by Tim Lebbon
Liliya hurried on.
She passed a couple of shipborn going about their duties, and soon she was in a tunnel that curved around the swollen belly of the ship’s hold. She knew what was contained in there—it was no secret, because the Rage all bore the same intention. Every child, man, and woman, whether they were ten years old or three hundred. Pregnant with violence and death, the hold was a place that Liliya had no wish to visit, ever again.
Maybe I can stop it all now, she thought. The idea struck her, feeling as hard as a punch, and she paused, blinking in the weak light and trying to imagine what that might entail. Destruction on a grand scale. Murder, when every instinct within her—every thought, movement, or inclination derived from her original programming, expanded and mused upon over the decades and centuries since—told her that murder was a bad thing.
I could sabotage the support network in there. I could blast open the hull, vent everything to hyperspace. One simple act, and the whole ship would be torn apart, become a smear across time and space, and then nothing. No sign that we had ever existed. Nothing left of me.
She wasn’t sure what made her forge ahead with her original plan. She tried to tell herself that it was her base synthetic programming and the tenets laid down in her original, ancient synapse circuits, but she also thought it might be because she was more human than many of the people on the Macbeth, and in that humanity she had discovered fear.
Fear of death, and the nothing that would follow.
She passed the hold. It was vast and it took some time, but behind it she knew there was a place she had to visit before attempting to flee. As soon as her escape was announced around the ship, nowhere would be safe.
The laboratory was one of several on the Macbeth, but this one was closest to the hold and the things it contained. It was a large, low-ceilinged room, the floor level but walls and ceiling textured and lined like the insides of a living thing. Another place created almost completely by the creature they had found on Midsummer.
She paused and looked around. So much of what had been achieved in here had been seeded by what she had stolen from the Evelyn-Tew, research that had been the catalyst for the monstrosities the Macbeth now bore back toward the Human Sphere. Discoveries on that alien habitat, Midsummer, had contributed, true, but the information she had carried had started it all. It had given the Founders—and later, Beatrix Maloney and the Rage—the abilities that made them what they were today.
Unbeatable, perhaps.
Monstrous, for sure.
As Liliya crossed the lab toward the cool storage hollows in the wall, a voice halted her in her tracks.
“Come to steal, Liliya?” It was Erika Simons. She must have learned of Liliya’s transgression and returned quickly to the lab. Her construct skittered from the shadows at the rear of the room, carrying the shriveled woman in her tank of gel. Her words were flat and monotone, an electrical facsimile of what her true voice had once been, driven purely by thought patterns. Grotesquely, her mouth still moved when she spoke, the mysterious clear substance distorting and bubbling.
“Not to steal,” Liliya said.
“Then what?” Two more shapes moved behind Erika. One was a shipborn, weak and strange-looking from the decades of in-breeding. Not even the technology they had found on Midsummer could expand their limited gene pool.
The other figure was one of the generals. The generals were combat androids, designed and built specifically by the Rage elders to control their monstrous troops, and programmed with every scrap of military history, tactics, and strategy the Rage could acquire. From early human history, through the technological revolution and three World Wars, and into the territorial conflicts that had marked the first centuries of space exploration and colonization, the droids knew it all.
This one liked to call himself Napoleon.
In some ways they were more advanced than Liliya. They carried nano-technology originally discovered on Midsummer and modified to link them symbiotically to their armies. They could control two thousand troops with a thought. Yet in other ways, they were so much less than her.
Built for war, their aesthetics had become an afterthought. They were humanoid but not human, with blank faces and haunting, empty expressions. Their eyes were white with black pupils. The blood in their veins was the clear gel, a lubricant rather than a life-giver. Liliya found them unsettling, and had never felt of the same ilk.
Napoleon stared at her, one hand resting on his sidearm. That was another technology they had taken from Midsummer—his weapon could punch a hole through the Macbeth, if he signaled it to do so.
“What are you doing here?” Erika asked again, but her questioning was a stalling tactic, and she didn’t wait for an answer.
The shipborn came first, darting around the aged woman and drawing a stun baton from her belt. She looked afraid but determined, keen to prove herself to the elder.
Liliya had to think and act quickly. If the baton struck her she would be paralyzed for an instant, long enough for Napoleon to grasp and crush her into submission. But this situation was completely alien to her. Violence had not been a part of her life—not even with everything the Founders and then the Rage had been through. Losing their sister ships, exploring new worlds, combating system failures and potential disasters, discovering Midsummer, and eventually being forced to leave that artificial world because it could never be a home to them.
Liliya was not built to fight.
The woman swung the baton, feinted, and then kicked out, intending to trip her and land the baton on her neck.
Liliya grasped the shipborn’s foot in both hands and twisted. The woman grunted, half-turned in the air, and hit the deck face first. The baton bounced from her hand, and Liliya caught it in mid-air. Pausing only for a second, she brought it down hard on the woman’s lower back.
The charge surged, the woman’s legs spasmed, and she vomited, staring across the floor and blinking rapidly as tears and blood flowed from her eyes. Though it wasn’t designed to kill, this had been an unlucky hit. The blinking lessened, and Liliya’s internals ran cold as she watched the woman die.
Even as she felt a rush of sorrow over what she had done, Napoleon came at her. He kept his sidearm holstered.
“Liliya, come quietly,” Erika pleaded. Even with the monotone, there was no trace of evil in her voice, only sadness—but Liliya knew what she and the others wanted to do, and she had to keep that at the forefront of her mind. No backing down, not now. No letting weakness take hold.
She slumped, feigning capitulation, and then lashed out with the stun baton. It caught Napoleon between the eyes, pulping the bridge of his nose. The impact sent clear gel splashing, and the charge pulsed into his eyes and burst them across his cheeks.
He whined a little, stepped back, and pulled his weapon.
Ten times her equal in a fight, he was built for war, yet he had made a foolish mistake in underestimating her. He would not do so again, and she would have no second chance.
She leapt across the lab and circled behind Erika. Her construct clattered its legs as the elder turned it, twisting in her gel bubble to follow Liliya’s progress. She was faster. She grabbed one of the construct’s rear legs and pressed in close, her face a hand’s width from Erika’s, with only gel and the bubble’s soft outer layer between them.
“On the floor!” she shouted at Napoleon, but the baton’s charge must have done more than melt his eyes and burst his nose. It must have fried some of his wet circuits, even damaged some of the hardware that shielded his central brain stem.
“No!” he shouted, pivoting, ignoring her command, and zeroing his aim on her shout. Then he fired.
Instinct dropped Liliya to the floor behind the elder. A blast, a wet thud, a splash, and she was showered with warm gel, metal shards, and then a heavier, redder chunk of meat. She shoved herself backward, away from what Erika had become, but not soon enough.
The dead elder slumped from her platform upon the crippled con
struct, her limp body landing across Liliya’s legs.
Her head was open, her brain exposed, flowing, merging with the gel that even now pulsed and flowed as it tried in vain to nurse and heal.
“Now it’s done,” Liliya said, shaking her head. “Now it’s done.” Something broke inside her with an audible snap. It was an electrical click as something shorted, a quantum hiccup, thoughts colliding, and she felt herself being torn in every direction.
Erika, exposed to the air for the first time in decades, twitched and clasped at the floor. Her wet mouth opened and closed, bubbles popping as her lungs attempted to process air. Her left eyelid flickered, but she was already dead, and everything Liliya witnessed of the elder was merely memory.
Napoleon froze in his shooting stance. His head turned seventy degrees to the left, then back, and that movement repeated again and again. She didn’t know whether it was a result of the baton damage, or a reaction inspired by what he had done and who he had killed. Liliya did know that each general was built with a self-destruct facility that could tear the Macbeth apart.
Slowly, quietly, she pushed herself backward, shoving Erika’s paper-light corpse from her left leg with her right foot. Napoleon continued in his strange movement. His shooting hand was dipping slowly, the weapon aiming at the floor, then at his feet. His head turned, back and forth. His left eye dripped fluid onto his pale blue uniform.
She crawled across the lab, then when she was behind a table she stood. Moving quickly, she reached into one of the cold-storage recesses and opened the skin-like door.
Inside sat row upon row of applicators. They resembled small handguns. Set on her course now, she didn’t even pause before plucking one out, pressing it to the side of her neck, and pressing the trigger.
A hiss, a click.
As of that moment, Liliya carried the nano-creation the Rage had made their own. As yet inactive, it still made her feel different.
She felt loaded.
* * *
Out in the hallways and shadowy routes leading beneath the Macbeth’s amazing engine room, Liliya sharpened her senses and hid away every time she heard what might be footsteps. But no one approached. She heard the whisper of an alert passing through the ship, and knew that the generals and shipborn security force would be aware of what she had done.
They would blame her, she knew. Erika was one of the ninety-eight elders still left from the original Founders. The loss would be mourned, and avenged.
She felt sad. Damaged. She had killed a woman, and her core programming was corrupted by that act. Glitches caused periods of blankness as she moved toward the ship’s hangar. Dark spots appeared in her vision, and then explosions of light. She didn’t know what was happening. Control slipped, and a thought she had never entertained before came from nowhere and surprised her. I could simply shut down.
Shocked, angry, she drove the idea from her mind, but she had to be away. She didn’t have long left. They would catch her and punish her, and then take their battle back to where she had come from, so long ago. A battle that would be partly fed by what she had stolen.
She pressed a hand to the red spot on her neck.
I’ve stolen it back, she thought. I am a thief. I’m a thief of hope, and now I have to keep hold of it.
* * *
Eighteen minutes later, Liliya slipped from the Macbeth in an assault ship and dropped into a parallel hyperspace plane. Seconds later she was ten million miles away, and ready to accelerate even faster.
Beatrix Maloney would not let her escape so easily.
She would send an army to bring her back.
13
GERARD MARSHALL
Charon Station, Sol System
July 2692 AD
As usual when he woke up, Gerard Marshall felt sick.
When he was awake he could handle the constant movement to which space travel seemed to subject his stomach, even though everyone told him it wasn’t even possible to detect it. The artificial gravity felt like the real thing, they asserted—there were vibration dampers, and the whole of Charon Station was equipped with static sinks and displacement buffers.
He knew all that, yet didn’t believe a word of it. Awake, keeping his vomit reflex under control was a case of mind over matter, and something he’d become very good at. Asleep, however, the dreams took over, the nightmares about floating naked in space. Freezing. Suffocating as infinity sucked the life from him.
He sat up on his cot and took several deep breaths, blinking away the ice across his eyes and the sight of nothing staring back at him. It helped to look down at his toes. Glancing around his cabin helped even more, because he had pictures of his kids across one wall, even a couple of his ex-wife. She’d been beautiful.
Probably still is, he supposed, but he didn’t like to think of her screwing a fucking tug pilot.
He could have had both of them killed.
Marshall smiled at the thought. It was ridiculous, and yet the anger the idea courted helped to settle his stomach. Wherever she was now, he quite hoped she was happy. She’d been a lovely woman when they had met, and deep down he knew that her loveliness persisted, despite her having been married to him. And she was a much better parent than he had ever been to their two beautiful children.
The tug pilot, though…
He hoped the bastard was hit by a meteorite.
“Somebody take me home,” he muttered, and as if in response his holo frame glowed blue and drifted from the wall, forming in mid-air. The words JAMES BARCLAY pulsed in the frame, and Marshall caught his breath. One of the Thirteen, Barclay was one of the few people he’d ever met who truly spooked him.
“What the hell does he want?” he muttered.
The frame’s color deepened and a continuous chime began. The call was urgent. Barclay really wanted to speak to him.
Marshall smoothed his hair, went to answer, then at the last second realized that he was still naked.
He tried to laugh as he quickly dressed, but the prospect of talking to Barclay troubled him too much. The man was only thirty years old, the youngest of the Thirteen by far, and he had already died three times. Once when he was born and his umbilical strangled him. Again when he was seventeen and his father, a Weyland-Yutani executive, went mad on Mars and shot six members of his own family. Finally when he was twenty-six, and the ship on which he was traveling struck a piece of space debris that turned out to be the remnants of a 20th-century deep space probe.
Each time, rapid medical intervention and the best treatment money could buy had brought him back. Most people called him lucky. Gerard Marshall thought he was cursed and unnatural, and he had given up researching just how Barclay had been brought back to life that third time. Everyone else on the ship had died, and he had been adrift in a space suit for seventeen days.
Dressed, hair smoothed again, Marshall answered the call.
“Gerard, about time,” Barclay said, even as his image fizzled into existence.
“I was asleep,” Marshall said.
“The Thirteen don’t sleep. They just close their eyes and rest.”
And they don’t die, Marshall thought. Spooky bastard. He smiled and nodded, and started to utter some welcoming pleasantries, but Barclay spoke first.
“We’ve lost contact with Milt McIlveen,” he said. “The scientist you sent to oversee Isa Palant’s work.”
“You were in touch with him?” Marshall replied, surprise loosening his tongue. The Thirteen were all equal, but most of them looked to Barclay as de facto leader. His personality invited that, as did his weird history.
“Of course,” came the response. “Your business is essential to all of the Thirteen, Gerard. It’s all of our business. Isn’t that always the case?”
Marshall frowned and shook his head.
“What do you mean, lost touch?”
“McIlveen was giving me daily updates concerning his research. Four days have now passed without contact. I’ve checked with other sources, and in that t
ime there’s been no contact with Love Grove Base. With what’s been happening elsewhere, I think we should be concerned.”
“I think so, too,” Marshall agreed. Southgate Station 12 hadn’t been the only target of sabotage. There had been at least seventeen other attacks throughout the Human Sphere, all of them targeting Colonial Marine or Company assets. A Spaceborne frigate had been badly damaged on its patrol through the Addison Prime system, the attacker a member of the ship’s crew. It was adrift, its few survivors still awaiting rescue. Elsewhere, three orbiting staging posts had been destroyed, nineteen light years apart and yet in an almost perfectly synchronized attack, with the loss of more than eight hundred Marines and support crew.
Moon bases, asteroid stations, and even a training colony on Whitman’s World, the attacks had been unexpected in every case. However, they hadn’t always been successful—the assailant on New London had been intercepted before she could deliver her explosive payload, the resulting explosion killing only her and flattening a forest of trees. Nevertheless, the incidents had seeded a sense of suspicion and fear across the Sphere.
“Doesn’t Section Seven have anything to go on?” Marshall asked. Section Seven were a special force of ex-Marines reporting exclusively to Weyland-Yutani’s Thirteen, brought together almost a century before to track and combat any terrorist organizations or activity against the Company. Renowned for their dedication and brutality, their reputation alone often was enough to quell a potential uprising or covert campaign.
“They’ve been following this since the attack on Southgate Station 12,” Barclay said. He shrugged, and it was strange to see such uncertainty in his expression. “They can’t find any link, and I’m certain this is no known organization.”
“Something new, then,” Marshall said.
“And just at the time when Yautja activity is increasing at an alarming rate.”
“Yes, I’ve been following the attacks.”
“Of course you have,” Barclay said. “Did you see the final message from the VoidLarks?”