Empty.
Wrong.
Empty.
Wrong.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
The ship shuddered suddenly and she found herself back above the podium. She opened her eyes and felt like she had been revived from her maintenance cycle again. A bad dream? She could dream. She had dreamt before. She could usually control them and stop them if they got out of hand. That the dream had confused her and that she had believed it was real—really believed it—frightened her. She looked for Burke. He was in his room. She closed her eyes. He moved to the helm by the time she opened them again. The seconds she took to blink had become minutes. More lost time? There must have been a glitch in Brisbane’s systems. They had only had the ship for a day, she reminded herself. It would take time to get used to it.
A day? How did we get so far into space in a day?
Burke stood in front of the podium.
“Cass. Cass. Cass. Cass.”
“What?” she said. Her attention snapped to the man. He looked odd. The scar under his eye was missing. She remembered how terrified for him she had been when the crawler’s leg had slithered through the hole in the aegis and lashed out at him. She had felt helpless and trapped. She hated that feeling.
“Are you awake?” he asked. He smiled. She loved seeing him smile.
“I can’t be awake if I never sleep,” she said, raising her head indignantly into the air. She loved teasing him, too.
“You usually spend a few hours each night in maintenance,” he countered. “Sounds like sleep to me. Did you not sleep well? Are you tired?”
“I can’t be tired!” she protested. He laughed. She laughed with him.
Her vision tore in half abruptly. He was standing in front of her. His chest was moving with each breath. She tried to simulate it with her own chest, mocking breathing in and out. Then he was still. Even the air around him froze in place. The image of him, in the helm, the main window of the ship behind showcasing the stars, ripped apart as if it had been turned to paper. The tearing streaked horizontally across her eyes. Everything went black. She blinked and everything was normal. Another time lapse. He was standing near the pilot’s terminal now. Weren’t they supposed to hire a pilot soon?
“Cass,” Burke said. “Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“I can’t be sick,” she said bluntly.
“You can get a virus.”
“I don’t have a virus!”
The image tore apart again. She felt it rip apart in her mind. She heard and felt the tearing sound. Wet paper being pulled apart, thick and bloated with ink. A flash of light blinded her mind and then she recovered just as suddenly. She looked around the command room. Burke had put on his aegis. She always liked it better when he was wearing it. She felt closer to him when he was in his armor, like they were working together.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
“I know,” she replied.
“Cass? I can’t hear you.”
“I said I know!” she called out. She watched as Burke’s brow creased as he looked at her. He shook his head.
“Your mouth is moving but there’s no sound coming out.”
She was afraid. Another emotion that the podium had helped to amplify. The thought came to her as she watched Burke’s face flash with comprehension. She was breaking and they both knew it.
“Havard warned us,” Burke said. “He told us you lasted longer than most AIs have and that he needed to study you, to help you, to extend your life. You said you were fine Cass. You said you had it under control. Do you?”
“I do!” Cass yelled out. She heard all of her words emerge at once then, everything she had said blasted out in a garbled mess from the podium. Burke looked like he had been slapped by the sound as the cluttered noise crashed into him. He raised a hand to his helmet. He pressed his fingers on the faceplate. He pulled them down, blocking his face and eyes from her view. She tried to merge with the armor and couldn’t. She wanted to see his expression. She needed to see that he was okay. She needed to see that he wasn’t angry with her, disappointed that she was breaking.
Her view tore open the moment the faceplate sealed itself away. She heard him scream, the same scream he had made on Meidum. That felt like years ago now. She remembered the night they broke through into the basement level of the base. She remembered being so worried each time he used a grenade to clear the rubble away but knew that they had no choice. He was close to death, nearer than she told him. His leg was broken in too many places. She didn’t even know how he could stand to move it at all. There was food and water in the base below them and he had less time than he thought. She was too afraid to let him to continue digging. She was too afraid to tell him to stop.
Her biggest fear on the planet was that he would die. She knew she would survive. The aegis would absorb power from daylight and keep her operational. The wildlife on the planet was too small to do any damage to her body but he was made of flesh. The breakdown of a human body seared across her view: flesh, blood, water, liquids, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium—bones, bones, bones, his leg is broken. She remembered the scream he made the night they broke into the basement. The alien animals were coming for him and he forced himself too quickly into the hole he had made. He fell down the open stairs and landed on his broken leg, the broken leg that broke all over again.
He died down there. She remembered it well. She had used the interior padding of the suit to perform chest compressions. She had tried, fruitlessly, to pressurize air into his lungs. The hole in the helmet had made it impossible, the same hole that had allowed the crawler’s leg to carve open his cheek.
Why was the scar gone?
She had barely managed to resuscitate him. She broke another one of his ribs in the process. She had never told him that he had died. She moved the armor carefully as he was unconscious, careful not to cause any damage to his body. The basement was full of supplies and she thought he didn’t have much time. She had saved him. She had been in control. She wasn’t broken.
Her view of the helm came back. Burke’s faceplate was open. His face was burning. His blood was boiling and bubbling away from his skin. She was back on Meidum in the next instant. He was sweating profusely under the day’s heat. They hadn’t broken into the basement. She was trying to conserve energy but she felt so sorry for him. She cooled the air in the armor as much as she could. The sun above them broiled the desert planet, impossibly close in the sky. She was back on the ship. The same sun was behind Burke, impossibly close to the ship’s main window. They were crashing into the star. The ship should have been falling apart. Burke should have been dead. He screamed.
The image tore. She felt corrupted. Burke’s voice sang a song in her head, the same word again and again: virus, virus, virus, virus. He dragged out a different syllable or changed the vowel sound each time. She closed her eyes. She was looking at the weapons again. She thought of Burke’s sniper rifle.
They were on the planet Veiti. They had tracked Eva Pond after she escaped from prison. They were waiting on a hilltop over the newly established town. Eva Pond was a slaver. They were going to kill her before she took anyone. They saw her approach a young boy between to houses. She smiled at the child and began to talk with him.
“I found a lot of information on Eva Pond—Pond, Pond, Pond, Pond—while I kept track of her,” she told Burke as he adjusted the rifle. “She was a slave herself as a child. Taken from a new planet like this one.”
He had shifted the rifle at her suggestion. He had the scope perfectly lined up on Eva Pond’s head. She had factored in for the wind, gravity, and other atmospheric conditions. He trusted her judgement.
“What do you mean?” Burke asked.
“She does horrible things to people now. I’m not excusing it, just explaining it. She probably does these things to others because of what was done to her. Do you understand?”
“No,” he said. She saw
he was ready to take the shot.
“You don’t believe in redemption?”
“I do,” he said. “I just don’t care.”
He squeezed the trigger on the rifle. The bullet blasted out and sliced through the air. The shot followed Cass’s calculations perfectly until the end. Eva Pond looked up. The bullet slammed into the boy’s head with enough force to knock him off his feet. He hit the ground, dead, and Eva Pond began to scream.
“Cass! What happened!” Burke roared.
“I don’t know! I triple checked! All my measurements were right!”
“You just killed a child!”
She felt like she was being electrocuted, like one of her processors was overheating and spraying sparks to others. The planet around them went dark. Burke threw the rifle away and jumped down from the hill. The planet changed. He took another step and they were back on their ship, the Brisbane. In the main window, Cass saw a ship circling around them. She couldn’t detach herself from the podium. Burke stood at the helm, calling out that they were under attack.
“I need your help!” he screamed.
The ship passed in front of them. A series of bullets pummeled into the main window and broke through the glass. She barely rooted Burke in place before the front of the ship lost pressure. Loose objects in the room and broken glass vomited out of the window and into space. The emergency shutters triggered and clamped down, sealing them inside.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“You need to focus!” he roared at her. “I need you here!”
A warning blared through the room. They were being boarded. She tried once more to shift herself into Burke’s aegis as he marched down the corridor. He grabbed for the handgun at his hip and he raced down the stairs and into the cargo hold. She couldn’t merge with the armor. She moved through the ship instead, looking through the cameras in the lower level.
The main doors were being cut through. She watched as a heated trail was cut around the middle of the door. Someone was tearing their way into the ship—something that should have been impossible. The door broke apart. They had been pulled inside a much larger ship, like a jump carrier capable of housing many ships of their size. A blindingly bright light came through the gap in the door, too bright even for her cameras.
“Fix my visor!” Burke called out.
“I can’t!” she yelled back.
A woman stepped through the door. The light went dark behind her. Cass thought she knew her. She had an augmented arm and held a long barreled rifle in both hands. Her name taunted Cass, staying out of her reach.
“Who are you?” Burke called.
The woman smiled and held up the rifle. She fired quickly. The first bullet hit Burke’s shoulder. The plate of the armor protecting him was knocked clean away from the rest of the aegis. She was unable to help him or create the shields to compensate for the hit. Burke raised his handgun and fired back. Each of his shots passed through the woman’s flesh, exiting her body in a splash of water instead of blood. She tossed the rifle aside and began to change. Her lower jaw fell away and she shambled forward as her body morphed into the alien shape. Her flesh turned to water and her upper teeth began to grow.
“Watch out!” Cass called.
Burke kept firing at her. When he ran out of bullets, he ran forward to meet her. He triggered the blades in his forearms but they didn’t respond. His aegis was only half functional without her presence in the armor. The alien swiped its claws over his chest and helmet. The armor peeled away from him like it was made of paper. It was shredded away, exposing his skin. The alien held up a claw and brought it down on Burke’s head. The air around the claw was stripped away in the wake of the blow. The image around it crumbled apart. Everything went black.
“Burke?” Cass said meekly.
They were back on Earth. She remembered her first visit. She was in the aegis. She didn’t understand how she got there. She didn’t understand why she was so relieved that she was in the armor. There were dross chasing behind them as they ran through the ruined city. Burke fired back at the aliens as they drew closer to him.
“How did we get here?” Cass asked frantically.
“We flew,” Burke said. “We’re here for the drone, remember?”
“What about the vampire?”
“We handed that in to ACU already. We got it from Rivera, remember?”
“No, there was one on the ship,” Cass said slowly. “Just now.”
“We transported its core. I need you to focus, Cass. We’re in the middle of a fight.”
A dross burst through the ground in front of them. Burke slid to a stop and raised his rifle. He fired a quick burst into the alien’s head and watched its skull and brains break apart under his fire. He broke into a run again. They were near the ship. They had landed on the roof of a building. The Brisbane was waiting for them, ready to fly off when they reached it.
We didn’t have that ship yet. That’s wrong.
Burke triggered the jump mechanism in his legs when they reached the building. He landed smoothly on the roof. A group of dross crashed into the building below them like a tidal wave. Cass signaled the doors of the ship to open and Burke rushed inside.
“One dives in after you,” Cass suddenly said, remembering as she did so.
“What?”
A dross leaped into the ship and crashed onto Burke’s back. He fell to the floor. His rifle was knocked away. The doors closed behind him. The dross sunk its teeth into the armor at the back of his neck. Too many sparks—an impossible amount—filled the air above them like fireworks. The dross tore through layers of the armor with each bite.
“Help me!” Burke groaned.
She tried to protect him. The alien chewed its way through all of the barriers she put in place. The ship began to move around them. The aegis began to bleed even before the dross reached Burke’s flesh, as if the armor and his body were one and the same. He screamed out, the same scream on Meidum, as the dross’s teeth slipped deeper into his neck. The blood flooded the floor of the cargo hold.
“What’s happening to me?” Cass whispered.
“You’re breaking,” Burke said.
They were in the helm of the ship. The dross was gone. They were in space again. There was no ship outside the window.
“Help,” Cass said weakly.
“No,” another voice came from behind the podium.
She turned and recognized the man instantly.
“We killed you,” she said.
“Almost,” Adam said.
Burke seemed not to notice the other man. He stood, staring dumbly at Cass over the podium. Adam raised the handgun and aimed down its sights. He aimed the gun through Cass’s head, the light of the room passing through the faint colors of her holographic skin. Through her, Adam saw Burke. He squeezed the trigger and the bullet pierced through both of them. Cass watched it sail through her body and into Burke’s head. The bullet landed perfectly—too perfectly—between his eyes. He slumped down and fell to the floor, dead.
“And now you,” Adam said. He laughed.
“This isn’t right,” Cass said.
Adam moved down the corridor and to the engine. He had already placed the bomb before he went up to the command room. He armed it and then was gone, vanishing in a moment as if he passed through the walls of the ship. Cass watched the timer on the bomb count down. She expected another jump and to be pulled somewhere else. She was broken, she knew. Something had gone wrong. But nothing happened. Nothing saved her. The bomb continued its countdown and, at zero, exploded.
The ship tore apart. The ship broke into pieces. Her mind, her focal point at the helm, shattered. The engine, her main body, disintegrated moments after the blast. The different rooms of the ship tumbled away from her. She felt like her body had been pulled apart and drifted away. She didn’t die. She didn’t understand how she had survived. There was nothing left to hold her; nothing left to embody. She drifted through space, the darkness growing as
the pieces of the ship disappeared around her. The stars were next, blinking in and out of existence until she was left in nothing.
Empty.
Wrong.
Empty.
Something pulled at her. It felt like the pull of gravity when she was in the aegis. She was pulled through the nothingness around her. There was no point of reference for her to see how fast she was moving. There was no air around for her to pass through, nothing to feel hurtle around her body.
The nothing turned into a room around her: a floor, ceiling, and walls. The computers appeared next, as if they were gradually being drawn in by her processors. Chairs popped up in front of the screens. People populated the room. They all stared, fixated, at the consoles in front of them. She was looking through a camera on a display, she realized. A man walked toward her. She recognized him. The name evaded her but she focused on it, grasping it and succeeding where she had failed earlier.
“What? What happened?” she said frantically.
“Don’t worry Cass, you’re safe,” Havard said gently. “You’re home now. We saved you, but we couldn’t save everything. I’m sorry to tell you, but Burke’s dead.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Adam was dead. She was certain of that. He couldn’t have killed Burke. It had been an illusion, a mesh of corrupted memories. Then, the thought struck her. If Burke had been killed and the ship had been destroyed, her files may have become fragmented. Her memories of the last few years had bled together. She might not be able to sort the truth from the corruption.
Burke’s dead?
Her eyes softened. She looked down at Havard. She didn’t know what to think.
Also by Joseph Anderson:
[email protected]
Science Fiction
Interstellar Soldiers
The Bounty Hunter: Soldier's Wrath Page 10