Cold Sleep, page 17
A small part of me can’t help thinking about pots and kettles but I push it aside. “That’s why the first thing Revenant Zero did was kill the woman. This Complex drove it.”
“No. It was part of the whole at that point. It contributed some military aims and objectives but the kill response came not from the nanites but from their interaction with the primal part of the human brain.”
“We made them killers?” I scoff.
“Yes. The Gestalt, the original, has rewritten itself, in part. It contains all it was but it is no longer actively linked to the ITF revenants and I believe it has purged that code. Their absence has made it more willing to listen to reason. I believe all it wants is a chance to survive.”
“Come on, isn’t it as bad as the Complex? Maybe a bit more subtle… How can you trust it?”
Hiroki cocks his head to one side, like a dog that’s heard something. “I do not. But it fulfilled the first of my tests. It released you.”
“But what exactly does it want in return?” I ask. “Don’t hold out on me, Doc. I need the truth. Now.”
“I, er, well…”
He breaks off as a grinding noise comes from behind us. The Comm Array is rotating. The look of horror on Hiroki’s face registers for me at about the same time I hear the high-pitched whistle of venting atmo.
CHAPTER 17
* * *
Several things happen all at once. Hiroki dives towards the rotating array, snatching up a metal bar propped against his worktable. The flare of a laser torch flashes bright in one corner of the room, and with it all the air begins to scream out into the void. And I grab the soft shell of my voidsuit with one hand and wrap the other around the leg of the worktable.
Focusing on the only thing that can save me, I pull the voidsuit over one leg, even as the sucking air tears at me with increasing force. My ears pop as I get my second foot in the suit. Dots appear before my eyes and my vision dims. There are sounds—mechanical grating, the howl of escaping atmo, the stomp of armored feet—but they’re fading fast. The tinnitus whine in my ears grows louder as my sight starts to fail.
>Detecting critical threat to node designated navigator.
A thought but not my thought. I try to scream, Get out of my head! But I have no air in my lungs to do so. I must have blacked out because the next thing I know, my voidsuit hood is up and I’m breathing the stale sweat smell of recycled air.
“Hiroki?” I croak.
“Easy, Kara. Easy.”
I keep my eyes closed—I know that voice. It can mean only one thing. I’m in the hands of the revenants. And the lack of radio identifier tone while the voidsuit’s haptics are warning me of a vacuum environment means the voice I’m hearing is coming from a helmet touching mine. Shit.
I open my eyes.
Zed’s face. Scarred, bearded but unmistakable. He’s crouching next to me, pressing his helmet against mine.
He smiles. “It’s ok. You’re safe. We drove him off.”
“Zed?” I shake my head within my helmet. “It’s not you. It can’t be you. You’re dead.” Every nerve in me is screaming with adrenaline. My heart’s racing so hard its beating must be visible even through the voidsuit.
“Baby, it’s me. I can prove it if you like. Ask me anything.”
“No. That’s no good. If it really is you, you’ve been taken over by the nanites. They’ll have scanned all your memories, all your knowledge. There’s no way you can remember anything they wouldn’t know. And that means you could be one of those face changing ITF freaks. They’ve tried it on me twice already. Once with your face. The next time with your voice. I’m not falling for it again.”
“Commander, if I was one of the revenants don’t you think you’d be dead or having nanites drilled into your brain right now?”
He’s got a point. I squint about. Zed’s flanked by three others. One I recognize as Ensign Joud—now sporting a grim expression to match the jagged scar across his right eye. He’d been a little more than a boy last time I’d seen him, with an openness that’d telegraphed his attraction to me. Now he may as well be forged from the same hyper-steel as Charon’s bow. Unreadable. Hard-eyed. Lines cut in his face adding what seemed a decade to his twenty years instead of just one.
The other two—both women of about the same build and height, at least as far as I could tell within the ’suits. The closest has skin as dark as mine is pale but there’s a definite similarity in our features. She could be my distant cousin. Her voidsuit’s still armored though the plating is discolored in several places, cracked here and there, and with the tell-tale bubbling at her left shoulder pad which speaks of a glancing beam from a laser torch.
Leaving her. Her nose is bent to one side, marring what might have been a pretty young face. I remember her. Remember the feel of the stock of my deckgun as it broke her nose. Remember the struggle she’d put up. Details I’d not bothered with before now seem important, as if I can find evidence she’s a fake somehow. Red hair, barely visible at her brow. Green eyes surrounded by freckled skin. If she’s much over eighteen I’d be amazed. But past the physical signs, it’s the look in her eyes that catches me most of all. They’re blank, as if a part of her has shut down. Not the wild frenzy which had been there when I’d wrestled her down while Hiroki tranqued her. An emptiness I’d last seen when I’d passed through one of Earth’s slums—the hollow-eyed look in the eyes of a child clasping the hand of her mother while the woman sprawled in an alley with froth on her lips. It seems real. Believable as a human reaction to all the shit that’s happened. But the fucking nanites had been inside my skull—are still inside my skull. Maybe they can read me even now. But then, if they can, what kind of game are they playing?
“We ain’t got a lot of time. We’ll take you somewhere safe. Follow me.” Zed, or the thing that looks like him, stands up from his crouch and holds out his gloved hand. I take it and allow him to help me to my feet. I look around again. They must have dragged me from Hiroki’s makeshift lab. The Comm Array.
“What happened with the array?”
Zed looks at me blankly, then taps the side of his helmet. Gestures with one hand farther into the innards of the ship before he strides into the lead. Joud steps up behind him and I feel rather than see the stares of the other two who have taken up position behind me. No way out.
I follow Joud, noting the way he limps. A fault with the voidsuit or an injury? I’ll find out, if they aren’t leading me to the end of the line.
As we’re squeezing through gaps between the bulkheads the gravity effect of acceleration ceases. There’s no warning, one moment I’m held down, the next my voidsuit’s beginning to float free. I activate the suit’s magnetic boots—find only one’s working—and pushing against the narrow space force my feet back into contact with the deck. I stamp the malfunctioning boot and its status flickers to active. The others haven’t suffered the same problem. Their boots activated before they could float free.
The overwhelming sense of my own vulnerability hits home. I’m surrounded by people—if they really are still people—who could tear through my suit like it’s thin cloth. The only advantage I have is the agility granted by the suit’s flexibility. Not much help when I’m pressed in by the bulkheads and have two of them in front and two behind.
Zed and Joud paused when acceleration stopped, they must be communicating over the radio—curse Hiroki for that as well as everything else. It should worry me that I’d felt no need to challenge what Zed had implied—they’d driven off Hiroki and so I’m safe. A cold, hard lump lies in the pit of my stomach. Instinct had warned me he was dangerous.
The radio. He’s locked it to one frequency and encrypted it. Which means I can’t communicate with the others right next to me. But I can try to contact him. Starting to tab the suit’s comm channel open, I pause. They might not be able to decrypt any communication I send Hiroki, but they’ll be able to detect a transmission. Now’s not the time to test how safe I am with them.
We emerge from the cramped access spaces around the Comm Array, coming out through a hole cut into one of the engineering section’s bulkheads. Here and there desiccated body parts float free. I puzzle over it for a moment until I realize.
They’d been kept in vacuum for over a year and undoubtedly subjected to several periods of microgravity followed by a full standard g. It’s small wonder they’re shattered into barely recognizable chunks of what had once been human. A piece of someone’s lower jaw drifts past lit by the blue glow from two small shards of crystal grown into it.
I clench my back teeth and will the rise of hot fluid welling in my throat to go back down. The twinkling blue light flickers as the piece of jawbone tumbles end over end in a slow dance out over the main engine casing.
The others press on and, trapped in the isolation of my suit, I have never felt more alone. Except… I can still hear them. The nanites. Is it my imagination or are their signals still transmitting? It’s both the most horrifying thought I could have and yet some strange part of me yearns for the company. The belonging. Escape from the lonely pointlessness of my own existence and an embrace of the unity with others. I shake my head to clear the foreign thoughts like shaking sweat from my brow.
A gauntleted hand grips my upper arm tight and jerks me back midstride. Only the malfunctioning boot is in contact with the deck and the force of the pull tears me free. The young woman whose nose I’d busted holds me and lowers me slowly to the deck again. Her lips are moving and her frown deepens. With her spare hand she gestures behind me and makes a sharp cutting gesture. I turn as best I can in her grasp and see I’d been moving towards the forward entrance of the engineering section—a route which would take me past first the medibay and then into the main corridor and linked cargo bays. Bays filled with colonists all bound by either the nanite Gestalt or the Complex.
It feels like a pressure building inside of me—not of blood but the rising of a tide of a different sort. Flashes of everything that’d happened assault me in waves. The torn-out throat of the first victim. The death of the VIP at my own clumsy hands. Zed being bitten as we desperately tried to crank the door to the crew section closed. Seeing him dragged away, blood streaming. The revenant Dominguez had blasted apart as it was about to tear into me. I can’t breathe. Start pulling at my helmet. Have to get it off. Have to get air…
“Kara, stop it.” Zed’s voice. My forearms are held in the steel grip of his voidsuit gauntlets, the bones grinding and near breaking under the pressure. It hurts. And pain breaks through my panic.
“Sorry… I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened…”
“Breathe. Slow, in and out. Let me check your oxy—yeah, looks ok. Guess you had a panic attack.”
“Fuck off, I’m not some cadet on her first time in a voidsuit.”
I can barely make out his chuckle through the contact of our helmets. “Ain’t about that but ok, Commander. Whatever makes you feel better. With all you’ve been through, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t suffered a panic attack.”
“Part of the comedown from the polymet Hiroki dosed me with. Nothing more.”
“You got to wonder where he got that from.”
Proof Zed is still capable of being thick as dehydrated shit. Which means nothing if the nanites have access to his memories.
“You thinking he got hold of our score?”
Zed’s eyes narrow. “Yeah. Not real important now though, right? Still, wonder what other drugs he can synthesize.”
“Street narcs. Nothing more useful than Blue for its nootropic effect and maybe some synth-H as a painkiller. Can’t see him tripping his balls off on synth-psilocin or DMT can you?”
“Nah. You gotta be right but…”
“You’re worried. Nature of command.” Throw him a bone. I feel calmer again and back in control of myself.
“It’s not that. I reckon he must be able to synthesize some celltech—like EsPD or BiPHOS.”
“What do you want with street steroids?”
“Ain’t exactly ’roids. One stops catabolism of muscle, the other reduces osteoclast formation. Kind of useful since we keep having long periods of zero-g.”
“Well listen to you, professor.”
“Don’t joke. My brothers were on ’em. Kept them strong enough to do what they needed to, face up to other cutters.”
He’d never spoken to me of his family before. I’d made guesses and it doesn’t really surprise me to think Zed’s kin might have been narced-up enforcers or the street thugs we call cutters. Must’ve worked hard to claw his way out of a similar fate. I study his face. Full of surprises this man. And my feelings for him…
“You ok to carry on?” Zed asks, breaking my train of thought. “Ain’t far. Be good to talk without having to butt heads, you know?” He gives me the lazy grin that’s always set my blood rushing.
I pull back from the contact and give him two thumbs up. This time he stays close as we walk on. My malfunctioning magboot keeps fritzing out until Zed puts an arm on my shoulder and presses me to the deck with every step. Makes me look like a total neophyte spacer. Not much to be done about it right now though.
We end up crawling out on the engine compartment all the way to the back. This is a section of the ship where I’ve never had cause to go. Right amongst the fusion rockets. We crowd into a small compartment which seals behind us and pressurizes, then an inner pressure door opens.
I gasp in the fresher air—desperate to get rid of the smell of my own sweat redolent with pheromonal dread and feeling another upwelling of nausea. The ceiling of the deck is close to my head, Zed’s head brushes it with every step, but I remind myself, this is a trick of perception. We’re in microgravity. There’s no up and down—no ceiling and no floor. Though it makes sense to act like there is when in a voidsuit.
“You’re safe in here, Commander,” Joud says. He begins stripping off his voidsuit. “This is one of the engineer’s emergency bolt holes for if there’s a leak from the engines.”
“You mean we’re sealed off from the rest of the ship?”
“Yeah. No way in or out. Revs’d have to bore through the main drive to get to us—or go the length of the engine compartment with only the emergency air supply in their wearalls.” He shakes his head as if to reinforce how unlikely that would be. “We’re safe from them in here.”
Them. To Joud at least, the revenants are still all lumped together. Interesting. “What about Hiroki? He has a suit.”
“He wouldn’t dare try it. I’d gut the cunt if he did.” Australian accent. The young woman with the squashed nose. Maybe she doesn’t know who I am after all.
“He got you pretty angry then?” I ask.
“He sold us out to the machines. Do anything for them. Creeping little shit.”
“Sarah. Knock it off. Commander doesn’t need to hear it now,” Joud says, floating free of his magboots and grabbing onto some zero-g handholds.
“No, Sarah, please,” I say. “I want to hear it.”
“We were… I mean I was paralyzed by those things. Wake up to find he’s messed with them somehow. Some great bloody machine wrapped round my head. Then he switches it off and starts babbling at me. Telling me I’m his way in. I’m the leverage. And he does something and I feel them come on at me again. It hurts. I black out into the emptiness you get when they take you. Then I’m back and he’s excited. Changing the dials making the things in my head scream. Now I hear them, their way of talking and it’s saying something different. Then he… then…”
“Then it all went to shit and he scuttled out of there like the coward he is,” Zed rumbles from behind us.
I fold my arms. “So everything he told me was a lie?”
“I don’t know what he told you. Wouldn’t trust a word of it myself. But you and he got pretty tight, didn’t you?” There’s a wounded look in his eye—not jealousy but recrimination. Of course, I’d left him. Must have seemed like I abandoned him without a second thought. I want to tell him how I’d felt after that. The feelings even I hadn’t expected. I don’t know how. And there’s the doubt. Is it him? Is this even real?
“Maybe…” I start, hesitating over my words. “Maybe, we just don’t understand what he’s trying to do. Maybe—”
“Bullshit, Kara,” Zed says. “It’s obvious he’s tried giving himself some kind of bargaining chip with the revenants. No idea how he’s communicating with them—” I stay silent. “—but somehow he’s done it. And now he’s got you out without one of these…” he gestures to the back of his head. As if on cue, Joud, Sarah, and the other woman who’d so far stayed silent, raise their own hands to the back of their heads.
“What?”
“Look.” Zed floats closer and spins giving me a view of where his hand had clutched his head. A disc about the size of my palm squats there. Looks implanted under the skin.
“May I touch it?”
“Knock yourself out,” Zed says.
It tingles under my fingers almost with static and a slight vibration.
“This is producing an electromagnetic field, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Got it in one. Focused right down so it goes into our skulls but not so strong it messes with radio transmissions. You get used to the humming after a while. Except at night. Then it kinda drives you crazy.”
“If it’s keeping the nanites from taking over your brain, shouldn’t you be thanking Hiroki, not cursing him?” I ask.
“He did this without anesthetic. Rammed it into us and tore out our crystalline “teeth” while he was at it. I felt everything. Everything. Bastard killed two of the other ’subjects.’ And sent another five screaming into the ship, worse than they’d been before. Worse than the revenants when it was just you and me.”
Hiroki had said seven. “Wha…”
“Believe it, Kara.” He pulls away and flips round to float parallel to me again.
“Can we backtrack a bit?” I ask. “I thought you were dead but you were taken over by the nanites?”
