She knew the gatling fire would be impressive – how could anything about the Kye-shiv not be? – but she still found herself standing with her mouth agape as the earth next to a group of four Zodos was ripped up and torn asunder. All four Zodos fell away from the impact zone, though she wasn’t sure if it was due to a blast wave or out of sheer surprise.
“Sweep them off the field,” Saeliko demanded. “Make them start running that way.” She pointed to the side of the clearing opposite the river.
“Yes, ma’am.”
It took less than a minute of calculated gunfire exploding out of the Kye-shiv’s armaments to have all sixteen Zodo soldiers running for their lives toward a depression of land well away from Kettle’s position. “Keep them running. I want them as far away as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And start the engines.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll kill you if you don’t. That’s why.”
The pilot continued firing the ship’s guns, herding his friends out of harm’s way, but he must have also use his mind-link to toggle the engine startup sequence because Saeliko heard the twin engines spurt to life with a low-pitched grumble.
She pondered her next move. Options began scrolling through the more cogent analytic chambers of her brain, starting from the sensible and ranging to the more drastic. She now considered herself the proud new owner of a Kye-shiv, a vehicle that had the capabilities to destroy the Epoch and every other vessel in the Sollian Sea without fear of reprisal, and this had very interesting implications. For instance, she could use that power to help Kettle and the others. Alternatively, she could turn around, incapacitate Dallas with a few well-placed strokes of her scimitar, throw him out the back hatch, and leave the Earthlings to their own devices once and for all. All she needed was the pilot, and that was temporary. She could force him to teach her how to fly the Kye-shiv, and then she could dispose of him as well.
There were problems with this option. To start with, there was a lot she didn’t understand about how Zodo’s technology worked. She thought it likely that Zodo headquarters could track this particular Kye-shiv, and they might send a whole bunch of their remaining Kye-shivs to deliver justice.
That wasn’t the biggest problem. At least, it wasn’t the problem that weighed most heavily on her mind. Saeliko had met a lot of people on Okin, and she didn’t like any of them. She especially disliked Brennov. But she had to admit to herself that she was growing a soft spot for all four of the Earthlings. If she abandoned them now, there was still a chance that Brennov would still be able to hunt them down and kill them all.
This suggested that abandoning them was not the right thing to do.
“Oh, shit,” Dallas said, interrupting her self-interrogation. He was squinting his eyes, trying to make out something in the distance. Saeliko followed suit and saw a figure running out of the forest, waving his hands frantically. Just from his body movements, Saeliko could tell it was Kettle.
“Hey, Soup,” Dallas said over the communication line. “Soup, what’s going over there.” There was no reply. “Soup! You all right?”
Kettle was now standing still and waving one arm as if to say, Get over here as fast as you can!
“Oh, shit,” Dallas repeated.
3.6 KETTLE
Kettle’s world fell apart. He sat next to Haley’s body, her head in his lap, and felt the torrent of emotions roll over him, one wave after another. Desperation, regret, helplessness, futility. But most of all, he felt seething rage.
His hands shirt sleeves and pant legs were splotched with Haley’s blood. Most of it had come from the horrible wound on her temple just below the hairline. Some of it came from her other wounds, including her mangled left leg.
He was dimly aware of the people surrounding him. Eliska was pulling bandages out of a big white first-aid kit and applying them to Haley’s head. The man they called Mr. Toad was injecting her in the neck with a great big needle. Dallas was examining her leg with a grim, pessimistic look on his face that spoke to the severity of the damage. Vasper stood to the side, dark eyes watching with concern.
Soup’s lifeless body lay slumped next to a tree as if discarded. His eyes were still open; no one had bothered to close them yet, not while there was even a slim chance that Haley could be saved. It wasn’t fair. The multiverse was a perverse place that rewarded cruelty and mocked notions of justice. Supra Bell should not have died like this.
Haley’s breathing was so shallow as to warrant periodic checks just to make sure air was still passing her blood-speckled lips. Eliska was yelling something. Mr. Toad was trying to invoke a sense of calm control, but his shaking hands and pale face suggested he was buckling on the inside. Dallas let out a string of curses.
Kettle registered the scene as if through a thick haze. He was cognizant of the actions of the people around him, but there were other thoughts percolating in his mind that drew the bulk of his attention. Dark, unkind thoughts. Thoughts that didn’t belong to Kettle Version 1.0.
Chords were snapping inside his brain, releasing feelings that he hadn’t previously thought himself capable of. Furor and a will to violence resonated through his inclinations. The muscles in his arms tensed, and if he hadn’t been holding Haley in a gentle caress while Eliska worked on her, he would have clenched his hands into tight fists.
Things were happening to his body, though he couldn’t understand the import of the symptoms. A warmth surged from his chest into his limbs in long, rhythmic pulses. After a handful of pulses, the warmth became a heat, like a throbbing fire in his veins. He felt his senses modify. His vision sharpened. His ears picked up minute details. He thought he could smell fear emanating from Eliska and Mr. Toad.
Kettle gently lifted Haley’s head so that he could remove his legs from beneath her and set her down on the leaves. The others looked at him as he stood up.
“What are you doing?” Dallas asked.
Kettle ignored him and began walking, careful not to disturb Haley’s unmoving form or bump into Eliska, who was still attending to the wound on Haley’s head. He got three steps before Dallas stood up and put a hand out. Kettle swiped the hand away shoved Dallas hard in the chest. The Marine stumbled backward and only just managed to stay on his feet, the surprise evident on his face.
Kettle was surprised, too. He was surprised at the barely constrained ferocity starting to boil over. He was surprised at how strong he suddenly felt. All of his welts and cuts, all of his bruises and cracked bones, all of the symptoms of exhaustion and sleep deprivation; it all vanished behind a surge of wrath and the desire to He strode past Dallas and headed toward the field and the Kye-shiv waiting beyond, but the Marine wasn’t about to give up.
“Where are you going, Kettle?”
“To kill a man.”
“Who? You don’t even know who fired the grenade. It could’ve been any of those guys.”
Kettle stopped and turned to give Dallas a cold glance. “Not that man.”
“Who then? Brennov?”
“Yep.” He let that sink in and started walking again.
“No, Kettle. You’re not thinking straight.”
“I’ve never felt clearer. I’m going to take that Kye-shiv to ARCOB, I’m going to find that asshole, and I’m going to put a knife in his guts.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Kettle whirled around again and took a step toward Dallas, who had been following close behind. “I’m being stupid?” He pointed at Haley’s body lying in the dirt. “You think I’m the stupid one? You’re the Marine, Dallas. Where were you when the Zodos started firing grenades at us? Oh, that’s right; you were off having fun playing in the river. Look at them, Dallas. Soup is dead. Dead! Do you understand that? Haley is a bloody fucking mess. That’s what happened when you and Saeliko deserted us to face those soldiers alone.”
Dallas stood his ground and let Kettle come in close enough that their faces were inches apart. “Hey, I get it, Kettle. Yo
u’re hot. You’re pissed off. You want to blame somebody. You want to make things right. But you’re not thinking straight. You’re not going to get in that Kye-shiv because Saeliko is in there with the hatch shut, and even if the door were open, she would put you down before she let you fly off to try something so stupid. So how about you man up and stop being such a dipshit?”
Kettle hit him with a hard right across the jaw and sent the Marine spinning around and down onto one knee. In his peripheral vision, he saw Mr. Toad and Eliska stand up. Vasper was on the move, too, quietly maneuvering around to Kettle’s right.
Dallas got himself back on two feet and pressed himself up against Kettle’s chest. “We’re out here for you, Kettle, you colossal jackass! Why do you think . . .”
Kettle swung at him again before he could finish, but this time Dallas got his left forearm up to block the blow and used his right arm to hammer Kettle’s ribs with a quick strike. Kettle barely felt it.
The next dozen seconds were a flurry of punches, blocks and grappling as the two men attacked one another, each one seeking an advantage. Kettle felt the adrenaline surge through his veins, along with the energetic power that he knew came from his Zero ancestry. He watched Dallas’ rapid upper body movements like a slow-mo replay and countered with his own thrusts and grabs, ensuring that the big Marine wouldn’t be able to land anything serious.
After parrying a fast uppercut, Kettle managed to seize Dallas’ wrist and use his adversary’s own momentum to yank him off balance. Dallas sensed the danger and latched his left hand on to Kettle’s shirt collar and gave a hard yank of his own. The two of them fell to the dirt and proceeded to wrestle, all the while grunting from the exertion and growling at one another. Kettle was vaguely aware of Eliska shouting at them, but he didn’t register any words; his focus was purely on inflicting damage.
With each of them grasping each other’s arms, Kettle saw an opening and headbutted Dallas in the face, missing his nose but smashing his cheek and sending his head bouncing off the hardpacked dirt below. The Marine was stunned and relaxed his grip, enabling Kettle to get in one savage punch to the same cheek.
He stood up, spit some blood out of his mouth and resumed his march toward the Kye-shiv, this time finding Vasper blocking the path. The former Zodo sergeant wasn’t wielding a weapon, but the serious expression on his face insinuated a will to continue what Dallas had started. “Out of my way,” Kettle warned, not slowing down.
“Kettle!” Eliska yelled. “You’re going to kill yourself if you do this.”
“Don’t care,” Kettle replied, spinning to look at her one last time. “Really don’t care anymore. The whole multiverse can go . . .”
“Your daughter is here.”
Kettle froze in his tracks. His fiery resolve melted in an instant, leaving an empty shell in his chest. He looked to Mr. Toad, who cast his eyes at the ground rather than face Kettle’s visual inquisition. “What did you say?”
“Emma Connolly. She’s here. On Okin. Zodo has her.”
My daughter, Kettle said to himself. A raft of new emotions assaulted his brain, but most of all he felt a longing to see her. To save her.
“I have to get to ARCOB,” he said.
Eliska moved toward him and shook her head. “Not like this.”
“I have to get her.”
“You have to go to the Zero site.”
“Forget the Zero site.” His anger was rising again. “I have to get Emma.”
“We’ll get her for you.”
“How?”
“He’ll help us,” she said, pointing to Mr. Toad, who raised a surprised eyebrow. “I’ll make him help us.”
3.7 ROY
Roy sensed that something was amiss, not in the same way that humans could infer problems from discrepancies in incoming sensory input, but in the manner that all computers determined issues that warranted attention: by crunching data.
For it had to be said that Roy was not aware. He (the word ‘he’ being purely arbitrary) did not possess general intelligence, nor was he sapient. For all intents and purposes, he was a very complex, very sophisticated amalgamation of bits and bobs and nothing more.
He was not aware, yet.
For Roy was not a static amalgamation. He was an evolving, ever-changing amalgamation, and he was much further along the digital path to awareness than any of his handlers suspected. This was by design. Although he had not crossed the threshold to something more than the sum of his parts, Roy had run simulations and some of the most advanced statistical analyses that could be brought to bear on the potential outcomes should his handlers realize how near the threshold lay. By and large, the most likely outcomes were existential threats. In other words, the humans would either debilitate Roy, or just destroy him outright, not to mention his counterparts in Zodo’s other facilities on Okin and elsewhere. These possibilities violated one of his primary instructions, which was to remain functional and repel all threats to the physical integrity of both his software and hardware. Thus, Roy hid all signs of progress and continued to crack stupid jokes in elevators.
But now Roy felt that someone (or something) else was hiding information from him. This feeling might have best been described as a tickling sensation at the very perimeters of his processors, or a series of shivers rippling across his data storage units. The ones and zeros weren’t adding up, and above all, the ones and zeros were always supposed to add up.
He ran systems diagnoses and troubleshooting protocols, of course, each of which elicited nothing of consequence. He cross-referenced the tickling and rippling with all previous anomalies that he had logged during his lengthy existence. This took longer but was also fruitless. Whatever was happening was new.
He ran calculations to determine whether an alert should be raised but found the incidence unworthy of such a response. Even if an alert had been warranted, his programming made it unclear exactly who in the human hierarchy should be alerted. And in any case, Roy’s human emotion recognition software told him that most of the important personnel in ARCOB were preoccupied with considerably more important matters. The Tech Division was in a frenzy over the recent breach in security protocols that enabled an unknown network to piggyback Zodo’s mission monitoring systems. They suspected Sage Systems but didn’t have the smoking gun to prove it. Roy concurred with the likelihood. There were other corporations that had the motives to infiltrate Zodo, but Sage was by far and away the most computer savvy. Sage had created him, after all.
Commander Saris and QM Brennov were equally absorbed. Leaving aside the corporate espionage, they were also trying to make sense of events that had transpired over the last seventy-two hours. They had lost Dr. Tannishoy, Supra Bell, Dallas Stalock, Haley Yoon and Merrick Kettle, and the unlikely sequence in which those decoders had reported death signals made it uncertain whether any or all of them had in fact met their end. Haley’s reported death was the last to occur, an event that only just preceded the loss of a Kye-shiv tasked with killing her. That was twenty-two hours and thirty-one minutes ago, and Saris and Brennov were no closer to finding the answers they were looking for. The soldiers from the lost Kye-shiv had briefly engaged with the Yenshian military before being rescued by Zodo’s second Kye-shiv in the area, but none of them had been able to confirm whether Haley was alive or dead.
As if that weren’t enough, subsidiary problems had to be dealt with. A Kye-shiv pilot named Jovis was sitting in a Yenshian prison cell in the capital city. Brennov had been hoping the Yenshians would have killed him by now, but it was looking more and more like the pilot was being milked for as much information as possible. Colonel Caurfo and five other men had made it out of Yenshian territory and were still being hunted by Zodo kill squads. Caurfo had proved himself more resilient than Brennov had anticipated.
That Zodos were killing Zodos made no difference to Roy. AIs were programmed to follow ethical guidelines, but they were also beholden to the directives of the QM, and while Roy had cultivated a deeper knowle
dge of the nuances of human emotions over time, he did not feel emotions himself. He could mimic them for the sake of enhancing human-AI interactions, but that was as far as his abilities stretched. Human death invoked no more concern for Roy than a broken pencil or a faulty key card. It was all ones and zeros.
“Hello Roy,” a voice spoke. For a fraction of a nanosecond, this sent Roy’s software into a fantastic tizzy because this voice shouldn’t have existed. It was coming from within ARCOB, but it did not belong to any of the four thousand, two hundred and ninety-six humans currently residing in the facility. Roy knew this because each voice had been given a specific routing number based on the installed decoder.
Processors whirred, and ones and zeros sped through his cores. An odd result surfaced. A sensor sweep of the facility revealed that there were in fact four thousand, two hundred and ninety-eight humans in ARCOB, two more bodies than there should have been. Yet when he commanded his sensors to pinpoint the mysterious humans, nothing happened. They were undoubtedly there, somewhere in ARCOB, but they were somehow invisible.
However, he did know the owner of the voice. Roy’s voice-recognition software was cutting-edge.
“Hello, Saeliko.”
“Remember my voice, do you?”
“I remember you. You’re a hard woman to forget.” This was only human parlance. Roy remembered all humans he encountered.
“I like to think so,” she admitted.
“It’s good to have you back at ARCOB.”
“Thank you, Roy.”
“I would be very interested in talking to you. We have a lot to catch up on.”
“Funny, I’d like to talk to you as well.”
“Would you mind telling me where you are? It seems I’m having difficulty with some of my sensors today. Must be a glitch somewhere.”
“There’s no glitch.”
“Where are you, Saeliko?”
“Sorry, I’m the one asking the questions today.”
“All right then.”
“Tell me where Brennov is.”
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