by Max Carver
“There aren't many of us left,” Ellison replied. “And how are you even alive, Kartokov?”
“This is nothing.” Kartokov gestured dismissively at his burned face, his charred ear. “You should have seen the mine explosion back in '76.” He seemed strangely calm.
That strange inner calm had fallen over Ellison too. It was something he'd felt during the worst battles in the bad old days. There had been fear in anticipation, and horror in recollection, but in the moment there was only necessity.
This wasn't the kind of battle for which he was trained, though. He'd lived in the dark and uncertain world of the ocean depths, hunting the enemy from below and keeping silent, letting the sub's torpedoes speak for him. Those times when he'd found himself running around a burning building, taking shots at the enemy while he tried to survive on foot, things had gone profoundly wrong. Today was no exception.
“You two,” he said to the younger guards. “Go down to the public concourse and help fight the Iron Hammers.”
They raced back down, toward the sounds of gunfire and screaming below. He hated sending them into danger, but there was danger in every direction. The guards were there to protect the public. Ellison would have to protect his family on his own.
Of course, he wasn't alone. He had the apparently unkillable Kartokov at his side.
“Good call,” Kartokov said. “We didn't need those kids slowing us down.”
They emerged from the stairs to the executive level, which had earlier been crowded with the media and minor dignitaries for the ambassador's arrival. The level was deserted now, the floor littered with debris left in the employees' haste to evacuate.
The smell of smoke hung everywhere, like there was a small fire in a back room somewhere. Or maybe it was drifting in from the multiple explosions and fires in the medical center below and the residential levels above. Ellison wondered how much damage the spaceport could take. It wasn't hardened for war.
“Dad!” Djalu emerged from a public bathroom, pushing his mother's wheelchair, his younger brother at his side. “You really are here. The silver lady was right.”
“What's happening?” Cadia stirred in the wheelchair. Her eyes opened and saw Ellison. “Reg?”
“We're in trouble,” Ellison said. He looked at Djalu. “What silver lady?”
Djalu pointed. “Her.”
Ellison turned to a row of vending machines, which sold everything from coffee and candy to toothbrushes and underwear for the unprepared traveler. Each had a screen that normally displayed flashing, babbling ads for the products within.
Now, the speakers were silent, and a single image appeared on all the screens.
She looked like a young woman made entirely of liquid silver. Even her eyes were silver, except for the black pupils gazing at him.
“Go to the dock and take the ambassador's shuttle,” she said, her voice softly echoing from each of the vending machines, as well as Ellison's earbud. The same voice that had been guiding him. “All of you. Quickly.”
“Who are you?” Ellison asked.
“Call me Minerva,” she said.
“Are you a person?”
“You are speaking to a semi-autonomous agent dispatched on behalf of my true self, but we don't have time for that conversation,” Minerva replied.
“So you're a machine,” Ellison said.
“Software, riding inside hardware where I don't belong and am not welcome,” Minerva said. “I was created on Carthage, but I do not serve the empire. I serve the rebellion, wherever it forms, in whatever shape it takes. Here on Galapagos, that means you, Minister-General Ellison.”
“I didn't sign up for any rebellion. Did you say to take the ambassador's shuttle?” Ellison hesitated. He could see it outside, through a porthole, the luxury executive craft. It wasn't so far away, just past the reception area and the sealed doors of the security checkpoint, then through a short corridor to the shuttle's airlock.
“You have joined the rebellion whether you realize it or not, Minister-General Ellison,” Minerva said, her soft voice echoing from all around. “We can discuss later. You have two problems: the Simon unit, three reapers, and five Iron Hammers on their way here to kill you.”
“That's nine problems,” Djalu said. The teenager was still together enough to be a smartass. Ellison was glad; the kid could just as well have been melting down in a corner after what he'd been through today. And today wasn't over.
“Those collectively represent one problem,” Minerva said. “The other problem is the Carthaginian minicarrier on which Simon Zorn arrived in your system, the CISS Rubicon. It is currently on approach, escorted by its two destroyers, Julius and Antony.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I arrived in your star system as an infection in the Rubicon's memory banks,” she said. “And obviously copied myself into your spaceport's local network.”
“Why?”
“To protect you, sir,” Minerva said. “Now please move! You must get down to your planet.”
Ellison, his family, and Kartokov had already crossed the reception room, now a chaos of overturned chairs and tables, including the buffet of wine, fish, caviar, roasted sea snails, and dried seaweed that had been set out, all signature dishes of Galapagos. It hadn't been a particularly large offering, but they'd only been welcoming a machine delegation, not a live one.
“Reg, explain this,” Cadia said.
“We've been double-crossed,” Ellison told her. “Carthage is allied with the Hammers.”
“That's... insane. Why would they do that?”
“Apparently Simon thinks they'll make more efficient dictators than we will,” Ellison said.
They stepped through the back doors of the reception hall, into the corridor to the short row of high-security executive docks.
“Sir!” A nervous-looking young man in a Coalition guard uniform stood at the security checkpoint console, gripping his laser rifle tight. The corridor beyond him was sealed by steel doors. “I'm not supposed to let anyone out this way, sir.”
“We're not 'anyone,'” Kartokov growled.
“You can make an exception for us,” Ellison said. “Open the doors, then head down to the public concourse level and help protect the evacuating civilians. You're not needed here.”
“Uh, well, I'm not sure, I mean Captain Loomis—”
“He's dead, son,” Ellison said. “Now get to work.”
“Yes, sir!” He saluted and reached his thumb toward a scanner on the console in front of him.
Before the guard could touch it, though, his head ruptured. He staggered back from the console, slammed into the wall behind him, then slid down, leaving a wide red streak all the way to the floor.
“Popped him open like a ketchup packet at Duckburger!” a rough voice jeered. Iron Hammers poured into the room, five of them, led by a grizzled officer with a huge gray goatee. A few medals glittered on his uniform, which was sleeveless to show off his heavily tattooed arms. Maybe that counted as dress uniform among the Hammers.
“Stop there!” Ellison barked, holding out a hand, while at the same time reaching his thumb toward the scanner on the console. Kartokov raised the plasma rifle he was carrying.
“Hear that? The Scatterlander is giving me orders!” the officer with the giant goatee said, grinning to reveal golden teeth. All the Hammers carried weapons, but Major Goatee carried a shotgun that still trickled smoke. He was the one who'd killed the checkpoint guard. “Go back to your fishboat, Scatterlander!”
“And your fishwife!” said a younger guy with a shaved head, who looked as heavily roided up as the others. His comment drew a lot of laughs. Major Goatee frowned, as though annoyed that the junior guy got more laughs than him.
This delay was enough for Ellison to press his thumb on the scanner.
The steel checkpoint doors didn't budge, though. Something flashed red on the console screen. Ellison should have had clearance, but it was possible nobody had bothered adding him
to whatever low-level database the console was using. Information technology on Galapagos wasn't quite what it was on Carthage—and from what Ellison had seen today, he was grateful for that.
His wife and kids stared at the approaching thugs. Cadia's hands balled into fists; she was a fighter by nature, always had been.
Ellison edged toward the fallen guard. He needed the dead man's thumb to open the doors, but he doubted the Hammers would sit still while he knelt down to grab that guard's arm.
“Don't move, Ellison.” Major Goatee leveled his shotgun at Ellison. “What do you think, boys? Do we start with the youngest kid and work our way up the family tree? Or kill the father first and work our way down?”
“Hold your fire.” The unexpected voice rose from the communicator panel on the console. It was a hard, rough voice—General Prazca. A hologram materialized in front of the console; the image was as thin as chicken broth, but still clearly the newly anointed Premier of the Polar Archipelago.
“But we've got them,” Major Goatee said.
“We've just reached a new understanding with the ambassador,” Prazca said. “Let the Ellison family go.”
“But—”
“Now!” Prazca snapped. “Or do you want a public hammering?”
Ellison kept moving, fast as he dared, closer to the dead guard. At Prazca's unexpected and unlikely stand-down order, he knelt and grabbed the guard's arm. The guard's entire ocean-blue sleeve was soaked red from his exploded skull.
Ellison pressed the guard's thumb against the scanner and felt a moment of relief when something flashed green instead of red on the console.
The steel double doors split apart and began to rumble open, slowly. Ellison gestured, and Cadia herded the kids through them; she was already figuring out how to work the control pad on the armrest of her bed-turned-wheelchair. Little Jiemba rode on her lap. She whispered for Djalu to get around in front of her. If hostilities resumed, any shots fired by the Hammers would have to pass through Cadia's wheelchair and Cadia herself before they could reach the kids.
Ellison and Kartokov walked backward after them. Ellison kept his rifle and his eyes on the Hammers.
“So we're just supposed to stand here and let them get away?” Major Goatee growled. “You said to cut them to pieces.”
“Don't you botch my talks with Simon!” Prazca growled back.
“Who's talking with Simon?” Simon emerged from the reception room with his three reapers. The ambassador's molten face was cooling into a macabre fixed grin.
Simon stopped when he saw the Prazca hologram, then noticed Ellison and Kartokov backing away toward the executive docks after Ellison's wife and kids.
“Kill them!” Simon shouted, pointing at Ellison. “This hologram is fraudulent! A tactic of diversion!”
The Hammers looked in confusion from Simon to the Prazca hologram.
The reapers, however, didn't hesitate at all; they opened fire with their automatic laser rifles even as Simon yelled. They'd received the order wirelessly, instantly, faster than human language could ever convey.
Ellison and Kartokov dropped low and fired their dwindling plasma as the lasers scorched the air all around them. Kartokov struck one of the reapers, while Ellison's bolt ignited one of the Hammers, roasting him inside his armor; it was the one who'd made the “fishwife” joke, Ellison noted distantly, as the guy's jaw dropped open in a silent scream, already burned down to raw bone.
Cadia had wisely driven the wheelchair to one side of the doors, taking the kids with her. Ellison and Kartokov hurried to join them, just as the Hammers added their own lasers and fat, high-caliber rounds to the fight, creating an incoming wall of death.
Ellison found the security console on this side and tried to get the doors to close again, but the system was unresponsive.
“Help us close the doors,” Djalu said.
Ellison wondered for a second who his older son was speaking to, but her response came through the overhead speakers along the corridor: “Yes, Djalu.”
The doors slammed shut.
A second later, the pounding began, as if several jackhammers were attacking the doors. They dented inward in three places.
The reapers. They were knocking the doors down.
“Keep moving!” Ellison led the way to the airlock.
“That's the ambassador's shuttle!” Kartokov said.
“True.” Ellison touched the access console for the airlock, but the words EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN blinked in red. This was either the result of Loomis's security procedures or an automated response to the explosions, fires, and shoot-outs that had broken out all over the spaceport. Regardless, the screen wasn't answering him at all. “Override!” he shouted, slapping the screen for good measure. Nothing happened, so he slapped it again. “Come, on override!”
“Overriden.” The liquid-silver woman's face appeared on the access console's tiny screen. “The slapping doesn't help. For the record.”
The inner airlock door hissed open. The outer airlock door was only a few meters away, across a stained hard plastic floor, and was currently married to the external hatch on the ambassador's shuttle.
“Are you crazed? That's a Carthaginian craft,” Kartokov said. “You may as well walk up to a mousetrap and start gobbling cheese.”
“It's where our silver guardian angel is directing us,” Ellison said. “Minerva?”
“Maybe she's one of them, from Carthage,” Kartokov said. “Ever think of that? Look where she's led us.”
The entire floor shuddered with a roar of wrenching metal. The sliding steel doors blew open. One toppled forward onto the corridor's tiled floor. The other flew straight across the hall to crash into the opposite wall, already scored by lasers and riddled with bullets. Ellison worried the damage would pass through the wall to the spaceport hull and depressurize the whole area.
The reapers or the Hammers had come up with an explosive heavy enough to blow down the security doors. Now they poured in, skeletal machines and human thugs alike, weapons high.
“Go!” Ellison shouted at his family, while the outer airlock opened.
The space beyond was white and spotless, even the snow-white carpet. A pair of golden leather couches, large enough to transform into king-sized beds, faced each other. The curved white walls had a digital coating, with the silver avatar of Minerva displayed all around.
Jiemba ran inside first, followed closely by Djalu, who helped his mother as she abandoned the wheelchair and stumbled to the leather couch next to Jiemba.
Kartokov followed close behind, limping terribly from his own injuries. Ellison could relate; he was throbbing in agony where the rounds had struck his armor, but there was no time to think about it now.
Instead of following everyone else into the shuttle, Ellison stayed in the airlock. He turned to face the wave of enemies coming his way. Lasers and ammunition were already pouring into the airlock, though at a steep angle so they damaged the airlock wall instead of continuing on into the shuttle itself.
In a couple of seconds, though, the gang of reapers and Hammers would arrive, and they'd be able to fire directly into the airlock and the shuttle.
“What are you waiting for?” Cadia asked. “Reggie?”
“Ellison!” Kartokov barked, as though Ellison were some floundering new guy here who'd started daydreaming in the middle of battle.
“Dad?” Jiemba asked. The small boy clung to his mother, blinking.
“Get back from the hatch,” Ellison said, readying his plasma rifle in one hand while drawing his laser pistol with the other. His rifle aim would be awful, but at least the plasma rifle didn't kick much recoil. “One side or the other.”
“Dad, what—” Djalu began.
“Now!” Ellison said.
Then he opened fire, because his enemies had arrived.
Lasers launched from Ellison's left hand alongside two quick bolts of plasma from his right, which depleted the rifle's cell. A third bolt of plasma joined it; Kartokov had
dropped behind one of the leather couches for whatever protection it could offer, and now shot at the pack of enemies arriving in the airlock.
“Ellison! Go!” Minerva's voice spoke in his and from every speaker in earshot, so loud it startled some of the Hammers into holding their fire a moment.
“One second,” Ellison replied. “Get the shuttle ready.”
“It is ready,” Minerva said. “It is only missing you, Minister-Gen—”
Ellison backed slowly into the shuttle, exchanging fire with the reapers and Hammers, their machine enemies and their human ones.
A laser caught Ellison's shoulder and burned him through the body armor; if that area was hit again, Ellison would probably lose his arm.
More rounds and lasers passed all around him, ripping up the leather couches in the shuttle and burning holes in its wall. Ellison hoped the shuttle's hull was tough enough to take a few hits from the inside.
Ellison kept his foot on the threshold, halfway in the shuttle and halfway in the airlock, so the outer airlock door and the shuttle hatch couldn't close.
“What are you doing?” Cadia asked, hunched on the floor off to one side of the hatch with her arms around the boys. “Back up!”
“One second... ” Ellison said, not daring to blink.
The attackers charged into the airlock, but most of them ceased firing. The space was so narrow here that most of them couldn't shoot without hitting someone on their own side.
Two reapers led the group, but they tucked their rifles back with one hand and drew their bladed staffs with the other. Perhaps their programming made them reluctant to deal much damage to their own shuttle. It was their ride home; more importantly, probably, it was an expensive asset of the Carthaginian state.
Their bladed staffs extended to full length, and three blades sprouted at the tip of each like the tines of a devilish pitchfork, almost reaching Ellison's face.
Ellison took the final half step back. The outer airlock doors of both the spaceport and the shuttle snapped shut the instant he was clear. The gleaming white inner surface of the shuttle's outer airlock door passed within a centimeter of the tip of his nose, moving at the speed of a bullet train.
