The Machine Awakes

by Adam Christopher

  Then she’d realized it must have been her … talent. She’d wanted to vanish, to disappear. And she had. Her mind, that part of it she didn’t understand, couldn’t control, not willingly, was shielding her, jamming the broadcast of her tag like the psi-marines could jam the communications network of the Spiders. She hadn’t chosen to do it. She just … had.

  Cait lifted the telescopic sight to her eye and squinted down toward the Wall of Remembrance, moving from one end of the row of caskets to the other. She wondered what they contained, because she sure as hell knew her brother, Tyler, wasn’t in one of them.

  Because Tyler Smith was alive, and she knew he was alive because she could hear his voice whispering in her head.

  She was doing this for him.

  As she watched, the casket honor guard came to attention, and everyone stood.

  Time for action.

  Cait ducked down beside the tree and began unpacking black metal parts from her backpack. In just a few seconds, the sniper rifle was ready, the telescopic scope now slotted into the top.

  Crouching, she braced the side of her long-barreled weapon against the tree, and once again looked down the sight.

  “That’s better,” she muttered. Connected to the sniper rifle, the scope now displayed a mass of data, a series of independent crosshairs moving over the faces of the officers standing on the tiers as they waited for the arrival of their commander-in-chief, the Fleet Admiral. Then the rifle’s OS glitched and the image in the scope broke up into jagged horizontal lines. Cait tapped the side of the sight, coaxing the device to work properly. First the data overlay reappeared, then the image settled, rolling for a second before re-stabilizing.

  Cait tracked the sight across the front row, picking out the officers and identifying their ranks. They were all here: the entire Command Council, representatives of the Academy and the Psi-Division, even the Fleet Bureau of Investigation. All branches of the Fleet.

  The Psi-Division had the whole front row. Cait bit her bottom lip in an attempt to kill the laugh that threatened to crawl up her throat, the crosshairs bouncing in her vision as she did.

  Of course they had the front row. The psi-marines were the ones in charge. They were the ones doing the real fighting too. Everyone knew that, of course, even if the actual detail was lost on the citizens of Fleetspace. But Cait knew how it worked, because she’d enrolled in the Fleet Academy in order to join their fight. To join the psi-marines.

  It was pretty simple, the way they taught it at the Academy. The Spiders were just machines of war, their operating system an AI. But this AI was different than those developed on Earth. The Spider OS was a gestalt, the individual components of the machine collective—the individual Spider war machines—all linked to one another to form a single hive mind. And the only way to break the laws of physics and connect every Spider machine with every other Spider machine across the whole universe was to use a psychic computer network. Like the Spiders themselves, there was no official name for this enemy communications network, but soon enough every cadet enrolled in the Academy’s psi-program—Cait included—began calling it what it was: the SpiderWeb.

  And so the psi-marines, psychic warriors picked from the Academy intake, their natural abilities amplified and honed with technology, training, and pharmaceuticals, were the Fleet’s most valuable fighting force, because while they were highly trained fighters, like all marines in the Fleet, they had an extra weapon available to them—their minds. They could attack the SpiderWeb, cutting the war machines off from each other on the battlefield.

  Bingo. Turned out uncoupling the Spiders from each other had some useful effects, like locking their CPUs into infinite loops as the individual machine AIs tried to clear the psychic jamming. That left the Spiders vulnerable.

  So while the regular troops kept them safe, the psi-marines would reach out and fuck the Spiders up from the inside. Of course, what the Academy downplayed was the fact that while they were on the offensive, fighting in a battlefield that didn’t even exist in the real world, psi-marines were effectively helpless. The mortality rate among Fleet Marines might have been high—the price of war, Cait knew—but among the Psi-Marine Corps it was even higher.

  There was other stuff the Academy deflected attention from too, but as Cait’s training had progressed, leap-frogging other recruits, her remarkably strong psi-ability fast-tracking her into advanced classes—Alpha One, baby—she began to think they weren’t exactly hiding something, but they were trying very hard to ignore it.

  Because if the physical risk of being in a war zone and unable to defend yourself at precisely the most dangerous moment wasn’t bad enough, psi-marines had other dangers to face. Prolonged psychic combat could burn out your mind, no matter how well trained, or prepared, or powerful. And if you survived the missions, and dealt with the stress, the strain, the trauma that wasn’t physical but mental, sometimes psi-marines were … changed. Came with the territory, said the Academy trainers. That’s just the nature of psychic warfare, they said. Because during an attack, the psi-marines would actually share their minds, their consciousness, forming a gestalt of their own to amplify their powers and push back against the infinite force that was the SpiderWeb.

  And that kind of thing changed you, forever. The price of war, right?

  So maybe if you made it through Academy training without your brain melting, and then if you weren’t blown up or eaten, and if your brain wasn’t fried, or your mind broken, if you didn’t get flashbacks and panic attacks or depression and anxiety and schizophrenia, then maybe—maybe—you could make it as a psi-marine.

  Like Tyler Smith had. Like Cait Smith almost had, before she realized the truth.

  Cait adjusted her grip on the sniper rifle. The moment was so close now.

  Tyler had been a good psi-marine. One of the best, according to his Academy test marks. So good they’d sent him out too early, to the front line, and no sooner had his fireteam dug in than the Spiders came, and then—

  Cait let out a held breath and stopped herself. There was no time to disappear down that rabbit hole. It was getting busy now, down at the stage. The buzz in her mind came and went, came and went, like the lapping of a tide. She focused down the scope, the image it showed flipping again a couple of times. She tried to clear her mind. The image stabilized. She was back in the game.

  Any. Moment. Now.

  Cait lifted her face just a little and checked the ammo counter on the top of the rifle. Full tank. She rolled her neck and repositioned her shoulder against the sniper’s butt, and focused on slowing her breathing, relaxing her muscles.

  If there was one psi-cadet who had scored better than Tyler, it was her—his beloved twin sister.

  Twins were a gift, the perfect Academy candidates. And boy, did the tests show it—of course, they’d both known about the gift all their lives. There was a connection, a bond, link, call it what you want, something only twins had.

  Only there was something else that Cait had that Tyler hadn’t. He was strong, a powerful psychic warrior. But Cait … Cait had a talent that went beyond the norm. She knew it, and was frightened of it, and when the Academy saw it, her fear had only increased.

  And then Tyler had been sent on tour, and Cait vanished.

  A fanfare sounded, giving Cait a fright. She swore under her breath, then let that breath out, long and slow. Goddamn it, she had to focus and do her job. Her new job, the one given to her by her new friends. They’d seen another ability in her, a skillset they said was useful.

  Caitlin, it turned out, was good at sneaking around, at being stealthy and shooting things from very, very far away. Sniper skills were not useful to the Psi-Marine Corps, but her brother had taken it as an elective course, telling her how much he enjoyed it. So she’d followed his lead, completing nearly all the advanced training before she ditched New Orem.

  And she enjoyed it too. The quiet, the secrecy. To be a good sniper you had to be a certain kind of person: you had to enjoy your own
company (check); you had to enjoy silence and stillness in a world that was full of noise and movement (check check); you had to be a very, very good shot, no matter how augmented your performance was by the computer systems and low-level psi-fi field of your weapon (check check and check again).

  She wondered, not for the first time, whether her other talent had anything to do with it, the power nudging her accuracy into the highest percentiles. It was impossible to tell. Maybe they were linked, maybe they weren’t. All she knew was that she was a good shot with a long rifle. Then again, so was Tyler.

  Cait blinked and then the Fleet Admiral was standing at the podium, right in the center of the scope, all of the moving crosshairs now locked on. He was talking, making his speech, looking left and right and center, then down to his notes—he would have learned his speech by rote, but the notes were a useful prop, giving him moments to pause, the rhythm of his speech carefully rehearsed.

  It was such a scam, Cait thought she might throw up, there and then.

  Because she knew other things about the Fleet. About what the Fleet was doing.

  She felt the heat rise in her cheeks, the tingle on her skin, the buzz in her mind. Fuck it. Let it out. Let it all out. Let them see what they had tried to control. Let them see what they had helped fashion.

  Her finger moved from the safe position to the trigger position. In her scope data flowed: wind speed and direction, distance, time, angles, options for different shots, different targets. All she had to do was think it, and the scope, loosely linked to her mind, would refocus, pick a different mark, suggest better ways of taking it out.

  She zoomed in until the Fleet Admiral’s face filled her vision. The crosshairs changed from green to blue, and a dot was painted onto his forehead.

  Target locked.

  Cait thought for a moment. Thought that this should feel like the end. Closure. Punishment, revenge, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it. Justice, maybe.

  But she knew that wasn’t the case. This wasn’t any of those things, because her twin brother Tyler was alive, the casket was empty, and the Fleet was lying about what was happening to their war dead. If Tyler’s casket was empty—and she knew it was, he had told her himself—then what about the others? Of the thousands being interred today, was it all a fraud? They weren’t all alive, were they? They couldn’t be, because the Fleet was at war and war meant death and the Fleet was losing. Badly. The Spiders were chewing through the Fleet out there on a dozen fronts, on a thousand Warworlds.

  But Tyler was alive.

  The others too?

  More heat, more anger. What was the Fleet doing, out there on the Warworlds? What were they hiding from everyone? She was determined to find out. Her new friends had some of the answers, but not all of them. What they needed now was a demonstration of their power, a demonstration that the Fleet was vulnerable. Here, at the heart of the capital, with the world watching.

  The Fleet Admiral kept talking, the blue spot fixed to his forehead. Cait’s finger curled over the trigger.

  A shot rang out. It was dull, somehow—the sound of heavy metal striking heavy metal on the other side of the city. The Fleet Admiral fell, and behind him the assembled Fleet brass swarmed into action, most on the higher tiers ducking down as the front row rushed for their fallen leader. The scope zoomed out and Cait could see the panic ripple through the crowd as the honor guard began waving at people to keep down even as they lifted their weapons and began scanning the horizon for the enemy.

  Cait ducked back behind the tree, more by instinct than conscious decision, her trigger finger slipping back to the safe position. She pressed the back of her head into the soft bark of the trunk, her eyes squeezed tight, her heart punching against her ribcage so hard, so fast it hurt.

  Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck?

  She opened her eyes. She felt dizzy. She felt the buzzing in her mind like a physical thing, pressing on the world around her.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, she thumbed the readout on the top of her rifle. The blue display flicked on, showing the weapon status and ammo count.

  She hadn’t fired a single shot.

  Her earlier anger, hot and sharp, had been replaced with something else, something cold, something that made the world swim around her.

  Fear. Panic.

  What the fuck just happened? What. The. Fuck?

  Someone had assassinated the Fleet Admiral. Someone else.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  She stood, the muscles in her arms and legs suddenly weak. She fell onto her knees and stared at the grass under her. It looked weird, pressed down in a circle around her like she was kneeling on a circular plate of glass.

  Because there was an invisible force, and it was coming from her. Her skin prickled with heat, the noise in her head nearly deafening.

  And she was floating an inch from the ground. As soon as she realized, it stopped, and she jolted to the ground.

  She had to leave. Now.

  She began regulating her breathing, like she did when things started happening around her, trying to calm her unconscious mind. Letting her hands work on automatic, the result of ingrained routines learned by rote, she disassembled her weapon and slid the parts into her backpack.

  And then she ran.

  5

  >> … please wait …

  >> SECURE_COMMAND_CHANNEL_IPSILON

  >>PRIORITY_ONE

  >>~avalon_L_199900

  >>password: *************************************

  >>WELCOME BACK, COMMANDER

  FROM:

  Commander Laurel Avalon, Bureau Chief of Staff

  TO:

  Special Agent Michael Braben, Field Operations

  SUBJECT:

  Extraction of primary asset

  LEVEL:

  Priority 1 Secret

  AUTHORIZATION ORDER GAMMA TWELVE. PRIORITY 1 OVERRIDE. EXTRACT PRIMARY ASSET USING PREPARED COVER. RESOURCES ASSIGNED AS BRIEFED.

  AUTHORIZATION GRANTED, AVALON L 199900

  P.S. Discretion is the better part of valor, Mike. Don’t take any risks, and make sure you bring him back in one piece

  6

  The Sentallion contest at the Grand Casino on Helprin’s Gambit had been running for four hours, and Kodiak’s hack was paying off, and paying off well.

  “Fifty-thirty on thirty-thirty,” he said into his glass as he took a swig of whatever-the-hell the vicious red liquid was and slid a pile of chips across the table. He’d been practicing for several cycles too—the casual laugh, the easy smile. He’d even prepared a backstory—the spoiled son of a starminer, left to his own devices while daddy-O suffocated on some chunk of herculanium spinning out there in deep space. It was a bit of a stretch, given he was pushing forty, but he thought that actually might help with the story. A charming, if greasy, little rich kid who refused to grow up, dressed in a tailored suit of crimson silk, shirt and tie to match, the height of Fleetspace fashion among those rich enough not to worry what other people thought of their taste in clothes. Out of the technician uniform, hair artfully styled, stubble trimmed just so, he wouldn’t be recognized by anybody who worked on the service levels. Not that any of the station’s crew would have been able to afford entry to the casino anyway. Lucky for Kodiak, the credit stick in his pocket still had plenty of money left over after buying his way into his tech job and collecting the gear for this little disguise—although, damn, did people really pay this much for bright red suits?—and Kodiak was adding to his fortune at a steady rate.

  The game he’d selected was also helping with the image. Sentallion was an obscure favorite of starminers, big in the ports of Arb-Niner and a dozen other industrial colonies, those unlucky in the asteroid fields drawn to the complex game that married advanced mathematics with pure random luck. The puzzles made you feel like you were actually doing something, that your years of interstellar navigation gave you some kind of edge on the calculations, while there was enough blind chance to make it dangerous
. Kodiak had been familiar with the game long before he had arrived at Helprin’s Gambit, but it was here that he had learned just how popular it was among the nouveau riche, who threw nauseating amounts of credits at it, even if most of them didn’t really understand the principles behind the game. Any opportunity he’d had over the last three months, he’d read up on the game and its rules, downloading a version to his maintenance datapad and playing as often as he could. He’d never got that good at it, but he knew he didn’t need to be. For the big game, he had a little help.

  The dealer accepted his bet. There was a smattering of applause, which Kodiak saluted by draining the fiery liquid in his glass and lifting the empty tumbler high above his head. Holy smokes, what was that stuff? It tasted like sweet wild strawberry, with just a trace of shuttle engine coolant.

  While he grinned at the crowd around him, the HUD in his glasses spun as a face recognition algorithm ran matches on everyone in sight, comparing the casino guests with the central register of employees held by the station’s computer. That was a little add-on Kodiak had thought of only yesterday, along with a quick little screening override that prevented the AI of his glasses—and the HUD it powered—from being picked up by any security scanners in the room. Both additions were, he now realized, absolutely essential. While the screening jammer went on in the background, the facial would alert him immediately if any undercover security agent came within his eye line.

  The three-dimensional projection of the Sentallion game board hovering over the table shuffled the players’ pieces; then the thirty-thirty square came up with a score of 93 percent on Kodiak’s last calculation. He’d won. He laughed as the dealer pushed a large pile of chips toward him, the shocked look on his face not entirely fraudulent, while his AI glasses chimed, indicating that the next bet would go against him so as not to create a suspiciously long winning streak.