by B. V. Larson
Even if the common spacer didn’t grasp the danger, CENTCOM and the government surely must. Why weren’t they building a replacement fleet?
I contacted my father seeking the answer to this question as I came down the umbilical aboard a nearly empty car. Director Vogel and his variants weren’t with me—our plan mandated that he and I separate until a critical moment in the future.
“Father?” I asked, sensing that an audio-only channel had opened. “Are you there?”
“I’m here. What is it, William?”
A cold greeting. I’d been in space for more than a month, out of contact except for an occasional vid message and presumably in great danger. I’d expected at least to be able to see the man who’d fathered me.
“Are you terribly busy?” I asked.
“No, not really. We’re on recess. Mother and I are away on a private getaway. I’m sure you understand.”
I hesitated, frowning. “No, I don’t. Are you saying you don’t wish to see me?”
“Not at all, son!” he said with false bravado. “We’ve just been planning this vacation for a long time. We don’t get to see each other much in a private setting with our busy schedules. I’m sure that you’ll have plenty to do on Earth seeing your friends and so forth. By the way… where will you be staying?”
“I… I thought I was coming home to stay at the mansion.”
There was a deafening silence. My mind raced, and I began to understand the situation.
I should have expected it. My parents were political creatures. As my reputation was now radioactive, they wanted nothing to do with me.
Suddenly, the lack of video streaming also seemed very purposeful. To avoid any sort of association, it wouldn’t do to have a snapshot of even a virtual meeting floating around the net.
“I understand completely,” I said with what I hoped was only a hint of bitterness in my tone. “As it happens, I won’t have time to come by the house. I’ve got a very busy schedule at CENTCOM. Perhaps after the next voyage, we’ll have time to get together then.”
“Yes!” my father said in relief. “That’s a splendid idea. And William, about your next voyage… do you know yet when you might be shipping out again?”
“Soon father,” I said, “very soon.”
“Good. I always feel safer with you out there among the stars guarding the world all of us share. You make me proud, son.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said quietly.
The channel closed then, and I stared down at the green forests and black ribbon-like roads of Earth. Dark clouds boiled off to the east, over the ocean. Air traffic flittered this way and that above the clouds, trying to avoid the storm.
I felt as if I didn’t have a friend in the world, but that didn’t weaken my resolve. In fact, if anything, it strengthened it. The elderly spiders in their hole up to the north, they were the ones I must defeat.
The path wasn’t going to be easy, and I knew I had to take serious risks if I was to have a chance. The first item on my agenda involved an early a.m. visit to CENTCOM.
That night I slept fitfully in a hotel. I dreamt of spiders and worse things, all of them seeking to steal Zye, Yamada, Rumbold and other familiar faces from me.
When I awoke, I was red-eyed and irritable. Shower and breakfast did little to improve my mood.
As the sun dawned over the land, I stood in front of CENTCOM. I didn’t go inside, but instead waited for Vogel and his shipment of special equipment.
He was late. The sun rose higher, and I began to wonder if I’d been taken for a fool. What kind of man would plan something as audacious as this and then bail out at the last minute?
Director Vogel, my mind said to me, supplying the name of the coward in question. This failure to act on his part seemed in character.
Perhaps he’d awakened this morning as had I, and during the early hours common sense had taken hold of his mind. The plan was half-baked at best. Vogel had never impressed me as a man of great fortitude.
Maybe he’d simply taken his packages and returned to the spaceport. Perhaps he was back on Araminta Station or in his homeland in Europe.
I could hardly blame him, but I was angry. I almost used my implant to call him. Almost.
Give it ten minutes more, something told me. Just ten minutes.
Pacing back and forth near a fountain, I was given odd glances by early-shift personnel as they arrived in Star Guard uniforms. The groundskeepers and even passing sparrows all seemed to pause for comment. But I didn’t talk to any of them, and I didn’t call Vogel. We’d agreed not to have contact until we met at this exact spot.
Losing patience a half-hour later, I reached out with my implant—but halted before I started a person-search. A new thought had frozen my mind.
What if Vogel had become an unperson overnight?
That’s how it had happened before with Zye. The mere idea of such a possibility was terrifying to me. If they’d gotten him, I couldn’t be far behind. I felt like I was living in a bad dream.
Fixating on the idea that Vogel had vanished like Zye, my mind began to churn. How could I run an online scan to check on his existence without sending up red flags? I was certain that a directory search on Vogel would trigger an AI somewhere. Then they would know my mind hadn’t been properly updated. My own existence would be in danger of erasure after that.
I hit upon a circuitous route. I searched not for Vogel, but rather for the Phobos labs themselves. Wouldn’t the director’s name be prominently displayed?
“There you are!” called a familiar voice.
Turning, I spotted Vogel. He was trotting toward me but not from the expected direction. He was supposed to approach from the street. Instead, he’d come from the main entrance.
“Director?” I asked. My emotions ran the gambit. I felt surprise, relief and irritation. After a moment, irritation won out. “What are you doing inside, man?” I demanded.
“Sorry, I had a technical problem. I had to be present at the unboxing, and—”
Waving my hands for silence, I began walking briskly toward the entrance. He followed along, panting. I could tell he was unaccustomed to full Earth gravity.
“We can’t talk about that,” I said. “Is everything set? That’s all I need to know.”
“Yes. We can meet them at the receiving dock. They won’t activate until we get within ten meters.”
I glanced at him. “Isn’t that cutting things a little close? What if the guards don’t let us get that near to them?”
He waggled his fingers in the air helplessly. I shook my head and hurried on.
“We’re under time-pressure now, unnecessarily,” I said.
“It couldn’t be helped, Captain.”
I had many choice words bubbling in my mind, but I let them go and tried to take deep breaths. We were almost an hour behind schedule. Admiral Perez would arrive at any moment.
Far overhead, I heard a buzzing sound. It could be his air car—I wouldn’t be surprised. He came in at 8 a. m. promptly every morning.
“Let me do all the talking,” I told Vogel. “When we get in there, you turn into a mute. Got it?”
“That hardly seems—”
“Got it?”
“Yes.”
We reached the security screening at the entrance. They removed my PAG and my power sword, but left my personal shielding device. It was something, anyway.
We didn’t make it ten paces toward the elevators before a Guardsman non-com rushed up to us.
“Sir?” he said, looking at me. “Are you Captain Sparhawk?”
“Of course.”
“Please come with me. We have a situation.”
This was it then. Could this be the straightforward approach the Council took when making an enemy vanish? Wait until they were in a compromised position then swoop down and arrest them?
My eyes flicked back to the entrance. It seemed very far away. I considered inventing an excuse to return—but then thought the better of it.
I would have to bluff it through.
“What’s the nature of this emergency?” I demanded. “We have an appointment with Admiral Perez.”
“I’m sorry, sir, it’s about a package down at the loading docks.”
My eyes gave Vogel an accusatory glance. He said nothing, as I’d directed.
“Very well then, lead on.”
We followed the spacer to the sub-levels. Before we even got to the double doors at the end of the hall, I heard the familiar rasp and hiss of moving variants.
“They’re loose!” Vogel exclaimed. He began to run, rushing past us. He hit the doors with his thin arms outstretched.
“It’s not safe!” the spacer called after him.
“He can handle them,” I told the spacer. “They’re like his children.”
Then I rushed after the director. What I saw when we opened the door was shocking and crushing. I knew immediately all our carefully laid plans had been dashed.
A man lay dead in a gory heap on the loading dock. Another spacer, terrified for his life, stood near the chain-driven doors. He looked as if he wanted to break through them, but he couldn’t. He stood with the air of a man who was trying not to be noticed by nearby predators.
The third of the variant team was just unloading itself from a cocoon-like shipping crate. Another helped it do so. They all turned to look at us when we entered the chamber.
“They killed Charlie!” shouted the spacer who’d led us here. “I have to call—”
“No!” shouted the man hugging the doors. “Don’t transmit anything! Don’t pull a weapon!”
The spacer who’d guided us here didn’t listen. He put his hand on his PAG. That turned out to be a mistake.
A very long limb extruded from what I believed to be K-19. The arm had a pair of snips on it. The spacer lost his hand. His wrist was a stump, spurting blood.
Whip-like, K-19s arm retracted in the same blurring motion it had attacked.
Shocked, the spacer looked down at his wrist then he began making a keening sound.
“You have to stop that,” Vogel advised sternly. “They’re in a heightened state. They’re off-protocol.”
I reached out, grabbed the director and shook him.
“Dammit, Vogel!” I shouted in his face. “Can’t you even control these abominations when you’re in the same room with them?”
The spacer we’d come in with passed out on the floor. We glanced at him, but then I became aware of a looming, unnatural presence.
K-19 was standing over us, his snips clacking like chattering teeth.
-23-
“Captain Sparhawk,” K-19 told me. “Aggression will not be tolerated.”
I let go of Vogel’s lab coat slowly. The nano-fabric of his collar unfolded itself and smoothed over.
“He’s fine,” I said to K-19. “This is all a misunderstanding.”
“Understood. We must continue our mission.”
Relieved, I opened my mouth to call out orders to them, but Director Vogel put his hand up to my lips and shook his head.
Watching in astonishment, I witnessed all three of the variants marching by through the double doors and up the ramps into the heart of CENTCOM.
“We’ll follow them,” Vogel said. “We’ll use your biometrics to get past the elevator doors. No one will notice us in the confusion.”
“We’re just letting them run loose?” I asked.
Down the hall ahead of us, I heard shouting begin. Two shots were fired from PAGs.
Director Vogel began to trot.
“Damn, damn, damn,” he said. “I didn’t think they’d get off a shot!”
“What have you done?” I demanded, grabbing him again and spinning him around. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! They’re killing the guards!”
“Did you really think they’d let my variants get all the way to Perez’s office without a direct assault being involved? Don’t be naïve, Captain!”
My jaw sagged. I had hoped… but maybe he was right. There was no way to sneak these things all the way down to the heart of CENTCOM. They’d be stopped along the way, and once they were, it would be done in force.
“Let go of me,” Vogel said, struggling. “They’ll get too far ahead.”
We rushed along in their bloody wake. Bodies were strewn about the place missing limbs in most cases. Some people merely huddled against walls, cowering. They’d been ignored by the variants.
“This is how Halsey lost his ship, isn’t it?” I demanded of Vogel, who was puffing now with exertion.
“I can only imagine,” he said. “Will you give me a hand?”
He was kneeling on the floor, sick from running in Earth’s high gravity. I paused and considered leaving him behind. He’d lied to me. His plan to get down into the War Room had been a fabrication.
“You can’t hope to control them without me,” he said, seeing the doubt in my eyes.
Reaching down, I hauled him up to his feet. He staggered into me, his muscles atrophied by too much time spent in a low-G environment.
“They’re programmed to drive a path between the loading docks and Admiral Perez’s office off the War Room,” he said in a gasping voice. “If they get stuck, we have to help them bypass security.”
Feeling like a traitor, I hustled Vogel along the corridor. He seemed to get heavier with every step.
At last, we made it to the elevators. Guardsmen lay in puddles of blood and snipped-off limbs. Most of the staffers were screeching and fleeing out the exits in every direction. Outside the windows in the quad, I saw an armed contingent of marines gathering. It was only a matter of time until they counterattacked in force.
The elevator we’d reached was designed for heavy freight. There had to be some way of getting large items down into the vaults below the CENTCOM building, and we’d found it.
My hesitation lasted less than a second. The marines would gun us down with the variants if they realized we were in league with them. That much was clear. It was one thing for these cyborgs to abuse a few stray guards with pistols. An organized platoon of marines with heavy weapons was something else entirely.
I touched my hand to the plate, and it flashed green. We entered, and the variants trooped in after us. It was a tight squeeze.
The elevator doors shut, but it didn’t start moving.
“They’ve locked it down,” I said. “It’s standard procedure. We’ll never get to our goal now. You struck too soon.”
Vogel wasn’t listening. He was hacking instead. After I’d entered a valid biometric input, he only had to bypass the lockdown, not the regular security.
After a few seconds, the elevator lurched into motion, heading down again.
He gave me a triumphant grin, but when the elevator began moving, the gathering troops outside took action. They opened fire targeting the heavy metal doors.
A hundred PAG bolts burned and sizzled on steel. The whole elevator shook, and a spot grew orange-white, throwing off sparks. A moment later, as we threw ourselves to the floor, another spot began to burn.
They must have thought they had us trapped in the elevator, but now that we were escaping them they’d decided to kill us while they could. They were burning their way through, but it was too late. We were already sliding out of reach.
The firing stopped, but then the lights went out. Emergency red illumination kicked in and the elevator took on aspects of a funhouse. The three variants, packed into a space large enough for a truck but still cramped by their standards, resembled artificial monstrosities assembled to terrify carnival-goers.
The ceiling of the elevator car began to take scattered strikes.
“They must have forced the outer doors open,” I said. “They’re firing down the shaft. The metal roof of the car probably isn’t thick enough to stop bolts from penetrating.”
The three variants conversed with insectile rapidity. I thought I heard a few squeaks and clicks, but that was all.
Suddenly, R-77 climbed on the back
s of the others and reversed himself, clinging to the roof of the elevator car with steel hooks. As it hugged the roof of the elevator over us, I couldn’t help but notice the variant’s carapace was smeared with the blood of innocent men.
PAG bolts soon began to sizzle through. As the fusillade was targeting the center of the car’s roof, it burned through there first. It melted away in a shower of sparks, and the variant’s exposed belly was lashed with fire.
He was sacrificing himself to protect the rest of us. The realization came as a shock. I’d never thought of the variants as protective of one another, much less us.
At last, before the variant died and lost its grip on the roof of the car, the door dinged and opened.
The scene beyond was smoking and vacant. The lighting at least was back to normal—normal for CENTCOM, that is. A dull, yellow glow filled the chamber.
We rushed out into what we’d hoped would be safety, but more troops were waiting for us.
“Step aside, Captain Sparhawk!” shouted a commander in dress-blues. His pistol was out, and his look was determined.
“Put away your gun,” I told him. “You can’t stop the variants with that. They’ll cut off your arm.”
He bared his teeth. His sides heaved as he looked me over for a second.
“Captain… are you with these things? What’s going on?”
“CENTCOM has been infiltrated by the Stroj. Stand aside, Commander.”
He stared. Perhaps he took too long because K-19 began to stalk him. At last, he waved for his men to put down their weapons. They all complied.
Dropping the gun like it was hot to the touch, we were all pleased to see K-19 halt and switch targets. He was now fixated on the doors that led into the War Room.
When I drew even with the commander, he snaked out an arm and caught me by the collar.
“If it was anyone else, I would have shot you down,” he said to me. “Why are you marching with these monsters, sir?”
“Do you remember Admiral Cunningham?”
“The Stroj agent?”
“That’s right,” I told him, “she was operating right here, at CENTCOM.”
He shook his head slowly, not liking where I was going with this.
