.

Elim wished them luck in any case, but put them immediately from his mind. His ship had a mission to carry out.

“Bring us around,” He ordered calmly into the chaos of the bridge.

“Yes, Master of Ships. Coming around.”

******

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty-Three

Portal Ship

The Conclave was briefly pulled back from their focus on the movements of Subject Entropy when an alert was generated concerning the situation within the sector they were watching over.

The Alliance ship has turned back. They’re no longer running?

I believe that they intend to engage in battle.

Foolish.

No. There is an anomaly in the scan. Look.

The group brought back the projection, taking advantage of the compressed time to examine the situation carefully. Over and over, they observed the formulae generated by the vessel from just before the Alliance ship made its turn.

They are masking something from us with their turn. They launched another ship.

Destroy both.

Agreed. Initiate a hard combat order. The vessel is to engage and destroy the Alliance ship without delay, then continue on to locate the other ship before it can escape.

Agreed. Orders have been issued.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

“Ross vessel has accelerated again!”

Elim flinched, but said nothing as he considered that. He would have sworn that the enigmatic species didn’t have ships that were capable of outclassing his Upwind by quite so much in terms of spacial performance. Firepower, certainly there was no comparison between them there, but during the war the Ross had not been that capable.

“Charge forward weapon arrays,” He ordered. “Watch for any alterations in spacetime. They will not be taken easily.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

The Upwind was still decelerating from its’ previous flight vector, moving in reverse but at an ever slowing pace as the Ross ship bore down on them. Elim did not want to change his course until the last possible moment, offering the fleeing ship with the Envoy and his group the best possible chance at escape by shielding them with the radiation of the Upwind’s own drives.

However, if the Ross ship was going to be closing at that extreme a rate, he needed to reconsider his options.

“Engines, all reverse,” He ordered. “Maximum reverse thrust, lift the limiters.”

“Yes, Master of Ships. All reverse.”

The Upwind shuddered noticeably, shaking slightly as the ship’s thrusters fired at a power and direction that was rarely used. He was confident that the noble vessel would hold together, but it was a reminder that the ships built by his people were fast, yet not always as solid as some others might be.

“Forward weapons fully charged, Master of Ships.”

“Stand ready to engage,” Elim ordered. “Draw a targeting formula for the enemy ship, center mass.”

“Formula to target, Center Mass, Yes Master of Ships.”

It didn’t take long. The Ross ship was blatant in their scopes and not even attempting to be difficult to track.

“Formula entered.”

Elim hesitated, part of him wanting to let the enemy fire first. If this were a case of mistaken identity or some other bizarre error, he might be about to start a war that the Alliance could ill afford. However, he knew it wasn’t. The enemy had attempted to assassinate the Envoy by destroying the Upwind and every soul aboard.

That was chance enough.

“Fire.”

Beam weapons that burned brighter than the heart of a star lanced out from the weapon emplacements of the Upwind, carving through spacetime at the speed of information. Even at that, the fastest speed possible in the normal universal spacetime, they took interminable moments to reach their target.

The great vessel bearing right down on the Upwind didn’t pause nor break its pace as they tore through the forward armor, venting smoke and gas into the void. A cheer went up across the command deck as the active scanners reported the successful hit almost instantly, but nearly the same time that it took for the beams to cross the distance in the first place passed again before the results were visible to the Upwind’s passive scanners.

“No slowing of the enemy vessel, Master of Ships.”

“Continue firing, full automated protocols.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

The next beams pulsed away a moment later.

The battle had begun.

*****

Portal Ship

Minor damage to the vessel.

Pay it no matter. Continue on course. Increase speed.

The vessel is approaching maximum acceleration possible without endangering it and those aboard.

Acknowledged. Issue the order.

Order issued.

The Conclave watched the initial exchange of fire dispassionately, unconcerned with the damage being done to the ship under their command as it went about its assigned task. For the moment all that mattered was the outcome.

The ship of the Alliance stood between them and the outcome they desired, so it would die.

Entering engagement range for the Valve.

Do not engage. Continue as planned, hold engagement until escape is impossible.

Very well.

The big ship bore on as the fire from the Alliance ship rained down on it, the distance closing with each passing slice of time as the Conclave watched.

*****

Parithalian Transport

Sienele stared at the screens, his face a dark rictus of emotion that he refused to allow out. The sensors of the small transport could not see much of anything past the Upwind itself, the radiation from the cruiser’s big thrusters turning their resolution to effectively null.

Even so, he didn’t look away.

He was no expert on the combat of fleets, Sienele would easily admit that had he had been present at more than enough to have an idea of what was happening. So long as he could see the Upwind, he knew that the battle was not over… or, at least, it hadn’t been over at the time that light had bounced off their hull before starting its journey to the small ship’s scanners.

The Parithalians were the backbone of the Alliance fleet, projecting power across entire sectors of the Galaxy at the behest of the Alliance peoples, and were generally considered the unmatched masters of anything that flew.

The Ross were, quite simply… not. They had no apparent interest in flight tactics, skills, or anything resembling a true talent for maneuvering in three dimensions. What they did have, however, was a rather large number of monstrous ships that could take a severe beating from any conventional weapon system the Alliance fielded while simultaneously displaying levels of power that, in any save and righteous universe, would not be in the hands of mortal species.

He had no idea whether the Upwind would be able to hold off the Ross long enough for the old ship he was on to escape… truthfully, Sienele didn’t know if they would be able to even survive the next few moments.

And he couldn’t even see them to watch.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

Elim held on as the deck vibrated under him, tilting dangerously forward as their reverse thrusters were pushed past the limits of the inertial compensation as much as they dared. It left the deck of the cruiser feeling like it was tilted at a nearly thirty-degree angle as everyone tried to ignore it while they kept on working.

The Ross vessel had not ceased to accelerate, which told him that they intended to simply blow right past the Upwind, finishing them off in passing before continuing onward. There was no reason for that maneuver, unless they had detected the launch of the small ship with the Envoy and were intent on intercepting it as well.

“Master of Ships, primary weapon ports are showing signs of overheating.”

“Continue firing.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

Elim could not care one whit about overheating at this point. If his ship survived this encounter, it was already heading for mandatory refit, if not destined to be scrapped and rebuilt entirely. The engines were screaming their protests, the hull had to be stressed to the fracture point by now, and he expected that they had all manner of minor systems issues derived from the aborted attempt to Jump from the system earlier.

Blowing out the weapons ports wasn’t even a blip on his screens. It might have mattered, were the fight to go on long enough, but if it wasn’t over the next few moments… well it was going to be over in the next few moments.

“Gravetic Anomaly!”

“Evade! Pattern Sio Bram!”

“Evading!”

The deck tilted wildly to the left now, everyone hanging on desperately as the ship scrambled to get out of the growing well of spacetime in their previous position.

The Upwind suddenly seemed to twist. The tilt of the deck reverse as a crewman was ripped from his station by the sudden sheer and thrown across the deck in a painful sprawl.

“Someone take his station!”

The Ross had finally decided to return fire.

*****

The conclave observed the Alliance ship as it evaded the initial pulse from their vessel’s primary weapon, disappointed slightly but unsurprised by the success of the maneuver.

The Alliance species, Parithalian was the accepted identifier according to records, was noted to be quite talented in special maneuvering within three dimensions. Most avian species were, though relatively few advanced to the point that they were capable of showing it off outside their natural atmospheres.

For reasons the People did not truly understand beyond a slight admiration for any talent they saw, the species seemed to think that skill gave it an advantage over others. Made it somehow superior.

Primitive species were curious in that way.

The Ross saw little point in the artful maneuverings of the Parithalian species, be it in normal activities or, especially, in war. What mattered was the outcome.

And the outcome was decided.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

The deck leveled out, on the side-to-side axis at least, while still keeping the forward tilt from the massive acceleration they were pushing to draw out the engagement as long as they could.

The monstrous acceleration of the Ross vessel, however, had just destroyed their initial velocity advantage and was now eating up the space between them with terrifying ease.

“Ready secondary weapons,” Elim ordered. “Continue full automatic fire on all primary batteries.”

“Continue firing, Yes Master of Ships. Secondary weapons report ready!”

“Establishing targeting formula for the enemy ship. Target their drives!”

“Formula established and loaded!”

“Fire all secondary batteries!”

“Firing!”

The ship’s deck again shuddered with the power of its weapons unloading into the cold dark of space.

*****

The Upwind’s secondary batteries were accelerated munitions, ballistic after launch, with high kinetic energy and powerful negative matter warheads. Not the sort of thing to use lightly, due to the danger they presented if one happened to miss, but a necessary concession to the sheer damage and speed of physical weapons used in space combat.

At the speeds they were launched at, no chemical or even atomic trigger could possibly hope to detonate once the weapons contacted their target. And managing pinpoint detonation when closing speeds could be in excess of the speed of information was not feasible.

Negative matter warheads didn’t require a detonator, and were unaffected by the impact save that it would ensure that their containment vessel was well and truly breached. Once that happened… well, nature took care of the rest.

The small spheroid warheads tore across space at over a third the speed of information, closing on a ship that was already doing more than that coming the other direction. Unlike energy weapons, however, that did give some slight warning that such weapons were in play which was why the Master of the Upwind had waited so long to fire them.

The Ross vessel, unlike previous motions, did move to evade the attack this time, but the delay period was too short, and it was unable to entirely clear the path.

Almost half the fired weapons struck home in a single blinding cataclysm of radiated energy.

*****

Elim ignored the cheers and exultations that swept across the command deck of the Upwind. He’d seen the battle records from the previous war with the Ross and wasn’t ready to call it a win just then.

“Give me a status on the enemy ship!” He ordered over the noise.

“Radiation is interfering with scans. We’re attempting to scrub it and it’s dropping off quickly…”

Elim closed the tough bony shell of his beak like mouth, grinding it as the tension of the wait bore down on him.

The screens were blacked out, having gone completely white when the front of the detonations reached them, overwhelming the instruments to the point that safety measures kicked in to keep them from being burned completely out. There was nothing to do but wait for the radiation energy to fade so that they could once more see.

The screens slowly came back on, blurred imagery appearing as the limitations of the instruments were pushed passed their capacity, but still it was something.

The blob of radiation showed up as a variety of colors fading one into the other, quickly settling even as he watched.

“Scans clearing up, Master of Ships. Visuals should be clear in just a few more moments.”

Unconsciously, Elim had gripped the edge of his console, waiting for the signal to clear enough to see. He leaned in, trying to will it to go faster, and was almost torn out of his position when the alarms for a gravetic anomaly suddenly screamed.

“Evasion! Get us out of…”

*****

Portal Ship

The explosion of the Alliance vessel briefly blotted out all scans of the sector from the eyes of the Conclave, the radiated energy blotting out those scanners quite effectively, and the sudden unnatural hole in the local spacetime essentially wiping out any decent resolution from the scanners that focused on that.

The conclave were unconcerned with that change, however, as their ire was more focused on the damage to the responding vessel.

The initial pulses from the Alliance ship’s primary weapons were inconsequential. Surface damage of that sort would be handled by the ship’s automated repair function over a relatively short period of time and served to do no negative effects on the ship’s necessary functions.

The negative matter warheads that had been launched at the last moment, however, were another issue entirely.

The vessel’s available acceleration was now cut to one third of its ideal maximum, and the damage was so severe that the spacetime shockwave of it’s own attack had caused even more damage to the structure of the ship.

They silently placed the vessel onto the immediate recycling list, just as soon as it returned to the People’s space.

First, however, it had one single mission left to accomplish, if it could.

*****

Parithalian Transport

Sienele swore as he watched the destruction of the Upwind over the limited scanners that were installed in the old transport. He pushed the display away and got up, making his way to the front of the vessel, kicking aside some of the Colonel’s supplies that were still stacked along the path.

“The Upwind has been destroyed, but I believe they might have bought us some time. How far to the Jump Point?” He demanded, leaning over the seat where Kriss was manipulating the controls.

“Too long, unless they bought us a fair amount of it,” Kriss answered grimly. “Last calculations had the Ross vessel placing us in range well short of the jump point.”

“I suppose we shall have to hope that the Upwind was more successful than we fear, then,” Sienele said fatalistically.

Kriss just grinned, “Hope if you like, it matters little now. Our fate is decided, all we need to do is wait to find out what the decision is.”

Sienele hated the Lucian attitude sometimes.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty Four

Portal Ship

Sorilla managed to stick the landing, almost, as she exited the portal, coming down in a crouch that left her skidding to a stop just outside the range of the mind-bending twists of spacetime that she’d used to jump across lightyears.

If she were right, she should be within a couple jumps to her target, though she was still guessing a little bit in those regards.

Each time, though, however, was teaching her more and more about the system the Ross had… found, stolen… she wasn’t sure which, though she was reasonably certain that they hadn’t made it themselves, not originally at least. It wasn’t instantaneous travel across any distance, for which she wasn’t sure if she should be disappointed or relieved, if she were being honest about things.

Relieved, probably, Sorilla admitted to herself.

If only because the Ross controlled the damn things, it was good that it had some clear limitations.

Range seemed to be one, though she wasn’t certain that range meant the same thing to the Ross as it meant to her and humanity. Pure distance wasn’t the impression she got from the captured notations she’d had time to decipher a little bit of, but Sorilla didn’t know what to make of the other variables listed.

Time almost seemed to be one of them, but she didn’t think it meant in terms of time travel.

Whatever it was, though, it meant that she couldn’t jump directly to her target but had to take a path from ship to ship, much the way starships occasionally had to go through several stars before they could get the direct jump point that would take them to their destination.

Might even be for the same reasons, Sorilla supposed. She’d probably know a lot better if she had a stronger understanding of how and why those limits existed for ships, but that wasn’t her specialty unfortunately.

There’s a thought I never believed I’d have… a wish that I specialized in spacetime math. Someone just shoot me now, before I start thinking like that full time.

Of all the things in her personal quiver of skills, high end mathematics really wasn’t one. She could, in a pinch, snipe or spot for a shooter, but that sort of ballistic calculations was pretty much the top end of what she could do without some serious mechanical aids.

Of course, she did have access to some of the best sub-compact supercomputers ever made, between her implants and her armor, but that still put spacetime calculations well out of her wheelhouse.

She looked around the section she’d appeared in, noting the lack of security with some mild surprise. Sorilla knew that the word was out to look for her, but it didn’t seem to have filtered out evenly, or some places were dragging their heels for one reason or another. She didn’t know which.

Whatever the case, she was happy to take advantage of the gap in security on the ships. While running off to the secure terminal room wasn’t a great idea since more and more of them had started being obviously guarded, there were unsecure terminals much closer that still gave access to some interesting bits of information that she had no doubt SOLCOM would willingly kill for.

Especially Ruger. That man is wound tighter than a German watch, and with even less humor.

Unsecure information was mostly the basic sort of logistical stuff that any NCO would probably know without needing the computer to tell him on a SOLCOM ship, but still needed to be accessible reasonably quickly. Inventory for the ship she’d jumped to tended to be easy enough to grab, TO&E tabulations, even some stuff like mission orientation if not object.

She copied it all down quickly, not bothering to try and translate it. It wasn’t likely to be able to help her, but she knew that SOLCOM would pour over it for years to come if and when she got it back to them.

She didn’t want to push her luck too far, however, and now she was just one jump from her target anyway. From there, well Sorilla had hopes of being able to get back to human space, or at least contact the Alliance. Worst case, however, she figured she could deal for a while until one or the other opportunity arose.

She closed down the terminal and triple checked her calculations and projections for the next jump as she headed back to the portal. Once she got herself lined up for the next hop, Sorilla leapt into the twisting mass of seriously non-Euclidian space once more, vanishing from the ship.

Behind her, after she vanished, a single Goblin stepped out from an impression in the wall and signaled back that the observation target had vanished.

*****

The conclave shifted their focus. The message from one of the watch posts they’d put into place had triggered. They left the ship with its current orders to eliminate the target and refocused on subject Entropy.

She is going to the human occupied world, Bera Ur. Interesting.

Has she had previous contact there?

That was a question that the conclave wasn’t certain of. There had been an Alliance operation reported there, but no mention of the human had been brought to their attention. Most of them had believed she would have chosen the other human controlled world they had contact with.

No matter. The orders are set, she will not leave that one of her own power.

*****

Portal Ship, Alliance World Arkhana

Sorilla felt the slip through the portal let her go as she exited the path and got her feet under her and flexed, ready to land with the force she had become used to. Before her feet could contact the floor, however, two things assaulted her senses.

First, the scanner she had running showed a marked difference between the room she was portalling into and the normally empty ones she had gotten used to. Second, and much more blatant, she felt the gravity surge of weapons charging and several firing while she was still airborne.

Unable to get any leverage, Sorilla was immediately clipped by one of the blasts, sending her spinning wildly as more were aimed at her previous position. Only that first hit saved her from being torn to pieces by conflicting gravity pulses, armor be damned.

Bruised and with system warning screaming in her ears, Sorilla hit the deck in a spinning slid that sent her skidding right into a pair of Goblin mechanoids, bowling them over before she slammed into the wall with enough force to break her legs if her armor hadn’t had something to say in the matter.

Armor or not, however, the impact hurt. Pain spiked up through her leg even as she was trying to parse together what the hell had just happened.

More gravity pulses from Ross weapons set her in motion, her body working on automatic while her brain was still trying to catch up to the situation. She powered through the pain, surging back to her feet and dove into a classic spear tackle, driving the closest standing Goblin to the ground, grappling with it as she rolled for cover.

In close the little mechanoids were vicious hand to hand fighters, but their skill level left a little to be desired. Sorilla got its limbs into arm and leg locks and didn’t bother stopping with a mere submission hold. Metal groaned, sheared, and shattered as she put the full strength of her armor into it, literally disarming the Goblin before taking its legs off too for good measure.

That left its weapon free for the taking. She couldn’t remember where she’d lost the last one she’d stolen, so Sorilla grabbed it up in a rush and bolted for the nearest corridor she could locate, space warp blasts pelting at her heels as she ran.

They setup an ambush, had to have worked out where I was going. Damn that’s more aware of human motivations than I’d given the goolies credit for, Sorilla thought, maddened by the fact that she’d not expected just that, and slipping into the old wartime terminology for the Ross in the process.

She’d not thought about them like that in a long time, not since the Alliance had softened some of her perceptions of the enemy by turning out to be, well, people. Sorilla supposed that, if you got close enough, even the Ross were likely to be people too, somewhere deep inside.

Really deep inside.

They just didn’t show it. Dealing with the Ross had always made her feel like an ant dealing with a human, or how she thought the ant might feel at any rate. They were unfeeling, uncaring, completely amoral by human standards, and really didn’t seem to much care about human actions until and unless it impacted directly on them.

She’d run operations that directly tore Ross installations to shreds, but while they would pursue her afterwards, it would only last until she was clearly outside of their area of interest. There had never been any hint that they even tried to outthink her operations in the past.

This was an interesting turn of events.

With the captured Goblin weapon in hand, she ran through the decks of the alien vessel. Chased by occasional attempts to pin her down or blast her apart, Sorilla tried not to stay still long enough to give them a chance to do either.

I need to get out of here, she thought.

Arkhana was one of very few destinations where she figured she might have a way to smuggle herself off world. The planet had been colonized, originally, by a militant white supremacist faction that had been under the guise of following libertarian ideals. As of the last time she’d been on the planet, the racist stereotypes had still existed but by her reckoning they were dying out, or at least being replaced by something closer to the pretense they had hid behind.

There was something about the idea of equality and self determination. It was an infectious ideal. You couldn’t pretend to follow those sorts of beliefs without them slowly taking hold, if not of yourself, then of your children.

Eventually, no matter what the beliefs of the ancestors, humanity didn’t have hate in their hearts sufficient to hold onto it for that long. If you tried to indoctrinate hate, you would breed a revolution that tore down everything you built… and if you tried to hide it behind something else, well that other thing would smother the hate in its sleep.

Arkhana wasn’t some utopia, of course. It had more than its fair share of residual problems inherited from the founders… as did Allah’s Word… but both were well on their way to being cultures she could easily find a way to live in.

Sorilla hoped that she didn’t have to, of course.

She had her own place in the galaxy, back on Hayden.

First, I’ve got to get off this damn ship, though. Then I’ll worry about getting off world.

*****

She evaded the first ambush. Impressive.

Chance. She was struck before she could fully ground herself. The blast knocked her out of the path of the remaining shots. The Universe conspires with Entropy, it seems.

Do not call upon some supernatural idiocy to explain her. Chance is a factor, but she is skilled in the sort of actions we are engaging in, she understands them better than do we.

Do not be disgusting. She is a beast.

And this is a beast’s game. We do not take part in such things. We do not live them. She does. That is why we have lost thus far.

There is no loss until the game is ended.

The conclave had been growing more heated with every passing moment. The longer the one known as subject Entropy continued to evade their forces the less certain some of them seemed to be in their superiority, at least within certain specific areas of endeavors.

That uncertainty had led to other voices growing more and more heated as they fell back on the defensive belief they had in the racial uniqueness and ultimate superiority of the People. They were unlike anything or any other species ever encountered.

None saw the universe as they did. None experienced or could manipulate it as they did. To be people, therefore, meant to understand the universe on that deep level. Only they could do so, only they were the People.

Some beasts were dangerous, yes, but they were just beasts.

Poor creatures who only existed within three dimensions, chained by the fourth… and entirely unaware of the remaining.

To be pitied, perhaps, depending on the charity one felt to less things, but nothing more than that was possible. Beasts were just beasts.

A few in the conclave had begun to, lightly, question that statement since observing subject Entropy, however. She saw more depth to the universe than any other they’d encountered. She could manipulate and navigate through the dimensional strings in ways that only the people could.

Yet she was a beast.

It made no sense to them, not to any of them.

A few among the conclave were no longer quite so enthusiastic about ending her spark as they had been.

None raised their voice to stop it, of course. The People and the missions they oversaw were necessary. One life, even of a not-quite-beast, did not compare.

*****

Sorilla lid to a stop, covering behind a corner in the maze of identical construction that was the interior of the Ross ship.

They’ve got the way out completely covered. This is bad.

She needed a new plan, because her current one was shot to hell. Sorilla wasn’t certain that she could fight her way out past the forces guarding the exit of the ship, but worse… she didn’t think it would make any difference if she could.

If they want me dead this badly, they’re not going to just let me go once I’m out. They’ll keep coming. The people here don’t deserve what the Ross will rain down on them in order to get to me.

That presented a problem.

For all that she had little respect for the tactical acumen of the Ross, or the individual strength of their security forces, they didn’t need much of either.

The power wielded by their forces, up to and including the ships themselves, was so far beyond anything that might be considered ‘conventional’ that it was laughable. At the low end, the weapons tech they could deploy was capable of shattering atomic bonds on a whim. Anything that could deploy nuclear equivalent weapons as a tactical option, and did, was not something to ever underestimate.

For all the power inherent in that, however, the power level of those weapons was still within the range that Sorilla would consider conventional, more or less.

Certainly, human forces didn’t opt to use nuclear equivalent weapons, but they just as certainly had them. Even tactical nukes were a thing though. Again, they’d never gained much favor in human conflicts for some very obvious reasons. Primarily that they tended to be overkill when you actually wanted to make use of land you had conquered.

Destroying buildings and infrastructure assets, irradiating land, air, and water, and killing indiscriminately was generally all a bad thing for the majority of operational goals. Contrary to what many civilians believed, the military didn’t center around killing people and breaking things. It centered around accomplishing specific operational goals. Killing people and breaking things just tended to be the most efficient means of accomplishing said goals sometimes.

The Ross were on another level, however. They didn’t care about the land as far as she could tell. They certainly had no care for anyone living on it. Irradiating the land was neither a positive or negative to them, for example. It had no effect on them, negatively speaking, but really offered no benefit either. So, if there was something to be gained by doing it, they didn’t hesitate… but if there wasn’t, they wouldn’t be bothered.

Simple as that.

The issue was with the level of pure power they had, and within that Sorilla strongly suspected that nothing the Ross had displayed during the war truly approached their full power aside from, possibly, the annihilation of a planet in an attempt to destroy the SOLCOM fleet.

Of course, given how damned casually they opted for that option, I doubt it was nearing their true limit either.

For whatever reasons, Sorilla was certain that even destroying a planet was the equivalent of them holding back.

She didn’t know why they were holding back, just that they were… which made her very cautious about doing anything that caused them to unleash any fraction of their strength, let alone whatever the full power of it was, upon any inhabited species.

It wouldn’t end well.

That, unfortunately, put her in a quandary.

If they wanted her that bad, she couldn’t let them know where she was so long as they had the capability to reach her. They could, and likely would, tear worlds asunder to get to her if that was an operational goal.

She slipped back away from the entry, she had things to do deeper in the ship before she could return to run that gauntlet.

*****

The conclave waited.

And waited.

Something is wrong. Subject Entropy should have arrived by this point.

Likely she is there, watching, attempting to plan a way through?

The uncertainty in the suggestion could be felt on multiple levels.

Perhaps. Is she frightened?

Subject Entropy does not show fear.

Do not enhance her more for no reason. There is no evidence of such emotional crippling in the subject. Fear may not be a powerful motivator for her, but it surely exists.

She is planning something. Her priorities have changed. We projected that she had prioritized escape to a world in which she could locate other humans, and she arrived as predicted. We projected that she would break out to contact other humans and she has vanished. We are missing something. Her priorities have been altered. We must determine how.

The conclave considered that and agreed quickly.

Subject Entropy was not what they considered an easy one to predict, but it was not because of inherent unpredictability as had been suggested early on during the creation of her file. No, it was more that her priorities tended to be different than others, both of her species and of other known species in general.

She acted with the precision expected of one trained in conflict, but with more fluid options opening to her that constantly changed as the situation changed. She would often seemingly change her entire mission profile mid-operation, when presented with some new piece of information that altered her perception.

That was unusual among the militant factions of most of the beast species they knew. All of them, honestly, though one Alliance species had a faction that had some level of fluidity beyond the normal expectations.

Entropy, however, flowed like water through the battlefield… she changed direction and goals constantly, taking the path of least resistance as she made her way toward whatever goal she ultimately had.

We know her ultimate goal must be to escape and return to her own people. Most efficient means of accomplishing said task?

The conclave considered that for a moment.

Escape the ship, acquire a jump capable ship from the locals, depart the planet immediately.

Agreed. Obstacles?

Our forces. She must eliminate the security force, or bypass them in some way.

Wait.

The Conclave paused, shifting attention to the speaker.

What is it?

Eliminating or bypassing our security forces does not accomplish her mission.

Explain.

Assume total victory by subject Entropy. Annihilation of our forces and escape into the world beyond.

Highly unlikely.

Assume it. What response remains for us?

The conclave considered it briefly, but the answer was obvious.

Once she exits the vessel, we would bring our main weapons to… oh. Oh no.

Her objective priorities are not quite what we believed them to be. She must disable our response capability before she exits the vessel.

Issuing orders to redeploy security now.

*****

There were not many points in the Ross ships that were known weak spots, unfortunately. Most of the ones destroyed during the war had fallen to bunker buster missiles with nuclear warheads. SOLCOM had learned early and quickly that nukes alone weren’t going to do much - the Ross vessels could take absolutely massive levels of damage to the exterior infrastructure and continue to remain operational. Getting the warhead deep inside the hull was the key to taking one down, though even then it often amounted to much less damage than could be accounted for in any of the models.

Now, Sorilla suspected that much of the unaccounted for energy had gone through the portal system, bleeding out into other ships lightyears away, but the key takeaway remained the same in any case. To disable or destroy the Ross vessels, you needed to punch hard, and punch deep within their armor.

Deep, that was something she could manage. She had, if not unfettered access, certainly a reasonable level of it.

Especially with the security forces arrayed primarily at the exits like that, she mused.

Punching hard, however, that was a potential sticking point.

The captured small arms she had acquired from a security mechanoid Goblin were considerably more potent than even standard anti-tank weapons issued through SOLCOM or any national governments on Earth, but it wasn’t even close to the power of a ship mounted nuclear missile.

Thank God, even if it’s a bit of a problem for me right now.

The idea of the Ross mechanoids with quite that much power sent a cold chill down her spine.

Sorilla figured she only had a couple viable targets. The tactical option would be to take out the Ross weapon itself. Destroy the gravity valve and that would eliminate most of their real firepower. They could chase her with their security forces, but frankly that could just as easily work to her favor if they started rampaging across Arkhana like particularly stupid bulls in a china shop.

The local response would certainly be fun to watch. Preferably from a minimum safe distance and with a bucket of popcorn, given the predilection for weapon’s ownership among the Arkhanians.

Is that the word? Arkhanites? Eh, I’m sure they’ll have something picked out.

Sorilla shook off the non-sequiter, forcing her mind back on track.

The problem with the idea of taking out the weapon was actually pretty simple.

She had no idea where it was. SOLCOM investigators had some ideas, but frankly no one was entirely certain if there even was a discrete weapon mount in the ships, or if it was some artifact of their drive design, or something else entirely. Which kind of put a damper on any chance of taking that particular target out.

That left option two, something she did know the location of. The ship’s main drives.

Sorilla dropped down a couple decks from where she’d been, working her way deeper in as quickly as she could. She had little doubt that the enemy would be working out her goal at some point, if they hadn’t already, and the closer she got there before they redeployed to stop her, the less she had to fight through.

The Ross used a gravity drive system, one that had been the inspiration for the gravity control mechanism on the new class SOLCOM vessels in fact. Granted, the SOLCOM design was like a child trying to build their own Harley out of carboard and plastic containers in order to drive what their dad was driving, but it somehow managed to work… after a fashion.

SOLCOM engineers and investigators actually knew quite a lot about the drives in a Ross vessel, though much of what they knew was more along the lines of knowing what they didn’t know. The important parts, however, were at least mostly identified… and, having been at war during those bits of research, blowing up the important parts had received quite a lot of focus.

While learning how the drives worked was never information that was considered important for someone in Sorilla’s position to learn, nor would she have had the education or time to learn it, knowing how to destroy them? That was right up her wheelhouse.

She ducked into a darkened room when she heard a rhythmic stomp of boots on the deck, and felt the presence of several squads moving in her direction. She frowned, though, when they shifted automatically to alter their direction toward her even as she moved to hide from them.

Are they watching me? I didn’t think they had me on visuals this time, based on… Oh, shit, I’m an idiot.

Sorilla grimaced, killing the captured scanner that she recognized had to be putting out a powerful field of active and thus trackable radiated signals, then slipped from cover and bolted up the corridor away from the approaching security.

This just got harder.

*****

The conclave grimaced slightly as they lost the tracking on the target.

She disabled her captured scanner. Annoying.

Isolate her location so we can get an active track on her visually.

The conclave agreed, getting to work on doing just that, but it was somewhat easier said than done. If they could find her, they could assign the system to an active track, which would process through all of the damn near infinite reams of data coming through the ship’s onboard systems. Without that to filter it through, however, it would take a rather large amount of time to locate her and, even with compression on their side, she was moving too fast toward an objective they considered far too dangerous, to risk spending that time on.

Bring in more security along this axis, another said firmly. Do not leave gaps, we will flush her into the open.

Agreed.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty Five

Parithalian Transport

“Jump point just ahead, Envoy.”

“The Ross vessel is just behind. Will we make it?” Sienele asked tersely, eyes flicking between the displays.

Kriss shrugged, seemingly unconcerned.

“The Upwind succeeded in reducing their acceleration significantly. However, they had still built up sufficient velocity to overtake us,” The Lucian answered. “The numbers are a little bit of an uncertain spread due to some uncertainty in how well the Ross vessel can maintain acceleration and how much of an effect they’ve had on the local spacetime when they destroyed the Upwind.”

Sienele grimaced, but tipped his head to acknowledge the point. The Ross had shown some variable energy in their acceleration since the destruction of the cruiser, likely from their attempts to repair the damage as well as from damaged sections wearing out under the stress of their ongoing pursuit.

The effects of the gravity valve on local spacetime had actually slipped his thoughts, but it was an obvious variable that would be difficult to account for. Even from the significant distance between them and the Upwind the small transport had felt a pull back toward the gravity sink used to destroy the cruiser.

They were firing everything they had, pushing as hard as possible to get to the Jump Point, but in the end, they were only going to find out if it was enough when they actually got there… or when they didn’t.

He examined the scans of the Ross vessel, making sure to get as much data on it as possible. The Parithalians hadn’t developed the negative matter warheads during the war, and for obvious reasons had not had any chance to use them on the Ross since. A lot of people would be very interested in the level of damage they’d managed to inflict.

Which was extensive, to be fair to the Parithalian efforts. The ship looked like it had been ravaged by some insane beast, with deep scars tore through the hull and exposing the inner infrastructure of the vessel to space along great swaths of the previous clean white ship.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been enough to destroy it, nor even disable it. The damage had been crippling, to some extent, but clearly not enough.

It would appear that the damage it primarily superficial, along the exterior of the hull or a few decks deep. An obvious issue with negative matter warheads, they are hardly capable of doing anything other than reacting with whatever is closest.

It would be something that the Pari designers would have to improve on, he supposed.

During the war, the humans scored several kills on the Ross. I wonder what weapons they used to do so?

He would have to look that up, assuming he got back to his office and had access to the Alliance intelligence systems ever again.

A proximity alarm shook him from his thoughts, and Sienele’s gaze shifted to the navigation system.

It was outdated by modern Alliance standards, of course, but still quite serviceable, and he could see that they’d just entered the outer perimeter of the plotted Jump Point.

“Finally,” He hissed.

“Do not be so excited,” Kriss warned him. “We need to get in deeper, our jump drive isn’t… well, it is not new, let us be charitable and leave it at that.”

Sienele snorted.

As the Lucian had stated, calling it ‘not new’ was being charitable. The old Parithalian ship they were using had one of the earliest model drives he’d ever heard of, one that he was honestly shocked was still in service. Though, selling off old ones to primitives like those on the two human colonies within Alliance space made some sense in that regard, he supposed.

“And the Ross are almost in range. This will be tight.”

*****

The conclave once more shifted focus, a warning alarm demanding that they turn some attention to the situation in the system they were originally tasked with handling rather than deal exclusively with the rampant human. Relaying on compressed time to provide them with as much of, well time, as they needed, they examined the course of the target vessel attempting to escape the Alliance Production system.

They are nearing the coordinates for initiating a jump. That must not occur. Calculations for intercept?

Interception will be too late… marginally.

Marginally late is still late. Options.

The minds set to determining various scenarios and the potential each would have, played out in simulations.

Disrupt the jump point.

That caused them to pause, shifting focus to the speaker.

Interesting. Before or during their Jump?

That question set the group back. Disrupting a jump point during a jump transition was a good way to establish a little death by accident, but only if you had the time to ensure the calculations, such as their original plan for the Alliance cruiser. Without that time, it was possible that the ship would wind up merely at the wrong jump point upon exit, or perhaps somewhere in deep space.

Unacceptable risk. We cannot determine if we will be close enough for a proper disruption during the jump, likely they would survive. Disrupt before, then destroy them before it can reform.

Agreed.

The orders were issued.

Scans were analyzed quickly, taking in the gravitational sources of the system and the waves that were entering from outside the system, their interactions creating the jump points in the first place. A quick calculation was made on the best placement to temporarily disrupt the point and the ship’s gravity valve was aimed and loosed upon local space time.

*****

Parithalian Transport

Acceleration alarms screamed as the ship was abruptly yanked off course by an anomalous gravity source.

“We’re being fired upon,” Sienele concluded, tension filling his body.

“No, that wasn’t even close,” Kriss said calmly. “It’s worse than that.”

“Worse? How?” Sienele leaned in as Kriss tapped a display in front of him with a single talon.

“We’re no longer reading as being within the outer rim of the Jump point… we’re no longer reading the jump point at all.”

“How is that even possible?” one of the Lucians blurted from behind them.

“Disrupting a jump point is theoretical to Alliance research, but with enough twisting of spacetime, it should be… and obviously can be done,” Sienele said grimly. “No one realized that the Ross had that much power.

“We are dead,” Kriss said. “We cannot outrun them now.”

Sienele grimaced, looking away from the screens. He knew it was true, there wasn’t much they could do now, not with their only means of escaping the star system cut off entirely.

“Make them earn the kill.”

Kriss and Sienele looked at one another, then back to the speaker, the same Lucian who had been shocked by the fact that the jump point had vanished. They nodded slowly.

“Agreed,” Kriss said, turning back, his smile returning slowly. “Make them earn the kill.”

*****

Portal Ship

The Conclave watched as the jump point vanished, moving away from the current location so quickly as to be faster than the speed of information, if only technically. It would be back, soon enough, but the gravity pulse would buy them sufficient time to accomplish their task.

The old Alliance transport didn’t have the speed to outrun the vessel, not even damaged as it was, particularly not with the vastly superior starting speed they had before the Alliance cruiser had damaged them.

It was only a matter of time, and the conclave knew that the people on that ship had to be aware of it.

So, they were mildly surprised when the ship began evasive maneuvering, cutting away at an oblique angle. The maneuver would tax the drives significantly to match, but they turned and followed.

There would be no witnesses.

*****

Parithalian Transport

“They are following,” Sienele said. “Acceleration… dropping. Still not low enough for us to escape, unfortunately.”

“Escape is a fools dream, if we had proper weapons, I would at least add to the damage they had to repair before we died,” Kriss growled. “Instead I will settle for making them work for our deaths.”

Sienele nodded, one eye tracking the pursuing ship while he focused some of his attention on the impossible effect the Ross had just managed to create.

As he’d told the Lucian, disrupting a Jump Point was believed to be possible by the Alliance, but none of the space warping technology in common use was anywhere near the potency believed to be needed. Indeed, no one in the Alliance believed that the Ross even had such power behind their systems, given the vast scale that Jumps were formed under.

It took the interplay between multiple stars, planets, and special stellar phenomenon, all in a balance to create one.

Destroying one should be beyond the power of any species, even the Ross.

The very idea was bothering him deeply, which was why he was taking time to try and work out just what had happened. Likely he would die before figuring it out and, even if not, he would never get to tell anyone, but if he worked it out at least he wouldn’t die with that itch scratching at his brain.

The transport’s scanners were old, but they were robust enough that they hadn’t been shut down by the gravity pulse releasing. Newer models would have done so in order to avoid damage, but it seemed that they’d been far enough away from it to have avoided that… though Sienele wouldn’t be shocked if the instrument cluster had lost a few thousand cycles off its life from the wear all the same.

They’d held up in the moment, though, and that was all that mattered to him just then. Crunching the numbers was taking an eternity, however.

Blast this old computational system, I can’t believe anyone ever traveled the stars with this little computing power.

The model he was running was forming up, though, based on the scanner data.

“What are you doing?” Kriss growled, “I’m showing the computers running eighty percent over peak!”

“Is it affecting your ability to avoid the Ross?” Sienele asked, tensing.

Kriss snorted, “Hardly. We are limited to picking a direction and flying in it as fast as we can. Takes little computer power to manage, thankfully.”

“Then don’t worry about it,” Sienele responded. “I’m just scratching an itch that I would rather not die with.”

Kriss laughed, “I cannot blame you there. Unfortunately, any itches I carry can only be scratched with a blaster, and I have no targets I want dead by my hand within my personal range.”

The other Lucians grumbled in agreement with that, leaving Sienele to continue his work. His eyes widened as he suddenly saw what had happened.

They didn’t destroy the jump point… they… chased it away?

He threw the computer display away from him, letting it swing back into its place and lock into the console as he lunged out of the chair and reached over Kriss to change their course.

“What are you doing!? That will let them catch us earlier!”

*****

Alliance transport has altered course. Estimate to intercept revised down eight percent.

The conclave blinked metaphorically at that announcement. It was not a particularly difficult calculation to make, working out the best course to draw out the engagement for as long as possible, and yet somehow the beasts from the Alliance had managed to get it wrong.

Mildly surprising in some ways, completely unsurprising in others.

Recalculate engagement formulae, engage when ready.

Formulae calculated, engagement window opening… now.

Prepare to fire.

Warning! Jump Point is returning, the course places the…

The conclave watched as the jump point intersected the Alliance transport’s position as it tracked back through space toward its original location and the transport’s Jump Drive flared once before the ship vanished from local space time.

They jumped from a moving Jump Point. That is not something even we would do.

Impressive, if also insane and likely suicidal… but impressive.

Can they be tracked?

Negative.

The following formulae that was spoken was as foul as anything ever imagined from any species before.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty-Six

Portal Ship, Alliance World Arkhana

Trying to smoke me out, Sorilla thought as she was forced to move out ahead of the advancing security detail. Smart.

Without using the advanced scanner she’d stolen from them it was considerably more difficult to stay clear of the enemy movements, but she was managing thus far. What was more of a problem, however, was that they were succeeding in keeping her away from the drive core.

The Ross had clearly worked out her strategy, or at least her immediate goals, which was going to be a problem.

Sorilla ducked down an empty corridor, one that looked like every other empty corridor she’d seen ad nauseum over the last little bit, this time managing to get a little closer to her target. It was clear that she wasn’t going to be able to get there entirely undetected, the enemy security was moving around in far to great number for that.

She just needed to pick the best possible time for exposing her position, so that she could try to get the best results from her actions possible. That was, of course, far easier said than done, but as her buddies in the Teams liked to say... the only easy day, was yesterday.

She came to a stop at a junction corridor, and knew that there were security forces not to far beyond. They weren’t remotely as quiet as she suspected they might wish to be, but she wasn’t going to be complaining.

The drive core was one deck down, almost directly under her, and the ramp to that deck was just on the other side of the security.

No way I’m sneaking through…

Sorilla gritted her teeth under the helm. Her body was sore, her mind and body both were tired, and she just wanted this to be over. It wasn’t going to end, however, until either she, or they, ended it.

Sorilla was determined to make the ending on her terms. One way, or the other.

She was already moving when she re-activated the scanner, her muscles screaming at her in protest as she began a loping run that slowly turned into a full sprint. The sound of the security coming to alert was almost on her before she got the first images back through the scanner, fed directly into her brain by her implants.

One at the corridor, swinging to intercept…

Sorilla dropped into a slide as she slid out of the side corridor, the big Golem’s swinging fist passing right by overhead as she fired two heavy blasts up into it’s joints as she passed.

She heard metal and ceramic crack, but was already moving on before she could see the results of the pass.

Goblins, bringing their pulse weapons around. They’re charging to fire… doubt they have any safeties currently running.

She sat up as she slid, leveling the weapon at the line of enemy mechanoids, and fired a continuous stream of warp pulses, tearing the line to pieces before they could fully orient to strike at her.

Sorilla could feel a dozen more Goblins turning on her from other directions, though, and their weapons were preparing to discharge.

More targets converging on the area of operation, she noted dispassionately as the signals filtered through her brain. They’ll saturate the entire area with fire in less than two seconds. Nothing will survive.

She didn’t pause as she moved from sitting to standing, her feet back under her and pumping hard to keep moving. She threw herself forward into a dive as the world behind her exploded in a chaotic mass of warped spacetime even as she vanished down the ramp, sliding along the deck, and tumbled out onto the floor below.

Sorilla killed her scanner, hoping it might delay them a bit if they thought she’d been killed in the attack.

Probably wouldn’t, but she could hope if nothing else.

*****

The conclave didn’t even have time to blink, despite being in a compressed time field.

The assault had happened so quickly and been over so fast in turn, that from the time it began to when the area had been saturated with fire was only a few moments even for them.

Is she dead?

Scanner has been deactivated. Area is currently unscannable due to interference from the weapon discharges. Unknown.

Subject Entropy is alive until we have her body in our custody. Bring in more security to replace the ones we lost.

Lost to our own fire.

Irrelevant. If it ends Entropy, it is worth it. Has the core been secured?

Several security detachments are there now, more are on their way.

That would be a no, then.

*****

Sorilla edged around the corner, looking at the enemy formations through her suit sensors, mostly leaning on the secondary visual gear rather than the primaries that were mounted roughly in line with her own eyes.

The core was just beyond the next line of security, but frankly she was running out of tricks. The enemy weren’t exactly hyper skilled, but they did learn from the past and they were disciplined beyond anything she’d ever want to see in actual living soldiers.

The mechanoid part of the equation coming out, of course.

She took a few breaths, easing her tension somewhat, and winced as the deep throbbing pain returned.

When in motion, the pain tended to be pushed down, but it was coming back stronger, and faster, every time she slowed down. Sorilla knew that if she didn’t end this soon, she was going to stop one of these times and just not be able to start again.

Pain might be weakness leaving the body, but that didn’t help much when your body was generating plenty of weakness to spare.

Oh lord, what I wouldn’t do for a remote drone with a shaped charge or twelve.

That wasn’t in the books, unfortunately, which meant that she was going to have to improvise.

Sorilla found an access panel near on the doors, like the ones she used to fry the door control circuits and pried it off with her armor shod fingers. She wasn’t looking for the door controls, however. Instead, she looked for a larger source of power.

The corridors were well lit, with more than just visible light, she’d noticed. Her armor and cybernetics didn’t require much light but unless she wanted to use projection systems, which would certainly give her position away to anyone with the right senses, she needed some.

She was willing to bet that the enemy was in much the same boat in that regard, otherwise the ship wouldn’t have lighting in the first place.

Finding the power conduit, Sorilla pried it out and managed to break open the protective covering. Keeping her hands well away from the open flow, she found another conduit and repeated the process before deftly looping the pair and ducking out of the way.

She wasn’t really well versed in how the Ross power management system worked, but in her experience with human systems it was pretty rare that power systems reacted well to being shorted out in such a way, and as it turned out she wasn’t disappointed this time either.

Rather than sparks blowing out from the interior of the wall, the whole wall warped visibly, giving her the impetus to get the hell out of dodge in a big damn hurry while the warping behind her continued.

Just before she was certain it was going to blow out, and maybe up, everything around her went black.

Not dark. Completely black as pitch.

Sorilla blinked, signaling her armor and implants to bring up the passive IR mode and initiating night stealth on her armor. It helped, a little. The walls and decks were roughly the same temperature, but the air wasn’t, and the security up ahead was a good deal warmer than ambient.

I can work with this.

Sorilla edged forward, moving as silently as she could. Her armor wasn’t exactly built for it, not on steel decks at least, but it wasn’t some clunk mech either. She was able to keep her sound profile low enough that the enemy ahead didn’t seem to notice her approach, her own body heat currently being masked by the stealth settings.

That wouldn’t hold for long. However, she was already noticing her internal temperature was climbing now that cooling had been killed on the inside and was being redirected to bring the external radiators back down to ambient as quickly as possible.

The security seemed able to see each other, she noted as she approached, but she wasn’t reading anything that looked like radiated energy, in any frequency, so she assumed they were using passive. Thermal, perhaps, maybe something else.

Sorilla just hoped that whatever it was had been covered by the tech geeks who built her armor. Otherwise, this was going to be one of the shortest sneak attempts she’d tried since boot camp.

*****

More chaos. Entropy is on the Core Deck.

None of the others of the conclave bothered to comment, the statement was patently obvious. The question wasn’t where was the subject? the question was how in the abyss was the subject constantly managing to slip through their grip in the manner that she did.

The entire section of the deck was now down with no power. Lights and the like were the least of the issue. Communication was also crippled with only emergency systems running and half of those were nearly useless because the pulse that took out the power was still resonating across eight decks and filling the entire area with interference that was all but impossible to punch through.

Signal evacuation of primary assets.

That order brought them up short, and every mind turned to the one who had spoken.

We cannot assume she will not achieve her goal. Primary assets must be protected, or the plan will be at risk. Entropy is a minor player. Irritating, but for all the damage she has done, she has never introduced risk to the plan. At this moment she is, unwittingly. I will not help her do so.

Well, put in that manner, they couldn’t really argue. The conclave issued the orders to have primary assets pulled from the ship and brought to safer locations through the Paths.

It… rankled to have to make that declaration, however, and the Conclave felt the frustration build as it swept across each of them.

One being.

It was… unthinkable.

*****

Sorilla slipped slowly past the security, back to the wall as she moved along sideways. They were sweeping the area, looking for her she assumed, but had shown no sign that they were seeing anything but each other.

Good enough for me, she thought as she pushed off the wall and slipped through the access way, heading finally for the core.

The lights were out there as well, mostly, but the core was still active as were the machines, which provided a low light environment that her armor and cybernetics had no problem amplifying.

Sorilla checked carefully before she slipped across the room and made her way to the machines that controlled the ship’s drive core. They were locked out, of course, though she tried to access them it was clear that while the controls were present under her touch, they were entirely unresponsive.

Pity, would have made this a little easier. Ah well…

Sorilla unslung the pulse weapon she’d captured a while back, and started to tinker with its settings.

Among other things that SOLCOM had learned during the war was how not to… and, by inference, how to, made the enemy weapons blow up after they’d been captured. It wasn’t really shocking. Weapons of any nature carried a lot of potential energy practically by definition. The more they carried, the more it was possible to turn potential into something… useable.

Luckily, for her current goal at least, the same held true for things like power cores in a starship drive… only far more so. Drive cores, like that on a SOLCOM starship or the Ross one she was currently preparing to sabotage, held immense potential energy, and intentionally kept all of that energy right on the edge of a runaway reaction because stable potential energy was harder to tap into as a general rule.

Incredible amounts of engineering went into keeping those little bundles of power stable despite the conflicting nature of requiring power that was safe and stable yet also ready to blow a planet apart at a moment’s notice (in the case the Ross ships at least), but the thing about engineering was that it tended to be easier to break when you were on the outside looking in.

Setting an overload on her captured weapon wasn’t easy exactly, but like the power conduits in the corridor outside, it was relatively straightforward. Bypassing the safety measures intended to keep grunts from doing exactly that sort of thing was usually the hardest part.

On her own gear, Sorilla was fully aware of at least eight different safety breaks that would keep her from blowing the power supply of her armor, for example, and that would cause a relatively low yield thermal runaway. The protections put into place on higher yield munitions were impressive.

They were also incredibly easy to bypass once you knew how.

Military contractors kept making things more and more foolproof, so grunts kept finding better fools… and Special Forces, like her unit, took careful notes of what the fools accomplished just in case they ever wanted to repeat the experience intentionally.

The Ross weapon wasn’t like that, however. In terms of safety mechanisms, it was quite sparse. Some basics to protect against the weapon accidentally going boom if it were banged around, exposed to enemy fire, that sort of thing… but nothing, as best she could tell, had been implemented to keep someone from intentionally sabotaging it.

Probably because they issue them to Mechanoids, Sorilla supposed. Easier to keep the grunts from finding better fools if you were programming the foolishness out of them in the first place.

So deliberately rigging the weapon to blow only took a few moments. What took a bit longer was finding the ideal place to set the newly rigged charge. Luckily that work had been done for her by SOLCOM. Extensive research had gone into how to sabotage a Ross vessel from within and she, as one of very few human soldiers who’d ever been in that position in the past, had both contributed to the work and benefited from access to the final report.

Sorilla jammed the weapon into a port that was intended to bleed energy off during an emergency, as best they could tell, and made the last adjustments to set her rigging in action. Almost immediately the weapon began to emit a rather unpleasant whine, or actually the room did.

That was the gravitation harmonics of the weapon reverberating everything in the room around her, and it was her signal to get the hell out of Dodge.

Sorilla heeded the signal, spinning on her heel and sprinting for the exit. She just flat out ignored the complaints her body was trying to put up, sore muscles and bruised internals could wait because what was about to happen in that engine room would not.

She hit the ramp to the next deck at full speed, tilting her shoulder down to catch a Goblin in the side as she body checked it into the wall and kept on going.

Now wasn’t the time to get into a fight.

Fighting is going to be kind of pointless in a very short while, after all.

*****

Gravitational harmonic registering in the drive room. She deployed… a space-warping explosive? Humans don’t have that technology.

Try not to be too primitive. She’s using our technology to do it.

The conclave was in a tizzy, dispatching security to try and defuse the bomb while simultaneously evacuating all priority personnel off world through the Paths.

Subject: Entropy had certainly managed to live up to her title, they all agreed on that. One single primitive had managed to throw chaos into a plan that had been operating without fail since they had opted to cease the conflict with the Enemy, and that was a very long time ago.

Of course, there was a growing sentiment that Subject: Entropy, at least, if not her entire species, might not be properly ‘primitive’ at all.

Clearly there was, at the very minimum, potential there. If one among a species could both see and manipulate the universe as they did, then others would have the potential. It was therefore of vital importance that the Ross learn more of these humans, and of Subject Entropy.

That would have to wait, however. They had an upcoming explosion to either prevent, or clean up after.

*****

Security forces were in a bit of a mess, Sorilla noted as she bulled through what had probably been intended to be a roadblock against her escaping. The mechanoids were clearly focused on something else, though, with many of their number having been pulled to deal with whatever it was.

Can’t imagine what that might be.

There was no time to get cocky, or smug, though and she reminded herself of that as she headed for the exit from the ship. Until she was back to the right side of enemy lines, or at least somewhere appropriately neutral, relaxation was a foreign word from a language she could not take the chance of understanding.

Unarmed, effectively, she kept running. Ross protocols would require that they had a way to deploy from their ship, and that generally meant a tunnel judging from personal experience. Which also meant that she had to escape that ahead of any explosion by preference, otherwise things were going to be rather uncomfortable for the rest of her, admittedly rather short, life.

Resistance was thinner as the got closer to the exit this time. Sorilla figured that the warning alarms had security running every which way, other issues prioritized over catching a single person. That would work to her advantage, of course, she just wasn’t certain if it would work enough.

She exploded out of the corridors into the bay that served as an embarkation/debarkation point within the vessel, taking the closest of the security forces by surprise. Sorilla hit the ground in a skid, keeping feet forward as she went right between the legs of a rather slow on the uptake Golem.

It bent down as she went under, trying against the obvious limitations of its design to follow her vector as she went right between it’s legs.

Scanner on, Sorilla felt the locations of everything around her like it was part of her own body. When the Goblins turned in her direction, she didn’t even look their way as she got a crooked leg under her and pushed herself right back to her feet and kept running.

Pulse charges signaled them preparing to fire, but Sorilla just ignored it all.

The deck was still open, she could see Ross personnel rushing back on board, and briefly wondered what exactly they’d been up to on Arkhana. Whatever it was, it wasn’t her concern at the moment.

The little grey goulie at the front of the line point at her, and for the first time since she’d known of them, Sorilla heard one speak.

Or, perhaps, heard wasn’t the right word.

Felt was more accurate.

The… communication that came from it was in spacetime pulses, nothing even approaching a weapons grade power of course, but similar enough that she was almost stunned into inaction as the creature shouted something at her in… gravitational fields.

The moment was so surreal that she nearly thought it was a dream, but it passed quickly as she realized that her body had kept on running despite her sudden shock.

The Goulie dove for cover as she charged the door, and she could see the outer armor plates starting to reform in an attempt to keep her in or maybe something else, but the end result would be the same.

Sorilla slammed into a Goblin, driving her knee into its head to shatter the primary sensors of the mechanoid, then she planted a boot in its midsection and kicked off, propelling herself up and over.

A Golem swept for her, but she was already above its grip, arms reaching out to get a grip on its head and use that for leverage to lift herself up and over the towering beast. Sorilla kipped over its head, then dropped a bit to get bent knees under her as she planted her boots into its back and kicked off with all the force she could muster.

The Golem was driven forward, unsteadily stumbling in an attempt to stay upright as Sorilla dove through the open door and out into the cavern beyond. She arced down from a peak height of nearly twenty meters, descending right into the midst of what looked like a group of stunned Goulies, Goblins, and what appeared to be a human or two.

Sorilla would very much have liked a few moments with any humans who were in the presence of Ross personnel without being obvious prisoners, but she didn’t have the time. She did grab two fast facial recognition profiles, just in case it came up later, right before she hit the ground and rolled with the impact, slamming right into the line of Goblins that had been escorting the Goulies back to the ship.

The mechanoids went down in a sprawl, tangling up with her as she lashed out with everything she had. She didn’t have the time to grapple with them, not this time, and the only thing on Sorilla’s mind was getting the hell out of there.

She nearly fought her way clear of the mess of limbs when a sudden crushing weight slammed down on her from above and she realized that she’d somehow missed the presence of at least one Golem.

The massive mechanoid was holding her tight to the ground, one arm pinned at her side while she hammered and pushed away at it with the other, only barely able to make any movement at all, mostly wriggling around to get her face down to the ground.

Without leverage, however, she couldn’t get clear no matter what she tried. The Golem just kept tightening its grip, her armor alarmedly reporting the increase in pressure as it began to approach the redline for what it could take in terms of constant force.

*****

Security Golem reports capturing Entropy!

Open the doors, send more forces to ensure she does not escape.

There is an issue!

Leave whatever it is to the security forces, we have her!

She rigged a weapon to overload.

We are aware of that. We will repair the damage later!

It was located in the emergency relief port of the drive core!

The conclave stopped, all attention shifting to focus on the speaker.

Disarm it.

Specialists are moving now, however…

A sudden deep reverberation shook everything, including the compressed space in which they resided.

It is too late.

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty Seven

Outside Portal Ship, Alliance World Arkhana

Sorilla felt it when the weapon went off, though no one else in the area probably could.

Maybe the Goulies, she supposed.

The first detonation was small, barely noticeable even to her, but she froze under the Golem’s grip because she knew what was coming. When the deep reverberation shook them, Sorilla planted her free hand on the ground and shoved as hard as she could.

Between the strength of her armor and the sudden shaking putting the Golem off its balance, she managed to lever the hand off the ground, a motion that tipped the balance of the big mechanoid entirely, sending it toppling over.

The shock of it hitting the ground shook its grip enough for her to get just a little leverage, and Sorilla used it as best she could, heaving with all the combined strength of her arm and her armor. Warning lights lit up across the diagnostics of her armor as she approached, then exceeded the listed tensile limits but she ignored them.

She actually heard the tearing as the synthetic musculature of her armor failed in her left arm, but it coincided with a grinding sound of the Golem’s grip being twisted open just a little bit farther, freeing her right arm.

Sorilla got twisted around and kept forcing, using her good right arm in addition to the now weakened left to pull herself clear of the grip, tumbling to the ground as a deep rumble welled up from beneath them all. Clutching at her limp arm, she stumbled to her feet and started to run.

A couple of the security mechanoids attempted to track her, but they were well and truly distracted by the shaking that was now growing around them. She could hear screaming… no, she could feel it. The Ghoulies, she realized, knew what was happening, and they weren’t remotely happy about it.

Sorilla couldn’t really bring herself to care as she raced up the rough-hewn tunnel, trying to stay ahead of what she knew was coming.

It wasn’t an explosion, not in the classic sense, nor was it an implosion as often happened with gravity valves in operation. Instead, what happened, was more like a sonic weapon turned up to eleven… billion. Everything shook. Actually, it all rippled. Spacetime was changing shape as she ran, and if not for how used to sensing those changes she’d become, Sorilla would never have been able to remain on her feet as the tunnel began to break up around her.

Cracks appeared first, from floor to ceiling, and then the rocks began to break loose. Sorilla could see light up ahead of her, but dust was billowing around her and dimming it out as fast as she could get closer to it.

She felt like she was running in place, even with the walls of the cavern and tunnel racing by her. Twisting spacetime made it feel like she was struggling uphill by times, then suddenly the bottom would drop out and she would plummet forward for a moment before everything just slammed her back into the cave floor with a vengeance.

Sorilla didn’t look back. Everything she had was focused on one thing, and that was the dim light she kept her eyes locked on while her remaining senses kept her on her feet and moving forward.

Just a step ahead of the explosive blast of air and dust, she threw herself out of the tunnel and into the Arkhanan desert, tumbling across the dusty and rocky terrain as she felt the ground quake under her.

Sorilla heaved herself over onto her back, looking back the way she’d come. There was a cloud of dust rising to the sky, as the ground heaved once more then seemed to collapse in on itself before everything became eerily silent aside from soft aftershocks.

Groaning, she slumped back, closing her eyes.

It was over, one way or the other. It didn’t matter if she’d succeeded or not, Sorilla was tapped out. If the Ross were still able to be active in the area, she knew she was dead or captured.

She didn’t try to fight it this time when the darkness took her.

*****

The conclave was not pleased.

That really went without saying, but it also didn’t remotely encompass the reaction they had to the events. The ship on the human inhabited world was gone. They were uncertain if it were destroyed or merely damaged sufficiently that they could no longer path to it, but in either case the effect was the same.

They would send another vessel to investigate, but the damage was done.

Frustratingly, they were not even certain if Entropy had survived the destruction she had wrought. It was considered a distinct possibility, but for almost any other human they would have simply listed her as dead in her final action.

That was a mistake they would not repeat for a fourth time, however.

The mission objectives for the plan were still largely ongoing. However, this current setback, or setbacks, would present unique challenges. What those challenges were, frankly, they could not entirely predict.

It would depend on the reaction of the Alliance, more than anything else. If they reacted with the craven primitive instincts, they had mostly leaned on thus far, the Plan would likely continue apace with little change.

However, the People had long learned that predicting the primitives was a tricky thing. Most of the time it seemed straightforward enough. Predictions were generally accurate and dependable… until they suddenly were anything but.

Whether this would be one of those times remained to be seen.

They had a great deal of mess to clean up regardless, however.

*****

It was dark when Sorilla awoke, though she could see the line of the false dawn illuminating the horizon as she struggled to her feet. Her body was screaming that it didn’t want to move, every muscle and joint stiff and burning with pain, but she worked through it anyway.

Her internal clocks all agreed that she’d been out for almost eighteen hours, lying there in the desert heat and then near freezing cold when the sun dropped. Without the suit’s protection she’d be in pretty bad shape, but even with it she didn’t dare take any longer than she had to.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have any map of the region, which was problematic, but at the same time the locals seemed to have a broadcast radio station playing so she listened to that while walking and let her armor run the triangulation on its own to guide her steps.

It was going to be a long walk.

*****

Lira McCallen didn’t look up from her cleaning when the door to her pub opened up. It was early for the regulars, but someone always seemed to find time to pop in for a drink shortly after she opened the doors, regardless of time.

She finished wiping down the bar before turning to greet the customer, and stopped dead when she saw the battered figure standing there, one arm hanging limp, and the most outlandish getup she’d ever seen looking like it had been drawn through forty acres of mud and rock from the back of a high-speed car.

“Are you alright?” She asked, carefully and slowly edging to where she kept her carbine.

The figure lifted its good arm up and unsealed its helmet, popping the covering off amid a pressure hiss. Lira blinked in shock, recognizing the face within.

“Good god, lady, what happened to you?” She asked, moving around the bar.

Sorilla, she remembered, grimaced as she gingerly lowered herself into a seat and carefully lifted her back arm up to rest on the bar.

“It’s been a long few weeks,” She answered. “How have things been here?”

Lira snorted, “Since you blew up Constantine’s ranch? Oh, just peachy.”

Sorilla rolled her eyes, “Not our fault his own men were trying to assassinate him. How is he doing, by the way?”

“Finished his little rampage of revenge a while back, still a smooth talker, picked up a couple scars that the ladies love, or so I hear.”

Sorilla looked up at her, smirking slightly.

“Sounds about right.”

“Now what about you?” Lira insisted. “You look like… well, pardon the brashness, but you look like hell wasn’t bad enough and you got sent lower.”

Sorilla laughed, which turned into painful coughing. Lira noticed flecks of blood on her lips as she did.

“Lower. Higher… every which way, you might say,” She answered. “As I said, it’s been a rough few weeks. The last few days, or so, worse than the rest.”

“When did you arrive back on Arkana?” Lira asked.

“Yesterday, maybe the day before. Not sure, don’t feel like checking my computer,” Sorilla admitted, looking like she was wavering slightly in place.

“There’s been no ships come in.”

“No, no there haven’t.”

Lira was alarmed by the wavering look in the other woman’s eyes, as though she were fading in and out of reality almost. She snapped her fingers, “Are you alright? You didn’t answer me… I can call a doc.”

“No need, I’ll live,” Sorilla responded, waving with her right hand. “Just a little desert sickness on top of everything else.”

“Here,” Lira poured a tall glass of water. “Drink this.”

“Thank you,” Sorilla nodded, taking a deep draw.

“Not too fast, not if you’re dehydrated…”

“I’m not, armor helps there, just not enough I guess.” Sorilla said, settling the glass back before looking up at Lira evenly. “I need a favor.”

Lira eyed her briefly, a slight smirk in her features, “Don’t suppose you have anymore Earth whiskey?”

“Not on me, sadly, but I can see what can be done.”

“Fair enough. What do you need?”

*****

Eri Constantine looked over the Saloon with slight disdain. Sasha Dalton nodded to him from the door, so he knew that there wasn’t a trap waiting at least.

“She’s inside,” Dalton said as he approached him. “Looks like hell, but it’s her.”

Eri wondered at that, the last time he’d seen the woman she hadn’t been in the greatest of shape either, but he’d not have said she looked like hell.

“I’ll have Franky the Idiot keep watch down the street,” Dalton said. “But it looks on the up and up.”

“Thank you.”

Eri took a breath and pushed open the doors, walking through into a building he’d honestly rarely had much cause to bother with. If he wanted to drink, or company while drinking, he had better ways of acquiring both.

There was a figure slumped at the bar, armor he recognized. He walked over slowly, sliding out the stool a space down from her, and taking a seat.

The owner, Lira, dropped a bottle and a clean glass in front of him.

“It’s on her tab,” She said, glancing at the slumped figure. “You awake, woman?”

Sorilla shifted, groaning quietly as she opened her eyes and pushed off the bar with her right hand. Eri’s eyes fell to the way her left hung loose and widened.

“What happened to you?”

“Just a skirmish, nothing really,” She said.

“You never should have trusted those Xenos.” He chided her, pouring a couple fingers of whiskey.

Sorilla waved his concerns off, “Trust was never in the cards, and the Ross want me anyway. I need something, Eri, and you’re the only one I know can help.”

“What?” Eri asked, taking a sip, genuinely curious what he could help this woman with.

“A ship.”

He choked on the booze, shooting her an incredulous look.

“Is that all?” He demanded after he stopped coughing. “Do you have any idea how much the Xenos want for anything remotely decent?”

“You can get one, Eri.”

“Perhaps, but why should I?”

Sorilla flopped her left arm over, looking at him, “Do you have a computer? Alliance interface would be fine, but I can work without it.”

Eri looked at her for a moment, then snapped his fingers.

One of the men at the door walked over, settling an Alliance computer on the bar. Eric powered it up before turning it over to her.

Sorilla didn’t touch it, but a moment after Eri saw the screen change and what looked like schematics appeared. He pulled it back, reading them carefully before closing the screen and turning back to her.

“How do I know any of this is real?” He demanded.

She rolled her eyes, “Do you really think I walk around with fake intelligence cluttering up my systems? It’s real, all of it. Get me the ship, you get the data, and I’ll even have samples smuggled back in as soon as SOLCOM decides to open up routes.”

“You seem sure they will.”

Sorilla snorted, “Between you and I, I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t already, but I don’t have any contact information for that. The tech should keep you at the top of the power structure here, for a long time.”

The way she stressed the word long caused his eyes to flicker back to the device. Slowly, Eri nodded.

“I will see what I can do.”

“You do that. You get the rest of the data when I get the ship.” Sorilla said. “I need to sleep. If you have anybody reporting to the Alliance, don’t tell them I’m here.”

Eri pushed back from the bar, waving off the man who’d come to fetch the computer. He carefully picked that up himself, not willing to let it out of his sight. He glanced at Lira, then dropped a handful of scrip on the bar.

“For your time.”

*****

Hayden Subcontinent, A Week Later

Alarms screamed, waking Cassius from a deep slumber in a shock. He was out of the bed and halfway across the room before he fully blinked his eyes open and forced himself to stop and grab a pair of pants and his preferred lever action rifle on his way out the door.

It was the air approach alarms, he recognized, and he briefly wondered if he should drop the rifle and fetch something beefier from Sorilla’s vault, but ultimately discounted the thought.

He found a terminal with the alert showing, and quickly got the data up on it.

We don’t have anyone due for a week, especially not this time of night. No transponder either, what the hell?

He noted that the incoming contact was coming on the standard glide path, though, and the speed was coming down fast. He doubted it was anything untoward, so he killed the audible alarm. Bad guys usually didn’t bother following protocols when they approached a target, after all.

Cassius slung the rifle, grabbing a light jacket on his way out the door, and started the walk to the landing pad.

He spotted the aircraft moving against the dark sky, but the running lights… if that was what they were, didn’t look normal to him.

A couple of the security guards from the city work crew were already there when he arrived.

“Hey Mr. Aida, any idea what this is about?” The guard asked.

Aida shook his head, “Not a clue, I was going to ask you lot.”

“We got a call about an unknown contact coming in,” The guard admitted. “No transponder, no communication, and they’re from off world.”

“Really.”

That was strange. The only off world visitors he could think of at the moment would have certainly called ahead, and they’d be running transponders sure as hell.

Cassius was regretting not grabbing something beefier than his rifle after all.

“Well,” He said aloud, nodding as the big aircraft slowed above them. “I’d say we’re about to find out what this is all about.

The security nodded, hands dropping unconsciously to their weapons as the ship, and it was a ship… a small ship, but clearly not an airbreather… settled into position over the pad and lowered itself neatly down beside the military jumpship parked there.

They waited as the craft powered down, odd sounds echoing through the night air every few moments for reasons none of them could tell. After several minutes, a crack opened up under it, air hissing as pressure equalized, and a ramp lowered.

Bathed in light from within, they watched a person limp down the ramp, coming to a stop at the base, looking the small group over.

“Dad?”

Cassius choked, his rifle dropping in the sling as he surged forward.

“Sor?”

“Hey dad,” his daughter smiled at him, looking more tired than he’d ever seen. “Good to see you.”

Cassius grabbed her up, ignoring the rigid armor as he hugged her.

“Don’t you ever do something like that ever again,” He told her, holding back tears by nothing more than force of will. “Never again.”

“I’m done, dad.” She promised, one arm lifting to hug him back. “I’m done.”

*****

OceanofPDF.com

Epilogue

Hayden Subcontinent, Later

It had been a good career, she decided as she looked over the repaired SOLCOM armor where it stood in an alcove built into the wall at the back of the room. On either side were the Alliance weapons she’d managed to scrounge up on her way back, one captured pulse rifle, and a few pieces she’d picked up from the Arkanans.

Fixing the damage her kit had taken had been harder than healing the wounds it hadn’t been able to entirely protect her from, but that was what the gear was for, all things considered she supposed.

SOLCOM had come and gone, weeks of interviews with everyone from the Old Man to Ruger to a parade of officious assholes whose names she wouldn’t remember by choice. She’d given them her intel, all the data she’d scrubbed from the Ross computers, of course, and everything she’d seen.

They tried to take her ship, but Sorilla told them all where they could shove that order. SOLCOM didn’t have any right to it, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to give up her own Jump Ship, even if it was an obsolete Parithalian beast of a ship. Of course, since she’d paid for it with essentially public domain intelligence controlled by SOLCOM, they might actually have a case… but she had no intentions of ever letting them know that and the only person who knew what she’d paid was sure as hell not going to let anyone else know where it came from. Controlling the market on life extension drugs was certainly going to be extremely lucrative for Eri in the short term, after all.

She had allowed them to help repair her baby, though. SOLCOM paid for the parts and experts, she got to watch and learn, and they both got to keep the information they learned about how the thing was put together.

Once they learned it was unarmed, Mattan and Ruger had even managed to get her permitted to fly into SOLSPACE.

Sorilla thought that maybe she might, at that.

Eventually.

For the foreseeable future, though, she was going stay on Hayden, at home.

They hadn’t asked about her armor, which surprised her. She had taken a peek at the reports, and Mattan had obliquely implied that it had been damaged beyond repair during her escape from the Ross.

He wasn’t far wrong, she supposed, but ultimately it had been repairable.

Sorilla stepped out, letting the heavy door seal as she walked up the stairs and into the clearing behind her home. She flipped the heavy storm doors closed over the stairs and decided that she’d put flowers over the door.

Something nice, roses maybe.

Sorilla didn’t plan on ever digging up what she’d stored down there, but years of training wouldn’t let her dispose of any of it either. Out of sight, though, would be out of mind, and that was good enough.

She walked around the back of her home and looked out over the rolling hills to the ocean beyond. The shimmering gossamer thread of the new orbital thread gave a surreal touch to the beauty of the scene.

The Alliance would send their first diplomatic teams soon, or so she had been told

The Old Man had let slip to her that SOLCOM probes had returned with intelligence that indicated the Alliance was experiencing something of a shakeup. Fighting was being reported in several systems, from the sounds of things the Alliance was cleaning up a mess that someone had exposed.

She hoped that meant that the intelligence had gotten out with the group she’d traveled with.

Sorilla wondered if she’d see Kriss or Sienele again?

That would be nice, She thought wistfully. Perhaps she’d prepare special rooms for them in the city.

She picked up her hunting rifle from where it had been resting, slinging it over her shoulder, and started off across the fields to the landing pad. The Socrates was due for a visit shortly, and she had a dinner date with Jerry and Tara in the evening.

As she walked away, a MOFAB unit trundled into action behind her, covering the storm doors with dirt while another rolled in and placed a statue of an old, broken, plow being pushed by a happy looking man over top of them.

We paid a lot for our plowshares, Sorilla thought as she walked. But I suppose we always do.

END

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