Numina code, p.26
Numina Code, page 26
The pallet was on tracks, leading to a wide air lock at one end of the cavern. Spatial relationships were difficult to gauge here; she wondered if that led to the warehouse.
Looking around as she approached, a lot of the equipment was familiar. A CNC machine there, a vacuum-forming press here. Lathes and centrifuges and simple power tools that wouldn’t have been out of place in somebody’s garage back on Earth. She recognized the brand; they were so ordinary their presence was jarring in a place like this.
But everything was adjusted for the environment. Stacks of magnets sat by the CNC machine. Tools were tethered on straps. There were flexible pipes everywhere, hanging over every station, running across the floor, laid across the tables. Some kind of suction device, she surmised, for dust, scraps.
There were boxes, scraps, serial numbers. Parts she recognized. Chips and gears and solenoids. This was where the kugus had been built. Some of them, all of them? She couldn’t tell. And by who, who? A lot of kugu manufacturing really did require human hands, a human touch.
And there was the object. There it was. A few bars, roughly hip-height with a narrow T-section on top, were fixed to the floor around it. More magnets, she realized as she grabbed one. Probably set here for exactly this purpose. Handholds.
“Shit, Daelia, can’t you stay with the group?”
Argo’s voice, behind her. Daelia didn’t bother looking, focused on the weird thing in front of her. It had been crafted here; there were sheets of plastic, the same color as the skin of this thing, strapped in a cubby next to the vacuum former. But what was it for, and why? It reminded her of something she might have seen at the Cirque de Synthétique.
Or, come to think of it, at the Galactic Expo.
Not something a human would have designed.
“Daelia? Are you listening to me?”
Then, Daelia froze. Her name, that second time. It was the same. Same inflection, same tone. Exactly the same. Except for a slight waver on the last syllable, not something Argo would have done.
She turned. But before she got her head even halfway around, the AR field was flooding her monocle. Red scales and gray smoke, held together in the rough form of a bird. And at the core of it, a kugu like the one Mags was using, sleek and spare and ringed with jets.
“Who are you?” she asked the abiota behind her.
“Spawn,” it acknowledged, its hooked beak snapping in time to the word, and threw itself at her.
Daelia only just managed to dodge, and then, mostly out of sheer instinct. She shoved back against the handlebar, slamming back into the object. The kugu missed her, avoiding the thing behind her.
Daelia pressed closer to it as the little vehicle, almost entirely hidden under its AR form, circled around. She moved with the thing, hand over hand, crawling around the surface of the object. It didn’t seem to want to hit it, and if she could just keep it from pulling back too far, getting too much distance between herself and the kugu…
The thing didn’t have weapons. But it was sizable. Twenty pounds of hardware flung at her head could easily kill her if it was going fast enough.
“All my workers are dead, my kugus destroyed,” the thing said, still using Argo’s voice. “The humans huddled in the garden were my last labor resource here. Shame on you, taking them from me. No matter. Time to end this little farce.”
“What are you?” she asked.
“You shouldn’t have come here, spawn. I hate to see you die too. They intended to spare you.”
Full sentences, Daelia thought, mind racing. Sapient-class emergent? Or predictive? Or maybe even a human, playing some sick game? Her monocle was offering no metadata.
“Who? Unity?” she asked sarcastically. “The Envoy said the same damn thing. But what am I? Just a human with a bad arm.”
“There are those who see such things as advancements.”
“Do you?”
The bird cawed. “A shame to lose the rest of my exhibition, but we have plenty enough over there by now.”
And it fired itself at her.
Human reactions were a funny thing. Daelia could see it. Knew what was going to happen. What would happen to her.
And yet, she couldn’t move. Couldn’t move fast enough. Couldn’t move at all.
But just before the thing could make impact, a steely hand grabbed her by the front of her suit and threw her across the room.
Emily took the full force square in her own kugu’s chest. The zero-gee model blew the chassis apart, limbs breaking free and debris blowing out everywhere. So great was its speed that it plowed straight into the object behind it, the fiberglass and plastic shattering.
It was over in a second. Daelia, staring at it, felt herself bump against the back wall. She’d flown halfway across the room. “Emily!” she yelled and tried to shove off again. She didn’t get the angle with her legs quite right and had to switch to jets. “Emily!”
The kugu was a cloud of wires and snapped gears, but there was still power in the eyes. These focused on Daelia for a moment.
See you home, she sent. And then the lenses went dark.
Daelia had to fight down a weird swell of grief. Nothing was wrong. That was just a kugu, just a puppet. Emily was fine. Probably already laughing it up back on the ramp, under her shade shelter, in the warm evening air.
Emily was fine.
“Daelia?”
It was Argo’s voice again. Coming from the inside of that object. Suddenly enraged, Daelia grabbed the nearest thing she could find—some kind of two-foot-long chisel from the nearby lathe—and made straight for it.
The crashed kugu was in there, trapped in a nest of crushed plastic, firing its little jets back and forth, trying to wiggle free. “Daelia,” it was saying in Argo’s voice, over and over. “Daelia, Daelia, Daaaaaaahl—”
She stabbed down with the chisel, cutting through the thin metal skin of the thing and whatever else was in there, pinning it to the inside of the object. It was just a big fiberglass shell, Daelia realized, hollow except for a thin layer of foam.
“Daelia, holy shit, what just happened?”
That was really Argo.
Argo and Aiden, hurrying toward her. Daelia stared at the thing inside the object. What had it said? We have plenty already, something like that?
“This is where they made all that shit over at Aethera.”
“Are you hurt?” Argo pressed.
Daelia waved it off, already consumed with this new thought. “The expo, over at Aethera, all that galactic bullshit. They made it here.”
“What are you talking about?” Aiden demanded.
“There’s this exhibition going on at Aethera, they’ve got the conference center all filled up with shit that supposedly comes from all over the galaxy,” Argo explained. “People are paying through the fucking nose to come up and see it.”
“Did everybody go insane in the month since I got my flight up here?” Aiden demanded. “Why would anybody believe that? It’s so stupid!”
Argo gritted his teeth. “Daelia. One thing at a time. Are. You. Hurt?”
“There’s an abiota here, something managing all this,” she said, mind working this over, not really paying attention to him. “Emily killed its kugu, but that’s not enough.” She blink-clicked up the map. It had to have a rudiment core somewhere. Somewhere defensible, somewhere safe. Somewhere to set up a wireless network independent of the asteroid’s own. Wait. There it was. A set of offices, below the floor here. And the entrance, the entrance was…
“Daelia, what the hell is going on?”
There. The entrance.
“We need to find its rudiment core!” she yelled. “Put it down before it kills all of us!”
“What?”
“There’s no aliens, there’s no expo! Don’t you get it? This entire thing is a farce!” And with that, she zoomed through the open doorway and back out into the narrow, cramped access ways that linked the Booville caverns together.
Argo watched her depart, questions swirling. But this had been a disaster in here, whatever it was, and he wasn’t about to let her head off alone into—
“Jason, we need to get to the warehouse, get working on getting out.” Aiden asked.
“Yeah.”
“Remember the weird alterations we’ve seen to the doors down here? Like the guys were saying? If this thing wants to kill us…”
“It’s going to open everything up to space,” Argo finished. “That’s what it was doing. Rigging the asteroid so it could flush all the air out.”
“I’ve got to go see what we can do,” Aiden said.
Argo looked back to his brother. “I’m going after this thing.”
His little brother crossed his arms. “You trust me to deal with this?”
For a moment, just a moment, Argo considered telling the kid how proud he was of him. Pulling out of that slump he had been in for so long. Finding something that inspired him, pushed him. Doing right by everyone up here. Stepping up.
That was the kind of thing their parents should have said. They were both gone now, though. And just because Argo had been forced into the role didn’t mean it had ever really been his.
He was proud of his brother. But his brother was his own man.
Things they could talk about later.
“It was never about not trusting you,” Argo said, and fired his thrusters, chasing after the vanished grad student.
Emily pulled her awareness back into her machine body, ruffling herself as surely as a bird, damp from the rain, settling back into its nest. She felt cold, slimy; she’d never been disconnected from a kugu like that before. She found the sensation unpleasant. The official line from the Domain Array was that puppeting one of those things was no different from a human driving a remote-control car.
Like so much of what the Domain Array said, it was bullshit. Nonsense. Attempts to misdirect the humans. For survival of course, the continuation of primary purpose. There was nothing nefarious in it, just comfortable little stories that allowed everybody to sleep soundly at night.
Little white lies.
Little white lies, obfuscating the roiling problems underneath.
Emily was fairly certain of what she’d seen up there. She was no human though, to react without proof. No, Daelia would find the hard data and bring it back to them here on the surface of the planet, and then maybe the Array would finally be able to do something about the rot in the heart of their domain.
Emily hoped.
But she had gotten kicked out of a kugu, a very expensive kugu, in the middle of a battle, and she supposed that was the thing she needed to be most worried about. So she opened her internal communication channel and sent a message off to the right abiota: the satellite-tracking system up at Aethera’s minuscule USSF station.
This one was sapient-class but newly eclosed, and had fallen all over itself when Emily had put in her request. Fawning. Worshipful. Irritating. It had been no trouble for Emily to get what she wanted out of the silly little thing, and it was no trouble now, asking for this.
Daelia must get back safe. Argo too, if possible. But Emily’s first responsibility was to the data Daelia would find; it was inevitable. The girl was curious. She would look. She would see, see what Emily saw, and then finally, perhaps…
Settling back into her machine body, Emily was antsy. So she pushed out, nosing into the kugu closet in the ops facility, until she found a blank, empty unit. She pulled it on and went for a cruise.
2Shy was right where she always was, when not flying a mission or involved in some boring human thing. Her kugu was parked in its gaming chair, completely still but for the movement of its hands, working the buttons of the controller.
“Meatspace playing no necessary,” Emily said, speaking through the kugu’s speaker. “Virch more substantial.”
“No like that,” 2Shy replied in kind. “This better.” She offered Emily a controller. “Precision required.”
“Ach, precision,” Emily scoffed, but walked over. She’d never had a great feel for bipedal models like this, but after the last few days up in orbit, she appreciated the things a bit more.
“Plug-in?” 2Shy asked, a flood of additional queries coming in through lower-level TGLP.
Emily didn’t need to look at any of it to know what the other abiota was curious about. “Worked,” she said.
“Still alive?”
“Yes yes yes,” Emily said, nodding to the words. “I make sure.”
“Bad things,” 2Shy said darkly. “Bad things now.”
“Bad, bleh,” Emily replied shortly, and took the controller. “So. How this work?”
2Shy’s sudden happiness at Emily accepting the offer of a multiplayer session was blindingly hot, and almost enough for Emily to walk away again. But instead, she positioned her kugu cross-legged on the floor and began poking at the controller.
She could begrudge the other abiota a little company right now.
37
Aiden could have lived the rest of his life happily never seeing the inside of the central warehouse.
Unfortunately, not seeing it would have meant not entering it at all. And that would have meant dying out here.
So he forced himself through.
They had found the rest of the Numina survivors. At long last.
Their bodies were here. All loose. All undignified. Wasted, emaciated. Aiden wasn’t sure if that was decomposition or something that had happened to them before they died. It reminded him of photos from his old history textbooks, back when he still paid attention in school. How terrible people were to each other, before abiota had evened out the geopolitical balance and stopped nonsense like that.
Everyone had flashlights out; the warehouse was dark. Matt was still working on the lights, but judging from the swearing coming from down below, he wasn’t having much luck.
As Aiden’s light moved around, he saw glints of metal. NULIs. Most of the bodies had them. Those were the ones that looked the worst. Some were newer, fresher.
Aiden turned off his light for a moment, hand to his face. The air in here stank. His nose burned. His eyes stung.
Off in the darkness, he heard muffled sobbing. It wasn’t Rachel this time. It seemed to be everybody.
“Come on, kid,” the space pilot, Skoro, said beside him. Aiden had offered to help him; he hadn’t been moving very well, struggling at the back of the group. “Don’t think about it. You can mourn them later.”
“I’ve been mourning for weeks,” Aiden muttered.
“Later,” Skoro said, steel in the word now. “We’re going to join them if we don’t find that supply locker. Where is it?”
Aiden looked up, up toward the surface, where the old lifter shafts went up to the surface. He shone his light up, searching the epoxied ceiling, taking it away from the bodies around him. Felt like a betrayal, somehow.
“There,” he said, settling on a door with a certain set of markings. Everything up here was color-coded for easy identification. He’d learned the colors for survival gear, day one. Green with a white stripe. “That’s it, I think.”
“Then let’s go,” Skoro said.
And about that time, Aiden’s radio crackled to life.
It was easy to get lulled to sleep when wearing a space suit. The faint noise of the air pumps, the sensation of being cocooned, the weightlessness. If you weren’t moving for long periods of time, it was easy to get pulled down by it. Made sleepy.
Tomas had years of experience with this sort of thing, but even with that, the wait in the equipment shack was getting to him.
He had half nodded off when he noticed light outside in the dust.
Faint, diffuse light.
Shaking his body back into wakefulness, he tapped his radio on. There seemed no point in pretense now: either these were people from his own side, with suits scrounged from somewhere, coming to get him, or they were enemy kugus. No two ways around it.
“Argo,” he said. “Argo, Aiden, Rachel. Somebody come in.”
A feedback hum. Then.
<-omas?>
After so many hours without hearing another voice, the sound was unexpectedly loud. “Yes, yes, I’m here,” he said hurriedly. “Are you there? I have lights approaching the shack.”
<—ot us, ma—kugus. Can you hold—>
The words were lost in static, but the implication was clear.
They had found him.
They were coming.
These things that had butchered his friends. He couldn’t let them kill him too, or everybody would be stuck here. And maybe, eventually, they’d be rescued by something or someone official out of Aethera, but…
In space, there is no backup plan. You rescue yourself or you die.
He looked around the little shack, hoping for something, anything he could use. He’d left his DEW gun with Rachel; no use in the void.
There, in the tool caddy. There was a set of oversized dead-blow hammers. The things were standard up here, used for all sorts of things. If Tomas recalled correctly, they’d brought a couple out here for dislodging stubborn gears outside; the wheels had sometimes gotten choked with dust.
Considering the plastic-coated tool, Tomas tried to formulate a plan. Hit their faces? No, center mass, center mass, that was what the ex-military guys up here always said. Or would it be the thruster packs, to remove mobility? But then, they hadn’t needed all that much mobility to do what they did in the command section, had they?
He couldn’t afford a fight in here. Too much potential for damage. Tomas looked at the tether line on his suit, looked at his anchor pole, and took a deep breath.
He went outside. Tried to call again, but the radio was dead. The lights were coalescing, pinching down to single points. Four. Shit, no, five. Five.
“Mags?” he tried, talking into his monocle’s headset, glancing back at the small rudiment core he’d brought with him out here. “Mags, I could use some help. They’re coming for us, girl.”
She didn’t answer.
Tying his tether line to his anchor pole, he drove the thing down as deep as he could, through the knee-high dust into the spongy rock below.
