He opened his mouth to answer out of reflex, but decided against it. Two could play the silent game. He crossed his arms before his chest and leveled his best disapproving look into the Praetor’s eyes while trying hard not to let his nerves show.
“What did you see?” Modulus repeated. He waited several long seconds, then moved to the front door. It opened for him and Praetor Modulus left the house in a burst of cold, dusty-smelling air.
Lina sat up. “If he moves down the street, follow my lead.”
“What do you have in mind?” Cylus asked, watching the Praetor stand in the road through the window. He was staring down it with his arms at his sides.
“I’ve been thinking about how we can get out of here,” she responded. “These houses are Solahab Mark III’s.”
“Solahab, that’s Dorsky’s barony,” he said. “How does that help us?”
“They come with a specialized first aid kit, usually kept in the utility closet.” Her blue eyes darted around the room. When she found what she was looking for she pointed at a narrow doorway between the dining area and the kitchen behind them. “Those kits have emergency reboot nanos in them.”
“Emergency reboot?” He frowned. “How do you know all this?”
“I’m a Gaian Evolutionary,” she said. “We’re sort of the espionage wing of the faith.”
“What?” He didn’t understand. How could a religion centering around worship of nature have an espionage wing? “I thought you said you weren’t a spy.”
“I’m not a spy for Zalor or any other baron,” she said. “I have training from the Gaians, but I’m not here to spy on you for them. The only person I serve now is you.”
He stared at her for a moment. Was she telling the truth? He already made the decision to trust her, and since then their relationship developed into something deeper than he would have imagined it could. He smiled. She seemed to love him—No, I won’t play this game, he thought. I trust her, and that’s it.
“Tell me about the reboot nanos,” he said.
She relaxed a little and smiled. “The reboot is meant for cerebral implants that malfunction on the frontier where medical assistance might be further away than normal,” she replied. “The nanos replace the implant’s OS with a very basic model. We’ll lose our mail and other stored data, but we’ll be free of that thing’s control.” Lina took in a deep breath. “We’ll be able to just climb out a window or the back door after, and maybe we can find Captain Fukui.”
He nodded. “Isn’t it dangerous to do that?”
“There’s some risk, but I don’t see another option unless you want to wait here for whatever Daedalus has in mind?”
He chewed his lip. He heard that if not done properly, reboots could lead to brain damage and worse—but she was right. He didn’t want to sit here staring at the walls and waiting for the Praetor to do whatever it was he intended with them.
Do it. Free yourself, the voice in his thoughts said. It was the same voice that spoke to him when he murdered Vargas and Olivaar. He was concerned that it wasn’t his own, but something reassured him that it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out of here, and that meant doing what Lina suggested.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
“What is the Praetor doing?” she asked.
He looked out the window. “Still standing in the road.”
“Okay, cross your fingers. We’re going to need at least a few minutes to get the kit and set it up. With luck, whatever you saw will give us more than that.” She paused, then added, “What did you see?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The light faded to nothing as Calemni covered the sun like a shroud. Meia watched the street vanish in the curtain of darkness from among the clutter of overturned tables and broken bottles in the bar’s common room. The air still smelled of sour beer even after so much time had passed since the colony died.
“This was where it started.” Vapor drifted up from her mouth. The temperature plummeted at an exponential rate after the eclipse began. Frost was already forming on the inside of the window.
“What started?” Captain Fukui said from behind the bar counter. She was helping Iapetus clear the debris from a trap door between it and the shelves. The room wasn’t that big, but it was still impressive that she heard what Meia whispered to herself.
“This bar is where Kaeden tried to warn me about what was going to happen.” She sighed, thinking about the strangely charming captain. Maybe, as a treat to herself, if she made it out of this, she’d hunt him down and find out if he needed a navigator or copilot. It was a wistful thought born of having many hours where the only activity, apart from surviving when Iapetus first woke her up, was to fantasize about carrying out her original intentions with him. She felt herself blush, and hoped Fukui’s eyes weren’t as good as her ears. When she glanced over to check she found the woman staring at her.
“You were here for the attack? How did you survive? Are there others?”
Meia licked her lips. Iapetus paused in his work, a bundle of broken chair legs in his arms. She gave him a look, finding his interest curious. They didn’t have much time left. Her clock indicated they were down to three minutes before the Praetor’s ship would be in scanning range.
“I haven’t seen anyone since that night. I only survived it because of him.” She pointed at her robotic companion.
“Please, Lieutenant. I do not deserve the credit.” He resumed his labor.
“You do. If you hadn’t thought ahead and downloaded a fragment of yourself into this DS-109 I’d be dead. I owe you my life.” She meant it, though several of her fellow officers would call her mad for suggesting one could owe an AI anything. They had an emotional barrier between themselves and the sentient machines they worked with. She had one too before all of this, but it was erased by what Iapetus did for her.
“I was serving my Lieutenant, nothing more,” he stated. “But thank you.”
A thin smile appeared on her lips.
Fukui gave them each a thoughtful look. “You said there was a nanoweapon called Siren? Did the Brogh attack this colony?”
She sighed. “It wasn’t the Brogh.”
Fukui’s eyebrow rose.
For a moment she considered telling her the whole truth, but realized she shouldn’t let their situational intimacy overwhelm her common sense. Sure, they had a common enemy in the Praetor, and the captain needed her help to get her passengers back, but that didn’t mean anything about what would come after. Meia needed to get off this world, and she needed to put Captain Solus in the shit for what he did. She had no idea if these people would help her with that or try to leave her here. She wasn’t going to take that chance, but there was no need to get so serious with Fukui just yet.
“How about you? How did you come to be here on such an unusual ship?”
Fukui shifted under her gaze. “I can’t talk about it. No one is supposed to know about the ship.”
She tensed. “So what does that mean for me?”
“That will be up to the baron, I guess. I’m sure helping him will strengthen your position.” Fukui’s ears twitched.
“Fair enough.” This was definitely the wrong time for this discussion, so she decided to change the subject. She walked over to the bar and started helping to clear the last of the debris. Her countdown clock expired. The Praetor would know where they were in seconds, though the ship wouldn’t be able to fire on them for another minute or so without destroying half the colony. Since he spared it at their last encounter, she figured there was some reason the Praetor wanted the buildings intact.
“What’s that?” Meia pointed at the moving shapes on her companion’s neck.
Fukui blinked, then touched the collar of her e-suit. “Oh, this? It is an anitat.”
“Looks pretty from what I can tell.” She could only see the top couple of centimeters, but the work did look exquisite. “Anitat” was slang for “animated tattoo,” a fashion that caught on
with the twenty-somethings in recent years. “What’s it of?”
“War,” Fukui answered.
“I’d like to see it sometime,” she said when they squatted down. The trapdoor was an old-fashioned sort, with a metal ring for a handle and no electronic parts.
“What is this?”
“I discovered them about a month ago. There are maintenance tunnels running under the whole colony. They connect a lot of the buildings. I’m guessing some of the residents added their own access hatches after the mains were built, probably for illegal activities.”
“How do you know?” Fukui asked.
“The newer hatches are manual, like this one. The originals are all electronic and controlled from the colony’s central computer.”
“Why are we going in?”
“The Praetor’s ship can’t scan into the tunnel network. Iapetus says it’s because the magnetite content in the rock is too high,” Meia said.
“That is correct.” He grabbed the ring and hauled the four-centimeter thick slab of fastcrete open. A musty, foul smell wafted up from within the darkness below.
Fukui’s nose twitched.
“Sorry about the stink. A lot of the colony’s water and sewer lines run through these tunnels. A few of them have cracked. Ah, also, there are a bunch of bodies down here,” she said.
“I will be okay,” Fukui stated.
“Switch your eyes to active IR. There are no lights down there, and it’s cold as hell.” She did so as she spoke. The rings of her irises lit up with infra-red light, though anyone without the ability to detect it would not see a change. Looking down into the tunnel now revealed it to be squared off, like a long box whose floor rested two-meters below them. The bar’s last proprietor installed a nylon rope-ladder which dangled from the doorway to just above the damp floor.
“Done,” Fukui reported.
“They weren’t meant for human traffic, but we’ll make do.” Meia lowered herself in, feeling the chill of the fastcrete below her soles even through her boots. Ice sickles hung from the thick pipes running along the upper corner of the tunnel, and now that she was inside, the smell was suffocating.
“Ugh,” Fukui said when she climbed down using her tail to stabilize herself.
“At least your breather membrane is working,” Meia said, reaching up to take her helmet from Iapetus. Hers was damaged in the attack, but she put the helmet on anyway, grateful for the small degree of warmth it afforded her head. “You may want to put up your hood now.”
“I am okay. I’m getting used to the smell.”
Iapetus entered the tunnel last, closing the hatch behind him. “Lieutenant, the Praetor’s ship will be able to fire on us in fifteen seconds.”
“I thought you said the ship could not detect us down here,” Fukui said.
“It can’t, but it likely detected us in the building, and there’s nothing to stop it from collapsing the tunnel. I don’t know if the walls will hold up under fire,” Meia said.
“They will not,” Iapetus stated.
“Let’s move.” She led the way at a jog.
“Will this take us to the house?” Fukui asked, referring to the place they found at the end of the street before being forced to retreat to the bar.
“No, there aren’t many hook ups to this tunnel in the residences themselves. There’s an exit nearby—”
She was cut off by a loud, dry snap behind them. All three of them stopped at once and looked back. The hiss of sand striking the floor was interrupted by a solid thud.
Iapetus? Meia messaged. Beside her Fukui’s tail jerked back and forth in the air in time with her twitching ears.
“Seismic scans are consistent with the Praetor’s mass falling from the trapdoor,” he messaged back.
“It’s the Praetor,” she whispered and drew her growler.
Captain Fukui’s eyes went wide, but she drew her gun just the same. “What do we do?”
“First? We run.”
Modulus bolted. The motion was so sudden it took Cylus a moment to realize why he wasn’t staring at the Praetor’s dark form anymore.
“Lina,” he said, turning around.
She was already on her feet standing before the utility closet door. When it refused to open she put her hands against it, braced her legs, and pushed hard enough that the muscles in her body bulged. He was shocked to see just how many appeared beneath her skin, and more shocked when he heard the hydraulics in the door hiss against the pressure. A popping sound followed, and the door slammed open with a loud, metallic snap.
“How strong are you?” he whispered. Now that she wasn’t straining the sudden definition she saw vanished beneath her smooth skin.
“I have genetically engineered muscles and reinforced bones,” she replied, pulling out a box about the size of two thick books laid side by side from the closet. She knelt down on the ground and opened it, retrieving a nanomachine injector from within and loading it with a blue phial. “Not quite sure what’s going to happen when I inject this, but don’t panic. I should be okay in a minute or two.”
“Is there a chance you won’t be?”
“We talked about this already, and it’s worth the risk.” She plunged the injector into her thigh and held it there until the LED indicator on the top flashed to red. “We don’t have time to make sure I’m okay first. We’ve no idea when he’s coming back, so—”
He interrupted her with a raised hand and hurried over to her side. He took the injector and ejected the used phial by twisting the end. The new one was heavy in his hand, and its blue label was covered in warnings written in tiny print. He felt his mouth go dry, but knew she was right. It was now or never, and never meant staying in the house until Modulus was done with them. He couldn’t accept that.
“Do I just—” he started, but when he looked at Lina he saw her eyes closed. Screw it, he thought and loaded the phial. With a deep breath he plunged it into his leg. There was a momentary sting and a tingling sensation as the injector flooded his tissues with nanoscale machines. It was done, there was no going back now. In just a few moments he’d be—
He blinked. Lina was no longer in front of him. The UI overlaying his vision was gray instead of blue, and the chronometer was blinking “15:00” at him.
“Did it work?” he said.
“Yes, we’re free.” Lina answered, drawing his attention to the kitchen. She had several drawers open and an assortment of cooking knives laid out on the counter. “I’m trying to signal Captain Fukui, but so far static has been the only response.”
“How’s that different than before?” he asked, struggling up to his feet. His legs were stiff, as if he’d been sitting on the floor for a long time. Perhaps he had.
“Static,” she said, picking several knives out and stuffing them into her empty gun rig beside a claw hammer. “Before we weren’t even getting that. Plus, I can access the colony computer again. With my access codes I’ve got control of the surveillance and defensive systems.”
“If you erased your UI, how do you have access codes?” He was perplexed. “And did you just say defensive systems?”
“I have an eidetic memory, and yes, I did. There’s not much left of them. Whatever happened here, it made a mess,” she said, her eyes distant. “I think I have Modulus on a visual sensor. He’s going into some low rectangular building with his gun drawn.”
“Captain Fukui?” he asked. If Modulus killed their pilot, they were in trouble. No one could fly the Fukurō-maru but her.
“Could be,” Lina nodded. “There are a few of the colony’s security drones still operational. I think we can help her.”
He nodded, about to suggest they head to the ship when he remembered their purpose for being here. “What about evidence against Zalor? Is there any in the system?”
She frowned in concentration. “A detailed search isn’t returning anything valuable.”
“Did we waste our time coming here?”
Her lips pressed into a tight line. �
��Let’s not give up just yet. Captain Fukui needs our help.”
“You’re right.” He nodded. “Shouldn’t we find our guns?”
“We don’t know where Modulus put them, but we’ve got something better now,” she said.
“We do?” He cocked an eyebrow. Off in the distance he could hear something mechanical thundering its way down the street.
“Yes, a G-2020.”
Chapter Ten
Annihilator 87136, Deep Space
41:2:41-41:2:49 (J2400:3171-3181)
Praetor Athame was in the “top” part of the chair when he entered the cockpit. Nero took a deep breath and felt his shoulder twitch. He didn’t want to directly antagonize Daedalus and the other Praetors, but he wasn’t going to let the machine entity dictate the terms of his life anymore.
“I need to talk to you about our destination. I have to get to Zov to complete my mission. It’s critical.”
“It is secondary to getting you repaired,” she responded.
“I am being repaired. Little by little I’m starting to remember who I was. That’s not damage, that’s me coming back to myself.”
“Your experiment is not yet at an end. Daedalus requires more data from you and the others.” Her purple eyes stared at him with quiet intensity.
“Tough.”
Others? Prospero thought.
Athame rose from her seat, the tails of her Abyssian coat billowed out behind her as she floated towards him. At first he thought she might attack, but she stopped, hovering just on the other side of the doorway. “Tough for you, Praetor Graves.”
“We’ll see.” He frowned. This was not going well. “How detailed are your files on me?”
“I am aware of your complete history,” she responded.
He felt Prospero’s anxiety at what he was about to ask, but he pressed on. “So, since you’re going to have me overwritten anyway, there’d be no harm in telling me a few things, right? Who was I?”
“Nero Alexander Graves, Lieutenant, Star Corps Armored Tactical Aerospace Commando division. You served three tours in the Savorchan Conflict between the years thirty-four and thirty-five Confederate Standard Time. Your personnel file with Star Corps states you were recruited in the Sasstossa system, in the sector of the same name in Confederate Standard Year thirty-two. You entered officer’s training school on Cyronia and graduated with middling grades. You were later promoted during the opening months of the Savorchan Conflict when you lead the charge over—”
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