by Greg Keyes
“Believe it or not,” he said, “that’s a leadership quality. You might surprise yourself.”
Oddly, she did look surprised. Very surprised, so much so that he thought she was having him on.
“Okay,” Amar said. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“No, Chief,” Chitto said. “Listen.”
He heard it then, close to inaudible at first, but growing steadily in volume.
CHAPTER 21
AT FIRST HE thought it was just some strange music someone had slipped into the intercom, some form of electronica.
But then he realized it sounded more like talking, a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy without breaks to draw breath. The words were unfamiliar and the articulation was very weird. Some of the sounds he was pretty sure the human voice couldn’t reproduce. And it got louder and louder.
He didn’t know what it was, but it sounded wrong—yet somehow familiar.
Now conversation had tailed off completely—everyone in the bar was listening. Most had puzzled expressions on their faces, but Nishimura looked horrified. She covered her ears and starting muttering in Spanish, and with creeping dread he began to understand why. Something about the cadence of the language, the tonal inflection, reminded him of the thing back in New Kochi, the monster that had reached into his brain.
And also of the jabbers—the language they spoke.
Trying not to lose it, he tapped on his radio. “Sam?” he said. “Sam? Dr. Shen?”
He got back only static.
“What the hell is it?” DeLao shouted. “Whoever is doing that—”
Amar had a bad feeling, and it was quickly getting worse.
“Chitto, Nishimura,” he said, “find Palepoi and gear up. DeLao, get your squad together.”
“What’s happening, Chief?” Chitto asked.
“I have no idea,” he said, “but it can’t be good. Call everyone in. I want a squad guarding the bridge, one in engineering, one in the workshop, and one in the armory guarding the Skyranger. Nishimura, check in with the perimeter; make sure nothing is coming in. I’m headed down to engineering. My squad, come as soon as you’re armed and armored, and someone drag my stuff down, please.”
* * *
Engineering was a madhouse. Lily Shen was barking orders, and her half-panicked staff was scurrying around like confused ants.
“What’s happening?” Amar demanded.
Lily looked up. Her expression was somewhere between irritated and panicked.
“The computer,” she said. “Something’s taking control of it.”
“Something?”
“Lena, explain to him,” she snapped. “I don’t have time.”
Lena looked at him apologetically. “She’s freaking out,” she said. “I don’t blame her. The bridge has been sealed off, and her father is in there. Our internal communications have been shut down.”
“What do you mean, ‘sealed off’?” he asked.
“It’s a security feature,” she said. “In case the ship is invaded.”
“I’ve already sent a squad there,” he said, trying to sound calm. “I should hear from them soon. Lily said something had taken control of the computer. What exactly did she mean by that?”
“At first we thought it was a bug in the system,” she said. “A virus or something. But now it looks like it’s some kind of artificial intelligence.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “The computer has been on for weeks.”
“But not fully operational,” she said. “We tested it a bit at a time, remember?”
“Well, what happened?” he demanded.
“Obviously we missed something,” she said. “As careful as we were, we weren’t careful enough. The system is too alien. It must have been slightly aware the whole time, hiding, playing along with us, waiting for this moment.”
“Bloody hell,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” she said. He could tell she was worried, but she shot him a little smile.
“You’re really cute when you say that, you know,” she said.
“You mean sexy,” he said.
“That’s exactly what I meant.” She kissed him. “Go do your job,” she said. “I have to get back to mine.”
* * *
Nishimura, Chitto, and Palepoi showed up a few minutes later. Amar took his gear from Chitto and began putting it on.
“DeLao,” he called. “What about the bridge?”
“Locked down, Chief,” he replied. “Can’t get it open. There’s a kid here from engineering working on it, but so far, no luck.”
It was getting hard to hear, as the ghastly chatter rose to a nearly deafening level.
And then, very suddenly, it stopped. Dead silence followed for the space of a few heartbeats.
“Zao gao!” Lily swore into the stillness.
Amar stood frozen, waiting—for what he wasn’t sure.
Then the lights went out, and they were in utter darkness. Lily uttered a few more colorful Mandarin phrases, and several people screamed. Amar flipped on his helmet light.
“Everyone keep calm,” he bellowed.
Then the diesel generator kicked in, and the auxiliary lights came on. He made his way to Lily.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“I’m frozen out,” Lily whispered. “It’s completely taken over the ship. And it has turned off the air.”
“And sealed all of the hatches, I would assume,” Amar said.
“Of course,” she replied. He saw that she was trembling.
“You’ve got this,” he told her. “You can do it.”
She looked at him. “The noises,” she said. “Did you hear?”
“Yes,” he said. “I get it. But you have to shake it off and save us, right?”
She took a deep breath. “Of course,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “So how long have we got? Before we suffocate?”
“That’s difficult to calculate,” she said. “We have at least a few hours before carbon dioxide levels start to become toxic.” She thought for a moment. “If I can devise some way of scrubbing the CO2, we could last a little longer.”
“How about this?” he asked. “Is there some way to manually open any of the outer hatches?”
“No. Not without explosives, and maybe not even then,” she said.
“Chief?” That was DeLao, over the radio.
“Yes, go ahead.”
“The bridge just opened up,” he said.
“Is Dr. Shen okay?” he asked.
“Yes, he and Sam are fine,” DeLao said.
Amar turned to Lily. “Why would the AI lock the bridge and then unlock it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.” Her brows beetled up. “Unless—”
“Guys,” Lena interrupted. “Lily, Amar—look at this.”
He stepped over to see what she was studying so intently. It turned out to be a screen divided up between security cameras they had installed early in the refit process. At first he didn’t see what had attracted Lena’s attention.
“Here,” she said, pointing. “That’s the Enigma chamber.”
“Oh,” Amar said.
Slowly, as he watched, the hatch began to open.
“Unless the computer didn’t lock the bridge,” Lily continued. “Maybe the security system locked it before the AI got control of it.”
“Oh, no,” Lena said.
Amar keyed the radio. “Everyone, watch for hostiles, originating in the lower fore of the ship. Repeat, we may have hostiles.”
His earpiece crackled.
“ADVENT?” DeLao asked.
“I don’t think so,” Amar said. “But it could be just about anything else. Watch the lifts and the access stairs and squeal if you need help. If they get through you, they can come at us from any number of directions. Akira, same for you guys in the workroom. We have to keep these things on the lower deck.”
“Right, Chief,” Akira said.
/> “Mak, are you there?” Amar asked.
“Mak” was Mukharymova, a fresh recruit from the New Moscow area, but she was anything but green, having fought with an isolated cell since the age of fifteen. She had dark eyes and honey-touched hair that was driving half of the men crazy, but if she noticed the attention, she ignored it. Her squad was still in the armory.
“Yes sir,” she replied.
“Get down here and guard engineering. We’re headed to the Enigma chamber.”
He signed off. “Come on,” he said.
The Avenger, he thought, suddenly didn’t feel like home at all.
The armory was on the top deck of the ship, in the rear. The Enigma chamber was in the front of the craft and three decks down, on the same level as engineering, which was in the back, underneath the bar and the armory. Between engineering and the Enigma chamber were three interconnected compartments that currently didn’t have any use.
Through these they now advanced, cautiously opening each hatch until they came to the third, from which they could see the now-open Enigma chamber. Amar couldn’t make out anything inside other than darkness and something in the distance radiating a pale green light.
He was about to give the order to move up when something came hurling through the hatch and bounced off the wall.
“Grenade!” he shouted, ducking back behind the bulkhead. Thunder boomed, and a blast of heat and fury came through the hatch.
Amar leaned around. He saw movement and fired without waiting to see what it was. His bullets rang like they were hitting a steel wall.
“Robots!” he yelped.
This particular robot was flying, and another came out just behind it. It looked a little like a human torso with no head and nothing from the waist down. It had one arm with a mechanical claw and the other was just a long tube.
Which suddenly spat green fire. Not a mag rifle, some kind of energy, and hot. He felt the scorch of it in the air, even though it missed.
Nishimura shot the same one he had, and it went rattling back against the wall. Amar tossed in a grenade, seeing as he did so more robots streaming through the opening. And they had nowhere to go except through Amar and his squad. If he got pushed back, though, they could potentially go anywhere using the lifts or stairs connecting the decks.
For a while, they managed to hold them. A few made it through the door but were gunned down as soon as they did. A pile of robotic debris was beginning to build up in the chamber.
But finally, there were too many. One shot Palepoi, sending him stumbling back. Nishimura came up and sliced its weapon off, but another was right there. Amar shot it, threw another grenade, and gave the order to fall back to the next room just before it went off. He slammed the hatch, but it wouldn’t lock.
Palepoi, still on his feet, fired another rocket as the hatch popped back open. Then they set up and waited for the assault to continue. They had now been pushed back almost to Mak’s position.
“DeLao,” Amar said, “report.”
“Nothing yet, but we can hear you guys catching hell. What is it?”
“Mechanicals,” Amar said. “Figures. What else could last twenty years in a sealed chamber?”
It was starting to feel hot and stuffy. The scent of propellant and ozone clogged the air. Was he imagining it, or was it already getting hard to breathe?
Nishimura leaned out and fired.
Amar glanced over at Palepoi and nodded at him.
“I’m okay, Chief,” he said. “Just a little scorched. If that had been a mag, I’d be done.”
“Okay, Chitto, go back and set up a supply line. We need people to walk ammo down from the armory. Tell Mak to move someone up to take your place.”
“Rather stay here, Chief,” she said.
“Not much use for a sniper in this situation,” he pointed out.
“Fair,” she said. He and Nishimura covered her retreat.
“KB,” the radio said, “this is Sam.”
“What’s up?” Amar asked.
“I think I can take control of the ship,” he said. “Dr. Shen says there’s a kill switch—”
“Hell yes,” Amar said. “Do it.”
“I’m on my way,” Sam replied. “I just wanted to keep you in the loop.”
“Thanks,” Amar said. “Do it.”
Things were looking up. The robots kept coming, but with two squads working together and a steady supply of ammunition, they weren’t making any advances. They seemed to have them contained and were even starting to push them back.
He realized he hadn’t heard from Sam in a while, so he tried the radio. The analyst didn’t answer.
“DeLao?”
But he didn’t answer, either.
“Has anyone heard from DeLao?”
“Haven’t heard anything, Chief,” Akira said. He was in the workroom, a compartment below the bridge. “It’s real quiet up here. Should I send someone up?”
“No,” he said. “Keep your position. Engineering?”
“This is Lily Shen,” his earpiece informed him. “What has happened to my father?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to find out. Could just be a problem with the radio.” He didn’t believe that, but he needed to give her something to hang on to.
“Sam said something about a kill switch,” he said. “Where is that?”
“There’s an access tube that runs between the hull and the bridge,” she said. “There are a series of kill switches Dad placed there in case something like this happened. They should literally cut the computer off from the rest of the ship, at which point we can open the hatches using the generator. I should have been able to detonate them from here, but something has severed the connection—perhaps the computer itself, using some sort of remote. Sam went to try and execute manually.”
But Sam wasn’t answering the radio.
“I’m coming back,” he said. “Show me.”
Gunfire rattled behind him as he came back into engineering. Lily had pulled up a detailed plan of ship. He studied it for a few minutes.
“What do we do when we get there?” he asked.
“Don’t worry,” Lena said. “I’m going along. I know the procedure, and there’s no time to teach it to you.”
CHAPTER 22
THE SOUND OF gunfire intensified behind them as Amar and Lena made their way up the stairs with Palepoi and Nishimura.
Amar paused. “What’s going on down there, Mak?” he asked.
“Chief,” his earpiece said. “Mak here. I think we may have gotten the last of them. We’re proceeding into the Enigma chamber.”
“Don’t fall asleep, Mak,” he cautioned. “You don’t know what’s in there.”
On the way up, they paused to look in on Akira and his bunch, who seemed almost bored.
Mak came back just as they reached the top level.
“Nothing moving in here, Chief,” she said. “I think we got them all.” There was pause. “Weird,” the Russian said. “These look sort of like coffins.”
Amar peered around the corner. He was now looking down the passage that the bridge opened from, where DeLao’s squad was supposed to be.
But the corridor was empty. And the hatch to the bridge was closed.
Someone on the radio link started screaming.
“Mak?” Amar said.
“Chief—” the Russian gasped.
Then nothing, as if her radio had been destroyed. But below, the sound of gunfire began again.
What the hell is happening, he wondered, fighting a sudden, almost overwhelming sense of dread.
Coffins. He remembered Vahlen’s lab, the alien-human hybrid in cryosleep….
One thing at a time, he told himself sternly. Do the job in front of you. Trust the other squad leaders to do theirs.
“Where is the access corridor?” he asked Lena.
“Down past the bridge,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “The two of us are going down there. Nishimura, Palep
oi—cover us.”
As they crept down the passage, Amar roved his gaze everywhere, but he paid special attention to the bridge hatch, afraid that it was going to suddenly spring open.
But they passed it uneventfully and reached the stairs.
Then the bridge door opened, and DeLao stepped out. He aimed his rifle at Amar and pulled the trigger.
Amar was already moving, pushing Lena into the stairwell. Two bullets smacked into his armor on his left side and nearly spun him around. He managed to stagger through the hatch before DeLao could shoot him again.
“Amar—” Lena began.
“Just go,” he said. “Do it.”
His ribs felt like a cinderblock had been slammed into them, and he was sure some of them were broken, but there wasn’t any blood.
He leaned out for a look. DeLao was waiting, and now Amar noticed what he hadn’t before, at least not on a conscious level.
DeLao’s eyes. Empty, glowing, like Nishimura’s back in New Kochi.
Bullets thudded into the bulkhead as he drew back again, but not before seeing something else coming out of the hatch, something not human at all.
“Chief?” Nishimura said.
“Try not to kill DeLao if you can help it,” he said. “But don’t let anything get to the stairs.”
Then he started up after Lena as the fireworks began in the corridor.
The narrow stairs took him up past the crew quarters and an unassigned room above them. Beyond that they continued until they reached a long horizontal shaft lit by cool blue light.
Lena was waiting for him. She shot him in the stomach as soon as he stepped into the corridor.
He gasped and staggered back. His legs suddenly felt like rubber, but oddly there was no pain, just the sense of impact. Behind her, he saw a misshapen shadow and huge phosphorescent eyes.
“Lena,” he pleaded. “Don’t. Fight it. I love you.”
She took a step forward and aimed at his face. He saw her hand was trembling. Her trigger finger twitched, once, twice.
Amar rolled over so he had a clear shot at the thing and then sprayed it with bullets. It staggered back a meter and then started forward again, screeching. Amar took aim at its huge, onion-shaped head and blew it into fragments.
Lena shrieked and dropped the gun. Amar staggered up and took her in his arms.
