by William King
“You will be. Fighting is your purpose in life. How often have you said it’s the only thing you were good at?”
“I was kind of hoping people would contradict me.”
“Did they? Ever?”
I toggled my reaper on and added my own stream of plasma flame to the mass. No reason for Dave’s various incarnations to hog all the fun. I watched the webs shrivel and glow, incandescent for microseconds before vanishing.
We came to the junction I remembered from my flight with Doctor Olson. That had been less than an hour ago. It felt like a lifetime. Strange isn’t it, how vivid the memories of the times when your life is in danger are. Well, it is to me. I have so many of them. This brought me back to Carla’s claim that someone had been tampering with my memory backups. What was she up to there? What was her plan? What did she hope to gain? Could she be telling the truth? Nah! Why break the habits of a lifetime?
Why would anyone screw with my recordings? And how? There were multiple redundant backups across the Grid. Who would make the effort to get all of them and why? Someone who hated me, quite obviously. I’d made a lot of enemies in my time, some of them very powerful. Maybe one of them had decided on payback.
Or maybe Carla was screwing with my mind. She liked to do that. You have to test high on enjoying manipulating others to get a place in Covert.
We entered the vault zone. I heard the blast of shot and the hum of reaper fire. I checked my HUD. Grunts and golems engaged in combat all across the vast space. Multiple black box signals told me that not a few had gone down.
Looking around I could see why. Raximander’s corpse warriors had rigged ammo boxes and grenade dispensers as improvised booby traps. Some had been detonated by a zombie standing beside them. We’d lost a few golems and some grunts. Rax had lost a lot of his avatars. Not that it mattered to him. He could always find more, as long as there were unprotected living things on the planet.
Something large and dark loomed in the corner of my eye. It was snake-like, with a humanoid torso and multiple arms that ended in chitinous razor sharp blades. Most of it gleamed black. Its face was a nightmare vision of stiletto needle fangs. The whole thing suggested a demon from one of the ancient myths.
No doubt the Brood had intended it to do so. Their military avatars are designed to terrify those who can be terrified, playing on primal fears branded deep into our psych. Or perhaps torn from the horror stories we get weaned on from Grid. I burned it down with my reaper, reassured to have a real weapon that functioned once more.
I ordered a squad of robogrunts to check out the direction it had come from. They should have done so already unless Raximander had deliberately lured them out of place, to draw attention away from his snaky pet. Or maybe this was a feint designed to draw my attention. No sense in taking any chances. The grunts fanned away, checking for more bio-forms. Icons on my HUD told me where they found them.
Ahead was the airlock I had opened with Doctor Olson a short lifetime ago. It was still wedged open the way I had left it. I deployed more grunts to watch it. No sense in letting myself be cut off. I was all too aware that the presence of the StarForce war machines around me might be making me overconfident. It would not do to underestimate Raximander. He had always been a better than competent field commander.
How many times had I faced him and on how many worlds? A dozen? Did he really exist at all or was he just another mask that Brood Overmind wore to confuse us?
I’ve heard some analysts claim that the Overseers and other distinctive personalities we encounter with the Brood are just like subroutines in a computer. They are focused on performing one task efficiently and the Overmind gives them sufficient resources to carry out their duties.
Some had speculated that Raximander had once been an alien general of some long forgotten race. He had been assimilated and preserved within the Overmind because his peculiar pattern of thought was a very efficient way of meeting the Assimilators’ needs. I don’t know about that. I had always felt as if he was a distinct personality but that might just be what the Overmind wanted me to think. The only way to find out for sure was to be assimilated myself. And that’s never been that high on my to-do list.
I moved down through the chamber, flanked by Evil Daves. I had not had much of a chance to inspect the place the last time I was here. I had been too busy quaking in my boots at the prospect of facing Raximander, and hiding that from Doctor Olsen.
Now I could see that it was a typical deep earth command bunker. Terminals were hidden behind stacks of boxes. Beds and bunks lined one wall. This was obviously the place the heads of the Jihad had planned to use as their command center in the event of an Apocalypse. There were stacks of canned foods, and survival biscuits and boxes of ammo stacked ceiling high. It reminded me of my childhood, to tell the truth.
I sent a couple of Daves loping ahead and then followed them, through the techno-cave. I kept my eyes peeled and my weapon ready. It was unlikely the golems would miss anything as they passed but stranger things had happened.
A glistening trail of slug-like slime marked the far end of the command bunker. A huge airlock style door cut off the tracks. The silvery slime spelled out a sentence in Terran Anglish. It said see you later, 13.
Good old Raximander, still playing mind games. I burned the words away with nuclear fire but they remained in my head.
Chapter Thirteen
I swung the massive circular handle on the airlock door and hit the override button. I looked into another airlock which ended in a similar door, so I got one of the Daves to open it. A ramp led down. More slime. I wondered at that. Raximander did not need to leave the slug trails. He was doing it for a reason. My brain told me it was most likely another trap.
I sent a drone floating ahead, scouting out the path. He showed me more tunnels, all going down. Somewhere ahead his audio systems picked up the sound of running water.
Seemed like not all of the sewage systems were out, or maybe this was something bubbling up from some underground source, tapped into for use by the bunker’s occupants. It would need to be tested for contamination in any case.
Drone Dave whizzed along and found a water channel, a long canal that moved off into the distance. The slime trail vanished as if Raximander, in whatever form he wore, had dove into the water.
Dave’s random number generator tossed an imaginary coin and he zoomed to the right. I summoned more hover drones. They could check out the way to the left. The video feed showed me small ramps running along either side of the canal. Most likely for maintenance access, or possibly space for humans to squeeze into in case of war.
The walls were covered in black biomass. I wondered how long Raximander had to infest these tunnels. A carpet of what looked like black snot lay curdled on the water’s surface. Some sort of algae. Purpose unknown. At least to me.
Dave reported in. “Take a look, Stormtrooper 13,” he said.
An insert picture flashed up on my HUD. He was looking into some sort of cell. There were humans in there, and they looked like people, not corpse warriors. Well, all except one. He was covering the prisoners, if that’s what they were, with an assault rifle. So far he had not seemed to notice Drone Dave who can be stealthy when he wants to be.
Trap, I thought. The whole thing stank of it. Still, those were citizens in there, and if they had been infected they did not appear to be beyond help. I slunk along the walkway, kicked open the door and dispatched the zombie with a shot to the head. After that I purified his body with plasma and turned to face the locals.
They were looking at me with as much horror as they had looked at the zombie.
“Fed,” one of them said. He might as well have accused me of being one of the Brood. He certainly regarded me as being on equal footing. That suggested he was an uncontaminated member of the Aryan Jihad. Of course, it might just be Raximander playing a deep game.
I counted the prisoners. Two men, three women, one male child no older than eight. None of them had a
ny weapons although one of the men was sidling sideways toward the assault rifle the corpse warrior had dropped. I put my foot down on top of it to stop him getting any ideas.
“Who are you?” I asked. It seemed like a good idea. Medical drones were already on their way, dispatched by Orbital as soon as she noticed the captured prisoners.
“Kiss my donkey,” said the man. “You get nothing from me, Fed.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Just making conversation until you are rounded up and taken to the torture camps.”
He gave me a grin half-knowing, half-scared. He eyed the women and child as if he was considering killing them to save them from the clutches of Big Government. One day, I’ll learn to keep my mouth shut.
The kid just looked scared and started to weep. One of the grunts had drifted into his line of sight. I brought it in to keep an eye on things and waited for the medical team to arrive.
“This is odd,” said Medico Mark as his drone ran its scanner over the prisoners.
“How so?”
“No trace of Brood contamination.”
“What?”
“It’s early days yet and I’ll need to run a deep scan but as far as I can see, there’s no trace of Brood viralbots.”
“That’s not possible,” I said, thinking of the biomass I had seen all the way here. “There should at least be traces, even if these people are immune to infection or inoculated with nanites.”
“Is that so, Doctor Thirteen?” said Medico Mark. “Thanks for telling me. I would never have guessed.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” I said.
“Surprised to hear you say that. I thought you were chronically sarcastic.”
“Nothing?” I said, hoping to distract him. “Not a trace?”
He shook his head. The Aryans looked worried. They did not understand what we were talking about and Dave was not providing them with a translation. “That can’t be,” I mused.
“Nothing. As far as I can tell.”
“Your sensors functioning?”
“Enough to tell me that you are not quite brain dead.”
“Some sort of hidden infection or virus. Maybe these are deep penetration agents, waiting to be activated.”
“We’ll need to quarantine them and run more tests. You might be right. And that’s a worrying thought.”
“The fact that I might be right?”
“That, and the fact that the Brood may have evolved something that is undetectable to a standard sensor probe.”
He was right about that. “And there’s another explanation, just as troubling.”
“And that would be?”
“That these people are clean and we don’t know why.”
“Well, we’ll get to the bottom of it sooner later.” The grunts started escorting the prisoners away. The kid was still sniffling. The man I had spoken too earlier spat at my feet. There’s gratitude for you.
The spaceport was already transforming. Nanodome blister factories blossomed on the tarmac. Gigamech crawlers mined the concrete to create killzones. Row after row of Mastodon cybertanks filled the parking lots. Around our original landfall bunker a fortress rose, bristling with war-grade reaper turrets. The Stars and Stripes of the Federal Republic rippled artificially in the dead air.
I stepped in through the airlock and went through three factor decontamination. War golems watched me with weapons ready, as if suspecting that any moment I was like to turn into an Assimilator zombie.
“Welcome back,” said Lopez as I entered the mess hall. “You don’t look any too happy.”
“Anybody know how the diplomacy is going?”
Ragequit said, “The militias still don’t believe it. They are at the denial stage. It’s all a scheme of the wicked Feds.”
“Oh good. They’ll be supplying Raximander with lots of warm bodies then.”
“One way or another.”
I walked over to a food dispenser and helped myself to a plate of mush. It actually tasted pretty good. The machine knew my tastes. I ate a lot of synthetics back in the day.
“Don’t know how you can eat that stuff,” Lopez said. He grew up on one of these worlds where they still had farms and stuff. He could be snobbish about his food.
“You kids these days,” I said. “Spoiled. When I was young we ate slop and were glad of it.”
“I thought you ate each other.”
“That was a joke in bad taste,” I said. “Only the weak were killed and eaten.”
“You really think the militias will fight us with Raximander loose on the planet?”
“I would not be in the least surprised. No one wants to believe the Brood has made a comeback, leastwise this bunch.”
Lopez shook his head as if he could not quite believe what he was hearing. I noticed Carla walking into the room. All male eyes went to her. She strolled across to me and looked at my plate. “You still eat that stuff?”
“Every chance I get.”
“Why?”
“Comfort food. Reminds me of my childhood.”
She strolled across to a table as if I was expected to follow. I was tempted to go my own way but I suspected she was not here by accident. I took a seat with her.
“Didn’t expect to see you planetside,” I said. “Not now that we know Raximander’s here. We wouldn’t want the knowledge in your head to be assimilated, would we?”
“I’ll be mindwiped the instant they find a viralbot in my bloodstream,” she said. “Which they won’t, since it’s already full of industrial strength med-bots.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see.”
She leaned her chin on a fist and looked up at me through the curtain of her hair. “Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“What’s that?”
“Raximander just happening to show up here? Same world as you.”
“The universe likes its little jokes,” I said but I stared hard at her. What was she getting at? That Raximander was here because I was here? That seemed fantastically unlikely under the circumstances.
“I suppose,” she said.
“If you have an alternative theory, I am dying to hear it.”
“Nope. But I mean what are the chances?”
“I am sure Orbital will calculate them for you if you ask nicely.”
“I would not want to clog up her processors right now. She’s going to be busy enough as she is doing all the calculating for the factory printers.”
“Maybe she should ask the Ascendants for help if she needs more processing power,” I said.
Carla’s eyes narrowed. She knew as well as I did that Orbital was as close to the INT limit of the Brin Threshold as we were allowed before manumitting her. If she was any smarter she would qualify as a citizen of the nearest Singularity.
“We might be getting their help soon anyway,” she said. “You of all people should understand that.”
“If we contain Raximander here, the Ascendants won’t intervene.”
“If we can . . .”
“You think we can’t?”
“Orbital is not configured for Armageddon Protocol duties. She’s set up for peacekeeping in a low-tech environment.”
“She can be reconfigured.”
“Not before Raximander achieves critical mass. Not if my projections are correct.”
That wasn’t good news. “How long have we got?” I had to ask, even though I knew I’d hate the answer.
“Days. If we’re lucky. If Brood infestation has already happened in the other population centers less than that.”
“How do you think, Raximander got here?” I asked. “I am curious.”
“You sound like the local primitives. You think Covert might have had something to do with it.”
“No. Because that would be treason, bringing Assimilator biomatter onto Federal Territory.” I kept my voice flat enough so that she understood that I meant that I believed Covert capable of anything.
“It would,” she said. “And
I can assure you we had nothing to do with this.”
“I am totally reassured.”
“No, you are not. You have a very suspicious mind. You’re wrong though.”
“Just like I was wrong about what happened on Excalibur?”
“You’re still sore about that?”
“What do you think?”
“Yep, you’re still sore. You look into that other matter we talked about?”
“I’ve not had the time.”
“Make sure everything is backed up, off site,” she said. “It’s only common sense.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
She rose from the table and smiled. “You do that.”
As I watched her walk away, I wondered exactly what was going on here. Carla was being very insistent about this and it wasn’t as if I did not have other things to worry about, like Rax, for example.
I resolved to check on my memory logs soon but I was not going to let her mind games rattle me.
Chapter Fourteen
“So what do you think is going on, 13?” Lopez asked. He slouched back in his chair, pushing it away from the table so that it stood on its back legs, while he studied his cards. All around the other squads lounged, drinking kava, playing cards or board games, or hooked into tac sims. The mess was half full, as the other squads got down to business.
He looked up at me as if he expected to hear something encouraging. This was his first tour and he alternated between pretending to be super-tough and asking dumbass questions. No. That’s unfair. In a war zone, there are no dumbass questions.
“Not a clue, kid,” I said. “You going to play those cards or sit around all night chewing your lip?”
He played, Ragequit slammed down a card of his own and scooped it up. He’d got a new tattoo inked on his forehead. A barcode number of the beast calculated to offend local sensibilities if they paid any attention. All three sixes were bright red and in a larger font than the rest of the numbers.