The Atreides soldiers all lay dead together, as if struck down in a strange suicide ceremony. One man sat in the center of their group, and when the Fremen leader moved him, his body fell to one side and a gush of water spewed out of his mouth. The Fremen tasted it. Salt water.
The scavengers backed away, even more frightened now.
Carefully, two young men inspected the bodies, finding that the uniforms of the Atreides were warm and wet, stinking of mildew and damp rot. Their dead eyes were open wide and staring, but with contentment instead of the expected horror, as if they had shared a religious experience. All of the dead Atreides soldiers had clammy skin … and something even more peculiar, revealed when the Fremen cut them open.
The lungs of these dead men were entirely filled with water.
The Fremen fled, leaving their spoils behind, and resealed the cave. Thereafter, it became a forbidden place of legend, drawing wonder from anyone hearing the story as it was passed on by Fremen from generation to generation.
Somehow, sealed inside a lightless cave in the driest desert, all of the Atreides soldiers had drowned.…
I edited a Fiction River anthology, Pulse Pounders, filled with action stories from all genres. As editor, I felt obligated to produce a story of my own, but I had a really hectic travel and appearance schedule. In one year I did twenty different comic cons and SF conventions, writers’ conferences, and keynote talks. I had a great idea for a science fiction horror story, a thriller set on an isolated mining colony whose controlling brain was going senile … but how was I going to find time to write it?
I traveled often with Peter Wacks, and I remember brainstorming this story with him sitting in adjacent seats on an airplane, scribbling notes, coming up with plot twists. At Salt Lake Comic Con, with the show floor open at 10 AM, I set my alarm early and got up just after sunrise so I could walk around the city with my recorder, dictating one or two scenes in this story before I had to get changed for a day at the show. I managed to get most of the first draft done before the end of the con, and Peter fleshed it out and polished it, and I did the final draft. I took advantage of any spare minute here and there, and the result is an extremely chilling SF tale.
Change of Mind
(WRITTEN WITH PETER J. WACKS)
“To know the enemy’s heart is expected. To know the enemy’s mind is a gift.
To know one’s own heart is divine. To know one’s own mind is impossible.”
* * *
—General Jack Ling Tzao
The Revised Art of War, Interstellar Edition, 2873 AD
I
THERE WERE barbarians at the gate.
The planetary defenses had fallen, and Colonel Ben Triegen did not know how long he could keep his surviving soldiers safe deep inside the main fortress in Collos City. Stale sweat and fear filled the air, a pungent odor he tried to ignore.
With the fortress’s command chip, he controlled the external defenses, most of which had already failed horribly. Automated cookie-cutter subroutines were intended to keep the Collos civilians safe, but now they worked against Triegen’s troops when the attackers were the planet’s inhabitants. The outer walls had fallen quickly as robotic machine guns refused to kill attackers. The successively tighter barricades stood firm, though.
For now.
His people had resorted to barricading themselves inside with old-fashioned piles of debris. It was already ugly and only getting worse. Triegen mopped perspiration from his brow with the arm of his uniform; he didn’t want the others to see him sweat.
The ragged survivors huddled inside the central chamber, which was washed red with the light of the alarms. The soldiers were terrified and desperate, but in their eyes Triegen saw faith … hope. If anyone could get them out of this, he could. He would. Colonel Triegen kept his expression stoic even as he swallowed bile.
There were explosions outside. Everything felt … unreal; detached. He had been through all this before. Sadly, the pain and the bloodshed, the vivid memories of what was going on outside, the images transmitted into the fortress—no, there could be no doubt what was happening out there. All across the planet, the rebels had laid siege to the Network fortresses. Triegen and his troops had fallen back one step at a time, their numbers dwindling as the rebels grew emboldened.
It was all too real.
“How much time do we have, sir?” Lieutenant Fazil’s normally soft, attractive voice was ragged.
“We have the rest of our lives.” Triegen hooked a finger under his damp collar, refusing to meet her eye. “And that’s up to us.”
His hands danced over the control conduits. The barricades held for now, but he had to find some way around the resources of the fortress. It was his responsibility to keep these people alive until Network help could arrive.
One hour at a time.
He didn’t want to think of how long it would take for a fleet to come across interstellar distances.
The Collos Uprising had been well coordinated. It happened in a flash—a complete surprise. A gross failure of intelligence and surveillance. Colonel Triegen knew he was out of options. Nothing to be done about it now, though.
Extremist independents had isolated the planet’s fourteen Network fortresses and then picked off the followers of the Network government, the tissue-thin fabric that bound the scattered human settlements across the galaxy. Due to extended interstellar travel times, the Network was a safety net rather than an overt governing structure.
Thousands of Network loyalists had been slaughtered in the streets. Many of the fortresses had already fallen. Only a few, like this one, were armored bubbles holding out thanks to Triegen’s command decisions. But the Network fortresses had never been designed to withstand the pressure of an entire planetary population crushing them.
“Let us in, Colonel Triegen!” piped over the intercom.
The words echoed through the vault of his mind. He didn’t believe any of their demands or negotiations. Images from outside showed him victims of the uprising, and he could still smell the blood, even in the sealed room. The pounding at the armored doors continued, along with the demands. “Let us in!”
Triegen turned to look at his soldiers, glanced at the sealed door. He blinked as a bead of sweat trickled into his eye. Once again, he felt the sense of vertigo, the detachment. The razor-edged fear of his soldiers gave him all the strength he needed.
Triegen drew a deep breath, “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe.”
He almost believed the lie himself.
II
Life support was failing, his exosuit getting colder.
“Let us in, Colonel!” demanded Zan Harker, Senior Mine Supervisor on Aurora Facility 5.
The ice planetoid was dark and harsh, bathed by cosmic radiation. The isolated mining facility was no plum assignment on the best of days; it was even worse when the facility’s central brain was trying to kill them all.
Next to him in an equally cumbersome exosuit was another competent ice miner, Rajid Suvo, just as desperate to get inside. Suvo had drawn the short straw to accompany Harker when they both left the dubious safety of their stranded transport crawler in a last-ditch attempt to get inside the pressurized dome facility.
But the brain wouldn’t let them in.
Suvo continued to transmit on his suitcomm, shouting … expending precious air and energy. “You have to open the hatch, Colonel! The crawler is docked, but our batteries are nearly dead. Life support is failing, with six people still aboard. Let us inside the base, or we’ll all die!”
Harker refused to waste oxygen, energy, or mental effort with pointless shouting. The brain of Colonel Triegen wouldn’t respond. Instead, making his way through the ice tunnels to the emergency access hatch, Harker used his exosuit tool kit. He hoped he could work the controls faster than Triegen could shut them out.
The original “temporary” ice tunnels had lasted for decades, with layers and layers of repairs, year after year. The passages into the domed base were a maze
of conduits and ducts full of spliced wires, piping, crystalline optical fibers. It was a mess, but that worked to their advantage now: a facility in peak repair would be impossible to hack. The emergency hatch was their best chance—but not when the base itself was fighting against them.
Triegen’s simulated voice blasted over their suitcomms. “My soldiers and I will hold out. We will not surrender to rebels. The Collos Uprising will fail.”
Upon hearing the words, Harker ground his teeth together. He turned and looked at his companion. Through the faceplate he saw the other man’s dark eyes widen with fear at the confirmation of their suspicions.
The facility’s central brain was having another war flashback.
Harker’s suit reserves were depleted. No time to lose. He took out the tools and frenetically assembled a plan. The other six ice miners trapped in the docked transport crawler had little air or heat left. Right now, they would be deciding which was preferable—suffocating or freezing. It wasn’t an easy choice.
Harker thought about death a lot—who didn’t on this barren frozen facility?—but he was more attuned to it than others. He didn’t consider himself a hero, just a man who would do what had to be done.
He and Suvo had worked out a few hand signals so they didn’t have to use any transmissions the brain could detect, but Harker didn’t expect the other man to be much use. Suvo was just dead weight … although, perhaps a useful distraction. Suvo hammered his gloved fists on the sealed emergency hatch, continuing to plead with Colonel Triegen. “Let us in! Please!”
What a waste of precious oxygen.
Harker was quieter. First order of business; he had to get rid of the monitoring cams. Taking out a telescoping probe rod, he reached up to smash the nearest glittering, optical eye that gazed down at them.
He studied the tangle of pipes and conduits in the low ceiling and spotted a second optical sensor, so he blinded the control brain there, too.
A mechanical scuttler appeared from the dark recesses of the conduits and raced toward the baton, trying to attack it. Each of the spider-like repair drones was the size of a loaf of bread and could work autonomously or be operated by the colony’s control brain. Harker crushed the scuttler with the baton, leaving a pile of twisted metal and twitching limbs, then he smashed a third optical imager, the last one he could see.
That should be enough.
Touching his faceplate against Suvo’s, a thousand-year-old astronaut’s trick of speaking without using comms, he said, “The brain is blinded now, but we won’t have much time. Remove the hatch access plate so I can get at the controls.”
Once the wiring was exposed, Harker jammed in the probe baton, blowing the liquid-crystal power cells. Energy-retentive gel mined from the ice of Aurora sprayed out of the damaged power modules like silvery blood.
On a normal excavation shift, Suvo was a hard worker, competent—because everyone had to be competent to survive here—but not overly skilled. Aurora Facility 5 could function without him.
Harker, though, was far less replaceable. He had to get inside before his exosuit failed.
He worked quickly, confidently, with steady hands. Though their situation was grim, he refused to die on this godforsaken rock being run by a senile brain.
He tried to distract the Colonel so he could work. He used a calm, logical voice, in contrast to Suvo’s panic. “Colonel Triegen, this is mine supervisor Zan Harker. Listen to me. What you’re seeing isn’t real. Remember where you are. The war has been over for fifty years.”
In many ways, Harker regretted the war was over. Harker had been in the armed services for several years, but he and Colonel Triegen had very little in common. He had washed out of the military; something about his psych profile was wrong. While others were relieved to have decades of peace and prosperity across the Network, Harker had never been bothered by violence; rather, he was disappointed that there was no longer any outlet for what human beings were genetically designed to do.
“You’re lying!” screamed the brain in its eerily human voice. Harker always had trouble associating that voice with the lump of gray matter floating in a vat at the center of the mining colony. But now that brain was failing, growing senile, and needed to be replaced.
Harker had come to Aurora Facility 5 as an ice miner shortly after his discharge from the military, and worked his way up to Senior Mine Supervisor. But now he felt trapped and helpless on a dark lump of ice.
Harker wasn’t the only one who had seen the signs of Triegen’s dementia. Only four weeks earlier another transport crawler—remotely guided by the Colonel’s brain—had been wiped out on the frozen excavation fields. All personnel aboard had died except for Zan Harker. He’d been outside the crawler on an EVA, trying to make manual repairs, when he had heard the screams, the pleas for help. By the time he’d gotten back to the crawler, the brain had bled out all the life support. Everyone inside the armored vehicle was dead.
Now, he and Rajid Suvo were trying to break inside the pressurized dome because the damned brain was having another flashback.
Transmissions came from the other six crewmembers inside the crawler docked outside. Their voices were weakening. “We won’t last much longer.”
“Neither will I, if you keep whining,” Harker muttered, careful not to activate the comm. He worked at the control plate, tried to bypass the locks.
Suddenly, a blast of frozen effluent pelted them, showering down like a wind driven hail storm. Another scuttler had dumped the contents, which hammered down like projectiles. Suvo flailed his gloved hands, trying to wipe the muck from his suit. He backed away, yelping.
But Harker finished his work. Focus.
Finally, he saw the system lights glow, and the emergency hatch seal unlocked. He felt a rush of euphoria. He was going to make it. He was going to survive!
He transmitted to the crawler crew. “The hatch is open. Suit up and get over here.”
Suvo was stumbling, still reeling from the debris barrage. “Harker—I think my pack’s been damaged. Help me get inside. Life support is bleeding out.”
Harker saw that his companion’s suit was indeed leaking fluids. Concentrated air spilled out in a frozen white steam. The damage was an easy fix, but …
His pulse was racing. He felt a metallic taste in his mouth, and his vision grew sharper, his thoughts more intense. The jagged shadows outside were nothing compared to what was going through his mind.
He hauled Suvo around. “Let me look at your pack.”
Suvo dutifully turned, exposed his vulnerable pack. “Thanks, man.”
Harker spotted some external damage, a few small fluid tubes and pressure cylinders, damaged but easily repaired. He took out his tools, the sharpest ones. “Here, let me.”
The pressurized dome was just another door away, but Harker no longer needed an extra set of hands. He felt hungry and excited by the opportunity.
All the imagers had been deactivated.
Harker extended a probe blade into his companion’s life-support pack and with a vicious twist, he severed the connections, breaking the power lines. The last air hemorrhaged out of the exosuit like arterial blood.
Before Suvo could cry out in question or fear, Harker yanked his comm line, disconnecting it. Harker panted inside his helmet, euphoric, as the other man flailed and struggled. Suvo didn’t fight back, merely tried to survive, but he had no way of doing so. He lurched toward the inner hatch.
Harker waited, watching him die. He liked to look at the faces, see the expression of terror change to acceptance, possibly even epiphany. Leaning over Suvo’s still form, he reattached the comm line. Suvo didn’t have enough air left to even gasp, and Harker needed to erase any traces of what he had done.
“We’re on our way through now,” transmitted the junior mine supervisor from the transport crawler. “Five minutes. Hold that door open for us!”
“We’re ready for you.” Harker watched the light fade from Rajid Suvo’s eyes behind the faceplate.
Oh, how he savored these moments, etching them into his memory! There wasn’t enough personal space on Aurora Facility 5 for Harker to take trophies, like he used to. These fleeting memories were all he had to keep.
He made his voice hoarse, hitching as he replied over the open comm. “But … Suvo is dead. The damned brain attacked us! Triegen is lost in another one of his flashbacks.”
Rajid Suvo lay in perfect stillness, and Harker felt a giddy rush of adrenaline and euphoria. This had been just too good an opportunity to waste.
III
Colonel Triegen knew his mistake now. He understood what he had done and what he was. And he was horrified by it.
As he existed inside his preservation chamber, he stripped away the layers of memories. The flashbacks were so vivid they had tricked him into thinking all those old actions—decades ago now—were real. His access to recall, enhanced by the base’s computerized systems, made reminiscences, history, and data all blur together. Trapped and bodiless, Ben Triegen could only wallow in a vichyssoise of despair.
“I’m sorry.” He projected his thought, which transmitted a simulated voice through the speakers in Aurora Facility 5, to all the cabs of the mining machines, to the living quarters, community rooms, and admin modules inside the pressurized domes. His words appeared as text on all computer screens, overriding any other activity.
“I’m sorry.”
He tapped into his own databases, studying information, not experiences, not real memories. By reviewing history and trying to match up the cold data with what his mind recalled from actual experience, he could disentangle the flashback from reality.
The whole Aurora facility was around him, a part of him. Millions of maintenance monitors and everyday life-support decisions had to be made, an incredibly choreographed production run by Colonel Triegen’s subconscious brain, while at the forefront of his mind he studied his own military record, reviewed what he had done—both during the war and during his years here on the ice planetoid.
Selected Stories: Volume 1 Page 18
