Atlantia Series 1: Survivor (33 page)

‘I still don’t get it,’ Andaim said. ‘Why does it want you there? What possible purpose could it have for you?’

‘We’re going to find out real soon,’ she said. ‘Pick the landing bay closest to the bridge.’

Andaim guided the shuttle toward the Avenger’s for’ard bays, nestled close behind the bulge of the bridge deck and surrounded by heavy armaments. Evelyn heard him whistle through his teeth as he noted that all of the guns were pointed directly at them and tracking their movements.

‘One shot,’ he said.

‘They’d have fired by now,’ Evelyn said. ‘They mistrust us, just as we mistrust them, but curiosity is what’s keeping us alive right now.’

Andaim nodded, and she looked over her shoulder to where the fusion core sat in its containment unit behind them, strapped to the deck. Their last defence, if they could get it close enough to strike the Avenger somewhere truly vulnerable.

The Avenger loomed vast in the viewing screen and then there was nothing but the open landing bay, a rectangle of bright yellow light against the blackness of the hull. Evelyn caught from the corner of her eye the shape of the Avenger’s hull shifting as though it were a black sea of oil, the waves catching the light as they rolled back and forth.

‘It’s as if the whole ship is alive,’ she said as the sight made her shiver.

The shuttle was swallowed by the landing bay doors and Evelyn craned her neck around to look out of the window behind her. Sure enough, as the shuttle sailed in the doors began closing behind them.

‘They’re just sealing the bay so the air can be released into it,’ Andaim said, sounding as though he was trying to comfort himself as much as her.

‘You didn’t have to be here,’ she said. ‘I could have come alone.’

Andaim smiled tightly as he guided the shuttle down and it settled onto the deck, the engines winding down.

‘There was no way I was going to do that,’ he replied. ‘And you know it.’

For the first time since she had been released from the bitter and claustrophobic chill of the escape capsule days before Evelyn felt a small but growing patch of warmth flood her chest, a foreign sensation that she realised she had forgotten about. Andaim did not meet her gaze, focusing instead on shutting the engines down.

It was Qayin’s voice that broke the silence.

‘Seriously, you two are making me feel all warm and fluffy inside.’

Evelyn looked over her shoulder at him. ‘Shut it, creep.’

Qayin grinned, his white teeth bright in the darkness.

‘I can’t tell if we’ve been scanned or not,’ Andaim said, ‘but the interference run by Atlantia might not be enough to have blocked the Avenger’s instruments. The Word might know that Evelyn is not alone and that the core is aboard.’

There were thirty convicts in the rear of the shuttle, and to her surprise one of the first volunteers had been Cutler. It was the old man who replied to Andaim.

‘So? This is the best chance we have, so I say let’s take it.’

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Andaim said as he got up out of his seat.

‘I got my reasons,’ Cutler replied, casting a quick glance at Evelyn.

The convicts were all armed with plasma rifles and blast charges, and all of them had a singular mission.

‘You know what to do,’ Andaim said.

The convicts held their rifles tightly to their chests, each bearing an expression of determination which provoked in Evelyn a brief and slightly odd sense of pride.

Andaim opened the shuttle’s boarding ramp and then turned to Evelyn.

‘This is it,’ he said.

Evelyn sucked in a deep breath as she stepped out onto the ramp. Andaim’s hand grasped her arm briefly.

‘Come back,’ he said.

Evelyn managed a faint smile, and then she walked down the ramp and out across the landing bay.

A number of identical shuttles were parked on the far side of the bay, looking as pristine as they had when they had first been built. On the opposite side were some small vehicles, machinery and a series of escape capsules set into the walls: standard procedure in any landing bay that was periodically exposed to the vacuum of space. She could see various pieces of equipment scattered about, left where they had fallen when the ship had first been overrun. Some of the walls bore scorch marks where plasma rounds had battered them, as the last surviving members of the crew fought for their lives.

Evelyn strode to an access door and it opened before her without prompting. She slowed and then eased her way inside.

Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the interior of the passageway. It was lined with a seething mass of black bots, billions of them scuttling like glossy black insects in layers so thick that she could no longer see the walls of the passageway. She hesitated, realising that she was utterly exposing herself to the Word.

She looked over her shoulder at the shuttle, knowing that Andaim and the convicts were inside and waiting for her to move. If she faltered, then they would be destroyed. She turned back to the passageway, and as loathing filled her guts she stepped inside.

The bots swarmed away from her as she walked in, scattering in black clouds up the walls and along the deck, as though she were a candle flame parting the darkness before her. Shocked, she stepped fully into the passageway and the door hissed shut behind her.

*

‘They’re inside.’

Captain Idris Sansin watched as the shuttle craft cruised into the Avenger’s landing bay and the doors slowly closed behind it.

‘This had better work,’ he said as he turned to his tactical officer.‘How many of our own Raythons are operational?’

‘Twelve are ready to fly sir,’ Jerren said. ‘The other six are currently inoperative and awaiting repair.’

Idris nodded and turned back to the viewing screen on the bridge.

As soon as Qayin had shut off communications with the War Room and Evelyn had made her announcement that she would be travelling to the Avenger, she had instead dashed with Andaim and the captain to the Atlantia’s bridge. There, Qayin had willingly let them in. Concerned about the Word monitoring communications channels through bots that may have survived the raid on the bridge, Qayin had wanted a face–to–face meeting.

There, he had explained to the captain his reasoning and to Idris’s surprise relinquished control of the bridge back to the captain. It was as much of a deception as he could have managed given his limited time and resources, but it was something more than they had had before.

Quietly, without fuss, the bridge and surrounding areas had been scanned and cleaned of all remaining bots, including several pockets tapping into the communications channels aboard the ship that would likely have relayed Qayin’s demands to the Avenger, thus bolstering the deception. A tiny handful had been isolated and purposefully allowed to remain, and now those channels were being used to send false signals proclaiming that there was nothing that could be done, that there were no operable defensive fighters available, little plasma for weapons and a great number of sick and injured aboard.

Thus, the game was in motion.

But now the entire venture was in Evelyn’s hands. As she had said, the Word had revealed a weakness:
her
. Quite why it wanted her alive, or indeed wanted her at all, was beyond the captain, but the fact that Hevel and Governor Hayes had in their infected state tried to kill her by blasting the high–security wing into oblivion meant that there was
something
going on. The Word had wanted Evelyn dead, yet now it apparently wanted her alive.

‘Has there been any signal from Tyraeus?’

‘Nothing sir,’ came the response, ‘all channels are silent.’

The plan was simple enough, albeit that it might require Evelyn to sacrifice herself, but that had been her decision. She had wanted to go despite Andaim’s loudly voiced protests, which had in the captain’s opinion been expressed without due consideration for his standing as an officer. Meyanna had suggested letting the indiscretion go by, for reasons that Idris wasn’t sure of.

‘How far from the Avenger’s landing bay to the fighter wing?’ he asked Jerren.

‘Seven floors, four hundred cubits,’ came the response.

The captain looked at the viewing screen, at the cruiser’s huge hull laden with heavy weapons, and visualised the path that Andaim and his men would be forced to take. Their route had been chosen based on the amount of bots smothering the Avenger’s hull. There were large areas so far left untouched, and it was assumed that the interior sections of the ship beneath these areas of hull were also uninfected. The Avenger was a large vessel, and even the voracious nature of the Word would take a while to spread to all of her corners, if indeed it even intended to.

Thus it had been determined that the fighter hangars, where the Avenger’s four wings of top–rated offensive Raython spacecraft were stored, were also likely untouched. Manned fighters were of less use to a mechanical foe, and it had been surmised that as the Avenger had not deigned to launch a defensive screen of fighters when it had arrived alongside the Atlantia, they were thus not yet under its control.

‘How long, do you think?’ he asked Jerren.

‘If they’re unopposed in their path? Ten minutes, maybe twelve.’

Idris nodded and put his hands behind his back.

‘Prepare all armouries for battle,’ he said, ‘but pass the word verbally, not through the communications channels. Charge the plasma banks, but do it slowly.’

As his officers dashed to perform their duties and the bridge lights were dimmed to a dull red, Captain Idris Sansin felt his wife’s hand squeeze his arm.

‘This is it,’ he said softly to her.

***

Evelyn walked slowly, her arms tucked in by her sides and her head slightly ducked down.

She could hear the hiss of countless spindly metallic legs clicking on the metal walls and bulkheads as she walked, swarming around her but always at least a few inches from her boots, a similar sized patch of bare metal above her on the ceiling as she walked.

She tried to keep her head level as she walked, almost as if pretending that the bots were not there, but her eyes swivelled left and right and up and down as she strode toward the bridge, seeking any sign that these horrendous little things were preparing to swarm upon her and consume her body in a frenzy of gnashing pincers and burrowing tools.

Warrior Drones, she faintly remembered them as being called. Larger than most nanotech devices, military grade. Programmed to attack, to consume, to swarm and to terrify. The size of large insects, they were equipped with razor sharp pincers, fangs and legs and shielded by glossy black shells of gleaming metal.

The bots also stayed clear of the nearest ceiling light to Evelyn, but all of the others were smothered after she passed through, plunging the passageway behind her into darkness and keeping the corridor ahead likewise inky black.

She wondered what had happened to the crew. She saw occasional scorch marks scarring the walls of the passageway, revealing that they too had fought each other as the infection had spread, mind after mind lost to the Word and its unstoppable mission of conquest. But she had seen no bodies, no blood, no other evidence of the aftermath of the carnage of battle.

The passageway ended and opened out onto the bridge deck, where two large doors awaited her. There, standing either side of the doors, were two marines. Evelyn paused on the opposite side of the bridge doors from them, watching. The bots around her scuttled back into the passageway and she realised that she had been allowed to pass through only so that she could be trapped here. With a plunging sense of dread, she knew that she would never be allowed to leave this place.

The soldiers did not look at her and she realised that beneath their visors their faces rippled with the countless bots crawling beneath their pale skin. The lights in the bridge deck illuminated them well but she could still detect the glow in their eyes and sense the heat radiating from their bodies, more machines now than men.

Without a word one of them stepped aside from the bridge door, his rifle held at port arms and his unblinking gaze staring at her expectantly. Evelyn took another deep breath and strode toward the door, which hissed open and revealed the interior of the bridge as she walked in.

Back before the catastrophe that had consumed the colonies, the bridge of a battleship would have been an almost sacred place that no civilian would ever have been allowed to see. Classified instruments of all kinds, carefully concealed data on range, speed, weapons and tactics were on display, and behind each station was a motionless human, or what was left of them, their arms now writing masses of bots spreading out across the control panels as though their bodies were now welded to their stations.

In the centre of the bridge and sitting in what had once been the captain’s seat, was the figure of a man, but a kind that Evelyn had never seen before.

‘Welcome, Eve,’ the man said.

His voice was deep, like Qayin’s but rippling as though heard underwater. The figure stood and she got her first clear look at what was left of Captain Tyraeus Forge.

His skin was a rippling mass of bots that darkened his pale skin, as though little of his flesh and bone remained. The bold leader’s features were thus recognisable but somehow deformed, a complex but unfaithful and ever–changing replication of a once famed and powerful battleship commander.

Evelyn stood her ground before him and noticed movement up on the bridge ceiling. Thousands of bots scuttled back and forth, following trails like insects as they scurried.

‘They will not harm you, Eve,’ Tyraeus said.

‘I’m supposed to believe that?’ Evelyn asked, finally finding her voice. ‘You wanted me dead.’

‘No,’ Tyraeus replied, ‘I have never wanted you dead, Eve. Hevel went beyond his remit. Too much of his human weakness remained and he feared you Evelyn, he feared you very greatly indeed.’

Evelyn realised that Hevel must have managed to contact the Avenger before his demise, but she could not know how much information Hevel had imparted. She said nothing for a moment, staring instead at this monstrous deformation of a man. The commander’s uniform was gone, what remained of his naked body seething with bots both above and beneath the surface. His teeth when he smiled gleamed metallic silver that flashed as they reflected the lights of the bridge around them.