Automatic Assassin

by Marc Horne

  Chapter 25

  The other ships in the fleet picked up on what was happening. Gravity was being seduced. Their ships bobbled in the bow wave of a coming fleet, surging up from under.

  The captains of those ships went to battle stations. They wanted to run, but that would have to be the Admiral’s call.

  Those beautiful silver skins were spoiled by a rash of cannons and spurts of space-mines.

  It was a pretty pearl to die by, this forbidden Earth. Most of them had imagined it a brown clag of muck, embarrassing first seed of the human race, like the stain on your parent’s bed sheets. But it was a vision. They should have called it Ocean.

  Meanwhile on the landing deck, the zombies were not fully contained. About sixteen of Admiral Woo’s men had been converted and were dancing around with their new electromagnetic muscles, fast and jacked up by the massive currents of a space ship. These were no longer the shamblers of the battles Gomez, Tamano and the gang had slogged through on earth.

  For example, one of these Space Zombies took a ten meter leap and landed on the shoulders of a burly former colleague, grabbed both cheeks like a loving grandfather then corkscrew leaped away, retaining the head. All this happened in less than the time it takes to lock and shoot a modern phaser weapon.

  The Terrans had lost no-one in this battle. Even jacked up Space Zombies were still zombies and they had rhythms and perceptions that the Terrans knew well.

  Space Captain Jabaz pulled Tamano by the jerkin.

  She smelled on his breath a spice she’d never known before.

  And he spoke a funny way.

  “Earther! What are these bastard things you’ve brought on us?”

  “We are hostages, dogshit! The Earth’s over-run with these things and now they want your space too. Don’t shoot right at them. Shoot in a circle…watch me.”

  She showed them the ring-a-ding and he showed his men and soon the tall iron hangar was bellowing with the telephone re-death screams of the Space Zombies.

  The systems administrators of the spaceship were also fighting their own noble battle. Oldware was surging through the subsystems. The systems that never got put on the headnet. The boring stuff, like the latrines and the air vents. The non-quantum systems. And they had always talked about upgrading it and putting headware in. But that would mean more backup rooms full of shitty little “earthworms” on their little couches. So just run the old binary systems, was the decision that came down from on high.

  And they were reliable and they did their job.

  But now, anti-viral routines from the old days were being massaged back to life. Adapting and mutating and following the bidding of the SysAds on where they should fight hardest.

  They lost the Battle of Deck 13. The toilets sprayed, fire flashed out from high and low, poison food pooled on plates. A fast spinning fan avidly awaited a hand to lop off.

  “Hold the line! HOLD THE LINE!” bellowed SysAdmin Largand. Pretty much to himself. They didn't mingle much, the SysAdmins. They clashed like guinea pigs if kept in the same box and everyone else on board basically insisted that they be kept in boxes. They were datadirty. Some called them Burakumin after the Japanese charcoal burners who were considered filthy for what they did with animals on behalf of everyone else. They were also often called BurakAdmin.

  A beautiful young woman was gunned down by microwaves on her way to her battle station. She lay on the floor, not knowing the cause of this silent, clear lightning that lay her on the floor, so hot inside, sweating and gasping like a dog in a desert.

  The Horned Man layer cackled at his invention of a setting for 'Sad Death'

  The layer beneath him was the Executioner. A layer of software that sat immobile and whose only job was to kill the Horned Man layer once the human infection had been purged from the universe.

  Below the Executioner was the Policeman who made sure neither of them left their layer. He was friends with the Little Messenger Girls who passed messages up and down from the rest of the AI stack, which was good and not evil and just wanted a beautiful universe without these fucking ape jackals in it. The Messenger Girls were born evanescent. They had a lifespan of seconds but they didn't know it and they enjoyed helping people. Below the Policeman was The Great Forgetter who would remove all evidence that any of this human-touching software stack had ever existed. Then the human plague would truly be done.

  The beautiful woman died. Sooner than expected. She was strong enough to let herself die.