Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) (89 page)

‘Not far,’ Isaacs replied.  ‘Just a little longer and then we’re clear.’

They flew onwards in silence for what seemed like an eternity, the tunnel lights whipping by on either side, the sound of the car’s engines reverberating from the walls, and then suddenly they were clear and racing along in the open air.  They breathed a sigh of relief as Isaacs pulled the car off the railway track and then skimmed low, parallel to its course.  They were clear of the city now and were racing through the flat fertile plains to the east that had largely been given over to farmland.

‘Anything?’ said Isaacs.  ‘Are we being followed?’

Steven and Anna peered out of the windows, desperately searching for airborne vehicles tailing them.  Anna looked upwards into a sky beginning to lighten on the horizon.

‘Oh god!’ she gasped.

Keeping his hands on the controls, Isaacs craned his neck quickly to see what she had spotted, and saw the huge crystalline shapes falling from the sky onto the plains around them.  The huge craft wore haloes of fire from their descent as they plummeted through the clouds, using their propulsion fields to brake rapidly, before they slammed into the ground.  One fell into a rice paddy about a kilometre to the left of the car with a thundering crash.  Anna saw the shockwave from its crash landing radiate out across the water-logged fields in a ripple of water and uprooted rice plants, then felt the pressure wave buffet the car.  Another fell another kilometre away still, crushing a grove of trees.

‘What the fuck are those things!?’ said Isaacs, glancing wildly at the craft.

‘Shaper vessels,’ said Steven.

‘I know that, but what
are
they?’

‘They’re landing craft,’ said Steven ominously.  ‘I’ve seen them before, they... each of those things is laden with thousands, if not millions of Shaper creatures.  They’re what the Shapers use when they want to devour a world.  When those things open, an army will spill out and take the city.’

‘Take?’

‘Every man, woman and child within Bolivar City will be seized and implanted by the Shapers.  Then the outlying towns, then the rest of this moon, then they will use their fresh troops to launch an attack upon other worlds, and their legions will continue to grow.  I’ve seen it happen before, on worlds far beyond known space... whole planets turned into charnel houses, whole populations enslaved and... altered.’

Another landing craft smashed down a few hundred metres ahead of the speeding car, throwing up a crater of mud.  Isaacs wrenched the controls, feeling the car buck violently in the backwash as it turned away.  As they streaked past it, they could see the gleaming crystalline panels begin to shift and move, as the ship started to open like a gigantic flower bud ready to bloom.  Isaacs urged the car onwards, speeding away from the craft as more began to fall around them in a cacophony of impacts. 

Things were moving inside the opening craft - leaping, deformed things that scrambled clear, and a spreading stain of darkness leaked from the bizarre, crystalline ships and began to engulf the fields.  As the dawn light caught its moving mass, it glittered, giving an impression of a shifting carpet of insectile forms.

‘Cal, get us the hell out of here,’ said Steven.  ‘Now I know why the enslaved cops didn’t pursue us.  They were just driving us forward like beaters at a hunt.  They were driving us forward into this.’

‘No shit,’ Isaacs replied.

Another landing craft thudded down ahead of them and to the left, splintering the railway line with the impact and sending composite and metal debris pinwheeling into the air.  It sat at an angle for a moment, propped up by the remains of the concrete embankment, before it too started to open and things began to pour out.  Creatures began to move towards the speeding car - altered, predatory things that sprang forward at great speed or propelled themselves through the air on insectile wings.  They were things that had been taken by the Shapers from some distant world in the galaxy and remade into living weapons.  Steven saw them approaching.

‘Cal, take us higher.  They’ve seen us!’ he barked as a swarm of giant beetle-like things swooped in.  They were the size of Alsatians, with iridescent carapaces pierced by the grotesque machinery of the Shapers, and mandibles that had been augmented with razor sharp blades.  As Isaacs pulled the car higher, out of reach of the leaping things on the ground, the beetle-creatures dove in, attempting to latch on to the cowlings and fairings at the rear of the vehicle.

Steven pulled out his pistol and started firing out of the rear window at the armoured things.  They seemed quite resilient to being shot.  Though his bullets hit home and black ichor oozed from bullet holes in those shiny carapaces, the chittering things were able to take several hits before they died, even when shot at point blank range into their sensor covered heads.  Anna joined in, adding her fire to Steven’s own, but the things had learnt now and were landing on the roof of the vehicle instead.  Above the noise of the engines and the howl of the wind, they could be heard scrabbling for purchase on the metal, and then insectile limbs and antennae began to appear at the windows.  Steven and Anna continued to fire, knocking some of the creatures off into the night, but more were landing all the time.

Isaacs tried desperate manoeuvres to shake the things off, weaving the car violently from side to side, and up and down, even flipping the vehicle briefly upside down, to the consternation of his passengers in an attempt to dislodge the creatures.  They were cutting their way into the car’s systems now.  Creatures clinging to the underside of the vehicle were gnawing with those razor sharp mandibles at power lines and couplings, working their way into the guts of the car’s engines.  Isaacs felt the vehicle start to die.  The weight of the creatures was already dragging the vehicle down, and now as its systems started to fail, Isaacs fought to control it.

More Shaper craft were hitting the plain behind them, punching through the clouds lit by the first fingers of early morning light and slamming home into the rolling fields all around the city in clouds of dust and debris.  Ahead, the way was clear.  The car sagged, the engine note falling and changing from a constant roar to an irregular sputter.  Steven and Anna were still firing at the beetle things, which were now trying to clamber inside the stricken vehicle, reaching towards them with questing limbs.  Their chittering was growing louder.

They were reaching the edge of the fields.  The fringes of the jungle were visible as a darker mass in the half light.  Isaacs grappled with the controls, struggling to keep the car aloft, but he was fighting a losing battle against gravity.  The car sank lower and lower, and the tree-tops were rushing by close enough to touch.

‘Hang on!’ Isaacs heard himself shout as branches reached up to claim the speeding car and it pitched over, plunging down into the greenery and the darkness within.

Isaacs came to and groaned.  He was upside down, and the seatbelts still holding him into his seat were cutting into his shoulders.  There was the sound of gunfire, then hands grabbing him, releasing him and pulling him free from the wrecked vehicle.  He was still groggy.  There was a figure standing over him and another seated on the ground to his right.  The standing figure held a gun.

‘Cal?  You okay?  Cal, it’s Steven.’

‘Sure.  I’m fine... I...  Where’s Anna?’

‘She’s right beside you.  A little shaken up, but she’s okay.  Listen, the crash saved our arses.  Most of the Shaper creatures were knocked off and killed by the impact or were swept off by the vegetation as we hit.  I took care of the survivors, but we need to move now, before more arrive to look for us here.  Can you both walk?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ Isaacs rose unsteadily to his feet.  He reached down and helped Anna.  ‘You okay?’

‘Sure, yeah.  Hitting a tree at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour was an experience I won’t forget in hurry.  Thank god for that car having the latest in crash safety fields.’

‘Hey, I only let Steven steal the best cars.  Right?’ said Isaacs, trying a few cautious steps.

‘Right,’ said Steven.  ‘Enough chit chat.  I’ve got a fix on our position.  Hopefully the dense undergrowth will mask our presence a bit.  Let’s move.’

They scrambled desperately through the jungle, sticking to the lowest levels of the tree covered ravines where the dense vegetation grew thickest and dripped with moisture from the morning dew.  Fear drove them onwards through the difficult terrain, fear of the things that hunted them.

Behind them, towards the city, more landing craft thumped to earth and disgorged their cargoes as the city was consumed by the Shapers.  A swarm of things descended upon the wreck of the car, the vehicle already grabbed in the embrace of fast growing vines.  The enslaved creatures searched the area for clues, but the jungle made tracking the bio-signs of the humans difficult amidst the abundant plants and animals that confused their sensors with heat traces, conspired to fill their olfactory detectors with strange hormonal secretions and perfumes and filled the air with a blanketing cacophony of sounds.  The chittering creatures fanned out, sweeping the area with sensor cluster eyes as they tried to penetrate the forest depths. 

Steven, Isaacs and Anna stuck to the heaviest cover, hoping against the odds that the tangles of moist vegetation, closely packed trees and overhanging cliffs would confound their foe.  For hours they ran and slithered amidst the muck, becoming caked in slime until the stink of rotting vegetation that hung heavy in the air permeated everything, mingling with the sweat that poured off them as they fled.

The bloated Achernar star had climbed high into the sky by the time the three bedraggled figures emerged from the jungle and crept cautiously towards the concealed entrance of the Hidden Hand base.  A fourth figure emerged from the rocks ahead of them, dressed in camouflage fatigues and gripping a long barrelled rail rifle.

‘Took your time,’ said Maria.  ‘Lucky it was me on watch.  Some of others are getting jumpy after what just happened out there.’

‘You saw the landing?’ gasped Isaacs, struggling for breath, wild eyed and dripping with sweat.

‘Uh huh.  I reckon it’s time we got outa here.’

‘Not yet,’ said Steven.  ‘You still have the secure comm?’

‘Sure. What do you think we are: careless?’

‘I need to use it now.  I need to warn Command about what’s happening here, before everything we hold dear is annihilated.’

‘Better come inside,’ said Maria as two more Hidden Hand emerged from their hiding place equipped with guns and scanning devices. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ Maria added and let out a low whistle.  ‘Jesus, Isaacs.  You look like shit.’

‘Nice to see you too, Maria,’ said Isaacs, as he submitted to the scanning.  As Maria got to work he looked upwards into the sky and saw the ring clutched in the grip of the massive Shaper ship.  High above the atmosphere, it gleamed in the sunlight as light glinted also from the multitude of ships that surrounded it and continued to stream out of it.

Chapter 49

Under its own power at last, the Executioner Cannon floated free.  It was a strange and ungainly looking thing, long and fluted for much of its length, then swelling to bulbous reactors that clustered around its end like over-ripe fruit at the end of a slender branch.  It manoeuvred itself into position slowly, fins and rills sculling against space time.  Those fins had been adapted from the wings that powered Arkari destroyers through space and were of a similar size, yet were dwarfed by the two thousand kilometre long weapon, appearing as tiny, waving nubs by comparison.

The cannon finally came to rest in its firing position.  Sculling fins fine tuned its aim.  In front of it, its target lay waiting: the Arkari constructed portal floating at the Lagrange point between the twin suns of the Orakkan system.

Beklide paced the bridge of the
Sword of Reckoning
as her busy crew hurried to and fro.  The ship was one of hundreds now gathering in the Orakkan system, not only naval vessels preparing for the coming assault and here to witness the test firing of the new weapon, but also those carrying selected members of the Meritarch Council.  The Arkari were still nervous about using their neural links to effect tele-presence at remote locations and, although it was a trivial matter to view the event from elsewhere in the sphere, where dignitaries were required or chose to attend they must do so in person.

Beklide cast her eye over the holographic data displays that floated free at the front of the bridge, surrounding a main display that currently depicted the cannon hanging in front of the portal, the scene bathed in the light from the binary suns and annotated with icons.  Everything seemed to be in order, though there was something strangely obscene about the sight of the gun and the portal.  At first she put it down to some odd, sexual connotation, but then decided that the sight of a gun theoretically capable of destroying worlds was simply deeply unsettling in itself.

‘I don’t think I ever asked where the design for this weapon came from,’ said Beklide, addressing the ship. ‘What sort of thinking led us to design such a terrible thing?’

‘
We
didn’t design it,’ replied the ship.  ‘We only modified an original design to suit our technology.  I did some digging: the schematics for this weapon were stolen by our agents from the archives of the Esacir Bubble City Farrianas.  They, in turn, had discovered it in the ruins of a long dead world during a rare exploratory mission towards the galactic rim.  Apparently, the device was originally known as the World Breaker.  The original was much smaller, only a hundredth of the size, but our energy generation and spatial distortion technologies are not up to the task of constructing such a compact device.  There is some evidence in the records that we have subsequently uncovered of such devices being deployed by the Shapers in the war against the Progenitors.  Whether any were ever actually used is unknown.  Certainly we have not encountered such devices among current Shaper forces. Perhaps those among them who possessed the knowledge of their construction have been eliminated, victims of their internecine conflicts following the defeat of the Progenitors.  Some have suggested that the weapons bear the hallmarks of Progenitor construction and were merely stolen by the Shapers to be used against them.’