Five by Five

by Aaron Allston

  Pulling Cowboy away from the aqueduct’s side, Marcos slid the body down into the dark, cold waters where no Cyborg would find it, claim it for parts. Then he cleared his queue with a long gaze into the VOID. Opened STANDARD VOICE to the entire platoon.

  “Big Mike has Bravo,” he said for those who hadn’t seem Marcos submerge the body. “Able, guard the rim. Bravo, two-by-two across this damn basin. Then we’ll safeguard Able. I want to put this aqueduct between us and the Cybs.”

  Rabbit gestured east, where Cyborg flitters continued to fall and rise over the city. Fall and then rise. “That’s going to move us deeper into the city,” he pointed out, fidgeting from one foot to the other.

  “Yeah.” Marcos nodded. He turned his back on the western embankment and waded farther out into the basin.

  Deeper into the city. Not quite in keeping with his standing orders, but it would be one of the few areas his platoon could move with relative freedom, being off the AID network. Where they could also do the most good, and inflict the greatest damage against the Cyborg assault force. That was always the goal. Make damn certain enemy losses outweighed their gains.

  And, if there were any answers to be had on Rho VII, that was where he would find them.

  “Yeah,” he said again. “It will.”

  –7–

  A violent trembler shook the lab, long and hard. Dr. Rutheford swung about in his chair and grabbed onto a steel table with renewed strength. Pieces of heavy equipment shifted, banging against each other. The monitor on which he’d been running his imaging program went dark. Lights flickered, and across the room a panel blew outward in a cascade of sizzling sparks and the sudden, overpowering scent of burned insulation.

  A week of relative isolation, watching fissures spread across the overhead as the city’s very foundation shifted and cracked, had not inured him to the danger. He had never grown accustomed to the sounds and shockwaves of the terrible battle being waged overhead. Within the city. Across the nearby plains. Over this world. If anything he had become over-sensitized to the danger. Such weakness terrified him. Fear was a human failing which could be conquered, he knew. Yet the quaking continued. Intensified. Taunting Rutheford as if this might be it. The one that took it all away, just when success seemed within his grasp.

  And then it subsided. Not as abruptly as it began, but trailing off as if unsure of itself. Leaving behind unfinished business.

  Rutheford swallowed hard. His breathing came in short, sharp gasps. “What do you think?” he asked aloud. One of Bountiful’s evacuees sat nearby, gazing into the overhead as if working out a puzzle. Trying to understand. The scientist in Rutheford appreciated such detachment. “That one felt … different.”

  His left hand maintaining a desperate grip against the steel table’s edge, he used his right to open up a new window in the lenses of his heavy-framed glasses. Option lists expanded in his peripheral vision, and it was a moment’s work to scroll through them. The microchips embedded in his fingertips allowed him to manipulate the data as if it had substance—or he was actually a virtual avatar, secure in the network and safe from such mundane worries as being buried alive in the underground facilities he refused to abandon.

  Wouldn’t that be something? To exist as pure thought within a world of data, with nothing to threaten him. Unhindered by physical limitations. Unburdened by doubt, and fear.

  Walking the shores of the infinite. That was how he thought of it.

  “The Cyborgs have collapsed another building.” It was helpful to speak out loud, filling the lab with the casual conversation it had been missing in recent weeks. If his voice cracked occasionally, he could ignore it. His guests did.

  He switched to an outside camera, confirming what the data had already told him. Half a city block, leveled. That was why it had felt different than the usual battlefield aftershock. “Creating a new landing area for their flitters.” And this one close. Too close.

  Where they on to him? Here for no other reason than to stop his work, as it sometimes seemed? Surely the raw materials the Cyborgs harvested in no way made up for their battlefield losses at this point. So their decision could not be purely deterministic. And from everything the Alliance understood, the Cyborg threat did not make emotional decisions. Therefore, there was a missing component. Still.

  Unless they were after quality, not quantity.

  “Tevin,” Rutheford muttered. “Where is Tevin?” He tapped fingers in the air, switching camera and sensor locations. The heavy glasses slid down his nose, but he left them alone while searching for the weak transponder planted in Tevin’s messenger bag.

  He never should have let the boy go out again. Too dangerous. Too dangerous for him. Tevin knew the entrances to Rutheford’s labs and living spaces. If captured alive. If made to talk. The idea almost didn’t bear—There!

  He found Tevin in the southwestern quarter, staggering out of a cloud of billowing dust with that other street urchin following along like a loyal puppy. Only a block away from where the Cyborgs had collapsed the old mercantile center. Caught in the dust and detritus that swirled for several city blocks in every direction.

  Too close. “Too close by half. Tevin should be brought back, don’t you think?”

  Where the tremors and exploding light panels had engendered only vague curiosity in his guest, Tevin’s name sparked something a bit more personal, Rutheford noticed. A tightening around the eyes. Was that a glare? A brief surge of resentment, perhaps? He would allow that. Resentment was a form of jealousy; both rooted in anger. And anger, unlike fear, was a motivator. Not a paralytic.

  He jotted his observations into his virtual notes. Then with a double-tap against air pulled up the power grid feeding the city’s streetlamps around Tevin’s location. The boy was heading south and west, at the moment, but it would be the work of a few minutes to turn him back around. Bring him to the door. Bring him down below. For safety.

  For his safety.

  He paused, considering. The subroutine which would charge and flicker the streetlamps at his will hovered in a virtual window, just beneath his hand, superimposed over the camera view.

  Reaching out slowly, carefully, he pinched the subroutine closed.

  “No,” he decided, finally regaining control over his fear. “Not yet.”

  He recalled that momentary expression of revulsion Tevin had given the lift—given him—and Rutheford was not quite ready to deal with that. Revulsion could turn toward fear or hate. While the former would be very accommodating toward bringing Tevin down below, the other was very, very dangerous.

  Besides, Tevin would eventually come back on his own with a new group of evacuees looking for a way off Bountiful. And these last few days, Rutheford had become quite the people person, hadn’t he?

  Still, he left one of the monitor windows open to follow Tevin’s progress along the course of the day. A necessary evil, he decided, begrudging every moment taken away from his work. Time was not on his side. He knew that. It trickled away just as the grit and chips trickled from spreading fissures in the overhead. This lab was doomed, just as Bountiful was doomed. But not yet. Not before he was finished.

  Bringing his imaging program back to the monitor, Rutheford pushed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, then bent forward to work. The virtual overlays displayed his progress and what was left to accomplish. Nearly there. With a careful, steady hand, he manipulated the micro-surgical tools. Splicing his probes into the neural pathways. Making one final severing which would help put his guest at ease. Then, turning away form the monitor, Rutheford reconfigured his glasses for extreme magnification and physically checked the bundle of bio-optic leads which sprouted like a new nerve cluster at the back of his guest’s skull.

  One lead, darker than the rest, began to glow with new, steady life.

  “Excellent,” Rutheford said in praise. For his guest as well as for himself. Forgotten was Tevin, the Cyborg threat, and the battle still raging on Bountiful’s surface. Now, for the mo
ment, there was only the work. “And it is proceeding well, wouldn’t you say?”

  Reclined in the chair, staring up into the network of cracks spreading across the ceiling, Cog simply smiled.

  The End

  THE BLACK SHIP

  A Mech Novella from the Imperium Series

  B.V. Larson

  –1–

  The Black Ship had been built to hide its nature as a vehicle of powered flight. The engines were cleverly designed to allow it to approach target planets without being detected. Like most spacecraft, it was propelled by ejecting matter from the tail section. The stealth drive operated on the same principle, but it cooled the exhaust and masked the energy emissions with powerful fields. To all but the most sensitive optical sensors, the ship resembled a large asteroid, nothing more.

  Under normal circumstances, the arrival of an interstellar vessel was as obvious as the approach of a large comet. The speed required to cross the abyss between star systems demanded a vast amount of thrust, and an equally vast amount of thrust had to be applied upon arrival to slow the vessel down. Any witness to this process saw a long plume of heated gasses, one that stretched for millions of miles.

  The crew of the Black Ship was keen on maintaining stealth, but today there was a new technical problem with the stealth drive. Being an unforgiving sort, the Captain summoned the Engineer into his presence. In his right gripper he held up a computer scroll. In his left, he held his disconnection device. This dangerous implement resembled a thick stylus, or a thin flashlight. It had a single, black firing stud on the silvery shaft and a projector dome at the tip.

  “Engineer,” the Captain said, lowering the computer scroll. “These emission ratings are off the chart. We’ve only reached eleven percent of light, and already the dampeners are failing.”

  Being a brave soul, the Engineer took two clanking steps forward. Unlike the Captain, who resembled a person in most respects, the Engineer was a mech of the old school. She was constructed entirely of burnished metal with exposed nanotube muscles and servos that whined when she moved. Not a scrap of false-flesh polymers covered her chassis. Even her optical orbs were bulbs of plastic on short metal stalks.

  “We do not have the components necessary to affect complete repairs, Captain,” she said evenly. “I have prepared a list of possible solutions.”

  “Let’s hear them.” The Captain placed the computer scroll on top of the central display unit. He kept the disconnection device in his possession.

  The Engineer’s orbs tracked the disconnection device closely as she spoke. “Firstly, we could abort the mission.”

  “Unthinkable.” The Captain’s gripper twitched on the disconnection device.

  “I have more possibilities,” said the Engineer hurriedly. “We can slow down to maintain stealth.”

  “What? Slow down? We are crawling now. As it is, we’ll be more than a month late. I must admit not even I had thought of slowing down further. Why can’t we at least maintain our current velocity?”

  The Engineer rustled her computer scroll nervously. Around her, the bridge crew glanced at her with unsympathetic orbs. The Engineer drew herself up and plunged ahead. It was best to present bad news quickly, she believed. Reality had to sink in and dominate desires. Facts were stubborn things.

  “We have several problems, sir. If we apply thrust while moving at a velocity of more than eight points, the field won’t hold.”

  “So what? We’ll accelerate to full cruising speed, then coast to our destination undetected, and—” he paused. “Ah, I see. When we arrive, we must decelerate. You’re telling me we’ll be visible even while we slow down?”

  “Yes sir,” the Engineer said, daring to allow her hopes to rise. He had to see the realities of the situation. “Thrust is thrust, and the engines must flare just as powerfully to reduce our speed as they must to increase it.”

  “Can’t we simply decelerate more gently?”

  The Engineer shook her head, the section of her chassis that contained most of her sensory subsystems. “No. The problem is with the phasing of the masking field, not the applied level of power. It won’t maintain integrity past ten percent of light. Not even at nine percent.”

  The Captain walked on heavy feet around the central table. Every mech on the bridge moved away from him as he approached. “What is your third option?”

  “The third … ?”

  “Engineer, do you realize where you are, what you are part of? This is not just a ship on an attack mission to raid a planet—this is the beginning of the end. Mechs are the way of the future, and we are the heralds of these new times. Wild humans will continue to breed and provide us with fresh minds for our perfectly-designed bodies, but—”

  “I’ve read all the official statements, sir.”

  The Captain halted his pacing and swung his orbs to her. After staring for a full second, he nodded curtly. “I see,” he said. “Thus far, you’ve presented me with only two options. Stop the mission, or crawl to our destination—”

  “There is one other possibility, but it would be a longshot.”

  The Captain’s orbs met hers. “Let’s hear it.”

  “We are passing an inhabited system. Possibly, they will have the technology required to make effective repairs.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

  “As I said, the odds are slim. The system is known as Faust.”

  The Captain paused to think. “The dead system? Those colonies were all lost long ago.”

  “Not according to our readings. There are meager signs of settlements.”

  The Captain tapped his gripper thoughtfully on the safety rail. Finally, he nodded and the Engineer felt a wave of relief.

  “We will take this third option,” he said solemnly. “Navigator, plot a course. We will make planetfall at Faust. Helmsman, get us there as quickly as possible. I do not care if our emissions are seen or not. Use all deceleration and navigational assets.”

  “I fully support your choice, Captain,” the Engineer said, even though she privately thought it was the least rational of the list. The colonists of Faust, if they even existed, were unlikely to have equipment that could help them repair the ship. Still, she had done her job and talked the Captain through the possibilities. It was not her responsibility to choose the right course, only to lay out options for her commander.

  “I thank you for your raw honesty, Engineer. Unfortunately, your performance in this instance was unacceptable. The Mech Revolution will not be derailed by the incompetence of a single member, feel reassured on that point. Our world, Talos, will prevail over all others.”

  “What? I—” the Engineer was unable to complete her statement, however. The Captain had directed the disconnection device toward her and depressed the firing stud. He held it down for the required three second duration, allowing the termination signal to be accepted by the Engineer’s autonomic processors. The shutdown signal caused her artificial body to freeze in place.

  “Remove that thing,” the Captain ordered, indicating the Engineer.

  “Should we put the brain back in the tank, or freeze it?”

  “Neither,” he said. “Flush it down the waste system. I don’t want to hear from it again. Install another qualified brain in the chassis. We have plenty in the cryo-vault. Let’s all pray the next Engineer will be smarter than this one.”

  These were the last words the Engineer heard via her passive auditory input systems before they, too, shut down forever.

  Her final thoughts wandered. She tried to recall her real name, the one she’d been born with long ago, but failed. It might have seemed an odd thought to a human, but none of the mechs aboard the Black Ship knew their original names. When their brains had been harvested, such details had been considered counterproductive. They were known only by their function: Engineer, Helmsman, Gunner, etc. Not even the ship had a real name, as the crew had never thought to give it one.

  As this thought faded from the Engineer’
s mind, no new concept came to replace it. Her life support system had shut down with the rest of her artificial body, and her brain died inside a dark, sloshing little tank of oily liquid.

  Within hours, her brain would be blended into the digesters. It would perform a final service as a source of nutrients for the rest of the crew.

  –2–

  Gersen followed a primitive road, taking care to place each foot softly. Little more than a dirt track, the road led uphill from the rocky beach where he’d left his boat.

  He had good reason to be cautious, as the area was overgrown by juvenile plants bearing lavender-green podlings. Lavender was a warning color for most varieties of pod, and with this particular subspecies it indicated they were ripe, approaching the final stages of their lifecycle. Ripe pods were always irritable, and these were no exception. They rolled fitfully at the ends of long writhing vines. Their stinging red hairs bristled as they sensed the traveler’s passing warmth.

  Gersen paused to look upward. The sky overhead was full of brilliant stars. Like every world in the cluster, the view was spectacular. The skies in vids from Old Earth were drab by comparison.

  He carried no lantern or torch, preferring the velvet darkness. To see, he depended on his flickering, light-enhancement goggles. The day-night cycle of Faust was less than eight hours long. He judged the sky above, and calculated he had no more than two hours of darkness left to reach a safe haven.

  Gersen took one careful step after another on cloth-wrapped boots. He was nearly silent, as would be any sane man who walked the open lands of Faust. Around him a thousand pods swayed upon a thousand reeds, responding to the coastal breezes. These were the lighter pods, those that had not yet swollen enough to droop to the ground. They were not as dangerous as those that rustled and rolled themselves over the sandy soil, but a stray gust of wind could cause one to slap against a man’s arm or an exposed cheek.