Maty Read online

  The entry point was not a cupola, merely a cavity that led to sunken stairs capped by the shield dome to secure it against falling debris most likely, for they were under several miles of planetary rock, with a few support spires visible in the distance where the Hadarak infestation had been cleared out all the way to the rocky walls. Meaning the stone in this area had either been excavated by the Hadarak, or by those who had built this relic…or a combination thereof.

  Whoever had built it had left these access points for a reason, and as Kyra passed through the shield without resistance, she got a very biological foreboding as to what lay inside. Something that Nevantha commented on as she descended inside following a stream of attack drones that would spring any traps well ahead of her before she could get to them and endanger herself…

  3

  There were Hadarak infestations everywhere, reaching into the facility like the roots on a tree, and where each root went it ended in an interface terminal. The Hadarak were actively using the facility and were plugged into it by a means that was not readily apparent until Nevantha’s drones cut apart and dissected the interface tissue.

  Somehow they had grown mechanical components into their biological tissue in order to establish a hardline connection…but that was easy enough to remove on the node Kyra came to first as many were being cleared out simultaneously. No Hadarak minions were present. Just the tissue growths. So Kyra had time to herself as she swept away some of the gore over an odd-looking triangular port set high above an interface screen with many virtual buttons.

  It hadn’t been covered, at least not entirely, for the Hadarak tissue had been plugged into the triangle port along with several others on the sides. Kyra scanned them all, then decided to go for the main port up top as she peeled back the armor over her Human hand and the tips of her fingers broke open with a splattering of blood that quickly sealed off. Out from her fingers little mechanical tendrils extended into the triangular port as she attempted to reconfigure them in a manner that would give her at least partial access.

  She failed multiple times until Nevantha stepped in and analyzed the mechanism, then he fed her the data on the best configuration her limited hardware would allow, but it was enough to establish a connection.

  Her mind split, with part watching her surroundings and the other going into the machine world inside…only to find it was enormous. This wasn’t just a facility of strategic importance. It was a city designed for living software…except it was totally empty and in powered-down mode. It told her as much as a program greeted her arrival and inquired as to how it could be of service at typical software speeds, meaning the conversation took less than a second.

  Kyra got the basic layout of the physical facility, the virtual one, and a brief history of the Hadarak presence here and before that, at which time Nevantha requested control of her body…which she granted, peeling back her defensive blocks and allowing herself to serve as a conduit for his enormous intellect.

  It burned her, for there was so much data passing through her both ways that she couldn’t mentally keep up with it all, nor the speed of the transfer, but Kyra tried to assimilate as much as she could without blacking out…which would stop Nevantha’s connection, for she did not have override technology in her for him to use. That had been a reward of her rescue of him. So if she blacked out his connection would be cut until one of the drones plugged into another interface terminal.

  A machine race…one that could reproduce technologically…predating Hadarak invasion…succumbed to natural disaster…forced to leave galaxy…toxic radiation…killed any who remained behind…infrastructure remaining…overlooked by Hadarak until recently…used to produce surveillance drones...low lag data feeds from multiple systems…Hadarak unable to access majority of facility’s purpose…

  Handshakes were made, passcodes hacked, databases explored. Nevantha was pouring through the high level security the Hadarak could barely understand, let alone crack, and even though it was foreign technology operating on physics that were beyond the PanNari computer technology, he learned quickly and efficiently…and within an hour he had full combat command of the complex as the battle above the planet grew more dire.

  Before Kyra got a summary from the Elloquim, courier ships were launched from Nevantha’s hull and raced through the battlelines heading for the binary stars at system center carrying an urgent message for the PanNari.

  Nevantha was ordering the other Elloquim and all PanNari assets to immediately retask to this location in order to hold it permanently. The future of their race depended upon it…

  Kyra fired her beam cannons, one from each shoulder mount, at the small, fast moving Hadarak minions pouring down the now sealed access shaft from the surface through the cracks as bipedal drones processed rubble from the cavern ceiling on the exterior of the Gahana Complex and turned it into makeshift building material to cover the entrance. Kyra and several combat drones too large to enter held perimeter as the fast moving ‘zerglings,’ as Star Force called them, rushed to get at them as they fell like rain out of the sidewall where the orbital bombardment from Nevantha had collapsed Kyra’s escape route just prior to his escape from orbit.

  The Hadarak were too many in this system for him to take alone…or at least in stationary combat. He needed to use strategy to defeat them, and standing still was not the best way to do it. Kyra had lost her link to him, but her mission was clear.

  Hold the Gahana Complex until reinforcements arrived. Protect Cranium Tovi, who was now inside the Complex and plugged into an interface port with drones building defenses around his vulnerable position as he sought to activate the factories inside the complex to produce Gahana defense drones…but that would take hours at the minimum, even if he knew how to operate the equipment. Learning was taking time, for he was not as robust in intelligence or processing power as an Elloquim was, but Tovi was far better suited to the task than Kyra, and together they were the only two living PanNari left on the planet along with an army of their own dwindling machinations that seemingly endless Hadarak units were slowly diminishing through attrition.

  Kyra couldn’t seal all the entrances…the complex was far too large for that…but they could lock down the ones nearest to Tovi, at least temporarily, and as soon as she got the signal from the Craniem she stopped firing, turned around and ran towards the barely Human-sized hole left in the entrance aperture.

  She dove through it head first, with the drones sealing it over from the outside as well as in, stranding themselves and the combat models above the complex as they continued to build layer after layer onto the blockage and killing more and more minions until the inevitable occurred and they were overwhelmed…but that wouldn’t happen immediately, and Kyra was not expendable. Nevantha had decreed as much before he left, mandating that she preserve herself at all costs, even if it meant abandoning the immobile Tovi who was nothing more than a two meter wide sphere at this point that was now firmly attached to the structure…meaning he couldn’t run if he wanted to. And Nevantha didn’t want Kyra dying to stay with him if it came to that.

  The QuipNari was inside now, temporarily safe, and she took off running through the alien corridors enroute to her next assignment with Tovi virtually showing her the way with floating orbs overlaid onto her biological vision.

  When she got to her destination the wavy ceiling architecture caught her attention as the ripples of light flowed up and down the curves in a pattern than suggested information rather than decoration, but she couldn’t figure it out in the 7.2 seconds she allowed herself. For her objective was right before her.

  There were 18 machines parked on the flat floor, all of which were quadruped, and Tovi’s direction was leading her to the red one third in the first row.

  Kyra ran towards it and jumped halfway up, grabbing hold of the crystalline nubs on the side panels and climbing the rest of the way to the top where she had to reconfigure her hand again to plug into a much smaller port. Tovi fed her the correct ac
cess codes that he had dug up…or more precisely Nevantha had dug up the protocols and fed them to him to explore further…in order to activate the combat machine, with a rectangular panel sliding open at the base of the neck that connected to the mechanical head.

  Inside was simply a cargo hold that would support the pilot. It hadn’t been designed for a biological body, but Kyra was small enough that she could fit…barely. She had to contort herself up into a fetal position in order to get low enough for the hatch to seal over her, but with her hand linking to a hardware slot inside, she let her mind disconnect from her cramped body and interface with the machine.

  Suddenly she was the machine, and quadruped, well armored, with new weaponry, sensors, and movement capabilities…as well as passcodes for many of the automated defenses Tovi was starting to get online by tripping various alarms after Nevantha had left with his larger intellect. It took Kyra several minutes to process the new software and create a cross link with her own biological brain. It wasn’t a new trick she had to learn, but every unfamiliar system took time to learn and form a handshake with, and this one was so advanced she didn’t fully understand what she was bonding with. Just that the pathways were there if she could expand her consciousness into them sufficient for the processing required.

  Kyra barely qualified, but the machine…known as a Kel’zat…woke up, with her realizing she wasn’t going to be driving so much as directing, for the automated programming was so advanced it behaved as if it was alive, yet there was no one inside. It was all carefully crafted software, but this software was more intelligent than her…or more precisely it had been written by those more intelligent than her…so she assumed the role of navigator and directed the Kel’zat to move towards the nearest unsecured entrance.

  It lurched into an awkward run that smoothed out considerably as the machine legs that hadn’t been moved in a very long time self-lubricated enroute, darting out of the storage area and down the highway-like corridors and up ladder shafts that the quadruped climbed with ease as its feet were designed to fit onto the rungs that would be hard, if not impossible for the zerglings to climb when they got here.

  On and on it ran until they finally came into contact with the enemy a few miles short of the entrance, though some of the tentacles from the surface were visible branching out down the corridor ahead, and a swarm of Zerglings were traveling down it like ants sticking to a tree branch.

  Kyra identified the targets as hostiles, then just rode along as her body registered damage from the extreme maneuvering. She didn’t feel it, exactly, but the warning prompted her to look for and find a dampening mechanism to soften the jostling to what would have been an elongated cube of the Gahana version of a Craniem.

  The warnings parred down, though they did not totally go away, but that was irrelevant as they were not in the critical range. Her body might get bounced around a bit, but with the dampeners she would live. The Hadarak minions would not, and the ferocity of the way the Kel’zat fought was awe inspiring. Kyra had never seen a drone move in such a natural, spontaneous way. She ran the movements through motion calculation, trying to backtrack to the parameters being used to generate them, but she could not detect an identifiable pattern. It was almost as if this Kel’zat was alive and had the ability to improvise, but that was impossible without a Core.

  Nevertheless, it was effective. Shooting the Zerglings as often as stepping on and smashing them, with shield walls for containment and pushing to make sure they didn’t get past it under its legs. It had anti-biological weaponry that it used when the numbers increased to swarm levels, with swaths of energy billowing out like a cloud that melted the organic components on contact, and blanketing the floor in a river of goo that it trampled as it continued to move and smash more of them all the way up to the nearest tendril.

  It melted it too, with a river rush of liquefied Hadarak running down the corridor and passing through the containment shields where it was of no threat, but with pieces sticking on the shield and being shot when otherwise.

  This was a pre-programmed purge operation. Kyra knew it before even looking it up, and she was getting quite the spectator’s view as she rode along inside as the Kel’zat worked its way through the Hadarak growths all the way up to the entrance that had a small bore hole in it that was allowing the minions through. They must have cut it themselves, but a blast from the ‘liquefier’ cleaned it out entirely, yet the Kel’zat was too big to go up to the top, though Kyra could see through its sensors the shield dome up top covering it…and sensing when it suddenly became opaque and hard, blocking out the Hadarak beyond as the Kel’zat gave the order without her telling it to.

  Then it inquired as to their next objective. Kyra’s biological eyebrows raised inside her faceplate, wondering again how such programing could behave like a living being, but her task wasn’t to wonder. It was to secure Tovi and survive until Nevantha could return with reinforcements. And to that end, she signaled the Kel’zat to move to the next closest entrance and repeat the purge and seal process that only one at the location could enact, for Tovi was informing her he had no remote command over the shield gates covering the entrances.

  The Gahana had engineered this place for lack of central command. Meaning you had to be physically at certain locations in order to operate them. That was why the Hadarak didn’t have access to most of the system and potential of this complex.

  And that also explained why they had been branching out tendrils in certain directions. They couldn’t have discovered this place that long ago, otherwise they would have infested the entire facility by now…

  No, the Kel’zat told her, for somehow it was monitoring her mind. Certain areas of the complex had automated purging protocols if certain codes were not given. The Hadarak could not spread to the entire facility without those codes.

  Kyra ran a timestamp analysis on the available records, realizing the Hadarak had been here for years, but not millennia. This was a new find, but they were already using it to create surveillance drones, interstellar-class, that had a cloaking technology that defied PanNari science…and probably Star Force’s as well if they hadn’t picked up this monitoring before. And if they had they would have shut it down and the efficiency of Hadarak movements in the cataloged area would have decreased again.

  And it hadn’t.

  But why would the Hadarak be able to interface and create these machines if the rest of the complex was off limits?

  The Kel’zat answered that as well, telling her that this place had access available for biologicals, but only so far in that they could see data. Weapons and other systems were not the privilege of the public.

  That was when something from before collated. Nevantha had offhanded mentioned it, but she was so overloaded she hadn’t realized what he had meant in his summary.

  This place was a library, meant for public access to the machine and biological races of this region of the galaxy to utilize. And the Hadarak were being allowed to do just that within the confines of the facility’s purpose.

  And clandestine monitoring of systems without their knowledge was essential in maintaining the peace between civilizations with less than honest disclosures.

  The Gahana had been a machine race of peacekeepers. Wiped out by a cataclysm…something to do with the Core of the galaxy. Some spike of radiation that would erase their hard drives and kill them. Many had died, and the rest fled. Leaving behind this Library…and others…for the biologicals to use.

  But the PanNari were not biological. At least not the Elloquim. And that’s why Nevantha had been given essentially full access.

  And if they could step in and assume the mantle of the Gahana, they would inherit everything they left behind…which was far more advanced than their technology now.

  A very biological shiver ran down Kyra’s spine again as it finally sank in how important this was, above and beyond denying it to the Hadarak and discovering another machine race. This was a potential leap forward for the PanNa
ri if they could hold onto it…and it was going to take more than one Elloquim to do it even if the Hadarak didn’t send reinforcements from other systems.

  And they would.

  Which meant the PanNari’s part of the push to the Core was going to happen early, and this system had just become the more important in the galaxy for them.

  And they weren’t going to lose it.

  4

  May 3, 154958

  Jamtren System (V’kit’no’sat Capitol)

  Holloi

  Mak’to’ran didn’t like being away from the Grand Border. His destiny was in combat there, but in order to lead the V’kit’no’sat in their mandate to defend Star Force’s inner border, he had to do a great many more things that lead a fleet in combat against the Hadarak…which he did often, but by design the Grand Border took care of itself with each individual system being fully capable of holding its own in most cases.

  In the cases where that was not so, a reinforcement system had been established that would respond immediately from nearby strongholds and roaming fleets. Mak’to’ran had made sure not to have a static map of forces for the Hadarak to somehow ascertain, for their intelligence-gathering still eluded him. They knew too much, and there was no chance of saboteurs and spies on the Grand Border. Everyone there was elite V’kit’no’sat from all of their 194 races, each of which was tasked with a piece of the Grand Border to hold on their own or in groups. And they had held it intact from its inception to this day, denying the Hadarak their continuing carnage and protecting all of the Rim and half of the Core.

  But they were savvy, and Mak’to’ran’s job had not been an easy one. If continual adjustments were not made, breakthroughs would have occurred long ago. The pressure on the boarder was continually increasing as more and more units were being drawn from other galaxies. But at the same time the Star Force pressure was also gradually increasing, and sooner or later one side was going to grasp and cripple the other. Mak’to’ran knew it had to be Star Force to make the first move, but until they were ready he had to hold the line firmly, and the best place he could do that from was Holloi.