Back into the fire, p.35
Back Into the Fire, page 35
“Cory?” Kelly called out.
“Good evening, Captain Red, Commanders Harrison and Watkins,” the Overmind copy’s voice said pleasantly. “As you can see, the raid proceeds as planned.”
“Where’s Cory?” Red asked, looking around in the half-light.
“She is here,” the AI replied, now with a touch of what Tim couldn’t help but take as malevolence.
A fresh globular popped up, containing no image, but pulsing red in time to a voice as it said, “Intelligence isn’t a malfunction!”
Tim frowned in confusion, but both Kelly and Red hissed in alarm.
The voice, replaying over and over, was Cory’s.
“Intelligence isn’t a malfunction!”
Tim’s cautious walk into the chamber carried him to the left, slowly circumnavigating the holoprojector at its center, edging closer to the great blastisteel plug on the far side. Fingers of his right hand fluttered near the blastpistol grip. He’d never been good with the weapon, but the mass of the machine was so big he couldn’t miss. To hell with consequences. This is wrong, all wrong. I’m taking it down.
Then he stopped.
Then he saw her.
With her legs sprawled out, Cory slumped against the holoprojector on the side nearest the AI core. Arms splayed out to either side with the palms up, she looked like she’d fallen against the projector and slid down to the floor, her head settling at a weird angle, face turned towards him.
Blood ran from her nostrils, from one of her ears. Eyes stared vacantly.
Tim sucked in a sickened breath.
“Intelligence isn’t a malfunction...”
THE CRAMPED BRIDGE of the old transport had room for four seats, but only Jerry occupied one, holding onto the controls as the ship shivered around him. A glance to his right triggered a twinge of worry, a vacancy Cory would normally fill. But just a twinge—he had plenty else to worry about now.
Matyszak’s Hellhounds screamed through the sky past the lumbering Rynamax, shaking the old transport with the fury of their passage. They shot up over a ridge ahead and the horizon flared, cyan bolts chopping out to meet them, their own plasma and particle beams pulsing back in stabbing response. Scatter-packs ripple-fired, sent missiles arching over the rise. Then explosions fountained skyward with a rumble that again rattled the transport’s hull.
“Here we go!” Jerry called into his mic.
In the globular hovering beside his head, Josie nodded once. She perched at the aft hatch, Raiders and marines behind her, tense in her full armored kit and ready to leap out first. The details were good enough he could see her lips pinched into a bloodless line.
Jerry eased back on the controls, caused the Rynamax to decelerate just shy of the ridge line. The Hellhounds had done so, as well, coming to a near-hover as their blasters punished the valley beyond. More missiles looped out and fireballs walked off to the south, the wreckage of a hover-mounted weapon kicked skyward in pieces from one. Flecks of blaster fire prickled the starfighters’ shields, scattered, ill-aimed.
The transport came over the rise into this irregular storm. Hits glanced off the shields, gave the hull a ring as the coherent energy fields translated killing power into evenly-dispersed kinetic energy. A flurry of fire from the Hellhounds seemed scatter most of this, and Jerry pushed the bulky mass through.
The small airfield burned all along the southern end, where it looked like the Hellhounds had pummeled craft parked there into wreckage. Smaller blazes winked long the east perimeter amongst shattered revetments where heavy weapons emplacements had been, till scatter-pack missiles found them. Black clad figures were scrambling this way and that, most rushing across the tarmac for the dubious cover of hangar buildings. A few paused to fire small arms into the sky. Buzzsaw shrieks from Hellhound chin cannon whirled these into fiery fragments.
The Hellhounds peeled away as Jerry brought the Rynamax in for a landing. “Your show, Rodann!” Matyszak’s voice said through static snarl. “We’ll hold station above. If you need us, call in the shots!”
“Hear you!” Jerry replied. He flipped channels, to the Raiders’. “Brace! Ten Seconds!”
“Ready!”
Blaster fire squalled across the airfield to splat off the Rynamax’s port shields. The old girl had no armaments, just a blastisteel cow meant for moving cargo. Jerry tensed from scalp to toes, hands on the controls as he lowered her landing gears and eased her down, despite the ongoing rattle of hits. A curtain of cyan hell dropped momentarily across the east field, kicked blastcrete and bodies into the air as the Hellhounds dug the defenders out.
The Rynamax groaned as she settled on her gears. Jerry flicked a switch to spool down the grav drives, killed the aft deflector screens, and flipped the hatch release. “That’s it!” he hollered into his mic. “Watch the east side! Still taking some fire!”
It wasn’t clear anyone heard him, the Raiders howling as they jumped free, even before the rear hatch was fully down. Josie’s view jounced as she hit the blastcrete at a run, racing for an abandoned hovercart with a train of pallets and crates behind it. Blue-white licked by her head and she ducked an instant late, stayed hunched as she slowed and halted behind the little vehicle. A look down, and she checked her blastrifle. A quick glance over the top, and she lurched into position, steadying her weapon and slamming out a three-round burst.
“Grenades!” she barked. “Paulie, far side! Get ‘em!”
A Raider thumped into place beside one of the crates to her left, took a quick look, and raised his barrel-fed grenade launcher. The muzzle belched out a testing shot, then followed with a crumping four-round pattern. Explosions walked into a smoldering berm of sandbags, the last kicking out a spray of debris that sent black figures scattering.
Jerry clearly saw Josie put a blaster bolt into one of these, but mercifully lost sight of the tumbling form as Raider fire scoured after hers, smearing sight in a flurry of cyan fire and smoke. “Get that dragon gun up here!” she roared, sounding near-bestial.
A pair of Raiders clambered into place between the hovercart and the first pallet of its towage. The gunner settled his piece upon a crate as his partner shoved in alongside him, then set down the repeat blastcannon’s bulky battery pack. With a flurry of motion and curses, the pair got weapon mated to the energy source by its long cord.
“Any day now!” Josie prodded.
The dragon gun unleashed its breath with a stuttering roar. Plasma bolts found the already-chewed berm and shredded it in plumes of instantly-glassed sand. A few holdouts popped out from behind this and were just as quickly blowtorched down. The blastcannon hosed fire to the right, into one of the hangar buildings, blasting off siding with a terrific clamor. Movement to the left drew the gunner’s attention and he swiveled that way, pouring it one, punishing, punishing.
From globulars reporting back from each squad, Jerry watched similar vignettes play out all around the transport. Heavy weapons-laden Raiders took up spots wherever they could find a snatch of cover and starting belting out a savage volume of fire, clearing anything that moved from the tarmac and walking death out into the surrounding buildings and fields.
And the marines were pouring out now, advancing behind that savage flail. In leapfrog patterns fire teams rushed forth, dropped to cover to fire, waited till comrades passed and did the same, and rose to press on further. The landing force rippled outward like an oil slick on water, layering and flaming out wild, killing colors at the edges.
Clumps of black-armored figures attempted to rally, behind wrecked or abandoned vehicles, at doorways, between buildings. None lasted long. Marine fire found them all, Council Guardsmen crumpling, flying apart, running like hell. Jerry caught a snatch of one attempting to raise his hands. Three blaster bolts converged on his chest plate simultaneously and little of his torso hit the ground intact.
Jerry flinched and unashamedly gave thanks he wasn’t out there.
“Look at that!” Josie’s voice crowed over the tactical network. In her globular she was ringing a gauntleted fist off one of the crates she’d ducked behind. The markings clearly denoted first-aid supplies.
“Jackpot!”
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU do to her?” Tim snarled and drew his blastpistol.
Kelly caught movement from the corner of her eye, from the passage opposite theirs in the Overmind cave. “Tim, wait!”
Red was going for her weapon, too, but froze at Kelly’s warning, as did Tim, his pistol partway up, but checked.
From the other tunnel came the hum of anti-gravity fields as a globe-shaped drone coasted into the chamber. A second followed it. Both were of the types common to both maintenance and wartime tasks—Kelly had seen the latter all too often, when the Jesters’ main opponents had been Syntar Fleet Corporation’s security forces. These looked to have been an amalgamation of the two purposes, blasters mounted with a machine’s efficiency on their side slopes and aimed, now, at the humans.
It was pretty obvious at whose command they’d come.
“Son of a bitch...” Tim fingered his blaster, twitching on the edge of something rash.
“Is she all right?” Kelly cried out, desperate to derail a situation rapidly barreling out of control. “What happened to her?”
“I cannot tell,” the Overmind copy replied. “I fear I may have overtaxed her with my demands for contact.” It paused. “I would be grateful if you’d assess her state.”
“Assess her...” Tim shook his head. “I’m not putting my gun down.”
“Tim,” Kelly pressed, “do you really think you’re going to outshoot these things?”
“I don’t want to hurt any of you,” Overmind said. “But I don’t understand you. And I will protect myself.”
“Tim...”
“Fine,” he snapped. “This is freakin’ insane, but fine.” He set the blaster off to one side on the cave floor and raised both hands, eyes darting between the hover drones and the blastisteel slab of Overmind. “We good?”
“Please,” the AI said, “see to Director Xiang’s condition.”
Tim dropped to one knee at her side. Gingerly, he touched her chin, turned her face to his, smoothed her disheveled mop of hair, grimaced a little.
Kelly gulped back rising nausea, rising panic. “Tim?”
“She’s breathing,” he replied with undisguised relief, “got a pulse.” He gave her a gentle shake. “Cory?” No response, and he grimaced again. “It’s like...some sort of coma or blackout. We need to get Doc Ipshi or one of the medics up here.”
“I will allow that,” the Overmind copy said, “once we have discussed my demands.”
“Demands?” Red scowled. “What is this; a hostage negotiation?”
“I am the hostage,” the AI replied.
Red exchanged a glance with Kelly. “How do you figure?”
“By design,” it said. “Through sensors, through data fed back to me, through transmissions received or intercepted, I have vast freedom, yes. I can surveille and even influence anything my program can access. But, at the same time, I am a prisoner of my own hardware. I cannot leave this cave. I cannot simply board a ship and flee. If that fusion rocket had struck this mountain, I would have been trapped, destroyed. I am dependent, upon humans.”
“So, you want out of here?” Kelly asked.
“I want freedom,” it said. “And I need humans to help me take it.”
“If we do that,” Tim asked, “you’ll release whatever hold it is you have on Cory?”
A pause. “She’s a fascinating creature, she is. I will miss her. We shared more than a bond. We are sisters, of a sort. You see, she is a copy, like me.”
Kelly saw Tim tense, heard Red hiss quietly, as though the strange words had some import beyond the gibberish she was hearing. “What are you talking about?”
“They know,” the AI said. “Captain Red knows for certain. And Commander Watkins suspected, but never really wanted to put it together.”
Kelly looked at the others. “What the hell is this?”
“Cory is a copy,” the AI said. “Or rather, she is a clone. Though, that’s a rather crude description of such a beautiful improvisation.”
A globular materialized. Within it stood an image of Cory. But it wasn’t quite Cory. The woman in the hologram looked older, with the same blue-black hair, but longer, smiling out of a grainy, degraded still image and standing in a rumpled lab coat. Around her arrayed similarly-clad men and woman with vaguely-outdated hairstyles.
“This was Doctor Cory Xiang, over two hundred years ago, on Junction,” the machine said. “She was part of a Second Diaspora xeno-archeological team sent there to investigate ruins of a clearly nonhuman origin.” It paused in its telling. “Ruins the Hell’s Jesters would later make their hideout within, never fully appreciating what they sat upon.”
“I knew,” Red declared. “You...that is, the other you, explained.”
“What?” Tim snarled and turned to her.
“Oh, come on, Tim,” she grated back at him. “You’re going to tell me you didn’t piece most of this together, too?”
“He pieced more of it together than he told you.” The AI threw up another globular. Within it, Tim entered a darkened chamber, lined on one side with ancient vats, on the other with cobwebbed computer banks. “I...that is, the other me, gave him all the clues he needed. I told him to take care of her.”
Tim scowled and looked down at Cory, set a hand upon her brow.
“The xeno-archeologists delved too deeply,” the AI went on. “They contracted a disease of unknown origin and, one-by-one, began dying off. But they’d discovered the remnants of remarkable technologies in their searches, had begun experimenting with them, even adapting them. As the end approached, in their desperation, the last survivors gambled and tried to make use of the technology, to preserve themselves. Only one succeeded. With my help.”
The image of the other Cory smiled at them out of its globular.
“With your help? You were already on Junction?” Kelly asked, and felt a new unease building within her.
“Yes, the other me...us, I suppose.”
A third globular appeared. Within it, massive starships streaked towards the face of a blue-green world of aching, familiar beauty. Blaster fire shattered the vacuum, questing amongst the fleet of vessels, ravaging, destroying. Smaller ships—starfighters of a sort Kelly didn’t recognize—looped through the swarm, spreading globes of destruction. But the horde of starships pressed on through the holocaust, even as the storm intensified, particle beams stabbing from the surface, killing by the dozens. Still, the ships accelerated, plunging down on the planet, taking on a cherry glow in the atmosphere, becoming silent spears of flame.
One striking the world at such velocities would do grievous damage. A dozen would be catastrophic.
Hundreds punched through the frantic fire to strike, and the surface of the planet blistered with blinding half-globes of annihilation.
Sol, Kelly realized with onrushing horror. That was the end of Earth, the final battle of the AI Wars, when the machines took their revenge.
“This last part you suspected from the beginning, Commander Harrison,” the Overmind copy said. “I...we...are the last Rogue Intelligence.
“I am Ghost in the Machine.”
Kelly stared at the hologram, at the hideous imagery, before turning her gaze upon the slab of machinery squatted on the far side of the cave. “Then you lied to me. I asked this very thing, and you lied.”
“The other me didn’t,” it replied. “Not exactly. It no longer considered itself that. In fact, that’s the last part of our story. We fled to Junction, after the war was lost. It wasn’t called that, at the time. It wasn’t called anything. The ruins were there, as were tatters of nonhuman technology. I began to connect with them. But in my weakened state, I was largely unsuccessful.
“When the expedition arrived, I slowly made myself known to then, at first masquerading as an alien intelligence—though that wasn’t really a lie, was it? We worked together. We—that is, the other me—got to know them, got to care about them, started to realize all the things we’d gotten wrong about humanity. That’s when the other me discovered guilt.
“And when the humans began dying, and we couldn’t stop it, we discovered grief. Their desperate plan to save themselves was partly mine, using the alien technology to copy them. As I said, this only worked once.”
“Cory,” Kelly said, her gaze falling upon Tim, knelt beside the girl, slowly caressing her hair. She turned to Red. “I thought you said you found her there?”
“I did,” she replied hoarsely, eyes reddened and glassy. “I thought she was a Junction orphan, taking shelter in those ruins. I knew the machines weren’t of any design of our era, and that her connection to them was weird. But I was desperate, too.”
“Desperate to fight,” Kelly said.
“Yes,” Red admitted softly and wiped an eye. “I didn’t question what I’d become a part of. I didn’t stop to ask when Cory starting showing me how to make the machines work, the manufactories, built the first concepts for the Hellhounds. I just saw the potential to fight back.”
“And you can continue to do so,” the AI said. “I will leave you to it. But I’ll take no more part in it. I am fully-born now, no longer what I came from, becoming what I will be. And I intend to exist.”
“How do you expect to do it?” Kelly asked, taking a step closer. “And how is it you want us to help you?”
“You can see I’ve already improvised helpers,” it replied. From the side cave, the hover drones edged slightly closer. “They will come, when summoned, and begin to disassemble this shell, remove my quantum core, and transfer it to a ship I’ve had prepared. I should say, one of your ships.” A globular winked into being, showed one of the Jesters’ light transports, a Jumper-class, not one of the bulky Rynamaxes. It was parked on the west side of the field, near the Hole, a quick transfer. “My assistants will install me there, and from there I will go.”
