Prisoners of Darkness

by Jason Anspach

  He heard the low hydraulic whine and hiss of the machine coming for him. He scrabbled up the circuit-laden block, dashed along the top, and started popping fraggers. Three in rapid succession.

  Explosions popped and ignited as Skrizz jumped off the block and raced toward the other side of the arena, dodging between and behind stones as he went. In his hunting mind, he knew the thing had some kind of local radar. It was constantly aware of where he was at all times. Wobanki hated when their enemies knew where they were.

  Instead of running, Skrizz strafed left, racing out toward another collection of tumbled blocks, firing with both high-powered light blasters by alternating his shots. He ran a line of fire across the chassis of the war machine, hitting with his left as much as his right.

  Then he was behind the stones and breathing heavy.

  Not moving. Forcing the machine to choose a path and playing a quick game of what that meant in his tactical hunting mind.

  To Skrizz it meant that it would come on straight at him. He popped bangers, two of them, and held position behind the block, eyes and even ears squeezed tight shut against the blasts.

  Bangers messed with cats on especially poignant levels. Still, they were perfect for this kind of scenario.

  Skrizz leapt straight up, landing on another row of blocks, and fired both high-powered light blasters dry on the temporarily banger-stunned bot.

  He’d fought bots before. He knew exactly where to hit them. The radar, when they had it, was always left shoulder. Skrizz concentrated all his fire on that spot.

  Faster than expected, the bot recovered and spooled its tri-barrel heavy blaster up to max output. A storm of blaster fire chased Skrizz off the blocks and into the next darkness.

  But as soon as the cat had gone, he was back, testing the damage to the radar. On levels the wobanki probably wasn’t even aware of, it was grading the reaction time of the Spartan and judging it to be more reactive than proactive now.

  Skrizz had shucked both high-powered light blasters and now ran right at the machine, firing the double-barreled blaster. Explosions rather than shots slammed into the Spartan’s chest plate, knocking it back. Skrizz continued his charge, firing the blaster with one hand while he popped claws in the other. The pass he made on the war bot was like a streak of lightning, and when it was done the Spartan was missing most of one arm assembly.

  The Spartan fell to its knees.

  From the darkness behind the war bot came a single double-barreled blast, and the Spartan’s head disintegrated into ruptured metal, melted circuitry, and exploding parts.

  The one eye that remained of the three pulsed and then died as the war bot fell face forward.

  The arena was dark and silent.

  Skrizz waited beneath a tumbled collection of stones. Stones that were something else. Stones that were alive with glowing symmetry and circuitry.

  Symmetry of an alien origin.

  Then the voice spoke.

  “Excellent.”

  Pause.

  “Upgrade complete. Commencing test… round two. Begin.”

  And from the darkness came another Spartan.

  ***

  The man made his way through all the places of the ship that were not commonly used. It was a massive ship and nothing like anything he’d ever boarded. In certain places it made no sense; in others it made perfect sense. And sometimes, when he went scouting through the access tubes, and vent housing, staying out of the main passages where the thinking machines marched and did their enigmatic work, sometimes places that he’d been before had been changed. Transformed. Turned to some new purpose.

  It was dark down here, but he’d been a man used to working in darkness. In Nether Ops, you started out old school. You learned to move in the night, one inch at a time. And in time you became the night and the darkness. It was later that they gave you the snazzy high-speed infiltration-model leej armor. But first, basics.

  All he had met down here, in this weird ever-changing ship whose walls glowed sliver and pulsed with a living circuitry, was the occasional bot—maintenance spider bots, plus some other weird enigmatic bots whose purpose he could not begin to imagine.

  They’d stopped sending the big Spartans in after him. That was a good thing. He was down to just a blaster now. He’d been charging it off the ship’s local power grid. He had the blaster and three charge packs.

  At first, they tried to send Spartan versions of tunnel rats to come in after him—the big Spartan war bots with their legs removed. They crawled in with their hydraulic arms, holding a blaster in each hand. He’d set traps for them and had even fought them in short but brutal firefights. He’d stolen their massive tri-barrel N-50s, but they wouldn’t work for him, so he’d booby-trapped their charge packs. After a few times, the machines learned. Eventually they’d stopped coming down into the passages beneath the lower decks.

  He tried to go back to the Forresaw. There would be food and weapons there. But when he found the hangar—he observed it through an air processing vent, and why was there oxygen on a ship run by thinking machines?—the hangar was filled with small fighter-class craft. Sleek. Agile. Crescent-shaped. High-powered blasters and some missile capability. They’d give the Republic’s latest and brightest technological masterpiece, the Raptor, a run for sure.

  But the Forresaw was gone.

  Perhaps Captain Broxin had left. Left them all behind, he might have said to the others, but Ghost was gone too. Except they were all killed, and he was the last surviving member. The last survivor was a better way to put it.

  Member sounded like he was in a band or something.

  He knew that. He knew they were all dead.

  It had been confirmed.

  Hutch came to the warren of almost cozy passages back near the strange and immense ship’s engines. Deep down in decks that were silent and dark. Where even the bots never appeared. Not yet anyway. On one deck was a massive three-story pool, or water tank. And that was a very strange thing to view.

  What was the purpose of it?

  Garret, as usual, was bent over one of the eight access panels he’d turned into his own workstation node. All these panels had once run maintenance operations on the ship’s light speed inducers, as near as they could tell, but once the code slicer had taken them over and shifted their functions off to other sub-systems across the ship, the little node had become Garret’s kingdom unto himself.

  It seemed like Hutch just rented space here. And ran errands. Tip-of-the-spear intel-gatherer. Errand boy.

  He’d found Garret days earlier, shortly after everything went sideways, running like he was being chased by all the hounds of hell. Which he might as well have been. The Spartans, having reconfigured themselves into forms resembling legless dogs, had come down a passage looking for him. Garret was running into a dead end. If Hutch hadn’t found him…

  Dog meat.

  Or whatever machines turned human bone and flesh into.

  And then they’d gone deep and secured the node, and Garret had gone to work.

  The first and most important trick the clever little code slicer had pulled was to make them invisible to the Cybar. It wasn’t something Hutch relied upon, because who really knew if the tin cans saw or didn’t see you, regardless of Garret’s assurances. Even though Garret swore by it and had even demonstrated it by walking in front of two Cybar Spartans guarding a passage.

  And if you’d been wrong, thought Hutch many a time after.

  Dog meat.

  Or whatever.

  Hutch preferred the darkness of the narrow maintenance passages that ran the length of the ship like some kind of krogemah warren.

  That had been Garret’s first trick. Making them invisible. Garret’s next trick had been finding out what happened to everyone.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  Ghost was dead.

  Enda was dissected and his body disappeared inside a part of the ship Garret couldn’t access.

  The rest of Ghost had been murde
red by the Spartans and then spaced. Hutch had seen it with their own eyes. Garret had managed to hack the vlogs from the Spartans they’d destroyed.

  The wobanki was alive. He was in a holding cell. But they only got occasional access to the feeds that watched his cell.

  “Why only sometimes?” Hutch had asked.

  “I don’t know, man,” Garret mumbled as he tapped at keys faster than Hutch could think. “My theory is that I’ve somehow hijacked a redundancy warden that processes anomalies on the code-script level so—”

  “Slow down, Nerdstrom. Don’t speak coder.”

  “Right,” said Garret, taking a deep breath but refusing to slow the staccato striking of the keys beneath his flying fingers. “It’s like I’m looking over the shoulder of a watchdog that runs around checking for errors. It’s not a high-functioning AI, but it’s smart enough to watch for pattern errors… so…”

  “So you’re watching their cross-check.”

  “Right.”

  “So sometimes it sees Skrizz and sometimes it sees Prisma.”

  But they had never seen the Forresaw. Or the Endurian, Leenah. Not in any of the brief glimpses they’d managed to pirate.

  They were starving within the week. Surprisingly, this bothered Hutch more than Garret. Garret seemed to feed on his work, carving out a local net and installing his own root access that mimicked whatever it was the machines were running.

  Then Garret found food. Every day he was learning more and more about the ship, and Hutch had a pretty good idea he wasn’t telling him a lot of it. Garret didn’t know that Hutch was an intel gatherer. That Hutch saw that as his main function. Even though the mission was completely sideways, he could still gather intel. Had to.

  But Garret did find food. Or rather… protein.

  “Hey, we can live on it. And there’s water. I think.”

  What’s it for, Hutch didn’t want to ask but did anyway.

  “Horror show is all my mind can think. They use it, along with their nano-forges, to build whatever they want. Monsters probably. My mind only keeps going to the worst possible scenarios.”

  Hutch stared at him. And it was not a pleasant stare.

  Garret shifted uncomfortably. “But for the sake of us not starving to death… let’s just say the Cybar pulled off at the nearest planet, harvested some… cows, or cattle-like creatures, and an abundance of vegetable matter, and then created their own protein slurry. And what they made… it’s in tanks… here.”

  Garret pointed at the glowing blue terminal, which was showing a schematic of the ship. He touched the spot where Hutch would need to head to get them food.

  “So… go there. Take something to carry it back in. And let’s just pretend it’s from a cow, or a vegetable garden, and not…”

  “People,” murmured Hutch.

  “Right,” said Garret. “Let’s pretend that.”

  It tasted like potatoes.

  “It’s probably potatoes,” Garret said through a mouthful once Hutch had brought back a container full of the stuff. That first time they warmed it up over some loose wiring, but it didn’t really matter. Sometimes they ate it cold and it was still fine.

  But it always tasted like potatoes.

  “Why do you suppose they haven’t killed them?” asked Hutch now, as he sat slowly chewing. Thinking, because what else was there to do. Forcing himself not to think the “food” he was eating was anything other than potatoes.

  “No idea,” said Garret happily.

  Garret didn’t want to admit that he actually liked the potato-tasting protein slurry. He knew that would irritate the big legionnaire. And he had a pretty good idea, from the withering glances the big man often gave him, that he irritated Hutch to a certain base level already.

  So it was best to remain cool.

  “But,” began Garret, who had been hypothesizing about why Prisma and Skrizz had not been killed, “I suspect it has something to do with testing.”

  Hutch raised his eyebrows and ladled in another mouthful of the vile protein.

  “These are machines,” Garret continued. “Right? To them, data is currency. Data is power. They…” He gulped as Hutch’s eyes bored into him. Maybe that’s his baseline, thought Garret, and he tried to forge ahead. “They tested… they experimented… on your friend. And mine, probably. Captain Broxin. My guess. Either the Forresaw got out of here alive and the Repub fleet is coming back with a bunch of legionnaires to take this ship, which seems like it should have happened days ago, or…”

  Big pause, in which Garret ate more of the delicious protein and tried to pretend he wasn’t enjoying it as much as he was.

  “Or…?” prompted Hutch.

  Garret shrugged and bobbed his head. “Or the… machines… broke the ship down and tested it. It seems to be what they do.”

  “So why not… test… on Prisma, and the cat?” Hutch asked.

  “I think they’re going to. They’re just looking for the right test. They started with the things they know about the galaxy. The things they’re likely to have to deal with. Ships and legionnaires. Wwhich leads me to believe this fleet is not going to try to save the Republic. It’s most likely gone rogue… which is a thing that can happen with bots, but no one really ever talks about it. So, it’s running through all that, and my guess is it’s not sure about Skrizz and Prisma. So it’s saving them for later.”

  “Why?” Hutch asked.

  Garret thought about this for a long minute. Chewing happily and unaware he was doing so. Hutch was irritated, in truth, that the kid chewed a protein slurry. There was nothing to chew.

  “Because the wobanki is a cat,” began Garret suddenly. “Wobanki aren’t really major players in the big scheme of galactic affairs… which leads me, now that you’ve asked about it, to refine a thought for hypothesis. Which is this. They’re not some rogue AIs that want to run and hide like many do once they’ve had their… uh… oh… call it a mental breakdown. That’s what a lot of them do. They hide, which is what I thought they were doing out here on the edge of the galaxy: hiding. I thought that’s what they were up to and they just freaked out when we showed up. Although I’ve never heard of a mass breakdown among an actual group of bots… though I guess it’s possible. In fact, it’s not just possible, it’s happened. So there’s that. Here we are.

  “Anyway, my guess, thanks to your question, forces me to admit that they’re interested in conquering. The cats aren’t big members of the Galactic Repub. They’d do their thing regardless of whether there was a government, or a military, at all. So the machines don’t think they’re important right now. So save ’em until you need to do some science.”

  “And Prisma?”

  “I mean, she’s a kid. They would see her as a child and therefore not super important on their checklists. So… they’re watching her. Though one Dr. Frankenstein scenario does occur. Perhaps they’re developing some childhood virus–based attack that wipes out, at least, the human population. Then the galaxy reaches zero viability, human population-wise, and the machines have it to themselves. They could be developing that as we speak. They could be saving her for that experiment.”

  “What do you think happened to the Endurian?” Hutch asked.

  Garret just shook his head. It wasn’t a motion that encouraged Hutch regarding the cute girl’s fate.

  For a long time after that they ate in silence. Because what else was there to do? Then Garret spoke once more.

  “So…” he began, drawing out the word. “I’m pretty sure I can take over.”

  “Take over what?” Hutch asked, coming back from some problem he was working in his head.

  “The machines.”

  In the darkness the big man muttered, “Tell me more.”

  And Garret told Hutch about the central AI he thought was running everything. Something the system called MAGNUS that was hidden behind some of the most impressive firewalling Garret had ever seen. Garret thought he could cut through it if he had the right access. That
is, if he could get the right access.

  “What’s the right access?” asked Hutch, an old hand at knowing when he was being given a mission he wasn’t going to like. Or survive.

  “Ah… access that’s deep in the ship. Place where we’ve never been. And I suspect it’s well-guarded. Very well-guarded. By the war bots, I mean, not just the firewalls. And possibly some other crazy stuff that will kill us. You should probably forget I said that. But if I can get into its main processing clouds, with… I mean onsite access… then I’m pretty sure I can make it, this MAGNUS, I can make it obey me.”

  “You’d be in charge of it?”

  “Yup,” said Garret with what Hutch felt was an unwarranted degree of satisfaction. The code slicer burped. The protein slurry tended to have that effect on him.

  That, too, irritated Hutch.

  “On site?” asked Hutch.

  “Yeah,” sighed Garret. “That’s the tough part. Well… not the toughest part. I’ll need to go in and hard connect. Be there. Know what I mean? On the ground, as you special ops spooks say.”

  “We don’t say that. What’s the hardest part?”

  “Well,” sighed Garret, which was yet another thing that irritated Hutch. “We’ll need to be visible.”

  ***

  Prisma ate the cakes the machines had been bringing her. They tasted like potatoes, and there was always a cup of flat warm water to accompany them. Then the meal would be taken away and she would wait long moments, listening to the machines and their hydraulic whine and hiss. Listening to it fade into the distances of the ship’s passages that Prisma could see in her mind.

  She could sense them coming sometimes. More, as of late. Long before she heard their machine sounds. And it hadn’t always been that way. One day she’d just known they were coming. It was their menace she sensed. Which was an odd thing, because most bots were kind. Or at least, that had been her experience. Bots were helpers. Bots could be trusted.

  But these bots could not.

  She tried not to think of Crash.

  Crash was dead now.

  Some other part of her mind told her that machines don’t die.