Crashland

by Sean Williams

  The Cashile retreated and her suit came alive. She could move again.

  “We’re not the threat here, Clair. We’re the messengers. If you don’t believe me, watch what happens next. I told you we didn’t have long, remember?”

  Clair sat up suddenly, banging her helmet on a crumpled bulkhead that might once have been the ceiling. She was in a twisted space barely larger than a booth. The air was full of smoke. She could hear gunfire in the distance, coming closer.

  The Cashile stood with four others by her feet, all dressed in sleek child-sized flak suits. They offered their hands and she let them pull her out of the tangle, into an area where she could stand. Her suit’s plates ground against each other with a horrible sound. Her interfaces were still down.

  Factions, she thought. Dupes fighting dupes. Some trying to kill her, some not. Some loyal to Wallace, some pursuing their own agenda. Or were they all loyal to their creator, ultimately?

  “We’re supposed to tell you that this is your last chance,” said one of the Cashiles. “But let’s be realistic. Come to us at any time, and we won’t turn you away. A new age is coming no matter what. We’re not the threat you think we are. In fact, we’re your allies, if you’ll let us be. Take a long, hard look at Nobody, and you’ll see that compared to him we’re actually on the same side.”

  “How are we on the same side?”

  “We both think the Consensus Court is wrong, for starters.”

  He was talking about Zep and Libby. He had to be. Could she learn to live with dupes if it meant her friends could come back? She didn’t even need to think about the answer.

  “I’ll never be on the same side as Ant Wallace—”

  “Forget Wallace,” said another Cashile. “This isn’t about him.”

  “Of course it’s about him. He’s making this happen!”

  “Don’t give the man more credit than he deserves, Clair. He’s a pawn—just like you were until you broke out of the box he tried to put you in.”

  “So who does Wallace work for?” asked Clair. “You’re just trying to confuse me.”

  “If you’re confused, Clair, it’s only because you don’t realize what a unique position you’re in now,” said a third Cashile with a wide-eyed look that might have been admiration. “If you could only know what you know . . .”

  The gunfire intensified, and all the Cashiles looked around with an eerily similar motion.

  “This ends badly for us,” said the first one, “as it seems to every time we meet. But it’s only a temporary setback. We’ll see you again.”

  “I strongly advise you to go that way,” said one of the others, pointing along a narrow seam that might once have been a corridor. “We’ll hold him off as long as we can.”

  Dozens of childlike figures crowded the seam in the opposite direction. Torchlight rippled along the walls, such as they were. Wild shadows danced.

  “Go!”

  Small hands pushed her away. She let the momentum carry her onward, picking up speed, not wanting to look back as the gunfire sounded again, horribly close, and she could hear the Cashiles falling silently, without the slightest cry.

  [38]

  * * *

  CLAIR RAN AS best she could, fighting the grinding friction in her knee and hip joints, climbing over wreckage whenever it got in her way. There was very little room and very little light, too. Once she got snared in a web of cables and had to cut herself free. She sent silent thanks to Sargent for insisting she take the knife.

  Her interfaces were still scrambled. There was no sign of anyone in the tangled mess. It was just her and whoever or whatever was on her tail.

  Because there was definitely something on her tail. She sensed it in the same way she had sensed the dupes following her in California. Her spine was screaming at her, louder and louder with each step: Behind you! She didn’t turn around even once for fear of what she might see. All she could hear was her own heavy breathing in the confines of the helmet, and a deep creaking that came from the seastead. It sounded like a wounded beast, groaning in its death throes. The gunfire had stopped a while back.

  She spilled out of a particularly narrow crack and found herself facing a heavily scored wall that didn’t match the others around her. It was black, and there was a cylindrical curve to it, suggesting that she had happened across the dart-missile that had stabbed deep into the body of the seastead. She could see where the bulkheads had been torn away from it, warped and twisted by the impact.

  She couldn’t go any farther forward, so she began looking for a way along it. There was space to her left, but that way led outside. She wanted to go deeper, away from the ocean and away from the dupes . . . unless they had taken over the seastead completely while she was out, and there was nowhere left to run. With her suit out of action and her augs scrambled, there was no way she could call anyone to find out.

  Metal squeaked and clattered behind her. Clair spun around, pistol in hand, and saw Dylan Linwood easing through the crack she had just crawled out of. He was bruised and red-eyed, grinning widely. She fired instinctively, closing her eyes for an instant as she pulled the trigger.

  The bullet threw him back. Then he came toward her again, pushed by the dupe behind him, another Dylan Linwood. The body flopped at her feet.

  She fired again, and kept firing until the crack was full of bodies and her right elbow was singing with pain. The gun never seemed to run out of bullets. She suspected it was a miniature version of a fabber, designed solely to make the same bullet over and over. But wouldn’t it run out of power eventually? And what would happen then? The dupe called Nobody would force his way through the corpses and catch her.

  She had to keep moving.

  Trying not to hyperventilate, feeling like she was caught in a nightmare, she backed up along the side of the metal needle, testing her footing carefully behind her before putting her weight down. She held the gun outstretched in both hands, ready to fire at anyone who came after her.

  The pile of bodies shifted as dupes on the other side of the bulkhead fought their way through. Red eyes gaped accusingly at her.

  “What do you want?” she shouted. Echoes flew back at her. The air smelled of blood and the ocean. She was glad Jesse wasn’t there to witness this horror. “Leave me alone!”

  The crack widened out slightly at her back, and she turned around, ready to run.

  Dylan Linwood was standing there with his arms outstretched.

  She screamed and shoved away from him, tripping over a sharp lip of curved metal and landing heavily on her side. The pistol slipped from her hand, but she snatched it back up before he was on her and lifted herself onto her good elbow, and fired once, twice. He fell forward, dead, pushing her back down. Grunting in revulsion, she shouldered him aside in time to shoot the next one. And the next.

  They kept coming and she kept firing, even when the bodies rose up over her like a tidal wave, crushing her back down into the deck. There was no light or air. She closed her eyes and sobbed in revulsion and fear. It was almost impossible to breathe. Was this how it was going to end, with her buried alive under a mountain of dead dupes?

  Then a hand clutched at her shoulder, slick with blood. A bubbling voice whispered, “Want to talk to you . . .”

  It was one of the dupes. Injured, but not dead.

  She struggled to pull away but found it impossible to move.

  A voice on the other side echoed, “Want to be with you . . .”

  A third said, “Want to be you . . .”

  And that was when she knew.

  This was the nightmare.

  [39]

  * * *

  A MACHINE GUN rang out in the tangled metallic space. She heard bullets striking flesh and closed her eyes even though doing so would make no difference at all to what happened to her. If the bullets hit her, they hit her. There was no way she could dodge anything, trapped as she was under the weight of the dupes. At least the gunfire drowned out their ghastly whispers.
<
br />   But who was firing?

  Only then did she realize that none of the Linwoods had fired at her. She wasn’t even sure they were armed. That made it worse—the thought that she had mowed them down in cold blood, even as Nobody tried to . . . what? Become her to death?

  The bodies shifted, and she squeezed her eyes even tighter. The mass of flesh lifted up off her and then fell away. Bright light swept over her, followed by a rush of cool air. She sucked in a lungful and sat up.

  A chevron-shaped drone hovered over her on roaring fans, stubby gun barrels thrusting at her under the single white eye of a spotlight. It bobbed in greeting.

  “Q?”

  But the voice that issued from a grill next to the spotlight didn’t belong to her missing friend.

  “It’s me.” Jesse. “Oh god, I’m sorry it took so long to find you. We knew you had to be alive somewhere. Looks like we found you just in time. Are you all right? Did he—did they hurt you?”

  She looked down at herself. Her armor was covered in gore, but she was barely injured. Her throat felt raw and her hands were shaking. She pulled herself out of the crater of bodies, and the drone bobbed away to make space for her. Her gorge rose, and she bent over with her hands on her knees, fighting the urge to be violently ill.

  “We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” said Jesse through the drone, his relief unstoppable although she would have killed for silence. “There was a massive electromagnetic pulse when that dart thing hit the hull. It must have shorted out your armor, so we couldn’t track you or even tell for sure if you were alive.”

  She took long, slow breaths, telling herself to be glad that Jesse had found her. Jesse had saved her. What’s more, he had done it in the cleverest possible way. He had thrown the rope in the form of a drone, rather than come after her himself.

  “How did you find me?”

  “You were screaming,” he said. “I followed the sound.”

  Screaming? She hadn’t realized. But that explained the soreness in her throat.

  A sob bubbled up, but she swallowed that down too.

  “We have to get you out of here,” said Jesse. “We’re going to evacuate.”

  She nodded. The deck was swaying under her in a highly disconcerting fashion.

  “What happened to PK Drader?”

  “He was looking for you in the wrong place. I’ve told him you’re safe. He feels awful about putting you in danger.”

  “Is he coming here?”

  “No. I can guide you to safety, although it means going back to the hull for a short stretch. . . .”

  That didn’t worry her.

  “How much weight can this thing lift?” She pointed at the drone.

  “More than you think. The standard payload is seventy kilos, and it can redline another ten on top of that. Why?”

  “Ditch the payload. We’re not going back empty-handed.”

  Only then did she allow herself to look at the bodies surrounding her. Some were still moving, slithering along the floor in an attempt to reach her. Their injuries looked serious, but she was sure Devin’s magic d-mat booth could fix them up. Not that Clair wanted to heal them completely—just make one of them well enough to talk . . .

  “All right,” said Jesse. He sounded faintly ill, and no wonder: how many times had he seen his father killed now? “But I’ll need your help getting him onto the drone’s back. . . . Are you up to it?”

  She would have to be. Nodding, she put all her qualms in a box and locked them deep inside, and set about sorting through the bodies to find a suitable candidate.

  “Can anyone else hear us?” Clair asked Jesse as he guided her through the wreckage, a dupe strapped tightly to the drone’s back. Her lenses were still scrambled, perhaps by the pulse he had mentioned.

  “In theory, not if I don’t want them to,” he said. “But it is a RADICAL drone.”

  Clair didn’t mind so much if anyone from RADICAL listened in. She just needed him to talk so she wouldn’t have to . . . and for the PKs to stay out of it, for now.

  “Tell me what’s been going on. Is everyone safe? Did the plan work? Why are we evacuating?”

  Jesse’s account was long on technical details and refreshingly clinical because of it, which she was grateful for. The black spheres had popped as expected, one by one, and an army of Nobodies in Dylan Linwood bodies had entered the seastead by the hundreds, identical in mind and body, united by a single purpose. While the defense of the mighty vessel had concentrated on certain key areas—keeping the fabbers and d-mat booths switched off, rooting out any more explosive caches, protecting the powersat beam receivers—the dupes had seemed intent on just one thing: finding Clair.

  “How can they be the same person?” asked Jesse. “I get how they can copy bodies over and over, but minds as well?”

  “I guess it’s all in the brain,” said Clair. “If you copy that, you copy the person as well.”

  “Some people don’t deserve one life, let alone as many as this guy has had. . . .”

  Jesse fumed, and she let him. His anger at the ongoing abuse of his father’s face was completely justified. They had seen no other dupes thus far on their journey through the wreckage. Perhaps, Clair thought, Jesse had killed every one of them in the area, getting to her.

  When he calmed down he told her that, now that she was safe, relatively speaking, RADICAL was abandoning the ship. The Nobodies could have it, or go down with it into the freezing water for all anyone cared.

  “What about casualties on our side?” she said. “Any signs of people coming back from the dead?”

  “None—and the PKs have lost a lot of people,” Jesse said. “Here’s something weird: the only explosives that didn’t go off were the ones around you. Why do you think that is?”

  “No idea.”

  “PK Drader didn’t know either. He said it might be because they didn’t want to blow up the transmitter you were looking for, but he didn’t find it.”

  “It must be somewhere. How else did the Cashiles get in?”

  “Maybe he’ll tell us,” Jesse said, rocking the dupe from side to side.

  They traveled without speaking for a minute, the only sound the straining of the drone’s fans. The dupe’s eyes were open. Clair had gagged him so he couldn’t speak and tied his wrists and ankles carefully with wire stripped from the drone’s normal payload. She considered blindfolding him as well so she wouldn’t have to endure that hot, red-eyed stare.

  Let him see, she thought. I’m not beaten. He’ll never beat me . . . and he’ll never be me, ever again.

  The thought of his mind inside her body, as it had been in the dupe that had exploded, made her skin crawl as though it didn’t belong to her.

  Don’t think that way, she told herself. I’m Clair Hill. I may not know what I’m doing, but I do know that.

  [40]

  * * *

  THE AIR GREW colder and wetter the closer they got to the tear in the hull. Clair walked more carefully, feeling her tread slip underfoot several times. When she reached the outside and contemplated a long climb across warped, slick metal, she was relieved to see the lights of an external crew coming toward them.

  “They’ll help you up,” said Jesse.

  The two-person crew consisted of a pair of soldiers in giant mechanical combat suits.

  “Step on,” the first one said via external speakers. His face was visible through the hard shell visor, partially obscured by a ropy yellow mustache. “We’ll get you inside before you know it.”

  “Thanks.” She climbed onto his back, toes and fingers slipping into holds designed for passengers.

  The other soldier took the dupe and tucked it over one shoulder while Jesse’s drone backed off.

  “Dupes coming this way,” Jesse said.

  “Okay, we’re moving on up,” said Clair’s ride, raising one enormous gripper to begin climbing up the hull. Clair hung on for dear life, glad she didn’t have to think of anything more complicated than that. H
er face was wet with spray coming in her open faceplate—or was it tears? She couldn’t tell. She still felt oddly disconnected from her own body, overwhelmed by events, and not unreasonably so. She was a sixteen-year-old girl, not a soldier. This wasn’t the way her life was supposed to go.

  Over her shoulder the sea grasped and hungered, just dying to suck down the crippled seastead into its pitch-black depths. Flickering beams crisscrossed the night sky, delivering power to the machines the dupes had built, enabling still more dupes to be created. Twinkling clouds of metallic flecks trailed in the wake of drones, attempting to scatter the beams. They flashed all the colors of the rainbow, creating fleeting auroras that would have been beautiful under other circumstances. The electrical storm Clair had seen earlier had reached the battle zone, adding sheets of rain and erratic lightning flashes to the catastrophic mix. Thunder rumbled.

  They reached a hangar door without being attacked by anyone, and stepped back into relative calm and quiet. These corridors were undamaged, their right angles seeming impossibly clean and neat. When the soldier carrying her said that she could get down if she wanted to, Clair said no. She was happy to ride, and would only slow them down if she didn’t. The idea of being held was very appealing, although it made her think of her mother and the possible failure of Clair’s plan to save her.

  With heavy, wide-spaced footfalls, the soldiers ran deeper into the seastead, followed closely by the drone. Jesse wasn’t letting her out of his sight, but she resisted all attempts at conversation. She was physically and emotionally exhausted, and might actually have fallen asleep but for the occasional trumpeting of a siren dragging her back to full alertness.

  Nevertheless, she was taken by surprise when the soldier carrying her slowed to a lope, then a walk, and then stopped at the entrance to the crow’s nest.

  The door slid open and Jesse himself emerged, closely followed by PK Sargent. She let them help her down, flexing her fingers and ankles as she came. And when they didn’t say anything, just began taking off her armor, she let them do that, too. She was glad to shed the weight of it, light though it had seemed when she had put it on. As each piece came off, she saw just how much blood she had been soaked in, and she felt faint. Mechanical grippers caught her before her sway could become a fall, and then held her under the armpits as her leg plates and boots came away. When she put her feet back down, she left bloody footprints.