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.

*****

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