Atlantia Series 1: Survivor (23 page)

‘What
are
we capable of?’ Bra’hiv asked her.

Hevel’s head swivelled to peer at him. ‘Whatever we put our minds to, Bra’hiv. Agreed?’

Hevel turned and looked at the screens.

‘What do we know about the planet down there?’ he asked.

‘Nothing more than before,’ Dhalere replied. ‘No advanced technology, no industry, certainly no craft of any kind but plenty of life.’

Hevel nodded.

‘Any survivors would be unlikely to survive long,’ he murmured. ‘But perhaps we should ensure that the planet remains pristine, uncontaminated by human presence’

Bra’hiv frowned. ‘Why would we need to do that?’

‘Because I said so,’ Hevel growled back.

‘Hard to tell from orbit but I’m not seeing any survivors,’ Dhalere said.

Hevel stroked his chin with one hand.

‘Take a lower orbital altitude and get some readings, just to be sure.’

‘Aye sir,’ the helmsman replied.

Bra’hiv spoke up.

‘Captain, I need to organise some training for the marines. With everything that’s been happening they’re a little short on preparations. I’d like to practice repelling boarders from the launch and landing bays: it’s the most likely point of entry for an enemy. I’ll need to evacuate personnel from the bays for a short time.’

‘Is that normal?’ Hevel asked.

‘Standard procedure,’ Bra’hiv replied. ‘My men will be wearing environmental suits, but groundcrews won’t. They’ll be exposed to space if we don’t pull them out.’

Hevel nodded and waved airily. ‘Whatever you need, general although I…’

The relative calm of the bridge was shattered by a single voice. ‘Contact!’

Keyen almost jumped out of his seat as he called out across the bridge, his eyes fixed upon a tactical display linked to the ship’s passive detectors arrayed along each side of the massive hull.

‘Where away?’ Bra’hiv demanded as he glanced at the senior tactical officer, Mikhain, who had quietly distanced himself from his own station for some reason and was now standing close to Lael.

Keyen struggled to determine the source of the contact.

‘Orientation three–five degrees, sub–level forty–eight degrees starboard,’ he replied. ‘Off the bow.’

‘Get it up on a screen,’ Bra’hiv snapped. ‘Now!’

Keyen relayed his display onto the bridge’s main screen, and the image of the peaceful looking planet far below was replaced with that of a pixelated speck moving against a background of distant stars.

‘Size?’ Hevel demanded.

‘Avenger class sir,’ came Bra’hiv’s response, his experienced eye fixed upon the pixelated image of the vessel, ‘twice our mass and moving fast.’

‘Estimated time of arrival at our location?’ Hevel asked Aranna.

‘Maybe we should take this opportunity to leave.’ Aranna uttered. ‘We don’t have time for…’

‘Now!’ Hevel roared.

‘Less than two days!’ Aranna replied. ‘It’s at the edge of the system, moving our way.’

Bra’hiv sighed as he felt his guts twist uncomfortably inside him. A stellar class vessel, moving at that speed, could only mean one thing. The Word had found them and was closing in for the kill. He turned to Hevel.

‘They’re here,’ Bra’hiv said. ‘We cannot run now if we wanted to.’

Hevel stood and looked at his men.

‘This is it, then. It is now or never. We shall make our stand here and will achieve our finest hour.’

Hevel turned to Bra’hiv. ‘You have the bridge.’

Hevel made his way quickly to the captain’s ready room, located barely twenty seconds’ walk from the bridge. He entered the quarters and ensured that the door was sealed and locked behind him and then hurried through into a small bathroom.

A polished steel mirror adorned one wall in the bleak little room, which was fashioned in a typically military style in dull greys and whites. Hevel moved in front of the mirror, turned on the light, and stared at his reflection.

He leaned closer to the mirror and reached up to his face. With the index finger of one hand he pulled at the skin on his cheek, stretching his lower eyelid down to expose his eyeball and the inside of his eyelid.

His guts churned as he stared at the exposed flesh.

Inside, buried beneath the skin, dull flecks of metal caught the light from the bathroom, and as he watched several of the flecks reacted to the light and turned to face it.

Hevel switched off the light, and in the darkness he could see in the reflection of the mirror that his eyes were glowing with a faint red light.

*

Bra’hiv moved as fast but as unobtrusively as he could.

As soon as Hevel had marched off the bridge he made his way up onto the tactical platform and crossed to where Mikhain was working. A former fighter pilot, Mikhain was one of the captain’s most trusted long–service officers and a man Bra’hiv himself considered a friend.

‘General,’ Mikhain said without looking up from his console, his expression like stone.

‘I know how it looks.’

‘All I’m interested in is what it
is
,’ Mikhain replied, still focused on his displays. ‘Have you sold out?’

‘No,’ Bra’hiv replied, gesturing to one of Mikhain’s screens as though he were discussing a tactical manoeuvre. Dhalere was taking no notice as she hovered near the command platform, awaiting her councillor’s return. ‘The captain is locked down but I’m still able to move freely. As long as Hevel thinks I’m on side with him, I should be okay.’

‘To do what?’

‘Can you launch a shuttle from here without anybody knowing about it?’

Mikhain nodded, gesturing to the same display as Bra’hiv as he replied quietly.

‘I can over ride the security and safety measures from here, but you’d have to evacuate the personnel from the launch bays or they’d be dragged out of the ship when the doors open. Hard to cover the alarms that would sound on the bridge when the bays open.’

‘Training sortie for my men, just like I told Hevel,’ Bra’hiv replied. ‘Repelling boarders in a zero–atmosphere environment. Next hour or so, agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ Mikhain said. ‘But even if you get off the ship, there’s no way I can conceal your return.’

‘I’ll deal with that when the time comes,’ Bra’hiv replied, and then louder. ‘You have the bridge, Mikhain.’

Bra’hiv turned and headed for the elevator banks, careful not to let Dhalere notice any haste in his movement. Once out of sight he dashed to the elevators and took the first one available down to the holding cells. He marched down between them until he found the captain.

Idris Sansin caught Bra’hiv’s expression as he arrived.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

Bra’hiv stood to attention, more to calm his own nerves than anything else.

‘The Word,’ he said. ‘It’s here.’

The captain’s face fell and his shoulders seemed to slump. ‘Already?’ he whispered. ‘How long?’

‘Less than two days,’ Bra’hiv replied, and relayed what he knew about the incoming vessel. ‘We’ll be crushed sir,’ he added. ‘Hevel has no idea about how to command this ship and his bridge crew are useless – only Mikhain, Lael and Aranna have any proper training. They’ll panic as soon as the first shot is fired.’

‘We need to get the hell out of here,’ the captain said. ‘We can storm the War Room and regain control of the Atlantia from there.’

Bra’hiv knew that the War Room was used to control the ship in time of intense crisis or damage, a heavily armoured replica of the bridge deep inside the Atlantia’s hull.

‘If I spring you, sir’ Bra’hiv cautioned, ‘it could cause a riot and perhaps even fatalities. Even my own men are not sure on whose side they should be standing, and Hevel is likely to have placed loyal and armed men near the War Room just in case we try anything. Not something we need to happen right now.’

‘We need to do something,’ Idris snapped. ‘We can’t just sit here.’

‘Which is why C’rairn will be coming with me to the surface,’ Bra’hiv said as he opened the cell door.

C’rairn moved to the cell doors as they opened and stepped out. ‘What would you have me do?’

Bra’hiv shut the cell door again.

‘Hevel won’t notice one man missing,’ he replied. ‘You can come with me to the surface and locate Andaim and anybody else that might have survived down there. We bring them back and surprise Hevel’s people, having hopefully doubled our numbers. I’ll then take my marines to the War Room and seize control. Until then, Hevel’s men won’t suspect me of treachery.’

‘That’s thin,’ Meyanna Sansin said. ‘Hevel might have them shoot you on sight before you can land back aboard.’

‘That’s a chance we’ll have to take, ma’am. Mikhain and Lael are both aware of what I’m attempting and will do their best to cover for us.’

The captain frowned.

‘The convicts?’ he asked. ‘Why would they help us? They think we sent them to their deaths.’

‘When they find out it was Hevel who murdered their cell mates they’ll be more than keen to help us,’ Bra’hiv said, ‘because I’ll extend the amnesty to all of them.’

A ripple of gasps fluttered between the cells.

‘That’s a mistake,’ Meyanna insisted. ‘They cannot be trusted – Hevel is right about that if nothing else.’

‘Sir,’ Bra’hiv said to the captain, ‘right now we’re the last remaining human beings that we know of. You said yourself that if we don’t organise ourselves into a cohesive force and start working together, in a few days we’ll be nothing but a memory to that monstrous thing that’s hunting us down. Those prisoners down there represent a fighting force that we can’t ignore, and with them we can remove Hevel from play and give ourselves at least a chance of survival. Without them…’

Bra’hiv let the question hang in the air for a long beat. The captain sighed and nodded.

‘Very well,’ he replied. ‘Do it, as fast as you can.’

***

Captain Idris Sansin watched Bra’hiv march away with C’rairn as he sat upon a hard bench in the holding cell, surrounded by his bridge crew, all of whom were watching him intently.

‘What?’

They stared at him for a long time, as though having finally had the courage to broach the matter they could not now fathom a suitable question with which to begin.

‘Is that planet down there habitable?’ Meyanna asked finally. ‘Somewhere we could live, like Ethera?’

‘It’s not quite like Ethera,’ the captain replied as he realised what his bridge crew were thinking.

‘But it’s damned close enough, isn’t it?’ Meyanna said.

‘Yes, it’s nearly identical in many ways.’

‘So we could stay here, right?’ Jerren said. ‘We could stop running and make a new home, right here.’

‘Perhaps,’ Idris replied, ‘but then what do we bring with us if we try to settle here?’

‘The Word,’ Meyanna said.

The captain nodded, staring at his boots as he did so.

‘But we are all descended from wanderers,’ Jerren insisted. ‘Would it be so difficult to start again here if we are able to defeat the Word?’

‘Do you remember your history classes, at school?’ he asked the deck, and then looked up at the crew around him. ‘The legends of a time when our people were consumed by ice?’

Jerren frowned at the captain. ‘That was just religion, fantasy,’ he said, ‘from a time when we did not understand our world.’

‘True,’ the captain admitted, ‘but then we also know that we did not evolve on our own planet, Ethera. Our species has no fossil evidence there, which led to the rise of religions and faith in deities, that we must somehow have been special in some way, the product of a god. It was only in recent times that we realised that we came to Ethera from elsewhere.’

‘How?’ asked Jerren.

‘I wish I knew,’ Idris replied. ‘Our history, that of our structures and our agriculture, suggests that we never possessed the ability to travel between stars until now, so therefore the logical conclusion is that we travelled to Ethera from elsewhere.’

Meyanna’s eyes narrowed.

‘And you think a world like this is where we travelled from,’ she said.

Idris inhaled deeply. ‘All I can say is that preliminary scans of the planet beneath us also showed evidence of periodic widescale glaciation, of ice floes that must have been miles deep. That, if nothing else, fits with the stories of legend that haunt the origin of our people.’

‘But if we stay here and the Word arrives then it will attack us again, and infect this planet too.’

Idris sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘We didn’t start this war,’ Meyanna insisted.

‘We did,’ Idris replied. ‘The brutal truth is that we became too damned clever for our own good, developed technologies too complex for us to control, too advanced for us to understand, and before we realised it they were in control of us. I guess we knew that it was possible, but nobody really ever thought that it would happen the way it did.’

‘The Word,’ Jerren said. ‘It was supposed to protect us.’

‘It still thinks that it is protecting us,’ the captain replied. ‘The Word was the ultimate learning device, devoted to collecting knowledge. It became the creator of rules and laws that were more effective than anything we had ever known, the builder of technologies that took us to the stars.’ He sighed. ‘What we didn’t know was that its greatest desire, to learn, required it to infiltrate our very minds.’

The captain saw members of his crew shiver mentally at the thought of what had happened, at what had been a pandemic of such bizarre and fearful proportions that those fortunate enough not to have been infected had been left with no choice but to flee with what they could carry in their hands, scattered to the farthest corners of the colonies.

‘How did it get inside us?’ Jerren asked.

The captain took a deep breath and looked at his wife, Meyanna.

‘The truth is that we just don’t know,’ she replied, ‘but we do know that it has something to do with our blood, which contains iron.’

‘A metal,’ Jerren acknowledged. ‘So they could use it, as fuel?’

Meyanna nodded.

‘The Word is in effect a machine, or rather billions of machines that act as a swarm and develop intelligence via sheer numbers. It’s like a human brain – each neuron alone is nothing, but a few billion combined give us self–awareness, emotions, feelings. The Word may be a machine but its components became so small that by infecting the bloodstream of humans they could use the iron in our blood to replicate themselves and then move onto biological manipulation, taking over control of people from the inside out.’