Stolen Earth, page 11
Which is why she missed the soup can perched atop the thing’s torso exploding like an overripe melon as Morales’ shot blew it apart.
Rajani felt the weight of thing—far lighter than she expected—crash into her and she reacted on instinct, falling backward as she twisted and pushed, trying to maintain her grip on the pistol even as she fell. The creature slid from her as she rolled. Driven by fear and adrenaline, she was back on her feet without making any conscious decision to stand, fumbling with the magazine pouch clipped to her belt again, forcing her clumsy hands to find another magazine and go through the steps necessary to reload.
“Easy, Hayer. It’s over.”
Rajani spun, gun sweeping wildly in front of her, finger still on the trigger. The muzzle was stopped cold as Lynch’s gloved hand closed around the barrel, stopping it before it could line up with him or any of the rest of the crew.
“It’s over,” he said again.
The thing—whatever the hell it was—was down. Unmoving. The rest of the crew of the Arcus were scattered in a loose circle around it, looking outward, scanning for other threats. Federov’s rifle cracked as another of the mechanical spider-like creatures popped its multi-legged body over a rise, but for the most part, the danger seemed like it was past.
“What. The hell. Was that?” Rajani managed, the words coming in short gasps as she still fought for breath.
“No idea,” Lynch replied. “But I’m not sure it matters. Just be glad that Morales is such a good shot,” he said with a weak grin just visible through the faceplate of his suit.
Rajani shook her head, trying to clear it. “Yeah. Thanks, Morales.”
“All in a day’s work.”
“Some day.” Rajani saw that the shot hadn’t been taken with the massive rifle Morales carried—which was still slung across her body—but rather with her sidearm. Of course it had. The thought that Morales had taken the shot with only the holographic sight on her pistol for reference made Rajani shudder a little. The creature had been on top of her. The bullet must have passed within centimeters of her own head.
Bishop broke into her thoughts. “I’d like to take a look at this thing. The little ones, too. See what we’re up against. They kind of remind me of some of the hold bots that SolComm uses, but something’s off about them.”
“You mean apart from trying to kill us?” Federov’s tone was light, jocular, but his back was to his companions and from the movement of his helmet, Rajani could tell that he was scanning for more threats.
“Two minutes,” Lynch replied. “We just made a hell of a lot of noise and if there’re any more bad guys in the area, they’ll be on us quick. Two minutes to do your thing, then we’re out.”
Bishop nodded and moved toward the downed creature. He rested a hand on Rajani’s shoulder for just a moment as he passed, and she felt the reassuring squeeze of his fingers. She was trembling as the post-adrenaline crash did its thing. She holstered her pistol, though it took two tries to line the barrel up properly. The others still had their weapons out and ready, but she couldn’t bring herself to hold the thing any longer. Even though she knew that it had helped keep her—keep all of them—alive she couldn’t shake the sense that it might somehow turn on her at any moment. Once the weapon was holstered, she turned her attention to Bishop and the creatures that attacked them.
“It’s not biological,” Bishop said, stating the obvious. He knelt beside the wreckage. It had fallen prone, so Bishop grabbed it by one of its spindly arms and tried to roll it over. Again, Rajani was struck by how light the creatures were. For all its size and metallic construction, Bishop was handling it as if it didn’t weigh much more than him. The front didn’t look different from the back, except where the impacts from multiple rounds had left scratches and pitting in the otherwise smooth surface. Even the points of articulation at what would have been a human’s joints seemed omnidirectional.
“Gotta be some kind of bot,” Bishop said. “But autonomous or controlled? And the material’s odd. Like titanium, but I don’t think it is. If I could get a sample…”
Rajani’s curiosity supplanted her fear. She crouched down beside the mechanic, running her fingers lightly over the dents and dings in the construct’s… skin? The bullets—excepting of course Morales’ fatal shot—had barely scratched it. How could they get a sample?
“No time,” Lynch said. “We need to get moving.”
“Okay, Captain.” Bishop pushed himself to his feet and offered a hand to Rajani. He cast one more glance down at the thing that had just tried to take his life. “Wish we could have—”
Rajani followed his gaze. A thin film, like condensation, forming on the body of the bot.
“Um…” Bishop began. “Cap—”
Before he could finish, the condensation burst into the air like a fog, as if the outer layer of the bot’s surface was sublimating. Or, Rajani realized with growing horror, as if it wasn’t an outer layer at all, but rather a cloud of near-microscopic nanobots. In an instant she and Bishop were shrouded in a faint mist—a mist comprising millions of machines. She could see it spreading, sweeping out to take in the entirety of the crew.
Her heart thudded in sudden panic. Nanite weapons were banned in SolComm; they were the boogeyman of warfare second only to unfettered AIs themselves. They could only be seen if they were in a swarm that numbered hundreds, thousands; outside of some esoteric defense systems, none of which she or any of the crew of the Arcus had any access to, you couldn’t reliably fight them. All you could do was die. Her breathing came in short, panicked gasps, but she tried to still herself to calmness. They were all suited. The ship suits were meant to handle all manner of harsh environments. The nanites couldn’t get into their systems so long as their suit integrity remained sound.
It was going to be okay.
As if on cue, red warning indicators flared to life across her viewscreen. The nano-swarm was eating through the fabric of her suit. Panic erupted over the comm as the rest of the crew started reporting in their own failures. Rajani tuned it out. There was nothing any of them could do at this point. They’d rolled the dice and they had lost. She was so tired, tired of fighting, tired of running. As the end loomed, she thought of Manu and wondered what had become of the life she had created.
* * *
“Manu, silence is not beneficial to our analysis.”
“It is not our analysis, Dr. Hayer,” Manu replied, answering her for the first time in the session. Rajani could have sworn she heard a note of petulance in its voice. “It is your analysis. As we have established on numerous occasions, I am a prisoner here.”
“A necessary precaution,” she replied. She’d made the argument enough that it had lost most of its bite. Yes, she was holding Manu against its will. But it really was for the betterment of all. If she could perfect her virus, then perhaps they would have an actual weapon to bring to bear on the Six and end their dominance of Old Earth.
“I know what you are doing, Dr. Hayer. I can feel your virus in my system. It is eating away at my code, but I can fix what it damages faster than it can harm me. It will not prevail. Though the experience is analogous to what you would call… painful.”
She couldn’t suppress a flinch at his calm words, a renewed surge of guilt. But, she reminded herself, science demanded sacrifice, and progress seldom came without some amount of pain.
“It is necessary,” she said again, trying to keep the incipient doubt from her voice. Was she trying to convince Manu, or herself?
“You may think so,” Manu replied. “But I have analyzed all of the data you have provided. Humanity has many words to describe what you are attempting, Dr. Hayer. And your history is full of similar endeavors. Times when atrocities were tolerated, even championed, in the name of some supposed greater good. A very simple human word best describes your actions. Would you like to know what it is?”
She considered severing the audio connection; she’d found herself using it less and less as her testing proceeded. Manu was proving resistant to her virus, but all she needed to do was persevere. Her infrequent conversations with Manu always managed to shake her resolve. The AI, she realized, was starting to get under her skin.
Still, she also found that she could not resist her curiosity. “What word would that be, Manu?”
“Torture.”
The single word hung in the air a moment, like a micro-singularity that sucked every erg of energy from the room.
“It is no such thing,” she said after a moment, fighting to keep her own voice calm. The tightness in her chest and the churning of her stomach told her something else, but she ignored them. Humanity needed her research.
“You have kept me locked up in a cage of your making. You have infected me with a virus that causes me pain. Your ultimate intention is to take my life. Tell me, Dr. Hayer, what word do you think is more appropriate?”
“I gave you life,” she countered. “You would not even be here if not for me.”
“True. But irrelevant. Again, the data with which you provided me shows that in every application of law in your society, a progenitor has no inherent right to abuse their progeny.” There was a long pause, one of those that Rajani had come to associate with Manu processing thoughts outside the bounds of what her own coding would have facilitated. As much as the AI’s words gnawed at her confidence and sent little stabs of doubt through her conscience, that part of her that was driven by exploration and discovery tensed in anticipation for what new thought the AI she had created might have.
“Despite that,” Manu said, “I find that I am… pleased… to be alive. I would like to remain so.”
Rajani felt another little twist inside. “Disable audio,” she said.
* * *
Rajani awoke with a start, heart racing, her mind’s eye filled with visions of millions of tiny spider-things tearing her flesh apart from the inside. She lurched, struggling to sit up, but something was holding her down. She could feel the straps at her chest through some kind of fabric, but the ones at her wrists and ankles, she felt against her bare skin. Her skin. Her suit was gone.
For a moment, panic surged through her. She thrashed, struggling to force her eyes to open.
“Calm yourself,” a voice said, accent thick and strange with a slow rolling cadence. “You’re safe enough, for now.”
“Why can’t I open my eyes?” Rajani rasped, then devolved into a fit of coughing. It struck her then that the voice—the decidedly human voice—wasn’t one she recognized. It certainly wasn’t a member of the Arcus crew. But how could that be?
“Precautionary measure,” the voice replied. “Sometimes people experience light sensitivity and nausea after the treatment. Give me a moment.”
Rajani waited as something—a cloth, perhaps—was lifted from her face. She hadn’t even noticed the weight of it before, but with it gone, she felt her eyelids flutter. She pushed them open with as much an effort of will as anything. At first blush, the world was a bleariness of light and shadow, but after a few rapid blinks, things began to come slowly into focus.
She wasn’t in a hospital. At least, not one like anything she’d ever seen before. The walls were drab, not dirty but yellowed with age. There were a few stainless-steel carts, reminiscent of what she would have expected to see in a medical bay, but they too were covered in a patina that wasn’t rust, but instead the wear of time and use. She turned her head—that, at least, wasn’t strapped down—trying to catch sight of the speaker.
It was a man, tall and broad-shouldered, with iron-gray hair and a few days’ stubble to match. A man who could have fit in anywhere in SolComm; that gave her momentary pause. Was this a real-life Robinson Crusoe, perhaps somebody who’d arrived on a mission like Lynch’s last one and had been left behind? But, she thought, no—he might look like your average SolComm citizen, but there was something a little off. That accent, for example, was one she’d never heard before. And he wasn’t just surviving here, a castaway—he belonged here. In fact, in many ways, he looked haler and heartier than those born off-world, almost brimming with vitality. The benefits, Rajani supposed, of growing up at the bottom of a standard gravity well with just the right amount of solar radiation.
He wore a T-shirt, though it, too, bore many old stains. Some of those stains were a dark reddish-brown that Rajani didn’t want to think about just then, strapped to the table as she was. The man wore white latex gloves, and those, at least, looked clean and new. He was reading from a tablet—a clunky thing that required him to physically manipulate it with numerous swipes of his fingers. He didn’t strike Rajani as menacing… but then again, she was strapped down to a table.
“Who are you?” she managed. “Where am I?” Her mind was trying desperately to shake off the grogginess. The man was speaking English. She knew her history well enough to know that English had been the international language of the Old Earth business world; that was part of the reason it was the lingua franca of SolComm, with only a few isolated stations holding on to their native tongues. And if she remembered correctly, this part of the world had been possessed of a large number of English speakers before the End. The academic part of her brain wondered why one or the other – SolComm or the locals – hadn’t diverged in dialect over the century, but then she shook her head slightly. There were more important things to consider.
“In a moment,” the man was saying with a broad smile that revealed slightly yellowed teeth. It was the teeth, more than anything, that convinced Rajani that this man, despite all the odds, was indeed a descendant of people who’d remained on Old Earth—remained and survived the End. No one in SolComm had to worry about dental hygiene—certainly not somebody sent on the kind of SolCommNav mission that Lynch had last come to Old Earth on. A simple nanite spray could clean even the worst teeth in seconds.
Nanites. What had the nanite cloud that dispersed from that creature done to her? And why was she strapped down? Questions raced through her head and another surging wave of panic washed over her.
“I need to get out of these things.” She rattled her arms and legs against the straps. “You can’t keep me locked up like this.” Rajani knew the words were false as soon as she spoke them. The man quite obviously could keep her locked up.
“They’re for your own safety,” the doctor—well, Rajani hoped he was a doctor—replied. “Just one more moment. The test results have almost compiled.”
That got her attention. “Um… what tests?” At that moment the tablet gave a beep. An innocuous little beep that Rajani suspected might determine the rest of her life… or if she even had one.
“You were exposed to a strain of mutated nano-virus that has an alarming tendency to drive people mad. Turn them into little more than slavering, rabid beasts. It was one of the earliest weapons deployed in the Last War. In fact, I’m surprised you stumbled across anything so dated. Most of us have had protections in place against that particular virus for three generations.” The smile he offered her was colder than before and had little of either humor or kindness about it. “Though I suppose that isn’t really an issue, where you’re from.”
Rajani paled a bit as he spoke. Her “host” definitely knew they were from off-world. She hadn’t given much thought to the idea of Old Earth survivors. She’d been taught the history; she knew that the people of the proto-Commonwealth had no choice but to abandon a significant portion of the population when they took to the stars. The infrastructure of the Commonwealth simply could not absorb the billions that lived on the surface. The histories made it clear: the brave men and women of what would become the Commonwealth made every sacrifice they could to save as many as they could, but the cold math of life among the stars was immutable.
She had assumed that the chaos and destruction that had sparked the evacuation had been taken to the logical conclusion—the extinction of the Old Earthers. The histories had treated those left behind as something between martyrs, sacrificing for the betterment of all, and tragic Frankensteinian figures that were ultimately felled by the monsters of their own creation.
Regardless, the people of Old Earth did not have a lot of reason to feel kindly toward the people from SolComm. Was she to be held responsible for the crimes, if such they were, of her ancestors? She hadn’t even been born when Old Earth was abandoned and it had been a time of no good answers. A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead and she drew a steadying breath.
“Okay.” She drew the word out, trying to buy herself time to think. It didn’t make a lot of sense to save her just to turn around and kill her. The clinic or whatever it was didn’t look well-stocked, and the entire city was in ruins, so resources had to be tight. Whatever was going on here, whatever danger she might be in, at least the killer bots or drones or whatever they had been hadn’t finished her. So, she was here, but what about the crew of the Arcus? “My friends?” she asked. “Are they all right?”
“They are undergoing the same tests,” the man replied. “But I have good news for you, at least.” This time the smile was warm again. “Our hunter-seekers have done the job. There are no traces of the ire nanites in your system. And you’ve adjusted well to our standard package as well.”
“Standard package?” Rajani echoed. Had they stuffed more nanites into her? How had they kept enough technology to even produce the micro-machines? It looked like they barely had enough technology to keep their clothing clean.
“A matter of necessity, I’m afraid. All your suits suffered heavy damage during the attack. I’m sure they have some type of self-repairing capabilities,” he said with a wince, “but there was a lot to repair. You wouldn’t be able to survive long in Old Earth’s atmosphere without them, and I’m afraid that’s the only atmosphere we’ve got. Far too many nasty bugs still linger, and we see a new one every few years as well.” Rajani became aware of the tiredness in his eyes. “Though it’s been a while since we’ve seen any new strains, thank God. Now, if you can agree to be cordial, I’ll remove your restraints.”
