The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  In only a few seconds Dinah and Overton had run up beside her, and a glance around showed Evelyn and Jabir right behind. The five of them emerged out of the tubeway and into a nightmare.

  Everywhere around them, people were dying. It took Staples several confused seconds to make out what was happening. The automatons that served society as valets, information directories, cleaners, dog-walkers, and personal shoppers had begun a bloody rebellion, and Staples had no doubt as to who was responsible. They were in an affluent part of Tranquility, one often filled with the robotic toys of the idle rich, and so the violence was terrible.

  A quick scan of the large domed chamber revealed at least six automatons cutting through fleeing groups of people. There was no mercy and no overt malice; the robotic forms were simply killing people as quickly and efficiently as possible. The methods varied from broken necks and crushed spines to torn limbs and simple blunt-force trauma. There were perhaps two hundred people in the dome, and though there was a mass of confusion, most were beginning to flee in a raw panic.

  All of this Staples assessed in a second. She understood the people’s reluctance to accept the reality in front of them. The automatons had been a part of human society for over fifty years, and though they had been consistently updated, they had also been programmed in such a way as to be unable to harm a human being. What was happening shouldn’t have been possible. The advertisements had spent half a century promising redundancies on top of safeguards.

  There was no denying the bloodbath that greeted them, however. Staples remembered Dinah’s story about fighting the automatons on AR-559, how the robots had ripped through military grade powered armor to get at the tender human encased within, and she knew that if one of them got its hands on any of her crew, they would be dead. People streamed past them and into the tubeway. Staples had the impulse to warn them about the chaos that likely awaited them in the next chamber, but they were in no condition to listen to reason. Besides, what else could they do but run?

  “Sir, we need to get to the ship,” Dinah said.

  “And get weapons along the way if we can,” Overton added.

  Evelyn was muttering behind them. “Oh my God, oh my God…”

  “Can you get us there?” Staples asked Dinah.

  “I can try, sir,” she replied. “Stay on my six.” The woman began to push into the rampaging and panicked crowd in front of them, and Staples followed. Evelyn and Jabir came along tightly behind her, and Staples noticed that Overton took up the rear in some instinctive military formation.

  The crowd offered them some protection from their attackers, and Staples felt momentarily guilty of using the screaming civilians that surged around them as human shields, but it couldn’t be helped. She knew that if push came to shove, she would trade a stranger’s life for that of a crewmember’s.

  A few seconds later the crowd had thinned and the five of them found that they were more in the open. This was a mixed blessing. It allowed them to move more quickly, but they were far more obvious. Staples glanced to the side and saw three automatons give chase to the crowd as they fled. They moved in great leaping strides that easily doubled the pace of their prey in the light Martian gravity. Oddly, Staples saw a smaller service automaton standing stock still, seemingly confused by the flurry of activity around it. Another dragged a terrified and whining dog along as though it had not a care in the world. It’s not all of them, she thought. It was small comfort as one of the attacking automatons, one already covered in blood, spied their group and started towards them.

  As she had when they were pursued by the Nightshade vessels, Staples cursed the abject unfairness of their situation. They faced a superior foe, one without pity, remorse, or fear, one that would never stop until they were dead. Instead of running away from it, Dinah changed directions and ran right at the thing, pushing herself up to a sprint in the process.

  From behind them, Overton yelled, “Keep going for the other tube!” The room that they were crossing tapered to another tubeway in front of them, and if Staples remembered their path here correctly, it led to the receiving area. Perhaps five minutes of hard running separated them from Gringolet and safety.

  Dinah and the robot closed the distance between them incredibly quickly. A second before they collided, just as the automaton was reaching out its powerful hands to crush her fragile human bones, Dinah leapt off the ground in a flying, double-legged kick. Both of her feet, the real one and the artificial, connected solidly with the robot’s chest, and it went flying backwards over five meters, its hands having just missed her leg.

  Dinah landed lightly and instantly scrambled to her feet. Instead of following up her attack, a choice that would almost certainly have gotten her killed, she dodged towards a blue-clad body not far away. The automaton she had kicked away managed to right itself just as she reached the corpse. A second later the robot was heading back towards her, moving even faster this time. Before it could reach her, Dinah freed a pistol from the holster of the dead policeman and fired three shots at the automaton. The bullets shredded the plastic and metal carapace, and the thing tumbled twitching to the ground.

  Staples took all of this in from the corner of her eye as she, Evelyn, Jabir, and Overton closed in on the other tubeway. They were the only living people in the room now, and the rest of the automatons seemed to have given chase to the fleeing crowds of locals and tourists. She could see the surging crowd in front of her further down the tubeway, and there were two automatons following. The robots pulled people away from the group at random and paused only long enough to dispose of them before playing catch up and selecting another victim. It was a slaughter.

  “Wait,” Overton yelled as he broke off to investigate a bloody body that had been crushed against the wall of the tubeway. Staples shuddered as she realized that the dead woman had not been killed by an automaton; she had been trampled to death by her fellow humans. A second later she saw what Overton had noticed: a pistol in the woman’s hand. Carrying weapons was legal in most cities on Mars, and the reports of aliens and a teleporting Moon had only encouraged the habit. The pistol might have helped the woman against the automatons, but it was useless against the panicked crowd they had created. Staples shook her head at the grim irony.

  “Okay,” Overton said, rising to his feet with the pistol. Dinah caught up to them, and they ran forward again, dodging around bodies and towards the moving massacre in front of them. The tubeway lights, damaged somehow, flickered overhead, and the effect made the killings and bodies more horrific. When they had closed to within ten meters of the back of the crowd, Overton looked over at Dinah, and she nodded at him. They both stopped short and took aim.

  “Wait!” Jabir said, obviously concerned that they would shoot the running masses in front of them.

  Neither Dinah or Overton waited. They each fired several shots, and both of the automatons dropped as their bodies shattered. Staples saw a portly middle-aged woman fall as well. She didn’t know if one of the bullets had missed or simply passed through the automaton and into the crowd, and she supposed it didn’t matter. If the friendly fire bothered Overton and Dinah, they didn’t show it. Instead they were moving again, and Staples, Evelyn, and Jabir kept pace. There were now no automatons between them and the group of perhaps fifty running survivors.

  Staples didn’t know if anyone in the terrified crowd had a plan more than just getting away, but she imagined that if they did, it was to get to the receiving area and aboard a ship. That, of course, was also her plan.

  As loud as she possibly could, Staples screamed “Wait!” at the crowd running before them. A few people at the back looked over their shoulders. She saw the faces of a teenage boy, an older woman, and a businessman in a tie. None stopped, and the businessman saw the guns in the hands of the people following them and pushed and clawed at the people in front of him in an attempt to get away.

  “I have a ship!” Staples screamed.

  It was useless. Most of the people couldn�
��t hear her over their own screams, and the ones who could were too caught up in the panic of the crowd to reasonably weigh their options. Perhaps a few of them had even seen the woman that Overton or Dinah had shot fall and now thought they were being pursued by new attackers. It was immediately obvious to Staples and her crew that Victor was behind the attack, and that allowed them to master their fear to some degree. In fact, Overton, Dinah, and Evelyn had all had encounters with Victor’s automatons before. No one in the crowd, or even in the solar system, knew whom or what they were dealing with, and so they had given in to their baser instincts. In this case, that was most definitely flight.

  A new chorus of screams and cries emerged from the front of the crowd as they left the tubeway and entered the receiving area. Staples remembered the barker, information, and tour guide automatons that had peppered the oblong chamber when they had arrived and knew that they had leapt out of the frying pan and into a consuming fire.

  The front of the crowd came up short, but the sea of people behind pushed into them, forcing them forward into some new terror that Staples and the others could not yet see. The people in front tried to turn and flee back the way they had come, and the people in the back were still running from the horrors they had left behind.

  “Clea!” Evelyn shouted, pointing to a break at the side of the mass of people where the tubeway widened into the receiving area. Dinah was already headed that way, and the others followed suit. Overton again fell into the rearguard position.

  The tide of the crowd turned, and they began to run back the way they had come. As the five crewmembers of Gringolet dodged around them, narrowly avoiding being trampled in the process, they caught sight of the main concourse. It looked like a battlefield in a war fought between the inmates of two madhouses. Human bodies littered the floor, well over a hundred, Staples thought. The human wreckage was punctuated by the occasional shattered automaton form. Brave and now deceased souls had managed to beat a few of them to metallic junk using pipes or other improvised weapons. Amid the chaos and death, a few unaffected automatons stood and waved at bodies or dying people, loudly calling “Welcome to Tranquility!” or “Looking for an unforgettable experience?”

  As Staples and the others rounded the group they had been following and pushed their way free, they saw three automatons tearing into the crowd. Overton and Dinah again took up firing stances. Staples saw Overton hesitate, but Dinah fired almost immediately. A moment later, he joined her, and the automatons fell one by one. One of them, its leg blown off, managed to clutch a fleeing man and drag him to the ground with it. Dinah closed the distance quickly to shoot the thing, but the chamber was empty.

  Mechanically, Dinah dropped the clip and rammed her scavenged spare home. By the time she put a bullet in the head of the automaton, spreading circuitry and plastic across the floor, it was too late for the man. Staples shook her head aghast, then tried again.

  “Stop!” she screamed. “I’ve got a ship! You can come with us!”

  A balding, middle-aged man who was just starting to turn and run with the others stopped short and looked at her. Reflexively, he reached out and seized the shirt of a man next to him. “Wait!” he shouted. The other man stopped as well and looked at the captain and her crew. “You’ve got a ship?” he asked.

  Staples sighed with relief, and in that second Evelyn answered for her. “Yes, you can come with us.”

  The man turned back to the crowd and shouted, “Hey!” in a surprisingly loud voice that echoed down the tubeway. It stopped a few of the people, and then like a chain reaction they held each other up. Several of them took in the shattered remains of the automatons and the guns in Overton’s and Dinah’s hands. Staples could see reason creeping back into their faces as their prefrontal cortexes struggled to overcome their reptilian brains.

  A minute later nearly fifty people had gathered around the crew. Some were crying, others shaking, and all were on the edge. Staples realized that the wrong move could set these people into a panic again, one that might cause them to flee in terror or trample her and her friends in an attempt to get off Tranquility. She also knew that she might not have the food or space for so many on her ship, at least not comfortably, but she’d worry about that later. Right now, she could save the lives of the people in front of her. They had to get moving.

  “What berth is it?” Evelyn asked, her voice shaking.

  “Six,” Dinah said immediately.

  “Let’s go,” Jabir said. He placed a hand on Staples’ shoulder.

  The five of them pushed through the crowd and crossed the bloody concourse as quickly as they could, and the crowd followed at a jog. Just as they arrived at the berthing tube, two automatons appeared from a tubeway across the room. They were newer models, sleek and black. They noticed Staples’ group immediately. Dinah pointed her weapon at them in a two-handed grip.

  “Hurry, sir,” she said, taking aim.

  Staples turned to the access console and typed their registry code to open the doors. The console beeped its objection, and the doors remained shut. Staples cursed and tried the code again, praying that she had just mistyped it in her haste. She was rejected again.

  “What the hell?” she said, and looked through the window in one of the doors. The docking tubeway was plainly visible, but the outer door was closed. There was only one explanation: Gringolet was gone.

  Chapter 8

  “It’s gone,” Staples whispered.

  “What?” Overton asked. Evelyn stepped forward and looked through the other window to see if Staples had somehow made a mistake.

  “Open the door!” a woman shrieked from somewhere in the group. A chorus of cries went up to match. Some of the people had spotted the newer automatons. A few on the outside of the group stepped away, ready to run but hesitant to give up on the promise of rescue the captain had offered.

  “It’s gone,” Staples repeated, turning to face the crowd.

  “What do you mean, ‘it’s gone?’” the man who had originally stopped and listened said. “You said you had a ship!” He pointed an accusatory finger at her. Dinah, still pointing her gun at the hesitating automatons, glanced darkly at the man. Staples realized that if he seriously threatened her that Dinah would likely shoot him.

  She said the only thing she could think of. “Someone stole my ship.” Only when she said it aloud did the truth of it hit her. She was tired from running, terrified for her life, and desperate to save her crew. The loss of her ship hit her hard all the same. It was more than just a way for them to escape Tranquility. It was her home, and someone had taken it from her.

  “Could it be a member of the crew?” Overton asked.

  Staples shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Sir,” Dinah warned. “We need to do something.”

  The crowd was at a breaking point. They were going to run from the as-yet still automatons, attack Staples for giving them false hope, or both. Just then the sound of another group of people came down the tubeway at the other end of the receiving area. More than a hundred screaming and panicked people streamed into the large room, and as they did so, the two automatons leapt into them. Dinah was unable to get a clear shot as the robots tore through the crowd, killing indiscriminately. The people continued to come on despite the attack, and a flurry of movement at the back told Staples that the group was fleeing from at least one other automaton.

  “Move!” Evelyn said as she charged forward and accessed the control panel. “Cover me,” she said to Dinah, and her fingers moved furiously across the keys. Staples tried to follow what she was doing, but she was far from a computer expert. She knew that Evelyn was a capable hacker. The computer scientist had done some key investigating that had helped to uncover the military’s connections to Teletrans. She was apparently poor at covering her tracks, but Staples couldn’t imagine that would matter right now.

  Meanwhile, the room had erupted in chaos. The two crowds had blended; people ran back and forth banging on doors, attem
pting to operate access panels at other berths, and generally fleeing for their lives. Automatons moved throughout the crowd, rending everyone they could get their hands on. Absurdly, one automaton that was seemingly immune to Victor’s influence stood nearby offering hotel recommendations and dining discounts.

  One of the automatons broke through the crowd and came at them, and Dinah spent four of her remaining bullets putting it down, leaving her precious few.

  “Sir,” Dinah warned.

  “I know,” Staples said. She turned to Evelyn who was still working wildly at the panel. The numbers and data on the screen were unrecognizable to Staples. “What have you got, Evelyn?”

  Evelyn didn’t answer. Either she hadn’t heard Staples’ voice over the din, or more likely, she was working as fast as she could and couldn’t take the time to answer.

  Staples scanned the room. The five of them were in the middle of a massacre. More than a dozen people had been killed since the other crowd had entered the room. From somewhere in the madness, a figure emerged. He caught Staples’ attention immediately, most especially because he was not running. In fact, he did not look in the least bit frightened. He was tall and broad, and his head was bald. It took Staples a moment to realize the other odd thing about him; he had no eyebrows.

  “Overton,” Dinah said and tossed the pistol with the four remaining shots to him.

  “What is it, Dinah?” Jabir asked. He had seen the approaching stranger as well. “Who is this man?”

  Dinah rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck, then dropped into a fighting stance. “William Grant. Former SSPOD.” She spared a glance at Staples. “Don’t worry, sir. I can take him.”

  “How do you know he’s not here to help?” Staples raised her voice to be heard over the tumult around them.