Silent Order: Axiom Hand

by Jonathan Moeller

  “But the subway tunnel is still there,” said Helen, nodding with understanding. “Sealed off, but still there.”

  “Yeah,” said Tolox. She traced her finger through the holographic diagram. “And it runs right next to the subbasement of Deveraux’s warehouse. Close enough that a plasma torch could cut through without too much work.”

  “Well, Miss Axiom,” said Dredger. He had worked up the courage to flirt with her on and off over the last few days with no response. “Do you fancy a walk through the sewers?”

  “Not particularly,” said Axiom, the holographic display reflecting in her sunglasses. “But this appears our best chance for unobserved entry to Deveraux’s facility. Based on what we have observed, I calculate our best chance for entry will be at midnight tonight when the delivery of Sugar arrives.”

  “Agreed,” said March. “I hope we have a plasma torch.”

  Casimir smiled. “I can obtain one for a very reasonable cost.”

  That night March and Axiom descended into the subterranean maze beneath Rykov City.

  They held flashlights because while Axiom could see in the dark, March could not. March was carrying a pair of printed guns since he didn’t know if Lorre had the foresight to install extra defenses in the basement, or if the Machinist agent had realized the danger the subway tunnel presented to Deveraux’s warehouse. March carried the plasma torch slung over his shoulder, the strap digging into his chest.

  They used a tunnel junction near Tolox’s base and then descended into the maze. Fifty meters down a tunnel they came to a locked metal door, the hinges bleeding rust into the concrete frame. March broke the lock with his left hand, and they stepped through the door and into an abandoned subway station. He swept his light back and forth, taking in the crumbling platform, the rails gleaming in the gloom, the empty ticket booth, and peeling murals showing Renarchist ideals upon the walls.

  “Left, I think,” said March, sweeping his light in that direction.

  “That is correct,” said Axiom, walking to the edge of the platform with a gun in her right hand. She looked at the rails. “None of the rails are electrified. There is no danger.”

  March nodded and dropped off the platform, dust gritting beneath his boots. Axiom followed suit, and they started the long walk down the silent tunnel. It reminded March of walking through a graveyard. Nothing moved in the shadowy gloom, and the flashlight in his right hand threw weird shadows against the concrete walls.

  Something flickered in the shadows, and March froze, shifting his pistol in that direction.

  “Do not be alarmed,” said Axiom. “It is only a rat.”

  March grimaced, but nodded and kept going.

  “You do not care for rats?” said Axiom.

  “I’m not fond of things that can bite and spread disease,” said March. There had been rats everywhere in the labor camps of Calixtus. As a child, he had spent a lot of time emptying and resetting the rat traps his mother had set around their tent.

  “The remaining Machinist nanotech in your bloodstream should protect you from any of the diseases carried by common rats,” said Axiom. She paused. “Unless you hate that part of yourself as well.”

  March sighed. “This is not the time for personal conversations.”

  “Quite right,” said Axiom, and she fell silent.

  They kept moving forward. March shifted his pistol to his left hand and drew out his phone with his right, pulling up the map. From time to time rats skittered past in the darkness, fleeing whenever March turned his light in their direction. They walked for a half mile, and March stopped, pointing his flashlight at the pipes running along the ceiling and reading the numbers.

  “I think this is it,” said March.

  “I calculate that you are correct,” said Axiom, gazing at the wall.

  “I don’t suppose you can see through the wall?” said March.

  He caught Axiom’s smile in the gloom. “The equipment necessary to do so would not fit inside a human skull. But I can tell that the wall is thinner here. The steel beams are not as thick. If Tolox’s surmise is correct, the original owners of Deveraux’s warehouse likely dug as close as they could to the tunnel wall without breaching it.”

  “Let’s hope Lorre hasn’t realized that,” said March. He returned his pistol to its holster and his phone to its pocket, strapped his flashlight to his head so it would look wherever he pointed, and produced a pair of welder’s glasses. When he put them over his eyes, he couldn’t see anything in the gloom of the old tunnel. “Keep watch while I cut us a door.”

  “I shall,” said Axiom, taking a few steps back.

  March hefted the plasma torch. It felt like holding a large, unwieldy rifle. Two massive power packs were mounted on either side of the torch, and the emitter would spit out a foot-long blade of plasma that could slice through almost anything given enough time. March adjusted the controls, setting it to the appropriate temperature and intensity for cutting through concrete.

  “Don’t you need welder’s glasses?” said March.

  “I do not,” said Axiom. “The amount of radiant light necessary to damage my optical sensors would also kill everyone in the tunnel.”

  “Handy,” said March. “Maybe you should be the one with the torch.”

  “I do not have a cybernetic arm capable of supporting the torch’s weight for the necessary length of time,” said Axiom.

  “In other words,” said March, “it’s heavy, and you don’t want to hold it.”

  “I believe I just said that, yes.”

  March laughed a little and started the torch. The brilliant white-hot plasma blade flared to life, roaring like a forest fire, and he began to work.

  It was more like digging a short tunnel than cutting through a wall. The torch sliced segments from the wall, and March paused to let Axiom pull them free. Once they broke through the tunnel wall, March found a second wall behind it, one built of rebar and concrete slabs.

  It was the wall of the warehouse’s lower basement.

  It took an hour to cut through that. March carved small pieces free with the plasma torch, and Axiom set them down one by one, taking care to remain silent. March didn’t know if Lorre and Deveraux had thought to put any security in the basement. For that matter, he didn’t know how far the light and the noise from the plasma torch would carry.

  Yet no one responded, and as the hole grew bigger, March saw the backside of a large metal machine. An industrial air circulator, he thought, designed to push air to the freezers on the first level of the basement.

  About an hour later, he shut off the torch, wiping the sweat from his forehead. The ambient temperature in the tunnel must have gone up by about forty degrees from the torch’s radiant heat.

  “All right,” said March. “Let’s sneak in and have a look around. If there are guards in the basement, I want to know about them sooner rather than later.”

  “Agreed,” said Axiom.

  March drew his pistol and climbed through the hole, the smell of plasma-cut concrete dust filling his nostrils. He straightened up behind the air handler and stepped out, pistol ready in his right hand. The basement was cavernous, but most of the space was filled with air handling equipment. At once March saw why no one had noticed the noise of the torch. The machinery made a constant noise, the whir of the fans filling March’s ears, and the bulk of the equipment would have blocked the light.

  Axiom climbed up behind him, gun ready.

  “Can you see anything?” said March.

  Axiom shook her head. “No human heat signatures. I do not detect any cameras or electronic security measures, either.”

  “Guess Lorre didn’t expect someone to tunnel into his basement,” said March.

  “It is an unconventional strategy.”

  They moved past the roaring HVAC machines, making a complete circuit of the basement. March saw no guards and no security measures, whether cameras, motion detectors, or other devices. It looked like Lorre and Deveraux had, at las
t, missed a step. At the far end of the basement, a flight of metal steps climbed to a steel door. March ascended the stairs and stopped at the top, trying to listen at the door, but he couldn’t hear anything over the whine of the machinery.

  “Can you see anything?” said March.

  “No,” said Axiom. “The walls are too thick, and there’s too much steel.”

  March tried the door. It was unlocked, and he eased it open a few inches. Dim light leaked through the door, and beyond he saw a corridor with metal freezer cases lining the walls. He pushed open the door the rest of the way and stepped into the hallway. The only illumination came from a few lights mounted to the ceiling, and once again he saw no signs of a security system. It seemed that Lorre and his allies had indeed missed a bet. The defenses aboveground were formidable, but no one had thought to guard the basement.

  To judge from the dust on the freezer cases, no one had been down here for a long time.

  There was another flight of stairs and a metal door at the end of the corridor. March and Axiom climbed the stairs in silence. This time he heard noises from behind the door, the whir of machinery, the clang of metal containers, the clatter of something that sounded like a conveyor belt.

  March looked at Axiom, and she nodded.

  He eased the door open an inch and peered through the crack.

  All he saw was a stack of empty shipping pallets a foot away. Someone had left them piled up, blocking the basement door. That would provide excellent cover. March reached into his coat, drew out the camera earpiece he had used during his pursuit of Axiom in the abandoned factory complex, and put it over his ear.

  Then he slipped through the door and peered around the stack of pallets.

  The first thing he saw was a naked woman holding a plasma rifle.

  The sight was so incongruous that his mind froze up for a second, but then he started noticing the details. The figure was not a woman, but a Companion android, with the cartoonish proportions common in female Companions. A few yards away stood a naked male Companion, a plasma rifle in his arms.

  Both Companions were missing the tops of their heads.

  No – March saw that the artificial flesh had been removed from the backs of their skulls, revealing the metal and wires beneath. The Companions were hardwired to be incapable of violence against humans, and unless March missed his guess, their programming had been forcefully altered to include parameters for violence.

  Beyond the two guards, he saw a factory.

  Lights hung from the ceiling overhead, throwing their harsh glare on hundreds of pallets of Sugar canisters stacked near the truck dock. Dozens of Companion androids moved through the factory, all of them missing the tops of their heads, and they unloaded the cylinders and carried them to the huge array of complex machinery that filled the central third of the warehouse.

  March recognized the massive pile of metal pipes and cylinders as a nanotech fabricator, the kind of assembler that could churn out tens of trillions of nanobots in an hour. As he watched, the Companion workers fed the Sugar canisters into the machine. They were carefully opened, injected with a spurt of orange fluid, and then sealed again and stacked on new pallets, exactly as they had been stacked before.

  The nanobot fabricator was connected to a massive black cylinder covered in flashing LEDs – a portable pseudointelligent supercomputer. That made sense. The nanobots for converting Citizens into ghost drones would need to be programmed with the DNA of their individual hosts. That supercomputer likely contained the medical records of every Citizen in Rykov City, perhaps even every Citizen on Rustaril.

  A dozen ghost drones wandered the floor, their legs clanging against the concrete as they moved along. As before, they looked like a ghastly combination of a corpse and a metal spider.

  At the far end of the warehouse, a flight of stairs rose to a row of lighted windows. The office complex, March guessed, from which Deveraux and Lorre could supervise the operation. In fact, he thought he glimpsed Lorre standing at one of the windows, watching his ghastly little factory.

  If March had a clear shot at Lorre, he might have taken it.

  Because Lorre had done something terrible and brilliant here. By using Companions as workers and guards, by using ghost drones as security, he had mobilized an effective workforce while cutting down the risk of leaks. Lorre was building an army in secret, right under the noses of the Renarchist Republic’s leaders. Perhaps the pro-Machinist Administrators congratulated themselves on believing whatever lies Lorre had fed to them. Maybe they believed they would rule over their hated fellow Administrators and their loathed Citizens as satraps once the Final Consciousness conquered Rustaril.

  Idiots. They would be sent to the camps along with everyone else.

  But March had what he needed. He took a slow, long look over the warehouse, letting the camera at his ear record everything. They could review the video in the security of Tolox’s warehouse, and plan their next move against Lorre and Deveraux.

  Then March saw something in the heart of the fabricator that made him freeze. It was just a small thing, just the glint of light off a component. But the component was at the heart of the fabricator, and thousands of delicate wires connected to its cradle.

  March reached into his pocket and drew out a small pair of portable binoculars. He opened them and lifted them to his eyes. Axiom grabbed his shoulder and squeezed, and March ignored her. He knew she was right, that they had pushed their luck far harder than was wise, but he had to see.

  Because he had seen that kind of glint before.

  He focused the binoculars, and he saw the thing lying in the wiring cradle.

  It looked like a big bluish-green insect, a sort of stylized scarab about the size of both of March’s fists put together. Had he not known better, March would have assumed that it was a piece of alien artwork, or perhaps a piece of human artwork done by an artist with peculiar taste.

  But he did know better, to his lasting regret.

  The device looked like a larger version of the quantum inducers that powered the Machinists’ Wraith mind-control devices, the machines that had gotten so many people killed and presented a mortal threat to the Kingdom of Calaskar.

  That meant the device in the cradle was technology created by the ancient and malevolent Great Elder Ones, and God only knew what the thing could do.

  Whatever Lorre was planning had to be stopped.

  And March had to take the alien device back with him to the Kingdom of Calaskar.

  March closed the binoculars and shoved them into his pocket, turned to Axiom, and nodded. She opened the door in silence, and they slipped down the stairs, past the freezer cases, back to the lower basement, and then into the gloomy silence of the subway tunnel.

  “Why did you look at the nanobot fabricator with binoculars?” said Axiom. “That seemed an unnecessary risk.”

  “Dark energy,” said March.

  “What?” said Axiom.

  “Did you see any dark energy radiating from that fabricator?” said March.

  A strange look came over her face. “I did. How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen this kind of thing before,” said March.

  “The dark energy was radiating from that peculiar sculpture wired into the fabricator,” said Axiom. “Which was highly unusual. Dark energy is often unusable within a planetary gravity well, which is why mankind did not discover hyperspace until we were well away from primeval Earth.” She frowned at him. “You have encountered similar statues?”

  “I have,” said March.

  “I assume it is not a statue, then,” said Axiom. “What is it?”

  “Something worse,” said March. “Something that might destroy Rustaril in the wrong hands. We had better talk to Tolox right away.”

  ###

  An hour later March stepped into Tolox’s office and closed the door behind him.

  “We have a serious problem,” he said.

  Tolox crossed to her desk, a puzzled look on her
face. March had insisted on talking to her before anyone else, even before they viewed the video from the warehouse.

  “More serious than the ones we already have?” said Tolox, sitting at her desk.

  “Yes,” said March. “We’ve been wondering how Lorre has been hiding the ghost drones, converting them without the victims’ knowledge. The implants are in a quantum state. But how did he do that? There’s no known technology that can cause that kind of effect.”

  Tolox’s expression grew solemn. “But you found out how.”

  “Yes,” said March. “Has the Silent Order told you anything about the Machinists using alien technology?”

  Tolox shook her head.

  “All right,” said March. “I’m not sure how much of this you’re cleared to know, but the technology is here, and we have to deal with it. A long time ago, long before humans ever left primeval Earth and spread into interstellar space, this part of the galaxy used to have many alien races.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” said Tolox. “They all went extinct for some reason or another. I remember seeing some video from a historian on Calaskar talking about it. Dredger kept commenting on how tight her skirt was. I think that was the whole reason he was watching the video. Anyway, that historian said all the alien races native to this part of the galaxy went extinct, wiped themselves out in a war or a plague or whatever.”

  “She was right,” said March. “They were destroyed fighting a race from another reality called the Great Elder Ones. They won and drove the Great Elder Ones back to their own universe, but they were destroyed in the process. Some of the Great Elder Ones’ technology got left behind, and recently the Machinists found a cache of the stuff and have been experimenting with it. One of those devices is powering Lorre’s nanobot fabricator.”

  “Okay,” said Tolox. “That’s potentially dangerous, but so what? There’s lots of old alien crap floating around in space. Half of it doesn’t work, and the rest explodes if you play with it. We’ll blow up the warehouse and blow up the device with it.”