And evidently its knowledge of body language gesture algorithms was very exact. At that moment I “heard” a high-frequency communication-burst, coming from a point outside the building, reach out and touch receiver cells in the four robots, and, yes, also in the nervous system of the girl. The so-called ‘girl’. The message ran: “Bio-chemical gestalt reactions of unincorporated Lamech unit display rejection-behavior. Probability 89% disbelief; he will initiate aggressive-defensive complex motif shortly. Neutralize. Terminate experiment. Log expended resources as wasted . . . ”
I must have sped up then. The sound in the room dopplered down the scale, and I felt a familiar burning heat in my limbs as my muscle pressure increased, a dizzy moment while high-speed superconductive strands took over the signal-trans-mission from my nervous system. And I jumped into the middle of the damn fighting robots.
Yes, I hit one with the green stick in mid-jump, and, yes, the blow struck the joint where the slugthrower was coming up out of its cleaning holster, so that the shell went past my head rather than into it, and hit the robot behind me in the magazine box. And yes, my skin turned mirror shiny where the aiming lasers touched me, reflect-ing them away, so that the beamriding smart bullets (which followed those beams) popped their tiny retroes and slammed back toward the third machine they had been shot out from, sending lines of gunfire stitching up the sides of two of the fighting units. One of them was hit in its target-finding lens-array and vomited napalm in my direction, but missed me by a country mile. I ended up with my foot broken where I struck the fourth machine, but I toppled it from its legs.
Yay and hurray for me. And no, being knocked over did not stop machine num-ber four from shooting a smart-grenade into my guts, or taking off my left leg below the knee with a fan of energy. The grenade did not go off for some damn reason (counter-electronic built into my goddamn belly-button?) it just passed through me, but that was enough to uncoil some ropy blood-colored spaghetti all over from in-side of me, (amazing how weird and ugly intestines look, when they’re yours) and for me to lose all sensation in my legs, and for hydrostatic shock (which should have killed me instantly) to blow out my eardrums and crack several teeth. I was slapped to the grass by some immense force (or immense clumsiness) and the un-godly pain which wracked my every torn muscle, the disgusting weakness and nau-sea, the sensation of freezing and burning convinced me that I had about two seconds left to live.
And what a goddamn stupid life it had been. How old was I? An hour? Less? Not counting time when I was asleep. My first memory was falling from a blown-up landing craft. If I had had any life before that second, if I was going to have any life after this second, well, you sure as hell could not prove it by me.
It is amazing what it feels like when your blood pressure drops to zero, or what it is like to see a red flood sweep out from what had once been your midsection all across the pretty grass and pretty flowers. (How long can a brain keep thinking once severe blood-loss cuts all its oxygen off?) Even the weeds were going to last longer than I was.
I was still sliding across the grass, actually, still being carried forward by the momentum of my original kick, or maybe I was being blown back by the shot that killed me. The whole combat had not taken an entire second to run its course.
My body (I could feel it dimly) was still jerking, like a slab of meat being slammed by a fire-poker. That was small-caliber antipersonnel shot coming out of machine number three, which was hunching over me like an eager spider, two pair of twin-barrels hammering away. Blue smoke trembled from hot barrels. The sound seemed so dim. I wondered how I could hear it at all, me with my eardrums blown out. It should have been impossible for me to hear anything. One more unanswered ques-tion in a short, strange, stupid, pointless life. One more impossible thing.
Damn liars. They had been telling the truth all along. I guess I was not a human being. Not even close.
But was I still alive . . . ? Maybe for a second or two longer. Alive. And that just made it too damn early to quit.
So I reached up and thrust my fingers in a knife-hand blow into the weak under-carriage of machine number three, where the leg-action elements joined the main power-box. The force of the blow rocked the war-machine backwards enough to ele-vate the blazing gun-barrels. Machine number four got a friendly dose of friendly fire.
My hand went through the armor into the interior of the machine. Then my fingernails touched the power-core, the computing center, and signals from the bio-circuits in my hand started to trace the communication channels back to the main brain running the whole show . . .
I began to see numbers in my head . . . timing synch information, addressing data, code/decode couplings, protection switch commands . . . Then, nothing. I flopped like a puppet with its strings cut, falling back, all my limbs dead and numb, paralyzed.
Cutie-pie, the girl emissary, had taken that long (her nervous system was bio-logical, remember, not photoelectronic) to twitch her thumb. I “heard” the signal come out of the box in her pocket and “saw” it touch some foreign metal objects implanted along my spine and hindbrain. Just some nerve blocks they had put in, simple as a pass-interrupt switch. Prisoner pulling garbage you don’t like, and zap, all voluntary nerve trunks cut. Even if the prisoner has some sort of gee-whiz-wow wonder-junk built into his body by the miracles of modern science, so what? Doesn’t matter what weapons he has in his hands or built into his armpit; if he can’t fire them, he’s a meat bag.
So I lay there, one leaking meat bag. Still conscious, even though the little black sparks were getting brighter every heartbeat, and the scene around me was getting dimmer. Funny how it felt like I was floating, falling. Funny how you don’t need conscious control of your nervous system to drool blood all over yourself. Blood was coming out of my nose also. I bet I looked all yummy and kissable.
She said, “The experiment has confirmed our suspicions; when put under pressure of immediate death, subconscious pre-conditioning took over. His reaction was to attempt to seize a communication node, and link into our mental system. The coded addresses his probes began to form were for deep-archives, for history data from the estimated launch-dates had the attack on Earth been ours. His mission was investigatory, not unlike the others . . . ”
Others . . . ? What the hell others?
“We conclude that the Earth-ship will not destroy us without proof of culpability.” I noticed her lips were not moving. I noticed I was deaf. This was not coming in through my ears.
“Can he hear us on this channel?” A high-speed zap of communication flickered through the room. Where was it coming from?
“Yes. Note the electrochemical changes in auditory nerves; his brain interprets this as speech.” Her voice was still pretty, or, at least, my dying brain was hearing it that way.
“How? We still do not detect any machines or electronic circuitry. No antennae. We removed all the energetic cells and manipulators our micro-probes detected in his nervous system.”
“Others may have been too small to detect. Or they grew back.” She sounded thoughtful.
“Grew? Grew?! It has only been a few minutes!”
And my brain was interpreting this as if it were a conversation. It was not. It was one mind talking to itself; an internal monologue.
One system, one collective, housed in many brains and neural nets, biological or not biological, as needed. A system old enough to have done the deed? If so, what had been the motive? Who would fight a war across the uncountable distances and meaningless emptiness of space? The damn nothingness is so damn big and so damn empty that everything men dream about doing. every cause they dream about fighting for, or against, means not a damn thing; not a damn thing at all; not hatred, not revenge, not anything.
The part of the collective mind I thought of as the cute girl was saying to her other selves: “We have no information about the sciences of Old Earth, or what developments might have taken place, over the centuries. Without information, it is premature to form expectations, irra
tional to be surprised.”
She turned to me: “Call off your attack! We have been forced to hurt you only in our self-defense, because you continued to resist. Surely that is legitimate! You cannot prove us guilty of the ancient crime against the Earth; we are not your subjects, you are not our king. Call off your ship.”
I could not talk or move and I was bleeding—bleeding heavily—bleeding to death. So I merely thought to myself: “How do you want me to do that, babe? Am I supposed to be able to talk to my Ship just by thinking at her?”
Without any fuss or bother, the Ship’s Voice came softly into my brain: “That is within the operational parameters of your present somatoform and body-system. Unless that was a rhetorical question, Marshall Lamech?”
I thought: “This channel is not secure.”
The Voice of the Ship: “Analysis of the initial code-address packages you retrieved, before contact was cut, from the deep archive communication system has been fed to the targeting computer. The main energy source-points for communication through-out the Avernus Collective appear to be grouped in a centralized bunker beneath a range of tectonicly stable mountains to the West of your present location . . . ”
Wait. What was going on now? Had the Ship somehow read my mind? Or some subconscious part of my mind had acted without my knowledge, and broadcast to the Ship just the tiny beginnings of what I had tried to steal from the Collective communication node. So the Ship now knew where the enemy HQ was hidden.
If they were the enemy . . .
The beauty of the Ship’s Voice came again: “Firing solutions are obtained for cen-tral communications bunkers and for the high-level satellite arrays which house the main neural network of the Avernus Collective. There appear to be no secondary or back-up systems present; therefore this single operation should win unparalleled strategic advantage.”
The Ship was talking about a blow which would lobotomize the Collective’s hivemind, and maybe kill off everyone on the planet.
Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I could not help but picture all those babies out there, once their robot-nurses keeled over, crying and crying for milk . . . The Ship: “We are in go/no-go situation. As the only human member of staff command, and therefore supreme commander-in-chief of all armed forces of Earth, the decision must be yours. Awaiting instructions.”
The ignorant amnesiac who had maybe a few seconds left to live? I was not exactly in the best shape to be weighing evidence and making careful judgment-calls. “Return my memory to me so I can make the goddamn decision . . . ”
“Unable to comply. This mission is still on a need-to-know basis, and you are a prisoner behind enemy lines . . . ”
I gave her an order which was anatomically impossible and probably illegal in most jurisdictions.
And the Ship replied: “I will interpret that as an order to restore bioconductive neural strand linkages to your command, since this action would be necessary before any sexually reproductive features can be initiated . . . ”
The bad guys must have broken the encryption on my communications just as I raised my head, because I overhead three high-speed zaps of communica-tion flicker through the room, one part of the Collective talking to another part.
First message: “His ship will not fire without his command. All of our assumptions were wrong: this is not merely another man-shaped expendable war-unit; he is the real Marshal Lamech! The original template! He will not issue the firing-order even in the extreme of death, since he cannot kill the innocent, and he does not know if we are guilty . . . ”
Second message: “His internal nervous system has changed its configuration; the nerve-blocks are being penetrated by an unknown signal, or he had grown bypass tissue . . . ”
The answer: “The experiment is an utter failure. Kill him at once.”
And maybe the Collective was not so collected and centralized as I had thought. Because when the girl heard the kill-order come down, she shouted, “NO!” and stepped into the line of fire, trying to protect me.
I did not see any signal traffic when she did it. It was not an outside order. It was just her.
I swear to God I do not know how it was possible for me to jump to my feet with my guts still hanging out. I was sure my nerves were dead; bioconductive strand must have been getting instructions from my brain and jerking dead muscles. Sparks making a severed frog leg flex, I guess. Red intestines slapped against my legs like a wet towel, and I drove my hand through in into the control processor of machine number three, same hole I had made before, but this time I had all the commands ready. On my fingertips, so to speak.
One group of my orders took control of war-machine three and had it open fire on its friends with every gun and energy-antennae. A second group bollixed the local communications net, so echoes of false orders were reproducing themselves, shout-ing back and forth across the room in a little chorus of chaos, setting off sprinklers and opening and shutting doors. A third group demanded answers from the archives.
But the archives were closed; the lines were dead. The Collective was too fast for me. I could detect some local system traffic in the area, though, and I could see a huge number of channels turn over a huge number of orders to something in the area, even if I could not read those orders . . .
Even though I was deaf, when treads a yard wide tore up the soil, I could hear it through my broken teeth. Nine or ten heavy armored vehicles had been buried under the gardens here, and now they rose up, saplings and hedges toppling from their upper turrets, yards of green turf sliding away, fountains and statues being shoul-dered aside, earth crumbling. Not little police units like my four preying mantis friends here. No. These were the big boys. Battleship guns swung my way and centered on me.
I assume they opened fire with everything they had, throwing out a few thousand pounds of shells per second in my direction. I also assume that some sort of primary assault orbit-to-ground directed-energy fire from the Ship cut through the roof blocking the canyon outside at that same point in time, shattering the huge plate glass behind me and burning away all the antennae and periscopes of the supertanks (and perhaps of few chucks of melted outer armor.) Because I assume they must have been blind not to hit me.
I also assume that the inside Earth-normal air pressure was somewhat higher than the native Avernus outside air-pressure. I assume that is what picked me up and flung me headlong backward out the window.
All this is assumption. What I remember is those huge battleship guns swinging to cover me, and then, after a moment of noise beyond noise, I woke to find myself floating again. A nice safe, comfortable sensation, falling is. Reminds me of zero-gee.
I still had the robot, fighting machine number three, in one arm, and, somehow, I had the girl in the other arm, who I was beginning to believe was not a robot. She did not seem that hurt. Not compared to me. The wind whipped her long black hair around her as we fell, and her eyes were all white in their sockets.
We were falling though the beam of sunlight which slanted down from the huge melted circle, lipped with white-hot molten stuff, which had appeared in the metal roof over the canyon. Windows and windows slid past us, and not-quite-people-shaped silhouettes stood and watched us fall.
I could feel her warmth in my arms, I swear I scented the perfume of her hair, despite the stinks and burnings and vapors we fell through.
With no eardrums, the whole scene was ghostly quiet. Eerie, actually.
I said to myself, “Ship! I am feeling sort of like an indestructible god at the moment. This techno-crap the Designer stuffed into my body can doing fucking anything, right? Tell me how I can save the girl.”
Really, I wasn’t too worried about the three hundred yard fall. I was assuming, after what I’d just been through, that my super-body could let me hop out of any crater I made and just dust myself off, smirking. But the girl might not be so lucky.
The Ship Voice came loud and clear, as if she were right by my ear. I wondered why the signal was so strong. “There
is no parameter for that operation, Marshall Lamech. The concussive force from a fall from that height, given the frail construction of her body, will most likely result in death. However, a communications bio-filament inserted immediately into her central nervous system should allow a read out of brain-cell charges sufficient to construct a mnemonic read-out . . . ”
“You mean I can suck her soul out and put it somewhere else? Give her a new body, new life?” I had already stuck my finger into her ear, and I felt my fingernail dissolve into a swarm of tiny assemblers, sending strands into her skull.
“Not at all, Marshall. It may provide us with some useful postmortem infor . . . ” I hit the ground and the lights went out for me too.
More floating sensations. This time it was because I was stunned.
When I came to, I was still standing within sight of the place where I fell; I could see it through remote cameras. I was on a green hill, with pools and fountains gathered around the foot of the hill, and chunks of broken canyon-roof armor were toppling with slow vast grandeur to the gardens to each side. One whole side of the canyon had had all of its windows blown out. The sunlight was slanting in through several holes melted in the roof.
The signal traffic in the area was a hash. The Collective was sending unsynchronized squawks from one segment of itself to another, all up and down the canyon-metropolis. Arguing, contradicting itself. I saw some war machines firing at each other, surrounded by toppling building-structures and broken glass. When one started to turn its guns toward me, an intolerable flash like the wrath of God smote down through a hole in the canyon roof-armor and burnt it like a bug under a magnifying glass.
It all made sense. The reason why the Voice of the Ship had been so loud and clear had been because she had infiltrated and subverted the communications satellites. Her directed-energy main battery had been making pin-point shots far beyond her unassisted targeting range. Not a problem if the local satellites acted as spotters, and sent her targeting info.
Breach the Hull Page 10
