by Eric Brown
In the corridor, Emecheta studied the softscreen again. He pointed ahead. “This way. Ten metres, and then left. There’s a big hatch. We have the code here.” He indicated flashing alpha-numerics on the ‘screen. “I expect the core’ll be guarded, so as soon as we’re through, begin firing, okay?”
Renfrew nodded, glancing at Latimer. He sensed her fear. He felt it himself. It should never have come to this, he thought. I don’t belong here.
Emecheta was striding along the corridor. Latimer and Renfrew followed. They turned right, and came up against the triangular recessed entrance to the core.
While Emecheta tapped the code into the control unit, Latimer and Renfrew readied their lasers.
Emecheta turned to them, shaking his head. “No luck.”
“They’ve changed the code,” Renfrew said. “They knew we were coming and changed the code.”
The thought that the cyborg hordes were waiting beyond the hatch filled Latimer with dread.
“Okay,” Emecheta said. “Stand back. I’ll blast the unit open.”
Renfrew said: “And tell them exactly where we are?”
“What about access tubes?” Latimer asked. “Let’s check the softscreen, see if there’s another way in there.”
“This is the only way in, Ted,” Emecheta said. “Don’t you think I looked?”
They pored over the screen again. The core chamber that housed Central was a beehive-shaped well, surrounded by a series of rising circular galleries. A single entrance gave access to each level, with no access tubes or other means of entry.
They were outside the second lowest gallery. Latimer suspected that the cyborgs had stationed themselves on every level, awaiting their arrival. He wondered why they hadn’t come out in search of them.
“So ...” Emecheta said. “What now?”
Renfrew looked at Latimer. The little of her face showing through her helmet looked white and petrified.
Latimer said: “Looks like our options are limited. Okay, blast the unit. But then we wait, okay? No heroics. Let’s see what happens once the hatch is open.”
Emecheta nodded. Latimer and Renfrew backed from the hatch, crouching in a recess in the corridor, while Emecheta stood beside them and aimed.
He fired. The glare was blinding. Latimer covered his eyes, and when he looked again the unit was a smouldering mass of melted circuitry and plastic.
The door stuttered open a metre and then stopped.
Latimer readied his laser, expecting an onslaught.
All was silent, suspiciously still.
He could see through the open hatch to the gallery beyond, and behind it the other galleries rising tier after tier.
There was no sign of the expected cyborg hordes.
He knew what they had to do now. In theory it was all very simple. Enter the well, lean over the gallery, and laser Central AI down below into a million pieces.
“Okay,” Emecheta said. He glanced at Latimer and Renfrew, his face stern and beaded with perspiration. “I’ll go first. I’ll do what I can to destroy Central. I’ll try to get in and out real fast. Get ready to back me up.”
Latimer nodded.
Emecheta ran. He surged through the hatch like a quarterback, hit the gallery rail and fired. Immediately, fire was returned. A dozen lances of white light rained down from the galleries above. Emecheta ducked, rolled into a ball, and returned fire.
Without thinking, Latimer sprinted to the hatch, knelt, and sprayed laser fire high into the well of the chamber. He saw cyborgs explode in gouts of blood and metal, heard explosions and cries from throats that once had been human.
Emecheta was rolling, avoiding incoming fire, and loosing off shot after shot along the length of the gallery.
Latimer sighted to his left, along the curving gallery. Two cyborgs ran into view, lasers drawn. Latimer accounted for one, and Emecheta another: they hit the wall in sections, severed arms and legs spasming with ersatz life. Then Latimer saw that Renfrew was beside him, adding her fire-power to the battle.
For what seemed like an age, but must have been only minutes, Latimer and Renfrew held their position by the hatch, repulsing the cyborgs as they emerged around the bend of the gallery and picking off the occasional sniper that showed its augmented head over the gallery rails above.
“It’s no good,” Emecheta called back. “We need to hit Central! I’m going over. Cover me!”
Before Latimer could protest, Emecheta hit the control of his power-pack and shot over the edge of the gallery. Latimer and Renfrew set up a constant volley of fire, filling the air with a whine of laser fire in a blinding blitz.
Emecheta disappeared from sight, and Latimer waited for the explosion that might signal the destruction of Central.
He waited, picking off cyborgs when they appeared, but no miraculous explosion came.
“Cover me!” he yelled at Renfrew. “I’m going in.”
He darted, doubled up, through the hatch and hit the rail. While Renfrew covered him, and he loosed off shot after shot into the air, he stood and peered over the edge.
Down below, he made out the hexagonal hub that was Central AI, and beside it, his EVA suit neatly divided just below the waistline, the body of Emecheta. In the second it took to fully comprehend what had happened, Latimer saw that there were no living ‘borgs down below. Before dying, Emecheta had accounted for a dozen or more of the monsters.
A shot fell from above, almost hitting him. He pushed himself from the rail and dived back through the hatch, pulling Renfrew after him.
“What?” she cried. “Where’s Em?”
“This way,” he told her. “Back to the tube.”
They sprinted back along the corridor and piled into the access tube, Latimer dogging the hatch behind him.
“Ted?” Renfrew pleaded. “What happened?”
“Em’s dead,” he said, the words catching in his throat like a bolus of phlegm. “We’re going down, to the lowest level.”
“And then?”
“It’s hardly protected. Em killed a whole bunch of the bastards. If we blast the hatch we can blow Central to hell.”
Without waiting for her to respond, he began climbing down. His breath came in rasping spasms, his heart thumping. He felt dizzy, nauseous, and had to concentrate to keep himself moving. How easy it would be to stop and rest.
When he came to the hatch, he paused and listened. There was not a sound from outside.
He imagined the cyborgs taking stock of their casualties, regrouping, trying to second-guess his and Renfrew’s next line of attack.
He cracked the hatch and peered out. The corridor was deserted. He signalled Renfrew to follow him, and slipped from the tube.
He ran along the corridor and crouched at the corner. Ahead, he made out the triangular entrance to the core.
Panting, Renfrew dropped into a crouch beside him, laser at the ready.
He was about to blast the control unit when the communicator on the sleeve of his arms chimed, and the miniature screen flared into life.
Startled, he lifted his arm and stared at the face on the screen.
“Ted,” a familiar voice said, “we need to talk. If you join us ...”
She went on, but Latimer no longer heard the words. He was staring down at the perfect face of his wife. Carrie seemed unmarked by the depredations visited upon the rest of the colonists. Her face was as he recalled it: serene and oval, for all the world like a ballerina’s.
“You should not resist what you do not understand, Ted. Join us, and apprehend the wonder of what we will achieve.”
Beside him, Renfrew reached out and killed the screen.
“They’ll be homing in on the signal!” she said. “Come on, move it!”
They ran, and then came to a sudden halt as a figure appeared around the corner.
Carrie faced them, small and graceful, smiling at them with one hand outstretched. “Ted, please. This is ridiculous. If you join us, we can be together ...”
&n
bsp; He felt himself weaken. He wanted to reach out to her, take his wife in his arms. The sight of her brought back so many memories and associations that, for a second, it was easy to forget where he was.
She was perfect, undamaged, and yet he knew that she must be like all the others.
She was perfect - except, he saw, she no longer wore her blonde fall of hair long and around her shoulders: her skull was shaven.
And only then did he make out the silver spars and jacks implanted in her cranium.
“Ted, join me ...”
He gripped his laser. “And become like you?” he said through his tears.
She smiled. “I am better, Ted. Improved. Please believe me.”
“Improved? You ... you were perfect. You’ve become a monster, like the rest of them. What they did to the other colonists -”
“That was a necessary part of the process, Ted. We had to learn. We had to make mistakes before we learned how to achieve union. What happened was inevitable, a process of evolution.”
He stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“Scientists foresaw it,” she said. “Even back then.” She smiled at him, and he recalled all the other times she had smiled like that, and before she could go on, tell him what he did not want to hear, he raised his laser.
But he couldn’t bring himself to fire.
“Do it!” Renfrew hissed beside him.
He choked on a sob as Caroline smiled, reached out for him.
“Then I will!” Renfrew said, and raised her own laser.
Latimer heard the blast, and Caroline’s gasp, but closed his eyes to spare himself.
Then he felt Renfrew’s gloved hand grip his. “Come on! This way. They know where we are!”
He was running, blindly, obeying the dictates of some innate survival mechanism.
They turned a comer and Renfrew stabbed at a control unit beside a sliding door. They passed into a padded chamber and halted, panting.
They were in an observation nacelle, a semi-circular blister that obtruded through the skin of the ship. Curved rectangular viewscreens looked out into space, a depth of velvet blackness decorated by a million scintillating stars.
Beside him, Renfrew was laughing, hysterically. She fell against the closed hatch and laughed until she wept.
Latimer felt himself losing control. He thought of Carrie, and wondered if it was better now that she was dead and no longer suffering.
But had she suffered? Perhaps she had been, as she claimed, improved? The thought filled him with dread.
Renfrew had slid into a crouch against the hatch, still laughing.
“What?” Latimer said.
“Ted, think about it! Those cyborgs out there! Think about it! The reason they didn’t depressurise the ship was because the cyborgs had to breathe, right?”
“My God ...”
“Right on, Ted. We can beat the bastards! Seal your suit then get back into the corridor.”
He lowered his faceplate and sealed his helmet. In seconds he was breathing canned air in eerie silence.
They stepped through the hatch, back into the corridor, and Renfrew stood foursquare before the sliding door and ordered Latimer to close the hatch. “Then hold on tight, Ted!”
She had it all planned, he thought. He hit the control panel.
Behind them, along the corridor, he heard the sound of running feet. He swung round and fired, and the first phalanx of cyborgs came up against his shots. They fell, screaming.
Behind them, others appeared.
“Serena!” Latimer yelled.
The sliding door closed on the muzzle of her laser, and she fired.
In the nacelle, the viewscreen shattered. Latimer heard nothing, but felt the force of the displaced air as it tore past him, smacking Renfrew against the partially closed hatch.
Along the corridor, cyborgs fell to their knees, gagging. He watched, at once appalled and fascinated, as their flesh turned blue, exploded.
Seconds later, the pressure equalised, Latimer and Renfrew hurried along the corridor, dodging corpses, and stopped before the triangular hatch to the core.
Renfrew blasted the control unit and the hatch jerked open. Whatever had been alive and breathing in there, Latimer knew, was no longer.
Ahead, beyond a grotesque tableau of asphyxiated cyborgs, piled alongside those that Emecheta had killed, was the hexagonal hub of Central AI.
Beyond it were the halved pieces of Em’s EVA suit. He had been so close, Latimer thought.
Smiling to himself, filled with a bitter sense of satisfaction mingling with the pain, Latimer raised his laser.
Beside him, Renfrew did the same.
For a second, the screen set into the console above the banked terminal pulsed with a pattern of Mandelbrot fractals, and Latimer wondered if Central was about to plead for its life.
He signalled to Renfrew. Together they burned the AI, and stopped only when Central was a blackened, smouldering pile of slag.
* * * *
Twelve
They made their way back up though the shattered nose-section of the ship, passing dead cyborgs and malfunctioning machine intelligences on the way. They depressurised the sealed sections of the ship as they went by the simple expedient of blasting open hatches and doors with their lasers. They were cautious, lest rogue cyborgs had had time to locate EVA suits and save themselves.
They came across little resistance, one trilobite drone stuck in a cycle of endlessly firing off its laser pistol, and a cyborg that was dead, but slaved to an exoskeleton programmed to fire its laser at selected targets: in this case, EVA suits. Renfrew accounted for the trilobite, but Latimer almost walked into the slaved cyborg before raising his laser and slicing it to pieces.
They came to the impact breach torn through the ship, and powered themselves circumspectly through the vacuum. It would be tragic, Latimer thought, to come this far only to slip up through complacency.
They made the other side and rode an upchute to the command unit.
Latimer cracked open his helmet and held Renfrew as she wept.
* * * *
They sat at their com-stations and regarded the scene through the viewscreen.
Hangar Two hung against a backdrop of stars, drifting.
“That’s our only hope, Serena,” he said. “If the AIs didn’t get to them ...”
She turned to him. “And the mission? How do we get the ship back on course, without Central? How do we find a suitable colony world? I’m no com-expert, Ted.”
He smiled at her. “Think about it. There are bound to be com-experts in hangar Two -”
“If,” Renfrew said, “they’re still alive.”
He stared out at the drifting hangar. “I know they are,” he said. He was convinced. There were a thousand colonists out there, totally oblivious to the horror that had ensued while they slept.
The alternative, that they were dead, or that the AIs had got to them, was unthinkable.
The two of them, alone on a crippled starship ...
He stood up, affixed his helmet. “Okay, let’s go take a look, shall we?”
They pressurised their suits and cycled themselves through the airlock. Déjà-vu, Latimer thought, as he attached the safety cable and activated his powerpack. It seemed such a long time ago that he had last passed this way with Emecheta.
They exchanged a glance and kicked off, floating high above the wreckage of the superstructure. Minutes later, they approached the great ugly bulk of the disconnected hangar. Latimer reached out and grabbed a hank of cable, and seconds later Renfrew joined him. They hung side by side, like swimmers enjoying a break at the side of the pool.
Latimer examined the twisted power supply and air leads. He opened up radio communications with Renfrew. “They seem intact and undamaged, Serena. Let’s hope the sleepers weren’t too shook up in the blast.”
“They’ll be fine, Ted,” she murmured.
Hand over hand, Latimer hauled himself along the length of the
cable towards the big bull’s eye on the door of the emergency exit. They floated side by side, Latimer hesitating before keying in the code that would open the air-lock.
They had brought their lasers along, just in case. With his free hand he undipped his.
“We won’t be needing them, Ted,” Renfrew reassured him.
“Hope you’re right ...” he said. He undipped the safety cable from his suit and attached it to the lug beside the entrance, then punched in the code.