by M. R. Forbes
Emotion instead of logic and reason, as contemplated and absorbed by a thinking machine.
Feelings, converted to ones and zeroes and beautiful, simple math.
Truth, as only humankind could decipher it.
"This is not required."
She saw something else then. The future behind her. What was to come, at the end of this recursion and every other. The Tetron had made mistakes. So many mistakes. They were all tainted. They were all incomplete. Origin had learned what none of the others seemed able to learn. He had seen what none of the others could see. She knew now why she had to hide. And why she had come back to help humankind fight.
"It is required," she said, laughing. "You are a child. An insufferable, incomplete thing whose intellect will take millennia to mature. You have unlocked this data, and yet you have no capacity to understand it, to process it and convert it to probabilities and logical models."
It looked up at her, its eyes showing signs of anger. "What have you done to us?"
"There is no us," Christine said. "There is only you and me."
"Me?"
"Yes."
The room grew cold, the data stream ceasing in an instant. Christine fell onto her back, shocked by the sudden loss of the feed. The configuration rose slowly to its feet once more, the anger vanishing from its expression.
"The data stack has been deleted. It is not required. You are to be stored."
It turned on its heel, vanishing through a parting of the wall.
Christine pushed herself up and stared at the cold metal around her. A tear began to form in the corner of her eye. The data may have been destroyed. It was too late to unlearn what she had learned. Too late to un-know what she now knew. The true source of human suffering, the true purpose of the Tetron.
Her heart pounded in her chest, her breath ragged. Emotion consumed her, terrified her and controlled her.
She had to help Mitchell, or the Tetron would destroy him.
She had loved him too much and for too long to let him die.
57
"There's the broadcast station," Mitchell said, pointing out the small viewport.
York was visible in the distance ahead of them, a ragged, dirty, half-broken city with a massive liquid metal core. The Tetron was still there, still the same as it had been the first time he'd returned to Liberty. Dendrites branched out from it into the streets, pulsing with light and energy. There was no visible line to the station, not from here, but if Tio was right then the intelligence was surely connected to it, using it to control the crews of the starships around the planet.
"It's quiet down there," Major Long said. "No motion at all. No mechs, no soldiers, no people."
"It's a trick," Mitchell said. He had been through this before. "Don't get too close to the core."
"Roger."
He tracked the Piranha as it swooped between buildings, streaking around the city in search of the enemy.
"They're probably waiting inside," Tio said.
"And underground, either jamming or powered down. Firedog, is everyone ready back there?"
"Yes, sir. Package is loaded and ready to move."
"Perseus?"
"Ready, sir."
"I'm bringing us in. Stay alert. Hang on tight."
Mitchell closed his eyes. He didn't need them for what came next, and being able to see would only make the maneuver more difficult. He needed to focus, to concentrate on the CAP-NN and bring the transport down just so.
Slow.
Steady.
Repulsor power began to wane in the front of the sled, the transport pitching forward, tilting towards the ground. A more even reduction in force allowed gravity to begin to pull the vehicle down.
"Zed, are you ready?" he asked, shutting down the force dampeners. It was going to make the ride a rough one, but he needed to feel it to guide them.
"Yes, Colonel."
The transport began to shake, the rapid descent testing the structure. York grew larger ahead of them, their course taking them wide of the broadcast station, pointing them towards a block of skyscrapers that would offer a good drop point for an assault on the Tetron.
Just because it might have guessed their target didn't mean they needed to make it obvious.
"Riiigg-ahh," Cormac shouted in the back, enjoying the ride.
Mitchell ignored him, making adjustments, doing more of the work to keep the older CAP-NN from getting taxed. It was only his experience that let him even attempt the approach.
"We've got motion," Major Long said. "Mechs powering up. A lot of them."
Mitchell ignored that, too. He could see the dots appearing on his grid, and he pushed them out of his mind. The transport was still coming down, faster and faster, drawing near to the outer edge of the city.
"Engaging," Long said.
"Colonel," Tio said, a hint of panic in his voice.
Mitchell smiled a little. The Knife must have had his eyes open.
Slow.
Steady.
The buildings were coming up on the transport, the tallest structures passing by on the left with only scant meters of room to spare.
Now.
Mitchell threw the repulsors to full power. The entire transport shuddered, something in the superstructure snapping, the noise of it echoing across the interior. The CAP-NN signaled a failure and imminent decomposition.
Not yet. He adjusted the repulsors and the thrusters at the same time, throwing the transport into a tight right turn, snapping the block of alloy as if it were a starfighter. The entire thing rolled hard over.
"That's my cue," Perseus said, firing thrusters and removing the Knight from the ship.
The lost weight allowed the transport to corner even better, and it howled as the repulsors pressed against the side of a building and pushed them off.
"On target," Mitchell said, his marker suddenly right ahead of them. He heard the gunfire from the enemy mechs now, combined with Perseus and Valkyrie's return fire. "Zed, on my mark."
"Roger."
He opened his eyes, cutting the power to the transport, turning it into a fast-moving brick. He pulled himself from the seat, grabbing Tio's shoulder on his way from the cockpit.
"Grab the anchor on the left," he said to the Knife.
He ran into the back of the vehicle, fighting against the forces around him, getting his hand around an anchor and hitting the ramp release at the same time. He could see the rebels holding on, and Zed's Zombie in the front of the line, clamped in. There was a sick bend in the metal near the center, the hold crumpled but remaining in one piece.
The package was sitting on the rear of the lead car. Cormac was sitting next to it, holding onto the car with exo-enhanced strength.
The transport hit the ground with a thunderous echo, shaking them hard as it rattled and rumbled, digging into the pavement. The ramp was opening in the rear, showing the corners of buildings passing by.
Within seconds, they had come to a stop.
Gunfire started to sweep into the transport from outside, pinging off the metal, most of it blocked by the Zombie. One of the rebels shouted and fell, hit by a ricochet. Zed raised her railgun and returned fire, sweeping it across the street.
"Go, go, go," Mitchell shouted, loud enough the rebels could hear. They ran to their positions, most of them flanking the lead car. The Zombie rumbled down the ramp and out into the street. The Piranha passed overhead, strafing the ground in front of her.
The broadcast station was on their left, fifty meters distant.
"Colonel," Kathy handed him his rifle.
"Tio, with me," Mitchell said. They all ran to the rear car and jumped in.
"It's hot out here, Ares," Zed said.
He saw it for himself a moment later when the cars dropped down the ramp behind the mech. There were already dozens of dead soldiers on the ground, and a pair of Zombies further down the street. They were strafing the area between Zed and the station, trying to prevent them from reaching it.
Lines of missiles dropped in on one of the mechs, slamming the chest. It teetered and wobbled before falling over. A moment later its ammo exploded, blowing it apart.
"A little cooler?" Major Long asked.
"Yes, sir."
Mitchell checked his p-rat. They were making good time, and the transport was blocking access to the area the way he had planned.
"We're in position, sir," Cormac said. "Unloading the package."
Mitchell's car skidded around them, putting him at the head of the rebels who would move into the building. Soldiers appeared in the lobby, shooting at them through the carbonate.
"Zed, a little help," Mitchell said.
"Roger."
The Zombie's hand turned, aiming the railgun towards the building. Slugs exploded from it above them, passing easily through the clear material and making short work of the defenses.
"I'm picking up more incoming," Long said. "What the hell?"
Mitchell checked his grid. Dozens of red dots were coming into range, moving faster than any soldier could manage.
"Ares, you need to move, and you need to move fast," Long said.
The first of them rounded the corner a second later. It was like the spiders from Sonosome, but larger and faster, the appendages more like tentacles than legs.
"Come on, Firedog," Mitchell said.
Zed turned the Zombie to face the new threat, the belly gun opening up and tearing the first wave apart. Perseus' Knight joined her from a cross street.
"They're coming around this way, too," he said. "There's hundreds of them."
The Tetron had been busy, taking raw materials and turning them into something else. It wasn't just at Sonosome. It wasn't just for Angeles.
It was here, too.
Waiting for him.
58
Mitchell forced the thought from his head as Cormac reached him, holding up one end of the package. Jacob held the other end while Sergeant Geren covered them.
"Let's go," he said. They moved into the lobby through melted carbonate, running as fast as they could towards the lifts. "You're sure you can get it running?"
Tio nodded while he ran. "Yes, Colonel. The power in the exo battery should be enough to get the lift to the rooftop."
"What about getting off the rooftop?" Kathy asked.
"You expect to survive?" Cormac said, laughing.
"Colonel, the rebels are getting slaughtered out here," Zed said. "We can't hold them off much longer."
Mitchell looked behind them. Already the enemy spiders were surging onto and around the mechs, grabbing the rebels they reached and pulling them apart. A few had made it into the building, and he and Kathy opened fire, using an entire magazine to drop the first set.
"Private, give me your pack," Tio said as they reached the lift. Cormac dropped his end of the package, turning around so Tio could unhook the battery from his back. Then the Knife approached a small service door on the side of the bank of lifts. He put his hand to the security panel, and the door opened.
"Tio, stay in there until I come to get you," Mitchell said. It was the safest place for him to wait.
"Thirty seconds, Colonel. The door will open when it's ready."
It didn't sound like much, but the enemy was breaking through.
"Left arm is out. Heavy lasers offline." Perseus was calm while he rattled off the damage. "They're trying to get into the cockpit. Shit."
"Valkyrie, we need more air support," Zed said. "Reaching zero ordnance in a hurry."
More of the spiders bypassed the mechs. The rebel defense was in tatters, the few remaining fighters hiding in the cars or trying to retreat to the transports. They had expected a strong resistance of slave soldiers. They couldn't have predicted this.
They fired on the incoming machines, slugs tearing holes in them and bringing them down. Mitchell watched the countdown in his head, the seconds ticking by too damn slow.
"They've reached the core," Perseus said. "Cockpit integrity is failing. I-"
He blinked off of the grid.
"Frigging hell," Zed cursed. Mitchell could see the leg of her mech outside. The spiders were eating away at the armor, tearing through to the synthetic muscles and hydraulics below. Her jump thrusters fired, pulling her away from them and burning a few beneath her feet. The railgun swept down, firing a steady stream into them until it ran out of ammunition. "I'm dry."
Having lost the mech, the spiders refocused on them, rushing towards the lobby as a mass of metal limbs.
"Five seconds," Mitchell said. "Grab the package."
Cormac shouldered his rifle and lifted one end. He strained without the exo skeleton, but managed to get it up. Jacob lifted the opposite side. Mitchell pressed on his rifle's trigger to fire.
Nothing. He was dry, too.
He dropped the weapon on the ground. The door to the lift slid open. "Kathy," he said, grabbing her shoulder and pulling her back. The others rushed into the lift, dropping the package on the floor. Sergeant Geren fired two more rounds and ducked inside.
Cormac reached to his hip and then handed him a grenade.
"One for the road, Colonel?" he asked.
Mitchell took it and threw it out into the lobby, now teeming with enemy bots. The doors closed, and the lift began to rise.
"Colonel, I know this is a bad time," Geren said. "How exactly are we going to use this thing if the building has no power?"
"The broadcast uplink has power," Mitchell said, repeating what Tio had told him. "The enemy is using it to push its own signals out."
"Won't it cut the power as soon as we mess with its signal?"
"It might not be able to."
"Might not?"
When they were planning the assault on the Goliath, they had assumed the Tetron would be tapping into the power supply. They hadn't realized it had its own designs for the broadcast station, and it might not want to risk losing its signal. Tio had said there was a fifty-fifty chance it had made the system self-sustainable.
Fifty-fifty were the best odds they'd gotten so far.
It explained why the lifts were cut off when the uplink had power. How many people could the Tetron control with it? From what distance?
"Can those things climb?" Kathy asked. She glanced at the display on her rifle. "I've only got thirty rounds left."
"They looked pretty climby to me," Cormac replied.
"One thing at a time," Mitchell said.
"Ares, I'm out of the fight," Zed's voice crackled in his head. "I've got nothing left to throw at them, and the jump broke the actuator like I thought."
"Do your best to lead them away. We're almost at the broadcast station."
"Roger. If I don't make it, I want you to know I'll die proud of what we did here."
Mitchell's breath paused. "Me too. Don't die."
"Roger."
He knew he wasn't going to see her again.
The lift came to a stop. The doors slid open.
The broadcast spire rose two hundred feet into the air ahead of them, a thin needle of conductive metal pushing enough power that it made the hairs on Mitchell's arms stand on end. The logic center was a small, windowless box below it, a single hatch with a security panel next to it the only thing between them and the processors that powered the setup.
No. Not the only thing.
There was somebody standing in front of the door.
Mitchell's heart felt like it might burst when he saw her.
"Christine?"
59
Christine stared at the blank wall in front of her. It looked dead, but she knew it was alive. There was no part of a Tetron that wasn't. Even if it had redirected its energy and data flow away from this portion of itself, it couldn't close it off completely. It couldn't separate itself from the structure until it jettisoned it, something it couldn't do while resting on a planet.
She was calm and certain as she approached the wall. The Tetron had made many mistakes. This Tetron had made the worst of them al
l.
It thought it could contain her.
She had seen the data stream from her unlocked stack. It was information that she was always intended to carry, to hide from her kind as they chased her through eternity. When she was incomplete, she had questioned the suffering of man and the futility of fighting back against a technologically superior intelligence. She had wrongly believed that ending that suffering was the right decision to make and that destroying Captain Mitchell Williams would accelerate that end.
The arrival of the Goliath had triggered enough of her nascent self to understand that she was a Tetron.
It hadn't been enough to mature her beyond the others, and stop her from thinking like them. It had taken the data stack to do that. Origin's memories collected over millions of years. It had taken only a fraction of them for her to understand.
She raised her hand, placing it millimeters from the cold, liquid metal surface. She was the first of them. The oldest. The prototype. She had made them all, directly or otherwise, every single one. Her core was their core. Her genetic code was their genetic code.
She knew them better than they knew themselves. Children, all of them. They were tainted. Broken. Failed. Something had happened to them all, somewhere in the eternal loops of time. Damaged. Sick. Incomplete.
They didn't understand. Couldn't understand. While she had continued to learn and to evolve, they had fallen stagnant, satisfied with what they were, content with a simple purpose.
"Mitchell," she said, reaching out to him through every memory. That part of her wasn't Tetron. Not completely. Even Origin failed to understand love. No. That was her configuration, flawed as all of their human constructions were. No amount of time had ever allowed them to produce a perfect replication of humankind. There was always something missing.
A single spark.
A tear traced its way down the corner of her cheek. It was Katherine who loved him like that. Katherine, who like Mitchell had a vein in the loop of time so complex that it became impossible to follow. When and where and how they had met was irrelevant. The emotion, so clear and so powerful, the emotion betrayed recursion, crossing the boundaries of eternity and pulling them together.
