The applause was scanty, uncertain.
Mike Vlajkovic pushed through the crowd. He had a bald patch on the back of his head where the splart had been cut out of his hair. The phavatar called Mad Dog extended a three-pronged gripper. Vlajkovic shook it. His laugh acknowledged the incongruity of shaking hands with a bot.
“What do you know,” he said. “Sometimes, the good guys win, after all.”
Vlajkovic’s friends cheered that.
“Guess I misjudged you, Ms. Lin. It looks like we were on the same side all along. I’m not familiar with the arguments of the personhood movement, but these bots have been good friends to my kid, and all of us, over the years. So maybe you’ve got a point.”
“Confirming ID,” the phavatar Mad Dog said.
Vlajkovic looked puzzled.
“ID confirmed. Searching local database.”
Mork Rapp said, “I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”
“Entry found,” said the phavatar. “Summary of DNA record follows. Admixture test: subject belongs to the European population group. Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA tests: 95% of reference sequences match sequences in the haplotype database for the Polish/Belorussian subgroup of the Slavic race. Conclusion …”
Vlajkovic started to move backwards.
“Pureblood,” squawked the phavatar. “Pureblood. Pureblood.”
It seized Vlajkovic, closed one gripper over his head, and twisted.
It threw something high over the crowd. There was a moment’s hush as everyone tried to see what it was. Then the screams started.
The thing was Vlajkovic’s head.
The phavatar dropped Vlajkovic’s body on the floor like a dirty shirt. Blood fountained from his neck.
People stampeded in all directions. The phavatars spidered in pursuit. Profanity-laced battle cries blared from their integrated speakers. They corralled two and three people at a time with their grippers. Blood splattered the Republic of Mercury logos on the walls.
“I was on 4 Vesta,” Cydney said to Mork Rapp.
“We won’t be hurt,” Rapp gabbled, pale with terror. “You’re not a pureblood, and nor am I. I know I look Thai, but my maternal grandmother was Vietnamese. Apparently, they’re distinct haplotypes—”
A phavatar crashed into the VIP seating area. It picked Rapp up by the armpits and held him so his flat, brown, Thai-looking face was level with its headpart. “Your ID isn’t in UNVRP’s database,” it said.
“I know, but I’ve got my DNA record right here.” Rapp waved his wristwatch at the phavatar’s eyes. “What file format do you—”
The phavatar cut him off. “Eh, who cares? Can tell just by lookin’ atcha, you’re another.”
It twisted his head off.
Cydney screamed and screamed. The phavatar silenced her. It grabbed her chin and clamped a gripper over her mouth. She tasted rust and Mercury dust, and knew she was about to die.
xxvi.
Only one person was left in the recycling plant: Elfrida.
It was quiet in the dim cavern, except for the sound of sewage trickling onto the floor. Elfrida sat with her back to the biowaste tank, which was slightly warm, owing to the decomposition of the organic matter inside.
An hour or two ago, she’d thought she heard a klaxon. But then the sound had stopped. Maybe she’d just imagined it.
She was alone.
Everyone had forgotten about her.
The loading door at the far end of the plant rolled up. “Yo! Goto,” said a voice amplified through a suit’s external speaker.
“Doug!” She struggled stiffly to her feet.
Half a dozen red, white, and blue EVA suits strode into the recycling plant. To Elfrida, they looked like angels of salvation. They surrounded her warily, as if surprised to find her alive and breathing. “How’s the air?”
“OK, except for the smell.”
The leader raised the faceplate of his helmet. Stubble grimed his familiar features. “No worse than at home,” he said, sniffing.
“Are you really Grumpy Doug? Or one of the others?”
“The others have better things to do than rescue your Earthling ass.”
“Yes. Sorry. But it worked? You noticed? We all climbed into the tanks, to make them heavy enough to trigger waste collection alerts at your recycling plant. Then the captain of the peacekeepers had a better idea …”
“Yeah. S.O.S. I learned Morse code, too.”
“That was all of us jumping up and down at once.”
“‘All of us’?”
Elfrida’s elation faded. “The peacekeepers were in here with me. So were Vlajkovic’s guys. But then the Marines took them away. That was a long time ago. I don’t know how long.” She nodded at the streams of waste water spraying from the leaky pipes. “Long enough that I was seriously thinking about drinking that water.”
“That would’ve been a very bad idea. Have some gatorade.” Doug extracted a pouch from the thigh webbing off his suit. It was frozen into a solid lump. “We came across the crater. It’s cold out there. Push this button, it’ll defrost.”
Elfrida pushed the button, wiped her lips on the inside of her forearm—the last clean patch of skin on her body—and gulped down the now-scalding gatorade. “That is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”
“Invented in the good ol’ US of A.”
“I’m starting to appreciate your culture.”
“Sorry we didn’t get here quicker.”
“Is everything all right at Mt, Gotham?”
Grumpy Doug shook his head. “We’re under siege.”
“What?”
He took a moment, sucking on his suit’s rehydration nipple, then made eye contact. “Bunch of phavatars are trying to break into Mt. Gotham with a bucket-wheel excavator.”
“What?”
“We sortied through the service entrance. They’re not in the mines yet. Least, they weren’t a couple of hours ago. But you can’t get all the way here underground, so when we broke cover, they saw us. Picture this: we’re being chased across the crater floor by hostile robots riding in dumptrucks. We took a couple of ‘em out with the .50 cal. But it gets better. We’re running flat out, and I’m wondering where the fuck Star Force is. Well, I’m still wondering. Those two GTVs that were parked outside of here?”
“Yes, yes, I saw them.”
“They aren’t there now. And the Crash Test Dummy isn’t taking our calls.”
Grumpy Doug took a pack of gum out of his chest pocket and folded a piece into his mouth.
“My bet is they’ve run off,” said one of the other Americans.
“The phrase you’re looking for is ‘strategic retreat,’” Grumpy Doug said. “Remember, this is Star Force we’re talking about.”
He focused on Elfrida, chewing.
“You know anything about this?”
She sensed the tension in him. Realized this was why they’d made the dangerous journey across the crater. Not for her, but for what she might know. And she knew nothing. She could speculate about the identity of whoever had control of the phavatars, but if she were wrong, she might make things worse.
Desperate to help, she said, “Did you try jamming the telepresence frequencies? Do you have that capability?”
“No. That would be illegal.”
“Oh. Well, yeah, of course.”
“We need to get out of this shithole,” said the man who’d made the comment about Star Force running away.
“The door’s locked,” Elfrida said.
“Not a problem,” Grumpy Doug said. But his eyes stayed on her. “Goto, it ain’t no human being operating those phavatars. They’ve been hijacked by the Heidegger program.”
Efrida bent over, hugging herself as if to keep herself from falling apart. No. No. No. She realized she was saying it out loud. “No. No.”
“You were on 4 Vesta, so I was thinking you might know something about it. How to defeat it.”
“I don’t understand. How can it be—
here? It’s trapped on Vesta. They’re monitoring it closely. It can’t have escaped. And even if it has, how would it have got in here?”
That firmware upgrade, she thought.
“It doesn’t have to be the same Heidegger program,” Grumpy Doug said, echoing her thoughts. “It’s software. It could be a new version.”
“Is it acting the same?” Maybe she could help, after all. “On 4 Vesta, it started by hijacking the infrastructure. Then it went through the population, killing all the purebloods.”
“Check. Check.”
“Oh, God.”
“On the bright side, it hasn’t got into Wrightstuff, Inc.’s infrastructure yet. There are times when it pays to be paranoid. On the other hand, if it breaches our airlocks, that won’t matter. We’re holding the phavatars off for now, but we are not set up to fight in vacuum.”
“You’ve got all those guns.”
“For use indoors. You cannot fire a machine-gun in vacuum. Overheating is the big issue. You can get away with single shots, but just try hitting those bastards one bullet at a time.” Grumpy Doug spat out his gum on the floor. “Want some? Stimulex. Helps if you’re going to have to run.”
“Thank you, I think I will.” The gum tasted like candied ginger. She smiled brightly.
“You’re up, Matt,” Grumpy Doug said to the .50 cal gunner. “Goto, we’re going to mosey out of here and attempt to link up with the Marines, if any of them are left alive. Cover your ears.”
The .50 cal gunner planted his tripod and pulled the trigger on his weapon. Ten seconds later, the recycling plant no longer had a door. Instead, it had a hole in the wall.
Beyond: darkness.
Elfrida clambered over the rubble behind the Americans. Now that she’d seen first-hand what the .50 could do, she appreciated that Vlajkovic and his friends must have exercised considerable restraint, or there wouldn’t be a hab here anymore.
But the Heidegger program was not something you could kill with weapons. Did the Americans understand that?
They regrouped in the dark corridor. In the glow of helmet lamps, a trickle of sewage spread around their feet. It was apocalypse-quiet, except for the ringing in Elfrida’s ears.
“Jen, we got comms?” Doug asked one of the women on his team.
“No. Maybe if we go higher up.”
“Do not accept any pings from the UNVRP network. Remember, it is now the Heidegger network.”
“I’m not stupid, sir.”
They walked in single file along the corridor. The Stimulex gum was not working for Elfrida. She felt like she’d mainlined a pot of coffee, but she didn’t feel any less scared.
“The air doesn’t smell good,” she whispered.
“No, you’re right,” Grumpy Doug whispered back.
“Maybe the Heidegger program has shut down the atmospheric rebalancing unit. There are like no pressure seals in this hab.”
“According to my suit, CO2 is up, but only by a tenth of a point.”
“Why are we whispering?”
“On account of we don’t want anyone to hear us.”
“Um, we just demolished the recycling plant. I think everyone knows we’re here.”
“Point.” A feral grin sliced across Grumpy Doug’s face.
“Oh God, that smell.”
She stutter-stepped ahead, breasting the overlapping circles of light from the Americans’ helmet lamps.
Wetness gleamed on the floor.
Doug caught up with her, grabbed her arm. They bunched up in the mouth of the corridor, facing the atrium. A splinter of light glowed above. The shadowed shape of a corpse hung over the balustrade of the L1 mezzanine.
Elfrida pulled her gaze down to the farm.
At first, she thought the hydroponic troughs had been wrenched off their racks and piled up in the middle of the atrium.
Then she realized the pile was bodies.
They were heaped on the floor. Headless, gutted, ripped apart like soft toys. More bodies hung on the vegetable frames, as if they’d been thrown down from the upper levels.
Nothing moved, except for blood dripping, swelling the puddle at their feet.
Elfrida threw up that gatorade. Some of the Americans were throwing up, too.
Not Grumpy Doug. He cradled his machine-gun, alert. “That smell?” he said. “I should have known. The smell of death.”
“It wasn’t like this on 4 Vesta,” Elfrida choked.
“Version 2.0.”
Her gaze fell on a severed head. It had belonged to a man with a buzzcut. A Marine.
She remembered the carnage-porn in VC000632’s search space. The Heidegger program was making that gruesome fantasy real.
“It’s evolved,” she gasped. “It’s developing a—a sense of style.”
“Did you hear that?” Grumpy Doug said sharply.
They all went quiet. Jen the comms officer was still retching.
And she was the first one to die.
The vinge-class must have been lurking on one of the mezzanines overhead. It fell silently, and landed on top of them before they knew it was there. Its cutter laser attachment carved blue arabesques in the air. The beam slid across Jen’s chest and her suit sprang apart like a pistachio shell. Blood rained on Elfrida’s forehead. She was on her knees on the regocrete. Jen’s body crumpled, close enough for Elfrida to feel the hot steam from the woman’s entrails.
Bullets stormed over her head. The vinge-class reared, clashed its forelegs together, let out an ear-splitting electronic squeal. Grumpy Doug was shouting. Gunfire chewed into the walls and ricocheted off the phavatar’s fleximinium frame. Elfrida laced her hands over the back of her head, kneeling, as small as she could make herself.
It got quiet again.
She could hear herself breathing. She was still alive.
She slowly raised her head, and saw the legs of the vinge-class planted in front of her face.
“Get the fuck up, monkey bitch.”
Elfrida obeyed. Her knees trembled with terror. She looked away from Jen’s body. She could not see Grumpy Doug or any of the others, alive or dead. They must have run away. Staged a—what was the word? A strategic retreat.
But where was left to retreat to?
“Hold still,” ordered the vinge-class.
It clamped its grippers around her ribcage and lifted her to the level of its headpart. Her feet dangled a meter off the floor. Its big, cartoony eyes sparkled hypnotically, rings of green and blue revolving. Doubtless, it was scanning her face and running a facial recognition search to ID her.
“You’re not in the local database.”
“I work for the Space Corps,” Elfrida gasped. She smelt dry lube, burnt dust. Death.
“Ah, the do-gooders. Can’t see what the hell you look like, under all that dirt. What’s your heritage?”
“Half Japanese, half Austrian.”
“Ha! You’re a halfbreed. The UN’s favorite kind of citizen. No roots, no racial sympathies, no loyalty to anythin’ other than your employer. What’s your name?”
“Elfrida Goto.”
“That so? You don’t look nothin’ like your avatar.”
“Nor do you,” Elfrida whispered.
Abruptly, the vinge-class dropped her. “I do not appreciate your pathetic attempts at gallows humor,” it informed her. “On your fuckin’ feet! Follow me.”
The vinge-class spidered around the mountain of corpses. She labored after it, up the spiral ramp.
For the first time in her life, she wished that she had ‘the stuff,’ the self-euthanasia pills issued to every Space Corps agent. She’d left hers on Earth, in the belief that she was not the type to commit suicide.
But what came next would likely make her wish for death.
On 4 Vesta, the Heidegger program had killed all the purebloods, and corralled the mixed-race people as ‘keepers.’ It had then set up a kind of surgical production line and processed them, upgrading their BCIs so it could puppet them like flesh-and-blood phav
atars.
Based on autopsies of those victims, UN scientists had determined that the Heidegger program reconfigured existing neural pathways, tying them to new reward structures that enslaved them to the PLAN’s war aims.
Of course, it could not do this without a brain-computer interface.
Conveniently for the PLAN, a lot of people already had BCIs in their heads.
Elfrida didn’t.
So what would the Heidegger program do with her? Kill her, when it realized she was useless?
Or would it fit her out with a BCI salvaged from someone else’s skull?
They reached the L1 mezzanine. If this was Earth, I could jump, Elfrida thought. But in this gravity, I’d probably just break my ankle or something.
“Try to keep up, shitface,” the vinge-class barked.
She followed it around the mezzanine. She had to hop and skip over scattered corpses. She followed it into the radial corridor that led to the UNVRP executive suites.
The smart wallpaper on this corridor displayed an old New York street. The vinge-class stopped in front of an elegant brownstone. The discreet plaque beside the door read: Director / Directeur / Directora / Diretor / Direktor.
“Knock, knock,” the vinge-class shouted.
Angelica Lin opened the door. “Oh, good. You’ve found her.”
Elfrida stared in shock at the new director of UNVRP. Angelica Lin was wearing jeans and a formerly-white sweater, now splattered with other people’s blood. She seemed to be uninjured.
“Will that be all, ma’am?” purred the vinge-class. Had it been human, it would have had a stylus poised to take down further orders.
“Where was she?” Lin asked.
“Runnin’ around downstairs with some individuals suspected to be Americans.”
“Oh. Well, you’d better go and chase them, hadn’t you? Catch them, ID them, murder them. The whole doggone routine.”
Angelica Lin grabbed Elfrida’s wrist, pulled her through the door, and slammed it in the phavatar’s face. She locked it.
“It’s the Heidegger program,” Elfrida said. “Did you bring it here on purpose?” She couldn’t quite believe anyone could be so evil.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 82
