In the bowels of the Agnes, on sublevel four
547 gritted his teeth but the rage bubbled up, forcing the scream out.
“I know it’s you, Sett! Jack was already dead when I found him, but I am going to enjoy watching you die!”
181 and 096 had come down here, too. There had been no time to tell them why this kill was so important to him, so he’d pushed his way to the center of the search without explanation. 547 had followed a couple of bloody streaks leading away from the dead Fiend, and the other Whites had followed his text directions to spread out and away in opposite directions in what he hoped would cast a wide enough net. There were cameras everywhere on the Agnes, but the area was so crowded with biomachinery that it was unlikely he’d be able to maneuver fast enough alone whenever they spotted something. So far, the cameras had caught flashes of the intruders in three different locations on this floor but the Whites hadn’t yet caught up with even one of them.
547 held his gun ready, listening for any noises that might reveal where his prey had gone. This would be the first combat test of what the Whites called the blurp gun, which shot a hard ball of enzymes that disintegrated on impact and dissolved into any living tissue that was not the Agnes. 547 was thrilled he would soon see it work for the very first time, chemically disassembling the one individual he hated most in the world.
547 searched carefully and methodically, around, under, and above each piece of machinery, looking not just for his quarry but also for any signs of disturbance.
A three-shot burst sounded ahead, over where 096 was. Whites only used blurp guns so it had to be a Williams weapon, and Jack was dead.
IAi547: You okay, 096?
IAj096: I’m okay. Shots missed me.
IAi547: At close range?
IAj096: Mercenaries ain’t what they used to be.
IAi547: Target now?
IAj096: Was ahead of me. Not sure now.
IAi547: Cameras still not showing.
IAi547: Watch above and below.
Ahead he could hear an unusual, tremorous sound. There were long periods of a soft, low vibration, broken by quick pauses. It seemed more alive than strictly mechanical, and different from the other machines down here. In this age of specialized bioengineering, though, such distinctions were nebulous at best. 547 crept slowly, scanning, listening. Slowly he zeroed in on its source.
He spun around a piece of equipment, weapon ready. A woman in a Corporate Green uniform sprung at him, firing an Unnamed weapon straight at his head. He ducked sideways and down, as much as his enhanced physique would allow in the cramped space, pulling the trigger of the blurp gun. The woman’s forearm dissolved and the weapon fell to the floor, along with part of her hand. She ran at 547, jabbing up under his White glasses with her remaining hand in an attempt to stab his eyes with a piece of broken glass.
He shoved her backward, aiming.
She stood with her lips curled back and her eyes narrowed in a sneer of pure abhorrence. His glasses displayed her identity and employment record: Alicia Krom, an Accepted who worked in biohydraulics. She had been a model employee, but the woman’s breathing, with long, intense exhalations and quick gasps to inhale, confirmed what 547 had suspected, based on intel reports. Fiends had claimed this woman and replaced her corporate soul with that of a deranged killer.
She lunged again and he fired the enzyme gun, hitting her in the chest. Within seconds the shot had eroded a head-sized hole straight through her. She dropped to the floor.
Shots sounded behind him and to his right, then came another three-shot burst from an Unnamed gun. 547 turned and navigated toward them. He worked his way around the various pieces of equipment and biomechanical components until he found 181. Most of her face had been blown off when she’d been shot in the back of the head. Her enzyme gun was missing, and so were her White glasses.
IAi547: 181 dead. Glasses missing. Track them.
IAj096: Fuckers.
IAj096: Activity on staircase. See it?
IAi547: Yes. It’s the dark one. Is he writing?
IAj096: Looks like it.
Why would Sett take the glasses? He was himself Unnamed. He had to know they were traceable, especially when they were all sealed inside the Agnes this way. The trace showed they were moving, though he couldn’t get a camera feed from them, concealed as they apparently were inside a fist or pocket. The trajectory was a wide arc, surprisingly fast. He tracked 096’s path and saw that they were both angled to intercept near the back staircase, if they picked up the pace.
IAi547: Two intruders down, two still running.
IAi547: Armed and killing. UTk181 down.
IAi547: Stole UTk181 White glasses.
IAi547: All Whites track on UTk181 to intercept.
He and 096 reached the stairway at the same time. 096 moved to shove open the door and 547 covered him, aiming up at an angle. Nobody was visible on the stairs and the various camera shots there showed nothing. Sett had entered on sublevel four. The glasses lay between the railings at the bottom of the stairwell down on sublevel seven. He ran down the stairs to get them and discovered a message written on the floor in chalk:
Li’l Ed
Check your footage. I have the Fiend’s Federal rail gun. If I have to defend myself with it, the hole will go all the way through. Back off.
7
Sublevel two
“Dok?” Sett said.
Dok emerged from a dark corner, hunched over with his hands on his knees and breathing hard. It seemed they hadn’t built in as much time for Dok to finish the message and meet Sett here as they’d thought.
Together they moved away from the stairwell and deeper into the dark recesses, among moving parts and rhythmically contracting tubes.
“Okay, Lawrence,” Dok said finally. “Looks like your plan worked so far. At least you showed them we can hurt them, even if doing so would be suicide.”
“Now we’ll see whether they decide to push us.”
Inside 547’s mind
It was his first assigned three-hour rest period since the world had been effectively destroyed two weeks ago, but in spite of his exhaustion 547 couldn’t sleep. He kept live feeds from various sublevels open in his EI, switching his focus randomly from one to another, but Sett was too good at hiding. Designed for protection from bioterrorism, the Agnes could seal off different areas and even pump out all the air from them, but 547 couldn’t use that feature in the Sett situation. Even if he spotted his former friend and caught him sleeping, adrenaline could kick in if he started to suffocate. One pull of that trigger would doom the Agnes and everyone aboard. Still, he kept searching the sublevels, if not to solve the problem, perhaps to punish himself for having let it get this far out of control.
He heard a soft chime, indicating that a message was forthcoming. Unlike civilian EI settings, Unnamed and Whites had no soft, sweet interface to let them select what came into their heads, or when.
“All Whites!” It was the voice of his superior, NJt994. “Communications are back. Unfortunately, we appear to be the only team members from the Organization Whose Confidence is Kept to have survived. As Whites know, the Organization’s other structures were held back in development, in hopes of exploiting some recently acquired Amelix technology. Apparently none of them were at a sealable stage by the time of the Event.”
547 sat up in bed. Had he heard that correctly? The Agnes, with a few thousand Accepted, was the last vestige of the entire Organization?
“However, there are other sealed, mobile structures remaining in the world. We are not alone! We have made contact with two other structures, the Linepithema, of Copec-Móvil Corporation, and the Kit, which at this time is refusing to identify its corporate owner.”
547 looked around his bunk, hoping nobody had heard him sigh. The other Whites nearby all seemed to be in a similar state. Others had survived! They no longer had to wonder whether the Agnes held the last trace of humanity on the planet. That was something, wasn’t it, ev
en when the Organization had diminished almost to the point of insignificance?
“The Linepithema, outside Buenos Aires, nicknamed La Línea, claims to have more than two thousand aboard,” NJt994 said. “The Kit, near Moscow, says it has more than three thousand. Both are claiming that their parent organizations had two other structures safely seal prior to the Event, but both are refusing to give any information about those ships and we suspect they are lying to gain a potential competitive advantage. For our part, we are doing the same. As far as they know, the Organization Whose Confidence is Kept has four other ships, in the locations the Organization was building them, which are Seattle and Miami in this hemisphere, as well as one in Wellington, New Zealand and another at Sa’dah in Yemen.
“We’ve been in communication with a number of other structures, as well, each from a different corporation, that managed to survive the Event. They bring the estimated total number of ambulatory humans left in the world to somewhere between fifty and two hundred fifty thousand, and the total number of networked Brain Trust minds to a few hundred thousand more. We don’t know how accurate the totals are because so much relies on self-reporting, but at least there are other human-controlled humans out there. It does at this time seem the Organization Whose Confidence is Kept is the smallest surviving institution.”
547 sat staring at nothing, stunned. He had dedicated his life to this, the Lord’s chosen corporation, and now it was the smallest institution in the world?
“Neither the Linepithema nor the Kit have seen any trace of Amelix Integrations,” NJt994 went on. “At this time, all Amelix employees and other assets are presumed lost.”
White control room
547 sat at the panels, staring listlessly at the grainy red IR feed from a camera he’d extended from the Agnes on a flexible telescoping arm. It was daytime out there now, early afternoon, but the view from the camera, room after empty room in shades of red against black, was always the same.
Certain employees of the Organization were privileged to know what the Event had been: a release of a lethal fungal strain that had been engineered to live inside human tissue. Had it been something else, like a virus or even bacteria, humanity might have had a chance of returning to life outside. Fungal spores, however, could blow around out there for thousands of years.
This information had been gleaned by Organization scientists and was therefore proprietary to the Organization, so when 547 spoke with representatives from other companies he had to pretend to be as baffled by the Event as they were. In truth, it was probably just a dance they had to do. Every surviving company had worked in biotech and was almost certainly aware of what had made the planet uninhabitable.
Amelix made it uninhabitable, so they could take over the planet with their biomachines.
It was not the first time this thought had occurred to him. Amelix had begun developing the mobile structures long before the Organization had even considered such things, dumping every possible resource into their development. Intel suggested that the Amelix structures were the most advanced biotech ever devised, years ahead of what the Organization could accomplish, yet none of that tech had ever been marketed, so secret had been its development. Amelix had been the world’s leader in fungal patents for decades, and now a fungus had nearly wiped out humanity. This had been an attack. Amelix hadn’t wanted to sell its technology, because it had been planning to add the entire world to its bottom line.
So why hasn’t it used those things to claim its prize? If Amelix planned it so well, why didn’t it survive?
There was no way to know.
The Agnes could hold two thousand, six hundred forty Organization employees but only seven hundred thirty-one had boarded in time, plus thirty-nine Whites, four children, and, regrettably, the four stowaway/hijackers. It was apparently the least populated of any surviving corporate structure, but that wasn’t surprising since it had been closest to the Event’s ground zero. The fact it had survived at all was astounding.
Now two Whites and an Organization employee were dead.
Thanks to Sett.
547 checked the small window he kept open in his EI, monitoring the cameras down on sublevel two, the last place Sett and his dark friend had been seen.
There was nothing new. He forced his attention back to his work.
547 watched the monitors, listening through headphones as the mechanized camera probed various parts of the old Organization building here in the CBD. So far, no living person had been found. In fact, there was little evidence that anyone had been inside the building when the fungus had spread. While bodies had foamed away, things like uniforms, tools, weapons, and Unnamed glasses had not, so it was easy to tell where the humans had been in their final moments. Instead of the expected workday pattern of people at desks and in the halls, it seemed almost everyone from the Organization had been gathered outside when they’d died. Shredded Corporate Green uniforms fluttered in the wind outside, over mounds of twisted, rotting flesh. Apparently the fungus only attacked living human tissue, so these workers had already been dead at the time it was released.
The first place they’d searched with the roving camera had been the office of IAg281, the last person to have made contact with them from outside the Agnes. There were no life forms in there, or anywhere else, except for an occasional rat, glowing bright red on the otherwise dim IR camera feed.
Suddenly NJt994 was in his head, monitoring his work.
547 always felt it when his supervisor perused what was happening in his head. This time, he spoke. “Close the sublevel feed, 547. Now.”
He let the sublevel camera feed go and felt NJt994 disconnect again. In less than a minute NJt994 was standing before him at the desk, staring over the monitors with a tight jaw.
“We can’t have you distracted like this, 547,” NJt994 chastised. “You told me about your past with the Unnamed down there, but there’s nothing we can do right now. He’s not causing us any trouble crawling around in the dark, and we’ve got more immediate problems to deal with.”
547 nodded. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
It had been more than two weeks since Sett and the dark man had disappeared among the machinery down there. The computer had analyzed the footage and identified Sett’s gun as a first-generation Federal Trident rail gun. One shot from it could indeed punch right through the Agnes ‘exterior and end it all for everyone onboard, but only if Sett aimed it far enough away. 547 had tried to convince NJt994 that they could pen Sett into a confined area so that the rail gun would revert to being a regular gun for close range, which would be less dangerous to the Agnes, but NJt994 had said no. With the stakes so high, it was better, he said, to just let them starve to death down there than to go hunting them.
“We all need to work together, and to be as coordinated as possible,” NJt994 said. “We need to function as ideal components of the whole, now more than ever. Separate agendas would pull us in separate directions, and pulling the Agnes apart would be the death of us all.”
It had been three days since the last news show’s power had given out and it had gone off the air, and that had happened five days after the last human face or voice had been transmitted over it. Outside the Agnes there were no electric lights, and no sounds of anything beyond wind and the occasional skittering of rodents. Beyond the CBD ruins, the desolate, empty desert stretched in every direction.
“Movement, sir!” 636 shouted. She was monitoring the sensory equipment and stationary camera mounted at the front of the Agnes.
“Rats again?” NJt994 asked, his voice flat.
“No, sir. Big. Really big. I think it might be another mobile structure.”
From his location, 547 could see over her shoulder to the monitor she watched. A black spot moved on the horizon.
“Take it to 10x and switch to UV,” NJt994 said. That might show a logo.”
“Yes, sir.”
The screen turned purple, showing the curving surface of a wall. Sure enough, a logo
stood out in a different shade: a stylized version of DNA.
“Amelix!” 547 said. “They weren’t wiped out, after all.”
“It looks just like intel said,” 636 said. “Look! It even has the beetle jaws!”
All seven Whites in the room crowded around the monitor, blocking 547’s view. Without asking permission, he withdrew his roving camera from the building and pointed it toward the moving structure, changing from IR to visual light and matching the 10x magnification. He gasped.
Amelix had dominated the biotechnology field with more innovative and aggressive technologies even than the Organization had, and the new building was proof of that. Rather than a beetle-shaped building with bioengineered components, this appeared much more like a giant, living beetle, roughly the same size as the Agnes. The entire body was glossy black that glinted metallic green as it turned, showing the massive set of jagged jaws at the front. It slowly pivoted its body so that only the grisly jaws faced the Agnes.
“Did it just…notice us?” someone said.
The Amelix structure began walking toward them. Its motion was not stiff and mechanical, like that of the Agnes. It was creeping, smoothly and slowly—almost cautiously—as if it were alive.
“Evasive action!” NJt994 shouted. “Back away and turn!”
The Agnes began a slow pivot and then lurched hard backward as one of its legs skidded on a patch of uneven ground. 547 maneuvered the camera beneath the Agnes to monitor the Amelix craft and report whatever he could.
“It looks like the Amelix structure’s legs keep it perfectly suspended so the body remains level as it walks, even over steep slopes,” 547 said. “It’s maintaining a speed which sensors indicate is more than double ours.”
547 himself was tilting a bit. The Agnes had compensators and levelers but not nearly as advanced. The Agnes pitched and tipped as it propelled itself over the terrain. The Amelix craft crept closer, appearing to float over a small hill as its legs moved around and found footing without any impact on the structure itself. “It’s closing the distance quickly,” 547 said. “The Amelix structure will be upon us in about two minutes, at present pace.”
The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy Page 36