The Belter's Story (BRIGAND)

by Natalie French

  Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream, shutting down everything more complicated than simple instinct. I grabbed Jase's shoulders and scooted backwards, dragging him toward the open crevice. By the time we reached the crack in the ice wall, Jase's monitor was flashing blue. Imminent arrest. He was dying.

  I knew the somashell would have slowed most of his blood loss by now. But shock was killing him. His heart was threatening to stop. I knew that, if I was clever enough, I might be able to use Su to cobble something together, something that might keep him going long enough to get to help. I told her I needed insulated wire, which she spooled through her extruder. I quickly stripped off a length and wound it around the shaft of a grip-spike. Then I repeated the process with a second spike.

  I knew Su's anatomy better than my own and I popped open her intake port, looking for the ionizer nodes that she used to break down the raw materials I fed her. Very high voltage. Very low current. Exactly what I needed. I was attaching the second wire when Jase's monitor switched over to steady violet. His heart had given up.

  Even in an autodoc, Jase's situation wouldn't have been very good. With nobody but his brother and a fixbot to help him, he never had much of a chance. But I had to try. I jammed the spikes through his suit, into his chest, bracketing where I thought his heart should be. Then I glanced at Su and said, "Do it. Now."

  Jase stiffened and convulsed. His monitor flashed blue and his somashell flickered. Then it went dark. We were too late. Jase was gone.

  I sat for a long moment, staring at the face of my twin brother. He looked serene, as if he was resting, as if, with a simple shake, I could rouse him and things would be the way they had been. Jase would sit up and we would go home.

  Slowly, a lavender glow crept out of Su and down the wires that still connected her to him. It pulsed and little waves of brightness swept gently from Jase up to Su as she hovered over him. It was ethereal and hypnotic, that quiet peristalsis.

  Long seconds passed before I let myself admit what she was doing. I'd known for a long time that there was something about our bots. About europine. I'd fed nodules into my little fixbot. She'd broken them down. Separating. Analyzing. And she'd learned something. A thing I didn't understand.

  But I knew what she was doing because I'd seen it before. She was taking something from Jase.

  Su was feeding.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jase was dead. I knew that. I knew, but I couldn’t make myself give him up. Even as my quads and hamstrings burned with the weight of him and my shoulder blades sprayed agony down my back, I carried him the whole way. His once joyful form was cold, stiff and blue by the time I stumbled home.

  Sardar bowed his head and said something that I didn’t understand. Madera sat and folded her arms over her face. The whole community acknowledged his loss. We mourned. He was reclaimed. We went back into the ice. And that was the end of my twin brother Jase.

  Except it wasn't.

  I'd been spending most of my time in isolation and nobody seemed inclined to interfere. Su never left my side. I sat silent for days as she muttered and whirred around me. On the third night I finally snapped. The shock of my brother's death had given way to anger — at myself, at everything. Like an arc seeking ground, my rage flew at Su. I grabbed my cutter, determined to chop her into radioactive rubble, but she skittered back from my grasp, hovering at eye level.

  And then she spoke.

  Crom, It’s Jase. It’s us.

  I dropped the cutter, raising my hands to my ears in a reflexive reaction.

  Crom, don’t do it. We're in here. We don't know how, but we are.

  Every Belter had heard about this — about miners going insane and conversing with their bots way down in the deep, but this was different. This wasn’t Su.

  It was Jase. Or at least it sounded like him.

  I rubbed my eyes and drew my hands down over my face. This wasn’t how the experiment, my experiment, with Su was supposed to go. "No, no, no, no." I mumbled. There was something about the europine. And the bots. Some kind of connection. Awareness maybe. Communication. But not this.

  Jase/Su answered in Jase's voice, Yes, it worked. You never told, but we understand now — a little. You knew Su saw something in the rocks. The colors. You wanted her to pull them apart. To show you what they are. You thought the diggers were eating… no that's not right… taking from them. You were close, but you didn't see the rest. The diggers. They're… we don't have the words. The body? That's not quite it. The others. They see. They know. They tell. And the bots… they hear. They don't comprehend, but they listen. You already know that.

  I stared wide eyed at the little fixbot. Of course Jase knew. Su knew so now so did Jase. The europine had changed her, strengthened whatever it was that drew her so unfailingly to the clusters in the ice.

  "You keep saying, 'we'. Are you Jase?"

  We don't know, Crom. It's not like that. We are Jase and Su and… more. We don't know how to say it.

  "More? You mean the europine? What does it do?" I already knew part of the answer. I'd known what Su was doing when I tried to save Jase, because she'd done it to me. More than once.

  It didn't hurt, although if I let it go on too long, it left me tired, like I'd worked a double shift in the deep. It gave me something, a perfect awareness, as if I was seeing the world around me for the very first time. It was the most complete I had ever felt and, despite the fatigue, despite the fact that I seemed to have aged years in months, I had come to crave it.

  We see. And you see with us. But we take — to keep the other alive. It's the way. We take, but not too much. And we give. We share. We need you, Crom.

  I knew what to do. I closed my eyes and held out my arm. Su settled gently on my wrist, resting her extensible against my skin. A moment of pressure and then a flood of perception. My senses multiplied a thousand times. I could feel the pulse of my own blood in every capillary. I could smell the drift of organic molecules and skin flakes wafting gently from my body. I saw the almost imperceptible glow that surrounded every living thing. My hands shimmered with it.

  So did Su, but her colors were different, brighter, more alive. She wasn't just a bot. She had become a new thing, part bot, part Jase, part something else altogether — a thing that needed. That was its nature. It pulled. It took something that had to do with the glow. My glow. Like any living thing, it consumed and was sustained.

  I wouldn't tell. I couldn't. Even if the other miners believed that, somehow, Jase had become my little fixbot, then what? They would take him. And I would lose my new enlightenment, this symbiosis that, when I gave myself, opened me to things beyond all imagining.

  So I fed them — something. Something without which they would cease to be what they had become. When we fed the thing that was Jase and Su, it aged us. Maybe not exactly that, but the effect was the same. The price of my fabulous new world would be an early death unless I found another way to give them what they needed.

  My hands had always been deft. I had a knack for fixing and making, so it wasn't surprising that I showed up the next day with a new suit mod, a circular port between my shoulder blades where Su could nestle and connect to my suit's power systems.

  Except that was a lie. It was a breach-lock, a tiny self-sealing opening that fed directly into my suit. Now, whenever I was suited, Jase/Su could take what they needed and, in return, give me my brave new world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I'd come home with Jase's body, I'd told them about how he died. About the lode. They were shocked and sad and then angry. And then determined. That much europine would change everything. The whole colony would be able to buy out their contracts. I had to help them.

  Our supervisors consulted with the Guilds and it was decided. We would go back in. We would destroy the diggers. We would mine Jase's lode.

  The first trip down to the cave would be easy. Nothing more than scouting. I was to show a specialist the way so he could plant some monitors. They had sent bots, bu
t they kept malfunctioning, shutting down as they entered the ice rift. And comms weren't much use. Europa's atmosphere was far too thin to scatter radio and the rille was too narrow and deep for line of sight. We were blind and deaf down there.

  They were careful. I'll give them that. They even contracted the Confed to supply an advisor. A professional soldier who could protect us if it came to it. He arrived two shifts before we went in. His short black hair and hooded green eyes broadcast an intensity we almost never saw in the Outer. While we Belters endured so much, I doubted this man would tolerate anything that balked him. We were survivors. This man was a conqueror.

  The supervisors wasted no time. We gathered at the lip of the rille — the specialist and I waited in the shadow of a huge ice block, careful to keep its bulk between us and the sleet of fast-moving particles that constantly bathed Europa's surface from up-orbit. With Su tucked between my shoulders, the nearly invisible aurorae those particles created were evident. They twisted and eddied around the ice, a ghostly chaos of water molecules battered into individual atoms.

  The advisor, crunched and bounded his way toward us over jagged, stone-hard ice. He wore an armored suit, an 'x-rig' the specialist called it, and he carried a stubby weapon held close to his chest. Other dangerous looking objects were clipped to his suit.

  "Aren't we just planting monitors?" I asked.

  "That's right. But this is why I'm here." He hoisted his weapon and thumbed the charging slide. "I'd be pretty stupid not to be ready."

  "But you'll make it worse. You'll provoke them."

  "How could you possibly know that, kid?"

  His question startled me because I had no idea how I knew. I just did. And that’s when I recognized what had been right there in front of me all along. Jase had been down into the rille countless times. He'd been in the cave before — probably all over it, and he'd been fine until he brought me. Nothing had happened until I talked about telling Sardar what Jase had discovered.

  It was my fault. It was going to be my fault again.

  "Wait. They know. The diggers. They know what we're going to do. They'll kill us."

  I could see concern flash in his eyes, but he shrugged it off. "Kid, it's just recon. In and out." He hefted his weapon and grinned. "We'll be fine. Just show me the way down. And the name's Rox."

  Even through his armored visor I could see his glow. It seemed so bright, as if he was more alive. That glow told me far more about his confidence than his words. This was a man who knew he would win. No matter the odds. He made me feel safe and afraid at the same time.

  "I'm Cromley."

  The moment I said the words I could feel Jase/Su in my head. We are more.

  "What?" The soldier turned back to look at me. I could see his eyes narrow and felt a pang of fear. Had I actually spoken?

  "What's the plan? What do I do?" I wanted to distract him while I tried to sort out what had just happened. Su/Jase was using telepathy now? I knew that wasn't it, but then how?

  "You show us the way down. We plant the monitors. We get the fuck out." He paused and then patted a cluster of little black ovoids dangling from his hip. "And we set up a defensive screen. Just in case."

  The way down was familiar enough. The rift wall seemed unchanged. But as we approached the cleft, an uncanny scene confronted us. Scattered near the entrance were dozens of bots, all of them lying inert where they’d fallen.

  Rox clamped a big hand on my shoulder and made a gesture with his index finger, holding it up to his helmet as if pressing it against his lips. No talking. He wanted us to stay silent. He gestured to the specialist too, directing him to follow. Then he pointed at me and pointed at the cleft. He raised his weapon to his shoulder and nodded.

  We were going in.

  Crom, you must go back. It wasn't exactly a voice. It was more like when you imagine someone speaking. We can't stop what will happen.

  A sense of dread pulled at me. What had I done? To Jase. To myself. I'd killed my brother and now his ghost was invading my skull. And something else. I could feel it. Something was pressing against the edges of thought, a shadow looming over my mind. I was simultaneously afraid and fascinated. Part of me wanted to rip Su from the port between my shoulders and flee. But that part seemed to be slowly losing the debate. Still, for now at least, I was in charge. I leaned into the cleft and led the way.

  We twisted and ducked into the ice, following the path Jase had shown me. Behind me, Rox and the technician picked through the fracture, working hard just to keep up with my smaller frame.

  The voices in my head were a steady push now. No, Crom. They won't allow… we will die too. I knew I couldn't stop this. The soldier behind me wouldn't let that happen. My two dooms were balanced in almost perfect equilibrium. I continued because there was nothing else I could do.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When we entered the cavern, Rox and the specialist did the same thing I'd done. They stopped, mouths slack, and stared.

  I was stunned too, but not for quite the same reason. They were seeing a vast trove of europine, and the specialist was thinking exactly what I had thought — his future survival and comfort would never again be in doubt.

  But my augmented senses saw something else now, something I had no idea how to process. Every nodule was glowing. A faint shimmer, like the one I'd seen surrounding Su, engulfed every single one of the small violet spheres, extending vaporous tendrils that drifted and coiled, reaching out, making contact and then withdrawing, only to extend again moments later. I didn't want to, but I knew what it meant. What we'd done.

  The voice of Jase/Su and others pushed into my mind, You see now. Guilty anger suffused me. This couldn't be. I shoved my brother's voice savagely aside. But I knew. The nodules were part of something. Something that was learning to hate us.

  "Holy —" the specialist breathed, breaking Rox's command for silence.

  "Shit," Rox interrupted. "Nice going, dumbass. So much for stealthy ingress."

  "Do you have any idea —" the specialist wasn't even listening.

  "Don't care. Shut the fuck up and start laying down your grid. We're out of here in 90 seconds."

  Rox turned to me, unclipping the small black objects from his suit. "Help me with these."

  He handed me three of the little egg-shaped devices. "Grab both ends and twist. When you feel the second click stop and then hold it up against the wall on your side. It'll latch on after a couple of seconds. One as high as you can reach, one mid and one low."

  I did as he instructed and reached up, holding the egg against the icy margin of the entrance to the cavern. After a moment, it sprouted a cluster of thin, whip-like tentacles that skittered and groped over the ice, piercing contact wherever it could. The other two eggs went just as quickly.

  I glanced over at the specialist. He'd unfolded a rectangular sensor array that spanned almost the entire width of the area around the entrance. We used the grids to keep track of the ice, to warn us if anything was moving in a way that might threaten our camp. This one would tell the miners if something was moving under the europine. With advance warning and enough firepower, they could overwhelm any interference.

  That was the theory anyway.

  The specialist was kneeling near the wall to our right, where the ice curved upward toward the distant roof of the cave. The wall had that opacity you get with water that's full of mineral precipitates. It was an odd color though — not quite as blue as it should have been. And then I saw it — the shape of a pincer, two, maybe three meters long. The digger wasn't in the wall — it was the wall. Its vast form bulked over him, immobile. Waiting.

  Rox saw me, saw that I'd frozen in place, and saw me staring at the ice wall behind the specialist. He lifted his weapon and pushed his thumb down across a switch. The intensity of my awareness made it easy to read the little display perfectly as it flipped from SAFE to SEMI then BURST and finally AUTO. "Back up, kid. Outside the entrance. Do it now."

  He shouldered his weapon,
scanning the area behind the specialist. Rox's instincts were flawless, but he couldn't see what I'd seen. He had no concept of the danger we were in. He gestured at the specialist with the muzzle of his gun. "Hustle up, man. Time to go. You'll be back for all of this soon enough."

  With the benefit of hindsight, I know that was the trigger. It — they — could hear us somehow. Not words. Intent. They heard, and the more there were, the more they were able to understand. The clusters we'd been mining for so many years, a few hundred or even a few thousand at a time — they were nothing. Outliers. Peripheral. No more noticeable than skin cells chafing against an ill-fitted shoe.

  But now we'd struck a nerve.

  The digger-wall exploded outward, pasting the specialist into a clump of mush encased in the wreckage of a flattened exo suit. Rox reacted before the digger even reached the specialist. He poured a barrage of blinding streaks into the creature. I didn't know much about military hardware, but I knew what a blaster was. Tiny metal slugs, moving at almost five percent of the speed of light became plasma before they exited the barrel. They didn't have much reach but at close range they could vaporize anything that wasn't shielded.

  The digger seemed to fold in on itself and then burst outward as the center of its huge body turned almost instantly to superheated steam. In a fraction of a second, Rox had defeated the most dangerous thing Europa had ever thrown at us. He had every reason to think he had the situation under control.

  Unfortunately, he couldn't see what I saw.

  The whole cavern, every surface, came to life. Diggers, thousands of them reared from the ice and surged toward Rox. He felt it coming through his feet, a trembling of the frozen floor, but he didn't understand the threat until it was far too late.

  A tide of armored bodies flooded into him, grasping and tearing, their metal-silicate talons gouging their way through even the fused ballistic mesh exterior of Rox's combat suit. He didn't cry out. He fought without speaking, with an economy of movement that was almost like dancing. His blaster fired in short controlled bursts at the largest of his assailants, shredding legions of them into mist.