A black market version of Marley.
“Another abomination,” cursed Gomez. He darted across the corridor to the doorway where his team hid. Orlov and Finn pulled him through the door. “Better together.”
Marley shot him a dark look from across the way.
“She’s coming!” said Finn pointing up the hall.
An eye emerged around the corner. A giant eye, magnified through a convex lens, extended on a metal frame. It peered around the corner. Wires and tubes stretched out of the back of the eye.
“Alice” said Hendo. “Truly down the rabbit hole.”
“Fuck this machine freak,” said Gomez sighting the eye with his rifle.
“Stand down!” said Marley.
“Not taking any chances with my crew!” barked Gomez. “We shoot first! And ask questions later! No time for play here.”
“Stand down! I’m in command,” said Marley. “Follow… my… orders!”
From the doorway across the hall, Marley pointed her gun at Gomez. He could sense her laser sight centered on his forehead. A single shot would end it all. He could imagine the steady squeeze of her finger, a bullet bursting from the barrel, the bullet spinning, then the cold crack of metal against skin and bone, and the inside of his head exploding out the back side.
Marley did not flinch.
He held his breath for a moment, considered something foolish, and then lowered his weapon, swallowing his promises of revenge. Marley shifted her gun from him.
“Come out!” Marley shouted.
The magnified eye blinked. Scalloped metal plates winked shut and opened to a slithering sound.
“Who are you?” a deep voice asked. Each syllable was slowly and carefully formed.
“I am Marley, an Agent of Huang Di Prime, a formal representative of the corporate interest. I am here to bring the colony online again.”
“Any robots with you?”
“No, only humans.”
“The AI sent you?”
“Come out.”
“You can’t trust the robots here. Not even the ones you might bring with you. Rom’s figured out how to worm his way in. Gets inside their comms system and introduces a takeover code. Robots aren’t smart enough to defend themselves. Even Ragnar has been compromised.”
“What do you know of Ragnar?”
The eye extended towards Marley. “You’re not just human, are you?”
“You come on out.”
Gomez squeezed the rifle. “We’re wasting time,” he said in a low voice. “The machine freak might be calling in reinforcements. We’re losing our window of opportunity.”
“I can hear you,” said the eye. “I am not a machine freak. I am an Evolved.”
“Take us to Ragnar,” said Marley. “We won’t harm you.”
“Don’t promise anything,” said Gomez.”
The eye blinked. “Ragnar can’t bring the colony back online. You will have to deal with Rom. Unfortunate as it is but there is no other way.”
“Then we’ll deal with Rom,” said Marley.
“No robots with you?” the hidden woman asked again. The eye withdrew around the corner.
Orlov and Hendo looked to Gomez. He held up a finger and mouthed, “Wait.” Even Finn fidgeted, his palm massaging the barrel of his rifle.
“What the hell is it doing?” said Orlov. “Where’d it go?”
“Hold your fire. Keep your weapons down,” said Marley to the team.
“We don’t need the machine to find Ragnar,” said Gomez. “We’ve got the map. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here and I am not going to risk my team on an unknown.”
“It’s not your team anymore, Gomez. It’s mine.” Marley looped her rifle over her shoulder, raised both hands, and stepped into the middle of the hallway.
The eye appeared around the corner again. Its metal lids blinked a few times.
Marley continued her slow walk until she almost reached the end of the corridor. “We won’t hurt you. Bring us to Ragnar so we can get the colony online again and get things back to normal.”
The modified woman laughed from around the corner. “Back to normal. I’m not sure if that’s really possible, or even what we want any more. But if you’re going to unseat Rom, then, what the hell, why not?”
Servos whined and metal feet fell heavy on the floor. Gomez clutched his gun. But Marley stood in the way. He would not be able to get a clean shot. Gomez choked back the sudden thought that maybe shooting Marley was not such a bad thing. With Marley gone, he would be in charge and their chance of getting off the colony would be much better.
The metal woman stepped around the corner and Gomez got a clearer look.
A metal mask covered the left half of her face. Bolted sheets grossly formed cheeks and a nose and an ear. Her eyes floated in small glass and metal orbs that were connected by tubes and metal scaffolding to her skull.
Her body, clothed in a glossy black skin suit, hung suspended in the metal exoskeleton frame. She stood seven feet tall. Her arms and legs ended in stubs, cut near elbow and knee. Plates of metal, some rusted, some painted white, cupped where limbs ended and the exoskeleton arms and legs began. Bolts protruded through puffy brown skin. Black stitches ran up the length of her thighs.
In the course of his service in the military, Gomez had seen artificial limbs added to soldiers injured during their service. It was not always pretty, especially out in the field, but he had never seen butchery like this.
A person should never have been joined with an exoskeleton. Not in this way.
“I am Dr. Ida Plain. Once I served with pride as the head physician for the colony. Now I am something different. They call me Patch.”
“You can’t get out of that, can you?” asked Finn as he broke away from Gomez and moved towards Marley. “You’re permanently modded.”
“It had never been my intention to walk down the path that Rom laid out for us. Never at all. But I had no choice.”
“He forced this on you?” asked Gomez. “He did this to you?”
Patch laughed. Past the cobbled metal plates on her face, Gomez saw that she too had Native blood like him.
“These mods, as you like to call them, all came at my own hand,” Patch said. “At least when I had hands.”
“Why would you do this to yourself?” asked Gomez. “Why would you mutilate yourself?”
Her magnified eyes extended a few inches away from her face. “We are all dying here. We came here with the promise of a new life. For me, a chance to get away from the slums of Lunar 4, a chance to make enough to return to earth, the great plains of my peoples. That was the promise, the dream. Then I began seeing all the tumors, the skin peeling off, the withering of miners who had been here for years.”
Her oversized metal fingers touched splotchy raw skin on her face. “The cancer is eating me up. Consuming my flesh. Been far too long on this rock. So I cut out disease and patched myself up. Soon I will be completely gone and there will nothing but metal bones. Salvaged scrap metal littering the halls.”
“We need to get to Ragnar,” said Marley.
Patch’s magnified eyes blinked hard. “Replaced your heart with cold metal, too?”
“If we can get the colony connected, we might be able to help you. Huang Di Prime can work wonders.”
Patch’s laughter sounded like struck tin. “He creates monsters. But I will take you to Ragnar for all the good that it will do. Follow me. Keep your guns ready. Rom’s spiders are out in force today. He knows you come for him.”
Twenty-Nine
MARLEY HEARD THE scuttling. But she ignored it. She did not want anything to distract them from reaching Ragnar.
Orlov and Hendo had taken point positions in the column as they hurried down a corridor, Marley and Patch trailing. Lagging was Captain Adams shuffling beneath the weight of Penelope, followed by Gomez and Finn.
Marley’s gaze kept drifting to the lumbering exoskeleton, especially the places where flesh ended and me
tal began. Patch’s skin, where exposed, had swollen and turned red with pus leaking from stitched cuts. Along one leg, her skin veined a dark purple as if an infection crept.
Gomez and Finn were talking off channel, their whispers conspiratorial.
She strained to hear to what they might be saying. But she could not make out the words. In the background, she detected a faint scuttling sound. Metal tapped and scratched against the floors and ceilings.
Orlov lifted her fist. “What’s that noise?”
The team halted, heads cocked. Marley made a half-turn, peering back towards the doorways they had passed without checking. Maybe she should have listened to Gomez and been more thorough but Patch had warned her that Rom would know they were coming. This was not the time for hesitation.
The scuttling grew louder then suddenly stopped. Silence
Patch’s eyes extended forward and then set against her skull. “Rom’s spider. I hear them now.”
“Spiders?” asked Gomez.
Before Patch could answer, the wall exploded.
A deafening boom burst in Marley’s ears. She was lifted off her feet. A hot gust of wind buffeted her and she slammed into a wall, her breath punched out of her chest. She crumpled to the ground. Dust and debris blanketed her.
Smoke and dust clouded the air.
She called out for Gomez but a loud buzzing drowned everything out. She waited for the pain but adrenaline surged through her body. She tried to push herself back to standing or lift her gun. She could not move.
She heard bullets thudding above the buzzing. She called to the others. Static surged on the comms channel.
Her robotic eye extracted images from the haze. Something large lay next to her, unmoving. Metal glinted. Patch. Marley glanced up. On either end of the hall, half a dozen shapes moved. Too many and too quickly to be her team.
Rom’s spiders! They were attacking!
She strained to see through the smoke. Shots slammed into the wall above her. Pieces of metal showered her head. She tasted the coppery bite of blood on her tongue. She gasped as her back suddenly spasmed, but with the pain came sensation and control in her limbs.
The dust thinned. She spotted a dark shape torn into the wall from the explosion. Big enough for her to find cover from the gunfire.
The air cracked with another round of shots. She was sitting helpless in the line of fire. One of these bullets would find her sooner rather than later. She needed to move or she would die.
Grunting and groaning, she crawled towards the hole. Shots exploded where she had been sitting. She pressed forward.
The buzzing dropped to a low hum. Voices emerged. The shouts of the team members. The screams of others – human but chittering.
With trembling hands, Marley found the tattered edges of the wall and pulled herself into the darkness. Her strength returned in slow surges. Her Augmented eye came online. She scanned the space behind the wall. She crouched in a large air vent that extended a dozen feet before turning.
Patch lay in the hall moaning.
Shapes at either end of the hall began to differentiate from the haze, bodies, a flurry of limbs, too many to count. Metal scuttled.
Marley’s breath caught in her throat.
The “spiders” were not really spiders. They were nightmares: men and women modified, their limbs completely severed off and six robotics legs grafted to their spines. Spiders.
They scuttled along the walls. Shots burst from guns mounted on their backs.
Patch moaned again. “Help me.”
The wall exploded above her head.
Marley glanced quickly outside her hiding spot. Maybe a dozen of the spiders at either end of the hall. Hendo and Orlov squeezed against the wall and fired at the spiders. At the other end of the hall, Captain Adam’s feet disappeared through an open doorway as if he were being dragged. The box that contained Penelope was abandoned on the floor, one end smashed open and wires spilling out.
Patch called to Marley. One of her extendable eyes had snapped off and lay in a small puddle of blood and machine oil. “Don’t let them get me. Rom will destroy me for parts.”
To reach Patch, Marley would have to leave the cover of the air vent and expose herself to the gunfire. Marley cursed.
Tears, impossible oily tears, leaked from the metal tubes near Patch’s eyes.
Marley inhaled sharply three times and lowered herself onto her belly. She crawled out of the vent.
The moment she emerged, gunfire erupted. A swarm of bullets cut through the air. She did not know whether it was from Rom’s spiders or her own team. It didn’t matter. A bullet was a bullet.
She dragged herself along the floor.
Bullets whizzed so close that they kissed her cheeks with air.
Finally she was close enough. She grabbed one of Patch’s legs. Patch was incredibly heavy. Marley strained, the reinforced fluvium tendons stretching taut beneath her flesh.
But it paid off.
Patch slid towards her a few inches. Then a few more. Marley scooted back towards the air vent. She hauled Patch further.
The floor next to Marley’s head exploded in fragments. Her foot kicked the wall and then empty space as it found the air vent. She crawled backwards until both legs were in the air vent. She hooked her feet on the wall and yanked. Patch glided along the floor and crashed into her.
Finally Marley scooted completely into the air vent. She raised herself to squatting, grabbed one of Patch’s legs with both hands and pulled her the final distance into the air vent.
“Goddamn you’re heavy!” said Marley through heaving breaths.
“You’re hit,” said Patch.
Marley ran her hands down her chest and belly.
“Your ear.”
Marley touched her face. Droplets of blood clung to the metal. “Is it bad?”
“Nothing I couldn’t fix with a tin can.” Patch laughed. She lifted herself to sitting. Methodically, she worked her way through the movement of the exoskeleton, checking to see if all her parts were functioning. The servos at her left ankle whirred, but the ankle would not flex.
“Can you get my eye?” asked Patch.
“Fix it with a tin can.”
“That’s my real eye out there. Encased in glass and metal. A piece of me.”
“I’m not putting my head out there again!” said Marley.
“You are cruel.”
“We can get your eye replaced later. Right now, we’ve got bigger problems. Where’s this air vent go?”
Patch stared past Marley and to where her eye lay in the rubble. “You can’t do this one thing for me?”
“Marley?” Gomez’s voice broke through the background static of the comms channel. “Where the fuck did you go?”
“I’m here,” she said. “In the blast hole. I found an air vent. Status.”
“I’m with Finn and Adams pinned down in a storage room.” A rhythm of gunfire burst over the comms line. “But we’ve got the angle. Picking them off! Fuckers can walk on the ceilings.”
“Orlov, Hendo, status.”
Static filled the comms line. Marley called for them again. Nothing. Her mouth suddenly felt dry. Then she heard a voice.
“Help! Fuckers got me!” Orlov screamed. “Help!”
Then Orlov went silent.
“Finn,” said Marley, “bring up a map. Show Orlov.” A map generated in the shared comms signal. Green lines. The cluster of red dots, a single red dot no longer pulsing, another red dot racing down a hallway. Not in the direction of Ragnar.
“We gotta get her,” said Gomez. Gunfire erupted again.
Marley peeked out of the hole in the wall. The spiders had cleared out from the far end of the hall. Hendo sprawled in the midst of red splattered rubble.
A thunderous rattle shook the hall. She turned. Spiders swarmed over floor, ceiling and wall, closing in around the doorway where Gomez, Finn, and Adams hid.
“Two dozen!” she screamed. “Right outside your door! Th
ey’re going to rush you. Get ready!”
“Fuck that!” answered Finn. “Sleep time.”
Before Marley could protest, Finn sent an electromagnetic pulse and she blacked out.
Thirty
SCREAMS AND EXPLOSIONS echoed. Trembling, Captain Adams crept into the hall until he found the cold metal box. He shot a quick glance down the hall. Gomez and Finn were already stalking among the bodies. It would not be long before the electromagnetic pulse wore off and the spiders would start moving again.
He returned his attention to Penelope
The metal housing had been torn back, its ripped edges sharp like a blade. Circuits and chips were exposed and wires spilled onto the floor.
He gently tucked the wires back into the box. Then using his fingers and the heel of his hand he bent the housing back, not enough to seal it, but enough so it contained the inner parts of Penelope.
He blinked back tears.
He lifted the cable that snaked along the floor. He inspected the plug. It was intact. He could still port back into her consciousness.
Adrenaline washed through his body.
He squeezed the cable and bit his lower lip. He was not ready. Better to not know. Not yet.
Shots rang out. Adams looked up. Finn and Gomez among Rom’s spiders. The mercenaries’ pistols bucked in their hands.
Adams turned. He could not watch. It was murder.
The worst part was that the men and women were conscious. They begged and cried out, flopping helplessly in their prison of powered-down robotic limbs. One by one, the pleading stopped until the only sound in the room was a distant hum.
Finn squatted by Adams. The young man’s hands shook as he fussed with his belts and buckles.
Gomez walked among the bodies, prodding each with a foot, his pistol hanging heavy in his fist.
“U..u..us or them,” said Finn. “Right? Had to be that way. Right?” He glanced up and down the hall. “Hope the others don’t come back. Don’t know if I could do that again. I mean it’s one thing when it’s robots but these are people.”
Adams brushed dust and fragments from Penelope’s housing.
“Is she…?” asked Finn.
Into Darkness Page 13
