"I remember telling you to get out of here as soon as the cannons were down."
"One, I don't take orders from a fleshy. And two," it said, patting Jack on the shoulder, "nobody gets left behind. Come on up to the cockpit. It's time we got out of here."
As Jack followed 11-P-53 up the stairs, he felt the Adeona drift forward. Clearly she didn't need any of them to tell her where to go: anywhere but inside the Confession.
The windows in the cockpit showed only empty space. For the first time, Jack found the view strangely comforting. Nobody was chasing them. Nothing was blocking their way.
"Show the rear video feed!" said Tuner, hopping up and down.
Rogan raised an eyebrow.
"What?" he said, shrugging. "We may as well see our handiwork."
11-P-53 sat in the captain's chair and pressed a single button. The view changed to show the Confession sitting on the edge of Ceros-VI's orbit. The picture continued to magnify itself the further the Adeona drew away.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the video feed grew bright with a brief, orange light, which dissipated as quickly as it appeared. It left behind a ship as shattered as the planet around which it orbited. The broken pieces tumbled and burned up as they plummeted through Ceros-VI's thin atmosphere.
The automata crowding around the cockpit cheered. Jack collapsed into one of the empty chairs and smiled.
"I will admit, that was satisfying," said Rogan, cracking a wry smile.
11-P-53 switched the video feed off. "Okay. Fun's over. Has the ship still got enough Somnium left to make the last jump?"
Brackitt nodded. "Only the one, mind. She's depleted the last of her regular fuel, so we'll be adrift once we reach the other side."
"We can worry about that later. Do we have a course set?"
Rogan summoned an image of the planet Detri from the hologram table.
"I've plotted out the optimal route," she replied. "Ready when you are."
11-P-53 spun its chair around and prepared to activate the skip drive.
"All right, then. Let's go home."
24
Detri
They broke out of subspace a few days' ride from Detri. The Adeona exhausted the last remaining dregs of her thruster fuel and then they floated the rest of the way, adrift.
Jack rationed what little food he could eat from the pantry. Unlike the automata, he wasn't convinced that Rogan's coordinates would lead them anywhere at all. Her maps were thousands of years out of date. And even if they did find their fabled planet, it wouldn't be anything more than a lifeless rock. They wouldn't find anyone there.
Not that rationing would do much but delay the inevitable, if that were the case. A million miles from the nearest ship, trillions from the nearest star system… nobody would come and get them.
A greater concern than food was the lack of water aboard the ship. Tuner had suggested building a device to recycle the ship's artificial atmosphere into something drinkable, but in the long term that created a whole other set of problems. In the meantime, he had to hope the juices from the fruits would do.
None of the automata shared these problems. They didn't even seem bothered by the boredom, some electing to go into standby mode until they reached their destination.
Being left alone with his thoughts did little to elevate Jack's mood.
He didn't only miss Amber, though of course she occupied his mind most of all, particularly right before slipping off to sleep. He missed the sounds and smells of their home. He missed the bland, mushy, government-issued rations given out at the end of each working week. Hell, he almost missed the work itself.
But everything that had come before the first solar flare – that's what he truly missed. Picnics in the park. Trips to the theatre. Sundays on which to do nothing, because doing nothing was enough.
Optimism. Hopes and dreams.
A sense that tomorrow might be better than today.
He supposed much of that had been lost long before he found himself flung across the universe.
"There it is," said 11-P-53, on their third day without fuel. "Eighteen degrees starboard – see it?"
Jack rose from his seat, his stomach rolling and his muscles groaning. The endless night sky was awash with stars – some bright and lonely, others in great, sweeping bands of distant galaxies. But one did look a fraction bigger than the others, and a duller, matte shade of grey.
Despite his doubts, Jack's heart fluttered.
"Detri? You found it?"
"Right where Rogan said it would be," said Tuner, his LED eyes bright with awe.
Rogan smiled. "I only typed in the coordinates and factored in universal expansion," she said, raising a sarcastic eyebrow in Jack's direction. "The stories told us where to go."
"All right, all right…"
Over the five or six hours that followed, Detri grew from a grey speck to the size of the Moon when viewed from Earth. Nobody left the cockpit the whole time.
Jack recalled the conversation he had with Rogan back at the Library on Kapamentis. The automata cities were inside the planet, not on its surface. Even so, he couldn't help but be overcome with hopeless disappointment when he saw no satellites, no superstructures, no pinpricks of light pollution from bustling metropolises below.
It was a dead and dusty planet without a star, and nothing more.
This would be his grave.
"We might have a problem." Brackitt spun around in his chair. "The Adeona doesn't have a way to slow down."
"I'm sorry, what?" Jack sat up in his chair. "Doesn't she have any air brakes, or something?"
"Yes, but this isn't like driving a land vehicle, Jack," said Rogan. "There's no air resistance in space. No friction. Even without thrusters, we're travelling towards Detri at an insane velocity. The only way for the Adeona to slow herself down is to fire thrusters in the opposite direction—"
"But she doesn't have any fuel left," said Tuner.
"We can change her direction to some degree with the air thrusters," said 11-P-53. "It won't be enough to bring us to a stop, but it'll give us some options."
"And those options are…?"
"Crashing into the planet, or using its gravitational pull to slingshot ourselves past it," said Brackitt.
Jack buried his head in his hands.
"Good grief."
Detri now dominated the view from the windows, growing larger with each passing second. Jack could clearly see the craters and canyons upon its pockmarked surface. A planet this far out, away from the protection of larger solar bodies, surely fell regular victim to meteoric bombardment.
"I assume everyone would prefer the latter?" asked Brackitt, waiting for an answer.
"Yes!"
Before 11-P-53 and Brackitt could turn the ship, Tuner pushed his way to the front. He pointed at the planet.
"Wait! What are those blue things?"
Everybody looked up. Two bright blue lights approached the Adeona, blinking in a slow and relaxing pattern. Each light belonged to a drone about the size of a family car.
At the speed it was travelling, the Adeona should have shot right past them. Instead the two drones changed course to match the ship's velocity, travelling alongside it towards the planet and washing the length of her hull with scan after scan after scan.
"What are they doing?" asked Jack, standing up.
Nobody had an answer.
The drones switched from scanning the ship to spotlighting it with something far brighter and, somehow, denser… almost as if they were tethering themselves to the Adeona with a pair of visible magnetic fields.
"They're slowing us down," said Brackitt. "I think they're bringing us in to land."
"Land where?" 11-P-53 waved a hysterical hand at the empty plains of Detri before them. "All I see is a bunch of craters!"
True enough, the two drones appeared to be leading the ship towards one of the smallest impact sites, the diameter of which was perhaps only a few miles across. The chance to slingsh
ot past Detri now gone, they had no choice but to surrender control and follow their shepherds down.
The problem was, even though the drones' speed – and therefore that of the Adeona – had dropped considerably, they showed no signs of stopping.
"Do something!" hissed 11-P-53.
Flustered, Brackitt raised his one remaining hand.
"I can't!"
The barren surface of the planet grew closer, until there was nothing left to see outside the windows but the fast approaching floor of the crater.
11-P-53 turned and screamed at everyone in the cockpit.
"Brace for impact!"
But no sooner had Jack wrapped his arms around his head than the crater began to split down its middle. They watched as the two halves grunted apart to reveal titanic cogs and gears turning inside, providing ample space through which both the Adeona and the drones could pass.
And as they drifted into the belly of the planet, through the thin waterfalls of dust shaken loose from the surface and the glittering forcefield that lay beyond, it all became suddenly clear.
"The sanctuary is real," said Rogan, pressing her hands against the windows.
If she'd had tear ducts, Jack reckoned she would have cried.
Before them stretched a great mechanical city, miles wide and dozens of tiers deep, like the caps of metal mushrooms overlapping one another in their struggle for light. Not that there wasn't plenty of space to go around. Construction was underway on every outskirt. Troll-shaped diggers ploughed through the rocky mantle, and cranes lowered towering steel blocks into the resulting foundations. Giant industrial pipes fed the resulting smoke and dust away from the city and towards the planet's surface.
The streets and pavilions were teeming with liberated robots. There had to have been millions of them.
Everybody cheered, even 11-P-53. Jack cracked a grin and laughed. For all his doubts, the stories had been true. After everything they'd been through, the automata were finally home.
And his chances of dying forgotten and alone on some crummy pit of a planet had dropped considerably. That helped lift Jack's spirits, too.
"Hey, Tuner," he said, tapping the little automata on the arm. "Congratulations."
"We did it!" Tuner could hardly keep himself from jumping up and down. "We're finally free!"
The drones brought the Adeona on a slow descent, past a residential outcrop and towards an open, elevated podium that reminded Jack of the top of an aircraft carrier. Dozens of armoured ships the size of frigates were parked at terminals around the edge, while scores of smaller spacecraft came and went from landing pads and bays.
Jack wondered how many of the ships inside Detri were as sentient as the Adeona. Most if not all, he reckoned. That got him thinking about everything else he could see outside the window – did the structures the automata built have minds of their own as well?
Did the city?
The drones hovered in place and lowered the Adeona onto an empty landing pad towards the front of the open-air hangar. She released her landing equipment and touched down even more delicately than she could have managed alone. The instant the Adeona made contact, the two drones relinquished their light-magnetic hold on her and sped off back in the direction of the crater door.
Below the cockpit, the loading ramp sighed open.
Nobody moved.
"Should we… should we leave?" asked Rogan.
Tuner tried and failed to peer over the dashboard at the hangar below.
"I guess so."
"Wait a moment." Jack's eyes grew wide and he clutched at his throat. "What's the atmosphere here like? Is there even an atmosphere at all?"
Brackitt raised his one good hand.
"Jack—"
"Because why would an automata world need one, right? It wouldn't, would it? But my suit can't protect me from a vacuum anymore. I mean, look at it." He pointed at the patch on his chest plate, the tear on his arm, and his complete lack of helmet. "I'll die the second I leave this ship."
"You'll be fine, Jack," said Brackitt, laying his hand on Jack's shoulder. "There's air here, probably to regulate heat. It's thin, but breathable. Let us know if you start feeling too light-headed."
"Oh, okay." Jack nodded erratically. "Sure."
Tuner reached up and grabbed his hand.
"Don't worry. You'll be okay if you stick with me."
"I'm just a bit exhausted, that's all," replied Jack… yet he kept hold of Tuner's hand the whole way down to the loading ramp all the same.
The automata streamed out into the sanctuary. Jack stood by himself at the top, watching them go. They all seemed so happy, so excited, so… full of hope. It was a nice thing to witness.
He took a deep breath – as deep as Detri's low levels of oxygen would allow, at any rate – and followed the rest of them down the ramp.
"Another day, another planet," he mumbled to himself.
He caught up with the crowd just as another group of automata, seven in number, approached from the hangar's entrance. At their front marched an old hunk of junk that appeared to be held together as much by sheer determination as it was by bolts and duct tape. Antennae stuck out at bent angles and it walked on four spider-legs, none of which seemed to belong to the original model. The technology looked ancient, as if a Victorian had designed it. If somebody had told Jack it ran on punch cards and cassette ribbons, he would have believed them.
Two identical robots the size of bulldozers rumbled alongside their decrepit leader on tank treads. Each of their arms looked like a jet turbine. The faint pulse of plasma energy glowed inside. Jack had no doubt that a single shot from one of them would leave him as nothing but a red smear across the hangar floor.
A sudden wooziness came over him. Rogan stuck out her arm and grabbed Jack before he had a chance to fall. He put his weight on her, which she accepted gladly.
"Welcome to Detri." The scrappy robot at the front peered at them all with a single eye like the lens of a Super 8 camera. "You needn't be so nervous. You're safe here. Is your ship damaged? We had trouble detecting you."
Brackitt stepped forward.
"Some of her systems got fried by a disrupter mine, and she's suffered some nasty scrapes. On top of that, she's run out of juice. No fuel in her main tank or skip drive. We had to drift most of the way here."
"Sounds as if you had a hard time getting to us. And my goodness, look at your arm. Don't worry, we can fix that." It waved a rusty appendage in front of the crowd. "My name is Tork, and it's my job to make sure you all get comfortable in your new home. Whatever troubles you fled from are over. Those troubles do not belong here. You are free. Nobody owns you. Nobody can tell you where to go or what to do. Whatever you build is your own, and… what in the name of Detri is that?"
All of the automata turned around to face Jack, who groggily peered back at them. Brackitt spoke up again.
"Ah, that's—"
"It is forbidden to bring fleshies to Detri! If word were to spread of the sanctuary's existence, our safety would be compromised!" Tork pointed an angry digit at Jack. "Remove him, LT-One."
One of the living tanks rolled forwards. Everyone instinctively stepped out of the way – everyone save for Rogan and Tuner, who remained glued to Jack's side. The tank raised one of its plasma cannon hands and aimed it at Jack's head. The turbine began to spin. Crackles of red and purple lightning danced inside.
Too tired to move, Jack merely turned his head to the side and winced at the sudden burst of heat.
"Wait!" 11-P-53 jumped between Jack and the tank. "You can trust him!"
"Trust him?" Tork scoffed. "If fleshies could be trusted, Detri wouldn't need to exist. Stand aside."
"This one is different!" Tuner stepped forward. "We wouldn't even be here if it weren't for Jack."
"He risked his life to help us," said Rogan. "Twice, actually."
The tank automata hesitated. It looked around at Tork, who cautiously scuttled closer.
"Really?" Tork addre
ssed the crew of the Adeona. "You're honestly telling me that this fleshy was willing to die for you all? For nothing in return?"
Everyone nodded or bleeped in agreement. A few even started forming a protective shield around Jack. Tork hesitated, studying Jack with his one analogue eye before he spoke again.
"Then I suppose our kind owes you a debt of gratitude." He came within inches of Jack's face. "Can we trust you, Jack?"
Jack nodded. His head felt terribly heavy.
"I've got nowhere else to go," he said, "and nobody else to tell."
"Then I suppose you'd better stay here," said Tork, pulling away. "For now, at least. Come along, everyone. Let me show you around."
Jack let out a sigh of relief. He went to follow Tork only for his legs to give out from under him. He collapsed onto the cold, hard floor with a loud smack.
"Jack?" Tuner hurried back. "Jack? Are you okay?"
"What's wrong with him?" asked Tork.
"He needs food and water," said Rogan, kneeling down. She rolled him onto his back. "And oxygen. The air here is much too thin for him."
"I think we pulled some cured proteins from a renegade ship seeking amnesty not too long ago." Tork gesticulated towards one of his companions. "Go to Salvaged Goods and bring back anything edible you can find. And you," he added, pointing to another robot, "head to the old steam engines and collect some water."
"We'll need to filter it." Rogan lifted Jack's head onto her lap. "What about air?"
Tuner's head perked up.
"There's still a little oxygen in the Adeona's air thrusters," he said. "I can extract some into a canister and then feed that into Jack's helmet, if I plug up the cracks. It'll be ugly, but it'll work."
"Good idea."
Jack tried to take as deep a breath as possible, but it made no difference. He didn't have the strength. His head felt fuzzy and everything sounded like it was coming from the next room over.
"Come on, Jack. Stay with me." Rogan stroked the hair out of his eyes. "You've come this far. Don't be an idiot and die on me now."
Jack wanted to laugh. Everything went black before he could.
The Final Dawn Page 20