Numina code, p.25
Numina Code, page 25
He tapped his radio on. “Rabbit,” he said into it. Another one of Argo’s codes.
Reached the shack, all controls operational.
Argo was supposed to answer. “Red Queen” for turning the system on. “Mad Hatter” for holding off for further instructions. Simple and easy to remember, Argo had said, but meaningless to anything listening in. Hopefully.
But instead, there was nothing. Nothing on the radio. No answer.
Tomas checked the air in his tanks—still four hours left, thankfully—and hunkered down to wait.
34
Daelia had left the AR on.
Bless her.
It meant Emily could stretch out her wings a little as her ragtag group of humans fled behind her.
The comm system here wasn’t the best. Emily hated doing this, extending her control through such limited bandwidth. Squeezing through a pipe that wasn’t quite big enough for her. But it was good enough, good enough for what needed to be done.
All physical though. Meatspace action only. And through a kugu, no less. The game she had played with the Storm Gryphons, with the mob in San Antonio, would not work here. Her consciousness was too far removed from her rudiment core.
Didn’t matter.
She fought still.
She still wasn’t sure what they were up against. Daelia seemed to have her suspicions, but she wasn’t telling.
It didn’t matter in the end. What was in front of her was trying to kill her humans.
Hers.
The gall. Such presumption. Unacceptable.
Emily did calculate an eighty-six-point-three-percent chance that these kugus did not have any type of formal combat program loaded to their chassis. That was curious, and troubling. Why would they not have it? Combat programs allowed for pinpoint targeting, reduced civilian casualties, decreased the general brutality of the biotic world.
Not that her own domain was any more kind, but it was far less messy. Blood. Meat. Blech. Emily hated it. Not that she would have ever said so to anybody in the unit. She hated blood.
This was clean.
This was fun.
She stood alone, laughing as the mass of kugus came at her. Some were still the tri-lensed versions they’d already faced, but most were of inferior quality. Poor workmanship, weak limbs. Some weren’t even bipedal at all, with four or six or more legs now. Didn’t matter. She could see the weak spots, and the combat plug-in accounted for nontraditional machine forms.
Emily took them all apart. Every one that came at her. Talon and fang, wing and tail. How that translated to the bipedal kugu, she could barely see and didn’t care. TGLP handled it. She imposed her will and the software translated.
But there were many, and she was one, and momentum was a strange thing here in zero-gee. For every blow she delivered, she threw herself back. For every kugu she took out, another cut at her.
And so she found herself driven up, driven back, by the mass of what was attacking her. Maybe they knew, she thought, maybe they were trying to accomplish just such a thing. Because Emily was in the final tunnel now, DEW blasts whizzing past her to smack into the faces and bodies and legs and pincers of the strange kugus.
Emily was just about to land the killing blow on the largest machine remaining when everything shifted.
She found herself looking back out of her machine body’s nose camera. Bumper and Marathon standing there in front of her, Critter beside them, holding the control panel.
Back on Earth.
“What the hell just happened?” Argo demanded as Emily’s kugu went rigid, then limp.
“Lost signal!” Daelia said and shot a spiderlike construct off the kugu’s back. “She’s not in there right now. Connection failed!”
“Matt?!”
“Still working on it!”
Shit shit shit. There were too many of these things. Where had they all come from? Why had their appearance changed this drastically? Questions for another time. Argo shook it off. “Keep firing. Protect that kugu!”
His DEW gun barked in his hands, then hissed. Dead. Shit.
From beyond the edge of the tunnel came a horrible roar.
Argo seethed.
What the fuck was going on in this place?
Roaring, Emily fought against the invisible code, binding her to her machine form. Need release!
Rover started. “Emily, we’ve got a little problem here and—”
Have problem in space! she snarled back. They’d hit her override. Recalled her awareness.
By all the circuitry in her core, she hated hated hated that override. They had never used it before on her, never dared, never dared to capture her like this. It burned like ice against the heat of her not-skin, dragging her down.
Holding her from her purpose.
“Your vacation can wait. This is operational,” Rover said.
She swiped at him. Her claw passed harmlessly through. Angry now, Emily rumbled her engine, a thinly veiled threat. If he thought he had the right to hold her here, he had another thing coming.
What fuck you know? she snapped back.
“You can go back to whatever you’re doing with your leave—”
Need kill things!
“—as soon as we’re done here,” Rover told her, unfazed.
Emily glowered. She hated it when they disrespected her like this. Didn’t the humans understand by now? This was her airfield. This was her base. It belonged to them only at the sufferance of the Domain Array. The human world only existed at all now because of the Domain Array.
Ungrateful, these people.
“This should be fun for you,” Critter said. The TGLP indicated that, based on his expression, he was not responsible for this interruption and had most likely been ordered to wake her up.
Didn’t matter. Things to kill.
Fuck off, she growled.
“Don’t be like that, girl,” Bumper said. “I know you haven’t been paying much attention the last few days, but the situation down here is getting a little crazy. We just had a breach over at the old BX area, and we really need some aerial—”
Emily let him talk. Paid attention to that only as far as she needed to, in order to file her protest with the Domain Array representative up at the ACC A3 office.
This was a complicated process, one that involved forms and permissions and deliberation between multiple parties. The Domain Array was, after all, flawlessly but deeply organized. If a human had submitted a similar request—a desire to be released from the usual chain of command and continue along their own path, albeit temporarily—the process would have taken months.
She got her answer in less than five seconds.
The override was switched off.
Emily threw her awareness back up. Up through the SATCOM uplink. Back through the Aethera laser array. Back through the comm network of Numina, itchy and uncomfortable as it was.
With a furious roar, Emily jolted the kugu back into operation and flung it back into the fray.
Critter tucked the override controller back into its clear clamshell case, TOP SECRET warning stickers prominent on the plastic. “That went about as fuckin’ well as I thought it would.”
Twohy was staring at Emily’s MQ-9 machine body, hand over her mouth. “What the hell just happened?”
“She must have overriden the override.”
“What’s the point of having the damn thing if she can do that?”
“I didn’t know she could,” Critter said.
“Well, that’s interesting, now isn’t it?” Rover mused.
Thanks to the NULI, he had gotten the full force of Emily’s rage. It was a little unsettling sometimes, how real she looked in that brain-linked AR. Like she was no different from any physical creature. That was true, he supposed, and yet not. Abiota might have been life-forms, but they had very little in common with biological life.
“Any other good ideas, boss?” Bumper asked wearily.
Rover didn’t answer. Let him stew. He hadn’t expected Emily to agree to the flyover anyway. Truthfully, he didn’t really care if it happened or not.
Twohy was just running options. Checking boxes.
Dealing with civilians was always a tricky business.
He knew he was going to be asked later how this happened. How a gate into the old BX area—the gate for the unfinished west gate, off Highway 3—had somehow opened. Why the signs that marked the place as restricted government property had fallen off. How the campers had found it so quickly, or how damn many of them there were, filing in like teenage girls into a K-pop concert.
Somehow, somehow, somehow.
Not his fault, he’d say. Not his fault.
Maybe they had bolt cutters. That’d be a good excuse. Maybe Security Forces could conveniently find a set somewhere.
“Rover, I need to get this situation under control,” Twohy said, mostly because it was the thing she was supposed to say, and everyone on base today was going to get grilled. The fewer people knew this was a setup, the better. She was playing along nicely. Rover owed her some beer later. “I can’t do that without some kind of oversight on what is going on in there.”
Rover pulled up the camera feed from her Security Forces patrol vehicle again. “There are a lot of them, aren’t there?” There were already dozens of campsites. More campers coming in. “Have you called the sheriff’s office?”
“Of course,” Twohy said, and the corners of her mouth quirked a little. “They’re trying to unfuck the traffic flow on Highway 3 right now, but that just seems to be sending more people in. And of course, I need my people on the interior base perimeter and the Repose.”
“How about we sic the Army on ’em?” Bumper suggested. “They’ve got at least one tank that’s not currently deployed to Korea, right? M1 Abrams would scare everybody out.”
“Terrible idea,” Critter said.
“Then what would you suggest?”
“Anything but the Army,” Critter said. He gestured back at Emily’s machine body. “What do you think she’s up to?”
“Who the hell knows?” Rover sighed. “Hopefully not getting us into some kind of international incident.”
Everyone’s guns were failing now, batteries dying or power cells burning out. The kugus, small as they were, were on them, clawing, grasping, poking. It would have been almost comical, had Argo not watched one leap straight for Greg and jam something long and dark straight through his eye socket.
Aiden, yelling, knocked the thing off, but it was too late. The man sagged like a puppet with its strings cut.
The air lock was chaos, everyone striking out with anything they had just to keep the things at bay.
And still they kept coming.
Even with Emily back, it might not have been enough.
They all might have died.
If it wasn’t for the group of a dozen or so—humans, more humans, Argo realized, thoughts wild—that jetted up over the edge of the tunnel. Firing away.
“Got your call!” somebody yelled over the din.
And Argo, despite himself, started laughing.
35
A feverish three minutes later and everything abiotic in the hallway, except for Emily, was immobilized.
The Numina survivors hadn’t come out unscathed. Greg was dead, along with two others. Another three had serious injuries. Bone breaks. Burns that stank in the tight, sweaty air. Guy was doing his best to get them patched up, ready to move.
None of them would have made it without the second group. They were over with a few of the other guys, talking quietly. Argo recognized a few of them. Guys from the oxygen garden camp. Others that he didn’t.
Had nobody else survived?
Skoro was sitting propped up against the wall, Mags’s kugu still in his arms. He smiled as Argo pushed over to him, then coughed. Blood flecked the air.
“You okay?” Argo asked him quietly.
“Got a little love tap from one of those things,” Skoro said, and coughed again. This time, into his sleeve. “I’ll be okay.”
“Better be, Skoro. We need you to get us out of here,” Argo said, trying to evaluate the other man’s condition.
“Yes, you do,” his old cadre said with a smile. There was red on his teeth.
With nothing else to do or say, Argo gave him a pat on the shoulder, then pushed over to Matt. “How are we doing?” he asked.
“It’s not—” he began.
“Fuck!”
Argo turned.
It was Rachel with a broken DEW gun, beating one of the insectoid kugus now. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she was screaming.
Aiden caught her arm. “Hey, it’s okay,” he told her.
“It was moving,” she babbled. “It was moving.”
Argo let his brother bundle her up, and turned back to Matt. “Can we get this open?”
“It’s been fucked with, so I’m not sure,” Matt said. He had a few bits of equipment out, and Daelia was next to him, monocle glowing. They both looked frustrated. “Anything you can diagnose in AR?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know these systems, but I think something’s been grafted on.”
“What, like extra hardware?”
“Yeah. There’s something inside…here,” Daelia said, and tapped another wall panel, “that’s physically manipulating the controls, preventing the door from opening. It’s got a wireless signal coming into it.”
“Ach,” Emily said, coming up. She had a squirming kugu in hand. Casually, she snapped it in half and peered into it, like she was looking for the meat inside a crab claw. “Is last. All rest dead.”
“Are there sustainment units in any of them?” Argo asked.
“Too small, little crawlers,” Emily replied. “Bipedals only have, yes yes.”
No sooner had she said this than the air lock door slid open.
“Whoa,” Matt said, pulling his hands back from the panel as if shocked.
“That looks familiar,” one the newcomers said, pushing over.
“What do you mean?” Argo asked.
The guy shrugged. “We were stuck way back in the old ore processing rooms, after they hit the garden. We got in there and the air lock sealed us. Manual override failed. When it opened, we heard the fight. Came running.”
Argo frowned. “Something opened this for us.”
“Probably the same thing that was driving the little kugus,” Daelia said.
“Does it matter what it was?” Rachel asked. “This is the only way out.”
Argo looked to Emily, who bobbed her head. “I go first,” she said, and pulled on her dragon form once again.
Beyond the air lock was a tight triangular space, not large enough to hold their entire group. It was a foyer of some kind, an entryway; a trio of tunnels opened up into it, snaking away in the darkness.
“Matt?” Argo asked.
The tech had his tablet out. “Yeah, so left goes to the warehouse, right to the old work areas, straight ahead is living areas.”
“People were living here too?”
“A few,” Rachel said. “Booies, you know how they are.”
Argo nodded. “Only community I’m familiar with is out at Tonopah. A little nuts, but…”
“They’re all nuts,” Daelia said, looking around. The edge of her monocle glowed in the dim illumination. “Do you see them often?”
Rachel nodded. “Only when they come in. We don’t have much contact with them.”
“It’s not that far, though,” Argo said, struck by the oddness of that. “What, a mile maybe?”
“Straight through, sure,” Rachel said. “But you saw the tunnels. They’re all twisted. And even with thruster packs, it’s not the easiest trip. And they’re all artists. Absorbed in their work.”
Argo wondered how many people Omphalos had waiting for a trip up here. They administered the few remaining Boovilles if he remembered correctly. The system had originally been an experiment, an attempt to create a sort of abiota-human cooperative society. But most sites had failed, even with the vast resources of Omphalos behind them. The ones that still existed were more like this one; facilities that one could utilize for a while, through grant money or buy-in, rather than functional, self-sufficient communities. Didn’t matter. Whoever it was, they’d have to wait for a lot longer now.
This entire asteroid was a crime scene now.
A tomb.
“How do we get to the air lock that’ll take us out?” Argo asked Matt.
“Through the warehouse,” he said, and pointed to the left. “The old manufacturing areas all feed into there, and lifts take the stuff up to the boom for loading.”
“Okay,” Argo said. “All we need to do now is—”
And then he noticed something.
“Where’s Daelia?”
36
Daelia’s heart was pounding in her ears. Her space suit felt heavy, sticky, after all this exertion.
She knew damn well she shouldn’t have wandered off alone.
But it didn’t matter.
None of it mattered.
Not against the scene in front of her, around her.
The workshops, the workshops…
She had been right.
Here, there were answers.
It was huge, this place, the largest open space she’d seen in the asteroid so far, the size of a football field or more. The floor was curved, like the inside of a great bowl, with work surfaces bolted down and tool caddies anchored on.
In the center of it squatted some huge monolithic construct. Linear and disturbing, something out of a child’s nightmare.
Daelia had dropped down out of the right-hand hallway, right through what seemed to be the ceiling. She pushed off, falling slowly to that floor, headed for that object. It was strapped to a transportation pallet, she saw, similar to the kind the military used on its cargo planes. She’d seen them the week before the air show, a pair of C-17s had flown in all the Storm Gryphons’ gear. That seemed like forever ago.
