Cold Sleep, page 23
“What?”
“What do you say? Fight fire with fire.”
“You’re using nanotech to fight the Gestalt’s nanites. Are you fucking crazy?”
“Not at all. It is not very effective—the nanites I have made have to be primitive to avoid being integrated by their targets. They are simple, chemically driven machines with no processors, no “brains” of their own. This is a carrier of the Complex. I have found a way to “remove” it one nanite at a time and without the risk of brain damage the EM field created. What will work for the Complex will work for the Gestalt.”
“OK, so you aren’t working with them. Hiroki, I didn’t want to doubt you but…”
“Oh, I am working with them. Just not how Zed and his companions believe. You see, I had begun to tell you of my mistake.”
“The splitting of the revenants into factions. Yeah, I know. But the others, they think you’re being played.”
“It is… possible. The Gestalt is highly logical. It wants to survive and it knows killing us or trying to control us is not its most efficient means of doing so. For now, at least.”
“What are you doing for it?”
“I was going to help it adjust course safely to its chosen destination. Then find a way for it to exist without the need for hosts.”
“Giving it what it wants? That’s a bad move.”
“No, it was a compromise. But I suspect what it really wants is to send a signal back to Earth.”
“Why? It can’t infect people back home. There aren’t that many who’d have this kind of nanite.”
“You pay little attention to the changes in the world whenever we return. Remember we talked of United America’s defense plan?”
“Not really. Wait, we discussed this… Something to do with aerosol dispersal of what did you call them? Nano-defenders. Oh… Oh shit.”
“Yes. I believe if the Gestalt could send a signal to Earth, it could spread to all of the nanotechnology on the planet. What is inside people is less worrying than the kind that does not need a host. That can replicate itself from available resources.”
“You mean it’d scourge the planet, don’t you? Hell… every colony too, right?”
“Either that or infect the whole population, yes.”
“Then why help it?”
“Because it is not willing to risk its own survival to achieve its aim. And I have come to believe it is not doing this to hurt us, but out of ignorance. It did not understand we are conscious beings. Communication is the key to learning from it. Removing the threat it poses. Harnessing all the good it could do for us. But…”
“But the Complex wants none of that.”
“No. It sees us all as a threat which must be neutralized. It is so much more aggressive I fear without help its logical counterpart is doomed. And then, so are we.”
“Doc, I got to tell you, if there’s some way we can eradicate both of these things, we got to do it. We can’t trust them. They’re not… human.”
His face reddens and his voice grows thick with anger. “I will not contemplate the destruction of a new level of evolution because you are afraid. We are not like the savages of the past, even if we still carry their primitive natures within us.”
“Doc, our survival and the survival of everyone on Earth has to come before this Gestalt. It’s not alive. It’s… they’re machines. Tools we made that turned against us. If there’s a way to switch them off…”
“No, you don’t understand at all. This cure, it takes so long to work. I could free maybe ten in a year. And they have nearly all hundred thousand colonists. The intellect—the web that makes up their mind—is more complicated than yours or mine. Their consciousness is deeper and more refined. We do not have the right to end it. And more. Unless we can find a way to coexist with them, we would have to annihilate every last trace of them here. We simply cannot do that.”
Hiroki’s eyes widen. I see why in the reflection from the faceplate of his helmet. Zed and Sarah have entered the medibay.
“I think we’ve heard enough, Doctor. You’re coming with us.” Zed advances, holding the vacbag loosely in one gauntleted hand and the bulkhead shears like a club. Sarah advances, the laser torch that had burned Joud’s life out clutched in her left hand while her right holds the other end of the vacbag.
“Kara…” Hiroki groans.
“Zed, you can’t… this is a mistake. Stand down.”
“No, Kara. Knew you couldn’t be trusted. Always thought you were so much smarter than the rest of us. We heard everything you’ve said since we rescued you from this lunatic. You and your secret transmissions… Seems you’ve always been on his side. Huh?”
I back up a step, looking around for something to use as a weapon. Sarah raises the laser torch, reminding me in that instant of how easily Akima had burned through Joud’s helmet. Any trace feeling of invincibility I feel wearing the armored voidsuit evaporates.
Hiroki reacts in a way I don’t expect one bit. He smiles.
“It is as they said it would be.”
Zed growls and moves forward.
“I wouldn’t.” Hiroki holds up one gauntleted fist. In it is a device with a button on top.
Zed stops. “A bomb, doctor?”
“In a manner of speaking. This will switch off your implants. Come one step closer and you’ll re-join the ranks of the revenants.”
“Bullshit.” Zed says, but he stays still.
“We should fucking kill him after what he’s done to us… to Akima and Joud.”
“Quiet, Sarah.” I say. “Zed, you know Hiroki. Or you knew him. You ever play him at cards?”
“No. Officers and ranks. They don’t mix well, do they, Kara?”
True. Very true. I can’t help but agree with him. You might not like it, most people don’t. But we know there’s a difference. Not how clever you are. Not how successful. But the main difference between a slum rat and one of us? You know if you give the slum rat money and watch them spend it on the most gaudy and nasty things possible. Or leave one of us destitute and see how they suffer with dignity. There’s a… qualitative difference. It’s got nothing to do with wealth, education, or ethnicity. Something less definite than those things. They used to call it class. I still do. But where they meant it in a bullshit rigid social sense, I mean it in what you can expect of someone. I have it, so does Hiroki. M’Benga despite our differences was a prime example. The Captain? She had it in spades. Zed… not so much. It’s why he’s a non-commissioned officer and always will be. Not just about his ability—he simply lacks class. Still, doesn’t need to be a problem.
I come forward, placing myself in front of Zed and Sarah with Hiroki behind me. Both of them tense and raise their weapons but I think Zed sees I’m giving him a way out. Sees there’s another option if he’ll only give himself time to calm down.
“Zed, you may say a lot of things about me, but you know, I always had a good eye for my fellow officers. Sized them up as part of my promotion strategy, you might say. Who was a safe bet and reliable. Who thought they always knew best. Who was predictable and who you could never be sure of. M’Benga—she was predictable as clockwork but you give her a hand of cards and you never knew what she was going to do. She and I were never friends… but she trusted me. Gave her life for me. I’ll never forget it.” It’s true. I never will. If only to make sure I never let myself end up in such a stupid position of so-called noble self-sacrifice. “Hiroki here, he’s a bit flighty. Used to be you couldn’t be sure if he’d panic or get over-excited about things. But cards? You could read him every time. Always called when he had a good hand. Always folded when his cards were poor.”
“You’re saying we should believe him ’cause you used to play cards together.” Sarah spits. “Fuck it, Zed. They’re in this together. It’s her fault Akima’s dead, as much as it’s his.”
Zed lowers the bulkhead shears. “Maybe, but I think Akima was doomed long before Kara came back. So Hiroki did it for her benefit, so what? She was unconscious, frozen. If you can’t blame Akima for what she did to David, I’m thinking we can’t blame Kara here. And right now, she has a point.”
“Yeah?” Aggressive little shit, is Sarah. Guess I’m no good at breaking them down to build them up after all. But who cares, right? Not like I’ve ever wanted to take on a teaching job at the stupid Academy anyway. Captain or bust. That’s what I tell myself.
“Yeah. She’s saying Hiroki don’t bluff. Maybe she’s lying, it comes easy to her.” I bite back a comment. “And maybe she’s wrong. But, shit, Sarah. We can’t take the risk.”
“Zed? Come on!”
“I’m telling you to put the torch down. Let’s see where this goes. We don’t like it—we go back to plan A and screw the consequences.” He slings the shears over his shoulder and starts gathering up his end of the vacbag. What the hell they’d planned to do with it is anyone’s guess. Stuff us in the bag? Seems pretty stupid as plans go but they were desperate.
“That’s better.” I say. “Now, maybe we can talk about…” I break off as an atmo alert flashes across my HUD. “This can’t be right.”
“You’re getting it too?” Hiroki.
“I don’t understand.” Sarah.
Only Zed stays silent. I could see from the way he closes his eyes and grits his teeth he realizes what this means for our survival chances.
I watch as the external monitor registers pressure and the presence of oxygen. It creeps up to one atmosphere.
Breathable.
Air.
“We’re in the shit now, aren’t we?” Zed.
“Those kuso yarō…” Hiroki.
Sarah stands there with her mouth open and doubt in her eyes.
“Whatever we were going to do,” I say. “Whatever you were going to do, Hiroki. It doesn’t matter. The Comm Array. We need to make sure they can’t get it facing Earth.”
“I jammed the motor so it couldn’t reposition itself. They would need time to repair it,” Hiroki says.
I crack my helmet seal. There was no point using up the suit’s reserves when all around me is breathable air again. I expect the first breath to sear my lungs with cold, but there’s never been anything wrong with Charon’s life support system. Only a gaping hole in the hull.
The air carries strange odors. I imagine they’ll get worse as the frozen and fragmented remains of the dead begin to defrost and rot. If desiccated flesh can rot. I push the thought away and focus on where we are and what we’re doing.
“It’s breathable. Come on. Stop wasting time.”
Zed cracks his helmet’s seal and it retracts to its storage position behind and over his left shoulder. The others follow, Hiroki—cautious as always—comes last.
“How long ’til they overrun us?” Zed asks.
“We’ve got to get somewhere defensible quick,” I say. “Wait. Without proper weapons, we’re going to be helplessly outnumbered. The armory’s out. Any ideas?”
“Breach the hull again?” Hiroki asks. Seems like a stupid question coming from him.
Zed snorts. “Can’t risk it. Bad enough suffering one decompression like that. Another might do enough damage to the ship’s systems we’d lose the engine or ramscoop or just, well you know, boom.”
“You think the whole ship’s been re-pressurized?” I ask.
“Yeah. Probably… It’d be automatic as soon as the environmental monitor detected no more leak. I mean, it wouldn’t happen all at once but each compartment in sequence away from the site of the hull breach would be re-pressurized.”
“Fuck.” I wipe my face, noticing how much I’m sweating. The walls are coated in condensation—some beginning to freeze in places only to melt again as the heat from the air slowly warms the surfaces.
“Isn’t this a good thing?” Sarah asks.
We all spin to face her at once. Of all the naïve questions she could have asked, none reveal her for what she is—an ignorant kid—than those few words.
“Nah, kid.” Zed. “We’re screwed. Revs’ll be able to go anywhere in the ship they want. Bet there are thousands of them out by now.”
“You think so?” Her eyes are so wide you can see their whites all around.
“The doctor here re-pressurized one of the cargo bays, ain’t that right?”
Hiroki. “Yes. Only one of them. It was necessary. But there were no conscious revenants in there at the time.”
“Yeah, but what about after your little experiments backfired, huh? We weren’t the only ones to get away from you, were we?”
“No, you were not. The others were… they had reverted to aggression. I didn’t realize they had formed a separate gestalt, this Complex as Kara calls it.” Zed snorts but Hiroki ignores him. “They had no voidsuits… How was I to know they could build them or they might rely on the emergency air supply in their wearalls?”
“You don’t slip off the hook that easy, Doc. That’s ten thousand Revs ready to go with another ninety thou soon after. This is all your fault.” Zed balls his free hand into a fist and waves it around as if he’s about to strike Hiroki. The doctor waves the trigger he holds, in turn.
“Enough!” I bark. “This bickering is pointless. We’ve got a few minutes, if that, before they swamp us. Now, I know you don’t believe it but if we’re lucky, really lucky, Hiroki is right and there are two factions, two separate gestalts.”
“How the fuck would that make us lucky?” Zed asks, turning the heat of his anger on me. There’s the look in his eyes again—like when we’d found the first body. Only this time, he isn’t staring over the edge. He’s sailed over and is looking at the ground rushing up at him.
“There’s a good chance they’ll fight each other. Give us time, not much but a little. The ITF. They’re our only hope. Whatever they’re doing—and let me tell you I have my suspicions—they’re as fucked as we are. They’ll need our help.”
“Those cunts will fucking vaporize us.” Sarah, finally snapping out of her dazed state.
Zed bares his teeth, the gaps reminding me again of what’d be done to him. “Better dead than one of those things again. Right?” I don’t like the wild look in Zed’s eyes but for now, I can harness his fatalism. Sarah’s eyes flick away from his gaze. Maybe she’s reassessing her loyalties about now.
“Let’s get going,” I say. “Zed you take point, Sarah you stay tight to Hiroki.”
They look at each other, each sizing the other up, but Zed’s already started moving and when I snap, “Now!” they both leap to do as I order.
Back in command, at last.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
The ventilation system is far too efficient—it sucks up every trace of organic matter that’d turned to dust and distributes it evenly through the air. The larger pieces had floated into vents and remain stuck there against the grills save for those places where revenants had crawled in and left the vents open behind them. Some of those who’d crawled into the vents had never crawled out, and now the air can get to them, the stench of their decay is also blown throughout the ship. It’s a huge volume of air, but the human nose is a sensitive thing and everywhere is pervaded by the meat odor of death. Not strong, but there, at the edge of awareness. Tickling the nostrils with the promise we’ll soon be joining the dead to rot together in this interstellar mausoleum.
Heavy thoughts dog my every step. Zed’s looking for a fight—that much is clear. Sarah’s nearly as much of a risk, though more from ignorance of the greater danger we’re now in than from pure recklessness. Hiroki… well, he’s twitching and jittering as he always has but now and then I’ll catch him falling still with a calculating gleam in his eye. He notices me looking and offers a faint smile. Which I immediately distrust.
As I reflect on his reaction to the return of atmosphere, it feels more and more staged and I convince myself he’d somehow known about it before hand. Call it a hunch or instinct or the power of the subconscious mind putting together clues my waking self hasn’t even picked up on. Whatever it is, I find my distrust for him peaking.
And of course, there’s one thing we’ve not done. No time to and it had slipped my mind so it could have slipped his. But that isn’t like him. Where was any effort to scan my brain and test whether the nanites were truly gone? It puzzles me that he claims to have a cure of sorts yet with me the nanites had voluntarily withdrawn.
“Let’s hope the Revs haven’t swarmed the engine compartment,” Zed says. From the way he hefts the bulkhead shears, I’m not at all certain he means it. More like, “let’s hope there’s enough to go round.”
Though life support’s returned, the engine compartment remains dark; lit here and there by a dim glow from active machinery—the sections governing the ramscoop’s magnetic cowl, and those on standby, primed for the ion drive to engage.
“Where are they?” I ask.
“Maybe there ain’t that many of the cunts,” Sarah says. “I mean, we only just got air, so there can’t have been that many out of caskets, can there?” Aussies and the “c” word. Not sure if I’m more shocked at her language or that she’s forgotten the ten thousand colonists turned rev who’ve been waiting for this chance.
I look to Hiroki—his jaw is clenched tight, holding his mouth shut against the words that want to spill out. His return of self-control is as impressive as its timing is frustrating. Even if the words would be in Japanese, hearing him articulate every thought might let me get a handle on whether he’s truly a threat or whether I’m buying into Zed’s paranoia.
“Let’s check.” I break from the group, deactivate my magboots and kick off in the direction of the nearest engineering terminal. “Coming?” I call back over my shoulder.
Hiroki frowns but joins me. Over the time I’d been on ice, he’d learned to handle zero-g like a pro. About damn time. It also confirms my main concern about him—not the insanity of talking to himself, nor the way he’s got control of the habit so fast. He’s gone from being a shy, bumbling academic to having a self-assurance I’d never seen in him.
