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.

*****

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