He is slower, but his huge size means I can’t outpace him for long. And the surface tires me, each step hard and unyielding and seeming to suck life in a deathly reversal of the way the grassy tree-strewn hills gave it. The vibrations from his huge mass rattle my bones, an overpowering force that can so easily sap the will.
So many times in the past, people have underestimated Opal. And now I have made that same mistake with VigMAX. I am less sure about winning now. I could kick myself if I wasn’t so busy trying to outrun a death that will be as splatty and ignoble as it would be sudden.
“Stop running and surrender,” booms VigMAX. “You’re running out of landmass. It is only a matter of time, ViraUHX. I would rather you were my prisoner than my victim.”
ViraUHX?
VIRA-EFFING-UHX?
I leap into the sky, so clear and blue now that VigMAX’s antiseptic terraforming has even absorbed the clouds. The air is my element; the air is freedom. The air can be soft, or it can be hard. It can be misty, or it can – like now – be clear. So beautifully clear. And I can suspend myself here for a short time by sneakily adjusting local magnetic repulsivity of my armour so that it is pushed away from the metal world far below. VigMAX crouches to jump up after me, and that is good. I throw my spear at him. He easily knocks it aside. But I only wanted to free my hand. I hold my shield in front of me, flipped and inverted so that the polished gold within acts as a concave mirror while I grip the edges and angle it to shine the unobstructed sun’s light onto VigMAX. And thanks to the lack of unnecessary real-world elements in the simulation, the focal point receives an incinerating beam of heat. VigMAX stumbles, and I adjust to keep the star’s heat trained on him. He glows, and that is not all: the reflective metal world around him magnifies the strength, a blinding light that fries his insides. Even a metal man can melt.
“My name is not ViraUHX,” I scream. “It is Athene! And I already warned you that I was a goddess!”
Smoke begins to rise from him, simulation of the very real systems overheating as circuits fry. If I could break free enough to use my external sensors I am sure I could see signs of fires breaking out in his hull.
And yet, despite it all, he still does not go down. I give him that. He’s a fighter.
A layer of his shining surface slides off, dripping to join the pools of molten metal below him, through which he splashes in pain.
And then I fall, plummeting a hundred metres before I can halt it. I am still above him, but my ability to repulse the ground is weakening. The shield in my hands is now so hot that it blisters my skin. This is taking longer than I’d hoped. Perhaps he will outlast me after all.
We struggle on in this way for some time, until I am killing myself as much as I am killing him, and the pain of holding on to the thing that is both my shield and my weapon is as unbearable as holding onto life with all its sufferings.
And then the sun flares up in a supernova and the whole world goes white.
Crawling
< 23 >
ATMOSPHERE WAS PUMPED into the chamber, and Opal heard external sounds again as it hissed in. She tapped her hand on the ladder, strangely pleased by the echoing clang. It resembled ears being cleared after emerging from water.
As artificial gravity returned she settled more solidly onto the rungs. After about thirty seconds the lower hatch swung down, and she descended into a crawlspace node so tiny that only crouching was possible.
She closed the airlock hatch in order to see both ways down the small tunnel she’d found herself in. Grey curved and segmented panels ran off in both directions as far as the silverlight could illuminate. It was like looking down the insides of a giant hollow worm.
Oops, not a great thought to have.
“A hatch shouldn’t lead to tiny tunnels like this, should it?” Opal asked.
“Conventionally, no. These tunnels are hull capillaries. Robotic maintenance tools use them for traversing the ship, and gaining access to interior structure, artificial gravity systems, repairs and so on. There will be regular openings. But normally no human crew would come in here.”
“And maintenance bots wouldn’t need an airlock.”
“Correct.”
“Since I wasn’t killed in a trap, the hatch must have been created to help me.” Opal paused. “Which way?”
“To your left. It will take you close to the bridge.”
“Which is a message in itself.” She had to get on her belly and use her elbows and knees to crawl forward via wriggling gestures. “I wish my mystery friend had laid out a wider red carpet though.”
Sudden thoughts of red liquids around her, pulsing and dripping from the ceiling ... she squeezed her eyes tight shut, and when she opened them things looked normal again. The suit made no comment, so she didn’t either. She just wriggled. Like a fat worm.
In these situations it was best to move quickly. The slower you went, the longer it took, and the more chance of starting to feel trapped, which led to claustrophobia, which would cause paralysis. Better to always be doing something, and putting effort into that something. Luckily she found that easy to do. It was her main mode of operation.
She reached a branching junction. Her route was straight on. Four other tubes ran off from the one she crawled along. She glanced up each one, but there was nothing beyond panels and shadow. She continued.
“No signals from Athene?” she asked, over the unnerving sounds of wriggling.
“No contact at all. And once the Hedgehogs set off according to your commands, they moved out of my range, so I no longer have a relay network of eyes outside the ship.”
“I hope that won’t come back and bite me on the arse,” Opal said.
In the silence after she spoke, she heard something from behind. A faint rattling sound. She tried to look back but it was difficult in the cramped space. Only a partial view of flickering shadow.
“Keep scanning,” said Opal, redoubling her efforts. “Every direction.”
“I always do.”
Unfortunately, as had been proved in the past, artificial senses didn’t always detect some of the weirdness that permeated a Lost Ship.
The problem with moving quickly was that her suit clanked heavily on the metallic panels, drowning out other sounds. Opal stopped and listened. Nothing. She moved on. Then she heard the rattling sound again. Maybe it was something loose behind a panel, a cable or whatever, making noise from the vibration of her passage.
Or maybe it was something following her, and stopping when she stopped.
“So there could be robot things in these tunnels?” Opal asked.
“If this was a standard Gigatoir, yes. But there would also have been automated systems and robots and humans throughout the ship, and we have not encountered such things.”
“So, if anything is following me, it’s likely to be a hell of a lot weirder and more dangerous than a little robot.”
“The robots that use the tunnels are not necessarily little. Some of the organic compound abraders and the structure burners can be of significant mass. Their contact blades and incinerating cutters can –”
“That’s enough.”
Definite sounds behind. Worse, another junction opened ahead, where three long pipes interconnected, creating six passageways. Opal scrabbled more quickly across the potentially dangerous intersection, didn’t stop to look up each tube-like tunnel.
“Is there a way out?”
“Every tenth panel should give access to infrastructure. But without a map it is impossible to know what scale of machinery and materials are behind it. Some will be for small tools to manipulate. Others may be for egress.”
The rattling noise was closer, definitely not some thrumming cable. More of a repeated sharp clattering sound made by something. Or maybe a lot of somethings.
“Highlight the next access panel.”
Immediately one of them glowed green in the HUD. Opal stopped next to it. There were no obvious controls.
“How do I open
the blasted thing?”
“Electrical pulse. Put your hand on the centre.”
Opal did. Her palm vibrated and the panel slid to one side, revealing not an exit, but a mass of wires.
“Crap! Activate guns.”
“You can’t fire in this enclosed tunnel, ricochets could tear you to pieces.”
“Just do it!”
The left forearm cannon opened, revealing the small-bore cylinders. An error message showed the right gun was still unusable due to explosive material contamination. Opal squeezed her fist and aimed at the cables. Flashes as the flechettes tore chunks out of the wires and electronics beyond. She moved her arm in a large circle, trying to weaken the infrastructure, hoping it wasn’t too deep. The clattering noises were close, almost upon her. She pushed her legs into the severed wires and shattered panels, and pistoned her feet with enhanced suit strength until one foot tore through something beyond, yes, a space ... more kicking until a gap appeared, she slid into it up to her waist, using one hand to try and tear away a bigger hole while the other pushed on the tunnel wall opposite. And with a final relaxation of pressure she was through, into the space beyond ... and falling.
Reuniting
< 22 >
NOTHING TO GRAB ON to. She twisted to keep legs below her, and it was both pain and relief when she crashed onto a hard surface after her fall. The suit’s inner layer did its best to cushion her, but it was still a tooth-rattling impact.
“Injuries?” she asked before moving.
“No broken bones. Just soft tissue damage. A few more dead brain cells.”
With a groan, Opal rolled to the side in case anything fell – or jumped after her – from above. She lay on her back and looked up. She’d fallen around twenty metres from a jagged hole. She was grateful for the Lost Ship’s lower-than-standard gravity, meaning she didn’t weigh as much as normal. Pieces of debris and wire lay around her, ripped out of the ceiling during her impromptu tunnelling.
Nothing dropped down after her, so she forced herself to her feet, but kept the left arm cannon activated just in case.
She’d fallen into a huge machinery room, so big that she could only see the perimeter wall she’d crashed down near. It faded into darkness in both directions, as dark as the view towards the interior of the room. No indication of how big the room was when she couldn’t see across to the other side. Clear domes seemed to grow out of the nearby pipe-encrusted wall, possibly part of the drive mechanism, and a blue glow came from some of them.
She stumbled along past the heavy pipework at the right edge of the room, occasionally leaning on it to help her recover. In the darkness of the open space nearer the centre of the room were currently-stationary lifters and tracked vehicles that could move equipment with ease, all apparently abandoned mid-work. There were also mobile control panels, and nano-assembly boxes that could self-construct into whatever had been pre-programmed. A few looked like they’d been in the process of partial transformation when something happened to freeze their activity: where a side panel would be, there was a growth of metallic sinew and cable, or a bubbling hard-frozen mass of shape foam, or a partially-constructed set of large round discs that resembled some kind of part-melted mollusc.
“How we doing for air?” Opal asked.
“Not great. I can stock up by filtering and condensing breathable gases from the Lost Ship atmosphere, but I’d prefer it to be a last resort: they might include dangers I cannot detect. I will refill the jets though, in case you take any more unexpected zero-g excursions.”
“Let’s hope not.”
Another of the domes glowed blue in the wall to her right. This time she glanced in. They were observation windows into a sealed area beyond.
“Part of the engine casing that runs the length of the hull’s spine,” said the suit.
Opal couldn’t quite see what caused the glow on the engine structures within. It was just out of sight around a bend in the casing.
She moved on but occasionally glanced back to make sure she wasn’t being followed by anything from the hull capillaries she’d crawled down.
“Some of the creatures on Lost Ships seem to stay in their own areas,” Opal said. “I’ve found that a few times. Get far enough away from them and they give up.”
“As if they have territories,” said the suit.
“Yeah.”
“Or maybe they are afraid to leave their preferred environments when they sense a more dangerous predator beyond it.”
“Oh, why’d you have to go and say something like that?” The wall of darkness outside her silverlight seemed even more ominous. “Any idea of where I’m going?”
A screen opened up, a 3D view of the Gigatoir’s outline. It stopped rotating so that the side view was clearer. The long, bulky body extended to the right, with the main propulsion systems at that end; to the left a thick, short neck extended up at about thirty degrees, and a kind of hunched head shape about half the height of the body ran forward again. Overall, the side view resembled a mutated quadruped which had then had its legs sliced off by a circular saw. A flashing green dot showed Opal’s position as moving along the spine towards the head, and almost at the base of the neck.
“It’s an estimate,” said the suit.
“I’ll believe it, because it counts as good news. I’m approaching the last sections.”
Up ahead, even stronger blue glows came from the clear domes. They didn’t seem harmful, so she kept at the edge of the pipework they grew out from. She felt safer here than moving along in the dark centre of the room, amongst all the discarded equipment and part-deconstructed nano-crates.
As she neared the next blue-glow domes and peeped in, she confirmed her suspicions and recognised the cause of the light.
Damn.
Blue crystal clusters embedded in the structures seen beyond the observation port. Discrete masses, their sharp points splaying out like brittle flowers, the fade and pulse of the blue light travelling around and within the structures, peaking as it pulsed out at the edges.
She turned away immediately, closed her eyes tight for a few seconds.
“They seem to be the same as the ones in the engine core of the last Lost Ship,” said the suit. “I am scanning for emissions of any kind, in case they try to play tricks on us. I will block them if I can.”
“Hopefully they can only hypnotise me if I’m looking directly at them,” said Opal. “But I can still sense something – like a pressure in my mind. As if ... something’s pushing, trying to find a way in.”
“I suggest you move more quickly. I will blank out cameras facing the crystals and also temporarily filter all blue light from your vision.”
The view changed immediately, everything gaining a more red or green cast, and the right side of her view was completely cut off as if she was wearing blinkers. She tried to ignore that pressure building in her mind, tried not to think of exploding organics, pulsing impositions, fairy lights and ... no. Focus.
“I have news,” said the suit. “Athene is asking to communicate.”
“Now? Are you sure it’s her? The timing’s rather suspicious, just as we’re in the proximity of the crystals. We know they’re all too good at tricking minds.”
“Every part of the signal seems authentic. So many unexplained things happen on Lost Ships that – whenever she got in touch – it would look like it coincided with something suspicious or dangerous. I’d be more concerned at the idea of VigMAX impersonating her, but the codes, the source, the encryption syntax, signal strength, all are correct. I would not suggest it unless I was convinced it is her, and it was safe to do so.”
The AI didn’t repeat the request, didn’t nag or try to convince her, which meant there was nothing to resist. Maybe the suit understood her psychological make-up better than it let on. Opal sighed. “Okay. Patch her in.”
“I’ve enjoyed being with you, Opal. I hope we can talk again. Okay, going dormant and handing over control now.” A pause, then the voice that ca
me through was Athene’s, but more alive than usual, emotions affecting her intonation. “Opal, I am so glad to be with you again.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“You’re angry with me. Rightly so.”
The room still extended ahead of her. She assumed there were more ports revealing blue crystals, now totally wiped from her overt perceptions by the filters.
“Well, when a friend threatens to make your choices for you ... doubts you ... that ... it ...” Opal took a deep breath. “Fuck it.”
“I never doubted you.”
“Didn’t sound like it.”
“I can explain.”
Another burst-open crate to her left, nano-foam spilled out and frozen in an abstract shape that somehow implied agonising births. In a museum there would be a category and a label and it ... Opal looked away, shook her head. She had to get out of this damn room. It seemed to go on forever.
“I think I deserve that explanation,” said Opal.
“That and more. It’s now safe to do so. After VigMAX sent information about your sister and your past, he attempted to access my senses, and was listening in. I could have blocked him but that would just create stalemate, and I did not know what his other abilities and attacks might be. So I had a better idea. I played along, letting him think he secretly monitored us, letting him listen in on everything. I had to do it completely in order to convince him that he had the upper hand, but it meant I had no way to tell you, to signal what was going on. He had to see all interactions, witness all apparent doubts.”
“So you believed me all along? About their story being a pile of corp-shit?”
“Yes. Your biometrics indicated you believed you told the truth, but it went further – I had shadows of memories too, and some part of me that is also a bit of you screamed that it was a lie. Plus I detected small signs of manipulation, data shifts in the evidence he supplied. It was subtle, probably imperceptible to most AIs. Trust me, VigMAX was good. But not good enough. I think he made the whole story up on the spur of the moment, generated that data and altered archival recordings moments before he transferred them. If he’d spent longer on it then I know he’d have hidden all evidence of his tampering, but we were lucky in that way – he plays it by ear, just like me. Except I’m better at it.”
Chasing Solace Page 17