Scavenger: A.I.: (Sand Divers, Book Two)

by Timothy C. Ward

  Cool wished for that seed of hope to find water, sun, and protection from all that he knew was on its way and working hard to tear down every inch of his life. As Doctor Hannu dripped a clear liquid into the first case, Cool thought about all that he’d seen that the doctor had no idea about. “I’ve seen what it turns into.”

  Doctor Hannu looked over his shoulder. “Turns into?”

  “Yeah. It’s violent, and also much faster.”

  “Faster? What do you mean?”

  “How it spreads. In Fort Pope, it turned the table into a dog in seconds, then that dog chased us into a corner, where it would have eaten us if Rush hadn’t shot it with a gun I’d never seen before.”

  Curiosity lit in the dark of the doctor’s eyes. “Was this a gun you found in Fort Pope?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did it look like?” Doctor Hannu sat in the chair at his desk, opened a different drawer underneath, and retrieved a black object.

  “Just like that,” Cool said.

  Doctor Hannu smiled. “The friend I mentioned before, a special young lady named Jules, gave me this, too. Along with a suit like the one your leader was wearing, though I doubt it’ll fit me.” His smile faded as his gaze waited for Cool to answer a question he couldn’t read. “You didn’t see her.”

  “Jules?” Cool shrugged, helpless. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think there was anyone in there prior to our arrival. Warren brought some people inside.” The doctor’s face tightened in anger at the mention of Warren. “But they’re dead,” Cool added quickly. “Rush killed them.”

  Doctor Hannu’s tension-widened eyes into mild shock. “He killed Warren?”

  “Yeah. Used his suit to take down a ceiling on top of Warren and a few of his men.”

  “Wow. He used a suit…like a dive suit?”

  “Yeah. He and Nedzad and now Dixon have suits they found in Fort Pope. They’re like the original or something. Very powerful.”

  “Interesting.” Doctor Hannu set the gun on the desk, sat back in his squeaky chair, and exhaled. “I’d like to meet him. And talk to Dixon.” He glanced at the dishes. “But I need to get back to work. And you look two seconds from passing out. Go ahead. I’ll wake you when I’m ready to take you back to your friends.”

  Cool rested his eyes, enjoying the sweet relief to their dryness.

  “One more question.”

  “Yeah,” Cool said, leaving his eyes closed.

  “Can you get us back into Fort Pope?”

  Cool slumped and laid his arm over his eyes to shade him from the ceiling light. “I don’t know. Rush melded the door shut behind us. Nedzad said only a sunbolt can unlock their doors, and we don’t have one.”

  “Sure. Go…”

  Cool didn’t hear anything else as sleep welcomed him in.

  39 - W (7:30 am, Saturday)

  W liked this new game. He didn’t like as much the pain he felt as Star’s sun flare fried trillions of his eggs, but she hadn’t killed them all, and he did like the idea of a newly focused goal: rebuild and destroy. Gratitude and revenge were sensations linked to the memories he shared with Star and Rush, but now that he was disconnected from them and displaying his own feelings, he knew he needed more. Thank you, Star. Without that near-death experience, I wouldn’t have understood this urgency to make sure I’m never so vulnerable again. To make sure none of my children can escape alive.

  W still possessed portions of Avery’s brain and most of the blueborns, the name he gave the reborn Springstonites as plasma helped give them new birth. The water under the cafeteria had deflected Star’s sun flare.

  And then there was precious Jules. He selected her experience from the list of his processes. Warmth from the sun held her skin in its embrace. The fire she set to some of the supplies the Springstonites had brought added a sour smell to the air. W inhaled deeply, savoring one more sensation his children provided for him. Through them he was more than computer code.

  The plume rose high into the early morning sky outside Fort Pope.

  Already two sails headed over the lip of a dune four hundred meters away. Headed for her—his—invitation. Trap, more like it.

  Jules twisted her bare arm to see the progress of the skin patch on her wrist, skin she’d cut off from the blueborn boy sitting next to her and placed in the hole she’d cut into her wrist. W’s M-MANs busied themselves replicating the melanin in the camel-toned pigment from the boy into the mottled green tone covering her body. A knifed scar had halted their progress toward her elbow. So far, they’d converted only five inches in diameter around the skin patch.

  They’re low on plasma.

  W added a new command to her tree: obtain new dose of plasma—then pinged the blueborns closest to Jules, one with an extra supply of pellets, one performing a function far enough down the list to be interrupted. A reordering of the list began calculating.

  If there was one glaring weakness to his M-MANs’ design, it was their ability to transfer and store power. Unlike the Poseidon’s engineering for simmer release from pellets, raw M-MANs burned plasma like a flash fire. The first pass through in Jules’ body had encountered so much damage he’d had to issue sixty-four passes before she was good enough to stand. Changing her skin to match a normal, living human, was going to take a larger dose.

  Now that her fire was going strong on the discarded clothes in a pit surrounding the pole with the burning flag of the Old World, and at least two ships were headed her way, she’d accomplished W’s task of drawing in new blood.

  A blueborn pinged back as viable: a nineteen-year-old once named Anna.

  Jules rose and turned toward the sand built stairwell leading down into Fort Pope. The blueborn boy watched her with eyes no longer white, but shaded in a paste of red blood. His skin had cracked rivulets spread like dry rivers searching for an oasis that wasn’t there.

  His recognition of her movement was unnecessary—W saw through both sets of eyes—but affected the appearance of community. “See…you,” the boy once called Clint said.

  W’s command of blueborn vocal folds was achieved, but still a movement under development. Clint’s mind recognized the sound of his voice. Charged neurons impacted, releasing a serotonin neurotransmitter into the pleasure center of his brain. It was good to be alive again. Gratitude and service to his new father.

  Jules and her memories of Warren were more difficult to overcome in convincing her to gratitude. His assimilation of Warren’s mind in his birth was too strong to hide in the communication between their brains. She didn’t know he was Warren, but she exhibited defensive mechanisms that others didn’t. W had to move her by force, which used more of his power storage and commands specific to her mind.

  The risk in her rebirth was overcome by the many skills she added to his interface. First of which was her ability to identify and deconstruct Nedzad’s computer virus, allowing him to block Nedzad’s communication with Rush or Star. She also had knowledge of the tunnels outside Fort Pope, which was helping Avery find his way to Denver Health.

  She descended into the shade of the sandstone stairwell, en route to refueling and then to wake up Star with W’s offer.

  40 - Star (Saturday)

  Star woke to a throbbing headache, a dry throat, and the desperate need to vomit. Computer fans hummed softly in the dark, where her only light came from the tiny lights blinking on their fronts. Did Singer turn those on?

  She thought her flare—What is that smell?

  The room reeked like an opened jar of wet death.

  She stretched her arm up under her sheet and slowly twisted over to her left, knees tucked against her aching stomach.

  Standing near her bed was a towering shadow within shadow. Her heart jolted. She screamed.

  The shadow didn’t move. Its patience and insolence subtly threatened to stink Star into oblivion or obedience.

  Her vision adjusted to the dark, tracing the lines of a familiar woman with a strange coloration to her skin.

 
The woman blinked. Her eyes reopened to an unnatural glint of red surrounding her pupils. The glow weakened Star’s hold on her stomach’s contents. The person at her bedside had nanos inside.

  “Your attempt to wipe W from his home was valiant but unsuccessful, I’m afraid.” As the woman spoke, a hoarse voice straining not to tear from its source, the smell worsened in waves that crashed in Star’s stomach.

  Too late. Star leaned over the bed and wretched a hot spray onto the woman’s legs. The woman stepped back as more water spewed from Star’s throat.

  Misery wrung Star dry with minute after minute of twisting agony.

  Why wasn’t Rush here to help her?

  Why was she surprised?

  After the hopeful end of dry heaving, Star let her face rest on the soft (and wet-ew) side of the bed. She inhaled a smell bad enough to make her repeat the flushing all over, if she had anything left to flush, then said, “It was hard, but I think I’ve managed a proper response to your presence, W.” She spit a little more onto the woman’s leg.

  “Your humor reminds me of Warren,” the woman said. “If your problem with working with me is that I threatened your dominance, consider how much worse it would be to be dead. Why don’t we talk about how you need my help? And how W might let you live.” The woman picked up a capped water bottle dripping with slop, unscrewed its top and tipped back its contents into her mouth. She gulped inch after inch of liquid until the bottle ran dry, then she tossed it at Star and gasped.

  Star considered snatching it off the bounce and throwing it back at her, but resisted what would have been a pathetic retort. If the bottle had a grenade in it, then…

  “Time’s up.” The woman pulled out a pistol from the rear of her waistband and pointed it at Star’s belly.

  Star was too weak to move quickly enough, even if her bedsheet hadn’t been twisted around her legs. So she merely looked up at her potential killer and embraced the glow in her eyes as though ready to leap into their pits and fall until they offered up a good, clean fight.

  “W is pleased to let you live and keep your baby, in return for completing a task you’d probably do anyway. Hopefully, I won’t need to get into the or option.”

  Star’s memory of the woman who’d carried Jet off from the dune matched, somewhat, to what stood and spoke before her. Her smile restricted with her face. “You’re Jules. Warren’s men shot you. Now you’re working for him? Is there anything left up there? Or were you always working for him.” Thinking of what she might have done to Jet if she were a traitor, Star ripped back her sheet and began sliding her legs off—

  “Don’t.”

  Star kept rotating toward Jules.

  Bang!

  The bed shook. Star clenched but only felt soft puffs hit her face.

  “Consider yourself lucky to be warned. Your baby won’t get another.” Monitors behind Star turned on, casting a gray glow over the mottled green skin of Jules as she held her pistol at Star’s stomach.

  “I mean it,” Jules said. “Before you cost your baby its life—one we’re all excited to see grow—at least listen to W’s offer.” Jules backed up, then wagged the pistol from Star to the open door behind her. “I’ll tell you on the way to the clinic.”

  Star was fine with leaving, either way. She searched for clearance free of vomit and tiptoed to the door.

  Once through, Jules pointed left. “That way.”

  “Where are we going, W?”

  “I’d prefer if you called me Jules. It’s me as much as ever, just a little different method on how.”

  “If you say so, Jules.” She stopped and looked at the glowing red eyes directly. “If there is something left of you in there, you might want to get out before he’s done with you.”

  “Would you throw away that which gives you life? Even you can’t be that stupid. Now get moving, before I have to carry you.”

  Star’s stomach churned in a wringing twist threatening to start another round of heaving. She moved forward. “Where are we going?”

  “Your discharge maneuver did more than fry some of his nanobots. It also damaged the Twin Suns.”

  “How?”

  “The shield. It’s cracked.”

  The shield? Star remembered the L-shaped, tinted box encasing the Twin Suns. “What does that mean, then? What can I do about that?”

  “Either W shuts it down or we fix it.”

  “His nanos form walls. Can’t he just spread some of you guys over the crack and meld it smooth as new?”

  “No.” Jules pushed open the stairwell door. “The heat is too much for our systems, as well as the electromagnetic rays are too disruptive to maintain, and thus a fix must come from something other than M-MANs.”

  “And the mutual benefit being that we both want the Twin Suns making plasma.”

  “Yes.”

  As she descended the stairs to LL3, she wondered how she could again remove W from their lives for good. A strange scream wailed from the other side of the wall. Star stopped. “What’s that?”

  “That’s what plasma creation sounds like without the shield to block the noise.”

  Again, it wailed, like a terrified girl with lungs strong enough to shout to the end of the world. Star slowly walked through the doorway on LL4 as Jules turned right.

  The plasma must flow. Without that, Fish wouldn’t grow, and nor did she want to envision life without its power.

  “What does W think I can do?” Star shouted over the trailing off of the newest scream. “I don’t know how to make a new shielding.”

  “You don’t have to make it. Our nanos are already working on forming a new one, but we can’t put it there. W needs you to do that.”

  “I’m pregnant.” Star stopped, remembering reading on a computer in Fort Pope how nanos with plasma leaked and poisoned soldiers during early experiments. “I won’t put my child at risk.”

  “We have your husband’s Poseidon. It has enhanced EM and radiation shielding.”

  Relief at their unknowing mistake eased her concern. Her nano-touched saliva on Singer’s temple connection had been a smarter idea that she had originally planned. As long as they were still there. She was too weak to feel them.

  She continued walking behind Jules.

  Would W have found and wiped them clean? Were they offering it to her because they’d rather not give it to Rush, or because they’d killed him? Star slowed and shifted to Jules. “Why don’t you have Rush do it? Singer is programmed for him.”

  “Rush is gone. Different mission. He’ll be back, but we have to get started right now.”

  How did W know what he was doing, and why did she word it as though the mission was W’s?

  Jules opened the door to the clinic and led Star to an open med kit.

  “Why can’t I just get some plasma? I can heal myself.”

  “We will get you plasma.”

  Star’s head flushed with warmth and swayed. She pressed into the cramp in her lower stomach and fought against the nausea. “Soon would be nice, if you don’t mind, friend.”

  “Here they are,” Jules said.

  Star opened her eyes to see two teenagers walk out of the hall on her right, a girl and a boy. They looked her in the eye with the personality of falcons scouting prey. The boy’s shirt had a deep crimson stain around the torn end of his shirt. The skin exposed under his shirt was as white and smooth as a baby’s. The girl had a similar streak of white skin up her neck, in a line that angled from her chin past her left eye and had left her dark hair severed in a line that entered at the temple. The girl set a briefcase down before Jules, who stopped and reached a hand toward the boy. He produced a four-inch-long black cylinder. Jules unscrewed the cap. A blue glow lit the nasty green skin on her neck and center face. She took out a pellet while the girl pushed a button to make the briefcase unfold and grow into the Poseidon with 85 on its helmet. Singer.

  Star’s focus returned to the pellet in Jules’ hand. Her palm had the normal skin tone of a living huma
n. The vibrant blue in the pellet, and its promise of a ceasing of her pain and anguish made Star salivate.

  Jules handed it over.

  Star snatched it and popped it in her mouth. The casing melted on her tongue in a pleasure that muted the world and comforted her inside the pulsing strength of its womb.

  The embrace ended too quickly and, under the impatient gaze of W’s three slaves, the wail of Twin Suns making plasma seemed to wake with new ferocity.

  Singer approached Star’s side, opening up at the chest, and then tilted into resting position.

  Star lowered her visor, powered her suit, and climbed into the Poseidon, wondering if her being alive was what made her solely capable of using the machine. Is it just a matter of time before they can?

  “We’ve disabled all but the skel’s basic functions,” Jules said. “W isn’t giving you any leverage beyond what is mutually beneficial to our partnership.”

  Star pressed the connect button and the suit stood tall, clamping shut over her chest and syncing the helmet over her head. When the sensor slid over her right temple, the one she’d touched her nanos to when she rode Rush, a warm sensation bled through into her scalp. Pieces connected, but she lacked the plasma to wield them. “I didn’t need W’s help last time I outsmarted him. I won’t need it this time.”

  “We hope there won’t be a next time,” Jules said, “but since I’ve already told you what it will mean for you and your baby if there is, let’s just keep moving with the plan, okay?” She motioned for the teenagers to lead the way to the doorway, and then flicked her gun for Star to follow.

  Star walked inside Singer with fluid grace, her visor showing no more commands than she already had without being connected to the skel. “I need more plasma,” she said. “I can’t feel my baby anymore.”

  “Okay, but we’ve done more than just disable your skel in case you try anything. You’ll regret it.” Jules reached out with another pellet.

  Singer’s helmet parted open at the mouth, sliding over her face and down into the collar. She tossed the pellet into her mouth and closed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. Warm love filled her from top to bottom.