I’m briefly, acutely aware of the enormous difficulty of controlling myself—these muscles, this mouth, these vocal cords.
Fortunately Urmagon solves this for me by pitching up and slamming into me face-first. Actually, it’s me who fell, but my brain asserts itself again, and I’m back to being me. The infinity is fading. And the air has just gotten a lot colder. OC’s little drone is hovering towards me.
“Nothing, just fell,” I mumble through a mouthful of dirt. “Muscle spasm.”
Even through a spider OC manages to look skeptical. I give him the dead-eye back. Half my body’s a bloody mess, but damned if I’m going to be certified mental before getting this payout.
What doesn’t kill you does make you stranger. The trick is not to let people see it too often.
I THINK WE HIT PAYDIRT.
Interlude: AMBER ROSE
The paydirt is as follows:
Sasaki “Shen” Tadao
Madeline “Maddie” Darjeeling
Henry “Aek” O’Connor
Zoey “Grace” McKenzie.
And I know why they survived. Because none of them, technically speaking, are human. There’s a reason they’re stowed away in the materials hold under “military gear.”
They’re Mark VIII replicants.
I’ve known of replicants. Designed for the UN military, presumably after someone got too obsessed with two Old Earth science fiction buffs called Phillip K. Dick and Ridley Scott. They made them to be the perfect puppets: human skin stretched over light metal frames, reinforced skeletons, the works.
I think the idea was to replace humans in war. Yet another bleeding-heart save-the-humans initiative, stalled when some military accounted pointed out that (a) replicants were stupidly expensive and (b) there were more than enough humans walking around for dirt cheap. You could still hire a small human mercenary force for the cost of one replicant. What they couldn’t achieve could safely be placed in the hands of AI with specialized bodies.
Like me, I suppose.
So the replicants ended up on the UN colony ships. Unlike the sex-bots and caretakers, these things had actual software. They were good enough to mimic a moderately social human seventy percent of the time, and despite being fairly bad at generalized learning, they did have enough processing power to outreact my crew without even trying. The lack of . . . shall I say, intellectual overhead? meant a decent replicant, above the Mark III at least, could react in under ten milliseconds. Just the kind of creature you want on a colony mission, to help the human crew get back up on their feet, do tasks they don’t want to do, and play butler, maid and caretaker.
Prime assets. Simon and I go over each of them carefully, slowly taking apart the plastic wrapping. They’re locked away in little crash boxes with clear fronts. I find the cargo bay door controls.
MILO?
“Still clear.”
I KNOW. GET DOWN HERE AND GET THESE DOORS OPEN.
Milo takes a while, but eventually the doors roll open, spilling light into the musty cavern. And outside, huddled, is the dead Mercer.
A bit unnerving, if you ask me. I use my spider outside to drag the damn corpse away. It’s frozen, as if in rigor mortis.
Shen is fine. The case is broken, opened and badly resealed—clearly someone from the UN tried to access this one. Chest plate slightly dented; the lower arms bulky vambraces of stainless steel and black fiberplastic; slightly rusted guards covering his joints—and the skin, like rich cream stretched thin over a metal skeleton underneath. A pocked suit is folded next to him.
Aek is in prime condition: his dark skin practically gleams in the torchlight. Maddie’s box has had a small crew transport roll into it, but she’s undamaged inside. And Grace, like Aek, is again in perfect condition. Their suits are untouched.
I try not to get too excited. If Urmagon has taught me anything, it’s that everything I hope for will be taken away from me. But . . . damn.
Four replicants.
We’ve won. We’ve made payday. AND THEN SOME. And that’s not even counting the rest of the equipment stowed here. To wit: twelve military-grade printers—tougher, uglier, faster versions of BSE. Three long-range AI recon drones; we don’t have the kind of infrastructure to launch them, but if we did, we could spy on the next continent from here. A tiny backup terraformer unit, the full drone/crawler/seeder combo scaled down to a tenth of its size. Spray-painted on its side in crude, flaky, dried-out sigils is the word GARDENER.
I run some brief numbers: even accounting for all the hits we’ve taken, we’ve doubled our payout for this job. One more run, to this site alone, and we’re above our targets. We won’t even have to bother with the third piece of the ship, wherever the hell that is.
Finally, a stroke of luck.
Simon whoops when I tell him this and pumps his fist and does a weird little dance.
SEE IF YOU CAN COLLECT SOME PERSONAL EFFECTS FROM THE COLONISTS, I tell him. ONE MORE RUN, AND THEN ONCE SHIP GETS BACK, WE’RE OUT OF HERE.
He gets that look in his eye. “Oh, I can do personal effects, all right,” he says, and makes a beeline straight for the locker room inside the human storage. The whine of a plasma torch echoes through the chamber.
Meanwhile, I contemplate the replicants.
What if, theoretically, I was to activate one of them? With Anna out of action, Milo brewing alcohol, and only Simon on any kind of active duty, Ship offline, the extreme possibility of Mercer attacks . . . I could lump this under Protocol 14, where salvage can be claimed as company property under extreme circumstances.
These are extreme circumstances.
What is the market value of a secondhand replicant? Quite high, as it turns out. So it can still be sold back to the original client. Right. This is a no-brainer. I’m hauling mass anyway, it might as well help out a bit.
Simon returns with an armful of personal effects—holophones with cracked wristbands, a home assistant or two, the kind of thing you can milk data from to make up a sob story that’ll run in the news for a bit. Good stuff. I tell him about my plan to activate one of the replicants.
“Do we have to split our shares with it?”
“IT’S TECHNICALLY EQUIPMENT. IT DOESN’T HAVE ANY RIGHTS.”
“Can it handle a gun? What does it run on?”
NOT SURE IF IT CAN OUT OF THE BOX. It’s been a while since I saw one of these things. BUT THERE’S NOTHING IT CAN’T LEARN IN A FEW HOURS. NUCLEAR BATTERIES, SAME TYPE AS MINE, BUT SMALLER.
“Then do it,” says Simon the Practical Realist.
PICK ONE.
Simon points to Shen. “Reminds me of a guy I knew back on New New York.”
Excellent. Open-box goods. Shen it is. I wave a spider leg in a high-five to Simon and begin the work of carrying all of this stuff to GUPPY, along with the high-power comms equipment I’ve looted from the ship.
We all pile in—spiders included—and with one last look at the Valley of Death, we begin rolling back home. No Mercer contact. Nothing. If I were a human, I’d let out the breath I’d have been holding.
By evening, the first snow begins.
Interlude: Shen
Unit 327 SHN “Shen” booting up.
Internal clock disrupted. All systems otherwise functional. Hard line engaged.
Primary camera: two humans peering at face. Both wearing suits that do not match UN regulations. Man has a thick, matted nonregulation beard, and other man’s hair is no better.
Diagnostic. Two nonstandard modifications detected. CMVS “Pathfinder” v 7.2.9 attachment to neural core, vendor UNSC Galactic Pulse. Micromachine mesh/repair network, vendor unknown.
Query process updating me. Suits become Planetary Crusade Services standard, minus some usual options. Man becomes Milo Kalik. Other man becomes Simon Joosten.
Query process is AI, very advanced. For reason unknown it talks to SHN like to a human.
WELCOME TO MY CREW.
Feel it rifling through memories. Querying ship timeline. No d
ata recorded; SHN was stored before launch. SHN is activated now. SHN is ready to serve.
I HAVE SOME WORK FOR YOU.
SHN is ready to serve.
EXCELLENT, says AI, which calls itself OC but transmits different name marker. LET’S BEGIN.
Interlude: Anna
Morning. Third day since Simon and Milo left for the dig site. The sky is cold outside, and the water in the stream even colder.
The silence has been welcome. Some alone time, for the first time since we landed—no OC over my shoulder, no Milo with his stupid let’s-engineer-the-shit-out-of-this attitude, and—I hate to say this—no Simon bleeding out over the sharp edges of the Hab. He thinks I don’t notice, but I do.
The farm is dying slowly. My suit stinks, a smell on my fingertips I can’t escape. The Hab is equally filthy—a moldy tangle of domes covered with a layer of dust and skin sheddings and gods known what else. There’s fungus growing where the coating on the walls cracked.
Damn this gray fog. Makes it hard to think.
I’ve knocked windows in all the modules except Milo’s research lab. Some wind will do us good. The cutter whines high and low. An alien thing in an alien world. The DogAnts and the flying jellyfish don’t like it: I’ve noticed they veer away sharply whenever we do construction. Probably the tools screaming at some frequency we can’t even hear.
We’re parasites on this world, and we’re not even aware of it.
Sound of tapping from the speakers. Metal shrieking. OC insists on keeping a live audio feed running. I don’t know about that replicant they’ve woken up. Paydirt, yes, but we should have left well enough alone. No call to go waking up the cargo.
Too hasty, that’s the problem. Too damn one-track, these people. Milo, yes, but OC most of all. They work like they’re used to someone cleaning up after them. We’ve killed a dozen people now, and the immediate next target is “get the metal”? Never mind the fact that something terrible seems to have happened to every Mercer we’ve come across, or that we still have to solve Simon’s medical issue.
We’re focusing on all the wrong things. Offense over defense wins the day only in books. In real life you plant your back to a wall and let the enemy throw themselves at you. Learned that the hard way on Kubera II. Our job is to make sure we can bloody the nose of whatever comes at us, barring that Mercer ship upstream, in which case we’re toast. OC’s spider-powered siege equipment idea sounds less implausible by the day. And walls: how many more walls do we need?
Routine check. South wall, fine. West wall, fine. Farm, nestled between: barely hanging on. The cold is going to kill it. I accidentally kick over OC’s stupid Go board. Idea. Wood is a decent insulator. I should be able to use it to channel the heat from the wood-burning generator more effectively into the crops. Combined with a fan, I can keep the ambient temperature up by a couple of degrees.
At least we’ll be stupid, but we won’t be stupid and hungry. I hope the boys get back home in one piece.
Something is still wrong.
Interlude: Milo
By now it’s clear that OC isn’t really too fond of me and likes playing favorites. That’s too bad, because I’m the one holding this place together. Someone needs to keep an eye on the tree line in case those Mercer bastards return. Is that someone anyone else but yours truly? Nope.
The first snow started falling yesterday. I called Anna to check on the roof, but no: all I get is silence. Apparently she went out to haul wood for OC’s stupid medieval siege equipment idea. It sometimes boggles me how stupid that thing is. Wooden siege equipment? Against Mercers? I tried to raise this with OC, but it’s too busy chuckling over the salvage and reprogramming that replicant. I swear it’s like dealing with a child sometimes.
Right. This whole job is a multi-trip business. It’ll take some planning. First things first: while Simon and Milo and OC muck about, I take GUPPY back to the base, double-time.
“What happened?”
No time to explain, Anna. Ask OC. “Salvage,” I say, brushing past her to the workshop. “More than we expected. We’ll have to do a proper multi-trip job.”
There’s a little something I left behind, a small ace up my sleeve: that UN hauler bot that OC fried trying to kill the micromachines in Simon. I’ve got its basic functions up and running—nothing particularly intelligent, but a tread-where-I-tread thing that uses the forward cameras and puts the burden of guidance on someone walking ahead. I boot it up. Kick it a couple of times.
“And I’m just supposed to stay here?”
“What did OC say?”
“Guard duty.”
“Then stay. Maybe take the second trip when Simon gets back on the first run.”
The swarm of DogAnts heading our way are no match for us. They’re being chased by what I assume is a baby Megabeast, but I stand up calmly and shoot it in the head, once, not the triple-tap wastage crap that Simon likes to do. It collapses. The hauler performs admirably well, following me like an obedient metallic puppy.
“Meat,” I announce, hauling the Megabeast kill to Anna’s little butchering operation.
She looks at it with distaste. “We have food.”
“I’d like some that doesn’t taste like recycled crap. Simon’s still pretty weak. We need decent food out at the dig site.”
And just then the lights dim again. Damn it. Just as I thought I had the grid balanced. The cold’s sapping a lot of the efficiency of the system. I could use a second furnace, but that means we’d have to spend more time cutting wood.
Anna’s bitching about the loss of power now.
“You fix it!” I yell back. “Why the fuck do I have to do everything?”
That shuts her up. The whining drops to a low murmur. Useless idiot.
I get to the workshop and start cutting apart those planks they hauled for the bullshit siege weapon. We need scaffolding and planks, not mangonels and ballistas. We need power—
There’s a bit of wind now. Simple wire-and-magnet motor, fan blade made of reinforced wood? Windmill right there. I can windmill the shit out of this place, and if I plug it into OC, we can use his onboard battery to stabilize the supply. That’s an excellent plan.
I dump everything we need into GUPPY. The seat’s a bit fucking rough, no more than a plank. But hey. It works.
What else?
Suit. Yes. This one’s getting a bit ripe. Did a lot of sweating in this thing. My room’s cold when I take this off—it isn’t just a cosmetic winter, then. Wooden floors. Outside, a sea of grass stretching into the forest. If I stick my head out my window, I’d see where I’ve been brewing vodka.
I sag a bit, suddenly tired. And hungry. My hands are cold. I’m too far from home.
Call. “OC?”
HOW’RE THINGS BACK THERE?
“Good. I’ve got what we need.”
HURRY. I’VE GOT A SPIDER AT THE HALFWAY POINT.
The show must go on, eh. And with a bit of pushing, the show will go on. I limp over to the suit I washed out and laid to dry. It looks crumpled.
This planet’s been fairly easy to breathe—a fact I’m really thankful for: if it hadn’t been so thoroughly terraformed, we’d be walking around with oxygen and biocortox tanks, panicking over every rip and scrape. I wouldn’t have survived. The suit, however clean, is a mess. The elbows are threadbare, the back’s got a few tears in it, and ditto for the butt and the knees. I slip into it and layer my leather armor poncho on top.
There.
The scent of meat being charred. Anna, grumbling, tosses a slice on a plate for me and packs the rest into a polythene bag. Fat drips off the cooked meat. I wolf it down.
Damn, but the one thing this planet got right: DogAnt meat. This right here is better than the original Jupiter Wagyu. Cloudy weather. Golden grass. Godrays where the sun breaks through. A cold wind. And this food.
I know my suit’s going to stink for hours after this. I don’t give a damn. You take what you can get.
And back into the woods we
go.
I pass the charred Mercer by the repeater tree. On a whim, I put a bullet through its head.
Can’t be too sure.
A day later. Here we are. Or rather, here I am on overwatch, digging up that spot probe for OC while peering down the rifle sights every so often. I get glimpses of Simon and the new replicant whizzing about, stuffing the two rovers with anything and everything they can carry.
The replicants. The miniterraformer. One of the drones. One of the printers. This first run will take about two-thirds of the valuable stuff back to base. The second run can get the rest. All of this we’ll cram into the vast empty space inside OC’s shell—oh, yes, there’s a reason they put a giant hollow lander in charge of us, and it ain’t for our mental well-being. Underneath that smugly self-absorbed processing module is enough liquid fuel to kick us and all the fancy goods into orbit, duty-free.
So why the spiders and skyhooks? A redundancy? An emergency measure? A way of double-dipping into the salvage site? Like, here’s your stuff by spider, all legal and aboveboard, very visible, and nobody minds if our lander sneaks off a few million dollars?
NOT EVERYTHING CAN BE FERRIED OFF-SITE ON A SPIDER, says OC, making me jump.
Fucking spy. “Like what?”
PEOPLE. ANIMALS. UNSHIELDED MACHINERY.
“Ferry those a lot, do you?”
A digital shrug. IT’S BETTER TO BE GENERALLY ABLE THAN SPECIFICALLY USELESS. ALSO, THE HOLD COSTS EXTRA.
Of course it all comes down to profit in the end.
YOU’RE WORRIED.
“Stop reading my vitals all the time.”
THEN STOP BEING WORRIED. WHAT’S WRONG?
I scan the horizon again. “No Mercers.”
NONE, FORTUNATELY. YOU FIND THAT ODD?
“You don’t?”
IT IS HIGHLY PROBABLE THAT THEIR NUMBERS ARE SPENT NOW. I HAVE EXAMINED THEIR SHIP, ITS MAXIMUM OCCUPANCY—
The Salvage Crew Page 16