Into Darkness

by Peter Fugazzotto

  “I don’t know. The pulse shut her systems down. We’re running out of time. We need to get to Ragnar. He can help her.”

  “I’m not sure I can move.”

  “We’re wasting time.”

  Adams hoisted the black box onto his back and slipped his arms through the canvas straps. She felt lighter. He tucked the data cable beneath one of straps so that it rested snug against his chest. He was not ready to plug in yet.

  Thirty-One

  MARLEY STARED AT the ceiling. Her ears rung. Her robotic eye had gone completely dead. She turned her head.

  Patch lay on the ground next to her, slowly getting up, testing her limbs.

  “That pulse knocked you out,” Patch said. “What kind of hardware did he put in that head of yours. I’ve never seen a person go down before because of a pulse.”

  “I’m fine. I fell.”

  Patch laughed.

  Finn appeared in the opening to the air vent, both hands shaking until he steadied them on the wall.

  “Sorry, Marley,” said Finn. “No choice. The spiders. No choice.”

  He bent to help her but she shooed him away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “We would have been killed. They were swarming.”

  Marley crawled into the hall and squatted with her back against the wall. She sucked in deep breaths. Her eye flickered on. “What the hell was that?”

  “I told you he was crazy,” said Patch. “You think my mods are bad.”

  Marley slowly stood and examined one of the spiders. She ran a hand over his spine. “They’re no longer human. I mean, are they? What’s he done to them? Did they go along with this?”

  “It all made sense for a while. He offered a new beginning, an answer to the cancer. And it didn’t start out like this.”

  Marley stumbled away from the corpse, but everywhere she turned she found more bodies. Gomez strode up the hall, his legs specked with blood.

  “Hendo’s dead.” He threw ammo belts and an assault rifle at Marley’s feet. “We need to go after Orlov. Finn, you got a track on her?”

  “The signal’s there but I’m losing it. These damn walls.”

  “Then we need to get going now,” said Gomez.

  “I’m not coming,” said Adams.

  Gomez narrowed his eyes. “I don’t care. Your and your box are dead weight.”

  “I need to find Ragnar. He’s the only chance for Penelope.”

  “What about Patch?” asked Finn.

  “That thing’s not coming with us.”

  “We might need her,” said Marley. “She knows the facility better than we do, and she knows what Rom might have in store for us. She warned us about the spiders.”

  “And she did what?” asked Gomez. “Got shot and fell over.”

  “We need to get the colony back online,” said Marley. “And Ragnar is the best hope of that.”

  “You’re saying that we should leave Orlov to those machines? You’re fucking worse than I thought. A walking nightmare. Are you even human anymore?”

  Marley matched his gaze, refusing to turn. “We get the colony back online and then we go for Orlov.”

  “Do whatever the fuck you want. I’m going after Orlov. Spiders already killed Hendo. After I get Orlov back, there will be a reckoning.”

  “We shouldn’t split the team,” said Finn. “That EMP blast drained the battery. We’re not going to be able to stun them again. We can’t handle the spiders on our own. It’s a whole different ballgame.”

  “Way too much time being wasted here,” said Gomez. He started down the corridor towards where the spiders had dragged Orlov.

  “Stop,” said Marley.

  Gomez spun around.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “Only me. Finn and the others get Ragnar back online.”

  “Bad idea,” said Finn. “We shouldn’t split into two.”

  “Get to Ragnar’s room,” said Marley turning to Finn. “Barricade yourself inside, get the AI back online, and wait for us. Once the comms system is back up, send a signal out to Prime immediately. We need full operational teams in here. As many as Prime can send.”

  Marley and Gomez jogged down the hallway leaving the others among the remains of the slaughtered spiders.

  “I’m not who you think I am,” said Marley.

  And a voice responded, but it was not Gomez. Instead a voice crackled over the colony comms channel. Rom spoke.

  Thirty-Two

  “THEY’RE COMING FOR us. I knew they would. Some of you prayed they would not. Coming for you and me right now. Sneak thieves in the night. With wicked blades in their fists. Creeping through our corridors. Scurrying in the shadows like rats, afraid to meet us in the honest light. They’d rather slip a blade through your ribs or smother you in your sleep than look you in the eye.

  “I know that some of you had hoped – rather naively might I add – that they would let us be. I saw it in your dreams. Maybe in my dreams I wished for the same freedom. We weren’t harming them. We only want to be left to live our lives. But they’re hungry for cold metal. Addicts. Insatiable.

  “They come again. But it’s not their robots or their guns that I fear. Death is our only promise in this life. Why would I avoid what I was born to do?

  “They can kill me, cut out my heart, hang me on the walls, burn me on my throne. They can do all these things, and I would even let them do that, if I did not think that they would bring lies.

  “That is their greatest weapon.

  “They come to our sanctuary with lies.

  “They will not be content with our blood. They want more. They want to wipe out our dream, afraid it will infect the rest of the colonies. And they are right to be afraid, because what we are, what we have done, is beyond any pale fluvium dreams. Beyond the dreams of the poets and the scientists and the generals.

  “What we have become, our dream, has the power to change the course of human history. We are the chosen ones. The ones who have Evolved. We are the future, and the deepest danger to them, and they will do everything they can to destroy us.

  “With their lies.

  “They will paint us as crazy, deranged, abominations, evil.

  “And that is why it is important, no, not only important, but critical that we tell our story, that we tell the truth, of how we Evolved so that others can know of the potential and of the promise of what we hold.

  “So how do we tell our story?”

  “Do we start with the sickness spreading through the colony? The flaking skin, the swollen flesh, the rot of muscles. Do we tell them of our friends and lovers and children wasting away before our eyes?

  “Or do we talk about the quotas? Prime’s directives, the ever-increasing tonnage required? We were complicit in that. We should not hide that. It serves us best to be as honest as possible. We were flawed. For some a hunger of credits, a bounty for exceeding the quota. For others, like me, a rising status.

  “And what came with this ragged pursuit? Carelessness. Limbs torn off in machines every day. Our brothers and sisters maimed and killed.

  “And we all saw it for what it was. Bonuses, credits to fill our bank accounts, our tickets back to Earth or Mars or wherever we dreamed about.

  “Were there any voices of reason among us?

  “We worked too quickly. Taking risks, and that’s when the accidents started happening. As bad as it was, it was business as usual. Are we replaceable pieces on the chessboard of intergalactic domination?

  “You came to me with your hands and legs gone, and I patched you back up with the standard issue artificial limbs, the AR series robotic hands, the Kadonov All Planet legs. I mended you, put you back together, and sent you back for more.

  “You for your credits and me for my quotas. We needed to fill those transports with fluvium. Fill them and send them out as fast as we could.

  “It made sense in the great scheme of things. How long before another
major biometal colony was discovered? Ivory, rubber, fluvium all will have their day and then become a relic of the past, the lessons that children will blink at before the wars surge, the economic crisis, the new beginning, the endless cycle.

  “Do I even need to tell our story? Is our story not merged with us? Is our existence not the greatest story that we can ever tell?

  “They come for us now. Creeping through the corridors. Cowards in the dark. With their wicked blades. They come for me.

  “To kill me.

  “And I am ready.”

  Thirty-Three

  GOMEZ BLINKED. THROUGH the flickering display in his VR goggles, green grid lines marked the hallway and the adjacent rooms. He and Marley were indicated by flashing red dots by the door where they crouched.

  On the other side of the door, the red dot representing Orlov pulsed so slowly that he wondered if she were even alive. Around Orlov, eleven green dots – the bugs – scattered around the room.

  Through the wall, voices raised, an argument under way.

  “What the hell are they arguing about?” Gomez hissed.

  Marley crouched, carefully molding plastic explosives on the frame. A sudden crash came from inside the room. Gomez bit his lower lip. A hard lump sat in his throat. He did not want to have to face the spiders again. Not after what they had done to Hendo. Not after the spiders had overwhelmed his crew. He was supposed to bring them all out safely.

  Gomez wished he had brought Finn with them. Finn had the EMP weapon and it would have been so much easier to knock the spider out and walk through them with his gun. But the EMP had lost its charge and they did not have the proper hook up to recharge it.

  Marley inserted a trigger relay into one of the plastic explosives.

  Gomez had been too blind with rage at the capture of Orlov and the death of Hendo to think clearly. He wondered if the mistake of separating his team would catch up with him.

  A machine hummed to life behind the door.

  “We’re going to have one chance to do this right,” whispered Marley.

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” said Gomez. He remembered the gun that she had trained on his head. At some point, the power dynamic needed to shift. Otherwise, she would lead them deeper and they might not ever get off the colony. He wanted to survive.

  “She may not be alive.”

  “I don’t leave mine behind.” He settled his breath. Talking to Marley agitated him. He needed to be calm when he charged through that door. “Even if she’s not alive, I’m not leaving her. And there’s a blood price to pay for Hendo and I mean to collect it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marley said as she inserted the final wireless trigger into the explosives.

  Gomez tried to get a read of her. “For what?”

  “Hendo, Orlov. The whole bit of it. Sorry you and your crew got dragged into this. It’s worse than I thought. Prime hinted about Rom and what he might have done here. I had no idea how bad it was.”

  “The credits don’t mean shit now. I can walk away without pay. I just want to get me and mine off this colony as fast as I can. Marley, what else did you expect from an AI? Those things are evil. Sending us in for the slaughter. Humans in this brand new world are expendable. Fucking machines have become our rulers. How did this ever happen?”

  “I should’ve known.” Marley touched each of the charges on the door

  “Why’d you agree to the Augmentation? Was your life really so bad?”

  “Let’s get Orlov. ” She held up the remote between her and Gomez. “On three.”

  Gomez curled away from the door, pressing himself against the cold wall. The deeper they moved into the colony the colder it had become. A single visible breath streamed from his mouth, dissipating almost as soon as it left his lips.

  Then the door blew open.

  Marley burst into the room, dashing through dark smoke. The remains of the door, tattered and heavy, flew off her shins. She fired into the smoke.

  Gomez sprinted after her. Shapes swam through his goggles. The spiders were easy to pick out with their long legs. But they moved quickly and he struggled to track them.

  He sprinted to the left and found cover behind a row of barrels, firing his gun high as he ran. Marley ran to the right and the shelter of overturned worktables.

  “Watch the door!” ordered Marley. “Don’t let them escape!”

  The spiders scrambled for cover.

  As the smoke cleared, Gomez’s shots became cleaner. A head shot of a sparsely bearded spider, a hole blasted into the chest of a woman who mouthed a sudden “o”, sparks from where his bullets bounced off metal limbs.

  The spiders had nowhere to hide. The center of the room had been cleared of everything but a single metal table on which the bloody body of Orlov lay. A robotic surgical arm hovered over her.

  Bullets tore holes into the barrels behind him. Dark liquid smelling of wax and lavender pooled around his feet.

  He shifted two steps to the left and peeked over the barrel. He fired into the back of one of the spiders.

  Picking them off was easy. He and Marley had superior firepower, had caught the spiders by surprise, and their cover had given them an advantage.

  Gomez saw another advantage. The spiders could only fire where they looked and right now they were desperately trying to find cover at the far end of the room behind a pile of metal cabinets. As long as they were running in the other direction, the spiders could not fire back.

  He popped off a few more shots and the last of the spiders, maybe two or three of them, crawled to the safety of the cabinets. The others lay bleeding or dead on the floor. He stopped shooting.

  In the sudden silence, the surgical robot arm whirred over the naked body of Orlov. A circular blade ran along side her and her arm fell off the table and to the floor. Blood spurted from the falling limb and sent streaks of thick red blood over her blonde hair. Another robot arm descended quickly and drilled a metal plate over the site of the cut.

  “What the fuck?” screamed Gomez.

  Marley fired her gun and the bladed robot arm exploded.

  “Truce.” One of the spiders called from behind the metal cabinets. “We give up. Don’t fire!”

  “Where’s Rom,” shouted Marley.

  Gomez could barely hold his gun. “Orlov? Oh my god.”

  She lay motionless on the table. The surgical robot had severed all her arms and legs and sealed the amputations with metal plates. They had butchered her. Her arms and legs, smooth and ivory, lay on the floor in a darkening pool of blood.

  Gomez choked back a sudden rush of saliva and then vomited.

  He heard Marley talking to the spiders. “You have my promise as an agent of Huang Di Prime that no harm will come to you. Disengage your weapons and come out slowly. I only want to talk.”

  “Orlov,” said Gomez wiping tears from his eyes with the back of his wrists, “I’m sorry…I’m sorry I let this happen to you.”

  Behind the metal cabinets, the spiders whispered before one of them finally answered. “We’re coming out. But one condition: protect us from Rom. Get us out of here.”

  Marley whispered to the comms channel with Gomez. “Keep me covered. Any sign of treachery and blow them to hell.”

  Orlov’s body spasmed, her body bucking beneath the straps.

  Gomez covered his eyes with one hand.

  The metal cabinets rattled, and the first of the spiders emerged.

  “Slowly!”

  A long metal leg poked from behind the cabinets, and then another. They were connected to the metal spine with a series of hydraulic cables and titanium braces.

  Gomez stared at Orlov. They had been planning to turn her into a spider. They had butchered her to turn her into a freak like they were.

  Gomez could not imagine a worse fate.

  They were no longer human.

  They no longer mattered.

  Gomez switched his assault rifle to missile mode, stood up over the barrels, and fired. Th
e cabinets and the spiders exploded in flames. The blast hurled Gomez off his feet and he slammed hard into the wall.

  Smoke. A buzzing in his ears. Orange and blue flames licked up the walls and swirled across the ceiling.

  Marley dragged Gomez out of the room. His boots bumped over fragments of wall and body parts. The operating table had fallen onto one of Orlov’s severed arms creating the illusion that she was trapped beneath it.

  The room fragmented before him. The ceiling spun. Gomez blacked out. When he woke, he sat propped against a wall in the hallway.

  Marley squatted on the other side of the hall, her gun cradled in her lap. She pressed an adrenaline patch against his neck.

  “You stupid shit!” she said. “Stupid! You could have got us killed. A missile in this space?”

  “What they did to Orlov,” muttered Gomez. “They couldn’t live. They deserved to die.”

  “She’s alive. Orlov is still alive.” Marley angled her head. Gomez followed her gaze.

  Orlov, or what remained of her, crumpled on the ground. Her combat skin had been slipped on her body again. The limbless sleeves and pant legs had been knotted into an “x” shape across her body. Beneath the thin fabric, the biometal plates bulged.

  Her chest heaved and her eyes jumped behind her lids. She said something but Gomez could not make it out. She muttered in Ukrainian.

  He wished he had taken the time to learn more about her. But it was too late now. Too dangerous to let himself be swallowed up in sentiment. He needed to focus on extraction. He needed to get out of here in one piece.

  He nodded down the hall to the operating room. Smoke, black and acrid, billowed out of the door. “All done?”

  “As only a missile stupidly fired at close range can do,” said Marley.

  “Payback.”

  “We can’t stay here. Rom knows we’re here. He’ll send something else for us.”

  “And we’ll blow them to kingdom come. Let him send who he wants. I don’t care.”

  “We need to get moving. Now.”

  Gomez pushed off his hands to unsteady feet. His knees buckled. He took several deep breaths and climbed his hands up the wall as he stood. Several more deep breaths. “What about…?”