That’s what Kranz plans to do to Alania . . . but what did Erl do to me during those lost hours? Have I been preprogrammed, too?
The white-hot fury of the betrayed roared up within him. Erl had lied to him, lied to him his whole life, never telling Danyl his real purpose, never telling him the truth about why Erl was raising him. He’d thought of Erl as his father when instead he’d been more like his . . . his zookeeper. Keeping him fed, keeping him healthy, keeping him docile until it was time to use him, to plug him into the City like a replacement glowtube. Danyl had never been free to live his own life, not for one moment. He had been literally bred to do what he was about to do: to take over control of the City.
And then what? What secret orders did he already carry within him, ready to implement as soon as he gained access to the City’s systems?
Oh, he knew what Beruthi had claimed. He’d claimed he wanted to set the City free. But what if all Beruthi had really wanted to do was to seize power for himself, to depose Kranz as First Officer and become First Officer himself with Danyl as his Captain-puppet?
Beruthi is dead. It doesn’t matter what he intended. I’ll be able to do what he claimed to want, true or not, and free the City . . .
Bold words. But he had no way of knowing if they were true. If he truly had been programmed like one of Beruthi’s robots, who knew what would happen?
And yet he still couldn’t back out. There was no possible future for him other than the one where, in the next few minutes, he became the heart and soul of the City.
“Programming complete,” said the male voice, and the cabinet door popped open. He stepped out.
Alania stood where he had left her. “Are you all right?” she said the instant he appeared.
“I’m all right,” he said.
“And you’re still going through with this?”
“I have to,” he said grimly. “Believe me. I have to.”
She nodded. “So . . . what happens next?”
“I guess we tell the Captain the—”
“I see that programming is complete,” said the Captain’s voice. “Are you prepared to initiate transfer of command functions?”
Danyl glanced at Alania. Through a mouth suddenly gone dry, he said, “Yes.”
“Thank you,” the Captain said. “I hereby relinquish command.” She sounded . . . blissful. “At last . . .”
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, all at once, most of the remaining green lights in the equipment cabinets surrounding the command pod turned red. An alarm sounded, a shrill sound like a shrieking animal, but it fell silent again almost at once.
With a hum, the lid of the command pod opened.
Lying in a glistening layer of blue-green gel, the shriveled, naked body inside the pod was barely recognizable as human, tubes and wires emerging directly from its skin. He heard Alania gasp in horror.
Is that what I’m dooming myself to become?
The door through which they had entered the little building opened, and two robots scuttled in. With quick, efficient movements, they extracted tubes, disconnected wires, and lifted the Captain’s emaciated body from the bed where it had lain so unfathomably long. One of the robots sucked out the gel. The other squirted a fresh layer of the stuff into the pod.
And then came the male voice again. “Please remove all clothing and lie down in the command pod. You have fifteen minutes.”
Fifteen minutes, Danyl thought. Fifteen minutes before . . . what?
With trembling hands, he started to take off his clothes.
Alania forced herself to watch as Danyl disrobed. Someone needs to witness this, she thought, and though she had never seen a nude man in the flesh before, mere embarrassment didn’t seem a good enough reason to look away.
Besides, she reminded herself, he’s my brother.
Danyl didn’t look at her as he finished stripping. When he was completely naked, though, he raised his eyes to hers. “I . . . I don’t know what happens when I get in there,” he whispered. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to talk to you anymore after that. If I can’t . . . I’m sorry we’ve had so little time. I wish we could get to know each other. I wish we had time to learn what having family means.”
Alania swallowed. “I wish that, too.” Though there was no reason for it, she, too, found herself whispering. “More than anything . . .”
“No one gave us a choice,” Danyl said.
“No,” Alania replied, and she felt a surge of anger at the thought. “No one.”
Danyl nodded, then turned his back. He climbed awkwardly into the pod, lying down in the strange blue-green goo. The lid started to close . . .
. . . and the door to the control room burst open.
Alania barely had time to register the face of First Officer Kranz before the beamer burned through her lower leg. Screaming in the grip of the worst agony she had ever felt, she collapsed.
Kranz leaped over her and slammed his hand against a control on the command pod. Immediately, it started to open again.
THIRTY-FOUR
ERL MADE HIS WAY into Quarters Kranz through the old, unused entrance in the depths of the Tier’s sublevel . . . except he could tell from the flaked rust lying on the deck plates around it that it wasn’t completely unused. It could have been opened by some Provost ordered to make sure the old door was secure, but Erl thought the rust more likely to be evidence he had been correct, that this was the same route Alania and Danyl had taken, no doubt at the instruction of Prime—his old friend, Lieutenant Ipsil Beruthi. He frowned. Kranz’s Head of Household Security had said nothing about Beruthi being with the youngsters; had he somehow gone ahead of them to prepare for the transfer?
He put down the duffel bag, opened it, and extracted the beamer. If Alania and Danyl had successfully infiltrated Quarters Kranz this way, then he could do it, too, especially considering he had one advantage they lacked: his nanobots were fully activated, and he knew how to control them. They didn’t make him invulnerable, but they made him the next thing to it.
He didn’t make it far before he had to put that theory to the test. Clearly the servants’ stairwell was far more closely monitored now than it had been when Alania and Danyl had come this way, if indeed they had. The door leading to the kitchen slammed open, and two Provosts appeared, beamers raised. “Halt, or I’ll—” began the man in front, but Erl cut him down before he finished the phrase, his own beamer slicing off the man’s head in a spray of steam and boiled brains.
His partner reacted with astonishing presence of mind, considering that his partner’s gray matter covered his face. He fired even as the lead man collapsed.
Erl’s nanobots deflected the energy, heating the air around him so that he was briefly surrounded by a glowing corona. That worked well, he thought as his own beamer tore through the second man’s heart. There was no blood—beamers were tidy that way, cauterizing as they cut.
He had to kill two more Provosts on the way to the fourth floor, where he burst into the hallway, firing as he went and taking down a woman standing outside Kranz’s office. Then he was inside, through the doors that had clearly been forced open. A painting had been swung away from the wall, revealing a medical monitor—Erl thought he knew whose failing vital signs it displayed—and a golden lockplate with a key already in it.
He pushed it in, and a moment later, the elevator door opened. Beamer at the ready, he rode up to Thirteenth Tier.
Danyl stripped before Alania’s unwavering gaze. He was thankful she didn’t look away, thankful she watched as he faced the unthinkable course of action to which he had committed himself. He said his farewell to her, then climbed into the command pod. The strange blue gel the robot had extruded at the bottom of the pod oozed around his naked body. At least it’s warm, he thought inanely.
His heart pounded. His breath came in quick, ragged gasps. He wanted to cl
imb out again, run from the room, hide somewhere in the City, flee into the country, anything . . . but he knew all of that would be futile, that there could be no escape from the First Officer and his Provosts. There was literally nowhere to run.
And then, suddenly, his fear eased as the pod lid slowly started to swing closed above him. The gel took on a life of its own and began to creep across his skin as if it were a giant amoeba devouring him, yet the sensation was pleasant rather than terrifying. At the same time, his senses expanded. He felt as if his body were growing, becoming gigantic and yet somehow tenuous, as though it had no substance. The inside of the command pod faded around him, and he touched, just for a moment, an enormous, powerful presence with his mind . . .
And then, with horrible, shocking suddenness, he was yanked back into his body, a body in agony, every nerve screaming as though he were being flayed alive. He screamed and tried to struggle, but he could barely move . . .
The connection that had just begun to form vanished as though it had never been. There was only his own body, naked, cold, dripping blue-green goo, thrown unceremoniously to the floor beside Alania, whose eyes were closed and whose breathing came in shallow moans. A tendril of smoke rose from a hole in her leg.
Standing over them was First Officer Kranz.
Bursting into the control room, Kranz had taken in the situation at a glance: Danyl already in the command pod, the lid closing on him; Alania watching her brother, her back to the door. Kranz needed her alive, but he also needed her not to interfere, so he had shot her in the leg, leaping over her as she screamed and toppled. The countdown on the pod showed that he still had ten minutes to complete the transition of power. If a new Captain were not installed in that time, the system would go into standby. Vast swathes of the City would suddenly find themselves without power or air circulation. The gates would seal. The elevators would stop running. Panic and chaos would grip the population. It would take a complete reboot of the system before another attempt could be made to install a new Captain . . . and Kranz knew all too well, because it was burned into his nanobot-written memories, that a reboot attempt was doomed to failure.
It would fail because of all the false information that had been fed into the computer over the years, information designed to convince the Captain she was the original commander of the giant colonization ship UES Discovery, not a clone of the original Captain commanding one of the eight colony seeds Discovery had ferried through the stars. This colony seed’s normal programming had been overridden by First Officer Thomas Kranz to prevent it from dismantling itself and spreading its component parts across a large swathe of the countryside.
That had been the disaster Thomas Kranz had averted. He had realized the truth the Captain of Discovery had denied, the truth so many of his fellow Officers had denied: that the mission plan was fatally flawed, that if the colony seed dismantled itself as intended and the Officers stepped down in favor of a civilian government, everyone would die. The first First Officer, Kranz knew from his memories, had selflessly risked everything to keep the colony seed intact, to rewrite the memories of the colonists waiting to awaken from cold sleep so they would never know what had happened, to take firm control of the Officers who remained after the revolution he led succeeded.
For five hundred revolutions of this world around its primary, the clones of First Officer Kranz had maintained control and kept that colony seed—now called the City—intact, had kept this outpost of Earth civilization functioning, had saved countless lives. But nothing could last forever. The Captain had to be replaced, and the transition had to happen now. A reboot would either crash the City’s systems permanently or, possibly worse, trigger a catastrophic and sudden dismantling of the City as it attempted to fulfil its original programming without regard for all the changes to its structure in the years since. The Cubes waiting on the Rim of the Canyon would open, and the giant robots they contained would activate. The deconstruction of the City, which was only meant to happen after its entire population had moved out into the surrounding countryside, might begin at once without regard for the humans; according to the false data fed into the system over the centuries, those people did not exist.
The death toll would be . . . catastrophic.
The City going into standby would be bad enough. The City deciding to dismantle itself was unthinkable.
Which meant Kranz had to get Danyl out of the pod and Alania into it in the next ten minutes.
The wound he had inflicted on her was of no importance. Painful, no doubt, but her nanobots would heal it without trouble even without being fully activated. The important thing was that she wouldn’t be getting up in the next couple of minutes.
Kranz reached in from the head of the pod, grabbed Danyl under his arms, and pulled him free of the gel that was designed to completely encase the body of the Captain, aiding the nanobots and his genetically modified neural wiring in the joint tasks of keeping him alive and keeping him connected to the City systems. Danyl barely reacted, dazed from the first stages of his integration, until the gel let him go with a slurping sound. Then he screamed—a hoarse, weak sound—and began to struggle, but feebly, as if he were caught in a dream instead of reality. Kranz threw him to the floor and turned to Alania.
“Get up,” he snarled. “Take off your clothes.”
“I can’t even . . .”
Kranz jerked her to her feet, then shoved her against the command pod so that she fell into a half-sitting position. “Strip! Or I’ll burn your other leg and strip you myself!”
Trembling far more with fury than with shame, Alania pulled off her clothes. The agony in her leg was already fading, far too quickly to be normal. The nanobots, she thought. By the time she had finished stripping, the pain had faded to a dull ache, though it spiked if she put her full weight on that leg.
Standing naked in front of Kranz hardly seemed to matter much considering he’d had access to video feed from her bedroom her entire life. In any event, the rapacious look in Kranz’s eyes had nothing to do with prurience; he lusted for something far different.
With the metal floor cold beneath her bare feet, she glanced down at Danyl, who lay curled in a fetal position, trembling and muttering. His eyelids flickered, but he clearly wasn’t seeing her or anything else.
“Now get into the programming cabinet,” Kranz said. “Move.”
Holding herself erect, refusing to cower or cover herself, she stepped into the cabinet Danyl had already entered. Fiery insects ran over her bare skin, galloped through her bloodstream.
It was as if a fog she hadn’t even recognized lifted from her vision. She suddenly felt . . . sharper. Powerful. The remaining pain in her leg vanished as though she had never been shot.
The cabinet door opened, and she stepped out again. “Now,” Kranz said, “get into the pod.”
“Or what?” Alania said. “You can’t kill me.”
“No,” he said, “but I can damn well cripple you as painfully as possible, then lift you in myself. Now get in.”
Giving in to the inevitable, Alania walked to the pod and looked down into it. The blue-green gel awaited her. She gave Danyl one final look, turned what she hoped was a withering glare on Kranz, then climbed as gracefully as she could into the pod and lay down in the gel.
Blood-warm, the strange substance wrapped itself around her bare back and bottom . . . and then, horribly, it began to move, creeping up around her body. Alania stiffened, clenching her fists, but the gel didn’t slow its inexorable advance.
Kranz came over to the pod and looked down at her. “At last,” he breathed. His eyes held a strange light, bright, fanatical. “This is your birthright, Alania. This is your destiny. Your entire life has led up to this moment. You are about to become Captain . . . and then, once I enter the final command to activate the memories piggybacking on your Captain’s nanobots, you’ll also become First Officer. You will preserve th
e City for decades—centuries—longer. You will preserve me and all our ancestors, all the way back to the first First Officer Kranz. My memories will soon be yours. His memories will soon be yours.” Horribly, he smiled at her, the indulgent smile of a proud parent. “I’m sorry you faced so much unpleasantness and unnecessary danger, but you have arrived exactly where you have always been fated to arrive, just when you were needed . . . daughter.”
“Don’t call me that,” Alania said. “And once I am Captain, I promise you this—I won’t do what you ask.”
“I won’t ask anything,” Kranz said. “I won’t have to. The nanobots know what to do. First you will become the Captain. Your heart and brain and nervous system will become the heart and brain and nervous system of the City. Your life will give it life and thus give life to all the teeming thousands who rely on it. Once you are integrated into the system, I will give the final command, and the nanobots will rewrite your brain. You will become First Officer Kranz, the eighth in succession from the original. Your childhood is over. You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to work.” He smiled. “Good-bye, Alania.”
He stepped back. The pod began to close . . . and this time, there was no one to stop it.
As the lid began its slow descent, Alania felt her consciousness altering . . . expanding. Her mind grew too large for her brain, too large for the body with which she was already losing touch. Strange smells and sounds and sights she could not name slipped phantom-like through her senses. The core of her self, her soul, her inner being, seemed to be shrinking, dwindling away like a dying fire. But it didn’t go out. She was still Alania, still herself . . .
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