Now he knew why he’d thought something was different about them.
And he’d use every resource at his disposal to get them to safety. Back to Roddy. Back home.
The robot compartmentalized the search for Mary and the children to a background process, forgetting it in his fashion, and brought a second process to his primary computational focus.
He’d managed to drop cameras everywhere in the world and feed them back into his network, and if he was truly human with human emotions, the batch he focused attention on now would upset him. He’d slipped away in his fashion on that trip to the island, claiming he’d wanted to partake of the general gluttony and hedonism available to the elites of Phoenix, of which he claimed to be. It was a standard method he’d used. But what made that place memorable wasn’t the pursuits he’d claimed to enjoy, nor the satisfaction he felt—in his manner—at the successful linking of another monitoring node to his network. No, it was the sheer evil he’d seen there, in a mock city built in an otherwise uninhabited part of the island. They’d transported there many suspected spies and traitors against the Phoenix mission—some correctly labeled, others not—and ran a live test of the Ravagers against them. Watching that day was a brilliant and resourceful former Special Forces member named Wesley Cardinal, whose contributions to a cause he thought altruistic made the massacre possible. He’d watched a good man literally lose his mind, and though he’d done what he could to keep the man gainfully employed and out of trouble, he knew he could never delete the memories that had scarred the man to the very depths of his being.
In many ways, he hoped Wesley hadn’t made it out alive after the Ravager activation. It would be a gentler fate.
But if anyone could survive and even thrive in the chaotic environment unleashed, it would be Wesley Cardinal. The old Wesley Cardinal.
In some ways, Micah’s target for his missile loaded with Ravagers and launching the instant the Ravagers were activated was driven by a desire to purge the evil from that island.
It was time to see if that penance by Ravager had been achieved.
His visual processing centers switched inputs to the specific camera clusters on the island, parsing together a series of moving imagery from a set of buildings just off the primary beach used by revelers. The processing unit pieced the imagery together, forming a moving panorama of the locale.
The consciousness module, always active in the background, learning from input data even when conceptually dormant, interpreted the visuals. It pushed a smile to the face of Micah’s body form while the internal robot mind processed the information in its own manner.
The missile had struck its target with deadly accuracy and at the prescribed time, late morning for the locals, when the largest populations would sit upon the dazzling sands and enjoy the picturesque ocean views and the mesmerizing sounds of the crashing waves. He noted the deep crater and the missing missile, no doubt dissolved into a part of the swarm of Ravagers spreading out from the activation point. The dark oozing mass stopped at the waterline, just as coded, but spread out in both directions. To his left would be the larger collection of private beachfront cottages, and to his right would be a collection of piers for those who preferred to travel upon the water than in the air.
There weren’t many people on the beach now. Or, more accurately, they weren’t there in their original forms. He regretted the fact that many innocents—forced here against their will to act as servants but treated more like slaves—would be among the dead. He wondered if they’d consider death a welcome relief from the hands of the cruel masters they served.
The swarm had stopped just after breaching the first row of cottages to his left, and just into the outskirts of the forest to his right. Sheila’s heroic efforts had saved lives, but probably not those of the people she would have preferred.
He switched his attention to the data and output from the new Ravager control system. The now non-lethal Ravager swarms had made excellent progress toward the various destinations he’d commanded. He recognized a problem in his approach: it was visible. While the original code used sunlight to determine the coloring of the killer machines, altering throughout the day and night for maximum visibility, he preferred the opposite. That portion of the code was hidden deeply within the machines, and a cursory glance revealed no trace of its whereabouts. He unleashed one of his smaller problem solving neural network nodes to review the maps and satellite imagery—yes, the Phoenix deployed machines that couldn’t possibly exist by the rules of science they taught to every school child and advanced academic to spy on those same people—and ordered it to find hiding spots for the Ravagers. Dark forest paths with branches ground down to pulp. Cracks and crevices from some ancient earthquake. The shadows between buildings and inside buildings showing no human activity. He wanted the machines as close as possible to the future Elite-occupied territory, ready to ruin their triumphant return to a post-terraformed land they’d just obliterated.
He just couldn’t reveal the machines’ whereabouts first. He added another code network in, ordering it to thin out the large swarms as best they could as they sought hiding places, disguising his attentions from those watching up above.
He wasn’t the only one who could look at satellite imagery.
And some of the enemy was high above the surface and had no need of satellites to see the seared, barren landscapes covered by the highly prominent deliverers of apocalyptic destruction.
With any luck, his enemies would think he was simply destroying the old Ravagers, rather than hiding and repurposing them.
What was the human expression? Fingers crossed? He allowed his body form to do just that, not understanding the expression or gesture, but allowing him the idle amusement as he tried to save what was left of the world before destroying those who’d sent the world to its current near-terminal condition.
His final task for the moment involved his sphere. It was a gift of sorts from his creator, one of the old machines, a nearly indestructible engineering marvel that seemed to violate every law of physics ever invented… and yet it worked beautifully. The ship had a mind of sorts, not unlike his own, and one could give it voice commands via a remote-control device without much detail, and it could carry them out as well as any human might. The only problem was that he didn’t have the remote. He didn’t know if it remained aboard the ship—that memory hadn’t been transmitted before his Will Stark body form’s demise—or if he’d taken it with him when he left the ship for the dramatic and noisy encounter with Oswald Silver he’d planned, a diversion to keep attention away from Sheila until she could locate the control server.
He smiled. He knew the frequency for communicating with that ship, one he knew the Phoenix systems didn’t monitor. He knew because he’d hacked the control systems once while aboard and whitelisted that specific frequency, essentially forbidding the monitoring systems aboard the floating city from checking on him and any covert communications he might make while there.
His ship had no such limitations.
He opened a channel to the ship to give it new orders, and the ship accepted his commands.
He’d told Sheila, in that cryptic note, to be at AA23 by nine o’clock that evening. He hoped when she saw the familiar ship she’d understand that she’d need to get aboard. But he knew she’d try to get there at precisely nine; any earlier, any extended time spent in the same spot, risked exposure.
He decided she could get aboard the ship in about five minutes. It would recognize her and let her aboard, though it would thwart boarding efforts of any of the others there.
And so he told the ship that at five minutes past nine, it should detonate what Ashley had dubbed a compression bomb, emitting waves that vastly increased the pressure in the space just beyond the ship, and expanding outward. The impact on that docking bay—built to exist against the almost pressureless void of space—would likely be disastrous, but it solved the problem of the tractor beam. He could get Sheila aboard, but without rel
easing the tractor beam brake, he couldn’t get her home.
He needed her back here. If she had perished during her mission—or worse, after she’d realized he’d closed the portal down—he still needed his ship back. He couldn’t rely on portal doors any longer, and he knew he’d need to either head to the East to help with any new Ravager outbreaks there, or back to the space station, to wreak havoc and vengeance upon those who’d start this, an act of retaliation that might be the human equivalent of frustration for a man-robot who’d known what was coming but could not, due to his coding limitations, act out to stop it at all.
He just hoped that this release of his pent-up frustrations, in the form of the compression bomb that would kill many in the floating city, didn’t also kill the only person there he cared about.
—7—
SHEILA CLARKE
SHE'D WATCHED HER CITY evaporate away like snow melting in the presence of blazing sunlight.
She'd come to accept that the millions who lived in her beloved Lakeplex were dead, disintegrated down into raw materials for the swarming Ravager mob.
She knew that, outside the door of this supply room, there lived thousands here aboard this floating, monstrous city, any of whom could discover her presence and turn her in to those who'd end her life.
And yet it was only now, only when she knew her escape route to Eden was gone, only when she knew that this technological marvel would become her tomb, that Sheila Clarke finally felt a sense of true isolation. Only now did she realize just how alone she was, not just here in this room, but in the entire universe.
The entrapment here was bad enough.
But the note... the note could have come only from Micah. If he'd left it here, where he'd once set up the portal door, it meant he'd known the door was inactive. There was no reason, to her knowledge, to think that the Eden side or this one had lost power.
Which meant the closed portal wasn’t an accident.
Micah had shut it down. On purpose. Knowing it would leave her stuck here.
That's what hurt the most.
It hurt because it dredged up feelings she’d felt since the day of the Ravager activation, the day she first thought the man she’d considered a mentor and friend might want her dead, might be using her to achieve some nefarious ends, and would terminate her the instant she was of no further use to him. Learning his secret—that he was a very humanlike robot, not an actual human—had done nothing to assuage those frayed nerves over time, especially given the constant chaos since.
It was chaos that kept from wondering if a robot trying to act human had mastered the human art of lying and deception, to wonder if she’d been conned by a machine.
And she still didn’t have time to make that determination, because, thanks to the robot, she had to figure out how to leave this place and go back to the beautiful island.
Where that same robot lived.
No. She had to stop this worrying and had to get back to surviving.
She took a deep breath, one that she silenced quickly, lest the sound attract the attention of any keen-eared passersby. She was, after all, still quite detectable by the eyes and ears of the human and machine variety. She fixed that issue, reforming the nano exoskeleton, and this time she made certain to command that her armor include soundproofing.
Thus prepared, she checked the corridor outside the room and slipped outside, rising into the air before anyone walked by. She found her mind wandering and her actions happened without conscious thought, until she was startled back to full awareness by the sound of a door clicking closed.
It was only then that she realized she’d made her way back to the room of her ancient ancestor, Ashley Farmer, the woman who’d created the robot that might be trying to save her life and that of the world, or possibly trying to kill her in the most drawn out and spectacular fashion possible.
The stress hit her, and here, without risk of discovery, she let the exoskeleton evaporate and excreted the pent-up emotion and fear and anger in the form of therapeutic tears that coalesced into little rivulets coursing down her cheeks. The tiny rivers flowed until she had nothing left inside.
Sometimes you just needed that emotional release to get yourself going again, and she found that the tears were cathartic.
When the tears stopped, she wiped her face dry on her sleeve and searched for a tissue to clear her nose. A second helped complete the drying process, and the thin paper did little to hide the taut determination spreading across her face. It was a characteristic Micah had long stated to be the reason he’d picked her to act as a civilian assistant: she could handle pressure. She could compartmentalize emotion until the opportunity arose to let it out, as she’d just done.
The only time she could recall losing that ability was in the immediate aftermath of the Ravager activation. Given that she was being chased by an expanding ooze that devoured every living and nonliving entity in its path, she thought that was a reasonable exception.
The determination in her face rippled through the rest of her as she crumpled the tissues and tossed them in a wall slot labeled “waste.” She’d fight like hell to stay alive… and do what she could to make the evil residents here rue the day they ever thought eliminating the bulk of the human population was a good idea.
She needed to figure out what Micah’s message meant. Though she still wasn’t certain beyond doubt she could trust the cyborg, she was still alive, often due to his direct action. If he’d wanted her dead, she’d be dead. Since she was still alive, she’d assume there were other extenuating circumstances driving his shutdown of the portal.
And deciphering that note would give her a chance to learn just what those circumstances were.
Her eyes moved back to the maps she’d used to discern the location of the hidden Ravager control server, and she nodded. Her instincts had brought her here, perhaps intuiting that his note gave her a time and a place to be for what might be a rescue attempt. If the 2100 represented a time… then AA23 must be a place.
She went to the map to find that place.
Her eyes scanned the large sheets of paper, trying to simultaneously find something labeled AA23 while figuring out what she might be looking for. Though it was possible Micah had multiple portals to and from the space station, she rather doubted he’d be sending her to another fearing this one had been somehow compromised. And that was likely the reason he’d shut the first one down… a fear that someone other than Sheila would find the activated portal and head through, recognize what that door was, and alert someone like Oswald Silver of its existence.
She took a deep breath. It was a logical decision for him to reach… and if their roles were reversed, it was one she’d make, too.
Admittedly, she couldn’t just reanimate in another artificial body as he could, but it was still the proper military decision. And he could still get her home, because…
She snapped her fingers, realizing what AA23 must be. Micah, decked out as a man called Will Stark, hadn’t gotten her via portal. No, he’d flown that silvery sphere here, and he hadn’t flown it back home because he’d been shot and killed. That sphere had gotten him here, and it could take her home.
AA23 was where he’d parked that machine.
The note meant he’d force the ship to fly home at 2100. She’d need to make sure she was inside by then.
She rummaged back through the stack of maps, looking for anything that might resemble large garages open to the vast emptiness of space.
She stabbed her finger at the paper when she found them, specifically at the one called AA23, and memorized the surrounding landmarks. It wasn’t difficult; the spot wasn’t far from where “Will Stark” held his fateful showdown with Oswald Silver.
Her eyes flicked to the digital clock. She had twelve hours until the ship departed from docking bay AA23. Twelve hours to explore this space station inside her invisible cocoon, safe from harm and detection, and to learn its secrets.
A nasty smile curled her lips. She als
o had twelve hours to leave her mark before she departed forever. Her face fell as she realized that a permanent departure wasn’t necessarily a good thing. She pushed the thought from her mind. Be positive. Unleash chaos. Pull them away from the docking bays. Get inside the ship and trust Micah to get her back home, outside the control of the monsters running this place.
She pursed her lips, thinking, then started rummaging through drawers and cabinets and boxes, looking for items that weren’t maps or mapmaking tools.
After a thorough search, she sighed loudly, exasperated. There was nothing here she could use for the plan forming in her head. She’d need to get the supplies elsewhere.
She found a blank sheet of paper and a pen, then scrolled through the maps once more. She drew a rough map of the station on the sheet of paper, marking her starting point and ending point—this room and AA23—along with the location and name of any room suggesting it might contain the types of supplies she needed. It was a good plan, and the work focused her mind on something productive, rather than the hints of gruesome forms of death she might suffer if she wasn’t aboard the ship on time.
She noted that there were large swaths of the space station Micah hadn’t marked on his maps. Given the amount of time she still had here, and the amount she’d need to unleash her retaliatory guerrilla strike, she could start in those sections and learn the secrets hidden there before working back to her supply points, launching her attack, and making it to AA23 aboard the ship in plenty of time for the ride home.
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