The Captured

by Kyte, Adrian

  ‘Oh, sure, deceptively harmless when trust up.’

  ‘Then you understand the kind of scrutiny we’re under. And that it doesn’t make us any more than pawns in this war.’

  ‘Expendable. I get it. And when they declare war it’s serious. But there is something more important than their leader.’

  Roidon stopped abruptly. ‘What could possibly be more important?’

  Torbin stopped in sync, turned round to face him. ‘A simulation of the entire Earth.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I mean an accurate simulation, down to individual minds.’

  ‘Interesting. You have evidence?’

  ‘About two hundred exabytes.’

  ‘A mere sample then. Give me the map data.’

  Torbin pulsed it into Roidon’s optronic receptor. He zoomed rapidly into the area of Nevada in which he’d been taken by the Elusivers. It even displayed the grains on the compound’s wooden panels. ‘Alright,’ he conceded. ‘That is significant. But we are rescuing this Elusiver.’

  Roidon detached the feed cables. He hoisted the alien out of the tank, then clamped over its face a device that provided the correct mix of air. The creature did not wake, thankfully. He had a thermal-shielded stretcher bag that unfolded from a pack on his side. Torbin even tried to assist but only proved useful in helping to carry the alien out.

  ‘Here’s the plan,’ Roidon began. ‘We take your ship. Mine will be sent back on auto, to hopefully create a distraction.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ Torbin intoned.

  Arachnids were approaching rapidly. Torbin also seemed to be aware of the imminent threat, following Roidon unquestioningly.

  In the outer corridor and only a few metres from Torbin’s ship the arachnids were in sight. The lead Kintra fired something which caught Torbin. He collapsed. Another blast then hit Roidon. His HUD display scrambled and he felt dizzy; the vulnerability of a human mind. But he knew still where the ship was located, so forged on, supporting Torbin as well as the alien slung on his back.

  He jumped through the outer wall. At first he wondered if it was his imagination but there seemed to be resistance. No, something was wrong. He had just managed to get Torbin through when his own foot became trapped.

  With one arm he kept hold of Torbin. With the other he reached for a plasma cutter, and worked away at his ankle. The de-masser had failed completely, no doubt caused by whatever the arachnid had fired at him. Inevitable that they’d adapt, but so soon?

  Whilst he continued cutting away he felt a pressure on his foot. Of course no pain but an awareness that something was being done to it. Perhaps examining it in order to incorporate his tech into their database.

  Finally he was free. And pleasantly surprised to see a stem, something akin to an ankle bone grow in replacement. But no time to wait for it to complete. He hobbled towards the complex outer shell. Unable to find a discernible exit. His plasma cutter had no effect. He checked Torbin for weapons, and discovered the singularity device. His HUD back to normal, giving him analysis of the ship. He manoeuvred to the area identified as the airlock. PULSE LINK ID REQUIRED it told him. He couldn’t enter the craft without Torbin, who was still out of action. He looked at Torbin. ‘Analyses object in sight,’ he ordered his AI. ‘Advise quickest method to reactivate.’

  ELECTRICAL STIM FROM INTERFACE. PROCEED?

  “Yes.” A tendril extended. It quested about for an interface, and found a spot at the back of Torbin’s neck. A few seconds later Torbin lurched awake. The benign monster.

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘Unlock your ship.’

  ‘OK.’

  An ovoid object, a shuttle craft or a probe, had left the complex on a steady course towards them. They got in the ship just as the object had reached them. It was now in forward view. The thought occurred to him that it had every opportunity to fire, to kill, but it appeared to be observing. With what he had in his possession it seemed inconceivable that the object would let them go without firing a shot. Already it must be scanning the ship, determining how to disable it, how to extract them.

  Torbin got in the forward seat. They were backing away, turning away from the probe. And then into hyperspace.

  Torbin, in obviousness, said, ‘I’m amazed it let us go. It must be following.’

  ‘Torbin, there will never be any escape from the Kintra,’ Roidon said in counter obviousness. ‘They have to be destroyed; it’s a zero sum equation.’

  ‘How – how did you get such advanced tech?’

  ‘---And why didn’t you? This is not the B’tari.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘If you remember your previous life then you might not want to hear this, but I am being helped by your old foes the Elusivers.’

  ‘I remember enough to know what it means to make a deal with the Devil.’

  Roidon kept his eyes fixed on the viewscreen, half expecting to see the Kintra probe, but all he saw was the mashed light of stars formed into a white tunnel. The B’tari had progressed beyond the use of wormholes to a method that created a null Higgs field around the vessel; zero interaction with any particle. Effectively massless, similar to the technology used in his suit. Of course, it was far more complicated than that; there still had to be a method of power generation way beyond the scope – if not the comprehension – of any Earthling. Only the Kintra: they had to deal with an even greater foe. Surely they had figured it out, had adapted. And yet, for now, they didn’t seem to have the edge. For now his greatest concern had to be their erstwhile arch-foe the Elusivers, who’d see his return to the B’tari base as a betrayal. Either way he was in deep.’

  The B’tari vessel switched back into normal space in orbit around Earth’s moon. Torbin informed the base commander, saying simply, ‘I’m back and have been successful.’ Then: ‘Beginning landing procedure.’

  ‘Thank you for not mentioning me,’ Roidon said. ‘No really. They think I’m a loose cannon, would probably not allow you back.’

  ‘A loose cannon. Of course.’

  ‘In any case, they’d certainly not expect me to be integrated into this body.’

  ‘Do you prefer the way you are now?’ Torbin wondered.

  ‘Hell, no! I had no choice in the matter. They’ve kept my body as a means of insurance.’

  The ship passed through the holographic crater rim into the hanger. ‘When I get out I’ll have to announce you’re here,’ Torbin told him. ‘Unless you’d like to surprise them.’

  ‘I’m tempted, but of course you should prepare them.’

  A B’tari representative was already in the hanger. Torbin exited the ship to a warm greeting. He then began talking, and for twenty seconds or so the B’tari was nodding enthusiastically. Then, as if he had received the most unwelcome and shocking news, opened his mouth and turned his attention to the ship. He then spoke into his wrist, took a few steps back and retreated away.

  Roidon jumped out of the ship, startling Torbin, who then said, ‘You’re not really him are you?’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Roidon Chanley’s here. Flesh and blood Roidon.’

  ‘No. You don’t understand. I’m the real Roidon. That’s … one of the Elusivers.’

  ‘The B’tari are not stupid, nor lax in their security. They run tests, they scan every molecule, every neural connection.’

  ‘Still. It must be a clone. An imprinted one perhaps.” Now several B’tari had appeared, carrying weapons. Not something he would ever imagine witnessing.

  ‘Do not try anything hostile,’ said the lead one. ‘We have you overpowered.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he told them calmly. ‘I surrender. But be warned, that man who claims to be me is a clone. And I will prove it.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Roidon allowed himself to be handcuffed, wondering whether he had really made the right decision. Go back to the Elusiver and be their slave or be here as a captive. Either way, things were not looking promising.

 
; * * *

  36

  Just as she had left the abandoned compound the message came through into her neural link. Translated it read: STATUS UPDATE: ROIDON HAS RETURNED. NEW OBJECTIVE: SEEK OUT ALIEN ENTITIES AKA THE ELUSIVERS. RECONFIGURING SCANNER. ALIEN TARGET WILL APPEAR AS GREEN TRIANGLES.

  Had Roidon really been the cooperative asset, encountered the Elusivers to record their biosignature for the B’tari database? One of three sides – an isosceles triangle, no enemy’s enemy, just a lesser enemy. Ever since the start of this war she had doubted the Council, thought they seemed craven in their leave-it-to-the-humans strategy. Now their confidence had extended to her as a human in form, skirting the edges of the Temporal Directive and then exploiting that loophole. What had Roidon told them that made them think she could be of use? Or was it simply that sending her was a shot to nothing, that she was expendable?

  Whatever. The element of danger actually excited her. The restricting arms of caution now totally released.

  Zoraina got back in her craft, switched scanner to main viewer, which now extended its range according to altitude. Nothing, so she climbed to the edge of space. An eight thousand kilometre radius range, and still nothing. She waited, not knowing what to do. Then … the first triangle appeared, followed by another and another; masked from detail, she could only speculate.

  Something about their location that worried her. It was in the Amazon jungle, where she had worked with a tribe, the tribe who worked with those super-advanced aliens. Now, that meant trouble. She ordered the craft to head towards that location. Now her heart was thudding furiously.

  It only took a nerve jangling ten minutes to arrive at a landing point less than a kilometre from the tribe’s base. But already the green triangles had disappeared. When she got to the tribal huts she found door hatches opened. She stepped inside the hut she remembered containing all the equipment for observing and communicating with the aliens. It was bare. But there was a body, the corpse of a man she had formed a friendship with, had made love with. And now he was lifeless. But still warm. She used her med-scanner. It told her severe neural trauma, in other words his brain had been fried; but less than an hour ago. Murdered. For what? Because he was no longer any use to them? They had gotten everything they needed from him and then made sure no one else could. Something did not seem right here. For all their desire to eradicate advanced life, the Elusivers were not known for casually extinguishing life.

  Should she stay and try to gain evidence, or get back in her craft for a probably futile pursuit, in the name of following mission objective?

  The alternative she presently considered went to very heart of B’tari philosophical thinking. Whether life had any spiritual significance, or just that all living things were no more than biological machines. What would it mean to bring it back, this shadow of the original version?

  No time to ponder that grey area of ethics. There were no other ways of obtaining evidence, no recording devices could penetrate these walls, at least not while the electronic array had been in place; the inhabitants had taken the precaution of isolating their habitats. Ironically, that would have alerted attention of the Machine overlords – and yet they had done nothing. Maybe the effort too great against those so determined to resist. Or maybe it was because of who they had collaborated with. But at what price?

  She slid the half-band over the man’s forehead. The metal device contained a series of electrogenic transmitter/receivers, connected to which an old-style cable to a junction box. In appearance it could have been a technology from two hundred years ago, but this ensured against remote detection.

  She pressed the simple activation button. She waited. Currently, it would be forcing his brain’s metabolic system to go into an extreme overdrive, forcing the repair of severed connections. This process, however, far from guaranteed any effective restoring of memory; it was merely trying to guess a pattern based on a template of how a human neural structure should look, like the error correction in reconstructing ultra-compressed data.

  Nothing for for over ten minutes. Then ... the man lurched upright like the apocryphal Frankenstein’s monster. His head darted from side to side. Zoraina flinched. She wondered if she had the gain turned up too high. With so much damaged she figured his brain needed extra stimulation, but mostly it was her impatience. Well, there had not been time to do a full scan to determine this.

  ‘Ahh. Ahhh,’ he said. Her translation program kicked in. This was not language.

  She tried, ‘Can you understand my words?’

  ‘Huh.’ It wasn’t even a question. Perhaps she’d brought back no more than some tragic impression of sentient life.

  ‘It’s Zoraina. I have a question.’

  ‘Zor … ai-na.’

  ‘Can you tell me about the aliens?’

  ‘Dark. Tall. Murders.’

  Okay, that was enough. She’d given the basic respect to a reanimated life in compliance with the Temporal Directive. So Zoraina fired a stun ray. The man collapsed without another sound. She then downloaded the reading from the neural regenerator, ran it through her PDU, which sent into her mind a blurry image of the tall dark figure; enough to confirm (at least in her mind) that it was one of the so-called Elusivers. It was some of the evidence that the Council demanded. But they’d want a primary visual record to sanction the Iridian protocol – only ever used where these aliens were concerned, such was their threat. Perhaps now it was all the more insidious that they could offer a solution to the Machines.

  And you foolish humans bought into their solution to the point it got you killed.

  She fired his weapon once more to kill the man she had once loved in that special way that her race had so envied from their sanitized and distant position of observing.

  Now there was only one course of action. Pursuit … at all cost.

  Part Five: New for Old

  37

  The first thing he noticed were birds – their twittering and fluttering in some kind of excitement. Then, when sight came, a forest. Very high trees. More noises, a shrill whooping. A monkey swinging from branch to branch. Now a hammering against bark. The sun shining down in bursts through the canopy.

  He sat up. And only then did he remember his name: Torbin Lyndau. He also remembered he used to be in a body of metal. No, more than that, he was artificial, or at least a substantial part of him – though even the organic part was not original. His entire self an accurate representation of a man who had lived and lost so much. Yet here he sat on the floor of some rainforest, as human-looking – and feeling – as he had ever remembered being. It was his wish, and they had granted it.

  That final mission.

  ‘I’m alive,’ he heard himself say.

  And alone. And without anything. Well, they hadn’t promised him anything other than to bring him back into flesh and blood. But that flesh felt vulnerable. He was never strong, he remembered, never confident in his prowess. Torbin the man only nominally, it so often felt. This was one of those times.

  ‘Well. Good,’ he told himself. No longer the false sense of security of a metal shell, that preternatural strength. Instead the purity of naked existence. Except he was wearing clothes: a blue thin cotton shirt and light trousers. And what was that tattooed in the back of his hand? A black triangle, slightly raised, each side less than a centimetre long. A credit chip, he realized What use would that be out here, with nowhere to spend it? Was this even Earth?

  He got off the floor. Started walking, not knowing in which direction. This was deep forest, possibly the Amazon. At least he was wearing walking boots. The voice startled him. ‘To reach your vehicle, turn round until indicated.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Your personal assistant.’ The voice seemed to be in his head, perfectly androgynous. ‘Do you wish to reach your vehicle?’

  ‘Okay. Yes.’

  ‘Then turn---’

  ‘Alright!’

  He complied. It then instructed him to proceed forward,
and he found himself walking into a clearing.

  At first, difficult to identify. A large khaki-green arrowhead shape but less flat, converging to a point. His car? A rectangular opening suddenly appeared. He entered without hesitation, thinking how the B’tari had after all recognized he was due for a reward.

  The display systems were quite traditional. Instead of throwing a display into his eyes or directly interacting with his brain, it was simply there as a heads-up display.

  ‘Where do you wish to go?’ the voice in his ear asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Home?’

  ‘Your house is approximately two thousand three hundred and thirty-four kilometres away.’

  ‘Okay. Take me there.’

  The journey was a rush of forests, mountains and lake-filled valleys. He allowed himself a feeling of exhilaration.

  In about forty-five minutes the car landed in a remote lodge somewhere in Calgary. Torbin stepped out nervously and with the incipient notion that what his benefactors had provided was a redundancy package.

  It was now dusk. Pure white lights illuminated along a garden path between multifarious flowers emitting a gently intoxicating scent. But also through a window he could see a muted interior lighting.

  The front door, made of solid oak panels, appeared to have no sensor. Yet it swung open within a few seconds of his arrival.

  Music was already playing. A tune he recognized; couldn’t quite place it: sonorous electronic interspersed with piano, but it made him feel … excited. Something he hadn’t remembered feeling in years. He walked through a short corridor to the softly lighted room. A large lounge. A traditional style comfy sofa. Occupied!

  Long red hair. She turned, as if startled, rose from the sofa. He recognized her. The woman from the train. She was wearing a tight red t-shirt and dark lounge pants

  ‘Torbin,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve been worried. Ten hours you’ve been gone. What happened?’

  Torbin’s mind was awash with competing thoughts. His heart racing. Was she part of his reward? Had they mined his memory, his desires?