by Rick Partlow
“Nice job, Caitlyn,” she heard from Franks, his voice sounding tiny and distant in her ear as it warred for attention with the pounding of her pulse. “I’m past them and in position. Get to the east entrance ASAP.”
Carr rounded the back of the band shell, intending to use the cover to head straight for the east entrance…but, as she came around the stairs that led up to the stage, into a cone of shadow thrown by the shell, she ran shoulder-first into a man’s chest, knocking him to the ground and nearly falling herself.
Recovering her balance, barely, she brought up her submachine gun and nearly fired a burst into the man before what she was seeing registered in her brain. It hadn’t been a man with whom she’d collided, it had been a teenager, a young one; and he wasn’t alone. Four other teens were clustered in the shadow of the stairs: two girls and two boys, all dressed in what she recognized as expensive designer clothes---or pirated knock-offs, it was hard to tell. But she could tell from the hairstyles and body art that these were the children of privilege; and she could tell by the smell that they’d been smoking something---maybe marijuana, maybe something synthetic, but certainly something illegal for minors to possess---and hadn’t obeyed the evacuation sirens for fear of being caught.
They stared at her, eyes wide, too stoned to run; and she stared back for just a heartbeat, the bottom falling out of her stomach.
“Franks,” she transmitted, “we have a problem.”
* * *
Drew Franks fought to control his breathing as he took a knee behind the cover of a solid granite memorial plaque that occupied the center of a bronze disc about a hundred meters from the archway that was the north entrance to the Central City courtyard. He didn’t know what the plaque memorialized and didn’t try to read it; his head hurt too badly to focus on the letters. He hoped to hell he could see to shoot, because the armored men leading the biomechs had given up any idea of pursuing Agent Carr and were, instead, continuing their mission and heading his way.
“Targets are making for the north entrance,” he announced. “Everyone get back from their entrances and get under cover.”
He brought his carbine to his shoulder, resting its barrel across the top of the memorial plaque, and sighted in on the approaching group. They were still about two hundred meters away, and that was probably close enough. He laid the targeting reticle over the lead man, putting it at the center of his chest. He was wearing body armor, but it didn’t really matter if the rounds killed him; he just needed him stalled.
“Missile launch in thirty seconds,” he heard Shannon Stark’s voice announce. Somewhere above him, she was riding that assault lander in.
He stroked the trigger and had barely registered the recoil when he heard Caitlyn Carr on his earpiece.
“Franks,” she said, “we have a problem.”
The lead bratva gunman tumbled head over heels, his weapon spinning away and Franks shifted his aim to the next man, just a few meters to the right.
“We have five civilian teenagers by the band shell about half a klick from the east entrance,” Carr went on.
“Get them out!” Franks snapped, head hurting even worse as he fired again. The surge of pain and desperation threw his aim off and his burst took the armored man in the left arm. He spun from the impact, blood spraying as the 8mm slugs went through the lighter armor over his bicep and straight through. The last man of the group opened fire, spraying a long burst at Franks that forced him to duck down behind the stone memorial.
“Get out now!” he repeated. “That missile is launching any second! Get them out the east entrance and get to cover!”
Even as he gave the order, he knew there just wasn’t enough time…
“I can go help…” he heard Abshay Patel offer, but he cut him off immediately.
“Negative!” he snapped. “Stay in position! You’ll never make it in time!” He ground his teeth and made a decision. “Colonel Stark! I need a hold on the…”
“Missile is away,” Stark announced. “Ten seconds to impact.”
Oh shit…
Franks ignored the rounds impacting on the stone marker and took off for the arch of the north entrance. His head felt like it was going to explode but he ignored it and sprinted even harder. The glowing white arch that stretched above the entrance to the park seemed like the gates of heaven, ever unattainable even as it grew ever closer.
“…not going to make it…” He heard the voice over the roaring in his ears but he wasn’t sure if it was Carr’s voice or his own.
The archway was passing by above him when a wall of overpressure slammed into him like the hammer of God and his world was filled with light and heat and pain for a moment that lasted all eternity…and then, abruptly, ended.
Chapter Twenty Nine
The grey sky clothed the dark and lifeless plains in shadow like a shroud hanging over a dead world. Jason McKay didn’t know what he had expected to find when he finally stepped out onto the surface of Novoye Rodina---well, he hadn’t known until he’d seen the video from the drones they’d launched from orbit, anyway---but this hadn’t been it.
A hard wind swept across the close-packed black dirt, a howling he could hear over his helmet’s external pickups even if he couldn’t feel it. Bits of sand and dirt pattered against his visor, along with the occasional raindrop, until he turned away from the wind and back toward the lander that had brought him to this place. Vinnie and Jock were stepping down the ramp behind him, their weapons held at the ready even though they hadn’t detected a single sign of life since they’d arrived in the system forty-eight hours ago.
There’d been no mine fields, no picket ships and no early warning stations to greet them as they’d transited the wormhole; they’d already known there wouldn’t be from the probes that had preceded them, but they’d still wasted a complement of Area Denial missiles through the gate before the two ships had passed through. By the time the drones had reported back from the surface, they had ceased to be surprised by their findings.
“What the hell happened here?” Vinnie asked over their command channel, his eyes scanning back and forth inside his helmet as if he didn’t believe what he was seeing.
They were all outfitted in full vacc armor, despite an atmosphere made habitable by a growth of hardy and probably genetically engineered lichen that coated every rocky surface on the planet and a layer of algae meters thick in the world’s oceans. Nothing else survived, probably due to the dangerously high background radiation, which was why they were wearing the armor. Even with the armor, it wouldn’t be safe to stay on-planet for more than a few days at a time.
“I don’t know, Vinnie,” McKay admitted. “But I know where to go to find out.”
He looked past the lander, past the half dozen others that were unloading platoons of Marines, squads of Special Ops troops and teams of technicians, to the cyclopean structures that loomed above the dead plains just a kilometer away. The seamless, black walls towered a hundred meters above them in a pattern that seemed haphazard at first, until you looked at it from multiple angles…then it came to appear geometric, but a geometry that had never emerged from a human mind.
One entrance broke those mysterious shapes: a half-circle ten meters across, with no door. Drones sent in through the entrance ceased to report after a few minutes, but the one thing they all managed to transmit back before they went quiet was a total lack of radiation inside.
“Bozhe moy!” McKay heard the exclamation muttered over the general channel and turned back to the lander to see D’mitry Podbyrin stepping down the ramp, seeming small somehow inside his vacc armor.
The old Russian was staring at the…alien, just say it, McKay told himself…the alien structure with eyes wide and full of what seemed like horror and awe. Podbyrin looked as if he wanted to go down to his knees, but he stayed upright with a hand on one of the ramp struts for support.
“I’d forgotten,” he nearly whispered the words. “I’d forgotten what it looked like, Jason. I�
�d forgotten the feel of it. How could I forget this?” He turned to McKay. “We are going in?”
“In a bit,” McKay told him. “I’m going in first, to make sure it’s safe. You’ll stay out here with Sergeant-Major Crossman.” McKay motioned to the Special Operations NCO who was approaching their lander with his squad in tow. “I’ll send someone to bring you in as soon as I check things out.”
“I feel as if things are pushing against my memory, Jason.” Podbyrin told him, his voice haunted. “Things I don’t want to know…but I have to know.”
“Not much longer, D’mitry,” McKay assured him, putting a hand on his shoulder. He turned back to Vinnie and Jock. “Let’s go.”
McKay hesitated just in front of the entrance, staring into the shadows. The featureless black walls absorbed the glow from the spotlights the technicians had set up as if resisting any attempt to penetrate the darkness.
“Admiral Minishimi,” McKay broadcast, “I’m about to head inside. Communications will probably cut out once I’m in there.”
“You’re a general, you know,” came the reply after a moment of signal lag. “You have people to do these things for you.” He could hear the worry in her voice, but also the wry grin.
“I’ve been waiting for this since I was a Lieutenant, Joyce,” he told her. “I’m not staying in the rear with the gear this time.”
“Good luck, Jason. Don’t get yourself killed…then I’d be stuck dealing with Kage all alone.”
McKay waved to Tom Crossman and D’mitry Podbyrin, who stood by the banks of spotlights, then stepped inside. The broad entranceway stretched off beyond the reach of the lights, the far end lost in darkness. The utility lights mounted on the helmets of their vacc suits snapped on automatically only a few meters into the tunnel, yet they didn’t illuminate much more than the dust particles in the air. Yet they kept walking in silence---almost, McKay thought, as if they were all afraid to speak, afraid that a spoken word would bring down some hidden menace concealed in the darkness.
Finally, after what had to have been at least fifty meters, the corridor ended in a huge, undefinable open space that taunted them with utter darkness; and McKay was forced to stop. He shone the light from his helmet all around but saw absolutely nothing.
“Well,” Vinnie commented irreverently, “this sucks.”
“Hey assholes!” Jock said, and McKay could tell he had turned on his external speakers. “Turn the fucking lights on!”
McKay thought hard for a moment, then reached for the latches of his helmet and pulled it off, feeling a cold draft across his face as he let it swing backwards on its hinges and hang behind his head against the suit’s backpack. The air had a stale taste to it, like the inside of a tomb…but the readings had said there was no radiation in here.
“Vklyuchite svet,” he said in Russian. Turn on the light.
And there was light. A diffuse yellow glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, the light revealed a huge, irregular interior structure that was somehow open and enclosed at once. The upper section was mostly open, though slanted and jagged portions of wall segmented it off in places for no apparent reason. The lower section, though, was portioned off by a curving and seemingly uninterrupted curtain of whatever black material made up the rest of the structure. Sticking up above the curtains in some of the portioned off sections were parts of…somethings. Things that could have been machinery if machinery was grown rather than built.
McKay realized he’d been holding his breath and let it hiss out.
“Wow,” Vinnie said quietly.
“Did I do that?” McKay muttered.
Something caught McKay’s eye, a static-flicker of white light above one of the…rooms? He supposed he could call them that. It repeated and he noted the location more clearly this time.
“This way,” he said, leading Jock and Vinnie deeper into the enclosure.
The distance was deceptive: when he’d seen the flash, he’d estimated it as no more than a hundred meters away, but ten minutes later they were still walking. The low, curving walls began to close in on them and several times McKay thought he was hopelessly lost…but each time, another flash would appear and he would set off again.
“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Vinnie asked over his external speakers, and McKay almost felt that the words broke a spell under which he’d fallen.
“Probably not,” he admitted, hand clenching nervously on the butt of his carbine. “But we’re here and I can’t think of anything else to do.” He had a sudden thought. “See if you can reach anyone on the radio.”
“Teague, this is Mahoney,” Vinnie transmitted and McKay could hear it echoing over the speakers inside his helmet. “Do you read? Teague, you read me?”
They waited a moment, but heard no reply.
“All right then,” McKay said with a shrug and set off again towards the intermittent flashing. “We keep going.”
Finally, after another ten minutes of winding through the maze, they came to a large enclosure, at least a hundred meters long and half that wide, filled with…something. McKay wanted to call it a machine, but that didn’t seem to fit it. It was more like a living thing, or a living organ from a living thing, perhaps. It was irregular in shape, bulging and rounded and narrower at one end than the other, and it seemed to…breathe somehow. As they grew closer to it, McKay thought he discerned openings at each end, almost analogous to a mouth and an anus.
“What the hell is that thing?” McKay murmured. Then he blinked with a sudden thought. He repeated the question, this time in Russian. “Chto eto za delo?”
“I imagine it’s what you came here to find,” a voice answered in perfect Russian.
McKay heard Jock curse as the three of them spun around, weapons raised, to see a man in a Protectorate uniform standing where no one had been only moments before. He was tall and young-looking, handsome in an archaic sort of way with dark hair swept back in a style that had been in fashion nearly two centuries ago. He appeared to be unarmed and was eyeing them casually, as if he’d just stepped off the street.
“Who the hell are you?” McKay asked, remembering to speak Russian. He knew Vinnie understood it, though he had trouble speaking it conversationally, and Jock knew some of the language though probably not enough to follow what was being said without using the translator built into his ‘link. “Where did you come from?”
If the man was disconcerted by the weapons pointed his way, he didn’t show it. He seemed calm and composed, even happy to see them.
“You can call me Misha,” he said. “And I have always been here.”
“Isn’t that all cryptic,” Vinnie said on their private frequency and McKay heard it on his ear bud.
“Where is everyone else?” McKay asked him. “What happened to the rest of the Protectorate colonists?”
“There is no one else,” Misha told them, his voice sounding wistful. “Not anymore.” He shrugged. “They had served their purpose.”
“No one else?” Vinnie repeated, speaking in slow, halting Russian. “What happened to them all?”
“Hold up,” McKay interrupted. “You said that,” he pointed at the huge organic-looking mass that took up most of the room, “is what we came here to find. What do you mean?”
“It’s the heart of this facility,” Misha replied. “It’s why I am here. And, more importantly to you, it’s what produced the army that the Protectorate used against you.”
“This is the…fabricator type machine,” McKay realized, eyes going wide. “The thing you used to make the biomechs.” He hadn’t said “biomech,” of course; not in Russian. Instead he had used the term biologicheskaya mashina, or “biological machine.”
“That is a good way to describe them,” Misha said, nodding. “And not just what was made but the thing that made it as well.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jock said---in English, over their team frequency. “If this is the duplicator thing, where’s all the support mach
inery? The Protectorate would have ramps, conveyor belts, power-loaders…hell, a road built out to this thing!”
“None of this makes any sense,” Vinnie grumbled agreement. “Where the fuck is everyone?”
McKay glanced at the man in the Protectorate officer’s uniform, the man who had called himself Misha, and frowned, a nagging suspicion forming in his mind.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
“Not yet,” the man answered, his voice pleasant, his lean face smiling. “If I’m provided a sufficient database---it will have to be inside this structure for me to access it---I can learn it in a few hours.”
McKay felt a tingle down his spine as he realized the implications of that statement. He took a step back from the thing that appeared to be a young Russian man.
“You’re an artificial intelligence,” McKay stated, and was surprised to hear the accusatory tone in his own voice.
“Approximately,” Misha confirmed with a very human shrug. “If I understand your technical terms correctly, I would be better termed a ‘sentient system,’ but you have the general idea.”
“Hold up,” Vinnie interjected, then remembered to say it in Russian and stumbled on a bit awkwardly. “You…are you a Protectorate computer? Or do you belong to this,” he waved a hand around demonstrably, “…this place?”
“I am older than the Protectorate,” the thing that looked like a man answered, what could have been amusement in its eyes. “In fact, I am older than any human government. Before your ancestors stacked one rock on another, I waited here alone.”
“Then why do you look human?” Vinnie wanted to know.
“This,” Misha passed a hand before itself, “is an illusion, an avatar with no substance. You would call it a hologram, although the methods used to produce it are somewhat different. I adapted it to deal with the Protectorate refugees who took shelter here.” The image smirked. “My previous avatar, the one left by my creators, alarmed them.”
