by Stephen Moss
Few in the room were above seeing the princess get a taste of her own medicine, but if anyone was, it was Quavoce, and as Sar went to respond, it was he who spoke reason once more in defense of his off-and-on lover. “DefaLuta, I think that is quite enough. And Princess Lamati, Your Majesty, please, you must stop accepting this bait.”
The two women faced each other and glowered.
After a moment, the Hemmbar added in helpfully, if also obliviously, “If it pleases the Council, I have an update on the force analysis of the fleet currently accelerating around Earth.”
“It does please us, Hemmbar,” said Sar, not breaking eye contact with the Kyryl woman smiling demonically at her. “Go ahead, Theer-im.”
The archivist began his running update, referencing the shared PM analysis of his fellow contingents as necessary as he explained his own group’s breakdown. Events so very worthy of record were coming thick and fast now as the battle approached, and if he had ever been guilty of showing emotion it was now, as something hinting at excitement for the scale of the coming slaughter flickered in his eyes.
As the academic spoke of force dispositions, closing velocities, the known capabilities of their enemy’s ships based on their brush with Þalía’s squadron, the ship flew onward toward Earth, the planet visible to the squadron now as a distant blue-green orb set against the orange fire of its sun.
While the Council discussed high tactics, descending often into regular bouts of semantics and frustrated distrust, the carrier flagship’s complement of repair and maintenance bots continued their mundane and seemingly endless work in and around the ship’s stout form.
But one among them, one of many that had apparently suffered from the long journey to this point, lumbered against its orders to the next of a series of loci it had received before the separation.
Other Pulujan stared with jealousy as a more advanced, and less biologically encumbered, cousin of hers jetted gracefully past. Three times she had been taken to task by such a machine, prompted by the same AMs that pinged her own craft in an endless attempt to reprogram it and get at whatever was causing it to keep malfunctioning. But the problem with her particular repair bot was, in fact, that she had infested the stupid beast with her own body, one that was now much reduced after some lo-fi amputations in the year since her attack.
It was a small comfort to her that those losses had also taken with them their measure of her itches and pains, as the repair bot that she had inhabited became her solitary confinement.
But the other, less contaminated repair robot was not interested in her today, and it spat propellant and flew by.
She looked after it and spoke to herself, as the isolated are prone to do. “That’s right, you prancing metal fart-box, keep moving, if you know what’s good for you.”
In truth, she would have little chance if the robot decided to take her to task, but her work, while deadly, was carefully planned to appear innocuous. For now, that is. Unfortunately, that same circumspection was another source in a long list of frustrations felt by the lonely Nomadi.
“So … here we go,” said O-Pu to herself, as she rounded onto another panel designated by her enigmatic patron. “Refuse reprocessing plant 26. Great, another shithole.”
She longed for the simple chance to just hit the big carrier she had roamed around for so many months, to punch it and rip at it, even if her puny muscles would be able to do little to hurt the great leviathan. Apparently, though, setting a synchronized cycling pulse into the poop processors would. At least that was what she had sensed her overseers had been forced to resort to when plans suddenly shifted and she had been sent to stow away on the pimply butt of this damn ship.
Her stubby maws punched outward as she approached, programmed to do some job by the ship’s AMs. When she was close enough to her destination as possible, she initiated the reset protocol and sent the machine’s brain into a circling loop that crippled its limited intellect, automatically sending out a maintenance request as it did so. But it would take minutes for the AI to recover, and even longer for any physical support to arrive, by which time she would have done what she had to do and be ready to sit back and listen once more as yet another AM whined and moaned about the bot’s spotty performance.
Calling underlying protocols to task, she began to manipulate the robot directly, cursing creatively as she maneuvered the ungainly beast into place and wrenched open the plate coverings over the recycling plant’s control systems. As far as the system was concerned, she was just a part of the glitch, her actions as seemingly random as the oscillating confusion algorithms bouncing around inside the robot’s brain right now.
She felt as her system turned over once more, not much longer now, she sensed, struggling to punch a precise form into a set of pipes in front of her with fingers not designed for such delicate work. She checked a timer in her head. She was not programming any system or setting any explosives. She had no explosives to plant, and any such device would risk discovery anyway.
She was limited to subtle corruption, bending pipes to make them resonate to a specific note, one she would initiate at the right time, and hopefully cause a chain reaction. That was the plan anyway.
She hammered onward.
“There,” she said with something approaching satisfaction, “not pretty, but it will do.”
She felt the returning lack of control as a timer counted down to zero. She waited for it to come. The pulsating diagnostics began like a ringing of a bell she was standing in, her mind’s limited access to the system vibrating with probing questions as a local AM sought the source of the machine’s persistent failures.
But as it came she was already locked away once more. For all the world just a dim remnant of a damaged part of the bot, something that might have been replaced or repaired in peacetime, when resources were not so strictly allotted.
As the system’s checks died down and their echo diminished, O-Pu did one last thing, dropping a hint into the bot’s AI, not something so blunt or detectable as an instruction, but a subtle manipulation of the bot’s next directive, a sachet of dye dropped into the stream, coloring it without affecting its flow, and off the bot trundled once more.
Where it was going she was not exactly sure yet. Another wonderful sewer, no doubt, thought O-Pu, as she retracted into her mind once more, to the limited sims she could create there to pass the time as the final battle approached.
Chapter 62: Claustrophobia
Rob looked down at Birgit as she tried to get comfortable. It was not easy. As the pressure had increased, their returned weight had lost its comedy, like a joke written on the wall of a prison cell.
Where they had been half their earthbound weight yesterday, they were more than double it today, and the feeling was oppressive.
“If I could just get my other arm in here … just one … more …” Birgit’s voice was strained as she pushed forward once more. Unlike before, now she was not only fighting to squeeze through an inadequate gap, but also struggling against a core that was actively trying to suck her in, drawing her inward into the hole with a growing strength.
“Birgit, darling, let me try again, please,” said Rob.
“You … are … too … fat,” she said against the pressure on her shoulders, wedged into the ragged gap in the core’s shielding that they had managed to cut.
There was only one more layer between her and the actual event horizon. But she had no intention of breaking through that layer. If they did, the core would break free as had happened on an unlucky carrier ship during the missile-mine attack, and it would expand outward uncontrolled and suck them and a goodly section of the moon into oblivion.
Not that such a release sounded all that bad to her right now, and indeed she may end up causing just that kind of imbalance soon, if she wasn’t careful. But even that was not possible, not yet. Not until she got access to the supermotor controls nestled inside the mantle, sealed in here decades ago when the ship was constructed. They had never
been designed to be accessed, thus they had been buried inside the machine, next to the heart, like pacemakers sealed into the body of the IST.
Maybe with the right access they might have been able to do some of this remotely. But there were limiters in here, in this place, that she needed to remove, balances she needed to unlock, if she was going to tweak this giant’s tendons and make it dance to a different tune.
“Just a … almost there … Jesus, Rob, where are your hands?”
He realized that in his attempts to help support her upended body in the tight space, he had accidentally started groping her in a most unladylike fashion.
“Oops, helllo!” he said, giving a quick squeeze before saying, “Oh, get over yourself. Seriously, Birgit, darling, do you need me to try and reach it myself?”
“No, no, just, God, try and lift me a little, my left shoulder feels like it is going to snap.”
He longed to do this for her, but this was tinkering on a level that belied instruction. And he was, in fairness, a good deal larger than she was. But he could only imagine how uncomfortable she was, head-down in the small grotto they had carved, even though they were, disconcertingly, hanging at right angles to the moon’s surface.
She grunted at the effort as she tried to shut out the ache in her neck. She stretched into the tight space, her eyes closed, her internal map of the machinery in here guiding her fingers. She was filling in the gaps in her and Minnie’s understanding of the inner-workings of the IST as she went, and now her daughter reached out.
Minnie:
Birgit: ‘knock yourself out.’
It was a good idea. She should have thought of it herself. Birgit let her mind go and felt as her hand began moving on its own, with a dexterity she could not, in fairness, come close to matching. If they’d had a Phase Eight with them this would have been so much easier. But then, if they had a Phase Eight with them a great deal would have been easier, no doubt. But they did not. They had one remaining wrecker, burly and completely useless in this cramped space, and they had each other.
And they had Minnie, now co-opting Birgit’s fleshy limb as best as she could.
Minnie: <¿while i am ‘knocking myself out,’ would you, in fact, like me to knock you out as well?>
Birgit laughed as heartily as she could with her chest compressed into the space.
“Charming!” said Rob, chuckling as he listened in on their conversation.
Birgit: ‘no, thank you though, minnie. i’ll stay here, if i can bear it. but you could numb this pain, i suppose.’
The balm was almost instant and breathtaking in its relief.
“…ficken danken!” Birgit exclaimed, reverting to long dormant Germanic idioms as her shoulder deadened. It was a cheat, a scam, she knew that. The pain was there for a reason. But until this was done the pain was just a nuisance, and one that was better ignored than suffered through.
Minnie had not shut off all sensation though, and both Rob and Birgit felt as the aftereffects of their breaching of this place resounded outward. The core’s pressure cage was starting to draw its surroundings inward, tugging on the already undermined superstructure, and Rob glanced around himself as the IST’s outer housing began to give and the whole machine shuddered with seismic fault.
“What the hell was that?” mumbled Birgit from inside the core.
“Nothing, we’re fine,” said Rob, looking up through the hole they had both climbed through into this outer-sphere. While the wrecker had been completely unable to fit into this space, they had decided that it was worth reopening one of the sealed ports in the carapace to allow it to climb into the main cavern, and Rob reached out to it now, looking through its eyes.
The space they had been spinning in only a few days before was visibly shrinking. The shudder they had felt had clearly been a spar giving under the pressure, and now the whole structure was starting to cave in, rolling over and crushing itself as the subspace horizon pulled at its surroundings, and at the moon itself, mashing its own housing into the ground as it did so. Rob knew that Minnie could probably handle the robot as well as whatever she was up to elsewhere, but he needed a distraction, if only for a second.
He took control of the wrecker and brought one mammoth foot of the robot around the surface of the core it was standing on so it could stand astride the small hole which he and Birgit were crammed inside. As the IST as a whole slowly rolled over, turning onto its side and crushing the outer shield inward, he brought the wrecker’s big arms upward, braced its massive fists and readied it.
The force came on hard, and the surly machine’s muscles sang with the pressure as it resisted, putting all its might into it. The metal gave in fits and starts, slowly starting to fold inward around the balled fists of the wrecker as its broad feet cratered the plating around the core itself. Rob reset its parameters and left it to its Atlas-like end, leaving no room in its instructions for self-preservation as its muscles joined the last pillars supporting the roof over their heads and the world began to close in.
“Rob, what’s going on out there?” said Birgit.
“It’s nothing, just the wrecker settling in.”
“That doesn’t sound like nothing, darling,” said Birgit, in a tone he had come to know all too well, a tone that said, simply, ‘don’t bullshit me.’
“Well,” he replied, coming back into himself and answering his love with the candor he knew she was demanding, “if you must know, my sweet, the IST is rolling onto its roof and starting to suck its head right up its own ass. Does that clear things up?”
“Yeah, I would say that sums it up pretty concisely,” she said after a moment.
Minnie:
Birgit: ‘yes, he is, minnie, in his own, wonderful way. ¿i am assuming, therefore, that getting out the way we came is looking … unlikely, at this stage?’
Minnie:
Birgit: ‘yes, minnie, i know that, thank you. but now that we are here, we might as well get on with it, hadn’t we?’
Minnie:
Birgit: ‘i fail to see what use it is to me now, anyway. do it.’
Minnie did not enjoy it. But with the road behind them destroyed, there was only the uncertain path forward. She apologized to her mother and then pushed the woman’s cramped finger and thumb forward, driving them into the sharp connections she had exposed and pressing the metal into the flesh. The connection was spotty at first as electricity coursed through the veins and tissue, but soon Minnie found the pattern in the pulses coming along the nerves running up Birgit’s arm.
She started connecting the lines, using the neurons in her mother’s arm to find and code the signal within the inner brain of the IST. Once she had connection, she started to talk to it. It was a strange conversation as they learned each other’s language, but she’d had practice doing this with the ancillary IST systems on their way here. She knew the lexicon.
It would take some time, but soon she would be talking to the machine and introducing it to its new mistress, Dr. Birgit Hauptman.
Chapter 63: The Red Zone is for …
Now they began to move with purpose. The last were being birthed now. Banu, minimized and sealed into a cylinder about twenty centimeters across and half a meter long, was rushed to rendezvous. The cylinder had its own power source, and a hardwire optical fiber linked to a gelport in its tip. As it arrived at Vladivostok, the ship it was going to be loaded into was already in the final stages of its unloading from the Russian Resonance Dome, as each of the world’
s seven dome facilities completed one last cycle of their aborted production run. This, then, would be one of the last Skalms that would be ready in time to join the fight.
That said, given this particular Skalm pilot’s reputation, this was one that many had high hopes for. In the southeastern sky, a series of lights could be seen appearing. They were plentiful and bright, and they moved fast east to west, overtaking the sky even though they moved far above it. It was the second time the mobilizing starfleet had passed in the last few hours.
Banu could not see it, though. Her mind was in a last moment of silence. The capsule was sealed and shielded, its contents highly pressurized and cushioned in a jelly of oxygenated plasma being slowly stirred around the soft grey tissue. The now-isolated organ had been carefully prepared, pumped full of nutrients and attached to a cycling pump that would feed it from now until the war ended, for better or worse.
The capsule was black, coated in multiple layers of superconductive plating, radiation shielding, and then more inner plating. The only markings were a sprayed-on id tag saying simply: Captain Banu Annat Mantil, Terrestrial Allied Space Command. As the arriving StratoJet came within fifty feet of the ground, the capsule was born out of the still landing fighter jet by a hulking Phase Twelve, the only of its kind, which leapt clear and was away and running before the StratoJet even touched down.
Hektor did not have much to do anymore. He was occasionally tasked with some policing or protective duty, but for the most part the time for people like Cara, Bohdan, Jung, and himself had passed. They were relics of ground-based conflict that had no place in the new era. An era where wars were between airborne gods, fighting not over land, but over whole planets.
However unwittingly, Hektor had once shared a home with some of these children, these orphan pilots. When he and his cohorts had been acquitted in the tribunal that had seen Ayala and Neal pushed into obscurity, he had volunteered to be stationed wherever the children went, to do his part to help them adjust to their new cybernetic bodies.