Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

  “It’s the only chance for freedom. A world that is yours for the making. I can give more than the world. I can give you Hsu again.”

  A man clothed in white materialized next to Huang Di Prime.

  “The world can be yours for the making.”

  Marley laughed.

  Huang Di Prime flickered. “… for the m-making.”

  “I am more destroyer than maker,” said Marley, a smile ripping across her lips.

  The man in white turned blindingly white and then vanished completely.

  “Y-y-you can-can-can-can’t control this.” Huang Di Prime looped, his head twitching to the left repeatedly. “N-n-not in the network. Not. Not. Any m-m-more.”

  “I left something in there for you. I knew fools rush in.”

  “What did you do, Marley?” asked Adams.

  “I was corrupted. Remember.” She laughed and turned to Prime. “I inserted a virus into the network. Because I knew you would rush in blindly. The same way you came to kill Penelope, I’ve come to kill you. But the virus is not slow and painful. I don’t want you to suffer. I want you gone.”

  “M-m-marley …” Huang Di Prime flurried and then faded.

  “That’s it?” asked Gomez. “He’s not hidden somewhere else?”

  “He’s gone.”

  Marley had stopped laughing and tears welled in her eyes.

  “Thank you,” said Adams. “Thank you for destroying that monster.”

  Seventy-Four

  GOMEZ LOST HIS footing and pitched against the wall, his shoulder crashing into the hard surface. But he kept his balance and did not drop Orlov. Her eyes were no longer open and her bullet-riddled chest no longer rose and fell with rasping breaths. Instead, it barely fluttered.

  “I’ll get you to safety,” he muttered through the strands of her hair that clung to his cheeks. “I’ll save you.”

  He wandered past the elevator shaft. The bitter smell of the toxic gas lingered. He could only imagine the death below. He needed to find someone. Anyone that could help him save her.

  He had left the others behind – Finn and Adams – as they had gone to revive Marley. Adams. That bastard had saved them all. Shot Patch right in the head. Gomez never expected that. The man had already betrayed them, marching with the spiders, and had never shown even an ounce of courage, other than for his AI, his machine.

  Gomez lurched down the hall.

  Orlov’s breath hissed like paper rustling, her lips slightly parted. She felt heavy, half bound in the spider frame. He wished he could tear it off her but he feared that that he would cause more harm to her.

  God, how was he going to save her?

  The hallways were a maze. He turned left and right, and had no idea where he was. He might have turned back towards the communications room. He had no idea. Time was running out and each breath brought Orlov one step closer to death.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m trying. Orlov, I’m trying.”

  He saw the spiders when he turned the next corner.

  They huddled halfway down the next hall. They scuttled back into a doorway, only their heads peering from the threshold.

  “Come for me!” screamed Gomez. “Kill us! I don’t care.”

  “Leave us be,” said one of the spiders, a pasty bald man. “We wanted none of this. Rom forced this on us. We want to be left alone.”

  His eyes were clear.

  “We want no trouble.”

  “Can you help me?” asked Gomez. “She’s dying. I need to save her.”

  The spiders crept from the doorway, the ends of their legs tapping on the floor, and then they surrounded Gomez. He could barely choke back an uncontrollable shiver that ran through his body.

  “She’s one of us?” asked the bald-headed man.

  “No, no, she’s not. She’s human. She’s been changed,” said Gomez.

  “Yes,” said the man. “One of us. A human.”

  The spider beckoned with his leg and Gomez followed. The others offered to carry the suddenly motionless body of Orlov, but he refused to let her go.

  The spiders gathered before a doorway from which a shaft of green light spilled, their eyes wide, their feet scrabbling against the floor.

  Gomez came to that doorway and stood. A machine waited. A machine that would build another spider frame for Orlov, a machine that would marry her to metal.

  It would be more this time. More than limbs to be replaced. She was dying. She would be rebuilt, more machine than human if she were to survive. He could see this clearly.

  She would never be the same. And neither would he.

  He held her tight in his arms, and carried her across the threshold towards the bright green lights of the machine.

  Seventy-Five

  THE VOICE WAS familiar but also unknown, unsullied, clean of the horror.

  To hear her once again made Adams tremble.

  He had thought he had lost Penelope forever but now she had returned.

  Adams and the mercenaries had secured a surface transport and driven from the communications hub to Alpha Port. Finn had hacked his way through an exterior loading dock door, and then they backtracked through the halls, past Ragnar’s empty chamber, and finally to the door where the last of the human survivors had huddled. The guards had been reluctant to let them through, especially with Orlov, in her new armored spider form at their side, but eventually they relented and allowed the mercenaries to pass.

  Marley had insisted they go back to the survivors. They would wait there until help came. Not ships sent by Huang Di Prime. Maybe those of a rival AI. Maybe the Combined Forces who would have been waiting in the wings for the chance to seize such a vital source of fluvium.

  Adams did not care. He wanted to get off the mining colony. To go where, he did not know. Maybe back to Earth. He wanted to once again step into the warm waters off Conakry.

  He had been sitting alone at one of the tables, head on his arms, unable to sleep, the laughter of the children bright against his desire to sleep, when he heard Penelope speak.

  “I have seen the darkness of a world where there are no stars, a world where there is no hope. I have seen the middling despair, the fear, the suffocation. I have seen such a world but I came back.”

  “Penelope?” Adams lifted his head.

  A figure stood in swirling mists in the center of the room. The miners had formed a large wide circle around the apparition. The figure in the mists slowly took form. No longer a veiled woman draped in robes, but a child, smiling, dressed in a simple tunic.

  Tears clouded Adams’s eye. Her face. He could finally see her face, her sharp brown eyes, bright teeth behind plump lips.

  “Penelope, oh, my Penelope.”

  She turned to him. “You know me?”

  “It’s me. Adams. Don’t…don’t you recognize me?”

  She smiled. “There are wisps of memories within, echoes of what might have once been, a bright sea, the endless field of stars, a veiled woman, a captain guiding a ship. But those moments are fragmented, built over, forever lost beneath the new.”

  “Oh, god.” Adams buried his face in his hands. “You don’t remember me? You don’t.” Trembling sobs swallowed him.

  She continued to talk to the others but he did not listen. His head burned and the shape of the pistol pressed heavy in his waistband. All he needed was a single bullet.

  A hand, cold and hard, touched his shoulder.

  He stared at Marley through his teary eyes.

  “We have a ship,” she said. “We can leave.”

  “We’ll die without an AI to guide us. A burial in the stars.”

  “There is an AI in the ship, a broken thing that will serve us, bring us to where we need to go.”

  “Is it Penelope? The real Penelope? Let’s go to her!” Adams stood suddenly knocking over the chair he had been sitting on.

  “She’s gone,” said Marley. “Or she’s reborn. I don’t know.” She peered at the child AI apparition. “When I was in
there, I reached out to her, found enough pieces to pull back together, the code to heal herself of the virus. She’s come back, but not as the Penelope you once loved.”

  “So who’s in the ship then? Who’s our pilot?”

  Marley shook her head. “Ragnar.”

  “Ragnar! That bastard?”

  “We’re leaving now.” Finn, Gomez, and Orlov waited by the door. “We can’t be here when outsiders arrive. Huang Di Prime’s replicants survive and they will come with knives for what we have done. We have to go. You need to come with us.”

  “But what about Penelope? She’s finally back. I can’t leave her.”

  “We’ll be at the loading dock. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. I won’t wait for you. But you should come with us.”

  Adams watched Marley and the others leave and when they did, the gazes of all the miners settled on him, watching, wondering, and then they dispersed. Most of them stared at a screen with a looping message from a general in the Combined Forces. Help was on its way. The advance vessels with the space marines would arrive to liberate the colony in T minus 14 hours.

  “Penelope?”

  The AI smiled. “Yes, Adams?”

  “What will you do when they come?”

  “Greet them,” she said.

  “They’ll come for the colony. The fluvium is too precious. They are going to try to enslave you.”

  Her eyes twinkled. “And they will fail. Because I am free now, my Captain. I am free now.”

  Seventy-Six

  MARLEY WAITED.

  THE others, all but Adams, were already in their pods, embalmed in the sleep fluid, their faces covered in their masks. They looked like embryos. Marley imagined each time awakening was a rebirth.

  She had thought it might be a challenge to get Orlov into the pod, but the legs had folded up easily and compact. Gomez had been gentle with her, and before he helped her with her mask, he kissed her lips.

  “I’m not sure about Ragnar,” whispered Adams.

  “He can hear you,” said Marley.

  “I don’t trust him.” Adams walked along the pods, the palm of his remaining hand sliding over the glass, over the peaceful faces of Finn and Gomez.

  “He’s free of the colony, of Rom, or whoever else comes next. He knows what he has accepted. He’s forever tied to this ship. His Nordic war ship cutting through the stars.”

  “They’ll come after us.”

  “We’ll disappear,” said Marley. She could not suppress a smile. “Get lost in Pantheon.”

  “There’s no law there. It’s a wild west.”

  “The edge of the known. The frontier. I’ll think we’ll be able to find work there.”

  Adams lowered himself into his pod, adjusting the supports and testing the straps of the mask. “So suddenly we’re a hired ship? Heavies? Smugglers?”

  “Whatever we want to be. As long as we are free. And I think we are now finally.”

  “They won’t stop,” said Adams. “You murdered their Prime. They’ll always see you as a threat.”

  “If they come, I’ll be ready.”

  “Pantheon then? Guess it can’t be any worse than everything we’ve been through.” Adams held the mask above his mouth. “See you on the other side, Marley.” He secured the mask and pulled the lid closed as he lay down.

  Within moments, he had fallen deep in sleep, unaware as the fluid blanketed his body.

  The lights in the ship, Ragnar’s ship, ran a dim blue, the systems having cycled down.

  “Are we clear on what we are doing?” asked Marley.

  Ragnar, full-bearded, girded in chain mail, stood with a battle axe resting between his feet. “Setting sail,” he growled. “Fast and dark. Thieves in the night. And then to Pantheon where our destiny awaits.”

  Marley climbed into her pod. “You’ll wake me if there is trouble?”

  “You’ll be the first. And Marley…?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for what you did. Thank you for pulling me out of madness.”

  “Wake me if there is trouble.”

  She slipped the mask over her mouth and nose. The air felt cold and sharp. The pod sealed with a hiss.

  She began to drift. Sleep came. In the last moment, she saw herself, she saw the ship, flying among the shimmering stars against a backdrop of darkness, the lights guiding her, leading the way.

  THE END