Assemblers of Infinity

by Kevin J. Anderson

  None of these barriers could protect him -- or the world -- if the hybrids decided to break out. The alien automata had escaped much more rigid controls in the Sim-Mars lab and infected Erika. From what Parvu had seen at the Daedalus crater, from what he knew about the theoretical possibilities of nanotechnology, he couldn't stop the hybrids from doing anything they decided to do.

  Luckily, his hybrids had shown themselves to be completely benign miracle workers. As he watched Kent Woodward, amazingly alive, functioning as if nothing had gone wrong, Parvu waited -- what was the English language cliche? He waited for the other shoe to drop.

  He stared at the readings piped in from the electrodes attached to Kent's body. All tracings looked normal, but that had changed drastically over the past day.

  He had spent many sleepless hours watching Kent sealed in the inner chamber, unable to go to him to help. Electrodes traced Kent's huge temperature fluctuation, from near hypothermia up to a high fever. The fever had lasted a long time, brought about most likely from waste heat put out by the incredible number of hybrid automata working inside his body.

  Kent had even died once, completely, as Parvu stared into the observation windows, helplessly pressing his palms against the glass and wondering what he should do. All of Kent's vital signs had been flat for more than thirty seconds, and then -- with no intervention on Parvu's part, the readings had jumped back up to human norms, as if someone had rebooted Kent Woodward. A true deadstart.

  Now, as he observed the young astronaut sitting on the table and staring at his hands, Parvu wondered exactly how he was ever going to tell the young astronaut the truth. Parvu had taken enormous liberties with Kent, but it had been the only way, hadn't it?

  Kent spoke into Parvu's long silence. "So ... can I get out of here?

  Why am I in this room, and how come you're staying out there?"

  Kent swung his feet off the table, standing up. He lost his balance, reached out to grab the edge of the table. He overestimated and ended up stumbling to the floor. He slowly climbed back to his feet, his eyes wide.

  "Feels like I'm drunk."

  Avoiding Kent's gaze, Parvu looked down at the heavily caulked doors, at the sealed vents. Only the autoclave would allow him to pass food and other items in and out. Parvu realized he hadn't thought this through very well. He hadn't had the time. And now he had to keep patching up repairs as he thought of things he hadn't considered before.

  "I am afraid you are in quarantine, Kent."

  Kent looked at Parvu fixedly. "Quarantine? From what?" His voice slowed, as if he were selecting his words carefully. "I got hurt in an accident, didn't I? Did I ... get exposed to something?"

  Parvu folded his hands together in a praying position. "You were mortally wounded in that accident, Kent. In fact, you did die for over thirty seconds. I have all the readings to prove it to you, if you should doubt me."

  As Kent had lain near death on the clean-room table, Parvu had taken a few of the active hybrids from the nanocore. When he had injected the hybrids into Kent's body, Parvu had no idea if it would work, or how long it would take. Just because they had worked with a rat suffering a minor wound, did not mean they could do anything for a human being.

  Parvu also did not know what the consequences might be for the young man. But he had no choice.

  It had taken a day and a half for Kent to wake up, apparently fully healed. Now Kent touched his chest, flexed his fingers, dubious about what Parvu was saying. He could see no injuries at all. "Then how -- ?"

  Parvu swallowed before taking a deep breath. "My nanotechnology prototypes ... saved you."

  Kent's mouth worked, but no words came out. Finally he said, "You put those nanothings in me! Like the ones that infected all those people on the moonbase?" Kent raised his hands and stared at them. "Is that why I feel so strange? Are they crawling all over inside me?"

  "Kent, please calm yourself. They saved your life, okay? You must remember that. They repaired your damage on a level no surgeon could have done." Parvu tried to sound reassuring. Maybe he should play some calming music for Kent. Maybe if Erika were there, she could make him relax and accept the situation.

  "To tell you the truth, the rat in the cage beside you has also been treated with my ... automata. He is fine. In fact, he has never been healthier. All of the little things that had been bothering him are now fixed.

  You, too, will be fine. It was a risk I had to take to save your life. Do you understand?"

  Kent turned to stare at the rat in the cage. His shoulders slumped.

  Parvu couldn't stop himself from justifying his actions, though Kent didn't seem to be listening. "Believe me, I would not have taken such a chance, but it was the only way."

  He drew another shuddering breath. "And perhaps this will provide the information we need to help Erika! That is the most important thing, is it not? We can find out how to get rid of her infection, too. If we learn how to treat you, perhaps we can free her from the quarantine and let her come back to us."

  He hoped that would suit Kent, who he knew had always had a deep crush on Erika -- but instead the young astronaut kept rubbing his arms and legs, as if trying to brush away ants. "No, it is not the most important thing.

  Everyone up on the Moon is in their mess because of Erika's screw-up. And now Sim-Mars is ruined for the Mars mission, too."

  Parvu blinked in total shock. Surely he had misunderstood something.

  "But Kent, how can you say that? I thought you ... do you not love Erika?"

  "_Love_ her? Where did you get that idea? She hardly ever said a word to me, and she's been gone for months!"

  Parvu felt his body stiffen and he pressed his lips together. "I see I was greatly mistaken." His voice was brittle.

  Kent stood up. His face was flushed and desperate, his expression suddenly plaintive. The RF electrodes showed his body temperature shooting up.

  "They can solve their own problems up on the moonbase, Doc. They've got all the facilities of Sim-Mars and the Columbus research centers. Forget about Erika for a minute. What are you going to do about me? You can't just leave me locked up here in this lab -- like a rat!"

  He paused, as if suddenly realizing something. "Have you told Commander Grace, or the Agency yet? What did they say? Did McConnell give you permission to do this crazy experiment on me?"

  Parvu felt himself becoming angry. He didn't want to lose control. He needed to think about this some more. "Right now, I am going to turn out the lights and let you rest. You are too distraught to continue a meaningful discussion at this moment."

  Without looking back, Parvu dimmed the lights in the clean-room until the room was lit only by a glow from the instrument panels and the nanocore.

  "Hey!" Kent shouted. His voice sounded hoarse and distorted through the speakers. "Hey! Don't just walk away!"

  Parvu stopped, out of sight from the observation windows. He waited, half-wincing.

  "Come back here, dammit!"

  Suddenly a high-pitched alarm squealed from the diagnostic panels. All of Kent's RF electrodes had flatlined.

  Parvu scrambled back to the observation window, only to find Kent tearing off his electrodes and throwing them at the window. Kent kept shouting at him. "You infected me just so you could figure out what to do for her, didn't you? I never volunteered to be your guinea pig!"

  "Kent!"

  But the young astronaut did not hear. With no more electrodes to throw, he knocked over a chair then moved to tip one of the worktables. The cage holding Old Gimp clattered to the floor, bouncing and rolling on its side. The rat squealed in terror.

  "Kent, stop this!" Parvu flicked the lights back on in the quarantine chamber. Kent stopped for a moment to glare at him, then moved over to the workstation terminals. He grabbed the keyboards and jerked out their cables.

  He tossed one against the thick glass of the observation window.

  Kent picked up the chair he had toppled, held it over his head, and ran toward the nanoc
ore.

  "Kent! If you don't stop, you will trigger the self-destruct systems!"

  Parvu shouted into the microphone pad and turned up the volume so that his words thundered into the clean-room. Kent hesitated for just a moment, the chair ready to swing.

  "Do you not remember the fail-safe systems here? Your friend Gunther was always afraid of them. If you trigger the sterilization sequence, you will flood the entire NIL with x rays. Do you want this? I think not! Now, calm down!"

  Kent heaved the chair at the other side of the room instead, then collapsed to the floor. He crossed his legs under him and stared at his knees.

  Parvu gnawed at his fingernails, frightened by Kent's tantrum. Had he done such a poor job explaining the necessity to him? Didn't Kent understand?

  Inside the clean-room, Kent crawled over to Old Gimp's cage, righted it, and looked inside. The rat appeared agitated, but otherwise unharmed.

  Ignoring Parvu, Kent opened the cage and pulled the rat out. The rat squirmed, trying to escape, but Kent stroked the back of its head, scratching its ears.

  Eventually, Old Gimp resigned itself to the manhandling and relaxed, sniffing Kent's fingers with its vibrant pink nose.

  Parvu narrowed his eyes as he watched the young astronaut. Perhaps Kent had not recovered as completely as he had hoped. What if the automata had somehow unbalanced his hormones, thrown the delicate ballet of human bodily chemicals out of equilibrium? That might make Kent prone to fits of anger and irrationality, turning him into a Mr. Hyde.

  Or could he really be so furious at Parvu's method of saving him? He didn't know. Parvu watched in turmoil as Kent continued to stroke the rat, shutting out everything else around him.

  He left without saying goodbye.

  --------

  CHAPTER 25

  MOONBASE COLUMBUS

  With Newellen sitting beside him in the surface transport, Bernard Chu watched the autopiloted supply shuttle come in low across the cratered horizon. They both craned their necks to look through the slanted front window of the vehicle.

  Like a satellite racing across the black sky, the shuttle first appeared as a gleaming white dot. The dot grew until Chu could discern ragged edges at crazy angles with no aerodynamic constraints, gangly antenna, and landing pods.

  The Agency hadn't written them off yet. The sheer presence of the shuttle showed they had some sympathy for the people under lunar quarantine.

  At least Celeste was still sending them food.

  As the shuttle grew closer, Chu could imagine the rumble it would send across the lunar plain if there had been an atmosphere. The shuttle approached the surface quickly, kicking up a cloud of dust that obscured the distant landing area.

  "Robotic landing worked like a charm," said Newellen. "Better not rub Zimmerman's nose in it. He hates that autopilot stuff."

  "Let's get going." Chu indicated the transport vehicle's controls. It felt good to be outside working again on the Moon. He could hear Newellen's breathing over the suit radio as the other man eased the vehicle forward to meet the shuttle.

  His thoughts turned to the supply shuttle and all that it meant. Though the automated piloting systems had always been in place for emergency telepresent landings, all regular shuttles required a human in the loop.

  Though it would have been vastly cheaper for many missions to send a bare-bones ship without the frills a human pilot required, United Space Agency policy insisted on it. But now Celeste refused to send any more people into the plague site.

  But they had all been cured. Cured, dammit! They were clean, not a nanomachine showed up on any test. Celeste should let them run back to safety on Earth. What was she waiting for?

  It was that nightmarish construction out at Daedalus. Dvorak had been spending more and more time going over the analyses, trying to second-guess the builders, to no avail. Flybys documented the inexorable progress, but they still knew nothing more about what its purpose was. Celeste wanted to keep them there as guinea pigs, an expendable investigation team. He was tempted to send somebody out to Daedalus to poke around.

  Of course, he would have to get Dvorak's approval to try something like that. Or maybe he didn't. Dvorak didn't seem too interested in keeping his command, now that Chu had returned. Dvorak had never struck him as someone who really cared about power or responsibility, but seemed more wrapped up in his own interests.

  "Hey, watch out for that depression." He gestured out the window.

  Newellen nodded curtly inside his helmet. "I see it, plenty of time. I can ride a bicycle almost as fast as this thing moves."

  Now that the landing area dust had settled, drifting to the surface like grains of sand through water, the shuttle stood in the raw sunlight.

  Chu wondered what it would take to refurbish it. What would stop them from adding some more fuel, disabling the telepresent autopilot, and having Bryan Zed haul them all back to Earth? Zed's L-1 shuttle used volatile liquid hydrogen, impossible to produce at this point on the Moon. These shuttles used methane, which they had plenty of.

  Somebody could calculate an appropriate orbit, even without the Collins transfer station. They would survive the trip -- they'd need to worry only about being blasted out of the skies by Earth-based defenses. Just how serious was Celeste after all?

  As Newellen brought the flatbed transport up to the shuttle, Chu worried that the craft might have landed poorly on its pods. But it looked stable enough. He clicked his chin mike. "Can you get a relay to base?"

  Newellen leaned forward and fiddled with the communications port. Ever since the Collins had been destroyed, they couldn't bounce their communications off L-1 anymore; since the L-2 relay was on the wrong side of the Moon, they were limited to line-of-sight transmissions. They had had to place backup K-band relays around the crater walls to communicate even at short distances.

  "Link's up."

  Chu cleared his throat. "The shuttle made it, Columbus. Our pantries are full again for the time being."

  "Make sure the bastards didn't booby trap it when you enter," said Cyndi Salito's voice. Chu grunted, but didn't reply to her bitter warning.

  They climbed down off the flatbed rover and trudged toward the shuttle, keeping away from its still-hot engines. A ladder unfolded as Newellen pressed the actuator. The single door slid open and seemed to beckon them forward. The interior had not been pressurized.

  Newellen waved Chu forward. "I told you we should have brought the lift. We didn't know what design they were sending down." He looked at the legs, the ladder. "Boy, I wonder where they got this ancient wreck."

  "It's an old Russian job, probably scheduled for dismantling," Chu said. "Not human-rated anymore. Expendable." The word expendable made them both fall silent for a few seconds, but Chu set foot on the ladder to climb up.

  "It's all yours," Newellen said, not mentioning the fact that he might have difficulty squeezing his beefy frame through the shuttle door.

  Chu worked his way up the aluminum ladder, disoriented, making sure he positioned his foot firmly on each rung before shifting his weight. The ladder was a relic from old days that didn't make sense -- spend a couple of billion getting to the Moon, and then as an afterthought strap on a couple of rungs and vertical bars that cost a few bucks and change.

  By the time he reached the top, he was out of breath. He didn't weigh much on the Moon, but compared to the last month he had spent in zero-G aboard the Collins, he felt as if he weighed a ton. He didn't know how well he would ever survive back on Earth in full gravity -- but it no longer looked like he would have the chance to find out.

  "You okay up there?"

  "Yeah," returned Chu.

  The door to the supply shuttle opened directly into the control room --

  there was no airlock, just like the old lunar landers. It saved weight and was much easier to engineer. The craft's inside was not pretty, but high in utility. The Russians had done a good job outfitting the emergency craft.

  Low-current LEDs were set a
bove old-fashioned mechanical switches; the control panel jutted out at an odd angle, put together with welding technology instead of melded composites. Extra controls were jammed next to the main systems, relying on redundancy instead of computerized heuristic fault-finding for backup.

  Chu stepped forward. A sheet of plastic was taped to the control panel, directly in front of the empty pilot's seat. Inside the plastic, on a sheet of paper, he read:

  FOOD AND MEDICAL SUPPLIES ARE LOCATED IN THE HOLD. WE INCLUDED A 5%

  SURPLUS OF FUEL FOR LANDING ONLY -- FUEL FOR TAKEOFF IS NOT, REPEAT NOT, AVAILABLE.

  ADDITIONALLY, A BIOLOGICAL AGENT WAS RELEASED INTO THE REMAINING FUEL

  PRECISELY TWO (2) MINUTES AFTER PUMP SHUTDOWN -- THE FUEL LINE AND TANKS

  SHOULD BE ENTIRELY CORRODED BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS. DON'T WORRY. WE'LL FIND

  SOME WAY TO BRING YOU HOME. YOUR WELLBEING IS OUR HIGHEST PRIORITY.

  -- DIRECTOR CELESTE MCCONNELL

  She didn't even sign it herself. A "sorry, hang in there guys!" was scribbled at the bottom of the note, obviously put on by the crew that had sealed the craft.

  Chu reached forward, and after searching for a moment, joggled the pump switch. The LED blinked from amber to green, then burned a bright red.

  Directly above the PUMP STATUS indicator, another row of LEDs burned red.

  "You bitch." Chu slammed his hand down against the control panel. He barely felt it through the thick glove.

  The whole thing sucked. Of course McConnell wouldn't risk sending a shuttle that could return to Earth -- there was too great a chance that one of the Columbus people would defy her quarantine and try to get back. As he himself had been contemplating. And with no fuel for Zed's L-1 shuttle, that left only the low-velocity methane-fueled hoppers -- and they barely had enough thrust to reach lunar orbit, and nowhere near the delta-vee required to reach Earth.

  That was fine logic if you were back on Earth. But the fact that Celeste obviously didn't trust them -- didn't trust her long-time supporter Bernard Chu of all people! -- made him seethe inside.