by Eric Brown
Li pointed. “A manufactory drone,” she said. “What the hell’s that doing up here?”
Then Latimer made out a host of other drones and roboids behind it, a veritable regiment. He peered, squinting.
The drone was advancing. As he watched, it extended something from the bulk of its body and fired.
He heard a small explosion in the corridor beyond, and the image on the monitor went blank.
Then he heard a quick skittering sound coming from beyond the hatch.
The drone appeared in the cut-away section of the hatch and let go with a volley of laser fire. Latimer returned fire, along with Emecheta, hitting the drone with little apparent effect. A stray vector struck Emecheta and he cried out in pain.
Li ran towards the dropshaft and yelled at the others to join her. While Renfrew laid down a constant hail of laser fire, Latimer hauled Emecheta on to the up-plate. Renfrew came last, still firing, and the second she was on the plate, Latimer stabbed the controls and they rose towards the command unit and safety.
* * * *
Three
“You’ll live,” Li said. She applied a seal of synthi-flesh to the wound on Emecheta’s upper arm, then administered a hypo-ject analgesic.
Latimer locked the hatch to the dropshaft. Emecheta looked across at him. “You think that’ll hold?”
“They can’t open it from the underside,” Latimer said.
“What about with cutting tools?”
Latimer was silent for a second, then said: “I’d rather not think about that.”
Li was staring at them, wide-eyed. “You don’t think they ...?”
Emecheta flexed his injured arm. “Who the hell knows what to think? Who’d think the drones’d arm themselves and attack us in the first place? Some bad shit’s gone down back there.”
Into the following silence, Renfrew said quietly: “Did anyone else see it?”
Latimer looked across the unit at her. She had been silent since reaching the safety of the unit, sitting by herself on a swivel-chair and nursing her pistol.
“What?” he asked.
“On the monitor, behind the drone and the other roboids. I thought I saw ...” She fell silent, shaking her head.
Emecheta said: “What the fuck, Serena, do you think you saw?”
Renfrew looked up at the staring faces. “You mean, none of you saw it?”
“For chrissake,” Latimer said.
“I could swear I saw a figure, a human figure. It was standing at the end of the corridor, in the shadows.”
Latimer felt an icy shiver pass down his spine.
“Impossible!” he said. “Listen, the pods were programmed to wake the sleepers at journey’s end. There’s no way they could’ve-”
“Hey, boss,” Emecheta said, quietly. “You forget who’s in charge down there, now.”
Li said: “But why would they wake up a sleeper?”
“Listen,” Latimer said. “Serena said she thought she saw a figure. The lighting down there wasn’t so good, was it? So she was mistaken.”
Emecheta moved towards the dropshaft.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Latimer said.
“There’s only one way to settle this. I’ll get the monitor. It’ll have recorded everything the cam relayed.”
“You want another laser burn, this time in your chest?”
Emecheta ignored him. He took Li’s laser and, a pistol in each hand, unlocked the dropshaft hatch and stepped onto the plate.
“Emecheta!” Latimer said. He almost lifted his pistol, then, and threatened the Nigerian. Something stopped him, the realisation that nothing would prevent Emecheta from retrieving the monitor.
“Don’t worry, boss, I’ll take care.”
He dropped.
Latimer ran to the aperture in the floor and stared down. Emecheta was crouching on the drop-plate, hand on the controls, inching his way down. There was no sign of the rogue drone down there, or any of its cohorts - which didn’t mean a thing. If one of them were in hiding beyond the hole in the hatch, just waiting for a human to show himself ...
The drop-plate reached the deck. The monitor lay where Latimer had left it, about a metre from the shaft. All Emecheta had to do was reach out and grab it.
He reached, got hold of the monitor and pulled it towards him - and then the firing began. A tracery of white light volleyed from the cut-away section of the hatch, filling the corridor with a blinding, actinic glare. Emecheta yelled out, whether in crazed delight at battle joined, or in pain, Latimer had no idea. The Nigerian returned fire and stabbed the up-plate command, and Latimer watched him rise towards the control unit as white light rained all around him.
He hauled Emecheta from the plate and locked the hatch, silencing the noise of the lasers. “You okay?”
“Told you I’d take care,” he laughed, laying the monitor on a workbench. “Now let’s see if you were seeing things, Serena.”
They gathered around the monitor while Emecheta accessed the file and replayed the images, from the time the cam entered the far corridor to the moment of its destruction.
“There!” Renfrew said, pointing.
Emecheta froze the image.
Behind the laser-wielding drone, Latimer made out the indistinct figure of a human being. There was no doubt about it. The figure stood in the opening to hangar one, seemingly watching the advance of the drone.
“What in Christ’s name ...” Emecheta whispered.
He ran the image at real-time. The figure stepped back into the hangar, and a second later the monitor went blank as the cam was destroyed.
“Get the figure again,” Latimer said. “Magnify it.”
Emecheta did so, zoomed in on the shadowy figure. The image became even grainier, but now they could see that the figure was that of a man.
Emecheta froze the image and looked up. “So what gives?”
“Maybe they’re holding the sleepers hostage in there,” Li suggested.
“We’re talking about slave drones!” Renfrew objected. “Machines about as dumb as your average holo-player.”
“It was a drone nearly did for us down there,” Emecheta said. “It came after us, fired with intent.”
“Maybe ...” Li said in a small voice, “maybe it’d been reprogrammed?”
“By whom?” Emecheta laughed.
She shrugged. “By Central. I don’t know, maybe the meteor impact sent Central crazy. Knocked out its Omega programming. It’s self-repairing, isn’t it? Don’t Central AIs have the ability to learn, upgrade? Maybe it repaired itself... But it’s decided not to tell us.”
“Look,” Latimer cut in, “I don’t have a clue what’s going on down there. The simple fact is that the sleepers are in danger, agreed?”
Everyone nodded.
He waited a beat, then said: “So what do we do?”
Li looked away. Renfrew pulled a face, considering.
Only Emecheta looked him in the eye. He said: “We get into the hangars, check out what’s happening.” He paused. “Only trouble is, the drones seem to have the lateral corridor pretty well covered, as far as I see it.”
“So we don’t go in through the front door,” Latimer said. “We get into our EVA suits, leave this unit through the emergency hatch and access the nearest hangar - hangar One - through its own emergency exit.”
“And just hope that they don’t have drones covering the exit,” Emecheta said.
Latimer looked around at his team. “I think two of us should go, two stay behind. I’m going. Any other volunteers?”
Emecheta nodded. “Count me in.”
* * * *
Four
They suited up, cycled themselves through the emergency airlock, and attached the safety cables. They were high above the body of the ship, looking down on the wrecked superstructure stretching aft.
Hangar One was perhaps a hundred metres below where they stood on the lip of the air-lock. Their destination, the emergency exit, was situa
ted on the near flank, highlighted by a crimson circle like a bull’s eye.
Hangar Five, where Carrie lay in innocent oblivion, was positioned beyond hangar One, its access tube mashed in the impact a thousand years earlier. High above the tortured decking, hangar Two hung on a length of umbilical leads, moving lazily like submarine vegetation in a slight current.
Latimer nodded to Emecheta and stepped from the lock. He felt the kick of his powerpack as it cut in and he steered himself through the vacuum towards the hangar.
A minute later he came down gently amid the scattered debris of radio antennae and microwave relays. They picked their way slowly through an obstacle course of twisted metal, Latimer aware that a cut from one of the many razor-sharp shards could depressurise his suit and kill him in seconds.
At one point he stopped and stared around him at the destruction. He examined the damage, the way the metal of the deck had been sheared and excoriated. Grotesque spars and girders arched above them, like the skeletal structure of a bombed-out Gothic cathedral.
He pointed. “What do you make of it, Em?”
“The damage?” Emecheta’s voice sounded tinny over the radio link.
“Does it look like meteor or cometary damage to you?”
Emecheta, bulky in his padded black and yellow EVA suit, bobbed in position as he took in the destruction. “Hard to say. Never seen a cometary impact before.”
Latimer gave voice to his fears. “Looks to me, Em, more like an explosion. The metal appears melted, cut through in some places-”
The Nigerian turned his great helmet and stared at Latimer. “Were you contacted that last day by some Earth First crazy?”
Latimer nodded. “He said Omega were holding back some information. The probes hadn’t failed naturally. He said something about the drives-”
Emecheta cut in: “So perhaps the Hansen-Spirek coil blew ... That’d explain the destruction.”
Latimer’s stomach turned sickeningly with the thought that, if they were right, and the Omega Corporation had known all along about the instability of the drives ...
It was too much to take on board, right now.
Emecheta gestured. “We’re wasting time.”
They covered the last few metres to hangar One and paused. The red-painted exit faced Latimer, an arm’s length away. Emecheta, perhaps sensing Latimer’s hesitation, hopped past him. “Let’s do it.”
The Nigerian drew his laser and approached the emergency exit.
Latimer followed. It should have been so much easier than this, he thought. What had the Omega officials said? Plain sailing ... The phrase took on a cynical meaning, if his suspicions proved correct. He tried to push the thought to the back of his mind.
They attached their safety cables to the lugs on either side of the hatch, and Emecheta punched the code. The hatch slid open. They pulled themselves into the air-lock, and the ship’s gravity took hold. Latimer faced the inner door. He realised he was sweating, the liquid dribbling down his face, tickling him. He had no way of scratching his cheek.
He told himself to ignore it, concentrate on the task ahead. This is a reconnaissance mission, Emecheta had said while suiting up. We assess the situation and then get out.
The inner door slid open and they stepped, cautiously, into a darkened cavern.
On his suit relay, he heard Emecheta: “Okay, we’re on the gallery overlooking the aisles. Let’s head for the rail and take a look.”
He led the way, Latimer following. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, which was alleviated only by the dim jade halation of a thousand alpha-numeric displays on the pods down below, and an erratic flashing white light somewhere on the far side of the hangar.
Latimer joined Emecheta by the rail and looked down.
“Christ on crutches,” Emecheta said. “Will you take a look at that.”
The first fact that Latimer took in was that the majority of the pods were open, their covers thrown back and the berths no longer occupied.
Then he saw the colonists.
He thought he was about to vomit in his suit, but managed to gag down a mouthful of vile-tasting bile.
There were about fifty colonists lying at the far end of the hangar, the area given over to lockers and showers. It was hard to tell if all of them were dead, but certainly no human being could have survived what had been done to the majority of the sleepers down there.
He saw halved bodies, torsos with limbs and heads removed. Sectioned arms and legs littered the deck, the scene all the more ghastly for being so dimly lit. Like something from the hellish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.
He felt a touch on his upper arm, and started. “Look,” Emecheta said, pointing.
Latimer followed the direction of the Nigerian’s gloved hand and made out something moving on the far side of the hangar.
Whatever it was had passed behind a pod, but a second later came back into full view - and Latimer wished that it had remained hidden. There are some things we wish we had never seen, he thought. This was one of them. He would remember this image, he knew, to his dying day.
Later, back in the command unit, he tried to describe what he had seen to Renfrew and Li, but his powers of description failed him.
It had once been human - or at least a part of it had. He thought he could detect where the human vestiges ended and the machine parts began, but it was not easy. It resembled a crab, with the carapace of a menial manufactory drone, and the multiple arms and legs of a human being. They scuttled along in a sequence all the more grotesque for being mistimed, some limbs tripping others and entangling themselves.
The thing stumbled towards the hatch and disappeared into the corridor.
Then Latimer saw colonists not quite so fatally ravaged.
These walked upright, seemingly with intent. They had had machine parts grafted onto their heads and backs, hanks of cabling trailing from their skulls like ghastly dreadlocks, and Latimer only hoped that the consciousness governing their movements was machine - that the humans had died quick deaths long ago.
Is this a localised phenomenon, he found himself thinking, restricted to this hangar, or is the same carnage going on in the other two?
Before he could follow up this thought, Emecheta gripped his arm and yelled: “Down!”
Latimer ducked. The laser vector missed by a good metre, and then he saw why. The creature wielding the rifle was a trilobite ‘droid with a single human arm affixed to its shell, and it gripped the rifle clumsily.
It fired again, and then Latimer was running along the gallery after Emecheta. Behind the trilobite, other machine-human amalgams gave chase. Latimer turned. Access to the emergency exit was blocked by the advancing monsters.
“Where to?” Latimer yelled.
The reply rang in his helmet: “Down the steps, across the hangar and into the corridor. Keeping running and firing ...”
They came to a steep flight of metal steps and clattered down, their movement impeded by their bulky EVA suits.
They had the element of surprise on their side. Latimer ran and fired indiscriminately, sending machine-human creatures skittering away across the blood-soaked deck. Once he lost his footing on a thick slick of offal, righted himself and ran on, firing.
He wanted to ask Emecheta where the hell he was leading him, but he could not articulate the words through fear. They were running further into danger, and as far as he could see there was no way out.
Occasional laser fire came their way, but ill-directed. He followed Emecheta across the hangar, past the area where the fifty bodies lay cannibalised, like a cross between an abattoir and a battlefield.
Emecheta came to the exit hatch and paused. He leaned around the opening, looking up and down the corridor, then turned to Latimer. “This is where the first drone zapped the cam,” he said.
Then Latimer knew what Emecheta had in mind. They were next to the corridor where they had sliced an opening through the hatch. If they could make it through the hatch and to the upshaf
t, they might yet get away.
Emecheta said: “Okay. Follow me. Fire at anything that moves. Turn left and run. Now!”
He vanished around the corner. Latimer gave chase, yelling and firing at a figure that scuttled across the corridor towards him. His shot hit something soft and bloody, and later he wondered if he had sliced in two a living, sentient human being.
Ahead, he made out the Nigerian’s lumbering figure and, beyond, the hatch with the neat rectangular section cut into its lower half. Then he saw the laser-wielding drone and opened fire. He hit it, but with little effect. This was an armour-plated industrial ‘bot, designed to last many thousand years’ wear and tear. A random laser strike was hardly going to penetrate its steel carapace and do it lasting damage.
