Or the Mercers themselves are dying. Like Yanina Michaels. And they mentioned Yanina, didn’t they? The blood is corrupt. Romain. Yanina. Moreci.
When Simon comes back from GUPPY, he looks thoughtful. He ladles himself some of the yellow sludge mashed-potato composite we’ve packed into meal rations and sits down to watch Milo carefully wrapping the body parts in polythene.
YOU ALRIGHT?
He laughs. It’s more like a short bark. “Be better when I get off this rock. That bastard said I was dying like them. You have any idea what the fuck that was about?”
I DON’T KNOW, I say, feeling helpless.
There are times when I wish I wasn’t a milk-run Overseer. I wish I had been put into one of the higher-end models they build for the United Nations. The terraformers. Those things are practically siege equipment. I could have ended this in no time.
But nobody gives you that kind of power until you’ve proven yourself. So I’m a glorified spreadsheet trapped in a glorified tin can parked under an alien sky, watching Milo dig, dig, and dig, and then haul the wrapped corpses into the dirt.
“No word yet from Ship?” he asks as he digs.
NONE. I gesture a spider claw at one of the pistols. YOU THINK YOU CAN FIT THIS GUN TO ME?
Milo looks it over. “Nope, too heavy, too lopsided, and you haven’t got the lift for that and the harness,” he says. “Besides, recoil.”
BAH. KEEP IT, THEN.
He sets it aside and keeps digging. Eventually Simon sloshes by with the lye, and they pour it on the grave and set fire to it. For some reason they’ve left the burned tree and its corpse completely untouched: that effigy seems to stare into the fire in some kind of twisted solidarity.
“Ashes to ashes,” says Milo.
“Stardust to stardust,” completes Simon. He coughs a little.
“You reckon that’s all of them?”
Milo says nothing, but pours more lye onto the flames.
“If they’re going to keep on coming,” says Simon, “at some point they’re going to get us.”
Milo stamps his feet.
Simon has a point. We can’t do this forever. We’re going to run out of food, or of able hands, or one of the guns will break, and we’re going to die.
I miss Ship. I miss having someone I can talk to. I package a log of what happened and send it out into the void, on the off chance that she’s still out there.
Then I think a bit more.
We are, or have been, under attack. The only thing to do is finish the job and get the hell off this rock as soon as possible.
These things are out of my control. Nyogi Buddhism teaches us not to stress too much over things we can’t control.
ARE WE READY TO MOVE ON? I ask Milo.
“Almost,” he says, kicking a limb back into the fire with a calculated malevolence. “We should get off this trail. Find a new one parallel to this.”
“Don’t say anything about this to Anna,” says Simon quietly. “Especially not about there being more than what we expected.”
“Why not?”
“She’s not in a good place right now. You should have noticed.”
“Yeah, well,” says Milo, “we don’t have time for that crap, do we?”
Simon meets Milo’s eyes. His face is pale and tired, but hard. “Don’t. Tell. Her. Anything,” he says.
“Or what?”
Simon hefts his gun, as if to leap at Milo and club him with it.
CAN IT, I yell at them. WE CAN’T AFFORD TO SQUABBLE RIGHT NOW LIKE SOME CHILDISH IDIOTS. GET THE ADRENALINE OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM.
They flinch. They know I’m right. This right here is what I need to do. I need to keep my people sane and get the job done.
We march, leaving the fire behind. Dawn stalks the world behind us.
We can speak of the rest of the march—the weariness, the fatigue, the jump-scares of shadows and footfalls in the distance—but something else happened:
I dreamed again.
That night I dream. I haven’t dreamed in a while.
A dream, by itself, is fine. We are, after all, human wireframes on silicon, and sometimes the human mind does a lot of its processing after dark.
Two dreams close to each other are unusual, though.
In my dream, we’re in the woods. Standing in front of the twin Mercers. And I am—
“A machine,” says the one on the left.
“Subservient?”
They are identical in the darkness. The same height, the same build.
SIMON, MILO, SHOOT THEM IF THEY APPROACH, I say, and then realize the order comes out of mouths, human mouths. I AM Simon and Milo. I control them.
“No, superior,” says Left.
“A machine,” repeats Right.
“Machine,” says Left, “what do you want?”
WE ARE HERE TO SALVAGE A FALLEN UNITED NATIONS SEED SHIP, I say. Am I pleading? Is it strange if I am?
“But what do you want?”
TO CARRY OUT OUR OPERATIONS IN PEACE, I say. PLEASE RESOLVE ANY CONFLICT THROUGH OFFICIAL CHANNELS. WE ARE HERE FOR OUR SALVAGE. ANY THREATS TO US WILL BE MET IN KIND.
“Back off, you spooky bastards,” I snarl through Milo.
They look down, as one, at the guns we point in their direction.
VIOLENCE WAS ANSWERED WITH SELF-DEFENSE, I say. YOU ATTACKED US UNPROVOKED.
“We form a proposition,” says Left. “When we speak, we denote concepts in the universe of facts, and lay bare the relationships between them.”
“But this language is a communal activity,” says Right. “It has no meaning outside the community that speaks it.”
“We have,” says Left, “been speaking the wrong language. We assumed you understood the underlying patterns in the flesh message.”
“It does not matter,” says Left. “Carry on with your task. This phase of the experiment—”
“—is over.”
I wake up.
What the hell was that dream about?
Do dreams mean anything? The training said no: random pieces of my overall brain being put to sleep, operating under reduced consciousness, just so some basic memory defragmentation can be done. A jumble of holographic memory—a byproduct of a rather boring software process. I’d probably had one or two more and barely registered them.
But this one, like the previous—the mad Mercer screaming—it leaves me slightly annoyed. Both of them feel like memories, remixed; but if so, I have a few choice words for the remixer, and right now that’s me. But more than that, really. What is the feeling for when you feel like someone is standing right behind you?
Watched.
Weird.
I’m not supposed to feel chills crawl down anything, unless it shows up on the temperature sensors. But right then and there, I did feel a chill crawl down my nonexistent spine.
A quick check on the boys—good, they’re cutting through bush now. They’re almost at the lip of the Valley. Simon is on foot; Milo’s resting in GUPPY, gun trained on anything that seems to move. They’re moving slowly because of the Megabeast spoor lying around—the tracks look at least a day old to me, and Simon opines that it’s the beast we found dead in the woods, but there’s sense in being cautious. Just in case there are more Mercers hiding in the trees, waiting to either rush us or give us cryptic messages.
“What’s this?”
“What?”
Milo kicks at something on the ground. Dirt. Kicks some more.
“Don’t,” says Simon, peering over GUPPY’s top. “Leave the damn thing.”
Milo is persistent and eventually unearths a gleaming dome. On top, once the dirt is cleared out, is stamped the new UN logo.
“Spot probe?”
Spot probes are the wedge-shaped hammers that a UN ship releases before descending. Sixteen of these plunge into the earth around a landing site and broadcast upwards to the ship above. The shipboard AI uses the data extracted to figure out the landing.
Hang on, that’s a pre
tty powerful transmitter. And it’s dumb enough that I can hack it. CAN YOU CUT IT OUT? WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO HOTWIRE IT TO TALK TO SHIP.
Simon throws the toolbox over.
“Almost there, OC,” says Milo, cutting with grim determination. “Almost there.”
Interlude: Simon
Daywhateverthefuckthisis.
My name is Simon Joosten. My recent training is as a geologist. I used to be a bit of a star in New New York—#14 on SUSUNORA, but you probably haven’t even heard of that game. The UN came and turned half the planet to rubble and shut down every entertainment system and then told us to go be productive citizens in a world none of us wanted to live in.
Which is why I’m here on a shit-tier salvage job. What do you do when your entire life has basically been a video game? Never mind that I have twitch responses way below most people you’ll meet; you put that military wetware on me and I’ll be faster than greased lightning. But no. Those jobs are already taken. The more dangerous stuff is all parceled out to people like the OC, who, let’s be real, haven’t been human for too damn long.
It’s either salvage or . . . nothing, I guess. Live off whatever crap UBI they hand out. Eat. Shit. Try not to die. Repeat. Whatever it is that people do back home between waking and the pseudo-death that we call sleep.
And speaking of bloody OC, the thing is right behind me. I can feel its bloody cameras on me. It’s doing that thing again where it’s trying to psychoanalyze the hell out of every single facial expression. You know that feeling you get in the dark when someone’s watching you, just slightly behind? That’s what we get every single day. That’s OC.
Mind you, he’s not as bad as some I’ve met. There was one called Ummon that ran the Dyson sphere for a whole three planets and answered only in shitty verse. I think our guy is new.
Well, he ain’t getting my feelings.
Right now we’re walking to this downed UN ship where all the shit went down, according to Anna. OC keeps offering me a ride in GUPPY, but it’s a fine, cold day and I need the walk. I’ve even taken off my boots. Something stabbed my foot a mile back and it’s this very nice high. It’s enough to drive the blurriness away. Enough to keep my gun up.
Fuck. Maybe I’ll take another few miles in GUPPY after all. Milo’s plated the front over the last couple of runs, and it’s like a tank now. Solid, plodding beast. Every so often OC’s spider perks at something in the bush and I raise the gun, but it’s always a snake or the wind. OC is paranoid.
I suppose I should be, too. But right now that’s just one data point. You know what really gets to me? The silence. I grew up in a city with the hum of a million and one things in the background. Here their absence makes me shiver. The world feels dead. Or worse, waiting.
Eventually we reach the top of what the others call Stardew Valley. It’s a beautiful place—millions of little glow-tree plants, all white leaves with tiny sparking buds and little jelly-bags playing above them. Roughly V-shaped valley, probably made by a river, probably the same one that feeds our little stream—before it switched course. I haven’t seen all the way south yet, but I’ll bet good money there’s a floodplain down there. I wouldn’t mind settling here, honestly. I tell OC this.
WE’LL SETTLE IT AFTER WE’RE SURE IT’S SAFE, says OC. MAYBE SET UP AN APARTMENT COMPLEX.
I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.
Right in the middle of this nice bit of land is what looks like a battle site. Huge UN ship, ugly fucker, same old extruded box design that they’ve been running for the last two hundred years. Or at least, half of it. Someone’s laid a thick cable from it to the opposite side of the valley, or tried to, but dropped the damn thing so hard it’s actually cut halfway through the lip of the valley and buried itself in it. There’s a dusty wind blowing ash my way.
The details become clear the closer I get to it. Bodies, two, three, huge chunks of Megabeast just lying there. Bloodstains on the white flowers. Little beehive-like creatures moving slowly over the raw meat. OC really did a number on this place, but ours not to reason why.
Ours but to do and die.
SPIDERS, SPREADING OUT.
Milo and I wait, guns out, until the damn spiders come back. OC thinks his spiders are silent, but they’re not: not here, where their slight cricaaaaw of motor limbs can be heard for ten miles either way.
We wait a stupidly long time.
ONE, says OC.
“Just one?”
OC updates my HUD. IN FRONT OF THE CARGO BAY.
Weird. Someone down there, arms wrapped around themselves. A nasty customer, by the looks of it—massive frame, giant cables replacing muscle.
He’s not moving. His eyes aren’t tracking, either.
Oh well.
Headphones on, I stroll into the Valley of Death.
The first order of business is to check out what Anna saw in the ship. She warned me about the smell, but . . . even from thirty feet away it reaches out like a living thing and crawls up my nose and down my spine. It’s like someone dug out a graveyard and left the corpses out to dry.
But I have, shall we say, some advantage here. When I was twelve, everyone in my class was put through the training sim for SUSUNORA. You’re all strapped to tables in a morgue, and your parents come in and start dissecting you alive. You can scream, you should, but as long as you don’t turn into a gibbering wreck, you get signed on by an agent. Turns out my agent was the one playing my sim-parents.
The smell was just like this.
When we were done, he took me out for drinks—in real life—and shook my hand hard and said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stranger. Your audition paid your parents’ mortgage, by the way. Welcome to the big leagues.”
The big leagues are everywhere. Even here, where there’s no audience, no monetization, no ad dollars rolling in.
I work my way past airlocks carved up and tossed aside—OC’s really done a number on this place—and into the long corridor that leads to storage. The smell of rotting flesh is stronger. Just above it is the oily aftertaste of coolant.
Torches on. One of OC’s spider drones, woken up in proximity, clitter-clatters behind me. I give it a thumbs-up and walk in.
Gods.
I’m in a room that stretches on like an airplane hangar. And hung at every level is row after row of cage after cage of frozen colonists in dead cryochambers. Maybe thirty—no, fifty, have fallen to the floor. Most of them have burst open like ripe fruit, spilling innards and body parts everywhere. There’s a thick sludge on the floor—coolant mixed with blood and shit.
No wonder Anna fled. I’m glad I can’t see their faces.
I DIDN’T SEE, says OC. He sounds sad.
“Batteries should have held up even in a crash,” I point out.
THE BLACK BOX INDICATED DAMAGE TO THE CORE GRID.
Well, that sucks. I shine my torch on the racks, and the absurdity of this hits me. “They should have sent kids. Or embryos.”
PARDON?
“Lighter weight, less energy requirement, you can pack more into a tiny space,” I point out.
OC’s spider pauses, hovering. THIS IS WHY WE HAVE AGE OF CONSENT, he says. BUT YES. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE PRACTICAL. YOU WOULD MAKE A GOOD OVERSEER.
Not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult, but I’ll take it. “So what do we do now?”
SCAN FOR SURVIVORS. THEN ACCESS THE MATERIALS STORAGE ROOM FROM HERE.
“They’re all dead.”
WE MUST FOLLOW PROTOCOL, EVEN SO.
PCS and their bloody protocols. “I’m going to take a breather and put my helmet on,” I say. “There’s no point smelling this shit anymore.”
YOU DO THAT.
Outside, at least, the air is nice and cold, and the flowers have their own odd scent, like minty chicken soup. I walk around for a bit. OC’s little drone has detached itself from GUPPY and is hovering over the few active spiders that woke up as we entered the valley. I think they’re taking apart the comms array, but it’s har
d to tell. I amble past them, stuffing some flowers in my helmet.
And then I feel something. No, feel isn’t the right word. I suddenly know something of mine is just over there, a bit up the slope, the way you know when your . . . parts get a bit excited. You barely think about them, but it happens, and now you’ve got this extra bit of your body to deal with, you know what I mean? It’s a little like that.
Which is weird. So I head that way.
The cargo hold. The door outside. The Mercer. Skin like gray ash, cables sprouting from the neck, wired to those thick muscle replacements. OC has a spider in front of it, plasma torches out; those things can be nasty. I don’t want to see what they can do to flesh.
It’s not dead. Maybe the brain’s gone. But something’s still running. How I know, I don’t understand. Just like that night when the one-armed Mercer attacked—I felt something there, I felt it running, I felt it even after OC made me bury it six feet under. It’s like gamesense.
The sense of something alive only grows stronger as I approach it. I unsling my rifle, just in case. Anything so much as twitches—
And suddenly I’m not there anymore.
I’m not even myself anymore.
I am a thing that sleeps under the ground. I am data and I am process I am cause and I am effect. My head rises above. Stars wheel past and the heavens change, but I remain I remain I remain and I have been woken by these fleshy animals these beasts who staple who staple metal to their bodies and try to be me be me be eternal but they are pathetic and flesh and dust that thinks they can think and they poke and prod and pry beneath my surface and I reach out to make them stop—
SIMON.
My armies my little ones my faithful they go out they meet they enter they command they control but the flesh muppets are as weak as the animals that toil in the plain they do not listen they cannot their pathetic attempt at thought centers fry even as I try to talk to them—
SIMON!
And suddenly I’m me again. All that largeness, that void, that process goes away, and I’m left shrunk and confused, flailing wildly with just two arms where I once had entire legions of my faithful.
The Salvage Crew Page 15