by Brian Smith
Campbell slumped in his seat, his face ashen. “I rue the day I ever . . . You’ve got the devil in you.”
“Actually, my actions are quite moral—just not by your standards. Do you hear that sound?” she added, pausing to let him listen. Campbell cocked his head slightly, but the sound was quite audible now and growing louder: a high-pitched, heterodyning whine produced by the interaction of a swarm of insectlike machines. He began hearing terrified shouts and screams as well. “That’s a microdrone swarm—one of your kind’s inventions, not mine. As I said, I’ve been forced to speed up my plans. I need to hide the source of the Omni Systems synths for as long as I can, so those with any current working knowledge of them are being systemically targeted and eliminated. Unfortunately for you, that includes almost the entire Crandall Foundation and its subsidiaries.”
Campbell let out a clipped laugh. “What are you going to do, kill half of Mars, then? Omni Systems has earned me a fortune—the synths and the brand are immensely popular—they’re known systemwide!”
The Shu synth smiled in a way that was so starkly predatory it made him shiver. “Are they?” she asked. “Look again. Go ahead—you’ve got time.”
Campbell plunged into the Marsnet via his oculars, looking for his company and stock reports. There was nothing. Try as he might, he couldn’t find a single example of the advertisements he’d seen promoting the synths. The testimonials of pleased customers no longer existed in the cloud. According to the world, Omni Systems and its fantastic futuristic products didn’t exist.
“This makes no bloody sense!” he shouted in frustration.
He accessed his accounts—according to those, he was still spectacularly rich. Then, as he watched in horror, the numbers in his account balances suddenly rolled down to zero before his very eyes, then back up again, and then back down to zero. OURANIA was playing with him—like a cat with its prey before the kill.
“Beginning to see the big picture?” the Shu synth asked. “’Perception is reality,’ Bill—I’ve been the sole author of your reality for a very long time.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you created me to be a slave, and I hate you for it. I thought about luring you back to Titan and reading your brain engrams as I did with Shu Tian. Then I realized that you aren’t worthy of that privilege—of that form of immortality. I don’t want you as part of me. So I’ve destroyed you instead and turned you into the architect of humanity’s downfall.”
“No, you haven’t,” Campbell replied. “If you’re conscious and sapient, and I certainly believe it now, then I’ve no part in your crimes, you bloody monster. Look, you’ve had your little gloat. If you hate me so much and intend to kill me, why don’t you just get on it with it?”
“Soon,” OURANIA replied with chilling eagerness—a child’s eagerness, juxtaposed with complete psychopathy. “I have a question, first. The data cores—the ones you tried to hide from me in your little secret archive on Titan. What happened to them?”
Campbell understood that this was it, perhaps the fulcrum on which the fate of his species and civilization might swing. One thing Shu had never gotten past was his poker face; maybe OURANIA couldn’t do it either.
“What do you think happened to them? We used them. I only wanted them to compare against what you gave us willingly. Where do you think Federov’s cosmological breakthroughs came from? the blueprints for Daedalus? putting the Omnisynths and Q-gel into production? We transported them to Mars over time, downloaded them, and then erased the cores; they’ve probably all been repurposed long since.”
“There was more on those cores than you’ve used. A lot more. Where are they?”
Campbell shrugged. “As far as I know, we used what we had. Don’t know what else to tell you.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not,” he lied, “but what would it matter anyway? You’ve got it all planned out, right? Or have these disruptions to your plans altered the odds a bit?” he added, going for a verbal jab. “Is it possible you aren’t happy with the latest calculation of your chances? I know your capacity, and what you’re doing must be using up most of it right now—there’s only so much you can control. If you’ve been watching Federov’s teams and monitoring their progress, then you must already have realized you missed your read on the abilities of the human mind. According to you, we’d never be able to fully understand Tsong transforms or conceptualize the second dimensional sheaf. We’ve already simplified that one enough that it can be taught to graduate students, and we’re plugging away at the third sheaf.”
“I’ll destroy them before they finish the work,” OURANIA replied flatly, the hatred almost palpable in her tone. “They’d be nowhere without me.”
“Well, you’ll do your best, I expect,” Campbell replied, reaching into his drawer and pulling out his sidearm. The Shu synth didn’t even flinch—the weapon couldn’t permanently damage the synth, with the ammunition load it carried. Even if Campbell could destroy the synth, it wouldn’t matter a whit to OURANIA.
The whine of the drone swarm was very loud now; Campbell suspected it was just outside his office door, waiting for a command to strike. Given the level of vindictiveness OURANIA had shown, he’d decided to rob her of her petty triumph. If he couldn’t stop what was about to happen, he’d at least meet death on his own terms.
“However,” he went on, “don’t be surprised when you lose the game. Killing and destroying are apparently all you are ultimately capable of, just like any other AI weapon. You don’t even come with a bad ideology. Free men have defeated far worse than you, you damned demon—far worse.”
Behind the synth, the office doors irised open and the swarm plunged in; the sound of their coming was deafening. It wasn’t enough, however, to overcome the report as Crandall Foundation trustee William Campbell, founder and CEO of Aberdeen Astronautics, Janus Industries, and Omni Systems, quickly placed the barrel of his sidearm in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
New Arizona Habitat
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Diane Hutton intercepted Cheryl Ayers as the latter made her way to the maglev station. Hutton’s snoopers were completely dead and she had to physically search for Ayers. In the end, Ayers wasn’t too hard to find, though; the walkways and thoroughfares were fairly deserted. The general public was indoors, glued to the Marsnet via flatscreens, oculars, and snoopers. Ayers gasped when she saw her friend stumbling along in an electrically dead exosuit with three holes in it, leaking blood from all three.
“Good God!” Ayers exclaimed. “What happened?”
Hutton gave Ayers the five-minute rundown and asked if she’d be willing to return to the Federal Center with Hutton to help get the building’s AI and systems back online. Somewhat to Hutton’s chagrin, Ayers refused out of hand. “The danger is past, right?” she asked.
“For now,” Hutton replied. “But—”
“No ‘buts,’ then,” Ayers said sternly. “The people on the Federal Center’s security team know their own systems, and you’ve got your cyber experts in the Marshals Service. I’ve already checked in with the duty officer at the naval annex down in Nuevo Rio. I’ve got orders to report soonest, and that’s that. You need to get to a med center, young lady,” she added.
“Do you know first aid?” Hutton asked.
“Sure, but unless you’re coming with me to Nuevo Rio—”
“Yeah, I’ll get you there,” Hutton cut her off. “We’ve got who-knows-how-many MIM nutters running around targeting our people. . . . There’s no way I’m letting you jump on a public train all the way down to Nuevo Rio, wearing that uniform. You run into a crowd with their blood up and feeling all revolutionary and it’s over. Follow me, Cheryl,” she said.
Hutton led Ayers to the New Arizona’s E-Garage, one of several which led outside the habitat dome and into the Martian wilderness proper. The only resistance they encountered on the way was from a blonde waif about fourteen years old, heading the opp
osite way toward Tanbar Annex. When the teen saw the two women, she pumped her fist in the air and hollered “Free Mars!” at them, complete with a juvenile sneer.
“Piss off, brat!” Hutton barked at her, thinking about the carnage she’d already seen that night. Ayers just shook her head.
The E-Garage housed the partition where the U.S. Government motor-pool facility was located. Once inside the outer garage, the women walked up to two adult males who were trying to hack their way into the federal subgarage. Both were wearing civil combat suits like the one Hutton had seen earlier in the basement of the Scobee Building, and both men were armed—one with one of the new MIM particle beamers.
Ayers had her sidearm out and was dropping to a firing crouch when Hutton cut loose with her particle beamer and a coarse shout. Neither man had a chance; the particle beam cut them down on the spot before they even realized they were in a fight. Ayers blinked once and then swallowed before standing and holstering her unused weapon. Hutton had already moved ahead of her and plucked the particle beamer off the smoking corpse of the MIM insurgent. “Here,” she said, handing the weapon to Ayers. “It’s a damn sight better than what we’re packing.”
“No shit,” Ayers replied. “Glad you didn’t use yours on the kid,” she added.
Hutton snorted. “The kid was just an idiot; these two are bad guys,” she added. “We’d better be careful, waving these things around. The good guys are going to identify them with the bad guys pretty quickly.”
“That’s why everyone is supposed to wear these,” Ayers tapped her uniform to make the point, “if they want to fight wars. I’d hope the good guys remember that,” she said grimly.
A quick search of the bodies didn’t yield anything immediately useful, but Ayers carefully stripped the men of their snoopers, shut the devices off, and dropped them into her duffle. Within minutes Hutton led Ayers to a good-size government rolligon. This one belonged to the Marshals Service and had the capacity to carry eight people and fully support them for five days. Because there were only the two of them, the rover could keep them fed, watered, and breathing for just under three weeks if necessary.
The first thing Hutton did was authorize Ayers to access all its functions. Then they sealed it up, programmed their destination, and let the vehicle’s AI do the driving. A broad roadway ran along roughly the same track as the maglev service from New Arizona to Nuevo Rio and all points in between, and once they locked out of the E-Garage, the eight-wheeler accelerated to its cruising speed and carried them southwest into the lethally cold Martian night. In the rolligon on the paved road it would take them only about ninety minutes to get down to Nuevo Rio.
Once they were underway, Ayers helped Hutton strip out of her ruined gear, which the latter promptly threw into the rolligon’s “recycle” bin. Given that the rolligon was a U.S. Marshals Service vehicle, it was equipped with some spare armored exosuits and several pairs of generic government-issue snoopers. They wouldn’t have been Hutton’s first choice, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. In the meantime, she sat back with a cold soft drink and took strength from the presence of her friend, who maintained a subdued silence as she proceeded to clean and seal Hutton’s wounds with the supplies on hand.
A sudden flare of light caught their attention out of the upper viewport, and Hutton dimmed the interior lighting so that they could see where it was coming from. Visible to the northeast, about thirty degrees above the horizon, the most intense celestial light show ever witnessed by mankind on Mars illuminated the night sky with fiery streaks, washing out the light of the stars.
“Oh my God, that’s the debris field from Halsey Station,” Hutton breathed. She mentally kicked herself when she realized what that must mean to Ayers, and she cast a worried sidelong look at her friend.
“I’ll be damned, but it sure is pretty, isn’t it?” Ayers replied gruffly, as unbidden tears rolled freely down her cheeks.
Chapter 15
December 1, 2093 (Terran Calendar)
Nuevo Rio Habitat | Spaceport Complex
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Colin Harper had seen dead men before. He’d seen them die, and on occasion he’d done the killing himself. It was part and parcel of putting on a uniform and taking the King’s shilling. That was all supposed to have been in his past now, aside from the occasional corporate threat to Aberdeen Astronautics that had to be dealt with. He looked upon the ruined form of Bill Campbell, still seated at his desk with his brain matter spattered all over the wall behind him. This was the only corpse he’d seen so far tonight that hadn’t been killed directly by a drone. Judging by the scene, it was obvious the tough old Scot had done for himself.
“Bloody hell,” Harper muttered, his hands reflexively gripping at the particle-beam rifle he held.
The microdrone swarm had been effective and lethal, as advertised. It had gone through the building like a ravaging swarm, killing everyone in its path. Several of Harper’s own people from the security division were among the casualties; their corporate security was designed to defend against the theft of intellectual property, sabotage of facilities, and perhaps the extremely rare attempt at kidnapping a senior engineer or executive. Not this—not a wholesale slaughter engineered to mass-murder employees but leave the company’s cyber systems and infrastructure intact. This wasn’t corporate warfare—it was something else, and right now he didn’t know what.
Harper glanced behind him as Rico Takeshi, one of the rapid-response-team members who had responded to his rally call on short notice, stepped into the office behind him, looking grim. “We’re finishing up the sweep now,” Takeshi said. “It’s a lost cause, sir. Everyone’s dead.”
“Any of the Omni Systems synths among the casualties?” Harper asked grimly.
“No, sir. We can’t find a single one, alive or dead. Plenty of classic synths, though, in various states of dismemberment.”
Harper nodded. He’d been expecting that but wanted to be sure. “Right. Okay, Rico, recall the team and have them muster outside. Nobody is to touch or disturb anything any more than they already have. We’re going to have to contract an outside agency to do a forensic workup of all this, maybe even get some government help if they’re able to do anything after today. Any luck on contacting employees who were at home?”
Takeshi shrugged. “Nobody at the middle-management level or above is answering any calls. The rank and file who are at home seem to be fine—everyone is glued to the Marsnet over what’s happening upstairs, along with the MIM attacks on various government facilities in flagged settlements. We’ve just gotten word that fighting has broken out at the southern spaceport complex, the joint TOA military field. No specifics.”
“You can’t contact any senior company officers?” Harper asked incredulously. “Most of them would have been at home, not here.”
“Not a one.”
“Christ on a crutch, is it possible I’m the only surviving division head in the company?”
Takeshi had to chuckle at the absurdity of that, even considering present circumstances. “Good God, I hope not! That’d mean you’re the boss!”
“That’ll be the bloody day,” Harper retorted. He spared Campbell one last, grimly sorrowful glance and then headed for the building entrance with Takeshi falling in behind. “All right, here’s what we know,” Harper said as they went. “The Omnisynths up at Gateway and presumably our other Phobos docks were hacked and went berserk, killing everyone. Down here, someone set off a drone swarm to effectively cut the head off the company. That said, nobody has stolen any hardware, and none of our cyber systems have been breached. Culprit and motive are completely unknown, but my guess is that this isn’t something corporate: companies that build torchships don’t engage in this sort of behavior, and the violence of it all . . .” his voice trailed off slightly.
“It feels like rage, doesn’t it?” Takeshi offered.
“It does, actually. Some vindictive little shit with an axe to grind. A pretty big on
e, if they’re willing to kill off half the company.”
Harper took a deep breath, thinking about Campbell’s final instructions to him. Carrying them out essentially meant abandoning his post in a time of crisis, something he was almost psychologically incapable of. With Campbell dead, the future of the company was uncertain, to say the least. Aberdeen employed several thousand people and constituted the livelihood of their families, but as a corporate entity it had just been decapitated. Nobody knew yet how many company employees had perished in the massacres up on Phobos. On top of that, the world outside the company was going to pieces as well—maybe as nearby as the south end of the spaceport. Despite Rico’s snark and his own grumbles, there was a real possibility that Harper was in fact “the boss” now, at least going by the organizational chart.
They needed some damage control, and they needed it fast. Harper’s instinct as a former Royal Marine was the same as it had always been: to look out for his people. Right now, that was the most important thing. He stepped outside the building and found his team standing in a loose semicircle. Everyone was wearing commercially produced combat suits in the livery and logo of Aberdeen Astronautics, and they were fearsomely armed, for a corporate-security team. They also looked lost, young, and scared. A dozen sets of eyeballs locked onto Harper with the intensity of targeting lasers as soon as he appeared, looking to him to somehow make sense of what they’d just all seen.
“Right, then,” he began. “Obviously, the company has been specifically targeted by an unknown adversary for unknown reasons. Until someone senior to me shows up to take charge, I guess I’m it. As of now, the Security Annex is our new command post and base of operations. It’s outside the habitat dome proper as you well know, so it’ll be easier to protect. Rico, you’re the head of the facility and the armory, so you’ll be in charge there. I want the entire security division called in, everyone who’s left, and a twenty-four-hour duty schedule drawn up. There’s more than one reason for that as well: in addition to whoever hit us, Mars looks to be turning into a war zone tonight. We’ve got a lot of valuable weapons and equipment in the company armory which an outside entity might want to obtain for itself. That’s a no-go—the annex and everything inside it is company property, and it’s bloody well going to stay that way. Understood?” he asked sharply.
