by David Hardy
“Use Neometh to work longer, use some Synthmorph to take the edge off, and then sell a little to pay for your habit.”
“I’ve traveled that country, yes.”
“Don’t need any saddle tramps. Don’t need thieves, don’t need pill heads. Good day, Mister Smith.”
“Sir, I’m not one to beg, but do you need a man who’s been lost and is trying to find his way back to the good trail?”
Boss Tom studied Hill for a long while. “That sort I have room for. Sling your gear in the bunkhouse.”
The men in the bunkhouse accepted Smith’s reticence about his past, being close-mouthed men themselves. About Tom Cole’s reasons for re-locating to the Argyre, they were more open.
“When they set up the Martian Regional Authority and started putting taxes on land and cattle, Boss Tom said it was nothing but thievery with a pen and headed south. He was right too, the MRA ain’t nothing but a front for the Fourth World Corporation so’s they can buy up everything cheap.”
The days passed quietly at Red Dust. Hill’s duties handling bos were not excessively difficult. Just as Martian bovines had been greatly modified from their Earth ancestors, a Martian pony bore genes that allowed it to literally sniff out bos, and to emit pheromones that brought the wild and aggressive beasts out of their hiding places. The bos-boys controlled their mounts with a cybernetic interface installed in their spurs, and carried an electronic tracking system in their broad-brimmed hats similar to the one in Hill’s badge. Despite that, Hill’s hat failed to show any sign of Jack Cole or his robot ally.
Boss Tom was a stern employer but a fair one, who drove himself as hard as his men. Hill almost felt bad about lying to Boss Tom’s face while planning to kill his brother. Then he remembered Kovacs’ blasted remains in an Asteroid Belt saloon.
Then one cold, thin-aired day, a stranger arrived at Red Dust. He could have been an itinerant bos-trader, robot tech, pony-breeder, seller of second-hand gene-splicing equipment, or any of the wanderers that crossed Mars. But Hill watched from the bunkhouse and sensed a strange familiarity in the man’s motions. The way Boss Tom quickly ushered the stranger into the house and then departed with him down a seldom-used bos track clinched the matter.
Hill sighed and muttered to himself as he saddled his bos-pony. “The robot can’t help but keep cool, but you have a conscience, Boss Tom. It’s too bad for your brother, but you do.”
Hill found them at a line camp, hard under the Charitum Montes. The camp had stood empty since raiding Sooeys had killed half of the crew working there. Hill dismounted at a distance, activated his badge, taking particular care to use its counter-measures to make him nearly invisible, and crept close. He sheltered behind a feed shed and turned on the audio sensors in his badge. Voices came from the camp’s ramshackle crew quarters.
“I told you not to come back, Jack,” Tom Cole said. “They will catch you one of these days.”
“Let ‘em,” Jack Cole replied. “It’ll be a…”
“Damn exciting day.” The robot finished the sentence.
“Tell that thing to stay quiet.” Tom’s voice was filled with sick fear. “You’re a mess, Jack. That thing has turned you into a monster.”
“Yes,” the robot said.
“And also a saint,” Cole added.
“That’s even worse. Turn yourself in and get help.”
“There ain’t no…” Cole said.
“Helping us.” The robot kept up the rhythm.
“You know I wasn’t raised this way.”
“But there’s a way to make it right.”
Boss Tom’s voice was pleading. “Whatever it is, don’t do it, Jack. If you’re still my brother, don’t do it.”
“I will,” Jack Cole said.
“Right after I kill the lawman lurking outside and the war party of Sooeys vectoring toward us,” the robot added.
Hill ducked back just as a plasma slug burned through the wall. He activated all the sensors in his badge and shot back, firing through the walls of the shed and crew quarters at the robot. The war-squeal of the Sooeys echoed across the bottoms. In moments the shed and crew quarters were reduced to flaming wreckage and Hill was running before a volley of ill-aimed blaster fire from the Sooeys.
Hill fired off a shot that dropped a Sooey, and ran towards Cole. The badge brought Cole into focus and the μ366’s stabilizers lined up the shot. Hill pressed the firing stud just as another Cole loomed into the sight picture. The robot had morphed into his comrade’s form. The second Cole staggered and loosed a spray of blasts that sent Hill scrambling for cover and cut down three attacking Sooeys.
“I gotta get our brother!” one of the Coles shouted.
“He’s gone! 6-2-2-5!” the other shouted back. Hill had no idea which was the robot and which wasn’t. He was too busy shooting at the Sooeys who were determined to take his life.
By the time the Sooeys drew off, the Coles were gone. Hill found Boss Tom in the smoking wreckage of the crew house. He’d caught blast in the crossfire and was dying.
“I should have known you were a goddamn rat. If I wasn’t dying I’d kill you myself.” Boss Tom grimaced in pain. Hill signaled on his badge for an emergency medical lift-off, but this was remote country, and Tom Cole had seconds to live, not minutes.
Tom was still talking. “Someone has to stop Jack. He’s going to save the country. He’s got the devil in him, believes in salvation. He’s going to kill millions and kill them soon. Out in the Kuiper Belt.”
“Where in the Kuiper Belt?” Hill asked. “What is 6225?”
Tom Cole’s eyes focused on Hill. “Stop him, lawman,” he whispered as he died.
○●○
Out in the Kuiper Belt, massive blocks of ice jostled rocky planetoids in riotous confusion. Thickly strewn among the planetoid drifts were decayed hulks of mining ships, blasted orbital bunkers, abandoned supply depots, and the remains of millions of men and cyborgs. This had been the scene of the hardest fighting of the Cyborg War, with hundreds of thousands of planetoids converted into everything from fortresses that held a division to isolated outposts consisting of a rock and a one-man foxhole. The main United States base had been on Pluto, where PFC Hill and Lance Corporal Kovacs had met.
Hill picked up Cole and the robot’s trail on Pluto. They had been spotted going into a bottery that was known for “no questions asked” service. The tech had been blasted to atoms, and his bottery wrecked. At some point the shop’s network connection was disabled and every device in the place wiped with savage thoroughness. Hill picked through the smoldering wreckage, his heart sinking. Cole was leaving no back trail.
Then Hill spotted a broken network fuser, the type of device that techs used to join circuitry in a robot’s limbs to its central circuits. The device would image the robot’s circuit to ensure the smooth functioning of the neural network. Hill expected it had been wiped like the rest.
At first it looked like broken junk like the rest of the shop, but as Hill stooped to study it, he realized that the external case was merely broken. The fuser started up weakly and Hill used his badge’s router to connect his spacecraft’s computer to the fuser. The fuser brought up an image of Cole and his doppelganger. Hill heard the tech’s shocked voice, “This didn’t come from Earth.” The image flickered and the number 6225 flashed, then was drowned in the echo of a blaster, fired at close range.
“What does it mean?” Hill asked the walls. Then he remembered.
Cole was an exception. The cyborgs only occasionally took prisoners. They had a predisposition to experiment on their prisoners, reconstructing them with machine interfaces, and then sending them back to the front as part of the cyborg army. During his tour Hill had heard of Station 6225, where prisoners were rumored to be held. He hurried back to his spacecraft.
The spacecraft’s collection of maps was excellent, but disused and drifting Cyborg orbital forts were indifferently outlined. Hill stared into the bleak depths of space, anxiety gnawing at him. Hi
ll and Kovacs had served a tour as forward observers, guiding fusion bombs toward Cyborg targets. It was dangerous work with Cyborgs making frequent raids to destroy the forward outposts. He and Kovacs had saved each other’s lives more than once.
Hill spent hours monitoring Cyborg communications traffic during the war. His expertise guided him as he tuned his spacecraft’s communication system up into the bands the Cyborgs had used. Relentlessly he scanned the ghost signals, echoes of explosions, wandering signals of dying transmitters, until he found it. A binary code message, repeated over and over again, 6-2-2-5, 6-2-2-5, 6-2-2-5, endlessly. Hill homed in and fired up his spacecraft’s reactors.
Fortress 6225 loomed up from the cloud of orbiting rubble. The station had been abandoned at the end of the war. The fortress’s weapons, plasma cannons, missile launchers, all the impedimenta of war, still glowered, but were as dead and silent as the emptiness about them.
Hill found Cole’s spacecraft, its reactor cooled. He brought his own spacecraft to a landing, in swift pursuit of his quarry. Hill used a universal jimmy to operate the airlock. The Cyborg fort was silent and dark, but still had breathable air. Broken Cyborg troopers, abandoned equipment, useless computer cores, the waste of war littered the corridors. Hill turned his badge to the highest sensitivity and pushed on.
Hill passed through a room where strange medical devices stood among man-sized containers holding human specimens. Most had been reconstructed with cybernetic parts, half-human, half-machine. There were gene-splicing devices, and units that were designed to fuse human flesh to nano-tech controls. A schematic of the human brain flickered in a 3-D projection. Someone had used a shard of rubble to scratch on the wall the words “Good” and “Evil.”
Hill studied the machine closely. Its batteries still held enough charge to bring it up. There were complex controls that interfaced with the brain. Fortunately Hill was very familiar with Cyborg machine coding. He scanned the device with his badge. It had a simple program that used English terms for moral concepts, as well as routines to interface between a physical organism and a machine. On impulse, Hill imaged the program to his badge. Perhaps there was some clue to Cole’s erratic behavior there.
Hill’s badge made a silent warning. He was approaching a weapons bay. The badge indicated a man inside. Cautiously, Hill approached, his μ366 drawn. Cole stood, illuminated by a sickly radium glow, staring at the shapeless mass of a cobalt bomb.
“Come on in,” Cole said. “This is where they held me prisoner. There wasn’t much left of me when I got captured. Just a spinal cord and some guts. So they re-built me, and built the robot as part of me too. They had some plan about me and the robot and this bomb blowing up HQ on Pluto. Eventually the Cyborgs let me go. Lost interest or something on account of it didn’t work right, forgot about the robot, too. War was over. America wasn’t interested in me, either. Crap jobs, drugs, and crime are what I found. Then the robot found me. It’s been a hell of a ride since.”
Hill leveled the μ366. “Jackson Cole, you are under arrest. Put your hands where I can see them.”
Another Cole emerged from the shadows. “Drop it, lawman.”
Hill’s mouth was dry and his heart was pounding. “Not happening. I’m not about to let a pair of outlaws have a cobalt bomb.”
“This is messed up,” the Cole at the bomb said
“They built a second me,” the Cole with the blaster said.
“It was my conscience.”
“To make me useful to them.”
“But it’s defective.”
“Goes from saint to sinner and back.”
“And it’s getting worse.” Cole turned from the bomb to look at Hill.
Hill’s hands were sweating on the blaster. “Then put down your guns and we’ll get you help.”
“Don’t want help.”
“I realized that I needed an act of charity.”
“I was raised to be good and to be free.”
“That’s what an American is supposed to be.”
“But I’m evil and a slave.”
“The Cyborgs just exposed what I really am.”
“I have to purify myself.”
“I have to purify the country that made my conscience.”
Hill took a deep breath. “That bomb will kill half of the people in the U.S.A.”
“That’s the purity I’m talking about.”
Hill felt truly sick. He had dealt with madmen before and it never ended well. “You’re going to destroy America to save its conscience. Because you’re messed up, they have to die, is that it? It’s a pretty thin excuse, but I reckon I’ve heard worse.” He kept the μ366’s sight on Cole.
“The Cyborgs just wanted me to be a weapon.”
“I need to be an act of love.”
“I liked you better as a son of a bitch, Cole.” Hill didn’t have many cards to play. “You could keep living free, but you’re choosing to die for people who won’t even be grateful.” He remembered the moral interface program. It was still running, good and evil as options. Hill chose a third, the one to end the interface between man and machine.
The first Cole looked up and laughed. “They don’t deserve my kindness.” In one swift move he drew his blaster on the other. “Let ‘em live with themselves.”
Hill saw the other Cole’s face dissolve, becoming robotic again, even as it pivoted, pointing its blaster at Cole. “Follow orders,” it said. The robot was fast, but Cole was just that much faster. But the robot was hard, it staggered under the blast and shot back, hitting Cole. Hill fired, a blast in the robot’s core. It erupted in flame and toppled over.
Hill lowered his blaster to see Cole was now aiming at him. “Let’s finish this, lawman,” he gasped, bloody and burned.
“Drop it, Cole!” Hill shouted.
“You ain’t taking me in!” The outlaw fired and Hill felt the plasma slug burn past, knocking him down. The robot rose up and blasted Cole in the back. Hill fired twice into the robot’s broken shape and the machine was reduced to flaming parts.
Hill walked over to Cole. The outlaw was badly shredded. “That was crazy. Sorry about shootin’ your pal back in the Asteroid Belt. I can’t make up for what I’ve done, I’ll just pay the price. You still ain’t taking me in, lawman. Live free, sonsabitches.” Cole died. There would be no coming back this time. He was gone with Ted Kovacs.
“Live free, soldier. Have some peace if you can.” Hill was hurt, but he’d live. He would make it back to America, bringing home a hero they never knew they had.
About the Author – David Hardy
David Hardy is the author of Crazy Greta, Tales of Phalerus the Achaean, Palmetto Empire, and numerous Western, historical, and adventure stories. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and daughter.
Jupiter Convergence
Robert E. Vardeman
Hugh Longstreet’s usually steady hand shook just a little. So much rode on being precise, and his blunt fingers hardly seemed up to the task. A faint touch of breeze against the back of his shaved head made him snap, “Close the airlock! I’m almost ready for the final card.”
He glanced over his shoulder at a grinning Sunny Gupta. The young man flapped the plastic strips that formed the inner portion of the “airlock” to create a small current in the storage room. He hardly contained all his energy in his thin frame.
“What’s wrong, Hugh? Your house of cards isn’t up to a little disturbance?”
“Too much is riding on this. If you blow over my tower of cards, I win.”
“Like hell.”
“When did a Buddhist start believing in hell?”
Longstreet stepped back to let the vagrant air current die down. In the Moon’s one-sixth gravity field it took longer than it would on Earth to disappear. The room had been isolated for their latest competition. Working at the lonely observatory on the far side of the Moon gave them too much spare time, even after they set up their complex experiments and deep space radio observation. Their astrono
mical work required long hours of simply letting the equipment suck up data before analysis. Until a significant amount piled up in the computer drives, there was no point in fiddling with it. Longstreet had always said it was possible to come to any conclusion when you only had two data points. For any paper leaving his facility, accuracy and complete data sets were paramount.
“It’s two meters tall. That’s impressive, even in a low-g field.” Gupta walked around, nodding sagely. “But you have to add one more layer to beat my tower, which, I might add, was far more artistic.”
“It looked nothing like the Eiffel Tower.”
“It was the New Delhi Tower. You just refuse to admit it.” Gupta crossed his arms and smirked. “Go on. Let’s see you beat me.”
Longstreet lifted the card that would win him the bet when a new gust of wind came through the storage room.
“Dammit, what is it? This place is turning into a wind tunnel.”
He ran his finger along the lower edge of the playing card. It would take only a split second to put the king into place and win naming rights from Gupta. His concentration flew away when his assistant, Fumilayo Enahoro, cleared her throat and spoke far too loudly.
“Got a hit on the radio antenna.”
“It can wait until I get to name it. When this card tops the pyramid, it will unofficially be the Farside Antenna Relay Tenia.”
“Tenia? Isn’t that repetitious?” she asked.
“Tenia means ribbon. The radio antenna legs string out on the maria like glorious ribbons.” Gupta nudged her. “You ought to know stuff like that from all the books you read. Anyway, when I win, it’ll be the Wide Area Receiving Tenia. And that will be any moment.” Gupta moved a little closer, eyeing Longstreet’s structure critically.
“He’ll beat you,” Enahoro said, “because he’s using sticky stuff on the bottom of the card to hold everything in place.”
“What?” Gupta grabbed for the card, but Longstreet moved faster and kept it from his examination.