Reclamation meant salvation to the Pantheon.
But that was then. And this is now. Crometheus stared out at a vast, unmoving plain of dead corn and dark shadows. A vast, murky, empty cylinder that fled off into a smothering distant gloom. It had been a long time since he’d been back here. A very long time.
His plan had been to use the hab cylinder to bypass any Uplifted military or allied units currently deployed in or around the slowly-being-deconstructed Pantheon. Once they were alerted they’d come for him, so it was best to get moving.
Crometheus set off at a run, plowing through the ocean of dead dry corn, hearing the hush and crunch of a thousand dead husks under his boots as he went forward.
Almost immediately the armor’s radar picked up several “friendly” units inbound from all points of the compass. Crometheus stopped and crouched down, running an identification diagnostic on the incoming tags.
Dogs.
“Dogs” was what they called the Hund law enforcement system when it was first deployed after breaking away from Earth orbit. The Pantheon had decided that instead of fellow seekers enforcing the law on one another during flight to the next world, and all the complications that would invariably come with, the central planning committee, as it had been known back then, would use a system of robot dogs. Gleaming metallic-alloy Dobermans. Mechanical dogs that were programmed to defuse, disarm, or deal with whatever situation they were presented with. They even ran a high-functioning psychoanalysis AI that could engage in questions and answers to determine why the offender was being engaged, often counseling them not to pursue the current disruption against the path they were all proceeding down. Or, if it went far enough… reclamation mode could be engaged on the spot once the offender had been dragged from public view.
In passive engagement mode all the Hunds, or “dogs” as everyone called them, had friendly blue eyes. Or what looked like eyes. But they were just electronic optical sensors glowing blue, indicating everything was normal and that there was no threat of danger or harm as long as the dogs were in this mode. As long as things didn’t escalate to the next level.
If things did escalate, the optical sensors turned a hellish red… and then you were in big trouble. The dogs were now going to deal with you in successive levels of escalating violence to resolve the situation in accordance with the Central Committee’s wishes for general utopian happiness.
As he crouched down amid the dead corn, Crometheus’s optical HUD picked up no less than sixteen pairs of red eyes converging on him from all points of the compass. The situation was already escalated. And that meant forces beyond what was known to him were already at war with one another. Someone in the Inner Council, which was beginning its climb to ascendancy over all the other endless power-grabbing councils, and even the Xanadu Tower, knew that Lusypher was going to make some move. Some grab for power. Interactions were noted and responses were planned. Obviously, both sides had known this was going to happen. And how could it not? Victory over the Animals was at hand. Of course everyone would start divvying up the cake before it got too late and the portions too small to be meaningful.
The best time to seize power was right now. Before victory was complete.
He was crouched in a debris-filled farm canal littered with ag equipment and the dry bones of the dead from the riots that came in the years after they pulled away from that first poisonous world at the end of their inaugural long sublight journey across the stars.
Crometheus moved fast, raising his rifle as the armor acquired a firing solution on one of the incoming dogs. A blur of automatic fire spat out from the barrel of the G-97 through the corn, illuminating the dead stalks and cutting down any that stood between operator and target. Rounds smacked into the targeted dog and sent it spinning off through the deadfall of ancient corn, its frame and systems mangled. Crometheus shifted position, putting his back against an old tractor that someone had tumbled down into the canal during that long cold year of rioting and fights across all decks of the Pantheon. The dark years when the Forbidden Decks had acquired their ominous name. Before order had been restored with brutal violence. When the Truth and Safety Committee had risen to power with their insightful restrictions against disobedience, and their Orwellian means to make it so.
Good Thought.
Good Thought.
Good Thought. One achievement point rewarded. Please continue on this path so Enlightened Uplift can be achieved soon, Player Crometheus.
Where had he been that year, that background app in his mind wondered as he scanned the field of tall dead mutant corn for another target. The year of the riots. There was so much he could remember with crystal-clear clarity about his life on Earth, but of the many lifetimes he’d lived on the Pantheon, most seemed hazy at best, or just plain inaccessible at worst. As though his mind couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go there, even if he wanted it to.
But on the other hand, if he tried to remember an old comic book from Earth, or a piece of art from a role-playing game he’d owned when he was twelve, he could almost see and describe every inky line within it. Noting even the artist’s signature scrawl, and that long-ago date that had felt like the future in its present clarity back then.
More dogs were coming into the canal. They’d rush him first. That much was clear. Two practically went airborne as they leapt down into the junk-laden depression of dead and hard-packed soil. One landed on a brittle old human skeleton. The dog’s hyper-forged alloy front claw crushed the ancient skull with a dusty smaff.
Crometheus fired quickly, which was his way. Immobility to the point of being mistaken for a statue, then the sudden blur of movement and action on the heels of target acquisition as he dispensed death in twenty-round bursts. Which was the standard amount for the HK G-97 in the selected mode. The armor maintained sight picture and corrected for aim as the gun blurred out a cone of hot streaking lead at the incoming robot sentries.
The dog’s mainframe processor exploded as solid hits smacked into it, tearing the frame to ruined mechanical pieces.
The other dog didn’t hesitate to charge. Crometheus reversed the weapon and butt-stroked the beast with the end of the G-97. All he got was a metallic clank. The dog shook its head as the red eyes turned to sudden violent volcanos of hot crimson anger. Targeting lasers danced across Crometheus’s armored chest plate; the violence and light of the sudden fighting within the abandoned canal lost somewhere in a sea of dead corn had drawn the other dogs into the fray. He could hear the Hund facing him deploying its primary weapon system. Energy-based stunners.
Crometheus swore and dumped the rest of the G-97’s mag into the dog at close range as he backed up a step. The weapon barked out a hollow litany of death and end-of-runtime error messages for the bot in the language of gunshots. More dogs were racing through the dead cornfield, circling for a better angle of attack instead of coming straight on at their intended target. Like sharks and other predators.
The rogue marine slapped in a new mag from off the carrier around his chest plate and listened as the G-97 racked the first round with a quick series of metallic snaps.
Null energy shots, powered by the Hunds’ onboard capacitors, surged through the dead corn, seeking to short out his systems.
The battle turned into a running firefight down the length of the dead canal as more and more dogs poured into it, leaping over long-abandoned farming equipment and racing across the dead bones of the rioters who’d been put down probably by these same civil disobedience pacification units. There were probably admin sys logs sitting around on some old server within the rapidly-being-deconstructed Pantheon, Crometheus thought as he ran, slapping in another mag after emptying the last on various targets, that indicated when such-and-such and so-and-so, now just skeletons in the land of dead corn, had been terminated—and by which-and-which unit now pursuing him.
Live long enough, and time and life merge and do funny little games
of intersection.
Out across the corn, up in the sky of the hab cylinder, a hunter-killer wasp joined the pursuit. Its hot white searchlights crisscrossed the corn, turning the permanent night inside the old hab and farming cylinder to a soft blue. Maybe a twilight blue like early summer late at night long ago back on Earth.
Equipment destabilization grenades would be great right about now, thought Crometheus, as he leapt rotten hay bales that had once been used as a pathetic redoubt by the rioting defenders. Then he turned and fired at more of the incoming drone dogs. Some got hit and went down. Others took rounds and kept on coming, heedless of the systems damage. Little dissuaded by the bright fire he sent into their glaring red eyes. Still others skirted off, leaping out of the canal and racing for the tops of the banks to get out and ahead of him. Scrabbling through the dead corn like strange unseen monsters from some nightmare slasher flick he’d seen as a kid.
And there was still the wasp coming in to assist.
He’d deal with that when the time came.
There were cities out here on the plain. Cities they’d once worked in and pretended…
Bad Thought.
Bad Thought
Bad Thought.
Pretending is bad. New update from Committee Prime. Only reality can set you free. Give up your dreams. Inner Council is now to be known as Committee Prime. Please note for continued Good Thoughts.
Suddenly he felt his pursuers trying to depress his neurosensors with some kind of sonic pacification system. Probably coming from the wasp in the dark sky above.
“Halt, recalcitrant. You’ve been identified for capture and re-education,” demanded someone over the wasp’s onboard address system. “Stand by to be restored to fellowship with your fellow travelers.”
Crometheus fired after ordering the armor’s HUD to filter out the bright searchlights and overlay with night vision. A second later he had a solid image of the hunter-killer ship and opened up on the wasp pilot’s canopy. One solid hit was all he needed, and he knew he got one when he saw whoever it was flying the ship come apart in pieces across the inside of the pilot’s canopy. Fire and fluid splashing across the cupola of the tiny airborne transportation vehicle like one of the old helicopters, but with four massive inductors operating off two wings.
The hit pilot lost control of the wasp and in the act took his boot off the collective. Inductor yaw took over without guidance and pitched the craft over into a short death dive into the dead cornfield below. In seconds the no-longer-airborne vehicle exploded in flames, most likely cooking the four Uplifted crew who manned it.
Knowing where the Committee’s, Committee Prime that was, head was at was crucial, thought Crometheus as he considered his next move. Now that they had taken New Vega…
You. Some voice inside Crometheus reminded him that it had been him, and other marines like him, who’d taken New Vega for the Pantheon, and for their betters. Xanadu Tower elites who couldn’t be bothered to sully themselves with such concerns as the ultra-violence that needed doing if worlds were to be conquered. They had been more than happy to let the marines pay the price.
You, that voice yelled through the constant flow of information in his brain. You and the other marines took New Vega. Not them. Not those who dwelt in the Tower.
Bad Thought.
Bad Thought.
Bad Thought.
Criticisms of High Path Uplifted are wrong. Who will show you the way to becoming a god? Who will tell you what is wrong and right? Who will be your better? How will you know?
He blocked out the programming alerts. It was hard. But he forced them into the background of his mind in favor of survival.
He would deal with the dogs first. Focusing on that was the only way to ignore the barrage of Good Thought spam coming at him like an avalanche. Or a shotgun blast at close range. The dogs and the wasp had most likely been the only assets dispatched at the first hint of his rebellion. Get rid of them now, Crometheus reasoned, and he could buy himself enough time to get back into the Forbidden Decks and beyond their reach.
He came to the end of the canal. Iron bars closed over a black tunnel. It was here where many skeletons had collected in the days when they’d tried to just wash the bodies of the rioters away with the last of the precious water aboard at that time. After that they’d been wanderers in the dark, looking, praying really, for a stray ice comet to get ahold of. It was here that the bodies of the dead had collected in the canal when the last of the water had been used on such thoughtless fancies.
And then they’d prayed for a comet.
But who do you pray to when you’re becoming a god?
That had been the debate that year. The Year of the Famine. Before the Year of the Comet.
Who do you pray to when you’re a god?
Who?
No one had ever liked any of the answers they’d been forced to accept.
The dogs came on at him and he shot them down in short brutal bursts because there was no other way than this to deal with their relentless pursuit. He took damage. A couple of the armor’s systems took some solid hits. Malfunction indicators went banshee inside the HUD. But in the end he finished his pursuers there at the dead river’s end. And in the silence that followed, he was free to go on to the Forbidden Decks, leaving the ruined skeletons of the dead behind.
If he dared.
Gods: Chapter Fifteen
Beyond the dark world of the abandoned farming hab lay the Forbidden Decks. Crometheus trudged through fields of dead corn and passed silent factory farms and brooding cities that once rang out with the life of the true believers of MW and their bright shining work of making it the next world. Devotees intent on building a perfect utopia despite all the math of the past, and all the failures. All of it financed by a corporation almost as old as the computer itself.
At the extreme end of the cylinder world within the belly of the vast colony ship Pantheon, the hab climbed up to meet itself in the sky above his head.
They’d designated this end of the hab as the south.
Towering above Crometheus lay a wall that blocked the hab from main engineering and central power. The wall was five kilometers high. Beyond it lay the reactors, and then the sprawling decks of the interstellar sublight drive itself. Everything surrounded by decks upon decks of maintenance housing constructed to cyclopean scale.
Only bots and madmen went into these dank and lonely sections anymore. They were abandoned long ago, and generally thought to be haunted. They, the collective Uplifted aboard the Pantheon, had seen a lot of strange stuff out there in the deeps of space. Stuff that made no sense to the rational and reasonable mind. Stuff that might make you believe in ghosts if you allowed the cracks in your firm convictions to show. And sometimes even demons became possible, whether you liked it or not.
Bad Thought alarms were ringing, but Crometheus ignored these. They felt weaker. More distant. Less effective out here beyond the control of the Inner Council.
Or maybe some desperate series of strikes against the AI subroutines that ran the behavior modification alerts was already underway by whichever faction, the Council or Lusypher’s people, needed that to happen for their goals to be realized.
The rogue marine picked up a fresh trail through the dead farmlands which led, as he suspected, off to an entrance someone had cut through the decks-high bulkhead between hab and main engineering. If Lusypher was intent on a secret cabal then most likely the conspirators had come aft to facilitate their secret preparations and organization. Following a forgotten trail through the wastes of the forsaken hab lands to find some out-of-the-way space in which to plan beyond the reach of the Council.
It was dark in there, beyond the ragged cut in the wall, but the armor had low-light imaging and even IR capabilities. Crometheus switched on both functions, checked the G-97’s load, then entered the gaping black maw that led to the ot
her side. Into the area known as the Forbidden Decks.
Beyond the ragged cut he entered a maze of abandoned control rooms and once-state-of-the-art processor nodes that controlled the functions of main engineering and its interface with the power and drive sections. It was hard to believe that in a matter of months all of this would, after years and years of crawling through deep space, be broken down for much-needed raw materials. All of it. Soon the Pantheon as a colony ship would no longer exist, and a new home would rise from its dwindling skeleton.
It was time for a shedding of the Pantheon’s own.
He remembered once, long ago, returning to the town he’d called home when he was a child. Viejo Verde. Seeing so much of what he’d once known as eternal constants, now paved over and gone. Chocolate gashes in the Earth where bookstores, computer stores, arcades, toy stores, and all the other businesses of those times had once promised to remain forever. The perfectly planned community of his youth had been going through some developer-forced next stage of development. Tearing down everything he knew and preparing the land for the new things to be built. Things that would be alien to the old and familiar. The trusted and expected.
This moment of entering the Forbidden Decks was just like that night long ago when he’d driven around town, or rather had been driven in a hired limo, nursing a two-hundred-dollar bottle of scotch and a pack of cigarettes. Returning once more at the midnight hour to see all the old places just one last time before they were gone forever. Haunting like some Ghost of Christmas Past. It had been near the holiday season, hadn’t it? Except they’d called it Christmas back then.
Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Page 15