Unstable Prototypes

by Lallo, Joseph

  "Ah. Well then, I'll just work at unlocking this then, shall I?"

  "On my way," Lex said, "Close Com."

  A high pitched whine came from the door that had protected their flank so faithfully, followed by a second, then an ear splitting clank as the heavy door fell away and Commander Purcell marched through. She slipped something into her belt and held her pistol with the rescuers steadily in her sights. Behind her was a meager assemblage of soldiers, including her second in command. Garotte quickly stood between the commander and Silo.

  "As I'm the one with the shield, it looks like you'll be the one working on the door," he muttered.

  "Not my strong suit," she said, holstering her weapon and going to work on the control panel for the door.

  "I've always admired your ability to adapt," he replied.

  "Stop what you're doing or I will fire," said commander Purcell.

  "I do wish you would, my dear," Garotte taunted, "I've got one of your precious shields."

  Purcell continued to march forward, weapon raised.

  "Ask your boys. Not much fun to fire on an active shield," he continued.

  "I'm aware of the details of the shield," Purcell said, drawing closer. Long, slow strides were moving her with deceptive speed. "It was my decision to pursue their deployment."

  "Oh, good, then that fellow who punched himself full of his own bullets has you to thank. Good show," he remarked.

  "It is the danger of using the most advanced technology available."

  "I can't help but notice that you aren't using a shield yourself. No, that particular honor goes to the men and women under your command. How many of them have you gotten killed?"

  "More soldiers by far have been killed by the reluctance of the modern military to become truly modern."

  "Oh really? Cite your sources. Maybe we should take a poll of the crew. How many have you got left, a dozen or so? We'll put the rest down for 'Bad Technology Killed Me.'"

  "You're trying to stall me. Stupid decision. You're the one on a time limit," Purcell tapped her free hand to her communicator. "Tactical, status!"

  "The download is finished. The CME Activators are fully commissioned and ready to deploy," came the reply.

  Silo doubled her efforts on the door lock.

  "Load them into the launch tubes and tell me when you are ready to fire."

  "Yes, Commander."

  Purcell smiled and continued her march. There were barely a dozen strides between them now, and she took them one by one, slowly and deliberately until mere feet separated her from Garotte. "You're too late. In seconds those missiles will be on their way. And I assure you, it is for the best. You haven't seen what I've seen. If you knew what lurked on the horizon, you would gladly trade the millions of lives that will be lost in the weeks ahead for the billions that will be saved in the years that follow."

  "Millions that will be lost..." said her second in command whispered.

  "I am awaiting status, tactical," Purcell stated, when the all-ready had failed to come through.

  "There... there is a problem with the computer. It isn't responding. Disc access and processor utilization are maxed out. Doors are locked down all over the station. I can't move troops. The only thing we've got is communication."

  "Looks like our furry little hacker did the job," Silo said.

  "Damn it, fix it! I want to be firing those things in thirty seconds, you hear me?!"

  "You're really going to do it," Marx realized.

  "Quiet!" Purcell demanded.

  "You are going to endanger all of those lives!?"

  "We will do what is necessary to preserve our future. Now quiet! That is an order!"

  He raised his weapon. "I know all too well that unwillingness to adapt is a death sentence, but I will not be one of the executioners. I will not-"

  Purcell turned and fired. For a moment the man remained standing, his face plastered with a look of agony and betrayal, the overpowered weapon having easily left a smoldering wound over his heart. Finally, the man crumbled to the ground.

  "Does anyone else feel their loyalty to our cause wavering?" Purcell hissed at her men.

  In a swift motion, Garotte disengaged his shield, pulled her arm to the small of her back, and put his pistol to her head.

  "Not really relevant anymore, I think," Garotte said. "How's that coming, Silo?"

  "Hard to say, really."

  "Well hurry, because-"

  Purcell hooked her leg behind his ankle and pulled him off balance. He wrenched her wrist as he stumbled, pulling her gun free from her hand. She pivoted, her fingers tearing at his belt and ripping the shield generator free. Her other hand caught his wrist, twisting it painfully, forcing the weapon from his fingers. Garotte pulled free and kicked both pistols away. The flurry of motion left Garotte and Purcell on firm footing, facing each other. Rather than retreating, she drew the knife from her belt and advanced.

  "Switch!" Garotte said, backpedaling.

  Silo stood and put the muzzle of her rifle to the Commander's face.

  "Look who brought a knife to a gun f-"

  Purcell swiped, the knife emitting a tone as it sliced easily through the barrel of the rifle.

  "-udge!" Silo finished.

  The commander attempted a second slice, but Silo pulled back, and the two began to battle in earnest. It was a symphony of threatening sounds, with the knife humming like a mosquito through the air and the remains of the rifle whistling in vicious swings. Silo knew that a single slice from that knife would likely end the battle, and her life along with it. Purcell learned a similar lesson when a wild swing of the rifle struck the wall and left a deeper divot than most of the weapon blasts had. As a result of a few years on Manticore, any blunt object was a deadly weapon in Silo's hands.

  Attacks flew faster and closer, each woman dodging the other's blows by narrower and narrower margins. On one side, the smattering of remaining soldiers held their weapons ready but refused to fire out of fear that they would hurt their commander. One of them tried to move in and lend a hand in the melee, but a screeching stray slice of Purcell's knife cut through several very useful bits of anatomy. Witnessing this event gave the surviving soldiers a healthy respect for the danger the swinging weapons posed. They kept their distance. On the other side, Garotte worked at the door to the weapons bay.

  "This bloody thing is warped. The mechanism is fused," he growled.

  "Quit making excuses," Silo huffed.

  At the commander's belt, her communicator chirped.

  "-sense they would put a com panel on this thing. Boss Lady, you hear me?" Karter's groggy voice remarked as the battle raged on. "I gotta say, I'm really liking this transporter of yours. And that was a pretty clever idea, putting targeting transmitters in your ships for emergency rescue. In related news, I'm all out of grenades, and you have one ship left."

  Purcell roared in anger and managed a desperate strike that Silo couldn't dodge. The demo expert raised her rifle-turned-club to block, and the knife sliced neatly through, missing Silo's fingers by millimeters. Now left with a uselessly small remnant of her former weapon, Silo threw the remaining portion aside and grasped the knife hand by the wrist, easily overpowering her with a squeeze that nearly shattered Purcell's wrist, forcing the commander to release the weapon. As it fell, still active, it slipped past Silo's arm, effortlessly opening a long slit in her suit and a shallow gash in her flesh before sinking hilt-deep into the floor. Silo cried out and released, and the women separated, each clutching an injured arm. For a moment, each eyed the other tensely, eyes darting briefly to the weapon as it screeched its high-pitch wail and vibrated in its self-carved slot. An instant before either attempted to grab it, a voice rang out from the other side of the hall.

  "Nobody move!"

  All eyes turned to the source of the order. There stood Lex among the fallen soldiers at the end of the hall nearest to the heroes, energy pistol in one hand and motionless Ma tucked under one arm. Silo seized the mo
ment to grab Purcell, spin her around, and immobilize her arms.

  "Excellent timing as always, my boy. Hand that over, would you?" Garotte said, quickly turning from the door. He caught the pistol as it was tossed to him. "Right now, let's think about this logically, shall we? This is a military crew, and you are running this like a military operation. Those CMEAs are clearly weapons of mass destruction, and in a military operation, things like that need command authorization to fire, thanks to computer fail safes, yes?"

  Purcell did not answer.

  "Yes?" Garotte asked more insistently, placing the gun to Purcell's face.

  She nodded stiffly.

  "And am I correct in assuming that, at this point, you are the only one on the space station that has command authorization?"

  Another stiff nod. Karter's voice crackled out of the radio on her belt. "Getting bored now."

  "So in theory, all I need to do is blow your head off and the crisis is averted, but there is still the tiny matter of making it out of this alive, which is a very appealing outcome for me. Thus, here is what is going to happen. You fellows are going to stand down. I happen to know you've got a few holding cells in this place. Find them and climb in. I'll be keeping the commander here, for my own safety and hers, until we can reach the missiles, disarm them, and wipe the design from your systems. Then we'll be taking her with us as we exit."

  "... Oh, hey. There's another transport target," Karter's voice observed.

  Garotte continued to dictate his orders. Lex paced over to the others, but he couldn't quite shake the feeling that something was wrong.

  "... This ought to be interesting. Radius set," Karter said.

  Lex's eyes shot open, and he fumbled with his free hand in his pocket. Inside, he found the target Karter had tossed to him. It had managed to activate while it was in his pocket. Juggling the device and the sleeping funk, he tried to get his panicked fingers to twist the top into the off position, but he lost his grip, causing it to fall and skitter along the floor.

  "Target set," Karter continued.

  "Scatter! Get away from that thing!" Lex yelped.

  "Antimatter cartridge loaded..."

  A moment of utter chaos, something that Lex realized was happening far too frequently these days, followed. In the space of a few heartbeats Purcell thrust an elbow into Silo's stomach as the hero tried to drag her away. The blow, combined with the sudden need to dodge was enough to allow the commander to escape. She snatched up her knife and rushed toward her troops while Lex, Silo, and Garotte retreated.

  "Engage."

  A flash filled the hall, accompanied by a rush of wind strong enough to hurl all present to the ground. The roar of wind came with a thunder clap and the screech of metal. The first to recover was Lex, who managed to squint through the purple and blue blotches in his vision to see... Frankly, he wasn't sure. It was a mass of metal and glass. Where it met the walls and floor, both the object and the structure had buckled, twisted, and fused. The edge that faced the heroes was bulged outward, layers of metal, sparking wires, leaking tubes, and twitching components having been clipped off by the transporter into an almost beautiful random design. It completely filled the hallway, with the exception of a few inches from the ceiling, where the spherical shape was rendered irregular by a few flat surfaces of glass.

  "What is that?" Silo asked.

  "Well, the other target was inside the ship... I guess that's a spherical hunk of the ship?" Lex surmised.

  Working off of that theory, the glass at the top did appear to be part of a cockpit, though glancing through it indicated that if there was a pilot, most of him was on the other side of the wall, which clearly hadn't been a terribly healthy experience.

  "I must not have been paying attention. How did it get here?" Silo asked.

  "They have a transporter, and Karter is at the controls," Lex explained.

  "... That is the most terrifying thing I've ever heard," Silo uttered.

  "Did that do something interesting?" Karter's voice asked. "I expected an explosion or something. And I'm all out of antimatter for this thing, so I can't do any more."

  The next sound they heard was Purcell smashing her radio in anger.

  "We've still got a chance. The door is on our side," Silo said.

  "I'll try to get it open, but it is clearly built to withstand an internal explosion, and the mechanism is fused," Garotte said, making his way to the door and beginning his efforts anew.

  "Go around the other way and stop them," Purcell ordered from the other side of the blockage.

  The troops hurried through the hole she'd cut in the door, the commander close behind.

  "Lex, try to find some weapons from the pile of failed security guards there that aren't too badly damaged. We're about to have company," Silo advised. "I'm glad they didn't decide to do that earlier."

  "They probably needed her knife to cut through all of those locked doors," Garotte guessed, "Or they are idiots. Equal likelihoods, I'd say."

  The pilot tried to rummage through the wreckage and remains without thinking too hard about the fact that they had been alive a few minutes ago. He also refused to put Ma's sleeping body down to do it. They had managed to turn up three guns which had a reasonable chance of working when they heard the pounding of boots.

  "Commander! Tactical here," came a voice over the station's damaged PA system. "We're getting some partial computer control back. I think I can give you voice interface."

  From her cover in an adjoining hallway, Purcell snatched a communicator from one of the soldiers.

  "Activate voice interface!" she bellowed.

  "Voice interface active," replied a low-grade computerized voice.

  "Launch CMEA! Command Voice Code Six eight eight three."

  "... No," the voice said.

  "Damn it! Repeat, Launch Coronal Mass Ejection Activator, now! Command Voice Code Six eight eight three."

  "Your coarse language is not called for, Commander Purcell," said a very familiar voice.

  "Ma!?" exclaimed all three of the heroes, with equal confusion, back at the door.

  "My control program has been loaded onto the space station's core system. I am currently decompressing, and attempting to gain control over the subsystems," Ma explained over their radios.

  "So you aren't dead!? Not even this you?" Lex said, indicating the funk.

  "No. I was able to break encryption and transfer a duplicate of my full data image prior to critical corruption. But I appreciated your concern. It was very sweet."

  "Yes, yes. A tearful reunion after thirty seconds of separation. Lovely," Garotte said. "Can you open the door to the weapons bay, or perhaps destroy the missiles remotely?"

  "Negative. There is a mechanical fault in the door mechanism, and the CMEA is not coupled to any station system besides the launch apparatus."

  "Can you maybe tell us why we aren't getting shot at by soldiers?" Silo asked, eyes still trained on the unobstructed hallway, weapon raised.

  "Most of the surveillance on this deck has been destroyed, but an emergency storage locker in an adjoining corridor has been accessed," the computer informed.

  "What were the contents?" Garotte asked.

  "Medical equipment, water, nonperishable food, one space suit, and supplementary oxygen," she said. "There is now an attempt to access a secondary airlock."

  "... She's going to go external. She's going to access it from the outside," Garotte realized. "The schematics show that there is a massive external payload door on the space-facing side of the bay for loading ordinance."

  "Can't Ma just lock her out?" Lex asked.

  "I have not yet completely taken control of all systems, and even if I had, manual overrides exist for both door control and weapon launch. If she reaches the door, she can open it, and if she reaches the launch controls, she can fire the weapons," Ma stated.

  "I think we're going to have to consider finding a way to blow the whole station," Silo said gravely.

  "T
hat may not be possible in the time available. I do not have deep enough control to produce a catastrophic failure, and am unlikely to gain that level of control prior to the launch of the weapons."

  "All we need to do is find a way to set off the weapons inside the weapons bay."

  "With the exception of the CME Activators themselves, which are non-explosive, there are no weapons in the weapons bay."

  "... What?" Garotte said, expression blank.

  "Station records indicate that the Neo-Luddites are extremely under-equipped, and most of their existing large-scale weaponry was disassembled for the parts to create the CME Activators and subsequent fabricated equipment."

  "Well that would have been nice to know five minutes ago. Everybody, clear out. This door is about to get what's coming to it," Silo said, unstrapping her grenade belt and beginning to make some choice selections.

  "This way my boy," Garotte said, grasping Lex and pulling him down the hallway. "Here's what you need to do while we're working at this. Find a spare suit so that we can get Silo back into the ship for the getaway, or get Ma to pressurize the launch bay..."

  "Please remember that you are now able to address me directly," Ma stated.

  "... then go and wrangle Karter, and get him to the Declaration. And ditch the rodent," Garotte continued. "I'll stay here and see to it that nothing happens to our darling Miss Silo."

  "Your referral to my previous incarnation as a rodent is once again inappropriate in terms of both biology and etiquette," Ma further objected.

  "What happens if I run into soldiers?" Lex asked.

  Garotte tapped the gun in his hand, "Shoot them. Are we clear?"

  "Crystal," Lex replied.

  "Splendid. Off with you, then," he said, slapping the pilot on the back to send him on his way.

  As Lex rushed off, Ma spoke through his radio. "I have begun rapid-pressurizing the docking bay. Please focus your attentions preferentially on Karter. I will link your radio to the com panel in the storage bay now."

  After a tone, Lex yelled, "Karter!"

  "You aren't dead?" Karter's voice responded with a vaguely insulting level of surprise.

  "No, I'm not. Your concern is touching. Are you okay up there?"