by Alex Lamb
‘Zoe,’ he bawled into the air as the machine wriggled in to embrace his strengthless form. ‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!’
He cried helplessly as the machine cradled him, drawing him up into its soft, glistening embrace.
17.2: WILL
Will hurled his robot squadron through the vast, shadowed spaces of the starship’s mesohull, following the transit rail the crew had identified for him. It ran straight as an arrow for several kilometres through the weird mess of enclosing sheets and filaments of elastoceramic alloy that enabled the Dantes to retain physical integrity under warp. He’d never seen a ship design so tightly optimised. It was like flying through the lightless guts of a steel whale.
He had belatedly realised that the body he’d co-opted belonged to the same family of weapons that he’d seen at the military testing stadium. It was a mass of pseudo-life pretending to be a human being, wrapped inside a spacesuit that was little more than rad-resistant body-armour.
He was now technically mortal in that his thread had nowhere to back up. On the other hand, he could run his mind on less than five per cent of the material that comprised his current body. He didn’t need to breathe, eat, shit or worry about vacuum – just retain an energy gradient around his isotope micro-cores. His new body interfaced directly with his mind via a suite of SAPs that offered more weapons options than was strictly sane. Inhabiting a near-unkillable undead super-soldier scared the bejeezus out of him.
The robots on his team were almost as bad. Each one was backed up by another dollop of pseudo-life organised like a human brain. They operated together as a fused, intelligent force via a redundant mesh-network operating on a dozen different kinds of signal at once.
The only weakness of the set-up he could see was its dependence on Snakepit’s rather transparent command architecture. But if trouble showed, he intended to use that to his advantage. Chances were, whatever Balance-fragment he met wouldn’t be expecting an attack from their own team using the Proustian Underground’s hacking SAPs.
Will’s robots surged through the maintenance portal into the vacuole that held Mark’s quarantine core. He groaned in despair as he caught sight of the seething mass of Phote machines waiting for him there. They clustered around the heavily buffered core, marrying a rad-proofed container to the transit dock where they’d ripped the rail free.
While Balance’s robots had fought over other regions of the hull, the Photes had made a beeline for the closest available human host. Will knew he should have anticipated that. Even with the data Ira’s team had supplied and the memory dumps that came with his new body, he still felt badly behind the curve.
As he watched, the Photes slid their container free, leaving the core empty. They had Mark. Will snarled. His robots descended on the harvesters in a blaze of fury. At the same time, he drove his waldobot-steed directly at the container where the wriggling, grub-like automata were preparing to deliver it to the exohull in a tug-drone harness.
Will ripped the container free of the Photes’ claws and drove a ceramic fist into the nearest automaton while his drones shredded the others into sprays of glittering trash. Balance’s hardware was years ahead of Photurian tech and Will felt exceedingly motivated. He smashed and crushed and burned with little thought for his own safety until the vacuole was a mess of hot debris.
Then, before the inevitable reinforcements could appear, he grabbed the container and fled back the way he’d come, towards their rendezvous point at the edge of the mining bay. While he raced through portal after portal, Will rigged a contact to the comms-port on the canister.
‘Mark, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘This is Will. I’ve got you now.’
The audio feed from the container delivered nothing but a low hiss. Thankfully, the device came with basic medical functions to track the health of transported converts, so Will could at least tell his half-son was alive.
‘Will?’ came a desperate croak at last. ‘Is that you?’
‘It’s me. The actual me. Not the thing you met before. Hang in there, we’re on our way to meet your friends.’
If Will’s new body had come with natural eyes, they’d have filled with tears. It was a long time since he’d been there for Mark. Too long. He’d failed spectacularly, both as a parent and as a mentor.
‘Leave me,’ Mark whispered from inside. ‘It’s too late. They got me.’
In Will’s cold, hard chest, his virtual heart tightened.
‘We’re still talking, aren’t we?’ he said, his voice all false brightness. ‘You’re not turned yet.’
Mark sobbed. ‘I’m compromised, Will. If that’s really you then you should kill me now and save yourself.’
‘Not going to happen,’ said Will.
‘Please!’ Mark cried and broke into coughing. ‘I beg you. I got a full payload. There’s just minutes left before I turn. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen, Will. Don’t let me become one of them. Don’t do that to me.’
‘I’m not giving up,’ said Will, ‘so save your breath until I’ve tried to help you myself.’
‘Then you’re risking the others,’ said Mark. ‘You’re risking everyone.’
Will gritted his teeth and didn’t care if it was true.
Brilliant whiteness surged suddenly in the back of his head. Several of his robots lost control and flew straight into the wall of the cavity he was traversing. He gasped as he fought for ownership of his own mind, swerving just in time to avoid smacking the container into a support filament at a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour.
Slowly, his perspective stabilised. He realised with cold alarm what must have just happened. He’d flown back within comms range of Balance’s struggling strike force and they’d just tried to rip his thread out of the body he’d stolen. He checked the local network conditions and found that, sure enough, he’d just nosed over the threshold. It was pure luck that whatever remaining fragment of the god reached out for him hadn’t succeeded. Balance’s failure was down to a simple lack of bandwidth.
He bolstered his defences using Moneko’s SAPs and sent a message into Balance’s mesh.
‘Nice try,’ he said.
‘It’s time to join forces,’ said Balance. ‘You need to come here now.’
‘You say that after trying to rip my thread? Go fuck yourself, you hideous parody.’
‘We don’t have time to piss around!’ Balance shouted back. ‘The Willworld is falling. You need to drop whatever it is you’re trying to do and come to my location before it’s too late.’
Drop what he was carrying? Not a chance.
‘Now you want my help?’ Will shouted. ‘You fuck over the entire planet by abusing code that someone else shoved in your head, and suddenly you’re the hero? I despise you, you insane sack of shit. The fact that one of me ended up like you makes me feel sick.’
He closed the channel and redoubled his speed.
17.3: IRA
Ira tried to pull a thermal layer on while he and the others bounced around the cramped interior of the transit pod. Ten minutes before, their ride had been unhitched from the ruined rail system and was now being dragged by a team of free-flying titan mechs running in semi-autonomous mode.
Ira would have loved the pod to stop jouncing but they were being chased at ninety kilometres an hour through the interior of the ship by Balance’s robotic army. Smacking his head against the walls and ceiling was the least of his problems. He was more concerned about the rad indicator on the wall-screen which kept creeping upwards as they ripped past each accelerator pipe. They were all going to have some nice commemorative cancers from this trip.
Their robot porters reached the edge of the mining bay and sped out into the void beyond. The ark’s docking portal now lay just a few hundred metres distant. Through the video feed the pod was sending to his shadow, he could watch their progress whenever he shut his eyes.
Abruptly, their sensor array was blasted by a multi-wavelength broadcast like an optical roar from the entrance to the
bay.
‘Stop!’ Balance warned. ‘Power down your robots!’
Palla messaged him back. ‘In your dreams, buddy!’
Unfortunately, Balance’s force was better armed than theirs, more numerous and faster. They also didn’t have a delicate human cargo to worry about. While the distance between them and the fanged portal was shrinking, the gap between them and their pursuers closed faster.
Ira watched their enemies approach with sickened disappointment. Their escape was apparently going to come close to succeeding without actually obtaining the prerequisite cigar.
Then the front rows of Balance’s descending swarm erupted in a mess of plasma and sparks as invisible beam-fire scythed across them. Ira glanced around through the robots’ eyes to try to figure out where the attack had come from. Another squad of robots had burst into the space above them. This one was dragging a Photurian harvester-package.
Ira whooped as he realised that the newcomer could only be Will. Will’s machines hurled themselves at their adversaries with wild abandon, blasting and impacting in a barely organised frenzy of violence. The ensuing conflict gave the humans just enough time to make it through the gap into the ark’s docking bay. Will’s machines came streaking through after – or some of them, at least. Will was experiencing ferocious levels of drone attrition just to keep the enemy back.
Palla wasted no time. She directed their mechs up the tunnel to the shuttle-scaffold where their improvised airlock system waited. Will followed, losing ever more machines as he tried to cover their escape.
The pod lurched and spun as the mechs positioned it for docking with little thought for the meat-creatures inside. At the same time, a message came through from Will.
‘Mark has been infected by the Photes,’ he warned. ‘Let’s make this quick.’
The unpleasant implications of the burden Will had brought with him dawned on Ira as the airlock cycled open under his feet.
‘Go! Go! Go!’ yelled Palla.
She dived through the opening, followed by Clath and Judj. Ira came last, launching himself into the narrow tunnel. He hung there waiting and hoping as the lock cycled. It was all up to Will now.
As he floated, his fingers brushed up against false matter for the first time. It was slick and surprisingly warm – a perfect insulator. Behind the glassy membrane lay the densely packed alien machinery they still didn’t understand. Ira had a moment to wonder what in Gal’s name they thought they were doing.
By the time the lock cycled again, Will had cracked open the package. His enormous gunmetal suit was crammed into the space, cradling Mark’s limp human form as if he were a child.
‘Get back!’ Will’s voice was an inhuman boom.
Ira launched himself down the tunnel, using the uncomfortably spaced dents in the wall to make progress. He hoped they hadn’t made a terrible mistake by inviting a Will-monster into their refuge. They still had exactly zero understanding of what had happened to Will and he’d just come aboard with a biohazard. The rest of them had long since got used to the heartbreaking necessity of giving up on friends and family taken by the Photes. Will, most likely, had not.
Ira sped through the knife-chamber, holding his breath as he passed the retracted weapons. As he did so, he heard terrible banging and scraping noises from above.
[That sounds bad,] he observed over their shadow-channel.
[Balance is trying to get in,] Judj warned. [Fuck! He’s trashed Clath’s outer-door replacement.]
Air suddenly started sucking Ira back up the tube while the monsters behind them struggled with the inner seal.
[You have to get out of that tunnel,] Judj warned. [Activating the machine in five …]
Ira scrambled madly out of the tube into the grand passageway below, launching himself at the floor.
‘Will, hurry!’ he yelled.
‘Get down here!’ Ann called from where she and the others waited below.
Ira reached for the surface that would very soon be down. As he got there, a small drone whizzed up to help him press himself against it. Will drifted after them, the wrong way up, clutching Mark like a teddy bear. At the last moment, he reversed his orientation and planted his enormous feet. Will’s suit apparently came with thrusters.
‘Two … One …’ said Judj.
Ira shut his eyes. Maybe this was how the world ended.
The hatch they’d fled through slammed shut. A half-second later, a deafening bang shook its way through the hull. And suddenly down really was down. Ira was pressed into the floor. At first it felt like horrendous acceleration, but then it slacked off to about point-eight gees. Everyone experienced a small involuntary bounce as the gravity settled. And then, unexpectedly, everything was extremely quiet.
Ira got to his knees and looked about. They’d made it inside and the universe hadn’t collapsed yet. A thud echoed along the passage, followed by a long, low hiss. Down the hallway, half-hidden by the tightly curving horizon of the deck, several dozen Subtle analogues of titan mechs rose to their feet.
Seen with vulnerable human eyes, the machines looked brutal despite the elegant sigils and designs smothering their bodies like Collapse Era fashion tattoos. Each one resembled a cross between a praying mantis and King Kong. They marched straight down the thoroughfare towards them with a weird simian gait, their upper scythe-arms swishing the air.
Ann leapt to her feet. ‘This should be okay,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I’ve been working on this system. I think I now have us tagged as non-threatening non-crew.’
‘You think?’ said Judj.
‘Just get out of their way,’ Ann warned. ‘To the sides of the passage. Now!’
They hauled themselves up and ran.
‘What about Will?’ said Ira.
‘Let’s hope they don’t think he looks too weird,’ said Palla.
Will lumbered after them. His besuited body was too large to avoid the machines completely. He pressed himself against the curving wall as they advanced.
‘Will, don’t touch them,’ Ann warned.
Ira held his breath as the first of the machines reached them. They walked casually around Will and stationed themselves next to the airlock hatch with blunt-nosed cannons pointing up.
‘Okay, now move,’ said Ann. ‘This way to the bridge.’
They edged past the robots and ran down the street-sized corridor to the room they’d rigged as a base of operations. As Ira staggered in, Ann embraced him. Gosh, she was tall, he remembered. Really tall. He didn’t care.
Will stomped up clutching his human burden.
‘What now?’ he asked in his booming artificial voice.
In that suit, he didn’t look remotely human. And Mark’s skin had turned a scary grey-orange as if he’d been dunked in old paint.
‘“What now” is that you’re carrying a biohazard,’ said Ann. ‘Mark is a Phote infection risk. Unless you can do something fast, he needs to die.’
Rachel shot her a look of loathing.
Ann returned it with an imperious glance. ‘Captain Bock,’ she said, ‘if he’s turned, then he’s already effectively dead. We may have seconds before he starts infecting the rest of us.’
‘Leave that to me,’ said Will and set Mark gently on the floor.
The giant removed his helmet. Without his armour, the Will-monster looked exactly like Will, but huge, with dull, teal-coloured skin. His eyes were jet-black marbles.
Will unbolted the rest of the suit. It opened in sections revealing a titan’s body dressed incongruously in old-fashioned shipwear of midnight black.
‘Pseudo-life,’ Ann breathed. ‘He’s made of Phote pseudo-life.’
Ira noticed Rachel staring at the glossy behemoth her husband had become with something like awed disappointment.
‘Most of me,’ said Will in a bass rumble. He sounded even less human without the suit. ‘I still have dedicated smart-cell pockets. Step back, please.’
While they watched, black animate grease slithered out of Will�
��s suit and across Mark’s body to form a translucent bioseal around it. When it was done, Will glanced at them with anxious eyes.
‘Let’s try this again,’ he said. ‘What happens next?’
‘The ship’s shield-engine is running,’ said Clath. ‘We’re protected.’
‘For how long?’ Will asked.
Clath and Judj exchanged glances. ‘We have no idea,’ she said. ‘Months?’
‘Okay,’ said Will. ‘What’s going on outside?’
‘Also no idea,’ said Judj. ‘You can look at the sensor-feeds we rigged. So far as the ship is concerned, we’re in another universe. If there’s a way to see out while the shield is on, we haven’t found it yet.’
Judj passed schematics to their shadows and broadcast an open invite so that Will could link to their network. Ira looked. Something like an ember-warp field had fired up just above the hatch they’d come through.
‘This ship has multiple warp-shells,’ Clath explained. ‘It’s like a thermos. The inner one runs off the singularity core and its distortion feeds the others. They’re designed to suck up passive warp-bleed and recycle it. That’s why our drive kept crashing – the outer shell doesn’t need fuel if there’s a warp engine nearby.’
‘Balance reached the airlock,’ Will reminded them. ‘He’s inside already.’
Judj shook his head. ‘Everything in that tunnel is now very, very dead.’
‘Don’t be so sure. He’s running on some scary tech.’
‘Still dead,’ said Judj. ‘Believe me. Super dead. Unless he can survive in finely diced pieces at a thousand degrees kelvin. In the unlikely event that Balance is still with us, he’s back in the docking bay, trapped between the inner and outer warp-shells.’
‘Can anything live out there?’ said Ira.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Clath. ‘Frankly, I’d be impressed.’
‘So we’re hiding,’ said Will. ‘If we can’t see out, how do we fly? Can we fly?’