I ring the alarms to get Anna and Milo to shut up. Anna sprints to the pin I’ve dropped; Milo, looking more exasperated than concerned, follows at her heels. The sight of Simon frothing on the ground wipes the look off his face.
“Simon? Simon?” He’s not wearing his full suit, so I can’t tell what’s wrong with him. Anna tries to catch his pistoning limbs and holds them down, close. “Milo, check his pulse!”
Milo fumbles. Anna curses and pushes him aside. “Tachycardia. Heart rate’s through the roof. He’s running a fever,” she reports. “Help me get him on the bed!”
“What’s happening?” bellows Milo as they half-haul, half-fight Simon’s body back into his bedroom.
“I don’t know. Hold him down!” cries Anna, sprinting for the medical supplies. For the next ten minutes, Simon jerks like an electrified rag doll, with me watching vicariously through Milo’s feeds as Anna injects him first with Metraprofen and then Benzanine. Simon shudders once, twice, and is still.
“Cut the undersuit,” says Anna.
Ah, fuck. Simon’s in bad shape. The wounds haven’t just opened, they’ve spread; scratches are gouges now, and actual wounds are now ragged pits several inches wide with blackened, rotting tissue at the edges. The undersuit peels off in ragged chunks, leaving chunks of antibacterial fiber wedged in them.
“We need a medical bay,” says Anna.
WE DON’T HAVE ONE OF THOSE.
“Then we need to sterilize this place!” she shrieks. “Hurry! And get me something to clean the wound with!”
So it’s now Milo and I, doing some mad scientist stuff in the back. I could synthesize bleach, but that would take far too long and produce too little. We’re making lye: granite at the bottom, wood ash above, and water on top, which produces a highly alkaline solution that should, if my calculations are correct, float a potato. And then we dilute the hell out of it with water so it doesn’t eat through the flimsier parts of the base.
Anna is bandaging Simon. Her hands are shaking as she snips pieces of garment out of his wounds. I watch her wince in sympathy as she hooks Simon up to the basic monitoring set that comes with our medical kits. The data floods my feeds. Simon’s vitals are erratic, like a self-correcting drive skipping bad sectors.
“OC, what’s happening to him?” she whispers.
I DON’T KNOW, I confess. WERE HIS WOUNDS THAT BAD?
“No, never,” she says. “Fuck, I need more material. His wounds are bleeding.”
Probable cause. Probable cause. Could it have been the meat I made him eat not so long ago? Together, the two of us—her hands, my voice—staunch the blood flow, pasting in Profanol foam, and worry over the black tissue at the edges of the wounds. Anna stems the bleeding and goes outside. Her hands are still shaking. She watches Milo’s bent back.
“He’s stable,” she says. “I’ve stitched him up.”
“He might get an infection,” Milo mumbles, toweling furiously.
“Yeah,” she says. “Listen, can you take over for a minute? I just need you to clean up the blood.”
Milo looks up at her, sees the blood splattered on her suit, and blanches. “I’ve got to finish this,” he says. “OC’s orders.”
YOU CAN AND SHOULD HELP, I tell him over his private comm.
He says nothing, only gives Anna that determined I’m-busy look until she sighs, shakes her head, and goes back into the bedroom, slamming the door.
“I don’t do—uh, blood is a problem,” mumbles Milo to me.
YOU’LL HAVE TO DO IT, I tell Anna. I’M SORRY. YOU’RE THE ONE WITH MEDICAL TRAINING. HIS HEART RATE IS GOING DOWN AGAIN. BRAIN ACTIVITY SEEMS NORMAL—
“I know,” she snaps. “Just shut up and let me think.”
It takes a while, but eventually Simon’s vitals calm down a bit. Anna’s squeezing Simon’s hand. “I thought you said we were injected for injury,” she says.
YOU WERE. Every crew gets a booster shot of artificial FieldMedic cells before the drop. Right now, millions of tiny, dumb cell-like constructs should be doing what Anna just did: closing Simon’s wounds, staunching the blood flow. PCS has an insurance contract with Evolution Banc for this stuff, and no crew is ever sent out without them.
CAN WE CLEAN UP THE BLOOD?
She looks around at the dingy room, her crewmate lying on the hastily printed bed, at the blood dripping out, and lets go of Simon’s hand.
“I don’t know what this means,” she says.
I DON’T EITHER. CAN YOU GET ME SAMPLES OF HIS FLESH AND BLOOD?
“I’m going to take a shower,” she says, suddenly sounding afraid.
Milo does not meet her eyes when she walks out. Instead he positively skulks out to the back to check up on the lye solution. And I’m left monitoring Simon. His temperature slowly creeps upward, as if in defiance of the Benzanine.
Crap. This is bad. When Anna emerges, wearing a clean plastic wrap, I ask her again for samples. They didn’t build us for fine surgery, so I improvise a microscope using Boomerang and wire for some basic signal processing.
A horde of cell-like structures stare up at me from under the lens, divided into black (cancerous) and red (healthy). As I watch, a handful cross over from the black and touch the red. Within hours new strands of black are running like cracks through the red, and the healthy cells around these cracks are dead.
I zoom in on the black. And instead of cells, I see boxes. Rows and rows of precise edges jostling against each other.
Shit. Shit. Shit. This is bad. This is very, very bad.
Micromachines.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
Micromachines are wonderful things until they go bad. They’re tiny, cell-sized machines supposed to do (in most cases) what the FieldMedic cells do; in most cases the distinction is academic. But micromachines were banned from the UN for a reason. Remember the Ebony Plague of SEDAR-IX? The Staticvirus on Stairway to Heaven? Those were all micromachine incidents, even though the media might tell you otherwise.
Nobody would be crazy enough to inject themselves with micromachines.
I ping Anna first. ANNA, LOOK AT THIS.
She watches the video. “They’re not supposed to be there.”
NO, I say. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE CAUSE IS.
“What’s going to happen to him?”
THE WOUNDS AREN’T GOING TO HEAL.
She is silent for a moment. Then she leans over Simon and takes his hand in her gloved one. “How long?”
I DON’T KNOW. But the worst hypothesis must be spoken of. ANNA, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HIM MIGHT HAPPEN TO EVERYONE.
How do I stop millions of tiny machines I can’t talk to?
I ping Milo. He’s outside, by the ridge, gun in hand. INSIDE.
“What’s going on?”
GET IN THE ROOM WITH SIMON AND ANNA. BEFORE YOU DO, DO THIS TO THE GENERATOR.
I send Milo a list of instructions that will turn our generator into a short, sharp EMP.
“But that’ll fry everything! The power—”
AND THE SUITS, YES. THE DRONES, BRIEFLY. ANYTHING HARDENED WILL BE ALRIGHT. JUST DO IT.
“OC—”
The corridors are bathed in red. YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE OR I EMP MYSELF.
“What’re you doing, OC?” asks Anna. She hasn’t let go of Simon’s hand.
I’M TRYING SOMETHING. I’m not the praying type, I never was, but I hope our karma is good enough to let us get through this.
Milo rewires the last board and sticks a wire in.
Sparks. The lights explode with popping sounds. GUPPY, the hauler drone, is well-shielded against stuff like this (as am I), but the rickety UN bot slaved to it just topples. An aurora dances briefly over our little base and vanishes in a thousandth of a second.
Silence.
“Milo? Milo!”
“I’m here! You alright?”
Anna, frightened, bursts through the door into a corridor that’s now completely dead. “What the fuck did you do?”
“D
on’t look at me! It was OC!”
I find my voice again. It’s my voice now, not the drone’s, not the tinny crispness of the in-Hab speakers.
SIMON HAS A MICROMACHINE INFECTION, I say. I HAD TO TRIGGER AN EMP TO WIPE OUT EVERYTHING.
Anna and Milo emerge from the darkness of the Hab, gaping. Milo’s hair is standing on end. He has burn marks on his face.
THERE WAS NO CHOICE. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HIM MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED TO YOU, TOO.
With luck, the micromachines should be dead now. I look at Simon’s tissue sample again. The black is still there. It’s too early to tell if the damage can be repaired. But—
IT WAS EMP OR WATCH US ALL DIE.
All three of us look despondently back to the Hab, a sad, half-fabbed thing now bereft of all light and heat.
Anna runs back in to check on Simon. I can hear her fighting the darkness. “He’s still breathing,” she says, and I catch a sob in her voice. “His heart’s still okay.”
WE’LL SOLVE THIS, I say as reassuringly as I can. WE’LL FIGURE THIS OUT.
19
Day twenty-five of our mission on Urmagon Beta.
Things have been slow over the past few days. We’re still reeling from that backhanded bitch, karma. Simon, or Simon’s body, lies in his bedroom, still connected to things that tell me what his heart rate is and offer me a glimpse of his brain activity. Around him, Anna and Milo are trying to pick up the pieces: Milo to repair everything I’ve just short-circuited, and Anna to . . . well, to Simon. She hasn’t eaten much lately and spends most of her time at his bedside.
When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see a marching band.
He said, “Son, life’s like this marching band.”
And I, who was expecting something more profound, inquired as to what in the seven hells he meant.
“Look closely,” he said. “They’re going to start with numbers that they’re really good at. Things they’ve practiced; things they know they can’t screw up. Then they start getting ambitious; they might pull off a few good riffs here and there. And then the crowd cheers them on, and they get really ambitious, and they go straight into a number way beyond their competence. And you know what that leaves? A sour taste in the mouth.”
I hate to say it, but my old man was right. And right now I’m a lot like that marching band. Started out with something I’m okay at; now in way over my head. I’m trying to think of the pros and cons of this situation, and it’s like this Jeeves-versus-Wooster conversation in my head:
Pros: What ho! The micromachines in everyone’s body? Dead. We did it, old chap. Simon’s taken some serious hits, but at least he’s not dying anymore.
Cons: Every major subsystem we had? Also toast. We did that too, m’lord.
Pros: Yes, but at least the crew are alive.
Cons: Not for much longer, m’lord. Anna’s body isn’t taking the sudden shutdown of her micromachines too well. Our bedroom is a sickbay now.
Pros: Milo can get the generator going. We can build another bedroom, what?
Cons: Yes, m’lord, but it’s going to take ages to run another salvage op OR investigate the city.
Pros: But we still have GUPPY and Boomerang. And we have more than what we started out with. So there! Buck up, old chap!
Hah. If only I could maintain the facade of a stiff upper lip to myself. Simon needs a few more shots and Profanol foam injections, but that’s half our medical supplies. Milo can get things running again, but only with weeks of backbreaking labor digging up graphite. And Anna’s farm lies untended, our hydroponics setup is fried, and she’s in no condition to do anything other than drag herself to Simon’s bedside and wait for him to wake up. Sometimes she talks to him.
Priorities first. How the hell did my crew end up with micromachines in their bloodstreams?
Let’s reconstruct the sequence of events.
Exhibit A: Simon. Reasonably healthy human, slightly messed up in the head. What has Simon done? Spent time mining. Some exposure to dangerous chemicals. Killed a MercerCorp employee. Fought, and been wounded by, a Megabeast.
Been a human guinea pig.
Guilt.
Hypothesis. Simon gets whacked around by a Megabeast, ends up killing it and taking a few scratches. Micromachines leap from Megabeast—
No, that’s stupid. Since when the hell did the flora and fauna carry advanced machine-cell tech?
Alternate hypothesis, says a part of my mind. Yanina Michaels, the MercerCorp linguist I didn’t really think about. Implants deactivated; brain turned to cheese. Is she a part of this? Was she some kind of plague vector for a passive attack from MercerCorp? Did they send one of their corpses to attack us? Did Simon go under first because of his wounds?
That’s an idea. And she said the city speaks. There’s only one city, or anything even remotely similar to a structure on this planet, which is exhibit D: the weird, clearly intelligently designed place we call the City (wow, the robustness here). Which is, as we suspect, a Mercer settlement.
We have two hypotheses. I can test them by examining the micromachine samples: it takes a little bit more engineering. Simon’s fever and condition would be his boosted immune system trying to fight off an infection of essentially bots in his bloodstream.
What if it is my fault?
Guilt washes over me again. What do I do? My crew will never trust me again. I can apologize, but as I once wrote,
Shatter this hull, cast aside this sheet metal
Puncture the airlocks, bleed dry the engine
What apology will save us then? O meaningless words.
So I do the next best thing: I don’t tell them what I’m thinking. Instead, I tune every sense Boomerang has onto the micromachine samples, acutely aware of Simon’s heartbeat and brain activity fluttering in the back of my sensor-consciousness.
First the chemistry. Simon’s FieldMedic cells are having the fight of their non-lives against an enemy that is, for all points and purposes, dead. Chemicals are breaking into the black clumps, dissolving them, whole squadrons of gold blood cells pulsing angrily and devouring the matter whole.
Fine. Further down. The micromachines peer out at me. First as shapes. Then—tune—finer. I run images of them against every reference image Ship can send me.
No match. Whatever it is, it’s not a design I’ve seen before. If I had a body, I would breathe a sigh of relief and worry. Instead I turn my drone cameras to the sun and ponder awhile.
The Yanina Michaels hypothesis starts to look more realistic. I examine it from all angles. It makes sense. I don’t know what the Mercers are using, but they’re the culprit. Some microengineered plague?
I feel fear, palpable, like lightning through circuits, a ghost quickening of a heart I no longer have, the panic of a simulated body. We are a small crew. We’re no match for Mercers.
I wish I wasn’t afraid. I wish I was second-gen AI, those near-lobotomized savants they made in the early days: a human mind with no fear, no happiness, nothing but a limited, artificially induced autism, bent to one task over all. But fear was deemed to be too important a feedback mechanism, too critical to the learning process, so our generation was left with most of our emotions intact, and the vague theory that time would teach us how to make the best use of things.
So I wait until my fear subsides, and I tell Anna and Milo. Privately. They cycle through emotions faster than I do. Anna clutches Simon’s hands and shakes and then a look of dull resignation sets in. Milo stares at my drone, then curses, grabs his gun, and storms out into the woods.
“I’m starting to think none of us are getting out of here alive,” says Anna to me on our private channel.
WE WILL. I PROMISE YOU.
“You can’t promise anything. Look at Simon.”
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN, I tell her, trying to be reassuring. WE’VE DEALT WITH IT. HE’LL WAKE UP. WE’LL GET THE SALVAGE. WE’LL GO HOME.
“Bet you say that to all your crew,” she says.
; YOU’RE MY FIRST, I say.
“Not helping.”
I meditate a bit more on what this means for us.
To be fair, salvaging isn’t an easy job. Yes, it’s advertised as free money, but the contract has a lot to say about immunity from legal action in case of death and so on. Those clauses are there for a reason.
We aren’t the first lot I know of to run into a rival crew. It happens a lot more often than people think. PCS is large, remember, and there’s always regional players who know that the big shark is sometimes going to be too slow to react. Most run data is confidential, but a few leak out every so often.
There was the case of Cutty Sark, for example. A PCS crew was tasked to recover a religious artefact: an Ark, one of the last ever launched by the Church of Stardust. It’s a glorified bit of religious decoration, but it’s an expensive bit of religious decoration, so a PCS crew was sent out under AMBER LILY 221.
I learned this because HYACINTH thought I should know a bit more about the AMBER lineage. The crew gets there. Unfortunately, so does a bunch of jokers from the Excalibur Legion.
ExLN is bad news, a bunch of hyper-religious nutters who worship the void. Space does strange things to people: among other things, ExLN really doesn’t like a lot of things. This list includes other religions—and AI. They’re harmless to the inner systems, or any well-protected station, but out there in the asteroid fields of Cutty Sark—well, they rip into the Ark.
The PCS crew lasts maybe ten minutes. ExLN commandos are tough.
So AMBER LILY does the only thing it can; it draws the ExLN brigade away. Away from the target. Away from the salvage. It fights like a demon, sending the crews of three ExLN cutters to their beloved void. And when it runs out of ammunition, it does the only thing it can: it explodes, taking out the rest.
The last message it sends? TARGET AREA CLEAR. SEND NEXT TEAM. GET THE SALVAGE.
AMBER LILY was restored from a backup, updated with the news. It chose a new name and went on. Very few heard of it ever since. But the moral of the story, as told to me by HYACINTH, was: people die. The life of a salvage crew is poor, nasty, brutish and short.
The Salvage Crew Page 9