Atlantia Series 2: Retaliator Read online

  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.

  ‘More blood I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’ve run out of the last batch.’

  Evelyn sighed. ‘Nothing yet?’

  Meyanna shook her head.

  Six months before, trapped in the bridge of the doomed Avenger, Captain Tyraeus Forge, a man no longer a man but a writhing mass of tiny machines, had revealed to Evelyn what had really happened to her family and why the Word had hunted her with such fervour for so long. She had been a journalist on Ethera who had uncovered the militarisation of nanotechnology and its subsequent theft and release by religious terrorists within a street drug known as Devlamine. From there, through shared needles, sexual contact, travel and countless other vectors, the Legion’s Infectors had spread. The Word’s purpose, achieved by manipulating the warped minds of the terrorists, had been to silently infect the entire human population of the colonies with its Infectors and then distribute a simple command to them: replicate, causing the bloodless coup of an entire species.

  Evelyn’s uncovering of the conspiracy had seen her husband and son murdered and herself incarcerated for the crime, sent into long–term stasis confinement and burdened with the mask that hid her face and silenced her voice.

  Then came the bombshell, revealed by Forge himself: Evelyn was immune to infection by the Word. For reasons that Meyanna had not yet been able to fathom Evelyn could not be controlled by the Infectors, which were destroyed by her immune system just like any biological infection would be. The Word had wanted to study her but she had escaped with her life and now Meyanna, on behalf of the entire crew, was secretly studying her blood in order to figure out what was happening. A cure, or even a vaccine against infection by the Word, would change the game of their new war entirely.

  Evelyn laid down on the narrow bed as Meyanna inserted a line into her arm and began slowly drawing blood.

  ‘How’s the flight training coming along?’

  Evelyn sighed. ‘I keep screwing up. Can’t think fast enough.’

  ‘The blood loss,’ Meyanna said, gesturing to the line in her arm. ‘You’re running low all the time. I can give you something for that.’

  Evelyn watched as her blood was extracted into a vial as Meyanna busied herself fetching pills from a steel cabinet in one corner of the cubicle.

  ‘Are you any closer to identifying who aboard is infected with the Word?’ Evelyn asked.

  Meyanna shook her head as she rummaged inside the cabinet.

  ‘We scanned the entire crew when we left the last planet we found,’ she replied. ‘Nothing. Are you really sure there’s somebody harbouring the Word aboard ship? This would all be much easier if I could just tell the crew about you and…’

  ‘No,’ Evelyn cut her off. ‘I’m one hundred per cent certain. Tyraeus Forge had been warned of our attack on him. There’s only one way that could have happened.’

  Meyanna stood up and handed Evelyn a small bottle of pills.

  ‘Iron supplement,’ she said. ‘You’re just a little anaemic after all this blood I’m taking from you.’

  Evelyn took the bottle and let Meyanna remove the line from her arm.

  ‘Maybe you should ask Andaim to give you some time off from your training,’ Meyanna suggested. ‘It’s not like you’re the only pilot we have.’

  Evelyn rolled her sleeve down.

  ‘He’s as under pressure as everybody else and we need the crews. We’re still at only half strength.’

  ‘He pushes you harder than the rest of them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

>   ‘He doesn’t know about this either,’ Meyanna said, waving the vial of blood in her hand. ‘If he did…’

  ‘The carrier could be anybody,’ Evelyn insisted, ‘even Andaim.’

  ‘Llike I said, the scans didn’t show anything.’

  ‘Then the scans missed something,’ Evelyn shot back. ‘The only way to be absolutely sure is to use the microwave technique.’

  ‘No,’ Meyanna replied. ‘That kills if it identifies a carrier. You know that.’

  The Word’s minions, the Legion, were machines designed to self–replicate. The Infectors, the smallest of their kind, contained working parts which when exposed to microwave radiation of a frequency that matched their own atomic resonance would cause them to heat up and melt, so small were their components. Unfortunately, as the Infectors routinely attached themselves to optical nerves, the brain stem and spinal cord, this process caused unspeakable agony to the victim and often death shortly afterward depending on how deeply entrenched was the infection. A microwave scan of the entire ship could kill all infected persons aboard, a loss of humanity that the captain was unwilling to risk given that the Atlantia’s compliment might now be all that was left of mankind.

  So far, the only individuals who had undergone the dangerous microwave scan were the Atlantia’s bridge crew, Meyanna, Evelyn, the Marines serving under General Bra’hiv and of course the general himself.

  ‘Yes,’ Evelyn replied, ‘but even that scan was conducted six months ago. We know that the Word is driven to infect others, like a disease. If there is a carrier aboard then they could have infected dozens of the crew and we wouldn’t know a thing about it. The Word remains dormant in people while replicating, waiting for the chance to strike en masse.’

  ‘I know well what it does,’ Meyanna replied.

  Evelyn sighed.

  ‘We’re not safe from the Word here,’ she said. ‘Not yet. The sooner we get some kind of antidote or vaccine, the better.’

  ‘Which is why we need to get your immunity out into the open,’ Meyanna pressed. ‘I could have entire teams working on this instead of just me. The work could take days instead of weeks or months.’

  ‘You won’t be testing anything if the Word has me killed,’ Evelyn snapped. ‘The only reason I’m not dead right now is because Tyraeus Forge died before he could reveal what he knew to anybody else.’

  ‘Or you’re paranoid,’ Meyanna replied. ‘And there is no carrier aboard. You went through hell aboard that ship, Evelyn. I can’t imagine what it was like or how it may have affected you.’

  ‘It made me damned cautious,’ Evelyn said. ‘I won’t rest until I’m certain that the entire ship’s compliment is free of infection. You should be doing the same.’

  ‘I am,’ Meyanna replied. ‘But it’s been months now and I haven’t found anything to explain why your body rejected the Word’s bots when nobody else’s does. There are only so many tests I can run, and I’m pretty much out of ideas right now.’

  ‘Use your imagination,’ Evelyn said as she stood up from the bed. ‘The Word does.’

  Evelyn’s feet touched the floor and then she felt the entire ship heel over as the deck tilted steeply beneath her feet. She felt herself topple sideways and Meyanna leaped in front of her, wrapping her arms tightly around Evelyn’s shoulders as she slumped back down onto the bed.

  ‘Easy,’ Meyanna said, her hands still on Evelyn’s shoulders as she stood back.

  Evelyn blinked. The deck was still but her head was swimming.

  ‘You’re burned out,’ Meyanna said.

  ‘I’m fine, it’s just the blood loss and…’

  ‘You’re done,’ Meyanna cut her off. ‘You need time out. I’m pulling you off flying duties.’

  ‘Like hell you are!’ Evelyn snapped as she made to stand again.

  ‘Until you’re supplments kick in,’ Meyanna promised. ‘Twenty four hours, okay?’

  Evelyn clenched her jaw and her fists but she knew that the doctor was right. Her anger lost its momentum and slipped away in a deep sigh.

  ‘The ship’s accelerating,’ Meyanna said, ‘and the mass–drive will kick in soon so there’ll be no flying for a while anyway. You head back to your quarters and get some rest, understood? I don’t want to see you on the bridge.’

  Evelyn grabbed her uniform jacket and made for the cubicle door.

  ‘I’ll inform Andaim that you’re to be relieved from duty until further notice,’ Meyann added.

  ‘He’ll be annoyed,’ Evelyn said. ‘Like you said, he pushes me harder and…’

  ‘And he needs you on top form. Right now you can barely walk. He’ll understand, agreed?’

  The last of Evelyn’s resistance melted away and she nodded and left the room.

  ***

  IV

  ‘All engines at full power, mass–drive will engage in… ninety seconds.’

  Captain Idris Sansin acknowledged his engineering officer’s report as he sat in his chair and spoke softly. His voice still carried to every corner of the bridge.

  ‘Alert the crew, prepare for surge.’

  The bridge lights turned red, much as they would do in time of battle, as a distant series of claxons sounded throughout the vessel.

  The Atlantia was equipped with six ion–engines, three on each wing nacelle, each of which produced vast quantities of thrust to power the half–mile long frigate through the immense emptiness of inter–stellar space. However, it was her mass–drive which produced the velocities required to traverse the tremendous distances between star systems.

  Ever since mankind had found his way into space, from the very first dangerous and yet thrilling rockets that had soared into Ethera’s atmosphere along with the dreams of the men aboard them, to the cosmos–travelling ships like Atlantia, a means had been sought to overcome the natural physical laws that governed the universe. The greatest of those laws was that no object of mass could ever reach or exceed the speed of light. It had been the universal constant, a single immovable law that governed everything in the visible universe. Engineers had spent decades searching for a solution to this crippling obstacle to true galactic exploration, seeking ever more powerful engines that propelled starships to ever increasing velocities, but none ever had broken through the speed of light.

  Until just a few decades prior to the keel of the Atlantia being laid.

  It had, as so often was the case, taken a genius to figure it out: a man capable of thinking beyond the cube. Deri Feyen, an astrophycisist and theorist, had realised that everybody had been going about it all the wrong way. The laws of physics stated, quite clearly, that no object of mass could exceed the speed of light. Light itself, comprised of photons, moved at the speed of light because, uniquely, they had no mass. Therefore, Feyen reasoned, rather than produce ever–more massive engines one only had to figure out a way to negate mass in order to accelerate to, and controversially, beyond the speed of light.

  It was Feyen’s manipulation of the fundamental particles that gave objects mass that opened a window onto space travel like nothing the colonies had ever seen. Theorizing that if a particle existed that gave atoms mass, then there should by logic be a way to manipulate photons to take advantage of their massless properties, Feyen devised a mass–drive. Put simply, the drive surrounded the parent vessel in a sphere of negative mass that perfectly offset and cancelled out the vessel’s natural mass: it became, in effect, massless.

  Pioneer, the first vessel to test Feyen’s mass drive, launched just a few years before the great man’s death. It accelerated to a velocity that generated enough energy to engage the mass drive, upon which moment the tremendous thrust provided by its ion engines accelerated it up to and beyond the speed of light in a matter of moments. What was more, the massless nature of the vessel meant that many of the mind–bending effects of faster–than–light travel were negated: the vessel did not travel in time as any vessel of normal mass would. What Feyen had achieved was a means to traverse the stars and not retu
rn home to find the graves of the young and healthy friends and family you left behind overgrown from decades or even centuries of neglect, when you had been travelling at super–luminal velocity for only a few months.

  The exploration of the cosmos had begun and within a few years mankind was spreading out into the galaxy and finding new worlds and new species. Much of the time those species were little more than algae floating in hot pools of muddy water on barren, volatile worlds. Sometimes, they were sentient species that bore little relation to the human form: one, the Icay, were tenuous beings who drifted like tendrils in the atmospheres of giant stars and communicated by light waves. The Icay had been the first species to make direct contact with humans, having detected mankind’s ability to directly observe other stars and terrestrial planets – the hallmark of an intelligent species reaching a technological level sufficient to initiate first contact. Others species still, like the Morla’syn, were bipedal and recognisably human in form but for their small, stocky stature: a consequence of their homeworld’s intense gravity.

  Occasionally, they were both humanoid and aggressive: like the Veng’en. And, some said, the humans.

  ‘Brace for surge!’

  The call went out and the captain leaned back in his chair, watching the viewing screen as the mass–drive whirled up. The Atlantia’s massive ion engines drew in huge quantities of hydrogen as the frigate accelerated through space, condensing it into fuel with ever greater efficiency until a barrier was reached: the engine’s intakes were overwhelmed with hydrogen. At this point, vents redirected the flow to the mass–drive and it spun up with dramatic and self–sustaining force as countless billions of atoms were converted into particles of negative mass that arranged themselves in a protective sphere around the Atlantia.