Invincible, Book Two

by David Mack

  Regretfully,

  Your former staff

  Transcript of tricorder recording by Commander Sonya Gomez, outside SA project camp perimeter, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53290.1

  GOMEZ: Please, wait! Don’t attack! I’m not your enemy, and I’m not food.

  SHII: Speak … you.

  GOMEZ: Yes, I speak. I am sentient. I’m not an animal for you to kill for food.

  SHII: Do … not … comprehend … “sentient.” You … not … owner.

  GOMEZ: No, I’m not one of the owners, but I’m very much like them.

  SHII: You … not … owner. Await … owners.

  GOMEZ: Your owners are gone.

  SHII: Do … not … comprehend … “gone.”

  GOMEZ: They—they ceased to function. They died. You don’t need to keep gathering food for them.

  SHII: Function … to … gather … food … and … protect.

  GOMEZ: I know that. But without the owners, that function no longer exists. You need a new function.

  SHII: Do … not … comprehend … “new.”

  GOMEZ: It means that things have changed. You have to adapt to the situation.

  SHII: Do … not … comprehend … “changed.”

  GOMEZ: Oh, great.

  SHII: Do … not … comprehend … “adapt.”

  GOMEZ: You’ve been committing murder for no reason. We can’t defend ourselves against you, and you have no need to attack us.

  SHII: Do … not … comprehend … “murder.” Am … fulfilling … function. Must … gather … food … await … return … owners.

  GOMEZ: The owners are gone! They’re dead! They’ve ceased to function!

  SHII: Must … gather … food.

  GOMEZ: Please, you must listen to me.

  SHII: Do … not … comprehend … “dead.” You … not … owner. Your … instructions … relevant … not. Must … gather … food.

  GOMEZ: There’s no need to gather food! There’s—dammit! [sonic rifle fire]

  Personal log, Commander Sonya Gomez, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53290.3

  The bastards took the Culloden.

  I saw it taking off after I managed to get away from the shii. It attacked me after I tried to reason with it, but the rifle on full blast managed to at least force it to run away, though I didn’t do any appreciable damage to it. For that matter, there’s no sign of any other injury it’s taken. Not surprising, given its chameleon circuitry—it can heal any “wound” by simply shape-changing over it.

  Right after it ran off, I heard the screaming sound of impulse engines. My heart soared for a brief instant, as I thought it might be either the Archimedes or the Franklin, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t a Starfleet impulse signature—and it was the sound of a ship taking off, not landing.

  Then I looked up to see the Culloden taking off.

  I ran back to the camp, only to find Razka alone. He showed me the note the workers had left for me. I asked Razka what the hell was going on.

  “I should think the letter explains it all, Commander. They have left.”

  “So why are you still here?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “My job is to assist you. You’re still here, so I’m still here.”

  I stared at him. “What’s the real reason?”

  “Does there need to be another reason?”

  “No, but I’m pretty sure there is one.”

  Razka sighed, and then he smiled at me. “All my life, I have prided myself on always doing the best job I could. I have always excelled at the tasks I have been given. Mind you, not all those tasks were especially challenging, but that wasn’t the point.”

  He started to pace. “The other day, I was given another simple task: to help you track down the monster shii. When it attacked, I did nothing. I could not fire my weapon. I could not move. You were threatened, and I did not move. My comrades were wounded, and I did not move. Zilder was killed right in front of me, and I did not move.”

  He looked up at me with a stricken look. I’d never seen him like this—he’d always been so easygoing and pleasant before.

  “So I have stayed. Becaue it is my job to aid you, and I will not fail again.”

  I nodded and said, “All right, fine. It’s just you and me, then. We can either wait until that thing comes and gets us, or we can stop it once and for all. It’s not going to listen to reason.”

  “Why should it, Commander?”

  I actually chuckled at that, which surprised me. I hadn’t thought I had any chuckles left in me. “You were right. I forgot the first rule of programming.”

  “Which is?” Razka asked.

  “A machine is only as good as what’s put into it—no more, no less. Garbage in, garbage out. Now, c’mon,” I said, hefting my sonic rifle, “we’ve got to take out the garbage.”

  Razka and I went and used the remnants of the camp perimeter barrier and the remaining Nalori-issue sonic rifles to form a small barricade for the pair of us. We’re within the confines of that barricade now, having just finished modifying my own sonic rifle. It now emits a pulse intended to immobilize the shii for several minutes. Of course, there’s no way to test it until the shii attacks….

  We’re waiting for midnight to come around. The next window in the pulsar/quasar interference will provide us with the best chance to stop it. I’m recording this log entry while we wait. We’ve both eaten some field rations, and we’re as ready to go as we can be.

  It’s funny, I’ve been thinking back on all the life-or-death situations I’ve been in in my career. I mean, I spent the first three-and-a-half years of my career on the Enterprise, where we had life-or-death situations on what seemed to be a weekly basis, starting with the Borg. Then there was that one-year project on the Oberth, which was pretty sedate until all hell broke loose at the end, when the Romulans turned up out of nowhere.

  Then there was the Sentinel. And the war.

  I’m sick of people dying. I’m sick of losing people. Whether they’re friends, comrades, subordinates—it doesn’t matter.

  It stops now.

  I reached into one of the pouches on my uniform—where I’d normally keep my tricorder. I had put Zilder’s copy of the Se’rbeg there—not entirely sure why. I’m not particularly religious. I remember what Kejahna joked when we tested the antimatter reactor: “Ho’nig helps those who help themselves.” He mainly said it to tease Zilder, who didn’t think that the reactor would be ready in time with only two antigrav units.

  Now they’re both dead. And I need to use their work to help stop the monster that is trying to destroy that work.

  It’s almost midnight. Time to get moving.

  First officer’s log, Commander Sonya Gomez, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53290.6

  At ten minutes prior to midnight, I came out from behind the barricade, leaving Razka safe inside. I had the feeling that the shii would attack us as soon as it could. Its function is to collect heads for its owners. It had targeted my particular head on three occasions now without getting it. I don’t know if it’s capable of grudge matches—in fact, I’m sure it isn’t—but I also suspect that it was programmed to keep trying to fulfill its goals. That meant that it would keep trying for me until it had my head.

  That, at least, was my plan. It turned out to be accurate. I waited near the concave dish that formed the most prominent part of the SA. The tricorder was able to detect its approach, and I fired a shot from the sonic rifle near it to give it pause. Then I ran toward the SA dish.

  As soon as I got to the ladder that would lead me up to the SA, I fired a shot with the rifle at the ground behind me, then again at one of the crystal bushes near the ladder. It wouldn’t delay the shii much, but I only needed to slow it down enough to make up the difference between its four legs and my two …

  Excerpt from a letter from Razka on Sarindar to Marig on Nalor, sixteenth day of Sendrak, twenty-third year of Togh

  … everything seemed fine until the barricade failed. I should have kno
wn that the curse of Sarindar wasn’t finished with me just yet.

  Luckily, Commander Gomez is no fool. She gave me her tricorder device. She had modified it so that it would emit a sonic pulse. The idea was that if the monster shii came for me, I should activate the pulse.

  As soon as the barricade failed, I clutched the tricorder to myself for dear life. I looked at the tableau in front of me.

  A fierce wind was blowing, as often happened at night. The crystalline trees and bushes made a mild tinkling noise that almost sounded musical. To the right was the massive concave dish that was the focus of so much of our labors. Commander Gomez was climbing the ladder to the dish. The monster shii was standing at the ladder’s base. I somehow doubted it had ever encountered anything like this ladder before.

  Then it turned to look at me. It ran for me.

  It happened again, Marig. I froze.

  But this time, I was able to push the button. Though I could not raise or activate a weapon, I was somehow able to make myself activate the sonic pulse. And it worked. The monster shii stopped dead in its tracks. Then it went for me a second time. I pushed the button again.

  (In fact, Marig, it is truly not a button, but a touch-sensitive control. But allow a frightened old man to wax poetic.)

  Amazingly enough, it worked again. And a third time. After that, the monster shii turned around and ran back toward the ladder. I looked up to see that Commander Gomez had climbed up to the top of the dish …

  First officer’s log, supplemental

  … as soon as I got to the edge of the dish, I turned to see that the shii had turned its attention to Razka. I braced my legs in the struts of the ladder, then fired a shot over the shii’s head.

  Since the shii was staying about three meters away from Razka, yet facing him, I assumed that the sonic pulse I built into the tricorder worked. But I had no way to judge how long it would last, and besides, I needed to get the shii up to the dish. So I fired.

  Sure enough, the shii turned around—probably deciding that Razka’s head wasn’t worth all this trouble anyhow—and ran back to the dish. It loped over to the bottom of the ladder, then tried to figure out how to climb up it.

  I looked down and tried to figure out the same thing. The shii had triangular “paws”—no individual claws or fingers or anything like that. Presumably the shii that the creature emulated had evolved that way as the most adequate way to navigate Sarindar’s glassy surface. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very useful for climbing up ladders with rounded rungs.

  Of course, the whole point of the exercise was to lure the shii up the ladder to the SA dish. Something else I didn’t think of. Latest in a series, collect ’em all.

  Then the shii’s paws changed shape, to something closer to a human hand. That made sense. It, and its smaller companion, had taken on the shape of a shii in order to blend in with the local fauna, and, being a machine, hadn’t changed shape to anything else since then because it hadn’t had reason to.

  Now, though, it did. Armed with its newfound opposable thumbs, it clambered up the ladder. As soon as the shii was about three-quarters of the way up the ladder, I did some clambering of my own, onto the outer edge of the dish. The plan was to get the shii up on the edge also, then immobilize it.

  It was a good plan. So, naturally, it went all to hell …

  Excerpt from a letter from Razka on Sarindar to Marig on Nalor, sixteenth day of Sendrak, twenty-third year of Togh

  … I watched as Commander Gomez stood on the dish’s edge. The monster shii climbed the rest of the way up. She raised her weapon. The creature, however, moved faster than expected.

  Actually, that is not true. The creature had been moving fast all along. It is simply so fast that it’s difficult to comprehend just how fast it is. I suspect that Commander Gomez failed to anticipate this. One cannot blame her. This monster is very easy to underestimate.

  The monster attacked her, knocking her weapon out of her hands. She lost her balance, and fell into the dish. The rifle, though, fell down the outside of the dish and plummeted to the ground.

  This presented me with something of a dilemma, Marig. You see, Commander Gomez needed that rifle in order to stop the shii. Which meant that I needed to grab the rifle and get it to her. However, that meant getting much closer to the shii than I particularly wanted.

  Besides, I knew that if I picked up the rifle, I would freeze again. I remembered Commander Gomez’s words. She told me of the engineer’s axiom that when garbage goes in, garbage comes out. I am like that. I hold a rifle, I freeze. It is the way of things.

  But I promised Commander Gomez that I would continue to do my job. I had told her that that was why I stayed behind. Of course, that is not the real reason. The truth is that the other workers did not want me with them on the Culloden. They also did not want Commander Gomez with them. While not all of them believed her to be bad luck, enough of them did. And enough of those also thought I fell into that category. That was why they waited to take off until they knew that she was away from the camp. However, I did not wish her to know that. Besides, what I told her was true. I wanted to redeem myself, to do my job. I owed her that much. I owed myself that much.

  So I ran for the rifle. I picked it up. And I climbed the ladder, trying not to pay attention to the scream of pain I heard from the inner workings of the dish …

  First officer’s log, supplemental

  … I tumbled into the inside of the dish, the duranium panels colliding with my body in a nastily bone-jarring manner. I managed to halt my descent, stopping myself at what appeared to be fifty meters down into the dish—or halfway to the center. It was about where the dish started to flatten out a bit and get less steep.

  I quickly tried to get my bearings, attempting to stand up and keep my balance. The rifle was nowhere to be seen, which made my life a helluva lot more complicated. The shii was still at the perimeter of the dish. Since I was unarmed, and could barely keep my balance, I was at a distinct disadvantage.

  Then it started running down the dish toward me, its “paws” having morphed back into shii form, since that was much more efficient for decapitating.

  This worked in my favor, actually, as the claws—which could easily get a grip on the crystalline surface of Sarindar—couldn’t grab hold of duranium. So, instead of loping gracefully down the inner surface of the dish, it slipped, slid, and tumbled down the dish, past me and toward the center.

  I just needed to be able to press this advantage—unfortunately, no real opportunity to do so presented itself. Instead, I found myself facing this creature from fifty meters away, with it standing between me and my only legitimate means of escape—the center of the dish. There was a small hatch in the center that was my best bet for getting out of there—climbing up the edge of the dish wasn’t going to be much of an option.

  Then the creature somehow managed to get enough of a grip on the dish to take one giant leap toward me. Starfleet training kicked in, and I managed to roll with the impact as it landed on me—rolling upward at first, then tumbling back down toward the center as gravity took over from the force of impact. I took a kick at it, but before I could, it slashed at my cheek. I cried out in surprise as much as pain, then followed through on the kick.

  The kick didn’t do much to damage it—though it felt like it had done plenty to my foot—but it wound up being enough for the shii to lose its balance and start scrabbling around on the dish some more. Under other circumstances, I might have found it amusing, watching it try desperately to maintain some kind of grip, its arms flailing as each attempt failed.

  I was standing in the middle of a concave dish at night on a crystal planet facing a creature out to kill me. I was armed with nothing more than a torn Starfleet uniform and a battered copy of someone else’s religious text—and my brain, which I had always relied on in the past. However, it was failing me now. There had to be some way to keep the creature still long enough for me to get off the dish, but I was damned if I could think of
it. I needed to get the rifle back …

  Excerpt from a letter from Razka on Sarindar to Marig on Nalor, sixteenth day of Sendrak, twenty-third year of Togh

  … with the rifle slung over my shoulder, I started to climb. I am grateful that my great list of weaknesses does not include a fear of heights. Climbing the ladder was not difficult. In fact, I had done it several times before during the project. No, the fear that gripped me had solely to do with why I took the climb. But I continued to climb. And I tried not to think about the scream I had heard. I also was hearing odd scraping noises.

  I got to the top of the dish and I saw that the monster was trying to attack Commander Gomez. For her part, Commander Gomez was trying to get away from it. She was bleeding from her face and her uniform was torn and ripped.

  As soon as she saw me, she shouted at me to shoot the monster …

  First officer’s log, supplemental

  … I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy to see anyone as I was to see Razka at that moment. I screamed at him to shoot the shii. Once he did that, everything else would come into place.

  He held up the rifle …

  Excerpt from a letter from Razka on Sarindar to Marig on Nalor, sixteenth day of Sendrak, twenty-third year of Togh

  … but once again I failed to shoot. I was programmed, it seemed. Nothing I could do could make me push the button. Not even the constant shouting of “Shoot it!” from Commander Gomez. Not even the monster finally being able to slash at both her face and her torso. I saw her strangely colored blood flowing from two wounds on her face now, as well as her side, and still she shouted, “Shoot it!” And still I could not pull the trigger.

  Garbage in, garbage out.

  I knew for sure that I was not someone who could fire a weapon. I was, however, still the aide to the head of the project. So I would do what I’d been doing. I would help her.

  Commander Gomez was about seventy meters down the dish and about ten meters to my left. I could not trust my ability to throw the rifle to her. I could, however, trust gravity. I laid the rifle down on the surface of the dish and let it slide toward the center …