by Peter Watts
“What’s behind the doors?”
“Uh, a vestibule, a few meters deep. And then—oh, last time there was another set of doors further in, but those’re gone now. There’s some kind of heavy slab instead, like a big dropgate or something. Looks pretty featureless.”
“What about the side walls of the vestibule?”
“Concrete or biolite or something. Just walls. Nothing special. Why?”
He tightened the ammo belt around his waist. “That’s where we go in.”
She shook her head. “No, Ken. No fucking way.”
“Dropgate’s the obvious defense. More sensible to go around than hit it head-on.”
“We can’t go out there. They’ll tear us apart.”
“I didn’t come all this way to let a pack of dogs pin me down eighty meters from the finish line.”
“Ken, you’re blind!”
“They won’t know that.” He held up his pistol. “And they’ll know what this is. Appearances matter.”
She stared at his corroded eyes, the oozing flesh of his face. “How’re you going to aim?”
“The same way we landed. You’ll give me bearings.” Lubin felt around in the pack and pulled out the Heckler & Koch. “Take this.”
She did, unbelieving.
“We keep the dogs back long enough to get in through the wall. The rest of the plan doesn’t change.”
Dry-mouthed, Clarke watched them circling. “What if they’re armored? What if they’re wired?”
“They’ll be pulse-proof. No electronics. The usual tweaks and nothing more.” He zipped up the knapsack and slung it across his back, tightening the straps around shoulders and waist.
“Are these guns pulse-proof? Are—” A sudden, disquieting memory rose to the surface of her thoughts: machinery in her chest, hiccoughing. “What about our implants?”
“Myoelectric. EMP doesn’t bother them, much. What’s the H&K set on?”
She checked. “Conotoxins. Ken, I’ve never even fired a gun before. My aim—”
“Will be better than mine.” Lubin clambered back down into the tilted cabin behind their seats. “You may get off easily. I rather suspect they’ll be focusing on me.”
“But—”
“Gloves,” he said, sealing his to the gauntlets beneath his clothing.
Clarke pulled her gloves over shaking hands. “Ken, we can’t just—”
He paused, fixed her with his sightless eyes. “You know, I liked you better when you were suicidal. You weren’t nearly so chickenshit.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I’m losing patience, Len. Five years of guilt-ridden self-pity should be enough for anyone. Was I wrong about you? Were you just wallowing, all this time? Do you want to save the world or not?”
“I—”
“This is the only way.”
Is there anything you wouldn’t do, then? For the chance to take it all back? Back then the answer had been obvious. It was obvious now. Freezing, familiar determination reignited inside her. Her face burned.
Lubin nodded, only his eyes blinded. He sat on the floor, braced his back against the bulkhead behind Clarke’s seat. “Noseplugs.”
They’d improvised them en route, little wads of the same semipermeable tape that blocked her intake. Clarke stuffed one up each nostril.
“I blow a hole in the hull,” Lubin said, inserting his own. “That drives the dogs back long enough for us to exit the chopper. Once we’re outside, point me at the main entrance. That’s twelve o’clock. All target bearings will be relative to that, not to where I happen to be facing at any given time. Do you understand?”
She nodded, forgetting for an instant, then: “Yes.”
“They’ll charge as soon as we’re in the open. Call it. Close your eyes when I give the word. I’ll be using the flash grenades; they’ll be incapacitated for at least ten seconds. Shoot as many as you can. Keep moving.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Lose the gloves once we’re free of the heat. The sight of a diveskin might start him thinking.”
Patient killers paced just past the canopy. They seemed to look her in the eye. They smiled, showing teeth the size of thumbs.
Just the usual tweaks, she thought, giddy and terrified. She braced her back against the canopy, raising her gloved hands to protect her face.
“We can do this,” Lubin said softly. “Just remember what I told you.”
He’s not trying to kill us. She wondered just who that applied to.
“You really think he expects us to survive.”
Lubin nodded.
“But does he know you’re blind?”
“I doubt it.” He pointed his gun across the cabin. The thumbwheel locked onto clusterfuck. “Ready?”
This is it, Lenie girl. Your one shot at redemption.
Don’t fuck it up.
“Go,” she said, and shut her eyes.
Lubin fired. Clarke’s lids glowed sudden, bloody orange.
Her diveskin took most of the heat from the neck down, but in that moment it was as if someone had thrust her head into a kiln. She swore the heat blasted the very skin from her face. She clenched her teeth and held her breath and cursed the chances Lubin wouldn’t take: it might tip him off if he sees our hoods.
The air roared and crackled, sizzled with spatterings of liquid metal. She could hear the crack of Lubin’s pistol firing again at her side. She realised, distantly amazed, that the pain was gone. Fear and adrenaline had swept it away in an instant.
The world dimmed beyond her eyelids. She opened them. A hole gaped in the side of the chopper. Soft alloy glowed intermittently at its edges; acrylic peeled and blackened. Chunks of shredded canopy guttered on the floor, one scant centimeters from her left foot.
Lubin fired a third time. A spread of incendiary needles shot through the breach and into the darkness beyond, a tiny, devastating meteor shower. Clusterfucks were designed to sow a thousand lethal pinholes across a wide area, but there’d been little chance to disperse across the meager width of the cabin. Almost two meters of solid fuselage had been reduced to silvery chaff and blown outward; a fan of dispersed wreckage steamed and congealed on the ground outside.
“How big is the hole?” Lubin snapped over ambience.
“Meter and a half.” She choked and coughed on the stink of scorched plastic. “Lots of little bits past—”
Too late. Lubin, blindly brazen, had already launched himself through the hole. He sailed over the scree nearest the threshold and hit the ground shoulder-first, rolling to his feet in an instant. A lozenge of hot metal smoldered like a branding iron against his left shoulder blade. Lubin writhed, reached around and pushed it loose with the muzzle of his gun. It dropped to the ground, tarry with half-melted copolymer. A ragged hole smoked on Lubin’s shirt. The injured diveskin beneath squirmed as if alive.
Clarke gritted her teeth and dove after him.
A bright spark of pain, needle-sharp and needle-fine, ignited briefly on her forearm as she sailed through the breach. In the next instant blesséd cool air washed over her. She landed hard and skidded. Two great carcasses twitched and burned before her, grinning behind charred lips.
She scrambled to her feet, peeling off her gloves. Sure enough, the rest of the pack had retreated for the moment, holding the perimeter at a more discreet distance.
Lubin swept his weapon back and forth, pure threat display. “Lenie!”
“Here! Two down!” She reached his side, pointing her H&K at the circling horde. “The others backed off.” She turned him clockwise. “Entrance that way. Twelve o’clock.” Remember, she told herself. Bearings from the entrance, bearings from the—
He nodded. “How far are the dogs?” He held his pistol two-handed, arms extended, elbows slightly bent. He looked almost relaxed.
“Uh—twenty-five meters, maybe.” Bearings from the entrance...
“Smart. Just past effective range.”
Bearings from—“Your ran
ge is twenty-five lousy meters?”
“Wide spread.” It made sense, of course—a useful cheat for a poor marksman, and blind was as poor as it got. The catch was a needle-cloud so widely dispersed that distant targets passed through it untouched. “Try yours.”
Clarke aimed. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She fired once, twice. The H&K bucked in her grip. Its bark was surprisingly soft.
The enemy stared back, undiminished.
“Missed. Unless they’re immune, Ken, you said they were tweaked—”
Sudden motion to the right, a rush along the flank. “Two o’clock,” Clarke hissed, firing. Lubin turned and shot a firestorm of needles. “Eight!” He swung and fired again, barely missing Clarke as she ducked beneath his outstretched arms.
Splinters of fire laced the ground to both sides. Three more dogs were down, lacerated by flaming shrapnel. Two more, fitfully ignited, fled back out of range. Still the pack was mute. The perimeter boiled with silent anger.
She kept her own weapon up, for all the good it would do. “Three down, two injured. The rest of them are holding back.”
Lubin panned left, right. “This is wrong. They should be charging.”
“They don’t want to get shot. You said they were smart.”
“Attack dogs too smart to attack.” Lubin shook his head. “No. This is wrong.”
“Maybe they just want to keep us pinned here,” Clarke said hopefully. “Maybe—”
Something rang faintly in her skull, not so much heard as felt: an itch, shrill and irritating.
“Ah,” Lubin said softly. “That’s more like it.”
The change was too subtle for sight and too fundamental. No motion sensor, no image-analysis subroutine would have been able to read the signs. But Lenie Clarke knew it instantly, on some primal level that predated Humanity itself. Something in the gut had never forgotten, in all these million years. On all sides, many creatures merged suddenly together into one, into a vast seething entity with myriad bodies and a single merciless focus. Lenie Clarke watched it leap towards her and remembered exactly what she was, what she always had been.
Prey.
“Flash!” Lubin barked. Almost too late, she remembered to shut her eyes. Four pops sounded in rapid succession. A constellation of dim red suns ignited briefly through her eyelids.
“Go!”
She looked. The composite organism had shattered, just like that. Solitary predators wheeled on all sides, blinded and confused. Briefly blind, she remembered. Briefly confused.
She had seconds to act and nothing to lose. She charged.
Three meters from the nearest beast she started shooting. She squeezed off five rounds; two hits in the creature’s flank. It snapped and dropped. Two others stumbled into each other, a mere arm’s length away: one shot each and she was spinning in search of new targets. Somewhere offside, needlefire slammed obliquely across the ground. She ignored it and kept shooting. Something dark and massive hurtled past, bleeding flame. She nailed it in the flank for good measure and suddenly she was transformed yet again, all that adrenalized midbrain circuitry flipping from flight to fight, whimpering paralysis burned away in a fury of bloodlust and adrenaline. She shot a leg. She shot a great heaving ribcage, black and sleek as a diveskin. She shot a monstrous, silently-snarling face, and realized it had been looking back.
A part of her she hadn’t even known was keeping score served up a number: seven. That’s the number you can take, before they come for you...
She broke and ran. Lubin was running too, poor blind Lubin, Lubin the human tank. He’d switched back to clusterfuck and cleared a fiery path down twelve o’clock. He charged down the driveway—
—I told him no obstructions oh boy will he be pissed if he trips on a sewer grating—
—like a sighted man. Dogs shook their heads in his wake and wheeled, intent on reacquisition.
They were closing on Clarke, too. Their paws drummed at her heels like heavy rain on a cloth roof.
She was back on the asphalt, a few meters off Lubin’s stern. “Seven o’clock!” she cried, diving.
Incandescent sleet streaked centimeters overhead. Gravel and coarse pavement flayed the skin of her palms, bruised her arm and shoulder through nested layers of denim and copolymer. Flesh and fur burst into flame close enough to warm her face.
She twisted onto her back. “Three o’clock! Flash wore off!” Lubin turned and sprayed fire across the bearing. Three other dogs were closing from eleven; still on her back, Clarke held the gun two-handed over her head and took them out with three meters to spare.
“Flash!” Lubin shouted again. Clarke rolled and ducked, closing her eyes. Three more pops, three more orange fleshy sunrises. They backlit the memory of that last sighted instant—the instant when Lubin called out and every dog had flinched and turned their heads away...
Smart, smart doggies, giggled some hysterical little girl in her head. They heard FLASH, and they remembered it from the first time, and they closed their eyes...
She opened hers, terrified of what she was about to see.
The trick hadn’t worked twice. Lubin was bringing up his weapon, desperately switching modes as some black slavering nemesis launched itself at his throat. There were no stars in its eyes. Lubin fired, blind and point-blank; blood and bone exploded from the back of the creature’s skull but the carcass just kept going, a hundred kilograms of gory unstoppable momentum hitting him full in the chest. Lubin went over like a paper doll, gripping his dead attacker as though he could prevail over mass-times-accelleration through sheer bloody-minded determination.
He couldn’t, of course. He couldn’t prevail over anything. He had only killed one of them. He disappeared beneath a dozen others.
Suddenly Clarke was charging forward, firing and firing and firing. There were screams, but none of them came from anything she might have hit. Something hot and hard slammed into her from the side; something cold and harder slammed against her back. A monster grinned down at her, open-mouthed, drooling. Its forepaws pinned her to the ground like piled cinderblocks. Its breath reeked of meat and petroleum.
She remembered something Ken had said: You may get off easily. I rather suspect they’ll be focusing on me. She really should have asked him about that, back when she’d had the chance. Only now it was too late.
They’re saving me, she thought distantly. For dessert...
From somewhere nearby, the sound of crunching bones.
#
Jesus God, Ken. What did you think would happen?
The weight on her chest was gone. On all sides she could hear the sound of monsters, breathing.
You thought we had a hope in hell? You were blind, and I—I might as well have been. Were you trying to die, Ken? Did you just think you were indestructible?
I could understand that, maybe. I almost believed it myself, for a while.
Strangely, nothing had torn out her throat. I wonder what’s keeping them, she thought.
She opened her eyes. CSIRA loomed into the sky over her head, as though she were staring up from the grave at some colossal tombstone.
She sat up in a circle maybe four meters across. Massed black bodies circumscribed its edge. They watched her, panting with past exertion, sitting calmly on their haunches.
Clarke struggled to her feet. Her head itched with the memory of that irritating inaudible tickle, freshly resurgent against her inner ear. She’d felt it when the monsters had first charged. She’d felt it again, just now. Ultrasonics, she realised.
The Hechler & Koch lay at her feet. She bent to scoop it up. Dark shapes tensed on all sides; jaws snapped, restive. But they didn’t stop her.
The Sikorsky-Bell lay broken-backed fifty meters to her left, fat thorax and slender abdomen rising in a lopsided V from their common juncture. A ragged, charred hole gaped darkly in the cabin wall, as though some white-hot parasite had burst forth from inside. She took one shaky step in that direction.
The dogs bristled and held th
eir ground.
She stopped. Turned to face the black tower.
The pack parted before her.
They moved as she did, yielding in some approved direction, closing behind in her wake. After a few steps her own shifting bubble of space fused with another; two pockets merged into a single oblong vacuole ten meters down the major axis.
Two great torn carcasses lay piled before her in a pool of blood and spilled intestine. A foot protruded unmoving from beneath the nearest. Something else--dark, slick, strangely lobate—twitched further along one bloody flank as Clarke approached. It looked like some grotesque swollen parasite, pulsing weakly, spilled from the guts of its disembowelled host.
It clenched. Suddenly the image clicked: a blood-soaked fist, knotted in gory, matted fur.
“Ken!” She reached down, touched the bloody hand. It jerked back as if stabbed, disappeared beneath the carcass leaving only the vague sense of some half-glimpsed deformity. The mass of carrion shifted slightly.
Lubin hadn’t torn these two animals apart. He’d merely blown lethal holes in them. Their evisceration had happened after the fact, a demon horde ripping through their fallen comrades in pragmatic, remorseless pursuit of their target.
Lubin had used these two as a shield.
“Ken, it’s me.” She grabbed handfuls of fur and pulled. The blood-slicked pelage resisted her grip. Splinters of bone stabbed her hands through clots of muscle and fur. On the third try, the center of mass tipped past some crucial threshold. The carcass rolled off Lubin like a great log.
He fired, blind. Lethal shards sprayed into the sky. Clarke dropped to the ground—“It’s me, you idiot!”—and stared panic-stricken around the perimeter, terrified that Lubin had jump-started a whole new assault. But the pack only flinched and fell back a few steps, silent as ever.
“Cl—Clarke....?”
He didn’t even look human. Every square centimeter glistened with black gore. The pistol shook in his hand.
“It’s me,” she repeated. She had no idea how much of the blood was his. “Are you—”