The Machine Awakes

by Adam Christopher

  Klaus gasped, one hand reaching for the comm on the collar of his uniform even as he drew breath to ask the intruders who they were. But he was slow—the man raised a snub-nosed gun that spat a blue light with only a very high, short sound, and the chief engineer collapsed into the arms of the third intruder, who had reappeared behind him.

  The murky corridor swam in Klaus’s vision as he felt a deep, deep cold spreading across his body. He tried to focus, but saw nothing except whispering dark shapes looming over him.

  A woman. “Quickly. Reboot. Use the data stick.”

  A man. “Got it.”

  Klaus felt something needle-sharp slide into his neck. He wanted to cry out in surprise, but he couldn’t.

  Someone else spoke, but their voice was a million miles away.

  The woman replied, speaking, Klaus realized, into a comm. “Confirmed. Phase one initiated.” Then, louder, to her colleagues: “One down, twenty-three to go.”

  And then the cold spread and the darkness grew, and Ramin Klaus’s last thought was of the signal, and what the sequence eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno could possibly mean.

  And then … then he saw a light. A bright, bright light.

  THE BATTLE OF WARWORLD 4114

  The machines were still over the horizon, but even though the battle hadn’t reached the marines hunkered down in the trench, the entire sky was lit by the fierce red-and-white aurora of suborbital bombardment.

  Warworld 4114 was on fire.

  In less than a cycle, the Spiders had swarmed over an entire hemisphere. Warworld 4114 was a hair smaller than Earth, an uninhabited lump of nothing, the surface alternating between thick forest and gray rocky plains. There was plant life aplenty. But animal life? Aside from the company of marines dug into the gray desert, waiting for the enemy war machines to arrive, Warworld 4114 was a dead planet.

  A dead planet both sides wanted. The Spiders had moved first, as they always did, a Mother Spider seeding the world with millions of organo-mechanical babies, each the size of a dog, which landed and began consuming matter and growing and dividing and then building, until the machines now walking toward the marines’ position were eight-legged monsters a hundred meters tall, their curved, knife-like legs carving the hard surface of the planet into rubble as they advanced.

  The Spiders wanted the planet, which meant the Fleet wanted it too. The battle plan was simple: hold the machines back from suborbit—the U-Stars safely out of reach, the Mother Spider having departed as soon as its spawn had touched ground—until the psi-marines could dig in. Then, weakened and distracted by the aerial onslaught, the Spiders would be disabled by the psi-marines, their relentless march halted long enough for two smaller U-Stars—in this case, the Seether and the Shutterbug—to come in for the final, low-altitude kill.

  So went the theory, anyway.

  Psi-Marine Tyler Smith looked up, the HUD inside his helmet tracking the path of two more photonic torpedoes as they streaked across the sky, heading for the target. The U-Stars were doing a fine job, hovering in the upper atmosphere as they dumped munitions on the war machines. Tyler just hoped it was enough. There was no doubt the Spiders were getting toasted, but there were a lot of them. What they lacked in firepower and strategy was made up by sheer numbers.

  The comms buzzed in Tyler’s ear. Transmission incoming, battle command.

  “Fireteam Alpha, Fireteam Bravo. Heads up, twelve o’clock.”

  An amber indicator appeared in Tyler’s HUD. He glanced to his left and to his right, the other members of his seven-man psi-marine fireteam giving the thumbs up as they all squatted below the lip of the trench. Tyler pushed himself off the trench wall and, still crouching, shuffled around. The amber indicator slid around his HUD until it was dead center at the top of his vision.

  Straight ahead. The Spiders were nearly here.

  An alert inside Tyler’s helmet told him that Fireteam Alpha was also ready, a few hundred meters farther down the trench. Tyler lifted himself up, until his eye line was at ground level.

  Down the left side of the HUD, text began to scroll as the U-Stars somewhere above began feeding data to his combat suit’s computer. As the night sky bloomed in brilliant color once more, the horizon exploding in flaring white, the HUD began drawing small red boxes—two, then three, then four, then a dozen, then Tyler lost count. The icons buzzed around the horizon like insects; then his HUD finally settled as the icons flashed, locking onto the targets.

  The machines stepped over the horizon, still too far away to see any detail against the glaring whitewash of the continued aerial bombardment. But there they were—black shapes, as tall as skyscrapers, lumbering toward them. As Tyler’s combat AI fed the view to the other marines, the comms clicked to life and filled with chatter—not from the psi-marine fireteams, but the regular troops dug in half a klick in front of Tyler’s trench. There were two hundred heavily armed Fleet marines between them and the Spiders.

  Once again, Tyler hoped it was enough.

  He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Timing was key. He had to wait until the machines were close enough to make contact, but the Spiders were big, their giant legs covering alarming amounts of ground with each step. The window of opportunity was a small one.

  Fireteam Alpha, confirm.

  The communiqué came not over the comms, but inside Tyler’s mind. With his eyes closed he saw nothing but dull shapes moving across blackness, as his HUD continued to shine its light against his eyelids.

  Fireteam Bravo, he thought, linking minds with the other team leader. Acknowledged.

  There was a moment of nothing, of silence, of stillness and calm borne both of training and experience, as Tyler closed his mind to the outside world and focused in on himself. Psychic battle with the Spiders was just as dangerous as a firefight. But the two teams were good, and while they weren’t carrying anything more than small plasma rifles, they were very, very well armed indeed. The psi-marines had weaponized minds, and the battle was about to commence.

  Then Tyler heard it and opened his eyes. His comms stayed quiet, but a blue triangle flickered in his HUD as the psi-fi router in his combat suit picked up the signal and amplified it, spreading the data load across all of the psi-marines. The sound in Tyler’s head made his heart race and made him feel infinitely small. It buzzed and clicked, a staccato nonsense that was half white noise, half something else. Something rhythmic. Intelligent.

  The language of the Spiders.

  Contact established.

  Engage.

  Across the plain, ahead of Tyler’s trench, the ground flickered with blue sparks as the embedded marines opened fire with their plasma rifles. Above, the two U-Stars continued to fire, the scrolling text in Tyler’s HUD showing their descent path and a countdown.

  The clock had started.

  Tyler dropped down into the trench and rejoined his fireteam, their backs turned to the oncoming machines, their eyes—like his—closed behind the opaque visors of their helmets.

  The sound in Tyler’s head had reached a crescendo, so loud it felt like he was being physically crushed under the weight of it. Pain, hot and brilliant, shot through his eardrums, and then, behind his closed eyes, his optic nerve was lit by a wave of psychic feedback as his team opened up on the Spider communications web, throwing everything they had at jamming it.

  But this … this was different. The pain, it was real. Tyler felt something warm and liquid roll down his cheeks inside his helmet. He screwed his eyes tight and screamed as he stared into the burning darkness.

  The roar of the Spiders was agony without end. The screams of the psi-marines was pain beyond imagining.

  The white light blazed, flaring golden, flaring blue—

  * * *

  Caitlin screamed and sat up, kicking at the damp sheets tangling around her feet, her drenched T-shirt slick against her skin. For a moment she could see nothing but golden light flaring and hear nothing but the roar of the ocean. But as she opened her eyes and
blinked and blinked and blinked she realized the glow was morning light reflecting off the gold mirrored glass of the building opposite her own, the shard of light shining through the unfinished wall of her refuge and spotlighting her as she sat on her makeshift bed. The roaring wasn’t in her head, either. It was coming through the ceiling, the endless screech and thud of music so heavy it sounded more like an unbalanced shuttle afterburner.

  She kicked the sheets clear, then leaned back and reached under her pillow. It was the only place you could keep valuables, and her most prized possession was still in place. Likewise her watch, which never left her wrist, not in a place like this. She rubbed her face and glanced at it.

  Five A.M.

  Time to move. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, then paused.

  She’d had the dream, again. As vivid as a memory, a flashback from battle, as if it had been her on Warworld 4114, crouching in the trench, facing down the marching Spider army with her mind as her weapon.

  But it hadn’t been her. She had never served the Fleet—never gotten that far. The memory belonged to someone else.

  Her brother, Tyler.

  Cait sniffed the air. It was warm already, although the breeze blowing in through the open wall of her twelfth-floor hideout was starting to make her shiver in her sweat-soaked underwear. Getting undressed to go to sleep was a risk—a place like this, you had to be ready to move, quickly—but it had been so fucking hot the last few nights, she’d decided to take the chance. Not that she’d been able to sleep much. The dream had disturbed her rest for most of the past two weeks.

  With the music still thundering from elsewhere in the half-finished building, Cait quickly hopped across the floor, the concrete cool on her bare feet as she crouched down near the plastic crate where she had stashed her gear. That was another risk. She really should have kept the crate within arm’s reach of the bed. She chastised herself for being sloppy, but that was the last night she’d have to spend in this dump anyway.

  For two weeks she’d been living—if you could call it that—high in an abandoned, unfinished skyscraper on the edge of Salt City. Despite the slum’s overcrowding, the skeletal building was only half-occupied by squatters—perhaps, Cait had thought, it was the proximity of the building to the shiny clean world of New Orem, literally just across the street, that put people off. The construction—half-finished fingers of building poking into the sky like the rotting ribs of a forgotten animal carcass—had been halted who knew how many years ago, a symbol of the Fleet’s complete indifference to the plight of the giant slum right on its doorstep. Maybe that was another reason she’d found a hideout so easily. The people of Salt City didn’t want any reminders of how the Fleet had failed them. The construction site, and the shell of the building in which Cait had made her camp, was just that.

  That didn’t stop scavengers, of course. As Cait got dressed, she padded over to the open wall and looked down at the rubble-strewn ground far below. The body of the last one she’d fought off was still down there, lying in a particularly inaccessible half-finished foundation pile. She hadn’t intended to kill him, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself. Backed into a corner, fighting not just for her life but for the mission, and … it had happened again. Her wild talent had come to the fore, acting almost like it had its own intelligence, taking over to protect her when she couldn’t do it herself.

  The scavenger had screamed all the way to the ground.

  And he was still there. And she really hadn’t meant to kill him—her talent, her power impossible to control, no matter how hard she tried. But since then, nobody else had come to bother her. She guessed his corpse—his screams—had served as a warning. Stay away from the woman on level twelve, north side. She’s a crazy bitch.

  Cait pushed the memory away, focusing on the here and now, controlling her breathing as she felt her heart rate pick up.

  Because her talent was a frightening thing. And not just for scavengers or the trainers at the Academy who had seen something different about her, out of all the thousands of recruits who enrolled.

  She was scared of it too.

  She blew out her cheeks to calm herself, and she sat on her bed and pulled her boots on. Her outfit wasn’t black as instructed, but it was comprised of the darkest things she still owned. The pants and boots were black, but the hoodie was dark navy blue, and the T-shirt underneath was light gray—there was nothing she could do there except keep the hoodie zipped to the neck. She stood and pulled a hair tie from her pocket, scraping her still-damp bangs off her face as she looked out to the spires of the Fleet capital, New Orem, glowing in the sunrise. It was a beautiful sight, despite the ruined surrounds.

  The morning sky was clear, and when the chill breeze dropped Cait could feel the real heat beginning to grow, the sunlight already reflecting off thousands of immaculate mirrored buildings opposite her own incomplete shell of one.

  Today it was time to head back into the city, because today was her brother’s funeral.

  It would be a military service with full honors, to be held at the Fleet Memorial, a vast cemetery on the other side of the city. Cait had worked out a route, had run it a few times to make sure it was okay. It would take three hours to get into position, as instructed. The service was due to start at one in the afternoon. She had plenty of time, but she knew she needed to get in and set up before it got too difficult.

  Cait turned from the open wall and lifted her pillow. Beneath it was a slim black backpack. As she picked it up, something hard clanked inside. She unzipped the top, made sure the objects inside were secure, and slipped it on.

  She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.

  I’m ready, she thought.

  The breeze picked up, pulling at her hair.

  I’ll see you soon, sis, said the voice of Tyler Smith inside her head, as real as her own thoughts.

  Cait opened her eyes and smiled. She reached down into the plastic crate and took out a small canister of liquid. She flipped the cap, poured it over her bedding, and then walked backwards, splashing the liquid around as much as possible before tossing the container back into the crate. She took two steps down the open stairwell at the back of the room, then pulled a disposable lighter from her pocket. She flicked the flame and watched it for a moment, then threw the lighter. Immediately, her former accommodation was engulfed with thin, pale flames.

  Caitlin Smith turned on her heel and jogged down the stairs.

  She had a funeral to interrupt.

  PART ONE

  EARTH

  1

  The robot servitor bay was cramped, the air rich with the chemical tang of ozone and disinfectant. Von Kodiak did his best to ignore both discomforts as, balanced on one foot to reach the open access panel in the bay’s back wall, he delicately touch-soldered an exposed circuit board while holding a bundle of wires between his teeth. The service bay was almost completely dark, but the HUD in his AI glasses amplified what little light there was, allowing him to get on with his work.

  Kodiak was squeezed awkwardly in one of two channels, each a meter deep and a meter wide, that ran the full length of the bay on either side of the central platform. They were designed to allow humanoid crews—vertically challenged humanoid crews, Kodiak thought with a sigh—a minimal amount of space to work on the cube-shaped maintenance robot that would be parked in the center. There was just enough room to stand upright in the channel, but the space was narrow and Kodiak had to lean out awkwardly to reach the access panel at the back of the dock—the alternative being to crouch in the center of the bay itself, risking life and limb if the servitor should return to port, crushing him between it and the back wall.

  Kodiak had been working for two hours now, according to the counter in the corner of his glasses. He had a sore back, and he had already paced the tiny channel twice to walk out a cramp. He was almost done, but the last couple of connections were a son of a bitch. But the work, the effort, would be worth it.

  Because Von K
odiak’s new plan was a damn good one, even if he said so himself.

  The service levels of Helprin’s Gambit, and the dozens of servitor docks they contained, were not on the usual visitor’s docket. The station was a leisure facility, pure and simple, packed with spas and entertainment complexes, offering sensual delights both real and virtual, ranging from the family friendly to the borderline illegal as the facility lazily orbited a star just close enough to a major quickspace transit point to make it a tempting destination. But the station was famous for one thing above all else: the Grand Casino, which occupied almost the entire central spire of the torus-shaped pleasure palace. It was the biggest such enterprise in all of Fleetspace, privately owned and operated, a destination for the rich and famous and the poor and desperate alike.

  It was also a front for one of the biggest criminal organizations in Fleetspace.

  Kodiak tried to put out of his mind what they would do to him, and for how long, if he got caught. The new plan was a risk, but circumstances and the parameters of his mission had changed, and he’d had to come up with something else. And, really, the new plan was quite, quite clever. Okay, so it wouldn’t have the same outcome as the original, but it was better than nothing. He was pretty sure the team would be pleased with the results.

  Kodiak extracted one of the wires from between his teeth. As he held the bare end against the contact of his microsolder, there was a tiny puff of blue smoke, and the connection was in place.

  The city-sized station needed cleaning robots. A lot of cleaning robots. The machines—servitors—were perfect cubes a meter and a half across, designed with the same aesthetic touch as the rest of the station. During the day, the army of machines was docked in their bays where they charged up, underwent maintenance, and, importantly, re-synced with the station’s central computer via a hardwire link.

  A hardwire link Kodiak was busy modifying. He hissed in annoyance as time ran on in the corner of his eye. He pulled another wire from his mouth and soldered it to the exposed circuitry on the panel in front of him. Just one more to go.