by M. R. Forbes
When Christine had said the Tetron were sick, she had underestimated how far that sickness might go. Mitchell rounded the last of the mainframes, finding him only feet away from the source of the noise.
Two soldiers, a male and a female, both stripped naked by the Tetron. They were each holding a knife, having sex and stabbing one another in rhythm to the motion.
"Do you see what I mean, Mitchell?" the woman asked, turning her head towards him.
"We can make them do anything," the man said.
"What the hell?" Socks said, arriving at the scene and then turning away.
"Is there a point to this?" Mitchell shouted. He raised his rifle, shooting each of the slaves in the head and dropping them.
"Of course there is. You just fell for my distraction and boxed yourself in."
Mitchell cursed his stupidity and spun around as the gunfire started anew. Bullets tore into Socks, knocking her back and down. Teal took a round in the shoulder before managing to find shelter behind a stack. Firedog reacted faster than the others, dropping to a knee and hitting his attacker first.
"Nice try, frigger," Cormac said.
"Five, Mitchell," the Tetron said through the slaves.
Bullets continued to whiz past Mitchell's ears, but none of them hit. It didn't want him harmed. It wanted to kill his squad.
He raised his rifle, quickly picking off the rest of the attackers. Eight more of the Gold Dragons fell. The Tetron still had plenty more in reserve.
Cormac was laughing. "I thought Liberty was frigged up, Colonel. This is way crazier."
Mitchell couldn't argue with that. He cursed himself for falling into the Tetron's trap and losing another soldier. He needed to be smarter than this.
More enemy soldiers were entering the space. Mitchell could hear their boots on the floor, moving closer within the stacks.
"Stay together. Eyes open. We need them dead. All of them. Teal, are you okay?"
"I'll live, Colonel. Let's get these bastards."
"I won't miss the next time," the Tetron said.
Gunfire echoed through the space as Mitchell, Teal, and Cormac slowly inched their way along the stacks. They had to be careful, very careful, because the enemy soldiers would be able to sneak around them and attack from any side.
They couldn't plan a retreat either. If they wanted to claim the assets from Hell they would need to take out the Tetron's ability to fight them.
"Watch your flank," Mitchell said to Teal, a dark blur passing them in the corner of his eye.
"I got it, Colonel," Teal replied. His left arm was hanging limp at his side, and he cradled the rifle against his hip. "My aim is going to be lousy."
"Quantity over quality."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm getting them ready for you, Mitchell," the Tetron said through the soldiers, their voices all around them. "Sixty-three Gold Dragons, sixty-three baby duckies. One golden ring." They all laughed together in an echoing chorus.
"That thing is totally frigged up," Cormac said.
"Broken," Mitchell said. "Something is making them insane."
"One-one-thousand," the voices taunted. "Two-one-thousand. Three-one-thousand. Ready or not, here we come."
"Grenades," Mitchell said, reaching to his side and finding his own explosive.
"Too close," Teal said.
"We have to risk it."
Mitchell tapped it to activate and rolled it out in front of him, only a few feet. Teal and Cormac did the same.
"Split when it goes off. Go in shooting."
The first wave of soldiers appeared from the nearest column, raising their weapons to fire.
Mitchell, Cormac, and Teal turned inwards, bracing themselves.
The grenades exploded.
He felt the shrapnel as it slammed into his back, most of it hitting the power pack of the exo and the skeleton that ran along his extremities. A few hot shards dug into exposed skin, and he gritted his teeth against the pain.
There was no time to hesitate. Mitchell forced himself ahead, working hard to get moving, his exo offline from the damage. He kept his finger on the trigger, pumping round after round through the smoke, hearing the slugs hitting flesh and bone. A face appeared right in front of him, and he raised a heavy arm, battering it with the butt of the rifle. A second soldier tried to tackle him from the side, and he slammed his hand down on top of the woman's head.
"Twenty-two left, Miiiitttcheellll," the Tetron said. "Not bad for a meat."
Mitchell moved through the smoke. Bullet-ridden corpses were scattered on the floor, and he killed two more while he swept the stacks again. He heard the continuing rifle fire behind him, and then Cormac's scream.
He tried to turn. The exo was too damn heavy. "I'm coming, Firedog," he said, reaching down and pulling off the skeleton from his limbs before losing the pack. It cost him precious seconds.
He raced back into the fray, leaping over bodies and searching for targets. One. A bullet in the head. Two. A bullet in the back.
"Sixteen," the Tetron said, taking on the voice of an old-time southern belle. "Why Mitchell, I do declare! You may actually win this fight. Too bad about Firedog though."
Mitchell ignored it. He moved through the maze of stacks without slowing, not even feeling the pain from his wounds. Another soldier fell. Another. He caught sight of Teal up ahead. His head was sweaty, his back was to the wall. He gripped the rifle in his good hand, watching for more targets.
One appeared from behind a server ahead of Mitchell. He shot that one in the back, too.
At the same time he did, he felt the heat of a bullet slam into his shoulder from behind. The force of it twisted him, and he saw his attacker standing only feet away, arriving in unison with the other the way only an automaton could.
"Gotcha," he said.
Mitchell lost his footing, slipping on the blood soaked floor and coming down on his rear. The Dragon kicked his rifle away from him before he could recover.
"You lose, Mitchell. It was a nice try, though. You got all but eight of me."
Mitchell stared up at the soldier. He was an older, imposing figure with a tattoo of the unit's namesake running across his face. A veteran trainer, no doubt.
"Now what?" Mitchell asked. "You kill me?"
"I thought that was a given. First, I need to know what you did, and how to stop it."
Mitchell caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Teal was coming towards them. He was still alive.
"Not so fast, pardner," the Tetron said, raising the vet's rifle to Mitchell's face. Two Dragons appeared behind Teal. Two more filed in from the other side.
"What do you mean, what I did?" Mitchell asked. "You mean on Liberty?"
"You know what I mean," it shouted. "You know what I mean!"
Mitchell didn't know what it meant. "No, I-"
"Tell me! Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell-"
One second the Tetron's slave soldier was there, the next it wasn't. A ragged shape slammed into it, knocking it to the ground. Mitchell didn't waste time trying to figure out what it was, turning on his side and shooting at the soldiers behind Teal. They both dropped at the same time Teal fired across at the opposite pair.
"Noooooo," the Tetron cried through the loudspeakers. "No fair."
"Bloody hell, this frigging hurts," Mitchell heard Cormac say. He found the soldier laying on top of the vet, his fatigues slicked in blood, his face grimy. Half of it had been torn away by a bullet.
A knife was jammed into the vet's mouth.
Cormac stumbled to his feet, looking over at Mitchell with his remaining eye. "I can't believe they didn't hit anything important," he said, the words jumbled by the damage.
"We need to get you out of here before you bleed to death," Mitchell said.
"You weren't supposed to win. You weren't supposed to get away." The Tetron whined over the loudspeaker like a child. A true child.
"Teal, stay sharp, there are still three more out here."
Teal nodded, his eyes scanning around them. Mitchell took Cormac under the arm, helping him stay up.
"And I thought I was ugly before," Cormac said, laughing.
"What did you do?" the Tetron asked. Its voice had changed, going from confident taunting to meek sadness. "What did you do? What did you do?"
It continued to repeat itself while they abandoned the generator room, heading back to the staging area as quickly as they could. They found the three remaining soldiers outside the room, huddled together and crying.
"What did you do?" they said in time to the Tetron. "What did you do?"
"What did you do?" Teal asked.
Mitchell shook his head. "I don't know. I wonder if it's never failed before? Maybe it doesn't know how to handle it."
Whatever it was, Mitchell liked it.
46
"Stay with me, Firedog," Mitchell said.
"I'm with you, sir," Cormac replied.
"What did you do? What did you do?" The Tetron's voice continued to repeat the question through the base's loudspeakers, over and over and over again. It was enough to drive anyone insane.
"I wish we could shut that frigging thing up," Teal said.
After they had defeated the Tetron, or maybe after the Tetron had given up, depending on what the real truth of the situation was, Teal had gone ahead while Mitchell had waited with Cormac. He had returned a short time later with a Medic trailing behind him. The robot was similar to a Mule, except that it's top platform served as a stabilizing gurney, and it had eight legs instead of four, allowing it to move more easily over rough terrain without disturbing the patient.
Cormac had been silent while they loaded him onto the Medic and walked him back to the infirmary. The original plan had been to load him into the medi-bot and let it do its thing. Mitchell had thought better of it, unsure if the Tetron was able to control the device, and even more uncertain what it would do if it could. It was Firedog who had saved him from it. Did it understand revenge?
Otherwise, it seemed as if the intelligence had been rendered annoying but ultimately harmless. It continued to repeat the same question without pause, as though its operating instructions were trapped in an infinite loop. Was there a defect in its programming? Had it always been there, or had it been introduced? If so, then how?
And how the frig had the Tetron gotten back to twenty-first century Earth, anyway? Origin claimed that it had escaped from the Tetron collective unnoticed. Was that wrong? Or had that been true at one time, however many recursions ago this had all started? Mitchell wasn't sure there was a truth anymore. It was lost in eternity.
The three of them reached the lower hangar. With the power on, they could see the assembled mechs and fighters more easily, along with a number of other tools they could use. Loading carts, lifters, and more. He was grateful the Avalon had been configured to carry so much salvage, despite the cost to the hygiene of the crew.
"Wait here," he said to Teal.
He put his hand on Cormac's shoulder. They had bandaged his face with the emergency kit that came loaded on the Medic, leaving only his left eye and the undamaged part of his mouth visible. The bandage had stopped the bleeding and moved painkillers into the grunt's body, keeping him fairly relaxed. Mitchell was certain the wound still had to hurt.
It wasn't like he or Teal were pain-free either. He had taken shrapnel to his legs and a hit to the shoulder. He was in throbbing agony once more, only days after Tio's medi-bot had fixed up his prior wounds. Teal had been shot twice.
There wouldn't be much relief on board the Avalon either.
He headed to the massive lift, entering it and moving to the manual control panel. He pulled out the kit he had recovered from Sleepy's body and began dismantling it. Like all Marines who had done any kind of special ops, he had limited training in hacking access systems. It probably wouldn't have gotten him into any secure locations, but it was enough to rewire the lift to only accept local commands.
"Come on," Mitchell said, waving to Teal. He wandered over, the Medic crawling behind him and into the large structure. Mitchell hit the panel and the lift began to rise.
"Nice work on the rig, Colonel," Teal said.
"I'm glad to get away from that thing's yammering," he replied. "We'll have to tell the salvage team to wear earplugs."
"Do you think it will stay that way?"
"If what Tio says about AI is right, yes."
It took fifteen minutes for the lift to near the surface. As soon as it did, Mitchell activated his comm system.
"Valkyrie, this is Ares, over."
"I hear you, Ares," Major Long replied. "You've been MIA for a while. What's your status?"
"It's a long story. The site is clear and ready for retrieval. We lost..." He paused, finally having a moment to realize what they had lost for himself. "Almost everybody. Firedog is down but stable, Teal and I both need some attention from Jameson."
"Frig me," Long said. "What about the others?"
"Dead."
"All of them?"
"Yeah."
"What the frig happened down there, Colonel?"
He wasn't going to talk about his experience in the Construct with Long. He would wait to confront Origin with it. "The Tetron who bombarded the planet left. There was another one that had been hiding here for a long time. A really long time."
"You destroyed it?"
"Not exactly. You'll see when you bring the team down."
"Roger."
They reached the upper staging floor. Major Long was already there with the retrieval team, all of them organized and ready to get to work. They froze when they saw the three of them depart, clothes torn and bloody, faces hard and tense.
"Colonel," Long said, reaching them and putting his hand on Mitchell's good shoulder. "I'll take it from here." He pointed back towards a small personnel transport. "Take that back to the ship. Have Germaine or somebody return it."
Mitchell nodded. "You have the mission, Major," he said.
Long moved away, gesturing to the others. He was sure the Major had opened a comm channel with his team and was explaining what had happened. He was too drained to care.
They made their way to the transport. A pair of Tio's soldiers helped them get Cormac on it. Mitchell's eyes were fixed to the dark shape of the Avalon resting off in the distance, but his mind was an eternity away.
47
"That's the last of it," Major Long said. "Zip her up and we're good to go."
"Roger," Germaine replied. He reached over and flipped a switch on the Avalon's main console, closing the rear hatch of the ship. "I think that might be a record."
Sixty-eight hours. That's how long it had taken them to load the ship with as much salvage as they could manage. It was a massive haul, so large that they had been forced to change some of their original plans in order to manage the launch weight. The Avalon had powerful repulsers running along her hull, but they could only do so much.
"How long to the rendezvous point?" Mitchell asked.
"Three days."
"Goliath should be there when we arrive." He couldn't wait to see the ship and its crew again.
"How are you feeling?" Germaine asked.
Mitchell stretched his shoulder. The bullet had been well-placed, perfectly aimed to knock him down without doing too much damage. It was painful, but nothing a steady supply of patches wouldn't be able to heal. As for his legs, his fatigues were pressed out by the bindings the ship's medic, Jameson, had wrapped around them. The pain was manageable.
"I'll be okay. I imagine at least one of Tio's ships has an infirmary?"
"Yeah. A few. What about Cormac?"
"He'll live. He lost his right eye and half his jaw. Jameson said it was lucky the bullet missed his brain. You know Firedog, he asked him how he would prove that was true. Anyway, if he's in pain, he isn't showing it. He said he wants a mask made out of whatever the Tetron are made of, with a fake eye that's actually a laser."
Germaine laughe
d. "Laser beam eyes?"
"Yup."
"Hatch is sealed, all hands are accounted for, Colonel," Germaine said. "Are we ready to get off this hell-hole?"
"Absolutely. Are the charges set?"
"Set and active. Press that button over there when we get to orbit and boom." He waved his hands to simulate a massive explosion.
Mitchell nodded. There had been no consideration that they might leave the base intact. While the Tetron had continued to remain frozen in its loop for the remainder of the mission, he wasn't going to risk that it might somehow snap out of it.
"Let's go," Mitchell said.
"Roger."
Germaine activated the repulsers. The ship began to shudder as they came online, the sleds working to reverse the force of gravity in compensation for the ship's mass. They vibrated roughly for thirty seconds or more while the computers ran the calculations, steadying out the power distribution and bringing the Avalon into a smooth, controlled rise.
Mitchell looked out the side of the viewport, watching the surface of Hell sink below them. He put his eyes on the external portion of the base, half expecting one of the starfighters to come launching out of it, controlled by the mad AI in a last ditch effort to stop him.
He had spent a lot of time over the last three days considering all that he had experienced on Hell. What he kept coming back to was his conversation with Katherine in the Construct. Not so much the things she had said. The things she hadn't said, along with the way she had spoken to him. There was something about it that had gnawed at him in every moment that he sat awake in his bunk, staring at the cold metal above him.
It was the ease of it. The familiarity. The Construct had been programmed by Origin. Katherine had been part of that program. A representation of the real thing, but still a routine inside an algorithm. Yet she had seemed so real. So lifelike. She had spoken to him as if she knew him intimately.
Like they had spent time together. Somewhere. Somehow.
Was it his imagination? Or was there more to the deep-seated connection he felt to her? The love her felt for her.
He closed his eyes, shaking off the thought. How could he love someone he had never met? Why had he felt such powerful emotion for her to meet a replica of who she was?