by R. A. Nargi
“What the fuck!”
The sound of groaning metal filled my ears as the tunnel continued to fall downward. I slid hard into Ana-Zhi, and the two of us tumbled into a vertical shaft which had opened up in front of us. I desperately tried to activate the magtouch on my boots and gloves to grab onto something, but I was falling too fast and too chaotically.
A few seconds later the two of us lay tangled in a heap at the bottom of the shaft.
“You okay, Ana-Zhi?”
“I will be when you get your head out of my crotch, junior.”
I struggled to my feet and shook myself off. The magtouch must have slowed my fall, because other than some bruising and a bitten tongue, I didn’t appear to be injured at all.
We were in a long straight corridor that was a bit wider than it was tall. Light strips flickered erratically from the ceiling, shedding enough illumination to see that the corridor was barren.
I tried to help Ana-Zhi up, but she brushed my outstretched hand away. “Did you hear that?”
I did hear something. It was a strange combination of a low humming noise combined with a metallic clinking sound—almost like something scraping. I had no idea what I was hearing or where it was coming from, but the sound was getting louder.
“Oh shit,” Ana-Zhi said. She fumbled for her blaster. “Heads up! Incoming!”
I turned to see dozens of metallic orbs—each the size of a softball, but with numerous protrusions—coming at us. They rolled swiftly down the corridor, bouncing and banging off the floor and walls.
I recognized what they were and realized how fucked we were.
Scrubbers.
Ana-Zhi steadied herself on one knee and started blasting at the scrubbers. Acting purely on instinct, I did the same. Soon the corridor was filled with bolts of energy. But I doubted it would make a single bit of difference. Because scrubbers were incredibly deadly. And there were over fifty of them hurtling towards us.
Scrubbers were the piranhas of the defense bot world—a swarm of fast-moving, coordinated bots with incredibly-sharp ceramic blades capable of slicing through just about anything. Including the armor of our exosuits. They are typically used to keep an installation clean of organic matter. Kind of like the world’s deadliest rat catcher. One of them might be survivable. Fifty would turn us into meat shavings within ten seconds.
But that didn’t stop us from trying to survive.
“On the ceiling!” I yelled, as I activated the magtouch on my boots and gloves and jumped up.
The one thing about scrubbers was that they were ground-based defense bots—old technology. That meant that they didn’t have miniature z-field generators like the drones and couldn’t hover or fly.
I scrambled up the wall on one side of the corridor as Ana-Zhi scrambled up the other, cursing her head off. Below us a swarm of scrubbers rolled past us, narrowly missing the bottom of our boots.
“Higher!”
But Ana-Zhi was struggling to climb the wall. Even with her suit engaged, she probably lacked the upper body strength to climb much higher.
“Fuck me!” she yelled, almost losing her grip.
“Stay there!” I dropped back down to the ground beside her and started blasting at the scrubbers, which hadn’t yet realized that their quarry was now behind the swarm.
I nailed at least four of them before their hive mind realized that they needed to reverse direction. Unfortunately there were at least forty left.
Ana-Zhi lost her grip and tumbled to the ground. I kept blasting, but I knew this was the end.
18
“Get down JJ!” A voice came out of nowhere. Metallic, distorted. But somehow familiar.
“Holy mother!” Ana-Zhi stumbled against the wall.
There, not a half-dozen meters behind us, stood an imposing figure.
At first glance I thought it might be a large human wearing a full ceramlar-plated combat suit, but then I saw the joints and exo-skeleton and weapon array and realized that this was some sort of bot. A war bot, if I had to guess.
“I said get the fuck down!” the bot yelled as it barreled past us right into the throng of scrubbers.
I staggered back. My mind couldn’t process what I was hearing, let alone seeing.
That war bot spoke with the voice of my father.
The next thirty seconds were a blur. The war bot blasted at the scrubbers with deadly precision. I had no idea that the targeting system of an old technology bot could be that good, but it managed to lock on and destroy a few dozen of the scrubbers in as many seconds. Then, just as the remaining scrubbers swarmed on top of it, the war bot tucked itself into a fetal position.
I thought that maybe the bot had given up. In a few seconds the pack of scrubbers would reduce the war bot into its component parts. Maybe its plating might slow them a little bit, but it looked like game over for the war bot.
But then, a high-pitched metallic hum emanated from the bot—increasing in volume. The war bot convulsed as a velocity bubble popped around it, sending the scrubbers flying.
This was incredible. I started to think that we might have a chance. But I’d have to do my part to help.
As I brought up my RB, I glanced over at Ana-Zhi. She was cowering against the wall, paralyzed with fear.
“Snap out of it,” I yelled at her. “Shoot!”
The bot had rolled into a kneeling position and was blasting away at the scrubbers. I joined in, and a few moments later so did Ana-Zhi.
“Careful of the crossfire,” I warned.
But before I had finished speaking the words, the battle was over. We had survived. Thanks to the war bot.
It checked the destroyed scrubbers, one by one, to make sure they were all non-functional—which was smart. We didn’t want any nasty surprises.
“JJ, are you okay?” the bot asked, turning to me.
It really was my father’s voice. And no one but him had called me ‘JJ’ since I was a kid.
This was impossible.
“What the hell are you?” Ana-Zhi growled, leveling her RB at the war bot.
“Nice to see you too, Z,” the bot said.
I stepped forward. “Why are you talking with my father’s voice?”
Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed like the war bot’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t believe you’re here, JJ.”
“Jannigan, move away from it!” Ana-Zhi shouted. She kept her blaster trained on the bot.
“Okay, settle down, you two,” the bot said. “I know this is weird, but it really is me. Sean Beck.”
A million thoughts spun through my brain, but none of them made any sense. I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “Explain,” I said in a quiet voice.
“I was betrayed by Virgil Yates during our mission to retrieve the Tabarroh Crystal for the Dodelan Alliance. After I had located the Tabarroh Crystal, Yates sealed me into a hot zone, swarming with security bots. Then he left me there.”
“How did you survive?” I asked.
“Dumb luck, mostly,” the bot said. “I managed to hide in the empty vault where the Tabarroh Crystal had been. I spent three days there, waiting for the bots to disperse.”
“Then what?” Despite how strange this was, I found myself fascinated by the story.
“Then I made it back to my zephyr. Thank Dynark, Yates hadn’t destroyed it or taken it. I was able to shut down the security grid in the zone I was in and buy myself some time.”
I shook my head. “Even if you were able to buy yourself some time, you wouldn’t have been able to buy yourself seven years’ worth of time.”
“Very good, JJ,” the war bot said—in the same condescending tone my father had often used with me. “It became very clear that without food or more specifically water, I wouldn’t last more than four or five days. A week at the outside. It turned out I was able to overload one of the evaporator units in an atmospheric regulator and that managed to produce a little water, so I ended up lasting nine days.”
“What
do you mean lasting nine days?”
“I mean, that’s when I put my body into hibernation and cross-loaded my neural array into this Aanthangan clone bot.”
“You what?” I gasped. This was inconceivable.
“Don’t look so surprised, Jannigan. You knew we were looking for one. Remember Denn Jerue?”
I did remember Denn Jerue. He was an old guy in Beck Salvage’s advanced research group. The ARG was in charge of the intake of technology acquired during a Beck Salvage mission. Either overtly or covertly. Jerue’s holy grail was something called an Aanthangan clone bot.
“Denn Jerue believed that the Yueldians had acquired a specimen and stored it here on Bandala,” the bot said. “We kept it secret from the rest of the crew, but my secondary mission was to recover the Aanthangan technology. Even if the Rhya never let us bring back the bot itself, we were going to do an onsite reverse engineering of its technology.”
“What the hell is an Aanthangan clone bot?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“You’re looking at it,” the bot said. “It’s a class-five combat bot, similar to the Jacrea T-311.”
“I still don’t understand.” I didn’t think the bot posed a danger to us, but I was having a hard time making sense of its story.
“The Aanthangans were the first to develop neuro scanning protocols at atomic resolution, nearly eight hundred years ago. This bot has a gamma-ray holographic brain scanner that allows for neuro cross-loading into its bacto-substrate.”
“How about speaking English for a second?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“I transferred a copy of my neural array—thoughts, memories, consciousness—into this bot.”
“What?” It was talking about a technology that didn’t exist.
“It was the only way to survive,” the bot said.
“I don’t believe you,” Ana-Zhi said.
“That’s because you have zero knowledge of Aanthangan technology,” the bot replied. “Ask me a question. Something only Sean Beck would know the answer to.” It turned to me. “You too, JJ. Ask me anything.”
I looked over at Ana-Zhi. She didn’t say anything. I wondered if she was thinking about it. Considering whether or not the bot was telling the truth.
“Okay, Z,” the bot said. “Remember Harcho Moll way back when? You and he had a thing going on for months during the Dadari expedition. Then you caught him with that little Palanese woman… What was her name?”
“Fenine Vaskas, the bitch.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Fenine Vaskas. When you confronted Harcho, he said she was his cousin and there was nothing going on.”
“Cousin, my ass,” Ana-Zhi said. “He didn’t know a soul on Palan, let alone have any family there.”
“So you went down to the commissary and got one of those big containers of catsup.”
“Mayonnaise.”
“Right,” the bot said. “Mayonnaise. And you poured it into the cooling system of his hover-jet.”
Ana-Zhi laughed. “He had to rebuild the engine.”
“And wasn’t it an old Mercer MKX that he got from his brother?”
“Yeah. Moll never forgave me for that. Fuck ’em, though. He had it coming.”
“He sure did.”
I shook my head in surprise. This was unreal. Ana-Zhi was reminiscing with a robot.
“C’mon, JJ,” the bot said. “What about you? Remember when you were a kid and we went to the aqua park on Jaalbar?”
I didn’t reply, but I did have a hazy memory of an immense water world with islands and wavejumpers and vast undersea globes.
The bot who sounded like my father continued, “We were in the Hall of Serpents and it was crowded with tourists—all trying to get a glimpse of the Yersithian Wyrm. Remember?”
The memory came back to me. It was just like the bot described. The Hall of Serpents was a curved hyaline tunnel which ran under the sea. As a little kid I couldn’t believe I could walk underwater. It blew my five-year-old mind. As did the prospect of seeing a hundred-meter-long sea dragon on the other side of the hyaline.
“I got into a discussion with your mother,” the bot said.
Yeah, more likely another huge fight. There was a lot of that going on when she was still alive.
“And somehow we lost sight of you,” the bot said. “Your mother started to panic. I was running around trying to find you, and was this close to demanding that the park docents seal off the hall and let me access their security cams.”
“I remember…” I hadn’t thought about that since I was a little kid.
“You had gone up to another woman, a total stranger who didn’t really even look like your mother. You apparently took her hand, and asked if you could go home with her. You were ready to just trade in your own mom and take up with another family. Can you believe that, Z?” The bot laughed.
Well, the bot had certainly got most of that story right. The one thing it left out was a little fact that I uncovered only after several years of therapy.
It turned out that the reason I had latched on to that other woman—who was shorter and blonder than my mom—was because she looked like Beatria, a woman who worked in my dad’s office. It also turned out that my father happened to be having an affair with Beatria, and little five-year-old me visited the office a lot and must have picked up on their closeness. At least that’s what Dr. Edevaine thought.
“What else do you know?” I asked the bot. “Tell me about Conniel Lear.”
“Lear…” The bot trailed off as if it was thinking. After a moment it said, “Are you talking about the Lears on Cantessa?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know how you remember things from when you were so young, but we lived next to a family named Lear back in Cantessa. Donn and Fella. And they had a son who was your age, right? Conniel.”
“Yeah.”
“So you don’t think I remember what you did to that poor kid, do you?” The bot sounded like it was amused.
“Do you?”
“This happened right before we moved to New Torino, so it must have been in ’30. We were having a barbecue or something. Probably a going away party. You were playing with the Lear kid and a few other neighborhood kids in that little fort I built for you out back. When all of a sudden we hear someone screaming their head off. All the adults came running. As I recall, I was the first one there and saw Conniel Lear with a river of blood running down his head and you standing over him with a bloody chunk of rock in your hand.”
I couldn’t believe it. The bot knew every detail of that incident.
“You brained that kid good.”
“He stole Ursula Sokkel’s Wobblufett.”
“Wobblufett? What’s that, a toy?”
“Yeah. A Zaugummy.”
“Don’t tell me you’re still obsessed with those little monsters?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Yet you remember the exact toy you were fighting over.”
“I wasn’t fighting over it. Conniel stole the Wobblufett from Ursula.” I felt a flush of anger.
“And you wanted it for yourself.”
“No,” I said pointedly. “It was wrong for that little schmuff to take something that didn’t belong to him.”
“I get it,” the bot said. “You were sweet on little Ursula. You were her knight in shining armor, weren’t you?”
“It was wrong.”
Ana-Zhi cleared her throat. “As much as I hate to interrupt this extremely wacko family reunion, we need to get out of here.”
I glanced at my Aura. She was right. We had less than twelve hours before the official end of the mission, and—at best—another few hours after that until the Fountain closed for good, trapping us here.
“Where’s the comm station?” I demanded.
“The comm station?” the Sean bot asked. “Why do you want that?”
I quickly explained what had happened to cause our current predicament, including how Yates had stolen the Kryrk and betrayed us to the
Mayir. I also reiterated the fact that we were all a few hours away from being trapped here for the foreseeable future.
“Our plan is to see if we could hail the Rhya,” I said. “We’d issue a mayday and say that our ship was destroyed by the Mayir. They’d come and get us.”
“Maybe,” the Sean bot said. “Or maybe not.”
“What do you mean?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Yates is a very careful man. When he left me to die here seven years ago, he didn’t take any chances. He knew that there might have been a slim chance that I survived the security bots. So he jammed the comm systems until it was too late.”
“You had the same idea?” I asked. “Back when you were trapped, you were going to try to signal the Rhya?”
“Great minds think alike,” the Sean bot said. “Now if I was Yates, I’d suspect that at least Ana-Zhi was still alive, and I’d jam the hell out of Bandala. At least until the Fountain closed.”
“That sounds about right,” Ana-Zhi admitted.
“Yeah, but we have to try,” I said. “What other options do we have?”
“Actually,” the Sean bot said. “We do have another option. We could fly out of here.”
19
As the Sean bot led us through the maze of access tunnels and corridors back to the core, he explained that there were a handful of shuttles that had escaped destruction by the Ptomeans. Most were in pretty bad shape after 700 years, but there was one that he was able to repair.
“It took me nearly three years,” the Sean bot said. “Scavenging parts, rebuilding the z-field generator—”
“You don’t know anything about spacecraft repair,” I sniffed.
“More than you, JJ. And besides, why do you think it took me three years to get the orbiter operational?”
“So we’re just going to fly out of here?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“It’s a little more complicated than that. The shuttle in question is the Yueldian version of a Wexler MoonRunner.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.