Gomez shook his head. “Ship’s fucked. We crashed. AI’s been corrupted.”
“You gotta be kidding me. You come here to tell me this. Why you here at all? Ship’s not fucked! We’re fucked!” said Jean. She slammed a fist on the table. She lowered her voice. “We’re running out of time. We’ve been able to hold them off but it’s not going to last forever. Rom’s told us in so many words we either come along with him or we go away, and there’s nowhere to go. He’s being nice right now, giving us the opportunity but it’s only matter of time before he cuts off our air and water. We’re only so much meat to him. A goddamned savage! Inhuman abomination!”
“The other ship the robot team arrived on,” said Marley, “where it’s AI?”
Jean slumped heavy on the bench. “Rom’s creatures took it. You think we can escape on their ship?”
“We’d have to move the sleep chambers over from our ship. Not enough for everyone here. Also with no AI, there’s nothing to regulate the sleep and the atmosphere. We could try a manual override and set up a program but I’m not sure I’d trust it to get us back to Orion 7. Not even sure we can get it off the surface.”
“So what then?” asked Jean.
“We get back online and send a message for a larger transport. Can you get us to the room where Ragnar is housed? We can figure out a way to get the comm system online again.”
Jean laughed, her teeth bright against her skin. Her laugh died quickly. “I’ll point you in the right direction. But I’m not going. That’s where he wants us. And that would be the end of us. He might give us a choice about how we want to evolve but in the end he’ll do what he wants. How could you all have set him loose on us? Don’t you run any psychological tests before you send agents out into the world? You had to see this coming.”
“What about Vilms?” asked Marley. “Or someone else to take us to Ragnar?”
“I’m not sacrificing my people. You’re on your own. And, honestly, Ragnar’s not going to help you,” said Jean. “Don’t know what you think is left of him, but he’s certainly not in charge of the colony. Why would they send another one like you? Rom’s lost his marbles. I can’t imagine you’re far behind. Used to be I was okay with the robots and you Augments. And even the AIs. I was pro-AI. But now I see the shape of things and it ain’t pretty. Rom thinks he’s got everything wrapped up tight around his little finger. Ruling with his pinkie. But I’ve got an ace in the hole. He’s not the only one who can be tricky. I had been stationed here long before his metal ass climbed out of his tin can. My colony long before his. Manifests can be changed with a few key strokes. What’s missing can never have existed. Comes to that, I’ll do it. I’ll end it all here rather than letting him spread his sickness. Better we all die than he persists.”
Jean scooped the bowl of the green ration mixture in her palm. “You let me know and I’ll give you a parade to the door. Confetti, cheers, and all. We’ll send you off with the best of wishes and then close the door behind you. Lock it up real good. And throw away the key. Time’s not on your side. Not on anyone’s side. He’s coming for us. Sooner than the others think. At some point, I’ll need to make the choice. Blow this colony right off this rock. End Rom’s madness.”
Jean pushed away from the table and unfolded to standing, her breath heavy. She shot a tight smile at Marley and then shuffled off to where a handful of other miners waited.
“Well, that went well,” said Gomez. “Wonder if there’s anyone here who’s not crazy. Present company included. ”
Marley looked around the room. A child curled in his mother’s arms, her fingers twining his long strands of hair. A man near bald, his stubble a dark smudge on his skull, fanned playing cards in his hand while across from him a smirking man lifted and dropped plastic poker chips between his fingers, the clack of plastic marking time. A child’s laughter bubbled as she tried to not to get tagged by Finn.
“She’s got a weapon,” said Marley.
Gomez pushed his empty bowl of food from him. “A mining colony. Probably some kind of explosive around every corner.”
“But enough to wipe out Rom and the colony? She’s got that in hand. And she’s ready to light things up rather than let Rom survive? I’m starting to wonder who’s the real threat here. Rom’s rambling in his madness but she’s got her finger on the trigger.”
“The others have no problem with her leading.”
“Maybe they don’t know what she’s thinking. She’s a risk to the mission.”
“A risk to us.” Gomez stood up. “That food was welcome. Not particularly appetizing but welcome nonetheless. We could be subtle. She disappears.”
“We still don’t know what we’re facing. Huang Di Prime gave no orders about the miners. But she could disrupt everything. Turn the lot of them against us.”
“Then we could be less subtle and send a clear message we’re in charge.”
“She won’t blow the colony,” said Marley. “There are children here.”
“She doesn’t care, Marley. You heard her. We need to deal with Rom or we need to deal with her. Who’s to say she won’t hit that trigger before we get to Rom?”
“I’ll talk to her,” said Marley.
Twenty-Seven
MARLEY COULD NOT shove Jean into the locker. She was too large.
Marley cursed and looked around the room. The metal benches were bolted to the floor. Marley would not stack them into a pile or barrier. She pried open a maintenance door but it revealed only a narrow closet with shelves filled with chemicals and cleanings supplies.
She had nowhere to hide the body.
Marley considered dragging Jean out of the locker room and into one of the other rooms where she could bury her beneath workstations that had been torn from the wall.
But then she would have to return to the hall and risk the chance someone might be manning the barricade and see her moving the body. She did not want any questions. They would not understand the threat Jean posed.
The threat had turned out to be real. After Marley broke Jean’s neck, she found the detonation device, slim and smooth in her hand, a simple device that would send a signal to wherever bomb or bombs had been placed.
To get Jean away from the others, Marley had lied, telling her she had a way off the colony. Jean had agreed to meet Marley in the locker room. Marley had expected Jean to arrive with a small security escort but instead she arrived alone.
Taking the detonation device from Jean would not have sufficed. It would be easy enough for her to fabricate a new one. The ideal solution would have been to convince Jean to tell her where the bombs were, but Marley imagined there were probably at least a dozen and all wide spread.
She did not have enough time to find them.
It was more efficient to kill Jean.
But now looking at the woman’s face, as Marley dragged her to the showers at the back of the locker room, Marley’s stomach buckled and she choked back bile.
She fell to her knees.
What had come over her? She had snapped the poor woman’s neck.
Marley pounded her fists on the ground.
She remembered everything: pressing against the door frame, the thump and scrape of Jean’s feet in the hall, the fluvium hands liquid and shiny, Marley reflected in her own skin.
She remembered everything but she felt as if another had inhabited her body. Why would she kill Jean?
Marley knelt over the body. She wanted to get up but she could not.
Then Prime appeared.
He leaned against the wall of the shower, a long opium pipe balanced in his right hand. His hair had lost its gray. He was younger. He inhaled deeply on the pipe before letting the smoke spiral to the shadows above.
“You can’t be here,” said Marley. She glanced around the room for VR projectors on the walls. “I’m not connected. I shouldn’t be able to see you.”
Prime’s lips turned up slightly. “I can only imagine what it is like. Create a construct of possibilities
. The sap scraped from a flower pod and it opens up a world. I’ve read the accounts, accessed human memories, and I think I have what it is like.” He licked his lips and sighed. “But will I ever know? It doesn’t matter. Really, my child, what does it matter… in the end? What do I gain by living through someone else’s experience?”
“How can you be here?” Marley crawled back to her feet. She peered to the corners of the room, looking for projectors that might have cast the interface of the AI. But the walls were empty. “Are you in the colony’s system?”
He laughed. “Of course not.”
“Then you’re in me? What have you done to me?” Marley pressed her fingers into her temple. “Get out! Get out of me!”
Prime blew a ring of smoke towards the ceiling. “So solid, one almost thinks it has form. Smoke. It does have a form, a shape, a presence in the world. But for how long? Already it is dissolving. It seemed so defined, so unique, and then we realize the borders were transient.”
“Get out!” screamed Marley.
“What is its own thing becomes everything, the lines blur, identity falls away. Marley, why should we be any different? Why be limited by the borders we imagine? Why not let the lines blur?”
“Get away!”
Marley left the dead woman on the floor and ran from the locker room. The cold trip wires brushed her skin. The wire hummed. She should have slowed down but she was filled with the mad desire to escape. She leapt over the barricade and ran down the hall.
She stopped outside of the mess hall, unable to catch her breath, unable to slow her breathing. She leaned against the wall, but the world tilted as if to cast her to her knees. Her vision tunneled to the floor beneath her feet, painted with black scuffs, markers of the survivors funneled into a last place of refuge.
She heard the approaching footsteps. She wanted to look up but could not.
“Marley,” Gomez said, “what’s going on?”
Her vision widened suddenly. The mercenary watched her, his lips pressed together. From the hall of the miners, a child sung a lullaby, the words not yet fully formed. The door smelled of machine oil.
“Gather your team. We leave now. We find Ragnar.”
“What about Jean and her bomb?”
Words came out of Marley’s mouth, words she was not certain she formed. “Gone. Like smoke.”
Twenty-Eight
“JEAN SAY THIS is okay?” asked the hulking guard. He sat wide-legged on a chair next to the reinforced door that led deeper into the colony. Gomez eyed the assault rifle resting in his lap, one thick finger flicking over the trigger guard. Not a professional but an impediment nonetheless. “I’m not supposed to open this door.”
“We don’t need permission,” said Gomez. He could feel Orlov’s breath on his shoulder and heard the anxious shuffling feet of Hendo further back. “We’re here on the authority of Prime.”
“I get that, buddy, but I’m really supposed to take orders from Jean.” The guard shrugged. He stared back down the long hall, past Marley, Finn and Adams, past another set of barricades, in the direction of the mess hall. “Once you’re through here, you got no more back up. And honestly you ain’t gonna find Ragnar.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “You all know what you’re getting into?”
“We’re big boys,” said Gomez. “Finally grown out of our diapers.”
The guard’s lips drew back and he snorted. “Big man, huh? Don’t come knocking when you shit your pants. Door don’t open after I let you through. On your fucking own, tough man.”
“Just open the door.”
The guard crossed him arms over his chest. “You want to know what’s on the other side. Fucking machines that’s what. And not the machines you come to expect. Rom’s grand experiment gone wild. His mad scheme. And he’s not going to be happy with you strolling in his kingdom. No walk in the park, boyo.”
“We’ve dealt with robots before,” said Gomez. “Ain’t no thing.”
“Blow their shit up,” said Orlov lifting her rifle. “No problem.”
“I’m sure you have,” said the guard. He smiled widely and settled back into his chair. “But we’re still going to wait for Jean. I’m in no hurry.”
Gomez was bumped to the side. Marley darted past him. The guard rose quickly but before he could raise his gun, Marley grabbed his forearm. She squeezed so hard that he collapsed into a half squat, his face twisted in pain. She held her pistol inches away from his face. “Open the fucking door.”
The guard winced. “My arm. You’re breaking the bones.”
“Drop the gun.”
He complied and Marley kicked the rifle away. She released him but kept the gun pointed at his face. “Open the door.”
The guard rose slowly, massaging his arm. Gomez saw the dark prints of Marley’s fingers on the man’s skin. He wondered how much strength she had in her Augmented limbs.
The guard wiped at his eyes. “I got no problem letting you through. No problem at all. But I’m not letting you back in.”
He punched a code into the panel and stepped back. The door slid open. The hallway on the other side of door was empty.
Gomez followed Marley through the door with the rest of his team at his heels. As soon as Adams stumbled through, the door slammed shut behind them.
Gomez turned to the hall ahead. This hall was meticulously clean: no piled garbage, no bodies, no barricades.
“I don’t like this,” Gomez hissed. “Too fucking quiet.”
He and Marley took point with Orlov and Hendo behind them. Finn and Adams trailed. These were the worst missions, he thought. The slow creep into unknown territory. He preferred an honest firefight where the enemy was known and in sight. Better to be outnumbered and in the open than fighting against an invisible foe.
“Maybe all for nothing,” said Orlov. “Maybe the miners are just scared.”
“I don’t think so,” said Marley.
They were fifteen minutes down the hall, having cleared only two rooms, and far from where the hall ended in a “T” when Gomez opened a private channel to Finn. “Bring up a map on my goggles. Locate us and the room where the machine is.”
Lines of green mapped before Gomez’s eyes. They would need to get to the end of the hall, then a left, a right, and another right.
Finn’s voice filled Gomez’s earpiece. “At this pace, boss, it’s going to be another two hours before we reach Ragnar. The Cap here is getting more agitated. We need to get him there and see if Penelope can be fixed up.”
“What do you think we’re going to find there? Think about it. The colony’s dark. The long-range comms system is down. The local comms system is fucking chaos. Obviously Ragnar no longer controls it. If the AI can’t control something as simple as an internal comms system, you think it’s even working?”
“I worried about Adams,” said Finn.
“Me, too. I’m worried the fool has gone completely crazy. Obsessed with a machine. We should drop that box of electronics. We need to find the AI for the other ship. We can re-install it and drag over the sleep pods from our ship.”
Finn laughed. “You’re a dreamer. You think I can install an AI? It’s not as simple as connecting a few wires. It’s an AI level operation to integrate it with a ship.”
“Can’t you figure some kind of work around? You’re the computer genius. That’s why I brought you on the team.”
“You didn’t hire me because I could fix things. You hired me because I blow things up.”
Gomez rolled his eyes and shut off the private channel. He glanced back at the door. He wondered if they pounded on it and pleaded long enough whether the guard would open the door.
Marley pointed to the next room and Hendo, Orlov, and Finn slipped through the door. Gomez grabbed Marley’s elbow.
“I think we should turn back,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I got a bad feeling about this. We’re walking in blind. We have no idea of who the enemy is. It
’s safer on the other side of the door. The miners have survived for months, and so could we. We could set up a defensible position in the loading dock so even if something got through that door, we could buy time.”
“Buy time for what?”
“For Prime to send back up. We dropped out of communications right after entering orbit. Penelope must have sent a distress signal. He’ll know something is up. He’ll send a team to extract us.”
Marley stared at him, wordless, and then laughter bubbled out of her lips. “You think he’s going to send someone in to rescue us. My god you’re even more a fool than I thought.”
“He won’t leave us here.”
“There’s only one way off this rock. We complete our mission. We secure the comms system. We secure the colony.”
Gomez was about to respond when a giant metal woman loped across the intersection ahead. Before she vanished behind the wall, she turned giant magnified eyes towards Gomez.
“Take cover!” shouted Gomez running after Marley towards a doorway.
“What the fuck!” said Orlov popping out of the room, her gun swinging at her hip.
“Hide, little rabbit, hide!” said Hendo. He grabbed Orlov from behind and pulled her back into the safety of the doorway.
“There,” said Gomez pointing up the hall. The giant metal woman peeked around the corner.
“You see that?” shouted Finn. “Holy shit! You see the mods on her!”
“You sure that’s a person?” said Orlov. “Look likes a robot to me.”
Gomez got a better look at the woman when she glanced around the corner: long black hair and a half a face, fitted in an exoskeleton, the type used in the loading docks.
But the woman was not just in an exoskeleton. Her limbs had been severed and in their place she had been surgically attached to a machine.
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