Death to the Imperium (Imperium Cicernus) (21 page)

“So
everyone dies?” Glitz said.

“On
the contrary. According to my predictions, a small percentage of the human race
will survive—most likely through building secret underground dwellings. After
the fall of the Weerms, the human race will re-emerge. And, like the new life
which grows from the ashes of a forest fire, the shoots of the human race will
begin once again to flourish. But the tyranny of the Imperium will be no more,
and humans will have a chance to build a
better
galaxy!”

“You’re
insane!” Alyce spat.

Ozytan
started to laugh again. The Weerm had backed them into a corner. He was still
advancing very slowly—but they would be dead within seconds. There
was
a
way to stop the creature, but could she do it?
Yes
, Alyce thought
firmly.
It’s either him or us. I have no choice…

But
then Doland suddenly turned, and began instead to advance towards the force
vault in which Ozytan was sitting. “Ozytan,” he hissed, through jagged teeth,
“I remember you. I can’t… remember everything… even my name… I don’t remember…
but I know you. You did this to me!”

Doland
lifted a clawed arm and thrust it into the force vault. It had no effect at
all, and he quickly walked through the membrane. Clearly, the technology was not
effective against the Weerms, who had a much tougher exterior. Glitz realised
what Doland was about to do.

“No!”
he yelled. “We need him! We need him to stop the machine!”

But
there was not enough of Doland left in the creature to reason on the matter. He
had become an unreasoning, vicious brute—a brute who vaguely remembered that
Ozytan was to blame for his transformation. The creature Doland lashed out at
Ozytan with a fierce claw, piercing his stomach—his intestines began to
unravel…

“You
can’t stop the transmogrifier,” Ozytan said weakly. “I’ve won! The Imperium…
the Imperium will fall…”

He
collapsed, dead, his innards spilling out onto the ground. Doland picked up the
fleshy mass of organs with a clawed hand, and lifted it into his mouth,
savouring the taste of fresh blood. It only took less than a minute for Doland
to finish the whole corpse, and then there was nothing left of Ozytan. Then,
after finishing his starter, Doland climbed through the force vault to get his
main course.

“Doland,”
Alyce said nervously. “Doland! It’s us! Your friends!”

But
of course it was no use. Doland continued to advance. Glitz felt sweat beads
forming on his neck and torso, and his forehead was moist. Was this the end?
Were they going to be murdered and eaten by their friend? Or were they going to
have to kill him? It certainly looked like they only had one of those two
options. Tekka kept his exterior calm, but he was just as frightened as the
others. They all had their sonic rifles lifted, aimed at Doland. They walked
backwards out of the door, exiting the storage room and entering the connected
corridor. The Weerm followed them… then it leapt forward… slicing out with its claws…

Alyce
fired the sonic rifle. A split-second before the sonic beam touched Doland, he
fell forwards onto the floor. Because of his collapse, Alyce assumed that the
beam had made contact, and that the weapon had killed him. Doland was lying
face forward on the floor. Then he stirred.

“Doland?”
Alyce said, edging forward carefully, still pointing her sonic rifle.

The
man thrust out a hand towards her. It was pale and white—a human hand. Slowly,
Doland lifted himself back to his feet. His skin was no longer dark and
reptilian; the process had reversed itself, and he was human again. Glitz and
Alyce simply stared at him, bewildered. They had assumed that he had gone for
good.

“What
happened to me?” Doland said weakly. “I feel… I feel terrible. And I have a
funny taste in my mouth…”

Alyce
turned to Tekka. “What
did
happen?”

“It
seems that our little trip to Mazaroth wasn’t wasted after all. Remember, we
underwent the transmogrification procedure at the hands of Shaitana, in a bid
to avoid Imperial detection. I would guess that Shaitana made a slip-up with
Doland’s transmogrification—perhaps he used some unstable nanoliquid. Doland’s
DNA was, I assume, altered sufficiently to render his DNA strand quite
different from that of a normal human. And remember, Ozytan’s
transmogrification machine is designed to alter
human
DNA. I would guess
that the transmogrification could only be partially successful in Doland’s
case, and so he reverted to normal form after a short duration.”

“What
do you mean,
normal form
?” Doland asked suspiciously.

Before
Tekka could answer, they heard a cry of pain. It had come from the direction of
the control room. “No time,” Alyce said. “We’ll explain later.” She wasn’t
looking forward to explaining; how would Doland react when he realised that she
had been ready to kill him? If she had fired even half a second earlier, it
might have been a completely different story. He might have died.

“Come
on,” she said. “To the control room.”

Alyce,
Glitz, Doland and Tekka made their way to the control room as quickly as
possible, and dived through the main doors. They were met with an alarming
sight. Three snarling Weerms in Marine uniforms were standing in the centre of
the room, each pointing a sonic rifle, and each facing out to a different part
of the control room. Some of the human Marines were pointing rifles back at them;
it was clearly a stand-off.

“They
just
changed
!” the Admiral said, when he noticed Alyce enter the room.
One of the Weerms had a rifle pointed straight at his chest. His eyes flickered
to her face, almost pleadingly. “Please tell me you know what’s going on.”

“I
have some idea,” Alyce said quietly. When they had entered the control room,
they had stepped directly into the line of fire of one of the Weerms. They
would not be able to move another inch without being gunned down, presuming
that the creatures remembered how to fire the weapons. She would have to make
that assumption; to assume otherwise could mean the end of their lives.

Right
now, it looked like none of them might leave the station alive.

Alyce
and Glitz had entered the control room first, and they were pointing their
rifles directly at the trio of Weerms. A single shot might, in theory, be
enough to wipe out the three creatures. The sonic blasters had proven
themselves in testing to have a fairly wide range of impact. But Alyce could
see the Weerms’ reptilian fingers hovering a hair’s breadth from their own
triggers. And one of the Weerms had its weapon pointed straight at them. If she
fired her weapon, the Weerm was likely to fire too—and the laser energy would
certainly kill one of them, if not all of them. It was too fine a chance.

And
yet what alternative was there? They could not stand like this all day.
Eventually, someone was going to tire. If someone was going to shoot first, it
should be her. With a bit of luck, the creatures might be destroyed before they
managed to fire. It was a long shot, though, she knew that. She wished there
was some way of secretly communicating with the others, but it would be
impossible. It was clear that the converted Weerms retained their ability to
speak Galactic Standard One. If only there was a way to reason with the things…
she knew that the Weerms were savage and malevolent, but perhaps there was
still some human goodness buried in the back of their minds. After all, they
had been human only minutes before. The creatures were still wearing Marine
uniforms. If she did kill them, she would be killing Imperial troops… she
shuddered…

“We
mean you no harm,” she said, as calmly as she could manage, without moving her gun
an inch. “If you lower your weapons, we will lower ours. Then we can talk
things over, and come to some agreement.” She paused, but there was no reply
from the Weerms. “Is this acceptable to you?” she prompted.

“No
bargaining…” the Weerm hissed, revealing his pointed teeth. “Anyone not of our
species will be destroyed. No exceptions, no deals, no mercy.”

So
it seemed there was no chance of reasoning with the things. It was to be
expected, of course. The Weerms had developed on a world where all other
existent life was harmful to them—they had evolved to trust no other species,
and to believe that their survival could only be ensured by wiping out all
others. These Weerms may originally have been human, but the fear of other
species was clearly hard-wired into their very genetic makeup. In a way, she
felt sorry for them… even more so because they had used to be human. But there
was no room for sympathy in war.

Alyce
swallowed, her finger brushing the trigger. If she fired, and the Weerm facing
her fired too, she would almost certainly die. But if she waited any longer, it
might fire anyway, and she would still be dead. Sometimes, you just have to
take the risk, even if the chances of survival seem microscopic.

“I
love you, Glitz,” she murmured quietly, and pulled the trigger—

The
beam of sonic energy shot out—and made contact with the trio of Weerms. It
pierced their tough flesh, ravaging their cells. As the creatures fell to the
ground, the Weerm facing Alyce fired its own rifle, and a burst of projected
laser energy streamed towards them. But, collapsing, the creature didn’t aim
the rifle correctly, and the beam collided harmlessly with the wall of the
control room. The three creatures buckled finally into a lifeless heap.

“You
did it!” the Admiral shouted. “You killed them!”

“Don’t
congratulate us just yet,” Alyce said grimly. “Unless we do something, a third
of the human race will turn into those things. She turned to Tekka. “How long
do we have?”

“Ozytan
stated that the transmogrification cloud is set to radiate out from this
station,” Tekka observed. “We have perhaps twenty minutes to stop it. I expect
that the nanobots will pause at the wormhole and wait for a freighter or some
such to pass through. The nanobots will enter it at the same time, and then
nothing will be able to stop their progress.” He paused, trying to think of a
simple way to express the function of the transmogrification cloud. “It is like
a software patch. The nanobots—spreading out through the galaxy by means of the
wormhole network—will transmogrify a third of all humans to fit in with the new
genetic template, which happens to be that of the Weerm. This was Ozytan’s plan
all along; the idea was not to use the Weerms as foot soldiers, but to turn a
third of us
into the Weerms
.”

“OK,
so how do we stop it?”

Tekka
frowned. “The transmogrification controls must be somewhere on this station. We
are nearest the machine, so we began to be affected first. But the nanobots
will quickly spread out from this point of origin.
We must stop the machine
before the nanobot cloud can reach the wormhole
. The machine will be
something big, very big indeed…” He glanced around; there was nothing
resembling the device he was looking for. But if the device wasn’t located in
the control room, then where was it?

Alyce
racked her brains. She had memorised the full schematic of the station, and she
went over it mentally, trying to decide which would be the most likely place to
store a giant machine.

She
turned to Tekka. “
How
big is this machine?”

“I
would estimate the height of the device to be at least sixty Imperial metres.
He must have built it using cannibalised parts from this control room, as well
as some external materials.”

Glitz
whistled, and Alyce once again ran over the schematics in her head. If the
machine really was so large, there was only one logical place for it to be. She
beckoned urgently to Glitz, Tekka and Doland. “Come with me!” She turned to the
Marines. “Lieutenant, we need your men too.”

“Certainly.
Men, with me!”

They
followed Alyce as she led them to one of the anti-gravity elevators, which were
used as the primary intrastation transport. They all stepped inside the wide
opening; as soon as they passed the threshold, it was as if they had become
suspended in the air. There was no floor inside the lift, because there didn’t
need to be. They worked by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, which
had the effect of neutralising the artificial gravity. Thus, the neutron flow
could then be distorted in either direction, allowing you to travel up or down.
Alyce hit the bottom arrow on the controls. They were going down—all the way
down. They floated right down to the bottom of the elevator, and Alyce led them
out.

“What
is this place?” Glitz breathed.

They
had entered a sort of massive cylindrical hangar, the ceiling of which was particularly
high. The circular wall was covered in millions of tiny glass panels, all of
which were marked with small holo-printed labels. Alyce had the extraordinary
feeling of being inside a giant tube, a tube which was covered in glass
compartments. The hangar was lit by bright white artificial lights.

“This
is the Archive Chamber,” she said.

There
was no time to explain its purpose further, but she was not so much interested
in the Archive as what lied in the centre of it. In the very middle of the
hangar, there stood a colossal machine, which was protected by a field of
crackling energy. It was a force vault, Alyce realised. The only way to get
past it was to disable it somehow. The machine was clearly made up of largely
stolen components from the station; Tekka clearly recognised an
Imperium-produced splicer and sequencer in the mesh of cables and circuitry.

“This
is it,” Tekka said, nodding. “This is Ozytan’s machine. Unless we can disable
it, a third of the human race will turn into Weerms very soon. But how can we…”

He
circled the force vault, attempting to located the power source. He cursed when
he realised that it was being powered by an antimatter battery right at the top
of the hangar, well out of reach. If they were to disable the power, they would
have to find some way to reach the top. Perhaps they could switch off the
artificial gravity temporarily.
No
, he thought, shaking his head.
That
would simply cause the force vault to destabilise and destroy us all
. So
how would they stop it? Force vaults were designed to be the ultimate security,
he knew. He
could
technically step through it, but he would certainly
die. Even the most heavily augmented human could not survive the ravages of the
field.

“What
do we do, Captain?” Lieutenant Jameson asked, turning to Alyce. He looked
desperate. His skills were in ground combat, in fearlessness in battle, in
keeping his men in prime fighting condition. When it came to highly technical
operations, he left it to the experts.

Alyce
shook her head stiffly. “I don’t know. I just don’t know…”

One
of the Marines fell to his knees, howling in pain. The other commandos went to
his aid, but jumped back, horrified, when they realised that his face had
changed. He had been
altered
, just like the other three Marines
earlier—Singh, Buckner and Blake.

One
of his friends murmured quietly. “Tabiner? Tabiner?”

The
creature that had formerly been Marine Simon Tabiner lunged towards the other men,
bearing his sharp claws. It lashed out with vicious, brutal talons, slicing
Edgewood in the stomach. The other man fell down, gushing with blood.
Lieutenant Jameson raised his gun coldly, and shot Tabiner in the back. The
Weerm fell to the floor, thoroughly dead.

“Mathematically,
roughly a third of humans on this station will have changed within five
minutes,” Tekka said quietly. “Followed by a third of the humans in the rest of
the galaxy. Any one of us could change at any time. We have to get through that
force vault somehow.”

In
the back of his mind, Tekka knew that there
was
a possible solution. But
it was horrible to contemplate. He had never considered himself to have any
friends, but his relationships with Glitz, Alyce and Doland had come closer than
any others before to friendship. And the only plan that presented itself
involved the death of one of them. Worse than that, he guessed that the idea
had less than a 10% chance of success. Ozytan had really stitched them up well.
Tekka had to admire the man, despite his great evil. He wasn’t even alive
anymore, and yet they could still feel his hands, from beyond the grave,
pulling mankind down into a great disaster.

If
he did succeed, if the machine did turn a third of the human race into Weerms,
the consequences would be dire. Even assuming that the Weerms followed the
calculated pattern, destroying themselves while there were still some humans
left alive, the galaxy would be thrown into barbarism, a savagery that would
last for centuries. And he highly doubted that humanity would develop a more
peaceful civilisation. No, the human race would regress, possibly even losing
their knowledge of science and technology. He glanced at Doland out of the
corner of his eye, wondering whether he should tell him the possible plan…

Doland
turned to him, and nodded. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“I
doubt that,” Tekka said.

“You
all think I’m so stupid,” he said, raising his voice a little. He stared around
the room, at Captain Wickham, Glitz, and the Marines. “Stupid and cowardly. I
know that.”

“Doland—”
Alyce began.

Doland
cut her off. “It’s OK. I haven’t given you any cause to think otherwise. Look
at me. I was born on Opus, and spent my life as a bloody salesman for some
two-bit firm. I got sentenced for five years imprisonment. For what—for
something brave, or interesting? Did I rob a bank, or smuggle? No! I had two
votes in some meaningless, trivial election! I’ve spent my life doing
nothing
of importance, being
nobody
. But that will change today.” He nodded at
Tekka. “I know what you’re planning, and I agree.”

“What’s
he talking about?” Alyce said, turning to Tekka.

“None
of us can step inside the force vault without instant death. It has been
designed that way. But we have already seen it demonstrated that Weerms can
penetrate the force barriers. They have much tougher skins, and a more robust
genetic makeup. Of course, we cannot predict who of us will turn into a Weerm,
or when. But Doland has already been affected by the cloud, despite his
reversion. All we would need to do is turn Doland back into a Weerm.”

“Back
into a Weerm?” Alyce frowned. “Can that be done?”

“I
believe so. A beam of low-level radiation should be enough to re-excite the
nanoparticles which are still streaming through Doland’s bloodstream, and they
would restart the transmogrification procedure. Of course, Doland would not
survive the procedure.”

“Why
not?” Glitz asked.

“His
DNA is not compatible for further transmogrification; that is the reason that
his DNA reverted the first time around. We can force through the procedure, but
his genetic structure would be unalterably distorted. Doland—the Doland you
know—would cease to exist. Even if his Weerm body managed to somehow survive
beyond a few hours, there would be no way to change him back.

Alyce
wanted to scream to Doland that he couldn’t do it. She wanted to insist that
they could find another way, a way that didn’t involve his death. But the
simple truth of the matter was that Tekka’s plan did seem to be the only viable
option. Sometimes, in war, there were casualties. Deaths were unavoidable.
Despite her friendship with Doland, she did not really have a choice. She could
either sacrifice her friend, or the security of the Imperium. If they did not
stop the machine, billions of lives would be lost. Sometimes, she really hated
being in the armed forces.