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The Cyborg Messiah
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Back aboard the Mellagoshyn shuttlecraft, Shiela and Yeneth continued waiting for a message from Saul. They were both extremely tense. The worst part was knowing that it was all out of their hands. They could do nothing but watch and wait.
"This sucks." muttered Yeneth, staring at the timer as it counted off yet another minute of silence. "Two more minutes until... Mmnnnn. But just because he hasn't called doesn't mean anything. His signal's probably being jammed."
Shiela only nodded blankly.
"Maybe he's keeping radio silence on purpose. If there's somebody tracking him through the ship, they'd find him if he transmitted. He'd know that, and he'd find some other way of signaling us. We should watch for anything odd coming from the ship."
She looked at him impatiently.
"Course, maybe he's just too deep in the ship to get through all of that interference. It's going to be pretty tough trying to beam a signal through all of that rock and metal."
"Yeneth. There's nothing we can do. Just watch your screen and try to relax."
He let out his breath and turned back to his consul.
Neither of them wanted to think about any of the negative possibilities. After losing Gannon, the thought of losing Saul was too much for either of them. Shiela might have talked tough about blowing up the Tquezz if Saul failed, but in actuality, she knew the odds of them being able to damage the huge warship without his help were effectively nil. They were trapped by their circumstances, and relegated to the status of bystanders.
Yeneth was right, she thought, it sucked. Whatever that meant.
Her head felt like it was filled with gobs of charred cotton. But it wasn't Saul that had her mood locked into an uncompromising feeling of lethargic despair. It was Gannon Kern.
She berated herself for having come to care about him. She knew better than to let someone get that close to her. It hurt too much now that he was gone. It seemed like a cruel trick, after so long, to have found someone like herself, someone she might be able to love, and then have him snatched away by something as ridiculous as a virus. She kept remembering the look on his face when she'd caught him staring at her in the Blood Pit. It was just business, she told herself, but even then there'd been something about him that attracted her. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she couldn't think about anything else.
If Saul failed, Gannon died, Vargas died, her world would end. Her entire life teetered on what that Omegan did, and she suspected that his desire to capture the ship stemmed more from the motives of his wierd religion than anything else.
She hoped he wasn't insane. Gannon hadn't been sure.
Yeneth's brow suddenly furled in concentration, and he leaned forward, staring at the readout in front of him.
"Look at this!" the boy exclaimed. And, with an obsessive flurry of activity, he was punching the keys of his control panel.
In the cockpits main holographic display, the graph of a three dimensional waveform quickly swam into view, and Yeneth magnified the time parameters, blowing it up.
He caught his breath. Like a thin swirling corkscrew of light, the waveform hung there, rotating in the air. Though he had never seen it before, to the teenagers genius mind, the formula behind this waveform was both apparent, and obvious.
"What is it?" asked Shiela.
"The mass detector just scanned some serious gravity fluctuations comeing from the Tquezz." He ran the recording backward and forward, showing her the anomalous area. "For a thousandth of a second she gained about five Gees, then dropped back to a half Gee, and then up to full again. Radically unnatural."
"Artificial Gravity."
Yeneth nodded. "You're greenline on that! And E.P.M.'s the only corporation in the Coalition with that kinda tech." He stared obsessively at the wave form. "It's incredible. I'd give anything to know how it works. Just knowing the theory behind it would teach me so much... Just knowing it's possible hints at quite a lot."
She sighed impatiently. "So why is it fluctuating?"
He shrugged, his eyes not moving from the hologram. "I would guess it's Saul's doing. Maybe he's already made it to where his wanted to go and he's taken over the ship. Or maybe the Overwatch is losing control because of what Eko Vito did to it. I don't know. Saul's not answering the comm link." He sighed, and started muttering calculations and formulas to himself, still obsessed with the sight of the gravity wave.
Shiela looked at the boy and shook her head. When this kid develops, she thought to herself, he's going to make women so intimidated with his chronic analysis of everything that he'll probably be lonely until he's thirty. He needs to learn how to calm down and control himself. Maybe some of the Akyva mental disciplines the Militia taught covert operatives like herself. They'd certainly helped her keep a clear head.
She made up her mind that she'd help Yeneth out if they survived this. He obvioulsy needed someone to guide him, and she'd played the big sister routine before. She was good with people, knew how to deal with them, and that's what Yeneth needed. It had to be tough growing up without parents, even if the company supplied you with your education and your room and board. They never taught classes in how to be human.
A voice cut in across the comm relay. It was Brand.
"I can't get this last warhead. Damned thing's jerking around in the stratosphere too much to get close enough to use the molecular cutter. Shuttle's just not made for this type of work."
A blurt of static crackled through the transmission.
Shiela glanced to the orbital scan next to her nav-comp and saw that Brand was already in the midst of re-entry, chaseing after the third nano-tech device. He'd destroyed the first two without much trouble, and it had looked as if he might manage to take this one out as well, but now it appeared that their luck had finally run dry.
Yeneth turned to her. "His comm laser's catching infrared bleed-off from the heat, and the vibrations from his ship are interfering with the transmission."
"What are you going to do?" Shiela asked Brand. "You can't let it impact. It's on a direct course for Caravan."
"I don't know. I'd detonate the quark in my hold if I thought it would do zzzzt but it's blast radius wouldn't be able to catch up zzzzzt."
"Can you fire a mining probe at it?"
"I doubt thzzztld do anything to itzz."
"He's right." said Yeneth. "It's just a chunk of metal right now. It won't have any moving parts until it detonates, and then it's too late. Fireing a probe wouldn't do anything to it now that its field is active. If he can't get close enough to vaporize it with the cutter like he did with the others..." the boy shrugged. "He should have let the one for Wendalwright hit and saved Caravan instead."
"Why?"
The teenager looked away, his eyes filled with vicious hatred. "Vito's in Wendalwright."
Brands voice crackled in again. "I'm zzzzting down after it. If I don't get zzzzt then I'm dead too."
Yeneth looked at the orbital display on his own panel. "If he follows it down at the approach vector he's on he'll die whether he picks off the warhead or not. The friction will burn his shuttle to a cinder at that angle. His thermal dampers will overload."
"I'm sure he knows that Yeneth."
Shiela rubbed her temples and thought about the initial reaction she'd had upon seeing Brand in the Admirals office for the first time. She had thought him a fanatic with his wild eyes and perpetual scowl. Now he was sacrificing himself to save lives instead of take them. Now he was dying to live instead of living to die, and the incredible thing was: they were both the same to him! Her instincts about him had been wrong. It wasn't blood lust that motivated Brand, it was conviction. He believed in the future the Dreamers had shown him, and he wanted to make a difference, no matter what the cost. He was the same as Saul, he'd just found a different route.
She was surrounded by fanatics. Maybe, she thought wistfully, there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe strong convictions were good, depending on what you believed in.
"Good luck Brand," she whispered hoarsly into the reciever. "And God be with you. Your sacrifice will be remembered by all the people of Vargas, I promise you that."
The response was too broken up to be intelligible.
Behind her, Yeneth rolled his eyes irreverantly at her heart felt speech, but inside he was deeply moved by what the rebel assassin was doing. He wondered if he would be capable of giving up his life like Brand, and discovered that he emphatically hoped he wouldn't have to find out. He simply didn't have the guts. He recognized this limitation, and he felt shamed by it. But he couldn't change the way he felt, could he?
He remembered what Kamarand had once told him. "You must learn to control your emotions. Don't let them control you. Think with your mind and not your instincts. Animals think with their instincts, and only humans have the ability to go beyond that, but it requires discipline. Feel what you want to feel. Being G-plus gives you a better handle on this than the Norms. Take advantage of it, and you can take charge of your destiny. Fail, and your destiny will control you."
Yeneth wondered what Saul would have said. He would like to have asked, but from the radio, there was still nothing but static.
They could only hold position, and wait.
And hope, thought Yeneth. That was an emotion, but it was one he wanted to feel.
*
*
*
Saul bolted with calculated precision through the fluctuating gravity of the Tquezz, coming quickly up on Cynthia as she was desintigrating yet another secured hatch. She was in a portion of the ship where the floor was formed of a thick metal grating, and through this grating, several levels below, he could see the ships glowing reactor core. It was undoubably where she was wanting to go, but she was too shook up to think about simply buring through the floor. Instead, she was taking a roundabout way, cutting through the doors with her quark emitter to get to a lift. He decided to give her a hand.
Cynthia seemed highly aggitated, almost in a panic. Likely she'd detected his approach on her own scanners.
She spun around as he entered the passageway, and this time she fired a blast of energy at him from a tube that clicked into place just below her palm. A tiny beam of incandescent light shot forth and burned a red sizzeling patch of superheated rock in the wall next to him as he dodged easily to the side, an instant before the the lasers release.
She adjusted her aim, preparing to fire again, but Saul had something else in mind. Crouching low, and tumbling quickly forward, Saul came up next to her before she could get off the shot. Reaching under her guard, he took her arm and swung her entire body as if she were some kind of huge unstrung marionette. She crashed heavily against the bulkhead, sending a cascade of sparks streaking through the air, but rather than let go, Saul kept his grip on her arm and swung her down at the floor, then back at the wall, breaking off rock fragments. Changing his stance, and getting a better grip, he brought her body crashing against the floor again, bending the metal grateing they stood upon. If not for the assualt armor Cynthia would have been beaten to a bloody rag, but E.P.M. built well. When Saul finally finished using her as a sledge hammer, and hurled her completely through the floor to the level beneath them, she was still relatively unharmed.
Physically.
Mentally she was more frightend than she'd ever been in her life.
Saul leaned over the hole, and shouted down at her. "You must be made aware that this situation is partly your doing Cynthia Rasbeerasyn. Gannon Kern has explained this to me. If you hadn't accepted the word of Eko Vito that the northern sectors of Vargas were clear, then Gannon would never have sent me there to covertly examine the area. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. If he hadn't sent me in there, I would never have learned I was a slave, or that my masters are all deviant hypocrites.
You may think you own us because you made us, but we're not slaves. Your domination of my people is at an end."
He dropped down through the hole and landed next to her.
"Like it or not, you are destined to assist me. I understand that you want to protect your company Cynthia. I can even respect your loyalty, despite how misguided it is. But I'm going to free my people and you're going to help me. There is no other option."
"And your people well try to free mine, right? Forget it!"
She tried to run, but only managed to stumble forward before he grabbed her arm. and proceeded to batter her against the floor again until he had broken through the next layer of grating. Then he threw her down and followed close behind. This time she didn't even have a chance to whimper before he picked her up and began bashing her into the floor, again and again and again...
The core grew closer, as Saul continued pounding her down through the passageways above it. Below them, flashing energy and superheated gaseous ions swam through powerful magnetic fields in a carefully maintained pattern that formed what could only be called an engine, comprised entirely of high energy particles. This could be seen through the transparasteel floor of an observation chamber where portions of the core were exposed to view for engineering and analysis. It was heavily shielded, of course, but the grating Saul finally smashed Cynthia through dropped them a full twelve meters down onto it.
He stood there before her, in his ragged transit armor, on a floor of solid transparasteel with nothing visible between them, and one of the reactor cores, but a shimmering sheet of reflected light. The visible emissions were dampend down to prevent blinding observors, and all portions of the spectrum harmful to organic life had been filtered out, but nevertheless, the view was quite spectacular.
"Is this where you wanted to go?" he asked her.
She whimpered, and started crawling away from him across the smooth surface of the observation chamber. Multicolored reflections swirled over the rippleing silver skin of her armor, the only thing that stood between herself, and this horrid creature she feared so much.
The armor's skin was composed of millions of molecule sized robotic systems that automatically conformed to her muscle's movements, and enhanced them. Even so, the additional strength, coordination and protection still hadn't give her much advantage, beyond keeping her from being beaten to a pulp. In another's hands the armor might have been a devistating weapon against an Omegan, but Cynthia had lost her nerve, and was operating on pure instinct.
"I will not harm you unless you force me to. Now WAKE UP." Saul demanded.
Cynthia managed to gain her feet, and stumbled toward one of the walls where a computer console was located. Saul leaned in close to her.
"I want you to tell me exactly where the A.D.A.C. is located, and then I want you to force the Overwatch to open the doors leading to it."
"But... I don't even know where we're at, and besides... the Overwatch won't listen to me."
"I can hear the lies in your voice Cynthia, in the tremor of your speech. I know you have command codes which will allow you to issue orders even when you're locked out of the system. If you didn't, you wouldn't have been trying to get down here to this terminal. So, in addition to being in direct control of the reactor, this must also be the closest terminal that will accept those codes."
Cynthia just stood there staring at him. What had Vito's cronies done to this slave? It was more than just knowledge, this Omegan had... life. It was in his face and the way he talked. He was charismatic in the same way she would expect a great leader to be charismatic. People would listen to him, and that made him far more dangerous than any mere weapon, especially since he had a message they were willing to hear. Did he realize it how dangerous he was?
"Yes Cynthia," he sighed impatiently, knowing full well what was going through her mind. "I am aware of your concerns, they are understandable, but your perception of danger is shortsighted at best and I do not wish to enlighten you at this time. Please display the maps."
Surprised, and confused at his apparent awareness of her thoughts, Cynthia inserted her suit's manual input jack into the terminal, linked with the control system, and in a few seconds, schematics and floorplans began flickering through the air around them. Saul recorded them all, and sorted instantly through the recordings to find what he needed.
"Thank you. Now open the following doors." Quickly he rattled off a list of numbers and letters denoting the doors he wished open.
She did as he told her, and then he gestured for her to get up. "Now come with me please. I can't leave you here."
Of course he couldn't be certain she hadn't entered other codes as well, but that pathway was now anticipated. The Tquezz would have to be saved, but first it would have to be destroyed.
"No, wait!" whimpered Cynthia as he pulled her to her feet. "Fine, let the Vargans have the ship. Just let me go." she pleaded, almost whined. "I don't care about any of this. It isn't really my fight, it isn't my problem. I'm just a mercenary. If you let me take the one of the life boats you'll never hear from me again, I guarantee it."
Saul was mildly disgusted with this act of hers, but it did reveal to him the fact that she had managed to activate the self destruct codes when she had pulled the maps for him from the computer. She wouldn't be so desperate if she hadn't. It didn't matter.
"You dissapoint me Cynthia. I had hoped that at least your company loyalty would have extended a bit further than this. It's the only loyalty you have. I wonder if you will ever learn to care about anyone other than yourself. You seem to be a part of me with no conscience."
Putting her hands on either side of her helmet, she groaned and complained of a headache as they headed through the hatch.
"I don't feel good."
"I don't suppose you do. If you hadn't tried to attack me I wouldn't have used you to batter through the floor gratings."
They passed down several halls and up a lift. So far so good. The Overwatch had done nothing to stop them up until this point. Even so, Saul regarded this final door with a great deal of trepidation. His scans indicated energy and matter manipulation equipment imbedded in the walls within. Without the power to raise his force field, he would be helpless against them, and he had only enough battery strength left for one plasma shot. The situation was not conducive to a profitable outcome.
Perhaps that was just as well.
"I should have listened to my councilors and stayed away from the Fleet." Cynthia continued to complain. "I could have had any job I wanted you know, any job in the company."
She sighed.
"But it's really my uncles fault I'm here. Just because I decided on a career in Fleet administration, he thought that I should be the one in our family to prepare for public office. This assignment is supposed to be good for me." She snorted sarcastically. "I woudn't call this good."
"You were needed here," answered Saul.
"Huh? what are you talking about?"
"Your inexperience in military tactics and natural animosity toward Eko Vito were required at this time and in this place. The Tquezz's previous Attache would have prevented my creation, and therefore the proper pathway to the desired future would have been prevented."
"I doubt my uncle was too interested in your creation."
"I wasn't speaking of your uncle. I was speaking of the Khoa."
Beneath her faceplate, Cynthia's expression was colored with disbelief. "You're saying I was manipulated into this job by God?"
She halted before a white door with E.P.M.s library symbol on it.
Saul paused at the door to explain. "From the initial state of the universe, prior to the big bang, there was a complex interaction within a matrix of the energy we now call matter. At the moment of that energy's explosion, everything that forms this reality and all that happens within it, was determined. The only random factors in this reality, this illusion, are those generated by the life forms within it. They are left to grow and develop on their own, except when there is a paradox. When there is a paradox, the being that exists at the end of this illusion, that is: the unity that will be formed when the universe inevitably recombines, has to step in and make slight alterations. I am an agent of one of those alterations. My creation was destined to occur. I exist only to insure that the correct path to the future is taken."
"This sounds a lot like an expansion on the basic theology we designed to control your people in the first place. Are you sure you're not just deluding yourself? There's no way to prove any of it. Maybe you're wrong. Have you considered it?"
He smiled. "No, I'm not wrong. I have total faith, and that faith allows me to sense the correct pathways. I know when I'm where I'm not supposed to be, and I know when I'm performing the correct actions."
"How?"
"I can feel it."
"So your actions are set ahead of time? You're pre-programmed?"
"No. There is a certain amount of leway. There are an infinite number of paths that can be taken, some leading to the correct future, and some leading to the wrong one. All will occur, but in this particular illusion it is my task to insure that the percentage of probabilities leading to unity is the highest."
"So percentages and probable outcomes are what this is all about."
He nodded. "Correct. You're intelligence is admirable Cynthia. I have encountered many humans who would understand very little of what I have explained to you. It's a pity you care for no one but yourself. If your motives had been pure, you could have been a great force for good in your universe."
"Thanks, but just because I understand it doesn't mean I agree with it." She pointed to the door. "This is a side entrance to one of the ship's libraries. The A.D.A.C. takes up a huge room in the back.
But I don't know why you're so determined to get to the Omega system's central memory stores. There's nothing you can do to the A.D.A.C. here that you couldn't do from a terminal, except perhaps burn your brain out with a direct interface. Is that what you want? To try and absorb all your peoples memories at once? Do you think that will increase your percentage of alignment with the Khoa?" She laughed nervously and shook her head. "You don't have the capacity. It would destroy you. Your personality will be lost in the data stream. Don't let me stop you though," she added with a wave to the door. "Feel free to fry your brain anytime you want."
"I have data to add, not subtract." He approached the door and it slid upward into the cieling.
Inside was a library, just as she had said. It was about fifty meters from side to side, with an eight meter cieling, all formed from the black rock of the astroid that the Tquezz had once been. Directly in front of the entrance there were many chairs and tables, and about twenty five meters further in there was a large counter. Behind the counter were shelves holding rows and rows of crystal rods, each of them containing gigabytes of stored information.
As he was about to step in, Cynthia suddenly turned to the right, and screamed.
From down the corridor they were standing in came something extremely strange. What appeared to be three parallel beams of warped light reached out and struck Cynthia in the chest. What made the beams odd was that they did not glow or show up as heat on infrared as a laser would. They seemed to bend the very air itself, refracting the light in the same way a plexiglass rod would if it were immersed in water.
Where they touched Cynthia's armor the substance swirled and rippled like a liquid, moving out of the way and punching three holes straight through her body. Her flesh swirled and rippled as well, bending bone and muscle out of the way, sending her liquified ribs, backbone, heart and lungs spiraling into the rest of her chest. Mixing them together like meat in a high speed blender.
Behind her, and down the corridor the way they had come, the beams continued on their destructive path. Where they touched the smooth black wall at the end of the corridor, the stone rippled in a spiral. The effect looked like a whirlpool swirling through the fabric or the rock itself. Three small dark holes appeared on the wall in a parallel line. The matter around the holes seemed to be draining into them.
The effect lasted only half a second, but when the beams ceased, the results were obviously permanent. Cynthia collapsed to the deck without a sound, and no longer registered as a life form on Sauls scanner.
But, at the same time as the odd beams of energy were doing their damage, Saul was leaning backward and rolling through the door to the library. It automatically slid shut, and the Omegan wasted no time in ripping out the access control panel, and fusing the embedded circuitry with a quick electrical burst from his claws. That should buy him a few minutes at least. Then he ran forward, and flipped through the air over several plastic tables. He ended up behind the large counter where the metal racks filled with the crystaline data rods were. Simultaneously, as he was ripping a metal bar out of the side of a rack, he was going over the visual recording of what had just happened.
In his minds eye, the recording showed him what he had been unable to get a good look at before. Just now, when he had rolled through the library door, he had snapped a quick glance to his left and, for a microsecond, he'd caught a glimpse down the corridor. He enhanced that image and saw what it had been that had killed Cynthia.
Two Omegans had been in the corridor, but something was wrong with them. He saw that their flesh was cracked and mottled. The variable pigment in their skin was functioning strangely. There were patches of white, black, and grey fading in and out all over their bodies. They were completely naked, without any armor, and they obviously contained the aural cloaking devices used by infiltration class Omegans. They did not show up on any of his scans.
It was easy to postulate that they had been removed from their freezers too quickly. They had hibernation sickness.
None of this explained the weapons they were using, though. Gannon had told him about the Kilo class Omegans, and Saul could only assume that these were two of those, but Gannon hadn't said anything about this type of armament. They were supposed to have a variable force field, and some type of ventavish storage system for their forearm hardpoints, but what those ventavish systems contained was something Gannon hadn't known. It was obviously new. Whatever it was seemed to warp the fabric of reality itself. He could not afford to let one of those beams touch him.
What Saul really needed was energy to defend himself. After the pounding he'd taken from the fight at the starport, the electron matrix implanted in the hardpoint under his stomach was nearly empty of power, and would require several more hours to recharge. Unfortunatly, there were no recharging links to hook his claws into in this portion of the ship. He would have to make do with what he could find in this room.
As ususal, his main advantages were from the skills that Ernst Kamarand had accumulated over his long and rather diverse life. The past life memories imparted no skills, only the memory what had happened, but it mattered little. He had all of Kamarands memories from this life, and the Doctor had spent his entire life studying a huge mixture of everything, with total recall of it all.
Outside the door he could hear footsteps.
There was no time to get to the A.D.A.C. main. They would cut him down as soon as he linked up, and the data he had would never reach the memory core. He would have to take these two out first, and he had no doubt that the trick he'd pulled on his brothers at facility 6 would not work here.
Saul didn't know what had happened to those Omegans. He wasn't aware that the two who had been guarding Gannon had reawoke just as he had, changed from what they had been. They had shared that information with the rest of the Omegans on the ground. Then they had all defected from E.P.M. after assimilating the data he had given them along with his memory of the Khoa. Saul figured that they were still on Vargas somewhere, and had transferred their information to the A.D.A.C. via the dropship relays, thereby alerting the Overwatch.
In actuality the Overwatch had instructed the Kilo class Omegans to maintain seperation from the Omega link, because its analysis of the situation indicated a possibility that Saul could alter their programming somehow. Of course, that also meant that the Overwatch wouldn't be able to communicate with them over the link either. It would have to give instructions verbally, and it wasn't thinking too clearly anymore. Not only had Eko Vito's subliminal virus continued to eat into its brains, but Cynthia had entered the codes for the reactor overload, and now the Overwatch's self preservation sub-routines were overiding all other priorities.
Saul's suspicions about the Overwatch's actions were correct, even though the data he had used to determine those actions was not.
On the top of the counter Saul stood behind, there was a large holographic data projector. He knew that such a device required a great deal of electricity, something he needed. He kicked the plug out of the wall with his foot.
Then, with the metal rod from the shelf in his right hand, he grabbed several of the data crystals in his right, and ducked beneath the library counter he was standing behind. Tossing the crystals to the side for a moment, he extended his claws and split the rod lengthwise into two long pieces. Then he dug all the claws of his hands into the rods, and inserted both of them into the power jack beneath the counter, completing the circuit with his own body and routing the energy to his battery. While he recharged as best he could, his sensitive ears detected the voice of the Overwatch speaking to the Kilo class Omegans over the sonic emitters in the passageway ouside.
"Do do do not use hyperwave weapons in me again." it commanded with a stutter. "Their range is too exten exten exten... too unlimited and threatens to harm reac, reac, reac... delicate equipment. Use your holy fire instead. It will limit the dam, dam, dam, destruction to this area alone."
The reply was composed of bunch of grunting and grumbling, as if the Omegans were unable to speak intelligbly. Perhaps they were decaying too fast.
Excellent, thought Saul. His enemies were falling apart before him. Their motives were corrupt, and their methods impaired by that corruption. He was still on the pathway, and he felt closer to the Khoa than ever before. He was almost to the point of inevitability where even failure would lead to success. Soon...
Then he heard a rending ripping sound. The door was being torn open by claws formed from a focused positronic force field. Also, the power in the jack he was using was suddenly cut off. The Overwatch must have become aware of his siphoning from it. He thanked the Khoa to have gotten this much. Releasing the blackend metal rods, he stood up.
With only seconds before the door was breached, Saul decided on the only plan of action that matched with what he sensed would lead him to the correct future.
Confidently, he split the skin on his left forearm, extending the plasma cannon from that hardpoint. Then he fed power to the device, but he didn't trigger it. Instead, he opted to engage the emergency sequence that E.P.M. had programmed into them for Omegans to initiate suicide in the event they were captured. Inside the device, energy began cycling in a closed loop, building on itself. Ripping the micronized cannon from his arm, Saul threw it at the door, just as the Omegans on the other side kicked in the ragged hole they had finished carving in it.
The one in front tried to catch the flying device, but his movements were far too slow. Already, patches of gangerous rot had eaten deep into his muscles. He could feel none of the pain since the nerves for those sensations were undoubtedly shut down, but the decay was wreaking havok with his motor control. The whining plasma cannon bounced off of the field on his chest, and dropped to the deck at his feet.
The Omegan had enough time to look down at it in obvious confusion before it detonated.
Naturally, Saul had ducked back below the library counter the second he'd thrown the cannon. And, by standard practice, E.P.M. had used the rock of the astroid itself to form much of the furnishings within the Tquezz. The counter was only a few centimeters thick, but it was made from polished rock coated with a heavy metalic polymere. It protected him from direct exposure to the plasma released by the explosion, and saved him from loosing what little energy he had left in his field capacitors. His internal displays indicated that he even retained enough for a couple of shots from his remaining cannon.
The two Kilo class Omegans, however, had nothing between them and the explosion. They were caught at ground zero, surrounded by a bathing nimbus of superheated ferrous gas. The "holy fire" also ignited everything else that was flamable in the room. Plastic chairs and tables filled the air with thick black smoke as they rapidly melted into flaming piles of unrecognizable goop. Flatscreens, holographic displays, and printers crackled and popped in the blazing inferno. Hardcopies of maps, and a variety of other paper data, burned so quickly in the heat that they appeared to explode into ashes.
It was impossible to see anything through all the smoke, and the infrared spectrum was so blinding that Saul was forced shut off the portion of his retina that were recieving it. He was also on internal oxygen now, feeding from the specially designed organs that chemically stored it. There was no point in trying to breathe the air in this room, it would only burn his lungs.
He picked up the cluster of data crystals he'd set next to him, and threw them in the direction of the door. The echoes they created as they clattered and bounced gave him a good idea of where the two Omegans were located. It was easy to tell the difference between the sound of crystal hitting rock, and crystal hitting a force field. The two Kilo's were still there, and from the sound of it, they were still standing.
He hadn't expected the blast to take them down. If his field had been fully charged, a blast of this nature wouldn't have damaged him either, but it would have reduced his capacitor strength, and that's what he was counting on. These two were physically crippled already. If he could knock out their fields, he'd be able to rip them apart with his bare hands.
The fire suppression system finally cut in, delayed perhaps by the Overwatch's rapidly flagging control over the ship. Green foam rocketed from nozzles in the cieling, coating everything. The ventilators kicked into overdrive as well, sucking the smoke out of the room, and filling the atmosphere with a non-flamable gas.
Through the sound of the foam and the fans, Saul heard the Omegans approaching the counter. Their footsteps were staggered, and lacking in the dexterity inherent in a healthy member of his race. He waited patiently until they were standing almost on top of him before leaping backwards over the counter and spinning through the air between them.
As he'd expected, they lunged at him and ended up attacking each other instead. They moved like zombies, as if they were half dead already, and Saul wondered how much of their organic minds were still in control.
It was possible that they were operating solely off of their cybercomps. Even cybercomps required organic connections though, and if the neurons in their brains that were connected to their computers were decaying at the same rate as their bodies were, they might not remain functional much longer. If he could just manage to avoid them that long, the hibernation sickness might do his work for him. But, despite this, he would still have to be very careful. With their defenses and weaponry, these two were a couple of walking juggernauts.
There was a flashing discharge of energy as the humming claws formed from their variable fields connected with each other. They had hit each other in the neck when he'd flipped through the air between them, but the variable field didn't just form claws, it covered their entire bodies. The only effect that their sloppy attack really had was to drain their capacitors some more.
They turned to him, gurgling insanely, and began lurching in his direction. One of them slipped on the incinerated foam covered carpet, and dropped to one knee, sputtering in anger. The other was more successful, and got in close enough to take a swipe at Saul, which he ducked under easily.
Unlike his own positronic field, the variable fields these two were using could be seen in the visible spectrum. It covered them in a yellowish sparkleing glow that flowed like an aura over their bodies, and extended about a centimeter from their flesh. The technology itself was similar to the slipfield that the Mellagoshyn shuttles used to form their wings and canards. What made it so amazing was the fact that E.P.M. had managed to make them small enough to implant in the Omegan hardpoints. It was also quite incredible that they had made them efficient enough to run effectively from the electron matrix the Omegans used as batteries.
Saul knew that it must be drawing on a lot of power though, certainly more power than his own field used.
He dodged several more attacks from the one in front, while the other slowly gained its feet. The transparent yellow claws sizzled around him as he avoided them. He noticed that the field was matching the movement of each of the Omegans fingers in the generation of the half meter long claws. This made them even more dangerous. The slipfield's sensitivity was undoubtedly connected to their cybercomps, and matched to make them feel as if the claws were actually part of their body. They could be used instinctively in the same way that he had matched his body's kinesthetic sub-routines to the Rectifier during his assualt on the starport.
The Kilo Omegan lunged forward again, and this time Saul decided to test the field. He leaned back as the claws burned through the air just out of the reach of his torso. Then, while the warrior was recovering from this uncoordinated move, Saul lept up and kicked him in the head, using the resulting inertia to push himself backward and land out of range again. The blow seemed to have little effect on the Kilo other than knocking him back a little. Apparently the field strength wasn't low enough yet.
It stumbled, but kept its feet and turned to him. The mottled rotting flesh of the Omegans face twisted in a rictus of rage, and it roared in an undecipherable spasm of primal anger.
"K, k, k, Kilo-4." warbled the Overwatch from the few still undestroyed sonics near the back of the room. "Initiate c, c, cover fire. H, h, h, holy fire. Purge the deviant. Now!"
The second Omegan, the one that had stumbled, held its right arm aloft and split the skin of its hardpoint. Rather than a weapon emerging though, there was only an oddly configured post, but as Saul watched, a ventavishly stored plasma cannon phased into position on it.
Another of the Kilo class refinements. They were able to call on more than just one weapon by bringing them out of storage from a dimensional pocket created by the ventavish system.
While Kilo-4 brought the cannon to bear on him, Saul lunged and tumbled along the ground, putting the first Omegan between himself and the blinding spheres of plasma that were being fired. Kilo-4 followed Saul's motion and tracked him, but his reflexes were far too hampered by the ongoing muscular decay to keep up with Saul. The volley of argent energy balls impacted with the floor. Despite the fire retardent foam, they temporarily igniting the remains of the padding beneath the scorched carpet. He burned a trail with this sustained burst, all the way up to where Saul had rolled behind the first Omegan, at which point the energy nailed his partner.
Six of the thirty rapidly deployed plasma balls slamed into the angry Omegan just as he was turning around to attack Saul with his claws.
Kilo-4 ceased firing as soon as he realized what was happening, but it was obviously much too late. Normally the Omegan reflexes would never allow such an blatant error to occur, but in his current condition it was doubtful that Kilo-4 was even multitasking on a level that could outwit a 23rd century chess program.
Kilo-4s partner was the one who suffered for that lack. The first discharge was deflected by his variable force field, but the other five riddled him. He might have survived one or two of the impacts had his regeneration system been operational. As it was, the damage was severly overkill. The second round was partially deflected, and only singed his right arm. The third round blew it off at the shoulder. The fourth round blew away a large chunk of his right torso, exposing blackend sizzeling ribs. The fifth round hit dead center in his spine, burning straight through his body and incinerating everything inbetween. The sixth round took of his left arm at the shoulder, just as it had done to the right. All of this damage hadn't quite blown him in half, nor had it killed him instantly, as his brain was still temporarily functioning, but he was effectively eliminated. He stumbled to the right, his torso twisting abnormally on what remained of the left side of his chest, and then he dropped to the floor in a gurgling heap of smoking tissue. The sizzeling and popping of his burning flesh was still audible as he lay were twitching. His brain began cycling down. Regardless of the Omega systems many refinements, he woudln't live long.
Saul turned to Kilo-4 with a disgusted look.
"Nice shooting."
The enraged cyberslave gurgled loudly, his eyes wide, and flashing with anger. He brought his weapon to bear again, and fired another stream, but Saul wasn't there anymore. He'd already leapt into the air and somersaulted over Kilo-4s head, landing behind him.
The mistargeted plasma burned into the rock behind where Saul had been standing.
Having landed while the rapidly rotting zombie Omegan was still in the process of firing, Saul kicked him hard in the back and sent him flying forward. Spheres of argent energy pulsed up the wall and across the cieling from his opponent's weapon, completely off target now that his arm was flailing wildly.
Kilo-4 actually managed to land on his feet, and had the presence of mind to cease firing while he tried to get his balance. But the sustained burst had caused the fire supression foam to kick in again, and he immediatly lost traction with the slippery stuff pouring down all around him. Hitting something beneath the foam, he fell forward and ended up with his face buried in the still sizzeling guts of his dismembered partner.
It was then that Saul heard the high pitched whining sound building up from the location of the first Omegans blasted body. What it signified was apparent, but what he could do about it was not.
In a microsecond, he ran through his options. Time slowed as his mind multitasked, and his personalities fragmented into dozens of copies, each considering a different probable outcome. One of them would be right, and the Khoa would show him which.
To late, a fragment of him now realized. It should have been obvious that E.P.M. would have been even more paranoid about the weapons that these two carried than they were about the standard equipped Omegans like himself. Of course they were configured for self destruct! Every system inside them was a prototype. Every system would have its own pre-set auto-destruct method, ensuring that this technology never fell into the wrong hands. E.P.M. always did that, just as they done it with himself, and to a lesser extent, with Gannons armor.
Another personality remembered that the trigger for Omegans was the cessation of neural activity. The first Kilo class Omegan's cybercomp had already triggered the destruct sequence, and therefore his brain was dead. Now his corpse would detonate.
Futures were colliding, and Saul had to find the correct one.
Thought speed increased again, and detail was abolished. He needed options, not explainations.
Jump behind the counter?
No, they were right next to it.
Run for the door?
No time.
Leap for the rear of the library?
He'd be caught in the blast.
Rely on his field capacitors to protect him, and ride it out?
Not enough energy in electron matrix to boost capacitors.
Attempt to alter the illusion of reality?
No, merger with Khoa before download to A.D.A.C would
generate an unresolvable paradox.
Attempt direct phase modulation of explosive force?
No, not enough computational power.
Attempt phase modulation of Kilo-4s field?
Yes!
Back in realtime, Sauls body moved. He jumped from where he stood and landed precisely onto the back of Kilo-4. Laying himself prone over the top of his opponent, he began adjusting his force fields frequency.
What he was attempting was truly unique for one of his race, and it would not have even been possible had it not been for the fact that Yeneth had removed several of the static control regulators from his cybercomp when he had been at facility 6. One of those control regulators had guided the pulse frequency of his positronic field, locking it in on a specific frequency, the one that was the most effective, and keeping it there.
Yeneth had removed the regulator because it had also been part of the self destruct triggers for the field generators, and he'd been ordered by Kamarand to remove all the auto destruct devices that he could find during the initial operation. A side effect of its removal was that Saul could now alter the frequency that his field generated. Normally this was utterly useless, and he hadn't bothered, but now he could try and use it to merge his own field with that of Kilo-4s by modulating the frequency to match, and then phasing them together. To be truthfull, Saul never would have thought of this if it hadn't been for Gannon's plan to use this technique to gain access to the Tquezz. They hadn't had to try it because the Tquezz's shields had been down.
This was a different set of circumstances, but the same rules applied. It should work.
The only problem was, it normally took anywhere from several minutes, to several hours, for fields to bleed together, and Saul had only milliseconds. It had to be possible, though. It was the only pathway he had sensed that would lead to a future in which he reached the A.D.A.C.
Desperatly, Saul sped his thoughts up again, going as fast as he could, and breaking barriers that he had once thought were insurmountable. Time slowed nearly to imperception as he struggled to match the fields perfectly. But another complication cropped up. Kilo-4s field was variable, and uneven. In some locations the field was denser than others, and in some areas it was modulated at a different frequency. The variable field was not like his own. It was not fluid throughout. He could not possibly match the two together. The task was like being blindfolded while trying to put together the pieces of a thousand three dimensional puzzles, and every time he got one to fit, the others all changed.
But there had to be a way. The voice of the Khoa was singing within him, telling him that this was the pathway.
He laughed at himself then, realizing that the sensitivity to the pathway was the answer. All he had to do was to make the changes he felt led to the correct outcome. It was exactly what he had been doing since Kamarand had changed him. This was simply taking it to another level.
He fragmented himself into a thousand different personalities, each of them working on a single piece of the problem. Each of them taking only the actions that they sensed would lead to the correct future. Ironically, he suddenly realized that in fragmenting so thoroughly, he was closer to understanding the Khoa than he'd ever been before.
With time slowed nearly to a halt, he created a universe out of the personalities within himself, an illusionary model of the reality that was an illusion. Each of them taking on a life of its own, becoming individual, yet still part of what he was. They existed only to solve the pieces of a puzzle that could only be solved by a united effort, and yet they could not reintigrate until the answer was known, and the goal was accomplished. In this universe, Saul was the Khoa, and everything that existed in it was Saul. He understood it now, on more than just an intellectual level, because he had lived it.
When it was over, and the fields merged, so did he. All the personalities, with everything they had done, each different, yet each the same, returned willingly to him with all the pieces of the riddle, now joined.
And he was one again.
The blast hit them, exploding directly beneath Kilo-4. It was intense, and despite the strength of the merged fields, they were both knocked unconcious by the magnitude of the concusion.
Blackness enveloped him, and for a time he ceased to exist.
When he came to, Saul found himself buried in rubble, but not crushed by it. The artificial gravity on the ship had dropped down again to an eighth of standard. He climbed out of the mess, still shaky from the blast, and discovered that the library was no longer. There was an enormous spherical crater where it had been, perhaps fifteen meters in diameter. At the edge of the crater, toward what had been the rear of the library, was a door that had previously been behind the shelves of crystal.
On the door were the words, "A.D.A.C. MAIN."
Then he heard a noise behind him.
Before Saul could take any action, a tiny sphere of superheated metallic gas burned in through his back and out the left side of his chest, incinerating his heart and left lung. A burst of flaming tissue, steam, white light, and black smoke billowed out of the fist sized hole and blackened ribs, but despite the horrible nature of the damage, Saul didn't make a sound. He didn't feel pain since the sensory nerves to that area had been reflexively deactivated. His body took emergency repair measures as it was designed to do, but Saul could tell from internal status displays that the damage was beyond critical.
His remaining lung had been badly seared by the heat, and was no longer functioning. His heart was effectively gone, and despite the fact that his modular design had kept most of his blood from being destroyed, his oxygen storage glands and independent arterial pumps would only be able to keep his brain and body alive and operating for about fifteen minutes. His body would need far longer than that to regenerate the destroyed organs. He was "walking dead." The term for Omegans who were beyond repair and doomed to die, but still temporarily active.
But his own life was not important, and he still had time to fulfill his purpose. Considering that he had proof that Death was merely a transition from the illusion of separateness to a state of union with the Khoa, his own end did not bring fear to him. Still, there were things that could only be done by the living. The Khoa needed a tool in these lands of illusion, and thus he was required to stay alive just a little bit longer.
With the energy left in his remaining plasma cannon, Saul reached back and blew the arms off of Kilo-4 at the bicep. It only took two shots, and he aimed them precisely. He felt sympathy for this brother of his, but he could not afford to put him out of his misery. He refused to risk another auto-destruct detonation.
Field capacitors completely depleted from surviving the explosion, and muscle tissue decayed nearly to the bone, the last of the two Kilo class Omegans stood in the rubble and gurgled insanely. Without his arms he could do nothing to stop Saul from reaching the A.D.A.C., not that he had ever known what his goal was to begin with. The Overwatch had simply instructed them to purge a deviant Omegan, and now even those instructions were vague memories in its rotting brain.
True to its killer instincts, Kilo-4 did try to continue his mission. he slipped in the smoking rubble, and without arms to catch himself, he fell facedown onto the rocks. Eventually he would probably have reached Saul, though what he would have done if it had was rather debatable.
Saul merely ignored him, and headed for the door. He didn't have a lot of time before this body perished, and he still had an errand to complete.
*
*
*
It was a relatively mild morning in the city of Caravan. In the light of the sun there was warmth, but in the air there was the cold remnants of a frost that had not quite fallen. The wind blew softly, but briskly through the streets, sweeping trails through the dirt and dust. It also swept across the bodies of the fallen, and fanned the flames of the buildings still burning from the night's violent anarchy.
Smoke from the fires caused an inescapable stench, and crowds of vigilantes could still be seen fighting against bands of looters, both sides armed with a variety of weapons. They were too busy to put out the blazing buildings, and as they fought, Caravan burned.
The local Magistrates, the division of the Militia assigned to civil defense, had either abandoned their posts, or died at them. But, though the people had no compunctions against attacking the Magistrates, the terror of the Tquezz held them, at least out of necessity, temporarily loyal to Mellagoshya.
When Lord Eko Vito had declared independence with an E.P.M. mercenary warship already in orbit, the people of Caravan had acted in utter desperation, and they had acted at once. The C.E.O.s claims that the warship would not harm the colony was believed by no one. The destruction that had already been perpitrated by the mercenaries against the outlying western farm communities was well known. The rumors of their elimination had circulated, and no one doubted that this was what was planned for them all.
The Militia had dissapeared almost as soon as the announcment was made. Most of them joined the rest of the colonists in an armed coup that seemed almost too concerted to be spontaneous. The officers and executives in charge of maintaining corporate loyalty suddenly found themselves uniting with the people against the very leadership they had worked for all their lives. Most of these people had been heavily indoctrinated, brainwashed to believe whatever the company told them, yet these programmed beliefs had mysteriously vanished at the announcement of independence.
Across the planet the floors of the vacated Militia barracks were covered in abandoned company uniforms.
The people of Caravan had behaved no differenlty. Like the other cities of the colony, they had taken control of their government and tried to contact the warship. They wanted to beg for mercy. They were willing to accept any terms.
They knew the price of rebellion, and they strove to make the mercenaries understand that it had been the C.E.O. of their division who had declared independence from Mellagoshya, not the people themselves. They vowed to create a new adminstration from the remaining executives who were still loyal to the company. To Vito's surprise, they loudly declared their intentions to honor the Mellagoshyn corporation's ownership of Vargas, and to obey their division's corporate charter.
But from the ship there came only empty static.
The panic of the uncertanty generated by this fact did nothing to help restore order in the streets. The gangs of wandering youth, and the underground traders that ran the black market, were quick to take advantage of this opportunity to settle old scores. Crime ran rampant, uncorked and unchecked for the first time since the colony had been established. Centuries of bottled hatred was poured like gasoline into a bonfire, and those who had taken temporary authority begged fruitlessly for the mercenary ship to help them restore order.
They were not aware that their electronic prayers were being sent to a God who no longer existed. Only one mind remained functioning onboard the Tquezz, and though he might eventually hear their pleas, he could not yet answer them. He could not save them.
Few noticed the shooting star as it came down towards them. It was the wrong time of day to easily see such things, and the smoke still obscured much of the sky. Even if it had been night, the trajectory was such so that it would still have been very difficult to notice unless you had known precisely where to look. Those who knew where to look, and had the means to do so, were already looking. For the rest of the population, ignorance was the only sheild and protector they possessed, and it covered them like a blanket.
Those at the city's observatory who were anxiously watching the sky for some kind of sign from the mercenary ship, witnessed a brilliant phenomenon. At magnification, it could be seen as a large cylinder shaped object that was blackened, burning, and falling to pieces. There was no mistaking it for anything other than a Mellagoshyn in-system shuttlecraft. It was far behind the first little shooting star, however, and the effects of that object soon ended any wonderment about the burning shuttle.
The point of impact had been targeted as the cities central marketplace, and that was precislely where it hit. If the warhead had actually been in a missile, its intended delivery device, the detonation would have occured in the air above the city. Infiltration pods, however, were not built to be used for this purpose, and the inertial dampening fields they contained interfered with the operation of the multitudes of incredibly small robotic systems inside the warhead. Because of this, the technicians who had launched the weapon had programmed it to delay it's detonation until after the pod had landed and exposed itself to atmosphere.
It didn't really matter, the effects would be the same, and they were.
The marketplace was virtually empty, its flat expanses were a snipers playground, and crossing it was a foolish risk made evident by the dozens of corpses scattered across the littered pavement. Ripped canvas tents and their broken wooden frames competed for space with the bodies of their owners and the ruined goods they had once peddled here.
In the middle of this wreckage, the infiltration pod hit the pavement with enough force split the ground and generate a thundering shockwave that could be heard throughout the city. It's themal and inertial absorption fields protected the device inside, but the bodies and the ruined sales stands were instantly ignited and sent flying in every direction. The ground was turned into shrapnel from the force of the blast leaving a circular crater roughly fourty meters in diameter.
The rubble and dust was left to fall, and for almost a minute nothing happened. Then a young man, armed with an energy rifle that he had liberated from one of the Magistrates, carefully approached the side of the crater, his curiosity overcoming his caution. He had come running when he'd heard the explosion, and finding the huge crater, he immediatly assumed that someone had set off a bomb. That assumption was laid to rest when he looked into the smoking bowl shaped depression that had once been the center of the marketplace.
He saw the black sphere sitting quietly in the center of the crater, and watched in awe as it split open like a deadly flower.
Inside was another sphere, but transparent, and ringed at the equator with a row of oddly shaped silver boxes. Though he had nothing more than the manditory education the company gave to all its proletariate, the young man was not stupid. He quickly deduced that he was looking at something very deadly. A loud buzzing began coming from it, and it grew rapidly in both pitch and intensity. He turned around and began to run, so he did not witness the beautiful flickering patterns of prismatic sparks that swarmed through the transparent sphere a second before the micronized particle manipulators reached their maximum capacity.
There was a flash of light, and everything around him, including himself, glowed with a bright eldrich shimmer.
Then it erupted.
Exponential expansion of the packed energy nanobots as they devoured and transformed Caravan into a soup of free ions took place so fast that death was painless and instantaneous.
For a space of microseconds, the city's population existed as living beings composed of a unique and highly unstable configuration. Then the substance of their altered flesh, along with the substance of the buildings and the ground they stood upon, exploded outward in a flashfire of magnificent resplendence. The energy released was tremendous, matching an old style thermonulcear device in it's intensity, but lacking the lingering menace of slow decaying radiation. Even the impurities were consumed. It was both beautiful, and horrible.
And it was the ultimate in indepence fireworks.
Nearly a million people vanished in an eruption of hydrogen gas, blackening the landscape, and incinerated all living things in a five hundred kilometer radius from ground zero. Thier hopes and dreams were transformed with their bodies as their atomic structures were devoured and transmuted into a golden fire of pure energy.
The expansion halted as programmed, but only after so many billions of metric tons of mass was converted. E.P.M. would have been glad to have known that the first field testing of their packed energy nano tech weapon had worked exactly as advertised. Unfortunatly for them, there was no one left awake in the Vargan solar system that was loyal to thier corporation to record it.
In the outlying farms and villages, those distant enough to survive the explosion, the horror of what had happened was too fantastic to instantly comprehend. They were shell shocked, and terrified to the core. Tied to the city by bonds of commerce and relation, there were very few who did not have a blood relative there.
With nothing left to do but run, the survivors abandoned their farms, packed their belongings, and scattered into the mountains.
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