by Mark Wandrey
These were all handled by the pinplants, he realized. When the ‘plants went offline, he’d disconnected them. Sato had said reversing the process wasn’t possible. He wondered if the scientist was being melodramatic? Many of the suit’s functions were now completely seamless. He could fly and maneuver in space without thinking about it. He could also unlock storage compartments by just reaching toward them.
“Oh, shit, the weapons,” he said and brought himself to a stop. The weapons systems had all been controlled by pinplants. It wasn’t much different from a standard pinplant interface with a hand weapon, such as he’d trained on with the Hussars. Firing them before had been as simple as telling his pinplants the power setting, choosing a target, and firing. As simple as snapping your fingers, bang, you’re dead.
Time was passing, and he couldn’t waste any more thinking it over. He would have to work it on the fly. In an instant, he was flying back down the corridor without thinking it through much at all. The weapons must work similarly, he thought as he navigated a slightly crooked bend in the corridor and careened into something.
Stunned, he cut the jets and rebounded slightly. He’d just had time to realize it wasn’t a wall but something floating like him before he was struck by, of all things, a flexible metallic tentacle!
The impact sent him back the way he’d come, bouncing off the wall and spinning wildly. He stabilized his flight and came around so he could better see what he was facing. He instantly knew what it was, because he’d looked them up in the GalNet back on Earth. It was a Peacekeeper bot.
“So much for you all being deactivated,” he said.
The machine was shaped a little like an aspirin capsule, with a blue band around one end. He assumed that was a vision receptor. Four long, powerful-looking tentacles were extended from the capsule-shaped body, two on either side, ‘under’ the eye slit. A red line began to glow, and Rick instinctively dodged sideways. It was more like throwing himself into yet another wall. A high-intensity laser cut a swathe exactly where his midsection would have been, only touching his foot at the end of its transit.
Pain!
He yelled in shock as the laser scored across his right foot, making him reflexively yank it back, further exacerbating his erratic flightpath. Ironically, this caused yet another laser to miss him entirely.
His crazy trajectory landed him around the corner, and out of the Peacekeeper’s view. Rick used the momentary safety to look at his right foot. Right again?! That leg just doesn’t have any luck. It looked like a third of his foot had been cut away, starting at the outside, part way to the heel, and continuing up between his 2nd and 3rd toe. It was a clean cut, and nothing was leaking, but fucking shit, it hurt!
The buzz of air turbines like his own sounded as the Peacekeeper came around the corner after him. Rick raised his right arm. Nothing happened. The Peacekeeper cleared the corner, and its laser collimator glowed. He dodged again, this time better, and the laser missed him. He took careful note of the period of firing. Each pulse was less than a second, and it took five seconds in between to recharge. I can beat that, if I can just fucking figure out how!
One of the Peacekeeper’s tentacles lashed out and wrapped around Rick’s torso, pulling him toward the warbot, reeling him in like a freshly caught trout.
Rick held his right arm out, trying to will the blade to pop. Nothing. “God dammit!” he yelled and snapped the arm to full extension, as if he were flicking out a folding knife. Ksnickt! The blade slid out and locked into place. He concentrated on the feeling he’d sensed in his mind even as he swung the blade down with all his might.
The 50-centimeter-long blade was made of hyper-tough carbon-carbon with a tungsten Inconel alloy spine for rigidity. Every time it extended, synthetic diamond composite sharpening stones gave it a little touchup, ensuring the edge would remain as sharp as it could be. With all the strength of his mechanical arm muscles, the blade threw sparks for meters as it slashed through the tentacle. The machine reeled from the blow, jerking on its turbines.
“I’m sorry, did that hurt?” Rick said aloud as he fired his own turbines and rushed the machine. “Eat this!” He rammed the blade at the robot’s center. There was an explosion of sparks, and a little constellation of spalled material flew away, but the robot’s armor turned the blow. Rick could see a nasty gouge a couple millimeters deep. Fucker’s tough, too!
He pulled his arm in and flicked it out again. The blade retracted and extended, cleaning the edge, which had surely been dulled by the impact. The Peacekeeper used that moment to produce three more tentacles and wrapped Rick from head to waist, pinning both arms at his sides. The strength of the Peacekeeper as the arms constricted was overwhelming.
Rick strained, and the tentacles creaked as the metal fatigued. Still, they held. The Peacekeeper pulled Rick sideways, moving him until his face was in line with the laser collimator. Oh, shit! With his arms pinned at his sides, unable to activate the lasers or reach for his gun, there wasn’t much he could do to shield himself.
His entire being was immersed in flaming agony so bad that he thought the Peacekeeper had cut him in half. All he wanted was for it to STOP! Then, just as fast as it had begun, it ended. He was spinning around in a maelstrom of sparking, smoking, burning components. He blinked inside his helmet.
“Uhm, what just happened?”
The memory of Sato working on him back aboard Vestoon floated to the top of his pain-fogged mind. It was just after the shield generator was installed, and Sato was warning him about using it, saying the experience would be painful. His exact words had been, “In fact, it’ll hurt like hell, because I can’t get the bios to properly disable the pain receptors.”
“Yeah, I’d say that was hurting like hell.”
There was no lasting effect, though, except Rick’s memory of the pain. He wondered if this was how Paul had felt after the Gom Jabbar, smiling a little at the memory of a movie he’d watched with Jim. Rick wished he could see better through the cloud of debris, and an IR flood on his helmet bathed the hallway, allowing him more visibility. I think I’m figuring it out.
The Peacekeeper was still there, but now in two principal parts. It looked like the entire front of the bot, the part Rick had been held against, had had a massive, concave chunk sliced out of it. He stared in disbelief.
He dug into his pinplants for information on shields and quickly gave up when he found a few million pages of data to surf through. They were very complicated. Something about the nuclear strong force allowed them to work, and quantum instabilities? The one thing he understood was regarding their use. “No matter what, do not be in the middle of the field-effect zone when a shield is energized. Inside or outside is safe, but the event horizon of the shield field effect can generate a transient sheering effect of more than a thousand gravities.”
“I can see how that could be handy,” he said, then remembered that you had to be at exactly the right distance. Or, in the case of the Peacekeeper, overlapping it. He wondered, if he held his arm out, if the damned thing would chop it off? There might have been safeties against it before he’d cut the pinplants out of the process. His regret over severing the link was rapidly growing.
He spent another minute on non-autonomous functions. He had several examples now, including the arm blade and the shield. He practiced the blade a couple of times, with the added benefit of sharpening it. He knew after a few thousand in-out cycles the blade would be deteriorated. That wasn’t really a danger right then. He was also confident he could activate the shield. After his last experience, he didn’t practice that. This left his sidearm, and the lasers.
Rick concentrated on drawing the machine pistol and reached for it. The holster snapped open just in time for him to snatch the weapon. Yes! He concentrated on holstering it, and the process reversed. “Okay, here we go,” he said, raised an arm at a chunk of the still sparking Peacekeeper corpse and thought; Full power! A targeting reticle appeared in his vision. He looked at the center of the
ruined bot and thought FIRE! A laser slashed into the box, sending more sparks and molten globs of armor.
He sighed. At least if he came upon another of those things he could fight it on its own terms, even though he was still short part of a foot. One last thing. He used the retractable blade to cut into the dead Peacekeeper, and, locating a power cell, he recharged with it. The cell’s capacity was impressive, too. Rick locked it to his thigh’s recharge point, noting that the air pressure was slowly falling. Their battle had compromised a seal. No matter. He resumed his quest to find Sato, ready for anything now. At least, so he thought.
He opened a door, overriding the mechanism that would have stopped him because of the growing pressure difference. It swung inward with a resounding bang, propelled by the pressure difference. Inside were three Peacekeepers.
“Oh, fuck,” Rick said as they started to turn. He might be able to get one of them with his lasers, maybe two. No way he could take all three. He decided on a more expedient solution. Rick tossed both his remaining grenades in the room, used his considerable strength to slam the door closed, and spot welded it with an arm laser. The grenades went off in the confined space, blowing the door off in his face, and slamming him into the opposite wall.
* * *
Sato felt he was ready. He’d given Dakkar as much time as he could afford. The Flatar would be back before long, too. He needed to act now, so he floated over to the silently waiting Peacekeeper bot. It didn’t respond to his approach, as he knew it wouldn’t. The machines were powerful, yet simple. Had they still possessed an AI, this would have been impossible.
Mindful to avoid touching the machine, he lined up the fusion knife carefully, braced the small handle against the inside of his right hand, and shoved as hard as he could. The fusion-hardened edge punched through the relatively thin alloy of the vision slit and into the subprocessor underneath. It shorted out and exploded.
Luckily, the fusion knife was highly insulated, and the high-voltage explosion didn’t affect him. He’d rather have taken the machine over, but that wasn’t in the cards. He needed it offline and not left behind him as a threat. The vision slit armor was designed to create a frangible situation with any rounds and was laser resistant. It had no way of dealing with the fusion-hardened carbon-carbon blade. Overloading the sensor subprocessor there was the best chance of quickly disabling one.
Even so, Sato pushed back, in case his attack hadn’t had the desired effect. The Peacekeeper gave a single twitch, all four tentacles slid out, and it floated away from where it had been waiting. Sato nodded; it had worked. He checked his hand, where a little blood was pooling. It was his right palm, which he’d used to shove the knife in. It didn’t look bad. He wrapped it with a scrap of fabric from his pack and went out the door.
It was so much better, maneuvering in zero-G now. With the return of his memories came the abilities he’d spent countless hours honing. Now he moved with the same assurance as the marine-trained Rick. It was exhilarating, even with the memories of the horrors he’d perpetrated. Regardless of what Dakkar had said, the Science Guild had to have material to manipulate. It seemed a young Taiki Sato had been a killer carefully concealed under a naïve surface.
He had detailed memories of his time here. This had been his operational base, and where much of his training had taken place. He’d seen others of many races; likely some were proctors as well. Were they busy destroying technological developments wherever they found them? Did they prey on their own races? Maybe they were soulless monsters like he’d become, driven mad by some inconceivable tragedy?
As he moved down the service corridor toward his destination, he hoped Rick was alive and that Dakkar had made it. He didn’t know what they’d used on his companion, probably an EMP weapon. They’d tried to bait him in. Ultimately it had been the bits and pieces left behind by Nemo wiping his Mesh that had caused the end results. Sato just wished he’d remembered that the battleship was the base. The asteroid hadn’t been there the last time he’d been here. This was a curiosity, and he wished there was time to understand.
Sato reached the operations center. The door was open, and he could hear conversation inside. He caught the handhold by the door and stopped himself. Inside was the Flatar, a Shinjitsu, and a dozen opSha, which always served as Himitsu. They were relentless in pursuit of whatever the guild sent them to do, if not terribly imaginative in their solutions.
He drew his pistol and took a calming breath. There were so many memories he wished he had time to go over. A lot made more sense now, like how he’d helped develop the Human version of pinplants shortly after Nemo had wiped his memory. Lots of residual stuff bouncing around his brain. He’d nearly caused as much damage after being brain wiped as he had before, though the former was more the result of his unstable residual personality.
Of all the knowledge he’d lost, and now recovered, the most important were the secrets of how hyperspace interacted with the various realities. This was the biggest secret the Science Guild kept to itself, and potentially the most dangerous. As he’d suspected in his time with the Winged Hussars, when they’d traveled to 2nd Level Hyperspace, there were clues in the Science Guild official data. You can’t delete everything in databases as epically extensive as the GalNet.
What frustrated him the most was how much of the ‘memory’ of his early life was just plain wrong! Other than his name and his childhood, the rest was a mess of false memories created by the Science Guild to give him covers on many of the missions he’d performed on Earth. There had never been a Sato Intergalactic, he hadn’t won a Nobel, and while he had gained many degrees, they were after he’d been offworld aboard Sakura Maru, before leaving on Beagle. The rest was a mishmash of fake identities and delusions so thick, he could barely tell what was real. His lips skinned back from his teeth as he stared at the Flatar. Payback time.
“Are we prepared to deconstruct the traitor?” the Flatar asked an elSha.
“Probes are being programmed,” the reptilian replied. “Any minute.”
“I want this done,” the Flatar snarled. “The asteroid base destruction was not part of the plan, and I still don’t know what happened!”
Rick, Sato thought. Well, he went out like he would have wanted to.
“The probes are finished,” the elSha said.
“Let’s see to our proctor,” the Flatar said.
“Don’t bother,” Sato said.
All eyes turned to him at the entrance. Most were confused, some were surprised, and the Flatar Shinjitsu looked like he’d just found a turd in his lunch. “How?” he demanded. “Entropy, we left a Peacekeeper. A fucking Peacekeeper!”
“Never leave a machine to do your dirty work,” Sato suggested. The Flatar snarled, and one of the opSha began to move. Sato killed it instantly. His grip on the door kept him braced against the gun’s recoil. The GP-90 really was a fine weapon.
“You used me as a weapon, forged me into a sword to do your evil work.”
“It wasn’t hard,” the Flatar replied. “A simple push. Where do you think you can go?” the Shinjitsu asked, casually watching the dying opSha’s body float past, spewing blood. “There is nowhere you can hide now, even if you could get out of here. Maybe if you had stayed missing, you could have avoided detection.”
“What do you mean by ‘a simple push?’ When Skoowa found me, I was at the end; there was nothing left. You took advantage of my fallen soul.”
The Flatar laughed and shook his head. “You honestly think it was a genuine accident, that a Jōshi just found you at exactly the moment you would be receptive to recruitment? You think that starship landing next to you, ready to explode, and you not dying of radiation or it exploding in your face was some act of deity?”
“What are you talking about?” Sato asked.
“You fool!” the Flatar spat. “You simple fool! You were being followed for months as your pathetic group of monkeys wandered away from the nest, blundering around the galaxy like kits straight from t
he nest. You would have all been killed within months if we hadn’t kept you alive. I can see by the look on your stupid face you don’t understand. It was you, Taiki Sato, you were the reason we kept your expedition alive.”
“Why?”
“You had the basic material we needed. An operative to keep your race under observation and to intervene when needed. You proved that. Humans are potentially dangerous, one of four races with the potential to break everything.”
Sato blinked, caught completely off guard. There was too much he wanted to know, especially confronted by a dozen armed aggressors. He concentrated on the endgame; kill the Saisho who was at the center of the Science Guild. Then he thought…
“Wait, you said nothing was a coincidence?” He felt a growing rage. “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” the Flatar said, its bright white teeth flashing. “Not even the Aposo killing your mate. We made you.”
His vision tunneled, and he aimed at the Flatar’s head. The ship/base shook from a massive explosion somewhere, the sound following right behind, transmitted through the hull at a slightly slower speed. The wall smacked against Sato, pushing him sideways. In a flash, all the opSha launched themselves at him, and his logical mind shut off.
* * * * *
Chapter Twelve
“At least this time my brain isn’t damaged,” Rick said as he floated in the smoke-choked ruins of the hallway. Even more atmosphere was leaking this time, and his back hurt. Well, everything hurt. He was learning to ignore the pain, in a way. He wished he could use those codes he’d memorized when Sato had turned off his pain receptors. The three Peacekeepers must have been destroyed, or Rick would have been killed while he was unconscious.
