The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (22 page)

She thought about having more time to talk with Jav when this was finished, but any conversation with him was a bittersweet prospect. She’d fallen into the depressing habit of trying to convince herself that there had been a time when his feelings for her had measured close to hers for him. She was never able to pinpoint such a time, but she shrugged this off. It would make sense for her to accept that their relationship had gone and would go no further. It would make sense for her to forget him—in that particular capacity—and move on. She deserved her equal, was entitled to it. But that was the problem. She knew she’d doomed herself with him. No one could ever compete with Jav in her estimation. She would do the only thing she could do, which was to keep trying. If, in the end, Jav changed as he said he might, it would be more than worth the effort—and the pain—along the way.

To work now. She pressed Scanlan’s machine up against an interface panel in the core conduit and it adhered there. In fact, it moved within her grip, startling her. She released it and watched it work its way into the Patrol ship’s technology. Just as she was about to seek exit, she lazily looked over her shoulder, responding to the approach of ship’s personnel. There were two… no, six in all. She arched her body as if suspended in water and turned towards them, kicking off from where she’d stood. She passed through the group of them, but not before two had fired their pistols. Were those the Farmington’s Jav had described? For something comparatively small, they
were
rather devastating. She placed the Darkness Piercing Spear Hand through each of them then made sure that Scanlan’s device was unscathed and still working. The shots hadn’t come close. She would have been exceedingly angry if her foray had been for nothing. She sighed out a breath of relief and left the ship.

Upon insertion, Nils Porta found himself somewhat removed from the Patrol ship’s bridge, but breaking up into the Cloud of Gnats made his search go quickly. None of the crew the cloud passed remained alive. After finding what he sought, he returned to the torpedo to recover Scanlan’s machine. With it snug under one arm, he strolled casually through the ship’s corridors back to the bridge, encountering no other living crew on the way. When he reached his first kill site, he paused at the mess he’d left behind. He glanced at his bundle then back at what essentially blocked the way to foot traffic. He sighed and carefully hopped over bodies, concerned—it was a ridiculous concern he knew—that he would dirty his boots.

In a way, Nils was like two different people. When Dark, he had no moral, mental, or physical aversion to killing. When he was normal, it always felt like someone else had been responsible for the acts he’d committed while Dark. He didn’t like to kill or the gory aftermath, but understood his job, what it required of him, and the necessity of it. At times, he tried to examine this dissociation, but always came to the same conclusion, that it was probably bad for him to fully embrace the amorality he exhibited while Dark. He felt the dissociation enabled him to maintain a portion of his humanity, however compartmentalized, and this he coveted, secretly fearing it would someday abandon him.

The bridge was a giant dome in the heart of the ship, heavily insulated from without.  Holographic screens covered the majority of the interior curve to give the appearance of being exposed to space. All the visuals here were from video feeds, and the overall effect was breathtaking. Ships were everywhere overhead and Nils had to remind himself that no one could see him down here or what he’d done.

He approached what he assumed was the main console, and pushed a slumped body from it. He set Scanlan’s machine down upon the console and stepped back, watching as the machine altered in shape, spread out, and
seeped
into the ship’s control interface.

Raus Kapler pocketed Scanlan’s machine and turned to face the crew that had gathered in response to his arrival. He reached out for the one closest, gripping the Farmington barrel in his right hand and squeezing it closed. The weapon exploded, bursting out the back into the guild man’s face, erasing it with wet strokes of black and red. Raus took the man bodily and flung him into the rest. Farmington blasts tore through the compartment, two punching the lifeless body, setting it to lurch grotesquely in one direction then another, two more going wild, one singeing off the shooter’s own foot.

Raus had been assured that his electrical pulse would in no way harm Scanlan’s machine and so he filled the compartment now with current, making everyone present go rigid. Smoke rose from beneath coats. Eyes boiled and popped. The stink of spilled bowels commingled with that of burning flesh. When he cut the power, everyone fell dead to the floor. And then rose again, responding to Raus’s silent control.

He sent the animate corpses off to infect more of the crew to keep them from becoming more of a nuisance. There was a computer terminal in the compartment, but it had shorted with his electrical pulse. He went in search of proper access to the ship’s computer and wasn’t long in locating it with his knowledge of and affinity for technology. He set Scanlan’s machine to work and sought exit from the ship.

Icsain stepped from his torpedo into a mess hall full of crew members. Before a single one could draw his or her Farmington—despite or because of the shock of the breach—the Relic Cords were out and writhing, making subservient puppets of them all. He had the lot of them escort him to the nearest all-access computer terminal. They served unquestioningly as his armed human shield, dispatching any other crew they encountered, with several falling to returned weapons fire.

Enslaving the entire crew was well within Icsain’s means, but this approach was so much more entertaining. During his time with the Empire, he’d developed a taste for watching the lesser beings suffer under his implacable control. Truly they were his puppets, and that they were fully aware of their forced actions and the resulting consequences only added to his appreciation of the practice of making them dance to his will. To him, it proved, over and over again, his superiority.

Brin Karvasti’s approach was not dissimilar to Icsain’s. People did what she told them. With some preparation, which they’d all had, language would pose no barrier to a Shade. Her device was put in place quickly. She spent more time finding an acceptable way off the ship.

Upon entry into the ship, Forbis Vays was set upon and put every one but one to death with the Titan Saber. The last he threatened until learning the way to the ship’s bridge. He left that man merely crippled—short one arm. During the course of the altercation, he’d discovered that, despite the impressive kick, their energy weapons could not penetrate the armor provided by the Titan Star. After the first shot hit him, he snorted, thinking that if god-forged Gun Golem pistols had been unable to breach the Titan Star, what right did manmade Farmingtons have to do so?

Now Vays walked the corridors of the Patrol ship with Scanlan’s machine in one hand and the Titan Saber in the other, dispatching anyone who came his way or attempted to bar his passage without breaking his stride. He came upon the bridge—right where it was supposed to be—and, like Nils, was taken aback by the sense of openness in such a sequestered compartment.

Weapons fire lit the bridge briefly, but each man and woman fell to Vays’s blade. He fixed Scanlan’s machine to a console, saw that it was doing whatever it needed to, and left.

Scanlan was unique among the current Shades in that he had never undergone gravity training—even Brin Karvasti had acquired a five-G rating. He was also unique in that his Artifact was forever working to improve his body, an autonomic response to his unvoiced and unconscious feelings of inadequacy regarding the disparity in gravity ranks. After receiving the Creation Cogs, Scanlan found that he could no longer return to normal. This was of no concern to him. He had no family. There was no vanity tied to his lost physical form. He’d given his life to the Empire and to intellectual pursuits. The latter he could now effect to a degree one might argue bordered on the divine and which was limited only by his imagination.

Now, after nearly a hundred and twenty years of his Artifact’s striving, his machine body was harder, stronger, and more durable than the metal of which it appeared to be fashioned. His Dark Raw Physical Power had topped at 40,000, putting him on par with the rest of his fellows. His RPP would go no higher, but his body was constantly undergoing adaptations and adjustments, incorporating new technology as he encountered it, altering in form and function as the need arose.

When the Farmington emission struck him, he was fascinated by the energy spectrum. The power generated by such a small device intrigued him. Immediately his thoughts moved to what might be possible when merging this technology with Vine ganglia. The second shot roused him from his musing.

He looked up and narrowed his eyes. His face, a flexible plate of what looked like antique brass, was the most human thing about him besides his overall outline, and though still expressive, was ultimately inscrutable. He calculated a moment then the Clockwork Beam lanced from his monocle, drawing a line across the ten guild men who had their guns trained upon him. Wherever the Beam struck, the men clutched at themselves, suddenly unable to breathe. Each cast his Farmington to the floor and struggled to tear off his coat, his shirt, and whatever it was that was itching through the skin to the organs beneath. Dark, spidery arms of metal writhed, clawed, and multiplied wherever the Clockwork Beam had touched. It was like a festering infection spreading impossibly fast, hollowing out each man as soft tissue was sacrificed for more machine growth.

Within moments, the men were unrecognizable. A new wall of machinery, different in character from that of the surrounding ship, stood in their place. It continued to grow, spreading to make contact with the ship’s wall and not stopping there. Scanlan’s machine began to reach out through the ship, so that it would soon permeate it totally. This ship would serve as the main processor for what he planned to do, communicating with the other devices the Shades had delivered, to those ships which would be masters to the remaining slaves.

He saw no sense in wasting readily available resources, so walked to the ship’s bridge. It would serve as the perfect and appropriate command center. Through his connection to the infectious machinery, he knew the ship’s layout, its armaments, all its capabilities and limitations. He shut down the life support system, which would soon be repurposed anyway, so feared no retaliation from the crew. Given time, they might be able to formulate a plan that would at the very least extend their lives, but without life support, they had no hope. The temperature was dropping at a fantastic rate. Oxygen was being expelled by the ton from exhaust ports, and to help expedite this purge, the safety protocols on all airlocks were overridden, and the airlocks were made to open. This was perhaps the single most effective method of eliminating the crew. More than two hundred men and women were ripped from the ship on the outrushing tide of air into the vacuum of space.

As Scanlan stepped onto the bridge, he received confirmation of established communication links with the majority of the master devices. The bridge personnel hadn’t fared well. The six at the forward stations below the main viewport were slumped in their chairs. Behind them, a man, most likely the captain, appeared to be dozing in his high command chair. Someone yet remained alive, though. A smallish figure covered in a bulky environmental suit cowered in the corner with a Farmington laid across its lap. It was a woman, Scanlan had no doubt.

His presence galvanized her, however. She raised the gun and fired ceaselessly until she realized that the blasts were beading off of a portable screen.

There was no longer any air to transmit sound and there was nothing he could say to her really. He shot her with the Clockwork Beam, ignoring what she evolved into since he already knew.

Scanlan stood before the viewport, which remained unobstructed. Below it, though, the stations had grown with his technology. Holographic screens formed a secondary arc opposite the viewport and gave a more complete overview of the ship’s surroundings.

By becoming a Shade, Scanlan had acquired patience on an order that would have sickened him prior to his transformation. With all that he could do now, there was no such thing as
waiting
, except when he had to depend on the actions of others. But the wonder of his Artifact-backed creative genius often gave him pause and had turned him into a daydreamer in this new stage of his life. He was daydreaming now, thinking of his plan made real, and so had to collect himself when the final signal came through, indicating that the last of the devices had been set. He grinned.

The first thing he did was establish a two-fleet-wide network, utilizing all the ships’ communications systems, and putting every computer in communication with every other computer. All communications would route through Scanlan’s ship. Differences in protocols would be dealt with from the top down: from Scanlan’s ship to the masters, from the masters to the slaves, until over the network there was but one overriding source of instruction. This took less than five minutes and was punctuated by a total cease fire. The second thing he did was send a command to all ships, locking out manual controls. The third thing he did was shut down life support and open the air locks on every last vessel as he had his own.

This last was something of a subtle spectacle. With the simultaneous release of oxygen from so many sources, both fleets shimmered and sparkled. In another time, Scanlan might have thought this beautiful, but overwhelming any visual appreciation was the sense of power he felt. His arms, his legs, his body, his eyes were all around him, spanning thousands of kilometers of space surrounding the Palace. Video feeds he didn’t need to see with his own eyes relayed images of crew members, Guild and Patrol, hurtling through corridors, bellowing out muffled cries as the retreating air robbed them of their voices as well as their lives. Some of the crew would find means to remain aboard their respective vessels, but Scanlan’s control was too complete to override or interrupt. If they were lucky enough to find and don an environmental suit, they would die of starvation. If they managed somehow to stave that off, they would ultimately parish, becoming food themselves for the Vine.