But he’d found it. Piloting the shuttle from the refinery and up out of the Jovian cloud deck, Kodiak was flying blind, relying on the rapidly fading quantum wake of the JMC orbital relay vehicle Braben had taken. He hadn’t known he was heading to Europa; all Kodiak could do was sit back and watch as the shuttle sped toward a sphere of rock and ice as smooth as a cue ball—an appropriate place, Kodiak thought, for a secret facility that Caviezel called the Freezer. Orbiting 670,000 kilometers out from its parent planet, Europa was well within Jupiter’s magnetosphere, so most of the shuttle’s sensors were fritzed even as the shuttle skimmed the icy surface of the world, beneath which Kodiak knew was a vast ocean of liquid water, kept from freezing thanks to the tidal flexing exerted by Jupiter. But soon enough the shuttle’s navcom picked up a short-range, local signal. Another trail of beacons, like the satellites strung out to guide ships in to the JMC refinery. These beacons, in contrast, weren’t in orbit around Europa; they were down on the ground, detectable at only very short range.
The homing signal led him to a landing pad that was a square of steel gray in a plain of blue ice. As soon as the shuttle touched down, the platform activated, lowering the ship into a huge subterranean hangar, easily as large as the giant landing pad that sat on the top of the JMC refinery. As the pad elevator came to a halt, the platform rotated ninety degrees and then rolled forward, parking the shuttle next to another craft—another shuttle of some kind, but not one of Fleet design. The sensor readings in Kodiak’s ship indicated that the other craft was still emitting alpha particles from its primary drive system and that he should take care.
The JMC orbital relay, still warm after being piloted to the Freezer by Braben.
The radiation warning inspired Kodiak to run a full sensor sweep before venturing down the shuttle’s exit ramp, very much aware that he might be walking straight into a trap. But all he learned was that although the artificial atmosphere and gravity were standard, it was very cold outside. Kodiak waited a moment longer, scanning the view outside the shuttle with his own eyes as he flicked the viewscreen to show the rear, the sides, even the view above and below the shuttle. There was no sign of life in the hangar, no movement at all. Braben and Tyler had headed into the complex.
Before he opened the ramp, Kodiak spun the shuttle’s comms, seeing if he could pick up the death rattle of the Spiders. The interference was strong, and he heard nothing but a wash of noise. But if the Freezer was the source of the Spider infection, that meant they were here, somewhere. Kodiak had a bad feeling that, as much as he might wish against it, he would be hearing the crackle of the SpiderWeb again very soon.
Outside, Kodiak stood by the front landing gear, breathing in the cold air, looking around him, listening to the steady click of the cooling shuttle echoing around the cavernous underground hangar. He pulled the staser from his holster. There was still plenty of power in the weapon, but what he would have given for something with a little more kick. Something like that Yuri-G Glass had been carrying back on Earth, for example.
The hangar had many doors leading off from it. One was larger than the others, and a trail dragged through the frosted floor led from the orbital relay right to it. Gripping his gun tightly, Kodiak followed.
The facility was eerie, there was no doubt about it. Away from the hangar, the place was clearly in an energy-saving mode, the lighting pulsing brighter as he stepped through corridor sections and fading behind him as he passed onward. It made stealth a little difficult, the automatic lighting announcing his presence as well as his footsteps.
There was no sign of Braben or Tyler, just a trail in the frost. They’d had a good head start on him.
No Spiders either. He wasn’t quite sure what he expected to find, but the empty, silent corridors were a surprise somehow. He had no idea how big the facility was—for all he knew, the entire moon might have been hollowed out by the JMC.
Every now and then, Kodiak paused and listened, just in case. There was nothing except a steady oscillation. As he walked on, he realized the sound was getting louder and louder, and it was coming from somewhere below.
He came to an elevator lobby, the trail leading directly to the doors. The LEDs on the panel beside them were bright, but there was no indication of where the elevator had taken Braben and Tyler. Inside, he saw it went down ninety floors. The Caviezel Corporation had buried something deep in Europa’s crust. Very, very deep.
Kodiak took a guess and hit the bottom button, and the elevator began to descend.
* * *
The doors slid open with a faint tone. Kodiak backed himself into a corner in the elevator car, gun ready, and he held his breath as he counted in his head. He glanced down at the floor of the corridor outside the car and saw the layer of frost was disturbed. He’d guessed right. Braben and Tyler had come to the bottom of the complex.
Kodiak exhaled slowly, trying to minimize the steam of his breath, and stepped out into the new elevator lobby. The oscillation here was very loud, loud enough to hide the sound of his boots crunching on the floor. As it pulsed, a bass note in the peak volume pressed into Kodiak’s eardrums, making him feel like he was deep underwater.
This level, at least, was lit uniformly. There was no energy saving going on, and as Kodiak moved onward, he noticed that the floor was starting to get damp where the frost was melting away. His breath no longer plumed in front of his face.
The corridor led to a gallery, which ran around the outside of a space about the same size as the shuttle hangar at the top level of the facility. Kodiak moved to the rail and looked down.
The huge chamber below was flooded with water, the liquid perfectly still and glowing an eerie blue thanks to the light coming from the rows and rows of tall oblong objects submerged a meter or so below the surface.
They were sarcophagi—pods, like the one in Braben’s shuttle. Each stood vertically in back-to-back rows, the head-level window on the front of each facing outward. Kodiak looked out over the room, counting at least a hundred of the double rows stretching to the back of the facility and as many going crossways, maybe more. There were at least ten thousand pods submerged in the liquid—which must have been fed in from the Europan ocean.
Kodiak crouched at the gallery rail and peered down at the pods closest. Dark shadowed faces were just visible, lit by the blue light from within each pod. Kodiak sighed in disbelief. He was looking at ten thousand people at least, held in some kind of stasis in the ocean of Europa. Men and women of the Fleet, apparently killed in action and shipped back to the Earth for repatriation, only to have been stolen by the very company responsible for returning them home. The scale of the operation was staggering, Caviezel’s treachery nothing short of monstrous. What the hell he wanted them for, Kodiak could scarcely think. But they were all alive—he knew they were. Tyler Smith was proof of that.
“You gotta admit, it’s pretty impressive.”
Kodiak looked up. Braben was standing halfway along the gallery, hands poking out the pockets of his jacket as he looked down at the submerged pods.
“And this is just one storage facility. There are three others here.” Braben whistled in appreciation. “That’s a lot of bodies.”
Kodiak stood slowly and rolled his fingers over the grip of his staser. Braben glanced at him and shook his head. He pulled one hand out of his pocket and pulled the edge of his jacket clear, revealing the red silk lining and the staser in place on his belt.
“Think you can draw that in time?” asked Kodiak.
“Probably not,” said Braben, “but then again, I don’t really need to.”
Braben took a step to the side. At the far end of the gallery, Kodiak saw a red pinprick of light as Tyler Smith took aim with his sniper rifle—right at his chest. He raised his hands, still holding the staser pistol, fingers splayed away from the trigger.
“So I was right,” said Kodiak.
Braben laughed. “You couldn’t have been further from the truth, buddy.”
“No,
I don’t think so. I said it was an inside job. And it was.”
Braben nodded down at the pods. “The Fleet doesn’t know about any of this.”
“I’d say that’s true,” said Kodiak. “But I’m not talking about this place. I’m talking about the assassinations. You’re Tyler Smith’s handler. You got him in and out of the Capitol Complex. You kept him hidden. Following Caviezel’s orders.”
Braben turned to face Kodiak, took a step forward. “Caviezel is right, Von. The Fleet needs leadership. Direction. We need to win this goddamn war or life as we know it is over, man. Over!”
Kodiak pursed his lips. “So Caviezel knocks out the Fleet’s top brass and then rolls up in a war machine the size of a small moon.” He turned to the gallery rail and lowered his arms onto it as he looked down at the sleepers and nodded to himself. “I guess you’d call that a hostile takeover. Go big or go home, right?”
Then Kodiak frowned and glanced down the gallery, toward Tyler, who stood unmoving at the other end. “So how come Tyler still has his manifest tag in?” he asked. “Caviezel has the tech to remove it without killing the subject. Tyler’s tag showed up at the time of the shootings, but not before or after—I guess when he was out of his box, right?”
“The tag is needed to control the sleepers,” said Braben, “so you have to leave it in.” He shrugged. “That’s all I know.”
Kodiak snorted a laugh. Next up Braben was going to talk about how he was just following orders, right?
Braben ignored him. “But you’re right, Tyler’s tag doesn’t show up when he’s in his pod. The stasis field shields it.” He waved at the pods in the giant pool below them. “None of these will show up on any Fleet system. You can’t hide an army otherwise.”
“So what’s it for, Mike?” asked Kodiak, turning to his old partner. “Caviezel called Tyler an experiment. So he has an army here, trained Fleet soldiers, marines, personnel. All officially dead. All kept on ice. But for what? Your boss has his own Spider war machine. What does he need an army for?”
Braben shrugged again. “Like I said, I don’t ask questions, I just do as I’m told. Come on, Von, we both know how that works.”
Kodiak smiled. Goddamn if he wasn’t right. Braben was playing exactly the card Kodiak thought he would.
“Yeah, well, I guess everyone has their price, right Mike?”
A shadow passed over Braben’s face. “It’s not just about money, Von. Although I don’t expect you would understand that.”
“Committing treason isn’t something you just decide to do.”
“Haven’t you been listening, Von? You want a reason? Take a look! There’s your reason! Look at what the Fleet is doing. The Spiders are killing us, man. There are fifty thousand pods in this facility, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We can’t keep on like this.”
Kodiak shook his head. “The Fleet didn’t put them here, Mike. Caviezel did. And yes, the Spiders are killing us. But look at what this company is doing! These people here, they’re not dead, they’ve been stolen. Kidnapped straight off the Warworlds, death records faked. None of this is the Fleet, Mike. This is the Caviezel Corporation.” Kodiak laughed again. “And you don’t even know why he’s doing it. You never even thought to ask.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Braben moved closer, spittle flying from his lips. “This is all the Fleet’s fault. All of it. Do you know how many Warworlds there are? How big the front is? Do you know how many men and women the Fleet sends out to war? How many never come back?”
Kodiak banged his fists on the gallery rail in frustration. He gazed out again across the sleepers, rolling his neck, focusing his thoughts. It was pointless arguing with Braben. He’d bought whatever Caviezel was selling.
This wasn’t what he had expected to find. Caviezel was kidnapping Fleet personnel off the Warworlds, and now he’d found where they were being kept, but that didn’t explain the Spider infection—the AI that Caviezel had deliberately acquired and installed in the JMC Sigma mines. Where did it come from? Was there something else hidden in the Freezer? Braben had said there were four pools storing fifty thousand Fleet personnel in suspended animation. How big was the facility?
Big enough to hide something else?
And was Braben just playing dumb, or did he really not know anything?
Kodiak stood back from the rail. At the other end of the gallery, Tyler had the sniper aimed at him. Braben had composed himself and was smoothing down the front of his jacket.
“What about his machine?” asked Kodiak.
Braben just shrugged. “What about it?”
Kodiak sighed. “Whatever Caviezel thinks he can do, he’s wrong, Mike. He didn’t build that machine, his robot mines did. They’re not following his plan. They’re infected, taken over by an alien AI. You were there, in the control room. You heard it too. The mines have built a Spider, right here.”
Braben’s eyelid twitched. “Caviezel can control it.”
Kodiak took a step toward his former partner. “This facility is the source of the Spider operating system. Caviezel managed to extract it and deliberately infect the Sigma mines, but from there it spread to the JMC computer. That infection is going to keep spreading, taking over every computer system in the Fleet if it gets out of the planetary shielding. Caviezel thinks he can control the machine—but even if he’s right, even if he can find another Pilot, it won’t matter. As soon as he leaves the magnetosphere, the Spider AI will jump to Earth. We’ll be finished, Mike. The war really will be over.”
He took another step forward.
“Back off,” said Braben. From his other pocket he pulled Tyler’s controller. At the other end of the gallery, the red light of Tyler’s sniper moved as the psi-marine adjusted his aim.
“You have to make a choice, Mike,” said Kodiak. He reached out toward Braben. “Come on, we were partners. Special Agents of the Fleet Bureau of Investigation. Our job is to serve and protect the Fleet.”
The blue light cast from the pool below the gallery shimmered on the wall next to Kodiak. He glanced sideways down at the rows of stasis pods. The water from Europa’s ocean now had a series of small ripples moving across the whole vast surface.
He looked back at Braben. His old colleague either hadn’t noticed or wasn’t paying it any attention. Kodiak nodded toward Tyler.
“You think maybe if you use Tyler to shoot me it’ll make it easier on your conscience?”
“You got a tool, makes sense to use it,” said Braben.
“That another pearl of corporate wisdom from your boss?”
“He’ll be your boss too, once he’s in charge of the Fleet.”
Kodiak smiled. “You say that like there’s a chance I’m getting out of here.”
“Like you said, buddy. We were partners once. Don’t see why we can’t be again. There’s a place for you with us, Von. Once you realize the truth.” He nodded toward Kodiak. “Maybe time to drop the weapon now.”
The light from the giant pool shimmered. Kodiak lowered himself to a crouch and gently lay the staser on the gallery floor. He smiled up at Braben. “Don’t want to drop it in the drink, do we?”
Braben held up the remote control. “Don’t try anything.”
Kodiak shook his head. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “So where do we go from here?”
“You going to listen, finally?”
There was a faint splash from far below. Kodiak looked down at the pool. There was something down there, moving around the pods. Servitors? Some kind of underwater maintenance system? Kodiak didn’t really think it was a good idea to stick around and find out.
“Look, I think we need to get out of here—”
“I said, are you going to listen—”
Water erupted from the pool in a huge spout. Kodiak threw himself sideways against the wall as a giant wave crashed onto the gallery. Braben, caught by surprise, raised his arms over his head as he was knocked off his feet while, behind, the red light on Tyler Smith’s
sniper tracked up the wall as he too was washed off balance.
Black metal rose out of the pool, water from Europa’s subterranean ocean cascading from it in torrents. Kodiak, blinking through the water, saw shapes moving, great angled girders that shrieked as their joints moved. The creature rose up out of the water as its scissored legs straightened out.
It was a Spider. Immature and small, merely the size of a Fleet shuttle, but alive, aware, a living intelligence driving a huge death machine, its black spherical body studded with antennae and ports, eight optical units arranged in a grid on the front. The underside of the machine glowed red as it vented blasts of steam from its combined exhaust and mouth, the heat vaporizing the surface of the pool beneath it.
The Spider was looking at Braben. Braben fumbled for the staser at his belt, but it was too late. The creature unfolded a smaller, knife-like appendage from its front and picked the former agent up, drawing him toward its eyes, seemingly curious but near-sighted. Braben struggled in the pincer, desperately reaching for his weapon.
Kodiak scrambled for his own. A staser pistol might be remarkably effective against electronics, but he wasn’t sure what it could do against a baby Spider. All it would probably do was draw attention to him, but even if that got it to drop Braben it was worth a try. His old friend was a traitor to the Fleet, but that didn’t mean he deserved to be eaten by an alien war machine.
Kodiak slipped on the wet decking, his fingers sliding the staser farther out of his reach. The weapon slithered across the floor, heading toward the open railing and a long drop into the tank below. Kodiak swore and dived on his front, grabbing the staser just as it hit open air. Lying on the edge of the platform, Kodiak got a quick view of the roiling water below, the sleeper pods now swarming with other Spiders—tiny ones, no bigger than he was. Worker drones, spawned by the monster that was about to tear Braben in two.
Rolling onto his back, Kodiak gripped the staser in both hands and opened fire. White bolts slammed into the body of the machine. Kodiak aimed well away from the claw holding Braben, not wanting to risk hitting him.
The Machine Awakes Page 30