The Cyber Chronicles 09: Precipice

by T C Southwell

  "Yes, almost."

  "Either they have, or they haven't, which is it?" Sabre asked.

  "Host Researcher Martis is inspecting it."

  "He's not a host researcher anymore, so quit calling him one. No more Myon Two jargon, got it? When we come into contact with outlaws, your men had better keep their mouths shut. I'll do the talking. Get your men on board; we're going to be leaving soon."

  "Right, okay."

  Sabre bounded up the steps, leaving Thestan at the bottom, and made his way to the hospital, where Martis and Estrelle were checking the equipment. They looked up with hesitant smiles, and Martis came over to him.

  "How are you doing?"

  "You mean apart from the fact that my head's full of ridiculous, illogical rubbish and I feel like an elephant's sitting on my chest? Just great."

  "Is that how you're dealing with it, by dismissing it as ridiculous rubbish?"

  "That's what it is."

  Martis shook his head. "I suppose for now we should be glad you're still able to function, but at some point you're going to have to deal with it."

  "Or what?"

  "Or become psychotic. Those emotions seem ridiculous to a machine, but humans need them, so you're going to have to face them."

  The cyber tilted his head. "What do you need them for?"

  "To be human."

  "I'm not a machine, and I don't have time to deal with it now."

  Martis said, "That's debatable. You're at least forty per cent programmed, and until now the rest was memories and a small amount of experience. Now you've just had a shitload of humanity dumped on you. Sort through it, don't just push it aside."

  "I don't want to sort through it right now, so piss off, okay?"

  The tech raised his hands. "Okay, don't blow a gasket."

  "And no dumb machine metaphors either."

  "Okay, you're pissed off, I get it."

  "Good."

  The husky tones of Scorpio's voice came from outside, announcing a translocation in thirty seconds. Sabre cursed, heading for the door. The translocation stasis field gripped him before he made it back onto the dock, and when he staggered free of its stifling embrace one of Fairen's aides came into the dock and hurried over.

  "Overlord Fairen has translocated to within two hours of the Dellan Station, saving you a nine-hour flight, sir. He must leave immediately on urgent business."

  Sabre nodded, and the aide gestured to the workers' foreman, who spoke into a tiny microphone on his cheek, which sprouted from an earpiece. Workers streamed from the battle cruiser's hull, floated down on antigravity platforms and gathered up their equipment before vanishing out of the dock. Patches of Pathos' original shiny black paint remained, but it added to her ratty appearance. Re-entering the ship, Sabre went to the ultra-modern bridge. Pathos was no more than three or four years old, he calculated, and had all the latest hi-tech equipment. Data screens and consoles lined the bridge’s smooth grey bulkheads, and the crew sat at smooth, contoured dark grey workstations, each equipped with a monitor and keypad. Thestan sat in the ergonomic black command chair, and his officers manned their stations, powering up the drives.

  Sabre stopped beside the commander and watched the last of the workers file out of the dock. The dock doors slid shut and a warning claxon brayed outside. The battle cruiser floated up as the dock's space doors rumbled open. Pathos drifted out and moved away from the blood-red city ship, whose extremities were folded close to her hull, the long, segmented tail stretched out behind. Starlight glinted on the ancient, scarred ship, a veteran of many battles, judging by her pitted flanks and gouged arms, some of them remnants of Fairen's ramming the Moth Ship to save him.

  When the Scorpion Ship had shrunk to fit into the screens, a shimmer of white light engulfed it and a gravity shockwave rippled outwards, then it was gone. Sabre fingered the bracelet on his wrist and turned to Thestan.

  "Get the hell out of my chair."

  The commander rose and moved away, and Sabre took his place. "You're demoted to sub-commander, pass it on. Since Fairen brought us closer to the Dellan Station and left Kole behind, I'm going to assume that he told him to catch up. Set course for the Dellan Station."

  Thestan relayed the order to the cyber pilot, and Sabre frowned at the screens as they headed for the closest corridor. He had grown accustomed to the Scorpion Ship's method of instant travel, and disliked the idea of spending two hours cooped up with a bunch of enforcers. The tension on the bridge made Sabre's nerves jangle, adding to his foul mood.

  That, plus the dark lump of emotional trauma that sat in the back of his mind like a crouching beast, making his breath catch every so often in an irrational emotional reaction, stretched his frayed nerves to breaking point. Martis was right, he wanted to find a dark corner and curl up in it to escape this hopeless quest and its inevitable failure. After half an hour he stood up.

  "Thestan, take over, I'm going to have a rest. I hope you've cleared your shit out of my cabin."

  The sub-commander stared over his head. "I'll have it done now."

  Sabre glanced around at the rest of the officers, most of whom looked away, frowning. He stepped closer to Thestan, and a muscle jumped in the sub-commander's jaw. Sabre glared up at the tall man.

  "Oh, I get it, Thestan, I really do. You're not used to taking orders from a damned cyber, are you? And yeah, I say 'I' and 'me' and even 'my'." He glanced around again. "You're all going to have a tough time with it, I can tell. But you'd better bloody well get used to it, and fast, understand? And you'd better start tacking a damned 'sir' onto the end of those clipped sentences. I know what you're thinking. You've got four cybers on this ship, and I'm only one. Take me back to your cronies on Myon Two, and you're heroes, right?"

  A muscle twitched in Thestan's cheek again. "We will obey Overlord Fairen."

  "You really think I'm going to trust you? I want your cybers' overrides, now."

  Thestan nodded to a crewman, and Sabre stalked around the bridge while he waited, pausing beside each man to study him before moving on to the next. The tension rose, becoming thick enough to hit with a hammer by the time the crewman returned and handed over four overrides. Sabre took them and went to the commander's cabin, where more crewmen were carrying out the last of Thestan's belongings. He flopped down on the bed and closed his eyes, turning his attention to the confusion of emotional debris in his head.

  It still threatened to swamp him, ebbing and surging in waves of raw, unbridled and unwelcome sensations, which he did not understand, and he was not sure he wanted to plumb their illogical depths. It had been so powerful when the wall had first failed it had threatened to push him into catatonia. He had wanted to escape it, but there was nowhere to run. It terrified him. His logical mind rejected it as useless data, and he had spent those minutes on Fairen's bridge stuffing most of it into as many dark recesses in his mind as he could find.

  A lot of it he had shoved into the dark void where his mocking voice lived, and it had silenced its cruel jibes. He was no longer just a cyborg, he was more, he had feelings. Too many of them. His mind shied away from them, and all thoughts of Tassin. Thinking of her brought a rush of strange and alarming impulses, ranging from a strong wish to open an airlock and step out into space, to a powerful urge to crush the skull of whoever had taken her. Despair, Fairen had called it. He tried to analyse it, but his mind ran in circles, failing to find a logical explanation for it. He was a machine with human emotions. He was a human with a machine mind. He was a wreck.

  Certainly he was intensely angry, and the feeling would not abate. Whereas before he had experienced occasional spurts of anger that quickly faded to a dull background of simmering hatred for Myon Two, now he could not shake off the fury that filled him. He tossed on the bed, rubbing his brow. He tried switching the control unit off, but that made it worse, and he considered letting the cyber take charge, so he could slide into the peaceful, enervating darkness. Surges of rage made his hands clench, followed by waves of
a strange feeling that clogged is throat and made it hard to breathe.

  Cursing, he jumped up and left the cabin, shoved aside two crewmen in the corridor and marched down to the exercise room in the bowels of the ship. A row of punching bags lined one wall, and he started on them, his fists ripping through the tough outer skin and shredding the dense foam inside. When he had demolished all of them, he went over to the rack of weights and picked up the heaviest, which a normal man could barely lift, and hurled it across the room, denting the wall. A crewman stuck his head through the door and goggled at him, retreating when a dumbbell smashed into the wall beside his head.

  Chapter Four

  Martis looked up from adjusting an analyser when Thestan entered the hospital. Boxes of half unpacked equipment littered the white, grey-floored room, jostling for space with the standard medical equipment that was used for injured crewmen. The enforcer ship had little in the way of cyber host repair apparatus, and setting up the delicate instruments was a tricky job. Especially since neither he nor Estrelle were engineers. They knew how to use the stuff, but setting it up was a whole different ballgame. Two crewmen helped, but, although they were maintenance techs, they knew nothing about control unit analysers or brain scanners either.

  The sub commander approached Martis, his expression grim. "Your, err, friend is in the process of tearing up the exercise room, Host Tech. Could you speak to him?"

  Martis swallowed, glancing at Estrelle. "I don't know about that, Commander."

  "Well someone's got to do something about him. He's out of control, and when he's finished in there, he might decide to start on the crew."

  "And you think I can stop him?"

  Thestan's frown deepened. "Isn't he your friend?"

  "I think Estrelle would have more success."

  "Why's that?"

  Martis put down the light reader. "Well, she's a woman, for one thing, and perhaps a little more his friend than me."

  "Why does her sex have anything to do with it?"

  "I think Sabre is in the process of discovering the drawbacks of being human, namely all the illogical emotional shit that comes with it. Right now, he's bloody angry, and another male would only aggravate that. Also, from his machine-mind point of view, she's not a threat, so she'd be safer."

  Estrelle stared at him, shaking her head. "If he's tearing up the exercise room, I'm not going to be target practice."

  "He won't hurt you."

  "You don't know that."

  "Yeah, I do. I'm the expert, remember? Personally, I'd rather leave him alone to blow off steam, because that's what he's doing. But if you really want him to stop, Commander, Estrelle's your best bet."

  Estrelle snorted. "You're just too cowardly to face him."

  "No, I've got more sense. He does need someone to talk to, though."

  "Let's wait till Kole catches up. He knows Sabre better."

  Martis shook his head. "He'd definitely get used for target practise. He's annoying."

  Thestan cast Estrelle a pleading look. "I'd be most grateful, Cyber Tech. According to the man who saw the exercise room, there's not much of it left."

  Martis picked up the light reader again. "Yeah, well, he's a cyber, Commander, what do you expect? He can punch right through two centimetres of reinforced duronium alloy."

  "He'd hurt his fist," Estrelle pointed out.

  "True. I don’t think he’d care, right now, though."

  She sighed and put down her magnotester. "Fine, I'll see if he'll talk to me, but if he throws anything at me, that's it."

  Thestan nodded and led the way to the exercise room. The sounds of its destruction were audible from far down the corridor. A few nervous-looking men listened to the ruckus, and hurried away when Estrelle came past. Apparently they expected her to spark the simmering cyber into an explosion. She paused outside the door, fighting a strong urge to refuse to go in, then pressed the panel beside it, and it slid open. A weight rack hit the wall beside the door, making her jump and yelp. She longed to run, but her legs did not seem to work.

  Sabre stood in the middle of the room, a ten-kilogram dumbbell in each hand, eyeing her. "Estrelle."

  She gulped, her mind blank. "Sabre."

  "What brings you to this den of destruction?"

  "I want to talk to you."

  The cyber hefted a dumbbell and hurled it at the wall. It bounced off with a clang, leaving a dent. "What about?"

  "Your penchant for pandemonium?"

  "I'm angry." Sabre hurled the second dumbbell.

  "I can tell."

  The cyber turned and strode towards her, and she backed away, bumping into the wall. Reaching her, he slammed his hands on the wall on either side her head with a terrific double bang, making her ears ring, and she gasped.

  Sabre thrust his face close to hers and bellowed, "I hate these feelings!"

  "I know, of course you do, you don't understand them," she gabbled, her heart doing a fandango in her throat.

  "I don't want to understand them. I want them to go away!"

  "Well, they won't. You're going to have to learn to deal with them."

  Sabre swung away, walked a few paces and sank down in a heap, bowing his head. Estrelle hesitated, then went over and knelt beside him. Sweat sheened his skin and ran down his face, and his chest heaved. She reached out to him, then snatched her hand back, recalling Martis' warning. Sabre turned his head slightly, glaring at the floor.

  "Don't touch me."

  He did not need to look at her to see her, she knew. He was either using the scanners or the optical inputs, and she wondered why. "Okay. But you need human contact now more than ever. You need comfort."

  "Not from you."

  "Then who?"

  He shook his head. "Tassin."

  "We will find her."

  "The chances of that are -"

  "No, don't go into machine mode on me now. I want to talk to the new Sabre, the one who's just been unleashed from his cage."

  "The beast."

  She nodded. "Yes. The one with all those feelings, who doesn't know how to cope."

  "I can't... cope."

  "You can. We all do it. I know what you're doing. You're venting, and on inanimate objects, which is good, although if you carry on you'll wreck the ship. Enough is enough."

  He raised silver eyes filled with anguish. "I can make myself calm, but it doesn't stop the shit in my head. This helps."

  "Yeah, it would. Tell me what you're feeling."

  "Anger. Lots of that. Hatred, for those smug bastards out there, who look at me like I'm a deformed toad they just found in their shorts. And others. I might never get her back, never find her again."

  "Despair."

  He nodded. "And what must she be going through now? Is someone hurting her? Is she all right?"

  "Anguish."

  "And why did this happen? Why her? Why now?"

  "Bitterness."

  "I want her back, more than anything. I want to see her again, hold her..." He shook his head, bowing it again.

  "Love."

  "That I know. I've felt it before, but not this strong."

  Estrelle edged closer, shifting into a more comfortable position. His eyes followed her movement, but he did not raise his head. Instinct told her that if she touched him now, he would lash out, yet he did not understand why.

  "You're also finding it difficult to control yourself, aren't you?" she asked.

  He nodded. "You're not safe. You should leave."

  "Do you want to hurt me?"

  "No."

  "But you think you might?"

  He tilted his head, looking away. "Say the wrong thing... or touch me, and I think you'll be sorry."

  "Yeah, I think I understand. You're an alpha male, dominance is part of your nature, and right now I'm encroaching on your private pity party."

  "You're playing with fire."

  "But if I shut up and go away, no one will help you. You have a right to some self-pity. It's natural, you
've been through hell, and now you're going through more hell. You've lost that pure, logical reason that the control unit gave you. That's got to be really shitty."

  "You have no idea," he murmured.

  "Yeah, probably not. I grew up with my feelings, and children throw tantrums before they learn to deal with them, even adults get hysterical sometimes. It can be overwhelming, so you're not alone."

  "I don't want to be like this."

  "No, much easier to feel nothing, to be numb and logical, cold and analytical, untouched by ugly, hard to control feelings. But at the same time, when you see Tassin again, you'll feel happiness so much more now, too."

  He lunged towards her, smashing his fists down on the floor beside her with a terrific bang that made her gasp and jump. "Get out!"

  Estrelle fought the urge to flee, rubbing her ringing ears. "No. You will see her again. You've got to believe that."

  He drew back like a coiling snake, shaking his head. "I thought I knew what happiness was, but no... I know what sorrow is now, though, don't I?"

  "Yeah, you're having a hard time of it. This should have happened to you when you were happy. It would have been so much easier. You're learning about feelings when the worst ones are at their strongest."

  "Now you're just stating the obvious."

  "Okay, how about this? You're a gentle man. You don't like violence, but now you find yourself driven to it by all these pent-up emotions, and you don't like it."

  He inclined his head. "Again, tell me something I don't know."

  "Breaking things is satisfying, in your current mood, and you're very good at it, aren't you? Is there perhaps a little bit of arrogance in there too? No one can tell you what to do, right? You'll just smash their head in. How does that make you feel?"

  "Like a freak."

  "Right. Well you are a freak, I'm afraid. You were designed to be the best fighting machine ever, and that's what you are. Except you're not a machine anymore. This is what Myon Two always feared; a free cyber with all your abilities, and the emotions of a man, ready to turn your skills on others. But you haven't killed anyone yet, and I don't think you will."