The Dauntless: (War of the Ancients Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  The shuttle's comms bleeped. A message for everyone. It was Lanik speaking: “Ground team, you may wish to be careful. We think there may be hostiles joining you.”

  Moore flicked her comm button. “What kind of hostiles? Glaber?”

  “We don't know. We just picked up a bogey heading towards the pickup point. It's operating under stealth. Something more advanced than we've ever seen the Glaber use, which is why the lidar didn't pick it up until now. We saw the disturbance as it entered the atmosphere. Still, best guess is the Glaber ship dropped it off just before they jumped.”

  “Right,” said Hanson. “Unknown hostiles with advanced technology. Wonderful.”

  “You're welcome, sir,” said Lanik. The comms clicked off.

  Moore eyed Hanson's pistol. “You might want something bigger than that. Actually, we all will. Corporal Saito, will you do the honours?” And to the pilot, she added: “And Corporal Stenberg, could you turn on the shuttle's camo? It might not be good as theirs, but it's better than nothing.”

  “Done, sarge,” said Stenberg.

  Saito, meanwhile, steadying himself with one of the handles fixed to the shuttle's ceiling, stood and moved over to a box near the far wall. From it he unloaded a couple of carbines and small submachine guns, which his distributed.

  “V90,” said Saito, handing Hanson one of the submachine guns. “Ever had experience with one of these?”

  Hanson nodded. “Been a while, though.”

  Moore grinned at him. “Just like old times, then.”

  Outside, the sheen of superheated air had vanished, and the planet's surface had become a flat plane. The sun was just sinking below the gently-curved horizon, and far below, Hanson could make out the stone forest.

  A couple of minutes later they were gliding above the treetops. The wood had petrified, but the leaves had long since rotted away. The forest was stuck in an eternal grey winter, and the bare stone branches cast long shadows over each other. Many had broken or collapsed, leaving great chunks of rock scattered on the dusty floor.

  “I see them,” said Stenberg. “The pods have crashed a few hundred metres away from each other … and there's a clearing about a kilometre distant where we can land safely.”

  “Any sign of the bogey?” asked Moore.

  “Nothing at all.”

  Hanson saw the smashed trail of trees where one of the pods had passed by below them. Then, soon after, the shuttle came to a stop and descended on the clearing. The gull-wing doors on the side opened slowly.

  The sun sat low in the sky, leaving it painted in bands of orange and pink. Stenberg locked the shuttle to respond only to members of the ground team, and they set out.

  “The shuttle made a visual map while we were flying over,” he said.

  Hanson called up the map. It displayed by the side of his field of vision, and in addition it circled the locations of the two pods with distant estimates. One was directly ahead, 780 metres; the other slightly to their left, 1120 metres.

  Closest first, then.

  “Saito, take point,” ordered Moore. “Stenberg, you're at the rear. The Captain and I will go in the middle.”

  The numbers counted down as they made their way between the broad stone trunks. Still no sign of hostiles. Eventually they reached the line of toppled and fragmented trunks where the closest pod had crashed. They passed through a narrow gap, and finally saw the pod.

  It was a dodecahedron, maybe three metres across, scorched and blackened in some places, studded with small thrusters elsewhere. It was impossible to tell whether it was upside down, leaning to the side, or facing this way or that. But on one of the upper faces, a hatch had extended slightly.

  When the suit scans couldn't pick up anything dangerous, Hanson walked up and pushed the hatch. It moved inwards, then hissed and opened.

  The pod was empty. Inside, there was nothing but a cushioned cavity lined with few bits of odd-looking alien equipment.

  “Okay,” ordered Hanson. “The other pod takes priority. We can come back for this one if we have time. Let's go.”

  They turned and set out towards the other pod. They were halfway there when Stenberg signalled he'd seen something. Hanson froze. So did the others. He looked intently into the mass of thick trunks ahead, but couldn't see anything.

  There! Something stepped into view just ahead. “Take cover!” Moore shouted, and she and Hanson dived to the side. A fraction of a second later, there came a sound like a thunderclap, and part of a trunk behind them exploded. Slivers of rock rained against their armour as they scrambled behind the trees.

  “Shit,” hissed Moore, then ducked out from her cover. She fired with her assault rifle, then returned again. Another thunderclap, this time against the tree Hanson was taking cover behind. He felt the thump through his armour. It was followed by another. “It'll shoot through the tree!” he called out. Already, in fact, the tree was collapsing. He dived out the way as the third shot hit and penetrated the trunk. As he ran for the next tree, he glanced at the attacker.

  It wasn't Glaber. It looked human – coated in camo armour not too different from their own. But the weapon it carried – a sphere a few centimetres across – definitely wasn't.

  The tree he'd just been behind snapped. It fell gracelessly and shattered with a bang as it hit the ground.

  He looked over at Moore. She'd be getting feeds from everyone's helmets. “Spread out,” she ordered as a shot hit her own trunk. “Outflank it!” By now they'd all timed the pauses between the shots, and the moment after the attacker had shot at Moore's cover a second time, they all fired on it together.

  Hanson saw its armour burst open, saw it stumble back a few paces, saw it look at him and lift its weapon again.

  Another piece of trunk exploded. This time, it snapped loose a branch several hundred metres above. “Oh, crap,” he whispered, and ran to the side again as the branch smashed into the ground where he'd been a second before. As he ran, he saw the hostile was approaching them. Definitely human. It moved in a sort of strafing pattern, now taking cover. That meant it was vulnerable.

  “In position, sarge,” came Stenberg's voice over the comms.

  “Same here,” said Saito.

  Hanson ducked out to get a reading on the hostile's new position. And, across from him with the hostile in the middle, so did Stenberg.

  The hostile's weapon was raised – at Stenberg. With startling speed and accuracy, it fired.

  Half of Stenberg's chest vanished in a clap of thunder.

  The hostile swung round to where Saito was positioned.

  Then its head exploded. The rest of it collapsed like a rag doll.

  “Got you, you bastard,” Moore said.

  “Well done, sergeant,” Hanson said. He glanced out from behind his cover. “Do you see any more?”

  Before he could get a response, there was a flash of light and a bizarrely gentle whump noise. Hanson found himself lying on his back, with fragments of stone raining down on him. His armour registered minor damage. A concussive blast.

  “Report!” he called through the comms as he struggled to his feet. The ground where the hostile had been was a small crater, strewn with fragments a few inches across.

  “I'm here,” came Saito's voice over the comm. “Unharmed.”

  “Same here,” Moore said.

  Stenberg wasn't. They found his body – or what was left of it – behind one of the trees. The hostile's weapon had cut through his armour as though it were tin foil. While Moore and Saito kept watch in case of another attack, Hanson retrieved the corporal's dog-tags. It seemed like ice coated his veins; no matter how many times it happened, no matter how poorly he knew the person, it was always hard losing a member of the team.

  “We'll take the body back when we've checked the second pod,” he ordered, putting himself back into the mindset of the mission.

  They headed over to the charred patch of ground where the hostile had been. Chunks of stone or armour crunched under their boot
s. Nothing remained at the epicentre.

  “It looked human,” Moore commented. “Anyone else notice that?”

  “Yes,” said Hanson. “Except getting shot through the chest didn't slow it down.” He looked over the remains of the explosion in the hope of finding something to analyse, without success. “And except for the weapon. From the mode of operation, I'd guess it's not a kinetic. Some sort of high-power energy weapon.”

  He didn't need to tell them that a weapon that powerful at that size was beyond anything the Alliance Navy could put together.

  “This guy seems to be at the centre of all our questions,” he said. “Apparently human. But why was it working with the Glaber? Why did it have a weapon and a stealth ship we've never seen before? And what about it was so important that it needed to self-destruct?”

  In any case, it was clearly sent to destroy the occupant of the escape pod, so maybe she had answers.

  They walked cautiously through the petrified forest, guns raised, ready for another hostile. None came, and they reached the escape pod safely.

  It sat there, another dodecahedron, among the broken remains of stone trees. Hanson led the team up to it and said clearly in Isk, “I'm Captain Hanson of the SAV Dauntless. Is there anybody there?”

  A few seconds later, something inside the pod whirred and clicked. A circular hatch on one of the lower faces pushed itself out from the pod and swung open. A furred head with oversized brown eyes peeped out very quickly and looked from Hanson to Saito to Moore and back again. Not Albascene, then. She was a Petaur.

  In Isk, she said, “You're from the human ship? I'm Yilva Vissin Avanni.”

  Chapter 4: Yilva

  Yilva seemed fascinated with everything in the shuttle. Her eyes darted from the console where Saito was piloting, to the structure of the deckplates, to the shiny surface of Hanson's armour. Finally her gaze settled on the shroud covering Stenberg. Her throat bobbed, her hands moved back and forth in short, fast spurts. She turned back to Hanson.

  “I'm sorry you lost your colleague,” she said, head snapping back to Stenberg for a second. “ … because of me.”

  Hanson nodded solemnly. “It's the risk we take.”

  Petaurs had evolved from some gliding mammal. They were covered in silvery black fur, with extended muzzles and large eyes. Velvety membranes of skin connected their upper limbs with their lower limbs. They had six thin fingers on their hands and feet. Yilva seemed as comfortable holding things in each – and with her prehensile hairless ratlike tail. Her gown, coloured in muted ochres, had openings down the sides for the membranes. Every movement she made seemed faster than the human equivalent, giving her a sort of nervous energy.

  “I'm sorry,” Hanson had told her when they were walking back to she shuttle. “As far as we could tell, you were the only one who made it out alive.”

  “Only me aboard!” she had assured him. “I just sent out all the escape pods as decoys.”

  Hanson supposed it worked better than expected – the hostile must have been on its way to the empty escape pod when it ran into the ground team. Yilva had never even seen it.

  He leant forward to Yilva, who sat on the opposite bench. “You asked for asylum and said you had something important. That's all we got before the Glaber jammed your signal. Could you tell us what happened? How did you end up alone in a ship being chased by a Glaber hunter? And – what do you have that's so important?”

  Yilva paused for a few moments, organising her thoughts. “I'm an indentured servant for an Albascene corporation, a technician in data science and jump engineering. A couple of months ago, my employers hired me out to someone.”

  “Someone?” asked Hanson.

  Yilva shrugged. “Yeah. It's real hush-hush. Lots of secrets, lots of money. I don't know what species they are. They took me in a windowless cabin to some system, I don't know where, and gave me work to do.”

  “What sort of work?”

  “Data stuff. At a terminal in my room. Half of it was stuff I'd never seen before – harder than anything I've ever worked on. When they talked to me, it was all through my terminal. I never met anyone … at least at first. After about a month, a couple of Glaber came to my door and took me outside.” She paused for a moment, her eyes flicking from Hanson to Moore and back again. “It's Ancient tech. Real, functioning Ancient tech. I don't know where, or what exactly, but they have it. They're trying to control it.”

  Something inside Hanson went cold. It felt like he'd just walked up to the edge of the abyss.

  About six million years ago, an alien species had appeared in the galaxy. Appeared was the right word: They didn't seem to have evolved or spread out from a home planet. They were just there, in all the galaxy at once. They had lived like that, doing whatever such advanced beings do, for close to four million years. In the end, they went to war with themselves, for unknown reasons, then vanished from the galaxy.

  That was it. No one knew why they left – whether they'd been exterminated by themselves, by someone else, or left of their own choice. No one knew where they'd come from. No one knew what they looked like. No one knew whether they were a single species or a coalition. But regardless, the Ancients hadn't taken all their technology with them. They left artefacts hidden in the dark corners of space: Around black holes, neutron stars, brown dwarves. These artefacts were often damaged beyond repair, and seemed to work using physics that even the most advanced living races didn't understand.

  People still tried, of course. They poked around Ancient technologies trying to make them do something, anything. When the artefacts responded, they usually turned their investigators into either gibbering wrecks slowly dying of radiation poisoning, or clouds of subatomic particles.

  If someone had managed to make Ancient technology work …

  The idea seemed ridiculous. Hanson stared at Yilva. “Are you sure?”

  “I'm sure,” she said. “Ancient history is one of my hobbies. I recognised some of this stuff. The Glaber took me to work on the technology itself. I think it's a ship or something. Anyway, after I'd been working there a while, I tried hacking into my employers' records. A girl gets curious, you know?”

  She paused for a moment, and gave an innocent sort of shrug. “They were going to kill me. Of course they were. I knew too much about their plans.” Yilva grinned humourlessly. “So I took the data I was working on, and stole the ship I'd come in. That was easy enough – I was already in all their systems. But the ship's navigation computers had been scrambled, so I didn't know where I was. They sent their Glaber goons after me, so I just ran. I kept jumping … until I got here.”

  Outside, the last of the planet's atmosphere fell away. The faint roaring outside the shuttle quietened away to nothing. Through the front window, Hanson could see the tiny silhouette of the Dauntless. He rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefinger. “And what's this important thing you have?”

  Yilva reached inside her gown with her lower limbs and pulled out a small grey object clutched in her foot. A datachip. She threw it across the shuttle to Hanson, and he caught it.

  “That's what I was working on,” she said. “It's a translation key. It lets modern computers talk to Ancient technology.”

  Hanson turned the datachip over in his palm. The label on the front had a little smiley face, drawn by Yilva, he guessed. Apart from that it looked entirely normal. “Is this the only copy?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” said Yilva. “That's the complete version. It's the work I was doing. The people at the base, whoever they were, have an earlier version. Not the complete thing.”

  The key to Ancient technology, a conspiracy, and a fugitive Petaur.

  He was beginning to regret asking for something interesting.

  Chapter 5: Equations

  Hanson sat in his ready room with Lanik, Yilva, and a couple of techs. A tablet made of smart-matter, extended to a couple of feet wide, lay on the table between them. He nodded to Yilva, and she slotted the chip into the table
t's reader.

  A few seconds later the screen was filled with writing. Numbers with hundreds of digits, equations with symbols he'd never seen before, tiny diagrams, and lines of densely packed code. According to a little tab in the corner of the screen, this was page 1 of 12,837.

  The content of the chip was automatically translated to human mathematical notation, but that didn't make it any more readable.

  He looked up at one of the techs. “Can you make anything out of this?”

  The tech peered at the screen, frowning. “I recognise parts of it, but …” He frowned.

  “Ms. Avanni,” began Lanik.

  “Yilva. Yilva is fine. Really, it's good.”

  “Yilva, then. Is there any way we could use this? If we handed it over to mathematicians, for instance?”

  Yilva laughed and shook her head. “Without the Ancient ship? It's useless. Entirely pointless. You can study the shape of a key all you want, right, but you can't do anything if you don't have the lock.”

  Hanson sighed. “Take it out.” The tech, who was scrolling through page after page of dense equations and code, seemed a little disappointed. But he followed the order anyway and gave the chip back to Yilva. Hanson gave the tablet a close-and-contract gesture, and it quickly shrunk until it looked like nothing more than a stick of blue-tinted glass, two inches long and half an inch wide.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?” Hanson asked. “Anything you saw when you were in their systems?”

  “A few names,” said Yilva. “I don't know if they mean anything, but …”

  “Anything could be of use.” Hanson thought for a moment, then stood. “Okay, here's the plan: We have to stop at Tethya anyway, for repairs and to offload Corporal Stenberg's remains. While we're there, I'll contact Admiral Chang and report what we've learned. Yilva, will you be alright if we let you off there?”