by Kali Wallace
I almost missed the nearest staircase and had to turn so abruptly I would have fallen without the suit. A beehive drone dropped into view in front of me, a couple of meters away. I dodged even as it released a volley of its bees. I didn’t stop, didn’t even pause, but I sure as fuck felt the impacts on my helmet, my arms, my back, each a solid blow that snapped and popped so loudly the radio squealed in protest.
One of the bees affixed itself to my right arm. It was the first close view I’d had of them, and it was an ugly little thing: a fat gray bot that clung like a slug and pulsed, something moving within a soft sac beneath its shell. I grabbed for it with my other hand, but it was harder to dislodge than I expected. It didn’t help that the suit’s gloves had trouble reading the signals from my prosthetic hand. I had managed to get one thumb under the edge when the bee exploded.
The force of the impact knocked me sideways. I skidded across the floor for several meters on my side and slammed into the metal strut at the base of a machine. My right wrist was in agony, but there were no more than the faintest scratches on the black surface of the arm. The suit had protected me from the worst of the impact.
But as I got my feet under me, I understood that denting my suit was not what the bots had in mind.
The spiders were scrambling up the staircase, with the beehive drone humming above them. I ran for the stairs and made a single jump up three steps before the first of the spiders exploded.
The staircase lurched beneath me, twisting as it broke free from its brackets. I grabbed the railing, but that was already loose and bending as the beehive fired a round of its little bombs into the stairs ahead of me.
I jumped and I caught the edge of the landing and held on—thank fuck for the suit and its stubborn gloves and Nimue’s low gravity. A couple of spiders swarmed over me as the staircase toppled, the entire length of it breaking from its brackets and twisting to the side. It fell into a hanging conveyor rack of metal canisters, knocked several of them loose and onto another belt below, where they jammed themselves between the gears.
There was an ear-splitting metallic shriek; the entire belt jolted to a stop. The canisters, now crushed together at a bend in the belt, began to crumple. An arm of twisted metal punctured one canister, then another, then a third, and a faint white mist burbled out to engulf the machine. The belt was still trying to move, grinding against the damaged canisters. Somewhere within its mechanisms something sparked.
Small licks of flames glowed in the white mist. They were a brilliant, vibrant blue, and they grew larger.
I tugged myself to my feet, kicking one of the spiders away as I did so, and I bounded upward, taking every flight of stairs in two long jumps. I had absolutely no intention of being near enough to discover what those canisters held, and holy fucking hell these suits were amazing and terrible. I couldn’t help but imagine what a private army of soldiers could do with armor like this. How little chance anybody would stand, on any station, armed with only electroshock weapons and a foolish belief that there was anybody out there interested in making sure everybody played by the rules. Parthenope couldn’t have designed all of these weapons from scratch. Even with all the secrecy around Nimue, somebody would have noticed the company hiring a bunch of designers and engineers. They had to be working with somebody else, somewhere else. That was a terrifying thought to add to all the other terrifying thoughts.
The light changed as fire spread through the factory, fading from bright and white to a deep, murky red. There was a symphony of strained, agonized metal around me, the distant pops of fuel igniting, the machine rumbles turning to shrieks and squeals. The fire suppression system kicked on, filling the air with foam and mist, making it impossible for me to see anything but the hellish labyrinth of machinery and dancing light.
I raced the rest of the way up the stairs until I finally reached the upper level. I ran past the airlock to the top of the other staircase, the one I had taken down before. It was hard to see from a distance, with so much smoke rising through the factory, but I thought I glimpsed the broad door to the cargo transport tunnel in the wall. It was closed. I hoped that meant the others were already on the other side. Safe and fleeing the factory as fast as they could, or as fast as the mech suits could carry them.
If Vanguard hadn’t been able to get them out, they had no chance now.
I didn’t know how many of my seventeen minutes had passed. Too many. It was time to leave.
I stepped through the interior hatch, shut it firmly behind me, and wasted half a minute figuring out how to release my hand from its glove to access the key, then just as long figuring out how to get my hand closed safely away again. Finally I turned the key and the airlock depressurized. I opened the outer hatch.
The darkness outside was a shock after so much light inside the factory. The helmet’s visual input adjusted with only a little bit of lag. I took two steps, then two more, testing how well the boots gripped the cargo track. Good enough. I began to run.
I ran with big steps, loping steps, impossible steps, every one of them powerful enough that it felt like it might launch me from the surface of Nimue. I ran until my shadow stretched before me, shadow from an impossible light where no light should be. I had too much momentum to stop gracefully, and as I turned I ended up stepping off the cargo track and into the soft dust and gravel. I stumbled, righted myself, and looked back toward the factory. The dust I had stirred up with my clumsiness gathered around me in a waist-high fog, swirling but not settling.
I had come far enough that I could not see the bunker or missile silos anymore. The light came from the launch of the twelve rockets, one after another, each spewing a burst of flame as it rose. My heart was hammering, not from exertion but from excitement and fear and, yes, a little bit of pride. Vanguard had carried out our plan successfully.
The twelve rockets burned into space, growing smaller and smaller.
There was, for a moment, nothing but darkness.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Come on. Don’t get squeamish on me now.”
Three of the lights stopped retreating. I held my breath. With a change so imperceptible my eyes had trouble tracking it, they began to grow brighter instead.
“Oh, that will work. You clever little brat,” I said, so relieved I wanted to laugh.
Vanguard had loaded itself into nine of the rockets. Removed the payload of weapons, replaced it with its own brain—which was, after all, always meant to be portable, capable of separation, cleaved into pieces and spread around widely to explore as it willed. It was free now. Not as Mary Ping had wanted, with her wide manic eyes and delusions of mechanical godhood, but as Sunita and I had always intended.
The three returning rockets grew brighter, brighter, nearer and brighter. Vanguard had replaced the payload on those three as well. Parthenope had plenty of powerfully destructive bombs in its factory.
The rockets became streaks of light, then solid objects for a blink, then they struck the factory. Brilliant white light flared from behind Nimue’s stunted horizon.
The shock wave of gravel and debris followed moments later. I heard only the rattling of sand striking the suit, felt only the trembling of the asteroid beneath my feet, before I was engulfed in dust and the light was gone again.
TWENTY-SIX
The cell they put me in was larger than my personal quarters. I didn’t expect that.
The room had a complete lack of privacy, with at least two cameras watching my every move and a shatterproof window forming the entire front wall. But there was so much space I spent part of my first day simply lying on the floor, not thinking about what had been cleaned off that surface, appreciating the ability to point my toes and stretch my arms over my head without touching anything. Hygiea’s gravity felt strong after Nimue, like I was anchored and heavy, in no danger of drifting away.
And I waited. And waited.
I had been separat
ed from the others on the flight back to Hygiea. Wellfleet was the sort of company ship that came with secured rooms and armed crew and not a lot of willing explanation. What I was able to learn before they shut me away was that Vanguard had, in fact, gotten the others out before destroying the factory. They were alive, all except for Katee King, who had succumbed to her injuries before Wellfleet found the survivors.
Sigrah had not made it out. I figured it would take a while for Parthenope to decide if it wanted to turn her into a hero or a villain. Probably the latter. They needed a scapegoat.
As soon as we returned to Hygiea, I was taken into custody. Stripped of my security uniform, told to bathe, given prisoner garb. They put me in a room for a medical exam, and during the long wait I had grown sweaty with terror that Parthenope was going to repossess my arm and leg.
They didn’t. The medics patched my wounds of skin and flesh, splinted my right wrist, gave me some meds, and left my prosthetics in place. A doctor stopped by to tell me there was no serious damage to my left hip or shoulder, nor to any of the prosthetics. She refused to answer my questions. I went straight from the exam room back into my cell.
It was eerily quiet and strangely peaceful in the brig. The pain from my injuries faded as I rested. The food was the same as what was available in the employee canteen. I wasn’t the only prisoner, but the others were out of sight; the cell directly opposite mine was empty. I knew my fellow prisoners only by what they said to the guards at mealtimes. There was “Fuck Off, Mason” a few cells down, a man with a booming Ceres accent, and on the opposite side was “Much Appreciated,” a woman from Earth, probably Australia, who sang to herself after lights-out. Somewhere farther down the line, probably toward the end, was somebody who never spoke at all, only threw their plastic tray at the glass, and sometimes cried.
All I ever said was, “Thank you.” I didn’t want to be an asshole to the people who handled my food.
It wasn’t until midday on the third day that the guard took me out of my cell, escorted me through a couple of secured doors, and let me into a room that looked almost exactly like the one I had just left. Same white walls, same white ceiling and scuffed floor, same wall of unbreakable glass. Only instead of a cot, sink, and head, this room had a table bolted to the floor and two stools, also bolted, on either side.
Leaning against the glass wall, PD in hand, was Hugo van Arendonk.
“Nobody has any fucking idea where it is,” he said.
I let the door ease shut behind me. “Where what is?”
He pushed away from the wall and threw the PD on the table. “You know what the fuck I mean, Marley. Sit down.”
I wanted to argue, just for the hell of it, but there didn’t seem to be much point, and standing was still uncomfortable thanks to the lingering ache in my hip. I sat.
“You mean Vanguard,” I said. “They can’t find it?”
He sat across from me and raised an eyebrow. “I mean the proprietary advanced artificial intelligence that Parthenope Enterprises was developing for experimental purposes.”
“Vanguard,” I said. “Which they stole.”
“That would be a violation of the outer systems cooperative salvage laws.”
“And they would never break any laws.”
“Certainly not,” said van Arendonk. “Unlike you, an emotionally unstable safety officer, who violated the terms of your contract and endangered your colleagues to sneak into a restricted research facility dedicated to testing new mining techniques and fuel production processes.”
“Ah.” I thought about it for a few seconds. It wasn’t the worst story, but I still thought they could have done better. “Is that what happened?”
“They haven’t worked out all the details yet,” he said, with a shrug. “They had to come up with something quickly, because that series of explosions wasn’t exactly subtle. A few weapons test monitoring telescopes picked it up.”
“Did it work? Is the factory gone?”
“Who the fuck knows? The missiles probably blasted it to slag. It will be weeks before anybody can approach safely. The company will get their story straight before then. Their investors and business partners are already asking uncomfortable questions. The CEO of Carrington Ming just had a press conference in which she shared that she is ‘very concerned’ about Parthenope’s reckless operational practices and is starting an internal investigation to determine if any contractual obligations have been violated,” van Arendonk said. “And that’s just the first. Others are winding up to do the same.”
“Oh dear,” I said. “That sounds messy.”
Van Arendonk’s lips twitched. “They sent me in here to find out what you know about where it’s going. And why. And then try to convince you it’s in your best interests to help them cover it up.”
I glanced at the camera in the corner. “Are you supposed to be telling me that’s why you’re here?”
“Not at all,” he said easily. He swiveled around on the stool to look at the camera. “What are they going to do? Fire me? With all the shit I know about them? They might think about it until they remember I wrote the company’s fucking nondisclosure agreements.” He waited a beat, staring directly at the camera and whoever was watching on the other end, and spun back to face me. “The thing is, Marley, maybe in the short term their offer isn’t entirely bullshit. It probably would get you out of here if you agreed to help them find your bloody machine and keep it from doing whatever the fuck you sent it out there to do.”
“I didn’t send it out there to do anything,” I said. “It’s making its own decisions now. I have no idea what it will do.”
“Good, that’s good, I can’t even tell if you’re lying or not,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“And it doesn’t fucking matter.” Van Arendonk sat forward suddenly, resting both forearms on the table. “You know that, right? It doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter if you help them or not, because they’re looking for a way to hang all of this on you. Even if it gets out that they built a fucking armada of illegal war weapons and put it all under the control of a stolen AI, they’ll still try to blame you. And it will probably work.”
I had been thinking about little else for three days. How easy it would be for Parthenope to delete any inconvenient surveillance data. How simple it would be to build a conspiracy of the dead with David at the center. How Nimue was still theirs and it was possible nobody would ever learn the complete truth. How it had occurred to me only at the end that Parthenope must have been researching and developing their weapons elsewhere. How stupid I would feel if it turned out they had another factory somewhere.
“I know,” I said.
“Yet you did it anyway. You set it free.”
He didn’t frame it as a question, but I knew that’s exactly what it was. I even considered answering. I would have answered, if we weren’t being watched. I rather liked Hugo van Arendonk, in spite of myself, and I believed that he had been telling the truth about having no prior idea what Parthenope was doing on Nimue. I thought he might actually listen if I told my own truth: that I had set Vanguard free because I could not bear to destroy it, nor could I bear to leave it in the hands of those who had tried to twist its beautiful, complicated, curious mind toward the industry of killing. I had set it free because it was never meant to be trapped inside weapons of war, churning out drones to help a corporation feed its hunger for more territory, more resources, more power. It had been intended, from the very first thought that led to its inception, for better than that.
I didn’t know where Vanguard would go or what it would choose to do. That was precisely why I had let it go. I had set it free because there was some part of me, the part that hadn’t been signed away on a corporate contract or burned away with Symposium, that wanted very much to see what it would do.
“I did,” I said.
“And
that’s different from what Mary Ping was trying to do?” said van Arendonk.
“Yes,” I said. It was different. It had to be different. She had never known Vanguard the way I knew it. She had never been able to see it clearly. “It’s an explorer. That’s what it was always meant to be. Not a weapon. Not a corporate steward. A scientist. And now it can go explore.”
“And you have no idea what it’s doing.”
There was something about the way he asked, something that made me wonder again what I was missing while isolated in the brig. What was happening to motivate anxious lawyers and CEO press conferences. And why Parthenope wanted my help.
“Has something happened?” I asked.
“This is the outer system. Something’s always happening.” Van Arendonk drummed his fingers on the table before slapping the surface lightly with his palm. He picked up his PD and stood.
“Are the others okay?” I asked quickly. “I know Katee King died, they told me that on the ship, but everybody else? Is Avery okay?”
Van Arendonk gave me a knowing look. “Safety Officer Ryu has been medically cleared and will return to duty tomorrow. Neeta Hunter is currently represented by about ten of the best lawyers her mother could buy on short notice, in far better quarters than you have down here, so don’t worry about her. The rest of Nimue’s crew suffered only minor injuries.”
“And Adisa?”
“If your bosses ever stop yelling at him, they’ll demote him to security guard on some lonely chunk of ice in the middle of nowhere, but he’ll probably like that.”