KLUNK.
The door fell inward, shifting just as I’d prepared it. I’d hollowed the concrete under it so that the floor was the only thing holding it in place.
The thick, heavy steel door crunched his skull nicely, and he wobbled until he collapsed onto the floor, waking up the girl. She shrieked, hauled her knife back, stabbed at him. She needn’t have bothered. That was a concussion and a fractured noggin. He wouldn’t survive without help. I’d seen it plenty of times before. Somewhere.
He didn’t get help. He got a knife in his throat. His buddy shouted from outside, tried to pull him back. But his leg was jammed well into my miniature pit trap, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
The girl shouted something that would have probably been threatening if she hadn’t stopped to cough in the middle of it. In between her racking gasps I heard running feet from outside. Then silence.
I looked over the dead guy. Bald, wearing ragged leathers and torn cloth. A small collection of pouches at his belt… that the girl seized and rummaged through.
Well, fair enough. She had could have those.
I’d take this.
With a command, the nanoswarm descended onto the now non-living mook. And my feedstock rose, as he dissolved.
“Where exactly am I keeping this stuff?” I asked Argus.
“Some of your swarm is carrying it back to your core.”
I blinked. Then I did something I hadn’t done before while I was occupying the nanoswarm and turned my perspective without shifting the swarm around entirely. Sure enough, there was a regular convoy of fireflies marching back and forth, to and from the sphere, so big from my current point of view.
“So I’m eating him, more or less.”
“And the smoke. And the floor. You should have limited capacity, though.”
“I’ve got three subroutines under the storage process. I’ll figure it out.”
“No need,” Argus said. “This looks like it’s wrapping up. We can take care of loose ends and get out of here.”
“Out of here. To where?”
“Back to Juno. Until the next crisis comes.”
I thought that over, as I ate the goon. “Will the swarm keep on doing things without me present?”
“Well, yes. I mean… Sorry. Contamination’s still muddling me. You have to occupy the core for the swarm to exist. So we have to stay here until you’ve used it to secure the area, I mean. But you don’t have to personally occupy the swarm for it to work, you can just think at it, and it’ll follow orders.”
I fiddled around until I figured out how to withdraw from the swarm. Instantly the room snapped back into proper focus… all save where the status screen blocked my view. That reminded me of the bargain I’d made my minion. “I’m taking my eyes back now.”
“What?”
I closed the status screen. “Get out of my visual sensors, Argus.”
“Alright. If it makes you feel better. You know I can still see things through the room’s microcams, yes?”
I’d guessed something of the sort. “Yeah. But I don’t think we’re going to see eye-to-eye, so I figure I’ll keep my personal view private for now.”
“I’m all eyes. I don’t see how we couldn’t see eye-to-eye. In fact, I’m not sure what you— oh hey, she’s doing something.”
I glanced over to where the girl was prostrating herself. “Oh get up,” I told her through the speakers.
She didn’t listen. But a minute or two later, she eased up to her knees. Her grubby face was broken by clean streaks from tears, and she babbled something that was probably heartfelt and complimentary.
“Same to you, kid,” I told her. She smiled, showing bad teeth.
Then she saw herself out, bending low and squirming out the lower part of the doorway. Still a tight fit, but nobody was trying to kill her this time.
“That’ll be trouble later,” Argus said.
“Meh. One of the goons already escaped. We had trouble anyway. Now we’ve got a friend who owes us one. Maybe.”
“I’m not sure Juno will see it that way.”
“Yeah,” I said, as I set the nanites to the task of repairing the floor and the door, with an eye to setting it back in its frame properly. “About Juno. It’s time for that discussion I promised you.”
“Must we? I hurt. That contamination’s… bad.”
I was feeling it too. I’d gone from a bad buzz to feeling vaguely brainburnt. Still, it was a different ache. So maybe that was progress? I shook my perspective like I was shaking my head and felt, impossible, a little better. Probably psychosomatic. No, no, I needed to focus here. “Yes. We must. Let’s palaver, you and I.”
“What do you want to know? The crisis is past, so I can answer things without time constraints.”
“I want to know how this works, precisely. You remember getting sent out before. I don’t. Have I been sent out before?”
“Ah… I said that?”
“You did,” I lied.
“Damn. Ah… sorry. I’m not supposed to talk about your prior excursions.”
“I don’t remember them. Why don’t I remember them?” He was silent. “I’m an artificial intelligence of some sort,” I continued. “And I came from somewhere else. So my memories, whatever they are, are on files. Is that the truth of the matter?”
“Yes. Presumably,” Argus said.
“And Juno has those files.”
“I can’t imagine anyone else who would.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It… I honestly don’t have any experience with how she handles the human conversions—” he shut up.
Too late. “Human conversions.” I said, softly.
I ached. Bodiless, I hurt. But not so badly that my thoughts could be kept from running down paranoid and cynical grooves. “So what you’re telling me is that Juno sends me and people like me out to handle things like this and sends you along, too. But you keep your memories. Whereas I don’t seem to have any. Which means she’s altering my memories.”
He was silent.
“Answer me, Argus. Answer me, you made thing.”
“There’s no need to get speciesist—”
“Answer!” I roared.
“Yes. Yes, I think she wipes you between missions. I… well maybe not you. You might be newly decanted. I haven’t worked with you before. I don’t know if any of the other systems have.”
“Decanted.” And didn’t that open up a whole host of horrorshow notions.
“Please. You can ask her when we go back,” Argus offered. “All we have to do is declare the situation resolved and think the command—”
“I order you to shut up!” I snapped. He fell silent and backed away, until his projection was in the corner of the room. His eyes were full of fear, now.
“You can speak, but you cannot say the command that will send us back,” I told him, relenting a bit. “Not without my permission. Do you understand me?” It sounded like I was the one who needed to think that command, but if I didn’t know it, there was no risk I could think it. Ever.
Argus blinked in fear. “I understand your command, but not what you intend. What… what are you… we’ll have to go back. We can’t stay here forever.”
I remembered the nothingness I’d dwelled in before I came here. “Try me.”
“Oh no. You… you want to go rogue. And you’re taking me with you. Oh no.”
“If that’s what it is, then sure. Beats the alternative.”
“No, no it doesn’t! You don’t understand! Wynne, she won’t, she can’t tolerate rogue cores! Sooner or later she’ll check on us, and then she’ll destroy us!”
“How? A hidden bomb in this core? Some triggered program that’ll wipe me?”
“No. No, it’ll be worse than that,” Argus said. “Look, this was a risk-level GREEN mission. Rogue Cores are risk-level RED. At a minimum!”
“I’m more partial to silver, myself.” I studied the sphere that was me.
“It�
��s no laughing matter! For stuff like intruders without high-tech weaponry, we were the most economic use of assets. For rogue cores… I don’t know what she’ll use, but it’ll be nasty. And what do we have? What do we even have?”
We. He was saying we. Good. That was important. I looked around the room. “Garbage. Ruins. Wrecked machinery… and you. I have you, don’t I?”
Argus sighed. “Yes. Yes, damn it. I was ordered to follow your commands. I don’t see any way around it. You’ve signed my death warrant, but I’ll do as you tell me to. I can’t NOT obey.”
“Good.” I said, as the door shuddered, and righted itself in the frame. I gave the nanoswarm a few commands to set them fixing the motors that could open and shut it. “Then let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot to do…” I called up my status, checked my resources, and got to work.
INTERLUDE: HUNTRESS 1
Donna walked.
She was weary, so weary, and her throat still tasted of ash. Tasted of fire and the old, lethal poisons of the garbage that the Jaspa had burned. And that wasn’t counting the bruises from the Jaspa’s rocks, or the ache from where skin had torn along her side. She’d rubbed it raw where she’d tried to push through the gap in the door, before it had opened for her.
Before she’d seen the god. Before the god had saved her… maybe.
She wasn’t worried about the bruises under her lumperhide jacket, or the gashes on her side, or any of the myriad aches and minor injuries she’d gotten during her flight from the ambush party.
Donna was worried about the smoke she’d breathed. It sat in her chest like a coiling slagworm, and whenever she tried to pick up the pace, her breath twitched and itched and the coughing shook her from head to toe. The last few times there had been blood, lots of it, and so she walked and breathed shallowly, and tried to keep her eyes open wide.
It would be daylight soon, and she was far from safety.
But even if she did reach safety before daylight, before the screamers came out, then she still had her lungs to think of.
Lungs didn’t always heal.
When Adim had found the patch of green mushrooms and come back wet, sprayed down with spores as he plucked them, he’d laughed off their worries. Then twelve days later he’d finally died, choking on fungus that ate him from the inside out. It had replaced everything moist in his body with mushrooms, including his eyes.
And then there was Chaim. Donna had been there when Chaim got her sickness. The shelter the two of them had found smelled foul but not worse than many places Donna had been. But Chaim had gone furthest in and come out coughing. It never stopped, and her voice had turned to a croak. It didn’t weaken her; there was no blood, but the cough never left.
What use was a hunter who couldn’t be quiet? Chaim was stuck at the Temple now, stuck with the old ones and the children, taking care of the countless little simple tasks that were normally left to those who were otherwise useless.
Something had gone out of Chaim then. Donna watched the fire die in her eyes. She visited with her a few times after it had happened but got sick of the yearning in Chaim’s voice, when she asked about the outside world. Chaim had roamed the near paths and far, seen the Highbinders, and helped fool the Jaspa with the best of them. Now she was… nothing, really. Useless before her time.
This was worse. Chaim could still run. But if Donna’s lungs or her throat didn’t heal…
…no. She’d worry about that later. For now she put one foot in front of the other, tired, her willpower keeping her going.
Still, a temptation crossed her mind.
Donna paused as she considered the moon, so close to horizon, and the stars, countless, winking in the sky. Clear night, tonight. No clouds, and that was rare.
She should just keep moving. That would be the smart thing to do. But… if she died, or was deemed useless, and forbidden to leave the village, then she wouldn’t up this route again. This might be her last chance to see, to remember.
And so she picked her way out of the forest, daring to cross the shattered ribbon of black stone. Past the rusted shapes that had been wagons back when wagons didn’t need herdlings to pull them. And up to the point where the metal fencing lay flat, and a wooden spike jutted out above the trees, leaning at an angle over the cliff.
It was a totally unnecessary detour, usually unsafe, but she took it anyway. Precious minutes gone, as she squirmed up the wooden pole, tall as the grand hall, with wires and cables snapped loose and dangling over the valley below. Rusted metal spikes provided handholds. Twice she felt the snake of poison in her lungs curl, and twice she held on tight, and rode it out, swallowing the coughs.
And when she was done, Donna looked out upon the valley that was her world.
It wouldn’t be far to dawn, now. North, she knew, north was safety. Down the hill, across the ruined homes that slumped among the spiderweb of cracked black stone that had once been roads. Past the standing bridges, the remnants of Eye Ninety-five. Then into the grove of Our Cadia. Once she was back on Cadian ground, she would be safe. Normally she could jog there in half an hour. Now?
But that was a worry that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, because this would be maybe her last memory of the sight she loved most.
Donna turned her eyes over the patch of darkness, over the crumbled buildings and overgrown neighborhoods, past the jagged teeth of dead glass skyscrapers, and to the one part of the dead city that still held light.
The east, where dawn rose. The east, where white lights sat in the darkness like crystals on black cloth. Scattered white glowing dots around where buildings still stood, far more intact than the city to the west.
And beyond them, stars. Stars on the ground, stretching out west in rows. Flickering, dancing… stars made by people, caught in glass and plastic and metal.
Men had done this. Men and women. Juscade had told them so, told her parents so, before she was born. And they’d followed him, when he told them that they could do it again, if they had the will. If they were brave.
Donna looked out at the stars of men and smiled. And before she could lose her nerve, she turned and clambered down the pole.
She didn’t see the shadow that had slunk out of the darkness down the road, sniffing at her backtrail. Nor did she hear it as it padded after her, patient and single-minded. She was too busy coughing.
The sky turned lighter, and Donna moved as fast as she could. Her muscles screamed at her now, and she had no water. The coughing came harder, with more blood, until the dizziness came upon her even when she wasn’t coughing. She was weak, and if dawn came, and she was still out in the open, she would be dead.
She moved past the last of the old, crumbled houses and sighed in relief. The old iron gate stood, red, mostly rust, with the few letters on it just visible if she squinted.
RCADIA
Then Chaimwords came to her; The wild is most deadly when you think you are out of it.
Though Donna’s vision spun, though her head pounded, though every bit of her felt like a walking bruise, she forced herself to stop. Made herself survey the last stretch of broken street. Then she turned, glancing to the flanks and behind.
And Donna froze, as she saw her death, not ten meters behind her.
The nighteyes had fur that shimmered in the nigh-dawn light. Purple and black and blue and shades between, oozing like an oil slick over its muscled form. Large, yellow eyes peered out at her, the only stable part of color on the beast. It was only half her size, but Donna knew that was more than enough to kill her. More than enough for one wounded human.
She stared. It stared back. No one had ever seen a nighteyes this clearly or this close before.
No one who had lived, anyway.
The gate was a hundred meters away. The nighteyes was ten. And she knew, she knew that if she moved, if she so much as blinked, it would break the spell; it would be the beast’s cue to act.
And she knew that if she did nothing, then it would act anyway. So she stared, knowing
it was useless, buying more seconds of life…
…and feeling the hot worm of poison stir in her lungs again. Feeling the cough rising, rising into her charred throat, and knowing she couldn’t stop it. Pressing her lips tightly, eyes wide, staring through tears as she felt the spasm coming, knowing her death would follow, feeling her vision swim as the weariness caught up to her—
CRACK
Part of the road fountained upward. And just like that, the Nighteyes was gone, gone as if it had never been. Donna fell to her rump, coughing, wanting to run, wanting to get to safety but coughing in spasms, as ropy mucus and blood filled her mouth, tasting smoky and salty. And maybe she was laughing, maybe she was laughing because she wasn’t dead, but she couldn’t tell. And then she stopped thinking at all.
Some time later, she woke to sunlight, and the feel of her bed under her. She took a breath, slower than normal. There was a cloth around the lower part of her face. And a smell of… honey? Yes. With other things under it.
“Feeling better?” A smooth, deep voice asked. Donna started, tried to rise, and a large hand caught her shoulder, pushed her back down. “Easy. You got a lungful of something nasty.”
“I… I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Jaspa. Spotted me, cornered me. I lost my bow.” She coughed again, but her throat felt numb. There was little pain.
Juscade smiled down at her, his kind brown face fringed with an unruly head of white hair that flowed into a beard she’d loved to play with when she was a child, tugging on it and giggling when he rocked her to sleep. He had his speckakles on, twists of metal and plastic, dusty and scratched but magnifying his warm brown eyes. He was like solid wood, was Juscade. Her leader. Their leader.
Their prophet, though he denied it.
For him they’d left behind all they’d known and followed him to the home he’d called “Our Cadia.”
“Don’t sweat the bow, kiddo,” Juscade said, rubbing her shoulder. “We can make more bows. Making more you is harder. Takes longer. Takes more food, too. Though I am a little annoyed at wasting a bullet, but that’s on me, not you.” He sighed. “Should have hit that kitty dead center. Gettin’ too old for this.”
Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1) Page 3
