Insidious

by Michael McCloskey

  She turned off the automatic door request through her link so she could step up to the portal without it opening. She preferred to sling doors open the old-fashioned way in these situations. Aldriena yanked the door open and stepped forward with C4B ready in her hand.

  She saw the UNSF war robot, a four-legged walking machine studded with sensors and god knew what else. It stood to the height of her shoulder filling the narrow hallway. She recognized two large-caliber weapon ports on the sides of its wide flat head, which brought the danger of her position into shocking clarity. Those were not for capturing anything; they were lethal weapons. If she’d had another second to think, she might have fled at that point, but she’d already committed herself to a course of action.

  Aldriena logged her target with her Cascavel with a quick thought. She pointed C4B at the monstrous robot with the trigger back. She watched the fire light cycle red to green in the course of one adrenaline-laced breath, and then she whipped back through the door.

  The robot exploded through the portal a second later, sundering the door into three ragged panels that flew inward, shedding the faux wood coating in confetti-sized chunks. Aldriena tried for another shot, but a silvery tentacle whipped out faster than her eye could follow and snatched C4B out of her hands. The tentacle retracted back under the robot’s head, still clutching C4B. The killing machine froze in front of her.

  But it didn’t kill. The thing turned and walked through the transparent wall, crumpling the thick plastic as if it were a clear food wrapper. The naked woman screamed from a corner somewhere. Aldriena swore, as much at the machine’s invulnerability as the theft of her weapon.

  She peeked down the corridor through the ruined door. There didn’t appear to be any more robots coming now.

  Ironically, even though the corridor was clear, it was easier to get back toward her courier through the opening in the wall created by the path of the invading robot.

  Aldriena felt bold enough after the close encounter to do just that.

  It had its chance to kill me and it didn’t. I was probably stupid to try to blind it with my weapon. The robot isn’t here to capture people, but to take care of the Circle Fours.

  She ran through the ruined plastic wall and picked up a new course fetched by her Cascavel. She knew at any moment a team of UNSF marines could appear and wrap her up in a tangler grenade or knock her out with a rubber bullet. She ran through a twisty section with more medical examination rooms and doctor’s offices before joining up with a main hall that ran a gentle curving course along the perimeter of the base. It was a risk. Each grand corridor, as they were called, could get you somewhere quickly. She figured that the UNSF invaders would lock down the grand corridors first.

  Aldriena sprinted down the section avoiding the occasional citizen who hadn’t found their quarters yet. She ran long and hard enough to start losing her wind breathing through the annoying plastic mask. Then she arrived at the branch off for Silvado’s bay. She left the grand corridor and started climbing up toward the runway on the inner ring surface.

  A person in blue trim identical to Aldriena’s, hurtled around a corner, and collided with her. Aldriena hooked her arm under the stranger’s and rolled the person over the side of her hip in a smooth judo throw.

  “Ugh. Where’s the space force troops?” the person transmitted from their back, staring up at Aldriena.

  “Get to your quarters before you get shot,” Aldriena growled and resumed her flight.

  Her hopes rose as she neared the dock where Silvado waited to whisk her to safety. She loped into the reception area and selected the outgoing passageway to the final lock umbilicus. The lock room felt cold. Or maybe it was her imagination, mindful of the unforgiving emptiness that lay beyond the thick triangular windows.

  She approached the umbilical doors, but they didn’t open. She sent an explicit open command through her link, as she looked to either side, half-hoping to see a manual opening mechanism. Her link request returned. It said the passage was forbidden to all but UNSF personnel.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  The UNSF must have already broken into Thermopylae’s system and locked the runway down. Either that or someone on the station had started to coordinate their attack.

  Aldriena looked through the human-sized windows at her ship sitting outside in the vacuum. If the damn robot hadn’t grabbed C4B, she would fire it into the windows and crack them. If the little entrance lock was in danger of depressurizing, it would unlock all the doors to any adjacent area that had pressure, so that anyone inside could escape. Provided the lock hadn’t been completely evacuated of air. In that case, she would have killed herself spectacularly, but now that she didn’t have her weapon, she supposed it didn’t matter.

  She looked around the room and found the pressure sensor opening. It was a round hole about a half-centimeter in diameter. It was well above her head. Then she saw another across the room.

  An idea struck her. She ran back the way she had come. She swore as she ran into the door, forgetting she’d turned off the auto-open broadcast signal from her link. Once through the door, she snatched up a flimsy chair from the atrium and brought it back. She slammed the chair up next to the wall and stood on it so she could face the sensor.

  Gotta get the timing just right …

  Aldriena slipped her mask off and let it drop to the floor. She leaned forward to cover the hole with her mouth. Then she accessed emergency services through her link and selected the atmosphere leak alert for the room. At the same time, she sucked hard on the wall sensor. She couldn’t help the other sensor being there, but maybe the emergency protocols would fire if the sensors disagreed. Either one could be malfunctioning.

  I’ve probably never looked so stupid.

  The lights turned red in the entrance lock. A synthetic voice came through her link and her ears simultaneously.

  Evacuate this area. Depressurization warning. Evacuate this area immediately.

  Aldriena leaped down and accessed the lock portal to her courier. The door opened and she stepped through. In the walkway, she could hear the sounds of foam being sprayed across the lock windows outside. She’d seen the procedures trigger before. In the event of a hull breach, the station would take immediate action to repair itself with a quick-hardening foam that sprayed on to seal any holes.

  Laughter bubbled out of her at the immense relief. Nice safety feature. One of the advantages of being an operative in this culture. These people would rather be really safe than pin down a spy or two.

  She knew she was a good kisser, but this had to be a record result. Now if she could get out of here, maybe she could share the story with a friend someday. An empty pang resonated in her soul, dispelling the amusement of a second before. She’d need some friends first. She left the troubled thought behind in the entrance tube. No time for self-pity yet.

  Aldriena slammed into her pilot couch and energized the control system. Her takeoff module blinked red in her mind, the controls faded out, inactive. Her courier took cues from Thermopylae’s docking computers, and the goddamn artilheiros had probably locked down the control tower.

  She gave the courier an override code from one of her fast buffers and disengaged the docking umbilicals. Her data tables flashed red in warning as she brought the plane straightforward, cutting across the runway. Up ahead, she saw the ninety-degree drop-off of the edge of the ring. Since her “down” pointed straight into the curved runway, it looked like a cliff.

  She gunned the close maneuvering jets and sent the craft speeding toward the edge. She denied the impulse to engage her main drive and blow a hole through the station behind her, because she knew there were innocents back there as well as the boira, artilheiros, interpols … she knew ten more names for the police in four languages.

  And she’d never let them stop her before.

  Her courier flung itself over the edge and plummeted out into the star-sprinkled void. Her weight left her so that she felt only the gentle push
of the seat at her back as her smaller jets pushed the craft farther from the station. Aldriena couldn’t resist peeking back to get a real eyeshot of the station receding behind her, even though she could have viewed it through her link from any of half a dozen cameras on the ship.

  So far so good. She didn’t see anything near the station. Whatever UNSF police vessels were out there, they were still docked with the station. She hoped the space force was happy with the chunk they had already bitten off. Maybe they wouldn’t need such a little morsel as the Silvado for dessert.

  Four

  Bren inhaled deeply, but the thousand-times-recycled air of his quarters couldn’t dispel the fatigue that gripped him. He traded a curse for a gulp of orange juice, then closed his eyes and linked into the meeting.

  Reality skipped and found him in a rigid chair at an elegant black table with microphones, laptops, and notes. Virtual meetings didn’t require such accoutrements, but humans reveled in their traditions. Bren opened the folder before him. His meeting notes slid across the pages as he mentally flipped through them. He glanced at the others trying to assess how much enmity awaited him.

  Jackson, the Vigilant’s ECM officer, sat next to Bren providing a slight psychological boost since Bren and Jackson both focused on the practical rather than the political. Jackson’s wiry frame reflected his recent exposure to the grueling academy regimen. He had curly black locks, dark skin, and a clean-shaven face. Bren knew the officer’s attitude included a fearless aspect that Bren had preserved in himself to get things done.

  Colonel Henley’s avatar waited with grim patience, ensconced directly across the circle of seats. Henley’s face held more lines and looked more thickset than Jackson looked. His copper hair lay flat over the weathered face. Bren searched Henley’s visage for any clue of anger. Bren knew the fight with the mysterious Bentra robot had forced Henley’s marines to endure extra punishment with the Circle Four security force. Henley looked calm. Did the colonel have a torpedo for Bren and the ASSAIL team? If he did, Bren knew he might hesitate to defend himself, because he felt guilty about the delay in protecting the marines.

  The female avatar next to Henley represented Advisor Isabella Vendrati. Vendrati wore white civilian business clothing and heavy-framed glasses. Bren wondered for the hundredth time what attached her to the obsolete vision correction, especially in a virtual setting. Bren figured Vendrati must be in her fifties or even older, because she kept her glasses, but she looked like she was in her forties. Bren resisted the urge to grind his teeth. The advisor’s arrogance and pontification annoyed Bren. She’d try to claw him down with her skeletal hands just to reinforce her own position.

  Admiral Jameson reigned as the senior ranking officer at the meeting. His avatar looked appropriately patriarchal, with gray hair and a severe face with beady eyes. Bren estimated that the admiral would possess the same authoritative aura wearing an ensign’s uniform.

  Shortly after Bren arrived, he felt the tabletop shift against the edge of his hand. He watched the table grow in circumference, opening a spot on Henley’s right. The image of another woman materialized to fill it. She wore the same space force uniform with a rank of lieutenant colonel. She wore her medium-length dark hair pulled back.

  Bren stared for a moment. He recognized her beautiful face. Nicole Devin. An academy friend of Bren’s and his ex-lover. Her avatar didn’t have any makeup and didn’t need any. She hadn’t changed much. She had flawless skin and a strong, straight nose. She still looked as wholesome and innocent as she had when he’d met first her, a farm girl fresh to the academy.

  He felt happy to see her. They’d parted as friends, although they hadn’t kept in touch. He recalled she was in Intelligence.

  As soon as Devin arrived, Jameson introduced her.

  “Everyone, this is Lieutenant Colonel Devin. She’s attached to our unit from Intelligence. She’s familiar with all of you, so introductions in the other direction aren’t necessary. Let’s start with your impressions of the Thermopylae board and control.”

  Vendrati opened with an attack, true to her character.

  “It was a disaster,” she said, straightening her archaic glasses. “Sixty percent of the frontline ASSAIL units destroyed in our first raid. What’s wrong with them?”

  Everyone looked at Bren.

  “Nothing’s wrong with them,” Bren said. “They performed well within the bounds we expected. If anything, better.”

  “We didn’t expect to lose six of them. We didn’t expect to lose even one of them!” Vendrati said.

  “They handled the Circle Fours flawlessly, when they weren’t fighting the unknown,” Colonel Henley said. “It all comes down to that one super robot. How could one machine be so powerful? I watched the ASSAIL units in action against the Circle Fours; it’s hard to believe that six of them were taken out.”

  Bren relaxed a notch, having found another ally in the meeting.

  “We handled the humans and known security robots,” Bren said. “No military robots besides our own were expected on Thermopylae. The disaster, as you put it, was due to that one wildcard robot, not any malfunction or underperformance of the ASSAIL units.”

  “Is that what that thing was? A military robot? From whose military?” asked Vendrati. Her tone drove Bren’s ire up a notch. Bren knew the question had a score of possible answers, including a few governments and an equal number of corporations. The corporations occasionally fielded sophisticated combat robotics but didn’t typically admit to possessing such forces.

  “Bentra may have had a program to develop elite security machines for certain clients. Or maybe they were even keeping something on the back burner to start making bids on military contracts,” Devin said. “The third possibility I’m considering is that it was a personal toy of the CEO.”

  “Why are you theorizing? We captured everyone on the base … aren’t they in interrogation yet?” asked Bren.

  “No one’s talking,” said Jameson. “We’d go right to the top, but the four main execs who ran the show were dead by the time we got to them.”

  “Dead as in … suicide?” Bren asked.

  “Unknown. Let us worry about that. We’ll tell you what we find out about the robot,” Jameson said. “Concentrate on getting a more favorable kill ratio next time.”

  Bren didn’t let it go. “What about the station databases? A machine that complex has to have maintenance records, testing runs, all sorts of activities should be logged for it.”

  Jameson shook his head. “We’re looking at a lot of scorched earth here. A huge amount of data was scoured clean despite our attempts to fragment the system and isolate as many databases as we could. They kept the sensitive records held tight in the high security area and managed to wipe it. All we have is a bunch of mundane medical records, VR time logs, ordinary, low-priority stuff. And most of that is from more than a year ago. They’ve recently cut way back on the record keeping. We don’t know if it’s because of this operation.”

  “Don’t underestimate the security discipline of Bentra or any of the other corporations,” Devin added. “They’ve been locked in a vicious game of espionage and counterespionage for decades now, and they know how to keep secrets. The UNSF is an information sieve by comparison.”

  “Any evidence of a full-blown AI core?” asked Vendrati.

  “Nothing obvious,” said Jameson. “Of course, we have everything in quarantine for a lengthy analysis in case there was one and it tried to persist itself somewhere.” He sighed. “No, what we have looks more like mind control.”

  “What?” Vendrati voiced everyone’s reaction.

  “None of those suited freaks we herded in even remember what the suits are for. At least that’s what they claim. So far, our doctors are saying the detainees really don’t remember. Some kind of amnesia from an unknown cause. We found a few booklets saying that the outfits are part of a team-building exercise, a kind of special offsite meeting activity that involves breaking down the current socia
l structure and creating a new one on the station. At first I thought it was crap, but now I’m wondering if they really were doing some heavy duty social experiments.”

  “Keep in mind these are still the early stages,” Devin added. “I think we’ll be able to piece something together soon. There’ll be more traces of what’s going on somewhere.”

  The group went through a summary of the hardware confiscated by Henley’s forces. They had seized several Circle Fours that had been down for repairs at the time of the raid, a small arsenal of nonlethal weapons, and a long list of data storage devices. UNSF marines still scavenged through the base looking for hidden caches of data and equipment. The Bentra personnel had strong privacy rights on the data in their links, but the threat of a persisted AI core overrode those rights, so the UNSF had the link memory of every individual on the base, living and dead, who had a link.

  Bren bristled at the thought. He deeply hated the link scans he had to submit to as part of a team that dealt with the AI cores routinely. He wondered if there were technicians back on Earth that got a kick out of poring through his link memory every week.

  A voice interrupted his thought stream.

  “Major Marcken?”

  “Yes? Ah, sorry, I didn’t catch that?”

  Bren had lost track of the meeting conversation. The others exchanged looks that said, not again. That part irritated him the most. They figured that because he often lost the thread of conversation, he couldn’t interpret the looks they shared with one another. They mistook him for a total social idiot, not just an engineer with link bias.

  Being able to concentrate and block out everything else is an advantage in my job, he wanted to protest.

  “I said … do you have any further recommendations?” Jameson asked.

  “Can we make it a priority to look for the hardware support for the robot?” Bren asked. “There should be spare parts or a maintenance room. The equivalent of our ASSAIL nexus.”