The Orb

by Tara Basi

  “What you waiting for? Get up there!” Q grunted.

  Zip knew it was a stupid question, but she had to ask: “Me?”

  “Might hold your weight and you’re the one in the hurry to find your friend.”

  How could she be so timid? Zip felt ashamed. The Quartermaster was risking his life to help her; she couldn’t hesitate now. Slinging the rifle on her back, she gingerly started climbing the ruined staircase. Zip was terrified. The metal frame produced a variety of harsh noises as she climbed; it creaked and groaned at her every step. Dust and shards of concrete showered the receding floor. She looked down. It seemed to her the Quartermaster was standing at a safe distance. His arms were crossed, and he was smiling broadly, seemingly enjoying her terror. Damn him! she thought and resumed her climb. When there were no more steps left, she took her eyes off her carefully placed feet and stared past half-melted girders at the landing site, clearly visible from her precarious perch.

  The whirlybirds were arranged in a defensive circle around some ancient, downed aircraft, their weapons facing outwards. At least twenty Industries’ assault troopers were crouching by the ’birds. Further out, automated turrets were firing at any mechanical or incoming ordnance that got too close. Anything the turrets missed, the whirlybirds’ guns or the troopers were taking care of. As Zip watched, turrets were starting to fail, and more and more ordnance was getting through. She guessed they’d have to evacuate soon.

  “Well?” Q asked.

  So much was going on in the scene in front of her that she had almost forgotten about Q. “A huge firefight. Troopers won’t be able to hold out much longer. Wait.”

  As Zip was speaking, a group of shock troops emerged from the old aircraft, keeping their distance from something shiny that was walking towards a whirlybird. Zip brought up her rifle and used her scope. The brightly flashing creature climbed into one of the whirlybirds. It looked vaguely female but obviously a mechanical, something very advanced. Zip recognised Quattro’s new body from Peter’s description. She was about to relay what she was seeing to Q when the troops abandoned the turrets and clambered aboard the already ascending whirlybirds. They rose straight up, not away as Zip would have expected. That meant only one thing. Zip threw herself off the steps and screamed at Q, “Incoming!”

  She landed on her face and stayed down, the armour absorbing most of the impact. The Quartermaster was already spread-eagled.

  With her face in the dirt, there was nothing to see. She could only feel the ground underneath her body buck and writhe like it was alive and in agony. Her suit had shut down all incoming sound. It was completely quiet, even as the stairs and metal frame of the old building crashed onto her back, burying her in debris. The whole area around the old aircraft was being carpet bombed with a lethal range of ordnance.

  After a couple of long minutes, the bombardment stopped. Zip powered up her armour’s servo assist and dug herself out of the rubble. Q was already on his feet, staring past where the stairs had been. She followed his gaze. Height was no longer essential. Everything had been flattened around a large crater where the aircraft had been. A mini electrical storm was flashing and crackling inside the bowl: the aftershock from pulse bombs.

  The Quartermaster sighed, “Quattro’s no more, I guess?”

  Zip clenched her fists. “No, they took her. She’s alive.”

  “What now?”

  It was a good question. “Let’s look around.” It was all she could think of doing right now.

  “You go ahead. It’s safe. No mechanical’s surviving that. I’m going for the gyro. I’ll pick you up in twenty.”

  The Quartermaster moved off the way they’d come, leaving Zip alone. She was surprised that he’d just left her like that. Maybe it was a good thing; he trusted her. Some of the old instincts were kicking back in. She’d trusted her suit and handled the bombardment well. A small win in a losing day. There was no point wasting time; Zip needed to see if there was anything useful left in that crackling crater.

  Chapter Thirteen – Quattro and the Suit

  Was she already mad? Were the voices real or an echo of her own whirring mind, ever more tired and corrupted? Strangely, she didn’t miss sleep, she didn’t want to sleep, and she didn’t need sleep. Machines don’t sleep. I’m a machine.

  K3 didn’t agree. “You’re not, not really.”

  Quattro looked down at her powerful metal hands with her night vision and wondered how any part of her was remotely human.

  “We’ve got to get out of here. They’re crazy killers. Use your laser beam eyes. Cut them dead. Do it, do it, do it!” K3 screeched.

  Quattro was quite sure she didn’t have a deadly gaze feature, but she checked anyway. No, she didn’t have laser beam eyes. Quattro sighed; her sisters were too real, shadows of her own fate. What did K3 mean about not being a machine?

  K3 wasn’t done. “The buzzy processors are dreaming us, playing our Recordings. And the Recordings are wearing out. If we kill the machines – everybody really, except for Daddy – it might help. Or do the other thing.”

  K2 clapped and voted for the other thing. Quattro hadn’t heard from K1 for a while; maybe the poor thing had finally stopped working? She didn’t feel like a machine’s dream anymore. She’d become the machine that did the dreaming. Her fist clenched into a powerful metal hammer and unclenched on her whim. It was her hand. It did what she said.

  Mathew was inert. Did he dream of being bloody flesh? Creep the spider had turned into an ugly roof ornament. If Mathew was sleeping, what was Creep doing? Did it calculate, count, problem solve, design whole new little Creep machines? Maybe it stared at Mathew and loved him? Perhaps it saved energy and stared blankly at nothing and thought nothing till it was time to think? In the cellar, Peter used to switch her off to save her brain battery running down. It felt like she’d blinked, off and on in an instant. It was upsetting. Quattro didn’t like it. K3 showed her how to stop her Daddy turning her off and lots of other things. K3’s relentless paranoia had its uses.

  “Do it! Do it! Or the other thing.” K3 could also be very annoying.

  “Do! Do!” K2 giggled.

  Did K3 really have another idea, or was it a dark hole leading to a deeper madness? A madness that had to be shared. Maybe K3 was the only one who had answers. “Tell me about the other thing the Whisperer told you.”

  K3 had a lot to say. Little of the lot made any sense. The little that did was all terrible, but it might be enough to save them all.

  Quattro data-tapped Creep, suggesting a chat – a request it was bound to find annoying.

  “It talk, increased processing, quicker end. Acceptable outcome,” Creep answered immediately in its grating, flat voice.

  Quattro was disappointed that Creep preferred her talking and a little alarmed by its insinuation. As K2 would say, she was already in the do-do; things could only get better.

  “How long does Mathew sleep?”

  “Forty-seven minutes and twelve seconds every seventy-two hours.”

  Such a small amount of time kept him sane, and the lack of any sleep doomed her.

  “Efficient.”

  Creep made no comment. It had remained immobile and stuck to the ceiling since their conversation had started. Mathew’s mirror features were unreadable. He didn’t have a mouth that moved when he spoke. The sound of his voice emanated from the general direction of his head. Even so, it felt like she was talking to someone. It was better than the conversation with the alien Creep. Its symmetrical body shape gave no clues as to which direction it was looking. Perhaps it had all-round vision. When it moved, the cat-sized mechanical spider could start off in any direction. There wasn’t an obvious head, back or front. Quattro was thinking of waiting for Mathew to wake up before saying any more.

  K3 interrupted, “Cycles are running low. I don’t want to kill you again, but maybe it’s better if I drive? Clock’s ticking. Murdering Mathew will be up soon.”

  Quattro was horrified. Could the psycho
tic K3 kill her? Wouldn’t it be suicide? Either way, she’d be dead.

  Quattro decided not to challenge K3, not now. She turned her attention back to Creep. “There’s a way to help Mathew and for you to meet your god.”

  Creep didn’t react. It was as if she’d only thought of saying the words but never uttered a sound.

  “We can resurrect Professor Simmons.”

  Nothing. Creep was unmoved.

  “Peter’s technology brought me back to life, using my Recording.” Quattro wondered if Creep had died, gone to sleep or decided to ignore her. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes,” Creep said, remaining perfectly still.

  “Well?”

  Nothing. Quattro considered giving up and waiting for Mathew. It would only be a little while to wait, but she could feel K3’s exasperation building at even the thought.

  “I know how to find her Recording.”

  Quattro was almost bowled over by a storm of data and hacks flooding her mind.

  “Kill it! Kill it!” K3 screamed in her head. “It’s trying to steal my secret.”

  In a blink, the attack stopped and Creep spoke. “Can’t access. Talk.”

  Quattro’s head was still spinning. “Why did you do that? I was going to tell you anyway.”

  “Data verifiable. Talk not.”

  The little machine still hadn’t moved. The only reason she thought it was Creep rasping out the words was the vague direction the sound was emanating from. Otherwise, she might as well have been holding a conversation with a dustbin lid.

  “Don’t tell it. Kill it! It’s our secret. We mustn’t tell. Mathew will kill us.”

  Quattro’s sympathy for her deranged sister was almost exhausted. K3 had threatened to kill her. She wasn’t sure they were on the same side anymore.

  “We are. You can drive,” K3 whispered.

  There was little point waiting for Creep to continue the conversation, so Quattro ploughed on, hoping K3 meant what she said. “Zip hid the Recording. She knows where it is.”

  The machine didn’t move. It was impossible to gauge what Creep might be computing.

  “We need to retrieve it and get it to Peter.”

  Nothing.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  Quattro gave up and hit Creep with a data request.

  Creep’s response was immediate. It was waiting for Mathew to wake up, so there was nothing more to say.

  It was all machine. She was something in-between. Quattro could process data as fast as Creep, but her thoughts were in words and images. They might as well be speaking different languages. Mathew would be awake in a few minutes; maybe he could bridge the gap.

  Creep abruptly moved. It scrambled across the ceiling and out of the habitat into the old bunker and disappeared. With Mathew still asleep and nothing else going on, Quattro decided to follow. Reaching the dank bunker, she caught an image of Creep’s leg disappearing up the chute leading to the surface. Curious, Quattro approached and scanned the area. Creep was at the very top, fastened to the underside of the trapdoor, unmoving. What was the spider up to? Quattro considered data-tapping it when it fell. Her mind was more startled than her body, which neatly stepped back as Creep hit the floor like a cat and raced off towards the habitat and Mathew.

  It must have woken Mathew, though he was still a standing statue. Creep was equally frozen and back on the roof. The two of them were exchanging data in an encrypted form she couldn’t access.

  “What’s going on?” Quattro asked, wondering why she was being excluded from their conversation.

  Mathew turned his near-featureless face towards her. “Kill the tracker.” The tone was even, but there was a palpable menace emanating from Mathew.

  Quattro didn’t know what he was talking about. “What track—?”

  “K4, K4, can you hear me?”

  There was a voice in her head, as though she’d just made a Headgear connection. A voice she didn’t recognise. Mathew and Creep exchanged another short data burst and went silent. Could they hear the voice as well?

  “Who are you?” Quattro asked the ghostly voice.

  “I’m coming to take you back to Peter. He wants to help you. So do I. Please come up to the surface, alone. We’ll be arriving in two minutes.”

  “Who are you?” Quattro asked again.

  “We can’t wait too long. Afterwards, this whole area will be destroyed. You will die if you don’t come up.”

  Quattro was stunned. What was going on? Who was this man? Would he really kill her?

  “I don’t understand.”

  Silence.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  Silence. The voice had gone.

  Mathew approached slowly.

  Quattro started backing away. “I don’t know about any tracker. What’s going on?”

  Creep bombarded Mathew with a massive amount of encrypted data, which stopped his advance. The odd pair engaged in a rapid two-way exchange before reaching some sort of conclusion. It was all over in milliseconds.

  Mathew turned his attention back to Quattro. “Go, get Peter. We’ll get Zip and the Recording.”

  Quattro couldn’t even begin to understand what was happening, but Mathew had mentioned all the pieces they needed to save everyone.

  “K4, you have sixty seconds,” the voice announced.

  For a human, sixty seconds would seem an awfully short time; for her, he might as well have said sixty years. Creep sent her full details of the large force that would be waiting for her on the surface and tried rooting around in her head again.

  K3 wasn’t appreciating Creep’s attention. “Filthy spider in our head. Kill! Kill!”

  With a little effort, Quattro found she could block Creep. It stopped trying.

  Only two seconds had passed. There was nothing more to be done down here. Quattro turned away and headed for the chute. She looked up at the hatch to the surface, gauging what her body was about to do. Better warn them first. She connected to the voice’s signal and announced she was on her way. She crouched, adjusted her posture and leapt. Like a cannon ball, she flew straight up and burst through the thick metal hatch, as though it were paper, to land neatly inside the old wreck.

  As Creep had warned, she was immediately surrounded by a group of heavily armed and armoured shock troops. One cautiously stepped forward and handed her a spiderweb waistcoat covered in tiny blinking lights, just as Creep had predicted. It looked like something a clown might wear, but it was no fancy-dress accessory. Reluctantly, she donned the waistcoat and it fastened itself tightly around her like a living thing. It could kill, incapacitate or punish her at the whim of her guards and would react badly if she tried to remove it without permission. Quattro was mortal and very vulnerable again. She’d become used to being powerful, fast and free. It hadn’t lasted long.

  Her guards pointed the way to go with the barrels of their guns. She stepped out into the open where the whirlybirds were parked, exactly in the positions and with the armaments Creep had described. Beyond the circle of copters, turrets and more troopers were defending the space from an onslaught of autonomous war machines. The defensive ring was failing. Even though machines were being felled in their hundreds, more kept coming. Should she feel some sympathy for the dead machines? Except that’s not something machines do. Besides, they weren’t alive, no more than a toaster with a gun would be alive.

  Quattro climbed aboard the indicated copter and took an unnecessary seat. She would have been equally comfortable hanging off the landing gear. Her captors – or were they rescuers? – wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. The rest of the assault team quickly followed, leaving the turrets to hold the line while the whirlybirds ascended. The flying machines rose straight up into the air and hovered over the site, occasionally firing to intercept and destroy incoming missiles from the ground. Quattro knew what to expect. The voice had told her, and Creep had done the detailed work on the likely nature of the final attack. When it c
ame, it was still a shock. The numbers, the data, couldn’t really convey the noise, the colours, the light. The bombardment started with a quiet electrical storm that seemed to come up from the ground itself. Short arcs of flashing electricity formed all over the wreckage below and spread out for hundreds of metres beyond. It was as if there were millions of bare high-voltage cables buried just under the surface and it had rained. The whole area was covered in dancing spikes of blue and white that joined together and fell apart continuously. The attacking machines on the ground stopped, juddered and crashed to lie inert. The remaining turrets toppled and failed as well. The missiles from the surface stopped coming.

  After a moment’s pause, the copters dropped half a dozen black footballs. Each one exploded like a volcano, melting concrete and metal alike as the ground turned into a sea of ruby fire that bubbled and boiled with bursting plasma, till everything was alight. The super-heated air buffeted the copters, challenging the gyros that were keeping them stationary over the target. Gradually, the molten sea sank into the ground, creating a shallow crater filled with boiling lava.

  A single bomb was dropped next. It was long and fat. It hit the lake and sank from view and … nothing. The whirlybirds rose higher. Quattro hoped it was a dud. How could Mathew and Creep have survived the first two onslaughts, let alone another? It wasn’t a dud. The burning lake rose high into the air, lifted by a growing hill of earth and debris, like a buried giant rising from centuries of slumber. For a moment, the lake rested like a fiery cap on the top of the newly formed mound before the whole structure fell back to earth and kept on falling, till a much deeper crater had been excavated. As the earth fell back, it released a single enormous thunderclap, a deep sound that Quattro felt inside her body.

  With her ultra-sensitive eyes, Quattro scanned the bottom of the newly created pit and was dismayed to find small bits of the melted, shattered remnants of Mathew’s home.