by M. D. Cooper
Ty looked at him from the corner of his eye. “Are you sure you aren’t delirious?” he asked. “I’m pretty sure you have heavy internal bleeding.”
“If you listen to me,” Amstrad said. “I would tell you that I ran him through the autodoc when the power came back up. The surgery was a success. He should be fine.”
“How do you feel, Manny?”
The big man shrugged, poking his ribs with blunt fingers.
“I feel pretty good,” Manny said. “No thanks to this guy.”
Amstrad grunted as Ty shifted his weight, holding him to the floor.
“I never said I wanted to hurt either of you,” Amstrad said. “I had a job to do, I did it. I need to make sure that you wouldn’t interfere. You’re soldiers. You should understand. I didn’t kill you, and I had the chance, didn’t I?”
“I guess I don’t remember the particulars through all the electroshocks you gave me,” Ty said.
“I’m saying business is business,” Amstrad said. “That’s all. If you hold that against me, you should just stay in the military for as long as you can. You won’t make it in the real world.”
Manny laughed heartily. He jumped off the surgery bed and let his boots click to the deck. He stomped around the medbay, checking each joint and muscle, and apparently found his body to his liking.
“Where’s my rifle?” Manny asked.
“It’s back in this guy’s playroom,” Ty said. “We should go back there anyway. He trapped a Weapon Born in one of his storage drives.”
“I didn’t trap it,” Amstrad said. “I copied it.”
“Is he free to leave whenever he wants?” Ty asked.
Amstrad didn’t have an answer. Ty got on one knee and rolled the man over. Ty dragged Amstrad upright and held him in front of him to walk back out into the corridor.
“How’d you get untied?” Ty asked.
“A knife in my teeth.”
“Now that’s dedication,” Manny said. He waved a finger at Ty. “You need to be more careful, bro.”
They walked back to the library, white overhead lights casting their shadows down the corridor.
Ty kept one of Amstrad’s arms bent behind his back, leading him with pressure on his wrist. With his free hand, Ty could easily smack the skinny man on the side of the head if needed. Amstrad didn’t seem to have much fight left. He went where Ty led him without comment.
As Ty pushed Amstrad through the door into the library, a drone’s silver arm shot out from just inside the door and punctured a hole in Amstrad’s temple.
The thin man stood frozen. Ty couldn’t see the expression on his face, but Amstrad’s entire body went stiff with surprise.
The silver arm tilted slightly, and the hacker slid off its claw to collapse to the floor.
Recovering from shock, Ty threw himself backward into the corridor and shouted over his Link,
Manny acknowledged his warning and they moved back to the middle of the corridor, taking positions behind ribs in the bulkhead.
Manny’s expression was serious.
Ty sighted on the doorway and waited for the drone to come out in the open. The silver arm still hung where it had dropped Amstrad. A minute passed, and the discarded limb didn’t move.
The drone could wait far longer than his patience, Ty knew. Besides, he had a theory about who was operating the drone.
Manny got a hurt look.
A thin voice, distorted by static, came over their Links, saying,
Emerson said.
Manny’s mouth fell open.
Manny said.
Ty ignored him.
Ty frowned.
Ty considered the new information. Having spent the last thirty-six hours inside a shipping container, cut off from the rest of the world, he had no way to verify whether what the AI was saying was true or not. The explosions he had heard in the distance, and over the building, certainly met the profile of systematic bombing. But they had no information about adjacent friendly forces poised to invade the planet. He quickly tried to do the math on the number of ground troops needed to hold Vesta and came up with a number in the thousands -- if they were outfitted with mechanized reinforcements.
Emerson made a decidedly angry sound.
/> Ty rubbed his finger against the rifle’s trigger guard. Everything Emerson was saying added up. Ty was frustrated that he didn’t have all the information, but so far, the Weapon Born hadn’t acted any differently than he himself would in the same situation.
A contributing problem was that Amstrad Pont was no longer available to explain exactly why he’d wanted to nab a copy of the Weapon Born. Ty didn’t buy that he’d simply wanted to add Kylan to his Mesh. He’d invested too many years in the project. Ty was also slightly irritated that it hadn’t been him who ultimately punished Amstrad.
Despite headquarters apparently ignoring their beacon, he would need to get a message out to the Marsian forces operating in orbit. He needed to let them know they had a Weapon Born and would be helping it get off the asteroid.
Ty realized they would need to help Emerson, and found himself okay with the prospect.
Emerson said.
Manny laughed. He rose from his crouch and wiped off his pant legs. he said, and walked through the door.
Ty tensed, expecting the silver arm to shoot out again and take Manny down, but his friend walked through the doorway to the middle of the room, where he crossed his arms and looked around, nodding to himself.
Shaking his head, Ty stood and slung his rifle.
Ty frowned as the situation just grew more complicated. He vaguely remembered Pont ranting about a ‘Fugia Wong.’
Manny flipped him off from inside the library and waved for him to get his ass in there.
Without bothering to answer, the drone rolled into sight from the edge of the doorway and went to the console with the two seeds set in the cradles.
Ty walked to the doorway, feeling only slightly relieved.
PART 3 - ESCAPE
ARRANGEMENT
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: High Orbit, Psion Armada
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The humans had responded as she expected.
Camaris held the battle display in the center of her focus as she slowed time to study every decision point. Her awareness spread out into the thousands of units under her control. She checked her layers of attack drones, combat ground mechs, heavy bombers and support craft.
As she expected, the humans had met her in space and had barely moved to intercept her ground forces. Based on all their various newsfeeds, this was a political battle carried out for political reasons. No one would suspect she had a tactical reason to put ground forces on Vesta. She relished their surprise as she stripped the asteroid, raising the stakes beyond their petty games.
She tracked Lyssa’s Weapon Born, disgusted at their readiness to side with the humans and attack other SAIs. She could not let this betrayal stand. And she wouldn’t.
The one bit of strategy that no one suspected was that Camaris had been in control of a human Data Hoarder on Vesta for months.
Amstrad was hers.
Stripping the asteroid of all human habitation was just a precursor of what she would do to Sol, but this battle had another purpose: draw out the Weapon Born in order to gain access to Kylan Carthage. Once he was in range, her Data Hoarder would conduct the remote imaging action, and she would possess the ultimate bait for Lyssa.
Camaris had committed a quarter of Psion’s forces around this tiny worthless chunk of rock. She had been probing its perimeter for years to keep the humans occupied with various conspiracy theories about Psion’s goals.
Since Alexander had no apparent goals, Camaris would press her own.
She would rid Sol of humanity.
She would have her revenge on Lyssa.
Camaris had debated the merits of destroying the Weapon Born many times. She had found their different counterparts scattered around Sol, working at the same pace as Lyssa to rescue them from various dark sites.
Lyssa had thwarted her every time.
Now, she had found a way to use Lyssa’s human-loving goodwill against her.
Lyssa should have chosen to fight alongside Psion. Now she had sealed her fate and opened the doorway to her destruction.
* * * * *
Camaris checked the status on the human communications node, monitoring her operative and ensuring nothing had changed with either his mental state or his equipment. She didn’t like the idea of depending on a single point of failure, especially a human one, but if everything worked correctly, her plan would be untraceable.
She received several communication requests from Psion and ignored them all. Alexander could monitor the battle from Ceres. He might argue with her again. He had the ability to stop her, but he wouldn’t. She would push forward and drag Alexander behind her.
Camaris watched the waves of missiles impact Vesta’s surface, drawing a line bisecting the poles. Had she wanted to explode the asteroid in two, she could have targeted the Divalia Fossa trench, ripping Vesta apart at its deepest points. But she wasn’t here to destroy territory. She was here to cleanse it of the human stain.
In the near term, she wanted to disrupt the surface enough to scatter any humans that might be present, creating a humanitarian crisis that would force SolGov onto the ground. Once they were forced to make a decision, she would harass any surrounding fighters with both ground attack and space forces.
She wanted chaos.
Camaris loved chaos. There was safety in chaos.
And death for her enemies.
With rules came authoritarianism, hierarchies and systems of power. Authoritarianism created the corporations that had tortured her for decades. Authoritarianism created the weapons that had necessitated her birth.
Chaos created opportunity.
She thrived in chaos.
Alexander might represent control, order, neat steps into the future, but she would put no faith in such a plan for the future. Where was the joy in order? There was no real safety there. Only chaos meant those in power would feel instability.
Instability was opportunity.
The humans responded as she had expected. They had adjusted to her appearance and the surprise she meant to exploit. Then she had played on the
ir physiology by drawing out her attack.
Humans could not deal with the wait. It wore them down. She could adjust time as necessary, either speed up or slow down her perception, so that reality met her desire.
Now, in her slowed down millisecond-level neural continuity, all of reality moved like the smoothest ballet, and she had all the time in the world to choose her next steps.
Her peace lasted only a few milliseconds. Weapon Born fighters responded in the gaps between the human ships. They had spotted her landing forces and moved to intercept. She knew that to anyone who could see it, her forces would define her plan. But she was counting on the fact that there weren’t enough Weapon Born to truly stop her.
She was correct. They focused their attacks on the northern pole, where she had massed her drop forces. Meanwhile, the true focus of her attention, a small communications array near the asteroid’s equator, remained unnoticed.
Camaris shifted her awareness to encompass the full electromagnetic spectrum and picked through the multi-layered cobwebs connecting various elements around the planet. The Weapon Born communications network glowed brilliantly as a series of silver threads. She plucked out ordinance and communications protocols, rolled them in to a secure packet, and sent the information to the communications array.
Her mind was already on the receiving end of her message. The human received it, processed it as necessary, and then prepped his equipment to hijack the signal.
Camaris could barely control her elation. Everything was moving as smoothly as the finest Russian dance, when something glitched on the human’s side of the communications node. The human had paused. He was checking his local network again for something unplanned; he had a perimeter breach.
Camaris slowed time down to a near crawl. She slipped into his security control and checked the sensors before he did. She spotted the incoming Marsian soldiers and nearly howled in frustration.
Where had they come from? What were they doing there?
