by Alex Lamb
She crouched over and retched at the sense of violation. Despite the gift, a part of her felt sure she’d be better off dead. The privacy of her own mind was gone for ever – mingled with his in some kind of involuntary union. She shivered.
But this wasn’t about her. Not any more. The old Ann had died from a bullet wound. The new one existed for a specific purpose. According to Will’s download, she had thirty days to save the world. Which, allowing for travel time, meant she needed to have done it a couple of days ago.
‘What about you?’ she whispered. ‘What will happen?’
[I’m fighting the Nems,] said Will. [Things are about to get complicated. If I succeed, I’ll fix all this. In the meantime, I apologise for putting myself in your head. The Earth needs saving.]
‘Understood,’ said Ann. ‘I don’t like it, but I get it.’
She stood, gingerly testing her new limbs. They felt just like the old ones, if a little stronger and more relaxed. She certainly didn’t feel superhuman. She clambered out of the alcove and slid awkwardly down the side of the tunnel to the floor, landing on her behind with a bump. The pain shooting up her spine felt entirely mundane. Ann fought back a wave of self-pity. She’d lost the sanctity of her mind but apparently retained a full capacity for painful humiliation. Great. She started walking.
Not far from their hiding place she found the remains of a firefight. Not the one she’d been wounded in, but a subsequent, bloodier affair between the League and the Nems. Bodies littered the tunnel. Some were human; others had been human once.
Ann stared down at the Nem-altered corpses and took deep breaths. Gone were the kludgy machine hacks. These bodies had been reworked with something like a Spatial’s killtech. She could see it under the skin. Orange growths branched out from the new nervous system to dot their limbs and faces with stiff tangerine bristles. The eyes had been replaced with moist, open organs packed with dozens of tiny lenses. She fought back nausea.
The mutants were dissolving, she noticed. On many of the dead, the extra parts had already turned to mush and begun to slough off onto the tunnel floor.
[That’s my work,] said Will. [You shouldn’t have any problems on the way to the science station now.]
Ann surveyed the battlefield and felt a kind of empty horror. Events had taken on a significance and a level of impersonal violence that her mind didn’t want to accept.
You knew this was coming, she reminded herself. Even if the League plan had worked, things would have got ugly. You signed up for this.
A tinny voice sounded somewhere nearby, breaking her reverie.
‘… ou hear me?’
She froze and looked about until she spotted an active comms unit attached to an overturned scramblerbot with half of its processors ripped out. She righted the vehicle and found the unit clipped to a rider-handle.
‘I repeat, this is an executive order from Senator Voss,’ said the comm. ‘Any surviving members of the ground teams are to remain where they are. Nem activity in the Snakepit System has changed yet again. All remaining drones are moving away from the planet. We believe a new warp assembly may be in progress. We don’t understand why, but it’s given us an opportunity to come and collect you. We may not get another. So keep your tags active and contact station command immediately if you have information about the fate or whereabouts of Ludik and Monet.’
In minutes, the tunnel would be crawling with people again. Ann wondered how long she had. She set off for the science station at a run.
18: GIANT
18.1: MARK
The constructorbots waited for him near the top end of the valley where it narrowed to a cleft in the plateau. They loomed like samurai office blocks, arms outstretched to bar his passage. Mark regarded them with a mixture of dread and disbelief. The situation looked as ridiculous as it did fatal.
Constructorbots had more in common with buildings than vehicles. If Carter still had its orbital kinetics platform, something of this sort wouldn’t have been possible. He’d have been dead already. As it was, nobody appeared to have predicted this insane scenario, so there they were – getting ready for what was probably humanity’s first genuine giant robot battle.
His enemies had the advantage of higher ground, superior numbers and walls to box him in. On top of that, the pilots handling these machines probably had years of practice with this kind of equipment, whereas he’d only had hours.
‘We don’t have to do this,’ he told them over the public channel. ‘I just want to leave.’
Whoever was running the steel titans didn’t reply.
Mark tried tight-beam but all three robots had their comms shuttered, which implied drivers actually in the vehicles instead of remote jockeys or defensive SAPs. A measure to prevent soft assault, no doubt. New Luxor had been warned about him, apparently.
He exhaled and sank fully into the six-limbed monstrosity he was driving, syncing with its fibre-optic nervous system and subsuming its small, anxious mind with his own. The cranes and gantries became his arms. The enormous tank-tracks became his legs. He took a moment to fully absorb what it meant to be that big. Gradually his perspective shifted until the size felt ordinary. He was merely a guy walking up a shallow trench towards three bullies waiting at the end. A heap of crumpled toys lay behind him. A few insects skittered around on the floor at his feet. Mark flexed his hydraulic muscles, gunned his engines and accelerated. The constructorbots surged forwards to meet him.
Fighting in a giant robot, he guessed, wasn’t going to be much like the fantasy virts made out. It would be more like fighting in syrup inside a body made of eggshells. Every impact would have devastating consequences. Every swing would take for ever to connect. So Mark decided to avoid contact wherever possible. Instead he’d try for a kind of constructorbot aikido, using his enemies’ prodigious weight against them.
He sped towards them at a reckless twenty kilometres per hour then threw the anchors on at the last minute as the first robot converged with him. As it powered forward, Mark swerved left. The cabin swayed alarmingly. Instead of reaching to rebalance, Mark swivelled his upper gantry-arms three-sixty degrees, knocking the constructor from behind with a crash of steel that made Zoe clutch her ears. The colonists’ robot toppled, smashing down with ponderous, ear-rending slowness. Mark powered forward again to put distance between him and the unfolding disaster.
It took a ridiculous number of seconds for the crumpled behemoth to settle and for the sound of screaming metal to stop. A cloud of dust billowed around the wreckage that looked like it was going to hang there all day. Mark and the other two pilots just stared for a moment, in awe of the scale of the destruction.
Through his human eyes, he could see Zoe lying tense on her couch, staring down at the mayhem as she waited for the fight to resume. He gave small thanks that her drugs had properly kicked in. At least she wasn’t writhing in agony over her feet.
Mark assessed the new situation. He was now standing slightly to the left side of the canyon, with his two remaining enemies a little too close for comfort. The remains of robot one lay behind him in the middle of the valley, filling up more of the canyon floor than it had any right to. His other two assailants were likely to be more careful going forward. By now they’d have learned their lesson. Each action in the fight might take a long time to connect, but split-second timing still counted. Every miscalculation of weighting or braking distance could be deadly.
Mark wished he could see his enemies’ eyes as they planned their next move, but the constructor cabins were lost behind towers of yellow metal strut-work. Were they afraid? Angry? No way to know. Why couldn’t they just let him leave? Mark gunned his engines again and tensed his enormous body.
Both machines came at him at once. They spread out their upper arms, pretty much covering the width of the canyon. The colonists evidently hoped to catch him between them and knock him backwards in a kind
of double-clothesline manoeuvre. Mark knew he couldn’t give them that chance.
Had he been fighting in his own skin, he’d have simply crouched, but bending wasn’t an option. Instead, he threw his arms forwards and raced backwards. He swerved tight around the ruin of robot one, putting the wreckage between him and his enemies. Then he slewed his cranes out to the side and took a sharp turn towards the valley wall on the right, holding his breath as the cabin shook. Spent gel-packs bounced across the floor like rubber balls.
He screeched to a halt before hitting the rock and splayed all six of his arms against the canyon walls, making as much room for the others to pass as possible. A welding pod on his robot smacked against the rock as his machine swayed, showering the ground around them with shrapnel.
‘Jesus!’ yelled Zoe as a sickening tremor worked its way up the constructor’s body.
One enemy robot made it around the heap of twisted metal. The other miscalculated and drove dangerously through the remains of the shattered torso. It teetered for a moment as its treads locked on the debris like a badly balanced Eiffel Tower. Then it toppled forward, smashing itself to smithereens and sending house-sized chunks of robot bouncing along the valley floor and turning the land around them into a minefield of impassable heaps of refuse.
Mark surveyed the increasingly dangerous terrain with despair.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘This is crazy. This is too crazy.’
He knew he’d been lucky so far. His opponents’ familiarity with their vehicles had made them careless. But who could blame them? Sword-fighting on tightropes would have been easier. Unfortunately, his cleverness had now created a problem.
With a heap of ruined parts two constructors deep between him and the top of the valley, there was only one route past wide enough for his treads. That route had a constructor standing right in it. Mark’s only option was to lure to the pilot out of the gap before he noticed his advantage and won by simply leaving the fray on foot.
‘Give up now,’ said a voice over the public channel. ‘Our pilot has your route blocked. This disgusting contest is over.’
So much for optimism. Mark pivoted his treads and drove back down the valley, straight towards Government Tower – the most expensive-looking building in sight.
‘Fuck it!’ he shouted back. ‘You want to fight? Let’s make this real. You bastards don’t get to keep your toys. Kiss goodbye to the eyesore.’
After what he’d already done to the middle of downtown, the tower was the most habitable part of the colony left. If the Carter colonists ever climbed out of their evac-ark, they’d need somewhere to live. He dearly hoped they still cared about that. He picked a route that took him deliberately over a line of private mansion domes, popping them like bubbles of storage-wrap. It was surprisingly satisfying.
‘Halt!’ yelled the voice on the channel. ‘Stop or we’ll shoot!’
The last constructor stalled for long seconds, then surged into life after him.
‘Yes!’ Mark shouted.
He waited with his heart in his mouth, watching while his opponent built up an unsafe speed, racing him for the tower. As soon as instinct told him he had an edge, Mark threw his arms forward and hammered the brakes. His body swayed like a tree in high wind, making Zoe grab the console in front of her with two desperate hands.
The colonists’ robot clipped him as it passed, trashing Mark’s right-middle limb but not quite toppling him. Mark pivoted his body one-eighty and headed back for the now-open gap as fast as he dared, powering between the robot parts with a clearance of inches.
When the colonist pilot saw his error, he cut his speed so fast he nearly fell and then reversed hard, making it a race for the exit. Mark had a lead of just seconds – not enough for vehicles that size. They wouldn’t both fit.
As they converged on the gap, the colonists’ constructor threw its arms forward and left, aiming to block Mark’s passage ahead or at least clip him a second time. Mark turned to face him without slowing, raised his upper cranes and slammed them down over his opponent’s outstretched limbs. The air came apart in a chorus of tortured metal. Mark’s cranes were ruined but it had worked. He slid around the heap of ruined metal as his enemy tipped awkwardly.
If the pilot hadn’t been driving so fast, the force would never have been enough to unbalance him. But these machines weren’t built to be used this way. They’d passed their safety limits in the first few seconds of the fight.
The last constructor ploughed towards the ground, its left-lower arm scraping a gouge in the canyon wall as it plunged. It landed with a sickening crash that went on and on. Mark drove headlong up the valley away from it while dust ballooned outwards around him, filling the valley to its brim.
Once he felt sure it was safe, he slowed and looked back. Smashed robot parts lay everywhere. Dozens of domes had been ruined. It would be a while before New Luxor was much to look at again. Amazingly, the Fecund glass tunnels built into the wall hadn’t even taken a scratch.
‘You okay?’ he asked Zoe.
She nodded tightly. ‘Yup. Still here. Just. Glad that’s over.’
Mark pressed his damaged robot onwards toward the end of the valley and the spaceport beyond. He hadn’t gone more than another kilometre before a fresh volley of missiles started heading their way. He took out eleven of them with his remaining welding lasers and shielded his cabin against the other nine with the outstretched remains of a crane-arm. Explosions bloomed along the limb, knocking off sections and reducing the manipulator waldo to scrap. This time the colonists had been aiming directly for his cabin, he noticed. If they fired again, he doubted he’d be able to fend off the missiles.
He shouted at them over the comm. ‘Do I need to remind you that I have most of your political leaders locked in my shuttle?’ he said. ‘Further attempts to fuck with me will result in their air supply vanishing. Do I make myself clear?’
The missile attacks stopped but Zoe gave him a worried stare.
‘Now you have to go really fast,’ she said. ‘We have to get there before they figure out that killing you means you can’t screw with that shuttle any more. Let’s hope they’re dumb.’
Mark doubled down on the speed, ignored the wounded constructor’s wails of panic and charged up onto the high plateau where the spaceport lay. From there, all he had to do was drive in a straight line. He overrode all the safeties and took the constructorbot up to a blistering forty kilometres per hour. The robot’s sensors warned him that weapons systems were targeting him the entire way. However, whether driven by caution or political panic, the colonists decided not to fire.
As he zeroed in on the shuttle, Mark brought his backup elevator pod online and raised the air inside to pressure. Then he opened a channel to the government officials trapped in the shuttle.
‘Get in the airlock,’ he told them. ‘All of you. Now.’
Through the cabin cameras he watched the angry officials glaring at the walls and shouting protestations.
‘Into the airlock or your air is gone,’ said Mark. ‘Don’t make this painful.’
He started dropping the cabin temperature. Once they knew he meant business, the politicians moved fast. As a single body, they stopped complaining and squeezed themselves into the tiny lock.
Mark drove the constructorbot over the runway, crunching robots and printrock beneath its treads as he docked the backup elevator against the hatch.
‘Now get off my ride!’ said Mark.
The politicians tumbled through the opening door into the pod beyond. Mark shut the hatch behind them, pulled them halfway up the constructorbot and shunted them into a station at chest-height. Then he had one of his exosuit zombies pick up Zoe while the other lifted Venetia’s entire med-chamber. Together, they descended in the primary elevator to the hatch.
Mark quickly checked the shuttle interior before bringing the others aboard but found it
empty. He decided he much preferred having the jump on his opponents. Being the one dishing out the unwelcome surprises made things so much simpler. He moved Zoe and Venetia through while New Luxor traffic control bombarded him with threats and warnings.
‘We’ve given you what you asked for. Now let our people go.’
As soon as his friends were buckled in, Mark parked the exosuits in the elevator, shut the hatch and redirected the constructorbot to the control tower. He positioned it with its remaining scaffold pincer around the habitat bulb at the tower’s top. He could see people cowering through the glass.
‘Here’s how it works,’ he said. ‘If I get out of your gravity-well intact, your leaders will live. Otherwise you lose your control tower, your government and my respect.’
The officials in the tower stared at the pincer with wide eyes. Meanwhile, the colony leaders shouted at him from inside the elevator pod.
‘How are we supposed to get out of here?’ one of them demanded.
‘We were guaranteed safe passage,’ said another.
‘Not by me,’ said Mark. ‘You should have thought about that before you tried to kill me.’
He fired up the shuttle’s engines, taxied gently around the mess on the runway he’d smashed and headed for space.
18.2: WILL
Will watched the Ryan-thing drop into a fighter’s crouch, his silvered boots scuffing the flagstones’ ancient grime. Will adjusted his pose to match, scanning the gloomy temple for weapons or potential threats. Despite the resolute solidity of the metaphor, he distrusted it intensely.
A woman’s voice broke the tense silence.
‘May the best man win,’ said the curator. She stood in a high alcove looking down on them – a high priestess now, dressed in white and gold, ready to be fought over. A handkerchief dropped from her fingers. Will frowned up at her. Snakepit had a rather confused sense of combat metaphor, in his opinion. But that was probably as much his fault as anyone’s.
