by MadMaxAU
The black suited ones stayed together. Their suits were little more than glossy helmets plus some thin film covering the rest of their muscled bodies, showing detail so clearly that he could tell they were all male, all remarkably similar. They moved with grace and speed that stunned the eye.
Carl expended the last of his fuel braking toward a clump of transport mechs tethered near Shaft 4. He rolled to a halt in a storm of dirty ice. He had no time to appeal for help, knew that the crew in black and green—whoever they were—would be too busy and excited to be of any use anyway. He was tired, but the mech would do most of the piloting—if he could get control of it. If one were fueled and ready If…
The comm was overloaded with a raucous rolling celebration, oblivious.
—Carl! That you? —It was Jeffers.
“Yeah. Got to get mech, fast!”
—Sergeov’s dead. Ould Harrad’s guys got him with two laser bolts. Blew him apart and pushed him right off into space. —
“Come here! These mechs—“
—Don’t seem anybody’s interested in retrievin’ him, either. —Jeffers was rejoicing. Then the urgency in Carl’s voice registered. —Okay, I’m comin’. —
Got to get one with enough fuel . . . Not this one . . .
—Carl. — A female voice. He turned to see Lani approaching from the north with Keoki Anuenue and a score of the big Hawaiian’s people. —The Ubers had the Blue Rock Clan bottled up, but we found a way out with the weirders, Ingersoll’s guys. —
They helped? The crazies? It was slowly sinking in. “Great. I . . . Look, help me find a mech that’s fueled.”
—Where’s Virginia? I looked—
“Find a mech!”
—Okay, check the inventory. —
“What?”
—We’ve got mech control up and running again. See? —
She transferred the manifest readout directly to his viewplate and he instantly saw the code numbers of two standby transports flashing green. —Here, — Lani said, coasting over to one of them. Her face was drawn but determined behind a spattered helmet. —I’ll boot it up. —
Carl joined her, punched up the mech’s status readout.
—Those black guys, who’re they? — Lani asked.
“I dunno.”
—You don’t? We all thought you and Virginia must have brought them. The mech purred to life. Carl shook off questions and got oxygen. Nothing else mattered. The madness of men was now only a backdrop. The goddamned politics could wait.
One step at a time . . . time is running . . . dunno how much oxy she had . . . think it through . . . each step . . .
Carl programmed the transport for high boost, stubby fingers punching in commands with a deliberate slowness. Lani insisted on going along and he wasted no time arguing. They lifted off with Lani in the side rider pod.
Virginia had left their centre of mass with the same speed as Carl—slightly less than four kilometers per minute—but in the opposite direction. Their separation lay over three hours in the past. That meant he had to recoup nearly a thousand kilometers at high thrust, then search the space for a weak, steady vector-finding signal…
Speed. Speed was all that mattered now.
Hours later Carl brought the mech in for a rough landing at the glassy entrance to Shaft 3. He was ragged with fatigue, but he had Virginia. The world tilted blearily as he dismounted, unsteady from the varying accelerations of the past hours.
Almost there. Just get her inside . . .
He slipped clumsily on the ice and dropped her. Lani helped. Everything was foggy, slow motion.
Only when gloves caught her, pulled the limp, space suited form away from him, did he see the others. They wore black suits and no tabards, with tight helmets that showed only eyes through narrow slits. He switched among comm channels but they did not respond.
They were eerie, silent. And identical. The one carrying Virginia swiveled and sped quickly for a shaft entrance, now cleared of ice. Carl stumbled after, slipping.
Down the shaft. Walls slid by like sheets of rain descending as he watched, impassive, numb a creeping slackness stealing into his arms and legs. He was well past the point of caring about himself, and concentrated only on the body that a black suited figure carried before him. Everything moved with ghostlike speed and silence.
They cycled into a lock, Carl leaning groggily against the bulkhead as pressure popped in his ears and the world of sound came flooding back, the rustle and murmur of talk swirling around him once more, after many hours of an embalmed isolation. He staggered through the portal, brushing aside hands that tried to steer him.
Scores of moaning casualties. Medics with blood soaked gloves.
Virginia. Got to see . . . she needs . . . got to . . .
The man carrying her set her gently down on a med couch. A team had been waiting. They attached oxy prep hoses, leads for diagnostics stripped off her suit, all beneath the pale enameled light that showed her bloodless face in terrifying detail, seamed and rutted like a collapsed landscape.
A torrent of voices, liquid words flowing past him in vortices, without trace…
Carl shambled forward, ignoring the restraining hands. Got to be with her…got to…
The man next to him put a steadying grip on his shoulder. Carl turned slowly. Then the figure in black loosened his glossy helmet, started to lift it, gasped, and, in an old familiar way, sneezed.
SAUL
Another rocking sneeze resounded before the ebony helm was off. Saul blinked away spots before his eyes. He had to clamp down with biofeedback to stop another tickle that threatened to get him started again. Now was not the time for his confounded allergy-symbiosis system to rear up. He’d had enough troubles since the cave in—what seemed like days ago and right now every second counted.
Carl Osborn was blinking at him, his dented, grimy, old-fashioned spacer helmet dangling from one hand. “But . . . but . . . you were dead!”
Saul shrugged. “I was, in a sense. But like an old weed, I keep popping back.” Carl deserved an explanation, but right now there wasn’t time to give him one. Saul bent over Virginia’s waxy, pale form and read the paten diagnostic attached to her blue tinged throat. An oxygen infuser hissed as it worked directly over her carotid artery.
No good, he realized, sickly. Oh, Virginia—
In spite of his stopped up nose, he clearly caught the scent of burning. For an instant, flames once again licked the century old cedars on Mount Zion.
No! Not this time!
He knew in an instant that there was only one hope. It’s come to this, my love. I must experiment even with you.
One thing was certain. He had to get rid of Osborn, for the man would surely interfere with what Saul had to do now.
“Don’t just stand there, Carl. Get topside, quick! Keoki and Jeffers need you. Tell Ould-Harrad I’m holding him to his word not to destroy any equipment, just the launcher foundations, as we agreed.”
“Destroy…Ould-Harrad…” Carl shook his head, obviously exhausted and confused. Out of the muddle he seized a priority and held on to it obstinately. “No. I’m staying with Virginia.”
Desperately, Saul felt the seconds passing. “Ishmael! Job!” he called. “Get Commander Osborn topside, now. He’s needed up there. Get him to work!”
Carl turned and braced, as if to fight to stay. But the force went out of his limbs when he saw the two strong limbed youths bearing down on him—identical and smiling with a grin he knew all too well. “I don’t believe it,” Carl whispered. “They . . . they’re clones . . . of you! But how . . .”
The hissing of the hall door cut off the rest of Carl’s words. Saul ran down the hallway, carrying Virginia in his arms, gripping the green Halleyvirid carpet with his toes and speeding toward the one place there might be a chance to save her life.
Carl would never have allowed this, he thought, knowing that the man loved her—in his own way—as much as Saul himself did. He’s needed above, and what I
am about to try would get me barred from the AMA.
He whistled the code that opened the door to Virginia’s lab and dived inside.
* * *
While JonVon’s diagnostic program probed the fringes of Virginia’s slowly dying brain, he stripped off his surface gear.
The helmet, hip pack, and skin paint combination were one of the gifts from Phobos that he had kept to himself. Months ago he had used a pretext to set the autofactory to produce a dozen sets—enough of the modern models to equip his ten “boys” and himself.
After the cave in, when he had found his way to the surface blocked, he had returned and gathered his cloned replicas. Just before they set off, though, a message from Suleiman Ould Harrad had arrived. The ex spacer offered to lead Saul down secret tunnels known only to his weird clan, and to help strike where Sergeov least expected it.
For a price, that is.
We probably won partly, by scaring the Ubers half to death, Saul mused while he monitored the flow back and forth between JonVon and the machine’s mistress.
It had been a strange army that followed Ould Harrad and Ingersoll—the “Old Man of the Caves” —down passages nobody else had ever discovered, emerging almost beneath the Uber command post and attacking like an army of ghosts.
Ten tall figures in eerie black body paint, and a lurid score of wild, living trees—once men, but now symbionts who don’t even need spacesuits, anymore…
Saul knew that he was furiously thinking about anything—anything at all—rather than contemplating the sad form on the webbing. There was nothing he could do until the machine reported. He found that he was squeezing the duraplast helmet between his palms in nervous tension, and had actually pressed a dent into the black globe.
Oh, Virginia. Hold on, darling. Please, hold on.
The holo main display flickered, above the console. An image appeared: a nurse in starched white with an old fashioned stethoscope around her neck looked gravely at Saul.
You are right, Doctor. The patient is clinically beyond the point of no return. Synaptic rates are receding. Progressive brain damage has been slowed, but not completely arrested. Cortex loss will, within fifteen minutes, cause erasure of memory and personality. There are no known palliative measures.
She is dead, sir.
“No! She won’t die! If her brain won’t hold her anymore, we’ll find someplace else for her to go. What about those procedures she’d been working on, for complete recording and absorption of personality?”
The simulation frowned.
Do you wish construction of Virginia Herbert simulation?
He shook his head. “I’m talking about full transfer and absorption.”
There was a hiss behind Saul as the door slid open. “What’s going on here?” A hand on his shoulder pulled him around. Carl Osborn frowned and held a fist under Saul’s face.
“I got away from those boys of yours after they dumped me on the ice. Came down a garbage chute. Now I’m asking you a question, Lintz. What’s happening here! Why isn’t Virginia in the hospital?”
The man looked exhausted, angry. His suit sleeves were zipped back to flap at his sides like some medieval garment, patched and grime-spalled. Muscles throbbed and Saul knew at a glance that Carl was on the ragged edge of violence.
“Here,” he said reasonably, in his best bedside manner. “ Hold her arm while I give her this medication.”
Carl blinked. He swallowed and moved over to lift Virginia’s waxen, chilled limb. “You . . . you’ve got to save her, Saul . I couldn’t stand it if . . . if . . .” He wiped his eye with the back of his free wrist. “She tricked me into being the one flung back. I . . . got back to her too late.”
“You did your best, Carl.” He checked an ampoule of amber fluid.
Carl didn’t seem to hear. “You’ve . . . got . . . to save her.”
“We will,” Saul promised. And he pressed the ampoule against Carl’s hand. The spacer blinked up at him in surprise at the hiss of injected drug—a quick—acting hypnotic.
He shuddered, opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.
“Good,” Saul told him, leading him by the arm over to the wall. “Now you can stay awake if you want to, Carl. Even ask questions, when I’m not busy. But I want you to relax back here. Loosen your muscles. Let everything below your neck nap for an hour or so. You need it.”
Carl stared at him accusingly, but remained where he was put. Saul went back to the console and spoke aloud to the machine.
“JonVon, is it feasible? What about the program I used in transferring my own memories into my clones?”
The holo tank flickered, and to his surprise a face he had known long ago appeared. It was a simulacrum of Simon Percell—from shocked white hair to tiny, broken capillaries on the great biologist’s nose.
He looks like an elderly version of Carl Osborn.
The famous bushy eyebrows bunched together.
Your clones are exceptional, Saul. No other genotype is amenable to such rapid forced growth to adulthood . . . probably due to the same combination of factors that gives you your immunity to disease.
The memory transfer program you used can only be applied between nearly identical human brains. Point-wise resonances have to run true. Nobody else’s phenotype follows genotype precisely enough.
It would seem impossible to use that method with any but a tiny fraction of human beings. In other words, my friend, you appear to be one of the few potential immortals.
Saul gaped. the verisimilitude was stunning. Simon was crisp, real. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Carl Osborn shiver—whether in awe of the patron father of the Percells, or at the revelation about Saul, was unclear.
“There’s no time, then. You, JonVon, you have to absorb her the other way, destructive or not. Virginia spoke of it as theoretically possible. Proceed at once.”
The simulacrum nodded.
There will be the superficial semblance of pain.
Time was slipping away. Desperately, Saul growled. “Do it! Emergency override Archimedes!”
Proceeding.
The reaction was almost immediate. Static flickered on all of the screens. Saul had to grab Virginia’s arms as her face contorted and her legs thrashed. Tendons hardened and she cried out like an animal caught in a trap.
Saul twisted the webbing, shaping makeshift restraints, binding her in tourniquets with only one objective—to keep the neural tap from tearing out of her head.
“You . . . bastard . . .” he heard the man behind him say. Carl’s voice was level, calm, as if he were commenting about the weather. “You’re . . . killing her,” he commented evenly. “If I . . . could move . . . you know, I’d take you apart with my bare hands.”
Saul finished tying her down. He stroked Virginia’s hair, and the touch seemed to calm her just a little. When he turned back, his eyes bulbed with clinging liquid that would not drop away. “If this doesn’t work, Carl, I’ll give you my throat and my permission.”
Their eyes met, and Carl nodded slightly. It was agreed.
Virginia moaned. The main holo display showed a rotating, color coded perspective of a human brain, sparkling here and there like a sun undergoing white hot flares and crackling magnetic storms. This was almost nothing like the Care Package episode, when Virginia’s surface consciousness was disoriented in the pulse-shocked data net. This time all of her was involved, her memories, her habits, her skills, her loves and hates…
Her.
The door slid open and Lani Nguyen stepped in, still wearing her patched spacesuit and tabard. Her gaze flicked from Saul to Carl to the keening figure on the webbing.
She moistened her lips, apparently unsure if she should interrupt. Her voice was soft, tentative.
“What is it, Lani?”
“Um . . . the Crystal Cave Clan just surrendered. That finishes it. The last of the rebels are being herded into sleep slot three for processing.” Her gaze never left Virginia. “Jeffers’s guys h
ave secured the factories and the hydro domes. Keoki and the Blue Rock people are holding the north pole yards and Central and all the sleep slots.”
Apparently Lani wasn’t quite sure whom she was reporting to, Carl or Saul.
“What about Ould Harrad’s people?” Saul asked, without taking his eyes off the display.
She shuddered. Even as allies, the green covered beings from Halley’s core obviously still frightened her.
“He stopped the weirders from wrecking the launchers. But they’re tearing up their mountings. Jeffers is furious, but every
one’s too exhausted from the fighting, too scared of those crazies, to try to stop them.”
“Well,” Saul muttered. “It’ll sort out.” The display had calmed down a bit. Virginia’s face was smooth again, her agitation betrayed only by her trembling fingertips and a sheen of perspiration.
Lani held out a small record cube. “Ould Harrad gave me this to pass on to you, Saul.”
He was torn. He didn’t want to divide his attention. But Virginia’s vital signs were stable . . . for someone who was already effectively dead.
He shied away from the thought. “Play it, please.”
Lani dropped the cube into a reader and a side display lit up.
The face had changed. The black hue was still there, in places where it had been taken up by the soft, dimpled growth that covered all but his eyes, mouth and ears. Elsewhere, the covering was multicolored—purple, blue, yellow—but mostly green.
The brown eyes seemed to flare with a seer’s long, burning look.
“Saul Lintz, you need not have asked Carl Osborn to remind me of my promise to you. The machines have not been harmed any further than they were in the wrath of battle. We of the inner ice have no need to interfere in any way other than in destroying their mountings.
“They are not to be remounted on the equator, or anywhere near it. The south pole, as well, is forbidden. We will permit no impulse to be applied to this fleck of drifting snow below the fiftieth northern parallel.”