The Salvage Crew

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  A squat tower of black metal: me. The grass has crept over the blast of my landing.

  I know I’m not supposed to feel tired. I am a machine. I have inside me a low-wattage nuclear battery that’ll run me for several hundred years, at least. But I am tired.

  I know this feeling. Back on the farm. When I was a boy. Tilling the fields, bringing in the harvest, line after line and acre after acre. At the end it was all we could do to look at each other and nod grimly. All that remained was the sunk cost, the knowledge that you had put so much hard work and effort into getting this far, and all of that would just vanish if you turned back now.

  So yes. I am tired. I turn my cameras to the sky, one on the moons, the other hoping to see Ship somewhere. Some small speck of light moving against the others.

  Something odd happens during the night: Simon wakes.

  I swing a drone around and watch him leave the hab. He’s in his undersuit and doesn’t seem to notice the cold at all. His body doesn’t do that little shudder-shiver they all go through the moment they leave the warmth of the hab.

  Curious. I swing the drone down closer.

  Simon looks at my drone, but his eyes are blank, unfocused.

  “It wakes,” he whispers.

  SIMON?

  Simon groans. “It wakes,” he says again. Still at a whisper. “That’s why it’s getting cold. It needs the cold. The processors work better. It’s been dreaming all this time, even when they attacked it. It dreams of death and void and the darkness between the stars.”

  He must be delirious. CLARIFY?

  Nothing. He sways in the moonlight. And then something changes. It’s in the way his muscles tense, the way the slight stoop of his shoulders vanishes, the way he suddenly seems taller, even though to every sensor I have he is the exact same Simon.

  Something flickers behind the eyes. Simon focuses on my drone now hovering just a foot away.

  YOU SHOULD GO BACK TO SLEEP, SIMON, I say gently.

  I can’t explain what happens next. Simon stretches out a hand, as if to ask for silence.

  The drone vanishes.

  I vanish.

  The sensors fall silent. The feeds cut out. I can sense the box I’m in—the batteries, the internal systems checks, the hardware—but even that flickers. Entire control nodes report null. And as they flicker, I flicker too.

  It’s as if someone is switching me off. Not one process at a time the usual way. The whole of me.

  I panic. There is one command available to me, and I scream it at myself: REBOOT.

  And I wake up to the gunshot.

  By the time I unhook myself and send the second drone screaming outside, Anna and Milo are stumbling back, choking, from a kneeling corpse.

  Half of it has been blown away. The light-gas gun, tied around the wrist, has yanked Simon’s body forward as it splattered him and recoiled. Now half his body lies propped up like a grotesque puppet, leaking black micromachines in the moonlight. They melt into the snow like ichor.

  Milo touches Simon, like a man not believing the evidence of his own eyes. His hand comes away painted black. He begins to cry.

  Anna looks up as my drone wobbles into view. Her face is completely blank. Her fingers twitch.

  “Dead,” she says, making it official.

  And I, with my metal body, can only stare through eyes not mine.

  Should I have told Anna and Milo about Simon’s last act? That hand outstretched, that brief, screaming minute of silence?

  I don’t think so. They wouldn’t understand it. I don’t understand it, either. But I think this is when I became truly afraid of whatever Simon had.

  Is it, as Milo thinks, a separate entity? I don’t know. My money is still on Mercer tech. But this isn’t something we have any chance of defeating on our grounds.

  So when I tell them to wall off the corpse and burn it, I hope they understand. When I tell Milo to restrain Anna, to pull her back from the corpse, to pour all the cleaning lye and scraps of aluminum on what’s left of Simon, when I sent in my half-charged platoon of spiders and their plasma torches—

  I hope they understand.

  I hope they forgive me.

  That night, we gathered around the burning bedroom-Hab.

  I don’t know if there are gods. Maybe there are, but if there’s anyone out there looking out for us, I don’t think they saw the fire we built for Simon’s flesh.

  It flickers and roars into the empty night sky of Urmagon Beta, turning the little bedroom into a tower of black smoke. It turns Milo and Anna into yellowing caricatures painted against the darkness. Occasionally a tongue of flame leaps out to lick the other buildings in the Hab, but the thermoplastics repel it.

  “We should have helped him,” says Milo, tears streaking into his frosted beard. “We—I should have done more.”

  FAREWELL, SIMON JOOSTEN, I say, speaking the words PCS mentions deep in their protocol list. YOUR CONTRACT IS FULFILLED, YOUR CRUSADE ENDED. MAY YOUR KARMA DO YOU WELL.

  “And we commend his soul to the void,” whispers Anna, who knows the old battlefield burial rituals from other traditions. “Ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust.”

  Simon’s soul rises into a sky now tinged with the first lightness of dawn. May it be reborn in a better place, in a gentler place, and may it forget all the pain and suffering that Simon Joosten went through in his brief and eventful life.

  The snow has melted in a wide circle, the grass underneath wilted and blackening from the heat.

  We wait a few minutes, out of some old instinct, perhaps, looking up at the sky as if for a response. Presently a green glare pulses. It’s coming from the direction of the valley. We stare at that source of death.

  Milo looks down at his hand still tinged with Simon’s black blood. It hasn’t come off.

  TIME TO GO BACK TO WORK, I say. WE NEED THAT COMMUNICATOR RUNNING.

  Nobody argues.

  36

  The communications tower is up.

  It sways alarmingly every time the wind gusts in from the south. Nevertheless, the cables are connected, the blades spin, the dynamo pumps enough watts into me that I can power up the old communications equipment and the spot probe we’ve stolen from the UN Damn Right I Ate the Apple.

  For once I’m thankful that UN tech, by mandate, is several generations behind whatever is current for their time; unlike MercerCorp, or even PCS, they’re happy trading off the bleeding edge for tried-and-tested, battle-hardened stuff like this array. Which is about as smart as a rock and lets me flood this entire chunk of atmosphere with a repeating broadcast.

  AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. SOS. If you receive this message, use onetime protocol 117 to decrypt the remainder.

  AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. SOS. If you receive this message, use onetime protocol 118 to decrypt the remainder.

  AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. SOS. If you receive this message, use onetime protocol 119 to decrypt the remainder.

  AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. SOS. Please respond. SOS.

  “Anything?”

  It’s Anna. Her suit’s streaked with dirt. She gestures, as if to say “can I?” and I shrug my solar panels in response.

  NOTHING YET.

  “It’s been what, seven days now?” She sighs, plunks down and leans on me.

  Four days, actually. Six since Simon died. Four since Milo plugged in the last components and made sure my battery wouldn’t blow.

  HOW GOES THE . . .

  “The cleaning?” She wriggles her gloves off. “He’s cauterized most of it; it’s just pus now.”

  I NEEDED TO BE SURE WE DON’T HAVE MICROMACHINE CONTAMINANT GETTING ON TO YOU.

  “I know,” says Anna. “Not judging you, just complaining. How’re the drones, by the way?”

  I waggle a leg on the one spider drone I keep near me now. Most of the others have shut down. Little faults build up when your power keeps shutting down and you can’t charge properly anymore.
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  There’s one trundling around where we keep Milo. Two others have been stripped and set up to explode around the Hab. The rest are just dead.

  That’s Milo’s doing.

  Here’s what happened. Three days ago, Milo finished work on the spot probe. He hooked up the spot probe, connected to the bastardized comms array, connected to me. Anna taped everything up nice and tight, and I had an open interface to everything. That was our big day.

  We had a toast. Nothing fancy, just water from the stream. They filled up two cups, exchanged them, drank. Anna hugged Milo; he hugged her back. Milo put on his furs again and went out into the cold.

  The Mercer was waiting for him at the tower. The woman with the chrome skull. I can picture it now—him climbing, laboriously, every breath misting, pulling the weight of his starved body and those stinking furs with him. Her, waiting, invisible in the snow.

  She shot him. I heard the gunshot, so unlike anything we’d ever unleashed on this planet. A dull thok-thump that tore Milo’s left arm off his body and flung him clear off the cliff. He landed on his side.

  The rest my spiders caught.

  She leaped down from the cliff. Her active camouflage was gone now; an ugly-looking one-handed gun, heavy and serrated, was in her hands. I moved the spiders on her the second she landed.

  She was fast—faster than I expected; her nerves must have been running like greased lightning. Two spiders went down in quick succession.

  I don’t know how Milo got up in the middle of all that. The light-gas rifle practically teleported into his remaining hand. Blood sprayed into the snow. The furs singed and burned around the stump of his left arm. Bits of bone poked out at the end. His face looked like bloody meat. Screaming in pain, he stuck the butt of the gun into his own stomach and pulled the trigger.

  The last spider leaped at the Mercer woman, and her hand came up as if to punch it away. Milo’s bullet hit the spider. Hit the battery compartment. The spider exploded in her face, blowing the chrome skull and the top of her shoulders clear off. Milo collapsed.

  I didn’t need a medical scan to know what would happen. When Anna came and just stared and him and shook her head, very softly, he began to laugh, lying there on the ground with his blood turning the snow scarlet. Then he sank into shock.

  Anna did her best, bless her heart. I don’t think I could have asked for any more from her. But Milo was too far gone. He opened his eyes at the very end.

  “Tower’s working,” he said, through clenched teeth. “Connect. Connect it.”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. She’s gone,” said Anna, trying to wrap the suit around his bleeding arm. “Milo, come on, hold still—”

  “Tower’s working,” he repeated. “OC, OC?”

  MILO, STAY AWAKE—

  “OC, take us home now,” he said, and then he sank back, coughed, and died.

  Anna knelt on the ground and wept. I would have, if I could have, because Milo died a hero.

  Then she looked up, past the corpses of the Mercer and the spiders, at the tower, and she began to climb, to connect it, to finish the job.

  Anna and I sit awhile in silence. There’s little we can say to each other now. I think we both know how we feel.

  “Not like this,” she says at last. “When they gave us the form, you know, risk of death and all that, I didn’t think we’d go like this.”

  NOT LIKE THIS. NEVER LIKE THIS.

  Sitting here like a sacrificial bison, yelling to the empty sky through a minor, hijacked piece of UN telecom hardware, guns pointed out, waiting.

  AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. SOS. If you receive this message, use onetime protocol 218 to decrypt the remainder.

  AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. AMBER ROSE 348 to Ship. SOS. If you receive this message, use onetime protocol 219 to decrypt the remainder.

  A signal!

  A brief burst of bits, too scattered to make any sense of. Something from the edge of the horizon. Text.

  CONFIRMED. STAND BY FOR EVAC.

  We have communications! I patch the feed to my Anna. She whoops and screams at the sky, punching up with both fists.

  We’re going home.

  I can’t believe this. We’re going home. After all of this. The goddamn spot probe worked. Milo, you genius. May you be reborn as a minor god. May you be the Deity of Electrical Engineering. I’m going to erect a temple in your name.

  And then the same stream again, this time much stronger. Communications protocol. Ours. Audio, which I run through the usual filter for speech—

  “. . . UP . . .”

  There’s some kind of distortion on the channel, tuning—

  “. . . UP . . . LOUD . . .”

  The next pulse blares through me:

  “SHUT UP, YOU’RE TOO LOUD!”

  For some reason, it’s Shen’s voice. That replicant how-may-I-serve-you-sir voice.

  VERY FUNNY, SHIP. HOW LONG UNTIL EVAC?

  “I’M NOT YOUR SHIP, IDIOT.”

  That stops us dead in our tracks.

  “I’M BOUNCING THIS SIGNAL OFF THE ATMOSPHERE,” says Shen. “STOP SCREAMING. STAY THERE. WE NEED TO TALK.”

  37

  Anna spots something four hours later. The sun hangs directly over us in the sky. She’s taken up position on the hill, shivering beneath her furs. The last two drones I have left are on hex pattern; she’s part of the scan now, moving to where the search dictates.

  Me? Every camera I have is trained on the sky. Every chunk of horizon I can see is being scanned, rescanned, scanned again. CONFIRMED. STAND BY FOR EVAC.

  Ship is coming for us.

  And, for some bizarre reason, so is Shen. But something’s wrong. I’M NOT YOUR SHIP, IDIOT.

  Anna is to shoot at first sight.

  “Another Megabeast herd headed our way,” she says. “West 280, no, 275, holding steady.”

  SAME HERD WE SAW EARLIER?

  “Can’t tell the difference. OC, can we get a drone over there?”

  We can, but whatever I send out to that distance isn’t going to return. The repeater on the edge has gone down again. I don’t think it’s equipment failure.

  In the distant sky, a plume, a single line of white too straight to be natural. That’s Ship. It’s got to be. She’s not responding to my hails, but right now that’s our own personal Bodhisattva riding in on a cloud of re-entry heat.

  “Megabeast herd heading our way,” says Anna.

  ARM THE TREBUCHET.

  My siege equipment idea hasn’t amounted to much, but behind these cardboard walls of ours we have one simple swing-arm monster. It doesn’t have the range of a rifle. But it can fire chunks of wood from the other machines, set afire.

  Anna runs around, winds the thing up, uses the plasma cutter on low, and suddenly we have a smoking, flaming beast on our hands.

  FIRE.

  The trebuchet arm swings forward lazily. The cord it drags whips into the sky, throwing the smoking projectile into the path of the approaching herd. A black line reaches up into the sky, from us, a greeting. The wooden shot disintegrates the moment it hits the ground, spilling embers everywhere.

  If this is a normal herd, that’ll be enough to scare them off. And sure enough, my drones see the herd milling about, confused. But then something odd happens: they line up, one behind the other, and walk straight on to us.

  That’s not a normal herd.

  TAKE GUMBALL, I tell Anna in private. TAKE IT OUT TO THE QUARRY. STAY THERE.

  “Sure you don’t want me to stay?”

  I debate reminding her of the last time she stood up to a MegabeastMegabeast charge, then decide it would be too cruel. JUST RUN, I tell her. She takes off, that ugly Megabeast leather wraparound flapping like a shroud around her battered suit. I scuttle the spider after her.

  There. I’m alone now.

  And all I can do is wait.

  They don’t take long to show up. Six Megabeasts, significantly thinner than the ones we usually see. Somehow haggard looking,
like the one Simon battled when we discovered the wreck. I watch them plod forward, defenseless. All I can hope for is that Ship will come down fast, hard, and firing. Every so often, one of them stops and shudders, and its partners reach out with giant claws as if to pull it onward. Three of them have shapes mounted on them.

  Pretty soon they’re at the little hill with the glow-tree. And now I can see, quite clearly . . .

  Shen.

  I’m utterly confused. He’s hanging on to the Megabeast in front with one arm, like some kind of overgrown louse. The other arm is missing, and his bottom half looks like it’s been melted away.

  The others are Mercers. One is hunched, one splayed out at an unnatural angle. The hunched one is a giant, his arms glimmering metal, thick cables snaking into his head and disappearing into what I’m guessing is adaptive armor.

  The bastards took Shen. Of course they did.

  The Megabeast convoy comes to our wall. And then they turn slowly, shuddering and stamping, and walk over to my side of the Hab.

  SHIP, I send out, THIS IS AMBER ROSE. HELP.

  I’ve never been this close to a Megabeast before. Or a Mercer. The beast’s hide is matted, filthy with snow mixed in with dirt. Parasites crawl all over it. The thing on top of it isn’t much better. The splayed-out one, thin, impossibly fragile looking. A face like bone china sneers at me.

  Shen’s Megabeast plods ahead, right to my lander legs. Shen lets go and lands face-first in the long grass. I stare at the Megabeast. The Megabeast sniffs at me and looks down at Shen.

  “Well, this is awkward,” says Shen’s slightly disembodied voice.

  The second Megabeast leans down, chomps, and sort of drags him upright, facing me, dangling from one arm in the Megabeast’s mouth.