Tyger Bright

by T. C. McCarthy

  “They are your guard. And yes; so that they maintain adequate vision in all environments we swapped their biological eyes with combat models; it’s classified tech developed on Mars. This way they can always see as if they wear helmets, whether they wear them or not.”

  And this way you can tap their visual feed to keep tabs on me, Win thought. And you got this technology from vivisecting my father, slowly, over the course of years.

  “I will be in danger for all time,” he said. “I have seen the future; it does not include these guards.”

  “Normal troops hate you, Win. Especially if you give orders to kill children. Yes; you’re in danger and you need a personal guard. These boys are perfect. And their training included constant operation in your virtual presence, as you are now.”

  “So they won’t even blink at the fact that when I take my helmet off I’m a monster—excreting fluid from my head and drooling because of the lack of some muscle control in my jaw. You’ve thought of everything.”

  Zhelnikov was about to respond but Win pushed past toward a distant gap in the rubble. He sped. Behind, the troop of guards jogged to keep up and Zhelnikov shouted wait, but Win was in a hurry and knew that the man could find a vehicle. First there was a thing to do. He had seen it in the vision provided by Sommen, a vault deep inside the Chinese nest far beneath Hong Kong and the path to access it. Win closed his eyes to avoid the data feed scrawling across his screen, instead putting his servos on auto-traverse, making sure the shaking framework maintained a low enough speed so the guards could keep up.

  Zhelnikov will not have the strength to see the truth; his schemes are abortive. I do not yet see the way, but I smell the futility of a genius with no clear vision. Even without clear sight, the future had at least been traced in faint pencil: mankind as a whole would be enlisted in the war, with their children, creeping toward a genetic shift that blurred the lines between Sommen and humanity. Their faith will be our faith. Children will live and breathe in the immersion tanks, fed combat training and mathematics, strategy and tactics, and their toys will be Maxwell carbines and worse. The hope of mankind will be rekindled in the fires of war, a fire that they would never let die and that their children’s children would carry into the universe as the Sommen had done for millennia. I am alive and my role is already written: glory and, one day, galactic empire.

  Win stopped. It took a second for the guard troops to pull even but none of them looked out of breath and they stood at attention, waiting for his next move. He checked his vitals. Everything read normal, but Win knew the thoughts he’d had just a moment ago weren’t something he’d have had even the previous day, and not prior to the standard masker. His fate felt locked to a track. There was no turning away now, and the locomotive of destiny pushed along a straight path toward an ocean of blood; Win was already drooling from the continued dosages, but the thought of killing made him salivate faster.

  “The place we’re looking for is just ahead. We’ll wait there for Zhelnikov and then move underground into the Chinese nest.”

  “That zone is still showing chemical agent signatures,” one of the guards said.

  “So? Secure your helmets.”

  By the time they reached the entry tunnel, Zhelnikov pulled up in a tracked transport that spat dust as it whined through the rubble to release him out the rear hatch. The old man wore armor like the guards’, jet black with a skull and crossbones on the shoulder pieces, but he also wore a phase-shifter cloak that he activated while walking toward them. In less than a second, most of him disappeared. Win’s visible light sensors picked up a shimmer where the cloak mimicked Zhelnikov’s surroundings, but nothing else.

  This is how someone will get to me. When I can’t see a face and read expressions, my enemy will spring the trap.

  “I’m ready,” said Zhelnikov. “This place is off-gassing nerve agent still; we need to be careful.”

  Win pointed at the guards. “Which one of them is in charge of the others?”

  “None. All of them will die to protect us.”

  “There are over a hundred men here. How many did you kill? The ones that didn’t meet specifications.”

  “I stopped counting, Win; that isn’t something worthy of remembrance.”

  Win’s legs squealed, their joints becoming rough with an intrusion of dust and concrete particles, but they carried him toward the tunnel entrance where the group plunged into darkness; he switched to infrared. His helmet spotlight scanned the way ahead and illuminated the tunnel to reveal the wreckage of Chinese weaponry, dead soldiers peppering the corridor as it spiraled downward. They are the same; these men are as me. Each soldier was a mixture of metal and mechanical legs, spiderlike, in the middle of which rested a carapace containing a form—the remains of genetically engineered occupants consisting of a head and torso hard-wired into the shell’s battle computer. Just enough brain matter to make a deadly weapon. The guards paused at each one, plunging knives into the corpses to make sure all of them were deceased.

  “They haven’t changed their design since my father fought them,” Win said.

  Zhelnikov nodded. “These ones weren’t interested in research and development.”

  “It was always a poor choice, and its future variations always will be. The Chinese put too much faith in automation and semi-awares. Had they succeeded in destroying us they would have eventually been taken over by their own research and mankind would have been lost forever. The Sommen are right to want them all dead.”

  “It worries me—the speed with which you adopt their philosophies.”

  “I thought that was your plan.”

  “Never mind the plan; do you even know where we’re going?”

  Win reviewed his vision. The corridor would bring them hundreds of meters beneath the city in a coiled snake of a passageway and then open into a complex labyrinth of chambers and tubes, the ant farms of Hong Kong. He tracked the group’s progress, overlaying in his thoughts their location from his vision. There had been something else; Win recalled the memory of what he’d seen of Zhelnikov’s master plan for fighting the Sommen and while they walked he traced each line from memory, pausing to consider the implications, fighting to reconstruct the portions that he’d already begun to forget. A new pattern emerged. Win glanced at Zhelnikov, unable to see him except for where his boots kicked rubble or scraped through piles of dust, and a scrap of respect for the man began to take shape; he’d almost succeeded in hiding one of his objectives.

  “My father had another child,” said Win.

  Zhelnikov stopped and pulled the hood from his helmet; Win paused too, and the guards took up defensive positions.

  “How did you know?”

  “I only just realized. When I read you, back in England on the cliffs, I saw some of your plans. You don’t understand, Zhelnikov; I see things I don’t even want to. They’re forced on me as if my mind is a bottomless garbage bag, into which the universe can stuff as much as it wants. It comes and goes.”

  “And so you had a vision of her.”

  “Her? So I have a sister. No, that’s not what I said. Your plans gave her and others away. I’m one of two different experimental programs, aren’t I? There is another one—one funded via Fleet Acquisition and Logistics, one you want eliminated.”

  Zhelnikov remained silent. Dripping water sounded in the distance and an occasional chunk of concrete fell, cracking on the floor like an echo of gun fire. Win marveled at the strangeness of it all. With a flick of concentration he viewed the universe as if he’d been the one to create it and its network of matter, a kind of nervous system that consisted of energy and dust punctuated by wormholes and warfare, with a Sommen trail of destruction cutting across everything. He was part of its fabric. There in the tunnels they all played a role, minor but connected via a thin trail of quantum particles, their interaction tangled and related, joining into a greater web, one that wrapped itself around everything and everyone—so real that Win wondered why this was the first
time he’d seen it, and why he couldn’t feel its suffocation.

  I will become too dangerous and they will erase me. Unlike the soldiers who didn’t perform to expectations in simulations, I will be taken out by those who fear my perfection and my power. My sister will help destroy me, although she won’t even realize what she does.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Win said, continuing onward. “You don’t have to answer. We must finish before the Marines arrive.”

  “Why the rush? We can delay the nuclear weapons detonations as long as we need.”

  “You don’t want anyone else to see what I’m going to show you, Zhelnikov. The Chinese didn’t just run; they are committing suicide. And they want us to come along.”

  Win increased the power of his infrared light, playing it back and forth across a long empty room where a single Chinese soldier now writhed, gurgling from its blown open carapace. He drove one of the servo harness’s legs through the thing, ending its agony. Beyond the dead soldier stood gigantic columns of equipment and machinery that reached upward into darkness. It is a forest of metal, thought Win. These are the only kinds of trees I’ll ever see in real life, now that I’m engaged in war; destruction will precede me. I’m here to review the hells I create.

  “This is almost identical to our original design,” Zhelnikov said. “They stole our technology.”

  “Not yet operational, however.”

  “What was their plan? Activate the communications device, punch a hole through an alternate universe, and send messages out into space? To their brethren—to whatever system the rest of the Chinese forces ran years ago?”

  “That was exactly their plan. But the Chinese have no idea that this communications system could bring unwanted attention—and not just from the Sommen.”

  Zhelnikov spat against the closest column of equipment. “Then the Chinese Fleet, out there, also has the plans. They are probably building one too and could activate it. Soon.”

  “Yes. This is also likely.”

  “You’re calm,” Zhelnikov began with a mutter, but his voice rose to a shout. “For someone who knows better than anyone that the Sommen themselves are terrified about what’s out there, Win!”

  Win froze. Another bolus of standard masker merged with his bloodstream and coursed through his brain, seeping into the neurons and forcing growth of cells, extending old ones to twist into a sea of looping brain tissue. He screamed with the pain. It wormed its way through his nervous system in a river of needles and acid, forcing Win’s breathing into a tattered series of short gasps, only ending when he’d reached the verge of unconsciousness. In its wake a new image appeared: a single Sommen. This wasn’t a warrior, he realized. The Sommen’s body looked emaciated and frail, suspended in a tank of pale fluid, almost clear, with an oversized and grotesque head covered with nodules as if the thing had become diseased with age. Win knew nothing of their biology, but this one’s physiology and bearing had marked it as a Sommen that mattered.

  “You are becoming one of us,” it whispered. The sound materialized within Win’s head, out of nowhere.

  “Who are you?”

  “You. We are you.”

  The Sommen repeated the phrase several times and a hologram appeared. It showed the Earth, spinning, with a single red dot that blinked and shifted in intensity.

  “There,” the Sommen said, its hologram fading. “You must begin to see the truth: that you are a mistake.”

  “Win!” Zhelnikov shouted.

  The guards had gathered around them both, and Zhelnikov pounded on Win’s carapace, reaching to pop the access cover for the life support system. Win stepped back before the man could finish.

  “I’m fine.”

  “We’ve been trying to talk with you for over ten minutes. What happened?”

  “We need to go, Zhelnikov. Have the Marines nuke all of this. We need to leave now.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Where do we need to go?”

  “Portugal. There is something in Portugal and we have to get there. Fast.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ganymede’s broken surface sped past, the monotonous grays and whites punctuated with craters and ice fissures that, San guessed, would have dwarfed the canyons on her home planet of Mars. It was her fiftieth orbit. The ship’s fuel gauge blinked a warning that meant she had a few more passes, after which San would have to land and deploy melting mats. That process was difficult even with a team. In this case San would have to land the ship and then drag out the massive network of cables before erecting the tent and collection system, which would route sublimated steam into collection tanks for conversion to oxygen and hydrogen. She didn’t want to visit Ganymede alone. The planet looked dead, and San recalled something her father had said: if you die in space your soul could be lost forever; die where your ancestors can find you.

  She laughed at herself. This is what I was bred for, San reasoned, to travel in space, and I’m too scared to do it? For the hundredth time she ran through the ship’s sensor diagnostics system, making sure she hadn’t missed something.

  “Ganymede orbital, do you copy?” San had set the radio’s power to its lowest limit, hoping Jupiter’s magnetic fields would prevent the signal from going too far. Out here, she thought, anyone could listen.

  “Ganymede orbital, this is an unchartered scout ship requesting emergency docking; do you copy?”

  Still no response came. San reached for the console, about to shut off her radio to conserve power for water collection when a woman’s voice broke through the static.

  “Transmit docking code.”

  San’s hands shook; she increased radio power to make sure her response got through. “I don’t have any codes; I told you I’m unchartered.”

  “Transmit docking code,” the voice repeated.

  “Are you receiving? I do not have a code.”

  “Transmit docking code.”

  “This is an unchartered ship. I have no codes. I’m low on fuel and request permission to dock. Where is your location, Ganymede orbital? I have no fix on your position and all sensors are blank.”

  “Transmit docking code . . .”

  The voice repeated itself and faded into static when San’s ship transited around the moon, moving further from the signal’s source. She slapped the console in frustration. San muttered into her mouthpiece, ordering her semi-aware computer to calculate the most likely location for the transmission based on her positional changes while receiving. It took less than a second. The answer blinked in a holo that rested in the air and San reached out to touch it, her mouth open in disbelief. There was no orbital station, or, at least, the transmission hadn’t come from one; it came from a point at the bottom of an enormous canyon a few kilometers below a flat plain of ice that surrounded it. She never would have received the signal if her ship hadn’t traversed an area directly above it.

  San plotted a new course. The computer’s voice, its suggestions and warnings of low fuel weaving into her calculations, faded with concentration. She started the burn but a feeling in her gut—that she would have only just enough fuel to land as long as everything went perfectly—made her palms sweat.

  The white and gray on her screens transformed into a vision of blue and light blue, with a wisp of an atmosphere that sent a shiver through her craft when it entered, spiraling in a wide corkscrew toward the surface and bleeding as much velocity as it could against what little gas existed above the moon. The computer counted down. When it reach zero, San closed her eyes against the g-forces of the ship’s retros, which threw her against seat restraints. She grunted for breath, wondering how much worse it would be for someone not genetically engineered for these forces. They wouldn’t have made it, San figured. With the deceleration she’d used, anyone with the wrong physiology would have suffered retinal detachment, suffocation, and blackout. At the very least, they’d need a hospital after landing.

  “Landing beacon detected,” her computer announced.

  “Loc
ation?”

  “Immediately adjacent to the radio transmissions, which have stopped. Two-point-three kilometers below the ice plane we currently traverse, two hundred kilometers ahead.”

  “Make for it and land.”

  “This ship cannot land; we have not received clearance.”

  San worried that maybe her hack hadn’t been thorough enough or that the stolen scout ship’s semi-aware had detected it and began to unravel the codes, pushing its way back toward realizing that San wasn’t an authorized pilot. That would be a disaster. With no fuel left, if the thing’s security program ordered it to launch in the direction of the closest Fleet post, she could find herself flung into space again to coast for God knew how long. Her fingers tapped on the consoles, only stopping when she was sure her code was fine.

  “I said land. Override normal landing procedures.”

  “Landing now.”

  “And let me out of the bridge confinement; I need to put on an environment suit so notify me when we’re about to set down.”

  “Understood, miss.”

  It took San a few minutes to find the ship’s suit locker, and Ganymede’s weak gravity tugged at her, pulling her to the floor so that she stumbled twice. Despite zero-g drugs and her engineering, San still had to reacclimatize. By the time she buckled on the massive globe of a Scout’s helmet, the computer finished counting down when the ship scraped against ice, and she squeezed her way toward the air lock. Its inner door slid shut behind her. Air cycled out of the narrow room and while the pumps chugged San’s forehead dampened; she ignored a sense of growing nervousness, slamming her fist against a large button to lower the loading ramp, which opened onto canyon shadows, her suit lights flickering on to illuminate the way down.

  San looked up. Jupiter filled the opening far above and the sight made San dizzy so that she stumbled in the light gravity, having to skip sideways to maintain balance. Her boots crunched in a thick layer of coarse ice crystals as she moved closer to the canyon wall. San imagined the weight of the universe as it crushed down on her, the distance to her mother so infinite that she guessed the woman dead already and that Nang’s soul had merged with Jupiter’s gaseous maelstrom, which refused to release anything from its red grip. Tears formed, blurring her vision.