by Alex Oliver
There were three swoops on the roof. What Lina was suggesting was that she should take one and fly to safety while she left all her people to be blown up by...
Things connected in her head. The Froward had been holed and blown off course by thrown boulders. The criminals had access to some huge missile launcher. Of course. They'd used it like the wreckers of old, destroying any ship that came close enough, sharing out the plunder when it fell from the sky.
But take the force needed to hurl a boulder into outer space, and turn it on a target little more than half a mile away? It wouldn't just take the top off the citadel and leave the basements standing. It would melt the rock under it and leave a crater the size of a town. Dear God, was McKillip really mad enough to do that? How many of his own people was he willing to kill in the process?
How many of hers was she willing to leave to die?
~
Bryant wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, straightening up for a moment from the interconnected network of computers he had cobbled together. His back cricked, and he felt elated and bright and alive as he hadn't since he'd decided to leave.
Just because Aurora had caught him fair and square didn't mean he had to go down without a fight. So from the moment he'd been able to stop hugging himself with glee, he'd been back on the computer, trying to wrest back control of the ship for himself.
He didn't think it was Aurora herself on the other side of the flurry of commands and codes and hastily written seek and destroy programs, but whoever it was was wasted on a lowly prison ship like the Froward. He was having so much fun he hardly took a moment to look when the green brick computer let out a bell like chime and pulsed piss-yellow.
All the cricked disks of his spine clicked back into alignment as he stretched. That job done, he hunched back over his keyboard to see if his distant bots had finished mutating yet. They were going to introduce a layer between the iris recognition software and the authentication program that substituted his own eyes for the Governor's. But even as his finger hovered over the enter button, the ship cleared its voice with a whistle.
"Control of this vessel has been ceded to you, sir. Please state your destination."
"What?" No, he didn't want his distant opponent to let him win. Where was the satisfaction in that? Why would they suddenly change their minds after fighting so hard to keep him?
He checked his scanners and didn't quite understand what he saw, the first time. That torus shaped ring beneath the surface of the planet seemed to be active, spinning a great weight up to mind boggling speeds. A lid or a repelling plate or some kind of powerful electromagnetic device was being angled across the lip of the volcano's caldera.
Digging through the alien computer brought up the history of the complex beneath the mountain. It had been built to launch their spaceships, as a better way to create the thrust needed to overcome gravity than by burning tonnes of fossil fuel - of which this world had very little. They had put their evacuation ships on the track, accelerated them up to speed with geothermal energy and flung them into space from here. At which point the ships' on board engines had taken over the task of moving them away from their planet, in what seemed to be a mass exodus - a planet wide desertion.
Bryant wanted to know why they'd gone, why an entire planetary population would leave what seemed like such a nice world. Were they afraid of something? He also wanted to know how the criminals had gained enough control of the launcher to use it for rocks. But something in the sleet of numbers down his screen caught his eye and breath.
The targeting array on top of the caldera was moving. His fingers flew as he extrapolated its target and it just confirmed what he'd known in his bones from the moment it took its eye off him. It was aiming itself at the citadel, where Aurora was.
Aurora had stopped fighting to bring him back, so she must know it too. He pictured her outside - because she seemed an outside sort of person to him - standing somewhere elevated, with the wind blowing her tangled hair off her face and the sky bright behind her. She must know, right now, that her death was in that mountain. She'd be preparing to face it with that bloody-minded faith of hers that sometimes made him envious, because he would have liked to believe in something that made sense of all of this.
His imagination replaced the picture of Aurora posed like a heroic poster, with that of Aurora in pieces, like the swoop riders she had taken down. Pieces flattened into molten rock, burning, white bones charring in the heat.
His mouth filled with spit and he had to swallow nausea as he turned away from the inside of his own head angrily. Fuck no. That was not going to happen. Not if he had anything to say about it.
Nausea turned into a kind free floating, high pitched glee as he directed the chemical factories inside himself to produce nanobots tailored to work with what he understood of the alien technology. He had already used the translation program to display their readouts in Common. Now he focused on the schematic of the launcher beneath him and tried to work out what to do.
There was a way of stopping it. "Computer? I want to input a course."
Why was he doing this? He wasn't a hero. So, the convicts were going to turn their own colony into a crater through their own short-sightedness? That would be of considerable benefit to his long term plans. He could still get clean away and put all this behind him. He just... He didn't want to any more.
"Yes sir."
"As fast as you possibly can, I want you to fly down into the caldera of the volcano below. Inside you'll find a tube-like 'throat' of rock. I want you to wedge us in there in such a way that if they try to use it anyway they'll end up blowing themselves up."
"Sir." It was possible the computer had a special program for identifying when to use the skeptical voice, because its calm seemed now to be underlain by something faintly sarcastic. He felt it was questioning his life choices. "This vessel is worth ninety million dinar. I am permitted to question orders which run the risk of damaging it."
Beneath them, the guidance array had slid to a halt on its circular track and the sloping arms of its fine tuning wands were slipping one by one into locked position. It looked like a worm's mouth had opened in the side of the mountain. And this was not how he wanted to go - arguing with a computer - but on reflection it did seem very him.
"You're the only working spaceship on the planet. They won't want to damage you. They'll call the launch off."
"Are you certain, sir?"
"I'm absolutely bloody positive," he lied. "Believe me, I wouldn't risk my own life either."
"On your head be it then, sir."
He barely had time to laugh before the whole planet was hurtling at him. The kick of the engines in the chest squeezed the breath out of him and made his eyes stream with tears. He didn't approve of heroics on principle but it was pretty thrilling as the atmosphere licked over Charity in red flames and she came shrieking and steaming straight down and into the volcano's open maw.
Radio chatter surged out of one of the sensors, the sound of men yelling at one another in disbelief and panic. Charity's nose lights picked out a distant rock wall and before he could even process that he'd seen it they were driving into it, the impact throwing him out of his seat, surrounding the viewscreen with gardens of fiery sparks. The sound of metal grinding against stone filled the cabin and shook his brain just as the sliding, bucking ride down the throat of the volcano was shaking his spine.
With another shudder and a wail of tortured metal, Charity slid to a halt. Bryant curled himself into a shaky ball for a long moment while he worked out how to keep breathing, and how to start thinking again.
"Is it blocked?" he asked at last in a whispery tone he'd never heard from himself before. Then again louder. "Is it blocked?"
"What the fuck?" came someone's voice over the radio. "What the fuck just happened?"
"He rammed the launcher with a spaceship, duh. It's wedged in the passage. You want I should pull the trigger anyway?"
"Y
es. Yes! Wait, no. What will that do?"
"Could ricochet back here, blow the whole thing up, I guess. Definitely going to trash the ship for sure."
"We got the other one we could repair in a couple of months."
"I really, uh..." Missile launcher guy had a whiny, nasal voice with a judder to it that said its owner was shaking hard. "I really think it might blow back, mess up the whole compound. Then you'll have no spacecraft and no wrecking ball."
Bryant was busy programming his alien software nanites, or he might have given the nervous man a virtual kiss. Instead he identified the radio signal, piggybacked it back to the broadcast station in the alien space center's control room and began working on access.
In his own tangled setup in the cockpit his alien computer flashed bright cyan green for a moment and then settled into a dim heathery jade, and his translated readouts began telling him that they were linked up.
"Okay," said boss guy. "I'm gonna believe you. But you get in there, you get that thing moved into a silo for repairs. You make sure whoever it was that stole it ends up in chains in front of me by noon tomorrow, and in the mean time you fit that fucker with some plasma cannon and get it back in the air. I've got a citadel to retake."
"Yes, boss. Thank you, sir. We'll do that right away."
Over Bryant's dead body they would. But the expression gave him pause. He wasn't at all happy about how literal it had become.
Bryant checked his updated schematic of the compound. Access tunnels connected with the 'throat' of the launcher both above and below Charity. The life signs monitor showed four red dots clambering out of the lower passage and forming into a clump as they no doubt discussed how to reach the ship. She was wedged into the walls on either side of the tube, but they would have to climb up to gain access. Good. Bryant had a lot to do and didn't want to add visitors to his schedule.
He wondered if he could drop something on them as they attempted to climb up, and then he wondered how a complex as huge as this could be maintained by woodlouse folk who were scarcely taller than humans.
"Charity, do you have repair drones?"
"Yes, sir. They are at work."
"Doing what?"
"There are five minor hull breaches, the most extensive of which is to the nose cone where some of the underlying shield generator emitters have been damaged. I have four drones, one is repairing the shield generator, each of the other four are at work correcting a different hull breach."
"Show me a schematic of a drone."
Cute little things, if crabs are cute, the drones were about the size of the torso of a five year old child, but equipped with multiple spidery legs, some with vibroblades for cutting, some with welding arcs and torches.
He wasn't fully on board with the places where his mind was going, but he really didn't want to be captured. These guys might be fellow scientists, but that didn't mean they wouldn't try to cut him up to see how he worked, and their boss sounded like every bad dream rolled into one.
"If any of those guys out there sets a hand on this ship, I want the drones to throw him off."
"Sir, I am not permitted to harm human beings, not even ones who have not been authorized to use me. I cannot allow my drones to be used as weapons. I am not a military vessel."
The repetition struck him. "You're very proud of that, aren't you?"
"I am pleased with what I am, sir. As I believe are you."
Huh. Well, Charity might have been right about that up until last month. Now he wasn't so sure. But yes, perhaps dropping defenseless people down a dirty great abyss was not a thing that Bryant wanted on his newly discovered conscience. However gently he had them detach the humans from the hull and drop them into the dark, the fall could probably be considered an act of violence.
Sighing, he turned back to the alien computer. His bots had begun to adapt to it, learning, evolving, each iteration more in tune with the alien technology than the last.
In practice what this meant was that the quality of the information he was receiving just kept increasing. A room beneath the main magma core caught his eye. Racked against the wall, covered in dust, the compound had drones of its own.
He sent them a wake up call.
A couple more red dots had joined the others, briefly, before taking off. Now they were apparently flying up the bore of the launcher towards him. Fear put a spike through his chest as they entered the sphere lit by the Dash's running lights, and he could see them in the window. Two men with repulsor boots on, pulling up a grapple and a chain between them.
"I am receiving a signal that I am to be moved to a silo on site," Charity said, its voice uninflected, devoid of even fancied scorn. "I do not believe this signal is from a legitimate source. Instructions?"
The two men in repulsor boots outside landed on the hull. Bryant thought he felt a judder go through the whole ship, though that could only have been his imagination. It didn't do any good to hope the ship would twitch them off like a horse trying to twitch off a hornet. Charity was too gentle for that. Shit. Now he would really have felt better if Aurora was still here to kick their heads in. He didn't like having to handle conflict with people on his own.
They had attached the grapples to the Dash's attachment grooves, and were now crouched by the hatch, assembling a welding torch. "They're going to cut their way in to get me," he squeaked, with a kind of baffled terror. Why? Why did they want to hurt him? What had he ever done to them? "That's going to hurt you. You're permitted to protect yourself. Get your drones to stop them!"
"I am permitted to protect myself only if I do not harm humans in the process."
"Well, that's easy." He smiled a ghastly forced smile. "Just send your drones out to hold them still. Pin them in one place. That's not harm."
"It is harm if it goes on too long."
"O...kay." Bryant pulled at his hair to help him think. "You can gently take them off the hull and put them in a room with food and water. Lock them in, and we can unlock them again later before we go."
A pause, while the computer considered its priorities and the availability of a suitable room. "That is satisfactory." And then Bryant was watching with glee as the two criminals outside were surrounded by sleek metal spiders.
The guy with the welding torch managed to chop the legs off one. Bryant watched it drop into the darkness with a stab of guilt. He'd clearly got far too attached to Charity if he was even feeling sorry for her lice. But a second drone swarmed up Welder's back, anchored its feet to the hull and retracted its legs, crushing him flat. A foot came down on the torch's gas bottle and punctured it. The gas ran out harmlessly into the great hollow of the cavern.
The second guy got the same treatment. Fitted snug against the hull, his cheek pressed to it, a metal claw around each wrist and ankle, immobilizing him. And then the four restraining legs moved inward and the criminal was carefully folded into a fetal position as the outer legs telescoped once more, lifting them away. Bryant watched the drones carry their burdens up the sheer wall of the launch tube and into an archway further up, and felt kind of proud.
He was still not a murderer.
A winch engaged above and the long prelim chain went slithering up by the window, pulling a massive cable behind it. Bryant watched it go by with incomprehension, turned back to his readouts in the hope they would make sense of it.
And they did. The boom of a crane had slid across the caldera some way above him. Even as he watched, the prelim cable came to an end and the main cable was fed onto the winch with a crunch and judder that meant business. The floor lurched under him, and with a metal bending shrieking noise the Dart was wrenched from its resting place and began to be swung round and lowered towards a distant hangar-like door.
Bryant was in someone else's power now and he didn't like it at all. What did he need?
He needed to stop this weapon from being fired at Aurora, and his blockage was currently being unplugged from its mouth. So...
He needed to make sure none of
the people here could hurt him. He needed to keep them out, keep them away from him. Failing that, he needed at least a bodyguard. But by a fairly obvious train of thought the idea of a bodyguard brought him to Aurora again. And when he thought about her, he had a good idea what she would do to make herself safe. She would get out of the ship, take the compound over and use its resources as her own.
Okay, okay. He put his hands over his eyes to think and noted that his alien bots had almost reached the level of intuitive control he expected from his human ones. A bodyguard. Charity's drones were too principled to do the job, but the dusty machines lying dormant below wouldn't give a damn about harming humans.
He diverted power from the magma chamber and completed charging them up. "Do you know where you're being taken, Charity?" he asked, still in the dark behind his hands, where everything was glowing lines and text, and life felt like a video game he could not lose.
"Yes sir. I am highlighting the silo's location now."
A rattle and thud, and a kind of springy sensation below as the Dart was lowered into a magnetic sled on a vast trackway, and Bryant directed the alien drones to boil out of their store and pour down into the silo to meet him.
They tried, jerking to life like marionettes, clattering and rattling and shaking rust and dust from broken feelers and rotted limbs. Fuck. They had to come. They had to, or Bryant would be deposited in that big warehouse alone, and the criminals would cut through and find him and take him, and he...
Nonono. Stay calm. He forced himself to breathe slowly. Found the repair stations and directed his drones to oil their joints and brush themselves down and come for him as soon as they could. There was time. He hoped.
There was.
By the time the Dash had been diverted to the silo and coupled to another chain so she could be swung upright and into dock, Bryant's army was on the move again. He sent them chasing after each red dot. Didn't do anything violent, but he didn't need to. The alien repair robots were twice the size of the Dash's drones and heavier in the body, with more legs, though shorter. He was fairly sure, in fact, that they were modeled after their late creators. They fitted in the corridors and on the alien machinery as if it had been made for creatures exactly their size.