by P. R. Adams
Rimes waved Lazovic over. “Send your fastest runner back to your shuttle. Have him take the shuttle back to Sergeant Bo’s position and retrieve Captain Meyers, please. Time is important here.”
Lazovic nodded and stepped back. He waved a small man over, relayed Rimes’s orders, then patted the man. The man nodded and then was gone in a spray of sand. Rimes turned back to Zayd.
Rimes pulled his water container from his hip holster and offered it to Zayd. “Who do you work for, Miss Zayd?”
Zayd slowly shook her head. Her face was unreadable. She could be refusing the water container, refusing to answer the question, or she could just be unaware.
Rimes guessed she was refusing to answer. “Your task force fled. They left you here. The other two gunships are destroyed. You’re the only ones alive. They’re not coming back for you. You won’t be rescued.”
Zayd lowered her head, but Rimes saw a tear drop along the side of her nose first. Behind her an Arabic man stepped forward. Like Zayd, he was young and powerfully built.
“We cannot tell you who we work for,” the young man said angrily. “It is part of our contract.”
Rimes turned to look at the young man and nodded. “I believe you, Mister…?”
“Karim Khalil,” the young man answered.
“You’re former military, right?” Rimes asked.
“Yes.”
“Released during the drawdowns?”
Khalil stood still.
“We have DNA from the corpses of your friends. We’ll have your DNA too. We’ll know in a month or two. You can tell us or we can figure it out on our own.”
Khalil looked at his crazed commander. “Yes, released.”
“So let me tell you what I think I know.” Rimes considered the two of them for a moment. “You were released from the military and found yourself without a job. After a fruitless search for work, you were recruited into a mercenary organization. Jobs were hard to come by. Your organization was falling apart. Am I getting this right?”
Khalil hesitated for a moment. “Yes.”
“Good. You were approached some months back by a representative of a potential client. They checked you out and made you an offer.” After Khalil nodded, Rimes continued. “You were transferred to a colony world where you underwent training away from prying eyes. About four, maybe five months ago, you were identified for a mission, given weapons, armor and flown to a forward position. How am I doing, Khalil?”
“Someone already spoke?”
“We’re still gathering data, but they gave us a start, yes. What happened to them doesn’t have to happen to you.”
The slavering mercenary commander lunged toward Khalil. “You know what you signed on for! Honor the contract!” Sweat dripped down the commander’s face, and his eyes bugged out.
The bizarre behavior and the strange disconnectedness of the wounded mercenary woman in the complex made Rimes think of Walter Theroux, the banking cartel agent who’d inserted himself into the Sahara operation years earlier. When he’d entered the dead zone Theroux had become even more distant and strange than before. Eventually he’d been revealed to be operating through a proxy, a remote-run, advanced humanoid shell.
Proxies. Rimes pointed to the commander. “I wouldn’t be too concerned about him. I’m not sure he’ll be able to remember any of this when it’s all over.” Rimes watched Khalil and Sayd for a reaction.
Khalil exchanged a quick glance with Zayd, then bowed his head in shame. “Our other commander died in the crash.”
“Say nothing more, Arab scum!” The mercenary commander fought against his bonds and lunged at Khalil again. “Say nothing more!”
Rimes motioned to Lazovic, who had two of his men drag the commander away, kicking and screaming. Even bound, the man was a challenge for Lazovic’s men. A shuttle settled nearby, and Meyers jogged down the rear ramp.
When Meyers approached, Rimes excused himself for a moment, then headed toward Meyers.
“Problem, sir?”
“Fewer now.” Rimes jerked his head toward the crazed commander being dragged away. “That’s the last of their leadership. They’re close to cracking, but he’s got them spooked.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Meyers jogged after Lazovic’s men.
Rimes returned to Khalil and Zayd. “Sorry about that. Captain Meyers is an engineer. A brilliant one. I wanted him to observe your commander’s degeneration.”
“An engineer?” Khalil said, more nervous than confused.
“Oh,” Rimes said with a half-smile. “Maybe your employers didn’t tell you? We’ve had some experience with proxies, although not with the newer models. That troop transport you came in on, it’s the one rigged with the new communications gear for the telepresence operations, right?”
Khalil blinked and licked his lips. “Yes.”
“We figured as much.” Rimes sighed inwardly in relief and hoped his luck would hold. “You, Miss Zayd, and the ones who haven’t gone crazy, you’re flesh and blood. They probably promised you more if you're hired on full-time with whichever metacorporation decided it needed you once this was all over. What’s the requirement to get a proxy for yourself, years or operations?”
“Either.” Zayd looked at Khalil, defeated. “Three operations or five years.”
Rimes did his best to hide the fear gnawing at him. He had the upper hand for just a moment, and he wasn’t about to lose it. “Even with us on-planet, Sahara couldn’t have been more than a three-month occupation. What was your next objective?”
Zayd cast her eyes down to the shifting sands. “No occupation. Kill everyone on-planet, then reinforce the task force at Epsilon Indi. We weren’t told you would be here.”
“Not Plymouth?” Rimes asked, fighting back a moment of hope. They didn’t know we’d be here. That means no spy in the organization. At least that’s something.
“Plymouth’s being run by Kapoor and Talwar,” Khalil said with a rueful smile. “That’s to be ugly work. Slash-and-burn. No, no one volunteered. That task force has many synthetics. They hand-selected the rest. The entire task force. It all sounded very personal.”
Rimes fought back a moment of panic. Kapoor. Talwar. Slash-and-burn. Synthetics. Personal. It’s about me. Molly! “All right. If you’ll excuse me, I have a seriously injured soldier I need to check on. Your cooperation will be rewarded. Discreetly.”
Stomach twisting into knots, Rimes walked toward the shuttle that had brought Meyers into the dead zone. It took every ounce of control he could muster not to break into a run and order the shuttle into orbit. His imagination was constructing a scenario in which a task force ten times the size of the one they’d just seen was orbiting Plymouth. The cities and the post—his home—burned bright in a darkness comprised of heavy smoke and ash.
When he reached the shuttle, he hesitated at the ramp, collecting his thoughts for a second. Then, he settled into a seat and pulled the seat’s harness over his head.
“Colonel?”
Rimes couldn’t be sure which shuttle he’d gotten onto or who the pilot was. It didn’t matter. “Get us out of the dead zone, please.”
The shuttle lifted off and Rimes turned his attention to the signal strength indicator. The moment it showed a clean signal to the Valdez he opened a private channel to Brigston.
“What is it, Jack? We’re up to our—”
“We have to get back to Plymouth. Now.”
Brigston sucked in his cheeks. “Jack, the task force is a mess. We have—”
Rimes clenched his jaw hard, then relaxed. “It’s the metacorporations. They’re attacking Earth and colonial assets. Not seizing, attacking. The attack on Plymouth, it’s personal, Jeremy. They’re going to kill everyone—the ERF, our families. Everyone!”
9
22 November, 2173. CFN Valdez.
* * *
Rimes leaned against a fold-out workbench in the Valdez’s maintenance room off the hangar bay. His arms were crossed, and his neck stretched so that he could
see over Meyers’s shoulder. Meyers was absorbed in his work. They both wore the loose-fitting, gray-green jumpsuits used by the shuttle maintenance teams. Where Rimes’s suit was crisp and clean, Meyers’s was wrinkled and stained. A helmet crafted from a thin web of circuitry and micro-lights covered his head.
Despite the maintenance room’s warmth, Rimes shivered. He was sure the ship’s engineering staff—had they been allowed to stay—would have felt the same sense of discomfort watching Meyers.
Meyers moved in the open space, lit mostly by a string of lights embedded in the wall panels and four fluorescent wand lamps he had brought with him. Spread across the floor were a dozen components taken from the crashed gunship and a blood-streaked, white tarp that held the corpse of the crazed Nordic commander captured in the dead zone. It had been exsanguinated and eviscerated, then dismembered and beheaded, then largely skinned and broken into sections: head, limbs, trunk, and viscera. Soft green and blue glows emanated from equipment embedded in the body parts and spread throughout the room. Rimes jumped when Meyers stabbed an electrical probe into the palm muscles of one of the corpse’s hands and then slowly scanned the room. The green and blue lights flashed.
“They’ve made some incredible advances,” Meyers said after a moment. He turned, focused on Rimes, then turned back to the corpse. “If you didn’t know that was a synthetic body, you couldn’t possibly tell.”
“I know. It’s creeping people out.”
Meyers snorted. “Complaints? Really?”
“There are concerns that we murdered a prisoner.” Rimes thought about Meyers’s description of the way the synthetic body functioned. “Did we?”
Meyers tapped the helmet on his head. “I can see the flow of power and communications through the corpse. I can interface with all sorts of invisible data and get a sense of the way this body worked. Maybe I’m seeing how the brain would have run this thing, but I can’t tell you if we killed him.”
“Theroux started to lose it when we entered the dead zone. He had a pretty crazy proxy host, probably what these are based off of—”
“You think the cartel is involved in this?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, but that’s not the point. The banks are about money, not manufacturing. Someone had to have created that proxy for Theroux. It looked awfully human to me, and that was five years ago. It just makes sense to me that the same people would be behind this technology.” Rimes stared at the glistening mound of guts piled on the tarp. They looked exactly like the guts torn from Gleason. “The point is, Theroux started going crazy in the dead zone, and so did this guy. When we pulled Theroux out of the danger zone he was nearly dead. A couple days later, he was up and running around as if nothing had even happened to him. New proxy or his own body, either way, he had complete recall of what happened on the planet.”
Meyers shrugged dismissively. “Telepresence and some sort of recording and limited response system set up for when the connection’s broken. Once he’s back on his ship, a quick transfer, and you have your complete recall.”
“With no reaction to the new memories or to the severed connection? Telepresence isn’t just observing, Lonny. When I went into Kwon’s mind I was there, in his memories. And I can guarantee you, you don’t integrate a new set of memories into existing ones without problems.”
“Fine. Theroux’s awareness was stuck in the proxy when we went into the dead zone. Doesn’t mean this guy’s was.”
“But he could have been. And that makes our decision to tear him apart for study murder.”
Meyers snorted. “So we killed someone sent to murder a bunch of scientists. I don’t think that’s going to get much traction with a United Nations investigative team.” Suddenly he looked serious again. “How’s that crawler pilot, the Brozek kid?”
“Dariusz? Cracked rib, collapsed lung. He’s in pain, but he’ll be fine.”
“What about that kid from Honig’s team?”
“Too much brain damage. They can keep him on machines for now. We’ll have to make a decision at some point. Honig says there’s a very clear request not to be kept alive as a vegetable in the personnel file. I guess his whole squad did that together.”
Meyers shivered. “It’s not living.” He jerked a thumb at the corpse and looked at Rimes curiously. “Speaking of not living…”
“Go ahead.”
“Okay. So, even the blood is good enough to keep a human alive. It’s AB positive—universal recipient. I think they could probably handle taking real human blood.”
“DNA?”
Meyers rolled his head from side to side. “Not my department. Doc Wambach’s doing what she can. It looks like they have fairly generic DNA. Just the pieces to keep systems going.” He looked at Rimes again, contemplative. “The systems are self-sustaining. Technically, they’re alive. If you want to believe in something like that. If you’re asking me, I think they must start with some sort of basic template—tall, muscular, white; short, lithe, Asian; and so on. When they select one of those for an organic pilot they probably do some sort of genetic modification to get things closer—looks, physique, the works. That still probably requires getting used to. I’m betting you could look at this thing’s real pilot right now and get the sensation you might know him from somewhere. I mean, look at him. Do you see anything wrong?”
Rimes winced as he looked at the proxy’s head. “He’s disemboweled and—”
“Besides that,” Meyers said with obvious irritation. “Look at the face.”
Rimes squatted next to the corpse and leaned in closer. The proxy’s eyes were closed, but Rimes could feel them burning through the lids. He ignored the sensation and pulled out his focus to study the whole face. For the first time he saw it. “It’s soft, like it’s missing details?”
“Like a baby’s face, right? Like it still has fat on it? It hasn’t matured yet, and it may never. Or it might eventually look exactly like the pilot. I guess it would depend on what sort of treatments they give it. It’s also way more symmetrical than normal. I’m guessing the baseline model is probably perfectly symmetrical. Uncanny valley, freak show stuff.”
Another glance at the face, and Rimes had the sensation of a low-resolution computer model. He turned to consider Meyers. “Lonny, do you think we killed him?”
Meyers grimaced. “How could we ever know? Theroux was fully committed to his proxy when we went into the dead zone. These systems are supposed to be a constant duplex data flow. If your awareness is fully uploaded into a machine like you’re saying these guys were, are you really alive anymore? That’s philosophy. I’m an engineer.”
“When I declined Theroux’s offer, Dana gave me access to a report on the latest in man-machine interfaces and proxy technology, the sort of tech Theroux was probably using. That was a while back, but I think it’s still the same principles: two-way communication, with the design primarily being one of remote control with complete remote awareness. But that requires some pretty serious bandwidth to pull off optimally, even with compression. The option is there to fully upload your awareness, and if you do that, you’re not really inhabiting your old body anymore. Your proxy dies; you die.”
“You’re more familiar with MMI than I am.” Meyers rubbed his chin with his shoulder. “Let’s assume this guy here was going crazy because of the same thing Theroux experienced: disorientation and panic after being cut off from his real body. The software makes a go or no-go decision and uploads the person’s consciousness, turning full awareness over to the proxy. Shutting him down—”
“Draining his blood. Lonny, if he was alive and aware in that body, we didn’t just shut him down.”
Meyers shook his head. “Nah. I’m going to guess they’ve put something together that would reboot the host body. That would be one hell of a thing to observe, right? One minute, you’re remote piloting a body, living whatever experiences it’s living, the next, you’re fully in that body, separated from your own. So, when you wake up again, your last memory is
of…” Meyers stabbed the hand he’d stabbed before and once again scanned the glowing lights. “I guess of being suddenly whisked away? Is that what they used to call an out-of-body experience?”
Rimes smiled. “So, for every one of the bastards we kill in battle, the only pain is the cost of the proxy and whatever disorientation and other effects they suffer from this momentary interruption?”
Meyers wagged a finger at Rimes. “Don’t downplay the implications, starting with the cost. You can hire a mercenary for a fraction of building one of these. Guarantee it.”
“So you’re confident we know where they’re keeping the human bodies?”
“They have to be in that big ship, Jack. Come on. I don’t care how far you advance science, things progress rationally and somewhat predictably. There are real limits to how far away they can be while still being able to drive these proxies with any level of effectiveness. That big ship was, quite simply, a combination medical ship and transmission station. If the opportunity arises, we target that ship and wipe out the hosts.”
“My guess is they’ll always surround those ships with the defense frigates,” Rimes said. “If they’re attacking Plymouth with a larger fleet than what we saw over Sahara…”
“Yeah, we’re a little outgunned.” Meyers’s shoulders slumped. “There’s more to it than that, though. I’m pretty sure we’ve got the frequencies down for the remote controls.”
Rimes stepped forward as Meyers ran one of his wands over the corpse, which took on an unearthly hue beneath the fluorescent lights. Exposed bone and muscle glistened, as if awaiting a simple spark to reanimate the corpse.
Meyers indicated the exposed spinal cord where strands of barely perceptible circuitry sparkled. “The antenna and transmitter run the length of the spine; the receiver sits right here at the base of the skull. There’s redundancy built in, but the important thing is that the signals come in close to the critical nerve bundles. Everything’s almost instantaneous. There are three processors embedded in the skull in a semicircle around the receiver. I’m pretty sure everything’s translated right there. I should have that confirmed in the next day or two.”