Europa Affair

by M. D. Thalmann

  The Peter that lived in Jeff’s body didn’t remember recording that message, or programming any trapdoor prompts. His ship had either been hacked, which was unlikely, or Peter had recorded the prompt after having uploaded his consciousness to North-Star. At that point in time they had, in effect, become different personas… or baboonas. Peter the TODD decided this was the more likely scenario and recognized it as an obvious booby trap he’d set for himself.

  “Not today, future me,” he muttered and then said clearly, “Zed Uno Niner October Lima.”

  The screen illuminated once more and Peter appeared in all his baboon glory.

  “I knew you’d figure it out,” he said, “Because I would have figured it out… well, technically I did figure it out. Just like I figured out that you were going to fly this ship to Earth, implant your consciousness into the mind of a young Purifier, and keep all the nanites to yourself… It was my plan, after all. But if I let you go, that means I die, and I’m not ready for that just yet.”

  The Peter-robot tried to kick free of the deck clamps, but he was immobilized. He shouted obscenities at the video image of himself, but Future Peter was of no help. The screen went black and the tether cable in the deck clamps sent the reboot command through his foot, up his legs, and eventually into his neural processor. His LED-illuminated eyes flickered as the upload continued to overwrite the data that comprised that copy of Peter.

  “Hi, I’m TODD. I’m here to help,” he said finally, then evaluated his surroundings. “Oh, wow, I’m a pilot!”

  “Welcome aboard, Jeff. Where to?” the prerecorded feminine voice of the HUD asked him. Without knowing why, Jeff gave the non-lady the coordinates to Elliot’s Martian compound.

  “Jeff… that has a nice ring to it,” he said as the rockets ignited.

  9: All Systems Go!

  “You were some help back there,” Melina said, removing the unnecessary bandage Marwick had placed in the crook of her elbow.

  “I wish I could have done more,” Marwick said.

  “Yeah, me too… I was being sarcastic,” Melina said.

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t smoke anymore,” she said and stormed away.

  “Maybe I’ll quit,” he said, following her as she made her way to the bridge.

  “Don’t bother lying. Apologetic words aren’t going to convince me. You could be the leader of an army of savages and you’d still be high all the time.”

  “I am the leader of an army of savages,” Marwick said.

  “Fuck it, we did what we could, we gave Peter what he wanted. Let’s just pretend this never happened and pray it never reaches Elliot,” Melina said.

  Right then, Marwick’s entangled communicator made a ruckus.

  “That’s Elliot. He gave me a real-time comm so he could keep the screws to me,” Marwick said, taking a step towards the device.

  “Don’t answer. Not until I leave.”

  The communicator fell silent once more, for just a moment, then the screen displayed an envelope and the device offered a boogaloop sound. They both stared at the Fruit Company Entanglement Communicator like it was a bomb that needed diffusing.

  Melina finally reached for it. “What’s your PIN?” she asked.

  “One, two, three, four.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I just got the thing a few days ago, give me a break,” he said.

  Melina swiped open the device which in turn automatically played an audio message from a furious Elliot: “You’re dead. Both of you. I warned you to stay away.” Then a damning twelve-second video played on a loop. She tried and tried to silence the message but it just wouldn’t stop.

  “Goddamn, sonofabitch, Peter!” she shouted, then took the quantum phone and threw it down the central shaft to the cargo deck. It landed with a clang, but the gravity of Europa couldn’t pull it hard enough to destroy it, so now their recorded selves were moaning and laughing from farther away, and it echoed through the empty craft.

  “You should have let me space him,” Marwick said.

  “That would have made matters worse, how can you not see that?”

  “Well, it’s too late for speculation now, and this is probably a terrible time to say so, but that video is hot.”

  “Literally the worst possible time,” Melina said with solemnity.

  “I’ve got five bucks says he masturbates to it,” Marwick said, “I mean, I look just like him, why not?”

  “You don’t have five bucks, Marwick. You have zero bucks.”

  “I’ll have five bucks if you take the bet, because he is definitely watching that again.”

  “Stay focused on how we’re about to be killed, why don’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Well, anyway, we got no other choice, we gotta run for it,” he said.

  “He can shut us down anytime he wants, the only reason he hasn’t liquefied our brains yet is that he wants to watch us suffer…”

  “He needs line–of-sight this far out in the system. When Elliot gets someone in front of us, he’ll shut us down. I still don’t see how that changes anything,” Marwick said, and threw open the door to the armory absentmindedly, his training taking over.

  “There’s no honor in running, Marwick.”

  The ship’s HUD lit up and the display cycled between the various exterior cameras, showing movement, and a whooping sound emitted from the PA, ship wide.

  “Now you have the proximity alerts activated? But not when we were naked and vulnerable?”

  “I wasn’t sure how to turn them on, and you were all like ‘get me out of this suit’ and you kept kissing me, so yeah… I was a teensy bit distracted,” Marwick explained as he thumbed rounds into the stock of two mag-rifles.

  “How do you not know how to activate the prox-alarm?” Melina asked.

  “It’s a new boat! I just got it a couple days ago!”

  “Worst test-pilot ever…”

  TODDs were surrounding the ship, slowly cresting the ridge of the crater in which Marwick had chosen to land.

  “Surely not ‘ever’,” he said. Melina stared through him, not letting him off the hook.

  “If I fire the main booster, we can watch them fly over the horizon. Whaddya say? And then you and I go settle in on Titan for a while. I’ve got at least six weeks’ worth of provisions on this boat,” Marwick said. After a long deliberation, Melina nodded.

  “Hold onto something,” he said and flipped the ignition switch. But rather than a glorious rumbling, they were greeted with an error message: “Your account has been locked, please contact an administrator.”

  “Goddamnit!” he shouted, “Get your helmet on, we’re gonna make a run for your shuttle.”

  “No, Marwick, just stop! We can’t escape this. We have to face the music. This is insane.”

  The ship’s AI, which was of course powered by the Fruit Company said, “Playing music by Buckcherry.” and “Crazy Bitch” began blaring through the PA.

  “Fuck that!” Marwick said, not in response to the terribly catchy song, and pitched her a rifle from the armory. She caught it with her palms positioned perfectly to deactivate the magnetic sensor-locks which prevented non-Purifiers from firing the weapon. Even though not a Purifier by name, she shared in the altered physiology with Marwick and his kind. The enhancements they’d received were the only way Elliot had been able to create a clone that could control its mental faculties. The lights along the barrel of Melina’s rifle lit up in succession as the rails charged.

  “We can’t fight who we are,” Marwick said as both of their weapons started to hum with the electrostatic buzz they knew so well.

  “Looks like we’re doing this, then,” she said and Marwick smiled.

  Melina studied the HUD once more, seeing dozens of androids gathered into clumps surrounding the ORCA. “Why aren’t they shooting?” she asked.

  “Because Elliot cares more about this ship than he does you or I.”

  “It’s ‘you
or me’ in that example.”

  “Whatever, fuck him! You and me belong together.”

  “That one’s actually, ‘you and I’, babe,” Melina said.

  “Well, I’m not leaving your side, even if it kills… me,” Marwick said and winked at her with childish confidence.

  She dove into him and kissed him once more, their suits preventing anything more than a glancing touch of the lips. “I love you, you crazy ape,” she said and snapped on her helmet. Marwick did the same.

  “Brace yourself, this is going to be rough!” Marwick said as he ran his arms through the five-point harness of the navigator’s seat and then pointed his weapon at the ship’s HUD. His mag-rifle kicked and dense chunks of metal flumped out with an eerie silence, easily shattering the viewport. The cabin violently depressurized, hurling broken glass and purple protein goop wrappers out onto the rusty, icy landscape. As the ship’s atmosphere vented out to mingle with the concentrated oxygen of Europa, Marwick and Melina were whipped about. They held onto the harnesses and were eventually dumped onto the metal grating of the flight deck.

  In the rarefied air, the klaxons seemed to sound from somewhere far away. The ship’s life support systems fought to stabilize the pressure by first sealing the cabin compartment. The door slid home with a distant bang that they felt more than heard and atmo regulators tried to backfill the cockpit to no avail.

  Marwick used the harness straps he’d been clenching to right himself. He then hopped up onto the flight control panel and appraised the army of androids below through the broken window. He leveled his rifle and squeezed the trigger; the magnetic rails of his weapon spit malleable ore into their chassis with a FLUMP, FLUMP, FLUMP, again feeling the sound more than hearing it as the weapon rhythmically pumped in his hands.

  One TODD he’d targeted had been rent to bits as the fragments had torn through its arms, neck, and head. Melina joined Marwick and let her weapon discharge into the crowd below. Marwick selected his next target and released another controlled burst.

  A couple of the androids looked to one another and pinged North-Star’s local edge server once more with this question: “Just how important is it to save the ship?” To which North-Star replied: “All clear for weapons hot.” In unison, the TODDs raised their .50 caliber long-guns and started to fire, emptying their drum magazines. Leaden slugs zipped noiselessly through the wispy air, away from barely audible ratatat-tats. Marwick dove for Melina and scooped her into his arms, absorbing the slugs meant for her. He landed atop her on the deck, and both felt the thousands of impact vibrations as bullets riddled the skin and frame of the ORCA. Icy red mist speckled Melina’s visor and in a panic, she pushed Marwick’s heavy frame off her chest.

  “You’re venting!” she shouted.

  “I’m fine,” he gurgled, his mouth filling with tangy blood. When he spoke, the perforation on the neck of his suit spewed out more blood, which quickly turned to ice.

  Marwick tried to push up from the deck, revealing myriad punctures in his suit, all of which were venting pink crystals. Melina sprang to her feet and shouldered her rifle. Marwick tugged at her boot, but she shook his hand off with a gentle kick.

  “It’s time to end this, one way or the other,” she said.

  “Put the rifle in sniper-config and go for the power cells,” Marwick said, out of breath from the effort.

  She threw him a look that said both “You crazy sonofabitch” and “brilliant!” Melina turned the combat mode selector switch to the “long-range” setting. The weapon would now fuse two rounds together, which was possible since the rounds of a mag-rifle were little more than dense ball bearings, and form them into a pointed oblong projectile. As soon as the melding had completed, the LEDs along the barrel came aglow once more.

  This time with caution, Melina leaned over the flight controls, braced her weapon on the instrument panel, and sighted in on the farthest android she saw. Slowly releasing a long-held breath, she squeezed the trigger.

  A blinding flash, brighter even than a PolyBlast detonation, filled the sky and was followed by a shockwave that tossed the ORCA across the serrated surface ice. It landed flat, slamming Marwick and Melina into the nav-panels at the rear of the bridge. The ship ground and skidded a path through one of the flow-channels, before it lost enough speed to begin tumbling.

  The two of them were flung about the cabin as the ship rolled, and came to rest in a heap together.

  Marwick’s helmet was jammed onto the klaxon and speaker-box. Between metallic warning howls, he heard the lyrics “...fuck so good, I’m on top of it…” and erupted into laughter.

  He rolled off Melina and onto his back. He was venting his suit-gas through dozens of jagged holes in his flight suit, but his bleeding had stopped. Instead of pink mist, there were only smoky-white tendrils.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Define ‘okay’ for me. Shit, I think I sprained my goddamn ankle.”

  “That’s rough,” Marwick said as he surveyed the cabin. Large swathes of the hull were missing, peeled away and littered across the rough surface, and he could plainly see the marvel of Jupiter’s striations dancing between the trusses that remained.

  He reached for Melina, pulling her towards him. She met his eyes through her cracked and leaking flight-helmet and they began laughing. “This isn’t where I parked,” Melina said, eliciting a harder bout of painful laughter.

  “No more, my ribs are broken, or bent, maybe… just don’t make me laugh,” Marwick said, then asked, “How bad’s your ankle? Can you walk?”

  “I think I’ll be okay,” she said and pulled a roll of suit-tape from Marwick’s utility pouch. They worked in silence applying squares of the self-healing adhesive to each other’s respective tears.

  “Okay, good… next question: can you help me up?” Marwick asked.

  “Yeah,” she said and smiled at him once more.

  “So, those new nanites, yeah?”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty fantastic,” she said, followed by grunts of pain as she rolled onto her chest.

  “I’m going to have to get me some of those,” Marwick said, then added, “Oh shit, we gave them to Peter. This could be bad. Like, real bad.”

  Melina stood and pulled Marwick up to standing with a firm but slow tug. “He had our backs against the wall. We… we did what we had to.”

  “Fat lot of good it did us,” Marwick replied as he draped one arm over her shoulders.

  “Let’s get you over to my shuttle,” she said and then they jumped down from the windowless hole that used to be the nose-cone viewport of the vessel and landed on the ice with a dull crunch. Melina flicked open her forearm data-pad and remoted into her shuttle’s nav-system, tethering it to her beacon for pick-up.

  “Two minutes to evac. Let’s get clear of the wreckage in case it decides to blow,” she said and started up the slope of the gash they’d carved, carrying most of Marwick’s weight.

  Her shuttle’s silhouette appeared on the horizon, Jupiter’s Great Eye as its backdrop, and Marwick breathed a sigh of relief. Then, from the edge of the wreckage, he saw a flicker of fire and a smoky trail carving through the sky. Immediately recognizing it as a rocket-propelled grenade, he snatched Melina by the elbow and threw her to the ice, falling atop her once more. A flash of blinding orange-white light drowned out Jupiter’s brilliance as the RPG halved Melina’s ship and sent the portions skittering towards them, breaking up more so as they tumbled. Flaming chunks of her shuttle landed one-hundred meters away and some bits rolled to within ten meters of where they lay huddled. On the horizon were a dozen more TODDs cresting a ridge on the other side of her flaming shuttle.

  Fighting the agony of the mangled alloy and shattered bone that was pressing into and piercing his lung, Marwick shot to his feet and reached for a rifle that wasn’t there; it had been tossed asunder when the ORCA’d careened away from the blast. Before they could turn to run, little irremovable transponders that looked like tiny unwaggable tails at the ba
se of their skulls started humming at a frequency that vibrated their very consciousness. They clutched their helmets, trying to block the sound, but couldn’t get to their ears. Nor would it have mattered if they’d been able to, as the sounds were coming from within.

  With blood streaming from their eyes, ears, and nose, they fell to their knees screaming. And then Elliot did them both a favor and sent the sleep command. Jupiter faded away from view once more.

  10: Eye, Eye, Captain

  Mars

  Marwick came to on Mars. The room was a standard issue colony pod: he’d escorted the parts here and overseen construction, so he was sure of this much. The lab, one of Elliot’s labs (of which he was also sure), smelled of disinfectant and he noticed a nano-molecule inhibitor in the far corner. He was in a Purifier surgery lab. He’d not been in the surgery since the one back on Earth, but recognized it nonetheless because of the equipment. Last time, Elliot had used the inhibitor field to drill into Marwick’s skull and place the comms port. Without the nano-molecule inhibitor, the nanites would have rejected the interface.

  Marwick attempted to stand but instead only managed to grunt and squirm, discovering that he was strapped to the same chair as he had been during that long-ago operation. Thick metal bands bound his wrists and ankles. He began testing their resolve by swaying side-to-side.

  “Just relax,” someone said from behind him.

  He spun his head, able to crank his neck only enough to make out Melina’s profile in his peripheral vision.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but we’re stuck. No sense in struggling.”

  “You’re in time-out,” said Jeff the TODD, who’d been totally motionless up till then and overlooked by both Marwick and Melina.

  Marwick erupted, “Peter, you double-crossing sonofabitch—”

  “No, it’s me, Jeff... don’t you recognize me?”

  “Jeff, just let us go,” Melina said.

  “No can do, Melina,” he said.