by Alex Lamb
16.5: WILL
Will lay helpless in the hole and gulped air into his ruined lungs while mutant alien machines prowled outside. He didn’t fear them because he knew he’d be dead before they found him, dissolved into this brackish pool like a human smoothie. His reign as the most powerful man in human space was over.
It had been an interesting ride, if a disappointing one. But if he was going down, his last act might as well be something decent. He reached out through his sensorium to the surface of his hand, still pressed against Ann’s wound, and tried to stay conscious as he pictured her tissues one last time.
He lacked the strength. Lurid, dream-like notions surged and pulsed in his mind’s eye. Fever visions and sensorium metaphors curdled together until he couldn’t distinguish between the data coming from her and his own memories of hiking through the scarlet tunnel-forest.
He heard Ann’s words played back to him.
‘This stuff grows fast. Stand still for long enough and you can watch it.’
He imagined her tissues growing across the wound without help, like fungal hyphae.
‘That’s not how you do it,’ he mumbled into his metaphor space. ‘You’ve got it wrong. She’s a woman, not a mushroom.’
‘I grow fungi,’ said Ann’s garbled voice. ‘Stand watch me still. There’s always a choice. Maybe you should try it on again.’
Another round of gunfire sounded from the tunnel below, followed by a long, inhuman scream. Will spiked back into lucidity.
He saw, then, that the vision before him wasn’t a dream. Ann’s tissue was indeed mutating wildly. The bacteria in the pool were trying to heal her even while they were killing him. She’d been deemed worthy of repair, like the meadow below. But with so much foreign material in the wound it had no idea what to do with her, so it was turning her into something it knew how to fix. Will tried vaguely to assist, only to have his molecular hands slapped away from the surgery. As far as Snakepit was concerned, he was a pollutant in its already crowded operating theatre.
Will refused to give in. If he wasn’t allowed to help, at least he could stop the planet from making a mess. While the precious gift of clarity stayed with him, Will called up all the submind strength he had left and started synthesising defenceless smart-cells. He loaded each of them with as much medical data as his meagre interface memory contained, written in the most self-explanatory format he could find. Then he started dumping those cells into the wound and across the surface of his own dissolving skin.
It was, he thought, a little like a propaganda drop onto enemy terrain. If he couldn’t stop his enemy, maybe he could still change its attitude. Will smiled inwardly at himself. This last act felt ridiculous – a terrible stretch. It relied on a barely logical alien biosphere spontaneously learning to read and understand his file format. But it wasn’t like he was getting off the planet anyway.
He watched as the alien cells snatched up his pamphlets. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t seem able to read them. He wished he had more time. With time it would be doable. After all, wasn’t this exactly what had happened at Tiwanaku? This learning curve was exactly what those drones had been looking for. He just needed the cells in this alcove to pull off the same trick without turning her into a staggering zombie first. He lacked the bandwidth, though. He didn’t need a cupful of smart-cells. He needed pints – not so much a cellular textbook as a cellular university.
Ah, well, he thought. He’d do what he should have done a long time ago – give others the tools to create change rather than imagining he could push it forward by the force of his will. He sent out a cascade of messages, turning off the cellular defences throughout his entire body and replacing them with medical how-to guides of every description stored in his smart-cells. He opened himself up, and with a final, physical act, flopped backwards into the muck.
‘Come on in,’ he told the planet. ‘Let’s get this over with. My one request: please at least fix her properly.’
17: REBOUND
17.1: MARK
The box switched off. Mark slumped to one side, utterly drained. He couldn’t have said how long the program had been running. Hours? Days? He had no idea. Guards in exosuits hauled him out and dumped him on the ground.
Mark squeezed his eyes tight against the blinding glare of sunlight. He shivered as they hosed down his body. He must have soiled himself at some point because he didn’t smell that great. He hadn’t noticed.
With trembling hands, he pushed himself up into a sitting position and blinked as the world began to swim back into focus. Den’s men hauled him to his feet while others looked on, cradling assault cannons in their augmented arms. They looked pleased with themselves.
Mark glanced to the side and saw Zoe and Venetia being brought out, too. Zoe’s face was grey but her eyes had taken on a glare of manic, crackling hatred. Anger poured off her like electricity. By contrast, Venetia wasn’t doing so well. Her eyes were hollow. Her shoulders sagged. Mark wondered how he looked. He felt physically feeble but somehow clean. His spine felt straighter than it ever had before, even though a strong breeze could have knocked him over. He smiled brokenly.
Den peered at him. ‘You find God in there?’ he asked with a coy smile.
Mark fixed him with a stare. ‘You have no idea.’
Den laughed. ‘Oh, I got an idea, all right. Been there myself.’
Mark’s smile broadened at Den’s imagined camaraderie. He tamped down the urge to laugh.
As they cut the helmet off his head, he pinged the network, this time using a tool he’d laboriously excavated from Will’s alien hackpack. Without the guards being any the wiser, Britehaven’s encrypted protocols flopped open before him.
The contents weren’t as impressive as Mark had hoped, but at least he had something now. If the labelling was to be believed, he’d gained access to an extensive suite of scripture broadcast tools and an API for the settlement’s industrial fabbers. Short of printing up some plastic swords, he couldn’t see much value in his new powers. He didn’t let it worry him. He’d keep working on the problem.
Den and his team gave them grey paper smocks to wear, then gestured back towards the middle of the dome with their guns.
‘This way,’ said Den. ‘Get moving.’
Mark looked down the dusty road ahead. Whatever lurked at the centre of town couldn’t be good. He glanced around and considered violence but knew this wasn’t his moment. He was still too weak. One wrong move and his friends would wind up full of bullets.
He let himself be marched down the road between the art-covered houses. Scrawny settlers watched them pass, jeering slogans at them while their collars chimed. In the centre of the Britehaven complex lay a bleached concrete expanse that served as a kind of town square, lined by two-storey printrock buildings covered with religious murals in white and red. In the middle of the square, three stacks of multicoloured plastic waste had been assembled. Each one stood about a metre and a half high with a tall ceramic mast jutting out from the top.
A crowd of several thousand Flags dressed in gaudy, loose-fitting clothes stood around the edges of the square, shouting over each other. Their hands and faces had all been smeared white with sun-cream, making them look like angry ghosts. They yelled and shook their fists, their shrill voices echoing off the dome far overhead. With them stood Massimo in his full regalia, a solemn expression on his face. A sluggish artificial breeze carried the tang of the ever-present dust.
Mark stared at the piles. They looked like an oddly untidy addition for the site of a trial. What were they for? Was this a recycling centre? Perhaps Massimo intended to mulch them. He glanced around for a biofuser but couldn’t see one.
Den’s team brought Mark and his friends to a halt in front of Massimo and held them in place with suit-grippers. The settlement leader raised a hand. The crowd slowly fell silent.
‘The betrayers of man have be
en given a chance to contemplate their sins before justice is delivered,’ Massimo announced. ‘Let us hear what they have learned before the punishment is declared.’
He pointed an imperious index finger at Venetia. ‘You. Woman. Do you have a confession to make?’
‘I’m from the planet where they invented that equipment, you pathetic little man,’ she said. She sounded drained. ‘Your helmets need recalibrating but for the most part it was a refreshing opportunity to practise mindfulness.’
Massimo’s face fell into an expression of theatrical despair. The crowd booed her wildly.
He pointed at Zoe. ‘And you, woman. Do you have a confession to make?’
Zoe spat in his eye with surprising accuracy. The guards knocked her to the ground.
‘Never fuck with the Vartian Institute!’ she yelled. ‘You’re all dead, motherfuckers!’
She drew boos and screams from the assembled zealots. Den’s guards had to brandish their assault canons to discourage the Flags from ripping her apart.
Massimo wiped his face with a snow-white handkerchief and looked, if anything, pleased with her reaction. He moved on to Mark.
‘And you, son of the Alien Satan, do you have a confession to make?’
Mark looked him in the eye. ‘God spoke to me,’ he said.
Massimo spread his hands and gave a grin of false delight. The crowd cheered. Mark’s smile became wide like a shark’s.
‘God revealed your sin to me and you will be punished for it. I will be the weapon in his hands and no obstacle will hide you from his wrath. In his name, I will dismantle you one piece at a time.’
Massimo’s smile fell away, revealing a flush of concern before he could plaster impatience over it. He turned to the crowd.
‘Look at what we have here,’ he boomed. ‘An intellectual, a harlot and a mutant – the supposed cream of the corrupt Colonial regime.’ He pointed at Venetia. ‘This one spouts aphorisms and claims that you, my people, are fools to have come here. What do we say to that?’
The crowd jeered in spastic frenzy.
His finger moved to Zoe. ‘This one fights like an animal and lacks even an inkling of feminine decency.’
Hoots of disgust erupted.
Massimo jabbed a finger at Mark. ‘And this one … This one claims to be of Earth. Examine his face, my children. Look how it resembles those of your brothers and sons. But his flesh is not like your flesh. He does not feel as you feel. He has blasphemy written into his very genes!’
The crowd screamed.
‘This is what the Alien Satan would have you become,’ Massimo proclaimed. ‘An effete joke. A machine puppet. And worst of all, an abomination in the face of the Lord!’
This time, Britehaven’s mob surged into such a state of apoplexy that it took a full minute for the guards to knock them back into order.
‘The crimes these people have committed are the most extreme I have ever presided over,’ said Massimo. ‘I have consulted scripture and prayed on the matter for hours to determine the correct punishment. But God has guided me. These three traitors to the human cause shall be burned at the stake!’
Massimo kept talking, orating at the crowd about the timelessness of primal law and the importance of setting an example before God, but that last phrase had frozen in Mark’s mind, blotting out everything that followed.
Were the Flags really that backward? Did they crave a return to the Dark Ages that much? Or did he mean metaphorically burned? Had they even considered the havoc they were about to wreak on their own air filters?
The men in exosuits dragged them up to the stacks, which Mark now realised were pyres, and lifted them to the tops with terrible ease. Plastic restraints locked them to the masts. It was definitely time to make a move. Any kind of move.
Mark hurled submind attention at the secret network and rifled through it as fast as his interface would allow. Understanding dawned. The scripture broadcast tools he’d found weren’t for video panels. They controlled the piety game. With the full force of his augmented attention, Mark threw an attack at the system. All around him, people’s collars started making plangent clanging sounds. Phrases like Credit lost!, You lose! and Impious notion! sounded from wearables everywhere.
With remarkable alacrity, the Flags panicked. Some fell to their knees and prayed. Others started clawing at their collars and weeping. In the midst of it all, Massimo looked on with astonishment.
‘Remain calm!’ he ordered the crowd. ‘These demerits are not real!’
The well-conditioned Flags barely noticed. Their precious piety accounts were vanishing before them.
Massimo fixed Mark with an icy look. While his guards grasped madly at their necks, he picked up an induction wand from the floor and touched it to the closest pyre: Venetia’s. The plastic went up like a torch. Venetia’s screams cut the air.
Mark’s urgency redoubled. It was Will’s Amy-story all over again. There was no way he was going to stand there like a victim watching history repeat itself. He scanned madly for something else he could use – something that would kill the flames.
In a moment of perfect clarity, he noticed that the answer had been right in front of him all the time. The forty-storey-high construction robots outside the dome had never been locked. He’d not even thought of using them because there was nothing he could do that didn’t involve trashing the dome and the air inside it. That idea no longer bothered him.
He seized one of the idle titans and threw awareness into its tiny mind. He swung it around and drove it straight at the dome. There was already so much noise and chaos that people barely noticed until the ground started shaking. The behemoth raced up to the settlement like a yellow wall of death. Mark held his breath.
As Massimo leaned down to light Zoe’s pyre, the robot hit the dome, crumpling the edge of the plastic like the skin on a boiled egg. Air screamed out. The fires sucked sideways and vanished in an instant. Flags everywhere started choking and grabbing their throats. By Mars Plus standards, Carter had a rich, healthy atmosphere. By the standards of human breathability, not so much.
The giant robot froze under emergency lockdown with outbuildings already flattened under its enormous treads. Spray cannons at the dome perimeter started throwing foam up at the breached plastic in thundering torrents. Decompression sirens filled the fleeing air.
Through stinging eyes, Mark watched Massimo scramble for an air-mask at an emergency station nearby. He didn’t have any time to waste. In seconds, the breach would be sealed and Massimo would be in control again.
He scanned digital space one last, desperate time. To his amazed relief, one of the exosuit controllers had popped onto the network. It glowed yellow at him, winking with urgency. It was Kal’s. Somewhere between the depressurization and the loss of his credits, Kal had fallen unconscious, so the muscle-control lockout had disengaged. The suit wanted someone to guide it to a recovery station so its driver could be rescued.
Mark grabbed the suit’s controls, threw himself behind its cameras and grabbed the assault cannon lying on the floor beside it. He aimed it at Nid, who was looking around in complete confusion, and fired. Ceramic cannon rounds peppered Nid’s body, reducing it to bloody rags. The person Mark had been before the punishment box might have blinked. Not any more. Now he was more worried about accidentally rupturing one of the suit’s hydraulic lines.
As the new exosuit popped onto the network, Mark split his focus. Now he had two armed robots instead of one. It was a start. He made Nid shoot Kal, just in case the little bastard woke up, and then worked his way through Den’s startled team, one by one. Thirty seconds later, Mark had seven suits. Only one remaining suit had a living driver: Den.
Somehow, the small spark of humanity Den had revealed made Mark hesitate at the prospect of killing him. Consequently, Den actually managed to fire a couple of badly aimed shots before Mark blew his head
off. A corner of his mind warned him that he was committing horrible, brutal murders. His new driving anthem of puritanical determination drowned it out.
Navigating all eight suits at once took effort. Their SAPs were pitifully underpowered and required constant encouragement. But Mark stopped worrying which parts of his mind went where. He hung limp from the stake, trying not to black out, and focused on the task at hand.
As mayhem reigned, he sent four suits to free Zoe and Venetia and two more to cover the Earthers as they scrambled to escape. He had one free his own limbs and the last he sent after Massimo as the settlement leader ran for the far side of the square.
Mark saw Massimo reach for the control on his wrist. Whatever he had in mind, Mark knew he couldn’t risk letting it happen. Massimo still had some sort of grip on the dome’s executive controls that Mark didn’t understand. He aimed his army’s closest assault cannon and fired. Massimo got halfway through some kind of shut-off command before his head burst like a grape in a storm of blunt ammunition.
Mark called to the crazed Flags as his hands fell free.
‘Your leader is dead,’ he shouted. ‘Lie down and no one else will get hurt!’
It was a mistake. Up till then he hadn’t been noticed. From somewhere, the Flags had started breaking out weapons. One of them took aim. Flenser fire ripped up one side of the pyre, forcing Mark to leap sideways off the plastic heap. He rolled on the ground, pain lancing up his shoulder while sporadic gunfire cut the freezing air. He scrabbled for cover behind the trash-pile and prayed it was dense enough to stop steel.
While he cowered, he had two suits carry Zoe and Venetia over to him as fast as they could while his other machines laid down protective fire. Zoe’s feet were a mass of blisters. She hissed through the pain, her face white and straining. Venetia lay unconscious and badly burned, her skin smelling sickly of roasted meat. Mark stared at her in horror. Vomit threatened to spill out of him.
He couldn’t afford to be weak. He gritted his teeth, shut his eyes and started herding the Flags together, using his exosuits to smash through the flimsy homes they hid behind. At the same time, he grabbed another huge constructor robot and directed it towards a functioning airlock on the far side of the dome. He picked the largest vehicle remaining – a six-armed behemoth with twin cranes. It was the only one likely to have the med supplies he needed.
