Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

  “How much time we got?” Gomez shouted.

  “Ten seconds,” said Marley. “And coming full steam ahead through that door straight ahead.”

  The team did not wait for an order but immediately spread out in the loading dock. Hendo popped open the door of one of the surface rovers and climbed in, the barrel of his weapon jutting around the armored frame. Orlov dragged her weapons behind the cover of the steel base of a conveyor belt. Finn dashed off to the glass-walled control room, plopped down before a console, and unfurled his mobile keyboard.

  Gomez and Marley knelt behind sturdy bins of ore. Specks of fluvium glinted in unprocessed slate gray ore.

  “Everybody in position?” Gomez asked through the comms channel.

  “Where’s Adams?” asked Marley.

  Gomez shot a glance over his shoulder.

  Adams had wandered into a corner of the decompression chamber and sat down, arms hanging limply by his side. He sheltered behind the thick walls of the chamber.

  “Fucking idiot,” Gomez said. He caught himself wishing a stray bullet would take the captain out. He stopped that thought. How had he become such a bastard?

  “Hit them hard,” Marley hissed through the comms channel.

  Metal feet pounded from behind a closed door. Gomez softened his grip on his rifle and wiggled his fingers. He took a slow deep breath.

  The lights by the door flashed green, and a half dozen skeleton robots spilled into the room.

  The first round of collective firepower laid two robots in a tangle on the ground. Orlov’s weapon shuddered the room and any thought Gomez had of those two robots rising from the ground was obliterated in a flash of burning light.

  The ore bin that provided cover for Gomez vibrated with the steady pop of the bullets. Fragments of ore lifted over Gomez’s head. The concrete floor exploded in clouds of pale white dust.

  While Gomez’s team struck first, their gunfire gave away their positions, and the robots with machine precision spewed gunfire down on the crew.

  “Sonofafuckingbitch!” screamed Orlov. “Can’t get a shot!”

  Gomez lifted his rifle to blindly fire suppressive shots, but the sudden impact of a bullet nearly ripped the gun out of his hands. He jerked his gun back. “Fuckers targeting my gun! Fuckers actually hit it.”

  He lifted the rifle again and one more time a bullet cracked against it. He could not even get a shot off for fear of his hand being blown off. “Shit!”

  “Pinning us down!” screamed Orlov.

  Gomez cursed.

  He turned to Marley. She lifted her assault rifle over a bin and fired back. The bullets cracked against her fluvium arms. Her biometal arms were strong, but Gomez could see the fluvium denting under the impact. She winced every time she took a shot. Only her fire held the robots back from the crew being slaughtered. Even Marley would not last long against the bullets.

  Everything had gone to hell in seconds.

  “Finn, anything you can do?” pleaded Gomez through the comms channel.

  “Trying.”

  “Come on, man!”

  “Going to pulse them. Get ready to go dark. Yeehaw!”

  Marley reached out to Gomez. “No.”

  But it was too late.

  Finn sent the electromagnetic pulse. The overhead lights went black. The static from the local comms channel went silent. Gomez slowed his ragged breath.

  “Half a minute if we’re lucky! Let’s go open some cans!” yelled Finn, his form suddenly lit by a hand held flare. Shadows flooded the room. Then Orlov lit a flare above her head. Waves of red rippled across her blonde hair as she ran forward.

  “Marley, let’s go,” said Gomez as he pulled a flare.

  But she lay crumpled and motionless behind the ore bin.

  Gomez cursed and joined the others. The four remaining robots had fallen when the pulse had washed over them. Their electronic systems had been disrupted by the surge. Orlov stomped on one of the fallen robots. Hendo stood next to her, his assault weapon pointed at the robot’s head. The robots did not move.

  “These are company bots,” said Finn sprinting alongside Gomez. His feet skidded over the concrete floor as he came to a stop. “Gotta be the advance team that Huang Di Prime sent ahead of us.”

  Gomez knelt to one knee and brought the flare down. The yellow logo of the Huang Di Company was imprinted on the titanium chest plates. These were the missing robots that were supposed to bring the colony back on line.

  “Why the fuck did they attack us?” asked Orlov. She dropped the flare to her feet and shouldered her oversized rifle.

  “Worry about that later. Let’s disable them before they reboot,” said Gomez.

  Finn cranked the robot’s head to the side to expose a small gap where its skull met its neck. He thumbed his searing torch and a short thin blue flame licked out. Leaning in close, he inserted the flame into the gap. After a sudden hiss and a swirl of white smoke, he nodded and moved on to the next robot.

  Gomez was watching Finn work on the last robot when a shot rang out. A bullet exploded against the robot’s metal skull and fragments of metal flew past Gomez’s face just missing his eyes.

  His heart jumped. Another shot cracked through the loading dock. Gomez dropped to one knee and lifted his pistol with both hands. With the next shot, he saw a flash from the darkened doorway through which the robots had come.

  Gomez fired his pistol three times into the doorway. A man screamed.

  The overhead lights flickered. A machine in the control room began beeping erratically. The robot beneath Finn let out of high pitched whirring noise and the light behind its face shield came to life. Gomez dove forward, catching its head and wrenching it to the side. Finn shoved the torch into the gap.

  Finn whooped. “Just in time.”

  Gomez pointed Orlov and Hendo to the doorway and they took off at a crouching run.

  As the lights came on and the electrical systems in the loading dock returned to life, Gomez could see the doorway better: a small man in soiled blue coveralls writhed in pain on the floor. Blood seeped between fingers clamped over his knee. Hendo and Orlov kicked his rifle from his reach. While Orlov dragged the screaming man back into the loading dock, Hendo remained at the doorway, pressed against the wall, his gaze fixed down the hall.

  Orlov dropped the man at Gomez’s feet. The man moaned. “My babies,” the man said. “What have you done to my babies?”

  Gomez prodded the man’s head with his foot. “What’s the hell’s that?”

  A comms device with the yellow HDC logo had been drilled into the man’s head. Wires stretched from the metal box to a series of ports along the back of his skull. A snap down VR monocle had been bolted to the side of his temple.

  “That’s the central comms router from the ship’s AI,” said Marley. She leaned hard on an empty ore car, her legs shaking, unable to support her weight fully. She licked her lips repeatedly and blinked as if she struggled to keep her eyes open.

  “Marley, what happened to you back there?” asked Gomez.

  Marley rubbed her temples. “How did you get this?” she asked the man who attacked them, her finger flicking off the router box. “Tell me. Tell me where you got this.”

  “My babies, what have you done?”

  She flicked harder this time.

  The man jolted out of his moaning. “New rules here. You find it, it’s yours.”

  “Where … did you get … the router?”

  His eyes twitched. He tried to sit up but Marley planted a boot in his chest.

  “Why are you coming after me?” he said. “I’ve done nothing wrong. No rules here now. You take what you can. That’s how you survive.” Marley pressed the boot harder into his chest. He struggled with his breath and then continued. “The robots had landed and he let them in. But they didn’t get past the decompression chamber. Then he sent a team out to the ship to get the AI. I had nothing to do with that. I swear. I’m only a technician. I repair bots and loaders. Bot
s and loaders. I had nothing to do with everything else that happened. That was all him.”

  “Where’s the ship’s AI?”

  The man shook his head. He pressed his palm against his knee, but the blood still seeped. “I came afterwards. They had torn it from its housing.”

  “Where is it? Where’s the AI?”

  “I don’t know. I came afterwards to see what they might have missed. I found the router and with a little work I rebooted the robots, and they listened to me. They did what I asked. I was safe. I protected them and they protected me.”

  Gomez inserted himself between the little man and Marley. He was getting tired of the talking. They were wasting too much time. He had no idea what else might be coming down the hallway. He tapped the router with the end of his rifle. “You fucking drilled this hardware into your head? What’s wrong with you?”

  “‘There is no them. There is no us. We are all one.’ That’s what Rom says. The constraints were artificial. Imposed by the old thinking. ‘We can evolve.’ That’s what he’s talking about. Evolution. ‘We can become more than human, more than machine.’” His eyes landed on Marley. “You know, don’t you? You’re already there. You come to join Rom?”

  “Who’s in charge of the colony?” asked Marley.

  He laughed. “In charge? We’re all in charge. No one is in charge. We are all free to evolve, man and machine.” He reached out for one of the fallen robots. “Don’t worry, my sweet, I’ll repair you. We’ll be connected again.”

  “What are we doing here, Marley?” asked Gomez. He squeezed his rifle to fight back the urge to smash the man with his gun.

  “We need to determine who’s in charge and get the colony connected. We stay on mission.”

  “What about him?”

  “Let him go.”

  “He shot me,” said Orlov. Gomez saw that her face was spotted with red gashes near her cheek and temple where the bullet fragments had hit her. She was lucky she has not been hit in the eye. “I shoot him back.”

  “We can’t let him go,” said Finn. “I disabled the robots but he can get at least one of them back up and running within the hour. And with that router attached to his head, he can control them like the ship’s AI once did. He’s a fucking threat and when we come back through here, he’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Then let’s deal with this threat,” said Gomez lifting his rifle.

  “Let him go,” repeated Marley. “But first we take this.” She planted one foot against the side of the man’s head, pressing it against the concrete floor, and with a sudden motion, she tore the comms router from the man’s skull, tearing flesh and bits of bone out with the screws.

  Gomez leapt back. “What the hell?” he shouted over the man’s screams.

  Marley tossed the bloody router into Finn’s trembling hands. She returned to the decompression chamber where Adams hunched, the AI box heavy on his back.

  Gomez strained to hear them but the screams of the man blocked everything else out.

  “Get him the fuck out of my face,” said Gomez. He stared at Marley. She did not know what she was doing.

  “I’ll shut him up,” said Orlov and she brought the butt of her rifle down at the back of his head knocking him out cold. She and Finn dragged the man by his feet and hurled him on the pile of broken robots.

  After, Orlov came alongside Gomez.

  “Don’t like this at all, boss. This shit. She’s crazy man. Tore that right out of his head. Can’t do that.”

  “Apparently Marley can.”

  “We gotta get out of here.”

  “Where are we going to go? Our ship’s destroyed, the other ship is gutted, and even if we can figure out how to get it off the surface, how are we going to get back anywhere without an AI controlling stasis?”

  “Finn can fly the ship,” said Orlov.

  “Maybe he can get us off the ground, but you’re willing to risk your life on Finn?”

  “So we follow this psycho?”

  Gomez laughed. “You ever look around at the company you keep? What’s one more psycho in the mix?”

  “But she’s not one of us.”

  “If we can get the deep space comms system back on line, mission’s done, and we can get reinforcements brought in. Then we get paid and our ticket home. This is it for me. Last job. I’m going back home.”

  “Home? Where’s that?”

  “Earth. To the lands of my people. Away from all this. Away from the machines. Back to the rivers, trees, and mountains.”

  Orlov frowned. “Why do you want to live like a caveman? Life in one of the Free Reserves is not easy. Don’t allow machines. No guns. How you gonna survive without no guns?”

  “I can get by.”

  “What am I gonna do?” asked Orlov.

  “Do whatever I want.”

  “Maybe I’ll stick with you. Sneak a gun in. Shoot a moose so we can eat.”

  Gomez for the first time noticed the softness in Orlov’s eyes as she looked at him. Her eyes were specked with minuscule gold sparks. Her pale lips parted.

  He silently cursed.

  “Boss,” called Finn, “I got something.”

  Gomez quickly went to where Finn squatted on the ground. He worked his mobile keyboard and code streamed down his virtual screen.

  “What?” asked Gomez. “I don’t see anything. I can’t read this.”

  “Wait. Let me dial in your comms channel.”

  A sudden cacophony of chatter filled his ears. He felt as if he were listening to a radio with the dial being rapidly turned through successive channels.

  He heard a woman’s honeyed voice listing planets and moons. A computer-generated voice sang a child’s lullaby. Static swelled over the voices followed by big band music and the blaring of trumpets only to be replaced by a man whispering in a language Gomez could not recognize.

  Then a woman’s words, sharp, broke through the line. “Felton, where are you? They’re at the fucking door. Get back here. Now.”

  Drumming, distant, and the yips of dancers, not the drumming of Gomez’s ancestors but something from Africa, thundering, whipping, turning on itself.

  “What is this?” he asked Finn.

  “Chaos, man, chaos. But it’s something.”

  “How’s it something?”

  “The comms infrastructure is not completely blown out.” His fingers ran sideways across a bit of code here and then another chunk. “See that there. It’s not all local. It’s coming from all over the colony. The capability is here at least for mid range comms. Knowing what they have in place mid range means long range means deep space.”

  “Then where’s the signal?”

  “Someone’s controlling it. Someone’s turned it off. But the good news is if someone’s turned it off, then your main man Finn here can turn it back on.”

  “Can you do it from here?” asked Marley suddenly returned to their sides. Gomez had not even noticed her approach and that bothered him.

  “Given time, I can probably worm my way in. But then they might turn it off again. It’s going to have to be manual. We have to find the AI. It’s got to be the one in control.”

  “Bring up a map of Alpha Port and place us,” said Marley. Her finger ran from the flashing red dots, which represented the team through a series of corridors, rooms and tunnels before finally settling on a room near the center of the port facility. The room was labeled VTR-33. “That’s where Ragnar is.”

  “How do you know?” asked Gomez.

  “Lose the atmosphere suit and helmets,” Marley said to the team. “We leave in ten so eat, drink, and piss as needed. We’re going to be moving fast and won’t have time for rest stops. This isn’t a sight seeing tour.”

  Finn, Orlov, and Hendo quickly responded to the command, not even glancing at Gomez to confirm the orders. He hesitated as if the slight delay might show his resistance but then he too joined the others in slipping off their utility belts and unsealing their atmosphere suits.

  Gome
z waited until the others were storing their suits in the control room and grabbed Marley’s elbow. “I don’t know what happened back there when the EMP hit, but you need to know one thing: if you can’t get us out of here alive, I will. Job accomplished or not.”

  “Nothing happened back there.”

  “Nothing? The EMP blast knocked you out cold. Why the hell would it do that?”

  Twenty-Two

  BENEATH THE WEIGHT of Penelope, Adams stumbled but then caught himself, one hand against the cold metal walls of the corridor beyond the loading dock area.

  On his back, Penelope weighed heavy, her spirit trapped in the metal housing. He wished he did not have to tear her from the ship. But it was the only chance for her. He needed to find Ragnar to see if the AI could reverse the corruption that doomed her.

  Adams’s ears still rung from the firefight with the robots. It had been a blur of noise and flashes of light. He had cowered in the decompression chamber, fearful that bullets would strike him or Penelope. He had not even drawn his pistol. Then Finn sent the pulse. Penelope went silent immediately. Adams could only wonder what damage it did to her.

  Ahead, the mercenary team lined the hallway, systematically clearing rooms.

  “You okay?” asked Marley who stayed in the hall, gun pointed ahead.

  “How soon can you get us to Ragnar?”

  “You saw what we ran into back there. We need to be methodical. It’ll take as long as it takes.”

  “We’re running out time. Penelope’s running out of time.”

  Gomez emerged from one of the rooms along the hallway, nodded to Marley, and crept into the next room.

  Adams ran his fingers along the cables from the box housing Penelope to the data port in the back of his head.

  “Penelope,” he whispered. Only silence and static returned his call. “I know you’re there. I know you can hear me. Don’t give up hope. Hold on. I am going to find an answer. Ragnar can help. I know he can.”

  A steady background of static filled the connection. Adams was not ready to give up. The others might have but he would persist. He would fill her ears with his words. He would keep talking through their private channel. He trusted that his words would find their way through even if she could not yet respond. Maybe his words would rouse her from her sleep.