Chapter 17
Alice
Good god, it was finally happening. The event she had been dreading her whole life was now upon her. She was being scanned on a Union planet. Unable to get free, unable to overload the impediment field holding her in place, she had no chance.
So the scream had been natural. Automatic. She’d been holding it in for years. The horrible prospect of being found out had haunted her every step her whole life, and now it was happening.
Her mind went into freefall, her senses felt like they were burning. Though the beam itself was relatively non-invasive compared to the blustering sensation of the impediment field, the knowledge of what it was doing was worse than any pain out there.
Alice forced her head up. After she'd finished her horrified, primal scream, she'd just let it drop, let the impediment field take her weight.
Now a final kick of desperation was crawling and rushing through her, prickling at her spine, making her arms and legs twitch against the field around her.
Her head yanked to the side.
Her gaze darting around the rest of the hall around her. She saw the security bots all lined up, she saw the Chief standing there with one spiked hand tapping on his gun, and she saw John. His expression was not hardened like the Chief's or cold and dead like the robots. He could hardly look at her, his lips twisted up into disgust as his eyes blinked tightly.
For a second that expression took her attention. It focused her. Then Alice looked past John to what was behind him.
It was a moment that would define the rest of her life and maybe, just maybe, save her from her horrible fate.
At the other end of the room was a bank of sophisticated-looking elevators. They would service the whole of Block Prime. Far more intricate and technical than anything on her native Block, these would be able to travel from the base to the top spire in under a second.
But it was not the elevators in their shiny, metallic-white cases that riveted Alice to the spot. They didn't send a last, spiking sensation of possibility bursting through her dread.
It was what was beside them.
Most Old Tech had long since died. The Old Ones had all vanished years ago, and without them, there was simply no one around to repower it. Apart from the critical modern systems like the ICNs and the transport network, most of it was good for nothing more than decoration.
Collectables. It showed your power and importance, after all, if you had a fancy Old Tech scanner sitting on your desk as a paper weight. Sure, you couldn't turn it on. But that did not matter; the stuff was like liquid gold.
Alice had seen it before - though certainly not in the slums of Block Alpha - but on her travels on other planets she'd seen Old Tech displayed around the place. Statues mostly. Sitting up in some prominent place so the people below could remember where the modern universe had come from. Or maybe so they could feel powerful and protected by associating with something far beyond their own level of development, Alice didn't know.
Right now it didn't matter. Because before her, just next to those elevators was Old Tech.
She knew it. She could feel it. It filled her every sense. Her mind rang with the certainty of it.
It also called to her. She could pick it up on the edge of her hearing. Like a keening cry, she'd heard it many times before. The final call of some soon-to-be-dead piece of Old Tech mourning its once-great existence.
None of the aliens around her could appreciate that little fact. If they'd been privy to the thoughts racing through Alice's mind, they would have baulked at the notion that the Old Tech before her was alive.
They were wrong. Life not as a biological would know it, but life nonetheless.
‘Report will be finished in approximately 120 seconds,’ the scanner in front of her suddenly chimed in an emotionless electronic voice.
‘Two minutes? Why the hell is this taking so long?’ the Chief of Security barked.
‘Encountering difficulties in the scanner matrix. Feedback from an unknown source is interfering with the beam,’ the computer replied.
Grumbling and still tapping on his very loaded plasma gun, the Chief cracked his neck and shoulders.
Alice ignored him.
Two minutes. She had two minutes to get out of here.
And now she had a plan.
Alice let herself drop. She deliberately stopped fighting the impediment field in every way, reasoning that it would either let her fall to the floor or string her in place like a puppet.
She didn't care if she was lying or standing for the next bit. A part of her just need to be touching the floor.
There was a crackle over her skin as the field registered what John Doe would no doubt term 'unauthorized movement'. The sensation of it trying to yank her back into place was one that Alice would never forget.
She did not care.
Survival was never easy.
With another enormous crackle, the field seemed to give up, and Alice finally flopped to the floor. Her head struck the reinforced smart metal and it gave a sickening thump. If Alice had been a soft-fleshed race, she would have no doubt just done herself considerable damage. But she was not going to die yet - though she'd be sporting a fantastic headache if she ever got out of this.
‘What the hell is happening? Computer, is she alright?’ John Doe barked.
Though Alice had her eyes closed, she could sense that John Doe ran right up to her and dropped to a knee just before her face. Maybe he hovered a hand over her shoulder, maybe he turned the flickering force field off from around his face so he could get a better look at her.
It didn't matter.
All that mattered for Alice was that she now had a hand clamped to the floor underneath her. She spread her fingers wide and slow, not caring that the impediment field fought her every step of the way. With a possible escape in sight, Alice was finding a reserve of energy she had not known she'd possessed.
She was going to use it in full.
Alice pushed her mind into her fingers, forced her concentration to lay hold of the special energy within her. Then she forced it out into the cool floor below her.
If someone had been paying real attention, they may have seen the subtle white-blue light shift from her touch. At first it pooled underneath her then slowly moved to the left and right, as if it did not know where to go.
Alice's skin began to twitch, a cold sweat drenching her.
She knew what would happen next.
‘Computer,’ John barked again, ‘is she okay?’
‘Get out of the scanner beam,’ the Chief barked back, ‘you are interfering. It's picking up your bios.’
‘Computer, override access, authorization Commander John Doe. Tell me now her life signs. Is she—’
John never got a chance to finish his sentence.
Before Alice had dropped to her stomach, slamming herself onto the cold hard floor in her last ditch effort, she had not bothered to ascertain exactly what kind of Old Tech was on the other side of the room.
Alice had two rules that kept her safe in this universe. One was never, ever to allow herself to undergo a proper biological scan. The other was to never, ever recharge Old Tech unless she knew exactly what it did. There was simply too much of it, and what was more, not all of it was nice. While the Old Ones had seeded the modern universe, they had not been beyond using force where necessary.
The Old Ones had possessed weapons that could wipe out whole planets in seconds.
Alice knew her rules off by heart, and yet here she was attempting to recharge Old Tech with no idea what it was.
Though she doubted the statue on the other side of the room was capable of tearing through Orion Minor in the blink of an eye, she was not prepared to give it more energy than it would require to turn on. Just enough for it to make some noise, maybe move around a bit, but nothing more.
Just a distraction, that was all she needed.
But as Alice sent her energy out, that white-blue line flickering through t
he floor on its way to find a target, she could not have appreciated what would happen next.