The Veng’en had fought several protracted conflicts against the human population of the colonies of Ethera and Caneeron, mostly territorial disputes that had ended in uneasy truces and endless rounds of political and diplomatic negotiations. The people of Ethera and Caneeron had spent many long decades living under the fear of a Veng’en invasion, which had been defended against by a large and expensive naval fleet in which Idris Sansin had been immeasurably proud to have served.
Ironically it had not been a Veng’en invasion but mankind’s own remarkable technological advances that had seen his downfall, the voracious spread of the Legion engulfing Ethera and Caneeron and spreading far afield. Thus, had the Veng’en found themselves for the first time facing an implacable foe that even their ferocity and courage could not hope to defeat. Adopting a scorched–earth policy, they had distanced themselves from humanity’s collapse in the hopes of preventing the Legion from ever reaching them. Those few vessels that had escaped the Legion’s wrath and navigated their way toward the Veng’en homeworld had seen their vessels blasted into oblivion by their warlike and now fearful competitor species.
‘The Veng’en would not lightly broadcast a distress signal on all frequencies,’ Andaim said, jolting the captain from his reverie. ‘They’re too damned zenophobic.’
‘That’s what’s bothering me,’ the captain agreed. ‘Maybe in the time that we’ve been away the Veng’en have also fallen. Perhaps they had no choice?’
‘They had more warning than we did,’ Mikhain pointed out. ‘The Legion would not likely have been able to infect them en masse as it did humanity, so it would have been all–out conventional war instead if the Word took the fight to them.’
The captain eased himself out of his chair and examined the nearby asteroid field.
‘For which they would naturally have blamed us,’ he said. ‘We created the Word, and now it is destroying them.’
‘Could it be just a fluke?’ Lael asked from her station. ‘Maybe the ship was part of a convoy that got lost or something? We can’t know if the Legion ever expanded beyond the colonies.’
‘It followed us all the way out here,’ Andaim replied for the captain. ‘Tyraeus Forge in the Avenger did not give up the chase. The Veng’en system is a damned site closer to Ethera than we were then.’
‘Agreed,’ the captain said. ‘That means they’re likely suffering as we once did. It may make them more welcoming of any assistance that we can offer.’
A new voice appeared on the bridge.
‘Or it may make them
hate
us more than ever.’
Councillor Dhalere was an exotic looking woman with dark skin, obsidian eyes and a confident stride. She walked onto the bridge as though she owned it, her long black hair flowing like glistening oil over her shoulders. The ship’s political officer and one of the few remaining establishment figures left aboard, she represented what was left of Ethera’s government.
‘Perhaps,’ Sansin nodded. ‘The question is: can we afford to miss the chance to find and ally others to our cause? We are but one ship against the Word.’
‘We’ll be one less ship if the Veng’en attack us,’ Dhalere cautioned. ‘You’ve already committed us to fighting one war, captain. I don’t think that we should risk starting another, do you?’
‘This isn’t about starting a war,’ Andaim said, ‘it’s about responding to a distress beacon.’
‘Which may be a trap,’ Mikhain pointed out in support of Dhalere.
‘You of all people know, captain,’ Dhalere said, ‘that the Veng’en will stoop to such tactics to draw in unsuspecting vessels.’
‘Yes,’ Sansin smiled without warmth, ‘but they wouldn’t advertise who they really are when doing so, would they now?’
Dhalere’s expression did not falter but she did not reply either.
Like the sailors of old who had plied Ethera’s great oceans in search of new lands centuries before, no call for help was ever ignored, be it sent by friend or foe. The vast expanses of space were as brutally cold and uncaring as any terrestrial ocean, and no man feared anything more than to be stranded alone to die in that immense vacuum.
‘Can we help, even if we wanted to?’ Dhalere pressed. ‘We can barely sustain ourselves and we haven’t seen a terrestrial planet for six months now. A few more weeks and it’ll be us sending the damned distress signal.’
‘All the better to move now then,’ Andaim said. ‘At least we won’t have given our position away by transmitting a signal. This way, we have a tactical advantage.’
Dhalere’s almond eyes flared with irritation but the soft smile on her sculptured lips did not slip.
‘On your head be it, Commander Ry’ere,’ she purred.
‘No, councillor,’ the captain intervened. ‘It’ll be on mine.’ He turned to the helm officer. ‘Clear the debris field and alter course, engage maximum thrust.’
‘Aye, sir!’
Dhalere cast the bridge a last, disapproving gaze and then turned and stalked from view.
‘She’s right,’ Mikhain said as the councillor left. ‘That ship could turn out to be a threat in itself.’
‘Which we won’t know until we get there,’ the captain said.
‘That’s a hell of a risk after what happened last time,’ Evelyn pointed out.
The Atlantia had barely survived her battle with the
Avenger
and its infected captain, Tyraeus Forge, months before. It had been the first time anybody aboard the Atlantia had ever seen the Legion at work, an entire battle cruiser engulfed by billions of seething devices.
Andaim peered at Evelyn. ‘What’s wrong? A few months ago you were the one screaming victory over the Word. Now you want to hide away again? We’ve never been stronger than we are now. This is the perfect time to make a move by choice instead of having our hand forced.’
Evelyn kept her voice calm and hoped that her nerves were not showing through.
‘It’s too soon, we’re not strong enough.’
The captain looked at Evelyn as a pulse of concern flared deep in his guts. Evelyn had awoken months before inside a per–fluorocarbon capsule, the victim of an assassination attempt by an agent of the Word after having been incarcerated for years for the murder of her family, a crime she had not committed. Within days, driven by an almost hellish thirst for vengeance, she had risen to control an entire army of convicts and then helped the captain and his crew take down the
Avenger
, the battleship that had hounded them for months across the cosmos.
As far as the captain could make out, Evelyn feared no man, but she had been through hell at the hands of the Word both before and after the apocalypse.
‘I know it hasn’t been long,’ the captain said to her. ‘I know what Tyraeus Forge revealed to you aboard the Avenger, about what happened to your family, and that you nearly died. I’m not about to send you into another Legion–infested ship if you’re not ready.’
Evelyn almost blushed, her green eyes blinking as shadows passed like ghosts behind them.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Just got a lot going on.’
‘Dismissed,’ he ordered her. ‘Get some rest, understood?’
Evelyn saluted crisply and marched off the bridge.
The captain gestured to Andaim, the commander following as the captain ascended a tight spiral staircase to a massive viewing platform that dominated the upper deck of the bridge. A circular dome of armoured and ray–sheilded glass afforded a spectacular, panoramic view of the universe.
Outside the viewing platform the vast asteroid field was vanishing from view as the Atlantia began accelerating away, building up toward the tremendous velocities required to traverse the cosmos in any reasonable period of time. Within a short while she would be moving at close to half the speed of light, fast enough for her mass–drive to engage and propel the Atlantia to super–luminal velocity.
‘Evelyn’s not herself,’ Andaim said.
‘Who is, these days?’
‘She’s hiding something,’ Andaim pressed. ‘I don’t know what, but it’s bothering me.’
The captain sighed and rested one hand firmly on Andaim’s shoulder.
‘She’s on our side, which is enough for me right now, and she’s under a lot of pressure with the flight training and everything she’s been through playing on her mind. Give her some space, Andaim, understood?’
The commander nodded.
‘Can she be relied upon, do you think, if we encounter the Legion?’ the captain asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Andaim said. ‘But right now along with Bra’hiv, Qayin and a handful of Marines she’s the only human being aboard ship who has ever seen the Legion up close and personal. We, for better or worse, were too far from the apocalypse when it consumed Ethera.’
‘We need her,’ Idris replied. ‘Keep her alive Andaim, whatever happens, okay? There’s an awful lot hinging on what she does.’
‘What does that mean?’ Andaim asked.
‘People know her, know what she did aboard the Avenger to protect the civilians, to protect us,’ the captain said. ‘Evelyn has become a sort of talisman for them, even a legend. Make her your priority, commander. I know how you feel about her – I’m sure it won’t be a problem for you.’
The captain saw the commander manage to suppress his surprised expression as he whirled away and marched off the bridge.
***
Evelyn made her way down in the elevator banks toward the Atlantia’s hospital deck, located deep inside a heavily armoured section of the hull near the sanctuary. The sanctuary, or
garden
as the crew called it, was a central core of the ship that rotated to provide natural gravity and was filled with a lush valley that provided the crew with a place reminiscent of home, Ethera. Built for the prison crew who had once served aboard her as an antidote to the long tours far from home, it now served as the accomodation for the civilian survivors of the apocalypse.
The Atlantia had once served as a ship of the line, a frigate of the Colonial Navy. She had, so Evelyn had heard, seen action against the Veng’en at Mal’Oora, a major pitched battle that had resulted in what could only be termed a draw: both forces had limped away, neither having achieved their objective of complete domination despite horrendous casualties. Many decades later the Atlantia had been recommission as a prison ship, her hull converted into the paradise of the sanctuary for serving officers to stay and many of her plasma magazines turned over to an enlarged hospital quarters, sick bay and administration offices to cater for the ship’s staff and her wayward charges.
Until the Word’s grotesque mutation and unleashing of the Legion.
Evelyn knew that the Word, a creation of quantum physics, was in effect a computer. It had evolved out of a major milestone in human engineering,
The Field
: a digital record of all information that had been accessible to all humans. The growth of human knowledge had accelerated, reaching all corners of the colonies through the sharing of information, and technology had likewise grown and expanded at a phenomenal rate. This massive database of information had been fused with quantum computing to create the Word, a depository of knowledge designed to be able to make decisions based on pure logic and an understanding of myriad complexities that were beyond the human capacity to assimilate and form cohesive responses. Tasked with finding solutions to the most complex problems in history, ranging from space exploration to crime to medicine, the Word eventually became the founder of laws, the arbitrator of justice and the icon of mankind’s prolific creativity.
The one thing that nobody could have predicted was that the Word, through its sheer volume of thought and understanding, would have concluded that mankind was a greater threat to itself than any other species and thus must be either controlled or eradicated. Thus had been born the Legion, and mankind silently infected long before anybody even realised what was about to happen.
Evelyn walked out of the elevator banks and headed aft, swerving by unthinking reflex between military officers and civilians hurrying to and fro through the ship’s ever–busy corridors. All personnel were wearing their magnetic gravi–suits and boots, filled with negatively charged particles of iron that pulled them down toward the positively charged cylinders beneath the deck plating. For service personnel spending months on rotation aboard the Atlantia and ships like her, the gravi–suits prevented muscle loss and preserved bone–density that long periods of zero–gravity would otherwise degrade.
Two of General Bra’hiv’s armed Marines stood guard outside the entrance to the sick bay, a precaution against any possible outbreak of the Word’s Infectors. Both of them snapped to attention as they saw her approach, even her meagre rank of Ensign senior to theirs as ship’s soldiers. They stood aside and as she walked in she caught a glimpse of one of the Marine’s tattoos: gang colours, signifying kills on the meaner streets of Ethera.
A former convict, now a serving member of the Marines.
In time of war, one’s enemy could easily become one’s ally.
Military ships were not noted for their luxuries or comforts and the hospital was no exception. Grey walls, grey deck and grey ceilings of bare metal, patched with ward numbers painted in crude symbols. Rows of beds in each ward containing men with various ailments, injuries and infections. The captain’s wife, Meyanna Sansin, ran the hospital with near–robotic efficiency, but on a cramped and crowded vessel infections spread fast. Even with extra staff her day was busy from start to end, and down–time was a rarity for all aboard the Atlantia.
Meyanna saw Evelyn coming as she tended to a Marine with a sprained wrist. She finished patching the soldier up and turned to Evelyn, her long brown hair pinned back behind her ears and her smile bright to mask her fatigue.
‘You’re late,’ she mocked.
Evelyn smiled. ‘I know, but I did rush here as I just couldn’t wait for another battery of tests to be run.’
Meyanna’s hand on her forearm was comforting, and Evelyn could see the veiled distress behind Meyanna’s expression.
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘There won’t be many more, I promise. Come this way.’
Evelyn knew the drill and she followed Meyanna without complaint to a laboratory at the rear of the sick bay, which was sealed off by glass doors. Meyanna led her inside, sealing the doors behind them as she led her to a small cubicle. Meyanna closed the cubicle door behind them and turned to Evelyn.