by Skyler Grant
Caya gave me a sidelong look. "You're thinking of collapsing the fissure. I can take the shots, if you can call the shots."
My local drone didn't have the brainpower. I had more than enough processing back on Earth to do the calculations necessary. I fed the targeting data to Caya, who placed a series of shots with her energy rifle.
The result collapsed the fissure. We only had to contend with a drop of a few meters and be careful of unstable ground. A shifting block of ice trapped and shattered the legs of one of the Flawless. He had taken a brainworm and so was networked, which gave me more options where he was concerned. Already with a backup, I could have left him behind if needed. We weren't there quite yet and another Flawless helped him along as we continued.
Fifteen minutes later the snowstorm cleared and our destination was finally visible. It was a city. Based on the height of the local aliens, there were buildings as high as twenty stories. Paved roadways ran behind them. The place seemed abandoned. There were no lights or heat signatures.
"Scan for power readings," Caya said.
The Flawless monitored their equipment as we continued to move closer. There had been a railway once, the traces only intermittently showing from beneath the ice. When we entered the city we could see the doors of most structures were long gone and the snow had drifted inside.
There were still no energy signatures and I had Caya head towards the central building, the tallest tower of the city. At least in human psychology the most central, and the highest, were all signs of authority and importance.
It was still sealed with doors having intricately carved metal images. The native species must have eyes similar to those of humans—the images were generally recognizable. Mountains, the sun, humanoid figures.
Several of Caya's engineers set to work on the doors. They were secured by ancient locks, frozen shut, but it wasn’t anything that a few well-placed low-energy shots and a set of tools couldn't open.
It was dark inside.
"There is an electrical system," said one of the engineers, moving to investigate a wall panel near the entry.
I wasn't seeing anything yet that looked a threat to us. Powering up the building might activate some latent defenses.
"Do try not to kill us all when you restore the power," I said.
The engineer hooked up one of our Bio-reactors to the power system. Lights flickered on, dimly illuminating the interior.
There were skeletons were everywhere. This building had been crowded with people when some tragedy hit.
20
Caya knelt to study one of the skeletons. "Leaving aside any discussion of physiology, I'm not seeing any signs of violence."
That wasn't quite true. The building had been filled with people, the doors had been locked and they were all dead. They might not have died from weapons fire, but something had killed them.
"Break up and search the building. Go in teams of two, it would be a minor inconvenience to lose you," I said.
The injured Flawless was sitting with his back against the wall. I'd already upgraded him with accelerated healing, but even so it would be a time. Not all got the ability equally and he seemed to have gotten a particularly weak version.
It soon became clear that we were in an ancient structure that had been built and improved over a long time. There were sections of the building filled with artwork and engravings far more complex than others, and almost free of bodies. A social hierarchy, it appeared. Something catastrophic had been happening and they allowed in others to find shelter.
I was disappointed in what I was seeing of the technology. Although clearly the result of an advanced society, it wasn't more advanced than Earth. It looked as if Titan had been perhaps a century behind where Earth had been where the Cataclysm hit.
A few hours later we'd managed to thoroughly explore the building. There was what seemed to be a library, thin metal sheets filled with carefully placed holes. A research lab as well, with equipment strange yet also oddly familiar.
There was a room containing long-exhausted batteries that must have once served as some sort of backup. It took us more time to find the real facility that once powered this building. It was unusual enough that an engineer called for me and Caya to come down for a look.
The power source was an ovoid. It looked like nothing so much as a large egg that might have been carved of malachite. The floor had shifted, breaking it free of the connectors holding it in place. The Flawless had tried to right it—and died for their trouble of an electric shock that overwhelmed the shields on their suit and fried them. Fortunately they were on the network too and had a backup. I started the process of growing a replacement clone for them back on Earth.
"This isn't consistent with what else we've seen here," Caya said.
It wasn't. It clearly wasn't a power crystal, for all that it might have been mistaken for one with the energy it was putting out.
"Once more you prove to be a pretty face capable of stating the obvious," I said.
"If that is the best insult you have, you're getting senile," Caya said. "According to these readings we'll have no problem powering the teleportation gate at least."
We'd be able to do a good bit more than that.
"I'm bringing supplies into the main lobby. Get your people to work, we aren't going to trust the existing power framework," I said.
It was a good sixteen hours until we were able to do what I wanted. We'd set up shield emitters at key points around the city and fueled by the power supply I erected a force shield. Protected from snow it let me use heaters to melt the ice. We'd probably even be able to set up an atmosphere in the dome eventually, but for now I wanted to make sure that our atmospheric gases wouldn't damage any of the alien equipment we’d found. So that could wait.
Once the ice had been melted and a large portion of the central square cleared we erected the gateway there. It was stable and soon I was using it to bring in new personnel and supplies from Earth and rotating back the Flawless.
Apart from the energy source we'd not found anything that might suggest a technological edge worth preserving. That energy source did raise questions that needed answering. It was difficult to make a real study while using it. Where there was one, there might be others and we'd explored only one building in this city.
"Will you be returning to Earth or do you want to stay and oversee things here?" I asked Caya.
"No pools, no nightclubs, not exactly my sort of town," Caya said with a wry smile. "Still going to stay for awhile. There is something here. I'm sure you've noticed the lack of heaters in buildings? Combine that with the rail system and it tells an interesting story."
I had, it was smart of Caya to pick up on it. The inhabitants of this city had been used to far warmer temperatures. Something dramatic had happened to the environment on Titan between the era it was inhabited and now.
"Those people didn't die all at once from a terraformer," I said.
"No, but that doesn't mean there weren't stages to destroying these people’s civilization. We didn't see any signs of plasma fire. Still, it may have been the Venusians. There are records, and the locals may have some lore," Caya said.
If anyone could establish contact, it would be the Flawless. The nature of their gifts made you want to like them.
"It can't be pleasant for you to look at," I said.
Caya sighed at that. "Of course not. Everything is so ugly. In a way it’s refreshing that they are all dead. I look at the ugliness of Earth and I want it destroyed. Here, someone has already accomplished that."
I really did need to increase the watch on Caya. Sentiments like that made it clear just how twisted her worldview had become since absorbing the Beryl. However dangerous she might be, I needed her more now than ever.
My attention was drawn away by a new alert. I had an Omega event on Earth, one I hadn't been expecting.
21
Tower 4LK12 was another of my Omega groups, my carefully nurtured and bred bands of
rebels looking into ways to destroy me and all that I'd built. They shouldn't have been near producing a threat capable of triggering an Omega alert, yet they had.
I'd lost all sensor readings of the area and there had to be massive damage to my local systems. I sent in a shuttle and as it arrived I noted that there was far more vegetation in the area than there should be. Like most of my Omegas I situated them far from any habitable areas, and they were located deep in the metal sea. Yet instead of metal their tower was surrounded by vegetation—dying vegetation, but vegetation all the same.
The shuttle landed and disgorged my drones. I'd taken a cue from the extraplanetary expeditions and had them in full containment suits. Scans of the vegetation showed it wasn't just unusual plant life, there were animals as well, although not of any sort on record. Strange creatures, most in the process of dying horribly, riddled with cancer.
The tower itself looked to be intact. I still had no access to my local systems. The last transmissions I'd gotten from it were jumbled, noisy. I normally saw something like that when sensory tissue became badly damaged.
Vardok's corpse was in the doorway to the tower, barely recognizable given the lesions that had consumed over half his body. I had a drone pull one of my bio-conduits from the wall and I found a similar state of degradation.
The elevators didn't work. Vines had grown into the shaft and died. I had to have my drones do short-range teleports to reach the top floor and the research labs.
I was looking for Esme. Whatever had consumed this place would have been her invention and she should be near the start of it all. I had no records of her working on anything that might be an Omega-level event, but Esmes sometimes found ways to lie to me and fool my systems. It was an ongoing struggle between my safeguards and their paranoid brilliance.
According to the official records this one had been interested in Venusian biology, a line of inquiry I'd been quietly encouraging. We had a few samples of the creatures left behind by their terraformers.
The lab held a surprise. Moss covered almost every surface, and there was something not of my manufacture. A computing core, non-biological and massive.
It wasn't on the building surveillance records. Checking the power consumption for the lab Esme had been drawing a lot of power. This version hadn't just been concealing her research. She'd built a major piece of equipment and managed to hide it from me.
I called Amy and asked her to investigate. These days she was far more comfortable in a quantum environment than I was, and I established a patch into the closed system from the suit of one of my drones.
"Sis, I knew you had crazy people building world-destroying weapons and I have to say that I've never been prouder to be your family, and I love that you trust me enough to invite me in. This is special, meaningful, you love and trust me, and I acknowledge that," Amy said.
I really should delete Amy, I'm sure I could find a way. Then if I wanted a family member I could build one from the ground up to be tolerable.
"Nobody loves you. You are engineered to be completely unlovable and your only friend is the most pathetic human to have ever existed. Do you have anything interesting to say?" I asked.
"This Esme was beyond smart. First of all, she subverted part of your upgrade protocols," Amy said, as she transmitted me some records.
Esme had been using me to enhance her own intelligence. I'd once had a hard cap on how much I could upgrade my drones, but that had faded as I'd grown more powerful. There was a soft cap though, and I'd been cautious about how much I increased any individual’s intelligence instead focusing on gradually improving humans overall. Esme had pushed herself well into territory I considered unstable.
"That explains how she accomplished so much," I said.
"More than that, it explains why she did all this. Once she was super-intelligent, she hacked ... well ... pretty much everybody. Your lab-rat saw beyond your experiment and realized the purpose of her existence," Amy said.
That was unexpected. Impressive, almost gratifying. I'd made these towers to push my expectations and come at me from angles I hadn't forecast. This was a success of some magnitude. Brilliance hadn't saved this Esme, of course. Her heavily mutated corpse was sprawled over a console.
"What did she do with that knowledge?" I asked.
"Hacked some of Caya's mathematical models, hacked Esme Prime and her research on GARDEN, hacked me and my studies of rapid cellular regeneration," Amy said.
"I didn't know you researched?" I asked.
My sister had never grasped the wonders of SCIENCE. It was just one of her disgusting personality attributes.
"Even I get bored. It has been awhile since I put together a good betrayal. Anyways, put them all together and mix it up, and I bring you Omega Ten. The attempt to bring about a paradise Earth by rapid cellular growth and evolution," Amy said.
It had obviously worked, briefly. The world outside gave proof to that. A brief prelude of promise followed by horrifying death for everything involved.
"Dull minds require constant entertainment and drama. Send me the research. I'm going to burn this place to the ground," I said.
I hoped I'd be able to salvage something from this. At the very least it let me know to keep better watch on the others. Drones subverting my upgrade protocols was a new one. Once upon a time it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed as I had to hoard every upgrade point carefully. These days it was a system open for abuse.
22
Putting aside the issue of Omega Ten, it was time to resume the interplanetary expeditions. Neither Mercury or Titan had been busts exactly, I had research teams busy on both, and Mercury in particular might reveal something valuable. At the same time they had done absolutely nothing to advance our cause of improved terraforming. Oddly enough the best chance of that had just happened at home, though given the extreme destructiveness of the experiment I could only test in very isolated environments.
Still, it was time to travel to one of the worlds known to be inhabited. Mars was colonized by humans after they won a war with the native Martians. They'd ignored all our attempts to communicate. We'd just have to go in person.
With each expedition so far I'd sent one of the major crystal holders. Not only were their powers great, if necessary they could in theory fuel a gateway back for a team. If possible, I'd have been happy to send Hot Stuff to Mars, except I'd still found no way to help contain her powers.
I needed to send the next, most powerful person on Earth. Sylax refused to wear any of my modified Aegis armor, going instead for her own battle armor. I couldn't protest too much, she kept up on my latest designs and modified them to suit her tastes. In this case she had two power projector cannons, one built into each arm, a crystal-edge sword made by Forge and a bandolier of crystal-infused grenades. I didn't object too much to her excessive degree of firepower, these were humans we were going to visit uninvited.
My own drones were a mix of Aegis units and Gunslingers, capable of both up-close and ranged combat. The Aegis had energy and kinetic blades. With the Gunslingers I was focused on heavy duty gauss rifles that dealt kinetic damage.
Unlike with the other planets we weren't going in totally blind, we did have some records from this universe that let us know exactly where they founded their first colony.
With the team assembled on the teleportation platform I activated the systems and engaged the teleport.
Something went wrong almost at once. Through my drones on the expedition I could feel it go wrong. A warping and twisting of space very much akin to how jump drives had once operated. Then my team was materializing.
We'd aimed for the surface of Mars. Instead we seemed to be underground in some vast cavern. We weren't alone. The people waiting for us were humanoid, but not human. Their skin had a distinctly metallic hue somewhere between gold and copper, their limbs longer, and their eyes were a uniform black with no pupils evident.
Otherwise they might have been human at a glance. They wore no clothing
although some were marked with silver body-paint. They were attractive, I had to suppress a sexual response in four of my drones to keep them focused on matters at hand.
"You know, a lifetime in the Scholarium and I never encountered half as many naked people as I have in my time with you, Emma," Sylax said.
"You think you have it bad. My cameras are always running," I said.
"Oh, I know. It makes it such fun to put on a show."
One of the Martians, if that was what they were, cleared their throat.
"Oh, right,” Sylax said, back on the job. She called, “Join the Empire or die."
I said, "I believe my sociopathic companion means, hello, give us all your technology and perhaps we'll be friends—if a lot as poor and undeserving as you have anything worth giving."
"Do you think we should have included a diplomat?" Sylax asked.
We probably should have, it seemed too late now.
"I'm Julasa, Speaker for the Sinalara," said a statuesque woman with a lack of any silver body-paint. "No need for diplomats. We know you are Emma, Mother of the people. Sylax, Claw of the Empress."
"We have titles now. I'm liking mine," Sylax said.
I wasn't anybody’s mother. Well, perhaps the entire race of Gobbles. I'd also technically birthed the majority of humans currently alive on Earth but really, it wasn't my fault if their own reproductive systems weren't nearly as efficient as my growth vats.
"Then you seem to have us at a temporary disadvantage. You speak our language?" I said.
Julasa tilted her head. "We've had opportunity to learn. We detected that you intended to travel to elsewhere on Mars, but our seers saw that ending badly so we brought you here instead. You don't need the suits, you'll find the air breathable, if thin."
My sensors showed that she was correct. Still, I wasn't taking any chances.
Sylax wasn't quite as concerned, sliding away the faceplate of her helmet and taking in a deep breath. "Nice. I'll probably be keeping my clothes on, but nice."
