Empire Ebook Full

by B. V. Larson

  The ship lurched and the display swam sickeningly as we changed course. Sandra and I clutched the arms of our chairs and strained against the restraining arms.

  “Open a channel, Actium,” I said.

  “Channel open.”

  “Hailing unknown ship: Identify yourself.”

  There was no response, but the contact swept quickly around to the far side of Eden-6.

  “It’s moving even faster, Kyle.”

  I frowned. “Marvin, is that you? Respond immediately.”

  “Oh, hello Colonel Riggs. I didn’t know you were in the area.”

  “Yes you did,” I said.

  “No, sir. You did not give prior warning concerning your visit.”

  “Yeah? Well, stop running away.”

  “Do you trust me, Colonel Riggs?”

  I frowned at the console for a moment. What was this crazy robot up to now?

  “Well…within reason,” I said.

  “Good. Let’s start from that positive basis. I’ll make my report from Eden-7. I’m quite busy now, you see—”

  “Marvin,” I said, cutting him off. “My admission of trust in you does not mean my orders can be ignored. You will stop and reverse course back to Eden-6. And, you’ll tell me right now who gave you authorization to rebuild yourself into a ship.”

  “You did, sir.”

  “That’s not how I remember it.”

  A recording of my own voice came over the channel. “Get it done, Marvin. I don’t care how, just make it happen—”

  “I see,” I said. “You took that order as a countermand to all previous orders against structuring your body into a vehicle?”

  “My body has always been vehicle, Colonel. Since the beginning, when I was downloaded from the Centaur database and you so kindly provided me with a large brainbox and limbs for locomotion, I’ve been capable of self—”

  “Yeah, look—oh, it doesn’t matter. Shut up about that. Let’s talk seriously. I’m heading down to your ponds. Meet me there in ten minutes, with a full report ready to go, or I’ll kick dirt into them.”

  “That would be extremely counterproductive, Colonel. At this delicate stage, the microbial colonies are—”

  “Right,” I said. “So make sure you aren’t late. And be prepared to explain why you tried to run off when you realized I’d arrived for a surprise inspection.”

  “You characterization of my actions is both hurtful and unnecessary.”

  “And also dead-on. Be there, Marvin. Riggs out.”

  When we landed at the planet’s only working spaceport. It was on the same island where Kwon had built his bunker and Marvelena had been blown up. In fact, it had recently been named Bunker Island by the new locals. There were colonists here along many of the beaches, but none of them were in sight on Bunker Island. The place looked deserted. I wondered what this place would look like in the future, when there were millions of inhabitants instead of a few thousand.

  As we stepped out of the stuffy canned-air interior of Actium, we took off our helmets and sucked in the fresh sea breezes. The surf was up, and the waves were crashing on the beach at our backs. The sky was overcast as usual, but it was humid and slightly too warm. We pressed forward into the foliage of tall grasses that dominated the island’s central region and followed the path up past the original bunker.

  There, we stopped dead. All around the bunker were pools of slimy brown liquid. There had to be a hundred of them. Marvin had cut down the thick stalks of grass and kept digging more and more ponds. I could see worker machines tearing out the taller grass-forests farther upslope, and sculpting fresh pools on every hillock overlooking the bunker. There were pumps everywhere as well, with black hoses connecting the pool to one another.

  “Kwon!” I shouted, expecting him to come up out of the bunker. Since I’d launched this project on his outpost island, I’d let him take up residence here again. I knew he liked it, and I hadn’t expected this level of destruction to the environment.

  Kwon didn’t appear. I frowned and marched forward. I’d donned my armor before exiting the ship, and my feet sank nearly a foot deep with every stride in the mushy ground. I flipped on my repellers and glided over the scene instead to make better time.

  “This looks awful, Kyle,” Sandra said. “Did you give Marvin permission to do all this?”

  “I guess I did—at least in his twisted little mind. Why don’t you go down to the beach area and find Kwon?”

  She looked at me for a second, then swept her eyes over the scene. “You’re worried what else we might find here, aren’t you?” she asked. “You’re trying to get rid of me, but that’s okay, because I don’t want to see what Marvin’s been doing anyway. Call me if you need me.”

  She left me then, and I pressed ahead with a grim expression on my face. I found Marvin way out in the back of the place. Here, things were worse. The pools not only dotted the once lovely landscape, they also stank. I could see bones in several of the pools, along with scraps of floating fur and the curve of a protruding horn now and then. Marvin had been feeding the ponds with the Centaur dead.

  Marvin’s chassis was bigger than it had been the last time I’d seen him. He could no longer fit into a ship, I was sure of that. He was a ship. This realization didn’t improve my mood.

  “Marvin, can you explain why you had to turn this place into a disgusting swamp? And while you’re at it, why you felt the need to build flight capacity into your physical form? I’ve forbidden that on multiple occasions.”

  “Colonel Riggs!” Marvin said, sliding forward with whipping tentacles. Something he’d been holding onto splashed down into the pool under his bulk. I only caught a glimpse of it, but it seemed to be a smallish Centaur corpse. “I’m so glad you’ve come. I’ve made so much progress. The experiment was a grand success—in the end.”

  I slowly glided around him, letting my humming suit fly me over the ponds. The water rippled and the crusty scum on the top of the one Marvin crouched upon spread open to reveal the inky water beneath.

  “Careful!” Marvin admonished me. “This is the one. This pool has produced the exact serum necessary. A dozen generations of Microbes have given their all to create the waters below us.”

  It looked like dirty, disgusting slime. I wrinkled my nose. Could this vile substance really be the salvation of this entire star system? What a strange twist of fate it was, if it was true.

  Then I noticed something as I gazed down into the pool more deeply. I squinted, looking past the ripples and reflections. “What the hell?” I asked. “Are those baby Centaur corpses, Marvin?”

  “Well, that is a definitional distinction which could be argued with,” Marvin said. “They are post-birth, and many of them have been weaned. I believe the proper term for animals in this stage of—”

  That’s as far as he got before I grabbed him. Grabbing Marvin wasn’t an easy thing to do on the best of days, but today he was bigger and more variegated than usual. There were stalks, bulbs, cameras and tentacles everywhere—lots of tentacles.

  I was beyond angry. Somehow, seeing that he’d experimented on Centaur young, using my name to perform his abominations, threw me into a rage. I grabbed the nearest tentacle, which terminated in a floating camera eye. I ripped it loose by the root and tossed it back over my shoulder. It twirled around twice before splashing down in a distant pool of muck.

  “Colonel Riggs? Are you experiencing a malfunction?”

  I didn’t answer. I just kept ripping pieces off him and throwing them away. Marvin backed up and his tentacles curled and swirled protectively. I didn’t care. They soon grappled me, but they couldn’t stop me. I was a nanotized marine, veteran of numerous Microbial baths and wearing a combat-ready exoskeleton. I was also seriously pissed-off.

  After I tore away seven or eight of his thrashing limbs, he began to fly upward. I went with him. He tried to spin around and dislodge me, but I hung on. We soon rose above the treetops.

  “This is highly irrati
onal behavior, Colonel. I have performed the function you requested. I have been successful.”

  “You also knew it was time to run when I showed up,” I growled, ripping loose one of his tacked-on gravity repellers. This change to his structure made the whole thing unbalanced, and we went into a spin. I clung to him, reaching for another gravity repeller unit. “You weren’t supposed to fly, and you didn’t have to kill their babies. You did it just to find out what would happen. Well, I’m giving you a new lesson in animal behavior!”

  After I removed a second gravity repeller on the same side, we began falling at a forty-five degree slant. The endless ocean appeared to zoom back out of the hanging mists of Eden-6 as we plunged back toward it. I snapped my visor down, suspecting I was about to get a mouthful of seawater.

  “You’re accusations are unfounded. I had to generate a disgust response and powerful fear responses. Employing heuristic problem-solving, I studied the brain activity and trained the Microbes to invade and alter that portion of each subject’s synaptic web—”

  We hit the water, and Marvin’s excuses were swept away with the crashing impact. I almost lost consciousness—but hung on. A minute or so later, I was moving under my own power again. I looked for him and spotted him, crawling on the rocky bottom. He was no longer able to fly or swim under propulsion. He dragged himself uphill toward dry land with whipping arms that churned up a great deal of debris from the seabed. Watching him, I was reminded of a desperate starfish caught on an open beach.

  I looked after him and thought about burning a hole in his brainbox. I had a laser unit on my suit—but I hadn’t yet used it. I could end the entire adventure that was Marvin right now. All the horrors and all the wonders. Was it the right thing to do? I wasn’t sure.

  Maybe he knew what I was thinking about, because he was really trying hard to get back out of the water and onto dry land.

  I heaved a deep breath and found that my initial rage had passed. I engaged my repellers and glided after him.

  He ducked when my gauntleted hand reached down to take hold of yet another tentacle. I grabbed again, and caught him this time. I lifted and pulled him toward the beach. After a few seconds, he stopped struggling and let himself be dragged along. Every camera he had was looking at me. They snaked around my helmet to gaze into the visor that covered my face. I don’t know what expression he saw there. Disgust, disappointment—depression? Something like that. After a few minutes, we reached the beach and his cameras retracted to a safer distance.

  “Thank you for pulling me out of the water, Colonel Riggs. I have internal injuries, and seawater has entered cracks in my aft brainbox. I’ve already lost a portion of my data storage. Many astrophysical mapping files are missing.”

  I heaved a sigh. “Do you have backups?”

  “Yes, fortunately. Each of my sub-brainboxes holds a compressed backup of my neural chain. Still, it is disturbing to lose one of them.”

  “Yeah. Kind of like dying, I guess. Creatures don’t like dying, Marvin. Do you have any empathy in that regard? Can you understand you need to avoid killing the brains of others, because you would not want to lose your own? Because the fate is so terrible, we don’t wish it upon others?”

  Marvin was quiet for a long time. I watched as seawater leaked out of various subsystems. His entire body was listing to the left. He began heading inland, and the left side of his body had to be dragged over the beach, leaving a deep groove in the sands. I followed him, walking at his side while he struggled toward the trees.

  “Was your attack meant to instruct me, Colonel?” he asked.

  I blinked, considering his question. “Maybe,” I said. “Benjamin Franklin used to say that pain was highly instructive. Did you experience pain and panic, Marvin?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, I hope that you learned something from the ordeal. In any case, I’m taking you off this project. I’m ending it. I don’t want you to do any more experiments on sentient beings. Whatever you’ve developed—well, that’s as far as it’s going to go. And you’re also forbidden to build flying structures for yourself. You know that. Are we clear, Marvin?”

  “Perfectly clear, sir. Crystal clear.”

  I glanced at him. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on inside that big, strange brain of his. “Okay. Let’s reattach enough of your limbs to allow easier locomotion, then you can show me what you’ve achieved. We’ll skip the messy description of how you got to this point—just show me the most successful results.”

  “Spoken like a true manager, Colonel.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. Were those bitter words? It was hard to tell with Marvin. I didn’t know what to make of him today. Maybe he felt abused and underappreciated. If that was the case, he’d just joined a very large club.

  -25-

  Kwon showed up on a flitter. He met me at the beach, and hailed me. Marvin pouted and reassembled himself.

  Kwon climbed down from the pilot’s chair and stared at Marvin. “What happened to your robot?”

  “He had a malfunction,” I said. “But he’s better now—I think.”

  Kwon looked around the island with critical eyes. “This place is disgusting. I never come here now. You want to see the new troops in action?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s see what Marvin has managed to do. We’ll go pick up Sandra first though. Marvin, you stay here. I’ll send someone to pick you up in a few hours. Load up all the serum you have that will work and shut down the rest.”

  “Should I exterminate all the colonies, Colonel?”

  I considered, and shook my head. Marvin had cannibalized members of one species to breed another. It was grotesque, but in a way, he was just a type of farmer or animal-breeder. I’m sure he looked at it that way. Did the relative intelligence of the species involved raise it to the level of a moral outrage? I guess in my mind it did.

  “No. Let them go if you have to, into the sea. Or let them live in their ponds with your equipment supporting them. Just don’t expect to come back here for a long time. I’m shutting down this lab of yours.”

  Without another word, Marvin dragged himself down the beach. I called after him and he stopped.

  “Marvin,” I said. “I’ve got another more important task for you. I know you like tinkering with biotics, but if we don’t break the code the Blues are using, we’re all going to die in this star system. For now, that has to take precedence. Okay?”

  “I hope that task won’t trigger any intense emotional responses,” he said. His tone was as prim and precise as always, but I was sure he was feeling sorry for himself.

  “It shouldn’t Marvin. I’ll send a ship for you in a few hours.”

  We parted ways, and Kwon flew me low over the waves along the beach.

  “You kicked his ass, didn’t you?” Kwon asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it fun?”

  I nodded. “It felt good at the time.”

  Kwon chuckled and stopped the flitter. We hovered over the beach and the crashing waves.

  I looked back toward the forest in the center of the island. Had I screwed up? Was Marvin going to be bitter, seeking revenge? In a way, that robot was a species of one. An ally on my long list of allies, and possibly one of the most helpful ones. He was also ghoulish and extremely annoying at times.

  I noticed we’d stopped flying and were now circling above a single spot. I turned to Kwon, who craned his big head over the side of the flitter and stared downward. I leaned over my side, and saw Sandra down there in the water. She was nude, and swimming. She looked up at us and gave us both the finger.

  Kwon chuckled again. I slapped his shoulder and he landed the flitter on the beach. When Sandra had some clothes on, she climbed into the back of the ship and we took off again.

  “Where are these super-Centaurs, Kwon?” I asked.

  “They’re on another island. Marvin sort of took over this one, and as his experiments grew stranger over the last week or so, we set
up camp for the Centaur volunteers just south of here.”

  We flew to a second island, this one centered around a single conical mountain. It looked as if it had once been an active volcano to me. We landed and before we even touched down, I saw them.

  Centaurs flew in formation over the waves. There were hundreds of them, moving in organized companies. They were tightly-grouped, and rode on oval-shaped versions of the flying skateboard systems I’d devised long ago when we first began assaulting Macro cruisers with infantry.

  “Wow,” Sandra said. “I’m impressed already. Look how close they are, and how they fly. If they can take riding in a transport to battle, I think they might be able to do this, Kyle.”

  I nodded my head and stared. “What kind of kits did you give them?”

  “Nothing special,” Kwon said. “Really, we just gave them the same basic system you built for us long ago. The skateboards are longer, more like ovals now. That’s to make up for having four legs. The change made them more stable in air or space.”

  I glanced at him. “Space? Have they been tested in space?”

  “Oh yeah. That’s why we called you. They’re not much use flying around down here.”

  “They each have a laser, a vacuum suit and propulsion,” I said. “What about grenades?”

  “Ah,” Kwon smiled. “That is where we made a little change. They each carry one grenade, a nuke of course. But this one is different. We made it especially for the Centaurs.”

  We climbed out of the flitter and Kwon showed me the new equipment. I frowned when I saw it, but I could not doubt its effectiveness. Nor could I deny that it fit the temperament of the troops that would wear it.

  Sandra, however, saw it differently. “What is this?” she asked, handling the cylindrical device with care.

  Kwon stumped forward and tapped the red contact at the tip. “See here? When armed, this nosecone-thingie will detonate if it makes a hard impact. Sort of like a dumb bomb.”

  “Why do we need dumb weaponry?”

  Kwon held up a thick finger. “Ah-ha, good question. They are not dumb, you see, because the Centaurs are their brains. And their delivery systems. The whole sled-device they ride on can be viewed as a delivery system for this payload.”