The others had best get back soon, Felix agreed. For Gideon's sake, and for Caitlin's. But mostly for Caitlin's.
"Careful!" came Marc's voice over the suit comms.
Michael risked only a quick peek around the corner before pulling back. "They didn't fire," he said. "Either they're out of ammo or they're just waiting for a better target."
"Testing that's not something I'm eager to do."
"We can only recon so much before we have to actually do something."
They stood around a corner from a hallway that ramped up thirty feet to the only door to Primary Control, beyond which lurked Omicron's mainframe. The atmosphere in the hallway had gone bad, and as Marette suspected, two mobile turrets guarded the door.
"Yeah, just watch it. Remember what Marette said about the EMP: one blast and the suit's fried."
"I was there too, you know." On the plus side, their check of the connection between the receiver link to the craft and Omicron's systems had gone quietly; it remained severed. If they could get past the turrets, things would be relatively simple.
Michael looked around. They needed more options! On the floor of the corridor behind them sat an expended fire extinguisher. "Hand me that, will you?"
Marc fetched it for him while Michael guarded the corner in case the turrets decided to roll their way. He didn't entirely know what he might do if they did—maybe tip it off its treads if one got close enough. It might be a viable option, come to think of it, but only if they did venture around the corner. Trying to get close enough otherwise was likely to get him shot.
Michael took the extinguisher from Marc. "Okay, stand back."
"What're you doing, exactly?"
"Trying to see if they're even active." It reminded him of a time long ago when he threw an ineffectual gas grenade, only this time Diomedes wasn't there to back him up. Now the stakes were higher and he was the one responsible for his companion's safety. Michael dismissed the memory and took a single breath before hurling the canister around the corner.
Though he ducked back before he could see exactly where it landed, he saw enough to know that he'd thrown it too high in the Moon's lower gravity. He heard the extinguisher crash against the wall of the corridor and then clatter to the ground. There was no response from the turrets. During his throw he also decided they were likely too wide at the base to be easily tipped over with anything but a full tackle that would leave him vulnerable.
The two exchanged glances. "So far so good?" Marc asked.
"Without actually making any progress." Michael grimaced and started taking off the thick glove of his suit, assuming carbon dioxide poisoning wouldn't take hold easily if his suit was only open through one sleeve. "Wait here."
"What're you going to do?"
One hand bare, he fished into his bag for the auto-pistol. "Present more of a threat."
"Swell."
Michael leaned around the corner, weapon pointed, and squeezed off a few shots at the turret. It reacted nightmarishly fast, swiveling and returning fire before Michael could react himself. Instinct alone pulled him back around the corner to cover, but not quickly enough: a slice of fire at his shoulder forced out a yell cursing the pain and his luck.
"What, what happened?" Marc yelled. "Are you hit?"
"Yeah," Michael pushed Marc further back from the corner and looked down at his shoulder as well as he could. "It's not bad, bullet just nicked me I think."
"Are you sure?"
He listened a moment, trying to ignore the pain in case the turrets decided to follow, but for the moment things were quiet. "I think it got the suit worse than me."
"We need to—"
Another short burst cut off Marc. Michael backed them away further, expecting the turrets to round the corner at any moment. "Get back to the door!" he ordered before realizing what actually happened. Michael cursed again and sprang to backpedal after Marc as fast as he could before punching the emergency seal on the hatch between them and the corridor they'd just fled. "Damn it!"
"We need to get back to the rover," said Marc. "Or Marette, or something. Make sure your shoulder's okay."
Michael looked at the wound again. There wasn't enough blood for it to come out through the suit yet at least, but the suit itself was definitely ruined. "It's not my shoulder I'm worried about. They just shot a hole through the window. That whole section's going vacuum, and we're out another suit."
"So we're—"
"More screwed than we already were."
Felix saw the blood on Flynn's suit before catching the kid's reassurance that he was okay. Even so, they didn't let him dismiss it completely until they'd gotten a look.
"See? Just a scrape," Flynn repeated without sounding too pleased. The bullet had barely nicked his shoulder, though there was a fair bit of blood. "I've got it."
Caitlin whacked Flynn on the head before continuing to bandage the wound herself. "Hold still. Two hands are better than one."
"I'm no doctor, but I think you'll live," Felix told him. "You know you people need to stop getting yourselves shot up here. It's not cool to die in space."
"You're telling me."
Caitlin finished up. "You lads are going to tell us how this happened?"
"Things're a little more complicated than we'd hoped."
"Aye, I rather gathered that, Marc. Who shot him?"
"What," Marc said. "Robotic turret."
"Crikey."
Flynn changed the subject before Felix could ask for more details. "How's Gideon? And the broken thing?"
"Still broken. Unless Marc can work a miracle?" Felix handed off the modulator.
"So there's no way to get him back to normal?"
"Not without that," Caitlin said.
"The processor itself is okay, but the little memory-jobber on the end there's what snapped off," Felix said. "And not in a salvageable way, from what I can tell."
Marc continued his examination. "This is memory? Looks specialized."
Felix nodded and tapped behind his ear. "It's something like my own, near as I can figure."
Marc sighed and frowned at Flynn. "Not exactly my area of expertise."
Caitlin handed him Ondrea's PDA and then sat beside Felix. "There might be something helpful in there, but we can't crack the password."
"That much I can do. But even if it tells me exactly how the modulator works, that might only let me be sure it's not fixable."
"Oh, goodie."
"Rather what we thought," Caitlin said. "If you can't do anything for it, you need to wrap things up here quickly so we can get him back."
"Gideon may be the key to getting us back, unfortunately." Flynn said. "Thing is, there's a number of other people trapped on this base. They're okay for the moment, but that won't last much longer, and we can't get them out with just this rover and the three suits we've got. We can't abandon them."
Felix leaned forward. "That would be what's a little more complicated. Just what are we talking about?"
"Long story short, we were right that something happened. I can't go into details, but the base computer's gone haywire and the core needs to be replaced for anyone to escape. Problem's that they have to get through vacuum to do that and their suits are all sabotaged. Plus, even if they had suits, the way there's guarded by two turrets that the computer controls."
"So you want to send Gideon in."
"He's got weapons, he can work in vacuum, and he's got enough hardware on him to where he might not even be detected, not to mention the EMP shielding. So yeah."
"And he's just plain tougher than the rest of us," Marc added.
"You don't have weapons?"
"One," Flynn said. "And it won't do much damage to those turrets. I doubt I'm a match for them in a frontal attack."
"Didn't you want to stop him from getting to the computer before?" Felix asked.
"Things are a little different now."
Marc glanced up from his work. "Plus, I mean, from what you said, won't he not care a
bout that anymore if you get him back the way he was?"
Felix and Caitlin shared a glance. "Possibly. Perhaps if he knows that Marquand effectively tried to kill him."
"With the computer infected, there's nothing he can safely steal anyway," Flynn said. "I think we're betting he'd rather help save some lives up here than do what Marquand wants, at least if he's anything like the old Gideon."
"If we can fix him," Felix said.
"Yeah."
Felix scrutinized them. "There's no other way?"
"Not that we can see."
"You're sure about that?"
Marc hooked his computer up to the PDA. "You realize you keep asking the same question?"
"Yeah, I know. It's just that I've got a really stupid idea and I want to make sure it's absolutely necessary."
Caitlin turned to him. "Just how stupid are you talking about, Felix?"
Felix hesitated, regretting the statement. It was true, he just didn't want to tell everyone how stupid it might be and risk them trying to talk him out of it. Well, okay, maybe it wasn't even that stupid, given the circumstances. If he understood what Ondrea told them about how Gideon's implant worked. . .
"Don't worry just yet," he told them. "I'm probably overstating. But let's find out what's on that PDA, first."
CHAPTER 47
A short while and one cracked PDA password later, Marc slid the connection into Felix's implant. "You're sure this is going to work like you think it is?"
Um, no?
"Yeah." Felix said anyway with a smile. "Should be just fine." He gave Caitlin's hand a squeeze, unsure if he was trying to comfort her or himself more.
Flynn moved in from where he'd been working in the rover's cockpit and crouched by Gideon's body. "Do you want to explain to me just what this is doing again?"
"Assuming we understand at all," Felix began, pointing to Gideon's implant, "he's got the two sets of memories right now—Gideon's own and the more, er, muted ones from Curwen's brain. That's one more set than it can handle, and the implant is. . . sort of a booster to stabilize them both." Felix considered an analogy about a plate-spinner keeping multiple plates balanced at once by alternately spinning them back up to speed, but he didn't feel like explaining what a plate-spinner was to them in the first place. "Except that did, er, bad things, so they switched it to just boost Curwen's."
"Letting Gideon's decay," Caitlin added.
"Right. Eventually fading to the point where they'll be gone entirely." Felix picked up Ondrea's modulator. "What this does is link up to the implant and reprogram it to boost only Gideon's memories, which Ondrea thinks should recover. Provided it's not too late. According to what we found in her notes here, this particular doohickey—"
"Memory engram storage core," Marc corrected regarding the doohickey to which Felix was pointing.
"—thingy—is an additional memory space that'll give Gideon's engrams more, ah, 'distance' to be boosted, so to speak. I think."
"You think."
"Well, pretty sure, based on everything she told us and what we, ah, borrowed." He waved the stolen PDA. "Sort of an acceleration ramp, maybe. To help them recover from going so long without a boost."
Felix didn't quite understand it, but there was enough to at least give them a pretty educated guess at the results, if not the specific cause. From what he gathered, Gideon had a bit of an advantage with his own memories as they were specifically "written" into his new brain. As a result, the boost was the only thing keeping Curwen's memories in existence at all, and they'd likely decay much faster. He was curious to see how that might affect Gideon's personality. Or, at least, that's what he was looking forward to in order to distract him from thinking about what might go wrong.
Caitlin scowled. "Felix, can you give me your word that this is safe?"
"I'll be fine. We need to do this."
"Can you give me your word?"
He smiled ruefully. "No. And it's not very nice of you to take advantage of that little quirk of mine."
"Aye, and it's not very good of you to take a risk like this without telling me the truth."
"I just don't see that we've got much choice."
"I didn't say we have, Felix."
"All we're really doing is substituting my implant for the memory doohickey, and I haven't been going to monthly check-ups on this thing for so long without learning at least a bit about how it works. It's got enough space to loop Gideon through the way it needs to. It's just going through the implant, not my own brain."
Probably. His implant was obviously wired to his brain, and the fact that it gave him a photographic memory as an unexpected side effect had him uneasy as to what this might do. Still, it wasn't going to erase anything in his implant. If there were side effects, they'd likely be temporary.
He hoped.
The fact that they needed Gideon to save their collective asses pushed him into taking the risk sooner than he might have otherwise. Besides, if he thought about it too much he might chicken out entirely. Felix just hoped he understood as much of what insight he'd managed to glean during Neal's check-ups of his own implant as he thought he did. Thank God for stolen glances and a photographic memory.
"All set," Marc announced with something of a lack of confidence. "If we're going to do this, we'd better do it."
Felix grinned. "I'm just racking up all sorts of new experiences today, huh? Suppose I ought to lie down." He shifted to do so, and Caitlin moved to give him her lap in which to rest his head. "Fifteen minutes."
"Fifteen minutes," she nodded.
Felix gave Marc a thumbs-up. "Here's hoping I don't pass out."
Marc began the sequence on the modulator. The effect was immediate: nothing happened.
"Um," Felix began, "go ahead?"
"It's working," Marc said. "At least it thinks it is. Nothing on your end?"
Felix swallowed. "Not yet."
"Perhaps it's just reprogramming Gideon's implant first?" Caitlin said. "Or perhaps you won't even notice it?"
"Well that'd be disappoi—" Felix gasped at a new sensation. "Ohh. . . I think I'm becoming a god."
He had just a moment to realize they likely wouldn't get the reference, another moment to decide he probably shouldn't tell them he was jokingly quoting the dying words of the Roman Emperor Justinian, and then, as the burst of sensation and color swam behind his eyes, he completely forgot he'd said anything at all to be explained.
He looked up at Caitlin. Marc was there too, with something in his hand, and Flynn, and. . . Gideon? They found him? Wait, where were they? He glanced over in confusion that turned frantic upon seeing a connection between Gideon and his own implant. What the hell was happening? Something was wrong with his memory, that much was clear.
That was the only thing that was clear.
His impulse to ask Caitlin what was going on—Caitlin, who was looking down at him in a way that wasn't exactly calming—was forgotten as rapidly as it came as Felix looked around with renewed confusion. Gideon? He was alive! Wait, where were they?
Memory failure? It must be. Something was wrong. He had to get up, find a way to get to Horizon for a check; or maybe he was already on the way? Get a grip! He needed to remember, needed to fight to hold onto things. Short term, short term memory was the problem—
And then he knew nothing but a wave of vertigo and an entire cascade of memories that couldn't possibly be his. They came in a rush, jumping like lightning through his mind and triggering others that snapped at their heels. Flashes of Ondrea's face and parts of Northgate mixed with other people and places at once both new and familiar, and all coming and going so fast! It was a roller coaster that took him along a spider web in all directions at once and far too quickly to even comprehend. It was all Felix could do not to drown in the myriad of associations that rolled him, wave after wave of nauseating fascination. . .
And then it stopped, and he was back in the rover.
Or was he?
He couldn't put a name to
any of the faces that watched him so intently. He knew them, he was just talking to them about connecting his implant to Gideon's, but. . .
In a flash he knew his own memory was in jeopardy. How many times had he realized it and forgotten in the last few minutes? The man on the floor of the rover struggled to recall himself, how they'd gotten to Omicron, anything, but so much was lost!
Keep it together, keep it together. . .
He drew a blank!
Heart in his throat, he looked up with a frightened grin at the woman in whose lap he rested. "Okay, which one of you wants to tell me my name?"
If they gave an answer, Felix only heard it for a moment before he forgot what it was and was again overtaken by another's memories. They came slower this time, but much more vividly: Isaac, his twin, lying on a morgue slab as he identified the body, cold and still in the harsh white light. Ondrea yelling at him in the blackness of his apartment, trying to keep him from risking his life and doing what he had to do. Pulling two gangers from a terrified woman caught in an alley behind the Arena, red neon reflecting in their eyes as they tried to escape retribution. Each one he saw, heard, sensed, in vivid recall as if they were his own—Were they his own?—yet there was no emotion save for the knowledge that he—no, that Gideon—had felt a certain way at the time the memory was made. Recall, but no passion.
Sense, but no spirit.
Understanding, but no empathy.
In a moment of lucidity, Felix realized they were more vivid than those of the donor whose memories Felix carried in his own implant—memories he couldn't for the life of him recall anymore!
He focused, trying to recall everything he knew thanks to the donor's memory: movie references from the twentieth century, knowledge of Welsh, the details of the "Bangor incident," but all he could remember was that he once knew those things. The information itself was gone.
No! Jaw fixed stoically, Felix tried to hide his panic from the others. It would come back! It'd be fine, wouldn't it? Wouldn't he? This was just temporary. This was just until Gideon's engrams had accelerated back up to—
A Memory in the Black (The New Aeneid Cycle) Page 34
