“Come in, Billie.”
The room’s lighting was dim, and he was barely visible as she approached the pallet. She stopped two meters away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
He remained lying down, his hands under his head. He stared straight up at the ceiling. “I can understand that you were upset.”
“It didn’t give me the right to behave that way. It’s just that—” she stopped.
“Just that what?”
She turned slightly, so she was looking at the back wall and not directly at him. “It’s all so confusing,” she said. “I thought I had gotten past it, about your being an artificial person. That it didn’t matter.”
“But it does matter, doesn’t it?”
Her sigh was almost a sob. “When we came out of the sleep chambers on the way here, you seemed so cold. So distant. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. What happened, Mitch? Did you change? Or was it me?”
Now he sat up, the sheet draping down around his waist, covering the metal skeleton and revealing his bare upper body. He looked human to her in this light. Was human, she reminded herself, but not quite the same as she was.
“They made us to be as much like humans as possible. We’re as far away from first-generation synthetics as they were from robots. Almost human.
“Funny, there were rumors we heard when we were still damp from the vats—the next generation of synthetics could not only pass for human among wombfolk, they would be born thinking they were human. Memory tapes of childhood, family, full implant blocks of internal workings, anatomically perfect right down to a dye in the circulation fluid so it would look like human blood to a naked eye.
“They would not only look like naturals, they would believe they were naturals. There would be inbuilt Laws of Function, of course, but the new APs would simply think they were personal ethics. They’d have the same energy requirements, ability to process food, oxygen, normal elimination, same natural cycles. For all practical purposes, they would be people, save that they couldn’t reproduce, and they would be stronger, faster, and more durable.”
“Mitch—”
“Of course,” he went on, ignoring her interruption, “the question that immediately arose was: What’s the point? If you want real people, why not make them the old-fashioned way, parent or artificial wombs? And the answer was that they would be expendable. Able to do the dirty and dangerous work that real men didn’t want to do. Radiation disposal, exploration on hostile worlds, pressure rescue, suicide missions for whatever reasons.
“The new androids would be perfect. Acceptable in polite society, able to move without upsetting the most delicate sensibilities, but throwaways. Instant third-class citizens—no, not even citizens, but property, slaves, loyal as dogs, ready to leap at the proper command.”
“Jesus, Mitch—”
“I’m not finished yet. But to get to those happy models, they had to experiment. Stir in the proper emotions so the passers-for-human would laugh at the right spots, cry when appropriate, even fall in love when necessary. So, here we are, you and I. It worked. My fake hormones did what they were supposed to do and I fell for you. Only thing is, there’s enough of me outside the emotional part that I can understand it apart from the feelings.”
Billie turned and looked at him. “And you resent me for it,” she said finally.
“No. Not you. See, I do love you. But I resent them for making me this way. They didn’t give me any experience, any guidance, any way of dealing with this whole thing rationally Billie smiled, small, sad, but a smile nonetheless.
His eyes were better than hers. He saw the expression. “Something funny about this?”
She heard the anger in him. “In a way. Nobody ever gave me any guidance or way of dealing with this “whole thing” either, Mitch. Love and logic don’t go together. You’re looking for a nice clean path to walk. It doesn’t happen that way very often among us “naturals,” either. Love is usually messy, cluttered, sometimes painful and just plain awful.”
“At least you had a choice,” he said.
“What makes you think so? We don’t get to choose any more than you do in some things.”
“You could have walked away. You didn’t have to love me.”
“I could have walked away from you but I couldn’t walk away from my feelings. That’s why I can’t just bail out now. I could leave but what I feel for you would stay with me.”
“This is beyond my capabilities to understand,” he said.
“Welcome to the club.”
The silence stretched long between them. If only he had told her before they’d begun. If only she had known. She wasn’t a bigot, she could have gotten past it, could have accepted him.
Really? Are you sure about that, Billie? Are you?
There was the damning part of it. She wasn’t sure.
Not at all.
Spears sat in the ship, waiting for the goddamned storm to pass. Stupid, he’d known the solar magnetic activity was up, there had been swirls forecast, he should have destroyed the traitors and hustled his ass back to base. They could have beaten it, if they had hurried.
Well. Done was done, no point in crying over a broken plan. Best he make use of the time. There were some combat scenarios he wanted to run; the compsim unit had the latest learned-commands the alien troops had assimilated logged into it. They weren’t a crack fighting unit yet, not by any means, but they were getting there. It was just a matter of time. And when they were ready nothing in the universe could stand against them. Spears’s word would carry more weight than God’s when he had these troops whipped into shape. Yes, indeed. Just a matter of time.
14
A man carrying a durasteel fire ax hurried across the open space, moving crouched. “Over here,” he called out.
After a moment a second man came into view, this one carrying a small shovel with a green plastic handle. Both of them were dirty, their clothes torn and worn. The first man had on a leather jacket that had probably once been black but was now a sun-bleached pale gray. The second man wore a dark blue nylon or synlon windbreaker with a hood.
“You sure about this?” Nylon asked.
“No, I ain’t sure,” Leather replied. “But if it’s true, we’re in fat town for sure. C’mon, dig.”
The men were next to a collapsed building. The arched doorway immediately behind them stood upright in the rubble and looked to be made of steel—there were patches of orange-brown rust on the metal and a few twisted rods extending from it.
“Man, it’ll take hours to get down far enough,” Nylon said.
“Yeah, but if there is a military food cache there, we’re talking about maybe a ton of canned food and barrels of clean water. We can retire to the Hidden Underground and never have to worry about bugs again.”
Nylon lifted a shovelful of debris and tossed it to one side. “Hidden Underground. You believe that shit?”
“I believe I can buy the prettiest woman in the burg with five cans of unspoiled edibles and ten armed guards with a hundred. With a truck full of military-issue protein, I can damn sure find out if there’s an HU. Shut up and fucking dig.” Leather used the ax as if it were a rake, moving shards of brick and stone aside.
“Okay, okay. Where’s Petey?”
“Standing watch, moron. Up on the tower.”
Nylon glanced up at a pockmarked building across the street. A segment of the structure extended up three or four stories, carved like some ancient rock formation, only not by wind and rain but by bombs and fire.
“I don’t see “im.”
“You’re not supposed to see him, he’s supposed to see you, and anybody else who might come strolling along. You didn’t think I was gonna be rooting around out here in the open without covering my ass, did you?”
Nylon shrugged, said nothing, went back to digging. With the two of them scraping at the rubble, anything they said was covered by the sounds of their work.
/> “Amy, what are you doing?” The speaker was unseen, his voice almost a whisper.
“Videoing, Uncle Burt. You can hear everything they say and they look real close in the camera, see?”
“You shouldn’t be out here, Amy, you know that. Your mother would—uh-oh. Here give me the cam.”
The viewpoint shifted, there was a quick disorienting flash of the ground and a small girl’s leg, then the picture steadied on the two diggers again, the angle slightly higher.
“Nobody moves,” came a deep and unseen voice. A second later, a tall man in GF camo gear stepped into sight, a softslug shotgun held at his hip. The soldier pointed his weapon at the two diggers.
“Oh, fuck,” Nylon said. “Where the hell is Petey?”
“Look,” Leather said, “there’s plenty to go around. We ain’t greedy, we’ll split it with you.”
The soldier laughed. Waved the shotgun. “There’s nothing down there, scatcats. We put out that rumor to catch guys like you.”
“Motherfucker,” Leather said.
“Oh, man, oh, man!” Nylon said. “You’re bug feeders! Fucking bug feeders!”
The soldier took a step and slapped Nylon across the temple with the barrel of the shotgun, hard enough to knock him to his knees but not so hard as to put him out. “Don’t call us that, scum. Never say that. We serve the queens. It is an honor. An honor, you hear? But you wouldn’t understand that. You aren’t among the Chosen.” The soldier glanced to his left. “Simmons, King, front and center.”
Two more soldiers, also armed with shotguns, came into view. Walking ahead of them, a third man, his hands cuff-taped behind him.
“Oh, man, Petey,” Nylon said.
“You’re not feeding me to the goddamn bugs!” Leather said. He threw the ax at the first soldier, turned and ran.
Simmons and King snapped their weapons up. “I got him!” one of them yelled. “Cover the others!”
The speaker fired his weapon. The charge caught the running man’s left ankle. He managed one more step and then collapsed when his weight came down on the shattered joint. He screamed.
The ax didn’t do any apparent damage to the first soldier, who said, “Go get him. I’ve got these two.”
The two soldiers moved to grab Leather.
“The queen will be pleased with these three,” the first soldier said. “She will smile upon us.” He looked around the clearing, what had once been a busy street in a major city.
The viewpoint shifted. “Go, Amy,” the unseen Uncle Burt said, his voice urgent. “Go, go!”
The image vanished. The scanners cycled, looking for another broadcast.
Seated before the now-blank screen, Billie was drenched in sweat, her heart pounding.
“Lot of them went over like that,” the female tech said. Annie, Billie remembered. “Not enough they have drones out hunting people. Now they got traitors doing their work for them, too. Hard to imagine why somebody would do that.”
Billie sighed, and it was almost a sob. Yeah. It was hard to imagine, but there it was. Jesus. How could anybody sink that low? Jesus.
The familiar weight of the 10mm carbine in his hands felt good. He wasn’t in field armor, but Wilks also had four spare magazines strapped around his waist. Five hundred rounds ought to be plenty.
Powell had gone off to the computer center to do the kind of thing he could do, fiddle with controls. Didn’t matter, Wilks would manage the hot work, it was the one thing the marines had taught him well.
Ahead, the doorway to the communications shack loomed. Wasn’t even closed. Of course, they didn’t have any reason to worry about security. Or at least, they hadn’t until now.
When Wilks stepped into the small room, he saw Billie sitting in one of the chairs, staring at a blank screen. Next to her was a female tech.
“Back away from the console,” Wilks said.
Billie looked at him. “Wilks. What—?”
The tech started to touch a control.
“Unh-uh, lady, you don’t want to do that.” He waved the carbine at her. “Roll the chair back and stand up slowly.”
The tech, unarmed, did as she was told.
“Wilks!”
“Come stand over here, Billie.”
She shook her head in puzzlement, but complied.
He opened up on the console first, then shifted his hip point up and raked the screens. He was wearing canal suppressor buttons so the sound was muted for him, but the two women covered their ears with their hands. The tech screamed. Thirty rounds were plenty. The hard plastic chipped and shattered, delicate biocircuits shorted out, and the flat screens starred and ran out of image, turning a dark gray.
Long-range communications at Third Base were history, at least for a while. There would be radio and Doppler on the crawlers and ships, of course, some of it capable of reaching over the near horizon to Spears, but if he hurried, nobody would get to those. Or if they did, it wouldn’t matter.
“Wilks, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Staging a coup. Or a mutiny. When Spears comes back, he is going to be relieved of command. Powell is taking over.”
“Shit, that pussy?” the tech said. “Spears will chew him to pieces.”
“If it was just him, yeah, probably. But there’s a few troopers who don’t want to become monster food, they’re on Powell’s side. And then there’s me. Which team you want to be on, sister?”
The tech licked her lips. Sighed. “I’m with you. Sooner or later everybody fucks up. That happens, you go into the hive. I’d rather swallow a bullet than an egg.”
Wilks nodded. “Come on, then. Tell me about communications elsewhere on the station.”
“What is the situation on the storm, trooper?”
The man shook his head, obviously nervous.
“Still swirling, sir. We can’t hope to lift for at least another three hours.” The trooper swallowed. “Sir.”
Spears nodded. Not much he could do about the weather here. On some planets, decent-sized worlds, there were measures that could be taken with surface meteorology. A climate-controlled world wouldn’t have your troops bogged down in mud or freezing in snow at the wrong time. A good commander had to think of such things. Many a battle had been lost not to the enemy but to a freak rain or heat low. A kamikaze—a Divine Wind—had once saved the old Terran empire of the Nihonese from an invasion by sea; better weather at the start would have tilted major engagements of the Civil War toward the South; the Australian Wars, the Acturian Police Action, the Berringetti Conflict, the outcomes had been affected in all these by a capricious natural ecology. How galling it must be to know you were superior in strength and numbers, had tactical advantages in terrain and materiel, and were a better strategist, only to be defeated by a monsoon. Could make an atheist believe in gods, that kind of shit.
Spears nodded to himself. “What about communications with the base?”
“Negative, sir. Even the LOS transmitters can’t punch through the swirls. Sorry.”
“Not your fault, marine. Carry on.”
Spears turned away from the communications man. They were in the plant’s south dock, a fortified and secured area the alien drones were unlikely to be able to penetrate, even if their queen would allow them to try. The place rang hollow under Spears’s gravity-augmented boot heels as he walked to the intercom sensor and waved it on. His men were clustered around their craft, talking in low tones. Scared shitless of the aliens. As well they should be. “Computer, put visual of the queen on-air.”
The holoproj flowered in front of the general. Four cameras, four different views of the young queen, busy pumping out fresh eggs four levels below where Spears now stood. “Good girl,” he said, smiling. “Just keep those troopers coming. Computer, ignite the floor burner in the chamber.”
“Burner tube is blocked,” the computer said.
Spears allowed his smile a bit more wattage. Had to give it to the queen, she never stopped trying. Her drones had paved over the
burner, probably four feet of the rock spittle covered the training device. “Clear the burner tube.”
After a moment, a faint orange glow began in one corner of the chamber, quickly climbing through the spectrum from dull to bright. A thin blue line flashed, speared through the overlay with the sharpness of a laser beam, hard-edged in the dim room.
“Tube cleared,” the computer said.
The queen had noticed and Spears would bet megacredits to mouse turds she knew what was coming, “light the burner. Half-second burst only.”
A blast of flammable gas roared up to splash against the ceiling, a single hot ejaculation that cut off while the circle of fire still painted a yellow-orange circle on the ridged overlay.
The queen looked at the vanishing fire, then swiveled her great emplated head to look directly at one of the cameras focused on her.
Spears chuckled. She knew it was there, knew he was watching her. “Computer, give the queen an image of the pulse-paint room. And put me onscreen so she can see me, too.”
The projection swirled into life in the chamber, the details hard to make out from where Spears watched his own holoproj. But he knew the queen could see it well enough. The queen looked at the image, then back at the camera. Opened her mouth, hissed an acknowledgment at the tiny version of the general floating in the air before her.
Spears nodded. “Very wise, little mother.” He turned away from the screen, looked at his human troops. “Gizhamme, Ceman, Kohm, front and center. We’re going to the ID room.”
The three men traded glances, but hurried to obey.
Very good, for troops about to be outmoded. They followed their commander.
Billie followed Wilks down the corridor. “We’ll get you a gun, Billie,” he said. “Soon as we get control of the situation on this level.”
“What exactly are we doing here?” she asked.
“Taking sides,” he said. “Powell has given me a list of men and women we can depend on to lean our way. And the transponder coordinates of the troops who are likely to stay loyal to Spears. We’re going to round up and detain the general’s supporters. Then when he comes home, we won’t have so much to worry about. We take him down, flush all this demented shit away, and live happily ever after.”
[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Page 10