The darkness was oppressive. Oshi edged her way out along a handrail until a ledge appeared beneath her feet. Then she reached out with her spidery arms and legs, grabbed hold of the wall, twitched a subverbal command to her exoskeleton. It jolted into autonomous life, carrying her out along the wall, down to the dying forest floor below. She permitted himself to feel a momentary relief, but there was too much wrong to feel normal.
The climb-spider began to run, skipping and sliding down the nearly-vertical surface until it began to pick up speed under the influence of the centrifugal effect. Then it began scrabbling to hold itself back, letting the world do the work. Gradually the slope bottomed out, until presently it was no more than a steep hill with trees growing on it at a strange angle.
She felt herself slow as the she reached a smooth, flat ribbon of road that ran between the trees. Where to? she wondered, indecisive, not wanting to commit herself to the finality of a decision. She looked round. There was a cat, lying curled peacefully beneath a bush to one side. Her vision amplifiers picked it out, along with the insects crawling over and through it. Patches of silvery mesh showed through tigerstriped fur in places; a cyborg spy. She looked away in revulsion, afraid that she knew exactly what she must do next.
The medical centre ... she thought. The essential location. They needed that Gatecoder unit. The gatecoder kernel was surprisingly small, a customized Von Neumann machine that carried a parasite module. The parasite, when full grown, was a placentory: a factory for building human bodies at an accelerated rate. Already she felt the chill wind of fear breathing down her neck. If the tapeworm's got to it ... she hunkered down in her supports as her exoskeleton lumbered along the road. The tapeworm Lorma had said, was from the dark anthropic zone: the sector of the graph of possible universes where human-like life could not arise. Not just a Lamarckian organism that coded into genes the characteristics it required to deal with its environment, but something worse: a machine designed to out-evolve and out-eat everything in the colony by integrating them into itself. There was a name for a huge cell with several nuclei, Oshi recalled: a syncitium. The worm was a Lamarckian, heterogenous syncitium. It could eat anything. Including the gatecoder and its placentory module, which they would need for the hijacking. Maybe the worm wouldn't have got there yet. Maybe it would be alright ...
Eventually Oshi arrived at the edge of the necropolis. She stared at the darkened shell of the nearest habitat. The door gaped on blackness. Something crackled faintly in her earphones; a mindless crepitation from the dying forest behind the twilit structure.
Stripped of the burden of life, she imagined the winds of time scouring the colony clean. She could see it as it would appear in a thousand years: a bizarre fossil lined with the ossified corpses of trees, baked by the heat of a distant sun. Distant protruberances would fall away over the years, dropping off the axial docking modules: the colony would roll and tumble unwatched through the centuries, at the heart of a belt of debris around Turing. The air would eventually leak away, but for a long time before then there would be a deathly silence broken by the pings and groans of metal warming and cooling. There were no barbarians in this star system, no witnesses to stare and marvel at the dusty artefacts. The diseased eye would darken, collapse, the contents sucked out of it by the vacuum of time: in the end, nothing would remain but a husk, a vacant socket that had once borne light and life, falling in orbit around the skull of a dead planet.
Where has everyone gone? she wondered, almost desperate to see a human face. This can't be the end yet. It's too early!
Stepping forward, she saw a pathetic bundle lying beside the path. Booster muscles whined in her knee joint as she rolled the corpse over with a boot, far enough to see an unfamiliar face before it fell back. She shuddered, cranked up the oxygen flow through her mask. The wisdom net was silent as the grave. She moved onwards.
The door to the medicentre was open. She stood on the threshold for a minute, breathing deeply and trying to think. A faint hissing came from inside, like escaping gas. The sniffer on the outside of her exoskeleton locked in, feeding olfactory insights to her. Something in there stinks, she decided. But what? It was an indeterminate worry; unrealistic. She felt like a tourist visiting a souvenir shop in a death camp, decades later, witnessing disconnected horrors with no toe-hold in reality. This couldn't be happening. She stepped inside. There was a manual light control just inside the doorway, a concession to primitive instincts. She slapped it lightly and looked around as the ceiling brightened.
Lying before her was the source of the smell; sickly sweet and withered, with empty eye sockets that buzzed. Rotting placentories hung like strange fruit on either side, each containing a fragile harvest of slime-smeared human bones. She recoiled, taking in everything with obsessive intensity. What – she thought, then looked up. At the artefact in the centre of the room.
“Hello Oshi,” said the thing in the life-support bush. “Small world, isn't it?”
Six days had turned Raisa into a shell; a rotting chrysalis within which nothing but a core of personality remained. She'd taken a cumulative dose of decaGreys: what was left of her body was held together by the frond-like peripherals of the life support system. Her skin was blotched and bruised and peeling, her hair moulting; she looked like a week-dead corpse.
“You took your time getting here,” she said drily.
Oshi blanched. “I thought you were uploaded.” For a moment her shell cracked; she looked at Raisa with eyes like broken glass.
“Sort-of: I had to stay,” Raisa said. Her throat crackled with mucus as the speech-synth vocalised for her, her injured pharynx vainly trying to keep up with her brain. “Rest evacuated ... we all uploaded. But I wanted to talk to you.”
Oshi glanced down. A mess of decaying skin and bones – all that was left of a goon – lay before Raisa's support hammock.
“A little contretemps,” Raisa said tiredly. “Not everyone made it. The goon squad went crazy. You know about them?”
Oshi looked at her dully. Slowly her face relaxed. One cheek twitched into a self-deprecating grin. “So you decided to stay for a little chat, right? If the radiation level here is so intense, what's going to happen on Pascal?” She turned away as if embarrassed, trying to conceal her reaction. Shoulders shaking. She really had thought that maybe –
“I wanted to talk to you.”
Oshi turned round slowly. “About what?”
“I think you know.”
“You didn't have to stay.” The air between them was gravid with tension.
“Ah, but I wanted to. I really – you didn't give me enough time.”
The gatecoder module bulked large against one wall, a black slab of warm ceramic. Oshi slumped against it. “I didn't know what I was asking for,” she said. “Why now?”
“Life's been empty. Too long.” Raisa shook her head, support hammock fronds manipulating muscles that were already decaying, eaten from within by their own lysosomes. “Do I need to give you a reason? Oh, Oshi, I didn't realise it would be like this.”
“I had thought that maybe,” Oshi said brokenly. “You and I –”
There was a carrier-wave whistle from the speech-synth. “Plans!” Raisa said with gentle derision. “I could see you making plans for us. Do you realise what's happened? I'm here. I'm still alive. I'll recover, you'll see. Just take a bit of cellular reconstruction. I didn't want to be alone ... what do you expect?”
Oshi shook her head, limp-necked. “Not this. I've got to get the gatecoder up to the hub, grow a new placentory. Without it we can't go anywhere. But Rai, there's hope! Boris, the others – everyone – they've uploaded. Anubis is dead and we're going to steal the Ultrabright ship! I can take you up to the hub. There's room for both of us. Do you want that?”
Raisa lay amidst the quiet hissing of pumps, silent for seconds as she formulated an answer.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I don't think I can move yet. I'm fixed, here. The tapeworm tried to get to the gateco
der but I stopped it. I stopped it good ... fed it fugu. I hurt, Oshi, I hurt everywhere. I can't move. What are you going to do?”
Oshi shrugged angrily. “What can I do? I wanted ...” she caught herself. Raisa closed her sunken eyes.
“I'll tell you what I was going to do,” Oshi said. She licked her lips. Story time. It was a distraction from her real worries: she didn't have to think about Raisa's condition if she kept talking. “There's a starship out there. With a small expansion processor, a gatecoder receiver, and a drive of some kind. It's dumb right now, waiting for an Ultrabright to arrive by broadcast transmission and tell it what to do. We're going to assemble a fleet of small ships. The enemy's parked in orbit thirty light seconds away. We don't have portable expansion processors capable of running an attack, but brains are cheap ... we need to grow bodies, soldiers to control the attack drones when we get close in. Then when we've hacked into the berserker we'll take control, set course for the nearest inhabited system. That's the plan.”
Raisa's eyelids snapped open, revealing bloodshot conjunctivae; “take me with you?”
“Oshi's face softened. “You're in danger here. We've got to get you to the hub somehow –”
“Can't move. I'm still too ill. I'd be dead but for the nanosystems glueing my cells together.”
“But you're –”
“A medic, or what passes for one here. I know best. Oshi? I'll have to wait. Take my chances with the tapeworm. It's very subtle, you know. Assimilates predator tactics, memes, as well as genes from its victims. But it doesn't know everything.” An expression of loathing or disgust twisted her face and she shut her eyes. “Oshi?”
“Yes?” Oshi took a step closer, until she could feel Raisa's breath on her cheek.
“Kiss me –” She tilted her face up towards Oshi, pursed slack bruised lips. Oshi instinctively leaned close, smelt something through her oloreceptors, jerked back and looked ...
Raisa's mouth hung open. There were no teeth inside: she no longer had a tongue. Her mouth was full of pale wormy palps, questing heads blindly seeking the warmth of human breath: “Oshi? Kiss me?”
Oshi looked at the support hammock, then at the ground beneath it. The floor was humped up, cracked open, something vegetable thrusting through and up into the mass of life support equipment that cradled Raisa. It smelt of shit and decaying vegetables and worms. The thing at the centre of the mass twitched, pulsing in time to the motion of Raisa's rib cage like the arm below a glove puppet.
“Upload,” said Oshi: “shit!” She scrambled back, covering her face with one hand, trying not to vomit. “If that's still you, Raisa, evacuate; go Dreamtime at once!”
“What's wrong? Oshi, I feel strange –” Raisa opened her eyes and screamed.
Her body heaved itself upright, shedding wires and support tubes like dandruff. A fat white cable impaled her from below: her eyes bulged and when she opened her mouth something like spaghetti spewed writhing and twitching across her chin. Tears of blood trickled down her cheeks as wormy pseudopods erupted from her eyes and ears. She glided forward, thrusting atop a thick body that slithered snake-like across the floor.
Oshi reacted instantly. She threw up her ghost arms: a mess of tracking digits splashed across the room, the tapeworm, the gutted puppet impaled upon it. She made one spastic twitch and there was a noise like a giant zip fastening lined with firecrackers. Shrapnel sang and pinged across the room. The world outside the medicentre screamed: the floor shook as the various extrusions of the tapeworm registered the pain of this extension.
Oshi lashed out with another arm, grabbing the smooth exterior of the Gatecoder module. It was buttoned down, totally sealed – someone had packed it up in anticipation of trouble. “ Thank you Raisa,” she mumbled, tears rising and her stomach heaving in noxious sympathy as she dragged at the heavy pod. Motors whined in her climb-spider as she hauled it up onto her back and glanced round for signs of the tapeworm's return. Raisa, she mourned. Why did you stay behind? Was it out of a sense of misplaced duty? Or was it that she knew what would happen if she didn't shut down the gatecoder and they needed it? The tapeworm acquires predator tactics from elsewhere, adding them to its repertoire as it blindly seeks to convert all biomass in the colony into extensions of itself. You don't stay behind after you've uploaded. There's not much left behind in your skull, anyway. Raisa was safe. But whatever had taken control of her body had known how to use it ...
Oshi stumbled out into the diseased night, crying and panting and trying not to think about anything, hauling the hope of survival on her back.
The axial factories clustered around the hub of the colony, exposed to the vacuum of space outside the pressurized habitat cylinder. Connected by hollow tubes, they resembled a huge string of garlic hanging from one end of an oil drum. Beyond them hung the docking bay: a vast bucket, open to space at one end. A school of tiny minnows clustered in the bottom of the bucket, locked onto the unpressurized end wall of the colony.
Each minnow massed six thousand tons, empty: triple that when loaded with reaction mass and payload. They were fusion rockets, complex assemblies of drive shields, fuel tanks, payload platforms. Each ship was large enough to carry heavy mining equipment, factories, aeromining assemblies, attack drones. There were eighty of them; all that was left of Anubis's neglected planetary engineering fleet. They had been mothballed decades ago, when the Superbright turned away from his mission to follow other, less material, goals. The ships slumbered for years, their systems powered down, drawing parasite power from the colony's grid. But now circumstances had changed, and the ships were beginning to awaken.
Oshi was depressed. Every time she looked out at the empty eye socket of the colony she saw a mirror to her dreams. The dim light filtering from the axial tube sprayed randomly across a mute landscape with no sentience to illuminate it. Quirks of the ecostructure had rendered it vulnerable to takeover by the right category of parasite: the tapeworm had spread out, infiltrating every available niche, and the cylinder was slowly filling with a haze of deathly-thick fog. The structure was degenerating, slowly turning into an undifferentiated and simple predator as it eliminated all it's macroscopic rivals. That was what it had been created for, after all: a biological weapon that had spun out of control. A deadly gossamer cloud of fibres threaded the decomposing crust of buildings and soil in the colony, leaking a pale yellow fluid across the sterilized ground.
But some parts of the colony were still hazardous. As soon as she'd reached the airlock Oshi had triggered the decontamination cycle, searing everything outside her isolation suit with short-wavelength ultraviolet: when she was sure the lock was sterile, she'd thermite-welded the lock door shut. The tapeworm assimilates the tactics of its victims. What it had done with the Raisa-puppet haunted her dreams, shaking her awake in a cold choking panic. First vocalization, then intelligence ... where would it stop? She used the axial control nexus to trace all the other airlocks opening onto the interior of the colony: then welded them shut and shorted out the control circuits. She set up monitor programs, watching every corner of the axial redoubt and the hub factories. Her dreams were haunted by decaying bodies in gashed space-suits, writhing with white coiled life. If the worm learned how to space walk before she was ready to launch ...
I'll have to destroy the colony, she realised, grimly watching its progress through external video eyes. To sterilise this infection will take more than antibiotics. Whatever was left of Raisa had tried tetrodotoxin, just about the most lethal neurotoxin known: it hadn't worked. And the worm was learning, using lures. It talked to her over the comm if she let it, stringing together nonsensical invitations and threats, fronting faces from which the grey flesh dripped in slow-melting ropes. She blinked slowly. It could be worse. Lorma could have used nanoassemblers. Grey goop syndrome ... runaway nanorobots would have converted the entire colony into a bloom of furiously replicating molecular monsters by now. But the tapeworm was less efficient, and less predictable. It might still have a nasty
surprise in store for her, and this was a risk she was not prepared to expose herself to.
The axial territories outside the biosphere were safe for Oshi as long as she observed biohazard precautions. One morning she visited a pressurised module she'd set up in one of the huge freight elevators that connected the factory sections to the docking station. She travelled by spider, externally sterilised, airlocks copulating and pulsing with plastic flexibility in the variable pressure zones. She let it suck her through a succession of claustrophobic chambers, the airflow whispering sweet nothings to her. She remembered – couldn't forget – Raisa: if it has truly become intelligent – what of the real woman?
Days before, she'd cloned the gatecoder firmware and despatched the specification to the factories for duplication. Eighty payload pallets were under construction, sized for the docking adapters of the ghost fleet. She'd worked it out with Boris and Mik, a ghostly telconference that had lasted nearly a day in realtime as they politely, almost ritualistically, waited for the thirty-second lag in communication. Each gatecoder would handle a dozen clone-and-download cases simultaneously, which should be enough. There was a limit, after all, to the number of attack drones the factories could build with the available materials. With all the uploads in the Pascal dreamtime, they had more than enough pilots for the combat craft ...
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