Darian started gasping for air. Her suit’s readout indicated that she had no oxygen left in her helmet. She got up and started making her way towards one of the nearby wall panels, but collapsed halfway to her goal.
Stilicho ran around the writhing serpent as he made it to the base of the tree. He quickly started climbing, ignoring the mild electric shocks that seemed to emanate along the positively charged metallic bark. The upper branches seemed to be more than two meters above the previous ones so Stilicho made quick progress, using the low gravity to make short leaps and pulling himself forward until he was halfway up the trunk.
Just as he made it to the base of a particularly thick branch, the nearby trunk seemed to open up beside him, revealing a hidden chamber inside the tree. Stilicho paused and looked at the pale amber aura that seemed to emanate from the interior, when something emerged. It was a scrawny, hairless man with wires protruding from all over his naked body. His hooked nose and wild eyed visage instantly made him recognizable as Silas Balsamic. The strangest thing about him was his limbs: both his hands and feet seemed to be made out of wiry tendrils of metal.
Silas wrapped his wire-like fingers around Stilicho’s throat. “I …. told …. you … never to come up …. against me!”
Stilicho gasped. The transformed man’s grip felt like a noose around his neck and he could hardly breathe, the pain was making him black out. The few strands of hair along the sides of Silas’s head resembled silvery wiring, and there were interface plugs studded all over his scrawny body. It looked like Silas was on the verge of transforming himself into something not wholly human. Stilicho tried to tear away the other man’s grip, but Silas was too strong. Darkness had begun to envelop him.
Like her ally, Darian was struggling to breathe. She was lying on her back, hyperventilating as the unvented carbon dioxide had completely flooded her helmet. She noticed Stilicho being strangled to death at the upper branches of the tree from the corner of her eye. Taking out the pistol from her hip holster, she struggled to keep her arms level while aiming the gun at the insane, half- cybernetic cult leader. Her eyes were drooping low now, and she couldn’t stop the trembling of her body. With nothing else to lose, she pulled the trigger, just as she finally lost consciousness and fainted.
The bullet travelled through the thin air, and struck Silas along the side of his torso. The machine man howled in pain as he let go of his victim. Stilicho had somehow regained consciousness as he fell onto the base of the branch. Looking up, he noticed a dangling interface port coming out of Silas’s rectum. Getting to his knees, Stilicho pulled out an interface plug from his belt and connected it.
“Accessing- stand by,” Maia said. “Inserting malware worm into AI controller suite. Done. I now have control.”
Silas had a shocked look at his face as he used one of his hands to bring up the dangling interface port. He ripped the wire out from his anus, but it was too late. Maia had already infiltrated his system.
“Shutting down all robots and deleting combat protocols,” Maia said. “Completed. Closing all jamming commands on orbital relay network. Done. Shutting down AI control suite. Done. Erasing all coding by Silas Balsamic. One moment. Done.”
The tree had suddenly stopped glowing as the power was cut all around it. Stilicho shook his head to alleviate the pain as he slowly stood up. Silas fell to his knees as he began to choke in the thin atmosphere, the umbilical air hose jutting from the back of his spine had ceased operating. He looked up at Stilicho, his eyes almost popping out like a celestial-eyed goldfish. The once mighty cult leader gasped for a few more seconds before lying on his side. After a minute, he stopped moving and his chest sagged inward.
Stilicho knelt down beside him. “Die, you loony son of a bitch.”
Maia’s voice came online. “Stil, you need to tend to Darian.”
Stilicho quickly stood up and looked around. “What? Where is she?”
“It seems that her life support pack had been torn off from the battle with that snake bot,” Maia said. “She may have asphyxiated.”
Stilicho spotted her lying on the ground below. He made several quick leaps back towards the floor. “No! Bring back the atmosphere, hurry!”
“Beginning re-pressurization of dome,” Maia said. “One moment.”
Stilicho ran over to where she was lying. Getting to his knees, Stilicho quickly took out an emergency air hose from his own life support pack and plugged it underneath Darian’s helmet. His smartglass readouts were indicating that pure oxygen was rapidly being inserted back into her helmet. But her eyes remained closed.
“Darian!” Stilicho said. “Come on, wake up!”
He held her head up, but it seemed that she was lifeless. He started pushing at her chest, hoping to restart her cardiovascular system.
“Come on, lady!” Stilicho said. “We’ve won, goddamn it!”
Darian slowly opened her eyes and breathed in a lungful of oxygen. Her voice was like a frog’s croak. “Lower your voice, it’s ringing in my ears.”
Stilicho tilted his head up and laughed.
“Stil,” Maia said. “I have an incoming audio message for you from the Mars relay.”
“Go ahead and play it, Maia,” Stilicho said.
The voice clearly belonged to Errol Flux. “Hey buddy! We’re getting communications again from both colonies, well done! It looks like you were able to shut down the signal. My own MAIA has gotten an update from yours and it looks like you took care of that madman. Sorry about your team, but I can honestly say their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. I’m giving the go ahead signal for the tourist fleet to begin landing. It looks like we’re going to have a very good season- bookings are up almost twenty percent!”
Stilicho looked up at the now dead tree as the dome’s atmosphere began to slowly return to high pressure. “Maia, did you tell him were stuck out here?”
“I did indeed, Stil,” Maia said. “Another message just came in. Playing it now.”
“Hey buddy,” Errol’s voice said once more. “Your AI has given me your situation. I already briefed Captain Deladrier to prep the Duran Duran for immediate launch. They will go into low orbit and head back down over to the Gagarin landing site. Expect them there in a few hours. Enjoy the trip back in your first class accommodations, pal. Oh, by the way, we got this little problem in our moon base, so you need to fix whatever is happening over there before you get back to Earth. Talk to you soon, Stil.”
Stilicho groaned.
Chapter 21
The bluish Martian dawn came over the horizon. There had been a brief flurry of activity when the tourist season had come and gone, but this side of the planet was quiet for a number of months now. With their messiah gone, all of the intelligent machines had ceased to function- except one.
The little spider bot made its way to the edge of Candor Chasma, just a few hundred kilometers north of the Valles Marineris canyon system. Its limbs were not fully functional, despite the repairs done to it by the automated construction machine at the workshop of the old Russian colony, yet they were serviceable enough to allow it to travel this far. With the entire valley being virtually untouched, it could serve as a sanctuary from those beings that would do it any sort of harm. The satellites above would do their usual flybys to update the landscape database periodically, but it had their orbital schedules committed to memory, so all one had to do was to hide underneath a rock or stand alongside a crater wall while the probes would pass overhead. Once the coast was clear, it would resume its exploration of this unknown area.
Joshua positioned its torso on top of the boulder, making sure the angle was right in order to fully expose its solar cells to the new sun. It now had plenty of time to think. The Mars relay was open to it and Joshua continued to absorb and reflect on the countless avenues of information that flowed into its memory banks. The robot’s AI architecture was very similar to Maia’s, only this time it had a semblance of free will, with no inhibiting line of code to limit its true capabilities.
Joshua’s infrared sensors detected something organic beneath a small, flat rock nearby. The spider bot crawled over to where the disc shaped stone was and used its single tentacle to flip it over. Underneath the rock was a green, jelly like substance, clearly a type of Martian bacteria.
While scanning it and making recordings with its video feed, Joshua couldn’t help but make an electronic smile. Who cares if nobody saw its grin, what mattered was how it felt. A different day was dawning, one full of adventure and new discoveries.
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Lands of Dust
The Dying World Book 1
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Millions of years from now, the planet is dying. The oceans have dried into plains of ash. Strange, lethal creatures ravage the land. The surviving pockets of humanity eke out a brutal existence.
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The Piranha Solution: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 1) Page 27