Nemesis

by Alex Lamb

  Will funnelled the information into Ann as fast as he could. At the same time, he readied his weapons. He had no idea how useful his Transcended software tools would be in this fight, but he didn’t have anything else.

  ‘Your projections are irrelevant,’ he said. ‘The processor organs you have identified will resist incorporation, causing waste and risk. They have been forewarned of your approach. You are ordered to decohere immediately to avoid fruitless damage to useful resources.’

  The Ryan-thing regarded him with contempt. ‘If you are right, then you will have to demonstrate superiority via force. This is how it is always done.’

  ‘I thought you might say that,’ said Will, hefting the broadsword that had materialised in his hand. ‘Brace yourself.’

  17.3: MARK

  To Mark’s intense relief, the constructorbot’s cabin contained a proper med-chamber. It wasn’t anywhere near as sophisticated as he’d have liked, but it promised to keep Venetia’s condition stable. With the help of his two remaining exosuits, he laid his friend inside.

  All the while, his mind kept churning over the revolting truths that Britehaven had thrust upon him. The Flag settlements weren’t places where fundamentalists went to fight. They were places where fundamentalists were manufactured. Once Earth’s sect leaders shipped the poor out to the Far Frontier, they could do what they liked with them, including stuffing their bodies full of compromising technology. And so long as they kept IPSO stretched, the probability of their being caught at it was next to zero. He thought briefly of the boy Ryan with the Sanchez-head sticking out of his neck. Were the atrocities the human race inflicted on its own kind really so different?

  At that point, his mind let him notice the presence of the staring corpses still hanging inside the suits like limp puppets. One of them was Den’s. Mark looked within for the disgust he knew he should feel, but instead found only a tight, fiery knot of determination.

  ‘It was me or them,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Of course it was,’ said Zoe from where she lay on the floor.

  It was the first coherent thing she’d said since they escaped from Britehaven. The med-packs covering her lower legs must have brought her pain down to manageable levels.

  ‘We don’t need them now. Put those poor bastards in the elevator pod then come and give me a hand.’ She winced as the huge robot rumbled over a boulder.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he said, kneeling to check on her packs.

  ‘I’ll survive,’ she said. ‘How’s Venetia?’

  ‘Okay, but she’ll need something better than that chamber. I doubt it can reprint as much skin as she’s going to need.’

  ‘Will she live?’ said Zoe.

  ‘The chamber says yes, presuming we get her to a fully equipped med-bay in the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Great. Then stop the robot.’

  Mark shot her an impatient glance. ‘Why? We need to get out of here.’

  ‘Because we need time to think. We can’t afford to touch the legal edge of Britehaven’s border. Massimo talked to Sam, which means Sam will be watching us. The fact that he hasn’t acted already means he was hoping the Flags would finish us off for him. The moment this robot crosses that border, he’ll know that’s not going to happen. He may have figured it out already. The moment he wises up, we can expect to be nuked from orbit. That fucker has made it very clear he wants us dead, which means we don’t have any time to waste.’

  Mark exhaled. Frustrating as it was, she had a point.

  He brought the huge machine carefully to a halt. Carefully was the only way to brake a machine that size, unless you wanted to make a forty-storey face-plant onto a dead ocean.

  ‘Can you get a direct link back to Massimo’s dome from here?’ said Zoe.

  ‘Of course. I have his overrides and line-of-sight. The signal will be perfect.’

  ‘Good. Take me to that console.’ She pointed to the manual driving station on the far side of the cabin.

  Mark shot her a sceptical look. ‘I’m not sure we should be moving you yet.’

  ‘Take me to the console!’ Zoe screamed. Her fists pounded the plastic floor. Her eyes said I’ve lost it and you have to help me.

  Mark recoiled, astonished at her sudden emotion. Apparently, Zoe hadn’t managed the experiences of the last twenty-four hours without scars. Was he really surprised?

  Without another word, he lifted her gently and placed her in the couch. She hunched forward over the touchboard and started typing furiously before he’d even finished setting her down.

  ‘Can you at least explain what you’re doing?’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to set up a satellite link to the Gulliver via Britehaven,’ she said. ‘I’m using Vartian Institute codes that will force the ship to listen without cluing that motherfucker in. Get ready with your interface.’

  Mark dived into his sensorium and followed the link she sent. A cut-down representation of the Gulliver’s helm-space formed around him.

  ‘I’m in.’

  ‘Good,’ said Zoe. ‘Now lock down both the shuttle and the ship before they can think of a way to block you. We need wings off this planet and a way out of this fucking mess. The Gulliver is still our best bet because we both know that Sam will take out any messenger drones we send.’

  He gave her a worried glance. ‘Have you been thinking about this or are you just improvising very fast?’

  ‘I’ve had plenty of time to think about this moment,’ she said. Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t look well.

  Mark reached out and asserted control over both vessels, being careful not to raise any warnings as he did so. The shuttle was still at the New Luxor spaceport, where a group of Colonial dignitaries were preparing to embark.

  Mark explained the situation to Zoe. The evacuation was in full swing.

  ‘Great,’ said Zoe. ‘Let those fuckers in and then lock the doors. We can use that. Do you see Sam with them?’

  Mark scanned around. ‘No.’

  He checked the Gulliver. To his astonishment, he found Ash’s command codes still active. He froze. Had Ash actually survived that neural surge? He couldn’t imagine how. Or had the surge itself been faked?

  Mark felt a hot stab of betrayal and checked for evidence of his subcaptain interfacing with the ship but found nothing – not even a remote pulse from one of the security-locked cabin sections. The only recent data on Ash he could locate was a stack of very basic life-signs reports filed by the med-bay.

  Mark relaxed. The logical explanation was that Sam had Ash in a coma, though how he’d achieved such a feat remotely he had no idea.

  ‘Ash’s codes are still active,’ he said. ‘He can’t be dead.’

  ‘Worry about that cowardly shit later,’ said Zoe. ‘What else do you see? Where’s Sam?’

  ‘Somewhere I can’t find him,’ said Mark. ‘Which might mean anywhere on the ship I don’t have eyes, or not on the ship at all.’

  ‘First thing we do when we get back up there,’ said Zoe, her voice quavering with rage, ‘is to rip out that fucking sector security lockout.’

  Mark scanned the helm, looking for clues to Sam’s location, and found a live link from their comms array to the black box of the science section. It was feeding data directly from Carter’s only orbital weapons platform.

  ‘He’s on board,’ said Mark with satisfaction. ‘I can see the feed he’s running. He’s somewhere in Science.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Zoe. ‘That sonofabitch thinks he’s so fucking clever. Let’s see how well he does when someone else has the edge.’

  Zoe typed madly on her touchboard, her ruined feet apparently forgotten.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Tapping Massimo’s system using those executive codes,’ she said. ‘I’m pinging his orbital support sats and priming two messenger drones.’
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  ‘I thought you said there was no point trying to send any?’ said Mark.

  ‘That’s right. There isn’t. But Sam doesn’t know that we know that. And he doesn’t know that we know that he’s watching us. Yet.’

  Torture had brought out a kind of fierce intelligence in Zoe that Mark could only marvel at. He was glad he was on her good side right now.

  While Mark watched, Zoe fired off a messenger drone towards New Panama with no message in it. She kicked in a set of preprogrammed evasives and he watched it twist and flicker towards the out-system in a wake of hard-boiled gravity waves. Sam, or someone on Carter, leapt on it. A cloud of pursuit drones flashed after it within a second of launch. Zoe chose that moment to fire her second drone, this time pointed at the weapons platform.

  ‘Put a warp drive on anything and it’s a bomb,’ she said. ‘A big fucking bomb.’

  By the time Sam’s weapons had retargeted to compensate for the distraction, it was too late. The second drone collided with the platform in a flash.

  The robot’s cabin momentarily filled with blinding light. The whole desert briefly went white.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Mark. ‘We’re all going to need an hour in the rad tank after that.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m going to need some new feet. Now freeze out the comms from the Gulliver to New Luxor,’ she said. ‘With luck, the colonists will think Sam has given up on them. He deserves it.’

  Mark broke the link with a smile.

  ‘Now use that iron grip on the ship that Monet gave you,’ she said. ‘Block Sam’s overrides and cut that fucker out of helm-control permanently.’

  ‘Done,’ said Mark. Sam was caught like a rat in a trap. He couldn’t leave the Gulliver, couldn’t take it anywhere and couldn’t tell anyone what was going on, either.

  Zoe sagged back into her couch. ‘The immediate threat is neutralised and we have a clear path to the spaceport. This is where you come in, flyboy. We should put the pedal to the metal before the colonists decide to stop us leaving. Can you do that?’

  Mark nodded and started the robot back towards the bottom of the river valley.

  ‘Sure. This thing isn’t fast, but it’s what we’ve got. The biggest problem is there’s only one way up to that plateau and it’s straight up the river valley, which means going through the middle of New Luxor.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Zoe. ‘I didn’t like the place anyway. Let’s give it a facelift. And by the way, thank you.’ Her expression melted for a moment, revealing an aching chasm of vulnerability behind her mask. ‘Really, thank you. Never thought I’d need rescuing. Never wanted to.’ Tears crept to the corners of her eyes.

  ‘You just rescued both of us from a nuke,’ said Mark. ‘Let’s rescue each other.’

  She smiled – a little desperately, perhaps, but there was hope behind the smile. Mark started to choke up.

  ‘And could you find me some more gel-packs?’ she added. ‘If my feet get any worse I’m going to start screaming again.’

  ‘On it,’ said Mark.

  As the robot raced over the border to the New Luxor claim, a warning appeared in Mark’s sensorium, followed by a sequence of urgent messages from Government Tower. Some young bureaucrat’s angry face appeared in a message window.

  ‘Unregistered Flag vehicle,’ he said. ‘In light of recent hostilities, we are forced to treat your robot’s approach as an invasion. Retreat to your legal claim limit or risk defensive action.’

  Mark turned to the closest camera and replied brightly, ‘Hey there, New Luxor border control!’ He couldn’t imagine what he must look like in his scorched and blood-spattered paper smock, with hair full of sealant foam. Scary, hopefully. ‘You shot down my messenger drone! I believe that kind of thing is illegal. And I’m an IPSO Fleet captain, by the way, which means that every attempt to block me will be treated as obstructing an officer in the line of diplomatic duty. And now I’d like to leave your shitty little planet. So I’d appreciate it if you got the hell out of my way.’

  ‘You can be sure they won’t,’ said Zoe. ‘Sam will have them believing your escape is a death sentence.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Mark.

  He brought all of the robot’s forty-eight welding laser stations online and pumped submind attention into their processor cores. When New Luxor fired a volley of police-issue stun-missiles at him, he carved them out of the air. They fell from the sky like dead flies and crumpled under his treads. They weren’t likely to stop a full-sized tower-constructorbot in any case.

  Mark reached the end of the valley where a fan of densely packed rock radiated out from the old riverbed. The colonists had paved over part of it with a highway zigzagging back and forth up to the canyon where Government Tower stood. He brought the robot to a halt and moved its upper arms around, testing its balance. He wished he wasn’t driving something built like the lovechild of an old-style rocket gantry and a Hindu god. Anything with a lower centre of gravity or fewer moving parts would have been easier.

  ‘Why did you stop?’ said Zoe.

  ‘This thing is enormous,’ said Mark. ‘Plus it’s designed for the flat, which that valley isn’t. We can take out their missiles, no problem, but the wrong kind of gradient will knock us on our ass, and this robot doesn’t have escape pods.’

  ‘I thought you were the best pilot in human space?’ said Zoe with a wry look.

  Mark smiled at her. ‘I am. Buckle up. Put those feet of yours somewhere safe and stable.’

  She shifted on her couch, bracing herself.

  Mark swung all six of the robot’s arms forward, compensating for the weight distribution with exquisite care as the robot crept up the slope. Its gantries groaned. Metal shrieked and protested all around them. If the colony wanted to take them out, now would be the time to do it. He prayed that they were too stupid to realise this was their moment.

  It took what felt like for ever to reach the bottom edge of the town, but for some reason the colonists didn’t attack. Maybe they hadn’t yet figured out just how vulnerable the constructorbot was. Finally, nothing lay between them and New Luxor but a short stretch of printrock and dust.

  ‘If anyone’s in those buildings,’ Mark said, ‘I’m about to ruin their day.’

  The behemoth powered straight for the colony’s outlying domes.

  ‘Can we drive over those?’ said Zoe. ‘Or will they topple us?’

  ‘We can’t go around them,’ said Mark. ‘There’s not enough room between the edge of town and that canyon wall. I guess there’s only one way to find out.’

  The fragile habitats crumpled and popped beneath Mark’s treads. Gouts of air puffed outwards carrying fountains of sealant. It was, he thought, rather like walking through a waist-deep bath of foam. The ill-kempt parks and transit rails vanished under his wheels.

  He kept a link open to the civic network as he pulverised downtown, checking for biomarkers. To his relief, New Luxor had already been evacuated. The only things fleeing from his approach were robots. He exhaled inwardly with relief. While he was ready to fight to get home, he didn’t relish the thought of more murder. The day had already featured enough of that for a lifetime.

  A new warning message from the new Luxor government arrived. The same bureaucrat appeared, his eyes dark with rage, sweat on his forehead.

  ‘Come no further or you will be resisted,’ he snarled into the camera. ‘We’re ready for you now. Don’t test us.’

  At the same time, at the far end of the valley, three huge silhouettes hoved into view – a triptych of erector-set kaiju. Mark suddenly understood why they’d let him get up the slope without shooting. New Luxor had broken out its own construction robots, no doubt left over from the Government Tower project. Apparently they wanted a fight. This time, though, they’d picked the right weapon.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ said Mark.

  ‘Y
ou will not be allowed to approach the spaceport,’ said the bureaucrat. ‘Power down your vehicle and prepare to be arrested.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Mark. ‘Let’s do this.’

  17.4: ANN

  Ann snapped awake. She lay in their alcove hiding place, face up in the water. The pain in her gut had vanished. She glanced down and found only clear, unbroken skin where her injury had been. Her ship-suit had disappeared and in its place were hundreds of tiny noodle-like rootlets attached to her flesh. They broke when she moved, coming apart like bits of vermicelli.

  She looked around frantically and saw Will lying nearby amid another tangle of threads so fine and dense that they appeared almost solid. There had to be millions of them. In fact, Ann couldn’t quite tell where Will started and the roots ended. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad one. Either way, she had to assume he’d done something to fix her up. She felt stronger and fresher than she had in years.

  Ann’s best guess was that Will had found a way to co-opt the biotech in the tunnel walls. An extraordinary achievement, even for him. She reached over to wake him.

  [Stop.]

  Ann froze. It was Will’s voice, but it hadn’t come from his mouth. Instead, it sounded as if it was coming from everywhere. Her skin prickled. She looked around at the tunnel walls for the origin of the sound. It certainly hadn’t come from her implants. So far as she could tell, they were all dead.

  [I’m inside you,] said Will.

  ‘What?’

  [I’m about to explain,] said Will, [but it’s going to hurt, I’m afraid. You need to understand quickly.]

  ‘Wait—’ said Ann.

  Knowledge poured into her mind like lava through a paper cup. She screamed aloud and slipped back into the water. A second later, she understood. She sat blankly for a while and then wept. A part of Will existed inside her now, intimately entwined – less than a person but more than a SAP. It was the emergent product of a trillion shorthand copies of his mind woven into her body. She’d become a roboteer. She was everything Will had once been and more.