What I mean to say is it’s a sort of technical Jack and the Beanstalk affair we have going on here. When the spiders have reduced the ship to whatever is most useful, they’ll pick up their fair share, grapple onto the cable and roll right up, hooking onto the carbon nanotubes for power and direction.
And to the left and beyond is the City. Boomerang’s camera spans its front. There are thermals here to ride on: I let it rotate, and the spinning images show me the GUPPY-tank trundling steadily towards the drop site.
“Approaching extractor. Everything looks good. OC, do you copy?”
Boomerang idles by in circles overhead. “Copy.”
SHIP, DO YOU COPY?
Ship is overhead, on the other end of this cable. COPY.
“Okay.”
GUPPY teeters on the lip of the valley and trundles downwards, leaving tracks of dead and dying flowers in its wake. Anna and Milo hop down, moving fast, fear apparent in every movement. The resource extractor waits patiently.
We have, rather pointedly, not spoken about micromachines for a while now. Almost forty-eight hours, to be precise. We’ve taken a vote, and the vote is this: we do our level best to finish this operation as soon as humanly possible.
No heroics. No more pointless yelling—Anna to me, me to HQ. Ship has a medbay. We get ourselves in there, get our payday; we go home.
From GUPPY, Anna extracts the little extension core that goes into the resource extractor. She approaches the thing. It hums and activates, spilling open to reveal a dull insert. She slides in the core and . . . ahh. With an almost sensual feeling I slide in among its idle processors, its circuitry, tapping into the eyes and hands and limbs of every spider it has deployed. Suddenly I am two. No, not two, but ten, twenty, thirty. The rush is orgasmic.
Boomerang dips briefly in the sky as the little repeater takes the load and staggers a little.
AHEM. TESTING. ONE. TWO, I boom from a small army of metal. Milo jumps.
“Holy shit, OC!”
Over two hundred beady camera eyes focus on Anna and Milo. How do I explain this feeling to someone with only one body?
I can’t. The only thing I can offer is my pity for those who are trapped with just two eyes and legs and hands. In these moments I am more. I am legion.
With Boomerang for added visual support, I spark cutting torches built into cheaply assembled claws, test motors, and arrange myself before the ruined ship.
ALRIGHT, I say. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can be out of this weird infected hellhole. LET’S TAKE THIS BABY APART.
22
Anyone who’s taken apart a ship will know the basic structure. First there’s layers and layers of ablative armor. No, no shields—that’s pure science fiction. We’re talking about a sealed, pressurized environment with enough armor around it to survive the void. Inside, it’s a fragile egg built by the cheapest bidder. Outside, it’s basically a giant rock.
The general approach, one often taken by rival captains, is to blast through with armor-piercing depleted uranium rounds or pulsed lasers. It’s messy and expensive and tends to make a lot of people upset. We try to avoid this. In our line of work, the crash does most of the work and nobody screams at you.
In this case, a ten-meter gash has been ripped right off the back end of the aux engine housing, leaving only a small graphene weave a couple of centimeters thick near where the nozzle used to be. I go at it with a will, drilling and sawing and turning fault lines and fractures into collapsible points. The silver turns gray-black under the blue fire of plasma torches. Little puddles of melted stuff run down the sides.
I can sense the engines in there. The wiring. The active components. This sense is part blueprint, part radioactive emissions.
And then—BANG. A rush of air as the vacuum collapses. We’re in. Light from the yellow sun of Urmagon touches the engine internals for the first time. I drop a couple of spider bodies in there. It’s dark, it’s sealed, and the engine core is still safe in its horribly green housing.
CLEAR.
Milo scrambles in, looking very much like a larger and dustier spider. He mutters to himself as he accesses the hard controls. They’re very basic tech, practically ancient by the standards of the rest of this ship: a single UN key, machined exclusively for this ship, opens up a bank of buttons. A passcode is entered. There’s a hiss, and the green cylinder, about the size of Milo’s leg, pulls itself free from the housing and rises slowly toward us.
“Phew,” says Milo. “I was almost expecting that to explode.”
I wasn’t. But I let him strap the thing to the back of one spider body and scuttle it over to the cable. As it begins to climb, I can feel it disengaging, shutting me out in favor of its own crude programming. Anna, outside, gives a thumbs-up.
Sigh. Five to go.
Somewhere around the third cylinder, Simon starts to stir. His hands twitch and his legs shake a bit.
WELCOME BACK, SLEEPING BEAUTY.
“Urrgh,” he says, and stares at the ceiling. “It smells in here.”
THAT’S MOSTLY YOU. CAN YOU GET UP?
He could, staggering a bit. I watch him anxiously as best as I am able—which is not much, now, post-EMP: all I have is a little drone flying inside the Hab. He stumbles and falls twice, but gets up eventually. He walks slowly, like an old man. I quiz him about aches and pains all the way to the bathroom.
“Oh, good, showers,” he says, and locks himself up for an hour. I cycle back to Anna double-checking the cable connection.
Unfortunately, at precisely this time, something stirs. Boomerang, surfing thermals further afield for power, sees it as a dust cloud from the direction of the City. It’s heading slowly down the slope.
MILO, ANNA, HALT FOR A SECOND.
They obey, puzzled. I coast Boomerang gently in for a closer look—
Holy shit.
That isn’t a dust cloud.
Bodies the size of boulders. Limbs that, even at a distance, look like tree trunks. And brown, shaggy fur.
It’s a herd of Megabeasts. And in the time I took to realize that, they’ve gone from a tiny speck to clearly visible lumbering giants no more than three miles out. And fuck me if they aren’t headed straight for us.
MILO, ANNA, DON’T PANIC, BUT ABORT. ABORT NOW. GET INSIDE THE SHIP.
“Why?”
WHY?
The spider body on the cable crawls upwards, beyond my control. I use its cameras to throw them a feed. WE HAVE PROBLEMS.
No time for finesse. I throw at Ship a compressed update with the important stuff—big angry things headed our way fast, dangly cable. Five spiders I scuttle to cutting through into the downed ship. There’s a way into the storage compartments through the engine-access stations.
Internal airlocks melt like butter under the fiery glare of my cutting torches. Bang. Corridor. Bang. Hatch. Spider legs grip surfaces without heed to orientation or gravity. Cut. Bang. A huge cavern. The ship is designed to withstand space, meteorites, and all manner of unpleasant things. It should keep them safe from a few oversized racoons.
INSIDE. GO.
Anna, dragging herself through holes I’ve punched, slides and stumbles on what used to be lighting strips on a wall. She gags. “Dear God, what’s that smell?”
What’s what smell? Doesn’t matter. Ship is pinging me for more information, wanting to know if it should temporarily disconnect from the cable.
I use one spider body to all but drag a protesting Milo in. Then I scuttle out, slap the pieces of the airlock door over the opening, and park myself there.
The Megabeasts are closer now. The trail they’ve left behind is like a dark brown scar on the grassy plain. And from here, their size puts the City into visual perspective. But wait.
There are shapes bobbing up and down on the creatures.
Are those riders?
Can’t be.
DECOUPLE?
DON’T. HAVE YOU GOT THE THIRD SPIDER?
EN ROUTE.
CA
N YOU DO GUNS?
The herd of Megabeasts Megabeastis closer now. Boomerang, diving from on high, sees them clearly. I can count thirteen. And they’re still heading straight for us. Is it the cable they’re after?
And those are riders. I can’t make them out with much detail, but they look like outgrowths wearing black. There’s cloth—I can see some flapping and limbs beneath—but there’s also so much fur it’s difficult to separate them on the visual or infrared spectrum.
They’re moving at terrifying speed.
SHIP, CAN YOU DO GUNS?
NEGATIVE, REACTION FORCE WILL KILL TETHER. NCONTROL HAS LIMITED ACTIVATION OPTIONS.
Boomerang and the herd rush towards each other. And then I see it: the rider at the head is pulling back his blackness. A hood of some kind. Beneath it, unmistakable, is a human head, except where the face once was there is now a grinning metal caricature.
MercerCorp!
Suddenly everything resolves itself. Thirteen Mercers on thirteen Megabeasts, the cloth-fur blend carefully confusing my optics until it’s too late. The grinning face looks up, unholsters what looks like a rifle, and Boomerang stutters. Systems scream. It falters in midair. The earth spins into my camera.
SHIP!
Boomerang hits the earth.
ACTIVATION CRITERIA MET! GRANTING NCONTROL ADMIN RIGHTS—
What happens next is straight out of an apocalypse movie. Boomerang’s failing temperature sensors spike. And then the heavens part and a brilliant pillar of red light, completely silent, appears right in front of the herd. I see the herd veer, but there’s no avoiding the pillar—it passes through them like a deadly ghost, turning charging animals into lumps of flaming, awkward meat, legs splayed akimbo. Just before Boomerang’s cameras melt, the beasts that the pillar didn’t quite touch burst into flame. Every single light sensor I have dissolves into screaming incoherence.
And just as suddenly, the pillar is gone, leaving just a black line of three blinded and screaming Megabeasts and a pillar of smoke and flame and what used to be body parts, only now they’re just so much carbon in the wind.
Everybody’s talking all at once, but it’s Ship I privilege: UNDER ATTACK. MERCER SHIP IS HOSTILE.
Oh, crap.
DISENGAGING. WITHDRAW.
There is a snap that echoes across the world like thunder. The spider, almost all the way up, wheels back in confusion, its connection to Ship lost. And the tether, like some kind of colossal beanstalk, goes slack and begins to fall. Part of it burns and pieces fall off, but not all. The planet spins and the great cable whips anti-spinward like a terrible tree, flaming, its sheer bulk cutting through the clouds and dragging them behind it like some heavenly sword.
Milo and Anna are shouting. I have to get them out. I move my spider aside. Milo fairly shoots through the opening in the downed ship. He runs towards GUPPY and collapses. His suit is stained with vomit.
Anna emerges much more slowly. Moving like a zombie, she shuffles around and takes in the flames on the horizon, the cable that is now visibly curving over the sky. Her gun hangs slack in her hands.
And the three remaining Megabeasts appear over the lip of the valley.
23
They say trouble comes in threes.
I say whoever says that forgot to add an extra zero or three.
The Megabeasts stampede down the valley, their claws sending clods of earth and grass flying. They’re charging at an angle to the downed ship, and Anna is right in their path. And improbably, one last Mercer is still hanging on one of them.
I scream at both my crew to turn around and get their guns out. They left their helmets in GUPPY, so I can’t fill their HUDs—but if a voice in your ear screaming, TURN AROUND! AIM! FIRE! doesn’t do it, nothing else will.
Anna sees the Megabeasts and freezes. She drops the gun.
MILO! TAKE THAT ONE OUT!
Milo turns. Milo gasps. Two shots. Both go wide.
Milo runs.
Oh, fuck.
FUCK.
Here we are, being charged by the rock-bottom remainders of Hannibal’s wet dream, and one of my people has frozen and the other one is hoofing it back across the valley, going, “Nonononononono!” in a kind of high-pitched wail.
I react with the speed only a machine can achieve. Before the Mercer’s gun levels, I throw every single body I control into the air. The spider bodies have extraordinary leg strength, partly because you need that kind of musculature when you’re clinging to a cable tethered between a planet and a spaceship. My eyes are suddenly ten, twenty, twenty-five feet in the air.
You engineers, who have mastered the art of warfare,
Have failed to crush the most formidable foe.
Charged with fighting the greatest,
My fear becomes a dull, spent rattle. In its place is crystal clarity.
A flaming tongue of plasma leaps out and licks five of me out of the sky. That leaves at least twenty-five that land on or among the Megabeasts. Six unfortunate bodies fall between and are crushed immediately. The others—
O I am death, the destroyer of worlds.
I activate my cutting torches.
Three heavy animals moving down a slope at high speed. Apply plasma designed to cut through starship plate. You can imagine what happens.
And when the animal screams are dead, I walk the remaining five spider bodies over to the Mercer who lies crushed beneath the weight of his own ride. Metal hands scramble madly for a rifle of unusual design.
He sees me coming and snarls, redoubling his efforts. I drag the rifle away with one body and surround him with five.
I can see Anna kneeling on the ground nearby and Milo, having run out of my range, sitting shamefaced on a rock, winded. I can see the now-ruined extractor chassis and the charred remains of meat that was once Megabeast. I can see the cable in its slow, terrible descent, whipping down towards the ocean.
Priorities.
I activate the cutting torches on the closest spider and jam them right into the Mercer’s fancy optics. They only scream for a minute.
I scuttle one of my spider bodies over to Anna. I send two more darting over the valley floor to the resource extractor. The ruined chassis is moot, but inside that thing is the transmitter core that lets me access these spiders. I cut it out. Take it with me.
Anna sees me approach, but something about the way she looks makes me feel like she’s looking right through my cameras and into something else beyond. Her face is streaked with tears and grime.
LET’S GET YOU UP, I say gently.
She bats away the metal claws. “There’s people in there,” she says in that same quiet voice, jerking her head at the downed ship. “You should know.”
PEOPLE?
My spider there scuttles inside, turning on its night vision. There are p—
Oh.
Uh.
The cavern is littered with pods. Pods closed, pods open, pods smashed, spilling their contents: dead human bodies. Hundreds of them. UN colonists, former hopefuls, humanity’s best and brightest, now rotten and rotting. In this sealed cabin, the spilled preservative has turned what should have been a decade-long decomposition process into messy, ugly, unfinished business. And here, boot prints in the sticky ooze, probably where I pushed Anna and Milo and shut them in.
Oh, dear gods.
No wonder Anna is out there shaking. I had hoped to give them safety. Instead I walled them in a tomb.
I pick Anna up. The spider is crude, but strong enough, and being in proximity lets me tap into her sensors again. Her heart rate is through the roof.
Where the fuck is Milo?
“Here!” he says. “Here!”
He’s at the lip of the valley. How he scrambled there that fast, I’ll never know. The coward. I scrabble to him.
YOU RAN, I snap as I pass him.
“I was trying—”
SHUT UP AND KEEP YOUR GUN UP. I deposit Anna near the trees. The rest of my spiders arrive, including the one carrying the con
trol core of the resource extractor. It’s smoking slightly.
“Did we win?” Anna says quietly, clambering upright.
Did we? The valley is a smoking mess. You can see the tracks from here, the Megabeasts’ stampede, and the flowers burn where my spiders met them. The cable, laid crosswise, like a god’s shoelace, crushing the lip of the valley on the other side. And up, across a sheet of smoke and dust that licks the horizon.
Did we win? Down to five spiders, tether snapped, our only ride off the planet is locked in combat over the clouds, Boomerang is probably a melted puddle of plastic, and this salvage mission has turned into an utter and complete train wreck. And I think Anna is in shock.
“Movement,” says Milo. “We need to get out of here.”
There, from the wall of flame. Dark figures climbing down. One of them stumbles and lands awkwardly. It does not move. The others crawl onward, steadily, up towards us.
GET IN GUMBALL, I say. MOVE. The spider with the resource extractor core I load into GUPPY. And I spread my spiders out, around the hauler. Milo clambers in, gun ready.
And we sound the retreat. GUPPY’s tires chew up the dirt. Saplings snap as the heavy hauler charges into the forest. The resource extractor jolts against Anna, but I don’t think she notices.
No Mercers chase us, but my spiders follow in a wedge behind us. Cameras peer at the trees that loom, the roots that grasp. A snake writhes across the grass and eyes snap, processing models optimized for ship-cutting reeling on confusion, trying to retrain. Is it a screw? A new handle interface? I squash their training procedures, taking point, batting aside suggestions from useless subsystems. They’re not built for this much input. Nor am I; spread among so many bodies, trying to keep track of the inputs, trying to alert the Hab. . .
The Salvage Crew Page 11