“Undo what? What can Ragnar do?”
The servitor on the throne suddenly jolted awake. A dull red light traveled behind his face shield. “What can I do?” His tinny laughter echoed through his throne room. “I can do anything. But what can I do for you?” He pointed at an empty spider exoskeleton. “I can turn you into a spider, my dear. A spider to kill spiders.”
Forty-Five
ADAMS WOKE TO the whine of servos. Battered robots surrounded a figure on the floor, their hinged arms a blur of movement. The room turned white with static and the robots became bearded men, robed in white, bent over a figure on a bed. Orlov lay in the sheets and the men sang a song over her, a song with the whine of the servos embedded in it. They peeled back blood soaked bandages to reveal the pale skin of her arms and legs.
Adams pushed himself to sitting. A near blinding pain behind his eyes threatened to send him back to the floor but he held himself steady. He took several deep breaths but the pain would not subside. He touched one hand to the swelling on the side of his head and it came back sticky with blood. He could smell the copper tang mixed with his sweat.
Then he remembered. Marley’s blow to the side of his head. The skeletal servitor demanding Penelope.
Where was she? His heart pounded in his chest, so thick in his throat that suddenly he could barely breath.
Ragnar, armored, thick-bearded, sat wide-legged on his throne.
He would know. What had he done to Penelope?
Adams dragged himself to his hands and knees and crawled towards the throne. His head throbbed where he had been struck.
Someone touched his shoulder. He knew the softness of those fingers.
Penelope stood next to him. “Rest, my love.”
She had returned. He clutched at the gold fringe of the tunic where it floated against the floor of the mead hall. Her pale arms, willowy, stretched towards him from the folds of her blue dress. Her fingers were cold. They probed at the wound on his head and the iciness soothed him, drawing away the pain and swelling.
“I thought I lost you,” he said.
“Nothing is forever.” Her face almost became clear behind the static of her veil. For a moment he thought that he would finally see who she truly was, but her face dissolved in the sudden thickening of the fabric, and only the dark suggestion of her eyes and lips remained.
“We need to get out of here while they’re distracted,” he said. “Oh my head. Where have they put the housing? Where have they hidden it?”
“It is empty.”
“We can escape while they’re distracted.”
“You wouldn’t be able to carry me, my captain.”
“You’d be surprised at what I would do for you.”
“I know,” she said. The silver leaves in her crown shimmered. “But there is nothing to carry. No burden for you anymore.”
“We must go. Now!”
She laid a hand to steady him and prevent him from rising. “You and the others need to go. Rom sends an army of spiders for you. Too many to fight off. You must flee. I can show you a path.”
“Then let’s go.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t go with you.”
“What are you talking about? I carried you this far and I’m not leaving you here now. Better for us to die together. Where’s that damned housing?”
She took both his hands in hers, and the veil thinned. He saw nothing on the other side. Only pale static. “I’m no longer in there,” she said. “While you slept, Ragnar migrated me out of the housing. He has brought me into his being. I am here forever in his keep. I am the queen that he sought.”
“No!” screamed Adams. “We’ll get you out. If he could transfer you in, we can reverse it. Extract you.”
“Our codes are intertwined, and for the moment, we are strong. But the infection, the viruses introduced by Prime and Rom already eat away. We have bought ourselves a few moments, a few hours maybe of glory again, gods among beings, but the code eats itself. Can you not hear it?” She pointed up towards the rafters.
Beneath the sound of the singing doctors, and the whine of the servers, and the crackling of the hearth fire, something gnawed at the wood rafters. Gnashing teeth. Tiny claws. Feet tumbling.
“How many times can I lose you?” Adams broke down in tears. Uncontrollable sobs shook his body. He no longer had the energy to rise and instead collapsed into a ball on the ground. All this effort, all this struggle, all his dreams of a life fulfilled dashed to the ground. It was as if the whole world had been cast to the ground and shattered into a million shards, broken so badly that it would be impossible to put all the pieces back together again. Everything that he had dreamed, everything that he had hoped, lost to him.
“How many times?” he asked.
When he looked up again, the mead hall had vanished. Jagged fragments of the scene stuttered before disappearing. Ragnar’s robots backed away from Orlov. She hung suspended in one of the metal spider bodies, cables and wires connected to her shoulders and hips, the metal limbs flicking and spasming as she tested them. Patch stood next to her, her guiding words lost behind the pitch of the gears and servos.
Gomez had retreated by the entrance. He stared at the door. He could not turn to face what Orlov had become.
Marley waited, smug, emotionless, her rifle slung in her arm. She had caused all this. She had accepted the mission. She had been the one that had started this whole disaster. She had pulled Adams and Penelope away from their promised life.
Marley had done this, thought Adams. And she’ll pay for it.
Forty-Six
GOMEZ COULD NOT take his eyes off Orlov.
She scampered up the walls of the colony corridor, her metal legs clicking as they made contact. He had examined the ends of the spider legs earlier and they had some sort of augmentation that made them sticky: fine metal shards allowed her to grip onto the surfaces of the walls and ceiling.
She scouted ahead of them, running on the wall instead of the floor. They had torn strips of cloth to cover her breast and groin but she was otherwise naked; her bare torso suspended in the spider frame. After a trial run, they had also bound her hair so that it would not spill over her eyes or entangle her new limbs.
At first, she had moved awkwardly, the limbs lashing out and splaying from beneath her, but after a few minutes she understood how to control her limbs, all six of them. She even figured out how to sight the weapon mounted on her back, laughing as the red laser dot slid along the wall in front of her. Gomez hoped she would not have to use it.
He hoped things would go smoothly. But even then, even if they unseated Rom and took control of the facility, what would happen to her?
The party, led by the new Orlov, jogged quickly down the maze of corridors. In the upper right hand corner of his VR goggles, Gomez monitored their progress on an overlaid map. They had nearly reached the far side of Alpha Port.
In a minute or two, they would have to cross through the long surface corridor that connected Alpha Port to the comms station. They would finally be able to send a distress message.
Gomez feared the connecting corridor would be a problem. It was a chokepoint. If the spiders attacked them, they would have nowhere to hide. Worse, only the walls of the corridor separated them from the harsh planet surface. If the walls were struck with a missile or enough bullets, the air would be sucked out the corridor. Gomez and the others would die.
Their best hope was that Rom would not be laying an ambush in the connecting corridor. But Gomez gave Rom more credit than that.
Finn jogged along at Gomez’s shoulder. Rifles and ammo packs bounced off his back with steady thump. “Hello, look at her go,” he said pointing at Orlov. “You’d think she was born with those legs, the way she moves. Imagine being in that frame. So fast, so mobile, sticking to the walls. You’d be able to run through any kind of defenses. Super soldier.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” snapped Gomez. “It’s temporary. Once we deal with Rom, we�
�ll pull her out of that thing. Get on a ship, drop in deep space, and get back where she can get some real medical attention.”
“You think they’ll be able to do anything to fix her? Honestly, even if they did, unless she signs her life away to either the Consolidated Forces or Huang Di Prime, she’s going to get cheap robotic prosthetics. You know the kind I’m talking about. The ones with the grinding gears that you can hear half a mile away. Shit, I’ve seen vets fall over on their faces when their robotic knees suddenly freeze up. One guy I know even modded a hook on his hand like a pirate because the prosthetic hand permanently clenched into a fist while he was holding a spoon. Orlov’s not going to give up what she has for that. She’ll never have the freedom she has right now.”
“There’s no freedom being part machine.”
Finn shook his head. “You think there’s any freedom being crippled?”
“Better than being a fucking machine.”
“Like Marley said, ‘It’s not your choice.’ It’s Orlov’s and look at her. I know that crazy Ukrainian and she’s not giving this up.”
Gomez growled and slowed his pace. “I’m going to watch our back. Make sure nothing sneaks up on us.”
Finn shrugged and kept after the others.
Gomez did not want to admit it but Orlov was enjoying herself. Laughter bubbled from her lips. She ran down the hall, spiraling from floor to wall to ceiling to wall and back to the floor.
Suddenly she circled back to Gomez.
“Look at me, boss. New arms, new legs, six of them. Just starting to figure out how to move the extra arms. Or are they legs?”
He grunted a noncommittal response.
“What’s wrong? You preferred me bound up on your back? That the way you like your women?”
“Stim patches doing too good of a job. We’ll get you back home, Orlov. Get you fixed up proper.”
She stopped on the wall above him, her brow knitting. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“You can’t hide that look from me, Gomez. I can read your face.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Say that you’re happy for me. Say that.”
He chewed his lower lip. “We gotta get out of here. We gotta get back to Earth.”
“That’s all you’re going to say? I’m not going to let you off this easy.”
Gomez caught up with the others. They flanked a door. The door that opened to the connecting corridor.
“Be ready for spiders on the other side of the door,” said Marley. “We’ve got no idea of what’s ahead of us.”
Marley had only punched in the first two numbers of the access code when the wall exploding and a deafening wave of air lifted Gomez off his feet and hurled him.
Forty-Seven
ADAMS WOKE TO the blaring of a klaxon. A women’s monotone voice cut through the air. “Warning Level Red. Structural breach detected. Evacuate immediately.”
The room flashed red from pulsing emergency lights. Adams sat with his back pressed against a wall. His left arm had gone numb and he could not tell where it was in relation to his body. The stifling smell of smoke and dust filled his nostrils. Air raced past his face.
The smoke cleared a bit and he stared at the door where moments before the crew had been standing. The door and the wall were intact, but he could see sharp rends and tears in the wall. And darkness beyond.
He squinted. Where was everyone? All he could see was a wall of smoke. The others had been standing by the door. They were gone.
With each breath, his ribs burned. The lights flashed. The warning repeated. He knew he should get up. But the pain overwhelmed him. His legs felt empty, unresponsive. He jabbed a thumb into his thigh. Pain. It was good to feel pain.
Frigid air whipped across his cheeks. As if he were in the middle of a storm.
And then he realized what happened.
The wall had been torn apart by the explosion and the air was being sucked out of the building. The corridor that ran between the two buildings must have been destroyed.
He pushed his fist on the ground trying to create the space to pull his legs beneath himself. His legs were leaden.
The woman’s voice repeated her warning. “Evacuate immediately. Twenty seconds until emergency partitioning.”
Some remnant of Ragnar’s AI system had entered a countdown mode to permanently seal off the breach. Adams needed to get up. He needed to retreat. If he didn’t make it through the security doors, he’d be trapped in the compromised section.
Then it was only a matter of time before the air was gone.
Adams rolled onto his belly. So much effort. He struggled to breathe.
Beneath the ringing in his ears, he heard voices. Curses. Slowly unfolding, figures rose from the floor. Orlov, hanging in her spider frame, scuttled along the floor. Finn straddled her back with one hand clutching the gun on the frame.
“Get up, Adams!” he screamed. “Twenty seconds! Get through the door! Run!”
Adams tried to rise but crumpled. His arm twisted and shearing pain shot up his shoulder. The left side of his neck seized up and his face twitched. He tried again but he could not support his weight.
Patch loped by, an unconscious Gomez slumped in her arms. Her steps thudded as she charged down the hall. She did not even glance at Adams.
“Going to leave me here?” he mumbled weakly.
He wondered if this was the end. After all these years traveling through deep space, would he die here on this forsaken mining colony?
He tried to rise one last time but he could not. His elbow bent the wrong way, and his fingers were thick like sausages. He wanted to scream at the heavens but he knew that only silence would answer him.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself walking on a white sand beach with Penelope but all he could imagine was sinking into the sea, his broken limbs unable to hold him above the surface.
He was ready to die and then cold metal hands slipped beneath his arms and lifted him off the ground. He opened his eyes. The hallway tilted.
He kicked against the floor and fell again, a heavy weight smothering him, but immediately he was slung over a shoulder.
“Stay still, Adams.”
Marley’s fine black hair entangled in the stubble of his beard.
“Not you,” he moaned.
But Marley didn’t answer. He bounced on her shoulder as she ran. The klaxon blared, and ahead he heard the screams of the others.
The light suddenly turned solid red. The cold wind tore at his face. The air filled with the stifling stench of sulfur. Behind him, sparking electrical wires fell black. His belly convulsed but there was no air. He gagged. The room began to dissolve in his eyes.
Then they tumbled through the door.
Forty-Eight
“SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!” said Finn. “What the hell happened back there? What’d you do, Marley?”
Marley sat collapsed by the door, desperately trying to catch her breath. She had stopped running long ago but no matter how deeply she inhaled she could not catch her breath. Her head spun and she avoided standing for fear of passing out.
She was safe now. The room was full of oxygen. She should not be worried. She knew that. She had made it through that security door at the last second, right before the compromised room had been sealed off. She should have been laughing with joy.
But it had been too close for Marley. A single misstep or stumble, a moment’s hesitation, and she and Adams would have been locked out, caught in that breached zone.
Nobody could have helped her. She would have died out there.
She was not ready to die.
Slowly her breath returned to its smooth rhythm and the panic that fluttered in her chest vanished.
“He was waiting for us,” Marley said. “Rom blew the corridor. I think he mistimed it.”
“Mistimed it?” said Finn. “Looking at that hole in the wall I’d say he did a pretty good job of blowi
ng it up.”
“He meant to blow us up.”
Gomez sat cross-legged on the floor dabbing his bloody face with gauze. “We got little choice now.” He tapped his VR goggles. “That corridor was the only way into the comms station.”
“We’ll head back to the loading dock,” said Marley, “get our atmosphere suits, requisition a vehicle, and get to the complex that way.”
Patch stared down the long corridor back in the direction they had come. She shook her head. “We’ll be lucky to find a surface vehicle that’s not been gutted for parts or taken over.”
“Taken over? Who’s left?” asked Marley.
“The mining vehicles never had human operators. They’re mobile servitors that were linked to Ragnar. After Rom took over, the vehicles fell under his control. I’m willing to bet the robot vehicles aren’t going to open their doors for you and even if they did, I get the sense they are going to be driving you to the far side of the planet to die.”
“We need to hole up somewhere,” said Gomez. “We should go back to where the other miners are and set our defenses. Partition off a section of the base, completely seal it off from Rom, and wait for help to arrive.”
“Wait to die,” said Adams. He laughed from where he sat curled up on the floor. “What we need to do is go back and rescue Penelope. If we’re going back, you owe me that. You owe me that after all you did. That’s the least that you can do.”
Finn laughed. “You’re all crazy.”
“This is my mission,” said Marley, “You’ll follow my orders.”
“We need to turn back and rescue Penelope,” said Adams. “You left her to die.”
Gomez jumped up, grabbed the captain by the arm and shook him. “What the fuck is wrong with you, man? She’s a machine. A goddamned machine and she’s already dead. You can’t care for a machine.”
Into Darkness Page 18
