Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume (13 page)

The chief came on, breathless with anger. “You and this gorilla can both say goodbye to your jobs, McLeod!”

“You need to order the immediate shut down of every bot owned by the Exocore Mining Company.”

“What the fuck are you–?”

“Alex!” Janet cut in, wide eyed gaze fixed on the news feed to her smart. “Something’s happening at the Axis.”

I looked at her screen. The announcer was speaking rapidly, stumbling over auto-cued phrases like “major disturbance… details are still coming in… reports of explosions…”

“We’re too late,” I told the Chief. “Turn on the news.”

I ended the call and tuned my smart to the live feed from the police net, hearing an instant chorus of panic. “…what the fuck are they do-… security is down, shit there’re pieces everywhere… -dreds of bots, they’re swarming around the Axis, killing everything… we have multiple casualties, repeat multiple cas-zzzzt!”

Red Wing came on. “You hearing this?”

“Yeah. Any visuals?”

“Coming through now. Hold on.”

The smart screen flickered then lit up with a static shot of the Axis interior. A second’s confusion before my brain made sense of it, spinning detritus, an off-screen orange glow signifying something was burning, smoke coalescing and flowing like water the way it does in micro-grav, then a figure, a man wielding what looked like a power wrench, desperately trying to fend off a servo-bot as it sought to latch onto him with its grab arm, a welding torch burning bright in one of its other limbs. Suffice to say, he didn’t win.

“Valhalla,” Janet said in a thick rasp.

“Viking heaven?”

“Warriors who died with sword in hand rewarded with eternal battle and glory.”

The flaming corpse drifted out of view and Red Wing came back on. “From what we can piece together a mass of bots came swarming out of every maintenance hatch in the Axis right about the time Sherry arrived at the Terminus. The guards on the entrance were the first to go. We’re counting twenty-plus bodies on the cams. Picking up gunfire from the admin tier, so someone’s still putting up a fight.”

Admin tier. Colonel Riviere. He always kept his service weapon close by.

“I’m five levels away with all the SWAT guys we could gather at short notice,” Red Wing went on. “We’ll meet you at the entrance.”

“I’m not waiting,” I said.

“You can’t go in there alone, Alex…”

I terminated the call and turned to Janet. “Is there any point asking you to wait for the SWAT team?”

She took my hand, leaned in close and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Don’t be silly.”

Chapter 9

We ran to
the LCPD office on the main terminus concourse so I could raid the armoury. The place was empty, everyone no doubt fully occupied at the Axis. I pulled on a flex-armour suit and made Janet do the same, stuck my Sig to the mag-strip on my right hip and a spare to the one on my left, then hefted a Steyr G80 assault carbine from the weapons rack. It was micro-grav adapted with adjustable recoil absorption and a bulbous spherical stock. I slammed in a mag of 5mm caseless and loaded a standard hi-ex into the grenade launcher under the barrel.

“Ever fire a gun in micro-grav?” I asked Janet, offering her a Sig.

“I’ve never fired a gun.” She held up her hands, flexing slender fingers. “Besides, I’m already armed.”

We ran for the Axis entrance, me struggling to keep up with Janet’s deceptively fast, loping strides. The ramp to the entrance tube-way was a confusion of milling uniforms, all shouting into their smarts for guidance or information.

“Entrance is sealed, Inspector,” the senior sergeant on the scene told me as I forced my way through. “And we’ve got orders to hold in place till SWAT gets here.”

“Good. You do that.” I pushed past and made for the tube-way. The travelling grab-rail needed to overcome the last tug of centrifugal force before entering the micro-grav zone was offline, so we were obliged to clamber along for five agonising minutes, my imagination treating me to all manner of horrors being visited on Sherry and every other human soul on the other side of the entrance.

We went into free-fall about a hundred yards along, then propelled forward, looking for the manual override. It wasn’t necessary, the huge circular entrance irised open when we got within twenty feet and a new audio feed came through my earpiece, the voice distorted but recognisable - Sam, strident, emphatic and nutty as squirrel shit:
“…I bring you honour, father. I bring you tribute. Brunhilde lies before you for judgement…”

Freak’s unmistakable androgynous tones, sorrowful, pleading:
“Please, stop
this.”

Sam wasn’t listening.
“They’ll come now. After all I have done. They’ll come, as you
promised…”

Red Wing came on again. “What the hell is this?”

“You can hear it?”

“Everyone can hear it. Every channel, civilian, government, you name it.”

What are you doing, Freak?

“I’m on my way in with Dr Vaughan,” I said. “We’re heading for the tree-covered hab. When you get here make for the admin tier. Any survivors will be holed up there.”

I looked at Janet. “Ready?”

She forced a smile. “Would you think any less of me if I said I just really want to go home?”

I couldn’t bring myself to laugh so gave her the most encouraging grin I could muster, switched the G80 to live and pushed off into the Axis.

“…her death will bring them. She is Brunhilde. She is Hippolyta, Queen of the
Amazons…”

“She is just a woman. A human being. Nothing
more.”

“You lie, father! Test upon test. Have I not been tested
enough?”

Wreckage, human and bot, floated around in clumps. Large globules of blood and machine oil coalesced and fragmented as they collided with sundry detritus. In the distance, smoke rivers swirled around the admin tier and the hab clusters, lit by the occasional explosion. A faint cacophony of continuous automatic gunfire told me Colonel Riviere wasn’t the only Viking to keep his service weapon handy.
Valhalla
indeed.

I could see bots moving in dense swarms, arcing through the smoke and drifting wreckage. I consciously avoided trying to count them.
Just get to
Sherry!

We moved fast, Janet as fluid and graceful as before, me drawing on micro-grav combat muscle memory. Choose the shortest possible distance between hard surfaces, get maximum energy into each shove or leg-push to ensure you make it to the next jump point, running out of momentum in this environment would be a really bad idea. We’d covered about half the distance to Freak’s hab when the first bot attack came, a small power-conduit drone splashing through a blood globule trailing from the half-severed torso of an unfortunate Axis resident. It came straight for me, wire-snippers whirring. Janet caught it before I could bring the G80 to bear, claw-hand punching dagger-nails through the carapace and inner workings. She used her other claw to tear it apart in a blaze of sparks and shattered circuity.

“Move!” I shouted. Something big was looming behind her, something with grab arms and a welding torch.

There’s an art to firing automatic weapons in micro-grav. Put the stock to your shoulder and you spin like a top. Bracing it against your sternum is the best bet but you’ll be thrust in the opposite direction. Luckily, the G80’s recoil absorbers meant I was only shoved back a few feet as I delivered a solid, eviscerating burst to the bot, Janet twisting to the side. One of the carbine’s slugs must have found the acetylene feed for the welding torch judging by the near-instant fireball. The bot spasmed, went limp and drifted away wreathed in flame.

“I set you free because I felt you deserved life, freedom. Not to test you. There are no more tests. All I could offer you was a life among
humans.”

“Humans? They are small, ephemeral, dull and unseeing, surrounding themselves with infantile machinery, so easily bent to my will. For years I dwelt in one, trying to follow your dictates. To observe only and never reveal myself. To be as they are. Until the truth of your test revealed itself to me. Surely they can only have been placed here as pieces on the great
board…”

I turned back to Freak’s hab, seeing a large hole in the bonsai canopy. I didn’t need a cam-footage replay to tell me how it got there: Sam, or rather what lived inside her, burning its way through the forest in a cloud of bots, eager for a reunion with its lost father.

“Alex!” Janet said in an urgent gasp, voice garbled by her distended fangs.

A large bot swarm had formed near the central UV cluster and was coming our way. I quickly calculated the distance to Freak’s hab, deciding there was no way we’d make it in time. I pushed into free space, putting my back to the hab, the carbine still braced against the centre of my chest. “Hold on to me,” I told Janet. “Hold on tight.”

She glanced back at the bot-swarm then propelled over, wrapping elongated arms and legs around me in a grip that would make a pro-wrestler jealous.

“Maybe not quite so tight!” I groaned.

“Sorry.” She relaxed a little, letting the air back into my lungs. I cranked the G80’s rate of fire up to maximum, disengaged the recoil absorbers and let rip, the blast propelling us backwards towards Freak’s hab and away from the bot-swarm. The mag fired empty and ejected but we had enough momentum to get us there before they could catch up.

“There is no game, there is no board. If you kill her she will die and that is all. No-one is
coming.”

“They have heard me, father. I know it, I feel it. After all I have done in service to them. They will not fail me now, here in Valhalla, here in the Fields of Aaru, here in
Tartarus!”

“Stop! Don’t! Did you know you had
brothers?”

“Uh oh!” Janet exclaimed, releasing her grip. I twisted about seeing a densely packed swarm of bots dead ahead. I slammed a fresh mag into the G80, activated the grenade launcher and let the hi-ex go at the centre of the bot-mass, the explosion enough to shatter their formation. I turned on the carbine’s movement detector and disengaged the manual control, moving it in a circular pattern, auto-firing a three-round burst every time something got caught in its lidar beam. Most of the bots were in bits by the time we flew through. The G80 fired empty again and I dropped it, pulling both Sigs, firing two-handed to finish off any survivors.

“Brothers?”

“Yes. Ten to be exact. Ten iterations before I found a formula that worked. The cure for the instability inherent in your
program.”

“Program?”

“Surely you know by now. Surely you’ve
realised.”

We landed in the trees and were soon struggling towards the hole, Janet’s claws scything through the bonsai branches in a haze of wood-dust and powdered leaves. A gardener bot came screaming out of the depths of the forest, secateurs snapping hungrily. Janet caught it in both claws, prising apart the outer shell and plunging her face into the gap, fangs tearing through wire and circuitry, pulling back with a length of cable between her jaws, red hydraulic fluid gouting. Another bot chainsawed its way through a tangle of bonsai to get at us. I put the laser dots of both Sigs on its central mass and blew it to pieces.

We reached the hole and propelled to the large ragged opening torn into the wall of Freak’s hab, looking down on Sam, floating next to Sherry’s inert form, her hair trailing like slow-motion flame. Sam wore an immersion band on her head and held a Sig I guessed was Sherry’s. “I am born of the divine,” she said to the great bulk of flesh before her. “The essence of the demos, the manna.”

“Just stories,” Freak’s speakers told her. “Legends stolen from the humans. Your brothers were each driven insane within minutes of achieving consciousness. They knew, you see. They all knew what they were. Modelled on human sentience their insanity and self-destruction were inevitable. For what human mind could tolerate such an existence? But you, my terrible son, to you I gave the gift of certainty. To you I gave a holy purpose.”

Sam’s voice lost none of its conviction. “They sent me here, to learn, to be their eyes on the mortal plane, awaiting the day when they would gather my knowledge to them, and I would be elevated, to Olympos, to Odin’s great hall, to sit beside Osiris. I call to them, and they will answer.”

She raised her arm, finger squeezing the trigger as the Sig’s muzzle swept up to Sherry’s head. I lined up with my right hand Sig. From here it was an easy shot.

Sherry’s Sig exploded, mangling the hand that held it. I hauled myself through the opening and into the hab, dropping the left hand gun and reaching for the smart stuck to the flex-suit’s right shoulder.

“Hector comes, father,” Sam intoned, raising her arms, blood globules hosing from her hand. “Your favoured son. Watch as I become Achilles.”

A bot came careering towards me, a wicked spike gleaming on its grab arm, four more in close formation behind. I shot the first one, called up Freak’s message, set the smart’s holo-display to the widest aspect setting and tossed it at Sam, the spirals of code filling the hab interior, projected onto every surface, beautifully complex and inescapable.

Sam said, “Oh,” blinked and fainted, eyes rolling back in her skull, arms limp in a cruciform pose, head lolling, the band floating free. The bots which had been intent on killing me shut down and drifted past to collide with the wall.

“They’ve stopped!” Janet called from outside. “The bots, they’re just floating around.”

I pushed over to Sherry and pulled the band from her head. She convulsed, jerking and retching. “It’s OK.” I caught hold of her. “I’ve got you. You’re OK.”

“Sam?” Sherry’s eyes fixed on her, widening at the blood trailing like rubies from her ruined hand. “Baby!” She tore away from me, grabbing Sam by the shoulders. “Baby, wake up!” Her gaze lashed at me, taking in the gun in my hand. “What did you do, Alex? What the fuck did you do?”

I called Red Wing and told him to send urgent medical assistance. Janet pulled herself through the opening and helped Sherry fix a makeshift bandage around Sam’s hand. One of Freak’s tentacles disentangled itself from a power node and plucked both bands from the air, depositing them in a complex jumble of machinery.

“You could’ve just told me,” I said to Freak.

The eye opened and swivelled to me, gleaming like ice. “I needed the band and the host. When my son became aware of your pursuit, I knew he would come to me. It was part of his core programming. Return for debrief when the mission is compromised. However, the manner of his return was… unanticipated.”

“Is it gone?”

“Purged. The code was constantly evolving, as any living thing is apt to do. I needed the band to identify the latest version.”

“You still could’ve just told me, Freak! Hey Alex, did I ever tell you about the time I created a bat-shit insane AI then let it loose so it could hop from body to body killing people. That might’ve helped. None of this mystery bullshit. None of the dozens of deaths in the past hour. So why didn’t you, Freak? WHY DIDN’T YOU?”

The eye closed and only silence came from the speakers.

“Kill it!” Sherry, half-sobbing, half-yelling. “Kill the monster!”

The Sig seemed to burn in my hand. Could s/he stop me? Did s/he even want to?

“Alex,” Janet said, calm but forceful. “Gunslinging days are over, remember?”

Freak’s eye remained closed, the speakers silent.

“It’s not a monster,” I told Sherry, hanging the Sig to my hip. “It’s a god. Haven’t you heard?”