Ravagers [05.00] Eradicate

by Alex Albrinck

  Chapter 3

  The Island of Eden

  His reboot process completed, and Micah opened his eyes.

  As usual, he found himself inside his primary workshop in the underground bunker on the hidden island of Eden. His consciousness module tested out his body form interface, ensuring he could move limbs, eyes, nose, and mouth at will. The reboot had checked the mechanical linkages between the compressed supercomputer he called his brain and the artificial skin-covered metal body form he used to interact with the human world and move around.

  Once convinced the interface worked, he assessed his recent memories. The sphere he’d gotten from Ashley after her death was gone, destroyed by multiple direct missile impacts and then dissolved to dust by the Ravager swarm that happened upon the crash site. On a more positive note, the friendlier nanobot swarm he’d carried with him had reported status, noting that it had blocked the swarm from reaching a few smaller human communities, at least for the time being.

  They needed to shut down the Ravagers in the East as they’d done with those in the West.

  Micah stepped away from the body form risers and moved to the primary control systems. He could directly interface to the data and control programs, of course, but he found it beneficial to practice human motions and mannerisms even without an audience. The East, sadly, looked much like the West, with vast swaths of territory buried under the Ravagers onslaught, with minor pockets of inactivity standing out. Micah knew most of those pockets represented the locations of Phoenix-built fortresses, mini-cities encased in a manner that left them immune to the Ravager threat.

  Micah switched to his fabrication program and initiated a rapid build of a pair of metal brains. He was now using the last available model, which meant any imminent “death” would leave him inactive for a significant period of time. He always kept at least two on hand for that reason, but he’d used the one inside him more rapidly than he’d expected, and the second… well, that had been a surprising usage as well.

  He glanced at the body forms and smiled as his eyes fell upon some of the figures. Most represented old acquaintances, peers and friends of Ashley from her time on the planet, and within each he’d stowed memories they’d shared, memories he’d extracted about each from other encounters, as well as mannerism observations, voice prints, and verbal tendencies. In a pinch, he could plug his active brain into any of those bodies and effectively become that person. It had worked well when he’d assumed the identity of Will Stark; Oswald Silver had likely not been suspicious until the “dead” body had dissolved into nothingness. He let his visual input system—his eyes—rest upon another of the forms there. He remembered her well, not as well as he remembered Ashley, but better than most. She’d rise again, fighting the same foes she’d fought centuries earlier. If Micah could talk to her and tell her, he knew she’d approve.

  He just needed someone with a bit more connection to the current era to occupy that body form.

  He left the laboratory and walked down the hallway, past the portal room and most of the general storage rooms, to the final door at the very end. His consciousness model tried to simulate a “feeling” of nervousness, but he’d not mastered that, not yet. His objective robot mind needed no human feelings to understand the incredible scene he’d take in when he walked through that door.

  He gripped the handle and turned it, pushed the door open, and entered the infirmary.

  He’d kept the place clean over the years, letting the robotic cleaning crew destroy any hint of dust or parasites or bacteria. There weren’t many human prospects likely to visit, and less reason to think any that did so would need any medical care. But Micah figured that cleanliness was good in the event they needed to treat minor injuries. And if they needed the room for something more severe—life-threatening injuries—he wouldn’t have time then to wait for the cleaning crew to enter the space and remove centuries of dust, microbes, and cobwebs.

  The data from the space station following the compression bomb’s detonation was bleak: immense destruction and possibly a hundred or more dead, crushed by the initial wave or hurled into the void of space without protection. One of those impacted—literally—had been Sheila Clarke. She’d been in the area based upon communication traffic aboard the station, led that way by the late Delilah Silver. His analysis indicated that all inputs pointed to only one possible conclusion:

  Sheila was dead.

  Fortunately, his ship had a “mind” of its own and didn’t care what Micah’s “mind” thought.

  He’d set the ship up to hack into the space station’s computer systems and beam data back to Eden. It had also tracked an energy signature not commonly in use in this era: the power source behind the intelligent, non-destructive nanobots of the type employed by Sheila in her quest to wrest control of the Ravagers away from Phoenix. The ship used space station sensors to track that signal around, like a mini-GPS system, and from that he could see where Sheila might be at any given moment.

  The final reading put Sheila in the destruction zone of the compression bomb.

  His ship, having deduced from his tracking of a power source and his referring to the signal as Sheila that he wanted her back on Eden, tracked that signal down and swallowed Sheila up into the cabin before returning. He’d found her when he’d gone to the ship to leave for Eastern territory, and though he thought it sentimental to be able to bury Sheila on Eden, it had seemed a pointless gesture by the computer system inside the sphere.

  He’d been shocked when he’d gotten closer.

  He didn’t know how. But though every data point said Sheila should be dead, she was breathing. Faintly.

  Alive.

  How?

  It was a question for another time. She was alive, but her condition was clearly perilous. Micah scrapped his timetable to head East in favor of giving his friend a chance to live.

  He carried her into the infirmary—faithfully kept ready for the injured by a hardworking robot crew—and set her upon a bed. He needed to get analysis bots inside her, monitors for her vitals in place, an IV line set up for painkillers, medications, and likely fluid and nutrient replacement drips.

  When he tried to tighten the tourniquet on her arm, though, nothing happened.

  He tapped her skin again. Hard as Diasteel.

  Her nanos. She’d built an exoskeleton. It must have protected her from the force of the compression wave, somehow, perhaps kept sufficient pressure and air inside until the sphere scooped her up. But if he couldn’t get it off her, she’d die.

  He had to communicate with her, but she’d gone into shock, her body in a coma, and standard communication approaches couldn’t work. He had to reach into her brain somehow, directly…

  The comms nanos?

  No, that wouldn’t work. The nanos were fully decentralized to prevent any possibilities of takeover by a single outside entity; a control server like those for the Ravagers, forcing commands and code through to comms nanos, would be a despot’s dream, and that was why the swarms he’d given her were impregnable. He’d need some other way.

  In the end, he found the pre-Golden Ages memory extractor in storage, reversed the process, and recorded a “memory” of him explaining the predicament and what he needed her to do. He then uploaded the memory into her consciousness and waited. The tool was remarkable; it took a scene in conscious memory, grabbed every sensory detail from any other part of the mind, reconstructed the scene absent any bias, and stored it in digital form. Sheila hadn’t actually seen him talk, hadn’t actually heard the words, but would remember doing so. And, with luck, that “memory” would trickle past her body’s coma firewall and cause her to act.

  He retightened the tourniquet every thirty seconds. After seventeen tries… her flesh pinched in. He let his human emotion module work at that point, projecting the sound of a loud sigh, and got to work. He and his medical specialty robots quickly hooked her into every possible monitor and scanning system; her drip bag included vital nutrients and
fluids she’d need, along with drugs to keep her unconscious—and thus heal faster—and to keep pain levels down.

  She suffered a severe concussion, a crack in her skull, a broken collarbone, three snapped ribs—one of which had punctured a lung—and a series of torn muscles and tendons in her lower body. Delilah Silver had been turned into pulp by the same force; the exoskeleton had done a marvelous job protecting her.

  He used the machine again and asked her to try to use her nanos in a way that would let them communicate. They eventually settled on Sheila forming a “scroll” with lettering to “talk” to Micah; if he was free to speak, they’d shape up like a view screen with a still image of her face on it. He would talk to the screen and the nanos would feed the information back to her consciousness.

  The conversation proved interesting.

  She explained that she’d spied Delilah talking to Oswald and tailed her back to her quarters, which contained a secret room housing the East’s Ravager control server. While there, Delilah had somehow detected Sheila’s presence, deactivated her nanos, and encased her in a different exoskeleton under Delilah’s control. Sheila had been “perp walked” toward Oswald Silver’s quarters, presumably to be questioned prior to execution. Sheila had formed a second exoskeleton around Delilah’s that worked to pry its way inside and free her, but before that happened… the compression wave hit. Delilah’s death had been gruesome, and she’d not had enough time before losing consciousness to wonder how she’d avoided a similar fate.

  “Two exoskeletons,” Micah deduced. “Hers trapped air… and to some degree, air pressure… inside. Not a lot, but enough. Yours… yours took the brunt of the compression wave, which meant the impact on her exoskeleton was less, and the impact on your body even smaller.” He frowned. “Why aren’t hers still there? I guess when the host human dies and the comms nanos lose their power source, the outer nanos just… dissipate.” He shook his head, a very human mannerism he’d mastered. “I don’t know if that makes sense right now, Sheila. But in the end, it doesn’t much matter. You’re alive.”

  Is Phoenix defeated yet?

  “Not yet. We’re still marshaling our allies together. We’ve identified most of the core leadership; if we can eliminate them, we should be able to reverse the mindsets of the rest and avoid any further mass loss of life.”

  So if we survive, we live among Phoenix people.

  “They’re all that will be left, Sheila. I’m going to go try to take out some of the Ravagers in the East and protect those still alive there, but the weapon is too powerful and too widely spread.”

  How can I help?

  “I have an idea.”

  He’d set it all up before heading out to try to save human lives in the East; now, as he watched her again, he noted the last of the robot brains sitting beside her bed, filling every nanosecond with more and more of her memories, her quirks, her mannerisms, her verbal tendencies. The robot brain was downloading the essence of what it meant to be Sheila Clarke.

  “You will stay in a coma, and I will shut off all sensory input. There will be no light, no sound, no smells, no sensations. Your body will not need to process any of that. It can focus on healing.”

  That sounds like I’m not helping.

  “The essence of what makes you you, Sheila, will be in a brain exactly like the one I use. I will put that brain into a robot body form. You will fight in that way.”

  Make sure you give me a body that can do some serious damage.

  “Oh, I will.”

  Good. Now get to work. I’m hanging up now.

  The screen went blank, then dissolved.

  Micah plugged a wire into the brain, then plugged the other end into the interface jack in his right wrist. The data showed she’d made healing progress far in excess of what data suggested was possible for a normal human being. And she was a normal human being, or she had been when they’d made their separate migrations to the space station.

  Something had happened to her, something that made her heal… too quickly.

  He used the interface to scour her memories, watched in reverse as Delilah Silver turned to pulp, trapped Sheila, disabled Sheila’s nanos and activated the East Ravager swarm, entered the secret compartment, entered her quarters, left her discussion with Oswald Silver. He walked back through her efforts to survive her time aboard the space station, her discovery of the Ark, and then back through her efforts to locate the Ravager control server—just for the West—and put it under Micah’s control. He watched her locate Ashley Farmer’s room and find his notes (“ah, so that’s where I left everything!”) and arrive through the portal door.

  Nothing yet. He frowned; he’d been certain that whatever had happened had occurred aboard the space station. Unless the compression bomb and exposure to space had done it? No, that sounded like some fictional fantasy; massive trauma didn’t trigger healing superpowers.

  Something… triggering…

  Oh dear.

  He saw it happen as the clues fused in his robot mind, realized what had happened even as he watched her leave the grove on Eden after she’d eaten the fruit of the tree there. He stopped the playback.

  She’d eaten the fruit that had granted immortality to Oswald Silver, the Wileys, and dozens of others still alive. It did so by preventing aging, keeping the body in perfect health.

  And significantly enhancing that body’s ability to heal from harsh physical traumas.

  He wondered how Sheila would feel learning she’d live forever if she survived this war. And he wondered if the other effect of eating the fruit would matter to her. Perhaps Sheila had no interest in having children, in which case it was a moot point. But they’d only found artificial means of reversing the sterility side effect after centuries of research. It was a good thing, too. Micah wondered what would happen if Arthur Lowell, the mastermind behind the forerunner of Phoenix, the philosophical mage who’d served as a role model for men like Oswald Silver… no, it was too horrible to think about. Arthur Lowell was long dead, dead long before that became a possibility. And he’d been reported as being sterile even before eating the fruit.

  For any of that to matter to Sheila, though, she had to live. And for her to live… Micah needed to be prepared to fight, and to bring the essence of Sheila with him.

  The interface chimed, alerting him that the download of Sheila Clarke into the robot brain was now complete. Micah disconnected the wires, picked the brain up, giving the order as he did to sensory proof the room after he left.

  Sheila’s full life experience would come from the brain in his hands until they could upload her new memories when they returned. If her robot body didn’t make it, she’d need to be told everything by those who’d experienced the battle.

  His eyes fell upon the robot body form he’d selected once again, and he moved to insert Sheila’s robot brain inside. As he did, he smiled.

  The Phoenix wouldn’t know what hit them.

  Chapter 4

  Near Eastern Territory Subcontinent

  Though the opportunity for more had presented itself, Roddy and Mary both knew, at some level, that it wasn’t the right time. Their lips parted but their eyes lingered on each other, a promise to work through the deep hardships created from his time away, to get back what they’d lost so many years ago. He set her back down, let his fingers brush across her cheek. She leaned into his touch, eyes closed, savoring the contact, remembering the new texture of his altered body.

  “Ready?” he asked as she leaned back and established eye contact once more.

  She nodded. Hand-in-hand, they walked down the ramp to the deck of the yacht.

  The mild air of the sphere vanished, replaced by the much warmer variety in this part of the world. Roddy blinked to let his eyes adjust to the bright sunlight. He glanced around for John, Wesley, and the children, but they’d left the deck.

  They found the quartet a moment later inside the bridge. The twins had gathered the pillows and blankets they’d left behind and we
re piling them together into a makeshift bed, and as they finished John set the unconscious Wesley down. Roddy felt his stomach lurch at the sight of the injured man. It was possible some of the physical damage happened before their fight, but he’d certainly inflicted his share. He wondered if his growing power would help the man heal more quickly.

  He watched, mesmerized, as his children positioned themselves at the head and feet of the injured man’s body and laid their hands upon him. They closed their eyes in deep concentration. Roddy could feel what they were doing, pushing that same warmth he now controlled into Wesley’s body. The combined surges interacted inside the injured man, building and strengthening the combined fields in a synergistic manner, and the field spread over Wesley’s body. Roddy’s eyes refocused, and he watched with amazement as Wesley’s deepest wounds stitched themselves shut, as bruises cleared. The body seemed to relax, and Wesley’s breathing stabilized on the bed. The twins finally pulled away without looking at each other, independently recognizing that they’d done all they could at that time for their friend. Each slumped back, exhaustion and exhilaration equally evident on their dirt-streaked faces.

  He moved toward the children, but John stepped in front of him. “Help me get the ship started back up, Roddy. I think it would be wise to get as far from shore as we can.”

  “But—”

  “They’ll be fine, Roddy.” He glanced back at the bed of pillows and blankets. “So will he. They need us to get the ship moving; we can help them recuperate later.”

  He knew John was right; the destruction of Micah’s lake island home proved that activated Ravagers could fly on the wind. You were only safe if you were surrounded on all sides by water. As close as they were to the mainland, they’d need the water on top of them as well.

  This boat wouldn’t work well if surrounded by water on the top.

  Mary stopped and gave each twin a loving pat on the head, and Roddy followed suit, met with a tired smile in each case. The twins curled up near Wesley, resting their heads on the soft pillows, and were asleep in an instant.