Outlanders 37 Rim of the World, page 11
Philboyd jerked upright at the sight of her enlarged red eyes. A startled curse sprang to his lips, then he smiled, unable to resist Domi's impish grin. "It's only been an hour," he said, "but in fact I have."
He turned toward Lakesh. "Any news from our people in Africa?"
Lakesh shook his head. "Not so far. The transponders are showing high-normal metabolic signatures of our away team but they haven't checked in yet. What've you got going here?"
Philboyd declared, "This little bug is a cybernetic work unit, basically a self-propelled tool, not remote controlled. It apparently had sensors that caused it to react. I'd say the head that detached itself was an observation and analysis system that sent images back to some control center. Now look at this."
With a pair of forceps, Philboyd reached into the thoracic cavity of the machine. The lamplight gleamed from a confusing mass of circuitry and microprocessors within. He withdrew a small cylinder that looked to be made of steel mesh, about the length and thickness of grown man's index finger.
Lakesh stared at it, unimpressed. "So?"
Philboyd picked up a set of needle-nosed pliers and probed one end of the little cylinder, pulling out a glittering object. Domi's and Lakesh's eyes widened at the sight of the sculpted yellow crystal, at first glance a flawless diamond. Philboyd placed it beneath the light and Lakesh studied it, seeing a tiny constellation of stars glowing deep within its facets.
"I think this is our bug's power source," Philboyd announced. "What used to be known as a CEM—a chargeable energy module."
"A rock?" Domi inquired dubiously.
Lakesh leaned closer, scrutinizing the stone closely. "Before the nukecaust, there was a field of study devoted to developing crystals as a solid-state energy source."
"I'm aware," Philboyd said stiffly. "The thesis was that crystals could be used as advanced energy-storage systems. In my work with NASA I experimented with crystals for electron imaging and convergent beam diffraction. But none of the researches went as far as this."
Glancing at Domi, he said, "If one of your bullets hadn't cut a power transmission coupling, I think the thing would still be running."
She lifted a shoulder in a negligent shrug. "Lucky shot."
Philboyd angled a questioning eyebrow, first at her then at Lakesh. "Yeah, luck is the word for it, all right."
Tapping the cyberspider's body with the tips of the pliers, he declared, "This thing was built with triple redundancies. You hit it in the right place at the right time."
Lakesh regarded him gravely. "What do you mean?"
"I mean Domi could have shot it literally to pieces and if she hadn't disconnected the CEM, it would be zipping around right now."
"How do you figure that?" demanded Domi.
"There are at least three pretty damn advanced microprocessors inside our little bug. If we could access just one, we'd be able to refer to all sorts of useful data about where this thing came from, how it's built, who built it—"
"Wouldn't doing that require a special interface?" Lakesh broke in.
Philboyd waved the pliers around dismissively. "With some of the techs we have here, it wouldn't be too much of problem to put one together."
Pursing his lips contemplatively, Lakesh fingered a bullet hole on the cyberspider's carapace. "What makes you think our two technologies are compatible? As damaged as this gadget is, how do you know if can be made functional again?"
"I don't," Philboyd retorted bluntly. "But there's a -way to find out."
He brandished the yellow crystal gripped by the forceps. "I can hook the power feed conduit back up to this and see if can reboot the whole operational system."
Lakesh stared at him in disbelief for a long moment, then his eyebrows knitted together at the bridge of his nose. "I might have expected such a reckless suggestion from Kane, but not from you."
Philboyd chuckled self-consciously. "It's not as reckless a suggestion as you might think. As Domi said, this little bug is shot to shit. Most of its moving parts
4 are wrecked, some are even missing and I gutted it of all its electronics. It's essentially a husk, a shell. All I want is to give it a taste of power to find out if it's worth the time and effort to build a processor interface."
Lakesh tugged at his long nose, gazing at the cyberspider speculatively.
"It would be like hooking up a battery to a junker car that's up on blocks," Philboyd continued earnestly.
"Just so we could test the electrical system, see if the radio and the lights still worked."
Lakesh sighed heavily. "You're sure the bug is dysfunctional? You have no doubt?"
Philboyd gestured to it, then to the litter of parts strewed over the tabletop. He arched his eyebrows meaningfully. "What do you think?"
"I think you think you're smarter than you really are," Domi stated flatly. "If that little monster was made by the snake faces, it's got to be tricky. You can't trust it."
Philboyd regarded the albino with a patronizing smile. "It's not magic, Domi. The overlords aren't gods and they didn't make a monster. This is just a machine they built, and machines have limitations."
Domi slitted her eyes. "Don't talk to me like I'm a jolt brain. I know damn well it's a machine. I'm the one who carried it uphill for six miles, remember? But I also know a machine made by a snake face might have a whole different set of limitations than what you expect."
"I'm sure friend Brewster will take all appropriate precautions," Lakesh said reassuringly. He speared the man with a frosty, challenging glare. "Right, friend Brewster?"
Philboyd smiled sourly. "I'd say doing everything but skinning and burying it is taking all appropriate precautions."
He bent over the cyberspider again, peering through the magnifying lens, inserting the crystal back into the steel-mesh container and then into the thorax. He manipulated the pliers and forceps swiftly and deftly. Lakesh gazed over the astrophysicist's shoulder at the operation as he reconnected the crystal.
"It's really not a very complicated piece of machinery," Philboyd murmured as he worked. "Those flying disks Enlil used against us were light-years beyond this clockwork doohickey."
Within three minutes, a soft, pale yellow glow suddenly washed within the thorax of the cyberspider. At the same time, the machine emitted a faint drone. "Here we go," Philboyd said confidently. "Nothing to it. My faith in electronics is restored."
Lakesh looked toward Domi to gauge her reaction and realized she wasn't present. He frowned slightly in annoyance, miffed that she was so distrustful of Philboyd's expertise that she would take herself out of the vicinity on the off chance anything went wrong.
Reaching for an amperage meter, Philboyd commented, "I'll just run a quick check on the power output and we can get a notion about what kind of interface—"
He broke off when the hum from the cyberspider changed in pitch to a buzzing whine. Both he and Lakesh stared at it. As they gaped at the machine in wide-wild-eyed wonder, the bullet holes perforating the cyberspider's skin swirled and closed up. Within seconds, the two edges of the slit cut into its thorax stretched out over the cavity, joined and sealed with a barely perceptible seam.
All at once, memories rushed over Lakesh, his thoughts flying back to the night of the aerial assault on the redoubt and how bullets that struck the scout ships seemed to be absorbed into the hull. He recollected what Brigid had told him of the body armor worn by the overlords and the Nephilim—that it was composed of a smart metal, a malleable alloy that responded to a sequence of commands programmed into its extruder. A miniature cohesive binding field changed it from liquid to solid and back again.
An image of how the hull of one the scout ships, sent into a tailspin by a mortar shell, had morphed and extended glider wings leaped to the forefront of his mind.
Even as the memory registered, the underside of the cyberspider began bulging in places, as if fingers were poking at the underside of a malleable membrane. Then a section of the alloy formed a cone and stretched out a pseudopod, the blunt tip questing blindly like the head of slug. Lakesh glimpsed the glint of a tiny crystal, like a diamond chip at very end of it.
"What the hell?" Philboyd blurted, jumping up so suddenly the stool crashed loudly to the floor.
The realization surged through Lakesh in a shaved sliver of a second—as Philboyd said, one of Domi's shots had indeed been lucky, penetrating the cyberspider's body, knocking askew its power source and impairing the smart metal from employing its ability to morph.
The pseudopod suddenly shot straight out like a striking serpent. Constrictor fashion, it lashed around Brewster Philboyd's neck, dragging from his lips a choked cry of terror. The electronic whine turned into a metallic rasp, and the tentacle contracted into a tight knot.
Philboyd clawed at it, trying to fit his fingers between the enwrapping tentacle and his throat. "Lakesh—!"
As if sensing the man's efforts to free himself, the alloy-sheathed tentacle tightened its grip, cutting off Philboyd's voice and respiration. He uttered a single gagging cough, eyes bulging with fright and pain.
Shouting in alarm, Lakesh picked up a screwdriver from the table and lunged to help. He barely noticed a targeting pipper blooming on the side of the machine, shining like a perfect drop of blood.
The boom of the single shot was painfully loud, sending out a wave of eardrum-compressing sound. A wad of 20-gauge buckshot center-punched the cyberspider. Fragments of metal and glittering circuitry flew outward. It spun like a crazed carousel on the tabletop.
The tentacle around Philboyd's neck slithered loose. He and Lakesh stumbled out of Domi's line of fire as she marched in from the armory, a Remington Autoloader USAS-12 shotgun in her arms. She trained the front-mounted laser targeter onto the cyberspider's bulbous body.
"Get down!" she shouted.
As Lakesh and Philboyd frantically complied, she fired again at the cyberspider, and a blizzard of shot blew it off the table, scooping a ragged, splintery furrow in the wood. The machine clattered to the floor in several pieces.
Stepping around the two men crouched down on the floor, Domi swept the red light thread over the fragments of cyberspider scattered over the floor. It writhed along the tiles with groping, disjointed movements. Tiny shards of shattered alloy glinted in its wake. Domi brought the autotargeter to rest on the largest piece, a cup-shaped shard about the size of her fist.
It shivered violently and several smaller pieces of the device suddenly skittered across the floor tiles toward it, as if it exerted a powerful magnetic attraction. The tentacle reared up for an instant like a wounded snake, blindly seeking prey to strike.
Domi squeezed the trigger again, easily handling the shotgun's recoil despite her small stature. The boom of 20-gauge buckshot exploding from the bore was deafening. The tentacle of the cyberspider vanished in a billow of smoke and a spray of broken tiles.
In the sudden silence that followed, Domi announced matter-of-factly in her little-girl voice, "A man has got to know a machine's limitations...right, Brewster?"
Lakesh straightened up and exchanged a long look with Philboyd, who massaged his neck. He said darkly, "Now that darlingest Domi has pointed them out, the bug—or what's left of it—might be safe for further study."
Philboyd continued rubbing his neck and he regarded the shattered fragments of the cyberspider with loathing. In a faint, hoarse whisper he said, "I think I've lost my faith in electronics."
Chapter 13
Reba DeFore lay in the sling bed, naked arms and legs dangling, her face tilted to the rafters. Sweat gleamed on her brown face and limbs, pooling in the hollow between her breasts, plastering her ash-blond hair to her cheeks and forehead. It was only six o'clock in the morning, but the heat was already suffocating.
She had spent a fitful night in the guest quarters of Princess Pakari's dwelling, but her restlessness had little to do with the heat and oppressive humidity. Consumed with worry about her three friends in the Sudan, DeFore had kept listening for a signal from the satcomm. A call to Cerberus around two o'clock in the morning hadn't provided her with any information except the biolink transponders had registered exceptionally high stress indicators among them.
Lakesh had made a cryptic reference to a mechanical-spider problem the redoubt had experienced a few minutes earlier, but he hadn't gone into detail. He had informed her that data about Prester John was ready for satellite download into the laptop she had brought along, but she wasn't inclined to go through the setup process.
Concern for Brigid, Grant and Kane kept her awake, but DeFore also worried about being bitten by the poisonous snakes and toxic bugs she was sure crawled all over the floor beneath her. She disliked in the extreme leaving the cool, sheltering walls of Cerberus and going out into the field. The few times she had joined away missions had resulted in situations that gave her nightmares for months. Over six years ago she had been recruited by Lakesh because of her medical background, not because she wanted to be either an explorer or an adventurer.
Nor had DeFore volunteered to join Cerberus. She had been forced to flee from her barony when her lover, tortured by Magistrates, had named her as a seditionist, as an agent of the Preservationists. Their existence was mentioned only in fearful whispers among the ville-bred, as a sinister underground resistance movement pledged to deliver the hidden history of the world to a humanity held in baronial bondage.
DeFore still retained vivid memories of her first days in the cavernous and uninhabited Cerberus redoubt, with its echoing corridors and empty rooms. The installation was like a vast city to her then, accustomed as she was to living in a tiny two-room flat in the residential Enclaves. The place felt haunted by the ghosts of a despairing past. The sleek vanadium walls seemed to exude the desperate terror, the utter despondency of the souls trapped there when the first mushroom cloud erupted over Washington, D.C., nearly two centuries before.
She had assumed the redoubt was the headquarters of the mysterious Preservationists. When Lakesh revealed to her that such an organization existed only as a myth for the purpose of presenting a false trail for the barons to pursue and fear, her first reaction was anger.
Lakesh explained how he had created the Preservationists to be straw adversaries, a non existent enemy for the Magistrate Divisions to focus their attention upon while the real insurrectionist work went on elsewhere.
However, DeFore had learned in the interim there actually were post-skydark precedents for groups like the Preservationists. A century or more before, a loosely knit organization called the Heimdall Foundation had been formed to keep alive the science of astronomy and astrophysics, not to mention Ireland's Priory of Awen, whose origins could be traced back over a thousand years, to its reputed founding by Saint Patrick himself.
Although she admired Lakesh's cunning, DeFore still felt a bit of lingering resentment over his deceptive actions. She had studied a bit of psychology and realized the man's motivations derived primarily from guilt, but it wasn't neurotic or misplaced.
Lakesh and other twentieth-century scientists had willingly traded in their human heritage for a shockscape of planet-wide ruins. After all, they had been selected to survive in order to reshape not only earth, but also humankind in a non-human image.
He had used his position as an adviser to Baron Cobalt to select likely prospects to join Cerberus, but he always knew his tiny enclave of exiles could never overthrow the barons by staging a guerilla war.
Humankind, at least those who were ville-bred, had been beaten into docility long ago. In the Outlands, a fragile, disorganized freedom remained, with pockets of Roamers, half-feral bioengineered mutants who had survived the purges, and tribes of Amerindians who had returned to their traditional way of life.
But even taken together, they represented only a fraction of a fraction of free humans. The population of hybrids swelled as the few truly human beings on Earth diminished, killed and bred and co-opted out of existence. Lakesh had been involved in the initial stages of that co-option and was desperate to find some way to balance out his sin.
Lakesh rifled Scenario Joshua's genetic records to find the qualifications he deemed the most desirable to breed into potential warriors in his cause. A few years before, Lakesh had arranged for Beth-Li Rouch to be brought into the redoubt to mate with Kane, to ensure that his superior abilities were passed on to offspring.
From a clinical point of view, Lakesh's plan to turn Cerberus from a sanctuary into a colony made sense. To ensure that Kane's superior qualities were passed on, mating him with a woman who met the standards of Purity Control was the most logical course of action. Without access to the ectogenesis techniques of fetal development outside the womb, the conventional means of procreation was the only option. And that meant sex and passion and ultimately, the fury of a woman scorned.
Kane had refused to cooperate for a variety of reasons, primarily because he felt the plan was a continuation of sinister elements that had brought about the nukecaust and the tyranny of the villes. His refusal had tragic consequences. Only a thirst for revenge and a conspiracy to murder had been birthed within the walls of the redoubt, not children.
DeFore shook her head to drive out the memories. Many changes had occurred in the six years since she had arrived at Cerberus, not only Lakesh's tactics but even her attitudes. Initially, she had resented the presences of Brigid, Grant and especially Kane. Now she considered them her closest friends, members of an extended family, the siblings she never had. And like siblings, they often exasperated her and worried her.
When she heard the bawl of cattle, the trumpeting of an elephant and the voices of people busy at their early-morning labors, DeFore decided to get up--not that it was easy to struggle out of the sling. She glanced down in annoyance at the mesh pattern imprinted into the damp flesh of her thighs.
She walked across the big room for her clothes, which consisted only of a thin, almost gauzy linen shift and a turban. It was like walking through warm molasses. The polished wooden floor, bare of vermin, nevertheless felt slippery under her feet. The room itself was shaped like the inside of a drum, the conical ceiling upheld by heavy beams. The walls were decorated by an arras of highly detailed fabric. A small table near the window held a decanter of water and she poured herself a cup. It tasted old, the temperature tepid.
