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Karter was several floors down, heading farther. The facilities were dug deep into the planet, more than twice as deep underground as they were tall above it. Some shafts and vaults ran much, much farther. The more important, more fragile things tended to be found in these areas in order to protect them from surface threats. After the collapse of the Asteroid Wrecker, half of the elevators were out of operation, and power was spotty, so the inventor was reduced to using the stairs.
“Stairs,” he muttered to himself. “What am I, a caveman? This is f--”
He was interrupted by a siren and spinning red warning light.
“Ma! What’s that all about?” he complained.
There was no reply.
“Oh, right. The reboot. Security came up pretty quick.”
He entered some commands into a hidden control panel installed on his false arm and brought up the heads-up display in his eye. It listed the status of various systems, then printed an alert.
“Intruder alert. That’s probably Lex. Pain in the . . . two intruders?”
He began to cycle through available cameras. He quickly found Lex milling about in the upper levels, evidently having trouble finding his way through the building. None of the other cameras seemed to be turning up anything. Quite a few of the them were nonfunctional after the attack . . . but there were seven nonfunctional cameras in a row along an access corridor right above him. And now there were eight. He switched quickly to the next in the sequence and caught a distant view of a man in military dress raising a gun and firing it before that camera blacked out, too.
“Damn it!” Karter growled, hurrying down the stairs.
He quickly issued the commands to lock down all of the doors between himself and the intruder, then opened a com channel.
“Lex!” he barked.
“Karter? Hey, great job on the--” the pilot began, his voice echoing over the microphone of the intercom.
“Shut up! I think your friend didn’t die in his crash, and he’s coming this way. Get your ass down here and help me.”
“Fisk isn’t dead!? Where are you?”
“Access Section Five. It’s on the north side of--”
There was a blast overhead as Fisk blew open the door to the stairwell. Before Karter could give any more direction, the agent leaned over the railing and opened fire down the shaft. From the sound of it, it was a plasma rifle. Military issue. Firing the vicious little beast looked and sounded like a rapid-fire roman candle, a dotted stream of orange bolts hissing through the air and turning bits of catwalk into slag. Karter wisely decided that any further energy should be dedicated to getting himself as far from that weapon as possible.
Unfortunately, unlike Lex, Karter wasn’t exactly in peak condition. His slight gut aside, most of his artificial parts weighed more than their natural counterparts, and he had an awful lot of them. As he labored down the stairs, his pursuer was closing fast.
“Stop!” Fisk ordered, firing a burst of shots ahead of Karter in an attempt to cut him off.
“How the hell much are they paying you that you are still after me after I blew your ass up!?” Karter huffed, fighting with a door that was stubbornly refusing to open.
“I’m a soldier. Soldiers finish their missions.”
“You work for VectorCorp. You’re a rent-a-cop for a parcel service.”
“Hands where I can see them!” he ordered, stopping at the landing opposite the door Karter couldn’t get open, maintaining the higher ground and keeping his target in his sights.
Cornered, Karter raised his hands, turning to face the soldier. Distantly, there was a rumble as the air conditioning finished reinitializing.
“So, you are the infamous Dr. Dee. Funny, until recently I thought it was an initial,” he said.
“You’ve heard of me, huh?”
“Of course. When Alexander ended up at this exact location a second time after acquiring the data, I did some research before pursuing. You covered your tracks well, but we eventually found the connection. Karteroketraskin 'Karter' Dee. Former military contractor, current independent contractor. Research and Development. Weapons specialist.”
“Idiots specialize. I’m a generalist.”
“Alexander came here to sell you the information. You are going to show me where you are keeping the data, what you’ve discovered, and what you were planning to do with it. If you found some way to transport the original data or a duplicate without our knowledge, you will give us the names of the other parties who may have it. If and when you cooperate, we’ll see where we go from there.”
“I didn’t do anything with your data because, up until you showed up, I didn’t care about it. But now that you’ve stormed my castle and murdered my pet to get it back, you can be damn sure that once I’m done killing you, I’m going to take a good, long look, just to spite you.”
Agent Fisk shifted the weapon’s aim and fired, striking Karter’s mechanical arm just below the shoulder. There was a spray of sparks and it fell limply to his side.
“Ow! The pain circuits were still on, asshole!”
“The records we’ve got on you list your other arm as intact. You open your mouth one more time to do anything but cooperate, and you’ll be looking for another replacement.”
Karter stood silently, measuring Fisk with his gaze. The only sound was the occasional hiss and sputter of his damaged arm.
“Well? What are you waiting for?” the Agent growled.
“This.”
At that moment, the gravity finished reinitializing, nearly doubling the weak gravity of the planet to artificial, Earth-level gravity in a moment. The instantaneous, unexpected increase brought Agent Fisk’s gun down heavily on the guard rail as his unprepared arms had to deal with its full weight. The weapon bounced free of his grasp and plummeted down the shaft of the stairwell.
Karter, who had been watching the countdown to full gravity on his HUD, had been prepared, and took advantage of the moment of confusion to give the door a few motivating kicks. Finally, it opened and he sprinted down the hall. Fisk followed, drawing a survival knife from his belt.
Karter ducked into a side room, Fisk close on his heels. The door to the room barely shut in time to keep the security agent out. The room was dimly lit and nearly empty. The only distinguishing features were a control console built into the angled top of a work surface on the far end, and countless tiny hatches, perhaps two feet square, completely covering the walls in a grid, like post office boxes. As Fisk began hammering on the door, Karter went to work at the console.
Outside, the agent stepped back and withdrew a black, hemispherical object from the pouch on his belt. He affixed it to the door, took a few steps down the hall, and pressed a key sequence on a control pad strapped to his forearm. There was a short, sharp rush of power as the breaching charge detonated, neatly forcing the door from its mounting. It fell aside and Fisk cautiously approached the cleared entrance. Karter rushed from inside in a mad blitz, tackling Fisk to the ground. His mechanical arm was entirely missing, but the inventor managed to land three good punches with his remaining arm before his enemy gained control, grabbing him by the shirt and throwing him aside.
In a heartbeat, Agent Fisk was on his feet. He hammered Karter across the bridge of his nose with the butt of his knife, then followed up with two more blows to the side of the face before hoisting him from the ground and heaving him back into the room. The inventor slid to a stop, his head bashing painfully into the base of the console.
“That’s enough, Dee. You are out of options, and you have no place to run. Either you do as I say, or you die and I get a team of men to tear this place apart until I find what I’m after.”
“Oh . . .” Karter said, spitting a mouthful of blood. “Something’s getting torn up, all right.”
Agent Fisk tightened his grip on his knife and stepped forward, but hesitated. There was a tapping noise from the console. He looked up to see the disembodied mechanical arm pressing bu
ttons on the control panel.
“Whatever you are doing, stop immediately, or you die right now!” he ordered.
Karter smiled a bloody grin as a tone sounded and a red light lit above one of the hatches. It slowly slid open. Agent Fisk backed cautiously away, knife held ready. In a blur of motion in the dim light, a furry form dropped out and landed on the ground. It shook itself, black and white fur ruffling to full fluffiness, and surveyed its surroundings. It was another funk. The beast looked to the battered form of Karter, then to the agent. Lips peeled back in a snarl, revealing tiny teeth, and a high-pitched growl buzzed in its chest. Fisk relaxed slightly.
“You are really going to make me kill another one of these?” he said, almost in disgust.
He raised a boot to stomp the creature, but before he could make another motion, it sprang from the ground to his shoulder, then climbed to the top of his head, squatting over his face and raising its tail. Before he could react, the little creature released a spray of the most intensely foul-smelling substance Fisk had ever encountered. It didn’t seem to be toxic or caustic, but the stench was literally disorienting, and whatever the stuff was, it burned his eyes. With a savage growl, he tore the tiny beast from his head and hurled it across the room, prompting a pathetic yelp.
“I will make you eat that little monster,” Fisk raged, coughing and trying to wipe the wretched stuff from his face, “I will shove it down your . . .”
His vision had yet to clear, but something made him pause his threat. There was a sound. First once, then again, then again and again there came a tone, followed by the soft tap of petite clawed feet and a chorus of the same high-pitched growl. One by one, each of the hatches slid open and an identical creature hopped out.
“Sic ‘em, boys,” Karter wheezed.
Tails were lifted, teeth were bared, and Fisk was buried in dozens of glorified stuffed animals. Soon the air was choked with their spray, a legion of genetic hybrids sinking their teeth into their target.
Outside, Lex was rushing down the stairs, heading for the doorway marred by plasma burns. As he got closer, the stench got progressively thicker. He covered his mouth with the cloth of his borrowed clothes and pressed on. When he reached the landing, the beaten form of Karter stumbled out of the hallway and into the comparatively fresh air of the stairwell.
“Karter, are you okay?” Lex coughed. “My god, what happened to you?”
“What took you so long?” he growled, punching Lex’s arm.
“All you said was ‘Access Section Five.’ It isn’t like there’s a mall directory. Are you okay?”
“Heh, better than the other guy. Hang on. Decontaminating,” he said, his final words delivered with the distant, distracted expression he tended to wear when controlling his arm from a distance.
A moment later, exhaust fans kicked on, clearing the air of most of the residual spray, rendering the hallway just barely breathable. What looked like sprinkler heads dropped from recesses in the ceiling and spritzed a mist of an antiseptic-smelling chemical. Whatever it was, in less than a minute the stuff had completely eliminated the stink.
“Come on. Let’s see the damage,” he said, pacing back inside.
Lex followed to find the most bizarre and disturbing sight he’d seen in his life. At least two dozen funks, ranging in size from barely a puppy to the smallish dog size that Solby had been, were milling around, investigating each other, and shaking off the chemical from the nozzles. At the sight of Karter and Lex at the door, they entered a frenzy of affection, yipping and prancing about and trying to claim a perch on each man’s shoulders.
“Easy guys, easy. Get down, line up,” he said.
Reluctantly, the furry little beasts gathered along the walls, sitting obediently and fidgeting with excitement.
“What’s all this?” Lex asked, confounded.
“This is Solby,” Karter said.
“Last I checked, Solby was one creature. Singular. And, for that matter, past tense.”
“Redundancies, backups, and replacements for all vital systems. That’s just good engineering practice,” Karter explained, scanning the row of creatures.
“And what the hell happened to him!?” Lex asked, suddenly noticing what was left of Agent Fisk.
He looked as though his skin had been worked over with a cheese grater, and judging by the rather sizable sections of his anatomy that were rendered unrecognizable, checking for a pulse would be a waste of time. Evidently, even tiny, adorable teeth could take out a full-grown man, if there were enough of them, and he could barely see or breathe.
“Well, he killed Solby, so Solby ganged up and killed him. I don’t know if getting mauled to death by an army of itty-bitty, stench-spraying cuties is irony or karma, but it sure is hilarious. A pain in the ass, though, since now all the little guys are covered in blood. Oh, well, I’ll just up the kennel-cleaning cycle for the next couple of days,” he said with a shrug. “Ah, there you are.”
He leaned down and plucked the largest of the assembly of funks.
“So you just keep a pack of funks around, in the event one of them dies?”
“First of all, the collective noun for funks is a parliament, not a pack. And, second, no, this isn’t just a parliament of funks. These are all Solby. I keep daily full backups of his memories and I do incrementals every five seconds. That’s what the little gadget on his neck is for. High-bandwidth wireless transceiver jacked into his nervous system for uploading and downloading the contents of his brain. Those guys all have the precise mind that Solby had when he woke up this morning, and the big guy here remembers everything up until a few seconds before he died. Saves me the trouble of training him over again,” he explained, turning to the others. “Okay, boys. Everyone back to bed.”
The little creatures eagerly scampered back to the nearest hatches. Once inside, each hatch closed and the red lights flicked off. One of them, the smallest, puppy-sized creature, hopped uselessly at one of the higher-level ones until Lex wandered over and helped him inside. Finally, only the “official” Solby remained.
“Okay, so now--” Karter began.
He was interrupted by a three-note chime, followed by a familiar voice.
“Altruistic Artificial Intelligence Control System, Version 1.27, revision 2331.04.01, Designation ‘Ma,’ fully active. Please stand by while I review sensor logs of recent downtime. Processing . . . Processing . . . Processing . . . I leave you two alone for six minutes and twenty-eight seconds, and look what happens.”
“It’s about time. Listen up, Ma. Here’s what I need. First, get rid of this trespasser. Second, I want a damage report, and get to work on fixing any primary systems that have been damaged. Third, I want burritos and beans and rice, stat. I want salvage bots working over all of the goodies that came down with that Asteroid Wrecker. Make sure you get enough of those lasers back online to keep the moat from coming down on us, and get to work stabilizing and mapping it. Get me a fresh arm, and set me up for a once-over from one of the medical units. Get some painkillers ready, too. Some of the good stuff.”
“Right away, Mr. Dee.”
“Oh, and one more thing,” Karter said, as he made his way to the stairs. “Get that data from the case you indexed up in one of the design rooms. This whole experience has piqued my interest.”
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