“They’re gone,” she says, a note of panic in her voice.
I rest a drone near her shoulder. THEY’LL BE BACK, I say, trying to be reassuring. WE JUST NEED TO MAKE SURE THERE’S NOTHING ELSE OUT THERE.
Of course I don’t tell her about the Mercers we met.
“Oh.” Just like that, she turns off again. Thirty minutes later she turns on again. “OC,” she tries, “shouldn’t we have more defenses than this?”
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, YES, I venture.
“We should head to higher ground.”
Unfortunately, there’s no viable high ground nearby. I need that stream, Simon’s too sick to move around much, and we’ve hauled over a ton of parts to our base already. We’re not going to be moving anytime soon.
“I’m tired of this shit, OC,” she says. “I’m tired of orders. I’m tired of thinking I’ll die in this fucking place.”
THEN DON’T FOLLOW ORDERS. THINK ON YOUR OWN. ACT. BUT WE’RE ON OUR OWN, ON AN ALIEN PLANET, AND YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT STAYING ALIVE.
“What’s the point?”
WHAT’S THE POINT OF ANYTHING? I challenge, irritated now. WHAT’S THE POINT OF WAKING UP IN THE MORNING? WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE ANYWAY. MIGHT AS WELL DO IT ON OUR OWN TERMS.
This earns me silence for the greater part of an hour. She shifts position twice. I compose a poem to help pass the time, and blast it in her direction.
Nearly two thousand miles from the Temple
The green grave-stones here reveal the relics of old age;
Nurses and doctors come and go, rebuilding the rooms
And little by little fill the voids between rooms with cloven
Dryness and wearyness.
Flowers march, as diplomats and military officers,
Going where soldiers and robots cannot.
They say that the Mountain of Heaven is guarded by spirits.
But government is a bandit causeway thinning;
And inland you will send your men, in boats of steel,
In the distance, the Valley draws closer.
Eventually she climbs down and looks at me.
“Not bad,” she says. “You should have been a poet.”
I AM A POET.
“If that’s what gets you up in the morning.” She kicks a clod. “We need food. Can’t build siege equipment on an empty stomach.”
THERE ARE AT LEAST SIX DOGANT SWARMS AROUND, I say. THAT’S MEAT.
“We’ll need more than just meat, OC,” she says. “It’s not sustainable. The farm’s a better option, but it’s running to shit. I need more . . . sunlight, carbon dioxide, whatever.”
This little aside shows why we need people around. Humans ask the right questions, make the right pseudorandom moves, nudge your thinking in all the right ways—ways that a machine can’t. Humans evolved to survive, and they’re fantastically good at it.
IF WE CAN BUILD A GREENHOUSE OVER THE FARM WITH POLYTHENE, AND YOU CAN CREATE A BIT OF SMOKE—
“Naw, next thing you know there’ll be a leak and we’ll be dead.”
YOUR TURN TO COME UP WITH AN IDEA.
She kicks the clod some more. “The boys are going to be hungry when they get back,” she says. “Let’s do what we can.”
RIGHT. EXCELLENT. NOW?
A sigh. “Maybe.” A shuffle. “Thanks, OC. Maybe let’s not go overboard on the pep talk.”
I sigh, mentally, and let her get on with it. At least some good has been done today.
The boys, meanwhile, have had an uneventful march to the repeater tree.
Or rather, the re-repeater tree. The corpse hangs there like an omen. GUPPY’s track stretches for miles, clearly visible. Nothing moves except for the spider I’ve tasked to them. A brief calibration—to make sure the spider is communicating with the repeater—and we’re off.
Over the hills.
The scrub.
Into the forest between us and the valley. The sun creeps below the horizon, and the moons rise, bathing the darkness in pale whites. The golden grass turns into a black sea that turns into equally black forest, a gift from the terraformer that must even now be crunching away placidly a continent away. GUPPY’s tracks—our high-speed retreat—cut a straight road through the grass, a song of crushed blades and panic.
There.
My spider picks up a shadow, insistently staying on the edge of the search, as if it knew exactly where I would be. No animal is smart enough to do that. I send Milo out and get to the drone equivalent of kicking Simon out of bed.
“What? What?” cries Simon, clearly confused, stumbling inside GUPPY. No matter. Soon he’s cocking his rifle and hauling himself upright, bleary-eyed. Milo is peering at the shadows.
The next few minutes are a maze of trees, grass in the evening sun, more trees, with me jumping my drones at every single gasbag and snake-thing that flits.
Unfortunately, the bastard seems to have scoped out the area: half-bent, he sneaks around to the northwest, behind us.
I see them in the darkness of the trees. Three, maybe four: the spider’s image recognition, set to near-overfit levels, jumps and classifies even the slightest shadow. One of them peels off. Small, thin, his suit almost entirely peeled off, wires trailing from his scalp. He’s moving in fits and lurches, like the zombie version of a former athlete. One arm looks like it’s been burned off. He’s clutching what looks like a pistol, but could be anything. At least he’s not on a Megabeast: he’s very much alone and on his own two feet.
I whisper to Milo, who very cautiously sneaks behind GUPPY. The Mercer attacker is making an odd sniffing motion, creeping, looking more like an animal than anything that used to be a man.
“Got him,” whispers Milo, and fires.
Surprisingly, the bullet doesn’t kill him. It goes into his chest and tosses him several feet backwards like a rag doll, but in seconds he’s up again. He makes a weird, wailing, laughing noise and goes straight for Simon, who’s just crept around the corner.
Focusing everything I have, I send a pulse of completely random noise on every available channel straight at the rushing Mercer. He howls and clutches his head. Milo shoots him in the leg. Simon, very carefully and patiently, and with a great deal of pain in his face, lines up his rifle just so and fires.
This time there is no mistake. The light-gas rifle, even though slightly depleted, turns the thing’s head into so much bloody mist spreading backwards.
Simon and Milo look at each other wordlessly and duck back behind GUPPY.
“OC, you have eyes on the others?” yells Milo.
I do. At least, I should have. I’m weaving through the shadows in spider form. The world is an unbroken curtain of grass, except where—
There. The separation.
Two more Mercers stand in the shadows, half in the tree line, half out. Or at least I think they are. It’s confusing: they don’t exist on my sensors as much as ghost in and out, shifting position along the tree line, their trail a disturbing sense of noise in their wake. No matter what I cycle to—vision, heat, sound—it’s like trying to watch something that’s both a particle and a wave at the same time, except much, much larger. Active camouflage, I think: the same type you get on ships, only in this case shrunk down to insanely tiny levels.
I don’t know how the hell they’re powering that, but they can’t stay hidden for long.
HERE. I ping a wide swath around the not-signals. TAKE THEM.
Simon and Milo roll out in almost perfect sync, Milo at the front, Simon behind, and gunfire erupts like thunder. Light-gas bullets turn the trees in front of me into so much kindling and stumps. A fragment ricochets and hits my spider, briefly spinning me around. When I untangle myself, the signal noise has retreated.
PUT YOUR WEAPONS DOWN AND IDENTIFY YOURSELVES, I blare out to them. I AM AMBER ROSE 348 OF PLANETARY CRUSADE SERVICES, AN ORGANIZATION CONTRACTED BY THE UNITED NATIONS FOR SALVAGE AND RESCUE. DO NOT MAKE ANY AGGRESSIVE MOTIONS OR YOU WILL BE EXECUTED.
Nothing. A shift in the shi
fting signals. The overfitted image recognition goes crazy; the waveform mutates in a way I can’t explain. Becomes two signals, right behind me. The grass rustles.
They might be spooky, but I am in a spider. My body right now is designed to haul tons of scrap into space, hanging with just a few limbs on a cable between the scrap site and a starship. My legs are powerful.
I lash out with a front leg, leaping up at the time, delivering the strongest flying slap in the universe into the air behind me. Something tears like paper, and two human forms go flying. My cameras see Simon revving up GUPPY, plowing into the grass, and Milo bearing down on us, circling around for a clear shot—
I twist. NOW! Another dual barrage of gunfire; a body is sucked from the space I inhabit and thrown against a tree. Silence.
“Did we get them? Did we get them?” screams Simon.
I don’t know. My view is the tall grass again. Milo’s face and arms are silhouetted against the moon. He’s crouching, reloading. I push myself upright and cycle my senses as rapidly as I can. Even at overfit levels—nothing. The night is silence and wind in the grass and the sense of a great movement suddenly ended.
The Mercer bodies are sprawled left and right of me. Right and Simon and GUPPY are closest. I click-clack my way to them.
Well, whatever this Mercer was, it’s not anymore. Simon’s turned it into so much red paste spread over the ground. Machine parts sizzle and pop. Simon hauls himself over GUPPY and puts a foot on what looks like a chunk of leg, breathing heavily and looking like he could vomit and orgasm at the same time.
“Active camo of some kind, OC.”
Yup. In life and in death, because right now you could pass that particular specimen off as a bit of strawberry jam. Urmagon Beta’s first hit-and-run. Simon, you’ve made history.
“Simon, OC,” says Milo. A babble of language, crackling as if parsed through a bad speaker. “This one’s still alive.”
We rush over.
There, leaning against a tree, and obviously in great pain, is the other Mercer. They—it looks like a she, but you can’t tell—is wearing some kind of power armor. There’s a jagged dent on one side, as if the fist of God hit them. That’d be my work. Milo’s is more precise: they’re missing a leg, the ground beneath them turning a dark red.
They’ve taken off their helmet, presumably to breathe. An angry, narrow face labors above the crumpled armor. It’s the twin of what our first visitor, Yanina Michaels, would have looked like, given a hospital and several hundred years’ bed rest.
They say something through gritted teeth, addressing Milo in their cracked and badly computerized voice. Then a brief shake. They seize, as if they’re having a fit. “Noufranç? Chinois? ไทย2?”
ENGLISH, I blare at them. I AM AMBER ROSE 348. MERCERCORP EMPLOYEE, IDENTIFY YOURSELF.
They fix a beady eye on me. Us.
“The blood is corrupt,” they spit, in English thickly accented with a Noufrance accent. “Do not touch the blood. Burn it, burn us all.”
YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS HAVE ATTACKED MY CREW. IDENTIFY YOURSELF.
A cough. Blood wells at their lips. “Romain touched it first. He died. And then Yanina. And Moreci, Abalon, the guards. They died. Hear them. In my head. Hear you. Like fire. Burning. Screaming. Dying.”
Milo makes to move closer, but I wave him back with a spider claw. MERCER, DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THE HELL I’M SAYING? DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE MISSING A LEG?
Their head swivels to me. “Unidentified flesh,” they say. “The City speaks. One of you is dying. One of you is dying like one of us.”
We exchange glances in the moonlight, my crew and I. “You ruined my micromachines,” whispers Simon.
A cough. A deep hacking sound, like lungs tearing themselves apart. Or laughter, some twisted analogue that the Mercers might recognize. Something sparked inside them and died. I felt it.
HOW MANY OF YOU ARE OUT HERE? I press.
“Delah,” they say, a hand twitching, a toss. Then they look at me—at us, standing open-mouthed in the moonlight. “Go, run, flee,” they say, with great effort. “This place is death.”
I don’t know who fired first. But I see, clear as moonlight, how the Mercer pulls the short pistol out of their suit. Black-suited hands, moving whip-fast, like coiled snakes in one last dying paroxysm, faster by far than any of us; in that split second they could have blown Simon and Milo right into their choice of any of the seven hells.
Except they don’t. Instead of pointing at us, the snakelike arm turns, pointing the gun at their own head.
Simon fires. Milo fires. Simon fires again. Milo fires twice more. The sound of thunder deafens and blinds. When silence falls, and the echoes die away, the Mercer lies spread all over the trees behind them.
“Well, fuck,” says Milo. He licks his lips. “That was fucking weird.”
“No shit,” gasps Simon.
A ticking, a hissing, some machine part dying in the silence.
THAT DIDN’T SOUND LIKE A THREAT, I say, equally disturbed.
“A warning,” says Milo. “And that same fucking catchphrase—”
“The City speaks,” finishes Simon, troubled.
“If that’s three of the four—”
“—there should be one more.”
SPREAD OUT, I tell them tersely. New configuration. We’re going to spread out in a line, as deep into the forest as I dare: spider at the edge, Milo in the middle, Simon between me and Milo. This line is going to move like an antenna around me. This is as far as we can range.
“Fuck, I’m sweating in this suit,” says Milo, crashing through the undergrowth.
I know. I can hear his breathing. His heart is doing double time.
MOVE.
We conduct this caricature march, sweeping. Simon, panting, tracks them as far as he can. The spider camera shows no heat; no signals save for some snakes skittering away from us, afraid of Milo’s crashing through the leaves.
“Nothing, OC.”
CONTINUE.
“This is like human radar.”
THAT’S THE IDEA. A little faster. Almost at the end of the sweep. WAIT.
Up ahead. Northeast, where the trees huddle like lovers wrapped around each other. There is something. I ping Milo and Simon. They won’t have a clear shot at anything—this is real jungle here—so I send the spider ahead, crashing through the undergrowth. Vague signals; something warm that now lies cooling, still not the temperature of the earth and the rock.
“Megabeast,” says Milo.
Not just a Megabeast. Three bodies, tossed around like debris. One impaled on a tree branch, black ichor dripping from the chest; it clearly died struggling. One crushed to so much pulp, flattened by a foot. The other up against a tree, bent at an odd angle. It seems to be missing a head. And at the center, curled up in death, the Megabeast. Its blood has salted the earth.
“Fuck.”
“I don’t like this,” Simon says, crouched in the moonlight before the headless body.
NOBODY DOES, I point out.
I can’t quite tell, but I’m hoping Simon’s grin is of . . . fear, rather than whatever kick he gets. It looks too much like pain.
“Something inside him,” says Simon. “Something else is there.”
“That’s crazy talk,” says Milo. “What do we do, OC?”
I spider over to the one invader whose head isn’t so much paste on the landscape. An armored suit: not the general hazmat and debris protection kind we’re rolling, but a proper Class-II rig, the kind you buy in the back of the military surplus shop. Inside, a chest, arms, pale skin shot with threads of gold. Unwatuun Jen Kawn, archeologist. Heavy subdermal modification.
“Six of them, total,” murmurs Milo. “And one of them killed themselves.”
The collarbone has a data jack and a wireless interface. I must have overloaded it with noise, thrown the sonic equivalent of a flashbang in his face. I try to connect to the circuitry. It identifies itself, provides a handshake protocol, bu
t I can’t make out much, because half of what’s in here seems to be either shut down or masked with some kind of weird encryption. Then whatever internal battery is powering the circuit dies, and a string of error messages fills the connection.
“Anything?”
“They said the blood was poison.” Simon angles his head at the corpse, as if listening to something he can’t quite make out.
THEY SAID THE BLOOD WAS CORRUPT, I correct him. I feel uneasy watching him. DON’T TOUCH HIM! IT COULD BE THE MICROMACHINE ISSUE.
Simon pulls his hand back. “We don’t know if they use micromachines.”
WE DON’T KNOW JACK, I say, peering at the corpses myself. I have nothing to scan or sample the body with, but it’s not moving, and if something else is in there . . . well, it burns, too. YOUR SUITS ARE ALL INTACT?
“Mine’s fine.”
“Mine too.”
THEN LET’S BURN THE BODIES. USE THE LYE. Salvage crew, three; Mercers, zero. Maybe half. And three to the flora and fauna. MILO, THERE’S PLASTIC IN GUMBALL. SIMON, GO EAT. YOUR BODY NEEDS FOOD.
Meanwhile, I need to think. I compile the footage of the first three Mercers.
First, the skulker. Then the camouflaged twins. If there is a pattern to their movements, some underlying message, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck it is, except THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING MAD. They are three, we are two and one spider, and going by those camouflage skills, they could have set up an ambush right here and turned us into so much dead meat. Instead they charge, like animals. They fight like animals. Even when they hide, they hide—
Like animals, I think, but not the human animal.
Pause. Reroll. Pause. Reroll.
HOW MANY ARE YOU?
Delah, she had said. Gutter slang, patois for many.
Alright. Silver lining. Because Milo and a barely recovering Simon just took apart three Mercers who between them have enough augments to take on a small army. Either my guys are good—no, that’s a really low probability—
The Salvage Crew Page 14