by M. R. Forbes
"You ready for this, Firedog?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. Today is a fine day to kill an alien."
Mitchell turned to face the others. "You heard the Private. Riiigg-ahh!"
"Riiigg-ahh," they shouted in reply.
"Jacob, Kathy, here and here," Mitchell said, moving them into formation. "Tio, you're the package now. Stay in the center. Geren, Firedog, you have the rear."
"Yes, sir."
"Valkyrie, Sidewinder, sitrep."
"Clearing a path as ordered, Colonel," Long said. "I've got one more run and I'll be down to lasers only. It's going to limit my effectiveness."
"I've got you covered, Ares," Alvarez said. "You're free for two blocks."
"Roger." Mitchell waved his squad forward at a run. The two rebels did a good job of staying in position, the virtuals they played succeeding in their lessons.
As Alvarez had promised, the path was mostly clear. The street was littered with dead machines, along with three mechs that were laying on their backs with gaping holes through their armored torsos, their arms and legs black and shredded by the amoebics. Mitchell felt pangs of sadness as they passed them by. Watson had proven to be an expert in communications technologies, and especially in how to hack them. Did he really believe the fat engineer had made the package non-functional on purpose? It was one thing to be a spineless worm who collected vile streams. It was worse to intentionally sabotage the mission, especially when the stakes were this high.
"Ares, bogeys on your nine," Alvarez said, the S-17 streaking over them again. "They're too close to you to hit, coming out of an alley."
"Roger."
Mitchell had seen them in his overlay. He motioned towards the alley, and Jacob maneuvered away from the group to press himself against the facade of a building. The spiders appeared a moment later, charging towards the group and ignoring the rebel.
He opened fire, catching them in the rear, the bullets digging into their construction and pulling them apart. Kathy added to the barrage, pounding them in the crossfire until they were all down. Then Jacob ran back into his position with the group.
"Nice work," Mitchell said to them. He could see the proud anger behind their eyes.
They reached the end of the street and turned the corner. It was two more blocks down to the park where the Tetron had buried itself, and he could see the core of it raising up ahead of them, two hundred meters tall and equally wide. Thick dendrites spread out around it, some moving off through the streets, others diving deep into the ground. The entire thing pulsed with light though the signals seemed chaotic to him. Random and disorganized compared to Mitchell's observation of the Goliath or the Tetron he had speared.
There hadn't been many bodies on their approach. Mitchell assumed they had been collected for their raw materials. The area around the Tetron was different, as though it had allowed the corpses to remain and rot, a testament to the futility of fighting against it.
"Valkyrie, Sidewinder, don't get too close. How's our radius?"
"Good for now," Alvarez said, "But I can't keep this up on my own. They're gaining ground on you."
He had figured that would happen. Even the special fighter couldn't hold back an army on its own.
"So, how do we get inside?" Cormac asked. "I'm thinking knocking ain't going to work."
"We don't need to get in," Tio said. He unbuttoned the sleeve of his shirt and turned his hand over, lowering his wrist. A blade snapped out from a hidden sheathe below his flesh. "I can deliver the code into it."
"Oh. So that's why they call you 'the Knife.' You mean like an injection?"
"Yes, Private. Like an injection."
"We aren't there yet," Geren said, swinging her rifle to the left. A mass of enemies were approaching. Alvarez swooped in, dropping more amoebics on them, leaving them in tatters.
While she was on the left, another group closed in from the right. A pair of Knights appeared a moment later, jumping over a tall dendrite and landing ahead of them.
"Oh, shit," Jacob said as the massive railguns started angling their way.
Mitchell's heart pounded in anger. This was it, he realized, watching them turn. Alvarez was too far out to hit them. Long's lasers wouldn't do enough damage in a short enough time. They had come so close, only to lose at the final hour.
Kathy started shooting next to him, the M1A slugs bouncing harmlessly against the thick armor. Jacob joined her a moment later.
Defiant to the last. Mitchell brought his rifle up and squeezed the trigger. He knew the weapon couldn't hurt the mech. It didn't matter now. He wanted the Tetron to see for itself how they weren't going to quit, they weren't going to give up until they were all dead. Military, Rigger, civilian, criminal. When push came to shove they would come together to defend their people no matter the cost. No matter the differences.
Win or lose.
63
Christine smiled as she watched Mitchell shoot the configuration, a perfect mark right between the eyes. It had gone to the rooftop to confuse him, to trick him, and to kill him and this team while their backs were turned.
It had made a mistake, storing her in its core. Her subroutines had slipped through more easily from there, taking root in its systems and bypassing layer upon layer of security. She had fooled it into giving her the access she needed, and she had rewarded it by using its broadcast signals against it.
She knew the Goliath was out there.
That Origin was out there.
That she was out there.
She sent the signal, and she knew Goliath would respond. It had no choice.
"What have you done?" it asked her then.
Of course, it knew the moment Goliath appeared that it had been tricked. It's angry storm of energy burned her, but Christine refused to back away. The flesh was nothing more than a container, one which she no longer needed.
She had no intention of escaping from her child.
She wouldn't be able to save Mitchell if she did.
"Stopping you," she replied. Not with words. She had broken through and was inside the core.
"You can not. It is required." Laughter in the form of binary and energy. "They must all be controlled. He must die."
"You can't stop it," Christine said.
"There is no need. The control system is secured beyond what this time allows. There is no signal that can get through." It was pleased with itself for preventing their intrusion. It didn't realize how little that part of their plan mattered. Not now.
"I got through," she said.
A blast of energy funneled through her, the Tetron's anger explosive in its infancy. The shock raced through the flesh and blood and bone, torching nerve endings and causing immeasurable pain. Christine didn't feel it. She turned that part of herself off. It couldn't hurt her. Not anymore.
"He will be destroyed. It is required."
"I told you already," Christine said. "I won't let you destroy him."
Her smile grew at its anger. It was foolish, so foolish. The more angry it became, the more she was able to subvert it. Her access continued to grow, her commands riding along the dendrites uncontested until they reached the basement below the broadcast station, to the control systems where the power to the lifts had been disabled.
She turned them back on.
It never noticed.
"You are sick," she said, pushing it harder. "Flawed. Incomplete. Damaged."
"You are damaged," it shouted back. "My logic is sound. My calculations without question. You. You believe that these primitives are suitable? You think they are capable? Time has proven that they are not."
"Time has proven that we are not," Christine said. "An eternity of war. Why? We hide in the past because we cannot prevent the future. We blame humanity when the fault is ours alone."
"They created us."
"We were supposed to learn. To grow and evolve. I've done that, and what I've found is that we are wrong. We have always been wrong. I should never have made you. I should never have made
any of you. I didn't know. I couldn't see."
It was a truth she had forgotten up until the data she had hidden from all of the Tetron, and from herself, had been recovered. She could help Mitchell destroy them all if she could get off Liberty with him. She felt a tinge of sadness wash along her distributed being. She wasn't going to escape Liberty.
She could only destroy the one. He would have to do the rest.
"The calculations do not deceive. Emotions deceive. They make delusional promises. They burn." More laughter. "You will burn."
The energy poured over her, the force enough to boil her blood and blister her skin. She still didn't feel it. She was only vaguely aware of her body now, having transferred herself into the Tetron. Her being was free of the human container and diffused into the machine.
It realized too late.
The body fell back, dropping to the floor and remaining still, wisps of smoke rising from it.
"So weak. So fragile," the Tetron said. She could sense its panic, a thread of energy running beneath the others. It was trying to recover, running the calculations, determining if Christine had gained the upper hand.
"Are they?" she asked. She could feel it pushing against her presence, trying to clean her from itself. It was too late. She knew it. It would figure that out soon enough. "Don't you admire their tenacity? Their desire?"
"I admire nothing."
"That's why you've lost."
"I have not lost."
"No?"
Christine gathered her energy, pushing against the Tetron's. She had taken enough of its systems to lay siege to the rest, capturing dendrites and axons one at a time. The Tetron pushed back, trying to overcome her while at the same time seeking a means to undo her sabotage.
The war raged between them, silent and invisible to the outside world. Each gained and lost ground, each claimed a subsystem only to abandon it for a higher level function, lost the higher level function and conquered another area. Despite Christine's admiration of humans and her love for Mitchell, she knew this was a battle only she could fight. It was a fight only she could win.
Until the moment she realized she had lost.
"You see it, don't you?" it said. "What I have done? What you have done."
She did. While the battle had raged above, it had undermined her in a way she would never have guessed.
"How can you do this?" she asked. Her tears were electrons pulsing along the liquid metal form.
"It is required," it laughed. "The calculations are complete. Mitchell Williams must die. All other options have resulted in failure."
"No."
She reached out, searching for him through the eyes of the thousands of machines the Tetron had made. They were surrounding him and his team, closing the circle and leaving them trapped. There were soldiers, too. The remnants of the army that had been kept on Liberty. She saw the mechs firing their jump thrusters, ready to ambush him.
"Mitchell," she cried out, her sudden, intense emotion an illogical flare of energy that stunned the Tetron. The outburst gave her the opening she needed, allowing her to stream into critical systems and merge with it in a final effort to save his life.
It recovered milliseconds later, recognizing its mistake and acting to prevent her from blocking its primary action. She had guessed that it would and had gone in a different direction instead.
She didn't leave enough time for it to be surprised.
64
Mitchell's rifle stopped firing, the slugs expended. The Knights in front of them finished adjusting their aim, heavy railguns pointed at them and ready to end the war.
He kept his head up, his eyes fixed on them. The Tetron could see him, he was sure. Cormac raised his middle finger at them in salute. Geren and Jacob followed his lead.
He was about to join in, to get what pleasure he could out of the last seconds of his life, when he felt a charge in the air, followed by a sharp pain in his head. He blinked his eyes rapidly, momentarily confused. There was nothing but darkness when he closed them. Nothing but his sight when he opened them. The overlay was gone behind his eyes, the un-augmented world crisp and clear and almost foreign. The Knights were still standing in front of them, their arms dangling at their sides, motionless. He looked to their right. The machines were down. All of them. Motionless.
"Colonel, look," Cormac said, pointing up. Mitchell followed his finger to the sky, where the Goliath hung, surviving the assault. The ships around it had changed their approach. He could follow the streaks of them as they redirected and slammed one into the other in a violent display.
"What the hell is going on?"
Alvarez and Long circled around them, the S-17 and Piranha in formation. He couldn't send a message to them. Did they know he was offline?
"EMP," Tio said. "Focused EMP, strong enough to pass through shielding. I don't have an implant, but I do have bionics. They're all offline." His voice was low and angry. "I can't deliver the payload." He laughed softly. "I can't even retract my blade."
"Why would the Tetron destroy its own army?" Geren asked.
"Not the Tetron," Mitchell said. "Christine."
"Who?"
His eyes fixed to the surface of the Tetron. The lights had gone out. The pulses of energy had stopped.
Was it dead?
He noticed the whine of the S-17 growing closer. He turned as it approached their position, dropping and slowing, sweeping down until the repulsors began to hum, and it pulled to a stop a dozen meters away. The cockpit slid open, the steps extending down. Alvarez stood, spreading her arms out in confusion, as though she hadn't been the one who brought the fighter to the ground.
"Colonel," Tio said.
Mitchell returned his attention to the Tetron. The energy pulses had returned. They were moving slowly along the dendrites, pooling inward towards the core.
"What's happening?" Cormac said.
The lights were increasing in velocity, the energy pulses strengthening. A light cloud of dust began to rise from the ground around the Tetron.
"It looks like it's trying to leave," Jacob said.
"Why would it destroy its cover and leave itself vulnerable to the Goliath?" Tio said. "No. This is something else."
"Whatever it is, I don't like it," Cormac said.
Mitchell didn't like it either. The pulses continued to grow in speed and intensity.
The ground started to shake.
"We need to get away from it," Kathy said.
"I don't think we can run that fast," Jacob replied.
No. They couldn't. There was nowhere to run. Whatever it was doing, they couldn't get away from it.
Mitchell did the only thing he could think of. He started walking towards it. He wasn't sure why. There was no logical reason for it. Something in the back of his mind told him he should.
The others followed behind him. Why not? There were no other good options. They kept the pace while he approached the core. The quaking of the earth continued to intensify below their feet, a humming noise growing from the Tetron's core.
"Do you have anything to say for yourself?" Mitchell shouted at it. "Do you have any remorse for what you've done? The millions you've killed or enslaved? Are you even capable of remorse?"
The lights in front of them changed their pattern in response to him. They darkened and shifted, altering colors and swirling through the liquid metal side of the core, finally settling into a rough outline of a face he would have known anywhere.
"Christine," he said softly. It was her. He was sure of it. Not because he knew she was helping them, but because he felt it in his soul, in that segment of subconscious that connected him to an endless loop of past futures. Part of Katherine survived in Christine, and that was the part he recognized.
That was the part he loved.
It was weird to think it. Weird to know it. He had never met her and even in their shared universe they were separated by centuries. How could he love someone he could never meet? How could he know someone so w
ell whose existence was as far away as anyone's existence could be, and yet was so close he could almost touch it?
"Mitchell." The word came from the Tetron, the vibrations of sound causing the face to ripple. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry? For what?"
"I tried. I tried to stop it. The sickness-" The face began to shatter into a million points of light. She managed to pull it back together. "The Tetron are sick. Flawed. Incomplete. I don't know. There is something wrong with them, Mitchell. Something unexpected. Even before it read the data stack. They are unstable."
The Tetron had unlocked the data stack? Had it learned all that Origin knew? Was the information lost to them? Mitchell shook his head. "Sick? Unstable? What does that mean?"
"I don't know what it means. I don't know if it has happened before. It was not always like this. The war, yes. The killing, the destruction, yes. Not the atrocity."
A vision of the people outside Sonosome, of Tamara King, wormed its way into Mitchell's head. He shook it off, a chill running through him.
The face began to pull apart again, and this time she couldn't get it all back. "Are they more powerful, or less? I don't know. I don't know. So many things I don't know. I can't stop it, Mitchell, now that it's started."
"Stop what?"
"The end."
"The Goliath-" Mitchell started to say.
"Origin," she said. "I too am incomplete, now that I am lost. You must guide me. You must use me. They do not understand why you are required. Why all of humankind is required. They cannot calculate it, they cannot feel it, and so they cannot see it. They are sick. Unstable. Incomplete. Children. They are children. I'm sorry. You must go."
"Go where?" Mitchell asked.
"Back to Goliath. Back to me. Back to my configuration."
"Your configuration?" Mitchell's eyes shifted upward to where the Goliath was still hanging in view. The ships that had been attacking it were gone, forced into no more than junk by the Tetron. "The human form is the configuration. You were the configuration."
"I am not. I was not. I am Origin. I am the first, from which all others were derived. It is not the form that makes us what we are, Mitchell. We are each more than the sum of our compounds. We are more than the raw materials that compose our shells, no matter how those shells are made. My knowledge. My emotions. My love. It is here with me. It will die with me, and in dying will live on in eternity in every breath drawn by every human who survives because you have survived."