by Kali Wallace
I stopped at Delicata’s body and nudged the twisted remains of the dead bots away from him. I knelt and scrubbed my hands on my trousers. He had told Sigrah he still had the key; he had to have meant the key to the UEN base, the one he used for his visits or inspections or whatever the fuck he had been doing. The corpse stank of charred meat and scorched plastic. I swallowed back my nausea and began to search his pockets. The fabric, where it had not been burned, was tacky with his blood. I tried not to look too closely at the ruin of his shoulder and upper arm, but my gaze kept drifting that way anyway. I wondered if that was what I had looked like when the rescue crew found me.
I found the key in the inner pocket of his jacket. It was nothing like the circuit key I’d taken from David’s room. It was bulkier and heavier, a solid chunk of metal. It looked to me less like a security key and more like the sort of tool sometimes used for manual overrides in creaking old machines—but the UEN base was, after all, a creaking old machine. I secured the key in my pack and looked at the camera over the door.
“Okay,” I said. “The warehouse, please.”
The door slid open. I stepped into the warehouse.
There had been no time to move Mary Ping’s body. She still lay on the floor, flooded with diffuse industrial light, in a pool of drying blood. I didn’t let myself look away as I neared. Didn’t let myself look away when I stood over her.
I had thought, when I first saw her, that it was hard to imagine her beating a man to death in a rage. But looking down at her bloodied corpse, with the skin singed and ribs cracked open and insides revealed, it was not hard to imagine at all. David had wanted to know what Parthenope was hiding, and Mary Ping had promised to show him. Agreed to meet him in the airlock, as long as he disabled the surveillance. Promised to bring him a vac suit so they might step outside. He had suspected that Parthenope was building weapons of war. I knew now that fear and disgust were what I had heard in his voice in the message to me.
She had killed him to protect the AI hiding in the UEN base. But I still didn’t know why it had killed her. I didn’t even know if it was reasonable to ask why. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of stories about martial AIs that had gone very, very wrong. Maybe this was another example of the same: an artificial intelligence designed to kill, so it killed, and it was as simple as that.
Her blood filled the air with a stale, metallic odor that turned my stomach as I walked away.
I was halfway through the warehouse when I heard the first spider.
There was a whisper-soft clatter of metal on metal, just loud enough to carry over the peel of my gecko soles and rasp of my breath. I froze for half a beat, then turned quickly, searching frantically, and glimpsed a flash of silver at the edge of my vision. I flinched, lurched away from it, and began to run.
The spider raced along the wall of the container behind me. Before I’d made it even three meters, there was a pricking sensation on my shoulder. The spider had jumped. The ratfucking thing had jumped, and now it was clinging to my upper arm. My left arm, with no flesh for it to grab, but its legs were clinging to the sleeve of my shirt.
I shook my arm frantically, and when that failed to dislodge it, I reached for it with my right hand. It scampered down my arm toward my exposed prosthetic hand. Its clever little legs wrapped themselves around the metal joint of my wrist, and I felt a spark, followed by a sudden and nauseating wave of pressure in my nerves, strong enough to make me stumble in surprise.
I grabbed the spider with my other hand and pulled, wrenching it free—felt that spark too, it was like a low-voltage shock, just above the threshold for pain—and flung it to the ground. I stomped on it, but even as I was enjoying that fleeting satisfaction, I saw another two spiders racing toward me along the cargo containers.
The surviving spiders were still following Sigrah’s earlier command to trap and destroy. And now the goddamned murder machines had found me.
I ducked my head and ran. The pain in my hip was growing worse with every step, shooting down my leg and up my back, but I didn’t dare stop. Another spider jumped for me, landed on my back. I grabbed it but couldn’t wrench it free.
Those sparks of nerve pain returned as the spider burrowed itself into my shoulder joint, and at the same moment I noticed flashes of light across my left eye—the artificial one—and fuck, fuck, fuck, that little fucker wasn’t just clinging to me to blow me up, it was fucking with my prosthetics, it was hacking me like I was an enemy machine.
I spun around and slammed my shoulder into the nearest shipping container, hard enough to knock the spider loose. I stomped on it just before I stumbled past the end of the row. I turned to my left and sprinted toward the exterior wall of the cargo warehouse, turned again.
We had left the airlock wide open. Careless for a crime scene, but really quite helpful for me. I veered inside and reached to pull the interior hatch closed. Another spider leapt for me, landed on my right hand, the one its friend had punctured hours ago. It ran up my arm and around my shoulder. The door closed with a heavy clunk, and I spun the wheel to engage the manual lock before grabbing the spider.
“Get the fuck off me!” I smashed it to the ground and stomped on it, stomping again and again and again, as the airlock door closed. “Fuck fuck fuck!”
I only stopped when it was a wreck of metal pieces and smashed circuits, utterly flattened beneath my boots.
Another one skittered over the outside of the interior window, then another, their blink-fast motions obscuring my view.
I dropped my pack to the floor and tore it open to get the emergency suit. I had to turn the suit a few times to locate all the limbs; my hands were shaking. I couldn’t see the spiders outside the airlock anymore. They would be climbing to the control panel, they were going to be trying to get in—could they get in? Was their programming that smart? Maybe. Probably. I had to assume they could get in.
I pulled the soft helmet over my head, wincing at the feel of the thick, rubbery, almost slick material. The gloves were fat enough to make my fingers clumsy, but luckily the suit had been designed for people in a panic, for people losing air and losing blood and losing control. I clipped the seals into place at the neck and shoulders and powered the suit on.
For one frightful second, nothing happened, and I thought: wouldn’t that be bloody perfect, a dead suit, a useless piece of scrap—then the ventilation and pressurization kicked in. It felt odd, like a warm breeze in the small of my back and down my legs, an obscenely intimate caress that made me squirm. I told myself to get over it, and I reached for the airlock control panel. I hit Engage.
“Please fucking work,” I said.
My voice was dull and loud in the confines of my helmet.
The old airlock clanked and groaned around me. A loud hiss filtered through the shitty microphones in the suit’s helmet. My heart was thumping so hard it was a pain in my chest. My breath was rasping and metallic. I counted down the seconds.
The control panel told me depressurization was twenty percent complete. Thirty-five. Fifty percent complete. I could have sworn I heard the clatter of the spiders outside the interior hatch. It was impossible—not that they were there, of course they were there, but that I could hear them. The steel was twenty centimeters thick. The UEN hadn’t fucked around when they were building their wartime bases. Always so afraid the Martians would show up out of nowhere and bomb them to hell, never mind that the Martians had only ever started rebelling because they were starving, because they had no ships, because Earth-based companies had stolen their water and their moons, because they weren’t permitted weapons to defend themselves, because they were living like animals in their own habitat domes, in their own homes—or so the more radical of my parents’ friends had liked to say, during those otherwise dull academic dinner parties in their garden in London after the war ended, when the wine flowed like delicate summer brooks before the cognac flowed like t
he Thames in a storm surge. Nobody told me and my brother to hurry off to bed because nobody cared that we were awake and listening. Voices would rise and fall and laugh and argue while the summer sun set in brilliant streaks of red and orange over Hampstead Heath. I missed my parents, I missed Devon and his kids, I missed London and Oxford and sunshine and greenery and being able to move without pain. I missed all of it so much it hurt, like I had swallowed a knot of thorns and my entire body had hardened into scar tissue around the ragged, still-bleeding wound in the center. I should never have left Earth.
One hundred percent. The airlock depressurization was complete.
The doctors told me I had not been exposed to open space. They told me a lot of things I did not believe, but that one I couldn’t deny. I would not have survived if I had touched the vacuum. It had taken seven hours for help to arrive. That my nightmares took me from fire into ice, tumbling and tumbling, flames trailing behind me as charred bits of my own body fell away and froze and crumbled to dust, that was as much a mystery as the accident itself, one that nobody cared to solve.
There were infinite places I wanted to be that were not the barren surface of an asteroid with minimal gravity. My parents’ kitchen as my father made a pot of tea. Sunita’s garden in Oxford as the long summer sunset painted the sky red and purple. Aboard Symposium without knowing what was to come. Even my grim, lonely quarters on Hygiea, where I could lock the door, lower the lights, muffle the world outside. Anywhere. Anywhere. In that moment, every wonderful and terrible place I had been in my life was more appealing than the prospect of opening that door and stepping outside.
I opened the door anyway, and I stepped outside.
The wide, flat metal plating of the transport track stretched before me. My gecko soles wouldn’t keep me anchored on loose or sandy surfaces, but it seemed like I was in luck, if I used a very generous definition of luck—because asteroids don’t have atmospheres, so Nimue didn’t have wind, which meant there was no dust or grit drifted over the track. I closed the hatch behind me.
Stay centered. I took a breath. Move smoothly. Another. And walk. Lift one foot, set it down. Lift the other.
Just fucking walk.
Faster.
Don’t look up.
Once I had been the person who would have craned her head toward the darkness and the stars to see whatever she could see, to spot distant bodies familiar and strange, to stare and stare and stare until my eyes watered and my neck hurt and the view above was more precious and familiar to me than anything on the ground. I had been so certain I would not fear the dangers of space. I would embrace them. I was an explorer at heart, or so I had told myself. I had nothing to fear but failure. It had been so easy to believe in that courageous fairy-tale version of myself when I was earthbound and safe.
I did not look up.
The surface of Nimue was gray and gravelly and utterly dull. Any features larger than cobbles were few and far between. There was only dust, and gray rock, and two or three kilometers of track ribboning beneath me. I did not look up. I had no instinct for how long it would take. I didn’t know how fast I was walking. I didn’t even know if I’d estimated the distance correctly from the maps.
I did not look up, until I did.
It was less a conscious action than instinct, the impulse born of being a marginally evolved primate treading on a surface that curved too much, toward a horizon that loomed too near, and the fear that came with that, a fear so deep in the old brain I didn’t even register it as such. It was only a thought that wasn’t a thought—I needed to see where I was going—and I lifted my gaze from the track.
The first thing I saw was that the surface of Nimue around me was no longer flat and featureless. The bulky structure of the UEN base was in view. It looked like a dull gray box set down on the asteroid’s surface at an angle, as though half of it had sunk into the regolith. Beyond the box were three towers. I recognized the shape of them from history books, from memorial parks on Yuèliàng: they were missile silos. I had no sense of scale, no sense of how tall they were, nor how far away. How insufferably bloody stupid it had been, for the UEN to build missile silos all the way out here, so far from Mars and the inner system battles. How scared they must have been, to think the war would stretch this far. Scared or greedy or bloodthirsty or some sick combination of them all.
However pointless its origin, it was a relief to see the base so close. I might have been able to drop my gaze again, to keep going, if I hadn’t also looked at the stars.
Above the dull gray surface of Nimue was the darkness that wasn’t sky because there was no sky here, specked with lights so small and so distant they might have been motes of dust, and the great size of the darkness, the crushing cold of it, it hit me with a wave of vertigo so strong I felt it as a physical blow, as though the asteroid was tumbling beneath my feet, the tracks bucking. I turned, dizzy, and sank to my knees, accidentally missed the edge of the track and plunged my right hand several centimeters down to the surface instead.
I squeezed my eyes shut, twisted in that awkward position, willing the vertigo away. My stomach was churning and my heart was pounding, and I felt suddenly, painfully hot all over, sticky and prickling and so feverish it was frightening. I shifted, thinking I ought to stand, but the surface of Nimue was soft, not solid rock, and my hand only sank deeper when I moved. I leaned to the left, clutched at the metal track with my metal fingers until I had a seam to grip, and pulled myself upright again.
I squeezed my eyes shut and I breathed, and breathed, and remained still, and breathed.
It was a long time before I could open my eyes.
My clumsy fall and even more clumsy recovery had kicked up a gritty cloud around me. The dust didn’t settle; it hung like a fog, obscuring my view, wrapping me in a dull gray shroud. I tried to keep my gaze down as I stood, to look at only the cargo rails beneath me, but I could not forget the darkness above. I knew it was there, and a single wrong step would send me spinning into it, drifting away with nothing to tether me, a trail of dust clinging to my boots. I could not stop thinking about how small Nimue was. How little there was of it, that hideous lumpy potato tumbling through space. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air in the suit. I couldn’t breathe and it was a bloody stupid way to die.
I took in deep, shuddering breaths. I took small steps. I kept moving. I did not stop until the entrance to the grim gray bunker loomed before me.
There was no control panel, no electronic input, no place to try an access code or employee ID. There was only an old-fashioned light signal above the door: red for pressurized, green for depressurized. The light shone red. I dug the key out of my pack and looked for the slot. I hadn’t noticed before how the dull gray metal was smudged with blood.
There it was, labeled for everybody to see: AIRLOCK MANUAL. Apparently the company, or Sigrah, didn’t trust the AI that reigned behind that door to control its own perimeter. I inserted the key and turned it. For several seconds, there was no reaction.
“Come on, come on,” I muttered. I had no idea what I would do if it didn’t work. “Come on, fucker.”
Then the door began to tremble. The key turned in my hand; I let it go quickly. There probably would have been noise, had there been any air to transmit it. Instead I felt only a faint shuddering quiver when I touched the metal. Several seconds passed before the light turned to green.
I opened the hatch and stepped inside.
TWENTY-ONE
On the other side of the airlock: nothing but darkness.
I closed the inner hatch—it made a deafening clang—and held my breath. The echoes faded. The airlock pinged and clinked quietly. There were no other sounds. The only light came from the airlock indicator above the door, and that was a muted green, illuminating nothing.
I checked the suit’s readout of atmosphere conditions. Breathable air at a normal pressure. Still I hesitated to take of
f my helmet. I wasn’t feeling particularly trusting. But the suit had limited peripheral vision and an internal speaker that crackled every time I turned my head. I needed to hear and see what was around me. I removed my helmet but left the rest of the suit on. The air on my face was cool and dry, stirred by a faint current.
The silence was deeply unsettling. I couldn’t even hear the usual station hum. There was simply nothing.
I switched on my flashlight. The floor ended abruptly about three meters ahead. There was no railing, only a drop into a deep, deep darkness. The light was just strong enough to illuminate the shapes of some machines: belts, gears, robotic arms, cranes. Some of it looked decades old, as though it had not been updated since the war, while some was very new. All of it was packed together, leaving very little empty space and making it hard to see much farther than what was right in front of me.
Nothing moved. The entire factory was still and quiet. As far as I could tell, none of the machines were operational. I caught the scents of metal, rubber, fresh oil, fuel. A hint, perhaps, of smoke. It was as though the entire facility had fallen quiet just before I stepped inside and was now holding its breath.
I reached for my radio but hesitated before turning it on. I had been making plenty of noise already, with the creaking of the airlock and thunderous clang of the hatch, but speaking felt different. After too many seconds of indecision, I clipped the radio to my suit without saying anything. I needed to see more of the facility before I alerted anybody to my presence. I didn’t see any surveillance cameras or tracking units, but I couldn’t be sure they weren’t present. I needed to know who— or what—was out there listening.