Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  ‘We have done it,’ Nada told her crew. ‘The homeworld is ours.’

  With one voice, they erupted into unhinged screams of mind-burning joy.

  16.5: WILL

  Will watched the video feed of the battle from his phoney-starship prison, gripping the edge of his couch. The world he’d woken up in was unexpectedly fighting for its life. He thought of Moneko and it hurt.

  There was a terrible symmetry to this battle. This was what he’d done to Earth all those years ago at the end of the Interstellar War – shown up with a single piece of overpowering technology – only this time, he was a citizen of the beaten world beneath the alien boot. Was this how it had felt, watching the madness in the sky and feeling hope shrink with every blinding blast? Knowledge of that reversal of fate would be dawning in ten billion minds across the world – hers included.

  Abruptly, all the video windows closed. The frozen avatars of his ersatz crew started shouting gibberish, even while their postures and expressions remained fixed. Will felt the environment weaken as if the reality around him had turned to rubber. Whatever SAP had been backing the simulation had apparently died.

  Will knew that this was the best chance to escape the planet he was ever going to get. After this, the Photurians would exploit the very hacks Balance had peppered himself with to retake their homeworld. The god’s insistence on keeping control had made him dependent on that alien code and therefore on Snakepit’s ancient genetic rules. Now that Balance’s military superiority had unexpectedly evaporated, all those hacks would work against him, just as Smiley had warned.

  Will glanced desperately about the space, searching for something that would get him out before the Photes locked everything down. If Balance could enter the sim, there had to be an exit.

  He spotted the bicorn hat. Will had abandoned it in a moment of jeering indifference. It had no role in the original simulation, yet it hadn’t disappeared when he left. That meant there was a chance it retained a link to whatever process had spawned it.

  Will grabbed the hat and felt around in his head urgently for a link to the mass of SAPs he’d ingested before he was captured. With luck, they’d still be there. Balance would surely have used them as the framework for his prison. He’d talked about infecting Will’s surface memory and the obvious way to do it was to abuse the programs that already had access.

  Through the soft, jellied texture reality had taken on, he felt those subsystems whispering in his mind, offering glimpses of senses and knowledge beyond his own. With tremendous care, Will reached down into the hat and pushed – more mentally than physically. He tore the fabric gently so that the inside broke while the outside remained intact, leaving him with a virtual bridge to whatever environment had spawned the hat. With luck, it’d be the machine room. If Balance had used some other mechanism, he was probably screwed.

  Will pushed his arm all the way inside the hat and groped around until he felt a metal bar. He groaned with relief. Then he pulled his arm back and carefully stretched the hat wider at the crown until it grew large enough for him to squeeze into. Then, with exquisite care, he pushed his feet inside the hat and wriggled through to the other side.

  He found himself crawling out of a distorted icon hovering about two feet above a grilled platform in the machine room. All around him was chaos. Balance agents dashed this way and that, apparently at war with each other. The pacifying power of the anchor-code clearly wasn’t decisive. Instead, Balance had become conflicted. He’d fractured into differing perspectives – the embodiments of clone factions more or less dependent on the belief-reinforcing software they’d borrowed. Will could now see just what an advantage the Willworld’s diversity represented. Had all the clones thought alike, the entire planet would already have fallen.

  Will dragged himself onto the floor and lay there panting while his mind and body adjusted. The talents he’d acquired from Moneko’s chocolates came back online one by one. He ripped free the control-edits Balance had used to secure him to the prison and looked about.

  He’d been dumped on a platform way down in the roots of the world-mechanism. Near him were a host of identical entrapment icons, each positioned above a simulation cog. They were other Glitches – thousands of them. Balance didn’t actually kill his prisoners, apparently, or at least, not always.

  Will raced up a level to the master-branch for the entire dungeon and smashed the control SAP, blowing all the locks beneath. Hopefully, an army of angry Glitches emerging from their containment sims would buy him some time. He wished he had the means to explain to all of them, but he probably had only minutes to act. They’d have to work it out for themselves.

  He leapt up the stairways, back towards Orbital Defence. Fortunately, the Balance agents were so intent on fighting each other that they had no time for him, despite the loss of his denialware. He watched them struggle hand to hand, dissolving into clouds of SAP schematics when their attacks broke the limits of the metaphor. It was only when an agent sprinted through him from behind that he realised physical contact was no longer to be feared. He redoubled his speed, leaping through manifestations of his meta-self with abandon.

  A cluster of fighting giants struggled over the root-control of Orbital Defence, so Will fled straight past them. Somewhere underneath would be the spot where the attack on the Dantes was being managed. He clattered down the stairs, past gangs of agents intent on their work, and finally found a relevant subnode that had been left to fend for itself in the escalating conflict.

  Enemy Mesohull Investigation Cohort Nineteen, it read. Will grabbed the SAP with both hands, ripped open a portal and threw himself through it, praying that a link to his friends’ ship lay on the other side. The substrate of the Willworld dutifully turned his mind into a message – a compressed pattern of deltas from the Monet baseline – and routed him over the intervening light-minutes to the corresponding agent-cluster stationed at the damaged bay doors of the Dantes.

  The world blinked, twisted and dumped him into a firefight. He was no longer a thread lost in the understructure of the Willworld – now he had a physical body again, albeit a borrowed one. He found himself inhabiting an armoured Balance agent tethered to the back of an enormous waldobot, flanked by a fleet of slaved microdrones. He was racing through a blasted hole in a sheet of exohull warp-alloy into a mesohull vacuole where another of his kind had already engaged the enemy. In this case, that meant the automated defences protecting Mark’s ship – an army of enormous multi-limbed robots armed with laser weapons. The space in the cavern was already littered with ionised gas and fried machine parts from both sides.

  A battle-status update landed in his mind. The body whose thread he’d ripped had belonged to a Balance loyalist rather than a Photurian convert. Those agents that had started the hull incursion had been running in secure mode when the planet succumbed and hadn’t turned yet. They were still involved in hundreds of small skirmishes like this one happening across the surface of the ship. While they’d already succeeded in disabling many of the Dantes’ critical systems, the Photes had just launched drones of their own in the ship’s direction. General confusion reigned as to how to respond.

  Will reached out with his mind and redirected the efforts of his machines to attack his fellow invader from behind. At the same moment, he tried tight-beaming signals at the Dantes’ defensive mechs, hoping dearly that at least one of them would see that gesture and had a comms-port open.

  ‘Cease conflict at this site,’ he messaged. ‘The real Will Monet is aboard. Tell Rachel I love her.’

  Maybe she wasn’t really his wife, but at that point, Will had nothing left to run on but hope.

  16.6: IRA

  Ira battled the invasion in the mesohull wearing a body five metres tall and studded with guns. He was fighting his way up a mech-delivery tunnel filled with swarming robotic monsters that kept flying at his face. It was a new experience for him – something like true roboteering that Palla had enabled for him with another mapping harn
ess. He wasn’t great at it. This was his fifth robot body already.

  One part of his problem was the battle status that kept unfolding in the corner of his vision. As the strategy SAP filled him in on his enemies blasting each other to pieces, his mind kept blanking in appalled disbelief. Instead of rousing Snakepit to their aid, they’d handed it to the Photes. They were witnessing the end of everything.

  The cloud of Will’s drones around their ship had fallen into a kind of daze – some racing up to the hull to dock, the majority fighting among themselves. That confusion offered the crew of the Dantes their only hope of escape.

  Ira slammed his scythe-arms through another incoming drone while firing wildly at a second with blink-directed cannons. He failed to notice a shot to his head and was thrown back into yet another body. He turned and blasted his assailant into pieces.

  ‘Fuck you, too,’ he snarled and pushed forward to regain the ground he’d just lost. Will’s weapons were appallingly effective. Breaking them into pieces only made them angrier.

  Suddenly the whole sim lurched sickeningly. He found himself dumped back into helm-space with a bump.

  ‘What happened?’ he said.

  The virt spasmed again. When it returned, Mark was missing.

  ‘Fuck!’ said Palla.

  ‘Internal data arteries are being targeted,’ said Judj. ‘Our mechs are being pushed back.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ said Ira.

  ‘I’m now seeing mesohull incursions at fifty-eight sites,’ Judj went on. ‘Swapping mechs to autonomous mode on secondary pathways.’

  ‘What happened to Mark?’ said Rachel.

  ‘When we lost the feed to our mechs, we also lost the data trunk to the quarantine core,’ said Palla. ‘They’re taking out internal power and comms.’

  ‘Palla, we have to get out of here,’ said Ira.

  ‘Not an option!’ she snapped. ‘Engines are still down. Weapons are down. And besides, I am not going anywhere until we know Mark is safe.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Judj, his eyebrows shooting upwards. ‘Look at this!’

  He posted a window. In it, one of Will’s unstoppable soldiers was urgently hailing them on tight-beam. His virtual face filled a vid-frame.

  ‘Ceasefire at that site!’ said Rachel, breaking into a grin. ‘That’s Will.’

  ‘How do you know it’s actually him?’ said Judj. ‘This could be another ruse.’

  ‘It’s him all right,’ said Rachel. ‘I’d know that look of guilty panic anywhere.’

  ‘Palla, give me a channel,’ said Ira. ‘Will, is that you?’ he said into the camera she sent him.

  A squad of Will’s machines came and hovered in front of the titan mechs, their weapons visibly disarmed. In the side-window, Will sagged in relief.

  ‘Yes,’ said Will. ‘Listen closely. The entity you’ve been fighting is a meta-variant of mine known as Balance. He’s insane.’

  ‘Meta-variant?’ said Ira.

  ‘No time to explain. The Willworld is falling and my clones are fighting among themselves. Balance’s hegemony is broken, which is how I escaped. We need to get out of this ship. It’s compromised.’

  ‘We’d noticed,’ said Palla.

  ‘If you can move your crew to a transit pod,’ said Will, ‘I’ll cover you while you navigate to a shuttle. If we can make it that far, I’m confident I’ll be able to subvert one of the remaining nestships and we can use that to escape. But we need to move fast – the Photes will arrive with their own drones in less than a minute and then everything is going to get nasty.’

  ‘We have a problem,’ said Palla. ‘Mark isn’t in the main core. He’s in the quarantine module about two kilometres out and the connecting transit rail just went down. Balance has twenty invasion sites in that direction that are all closer to him than you are.’

  ‘Mark?’ said Will, clearly dismayed. ‘Damn.’

  They all knew what that meant. There wouldn’t be time to rescue Mark and get the rest of them out in time.

  ‘Then there’s Ann,’ said Palla. ‘She’s not in the cabin, either.’

  ‘The good news is we have something better than a shuttle,’ said Ira urgently. ‘We have an alien ship in the mining bay that’s about as defensible as you can imagine. Ann’s down there already.’

  ‘Does it fly?’

  ‘We think so. It’s all powered up. There’s no reason to think it won’t. And we have a route prepped to that ship.’

  ‘Then that’s what we’ll have to use,’ said Will. ‘I hope it’s well armoured.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Judj.

  ‘Send me all the data you have,’ said Will. ‘I’ll get Mark and meet you en route.’

  The channel closed.

  ‘Dammit,’ said Clath. Ira noticed belatedly that she had tears in her eyes. ‘I love this ship. I spent years working on it. Now these bastards are ruining it.’

  Judj held her.

  ‘You sure about this?’ Palla asked Ira. ‘Once we’re inside the ark, there’s no going back.’

  ‘I’ve never been more certain in my life,’ said Ira.

  And besides, the alternative was to leave Ann behind. He’d rather die.

  Palla breathed deep and started typing frantically at her control sphere. It turned bright red. She’d invoked the Academic overrides – the ones that permitted the ship’s self-destruction.

  ‘I hoped I’d never have to use these,’ she said bleakly. ‘I’m preparing to flush the main database and detonate the core. There’s no point handing the enemy all our cool shit after we leave.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Judj. ‘I guess this is it.’

  ‘You’re coming with us,’ Clath snapped at him. ‘We need you down there to manage the software.’

  ‘Of course, honey,’ he said. ‘Nobody gets left behind. Dumping us out of virt in ten. Everyone say goodbye to the yacht.’

  Ira had a moment to miss his spot on the deck and the quiet cups of iced coffee before helm-space flickered out for the last time.

  17: COMPRESSION

  17.1: MARK

  Mark was running twenty mechs at once through Judj’s jury-rigged emergency coupling when his feed died. Suddenly he found himself alone in the darkness of his casket. The door cycled and promptly dumped him out into the quarantine core, a cabinet-sized space little bigger than the coffin he’d just left. He shivered and saw that his ship-suit was missing. His skin had been covered in stim-pads and surgical gel to help manage the infection still raging in his body.

  He glanced about at the claustrophobic fish tank that held him. An airlock hatch took up the entire ceiling. The plastic walls had given up on agitation patterns and now showed a variety of scarlet alert symbols scrolling ever upward. Fortunately, the quarantine core didn’t support audio warnings. However, that meant he could hear the curious distant clangs and groans of trouble far away through the kilometres of mesohull meshwork that surrounded him.

  ‘Status report,’ he said.

  The core didn’t answer. Mark checked it with his interface and found the entire capsule running on passive backup. The only digital site he could reach was the one in his own skull where the Transcended puzzle sat brooding. Mark regarded that unwelcome gift miserably and wondered if it was too late for regret. He’d clearly overplayed his hand in his stand-off with the aliens. All the dire warnings he’d received now looked hideously prescient.

  But it was worse than that. The Photes had used the weapon they’d encountered at the lure star to secure their victory, which they would never have found if not for him. By coming here and ignoring everything else, Mark had handed the Photes the victory he’d been so desperate to claim. Now that foolishness was going to kill him, along with everyone he cared about.

  Self-disgust squeezed at him, yet he refused to give up. While any course of action remained, however quixotic, he’d take it. He swallowed the despair that churned inside him and tried to focus on the puzzle. It wasn’t easy. Watching the Photes stea
l his victory had left him in a poor condition for complex logic. With a sob, he started assembling the tools necessary to rig up an interface with the SAP burning in his mind’s eye.

  He was barely halfway through the process when a wild clanging shook the core. The Casimir-buffers outside the walls crackled and snapped, indicating significant radiation bursts not far away. He gave thanks that they were still running. Without power, he’d be a charred corpse already. The core shook again. Mark hung in the ruby dark and wondered what the hell was going on. Then came a terrible scraping sound from the airlock overhead.

  Mark backed away from it in the only direction he could, towards the floor. He made himself as small as possible in the bottom of the space and prepared to attack whatever monstrosity the Will-thing had sent to claim him.

  ‘Fuck you, Dad,’ he said to the horror scraping at the lock.

  How ironic that he’d end up being dismembered by the very parent whose ghost he’d come to exorcise. Actually, was that ironic or just plain awful?

  The airlock cycled. Mark braced himself as the hatch opened and stared in terror. The contraption that pressed itself through the gap was not one of Will’s robots but the tentacle-ringed maw of a Photurian harvesting machine. A dozen flickering, needle-tipped tendrils quivered down into the space, their points dripping with a bright orange bacterial payload.

  ‘No!’ Mark roared, and reached too late for the emergency Phote-poison handle halfway up the wall.

  As his arm flew up, the barbs stung him, filling his skin with agonising fire. He yanked the limb back even as the Photurian toxin raced through his blood. The tentacles whipped down, stinging him over and over again.

  Mark screamed. They’d infected him. There was only one way that could go. His body convulsed as the enemy enzymes sought out the best way to co-opt his nervous system and bring him into the fold of uniform unquestioning love.

  The strength left his body as the paralysing agents started to do their work. He looked down at the wounds peppering his body and wept. He’d become that which he’d sworn to destroy. And all that he had sought to protect, he’d ruined. His crusade was at an end and he hadn’t even finished the damned puzzle.