by Greg Bear
"It seems that way."
"Because of something Cailetet has done?"
"Yes. No. We're all grabbing for the brass ring. We made our mistakes, too."
"Moving Phobos," Dandy said.
I remembered my sense of exaltation at the sudden turnaround; even now my pulse quickened at the thought of so much power, removing my burdens so quickly, allowing me to give back to Sean Dickinson even more than he had shoveled upon me. We are still children. We still dance to our deepest instincts. "They forced us to do it, but Earth can no more trust us now than it can trust a scorpion under its bed," I said.
Dandy shook his head, bewildered. "I've never even seen a live scorpion," he said.
More coded transmissions came in on the Presidential net. There had been a great many plans made besides Preamble; we had simply put more of our stake in the Olympians. Now the other plans were being explored: individual station defense against locusts, neighboring stations pooling their resources as well as defenses, more sweeps of all automated systems . . .
Thirty minutes away from Preamble, I spoke with Charles in the laboratory. He listened, face drawn and colorless, as I described what had happened at Lal Qila, and relayed the President's message.
"We're being toyed with," Charles said. "The government treats us like children. On, off. On, off."
"That's not our intention," I said defensively. "Ti Sandra wouldn't call on you unless — "
"We're on for good this time," he said. "There's no other choice. They're going to wipe our slate. I'll have to stay near the big tweaker. I've been training Tamara as backup in case something happens to me . . . And last night we sent a tweaker to Phobos again. Stephen put Danny Pincher in charge. Everything's in place for war."
War. That word summed everything and gave our preparations a horrible, urgent edge.
"What's the President going to decide, Casseia?" Charles asked.
I knew what concerned him. Having once held the sword of Damocles, he did not want to see it raised again.
"They'll have some defense against Phobos ready if we send it back," I said.
"The Ice Pit," Charles said. "Our spyhole has been closed."
"What?" I asked, startled.
"We can't tune in on their activities," Charles said. "They must have complete control of the Pierce region. They could use the Ice Pit against anything we send ... If they've mastered it."
Leander joined in the conversation. "Better than ninety percent chance they know more than we do now," he said gloomily. "Maybe they'll drop the Earth's moon on us."
I wasn't going to dismiss any possibility yet.
"I'll be near the large tweaker full time now," Charles said. "We can be ready within an hour. You have to read the signs and give us the order. If Earth decides to blow Mars to pieces . . . We may not be fast enough to get it out of the way."
"Charles is being a little evasive," Leander said. "I don't want to speak out of turn, but — "
"It's nothing," Charles said, voice tense.
"We've run into some difficulties," Leander persisted. "Handling a mass as big as Mars presents special problems. First, it puts a huge drain on Charles or Tamara, whoever watches over the QL thinker."
"It's manageable," Charles said.
"Yes, but at a cost. The QL becomes particularly intractable when dealing with so many large variables. I know Charles can handle it, but there's also a physical problem. Our tweaker may show instability when moving so much mass across so great a distance."
Charles sighed. "Stephen's been working over some anomalies in our test results."
"What kind of instability?" I asked.
"The mesoscopic sample at absolute zero asserts its own identity. It's a kind of perverse dataflow problem. So many descriptors being channeled through so small a volume. It may reduce the effectiveness of the Pierce region."
Charles said, "We've encountered the problem before. We can control it."
Leander said, "I think our masters should be informed, just in case."
"Can we do it?" I asked, far too tired to argue physics now.
"Yes," Charles said.
Stephen hesitated. "I think so."
"Then stay on alert."
We signed off and I slumped in my seat, anxious to be on the ground working direct and not puppeteering from a hundred kilometers.
Minutes later, Dandy unhitched and stood, stretching, to use the waste-room at the rear of the shuttle. He passed Meissner and D'Monte and they exchanged brief whispered comments. Falling into a reverie, I jerked to full alertness on hearing a few scraping sounds, and a sharp expletive.
"Ma'am," Dandy called from the rear. I leaned over the arm of my seat and looked aft. He stood with the two other guards near the wasteroom door. I unhitched and joined them.
"Something's wrong," he said, pointing to a series of pits and holes in the rear bulkhead. A section of floor had been unprettily removed as well, edges appearing eaten or chewed. I followed Dandy's probing fingers; something had termited much of the rear of the passenger compartment.
"It was fine a few minutes ago," said Jacques D'Monte.
Dandy rose from a crouch and wiped his hands on his pants legs. "Go forward, ma'am," he said. "Hitch in. Kiri, tell the pilot to get us into Preamble as fast as possible."
Kiri Meissner went forward, passing me with a breathless apology. I stooped to slide into my seat when I heard a heavy chunk and a cry of surprise at the rear. Face bloody on one side, Dandy staggered forward and collapsed in the aisle.
Kiri swung about and immediately placed herself between me and the rear of the shuttle. "Stay down," she grunted. She hunkered and pulled out her pistol, then frog-marched aft. Something clicked and hummed and Kiri jerked, clutched the seat arms on each side of the aisle, fell to one knee and rolled over on her back. A pattern of bloody holes on her chest poked through her black shirt. She coughed and convulsed, eyes asking a silent question of nobody in particular, then lay still. Her mouth foamed pink.
Jacques backed up beside me, straddling Kiri's body, cursing steadily and softly. He pointed his pistol at a dark shape hanging from the ceiling and rear bulkhead. Again the click and hum. Slowly, he twisted on rubbery legs, and the pistol dropped from lax fingers. He leaned over like a man about to be sick and pitched forward on his face.
I remained crouched behind my seat near the front, heart Earth-heavy in my chest. Aelita Two had disengaged her carriage from the mount behind me; my seat flexed as it moved.
The shuttle flew on as if nothing had happened. Had there been time to trigger an alarm? I could not restrain myself any longer; I peered aft around the edge of my seat.
A dark shape extended thin arms and legs, then rose tall from the exposed recesses of the rear compartment. It bumped against the ceiling, dropped slightly, made a high-pitched machine noise and crawled into the glow of an overhead light.
The locust bulked about the size of a man, its body a green twisted ovoid like the pupa of an enormous insect. Its multijointed legs probed at the seats and floor with a gingerly grace that made my blood freeze. A glistening trio of black eyes topped the body, and below the eyes, a flexible snout, thin as the barrel of a gun, swiveled purposefully.
Bioform nanotech, designed to survive on Mars and be deadly.
I stared in fascination. The machine climbed over Dandy, hindmost legs raised as if in effete distaste. My body shivered in expectation of the thin flechettes that had felled at least two of my guards, no doubt peppered from the questing snout.
Decapitation.
The seed of this locust had come aboard the shuttle at Lal Qila — perhaps with the duplicity of Achmed Crown Niger, although I could hardly believe such villainy even of him. More likely he faced a similar assassin even now.
The machine seemed reluctant to push past me. Knowing I was soon to die, a deep calm stole over me, replacing the nausea of seeing my guards so quickly dispatched. I knew I would join them soon.
Still, my mind raced, t
rying to think of ways to survive.
The pilot thinker would know something was very wrong. It would radio an emergency signal ahead. We were only a few minutes from Preamble.
With a start, I considered the possibility the locust wanted to be taken to Preamble. It would kill me, attach itself to the shuttle's thinker, take over the controls . . . And carry itself, and more progeny, into the research site. I could not allow that to happen.
I faced off the machine for more long seconds. I slowly bent down hoping to grab Kiri's weapon, the closest to me. I didn't make it. With a slight shudder, as if making a sudden decision, the locust rushed along the aisle, grabbed the gun, and shoved me aside with bone-bruising strength. It moved forward and began to work on the bulkhead door to the pilot thinker's space.
Quickly, I bent over Jacques and Kiri. They were dead. I ran aft down the aisle and rolled Dandy over. His eyes flickered and opened. He moaned. The machine had hit him hard on the side of his head but had not shot him.
I dragged Dandy forward and hefted him into a seat, clicking his harness. His head lolled and he looked at me.
"Can't let it get to Preamble," he murmured.
"I know," I sad. Facing forward, I shouted at the pilot thinker, "Bring us down, now! Crash the shuttle!"
Dandy shook his head. "Won't do it. Tell it to land."
The locust expertly sliced through the forward bulkhead and locked door. Beyond, I saw the shuttle's cockpit, pilot thinker mounted above the controls. The locust grew a new appendage and poked at me thinker's box.
"Crash, damn you!" I cried. "Land! Bring us down now!"
The shuttle lurched and rolled. The locust's body slammed against the luggage bay and released the cases of the dead guards. Behind, Jacques and Kiri seemed to rise off the floor, given new life, limbs flailing. Aelita's carriage fell past me to the rear of the shuttle, smashing into Jacques' body.
I did not know that the pilot-thinker would obey my orders, but there was no other explanation for the craft's wild antics, unless the thinker hoped to throw the locust away from its case.
But the locust would not be thrown. An insectoid limb flew past me, black and gleaming, but despite the loss, the locust clung to the front bulkhead and continued to probe the thinker's case. Above the roar of stressed engines and the crashing of luggage and awful slapping of bodies, I heard a drilling whine.
I pulled myself into a seat with all the strength I could muster. Jacques slid past me and spattered my leg with blood. The shuttle rolled again just as I locked the harness.
Before assuming crash position, I glanced forward and saw the pilot thinker's case ripped open, gelatinous capsules spewing forth.
The locust became the center of a spinning nightmare.
We hit.
My shins pushed painfully against the rack in front of me. For some immeasurable time I felt nothing, and then another slam. Bones snapped and I blacked out, but only for an instant. The shuttle was still sliding and rolling as I came to, tumbling across the ground. I heard plastic and metal scream and the hiss of departing air, instinctively shut my eyes and mouth and pinched my nose, felt the touch of vacuum as my skin filled with blood — and the pressure canopies ballooned around our seats, sucked down against the cabin floor, filled quickly with compressed air hot as the draft from an oven door.
The shuttle stopped rolling, slid with a shudder and a leap to a nose-up angle, and lurched to a halt.
I sat strapped in my seat, wrapped within a canopy like a lizard inside a rubbery eggshell. My rib cage had become a plunging of knives with every gasping breath. I gritted my teeth to keep from screaming. My vision shrank to a hand-sized hole of awareness. Going into shock. Fighting to stay conscious, I glanced through the foggy membrane at Dandy's seat. He had slumped to one side. I couldn't figure out why; then I realized he had unstrapped the upper portion of his harness before passing out.
I could not see forward. Debris blocked my view. I could not see the locust
I pressed my head back against the seat's neck rest. I could stand the pain now; shock numbed me. I felt cold and sweaty. Battle over. Earth wins.
With some irritation, I felt small emergency arbeiters wrap their tendrils around my wrist. The shuttle's tiny little life-saving machines had scrambled to check us out. I tried to pull my wrist out of the way. The tendrils tightened and a tube of medical nano entered the arteries at my wrist. The silver and copper arbeiter, barely as large as a mouse, tied to a shining blue umbilicus, crawled up my chest and exuded a cup over my mouth and nose. I tried to shake my head free but sweet gas filled my lungs and the pain subsided. The chill lessened. I grew calm and neutral.
The little machine hung on my chin and projected a message into my eyes. You are not badly injured. You have three cracked ribs and ruptured eardrums. Torsion units will reset the ribs and wrap them in cell-growth and sealant nano. The ruptured eardrums are being sutured now. You will not be able to hear for at least an hour.
I could feel the action in my chest, specked little fibers growing from bone to bone, rib to rib, tightening inexorably, torquing the ribs back together.
"All right," I said, hearing nothing.
The shuttle cabin atmosphere has been breached. Integrity cannot be restored. No rescuers have responded to our emergency signal. The pilot thinker is damaged, perhaps destroyed. We will soon exceed our programming. Do you have any instructions?
I tried to look at Dandy again. The fog on my canopy had cleared a little and I saw him still slumped forward. "Is Dandy alive?"
One seated passenger is alive but unconscious. He will regain consciousness soon. He has a minor fracture of the tibia and minor concussion. There are two dead passengers. We cannot repair the dead passengers.
"What about Aelita?"
Copy of thinker "Aelita" condition unknown.
Dandy lifted his head and raised an arm to wipe the inside of his canopy. He peered at me groggily, plugs of nano sticking out of his ears like muffs. "Are you okay?" He mouthed the syllables extravagantly and signaled with his free hand.
"Alive," I replied.
"Can you move?" He waggled his hand.
I shrugged.
I caught part of the next message: "... move with me . . . Get out . . . " But he could not coordinate his fingers to unhitch himself. He shook his head groggily.
I would have to rescue my guard.
I knew in theory how the canopies worked. They could stretch and roll with my movements, keeping a tough membrane between me and the near-vacuum of Mars's atmosphere. I unhitched and stood, feeling the nano shift within me, the edges of my broken ribs grinding.
The cockpit of the shuttle had been torn off and the nose lay open to the sky. Part of the cockpit bulkhead panel, cut by the locust and pushed aside in the crash, stuck out at a crazy angle. An emergency safety symbol decorated a small hatch on the panel. Pushing forward in my canopy, I wiped at the moisture inside the membrane, trying desperately to see where the locust had gone.
No sign of it. Perhaps it had been thrown free, or smashed into the dirt with the pilot thinker and the cockpit.
I pushed my hand harder against the canopy. With a worrisome sucking sound, the membrane switched functions and formed gloves around my hands. The panel hatch popped open at my touch. I felt inside, half-blind, and brought out two cylinders and two masks with attached cyclers.
Flesh creeping, expecting to step on the locust or have it rise in front of me at any moment, I pushed out of the shuttle and slowly rolled my canopy to a higher spot on the rough terrain. I peered through the translucent membrane at the rocky, nasty surface, all knife-edge shards and tumbles of flop-sand. We were two or three kilometers from the southern boundary of the station. We had enough air for five hours of exertion.
I returned through the jagged hole, nearly having a heart attack when the membrane snagged on a sharp pipe. I carefully lifted the membrane free and proceeded up the canted aisle.
Next I would expand my canopy and merge
it with Dandy's. I carried the cylinders and masks to the rear and dropped them at my feet. Then I bellied up against Dandy's membrane. The two surfaces grew together with another sucking sound. I cut through the common membrane with a finger as it purposefully rotted, spread the opening, and crawled through. The medical arbeiters had stocked themselves neatly on the next seat, their work finished. Dandy raised his head and looked at me with some puzzlement. His eyes focused. His expression of pained gratitude didn't need words.
I pulled my slate from a pocket to communicate with him. The emergency suits are gone. We still have some skinseal and masks. We're about three kilometers from Preamble. We're going to walk.
We sprayed each other with the bright-green skinseal and put on the masks and cyclers before climbing out of the shuttle's wreckage. It had plowed in head-first, rolled for half a kilometer, and come to rest on a smashed tail. The upthrust broken nose leaned by chance toward Kaibab station, toward Preamble. I tried to find our position on a map through a navsat link but couldn't get a signal.
I showed Dandy my slate again. Links are down. No navsat.
He nodded grimly. I climbed on top of a rock and used a pair of binoculars to survey the landscape. Dandy climbed up beside me with difficulty. The crack in his tibia made walking rough for him.
We huddled in a smooth patch of sand. Dandy held up three fingers and bent one halfway. Two and a half kilometers. He mouthed, "Trail . . . clear about half a klick north-northwest."
He pointed to the glistening fragments of vitreous lava. The rocks were always eroding, rounded segments falling away to reveal sharp fresh surfaces. Very nasty terrain. The soles of our boots could handle the edges, but if we fell . . .
We agreed on the direction and began walking.
Time stretched, nothing but staring at glittering scalpel-sharp edges and fan-shaped flakes dusted with flopsand; lifting feet, staring for a place to put them down without tripping, pausing to regain our bearings.
Two hours, and we stood on the twisted trail, free of the lava field.
Dandy took my shoulder and guided me due north. He followed the stars with a sparrow's eye. Another hour on the trail, however, and he shook his head, paused, examined our oxygen supply, and pulled out his slate to consult a map.