Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  Then, in a whisper, Hugo van Arendonk said, “Hello, Marley. I think you broke my fucking nose.”

  “What the fuck is that thing?” I hissed.

  At the same time, van Arendonk said, “Where did you come from?”

  “And what did you do to them? Why won’t they wake up?”

  “What did I do? Fuck. Fuck.” He took a deep breath, then another. He was trying to calm himself down, which did not exactly help me calm myself. “I didn’t do anything, for fuck’s sake. And to answer your first question, who the hell knows what the thing is. Some kind of bomb filled with shitty, smaller bombs? I’m not a fucking engineer. It can track motion and see in the dark a hell of a lot better than I can, but it seems to be pretty stupid about finding targets. Couldn’t you see it?”

  “Why would I be able to see it?” I said, still whispering.

  “You’ve got that eye.”

  I stifled a short, hysterical laugh. “The good ones cost extra. I can’t see shit with this one.”

  “Where’s Mohammad? Are you alone?”

  “It’s just me. He and Hunter are in the transport tunnels.”

  “Oh, fuck. Fuck. He’s such a fucking—”

  The whirring noise returned outside the room, and van Arendonk broke off abruptly. For several seconds neither of us spoke. We breathed quietly, carefully. The noise faded again as the drone moved away.

  “Sigrah’s here too,” I said. “In the control room.”

  “I know. I was watching for her. She switched on those fucking drones.”

  “What happened to everybody? Why are they here?”

  I heard a shuffle and a rasp as he adjusted his position. “Sigrah and her bloody henchman happened. They attacked us in Res.”

  “After that. I saw the surveillance. The Overseer showed me.”

  “The Overseer— Fuck.” A huff of laughter. “You can’t trust that machine. Did you happen to get a look around this lovely facility when you came in? This is what it’s been hiding.”

  “It’s not in control of all this. That’s—it’s something else. A different AI.” He started to interrupt, but I spoke over him. “I can explain. I will. Just tell me what the fuck happened.”

  A pause, one in which I very much wished I could see van Arendonk’s face, then he said, “We, uh, we fled into the transport tunnels—you probably saw that much? We made it before Sigrah triggered the lockdown.”

  “That was the Overseer too, trying to stop her from catching you.”

  “Was it?” He let out a slow breath. “Well, it didn’t do a fucking bit of good. It’s a bloody maze in there, and it took us a while to get through to the part that’s been closed off. But we got here eventually and started looking for a place to take care of the injured. And to find a radio. This is some kind of comms room, but everything’s shut down. They were trying to get it running. It seemed like a secure location. Melendez was keeping watch. And she—she collapsed. We thought she fainted, to be honest, or she’d been injured earlier and hadn’t noticed. There was no warning.”

  “It wasn’t a spider?”

  “No. Not one of those wretched beehives either. We didn’t see what it was until we went to get her.” He cleared his throat, cleared it again. That low scrape of sound in the darkness made me painfully aware of how thirsty I was. “It was a riot rover. A small one. Right outside the fucking door. We didn’t hear it roll up. Clever of it, wasn’t it, to wait until we had our helmets off?”

  That endless conveyor belt of gas canisters, unmarked and gleaming, had been bad enough. It was worse to know they were mounted on rovers and roaming the facility, and they had been activated well before Sigrah arrived.

  “Why didn’t it get you?” I asked.

  “Apparently good genes are still the best defense.”

  “The fuck does that mean?”

  “It’s a fast-working and extremely powerful sedative,” van Arendonk said. “Developed by some secret research team at Grimaldi Labs for the Yuèliàng military about a century ago, but the UEN picked it up quickly enough when they offered the right price. Brought it out of retirement, so to speak. I recognize the smell. Rotten roses.” He sniffed and let out a huff of laughter. “I can still fucking smell it. It’s just one of the dozens of unpleasant compounds my forebears genetically altered us to be unable to absorb or metabolize. Which does rather make it obvious who Parthenope intends to use it on, does it not?”

  “No shit. It’s not as though they built this entire fucking facility because they want to go to war with Yuèliàng. You were always going to be safe.”

  Van Arendonk was quiet a moment. “I didn’t know what they were doing here, Marley. I had no idea.”

  “You knew something was going on. You assigned yourself to this investigation.”

  “You did the same,” van Arendonk pointed out.

  “That’s not the same. I came here for a friend.”

  “So did I,” he said. Then, more quietly, “For all the good it’s done.”

  I rubbed my forehead; the combination of flashing lights and my prosthetic eye had given me another throbbing headache. “Did you already suspect that it had something to do with Aeolia?”

  “Not precisely,” van Arendonk said. “I still don’t know what this place has to do with Aeolia, but I know the story of what happened there is bullshit. The same flavor of bullshit as all the PR about Nimue’s productivity—and, yes, of course I knew something was going on here. Everybody in the fucking company knows something is going on here. Parthenope has called in too many favors and thrown too much money into building a furnace that has no hope of ever paying for itself. Everybody goes along with the polite fiction because the company has an uncanny knack for making its allies very rich and making its enemies very uncomfortable.”

  “And you help them,” I said, “as one of their lawyers.”

  “So do you,” he countered, “as one of their investigators.”

  I was never given a choice, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak the words aloud. It was true, and it was a comforting lie. We always had a choice. It was just that the companies we worked for were very good at making sure all of our choices were bad ones.

  Of all the positions Parthenope had offered to me, none had come even remotely close to being what I would be most qualified to do. Overseer wrangling, David had called it. I had assumed the company simply didn’t want to pay me what I would be worth in an AI-adjacent job.

  I sat up a bit straighter, trying to ease the ache from my hip that was radiating up my back.

  These machines would bore you. I had thought David was trying to be kind, trying to explain away why he was in the sysadmin job that should have been mine. But he had also said, Maybe they’re your style after all. Platitudes, or so I had believed. Fuck. He wouldn’t have wasted his time with small talk. He had one chance to contact me, one chance to tell me what he had learned without Mary Ping or Sigrah knowing. Everything David said in his message had a purpose. He had chosen his words carefully.

  I just hadn’t listened carefully. Not until it was too late.

  “The virus on Aeolia wasn’t a virus,” I said, slowly, working it through, trying to piece together David’s puzzle. Remembering Mary Ping’s knowing smile. “It was an AI. It was a test run.”

  “What would they be test . . . Oh. Oh, fuck me sideways.”

  “They sent an AI to see if it could overtake Aeolia’s Overseer. What’s the point of building an entire fleet of illegal weapons if you can’t be sure it’s going to be able to attack like you want it to? But it went badly. They didn’t expect the Overseer to react by shutting itself down and letting the entire crew die.”

  They should have. That was exactly the sort of thing an AI put in an impossible position might be expected to do. Humans tended to forget that for an AI, shutting itself off counted as protec
tion, not surrender. Ceasing to exist was the perfect way for an AI to guarantee its functionality could not be further compromised.

  “That infiltrating AI is here now,” I said. “That was the test. This is the real thing. But it’s already gone wrong. It killed Mary Ping using one of the mech suits, and none of them expected that. It’s not listening to Sigrah anymore. I’m not sure it ever was. AIs don’t kill their sysadmins and build themselves giant creepy nests in the middle of their factories if they trust their handlers.”

  There was a brief silence before van Arendonk said, “Half of the stations in the belt are run by AIs based on the Overseers.”

  “Half?” I said, surprised. I had known Parthenope’s steward design was popular, but I’d never bothered to find out exactly how widespread it was. “Really?”

  “At a guess,” van Arendonk said. “Mostly under other names, but they’re all built on the same design. Parthenope leases the right to brand and modify the system to a company called Asymptote Intelligence, which is functionally little more than a shell. They have several products that are all essentially Overseers. They pay very well for the privilege too.”

  I had heard of Asymptote but assumed it was just another AI designer trying to get a toehold in outer systems commerce. “That’s not common knowledge, is it?”

  “Oh, not at all. Parthenope claims that would make the clients and their stations too vulnerable. Which is true, I suppose. They are certainly vulnerable.”

  I shook my head. He was right, but it was not our immediate problem. “We have to shut it down. We have to stop it before it can do—whatever they want it to do.”

  “You’re mad to think it’ll let you get close. Or Sigrah. She’s already killed to protect it.”

  “I know. We have to do it anyway.”

  “Marley, you don’t know anything about this machine.”

  “Well, yes, that is something to consider,” I said. It was dark; he couldn’t see my expression. “It’s too bad we don’t have an AI expert sitting right fucking in front of you with no other commitments for the rest of her day.”

  “I— Okay.” Van Arendonk laughed slightly. “That’s fair. I apologize. Does the AI expert have a plan for stopping the homicidal AI and its equally homicidal human keeper?”

  “We have to—”

  Before I could finish, a loud sound carried through the factory. It was a series of sharp pops: an attack from a beehive drone, but nowhere near us.

  There was a scramble in the darkness as van Arendonk stood. “Fuck. I need—fuck, fuck, fuck.” He fumbled briefly, then a light flared, momentarily blinding. He held the flashlight with one hand and grabbed his radio with the other.

  I jumped to my feet. “Are you crazy? That thing is going to see us.”

  He ignored me to click the radio on. “Mohammad, do not come into the fucking factory. Do you hear me? Please be listening, you stubborn asshole. Do not enter the factory.”

  A beat, then a snap of sound. “That warning would have been more useful before we came into the factory, aye?”

  “Get out and shut the door,” van Arendonk said.

  “Where are—”

  Adisa’s question was interrupted by a squeal of sound, followed at once by a deep, concussive boom. I bolted to the door and pulled it open. There was another explosion, and with it came a brilliant flash of light to my left. Van Arendonk shouted something, either in my ear or in the radio, but I couldn’t hear his words over the noise reverberating through the factory.

  I switched on my flashlight as I ran and looked for any glint of silver, for any bots or drones. Smoke billowed from the entrance to the cargo tunnel up ahead, with dancing beams of light caught in the drifts.

  A bright flash filled the tunnel, startling and blinding, and another boom followed. I saw, for only a second, the silhouette of a beehive drone backlit by the explosion, but when the light faded, I lost sight of it. Glints of silver were racing up the factory wall, toward the mouth of the tunnel. So many sparks of light. So many spiders.

  The shape of a person appeared, then another.

  One of the figures—a flash of silver hair, it was Hunter— jumped from the tunnel entrance, ignoring the ladder and trusting herself to Nimue’s low gravity. She landed gracefully, then turned to face the tunnel. Adisa stood in the entrance, looking down over the factory.

  “Come on!” Hunter’s shadow stretched before her, long and wavering in the yellow light from Sigrah’s control room.

  I stopped so abruptly my gecko soles stuck on the floor, and van Arendonk slammed into my back. He caught my pack before I fell—the straps dug into my shoulders—and even as we were righting ourselves, he was demanding, “What are you doing?”

  I grabbed his arm to steady myself. “I have to shut down the AI.”

  Van Arendonk wasn’t looking at me. He was looking up at the tunnel, where Adisa, with a smooth, sure motion, grabbed a spider from his boot and flung it away. It exploded against a beehive, destroying the drone in a fiery, crackling burst of light.

  “Ask him and he’ll fucking lie about spending his childhood throwing grenades at UEN threshers,” van Arendonk said, before he turned to me. “Are you certain you can stop it?”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Without help?”

  “Oh, you’re going to help,” I said. “You get to be the distraction.”

  “You can’t distract an AI.”

  Not remotely true, but I wasn’t about to argue the point. “You can distract Sigrah. She might not know I’m here yet.” I let go of his arm and stepped back. “The AI didn’t kill you and the others when it had the chance. All it did was knock them out. And I’m pretty sure it’s not controlling all of these weapons.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  I huffed in frustration. “Yes, pretty sure! Sigrah’s the one trying to blow us the fuck up.”

  “You just said it killed Mary Ping.”

  But not me, I thought. It could have killed me so easily. I was right there when Mary Ping died. It ran away instead.

  What I said was, “Yeah, well, she was a murderer and a smug piece of shit. I’m not asking for your permission,” I said, when he opened his mouth. “Keep Sigrah and her bots distracted. Make a lot of noise. I’ll take care of the AI.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  A beehive drone was already arrowing toward me. The lights in its cells flashed as the individual explosives prepared to launch. It circled me, trying to cut me off, its whirring sound loud enough to be heard over the shouts and explosions.

  I dodged through an open doorway when the first of the bees burst from the hive. I ducked behind a wall, and they pelted the room, sending out showers of stinging, fiery sparks. Something struck my right shoulder; I bit back a gasp at the hot, sharp flare of pain. I cast my light around—there was a door on the opposite side of the room, open. I ran for it. The beehive followed, buzzing into the room and spraying it with another round of projectiles as I charged through the doorway. I tried to pull the door shut behind me, but the drone fired again and I had to dodge out of the way.

  From the room I ran to the base of the towering racks of shipping containers. I veered to the left, away from Sigrah, toward the AI. The incessant hum of the beehive grew louder as a second drone joined it. Distantly, I heard shouts and another two explosive bursts, one right atop another. For a moment the factory was washed with pale light.

  In that light I saw the massive, red-veined sphere ahead. It was too far. I couldn’t sprint across the open space with drones following. I turned sharply to the right and slid into a gap between two shipping containers, balancing carefully on the metal rack.

  One of the beehives let loose another spattering of projectiles—how many bombs did those fucking things carry?— that struck the shipping containers with a deafening noise. In the brief strobe of lights I saw the drones bobb
ing uneasily back and forth, passing the gap this way, that way, back again.

  I couldn’t stay there for long. There was a series of loud pops from elsewhere in the factory, followed by a startled shout. The drones whirred swiftly away.

  Slowly, with as little noise as possible, I crept back toward the end of the shipping containers. I turned on my flashlight and held my breath for several seconds. The air was hazy with smoke, making it hard to see anything. I stepped out from between the containers.

  There was a buzz right behind me. Smoke whirled as a drone zipped past my head. I cursed and nearly tripped as I ducked out of the way. The drone spun and flashed, preparing to fire, and I threw my arm up to protect my face.

  Instead of the sound of the drone spitting another volley of projectiles, there was a loud crunch, followed immediately by the solid, deafening clang of metal on metal. I lowered my arm cautiously.

  One of the black mech suits stood right before me.

  I stepped backward in alarm. Another drone flew down toward me, moving so fast it was a blur of motion. When it was about three meters away, a second mech suit dropped out of the darkness, knocked the drone from the air, and smashed it to the ground.

  I felt movement in the air as a third suit landed a couple of meters away.

  And another, right behind it. Another. Every one landed with a terrifying thud of metal on metal, filling the empty space between the rooms and the cargo with still, black statues. They weren’t only on the floor. There were mech suits standing atop the rooms as well, dark sentries in a line from one end to the other. I tried to count, quickly lost track. Two perched on the track of an overhead crane, another on a shipping container in the cargo rack below it. The suits did not move after they landed. They were as still as pillars, faceless and dark. They didn’t seem to be doing anything. My heart was pounding so hard it hurt. There were so many of them.

  And I could see them. I could see them, even through the shifting smoke, even though my flashlight was feeble and dim.

  I blinked my eyes rapidly. The factory had begun to hum. I hadn’t noticed before, but it was obvious now as the noise rose all around, and with it came light so gentle and gray it was almost unnoticeable at first, and it grew, and it brightened, like dawn rolling over a landscape. The low hum turned to a steady rumble, punctuated by machines chugging steadily somewhere in the distance, as regular and even as the beating of a dozen giant hearts. There were heavy clanks, metallic whirs, the hiss of air, and the chattering sound of racks and conveyor belts moving.