Inkers

by Alex Rudall

  Lily

  Lily ran through the trees, malnourished, injured, heavily pregnant and pursued by a small army of soldiers and drones, down tracks she knew so well she could have run them in the dark, which was fortunate.

  Mark was dead. Leonard was dead. Tom was dead. Annie was dead. Many, many ITSA soldiers were dead. Many semi–sentient drones had been completely destroyed. The farmhouse and the garden was completely gone, drowned in ink, burnt, eviscerated and then utterly demolished with the final blast that allowed her to escape.

  She wondered what had happened to the cows.

  She was starting to get the hang of it.

  She could do it with her eyes closed, but she was almost able to do it with her eyes open too. All she had to do was to visualise the scene before her, see Tia, and then concentrate her emotions.

  So far she had mainly been able to destroy. The exception was when the drones had buried her. She had been able to create a sort of field of protection, imagining Tia making a shell of her dark body around Lily.

  She had made herself almost invisible to them, heatless, lightless, soundless, using Tia to mask it all. She knew they would find her soon anyway, they had other ways and countless drones – but still she felt a rush of exhilaration like nothing she had ever felt. She was free, but more than that.

  She was exhausted, though, weakened from the months of inactivity, from malnutrition, from the fight. She looked around her. She was about halfway towards the other end of the island. She needed a rest and then she could press on to the lighthouse. Perhaps there she could find a boat. Perhaps by then she wouldn’t need one.

  If she turned to the left here, over this large stone – yes, there it was, ahead of her, a great tree. Lily went to it. It was a huge old oak, mossy and gnarled with age and weather. She put her left foot on a big bulge of bark and began to haul herself up. She lost her footing a few metres up but just managed to hold on to her branch and find it again, her hands burning with the pain of holding her increased weight.

  She paused on a sturdy branch, resting, and then with some difficulty Lily pulled herself up once more to a higher branch. Lily laid herself on her back as best she could, legs dangling over either side, hands holding onto a branch above to stop her from rolling off. She could see the Jupiter–star straight up above her. It was so bright it was difficult to look at. Dawn was coming now. Streaks of pink cloud drifted above. Lily could see the dots of the drones and helicopters and planes looking for her. Maybe they had already found her and the soldiers were already on their way to shoot her out of the tree.

  There was the distinct crack of a branch breaking far below and Lily stopped breathing.

  With a rush of wind and the chop of blades a helicopter drone rushed low overhead, throwing up leaves and twigs high into the branches. Lily covered her head with her arms. After a moment it was gone. The gunshots did not come. She was still panting from the run and exhausted and hungry from the long night of death and ink. She wanted desperately to sleep.

  But if she was caught they would cut her baby out of her, kill it, and put her in a cell until the world ended.

  She climbed down the tree carefully, checking below her for soldier or drones after every second step. When she was low enough she dropped and landed among the fat roots, brushing off the mud and leaves that had collected on her arms.

  She had been walking quickly for ten minutes when she heard a rustle in the leaves. Then he was on her, strong and fierce, grabbing her arms. She bit into his neck, breaking the skin and tearing, and she tasted iron but something familiar, too, a rush… he pushed her down and leapt back. The pale ghost of Brian, hand on his neck. He looked terrible, clothes half–burnt off him, his face bleeding and skin as white as the walls of the farmhouse.

  Lily lay back, panting, and spat the blood out of her mouth.

  “White,” she said.

  “Good tastebuds,” he said. He was patting the pocket of his jeans. He found what he was looking for and drew out a long silver knife, glinting in the dawn.

  She scrunched her eyes and started to picture Tia between them, protecting her – and with a rush he was on her, pinning her down, holding her eyes open with one thick–fingered hand. She wriggled and screamed but he was very strong.

  “Stop,” he said, and there was a sharp pain on the skin of her stomach that made Lily suddenly go still. “Open your eyes.”

  Lily snapped her eyes open. Brian was right there, huge and grotesque and pale. He nodded, breathing hard.

  “White. I was trying to figure out how to grow one of these —“ he jabbed with his knife, sending pain and fear rushing through Lily’s heart in equal measure, “ —inside me, before I found out how it was done. I just didn’t have the equipment.”

  His pale skin, his white, white skin…

  “I’m an addict, now, like you,” he said.

  The helicopter droned high overhead, and Brian glanced up.

  “I don’t know how you’re doing it,” he said, “but I know you do it when you close your eyes. So just keep them open. I need to get it out of you now, before they kill you.”

  Lily stared up at him.

  “Try to relax. I don’t want to kill you, if I can get it out and talk to it before you die it will be able to fix your wounds, probably. This is going to hurt, though.”

  He leaned back, raising his knife a little, and Lily scrabbled backwards along the ground, pushing herself away from him, but he put the knife between his teeth and leapt forward and was upon her, straddling her legs, pinning her hands above her head. Lily screamed and struggled, but he was heavy and strong, superhumanly so with the white. The hate ink. She could see now it had left veiny lines across his face and arms.

  Holding both her wrists with one hand, he took the knife out of his mouth with the other. She writhed again.

  “Stop! I’ll cut your throat!” he shouted. She stopped, terrified.

  Tia, if you’re there, help me!

  There was no flash of blinding light. Brian pushed her t–shirt off her belly.

  “This will be worth it,” he said.

  He pushed the tip of the knife into her belly and Lily screamed out and there was a flash behind her eyes. Brian rose off her into the air, his limbs spreading, the knife dripping tiny drops of Lily’s blood back onto her. Lily stopped screaming as the weight lifted off her. Brian bent backwards into a ball, hands and feet and head all going back, torso bending backwards like a yogi. There was a crunching noise. It was Brian’s turn to cry out. Then he exploded into blood and mist, coating nearby trees and spattering all around Lily. Instinctively she closed her eyes, but there was no need. None of the blood touched her. She put her hand to her belly and looked down, but it was just a little cut.

  Lily collapsed back onto the leaves.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  She got up again, found Brian’s gun next to him and shoved it in her back pocket. She carried on through the trees, running on and on towards the lighthouse, jumping over fallen logs, shutting her eyes and crushing any drones that came near, hearing bursts of gunfire behind and cries and running and running.

  She came out of the trees. There it was, white, black–capped, still sweeping its beam around against it all, across the waves, across the strange morning. There was a steep slope towards the lighthouse. The sky was half–blotted by the GSE and swarming with drones.

  It was surrounded by ITSA jeeps and soldiers and drones.

  Lily was half–invisible, a shadow charging amongst them, Tia hiding her from their sensors, but there were so many. A group of soldiers were huddled around a huge fallen drone. One saw her and spun and shouted and opened fire and she closed her eyes and swept them away with one hand, the drone and the earth beneath it flying away and falling off the cliff, energy pulsing out into the soil beneath her feet and up into the air above her.

  The soldiers were everywhere, gas–masked, hunting for her frantically, shooting down without mercy any private drones that made it thro
ugh the ITSA lines in the sky. She could not reach the lighthouse without killing them all. One might even get a shot through and hit her. She ran left instead, uphill towards the mountain, up a plain of heather and bracken, up a brook still flowing steadily, nature ignoring man’s final destructive game. She ran until she could no longer run. She turned to look back.

  Drones were sweeping down towards her, turning great camera lenses onto her for VR watchers all over the world, opening fire with bullets and bombs which Tia stopped without even being asked. Lily shut her eyes and swept her hand in front of her, and when she opened them the drones were gone and the sky was clear. The noise diminished a little.

  The GSE sat above, vast, unstoppable, a ball of white fire.

  Lily saw it then, the line of light coming down the sky and then splitting into many lines lengthening towards the earth. Lily knew what they were: ITSA’s nukes, the nukes that it was not supposed to be possible to direct at the earth, the nuclear option optioned at last. ITSA were willing to kill the remainder of their own personnel to stop her, perhaps to destroy all of western Europe.

  She closed her eyes and reached out. She saw them crushed and broken. When she opened her eyes again the lines were still there, the exhaust starting to spread, but they were no longer extending towards the ground.

  Lily looked down across the heather, to the sea, to the horizon.

  She just wanted to leave safely with her baby, to leave this place and these angry, desperate people and their terrible machines.

  From below came a great volley of explosions, every weapon firing simultaneously, let off by some central command. As she closed her eyes and stopped it, Lily wondered if it was Mary who had given the order.

  The soldiers were massing below, more and more jeeps emerging from the landing area surrounding the beach below the lighthouse, many weapons aimed at her. It was their final push; they had guessed that she did not want to kill the soldiers, so they were going to try to overwhelm her with sheer human numbers. It was a cruel tactic.

  They began to charge up the hill, screaming, opening fire, and she shut her eyes and imagined Tia protecting her but somehow protecting them too, keeping them safe and away, away from here. When she opened her eyes their guns were all falling to the ground. They were gone. The island was quiet.

  She felt a wetness running down her leg. She felt her abdomen clenching. She closed her eyes to visualise some antidote, but it was too late. Tia was coming.

  Amber

  Amber woke in daylight, on the beach, freezing, in excruciating pain, but, she was almost certain, alive. It was early morning, she was soaking wet, and gulls were circling high above. A ghastly orb of light dominated the sky.

  She rolled, pushed herself slowly to her feet, and immediately lost her footing on the slippery rocks. She fell limply, her arms suddenly failing to function. The stones came up quickly and she saw stars behind her eyes before she felt the pain of the impact on her forehead.

  “Yes!” a familiar voice said somewhere in her mind. “Can you hear me?”

  Amber rolled onto her back, rubbing her forehead.

  “I can hear you,” she said out loud. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “We’ve not spoken for three days!” Emily said. “Didn’t you miss me?”

  “I…” Amber said, going up on her elbows, looking out over the choppy channel, and then up the beach. There were two empty jeeps with their doors open in the distance. Empty black boats were beached all up the shingle. There was a cow standing in one of them. No soldiers were visible anywhere.

  She remembered with a rush of adrenaline.

  “I thought they deleted you!” she said.

  “Just cut off. I was still conscious in the implant. I managed to get some stuff reactivated through some backups I’d installed that they didn’t find, but not enough. In the end you needed a good crack to the head to get me over the line.”

  Amber rubbed her forehead. “I’m very happy for you,” she said. “How did I get here? I remember being in the middle, it was dark, I – I swallowed quite a lot of water, and then…”

  “You swam,” Emily said. “I watched. I couldn’t help, though. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Oh. Not your fault,” Amber said. “Good to have you back, anyway.”

  “Good to be back,” Emily said. “Seemed like you were surviving without me, just about – well only just, to be honest… but, god. It’s good to have some real–world effect again. Thank you. Hi.”

  “Hi,” Amber said, wrapping her arms around her knees. She was shaking so hard it felt like her bones would shatter.

  “Sorry to get straight into bossing you around, but you need to get moving. Hypothermia and all that.”

  “Oh, god,” Amber said, trying to stand up and falling back down onto her hands and knees. “We need to find the girl, stop them killing her…”

  “You’ve still got that watch you took from the guy, permission to use it?”

  “Granted,” Amber said, looking down at the black thing on her wrist, wiping the moisture off its screen. It lit up obligingly. ITSA watches were notoriously destruction–proof, and an indeterminate length of time in the channel did not seem to have done it any harm.

  “You don’t need to ask me before you do stuff like that, you know,” Amber said. “I trust you.”

  “Technically I do,” Emily said. “Might be able to bypass it, but I suggest we focus on finding the girl for now. Now then: OK, she definitely has a singularity in her, and ITSA are well aware. She’s killed about twenty–five soldiers, and teleported another two hundred down to London, they materialised naked in some warehouse. She completely cleared the island, but more are coming, they’ll be here in less than half an hour. All ITSA’s drones in the area have been destroyed, although they’ve got some massive heavy–duty ones flying in fast from the US with micronukes and nanoslammers, they’ll be here inside an hour too. They tried to nuke from space, too, but it didn’t work. And things are going tits–up everywhere else, there are rumours of grey goo in China.”

  “Where is she?” Amber said, already crawling up a shallow bank off the beach and onto the grassy patch that ran around the edge of the island.

  “Last seen to your right,” Emily said, ‘down near that lighthouse.”

  Amber staggered to her feet.

  Amber ran, skidding through mud spattering up onto her legs, falling and getting up again, trying not to bleed too much. Emily was dampening the pain where she could. The trees were thick and the undergrowth dark.

  There were two of them.

  “Full–quiet mode,” she said, inside.

  She was slipping between trees a hundred metres behind them, Emily and her implants picking out optimum foot–fall and hand–print locations and projecting them onto her retinas. The two noisy ones were talking, and she tuned in as best she could to what they were saying.

  “We’re pretty close,” one said, South African.

  “How close?” another said.

  “Half a mile. It is half a mile – uh – that way.”

  “You said that half an hour ago.”

  “Well she is moving, OK?”

  “Ret, can you see anything?”

  Amber did not hear a response, but the questioner seemed to hear one.

  “There you go, then. Either this ink–carrier leaves no trace, or your machine has broken. Maybe all that ink at the farm knocked it out–”

  There was a brief moment of silence, then, “How close? Where?”

  But Amber could not hear who or what the man was responding to. And after that the voices were silent and she could pick up only two pairs of feet trotting away through the forest. She guessed what had happened: they had a hunter with them, and somehow he had detected her. And now she was being hunted. She veered off their tracks and ran right, holding herself up between high trunks, weaving to try and lose him. She came across a stream and half jumped, half–fell right into it, pulling herself upstream to try and lose the
infrared trail. It would be an obvious ploy but it might buy her a few seconds. But then he would also know he was up against a hunter.

  “They’re after the girl,” Emily said.

  “Duh,” Amber said, running down a bank.

  “And they can track her. And you.”

  “Also obvious. What on earth happened to you?”

  “I think we’re a bit out of sync.”

  Amber focused on running for her life.

  “Sorry. Watch that root,” Emily said, a moment after Amber had hooked it with the top of her foot and fallen hard. Up once again.

  They were after the girl, that was certain, and they had a way of tracking her and Amber. This put her at a terrible disadvantage. But the technology was also perhaps her only chance of finding the girl before ITSA’s reinforcements arrived.

  She was moving up the base of a narrow valley, thick with trees lower down, rocky and exposed higher up. If she were to try and avoid the hunter, double back and skirt around the trees to find the noisier men, she would be almost completely exposed. Had he done this on purpose? Was she in a trap?

  She’d have to kill him, if she could; if the pair were tracking the escaped inker from the farm, for bounty or glory or god knew what, singularity–power even, then this was almost certainly the hunter she had fought before. Their accents all but confirmed it. Not only was he one of the more impressive hunters she’d seen in the field: she had shot him in the back.

  He was a killer with a grudge.

  She made her decision and began to run back the way she had come, towards the beach, reaching in her pocket to pull out the pack of tiny sticky grenades she had taken from the soldier at the hospital and zigzagging, sticking them on trees.

  Jupiter was blazing ever brighter above, looking four or five times brighter than the moon now, its great face uniform and grey, a few gargantuan scars just visible, picked up on its impossible dash across the solar system.