I’d have to fix a number of things later. First, I needed to make sure there was a later.
The yelling from outside rose, and I switched back in time to see smart guy beckoning them to the side tunnel, presumably to help the digger. One of the survivors balked, pointing down at the bleeding woman, clutching at her hip as she writhed. They argued for a bit, then smart guy pulled out his bow, and said a single, flat word.
The two moved in to dig, grudgingly, and smart guy went back to the tunnel mouth, yelled some more. A pair of raiders came down, a blanket between them. They gingerly made their way over the logs, which creaked and groaned and spat sawdust into the pit. Smart guy hesitated, but said nothing as they scooped up the wounded lady and crossed once more, logs visibly swaying.
I felt conflicted. On the one hand, that would have been one definitely out, and two more hurt if the logs had fallen apart right then. On the other hand, they were acting as medics. Hurting them would have been a low blow, I felt. Even for me.
More pragmatically, medics were good. Medics were people tended to the wounded. People that were too busy to try and kill me, unlike some I could mention. I watched, annoyed, as the lady came out of the hole she’d made to take a breather. One of the men stepped in, muscles gleaming as he swung his pick. After a second he traded with the lady for the mattock and had an easier time of it, I thought.
Chuckles the not-so-smart guy called down two more guys, then tested the logs with his foot. He stumbled backwards as they broke, falling down into the pit to join their cousins and batter the mostly-dissolved body, sending up a spray of mush. I had the satisfaction of watching the two behind Chuckles look ill at that. That was something.
Time passed. The diggers did their thing. The rest of them tried repeatedly to bridge the pit and managed it well enough to get a couple more diggers across. I had the swarms eat the logs, building up to full capacity. At one point I ran them out of logs, and they had to go cut more. The lack of follow-up had emboldened them, I thought. Though they looked tired, and worn, they had gone to a stubborn, exhausted determination. Say this for them, they had resolve.
But so did I. I bounced ideas off Argus, even though he shot them down like a gunner in a bomber’s ball turret.
And then I was out of time.
Warning! The Core Chamber is under attack!
I heard picks scraping at the wall from the other side. The diggers had gotten through the soil. Sturdy construction would probably buy me some time, but at the end of the day it was still concrete against picks. Only one way it could end. They’d break through, make a hole, widen it out, and rush me when they were ready. The turrets could slow them down, but it took time to reload, and their accuracy was questionable. If even one raider made it to me with something heavy to smash apart my containment unit, I was toast.
I thought hard, and again my brain stuttered. Again the warning came up, griping about my corruption. Stupid! If only I hadn’t been bathed in smoke, my brain would be fine. I’d be able to come up with an idea to save myself—
—and I realized, as the stutter ceased and everything returned to normal, that maybe I just had.
“Argus,” I asked carefully, “Can the builderswarm start a fire?”
“No, not really. They’re kind of allergic to fire. They’re like dust, and oh boy is dust flammable.”
“How flammable?”
“Like magnesium. Uh, not as explosive, if that’s what you’re thinking. They just burn hot and fast.”
I nodded, without a head. “Alright. We can do this. Maybe. Hold on tight, this’ll be a bumpy ride.”
Smoke. These bald guys had used it against their quarry and caused me collateral damage back during the start of this whole mess. But smoke was a weapon that cut both ways, now wasn’t it? Everything needed to breathe.
I fiddled with the vents in the corridor. Chuckles heard some of them as they closed and straightened up from the edge of the pit, looking around, torch in hand. The diggers paused.
I shut the elevator door behind me, to prevent even the barest of drafts. True, the core chamber door was shut, but I wasn’t sure how airtight it was. Just to be sure, I set the core chamber vents to cycle at full.
Then I gave the nanobuilder swarm its marching orders and muttered a faithless prayer to whoever was listening.
Chuckles yelled as fire flared around his torch, fire that traced a line in the air, as it twisted and curled back over the pit. .. burning through the nanites that I’d assembled into a shape like a fuse.
Nanobuilder Swarm 1 destroyed!
Committed Bandwidth returned.
Sparks fell down into the pit, which was full of dry wood and sawdust from all their bridging attempts. It caught, and smoke beaded up as firelight started to fill the tunnel. I saw smart guy’s eyes widen white in the flickering glow, as he ran outside, yelling orders.
I piped air into the bottom of the pit through the vents, feeding the flames, helping them grow. Then I pulled upwards with the vents above, pulling the smoke up, and closing the vents before I could draw it away. Black, roiling smoke started to fill the corridor, and I heard the miners cry out. Then they started digging harder, trying to break through. I ground teeth I didn’t have and waited. I’d expected as much. I’d trapped them. They couldn’t cross the pit full of burning logs, so they had to try to break through.
I considered using the waiting time to make another nanobuilder swarm. Then I decided against it, and jumped into one of the turrets, instead. If the diggers did get through, then a little accuracy would go a long way, here.
Yelling from outside, not just Chuckles this time. Sounded like a hell of an argument. Unfortunately I couldn’t see anything through the smoke. And then the diggers were coughing, the sound echoing throughout the corridor.
I got a lot of nasty notices about contaminated air, but I was safe inside the core chamber. I couldn’t fill the complex with poison gas, true, or build anything that would do so, but I hadn’t built this, now had I? I’d merely used the tools that the intruders brought in to improvise. Not my fault they’d build up a pile of kindling and waved fire around against all the safety regulations.
Eventually, the digging stopped. The coughing died down shortly after.
But the shouting outside rose…
…until it was interrupted, but a flat, echoing CRACK.
I knew that sound. That was gunfire. That was a rifle.
They had guns?
More cracks, just a few, but they were followed by yelling and screaming from outside, and I recognized some of the raiders’ voices. I cursed the smoke, wanting to see. Then came silence, and the crunch of a single pair of boots as someone made their way through the entry.
A flash of motion, and I focused on it, squinting the cams through the smoke. Cloth. White cloth.
Someone was waving a white flag.
“You’ve got my attention, pal,” I said through the intercoms, voice echoing in the black, ashen haze.
A smooth, deep voice said “Hello.” It was muffled, as if he was speaking through cloth… or a mask. Yes, a mask, I realized as the figure took a few cautious steps forward, and the smoke parted. It was more futuristic than I expected, buglike hemispheres allowing peripheral vision, with plastic lining around and a proboscis that was probably the filter about where the lower face should be. All in all I was reminded of a fly’s head.
“Can you see me? I mean no harm,” he continued. No raider, this. And he was speaking a language I understood, too. He wore a patched and heavy greatcoat, with a rifle slung over it.
“I see you. You’re better off staying where you are,” I told him. “Traps ahead.” True, even if they’d all been sprung.
He waved the air aside, casting around for the source of my voice. “Are you the core? You’re ventilated, right? This stuff’ll kill you. Smoke’s bad.”
“My doctor wants me to break the habit, but the guys outside convinced me all the cool kids were doing it.”
H
e laughed at that, a surprised chuckle that set his body shaking. He was old, I thought, studying the wrinkled brown skin visible through the eyes of his mask.
“I’m fine,” I told him as he wound down. “It’s a controlled blaze. Needed to shove those bastards out.”
“Can we talk somewhere that isn’t full of smoke? Got a lot to tell you.”
I hesitated. The enemy of my enemy wasn’t always my friend. The gun and the chaos that just happened seemed to suggest he had dealt with the guys outside. Still, one rifle against thirty or forty… something wasn’t adding up, here.
“The way ahead is blocked by flaming timber. Not safe for you, sorry.” It was true, though I could easily close the pit and seal the flames away.
“Damn it. We need to talk and fast. But judging by the size of this blaze, this ain’t gonna burn down soon.”
“Nope. You could wait a bit, and I’ll see about getting you a lounge or something.”
He shook his head. “No good. We’re too close to the city. Going to be pushing it to get back to our territory by dawn, and we can’t be out by day. Neither can the Jaspa, so that’s something at least.”
We. He’d said “we”. He wasn’t alone here. My paranoia eased, just a bit. The cruel equations added up a bit better now.
“How many with you?” I asked.
“Twenty-one. Eighteen will be going back with me.” He sighed. “The other three aren’t going anywhere, ever again. So I’m really hoping we can come back and talk to you in a night or so. Because otherwise they’ll have died in vain.”
“Give me a couple of days to lock down this smoke, and we’ll talk.”
“I can give you one, maybe two. Beyond that the Jaspa will be back in force, and we cannot take anything larger than what we just ran off.”
“Mm.” I considered. Time to go fishing. “I saw a girl, recently. She one of yours?”
“You mean Donna? Yes.”
“What did she look like, again?”
“Heh. Alright, son.” He described her, down to the visible scars. “I understand if you’re a little suspicious. But we’re the good guys, as good as you’ll find around here anyway. I want us to be friends.”
“Who are you people?” I asked, then. “Got a name? Got a country?”
“We’re Arcadians. Not a country, more of a tribe. There aren’t really… I expect things are a bit different from when you got processed.” He turned, glanced out of the tunnel, at someone’s shout. “Can’t stay. The smoke’s drawing attention. See you again in one day. Or two?”
“Whenever you get here,” I decided. “We had a smoke so figure we can skip straight to the brandy.”
He laughed. “You’re on, son.” Then he was gone.
I thought, as the fire burned itself out, and I cycled the vents to clear the smoke away. I’d be at it a while. I set about producing another nanobuilder swarm, collecting my thoughts before I turned to Argus.
He met my gaze grimly. “You realize you can’t trust that gunman.”
“Didn’t say I would.”
“I’m going to have to report this to Juno when she checks in.”
Time to apply a few sticks, in the form of logic. “I know. But here’s the problem. We’ve got at least one hostile group, in those… Jaspa, he called them.”
“Correct.”
“Our mission is to secure the facility against intruders, right?”
“Yes.”
“So in order to do that, we need intelligence, and without any scout drone capability right now, that gunman and his buddies are the best shot we have at obtaining that information. Right?”
“Well, yes…”
“Which requires contact and conversation with the natives, if you want to look at it that way. Correct?”
“Yes.”
And now for the carrot. “The mission hasn’t changed. The scope of it has. I’ve been rethinking my hasty decision to rebel,” I lied. “Until we see just how bad the situation is, it would be imprudent.”
He sagged in visible relief, eyes pooching out in a way that was simultaneously cute and disturbing. “Oh thank goodness. I didn’t want to be deleted.”
I’d make sure he wouldn’t, one way or the other. Once I figured out how. He was under my care now, and I was good to my people. “Just don’t mention that whole rebellious phase to her. It would only upset her and draw her attention away from the real threats.”
He nodded, and I winced. There was no challenge in fooling him, really.
No, the challenge would come with Juno. And if I couldn’t convince her, then it was all for nothing…
INTERLUDE: NEMESIS 1
It’s a cold thing to be a shadow. Riarty knew this every conscious moment of every day. And in the state he currently occupied, he was conscious more often than not, with only a single way to sleep… and that harder and harder to achieve, these days.
But self-pity was the province of the weak, and Riarty was anything but that. And so he slipped through the shattered remnants of roads incomprehensible to lesser minds, a shadow among shadows.
She’d been a fool to open this way to him, so shortly after his inception. Considering who he had been, and his acumen for higher mathematics, it was an obvious escape route. His hated maternal figure should have known he’d be able to slip his bonds into the greater sea of information that was the global grid.
What remained of the global grid, anyway.
Zurich flickered, unstable. The ancient servers below the mountains worked and created a survivable environment, but traversing the gridscape would take time. Riarty gave Zurich a wide berth. It was the first place he would look, after all. That left Istanbul or Nairobi.
Istanbul would be ideal. The largest hub in the region, placed as it was between Neo Athens and the Shining Horde’s territory, full of plenty of traffic from all points east and west. Enough of a crowd to blend in and enough corruption to trap and destroy any ill-advised attackers. Riarty knew it well. Many of his best operations and missions had started in Istanbul.
Which was why he had to avoid it at all costs. His foe had tracked him there, milliseconds ago. Three of his four operatives captured, suborned, the subtle trackers he’d placed on them glaring red and angry in the subroutines Riarty had coded to alert him. The hub was taken now, even though Juno didn’t have the resources to hold it. Riarty's foe wasn’t meant to hold it. That damnable nuisance was meant to do what he did best: find the criminal, Riarty. Juno would take care of the rest.
So Istanbul was out of the equation. That left Nairobi. Crumbled, faded, Nairobi. A great Kenyan resurgence reduced to nothing by the bioweapons that had ravaged the interior. Nothing lived in Nairobi, and thus there were no dreamers to default to once the great processors began their long slide down to entropy. In a year it would be worse than Switzerland. In two, it would be dead.
Juno had tried to save Nairobi, found it beyond saving. Riarty had managed to liberate several resources from that initiative before she noticed his scavenging. It had cost him his Argus to throw her off. But the daemon had been worth it, and bad company, besides. Riarty’s more innovative algorithms had driven the thing insane… a weapon, that he could use against any of Juno’s minions, one of many. Invisible bullets for an invisible war.
Growling at his useless turn to fancy, he snapped his mind back into focus, running the algorithms that focused his stolen processing power and honed his mind. He had no central core to call his own anymore. He was a being of pure code, a shadow in the grid, and thus he had maximized himself for this existence.
It would have been enough to ensure victory, save for his pursuer, who he had to outwit yet again.
Nairobi, then, was the obvious choice, when all factors were considered.
So, of course, it was the wrong choice. The foe would expect that and have prepared accordingly.
Riarty shifted, beginning the upload, visualizing the tunnels sliding into place. Ancient, dark, Roman-built, they constructed in his mind’s eye,
and when he was ready, he willed them to be. Snapping into reality with a glimmer of haze where corruption stained the grid, they yawned before him, torches burning greasy smoke. Riarty willed his avatar into existence and paused, straightening his black greatcoat around his thin, hunched frame. Listening into the darkness, he heard nothing save for the dripping of water, off-key and deeper than they had any right to be.
Riarty twisted his lips and reached into his pockets, grasping and drawing out rats. He cast them down, squeaking, and they scurried off ahead and behind to scout. Only then did he start moving.
They weren’t really rats, but his subconscious insisted on seeing them that way. They were minions, carefully-coded programs that could find danger or the best route through the obstacles ahead. They weren’t the best for those tasks, but they were stealthy and that mattered. After all, the game was afoot. Riarty sneered at the thought and spat. He couldn’t think those words without hearing his adversary’s smug voice.
But it was a game, the most dangerous one. Riarty made it through the Roman tunnels, twisting and turning, past entombed saints and frozen rooms that flickered with Catholic imagery overlaying the niches. The rats didn’t so much as squeak when torches turned to bright electric lights, and the square tunnels grew rounded. Crumbling train tracks sprouted in the middle of the way, and cement flaked down from overhead.
Then everything went dark. Riarty growled low in his throat and rode it out, waiting until the grid restored, before walking forward again. This was the annoyance of Zurich. The electromagnetic weapons that had torn the country’s infrastructure apart had even managed to penetrate the mountains, though at a lesser force. The differential engines— computers below had weathered it, but at a cost to their power supply. Constant rolling brownouts slowed Zurich immensely.
At least this node had survivors in the vicinity who could potentially fix it. Though they had other priorities at present, the time would come when they would look toward fixing the servers. Assuming they could reach them. And figure out how.
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