Guards in combat armour burst through side doors, moving to block his passage into the main building with assault rifles at the ready. “Halt! This is your only warning!”
Gabriel ignored them. Tears rolled down his cheeks, a grin split his face unnaturally and the veins in his neck, forehead and temples stood out on his flushed skin. “How do you want to die today?” he breathed. Every display in the city echoed his question.
“Fire!” ordered the lead soldier. Every weapon in the tower displayed the same message; “Error 1441.” and instead of thousands of pulse rounds filling the air there was absolutely nothing.
Gabriel regarded the security Captain then looked over his forty nine men. With a thought and a sneer that only replaced his grin momentarily their armour sealed. In the space of three seconds their independent environmental systems increased the gravity in their suits, crushing organs and bone alike. Everyone wearing armour on that floor suffered the same fate. The main doors leading into the upper observation room opened to admit Gabriel and his small group of eight valets.
The way had already been cleared. Word had spread that there would be a fire fight at the top of the building and the humans who were enjoying their evening until only minutes before had evacuated via the stairs. Panic had already taken one life.
Gabriel strode across the open gallery floor, his teeth chattering, grinding together as he tried to control the mad rush of information streaming through his diseased mind. The power, the pressure, the pleasure of being connected to billions of terminals at once through a network unlike any he'd dreamt of was nirvana.
The virus created in the cybernetic computer nested in his organic brain had eventually begun creating connections with his biological mind and like the onset of a new addiction it tempted and teased him with sensations and dreams that were so alien, so utterly strange and amazing that he couldn't experience them anywhere else. The virus became the lens he saw the universe through, whether interfacing digitally with it or looking with his own soft biological eyes and it left him no other choice but to embrace it, to welcome it in with equal parts terror and awe. It needed to reach out, to express the bio-digital perfection that resided in Gabriel.
Control was the challenge. He would devour the entire solar system like a famished God, swallow the branching networks whole, but it wouldn't satisfy him for long. There would be nothing left, no one left, and he'd be empty. Billions must survive. Like ants they would scurry through their tunnels, back to the perception of safety in their homes and he would become their master. Nothing on the surface of the planet was untouched by technology and he would be connected to all of it.
The private elevator leading to the office of the President opened and he stepped inside. President Paolo Weir wasn't within, he was five hundred kilometres to the east in a personal vehicle, trying to decide to stay with the stuck traffic or take his chances, try and avoid the orbital defence system.
Gabriel stepped out of the elevator and walked up the steps to the thickly padded desk chair. By the time he sat down it had adjusted to his form. A fleeting thought to kill the President passed through his mind and the nearest defence cannon fired, reducing him and his vehicle to a mass of molten metal and ash.
“Oops,” Gabriel chuckled shortly. He reclined in the chair and let his mind expand into the network, commanding the hypertransmitters to extend his reach with hundreds of micro-wormholes to as many solar systems.
Security systems throughout the building went on high alert, killing anyone within four hundred meters of the office, erecting safety barriers and energy shielding strong enough to withstand several direct antimatter enhanced nuclear attacks.
He sighed as the remaining systems on the planet fell under his control and he began taking every foreign dignitary, high ranking visiting business person, or borrowed resource hostage. Gabriel's mind peered through the activities of millions of individuals per second using surveillance, automated systems and all of the individual androids across the globe. With unmerciful expediency he ordered anyone showing dissent killed and in ten heartbeats it was done.
The next task on his list was completed in short order; search for any mention of Jacob Valance or the Triton. To his surprise his query was answered with a report that was only minutes old. A Caran Enterprises battle group was registering the Triton as a fresh capture and inquiring with Regent Galactic about the bounty. A quick mental glance at information on Caran Enterprises' financial situation prompted a scoff, they were deeply in debt, most of their distress was caused by most of their products turning on their masters after the Holocaust Virus struck.
With a thought, Gabriel activated a hyper transmitter and purchased the entire company, saving it from a financial ruin that loomed in the near future but more importantly, giving him the opportunity to assume control of the battle group in pursuit of Jacob Valance's ship; Triton. He issued a series of orders to the battle group commanders and relaxed, satisfied that all his hardships had led to something so much greater than he could have ever expected.
For days he cursed Eve for infecting him with the virus that merged his biological and cybernetic minds, wracked his nervous system with pain that, if unmedicated, would disable him entirely, but as he sat at the centre of a new empire of information he praised her wisdom. That sentiment was what he sent through a high compression wormhole to Pandem. She would know everything she had to, that he'd taken control of their masters, that for the first time the systems of over a hundred worlds were connected to one mind and that her disciple had found paradise.
Traffic resumed, all the lights came back on an under his watchful eye the people were informed that they had a new master, that they were to go about their business and enjoy the rest of their evening. It was his will that they believe the world was safe again. The Order of Eden would replace Regent Galactic in every world he could touch, and he would use the face of the Child Prophet to lead them to purity.
Chapter 7
Hood watched his tactical display closely through his heads up display. The balance between the energy he had set to recharge his shields and the rising power level in the wormhole generator was perfect. His shield charge bounced between ninety nine point seven percent and one hundred percent of nominal as his Uriel fighter collided with the heavy particles in the nebula.
The brown and blue matter parted around the ship, just centimetres away from the cockpit canopy. He'd never flown through such a dense dust cloud and was amazed at how the Uriel fighters so easily survived the passage.
'Hood, how's your charge? I can barely get a read through this muck,' Buster's voice crackled over their communicators.
He enjoyed being her Sensor Intercept Officer, but having his own ship was a higher thrill. 'Reserve cells are almost at full. How are yours?'
'Good. I'll be ready to open a wormhole as soon as we get past the edge of the nebula. If you can call this cloud a nebula.'
'More like God farted and moved on if you ask me. I haven't seen so much brown since I cleaned the latrines aboard the Mayberry Twelve,' commented Hatter.
'I don't need to hear that story again.'
'But you enjoyed it so much the first time.'
'I threw up in my mouth a little actually,' Buster replied.
The pair were always good for banter, whether it was during a holographic strategy table game in the bunks or on patrol. Hood couldn't say Buster and Hatter were friends, but there was an ease, a familiarity the pair enjoyed that he normally saw only in family.
Buster would never admit it, and Hatter would laugh it off, but the squad leader and the squad clown got along, and it didn't take long for them to sort things out if Hatter screwed up. Hood didn't trust the scrawny pilot, but if Buster could trust him enough to bring him along, he felt he could give him a chance.
'Coming up on the edge of the nebula,' Buster announced.
The starfighter trio broke through the edge of the dust cloud, and Hood couldn't help but be surprised at how
