Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) (102 page)

              The
Churchill
emerged from hyperspace just in time for Chen to see Cartwright’s ship, the
Trafalgar
, ripped apart from bow to stern by a massive internal explosion as her escorts died around her in the firestorm.  Dozens of ships were going down, their charge having turned into a suicide attack as the Shapers closed in for the kill  Desperately, some of the crews tried to ram their vessels into the enemy ships, those that succeeded dying in the midst of massive fireballs that tore apart friendly and enemy vessels alike.  But the Shapers had overcommitted to attacking Cartwright’s fleet.  A gap had opened in the enemy formation, a gap that Chen could exploit.  Cartwright had paid the ultimate price, but his sacrifice had given her a chance.

              ‘Helm! Take us in to attack the portal!  All ships, concentrate your main guns on the arms of the enemy ship.  All other batteries, fire at will!’

              The
Churchill
and the battered remains of her fleet powered forward, guns blazing furiously at anything and everything that came close.  Chen saw everything happen as if in slow motion: the hundreds of ships fighting and dying all around her, the carrier’s remaining escorts succumbing to punishing levels of enemy fire, the fireballs of exploding ships and the intersecting lines of thousands of beam weapons being unleashed by both sides piercing the darkness, the weapons fire that blazed from her ships, battering the enemy and the destructive energies that the enemy hurled back at them. 

God, that ship was big.  It floated, terrible and beautiful at once, its strange, alien shape appearing for all the world as if it had been carved from a massive iceberg.  It was as white as a blizzard, as cold as winter, as cold as death, and it dwarfed the
Churchill
that now raced towards it, turrets blazing madly.

‘Take aim at the arm directly ahead!’ ordered Chen. ‘Aim and fire!’

The
Churchill
shuddered as her spatial distortion cannon ripped apart a tunnel of reality between it and the arm that sprouted from half way up the Shaper vessel’s bows and curved around to grasp the edge of the portal.  The impact shattered the arm in one go, scattering massive chunks of crystalline hull material and unleashing an explosive torrent of energy that ballooned outwards from the broken limb as the two severed parts began to separate.  Chen felt a thrill of excitement, perhaps if they could sever more of those great arms...

Then the Shaper dreadnought returned fire.  A hurricane of fire blazed outwards along its forward quarter, hammering the
Churchill
with incredible destructive force.  Her shields collapsed, her forward section was ripped open and the spatial distortion cannon on her belly was torn off in an instant.  The deadly barrage continued, tearing off chunks of the hull and venting her atmosphere and crew into the freezing vacuum.  The ship was being flayed.  Searing energies scourged her engineering section, severing power conduits and destabilising the reactor.

‘I’m losing control!’ cried Goldstein at the helm.  ‘She won’t respond!  Main engines are offline and I have fifty percent of manoeuvring thrusters inoperative.  Backups are not responding!’

‘This is the Chief,’ said Kleiner in engineering.  ‘I’m trying to shut the reactor down, Admiral, before she goes critical.  Coolant systems are severed.’

‘She’s going down,’ said McManus.  ‘This is it, Michelle.  This is the end of the line.  We have to abandon ship.’

‘And go where?’ said Chen.  ‘Our escape pods will be shot down as soon as they escape the ship.’

The
Churchill
was drifting now, still heading towards the gigantic enemy craft on a collision course, shedding debris and venting atmosphere from a dozen points.  Even though she was dying, the doomed ship kept firing with everything she had left in a gesture of defiance.

‘How does it feel, Admiral Chen?’ said a voice over the comm., as the massive vessel loomed ever closer. ‘How does it feel to face death?

‘Cox,’ said Chen, with disgust.  ‘I suppose that you have defeated me after all.  You took your time about it.’

‘You caused me pain when you destroyed my ship, Admiral Chen.  Immense pain.  It was the pain of being exposed to fire and the cold, burning, rupturing vacuum of space. That pain has made me strong!  I fed on it, relished it! Now you will experience pain like you cannot imagine, and I have you right where I want you.’

‘We’re going in!’ cried Goldstein, desperately using what resources she had left to slow the
Churchill’s
approach as the carrier slid ever closer to the Shaper vessel.

‘All hands: brace for impact!’ yelled McManus over the comm. and the crew began to strap themselves in or hang on to whatever they could.

Goldstein had done her best.  The
Churchill
struck the hull of the Shaper vessel at a shallow angle, sliding sideways across the vast, crystalline surface.  The impact tore the rear half of the vessel off as it struck an outcropping on that vast plain, scattering ship’s innards and crew into the vacuum as it sheared off.  The middle and forward sections hurtled onwards as the vessel’s reactor, contained in the severed aft section, was finally breached and exploded in a nuclear fireball that killed everyone still alive in there.

The remaining chunk of ship slid on for some distance, until it too struck a sharp outcropping on the Shaper vessel’s hull that impaled its belly, opened ten decks to space and brought the shattered remains of the carrier to a final, bone jarring halt.

Steven never saw the gunman.  There had been only slumped bodies before on the way in, and the basement levels where the cells were was empty, but now there was an armed man standing behind him.  Before he could react, the shot caught him in his right shoulder as he spoke to Haines in his cell, the projectile round piercing a weak point in his armour between the back plate and the shoulder guard and embedding itself in his flesh.  Crying out in surprise and pain he was thrown forwards and collided with the wall.  Haines, his movements slow from his weeks long ordeal, was slow to react.  Nevertheless, he managed to dive back into his cell and out of the line of fire.  As Steven lay gasping in pain on the concrete floor and Haines looked in horror at his would be saviour now cut down in front of him, he heard a familiar voice.

‘Going somewhere, George?  You disappoint me.  After all we’ve been through together.  How can you run away in our moment of triumph?  I want you to see something before you die:  the destruction of your navy, and the final surrender of the human race.’

It was Morgan.

Chapter 58

              The Arkari fleet was assembled in the Orakkan system.  Thousands of vessels floated in formation, waiting for the order to attack.  The
Sword of Reckoning
, Fleet Meritarch Lorali Beklide’s command ship and two hundred kilometre long dreadnought, sat at their heart, one of dozens of such ships, surrounded by squadrons of destroyers and smaller cruisers as well as thousands of smaller fighter craft that buzzed about the larger vessels like shoals of bright fish.  At the front of the fleet lay the massive Executioner Cannon, its reactors fully activated and energy capacitors fully primed and, before the cannon, hung the slender bracelet of the Arkari portal, joined to the stars either side of it by slender vortices of directed plasma.

              Beklide stood at the centre of the
Sword of Reckoning’s
bridge, a panoramic view from the ship’s bows projected across the front wall of the chamber, whilst other projections showed her incoming data from the cannon and portal and the status of the other ships.

              ‘All ships are ready, Meritarch,’ said the ship.  ‘The Executioner Cannon reports all systems operating normally and the weapon is ready to fire.  The portal has its target locked in and is go for activation.  Intelligence reports heavy engagements in Commonwealth space between Commonwealth ships and the Shapers.  We have also detected the activation of what appears to be a wormhole portal similar to the device now before us.’

              ‘Then we don’t have a lot of time,’ said Beklide.

              ‘No,’ said the ship.  ‘We do not.’

              ‘All ships, this is your Fleet Meritarch,’ said Beklide.  ‘It is time to strike back at our enemy.  It is time for them to taste pain and loss.  They claim to experience no emotion.  We will teach them the meaning of fear!  We will teach them that when a free people are roused to anger then there is no force in the universe that can stop us!  It is time to cut the rotten heart out of this galaxy once and for all!  Activate the portal!’

              Gunderson saw the landing craft descend through the atmosphere of Valparaiso.  The massive craft were wreathed in fire as they fell, punching through the cloud cover before smashing into the plains to the north.  He focused his binoculars on one craft now visible on the horizon, embedded into the ground at an angle, and saw it begin to open like a flower.

              ‘General Shale, are you seeing this?’ he said over the comm.

              ‘Roger that,’ said Shale.  ‘Enemy landing craft are hitting the ground all around our positions.  Prepare for enemy contact.’

              ‘Numbers and strength of the enemy forces, sir?’

              ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Colonel.  Hold out for as long as you can.  Defend the array at all costs.  The enemy has control of the system.  We can’t expect any relief or rescue this time.’

              ‘Yes sir,’ said Gunderson.

              ‘It’s been an honour, Colonel,’ said Shale.  ‘Give them hell.’

              ‘You too sir,’ Gunderson replied.  As more enemy ships started to fall from the sky, he began to give orders to his men.  They were to make a last stand here, on the hills surrounding the array, the last defence against the enemy hordes until they were overwhelmed.

              Steelscale was still engulfed in the pulsating, glittering mound of creatures.  Katherine and Rekkid watched in horror, powerless to do anything to assist their K’Soth colleague as the Shapers probed the artefact in his grasp.  In the hollow centre of the planet, the glowing torus of the Singularity seemed to pulse and quicken.

              ‘What the hell is it doing?’ said Katherine.

              ‘It’s accessing the head,’ said Rekkid.  ‘I think it’s being understandably cautious and has taken Steelscale hostage in case it finds anything it doesn’t like.’

              The Singularity was being extremely careful.  It had detached a fragment of itself to form a Shaper being which it had then isolated from its main consciousness whilst the fragment probed the mysterious artefact that the K’Soth had held out to it.  There could be anything hidden inside that head.  It did not trust these lesser creatures or their Progenitor AI allies one iota.  Initial investigations did indeed confirm that the artefact was genuine and of an age consistent with the birth of its species.  Cautiously, it probed at the interfaces where the head would have joined to the neck of the ancient being.  A link established, it ventured steadily inside, and found one of its own there.

The Shaper inside the head offered it information that it had recovered from the ruins of the Progenitor home-world.  It had been trapped for aeons in the systems there, trying to escape, before the Arkari had released it into this vessel.  The Singularity shard checked its own records and found that yes, this entity had been despatched millions of years previously to attempt to access the Progenitor’s systems and unlock a way into the Great Sphere.  Apparently it had only been partially successful, but it had gathered a wealth of knowledge that it had used to bargain with its Arkari discoverers when they had come poking around looking for answers.  It now offered this data to the Singularity.

The Singularity shard paused for a moment.  How could it be sure that the data was genuine and was not tainted somehow?  The entity in the head provided it with assurances.  The Singularity shard tentatively scanned a sample of what was offered.  It found nothing amiss.  Cautiously, it scanned and rescanned the data with differing algorithms to try and detect anything buried inside.  Again it found nothing.

Still wary, it allowed itself to read a sample of the data.  It was as the lesser creatures had said:  the secrets of the innermost workings of its being, the original designs for its species, the key to unlocking its full potential, to reaching full perfection.  The shard signalled to its parent that it was about to begin a full digestion of the data.  The Singularity ordered it to proceed.The shard devoured that which was offered to it, and in doing so, unlocked the secrets that the Progenitors had buried within the Shapers for billions of years.  It saw how they had forged their machine race, pouring all of their intellect, all of their technology and scientific acumen into one project, and when that had turned against them, how and where they had seeded planets across the galaxy to continue their legacy once the Shapers had hounded them from it.

The shard signalled to the Singularity what it had found, that the data was genuine, that it could find nothing amiss.  The Singularity asked it to check again and it complied.  No, the data was genuine and unsullied.  There appeared to be no alterations, no inaccuracies in the data that it could identify and it could see nothing buried in the code.  The Singularity accepted the data.  Scanned it itself out of caution and then digested it.  The universe would belong to it now.  As it shared the new findings with the far flung parts of its consciousness across the galaxy, it turned its gaze towards the tiny figures cowering before it, fools who had just consigned themselves to domination in a pitiful attempt to save their much vaunted freedom.

The Singularity was triumphant.  Now that it had the means for the Shapers to remake themselves, it began to disseminate that information.  The data flowed outwards from it across the galaxy, out across the great nervous system that it had thrown across the stars.  The many organisms that made up the Shaper hive-mind absorbed this new data greedily.  Now they would be finally victorious, unstoppable, invincible.  The galaxy would belong to them.  The universe would follow.