Numina code, p.23
Numina Code, page 23
Numina, like all objects, did have its own gravity. Not an enormous amount, of course, but enough to keep a man on the surface, if he was very, very careful about how he set his feet and held on to the lines. There were a few aboveground locations out here that station personnel were obligated to check on from time to time. The antenna field, for example.
He could see that now, as he rounded the edge of the docking bay and set foot on the surface of the asteroid proper. Or rather, he saw nothing at all, which was an answer itself. The pilot, Argo, had said it was all smashed.
Tomas tried not to think about it. Focus. Stay on the line. One foot in front of the other. Don’t worry about the robots killing your people. Don’t wonder why so many are dead.
Numina had been his life for a decade. To see the place wrecked like this…he had no words for it. It enraged him, saddened him, worried him. His little apartment here was more of a home than the house he had back at Cadaqués. What would become of this place?
Would Gravipause finally decommission it, strip it for parts and then send the asteroid body out into the void? A lot of people on Earth would like that. Numina was the largest body in orbit, and its presence here had never been popular. It had long ago surrendered its usefulness as a mining location, scrambling for new purpose to justify its presence.
It wouldn’t be that hard to move the training school to Aethera; that had been proposed before. But Aethera was too commercial, too busy. There was value in Numina’s isolation, value in training mining teams here, before they were sent off to the loneliness of Earth’s Lagrange point, where larger asteroids were dragged these days, or the small camps on the small rocks that were still permitted in orbit and—
Focus, he told himself.
He had his AR on, but the abiota he’d rescued from the ruins of the small cargo freighter wasn’t talking.
Tomas found himself missing Lucy. She had been a gregarious little abiota, primate-class and cheerful in the way many of those were. The kugus that attacked them had ripped her machine body apart, as surely as they’d killed the station crew.
Tomas had only survived that initial assault because he had been in the toilet room, outside, down the hall. They’d been doing the morning stand-up brief and the interior toilet was already occupied. He’d gone further out. He’d heard something coming, and then Lucy had popped into the AR and told him it would be fine.
She’d led them away.
Lucy would have ridden along with him for this. She always rode along on EVAs. Like a mother bird fussing over hatchlings, she’d always taken a keen interest in what her humans were doing and why. She would have been out here with him, puttering around in one of her kugus, streaming conversation in that pleasant voice of hers, cracking jokes and talking about old times.
They’d been together for a long time. Since the beginning. Lucy had come up here, same as the rest of that first exploratory crew. A transplant, somebody looking for a new adventure. She’d stayed, just like he had.
Tomas wasn’t into that sort of thing like some guys were, but Lucy had become kind of like his work wife. He certainly saw her more than any of the women he’d tried to date back home. Those relationships never seemed to hold together for him. He was distracted, the last had told him, dreaming of being back out in space.
Lucy had never accused him of anything. She’d been a warm companion, a welcome presence. He mourned her, same as any of the human crew he knew to be lost. When they got out of here, he’d make sure her name was on the rolls, right along with everyone else.
Focus.
The cable’s long run was interrupted now. So far, Tomas had been traversing a plain, flat and smooth and deep with regolith. Now, here, the asteroid’s rocky skin rose about its covering of dust in a steppe. On Earth, the formation wouldn’t have been particularly difficult to navigate, but here, in the almost nonexistent gravity, it was a major obstacle. This was a training course, after all; this was a learning experience. On Numina, there were safety lines to keep a guy from drifting off into the back. Out on some raw asteroid, a man only had his wit and his skill to prevent that from happening.
But Tomas wasn’t a novice, and he wasn’t concerned about simulated conditions. He had the line and he used it, gently pushing off until it was the only thing connecting him to the asteroid. With that movement came a sharp change in perspective; it felt as though he was hanging upside down from a cave ceiling, an endless fall beneath his feet.
Tomas ignored what his instincts were telling him and started to move, hand over hand, upside down, up the slope.
The steppe wasn’t huge, maybe thirty feet all together, and Tomas expertly swung back down before he reached it. Careful not to nick his suit—he had sealant tape, but who wanted to trust that shit?—he got as low to the rock as he could, pulling himself along until he could see over it.
On the other side was another wide basin of regolith, and the hangar door control room.
Peeking over, Tomas could see it all.
He sent a message to the abiota in his pack.
She didn’t respond.
He tapped on his radio, not liking this at all. Abiota were creatures of the cyber world; using anything related to it invited discovery. The kugus, whatever was driving them, would hear this. But there was no other choice.
“Two,” he said, using the predetermined code.
All clear. Holding position. Awaiting okay to proceed.
He couldn’t get the images out of his head, the way the kugus had killed his friends. Lucy, broken apart, sprockets floating free, rudiment core smashed.
Tomas hoped Argo’s plan was going to work.
As much as he loved Numina, he had no desire to die up here.
31
With a course of action decided, everyone got to work.
Tomas had already left; his little jaunt across the surface would take some time, he’d said. Matt, the IT guy, headed down to the hub’s server room to see what he could do about the network.
Argo originally tasked Rachel with gathering up any supplies that might be useful—a couple days’ worth of food and water seemed like a good idea—but pulled her back off that after the first supply room she checked contained more dead bodies.
The survivors were finding their old station mates everywhere. Shoved under bunks, hidden in closets. Anywhere out of the way. Far fewer people than they’d hoped had escaped. They were all looking now, Aiden included. Argo had stayed with him.
Argo didn’t know what to tell any of them, least of all his little brother. He’d experienced plenty of death during his years in the military, and nobody had really come through the Five Days War without some kind of loss. But the Five Days War was, even now, fading from imperfect human memory, and everything he’d ever done or seen in the military had been via RPA. Through an abiota’s eyes. From a distance.
Bodies were outside his experience.
Beyond Emily’s too, and if anything, she was fascinated by it.
“Fucking hell, leave her alone!” Aiden finally snapped at her, after another one of the company shops had a dead woman, floating just inside the door.
Emily didn’t turn the kugu’s head to look at him, pawing at the body instead. Argo wanted to tell his little brother that the emergent abiota meant no disrespect, but honestly, he didn’t know if that was true. He needed to believe it, though.
“Her, her,” Emily mused, chewing on the pronoun. “Like rudiment core not gone out.”
“These aren’t kugus, Emily. They’re people.”
“Yes yes,” Emily said, and finally stopped, old blood flaking off, drifting around her. Aiden retched. “See?”
Argo, barely holding together himself, forced himself to look at what she was talking about. The mode of death. It was a bit hard to tell, with as decomposed as the body was, but… “Her throat was ripped out,” he said.
“Not military way. This”—and she tapped the kugu—“must follow Geneva Convention for human kill. Strike in right place. Faster better. Quick.”
“There’s nothing here,” Aiden said, wiping his mouth. He looked pale. “Can we go?”
“Plug-in insisting this damage done by terror mod,” Emily said, but let go of the body. Her AR was off again, the kugu lacking all nuance. But there was something in the angle of its head, the slowness with which it opened its hands, that suggested some kind of reluctance. “Like horror video game NPC. Or Taliban.”
“The Taliban has abiota working for them?” Aiden asked.
“All enemy have abiota,” Emily said. “Predictives, yes, but emergents too maybe, I think.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Why I do?” Emily asked.
“Loyalty?” Aiden guessed. “No other choice?”
“Ach.” Emily pulled the kugu’s face away from the dead. “Go find more bodies, yes?”
“I think we’ve done all we can do,” Argo said, and turned to his brother. “Anything that was here is either dead or fled.”
“Then why’d they leave the med bay intact?” Aiden countered. “Why’d they leave any of us alive?”
“I have no idea, and I don’t care. You’re here, you’re alive and—”
“And what? My life’s more important?”
“Yeah. It is,” Argo said flatly. “Now come on. I want to see what Daelia’s doing with that damn kugu.”
Daelia had claimed the workspace outside the main network control room for dismantling the kugu. The worktable here must have been magnetic: most of the screws and plates she was removing were stuck down themselves or held on by iron weights.
“Is this really necessary?” Argo asked as Daelia chiseled open the front of the ruined kugu.
“Yes,” she said. “The last one of these I took apart had a sustainment unit with it, and since the comms are down, it stands to reason that… Ah, here we go.”
Inside the chest was, indeed, a sustainment unit. Velcroed in, held in place.
Argo only recognized it because it was so standard. He crossed his arms. “Why does that look like it was manufactured in fucking Bangalore?”
“Probably because it was,” Daelia said, turning the thing over in her hands. “Remember how the Envoy told us they were using human-made kugus while Unity adapted their own for our gravity or air or whatever?”
“Yeah, I think I remember something about that.”
“I think she was trying to throw me off. Make me stop looking into this.” Daelia bit her lip. “Which means they probably know I have that kugu back on Earth, or suspect I saw something.”
“June seems like she’s got good security.”
“Well, these are aliens, right?” Daelia tapped the kugu with her screwdriver. “Only I’m willing to bet they aren’t, so what the hell is going on?”
She set the sustainment unit aside, slipping it into an elastic strap, and continued with the disassembly.
“Unit damaged?” Emily, silent until now, finally asked.
“No,” Daelia said. “Looks fine to me. Pristine.”
“I kill,” Emily said, reaching for it, but Argo automatically pulled her back.
“Down, girl.”
“Kill it,” she whined, but with less force. “Before moves.”
“It can’t do anything without the kugu,” Daelia said. She tapped it with the back of her screwdriver. “Can you transmit?”
For a moment, none of them spoke.
“See?” Daelia said. “It’s—”
And then, like fireworks falling to earth, ember lights filled the air around them. For a moment they hung in the air, then faded out, dissolving into smoke.
Argo blinked the afterimages out of his monocle.
“What was that?” Aiden asked.
“Same thing I’ve seen back on Earth. Ambient imagery,” she said, and looked at Emily. “What did you see?”
“Is emergent, yes yes. Me kill.”
“What do you mean it’s an emergent?”
But Emily didn’t answer.
Argo checked his watch. “Fifteen minutes to the rendezvous time,” he said. “I need to talk to the tech guy.”
“Matt,” Aiden supplied.
“Right, Matt. Daelia, you ready to head out?”
“Not really. I’d like to study this thing a little bit—”
“No.”
“Fine,” Daelia said. She started wrapping the sustainment unit up in a spare sweatshirt, grabbed from under the workbench.
“What are you doing?” Aiden asked.
“I’m taking it with us.”
Emily leaned in. “Eat it.”
“I already told you no, girl.”
“I’m with the abiota on this,” Aiden protested. “It tried to kill Argo earlier, and you want to bring it along?”
“It’s inert.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Umm, yes?” It came as a question.
“What about that thing we just saw?” Argo asked.
“Acceptable risk,” Daelia replied. She frowned at the bundle she was holding. Too big to fit in his suit pockets, she stuffed it into her helmet in its carry bag instead. “I came out here for answers, Argo. I’m not leaving this behind. What if I don’t get another opportunity like this?”
Argo looked at Emily, who was still busy studying the now-empty kugu. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Argo said wryly. “I think we’re going to see plenty more of these things.”
Aiden and Argo were the last two to arrive at the air lock. Of the group Argo had met in the oxygen garden encampment, there were now only nine.
There was a chance that others were still alive. A chance a lot more were alive. The group had gathered almost ninety tags from the dead here in the habitat, but that left at least twice that many still outside. Or at least, that was what Argo told himself.
Numina’s tunnel system was deceptive; the asteroid really wasn’t that large.
It was difficult not to hold himself responsible for this. He and Daelia had shown up here, upset the balance, tipped the kugus back into action. But then, what would have happened if they hadn’t? If he hadn’t?
Self-recrimination was pointless, Argo told himself, and only likely to cause him more problems later. Deal with this situation first. Then he could indulge in guilt.
After his brother was home safe.
“Jason?” Aiden asked.
Argo pushed the thoughts away. “Is this everybody?”
“Yes,” Rachel said. She was holding it together, for now at least. Argo had given her the job of organizing any supplies they might need, and judging by the backpacks everyone was carrying, she’d done that well.
It was a detail that worried Argo. Didn’t seem very smart, assaulting a base and then leaving some of the most critical assets intact. The enemy abiota had posted guards, ripped apart the station’s abiota and all the vehicles, destroyed the space suit storage bay, but hadn’t done much else from what he had seen. They hadn’t touched the food stores, for example, or the rest of the survival gear. Hell, even the air and water reclamators were still running.
Maybe the abiota simply hadn’t thought to do it. Hard to tell. Even military abiota often struggled to make decent tactical decisions on their own; there was a gulf between their domains, and war was decidedly the province of biota.
During missions out around the Bathtub, overestimating your enemy was just as dangerous as underestimating them. Made a guy see connections that weren’t there, draw conclusions that weren’t true. Expend energy and effort trying to counter something that wasn’t going on.
Right now, they had an objective.
Time to get to it.
Nine Numina survivors. Then Daelia, Emily, Skoro, and Mags. Skoro was stable, according to Guy, but only able to travel at all because of the lack of gravity.
He was dressed in a spare Gravipause uniform, his suit bagged up now. His left leg was encased in a makeshift brace from hip to foot, holding everything in place, but even that was precarious. One hard blow and all the medic’s hard work would be undone. Between that and the concussion, Argo would have preferred to leave him behind. But they couldn’t afford to.
Mags was with him, at least, in her little zero-gee flying kugu. Tomas was planning on extracting her machine body from the wreckage on his way across the surface. Said he had to go out the main bay anyway, wouldn’t add much time to his trek.
This was going to work, Argo told himself. It had to.
“Daelia, how are we looking on comm?”
“Everything’s up. We disabled the camera system. Pulled the home run connectors out of the video server. They can’t use ’em and neither can we,” she said, and nodded to Emily. “You girls have a good clean connection.”
“Matt,” Argo asked, thinking of something. “Does this rock have Giant Voice, some kind of notification system?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Put out a call. Anyone who’s still alive needs to meet us at Booville. We’ve only got one shot at leaving.”
“Hey man, this ain’t military encryption. They’ll hear us.”
“Doesn’t matter. Network’s back up, only one way off this rock, they’re going to know we’re coming,” Argo said, with far more confidence than he felt. “If anyone’s still out there, we owe it to them to try.”
Matt nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Skoro, you okay?”
“Doc gave me some real good painkillers,” he said with a yawn. “I’ll be fine. Just don’t let me fall asleep, or somebody might have to kiss me awake.”
It wasn’t funny, that reference to the concussion, but it got a grudging little laugh from the group. Argo looked at his brother, who wouldn’t meet his eyes in return. No, his brother’s gaze was set on the air lock, the same expression on his face as the first time their dad had taken them on a hunting trip. Apprehensive but unwilling to say so.
The only way to get any of them off this rock was to open that air lock. Go back into the tunnels.
“Okay. Let’s head out.”
