by Alex Lamb
‘We’ve got a problem,’ he gasped. ‘They’re back this way as well. They’ve boxed us in.’
Ann stopped and Will took a moment to lean on his knees and suck air. Couldn’t the damned biome just cut him some slack for a few minutes while they dealt with these assholes?
‘The science stations have mini-lifters,’ said Ann. ‘They must have used one. I guess the people in that base care more about catching us than they do about hiding from the Nems.’
‘Then they’re idiots,’ said Will.
‘People often are,’ said Ann.
‘Any chance we can convince them to just fuck off?’
‘Not much,’ said Ann. She glanced around. ‘There.’
She pointed to an opening high up on the left side of the tunnel where purple vegetation spilled out from a small oval hole. It looked like a kind of aborted junction, as if the tube had started to fuse with a neighbour only to change its mind. They’d seen dozens of them.
‘In there?’ he said incredulously. ‘That wall’s almost vertical and it’s nearly four metres up. How are we supposed to reach it?’
‘You give me a boost,’ she said. ‘Then I haul you up after me.’
‘Presuming there’s anywhere in there to hide,’ said Will. ‘How about I have a word with them instead?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Ann. ‘You can hardly breathe and they’ll be armed with bioblocker. You’ve escaped once. This time they won’t hesitate to use it. Come on.’
She started off though the ferns for the tunnel wall, picking her way carefully amid the vegetation so as not to leave a trail. Will frowned and reluctantly followed.
When Ann could scramble no higher up the tunnel’s steeply curving side, Will pushed her. Fortunately, wall-lining proved to be as dense as bone. Will had half-worried that they’d leave obvious streaks, but away from the moist floor, it hardened quickly. Ann scrabbled on the surface, found an edge and dragged herself up.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said, disappearing inside. ‘Wet, but perfect.’
A perfect trap, you mean, Will thought to himself.
He heard sloshing as she waded through some kind of liquid. She reached back down for him with an outstretched arm.
‘You’ll have to jump,’ she said. ‘Can you still jump?’
Will scowled as he scrabbled at the wall and tried to leap after her. With so much continual investigation happening inside his lungs, it wasn’t easy. He stopped to catch his breath.
‘Are you coming?’ said Ann. ‘Quick!’
‘Freeze!’ shouted a voice from behind them.
A bullet struck the tunnel wall beside him, leaving a sunburst of cracks from which pale fluid leaked. Will caught a whiff of vaporised bioblocker from the impact and coughed.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘They’re pissing me off now.’
With a grunt that was half-anger and half-anticipation, Will turned and ran back down the slope towards the tunnel floor, gathering speed the whole time. Two men with bio-bullet smart-guns stood there, next to a pair of scramblerbot ATVs. He threw half his submind attention at the ongoing molecular tinkering in his lungs and skin and told it all to stop. His smart-cells began churning out protective membranes. The tunnel cells would subvert them, for sure, but he only needed a few minutes. He felt his extra abilities coming back online.
The men turned and aimed for him again, but by then Will had enough strength for a surge of speed.
Plastic bullets whizzed past as Will reached out through his interface to the scramblerbots, seizing them with a viral assault. The League had upped their security again, but not nearly far enough. Both vehicles started driving straight at their owners.
While the two soldiers struggled to avoid being run over, Will raced down to meet them. One of them brought their gun up just in time to fire. A bullet grazed Will’s side. He threw cellular defences at the wound, numbing it instantly. He grabbed the gun as he streaked past, then turned and threw it straight at the second man’s head. The soldier’s neck cracked backwards at an unnatural angle. He fell beneath the wheels of his ATV, which gleefully reversed over him.
Will tripped and rolled, giving the remaining man time to pull a stim-stick from his belt. As he slashed the air with it, Will leapt out of range but slipped on the crushed vegetation. His edge was fading already. It had taken just seconds. Deep inside him, the Snakepit microbes were urgently dismantling his defences. Will turned the slip into a kick as the man dived, flipping the stim-stick out of his hand and high into the air. He caught it as the soldier staggered forwards, then hurled it like a knife through his visor. Plastic shattered. The soldier dropped.
As Will staggered to his feet, more bullets clipped through the vegetation on either side of him. The other group had arrived. Two more men on ATVs were bearing down on him, fast. Will snatched up a smart-gun to fire back but the trigger was ID-wired. It did nothing in his hand except complain. Will lacked the time to hack it so he hurled it like a spear instead, knocking one of the soldiers off his bike. The throw had a tiny fraction of the power Will was used to. He stumbled again, his head spinning as his vision started to cloud from the sides.
As he knelt there gasping, the last soldier aimed and fired. Before Will could move, someone threw him sideways – Ann. He hadn’t even noticed her running to his aid. She cried out as they tumbled together, jolting to one side. She’d been hit.
Will turned their tumble into a roll, aiming for the first soldier he’d taken out. He grabbed the stim-stick from the dead man’s belt as he passed and sat up, channelling the last of his energy. By then the final soldier was jogging towards him, ready to fire again. Will hurled the stim-stick into his exposed neck with every gram of power left in his body. The soldier froze, astonished, with the stim-stick protruding from his throat before toppling forwards into the smeared fungus.
Will almost passed out then – only the microbial warnings screaming into his mind from every part of his body kept him awake. It took him five minutes of lying still on the ground just to get his limbs to work again. By then, the frenzy of cellular activity inside him had returned to a manageable level of churn.
He sat up and found himself covered in blood. Some of it was his. A lot of it was Ann’s. There was an ugly hole in her abdomen. She looked up at him with a face like death.
‘We need to get back to that alcove,’ she breathed. ‘More of them will be coming. We need to disappear.’
16.2: MARK
After a nap, a long, hot shower and some confused thinking about Zoe, Mark made his way back to the lounge. His skin tingled like something new. He hadn’t felt so clean since they left Triton. As he walked along the hall, the servants stopped polishing and moved silently back to stand at the walls.
‘Please don’t mind me,’ he told them.
They smiled at him coyly but didn’t move from their places. The servants made Mark’s skin crawl. He’d met plenty of people on Mars and New Panama who’d chosen intergender lifestyles of one sort or another, but Massimo’s attendants were something different. Their creepy submissiveness suggested they’d given up something altogether more profound than vanilla sexuality.
Mark tried to ignore them and busied himself by scanning the local network. He found almost nothing out there – just a few weak nodes with narrow, specialised APIs like something out of the Dark Ages. Even the standard dome controls he’d expected appeared to be missing. The only things with recognisable handles were the giant construction machines slumbering outside.
If he strained his interface, he could make out a warbling stream of non-standard traffic. It wasn’t so much an encrypted signal as a different kind of signal altogether – probably some piece of old-fashioned dead-end technology the sects had repurposed as an economical defence against soft-assaults. That would be where the action was.
Massimo probably had his entire network rewire
d to defend it from New Luxor. He must have made a tempting target for any FPP hacker wanting to try his luck. Unfortunately, it left Mark very much in the dark as to what was happening on the rest of the planet. It was just one more way in which their current situation felt profoundly unstable.
Ten minutes later, Zoe and Venetia came in and sat down across from him, chatting. Mark stole a glance at Zoe but saw nothing in her expression to suggest that anything even slightly out of the ordinary had happened. He blushed before he could throw enough submind attention at the response to suppress it.
‘How are you both doing?’ he asked.
‘Much better, thanks,’ said Venetia. Zoe only smiled.
‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘I had no idea how tired I was.’
They heard Massimo approaching from the hallway. He came in and stood before them in his full regalia – hat, gloves and boots – along with an intense, unreadable expression. Mark read the signs of his appearance and felt a stab of concern.
‘Would you come with me, please,’ Massimo said stiffly. ‘We need to talk.’
He turned and walked back the way he’d come. Mark and the others got up to follow.
‘What do you think’s going on?’ Mark asked Venetia.
‘No idea. But if I were in his shoes right now, I’d be worried. After all, short of giving him a berth on the Gulliver, what have we got to offer him? We sure as hell can’t save his settlement.’
Massimo led the way to a shielded patio area behind the main body of the house where a heavily modified bougainvillea draped from a trellis. He stood at the far end and faced them with arms folded. Something about the set-up struck Mark as worryingly off.
‘Can I ask what this is about?’ he said.
‘I’ve looked into your story,’ said Massimo, ‘and I’m not completely happy.’
‘I assure you, neither are we,’ said Mark. ‘We’re all in grave danger.’
Massimo continued as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘New Luxor doesn’t want you back,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me why?’
Mark’s surprise melted quickly into worry. That Massimo had openly talked to the colony wasn’t good. Had he really been angling for a ransom despite what they’d told him?
‘From what you said,’ their host went on, ‘I assumed they’d be desperate to get their hands on you. Wouldn’t you?’
Mark struggled for something to say.
‘I need to ask – have you been completely forthcoming with me?’ said Massimo.
His eyes drilled into Mark’s. He appeared to have forgotten that Zoe and Venetia existed.
‘Yes,’ said Mark cautiously. ‘Yes, we have.’
Massimo waved his hands. ‘Is there anything more I should know about you, perhaps?’ A bright, angry glow was building behind his eyes. ‘For instance, you admitted to being both a roboteer and an Earther. That’s a very odd combination. Can you explain how you came to be both?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ said Mark.
‘Mark—’ Venetia started.
Massimo cut her off. ‘You’ll learn that evasive replies are not appreciated in this place,’ he said. ‘This is a community that respects truth. I think you’re a roboteer because you were part of Monet’s illegal pilot programme, the one that was shut down amid public scandal. And that, in truth, you are Will Kuno-Monet’s adopted son.’
‘I’m not anyone’s adopted anything,’ said Mark. Sam must have released information about him – packed with lies, as usual.
Massimo laughed without sounding remotely amused. ‘How stupid do you think I am? Where do you think I’m getting my information? I’ve seen footage of the Ariel Two attacking an alien world. I know that Monet is responsible for the threat to this planet. And I know you’re working with him.’
Mark stared in blank dismay while his brain unpicked the web of half-truths that Massimo must have heard.
‘You must have talked to Sam Shah,’ said Venetia.
‘Silence, woman!’ Massimo roared. ‘I want to hear answers straight from this man – the son of the Alien Satan. The son of the man who broke the True Church.’
‘For starters,’ said Mark, ‘I am not Will’s son. I share a genetic template with him, but that was true of everyone in the programme.’
‘So you admit to being in the pilot programme!’
‘Of course,’ said Mark. ‘I practically said as much already. But it wasn’t illegal and there were dozens of us. Listen, I told you – you can’t believe a word Sam Shah says. He’s already tried to murder me once.’
‘With good reason, by the sounds of it!’
Mark shook his head. He felt like a fool. They should have anticipated something like this. He should have spent more time talking about Sam and less talking about the Nems. He’d had the risks all backwards.
‘No. Look. Sam is trying to start a war. He’s fixed it so that the alien machines will attack Earth. He laid a trap for the entire mission, including Will Monet, and now he wants you confused so you don’t send a message to Earth.’
‘Then why did he encourage me to do exactly that?’
Mark could think of nothing to say. Sam must have gambled that Massimo would rather condemn Mark than use up a messenger drone. Of course he would, Mark realised. Messenger drones were expensive. Revenge would be free.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ said Massimo. ‘Because he knows that it will get me lynched.’
‘Then why would I want you to do it?’ Mark shouted back. ‘If it was a death sentence for me, why would I even propose it?’
‘To buy time. The one thing you don’t have.’
Mark gasped in frustration. ‘Please, Father Singh,’ he said. ‘You’re an intelligent man. You understand this conflict. Think about what you’re proposing here. Which is more likely – that we’re hiding from justice, or that the FPP are using alien weapons to attack you? If Sam’s story were true, why bother to come here in the first place? Our story wouldn’t have held up for a minute. And you said yourself you’ve heard reports of settlements vanishing. Doesn’t that worry you? And what are we even supposed to have done? Watched while Will pulled a trigger? Is that a crime? What kind of crap did Sam actually tell you?’
‘You conspired to produce another alien event like the one that broke the church,’ said Massimo, as if delivering a sermon from a pulpit. ‘To push Monet back into the history books and to create an excuse to break Earth yet again.’ He ground a white-gloved fist into a white-gloved hand.
Mark looked deep into the man’s eyes and saw with horror that Massimo wanted him to be guilty. An association with Will was enough on its own to condemn him. And that was why Will had never wanted it to come out. That was why he’d always been so paranoid. Seeing it face on, Mark was appalled by how naive he’d been.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Ruiz – or should I say Mr Monet,’ said Massimo, ‘but your acts appear to have doomed everyone in this settlement, including myself. The best we can expect to do is hide in the ruins while your aliens exact their revenge.’
So that’s it, Mark thought. Massimo wanted out. He was desperate. He probably even imagined that an act like this would convince Sam to give him a ticket.
‘Don’t,’ said Mark. ‘You can’t trust him. Whatever he’s said.’
‘I can hardly show leniency,’ said Massimo. ‘As presiding judge and cleric for this settlement, I have reached my verdict. I find you guilty of interspecies crimes of the worst kind. You are traitors to Earth and to the human race. And I intend to see all three of you face justice.’
Mark had a choice: to jump Massimo now or try for something better. He adjusted his stance, readying himself to move.
‘Surely we can work this out,’ he said as he stepped carefully, casually forward.
Massimo shook his head and touched a jewelled stud on his cuff. Immediately, Mark’s body felt like it
was on fire. He fell helplessly to the floor and writhed. Zoe and Venetia did likewise. Their screams filled the air.
Massimo’s patio had pain rays hidden in the slatting. The technology was old, very reliable and banned on every world. Suddenly the reason for his broad hat was very clear.
Massimo turned the beams down to low, leaving them gasping and twisting on the floor. Mark couldn’t have stood up if his life depended on it, which it probably did. Their host sauntered towards them.
‘Look at you,’ he sneered, kicking Mark gently. ‘Bourgeois scum fallen before God’s wrath. Did you think you could pull the wool over my eyes?’
He touched another stud on his cuff and four men wearing heavy yellow exosuits and protective coveralls clanked in through a rear door.
‘Put them in penitence boxes until I decide what to do with them,’ said Massimo.
One of the men clumped up and pressed a syringe gun against Mark’s neck. He tried to ignore the pain. He hurled submind attention at metabolic defence but the ray was wreaking havoc with his interface. They bound his hands and dumped him on a cart next to Zoe and Venetia.
As his vision blurred, Mark stared up into Den’s eyes. The man looked amused.
Den led the cart out into the compound beyond. As soon as Mark was free from the effect of the ray, he used what concentration he had left to combat the drug they’d given him. With the rest of his mind he tried to access the network again.
There had to be something he could use. It was hiding in all that non-standard traffic. Mark reached for Will’s hackpack, belatedly realising that it represented his best hope. A sea of options erupted before him. It would take him weeks to figure them all out. He swapped his attention to the guards’ exosuits to find the situation equally hopeless. The muscle-response circuits onboard locked out input from the tiny SAPs they carried.
‘Don’t do this,’ said Mark. ‘You’re going to get us all killed.’
‘The voice of the blasphemer is but wind in the ears of the faithful,’ said Den gently. His collar chimed. ‘You be silent now, otherwise we have to kill you, see?’