Rise of the Valkrethi Read online

  The ejection system picked her up and hurled her through the ring. The metal walls of the portal flashed by, and then she hit the vacuum of space. The main ejection phase cut in, and it felt like she’d been slammed across the heels by a giant baseball bat.

  The air whooshed out of her lungs as she sagged back inside the Valkrethi’s servo bay, and she came close to blacking out for a second. Moments later she was far above the moon and racing round the imposing flank of Neptune. She took several deep breaths to calm herself.

  “Activate homing pattern, repeat activate homing pattern!” snapped Cagill’s voice on the open band to all pilots. Celia fumbled for the sensor pad under her fingertips, then remembered this was a verbal command.

  “Set homing pattern,” she said quickly into the helmet, and her Valkrethi immediately veered off to the left and began to decelerate. She could see the others, twinkling in the weak light of the Sun, and came in beside the rest of her research team. It was the oddest of sensations, just floating there in space.

  “Got lost did you?” said Roberto, rather unsympathetically. She wondered whether getting her Valkrethi to kick his Valkrethi in the back of the knee would have any effect on him.

  “Cut the chatter,” said Cagill. “Team leaders report in.”

  When it was clear all the teams were present and correct, it was time to test one of the Valkrethi’s main functions – search and destroy.

  “Activate search function,” said Cagill over the common sub-space link, and Celia moved her hand a fraction to get 180 degree fields to come up on the optics, one for each eye. To her right there was a smattering of traffic around Prometheus, each of the ships marked as green friendlies.

  To her left were three grey neutrals, far apart in a straight line. These were their targets. The neutrals consisted of two disused freighters and a recently decommissioned science station. The research team had been allocated the freighter at the right-hand end of the line.

  “Independent action,” came Cagill’s crisp, clear instructions. “Go get ‘em, Valkrethi.”

  Celia moved her hand again, and a long sinuous thread appeared in her optics, connecting her and the freighter. This was a mechanism similar to the Rothii dipole her shuttle had used when she was part of an exploration party to the Mersa planet, but much more advanced.

  Something ‘greased’ the space between them, or so MacEwart had said, and Celia’s Valkrethi began to slide toward the freighter. It was a way of moving that had a negligible drain on her energy reserves.

  The acceleration increased exponentially, until in a flash she was half way to her target and decelerating sharply. She landed feet first on the freighter hull, and a dull clang reverberated up through her boots.

  Her optics showed the rest of her team approaching equally quickly. She reached down and punched a hole through the metal surface. Then she grabbed the edge of the hole and tore a sheet of metal off the hull.

  A blast of escaping air whistled about the massive form of her Valkrethi, to little effect, and a warning siren started up somewhere in the ship. The life support system on the freighter had detected the escaping atmosphere.

  She pulled herself feet first inside the hole she had made, and found herself in the main cargo bay. Gravitysum was still on, and she landed on the deck with a solid thump. She oriented herself by the freighter’s internal schematics, and strode quickly toward its bridge at the nose.

  On instinct she headed for the door out of the cargo bay, then laughed. Apart from being too small for her now, it was also an unnecessary waste of time. Celia powered through the walls and decks of the freighter without slowing down, leaving arcing power conduits and grotesque metal shapes behind her.

  In a matter of seconds she had reached the bridge. She swept away the star drive, navs and comms consoles with one hand. The freighter shuddered and died. It was now a lifeless hulk in the deeps of space. Weightlessness returned.

  The bridge suddenly shook from side to side, and Celia remembered that her research team were also at work on the freighter. She turned and forced her way back through the carnage she had created.

  She stopped short at the edge of the main cargo bay. The rest of the ship wasn’t there any more. Stars wheeled by as the half-ship turned end over end in space.

  Moving her hand fractionally she brought up the proximity sensors in her optics. It took her a moment to find the aft end of the ship. It was some distance away, and something was systematically shredding it. As she watched, the back half of the freighter disintegrated, and she could see three hulking forms in the middle of a cloud of expanding debris.

  “You won’t get invited over again if you wreck the place,” she said over the closed circuit, the corners of her mouth turning up in a smile.

  “But we do play well with others!” boomed Andre, and the Valkrethi on the right of the group raised a hand in greeting. Celia zoomed the optics in, and indeed a giant face closely resembling Andre’s was grinning back at her.

  Not long after the end of the training exercise they were back in the storage cavern under Prometheus, ready to go over their performance. They had all climbed down from their giant mounts and put them on standby.

  “Always aim for the most vital spot,” Cagill was saying. “The bridge of the ship if you can find it, though we don’t know if the Reaper ships even have one of those. But always go for the largest, most complex, or most heavily populated part of the target you can find.

  “Hubs before spars, bigger hubs before smaller hubs, flagships before Reaper ships, got it?” He was referring to the strange hub and spar construction of the Reaper ships inside their fierce plasma shields.

  There was a universal and vigorous response. All 24 of the pilots were still pumped up after the mayhem they had inflicted during the ‘seek and destroy’ exercise.

  “Ignore anything shooting at you,” said Cagill. “Your shields should take care of it. And remember that the quicker you dig yourself into an enemy ship, the quicker you’ll cease to be a target.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “When are we going up against the Invardii?” asked one of the pilots in Cagill’s group.

  “We don’t know,” said Cagill. “Cordez won’t use us until we can make a decisive difference. He thinks the less the Invardii know about us at this stage the better.

  “For now,” he said, “train hard, get to know your systems, practise thinking on your feet, and become one with your Valkrethi.”

  When the debriefing was over, Celia led her team back to their research labs. Every one of them felt the same ball of knotted tension in their gut. It was a feeling of promise, and a measure of barely contained eagerness. They knew they wouldn’t feel entirely normal again until they had gone into battle against the Invardii ships – and triumphed!

  The research team didn’t know when that would happen, but the fates that determined such things were already moving.

  A great many star systems away, on a medieval planet at the edge of the territory the alliance called its own, strange things were underway. A squad of villagers from a place called Shellport were sailing for a desolate ring of islands called the Barrens, to investigate a report of strange lights under the sea.

  It would lead to the first military action by the Valkrethi against an Invardii base. But they would meet their enemy in the depths of space a number of times before that occurred.

  CHAPTER 3

  ________________

  Menon beached his dooplehuel on a shingle bank at the back of the nearest island. Metris guided another of the sleek craft into the shallows beside him. Three Shellport villagers jumped down from the deck of each, and soon had the long, double hulls off the beach and hidden under branches.

  The hulls were made from the sea forest trees that grew in the freshwater tributaries of the Kapuas river, and the decks were made from the ribs and hide of the giant leviathon that beached themselves each year on the coast north of Shellport.

  The village ha
d been built above the water and between the trees, on the edge of one of the deeper channels, where the villagers had placed their trading docks. The planet had neither tides nor seasons, and the only thing the village had to watch out for was the occasional mild flooding of the river.

  The men checked their equipment, and formed up in a travelling file. They were short, and broad, and bronze in colour. Some had the green highlights of the western islands on their faces and shoulders, but most had the red tints of mainlanders.

  “So far, so good,” muttered Menon to himself.

  The Shellport squad had travelled overland until they encountered a southern militia stronghold three days ago, then requisitioned the two dooplehuel from a coastal village on Hudnee’s orders. Everyone on the small continent had heard of the head of the Shellport militia by now, and whether it was awe, or fear, there were no problems with the request.

  From there the squad had sailed around the coast of the continent until they reached the eastern wastelands. Here a number of rivers formed a vast knot of coastal swamp, deep and impenetrable, until it petered out in a circle of islands known as the Barrens. Noxious ooze from the swamps had worked its way into the shallow sea inside the islands, so that nothing lived there. Sparse, dead grasses covered the rocky islands.

  It was late in the afternoon, and Menon wanted to get a camp set up on one of the highest points before nightfall. He pointed toward the dry, rocky slope before them, and Metris scrambled to the top to get a view of their surroundings.

  He soon discovered the island was an insignificant mound of a place. That meant the squad would have to find another island, with a more commanding outlook, before it got dark.

  Menon sighed. Nothing about their mission was proving easy. He recalled the meeting at Shellport that had sent them off in such haste to the most remote part of the continent.

  “You speak into that thing there and this boss, this head man at the other end, can hear you – even though he’s all the way over on another planet?” said Hudnee, in disbelief.

  “Yes,” said Menona. She had been closest to the pale strangers who had provided medical support in the civil war that had ended when the militia had captured the capital, Roum. So Menona had been the best choice to take over the communications device Feedic and Salaan had left behind. “He’s a mining boss on a planet named Earth. Well, actually he’s not on Earth, but nearby, and ah . . ,” she tailed off. Habna looked up sharply, and made an imperious gesture with her head.

  “His name is Finch, and he’s a master miner, just like you’re a master builder,” said Menona hurriedly. Habna nodded approval.

  “And he says the Invardii . . ,” she continued.

  “Who caused the rains and the changes to our weather, and who the pale ones are fighting,” interrupted Hudnee.

  “Yes,” said Menona. “The ones Earth are fighting, have started landing on some of the planets in the Spiral Arm and mining special minerals called ‘rare earths’.”

  “The Spiral what?’ said Hudnee, lost on a number of the points she was making.

  “That’s not important,” said Habna. “The point is that the lights that have been reported around the eastern wastelands might have something to do with the Invardii.”

  “Who we really don’t like,” said Hudnee with a growl. This much he had grasped firmly. The change in the weather, the loss of whole species of plants and animals, and the deaths of many of the people of his world, were due directly to the Invardii.

  “But there are always lights over the swamps,” said Menon, who had travelled wider and further than most in his lifetime. “Coloured gases bubble up there all the time, and in places there are lights that move over the ooze and through the scrub at night.”

  “Some of these reports are from experienced sailors, Menon,” said Habna, “and they suggest much more than that. You can respect their judgement, can’t you?”

  Menon nodded grudgingly.

  “And swamp lights didn’t take half the skin off that fisherman’s back,” said Habna.

  There was silence in Habna’s front room, where the heads of the Shellport militia often held their meetings. The fisherman’s story was almost too strange to be true.

  Two fishermen had been caught in a wind shift off the southern plateau, and had no choice but to run before the squally weather while it battered them from the south-west. Their dooplehuel had been blown round the southern part of Hud and past the eastern wasteland.

  Sailing back after the blow, they had decided to save half a day by cutting through the Barrens, but darkness found them still some distance from open sea on the other side. Setting up camp on one of the islands they noticed flickering lights under the water, but soon dropped off into an exhausted sleep.

  One of them woke much later to a loud, roaring sound. He saw a glowing orange shape, several times the size of either fisherman, then something hit him with such force that he was knocked unconscious.

  When he came to he was floating in the sea, and one side of his body was a blaze of pain. Barely able to keep afloat, he had struggled toward a dark shape he could see in the pre-dawn light, and just made it to the shore of a small island.

  Later, in daylight, the Barrens looked as if nothing at all had happened, but there was no sign of the other fisherman. When the pain had eased a little he was lucky enough to spot the dooplehuel, floating upside down, and managed to turn it the right way up and bail it out.

  By the time he got back to the southern plateau, and his fishing village, infection had worked its way into the burns that covered one side of his body. He was picked up delirious and severely dehydrated. His recovery had been slow, but news of what had happened to him had travelled quickly through every village on Hud.

  Habna looked meaningfully at Hudnee, knowing this story added weight to what Menona had been saying. “One of head man Finch’s people says that something like this orange shape was recorded on Uruk,” she said, “another planet attacked by the Invardii.”

  “There are people on other planets than Ert?” said Hudnee, bewildered all over again. He had just been getting used to the idea that there were many planets out there, and had not expected there would be ‘people’ of some sort on so many of them. “Are they all similar to the pale strangers who helped us?”

  “Earth,” corrected Habna, “and no, they are not all like the ones from Earth.”

  There was a long silence.

  “But we must act now,” said Menona firmly. Habna nodded in agreement.

  “If Finch and the people of Earth can get more information about what’s happening at the Barrens, they might be able to do something about it.”

  “Just because the civil war on Hud is over,” said Habna, “it doesn’t mean our responsibilities are over. Remember who ruined our weather and started this chain of miseries.”

  “All right, all right!” said Hudnee, throwing his hands up in a gesture of surrender. The only thing worse than being ganged up on by two women, was being ganged up on by two women who were right.

  The war between the Invardii and the rest of the races out there – however many races there were, he thought wonderingly – needed the people of Hud to play their part too. The older members of the militia were on peacekeeping duties among the Descendants, and most of the younger members had volunteered to be pilots for the people of Ert. No, Earth, he corrected himself.

  Battrick, Tumbril, Carakas and the ArchOrdinate were overseeing the town council in Roum, making sure that Hud’s largest population centre ran smoothly. Well, almost smoothly. I’m so glad to be a long way from the politicking in Roum, thought Hudnee gratefully.

  Meanwhile, on the edge of the Barrens, the men Hudnee had sent to investigate the strange reports about the place were trying to find somewhere for a camp. It was particularly important they find a lookout point with a good view across the dry and lifeless islands before them.

  At least they had some idea of what to expect, reflected Menon, as he led the way along
the shore toward another island that looked like it had some height to it. Though the idea of strange underwater lights and towering orange forms wasn’t actually all that useful, he muttered to himself.

  If the fisherman’s story was to be believed, the Invardii base was somewhere in the shallow sea at the heart of the Barrens. It would be a good idea for the Shellport squad to keep their heads down and stay as inconspicuous as possible – and post sentries during the night.

  The stretch from the smaller island to the larger one looked like it would be extremely difficult to traverse. The river they had come in on curved away from the islands from that point on, and would take them no further on their journey. The only way to the next island was across a stretch of undulating ooze, an unappetising route streaked here and there with many-coloured chemical traces and scattered with the silvery-grey of salt bush.

  At least there were no channels of open water to contend with. There were reptilian grud-nak that lived in the poisonous soup. They always came to the sounds of anything crossing a stretch of water in the swamp.

  He suspected they were sensitive to vibration. The bigger ones grew legs and stayed in the more solid parts of the swamp, closer to land – where they often found unwary prey – but the smaller ones were more like an armoured eel. They had tiny limbs that seemed to have no function, scaled skin tougher than herd beast hide, and row after row of impossibly sharp teeth.

  The second island, when the squad finally floundered their way across to it, turned out to be one of the largest in the Barrens. As a bonus they were able to clean the ooze off themselves at the seaward end of it, once they’d hiked around the shoreline past the last of the swamps. Menon and Metris decided to camp in a concealing hollow near the top of the island, and the squad set up for the night.

  Darkness came on quickly, and after a cold meal of pre-soaked grains, seaweed and dried meat, the squad set two sentries for the first shift of the night. They were set at each end of the hollow, and Menon figured they could swap ends every so often to help them stay awake.