by Tim Lebbon
Stay with me, she said.
… surrender.
She frowned at the screen, confused, wondering whether it could be that easy. Then Shamana laughed again, the sound easily identifiable now, and Palant was left with the decision of a lifetime.
Try to prevent him doing what he was about to do… or run.
Self-preservation took over, and as Shamana’s clawed right hand moved toward the control sleeve on his left arm, she backed away and covered her eyes, hugging the datapad to her chest with her other hand, tripping over a rock. She hit the ground hard on her back. The air warmed and then burned around her, and the deafening sound of death smothered all other senses.
Palant squeezed her eyes shut and curled into a ball, and even when hands touched her and offered rough comfort she tried to keep herself away from the world. She wanted to hold onto that last moment of contact. It had been amazing. It was what every moment of her life had been heading toward.
When at last she looked she saw only the tattered, meaty remains of what had once been a living thing. One of Shamana’s tusks had sheared off when his head was blasted apart, and now it protruded from her left calf. She issued a single loud sob that might have been a laugh.
The woman she assumed to be Major Halley knelt beside her. She was wearing the full Colonial Marines combat suit and was heavily armed, as were her soldiers. Behind the skin-tight mask her face looked strangely inhuman. Or maybe it was simply her cold, impersonal manner.
“You could talk to that thing?”
“A little,” Palant said, looking at Shamana’s remains, steaming where the rain struck.
“Good,” the marine said. “That might help. I’ve been sent here to save you, so we need to get moving.”
“Right,” Palant replied, but she was glad when Major Halley stood and moved away again, leaving her with the Yautja’s remains. Then pain kicked in, her leg felt like it was on fire, and as she heard someone shout, “Medic!” the whole world receded into a deep, dark dream.
22
LILIYA
Yautja ship Zeere Za, Outer Rim
August 2692 AD
Even long ago, when she had betrayed the people who had made her and fled the Human Sphere with Wordsworth and the Founders, Liliya hadn’t been the most advanced synthetic in existence. Though a new model, she had been one of many rolling off the Company’s production lines in those vast lab and factory complexes scattered throughout Brownlee Major, a system given the nickname “The People Factory.”
She was indistinguishable from a real person—on the outside, at least. Inside things were different, and although altering her own physiology was forbidden, Liliya had embarked on an enthusiastic series of upgrading, installation of new programming, and downloading of any new update, patch, or improvements for her specific model.
She called it “learning.”
During that time, she had also been presented with one of the most profound choices available to an android synthetic. They were all given the nervous system of a normal human being, the rationale being that a android synthetic needed a way to detect its own damage and degeneration. They were also given the ability to determine whether or not they would feel pain.
As an abstract concept, it was built into them that their systems would transmit pain signals to their central hub—or brain, as most synthetics chose to call it. Once there, there were many ways in which the signals would be translated and addressed. The most basic arrangement was that it would arrive as a stream of information providing an instant analysis of the location, severity, and treatment required at any origin point the signals identified.
The hub would process the information and provide a solution. It was a clean, efficient way of protecting the biomech bodies into which consciousness had been uploaded, and the fact that it closely mimicked the true human nervous system was—as the Company tech people said—simply added value.
When given the choice, Liliya had chosen pain as her signal. Many synthetics did, as they believed it made them more real. The term “artificial person” was coined, but always in the background of their minds—in the deep, complex portions of their hubs created from quantum computing technology allied with biological circuits—lay the desire to lessen the term “artificial” as much as possible.
For the first time, Liliya was starting to regret that choice.
* * *
The chains swung in again. They caught her across the right shoulder, neck, and jaw, and her head flipped to the left. The initial pain was mainly shock, brought on by the bruising and splitting of skin. The residual pain bloomed through her, merging with agonies from other injuries, adding to the large conflagration her whole body had become.
Then the secondary pain began to kick in. The chain being wielded by Hashori of the Widow Clan appeared at first glance to be a traditional rope of smooth, oval, interlocked shapes. Yet these were the Yautja, and their entire existence seemed to be devoted to the hunt. This chain was spiked in a hundred places, and each spike was tipped with the egg of a small, horrific creature.
The spike punched through skin, the egg compressed and hatched, and the insect was left inside the wound, suddenly woken by the violence and given freedom to writhe, crawl, and eat.
Liliya screamed again.
Her throat was raw from shouting, her left eye swollen mostly shut. Her blood flowed, and at first Hashori had been surprised at its color and viscosity, white and thinner than human blood. This had only caused her to pause for a few seconds, however, before she went to work with even greater enthusiasm.
Liliya’s skin was slashed in and around the impact wounds, her clothes shredded, and inside some of those wounds she felt the insects eating her alive. Much smaller than the nail on her smallest finger, still they felt like burning, blazing rocks moving within her body. She hoped they would choke on her biomech flesh, that they would drown in her blood.
“Why are you…?” she managed to breathe, but Hashori turned her back on her bound victim. She had been doing so for the past hour of torture, any time Liliya spoke. “Speak to me!” Liliya cried.
The Yautja walked across the room and dropped the chain on the floor. She paced the chamber’s perimeter, disappearing behind her prisoner, reappearing again on her right. As she repeated the motion, again and again, her footfalls were soft, claws clacking on the metal flooring. Her breathing was heavy, rasping, and Liliya suspected she nursed a wound more serious than the fresh injury on her shoulder. Something internal.
Good, Liliya thought, surprising herself. Such uncharitable thoughts were unusual and went against her natural programming, but anger gave her some small measure of control over the situation, and she welcomed it.
Eating her… alive… slowly chewing, consuming, passing and moving on… and it couldn’t be long until the terrible insects made it to somewhere vital, the heart of her that was unlike any human heart.
Hashori paused where she had dropped the chain. She shifted it around with her foot, knocked spiked links together. One of the bulbous yellow eggs split and the glistening insect emerged. She shifted the metal aside as it unfurled itself, exposed to the universe for the first time. From several yards away Liliya could see no details, but she imagined chitinous legs stretching, multiple eyes opening and closing behind a milky film.
The Yautja moved her foot, lifted her largest toe, and pressed it very deliberately and slowly onto the insect. A subtle crackling sound and it was dead, little more than a smear.
Liliya started laughing. It felt good.
“You think that’s intimidating?” she asked through her laughter, using the Yautja tongue as best she could. They had no words for surrender, weakness, or pain.
“I’m thinking,” Hashori said.
“So you can think?”
The Yautja turned and regarded her, head tilted slightly to one side. Liliya took the opportunity to look more closely at her shoulder wound. It was a ragged cut, the skin rough and the wound uneven. An attempt had be
en made to clip the wound’s edges together, but blood still seeped through, forming a dark green scab in those places where it had dried. Elsewhere, it dripped.
Liliya hoped it hurt.
“You were sent to destroy the Zeere Za,” Hashori said.
“Is that the name of this ship?” She shivered. A plume of pain consumed her right hip as an insect there chewed through a nerve. She bit her lip and tasted blood.
Hashori did not reply. She came closer, leaving the chain on the floor behind her, but that didn’t put Liliya’s mind at rest. The Yautja could inflict equally heinous injuries with her hands, her clawed feet, her tusked mouth.
“You were sent to destroy,” her captor continued. “But your pathetic ship is now a cloud of atoms, and you will suffer every death you have inflicted on my species.”
“My pathetic ship, which approached with all weapons offline,” Liliya said. “What happened to your species?”
Hashori lashed out. Liliya’s reactions were fast, and she relaxed herself at the last moment, her head rocking on her neck and the impact blurring her vision. She gasped, coughed, spat blood.
I don’t even have to ask, she thought. She knew what had happened. It was obvious in the little Hashori had said, and the wound on her shoulder bore testament. She had recognized Liliya’s vessel and the drive tech it carried, and had associated it with the aggressors who had attacked her species. The Rage had already gone to war, storming in toward the Human Sphere and testing their horrific army against those they found in their way.
The Yautja.
It seemed ironic that such a violent species had been subject of what amounted to target practice.
“I’ve come alone to try to stop them,” Liliya said. “I have information—”
The blow came from her blind side, and for a while afterward all her senses receded, leaving only the pain and the grim realization that this might be the end of her voyage. Everything she knew—all that she brought with her to share, to end the mind-numbing violence to come—might go to waste here at the hands of this being.
Liliya coughed an agonized chuckle at the uselessness of it all, and Hashori picked up the chain.
* * *
For the first few days there were no questions, no demands. Only violence.
It was always Hashori. She said little, asked nothing, and Liliya could only guess at why the Yautja was singly responsible for her torture. Perhaps it was something to do with her membership in the Widow Clan. It might be that widowhood had landed on her very recently, and she thought of this as some sort of sick revenge.
After the first day the chain disappeared. The insects it had implanted were neutralized with the sweep of a sensor rod across her body. It seemed the Yautja didn’t want her to die too quickly.
It was replaced by a small, silvery device that resembled a simple metal ball. Hashori rolled it across Liliya’s body—it defied the ship’s artificial gravity, moving up her stomach and chest, across her throat, over her shoulder, down her back, around her hips—and everywhere it touched, it felt as if her skin was being ripped apart, her flesh minced, and the pain reached deeper to her bones and organs, grinding and pulping.
Liliya screamed aloud until she almost passed out, even though she knew the pain was false, the effects only imagined. Her sight fooled her, showing her ripped flesh and spilling blood. Her nose betrayed her, presenting the stench of insides turned out and the burn of an android’s skeleton melting into smoke and gas.
The damage was all in her mind, in her hub, but she had made the choice many years ago. That meant it could not be turned off—her pain was very, very real, and for the first time in her long existence Liliya wished that she would die. At the same time she had something to live for. She carried the information and means by which humanity might yet be able to defend itself against the Rage, and understand the weapons they brought with them.
“I’ve come to help,” she told Hashori again and again. “Not to destroy.”
Still the torture continued—the pain, the screaming, until her senses edged toward madness and she almost shut down. She wondered whether Hashori even understood these attempts at her Yautja language, because she very rarely replied. If she did it was only to mock Liliya, to tell what the next moments and days would bring.
More torture. More pain.
“I haven’t come to destroy,” Liliya said again, and she wondered whether this declaration was the reason for torture. For the Yautja, the hunt was their rite of passage, and killing provided the meaning of life. Perhaps telling them that she came in peace somehow diminished her in their eyes.
“I can help,” she said, and the torture ball curled around her chin and across her face, melting her lips against her teeth, crushing her nose, scooping her eyes from their sockets and setting acid into the hollows left behind.
Her face remained.
The pain went on and on.
* * *
At last Hashori sat against the far wall and stared at Liliya. Her tusks settled, her shoulders slumped. Her eyes drifted shut.
“I know who did this to you,” Liliya said. It was a change of tack. Hashori hadn’t asked a single question about the information the synthetic claimed to carry. No, this was torture for its own sake, not an attempt to glean intelligence.
“I also know,” Hashori said. “They are close. Bringing the fight to me.” She seemed to shiver in the delight of grim expectation, standing again and shaking away any dregs of fatigue.
“They’re coming?” Liliya asked. She knew all along that Alexander and his army would find her. It was destined to be. A single artificial person couldn’t hope to cheat the Rage. Beatrix Maloney would have her way, and capturing or killing Liliya was merely a distraction en route into the Human Sphere.
“How many of you are left?” Liliya asked.
“Many glorious brothers and sisters fell in battle,” Hashori said. “Survivors are ready for further conflict.”
“You can’t win.”
Hashori uttered something that might have been a laugh.
“I can help you fight them,” Liliya persisted.
This time it was obvious laughter, and the Yautja flung her head back, the metal slips in her dreadlocks glimmering as if in reaction to her mood.
“You can keep me occupied, while I await their arrival,” Hashori said. She cast the torture ball aside, and Liliya breathed a sigh of relief.
Hashori left the room. It was the first time Liliya had been alone since being brought here. She was weak, tired, damaged, bleeding, and wretched, but she did everything she could in the short time she had. Tested her bindings. Flexed her legs and arms, expanding her muscles, straining harder than any human could against the metal straps that held her there. Her skin beneath them split, but the agony was nothing compared to what she had already endured. It was the pain of trying to fight back, and there was something clean and pure about it.
But there was no escape. The chain was too solid, the bindings too tight.
The Yautja returned moments later, leaving the door behind her open. Two more Yautja stared in. One was even taller than Hashori, darker skinned, tusks chipped and yellowed, one side of his face and head horribly scarred. The other was smaller and fully dressed, heavy with weaponry and breathing fast, as if working itself up toward a fight. Its skin was a pale yellow color, speckled with reddish spots across its face and chest. Liliya realized how little she knew about these beings.
“Ask me something,” Liliya said. She was surprised at what she felt—the sadness, the frustration, the sense of hopeless at being tortured for the sake of torture.
“Your friends will be here soon,” Hashori said. “Will you enjoy watching them die?”
“They’re not my friends!” Liliya shouted. Her artificial heart thumped hard, her wounds dripped white.
Hashori returned to the door and took something from the tall Yautja. When she turned, Liliya saw a thin, long creature squirming in her grasp, the barbed spines along
its length, the rounded head filled with the silvery gleam of countless tiny teeth.
“You’re all going to die,” Liliya said. The Yautja language felt strange in her mouth, and she knew that no true human would be able to speak it as well as her. Their jaws weren’t built that way, their throats and vocal chords unable to be molded and manipulated the way she was doing with hers. It was a feeling she was usually successful in hiding away in the vastly complex depths of her quantum computer brain, but sometimes humans felt like children in her care.
Even though she didn’t think she could, Liliya began to cry.
* * *
After seven days on board the Zeere Za, the Yautja ship that Liliya still knew nothing about, Hashori entered and closed the door behind her.
She wore full armor now, and all her weaponry. Her feet were encased in metal-strapped sandals, her limbs bore muscle-hugging, supple armor, and her torso was similarly adorned. It must have been her own personal combat gear, scarred and battered from old fights, each scorch or impact mark the memory of some past conflict. Her helmet hung from one hand.
On her left shoulder a blaster drooped inactive, ready to be paired to the helmet when she put it on. Her left forearm was bulky with the control panel that most Yautja carried into battle, a system which allowed them to control weaponry, communicate, and which also contained vital medical equipment and drugs. Guns hung from her hip, ammunition from a bandolier around her shoulders, and on her back was fixed a vicious spiked weapon, its handle probably home to other blades and throwing knives.
She presented an intimidating figure, a self-sustaining fighting machine with a fearsome countenance and the desire, the craving, to kill. Evidence of victories hung on a heavy wire around her neck—scraps of flesh, leathery and dried, of differing shapes, colors, and sizes. Liliya thought they might be tongues.