Dead Space

by Kali Wallace

  The lights came on around me, fading from red to white. I was in a control room of some sort. Not terribly big, maybe three meters square, but it felt larger due to the windows on both sides. One window, of course, looked out over the sphere and what would be the factory, if Vanguard’s nest wasn’t blocking it.

  The other window had a very different view.

  “Oh.” I stepped over to the window. “Oh, fuck me.”

  The lights were on beyond that window, as bright as they had been in the factory, and the massive space was filled with activity and motion. Bots darting everywhere, machine arms moving, cranes sliding along tracks that traced circular routes around the exterior of the long, broad cylinder.

  I had noticed, when I first spotted the sphere, that it sat at the bottom of one of the base’s missile silos. I just hadn’t considered that a missile silo was not going to be merely structural in an old war base now converted into a secret weapons factory.

  “Fuck them,” I said. I could not stop staring. “Fuck.”

  It was a massive cylinder, thirty meters across or more, extending so far down I couldn’t see the bottom, and narrowing toward a closed iris in the ceiling. All throughout the space, bots and machines were adding payload to a series of rockets.

  Twelve rockets. I counted. I counted again.

  I had seen bits and pieces of the rockets in the factory, but I hadn’t quite understood what they meant. I had been assuming all those weapons, the drones and bots and canisters of gas, were going to be packed away in neat rectangular shipping containers and sent to buyers throughout the system. But Parthenope was not just building its own weapons. It was building its own fleet of spacecraft for deploying them, and that fleet was almost ready to launch.

  Another spider bot struck the outside of the door with a small explosion; the reinforced walls vibrated ominously. I heard the clatter of metal and saw a flash across the window: Vanguard was scurrying along the wall. It was trying to stop the spiders before they found a way inside. That realization jolted me into action. I couldn’t stand around doing nothing while Vanguard protected me.

  With my injured right hand held cautiously at my side, I touched every terminal, waking them all from their slumber.

  “Okay, kid,” I said. “What did you want me to see in here? Show me what you know.”

  There was a live operation status report that showed me what Sigrah controlled and what Vanguard controlled. Sigrah had several deployments of spiders and beehives and seemed to have access to many more; Vanguard had the mech suits but not much else. I didn’t have time to work out how or why. I had to trust that Vanguard was doing what it could to get the weapons out of Sigrah’s hands.

  Sigrah also had control of surveillance. I couldn’t see anything except what was right before me.

  And what was before me, according to Vanguard, was mission preparation. I had finally found Parthenope’s Project Sunburn.

  It took me a few seconds to realize that I was not looking at a single plan; I was looking at two mission plans, the second of which was an altered version of the first. I checked—I knew exactly what to look for—and confirmed that Mary Ping had created the second plan. There were also two timetables, one with a series of dates well into the future, the other with a single launch date only a fortnight away.

  “Fuck,” I whispered.

  Everything’s going to change soon, Mary Ping had said to me, before Vanguard killed her. I know you’ll understand when you see it.

  She had her own mission, one separate from Parthenope’s, and that meant she had to act before they could. That was what the second plan was all about. That was why she had been so angry when she realized David was about to discover the factory.

  Each mission plan had its own list of targets. I asked for a map while I looked over the first list. I didn’t recognize a lot of the names, but the information attached to them confirmed they were active mines, ports, and transit stations across a broad swath of space beyond Parthenope’s current area of control. Stations owned by Carrington Ming, Sorrell-Larkin, Zinoviya, Hennig-Vishal, and a great many other corporations and competitors. I couldn’t tell without digging but would have wagered that all of them ran steward AIs based on the Overseer system.

  Parthenope’s plan was to use these weapons to attack and seize several stations around the asteroid belt. Once they were taken, they would be brought under Parthenope control. It was breathtaking in its simplicity. The company had taken a look around the belt, picked out the pieces of it they wanted for themselves, and built a massive weapons force to take them. They knew the stations would be vulnerable, because the Outer Systems Administration did not have the reach or power to prevent a large-scale attack and what remained of the UEN was too far away for a quick response. They were going to start a war to take what they wanted, and nobody would be able to stop them.

  I brought up a map that showed how the operation was intended to spread over time. It was a helpfully hideous display of lines of flight and contact emanating from Nimue, of stations shifting into Parthenope control, a sea of bright specks growing smaller and smaller as the scale of the expansion widened. The ratfuckers even had a nice little casualty estimate ticking upward in their plan. The low estimate for smooth and successful infiltration included a few hundred deaths among low-level workers. The higher estimates were for if what happened at Aeolia started happening everywhere else—there was, according to the plan, a thirty-five percent chance of that happening at about half the targets. They knew it could be the Aeolia catastrophe all over again, this time at dozens of stations, but they didn’t care. A thousand dead, two thousand, five thousand, more. On the map, so clinical and calculated, it looked like a contagion spreading through the belt. More than ten thousand dead in the first phase was considered suboptimal. How very fucking humanitarian of them.

  That first phase was due to begin in about a month. Right now they were in the final prelaunch push.

  Mary Ping’s plan was different. Her mission brief to the AI was the same—go, and take control—but the targets were different. The first target on her list was Hygiea. The second was Badenia, home to Parthenope’s medical center and jointly operated shipyard. The third was Friederike, on which Parthenope co-owned a major transportation hub with Hunter-Fremont and a few other companies.

  Parthenope stations. Parthenope territory. Starting with the company’s central facility and working down the line. All to be infiltrated and seized and placed under the attacking AI’s control. That was what Mary Ping had been targeting with her plan. She had set up a first wave of attacks to launch before the others. Which, if it worked as she intended, would have meant that when the rest of the attacks launched, they would not be bringing the seized stations under Parthenope’s central company command, but under no human control at all. She wanted the AIs to be in charge.

  She had told me as much in the warehouse, right before she died. You created something beautiful and powerful, she had said. You know we can be so much better, if we let them show us the way.

  She did not seem to have planned beyond that initial takeover. Her mission timeline did not include predictions for what happened when dozens of independent AIs were fighting for control of stations and colonies that were home to tens of thousands of people.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I said. “That would be absolute fucking chaos.”

  Outside the window, Vanguard ducked its triangle head, its long swan-like neck curving downward. It had been listening to me all the while its physical form was fighting off the spiders.

  “Oh, kiddo,” I said. “I know. I get it. I know you don’t want to do that. I’m not mad at you.”

  It shook its head again and moved its forelimbs side to side again, that gesture of apology it had learned from Michael.

  A spider scurried across the inner window, leaving a trail of something damp and shimmering behind it. I watched it
until it disappeared from sight, then cleared my throat. I wanted a drink of water so badly I thought I might cry, but there was none in my pack.

  “Okay, we need a plan of our own,” I said. “There has to be a way we can both get out of here. And the others, if they’re not dead already.” A pair of spiders ignited outside the door. I jumped nervously and winced as the metal bolts strained with the impact. “Help me. What can we do?”

  Vanguard, it turned out, already had a plan. It showed me another map, not of the asteroid belt, not of the Hygiea group, but of this base and only this base, a pockmark on the side of the lumpy potato that was Nimue.

  It showed me the protective sphere it had built around its own brain.

  It showed me a network of carefully positioned explosive charges. It had moved them into place when it had built the sphere. Another layer of protection against its kidnappers. Always looking forward. Always anticipating the moment when everything went wrong. Its intent was clear.

  It showed me a start time and a countdown.

  It would happen very fast, once it began.

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. That is not an option. We’ll find another way.”

  Another couple of spiders raced across the window, leaving trails of fuel. Bug leapt after them, grabbed and crushed them, but not quite fast enough. One of the spiders self-destructed in a shower of sparks and a whip of bright blue flame. The fuel ignited immediately, slashing across the window in lines of brilliant fire, and the glass creaked ominously. The praying mantis reappeared in the window a second later.

  “I know,” I said. “I know you’ve been doing some fucked-up stuff. It’s not your fault.” I reached out to touch the glass, right where it was looking through at me. “But we can both get away from here. And all the others too. I’ve got an idea.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  We have to work fast,” I said.

  I didn’t know how much time we had. If Sigrah was able to break into this room, we were out of time. If she was able to wrest control of enough weapons away from Vanguard, we were out of time. She had already demonstrated she was perfectly happy to sacrifice lives and commit a great deal of corporate property damage to protect the base—but protecting the base meant protecting the AI that ran it. She wanted to get me out of here. She didn’t want to destroy Vanguard.

  “There are ten people that need to get deep into the transport tunnels,” I said. “Back to the station, if possible. The Overseer will protect them.”

  I kept working as I talked. Vanguard could listen to both my terminal and verbal commands. I couldn’t see Bug through the window anymore; it was busy elsewhere, trying to keep the onslaught of spiders away. Every time one slipped past and launched itself at the window or door I flinched, convinced that would be the time they broke through.

  I went on, “And most of them are unconscious, thanks to you. The door needs to be closed behind them. Plus any other doors—are there even other doors along the transport route? There must be security doors, if this place has been locked up.” I was rambling now, my thoughts and words tumbling together. “Anyway, they all need to be closed, with everybody safe on the other side. What can you do?”

  In a blink, one of the screens switched to a bewildering segmented view of the factory. It looked like what a bee might see, and for a few confused seconds I wondered if Vanguard was showing me the view from one of the beehive drones—but that made no sense, they weren’t actual bees with bee-like eyes. Only after I looked again did I understand that it was a collage of viewpoints from a huge number of sources.

  “What is that? Are those drones or bots? Are they—”

  Vanguard answered with a weapons schematic on the screen. Right. Should have been obvious. It was showing me what the mech suits could see. It wasn’t limited in its choice of tools by the need for semiautonomous behavior of a cohort the same way Sigrah was; it could individually control as many machines as it needed to without any degradation in attention or reaction speed. As I watched, several of them began to move. The segmented view on the screen became nauseating, dizzying, impossible to follow, so I narrowed it down to just a few, and only for long enough to see that they were heading in the same direction: toward the comms room where most of the crew lay unconscious.

  “That will work,” I said. It had to work. I had no other ideas. “Do it. Get them to safety.”

  Through the other window, the activity in the missile silo had, at Vanguard’s command, ramped up to a frantic speed. One swarm of cargo bots was redistributing the weapons among the twelve rockets, stripping out everything bulky and useless, making space; another swarm was marching into the missile silo with a steady stream of containers that carried the new payload. The machines moved swiftly and with dazzling efficiency. Vanguard estimated seventeen minutes to completion. It was an eternity for an AI. A thousand life cycles. Millions of calculations. An eon’s worth of decisions.

  For me, a small fleshy human in the middle of a factory of war, it was no time at all.

  Another pair of spiders struck the window of the control room. There was a loud snap, and a wide crack spread across the glass, left to right, with tendrils of smaller cracks reaching all along its length.

  Time was up. I had done what I could.

  “Ready to move out?” I said.

  Vanguard’s only answer was to start turning off the screens of the terminals around the control room. The white light vanished, replaced by the muddy standby red. I took a breath and shoved the door open.

  Bug was waiting for me outside, perched on the railing. I started toward the ladder, but the spiders were already there, joined in a silver web across the top, so I swung both of my legs over the railing and jumped.

  I struck the outer curve of the sphere crookedly, with one gecko sole catching, skidding, catching again. A fresh riot of pain screamed in my left hip when I landed, in my right arm when I tried to steady myself, and for a second my vision was dark with spots. I had to ignore the pain, all of it, for a little while longer. Bug bounded after me, propped me up to keep me from toppling down the side. When I had my balance, it let me go to smack away the few spiders trying to follow. I scrambled over the outside of the sphere and dropped down to the underside of its support structure. I could hear the cargo bots working in the sphere overhead, could feel the rumble of their movements. The metal plates protecting the base shuffled again, as they had when I came in, and I scrambled out.

  I slid to the factory floor and rolled right into the legs of a stationary mech suit. Bug tumbled out after me. One of its forelimbs had been badly damaged and was dangling uselessly by a few singed wires. It regained its feet quickly and, with its remaining forelimb, it gestured at me. It gestured again. It ducked its head, once.

  Then it turned and raced back up toward the sphere.

  Another explosion flared from the base as it approached. Bug’s damaged forelimb tore off and skidded down the metal slant. I winced, even though I knew it felt no pain, even though I knew it was only one physical piece of a much greater whole. I rose to my feet, using the mech suit for balance—which was when I noticed that the suit was not a solid figure. The torso was split down the center, with both sides folded outward, and the helmet was tilted back. It was open. Open and waiting.

  “Fuck’s sake,” I muttered. “We did not agree to this, kid.”

  But it was, I had to admit, a good idea. I stripped off the ruined vac suit even as another explosion flared behind me. I almost forgot the airlock key but remembered to dig it out of the pack. Vanguard’s praying mantis was reshaping itself, damaged and undamaged parts alike, into something broader, wider, a shape I hadn’t seen before and didn’t recognize now, but it was clearly trying to contain the spiders in a cage of some kind. It wasn’t going to work for long.

  I stepped into the mech suit backward and slid my hands into the openings for its arms. It felt wrong immediately, too bi
g and unwieldy, and the sense of wrongness only grew when the suit began to close around me. My right wrist was a blazing knot of pain, but as soon as the suit closed over it, the agony began to lessen—ah, right. Analgesics in the suit. Useful. The glove pressed the thick metal key into my left hand; it seemed as good a place as any to keep it for now. The helmet was the last to fold into place, and for one heart-stopping second, I couldn’t see anything.

  The suit whirred to life around me. The helmet’s visual feed clicked on just in time for me to see fire engulf Vanguard’s bot. Metal groaned ominously—the base of the sphere was weakening—and a spider raced toward me, so fast it was scampering up the legs of the suit before I could react. I batted at it ineffectually with arms I wasn’t quite sure how to control. It crossed my torso and jumped to my faceplate before it ignited.

  Had I not been wearing the suit, the explosion would have turned my head into pulp. As it was, I felt the force of the blow rocking me backward, felt the slight pressure as the helmet adjusted to cushion my head. The stuttering flash of white light that should have been blinding was instantly dimmed. The visual input came back quickly, slightly quivering: there was damage, but it seemed slight. I didn’t wait to find out. I tried to speak, to call out to Vanguard or even the others, but the radio squealed and spit feedback into my ear.

  I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to trust that Vanguard would save the others. It was faster than me in every way. It had an unlimited number of hands and the ability to use them all at the same time. I could not carry ten people to safety, even with the suit. There was nothing for me to do but run.

  So I ran. Down the line of rooms in the center of the factory, letting the suit’s mechanisms propel me forward faster than I could ever manage on my own, with balance and surety as the boots gripped the floor without the least skid and the exoskeleton kept my limbs in perfect alignment. The spiders raced around my feet, nipping at the metal, searching for purchase, releasing their chemical and setting it alight, but none of it slowed me down. Even with radio static in my ear and visual inputs showing me nothing but a murky sea of smoke and metal, I did not hesitate as I barreled forward.