by Mark Wandrey
Ooh, he’s pissed.
The Flatar, or Shinjitsu—whatever it was—got itself under visible control. It looked back at the opSha. “Prepare a detailed deconstruction of his brain.”
“That will destroy him,” the opSha said.
“Only if he resists.” He looked back at Sato. “So the choice is yours, Proctor. Either tell us what you’ve been doing the last 40 years, or we’ll peel your brain like an okfu fruit.”
Sato glared at the Flatar only centimeters from his face, pronouncing each word of his reply as if he were talking to a misbehaving child. “I. Don’t. Remember. Anything!”
“Fine,” the Flatar snapped and kicked off with its short rear legs. “Have it your way.” And it was gone.
“What’s involved in this deconstruction?” he asked the opSha. The simian alien merely smiled and followed the Flatar out. The Peacekeeper remained, an unmoving object. It could have been as seemingly dead as all the other Peacekeepers in the galaxy, except for the blue glowing vision band.
* * * * *
Chapter Eight
Rick woke in total blackness. For a second, he thought he was in space, then what sensor data he had confirmed there was atmosphere; he was just blind. He popped his helmet open, and it rotated up away from his face. He was in the same room he last remembered entering with Sato. The air was full of floating debris, it smelled like ozone, and he was slowly spinning in place. Most of the lights looked like they were burned out, and the wiring was melted, accounting for the smell.
“Something zapped me,” he surmised. “But what the fuck is up with my pinplants?” They were supposed to be impossible to damage, short of his death. There were no menus in his head. He could feel the armor, still, but only just, via a series of direct connections he’d never really explored. His pinplants had handled communications between him and the armor, running some systems automatically, and allowing him to make detailed commands without having to know the technical aspects. Without his pinplants…
He messed with the interface for a few moments, long enough to confirm that the pinplants simply weren’t responding.
“I thought I was fully integrated into the armor,” he’d said to Sato while the man had fixed his severed armor leg.
“You are, sort of. It’s best to avoid direct control of the armor.”
“Why?”
“Your pinplants handle much of the command interpretation from your mind to the suit. A direct interface could possibly cause some neural damage.”
“That doesn’t encourage me,” Rick had replied.
“Which is why you have the pinplant interface.”
Of course, Sato hadn’t said what to do if the pinplants failed.
As he floated, slowly spinning and considering what to do, he heard a sound. He could only see any one place for a second as it rotated by. What he saw was a pair of bots floating into the room. It took him a second to recognize them. They were maintenance bots, like you would commonly see in space stations. He’d first seen this type on Karma Station, working inside the ship docks. They were used to cut up damaged sections of starships for repairs.
They’re here to chop me up!
The revelation made the decision of what to do for him. He felt for the interface between the armor and his mind, sensing how it worked, and then embraced it fully.
His body and the mechanicals of the suit had always been linked, though he’d never been fully aware of it. Interfacing was a function of the pinplants. While this partnership was not a fully shared feature, the pinplants were there to modify and interpret commands from his mind. Thus, he’d never felt any difference between his arms and legs, and the suit’s limbs, though his resurrected body had no flesh and bone appendages of their own.
The command was effectively an override to the suit. “Bypass pinplant interface.”
“Yes.”
His mind exploded with the raw data from the Æsir’s own computers, and he reeled. There were a million inputs cascading into his visual cortex, as well as other parts of his mind, which controlled everything from motor reflex to autonomous functions. It was like being dipped in acid during a heavy metal concert. His screaming voice echoed in the smoky space. Everything deployed, activated, lit, fired, flexed, or did whatever it was designed to do.
It felt like it went on for hours before Rick saw something flash in his mind.
Just as suddenly as the horror had begun, it ended. Rick blinked and looked around; his former casual spin was now a wildly dizzying gyration. He used his body’s thrusters to arrest the movement and stabilize himself relative to the room. He concentrated on slowing his breathing, then on steadying his body’s energy flow.
“Oh, shit,” he said. His EM perception showed there were two flickering energy readings nearby. He turned in space without thinking about it, examining the room. It was still full of smoke and ozone, and now it also contained a halo of floating bot chucks. The walls were scored with laser fire. Based on his energy levels, he must have fired both arm lasers while spasming.
His pinplant interface came online. Rick instantly triggered a diagnostic. The pinplants had suffered damage; the interface between them and the Æsir were out. He could use them to diagnose the suit, just not to control anything. Sato’s words about not taking direct control echoed in his mind, along with ‘neurological damage.’
“Well, shit,” he said.
After floating for another moment, he turned and flew back toward the corridor he’d come in through. It didn’t take any more conscious thought than would be required to breathe. His every action was fused to the armor. Whatever the issue was, he was sure Sato could fix it. First, he had to find the scientist. Someone had come in after he’d been stunned and taken him away. Simple fix.
At the first intersection, a trio of the same bots were coming down the hallway. Rick lasered them as easily as he’d point to an item on a store shelf. Gesture, and they were gone. He flew over to the ruined bots and assessed the remains. He was hungry for energy. One of the three had a surviving hybrid energy cell. He extracted it and mated the power coupling to an external adapter on his left thigh. A tiny sigh escaped his mouth; the feeling of the power flowing into him had an almost sexually euphoric edge. He felt his cheeks getting hot as he sucked the battery dry.
Ninety-seven percent; that’s a lot better. He removed the drained battery and let it float away, flying back along the course they’d taken to get to the center. After maneuvering around corridors, slowing at each intersection, he finally thought about Dakkar. Where was the Wrogul?
He thought back to the last time he’d remembered seeing the cephalopod, and realized it was just as they were leaving the airlock. Had the slippery alien found a hidden entrance and was now sneaking around?
He’d wanted to avoid using the pinplant comms in case their enemy could use them as well. Sato had said they were perfectly secure, but he’d also said this operation wasn’t very risky. Rick should have known better.
He’d almost reached the airlock they’d come in through when he blundered around a corner into an entire squad of opSha in light combat armor. They all yelled and tried to arrest their forward momentum, only succeeding in either flying right past him, or bumping into him.
Rick grabbed the pair who’d collided with him and crushed their necks. It made a rather satisfying crunching sound, like a handful of walnuts. They weren’t dead; it would take a few moments for their bodies to realize it was over.
Two of the others had enough presence of mind to fire on him with handheld laser weapons. The armor sloughed the beams off as
if they were flashlights. However, to Rick, it felt like a cat scratching his skin.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled in surprise. The thigh holster popped open without conscious thought, and he snatched up the weapon that slid out at the exact moment his hand made contact with it. He hadn’t had call to use this one yet, a tiny machine pistol firing .177 caliber caseless bullets at 750 rounds per minute. His arm brought the weapon out and played it across the two who’d shot him, firing 30 rounds in a little over a second; he scored eight hits on one and nine on the other. Their armor was good, but not perfect. Bright red arterial blood sprayed from one opSha’s neck, while a bullet went through the eye of another.
Rick countered the weapon’s ferocious recoil using his jets without thought. The remaining three tried to retreat. Lacking an active flight system, they were reduced to scrabbling for handholds. Another two seconds of fire and 90 more rounds left all three dead.
“I should have used this before,” Rick said and holstered the gun, which automatically retracted into his thigh. Of course, what it had in rate of fire, it lacked in firepower. A sound made him spin around, right arm laser up and armed. It was only one of the opSha he’d machinegunned, surprisingly still alive.
Rick flew over to the alien, who was holding its throat as blood bubbled out between its fingers. The corridor was full of red globs floating all over, splattering onto the walls and bodies, combining to make larger globs, with some landing on him. So he didn’t get any on a critical sensor, he used a leg thruster to blow a cone clear between him and the dying alien, automatically thrusting with a back unit in the opposite direction to hold position.
“Gahk,” the alien gurgled as blood roiled from its mouth. They didn’t use air to make their vocalizations, but the sounds still originated in their mouths.
“Where’s Sato?”
“Gah…gawn,” it said.
“Gone? Where?” The alien’s eyes went out of focus, and the blood stopped surging. “Fuck,” Rick snarled and spun around, boosting toward the airlock. As he feared, when he arrived it was closed, and nothing was outside. They’d taken Sato and their ship.
“Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” He slammed his fist into the wall with enough force to shatter the laser-smoothed rock. The energy propelled him backward, and he arrested the momentum with his back jets without thinking.
After a moment, he controlled his rage. He examined his knuckles, which were throbbing in pain. The metallic alloy was scuffed, but not broken. The map he’d compiled of the asteroid was, naturally, incomplete. He used his pinplants to plot what else might exist, based on his mapping thus far, and was rewarded with a probable outline of the remaining space. At least another airlock where the other ship was docked.
Rick channeled his fomenting rage into something useful. Focus. He considered; where could they have taken him? They wouldn’t leave the system. Well, they could; however, he doubted they would. If they had, there was nothing he could do. This left somewhere in-system, or, more likely, in orbit of the gas giant. There were only sparse asteroids elsewhere. While it appeared their enemies liked asteroids, this base was nothing more than a trap, a tar baby.
“They expected me to be dead,” he said as he examined the map. Or they thought he was just a bot. Maybe one of those Peacekeeper robots. It didn’t matter; he’d become the x-factor. They weren’t expecting him.
Rick pushed away from the airlock and flew down the corridors. Part of his mind remembered how it was to fly when the Æsir and he were separate. He’d command the suit through his pinplants. The control was precise, but measured, controlled, and ultimately delayed. It might appear fast and fluid to an observer. It really wasn’t, though, not even to him. Now? There was no delay or relay. He didn’t tell the suit what to do; he did it. He didn’t know how he ever flew before. Before the Æsir and he were one. Before he was the Æsir. Why didn’t Sato set it up this way from the beginning?
Corners in the corridors that would have required him to stop and change directions, he now took at speed. His body spun with blinding speed, using back and leg jets in intricate combinations to perform skew turns an observer would think was impossible. He laughed out loud in the joy of the moment. At last he felt whole, for the first time since he’d ‘woken up’ with Sato looking at him. The flesh inside the metal was so limiting.
Rick arrived at his destination, a predicted series of rooms on the opposite side of the asteroid from the center where he and Sato were ambushed. Its existence was further highlighted by the squad of armed opSha he’d blundered into. They’d been coming from that direction. It also made sense for a location of their enemy’s forces. Sato and he would have blundered into it, ignoring all other reasonable directions, to have reached it.
He braked with leg thrusters, slowing. Ahead was a lightly armored door that he was falling toward at 20 meters per second. Rick put both arms down, aiming between his legs, and pumped the lasers to full power, firing the millisecond they came on target. Both arms effected a precise arc, 250-kilowats of laser energy slicing into the doors, leaving glowing trails, and sending molten metal globules flying away. His armored legs slammed into the door’s center, feet first, a split second after he finished the cuts.
The doors split in the center. Half folded back, the cut on that side not quite complete. The other half was propelled away from the impact, a red-hot scythe cutting into the room’s occupants. A handful of opSha who’d been gathering weapons and armor were cut down by the projectile, either killed outright or horribly burned, out of action. The other 50-odd occupants cried out in surprise and tried to fight back.
It was a bloodbath. In a confined space no more than 20 meters across, many of his enemies were within easy reach. Others were only a handful of meters away. Rick was mad enough to kill them all with his bare hands, but he needed to move, so he used maximum carnage. The lasers were already energized. He used them. Scores of stinging bullets and lasers glanced against his armored skin. All they did was tell him where to turn and shoot, which he often did without facing the attacker. They all died in moments.
The door into the next compartment opened as he ceased firing the lasers. Both arms seared from the heat, telling him the lasing chambers were severely overheated. His head came around for a better view as the doors opened. A squad of opSha were maneuvering a pair of heavy lasers into view.
He snatched one of the grenades from the mount on his waist. The data interface built into the palm of his hand programmed it instantly, and he flicked it backhanded toward the door. He jetted to the side as the first laser fired, slicing the air a full meter wide of him as the grenade smacked into the same laser’s metallic shield and stuck, just as he’d programmed it.
Rick hugged the chamber’s wall as the grenade detonated. A split second later, a secondary detonation went off. The already gore-choked room was flooded with a wave of torn and shattered alien bodies, blood, and metal fragments from the exploded laser. He immediately flew into the maelstrom.
Hunger gnawed at him, making the core of his being ache, and his head swim. He searched the dead and debris, finding a trio of laser carbines, as well as one of the powerpacks for the heavy laser. He grabbed the rifles, sliding the straps over one arm, then snatched the powerpack, removed the connections, and slapped it onto the power coupling on his thigh. Energy flowed, and he shuddered with pleasure. It was…intoxicating.
The powerpack wasn’t spent after his internal batteries reached 100%, so he left it there to act as a backup. On to the next room; his theoretical map suggested he was close to the opposite airlock.
The room where the heavy laser squad had been was completely ruined. Guts and shattered equipment were everywhere. The miniature K-bomb had wreaked extreme havoc. If anything was useful, he couldn’t see it. He flew to the next door and stopped short of opening it. He could see the lock wasn’t secured; all he had to do was push it open. His adversaries had had over 10 minutes to prepare for him. He hadn’t been subtle or quiet. This was likely the last
room before the airlock. Good place for a last stand.
He removed two more grenades, programmed them, and pushed the weapons against the door. Clink! They stuck magnetically in place, and Rick pushed away. At the other end of the space, back by the charred remnants of the heavy laser, he stopped and grabbed the biggest portion of a body he could reach. He launched it across the room with a heave, anchoring himself with a laser mount strut.
The corpse—he thought it had been an opSha—slammed into the door, forcing it open. A wave of laser and ballistic weapons fire poured out. While Rick shielded himself inside the previous room, the slaughterhouse he’d wrought was further burned, sliced, and torn apart. When he was more or less certain the doors would have swung completely open, he remotely detonated the grenades.
The asteroid base shuddered from the twin blasts. Then, silence. He grunted and flew into the remnants of their last-ditch defenses. It was impossible to tell how many there had been, or even what races they were. Most appeared to be opSha, but he was relatively certain a few were elSha, and he saw one alien he’d never seen before. A sleek body with flexible skin between legs and hands, silky black and brown fur, and tiny black-on-black eyes. It vaguely reminded him of a terrestrial marsupial, the name escaped him. Whatever it was, it was dead, just like everything else in the space.
The strange alien had been just next to the lock, which stood open. Smoke billowed out of the airlock and into the asteroid, moving in that strange way smoke moved in zero gravity. It could be deadly for a living being, creating clouds of dead air or air contaminated with toxic fumes. Rick closed off his air inputs without conscious thought, ‘holding his breath.’ As he flew into the smoke, he knew subconsciously how long he had before he’d need to breathe—around 20 minutes—with the stored oxygen in his atmospheric processor.
His grenades had done a good job on the defenders as well as their ship. It looked like they’d been preparing to abandon the station in response to his brutal attack. The ship’s interior was aflame in multiple places. Pockets of fire moved along combustible materials like a living fungus, spitting chunks of flame, which would writhe and sometimes find a new source of fuel. Fire on a spaceship was deadly serious business, as he’d learned in damage control training with the Winged Hussars.
