by Richard Fox
The bottle of pills came out and Martel stopped to read the name. She knew the woman and wondered exactly what she’d done to earn Ibarra’s sanction. The coroner’s examination, carried out by a pliant Ibarra Corporation medical service robot, would list the cause of death as suicide. All too easy.
A lamp snapped on.
Martel dropped the pills and aimed her pistol at the woman lying in bed, her hand on a lamp and her terrified face staring right at Martel.
“Don’t,” Martel said quietly and forcefully. “I’ve already killed you. You can stay quiet and go peacefully or make this difficult for both of us. You scream and you will go slow and painfully.”
“Martel? No, this is impossible,” Caruthers said.
“It is possible. It is happening and the feeling in your chest is your internal organs failing. Stay. Quiet.”
“I saw you next to Ibarra when he addressed the fleet the last time. You were there. There’s no way you could have made it to the fleet before the jump. How did you survive on Earth all that time?” Caruthers asked. She rubbed her jawline as the poison in her system made speaking more difficult.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was on the fleet, same as you,” Martel said.
“No … I have … pictures on my Ubi. You’re there. You must have died,” Caruthers’ eyes lost focus as her pupils dilated. “You’re one of Ibarra’s abominations, aren’t you? Grown in a tube … no soul.” She coughed and slumped back against her pillows. Her hand fell from the light and knocked an Ubi on her nightstand to the floor.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Martel’s voice rose to a hiss. She sidestepped around the bed, her pistol ready to end Caruthers’s life a few seconds early if she made any sudden moves.
Tatiana Caruthers’ breathing became shallow, irregular. She coughed twice then went limp. Her head lolled to the side and white foam fell from the corner of her lips. Dead.
Martel picked up the Ubi and pressed her thumb against the screen, her print overriding Caruthers’s lock, and the device came to life.
“Show me Ibarra’s last address to the fleet,” she said. The Ubi played a video—Marc Ibarra, elderly and leaning against a cane, reading from a prepared speech. Martel’s face twisted in confusion. This was a major event. Why didn’t she remember this? In the background, Martel saw a woman with dark hair behind the regular group of Ibarra flunkies he traveled with.
The video continued and Martel got a good look at the person behind the group.
“Freeze, zoom in on the third person from the left,” Martel said. The Ubi did as requested, and Martel saw herself.
“This can’t be right,” she said. She looked at the video’s time stamp, just tens of minutes before the false engines in the Saturn fleet took the entire fleet out of the space-time continuum and held them beyond the reach of the Xaros fleet for almost thirty years.
“No, I remember. I remember being on the fleet, you dead bitch,” Martel said to Caruthers. She dropped the Ubi to the ground and bolted from the apartment. She ran to the elevator, her mind failing to reconcile what she remembered, what she knew, and what she’d just seen.
She got to the elevator and hit the button for her floor. Nothing happened.
“Reset!” The elevator doors closed once she removed her restrictions and the lift got moving.
Martel’s hands opened and clenched, running over her face as her mind raced.
“Not right, not right at all,” she muttered. She looked at her reflection, seeing a face that didn’t match her memories.
The elevator opened and Martel sprinted down the hallway and into the security of her own apartment.
She ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She reached beneath the sink and pulled out an Ubi.
“Marc? Marc, it’s Martel.”
Ibarra, his younger-looking hologram, filled the screen. “Hello, Martel. Mission accomplished?”
“It is done.” Martel swallowed hard as panic crept up from her stomach and doused her heart with fear. She’d never reacted this way to a killing, her decades of composure in the face of stress and danger unraveling.
“Marc, she said something. Said I was dead. I saw the video, saw me. Me. Right next to you. Was I there? With you? Why don’t I remember that? What the hell’s happening to me?” Martel set the Ubi on the bathroom sink and looked in the mirror. She pulled at her face, trying to remake it as she remembered.
“I’m sorry, Martel,” Ibarra said.
“What?”
“There’s been an error in your memories. I thought we’d fixed this production flaw but it seems something slipped through the cracks,” Ibarra said sadly.
Martel snatched the Ubi up and held it close to her face.
“She called me an abomination. Something without a soul. What the hell have you done to me?” She could see her wild-eyed reflection.
“I’m sorry, Shannon. This is my fault. I take no pleasure in this,” Ibarra said.
A tiny capsule in the base of Martel’s brain popped, disrupting just enough blood flow to kill her instantly. Martel collapsed against the sink, smashing her head against the edge. The Ubi clattered to the floor and shut off.
****
Ibarra’s hologram stood in the Crucible control room. He put his hands on his hips and shook his head from side to side.
“That was unexpected,” the probe said. Its silver light rose from the plinth in the center of the room.
“Shut the hell up,” Ibarra said. “That was the second time I’ve killed her.”
“Your brain patterns are erratic. Should I shut you down for a maintenance scan?”
“It’s called grief. Grief, you stupid lump of electrons. Let me have it before you try and purge it as programming error.” Ibarra swung back to the communications panel and his fingers swiped through contacts until he found who he needed and doubled-tapped the screen to make the call.
His hologram didn’t actually touch the screen, but the computer system in the control room reacted accordingly. Ibarra’s mental imprint rejected the notion of doing everything by mental command. It still wanted a tactile connection to the physical world and the probe gave Ibarra that illusion.
The call went through and Thorrson’s very tired and bleary-eyed image came up.
“Boss? You know what time it is in Hawaii?” Thorsson murmured.
“I don’t sleep anymore, Thorsson. It does wonders for productivity and I suggest you learn to do the same,” Ibarra said.
“My report.” Thorsson sat up and rubbed sleep from his eyes. “You want it now or can I get it to you once the next batch of tubes are online, like usual?”
“I need you to regrow and reload specimen thirty-seven immediately,” Ibarra said.
“Thirty-seven … Martel? Why? You know iterating a specific body type and her recorded experiences put a real toll on the computers. I could have nine more proccies decanted and in the general population by the time another one of her is ready to go.” Thorsson looked at amended production graphs on a screen and held up his Ubi so that Ibarra could see the impact of what he’d just requested.
“I’m well aware of what it’ll do to our production timeline, Thorsson. I need her back. And I need her as soon as you can give her to me. We’ll send over some amendments to her memory file and I want the face molding done in utero, not plastic surgery once she’s regrown,” Ibarra said.
“That’ll add another day to her tube occupation,” Thorsson said with a roll of his eyes.
“Get it done. I don’t pay you to whine.”
“Wait, are we getting paid again?”
“You know what I mean. I want updates on her twice a day. Make sure you encrypt and hide the report. The rest of the council can’t know about this,” Ibarra said.
“You’re the boss, boss.”
Ibarra ended the call with a flick of his hand.
“You exhibit the exact emotions and irrational behavior you’re trying to prevent in th
e other humans,” the probe said. “Why is your emotional attachment to the Martel specimen overriding the logic needed to rebuild the crews for the fleet? There will be eleven fewer Marines, pilots and crewmen available to fight the Xaros when they arrive. And for what?”
“Martel has skills we need,” Ibarra said.
“We do not need an assassin.”
“We did today. Caruthers was trying to contact bleeding hearts in the company and in the fleet. She opposed what we’re doing—the only course of action we came up with that will beat the Xaros when they return in fourteen years. I can’t have our plans disrupted, same as when we were preparing the fleet for the Xaros’ first arrival,” Ibarra said.
“You think we will need Martel again?”
“I hope not, but it’s possible.”
“Your cognitive patterns remain distressed. You risk this same disruption by recreating, and thereby creating the chance of losing, Martel. Why not let her stay dead, so to speak. We can create an intelligence that will serve the same function.”
“Because it won’t be her, Jimmy. It won’t be the same,” Ibarra said. He found the file with his address to the fleet that Caruthers must have mentioned to Martel and purged Martel’s image from it. He sent the probe a command to repeat that action on all known databanks and any that might be encountered in the future.
“This is illogical. You’re taking an unnecessary risk to satisfy some legacy biological needs in your memory matrix.” The probe’s light wavered in annoyance.
“You’re so eloquent when you’re pissed off. Don’t try to make sense of human beings, Jimmy. We’ve been trying to do it since we figured out how to speak to each other and we haven’t made much progress,” Ibarra said.
CHAPTER 9
There was a thin line around the edge of the city, a dark band the width of a thumb. Hale looked down at it from where he stood on the dusty plain that extended to the mountains. The city beyond the line was pristine, rough cobblestone streets without a speck of dirt or invading weeds growing between the seams of concrete and stone. Stone-and-mortar buildings with doorways built for something twice the size of a human looked like the occupants had left for lunch, ready to return at any moment.
“Lowenn,” Hale said, “how long has this place been abandoned?”
“The Xaros arrived a thousand years ago. The last invitation went out a few months before that,” she said.
“Why is it so … clean?” Yarrow asked. “Phoenix, Tucson, St. George, they were all empty for about thirty years, and now they’re falling apart. Anthalas has rain, lots of plant and animal life. But this looks like the Shanishol were here yesterday.”
“Maybe they’re all ghosts,” Standish said.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Standish,” Hale said.
“Remember when you said there was no such thing as aliens? Yeah ….”
“You’re violating your talking profile,” Cortaro said.
Standish raised his hands in mock surrender.
“I do not understand your trepidation,” Steuben said. “The Toth are in the city without incident. What are we waiting for?”
Hale glanced down at the charge reading on his gauss rifle and flexed his fingers around the handle. He lifted his boot and set foot over the line. There was no reaction, no warning klaxons, no swarm of Xaros drones emerging from beneath the cobblestones. He took another step over the line and waved his Marines on to follow him.
“This is a recon mission,” Hale said. “Avoid detection and don’t fire unless our lives depend on it.” He raised his rifle to his shoulder and kept the muzzle low. He jogged to the nearest building, three stories of rough stone and concrete with the same bubble-shaped imperfections they had seen at the corral.
He took cover against the wall and took a quick peek around the corner, seeing nothing but more crude buildings and silence.
“Sir, look at that,” Torni said as she ran up beside him and pointed to the ground leading back to the edge of the city. Dust carried in by the Marines and knocked loose from their boots trembled on the cobblestones then blew through the air, carried by a strong breeze Hale couldn’t feel. The dust flew off the edge of the city and over the black line.
“Let me try something.” Orozco pulled a pebbled from between the tread of his boots and tossed it in the air. The pebble froze in midair just above the cobblestones, then was swept from the city.
“That’s … different,” Bailey said.
Cortaro, standing beneath a window sill that was almost seven feet above the ground, jumped up and grabbed the edge. He pulled himself up and took a quick glance inside. “Sir, there’s stuff inside this house. Open doorway on the other side,” Cortaro said.
Hale nodded and led the Marines to the other side. There was no door in the entranceway, not even a frame or hinges to suggest one had ever been there. The Shanishol weren’t much on security or privacy, he thought. He ran inside, scanning the room over his rifle sights. A staircase without a railing led up from the back wall. A high wooden table with clay bowls and metal knives sat against the wall to Hale’s left. Two round wooden lids covered depressions on the floor next to the table. Mats made of thatched reeds were laid over the floor next to the far wall.
The rest of the Marines filed in behind Hale.
“Cortaro, clear the second floor,” Hale said. The Marine and Standish ran up the too-tall stairs.
“Clear,” Cortaro announced a moment later.
Lowenn, her weapon dangling from loose fingers, looked around the room. She picked up a knife from a table, the handle and blade meant for a much larger wielder.
“This isn’t right,” she said. “This is the home of a civilization that’s pre-industrial. I don’t see any evidence of electricity, do you? But this blade ….” She took a sensor wand off her gauntlet and pressed it against the knife. A waveform coalesced on her display and she gingerly set the knife back on the table. “That’s made from Omnium. The underlying energy signature is there.”
Against Hale’s protest, she turned and lifted a wooden lid from the recession. Lowenn stood still, balancing the wooden lid on its side. “Huh,” she said.
Hale pointed his rifle at the depression and walked up to it. Inside was a clay urn full of plastic pouches, the Shanishol dash and whirl writing printed on each one.
“What does it say?” he asked Lowenn. He put his hand on the lid; it felt new and full of sap as squeezed it, not a thousand years old.
Lowenn picked up a packet and her mouth moved as she tried to read the writing. She flipped the packet over then frowned. “‘A gift from the prophet.’ That’s what they all say.” Lowenn pulled at the edges and a corner ripped away, revealing a square of white chalky material. She wafted air from over the open package toward her nose and sniffed. “I think it’s food.”
“Steuben, you want a bite?” Torni asked.
The Karigole shook his head emphatically.
“Giant half-dead alien bugs, yes. Millennia-year-old field rations, no. Remind me to get you a can of Surstromming or anchovies,” she said.
“Sir,” Cortaro said from the top of the stairs, “this is …I don’t know.”
Hale plucked the food packet from Lowenn’s hand and tossed it back in the urn then set the wooden lid back down. “Show me.”
There was a suit of armor on the second floor. A silver and gold breastplate with pearl-like inlays attached to shoulder pauldrons hung on a wooden crossbeam. Platinum chain-linked mail, so fine and intricate Hale mistook it for silk until he touched it, was attached to the underside of the breastplate and extended to the floor. The armor was twice the size of the combat armor Hale wore. A halberd made from the same gold and platinum hung on the wall, the shaft too large for Hale to wrap his hands around it.
“Then there’s this,” Cortaro said. A poster, the construction too cheap and flimsy to be a meaningful work of art, hung on the wall. A Shanishol, his arms held up to his side and wearing a white robe, basked in golden light
. The worshiper had bright golden eyes and was flanked by Shanishol wearing the same armor as stored in the building.
“‘Exaltation for all,’” Lowenn said, reading the words on the poster from where she stood on the stairs.
“Sir, can I keep this?” Standish asked. He held a straw doll, wrapped in threadbare cloth, a blue pigment added to the hands, arms and face of the doll.
Of all the things he’d seen in this city, the doll set Hale’s nerves on fire. His breathing quickened and fear’s icy touch brushed over his heart. Children, he thought. There were children here.
“What did I tell you about touching? And talking?” Cortaro said. Standish laid the doll back on the floor, reverently.
“OK.” Hale went back downstairs, wanting more than anything to just get away from that doll. “This obviously isn’t what we’re looking for. Let’s keep moving toward the pyramids, keep our eyes open for anything useful.”
The Marines moved through the city slowly, and with purpose. Half the team bounded from one house to another while the rest kept them in over watch, covering their movement. There was no deviation among the houses, other than a few three-story buildings. Every glance Hale made inside the homes revealed the same thing—a simple lifestyle. Some had open meal packets arrayed in a circle on the ground floor; others had wooden blocks and hand-carved figurines strewn about the floor.
Life had ended in this city suddenly, and the Xaros weren’t to blame.
Cortaro’s fire team ran past Hale and pressed against a wall. Yarrow glanced around the corner, then glanced again. He held up a fist to stop Hale and his team from moving up. Yarrow looked at Hale and tapped his index finger against his forehead, mimicking the lieutenant rank bar Hale wore when he wasn’t in his armor.
Hale, alone, ran forward.
“Sir, not sure what this is,” the young medic said. Yarrow held his rifle around the corner and the camera feed from the tip of his rifle showed Hale a road of wooden planks flush with the ground around it. The road looped around homes and led toward the distant pyramids.
“I thought it was a canal,” Lowenn said over the IR. “I saw it on the pictures the Breitenfeld took from orbit. It runs beneath all the pyramids.”