"There's nobody here," Calan whispered as she carried him through a quiet terminal.
> Sineul: connecting to space port network...(2s)
- space port operations paused under AUM planetary contingency protocol
Only three spacecraft remained. One large freighter, and two military personnel carriers. She couldn’t hack into them or their hangar facilities as they had been turned off.
Something was off about this situation. If the space port was on lockdown, there should be hundreds of spacecraft. Only two structures were in orbit. The GALSTAN outpost and her own satellite. If the ships weren't in the space port or the orbit, there weren't many other places they could be.
> Analysis: missing ships
- AUM contingency protocol involves military enforcement of its policies
She knew it without Sineul having to spell it out for her. The GALSTAN was an orbital fortress. It was built thousands of years ago before builder swarms arrived in the galactic frontier for terraforming ahead of the progenitor fleet. It certainly had enough firepower to vaporize any spacecraft in violation of AUM policy.
“Where is everyone?” Calan asked, pulling her hand.
“Looks like they were killed”
“W-what!? Everyone?”
That was too straightforward of an answer. She has to be careful with what she’s revealing to the child.
“You! hands where I can see them!” The voice thundered through the empty terminal they were in. It was a rough voice that echoed on the walls.
> Scanning…
- target located
> Sineul: target locked
> Analysis: Kovarian military high command
- Hegsworn D
- Standard issue plasma cutter
Liera cut a wide arc across as a warning. The concrete pillar that stood between them slid off and crashed on the ground.
She hacked into his transmission line at the same time.
“The next one will cut you in half. You have until the count of three”
“One”
“Two”
His weapon clattered on the floor.
“Stay where you are”
She picked Calan off the floor while he gazed at the concrete pillar that magically fell on the floor with his mouth open.
“How did you do that!”
“I can do that” She told him as she dashed towards the man on the top of the staircase.
“Hey there’s people!” Calan pointed as they made it to the top. She saw it from a scan before she cut that pillar in half. The man wasn’t alone. There were four faces behind him, one adult female and three children.
“Oh My Priestess!” The woman immediately turned her head down and forced her child to do the same. Liera noticed her necklace immediately. It was an old symbol of the Illuviets.
“You-re a! I couldn’t see! I was using thermal” Hegsworn bowed respectfully. “I apologize, I didn't mean to-”
“Why are you in here?” Liera asked, scanning the vicinity for any others she could’ve missed. There were none. They were protected against the vervid. Hegsworn and his wife had shield modules on them and all 3 children wore space suits with isolated air supplies. The shield module on Hegsworn was better than what his wife had and he carried a fuel cell strapped to his back to power it. He had salvaged it from something else. It was just enough to push all dust particles away in a 10m radius.
“We wanted to catch the last ship but we were too late”
“You just avoided certain death”
“Yes, we saw that. They killed everyone before the ships reached orbit”
“Then, why are you still here?”
“I have a plan. We don’t need to get to orbit. We just need to get away before that reactor explodes,” Hegsworn rubbed his forehead. “We could just go anywhere in the terminator line, wait there until all this trouble is over”
“You need a ship without a transponder”
“That’s easy enough. I’ll break one of them over there”
“Why didn't you?”
“Someone, some way, brought that plague in here. It fed on about 1300 people and somehow, I kid you not, it became a big, black ball”
> Analysis: subject is truthful
- no signs of deceit (87% confidence)
- information aligns with the behavior of the sphere entity
”Where is it now? Do you know?”
“Why yes, You can see it from here”
Liera turned around, puzzled. She scanned the area multiple times and caught nothing.
> Deep Scanning…(5s)
There was indeed nothing.
“Over there, you see that ship?” Hegsworn pointed. It was the fourth ship that she ignored. It was a husk of its former shape, obscured by thick black smoke from nearby chemical fires.
“That’s it!” He told her with the utmost confidence.
“What do you mean?”
“It rolled over that ship and…it fucking became...it”
“I need visual confirmation. Apologies in advance” Liera turned him around and jammed her finger into his brain dive port. Sineul brushed away several layers of military firewalls with ease.
“Remember it” She spoke directly to his thought stream. The memory surfaced and she cloned it and synthesized it to an experience.
She turned into Hegsworn. He watched the sphere for a while and he gathered enough courage to inch closer, trying to get to the second military ship. He knew it was the best equipped to handle all his problems. If he could get airborne, he could blast this abomination to dust with the amount of ordnance on it. It was a small, heavy destroyer, designed for ‘landscaping’ tasks. It was good enough for leveling a target and getting far away.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
The sphere was larger than the one Liera fought by several degrees. It was as tall as the terminal building, at least 20m radius. The ripples and folds on its surface were far more intricate.
Hegsworn weaved his way through debris, hiding every now and then whenever the sphere changed its ripples. He had caught glimpses of how it was made and he knew what it could do. Due to its larger size, the voices were audible even from 30m away. He picked up screams and pieces of sentences. He was terrified to his core.
He was praying to God, the Asmolan one. That was unexpected, Liera assumed him to be Illuviet like his wife. Galactic frontier was a different place. She knew more prosperous worlds behind the frontier where such cross-faith unions were punishable by death or confiscation of lineage.
“I…can see you” The sphere said, the screams fading for a moment as its ripples formed a circle towards Hegsworn’s direction. He felt his gut drop to the floor and his legs acted on their own. He dashed for the spacecraft with all he had as the sphere rolled behind him silently. That abomination spoke to him! It spoke!
He ducked under the ship’s landing gear and crawled into the maintenance hole below it, closing the hatch behind him. This wasn’t where he wanted to be. There was no way to get inside the ship from here. He watched in horror as the vibrations from the sphere sent shivers through his back. The hatch leaked black tar. He could tell it was directly above him, above the ship, melting down. He heard metal creaking and power cell explosions. Each time, the sphere made a noise that corresponds to pain. He opened the hatch when everything was silent.
The ship itself had been moved, broken in half. All of the ordnance he wanted to throw at the sphere lay strewn about among other debris. At first he couldn’t tell where the sphere was. When he saw it, he fell back into the hole because his legs gave out. The ship was wrapped in a thick layer of tar, all biomass and material gathered at the core of the sphere, which twisted and bent the shape into something bizarre. It was making noises like a toddler playing with a toy, except those sounds were modulated from screams of the dead. At a glance, it was as if the ship became a creature, broken at the middle and twisted into something new. He made it out from there with patience and luck, as something exploded inside the sphere. The scream that came from the sphere was a sound he wished to never hear again.
Liera looked at Hegsworn.
“It’s learning” She told him.
“Yes” He replied, half surprised about her figuring that much out in about two seconds after she pulled her finger from his dive port. “I don’t know what fresh hell they dug it out from”
“They dug it out?”
“That’s what I heard. Underwater dig, somewhere close to the nightside. One of those AUM rediscovery expeditions” He looked at her. “I know your kind have been around for a long time. Is this something you‘ve seen before?”
“No, this is new” Liera nudged Calan towards the woman. He did his very best not to leave her side. They were stranger to him than her.
“So what is it? Is this that damn first contact?”
“This is highly likely man-made” She looked at the ship. “The first contact that met consensus criteria for sentience was 2187 years ago. It was a small fish”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it” Hegsworn sighed. “I guess the fish wasn’t good enough”
”It wasn’t”
Liera lifted Calan up and handed him to the lady. “Keep him with you until I get back”
“Y-yes my priestess” She barely looked at her. The faithful always obeys. This was perhaps the first time she had been ‘blessed’ with the presence of a Red Priestess.
“You can find shelter in the storage section” She pointed towards the back of the terminal. Hegsworn nodded, picking up his plasma cutter off the floor.
“D-don’t leave me!” Calan cried, he was panicking.
Liera hacked into his transmission line.
She broke through the terminal’s glass front in a single dash.She couldn't operate with any reservations about power now. If estimated by biomass, this sphere had to be more difficult than the first. She allocated nearly 50% of her total capacity to beat it as fast as possible.
She landed in front of it in three hops across the asphalt and she thickened her shields at the front, bracing for any counter-measures from the sphere. It made no effort to notice her as it idled with the parts of the ship it destroyed. Liera picked up several patterns in its behavior. It put the pieces back together, trying to figure out what made the thing work in a bizarre way. It was indeed, learning. She cut two lines across the front. The sphere retracted from the ship, a huge blob forming above it, rippling furiously. The screams modulated to angry noises and died down to an unsettling silence.
> Scanning…
> Analysis: core detected, neural structures
Liera released a massive beam like before, It took milliseconds to prepare everything now that her body was primed for it. The blast cut deep into the center of the mass, melting steel and burning through biomass. The sphere changed its entire shape in a split second. Nine balls shot off in different directions from the center, leaving the burned biomass behind. As it escaped, it combined itself to a full sphere again.
She gave chase, using her palm emitters to burn as much of the biomass as possible. For all her efforts, she reduced its radius by 1m. It began gyrating like before, the internal structure generating an EMP blast. It came faster and stronger than before. Liera barely dodged it by dashing backwards, her ankle sparked.
“It is…you” came from the sphere. She heard it faintly at first.
“I know you!” it said, modulating a scream of a child to fit the words. “I know…you…”
The sphere changed shape, twisting into the shape of a torso, a careless mimicry of her shape. It picked her center mass to build the shape and buried the neural structures deep in the chest. Two frail appendages mirrored her arm posture.
Liera burned them at their shoulder joints, and used secondary beams to burn them to embers before they hit the ground. It had a way to ‘see’. She couldn’t identify the mode. It wasn’t visual. Based on the torso shape it mimicked, it picked up a low resolution 3 dimensional representation of her. Limbs were hard to mimic that way and it was weaker for trying it.
No life form thrived on mimicry alone. This had to be programmatic, something that someone made to behave this way.
As she burned off the arms, another shape emerged from the center in a thin straight line. It was biomass projected towards her at incredible speed. She managed to dodge it as the thick line retreated into the sphere.
“I can…also…” wailed a woman from the sphere. Now, it was mimicking something of hers.
The beams. It was trying to recreate the beams that she used to burn it. This confirmed her assumption about its vision. It made no differentiation between energy beams and matter. It could only see energy and that made immediate sense why it created a torso shape. Her field generator was embedded just above her stomach, between the gap of the ribcage. It was ‘seeing’ or ‘sensing’ her energy distribution.
It sent several of its beams her way, but she was faster. She managed to cut two long ones off the base and burned them before it could retract them. It tried to counter her beams with his own and it quickly discovered this strategy only burned things faster. It adapted rapidly to never use the ‘beam’ again. Liera found her opening as it recalculated its priorities. She released 12% of her power output in a single superheated block that immediately vaporized 1/4th the sphere. It shaved off a significant chunk from the central neural structure.
The scream that came from it was a collection of final screams; it was intertwined into one long dragged out wail as the sphere put everything it had to escape. Liera followed it in two hops and released a wide beam from above, eroding the top surface of the sphere and used her free hand to cut across it.
She had to target the neural structure. Biomass was expendable and could be repurposed but damage to the neural structure took longer to repair. As she opened its core, she saw the chunk she cut from it earlier still missing the same piece.
Suddenly, the ground beneath rumbled. In her peripheral vision, she saw something loom above the space port wall. All turrets of the defense arrays focused on it, concentrating their burst lasers on its colossal outline. It was an amalgamation of black tar; It was biomass trying to build a shape that couldn't be maintained without rigid structures. Thousands of tendrils weaved into each other trying to mend each gap but for each tendril that pulled biomass together, ten others snapped and fell apart below it.
“I…eat…you” the sphere slid across the asphalt towards the wall to meet it. Liera followed, using small bursts to peel away at the neural structure. It had learned to plan ahead and it was planning on joining forces, assuming this trajectory that it took,
“I…eat…”
“Eat!”
“EAT!” The looming biomass on the other side crashed and spilled over the wall. Several spheres rolled over the top, each one as large as a ship. They pulled massive amounts of biomass behind them. The turrets and defense arrays on the wall were overwhelmed and drowned in thick tar.
Liera stopped as a giant black wall fell towards her. There was nowhere to retreat. This was enough biomass to build a sphere as large as the dome reactor. The entire population of Rhea couldn’t create this amount of mass. It had figured out something else, some other way to increase its biomass.
“EAT EAT EAT!”
The voices came slower and calmer. It wasn’t screams modulated this time. It was a deep, guttural voice that echoed from all the spheres. The vervid had finally learned to speak.
> Sineul: field generators 1 through 4 engaged
- warm start (0.7s)
- calibrating emitters 127916/320000
- calibrating sub emitters 767496/1920000
- shield extension (8m)