Mech 4: The Black Ship (Imperium Series Book 5) Read online

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  Mech 4: The Black Ship

  (A Mech Novella from the Imperium Series)

  by

  B. V. Larson

  Imperium Series:

  Mech Zero: The Dominant (Novella)

  Mech 1: The Parent

  Mech 2: The Savant

  Mech 3: The Empress

  Mech 4: The Black Ship (Novella)

  Copyright © 2017 Iron Tower Press.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Author’s Note on the Imperium Series:

  Unlike many of my others works, this science fiction universe isn’t based on a single hero, but centers instead on humanity’s first colonies among the stars of the Faustian Chain. The chain is a loose cluster of some sixty stars, a whorl of sparkling suns rich in planets which occupies an irregular volume of space twenty lightyears in diameter.

  Since there is no “warp drive” in this view of the future, it can take years to travel from one colony to the next. Each world is thus a distant island populated by outcasts from Earth decades earlier.

  Earth, the mother of them all, has fallen silent. No one knows what happened back home, but all the colonies have been cut off from their central government. As a result, they’ve grown apart culturally, and many have fallen into barbarism.

  Worse still, there is evidence everywhere that dangerous aliens once inhabited these stars, strange creatures that were erased by unknown forces centuries before the first humans arrived…

  -BVL

  One

  The Black Ship had been built to hide its nature as a vehicle of powered flight. The engines were cleverly designed to allow it to approach target planets without being detected.

  Like most spacecraft, it was propelled by ejecting matter from the tail section. The stealth drive operated on the same principle, but it cooled the exhaust and masked the energy emissions with powerful fields. To all but the most sensitive optical sensors, the ship resembled a large asteroid, nothing more.

  Under normal circumstances, the arrival of an interstellar vessel was as obvious as the approach of a large comet. The speed required to cross the abyss between star systems demanded a vast amount of thrust, and an equally vast amount of thrust had to be applied upon arrival to slow the vessel down. Any witness to this process saw a long plume of heated gasses, one that stretched for millions of miles.

  The crew of the Black Ship was keen on maintaining stealth, but today there was a new technical problem with the stealth drive. Being an unforgiving sort, the Captain summoned the Engineer into his presence. In his right gripper he held up a computer scroll. In his left, he held his disconnection device. This dangerous implement resembled a thick stylus or a thin flashlight. It had a single, black firing stud on the silvery shaft and a projector dome at the tip.

  “Engineer,” the Captain said, lowering the computer scroll. “These emission ratings are off the chart. We’ve only reached eleven percent of light, and already the dampeners are failing.”

  Being a brave soul, the Engineer took two clanking steps forward. Unlike the Captain, who resembled a person in most respects, the Engineer was a mech of the old school. She was constructed entirely of burnished metal with exposed nanotube muscles and servos that whined when she moved. Not a scrap of false-flesh polymers covered her chassis. Even her optical orbs were bulbs of plastic on short metal stalks.

  “We do not have the components necessary to affect complete repairs, Captain,” she said evenly. “I have prepared a list of possible solutions.”

  “Let’s hear them.” The Captain placed the computer scroll on top of the central display unit. He kept the disconnection device in his possession.

  The Engineer’s orbs tracked the disconnection device closely as she spoke. “Firstly, we could abort the mission.”

  “Unthinkable.” The Captain’s gripper twitched on the disconnection device.

  “I have more possibilities,” said the Engineer hurriedly. “We can slow down to maintain stealth.”

  “What? Slow down? We are crawling now. As it is, we’ll be more than a month late. I must admit not even I had thought of slowing down further. Why can’t we at least maintain our current velocity?”

  The Engineer rustled her computer scroll nervously. Around her, the bridge crew glanced at her with unsympathetic orbs. The Engineer drew herself up and plunged ahead. It was best to present bad news quickly, she believed. Reality had to sink in and dominate desires. Facts were stubborn things.

  “We have several problems, sir. If we apply thrust while moving at a velocity of more than eight points, the field won’t hold.”

  “So what? We’ll accelerate to full cruising speed, then coast to our destination undetected, and—” he paused. “Ah, I see. When we arrive, we must decelerate. You’re telling me we’ll be visible even while we slow down?”

  “Yes sir,” the Engineer said, daring to allow her hopes to rise. He had to see the realities of the situation. “Thrust is thrust, and the engines must flare just as powerfully to reduce our speed as they must to increase it.”

  “Can’t we simply decelerate more gently?”

  The Engineer shook her head, the section of her chassis that contained most of her sensory subsystems. “No. The problem is with the phasing of the masking field, not the applied level of power. It won’t maintain integrity past ten percent of light. Not even at nine percent.”

  The Captain walked on heavy feet around the central table. Every mech on the bridge moved away from him as he approached. “What is your third option?”

  “The third…?”

  “Engineer, do you realize where you are, what you are part of? This is not just a ship on an attack mission to raid a planet—this is the beginning of the end. Mechs are the way of the future, and we are the heralds of these new times. Wild humans will continue to breed and provide us with fresh minds for our perfectly-designed bodies, but—”

  “I’ve read all the official statements, sir.”

  The Captain halted his pacing and swung his orbs to her. After staring for a full second, he nodded curtly. “I see,” he said. “Thus far, you’ve presented me with only two options. Stop the mission, or crawl to our destination—”

  “There is one other possibility, but it would be a longshot.”

  The Captain’s orbs met hers. “Let’s hear it.”

  “We are passing an inhabited system. Possibly, they will have the technology required to make effective repairs.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

  “As I said, the odds are slim. The system is known as Faust.”

  The Captain paused to think. “
The dead system? Those colonies were all lost long ago.”

  “Not according to our readings. There are meager signs of settlements.”

  The Captain tapped his gripper thoughtfully on the safety rail. Finally, he nodded and the Engineer felt a wave of relief.

  “We will take this third option,” he said solemnly. “Navigator, plot a course. We will make planetfall at Faust. Helmsman, get us there as quickly as possible. I do not care if our emissions are seen or not. Use all deceleration and navigational assets.”

  “I fully support your choice, Captain,” the Engineer said, even though she privately thought it was the least rational of the list. The colonists of Faust, if they even existed, were unlikely to have equipment that could help them repair the ship. Still, she had done her job and talked the Captain through the possibilities. It was not her responsibility to choose the right course, only to lay out options for her commander.

  “I thank you for your raw honesty, Engineer. Unfortunately, your performance in this instance was unacceptable. The Mech Revolution will not be derailed by the incompetence of a single member, feel reassured on that point. Our world, Talos, will prevail over all others.”

  “What? I—” the Engineer was unable to complete her statement, however. The Captain had directed the disconnection device toward her and depressed the firing stud. He held it down for the required three second duration, allowing the termination signal to be accepted by the Engineer’s autonomic processors. The shutdown signal caused her artificial body to freeze in place.

  “Remove that thing,” the Captain ordered, indicating the Engineer.

  “Should we put the brain back in the tank, or freeze it?”

  “Neither,” he said. “Flush it down the waste system. I don’t want to hear from it again. Install another qualified brain in the chassis. We have plenty in the cryo-vault. Let’s all pray the next Engineer will be smarter than this one.”

  These were the last words the Engineer heard via her passive auditory input systems before they, too, shut down forever.

  Her final thoughts wandered. She tried to recall her real name, the one she’d been born with long ago, but failed. It might have seemed an odd thought to a human, but none of the mechs aboard the Black Ship knew their original names. When their brains had been harvested, such details had been considered counterproductive. They were known only by their function: Engineer, Helmsman, Gunner, etc. Not even the ship had a real name, as the crew had never thought to give it one.

  As this thought faded from the Engineer’s mind, no new concept came to replace it. Her life support system had shut down with the rest of her artificial body, and her brain died inside a dark, sloshing little tank of oily liquid.

  Within hours, her brain would be blended into the digesters. It would perform a final service as a source of nutrients for the rest of the crew.

  Two

  Gersen followed a primitive road, taking care to place each foot softly. Little more than a dirt track, the road led uphill from the rocky beach where he’d left his boat.

  He had good reason to be cautious, as the area was overgrown by juvenile plants bearing lavender-green podlings. Lavender was a warning color for most varieties of pod, and with this particular subspecies it indicated they were ripe, approaching the final stages of their life cycle. Ripe pods were always irritable, and these were no exception. They rolled fitfully at the ends of long writhing vines. Their stinging red hairs bristled as they sensed the traveler’s passing warmth.

  Gersen paused to look upward. The sky overhead was full of brilliant stars. Like every world in the cluster, the view was spectacular. The skies in vids from Old Earth were drab by comparison.

  He carried no lantern or torch, preferring the velvet darkness. To see, he depended on his flickering, light-enhancement goggles. The day-night cycle of Faust was less than eight hours long. He judged the sky above, and calculated he had no more than two hours of darkness left to reach a safe haven.

  Gersen took one careful step after another on cloth-wrapped boots. He was nearly silent, as would be any sane man who walked the open lands of Faust. Around him a thousand pods swayed upon a thousand reeds, responding to the coastal breezes. These were the lighter pods, those that had not yet swollen enough to droop to the ground. They were not as dangerous as those that rustled and rolled themselves over the sandy soil, but a stray gust of wind could cause one to slap against a man’s arm or an exposed cheek.

  He tried to avoid thinking of such possibilities. He didn’t even look at them directly. Many men became paralyzed by fear as they passed patches of pods and podlings, especially at night. Gersen had never lost his nerve, but gazing too closely at the pods was always a mistake. As when crossing from one high cliff to another by stepping over open space—it was best not to gaze into the abyss.

  Traveling past wild pods required a certain level of disbelief on the part of the traveler. To stay calm with death so close at hand, one had to pretend you were somewhere else. The trick was to keep moving. Therefore, he walked as if he were at home on his own lands, without a care in the world. His wrapped boots did not waver, scrape or snag. His knees didn’t bump a swaying pod nor catch on the tiny red spikes that grew from each fist-sized bulb.

  At last, Gersen topped a ridge. He gazed across a final field of restless plants. The road terminated at the base of a thirty-foot high wall of stone. It was rude for a stranger to approach a village wall at night, but it was also dangerous to do so with fanfare. He chose to remain quiet, and did not call out his name or summon the watchman. It was very unlikely they’d open the gates for him anyway, if he did.

  Flickering gas torches burned at random intervals along the wall top. Yellow-orange flames danced above a tiny tongue of deep blue. When he stood at the ramshackle gate at last, he examined the defensives closely. The gate was corrugated steel, braced with rivets and wrapped with wire. It looked solid enough. Directly above him crouched the watchtower, built with concrete blocks and rusty girders. A high cupola sat at the pinnacle, but he could not see the lookout inside. The man was most likely drunk, sleeping—or both. Otherwise, he would have spotted the stranger approaching the gates by now.

  The gates were sealed by an ancient mechanism, something that looked like it had been part of a ship’s hatch decades earlier. Gersen had no idea how to open it, and had little interest in asking for entry. He’d never met a village watchman yet who welcomed visitors after sunset.

  Instead, he made his way north, walking along the base of the wall. He walked with exaggerated care, lest his boots stray and crush down a sprig of growth. There were no pods this close to the walls, as the villagers had wisely salted the base with gravel. But fleshy leaves and pale tubers still grew everywhere. It would not be wise to upset the local flora, especially not in the shadow of an unknown village.

  Running his gloved hands over the wall as he walked, Gersen took the opportunity to examine the structure itself, which was ingeniously built. Made entirely of dark boulders rolled up from the rocky shoreline of the island, it resembled a natural formation. Except for the gate, the wall used very little metal or other artificial substances. These precautions had been taken to hide the human origins of the construction in hopes of calming the wildlife. To any trained eye, of course, the wall was clearly artificial, but this didn’t matter. The fortification only had to fool the plants.

  Gersen reached out to touch the mortar that cemented the stones together. His gloves were heirlooms, handed down to him by his father, who’d been a spacer on the third ship. The index finger of the right glove had worn through the ancient leather. Using his single exposed digit, he reached out a hand and ran a bare finger over the substance used to cement the boulders together. He felt the rough texture and noted the ash-like crust it left on his fingertip.

  He nodded to himself, admiring the workmanship. The cracks between each boulder had been filled with molten rock, leaving a rough gray surface like that of pumice. Probably, a laser team had done it l
ong ago after they’d hauled up each of these massive stones from the sea. He wondered if these villagers still had big lasers, or even a generator to run them. If they did, they were a rich people indeed.

  After taking a hundred steps along the wall of towering stones, Gersen found an opening that wasn’t sealed. Crouching and peering within, he thought to see the dancing light of gas torches reflected from the walls of this narrow passage. He smiled and began to creep into the tunnel. With luck, he’d be able to slip his way past their massive fortifications without notice.

  As a precaution, he sprayed a fine mist of juice from a sterile gourd ahead of him. A network of gleaming lines appeared, and his smile faded immediately. The passage was laced with sensors. He shook his head. People were born without trust these days! Grunting with disappointment, Gersen backed out of the tunnel, straightened his spine and leaned against the base of the wall. The rough-cut boulders pressed against his back. They felt cool and very solid.

  He considered his options. The villagers would come running if he slipped through the passage. Possibly, they had a spy bug floating overhead right now. He hadn’t seen one for years, but he never dared to discount the possibility of meeting up with a piece of old tech that still functioned.

  Gersen looked downslope into the darkness. The field of pods he’d passed by was no longer tranquil. The plants rustled and shifted like a thousand old men stirring in their beds. They weren’t fully awake yet, but they would be soon, long before daybreak. If he chose to run back for the boat he’d left on the beach, he might not make it past them a second time.

  Calmly, he arranged the pack on his back until it rode there tightly. He set up a thumper inside the passage, which was sure to both trip the alarms and summon the most alert of the pods. Then he walked with measured steps back toward the gate. He would meet whoever came out to investigate the trouble along the wall. Detainment and questioning were infinitely preferable to spending another night at the edge of an active field. Gersen had been arrested before, and he was very familiar with the process.