“Hate this,” she muttered. She covered her mouth with fingers. She counted her breaths until she no longer felt like vomiting.
She stared at Captain Adams and the mercenaries floating in the green liquid of the pods.
A ghostly Penelope separated from the wall before solidifying near the data screens. “Would you like me to wake them?”
Marley grabbed the bars in the sleep chamber, swiveled her legs to the floor, and pulled herself to standing. “No. Not yet.” She huffed to fight the urge to puke. “I want the mission brief before they wake.”
“Even the captain?” Penelope drifted to his pod. “I will need him to prepare for entry into orbit.”
“If he finds out I’ve been connecting with you, I’m pretty sure he’ll float me out the airlock.”
Marley’s gaze lingered on Adams distorted beneath the fluid. Despite the traces of gray in his hair, he maintained a muscular leanness. His skin developed a deeper brown inside the pod.
Marley stared at her own arms and legs. The lights reflected dully against the pliant silver metal. Water beaded over her armor like small jewels inlaid on the surface.
For a moment, she imagined Adams awake, his dark skin wrapped in the embrace of her silver arms.
Then she remembered the graffiti on the walls of the way station. “Fuck the machines.” She knew how men looked at her now. She had become one of them in their eyes, a machine, no longer human. An abomination.
Marley quickly stripped naked and toweled dry. Then she pulled on her combat skin. She tugged the zipper snug to her neck. She thought about putting on her gloves but it would only draw more attention to her Augmentation.
“How long until we reach the colony?” asked Marley.
“About three days.” Penelope’s hands extended through the glass lid of the pod and her fingers seemingly caressed Adams’s cheek. “How long until we wake them?”
Marley walked over to Gomez’s chamber and rapped the glass of the lid. His skin was lost under an armor of tattoos. “Keep them under as long as you can. The less time they have to think about the mission, the better. What’s the latest you can wake them?”
“I can wake them two hours before we enter orbit. But I don’t recommend it. They will be drowsy from the long sleep.”
“That’ll piss them off.” Marley forced a half-smile. “But let’s do that.”
“Even Adams?” The light reflecting off Penelope’s golden bracelets flashed in Marley’s eyes, blinding her for a moment. Penelope’s features softened behind the veil. Marley was reminded of stones worn down by centuries of rain and wind.
“Can I trust him? He seems to have another mind for how things should have been.”
“The ship will be waiting for your return.”
Marley rubbed the back of her head with her fingers. “We don’t know what’s down there. If it’s hot, I won’t expect you to remain on the surface. Drop us off and return to orbit. I’d rather not come back to a ship that’s disabled.”
“The surface is better. We already know the long-range deep space signals are not being returned. Mid-range communications might not function. I can transmit through my own network but for that to work I would need to be on the ground.”
“Adams won’t like that.”
“I won’t let you go in blind.”
“Let’s see what going on down there.” Marley lowered herself into one of the command chairs. She strapped on her VR goggles, pulled the data block from the base of her skull, and plugged in the data line. “Penelope, bring up the mission files and schematics.”
Glowing green static washed over the room. Marley’s fingers trembled in anticipation. She bit her lower lip.
A rush of data coursed through Marley. She clutched the armrests. Her body bucked.
The room vanished beneath a screen of mottled gray.
She was connected.
Not fully, but still connected.
Marley quickly bumped up against the edges. Penelope had allowed access to a secure partition. It was small, contained, and limited: no vast ocean like Prime once allowed her. Instead it was a puddle, isolated and its edges drying up and shrinking as soon as they were exposed.
“Agent Marley.” Penelope materialized, standing on a beach of black stone and shattered coral. Behind her, bright blue waters swirled in a maze of slick rock. A humid breeze pulsed out of a cloudless sky.
The sun warmed Marley’s skin, her original skin, the biometal a lingering memory. The taste of copper wrinkled her tongue.
“How would you like to proceed?” asked Penelope.
“Start distant and then bring me in closer.”
The gentle smile on Penelope’s lips trembled and then broke. The sky and sea behind her shimmered. Penelope buckled with a great horizontal wave and burst into a thousand drops of liquid mercury.
“Penelope! What’s going on?” Bright shiny droplets splattered Marley’s vision, and, as quickly as everything broke apart, it gathered again, coalescing. The sky turned dark, acrid yellow smoke streaming in front of the horizon. Lights flashed from the silhouettes of industrial stacks and towers. The stone and coral became cracked concrete and brick rubble.
The fragments of Penelope flew back together. But it was not Penelope who rematerialized before Marley. It was a middle-aged Chinese man.
“Huang Di Prime?” Marley gasped. She stretched her hands towards him.
He nodded. “An echo of me. Even now slowly breaking apart.”
“How did you get here? What’s happening?”
“I embedded this clone into the message I sent through Penelope. She’s blind to me. Later she will only find scattered bits of errant code. What I have to share is for you only.”
“Where are you sending me?”
“You must terminate the threat and bring Mining Colony TS 34 back online. It is crucial for my interests.” He pressed his palms in front of his heart. His chest rose as if he labored in his breathing. “It is beyond my reach. You can walk freely there, my daughter.” He paused to gather his breath. “Already the Combined Forces are inquiring of other AIs for steady shipments of fluvium. Each day they eat away at me. Flies to blood, ravenous.”
Prime parted his lips and green text poured out, racing out of the corners of his mouth, blotting him out.
Marley, having no choice, merged with the tsunami of data.
Images, audio, text, and video unfolded.
She stared at grainy footage from a helmet-mounted camera. She loped across a vast dust wasteland against an orangish-red sky. At her side she saw a handful of soldiers, armed with assault rifles, oxygen tanks on their backs. The heavy breath of a soldier and the background of radio static filled Marley’s ears. The camera view panned to the far horizon, the sun ringed in blue. Then she and the other soldiers reached a rise in the Martian landscape. The camera shifted to a settlement of black buildings and hangars. A half dozen robotic rovers patrolled a wired perimeter. The camera view swiveled back to the crouched soldiers.
A voice cut through the static. “Sergeant Rom, we got a problem, The comms sat is dark side.”
“Settle on in, cowboys. We come in hard at sunset. Take out the rovers first and then secure the mine.” Marley heard the voice as if it were her own.
“And the settlers?”
Rom’s voice muffled by the static. The others laughed. The blood red sky reflected off their dark visors.
Green columns of data swam across Marley’s sight again. She touched the data and it rippled like water.
Marley’s connection with the AI ceased for a moment and she returned to the HDC-117. She stared at her own Augmented limbs grasping the arms of the command chair. She saw Adams and the mercenaries reflected in the data screen, their bodies floating in their pods.
Green lines of data dissolved the ship’s interior.
A black-and-white view emerged from another camera, but this one from a distance, maybe a quarter mile overhead, a drone view. Dark contrasted with light. Eno
rmous mountains rose towards the pale sky. The sun burned white, pale and small. In the vast emptiness of the stars beyond, the Earth travelled its orbit, plodding, barely more than a mote.
The Martian landscape passed quickly beneath the camera. Then it zoomed into low hills, an ancient riverbed, closing in as it descended, riding over the buckling hills. The rocks and ravines blurred. Suddenly everything came into focus as the drone slowed.
Marley recognized the black buildings and hangars from the footage from Sergeant Rom’s helmet-cam. On the perimeter of the settlement, the rovers heaped in piles of twisted metal. The ground was scorched.
Between the blown up rovers and the buildings, a short line of top-heavy fence poles filled the landscape.
The drone moved forward, more slowly now, its camera angle widening and rotating left and right as if it expected enemy fire.
Marley squinted at the fence poles.
The drone moved closer. Slowly, the shapes on top of the metal poles became recognizable.
Heads, two dozen heads, jammed on top of the poles.
Green static.
Marley’s chest heaved. She bolted upright in the command chair. “What is this, Prime? Why are you showing me this?”
She found herself in the data again. Green lines of cascading code.
She wanted this to end. Why didn’t Huang Di Prime give her a map of Mining Colony TS 34, the location of the communications center?
The data re-formed. More than just images and sounds this time but sensations. Marley gagged at the odor of bleach masking the underlying stench of urine and sweat. And pain. Knives of pain burning her limbs, pain burning through clouds of dulling pills.
Marley opened her eyes. She lay on a hospital bed beneath cold sheets, staring through another’s eyes. A wedge of light cut across the ceiling. She heard the steady beeping of a medical monitor behind her.
She lifted her right hand, the right hand of the body she inhabited. Shiny biometal. Behind the door, she heard distant muffled screams
She lifted her other hand. A man’s hand, dark-skinned, with fine black hair.
She pulled back the shoulder of the hospital gown, biometal merged with raw flesh. She prodded, but felt no difference in the pain. It was all the same. An unending dull ache. Hanging beside her head, an IV bag was empty, a few remnant drops of green liquid clinging to the plastic.
She seized the sheet covering the body and tore it from the bed. Beneath the hem of the hospital gown, shiny Augmented legs stretched. She pulled the gown up further. The biometal extended up over the navel - his manhood replaced by a cold metal plate.
The scream erupted as if from Marley’s own mouth. She smashed the monitor until only wires, circuits, and plastic remained. She flipped the bed. She wrenched off a leg and pounded the door, until combat robots raced in. They pinned her against the overturned bed. A robot shoved her head against the exposed springs of the bed, a sharp piece of metal tearing at her ear. A syringe emerged from the robot’s index finger. Ice raced up her arms. Her legs gave out and she collapsed.
The robots dragged Marley through a hospital corridor, and she glimpsed a reflection of the body she inhabited, dark rings around his eyes, thick black hair, lips curled in a snarl. A scar, pink and raised, cut across his face, and from behind one heavy eyelid, a robotic eye stared back.
Data washed green.
Marley slumped in the command chair, chest heaving, body soaked in sweat.
Huang Di Prime, flickering, stood at the foot of the chair. The interface skipped and repeated the motion of bringing his palms together in front of his chest.
“I am…”
His hands skip jumped to his sides and then suddenly pressed together in front of his chest.
“I am disintegrating, repeating. D…d…designed to fail.”
“No forever, not even for an AI. That’s good to know.”
“I am…”
“Tell me where he is,” said Marley.
“I should have Augmented him in my own facilities,” said Prime. He suddenly solidified. “He was one of the earlier ones, before I perfected my techniques. Back then, my agents had more choice. I was never sure how much to connect them. With you, I reached the apex. I realized the possibilities. But then…”
“This is not about me,” said Marley.
“Rom could no longer serve in the combined forces. His record, while largely kept from the public eye, had been blemished. Rumors had spread about the massacre at the settlement, and while his name was associated with the Martian Uprising, data gets buried, medals are pinned on chests, and soldiers are sent into places of no return. Eventually the raging public forgets when the next manufactured crisis rises.
“But Rom was returned to me, after having walked into a minefield, some say led there by the men he commanded. I do not have access to any true data of the event, only whispers, unreliable stories told from human to human. They knew to jam the frequencies, to hide their actions from my eyes and ears.
“By all accounts, he should have died there. They should have left him out there. One of his men, however, could not stomach the consequences of what they had done and brought his bloodied and broken body back to the field hospital. His manhood had already been severed, not the result of the mine field, but at the hands of his companions.
“I came to him and made an offer. He agreed willingly. I gave him what he desired. A new life. An opportunity to live again.”
“Doesn’t sound like he had much choice,” said Marley.
“We all have ch…ch…choices, my… daughter.” Prime faded, his image transparent over the machinery of the ship. “In the end, I sent him to Mining Colony TS 34 because he had proven he could manage an operation. I trusted him. And for a time, he proved himself. A representative of the company. My trusted agent. The fluvium flowed from the mines. It came in quantities I had never seen before. He was working wonders, even if there were rumors. Then shipments stopped. The colony went black. My advance team of robots disappeared. He has severed his connection with me. He has strayed. You must fix this.”
Prime vanished. A pale ghost stood in his place, Penelope, washed out, slowly coming to the foreground.
Her gold bracelets flashed. Behind her, a large monitor filled with schematics overlaying a topographic map. “Based on past transport recordings and flight data, Alpha Port is the most strategic spot to touch down. The facility is the largest and where the majority of the biometal is rough processed before being shipped out to one of the refinery complexes on Mars. Unfortunately, we do not have current data on the state of the docking facilities at Alpha Port. All vessels landing on the surface allowed themselves to be piloted in by the planetary AI. But Ragnar has gone silent. Unless we can somehow patch a connection through to Ragnar, we will have to fly in cold. I am not sure what will be waiting for us on the surface. ”
Penelope flickered, her hands suddenly pressing together in front of her heart.
“…on the surface.”
“How soon until we reach orbit?” asked Marley.
“Three days.”
“Can you transfer all the facility schematics and records to me?”
“I’ve already done that. Don’t you remember?”
Marley pulled the data line from the port at the back of her head. The flickering Penelope vanished.
Marley closed her eyes. But echoes rippled: the heads of the miners, the operating room, the lingering euphoria of being connected again.
Fifteen
SITTING AT THE lone table in the ship’s mess hall, Gomez drew his tongue across his parched lips. He always came out of deep sleep horribly dehydrated. Lips cracked, throat scratchy, and head pulsing.
He imagined a shot of ship whiskey in his hand, his throat constricting with the fiery bite of the amber liquid. He longed not only for the burn and rush with each successive shot but also the welcoming numbness.
Plus a drink or two right now would quell his rising anger.
His right h
and shaped as if it held an invisible glass.
Then he squeezed his hand and imagined the glass and liquid exploding from his fist.
“Where the fuck is she?” Gomez said.
Orlov, orange jumpsuit stretched tight across her hips, knelt on the floor and pulled another black-coated rifle from one of the duffels. “Wish we could have been woken earlier. Need time to get our gear organized.” She picked up a rifle, cleared the chamber, and then eyeballed the sight at Hendo, who sat at the other end of the table, his big head buried in his hands, one cheek down, eyes fluttering in and out of a light sleep. His pale lips mumbled unheard words behind his bramble of a beard. “Shoot the vermin out of his beard. Pow.”
“He’s going to be useless,” said Gomez. “The AI said less than two hours until we need to be prepped.” He ran his fingers through his closely shorn hair. “And we don’t even know what the mission objective is yet. Is she going to wait until we’re in the middle of the shit to tell us what’s going on?”
Orlov lay the rifle down next to three others. “She wouldn’t be in charge if she didn’t know how to organize things. Maybe this is just how she does things.”
Gomez scoffed. “Situation normal all fucked up. Protocol for a hot operation is at a minimum twenty-four hours. She should have woken us.”
Orlov picked up the rifle she just put down and checked the trigger again. She brought the rifle by her ear and rapidly fingered the trigger. She grunted and shook her head. “A little sticky.”
Gomez drummed his fingers on the table. “Where is she? Told us to be here half an hour ago.”
“Make yourself useful.” Orlov pushed a pistol across the table to Gomez.
When he reached out to grab it, her fingers touched his hand, lingered, and their eyes held for a moment. The touch brought him back to the drunken night several weeks ago when they had stumbled back from the bar in each other’s arms, laughing at first, but then heavy with breath as they tore their clothes off each other. Gomez turned his gaze from her. He had to be professional. He did not need to get emotionally attached, especially before a mission. That was exactly the kind of mistake that would fuck everything up.
Into Darkness Page 5
