by Sean Williams
When they were gone, De Bruyn unsealed her own suit and slipped out of the helmet. While she watched the autosurgeon stabilize its patient, she patched into the command network via her implants and summoned the pilot of the vessel.
The ship lurched. De Bruyn grabbed for support as the deck fell out from underneath her and the lights flickered.
she asked.
She could hear a racket in the background as the pilot fought for control of the ship.
There was another lurch, more violent than the first. Voices shouted at each other over the command network.
Free-fall came suddenly, and just as abruptly ended. De Bruyn’s feet lifted off the ground for a second, then slammed back down with twice her normal weight. She slipped and fell, skidding across the floor as acceleration sent the ship into a tight turn. The lights flickered again, and didn’t return to their full strength. Red emergency lighting came on, and stayed.
<1 don’t understand it!> the pilot shouted.
De Bruyn snapped, gripping the lip of the autosurgeon’s operating table and scrambling to her knees.
she ordered.
<1 can’t! We’re broadcasting something but I can’t tell what it is. It’s like the ship’s been taken over!>
A chill ran the length of De Bruyn’s spine. “This can’t be happening,” she muttered. “Not again...”
The last time she’d had Roche in her grasp, something much like this had occurred. The AI that Roche had babysat too well had somehow taken over a Dato Marauder and COE Intelligence HQ, bending them to its will as easily as De Bruyn used the Disciples. But a recurrence was not possible. That particular AI had been destroyed back in Palasian System. Or so she had thought.
De Bruyn clambered to her feet, leaning over the operating table, studying its patient intently. Despite all the power fluctuations, the autosurgeon’s work on Roche continued unabated.
Roche’s lips were moving. It was hard for De Bruyn to hear over the racket in her implants, but Roche was definitely trying to say something. De Bruyn leaned in closer still, and in doing so heard one word being repeated over and over again. It was faint, but unmistakable: “Box... Box ...”
De Bruyn stood upright, aghast. How it was possible, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t afford to have any doubts. Not now, when she was so close.
she ordered.
The ship lurched beneath her again as the pilot obeyed.
The emergency lights went out completely for a second. De Bruyn could hear noises from the bridge that sounded like panels being opened. There was a pause and then: Gravity disappeared completely.
The line died, and everything went quiet.
De Bruyn anchored herself on Roche’s table. Her suit had closed automatically, and she had just enough light to see by. Roche’s face was in shadow, but parts of her body were visible under the autosurgeon’s lasers. It was still operating, using its internal emergency power. Roche’s lips had stopped moving.
De Bruyn grabbed a cutter and began to slice away the remaining fragments of Roche’s suit. The autosurgeon resisted, especially as she cut at the glove encasing Roche’s right hand—where Roche’s standard COE Intelligence implants provided her with an external data link. But the autosurgeon had nothing strong enough to cut living armor, and as the glove came free, its resistance ceased.
De Bruyn heard someone moving toward her, through the crawlspaces.
“Reverence?” called a voice. “Reverence!”
“Here,” she replied, turning from Roche.
“The interference has ceased,” said the pilot, climbing into the room. His robes fluttered like the wings of a giant moth. “But we are drifting blind and vulnerable!”
She heard reproach in his voice, and didn’t rise to it. “Bring the systems up slowly,” she said. “One by one. Keep automation to a minimum. If that means doing without communications and life-support for the time being, then that’s what we do. Navigation, too. All we really need is a working drive to get us away from here. Once we’re out of range, everything will operate properly again, I’m sure.”
“Out of range?” The pilot frowned. “Of what?”
Of the damnable Box, she wanted to tell him, but couldn’t bring herself to say it. She hardly believed it herself.
“The Phlegethon,” she said instead. “They must be interfering with us somehow.”
It was only a half-lie. If the Box still existed, then it had to be broadcasting from the big ship. Roche’s suit was in pieces, now, and it wasn’t anywhere to be found on her, so it had to be somehow communicating via her implants. If they could just get away from its influence, they would be able to continue their work. With the only possible link between Roche and the Box severed, now that she was entirely free of the combat suit, it would have no way of communicating with her when she awoke. Or so De Bruyn hoped. Her only alternative was to try the “Silence between thoughts” shutdown code again—although Roche had ordered the machine to ignore De Bruyn if she said it, and there was no guarantee it would listen to any of their transmissions anyway.
The pilot looked doubtful. “Reverence, I—”
“Do as I tell you, Wamel.” Her tone was smooth and cold; argument would not be tolerated. “I want those drives working even if you have to stoke them with coal. Take us away from the Phlegethon as quickly as possible. We can discuss what happens later. Just get us moving before someone decides to do it for us.”
“Yes, Reverence.” He bowed and left the room.
De Bruyn returned her attention to Roche. The sight of her lying there in the dark, so near to death, filled De Bruyn with a sense of satisfaction. Finally, Roche was in her hands. Finally, she would know the truth. And nothing was going to keep her from that.
The lights flickered weakly. Gravity came and went. Deciding that the Disciples needed all the help they could get, she left the autosurgeon to its work—confident in the knowledge that, at least for the moment, she and the machine were on the same side....
* * *
God’s Monkey limped through the battle zone and out of the Phlegethon’s camouflage screen on the tip of a fluttering, poorly tuned fusion flame. An hour later, when the need for accurate navigation overrode De Bruyn’s sense of caution, she allowed the pilot to risk switching on some of the ship’s higher functions. Gradually, when it became apparent that nothing untoward was going to happen, all of the systems were reconnected. When the ship was fully operational again, she sent it along an orbit that would take them close to the sun, then out to the system’s dark fringes, where they would linger in the lesser-populated regions until they had to return.
Within another hour, the embattled Phlegethon was far behind them, along with the council, the Rebuli, and Siriote fleets, beyond even Salton Trezise and his devious little schemes. Originally, his price for letting her and the Disciples into the Phlegethon had been a disturbance that would justify his push to get the Exotics off the council. But events turned out to be a little more dramatic than anyone had anticipated, what with the Hum kidnapping and the atta
ck of the Rebuli at once. Nevertheless, from De Bruyn’s point of view, the outcome had been more than satisfactory.
Separating Roche from her friends had been ridiculously easy, and Trezise had happily turned Hue Vischilglin to his will, filling her head with the notion that Roche was consciously working for the enemy and convincing her to set Roche up. Whether it was true or not, De Bruyn neither knew nor cared. She had what she wanted, and that was all that mattered.
When she was certain they weren’t being pursued, she returned to the operating room to see how her captive was doing.
Hum autosurgeons were notoriously simple-minded in their relationships with Pristine Humans, and this one was no exception. It took her much longer to access Roche’s medical data than it should have, and even then it didn’t make much sense.
Roche was stable. Her wound had been cleaned and sealed, and tissue regeneration had begun. It would be days before she was able to move again, and it was still a mystery how she had survived such enormous blood-loss and trauma, but at least she was out of immediate danger.
Trezise had given De Bruyn the council’s information on the enemy, and she ran Roche’s genetic code past it, to see if there was a match. She was half surprised to receive a negative response: Roche was not a clone warrior. But she wasn’t normal, either. Roche’s code was riddled with irregularities that neither De Bruyn nor the autosurgeon could explain.
She patched into the command network.
When the reave arrived, De Bruyn was busy programming the autosurgeon to remove Roche’s implants.
The man’s voice in her mind was like a smooth dark fluid, yet conversely sharp and penetrating at the same time. The first time his mind had touched hers had been disturbing, but she had quickly accustomed herself to this epsense adept’s “tone.”
“Yes. Wait a moment.”
Lemmas waited patiently behind her, his arms at his sides in the folds of his black robes. No ordinary reave, he was unskilled at long-distance communication or remote sensing but frighteningly precise at close range. His specialty was the extraction of information from unwilling subjects, and his methods were notoriously effective.
The autosurgeon whirred and set to work, prepping several places on Roche’s body for surgery. De Bruyn turned to face Lemmas, folding her arms across her chest. In doing so, she felt a stickiness there and looked down; some of Roche’s gore had made it onto her, perhaps during the brief free-fall when the ship had been drifting.
Not that it mattered. Undoubtedly there would be more in the hours to come.
“Lemmas,” she said, absently wiping Roche’s blood off her uniform. “I have some work for you to do.”
The man nodded slowly, his hairless face, like most Hums, finely boned and long. He wore his ritual mutilation openly: ears removed, eyes sewn shut, tongue gone. His skin was bluish in the harsh light; through it, De Bruyn imagined that she could see not just his veins but his bones as well—yellow and decayed, like his teeth.
he said.
“I want you to take her apart,” she said. “Slowly. I don’t want you to kill her. Just break her open so I can look inside.”
She looked over to Roche on the table and shook her head. “I’m not entirely sure.”
There was an unhealthy relish to his voice.
“Just do what you have to do.”
The reave inclined his head. he said.
“Naturally. You need my eyes.”
<1 will also need you to tell me when I have found the information you seek.>
“I can assist you in other ways, if you like.”
He paused.
The thought of Roche being tortured didn’t bother her at all. Not that she could have hidden it from the reave even if it did. “That’s not something you have to worry about,” she said.
His smile was an open wound between his cheeks.
“By epsense, immediately,” she said. “You will have full access to her body once the autosurgeon has finished. In theory, you will have as much time as you need. In practice, however, I think you should proceed as quickly as you can. There’s always a possibility that we’ll be traced.” She was still nervous about the Box. However it had survived, and whatever it was doing on the Phlegethon, the fact that it was out there at all made her anxious. The one thing she couldn’t take into account in her plans was a rogue, hyperintelligent machine.
said the reave.
“Be that as it may, I’d still like you to hurry.”
Lemmas moved closer to the table and rolled up the sleeves of his robe. His hands were as slender as the rest of his body; his right hand possessed six fingers. He had no fingernails, and below each knuckle were tattoos like rings. He stood for a moment with his head bowed over the operating table, uncannily as though gazing at Roche’s face.
The autosurgeon whirred as it unwound artificial nerves from Roche’s arm.
De Bruyn wondered when and how Lemmas would start.
he said.
He reached out with one hand to stroke Morgan Roche’s face and, even though she was unconscious, she flinched from his touch.
* * *
It was less crude than De Bruyn had anticipated. Barely minutes after the autosurgeon had finished—leaving Roche with several wounds across her body, one hand crippled and an empty eye socket—Lemmas began in earnest. All he did was touch her. De Bruyn couldn’t tell whether his mind had powerful psychosomatic effects, or if his nail-less fingertips held hidden tools, but his slightest touch pierced skin, parted fat, and slit through muscle with disturbing ease.
Roche remained unconscious throughout the procedure. De Bruyn didn’t ask if that was Lemmas’s decision. The autosurgeon might have been keeping her sedated while she recovered from its ministrations. A couple of times De Bruyn had to override its attempts to intervene in Lemmas’s work, but she resisted turning it off completely; she didn’t want Roche dying from shock before she had learned everything there was to learn.
Lemmas held one hand over Roche’s mouth as though he were trying to keep her silent. A tiny line of blood trickled down her cheek and onto the table.
“Where does she come from?”
“That’s not the point. I want to know what she thinks.”
he said, with the faintest hint of irritation.
“When was she born?”
De Bruyn nodded. That accorded with COE Intelligence and Armada records, but still had not been verified independently.
“Who were her parents?”
“There are no deep memories at all?”
He paused for barely a couple of seconds; Roche’s body stiffened. he said.
“So she does remember her childhood?”
he said, as if at that very moment his mind was caressing those particular memories from Roche’s past.
“Give me an example.”
he said.
“Not dreams,” snapped De Bruyn. “Are there any real memories?”
Lemmas didn’t hesitate: with a round display, and specialized in M35 children’s stories. It—>
“Enough of that,” she said. “Tell me what she was afraid of.”
he said.
“Was that why she put her name down for the Armada intake?” De Bruyn asked.
said Lemmas.
“Did she ever find them?” De Bruyn was suddenly very interested in this line of questioning.
De Bruyn nodded thoughtfully to herself. “Was she ever sick before joining the Armada?”
There was another slight pause. he said.
“She was treated on Ascensio?”
De Bruyn noted that treatment of neither condition appeared in Roche’s official records. “Go back to the orphanage,” she said. “Does she remember any of the caregivers’ names from there?”
Lemmas rattled off five names, two of which De Bruyn recognized from her research.
“And did she have friends in the orphanage, or outside?”
More names followed. De Bruyn consigned them to her implants; she would check them later.
“What about emotional or physical intimacy?”
De Bruyn couldn’t help a slight sneer. “Was she ever in love?”
Lemmas didn’t reply immediately.
“That doesn’t mean there weren’t any,” said De Bruyn. “I want someone who will remember her—somebody who couldn’t possibly forget her. Caregivers can forget, and even friends might with time—but a lover never forgets.”
Lemmas recounted several instances that, on the surface at least, suggested a willingness to open up to friends and colleagues—a willingness that De Bruyn knew Roche had not shown in Military College nor any time after graduating. She had always been considered aloof by those who came to know her—emotionally distant and efficient, very much like the machines she had once regarded as friends. Yet what Lemmas recounted now of Roche’s past portrayed a woman who at least had dabbled with the idea of sharing life with someone else, but who had ultimately rejected it—maybe because it made her feel vulnerable; maybe because her sexual needs simply weren’t that great; maybe because she was self-sufficient within herself. For whatever reason, there were only a handful of people, male and female, who featured in Roche’s memories as ones who might have been regarded as “lovers.”