The Legacy of the Lost Hope Read online

accepted into society, whereas organic augmentations were modified DNA strands in a stem cell which were altered to suit the purpose the user required without possibility of rejection. Suddenly, Sallyn had a brief period where her mind wandered from the track of discovery.

  Flashes of amber lights spun as alarms sounded, thunder pounded outside the box and gashes in the metals showed her a view of utter chaos. Buildings transformed into pyres as an invisible attacker laid waste to a world stained red in carnage. Footsteps, heavy ones, marched all around her. A little girl frightened and protecting herself until a beam of white blinded her.

  She had fallen asleep without knowing, her eyes opened to the Cyclops’s glaring green eye beaming down on her. It stood poised with its arms ready to grab her, while the orb began scattering the green light all over her body. Sallyn caught a glimpse of Volg looking down at her in disappointment. She was not in the lab, nor was she on the flat of her back; she was curled up in a protective ball defending herself from the two looming intruders.

  An uncharacteristically gesture came from Volg, he offered a hand to her. “We are both in trouble now little girl.” “I’m not a girl, I am Amber Sallyn!” “Be that as it may, I know I am having a relapse. Seeing you like this is worrying me though, I don’t recall any of your files informing me of you having a previous Inhibition procedure.”

  “You should read my files, I wasn’t part of that generation of augments.” “That’s what files say!” “Meaning?” “Files can be doctored and made to hide things from everyone. Even the slightest abnormality can be hidden from those with a trained eye when it comes to reading the Consortium’s written documents. Are you sure you are who you think you are?”

  Sallyn’s throat tightened as she lost all sense of reality. Questions started running down her eye in code form, most were simple body function diagnostic checks, one question then arose that repeated in code and she locked up.

  “Sysdiagchck:WhoamI?-Unresponsive” created a wall of white type. It kept cycling until a sudden shock to the system caused her to respond with a dull and emotionless “Ouch.” A second harder knock to the system caused more of an organic reaction as Sallyn flinched. Relinquishing hold of that terrifying question, her system reverted to functional settings while her mind still whirred in confusion.

  Her spatial awareness detected Volg kneeling beside her. “What happened, what did you remember?” “They were dreams, not memories.” “Tell me about them.” “I’m a child, in a room and the world outside is falling apart… burning but it’s a conflict without any obvious origin for attack.”

  “Maybe I should tell you what came back to me. I lived in a community separate from the Consortium. I lived with augmented humans as well as the unchanged. Like any other colony, it had its troubles and solved them in its own way. Suddenly rogue elements from Augment territory gained an asset that was in its infancy. I should know, I sent the consortium schematics for a prototype weapon, something that relied on an old forgotten tech lost to us in the information collapse over eight hundred years ago.”

  “What did you give them? What was it?” “Lasers, high energy lasers, capable of melting armour in seconds without the material wastage of kinetic weapons or chemical explosives. Although, they are highly taxing for energy consumption, even for our largest cruisers. They were silent assassins to defend against bombardments and annihilate the most deadly weapons of the time. I found the schematics for a special chemically powered laser, it was powerful enough to maintain its strength in atmospheric disruptions such as dense cloud and fog. Such was my arrogance, that I never thought the consortium would have attacked us. I remember their ships just loomed overhead and suddenly bricks crumbled while glass and metals melted into yellow fluids. No sign of foul play came from their ships except strange coaxial lenses. An idiot I was and shall remain as I gave them a weapon they could use to assassinate whole colonies without so much as looking like they were recording the event to pass onto the feed. It’s where the cutting pistols descend from and they were conveniently given out during the complete collapse of Consortium control over the Pollux sectors.”

  Sallyn witnessed his eyes welling up, though they refused to release the tears to trickle down his face. The man before her was no longer Volg, he was someone new hiding in his skin. Volg never cared nor showed remorse, he was only concerned with ensuring the Consortium were happy with his research. “Who are you?” “Me? Well that would be telling.” “Why hide, we’re dead already” “You maybe, but I always had a trick or two up my sleeve.” “Had implies you don’t have a trick left.” “Are you entirely sure of that statement?”

  As Volg’s new personality finished revealing enough, he got up to leave the room. “Look, you can trust me and live or you could die here. It’s your choice.” While his body crossed the threshold of the doorway, the Cyclops drone followed subserviently. Bolting out of the enclosed room, Sallyn preferred the illusion of open space granted by the ‘Stargazer’ walkway. Volg studied her reaction. “Afraid of boxes?” “Nope, just traps prepared by people I no longer know.” “You never knew the real me.” “As this conversation evidently proves.”

  The Cyclops then illuminated a dark section of corridor as a reaction to something; Sallyn could read its thoughts through the data streams. It had seen something but it had stalked the unlit hallways leading to service pipes. Even extremophiles would have struggled to survive in the conditions the service piping provided.

  Scurrying out of the dark corner, limped a barely functional drone. Specifically it was a drone that had joined Sallyn on the surface of the planet. Optic cables frayed and its outer shell was torn apart by minute bite marks. The poor thing had been attacked by the insect drones from the corpse. She could see its signal was erratic, what could only equate in coding terms would be pain as virus code slowly overridden the machine’s processors. Once the being had succumbed to the infection, Volg suddenly charged along the hallway. He was heading to the command centre of the ship.

  Sallyn witnessed the whole lighting system shut down, her body began to drift without the need of movement through the air. Realising the vessel’s centrifugal gravity had been terminated; she grabbed the head of the Cyclops to stabilise her movements. The glare of the eye was enough to know the dissatisfaction this machine had. Although it did not agree with the manner in its groping, it showed no signs of rebelling or malicious intent, only the utmost patience for those around it.

  There was something amiss though, the drifting corpse of that should have been the other drone was no longer there. Both the augment and the drone rapidly scanned in the near pitch black corridor using infrared vision to detect movement. Now she understood the purpose of the emergency infrared lighting system. Floating towards the direction where Volg ran off, she found the experience exhilarating and the sensations enjoyable. Ponderously drifting through channels of grey lit infrared corridors, gentle pushes off walls and floors as well as ceilings helped navigate her way through the vessel’s body.

  After the seemingly lengthy period of time spend adrift inside the starship, lights glowed and the centrifugal forces started to gently pull both of them to the floor. Glistening particulates in the fading infrared to standard lighting transfer caught her attention as they registered as a foreign material. Fully lit, the extinguished darkness had now revealed cuts and tunnels carved from small parasites. What disturbed her most were the hidden rooms now being unveiled, she now doubted Volg’s intimate knowledge of the vessel’s schematics.

  One such hole revealed a black shiny material, like everything else, this ship was remodelled to hide its previous form. “What are you hiding?” She uttered while the drone adjusted to the newly applied gravity. Feeling her way with one of the tendrils, she felt something beyond the material of mystery. It was a configuration for a circuit, but it was unlike anything encountered before as conventional processors and microchips were replaced by uniform silicate crystals surrounded by electromagnets. Luckily these components had not
been activated as of yet. There was no time to study them and if she did not contact the patrol ship, there would be a chance to experience her last moments of sentience in the vacuum of space.

  Sallyn began broadcasting a radio signal while Volg needed to reset the transmitter controls. Bursting a code into one large radio pulse, Sallyn hoped that would be enough to inform the other ship what was happening. What came through in response was certainly not satisfactory. Staring toward the external cameras’ screen, she saw the patrol vessel realign itself so its magnetically accelerated missile bay faced the belly of Volg’s ship.

  Her head locked onto movement immediately. Quickly glimpsing that metallic hand was enough to know what it was, it did not linger too long as it retreated into a corridor while grasping something. Pulling her tendrils out of the gaping in the wall, she followed the entity around the corner to a rotunda hallway. Once again the entity eluded discovery. Labyrinthine displays started mapping all of the outer deck hallways as she wanted to find the relic before it could escape the ship. Another sound called her attention to another opening in the wall, this one was