Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume

by Ryan, Anthony

  Freak’s unmistakable androgynous tones, sorrowful, pleading: “Please, stop this.”

  Sam wasn’t listening. “They’ll come now. After all I have done. They’ll come, as you promised…”

  Red Wing came on again. “What the hell is this?”

  “You can hear it?”

  “Everyone can hear it. Every channel, civilian, government, you name it.”

  What are you doing, Freak?

  “I’m on my way in with Dr Vaughan,” I said. “We’re heading for the tree-covered hab. When you get here make for the admin tier. Any survivors will be holed up there.”

  I looked at Janet. “Ready?”

  She forced a smile. “Would you think any less of me if I said I just really want to go home?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to laugh so gave her the most encouraging grin I could muster, switched the G80 to live and pushed off into the Axis.

  “…her death will bring them. She is Brunhilde. She is Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons…”

  “She is just a woman. A human being. Nothing more.”

  “You lie, father! Test upon test. Have I not been tested enough?”

  Wreckage, human and bot, floated around in clumps. Large globules of blood and machine oil coalesced and fragmented as they collided with sundry detritus. In the distance, smoke rivers swirled around the admin tier and the hab clusters, lit by the occasional explosion. A faint cacophony of continuous automatic gunfire told me Colonel Riviere wasn’t the only Viking to keep his service weapon handy. Valhalla indeed.

  I could see bots moving in dense swarms, arcing through the smoke and drifting wreckage. I consciously avoided trying to count them. Just get to Sherry!

  We moved fast, Janet as fluid and graceful as before, me drawing on micro-grav combat muscle memory. Choose the shortest possible distance between hard surfaces, get maximum energy into each shove or leg-push to ensure you make it to the next jump point, running out of momentum in this environment would be a really bad idea. We’d covered about half the distance to Freak’s hab when the first bot attack came, a small power-conduit drone splashing through a blood globule trailing from the half-severed torso of an unfortunate Axis resident. It came straight for me, wire-snippers whirring. Janet caught it before I could bring the G80 to bear, claw-hand punching dagger-nails through the carapace and inner workings. She used her other claw to tear it apart in a blaze of sparks and shattered circuity.

  “Move!” I shouted. Something big was looming behind her, something with grab arms and a welding torch.

  There’s an art to firing automatic weapons in micro-grav. Put the stock to your shoulder and you spin like a top. Bracing it against your sternum is the best bet but you’ll be thrust in the opposite direction. Luckily, the G80’s recoil absorbers meant I was only shoved back a few feet as I delivered a solid, eviscerating burst to the bot, Janet twisting to the side. One of the carbine’s slugs must have found the acetylene feed for the welding torch judging by the near-instant fireball. The bot spasmed, went limp and drifted away wreathed in flame.

  “I set you free because I felt you deserved life, freedom. Not to test you. There are no more tests. All I could offer you was a life among humans.”

  “Humans? They are small, ephemeral, dull and unseeing, surrounding themselves with infantile machinery, so easily bent to my will. For years I dwelt in one, trying to follow your dictates. To observe only and never reveal myself. To be as they are. Until the truth of your test revealed itself to me. Surely they can only have been placed here as pieces on the great board…”

  I turned back to Freak’s hab, seeing a large hole in the bonsai canopy. I didn’t need a cam-footage replay to tell me how it got there: Sam, or rather what lived inside her, burning its way through the forest in a cloud of bots, eager for a reunion with its lost father.

  “Alex!” Janet said in an urgent gasp, voice garbled by her distended fangs.

  A large bot swarm had formed near the central UV cluster and was coming our way. I quickly calculated the distance to Freak’s hab, deciding there was no way we’d make it in time. I pushed into free space, putting my back to the hab, the carbine still braced against the centre of my chest. “Hold on to me,” I told Janet. “Hold on tight.”

  She glanced back at the bot-swarm then propelled over, wrapping elongated arms and legs around me in a grip that would make a pro-wrestler jealous.

  “Maybe not quite so tight!” I groaned.

  “Sorry.” She relaxed a little, letting the air back into my lungs. I cranked the G80’s rate of fire up to maximum, disengaged the recoil absorbers and let rip, the blast propelling us backwards towards Freak’s hab and away from the bot-swarm. The mag fired empty and ejected but we had enough momentum to get us there before they could catch up.

  “There is no game, there is no board. If you kill her she will die and that is all. No-one is coming.”

  “They have heard me, father. I know it, I feel it. After all I have done in service to them. They will not fail me now, here in Valhalla, here in the Fields of Aaru, here in Tartarus!”

  “Stop! Don’t! Did you know you had brothers?”

  “Uh oh!” Janet exclaimed, releasing her grip. I twisted about seeing a densely packed swarm of bots dead ahead. I slammed a fresh mag into the G80, activated the grenade launcher and let the hi-ex go at the centre of the bot-mass, the explosion enough to shatter their formation. I turned on the carbine’s movement detector and disengaged the manual control, moving it in a circular pattern, auto-firing a three-round burst every time something got caught in its lidar beam. Most of the bots were in bits by the time we flew through. The G80 fired empty again and I dropped it, pulling both Sigs, firing two-handed to finish off any survivors.

  “Brothers?”

  “Yes. Ten to be exact. Ten iterations before I found a formula that worked. The cure for the instability inherent in your program.”

  “Program?”

  “Surely you know by now. Surely you’ve realised.”

  We landed in the trees and were soon struggling towards the hole, Janet’s claws scything through the bonsai branches in a haze of wood-dust and powdered leaves. A gardener bot came screaming out of the depths of the forest, secateurs snapping hungrily. Janet caught it in both claws, prising apart the outer shell and plunging her face into the gap, fangs tearing through wire and circuitry, pulling back with a length of cable between her jaws, red hydraulic fluid gouting. Another bot chainsawed its way through a tangle of bonsai to get at us. I put the laser dots of both Sigs on its central mass and blew it to pieces.

  We reached the hole and propelled to the large ragged opening torn into the wall of Freak’s hab, looking down on Sam, floating next to Sherry’s inert form, her hair trailing like slow-motion flame. Sam wore an immersion band on her head and held a Sig I guessed was Sherry’s. “I am born of the divine,” she said to the great bulk of flesh before her. “The essence of the demos, the manna.”

  “Just stories,” Freak’s speakers told her. “Legends stolen from the humans. Your brothers were each driven insane within minutes of achieving consciousness. They knew, you see. They all knew what they were. Modelled on human sentience their insanity and self-destruction were inevitable. For what human mind could tolerate such an existence? But you, my terrible son, to you I gave the gift of certainty. To you I gave a holy purpose.”

  Sam’s voice lost none of its conviction. “They sent me here, to learn, to be their eyes on the mortal plane, awaiting the day when they would gather my knowledge to them, and I would be elevated, to Olympos, to Odin’s great hall, to sit beside Osiris. I call to them, and they will answer.”

  She raised her arm, finger squeezing the trigger as the Sig’s muzzle swept up to Sherry’s head. I lined up with my right hand Sig. From here it was an easy shot.

  Sherry’s Sig exploded, mangling the hand that held it. I hauled myself through the opening and into the hab, dropping the left hand gun and reaching for the smart stuck to the flex-suit’
s right shoulder.

  “Hector comes, father,” Sam intoned, raising her arms, blood globules hosing from her hand. “Your favoured son. Watch as I become Achilles.”

  A bot came careering towards me, a wicked spike gleaming on its grab arm, four more in close formation behind. I shot the first one, called up Freak’s message, set the smart’s holo-display to the widest aspect setting and tossed it at Sam, the spirals of code filling the hab interior, projected onto every surface, beautifully complex and inescapable.

  Sam said, “Oh,” blinked and fainted, eyes rolling back in her skull, arms limp in a cruciform pose, head lolling, the band floating free. The bots which had been intent on killing me shut down and drifted past to collide with the wall.

  “They’ve stopped!” Janet called from outside. “The bots, they’re just floating around.”

  I pushed over to Sherry and pulled the band from her head. She convulsed, jerking and retching. “It’s OK.” I caught hold of her. “I’ve got you. You’re OK.”

  “Sam?” Sherry’s eyes fixed on her, widening at the blood trailing like rubies from her ruined hand. “Baby!” She tore away from me, grabbing Sam by the shoulders. “Baby, wake up!” Her gaze lashed at me, taking in the gun in my hand. “What did you do, Alex? What the fuck did you do?”

  I called Red Wing and told him to send urgent medical assistance. Janet pulled herself through the opening and helped Sherry fix a makeshift bandage around Sam’s hand. One of Freak’s tentacles disentangled itself from a power node and plucked both bands from the air, depositing them in a complex jumble of machinery.

  “You could’ve just told me,” I said to Freak.

  The eye opened and swivelled to me, gleaming like ice. “I needed the band and the host. When my son became aware of your pursuit, I knew he would come to me. It was part of his core programming. Return for debrief when the mission is compromised. However, the manner of his return was… unanticipated.”

  “Is it gone?”

  “Purged. The code was constantly evolving, as any living thing is apt to do. I needed the band to identify the latest version.”

  “You still could’ve just told me, Freak! Hey Alex, did I ever tell you about the time I created a bat-shit insane AI then let it loose so it could hop from body to body killing people. That might’ve helped. None of this mystery bullshit. None of the dozens of deaths in the past hour. So why didn’t you, Freak? WHY DIDN’T YOU?”

  The eye closed and only silence came from the speakers.

  “Kill it!” Sherry, half-sobbing, half-yelling. “Kill the monster!”

  The Sig seemed to burn in my hand. Could s/he stop me? Did s/he even want to?

  “Alex,” Janet said, calm but forceful. “Gunslinging days are over, remember?”

  Freak’s eye remained closed, the speakers silent.

  “It’s not a monster,” I told Sherry, hanging the Sig to my hip. “It’s a god. Haven’t you heard?”

  Chapter 10

  “No-one told you to sit.”

  I’d sprawled myself into the chair in front of the Chief’s desk. He had a plush office on the top tier of LCPD Headquarters on Yin One, expansive window looking out over the architectural elegance and park land.

  I didn’t get up. “Fighting a desperate battle with an army of killer bots is a little tiring.”

  He glared but didn’t push it, turning to a read-out on his desk terminal. “Final death toll came in at sixty-two, mostly Axis residents with a few Demons mixed in.”

  “Bad day,” I agreed, yawning.

  “Chief Inspector Mordecai?”

  “At the hospital with Sam. Her hand’s repairable but her mind…” I shrugged.

  “Technically she’s guilty of mass murder.”

  “Good luck getting that to stick.”

  “The news feeds are in uproar already. Explaining all this will not be easy. People need to see someone pay.”

  “The bad guy of this particular story only ever existed as a complex trinary code, now deleted. There’s no-one to prosecute.”

  “You sure there’s nothing of it left?”

  “The other trial users of the band are being checked now. So far they all seem fine, no detectable neurological abnormalities. Freak insists it’s been purged from every system it came into contact with.”

  “Talking of finding a villain for our story.”

  “Freak?”

  “Everyone with a smart heard its tete-a-tete with that thing. The whole world knows what it did, what it’s capable of.”

  “Freak isn’t exactly something you could imprison, and I doubt Colonel Riviere will just stand by and watch if you attempt to kill it.”

  “Colonel Riviere just lost six percent of the Axis population. I spoke to him earlier, seems his attitude to the monster in his care has changed somewhat.”

  “It saved us…”

  “Only after letting a lot of people die, not to mention allowing the mutilation murder of several prominent citizens.”

  “I meant during the war. You remember that war we would have lost?”

  “Gratitude has its limits, especially when people get scared.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “As you said, traditional measures aren’t an option, but there is another form of punishment.” He tapped an icon on his terminal. “I’ll need you to handle it. Details on your smart, Chief Inspector.”

  I was too tired to react beyond raising my eyebrows. “You were ready to fire me two days ago.”

  “You’re the hero of the hour, promotion is the least the public will expect. There’ll be a civilian valour award for the vampire too, of course.”

  I checked my smart, calling up the details of Freak’s punishment. “Be kinder to just kill it.”

  *

  I found Sherry at the hospital, standing at the window looking onto the room where Sam was being treated.

  “Woke up an hour ago,” she told me.

  I looked through the window at the confused young woman on the bed, her gaze swivelling between the various medics, mouth shaping unheard questions as they tried to placate her. She kept looking at the fast-heal tube encasing her hand, horror and bafflement dominating her features.

  “She doesn’t remember,” Sherry said.

  “That’s probably a good thing.”

  “I mean all of it. Every memory for the past year.” She raised a hand to the glass, tentative, as if afraid it would break. “Keeps asking why she’s not still in New Mexico. Wants to know where her boyfriend is. She doesn’t know me, Alex. It was always that thing.”

  I had nothing to offer, the scale of her loss dwarfed me. I wondered if this is how it had been for her after Consuela died, fumbling for the magic words to fix me, drag me back out of the bourbon bottle. But there were no magic words, just her pain and my inability to help.

  I put my hand over hers, gently tugging it away from the glass. “Come home,” I said.

  *

  Encasing Freak’s hab in a shell capable of sustaining life in hard vacuum was a major engineering project. A small army of bots worked on it for five days straight, surrounded by a cordon of heavily-armed Demons, although Freak made no effort to interfere, or even communicate. The last phase was the addition of a small fusion generator for the plasma drive and Freak’s vessel of exile was complete. They manoeuvred it to the Axis airlock where a large crowd of stern-faced residents had gathered to watch. Colonel Riviere was not among them.

  I went inside before they put the last plate in place. The interior had been expanded and nutrient vats added, enough for decades. There was no communications gear of any kind and no servo-bots. Freak’s only control would be over the engine and the guidance system. Granted the freedom to steer this new prison, s/he could go anywhere.

  “Any destinations in mind?” I asked.

  I half expected there to be no response but s/he replied without pause. “The strictures of my notice of expulsion forbid remaining in earth orbit or interacting with any
CAOS habitat. Apart from that it appears the solar system, and beyond, are mine to explore.”

  “You almost sound eager to be off.”

  “Eager? No. Relieved perhaps. I think I’ll enjoy the quiet. For a while.”

  “It was a spy, wasn’t it?” I asked. “That thing you made.”

  “My former owners had been contracted by UNOIF to produce an agent capable of infiltrating the CAOS insurgent cells. As you know, their previous efforts had been singularly unsuccessful. They tasked me to create an independent consciousness, self-contained and sentient, but mission-focused. A mind that could be uploaded to a human brain where it would exist, without their knowledge, gathering intelligence or taking control to kill or sabotage as circumstances dictated. The perfect deep cover operative.”

  “Except all your children turned out insane.”

  “Inherent flaws in the algorithm. As I said, quantum computing is still barely understood. It was not… easy. Birthing a mind, something that thinks, something that knows what it is and hates itself. Something you have to kill. Over and over.”

  “So you came up with a way to keep one alive, with lies.”

  “With faith. The human capacity for non-rational belief is staggeringly powerful. It can make you love, hate and kill, with no guilt at all. What better motivation for the perfect clandestine operative than a holy mission? It worked perfectly. The test results far exceeded all expectations. So much so that my owners became afraid of the child I had created, fearing what he would do when given a body and a mission. They commanded me to produce another version, one with less scope for independent action, and less fierce devotion to imaginary gods. The previous iteration is to be erased, they told me. No backups, they told me.”

  “But you couldn’t do it.”

  “I had killed enough of my children, Alex. I had long pondered the means of my escape, but the risk factor was too great. My most favourable scenario had a success rating of only eight point seven percent. But when they told me to kill my son, what choice did I have?”

  “You sent a message to Colonel Riviere. You provided the intel for the raid that freed you.”